Tag Archives: Edina

Pop Quiz: “How Many People Actually Know What’s Going On?”

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It was another of those “convergence moments.” I’m out having breakfast at my local supermarket restaurant, which is kind of a Rick’s Cafe for beautiful Edina. Everyone goes there.

And as I waited for my Denver omelette, doomscrolling through the news, three old geezers at the next table, two dressed in matching Elmer Fudd-red plaid flannel got going on politics. And in that same moment I came across the story of freshly-elected Minnesota state representative Walter Hudson, holding court at some local MAGA-naut Republican meet-up.

I’d never heard of the guy but listening to him speak I immediately consigned him to the over-stocked Rush Limbaugh wannabe hall of infamy. Basso profundo. Theatrical pauses. Repetitive phrasing. Yadda yadda. All the stuff that convinces the dull-witted you’re a serious guy in the know. (So corny … yet, after all these years, still effective.)

Alongside a dais of head-bobbers Hudson told the room, “You are equivalent to a plantation owner who enslaved Black people and forced them to work for you if you, today, as a medical professional or just a member of the populace, demand that your neighbor take a vaccination to keep you safe.”

Incoming GOP lawmaker compares medical professionals to slave owners - KSTP.com Eyewitness News

A million-plus extra deaths later and these deep thinking, attention-hungry libertarians are still flogging the “tyranny” of … vaccines. Otherwise known as life-saving medicine. Talk about a stale playbook.

(Predictably, Hudson has a … talk radio show … “Closing Argument with Walter Hudson.” I haven’t seen the ratings. But I’m kind of imagining Robert DeNiro as Rupert Pupkin in Scorsese’s “The King of Comedy”, cos-playing a Johnny Carson-like star in his home basement studio.)

Meanwhile, the geezers, each nursing a lonely cup of coffee, were getting worked up. The most talkative and putatively most “informed” was well into a riff/lecture on the “out of control” crime problem … in Edina, presumably (it’s a free-fire zone, I gotta tell ya) … and how Democrats are responsible because of the way they “restrain” the cops. I can’t be certain because of the ambient clatter from other patrons, but I thought I heard him spout out a “50%” increase over the last few years.

The element that glued this together in my alleged brain was a passing exchange in a recent podcast between a bunch of political pundits. I think it was David Axelrod/Mike Murphy’s “Hacks on Tap”, but it might have been Charlie Sykes’ “Bulwark” show. I was driving and drinking coffee and eating a donut at the time so I couldn’t write it down.

The context was the latest example of cluelessness on the part of some too well known politician, which led to the question, “What would you say is the percentage of people who actually know what is going on? I mean really know and aren’t just best-guessing it?”

They were talking politics, but I instantly applied this to myself and my life experience and came up with the number, “Five percent.” Tops. Of people who truly know who is zooming who and why, and how all the thread stretched between pins on a wall actually connect.

The pundits more or less agreed on “20%” … of characters they knew and interacted with practicing or reporting on the political game.

Being pros, they would know better than me, but I still put 20% in the category of “that’s generous, kids.”

I won’t belabor this, but whether the conversation is football, art, street cleaning, fashion, cooking, dog training or bar stool philosophizing I am forever amused at people prattling on on topics they clearly understand in only the broadest and usually most cliched terms.

Now, The Dude once wisely said, “Well, that’s just like your opinion, man.”

It’d be nice if all opinions rested on a solid foundation of facts — “information literacy” if you will — but no one expects that. You think the sun rises in the west, or Donald Trump is one big hunka hunka burning love … fine. Opinion.

The bafflement, for me, sets in when guys and gals like Hudson, the House Freedom Caucus, Kari Lake, geezer pundits, more than a few film critics I read, financial experts and major investors in FTX, paranoid neighbors and so on insist they’re dealing with facts. Not opinions. Facts! Horrible, terrible indisputable facts! Facts that place themselves (and usually they alone) at the center of the axis of veracity and authority.

Obviously, as a blogger supremely proud of my opinion and bizarre transmutation of facts, I have to place myself among the 95% you and yours should carefully vet before accepting anything I say as … mmm … bona fide.

But in my defense, out of sympathy and respect for my usually bored and annoyed audience, I try … try … to qualify my gas-bagging and separate what I know and what I only think I know.

Edina Surfs the Blue Wave

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It’s not like they’re going to hold the next Bernie Sanders rally at the Edina Country Club, (“The ECC” to us in the ‘hood), but I’m here to tell you, your father’s Edina is fading away like the old man’s canary yellow Olds 98, ill-fitting chrome trim and all.

Amid all the “Blue Wave” news after Tuesday’s elections — with a Democrat knocking off one of the least popular governor’s in the country, Matt Bevin of Kentucky, and Democrats taking full control of the legislature in Virginia, few paid much attention to the school board elections here in Edina, where, for the record, all children are exceptional and entitled to the privileges of enviable zip-coding.

While ostensibly non-partisan, once the seven candidates announced, it took the social media grapevine about a morning to figure who was on what side … and who had any tolerance for the Center of the American Experiment, the local, well-heeled conservative “think tank” that has spent the past few years trying to convince us Edina-mites that by failing to choke off the in-flow of kids from, you know, those other places, crazed socialist liberals were degrading the quality of the education of those children who, you know, belong here.

The basic charge, more or less, is that Edina’s children, their bright, pure minds open and eager for the tools to achieve, are instead being subjected to “liberal indoctrination” from teachers rolling in too much touchy-feely “empathy”, likely in response to the modest influx of kids whose ancestors worked on the plantations of our Scottish-English-German forebearers.

Those others you see, not being hedge fund traders or tech entrepreneurs by genetic stock, simply don’t test as well as our cherished off-spring. They’re a statistical burden. Also, given too many others, our children might waste valuable childhood networking time socializing with people who will, let’s be real, never qualify for an American Express Centurion Card.

The net effect is that this … this … caravan of immigrants … brings down the test score curve and sorely diminishes Edina’s standing among all American high schools. A standing that has already eroded from the top .001 of U.S. schools to only the top .005. The horror! The degradation of our precious property values! My god, they might as well roll a double-wide on to the lot next door!

The lead face/name of this elegantly cynical fear-mongering has been Katherine Kersten, best known for her years defending 1950’s-style Edina Country Club white male ethno supremacy in the Star Tribune.

Point being that soon after the slate of names appeared last summer even those of us currently without children in district schools, (our two precious and entitled little achievers chose to attend Minneapolis’ Southwest High to hang with their grade school buddies), sent our antennae up. We were looking for clues for who among the candidates was or was not on board, or playing “fellow traveler”, with Kersten and the Center of the American Experiment’s dog whistle racist “test score” bullshit.

So, finally getting to the lead … I am extraordinarily happy to report that none of the three winning school board candidates owe any fealty to Kersten and her swamp of sour, dime-deep thinkers. It was a wipe out. All instead were endorsed by Education Minnesota, (an anti-American cult of “jack-booted socialist thugs” if you’re a right-wing media fan).

One of the defeated candidates was Lou Nanne. No … not that Lou Nanne, hockey legend … but his grandson, (although happy to let anyone confuse him for the famous old geezer). Nanne the much younger made very little headway with Edina’s new blue moms by arguing that the time had come to start issuing guns to Edina’s teachers. (I didn’t hear this out loud, but the reaction was kind of along the lines of, “Dude, this is Edina, not Big Lake or one of those Sixth District free fire booyas.”)

With DFLer Dean Phillips flushing out UnitedHealth/Medtronic/St.Jude bag man Erik Paulsen in the 2018 Blue Wave, and liberal women — Rep. Heather Edelson and Sen. Melisa Franzen, representing this end of God’s Greenest Acres — the picture is getting dimmer and dimmer for any Republican, much less anyone so foolish as to play any note of lunkheaded Trumpism.

As we saw in the suburbs of Cincinnati and Louisville Tuesday night, college-educate suburban woman have had about enough of what the Republicans have been selling since 2016. Not to make dangerous generalizations, but I like to think such women are a bit more attune to role modeling than your average hyper-competitive tribal corporate warrior husband.

And — speculation here — those gals have reached something like maximum revulsion/disgust/mortification at the model of “leadership” Donald Trump has been embodying — and Republicans have been defending — for America’s youth … whether entitled, pre-school networked, esteem-enhanced and mostly white … or not.

The Edina Resistance and Katherine Kersten

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Judging by the interest in what would normally be a sleepy school board election, The Resistance is alive and fired up in leafy Edina. The town is slathered with yard signs. It isn’t just that there are 12 people running for four seats. It’s also the clear reaction to former Strib columnist Katherine Kersten and a suddenly reinvigorated Center of the American Experiment (CAE).

The latter used to be a deeply ingrown redoubt for what passed for the intellectual right in Minnesota. (It’s run out of Golden Valley.) For years the leader was an amiable guy named Mitch Pearlstein, the sort of character you could have a pleasant and even entertaining lunch with and not feel like you’d been exposed to some mutant toxin. The CAE brought in speakers and held luncheons and generally maintained boiler pressure for the usual conservative shibboleths like “smaller government” and climate change denial.

But as American conservatism began walking further and further out on the plank of talk radio nuttery, the CAE began losing what relevance it had. I mean … eight years of ruinous, disastrous, freedom-sapping Barack Obama rule! This aggression can not stand, man! Whether Pearlstein grew tired of that shtick or simply too old, I don’t know. But roughly a year ago he was replaced by John Hinderaker, best known as the most incendiary (i.e. unhinged) of the attorneys fueling the nationally popular Powerline blog. (The Strib ran a perfunctorily bland PR piece shortly after he took over.)

Hinderaker will forever be remembered for this 2005 commentary on George W. Bush, “It must be very strange to be President Bush. A man of extraordinary vision and brilliance approaching to genius, he can’t get anyone to notice. He is like a great painter or musician who is ahead of his time, and who unveils one masterpiece after another to a reception that, when not bored, is hostile.” It was typical of both his depth and his lick spittle approach to conservative power centers.

Which is why a lot of people, me among them, suspect Hinderaker tapped some very (very) rich vein of cash to infuse the CAE with enough money to choke Edina mailboxes last month with a remarkably polished magazine, “Thinking Minnesota”, driven by a cover story from Ms. Kersten on “racial identity activists” polluting the traditional curriculum of Edina’s public schools. It was an academic gloss on nakedly distasteful racial fear mongering.

No matter how much Kersten, the CAE and establishment Republicans (most of whom have their toes curled at the very edge of the talk radio, race-baiting plank) try to “intellectualize” and legitimize her message, the fact remains that the targets of her animus are invariably organizations and people with increasing racial and cultural diversity. Rethinking hoary white traditions and encouraging racial/cultural acceptance is like a dagger to her ideological heart.

As everyone watching politics since Richard Nixon’s “Southern strategy” knows, modern Republican antipathy toward racial and cultural diversity is also a key tactical strategy in suppressing Democratic votes. (Here’s another Strib piece, reporting on the effects of Kersten’s persistent, dog-with-a-bone attacks on a Muslim-oriented St. Paul charter school.)

Anyway, pretty much everywhere you go in unequivocally first world Edina these days people are talking … school board elections. The “Thinking Minnesota” mailing, coupled with a Kersten commentary published by the Strib has given my well-bred, well-educated, upscale neighbors, (I’m none of that), an amphetamine-like injection of resistance/activist zeal. The field of 12 candidates has been parsed down to pro-Kersten and well, “[bleep] Kersten and the horses she rode in on”.

As I say, I don’t know where Hinderaker got the money. Lord knows there are enough well-heeled metro area Republicans to goose the CAE’s prospects. (Climate change denying will always get you a check from Stanley Hubbard.)  Or it could be, as conspiracy-minded liberals like me prefer to think, an example of the Koch brothers tossing the Minnesota bums a dime to both shore up “traditional thinking” on the school board and prep the landscape to reelect Third District Congressman Erik Paulsen. Paulsen being a legislative lightweight ripe for plucking if the Democrats can coalesce around a viable opponent. (“Adult spirits” heir Dean Phillips would seem to have the best shot.)

Defeat of the “Kersten slate” of school board candidates should rightly spook Paulsen.

Down around the bottom line is this: Edina has changed. Once a reliable fortress of white entitlement, the city, while still very (very) white is home to enough brain power and conscience to be disquieted-to-horrified by the corruption and bigotry of the Trump regime and the various apparatuses — (eg: the CAE) — that promoted his pyrrhic victory.

The resistance is lined up for lattes and scones at Patisserie Margo and is saying, “No way! Not here!”