Category: Favorites – Culture
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Kind Of A Drag
Let’s talk about drag shows. Not the current hot-button politics of the whole genre today. Just the “art form” itself. I don’t care for them. No, not because it involves men cross-dressing. Guys wearing dresses and wigs to play a role? Mitch, please. All the female parts in Shakespeare’s day were played by cross-dressing men.…
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Critical Marksmanship Theory
SCENE: The year is 2028. Mitch BERG has just been sworn in as governor of Minnesota, via a series of happenstances too bizarre to go into. He is speaking to a press conference. BERG: As the first phase of my plan, as promised, I’m directing the state Department of Education to begin mandatory instruction in…
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Expertise
SCENE: Mitch BERG is having a glass of wine at the bar in Whole Foods in Saint Paujl, after a day of vigorous shopping. Lost in the reverie, he doesn’t notice Avery LIBRELLE has walked in. LIBRELLE: Merg! BERG: Oh, shhhhhuuuure enough, it’s Avery. Long time no see. What’s u.. LIBRELLE: Marsha Blackburn asked Ketanji…
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The First Of Many Wavings Of The Bloody Shirt
I don’t disagree with any of the particulars of the National Review’s editorial about January 6: There is no defense for what the mob did that day. None. The people have a right to form loud, angry crowds to petition and protest their government. They need not do so in ways that are pleasant or…
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What’s Swedish For Omertá?
When people can’t trust the “Justice” system, they create their own. From Irish cops to legends of The Godfather and Goodfellas and The Sopranos to the various warlords and cartels of Central America (and what is a cartel but a warlord with a product people want to buy?), the long legacy of people, even in…
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I Think I Figured It Out
An allegory in three acts: Act 1 SCENE: An elementary school classroom.BULLY is sitting at the desk next to KID. A half dozen pencils lie strewn about the floor around KID’s desk. BULLY: Throws a pencil at KID. KID looks annoyed, but shakes it off. BULLY: (Sotto Voce) Hey, kid! (KID looks over as BULLY…
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Urban Progressive Privilege: In Which I Defend A Cake-Eating Private School
Around the time of the Chauvin verdict, and in the wake of the Brooklyn Center shooting, a group of students at posh Creti\-Derham Hall – a private Catholic school in Saint Paul – held a walkout. Now, that’s fine. It’s a foreign concept to me, of course – in my day, at my high school,…
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Breaking News: Retreat
According to a very reliable source, a Minneapolis police officer reports that all Minneapolis police have been moved out of the Third Precinct to the Fourth, and told to “sit tight, do nothing”. And the police are – according to my source’s source – “pissed”.
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Declaring The Causes That Impel Us
We’re into month two of the “State of Emergency” in Minnesota. Let’s stipulate in advance – government does have emergency powers, and should have them, at least as a broad concept. One of government’s few genuinely legitimate roles is to exert its power to react to things that are beyond the power of the individual,…
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Crowd Psychology
Imagine this: It’s the middle of June, 1940. Germany has just conquered all of Europe. The British have just withdrawn their army from the continent, in a miraculous evacuation that was the only redeeming note in a catastrophic defeat. The army had left virtually all of its equipment – just about everything heavier than a…
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Little Straw Men
A few weeks ago, I saw the new film adaptation of Louisa May Alcott “Little Women“. I’m told there are seven different versions on film out there – I’ve only seen parts of the 1933 version with Katherine Hepburn, and of course the 1994 version with Winona Ryder (of which the less said, the better).…
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Hollywood Polishes The Cannonball
Some stories shouldn’t need Hollywood to go all, well, Hollywood on them to make them riveting utterly compelling. But they do it anyway. And it’s almost always a massive drag. It’s not a new phenomenon; The Battle of the Bulge was utterly atrocious, seemingly feeling the need to dumb World War 2 down to a…
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One Place That Ain’t Looking Through Me
About a decade back, I heard an interview on All Things Considered with Sarfraz Manzoor, who’d just come out with his book Greetings from Bury Park – his memoir about growing up as a British-Pakistani in Luton, in the Midlands, and getting immersed in Bruce Springsteen’s music. And I think I sat in the garage…
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Open Letter To Those Who Just Don’t Get It Yet
To: Some Of You Trump Opponents Out There From: Mitch Berg, Ornery Peasant Re: Terminology Dear Hollywood and New York Showbiz and Media “Elites” As we come up on inauguration day, some of you are still sore about Donald Trump. I get it. I mean, I didn’t vote for him, either. You’d like to pretend…
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Somewhere In Morocco
KAEPERNICK (Staring out of the desert): “Chris Kluwe, you magnificent bastard! I read your book!”
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The Slogan-Based Life
SCENE: Mitch BERG is at a hardware store, shopping for a chainsaw sharpener, when around the corner steps Bud GUNKEL, chairman of the CD2 chapter of “Former Republicans for Ron Paul”. GUNKEL: Hey, Merg. The only way to fix the system is… BERG: …yeah, I heard it. To “withhold your consent from it“. …
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Film Review: “The Overnighters”
I went to the Saint Anthony Main theatre on Friday night for a showing of The Overnighters. It’s a good movie. It’s worth seeing. But it’s more complicated than that. The Punched Social Ticket: In reporting on life and the people in the Square States (aka “Flyover Land”), our culture’s self-appointed elites have a fairly…
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On A Rattlesnake Light Rail ‘cross The Hiawatha Desert
SCENE: It’s 1985. Mitch BERG – just out of college, hair waving in the breeze and his elbow resting on the sill of his open driver’s side window – barrels down North Dakota Highway 200 at 85 miles per hour in his 1973 Chevy Monte Carlo. Over the deafening racket of his small-block 350 engine (whose…
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This Hard Land
Note to all you folks thinking of moving to North Dakota to start cashing in on the oil boom: North Dakota is cold. There aren’t a lot of trees. And outside of the eight or nine significant-sized cities (Fargo, Grand Forks, Jamestown, Devil’s Lake, Bismark/Mandan, Minot, Williston, Dickinson, and maybe Valley City), there just aren’t a…
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Tragedy On A Dimmer Switch
The nation wracks itself in grief – justifably – over the deaths of 20-odd children in Connecticut. I’d shudder to meet the monsters that don’t recoil in horror and outrage. I’m struck, though, by the lack of outrage over the carnage in President Obama’s home town, the town run by the machine that put him…
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Stay Hard, Stay Hungry, Stay Alive If You Can
I got an email from MPR the other day. It was actually a combo email from MPR News and “The Current” asking what song we thought best summed up the state of the nation during this election season. I wrote back with my suggestion – a song that has layer upon layer of significance to…
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Art Of Valor
I went with the Morrisseys to see “Act Of Valor” last Saturday. You’ve probably heard about it; it’s the movie ostensibly about Navy SEALs starring, well, Navy SEALs. The film’s gotten mixed reviews from the usual film-critic suspects. Some point to the quality of the acting (while there are a few C-list actors playing terrorists,…
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The Conductor
It was a chilly, rainy night in March of 1983. I had a horrible cold – but no matter. I was standing on a riser in a tumbledown little church in Pendelton, Oregon, with 69 or so other college kids. And by this time in the tour, cooped up on buses for day after…
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The Gender Ghetto, Part II
Yesterday, we noted that critics like Kay Hymowitz are noticing young men today are “angry”. They attribute it to the usual dog’s breakfast of feminist conceits; the young men are a little misogynistic, a little bit childish, a little bit full of inchoate rage over “poliitcal correctness” and changing gender roles. I pointed out that…