MN on the Street

I’ve had an odd reaction about the whole ICE invasion of Minnesota, along with news that 1,500 active duty troop have been put on alert for deployment to Minnesota.  To be clear, yes, of course, I’m aghast and sickened and furious and sadden by the violence caused by ICE and by the Trump administration’s reaction to it all.  But separate from that, whenever the story comes on and I see all the brutality there and how unrelenting the military presence is, my reaction is –
 
Minnesota???
 
Now, no, I don’t have great, long experience living in Minnesota, nor spending a huge amount of time there.  But I’ve spent more time there than I have in probably 46 other states.
 
My brother lived in St. Paul – sister-city to Minneapolis – and I visited him there.  In fact, one night he took me to a radio show he’d been writing me about and loved, a thing called A Prairie Home Companion, that was still just a local show on Minnesota Public Radio.  I even still have my program from it at the World Theater and have a booklet of funny poems I bought that Garrison Keillor wrote, supposedly by ‘Margaret Haskins Durber,’ the Poet Laureate of Lake Wobegone.  Further, I remember getting up every day and listening to the morning show on WCCO, where the DJ was Keillor.
 
When I was at the oft-mentioned Camp Nebagamon, we were about a 20-minute driven from the border with Minnesota, at Duluth-Superior.  As campers, on occasion, we’d go to Duluth on field trip days.  And when I became a counselor, we’d often go to Duluth.  (Rarely to Superior, on the Wisconsin side, which did not leave up to its name.)  I still remember listening to the radio, where you’d get the Duluth stations, and hearing the ads for the main department store there, Goldfine’s.  It was memorable because the announcer would promote their special on-sale items that week, and one of them has stuck with me all these decades because it was so Minnesota – because their special was “Potted plants potted in pots.”  (A couple of years later, one of the younger Goldfines became a counselor, too, a nice guy.  And on a day off, a few of us went into Duluth and were invited to his house for lunch, where we met his father who owned the store.  And the moment he began talking, a huge smile broke out in me because I recognized the voice – he was the guy pushing “Potted plans potted in pots.”)
 
Another time, I took a canoe trip in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, whose main base leaves from outfitters in Ely, Minnesota.  And we canoed, portaged and camped out on just a few of the 10,000 lakes.
 
None of this qualifies me as an expert or deeply knowledgeable about Minnesota.  But I do have a respectable knowledge of the state and a great appreciation for it.  From my time there, and having friends who live there and teach at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, Minnesota has always struck me as the closest state that the U.S. has to Canada.  I don’t mean logistically, though it does border Canada, or that its Minnesota accent is a cousin to Canada’s, but all that and (most importantly) how Minnesota Nice is as similar to Canada Nice as anywhere in America. 
 
And this is where Trump and MAGOPs have sent the military to brutalize and shoot and gas and even kill people.  This is the hill that Trump and his fascist team and MAGOP enablers in Congress actually chose to fight on -- chose to make a pretend point about supposedly radical protestors who are “domestic terrorists” and “professional agitators”????!!!!  Minnesota???  Minnesota?!!!!!! 
 
That’s who Trump and DHS and his clueless cronies chose to attack with an unrelenting, daily military barrage, trying desperately and cruelly to justify to the America public that conditions in this most tranquil of states are so out of control with non-existent public rioting and fictional anarchy that he may even have consider invoking the Insurrection Act!!
 
Meehna-soaw-tuh.  You betcha.  Darn tooting.  Have a nice day.
 
When Trump, Kristi Noem, Tom Homan (post his $50,000 bribe) and others first sent ICE, the U.S. Border Patrol and National Guard into Los Angeles, as sick and reprehensible as it was (and illegal, as a federal court later ruled), I at least understood why the fascists stood a chance of not outraging the public as much as would be the case elsewhere, since Los Angeles is LaLa Land, and Hollyweird and nut cases and drugs.  But what on earth were they thinking when they decided, “Hey, you know who we should violently attack with federal military?  Minnesota!!!”
 
There were a lot of Americans who might sympathize with screwing over L.A. just because it’s L.A.  But if there’s any state in the union that (for whatever problems it has, and it does have problems, like all states) Americans generally like and think is low-key and quintessentially American and friendly and polite -- Minnesota is very high on that list.  States like Vermont and Rhode Island are up on the list, too, but you can actually find Minnesota on a map.  Easily.
 
And as I watch the absolutely out-of-control daily violence perpetrated by ICE – towards people who are going to doctor's appointments, look Hispanic, sound Hispanic, going to work, protesting by blowing whistles (which is completely legal, of course) – people who smile and say to armed ICE agents, “Dude, I’m not mad at you” before the officer shoots them to death – I am unable to not stop and take a step back and think…Trump and his circle of fascists have actually chosen to brutalize…Minnesota!
 
And they think that most Americans won’t be even more horrified by their fascist actions than they would be otherwise.

And it's all enabled by the MAGOPs in Congress who, at best, are silent and accepting of it all and -- at worst -- are piling on publicly with support.

None of them understanding that each ICE attack, each MAGOP attempt to justify it, each ludicrous faux-cry of "domestic terrorists!!!, only comes back to deeply undermine Trump and his party.  Because Americans actually see the brutality unrelentingly on television every day, and actually have long had an extremely good sense of what Minnesota -- Minnesota!! -- is.
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