When Joel and Ethan Coen made Fargo and gave the world a generous serving of the rounded, marbles-in-the-mouth outstate Minnesota accent, it seemed a little over the top. But we all knew it was out there. Just 20 minutes of any WCCO-AM call-in show will prove it. Even those of us in the metro have the long O and the hard R, though we think we talk like newscasters.
Of course, we’re always adding to the mix. Norm Coleman, a New Jersey native, brought us vowels that sounded, oddly, sort of South Boston. First he told us, “I wanna be yah Mayah,” then “I wanna be yah Govenah,” and finally, “I wanna be yah Senatah.” With his thumb ever poised for action, there will doubtless be more of these announcements, but that’s a different story. More recently, Coleman has turned his Southie accent against one of his own party, scolding State Representative Arlon Lindner. He is the Corcoran legislator who has lately brought shame on the state with language that sounds more like Deliverance than Grumpy Old Men.
Coming from a guy who represents a district just outside the 494/694 beltway, Lindner’s twangy drawl has been just as startling as the content of his speech. To find out how this dialect might have emerged on the edge of the prairie, we turned to the late Harold Allen, who painstakingly mapped Minnesota speech patterns for a masterpiece of research titled The Linguistic Atlas of the Upper Midwest. Samples taken near Lindner’s congressional district (32A) found farmers with “speech of moderate tempo, with unusually distinct articulation of emphasized words. Deliberate, even-tempered, carefully articulated speech. No special peculiarities.” Hard to see where Arlon Wayne Lindner fits in there.
But maybe things have changed since 1973, when the atlas was published. So The Rake loaded up the wagon and headed northwest to Corcoran, almost smack in the center of district 32A, and Lindner’s current hometown.
The Stanchion and its ornamental fiberglass cow sit at the intersection of County Roads 10 and 50. The morning crowd on a weekday is a mix of retired locals in seed caps and somewhat younger guys who have just finished with the morning’s snow removal. They work for a lawn service company with contracts in the new developments that are now paving over the few remaining farms in Hennepin County.
Some of the crowd warmed to the topic of Arlon Lindner with racial jokes. A few seemed embarrassed by this, but one guy with a big white beard and a long thin ponytail couldn’t be stopped. He loves Lindner, and it turns out, he’s pretty unhappy about African Americans.
“I’ve worked hard my whole life to support myself. Why should I have to pay for a bunch of niggers who don’t want to work?” What part of Lindner’s legislative agenda remedies this problem he didn’t say. But he wanted me to know he’s not a racist, offering this proof: “Go out in the parking lot and look at my truck. I’ve got one white mud flap and one black one.”
Francis Pomeroy, a World War II vet who says he votes both DFL and GOP, hopes Lindner will do something about illegal immigrants.
“These citizens [sic] that come over have more rights than you and I and they’ve only been here ninety days,” said Pomeroy. “There was a picture in the paper the other day of an illegal alien protesting. What have they got to protest about?”
Others at the bar seemed a bit more acquainted with the current crap-storm involving Lindner, and they seem to think he’s on the right track, too. Doug Theis, a former truck driver, is no fan of gay rights.
“I don’t want to see AIDS become an epidemic like it is over there in Africa. Those diseases are coming from people living, let’s just say, a tasteless lifestyle,” said Theis gravely.
Vernon Peterson, a stocky Korean War veteran, got his coffee refilled and echoed this view. “There’s no racism in it. He tells it like it is,” said Peterson. “If we want to turn into the greatest AIDS nation in the world, we can compete with Africa. It’s a proven fact that Africa is rampant with AIDS and HIV and all that stuff. And that’s all he said. If we want to be equal with them, keep it up.”
Lindner is currently serving his sixth term in the House and has been gay-bashing pretty much from the start, informing the public as early as 1997 that same-sex marriage is like “a man marrying a dog.” When State Rep. Karen Clark took umbrage at this, Lindner replied, “I don’t know why you felt that was insulting.” He apparently did not have a set of mud flaps coordinated to demonstrate his benign intentions, but eventually acknowledged that Clark, a lesbian, was “one of God’s creations.”
While it was quaint to discover that these and other of Lindner’s views are in step with his constituency, the feeling persists that he’s a good ol’ boy in the geographic, as well as the cultural sense. His middle name is Wayne. His wife’s name is Shirlee. He’s got three German Shepherds. And as “down home” as the fellas at The Stanchion sounded, none spoke in anything remotely like Lindner’s drawl. They all spoke pretty much with the diction and style described in Allen’s samples from Wright County, if not in the way encouraged by Rosalie Maggio’s Dictionary of Bias-Free Usage.
Well, it turns out Arlon Wayne Lindner is from Texas, born there with a rawhide spoon in his mouth in 1935. He got his B.A. from North Texas University, and went north. After receiving his Master of Divinity from Central Baptist Theological Seminary in Minneapolis, he decided to stick around and help the State of Minnesota make up for its alarming shortage of concealed weapons. Sure, Lindner might not be able to help out right away with the African-American problem in Corcoran. And his efforts to save Minnesota from becoming “another African continent” might not get traction this year; his proposed repeal of civil rights protections for gays and lesbians has not got the Governor’s nod. But the conceal-carry bill, also popular with the guys at The Stanchion, has good prospects in both houses. If it becomes law, perhaps the good people of Corcoran can take care of their other problems on their own.—Joe Pastoor
Leave a Reply