Tagged: minnesota

Secession, then and now

I was surprised to discover last month that I live in a Congressional district that contains a sizable minority that “supports nullification of unconstitutional federal laws and secession as options to enforce state sovereignty.” This is a question that I thought had been determined a thousand miles and a hundred fifty years from contemporary Minneapolis.

What makes this particular eruption of secessionist opinion especially ironic is that it comes from Minnesota Republicans. A hundred and fifty years ago, it was Minnesota Republicans who raised the first volunteers to preserve the union and settle the secessionist question. After the Civil War, Republicans shaped the political character of Minnesota; it was the Republican Party of the late nineteenth century that laid the foundation for the moderate, pragmatic, and civil politics that has allowed the Minnesota tradition of good government to flourish. Indeed, until very recently, the Minnesota Republican Party has been far closer to the progressive tradition of Theodore Roosevelt than the rightward course the party has been on elsewhere. It would seem that the party has finally caught up to the retrograde tendencies that turned the GOP away from its origins in the 1960s.

This isn’t the only secessionist noise that has been made over the last couple years, of course. The same sort of empty threats have been coming out of areas like Texas, South Carolina, and Virginia, places where secession actually happened (and where one would think, except for the pernicious Lost Cause myth, hard experience would suggest it’s not such a great idea). This secessionist theater is largely an empty gesture, but it’s interesting to contrast it with the actual secessionism that led to the Civil War and unpack what lies behind the resurgence of the rhetoric.

My recent reading in Civil War history has highlighted that, whatever the later objections of Jefferson Davis and the other Confederate leaders may have been, secession was about slavery. It was only after the war that it became wrapped in the highfalutin language of “state sovereignty.” Prior to Lincoln’s election, the South held significant power in the United States; the majority of Presidents were from the states that would secede. And the South was hardly shy about enforcing federal power over “state sovereignty”: the Fugitive Slave Act, for example, was passed to nullify the laws of many Northern states that gave freedman status to escaped slaves on free soil. Lincoln threatened the expansion (though not, until 1863, the existence) of slavery, and it was this threat to the slave economy that prompted secession.

There doesn’t seem to be nearly so compelling an economic origin to the current secessionist rhetoric; Lincoln threatened to curtail and unravel the base of Southern wealth, but Obama has barely threatened even to dent the base of corporate power. I’m enough of a materialist to believe that compelling economic interests need to be lined up behind something drastic like secession for it to come to pass: the Hartford Convention had some good points, but not enough real economic benefit to outweigh the costs of secession. There’s also not enough sectionalism (and certainly not here in Minnesota, where the impulse is decidedly a minority opinion) to make secession very practical; we are a much more interdependent and integrated nation now than we were in 1860, and it’s unlikely that anyplace of any size would be able to mount enough support to really pull of a secession.

So, what could be behind the “state sovereignty” bluster that has compelled people who should know better to hop on the “nullification and secession” band wagon?

At the risk of making the political psychological, it seems to me that the voices raising the secessionism roar belong to people who would rather not have to talk to anyone who disagrees with them. Secession represents in this case a retreat from debate and compromise, an unwillingness to accept that the other side has valid points, and a desire for a utopian political purity of the sort that has never existed in the United States. By defining oneself as no longer beholden to the national unit, one no longer has to do the hard work of building support across factions to get things done; one need only get agreement from people who already agree. It is, in the end, a rejection of the entire concept of civil society, where people with different interests and ideas are engaged in a common enterprise.

There’s nothing especially new about this sort of impulse, nor is it exclusive to the right. Indeed, political puritanism used to be a hallmark of the left, where splinter groups of Trotskyites, Maoists, and Bakhunists could argue forever over their relative ideological purity (which is perhaps why they never got around to fomenting actual revolution). But it’s surprising, and disappointing, to hear it coming from Lincoln’s party from people one would have thought were serious about civil society.

The Dance Hall at Spring Hill

When I was eight my Aunt Suzanna died. My sister Eva and I started crying at her funeral and we couldn’t stop. I remembered the uneasy looks we got from relatives, all dry-eyed, as if there were something wrong with us for crying at all. By the time we got control of ourselves, I couldn’t tell if I was crying for Aunt Suzanna or out of shame for my own tears.

The Dance Hall at Spring Hill, Duke Klassen

The German Catholics of Spring Hill are the near neighbors of Bill Holm’s Icelandic Lutherans. Like those Icelanders, they’ve wrestled a living from the harsh prairie of western Minnesota, and in the process have become as hard and cold, at least on the outside, as the stones and ice of their landscape. There’s little room for sentimentality on the prairie: kittens are drowned, dogs are run over, mothers are buried, houses are burned. Klassen’s stories are stark and unadorned, only rarely taking lyrical flight; life and death on the prairie is a matter of fact affair.

Not that there isn’t room for some humor and magic, though, in these interlinked stories. In “Mrs. Cabot and Mrs. Abernathy,” the school board is forced to hire a Protestant teacher when no Catholic is willing to work for the salary offered. The schoolchildren, who until then had only encountered Protestants when Lutheran farmers (uncles and cousins of Bill Holm, perhaps) came over from a neighboring dry county to buy booze, discover that Protestants have a strange obsession with oral hygiene. They are ordered to get their own toothbrushes (no sharing) and visit the dentist, which they do with the resignation of Catholic martyrs. In “Rimpel-Zimpel,” a boy, his father, and a hired hand challenge property lines and a fearsome storm to fish a secret lake, and are rewarded with “pails … so full that fish flop out as fast as we throw them in.” And in “Below the Surface,” two blows to the head transform a boy first from a stoic farmer to an awe-struck romantic, then back again, but not without a painful sense of loss.

The fifteen stories in The Dance Hall at Spring Hill drift back and forth over about thirty years, from the 1920s to the 1950s, chronicling the transformations in the place and its people: railroads come and go, farming practices change and shape the landscape, generations come and go. But abiding through all the change are the tough but not joyless people on their bleak prairie, as impossible to root out as the rocks in their fields.

our obligations to each other

As Lori Sturdevant reports in her column in today’s Star-Tribune, not all of Minnesota’s representatives went down without a fight against the governor’s cuts to social services. She notes that Lyndon Carlson, Jeremy Kalin, and Paul Thissen stood up to the unallotment. And she quotes at length from Thissen, who may be a gubernatorial candidate when the chance to replace Pawlenty rolls around again in 2010:

[I]t’s a clear example of short-term thinking. It’s thinking we can solve problems by not paying for them, or just moving them off of government’s books. . . . We’ve had this notion put before us that we can keep the Minnesota we’ve always known without paying for it. That’s tied to a notion that we’re all on our own, and should be able to take care of ourselves.

“The pendulum is swinging back to the idea that we do owe obligations to each other. That is what the next election is going to be about.

It’s awfully early to be picking candidates, but based on these words, I’m looking forward to hearing more from Rep. Thissen. I think he gets it.

Governor “No” and the politics of perfidity

Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty has decided to go it alone on the state budget, using his line-item veto and unallotment to unilaterally chart Minnesota’s future. He has stuck to a fundamentalist “no new taxes” line, throwing the legislature’s budget out of balance by striking down revenue increases, and is going to work on his own path of cutting services and funding. This is a deeply undemocratic act (which Pawlenty appears to be making quite gleefully), and counter to a long Minnesota tradition of generosity and compassion.

The University of Minnesota, K-12 school districts, Minnesota’s cities and towns, and the health care system will all be harmed by the budget cuts. Jobs will likely be lost, and Minnesota’s infrastructure further eroded, just so Pawlenty can hold to a hard line on taxes that made little sense when times were good but makes far less sense when times are bad. Far fewer people will benefit from Pawlenty’s stance on taxes than will be hurt.

As angry as I am at the governor, though, I’m equally disappointed with the DFL legislature. This was their opportunity to step up to the challenges of a new era in governance, a chance to make the case that reviving the “Minnesota Miracle” means asking everyone to pitch in, and they failed, pushing their tax bill through at the last moment, after deadline, when they should have been building the case for months. In this environment, there’s a good chance that people would have listened.

The pendulum is swinging, and not only the governor but the legislature have managed to be struck by it. If we learn anything from the economic meltdown of the last year, it should be that a system that prospers the few against the many is not a recipe for wealth, and that a society that shares prosperity more equitably is better prepared for the inevitable failures. Both the governor and the legislature are guilty of wishful thinking, looking to 2010 to solve all of their problems. Better that they participate in, as Lloyd Alexander called it, hopeful dreaming: imagining ways in which we can rise to our challenges, slough off the shackles of the past, and create a state, if not a world, where we value more than the short-term gain.

Hopeful dreaming is an active process. The hopeful dreamer is willing to take his tumbles with the world, not insisting on the immediate gratification typical of infantile demands, but with the patience that is one sign of growing up. The hopeful dreamer says, “If not now, maybe someday . . .”

Lloyd Alexander, “Wishful Thinking — or Hopeful Dreaming?”, in Fantasists on Fantasy: A collection of Critical Reflections by Eighteen Masters of the Art

The Passionate, Accurate Story

America has a good deal of ugly fiction about. Some of the violence in it is salacious: that is, the author gets a kick out of thinking about it and knows the reader will, too. But some is a mistake in calculation: the author thinks that exposing the reader to this or that specific grunge or evil will teach the reader not to participate in that grunge or evil. In fact, people imitate what they see most sensually put before them–rather than learning from the moral brought out at the end of anything.

Carol Bly, The Passionate, Accurate Story: Making Your Heart’s Truth into Literature

There are lots of writing guides out there; some are useful for points of craft (Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular), others focus on the “spiritual journey” of writing (Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within), and others are quirky and fascinating reads in their own right, even if not entirely useful in a utilitarian sense (Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life). But none that I’ve read (and I’ve read a lot of them) are quite like Carol Bly’s “The Passionate, Accurate Story.”

What Bly brings to the writing-book shelf is a fierce sense of morality. Writing for Bly is not merely about expressing oneself, or even about creating literary art (though she has deep respect for art as a thing larger than ourselves); for Bly, writing is a moral act, and fiction must be built on strong ethical ground.

Before even beginning to write a story, Bly urges us to compose a “Values Listing,” a written record of the things that are most important to us. And throughout the writing process–in the sketchy, secret first draft, through the crafting of structure and plot, in the imagining of character and setting–we are to return to this list and ensure that our work remains grounded in it. If we stray from our Values Listing, and start to let our stories lose their moral center, then all the fine craft and careful words will not give them life.

Bly is especially insistent that the characters writers create be approached ethically. Even if we disagree with a character, find them distasteful or even repugnant, we need to know them and respect them. Bly hates disdain: “people feel more disdain than they suppose they feel. We don’t notice it in everyday life, but it immediately shows up in our fiction unless we recognize it and confront it.” She proposes that the writer should know all the facts of even the minor characters in a story, their secret desires and hidden strengths and frailties, even if those things never find their way into the story.

Throughout “The Passionate, Accurate Story,” Bly builds a story of her own–about a man who quits his job at a chemical weapons factory before going fishing with his wife on their wedding anniversary–around the principles she extols. She shows how to avoid the easy traps of snark and interiority, and how to move the plot (and for Bly, plot is everything) forward. Readers of Bly’s last novel, Shelter Half, will recognize many of the characters, settings, and themes presented in these snippets of story: it seems that almost twenty years before “Shelter Half” was published, she was working through not only the mechanics of the novel but also its moral universe.

Bly is a solid writer, but not a sparkling one. There’s little flash in her writing; it’s straightforward and workmanlike, careful but never precious. Her tone is sometimes a bit gadflyish, and her politics are unabashedly left of center: readers of Letters From the Country will recognize her concerns, and her occasional crankiness.

I’m not sure that I’m 100% on board with Bly’s project; in less capable hands, her prescriptions would produce preachy, pedantic work that sounds more like an earnest pamphlet than a piece of literature. At the same time, though, it’s clear that these are the prescriptions that Bly followed in her own fiction: in her stories, she is never condescending, always decent, and filled with a love for humanity that is so specific in its passions that it can’t be mistaken for a mere facade. And it’s hard to argue in these times with someone who demands an increase in the general decency of our culture.

a haiku for Eleanor Arnason

Vultures circle low,
seeking Winter’s thawed corpses;
birds return in Spring.

One of my favorite science fiction writers is Eleanor Arnason; if you haven’t read her, I highly recommend the short stories The Grammarian’s Five Daughters and Knapsack Poems, and the novel Ring of Swords. Her work is smart and insightful, very much in the tradition of Ursula Le Guin.

Also smart and insightful is her occasional blog, where she writes about science fiction, politics, economics, and nature. She lives in Minneapolis, so her observations about the changing seasons are a treat for me to read; she notices things that I don’t.

Today she noticed that the vultures had returned to the skies over our rivers, and offhandedly noted that “[i]t calls for a haiku, but I can’t think of one right now.” Though I’ve noted with my recent string of juvenilia that I gave up poetry about twenty years ago, I managed to come up with a little something, which I’ve inflicted above.

The Music of Failure

The Music of FailureThere are two eyes in the human head–the eye of mystery, and the eye of harsh truth–the hidden and the open–the woods eye and the prairie eye. The prairie eye looks for distance, clarity, and light; the woods eye for closeness, complexity, and darkness. The prairie eye looks for usefulness and plainness in art and architecture; the woods eye for the baroque and ornamental.

The Music of Failure by Bill Holm

The Music of Failure, Bill Holm’s first collection of essays, is a meditation on how a place–in particular, a no-place place, the empty prairie around Minneota, Minnesota–is made sacred. The graves of immigrants and dogs, the ruins of Icelandic churches, the obsessive carvings of a Norwegian farmer, a hodge-podge squatter’s garden, bring the vastness of the prairie down to a human scale, and fill it with story.

Holm has a strange love for Minneota. Though he fled the prairies as soon as he could–”[a]t fifteen, I could define failure fast: to die in Minneota, Minnesota”–his time away from Minnesota (teaching in China, Iceland, and Virginia) pulled him back. “I found empty-hearted rootlessness, books used as blunt instruments, a sneering disbelief that hayseed farmers had souls” instead of the elegant and cultured world he expected. His celebration of Minneota is not, though, a celebration of the stalwart and intrepid immigrant farmers who found success on the Great Plains; Holm’s subject is failure, gloriously recounted.

In the long eponymous essay at the middle of the book, Holm turns our common understanding of failure on its head. Through Whitman’s lines–”I play not marches for accepted victors only, I play marches for conquer’d and slain persons”–he explores the lives of some of his immigrant relatives. Pauline Bardal, a homely old maid who was not an especially good organist, would appear to be a failure. But she imparted to the young Bill Holm a set of values that put the work-a-day world in a different context:

Watching that joy on her bony face as her fingers slid over the yellowed keyboard of the old upright, it became clear to me even as a child that neither her nor my true life came from kneading bread or candling eggs or fluffing pillows in a sick bed, but happened in the presence of those noises, badly as they might be made by your own hands.

Though Pauline and her siblings ended in apparent failure, “six dead in the graveyard of a dead church, no progeny, no empire following them, only the dry wind of a new world which promised them and all of us so much,” she lived a self-contained, sufficient, and consistent life that eludes the successful. Holm traces this to the character of the Icelanders who “came out of an immigrant culture that had succeeded at failure,” and back further into the Icelandic sagas that document the poverty, murder, and hubris, the “600 years of colonial domination, black plague, leprosy, volcanic eruption, and famine that by 1750 reduced this already half-starved population to half the size it had been at settlement time.” This historic failure has led, a hundred and thirty years after Holm’s family came to the Great Plains, to “a mild, harmonious, democratic welfare state, just and literature, almost without murder, theft, or any violent crime. … Iceland is what America says it is.” Holm’s thesis is that the Icelanders have accepted responsibility for their failure, and have learned to live within bounds that Americans find stifling. (How Holm would view Iceland’s role in the global economic collapse, twenty-three years after “The Music of Failure,” is an interesting question; I haven’t been able to find his final thoughts on Iceland’s economy, though I’m sure he had some interesting observations and hope that they will be published someday soon.)

Holm claims to have the “prairie eye” for simplicity and practicality, but his essays suggest otherwise. His sentences are long and complex, turning around on themselves as he works through his thoughts. He is drawn not so much to the gruff farmer as to the retarded handyman, the “naked man eating lilacs” in his yard one night, the old woman at a nursing home reading who yells that his poems are “Shit! Nothing but shit!” whom he would like to kidnap, “first to Minneapolis, then New York, and wheel her into committee meetings, cocktail parties, congressional hearings,celebrations of the mass, and serious cultural occasions. I may even marry her.” Holm’s people are misfits and failures, complex and broken, with darkness and light at their center in equal measure. Like Carol Bly (and unlike, I would argue, Garrison Keillor, but more on that some other time), Holm loves his misfits without condescension, and finds in them strange and wonderful lessons for living a successful, if failed, life.

The Quiet Hours

There’s a danger of nostalgia when looking at these seventy haunting pictures, but we should, as the artist did, beware of falling into it. These are not pictures of the good old days or of some lost Shangri-la of refined taste and quality buildings. These are the practical everyday places, used places, streets where ordinary people lived and grain elevators, railroad yards, and factories where they carried their lunch buckets to work. What these photographs give us is insight into the pulsing real life of cities where we had not previously thought to look for beauty.

Bill Holm, from the introduction to The Quiet Hours: City Photographs by Mike Melman

After Bill Holm passed away in February, I went to my library to grab up the books of his I hadn’t read yet. Not surprisingly, most of his books were out already, so I added myself to the request list. Hidden away in the local history section, though, was Mike Melman’s The Quiet Hours: City Photographs, a collection of black and white photographs with an introductory essay by Bill Holm. I snatched it up and scurried home.

The photographs capture city scenes in Minneapolis, St. Paul, and Duluth in the quiet hours just before dawn. Some of them are of places I know well: the railyard and grain elevators in my South Minneapolis neighborhood, the streets of Northeast Minneapolis, the bridges of St. Paul. Quite a few are interiors that I have never seen: the abandoned commandant’s quarters at Fort Snelling, the steam plant at the Ford factory, a violin shop with an array of instruments–violins, a cello, a lute–that seem to float in the air. These photographs remind me a little bit of many of Andrew Wyeth’s paintings: there are no people in the pictures, but there’s a very real sense of the people who populate these places. This is what our world looks like when we’re away.

Holm’s essay is well-paired to the images. It includes reflections on Whitman, Sandburg, and Wordsworth, very much in the spirit of similar essays in The Heart Can Be Filled Anywhere on Earth. Holm, Minnesota’s poet of failure, quiet, and solitude, understands what Melman is doing with these photographs.

For someone who has an equal interest in photography (particularly black and white photography) and literature, “The Quiet Hours” is a wonderful work. And for anyone who is curious about what happens in those hours when “all that mighty heart is lying still,” it offers a glimpse into the stillness.

Letters From the Country

If we are truly serious about life we are going to have to stop thanking people for sharing. It isn’t enough response to whatever has been offered. It is half ingenuous, and sometimes it is insincere, and often it is patronizing. It is the dictum excrementi of our decade.

Letters from the Country by Carol Bly

Though most of the essays in Carol Bly’s Letters from the Country were written in the early 1970s, they feel as relevant to our current decade as they were to the era of Nixon, Vietnam, and the start of the farm foreclosure crisis. That may be because our times aren’t so different from those days thirty years ago as we might like to image. Or it may be because these letters are written in the tradition of the Jeremiad, prophetic calls to our better angels, that is as timeless as it is timely.

Bly apologizes for being “shrill,” but these essays are hardly that. Rather, Bly has a quietly rumbling voice: though she writes candidly, and doesn’t shy away from making very specific condemnations when they’re called for, she is for the most part reasoned and loving in her criticism. Her main topic is the decay of civic culture in the “lost Swede towns” of southwestern Minnesota, and her deep affection for the people in these towns comes through in every essay. If she is critical of some of the people and institutions in these towns, it’s because she expects better of them and knows they can rise to the occasion. Indeed, her dismissive tone is reserved for the urban elites of the Twin Cities; her jokes at the expense of the small towns are gentle and tinged with love.

The letters cover a variety of topics: education, farm labor, civic organizations, rural community and culture, the arts, and the quality of conversation. They were originally published as a monthly column in the Minnesota Public Radio Magazine (now Minnesota Monthly), and as such the collection has a somewhat scattered feel. Still, Bly’s voice is consistent throughout, and if not holding together as a coherent piece the collection is certainly informed by a coherent set of values.

Many of the letters have practical recommendations for organizing civic life in small towns. Bly considers the paucity of humanistic education in the small towns; the educational elites have written off the rural areas as lacking opportunity or inclination for fulfilling work, and instead have herded the inhabitants into “vocational education.” Bly’s response is both hard-headed and open-hearted, and surely applies as well in today’s economy as that of the 1970s:

It isn’t fair that a deliberately impractical education which examines the verities of human life should be such a marvelous help to the self-image or the general ego strength and yet be limited to the gentleman. For years and years liberal arts graduates have taken up the best jobs in American, while others, whose coursework promised upward mobility, have desperately taken “business” courses without any suspicion that they were running their race on the layby track. Now that jobs are less and less rewarding, and for the most part people in rural areas cannot get the jobs they want, it is doubly unfair to keep the schools headed toward job preparation. They could much better be teaching preparation for the other two-thirds of our lives.

Indeed, Bly’s thoughts echo those of the classic post-”dot com” collapse study of the plight of white collar workers in the early 21st century, Barbara Ehrenreich’s Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream.

Other letters are more concerned with intimate personal relationships, and this is where Bly’s humor comes through. She is, for example, dead set against the “extended family,” and extols the value of the nuclear family as an institution that can better nurture creative and resilient people. “I have been thinking about the positive side of a Minnesota blizzard,” she writes in “Extended vs. Nuclear Families.” “Another of the blessings is that extended-family occasions come to a halt. Thank goodness.” The extended family is stultifying because it forces an environment where dissent is quashed:

There are conversations that can kill:

“Ja, you can sure tell there’s more snow coming from where that came from.”

or

“You’re a lot safer in a jet than you are on U.S. 212 I don’t care what they say.”

The problem with the above remarks is not that they’re untrue or dull: it is that one can’t reply, “To tell you the truth, I think I’m on the other side of that one.” It is impossible to dissent.

Bly calls the bluff on many of Minnesota’s most cherished myths, particularly “Minnesota Nice.” She considers the Minnesotan tendency to avoid controversy and conflict a stultifying tendency, inimical to true civic life. She proposes intentionally conflict-laden events, where people with real, deep divisions are forced to interact about those topics. Her ideal of civic life is not a place where everyone gets along; it’s a vision of candor and conflict that leads people into creative solutions for common problems.

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