The second-season premier of Mad Men was still rattling around in my mind when I met with Robert Bly Tuesday. I doubt Bly, 81, Minnesota's poet laureate (appointed by Tim Pawlenty with whose politics he shares very little sympathy), has seen Mad Men, AMC's much gushed-over series about early-'60s advertising men. But he has written frequently about the impact impoverished, valueless storytelling has on American culture.

Bly will be speaking in England in September, and the interview revolved around the concept of storytelling for adults. Very basically, his view is that commercial media succeeds only by selling escapist stories that either avoid digging around in any of the fundamental fears of life or presents those fears/anxieties in such a superficial manner, camouflaged with so much outlandish sex and mayhem, that the percentage of the audience likely to have any kind of spiritual catharsis from absorbing it is close to zero. (This obviously is my interpretation of Bly's message. Pick up any of his books for a far more precise explication.)

I still haven't made up my mind about Mad Men. Do I appreciate it for its obsessive (compulsive) attention to period detail? (I'm a sucker for that stuff, and I loved it when movie director David Fincher did it in Zodiac.) Am I reacting to Mad Men's shameless wallow in Ike & JFK-era male piggishness? (The kind of guilty pleasure that is strictly vicarious in HR-heavy twenty-first-century America.) Do I tune in for Mad Men's echoes of Sopranos-style mercenary ruthlessness? (Mad Men's creator, Matthew Weiner, wrote for The Sopranos.) Or, is Mad Men actually working toward something more valuable than the visceral buzz we get off malaprop-spouting, poon-chasing mobsters?

As avidly as I consumed The Sopranos, the high-minded argument that it was holding up a mirror to the modern middle class American family (or the failures of modern psychotherapy) always seemed a bit of a stretch. To my mind, the show delivered high-quality pop-culture candy. Grown men conniving and conspiring and settling scores like psychopathic oafs. Available women. Flashy toys. That's pretty American, I guess. At least it plays to the paradigms Hollywood movies have set for American storytelling and self-image since the 1930s. But my eyes turned to Paulie Walnuts anytime he walked into a scene, and I failed to connect Paulie to anything particularly relevant in broader American culture. Although I did work out a Dick Cheney riff at one time. (Pathological fear of exposure . . .)

The second season of Mad Men opens on Valentine's Day 1962, a year-and-a-half after season one concluded. JFK and Jackie are in the White House, and the country is giddy with the "look" of upscale glamour. You know, "quality people." The best "stock." Elegant role models for the rest of us. What we would ever know about JFK's mob hooker girlfriends and Jackie's Stepford smile would all come much, much later.

As an ensemble drama, Mad Men is developing quite nicely. Peggy, the lead character Donald Draper's "pupil," is obviously setting up to become an icon of corporate feminism. She is rapidly becoming a woman who will compete with the boys at their game and beat most of them . . . because they, lazily, remain boys while she dives into calculating, full-bore adulthood. Draper's wife, played by January Jones, is a half step away from a walk on the wild side, and office manger, Joan Holloway . . . well, she isn't pouring herself into those dresses to get attention for her thoughts on the new dental plan.

But as Bly would say, if he ever tuned in, this is all pretty routine. Better than average routine. Maybe much better than average. But still the staple stuff of escapism. Sex and intrigue. Intrigue and sex. Mix and match.

But Mad Men is closer to something with real resonance in American life than The Sopranos ever was. American storytelling, from its "hero myths," like The Dark Knight, to its most potent dramas, like say, George Clooney's Michael Clayton, hasn't played with or explored the confluence where our fundamental dreams devolved into what is for sale. Bly's basic complaint, as I read it, is that storytelling that encourages an audience to seek paths to personal enlightenment has been overwhelmed by commercial "art" that suggests personal enlightenment can be applied with eyeliner, dispensed by gunfire, and seduced quickly with a lace bustier.

Mad Men is positioned right there at the point where storytelling stopped driving salesmanship and the sales game, with its shrewd exploitation of consumer psychology, began driving storytelling. No network executive in his right mind will be encouraging Matthew Weiner to push an agenda of examining what Madison Avenue has done to Americans' notions of heroism and valor. But as I say, like no other show I can think of, Mad Men is in a place where it can play with that tantalizing, relevant conceit and provoke a cultural discussion. 

John Edwards was my guy in this year's presidential derby. He exhibited the proper level of indignation for what's been going on, and through the smoke of Iraq and all the other Bush-Cheney frauds and blunders, he kept his eye on resolution of out-of-control health care costs as the key to economic stabilization. So whatever is going on with this blond in LA, I still admire the guy.

OK, maybe a little less if this National Enquirer story is completely true. But as a favor to the faction of the public that is damn near exhausted by public, government, and corporate perfidy and is adult enough to accept other adults with adult-like flaws, Edwards ought to convene one of those press conferences where he answers every question until the media's tongues hang out.

If you haven't followed any of this, Edwards, John Kerry's running mate in '04 and one of the top three Democrats in this year's race, is caught up—again—in a story that suggests an affair—if not a love child—with a good-looking blond/former actress/campaign filmmaker. (Here's a link to one of the Enquirer stories.) The "issue" of Edwards's relationship with the woman, Rielle Hunter, broke last September and was dismissed with both Hunter and an Edwards staffer saying the baby was theirs. (Not that that dismissed the notion of an affair between Edwards and Hunter.)

Anyway, now it's back, and the usual suspects, including conservative blogger Mickey Kaus at Slate, are lapping this up, much like if, say, a Bible-thumping, family values, anti-homosexual Republican ever got caught flagrante delicta in an affair with a gay prostitute, a teenage page, an undercover cop . . . etc. It's the hypocrisy hammer, and few things ring the bell louder than that.

The latest Edwards incident happened at the Beverly Hilton Hotel in LA, and the Los Angeles Times sent out a much-circulated memo to its staff to avoid blogging on the Enquirer story, at least until the paper could do some, you know, original reporting. Naturally, the usual trolls began screaming "liberal bias," insisting the Times was covering up for a big time Democrat. In fact, the Times, which like so much of the mainstream press, has gotten a bit tired of following the lead of supermarket scandal rags and bloggers under the tired rationale that anything that crowd puts "out there" is suitable to feed off of . . . simply because it is "out there." The Times was beaten by the Enquirer time after time on the OJ Simpson story, largely because the Enquirer has no rules about anonymous sources and multiple corroboration. Then, of course, everyone hopped on the drudge and Richard Mellon Scaife-fueled Paula Jones/Monica Lewinsky scandal, never caring too much about who was cutting checks to keep the scoops coming.

Since those debacles, most mainstream newsrooms have held seminars, brown bag lunches, and soul-searched over how much they really want to play by Enquirer/blogger rules. (Despite staking out the hotel for the Edwards "gotcha," the Enquirer has not published any photographs of . . . anything. That may change with its next issue, but the LA Times at least doesn't like the smell of that and the lack of eyewitnesses, other than the two Enquirer "reporters.") Frankly, I have to say the picture of the LA Times waiting to do its own reporting on this thing is a refreshing display of restraint in the face of the twenty-first grail of who screams "Scandal!" first gets the prize.

Moreover, as I responded to one commenter who asked about this, in light of the past seven years of apocalyptic scandals, starting with a $2 trillion war we didn't need to fight, Katrina, and countless abuses of fundamental Constitutional law, we may have re-set our criteria for scandal relevance since the days of Bill and Monica. I mean, if that scandal didn't matter all that much to the general public back then (Clinton's approval rating in early '99 was two-and-a-half times what George W. Bush's is today), what are the chances CNN will go twenty-four-seven Edwards and Hunter?

But as I say, lacking much of anything substantive issue-wise to throw back in the faces of liberals/progressives/Democrats, this Edwards thing, with all the usual tedious "values"-based righteousness, is providing traction for the right-wing echo chamber. Which is only one reason why Edwards should come clean by answering every question any reporter wants to ask and give a DNA sample for the bambino.

What this business does to Edwards's political currency—Attorney General under Obama?—is secondary to setting an example for how to deal with private, personal misbehavior. The wisdom of crowds on Clinton-Lewinsky was that hanky-panky had nothing to do with the job Clinton was doing as president, which the public clearly liked. Here, Edwards has a tougher dilemma, considering the sympathy and affection the public has for his cancer-stricken wife. This thing, if true, could send him back to North Carolina for good.

But if progressives, such as Edwards claims to be, are in the business of taking professional risks to push the ball of progress further upfield, this would be a classic example of coming clean and taking the hit . . . if that's what's coming . . . in the interests of demonstrating to the objective public that we do things differently.

The spectacle of the American press horde following Barack Obama halfway around the world and back last week was a reminder of how much competitive journalism loves playing stage door Johnny and Joanie to a winner. Right, he hasn't won the big one yet. But you don't need Jon Stewart or any of a dozen cartoonists to point out that the Charlie Gibsons, Brian Williams, and Katie Courics of the world (and their ratings-obsessed bosses) gave Obama the kind of attention Jim Morrison used to get from hotted-up teenage girls after shows at the Whisky a Go-Go.

Oh, they all made a brief show at coolness, you can't appear totally slutty, but in the end, the star got everything he ever imagined. Why? Because here in late July, conventional wisdom says Obama has a near certain lock on the White House (even if the popular vote doesn't hit my predicted eight-point spread, the electoral vote projections already have him over the 270 mark). Now is the time to start building access to the new regime, the new (very) cool guy in town. A guy, you know, the rest of world already loves five times more than Ronald Reagan, if you compare the crowds who turned out in Berlin.

Prior to Obama's liftoff eight very long days ago, the poor losers in the raffle for the forty seats on his official plane—can you say FoxNews?—were heavily marketing the outrage that this was . . . outrageously . . . presumptive, something no mere sitting senator should ever be caught doing. (Unless it is John McCain, Lindsay Graham, and Joe Lieberman). They were, of course, referring to the press attention Obama was getting shooting three pointers with adoring troops in war zones. Damn that cool guy. How dare he? CNN and every other cable outlet seized on "gaffe watch" as their mid-summer raison d'être. (Without micro-analyzing the impact of Obama cleaning Afghani chick peas out of his teeth on under-educated white male voters in Appalachia, why else stay on the air in July?)

On the trip, the anchor "stars" went through their usual performance, which involves equal amounts self-promotion and journalism. This always involves long (for the twenty-two-minute evening news) one-on-one, movie-junket-style interviews with the star, I mean, candidate . . . I mean president to be. Specifically, the shtick requires as much two-shot camera time of their anchor with the star as possible, then a series of "tough" questions that they just as easily could have asked via e-mail from New York . . . before a collegial expression of bonhommie.

After the obligatory shot of Obama greeting Charlie Gibson with a pat on the shoulder as he entered a Jerusalem hotel (Charlie to folks back home, "Dudes, I'm with the band!"), Gibson, reading glasses perched on the furthest tip of his nose, "pummeled" Obama with questions about his experience. Obama, looking weary, from the same tediously predictable line of questioning and a week of four-hour sleep, replied directly and politely, avoiding the slightest tone of defensiveness. Naturally, Katie Couric took the, "Screw nuance, I'm sticking with my question of the day" tactic to the most ridiculous extreme, badgering Obama over and over . . . and over and over . . . about whether the surge had worked, clearly not listening to the first of the six times he answered the same question.

Once in the White House, it's hard to imagine Morrison, I mean Obama, inviting Katie back for a post-show party. She's no fun.

What we witnessed was sycophancy on a major—I won't say "grand"—scale. It came with abundant risks. Just as groupies will eagerly trade stories of the star's occasional "performance" issues, Gibson, Couric, Andrea "Mrs. Alan Greenspan" Mitchell, and the rest would have been thrilled to lead their breathless coverage with news of a clearly addled out-of-his-element Obama confusing the Iranians with Al Qaeda, re-positioning Iran on the Afghan border, suggesting the surge brought about the Anbar Awakening . . . well, you know, really, really appallingly dim "gaffe" stuff. But it didn't happen.

That damn cool guy pulled it off. Every single second of it, right down to conceding on the plane back home that he could understand average Americans [white, male, not too much education] getting a little annoyed at pictures of him "traipsing" around the world while they're trying to figure out how to gas up their '02 Expedition and saying, "But we thought it was worth the risk."

Which is, I think, the big takeaway from the past week. Obama took a huge risk—with the American press, (screw security in Basra)—and pulled it off beyond any of the snarky groupies' expectations. A bit like silky smooth Tim Pawlenty benefiting from the aftertaste of rude and boorish Jesse Ventura, Obama has the distinct advantage of being nothing but uphill from the most incompetent, graceless, and despised U.S. administration since . . . well, maybe forever. But the point is that in today's twenty-four-seven "feed the beast" media world, where mid-July offers TV blowhards nothing better to sell than vice presidential guessing games, Obama mixed ambition with risk and pulled it off. He took the stage with pecking, preening carrion birds on both shoulders . . . and sank a three pointer.

That mix of ambition, risk taking, and God-given hand-eye coordination will come in handy.

Here's a good piece from The Guardian on Obama doing his thing on the press corps. 

(UPDATED: CUT TO THE BOTTOM)

Turnabout, I guess, is fair play. After years of torturing editors with pathetic excuses and flagrant abuse of deadlines, I've been socked in for the last few days in my editor role trying to squeeze a couple very late ten-pound sausages into five-pound skins. (Translation: Late stories, much too long.) It ain't pretty. The only upside is that I have been able to unleash a gleeful torrent of Paulie Walnuts-style profanity at two high-profile, venerable lions of the local pundit scene.

Meanwhile . . . despite a high pitch of anxious, wishful thinking on the part of the cable-news crowd, Barack Obama has managed to sink three pointers with the troops in Iraq and avoid anything resembling a "gaffe-gate" . . . unlike his opponent, Mr. McCain, back here in the States who seems constantly confused about where we're fighting and why.

Also, the courts smacked down CBS's $550,000 fine over Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction," which was always bogus and another vivid example of right wing interest groups gaming the FCC complaint system. Without a coordinated flood of complaints from the Parents Television Council and Reed Irvine's Accuracy in Media, the nine-sixteenths of a second America's children ogled Ms. Jackson's nipple would never have been so titillating.

But before moving on to any other topic, I remain fascinated with the meltdown of the local Metropolitan Media Group (MMG). Believe me, there is one sordid, juicy business-character study waiting to be written here.

At a quarter to seven tonight, Chris Serres of the Star Tribune wrote that he finally got a call back from Kenan Aksoz, chairman and CEO of MMG, the Bloomington company that published Minnesota Business, Sun Country's in-flight magazine, and all those astonishingly vapid community lifestyle magazines.

Says Serres:

"Earlier, I noted that Kenan Aksoz had not bothered to return my calls. He did, in fact, call me this afternoon and suggested that the Star Tribune do a fuller account of what happened at Metropolitan Media Group. For now, however, he does not want to discuss it." (Let me get this straight. Tell a "fuller" story but don't count on anything from me, the central character?)

If you haven't read through the comments to Serres's Tuesday business story, you're missing some quality invective.

Here's a sample:

Double check your law books

It's too easy just to look at the legal aspects of this case in terms of Petters' acquisition of MMG, and ignore the Minnesota state statutes that protect the rights of workers, regardless of change of ownership or responsibility. MN Statute 181.13 states that a company cannot refuse to pay workers for time worked, in fact said company can be liable for 1 days unpaid wages for each day the company refuses to pay. Petters liability may not be 100% secure in this case, but rest assured, the workers, including those STILL employed at the NEW company (curiously titled CMG...who by the way, also were refused their last paycheck by the new entity) are legally owed their pay. Whether Askoz or Petters or whomever pays the bill isn't the point. The point is, these workers are due their wages, and if you were in their shoes you would feel the exact same way. Empathy, try it on for size, see how it feels, then get back to us. Oh, and the MN Dept. of Labor is investigating this case. They have told workers that what Petters/MMG has done is illegal. So, instead of bickering about assets and liabilities, and making inane comments about salary miscalculations or the legal right of a worker to accrued vacation, let's look at the basic facts, see the truths and find it in our minds to understand the plight of people making an honest wage. Both Petters and Askoz should feel ashamed for leaving their workers, current or former, with the sense they no longer care. What's a couple extra $100,000 when you're making sales figures like Petters?

posted by Topherk13 on Jul. 22, 08 at  3:01 PM

Not to mention the nugget where Tom Petters, who now owns what little is left of MMG, tells Serres he had loaned Aksoz $5.5 million dollars over some undisclosed period.

The picture of the MMG is of a house of cards with the king of diamonds—Aksoz—living the full CEO/baron lifestyle: home next to Paul Douglas in gated Bearpath, hand-tailored suits, new BMWs, regular lunch at Kincaid's (where one story has him insisting on the white napkins instead of the black). Meanwhile, his empire of lifestyle magazines was being edited and largely written by kids—all young women, average age "twenty-three to twenty-five," according to one who was there—being paid less than $40,000 a year.

This is one very shabby scene.

The gist of the conversation in the Strib comments section is over which gentleman, Aksoz or Petters, has a moral obligation to compensate the sixty or so employees for the eighteen days they worked and are being told they will not be paid. As an "asset sale" (something frequently mentioned in the context of what's next for the Strib itself), neither Aksoz or Petters may have any strict legal obligation to pay a total sum of what one former editor calculates to be more than $140,000 but not more than $200,000.

$200k? "Big whoop," you say.

The presumption is that Aksoz, based on nothing more than the appearances of his lifestyle, has personal assets sufficient to make good on this debt to his former employees. Given Petters's various holdings, it would be startling news indeed if he declared he has no way of coming up with $200,000, which you'd think he would do if only to stop what may swell into a period of very bad publicity. (Publicity that, as one aggrieved ex-MMG editor pointed out, could well impact the foundation Petters operates for his son who was murdered in Italy several years ago). Also, if, as is rumored, Aksoz has outstanding bills with printers and other vendors and Petters was an investor in MMG, no matter how small, it is hard to imagine him blowing off those debts and maintaining credibility with that crowd in a town as small as this.

Meanwhile, I'm told employees who were summarily dismissed from MMG in the guillotining last Friday are coalescing around possible legal and publicity action. Letters to the attorney general's office and other state agencies may just fall into the slow grinding wheels of the bureaucracy and, given the amounts owed each employee, a trip through conciliation court with a toothless judgment against whomever may be all that ever goes down. But, this particular aggrieved crowd has some grasp of the court of public opinion and seems to know how in a bad economy rife with stories of obscene CEO compensation simultaneous with mass layoffs, this local, tangible mess is a squalid step beyond the usual cruel attrition.

The stories of executive mumble mouthing and preening and cheapskate shortcutting at MMG are, as you might imagine, both vicious and hilarious, in a gallows humor sort of way. The point is that the longer either Aksoz or Petters takes making right with the people who created the product they allegedly sold, the longer the spirited vindictiveness will take to go away.

I mean, I'm certain some reporter hip to Internet reporting is already doing a check on MMG's pattern of payments to vendors.

Others will be trying to verify the story about Aksoz standing up at a June 11, 2008, MMG staff meeting and assuring the troops that, "Profits are better than ever."

UPDATE: Wednesday brought news that Petters had announced "retention bonuses" for the three dozen or so former Metropolitan Media employees he brought over to his operation. These "bonuses" were, I'm told by both those getting the bonuses and those still out in the cold, equivalent to the eighteen days of unpaid salary voided by the MMG meltdown. This does nothing for the ten or eleven still unemployed. As of Thursday, they are still holding the bag for the eighteen days they worked for Aksoz and are not being paid.

Also . . . I got a note from an editor of one of the Metropolitan Media lifestyle magazines I described rather uncharitably. She was upset with me for calling her and her colleagues, "kids," and implying that they were all doing sub-standard work. Well, I call everyone who is the same age as my kids, "kids," and I stand by my remarks on the general content of those magazines. But I do not want to leave the impression that that was the "kids'" fault. I know for a fact how little they were paid, how much of the entire magazine they were expected to write themselves (she said each magazine had a $250 freelance budget!), and how absurd the editorial direction was they were operating under. For most, it was their first experience in publishing. I'd like to think it is all uphill for them from Metropolitan Media. 

The "yes" part of the Strib's Guild vote on a new contract with fumbling, bumbling rapidly tanking Avista Capital Partners was not a surprise. The margin, 210-27, caught me off guard. I thought there might be a few more newsroomies willing to take the risk that the existing deal will survive at least as long as Avista does in Minnesota.

The deal, such as it is, is not pretty. But then very little is lovely in newspaper land these days. As explained to me by arts reporter and Guild newsroom unit co-chair Graydon Royce, he and his colleagues are looking at a 16-month wage freeze, as the deal goes into effect, August 1, then a 1.25% raise for six months, then "1% for a period of time and then 1.5%. It isn't" said Royce, "a straight year-to-year deal." In addition, (or is it "subtraction") the Guild holds on to its pension (status quo) and continues the company's 2.5% contribution to cash balance accounts (generated by over payment on the pension). Health care -- here comes the broken record -- "Is not as good as it was. We're looking at higher deductibles, higher co-pays. It's like a lot of other places, but we had a great plan once."

A lot of people did. Now it's down to pretty much members of Congress and Bill McGuire.

The looming cliff over which Avista will soon fall, or at least their benighted newspaper venture here in Minnesota, was a primary consideration for other Guild members in the run up to today's vote. If Avista, facing crushing debt with no hope of generating significant new revenue, (here's a link to an excellent story on Avista's debt miasma by Burl Gilyard, Bob Geiger and Mark Anderson in Finance and Commerce), pulls the bankruptcy cord the thinking among the Guild was that they'd have a better chance with the all-powerful bankruptcy judge if they could point to a fresh contract agreed to by their incompetent owners. Basically, they're betting the judge would say to Avista, "No, I'm not going to void the contract. You just negotiated this thing a month ago. You knew what you were signing."

Royce says the new contract fulfills Avista's stated demand to trim $2.5 million from future newsroom expenses. He also says the Guild insisted and got new language requiring Avista to offer buy-outs before lay-offs. That has been the norm, but until now it wasn't contractual. "We just didn't feel we could count on the historical pattern," said Royce. Good thinking.

If the Strib does go to another round of staff reductions, (the possibility is not mitigated by this new deal). lay-offs would be seniority-based, cutting newest (and cheapest) first.

Columnist Nick Coleman was one of the 27 voting "nay".

"It wasn't that I was opposed to the contract as much as there was a kind of panicky feel to the decision, a agreement I might add with a company that the majority of Guild members by their own admission don't trust. But I was arguing that there was no reason not to wait a week or so, if only to see what the other unions do with their [health care] negotiations."

Without getting all eye-glazey with health care sub-clauses, the Strib's other unions, via the so-called Inter-Plant Council are working out their health care deals. Coleman's view, shared by others, is that newsroom employees couldn't be any worse off choreographing their deal with the others, at the printing plant and elsewhere.

"I actually proposed they table consideration of the contract for a week or two. But that got voted down something like 90-10, so I shut up and went back to my battle station. But we're being asked to accept a very inadequate health care plan, especially if you're someone like me who needs two Medica cards to list all your dependents. (Chris) Serres and (Steve) Brandt were throwing around numbers like $7000 more that this'll cost us. I guess if you're thinking about emergency surgical procedures you better get 'em done this next week."

He adds, "The meetings for these things are always the same. People start sharing horror stories of their brother-in-law's horrible health care plans, and everyone gets, as I say, this panicky tone to their voices. They talked about this company (Avista) could go crazy at any minute, how it could be in bankruptcy. My point was that we'll never know when they're about to go crazy, but that our position wasn't going to be demonstrably different by waiting a week."

The demise of the Metropolitan Media Group won't register much more than a 1.0 on the Richter scale of publishing calamities, but it bears brief comment.

Metropolitan Media is the company that churned out those semi-glossy magazine/letters devoted to celebrating places such as Eden Prairie, Woodbury, Maple Grove, and Edina. Each issue featured a different resident "celebrity" on the cover and only the faintest resemblance to actual human life inside. I know this created an intense, emotional curiosity in the citizens of the communities the magazines "served." Each month, as the delivery date approached, I anticipated my picture on the cover of Edina magazine. You know, caught in a manly and prosperous pose with a lot of fill flash and pancake for the bags under the eyes. Maybe me in my paint-splattered "Superior, Wisconsin" T-shirt, power washing sludge off the oil pan of my classic '95 sedan? I know I'd get more respect at Lund's if I was the Edina cover boy of the month.

I may still have a chance. Edina magazine is one of the few Metropolitan Media mags that has half a chance of living on in the aftermath of "minority shareholder" Petters Group taking control yesterday. (Here's a link to Liz Fedor's story in this morning's Strib.)

The official story is that the Petters folks (who also own a chunk of Sun Country Airlines, whose inflight magazine, Escape, is/was published by Metropolitan Media), have taken control effective immediately and that by Monday, an undisclosed number of Metropolitan Media employees will be relocated to the Petters offices in Minnetonka; Metropolitan Media's Bloomington office will be vacated.

And did I mention that this was news to most of the sixty employees only yesterday?

Obviously there's more going on here than the usual happy merger. (One rumor is that Petters is "taking control" solely by picking up Metropolitan Media's unpaid bills.) Not that anyone will care too much, other than two or three dozen people and their families who are out of work effective immediately.

OK, full disclosure time. About a year or so ago, I got a tip that Metropolitan Media was going to launch something called Twin Cities Radio magazine and needed an editor. I met with the company's two top dogs, Kenan Aksoz and Tom Beauchamp, who sketched out their vision for a monthly celebrity magazine . . . built entirely around local radio "stars." A new one every month. With happy celebrity stuff posing as copy around lots of glamorous photos inside . . . and as much advertising as the market would bear. I remember thinking, "This has got to be one of the dumbest ideas I've ever heard of." But they were emphatic that they could sell it.

I told them that they would probably run out of cover-worthy local radio celebrities after, um, maybe two issues. But, just thinking out loud here, if they expanded the idea to, say, Media and pulled in TV people, hotshot advertising people, and anyone else in the so-called creative communications game, maybe they'd have something to write about.

It would be a significant understatement to say the two gentlemen had zero interest in "covering" either the local media or local radio. The news of who was doing what, going where, getting fired or re-hired drew pretty much blank stares. The point, they explained, was local radio personalities as a vehicle for market-wide advertising sales. The money was out there. Radio celebrities were a natural draw, and they were going to go get it. Content, at least as I thought of it—you know with news, good and bad—was not a consideration.

Needless to say, that was our one and only conversation. They soon hired ex-WCCO reporter Bridgette Bornstein who put out, I believe, two issues of Radio magazine before it folded. (KDWB's Dave Ryan made the first cover.) So consider the source, I guess. (It turned out the whole idea was a confabulation with a local group called Marketing Architects, which, among other things, trades in unsold radio ad time.)

Speaking of  . . . sources tell me neither of the gentlemen with whom I met will be staying on as what's left of the company as it transitions over to the Petters offices. Moreover, I'm told news of the meeting to announce the news was sent around the Bloomington office via e-mail . . . but only to those who would be staying on. Those people should stop whatever they're doing, get up from their desks, and go to the conference room. Those who did not get the e-mail and wondered where everyone else was going . . . well, "need to know" and all that.

Oh, and the question of whether employees will be paid for the last two weeks they worked for Metropolitan Media is also in doubt.

As I say, in the grand scheme of things, this is just another collapse of another misbegotten enterprise. But one thing that caught my ear as I chatted with a few suddenly former employees of the company was how much the concept of "Local, local" had been drummed into their brains. "Local, local" was the prime directive. "Local, local" was true service.  "Local, local" was what the market lacked. "Local, local" was what readers and advertisers were crying out for. "Local, local" was the best path to sustained, positive revenue flow.

If "local, local" sounds familiar, it's because both local newspapers long ago signed on to essentially the same logic. True, each paper prints stories about bad things happening locally, something Metro Media thought unnecessary. But just as with Metro Media, "local, local" the newspaper version, is first and foremost a sales and budget strategy. "Cover" local "communities" in hopes of reaping advertising revenue. Save money by not doing your own reporting on anything outside a couple hour drive. Whether the "local, local" news —break-ins, car accidents, winning youth soccer teams, lots of prep sports, school referendums—was of much or any interest to readers not in that immediate community mattered less than the ability to sell something to businesses in those communities.

I'll also go so far as to say that—I believe, based on conversations with reporters assigned to "local, local" coverage—the papers are happier with upbeat news than reporting on the garden variety scandals and incompetencies that afflict every community everywhere. Accentuating the positive accentuates the possibility of revenue.

You're screaming, "It's a tough market, you idiot. YOU try keeping one of these things afloat."

It isn't likely I ever will. But I know I'd start with a concept more compelling than painting happy faces on stories a fraction of a dwindling fraction of people want to know anything about.

I probably should have whipped together my deep thoughts last night on The New Yorker's Obama the Terrorist cover art. But I got caught up in the Home Run Derby on ESPN. (Love the State Farm muckety-muck calling Morneau "Jason" at the big, anticlimactic award ceremony. Note to State Farm: Next year send a baseball fan in with the hardware. ESPN reporter Erin Andrews's expression at the gaffe was also pretty amusing.)

Like most mid-summer outrage/umbrage flare-ups, this one will probably be over before I hit the "send" button. But within it are at least a couple tantalizing nuggets related our other great national pastimes: outrage and cultural warfare.

Here's the sequence of my experience with the Obama cover, and I relay this as a longtime subscriber (i.e. liberal elitist.) Surfing around, I saw it pop on some website. I looked. I laughed. I moved on. A few clicks later, there it was again, this time with the first barrage of "outrage" from Obama-friendly lefties. I looked closer at the drawing and read through a couple dozen comments, I think on Kevin Drum's site, Political Animal. The "incident" was on.

What I find interesting is that I, as a more or less typical New Yorker reader, immediately got the hyperbole of the joke. "As FoxNews would have us see it," I thought. But unlike other recent Barry Blitt political covers—here's a link—even in that first impression, I had the sense there was something missing.

But as someone who spends too much time shaking my head in dismay at the trumped-up outrage du jour of the forever-victimized right wing, I told myself I wasn't going to get trapped into my own expression of grievous umbrage over so obvious a piece of satire. Certainly not a drawing I immediately recognized as satire—and reflexively laughed at as satire. The degree of cognitive dissonance required to first "get" something as a joke and then turn around and make a convincing display of moral offense is the sort of intellectual dishonesty with which I'm happy to only tar the Other Team.

Moreover, a bit like Al Franken's old jokes here in Minnesota, there was a pretty high "us" and "they" factor in the complaints of outraged liberals.

Here's a comment from Spiegelman, the famous New Yorker artist, in the San Francisco Chronicle: 

. . . Spiegelman, the Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist and former New Yorker staffer, was baffled that much of the negative reaction to the cartoon was coming from Obama supporters on liberal blogs.

"They sound so elitist," Spiegelman told the Chronicle. "The essence of what they're saying is, 'I get it, but I don't trust the people in Kansas to get it.' But isn't that what the whole hope and change thing is supposed to be about? That they will get it?"

(I also loved—note irony—Rahm Emanuel, the Democrats' campaign ramrod, declaring he was through with The New Yorker because of Blitt's cover. Right, pal. If House Democrats had done the quality of investigation The New Yorker's Seymour Hersh has done on the cooking of intelligence in Iraq and the Cheney administration's plans for Iran, they might double their approval ratings.)

But elsewhere in that same piece, someone put their finger on the "problem," which really only applies to "those who aren't as hip as us."

What Barry Blitt missed, in a cartoon about the ludicrous misunderstandings and phobias surrounding the Obamas, was a visual cue suggesting the genesis or the architects of this lunacy. Kevin Drum suggested Blitt needed John McCain down in a corner with thought bubbles imagining the Obamas in Al Qaeda-chic fist bumping in the Oval Office. That seems heavy-handed and, frankly, beneath McCain. But if he could somehow work Sean Hannity or Laura Ingraham into that shtick, hypervenilating into a FoxNews mike . . .

I don't know what Blitt's solution could have been. But what was missing was the immediate, instantaneous recognition of whose absurd vision this is or from what whacked-out imagination it leaps. Unlike Blitt's other New Yorker covers—the Bush team in a flooded Oval Office post-Katrina, Bush playing Felix Unger to Dick Cheney's Oscar Madison post the '06 election, neither of which needed any additional explanatory elements or setup—the setup in the Obama cover was almost entirely inferred. It was precisely hip enough for The New Yorker audience room . . . who then began fretting loudly that it was too hip for the Kansas room everywhere else.

Never mind that Seinfeld was arguably the most popular sitcom of all time. Irony is regarded as a highly problematic technique. Big, groaning, mainstream-directed institutions—such as TV networks and presidential campaigns—treat irony like explosives. One fumble, and you'll blow your fingers off. The operative presumption being that too many of "them" don't get irony.

I'm not convinced that is true. There are way too many people who don't pay close enough attention to stuff that has a big-time impact on their everyday lives, and there are probably way too many people who still believe Obama is a muslim (which, if you read your favorite local metro columnist, is always tacitly synonomous with "America-hating terrorist"). But a cartoon? On the cover of a magazine with the title of The New Yorker? Even at the Little America Truck Stop in Rock Spring, Wyo., I'm thinking the clientele took it for some kind of weird "elitist joke."

New Yorker editor David Remnick spent most of yesterday explaining Blitt's joke—never good for anyone trading in comedy. He turned up on the evening news arguing that the cover had already served its purpose what with all the free airtime he was getting pointing out how absurd the image is.

If he's arguing that the cover does Obama more good than harm, I agree. (Hell, when even John McCain gets on national TV tut-tutting about how "offensive" it was, that's a good day for Obamamania.)

Amid all the flame throwing last week between the Star Tribune and MinnPost were repeated reminders that the state's biggest newspaper/biggest news operation has also abandoned its ombudsman, AKA "Readers' Rep."

For awhile, the paper did have a full-time staffer apparently taking calls and e-mails from curious-to-outraged readers wondering what in the hell is in the water over there. But not long after Par Ridder deep-sixed the sweet old ladies at the switchboard in favor of an automated system that only occasionally pronounces names correctly (quick, get me "Kristin Ti-LOTT-son"), the "Readers' Rep" also disappeared, reassigned into the bureaucratic depths.

Not that the former "Readers' Rep" ever agreed with any criticism of Strib owners, editors, or writers mind you. (Can you say, "Big time taboo?") In her view, everyone in the building, especially those above her in the pecking order, were always and only doing "great journalism" and making "tough decisions" under "trying conditions." But at least the gun-stroking nut cases in their Medina enclaves had a number to call to complain about "Withering Glance."

Since nature abhors a vacuum, the tough work of handling questions about Star Tribune decision making was outsourced . . . not to India such as other departments but to the Dry Dock bar in rural Superior, Wisc., where Randy, a lightly employed septic-tank cleaner and part-time bear-hunting guide agreed to take on the job.

OK, full disclosure, I have to pay him. A running tab for four dozen Keystone Lights and no more than a half dozen of Ron's Famous Dago Burgers a week is probably more than the switchboard ladies were getting, but so far, the bookkeepers here at the magazine haven't challenged the expense.

Let's get to the mailbag.

QUESTION:  Randy, the Strib doesn't look too good in this business about offshore oil drilling. I mean, the hedge fund pirates at Avista may be a pack of shadowy vampires, but they aren't exactly General Electric. If 20 percent of their fortunes are tied up in offshore drilling, don't you think the paper should tell us that when they suddenly decide oil drilling on Sanibel is the way to go?

RANDY: This whole thing is a crock of monumental crapola. Do you think anyone at Avista is paying any attention to what's in the goddam paper? Wake up! I mean, have you ever seen one of these Avista "partners?" Kee-rist! Even their tighty whities are sewn out of silk. Do you think any of them have ever been on an oil rig? I guarantee you the only oil they've ever touched is sunblock. They're traders, dude.  This stuff is all numbers. And I mean look, judging by their play on this newspaper thing, you gotta figure they're looking at nothing but dry holes in Florida, too. Lighten up. They ain't pushing nobody to say nothin'.

QUESTION: Randy, now that they've sacked that other Readers' Rep, my new favorite column is Nancy Barnes's Sunday thingie. I noticed this morning that she was patting herself on the back for letting readers post comments on news stories. WooHooo! That girl is getting freaky with the Internet, I tell you. What next? ReusseCam? So we can watch Patrick watch batting practice and file an expense report? But the thing that got me is how she's trying to sell the idea that the paper is better off now because, "Before, the only way readers could respond to something they read was to write a letter or call us." Uh, yeah. But then they reassigned the person who got the mail and fired those friendly old gals who answered the phones. When I'm pissed off at something that commie bastard Nick Coleman writes, I want to talk to someone at the paper, not some numb-nuts troll. No offense, man.

RANDY: Yeah, yeah, yeah. The comments thing isn't exactly breakthrough stuff. I mean, I'm on SludgeSucker.com, the website of the Association of Northeast Wisconsin Sewage and Methane Collectors and Redistributors, most of the day talkin' disposal issues. I know how that "comments" game goes. There are some real idiots out there. You would not believe the drafty attics in the deregulated septic business. But what's Barnes supposed to do? Answer her own mail and phone? Get a clue, pal. Do you know what that'd be like? From her point of view, this "comments" thing is a sweet deal. The cranks and trolls can talk to each other. She never has to get involved. She can devote every minute to sweet-talking that Jelly Hall guy down in Miami. I'm telling you, she'll need a high-power back-flushing if she has to spend another winter in Minnesota.

QUESTION: Randy, I read the same thing. Barnes says they've got a part-time person "whose job entails deleting comments that don't pass community standards." I got two questions: Does that person have to read Kersten's column? And two, what do you figure a gig like that pays?

RANDY: This is how that rolls. Kersten puts a few dozen thoughts . . . okay, words . . . on her computer. Then the "raw" column is sent over to those lawyer boys at Power Line. They touch it up, add a couple "therefores," work in a little "towel-head this" and "eco-Mom that," and kick it back. It's called community outsourcing. Saves a ton of dough on the copy desk. Word is the Strib is paying 100 an hour for that job. That's rupees, of course, which are kind of like money. Let me see . . . carry the four . . . damn! You can get forty-two of those pups for a buck. I am in the wrong business.

QUESTION: Randy, my man. How's it hangin'? Listen, that last Barnes column really was a kick in the ass. She's on a roll. I loved the way she kept talking about get "rollicking." Damn, I love it when chicks talk like that. But she mentioned that the local crime stories they ran "spawned ugly, racial hate-mongering comments aimed at a wide variety of minority and ethnic groups." I'd like to know a little more about who exactly gets into nasty, ugly stuff like that? I mean, I know that in big-time newspapering, both sides are always equally guilty. Always fifty-fifty. But this smells like another Liberals Gone Wild thing, if you ask me. That crowd is nothing but a bunch of sickos.

RANDY: I tried to get some more info on that one, but Barnes wouldn't take my call or answer an e-mail. (I think they're blocking SludgeSucker.) Although, you know she actually picked up when I left a message that started, "Ms. Barnes I just wanted to say how much I admire you, and I want to compliment you on the courageous decisions you've made on behalf of our community." I swear to God, she actually came on the line. Sounded damned friendly, too. But when I told her I had a question, she hung up. So I don't know what to say on that one, whether it's the Liberals going bat shit again, or hell, far-fetched as it seems, a couple patriotic ditto heads with a little too much Rebel Yell under their belts. All I know is I never see any Liberals down at Superior Speedway, and the only crime we got there is the price of gas. So you do the math.      

There are moments when I envy my colleagues covering the restaurant industry. All that expense account chow is cool enough, but the occasional public hissy fits and feuds are often pretty damned entertaining. A foodie artiste whipped up like over-beaten meringue is always good copy.

Here on the media end of public life, you rarely see a lockup/throw down as good as this week's bout between Star Tribune editorial page writer Jill Burcum and MinnPost media writer David Brauer.

The background is this: On June 28, the Strib ran an unsigned editorial suggesting that there might be reasonable cause to take a new look at offshore drilling in Florida and California. Since the Strib doesn't exactly have a history of "hear-hearing" Bush administration proposals, this one caught Brauer's attention.

Said the editorial, "President Bush and other political leaders are right to weigh all options as potential solutions to what is clearly an energy crisis. Of all the proposed measures, none has sparked a more bitter and unproductive debate than tapping into the nation's vast oil reserves in areas currently off limits: offshore and in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR)." Adding, "Though some environmental advocates dispute this, drilling technology has advanced over the past quarter-century. Oil companies can drill more efficiently in deeper water with significantly less risk to the environment."

(Full disclosure: David is an old friend of mine and has been camped -- doing a terrific job -- on all things Strib for months.)

On Tuesday, Brauer filed on MinnPost noting that the Strib's private-equity owners, Avista Capital Partners (cue snake rattle sound effect), have 20 percent of their portfolio invested in . . . offshore drilling operations. Brauer then suggested it might have been a good idea for the Strib to disclose as much somewhere on the Op-Ed page.

This did not sit well with Burcum, who moved over to the editorial department a few months ago and who, as it turns out, authored the piece.

Very, very much unlike standard Strib response to criticism, especially criticism from "bloggers" (Brauer qualifies as something more), Burcum fired off a comment to MinnPost accusing Brauer of just about everything short of necrophilia with Wisconsin roadkill.

Wrote Burcum:

"Let’s be clear. David Brauer’s employer has an economic interest every time he writes about the Star Tribune. MinnPost views itself as a Star Tribune competitor. It stands to benefit directly from a weakened Star Tribune, something that Brauer clearly has an interest in hastening. Does Brauer state his employer’s interest in each of his frequent, negative columns about the paper? No. Should he? By the standards he puts forth in his latest underreported broadside against the Star Tribune, yes.

"Not surprisingly, today’s hypocritical piece begins with a cheap shot, that it’s hard to find a call to action in the editorial pages. David, I thought you read the paper every day for the pointless, commentless Daily Glean?"

She concluded by saying:

"As far as disclosure goes, David, heal thyself. By your own standards, your columns require a lot more of them than the meaningless Gray Plant disclosures you put in. Today’s reality, which you should know as a critic, is that most media companies have owners with vast investment interests. Do these newspapers, TV stations and other outlets disclose this every single time they write about these topics? Has MinnPost ever disclosed its founders' and funders' vast investment interests when it writes about various topics? No.

"Your reporting was weak. Your motivation, suspect. Your conclusions, circumstantial. Were this an editorial, I’d be forced to conclude with an uncomplimentary summary graf about your reporting integrity and trustworthiness."

Ouch.

Not exactly defenseless, Brauer responded pointing out the difficulty in getting current Strib management to respond . . . to anything.

To a Burcum complaint that he hadn't adequately pursued comment from someone in management, Brauer wrote:

"I always contact people I write about at 425 Portland. But they don't always get back to me. I know the poohbahs don't like me, but that's no excuse for not calling a reporter back - if so, the Strib's more aggressive reporters would never get a callback. Please communicate your feelings about callback decorum to Nancy Barnes (who has never returned a call or email, though Rene Sanchez does) and Ben Taylor, who has also stiffed me since November. I certainly hope the Strib's sources don't follow management's pattern."

As of yesterday, the boil was still on.

Brauer called back first.

I told him the scuffle over offshore drilling and even whether the Strib should have disclosed Avista's involvement in such interested me less than a newspaper's, dare I say, journalistic obligation to accountability and transparency, which, as I see it, requires . . . returning an occasional phone call from a reporter.

Brauer, as I say, is covering the Strib's reporting and business operations as a reporter. Other than Paul Schmelzer over at the Minnesota Independent and City Pages, and me, intermittently, that's it in terms of who Strib management might have to deal with here in town. But in my experience, the courtesy of a call back or response to an e-mail ended when "St. Paul Pioneer Press" stopped being my last name.

"In fairness," says Brauer, "this was the first time Scott [Gillespie, now head of the Strib's editorial page] took an absolute pass on a question. [Gillespie responded to a Brauer e-mail declining comment on the offshore drilling piece]. The way it has been working, [deputy managing editor] Rene Sanchez has been designated as the talk-to-Brauer guy, and he's been both cordial and professional. Nancy Barnes has never responded to anything."

Brauer beat me to the punch by noting that the advantage to the Strib in having Sanchez play designated commenter is that Sanchez is too low in the food chain to know much about anything beyond the newsroom. Sanchez can honestly say, "I don't know," something people like Barnes and publisher Chris Harte have a harder time doing. My point is that the designation of a credible denier is a drearily familiar corporate crisis management technique—i.e. something beneath an organization allegedly committed to public accountability and transparency.

I know, I know. It's really so quaint, isn't it? Expecting a group of managers employed by a panicked private investment group to behave like public, journalism figures of old. Similarly, I suppose I have to concede it is disingenuous, therefore, of people like Brauer and I to continue expecting current Star Tribune management to behave according to rules of journalistic comportment we both know they long ago set aside in the interest of avoiding conflict with their bosses who have no accountability to anyone other than their undisclosed investors.

Cracked Brauer, "At least with Anders [Gyllenhaal, Nancy Barnes's imperious predecessor], he took your call even as he let you know you were wasting his time."

I'm perilously close to whining here. You know, " . . . waaah . . . the big meanies won't play fair because I'm just a blogger." But the question is still fair. What is the criteria for credibility sufficient enough for an upper-level Star Tribune manager to return a journalist's phone call or e-mail? Is it a certain level of  circulation? If so, how much? Will they take a call from The Highland Villager? Is it the presence of editing by someone they respect? In Brauer's case, MinnPost has a table full of editors from both the Star Tribune and Pioneer Press. Or is it, as I suspect, simply that they believe they can ignore any and everything online without peril?

Point being that in a journalism world evolving as fast as ours is today, with journalistic standards flexing to gain and sustain a toehold, the online world is sprinkled with professionals who, though their dental plans might not be as good as they once were, are still asking fair and valid questions . . . and whose work is still being read by people interested in the topic. Questions (a bit like termites gnawing at footings) are something big, teetering newspapers ignore at their own peril.

As one Strib reporter I spoke with put it, "If they don't believe bloggers have credibility, how come they are paying [Katherine] Kersten to blog?"

Jill Burcum called back a couple hours after Brauer. She didn't want to wade into the criteria-for-credibility business or why her superiors over the Strib habitually stiff scurrilous bastards such as Brauer and myself. She was still steamed over what she regarded as Brauer's insinuation that she and the rest of the editorial department, "Were bought off on that piece or are dictated to by Avista. Who is he to impugn our integrity like that?"

I've only interacted with Burcum a couple of times, and, like most Strib reporters/writers, she has been professional about it, calling back and answering questions. (The cone of silence really only applies to editors and up.) She calmed down a bit when I told her that all things considered, Brauer had complimented her on at least (wo)manning-up and giving him a piece of her mind . . . in public and on the record. That much he found refreshing.

"Well, I appreciate that," she said. "But I'm still mad. He says he has all these sources over here. If that's true, he could have called around and found out who wrote the offshore drilling edit. I would have called him back."

(Your ball, David.)

The pass-around post of the day is Michael Kinsley's Slate piece titled, "Can Minnesota Take a Joke?"

An iconoclastic liberal, Kinsley's target is Minnesota Democrats' and lefties' hand-wringing over Franken's demeanor and whether he is too much of a comic to be appropriately senatorial, whatever that means.

Kinsley is Slate's founding editor, and accordingly, he got his money quote in at the very top:

 "Americans say they want to be represented by 'real people' and not by 'professional politicians.' But with their votes, they reward professionalism and drain the reality from politics. Real people haven't spent their lives plotting a political career, and therefore real people may have said things from time to time that an aspiring politician would not."

I've got my issues with Franken's campaign to date. One side of the complaint is Franken's apparent lack of a deflective strategy to bat away sporadic "outrages" relating to his career as a comedian. If he and his people had done the proper intensity of opposition research on him, they would have had this deflection business figured out months ago. In effect, saying,"I was funny then, but I'm serious now," isn't anywhere close to good enough.

But that's Franken. The flip side is that the "good Democrats," "liberals," "progressives," "ultra lefties," and fringe militants who wince and cower every time Ron Carey or some blogger tosses out another "Al bomb," which, as I've been saying for awhile, are just going to get bluer and saltier as the campaign goes on. (To reiterate another point: Franken is hardly "hiding" this material. The Republicans are freely picking it out of stuff on the public record.)

As someone who pretty much meets every right-winger's definition of a "liberal elitist" (went to college, lives in a first-ring suburb, reads The New York Times and books but not Vince Flynn, subscribes to "liberal" magazines such as The New Yorker, Esquire, and uh, Automobile but not Guns' n Ammo or laddie mags, buys tickets to foreign movies, and thinks, all things considered, France might be more livable than Detroit), I can tell you that even I detect a paternalistic, condescending "class" concern for the appeal of Franken's campaign.

After the last Franken "outrage" (Kinsley, I guess gets credit for "The Culture of Umbrage", which is pretty good), I lost track of the number of lefty cronies shaking their heads convinced, "Franken's going to lose." Why? Because "they won't buy this stuff out-state."

That would be, yes, the "they" word.

"We," the urban sophisticates, of course, have no problem with raunchy humor. We, after all, are hip. We practically light votive candles to Lenny Bruce. Chris Rock? Now that's funny. But those uptight, church-going rubes "out there," I mean "outstate," (like where I grew up) . . . whoa, baby! Wait until the Republicans come up with a frat house video of Al sucking fumes out of a bong, or telling Arianna Huffington she's one tasty-looking slice of souvlaki. THAT ain't "senatorial." I mean, it ain't enough for "they," I mean "them," I mean, oh, hell, he's doomed.

"We" have a wary view of the "they" crowd. To us, they—even the usually Democratic "they"—are a highly caricatured crowd with one foot in some Ole Rolvaag agrarian epic and the other barely tolerating Hubert Humphrey. Worse, in my estimation, too many political consultants essentially agree with that caricature and shape their candidates into over-researched, utterly edge-less, TV anchormanlike incarnations whose idea of an acceptable joke is telling the weatherman it'll rain because he just got his car washed.

(Also, am I the only one who starts grinding my teeth every time some politician promises to "fight" for Minnesotans, the handicapped, the overtaxed, the undertaxed, the Psoriasis Therapists Union . . . Is vowing to "fight" for . . . yadda, yadda . . . the corniest line imaginable? As in something only a "professional politician" or a guy who aspires to be a professional politician would say?)

Given Barack Obama's very likely long coattails in Minnesota and Norm Coleman's eminently exploitable vulnerabilities . . .

Says Kinsley, "Coleman is a man of no interest, a run-of-the-mill political hypocrite who started out as a standard-issue long-haired student rebel leader on Long Island in the 1960s and surfed the zeitgeist: Now he is a standard-issue pro-war, tax-cut Republican." ... Franken probably has more room to roam image-wise than he and his handlers have allowed him so far. He should use it.

More to the point, my hand-wringing pals, a few who "just had to" vote their conscience for Nader in 2000, and a few who couldn't abide Mike Hatch in '06, (that Hutchinson guy really had a shot, didn't he?) are the ones who ought to loosen up. Loosen up and express some confidence that "they" out there, so far from a decent $4 latte and an Audi dealership, are hip enough -- and pissed off enough -- to accept a new definition of "senatorial".

A definition that allows actual jokes, doesn't look or sound like Foghorn Leghorn and isn't forever doing that damned cornball, promising to "fight" for every interest group in the state thing.

The indignity of it all.

For fifteen years as the media columnist for a not-quite major daily newspaper, I was flooded/barraged/bombarded (take your pick) with press kits, tapes (then DVDs), and phone calls from publicists for every network and every obscure cable channel and their even more obscure cable shows. Each was more desperate (or more bored) than the last. Each wanted to squeeze five inches of space out of a deep hinterland paper that was at best known to them as one of a hundred names on their calling list.

Smug with a god-like control over their job productivity, I let most of these publicists, usually with sing-songy voices, twist slowly in voice mail hell and then laid on person-to-person indignation when I couldn’t find the screener of Celebrity Sex Kittens in Borneo, which was suddenly generating so much buzz.

Apparently, it is now payback time. As a low, miserable, one-in-a-billion blogger, I can’t even get a ten-minute phone interview with a cameraman–any cameraman–for my favorite summer series, Ice Road Truckers. My request to The History Channel (i.e."History" as it prefers to be known these days) for a quickie with anyone involved in last winter’s production up in Canuckistan was met with a terse e-mail from a publicist saying their policy was not to “place fans in direct contact with our staff.”

“Fans”? Me? WTF!

Like I was going to do one of those Chris Farley-interviews-Paul McCartney numbers on whoever rode shotgun with Hugh “The Polar Bear” in his Peterbilt to Tuktoyaktuk.

Unusual for me, I decided to play back on the "Do you know who I am?" bit. I did briefly consider throwing some statistics at them, verifiable page views here at Mpls.St.Paul Magazine versus murky “readership” numbers at the newspaper. But my pride had been battered enough. Letting The History Channel see me sweat would blow a pretty good hole in my portrait of indifference.

But I am a fan of Ice Road Truckers. The pissy publicist got that right. If my reasons are perverse, I’m not alone. Last season's debut was a bona fide hit for The History Channel. It ain't American Idol, but it drew unexpectedly good numbers.

What I love about it includes the fact that none of the cast of characters is beautiful or sexy. Far, far from it. Most, in fact, are carrying a minimum of sixty extra pounds, and that blubber is buried under six or seven layers of oil-and-diesel stained fleece, wool, and flannel. This is Carhartt chic. What’s more, the setting, mid-winter on the Arctic Circle, assures viewers that nothing will be decided by some mincing “tribal challenge” in bikinis.

Ice Road Truckers, a show about fat, hard-cussing, blue-collar guys hauling sometimes 90,000 pounds of weird mining gear over frozen rivers, lakes, and the Arctic Ocean is the antidote to every silly, contrived, airhead, hard-body/soft-mind “reality” show, including the granddaddy of them all, Survivor.

I mean, these guys are workin’ here.

Moreover (sexist pig alert), Ice Road Truckers is a completely unsparing male world. While the show occasionally ducks behind the scenes to check up on the drivers cooling their jets while their truck gets repaired or phoning home from some cheap motel, it almost never hangs out with them at the local watering holes probing for their deepest fears or how Hugh “The Polar Bear” hurt their feelings when he told them they were “a [bleeping] loser” for shearing off their oil pan.

Appropriate for a male community in an environment that can turn lethal in an instant, there is little to no sympathy for laziness, stupidity, mewling self-involvement, or preening. You do the job, or you don’t. Excuses are for the “I broke a nail!” bikini crowd out on some Fiji atoll playing with lawn darts.

On the Ice Road, if your truck breaks down, it’s your fault. Somehow that seems more like real life.

I wanted to ask a cameraman about the logistics of shooting the show. This second season, which looks great in HD, seems to have more helicopter footage than last year, which helps convey the vastness and stark beauty of the sub-polar north . . . when the sun is up. But as a fan, I’m curious how they assigned the shooting work and how they picked the runs the truckers were making.

If anyone from The History Channel had deigned to speak . . . to a fan . . . I’d have asked them about how the mostly-male viewing demo is working for them, if they've got any income-level demos, and what women viewers, if any, are saying? I would have also told them that Geo Beach, the self-consciously macho “host” of Tougher in Alaska (a show which follows Ice Road Truckers this summer), is self-defeating. (If you have to tell people you’re tough, you’re probably worried they think you’re not, which means you care too much what they think, which means you’re really not that tough.)

Several years ago, while employed by that not-quite major daily paper that The History Channel and others were once so eager to flatter and cajole, I cornered Survivor producer, Mark Burnett, in a Pasadena bar and, playing devil’s advocate, asked him when he was going do Survivor: Duluth with hard bodies in parkas and mukluks eating raccoon livers and swimming under two feet of lake ice?

“Not too bloody soon,” was Burnett’s reply. “This is show biz, Mate.” (Translation: For every layer of fleece and flannel you lay on the hard bodies, your ratings drop 20 percent.)

I told Burnett, an Aussie, that I much preferred his original show, Eco-Challenge, a lavishly produced chronicle of actual teams of super athletes in a non-stop, days-long 300-mile race through jungles, snake-infested swamps, and ocean channels in places such as Fiji and Borneo. Very much unlike Survivor, survival was in peril, and the rigors and endurance were astonishing.

“I liked it, too. But it was hell to shoot. With Survivor, we can contain it and build the story.” (Translation: A camera is always there every time a bikini picks up a piece of driftwood, and the action stops long enough to work on the soap opera.)

On the Ice Road, soap is a pretty much forgotten commodity, and the soap opera pretty much ends when Hugh “The Polar Bear” tells mopey Drew Sherwood, “You’re an ***hole.”

(Programming note: I see that Burnett and History are teaming up for a series retracing Henry Morton Stanley's trek across Africa in search of Dr. David Livingstone, using only a compass and a map. The series, titled, Expedition: Stanley and Livingstone, will be shot this fall for air next year. Cool.)

    One upside to the relentless, Draconian reduction of reporters in mainstream newsrooms and their vigilant focus on crime and he said/she said political coverage is that that daily papers and TV stations have neither the resources or interest to get involved with the truly ludicrous fringes of the Culture Wars. That’s too bad in a way, because there is a laugh in some of this stuff, and little more widely-publicized ridicule of the worst excesses could have a tonic-like effect on our hyper-partisan culture.
    But, hell, I’m happy to handle the crumbs the corporate folks won’t stoop to sweep, (unless the Strib’s Tim O’Brien drops this into his on-line round-up).
    The hyperventilating over Gen. Wesley Clark’s “attack” on John McCain’s “service record”/”patriotism” had barely died down this past week when some of the same suspects – coagulating around the National Review On-Line’s Jonah Goldberg, (an occasional contributor to the Strib’s editorial pages) – started going off on “Wall-E”, the new Pixar movie about love between a couple cute 29th century ‘bots.
   Here, via Talking Points Memo, is a hilarious, “Daily Show”-worthy compendium of FoxNews’ morning ninnies and others blowing gaskets over Clark’s comment. (Do these people ever go home at night and say, “God, I hope my kids didn’t see that show”?)
    I caught “Wall-E” out at Southdale this past Wednesday night. By the “Tomato-Meter” over at RottenTomatoes.com it is the best-reviewed movie of the year. Accordingly, the theater was 90% full. Adults laughed and kids seemed to eat it up. And that’s good sign, because it really is a terrific movie. (I won’t say “terrific little movie”, because the thing cost close to $200 million, and comes via the Disney juggernaut.) The visuals are frequently stunning – without quite the luscious, over-saturated gleam of “Cars” or “Ratatouille”, (different director, different story), and yes, there is a bit of a message. Wall-E, you see, is a garbage compactor dutifully cleaning up the planet after human life has literally trashed the place and cut bait for the stars … and a new market for the omnipotent Buy ‘n Large corporation, (Wal-Mart), through whose ultra-mega big box emporiums all human wants are created and then over-met.
    The lover ‘bots, Wall-E and Eva (a sleek, gleamy-white Mac kind of girl) operate in service to humans, all of whom have been fattened like Slurpee-sucking ticks by Buy ‘n Large and are now floating in a permanent Carnival Cruise-like torpor billions of miles from home. Too obese to even walk they float around on levitating Barca-Loungers with a TV screen hovering inches from their porky faces delivering all the information they need to mintain their lethal levels of consumption.
    (As someone with a dangerous obsession for Costco, I laughed … nervously.)
    So, yeah. A satiric, cautionary message amid the glorious pictures, romance, comedy and sci-fi homages. (A la “2001’s” HAL 9000, Otto the giant cruiser’s on-board computer shouldn’t be trusted, and the soundtrack exults with “Also Sprach Zarathustra” when the porcine cruiser captain finally stands up right and walks.)

    So what happens over in The Chronically Irritable Echo Chamber? With Goldberg as the tent pole, accusations of "fascism" began flowing in.

    Says NRO blogger Shannen Coffin:  "From the first moment of the film, my kids were bombarded with leftist propaganda about the evils of mankind. It's a shame, too, because the robot had promise. The story was just awful, however. Nice to see that Disney and Pixar can make mega-millions off of telling us just how greedy, lazy, and destructive we all are. There's no hope for mankind. Hand over your wallet."

    A fawning reader of both Goldberg's latest book, "Liberal fascism" and his blog: "I am about two thirds of the way through Liberal Fascism (brilliant, by the way, and utterly absorbing), and so I find myself in “spot the Fascist” mode in just about everything I do – especially in regards to popular culture and movies. Your dissection of the fascistic elements in “Dead Poet’s Society”, for example, really raised my eyebrows, as I have always really enjoyed the movie and know it quite well, but was not previously equipped to notice those sort of elements. 

    "I took my kids to see “Wall-E” over the weekend, and although I really did enjoy the movie, I was at various points struck by what I perceived as strongly fascists elements in the story and the aesthetics. Possibly I am REALLY over-reaching, thanks to the fact that I am still tripping out over your book’s eye-opening thesis, but some elements seemed to fall right into the aesthetic and political traits you cite so often in LF:

     "1) The entire issue of environmental concern and crises mongering, which pervades the movie, although admittedly in a fairly good-natured form that tends to avoid being preachy

    "2) The portrayal of the corporate consumer world as bad, with its attendant “system” that lulls the populace into a stupor, and which is then countered by the back-to-the-soil, making-it-real rebellion lead by the Captain after his spiritual awakening learning about the tribal roots of human society.

    "3) The use of the color red to mark those who have experienced liberation from the “system” 

    "4) The mass rally on the Lido deck near the end of the movie, with its ordered ranks of humans staring up in awe at the Captain as he fights the system, and the green banners flying all around them as they do.   

    "5) Eve shaking off her programmed directives and getting in touch with her emotional, passionate inner self when she sets out to save Wall-E.

    "There were other things that tingled my “fascist sense”, or whatever, although I can’t immediately recall what they were."

    And Goldberg responding, "I agree with the charges of hypocrisy. I agree that the Malthusian fear mongering was annoying."

    I don't want to make more of this than it is worth -- which isn't much, other than a sad statement on some folks'  tortured sense of victimhood --  but  it  git me going on a  favorite  hot button for discussion, namely, if something like "Wall-E", with what  (to me) seems  a pretty  non-inflammatory tale of robot love amid an, as I say, cautionary message about the effects of gross consumption is both "liberal" and "fascist", where, or what is "conservative art"? Obviously Goldberg's ginned up "liberal fascism" is oxymoronic, a bit like "racist integrationist", or "secular religious fanatic". So by his standard, "conservative art" may be oxymoronic as well.

(And yes, Goldberg's deluded fan is actually so confused he's got Eva the robot's individualistic rebellion confused with fascism.)

    If true art is defined as the combination of skill and imagination that produces an aesthetic advancing, enhancing or illuminating the human condition, where are examples of conservatives of Goldberg's ilk producing anything like that?  You know, like maybe a full-length animated feature snickering at global climate change, mocking equality of the sexes, championing conceal-and-carry laws, or, a la Edina resident Katherine Kersten, turning up their noses at (Edina) EcoMoms doing something to raise environmental consciousness?

     Besides the cheap joke that "conservative art" doesn't go much further than ribbon magnets on SUVs and Lee Greenwood anthems, the fairer answer is that most everything other than what is generally regarded as "art" is anchored (mired) in a fundamentally conservative ethos of revenue before unique expression. The average, formulaic Hollywood movie -- "Get Smart", "Hancock" -- with nothing at all to say, about anything, and up on a screen for no other reason than to provide enough escapism to make a buck, is status quo "art", (which is also probably oxymoromic).

    Goldberg and his crowd take their shots at giant Disney, as though the Disney corporation, (as Buy 'n Large as you get), is getting fascist and subversive with "Wall-E's" dystopian setting and bloated humans. (A cameo by Fred Willard as the President/CEO of Buy 'n Large urging the fatsos on the space cruiser to "Stay the course" really gets 'em going.)

    I think it was Independence Day that set me off on this one.