Star Tribune Now in Default

 

Views from a city with a newspaper that is failing.  There was a price we pay for inattention.  Waking up and realizing the morning bird call was gone.  I was in a place where there was too much insouciance.  Not caring about the loss of a species, not caring about the losses, not caring about the suffering of other men.  Not thinking about the source of food, the resources, the water, the work of creation.  We were numb.  Living pre-recorded lives, listening to pre-recorded music day after day.  The birds’ flyway connects us as the mortar to South America.  To markets.  To families here among us.  To animals.  To the land. 

While humankind in the north was changing the land, sub-diving it, breaking it apart,the birds kept going south each winter.  When the river began in your backyard and went for more than one thousand miles, when it went into the sea, you thought differently.  You sensed an impact you had on everyone downstream.  It was not just arrogance.  But now we were breaking apart, like the land, like our bridges.  In Minneapolis.

July 1, 2008

NEW YORK The owners of the Star Tribune in Minneapolis have opted not to pay interest on the paper’s second-tier debt.

Neal St. Anthony reported. in the Star Tribune that Avista Capital Partners declined to make a quarterly interest payment on $96 million in debt, which is now in default. Instead the company wants to work out a restructuring plan with The Blackstone Group. Avista retained the financial advisors in May.

Chris Harte, CEO of the Star Tribune, told St. Anthony, “If we can restructure this debt, we still have a very viable [business].”

Avista paid the interest payment on its senior debt of $400 million.

Harte said that EBITDA is “down dramatically” and that the newspaper has not be able to cut operating costs fast enough. The plan is restructure the debt with senior creditors.

St. Anthony reported that Avista’s senior debt has traded among banks for as little as 56 cents on the dollar and the second-tier debt has traded for as little as a 10 cents on the dollar.

 

 

THINGS THAT MOVE US

Over the past two weeks, my attention has been focused on things that move us in daily life.  My German made car was not working.  This car made in Bavaria had a cooling fan, necessary in a car that might otherwise overheat, and this fan was not always shutting down.  It took a while to diagnose what was wearing down the battery. 

 

I live in a metropolitan area that last summer had a major bridge collapse over the Mississippi River.  Since the time of the bridge collapse, the Minnesota Department of Transportation has been doing a lot more bridge inspections.  They found another gusset plate issue in Winona a few days ago.  Suddenly another bridge was not moving the local populace.  The modern human gives little though to crossing bridges until the bridge no was no longer there to move the locals, where the metric intervals to Wisconsin were turned into extra miles to commute. 

 

I have been focused this spring on the local newspaper.  I come from a family where my father’s first job was that of a journalist.  Three of his five children had gone to college, majoring in journalism.  And suddenly like never before, we were all looking at another kind of gusset plates to make sure the newspaper in town was stationary and kept on unifying the community, moving us to a destination. 

 

In March I had received a book, Vanishing Ireland.  There was a concern in Europe about a vanishing world.  Europeans were struggling to live in a secular world with their Christian past.   Vanishing Ireland was not a book so much about vanishing Catholics in Ireland as a vanishing way of life.  The Catholics were still there.  But the meaning and purpose of a Catholic identity in the vanishing world of Europe Union was a concern to clerical leaders.  Vanishing Christianity, whatever the denomination, was faced with a shortage of clergy for the next generation.  It had happened and was continuing to happen.  But why?

 

Mortar was the thing that held a building together.  Newspapers, churches did the same thing for the identity of a community.  Whereas gusset plates had a hard time in these parts holding the weight on an increased number of cars and the increased weight of the things that things that moved us like SUVs, mortar still did its job with buildings. 

 

During World War II, they drank “ersatz coffee” in Europe, in Italy.  It was not the real deal.  In the new millennium I have gotten a sense that the current Popes have carried with them a sense of “ersatz infallibility,” so that even routine administration seems like an exercise of infallibility.  That was also mentioned in a speech yesterday delivered by outgoing president of the Catholic Theological Society of America, Margaret O’Gara. 

 

I was hopeful that issues of differences in the Christian world between papal primacy and papal infallibility would give way to the wisdom of a theologian who had spent too much of his life dwelling over the gusset plates that most people did not want to have to worry about.  Most of us just wanted church and theology to be the thing that moves us in daily life, that we might go about our business.  For Christians, the mortar of Christian identity was in the message of Jesus Christ that God is love.  The lesson here over the past few months was that it was the bridge and not the parts that united humanity in our struggle, and brought us ALL together. 

 

Maybe when you were pope in the remnants of what had been the Papal States, you were still caught up in temporal matters and power struggles.  Divide and conquer.  It had never been so much the dogma coming forth from Vatican City as the bridge carrying us to God that people cared about.  It has been a long time that the real world had cared about the dogma.

 

There is a concern here in Minnesota about the inter-structure and our bridges, with the cost to maintain them.  The problems in Vatican City would seem to be about the same.  What would it mean in 30 years this Catholic identity unless the spotlight was put on what needed to be done on another kind of inner structure which would have an affect on Catholics for the generations to come.

 

Minnesota Mortar

Connecting the stories of the week.  Thoms Lynch said that really poetry was connecting items that seemed in no way connected. 

 

 

Bob had had a coming out party.  At the age of 44.  Saturday night.  The party was an announcement to friends that had always meant the most to him.  The party represented his desire to say something intimate about himself.  His past, his future.  It was interesting to note who was and who was not present, and who might not be there for him from now on. 

 

 

He had addressed intimacy, when there always was a fear of it for everyone, of saying what is deepest inside.  I was not crazy to hear in this case what it was that was deepest inside.  The fear was about not knowing how to handle it.  “It” being loss or change. 

 

 

On Sunday of this weekend the story was about the potential bankruptcy of the Minneapolis StarTribune.  It was a decade where the future of all newspapers, an enterprise of communications, was being threatened.  Not many Americans had wakened to what it meant to be in the throes of this loss. 

 

 

I had a dream last night that my mother was going in for a CT scan to address issues of dizziness.  At least to my knowledge this was a physical problem restricted to my dream.  But it too did call the question of the meaning of love and of being loved.  The dream also called the question of identity, my family identity, expression of who were and are.  In my dream, I wanted to work at communications, communicating the importance one life had been to mine.    And like most guys, I was not very good at expressing it. 

 

Intimacy:  Sex. Communication.  In a world where there was so much threatening human existence, in illness that needed to be diagnosed, most people had something wrong with them.  And it was in facing challenges to good health, physical, econonomic, in relationships, each of us was challenged to how express things of significance.   

 

 

I had seen a rat in the garage on Saturday.  I had not seen many rats in my life.  Never before had I seen one in my neighborhood.  The rat still existed as some kind of terror.  And these were the days of the ongoing, never ending War on Terror which did show the ultimate threat to life was death.  Whether it was a worry from the dream of what was wrong physically, fears of what were spiritually wrong, whatever the answer, it was the threat of, a fear of the unknown. 

 

 

When so many people have no spiritual identity, then there is a threat to spiritual existence, to ideals.  A good number of people amongst us had no idea who they were.  The threat was to the meaning and purpose of any individual.  The trouble was living in relationships, in community, with people different than I was.  And institutions were a mortar that held us all together. 

 

 

With death, an individual comes to grips with a side of intimacy and the desire to pass on what is, what was most important about life.  Intimacy afterall determines identity.  

 

 

With sickness, it was a time to wake up to reflect on what I could pass on.  What was most important here, in the area of ideals?  For the friend now gay, the newspaper, the rat, a mother near the date of Mother’s Day?  Was Darwin right?  Was ultimately life, the sex life, about the survival of the fittest? 

 

I had started to think of all this last night on a walk.  I had wondered this spring what was the shape of the foundation of who I was, who I am, who we were, we are.  I had noticed the bricks around the base of a wall near a Summit Avenue mansion, close to the governor’s mansion, when I wondered about the mortar of American identity this year, that certain mortar that had always held people together.  On Summit Aveneue, the mortar was coming apart but only at the base.  It dawned on me that the legislature was due to adjourn this week. 

 

 

Actually when I got home there was a live debate still on public television at 10:30 pm when PBS programming should have been on. 

 

 

Newspapers, government, there had always been a certain mortar—keeping people together.  We took the connectiveness all for granted.  Now we need this real life poetry more than ever.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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.