Monday, July 20, 2015

Sober But Unserious: The Mayor of Minneapolis

Last Friday Betsy Hodges, the Mayor of Minneapolis, a city in decline before our eyes, tweeted she was that day 26 years sober. One would think saving your own life would be reward enough but ours is a confessional society which may or may not be blamed on Joni Mitchell as the precursor, accelerated by online social media. Gawker or death.

I favorited her tweet as a way of showing support but even then I felt somewhat uneasy. Why the need to publicize what should by now be easy, or easy enough? Yes, yes, you can slip at any moment, I hear the blog harpies say. Got it. But still: maybe say this in a 12 step program for booze, narcotics, sex, work, gambling, (Twitter?), you name it.

Lars Leafblad is the public face for much of the Twin Cities confessional culture. Such a culture betrays an immaturity at bottom: praise me and we'll all feel good, group hugs, readings from cheesy diary entries, an inflated sense of an otherwise unaccomplished self and, for the professional, perhaps a State Arts Board grant so your personal dreck of a psychodrama can have added life. While we're at it, does anyone keep their disease to themselves these days? Apparently not & we're the worse for it.

I once thought of killing myself. What sane person hasn't? Should I orbit around that "didn't die" date (true, I was never on the ledge, the gun never in my mouth, the thought never became fixed, it was all drama, like a democrat) and extract compliments from strangers? How desperate, needy, and shallow is that?

I didn't want to be "that guy" on Twitter to the Mayor, a woman I've never met but whose infrequent, not recent, direct interactions have been cordial and respectful, despite our enormous political differences.

Perhaps if Susan Spiller hadn't been murdered the night before I wouldn't have had this reaction. Spiller was part and parcel of the liberal fabric of Minneapolis and apparently died a horrific death, her back door kicked in and murdered in some way the details of which have not yet been released.

Expect the liberal establishment to respond in its usual ways, depending on the killer's skin color. They see nothing wrong with this. Indeed, it's who Betsy Hodges is and, apparently, with unadorned pride. So too the bulk of Twin Cities liberals and local media.

According to reports, there have been 26 homicides in Minneapolis and 11 non-fatal shootings this year. Chaos is routinely rampant in downtown Minneapolis after the bars close, such that a hare brained scheme of having dances & making hamburgers available to the crowds was floated as a solution to the problem. Even this was too much for city council members who shot down the proposal, so to speak.

In the face of Spiller's and others' death, Mayor Romper Room said "We know that these crimes are wrong." Well gee, Betsy, that observation gets us most of the way home toward a solution. She added "Everyone deserves to be safe." Two for two, the Mayor. Possibly if she pursed her lips when bleating such banalities the cure would take, problem solved.

The day after Spiller's death the Mayor tweeted about her own sobriety anniversary as well as climate change. She also tweets about protected bike paths and her upcoming meeting with Jesuit Pope Francis about "climate change." For conservatives and libertarians living in Minnesota, it's difficult to overstate how insipid and foolish liberals have become. They, of course, are blindingly ignorant to their own folly. To live in the Twin Cities is to live The Onion.

For the most part, the liberal establishment doesn't mix with non-liberals and the local media never seriously holds them accountable because the members of the press are as liberal, if not more so. David Mamet, after his enlightenment, called his prior self a brain dead liberal. The Twin Cities is filled with them. Some people actually move here because of that, lemming like.

What did the Minneapolis Chief of Police JaneƩ Harteau have to say about Spiller being slaughtered in her own home? Nothing. She was off hiking the Inca trail for some charity. She couldn't really be bothered. Harteau is held in contempt by the rank and file and not because she's a publicity seeking lesbian: is that shtick supposed to be edgy?

No, she isn't respected because she's incompetent. But remember: for liberals results are never the issue, they literally do not count. Just look at Twin Cities schools, to pick but one example from a myriad.

Minneapolis is in real trouble, trouble that shows itself with depressing regularity. A lack of seriousness on the part of its Mayor & Police Chief condemns it to ever worse crime and social decay. The other day someone I follow on Twitter marveled that a man urinated in broad daylight on Nicollet Mall. I responded by congratulating Minneapolis for finally having become like New York City, always a goal of its insecure elites.

De Blasio's New York.

Hodges' Minneapolis.







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