Jon Tevlin: Waterboy For The Narrative

After the Franson “story” broke the week before last, the DFL thought it was onto a Don Imus moment. And they needed one – their somnolent legislative caucus

They were disappointed when the story started to fade – even most DFLers can tell when context is being waterboarded.  It was dropping off the radar last week when the “Alliance For A Better Minnesota” stepped in to demand an apology and try to fan the flames among their droogs.

It didn’t work. The protests planned for Rep.Franson’s lawn drew, according to one report, three droogs.

But the droogs on the street are afterthoughts to the DFL. They have them in higher places.

Jon Tevlin – aka “Nick Coleman 2.0” – seems to have gotten his marching orders, “file an indignant piece about Franson”, in by deadline,which was apparently back when the DFL was still flogging the story.

And Tevlin’s piece hits all the points Alita Messinger and Ken Martin desperately want to be hit:.

 When Rep. Mary Franson compared people who get food stamps to animals in the wild, beholden to humans who feed them,

Huh?

I wonder if Tevlin even knows how bizarre that is.

she was being blissfully ignorant of a growing number of people who live in a certain region in Minnesota.

Namely, her neighbors.

Really, Jon Tevlin, ace reporter?

And how do you know what Mary Franson is “ignorant” about?  She lives there, works in daycare, campaigns there every two years.

I’m going to suggest she’s less “blissfully ignorant” than Jon Tevlin is invincibly arrogant-enough to write columns in first-person omniscient.

Before she made jokes about people on food stamps, or SNAP, she might have asked around, or just looked at the website for Todd County, which is in her district. There, she would have seen a recent report that both food stamps and medical assistance are up dramatically in Todd County.

Soaring, under her watch.

And here, the ethical reader has a dilemma: does the Strib employ a columnist who is stupid enough to believe a state legislator’s “watch” has direct impact on poverty in her county?  Or do they employ one who’s so cynical and in the bag for the DFL propaganda machine that he writes garbage like this in hopes that the readers are too stupid to know any better?

To my mind, it’s a toss-up.

The assumption behind Franson’s logic is that people who get assistance do so because, like animals used to being fed, they get lazy.

No.  They get dependent.  “Lazy” is when columnists crib their chanting points from “Alliance For A Better Minnesota” .  “Dependent” is when you honestly don’t know another way than being on the dole.

Compare and contrast:  “Jon Tevlin is too lazy to dig beneath his own arrogant, smug, entitled, DFL-pimping preconceptisons”, versus “Jon Tevlin is dependent on DFL / ABM chanting points for his material on this issue, to the point where he has no idea how to find the real facts about the issue”.  See the difference?

OK.  Maybe not in Teviln’s case.   Because as we see, he’s both:

But the report from Todd County Social Services shows quite the opposite. The unemployment rate is relatively low, 5.8 percent.

Now, I get confused – is that “on Mary Franson’s watch”, too?

People are working, and working hard, but the fact is they just don’t get paid very much.

Right.  There’s a recession going on.  Perhaps Jon Tevlin has heard?

Need, Rep. Franson. Your constituents, about 8 percent of them, need help because the businesses in your district can’t or won’t pay them enough to live on, and can’t or won’t provide them with health care.

And here’s where both dependence and laziness rear their slothful, indolent heads.  Franson was talking a general principle; Tevlin is talking details – the temporary needs of people having hard times.  Which, I’m sure Tevlin would find if he weren’t dependent on ABM for his chanting points, the GOP broadly supports.

Franson probably thinks these people are slackers, too, no-goods leeching off the public.

And Jon Tevlin “probably” wrote about a third of this column.

Except for this next bit:

Franson might not know these people — her neighbors — very well, but I do.

I lived in Todd County and graduated from high school there. Yes, some of the people who took assistance were lazy or drunks. But mostly they were people like the old woman across the street, whose husband had died many years ago, or like the people who toiled on poor dirt farms, or waited tables at the local restaurant.

Yes, they were even people like my dad, who after working for 40 years at Honeywell had a brain aneurism and had to rely on Social Security, pension, and food stamps for a while.

My dad accepted food stamps because he believed in responsibility, responsibility to feed his kids even though he couldn’t work.

In other words, “my story about real, genuine, acute need – and, more accurately, the emotions it churns up – trump your statement of high-level principle”.

It’s a logical fallacy.  It’s an argument based purely on emotion – which, to be fair, is the only kind of argument Tevlin’s DFL masters can make.   You can’t top it, the logic goes, so you have to just shut up, or appear cold and heartless.

It’s crap, of course; nobody, least of all conservatives, denies that human circumstance and human frailty creates need.  Nobody, least of all Franson, has said anything about changing that.  But the larger point – that welfare does create dependence, and it does – gets obscured by the inflammatory emotion, both of the “can you top this” story and, behyond that, the defamatory slander of the DFL/ABM’s chanting point.

Yes, I said “Tevlin’s DFL masters”:

The war on women apparently now joins the war on the poor.

Two narratives for the price of one.  He’s lazy and dependent, but he’s thorough.

Keep going, Strib.  Has anyone thought about what happens when your paper becomes nothing but a DFL news release ‘bot?

A lot of you Strib employees will be on food stamps, for starters.

10 thoughts on “Jon Tevlin: Waterboy For The Narrative

  1. Nick Coleman 2.0

    Great title!

    Except Jon doesn’t seem as bitter and angry as old Nickboy!

    Give him time.

  2. I’m in the area Rep Franson represents on a weekly basis talking with business managers and owners. The biggest concern nearly 90% of these people have: where are we going to find people (pref. Skilled) to staff our businesses as they grow? It comes up in every business review and forecast. Maybe if Nick 2.0 had experience working for a successful business he would have a better handle on the situation.

  3. Jon Tevlin is Prick Coleman without the suave, refined intelligence. Or something.

  4. To put it terms of this blog’s commenters/trolls:

    Tevlin=Dog Gone. Concern troll, long-winded and not half as clever as he imagines himself to be. Theoretically capable of independent thought, but prefers to phone it in.

    Nickboy=Tim in StP. Straight-up nasty and unapologetic about it.

  5. It is true that Tevlin comes to the job douchnozzle in place, but hasn’t been publicly mocked by a nationally known Prof. of journalism like Nicky-boy.

    He also hasn’t had a would-be target for one of his specious, tear sodden bits of amphigory throw a can of pop at him while yelling “Get the fuck out!”

    He doesn’t have a terrified underling to send to to spy on a MOB party… disguised as a fern.

    He just don’t “know stuff” yet.

  6. On behalf of those born and raised in Todd County, I ask your forgiveness for not better educating Mr. Tevlin. He is an embarassment to those of us who graduated in the top half our our Todd County high school classes. We obviously should have spent more time assisting our less intellectually competent classmagtes represented by Mr. Tevlin. While we were achieving, the less capable were, like Mr. Tevlin, looking for a way to make their living by whining. Please accept our most sincere apologies.

  7. The real problem with Tevlin’s piece, and the part that makes him a poor writer, is his caricature of Franson. Franson obviously engaged in caricature in her remarks, but she was speaking, as Mitch notes, in terms of principle and generality. Tevlin was caricaturing Franson specifically. It may be true that in general giving people things makes them dependent on being given things, it is not true, and I doubt that even Tevlin believes that it is true, that Franson would consider low-paid working people who have trouble paying their bills “slackers”.
    Franson is an individual. If he wanted to know if she believed that people who are working but are paid so little that they need public assistance or who can’t work due to a disability are parasites, he could have called her office and asked her.
    But that wouldn’t have served Tevlin’s purpose, which was to demonize Franson, or, as Alinsky put it in his rule 13, “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.”

  8. Shortly after this broke, one of my liberal friends on FB quoted a Kos article that screamed “REP FRANSON COMPARING POOR PEOPLE TO ANIMALS” and posted “Rep Franson should resign and spend a week working in a food shelf!”. I made the mistake of engaging this person in a debate, stating that DK took this thing WAY out of context. She refused to go beyond “you NEVER compare policies for people and animals in the same sentence, that’s offensive and disgusting.” She herself is a former “poverty activist”. After a few rounds of back and forth of both of us accusing each other of not understanding (or willfully ignoring) each others point, a friend of hers who lives in, and runs a food shelter in N Mpls, jumped into the fray with all sorts of gov’t statistics that I didn’t have the time or the knowledge of source material to refute.

    Brought a knife to a gunfight, I did.

    It’s too bad this post wasn’t around because it makes a lot of the arguments I was trying to, but makes them a lot more eloquently and knowledgeably than I was able to.

  9. Tevlin stereotypes Franson with the “Republicans are all rich oppressors” meme. Franson runs a daycare. I’m willing to bet Tevlin’s annual income is higher than hers, even if you throw in her pay as a representative.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.