They Only Wish They Were Pretti Good

 

A Substack page I read regularly, The Contrarian, wrote “Sadly, a larger swath of Americans — white men and gun-owners, for example — might only have been stirred when the victim turned out to be someone who closely resembled themselves and people they know.”  Sadly, I object to this analysis because I live in rural Minnesota and, other than gun ownership, there is nothing about Alex Pretti that resembles many of the white people here in the outback.  Mr. Pretti was educated, adventurous, liberal, generous, and courageous.  I know a few people here who fit that description, but I was surprised and disappointed, when I moved from the Twin Cities to Red Wing, to discover that “Minnesota Nice” mostly applies to the urban areas. 

I have lived in many of Trump’s favorite “shithole” states and counties from Kansas to Texas to Nebraska to southern California to Indiana to Colorado to Minnesota and worked with and around racist, ignorant assholes from Florida to Alaska.  Up to taking a cabinet-making class in Winona, MN in 2015, I thought the rural southern goobers I knew in Dallas, Texas in the late 60s were the worst people—the most racist, ignorant, most violent and dangerous, and flat-out-evil—I’d ever imagined meeting.  Think the murderous Deliverance butt-fuckers for reference and you’ll almost have a feel for how vicious and awful our first Dallas neighbors were.  The ignorant, intolerant, fascist rural boomers filling the Winona State Cabinetry Lab night class were so benignly awful that I felt like I’d accidentally wandered into a KKK country club.  As wonderful as the huge Minneapolis anti-ICE crowds have been, it’s important, even critical, to remember that just a few miles outside of that fantastic city the countryside is sparsely filled with goobers who are just as awful as any ICE goon, Alabama Klan member, Michigan Proud Boy, or January 6^th seditionists. 

I don’t believe, for a second, that the murders of Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti are waking these awful people up with some deeply buried and suppressed sense of compassion, community, decency, or empathy.  I imagine that the majority of rural fascists are church-going and that the churches they attend are led by pastors and priests who are just as awful as the people they “minister” to: selling hate, prejudice, and racism like it’s some kind of “get out of hell free” pass for fun and profit.  Minnesota’s claim to decency comes almost exclusively from the progressives in the major cities (Minneapolis, St. Paul and the suburbs of the Twin Cities, Rochester, Duluth, and the state’s college towns) and that is about two and one-half million of the state’s four-million, eight-hundred-thousand people.  A not-insubstantial percentage of the Cities’ suburbs are uncomfortably transplanted rural goobers who are exactly the same miserable souls as their rural misfit and unfit relatives. 

I would love to believe that the majority of rural Minnesotans were stirred to action or even empathy because the two murdered Minnesotans “closely resembled themselves and people they know,” but I’m not that gullible.