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  • Letter from London >> Sticker Shock

    There weren’t many people on the plane from Minneapolis to London. My husband, Mike, and I could have had our own aisles, our own sections, our very own bathrooms. Granted, we were traveling in the off-season, but also, dollar-wise, visiting Europe has become rather stupid. Thanks to our huge national debt, the war in Iraq, and a bunch of other financial factors I don’t really understand, the dollar is losing value by the day. Three years ago, a dollar bought almost three quarters of a British pound. Now, it buys just more than half. That’s a nearly twenty-five percent slide, making a tasty Orangina beverage, which costs $2.50 here, the equivalent of $3.50 in London. We paid three dollars for M&M’s and four dollars for a bottle of plain water. Carbonation costs extra.

    Nevertheless, we were determined to vacation in what we would come to know as the most expensive place on earth. We’d never been, after all—never seen all that history. We had relatives to stay with. We had savings and the necessary devil-may-care attitude. So, after a disorienting layover in Reykjavik, Iceland (it was nine in the morning local time and still pitch black outside), we made London at around noon on a Sunday.

    Spending money in London as an American felt like spending money in America as a Mexican. Dollars drifted away like pesos, confetti, vapor. It was a humbling experience, coming from a country where we’re taught to swagger, own the place, no matter what or where. On our first night, by the time Mike and I headed out for dinner, the pubs had all stopped serving. We wound up at a pizza place, where we split a twenty-five-dollar mini pizza pie (we steered clear of “the American,” a pepperoni version intended for people who like their pies “strong and simple”) and a four-dollar bottle of water, and walked back to the house where we were staying.

    In fact, mostly we walked, to avoid the cost of the Underground—cabs were out of the question—but also to view life on the streets. Neither of us is particularly fond of the theater, but we can appreciate an odd situation. We traversed Hyde Park, where we came upon a monument to all the animals who had died in battle. It was embossed with the words, “They had no choice.” We saw the ornate Parliament building and Westminster Abbey (a splurge, since total admission cost around thirty-five dollars), which is basically a giant graveyard full of royalty and other less important people. A coffee stand served cappuccino directly on top of the graves of the least important people. We passed through the financial district and stared down into the swirling brown Thames. We toured several free museums, and stood outside several that charged admission.

    We saw many sites missed by rich people in cabs: the graphic porno flyers in those quaint red telephone booths; the metal fencing that’s been painted so many times it’s clotted with texture; and graveyards where the words have weathered off the stones. In east London, we found an ancient pub called the Town of Ramsgate. It’s right on the Thames and its claim to fame is that pirates used to be hanged out back on scaffolding at the foot of the Wapping Old Stairs. How the Brits love their gore. From the tourist-packed Tower of London where hundreds, maybe thousands, of people were decapitated or hanged or left to rot in their cells, including two of Henry VIII’s wives, to tours of Jack the Ripper’s killing territory, to these Wapping Stairs, the British are simply fascinated.

    At the Ramsgate, my husband and I finished a rather bland traditional English meal of bangers and mash and a pasty chicken pie (total cost, an eye-popping forty dollars) and then went out back to view the spot where Captain Kidd met his end in 1701. According to an excruciatingly detailed placard inside the pub, as Kidd stood atop the scaffold with a rope around his neck, he pointed at a woman in the crowd and yelled, “I lain with that bitch three times, and now she comes to see me hanged.” Not much of a commentary on his performance, joked my husband. Kidd’s body was left to bloat and be picked apart by crows.

    We trekked and trekked. For rest, we usually ducked into the pubs, where, if you’re lucky, you get a glass of beer for five dollars. And where you can hang around all day reading a complimentary copy of the Guardian, which is convinced that all Americans are fat and caught in the grip of a misdirected morality craze. London pubs admit dogs and Englishmen with missing teeth. At one particularly charming pub, the Warwick Arms, Mike was at the bar buying me an extra special bitter. A regular, who had obviously beaten us to the scene by a few hours, slurred in heavily accented English, “Steady, boy.”
    “Why am I silly?” my husband responded.

    “Stea-dy!” he bellowed. “Is there somethin’ wrong with me English?”

    “Well, I’m English as a second language!” The guy had to laugh. He kept laughing as Mike paid the bill.—Jennifer Vogel

    Jennifer Vogel

  • The Mechanic at Rest

    The other day, Northwest Airlines informed the union that it wished to lay off six hundred mechanics. In recent years, Northwest has had a near-perfect record measured on the only scale that really matters—mechanical failures leading to tragic crashes. Some thanks is surely due to the men and women who are responsible for keeping things shipshape under the hood. It was not always thus.

    Plenty of Twin Citizens remember the early days of the airline industry, a racy time that bred giants. In the late forties, Howard Hughes led Hughes Aircraft and Trans World Airlines with the fastest and latest aircraft. Juan Trippe of Pan American pioneered and charted new flight routes with Charles Lindbergh. But in March 1950, Northwest had no giants of its own, and it was in big trouble. The next thirteen months would be very rocky indeed.

    On March 7, 1950, the snow and wind howled. Howard Huber was tending bar at his tavern near the airport. The regulars heard an aircraft that was too low and too close. When they heard it a second time, apparently making another approach, Huber said, “That plane is in trouble but he’s not going to make it this time.”

    The plane was a Martin 202, a sexy model for Northwest in 1947. It was new and fast and quickly set some impressive speed records. It brought the age of air travel to cities such as Eau Claire, Sioux Falls, Bismarck, Rochester, and Helena. Within a short time, the company was flying twenty Martin 202s—more than forty percent of its total fleet. In an effort to fight the glamorous publicity of Howard Hughes, who at the time was canoodling publicly with Katharine Hepburn and Ava Gardner, Northwest hired Yvonne DeCarlo as its sultry spokeswoman. (She would later become famous as Lily Munster on The Munsters and star in horror films like Satan’s Cheerleaders.) The Martin 202 also marked the birth of the Northwest red tail as an enduring symbol of the carrier. Some employees speculated that the primary purpose of the paint scheme was so emergency crews could find the often waylaid aircraft. They had good reason.

    On that day in March, Mrs. Patricia Knowles was shoveling snow and wanted to stay ahead of the snowfall. She glanced up at the Washburn Park Tower and noticed an airplane wing “floating down like a feather.” In seconds, Northwest’s problems would come crashing down into three Minnehaha Parkway residences.

    The crash of Northwest Airlines Flight One summoned thirteen fire engine companies to the scene. Amid a sea of blowing snow, smoke, and ash, neighborhood heroes pulled survivors from the burning houses. But when firefighters set up their ladder to rescue two children from the second floor of a house on the eleven-hundred block of West Minnehaha Parkway, the flames were too much, and the house collapsed in front of them. The children had just been tucked into bed while their parents watched the Minneapolis Lakers game on a television downstairs. The disaster claimed the lives of all thirteen passengers and the two children on the ground.

    From August 29, 1948, until January 17, 1951, Northwest endured six fatal crashes and, astonishingly, lost five of its twenty new Martin 202s. In other words, twenty percent of the fleet had been destroyed in crashes.

    Later, in the spring of 1951, one hundred Twin Cities businessmen celebrated Northwest Airlines’ twenty-fifth anniversary. Hosted by Radisson Hotels, the fare included Alaskan salmon and “Broiled Guinea Chicken Croil Hunter,” named after the sitting president of Northwest Airlines. The guests were startled when the intercom system roared, “The twenty-fifth anniversary flight of Northwest Airlines is ready for departure. Captain Croil Hunter and Captain Tom Moore at the controls. All aboard please!”

    The spring of 1951 was indeed a perilous time for Northwest. With its planes grounded, its crews and the general public afraid to fly, the government agency doing the comprehensive investigation was led by a man named Donald Nyrop. His top-to-bottom review of the carrier’s safety record, maintenance, and pilot training led him to declare the Martin 202 “a basically sound airplane.” This surprising confidence made a profound impact on Northwest’s board of directors, and they began a determined three-year courtship to get Nyrop as its president. When he accepted on September 27, 1954, Northwest had its industry giant and its future would be secured.—Tony Nichols

  • Get Right with God

    About two years ago, a Northfield, Minnesota, man named Fred Herzog had a vision that made him weep for hours each day for weeks on end. “Jesus came to me and said, ‘You are crying out to the souls of people in South Minneapolis,’” he said. “When I discovered South Minneapolis, it was narrowed to Uptown. I saw young people in chains, hands in chains, legs in chains. And I heard these words: ‘These people are in the devil’s chain gang. Pray for them so they can be set free.’”

    For two years, Herzog conducted services in an Uptown-area living room. But today, thanks to a growing assembly of worshipers, his church has been blessed with a permanent home in the sub-basement of a strip mall. The congregation calls itself the Uptown Fellowship, and the name fits. It is made up of a few dozen ragtag members. One recent Sunday night, I noticed a tattooed and pierced schoolteacher, an African-American man in a Nike jumpsuit, a homecoming queen from my hometown (she was a year ahead of me), and a mop-haired guitarist who fronts the church band. (This last congregant I thought quite attractive, until he shared his thoughts on the importance of freeing ourselves from lust. Busted!)

    The band jammed off-key as parishioners shuffled in for the service. There were coy waves and earnest smiles. As coats were hung and diaper bags stashed under seats, personal Bibles came out. This being a special spontaneous service, however, the Bibles were soon set aside in favor of making a great noise with the house band. Parishioners jumped to their feet, clapped their hands, and swayed their hips. A middle-aged guy in the front row, wearing a Calvin and Hobbes T-shirt, shouted “Praise Jesus!”

    A church elder stepped forward, and the music lulled. Then the room was filled with the odd clamor of someone worshiping in tongues. The elder closed his eyes and raised his voice. “I think there’s someone here who needs to be healed,” he said. He brought forth a parishioner whose chronic illnesses were well known to the congregation, and he beckoned others to place their hands on her shoulders. Then the keyboardist complained of knee pain and two parishioners knelt in front of her, laid their hands on her patella, and prayed. Soon the bulk of the congregation was splintered into several small huddles, each murmuring prayers. The band provided instrumental ambience. The elder now shouted to be heard: “I’m feeling that there’s someone here with neck pain! Is there someone with a digestive problem?”

    As the commotion settled, John Shank opened his Bible to the book of Isaiah, as instructed by Herzog. By day, Shank is a professional animator. Here, he is a church elder and Bible-study leader. A person worshiping next to Shank would notice that he has devised an elaborate highlighting system that divides and subdivides biblical texts into blues, yellows, and oranges (only prepositions are left behind). He followed along as Herzog dissected a passage on King Hezekiah, the Old Testament king who died young as punishment for pride and bitterness. Not being burdened by traditional notions of theology, Herzog speculated that premature death is thus evidence of certain kinds of sin. “Humpf,” said Shank, closing his Bible at sermon’s end.

    After the service, everyone moved to the back of the room to eat tacos, coo over babies, and make a visitor feel welcome. One of the Fellowship’s rising stars, a twenty-six-year-old fashion designer, described it as “a charismatic-type church” and admitted to tempering that definition in accordance with Uptown attitudes. She related a dream in which she was anointing the sick with oil, and she was excited to have realized that dream earlier in the evening, before the sermon. As she told her story, I began to see what binds this hip young woman with golden highlights in her hair to the congregation’s eclectic mix of tightly permed sixty-somethings and burned-out Gen Xers. It’s not so much the literalist reading of Scripture, which she and other parishioners didn’t want to discuss over dinner. Rather, it’s a taste for mysticism and a belief that Herzog provides a special link to the divine.

    Even Shank, regarded as the most academic in the bunch, said he thinks Herzog is specially attuned to demonic spirits and has a gift for warding them off with prayer. After a youth spent in more traditional Christian settings—places he called “dead churches”—and dalliances with Hinduism, hatha yoga, and psychedelic drugs, he’s all too happy to be following Herzog’s flamboyant path to God. “After being in the presence of the Holy Spirit, I’d find it insulting to be in a dead church,” he said.—Christy DeSmith

  • Tolls for Thee

    In just a matter of days, the new toll lanes on Interstate 394 will open, giving thousands of commuters in the western suburbs the option of paying to escape the bonds of gridlock as they make their busy way to and from downtown Minneapolis. The last time we drove west on I-394 it was not rush hour. It was a Saturday afternoon in October, not long after President Bush had held his “victory rally” at the Target Center. We were taking the children to a Halloween party in Golden Valley, and we were beset by scrubbed suburban teenagers too young to vote but old enough to drive—and honk and point and make lewd gestures when we did not show a sufficient level of enthusiasm for their candidate. Anyway, the traffic was terrible, and we waited for what seemed like hours just to reach the HOV lane. We were demoralized to see it was closed.

    In theory, then, we should be very pleased, along with our westerly friends, that we now have this high-tech option. It is called MNPass. For a deposit of around forty dollars, you can receive a small antenna and computer chip to be glued inside your windshield. This transponder will be recognized by overhead chip readers, which will be indirectly connected to your bank account (and, by the way, directly to the State Highway Patrol—you didn’t think this was going to be on the honor system, did you?). Your MNPass account will authorize you to use a special lane shared only by other toll payers or car-poolers. The technology for MNPass looks much like that for EZPass, New York City’s celebrated system used on countless toll roads around the Big Apple.

    There is one important difference, though. Everyone must pay to use the Garden State Parkway, or the New York Thruway, or the Tappan Zee Bridge—there are no special lanes, no special dispensations. (There are different tolls for commercial vehicles and for trailers; also, you are allowed to pay with hard cash.) Back East, all are equal under the electronic eye of God. But our own pay-to-play toll road rankles for a couple of reasons.

    While it’s nice to see that car-poolers will still be able to use the lanes unharrassed, the idea that you can substitute money for socially agreeable behavior is repugnant to us. MNPass may appear to embody the libertarian ideal of point-of-service fees, whereby those who use are those who pay. But we’ve seen how this ideal works before, particularly in our public parks. We never liked it, and now we know why. While besieged taxpayers are supposedly getting “relief,” they are expected to pay higher fees for many of the things their taxes formerly paid for. There is a subtle moral violation of the public trust in this. Forty dollars may not seem like much money—indeed, it is merely a deposit against tolls you will be paying when you use your pass, and the monthly cost of the transponder is just $1.50—but the system inherently excludes people who don’t have forty dollars to deposit. (Another telling example: You need to reserve your account with a credit card number; if you have no plastic, you are not welcome.) We think the punishment of sitting in traffic fits the venal sin of insisting on driving your own automobile alone, every day. Money should not be the lowest common denominator dictating our behavior. Morality should be.

    But if you insist, then let’s consider this matter strictly on a financial basis. The high price of gas is already putting a pinch on drivers, and in a rational world, it should lead to more car-pooling, more public transit, and more long-term solutions in which we all participate. Opting out, or rather paying what amounts to an indulgence, in order to have the law not apply to you, in order to be exempted from uncomfortable realities—is that any way to act? MNPass calls to mind recent efforts to allow industrial corporations to buy and sell pollution credits. In our bizarre, delusional state, we seem to believe that social and civic responsibility is optional, that morality is a commodity that can be traded in the open marketplace. We seem to believe that responsible behavior is something that takes place in the aggregate, not at the individual level. Someone else will take care of it; let’s just make sure I got mine.

  • Don’t Go Into the Light, Dick Clark!

    Dick Clark is not pleased about the headlight situation. Oh sure, he’s driven his fair share of luxury automobiles, both domestic and European. He has even leased various Japanese models, though he finds the lack of headroom troubling. But every day lately, Dick finds he’s spending more and more of his valuable time thinking about how best to carry out his crusade against the proliferation of very bright headlights. Unread copies of Billboard accumulate in a growing column on his nightstand. He isn’t keeping up with pop culture like he should, and close friends say they’ve noticed a few gray hairs at his temples. He lies awake at night, vacantly watching the LEDs dance on his clock radio. In the morning, exhausted, he makes his coffee without turning on the kitchen radio. He does not make his customary scan of both frequencies in search of his friendly rival, Casey Kasem. For the first time in his life, there are dark circles developing under his eyes.

    Why do they have to be so bright? Why is the light so intensely white-hot? Is this a further sign of man’s inhumanity to man? Dick Clark is deeply troubled. Now that Daimler and Chrysler have merged, he feels certain that very bright headlights will be installed on virtually all automobiles. This, of course, is unrealistic and pessimistic. But there is little doubt in Dick Clark’s mind that cheap, aftermarket headlights will be made available to drivers of older cars. These will not be quite as bright, but they will have the same painful blue nimbus seen from certain angles. He’s already noticed them retrofitted on used minivans and economy cars.

    Technically, Dick is not losing sleep over very bright headlights. He’s resigned to the fact that they are here to stay. Instead, he is obsessed with what his own personal response should be. He feels a vague sense of powerlessness, even though he is one of the most influential pop culture icons ever to hold a California driver’s license.

    The fact of the matter is that this is not the first time Dick has toyed with the idea of using Bandstand as a bully pulpit. Several years ago he was very unhappy about high levels of mercury in the environment, due to sneakers with batteries in them. In the seventies, he felt that so-called “earth tones” were unflattering to most complexions. In the fifties, he was convinced that canned beer was a sure sign of social declension. But his producers always prevailed. Why would he want to needlessly alienate his fans and his potential advertisers? Bandstand was about uniting the kids, not dividing them! A professional would surely save such personal “issues” for private after-parties.

    Frankly, though, Dick is at his wit’s end. He has tried everything. At first, he would flash oncoming cars. Unfortunately, they often flashed him back. When you are flashed by very bright headlights, you don’t soon forget it. Once, Dick saw multicolored lights in his peripheral vision for a long time afterward. Dick Clark is a very conscientious steward of the corporal territories of Dick Clark (particularly those in the Northern Hemisphere), so you can imagine how disturbing this must have been.

    Dick tried honking. He quickly realized this brought him the wrong kind of attention. Other drivers thought he was trying to get them to notice him—Dick Clark! A grown man with his own television program! And yet still eager for every last bit of public recognition, no matter how petty! He felt certain this would lead to a backlash in his popularity, or at least an insinuating article in the tabloids. Not very helpfully, his agent advised him to avoid driving at night.

    Perhaps it was desperation that finally pushed him into playing “chicken” with drivers of cars equipped with very bright headlights. Most sane people would say that at this point Dick Clark had crossed the figurative line. His producers would have killed him if they knew what he was up to. Luckily, he came to his senses. In theory, of course, it would not have been an unpleasant death for a timeless legend like himself—Dick Clark finally dead! Foul play suspected! Yet he was repelled by the thought of leaving such a big tonsorial job to even the most accomplished of mortuary beauticians.

    In his troubled dreams, Dick Clark entertains fantasies that do not conform to the expectations and practices of the waking world. He uses laser-sighted weapons to frighten inconsiderate drivers (he would never actually fire). With a very powerful transmitter, he commandeers their car radios and shames them in full surround-sound stereo. He spends hours in the hot sun of the San Fernando Valley, putting up false detour signs that say “Deduction for Business Use of Halogen Headlights, Next Exit.” In the mercifully muted twilight between dreaming and waking, Dick Clark is afforded a precious few moments of extraordinary happiness each morning.

  • The Russian Renovation

    “It was like two philosophical trains running past each other on parallel tracks,” said Brad Shinkle, describing Russian and American art during the twentieth century. “Each had little or no awareness of the other—what it consisted of, or its rationale.” Shinkle is president and director of the Museum of Russian Art, the only institution in the U.S. dedicated to Russian art. For fifty-plus years during the Cold War, he pointed out, the Russians weren’t worried just about American nukes. They were also worried about a more insidious type of damage that could come from our “decadent” and “degenerate” art seeping into their country. At the same time, Russian art was virtually quarantined inside the Soviet Union; the few works Westerners did see were disdained as “propagandistic” or “intellectually corrupt.”

    Understandably, then, most Americans have trouble conjuring any image at all of twentieth-century Russian art beyond, say, Wassily Kandinsky, or the propaganda posters and Social Realist paintings from the Stalin years. But the collection at the Museum of Russian Art—which will go on view May 9 in a new home in South Minneapolis—is meant to change all that. Many of its works invoke quietude and simplicity with brush strokes inspired by Late Impressionism. There are also glowing forests and reverently rendered birches. Frank, round faces of children stare out from the canvases. A stunning portrait of a composer in front of his grand piano might elicit comparisons to Alice Neel or even Alex Katz, except that it’s hard to believe the Russian artist ever saw their work. Nikolai Baskakov’s Milkmaids, Novella is especially arresting—these casual, laughing women are not the somber, chiseled Russian workers we’re used to seeing.

    These works and others from the museum’s collection, together with paintings from Moscow’s State Tretyakov Gallery, make up In the Russian Tradition, an exhibition that was recently on display at the Smithsonian Institution. Its opening this month in Minneapolis will inaugurate the Museum of Russian Art’s new facility, a former church built in the Spanish revival style.

    Shinkle recently led a visitor through the building as its $4.5 million renovation was heading into the home stretch. A mezzanine level had just been completed, halfway up to the building’s exposed rafters; an empty shaft awaited an elevator. “People have been here working elbow to elbow to get this place ready,” he said, pointing out the well that would soon hold a circular staircase.

    If the dazzling new Walker Art Center was considered a modest building project compared with other products of our national museum-building boom, then this church renovation might seem quite minor as art facilities go. Nevertheless, the collection of twentieth-century paintings that will be housed at the new Museum of Russian Art is the envy of the top-drawer galleries in Russia.

    Shinkle says that people are drawn to these works the first time they see them. “For fifty years, [Soviet] artists were told to paint so that common people can understand,” he says. “So there’s a comfort factor with these paintings.” Yet they are, he is quick to add, “the technical equal of other twentieth-century works.”

    With more than ten thousand works, the museum’s collection began as the private passion of Ray Johnson, a Minnesota businessman with a soft sweep of white hair and a near-constant twinkle in his eye. When perestroika began to open doors in the Soviet Union, Johnson was already a seasoned collector. Suspecting that there might be some artistic surprises hidden behind the Iron Curtain, he sent a proxy to live in the Soviet Union for a year and learn about the art market there.

    Johnson himself poked around in attics, sheds, and dachas, all the while building relationships with artists. Many of them were wary of showing their work to outsiders. Since 1945, the government, the only legal market for art, had exclusively purchased paintings that supported its official view of life in a communist state. So two or three generations of painters had amassed whole bodies of work that didn’t fit this mold.

    Myths about Soviet art persist today because, frankly, few people have cared enough to dispel them. Recently, fourteen exhibitions of works from Russian museums were simultaneously on view in the United States—but none of them included Russian art. Even in St. Petersburg, tourists line up at the Hermitage to see French Impressionists, but few venture down the street to the State Russian Museum. Unlikely as it seems, that is the reason Johnson decided to build a public home for his collection in Minneapolis. He still sees barriers that need to be brought down and bridges that need to be built.

    “These artists, as much as anything,” he says, “want Americans to understand that even if they couldn’t make a working toilet or a good car, they could make a beautiful painting. It’s like they’re saying to us, ‘We didn’t just make bombs.’ I’ve taken that very seriously because I’ve met some wonderful, talented old men who knew full well that Americans thought they only did poster art. They changed me from being just a collector to feeling that I have a real responsibility.”

  • Soundtrack to Mary

    Yeah, yeah. In some ways I have that “old soul” thing going on (though I find that expression to be fundamentally jive). Lately, however, some form of latent immaturity has started to kick in. For instance, I recently walked into a conversation at work among a group of people who were discussing the joy–and excitement of–a pregnant coworker. The conversation came to an abrupt halt when I pointed out how weird it was that she was growing a little penis in her stomach. Well, she is! Maybe it makes sense to be working my way backward. I was kind of an old woman as a little kid. I loved cats and my own company. Getting into my jammies was usually the highlight of my day. However, I was a complete insomniac, which isn’t a disorder one normally associates with childhood. While most little girls were sawing logs wrapped in their Strawberry Shortcake sheets, I was wide awake at 3:00 A.M., fretting that I’d lost my hot-lunch ticket and the lunch lady with the hairdo that looked like a roast was going to yell at me. Everyone says, “What’s the hurry to grow up?” Oh, I don’t know. How about the fact that life is ass when you’re fifteen? Fake IDs saved my life at a time when seeing bands meant more to me than any prom or college application. There was nothing more satisfying than waking up for school with a smudged ink stamp on my hand, which I was careful not to wash off. Listening to girls on the school bus chirping about their latest crushes, all I could think was, “Dude, last night I somehow passed for twenty-one, saw Brad Brains, and had to climb through a basement window when I got home.” I think they missed out. They think I missed out. What do you think?

    Email Mary at popularcreeps@yahoo.com

  • Liza Featherstone

    It’s not just the prices that are low at Wal-Mart. Journalist Liza Featherstone has written extensively about the world’s largest retailer, exposing its many abuses of its employees and the effect its labor practices have had on the culture of work in the United States. Her new book, Selling Women Short: The Landmark Battle for Workers’ Rights at Wal-Mart, chronicles the injustices faced by female employees at Wallyworld and the overseas factories that keep the big box chock full of cheap junk. In the tradition of Upton Sinclair, Featherstone’s work doesn’t just record labor history, it inspires a cry for change.

    THE RAKE: What inspired you to make Wal-Mart the center of your work?

    FEATHERSTONE: I write a lot about labor issues and women’s issues. When the Duke v. Wal-Mart sex discrimination lawsuit was filed in 2001, I was very curious about the women who would stand up to such a powerful retailer. I also got interested in what it means for our society to have so many people working in these low-wage jobs.

    You’ve reported on labor violations that are almost beyond belief.

    Some of the things really are like the Shirtwaist Triangle factory days. Locking workers into the stores, not letting them leave. The extreme disregard for worker safety, child labor. A lot of the stories in the sex discrimination lawsuit really evoke the 1950s or pre-feminist America.

    What do you make of the fact that so many people so passionately defend Wal-Mart?

    Wal-Mart markets itself as a friend to the common person. There are a lot of parallels to the Republican Party, but one difference is that Wal-Mart actually does deliver something to its low-income constituents–low prices. This enables Wal-Mart to say, “Hey, we’re helping poor people.” People don’t see a connection between the working conditions of others and their own work. But the fact is, if you’re letting the world’s largest private employer get away with these abuses, then you’re opening the door for other employers to behave the same way.

    Do you think Wal-Mart is too powerful to feel any repercussions?

    They do get away with things, and people continue to shop there despite their abuses. But recently, they’ve become very concerned about their public image. They’ve hired Hill & Knowlton, a famous public relations firm that companies go to when they’re in trouble. Why? The stock price has been rather lackluster for a number of years; the way people feel about a company affects the price. Also, sales have not been as impressive as they have been in the past. And they are encountering an enormous amount of opposition as they expand into new areas, especially cities. They need to expand in urban areas because they are running out of space in the rest of the country–their stores are beginning to cannibalize each other. Which I always find quite funny.

    People of color seem especially opposed to Wal-Mart. Why?

    In some places, they’ve welcomed it because they want the low prices; and they’ve taken the pessimistic attitude that Wal-Mart jobs are better than no jobs. But in many places, people of color have rejected that. They want economic development that will provide decent jobs that people can support families on. They find it very racist that they’ve been asked to accept this kind of lowest-common-denominator development. Also, Wal-Mart is the biggest gun dealer in the country, and black communities often feel under threat by gun violence. And the fact that Wal-Mart tries to circumvent local laws in many places and build a store regardless of how the community feels–this strikes people as tremendously arrogant, and violates their basic need for respect.

    What do you mean when you describe Wal-Mart as having a “plantation mentality”?

    African-Americans are suspicious about Wal-Mart because it’s a Southern company. They see people accepting extreme violations from bosses who claim to be working in their best interests. It’s not accidental that a company like that originated in the South, because that kind of thinking goes back to slavery: “We’re going to commit these outrageous abuses against you, but we’re all family. We’re looking out for you.” That kind of paternalistic and abusive attitude goes back a very long way in those regions. I went to the Wal-Mart Visitor’s Center in Bentonville, Arkansas, which is the site of the first Wal-Mart store, and there’s a Confederate memorial right across the street.

    Have you ever experienced any threatening or retaliatory behavior from Wal-Mart?

    Never. When I was working on the book, sometimes workers would ask me, “Aren’t you scared? Wal-Mart’s really powerful.” And I’d think, yeah, it makes me a little nervous. But the provisions for journalists and free speech in this country are actually quite good. They haven’t taken any legal action against me. I haven’t gotten any anonymous calls in the middle of the night.

    Liza Featherstone will appear May 5 as part of the Friends of the Saint Paul Public Library’s Untold Stories series about labor history; Weyerhaeuser Chapel at Macalester College, 1600 Grand Ave., St. Paul; 651-222-3242; www.thefriends.org.

  • An uncharacteristic pessimism

    The tone of Paul Krugman in this morning’s NY Times was the first in a long time in which Krugman seemed to give in to his pessimism that the current administration will ever do the right thing–economically or otherwise. As his colleague Bob Herbert so aptly described it today, we’re ruled by “small men committed to the concentration of big bucks in the hands of the fortunate few.” Krugman usually, in his editorials, manages to offer some constructive remedy. Today, he seems to have come to the conclusion that it’s too late. Sort of like W. H. Auden must have felt in 1939.

    For the historically impaired, September 1, 1939 was the first day of World War II.

    September 1, 1939
    W. H. Auden

    I sit in one of the dives
    On Fifty-second Street
    Uncertain and afraid
    As the clever hopes expire
    Of a low dishonest decade:
    Waves of anger and fear
    Circulate over the bright
    And darkened lands of the earth,
    Obsessing our private lives;
    The unmentionable odour of death
    Offends the September night.

    Accurate scholarship can
    Unearth the whole offence
    From Luther until now
    That has driven a culture mad,
    Find what occurred at Linz,
    What huge imago made
    A psychopathic god:
    I and the public know
    What all schoolchildren learn,
    Those to whom evil is done
    Do evil in return.

    Exiled Thucydides knew
    All that a speech can say
    About Democracy,
    And what dictators do,
    The elderly rubbish they talk
    To an apathetic grave;
    Analysed all in his book,
    The enlightenment driven away,
    The habit-forming pain,
    Mismanagement and grief:
    We must suffer them all again.

    Into this neutral air
    Where blind skyscrapers use
    Their full height to proclaim
    The strength of Collective Man,
    Each language pours its vain
    Competitive excuse:
    But who can live for long
    In an euphoric dream;
    Out of the mirror they stare,
    Imperialism’s face
    And the international wrong.

    Faces along the bar
    Cling to their average day:
    The lights must never go out,
    The music must always play,
    All the conventions conspire
    To make this fort assume
    The furniture of home;
    Lest we should see where we are,
    Lost in a haunted wood,
    Children afraid of the night
    Who have never been happy or good.

    The windiest militant trash
    Important Persons shout
    Is not so crude as our wish:
    What mad Nijinsky wrote
    About Diaghilev
    Is true of the normal heart;
    For the error bred in the bone
    Of each woman and each man
    Craves what it cannot have,
    Not universal love
    But to be loved alone.

    From the conservative dark
    Into the ethical life
    The dense commuters come,
    Repeating their morning vow;
    “I will be true to the wife,
    I’ll concentrate more on my work,”
    And helpless governors wake
    To resume their compulsory game:
    Who can release them now,
    Who can reach the deaf,
    Who can speak for the dumb?

    All I have is a voice
    To undo the folded lie,
    The romantic lie in the brain
    Of the sensual man-in-the-street
    And the lie of Authority
    Whose buildings grope the sky:
    There is no such thing as the State
    And no one exists alone;
    Hunger allows no choice
    To the citizen or the police;
    We must love one another or die.

    Defenceless under the night
    Our world in stupor lies;
    Yet, dotted everywhere,
    Ironic points of light
    Flash out wherever the Just
    Exchange their messages:
    May I, composed like them
    Of Eros and of dust,
    Beleaguered by the same
    Negation and despair,
    Show an affirming flame.

  • Art Pour L'Art

    This past weekend, it was hard to escape the feeling that most of the art world showed up on our doorstep to help celebrate the gala reopening of the Walker Art Center. This had the feeling of a truly remarkable moment—an acknowledged world-class art center turns its operating volume up to eleven.

    It is not enough, in these loud times, to merely toot your own horn to achieve this kind of harmonic convergence. You must call in your markers, and judging from the guest lists, the turn-out, the general commotion emanating from Vineland Place, the Walker people could not be better connected. This morning, we are counting ourselves lucky to associate ourselves with them. (Together with the Minnesota Book Awards—where our own Jennifer Vogel received heavy metal in the memoir category for “Flim-Flam Man,” hurray!—we feel mighty proud to be so close to the center of the universe.)

    It’s important for patrons of the arts to celebrate their besieged communities. And if we occasionally seem immodest about it, well—you only get a fifty million dollar art-center addition once a generation. On the other hand, we found this story about the return of legendary graffiti artist “Revs” a very interesting counterpoint indeed. Speaking with friends here from New York, we ran through the paces of our usual arguments about the tension between, say, the paintings of Sigmar Polke (so good to see again!) and the sculpture of Claes Oldenberg (uh…)—the latter showing many signs of incipient childishness, commercialism, and general superficiality for several decades now. So few successful artists actually have the courage to continue to evolve, even after they’ve become the art world’s equivalent of rock stars. It’s not clear why this must always be the case—although we now have a pet theory that says artists are lousy money-handlers, and desperation is the single biggest ingredient in the recastable mold.

    Anyway, the point of the Times piece on Revs resurgence is that it is very refreshing to transcend the normal boundaries of media-PR-self-promotion, and discover an honest-to-god outsider artist who relishes his outsider status, uses it to resist the corrupting influence of money and celebrity. Perhaps the answer is as simple as unionizing all visual artists (after teaching them how to work steel). We have no truck with the romanticism of the “starving artist,” but we also don’t have a lot of patience with the overfed artist, either.