The Rake Magazine

Category: Article

  • A Picture is Worth 5,000 Years

    “A photo is all I have left of her,” Chris Lang, the boyfriend of murdered college student Dru Sjodin, told a Judiciary Policy and Finance Committee at the Minnesota House of Representatives. His testimony culminated with a heated statement about Level Three sex offenders: “They’re not like normal people. I think they’re wired wrong. They’re like animals. They need to be treated like animals, and animals are kept in cages.” The committee, including freshman legislator Cy Thao, remained impassive. Lang stepped down, and discussion moved on to child abuse, crystal-meth addiction, and other problems.

    “We don’t have time to do all the emotional stuff,” said Thao later that day, by way of explaining how legislators can seem inured to the personal horrors their legislation is meant to address. Capitol business is often conducted at a safe remove from emotional issues at hand, but that doesn’t mean Thao, who was elected to office in 2002, sometimes finds the impersonal nature of policy and politics hard to take. A thirty-one-year-old Hmong-American whose round face is accentuated by a close-cropped haircut, Thao came to politics by an unusual route, as a painter and former arts organizer in St. Paul’s Frogtown district. “Artists have to be passionate and emotional,” he believes. “When I’m painting, I put my emotions into it. That’s what drives me. But as a legislator, you’ve got to contain your emotion and turn it into strategies. You just have to focus on the policy.”

    When I met Thao several years ago, he attributed his political views to his college internship experience at the state Capitol: “I saw a lot of people who would only pay attention to people with wealth and people who knew the system. They just didn’t pay attention to the little guy.” Thao’s frustration with the system led him to add an art double major to his political science major while at the University of Minnesota, Morris in the early nineties, and he’s swung between the two ever since—much to his advantage. His stint some years ago as an organizer at the Center for Hmong Arts and Talent, an arts center on University Avenue, gave him skills crucial for politics: raising money, maintaining a grassroots organization, and conducting community outreach, as well as publicly addressing social issues through the Center’s theatrical productions and mural projects.

    Meanwhile, Thao confronts issues through his art that are anything but small, addressing such horrors that would move even the most impassive of observers. Fifty of his paintings will be on display at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts beginning May 21 in The Hmong Migration, an exhibit that is part of the Minnesota Artists Exhibition Program. In this series, Thao creates a compressed visual record of the troubled history of his people and his family.

    Using a technique that is simple, raw, and unpolished, with quickly applied daubs of paint indicating simplified figures and forms, Thao draws from both Hmong folk-art quilting traditions and an interest in the work of Jacob Lawrence. Each work in the series depicts an episode in the history of the Hmong, starting with their creation myth and ancient history and continuing through the culture’s dispersion and its struggles against China in the late 1800s, the French in the mid-1900s, and Communists during the American war against Vietnam and Laos. Thao focuses heavily on the aftermath of that war in works featuring long lines of families fleeing through mountains, across fields and rivers, and corpses left behind on paths or floating in water. In one particularly gruesome image, a Communist leader directs his soldiers to open fire on Hmong approaching a bridge, the passage to freedom in Thailand. Other images poignantly depict life in Thai resettlement camps, conjured from Thao’s memories of the four years he lived in one; and still later the series conveys the difficult move and adjustment to Minnesota, where Thao arrived twenty years ago.

    Thao had proposed exhibiting The Hmong Migration at the MIA before he was elected to the Minnesota legislature; it was a time when he had not yet learned to consider how the public or peers might receive his work. “An artist just wants his work to be shown,” Thao says, adding that he probably wouldn’t apply for an MAEP show now because of his work’s emotionally raw nature. “I have some worries because in that art there was no holding back. I wanted to address every important issue. As a state representative, saying one word out of context or choosing one wrong word can result in different meanings and bring different outcomes. When I painted, I didn’t worry about that at all. I just painted how I wanted to… But I think I will let the art speak for itself. If it hurts me politically, then it just does.”

    At noon, Thao abruptly leaves the committee room. Though the discussion on amendments to the Sex Offender Judiciary/Finance Omnibus Bill is not finished, Thao is unconcerned. “The decision on the bill was made back in February when the chair met with the governor,” he says, and indeed, voting on the amendments had been running on strictly party lines. Thao makes his way to the steps of the Capitol, where Ann Bancroft, the polar explorer, is stirring up a crowd of several thousand at a rally protesting the amendment to ban gay marriage. “Laws that discriminate are just plain wrong,” she shouts. “One thousand benefits received by married couples are not available to me and my partner, Pam. This includes education, health care reform… a home, for God’s sake.” The crowd cheers at her rising pitch, and Thao leans toward me. “She’s got it right,” he says.

    Thao has his own early experience with discrimination and prejudice; among the most poignant of his paintings are those depicting the trials that his family and other Hmong faced upon arriving in Minnesota in the seventies and eighties. Parents visit the welfare office with kids in tow; an assembly line in a large colorless warehouse is manned entirely by Hmong immigrants, with the only hint of the outside world coming through a single small door; teenaged Hmong gang members fight in the streets. One painting depicts the projects in north Minneapolis as a zoo-like maze. Barred windows are the most prominent feature on the plain brick buildings, and on a wall someone has scrawled: “Chink go home.”

    Leaving the rally, Thao passes a tall, young legislator just arriving. Thao asks if he is going to make a speech. The lawmaker gives a gruff “no,” without breaking stride. Thao laughs, and explains, “He’s one of the most conservative members of the House.” He is nothing if not feisty, having earned a reputation for passionately expressing his side of an issue—despite how futile it may seem in the current legislative atmosphere. Thao got into politics during the brief antiestablishment frenzy of the Jesse Ventura era. He had been peripherally involved in Ventura’s 1998 campaign, and so was tapped by the governor to appeal to the Hmong community for the 2000 election. “I figured this would be the only chance that a governor would help out our community,” recalls Thao, “and since no one else wanted to do it, I did it.” He gained national attention for a TV commercial, filmed by two artist buddies, in which he chased prostitutes and criminals from Frogtown with a broom. He also tapped artist friends to run the campaign—going door to door, painting a van, silk-screening posters by hand. Though Thao lost that election (by a surprisingly small margin), the strategies he developed worked for him in 2002.

    After an almost two-year hiatus taken as he learned the ropes at his new day job, Thao hopes to return to painting later this year. After his MIA exhibit, and after the current legislative session, he plans to begin a new series about America. “I think it will be interesting to see the history of this country from the point of view of an immigrant who was a product of American policy.”

    Thao had expressed concerns about a negative reaction to his exhibit, but I asked if his paintings might actually help his political cause. “It could work both ways,” he says after a pause. “Especially during this time when the country is at war and has invaded another country and is imposing its will on people who have no clue about us. My paintings speak to that. Their imagery is critical of misguided policies, regardless of which president the policy comes from. We have a bad foreign policy in this country… But I’m an optimist. If we don’t win this year, we always have next year.”

  • Drowning in Decency

    Nearly a decade ago, in an endearingly inept campaign to counter his Entertainment Tonight anchorguy blandsomeness, John Tesh embellished a series of magazine articles with casual expletives and weird, crude asides. “Well, [fatherhood] hasn’t helped with the sex life,” he told GQ in August 1995. “I get no time on the breasts anymore, ’cause the baby’s always there.” That December he got even freakier in a People magazine interview, detailing a vivid fantasy that tickled his cortex during concerts, as he played bombastic background music for thousands of fans: “It is like I’ve taken my penis and laid it on the piano and there’s a big chopper right there…”

    Now, however, Tesh hosts a radio show that’s marketed as an upbeat source of “intelligence for your life,” and public castration fantasies are decidedly not a part of the mix. Instead, he promises to make listeners “smarter, healthier, better at everything” they do by playing old Celine Dion ballads and making observations like “Getting your boss to see things your way can sometimes be tough.” For people who find the “For Dummies” books too literary, the John Tesh Radio Show is a winning blend of homiletic soundbites and hackneyed pop, and as an added bonus, it’s kid-friendly too. At the beginning of every show, the daughter who once stole breast-time from Tesh now robs him of airtime. “If a nine-year-old can’t listen to it,” she promises, “you won’t hear it on this radio program.”

    Unfailingly upright, vigorously inoffensive, Tesh’s daily radio assault is part of a riptide of decency that threatens to drown us all. Broadcast and cable TV, slick magazines, radio, and, of course, the dangerously unregulated Internet have become unwitting handmaidens to legions of do-gooders intent on disseminating inspirational news items, fiery sermons, and poorly acted TV dramas in which cute kids and aged curmudgeons alike learn Important Life Lessons. But while grim crotch cops and shrill hand-wringers portend imminent cultural annihilation in every publicly aired fart joke, the decency explosion goes virtually unnoticed.

    Take, for example, Pax-TV, which, according to founder Lowell Paxson, uses “storytelling and parables” to deliver the message “that there is a higher power intervening in our lives.” Launched six years ago, it now reaches ninety-five million American households, or eighty-nine percent of the viewing public. The Trinity Broadcasting Network, which bills itself as “the world’s largest religious network and America’s most watched faith channel,” is available in ninety million U.S. households. Along with faith-based networks like EWTN, CBN, the Word Network, the Church Channel, and numerous others, secular entities like the ABC Family Channel, the Disney Channel, and Nickelodeon provide hours upon hours of wholesome fare. 7th Heaven and Joan of Arcadia are current network hits; old favorite Touched by an Angel has achieved immortality in the afterlife of syndication. Money magazine reports that religious radio group Salem Communications is the nation’s third-largest major-market radio network. American Family Radio, founded in 1987 by professional vice-hunter Donald Wildmon, operates more than two hundred stations. According to radio consultant Bryan Farrish, who maintains an industry website called Radio-media.com, approximately 1,900 religious stations are currently broadcasting in the U.S.

    At some point you have to ask: How much decency is too much? A small dose of Tesh is like aural Prozac. His soothing baritone refreshes; his sunny optimism uplifts; his easygoing rectitude inspires. But the John Tesh Radio Show goes on for a full five hours! And some radio stations actually air the show from 7 p.m. to midnight, then immediately repeat it from midnight until 5 a.m. Scientists have yet to subject lab monkeys (or children) to such massive quantities of Tesh, but when they do, you can be sure those lab monkeys (and children) are not going to get smarter, healthier, and better at everything they do. Instead, they’ll be chewing each others’ ears off and flinging feces at their captors. Surely, our lab monkeys (and our children) deserve a better fate than this—yet where are the efforts to regulate decency?

    Rather than address the obvious dangers of Tesh saturation, federal lawmakers remain hopelessly fixated on Janet Jackson’s weaponized nipple and Howard Stern’s sleazy radio banter. To protect America from such evils, they insist, stronger indecency laws are required. But indecency laws are already quite strong; indeed, both obscenity laws and indecency laws criminalize content that describes sexual or excretory organs or activities in a “patently offensive” manner. But a prosecutor who files an obscenity charge against you still has to convince a jury that you’re guilty—and you can appeal an obscenity conviction to a higher court. On the other hand, if the FCC charges you with indecency, that’s it—you’re guilty, no jury required. And you can only appeal an indecency violation to the FCC itself.

    Luckily, the FCC’s power only extends so far. Broadcast radio and broadcast TV rely upon public airwaves to deliver their programming, and because of this fact, they fall under the FCC’s domain. As part of the deal for using the airwaves, broadcasters agree to forfeit some of the free-speech protections that more private mediums like books, newspapers, and DVDs enjoy. For decades, this gave the FCC a great degree of power over electronic media, but that power is diminishing with the increasing popularity of cable TV, the Internet, satellite TV, and satellite radio, none of which are currently under FCC control.

    Thus, those few seconds of Super Bowl micro-nudity could not have come at a more opportune time; they gave the FCC its best chance in years to make a case for reinforcing its authority. Currently its allies in Congress are trying to strengthen the FCC via the Broadcast Decency Enforcement Act of 2004, which would increase the maximum fine for a single act of indecency to a half-million dollars. Even more alarming are the FCC’s efforts to popularize the idea that cable and satellite broadcasting should also be under its thumb, because even though they’re subscription services delivered via privately maintained hardware, they do sometimes use the public spectrum in their delivery processes. This amounts to a pretty audacious land grab from an organization heading toward irrelevance, but if the FCC pulls its off, then MTV, Comedy Central, and perhaps even HBO and pay-per-view porn could become subject to the same regulations as broadcast radio and TV.

    Then, of course, the FCC would really have some indecency to combat. Right now, it’s difficult to find objectionable material in the two mediums over which it presides. Yes, there’s Howard Stern, the favorite whipping boy of every family-values firebrand, but his show is currently carried by fewer than forty radio stations nationwide. (In contrast, Tesh can be heard on more than one hundred and fifty.) And beyond Stern and a handful of Stern imitators, several of whom have been fired in recent months, what else is out there?

    Already it’s apparent how quickly an amplified FCC enforcement effort could devolve in scary farce. In March, before the Senate had even considered the Broadcasting Indecency Enforcement Act, radio stations were already flinching at the mere possibility of $500,000 fines. In Cleveland, WNCX pulled the Steve Miller Band’s “Jet Airliner” from its rotation because it contained the lyric “funky shit goin’ down in the city.” In Los Angeles, public radio station KCRW took similar precautionary measures by firing longtime contributor Sandra Tsing Loh after she and her engineer forgot to bleep a single F-word out of a pre-recorded piece.

    Some pundits maintain that WNCX and KCRW have wildly overreacted to a threat that isn’t there. The FCC itself, however, has enthusiastically legitimized their para
    noia by declaring open season on “lone expletives,” which are now subject to “significant penalties.” That’s because in addition to indecency, the FCC also has the power to penalize “profanity,” which it defines, in part, as the “F-word” and those words (or variants thereof) that are as highly offensive as the “F-word.”

    What’s the average citizen to make of all this? Prepare yourself for lots and lots of Tesh (unless he starts talking about amputating his penis again). And drop to your knees and pray that cable TV, satellite TV and radio, and the Internet remain free from FCC regulation. Because really, how much enforced propriety can one freedom-loving nation stand? Already, there’s a surfeit of decency. While Pax-TV is available in ninety-five million households, it has attracted more than three million actual viewers on only two occasions during its six-year history. To make ends meet, it airs infomercials for hours each day.

    Meanwhile, by embracing nudity, sex, profanity, and violence—which is to say, everything the FCC aspires to eliminate—HBO has netted an estimated twenty-seven million paying subscribers. And that’s the beauty of our current media age: There’s decency for the pious, trash for coarser sorts, and plenty of squeaky-clean fare for the kids. Blessed with such abundance, we all should be celebrating. Instead, the FCC and its allies broadcast a clear, condescending, and cynical message: if allowed to make your own choices, they believe, you will invariably choose sleaze over rectitude, fart jokes over sermons, Stern over Tesh. And only by fining indecency out of existence can decency triumph.

  • Public Icon, Private Property

    Imagine: It’s springtime, there’s a sense of optimism in the air. Best Buy is about to open its new corporate headquarters in Richfield. Everyone’s talking about it. Some say it will usher the Twin Cities into a new era; others argue about whether or not that’s a good thing. Wanting to include the community in the historic event, Best Buy paints one of the thousands of steel construction beams white and leaves it on the sidewalk for several days. Ordinary citizens are invited to sign their names to it before it’s used for the “topping off” ceremony at the apex of the new building. The turnout is huge; when the mayor comes by, accompanied by reporters from every local news outlet, he can barely find space for his own autograph.

    OK, so this isn’t what happened last year, when Best Buy unveiled its shiny, nondescript corporate headquarters, a vaguely cruise-ship-shaped building plying the suburban seas just off I-35 and I-494. But that’s precisely what occurred thirty years ago when the IDS Center was built in downtown Minneapolis.

    That was a true community event. From the placement of the first beam to the final opening gala, the local papers monitored every detail—how many tons of steel were being used, how many panes of glass, how many light bulbs. They covered the seventeen helicopter trips required to haul the mechanical window-washing equipment to the top of the tower. And they related humorous anecdotes, such as the family of bats that had made a nest within the structure while it was under construction, only to come out of hibernation and fly into the Crystal Court, swooping above the heads of terrified Woolworth’s patrons. It was like celebrity gossip, with the building itself as the celebrity.

    Today, of course, it’s hard to pick out the IDS as the tallest amid Minneapolis’ brace of skyscrapers. But back in the 1960s, the tallest building was Foshay Tower, and its exceptional stature was obvious to the eye. Foshay was the Minneapolis skyline, and had been since 1929.

    “I still remember coming in on the train at the Milwaukee Road depot,” says Charlie Nelson, an architect with the Minnesota Historical Society. “And coming round the bend and this older man next to me growing very excited and pointing out the window and saying, ‘Look, it’s the Foshay Tower! That means we’re home!’”

    The IDS was built to tower over Foshay. It was built to bring focus to downtown, to connect the skyway system at a central point, to push Minneapolis into the modern age. As its website proclaims, the IDS was “a building so impressive, they built a city around it.”

    “It was a bold statement,” says Chuck Liddy, who was part of the Minneapolis Historic Preservation Commission from 1979 to 1984. “There’s been kind of a gentleman’s agreement not to build anything taller, because it was such an icon when it was built.” The Wells Fargo Center is a foot shorter than the IDS; 225 South Sixth (formerly US Bank Place or First Bank Place), a foot shorter still. The IDS remains the tallest building in the city, even if you can’t tell by looking.

    If things had gone as initially planned, the headquarters of Investors Diversified Services, Inc. would be a simple twelve-story building sited on one corner of the block. It was not intended to top Foshay or to bring Minneapolis into a new era. However, Baker Properties, Inc. had determined there was a great need for more office space in downtown Minneapolis and, in close partnership with IDS, it set out to provide some. This was 1963. The new plan was to take up half of the block and include a twenty-five-story office tower, skyway links, an apartment complex, and parking ramp. Soon afterward the proposed tower grew to thirty-six stories, and again to fifty stories in 1967. Then a 1968 study prompted another round of considerations to expand still further.

    The Fantus Company, commissioned by the Greater Minneapolis Chamber of Commerce to assess the potential of Minneapolis and Hennepin County as a location for corporate headquarters, had found the area “excellent” but the availability of space only “fair.” So Investors Diversified Services, Inc., realizing that its development could have an effect on downtown Minneapolis as a whole, devised yet another plan: a four-building complex covering the entire block and linked by skyways. Its anchor would be a central glass-roofed indoor plaza; its highlight, a fifty-seven-story, 775-foot tower—the tallest between Chicago and San Francisco, and one that would outstretch the Foshay Tower by an awe-inspiring 225 feet.

    The design commission went to Philip Johnson, an architect of international stature who had collaborated with Mies van der Rohe on Manhattan’s iconic Seagram’s Building, and his partner John Burgee. Their innovative zig-zagging windows allowed for up to thirty-two corner offices on every floor; the building as a whole, once completed, was proclaimed “one of the finest skyscrapers built in any American city” by no less an authority than the New York Times. Fortune magazine said it made Minneapolis “a leader in architectural innovation.” The words of IDS CEO Stuart Silloway, who in 1969 had described the project as “a demonstration of towering confidence in the future of Minneapolis,” rang true.

    Meanwhile, a similar phenomenon was occurring in New York with the World Trade Center, whose two main towers were erected between 1966 and 1972. Like the IDS, it began as a rather modest proposal and grew to gargantuan proportions. Its planners hoped the World Trade Center would revitalize lower Manhattan, create a new office district to rival Midtown, and bring renewed pride and confidence to the entire city. Critics in the Big Apple complained that the WTC was too big, that it didn’t fit in, that it would rob New York of its character and disrupt the legendary skyline, spiked by the Chrysler and Empire State buildings.

    Minneapple critics posed the same arguments: the IDS Center was like a giant looming over downtown, threatening to squash it. Its architecture appeared alien, completely out of context with its surroundings. In a local cartoon, a Minneapolitan showed a tourist the new skyline, saying: “There’s Foshay Tower, and there’s the box it came in.”

    There was also some resentment of the fact that designers Johnson and Burgee were New Yorkers. “Up until that time, all the great buildings here had been designed by Minnesotans,” explains the historical society’s Nelson.

    But others were eager to welcome the postwar skyscraper to Minneapolis, eager to see a city that outsiders could associate with something other than cows. And for them, the IDS was a gem. “Modern architecture tends to get dumped on as being blah, not very humane—hard to love, if you will,” says Nelson. “But the IDS is vibrant. It changes with the light; it changes with the movement of clouds.”

    1972 saw one grand opening after another at the IDS Center. On June 17, the Crystal Court had its debut with a fifty-dollar-a-ticket formal symphony ball. After a Minnesota Orchestra performance, a dance band from Palm Beach, Florida, took over. Andy Warhol was in attendance. Four months later, regular folks were welcomed to the Crystal Court, and in November, the short-lived movie theater on the lower level opened with The Darwin Adventure. Finally, the fiftieth-floor Skylook Observation Gallery went into business, open until midnight every day of the year.

    The glamour and novelty dissipated with the recession of 1973 and 1974. Investors Diversified Services, Inc. was broke. The culminating grand opening for the entire complex was canceled. In 1975, IDS sought to decrease its tax burden by reducing the official valuation of its building from $92 million to $76.6 million. The lesser valuation was granted. The building had cost $125 million.

    While the IDS was not a stunning financial success, its cultural success was immediate. The building won awards from the American Institute of Architects; it was talked about in more cosmopolitan cities like New York; it was immortalized as the location of the TV station on The Mary Tyler Moore Show. The IDS Center, for all its financial troubles, quickly became an icon.

    The Crystal Court was the crown jewel of the building—and, it could be said, even downtown as a whole. Practical in the Minnesota climate, beautiful in its construction, and ideal in its location, the indoor plaza was a perfect place to escape the hectic pace of downtown. Trees in planters provided a park-like feel, and seating cubes were strewn across the court. There was even an informal sidewalk café. The court also pulled the budding skyway system together and gave downtown a central focus, like the central square in a medieval European town. Locals loved it. Architects from all over called it the best people place in the country. Philip Johnson, the architect, talked about its importance on WCCO: “Every city has to have a place where it’s natural to be together,” he said. “I hope there will be lots of little Grecian fountains, and little kiosks with flowers for buttonholes… And guitars.”

    The love affair was short-lived. The Crystal Court’s sparkle gradually dimmed, and in 1979 Bernard Jacob, then editor of Architecture Minnesota, wrote an editorial criticizing changes that had taken place since the court’s debut. The indoor greenery had become sparse, and the seating had been dispatched to the margins to make way for an upscale restaurant on a raised, carpeted platform, which had replaced the self-service café. With the main space now open only to those with the time and money for full-service dining, the Crystal Court was no longer a truly public space.

    But the real trouble began with the first of a series of ownership transfers. In the early eighties, Investment Diversified Services sold its namesake building to Oxford Development, a company that was not only controlled by Canadians who would likely value their bottom line over the social and culture welfare of downtown Minneapolis—but also the very same company that had constructed City Center, widely considered downtown’s ugliest building. The public was wary from the outset.

    Oxford did little to dispel their fears. In 1983, the company decided the observation gallery space was too valuable and gave its managers two choices: pay double the rent, or vacate the premises. The managers opted to bail. The gallery had been drawing around a thousand guests per Saturday, but on December 31, nearly seven thousand people showed up for one last visit.

    Next, Oxford announced its plans to renovate the Crystal Court. The space was bringing people in, but not the kind who were inclined to spend wads of cash at the nearby shops. Oxford planned to move one of the escalators to the south side of the court and to cut a hole in the floor to bring light to the lower level, which to this day has yet to prove itself a viable commercial space (it currently functions as an employee cafeteria). Finally, the company was going to allow the Center’s retailers to modify the facade of their shops.

    The Minneapolis Heritage Preservation Committee would have none of it. They quickly voted to designate the Crystal Court a historically significant structure, which would mean that any changes would require city approval. The Oxford managers were stridently opposed. The preservation committee was attempting to impose government control over private property, they complained; if the designation was made, the building’s value would plummet.

    “People seem to think the city owns the IDS, like it owns a park,” City Council member Barbara Carlson told R.T. Rybak (then a cub reporter with the Minneapolis Star and Tribune) in defending Oxford. “As much as I would like that, it isn’t the case.” In 1984, the Minneapolis City Council held the final decision on whether to designate the Crystal Court as a significant structure. Both Oxford and the Heritage Preservation Committee lobbied hard, and Rybak reported that a shouting match broke out in the council chambers after a March public hearing. In the end, however, the parties managed a compromise. Oxford scaled back on its planned renovations, and the City Council agreed to withhold its “historically significant” designation.

    Less than a decade later, the Chicago-based Heitman Advisory Corporation, the new owners of the IDS Center, bought out the remainder of Woolworth’s sixty-year-lease. The beloved five-and-dime, which had been on the block since before the IDS Center was built, was replaced by the Gap, Gap Kids, and the Gap-owned Banana Republic. Windows on Minnesota, the restaurant on the fiftieth floor, was closed to the public. But by far the most upsetting change was the bleak state of the Crystal Court, which Heitman’s management swept clean, removing all the seating and creating a granite wasteland. People still passed through, but there was no reason to stay. Editorial writers once again began making snide comments about the court. Heitman promised changes, but for years, apart from the occasional art exhibit, the court stood empty.

    “The management would always say ‘well, we’re working on it but we want to do it right,’ and people didn’t believe them,” says Linda Mack, who covers architecture for the Star Tribune.

    Yet to everyone’s surprise, Heitman stayed true to its promise. At long last, in 1998, seating returned to the Crystal Court. Black olive trees were shipped in from Florida. The designers examined Philip Johnson’s original plans and discovered a fountain that had never been built in 1972 because of the recession. Upon further investigation, they discovered the needed structural supports for the fountain were already in place beneath the floor. There were even water pipes in the ceiling, and extra light fixtures trained on the spot where the fountain was to stand.
    The original 1972 concept was for a fountain in brass, one that was quickly deemed too small (at fifty-some feet)—and too phallic. But the 105-foot rainfall that was eventually installed met more or less unanimous approval. Minneapolis had reclaimed its public city center.

    Its panoramic view of the city, however, may be lost for good. Technically, one can see thirty-five miles from the top floor of the IDS Center—a distance that is significantly decreased by cloud cover and pollution, but is still a lot better than what most of us will see today. The observation gallery has never been reopned since its 1984 closure.

    For awhile, there was still a restaurant people could go to, and the rumor was they wouldn’t kick you out if you just wanted to enjoy the view and not buy anything. Now that restaurant, still called Windows on Minnesota, is a private rental space run by the Marquette Hotel, and visitors can’t get there without an access key. Renting the ballroom for a wedding or bar mitzvah will run you $6,000. According to Nigel Pustam, a manager for the Marquette, opening the restaurant to the public would be “a bad business plan.” There are dozens of restaurants on Nicollet Mall, he explains; it’s the view that gives Windows on Minnesota the “uniqueness” which enables them to make thousands of dollars off the space. Guests at the $300-a-night hotel can ask for an escorted tour, but the average tourist off the street is not allowed. No exceptions.

    “I get a lot of people from other countries and out of town who want to go to the top of the building,” says Carrie Stowers, the “customer service ambassador” for the IDS Center. “It’s really sad to see the looks on their faces,” she adds with a tone of tragic perkiness.

    Gone, too, is the stream of gossip and anecdotes coming from people like Stowers. RREEF, the building’s current management, has a website with a few simple facts, which is where they direct nosy reporters. Anything beyond that is a “security concern.” Jim Durda, IDS general manager, wouldn’t even say how large the cleaning staff was. “There’s an adequate team to clean the building,” he assured us. And what equipment do they use? “The methods are proven, and they work, and they’re efficient.” Pressed for more details, he politely apologized. “Because of the heightened security, there’s a lot of questions that we just don’t answer.”

    But it’s not just the heightened security. This is the modern age. The corporate age. The impersonal, privatized, “what’s-it-to-you?” age. The IDS was constructed in a small city where the pride of a community swelled as each floor was added, but that was a different time. Any maybe that is the point: That’s what the IDS Center used to represent. It was Minneapolis’ symbolic entry into the world. It was the Minneapple’s rite of passage from a small town to a cosmopolitan city. If the building that set off that change has become impersonal, inaccessible, and all too corporate, maybe that’s only appropriate.

  • Wrestling Matt

    It’s a bitterly cold Tuesday evening in mid-January, the kind of subzero, dangerously low windchill night when Minnesotans are apt to crank up the boiler and hunker down in front of “American Idol” and “Law & Order,” so it’s a little surprising to find more than fifty constituents gathered in the living room of a foursquare house in St. Paul’s Merriam Park neighborhood for a pre-legislative session chat with state Sen. Dick Cohen and House Minority Leader Matt Entenza.

    For the first hour or so, Entenza, who, at six-foot-five, towers over his fellow DFLer, defers to Cohen in the give-and-take. There are questions about property taxes—the state’s formula for limiting increases is going to expire in a couple of years and in some older cities, property taxes could rise by as much as twenty to twenty-five percent—health insurance, the budget, education, conceal-and-carry, and gay marriage. But when a young constituent, a former Paul Wellstone student at Carleton College, launches into a Howard Dean-like critique of Democrats for talking too much about what can’t be accomplished rather than what can be achieved, Entenza steps to the fore.

    Speaking with the pinched vowels of his hometown of Worthington, Entenza (the name is Catalonian) is relaxed, collected, and articulate: what you’d expect from an old high school debater. He’s no Wellstone—too low-key for that—but in this season of growing liberal discontent and swelling fury at George W. Bush, his message this evening is a hit with the crowd.

    In media appearances, Entenza tends to come across with a lawyerly air (he is an attorney by training): a man who thinks the truth is so obvious that anyone who disagrees with him is either disingenuous or dim. But in a one-on-one setting like this, he seems more reflective than righteous, picking and choosing his words methodically. In fact, “methodical” is probably the best way to describe him, an approach he honed as a white-collar prosecutor combing through the dry barrens of financial documentation and tax filings to nab scam artists. It’s a praxis he has also applied as a legislative watchdog in unsexy but nevertheless critical areas like charter school accountability. Entenza is one of those rare figures who combines a high level of idealism with the tenacity to master the details of issues that are superficially boring yet have a huge bearing on the commonweal. He is capable of speaking in sound bites, and can put a sarcastic edge to his comments when he’s talking about things he doesn’t like—Tim Pawlenty, the Minnesota Taxpayers League—but for the most part, he refrains from rhetorical flourishes.

    Unlike the Republicans and Governor Pawlenty who, Entenza declares, retail nothing but fear and the message that “all that Minnesotans can do is buy a gun and hole up inside a moat,” the DFL stands for the “Minnesota way” of doing things, helping build community and making sure the most vulnerable of the state’s residents “don’t get shortchanged just so the members of the Minnesota Taxpayers League can save money on their taxes.”

    “One of the things that distinguished Minnesota was that there used to be consensus that there would be an opportunity for everyone to climb up,” Entenza says. “Now that consensus has been challenged and they are pulling out the rungs on the ladder. We plan to change that.”

    In the House, the DFL is down by fourteen seats. But Minnesota is known for sudden seismic shifts in the political landscape. Twice in the past fifteen years there have been double-digit swings in House membership following an election. Riding a wave of anti-Bush sentiment, it is conceivable that the DFL could retake the House. If so, Entenza would most likely end up speaker of the House, making him the second most powerful person in state government after Tim Pawlenty, a man with whom he has clashed with growing frequency since Pawlenty was elected governor.

  • Off Track

    Notwithstanding our love of the single-occupant automobile, we were very excited about the arrival of the light-rail train this spring. We love strolling down Fifth Street past the bright new Warehouse District station. It gaily announces the time and date on its prim marquees and generally looks as if it expects our train to shoosh in momentarily. But then things went a little fubar with the MTC bus strike. Because MTC won the contract to operate the Hiawatha Line, it cannot do so until the final Ts are crossed on the present agreement between management and operators. Each delay is amplified tenfold for the nascent light-rail system, since the preparations for its launch are legion and complex.

    These sorts of capital improvements are always controversial, for the simple fact that they cost big bucks. They feel almost hydraulic, in the way that powerful amounts of money have to be diverted from some other major program. It is a legacy of certain conservatives (who, we can’t help pointing out, have managed to outspend liberals in “reducing the size of government” for the past twenty years, and hold the present and previous records for largest federal deficits in the history of the world) that there is no gain without pain. Incidentally, the best way to minimize the pain seems to be to punish those who are already in pain, in the hope that they won’t notice or can’t complain.

    We are noticing and complaining. The closure of public schools in the wake of maximum increases in property taxes, along with an unwise conversation about three new stadiums and a silly plan to test a monorail, have opened up old wounds. It is galling to have state leaders bragging about balancing the state budget and being “fiscally responsible” when they have merely passed the bill along to the counties and cities.

    Invariably, taxpayers feel compelled to do the math and weigh the options. When Minneapolis chose to indulge its vanity with the Hennepin Avenue suspension bridge—or more recently, the heinous “Frank Lloyd Wright” bridge on Third Avenue—we were among the complainers who wondered whether the money might be spent on something more important. It was only the mean-spirited who pointed out that a new bridge actually meant more accommodations for the homeless.

    Still, what would life be like if every decision were based merely on utility? Would an artless world be preferable to a starving one? We would not like to live in a city that lacked the imagination to do both; the choice between want and need is artificial. We’ll mull this conundrum while we wait for our train.

  • Mothers for Meatlessness

    My thirteen-year-old daughter Sophie is a dyed-in-the-wool lifelong vegetarian, occasional vegan, and budding animal rights activist. I hadn’t had the heart to tell her that as a result of this latter interest she’d be the butt of a lot of jokes in her lifetime, but she found out on her own not long ago when she joined the PETA Street Team and discovered a section of the organization’s website devoted to “come backs” for miscellaneous insults she might encounter.

    The thing about animal rights is that the topic draws criticism not only from the people who would prefer to wear fur in peace, but also from the leftiest of lefties, who get infuriated over people raising a ruckus about factory farming and cruel shampoo when the world is plagued by war, homelessness, child abuse, and environmental devastation.

    I know that buying free-range eggs, in the whole scope of planetary problems, is a rather small drop in the bucket. But I’m quietly thrilled that my daughter is expressing a commitment to and a passion for something with more substance than lipgloss. There are more than enough issues out there for everyone, after all, and involvement with one often leads to another. For example, she just finished reading A Civil Action, the real-life legal thriller about the toxic waste dumping in Woburn, Massachusetts. She loved it, despite (and because of) having to swallow a bitter pill of indignation over the omnipotence of corporate giants and the fallibility of our justice system.

    I myself converted to vegetarianism because, put simply, I could. With almost no effort, I am able to do something that’s better for the planet, that eliminates the possibility of contributing to unethical livestock practices, all the doing something that’s healthy for me. So many other things I should do, but I can’t or I don’t, but vegetarianism is just so easy I can’t turn down the potential good karma it represents.

    The day I went vegetarian still sticks in my mind. It wasn’t long after the ice had gone out on North Center Lake, and the blinding spring sun bounced off the water and flooded through the west windows of our old Victorian house. I was upstairs folding laundry while baby Sophie helped by pulling the tidy stacks off the couch when I wasn’t looking. Somewhere in the middle of this tiresome game, my attention turned to the television in the other room. I caught a short snippet of a PBS documentary showing a man drinking warm blood from the neck of a freshly beheaded snake, and I said, “That’s it.”

    I can see now that my reasoning was pretty loose, and I also recall feeling pretty sheepish about subsisting primarily on bread and noodles for the first couple of meatless years (“For vegetarians, we don’t seem to eat very many vegetables,” I remember saying). I didn’t care for tofu back then, and couldn’t stand legumes. I’d grown up on hamburgers, tuna fish, and hot dish, and it took years to orient my palate toward broader horizons.

    Meanwhile, we decided to raise Sophie vegetarian, and her siblings, too, as they came along. Once in a while, people would prod us about what might happen when our kids got a little older. “Aren’t you worried that once they have the chance they’re going to go off the deep end—you know, gorge themselves on hot dogs and Big Macs?”
    In truth, I wasn’t worried at all. I figured that eventually they’d have to make their own choice anyway, and what they ate when they came of age would have little bearing on me. As it happened, when their dad and I split up, he married an omnivore and gave up vegetarianism. Perfect opportunity for the kids to start scarfing down sausage and buffalo wings. But the years have unwound and they haven’t chosen to do so. At thirteen, eleven, and eight, they’re wholehearted herbivores, and for reasons of their own.

    Which, as I said, can sometimes be cause for humor, intended or not. Sophie was at the mall recently, celebrating a friend’s birthday. All of the girls ordered Asian at the food court. Sophie was the only one who didn’t get chicken, and she had to explain to one of the girls who didn’t know her that she’s a vegetarian, has been her whole life. “Really?” asked the girl, with sincerity, concern, and an extended fork. “Would you like to try my chicken?”

  • St. Paul’s Lunch Lady

    I don’t know whether I was having a nightmare, but I recently woke up wondering what it takes to produce 48,000 meals a day. So I invited myself to the St. Paul Public Schools’ nutrition services headquarters to find out.

    The answer, supplied in the person of Director Jean Ronnei, is nerves of steel. District 625 serves more than eight million meals and snacks per year on a budget of $17.9 million dollars, and the buck stops with her. Supplies arrive daily at the central facility near the fairgrounds. Here the food is prepared, then delivered to more than seventy schools with a fleet of only six vehicles. When I arrived at the 72,000-square-foot kitchen, I was met with evidence of Ronnei’s aide-de-camp efficiency. She had a manila folder with The Rake written on the tab, containing a sample of school lunch menus, stats (23,000 gallons of ketchup served annually), and a recipe for 1,200 pizzas.

    In contrast to the frazzled, jumpy nature of restaurateurs trying to orchestrate a few hundred meals in an evening, Ronnei led me on my tour with the composure of someone who’s kept things well in hand for fifteen years. It may be her background in hotel hospitality that taught her to hide the sweat. But it was also clear she had nothing to hide. The place was spotless and running smoothly—no vulgar mechanics cursing seized-up mixer motors, no fetid heaps of waste, no vats of steaming Soylent Green. Among the eighty or so production machines on site, my favorite was “Wally,” a Brobdingnagian kettle in which 250 gallons of sweet-and-sour sauce simmered at exactly 180 degrees.

    Many of St. Paul’s 43,000 hungry students eat breakfast, lunch, and after-school snacks at school, making the district the most important source of their daily calories. Presumably, this is a wretched fate. Oliver Twist would not have asked the beadle for seconds at my school. The memory of thin, rubbery burgers, glutinous casseroles, and flaccid green beans haunts the nation’s school cafeterias to this day. When Ronnei and I lunched at St. Paul Central High, site supervisor Pat Mergens, a twenty-three-year veteran of the trade, sat with us and recalled those dark days. “We pretty much never used a vegetable that wasn’t out of a can. Maybe a tossed salad every now and then. I liked meatloaf and mashed potatoes, so we made meatloaf and mashed potatoes.”

    Times have changed, and school lunches have too. Today, for example, St. Paul schools consume 1,100 pounds of chili powder per year, and 3,700 gallons of jalapeños. Ronnei and I were treated to teriyaki chicken breasts on wild rice, broccoli au gratin, strawberries (frozen, but good quality), and French bread. There were five other entrée choices. Students weren’t throwing food; they were eating it. Trays carried past our table revealed the popularity of the breaded chicken patty. Kitchen manager Wanda Christianson boasted that since lowering the fat by eight grams and improving the quality of the meat, they’ve been putting out 450 patties a day.

    It wasn’t hard to get opinions from the kids. “I’ve got something to say,” piped up Nathan Giles, a precociously bearded lad who had chosen the teriyaki chicken. “Public school food is really good. I enjoy it every day. The stereotype is, ‘Oh, the food in the schools is sooo bad.’ It’s not.” He looked around, surveying his classmates for contradictions they did not offer.

    Ronnei asked what I thought of the food, even though she had already made it clear she answers to no one but the kids. “I have the greatest customers in the world. And the greatest job. Who could argue with the joy of feeding kids?” I only cook for two, but I wouldn’t dare.—Joe Pastoor

  • No Campaign, No Gain

    Much is being made nationally of so-called “NASCAR dads,” allegedly a flag-waving bloc of voters who drive pick-up trucks, belong to the NRA, and tend to favor football and beer. The colloquial wisdom is that NASCAR dads are concentrated in the South, and in Indianapolis. But according to some experts, there is a healthy crop of them right here in Minnesota.

    “Have you been to Brainerd? Have you been to Elko?” exclaimed Bill Hillsman, a political strategist and advertising guru. Brainerd International Raceway and Elko Speedway are real racetracks, and one should not be surprised to learn that real NASCAR dads congregate there. But Minnesota’s dads are also hunters, snowmobilers, and guys with cabins. They populate key districts in the state stretching from St. Cloud down to Mankato. “Whoever gets those votes will win the election,” said Hillsman.

    So how did the NASCAR dad displace the soccer mom as the punditocracy’s favorite swing voter? “They resonate with a national leader who is strong and decisive and doesn’t take guff,” explained Larry Jacobs, the director of the 2004 elections project at the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey Institute. Nationally, the dads overwhelmingly supported George W. Bush in the 2000 election. His brand of “compassionate conservatism” apparently resonated with a group of voters whose beliefs don’t neatly align with either party. On issues like gay rights, the death penalty, and military spending, the dads tend to side with Bush. But like Democrats, they fear corporate greed and job loss while they support generous funding for their kids’ schools. “‘NASCAR dads’ is a new label for a persistent swing bloc of voters,” said Jacobs.

    Minnesota delivered its electoral votes to the Democratic candidate in 2000—and has a long history of doing so. But according to Hillsman, Minnesota liberalism has slowly eroded during the past several elections, culminating in 2002 with the victories of Norm Coleman and Tim Pawlenty. In light of this, Republicans are promising a drag race for Minnesota’s ten electoral votes. What was no-man’s land for Bush in 2000 now appears to be a key state.

    It’s not so much that Minnesota NASCAR dads lean to the right. They lean whichever way they feel like leaning. In other words, they vote independently, and this has led to some surprising results in the past fifteen years. It is possible that Minnesota NASCAR dads are responsible for both Jesse Ventura and Paul Wellstone, two of our more unique politicos.

    Bill Morris, a former Republican Party chair and renowned pollster, says that Ventura’s election is what makes Minnesota’s NASCAR dads so special. “Our data suggest that they are a big part of his support coalition,” he said. Like Bush, Ventura exuded the toughness, masculinity, and folksy American values that the dads find appealing. Just so, Ventura was a loud independent, which underlines the fact that NASCAR dads in Minnesota are not blindly loyal to soft-headed Republicanism the way they seem to be elsewhere.

    And that’s where the Democrats come into the picture. “There is a cultural dimension to the Democratic Party that these guys find really off-putting,” said Jacobs. “The Democratic Party comes off like a bunch of sissies.” But poor grammar and bad attitude aren’t necessarily going to win their vote this time around. Since the elections of Coleman and Pawlenty, the dads have grown increasingly nervous about jobs and irritated about Iraq. Both Morris and Jacobs agree that the Dems have a fighting chance with the dads, so long as they focus on issues like economic stimulus, job security, NAFTA, and corporate corruption. “The Democrats’ economic populism is aimed at NASCAR dads,” said Jacobs. “It’s not over yet.” To see where the rubber hits the road on this issue, I called Elko and Brainerd. But officials at both tracks were busy, either opening for the new racing season, or reading The Nation. —Christy DeSmith

  • Juliet, “The Bachelorette”

    O Romeo, Romeo! Wherefore art thou Romeo? My girlish companions at the modeling agency would make much sport of such a name. Yet my heart is thine. My bounty is as boundless as the sea, my love as deep; the more I give to Romeo, the more I have, for both are infinite. Were not the mask of night upon my face, a maiden blush would bepaint my cheek for that which thou heard me speak tonight, whilst we in the hot tub did frolic. Romeo, thou art the god of my idolatry!

    But soft! Mercutio approacheth. A fellow of infinite jest. How he maketh me laugh! This bud of love I feel for him, by summer’s ripening breath, may prove a beauteous flow’r when next we meet. The producers avow that for our special one-on-one getaway date I shall wing him by private jet to romantic Puerto Rico. Mercutio, if that thy bent of love be honorable, and thou alarmest me not with more feverish speech of that Queen Mab person, mayhap we shall forswear our separate rooms and choose to couple tenderly in the fantasy suite.

    Benvolio. Now there is a really nice guy. I would he were my bird, yet I fear I should kill him with much cherishing. As we continue on this sweetheart’s journey, gentle Benvolio, the path leadeth surely to a holy altar and a wedding made pink and wondrous by the bottomless treasure of ABC. Oh, to exchange thy love’s faithful vow for mine! Though in truth I gave thee mine before thou didst request it. I pray thee, Benvolio, think me not false, nor impute this yielding to light love, should it come to pass in the morrow’s rose ceremony that I bequeath my precious flowers to others and send thee in the limo packing.

    The County Paris hath gained much favor with mom and dad—yea, he did score a great hit with all of the family on our televised pilgrimage to my beloved Ohio home. The nurse esteemeth him highly, as well, and holds Romeo but a dishclout to him. Paris, thou art a gallant, young, and noble gentleman, and thou hast comforted me marvelous much. “Venus smiles not in a house of tears,” thou spake so sweetly, when I told thee of the white-pawed pussycat that brightened my girlhood days and of the fearsome Chevrolet ’neath whose cruel wheels she untimely perished. How my heart did melt at thy tender protestations of sorrow! And the poem thou made on the cocktail napkin, that so happily did rhyme “kitten” with “smitten.” Oh, be but sworn my love, good Paris, and I’ll no longer be a cat widow.

    Ay me! Fiery cousin Tybalt. Never a dull moment when he is about. And so passing fair of form and face! Forsooth, he could do underwear layouts for great Abercrombie. Did my heart love till now? Forswear it, sight! For I ne’er saw true beauty till the night that Tybalt stepped forth from yet another gleaming limo and made haste into my trembling maiden arms. Like the nineteen others. Fie upon “cousin”! Cousin is a mere honorific. It pertaineth, if I mistake not, to some far-flung relation by brief and turbulent marriage to a maternal great aunt. My slumber need be not vexed by visions of monstrosities from recessive genes sprung forth. Yet even should the tie of blood prove nearer, rash Tybalt—O trespass sweetly urged!

    Did I say trespass? Laurence. Dear, dear Friar Laurence. A man of the cloth, yet more ardent in thy wooing even than the County Paris. “What early tongue so sweet saluteth me?” quoth thou, wiping thy nose and noble chin from the chaste morning kiss I granted on our second group date. Yea, fair friar, ’twas at the petting zoo thou won my steadfast heart, there where the producers sent the six of us—thou, me, and those other suitors, now departed, that I loved so, and love truly still, each one, though cruel and rose-stingy fate too soon hath torn them from me. Oh, gods, what were their names? Thou, beloved Laurence, art with me still, now and for eternity. Yet my heart misgives. Perhaps thou may repent thy choice to flee thy craggy monastery. Or discover that thou art gay.

    Only four piteous roses for the next ceremony! Tragic few! I pray thee, gentlemen, think not my passion too quickly won, nor my ’havior light. Parting would be such sweet sorrow. Two true loves must I ditch upon the morrow.

  • The Flour Mills of My Mind

    After a long winter of channel surfing, The Rake took heed of the growing evening light and resolved to check out some of the local culture that those freezing nights had held at bay. The other night, we trekked down to a new local favorite, the Mill City Museum, where a lecture was underway by Gail Peterson, a professor of psychology at the University of Minnesota. The subject? How the Washburn A Mill was used during the forties to develop weapons of war.

    According to Dr. Peterson, in 1943 Betty Crocker wasn’t the only one cooking up ideas at the flour mill, now the ruin that so romantically embraces the museum. In a shed atop the twelve-story building, a team of scientists was conducting top-secret experiments.

    Their project quietly proceeded behind the two-story-tall neon sign that happily beamed the word “Eventually,” General Mills’ motto at the time. Was it exploding flour? Nerve-agent pancake mix? Not quite. It was nothing less than the development of the first “smart bomb.” These were the early days of long-range rocketry. Hitler was ahead in this arms race, maybe months away from being able to bomb any city on the planet. The U.S. War Department responded with zeal, developing a rocket propulsion system dubbed the “Pelican.” Still, a confounding hurdle confronted them: How to guide that rocket over hundreds of miles to find its target.

    Enter B.F. Skinner. Yes, that B.F. Skinner, the famous researcher and theorist who wrote an entirely new branch into the lexicon of psychology known as Applied Behavior Analysis. Most people remember Skinner for his experiments on “shaping,” a method of modifying behavior—be it human or animal—using certain enticements and reinforcements. By 1936, Skinner was well on his Behaviorist path when he received his first professorship at the University of Minnesota. Over the next few years, he had rats performing a circus of elaborate functions, all for the promise of a few pellets of kibble.

    When World War II broke out, Skinner decided to lend his skills to the cause, and began experimenting with the unique abilities of pigeons to recognize distant targets. The government asked General Mills to help fund Skinner’s “Project Pigeon.” (This may seem odd, but local industry jumped to help the cause in any way it could. A small Minneapolis thermostat manufacturer created the first autopilots for B-52s at about the same time; that company was later known as Honeywell.) By 1943, Skinner and a team of graduate students crossed the river to become employees of General Mills, riding a treacherous conveyor belt to the top of the building and setting up shop on the roof. Pigeons were plentiful and their experiments showed slow, but promising results. Pigeon “pilots” were trained to recognize a photo image of a distant target and, with slight movements of their heads, guide their missiles to destiny. The Pelican rocket was fitted for three valiant pilots. Unfortunately, while Project Pigeon was proving that birds could fly bombs, another secret project, this one called Manhattan, was proving that an atom could be split with a remarkable outcome. The rest is the birdseed of history.

    Things weren’t over for Skinner, however. During his experiments, the professor made the important discovery that by interacting with his subject—leading it, rather than waiting for the birdbrain to do most of the figuring—he could guide behavior with remarkable speed and accuracy. It would become fundamental to shaping methodology. and revolutionized fields such as physical therapy to recover lost motor function, and the education of autistic children. Then again, maybe Skinner was merely putting words to an ancient technique. Willful spouses have been shaping our behavior for centuries. Come to think of it, what did rouse me from the couch to hear a lecture on Skinnerian psychology in an industrial museum?—Jon Zurn