Paranoia Strikes...Shallow

I've been softpedalling the fisking of Nick Coleman's Strib column lately, partly to leave material for other local bloggers, partly because the exercise starts to feel almost ritualistic after a while. Answer the faulty facts; debunk the inflammatory statement; illuminate the illogical leap; undercut the ponderous finish; break for breakfast. Yawn.

But I read this bit this morning, and figured it was worth a quick pass.

Coleman is "reporting" about the shootings in North Minneapolis. If you aren't from the Twin Cities - or are a particularly myopic columnist - North Minneapolis is one of the two or three most blighted, crime-ridden neighborhoods in the Twin Cities. Two generations of "Urban Renewal", freeway construction, and welfare-state warehousing of the poor have devastated the North Side (along with Phillips in South Minneapolis, and a fair chunk of central Saint Paul.

This next graf appears near the end of the piece - which theretofore seemed to stay somewhere within shouting distance of sane. I add emphases:

People who have vested interests in keeping mentions of a crisis down to a low whisper don't like loose talk in which "Minneapolis" and "Iraq" are used in the same sentence. Others, who are the enemies of the inner city, point smugly to blood in a restaurant as proof that the city is a lost cause. Both approaches leave the city at risk.

Only one paragraph - and yet a whole world of fisking.

• "Vested Interests" in keeping talk about North Minneapolis to a whisper? Really? What "vested" interest is Coleman suggesting? That there is a segment of society that benefits from crime in North Minneapolis? What, is Halliburton trying to build a pipeline down Plymouth Avenue? Perhaps the ace reporter could elaborate.
• "Crisis"? Crisis implies some sort of acute explosion in the situation. North Minneapolis, sorry to say, has been a hellhole for decades. When I moved to the Twin Cities, it was a combat zone. When my old colleague, the late John McDougal, covered it for Channel Five in the late sixties, it was a tough, dangerous neighborhood - the only time McDougal ever carried a gun on the job, he said. When my ex-father-in-law was growing up there, it was gangland. And the Best Steak House shooting, as brutal and senseless as it was, was hardly the first - or the hundredth - such murder on the North Side in recent memory. I remember in the mid-eighties, when Minneapolis was first getting introduced to west-coast-style gangs, talking with the cops that had to respond to the first of the city's senseless, moronic gang shootings. Those were the days when it seemed that the safest place to be during a gang fight was the shooter's target, and the most dangerous was the innocent bystander, 45 degrees off the putative line of fire. I remember a pre-teen boy sitting in an apartment half a block to the side of a pointless gang shootout getting shot and paralyzed while sitting and watching TV. The question, then, is at what point does a "crisis" become the state of being? Because North Minneapolis must be there.
• "Minneapolis and Iraq in the same sentence?" Huh? What lunacy is this? North Minneapolis is stricken with dead-ender holdouts of a deposed, genocidal regime? Sharon Sayles-Belton's die-hard supporters won't let the last mayoral election go? How on earth does this doddering fool draw this kind of parallel?
• "Enemies of the city?" As if people don't have a right to look at a social experiment gone horribly wrong and say "I don't want this?" We do have that right, don't we?

It's not an idle question to me. While Nick Coleman sits making smug pronouncements from his upscale Crocus Hill neighborhood, I live in the Midway. I've patched bullet holes in my walls (three of them, from a scary night in 1998), chased thieves, staked out my alleys and taken down license plates with my neighbors, and on one horrible night about eight years ago, held my kids and answered their frightened questions when the news of the murder of a toddler in a gang-related shooting, scant blocks from our house, came on the TV.

Enemies of the city? No, Nick. That's people like you; people who want to condemn city residents to the same miserable schools, the same dehumanizing entitlement machine, the same racism of low expectations that has given us the North Side and Phillips and Frogtown that we have today.

Posted by Mitch at March 11, 2005 12:39 PM | TrackBack