The Hellish World of Nick Coleman

The buses are running again. Nick Coleman can stop prowling the nether regions of the cities, looking for the most disaffected bits of the thin film of people who even noticed that the buses were gone.

So is he happy?

What, are you kidding? It's Nick Friggin' Coleman, the man who bears all our pain.

I was going to fisk this piece - but the Fraters already did it", and did it very well.

Still, there's one bit here that keeps coming up, whenever the perpetually indignant and fashionably depressed start talking about our transit shortcomings.

But if you want to know how a metro area with pretensions to greatness...

Let's stop right there.

Last week, the City Pages slugged its front-page article " Bring Back the Buses
For Chrissakes... Milwaukee's got public transit. (Omaha, too.)"

So in the minds of the perpetually-indignant and fashionably depressed, being a major city has nothing to do with

• museums
• a cultural scene
• the presence of a critical mass of business that create both jobs and innovation
• universities and colleges
• a music scene (albeit a badly atrophied one)
• a couple of million people.

No. It's little white boxes to carry people from here to there.

By this logic - and I giggle whenever "logic" and Nick Coleman turn up in the same sentence - then every time New York's transit system strikes, it becomes a Grimy Omaha. For that matter, Los Angeles isn't a major city at all.

Back to Nick:

...could allow its rudimentary transit system to sit idle for six weeks before the big cheeses got interested enough to settle it, take a spin on the 69 bus.

The people on the No. 69 don't have clout or friends in power.

No, but the drivers certainly did.

Check the list of people Coleman talks with:

• People like a 46-year-old woman named Soong Sook, who rode from the East Side to a charity store on West Seventh to pick up some clothes for her grandkids.
• I saw only one person going to an office job.

  Maybe there are more. Maybe they will come back when the parking deals they made during the strike run out. But many No. 69 regulars don't make parking deals. They just make do:

• Doug Lyons, 55, a carpenter who had a stroke, uses a cane, and was taking the bus to look for a new apartment.

• Tom Garcia, 53, injured his neck in an accident and was riding downtown to transfer to the 63 bus back to Johnson Parkway, to a light-duty landscaping job for a friend.

• Beverly Weiss, 65, gets Social Security but works in the kitchen at St. Joseph's Hospital because "you can't live on what you get from Social Security." She spent the strike walking to her job and cursing the politicians and the union and the big shots who didn't seem to care about people like her.

  "You don't want to hear what I yelled at them," she said. "It wasn't nice."

• Augustine Cortez, 48, said that he was taking the bag of clothes on his lap to wash them at the coin laundry.

  I have just enough Spanish and he just enough English for us to communicate, but Lunes is washday everywhere, I guess.

• And there was a 49-year-old woman named Victoria, wearing a Vikings stocking cap, who was on the first leg of a two-hour, one-way trip from the East Side all the way to Eagan where she works as a clerk at a shopping mall.

• And a veteran named Bill Pipe who was on his way to the VA to take a class in how to quit smoking.

• And a woman named Lisa Bailey, who has a learning disability and whose left arm was in a cast. She got on the bus with a bag of plastic juice bottles that she was going to drop off at a recycling center because her apartment building doesn't recycle plastic.

  "Where's all the free newspapers at?" she asked as she made her way down the aisle, looking for evidence that a disastrous transit strike was finally over and that she was on board a party bus.

So after a strike where a DFL-leaning group, the drivers, struck to get benefits far out of touch with the reality of their jobs, and are defeated, Nick Coleman takes a ride through a series of neighborhoods where the DFL-dominated social services bureaucracy have traditionally warehoused those too addled by disability, bad "luck" and lousy choices to function in society, and uses it to condemn...everyone that's not on the bus.

A few years ago, I wrote a piece that was actually, if backhandedly, complimentary of Coleman. He responded with an email that was snide and curt, and manage the very difficult feat of being about two lines long and yet still plodded interminably, just like his columns (or his late and unlamented radio show).

Nick Coleman is a lousy writer - I'm told he had his day as a writer, but it's in the deep, dark, dank past. He lives in a fantasy world - the same world Lori Sturdevant lives in - where DFL and pseudo-DFL Republican government made all things wonderful, until the ickypoopy unwashed masses ruined it all and turned everyone ugly and hateful. He is the Sid Hartman of news columnists.

Worst of all, though - he's completely irrelevant.

Posted by Mitch at April 21, 2004 05:37 AM