Real
By Mitch Berg
Let’s be clear about this: I do appreciate the leftybloggers and lefty pundits in the Twin Cities that can have a civilized debate for more than one round without diving straight into the name-calling. They are rare, but given the number of “progressives” in the Twin Cities, there are still plenty of them.
That’s not just smack-talk. I grew up in a liberal household, I was a liberal til my early twenties, and my parents still are (although all three of us Berg kids did in fact see the light), so I have no interest in demonizing or pointlessly antagonizing liberals; I have to visit them over Christmas, for crying out loud.
Anyway, I get along with Jeff Rosenberg just fine. He’s a good guy. Wrong about most things, but then so’s my Mom, and we get along too.
Anyway, Jeff bit on that most classic bit of inter-party smack talk, “The Real American”:
According to Sarah Palin during the 2008 presidential campaign, I’m not a “Real American,” because I live in a city.
That one seems to bug a lot of libs. Which, to be fair, is what it was intended to do. It’s “smack talk”; sorta like saying “your momma’s so fat, they can’t even find the search party they sent down her butt crack to find the missing airplane”; it doesn’t really mean that anyone’s missing, or that any of that could fit between “your momma’s” buttcheeks, or even that any of us have met your mother.
It’s just supposed to get you too angry to think about your game. It gets me – the smack-talker – into your head. It puts me in control.
And it worked!
Now, it is a fact that America’s urban areas tend to vote Democrat. And it is a further fact that Democrats, while often proclaiming the depth of their patriotism, also have a really hard time with the idea of American exceptionalism; patriotism in a red county may be chock full of God Bless America and the Troops and “Shining City On A Hill”, while in a Blue county it is frequently more a matter of “We’re a lot less unlike France than we used to be, and with 12 more years of Obama and Dayton, we’ll get even better“, and yes, I know I’m simplifying things, but work with me here.
So it is a logical deduction that an urban American is less likely to believe that America is anything special.
Rosenberg:
Apparently, Palin isn’t the only one who feels that way. Minnesota Supreme Court Chief Justice Lori Gildea feels similarly: I’m also not a “Real Minnesotan.” At least, that’s what she told an audience in Brainerd:
Jeff quotes a City Pages piece:
“I’m so happy to be in real Minnesota,” Gildea said.
Okay, well, maybe Gildea was just coming down from an acid trip, and couldn’t tell if she’d actually been in the state of her birth. Let’s give her a chance to explain.
“Outside of the Twin Cities,” Gildea clarified.
Darn those SCOM justices and their smack talk! Now, we’re going to have 50,000 leftybloggers’ undies in a bunch!
And Rosenberg must be wearing boxers, because the bunch is obviously painful:
Got that, everyone? The only “real” Minnesotans are the ones who live outside of the Twin Cities, the place where most Minnesotans live. That made me wonder: Just what percentage of Minnesotans are real?
Warning: A Democrat is about to attempt to work with empirical, geographical and demographic data. This could get ugly.
That’s why I’ve put together a handy chart to give you an idea of how it breaks down. The chart uses the smallest possible definition of the Twin Cities, the seven-county area.
Here’s Jeff’s chart, for starters:
And can we get all you good Lakeville and Maple Grove “Real Minnesotans” to sound off here? That’s not the smallest possible definition of the Twin Cities.
That would be, er, the Twin Cities; 667,646 people according to the 2010 census, between Minneapolis and Saint Paul.
So an accurate chart looks a little more like this:
I wasn’t sure if the exurbs were real; Gildea hasn’t yet clarified how many acres of land you must own to be a real Minnesotan.
All right. Time for a cleansing breath, everyone.
(Whooosh).
OK. If you’re going to get all knotted up over other peoples’ smack-talk, then the game is no fun.
Still, speaking on behalf of all conservatives, I’ll work with y’all on this. Tell your buddies in the SEIU, MAPE, AFSCME, the MFT and the Teamsters to stop calling themselves “labor”, or at least “workers”. I’m not in a union (anymore), but I most definitely work. Indeed, among “real workers” in the private sector, 91% of us “workers” apparently aren’t “workers” according to “labor”.
As long as you wanna be all literal and all which, I stress, I don’t. Not really.
That is all.
October 14th, 2011 at 3:02 pm
Speaking of phrases expropriated and pounded into nothingness by the progs, here’s my personal favorite:
Working Families
Kind of conjures up an image of Mom, Dad and the kids rising before dawn, doing the chores and then heading off to the factory to make steel implements from honest to goodness iron ore from Da Range.
Then I asked myself, what the hell is a non-working family? There must be some around. I guess they get up around ten, somewhere in Eden Prairie, pile into their respective sports cars, SUVs and limos and head off to the country club for another day of furious consumption and tax avoidance.
Yeah, life is peachy when you deal with nothing but stereotypes and straw men.
October 14th, 2011 at 3:10 pm
Rosenberg started with a lie. Neither Palin nor Gildea said anything about people. They were talking about parts of the country. You know, regions.
I was born in Minneapolis, near the U of M. I graduated from West High School in Minneapolis. I am absolutely certain that Gildea would consider me a “real Minnesotan” (even though I have lived in Hawaii since 1989).
October 14th, 2011 at 3:23 pm
Well Golfdoc, there are plenty of “non-working” families in Minnesota. They coincidentally mostly live in the region Mr. Rosenberg and Berg deem fake.
I do love how Joel can just insert the word “only” in the judges statement to make his point. That must be a case of putting word into someone’s mouth.
October 14th, 2011 at 4:39 pm
While they are both Rosenbergs, both registered Dems, and both decent guys, there is no mistaking Jeff and the late Joel.
But I’ve done it too, Kerm.
October 14th, 2011 at 9:14 pm
So…whose smack-talking here? It all sounds like much ado about nothing. We “real Minnesotans” never worry about things like that anyway. What I find interesting is that “real Minnesotans” like me all live “outstate.”
Oh, well. At least you “fake Minnesotans” get to live “instate.” 😉
October 14th, 2011 at 9:41 pm
My bad, mea culpa. I now remember the tribute to Joel. He believed in personal rights. Much respect and felicity.
And I’m a “real Minnesotan” And a conservative. Like my father before me. Have been now for over fifty years. You want to argue that, name the place and time, i will gladly come and kick your ass. Rhetorically speaking, of course.
October 15th, 2011 at 10:22 am
Doesn’t bother me any. I moved here 19 years ago, but I’ll never be “one of us” or a “real Minnesotan.” But unless there’s some sort of secret 10% “real Minnesota” discount at local merchants, it doesn’t much matter.
I like Jeff, too — I met him at a MOB party and he’s a good guy. On this issue he should try the decaf.