{"id":80736,"date":"2022-01-25T11:00:00","date_gmt":"2022-01-25T17:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=80736"},"modified":"2022-01-23T17:21:29","modified_gmt":"2022-01-23T23:21:29","slug":"the-entropic-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=80736","title":{"rendered":"The Entropic Life"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

It’s the image that keeps Minnesota DFLers, and “moderate” Republicans of the Dave Durenberger \/ Arne Carlson, warm on cold nights; the moment when Minnesota’s political class got the national warm fuzzy they so desperately sought and, decades later, so yearned to have reaffirmed:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"\/<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Governor Wendell Anderson on the cover of Time<\/em>, proclaiming that all the best things in life could be delivered by “good government” – defined as interventionist, but driven by “compromise” between a DFL that was still very much the party of Hubert Humphrey, and a GOP that was basically the DFL in better suits. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The image encapsulates an era that for decades made the likes of Doug Grow and Lori Sturdevant misty-eyed with nostalgia, with boxcars full of newsprint over the decades devoted to columns bemoaning our inability to reach the acme of their respective youths…<\/p>\n\n\n\n

…even as we with eyes for history and current events noted that that gauzy, soft-focus bit of hindsight ignores how much that sort of governance depends on a shared culture of communitarian polity that emigrated from poor, rural Scandinavian towns to poor, rural Minnesota towns – not to mention that the DFL of today would expel the gun-owning, forthrightly anti-Communist Humphrey were he seeking office. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And now comes this piece, by one of the writers behind the original Time <\/em>article<\/a> and the original Minnesota myth, nearly five decades ago. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And he‘s revising his view – big-time<\/a>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What happened? Minnesota once enjoyed a high degree of social cohesion rooted in the traditions of previous waves of immigrants. But as the region has grown and become more diverse, the Twin Cities in particular developed most of the problems that bedevil much of the rest of urban America (crime, unemployment, drugs and so on). The reasons for this are complicated and widely debated. In any case, Minnesota now ranks among the worst states in the country when it comes to racial inequality.<\/p>

In 1973, there were two strong political parties in Minnesota, both centrist and in touch with the state\u2019s voters. A profound change occurred in the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, especially among the wealthy and young. They contrived to seize political power by leveraging certain idealistic or merely sentimental impulses in the public mind. It was the prospering woke who elected the progressive Minneapolis City Council that supports defunding the police, and it was those white elites who, more than her fellow Somali-Americans, elected Ilhan Omar to the House. A mostly white \u201cmeritocracy,\u201d caring more about, say, transgender rights than about job creation, took command in Minneapolis and elsewhere in the country. Both parties have become much more ideological, controlled by angry amateurs\u2014the woke and the antiwoke.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Morrow, currently 80-something, somewhat myopically saves some blame for the MN GOP, as if the Republicans move to the right was in any way symmetric with the DFL’s leftward lurch, and as if moderation itself, rather than enlightened communitarian self-interest, was what brought Minnesota’s near-mythical golden age about. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But the whole thing is worth a read – because the conclusion couldn’t be more correct:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The difference between my 1973 story and the news reports of 2022 amounts to the difference, as it were, between Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. Tom gives you the boyish, innocent, sun-shot rendering of Hannibal, Mo., in the middle of the 19th century. Huck\u2019s story is the version of America that includes poverty, murder, alcoholism, child abuse, race prejudice, blood feud and imbecility. Minneapolis today looks a little more like the Huckleberry Finn version, although without Huck\u2019s humor or his rascal charm.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Some of the same DFLers who venerated the myth created by the original coverage have been venting their bottomless barrels of spite at Morrow for turning on him – he’s being compared with Sean Hannity, for Florence’s sake. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But he’s far from wrong. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s the image that keeps Minnesota DFLers, and “moderate” Republicans of the Dave Durenberger \/ Arne Carlson, warm on cold nights; the moment when Minnesota’s political class got the national warm fuzzy they so desperately sought and, decades later, so yearned to have reaffirmed: Governor Wendell Anderson on the cover of Time, proclaiming that all […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-80736","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80736","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=80736"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80736\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":80737,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80736\/revisions\/80737"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=80736"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=80736"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=80736"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}