Eric the Blue

Mostly politics, sports, literature, arts reviews

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Nerdy Minnesotan

  • Dystopic

    One day a few weeks ago I was dining in the school lunchroom when a kid a table over suddenly began vomiting just as a first grade teacher was striding into the room to collect her class. She veered from her original course and, as she’d already been moving, arrived at the scene of the trouble before anyone else. From behind, she put one hand under each armpit of the puker and lifted him out of there before too much more could drip into his lap. Then she stood guard over the puddle, holding one small and possibly contaminated hand, until reinforcements arrived. All in a day’s work. If you’d like to see her in less trying circumstances:

    https://www.facebook.com/reel/1580063246528085

    Crazy, crazy times at Ms. Fultz’s school, Valley View Elementary in Columbia Heights, Minnesota. Even before our pre-k student was nabbed by ICE–what a relief to get him and his bunny-eared stocking cap off the streets!–attendance had dropped precipitously. Parents are supposed to call in if their kid is going to be absent, and if they don’t, someone from the school office calls them. Consequently we knew that out of fear people were staying home instead of prosecuting their normal routines, which had included delivering their kids to Valley View in the morning and picking them up in the afternoon. To boost attendance, school staff have volunteered to walk kids to and from school. I guess there are legal reasons district employees can’t drive kids in their cars, but with the permission of parents, we can walk with them. I often see a group when I’m getting close to school in the morning. They go from house to house picking up kids, their number slowly accruing until they have everyone, and then they walk to school together.

    I believe there are like six neighborhood zones, times five days in a week, morning and afternoon, so about 60 shifts per week. All slots are filled by a volunteer, people like Ms. Fultz. It adds an hour to the work day, it’s cold out, the eastern sky just brightening in the a.m., and they need a plan for what to do if harassed, or worse, by agents of their own federal government.

    On the theory that laughter is good medicine for surviving life in Dystopia:

  • Cruelty is the point

    A picture of the 5-year-old Valley View student being detained by ICE Tuesday afternoon after school. According to our superintendent, the family has an open asylum case with a “no deport” order. Nevertheless, the pre-k student is “being held at a detention center in Texas.” A report by the local CBS affiliate, here. And Sahan Journal, here. The picture, in the Sahan Journal piece, of his teacher wiping away tears while listening to district officials talk about her student at a press conference today, is just about more than I can tolerate. Three other Columbia Heights students have been detained, two high-schoolers and a 10-year-old. What fresh hell next? “This is not the worst, so long as we can say, ‘This is the worst.’”

    It doesn’t make anyone safer, obviously. As has been said, the cruelty is the point.

  • Further review

    Regarding the killing of Renee Good in Minneapolis, it’s clear that people are going to believe (or say that they believe) whatever it pleases them to believe. It seems a short step from there to the claim that the shooting is essentially a “Rorschach Test” and that objective truth concerning the event doesn’t exist: some will “interpret” the evidence this way, some that way, and there are only “interpretations,” no truth. If you think that’s a crock (and I do), this frame-by-frame analysis of the available video evidence by the New York Times, which is augmented by the synchronization of different videos, is invaluable. I’d encourage anyone to watch it.

    The Times’s narration tries to play it down the middle, but the evidence plainly contradicts the Trump administration’s account. The shooter, Jonathan Ross, was not “run over” or even “struck.” At most–and I doubt this–he was grazed by a slow moving vehicle as he leaned forward to shoot. Nor did Good try to run him over. If she had wanted to, she easily could have, because he walked around her car and was for a second or two a short distance in front of the middle of her front bumper. I doubt that’s what they teach you to do at Cop School, but that’s what he did. During the moments when Ross was most vulnerable, Good, instead of moving rapidly forward to run him over, put her SUV in reverse and backed up a few feet. She shifted to drive as Ross’s counter-clockwise circumnavigation of her vehicle reached the area of her left front corner. Then, turning the wheel sharply to the right, away from Ross, she began to move forward as he began shooting, once through the left edge of the windshield and then twice through the driver’s side window. There is always open space visible between his feet and legs and the SUV. While shooting, the cell phone with which he’d been recording Good struck her car and made a thudding sound that some have claimed was caused by the vehicle striking him. The mortally wounded Good stopped steering and her SUV crashed into a parked car at the side of the road. Ross, who according to the government had been “run over,” suffering “internal bleeding to the torso,” is seen walking normally in Portland Avenue immediately after the shooting. He doesn’t appear hurt, does not ask for help, and none of his colleagues seem concerned about his well being. They soon drive off. Though the government claims he required treatment at a local hospital, there is no record of this.

    The Times’s narration mentions that Ross put himself in danger by walking in front of Good’s car, and that this runs counter to common law enforcement training. Others have pointed out that his organization, the Department of Homeland Security, has a policy on use of force that emphasizes de-escalation and requires agents to deliver medical assistance when necessary. The video evidence indicates these were two additional failures. In subsequent encounters between ICE agents and Twin Citians who record and jeer at them, the agents have asked whether they haven’t “learned the lesson” of what happened to Good. But the official story about what happened to Good is that she was shot because she ran over an agent. That agents think people standing along streets blowing whistles and cursing them need to “learn the lesson” suggests to me that the problem wasn’t that Ross had been hurt or feared that he might be. The problem was that Good wasn’t afraid enough, and her partner, especially, a little too mouthy. The “lesson” the agents have in mind is: You all have to stop being mean to us, or we’ll shoot. It’s evident that they have a license to do that. Nothing is going to happen to Ross, but the DOJ is investigating Good, her partner, Minnesota’s governor, and Minneapolis’s mayor, which is why several of the top dogs in the local US Attorney’s Office resigned. Not every government worker connected to this saga is without honor.

  • After a Replacements tribute, another

    I saw a Replacements tribute show at the Turf Club a week ago and have been listening to their records again ever since. My God. A friend and I like to play the game, Favorite album? Favorite song? For me, it’s changed, and it will again, but tonight my answer for the first game is Tim. Notwithstanding the most common free association responses to “punk rock,” so many of their songs are, um, tender. Here is the remastered “Swingin’ Party”:

    Not sure the phrase “toxic masculinity” had any currency, or had even been invented, when in the mid 1980s Paul Westerberg wrote this song, but today it sounds like a prescient rejection:

    If being alone's a crime I'm serving forever
    If being strong's your kind, well,
    I  need help here with this feather.
    If being afraid is a crime we hang side by side
    At the swingin' party down the line.

    Trouble Boys, Bob Mehr’s history of the band, recounts how their first show ever was scheduled for a Minneapolis halfway house, and that it was cancelled when they showed up drunk. I think I remember that accurately; I seem to have lost my copy. For sure, the band was famous for sometimes being too drunk to play, and on at least one occasion Westerberg reached into his pockets and threw money into the crowd to compensate at least a couple attendees for having bought a ticket. These episodes are part of the legend, and some of my fellow fans may feel almost romantic about them, but “Here Comes a Regular,” which closes Tim, is an alcoholic’s lament. The lyric begins:

    A person can work up a mean mean thirst
    After a hard day of nothing much at all.
    Summer's past, it's too late to cut the grass
    There ain't much to rake anyway in the fall.

    And sometimes I just ain't in the mood
    To take my place in back with the loudmouths.
    You're like a picture on the fridge that's never stocked with food.
    I  used to live at home, now I stay at the house.

    If you’re still with me, here’s the whole thing; hard to describe in words the elegiac force of the song:

    And my current fave song, answer to the question posed by Game 2, is the one that includes this memorable representation of futility:

    For the moon you keep shooting
    Throw your rope up in the air

    You get the idea: the rope just falls to the ground, right? The song, about a break-up from the point of view of the dumped woman, a mom, is called “Little Mascara”:

  • “People say I have a bad job, but I get to carry a gun and tell them what to do.”

    At first glance, I thought the phone in her right hand was a cigarette, which is about the only thing that could have made for a more indelible image: like Pam Grier contemplating the dumb white cops in Jackie Brown.

    Unless someone is completely cropped out, I think there are seven of them. Note that the fellow at the left has his hand on the grip of his holstered pistol–because, I guess, two rifles at the ready might not be enough when you’re face to face with a black lady wearing slippers.

    Careful, darling, everyone now knows that they don’t call 911, either.

  • Ice out

    Bought a copy of the Minneapolis daily paper yesterday for the first time in a couple of decades. I think I could have read every word, excluding the sports box scores and the ads regarding mortgage foreclosures, in around an hour and a half. Is it always so skimpy? The sports box scores did not include one for the Timberwolve’s game the night before. The locals had rallied from a big deficit to beat the Spurs by one point, but the only thing you could learn about the game in the hometown team’s paper is that it had been “late.” I don’t know when the game ended. It started at 7 p.m.

    My main motivation for dropping a few extra dollars at the store had been curiosity about how Minneapolis’s only daily paper was covering the ICE operations in our city. Answer for that was “also skimpily,” as evidenced by the front page, which had above the fold on page 1 the headline “Problems at food supplier persistent” but nothing up top about what everyone is talking about, since it’s temporarily (I trust) put an end to ordinary life in the Twin Cities. For example, where I work, a school for PreK through 5th-graders in Columbia Heights, a third of our students were absent yesterday, the first day back after a switch to e-learning last Friday. Eerily quiet in the building. The sound that a full lunchroom of little kids makes was down to something the librarian would tolerate. Meanwhile, the StarTribune’s editorial page ran opinion pieces under the following headlines: “Funding freeze harms working people, but why are we surprised,” “The gun violence prevention need from the Legislature this year,” “Minnesota River needs leadership, not more delay,” and “Emergency eye care is disappearing when it’s most needed.” True, the “readers write” section had letters about no other topic than the one that was largely ignored everywhere else. I guess it’s only the professional journalists who think ICE is barely a story?

    I should say, though, that other organs of local journalism are distinguishing themselves, at least intermittently. KARE-11 posted this interview with two south Minneapolis residents whose constitutional rights were plainly violated by ICE; it’s valuable, also, for the picture provided of what’s going on at the Fed’s detention center at the Whipple Building (to say nothing of the unassuming heroism of the interviewees):

    On this topic of the quiet deeds of ordinary people, the “press” however trails far behind randos with cell phones. Here’s a homemade piece of journalism documenting an encounter that occurred in Minneapolis during one of ICE’s door-to-door actions:

    If you listen carefully, you will hear her mutter, after she wins and the goons are trudging off, “What the fuck!”–the expletive standing out from the accented English with which she courageously stood down the bullies. “This is my home. I belong in Minneapolis. I am a citizen. I do not need ID in my house.”

    In a different part of the city, this was the scene when ICE paid a visit to one of my favorite establishments, Wrecktangle Pizza at the intersection of Lyndale and Lake:

    Video of federal agents getting run out of Lyn Lake this afternoon. Agents drop a gas can at the end and someone kicks it back at them.

    — Wedge LIVE!™ (@wedge.live) 2026-01-12T23:15:24.400Z

    Within seconds of the warning whistles being sounded, people pour into the street to express their disgust and the ICE dudes have to slink away, though not until after setting off a chemical irritant (someone kicked the device back at them). I might be in love with the woman in the bright skimpy top who didn’t have time to put on a jacket. These are good stories, StarTribune! The owners of Wreck Pizza, by the way, were likely targeted on account of their decency. Also, by chance I know that they have an attractive Happy Hour–$4 house wines and $6 margaritas, 3 to 6 p.m., seven days a week.

  • Current events in south Minneapolis

    Probably it would be prudent for me to stay off of social media when events in my stomping grounds are the lead story in international news reports, and not for the first time in recent memory. But being a boomer, I occasionally peruse what my kids derisively refer to as BoomerBook, and unfortunately cannot give myself an order to regard with equanimity, for example, Tom Emmer, who represents probably Minnnesota’s reddest congressional district. I should just laugh but Jesus. I trust Emmer’s not dumb enough to believe his own b.s. and is only pandering to his dumbest constituents, but maybe that’s charitable: maybe he really is that dumb. Anyway, based on his BoomerBook post, he thinks that the statement put out by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) after yesterday morning’s homicide on Portland Avenue was drafted by Joe Friday. Here it is:

    Just a few comments, paragraph by paragraph.

    1. Riot? What riot? By now everyone with the slightest interest in the matter has seen the videos. There was no riot. I love the way they insist upon the lie: in one sentence “rioters,” then again “violent rioters,” even though everyone knows there wasn’t a riot. Portland Avenue wasn’t “blocked,” either. The street is too wide for one vehicle to achieve that feat. ICE could’ve driven around the little SUV like everyone else was doing. After all, they had “targeted operations” to conduct. The puffed up vocab of boys playing at being cops.

    2. DHS purports to know what was in the mind of the shooter, just as they purport to know what was in the mind of the woman he killed. Of course they don’t know. Also, they don’t want anyone to investigate these matters, which is why they’ve thrown Minnesota’s BCA off the case. A close analysis of the video evidence proves the woman wasn’t trying to run anyone over, but it’s a fool’s errand to take up that subject with someone who thinks there was a “riot” going on.

    3. “Used his training”? Give me a break. The DOJ has a Manual that includes its policy on use of force. Here’s part of what it says:

    [F]irearms may not be discharged at a moving vehicle unless: (1) a person in the vehicle is threatening the officer or another person with deadly force by means other than the vehicle; or (2) the vehicle is operated in a manner that threatens to cause death or serious physical injury to the officer or others, and no other objectively reasonable means of defense appear to exist, which includes moving out of the path of the vehicle.

    Moreover, the ICE guys refused to permit a doctor on the scene to check on the woman they shot, and did nothing to help her themselves. The video evidence proves this, too. Yet one section of the DOJ’s Manual is entitled “Affirmative Duty to Render Medical Aid.”

    4. “The alleged perpetrator was hit and is deceased”–finally, a true statement, though couched in the passive voice. Another way to put it might be that an ICE officer, in violation of his training, if he had any, shot a woman in the face three times, at point blank range, and this is according to Hoyle, because he was at the side of her car, which was threatening to lurch sideways, as cars do.

    5. The referent for the “This” with which this paragraph begins is all the foregoing bullshit. I’m sorry but the evil Democrats are not forcing the Trump administration to lie.

    6. “An evolving situation”? The whole point of this statement has been to insist that everything about what happened is known and reflects the Glory of Trump and the depravity of his foes. In any event, the content of the conclusion is a broken promise, because everything new we learn comes from ordinary people, like the Portland Avenue resident who said the ICE guys were shouting contradictory commands at the woman. “Get out of your car!” “Get your car off the road!” Our state’s BCA would investigate this claim, and others, and come to a conclusion about what’s true and what isn’t, which, again, is why the Feds have booted them from the case.

    ,

  • Spluttering

    It’s a footnote to a sidelight, but watching Trump speak this morning about the events in Venezuela last night, I almost felt a little sorry for the guy. He can barely read a text that’s been prepared for him, and when, perhaps impatient with his own bumbling progress, he freelances for awhile, the result is comically irrelevant asides that soon subside into incoherence. At sea, he finds a place at random in the prepared remarks and restarts his unsteady way through them. Cycle through, repeat, repeat. Should probably be grateful that none of his diversions concerned the water pressure in shower heads or the flushing power of American toilets.

    I feel that he’s declined considerably from his reality TV days, but then, he did in the prime of life bankrupt some casinos. No doubt “running” Venezuela will not be too big a task for him and the brain trust lined up behind him as he splutters along.

  • Living my best life

    Shoveling snow. Watching sports on TV. Ubering teens to their New Year’s parties. Debating with myself whether to be asleep at midnight or stay up till my young reveler is delivered home by someone else’s dad. In short, living life all the way up. According to the actuarial charts, I have maybe 15 years left, so how could I do anything else?

    The TV Guide counseled in favor of staying up as an obscure cable channel was airing Tarantino’s Jackie Brown starting at 10. In the event, my enjoyment was abated somewhat by the suppression of all the worst words. At least they didn’t dub in unobjectionable substitutes, which, considering the dramatic context, tends to have an effect of unintended and inappropriate hilarity. But sometimes I’d remember what someone–generally, the Samuel L. Jackson character–was about to say, and was relishing the prospect, and then didn’t get to hear him say it except in my mind’s ear, which I’m not even sure is a thing.

    It’s as if they don’t know that the young impressionables are away having a good time and that it’s too late to fret about corrupting the superannuated losers watching TV alone at home on a holiday. And why, if “motherfucker” cannot be pronounced, did perhaps the least erotic sex scene in the history of cinema survive the cut? Maybe sex is okay to show so long as it doesn’t elicit envy.

  • Those dang homophones

    I used to think that law school must be pretty boring, but maybe not. As for the reading, it seems that sometimes even the footnotes to judicial decisions are enjoyable. For example, here is the text of a footnote to an appellate court’s opinion in U.S. v Murphy, 406 F.3d 857, 859 n.1 (7th Cir. 2005):

    The trial transcript quotes Ms. Hayden as saying Murphy called her a snitch bitch “hoe.” A “hoe,” of course, is a tool used for weeding and gardening. We think the court reporter, unfamiliar with rap music (perhaps thankfully so), misunderstood Hayden’s response. We have taken the liberty of changing “hoe” to “ho,” a staple of rap music vernacular as, for example, when Ludacris raps “You doin’ ho activities with ho tendencies.”

    My attention was directed to this nugget by a lawyer who criticized the following actual tweet by Harmeet Dhillon, who heads the Civil Rights Division in the Department of Justice:

    “Conservative” influencers, if you think you are “keeping the pressure on” or “winning” by spreading bullshit attacks on @realDonaldTrump’s hand-picked cabinet, you are NOT. You are earning money to spread disinformation. You are hoes. Learn an honest profession!

    So there are at least a couple things “off” here:

    1. The Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department should be too busy with civil rights to take time to help the president with his political messaging. (I trust the division chief knows that white people are having a hard time getting ahead these days.)
    2. Though presumably a law school graduate, the tweeter is unable to distinguish standard-issue conservative influencers from a common gardening tool used for weeding.