The Rake Magazine

Category: Columns

  • Jack and Jill Moved Up the Hill

    In George Orwell’s Animal Farm, farm animals overthrew the evil Mr. Jones and created a utopia where “all animals are equal.” However, the pigs, who led the uprising, gradually began acting more like the hated Jones. By the book’s end, the pigs had morphed into porcine Mr. Joneses and the farm into a place where “some animals are more equal than others.”

    Orwell’s classic tale was an allegory about the 1917 Russian Revolution, but it was also aimed squarely at the very human tendency to create a pecking order based on perceived differences in status. Over the years, African-Americans, tired of fighting for social acceptance, have created their own groups in which they can feel comfortable. However, critics claim that some of these African-American groups have become as exclusive—some would say as discriminatory—as the white organizations that once spurned blacks.

    One institution often singled out for excluding the “wrong” kind of black person is Jack and Jill, a social club for upper-crust African-American children. Jack and Jill was created in 1938 so that young African-Americans could “network with each other and meet each other,” as alumnus Lawrence Otis Graham, author of Our Kind of People, put it. Founder Marion Turner Stubbs Thomas said she wanted a “means of furthering an inherent natural desire … to bestow upon our children all the opportunities possible for a normal and graceful approach to a beautiful adulthood.”

    When it comes to joining Jack and Jill, it is not who you know, but who knows you. Potential members must be sponsored by a current member. And not all who are called upon are chosen. In fact, not so many years ago, the biracial children of a well-known Minneapolis barrister were nearly rejected because their mother broke an unspoken taboo by having a white spouse. Even to this day, the local Minneapolis chapter doesn’t include any biracial families with a white mother as a member. When I asked a Jack and Jill member if my decidedly non-African-American wife would be welcome, she told me that she would support it, but she conceded that some of her sisters might be a tad lukewarm about bringing a white woman into the fold. And despite its billing as a family organization, this is a group run by women. (The role of men, who are relegated to an “auxiliary,” is made clear by their “under construction” page on Jack and Jill’s web site.)

    However, Murvyn Baker Kelsey, the organization’s National Recording Secretary, claims that Jack and Jill is much more “receptive to today’s culture.” Yet even she concedes that old habits die hard. “We are not a racist organization,” she told me recently. “We just want to make sure that our children have contact with other quality black children. Class, more than race, is the dividing line.” Kelsey said that she had seen white moms at a Jack and Jill function once on the West Coast, though she could not tell me which chapter they belonged to.

    She also asked plaintively, “You aren’t going to write something bad about us, are you? You sound like a professional, educated man. Don’t you want your sons around people that are going to uplift and support them?”

    Indeed, I do. I have to admit that there are certain kinds of people with whom I do not want my sons to associate. My wife and I have candidly discussed whether we have the gumption to continue our Northside “urban adventure” once my youngest son starts school in three or four years. Like others, I do notice where people went to school. And I usually find some discreet way of asking my oldest sons about the parents of their new friends, what they do to put bread on the table.

    Martin Luther King Jr. dreamt of an America where his four young children would be judged not by “the color of their skin but the content of their character.” However, his dream tacitly acknowledged that it was entirely appropriate to judge children, as long as it was for character using criteria that they could control (or perhaps more accurately, that their families could control).

    Maybe Jack and Jill is just honest about what the upwardly mobile of all races have always secretly believed: People may be created equal, but when it comes to shaping your children’s character and hence, their future, some are more equal than others.

  • Sweetness and Lime

    There are three golden things that never perish: gold, honey, and the sun. An archaeologist friend of mine once put this to the test. She was excavating at the Bronze Age citadel built at Mycenae during the Greek Civil War when her team came across a large jar full of honey. They agreed it would be a pity to let the honey go to the museum, so each morning they had some for breakfast. It was delicious, but it took them most of the season to get to the bottom of the pithos. When they did, they rather regretted their self-indulgence. For what they found at the bottom was an offering to the chthonic gods: the well-preserved bones of a small child. It was quite some time before my friend could be induced to eat honey again.

    For Greeks and Romans, bees and honey were special. Honey, they thought, came from heaven, like dew. (“Pour upon us the continual dew of thy blessing,” says The Prayer Book of 1662.) And bees had a perfect polity, everyone with a place and everyone in her proper place (even the gentlemen of the Drones Club), all ruled equitably by their king. No one tumbled to the sex of the queen bee till the 1670s, when a Dutchman, rejoicing in the name of Jan Swammerdam, peered down an early microscope to dissect and draw a queen bee’s ovary, which, so he calculated, contained more than five thousand eggs.

    I learned early to respect the political judgment of bees. The tyrannical headmaster of the boarding school where I spent the years seven to thirteen kept several hives, and one afternoon as he was pumping smoke into them the bees turned on him in their thousands. He became an apian pin-cushion and had to be whisked off to the hospital and dosed with antihistamines. In the long run it did nothing to improve his temper, or temper his countenance, which was the color of port wine (yohoho, his nose doth show how oft the black jack to his lips doth go). But it put the old brute out of circulation for an appreciable stretch, so preventing him from caning us.

    The sweetness and light our ancestors had from bees was, of course, not all metaphorical. Beeswax made candles and much else, and honey was the principal sweetener of food until the eighteenth century, when imports of cane sugar from the West Indies began arriving in bulk. It is amazing how thoroughly sugar corrupted eighteenth-century taste. The sugar basin of a Georgian tea set is huge, out of all proportion to the teapot or the fat-lipped cream jug; the tea Jane Austen sipped was a syrup. After dinner, eighteenth-century men drank Madeira and port, but they also drank mountain, a super-sticky dessert wine from Málaga in southern Spain, and Marsala, a ditto from Sicily. The Royal Navy ran on rum.

    With corruption of taste went corruption of language. Sweetness came to mean simply the presence of sucrose. An earlier age was subtler. When Horatio says, “Good night, sweet prince,” to Hamlet’s corpse, he is not inferring that his royal friend had a high concentration of C12 H22 011; it was more a matter of the air that breathes upon a bank of violets, stealing and giving odor.

    All of this came to mind as I was trying to describe the nose and initial taste of an excellent 2001 Chardonnay, Broquel from Argentina (around $15 locally). Others I consulted named fruits. The word that came to my mind was “honeyed.” Not sweet like the sugar-water that oozes from the nozzles protruding from the trepanned plastic bears you buy in supermarkets. But fragrant like lime flowers or thyme—the stuff, in fact, which bees collect and pack so neatly in the pouches on their little thighs. (Even Virgil knew about those, but for the full story, try A Hive of Bees by an apiarist called John Crompton.)

    There is nothing flimsy about this wine, which makes it quite unlike the penny-plain Chardonnays you often meet at dull parties. The color is that of wheat straw. There is a faintly smoky aroma and a firm grip on your tonsils as you swallow; then suddenly you are left with freshness. I found it strong enough to stand up to chicken thighs roasted with salt and fresh limes. It would be equally fine with green salad or sharp cheese. In Mendoza, where it originates, it is now late in the southern spring; no doubt there are flowers on the foothills of the Andes. This is a wine which will clear the indoor indulgences of a cold and cloying yuletide. Look on to April and his showers sweet.

  • Life Skills

    One of my favorite ways to pass the time while standing in line at the grocery store is to analyze the contents of the carts of the people around me. I like the incongruity of it. Gazing up and down the lines, it’s not unusual to see a cart containing a sack of generic Froot Loops the size of a duvet cover, plus a few shiny, well-chosen apples. I imagine sharing meals with these people, dining on fare concocted solely from what they’ve got in their carts. The social activity would have to complement the menu. I think: “Lady, I’m coming to your house for breakfast! I love generic Froot Loops! Let’s you and me eat ’em dry by crumbly handfuls in front of the tube while we take in The View! Is Star Jones married yet, or what? (Munch-munch-munch.) Do you think she’ll wear Payless shoes to the wedding?”

    Yes, it is possible to dream up an entire relationship with someone in the span of time it takes to get through the checkout. But part of the game is never, ever talking to the people behind the cart. It’s important to tell the story of the cart all by yourself. I don’t want to hear that this worn-looking woman has five kids who eat through that massive bag of cereal bowlful by bowlful, like dog food. In my mind, she’s an eccentric who lives entirely on snack chips and apples. She can’t deal with utensils, not since she was involved in a walk-by stabbing at the Old Country Buffet salad bar. She did her time all right, paid her debt to society. But she can’t trust herself with cutlery in a world where certain folks think it’s all right to take the last of the low-cal French.

    Still, I had to break my long-standing rule of silence the other day when a cart rolled up behind me that contained the following: forty-eight cans of refrigerated biscuit dough, three economy-size jars of tomato basil Prego spaghetti sauce, a pillow sham of grated cheddar, one can of Diet Coke, and a pack of Dentyne Ice.

    I immediately came up with several options for a back story, but none rang true. Spaghetti sauce wrestler? That explained the Diet Coke and the breath-freshening gum, but not the cheese and biscuit dough. In my list of possible explanations, I had gotten all the way down to, “Well, maybe she’s having a party.” But what kind of party do you have with forty-eight cans of dough? I had to ask.

    The woman laughed nervously and drew her hand through her smooth blonde hair. “Oh! I teach a junior-high life skills class, and today we’re cooking a dinner. I’m going to teach them how to make ‘Bubble Pizza.’ ”

    Instantly, I had a snapshot of Bubble Pizza. The separated biscuit rounds smashed onto an ungreased cookie sheet, smothered in Prego, caked with cheese curls, and baked at 350 degrees for ten minutes. I could see this pretty teacher standing in front of her class, holding aloft a can of dough to show how to press the back of a spoon along the seam of the can to pop it open. I could see our nation’s youth, diligently taking notes.

    Life Skills. In 1985 we called it “home ec,” and it was widely considered an easy A. With the advances in convenience foods since then, anybody who can press the popcorn button on a microwave oven must be guaranteed top marks.

    I remember cooking at age sixteen, stewing a whole chicken and making from scratch leaden baking-powder biscuits that not even my dog would sniff. These early adventures did not transform me into a good cook, but did help me to take culinary missteps in stride. Two Thanksgivings ago, in the course of using a “foolproof” Reynolds roasting bag, I neglected to remove the bird’s plastic wrapper and laminated a twenty-pound turkey. The year before I tried the traditional roasting method, and terrifying flames leapt out of the oven when my snoopy sister looked in to see “what that smell was.” Someone recently gave me a recipe for “Beer Can Turkey,” which calls for stuffing a twelve-ounce can of Schlitz into the bird’s cavity. I am afraid to attempt this until the terror alert goes down. I don’t know if you can call the bomb squad to defuse poultry.

    The point is, it’s a part of life to take chances. The kitchen is one of the few places in life where even if you don’t succeed, folks are more than willing to give you a chance to try, try again. Pre-grated cheese is to cooking what Legos are to architecture. Read a recipe, screw it up. Decide what you’ll do next time and eat the mistakes.

  • Judging LaJune

    On November 2, 2004, perennial candidate Kevin Kolosky will achieve something that few, if any Minnesota lawyers ever have: He will have run for judge nearly as many times as he has argued before a jury. Starting in 1994, literally weeks after passing the bar exam, Kolosky started campaigning, opposing whatever hapless soul he believes is the weakest judge in the herd. In 2002, five elections later, he came within eight percentage points of toppling African-American judge Harry Crump. This time, he has set his sights on Judge LaJune Thomas Lange. Interestingly, all but one of Kolosky’s five previous opponents have been females or minorities. Given Kolosky’s growing name recognition and Lange’s challenged rankings in recent lawyer preference polls, the “underwhelming” Kolosky, in the words of one judge, just might bag his prey.

    Every lawyer has the opportunity to “strike,” or remove, a judge from a case, no questions asked. Over the years, lawyers have come to use the resulting statistic as a barometer of a judge’s effectiveness. Lange, appointed by Gov. Rudy Perpich in 1985, was a relatively popular choice. In her first ten years or so on the bench, her removal numbers were consistent with other Hennepin County judges.

    Recently, however, her numbers have gone dramatically south. In fact, a third of all lawyers slated to appear before her in the past year have struck her from their cases. Some trace the spiral to 1995, when a group of Hennepin County District Court judges publicly accused Lange of lagging behind in processing juvenile court data. The Minnesota Board of Judicial Standards, which then investigated Lange for “undermining public confidence in the judiciary,” eventually exonerated Lange and even paid her legal fees.

    Lange is not the only judge who finds herself targeted by certain constituencies—onetime criminal defense attorney Jack Nordby often gets booted by prosecutors who think he is too soft on bad guys. But no one gets struck from cases nearly as frequently as Lange. Some of the lawyers who diss her claim that she relies on her clerks too much and is not “engaged” enough with the litigants in her courtroom. Her supporters, on the other hand, such as campaign co-chair and former Republican state senator Wayne Popham, say she gets high marks from crime victims, cops, and many county prosecutors, who appreciate that she is tough on criminals.

    The judges I spoke with, even those who are not big Lange fans, overwhelmingly support her over Kolosky. However, at least one judge believes much of Lange’s support would evaporate if “a Don Lewis [a well-regarded African-American trial lawyer] or someone equally respected” were to run instead of some non-entity with “baggage” like Kolosky. Said “baggage” stems from an incident during Kolosky’s first campaign, when, in addressing a debate question about combating domestic assault, he admitted that he had hit his wife. Asked to explain his comments, he said, “Yes, I was arrested for domestic assault. My wife and I both hit each other and a neighbor called the police. I am sorry that I did it and I do not think it should disqualify me from being a judge.”

    Unlike Lange, who has a number of endorsements ranging from the Minneapolis Police Federation to the Academy of Trial Lawyers of Minnesota, Kolosky boasts that he has none because he is not out there “kissing any butt.” Kolosky concedes that he has virtually no trial or appellate experience; he claims his strongest qualifications are his pro bono work and the hours he has spent watching “good judges.”

    Kolosky declined to comment on Lange’s abilities, saying he was not “going to dish any dirt on her.” He says he chose to run against her because her judicial evaluations indicated certain “vulnerabilities.” Race, he adds, “has nothing do with it.”

    Maybe Kolosky believes that. Several Hennepin County judges and lawyers with whom I spoke do not. According to one judge, who declined to be named, “Race has a lot to do with it. Judge Lange is revered in the African-American community as a role model and leader. She has served the international legal community, for example, helping out South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Kolosky has done little but make a career out of running against women judges and black judges. Replacing her with Kolosky would be a real shame.”

  • Anyone for Dominoes?

    Other countries’ politics are always a mystery. Of course, it helps to know some history. Then you can at least ask how they got here from there, rather than merely measure how different they are from us, how they fail to meet our highest standards of democracy, feminism, etc.

    But even disinterested interest is sometimes thrown for a loop. Take the recent debate in the Turkish Parliament about making adultery a criminal offense. Most English-language coverage of this unlikely proposal considered its impact on Turkey’s application to join the European Union. A rationale was suggested by a brisk reflection on honor in the villages as described in the novels of Yashar Kemal–and yet there was clearly still more to the politics of this proposal.

    American politics can be just as mystifying for foreigners–even for helots who have lived here for decades. Some years ago the London Times published a piece explaining President Carter’s reasons for not attending the funeral of President Tito of Yugoslavia: “Mr. Carter believes in the sanctity of motherhood and therefore sent his mother to the funeral. The affection he feels for her is not universally shared in the United States and is not widely understood abroad.” Quite so.

    Maybe it is incomprehension on this level that is behind poll results recently released by the BBC World Service. The BBC reasoned that the Rest of the World were the consumers of American foreign policy and so asked its listeners whom they would vote for as president of the U.S. If the Rest of the World had votes, the result would not be encouraging for Current Resident at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. N.W.

    My guess is that the Rest of the World simply does not see the point of recent U.S. foreign policy. It’s decisive, of course; in Iraq it has decided the fates of between ten thousand and twenty thousand people of several nationalities. But its apologists explain it in circular terms, with a persistent resistance to facts that might only serve to “confuse” the issue. It’s as if history was, or ought to be, a series of self-fulfilling prophecies.

    Some of us in the Rest of the World actually feel as if we have been here before. There was just this sort of circularity about the Domino Theory. You remember–nothing to do with pizza, but the Cold War notion that the Reds would pick off adjacent countries one by one and that the West was fated to try to stop them. The trouble is, Russians play chess, not dominoes.

    Wine talk, too, can often seem circular when it gets separated from confusing facts like what the liquid in your glass actually tastes and smells of. It is easy for those not paying attention to what they are drinking to think that they are tasting what they have been told they ought to be tasting. Which is why I mention a pleasant surprise I had the other night: a single-variety cabernet sauvignon I really liked. Often, the pure cabernets of California seem overpowering, like a new friend from the West Coast who is trying to tell you too much all at once. The great winemakers of Bordeaux don’t use pure cabernet; they blend it with the blander merlot, so tempering the angular character of the cabernet.

    What I was expecting, then, after reading the label, was something with an edge. Instead, I encountered Taft Street Cabernet Sauvignon, a rich, round red (well, almost purple, actually) from the Russian River Valley–the limit of Russian expansion down the California coast from Alaska in the nineteenth century. The soft edges of the taste have a charm that does not weaken the central strength of flavor characteristic of cabernet. If one were not operating a motor vehicle (or a foreign policy), one could drink quite a lot of this, with pork or beef or cheese, even with turkey (no, Jessica, the Rest of the World does not have Thanksgiving). And it’s priced so that many can afford to do so.

    The name Taft Street comes from the road in Oakland where the company was founded. President Taft was a Republican; he was also the incumbent president who received the fewest electoral college votes when he stood for reelection (eight to be precise–Utah and Vermont). What the Rest of the World does not understand about the electoral college could be measured by the imperial gallon. One might be happier not thinking too hard about it, but rather getting into bed gratefully with a bottle of this pleasant red. Oblomov rules, OK?

  • My Appearance

    I was sorting through an old box of videotapes the other night and came across an unmarked VHS cassette with no case. I popped it in the VCR, hit play, and for the next half hour, marveled at the human animal’s capacity for selective memory.

    1993. I was a barista in an espresso bar downtown. At night, I’d perform standup comedy at the local clubs. I had wild showbiz hopes. The kind of hopes that are exhilarating but doomed, because they have no planning behind them, only unfocused energy. Because my monkey-with-a-typewriter approach is a fairly commonplace phenomenon in the performing arts world, it came as no surprise when I was offered a guest spot on a national television show. I would fly to New York and do five minutes of my choice, then an interview with the host.

    My bosses at the coffee shop were delighted to have a burgeoning star in their midst, and they insisted on taking me shopping for a dress and makeup. This was my Cinderella moment. Every girl has one, you know. Sometimes it’s prom, or a wedding. Mine was walking through Dayton’s with someone else’s credit card.

    I flew to JFK and was greeted by a limousine driver who had my name on a sign. As a minimum wage worker, I had budgeted carefully for my trip. The limo driver’s tip cost a whole day’s food allowance, but it was worth it.

    The hotel was a luxurious midtown tower. During my two-day stay, every time I passed through the lobby, I grabbed an apple from the continuously replenished bowl on the coffee table. I rounded out my diet with hoarded peanuts from the flight. That way, I was able to tip the driver on the way back to the airport.

    The producer of the show knew that this was my first television appearance, and he promised me that as soon as a “rough cut” of footage was assembled, he’d FedEx me a copy. Two weeks later, an envelope arrived at the coffee shop. I pulled the zip-strip and out popped an unmarked, untitled VHS tape with no case.

    I immediately invited my bosses over to my apartment for dinner and a viewing. I made spaghetti, they brought the wine. They also heaped my plate with compliments, which I ate like a prize pig.

    After dinner, we settled in front of the TV. I put the tape in and pushed play. When I walked onscreen, I didn’t recognize myself. (Such is the transformative power of a good dress.) My set was solid, and the audience laughed. The TV Me thanked them and strolled confidently to the host’s couch for an interview.

    The camera focused on the host asking a question, and then shot to me, answering. Then it pulled out to include both of us in the frame.

    When I wasn’t speaking, I was listening to the host, which is appropriate. However, I was listening with my mouth agape, just hanging wide open, as if for catching flies. This tends to make one look like Barney Fife. My guests laughed nervously at first but, as the tape rolled on, it dawned on all of us that my mouth wasn’t going to close. And it didn’t, for the entirety of a twenty-five minute interview.
    Halfway through the tape, my dinner guests began offering solace, saying things like, “Oh, that show is on very late, probably no one will see it.” And, “Maybe people will think you made that face on purpose.”

    As the interview drew to an end, the camera pulled out for a long shot. My legs were visible, since the hemline of the dress was fairly high. I am a sturdy person, so I tend to sit with knees apart, which is fine if you’re wearing jeans, but not so good if you’re flashing an entire national television audience, Sharon Stone style. What saved me from giving the money shot? Thigh fat.

    Andy Warhol famously said that everyone would one day have fifteen minutes of fame. I achieved thirty minutes of shame my first time at bat. Too bad the “upskirt” video market wasn’t invented yet. I might have attained a kind of enduring Bettie Page niche appeal.

    Despite the poor archival quality of VHS, I will not have the tape transferred to DVD. That would ruin its sentimental value. I put it back in the box of old tapes, where I will forget about it again. It will sit there, not so much a time capsule as a ticking time bomb. Why don’t I throw it away? What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger. What embarrasses the hell out of me will only make future embarrassments less embarrassing. And if past experience is any guide, there will be many.

  • Rising from the Ashes

    Remember Brian Herron? Just three summers ago, the former Minneapolis City Council member was the poster boy for political graft after the FBI videotaped him accepting a $10,000 bribe. This very public crash-and-burn earned him a year in prison and spawned an investigation of the entire Minneapolis City Council. Political wags claim that Sharon Sayles-Belton still blames Herron for fueling the political firestorm that blew her out of City Hall.

    Today, Herron describes himself as “better, not bitter.” He is out of prison and working for the Greater Minneapolis Council of Churches. He has returned to the same house and the same wife he had “back in the day,” when he was a comer in Minneapolis politics. Reflecting on the past three years, he thanks God for leading him on what he calls his “spiritual journey.”

    This is not the same Brian Herron I talked with in June 2001, forty-eight hours before he publicly acknowledged the charges against him. He stopped by my office for what I thought was a casual visit. We bantered for a few minutes about his upcoming reelection and then he grabbed me as if on the verge of physical collapse and said, “Clinton, I’m in real trouble. The FBI videotaped me accepting a $10,000 bribe.”

    For the next hour, I listened to his story, which was punctuated by heart-wrenching sobs. The FBI had told him bad things would happen if he told anyone, even his wife, about its investigation; I advised him to tell his wife immediately. Two days later, with his wife and father standing beside him, Herron publicly announced his resignation from the Minneapolis City Council. Eight months later, he began serving a yearlong sentence at the federal penitentiary in Duluth.

    For most Minnesotans, that was the ignominious end of Brian Herron. Nearly everyone—from the formerly ardent sycophants to the City Hall establishment running for cover—wanted the man, now a the convicted felon, simply to go away. Most did not consider him worthy of forgiveness, if they considered him at all. And, politically speaking, he might as well have been dead.

    There is a popular narrative pattern in literature called “absence, devastation, return.” In this pattern, the hero leaves the scene. In his absence, all sorts of bad things happen. He ultimately returns and restores order to the world. The hero’s absence can be emotional, spiritual, or physical.

    Herron now admits that he was absent—from his family, his friends, and most important, his own spiritual values—long before the FBI came calling. This absence devastated his political career and very nearly destroyed him. “Over the years, I had become too busy for God,” he said. “I got lost, caught up in being everything to everybody, all things to all people. My ego and my pride twisted my moral compass. I was raised by a black Baptist preacher. I knew right from wrong. And I was doing wrong.”

    Herron is grateful for his stint in prison, which he calls a yearlong spiritual retreat. “By the time I arrived at the federal prison camp in Duluth, I was empty,” Herron admitted. “For the first several days, I just read my Bible and kept to myself. Even though I knew I had messed up, I viewed myself as somehow different from the other inmates. On the third day, one of the brothers confronted me. He said, ‘We know who you are and why you are here. Maybe you don’t belong here, but you are here. Many of the cats here can learn from you and you can learn from us. Why did you want to be a councilman?’ I told him, ‘To help people.’ ‘Well, you can help us. God sent you here to be a light to us.’” Those words saved Herron. “Through them, God taught me a lot. Humility, gratitude, forgiveness, and the power of unconditional love.”

    Our culture revels in watching people be brought down. From our perch in the grocery store checkout line, we tsk-tsk the human implosions displayed on the front pages of tabloids, much like gawkers at an auto accident. Our morbid curiosity leaves little, if any, room for compassion. Herron realizes that many believe he got what he deserved. But having been through his ordeal, he says he is stronger, wiser, and better equipped than ever for community service. “I am ready to serve in whatever way God has planned for me,” he says. In fact, he does not rule out a return to politics, “if that is God’s will.” Continues Herron, “People have approached me and asked me to get back into the game. The other day, an older white guy kept looking at me and I thought, oh boy, here we go. Instead, he broke into a big grin and said to me, ‘The cream always rises to the top.’”

  • The Taste of Place

    There is a Gresham’s Law in music; bad tunes drive out good. On Sunday you hear a competent choir render a subtle and melodious anthem by Herbert Howells. You are then obliged to join in a repetitive praise chorus of the sort whose words and tune suggest that the righteous are those who have enjoyed a double lobotomy. Guess which piece you are still humming come Wednesday.

    Of all the world’s annoying tunes, even worse than the song that never ends (it goes on and on, my friend), the ditty that annoys this noisy oyster most is the one about this land being my land. It’s not just the uninventive tune and bumpy rhythm, it is also the grotesquely all-embracing claim made by the words. They are as vapid as the line of Schiller made famous by being belted out at every performance of Beethoven’s Choral Symphony, Diesen Küss der ganzen Welt—This Kiss to the Whole World. How could anyone, even a tenor going all out and backed by the full faith and credit of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, possibly offer osculatory satisfaction to the entire population of the planet at a single instant? I ask you.

    Love of land, like kissing, has to be specific. “Breathes there the man with soul so dead/Who never to himself hath said/This is my own, my native land!” Not that it has to be one’s native land. Generations of northern Europeans have loved the Mediterranean; for every Browning that prefers British buttercups (“the little children’s dower”) to the gaudy melon-flower, there is a Goethe with an ache for the land where bloom the lemon trees (though not all anatomize their Sehnsucht with the same cloying attentiveness).

    Love of specific places, like all love, can lead to anguish. Think of Derry’s walls. Or consider the pain (for all concerned) of Serbian attachment to Kosovo, scene of their tragic defeat by the Turks in 1389. You have only to see Behind Enemy Lines (or read a decent newspaper) to know about the horrors of Srbrenica; there are websites maintained by professional Byzantine scholars that catalog the devastation recently wrought upon medieval Serbian art and architecture.

    Any human love can be distorted. But in a pure form, the essence of a place appreciated for itself, without emulation or rancor, is a thing of beauty. Wine folk have a word (French, naturally) for the unique quality of a particular place that alone can produce a specific complexity of flavor. It is terroir, the character of a particular piece of terrain, its soil and geology, its climate and micro-climates, the entire physical condition of the place.

    Nowhere is terroir more celebrated than in Burgundy, that celebrated swath of eastern France, which produces some of the most expensive wines in the world. The geology here is Jurassic limestone (the Jurassic Era was not invented by Mr. Spielberg but is named after the nearby Jura Mountains), but there are fine gradations of soil chemistry and chalkiness, not only from north to south but also up and down the broad, vine-clad hillsides.

    Generations of agricultural ingenuity, beginning with the monks of medieval Cluny and Citeaux, have married the Pinot Noir grape to this complex landscape. In more recent times the vineyards have belonged to a maze of small proprietors, a complexity reflected in the system by which their wines are named, each “grand cru” having its own characteristic terroir and taste. I shall never forget the concatenation of complexity and power issuing from a glass of Corton Les Marechauudes 1964.

    Alas, such experiences, at least for the likes of you and me, are rare. If you have not heard of a grand cru Burgundy, you cannot afford it. But there is red Burgundy of a more generic character that can also give great pleasure, especially with cheese or meat. The good and the best are not enemies. It is quite possible to enjoy a Burgundy Passetoutgrains, like the excellent example from Robert Chevillon available locally for less than $15, without insisting that place does not matter and thereby declaring war on terroir.

    Nor does it involve assenting to the old saw that “good wine needs no bush.” Burgundy Passe-toutgrains is made mostly of the Pinot Noir grape, though it is permitted to add some Gamay, the lighter-flavored grape characteristic of the Beaujolais region. Buy some, you’ll like it. Well-made wines, unlike cheap music (“extraordinary how potent cheap music is”) and bumptious politicians, do permit variety.

  • Classic TV

    We’ve hit an interesting point in the arc of TV storytelling. It’s almost completely self-referential. Like monks from those earlier Dark Ages, copying illuminated manuscripts over and over again, today’s Hollywood hacks are feeding internally until there is no discernable output or input of ideas. Only yeasty, subdividing molecules of “Cop,” “Hot Chick”/“Dopey Chick”/“Brainy Chick,” “Cute Kid,” “Uptight Mom,” and “Bumbling Dad.”

    Which got me to thinking. Wouldn’t TV be a lot better if rip-off shows substituted Great Minds of Western Civilization for their original characters? The only rules: A surrogate character must have roughly the same attitude as the original. Extra credit for sound-alike names. Like, for example…

    All in the Family, with Edith and Nietzsche Bunker.

    Gloria: “Daddy, when are you gonna start treating Ma like an equal?”

    Nietzsche: “As yet woman is not capable of friendship: Women are still cats and birds; or at best, cows.”

    Mike: “The way you make Edith wait on you hand and foot is a crime!”

    Nietzsche: “Listen, Meathead. Once upon a time ‘good’ meant ‘godlike,’ and actions were considered good when they were done by the powerful. The chief virtue was power. ‘Bad’ meant common or poor and described those who were not powerful. Nowadays youse Commie pinkos are pushin’ a morality that’s all about loooove and compassion, and it comes from the resentment that the base and sheeplike feel toward the powerful. What was good now is called evil and what was bad came to be called good.”

    Mike: “Sheesh!”

    Edith: (scurries in from the kitchen) “Dinner’s almost ready!”

    Nietzsche: “Get me a beer, Dingbat!”

    Edith: “Sure thing, Neech! Right away!”

    The idea works with game shows, too. How about the great 1920s know-it-all fronting her own quiz program: Win Gertrude Stein’s Money. She and Ben Stein have exactly the same haircut, you know.

    Gertrude: “Hello. I’m Gertrude Stein. And today, I’m putting up $5,000 from my trust fund that says I know more than you. Money is always there but the pockets change; it is not in the same pockets after a change, and that is all there is to say about money.”

    Jimmy Kimmel: “Gertrude, our first contestant today is a football coach at a males-only military academy. Welcome, Jack.”

    Jack: “Thanks, Jimmy. Hi, Gertrude.”

    Jimmy: “Please step into the isolation booths. The categories are the Island of Lesbos, ethnic jewelry, Provincetown, Legends of the LPGA, and David Crosby.”

    Even Nick at Nite classics could benefit from creative recasting. Imagine that unforgettable uptempo chacha music and the big Valentine heart as animated letters spell out “I Love Luther.”

    Desi enters the apartment, carrying an armload of papal indulgences, a rosary dangling from his coat pocket.

    Desi: “Luther, I’m hoooome. Hey, wha’s this note you nailed to the door? You got some ’splainin’ to do!”

    Luther: “I cannot and will not recant anything, for to go against conscience is neither right nor safe. Here I stand, I can do no other, so help me God. Amen.”

    Desi: “Luuuuuuther!”

    Luther: “Waaaaaah.”

    Memo to CBS: Want to shake Ray Romano’s long-running sitcom out of its creative doldrums? Turn him from a likable sports columnist into a depressive alcoholic turning out masterful stories of blue-collar despair. Presto: Everybody Loves Raymond Carver.

    Robert sits snacking at Ray’s kitchen table, compulsively touching his glass or spoon to his chin before eating or drinking.

    Ray: (takes an anguished slug of gin straight from the bottle) “Will you please stop with the chin thing. Please?” (Tilts head back and takes continuous Adam’s-apple-bobbing gulps.)

    Robert: “You should really stick to Canada Dry ginger ale. Whadda you got to drink for, anyway? You’re a writer, you got a perfect life. I’m underappreciated, unloved, and always getting slighted by our parents. I’m freakin’ six foot eight!” (Weeps.) “I should be the drunk, but I can’t be, because they’d say I was copyin’ you.” (Pulls out his service revolver, taps it on his chin, and cocks it at his temple.)

    Ray: (puts down bottle, brightens) “Wait a minute.” (Pulls a notebook and pencil out of his pocket, prepares to record Robert’s pain in terse, resonant, hard-edged sentences.) “Go on. My life is going to change—I feel it.”

  • One Man Does Not A Movement Make

    Thirty columns ago, in the very first issue of The Rake — March 2002 — I wrote that “being a real brother is not as important as being a real man. Real men think for themselves and live with the consequences of their decisions.” I admit that I took some defiant pride in the not-so-veiled assertion that I was above race. In fact, I accepted the Rake gig with the clear understanding that I was not going to be the magazine’s “head nigger in charge.” I was a writer who happened to be African-American. When it came to topics that would be covered in this space, the world was my oyster.

    However, I found myself writing about race-related stuff and the challenges of living in north Minneapolis more than I envisioned in 2002. Over time, readers began emailing, calling, and stopping me on the street to say things like, “Finally, someone is writing about us.” Even people who initially thought that I was suspect because I didn’t shy away from being critical of black people decided that I deserved my “brother card” after all.

    In fact, I began to view my column not so much as an exclusive possession, but more like American Indians historically viewed the land—as something that I merely managed as a steward. This became especially clear to me over the past several months, when I wrote about the bad guys who shattered my front window after I confronted some neighborhood wannabes about drug dealing. That column, and the one that followed, about Bill Cosby airing African-American “dirty laundry,” generated more letters from readers than any of my others. I felt simultaneously flattered and trapped by the response. All writers love knowing that they are connecting with readers. There are few ego strokes sweeter than to have a stranger leap out of a crowd and tell you “I really loved your last piece. I can’t wait to see your next column.”

    Yet I also began to feel more like a spokesman than just a writer. I am all too aware of how few African-American writers in this city have had the writing platforms that I have in the past dozen years. In fact, when I started writing for the Star Tribune in 1992, I was that newspaper’s first African-American editorial writer since Carl Rowan—in the 1960s. Things haven’t changed much since then. You can count on one hand the number of African-American columnists in major (i.e. white-owned) media outlets in this town and still have a finger or two left over.

    There is a scene in the film The American President when an advisor played by Michael J. Fox tells the president, played by Michael Douglas, that “the people want leadership! In the absence of genuine leadership, they’ll listen to anyone who steps up to the microphone. They’re so thirsty for it they’ll crawl through the desert to a mirage and when they discover there is no water, they will drink the sand.” I believe that a number of Minneapolitans are in a similar position—which explains the powerful response to those recent columns. Many of us, especially those on the Northside, feel like our problems and our pain may get headlines, but that month after month, year after year, we are denied the resources to deal with them.

    I am grateful for the support I have received from Rake readers. I will never forget those who encouraged me to fight the drug thugs and not lose hope. But as much as I care about Minneapolis and the gritty issues confronting the Northside, I must respectfully resist the temptation to allow this column to become a monthly collective cry for help from disenfranchised parts of the city. This is too big a burden for one writer, armed with only one column, to carry.

    On the other hand, it’s an entirely appropriate burden for all of us, as a community, to shoulder. We need to shake down the system and let the people who run it know that we are thirsty for real leadership—the kind of leadership that is just as fed up as the rest of us with the gangbangers, the drug dealers, the users and abusers destroying North Minneapolis. And, we need to let our elected officials know that we are willing to stick with this fight even if it means taking down members of our own families if they refuse to get with the program.

    Truth is, I want to write about other topics—and not feel that I’m letting down my community if I do so. Like it or not (and I do not always like it), I do have a special responsibility as an African-American columnist in a mostly white town. Yet those loyalties can never be greater than the one I have to myself as a writer to take on all the things—and there are many—that trip my trigger.