Nick Coleman attended the rally for President Bush on Wednesday. He must have slipped in after the Northern Alliance crew, because we were keeping an eye out for him as we stood in line to get into the Xcel Arena. We would have settled for any bald, surly, Peter Yarrow looking guys, wearing a Mao cap, sneering, skulking in the shadows. But none were to be seen and our sarcastic jibes and pointed criticism of his body of work were reserved for each other's ears alone.
Today Nick wrote a standard column about his attendance at the rally. Full of outright lies, distortions, ridiculing of religion, glorification of himself as a man of the people, and including his uncanny ability to find alleged misery in the brightest of settings. It really deserves to be taken apart bit by bit, but I can't do it. Why, you may ask? Because I am a victim of the most insidious plague to hit this town since Gopher Women's Basketball Fever a few months back.
Yes, I too am suffering from the early stages of Nick Coleman Fatigue. It's an affliction described by Sarah Janecek, in the Star Tribune on Wednesday, as:
"There's some degree of fatigue to these columns because they're such a hassle to read."
That's a strategic edit of Sarah's real comments, which were actually geared toward what the Star Tribune called, in conjuction with the Bush visit, "campaign fatigue".
But Nick Coleman Fatigue is real. Ask anyone who slogs through his windy, delusional, self-satisfied prose three times a week and they'll tell you, they'e got Nick Coleman Fatigue. They get tired, irritable, and despondent. In advanced cases, their hair starts to fall out, they grow a paunch, they quit paying their Marshall Fields credit card bills on time, they start sneering, laughing and their own jokes, and start driving around homeless shelters in their luxury cars, looking for misery to exploit for their own edification. If they were writing columns of their own in this state of mind, they'd probably read a lot like Nick Coleman. Which makes me wonder if Nick Coleman himself is the first victim of Nick Coleman Fatigue. (And it makes me wonder if his wife, Laura Billings of the Pioneer Press, is the real cause, the patient zero, of this epidemic.)
Based on the genuine and sustained excitement on display inside the Xcel on Wednesday afternoon, Nick Coleman Fatigue is a much greater threat to the mindsets of Twin Cities residents than anything associated with the Presidential race. Star Tribune, let this serve as notice. You're making us sick. Deal with Nick Coleman, before it's too late.
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