What with the holidays and all, we’re a little behind in the reading of The Economist. We went years without it, and just started subscribing again when our son, the economics major, mentioned he’d like a subscription for Christmas. His doting mother obliged, and, while she was at it, picked one up for home as well.
We’re glad she did, because it’s the best news magazine weve found. And we wonder why we stopped subscribing to it 7 years or so ago. Think of The Economist as Time or Newsweek, except with better writing and without the long features on why Americans are infatuated with Desperate Housewives. (In case you missed that issue of the other news rags, it’s because we’re congenitally stupid.) Also think of it as extremely intelligent coverage of the rest of the world that you don’t get in the American media unless 150,000 people are carried off by an angry sea.
Although it’s a British magazine, it is global in its scope, and so has a section every week devoted to the U.S. Tucked into a thought provoking feature in the December 18 issue on a revolutionary grading system at an historically African American university is a sidebar headed “Strangers Not Wanted?” The kicker above the headline says, “The mood of Minnesota.”
The story reports on a survey, commissioned by Walter Mondale, on the mood of the Twin Cities suburbs, which notes some not too surprising things such as the suburbanites are willing to pay for good schools and are more socially liberal than their Republican-leaning comrades from rural Minnesota.
But now we get to the “stroppiness,” as The Economist puts it. (If you have to look up stroppiness, as we did, you’ll learn it comes from obstrperous, one of our favorite words.) While rural folk are decidedly “cool” toward Minnesota’s immigrant population, suburbanites are only barely positive–putting new Minnesotans only slightly ahead of the NRA. To be fair, most suburbanites do see immigration as good for the state. More troubling, though, is that twenty percent of suburbanites say that foreign immigration is the “most discouraging” thing about Minnesota.
The Economist wonders if this is a momentary snag in our liberal fabric. Hey, we’re not Mississippi, where murderers of civil rights workers can get away with it for 40 years, but those of us who’ve live here for a while know well that racism, just like the Scandinavian propensity for drinking in secret, is a Minnesota characteristic that becomes every day a little less secret as you get to know us a little bit better.
–Oliver Tuanis
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