Decline Porn, Duluth, and Love Amid the Ruins

J.D. Vance, in a review of Janesville: An American Story in Commentary magazine:

Having grown up in a blue-collar family that has largely abandoned the Democratic Party in droves, I have an unusually high tolerance for the many profiles of Trump voters in struggling industrial towns. Lately, however, even I have grown weary of what Noah Rothman calls “decline porn.” There are only so many words in the English language, and nearly all of them seem to have been used at least three times to help the denizens of Williamsburg and Dupont understand red-state voters and dying factory towns. Enough already.

Vance penned the most orgiastic piece of decline porn in recent memory, Hillbilly Elegy–apologies for my juvenile enjoyment of this metaphor–but there has been no shortage of titles in this genre, and a survey of this blog will find me devouring much of it, from Robert Putnam’s Our Kids to Yuval Levin’s The Fractured Republic, from George Packer’s The Unwinding to Charles Murray’s Coming Apart to Brian Alexander’s Glass House. It need not even be American; I could carry on with examples for a while. Decline porn is a fertile ground in contemporary non-fiction, and its best works tell haunting tales of realities that anyone vaguely involved in the shaping of political or economic trends must wrestle with. They also tap into a into a lament for things lost speaks to a certain part of the human psyche and permeates my own writing at times. Someone who knows me well can probably psychoanalyze this wistfulness easily enough, but I come back to it for reasons that are philosophical as well as personal, and I could devote a lot of words to defending it in those terms. Meditations on loss go back to Eden and the early creation myths, as Paz so masterfully explains in the last chapter of The Labyrinth of Solitude. It’s a near universal human trait.

Despite this, I don’t consider myself a declinist. That golden past usually had its own ugly features, and nostalgia and selective memory whitewash the worst of it. Coping with change is also one of the greatest engines of human ingenuity and heroism, and if noting else, it’s remarkably educational for those of us looking not to repeat past errors. If we fixate only on decline, we become depressing, tiresome people who are locked into a single lens and not much fun to talk to at parties.

Still, Vance likes Janesville. Despite the oversaturation of the genre–porn is everywhere these days, after all–its author, Amy Goldstein, gets to the heart of the flawed human stories, and instead of merely lamenting loss, looks to assess the responses to it. This one would likely strike home for me, too: my earliest memories are of the short stint my family spent living in a small town just north of Janesville, Wisconsin, and my mother worked there for a time. Unfortunately, Goldstein comes to fairly depressing conclusions. The basic tools of the trade in economic development, Janesville argues, have done little good to stem the tide of decline. Neither have worker retraining efforts, a rare point of bipartisan consensus on putting communities back to work. It adds up to a depressing summation of post-industrial America, with no obvious way forward for anyone.

Unless, of course, there might be any exceptions to the trend out there. I happen to be living in one.

Duluth, Minnesota is not heaven on earth. Its economy is not booming, its poverty rate is high, and there has been a rash of opioid overdoses, as in so much of the America exposed so ubiquitously in decline porn. But I will submit that it’s important to think about what it could have been, and that Duluth’s story is as much a triumph as any medium-sized Rust Belt town. In the early 1980s, its unemployment rate was second only to Youngstown, Ohio, which is not exactly great company to have. Population plummeted, manufacturing packed up and left, and a billboard asked the last person to leave to turn out the lights.

Most Rust Belt cities remain mired in the post-industrial swamp; the few that have broken free, like Pittsburgh, are the large ones that operate on a very different scale. And yet Duluth has charted a respectable course since it hit rock bottom in the 80s. Unlike every other Rust Belt city, its population has been stable since 1990, instead of continued shrinkage. (See the table on this page for comparison cities.) The city is basically at full employment. Income growth around the greater Duluth area, while not on par with the booming coastal metros, does outpace the stagnant national average since 1990. The median income within the city itself, while not stellar ($40-some thousand), is a clear step above the Eries, Akrons, South Bends, and Scrantons of the world. The city’s image rehabilitation has been thorough, as it now comes off as an outdoorsy playground for Twin Cities residents on vacation. The Trump tide made little headway in the city proper (though precinct-level data challenges some aspects of the dominant media narrative, and suggests Trump was largely a rural and exurban phenomenon in Rust Belt states, not something that happened inside its former industrial engines). Sure, “we’re better than Flint!” isn’t exactly a winning slogan, but it’s important to understand what the odds were, and what could have been.

There are two ways to explain this.

The first is one of leadership and vision and a certain Duluthian exceptionalism, which us Duluthians would certainly like to believe. A lot of credit in this line of thinking goes to Don Ness, the young mayor who served from 2008-2016 and brought the city’s debt under control and led a massive rebranding effort. But he had some strong forerunners. At the height of the crisis in the 80s, Duluth elected 29-year-old John Fedo. Unlike the consensus-driven and generally beloved Ness, Fedo was a warrior who wasn’t afraid to make enemies to push through his vision, but he also operated in a very different environment, and push through his vision he did. Fedo’s strategy was Keynesianism par excellence, with a junkyard reinvented as a tourist district and work crews set to work rebuilding streets for the sake of work and little else. Those efforts endure in obvious ways. His more market-oriented successor, Gary Doty, tried a lot of things to revive the economy, and while not all of them stuck, the general thrust was positive, as the city landed companies that are the cornerstones of the aviation and healthcare clusters that remain among its most promising foundations for sustained success. Beyond those three mayors, there’s the political influence of some clever longtime political operators who knew how to bring in the benefits like Jim Oberstar and Willard Munger, who were ahead of their time with ideas for building trail networks and capping freeways.

We can’t just credit the politicians, though. Duluth’s rehabilitation always had strong support from a loyal private sector, which continues to support changes through development and philanthropy. Pizza roll magnate Jeno Paulucci was a complicated figure with a complicated relationship with Fedo, but he did bankroll a lot of the changes in Canal Park. Several other big names in business left their mark, as did some of the legacy families whose early 20th century wealth continues to support local foundations and scholarships. That old money remains a boon to Duluth, as does a strong civic culture with its roots in Scandinavian immigration and a thriving arts scene that allows the city to punch far above its weight.

This, however, feeds into the other explanation, which has much more to do with structural factors than any brilliant maneuvering by the people in charge.

First off, geography has had its say. We call Duluth a Rust Belt city because it used to be a manufacturing center on the Great Lakes, and suffered the loss of that economic base and a drop in population comparable to other Rust Belt cities. But it’s isolated from the rest of them, and that may contain some spillover effects or a general sense that everything is going downhill. Instead, it sits in Minnesota, home to one of the wealthiest and most white collar metropolitan areas in the country in Minneapolis-St. Paul. As a regional center with a university and some hospitals, Duluth has some staying power that an Akron, just down the road from Cleveland, may not.

Local geography makes a difference, too. While Duluth isn’t overflowing with buildable land, it has had some pockets for new subdivisions that allowed for continued new home construction. Duluth has also proven somewhat resistant to the mass suburbanization of other Rust Belt cities; while there has certainly been growth beyond the city limits, it hasn’t come at major expense to the city’s tax base. A tour of the other Rust Belt cities will show that none of them has a Congdon: while some of the larger metro areas do have wealthy suburban neighbors, basically none of them have concentrations wealth of any size within the city limits. (The only real exception, surprisingly, is Charleston, West Virginia, which benefits from the machinery of a state government that most Rust Belt cities lack.) For that matter, precious few Rust Belt cities have many Lakesides, Woodlands, or Piedmonts, those stable, comfortably middle class neighborhoods that allow for upward mobility and keep perceptions of public schools afloat. Many of these neighborhoods (and even little nice blocks that don’t show up in census tract data) are fairly isolated, strung out along Duluth’s 27 miles of ridgeline and separated by streams and parks. Even though they are older, they feel fairly suburban, and the park-like nature of the whole city just makes it more resistant to changes that might march smoothly down more cohesive urban grids. It has so many different little pockets, and that diversity begets resilience.

Speaking of diversity, Duluth has always been a very white city–yes, a 1920 lynching probably played a role in that–and the relative lack of racial dynamics make it distinct from a lot of Rust Belt cities that convulsed with conflict in the mid-20th century.  White flight didn’t happen in Duluth on any meaningful scale, and while I wish I could claim this was due to some enlightened thinking on behalf of Duluthians, in reality there probably just weren’t enough people of color to set off that chain reaction. (Typically, this happens when the non-white population hits about 20%; Duluth remains over 90% white.) While the center of Duluth has hollowed out like basically every American city, Rust Belt or not, that probably had more to do with a declining old housing stock and poverty among white people. Other than perhaps some very recent school-driven outmigration, the growth in Duluth’s more suburban areas had much more to do with an abundance of buildable land and desire for space and newer homes than anything related to the people in Duluth itself. The city has been crawling toward greater diversity over recent decades, and if that trend continues or accelerates, Duluth’s response could well determine its future.

All of these factors are most likely intertwined in feedback loops, the causes impossible to separate from one another. There are few obvious lessons here, and some of Duluth’s strengths are accidents of geography in a city at the end of the line in the far north. But the relative successes are real, the leadership examples are real, and some of the things Duluth needs to do to remain an exemplar of Rust Belt success are clear, and cut across all such small cities. It needs to maintain its strong neighborhoods, keep its schools afloat, and prepare for an increasingly diverse future. Continued growth in diverse economic clusters will build a stronger safety net against future crashes. Concentration of poverty will only exacerbate divides and cut off pathways to eventual mobility. Duluth also needs to think on the level of a regional system, so that its future doesn’t devolve into squabbles between the city proper and the outlying areas. They’re all interconnected, part of one economy and one labor market, and their fates are intertwined.

As addicting as the decline porn may be, I’d much rather have an amorous adventure with something real, and with something that can learn from the past and grow into a future with me. It’s all right there before us.

Exit Dave Esse

In a spring of job-related bombshells in Cloquet, the fate of a high school hockey coach may seem like a minor affair compared to a controversy embroiling that city’s police department or the closure of an 85-employee match and toothpick factory, the last of its kind in America. But hockey is no small thing in Cloquet, and sometimes a coach’s plight can have far broader messages about the state of amateur sports and beyond. The tenure of Dave Esse, the hockey coach who amassed a 282-176-28 record over 17 seasons as the head coach of Cloquet-Esko-Carlton, has come to an abrupt and highly suspect end.

Esse was a true throwback coach who demanded excellence at every turn, and would say so when players did not give their all. He was a street fighter, and not just in a metaphorical sense: once, following an on-ice altercation between Duluth East and Cloquet, he challenged Mike Randolph to a fight in the parking lot. His teams were rigidly defensive-minded and tough warriors, no matter the talent level. It was Esse’s way or the highway. He was a schemer of the highest order; it is Esse, not Randolph, who deserves Elk River’s ire for some of the more questionable decisions to come out of 7AA seeding meetings over the years. And when he got a team to buy in, they matched their coach’s image, as pesky and sure of themselves as anyone out there.

Esse’s tenure was a tale of two halves. His early years were a glowing success: six section final trips in eight years, four playoff wins in six tries against archrival Duluth East (despite usually being the underdog), and two State Tournament trips. In neither of those Tourney years were his Jacks the most talented team in 7AA, but they found ways, both through Josh Johnson’s goaltending and David Brown’s goal-scoring binge. This was Cloquet’s longest run of sustained quality, and the Jacks pulled it out with a combination of star power and feisty, relentless effort.

The later years were less kind, but this had much more to do with a precipitous drop-off in talent than anything behind the bench. The Jacks still put up a serious fight over those nine seasons, pulling a memorable playoff upset over Grand Rapids and twice taking 1- or 2-seed Elk River to overtime. Lists of the best coaches in the state often align with their teams’ on-ice accomplishments, leading some to wonder whether the praises heaped upon a Curt Giles or a Lee Smith are really due to any brilliant coaching maneuvers or merely the good fortune of having many skilled players come through their system. If those critics ever wanted an example of someone whose talent level wasn’t always there, but routinely got teams to play as more than the sum of their collective parts, Esse was their man.

If there was a knock on Esse, it was that some of his most talented teams didn’t quite find a way to get it done. The mid-2000s teams, more talented than 2005 Duluth East and deeper than 2006 and 2007 Grand Rapids, really should have found a way to win another section title or two. And with a coach so completely committed to a team system, parents of star players didn’t always think their kids were getting their due. This all blew up during the 2012-2013 season, when Esse had his one post-2008 team that was a realistic contender for a section crown. This attempted firing, an amusing scenario in which politically powerful father of two talented players tried to accuse the good old boys’ network of denying his goalie step-son playing time, ultimately amounted to nothing. The team, however, seemed remarkably flat after that flare-up. Its aftereffects lingered, too: not only did the sons of the father in question leave for juniors after that year, but so did Karson Kuhlman, the best player on that squad.

The incident that drove Esse out this past week bears some obvious similarities. The instigator in this case was the greatest hockey player to ever come out of Cloquet, a 16-season NHLer who came home after retirement to raise his kids. Said hockey player and his family built something of a reputation for themselves in youth hockey, earning ejections from arenas for their antics. But when the player’s son made it to high school this season, Esse decided to bring his old man on board as an assistant coach.

I was immediately skeptical. Was there any way this would end well? Perhaps Esse, as canny an operator as there was in high school hockey, thought his best chance was to bring the father into the fold, rather than having him grumbling from the outside. From the press clippings, it seemed like it worked out last season, and everyone said the right things. Obviously, that wasn’t the case. The facts as we know them now are thus: Esse dismissed his troublesome assistant last week, and while the details aren’t all out here yet, retribution was, clearly, swift. “With great sadness,” Esse stepped down on Friday morning. At this point, I don’t blame the man for moving on.

The timing of this saga throws Cloquet hockey into tumult. After a run of successful youth teams, it looked as if the Jacks were about to announce their arrival back on the state scene. Now, their future is unclear, especially since a couple of the rising talents are the offspring of the man responsible for Esse’s ouster. Their father, after all, was one of the first Minnesotans to leave high school early for other hockey opportunities. Will they follow suit?

There will be plenty of time to sort out that drama, and to see who will want this job opening, given both the potential and the toxic dynamics surrounding it. This is a time to reflect on 17 memorable years of hockey in a town that loves the sport, whether Cloquet was going toe-to-toe with Duluth East and Grand Rapids for 7AA titles or fighting to prove that it could hang with more talented opponents. But we shouldn’t sugarcoat the ending of his tenure, either: Dave Esse’s fate is a sorry statement on the state of high school sports, and yet another incident of political power trumping a track record of exemplary efforts. He created some enemies, as any strong-willed person will over such a long time period, but he also has a legion of loyal former players who appreciate what he instilled in them. He deserved far better.

Highway 61 Revisited

When I was a small child who wouldn’t shut up, my parents would just strap me into the car seat and take me for a drive. It worked every time, and put Baby Karl to sleep. As I learned on my whirlwind West Coast road trip last summer, a good, long drive still has the power to lull me into a satisfied place. Perhaps no road can do this better than the one lining Minnesota’s North Shore of Lake Superior, a pathway woven through childhood memories that also looms up in vague visions of the future.

Minnesota Highway 61 runs some 150 miles from the end of Interstate 35 in Duluth to the Canadian border. It was decommissioned from federal highway status a few decades ago and is no longer the continuous highway that ran from Bob Dylan’s birthplace down through the heart of Blues Country to New Orleans, but it remains the only connection between the U.S. and Canada through Minnesota’s Arrowhead region. The highway is an engineering achievement, often blasting its way through the thick Duluth Complex and the volcanic extrusions that jumble together in the headlands on the Shore. I drive this road with some regularity; no year is complete few trips up the Shore for hikes, runs, and skis. Work takes me up this way at times as well, including a trip to Silver Bay and the old Finland airbase site just this past Wednesday. But while this voyage has a few ulterior motives, it’s primarily dedicated to the ribbon of road.

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The view from Mount Josephine toward Canada

The North Shore is a tourist playground of rocky beaches and cascading streams, rustic beauty frozen in time. Resorts and vacation homes that range from humble cabins to palatial lodges with floor-to-ceiling windows out on the lake dot the way along 61. The greatest of these is the house atop Silver Creek Cliff that was once rumored to belong to Arnold Schwarzenegger, that illustrious alumnus of the University of Wisconsin-Superior. I’ll have to dust off an unfinished short story that took place in a house modeled after this one. But that castle is just one of the retreat homes on the Shore. There are also the homes of the Encampment River People, the residents of a cloistered community north of Two Harbors whose sole purpose in life appears to be yelling at people who disturb their peace; north of Ilgen “City,” I pass a house on the market for $5.5 million that looks worth every penny on its Sotheby’s listing. Real estate now excites me. I’m getting old.

These vacation homes are a far cry from some of the Shore’s most distinctive markers: the ore docks of Two Harbors, the taconite plant in Silver Bay, and the ghost town of Taconite Harbor, home to a now-idled power plant. These and the occasional logging truck are the only vestiges of the industry that led people to first settle on the Shore. While doing my homework before my visit to the Finland airbase, I stumbled across a forum devoted to these shuttered military installations, where a few aging former servicemen and their children who lived their early years on the base at the height of the Cold War reminisced on their time atop a hill in rural Lake County. Despite the desolation and cold—many of them were not native Minnesotans—they almost universally called it the best years of their lives. Now, the base sits vacant aside from a few apparent squatters, a superfund site at the end of a crumbling, precarious road. In place of the solidarity of years on the base, the Shore has now often become a playground for people who live somewhere else.

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Intermingling rocks at a wayside south of Grand Marais

I’m guilty as charged today. This road trip emerged from a plan to test out a new pair of trail running shoes, and their maiden voyage commences at Oberg and LeVeaux Mountains, two peaks that flank the Onion River and its eponymous road just south of the Lutsen ski resort. I start with LeVeaux, the longer hike up an oblong bluff rising 900 feet above the lake. I don’t see anyone else on this 3.5-mile loop, which features some muddy slop to mar my new shoes, a bridge over the rushing Onion, and a climb up the north face, some lingering drifts of snow tucked in at its base. The stark solitude here exudes both a complete rightness and a wistful loneliness, two peaks twinned in my first eight months back home. The trail that circles the summit doesn’t offer nearly as many views as other hilltops in the Sawtooths, but there is a superb look back to the south and west at its far end, as clear as one will ever see it with no leaves on the trees quite yet.

Oberg, meanwhile, is bustling with hikers, including a father who, when asked by his young daughter why that guy was running, immediately replies that “he’s being chased by bears.” The run here is easier than on LeVeaux, so it’s easy to bounce along and repeat those old clichés about climbs and endless pursuit. Yes, I need more of this. The views fan out in each direction as I make the circuit, with long looks down at both Superior and inland Oberg Lake. I do, however, opt to skip the overlook at which a man with his significant other appears to be pulling down his pants. I careen back into the parking lot, both tired and wishing I’d found myself a longer route.

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Oberg Lake

I stop for a spell at a wayside to put some thoughts on paper at a bend in the highway where I can enjoy views all the way north to the breakwater in Grand Marais. I press on to that town whose name is better left untranslated, which stirs to life at the start of another tourist season. Downtown bustles with the precise pace of a place that knows what it is and makes it work. I’m tempted to stop in a gallery to find some local art to check off one of the boxes on my ever-expanding apartment decoration checklist, but restrain myself and settle for a sandwich from the Java Moose. (Alas, the tamale cart is nowhere to be seen.) It’s been a good five years since I was last in Grand Marais, and that last visit mostly involved the hospital after a friend separated his shoulder on a Boundary Waters trip, but it’s just as vibrant and quirky as I remember.

My plan had been to turn around at the Devil’s Kettle at Magney State Park a short ways north of Grand Marais, but then I decide, what the hell, I’ll go to the border. I’ve only crossed here once before, on a childhood vacation to Thunder Bay most memorable for the words my mother uttered when faced with the hike up Sleeping Giant. I have a vague memory of Mount Josephine, which towers over the last settlement in Minnesota, Grand Portage; I’d forgotten how much the highway climbs to cross this final rampart before the Pigeon River. If we ever decide to build a wall with Canada, this portion of the border is already covered. I’m rewarded with a stellar view from the wayside, with Pigeon Point and a few islands at the mouth of the river dotting the azure lake.

The last stop on Highway 61 is a few hundred feet from the customs booth at Grand Portage State Park. A paved path traces its way along the Pigeon, which bursts its banks with spring rains. I am spattered with spray long before I see High Falls, a torrent down into the ravine that separates two nations. When the sun emerges, rainbows proliferate, and the torrents thunder with such power that water rockets back upward in fountains off the rocks below. It’s the most impressive waterfall in the Midwest (even if half of it is in Canada), and it’s not hard to imagine the misery of the Voyageurs as they struggled to find a way around it. This is the end of the road.

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The gateway to Canada

After one last glance at the land of maple leaves, Tim Hortons, and Justin Trudeau, I turn around and head south, past the signs telling me how to translate kilometers into miles. I swing off 61 in Grand Portage and search for a hiking trail up Mount Josephine, but its parking lot has spawned a sixth Great Lake, and with some clouds rolling in, I’m not too disappointed to head on my way. I meander through the heart of the Grand Portage Reservation, which boasts a shiny new school whose playground teems with children, alive on this otherwise desolate stretch of shore. Much more alive, at least, than the old Voyageur fort at the Grand Portage National Monument. It sits in sad in repose, still closed for the season; in one part, orange construction fencing stands in place of the wooden palisade.

I get another dose of the Shore’s limited brushes with history beyond this little corner of the planet when I stop in the hamlet of Colvill to wander along the beach. This was the old summer home of Col. William Colvill, the commander of the First Minnesota regiment whose suicidal charge at Gettysburg ranks among the most crucial military maneuvers in American history. The First Minnesota suffered an 80 percent casualty rate, but stuffed the Rebel advance and may just have saved the nation as we know it. Shot twice and left with a wrecked ankle, Colvill found solitude here as he gimped down this rocky beach, recovering from the horror of war. I follow in his footsteps, any of my more plaintive musings paling in comparison to what weighed on the old Union hero.

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Nowadays, elsewhere in northern Minnesota, I’ve seen a surge in the number of Confederate flags flying from pickup trucks. History is rarely as decisive as we’d like to imagine. What endures a century and a half later is the sense of duty of a man like Colvill, who was the first Minnesotan to enlist when the War Between the States broke out. That sense of compunction, unfathomable until we realize there are things that we, too, would fancy to think we’d drive to the end of the earth to achieve. It’s all somewhere in the pursuit, I muse as I brush a little mud off my leg.

The return trip drags more than the venture northward, as I’m repeatedly stuck in columns of slow-moving traffic. Tourist season is indeed upon us. By the time I’m passing Gooseberry Falls I decide I deserve a beer, and swing down to the Castle Danger brewery in Two Harbors. I sit at the bar and unwind, even as I remind myself how much I have to do to align dreams and reality. Along one road, however, they already blend, and I head home with little doubt that I could just drive this highway into eternity.

History Is Still Over (For Now)

The end of history will be a very sad time. The struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one’s life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism, will be replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands. In the post historical period there will be neither art nor philosophy, just the perpetual care taking of the museum of human history. I can feel in myself, and see in others around me, a powerful nostalgia for the time when history existed. Such nostalgia, in fact, will continue to fuel competition and conflict even in the post historical world for some time to come. Even though I recognize its inevitability, I have the most ambivalent feelings for the civilization that has been created in Europe since 1945, with its north Atlantic and Asian offshoots. Perhaps this very prospect of centuries of boredom at the end of history will serve to get history started once again.

So ends The End of History, a 1989 essay by Francis Fukuyama that later evolved into the seminal work on what the end of the Cold War meant for the world. Due to his grandiose phrasing, Fukuyama has spent most of the past three decades being misunderstood by most people who try to comment on his theory.

This isn’t to say his article was right about everything—no one ever is—but it got a lot right in its explanation of how alternatives to liberal (meaning capitalist, relatively free) democracy have basically been exhausted. The original article accounts for basically every counterpoint people have tried to raise since. Countries that don’t fit that liberal democratic title are still very much in history, fighting and struggling in ugly ways. Fukuyama accurately diagnoses the explosive potential but limited appeal of radical Islam, and also China’s rise as a powerful authoritarian state ultimately more interested in commercial power than some violent takeover. While he shows some hope for a different path, he also recognizes that a fascist-nationalist cause in the then-Soviet Union “has not played itself out entirely there.” (And, despite Putin’s recent maneuvering, present-day Russia is still a long way from taking serious steps down that road.) Fukuyama’s later works worry about the dangers of genetic engineering, suggesting a world in which Silicon Valley manipulates humanity enough that it upsets the balance. That still may be a valid concern.

No doubt others who don’t really know what Fukuyama was saying will say the rise of Donald Trump and various European anti-establishment movements will upset the liberal order, but the paragraph at the top of this post shows that Fukuyama was all over this, too. “Make America Great Again” just screams “powerful nostalgia,” and that sentiment is even more palpable in better-defined movements like Marine Le Pen’s National Front in France. His diagnosis of our ills rings true: bourgeois societies replaced philosophers with data-crunching policy wonks, back-to-nature pushes with spurts of carefully managed ecotourism, and the consumer standards created by old gatekeepers for shopping and even news-gathering with curation by an algorithm. Too much contemporary art is vapid self-expression or thinly disguised political sloganeering, instead of an aspiration to perfection or wonder; too much of “philosophy” is just a negation of previously constructed philosophy without aspiring to a genuine alternative. No wonder that, as someone drawn to philosophy as an ordering project for human life, I’ve found the somewhat fringy right—and occasionally the left, when it stops trying to fight last century’s wars—a far more fertile ground for serious philosophical debate than anything mainstream for some time now.

So are we all going to lapse back into history? Possible, I suppose, but I’m not convinced. We may or may not like the form it takes, but some fusion of democracy (however thinly ritualistic it may be) and capitalism still seems like the only realistic way of ordering an advanced society. Revolt may simmer, but for now, revolution is dead as an agent of dramatic social change. If the 20th century taught us anything, it was that the proletariat never really coalesces into a unified popular force; there are too many things dividing it. While Bernie Bros and Deplorables may have enough shared hatred of The System to collaborate on occasion, their worldviews are too diametrically opposed to ever form a lasting alliance. I expect most of the rebels who attain power (including Donald Trump) to be more or less co-opted by the mainstream, and if they don’t, the revolt by the bourgeois—the still large, still politically powerful middle and upper middle classes—will be swift.

Like Fukuyama, I’m rather ambivalent about all of this. I won’t pretend not to enjoy the creature comforts of life in a liberal democracy, and will readily admit that, more often than not, I’ve been a winner in its meritocratic system. It gives a lot of people an effective ladder to comfortable, happy lives, and that is the source of its ability to outlast other ideologies, and by and large a win for humanity. Its allure will endure for the foreseeable future. But it all goes back to the Answer to Everything: thinking that this way of life is all there is amounts to a dangerous misreading of human nature, and that push for more—for greatness, for glory, for God in whatever form that might take—will forever loom beneath, looking to stake out a distinctive identity or even a soul. Anyone who fails to take that seriously, as an awful lot of mainstream commentators have lately, will reap what they sew.

“The sterility of the bourgeois world will end in suicide or a new form of creative participation,” Octavio Paz writes in the closing lines of The Labyrinth of Solitude. Lately, I’ve been telling myself to try to make sure the tasks I do are acts of creation, such as they can be. We are all world-builders, not mere consumers, and every step we take to use the knowledge we accumulate toward productive ends will help ensure that something healthy emerges from those inescapable desires for greatness and achievement. Sterile conformity will eventually dissolve into something far uglier, and many critics of the system probably won’t realize what horror they’ve unleashed until it’s far too late. Without some healthy renewal, history may end in a much more definitive way.

Exit Bruce Plante

Farewell, dear Bruce: one of high school hockey’s most colorful and recognizable coaches has decided to head for the exits. He led the Hermantown Hawks for 28 years over two stints as head coach, went to 13 Class A State Tournaments, won three titles, and produced an NHLer of a son along the way. Bruce, 68, goes out on top, having claimed his second consecutive title just a month ago.

When I first started attending State Tournament press conferences in 2012, Bruce immediately stole the show. He was passionate, he was insightful, and he was downright hilarious, with some memorable quip coming out of his mouth with every other line. What more could you ask for out of a coach? He did it all with his heart on his sleeve, and it wasn’t hard to see why his players loved him and usually managed to stay loose in big games. His feisty teams that hung with St. Thomas Academy teams drowning in D-I talent channeled their coach full-stop, and the sight of Bruce chasing the referees all over the ice after St. Thomas topped the Hawks on a questionable series of calls late in the 2013 title game will always be among my State Tournament favorites.

The News Tribune’s write-up tells some of the early details about Bruce that got lost in his later coaching success. It’s a superb redemption story, as a man coming out of a divorce and a drinking problem put it all together to become a community pillar, as recognizable a face as any in a town on the rise. His players were always approachable, respectful, and shared in more than a little of that infectious charm. Mike Randolph at Duluth East is probably the only other coach in the state who is deeply wrapped up both in the history and as the present-day face of his program as Plante was at Hermantown.

Bruce will go down as a program builder, a person who took a school that had been a hockey afterthought and turned it in to a power. It was a slow but steady process, as they first broke through with a second place run in the ‘98 Tourney, built their way into a Tourney regular, went through year after year of agony as runners-up, and then finally started claiming crowns at the end. He had some perks, to be sure: Hermantown runs right up against a busy commercial corridor in one of Minnesota’s larger cities, and (unlike that neighbor, Duluth) has ample tracts of undeveloped land for new single-family housing on large lots. As history has shown us, this is the exact formula for building a great program, and few have done it without such favorable conditions. (At about the time the announcement came, I happened to be driving around Hermantown for work purposes, and it was hard not to notice the amount of new home construction under way.) A variety of situations with neighboring school districts also helped the Hawks along. Still, it takes a committed leader to guide that process over many years, and Bruce was a steadying influence every step of the way.

Bruce won by inspiring confidence in his players and turning them loose. While he could at times be creative tactically, he never seemed to fancy himself a chess master, unlike some of his fellow longtime Duluth area coaches. Instead, he just lets his forwards fly and apply constant pressure. It’s fun hockey to play and watch, though perhaps worth noting that it is much easier to win with this style in Class A than in AA, and if there were a few playoff games that his Hawks probably should have won but didn’t, they came against big, tough defensive squads, as with the East Grand Forks team that knocked them off for a second straight year in 2015.

I can’t write this column without mentioning the controversy that plagued the Hawks in Bruce’s final years. After years of being the plucky upstart against Class A’s private powers, Hermantown suddenly became that power themselves. The Hawks’ advantages were obvious, and the program came to enjoy a combination of perks that no other Class A public school could claim. The 2017 Tourney, in which they frankly did not play anywhere near their potential throughout three games (two of them against vastly less skilled opponents) but still won it all anyway, seemed to underscore the tiredness of it all. While I’m not in the “Hermantown must move up!!!” camp—it’s their program to run as they see fit—I was a little disappointed that someone I’d come to like a lot seemed stuck in a rut of denial.

Hermantown will stay in A for at least two more years, though, and while they will still be a power, Bruce’s successor will start out with a slight down cycle in Hawk talent. This program has become big time, and the pressure will be on, both from inside and out of Hermantown. The position should attract some big names. For now, though, I suggest we take a moment to drop the class warfare and the pressure of the post and stop to honor Bruce, who was as rich a character as there was in high school hockey. Whether we know it or not, we’ll miss him.

Of Vacation Rentals and Density Debates: Duluth City Council Notes, 4/10/17

The Duluth city council was on the forefront of urban planning debates this past Monday, as it discussed vacation rentals and density within the city limits on the same night. In both cases, I’m going to poke at urban planning orthodoxy mildly, not because I think it is wrong, exactly, but because I think Duluth needs to ask some questions rather than simply accepting trendy thinking. The details:

Vacation Dwelling Units and Neighborhood Effects

The first debate involved a permit to allow a vacation dwelling unit (VDU; think Airbnb) on Berwick Court, a cul-de-sac off of Arrowhead Road near Hartley Park not far before Kenwood Avenue as one heads west. John Ramos at the Reader covered this one in detail when it was before the Planning Commission, so I won’t belabor the background. At Monday’s meeting, several neighbors said the VDU was wrong for many reasons, though they gave only one concrete one beyond the vague “character of the neighborhood” stuff one always hears on this sort of issue: an immediate neighbor is old and not exactly in possession of all of her faculties, and may have some unfortunate run-ins with VDU guests. Council President Joel Sipress delicately described his interaction with her as “challenging” when he went up to do his due diligence on the property. As a result, he and Councilor Em Westerlund amended the permit to require the addition of a screen between the VDU and the elderly neighbor. Both the amendment and the permit passed 8-1, with Councilor Noah Hobbs preferring to stick with the original screenless recommendation from the Planning Commission, and Councilor Howie Hanson opposing the thing entirely in a screed against an the “erosion of neighborhoods.”

This was an issue that blew up normal battle lines and inspired good debate. As with the Uber debate two weeks prior, the normally solidly progressive Sipress expressed considerable leeriness of this supposed progress, and went into his nuanced monologue mode to worry about the effect on neighborhoods. Councilor Barb Russ seconded this, and suggested the city revisit the criteria for VDUs and find some way to limit dramatic changes. Councilor Jay Fosle, normally the voice of no to this sort of newfangled scheme, showered love on VDUs, saying they created economic activity and scoffing at the suggestion that “a bunch of nasty people will come and rent the house.” Hobbs, meanwhile, brought up the biggest sticking point with any neighborhood-based policy: how on earth do we devise a “hierarchy of neighborhoods” for awarding of VDUs without making some potentially prejudicial decisions? Sipress and Russ both readily conceded this point. Anyone who’s observed city politics knows this runs the risk of just opening up a door for whoever yells loudest to get permits denied, and that these people are inevitably going to be older, more affluent people who have the time and resources to devote to hammering city councils.

If the city does revisit this and sees a need for continued limits of VDUs, I would advocate for quotas within neighborhoods, set by some blanket standard such as population. This would remove the influence of well-connected neighbors and prevent the emergence of “vacation rental ghettoes.” That phrase sounds silly as I write it, which perhaps betrays my natural bias here: in principle I think VDUs make a lot of sense. However, I prefer not to make unfounded assumptions about how their consequences at a large scale, and while this is a different phenomenon from the fashion in which neighborhoods tip from majority homeownership to long-term rentals, a neighborhood that achieves some critical mass of homes without long-term residents does probably start to erode some. (No, one or two houses on a cul-de-sac do not represent that sort of critical mass.) I also think decisions that take good single family housing stock off the market may pose some problems in a city like Duluth, as the council’s next great planning debate showed all too clearly.

The Great Density Debate

The other hot button issue involved a resolution that, as initially worded, would have encouraged the city to consider “high density zoning”—basically, taller buildings—in its ongoing comprehensive plan process. Councilor Zack Filipovich brought it forward, and took a beating for his trouble. A big part of the issue was the process, which Filipovich conceded: this resolution appeared seemingly out of the blue immediately before the previous week’s agenda session, and Hobbs seemed to speak for many on the council when he said he’d wished they’d had a chance to debate this before it came before them all as a whole. He and Sipress, who once again seemed quite presidential in his ability to give a nuanced take on the concerns of the council writ large, offered an amendment which dramatically reworked the resolution, and instead pitched it as a call for greater density using all potential development tools, from infill to redevelopment to townhomes.

No one found this broader emphasis controversial, though Filipovich tried again to get at his original point, which seemed to come out of his conversations with city planning staff: they think the city is already doing what it needs to do on the infill and redevelopment fronts (which is mostly true), but needed this added pitch to encourage height. The rest of the council balked at this, given the political sensitivity of views; Hanson went off about how this might be in response to specific projects (which Filipovich roundly denied), while Fosle found the whole debate much ado about nothing, as it is the unified development code, not the comp plan, that ultimately settles these questions. While there is probably some merit to further outlining standards for upward growth, Duluth’s planners need to do a much better sales job instead of ramming a quick resolution through. In the end, the councilors tabled the whole mess.

Discussion strayed far and wide and to interesting points, though, and one of the more frequent topics was Hermantown. Filipovich first noted that it is the fastest growing city in the region (which is true), even as its prices are not inflating, whereas Duluth’s are doing so despite the fact the city isn’t growing. Real estate listings in Hermantown are up considerably, whereas Duluth’s market only seems to get tighter and tighter. Hobbs countered that this was a bad analogy for this resolution, as Hermantown’s growth was anything but upward: instead, it sprawls outward far more so than Duluth. Given Duluth’s relative lack of available land and aging infrastructure that is difficult to maintain, let alone extend, that sort of growth pattern is not a realistic option at any sort of scale.

The Hermantown debate also illuminated the battle lines between those who we might call the critics of the happy talk about Duluth’s direction in recent years (Fosle and Hanson) and the liberal optimists’ club. I will counter one of Fosle’s critiques, in which he wondered where this supposed job growth was coming from in a city with a stagnant population: while the Duluth metro area may not be getting dramatically larger, its job growth over the past decade is reasonably good, and relative to its population growth is actually very good when compared to most peer cities. (If someone wants numbers to back this up, I can oblige.) As I’ve been at pains to note in other posts, the metro area has been growing steadily since 1990—not quickly, but steadily—and basically all of this growth is beyond the city limits, namely in Hermantown. As Hobbs noted, these outlying areas have the obvious perk of having a lot of available land, and Fosle and Hanson tagged on a few additional concerns that may lead people to move beyond the city limits, such as perceptions of crime or newer infrastructure or a desire for space. (No one mentioned the other major driver I’d put up next to land availability, though. Hint: it involves a different Duluth elected body that I cover on this blog from time to time.)

Still, I think the Hermantown-Duluth comparison is illuminating, though perhaps not in the way councilors thought it was. Whatever the benefits of density, large new apartment or condo complexes do little to make Duluth appealing to a lot of the people who are electing to move to Hermantown and its ilk. To the extent that housing decisions drive this move—and they certainly do—any response by Duluth to try to stem that tide will require an expansion of the single-family housing stock. Given the relative lack of buildable land within city limits, that’s going to mean renovation (or teardowns) and infill or bust. That isn’t cheap, and requires further study to understand the costs, but if the city does want to retain younger families and build the tax base through housing development—a goal I firmly support—I see no other option at this point.

This doesn’t invalidate the broader emphasis on density, which is spot on, especially when it comes to commercial property. On the residential side, I think the city can handle a few more Bluestones and Endis, and would wholeheartedly support them. However, I’m skeptical that the market justifies a broader glut of market-rate apartment complexes that would build the tax base. Duluth doesn’t have a ton of upwardly mobile twenty-somethings, and those who are tend to get on the marriage-and-kids train faster than in other cities; for that matter, there is still a reasonably affordable single-family housing stock. (Yes, options are tight, but the market here still looks heavenly for this soon-to-be-house-hunting 27-year-old when compared to Minneapolis, to say nothing of anything on the coasts.) And while there have been some increases in other populations that lend themselves to density—seniors, low-income people—the sort of dense housing they need isn’t going to prove a windfall for city coffers.

I’ll quickly note that I’m not saying Duluth shouldn’t build dense housing for these populations; the city does have some real affordability concerns, and I applaud the recent push to get more lower-income units in a development in Duluth Heights, which is both near jobs and may help de-concentrate poverty. We do need to be clear-eyed about the realities of who uses dense development, though, and recognize that there’s a clear role for the Hermantowns of the world to house some of these people, too. The density gospel in contemporary urban planning gets a lot right, but it’s not a panacea, either. We need to think beyond that to get to the heart of issues.

Four More Years

Hey, I’ve managed to keep this blog thing alive for four years. I had no idea where this was going to go when I started barfing thoughts on here four years ago, but whether due to continued spurts of inspiration or sheer stubborn inertia, I’ve kept plugging along with this ever-so-natural blend of Duluth affairs, philosophizing, and high school hockey. Thanks to those of you who put up with the stuff you don’t like or even take some time to learn about it, and congratulations to the handful of you who come for it all on your excellent taste.

It’s been a grand experiment in self-discipline, staying fresh, and seeing how the things I write resonate with different people. (I don’t do this for views, but it can be fascinating to see what does get read and what doesn’t. Long story short: the hockey stuff gets at least ten times the views of everything else, especially these days since this isn’t the Duluth politics destination, such as it was, a couple years back.) I’ll continue to plug away, and may also think outside the box a little going forward. I also won’t pretend that I don’t aspire to a certain level of influence—talking to empty rooms is never fun—though certain fundamentals won’t change. This blog does aspire to a certain ethos, a blend of some fairly scattered threads of life that have gone into creating me as I am today, all channeled through a voice that aims to be creative, easily readable, and makes it clear I’m having fun with all of this. Above all, this has to stay fun, or it won’t be worth it.

This blog is also only the tip of the iceberg of everything I write. I don’t know how many hundreds of thousands of words I’ve produced over the past nine years or so. The majority has actually been fiction, though there’s also a fair amount of non-fiction and autobiography lurking in the shadows. There is still a layer to my writing that is very much for my eyes only. Funnily enough, the blog—the only real stuff I’ve written that’s made it into the public—began at the exact time I decided I wasn’t going to go down the road of trying to make a living off of writing. That was one of the wisest choices I ever made, both for my sanity and my bank account. But I’m also a perpetual wanderer who needs somewhere to come home at the end of the day, and that’s what this blog is for: to organize thoughts, frame them in a way that other people can follow, and to provide an avenue to bring a little bit of that submerged ice out into daylight.

I’ve been a lot of different places over these four years: recent college grad, returnee to Duluth, struggling writer, aspiring intern, harried grad student, unemployed and driving the American West, and now, gainfully employed in both a field and a place that I don’t see myself leaving. The world beyond this little corner of the internet has changed plenty over the past four years, too. Through it all, though, I don’t think my outlook on life has changed all that much. Things have crystallized, and with my house now largely in order, who knows, maybe some of that other stuff I’ve written will make its way out into the world someday. I’ve never felt better about the direction of my writing, both for the humbling amount of respect my hockey stuff gets and the increasing certainty in the direction of my more political stuff.

And so I look forward to four more years of adventures in investigative journalism, from Emily Larson’s coalition construction to Mike Randolph’s line construction, from travel journals and thinkpiece reactions to my quest to discover where the hell Duluth keeps its single, cute, well-read, civically engaged, genuinely open-minded, ambitious, and yet well-grounded mid-to-late 20-something women. (Who, me? Picky? Never!)

Enough about me, though. Whatever brings you here, thanks for coming along for the ride, and I hope you stick around for the next four years, too. It’s been a delight.

A Floor for the Stool to Stand On

Last Monday, I attend committee of the whole meeting, a soiree in which the Duluth city councilors all gather together to hear a presentation, often from a city staffer or some contracted party. Monday’s topic was the recent spate of heroin-related deaths, overdoses, and arrests in Duluth. (Though city officials use it, I am going to shy away from using the term “epidemic,” for reasons I will explain later.) It showed a proactive city response, one that has already heard Mayor Emily Larson’s call to fight back.  Duluth is basically doing everything right. And yet it still may not matter.

Mike Tusken, the city’s Chief of Police, gave the presentation. Duluth is lucky to have Tusken, who is on the forefront of tackling issues like opioids, and has worked with many partners to develop a comprehensive strategy. He continues a long tradition of creative, community-minded policing in this city. He repeated himself several times: Duluth cannot arrest its way out of this problem.

Not that it can’t try. The city has been remarkably proactive to date. Its arrest and seizure rates far exceed other parts of the state, even when accounting for the higher addiction rates. They’ve overheard arrested dealers saying they have no desire to ever return to Duluth, as the police are all over them here.  Paradoxically,  with a crackdown on the supply and no change in demand, the price only rises, and increases the incentives for dealers to try their hand in this market. Without a change in demand, there will always be a reason for people to try to match the supply and make money off of it.

Tusken spoke of a three-legged stool necessary to combat the opiod surge, and spent plenty of time on the second leg, treatment. The opioid task force has an embedded social worker on hand to help with outreach. Needle exchanges, methadone clinics, drug court, treatment programs: there are a wide range of options available to people at various stages of addiction recovery, though in some cases, long wait times leads to people slipping through the cracks. When these programs are effective, expanding them only makes sense, and the police appear to be doing a good job of tracking data.

Finally, there is an education component, and once again, Duluth is staying as close to the cutting edge as it can in making sure the education leg of the stool relies on serious research and study. The city dropped its old DARE program for fifth graders because studies found it ineffective; now, with a new curriculum that has shown some initial promise, DPD is ramping it up again, recognizing that middle school health class is often too late to make this connection.

In short, combatting opioids requires a comprehensive strategy, and Duluth has built a comprehensive strategy. And yet I still find myself taking a skeptical bent. The opioid crisis is much more than a public health issue. Hence my misgivings over the word “epidemic,” which makes it sound like an outbreak of some virus. Treating it as such misses out on yet another element at play, and may mistake the symptoms for the disease.

Chief Tusken was at pains to emphasize how opioids affect everyone. Yes, at times these addictions can hit people who’ve been on them for, say, a sports injury. And yes, as with any drug, there are no doubt plenty of people from wealthier backgrounds who end up on them, whether due to peer pressure or ennui or an effort to escape dysfunction in some less material sphere of life. But let’s not bury the lede here: this particular crisis grew out of a particular class of people. Those who are toward the bottom of the economic ladder, even if they do not necessarily use drugs more than those toward the top, are much more likely to suffer its negative effects. The increase in middle-aged white mortality in the United States—a stunning reversal in recent years, one that runs counter to trends in other first-world countries and even other racial and ethnic groups in this one—is among the non-college educated.

This implies that the problem is socioeconomic, which in turn implies a need for socioeconomic solutions. Better education, more reliable careers for those who don’t have an education: we’ve heard all of these before, and it adds up to the fourth leg of a stool. The stories from later that evening make it clear how declining economic station can lead to feedback loops and greater struggles. This sort of crisis is a call to find solutions, and this is, I suppose, why I work in economic development. We have a lot to learn about how to adapt to an economy that looks drastically different from the one that made Duluth a powerhouse of the industrial era. Even with this city’s relative success when compared to many of its Rust Belt brethren, there are a lot of people who don’t have obvious long-term roles to play in the economy. Regardless, stable incomes and meaningful work are part of the solution.

But for all these pieces coming together, for all the scholarly rigor in making sure they work, this approach can’t quite go all the way. Take it from the pioneers of the first study to document the dying white non-college-grad trend have just come out and said it: the crisis goes much deeper than opioids.  Call it psychological, moral, spiritual: without an underlying belief system that informs a conception of what a complete human life looks like, all the policy tools in the book can’t turn the tide. Perhaps we can learn a thing or two from the Mormons; whatever one may think of their faith, they’re keeping the American Dream alive better than anyone else out there. Perhaps we just need to do a much better job of thinking holistically, especially when it comes to an honest accounting of the more troubled portions of individuals’ minds that we can’t just legislate away. People who have fought addictions and won know this better than anyone. Without a solid floor to stand on, it doesn’t matter how many legs there are on a stool.

Progress Uber Alles: Duluth City Council Notes, 3/27/17

Oh no, the black hole is sucking me back in: I’m writing about Duluth City Council meetings again. Perhaps I’m out of practice after a few years away, but Monday’s edition certainly ranked among the most uncomfortable public meetings I’ve ever witnessed. I attended mostly for the pre-meeting Committee of the Whole about opioid abuse issues in the Duluth area, a topic about which I know little and am somewhat curious, especially after just reading a book on how they can consume a post-industrial town. I did, however, stick around for the more memorable part of the night: a debate over “Transportation Network Companies,” or TNCs, which is legalese for Uber and Lyft.

My caveats before I start: I rarely take taxis, in Duluth or anywhere else. My handful of experiences with cabs in Duluth have been fine, though I’ve also had a couple of nights where they were unreachable, and had another ride in a memorably dented cab. I have used Uber and Lyft with some regularity in larger cities and enjoyed those experiences, mostly because of the convenience and ease of the platform they operate on. Being able to request a ride with a few touches of a screen, see how far away that ride is, know the fare beforehand, and easily divide fares among riders makes life easier, especially for more spontaneous trips. The nicer vehicles don’t hurt, either. I’m aware that Uber has some ethical issues and implications for existing cab companies, but hadn’t given them much thought until Monday night. One can only fight our Silicon Valley overlords on so many fronts.

While the council chamber was filled with cab drivers and their various allies, only four came forward to speak. All expressed worry about the damage TNCs could cause to their business; many expected to be done. It was a hardscrabble crowd. Unlike many large cities, where immigrants have come to dominate the cab industry, this group’s membership was almost entirely from that category we’ve come to call “white working class” this past election cycle. They came out in numbers, they were angry, and they were largely resigned to yet another defeat.

Councilor comments began with Councilor Noah Hobbs, the author of the resolution, explaining his many efforts to regulate TNCs in a fair way that imposed standards without being onerous. He pointed to stringent insurance requirements and a clear permitting process, even if certain fees were somewhat lower that with cabs. Councilors Barb Russ, Zack Filipovich, and Howie Hanson lined up to support the resolution, all thanking Hobbs’ work and acknowledging the complexity of the issue. They all hinted at a certain inevitability when it came to TNCs; while none of them expressed much of an interest in using them, they said they knew which way the world was going, and had little choice.

With four ‘yes’ votes in the books, Council President Joel Sipress took the microphone, and began a lengthy discourse on his concerns about TNCs. He worried about their effects on existing cab companies, lamented the practice of employing drivers as contract employees (thereby skirting labor laws), and expressed disappointment in seeing money from local transportation swallowed up by a large outside company instead staying in the community. He then asked CAO Montgomery to elaborate on the city’s regulation mechanisms, who allowed the entire council chamber an opportunity to nap through this lengthy recitation. Satisfied, Sipress then announced that, for all his reservations, he would support the resolution, as he knew it was going to pass anyway and wanted to acknowledge the hard work done by Hobbs and city staff to find something workable. With a fifth ‘yes’ vote in hand, the cabbies all marched toward the exit, some adding choice words on their way; one announced that his Superior-based cabs wouldn’t cross the bridge again. The measure ultimately passed by a 7-1 margin, with Councilor Jay Fosle as the lone ‘no’ vote. (Councilor Elissa Hansen was absent.)

In the councilor comments following the meeting, Fosle politely rebuked Sipress’s intimation that his no vote wouldn’t have mattered: “Voting no matters to the people who it affects.” As a frequent lone ‘no’ vote, Fosle would certainly know. In opposition to the ordinance, he mounted a defense of threatened individuals and businesses in the here and now rather than relying on vague hopes it would all work out, and promises to revisit the issue if it didn’t. Fosle is a conservative in the truest sense of the word: he is here to conserve what exists, to protect people from changes in regulation no matter their station. He consistently speaks for people who do not have it easy and who are not at ease in these stately halls, even if they are not a majority, and if their plight goes far beyond the control of this little city council.

Howie Hanson, sounding as eloquent as I have ever heard him, pushed back. “I’m not sure our role is to protect businesses; it’s to level the playing field,” he said, hoping the regulations would do that. He pointed out how much the internet has changed things in countless fields: “you have to change or die.” As someone in the publishing industry, he would have some knowledge of this. “It’s scary. It’s hard to know what’s our role,” he concluded, sounding a very fair philosophical question.

The counterpoint comes from Celia Scheer, one of the cab drivers who spoke. It was difficult for her to come to this meeting, she said: it was the birthday of her late son, who had died of a heroin overdose in the past year. That might seem coincidental with the committee meeting on opioids at the start of the night, but the parallels here are all too real. She blamed government regulation for this and a previous job loss, though I think she misses the degree to which politicians are responding to market forces (on this issue, at the very least). Still, it is difficult not to see Ms. Scheer and her fellow drivers as victims of a changing world beyond their control, the poster children for the white working class that has been battered time and again by economic and social disruptions of recent decades.

The cab drivers are among the people with no safe home in a knowledge and technology-driven economy, and for whom even our most creative theories on community and economic development do little. If we’ve learned anything from the past few decades in politics and urban development, it is that decline and loss have particularly harsh effects. They linger, affect different generations, and can trap large swaths of the country in different worlds from its more successful enclaves. Nor is the political party typically associated with support for the downtrodden much of a voice here: all of the DFL-endorsed councilors supported this resolution, while the lone holdout is its most frequent critic. A more rigid partisan than I might use this as an opportunity to blast the direction of the Democratic Party, but I’m not sure that would be right, either. The emotional, raw side of politics has had a good run over the past year and a half, and while I do think we need that rawness to get beyond platitudes and fully understand people’s humanity, we also need to be able to step back and see the big picture.

As Councilor Hanson suggested, it’s hard to justify keeping a struggling industry alive for the sake of propping up the status quo. One speaker mentioned how he and other cabbies could have days where they earned little to no money. If that’s reality, frankly, it’s a sign that the market has too many drivers and not enough riders, and could also benefit from a near-universal real-time app that better matches supply to demand. Regulations might just be propping up a bad business model that distorts the market and passes off costs on consumers, who struggle to organize in response. Sure, the city could continue to prop up the cabs if it wanted to, much as the national government does with, say, the steel industry, another local economic driver that has had its share of misery in recent years. But this is a practice that can quickly grow out of hand and overly political, and with real service improvements from TNCs, comparatively few jobs at stake, and none of the geopolitical or national security implications of something like the steel industry, it’s hard to make a coherent case for the cabbies. If these jobs are on their way out the door, there’s no reason for the council to give false hope, when in reality we may just need to bite the bullet and admit that certain ways of life might just not be sustainable anymore. The city council just finds itself in the unenviable position of needing to deliver that message from on high.

Fortunately, we do have some evidence on the effects of TNCs beyond Duluth. Stories from some major cities point to clear drops in cab drivers, while the most recent and rigorous academic paper I can find on the topic points to no loss in employment, though there is some decline in income among traditional cab driver income only partially offset by the gains in the non-traditional sector. Many of the cabs will survive, though a number of the drivers will likely migrate over to TNCs, and overall options for transportation in Duluth will get better.

This is, however, little consolation to the people who stayed to plot their next moves alongside a row of cabs parked on Government Plaza, their alienation evident even from a distance as I trudged past to my car after the meeting. Even as I look forward to my first Uber ride in Duluth, this night will linger.

Exit JTIII

On Thursday, the axe came down on John Thompson III, the head coach of the Georgetown men’s basketball team for the past 13 seasons. He took the Hoyas to a Final Four in 2007, won three Big East regular season titles, and brought a program a heap of thrillers against top tier competition. It was time for him to go, however, and I was mildly surprised that the university had the guts to lay Thompson’s tenure to rest.

I missed the good years. JTIII’s downfall began with a long string of losses to double-digit seeds that coincided with my first interest in Hoya hoops. (In 2008, as a high school senior with hopes of heading to the Hilltop, I watched them lose in the NCAA Tournament to unheralded Davidson and this Stephen Curry kid who came out of nowhere to have a huge game. I wonder what ever happened to him?) The Davidson loss set off a string of can-you-top-this losses to double-digit Tournament seeds: Ohio (no, not Ohio State, Ohio), Virginia Commonwealth (hello there, Shaka Smart), North Carolina State (at least they’re a power conference program…?), and Florida Gulf Coast (the last and worst). But lately, those years when they gave talented young coaches the breaks they needed to land more prestigious jobs are a happy memory. With just one Tournament appearance in the last four seasons, with transfers out and decommitments and with the same obnoxious shortcomings, it was certainly time to bid JTIII farewell.

JTIII’s dismissal has to be among the most pained firings in sports history, as evidenced by Georgetown President Jack DeGioia’s glowing retrospective in the announcement. (DeGioia, a Georgetown man through and through, named his own kid J.T.) And for good reason: despite the underperformance on the court, JTIII has done nothing but represent the program with dignity and class, and the 2007 Final Four run will forever be a proud moment, and one that restored pride to a program that had been on a downhill slide. JTIII fit the Georgetown ethos well: a blueblooded coach carrying forward a legacy, and doing it with cool composure, high standards off the court, and a somewhat antiquated but largely successful (for a while, anyway) Princeton offense built on pretty cuts.

But, enough beating around the six-foot-ten elephant in the room: the proud old Princeton Tiger’s firing was momentous because of what his name means to this program. His father, John Thompson Jr., built Georgetown up from nothing. He did it in brash and memorable ways, and in ways that went far beyond the court. He made Georgetown Big Man U, with names like Ewing, Mourning, and Mutombo all rolling through, plus a little Allen Iverson, too. He was an early pioneer among black coaches, withstanding abuse to blaze trails. John Thompson was such a larger-than-life figure that he could confront and intimidate the most dangerous of D.C.’s druglords at the height of the city’s crack epidemic. With five years from longtime assistant Craig Esherick wedged between the two Thompsons and a continued presence around everything Georgetown basketball eighteen years after his retirement, his son’s dismissal is a sudden shock to the system.

The Hoyas now head out into the great unknown. The decision to name former NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue (an alumnus and Board of Directors member) co-chair of the search committee would seem to suggest the Hoyas are ready to play big league. It’s tough to guess what sort of interest the program will draw, given that it’s basically been in one family for 45 years. The Hoyas are a big name in basketball, with an NBA home arena and a sparkling new practice facility, but the cupboard is also pretty bare at the moment, and Georgetown has some quirks that could drive people away, including its high academic standards, the lack of a big state school’s huge following, and the very long shadow of John Thompson Jr. As with any other major program with an opening in recent years, Shaka Smart’s name is getting tossed around. More realistic, really, is Danny Hurley, who has done a very nice job with Rhode Island and comes from a famous basketball family that will give him some added credibility. Tommy Amaker at Harvard fits the academic pedigree this program would like, but his track record is fairly meh. Tom Crean, freshly dismissed from Indiana, has won at a high level; Notre Dame’s Mike Brey has local ties and a relatively small paycheck from the Golden Domers. Even Minnesota’s Richard Pitino is getting some serious mentions. (Hey, he already knows how to lose to a double-digit seed in the first round.) Whatever course Georgetown takes, it will be a clean break from a long tradition.

Unless, of course, they go with an alumnus who is incredibly loyal to the Thompsons, and has been biding his time as an NBA assistant for the past 14 years. A man by the name of Patrick Ewing. There are reasons to question Ewing as Georgetown coach; the NBA game is different from college, and he will certainly need to find himself some assistants who can give him a quick education in the recruiting game. At 54, he’s at a point where the kids who would play for him have no memory of him as a dominant player. It’s no secret he’s been angling for an NBA job, too; does he really want to go all in on a college program?

But I’m a sucker for tradition and continuity, so if everyone wants it to happen, I’m on the bandwagon. He’s a loyal man who will honor the brand. The program is at the point where it could use the buzz of celebrity, instead of the moderately successful mid-major coach this program is likely to command at this point in time. His return would, presumably, come with the blessing of John Thompson Jr., and spare the program any fallout there. Sure, there are risks, but there is also incredible potential. Bring the big man home.