Friday, 17 May 2002

ST. PAUL, Minn.

I have a sort of hangover today, thanks to having broken down and accepted an invitation from a cousin to attend an annual dinner thrown by St. Paul’s downtown power elites. It’s called the Millard Fillmore Dinner, after the hapless U.S. president who stepped off a Mississippi sternwheeler in 1854 as part of a flotilla of seven paddleboats in what was called the Great Excursion. St. Paul was then the navigable northern terminus of the river, and a very young town The cruise started in Iowa. Fillmore lost his bid for re-election as the Know-Nothing Party candidate.

I mention all this history because an ambitious recreation of that event is planned for 2004 as part of an overwhelmingly self-congratulatory series of activities embroiling 40 cities in four states along the river from Iowa, Illinois, Wisconsin, and, of course, this fair Minnesota of ours. A lot of money. A lot of riverfront development.

Oh, how I wish I could be as celebratory as these self-styled renaissance men and women who believe they are reinventing the river as a people-friendly place after 100 years as a commercial highway for grain, garbage, and human waste.

But I can’t. I went to the first Millard Fillmore soiree eight years ago, when no more than 125 people showed up to dine courtesy of the St. Paul Foundation while listening to ambitious plans by a our Democrat-cum-Republican mayor, Norm Coleman, to revitalize the riverfront. Much of that plan has been implemented. And much of it fails to respect the natural order of rivers — no lessons learned after disastrous floods from humans unsuccessfully trying to tame the spring swelling that comes with the melting winter snows.

It’s pretty much impossible for those who toil in the environmental trenches to empathize with this glitzy gluttony while literally four blocks away, an old coal-fired power plant sits adjacent to that same river spewing mercury and hydrocarbons all over the city. A few blocks further sits our nemesis — the ethanol plant — choking city residents on it plume and awakening them in the middle of the night with its racket.

And past and current mayors, both feted last night for “saving our riverway,” are in large part responsible for the pollution because of their support for the corporations that create it and their opposition to those of us trying to stop it.

Last night, 1,600-plus people filled a St. Paul civic center ballroom to hear more of the same spin we heard the first time around — only now the emcee was dressed in a $700 suit and a wireless mike strolling in a political convention-sized space with a quartet of cabaret singers behind him belting out homemade lyrics about this ambitious river project. (They sang the names of all 40 cities participating in this Grand Excursion 2004 and about the wonderful Twin Cities institutions, organizations, and companies that will be involved as well.)

Hobnobbing for the hour or so before sitting down to breaded chicken breasts (we were paying for both the time and the food, by the way), I couldn’t help but notice the agglomeration of strange bedfellows in the place. It was obviously the place to be last night for most of St. Paul’s movers and shakers. I admit to being a scion of some very old and founding St. Paul families, and I’ve been active enough in my years here that I knew at least 50 percent of this crowd. I certainly have made a bunch of enemies along the political way — and here they were en masse, many greeting me (and one another) with smiles and handshakes that belie the battles “out there” for justice and equity.

I suppose they’d all say, “But what we have between us is just politics,” or, “But that’s business, not personal.” But, y’know, I’ve never been able to buy that concept. I take all of this polluting and looting of the public treasury very personally. Why don’t they? How can people like this ignore the real-life impact of their work? How can they bifurcate their minds and their lives — on the one hand producing and defending sickness or death, on the other living as husband, wife, father, mother, or other family member who cares about the health and safety of their own? This compartmentalization of our lives may help us survive the daily wars, but how can we cope with a conscience that would otherwise recoil in horror over man’s inhumanity to man?

Where is conscience?

Last night, at least it appeared to be missing in action, and while I smiled and glad-handed my way around the lobby and exhibit halls, schmoozing with the best of them, I came away full of fair food but hungrier than ever for a more rational merging of all aspects of our lives to create a saner and safer world in which we all can thrive.

What a lousy sort of hangover to wake up with.