For a month now the Red Plan propagandists have been on the offensive while the Pro Vote forces have been preoccupied raising money for a $100,000 bond and polishing up their Plan B alternative. The priciest example is the dim witted video from Greenfield Communications.
There are two such examples in the Trib today. I’ll start with the lamest of the two the ironical letter to the editor by Nick Lansing, a very personable fellow I met at the Chamber of Commerce’s announcement that if you spend people’s stolen money you get a multiplier effect.
Nick’s first paragraph sets up the irony:
The July 2 article about the new airport terminal omits a horrible fact: We didn’t vote on it (“Design for new airport terminal features unconventional curves”). I’m so inspired by Let Duluth Vote’s crusade against schools that I encourage the organization to attack the airport, too. Consider the similarities.
OK, Already, Nick. We get it. If everything that might improve Duluth was put to a vote the old Neanderthals who might object to progress could send us backwards.
Actually, Nick, the issue of the airport is an interesting one. What makes the most sense for our future? Should we spend money on trains or planes or a six-lane highway to Duluth? Each mode of transportation has its lobby. Congressman Oberstar would spend Federal money on all three, its all stimulus of course. Unbelievably Jim would tax humvees and prius’s the same for the mileage they travel instead of the energy they burn. Some folks think they can eat all the candy behind the glass case. That includes you Red Plan enthusiasts.
You and Dr. Dixon are going to take a century’s worth of school buildings and fix them all up over night – whether they need it or not. If smart boards are so important you can put them in fifty year old schools. I’ve got a computer in a 90 year old house. That would cost Duluth $8 million not $300 million. You argue that this is being done for reasons of economy. You’re damn right it is Nick – Johnson Controls’s economy.
Its also being built for vanity’s sake – the same vanity that built a glut of mortgage foreclosed McMansions. Well Nick, Here’s a little irony back at you from my flesh and blood high school English teacher Mrs. Powers:
OZYMANDIAS
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: `Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear —
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.’
I’ll give you ten seconds to guess who Duluth’s Ozymandius is, Nick.
