GK: A modest proposal sure to be rejected
The column: 08.03.21
The sheer ferocity of Ida, high winds, buckets of rain, flash flooding in New York City Wednesday night, rivers and waterfalls in the subway, made millions of New Yorkers think about the advantages of settling in rural Minnesota, especially as more hurricanes, even more brutal than Ida, are forming over the climate-warmed water of the Atlantic. There is a limit to how much punishment people are willing to accept before they look around and consider greener pastures and meanwhile, in St. Paul, people thronged to the State Fair, devouring cheese curds and bratwursts, admiring the livestock and enjoying powerful centrifugal experiences. Facts are facts. If what it means to live in New York is to ride the subway into a waterfall, maybe it’s best to be less stressed in the Upper Midwest and instead of flooded tunnels and tornado funnels, take sanctuary on the prairie.
We have some snow here but it is not catastrophic. I speak from experience. Snow falls gently and does not harm anyone. When the Weather Service says, “Minnesota was hit by a blizzard,” the verb “hit” is fanciful, like being “struck” by a bluebird feather or being “attacked” by ants. When snow falls, we don’t hide under the bed, we don’t need powerful pumps, there are no dikes to prevent snowdrifts. We enjoy a blizzard, standing in the kitchen, drinking coffee, and we feel grateful for having teenagers in the family who will shovel the sidewalks. Bob Dylan shoveled snow, Amy Klobuchar, Jessica Lange, Prince, Jesse Ventura. It is a life-shaping experience.
When a city is flooded by tourists over a long period of time, as New York has been, they turn the place into a cartoon, and the last time I walked down to Little Italy, it was no more Italian than Domino’s Pizza or Venetian blinds or your aunt Florence. Nobody in Brooklyn speaks Brooklynese, it’s all gentrified. The press came down hard on Mets fans booing their team, one more sign that New York is turning into Seattle.
Americans enjoy having some foreignness around for variety and color and that’s what makes Texas appealing to so many people. You can freely enjoy peculiarities there that would make you an outcast elsewhere. For some reason, our Southern states tend to encourage the outlandish, which is why Mr. T moved to Palm Beach: he fits right in. New Orleans puts on Mardi Gras for guys who like to wear wigs and feathers and high heels. A country needs to maintain places where standards of normality are fairly loose. Sturgis, S.D., for example. Cambridge, Mass.
Minnesota never had a French Quarter and the French persons I know who’ve come to visit didn’t seem interested in starting one, but we’re in need of diversity and when the State Fair ends in a few days, I propose turning the Fair’s grounds into a Persian Quarter and resettling some of our Afghan allies there who are floating around, looking for a home. The grounds are unused except for ten days a year, a neighborhood with streets, barns, arenas, shops, parking lots, all it needs are houses. In the Persian Quarter, the refugees could re-create what they love of their culture, and Americans weary of the Walmarts and work cubicles could travel abroad in St. Paul and find exotic style and fabulous cooking. Resettlement could be redemptive, showing that the bearded bullies with ammo belts don’t represent the best of a people. Art and learning do, and folk tradition, and the bonds of language, the food, the music and poetry. Leave religion to personal preference and enjoy the rest.
New Yorkers saw horrendous scenes of subway tunnels turned into raging rivers, trains pulling into the 28th Street station under a Niagara of water, passengers dashing to safety. We don’t have that in Minnesota. Summers are quite pleasant here except for an occasional tornado. The culture is predominantly northern European, white, judgmental, and we’re eager to escape that and New Yorkers would be welcomed here. We tend to be soft-spoken, self-deprecating, compulsively passive, and I know of numerous New Yorkers who’ve found happiness here. Their honk and brassiness are admired here. Back home they were nogoodniks and here they’re heroes. It’s a big country. Check it out.
LISTENERS O radio listeners, I think of you with gratitude, Tuned in, cooking tomato sauce, trying not to boil it, Or bicycling with headphones, or reclining nude In the bathtub, the radio perched on the toilet. Every week I think about you listening to the show, Though I realize that listening is erratic, And that many of you turn the volume low So as to make me a murmur, a sort of static, The whisper of leaves in the radio tree. But two weeks ago, a girl with green eyes Told me that the show is cool, and this to me, Was worth more than a Pulitzer Prize. She was sixteen and pretty cool herself. It made me glad, A cool compliment from a friend I did not know I had.
This week in The Back Room ($6 per mos or $65 per year): *The final installment of "Guy Noir and the Dolly Lama" *A new weekly Sunday feature - Audio of a monologue for the vault (The Early Years)
After living in Winona, MN, the "banana belt" of Minnesota, and being from a family with NY/NJ antecedents, I can whole-heartedly agree with Mr. Keillor. I think using the State Fairgrounds to welcome the many refugees from Afghanistan, is a brilliant idea. I remember the many Hmong people with whom I was lucky to interact, whilst my husband and I worked at Winona State University. Meeting people from other cultures, listening and learning about their lives and traditions, and so forth, made my life more interesting, and was a bonus for us, as we had a child born in Winona, who benefited from the many people she met from all over the world. As a nation, this country needs to come to terms with itself, and how we need to make an effort to be more civil, and certainly, more inclined to welcome the stranger. Once upon a time, most of us were from elsewhere. We should welcome those seeking a pretty good place to live. If I could move back to Minnesota, I would. Maybe we can make this time we have on Earth better by encouraging one another. I know that the sweet corn and tomatoes, and oh my God, the strawberries, in Minnesota, are the best I have ever had. Those alone could make a person think twice about staying in a place that has become tougher to live in.
Arriving in Medford Oregon, New Yorkers would feel right at home with 300/ppm of wood smoke...but a little different flavor from pigeon poop and exhaust. They could think of as a valley of incense burning Village folk.