Minnesota has recently become an intellectually poorer place with the departure of Richard Cretan for Portland, Oregon. I’ve known Richard since the early 1990’s, when we were introduced by a mutual friend, Prof. Peter Firchow of the University of Minnesota English Department, where Richard and I were both undergraduate majors in the 1980’s. (Our paths did not cross back then at that big place.)

Richard’s wife was recently offered a new job in Portland, and the combination of a good opportunity and the promise of going to one of the most sane and progressive cities in the country overcame their ties to the Twin Cities. So they have said goodbye to many dear friends and many years of life here in Minnesota.

I’ve learned much from Richard over the years, most recently my tendency to put too much trust in the powers-that-be: the mainstream media, the government, the corporate world, the political parties, etc. That trust, for example, led me to mistakenly support the Iraq War at its outset, not heeding Richard’s warnings. More recently Richard has been warning about the weaknesses in our economic system, some of which have been evident in the financial problems related to falling real estate prices and rising foreclosure rates.

Richard recently wrote a masterful post, “St. Paul to Portland, the long way,” that touches on these subjects and more. It’s his farewell to the state. Richard, we will miss you, but we look forward to seeing you in “Cascadia” and back here in the Upper Midwest.

Here’s a quote from Richard’s farewell post:

Driving west we recalled that the interstate highway system was a testament not to American get-up-and-go-ness, which learned to use it, but to the rigid grip of Cold War paranoia: Eisenhower’s dream of moving armies to stop a Soviet invasion (his plan got a boost from not-disinterested Detroit). It was hard to imagine fears about invasion in the vast open expanses dotted by farms and factories, in the humble beaten-down towns we occasionally detoured to see, or in the chiseled Idaho rock faces where there are monuments to miners. Who could dwell out here and not already feel conquered by immensity? But we Americans depend on myths spun for us by our masters, drummed into us by their institutions, and neither they nor we are much wiser a half century on. Here we are in 2007, once more captive to the baleful war drive of our ruling class, though nothing as useful as the highway system will come out of it this time.

I-94 as we struck out for North Dakota seemed lightly traveled, surely due to the wallop of gas prices and the fact the state more often sees exodus, not influx, these days. Fewer cars made driving much easier and also strangely isolating after the last few years in congested, car-sick Minnesota. It was a sour sight, a last glimpse of the outlying Twin Cities area that sealed, for me, anyway, the sense we were leaving a place that had changed in the last 20 years for the worse. An hour or so due north, the highway passed over another of the exurban rashes left by white flight and the moronism of unregulated sprawl.

This was a vast strip mall-and-box shopping district, maybe a quarter square mile in size, certainly among the largest I’ve seen. There it sat, gouged out of the middle of nowhere, with its McMansion subdivisions just over the ridge. Composed like all the rest in mostly windowless Big Boxes set on a lick of asphalt, all its black acreage was laid out crazily as if in mute homage to its formal disregard for space (sprawl is always in a hurry and land always in its way). Yet as I could see from this rare perspective, the topography also had a cruel, maze-like logic. Once inside it, you were not to leave easily. You would be passed through its integuments like bubbles in a twisting drip-feed. Scattered throughout were the fast food troughs, these mutant grease nipples. Burger nipple here and chicken nipple there. I wondered what the possibilities were like in these die-cut warrens for joy and community, let alone earning a living or simply surviving your meal.

Minnesota’s fate is being decided by these places. Packed with latter day Babbits nursing as much on McDonalds and imported chemical-laced food as on the cosmic gruel of their mega-steepled Elmer Gantrys, these are the population centers that have welcomed and powered the state’s ghastly descent into right wing culture.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 27th, 2007 at 10:59 am and is filed under Autobiography, Minnesota, Politics, Travel.