Last week, President Brandon accused Republicans of being “Semi-Fascists”.

To be fair, it sort of sounded like one of his “is he senile, or just not very bright” moments:

I could go either way, to be honest.

But it got me thinking about a couple of things.

What’s In A Word

The left has been devaluing the term “fascist” since I was in high school, and long before, if I recall.

If you want to be pedantic about it, in the 1910s Benito Mussolini – at the time a prominent Italian socialist – figured that while a command economy, a welfare state and state ownership of the mean of production might go over just fine, Internationalism – the concept near and dear to socialism that eventually all borders will be rendered moot by the unification of workers around the world – was not going to fly with Italy, which was had been a nation for about fifty years, and had a lot of nationalist energy about it.

And, presto change-o, Mussolini did some tinkering; in founding the Italian “Fascist” Party, he chucked the “internationalism”, and replaced it with a heaping helping of nationalism. The command economy, nationalization of assets and welfare state, of course, he kept – to Italy’s chagrin in World War 2, as the command economy lagged the rest of Europe so badly that the Italian war machine was positively handicapped.

Most “Fascist” movements – the Nazis, Franco’s Falange and so on – repeat that pattern, keeping the small-l socialism, substituting nationalist dogma for internationalist chanting.

Of course, the left’s version of “fascism” is more nearly described as “saying or doing anything I don’t agree with”.

These days, references to “fascism” almost invariably seek to “other” those your crowd wants to erase from the public square;

And we’ve been seeing an awful lot of that, lately.

How much?

More tomorrow.

Drop The F

So as we close in on President Brandon’s “speech about America’s Soul” on Friday near the Liberty Bell, let’s talk about some of the attributes of…

…well, not ‘fascism’, per se. Or at least not only fascism.

Let’s talk, instead, about authoritarianism, by whatever name you want to call it.

About government that:

• Ignores, subverts and/or perverts the rule of law in favor of the rule of men
• legitimizes itself in comparison to some boogeyman, without or within – a boogieman that personifies all evil in the eyes of the state, and who must be subjugated for “good” to prevail.
• Sublimates everything to a more or less utopian vision of what the world could be, if they had the means

More tomorrow.

Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, died yesterday at 91.

The media has been eulogizing him as the person who led the way in ending the Cold War – the coverage lists Reagan almost as an afterthought.

A quick remiinder:

In 1980, literally nobody was predicting the fall of the USSR. Everyone claiming in 1992 that they knew all along it was inevitable was full of s**t. The Left thought Reagan in particular was insane for believing it could fall.

Gorbachev was not selected by the Politburo to dismantle the Soviet Union. He was brought in to preserve and update it – think “China”. It didn’t work.

Or, to put it in a pithier vibe:

Still and all, it could have been much worse. The disintegration of the USSR could have been a bigger disaster than it’s actually been (and that’s been bad enough).

RIP, Mikhail Gorbachev.

Rashida Tlaib, antisemitic Democrat Congresswoman from the Detroit area and one of the most strident advocates of defunding the police…

…intentionally exposed two victims of oppressed classes to being murdered by the systematically racist police in her neighborhood.

SCENE: At a studio at “Yoicks”, a new streaming service. On one side of the table, Bernie BRICKMAN, head of development for Yoicks, sits, brow furrowed, reading a script. By his right elbow sits Beyonce CAPRIÉ, his assistant.

Across from him is Ashley KLEIN, age 27, graduate of Oberlin’s screen writing program, veteran of the writer’s room at several streamcasts – Cringey, Can You Hang and Millennial Hellscape Bachelorette.

She’s pitching script for a new show…

BRICKMAN: …Sounds Like A You Problem. Cool.

KLEIN: Gen-Z angst and hopelessness meets post-Covid dystopia in a world shaped by Trump.

BRICKMAN: I like it! Let’s see. So we’ve got…

KLEIN: The show follows the ongoing life, love and adventures of Isabella “Izzy” Cohen, 26 years old, from Darien Connecticut, a graduate of a small liberal arts school who works at a social justice non-profit (CAPRIÉ makes a check on a checklist), and as she navigates the modern world of work, love and society.

BRICKMAN: So the cast of characters…

KLEIN: Yep. Roommate Queen Jenkins, her high school and college classmate, valedictorian at both, majored in Afro-American studies, and is the youngest woman on the partner track at her downtown law firm (CAPRIÉ makes another check on the checklist), who’s navigating a complicated relationship with her boyfriend and supervisor, junior partner Geoffrey Belcher, a former Ivy League lacrosse player – which is complicated by her friendly and occasionally intimate relationship her her and Izzy’s other roommate, Natasha Kim, a genderqueer Asian woman of color (CAPRIÉ makes yet another check on the checklist) who works as chef and caterer, and is a closet alcoholic (CAPRIÉ makes another check).

BRICKMAN: And Izzy’s love interests…this Kyle Dershowitz…?

KLEIN: Kyle is sort of a neurodivergent child-man-child (CAPRIÉ makes another check on the checklist), lost in the world, clinging to Izzy as his only real link to the heterosexuality he is so clearly uncomfortable with (CAPRIÉ makes another check on the checklist). He loses his job as an executive assistant to Izzy’s in the first episode, and has to go to work at Natasha’s catering company, and he thinks he’s good at it, but he is just terrible, and realizing that sends him into spiral.

BRICKMAN: I see Dershowitz as sort of a Woody Allen type character…

KLEIN: Yes, only less masculine, especially after Izzy meets her other boyfriend, Tyrone Marley, a Jamaican-American bicycle messenger and rapper (CAPRIÉ makes another check on the checklist). The love triangle is the big conflic

BRICKMAN: And Queen tells Izzy to follow her truth…?

KLEIN: Yes – but the twist is, Izzy has no idea what her truth, or any truth, is (CAPRIÉ makes another check on the checklist).

BRICKMAN: Heavy.

KLEIN: Could get dark (CAPRIÉ makes another check on the checklist). .

BRICKMAN: So, Beyonce – where does that leave us?

CAPRÉ: (Adjusts her glasses) It appears it checks every box on the modern young adult streaming dramedy checklist.

BRICKMAN: Awesome! Let’s talk directors!

And SCENE

Releasing a story the Friday before the Labor Day weekend?

Wow. This must be a real disaster:

The southwest light rail, the biggest civil engineering project in state history, is shaping up to be an epic disaster.

And if, after all the terrible news of this last year, they’re still doing their news dumps before the weekend when literally everyone is doing something else?

Fearless prediction: Governor Klink won’t be going to the fair this weekend.

I make it a matter of principle not to heckle other peoples personal healthcare decisions.

Do you want to wear a mask? Go for it.

Want to stay rigorously up-to-date on vaccines and boosters? That’s your call.

But this photo?

Is there anything that sums up “Peak Minnesota DFL “more than a boothful of “volunteers “, sitting outdoors, wearing masks, better than this?

With the impending retirement of Dr. Fauci, we are learning more about how much our federal and state public health bureaucracies deceived the public in the interest of “the public good“.

And, perhaps worse, the extent to which it is standard operating procedure:

When experts or agencies deliver information to the public that they consider possibly or definitively false to further a larger, often well-meaning agenda, they are telling what is called a noble lie. Although the teller’s intentions may be pure—for example, a feeling of urgency that behavioral change is needed among the lay public—the consequences can undermine not only those intentions but also public trust in experts and science. During the first year of COVID-19, leaders were faced with an unknown disease amid a politically sensitive election in the era of social media, and the preconditions for noble lies became especially fertile. Not surprisingly, we witnessed several examples. More than anything, these examples illustrate the destructive potential of such lies.

The moment that I realized we were being lied to at the state level? May 11, 2020 Dash the Governors press conference, where the states “healthcare economist“ told a reporter that they had no plans on releasing the code for the “models“ that had predicted between 20,000 and 70,000 deaths in Minnesota by July 2020, because “people might use that to reach different conclusions than we did“.

That is the opposite of science, and a repudiation of any idea of trusting that particular institution.

The school district in rural Spirit Lake, Minnesota is going to have armed staff on premises

“It’s really our obligation and duty to do whatever we can to protect them. And we talk about school shootings, and you have an active shooter, a killer, in your building, the number one way to save lives is to address the killer immediately,” Spirit Lake Community School District Superintendent David Smith said.

This being Minnesota, they are doing with an extra special bureaucratic twist; they are selecting (secretly, and anonymously) 10 staffers, and putting them through some extra training.

Which is way better than nothing; merely knowing that the school is not a “gun free zone“ will go a long way toward detering any potential nonsense.

This being Minnesota, again, there will be dissent:

“I believe there are better ways to go about it, and all kinds of security measures that can take place as opposed to adding more guns into a school building,” said Harold Prior, a Spirit Lake resident and former school administrator.

I always want to delve into the vast self-defense experience of people like Mr. Prior and ask them what they think is “better ways”.

But I will take this – to my knowledge, the first school district in Minnesota to openly lose the “gun free zone“ label – is at least a move in the right direction.

This may be the most badly-aged tweet of the decade so far:

sometimes it feels like the world is in a race between those who are inventing fusion Power too cheap to be metered, and those who are trying to send us back to the 1600s as serfs to the progressive nobility.

According to the Strib, there’s almost no difference between the two attorney general candidates!

I mean, an honest report would note that, for the incumbent Attorney General, this (if true, which you can never really assume with the incumbent attorney general) would be a 180° reversal of course…

… but no worries. It’s not like people are concerned about law and order, this cycle…

So on Tuesday, Brandon banged his sceptre on the floor of the palace and bade $20K to disappear from student loan balances, forthwith.

And his reasoning was the same, sober statesmanship we’ve come to expect from Brandon:

Unanswered – and, as far as I know, unasked by most of the media – does he actually have the authority to unilaterally erase loan balances and transfer it all to the deficit?

Of course not – not if you take enumerated powers seriously:

As of yet, Congress has provided no authorization for the executive branch to arbitrarily write off some of the money that borrowers owe to taxpayers. As of yet, Congress has passed no rules that allow down-on-their-luck presidents to throw money at people for political gain. As of yet, Congress has given no instruction that if the president’s friends might like a little more cash, he can raid the Treasury to give it to them. Certainly, Congress has set up a loan program. But the deal there is rather simple, all told: First you borrow, and then you pay back what you borrowed. There is no mention of “forgiveness” days or of “help” or of rolling Chekhovian jubilees, and by pretending otherwise, President Biden is making a mockery of his oath to uphold the Constitution.

To be fair and accurate, there’s never been any indication Biden understood that oath, even before his senescence.

But mark my words: colleges – their endowments untouched – will start telling prospective students “Borrow whatever you need – there’ll be another forgiveness soon”.

You and I, and our grandchildren, will be paying off the loans of these

I stay pretty relentlessly civil, especially when discussing politics. There’s enough pointless anger out there.

But I’m going to say this, and I don’t care what you think about it: If you are part of the lefty social media mob that thinks “Kyle Rittenhouse is a murderer”, you are a flat-earther.

Complicated stuff follows. Stay with me, progressives.

You think someone’s trying to kill you. You shoot them – maybe fatally, maybe not. You’re arrested. The DA presses charges – assault, homicide, whatever.

To even be allowed to *argue* self-defense for assault or homicide, you have to show a judge evidence, to a legal standard, that:

• you reasonably feared being killed
• That threat was immediate – it was literally them or you, right then and there.
• you were not the aggressor [1]
• you used ONLY the force needed to end that lethal threat.
• in many states (including MN, but not WI), that you *reasonably* tried to get away [2].

That’s *before* the trial. If your evidence on any of those 4-5 criteria doesn’t stack up, you’ll be a defendant in a murder trial, not a self-defense trial.

Once you’ve gotten past that? On to trial!

And there, if the prosecution disproves any of those 4-5 factors beyond a reasonable doubt to a jury? You’re going to prison – for assault if nobody died, and murder if they did.

That’s a pretty high burden of proof for a “Murderer” to skate past. (Don’t think so? That’s just ignorant.

“But the judge was biased”

No, he wasn’t.

Rittenhouse may not have been a hero [3]. And if you think the whole episode is stupid and unfortunate, I don’t disagree – although in a moral society, the burden should fall on those who set out to damage and destroy others property.

Either way calling Rittenhouse a “murderer” is ignorant at best. And there’s an implied clause after “at best” [4]…

…but again, I try to stay civil.

I try. But I’m only human. It can’t last forever.

[1] And no, doing something you have every legal right to do does not make you an aggressor. Rittenhouse had a right to be where he was, and to carry a rifle. Don’t like it? Take it up with the Wisconsin Assembly.

[2] Where “reasonable” is defined by statute or, much more usually, in a stack of case law references that you have to be a lawyer to understand.

[3]But after seeing the mayhem that the entitled children of the politicalclass got away with scot-free in Portland, Seattle, Minneapolis and Kenosha, it’s not hard to understand why some people think he is a hero.

[4] And that implied clause may or may not but definitely does include the thought that a whole lot of the “Rittenhouse is teh murdererer” crowd think rioting and rioters are justified, which is a pretty problematic view.

Since it’s state fair time Dash the time when at least some people in Minnesota start paying attention to the upcoming elections – let’s make sure we remember: when minutes counted, Governor Klink took days to respond to the collapse of law and order in Minneapolis.

The media is going to focus on cheery stories about food on sticks, and a blijf The Administration in deflecting to happy talk about abortion.

To protect a progressive administration, the rioting is going to get memoryholed.

Let’s not let it get memory holed.

I’m a conservative, and a Christian.

And I cringe at some of the things said in the name of “conservative Christianity“.

Which I hasten to add, because some of the things I’ve seen from “progressive Christians“, including some friends and classmates, this past few days have had me cringing even more.

Three things, specifically:

“Christ came to earth to forgive mankind‘s sins – so if you oppose loan forgiveness, you’re not a very good Christian“.

This is not “loan forgiveness”. This is transferring the loan to people who didn’t borrow it.

Will it benefit some people? Sure, it must be nice to have $10-$20,000 in balance disappear.

But this political act has nothing to do with Christ’s grace – dying for the sins every individual commits. It’s more like rounding up randos off the streets because someone else committed a murder. 

“It’s predatory lending!”

You can make that case. But unfortunately, the “forgiveness“ will do nothing to change that. In fact, it will only accelerate the “predatory“ lending, since everyone applying for those “predatory loans“ is going to figure “the first $10,000 is going to be free, again, anyway…“.

In fact, if the administration had sat down in a room to figure out the worst possible solution to student debt, this would’ve been it.

They could’ve made universities, with their hundreds of billions of dollars of endowments, share some of the risk. They could’ve even just cut interest rates.

But no. Fighting predatory lending by making everyone else pay is like fighting street crime by dumping piles of wallets out on the street and hoping people will stop holding other people up.

“New Ministers Go Deep Into Debt – and Don’t Make Much Money”

A couple of (it’s fair to say) “liberal” clergy I know have pointed out that their denominations require a Masters in Divinity (MDiv) to be ordained – which can cost up to $200K, as much as law school or medical school – but their first jobs out of seminary pay something close to minimum wage. And it’s fair to say outside Joel Osteen, Creflo Dollar and Pope Frank, nobody goes into the ministry to get rich.

But isn’t that a little odd – an academic discipline (a product and service) that pays badly, and doesn’t necessarily cater to the children of immense wealth, costing well into six figures? I mean, if “products and services for people without a lot of money to spend on them” were prone to spontaneously inflating out of reach, the McDonalds cheeseburger would be $25.

At any rate – presenting this as a gesture of Christian grace is cynical, manipulative and profoundly wrong.

You knew it was coming. And here it is — student loan “forgiveness,” baby:

President Joe Biden announced Wednesday that he will forgive $10,00 in federal student debt for most borrowers, fulfilling a campaign pledge and delivering financial relief to millions of Americans.

Biden will cancel up to $20,000 for recipients of Pell Grants.

“Both of these targeted actions are for families who need it the most,” the president said in remarks from the White House on Wednesday afternoon.

I love the smell of moral hazard in the morning. But if there’s a cohort of our society that really loves this sort of thing, it’s the folks who assumed their “Studies” degree was their ticket to the carriage class. The donks long ago realized they have neither reason nor incentive to bestow other people’s resources on the working class or the small business dudes, because they aren’t picking up the check at Le Diplomate. The “S” in an S corporation now stands for suck it.

At this point, the game is evident even to those who’d rather not think about politics — helping the commonweal is right out. Higher education is the best thing the donks have going and subsidizing their efforts is the highest and best use of other people’s money. And if you look at the price tag, you’re probably a denier. And if you paid your own way to go to trade school, you’re a chump. The rewards go to Derrida, not derring-do.

The timing is crucial here — there’s no question this move will piss off millions of potential voters, but there’s also no question that we’ll all be getting a steady supply of ether from the Alliance for a Better Minnesota and the constellation of like-minded political action groups flattering the Studies majors from Olaf and Kenyon and Swarthmore (and Eau Claire and Bemidji, too) that despite everything, they are actually part of the in-crowd. The checks will clear in plenty of time for the clientele, but the unwilling benefactors will be too busy trying to make payroll to get out and door knock.

But hey, have a nice day!

2018: afraid that the hyper-progressive Erin Murphy/Erin Maye Quade ticket will lose the governor‘s office, the coterie of progressive plutocrats that bankroll the DFL prop up retrofitted “moderate“ Tim Walz as a sort of Danish-monarchy-style figurehead for the hyper-progressive troika of Peggy Flanagan, Ryan Winkler and Melissa Hortman (all of whom are essentially mouthpieces for Aleta Messinger And Michael Bloomberg). With the help of the invariably subservient Minnesota media, they retain the governors office.

2020: Fearing the electoral consequences of nominating socialist Bernie Sanders, progressive cabal appropriates elderly, addled Joe Biden as their “Moderate“mouthpiece and, in effect, Trojan horse. They win a bitter election, and go on to drop all “moderate“ pretenses even before the inauguration.

2024: I don’t want to keep seeing the same hands, here.

MINNEAPOLIS IS BACK, BAYBEEEEEEE!!!!

And if you say otherwise, you’re probably from Fridley and live in your mom’s basement!

Oh, yeah. Minneapolis is back.

Pay no attention to the mass of criminals behind the curtain:

I bet Andy Lugar lives in his mom’s basement in Fridley!

“ DeSantis in fighter plane conjures images of Dukakis in tank“

Just between you and me, I suspect that the only people for whom it “conjures” that image is Charlie Crist’s message team.

DeSantis was actually in the military; putting Dukakis in a tank was a little like putting Paul Lynde in a UFC ring. (UPDATE: Duke served in the Army, as a radio operator serving the UN Armistice Commission, back in the fifties. My bad. Albeit not as big a bad as the ).

SCENE: Mitch BERG is looking for Gatorade Zero at Cub Foods when Cat SCAT, he designated “fact checker” at the (possibly fictional) progressive blog “”MinnesotaLiberalAlliance.Blogspot.com“ and office manager at a small phrenology practice, steps around the corner.

SCAT: Merg!

BERG: Uh, hey, Cat…

SCAT: Shut up. You and other so-called conservatives are spreading disinformation.

BERG: Do tell.

SCAT: You say that the so-called “woke mob” is “grooming” people, especially young children, into transitioning their gender.

BERG: Yep. You know who else says it? The parents of those children.

SCAT: Ack-shyu-ally, before someone can transition, they have to go through rigorous counseling by physician, culminating with a “Letter of Readiness for Surgery” signed by a physician.

BERG: Ah. A legal document.

SCAT: Yes.

BERG: Delivered with all due solemnity.

SCAT: Of course.

BERG: Because science.

SCAT: Uh…yeah?

BERG: Yeah – about that?

BERG: Comments?

SCAT: White supremacy! Racism!

BERG: Of course.

And SCENE.

To: Governor Walz
From: Mitch Berg, Irascible Peasant
Re: Priorities

Your Highness:

You wrote this on Twitter yesterday:

Let’s look at this past four years:

• Crime wave, abetted by DFL policy
• Riots, encouraged by your administratiion’s passive-aggressive bureaucratic gamesmanship with the National Guard
• Collapse of respect for the rule of law, as a result of DFL policy
• Educational outcomes for minorities, already terrible, collapsed
• State divided between “essential” and “non-essential” workers – meaning dividing people
• “Science” bastardized by your administration hiding the code for the “model” “predicting” tens of thousands of dead from Covid by July 2020, as a best case. That’s how how science is done,

To the extent Minnesota is doing well, it’s in spite of you.

Hope we’ve settled that.

That is all.

I listen to NPR, on occasion. I do it so you don’t have to. Freedom isn’t free.

And in and among the hours and hours of bald-faced Democrat public relations and PR, you find the occasional nugget of brilliance.

On occasion, that brilliance is utterly in spite of any original intentions.

Such is this hour-long documentary by one DJ Cashmere – which I thought was a hip-hop stage name for a moment, but is in fact the name of a nebbishy-sounding former high school teacher at “Nobles Street School”, a “chain” of Chicago-area “no-nonsense” charter schools. Cashmere went on to become a journnalist…

…under which guise he came back to report on, as “APM Reports” says:

In this hour, DJ, who is white, revisits his old school as it tries to reinvent itself as an anti-racist institution. And he seeks out his former students to ask them how they felt about being on the receiving end of all that education reform, and what they think now about the time they spent in his classroom.

While I eschew the term “dog whistle” as a way of slighting other points of view, the story is full of terms that both sides have staked out, for and against. The blurb notes “At the time, Noble followed a popular model called “no excuses.” Its schools required strict discipline but promised low-income students a better shot at college.”

That discipline included uniforms, plus some pretty rigid behavioral expectations; being late, disruptive, or tardy with homework was not tolerated; detentions flew like spitballs for infractions, not only of disciplinary rules, but for being in class late or having uniforms out of spec.

No education model is a panacaea, but Noble Street had good results – good enough that close to 10% of Chicago families, overwhelmingly “of color” and low income (just like Twin Cities charter schools) put their kids in Noble Street schools. There were exceptions. When dealing with human beings, nothing is ever foolproof. But pretty much every objective measure – graduation rates, test scores, college acceptance rates, crime rates – showed the concept worked well for most kids.

And then…

…well, the blurb mentions the dramatic peak; management at Noble Street changed. Noble Street’s “no excuses” values were patriarchal, colonial and, despite the overwhelming approval of the overwhelmingly of-color clientele who’d voted with their and their kids’s feet to get into Noble, “white supremacist”.

And so they changed.

As to the results?

You can listen to the story here (I can’t embed it, unfortunately).

Like all human behavior, there are as many sides to the story as there are people. But it’s a lede that one might suspect public radio would bury, and you’d be at least partly right. The results that parents were looking for – the sort of accomplishment based measures that modern Big Left has called “patriarchal” and “white supremacist” – didn’t fare well.

It’s worth an (occasionally infuriating) listen.

Governor Klink (or one of the chirpy 20-somethings in his communications office) writes:

So let’s make sure we’ve got this straight. The governor whose party says:

• public safety is a “privilege”
• We need to ban most/all guns
• The police should be defunded or radically reorganized
• Parents should just shut up and let teachers and school administrators do their thinking for them
• A five-year-old can pick their own sex
• entire (politically favorable) classes of debt should be eliminated without consequencedebt should be eradicated without consequence
• Society needs to be radically rebuilt from the core outward
• fetuses should be abortable until birth, if not after

… feels the need to warn us about “extremism“?

Where we are now:

Many common social-justice phrases have echoes of a catechism: announcing your pronouns or performing a land acknowledgment shows allegiance to a common belief, reassuring a group that everyone present shares the same values. But treating politics like a religion also makes it more emotionally volatile, more tribal (because differences of opinion become matters of good and evil) and more prone to outbreaks of moralizing and piety. “I was thinking about that Marx quote that religion is the opium of the people,” Elizabeth Oldfield, the former director of the Christian think tank Theos, told me. “I think what we’ve got now is [that] politics is the amphetamines of the people.”

Writing for the Atlantic (via MSN), Helen Lewis also noticed something else:

I asked Alex Clare-Young, a nonbinary minister in the United Reformed Church, whether their faith or their gender was more surprising to Generation Z acquaintances. “I think probably being religious,” Clare-Young responded. “I know a lot of LGBTQ+ young people who say it’s harder to come out as Christian in an LGBT space than LGBT in a Christian space.”

Of course it is. In our world, the wrath of the mob is more fearsome than the wrath of God. And you’re more likely to get instant karma if you don’t bow to conventional wisdom. If you see a sign in someone’s yard, proclaiming “In This House We Believe [select platitudes here]”, it’s almost certainly a leftist. I suppose it’s good when they self-identify. But as the old saw goes, the devil is in the details.

A friend of the blog emails:

Some hipster soccer fan from Brooklyn stayed at a hotel in Minneapolis and was not impressed

The beginning of the thread is pretty funny. He complains that the Hilton Gardens isn’t really downtown because it is between a highway and a vacant building. (Surprise-that is what our downtown is like these days). In the next tweet, he complains that the hotel seems to be full of people “waiting until things with the police cooled down or their wives took them back.” (Another surprise, I guess, because this seems to also be something many people are saying about downtown Minneapolis these days. It’s just not that #vibrant).

Sorry the guy got some big bed bug welt. I’m also sorry that the bed bug made the news but the deterioration of our Twin Cities, with all it’s vacant buildings, vacant lots, and ongoing crime do not really make the news in any significant way. 

Stay with me, here.

Minneapolis has always had an inferiority complex re New York. It even adopted “The Mini-Apple” as its marketing slogan in the ’80s (during the later years of NYC’s nadir in the Dinkins years, for crying out loud).

If New York media figures start dunking on Minneapolis? That might get the administration’s attention.

For every singer who manages to keep a career going for decades, there are hundreds of flashes in the pan – people who get a one-hit-wonder in their teens or twenties, have a brief spurt of stardom, and then…

…well, nothing.

What happens to them?

Nick Duerden at the Guardian wondered the same thing, enough to write a book about it. The article abridged from it zooms past an array of “where are they now” artists in a dizzying variety of genres, including one I’d been wondering about myself for a while, now:

In 1987, seemingly overnight, Terence Trent D’Arby became the most arresting new pop star of his generation. To hear him sing songs such as If You Let Me Stay and Sign Your Name was to bear witness to the art of aural seduction; the knees buckled. He became terribly famous, terribly quickly. He was 25.

“I wanted adulation and got it,” D’Arby tells me almost 35 years later, by now working under the name Sananda Maitreya, “but I had to die to survive it.”

If his ascendancy had the stuff of legend about it, then so did his demise. Like Prince before him, he began to feel himself capable of anything, each new song he composed a masterpiece. His record company felt differently – it wanted hits, not ornate rock operas – but D’Arby was not someone easily restrained. And so, in pursuit of his muse, he spent the early 90s reportedly living the life of a tormented recluse in a Los Angeles mansion. When I speak to him – which takes six months to arrange – he suggests he was grateful to move on “from such excess and artifice. I didn’t give a fuck about it then, and even less about it now that memory has been kind enough to allow me to forget most of it.”

Prince had died, Michael Jackson, too. D’Arby was still here, albeit with a name change – prompted by a dream he had in 1995 – to help him better bury the past. Today, Maitreya lives in Milan, is happily married with young children, and writes, records and produces his own music, which he releases on his own label, behaving as he damn well pleases.

And Trent D’Arby…er, Maitreya – hints at something that dogged me and my mental state through my early thirties:

The question of whether anyone is listening any more doesn’t seem to trouble him unduly. When I ask what, if anything, he misses from the old days, he replies: “I miss the unbridled, bold, naked stupidity of youth’s vibrant electric hubris.”

As someone who oozed vibrant electric hubris himself? Even though I never had a hit (or came much closer than this single glorious evening), I do miss feeling that way pretty badly, sometimes.

Not all the side-effects, of course. I’m one of those guys who wants four metaphorical Old Fashioneds, but no hangover.

As the article shows, it doesn’t work that way, literally or figuratively.