We Like It Here
It’s always a thrill to see your home state mentioned in The Economist. That is, it’s thrilling when it isn’t preceded by words like “SARS ravages...” or “US Marines smash the outskirts of....” or most humiliating, “Mark Dayton, the Senator from.....”
When it’s a benign or laudatory reference, you feel like you’ve made the big leagues. The goings-on in your little corner of the world sharing glossy newsprint space with the great and weighty issues of the day, being read by the great and weighty leaders of the day.
It’s thrilling, thrilling I say! Which of course helps to counterbalance the chagrin felt when reviewing the help wanted ads in the front of the magazine and thinking about one’s own qualifications . According to the current issue, there are openings for the Economic Research Director of the International Monetary Fund, the CEO of the Baltic Ship Brokerage Exchange, and the Director of the Legal & Constitutional Affairs Division of the Commonwealth Secretariat.
My God, who the hell do the advertisers think is reading this publication? Highly educated, wealthy, cosmopolitan guys? The guys from Powerline? Ha! According to my observations from this corner of St. Paul, the readership consists of guys like me. And also a bunch of unemployed bloggers. The classified ad sales staff of The Economist better hope that their reader profile surveys never happen to find any of our growing legion with their random samples. Because if they do, there go the socio-economic status numbers baby! And with them the advertisers.
For this reason I sometimes suspect that The Economist would prefer I not even bother picking up their august publication, lest they start getting employment advertising overtures from the Globe College of Business rather than the World Bank.
But enough of the pain associated with The Economist and back to the thrills. That is, a reasonably substantial article on Minnesota appears in the May 17 edition. One of only five articles in the “United States” section (By the way, Wisconsin? You got nothing.) Sadly, the Minnesota article is only available online for a fee, so I can’t link. But, I’ll risk violating international copyright law (and probably a summons issued by the Director of the Legal & Constitutional Affairs Division of the Commonwealth Secretariat) to summarize it for you .
Primarily, it’s an article about Minnesota’s budget crisis and the Republican plan to address it without raising taxes. But it also serves as a promotional piece for Tim Pawlenty, positioning him as a young, energetic leader with new ideas and big potential. Perhaps this is The Economist’s way of indicating they think Pawlenty has prospects for a larger stage than the Minnesota Capitol building.
However, the entire piece also has a rather Continental undercurrent of bemusement at the unsophisticated nature of Minnesotans and their politics. This is best exemplified by a picture of Pawlenty furiously skating down a rink and smiling away, wearing a Wild jersey and jeans. (Which granted, isn’t exactly sophisticated. But it’s not a petulant, bald lummox wearing a feather boa around the Governor’s mansion either. Give us some credit gents, we’re making progress here!)
My favorite part of the article is the title. It’s only three words long, yet still reveals a knowledge of Minnesota political history and sports history and is perfect in summarizing the current efforts of Republicans in reversing profligate government spending trends of the past 30 years.
"Miracle. On ice."
Upon reading this I had high hopes that The Economist found a writer with some insight into Minnesota culture and history, knowledge of how we found ourselves in this fiscal predicament, and a sense for the current political trends in the state.
These hopes lasted all of about a second, until I read the first sentence of the article and realized the writer's research consisted entirely of listening to A Prairie Home Companion and renting Fargo:
“Cold, northern, and Lutheran, with ice fishing and coffe-klatches apparently the pinnacle of its social life, Minnesota does not always seem the most desirable place to live.”
Yikes. A lede that would make Jayson Blair wince. Although the unnamed Economist writer did nail that “northern” part perfectly. Way to read a map, bub.
Maybe I’ve given The Economist way too much credit over the years. Yes, they’re Conservative and British and have the air of stuffy certainty to them. But is it possible they’re just another group of newspaper hacks? A breed John Derbyshire pungently (and persuasively) referred to last week as “scum”?
I’m not sure about that, but I’ll leave you with a couple of Derbyshire literary examples with which you can make up your own mind:
"The journalists-are-scum assumption has a long pedigree in the land of my birth. It is almost as if, since show business became respectable, British journalists have inherited the old prejudices about the acting profession — "vagabonds and strumpets." When the London satirical magazine Private Eye, back in the 1960s, wanted to invent an archetypal denizen of Fleet Street, they named him Lunchtime O'Booze.
Forty years earlier Humbert Wolfe had written:
'You cannot hope to bribe or twist
Thank God! The British journalist.
But, seeing what the man will do
Un-bribed, there's no occasion to.'
Around the same time Evelyn Waugh wrote his wonderful satire on newspaper life, the novel Scoop.
'Why, once Jakes went out to cover a revolution in one of the Balkan capitals. He overslept in his carriage, woke up at the wrong station, didn't know any different, got out, went straight to an hotel, and cabled off a thousand-word story about barricades in the streets, flaming churches, machine-guns answering the rattle of his typewriter as he wrote, a dead child, like a broken doll, spreadeagled in the deserted roadway below his window — you know.'
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