Flyover America

Fly over us all you want, America, we're still going to do this now and then.

If you add up all the time that there has been a Vice President in America supplied by Minnesota, you’ll find that Minnesota has supplied the Veep for more years than any other state. Almost. If we include Tim Walz after a few years in office if Harris-Walz win. In living memory.

Democrats, which are known in Minnesota as DFLers, are part of mainstream Minnesota culture. There are also Republicans here but they are not us. They are assholes and they wear funny clothing, as if to stand out. (Shiny suits, narrow ties, that sort of thing.) DFLers think and act like your typical Minnesotan. I’ve heard this affect and attitude described as “sensible midwest.” That is partly true, but really, it is Minnesota born, with some spillover into adjoining counties.

Tim Walz memes, like the picture of him with phrases like “Tim is going inside to get a pop, he’ll get one for you too,” “Tim just cleared the snow off your car,” “Tim heard a noise under your hood, he’s adjusting your timing belt,” and so on are actually Minnesota memes. Were all like that. We’re all going to clear the snow off your car.

Tim is a great communicator. He has a good head on his shoulders, and he knows bull hockey when he sees it. He’ll call you on it too. You get the sense that if he was a preacher, he wouldn’t have to spend a lot of time on his sermons; he would just talk sense. Tim makes sense like any of his neighbors would. He knows how to be pro-labor and pro business at the same time, because without a business to hire a worker, there is no labor, and if labor is not treated with respect, the business will fail. But Tim isn’t special in Minnesota. We all make sense, we all know how to say our piece. We all know that we pay taxes for a reason, and we appreciate what we get in return: good schools, safe roads, bridges that only fall down under GOP administrations.

Now, I’m not saying that you can pick any random (non GOP) Minnesotan and you’ll get a clone of Tim Walz. Tim does certain things better than the rest of us, and that is why he is the governor. But I’ll also add that we have a lot of other Tims. We have a deep bench in Minnesota. The year Tim was elected governor, my local Indivisible group invited every single one of the dozen candidates to speak to us, one at a time, and they all obliged. (Well, all the DFLers obliged, the Republicans were busy shopping for shiny suits and narrow ties, and couldn’t give us the time of day.) By the end of that long stretch of conversations, it would have been fair to say that none of them would have totally sucked as governor, and all of them had qualities of leadership. (Of course, every one was already an elected member of the US Congress, a member of the Minnesota legislature, or mayor of a major city. Nice of them to give us their time! ) No, Tim is part of the Minneota elite, along with all the other teachers, nurses, coaches, and public servants.

When I hear national level political commentators say, “Yeah, I never heard of Tim Walz before, nobody else did either? But he is amazing, the perfect pick to run with Harris.” I think, “Uffda, man, you should have been paying attention, of course the party of Humphrey, Wellstone, and Mondale is going to have what you are looking for.”

Now, don’t get me wrong. Minnesota isn’t perfect. We’re far from perfect. We are the state that produced one of the only Nazi operatives in the US Senate. We are the state that, together with our cheesy neighbors in Wisconsin, produced the America First movement, and anti semitic leader Charles Lindbergh. Hell, we still use Lindberg’s name for our airport, shame on us. Farther back in history, we hosted the largest mass execution, all of Native Americans, in our nation’s history. And those are not good things to say the least. Bur by having a full political range and a humbling history, we are a crucible, and from a crucible comes stuff that’s been melted and annealed and, in the end, fired up. And right now you’all outside of Minnesota sure are fired up.

We are also seen as not culturally diverse, as one of those very white midwestern states one imagines when one flies over us, travelling between highly diverse New York or Washington and highly diverse LA or San Francisco. Fine. That’s true mostly, but we are also one of the handful of states that has a politically relevant and powerful Native population, and the Twin Cities has become a favorite destination for immigrant groups from Asia, eastern Europe, and Africa. We have one of the midwest’s oldest Russian Jewish populations, piles of Ukrainians and Poles, and other Orthodox groups. Our white majority has long been German or British, just like the rest of the country, but where else are you going to find such well entrenched and empowered Nordic people? This might be why our white population, excepting the GOP, tends to be more progressive than we find in some other states.

When I first moved to Minnesota, my back yard had a Hmong farm in it. I could have thrown them off the land, but tradition was, in that neighborhood, that Hmong people were allowed access to our properties for their farming. A few years later, I found myself teaching at a college where my boss, a Dean, was the daughter of one of those Hmong families. When I was working on the West Bank, a neighborhood in Minneapolis, I remember a rapid influx of Somali people, among whom were women who for the first time in their cultural history were allowed to drive, and they all did that — learn to drive — at once. Imagine an entire neighborhood where fifty percent of the adults got their learners permit in the same month. A few years later, that city was represented in the United States Congress by a Somali woman.

When Tim elevates to Vice President, our Lieutenant Governor will become Governor. We will then celebrate having our first Native American woman leader in the State House.

So yeah, not only do we have immigrants, like everybody else, but we (excepting the GOPers) welcome them, recognize their value, and put them in charge, sometimes sooner, sometimes later. We figure they will add novel insight and skill, mix it all into the crucible, get us fired up.

In ten years, after Tim has moved on and there is a new coastal administration, you’ll all start to forget about us. Another ten years later, there will be a crisis or a movement in the wrong (GOP) direction, and someone named Hawj Dahir Agnarssen, grandchild of a Hmong professor and a Somali business owner on the mother’s side, and a Norwegian school teacher and a Native American Governor on the father’s side, will be invited onto the national political scene and help defeat some asshole GOPer from Florida, leading us into the next decade. And in the middle of that period of peace and common sense, you’ll be flying over flyoverland, look down on the vast loon-infested forests of Minnesota, and think, “hey, did they ever hand out peanuts, I’m hungry,” then go back to your nap better off, and if you’re lucky, you might even be … just fine.

You are welcome, America.