…on my Thug III post.
Thug III is not by any stretch of the imagination my longest post. It is long and I hope well written. I had the time and focus to make sure of this. I began writing it about about 8am and kept tinkering (in literary circles this is called editing) until my last couple typo corrections at about 11pm. Part of the process of editing required me to dig through old posts I hadn’t read since uploading them to the blog two years ago. Late last night I took the trouble to read an even longer post that I’d cranked out at the end of my Frisking in October of 2009.
That post brought back a flood of memories and reminded me why I have remained so tenacious (and maybe a touch vindictive) in subsequent years where our School Board and newspaper are concerned.
Sorry- My wife wants to water the lawn and I’ve got to mow it first…….I’ll continue this shortly.
Yesterday’s post was polished. The “Take Five” post was not. It was like a lump of clay intended for sculptural bust stopping after being crudely molded into a ball or an unfinished piece of furniture without a proper sanding and staining. Being a leader in Let Duluth Vote was time consuming. I spent a lot of time at the typewriter riposting the Trib the school board members, JCI, everybody’s lawyers, email critics like Doug Frisk, and the Superintendent’s public relation’s person. I had my blog. They had 300 million of our dollars to propagandize with. It was hardly a fair fight. I was honest.
I was also burning out. I had fund raising to do and after all the trashing I was subjected to I had to do a lot of fence mending with my own allies. I guess some of the propaganda even worked on my friends. That’s really what the Take Five post is all about.
Its a long post. I wrote it late at night and was probably up till 2am cranking it out. Its incredibly rough. Even now I can’t fully grasp all the nuances I attempted to cover because time has erased some of my intentions from me. It would have taken a minimum of four hours to just start fixing it up and I didn’t have that kind of time or doggedness. A full day would have really made it shine.
Even with this terrible deficiency my italicized epilogue is spot on. I think anyone slightly familiar with the Trib, Duluth, our schools the Red Plan and me can easily get what I’m writing about. I even was surprised at one thing I’d forgotten – how I had begun the day singled out by name in the Trib’s Editorial as the leader of “Welty’s gang.”
Ah yes, my “gang”…..like so many rats fleeing from a sinking ship. Not all, of course, but that was the Trib’s strategy. It was the strategy of the powers that be. For good or ill the Red Plan was a done deal. It should be put to rest. If there were any villains we should simply let them off with a scowl and forget their profiteering at our expense or lies or anything else. You can be sure that all the villains felt the same way.
You see a news paper is in the business of selling eyes to read advertising. Whatever merit there is in its journalism without revenue it lays off reporters. Its leadership is also a little like the editors of the high school newspaper and yearbook. They are gate keepers for the popular kids they chill with. In the case of the Trib that’s the Chamber of Commerce a major booster of the Red Plan. When all else failed the powers that be with the aid of their pals at the Trib had to chip away at the folks who wouldn’t shut up. I’ve seen it many times. In fact, my latest project is writing a book about the Mother of all public humiliations at the hands of the press.
The day the Trib wrote about “Welty’s gang” was the set up for my public comeuppance. I’m sure all the players had a hand in it and I mentioned a few of them in the Thugs III post. Doug Frisk was merely the stooge who was going to pull off the coup de gras by giving the Trib ammunition to proclaim that I wanted his children harmed because I had shouted “fire” in the darkened theater. I can just imagine the tut tut tutting in the story about the police investigation. Well Harry may not have made the threats but he unleashed the forces of darkness that have sullied out great city and brought it shame.
But then without quite realizing how much the Trib was going to soil itself in order to emasculate me its better angels kicked in. Maybe it was the ferocious phone message I left Chuck Frederick. I don’t know how many people at the Trib heard it. I’m sure Sarah Horner did. I know it was played back to Jana Hollingsworth and she didn’t even normally cover the public schools. She didn’t know what to make of it. Now, two years later, I have little doubt that Frisk was to be the frosting on my coffin. I think we had a conspiracy going. Thank God it evaporated or I would probably have bent my will to destroying the Trib which would be a shame, because we still live in an age where we need some journalism even if its not top notch.
Will I pay heed to any denials by the Trib that destroying me was not their intention? Yeah sure! Like I credit James Murdoch when he says he knew nothing of the illegal wiretapping by his reporters at News of the World.
