The Mythology of Destruction

Northeastern Minnesota's history is based on exploitation; the small cities are and contain monuments to both the exploited land and people. The now empty downtown's, populated by bars and empty storefronts, are the best symbols. The miserable poor, the addicted and the hapless drink themselves away in the past's shadow.  Some extol the benefits, of course; the exploiters themselves, the cynical self serving and the co-opted. The first group are the same as now, the distant wealthy, treating the land and water as nothing more than objects of wealth.

Whether the lumbermen, the now honored Merritt family, given silhouette memorials in the local school, or the seated ruler Jay Cooke in Duluth, those who destroyed the landscape are honored.  The history lessons ignore the original theft, the giveaway called "severed mineral rights", the rapacious logging and the earth scorching fires that resulted.

The self serving now range from local politicians or favored good old boys. The IRRRB, supposedly a government agency, but now one of gifted loans to former hockey players, employment to local favorites, subsidized golf courses, and giveaways to favorites, doles out the public's pittance share of the removed wealth, borrowing from the future for a lake home, a large truck, a gun and fatty steak. Then there are the managers, the servants of the corporate office, the contractors, and the lobbyists. But we expect the mouthed platitudes from them, as they owe all to the system. They would gladly sell the entire area as long their side of the lake keeps its view.

The most painful, however, are the co-opted. Unlike the workers of a century ago, who, due to the near slave like conditions and pay, saw the system clearly, the workers now preach the corporate line in exchange for vehicles, large screen televisions and drugs. But, unlike the cynically self serving, they are Orwell's latter: "Circus dogs (who) jump when the trainer cracks his whip, but the really well-trained dog is the one that turns his somersault when there is no whip." The truth of the gifts of mining are as water is to the fish...one cannot describe the very thing that makes the world which one lives in. To say the truth, that we are all stealing, is to admit the end of the enterprise. We must pretend there is no world with air less we stop swimming.

A place destroyed and unliveable.