The Rake Magazine

Year: 2007

  • The Patriotic Pragmatist

    Eugene Sit’s grandfather was one of the twelve thousand Chinese immigrants who were paid one dollar a week to build the Central Pacific railroad in the 1860s. But before the end of the nineteenth century, Chinese immigrants were all but forced to return to China by the Chinese Exclusion Act legislation of 1882. Although the Sit family prospered in China, the Japanese invasion of World War II and Mao’s subsequent takeover put an end to that. Sit’s father had escaped to the U.S. in 1938, and his son was finally sent to join him in 1948. His mother stayed in China and was a political prisoner for thirty years.

    Today, Sit has rebuilt the family fortune, and then some. He is the founder of Sit Investment Associates, which has built an initial $1 million investment portfolio to over $6.6 billion under management. But what he’s most proud of these days is the Minnesotans’ Military Appreciation Fund, which he started with $1 million of his own money. He has continued to raise more to give financial grants to every Minnesotan serving in the U.S. Armed Forces in a combat zone since September 11, 2001.

    Were you in the military yourself?
    I was in ROTC, and I was excused when I started having a family.

    You have a son, who went to the Air Force Academy and served in the Air Force.
    Yes. Roger. We chose Roger to serve because we felt very strongly that freedom is not cheap, and every family has to do its part.

    You say, “We chose Roger.” Did Roger have something to do with the discussion as well?
    In his letters from first year, it was clear he was not a happy camper. “Get me out of here, get me out of here” every day. But later, he became an upperclassman …

    Why did you start the MMAF?
    Basically the genesis of it is, we understand the sacrifices that are being made by the military in terms of the financial sacrifice, the personal hardships, the family hardships. Most of these people are citizen soldiers, part-time soldiers who are giving up their regular jobs, not only career opportunities, but taking fifty- to seventy-five-percent pay cuts. It’s hard enough for a middle-class family to make ends meet, but then when you separate the family, losing the heads of the household, families take a tremendous financial hit. That is something we need to recognize.
    We realized that relatively few people are doing the heavy work for us. There are only a few of us that are really making sacrifices, and that is quite different than in other conflicts—Korea, World War II, even Vietnam.

    And the third part of it is that it is part of our values, our family’s values, that I truly believe that when you are doing well and are fortunate, you should think really hard about giving back to the community.

    You have said that the fund takes no political position. Do you personally?
    Well, I do and I don’t. I’m a pragmatist. I’m a patriot. I’m appreciative of what we have in this country. I’ve voted both Democrat and Republican.

    What would a pragmatic person do in this war? That’s a loaded question.
    I think there were many mistakes made in the beginning. But having said that, the alternatives are so bad that we have to find some way to give it one last try and hopefully send a message to the factions that “Listen, we’re not going to be here forever. We believe in helping you, but you guys are going to have to cut this ethnic conflict between yourselves.”

    We have to find a way to stabilize the situation and find some way to extricate ourselves.

    It’s very hard on our men and women.

    You suggested that you think people could be doing more. Do you think there should be a draft?
    I think we can have something similar to that for young people, and maybe old people like me, whether it’s community service, whether it’s neighborhood service, whether it’s helping in the Appalachians—I think all these things would be very good.

    You are in the finance business. I have a financial question around the topic of sacrifice. Do you think there should have been a tax cut while we were at war?
    Number one, I believe in the private sector. I believe in the market and the economic system. We’ve had growth twenty-four of the last twenty-six years. A lot of that could be due to economic policies that I call incentive economic policies, which included incentives for people like you and me to be enterprising, creative, and entrepreneurial. Lower taxes on capital gains allow us to invest more, to be more competitive, and that contributed to the growth of the economy. But having said that, I do believe in times of war, we should not have a segment of society bearing the burden. I think the whole country should be asked to join in to make this a unified effort. We should have had a gas tax and a higher tax on people like me.

    I don’t believe we should mortgage the future—putting the burden on future generations.

    You are an immigrant. What advice would you give to new immigrants coming to the United States?
    This is a great country, a great community. You can do a lot to help yourself. There are a lot of things here that will help you. And don’t forget to be responsible and do your part.

  • The Least I Can Do

    I love television. Loves it! The only thing that is better than watching television is eating while watching television. I especially love what I call “helper television.” It’s vulgar entertainment with a psychology lesson—all rolled into one fun-filled half hour.

    Do you live in a filthy, dysfunctional, crap-clogged house? Then I guarantee one of your favorite shows will be The Learning Channel’s magical Clean Sweep. Each week, a team of attractive, non-judgmental strangers descends upon a burgeoning garbage house. This elite team consists of a carpenter, a perky-breasted hostess, a designer, and an organizer/life coach. They pick the two worst rooms of the hovel, enforce a mandatory yard sale, slap some paint on the walls, and run a Swiffer.

    All the denizens of the remade cave cry and swear that they’ll keep it clean this time, and that they didn’t know organized living could be so easy. But we the viewers know that as soon as the cameras shut down and the carpentry truck pulls away, Tearful Emotional Mom will start ferreting away scraps of quilting fabric and dried flowers with all the spastic energy of a squirrel in late November. When there is no room left, she’ll stuff her cheeks with it. Why? Because she just never knows when she’ll see damask at that price again.

    Not to be outdone, Gruff Dad in Ill-Fitting Shorts will begin re-hoarding NFL bobblehead figurines and antique stereo equipment. Why? Because half of his tunes are on vinyl, and those bobbleheads (still in the box, natch), will double in value forty years from now. Soon, their bedroom will be even more cramped than before because the TV carpenter left brand-new shelving to fill.

    It’s like giving the house gastric bypass surgery. The doctor has cleared out the pipes, but the brain of the house is still a pathological overeater. And putting this process on TV is even more brilliant because people who are attracted to that kind of show probably know a thing or two about living in filth. (Not me, of course!) And people who watch that show are actively not cleaning their houses while they watch that show. Can you hear Satan laughing?

    My very favorite helper television show has got to be the Food Network’s Semi-Homemade with Sandra Lee. Semi-Homemade is the Insane Clown Posse of cooking shows—mediocre pre-made ingredients with a layer of busywork added. It’s a cooking show for people who cannot cook at all but love to pretend. Instead of raw ingredients, her recipes go something like this: Buy an angel food cake. Smear Cool Whip on top. Thrust a Barbie into the center. Presto: Barbie’s Hot Tub Party Cake!

    Sandra caps off every episode by stirring up a big pitcher of girlie cocktails as a reward for all our hard work. Instead of just slapping grocery-store rotisserie chicken on the plate, Sandra will dump half a jar of salsa over it and accent the plate with a tiny plastic sombrero. And you know what would go extra good with that? Giant margaritas! Olé!

    Sandra’s show always includes a signature cocktail related to the meal. For a birthday, it might be Sandra’s famous “Icing on the Cake” martinis (peach Schnapps, Kahlúa, and vodka in a sugar-rimmed glass). For a Halloween treat, the tantalizingly named “Witches’ Brew” (Mountain Dew and vodka served from a plastic jack-o’-lantern bucket, with a sugared rim). I wish they just called the program Half Baked, starring your favorite alcoholic neighbor … Sandra Lee!

    For me, the only thing that could be better than watching TV and eating would be watching TV, eating, avoiding cleaning the house, and getting sloshed all at the same time. Because I am so good at this kind of multi-tasking, I should have my own show. I’d call it The Least You Can Do, with your host, efficiency expert Colleen Kruse! I would demonstrate the ultimate in streamlined existence. For my kitchen segment, I’d prepare a feast of box wine and Dinty Moore stew: Hobo party! For my housekeeping segments, I’d show my viewers how to use sheets and blankets as window treatments. You won’t use actual drapes or blinds because you’ll sleep in your recliner in your bathrobe, snug as a swarm of bedbugs. Now that you won’t be needing that bedroom, the home-finance segment will show you how to market that space as prime rental property. Working from home is so now.

    And now a word from our sponsors: Febreze Air Freshener and Colt 45 malt liquor.

    Writer, performer, and femme fatale Colleen Kruse can be reached at mscolleenkruse@yahoo.com.

  • Kuwait

    Here are two photos from our recent trip to Kuwait.

    While there, we went to the Kuwait fish market where they hold daily auctions of local fish and “foreign” fish (caught in non-Kuwaiti waters). The action’s wild, with a few hundred buyers vying for bucketsful of various varieties of fish and shellfish to be sold in restaurants or in the public market located in another part of the same hall, or even to private buyers buying in bulk. We even got to eat some the next day at a wonderful home-prepared meal.

    The auction started with people milling about until suddenly the action started and little by little became more frenetic. It lasted about 15 minutes untill all the fish was sold off.

    In the first photo, Chris Kunz is on the right and Hassan Saffouri is on the left—we took the picture shortly after the auction ended. For some perspective, the second photo is of the auction area before it started.

    Hassan Saffouri

  • Mexico

    These are a couple of recent pics from a recent trip to Jalisco, Mexico
    – where humpback whales migrate for their mating season. In the first,
    you can see The Rake, the tops of a couple of whales, and a “water
    spout”. There were four males and one female in this group, where the
    males were competing for the female. The second shows a few of these
    whales swimming.

    Greg Vinson

  • Dance Dance Contributions

    I am writing in reference to the “Dance Dance Competition” article in the April issue. Although I appreciate any visibility that dance receives in this community, I do not feel this article speaks to the comprehensive nature of dance education available to my students at Summit School of Dance nor to the positive benefits gleaned from the competition experience. Let’s face it, why in this community where education and the arts in general are so valued, would so many students and their parents spend so much time, sweat, and money if the value of the experience was as limited as the article implies?
    At Summit School of Dance our students train in a conservatory-level ballet program alongside their competition classes. They are exposed to creative movement, improvisation, and modern dance from a very early age. Instead of participating in “nationals” our students travel during the summer months to study at many prestigious conservatory programs. Last year, four out of the forty-four students attending the Juilliard summer program were Summit students. This year, we have three students heading to Juilliard with an additional student accepted into the freshman class.

    Just as in any conservatory program, not all Summit students pursue a career in dance, but they do build skills that translate into valuable assets in the corporate world. The competition dancers incrementally learn how to audition as it is a process they are required to go through each year to make their danceline. They learn to be prepared and thorough, presenting themselves as a complete package, confident and put together in spite of the “butterflies.” The rehearsal process builds team skills and students learn about their strengths/weaknesses, what they bring to the group and how to value what others bring. The ability to perform on unknown stages and having to immediately adjust without a spacing rehearsal is an invaluable skill for a professional dancer, but it also breeds flexibility and confidence in all competition participants.

    My students are encouraged to pursue excellence regardless of venue and idiom. Competition dance is a much-beloved venue and something my students share with other dancers. It does serve a social purpose, but it is also an entrée to dance as an art form. By dismissing something so stimulating, and culturally invested, one misses the chance to create openings and bridges between the diverse dance worlds … and we all lose.

    Finally, I resent the term “penis points.” I have never heard that reference prior to this article and find it infinitely demeaning and derogatory. I value the fact that I have young men to teach and that those young men enjoy and pursue their ballet training with gusto. They expand the training possibilities for our young ladies and offer me many choreographic options and opportunities. Outside of a competition studio, I have had very little opportunity to instruct male dancers. Thus, my association with Summit has expanded and nurtured my own professional artistic experience.

    Linda S. Muir Finney, Plymouth, Director of Ballet, Summit School of Dance

  • The Writing's on the Ground

    In the April Rake [“Cuddly Kierkegaardians”], Dan Sinykin mused that “Søren Kierkegaard … wrote more than thirty books during his life (1813-1855) on topics ranging from faith to seduction. That’s a lot of ink for a man whose favorite thinkers, Socrates and Jesus, never penned a word.”

    I’d agree that Socrates and Jesus never saw a Bic or a Biro, but assuming that “penned” here is just meant as a variant on “wrote,” this is seemingly not true of Jesus (though perhaps so of Socrates). See John, chapter 8, verses 6-8:

    6 This they said, tempting him, that they might have to accuse him. But Jesus stooped down, and with his finger wrote on the ground, as though he heard them not.

    7 So when they continued asking him, he lifted up himself, and said unto them, He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.

    8 And again he stooped down, and wrote on the ground.

    Dennis Lien, Minneapolis

  • Life, Friends, Is the Pits

    Psychiatrist Kevin Turnquist gave an excellent response, conservative and correct, to important questions about “depression” and related issues [“The Doctor is In,” April].
    I find that the word “depression” nowadays is loosely used and over-used by the general public. Where once we were “unhappy” or “down” or “moody” or “low,” now we are “depressed.” This buzzword too often gets us directed—unnecessarily—to a mental-health practitioner for treatment.

    Life is not a bowl of cherries; it has its pits. When we feel “low” or “down,” by no means does this mean that we need professional treatment for depression. Talk with a friend. A relative or religious leader can help us when we feel “low.” So will a vacation, change of scene, another activity, or merely time itself. If our happiness interferes not with our work, social life, or our physical well-being, then (in my view) we are only “unhappy”; we are not mentally “depressed” such as to need treatment.

    Unfortunately, in these times there is a pervasive attitude that no discomfort, mental or physical, is allowed—and an immediate treatment or a pill is called for. And we forget that sometimes the “treatment” is worse than the “disease.”

    Leo Shatin, Ph.D., F.A. P.A., Plymouth

  • Semantics of the Unfamiliar

    Thank you for the moving and chilling story about Fozia Mussa [“Country Girl,” April]. I am glad she, unlike so many others, is getting the opportunity to explore her potential and is doing so much with it. There certainly is more than enough racism and xenophobia in the world. However, many if not most of us stare, peer, and yes, even “gawk” at things that are unusual that we are trying to understand. To describe looks as “sneers” and impute racism and xenophobia to scrutiny or long glances seems unfair and excessive; political correctness runs amok. Seeing is believing but believing is seeing as well. It is our attitudes that primarily divide us. I am glad Mussa “paid little attention to the apparent xenophobia,” perhaps she didn’t see it, and chose hope over fear in accepting help and the hand of friendship from a rival clan. Hopefully revealing hers will not “lead to trouble” with her clients.

    John G. Newman, Minneapolis

  • Tenet Sells the Revision

    The question I’ve always had about George Tenet — seen this evening on “60 Minutes” getting feisty with Scott Pelley — is this: How exactly did he, a Clinton-appointee running the goddam CIA, pass muster with Dick Cheney and hang on into the Bush 43 administration? I mean, here was a crowd gone obsessional with doing everything the opposite of Bill Clinton. North Korea? No talking and no deals! Measured fiscal prudence? Gargantuan tax cuts for the Top 1%! And every disposable FOB anywhere in Washington … overboard! But they leave Clinton’s guy running the CIA? The Coast Guard, maybe. But the CIA is one job where you want an unequivocal Kool-Aid partisan, like, uh, Porter Goss.

    From what I’ve read Tenet plays the man’s man game pretty well. He is cocksure and smokes a good cigar. But someone like Cheney had to have some kind of deep assurance that Tenet was not going to be a problem, either with him or with the Richard Perle-Paul Wolfowitz crowd squeezing the Iraq alarm even before 9/11, to survive the Clinton cauterizing going on everywhere else in the federal bureaucracy.

    But here is Tenet now selling his version of history. Granted, it is a version pretty much lacking in surprise and neatly in step with everything else we’ve learned — and Condoleeza Rice, Cheney and Bush continue to deny, to their further utter marginalization.

    I’m all for public officials stepping up and admitting they screwed up — even if they do it by way of fulfilling a $4 million book contract — but the primary strike against Tenet, which maybe he’ll answer better when he testifies before Congress, is why he didn’t step up and scream, “Bullshit!” two years ago, when he realized that either Cheney, Bush, Rice or Andy Card had sold him out to Bob Woodward.

    If he stays as combative as he was with Pelley it’ll be one of the more interesting book tours in recent years. (Must check to see if he’s doing Stewart).

  • Thus Far, A Season Without A Script: The Weekend

    The Twins have now lost three of Johan Santana’s last four starts, which would be disastrous were it not for the surprising performances of Ramon Ortiz and Carlos Silva.

    Everybody, of course, is just figuring that anything positive that Santana can give the team in April is gravy, given his slow starts in recent seasons. I think that’s about the right way to look at it, and it’s sort of easy to look at it that way when the team has had an erratic April and is still 14-11 and in second place in the Central. It’s easy to look at it that way when two of the big rotation question marks coming out of spring training have thus far silenced critics.

    There was no reason to expect that the team that lost five-out-of-six to Kansas City and Cleveland would go to Detroit and take two-out-of-three, but therein lies the basic truth about baseball: there’s really never any reason to expect anything, other than the unexpected. The Twins’ season has already had more highs and lows than a Hold Steady record, but they’re sitting in pretty good shape as they head to Tampa Bay for what should —should— be a little breather (it won’t be, of course, if only because Sidney Ponson takes the hill in the opener) before heading into one of the toughest stretches of the first half: a homestand featuring series with Boston, Chicago, and Detroit, and then a three-game set at Jacobs Field.

    Today’s game –a 4-3 loss on a Brandon Inge walk-off homer against the struggling Jesse Crain– demonstrated how much the Twins depend on their middle of the order guys. Gardenhire shook up the lineup; Punto led off, and Bartlett hit second, and they were on base five times, but didn’t score any runs owing to the fact that Mauer, Cuddyer, and Morneau were a combined 0-10.

    So far ’07 is looking like a repeat of last season in that the three-through-six guys in the batting order (Mauer, Cuddyer, Morneau, and Hunter) are the top four on the team in both RBI and runs scored.

    As far as Crain’s wretched April goes, I’m not going to get too concerned until we get a couple more months out of the way. He was awful last April as well (12 IP, 20 hits allowed, and a 7.50 ERA).