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December 20, 2004

Just Go Away

I live in Saint Paul. I have two kids who attend Saint Paul schools - one in elementary school, and on in Junior High. I'm up to my ears in Saint Paul schools - their strengths, their weaknesses, the whole works - every single school day. There is nothing - nothing - that Nick Coleman at his scoldiest can tell me about the Saint Paul public schools today.

Brian "Saint Paul" Ward, ironcally, also lives in Saint Paul. He does not have kids, in the Saint Paul school district or anywhere else. Whichs is probably why he had the time to write the post that I wanted to write, basically, on Coleman's latest installment of the series.

One of a till full of money quotes:

Back to the predictions, last week we said Coleman would engage in:

Clintonian parsing of language. He'll try to make us believe there is a difference between "textbooks" and "books in classrooms." Any readers who made the mistake of confusing the two will be blamed for their own ineptitude. Then he'll question the secret, evil motivations behind anyone who could possibly make the mistake of misreading a Nick Coleman column.

Coleman, in his charming way, did just that:

Deliberate idiocy is a terrible thing. When I wrote about a book shortage at Maxfield Elementary School in St. Paul Nov. 14, I made it clear that the books that were in short supply were reading books -- books needed to boost the literacy levels of kids who attend the school.

Sadly, "literacy" turns out to be a hard word for public school bashers to understand. Literacy means an ability to read and comprehend. But the professional bashers of public school education seem to have poor reading comprehension. Either that, or they are mean as snakes. I'm leaning toward snakes.

Fans of strict verification can review Coleman's columns from
Nov. 14 and Dec. 5 to see if there is any distinction made in types of books or a specific mention of "reading books." (Trusting souls and the lazy/casually disinterested can take my word for it, there isn't). And even if there were such references (and there aint!), the distinction is meaningless. What other kinds of books are there in schools, besides "reading books"? Did Coleman think we were referring to "bunion massaging books" or "books used to serve lunch on"?

Craig Westover - whom Coleman nicknames "Captain Fishsticks" in a display of the rhetorical aplomb that has earned him his nickname, "The Furious Monotone" - also responds.

Doug from Bogus Gold takes a different tack:

Obviously most people will focus on Coleman's continuing attempt to portray his previous columns about the Maxfield Elementary School in St. Paul as something other than the misleading hucksterism they actually were. I'll leave the straightening of that issue to people like Craig Westover, Swiftee, and Coleman-mocker supreme, Saint Paul of Fraters Libertas; all of whom are far better equipped than I to comment on the specifics of Nick's educational bufoonery.

However, this being Sunday, I'd like to focus on our holier-than-thou columnist's subtle reference to the Holy Gospel. Though I may disagree with Nick on matters of education (therefore, I be a pirate, me hearties!) , I surely cannot disagree with the real-life parable Nick was kind enough to offer as perhaps a kind of olive branch to his (swashbuckling) opponents.

He goes on to do just that - read his piece.

Swiftee gives Coleman's piece the kind of wondrous fisking that many of us old-timers - Saint, Ed, Trunk and I - are just getting too burned out on Coleman Fatigue to do any more; it's good to see some of the young 'uns stepping into the gap.

In fact, if you flip around a lot of the better local blogs, you'll find a phalanx of local bloggers, "fact-checking Coleman's ass", exposing for all who are willing to see the biased, shrill, joke that Nick Coleman has become.

What have I to add, after all that?

Let's jump back a bit. As I mentioned earlier, I have kids in the Saint Paul schools. As I've said a time or two, my daughter actually attended Maxfield. I have spent more time at Maxfield school than Nick Coleman ever will.

The last paragraph of his column brought up two questions:

But where is Fishsticks and his crew? I asked Wiley. Why aren't all your critics here? She laughed wearily.

"Because this is something positive," she said. "If there was a shooting around here, they'd all show up. They're making a crusade against us. I wish they'd just leave us alone."

First: I asked Coleman and Wiley to comment on the story. Wiley never returned my call. Coleman attached a bunch of absurd conditions on his response; half of them just plain nonsense, half of them the sort of thing that anyone calling himself a "journalist" would know is a really, really dumb joke. He had no intention of actually meeting the public, much less his critics - he can only exist in an environment where he has complete control, his column. And that's fine - I really don't want to talk with Nick Coleman; that voice would have made me tune out, even it the studio. But the truth is, "their critics" - the proper word is "customers" and "taxpayers" - were indeed there, and we wanted a conversation. Emphasis on the past tense.

Second: Wiley's comment was downright strange; does she really wish we'd "leave them alone?" Conservatives and Republicans have been leaving the inner cities, sick of the hectoring, nagging urban establishment that has one hand ever-deeping in your wallet, while the other slaps you and calls you ugly names, in droves. It's not just bitter little trolls like Nick Coleman - who is becoming the print equivalent of Howard Stern, needing to piss people off more and more to get anyone to notice him. No, it's the institutions, including Education Minnesota itself, which not only leans left (no big news there) but whose members have been bringing a more combative, overt sense of political and social indoctrination into the classroom.

So does Principal Zelma Wiley really want us to just go away? That's part of her school's problem in the first place.

Posted by Mitch at December 20, 2004 10:52 AM | TrackBack
Comments

I've quit engaging people like this, the self-absorbed left-wing intelligentsia. Their reaction when someone disagrees with or even simply questions them is always the same: confused and uncomfortable glances as if the dog had spoken, followed by ever more angry denunciations, followed by airy accusations that the questioner, not them, is behaving angrily and inappropriate.

Well, this is, admittedly, inappropriate: eff 'em. There's no arguing with them. So we'll just have to keep defeating them - at the polls, at the box office, in the ratings, and at the circulation dept. How *is* Strib circulation nowadays?

Posted by: Brian Jones at December 20, 2004 12:53 PM

I think the thing that really separates Jolly Ol' St. Nick (and his ilk) from bloggers is that he can be nasty, take a lickin', remain nasty, take another lickin', and come back still nasty. He may lose every argument on the facts, but he'll be damned if he's gonna let you win the consolation nastiness prize.

Posted by: jdm at December 21, 2004 09:36 AM
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