Xcel Arena, Deoderent, Protestors & the RNC

 

Politics to me was a lot like deoderent.  Trying to make me smell not so much better but just not bad.  Recently I tried using the expensive one.  It still smelled like a deoderent to me.  And I still did not smell much different. 

 

That was campaign 2008 for me.  More expensive than ever.  But not really hiding the smells. 

 

Delegates, journalists, lobbyists and prominent political leaders have begun arriving in the Twin Cities for the Republican National Convention.  At 1:30 am I saw a helicopter making sweeps just north of I-94 along Lexington to Western Avenue.  I think it is safe to say that security forces are approaching this job like they are in Iraq.

 

After a legal challenge, the Jumbotron is to arrive Sunday afternoon in the small park across the street from the Cathedral of St. Paul, just above the Xcel Center.  The satelite bathrooms with the patented name of Biffs are set up.   And I can report I saw a worker actually using a disinfectant to make sure thos Biffs are clean.  At least for now, at 1 pm they are very clean.

 

MinnPost, an on-line Twin Cities newspaper, reports that Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist John Camp (also known as John Sanford, the best-selling novelist) this week will report on the street scene outside the convention hall, along with Christina Capecchi.  I am here to say there will be no real street scene anwhere close to the Xcel Arena to report on. 

 

The St. Paul Pioneer Press was reporting at 12:45 pm that a response team was testing a flash-bang grenade in the State Office Building parking ramp on the grounds of the Capital around noon today.  The Minneapolis paper reported that a state trooper accidentally dropped the device in the parking lot.  

 

I just came back from walking to Assumption for 11 am mass.  This is as close as anyone without credentials can get to the Xcel.  Coming out of church, there were 4 black helicopters circling the Xcel.   Repeatedly.  About 150 feet above the building.    All week long they have been about 300 feet or less overhead. 

 

From walking downtown, I saw security set up for cars trying to get into the Cathedral parking lot.  Besides a rent a cop, there had a real cop with communication in his ear closer to the archbishop’s residence.  All of the $50 million St. Paul got must be going to security. 

 

The best security fence I ever have seen have been built to protect the customers of Mickey’s Diner next to what I still call the St. Paul Companies.  I headed down to the Farmers Market in Lowertown.  There were no women downtown today, except at mass.  There might have been 100 people as Assumption instead of the normal crowd of 900 to 1,000, with the access restricted to pedestrians.

 

I saw two guys with shaved heads, one earring, who looked as if they played in the NFL in plain clothes, looking like they were students.  In case the anarchists ever arrive downtown.  Every building had there own private security outside on the sidewalk in special issue vests. Every parking lot has a sign posted as FULL.  

 

FOX News ended up erecting an aluminum building in the parking lot across from the Xcel.  The cement barriers around the Xcel are visible from across from the Cathedral.  No protester is gonna get close to the building. 

  

I now am staying away from all of this.  I had never smelled tear gas but suspect it had more of an affect than deoderent.   

Murder in Beijing

The media was slow to report on exactly who was murdered in Beijing.   Todd Bachman had fame in his own right.  He was CEO of Bachmans, a 121-year-old family business located on 60th and Lyndale in Minneapolis.  This was the largest florist in this part of the country.  Mr. Bachman in April 2008 became the chairman of the board of what I once knew as Florist Mutual based in Edwardsville, Illinois.  Apparently Florist Mutual has changed its name to Hortica Insurance & Employees Benefits.  I never had met the man but i expect he was as classy as the two companies under his charge.     

The father of 3 daughters, he lived in Farmington.  His 6’4” daughter, Wiz, the youngest, had attended UCLA on a volleyball scholarship after rising through her youth in volleyball the way boys in Lakeville are groomed as hockey players.  

(See  http://www.startribune.com/business/26470694.html.)  

With the 300 police reportedly who descended on the scene, it is understandable that the media in China is having a hard time to learn more about the story.

 

It looks to me like the Farmington Independent seems to have broken the story before the Minneapolis and St. Paul papers.   

Todd’s name appear as one of the board of trustee, the chair of Admissions/Financial Aid, at Wartburg College, a private liberal arts Lutheran college affiliated with the ELCA in Waverly, IA.   

 

Mark Zeigler is a writer with the UNION-TRIBUNE in San Diego.  On August 14, 2008, he wrote the following from with a dateline of BEIJING.

China scholar sees ’symbolism’ in killing of foreigner

In a city of 17.4 million people, the ancient Drum Tower, or Gulou, rises majestically from a gray sea of crumbling brick homes and meandering alleys in central Beijing.  Nearly all of the residents of Beijing are Chinese, and Westerners are easy to identify.  One place they are likely to be found is the Drum Tower.

The notion of suicide also carries a different meaning in China than in the West, as an act of protest. The popular annual Dragon Boat festival commemorates the death of Qu Yuan, a poet from 300 B.C. who drowned himself as a final, heroic act of defiance against a repressive government.   

Locals speak of the increasing number of people from the countryside who move to Beijing in search of a better life and, if they don’t find it, quickly become disillusioned. A 2004 report by the Beijing Suicide Research and Prevention Center named suicide as the fifth leading cause of death in China and No. 1 among people between the ages of 15 and 34.

Chinese authorities said Tang was a troubled 47-year-old man from the eastern province of Zhejiang. He reportedly had lost his job at a factory in Hangzhou, had gone through a divorce and was living in a rented room in Beijing. Beijing newspapers and television stations have carried little, if any, mention of the story.

“They are worried you’ll have copycats,” said an official from a Chinese governmental agency, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of losing his job. “You have how many people who are destitute and disenfranchised in a city this large? (Publicizing the incident) might empower someone to do it again.

“It happens all the time,” said a European language teacher who has lived in Beijing for a decade and who declined to give his name. “Someone loses everything. They lose their job.  They get divorced.  They kill themselves. It happens so often here that no one notices anymore. “

 “I think it’s a minority but I think it exists,” Brownell said of anti-foreigner sentiment in China. “It’s a product of all the rhetoric of China’s humiliation at the hands of the West. There is a deep-seated xenophobia that has been an integral part of China for centuries, to close down and shut off to the rest of the world. It’s still there today, to a certain extent.”

The Drum Tower was renamed the Tower of Realizing Shamefulness in 1924, serving as a museum devoted to invasions and occupations by foreign nations. It once served as a watch tower on the northern edge of the city, able to alert residents of unwelcome visitors. It has since been converted to a tourist attraction.

 

 

In Search of Scapegoats

I live in a town where since last August 1, 2008 there has been a heightened awareness about crossing a bridge.  One day last November, the oldest business in the state of Minnesota had lost its identity, with little note made.  There is more awareness this week over the loss of the headquarters of a major airline.  And there was awareness over the national convention of one of the major political parties which would be here in less than 5 months. 

 

 

Most residents of the two cities seemed asleep as to whether the Minneapolis StarTribune or the St. Paul Pioneer Press would be around to cover the national convention.  A pending bankruptcy of the StarTribune Company was written about on May 4^th in the New York Post.  It has currently been denied.

 

 

The threat of collapse of either enterprise was not just the loss of a local source of news.  The news could be read elsewhere, without a local taste.  Small towns in Minnesota had been going through similiar change, with consolidated school districts for most of the last twenty-five years.  And that will be the direction of the churches in the archdiocese of St. Paul-Minneapolis, as throughout the country, for the next decade.

 

 

What exactly did they teach in MBA programs where consolidations were supposed to be workable when smaller companies could not survive?

 

 

I had worked in downtown Chicago 18 years ago when I heard a contemporary, a suburbanite, bemoan the loss of identity of the suburb where he had grown up.  He felt that Arlington Heights was suddenly just like any other suburb in Chicago, in America. Without any flavor.  Tasteless.   Or had it been Elk Grove?

 

 

How soon would Minneapolis–St. Paul be just tasteless, without a flavor?  The loss of ethnic identity was having an effect on this generation of Americans.  As people I saw lost a sense of belonging, a sense of anger seemed to be a substitute, to those of the other party who might be responsible for the current state of affairs.  The community already seemed fractured.  But the stress fracture seemed to be getting worse.  A lot like what had happened to those gusset plates in that bridge structure that led to the collapse.