The Rake Magazine

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  • Wanted: The Middle Class

    When I moved to north Minneapolis in October 2001, my “posse,” with perhaps one or two exceptions, was, shall we say, perplexed. Oh, everyone liked the house, a recently renovated five-bedroom house with Birdseye maple hardwood floors and leaded glass windows. The neighborhood—that was a different matter. My former wife warned my two oldest sons to never stray more than a block from my house, and then, only in broad daylight. My future father-in-law asked me, “Will my daughter be safe in this neighborhood?” And my sons nervously joked about borrowing my old military flak jacket when they came to visit.

    Someday, I vowed, y’all be kicking yourself in the backside for not joining me up here. Now, I must confess that sometimes I wonder if I should be kicking myself for moving up north; I still contend with trash in my yard, the “boom-boom” of mega-decibel car stereos, and the knowledge that some of Minneapolis’ worst mayhem occurs within a 20-minute walk from my front door. For some time, the prevailing mantra among those in the urban renewal business has been “affordable housing.” However—and I am sure I’ll be called an elitist or worse for saying so publicly—some of the people who most need affordable housing are not great neighbor material. Now, I am defining “great neighbor material” as those who are stable, law-abiding, and respectful of the rights and property of others, those who value education—in other words, those with values closely associated with the middle class. And, unfortunately, a disproportionate number of those who fall short in the “great neighbor department” live in north Minneapolis.

    Now, I am not alone in that view. Don Samuels, Minneapolis’ newest City Council member, represents the racially diverse Third Ward, which includes a very good chunk of north Minneapolis. Samuels recently told me that the Jordan neighborhood, where he lives, has too many thugs. He told me about drug dealers threatening him in front of his own home. Samuels believes that the gangsters felt bold enough to do this for one reason. “They had become the dominant culture on my block. Sure, we had a few middle-class families—three or four—on our block, but that is not enough to change the culture. Give me just two or three more families, then we really make a difference.”

    Samuels publicly exhorts the middle class, particularly the African-American middle class, to “come home” to north Minneapolis. Privately, he admits that living in north Minneapolis is harder than, say, Linden Hills or Uptown. He concedes that it is tough to encourage affluent, educated people into neighborhoods like Jordan, joking, “not everyone shares my sense of mission.” Samuels agrees that middle-class people, because they value hard work and planning for the future, can anchor a neighborhood in a way that those struggling to survive simply are unable to do.

    The truth is that many middle-class people are scared away from north Minneapolis because they fear what nationally known educator Ruby Payne calls the “culture of generational poverty.” According to Dr. Payne, those in generational poverty live “in the moment,” and do not consider the future ramifications of their actions. She adds, “being proactive, setting goals, and planning ahead are not a part of generational poverty.” The middle class by contrast usually embraces those very values that those in generational poverty resist.

    What if the Minneapolis City Council, in conjunction with various community groups, collaborated in creating a predominantly middle-class neighborhood in north Minneapolis? I would suggest redeveloping three or four city blocks with market-rate (i.e. no subsidized) housing, unlike Heritage Park, the new development rising where public housing projects once stood. I personally think Heritage Park developers will have a tough time selling market-rate housing alongside significant subsidized housing. Why? Because most people want to live around people that share their world view, even if they are not willing to admit so publicly.

    North Minneapolis is at a critical juncture. Middle-class folks and their values are crucial to providing the stability that creates a truly healthy community. The Minneapolis City Council needs to do everything in its power to ensure that middle class values are the rule, and not the exception, in this challenged part of town.

  • Excellent References

    The next time you wake up at three in the morning, sweating and shaking and befuddled by what the appearance of Barbara Flanagan’s bustier in your dream could possibly symbolize, don’t just make yourself a glass of warm milk, roll over, and try to forget about it. Oh no—that’s what someone in Andrew Carnegie’s day would have done. We’ve come a long way in information gathering and reference services since the 1890s. Gone are the days of dusty card catalogs, dismal Dewey decimals, and pinch-lipped librarians who go home when the clock strikes five. (In fact, gone may be the days of an actual public library, to judge by recent developments in Minneapolis.) Enter “24/7,” a round-the-clock live chat room full of, well, unrestrained librarians. If you live in Hennepin County and possess a Hennepin County Library card, you are but three mouse-clicks away from a librarian’s magic touch.

    24/7 is one of the most up-to-the-minute services a library can provide, explains Maureen Bell, references services manager for Hennepin County Library. People are out there researching and surfing the web at all hours of the day, and the library wants to be there with you, no matter what you’re looking for.

    Over at the Minneapolis Public Library (uh, wherever that is right now), Nancy Corcoran helps run the MPL’s InfoLine, a telephone reference service available during library hours. She says it is not a 24-hour service per se, but you can leave a message on the machine anytime, and library staff get cracking on your behalf the next business day. If you can wait till morning, we still nominate InfoLine as the city’s most valuable resource.

    What many Minnesotans in their stoicism fail to understand is that reference librarians relish a challenge. They love your questions, need your questions, depend for their jobs on your questions. And though (despite the rumor) there really is such a thing as a stupid question, it is often even stupider not to ask it.

    The other day, I watched the standard crew of six answer the InfoLine phones, which never stopped ringing for very long. The librarians efficiently answered questions, quickly relaying the correct spelling of “seizure,” retrieving the number for the Ramsey County Medical Examiner, and researching the availability of a particular CD. They remained professional and thorough at all times. But they admitted that they do catalog some of the weird and wacky questions that come their way.

    One staff member remembered the day a woman called from South Carolina. She was helping her daughter with a school report on Minnesota, and wanted to know simply “what ya’ll wear, up there.” Another woman, who said she was looking at a map of the United States, called to ask if Mexico was a state. The staff takes these calls seriously, and they work diligently to provide answers. But frankly not all of the 500-600 calls a day are answerable. It would take a virtually omniscient librarian, for example, to answer the woman who called with a technical question about her crockpot: Was the meat she had started simmering four days ago in fact horse meat? A reference librarian does not like to admit defeat, but hates even more to be wrong.—Katie Quirk

  • “Slaughtered By A Muslim”

    At the 2002 State Fair, the Minnesota Pork Producers Association unveiled a catchy new slogan: “Today’s Pork: Created With Enduring Values.” Ever curious, the Gastronomer asked a representative if these might be, specifically, Christian values. According to Muslim values, of course, pork is “haram”—not allowed. To Jews, pork is “treyf,” or not kosher.

    “Rural values,” was the artful reply to my query. Of course, this could amount to the same thing. The vast majority of the 2.2 million Muslims and 5.8 million Jews in America are city slickers. Issues of social tolerance doubtless play a role in this, but the proliferation of five-million-gallon hog manure lagoons across the Minnesota countryside might also be a contributing factor.

    So when a rabbi was spotted in February near Thief River Falls, it made the news in a big way. A tanker of kosher canola oil had overturned, and the press, as usual, found it very much fer cute that a little guy with earlocks showed up to wave a blessing over the process of transferring the oil to another kosher tanker. The rabbi was really just verifying that the transfer equipment wasn’t contaminated with non-kosher products.

    The dietary rules for Muslims don’t make the news as often, despite a large local market for halal products. The Holy Land market and deli on Central Avenue in northeast Minneapolis does a bustling trade in halal goat, lamb, beef, and poultry, as do the Cedar Bakery and Deli and several other metro outfits serving the local Muslim community. While there are significant differences in practice, halal regulations and kosher laws share the same basic foundation, says Iman Ghazalla of the Arab-American Cultural Institute in Edina. Each custom forbids consumption of insects, amphibians, reptiles, birds of prey, pigs, dogs, donkeys, or any carnivorous animal.

    Also similar to kosher custom, halal products are subject to certification. Al Safa Halal in El Paso, Texas, certifies most halal products in the Midwest. While their tagline “Hand Slaughtered by a Muslim” may give pause to some, their mission of “Extending the benefits of Islamic dietary laws to Muslims and non-Muslims alike” is a worthy goal, according to Holy Land market staffer Amber Essaid. Both halal and kosher slaughter are more sanitary, more humane, and involve more thorough bleeding of meat than the average factory practices. Essaid says this satisfies more than a spiritual necessity; it’s simply better quality. “You have to taste it,” she commanded. “There’s no comparison.” Whether a halal chicken might taste different than a kosher one, we’ll keep you posted.—Joe Pastoor

  • from Saigon: Two Wheels Good, Four Wheels Bad

    We pedaled our singlespeed bikes for three days, roughly 50 kilometers each day, from the Thai-Cambodian border. We were traveling on National Highway 6. Some highway; it’s like a bloody Cal-Trans orgy, only they forgot the asphalt and somebody stole a fleet of Toyota Camrys which cannot be driven slower than 95 mph, kicking up cyclones of pure, demonic, red dust that gets so far down the crack of my biking shorts I think I’m working for Mr. Slate. But it’s a dandy way to see the country. Every Cambodian school kid knows the words “hay-lo” and “bye-bye” but not always in that order. Sometimes they throw a curve ball, and ask, “Where you go?” Well, to paraphrase Picasso, if you know exactly where you’re going, what’s the point? The smiles are endless and genuine, and a great juxtaposition to the endless dust—or if the roads are “paved” then potholes that, if the world were a just place, would be swallowing those damn Camrys. I’m not kidding. Nearly every car is a Toyota Camry, driven by madmen at top speed. They don’t slow down, but their horns work. The pigs don’t seem to mind, and I don’t mean the cops. See, the pigs are being held against their will, upside down, usually three abreast in makeshift cages that look like they were rigged from snow fencing. These “cages” are strapped to the back of moto-bikes, and sometimes rip past us in squadrons of three, for a total of nine pigs. In the morning, we stopped for Coca-Colas and Marlboro (oh, yeah—this is Marlboro country) and I positioned myself so that the local police station sign was in the foreground as these swine merchants rode past. It was pure delight. Well, I laughed anyway.

    As I write this, we’re enjoying 75-cent Angkor beer, (in cans, no less, with old fashioned pull-tabs! Can you imagine?) at an air-conditioned Internet brothel. On the way into Siem Reap, we rode with some young Cambodian kids who spoke excellent English. They ride about 10K to school each day, and I gave one of them my last copy of Bike magazine. He was geeked, and then they invited us to their home for coconut water. The kid just shimmied up the tree about 25 feet above the ground, knocked a few ’nuts down, and we had refreshing coconut water, through a straw naturally, as all drinks in these parts are served. We met his whole family, and got to ride through some true backroad Cambodian villages.

    Now it’s four days later. We made it from Phnom Penh (and completed our trek across Cambodia) to Saigon. We crossed the Cambodian-Vietnamese border at Bavat/Moc Bai with no problems. Cambodia: What an incredible adventure. Just too bizarre, and yet extremely beautiful, and poignant in its own way. Very desolate, very poor, yet the people so proud, so genuine and friendly. They comport themselves with such grace. Truly humbling, and somehow, sandwiched between the gritty fast-paced world of Thailand, and then the barren landscape gives way to the lush, green irrigation of Vietnam.

    At the border, we were immediately thankful for the paved, mostly smooth roads. Aside from that, the mad 71K dash into Saigon was nothing short of a mindblower, traffic coming at us from all directions, in every conceivable and unbelievable vessel. The usual Camry brigade firing past at Mach 666 speeds. Yesterday, we regaled in joy at a broken down Camry on the side of the road. I swerved into the other lane to take a photo, which Mac thought a bit “in-your-face,” as the poor chap had his hood up and was cranking an obvious beat-down starter. Screw ’em. As just one of the legions of Camrys who terrorized us for the past 17 days, I have no sympathy.

    The heat continues to beat down on us. We’re riding most mornings by 6:30 a.m. My face is a beautiful shade of crimson, even with the SPF 50 I’ve been lathering on. The exhaust fumes are black clouds of distortion that you could chew on. We feebly defend our lungs with bandanas pulled over our faces like some modern-day Jesse James. As we neared Saigon, the traffic just increased and it was a full-on assault to stay focused and upright, fighting through the maddening throngs of silk-suited school girls, tuk-tuk taxis, moto drivers, and cyclos hauling sheets of stainless steel, or maybe a woman would roll past with a 12-foot piece of PVC tubing casually draped over her shoulder, held at a deathly-close-to-our-heads angle. Pick a lane, any lane, just don’t make any sudden moves and you’re golden.—Hurl Everstone

    Hurl Everstone

  • Your Point?

    Long before Scud missiles, Apache choppers, and Shock and Awe, warriors lived and died by the sword. That spirit survives — albeit tempered by civility and an official rulebook — in a former bowling alley on Chicago Avenue in South Minneapolis. Here, the Minnesota Sword Club has operated for 20 years. Just the other day, more than 40 young fencers, ages 8 to 19, filled the room. “The defender doesn’t lunge,” said a voice from the practice floor. “I didn’t lunge!” his opponent replied. “Yes you did!”

    Fencing often appeals to young people who aren’t interested in other athletic pursuits. “It attracts smart kids because it’s a mental game, like chess,” said Sword Club owner Rich Jacobson. “It’s kind of like debate, but it’s a physical debate.”

    Jacobson’s svelte physique, his wavy grey hair, and well-trimmed moustache give him the look of a dashing European villain in a swashbuckling film. But his East Coast accent, still with him three decades after moving to the Twin Cities, reveals less exotic roots. As a teen in New York, Jacobson took up fencing and competed using the foil and the saber. He moved to Minneapolis to coach several fencing groups before founding his own club in 1982.

    Jacobson recalled when there were just 2,000 competitive fencers in the United States. Now, he said, the number is closer to 20,000. At the Minnesota Sword Club, there has been a particular surge of interest among girls. Alyssa Vongries is one of the most dedicated. She’s been fencing half her life. With her slight build, feathered hair, and dark eye shadow, she looks like an average 12-year-old. But armed with an épée, she’s ranked number one in the nation in her age group.

    “I fence against people who are older, taller, and more experienced than me a lot,” Vongries said. Does she beat them? “Sometimes. Sometimes I lose to them. But it’s all in the game.” Alyssa’s mom, Lynne Vongries, likes those odds. She often watches her daughter and son, Alex, compete, and she values the losses as much as the victories. “Competition is something that schools tend to try to hide,” she said. “Everybody gets to win, and that’s not the way life is. Everybody doesn’t get to win. Everybody gets to lose a lot and sometimes you get to win. Our kids are learning how to win and lose on an individual basis. I think it’s helping them be better people.”

    The appeal of fencing is pretty straightforward. “Kids just naturally hack at each other with two sticks,” noted Jacobson. Movies play a role as well; gunplay may be more common, but sword fights still make it to the silver screen. In the last two years, filmgoers have seen a Count of Monte Cristo remake, heartthrob Heath Ledger in A Knight’s Tale, Madonna teaching James Bond suggestively about swordplay, and a digitally enhanced Yoda kicking serious butt with a light saber. For Sword Club newcomers, reality sometimes suffers by comparison.

    Two men bouting inside the club were secured by wires to a pulley system above their heads. The mechanism allowed back-and-forth movement and conducted electricity, triggering wall-mounted lights and buzzers each time one fencer’s sword touched his opponent’s metal lamé jacket. These sparring partners traded blows and chatted amiably about church activities. Elsewhere in the club, another group learned the en garde position and tried to maintain a slight crouch as they advanced on their rivals. The real beginners were getting a demonstration of how to put on a mesh fencing mask with one hand.

    Wayne Hector was an unlikely musketeer, in jeans and a Hawaiian shirt. He and his wife, Carolyn, picked their fencing course out of an Open U catalog. Others are more serious about the sport. Linda Merritt, who is 38, has gone from a 44- to a 36-inch waist since she discovered the Minnesota Sword Club. She believes fencing gives you “every bit as good a workout as you would get from taking an aerobics class, but you don’t have to dance around like a big fool.” Anna Leahy, 35, appreciates fencing’s therapeutic qualities. “I really like hitting people,” she said. “Without, you know, hurting them.”— Scott A. Briggs

  • Busting Baghdad

    Two days after one of those giant statues of Saddam Hussein was toppled in Firdos Square, and had its head chopped off and dragged through the streets of Baghdad, artists at the University of Minnesota were participating in the art department’s 34th Annual Iron Pour, casting new and graven images for artistic fulfillment and academic credit. Dozens of artists in heavy protective clothing, safety glasses, and a hodgepodge of facemasks and respirators braved the acrid smoke from the coke-fired furnace, which stung the eyes and embedded in clothing. Manipulating heavy crucibles on pulleys and poles, teams of artists poured molten steel into sand molds. It was a delicate and carefully timed group performance, not something you see too often among go-it-alone artist-types.

    Given the sweat and planning required to finish even the simplest of these metal sculptures, did anyone here experience a pang of sadness for the public art being pummeled in Iraq? Max Thomas, a University senior in red safety glasses, said that seeing a 40-foot statue come down was an amazing visual experience in itself. He said, “I wish all sculptors could have an armored M88 tank to do stuff with!” His eyes went wide with the possibilities.

    First-time pourer Peter Schmidt, a student from Southwest State, had doubts. “It’s a shame to see all those statues being torn down. It’s like taking away history—like burning up pictures and paintings.” Although no fan of that particular subject or its execution, Schmidt hoped the statue’s remnants would one day end up in a museum rather than, say, the basement of a frat house at Baghdad U.

    Jim Swartz, another visitor from Southwest State, considered the artistic possibilities of the fallen Saddam statuary. “I figured you have two choices with all those statues: Either put them in a museum for bad art from bad regimes, or cut them up and reassemble ’em in a really nice abstract way. That’d be the first thing I’d do,” he said.

    Actually, the bad art museum is not all that far-fetched, said iron-pour organizer and U of M art professor Wayne Potratz. “I can certainly understand why people would want to destroy a symbol that’s been oppressive, but one of the things that’s happened in the former Soviet Union is that they’ve taken a lot of the sculptures of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin and put them in these very bizarre sculpture parks. Then they’re all together, representing an era.” Indeed, in Grutas, Lithuania, a local entrepreneur assembled more than 60 statues and busts of Lenin and Stalin in a park that locals dubbed “Stalin World.” The park, which its creator has boasted “combines the charms of Disneyland with the worst of the Soviet Gulag prison camp,” has not been without controversy among Stalin’s victims. But it has become a popular tourist attraction. Would a future Saddam Land be any less tasteful or popular among history buffs?

    “The statue of Hussein does speak about a particular style and an idea of what art is,” Potratz said. “I thought it was pretty typical of what I call totalitarian art, which follows very closely the aesthetics of Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia. It’s naturalistic work depicting heroic figures. It’s very much like a lot of the post-Civil War statuary you find here in the States.”

    Structurally, the Firdos Square Saddam got low marks from Prof. Potratz. “My impression was it wasn’t made very well, because they had big steel pipes in the legs and it was broken up pretty easily by people with hammers. That leads me to believe it wasn’t such a great casting.” What would Potratz create if given the opportunity to build a 40-foot sculpture intended to weather the ages and sway the masses? He thought for a minute and then grinned. “Me, I’d make a giant turtle.”—Dan Gilchrist

  • SARS Wars

    Having seen all the news reports on the outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, or SARS, I sat down with two physician colleagues of mine who specialize in infectious diseases and asked them the obvious: Are we all going to die?

    “Yes,” they answered in unison and without hesitation. “Of course everyone dies,” Dr. Dan Anderson explained helpfully. He and Dr. Jason Sanchez work in Abbott Northwestern’s Infection Control department. “We just don’t know when or what from.”

    Maybe this SARS thing is becoming an epidemic of hysterical proportions? “There’s some of that,” said Dr. Sanchez. “A patient asked me if they should cancel their trip to Washington D.C., so people do take leaps. The lay public is afraid to travel here in the U.S., and I don’t think anybody has told them to be. People came to those conclusions on their own,” he added. “But it is a serious, front-page issue.”

    Definitely serious. It’s an infection with lethal potential, after all. But not even the World Health Organization is giving us any sense of proportion. Right now, the talk is all numerator, not denominator, and you need both to calculate risk. “There have been 80 or 90 deaths now, out of almost 4,000 suspected cases. But that’s 4,000 people who got sick enough to come to somebody’s attention,” noted Dr. Anderson. “But maybe it’s 90 deaths out of 10 million this year; no one knows.”

    Here’s what the experts do know: The SARS virus is a member of the coronavirus family, whose members generally cause only mild respiratory illnesses. So why is SARS acting more like a Gambino family virus? “Take influenza for example,” Dr. Sanchez said. “Some of the major pandemics in the past are not just from minor mutations in the virus, what we call antigenic drift, but from a major re-assortment of the virus’ DNA that the population will not have immunity to. That’s called antigenic shift.”

    So a few weeks back, maybe a coronavirus somewhere in China slipped into a genetic Glamour Shots, got a complete make-over, and walked out the door nearly unrecognizable to our immune system. If that happened, it would give a virus like SARS the chance to really get going before our bodies’ defenses could react.

    But antigenic drift—the reshuffling of the genetic deck—has been going on since the beginning of time. What’s really revolutionized the infection world is, of course, the travel industry. More people flying more often to more places. Viruses are hitchhikers, and hitching a ride—a really fast ride—has never been easier. A SARS offspring can catch a 5 p.m. flight out of Hong Kong and be touching down at Heathrow by day’s end. That beats a sneeze of just about any magnitude.

    “Read The Demon in the Freezer by Richard Preston,” suggested Dr. Anderson. “Part of it reviews how people like D.A. Henderson eradicated small pox in the 1960s and 70s. When they identified a case, they would treat or isolate everyone who had had contact with that person in the last two weeks. In Pakistan, in the late 1960s, how far might that net be cast—15 miles, 50 miles? And how far might that be today?”

    Until we develop more rapid ways to identify new viruses (or the airline industry tanks, and we all agree to travel on foot), global health alerts, travel restrictions, and a bit of fear and loathing are here to stay. If the SARS virus does end up getting to the Pandemic Hall of Fame, we’ll have antigenic drift, the Wright brothers, and your local travel agent to thank for it.—Craig Bowron

  • Love It or Leave It Alone

    Alan Ralston started collecting De Sotos in the mid-80s, including the white wagon with a 361 parked in the front of his shop, one of two street-worthy sleds he has so far restored from his fleet of nine or ten. In back, one of the Fireflites holds an intact Torsion-Aire suspension.

    “I would have been eight years old in 1959, and when you’re a boy you’re always dreaming about driving a car. One of the most appealing things about a De Soto is that it has a push-button transmission. An eight-year-old doesn’t know how to shift gears, so we dreamed about driving cars like this and shifting the gears by pushing the push-buttons.”

    Ralston’s collection is stored in a downtown Mendota building that once held a U.S. post office, Ernie’s Liquors, and finally a thriving indoor marijuana farm. After the farm was shut down, Ralston bought it from the feds in 1992. “I’ve put a home in the upstairs for my wife and me. I live here,” he said, when I found him at work in the shop the other day. The south end of the building is in various stages of restoration as the energetic man gradually builds a garage for his push-button 59s. He plans to restore all those cars after he retires from his job as a flight operations programmer at Northwest Airlines.

    About a year and a half ago, someone started pushing Ralston’s buttons. It started on September 11, 2001. “I was so upset that I came home. What I was doing is, I had my American flag out and I was waving it on the sidewalk and saluting people and just trying to get support for the United States ’cause I was very saddened by what happened to us. And then I made a little poster that said ‘revenge,’ and I taped that up to the side of the wall in the front.”

    The next day, a passerby was upset by this message. A woman driving a maroon Buick stopped her car. “She actually came in, and I was up on the scaffolding, and she said, ‘Did you put that sign up on the side of the building?’ and I said, ‘Yes, I did,’ and she said, ‘You really shouldn’t feel that way. You shouldn’t think that way.’ And I said, ‘The last time I checked, it’s a free country and we can think and we can say what we want, including you.’

    “I got up the next morning, and my flag had been stolen off the side of the building, along with my poster.” Admitting he has “nothing to prove it,” he nonetheless feels certain that the woman in the maroon Buick was behind this and other acts of vandalism that followed.

    When the first flag was stolen, he put a reinforced flagpole bracket higher up on the building. A motivated vandal threw a rope over it to pull it down. Ralston responded with guy wires anchored into the masonry to support the pole. And, of course, he has famously exercised his First Amendment rights in paint on the front of the building:

    To those who stole my flag and poster: You cannot silence my speech or diminish my love for the United States. With resolve and might we will defeat our enemies. Alan L. Ralston, citizen soldier 9/17/2001.

    GOD BLESS AMERICA

    This bracket was not bent by the wind! Those who continue to be intolerant of my First Amendment rights, please be advised that I exercise my Second Amendment rights with equal fervor. Alan L. Ralston 9/9/2002.

    Since adding that second warning, the vandalism has stopped. But he thinks he knows why his messages disturb some people.

    “I think there’s a lot of people who don’t support the United States. They feel America is always wrong no matter what we do. And they can’t stand anyone who loves the country and supports the country and demonstrates patriotism.

    “I find it interesting that even a year and a half later, people drive by and they stop across the street and they read it. And you see people come out and take pictures of it. I think that’s nice.” Eventually, the messages will be painted over as Ralston restores the rest of the building. He thinks he might have a public ceremony when the time comes.—Joe Pastoor

  • May Day, May Day!

    Last year, President George W. Bush issued a proclamation designating May 1 as Loyalty Day. “Whether born on American soil or abroad, Americans appreciate patriotism and loyalty to our country,” he read from a prepared speech. “Americans affirmed this sense of loyalty for their homeland during and following the attacks of September 11, 2001.” As an example of our fealty, Bush’s speechwriters pointed out boldly that “Americans pledged to fight terrorism, both here and across the globe.”

    But Loyalty Day already existed. In the 1930s, the Veterans of Foreign Wars started staging patriotic demonstrations on May 1. They were trying to upstage another holiday—Communist Labor Day, which dated from the Russian Revolution in 1917. That Labor Day had its origins in the United States, and the effort to establish the eight-hour workday. The cap on full-time labor was legally established after nationwide strikes on May 1, 1886. Students of American history will remember that violent clashes in Chicago led to a May 4 demonstration in Haymarket Square. Someone threw a bomb, and labor leaders were hanged for it, including several who were not present at the time. In 1889, Paris socialists proclaimed May 1 International Labor Day to commemorate these events.

    May 1 is still celebrated as Labor Day in most countries, but not here. To thwart organized labor, Congress moved the holiday to an autumnal position between the patriotic holidays of July 4 and Thanksgiving, thus appeasing the working man while severing his ties to the international labor community. But unions continued to sponsor Labor Day parades in May, most notably in New York City, and governments were forced to find new strategies of co-option. In 1932, Pennsylvania created “Americanism Day,” which later combined with Loyalty Day and became federal law in 1958. Just to be sure, in 1961, May 1 was also codified as Law Day, to celebrate our laws and liberties (which President Bush also recognized in 2002, though in a separate proclamation, touting the few civil liberties our Attorney General had not yet abrogated.)

    And none of these modern holidays acknowledge May 1 as Beltane, Floralia, or any of the other licentious spring fertility festivals dating back to pagan Europe. These holidays have all but disappeared, much as May Labor Day was phased out in the 1950s and Loyalty Day went out of fashion during the Vietnam War—though of course May baskets and May poles have persisted.

    The spirit of all this conflicted tradition, however, is very much alive in Minneapolis. Sandy Spieler, Artistic Director at the Heart of the Beast Puppet Theater, said the legendary Minneapolis May Day parade in Powderhorn is about “the twining of two different roots: the red root, the blood of the People’s struggles; and the green root, the ancient, ancient root of the change-bringing of the earth to springtime.” In other words, the pagan and the proletariat elements of May Day live on in the parade’s frolicking nymphs doing battle with soot-faced corporate demons and warmongers.

    Meanwhile, the VFW will hold a parade and celebration at the Minnesota Veterans Home for the somewhat less historical Loyalty Day. In other cities, they are focusing on counteracting the anti-war sentiments they feel are over-represented in the media. But locally, Loyalty Day will be more a tribute of respect to elderly or disabled former soldiers—undoubtedly confusing those of us who already can’t keep Labor Day and Memorial Day straight.

    Jim Lahay, who runs the VFW building on Lake and Lyndale, said there’s no conflict between their event and the May Day parade. “It’s not the same day,” he explained. Loyalty Day is celebrated the Saturday before May 1, while the May Day parade usually falls the Sunday after. As to ideological differences, Lahay shrugged and said, “They do their thing, and we do ours.” Perhaps that is the true spirit of May Day. And, more and more, every other day of the year, too.—Katherine Glover

  • Toys Are U.S.

    There’s a cute little gift shop on 42nd Avenue in South Minneapolis called Wasteland. There isn’t much to the place, and the hours are erratic. It seems mostly to be a storefront reserved for the editorializing of its eccentric owner. In lieu of a strong geopolitical or psychosocial opinion one way or another, the window celebrates the season—festooned, for example, with valentines in a good February, or St. Patty’s shamrocks for a peacetime March. Needless to say, the past six months have given the shopkeep plenty of inspiration by which to arrange her display.

    Early in the year, we walked by and noticed the window was filled with dolls, toy figurines, and action figures from every walk of fantasy-life: everything from farm animals to stormtroopers to kewpie dolls. They were staging a protest, each holding a little tooth-picket sign with an anti-war slogan. A mutant ninja turtle held the largest sign, which acted as a kind of caption for the whole mob. It said “Toys for Peace.” And we misunderstood the slogan, at first, as a kind of Food for Oil corollary. What if Iraq had been carpet-bombed, we thought, with toys instead of cruise missiles and bunker busters? After all, if we want them to forcibly accept democratic capitalism, why not cut to the chase and litter the whole Middle East with Nikes and Coca-Cola and Nintendo?

    A month ago, our friend Kurt Andersen visited Vietnam, just as the first bombs fell in Baghdad. Writing in the New York Times magazine, he found his vacation instructive. Seeing the bright storefronts, the sidewalks in front of Hanoi convenience stores stacked with 12-packs of western soda, Andersen had an epiphany: We may have lost the battle in Vietnam, but we apparently won the war.

    That is, if winning means opening new markets for capitalism. But that war, much like this one, hardly proved the veracity of our geopolitical paradigm. (Not a single WMD turned up yet. Hmm.) If terrorism is the visceral response to American imperialism and hegemony in Arab lands, and if this war was about stamping out terrorism, then there’s a pretty good chance that we’ve won this battle but may yet lose the war.

    On the other hand, we pride ourselves these days in courageous thinking. And we think Wasteland is onto something. What would happen—really?—if instead of approaching global problems with a hammer, we came at it with grease? If, instead of marching into Baghdad with bayonets, we brought Barbies? Think of the money, the diplomacy, and the innocence that could have been saved if we’d spent $80 billion on toys, clothing, and food for the Iraqis.

    Then again, we’re not entirely convinced that raising the standard of living and putting playthings in their hands will help at all. Look at how Gopher fans made Dinkytown look like Basra—after winning a hockey game.