I’m not exactly feeling good about local law enforcement these days. Two astounding tales of cop/prosecutor cluelessness follow.

From the cop shop: The Minneapolis Police Department is honoring the SWAT officers who erroneously busted into the wrong house in North Minneapolis last December. Khang Moua and family were sleeping. The cops had the wrong address and were expecting a gang member. Moua started shooting at the cops, thinking he was being robbed, until he realized who they were. They shot back, their poor aim a plus in this case in that none of the family, including six children, were physically hurt. The MPD has apologized to the Mouas but decided to honor the eight officers because of their “bravery under gunfire” and “smart decisions.”

This is one of those tales from through the looking glass, where a cloistered and indifferent police force finds a way to find a morale boost in a massive mess up. Arrogance begets more arrogance it seems. The MPD can’t catch a break between race lawsuits, corruption charges, dissension, and incessant chief turnover. From the look of things, it doesn’t deserve to.

From the Hennepin County Prosecutor: The steel-toed boot of selective and pointless prosecution has snagged poor Max Sanders of Edina, the nineteen-year-old U student who jokingly offered to sell his vote in November for at least $10 and put it up for bid on eBay (no takers). Apparently, that’s illegal (tell that to Chicagoans) though this abuse of prosecutorial discretion is the greater crime.

I’m surprised Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman doesn’t have anything better to do than charge a smart-aleck teenager with multiple felonies to make some ridiculous PR point. Sanders accepted a plea bargain that requires him to do fifty hours of community service. The next time you hear Freeman or District Court judges complaining about a lack of resources or excessive court backlogs, think about pompous Mike Freeman and the prosecution of Max Sanders. Here’s an equally humorless take from the Minnesota Daily.

Rarely does the Sunday Strib provide as much fodder as this week’s. If you never got to it, I’d point you to three articles, two of them interesting, one just strange.

Topic 1: Starting with strange—There’s little new in Neal Justin’s preview article about the new season of Mad Men— 'cept it's probably the only piece about the show that goes out of its way, repeatedly, to point out actors on the program with Minnesota ties. They’re not the most prominent actors nor are their ties to the state particularly deep or abiding. (Every time The Office’s Rainn Wilson is mentioned in the Strib, it’s noted that he did a tour of duty at the Guthrie.)

Does this matter? Do we care? Why does it make the story any more interesting—especially when the article has nothing at all to do with their connections to Minnesota? Are we such small-minded parochials out here that knowing someone spent a summer at camp in Brainerd raises our interest level? Or is it just lazy writing from a journalism fraternity conditioned to do it?

I’m not trying to pick a fight with Justin, an affable fellow who, like me, is not “one of us,” but is so steeped in this self-referential crap that he can’t help himself. I’m sure I’ve engaged in some of it myself, and my magazine probably does every month. But it’s small-time hackery, and we need to shake ourselves of it.

Topic 2: Met Council Chair Peter Bell’s wise commentary on the Valleyfair criminal rampage is a must read. He insists that there are not enough diversity training seminars in the world to erase the stereotypes engendered by chronic lawlessness and depravity in the black community. He says Twin Cities black leaders, mostly apologists for such behavior, need to focus less on blaming society and more on creating a mentality within their community that decries and ostracizes such behavior. Bell, by the way, is African-American.

It’s these kinds of exhortations of personal responsibility that Jesse Jackson was heard decrying in his notorious comments about Barack Obama. White guilt hasn’t accomplished enough for black social justice for it to still be the modus operandi.

Topic 3: In the same op-ed section. there is an interesting commentary about how the rules governing Minneapolis swimming beaches are so draconian that they have rendered the beaches bastions of boredom. Imagine a rule that small children cannot use blow-up flotation devices to keep from sinking. Welcome to Minneapolis.

The Minneapolis park system runs like a small third-world country with its own elected board and bureaucracy. It engages in pointless and counterproductive rule making while demonstrating abject incompetence on essential projects. Take the rehabilitation of the Lake of the Isles shoreline, which took years too long to complete, met none of the Park system’s own stated timelines, and was to conclude this spring but now will drag into next year because the bulk of the decorative plants and shrubs put in this spring died within days due to improper care.

It’s time to dismantle the fiefdom and put the parks back under the auspices of city government, which doesn’t work well either, but who needs two dysfunctional bureaucracies when you can have one?

Suffering through endless ads on WCCO, constant Vikings minutiae on KFAN, and a boring guest on MPR, I settled on KSTP-AM Monday mid-morning. “What,” host Bob Davis intoned, “what is unsustainable about America today?” His answer was basically nothing.

Listening to KSTP before noon is risky business. Though the station hosts Tommy Mischke and Joe Soucheray, two wonderful radio talents, it also is home to some of the intellectually weakest bombast on the radio. From Willie and Jay to Davis to Dave Thompson, it’s just big bags of opinions unmoored from any coherent intellectual philosophy. Sure it’s shtick as well, but do the people who lean on its every word get that?

Let me answer Davis’s question with a few of my own:

—Is the state of our financial markets, the lack of effective oversight, and the greed-at-all-costs approach of our leading financial corporations sustainable? (See this Wall Street Journal piece, which begs the same question.)

—Is the lack of a national energy strategy sustainable?

—Is a shrinking currency and a national debt being funded by nations whose values we abhor sustainable?

—Is the growing economic disparity between rich and poor and the shrinking middle class sustainable?

—Is the lack of action regarding a planet that every year sets new heat records sustainable?

—Is a crumbling infrastructure and chronically insufficient funds to address it sustainable?

—Is an energy transmission system that can’t meet peak demand in many states sustainable?

—Is an air traffic control and airport network burdened with insufficient capacity and ancient technology sustainable?

—Is a third of the nation without health insurance sustainable?

—Is a nation that has abandoned its industrial base but leads the world in coffee shops sustainable?

—Is a Congress that can only deal in partisanship and is incapable of making tough decisions sustainable?

Trust me, if guys such as Bob Davis speak for the average American, we are in big trouble. Pretending these problems don’t exist out of some selfish desire to avoid sacrifice is not a solution. Neither is trusting in markets and God. That blind allegiance is part of what got us here.

I’m not sure today’s America could dig itself out of the Depression, initiate a space program, or cure polio. And I don’t see how we’re making any progress on any of the questions I begged above. That’s because too many Americans and their pandering elected officials can only work up outrage over taxes, guns, our troops, Muslims, gays, and abortion.

Here’s your answer, Bob. Very little of today’s America is sustainable. And it’s because of guys like you exhorting us to even greater levels of greed and indifference.

Some observations from a few days on the East Coast:

—Everyone in New York City moves fast with a sense of urgency, except the tourists. The average pace of tourists is about the same pace as on the downtown Minneapolis streets and skyways. What does that say about us?

—Passing through Baltimore evoked a credits sequence from HBO’s The Wire: block upon block of boarded-up row houses, streets deserted of cars and people except the odd African-American male. If this isn’t the most troubled inner city in America, it’s the runner-up.

—Anyone who thinks this country has shut its doors to Middle Easterners or Muslims should just spend a weekend in Arlington, Va. Most of the folks I encountered in the town were are immigrants speaking heavily accented English. Assimilating these folks into American culture is going to be a fascinating challenge, one that Europe has failed at.

—If New York is the gateway to America, then New York’s airports are a piss-poor statement to the world. Decrepit, poorly cared for, woefully underbuilt for the volumes of traffic they deal with, and besieged with flight delays caused by airline over scheduling and FAA inefficiency, Kennedy and Newark (LaGuardia has international traffic only from Canada) are emblematic of a nation in decline. LAX and O’Hare are close behind.

—Amtrak has been bashed by idiot Republicans and transportation-ignorant types for decades, but the Midwest can only dream of the dense network of fast, frequent Amtrak trains that knit together the Eastern Seaboard. Imagine taking the train to Chicago in five hours, door to door, with no TSA, no ground stops, no fuel surcharges, and employees who are no meaner than on the plane. Don’t hold your breath.

—New Yorkers like Jesse Ventura and were puzzled that he decided not to run for Senate because of the intrusiveness of the Minnesota media. It’s my opinion that the only establishment more ingrained and mediocre than our state legislature is our capitol press corps, which received Ventura’s contempt and doubled down during his governorship. It says something about Ventura’s toughness that he won’t go toe to toe with the media but never has the coverage of an elected official been as harsh than during his tenure. Ventura’s record as Governor is undeserving of the derision.

—Chain-food establishments, such as Starbucks, now have to post calorie counts alongside their food displays. Good for New York. In a nation lumbering toward collective obesity, obsessed with quantity over quality and perceived value, it’s information people deserve.

One of the great frustrations of these economically constrained times is that as cities reduce services and deliver less and less to residents, it fosters a sense of incompetence that diminishes the cities' ability to generate public support for the resources to do the job. Cases in point:

—From what nearby residents told me, those of us who attended the Minneapolis fireworks on the river last Friday left a lot of trash, mountains of it. I’m not clear on whether the Park Board or the city is responsible for trash collection after such an event (I suspect the city), but the riverfront was awash in garbage all weekend. Saturday waste collection of that magnitude would cost plenty of overtime.

—I decided to take the bus to the fireworks to avoid parking hassles, and on the way home, I showed up at the bus stop at Washington and Hennepin for the number 6 bus at approximately 11:15 p.m. There were a lot of angry revelers waiting—apparently the previous 6 had no-showed.

Because skeletal holiday schedules were in force, it had been an hour without a 6 when ours arrived, jammed to the gills before it even hit downtown. The next 6 was an hour later, so no one wanted to wait for a bus with a seat. But by the time we hit 6th and Hennepin, the bus was full, so the driver left dozens of people standing on the lonely streets of downtown and points south until the next bus at nearly 1 a.m. There was no explanation from the driver, no call to the operations center to ask for assistance. That’s all too common among the blasé transit force, many of whom can’t even answer basic rider questions about how to get from point A to B. (I say this as an everyday rider who utilizes a whole bucket of Metro Transit routes.)

More to the point, there should have been extra buses available. On special event days such as these, there’s an opportunity to make a great impression on one-time riders and get them out of their cars and into transit or at least increase transit’s support in a transit-ignorant community. I’m sure it would have been costly to provide the extra service on a holiday. I’m sure Metro Transit lacks the funds. So those revelers walked away cursing Metro Transit, and I don’t blame them, even though some of the anger is misplaced.

—I live near Lake of the Isles, which is nearing the end of nearly a decade of heavy construction for shoreline remediation. In the process, paths have been torn out and rebuilt, trees removed and replanted, and basic park infrastructure was unavailable for years. The end result was years of dust and decay and mud by the lake, devastating hardship to nearby businesses that live off summer recreational revenue, and a general sense of a lack of urgency from the Park Board.

Two years of work took nearly a decade because the legislature would not provide the funds for a timely effort. But also because my anal-retentive neighbors fought with the Park Board about issues, both genuine and picayune, and because the Board’s contracting and construction management operates at a pace that is probably three times a long as the private sector’s.

The process left me one of those people supporting an end to an independent Park Board in Minneapolis.

But in all these cases, I can’t separate what’s bureaucratic bumbling and indifference from a lack of resources to get the job done right and on time. I have this lingering suspicion that all of us who are cursing Metro Transit and the Park Board and the city of Minneapolis should be directing our ire at the legislature and Governor No.

Most folks aren’t willing to give government the benefit of the doubt these days. And when it begs for greater resources, people legitimately ask, “If you can’t pick up a mountain of garbage, provide reliable bus service to meet demand, and efficiently manage the city’s best natural asset, why should we trust you with even more of our dollars?”

As I write this, noise is booming into my office cubicle from the City of Minneapolis’s summer-long MOSAIC festival of cultural diversity. The city doesn’t run the buses or maintain the parks, and I’m not sure it wasn’t the Park Board’s job to collect the fireworks trash—I get that. But when urban government can’t get the basics right, you wonder how it can devote so much effort to frills?

Barack Obama’s speech on patriotism earlier this week is noteworthy in that it references an issue many of us have been wrestling with for the entire Bush presidency, or at least the years since 9/11. That is the role of dissent in our society. It’s an appropriate topic for Independence Day.

I’m not sure that the tax revolt in Boston Harbor was any more high-minded than a lot of the anti-tax dogma that flows from contemporary conservatism, but that act of dissent birthed a Constitution that has often been the only bulwark keeping this country from engaging in the very types of autocracy and fascist behavior that we were founded in opposition to.

In today’s America, dissent has a bad name. It is reviled in our politics, in corporate settings, in consumer behavior. And yet there is really no more patriotic act than the expression of independent thought by someone who cares enough to fight conventional wisdom.

Quoting Obama:

Of course, precisely because America isn't perfect, precisely because our ideals constantly demand more from us, patriotism can never be defined as loyalty to any particular leader or government or policy. As Mark Twain, that greatest of American satirists and proud son of Missouri, once wrote, "Patriotism is supporting your country all the time and your government when it deserves it." We may hope that our leaders and our government stand up for our ideals, and there are many times in our history when that's occurred. But when our laws, our leaders, or our government are out of alignment with our ideals, then the dissent of ordinary Americans may prove to be one of the truest expressions of patriotism . . . .

I would replace “may” with “is”, but they are important words from the man who may replace the president and vice-president that equate dissent on the longest war this nation has ever fought with an act of treason. We didn’t want to demoralize the troops. Talk about the big lie.

Dissent is just as necessary outside politics. We live in an age where we are bombarded with messages designed to manipulate our behavior. In the workplace, companies spend vast sums on internal and external marketing to motivate workforce and customers. So many of us actually believe we are better human beings because we work too hard or shop too much under a trendy label.

An acquaintance of mine spent several years in a marketing role for a major local company. He drank the Kool-Aid, extolling the virtues of the business and its leadership at every opportunity. That is, until he was purged in a management shakeup, his loyalty and dedication tossed because he was aligned with the wrong executive. Now he denounces the company at every opportunity.

He was full of it on the front end and equally naïve on the back end. He was a “team player” unable to recognize that the “team” he played for had no allegiance to him beyond his ability to service its needs.

Blind allegiance is perhaps more valued on these shores because more of us were raised with an abiding trust in the infallibility of religious institutions. But patriotism, being a good worker, or a contributing member of your community is not based on loyalty to a pin or a piece of fabric or a president or a CEO. It’s the capacity to stand up for what you believe, especially when it’s unpopular. How many of us want, on our tombstone: “He was a nodding cog in the wheel of the consumer society.”

But it’s the life many of us lead.

We live in a culture steeped in marketing and PR. The product is irrelevant; the message is everything. We are seduced by the phony smile of the TV anchor, the dissembling politician, or company spokesperson. Dishonesty is expected in the corporate setting. They call it spin.

We embrace people who “keep it positive,” who have something nice to say about everyone and everything. Skepticism is distasteful.

But how can we discern the truly righteous without calling out the truly venal? Or recognize great art unless we call crap by its name? And we can’t keep our society true to its highest ideals by mindlessly assenting to every bit of manipulation as long as we have our iPhones to keep us entertained and in touch with an e-mail from work on Sunday at 9 p.m.

It’s good to love our country, our jobs, our community, and all our stuff. But don’t love it all so much that you can’t recognize when it’s selling you a bill of goods, exploiting you, your fears, or your lack of power.

Dissent can be powerful. Ask those guys in Boston.