“We’ll be pushing up to the gate now. Thanks for flying Big Sky airlines, and on behalf of co-pilot Hank Bjornson and stewardess Gladys Tostengaard, I’d like to welcome you to Fargo“. The disembodied voice of the pilot sounded flat but crisp over the tinny loudspeakers.

“Wow, I thought…” she started, unwrapping her hand from its death grip on my wrist.

“…Praise Jesus“.

She stopped. “Did he just say “Praise Jesus?””

I cocked an eyebrow. “I dunno. That’s what it sounded like”.

She slowly unbuckled her seatbelt. “Wow. So do people talk like that out here…?

“Not usually”, I replied, climbing up and offering her my hand to climb out of the seat. “People out here are pretty much like people everywhere”, I said, reaching into the overhead rack to grab our carryons.

“Well, I’m tempted to hope so”, she said, putting her sunglasses on. “That flight in was turbulent as hell”.

I chuckled. “Nah”. I banished the thought from my head, and set about getting us out of the cramped 737.

As we climbed down the ladder to the tarmac, she took my arm. “Mitch”, she said, cocking her sunglasses up onto her forehead to push back her curly brown bangs, “thanks for taking me out here. It felt weird knowing you this long and not having ever seen where you’re from”.

I smiled. “My pleasure!” I said. We shared a kiss as we walked through the door into the Hector Field terminal.

A woman in a bonnet and a plain brown peasant dress stared bullets at us, her plain, un-made-up face creased with lines of anger and hate among the more mundane wrinkles. I filed that thought away for later, too.

———-

We needed to rent a car for the drive to my parents’ place, two hours west of Fargo on I94. We walked into the “Midwest Rent-O” office, at the west end of the Hector terminal. The desk was unmanned. I rang the “service” bell.

Nothing.

I rang it again.

“Wow. Slow…” Marisa started staying, stopping abruptly when a doughy man whose ratty, grease-and-mustard spotted dress shirt barely stretched to cover the spare tire around his waist, with half-hearted blond hair for whom receding was probably a merciful death, slouched into the room from the back office.

“Hullo”, he muttered.

“We’d like to rent a car for two days”.

He rolled his eyes, looking almost irritated. “Oh Kay”, he said, leaning on the “oh” hard enough to make the underlying meaning crystal clear. He walked across the room, grabbing a small stack of forms, walking back to the counter, and then walking back to grab another form he’d apparently forgotten.

“What kind of car?” he asked halfheartedly, as he shuffled his papers and pencils with a great ruffling and grunting.

“Oooh,”, Marisa piped up, smiling, “let’s rent a Jaguar!”

It would be cool having my old friends in Jamestown seeing me in a Jag with a movie star…

“…we don’t rent Jap cars”, the guy behind the counter countered, his voice clipped, his lip curling with muted anger.

“Er – Jaguar is…”, I started – but he didn’t look too interested in talking car trivia. “Look, what can we…”

“And we don’t have any low-riders for your little wetback beaner hootchie, either”, he said, pointing at Marisa.

“I beg your pardon?” she said, rearing figuratively up on her hind legs, “I am Italian American“.

“Whatever. We need two forms of ID. Three if you’re an immigrant”, he said, his speech getting more rushed, almost like he was an an anger high.

“No, man, she’s from New York“, I said, willing my voice to stay calm as I tried to reason with this…man. “And I’m originally from Jamestown“, I added, hoping he’d get the local reference, “not that you couldn’t tell by the accent”, I said, a hopeful smile crossing my face, hoping it’d be catchy.

“Yeah, whatever. People from Jamestown keep moving here taking our jobs. Should send them back where they came from, too…”

“OK – how about an Olds…”

“I’ll give you a Buick Skylark” he said with the finality, like a komissar telling a kulak it was his way or the highway.

I nodded my head. Anything to get out of this dump, I thought.

“A Skylark sounds great”.

I rolled my eyes at Marisa, and reached my hand around her waist, pulling her close. “It gets better. Honest!”

She kissed me. “I believe it”, she whispered. “You came from here”.

“You and seniorita wanna get a f*****g room?”, the doughy man yelled as he bent over the file of cars, his shirt pulling out to reveal an acne-riddled plumber’s crack that might have hidden the Jag Marisa wanted.

———-

My parents weren’t expecting us for another day. We drove the Skylark out to a little Bed and Breakfast in the valley of the Sheyenne River, on the edge of the little town of LaMoure, about sixty miles west-southwest of Fargo.

We drove through the little towns along North Dakota One – desolate little towns where farming hadn’t paid the bills in years. Women in peasant dresses and bonnets, faces lined with worry and scowl lines, tending broods of dirty children, watched from the porches. The menfolk, mostly idled for years by the farm market collapse, mostly stood around by the doorways of the ratty-looking bars, holding cans of beer and bibles, staring us down. Other men – mostly the younger ones – wandered around with hunting rifles and revolvers shooting at signs and vacant buildings and occasional small animals. I bit my tongue; these once-proud men had started out just like me, in towns just like mine. But somewhere along the way…

“This is almost spooky”, Marisa said, peering out at the umpteenth scolding gaze. She was tired from the flight.

“Take a nap. I’ll wake you up when we get there”

“You sure?” she asked, leaning her head against my shoulder.

I nodded. In a few minutes she was softly snoring.

The radio was on a station from Winnipeg. They were playing the Corries, a Scottish folk group. I listened to the lyrics:

Flower of Scotland,
When will we see
Your likes again,
That fought and died for,
Your wee bit Hill and Glen,
And stood against them,
Proud Edward’s Army,
And sent them homeward,
Tae think again.

The Hills are bare now,
And Autumn leaves
lie thick and still,
O’er land that is lost now,
Which those so dearly held,
That stood against them,
Proud Edward’s Army,
And sent them homeward,
Tae think again.

I sang quietly along on the next verse – almost a lullaby, I thought, as Marisa snuggled into my shoulder. But yet so far from one:

Those days are past now,
And in the past
they must remain,
But we can still rise now,
And be a nation again,
That stood against them,
Proud Edward’s Army,
And sent them homeward,
Tae think again.

0 Flower of Scotland,
When will we see
your likes again,
That fought and died for,
Your wee bit o’ Hill and Glen,
And stood against them,
Proud Edward’s Army,
And sent them homeward,
Tae think again.

I looked around at my once-proud, once-prosperous home state, and felt a chill go up my spine.

An angry chill.

I shook it off and kept driving.

———-

We pulled into LaMoure and drove up to the B’nB around 2PM. A plump older lady and her stooped, seventy-something husband came out and helped us haul our stuff into the B’nB – a converted Edwardian-era house that had once belonged to a bonanza farmer. The current owners had lovingly restored it over the past decade. The place had four guest rooms. It was a beautiful place.

I slung my bag – an old Dutch navy-surplus duffel bag I’d picked up in Cote D’Ivoire during that egregious misadventure that I knew I’d never dare tell Marisa about – and led her up the hallway to the room. The owner gave me a key, eyed Marisa suspiciously and left without a word.

As I unlocked the door, I noticed the other room across the hall had its door ajar. I paused, listening:

Just you and me, baby. They can’t beat US. We’ll take ’em. You’ll never let me down. You’ll never let me down”.

I stole a glimpse through the jarred door. An obese forty-something man with a Billy Gibbons beard lay on the bed, sleep-talking loudly, his arms wrapped around a World War I vintage M1903 Springfield rifle.

“Is that saliva?” Marisa asked,referring to the moist glint around the end of the barrel, next to the guy’s mouth.

“God, I hope so”.

The door to room three opened. A youngish, African-American couple poked their heads out. “Hey – are you two from around here?”

“It’s a long story”, I said, thinking better of trying to explain my history. “Not really”.

“What’s with these people around this town – hell, everywhere we’ve been in the Midwest lately?” the man asked. He was an attractive, articulate fellow with an accent that bespoke plenty of higher education. “The guns, the anger about the economy, the fundamentalism, the bigotry…”

“For the first time in my life” said the woman, an equally-attractive woman, “I’m not proud to be an American”.

“Well…” I started as I unlocked the door, non-plussed and unsure of how to answer at all, much less defend a home state I barely recognized myself, “give it time. Things’ll change”.

They shut the door.

We stepped into the room. I started putting my stuff in the closet. “Jeez, they say you can never go home again, but this place just seems so wierd. Like, we stepped into a production of “Our Town” that nobody ever called “Cut” for…”

I heard the water start in the bathtub.

“But I promise, it’s not all this weird…”

I felt something brushing against neck – soft fabric. I looked down. It was Marisa’s blouse, wrapped around me from behind, pulling me backward.

“So are you gonna give me a sociology lesson?” she whispered in my ear – a phrase that I’d have never figured would sound suggestive up until then.

You live and learn.

———–

Knock knock.

“Get the door, hon”, she mumbled,half-asleep.

I pulled on a pair of running shorts and looked at the clock. 7PM, I thought. Wow.

And then who on earth would be knocking on my door here, a hundred miles from the edge of nowhere? “Just a minute” I said, as I fished my SIG P220 out of my suitcase. I quietly pulled the slide back; the .45 cartridge was seated in the chamber.

Good.

I held the pistol at the ready behind my leg as I opened the door…

…and relaxed as the familiar face glared impatiently at me.

“Добрый вечер, Михаил Павлович!”, Yevgenii Batiukh muttered through clenched teeth. A young woman – early twenty-something, Filipina in appearance, dressed stylishly and wearing very non-North-Dakotan stiletto heels, stood next to him.

“Здравствуйте, Евгений Борисович! Почему Вы здесь? Для того, что я в долгу удовольствие?”, I asked – and he really was the last person I’d expected to meet in a B’nB in a little town in North Dakota in 1999, truth be told.

“I hef bain praktising my Eenglish”, he said thickly. “Meets please my girlfrient, Marta Carlosovna Balakanang”

“Magandang gabi po“, I said, nodding politely, hoping I wasn’t mangling my Tagalog too badly – it’d been years.

“Oh, Mista Berg – good evening to you, too!”, she said with a smile, in English that had only the faintest burr of a Philipino accent.

“Who’s there, hon?” Marisa asked from under the covers.

“Oh, you remember my friend, Gene the Crazy Ukrainian Enforcer? The one I told you about? He’s here with his girlfriend Marta”, I looked at Yevgenii and nodded at Marta.

“Oh!”, she answered, shaking fatigue from her voice, “cool!  Hi, Gene”, she said.  “Mitch has told me so much about you”.  She reached out from under the covers to start finding her clothes. “Gimme a minute!”

“Eez Plezha”, he responded.

“To what do I owe the honor, Yevgenii Borisovich?”

“Well, ees not oll plezhoore”, he said, lingering over each word like it was a sloppy cherry Varenikh. “Een fact, I vas soorprized to see you rezhistered here. Eez coincidence! But Mikhail…” he said, nodding conspiratorially, “Ve heff to talk”.

“Meet me at ze Better Days Bar, on Main Strit, in heff an hour”.

———-

Half an hour later, Marisa and I walked down a decrepit but well-maintained side street, as darkness gathered.

Suddenly, she pulled on my arm. “Look”, she said, sounding alarmed.

In front of a house – 210 Second Avenue – stood a cross. A man in a grease-spotted wife-beater with a holstered revolver was wrapping it with turpentine-soaked rags.

I shook my head to try to clear the vision from my mind – but it was real. I walked over to the guy.

“Sir – are you gonna burn this cross?”

“Hail, Yeeeah”, said the guy. “Gotta teach them thar furriners and japs and Ay-Rabs that we ain’t gunna surrender”. He grinned a mirthless grin.

“Mitch”, Marisa whispered, “look!”.

Next door, at 208, the neighbors – a man in a “WWJD” t-shirt, his wife in a bonnet and a peasant dress, and their kids, gamboling about in joy, were wrapping gas-soaked rags around a ten foot tall wooden Star of David.

“Wow”, I thought as we started walking down the street. “Swear, hon – I’ve never seen anything like this before. I lived here over twenty years, and…”

“Mitch!”, she said again, pointing across the street to 207 – where a hawk-faced woman in a bonnet and peasant dress wrapped a kerosene-soaked sheet around a large wooden crescent – the symbol of Islam.She noticed us, and grinned a venal, toothless grin. “Yieeew-all gunna stay fer the cross-burnin’ festival?” she said with a shrill Arklahoma drawl.

“Maybe”, I said, moving along, nodding as I grabbed Marisa’s hand.

The woman abruptly turned and drew a Colt Peacemaker from under her skirt, firing three shots into the air. Marisa flinched.

“Zebulon? Jedediah? Ezekiel! Dinnertime!”

I struggled to take it all in. The woman’s neighbors over in 205 – a paunchy, overall-clad man wearing a seed cap – was pouring a can of gasoline on a big wooden mockup of a Klansman’s hood.

“Sir”, I yelled to him from the sidewalk as we shuffled down the streeet – “you’re burning a Klan hood?”

“Outsahders is outsahders”, he muttered without looking at us as he continued working.

Marisa tugged my sleeve,and pointed to 203, where a group of drunken, mulletted, wife-beater-clad louts was putting the finishing touches on a huge wooden leprechaun, with a fierce, red, drunken, belligerent caricature of an Irish face and big hands clutching a big bottle of whiskey fabricated from a single elm tree stump. One man poured benzine on the wooden statue.

“I have to say”, Marisa nodded, “that, moral aspects aside, the woodworking is amazing“.

“Yeah”, I nodded, eyeing the huge Golden Gopher being rigged with dynamite across the street at 202.

Finally we turned onto LaMoure’s dirty, ratty main street, and walked to the Better Days bar, a little roadhouse that advertised “Eats”, “Beer” and “TV”.

A group of sullen men – teens through the sixties, mostly in flannel shirts and seed caps – sat on benches on the cracked sidewalk, mounds of crushed Shaefer cans piled up around them, as we walked past. They hushed as we got close, and eyed us wordlessly as we walked in.

The bar smelled of cigarette smoke and vomit. Two tables of fat, doughy people in seed caps and quilted jackets sat, wordlessly eyeing their beer; at another table, a man was cleaning a disassembled hunting rifle as two shot glasses of brown liquor jiggled in front of him. Behind the bar the usual assortment of trinkets, bottles and glasses clashed artlessly; a poster declared “Jesus Saves. You Spend”. A George Jones song played on a wan jukebox in the background.

As we walked to the bar, Yevgenii and Marta walked in. “Mikhail! I heff forst rount!”

He turned to the barkeep, a doughy, malevolent-looking man wearing a “Cheaper Crude or No More Food” T-shirt over a slowly-undulating paunch that almost-completely covered a holstered .38 revolver. “Two wodkas, and two glasses of vite vine!”

“Wodka?”, said the barkeep, a malevolent scowl crawling across his wrinkled face. “WOD-ka?”

The bar got even quieter.

“You some kinda FAY-gut?” he said in the same Arklahoma accent that everyone else seemed to be affecting, looking at Yevgenii, whose bonhomie was rapidly bidding him au revoir – and I knew how dangerous that could be.

“Er, hey, bud – nah. He’s from…”, I thought, measuring my words, “Canada. Canadian. Hey – two Buds, and two Bud Lights for the ladies – and ya wanna get us some peanuts and chips?”

He shuffled away to fill the order. A disembodied older male voice muttered, sotto voce, in the background “This country was a lot nicer before we started tradin’ with them Ay-rabs and Wetbacks, and them and the Jieeews started runnin’ the place“.

I looked; a table full of doughy old men sat, eyeing us.

Yevgenii and I led the ladies to a table in the corner by the front; we sat with our backs to the wall.

“Mikhail Pavlovich – Ve came here to get aVAY vrum eet all”, Yevgenii started out, looking puzzled. “Vat is VIT zese peepel?”

“I don’t know. This place used to be – civil. Civilized. A typical small town, in a typical American part of the country, full of people with the same mix of human imperfections and dreams of improving themselves as every other place in the country – hell, the world“, I said, taking a drag off the Budweiser.

“Zo vot heppened?”, Yevgenii asked, focusing intently on a small group of young, wife-beater-clad toughs who’d come in the back door. “Eez like…”

“Like an Ingemah Bugman film”, Marta interjected, not touching her Bud Light.

“No”, Marisa said, her eyes lighting up with a sudden realization. “A David Lynch production”.

Damn, I thought. Maybe that was it.

“Yevgenii – I think that’s it! I think I know what’s happened! The stereotypical Arklahoma accents, the odd behavior, the sense that the whole town is keeping some deep dark secret…”

“Vot?” Yevgenii started – before the sound of breaking glass drew our attention.

Oh, crap.

One of the local toughs was sauntering over to us, a broken beer bottle in his hand. “Ah think we got oarselves a bunch of Fay-guts and Imm-uh-grunts heer”, said the man – average height, with a red mullet tamped down by a green seed cap, stocky in the way that people get when they start slinging hay bales at age eight. His two friends sauntered behind him, carrying pool cues even though the bar had no pool table. Two of the doughy men from the back table rose to join them. “Jee-zuz don’t like fay-guts and imm-uhgrunts”, he said. “I betcha y’all are Moozlems“.
“Left”, I muttered. Yevgenii nodded. “Hey, fellas”, I said. “Howzabout I get you guys a drink. On me”, I said, standing up, digging in my pocket as if for my wallet.

“We don’t want your faw…” he started, abruptly taking a swing at me. I slipped aside, turning his momentum against him and slinging him face-first into the wall behind me, as Marisa and Marta screamed and shuffled backward. I quickly twisted his arm behind his back until I heard a “snap”, and kicked him hard in the ribs to keep him down.

Yevgenii sprang like a coiled cobra at the man on the left, feinting and drawing his block away with his left hand before smashing him in the face with his Bud bottle.

Marta leapt to her feet, and snapped a pair of nunchucks from her purse, neatly smacking the third tough in the face, sending him sprawling over a bar stool.

I heard a metallic snick as I turned. One of the doughy guys who’d come up from the back table was drawing and cocking a Ruger Redhawk, lifting it toward my head, its .357 inch bore looking more like 35.7 inches from this angle…

…when the man screamed in pain and slumped forward, the pistol discharging into the floor in a geyser of sawdust and wood splinters; Marisa had kicked him in the giblets. I sprang forward, kicking him in the face, sending him sprawling backward as teeth and blood spewed from his mouth. He fell like a sack of durum to the floor. I stomped hard on his pistol hand as I drew my own piece to cover the rest of the people in the bar. Yevgenii, his own silenced Makarov drawn from under his jacket, moved silently, his eyes fierce and bright and calculating, toward the remaining table of sitting people. “No vitnesses, da?”

“No!…NYET!” I yelled. He instantly averted his pistol upward from the first man’s temple. “Vy?”

“It’s not their fault – I know why this is going on. C’mon! Get them outta here”, I motioned toward Marta and Marisa, “I’ll cover. Meet me at your car!”

Yevgenii led the way out of the bar, pistol at the ready, as I covered the bar with my SIG. When they’d left, I fished a $20 out of my pocket. “This should cover the beer, the chips and a tip”, I said as the four men groaned in pain on the floor in the otherwise silent bar. I backed out to the street, and ran toward Yevgenii’s rented Cherokee.

“Get out on the highway to the west – now!”

We drove past groups of people, slowly shambling their way out of town to the west – men in mullets and wife-beaters, women in bonnets and peasant dresses, diaperless children in greasy t-shirts trailing behind them. “I knew it!”

Yevgenii spun the wheel, and we turned onto a two-lane road across the flat prairie as the last streaks of sunlight in the west turned the sky a blood-hued purple.

“Zo – vot?” Yevgenii demanded, the adrenaline slowly subsiding.

“Mitch?” Marisa whispered, looking a little dizzy as her own adrenaline rush faded.

“There’s an old Coast Guard “Omega” navigation transmitter outside town”, I started. “It’s a huge old thing, a huge array of towers, from the sixties or seventies, designed to send a signal around the globe so ships and planes could navigate. It was so powerful it interfered with wildlife’s natural homing instincts, and could fry ducks out of the sky if they flew too near. Satellites made it obsolete, so it was decommiissioned in the early nineties. But…” I started – and saw the aircraft beacons at the top of the array of 600-foot-tall antennae, “if someone were to have taken them over, and run some sort of electromagnetic mind-control system…”

“…like ve – ze Sovietz – vur dewelopeeng”, Yevgenii interjected soberly.

“Exactly. The old “Коллективные мозга…”, I stopped and corrected myself, “‘Collective Brain’ system!”

Yevgenii’s face flashed recognition. “Da. Ze system vas zuppozed to make prrropagahnda obzoleet, by controllingk za peoplez minds by remote control…”

“Jeez”, I muttered. It was all coming together now. “The Russians’ – er, Soviets’ experiment failed because they never had the transmitter power at the right frequency to actually trigger the psychochemical reaction outside the lab. But with Omega…the transmitters have enough power at the right frequency to cover all of Middle America”. I calculated the numbers in my head. “Like, there’s enough power here to cover the whole country, from the Poconos to the Sierra Madre…”

I paused to let that sink in for a moment. “Someone is turning Middle America into a David-Lynch-style Hollywood caricature of Middle American life”.
“Ve heff to do someting”, Yevgenii muttered. Our eyes locked for a shaved moment. We both knew what that was going to have to be.

And it was gonna be ugly.

———-

We drove another few miles, past small knots of people sauntering to the west, toward the lights in the sky. Yevgenii finally doused the lights, and we whipped into a shelterbelt.

“Stay here”, I told Marta and Marisa. I thought about giving them the SIG, just in case, when Marta pulled a Smith and Wesson Model 29 – with the eleven-inch barrel – from her purse. My jaw must have dropped; Yevgenii explained “Zey ver free vit a full of gaz at ze WalMart in Wahpeton…”

We camouflaged the Cherokee with fallen branches, and then moved to the west edge of the shelter belt. There were lights on, and the Omega base complex was humming with activity.

Odd, since the base had been closed for most of a decade.

I nodded to Yevgenii, and we set out toward the cyclone fence that surrounded the complex. I hacked through both layers with my jackknife – and we were inside, moving swiftly and silently.

I heard voices. We froze and took cover behind a fold in the ground. Two men, dressed in all-black Soviet-pattern battledress with black ski masks and goggles, walked toward us – the outline of the curved “banana-clip” magazine of their AK-74s unmistakeable in the ambient light from the tower lights.

“음, 베이컨!” said the leader of the two men in a harsh, North Korean accent.

They both lit cigarettes. Perfect.

I signalled Yevgenii, who nodded curtly and took careful aim.

Silently, I slipped behind the trailing man; he’d just blown his night-vision to hell, lighting up the cigarette. Amateur flub, for a pro, I figured. Oh, well.

I slipped silently behind him, grabbed him around the head as I kicked his legs out from under him, and hacked at his neck with my jackknife. He struggled for a shaved moment, and then slumped to the ground, blood geysering and then ebbing. His leader was already splayed out on the sod, two 8mm entry wounds where the bridge of his nose had been. I nodded approvingly at Batiukh; for an older guy, he still had the eyes and the reflexes.

We grabbed the guards’ AKs and a few extra magazines, and set off toward the center of the compound, the concrete Control Bunker. Hunkered down, we alternated between creeping forward and covering each other.

We got into the shadow of a generator building – the last stop before the control bunker – and looked around, taking stock. We counted at least six more guards with rifles – and we knew there were more where they came from, noticing the two-story barracks block across the way. A couple of black Chevy Suburbans sat in front of the control block.

“Cover”, Batiukh hissed, signalling me that he was going in…

…until I grabbed him. There was a car coming. Batiukh held up, as the lights of another black Suburban bounced into view.

The truck ground to a halt in front of the control bunker. Two Koreans got out first, scanning the area. Then, two more men – middle eastern, I noticed, mildly incredulous – got out, pulling a handcuffed, middle-aged caucasian man. He looked familiar…

“Devvid Leench”, Batiukh hissed.

Damn, I thought. A bunch of North Koreans are in the middle of North Dakota, holding oddball American auteur David Lynch, of Twin Peaks, Blue Velvet and Dune fame, hostage?

I was right!

“Cover me”, I hissed at Yevgenii as the five men walked into the bunker. He switched to the AK – no time for subtlety now.

I got up, and dashed through the scattered shadows, silently approaching the entrance. As I got within ten feet, a guard came out, his rifle slung.

Sucks to be you, I thought, planting the knife squarely in the center of his throat. He slumped to the ground, and I moved into the entry tunnel; I sensed more than saw Batiukh moving up to cover behind me.

I slung the AK, and drew the SIG as I walked down the access hallway, signalling for Batiukh to make sure nobody came through the door behind me.

A sign above the hallway said “Control Room”. I silently slipped to the edge of the door, and peered around the corner. Two Korean guards stood watching the center of the room; one of the middle-eastern men held a gun on Lynch, while the other undid his handcuffs.

“So now you put Blue Velvet in the demoduplexor”, said the man with the gun, “and I will turn the mechanism on”. Stressing the last syllable of each sentence – Iranian. What the…?

And Blue Velvet...?

This was getting serious. Middle Amerrica was about thirty minutes away from morphing from hackneyed urbanite cliche to overwrought and psychodramatic.
I shifted the SIG to my left hand, and took my jackknife in the right. I silently sized up my aim, said a quick prayer, and threw it.

It stuck firmly in the back of the Iranian gunman’s head. He slumped to the floor. The Koreans hesitated for just a second, shocked. It was all I needed; I slid on my back across the linoleum into the room, double-tapping them both. They slid to the floor, a slick of gore on the wall behind them.

The final Iranian – the apparent leader – ducked behind a stack of transmitter gear. “You will never catch me,” he yelled.

“A cigarette”.

Lynch had spoken.

“Huh?” asked the Iranian, as I wondered about the same thing.

“Lush pomegranate smoke”, he said in an affected British accent.

Whaaaa?

The Iranian stepped out from behind the stack of transmitters. “What you say, it make no sense…”

I opened up with the AK, firing all thirty rounds in one long burst, just to clear the conceptual dissonance from my mind in one long cathartic release of tension and ammunition. The Iranian fell to the ground.

“I…never…understood…Blue…Vel…”, he said, before gurgling to a stop, dead.

“Gets them every time”, Lynch said with an enigmatic smile, dancing a wee jig.

I shook my head to clear yet more dissonance, and walked to a VCR player that was attached to a piece of equipment.

“It was playing “Twin Peaks” through the demoduplexor”, Lynch recited in a drab monotone. “The demoduplexor was attached to the transmitter. It was thus affecting the minds of everyone in the middle of the United States – simultaneously hypnotizing them into becoming adjuncts of my concept.” He stopped, then grinned cryptically. “Pretty cool”.

I hit the big red “Emergency Off” button – and with a clanking and rattling, the huge old transmitter shut down.

“They were summoning the locals to do their will”, Lynch said.

“That’d explain everyone that was slowly walking this way like a bunch of zombies”, I mused, riffling through a pile of documents that the Iranian had dropped.

“They should all be OK now”, Lynch said in a Hindu accent.

Yevgenii Batiukh backed into the room. “Come here and look”, he yelled, leading me to the door of the bunker.

From around the facility perimeter, rifles twinkled as the Korean guards fled under a heavy, accurate fire from the locals, who, freed from the mind-control beams, realized the danger that faced their families and their nation, drew hunting rifles from the backs of their pickups, and attacked, taking a heavy toll from the fleeing guards.

In ten minutes, it was over. The locals – shaking the last of the delirium clear from their heads – walked back home to nurse the mother of all psychic hangovers. Marisa, Marta, Yevgenii, Micheal Lynch and I stood in the shadow of the Omega transmitter.

“I, and all of American civilization, owes you my and our lives, respectively” Lynch sang to the tune of a New Bedford whaler’s chanty. “Please accept this as a token of my regard”.

He handed me a Raggedy Ann doll. It had had a pencil stuck through the back of its head. In place of blood was yellow Play-Doh.

“Um – thanks”. I turned to Yevgenii. “I’m trying to figure this out. This operation had Korean muscle and Iranian brains – but most of these documents are in…”

I riffled through a small stack of them, “…Hungarian”.

“Odd”, Yevgenii said. “What are they about?”

“Not sure”, I said – my Hungarian was rusty. “Something about ‘buying mind control on the cheap’? I have no idea”.

In the distance, a siren wailed – probably the county sheriff coming to investigate. Time to get out of here. I pocketed the documents, and we got into the Jeep and drove back to the hotel.

The proprietors met us at the door. “Know what happened to that there nice couple from Chicago?” the woman asked. “They seem to have taken off. Ya, sure – you bet”.

She said it in that “Fargo” accent. The Arklahoma accents were gone! My home is full of real people instead of Hollywood cliches again!

“Crap”, I said. “So the only idea those two will ever have about life in Middle America is that everyone acts like extras in a David Lynch movie, like they’re rotely reciting characterizations from Twin Peaks. Nothing but alarmist, slanderous cliches.” I shook my head. “What a shame”.

“Da”, Yevgenii said. “Good ting he’s not in government!”

I smiled. “Yeah. Whew!”

UPDATE: I’m informed that video shows I was a Human Factors guy at a local network engineering company in 1999. I misspoke – and I am sorry that you simpletons are all bitter about it.

You’ve got to do a “Bride of Indoctrinate U“. The University of Saint Thomas’ shenanigans could make a dandy centerpiece to your next installment on PC run amok on campus.

Katherine Kersten covered a lot of the same territory in her column today that Ed and I went over with Katie Kieffer on the NARN show on Saturday (check out the audio here):

For almost two months, St. Thomas’ Students for Human Life organization looked forward to sponsoring Parker’s planned appearance on campus April 21. Her fee was to be split by the St. Thomas Standard, a conservative student newspaper, and the Young America’s Foundation, a Herndon, Va., group that brings conservative speakers and ideas to college campuses.

YAF is, of course, overtly conservative.

Students for Human Life applied to the university’s Student Life Committee for a campus site where Parker could speak. But the committee turned thumbs down. Star Parker, it seems, was not welcome at St. Thomas.

Katie Kieffer, an alumna who helped plan Parker’s visit, says that Vice President for Student Affairs Jane Canney, who oversees the committee, blocked the way. “She told me, ‘As long as I’m a vice president at St. Thomas, we will not deal with Young America’s Foundation,'” said Kieffer.

Let’s back up a bit. A couple of years ago, Young America’s Foundation (YAF) brought Ann Coulter to speak at Saint Thomas. It was controversial; there was a lot of foul, inappropriate language.

On the part of lefty hecklers. Coulter may shoot off her mouth (frequently to conservatives’ chagrin, including my own) at times, but she was on excellent behavior at St. Thomas – and pretty well stuck the landing by all accounts. The only embarassment to Saint Thomas came – by all accounts – from the lefties.

But fine – Coulter’s too hot for the University of Saint Thomas to handle. Fair enough.

Star Parker?

Ann Coulter is a well-known firebrand. But Star Parker? What’s the university afraid of if she speaks?

On Friday morning, Hennes did not elaborate on the statement that St. Thomas would refuse to permit any YAF-affiliated speaker to set foot on campus. “We’re not comfortable. It’s that simple,” he said.

Got that? At the U of St. Thomas, speech can be free – as long as the administration is comfortable.

Mr. Hennes? Jane Canney? Father Dennis “Hanoi Denny” Dease? Free speech is supposed to be uncomfortable!

Now – this next bit was the part that made my jaw drop when interviewing Ms.Kieffer last weekend. Hennes (with emphasis added):

“We’re always willing to look at the possibility of collaborating with outside organizations, including YAF,” he said. “If they approach us with another speaker in the future, we’d consider it, but the speaker must be willing to conform with all the things in our contract, including the behavior or ‘subject matter’ clause,” which bars obscenities, racial slurs and other derogatory language.

Pro-life activism on the part of a Afro-American woman “violates the behavior/’subject matter’ clause?”

If it seems like you’ve let slip the surly bonds of reason – well, welcome to Saint Thomas. More in a bit.

Ms. Parker responds:

Parker — president of the Coalition on Urban Renewal and Education and a regular commentator on CNN, Fox News and the BBC — was incredulous at St. Thomas’ initial decision to ban YAF.

“I’ve spoken on over 150 campuses,” she said. “I’ve never been treated like this. Is St. Thomas saying that all conservative speakers are alike? Are they saying that because one conservative speaker said things they don’t like, they won’t deal with any speaker sponsored by YAF?”

“We’ve got to move away from that kind of prejudice and stereotyping,” she said.

Of course, prejudice and stereotyping are part and parcel of life at Saint Thomas.

You might recall last fall, when St. Thomas disinvited Bishop Desmond Tutu from a speech on campus because he “might offend Jews”. (And the reason you might recall it is that the local leftymedia actually deemed it worth covering (prompting cries of “intimidation of liberals” on the relentlessly left-of-center campus). Of course, the school’s president, Father Deese, has shown his commitment to freedom to be even more craven that this in the past; in 2002, when St. Thomas hosted a Cuban baseball team for an exhibition game, Manuel Chaoui defected, Father Dease forbade any Saint Thomas student from helping the young athlete in his sprint for freedom, making fairly ominous threats about what’d happen to any students caught harboring the fugitive from Castro’s worker’s paradise; Dease took the opportunity to shamelessly beg the Cuban government’s forgiveness for the fact that one of their slaves slipped away on his watch.

Ah, but that’s just liberty. When it comes to one of the Catholic Church’s ostensibly-key tenets – the sanctity of life? Ms. Parker’s main topic?

Ed Ed writes over at Hot Air:

Universities used to value intellectual diversity and debate. Catholic universities have a centuries-long tradition of this, in and out of the US, a diversity that includes staging “The Vagina Monologues” at Notre Dame, for example. Dease’s actions to stifle dissent at St. Thomas — and to demand the equivalent of a loyalty oath as a prerequisite to speak one’s mind — are not only un-Catholic, but also un-American and un-academic.

I’d have to wonder what a lefty publication would say if a conservative-leaning university – say, Hillsdale College – were to demand such a speech code of those wanting to speak to their students? (And wonder we must; Hillsdale, like most of the tiny coterie of conservative-leaning college, is much gutsier about free speech than most of American academia today.

He has turned St. Thomas into the Zimbabwe of American universities, most of which have already succumbed to a lesser extent to the stultifying grasp of political correctness.

I thought for a moment about Ed’s statement. Zimbabwe?

And then I thought about the reams of examples from Indoctrinate U – conservative newspapers vandalized; conservative faculty ostracized, denied tenure, and forced to defend their existence; students caught espousing conservative values accused of “threatening” other students (with actual intellectual diversity, apparently)…

…and I have to agree. The deep stupidity of this incident not only stands side by side with the Hall of Fame of academic cowardice in Maloney’s film – but it’s merely the latest of many different but utterly similar lapses in academic integrity and moral courage.

The Twin Cities have much to be ashamed of. And while I’m a Protestant and less familiar with this angle, Ed notes that Catholics have even more reason to be outraged:

If Dease and Canney truly believe that, then both need to find new careers, and the Catholic Church needs to reconsider St. Thomas and its entire administration.

Scott Johnson at Powerline adds:

Dease and Canney are tyrants of the petty bureaucratic variety, but they seem to have inspired a rebellion at St. Thomas:

“I’ve got St. Thomas on my calendar, and I plan to come on April 21,” [Parker] said. “If they won’t let me on campus, I’m willing to talk out on the street.”

Let’s just hope Father Dease and his apparatchiks don’t call in the tanks.

If Star Parker is there, I’ll be there. And I hope you will be, too; updates as the situation warrants.

Bring on the tanks, Dease.

NOT VERY TANGENTIAL TANGENT:  Last fall, when Saint Thomas when through their extended tete-a-tete with Bishop Desmond Tutu, the Minnesota Monitor – Minnesota’s official George Soros news outlet – demonstrated their commitment to free speech and intellectual inquiry by devoting no less than eight articles to the subject (and, being a supporter of real free speech, I largely agreed).

And when it’s a conservative speaker – as usual – being banned from campus?

It’s hard to hear the tanks over the crickets.

My thesis: The Minnesota Monitor has changed missions in the past few months; where they were once a dubiously competent but utterly earnest attempt at a “news” organization, it is now a walz-to-the-wall propaganda tool of the left.

So let’s dip our toes into a story that’s just a tad off the Monitor’s turf and/or expertise; the Iraq war.

Compare, contrast, and ascribe credibility via whatever standards you use to filter the news in this asymmetric world:

The Monitor’s source – David Schultz, Hamline professor also known as “The Larry Jacobs of the “Wellstone was a Moderate” set”, reports from his tenured office in Saint Paul:

“That should have been the headline in the media: Surge failed. But it didn’t play. It almost reminds me of when Oliver North testified before Congress back in the ’80s. He showed up with a chest of medals and everyone was dazzled by his presence. I just wonder if the media was similarly dazzled by seeing this general, and [was] unwilling to dig beneath.”

Nattering about semantics and subtext with a military speaker is like dissecting the underlying leitmotif of a hockey game; soldiers don’t work for speaker points. At any rate – score one “against” from Dave Schultz – plush-bottom yoohoo from an obscure college who was likely declaring the war lost before 9/11, and will be declaring it lost years after the last shot is fired in anger.
In the other corner,M ichael Yon – former Green Beret, who’s been reporting from Iraq for the past couple of years, a guy who had no problem bucking the Administration’s line on the war when it was needed (earning a ban from the Sean Hannity Show, and more power to him), says (among many other things – read the whole thing):

Equally misguided were some senators’ attempts to use Gen. Petraeus’s statement, that there could be no purely military solution in Iraq, to dismiss our soldiers’ achievements as “merely” military. In a successful counterinsurgency it is impossible to separate military and political success. The Sunni “awakening” was not primarily a military event any more than it was “bribery.” It was a political event with enormous military benefits.

The huge drop in roadside bombings is also a political success – because the bombings were political events. It is not possible to bury a tank-busting 1,500-pound bomb in a neighborhood street without the neighbors noticing. Since the military cannot watch every road during every hour of the day (that would be a purely military solution), whether the bomb kills soldiers depends on whether the neighbors warn the soldiers or cover for the terrorists. Once they mostly stood silent; today they tend to pick up their cell phones and call the Americans. Even in big “kinetic” military operations like the taking of Baqubah in June 2007, politics was crucial. Casualties were a fraction of what we expected because, block-by-block, the citizens told our guys where to find the bad guys. I was there; I saw it.

The Iraqi central government is unsatisfactory at best. But the grass-roots political progress of the past year has been extraordinary – and is directly measurable in the drop in casualties.

Read the whole thing (and Yon’s interview with Glen Reynolds is worth a listen, too).

Compare. Contrast.

Place your bets.

Powerline has quite a track record, you betcha.

Deposing Dan Rather? Yeah, OK.

Top-ten blog in the business? Okey-doke.

But this? To American males of a certain age, this is big news.

From Scott Johnson’s mailbag:

I’m Donald “Buck Dharma” Roeser from Blue Öyster Cult, lead guitarist and the author and vocalist of “Don’t Fear The Reaper.”

I’m a longtime frequent Power Line reader, and I’m enjoying the play BOC and The Reaper have recently gotten on the Power Line blog, in the “Don’t Fear the Professor” and “More Cowbell” posts.

What can one say…?

I remember going to a hearing on Senator Alan Spears’ attempt at an “assault weapon” ban back in the late eighties, up on Capitol Hill (Saint Paul, not DC).

Despite the usual DFL shenanigans to keep outstate, pro-freedom people from making it to the Capitol to flood the hearing rooms, 600 of us showed up.  That was a hard, reliable count.
Six hundred.

Indoors.  They had to link two more hearing rooms to the main one via closed-circuit TV.
Against us, perhaps a dozen orcs sat at the right-hand of the hearing table.

So the leader of the Public Safety Committee – a metrocrat DFLer – looked over the mob of animated but polite faces arrayed in front of her, cast her gaze the tiny coterie of lumpen stasi wannabees on her side, and said for the records “I think both sides look about evenly represented here today”.

I think about that every time lefties try to count crowds.  I remember the “Million Mom March”, which claimed somewhere in six figures (and the DC Park Police called more like 30,000, which is about 3,000 times as many as they can draw for a rally today.

And of course, here in Minnesota, it cuts both ways.  During the great Tax Cut Rallies of the mid-nineties, the Twin Cities leftymedia would routinely claim audiences of around 1,000 – when I would count to 1,000 myself, and could see that I’d gotten maybe 1/5 of the crowd.And I came up with the following formula:

• For liberal rallies:  divide whatever the press claims by 10 (and whatever the Sorosphere or leftybloggers claim by 20).
• For conservative rallies:  multiply whatever the leftymedia claim by at least five.

And that should generallly give you an accurate count.

Now, I wasn’t at last Saturday’s tax rally – I have little doubt that turnout was lower than normal if only because of the weather – but experience tells me that whatever the left says about these rallies is wrong at best, a lie at worst.

(And when lefties are qualified to lecture the rest of us about numbers, we won’t see stories like this.  Give it up,lefties; leave the counting to the adults).

Came home yesterday after running some errands.  Living room was crowded with teenage boys (including my son) playing an XBox.  (Tangential note:  No, I don’t own an XBox.  It must have belonged to one of them).  Indoors.  On a gorgeous day.

What to do?

Went the the computer.  Fired up ITunes.  Found my “Punk/Power Pop/Loud Jersey Shore R’nB of the ’70’s and ’80’s” playlist.  Cranked the volume.

Somewhere between “Spanish Bombs” by the Clash and “Got To Be A Better Way Home” by Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes, they all went outside, and stayed there for an hour or two.

Just in case that helps any of you.

Last week, I noted that of the six big DFL pols or organizations that I’d contacted – Franken, Klobuchar, Ellison, McCollum, Rybak, and Growth and Justice – none had responded to my request for an interview.

This, of course, in response to Andy Birkey’s piece in the Minnesoros Monitor, who sniffed that Michele Bachmann seemed to be limiting her media appearances to friendly conservative and Christian outlets.

And we have an update!

I left phone and email messages to all of the subjects save one, for whom I couldn’t find phone numbers. And as I noted, I got responses from only one – and Dane Smith of Growth and Justice will be appearing on the NARN this weekend.

And now there’s another – maybe.

Updates as they are warranted.

Politico sez Hillary is…sandbagging?:

A lot of coverage of the Clinton campaign supposes them to be in kitchen-sink mode — hurling every pot and pan, no matter the damage this might do to Obama as the likely Democratic nominee in the fall.

In fact, the Democratic race has not been especially rough by historical standards. What’s more, our conversations with Democrats who speak to the Clintons make plain that their public comments are only the palest version of what they really believe: that if Obama is the nominee, a likely Democratic victory would turn to a near-certain defeat.

Far from a no-holds-barred affair, the Democratic contest has been an exercise in self-censorship.

Rip off the duct tape and here is what they would say: Obama has serious problems with Jewish voters (goodbye Florida), working-class whites (goodbye Ohio) and Hispanics (goodbye, New Mexico).

Republicans will also ruthlessly exploit openings that Clinton — in the genteel confines of an intraparty contest — never could. Top targets: Obama’s radioactive personal associations, his liberal ideology, his exotic life story, his coolly academic and elitist style.

Is Madame Putin just paying out rope, biding her time for ’12?

Carnivore writes an excellent “42 Theses” piece on firearms that includes some excellent advice (some of which I did not know, but am grateful to learn).

Or I should say, almost writes an excellent piece.

Because after 41 excellent pointers, he concluded with…:

It’s OK to hold your Glock sideways, as long as no one else is looking.

Don’t use the John Woo grip if anyone is in the same county as you. Sheesh, Carny. Did you poop out in the stretch? Anyone seen using the Woo Grip should be castigated and humiliated.

The John Woo grip is why the safest place to be in a gang shootout is the target. And the most dangerous place is 45 degrees off the line of fire, watching TV in an upstairs apartment.

…that my current career got its first huge break.

I’d been working for about five years as a technical writer. Now, not to offend all the techwhirlies in my audience – but being a twirlie bored me stiff.

I first encountered my current field – which I wrote about a few months ago – when I was working at Cray Research in Eagan, in 1994. I’d been a tech writer for about a year, and already knew it was, shall we say, a “transitional career” for me. I just had no idea what I was going to transition into.

And I met a guy who had just finished building a Usability Test lab at Cray. I sat and talked for hours about Usability – which involves observing people doing things with whatever you’re designing, whether it’s software or grocery stores or artillery fire control equipment or online shopping carts, noting where they have problems understanding what they’re supposed to do, and coming up with ideas to rectify it – for hours. And the light went on above my head; “right now, I get paid modestly, to explain how to use badly designed software to end-users. In this field, I could use the same basic skills to explain to developers how to design software less-badly”. Better money, more respect, more fun? Sign me up!

Of course, it took four years to “sign up”. In that era, there probably weren’t two dozen Usability/Interaction Design/Human Factors people in the Twin Cities, and most of them were at the U, or at Medtronic or FMC, working in highly-regulated fields where human factors is a statutorily actionable issue. There were very few of us actually working in software at the time. Which is why for four years, I read everything I could find on the subject, attended the “Usability” track at all the tech writing conferences, and feverishly pitched the idea of usability testing and user-centered design to one project manager after another. I got a few nibbles – a few companies let me run tests, which generated some pretty cool and vindicating results – but I remained in the Tech Writer ghetto…

…until, finally, ten years ago today, a company (which no longer exists, although I swear it wasn’t my fault) bit the bullet and hired me to design a product.

Fast.

As in, they said “you can start right away” at the interview, on the previous Friday. “Great”, I told them, “I’ll give my two weeks notice”.

“No”, the guy said. “Monday”.

So ten years ago this morning I went in to my job at 4AM, asked my boss (when he showed up) if I could change my schedule to 4AM to noon (puzzled, he agreed) – and gave my two weeks notice. And then I drove about a mile (thankfully) to the other company, and worked from 1 to 9PM.

For the next two weeks.

And it sure hasn’t seemed like ten years…

The demands of show prep kept me from the Tax Rally yesterday.

I hope to think I’ll do my part anyway.

Janet from the SCSU Scholars was there, of course:

in 2006 MN Republicans, along with Republicans across the country, decided to stay home and “teach the Republicans a lesson.” In MN, that “lesson” resulted in the largest tax increase in 150 years, courtesy of our DFL (Democrat, Farmer Labor party). Today we held our tax payer rally at the State Capitol in St. Paul, MN.

The usual suspects were there – Reps like John Kline and Michele Bachmann, of course, who’ve been fighting the good fight for their entire political careers; Jason Lewis, who has literally built a career out of leading or demagogueing the issue (depending on whether you ask an honest, law-abiding Minnesotan or a slack-jawed orc who is “Happy To Pay For A Better Minnesota” and thinks Lori Sturdevant is a centrist.

And there was new blood, too.  By all accounts Barb Davis-White blew the doors off the place:

Can I say it’s great to see American political sartorial styles being driven by George Clinton rather than Bill Clinton.

Seriously though – every single person I’ve heard talk about the rally sang Davis-White’s praises.  She’s a great speaker, an engaging person, and a solid candidate to go after Keith Ellison.

Needless to say, you’ll be hearing a lot more about both her and Fourth District GOP-endorsed candidate Ed Matthews.

Til next year!

Today on the Northern Alliance Radio Network:

• Volume I “The First Team” – Chad, John and Brian will do their thing from 11-1.
• Volume II “The Headliner” – Ed and I will be on from 1-3. We’ll likely be talking about the turnabout in the polls, the week in the campaign, and Saint Thomas University’s rejection of a pro-life speaker sponsored by a conservative student group. Because goodness knows a Catholic university wouldn’t want to get all associated with pro-life stuff, would it?  Oh, and since I invited Dave Thune to come on the show, I’m sure he’ll turn up.
• Volume III, “The Final Word” – King joins Michael from 3-5.

So tune in to all six hours of the Northern Alliance Radio Network, the Twin Cities’ media’s sole guardians of sanity. On the air at AM1280 in the Metro, or streaming at AM1280’s Website, or via podcast at Townhall.

And don’t forget the David Strom Show, with David Strom and Margaret Martin, from 9-11!

(h/t XTC)

An American Airlines’ spokesguy, discussing American’s equipment woes in a piece on the main page of the Strib’s online edition Saturday:

But it won’t be until Sunday morning before the MD-80s can be positioned throughout the American system to fly a dull day’s schedule, spokesman Charley Wilson said.

Typo? Freudian Slip?

Both?

Barack Obama on middle America:

So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

Nothing like a little bigotry to kick off campaign season.

It’s been a good stretch for Democrat bigotry; it kicked off with Saint Paul City Council prez Dave Thune worrying in public that  Republican delegates would puke all over Saint Paul if the bars stayed open (and “clarifying” that while he wasn’t trying to insult lobbyists, Republicans were a bunch of warmongers).

Back in ’04, the Dems were good enough to keep the most preening pieces of bigotry until after the campaign.

Ain’t technology grand?

The event that is on the short list of Great Minnesota Conservative Traditions – Jason Lewis’ annual Tax Rally on the Capitol grounds – is tomorrow at noon.

I will not be there – Ed and I will be on the air with the NARN – but the good folks from True North will be working the crowd along with the rest of the coalition of intellectual and fiscal freedom fighters that have gathered around Jason and the cause.

It’s also important in that it’ll be the first appearance of Barbara Davis-White as an endorsed GOP candidate; she’s running against Keith Ellison in the beleaguered Fifth District. She needs your support.

Kudos to Jason. He’s the competition, of course (for the Patriot, at least) – but I’d like to join the rest of the True North ruling junta in thanking him and his staff for listing TN as part of the Minnesota Freedom Network).  And while we’re up, let’s call a spade a spade; Jason was the locomotive that got conservatism moving down the track in Minnesota.

Here’s an unusual one for me. I got this email (as part of a group, mind you, not personally) from a friend recently:

So here is the scoop…I have a nephew – that got into trouble when he was younger. He spent time in jail and now is having a very difficult time finding a job for obvious reasons. He is 21 years old and needs an entry level job in the Albany, NY area to help him get confidence and skills. He has his high school degree, experience with computers,and also warehouse inventory. I don’t think I am biased when I say he has his head on straight and is motivated to build a life. Any recommendations on connections, websites for job search, organizations that might be able to help, or other suggestions would be welcome.

While I have tons of experience at job-hunting (oof-da), I am lucky to have never been convicted of anything actionable, and haven’t had that particular albatross on my back.

And I do have some friends who’ve made their mistakes earlier in life – up to and including serious felonies committed in fits of adolescent stupidity, for which they served their jail time – and gone on to be productive, solid citizens.  Adolescent stupidity is a byatch – says the guy who wasn’t that stupid as a teenager, but who is on his third swing through the blender of “teenaged kids” and is hanging on for dear life.

So – if anyone has an answer to the question above, especially ones that are germane to the greater Albany NY area, shoot me a line at my Yahoo.com email address which is named “feedbackinthedark”.  I’d love to forward some leads to my friend.

Sure, we’ll call it your good deed for the day.  What the heck.

So if you’ve got nothing else going on, and you need a Saturday night jazz fix, I think tomorrow would be a fabulous night to indulge that jones!

And to help you do that, I suggest you scamper out to see the CC Septet at Our Bar and Grill (500 Fifth Ave, New Brighton, MN. 651.332.5959 8:00-11:00 PM Saturday night). Cover? They don’t need no steenkin’ cover.

Even though to the best of my knowledge none of them is a heroin addict, they are an excellent jazz group. (And they’re tentatively playing the Dakota on May 29, which would be a fun night out, too…)

Trivia: the bass player was my instrumental music prof in college – the guy who taught me how to play drums and tune pianos – and the alto sax guy was the director of my junior high band when I was in eighth grade (which has got to make him feel old).

I gotta get out there one of these weekends – but this weekend’s just not gonna work out.

Tell ’em Mitch Berg says hi, if you get there, though!

Feel free to post a review in the comment section, if you make it out there.

Scott Johnson discusses his conversation with a Minnesota Department of Education official that would seem to support the loophole the Tarek Ibn Ziyad Academy seems to have found in the state’s laws separating church and government school funding.

You should read the whole thing for the background.

The conclusion?

Morgan [the official whom Scott interviewed] commented that so long as prayer is voluntary and not led by school officials, it does not detract from the school’s nonsectarian character. He had no knowledge of after-school instruction, but so long as it was voluntary and the school afforded equal access to other providers, that too would be in keeping with the school’s nonsectarian character. He added that the department was following up on Kersten’s Sunday column with a site visit and a letter to TIZA’s principal inquiring into the issues it raised, as it had done in 2004 following Tammy Oseid’s Pioneer Press article.

“Equal access to other providers?”

Like if I offered to start a Presbyterian youth group for the school’s after-hours activities?

Johnson concludes:

Muslim activists have found a workable seam in the purported separation of church and state in Minnesota. One does not need to engage in much speculation to foresee the day when Minnesota’s burgeoning Muslim population will be educated in separate charter schools like TIZA at taxpayers’ expense, where they will receive religious instruction courtesy of the likes of the Muslim American Society of Minnesota.

What is an opponent of the phenomenon represented by TIZA to do? If TIZA’s arrangement passes muster with state authorities, an opponent is left with two options. One must either await judicial intervention at the behest of some party with standing to bring a lawsuit raising the obvious First Amendment issues, or one must work for the demise of charter schools.

The demise of charter schools is not an option; indeed, for many of us parents in the city, charter schools have been an unqualified Godsend.

So maybe the third option is to take reciprocal advantage of the loophole; the city’s other charter schools that have adopted the structure, if not the dogma, of religious education should also take the opportunity to offer after-school activities to their kids.

OK – so you’d think a post that starts like this…:

I got the stinky meat smell out of my car.

…can’t possibly end well.  And in fact I’ll let you be the judge.  But local lefty(?)blogger and longtime commenter Discordian Stooge writes:

Our [Katherine Kersten] is enraged about religion in schools. Shocked? Don’t be. It’s only because it’s an Islamic school.

Of course, I agree with her. The school is obviously supporting religion, and specifically Islam. Since it’s a public school, it’s wrong. But of course, we dangerous atheist lefties support the Muslim hordes and only hate Christians, so we’ll ignore this. Oh, wait.

Stooge (if I may call him Stooge, since “Disco” seems a bit stretchy) is writing about Kersten’s expose on the Tarek Ibn Ziyad Academy, a Moslem-focused – or, according to Kersten’s source, completely Islamic – charter school in a Saint Paul suburb.

I’m not going to get into the “discrimination against Christians” argument; although there’s plenty of evidence of it, let’s come back to it some other time.

Here’s my real question; there is no figure in the Twin Cities’ media that inspires more irrational and, frankly, unseemly derangement than Katherine Kersten.  From the day it was announced the Strib was going to hire an actual conservative as a columnist, Twin Lefties – from Nick Coleman and the Strib Editorial Board to the usual array of leftybloggers – howled like a bunch of feral beagles, and churned out enough ad homina to power a good-sized wind turbine.

Of course, anyone who takes a partisan position invites a counterposition.  Such is debate.

But when Stooge says…:

Anyway, until [Kersten] decides that religion in public schools is wrong, not just the religions she doesn’t like, I’ll continue to ridicule her.

Well, that’s a choice one may make.  But I have to ask…

…when has Kersten supported “religion in public schools?”

Not “school choice”, mind you (and for clarity’s sake, let’s not go into “Vouchers”, since if you throw out vouchers you also need to throw out government-sponsored grants and government-secured student loans to anyone who attends a religious-affiliated college or university), or perhaps inveigling schools to relax a bit about allowing faith-affiliated groups to use the occasional school facility outside of school hours (since their parents paid the same taxes everyone else did, or thoroughly-voluntary prayer, say, in the locker room before a football game.

When has Katherine Kersten supported something equivalent to the Tarek Ibn Ziyad Academy – a publicly-funded school that has a fundamentally faith-based program that would be hostile (passively or actively) to a student of another faith from the opening bell to the moment the bus dropped him off at home?

I’d like some of Kersten’s critics to answer that one.

As to this bit…:

Honestly, Star Tribune, hire Cap’n Fishsticks as a columnist, or maybe Mitch Berg.

Stooge, what did I ever do to you?

(Hee.  Thanks).

Oh, and…:

Someone who can come up with an original idea, not just copy from other right-wingers.

Have a word with Flash, when you have a moment.

Save May 7 on your calendars for the Patriot’s debate between Michael Medved and Ed Schultz.

This is going to be yuuuuuuge.

I’ll take bets a little closer to the event.

Bill Clinton on his wife’s Tuzla Shuffle:

Everybody else had to put their flack jackets underneath the seat in case they got shot at. And everywhere they went they were covered by Apache helicopters. So they just abbreviated the arrival ceremony.

[and placed ituner sniper fire]

Now I say that because, what really has mattered is that even then she was interested in our troops. And I think she was the first first lady since Eleanor Roosevelt to go into a combat zone. And you woulda thought, you know, that she’d robbed a bank the way they carried on about this. And some of them when they’re 60 they’ll forget something when they’re tired at 11:00 at night, too.”

“Forget something?”  Er, sure.  I might forget a mundane trip or two in fifteen years.  I might even forget the odd bit of, um, extramarital wango tango at the office, if you catch my drift.

Since Hillary’s never been shot at in her life, I’d suspect “being under fire” isn’t one of them.

Sen. Clinton did not apologize, like Mr. Clinton asserted, she simply indicated that she mispoke when describing the Bosnia incident.

“Listen carefully; she did not lie…about…that trip.  It depends on what the meaning of the term “sniper fire”…is.”

Wait for MoveOn.org to start trying to convince the world that “fake but accurate” applies to sniper fire.

Women seeking a lifelong mate might do well to choose the guy a notch below them in the looks category. New research reveals couples in which the wife is better looking than her husband are more positive and supportive than other match-ups…

On behalf of all of us Fives, I say “You’re welcome, Nines”.

The article is written by Jeanna “The Most Insightful Writer in History” Bryner, who deserves thanks from a nationful of schlemiels.

Everyone has that “what could have been” moment” in their lives; the date with the perfect gal or guy that somehow slipped away before you could get the phone number, the chance at the break that might have changed it all if you’d have heard opportunity knocking, the glimpse of the sunset that brought the great American song or the epic poem just soooo close to the surface.

For me, there were two.

One day, I stood outside the Cartoon Network studios holding in one hand a paper carton with the unduplicated master copies of every episode of Squidbillies ever made, and in the other, a five gallon can of kerosene. In my pocket was a blowtorch.

What could have been.

And the other? The Martin D45 that my college English major advisor had picked up at a Greenwich Village flea market in the late sixties for about $100.

Today, the brand-new ones run between $7,000 and $11,000. The classic ones, from the thirties through the sixties (Dr. Blake’s was from the late forties, if I recall correctly, and I may well not) go for waaaay more than that.

I used to noodle around on Dr. Blake’s D45 when I was over at his place for English department get-togethers.

Keep your heroin. Nothing can top the D. The tone was like something Peter Jackson would have used CGI to generate for some deity speaking to Gandalf – rich, nuanced, with harmonics that played about your perceptions like little pinpricks of joy – and an action so smooth it felt like I could sit back and let it play itself for a while.

As I go through this Hot Gear Friday series I’m rapidly figuring out how I could burn through a big Powerball purse.

(H/T to Anti Strib, who are finally featuring a genuinely hot chick)

Because sometimes there’s just no way around it.

Kerry emails Councilman Thune, via me:

Mr. Thune, You, sir, are a terrific embarassment.  Nothing beyond, “If we let one bar stay open until four, we must let all stya open” needed saying.  You ought to have left it at that.  Where is your Christian charity that you decide 8000 people you have not and never will meet will be 1) “….puking” and 2), doing so on your lawn.  To keep a man down, one must be in the gutter with them.  In this case, you occupy it alone.  Is this decent? Loving?  Why broadcast your personal opinions about national policy in this case?  You have, in Mark Twain‘s words, removed all doubt in opening your mouth.  A great city does not have offical city council members who ridicule others in public.  Like a lie, a slander travels at least halfway around the world before truth puts on its pants.  Will St. Paul benefit or lose if parts of its reputation includes people  in Peoria or Buffalo chortling at  “some guy named in St. Paul named Thone or Thune”  and the word “puking”?  Please, next time, keep silent, I beg you.

Need I say more?

I think not.