I've spent the last few days in Minneapolis where it is, according to the natives, not nearly as cold as all my bitching might lead one to believe.
Still, it was cold. And liberal. There are very real differences between progressive Minnesota and reactionary Kentucky, and for all of my fondness for my adopted home I'm amazed that anyone would choose crabbed southern conservatism over friendly, upper-Midwestern liberality.
We spent the weekend riding public transportation and walking in beautiful parks and making sure our various beverage containers got into the right recycling bin. Our host also spent a significant amount of time chipping ice off his sidewalks lest he be cited by the city for endangering the lives of passers by, an aspect of the liberal nanny state that he embraced less than enthusiastically but that we appreciated while walking on those same sidewalks to hop the light rail downtown.
In Minnesota, people expect government to work, and it largely does. Public plazas are clean and lovely, if occasionally a tad fascist in their grandeur, and everywhere one looks there are signs of well-thought-through public economic development projects that almost no one seems to think should have been left for the private sector to pursue.
In Kentucky, we decided a long time ago that government projects meant people we didn't like getting our money, and as a result we expect almost nothing of government. And it delivers in full. In Louisville we have lovely parks, but they're isolated rather than entwined with our communities, the result of a vision of activist government exhausted a century ago. (A new ring of parks on the outskirts of the city, which is going to be wonderful, is currently being assembled through public and private partnership.) Our public transport is by buses, which sit in traffic right alongside cars rather than cruising along their own right-of-way the way trains do, and all discussion of rail transport is in the context of the prevailing belief that it has to be self-supporting the day it opens. Which means, of course, that it will never be built, because it's not government's job to pay for trains when there are so many freeways yet to be built.
Anyone who doesn't think that literacy rates make a meaningful
difference in the culture of a state should compare the signage on
Minneapolis's light rail system to that on Kentucky's buses.
Minnesota's 3rd-highest-in-the-country literacy makes possible
instructions that can be quickly read and understood; Kentucky's
3rd-lowest literacy rate means everything has to be explained in
unintimidating-but-less-than-precise cartoons. That illiteracy is no accident; Kentuckians, by and large, distrust book learnin' -- a distrust exploited by Republican politicians who sneer at anyone who went to college for any other reason than access to season basketball tickets. Kentucky would rather argue about which prayer the kids should say rather than, say, trying to figure out why no one seems able to read above the fifth grade level.
I feel at home in Minnesota, though I have never lived there, for a lot of reasons. I grew up northwest of Chicago, where the countryside is wooded and lake-strewn, just like Minnesota. And in Minneapolis there are lots of Lutherans. There, Lutheran churches look like Catholic cathedrals. They're huge, carved out of stone, and are packed with people. In Kentucky, Lutheran churches are nice little buildings with half-full parking lots. We're tolerated here, I think, because the burgeoning Baptist mega-churches need to sell their old, no-longer-adequate buildings to someone, and who would want a modest frame chapel on a quarter-acre lot except for members of a minor sect like Lutheranism?
There's also a certain Garrison Keillor familiarity to Minnesota. Everyone you meet seems like a character actor out of "Prairie Home Companion." I found myself, Christmas night, at a party of in-laws I've met a couple of times, listening to people say the most remarkable things in tones of voice so laconic they might have been talking about removing grape jelly stains from the kitchen sink. As a grand niece of someone's worked to keep an elderly aunt from bursting loudly and randomly into song, and a great aunt several times removed fiddled with her oxygen tank in hopes that it wouldn't ignite the Christmas candles, I listened to a cousin-in-law describe the trials of getting the right kind of replacement tires for the tiny cart that enables her half-paralyzed dachshund to continue to chase squirrels.
Maybe not Keillor so much as Thurber, perhaps, but familiar and with enough "yahs" and "dontcha knows" to make me wonder if perhaps I hadn't wandered onto the set of Fargo.
So anyway: I'm back. My cheeks are ruddy from the wind chill and I was able to pick up a few bottles of rare wine that are only available in Kentucky if you're willing to risk the same legal penalties one would face if one were caught in possession of heroin. It was a very nice trip, and I find myself wondering why I live here and not there. There are two answers, of course: inertia and thermodynamics. For now, that's sufficient.
