Saturday Night Music in October
Posted September 30th, 2006 at 5:31 pm by TomOctober 7th: Jon Peterson’s Acoustic Sounds 8 to 10pm
October 28th: Pigs in a Pen Bluegrass Selections 8 to 10 pm
![when_i_fall_in_love[2].JPG](http://wilderoastcafe.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2006/09/when_i_fall_in_love[2].JPG)
WHILE my assignment was to write about Minnesota’s important Senate race, I think there’s more to be learned right now from the far closer contest in Minnesota’s Sixth Congressional District, which borders Minneapolis-St. Paul to the east, north and west. The race, between Michele Bachmann, the Republican, and Patty Wetterling, the Democrat, has revealed a Bush-era national trend now visible locally.
That is, we are facing a choice between a “conservative” who wants to institute radical reforms and a “progressive” who wishes largely to maintain the status quo. In Minnesota’s Sixth District, liberalism is the new conservatism.
Ms. Bachmann, who was born and raised in Anoka, Garrison Keillor’s hometown, is technically a daughter of Lake Wobegon, but there the resemblance ends. She holds a law degree from Oral Roberts University. As a Minnesota state legislator, she spoke out against the minimum wage, arguing that eliminating it would result in universal employment. She became well known for her tireless attempts to add a gay-marriage ban to the state Constitution. She has stated that evolution has a “cult” following. Concerning Iran, she has said, “We should not remove the nuclear response … from the table.” Her favorite topics are not local, but national, global and cosmic.
Somewhat predictably, she draws her support largely from evangelicals. The centrist Republicans I know — those few who are still around — tend to regard her as superficial. President Bush visited Wayzata, Minneapolis’s most affluent suburb (though not in the Sixth District) to speak on her behalf. The two are quite in sync.
Having allied herself firmly with the president’s policies on Iraq and privatizing Social Security, she also advocates eliminating the estate tax. For supporting these radical reforms she is called an “archconservative,” though what she is trying to conserve, other than large family fortunes, is never scrupulously clear.
Compared to Ms. Bachmann, a suburban radical of an increasingly familiar sort, Patty Wetterling seems rather tame and pleasant and sensible — conservative, that is. In the view of Ms. Wetterling (who came into local prominence when her son was abducted at gunpoint and disappeared in 1989) we are not in the end times but in a stable world shaped by well-financed public education, Social Security, benefits for veterans, a decent respect for the opinions of others, a reluctance to engage in foreign adventures, and balanced budgets.
As a former public-school math teacher, Ms. Wetterling has an aura of kindliness and good sense, as if she believed in a general social welfare that depends upon all citizens “joining hands,” as a former Republican governor of Minnesota, Elmer L. Andersen, once put it.
But citizens don’t join hands much anymore in Minnesota, nor are they encouraged to. The problem faced by politicians who wish to preserve the social programs enacted by their grandparents is that President Bush has been wildly successful at creating an air of constant crisis, both foreign and domestic. Crisis rhetoric, which is inherently radical rather than conservative, dissolves social stability.
In this sense, terrorism has infected every subject and every discussion, even locally. Alarmism has become so ubiquitous in discussions of Iraq, the decline of the family and financing for Social Security and education that polarization is assured. Extremity, after all, is more newsworthy than good sense.
This outlook has the effect of trivializing most local issues — who cares about farm-price supports when radical Muslims want to make Stillwater part of the caliphate? And it ensures that the volume will always be turned up to 11 — at least until everybody begins to suffer crisis fatigue and tries to calm down.
“Angie and I will consider tying the knot when everyone else in the country who wants to be married is legally able,” the 42-year-old actor reveals in Esquire magazine’s October issue, on newsstands Sept. 19.
