I’m a Rake fan and this is my first letter. I thoroughly enjoyed Eric Dregni’s article. Enlightening (being paid to have a baby), informative (wages, health and welfare system), funny (the meat bus to Sweden!), and heartwarming (the birth of Eilif). Oh, to live and work in Norway would be a dream come true for any of us!
Jennifer M. Jones
Minneapolis
Eric Dregni leaves out a few very important matters regarding society in Norway, Italy, and the U.S. I also lived and worked in Norway and Italy in the 1980s and early 1990s. Hugh oil revenue to the state underpins the wealth of Norway. I was part of the effort to find and produce this oil and the Norwegians enjoy world leadership in oil production technology. But, more importantly, Eric fails to note the low population and homogenous nature of society in Norway. It is easy to create a welfare state with both high revenue and few social and ethnic divisions. In the U.S. and Italy, the complex historic divisions create different needs. Some regions and ethnic groups seek to maximize opportunity, and others seek minimal contributions and accept corruption as part of life. This is sad for the U.S. and Italy, as Norway is a better society. But it is better because, even before the oil wealth and welfare state, the ethnic divisions and social strife were eliminated in Norwegian ethnic development. There are dark chapters in Viking conquest and Eric glossed over them. He failed to note that the Netherlands and Norway have been occupied countries and, as a result, favor a strong, aggressive NATO. Peaceniks were not welcome in the 1980s when the U.S. upped the stakes. Libya is like Norway. Few tribes, lots of oil money, a strong welfare state, and low crime. Why not write about Libya? Ask Eric why environmentalists are so low-key in the high-impact oil and gas industry. The state of Norway needs the money more than it desires a pristine environment. That is the benefit of top-down-driven social welfare. Money first, then the environment.
Larry Sullivan
Roseville
Many thanks to The Rake and Eric Dregni for the informative essay on the alternative social policies offered by the Motherland. Although Minnesota was settled largely by Scandinavians steeped in the principles of Social Democracy, recent political shifts in both our state and our country reflect a narrow-minded philosophy based on the credo “It’s my money, mine! Mine! Mine!” Too often we forget that a healthy civil society benefits all its members, that supporting young families and children helps ensure that they contribute positively to the world in which they grow, that our governments exist to provide for all citizens rather than to transfer wealth to the privileged. There is no such thing as a “tax cut,” only tax shifts. We can transfer the responsibility for generating revenue from the rich to the poor, from the national government to states and cities, from “now” to “later.” The long-term effect, however, encompasses the destruction of social safety nets that effect us all.
Craig Barton Upright
Saint Paul
How a country that forces you to pay ten dollars per whopper, has a combined total of seventy-five percent for taxes, and has incomes that range only to $57,000 can boast the highest standard of living is beyond me [“They Paid Me Cash for this Baby!,” April]. It sounds to me a bit like liberal propaganda. What Eric failed to point out was that it is the U.S. that supports Norway and provides the Norwegians with many of their social benefits. It is the U.S. that is buying more than its share of world oil, and therefore it is the U.S.—our consumption and social system—that support the relaxed life styles found in oil rich countries. The article implies the Norwegians somehow have discovered a social structure that includes all. Wouldn’t it be nice if we all had a goldmine in our backyard and we could point at those that aren’t so lucky and ask why they work so hard?
James W. Nelson
Eagan
My thirteen-year-old daughter Sophie is a dyed-in-the-wool lifelong vegetarian, occasional vegan, and budding animal rights activist. I hadn’t had the heart to tell her that as a result of this latter interest she’d be the butt of a lot of jokes in her lifetime, but she found out on her own not long ago when she joined the PETA Street Team and discovered a section of the organization’s website devoted to “come backs” for miscellaneous insults she might encounter.
The thing about animal rights is that the topic draws criticism not only from the people who would prefer to wear fur in peace, but also from the leftiest of lefties, who get infuriated over people raising a ruckus about factory farming and cruel shampoo when the world is plagued by war, homelessness, child abuse, and environmental devastation.
I know that buying free-range eggs, in the whole scope of planetary problems, is a rather small drop in the bucket. But I’m quietly thrilled that my daughter is expressing a commitment to and a passion for something with more substance than lipgloss. There are more than enough issues out there for everyone, after all, and involvement with one often leads to another. For example, she just finished reading A Civil Action, the real-life legal thriller about the toxic waste dumping in Woburn, Massachusetts. She loved it, despite (and because of) having to swallow a bitter pill of indignation over the omnipotence of corporate giants and the fallibility of our justice system.
I myself converted to vegetarianism because, put simply, I could. With almost no effort, I am able to do something that’s better for the planet, that eliminates the possibility of contributing to unethical livestock practices, all the doing something that’s healthy for me. So many other things I should do, but I can’t or I don’t, but vegetarianism is just so easy I can’t turn down the potential good karma it represents.
The day I went vegetarian still sticks in my mind. It wasn’t long after the ice had gone out on North Center Lake, and the blinding spring sun bounced off the water and flooded through the west windows of our old Victorian house. I was upstairs folding laundry while baby Sophie helped by pulling the tidy stacks off the couch when I wasn’t looking. Somewhere in the middle of this tiresome game, my attention turned to the television in the other room. I caught a short snippet of a PBS documentary showing a man drinking warm blood from the neck of a freshly beheaded snake, and I said, “That’s it.”
I can see now that my reasoning was pretty loose, and I also recall feeling pretty sheepish about subsisting primarily on bread and noodles for the first couple of meatless years (“For vegetarians, we don’t seem to eat very many vegetables,” I remember saying). I didn’t care for tofu back then, and couldn’t stand legumes. I’d grown up on hamburgers, tuna fish, and hot dish, and it took years to orient my palate toward broader horizons.
Meanwhile, we decided to raise Sophie vegetarian, and her siblings, too, as they came along. Once in a while, people would prod us about what might happen when our kids got a little older. “Aren’t you worried that once they have the chance they’re going to go off the deep end—you know, gorge themselves on hot dogs and Big Macs?”
In truth, I wasn’t worried at all. I figured that eventually they’d have to make their own choice anyway, and what they ate when they came of age would have little bearing on me. As it happened, when their dad and I split up, he married an omnivore and gave up vegetarianism. Perfect opportunity for the kids to start scarfing down sausage and buffalo wings. But the years have unwound and they haven’t chosen to do so. At thirteen, eleven, and eight, they’re wholehearted herbivores, and for reasons of their own.
Which, as I said, can sometimes be cause for humor, intended or not. Sophie was at the mall recently, celebrating a friend’s birthday. All of the girls ordered Asian at the food court. Sophie was the only one who didn’t get chicken, and she had to explain to one of the girls who didn’t know her that she’s a vegetarian, has been her whole life. “Really?” asked the girl, with sincerity, concern, and an extended fork. “Would you like to try my chicken?”
Notwithstanding our love of the single-occupant automobile, we were very excited about the arrival of the light-rail train this spring. We love strolling down Fifth Street past the bright new Warehouse District station. It gaily announces the time and date on its prim marquees and generally looks as if it expects our train to shoosh in momentarily. But then things went a little fubar with the MTC bus strike. Because MTC won the contract to operate the Hiawatha Line, it cannot do so until the final Ts are crossed on the present agreement between management and operators. Each delay is amplified tenfold for the nascent light-rail system, since the preparations for its launch are legion and complex.
These sorts of capital improvements are always controversial, for the simple fact that they cost big bucks. They feel almost hydraulic, in the way that powerful amounts of money have to be diverted from some other major program. It is a legacy of certain conservatives (who, we can’t help pointing out, have managed to outspend liberals in “reducing the size of government” for the past twenty years, and hold the present and previous records for largest federal deficits in the history of the world) that there is no gain without pain. Incidentally, the best way to minimize the pain seems to be to punish those who are already in pain, in the hope that they won’t notice or can’t complain.
We are noticing and complaining. The closure of public schools in the wake of maximum increases in property taxes, along with an unwise conversation about three new stadiums and a silly plan to test a monorail, have opened up old wounds. It is galling to have state leaders bragging about balancing the state budget and being “fiscally responsible” when they have merely passed the bill along to the counties and cities.
Invariably, taxpayers feel compelled to do the math and weigh the options. When Minneapolis chose to indulge its vanity with the Hennepin Avenue suspension bridge—or more recently, the heinous “Frank Lloyd Wright” bridge on Third Avenue—we were among the complainers who wondered whether the money might be spent on something more important. It was only the mean-spirited who pointed out that a new bridge actually meant more accommodations for the homeless.
Still, what would life be like if every decision were based merely on utility? Would an artless world be preferable to a starving one? We would not like to live in a city that lacked the imagination to do both; the choice between want and need is artificial. We’ll mull this conundrum while we wait for our train.
It’s a bitterly cold Tuesday evening in mid-January, the kind of subzero, dangerously low windchill night when Minnesotans are apt to crank up the boiler and hunker down in front of “American Idol” and “Law & Order,” so it’s a little surprising to find more than fifty constituents gathered in the living room of a foursquare house in St. Paul’s Merriam Park neighborhood for a pre-legislative session chat with state Sen. Dick Cohen and House Minority Leader Matt Entenza.
For the first hour or so, Entenza, who, at six-foot-five, towers over his fellow DFLer, defers to Cohen in the give-and-take. There are questions about property taxes—the state’s formula for limiting increases is going to expire in a couple of years and in some older cities, property taxes could rise by as much as twenty to twenty-five percent—health insurance, the budget, education, conceal-and-carry, and gay marriage. But when a young constituent, a former Paul Wellstone student at Carleton College, launches into a Howard Dean-like critique of Democrats for talking too much about what can’t be accomplished rather than what can be achieved, Entenza steps to the fore.
Speaking with the pinched vowels of his hometown of Worthington, Entenza (the name is Catalonian) is relaxed, collected, and articulate: what you’d expect from an old high school debater. He’s no Wellstone—too low-key for that—but in this season of growing liberal discontent and swelling fury at George W. Bush, his message this evening is a hit with the crowd.
In media appearances, Entenza tends to come across with a lawyerly air (he is an attorney by training): a man who thinks the truth is so obvious that anyone who disagrees with him is either disingenuous or dim. But in a one-on-one setting like this, he seems more reflective than righteous, picking and choosing his words methodically. In fact, “methodical” is probably the best way to describe him, an approach he honed as a white-collar prosecutor combing through the dry barrens of financial documentation and tax filings to nab scam artists. It’s a praxis he has also applied as a legislative watchdog in unsexy but nevertheless critical areas like charter school accountability. Entenza is one of those rare figures who combines a high level of idealism with the tenacity to master the details of issues that are superficially boring yet have a huge bearing on the commonweal. He is capable of speaking in sound bites, and can put a sarcastic edge to his comments when he’s talking about things he doesn’t like—Tim Pawlenty, the Minnesota Taxpayers League—but for the most part, he refrains from rhetorical flourishes.
Unlike the Republicans and Governor Pawlenty who, Entenza declares, retail nothing but fear and the message that “all that Minnesotans can do is buy a gun and hole up inside a moat,” the DFL stands for the “Minnesota way” of doing things, helping build community and making sure the most vulnerable of the state’s residents “don’t get shortchanged just so the members of the Minnesota Taxpayers League can save money on their taxes.”
“One of the things that distinguished Minnesota was that there used to be consensus that there would be an opportunity for everyone to climb up,” Entenza says. “Now that consensus has been challenged and they are pulling out the rungs on the ladder. We plan to change that.”
In the House, the DFL is down by fourteen seats. But Minnesota is known for sudden seismic shifts in the political landscape. Twice in the past fifteen years there have been double-digit swings in House membership following an election. Riding a wave of anti-Bush sentiment, it is conceivable that the DFL could retake the House. If so, Entenza would most likely end up speaker of the House, making him the second most powerful person in state government after Tim Pawlenty, a man with whom he has clashed with growing frequency since Pawlenty was elected governor.
Imagine: It’s springtime, there’s a sense of optimism in the air. Best Buy is about to open its new corporate headquarters in Richfield. Everyone’s talking about it. Some say it will usher the Twin Cities into a new era; others argue about whether or not that’s a good thing. Wanting to include the community in the historic event, Best Buy paints one of the thousands of steel construction beams white and leaves it on the sidewalk for several days. Ordinary citizens are invited to sign their names to it before it’s used for the “topping off” ceremony at the apex of the new building. The turnout is huge; when the mayor comes by, accompanied by reporters from every local news outlet, he can barely find space for his own autograph.
OK, so this isn’t what happened last year, when Best Buy unveiled its shiny, nondescript corporate headquarters, a vaguely cruise-ship-shaped building plying the suburban seas just off I-35 and I-494. But that’s precisely what occurred thirty years ago when the IDS Center was built in downtown Minneapolis.
That was a true community event. From the placement of the first beam to the final opening gala, the local papers monitored every detail—how many tons of steel were being used, how many panes of glass, how many light bulbs. They covered the seventeen helicopter trips required to haul the mechanical window-washing equipment to the top of the tower. And they related humorous anecdotes, such as the family of bats that had made a nest within the structure while it was under construction, only to come out of hibernation and fly into the Crystal Court, swooping above the heads of terrified Woolworth’s patrons. It was like celebrity gossip, with the building itself as the celebrity.
Today, of course, it’s hard to pick out the IDS as the tallest amid Minneapolis’ brace of skyscrapers. But back in the 1960s, the tallest building was Foshay Tower, and its exceptional stature was obvious to the eye. Foshay was the Minneapolis skyline, and had been since 1929.
“I still remember coming in on the train at the Milwaukee Road depot,” says Charlie Nelson, an architect with the Minnesota Historical Society. “And coming round the bend and this older man next to me growing very excited and pointing out the window and saying, ‘Look, it’s the Foshay Tower! That means we’re home!’”
The IDS was built to tower over Foshay. It was built to bring focus to downtown, to connect the skyway system at a central point, to push Minneapolis into the modern age. As its website proclaims, the IDS was “a building so impressive, they built a city around it.”
“It was a bold statement,” says Chuck Liddy, who was part of the Minneapolis Historic Preservation Commission from 1979 to 1984. “There’s been kind of a gentleman’s agreement not to build anything taller, because it was such an icon when it was built.” The Wells Fargo Center is a foot shorter than the IDS; 225 South Sixth (formerly US Bank Place or First Bank Place), a foot shorter still. The IDS remains the tallest building in the city, even if you can’t tell by looking.
If things had gone as initially planned, the headquarters of Investors Diversified Services, Inc. would be a simple twelve-story building sited on one corner of the block. It was not intended to top Foshay or to bring Minneapolis into a new era. However, Baker Properties, Inc. had determined there was a great need for more office space in downtown Minneapolis and, in close partnership with IDS, it set out to provide some. This was 1963. The new plan was to take up half of the block and include a twenty-five-story office tower, skyway links, an apartment complex, and parking ramp. Soon afterward the proposed tower grew to thirty-six stories, and again to fifty stories in 1967. Then a 1968 study prompted another round of considerations to expand still further.
The Fantus Company, commissioned by the Greater Minneapolis Chamber of Commerce to assess the potential of Minneapolis and Hennepin County as a location for corporate headquarters, had found the area “excellent” but the availability of space only “fair.” So Investors Diversified Services, Inc., realizing that its development could have an effect on downtown Minneapolis as a whole, devised yet another plan: a four-building complex covering the entire block and linked by skyways. Its anchor would be a central glass-roofed indoor plaza; its highlight, a fifty-seven-story, 775-foot tower—the tallest between Chicago and San Francisco, and one that would outstretch the Foshay Tower by an awe-inspiring 225 feet.
The design commission went to Philip Johnson, an architect of international stature who had collaborated with Mies van der Rohe on Manhattan’s iconic Seagram’s Building, and his partner John Burgee. Their innovative zig-zagging windows allowed for up to thirty-two corner offices on every floor; the building as a whole, once completed, was proclaimed “one of the finest skyscrapers built in any American city” by no less an authority than the New York Times. Fortune magazine said it made Minneapolis “a leader in architectural innovation.” The words of IDS CEO Stuart Silloway, who in 1969 had described the project as “a demonstration of towering confidence in the future of Minneapolis,” rang true.
Meanwhile, a similar phenomenon was occurring in New York with the World Trade Center, whose two main towers were erected between 1966 and 1972. Like the IDS, it began as a rather modest proposal and grew to gargantuan proportions. Its planners hoped the World Trade Center would revitalize lower Manhattan, create a new office district to rival Midtown, and bring renewed pride and confidence to the entire city. Critics in the Big Apple complained that the WTC was too big, that it didn’t fit in, that it would rob New York of its character and disrupt the legendary skyline, spiked by the Chrysler and Empire State buildings.
Minneapple critics posed the same arguments: the IDS Center was like a giant looming over downtown, threatening to squash it. Its architecture appeared alien, completely out of context with its surroundings. In a local cartoon, a Minneapolitan showed a tourist the new skyline, saying: “There’s Foshay Tower, and there’s the box it came in.”
There was also some resentment of the fact that designers Johnson and Burgee were New Yorkers. “Up until that time, all the great buildings here had been designed by Minnesotans,” explains the historical society’s Nelson.
But others were eager to welcome the postwar skyscraper to Minneapolis, eager to see a city that outsiders could associate with something other than cows. And for them, the IDS was a gem. “Modern architecture tends to get dumped on as being blah, not very humane—hard to love, if you will,” says Nelson. “But the IDS is vibrant. It changes with the light; it changes with the movement of clouds.”
1972 saw one grand opening after another at the IDS Center. On June 17, the Crystal Court had its debut with a fifty-dollar-a-ticket formal symphony ball. After a Minnesota Orchestra performance, a dance band from Palm Beach, Florida, took over. Andy Warhol was in attendance. Four months later, regular folks were welcomed to the Crystal Court, and in November, the short-lived movie theater on the lower level opened with The Darwin Adventure. Finally, the fiftieth-floor Skylook Observation Gallery went into business, open until midnight every day of the year.
The glamour and novelty dissipated with the recession of 1973 and 1974. Investors Diversified Services, Inc. was broke. The culminating grand opening for the entire complex was canceled. In 1975, IDS sought to decrease its tax burden by reducing the official valuation of its building from $92 million to $76.6 million. The lesser valuation was granted. The building had cost $125 million.
While the IDS was not a stunning financial success, its cultural success was immediate. The building won awards from the American Institute of Architects; it was talked about in more cosmopolitan cities like New York; it was immortalized as the location of the TV station on The Mary Tyler Moore Show. The IDS Center, for all its financial troubles, quickly became an icon.
The Crystal Court was the crown jewel of the building—and, it could be said, even downtown as a whole. Practical in the Minnesota climate, beautiful in its construction, and ideal in its location, the indoor plaza was a perfect place to escape the hectic pace of downtown. Trees in planters provided a park-like feel, and seating cubes were strewn across the court. There was even an informal sidewalk café. The court also pulled the budding skyway system together and gave downtown a central focus, like the central square in a medieval European town. Locals loved it. Architects from all over called it the best people place in the country. Philip Johnson, the architect, talked about its importance on WCCO: “Every city has to have a place where it’s natural to be together,” he said. “I hope there will be lots of little Grecian fountains, and little kiosks with flowers for buttonholes… And guitars.”
The love affair was short-lived. The Crystal Court’s sparkle gradually dimmed, and in 1979 Bernard Jacob, then editor of Architecture Minnesota, wrote an editorial criticizing changes that had taken place since the court’s debut. The indoor greenery had become sparse, and the seating had been dispatched to the margins to make way for an upscale restaurant on a raised, carpeted platform, which had replaced the self-service café. With the main space now open only to those with the time and money for full-service dining, the Crystal Court was no longer a truly public space.
But the real trouble began with the first of a series of ownership transfers. In the early eighties, Investment Diversified Services sold its namesake building to Oxford Development, a company that was not only controlled by Canadians who would likely value their bottom line over the social and culture welfare of downtown Minneapolis—but also the very same company that had constructed City Center, widely considered downtown’s ugliest building. The public was wary from the outset.
Oxford did little to dispel their fears. In 1983, the company decided the observation gallery space was too valuable and gave its managers two choices: pay double the rent, or vacate the premises. The managers opted to bail. The gallery had been drawing around a thousand guests per Saturday, but on December 31, nearly seven thousand people showed up for one last visit.
Next, Oxford announced its plans to renovate the Crystal Court. The space was bringing people in, but not the kind who were inclined to spend wads of cash at the nearby shops. Oxford planned to move one of the escalators to the south side of the court and to cut a hole in the floor to bring light to the lower level, which to this day has yet to prove itself a viable commercial space (it currently functions as an employee cafeteria). Finally, the company was going to allow the Center’s retailers to modify the facade of their shops.
The Minneapolis Heritage Preservation Committee would have none of it. They quickly voted to designate the Crystal Court a historically significant structure, which would mean that any changes would require city approval. The Oxford managers were stridently opposed. The preservation committee was attempting to impose government control over private property, they complained; if the designation was made, the building’s value would plummet.
“People seem to think the city owns the IDS, like it owns a park,” City Council member Barbara Carlson told R.T. Rybak (then a cub reporter with the Minneapolis Star and Tribune) in defending Oxford. “As much as I would like that, it isn’t the case.” In 1984, the Minneapolis City Council held the final decision on whether to designate the Crystal Court as a significant structure. Both Oxford and the Heritage Preservation Committee lobbied hard, and Rybak reported that a shouting match broke out in the council chambers after a March public hearing. In the end, however, the parties managed a compromise. Oxford scaled back on its planned renovations, and the City Council agreed to withhold its “historically significant” designation.
Less than a decade later, the Chicago-based Heitman Advisory Corporation, the new owners of the IDS Center, bought out the remainder of Woolworth’s sixty-year-lease. The beloved five-and-dime, which had been on the block since before the IDS Center was built, was replaced by the Gap, Gap Kids, and the Gap-owned Banana Republic. Windows on Minnesota, the restaurant on the fiftieth floor, was closed to the public. But by far the most upsetting change was the bleak state of the Crystal Court, which Heitman’s management swept clean, removing all the seating and creating a granite wasteland. People still passed through, but there was no reason to stay. Editorial writers once again began making snide comments about the court. Heitman promised changes, but for years, apart from the occasional art exhibit, the court stood empty.
“The management would always say ‘well, we’re working on it but we want to do it right,’ and people didn’t believe them,” says Linda Mack, who covers architecture for the Star Tribune.
Yet to everyone’s surprise, Heitman stayed true to its promise. At long last, in 1998, seating returned to the Crystal Court. Black olive trees were shipped in from Florida. The designers examined Philip Johnson’s original plans and discovered a fountain that had never been built in 1972 because of the recession. Upon further investigation, they discovered the needed structural supports for the fountain were already in place beneath the floor. There were even water pipes in the ceiling, and extra light fixtures trained on the spot where the fountain was to stand.
The original 1972 concept was for a fountain in brass, one that was quickly deemed too small (at fifty-some feet)—and too phallic. But the 105-foot rainfall that was eventually installed met more or less unanimous approval. Minneapolis had reclaimed its public city center.
Its panoramic view of the city, however, may be lost for good. Technically, one can see thirty-five miles from the top floor of the IDS Center—a distance that is significantly decreased by cloud cover and pollution, but is still a lot better than what most of us will see today. The observation gallery has never been reopned since its 1984 closure.
For awhile, there was still a restaurant people could go to, and the rumor was they wouldn’t kick you out if you just wanted to enjoy the view and not buy anything. Now that restaurant, still called Windows on Minnesota, is a private rental space run by the Marquette Hotel, and visitors can’t get there without an access key. Renting the ballroom for a wedding or bar mitzvah will run you $6,000. According to Nigel Pustam, a manager for the Marquette, opening the restaurant to the public would be “a bad business plan.” There are dozens of restaurants on Nicollet Mall, he explains; it’s the view that gives Windows on Minnesota the “uniqueness” which enables them to make thousands of dollars off the space. Guests at the $300-a-night hotel can ask for an escorted tour, but the average tourist off the street is not allowed. No exceptions.
“I get a lot of people from other countries and out of town who want to go to the top of the building,” says Carrie Stowers, the “customer service ambassador” for the IDS Center. “It’s really sad to see the looks on their faces,” she adds with a tone of tragic perkiness.
Gone, too, is the stream of gossip and anecdotes coming from people like Stowers. RREEF, the building’s current management, has a website with a few simple facts, which is where they direct nosy reporters. Anything beyond that is a “security concern.” Jim Durda, IDS general manager, wouldn’t even say how large the cleaning staff was. “There’s an adequate team to clean the building,” he assured us. And what equipment do they use? “The methods are proven, and they work, and they’re efficient.” Pressed for more details, he politely apologized. “Because of the heightened security, there’s a lot of questions that we just don’t answer.”
But it’s not just the heightened security. This is the modern age. The corporate age. The impersonal, privatized, “what’s-it-to-you?” age. The IDS was constructed in a small city where the pride of a community swelled as each floor was added, but that was a different time. Any maybe that is the point: That’s what the IDS Center used to represent. It was Minneapolis’ symbolic entry into the world. It was the Minneapple’s rite of passage from a small town to a cosmopolitan city. If the building that set off that change has become impersonal, inaccessible, and all too corporate, maybe that’s only appropriate.
There are no bus stops in San Salvador. Well, there are places where buses stop and people get on and off, but there are no signs with pictures of buses, no benches, no helpful words to reassure you that you won’t just be waiting on the street all day like an idiot.
There are also no bus schedules. The buses cough back and forth from one end of the route to the other at their own pace, determined by traffic, the number of regular passengers, and how many people flag them down at random places on the side of the road. As I wait for Ruta Uno, I watch two 9s go by, one after the other, followed by a 44, a 30, a 9, two 44s, and another 9. Then a bus pulls up with psychedelic letters that look like they belong on a surfboard or guitar case. I study the fluorescent glyphs, trying to make them out. It could be a 4, or maybe a 7, or maybe it’s not a number at all. Only after the bus leaves do I realize the sign said “R-1.” That was, in fact, my bus.
A 9 goes by, followed by a 30, a 30, and another 9. I study each carefully, making sure the numbers are not optical illusions that will again transform themselves into R-1’s in passing. But it’s not always easy to find the route number. Sometimes it appears on a little card taped to the front window instead of professionally painted in illegible Day-Glo script above the windshield. In the latter cases I wind up spending six or seven seconds staring at the swirling colors before realizing that they are not route numbers, but rather messages like “Dios es Amor” (God is love), “El Salvador,” or, on one occasion, a cryptic, “Jeniffer.”
The bus drivers don’t own the buses, but they do drive the same ones every day. The vehicles themselves are old discarded American school buses, complete with English-only evacuation procedures printed over all emergency exits, though all traces of National School Bus Yellow, the official color, have been painted over as required by law. To the drivers, these are their offices, their cubicles, their mobile homes away from home, and they do their best to personalize them. A few weeks ago, they all brought out their political flags in honor of the upcoming presidential elections. The majority of drivers are left-wing, and had FMLN flags taped to windows or hung from rearview mirrors; I saw only one flag from ARENA, the ruling party, on a starkly clean blue bus with no other signs of personalization. I have also seen Salvadoran flags, Canadian flags, and American flags, plus one flag with the randomly English slogan, “In God We Trust.”
A bus goes by with glowing green shark fins attached to its top edges. I am so distracted by the spectacle that I miss another R-1. I curse under my breath, then wait impatiently as a 30 goes by, then two 44s, and then a 9.
I play with the coins in my hand: a dime, a nickel, and three pennies—seventeen cents, exact bus fare. They’ve switched to the U.S. dollar in El Salvador but it’s always dangerous not to have exact change. You give them a one-dollar bill and they ask if you have anything smaller. You give them a five and they wince. With a ten, you’re lucky if they don’t swear at you. One bus driver didn’t have change for a quarter. I let him keep it, my noble eight-cent contribution to the bus-driver cause.
Finally an R-1 comes and I manage to identify it before it pulls away. I climb aboard but freeze on the stairs, too astonished to continue. A two-foot stuffed ape hangs from the ceiling, accompanied by half a dozen smaller stuffed animals, including a rabbit, a monster, and a grimacing dog. A flashing red police light has been stuck to the ceiling and a fluorescent green strip blinks on and off, just above the rear-view mirror. All of this is reflected multiple times in the surfaces of three dozen CDs that have been glued to the ceiling. I have just climbed aboard a mobile fun house.
The other passengers appear inured to the spectacle, and the driver glares at me for loitering on the steps. I quickly hand him my seventeen cents and take a seat, but not before the bus lurches forward and I almost fall. I sit next to a man calmly reading a newspaper. The lynched toys swing back and forth all the way home.—Katherine Glover
Nearly a decade ago, in an endearingly inept campaign to counter his Entertainment Tonight anchorguy blandsomeness, John Tesh embellished a series of magazine articles with casual expletives and weird, crude asides. “Well, [fatherhood] hasn’t helped with the sex life,” he told GQ in August 1995. “I get no time on the breasts anymore, ’cause the baby’s always there.” That December he got even freakier in a People magazine interview, detailing a vivid fantasy that tickled his cortex during concerts, as he played bombastic background music for thousands of fans: “It is like I’ve taken my penis and laid it on the piano and there’s a big chopper right there…”
Now, however, Tesh hosts a radio show that’s marketed as an upbeat source of “intelligence for your life,” and public castration fantasies are decidedly not a part of the mix. Instead, he promises to make listeners “smarter, healthier, better at everything” they do by playing old Celine Dion ballads and making observations like “Getting your boss to see things your way can sometimes be tough.” For people who find the “For Dummies” books too literary, the John Tesh Radio Show is a winning blend of homiletic soundbites and hackneyed pop, and as an added bonus, it’s kid-friendly too. At the beginning of every show, the daughter who once stole breast-time from Tesh now robs him of airtime. “If a nine-year-old can’t listen to it,” she promises, “you won’t hear it on this radio program.”
Unfailingly upright, vigorously inoffensive, Tesh’s daily radio assault is part of a riptide of decency that threatens to drown us all. Broadcast and cable TV, slick magazines, radio, and, of course, the dangerously unregulated Internet have become unwitting handmaidens to legions of do-gooders intent on disseminating inspirational news items, fiery sermons, and poorly acted TV dramas in which cute kids and aged curmudgeons alike learn Important Life Lessons. But while grim crotch cops and shrill hand-wringers portend imminent cultural annihilation in every publicly aired fart joke, the decency explosion goes virtually unnoticed.
Take, for example, Pax-TV, which, according to founder Lowell Paxson, uses “storytelling and parables” to deliver the message “that there is a higher power intervening in our lives.” Launched six years ago, it now reaches ninety-five million American households, or eighty-nine percent of the viewing public. The Trinity Broadcasting Network, which bills itself as “the world’s largest religious network and America’s most watched faith channel,” is available in ninety million U.S. households. Along with faith-based networks like EWTN, CBN, the Word Network, the Church Channel, and numerous others, secular entities like the ABC Family Channel, the Disney Channel, and Nickelodeon provide hours upon hours of wholesome fare. 7th Heaven and Joan of Arcadia are current network hits; old favorite Touched by an Angel has achieved immortality in the afterlife of syndication. Money magazine reports that religious radio group Salem Communications is the nation’s third-largest major-market radio network. American Family Radio, founded in 1987 by professional vice-hunter Donald Wildmon, operates more than two hundred stations. According to radio consultant Bryan Farrish, who maintains an industry website called Radio-media.com, approximately 1,900 religious stations are currently broadcasting in the U.S.
At some point you have to ask: How much decency is too much? A small dose of Tesh is like aural Prozac. His soothing baritone refreshes; his sunny optimism uplifts; his easygoing rectitude inspires. But the John Tesh Radio Show goes on for a full five hours! And some radio stations actually air the show from 7 p.m. to midnight, then immediately repeat it from midnight until 5 a.m. Scientists have yet to subject lab monkeys (or children) to such massive quantities of Tesh, but when they do, you can be sure those lab monkeys (and children) are not going to get smarter, healthier, and better at everything they do. Instead, they’ll be chewing each others’ ears off and flinging feces at their captors. Surely, our lab monkeys (and our children) deserve a better fate than this—yet where are the efforts to regulate decency?
Rather than address the obvious dangers of Tesh saturation, federal lawmakers remain hopelessly fixated on Janet Jackson’s weaponized nipple and Howard Stern’s sleazy radio banter. To protect America from such evils, they insist, stronger indecency laws are required. But indecency laws are already quite strong; indeed, both obscenity laws and indecency laws criminalize content that describes sexual or excretory organs or activities in a “patently offensive” manner. But a prosecutor who files an obscenity charge against you still has to convince a jury that you’re guilty—and you can appeal an obscenity conviction to a higher court. On the other hand, if the FCC charges you with indecency, that’s it—you’re guilty, no jury required. And you can only appeal an indecency violation to the FCC itself.
Luckily, the FCC’s power only extends so far. Broadcast radio and broadcast TV rely upon public airwaves to deliver their programming, and because of this fact, they fall under the FCC’s domain. As part of the deal for using the airwaves, broadcasters agree to forfeit some of the free-speech protections that more private mediums like books, newspapers, and DVDs enjoy. For decades, this gave the FCC a great degree of power over electronic media, but that power is diminishing with the increasing popularity of cable TV, the Internet, satellite TV, and satellite radio, none of which are currently under FCC control.
Thus, those few seconds of Super Bowl micro-nudity could not have come at a more opportune time; they gave the FCC its best chance in years to make a case for reinforcing its authority. Currently its allies in Congress are trying to strengthen the FCC via the Broadcast Decency Enforcement Act of 2004, which would increase the maximum fine for a single act of indecency to a half-million dollars. Even more alarming are the FCC’s efforts to popularize the idea that cable and satellite broadcasting should also be under its thumb, because even though they’re subscription services delivered via privately maintained hardware, they do sometimes use the public spectrum in their delivery processes. This amounts to a pretty audacious land grab from an organization heading toward irrelevance, but if the FCC pulls its off, then MTV, Comedy Central, and perhaps even HBO and pay-per-view porn could become subject to the same regulations as broadcast radio and TV.
Then, of course, the FCC would really have some indecency to combat. Right now, it’s difficult to find objectionable material in the two mediums over which it presides. Yes, there’s Howard Stern, the favorite whipping boy of every family-values firebrand, but his show is currently carried by fewer than forty radio stations nationwide. (In contrast, Tesh can be heard on more than one hundred and fifty.) And beyond Stern and a handful of Stern imitators, several of whom have been fired in recent months, what else is out there?
Already it’s apparent how quickly an amplified FCC enforcement effort could devolve in scary farce. In March, before the Senate had even considered the Broadcasting Indecency Enforcement Act, radio stations were already flinching at the mere possibility of $500,000 fines. In Cleveland, WNCX pulled the Steve Miller Band’s “Jet Airliner” from its rotation because it contained the lyric “funky shit goin’ down in the city.” In Los Angeles, public radio station KCRW took similar precautionary measures by firing longtime contributor Sandra Tsing Loh after she and her engineer forgot to bleep a single F-word out of a pre-recorded piece.
Some pundits maintain that WNCX and KCRW have wildly overreacted to a threat that isn’t there. The FCC itself, however, has enthusiastically legitimized their para
noia by declaring open season on “lone expletives,” which are now subject to “significant penalties.” That’s because in addition to indecency, the FCC also has the power to penalize “profanity,” which it defines, in part, as the “F-word” and those words (or variants thereof) that are as highly offensive as the “F-word.”
What’s the average citizen to make of all this? Prepare yourself for lots and lots of Tesh (unless he starts talking about amputating his penis again). And drop to your knees and pray that cable TV, satellite TV and radio, and the Internet remain free from FCC regulation. Because really, how much enforced propriety can one freedom-loving nation stand? Already, there’s a surfeit of decency. While Pax-TV is available in ninety-five million households, it has attracted more than three million actual viewers on only two occasions during its six-year history. To make ends meet, it airs infomercials for hours each day.
Meanwhile, by embracing nudity, sex, profanity, and violence—which is to say, everything the FCC aspires to eliminate—HBO has netted an estimated twenty-seven million paying subscribers. And that’s the beauty of our current media age: There’s decency for the pious, trash for coarser sorts, and plenty of squeaky-clean fare for the kids. Blessed with such abundance, we all should be celebrating. Instead, the FCC and its allies broadcast a clear, condescending, and cynical message: if allowed to make your own choices, they believe, you will invariably choose sleaze over rectitude, fart jokes over sermons, Stern over Tesh. And only by fining indecency out of existence can decency triumph.