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Now that E.L. Doctorow has been elevated to that rare pantheon of not-dead white writers worth reading, it will be worth checking out what has made him transcend the solipsistic excesses of Nobel laureate Saul Bellow and his ilk. World’s Fair, Ragtime, and Billy Bathgate were compulsively readable literature—and we have to thank Doctorow’s novel for inspiring the opening scene of the Bathgate movie version, when Dustin Hoffman is fitting Bruce Willis with concrete shoes, the better to toss Bruce in the East River. If only art really did imitate life. Sweet Land collects a handful of shorter Doctorow tales, all of which echo his familiar themes of alienation and survival in the American heartland.

The great news is that Pete is going to be a dad—the first in my little circle of friends. For no good reason at all, my little gang seems to have put off having kids. Even though Pete, Ben, Don, and I have all joked about being deaf to the ticking of the biological clock, our wives are beginning to get itchy. Fact is, all my guy friends would make great dads, and they are all signed up for eventual parenthood. Even Don, who is going through a sort of second adolescence involving lots of casual sex with women a decade younger than he is.

We’re all very excited about Pete. But something funny happened on the way to fatherhood. Amanda, Pete’s wife, decided that pregnancy created a mandate for cleaning the house. In particular, she went at the attic with a vengeance. Now, the attic is normally Pete’s domain. Every guy I know has carved a little space for himself at home—whether it’s a shop in the garage, or a corner of the basement. And it’s generally considered bad form to go into a man’s domain and mess around with things. Cleaning is an especially serious transgression.

So, Amanda found Pete’s inflatable sex doll. Needless to say, there were fireworks, recriminations, and tears. Pete claimed that it was a gag, given to him by his friends back in college when he was notoriously and involuntarily celibate. But Amanda did not believe him. Owing to her pregnancy, she said, she was especially disgusted with her husband and her husband’s friends, and she threw the doll in the trash. Knowing which battles are lost before they’ve even begun, Pete prudently did not object.

Technically, Pete’s claim was true, and I knew it. I had been one of the buddies who pitched in for the gift back in our college days, and was tickled to learn that Pete had held onto “Maureen” all these years. Of course, corroborating Pete’s story got him no closer to redemption with Amanda. That’s because we all assumed Pete held onto Maureen for reasons that went somewhat beyond comedy.

After the discovery, it was a tense week. It was unclear how big a deal Amanda meant to make of Maureen. Pete was officially in the doghouse, and Amanda seemed to be mulling the long-term consequences. So all the guys met up at the local to discuss the situation. It turns out that Pete had recently dug Maureen out of a box. Without getting into sordid details, Pete was feeling like it would be at least a year before he and Amanda would be making love again. He was anticipating a period of loneliness that reminded him of the bad old days of bachelorhood.

As usual, Don, Ben, and I all made fun of Pete. He deserved it! Did he really believe that pregnant women can’t or won’t make love? Ben said he’d heard that the hormonal whirlpool of pregnancy often made women very, very interested in sex. True, Don had heard that some women are so freaked out by pregnancy that they’d rather not touch a man for a decade. But the fact is, there is no reason to believe that pregnancy should have anything but a positive effect on the sex lives of married men. (Think about it: For starters, a woman can’t get pregnant if she’s already pregnant. No protection, no problem!)

Which brings us back to Maureen. I have no idea whether Pete had any intention of reinflating her, and that was hardly the point. The real problem was that she represented a kind of selfishness. There is nothing wrong with an inflatable sex doll in itself, and there is nothing wrong with using one for its intended purpose. But in Pete’s life, it represented a kind of self-centeredness that could easily be addressed by simply talking to Amanda about his fears and his desires. How did she feel about sex, now that she was pregnant? Would they need to try something new? If she felt like taking a break from intimate relations, would it be all right for Pete to go solo with a clean conscience?

So, after we made fun of Pete, we told him to go home—go home right now and have a heart-to-heart with Amanda about his fears and doubts, no matter how silly or selfish they might seem. Men hate to appear weak, vulnerable, or needy. And it’s only about a million times worse when those feelings involve their sexuality. But we have to get over that. It is not weak or shameful to worry about whether you’ll ever have sex again with your now-pregnant wife, but it is weak not to speak to her about it. And for heaven’s sake, Pete. Why the hell didn’t you throw Maureen away years ago? You made us all look like idiots!

The now ubiquitous spoiler—that horizontal fin typically perched on the trunks of sports cars—goes way back, back before the elevated brake lights that now decorate them on every third Honda you get behind on Lake Street. In the early days of Gran Turismo racing in Europe, about forty years ago, the spoiler was the solution to the problem of “lift.” At one hundred miles per hour and greater, the massive airflow under race cars has a tendency to lift the rear of the vehicle, depriving the wheels of traction, and preventing—as physicists and motorheads everywhere know—the transmission of power to the road surface. Clever engineers decided to capture the force of air rushing over the top of the car with a wing-shaped appendage on the back that would transmit that force down to keep the rubber on the road. In the sixties and seventies, Ferrari and Lamborghini added spoilers to their production cars, and it was only a matter of time before everybody wanted one.

The family tree of such bolt-on beauties has deeper roots, of course, than GT racing and Ferrari envy. Some would trace the lineage back to the Cadillac fins of the fifties, or even the running boards of the forties. But it took dealers a while to realize what kind of market share they were giving up to classified advertisers in the back pages of car magazines. By the seventies, enthusiasts were spending thousands to “personalize” their cars, and dealers were still just peddling rustproofing and the odd set of floormats after the deal. The enhancement trend reached the average consumer in the eighties as itinerant installers went from dealer to dealer like gypsies, dressing up defenseless, ordinary sedans with euphemisms like the “spring package” (white spoiler, white wheel covers, and a pink stripe on a white car) and “performance group” (rear-deck wing, chrome wheels, low-profile tires).

Observing the force that spoilers exerted on consumers’ wallets (if not their wheels), most dealers have now folded accessory departments into the showroom. To see the very latest in auto prosthetics, I paid a visit to a suburban metro dealer whose manager kindly asked that no one be named, though I can safely disclose that they sell a brand that rhymes with “gourd.”

The strangest new things are now sprouting from trucks. Our manager estimated that eighty-five percent of all new models are “personalized” before delivery. The decline of the once popular visor (so many fallen to automatic car-wash brushes, said the manager) has given way to “vent shades,” which are plastic deflectors apparently designed to keep air from entering the window, even if it’s open. “Cab back spoilers,” a matched pair of wings mounted vertically to the top of a pickup box where it meets the back of the cab, are still in some demand, but the strangest thing has to be the “tailgate spoiler,” a narrow little wing stuck out on the end of a pickup box like the last hot girl to leave a party. SUV buyers hate to be left out of anything, so they can get a “rear air deflector” mounted near the top of the tailgate too, though frankly, it’s less of a statement.

Despite the caricature that spoilers have become on trucks (and yes, even minivans), they have enjoyed a huge comeback in the street-racing subculture, where the Honda Civic (no kidding) has muscled into the gearhead niche inhabited thirty years ago by Novas, ’Cudas, and GTOs. Known either disparagingly or venerably as “riced-out,” depending on whom you talk to, Civics and even Acuras now appear alongside their big-block ancestors on the Porky’s scene in St. Paul, dressed in ground effects, $2,000 worth of trick wheels, and massive homemade spoilers that look like they might have been stripped from a Cessna.

Ever mindful of our readers’ needs, we found an expert to explain what folks are actually getting for their aftermarket dollar. Automotive engineer Simon Palko took a strong stand for fiberglass conservation. “You’d be better off throwing fifty pounds of bricks in the back,” he said of the various truck enhancements I described, adding that the wind drag inherent in pickup and SUV design is merely exacerbated by the add-ons.

What about the Civics cruising Lake Street like nobody’s business? Palko pointed out that all of these cars are front-wheel drive. Were they to go fast enough to generate lift, he said, “adding down force in the back is acting like a lever, reducing force to the drive wheels in the front.” He doubts, however, that many of them reach the velocity where it matters. “With most of those cars, for every fifteen horsepower they add in performance modifications, they add fifty pounds of plastic for cosmetics. It all kind of balances out.”—Joe Pastoor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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