Conservatism Kills! - I never

Conservatism Kills! - I never liked Richard Broderick's Green Party candidacy for the Saint Paul School Board, which ended last week when he came in out of the top four in the city School Board elections.

I didn't like his proposals - to turn the school board into a lobbying body for Green political causes, and turn the schools into mechanisms for Green indoctrination. His snide, condescending responses to my questions (on an email discussion group) were another matter - but I'll leave that out of the discussion for a moment.

The fact that he lost - and that relatively conservative DFLer Randy Kelly beat ultraliberal DFLer Jay Benanav in the last mayoral election - isn't just the ebb and flow of politics.

From 1492 until today, the European settlement of the Western Hemisphere has been driven by a cultural dynamic of exploitation and domination.

Whoah! When the hard-left starts with talk of European dominationineeination of the indigineonistic poplulatrices, we know we're onto something really big, right?

We continue:

Though in the United States the overt expression of this dynamic came to an end with the "battle" of Wounded Knee, looking south it is clear that it still plays itself out in its old familiar form in Chiapas, Guatemala, Amazonia, and the Andes...

That Broderick ties Wounded Knee - a massacre in 1890 brought on by poor communication and panic - to Guatemala (a failed leftist insurgency) says more about Broderick than about history.

But simply because in the United States the last Hotchkiss shell in this ongoing struggle flew 113 years ago does not mean that the cultural dynamic that brought us here, to this time and place, simply disappeared along with Native American resistance. On the contrary. It went underground, and continues to haunt the political and class struggles of today.

So the stage is set. Whatever follows is comparable in significance with the massacre of 200 Natives in South Dakota, with the epochal struggles of indigenous peoples to survive (as frequently against the evils of the centralized planning that people like Broderick support as against racism and nationalism). Pretty big stuff, right?

So what is the epochal event that Broderick equates with massacre and epochal social upheaval?

In St. Paul, this cultural dynamic is clearly evident in the policies and administrative style of Mayor Randy Kelly,...

Spit Take

Whaaaa?

Randy Kelly? The moderate, Eastside DFL mayor who comes across as nothing so much as a luke-warmer version of Norm Coleman? Or as Broderick says:

...a politician who won office by only a few hundred votes but has governed as if he'd been granted a mandate from heaven

[Ed. - What? Because he won a narrow victory, he's supposed to cower in fear of his opposition?]

In his push for mixed zoning along the city's dynamic business strips like Grand Avenue and West 7th Street - mixed zoning that would open these thriving small business areas to exploitation and eventual ruin by big box franchises - or for a publicly financed stadium for the Minnesota Twins or his imperious, and possibly illegal, decision to connect Ayd Mill Road to 35-E, Kelly has demonstrated a high-handed manner worthy of a Conquistador.

And the deaths of hundreds of thousands of St. Paulites from smallpox and forced resettlement are truly shameful episodes in Western Civilization.

But in his eagerness to act on behalf of outsiders itching to get their hands on the human and economic resources of St. Paul, he more nearly resembles the stereotypical 19th Century Indian Agent, appointed to lull the natives into submission even as they are robbed blind and the meager rewards they have been promised in return for their cooperation withheld or replaced with shoddy trade goods and tainted meat.

So let's get this straight: Mayor Kelly's initiatives to:

• Bring a Menards to St. Paul
• Keep the Gopher States Ethanol plant on West Seventh open
• Allow national franchises on Grand Avenue
• Connect the Ayd Mill Road with I-35E (note to non-St. Paulites - Ayd Mill Road is a four-lane arterial that was built in the 1960's to - you got it, connect with I-35E!)

...are epochal tales of oppression equivalent, even symbolically, with the Wounded Knee massacre...?

Words fail.

Unfortunately for Kelly, his project received a major setback in the most recent citywide elections. Three of the four City Council candidates endorsed by Kelly - and by his masters at the Saint Paul Area Chamber of Commerce - went down to defeat, and the one candidate who did win, Debbie Montgomery, succeeded on the basis of her own merits as a long-time community figure - and not because of Kelly's support.

The Native American struggle to retain their cultural identity. The Maori battle to regain their cultural self-respect. The fight of the Chiapas peasants against the depredations of a leftist central government. The struggle to keep Chipotle from opening a franchise on Grand Avenue.

Which doesn't fit, here?

I know who not to ask:

Whether this outcome has legs or not, I'm not sure, though I'm inclined to think it portends the outcome of next fall's Presidential election. Kelly, the local Chamber of Commerce's Indian Agent, emerged from this election a de facto lame duck. George Bush, the nationwide Indian Agent of the same exploiting class that backs Kelly, will suffer a similar fate. Why? Because the big difference between middle class Americans and 19th century Plains Indians is that there are a lot more of us and, for the moment at least, we can still vote the bums out of office.

"For the moment at least". So which is it, Mr. Broderick - do we conservatives, especially conservatives aligned with that most vile of evil bodies, the Saint Paul Chamber of Commerce, want to massacre our opponents in the fields (with Hotchkiss mountain guns, apparently), or merely revoke everyone's right to vote?

This will play among the ritualistically-guilty in Highland Park, of course - where people are still looking for hanging chads under their fair trade espresso cups.

Final question: Is this an example of the "instinctively Green worldview" that Mr. Broderick proposed using the St. Paul School District's resources to promote among our school children?

Just curious.

Posted by Mitch at November 12, 2003 06:24 AM