April 2007 archive

Obama leads in Rasmussen poll

'Beauty and the Beast' in Hibbing

When all is well for working families, all is well

(This is my Sunday, April 29, 2007 column for the

We also know that the dollar number we wrote down on our tax returns last month was much lower than the dollar number that actually passed through our wallets in 2006. Some choose to blame the tax man, others blame HMOs. Well, they both take their bite. So, too, does the rising cost of living, housing expenses and – for parents – day care and a public school system that has subtly moved from meritocracy to a gentle but dangerous caste system. If you exclude health care, transportation and educational expenses, your take home pay is a tiny percentage of your income.

The American Dream – real or idealized – is central to the Iron Range and all of Northeastern Minnesota. The powerful people have always been “out east” and, more recently, in Finland, Japan, China or, soon, India. The people here have always worked for the people “out there.” They’ve toiled, lived and died, in pursuit of a dream. That dream usually wasn’t as specific as a house or car. Usually it had to do with the sense of relief and pride in being able to choose your livelihood and daily endeavors. That’s why we see engineers, doctors, governors and artists whose family, perhaps only one or two generations earlier, could only find work in the mines. That is the story of the Iron Range. That’s my story.

So if independence and upward mobility is the goal, we should not revel too long in the record-breaking stock market prices or in the continued stability of our employment and consumer indexes. Those are good things, but there’s more to the equation. We are learning – through the stagnant housing market, struggling auto market and massive increases in consumer debt – that houses, cars and spending don’t necessarily lead to the American Dream of financial freedom and security. 

The St. Paul-based Jobs Now Coalition released a study last week indicating that 42 percent of jobs in Northeastern Minnesota, including here in St. Louis and Itasca counties, do not pay enough money to support a family. This was detailed in a March 23 story by Jane Brissett in the Duluth News-Tribune. According to the story, a single worker must earn $20,414 to make it in Northeastern Minnesota. A two-worker family with two kids must earn more than $42,000 to cover costs, which would include child care. Professionals with a college education and a stable family situation might not blink at those thresholds. But almost half of the people you meet in our region struggle with these numbers every day, often because they have neither college nor social connections.

Remember, we’re talking about working families here, people who work as hard as the powerful titans of Washington and Wall Street. We should try to do well by these folks – and that means investing in education through a fourth tier in the income tax, building infrastructure and keeping property taxes and fees as low as possible. Doing this will make our economy both strong and fair.

So, don’t be overly influenced by the happy chirping of the stock market report each evening. Instead, ask yourself how working families are doing in your town or county. If you want to know what kind of economy you have, you’ll find your answer there. Like a tree, our economy is either growing or dying. Woe to the tree whose branches grow faster than its roots.

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Brown on the air -- Prom Season

For me, going to prom at my high school was a lot like the respective U.S. invasions of Canada, Vietnam and Iraq. Initially exciting. Very expensive. Ultimately disastrous.

But isn’t that true for everyone? When asked to list the greatest days of your life, who says prom? Seriously? Prom? Few end up married to their prom date. Half of those who do get divorced. The other half remember prom as a blur, a dull, distant reminder of a time when the sweatpanted person eating Cheetos on the couch looked good in a cummerbund. Most prom dates are “just friends,” which is like a baking soda volcano of teen angst. It’s not easy being just friends with a pretty girl in a strapless dress, especially when you’re 17.

But prom is supposed to be magical. It’s your last dance as a kid and your first as something not unlike a grownup. If ever a young man and woman were going to toss aside their fears of rejection and social convention and fall into each other’s arms, it’d be then, right? After all, you’ll never look or smell that good again.

I went to my first prom when I was 15, at the invitation of a beautiful blond high school senior. What could possible go wrong with that? Of course, we were just friends. She had a boyfriend who was in the Army and was always away doing Army things, which made him the perfect boyfriend for her to have as far as I was concerned. On prom day, I was ready for the magic. Who knows, maybe I’d even tell her how I really felt, even though it might, sigh, jeopardize our friendship.

Then the call came. Army boyfriend has come home to surprise her for her senior prom. But that’s OK, because he’s cool with us still going together. Only he’ll be there too. Oh, yeah, he’s an Army Ranger now. She didn’t say it, but I knew that meant that not only could he beat me up, but he could break my neck in a way that made it look like a heart attack. That’s … fine, I said. What was I going to say? I had the tux. It matched her dress.

She went through the grand march twice, once with me and once with the Army Ranger, whose crisp dress greens did not match her dress. There were two sets of pictures. One with me and one with the Army Ranger. I got one dance with her that night, which was the same number of dances I got with her best friend and the French teacher, both of which were blatant mercy dances. At one point the Army Ranger and my friend were sitting next to each other across the table from me playing a cute little couple’s game of guessing what was in they guy’s wallet. “I give up, what is it?” she asked about a slip of paper. “It’s the receipt for my gun,” he said. “Ha! (pause) Ha! Ha!” I added. “I am having a very good time!” I rode home in the back seat of his car.

Future proms went better, but not dramatically better. The problem with prom is that the outcomes can’t possibly match the expectations. Years later, as a speech team coach, I talked to some high school students who, in January, had not only secured their May prom date but lined up a different date for the following year as well. “You’ve got to book early if you want a good one,” I was told. True for septic system installers and true for prom dates, too. Be warned, though. These early bookings and hundreds of dollars for flowers, dresses and limos bring great expectations. And, whether you read the Bible, Dickens or the financial section of the newspaper, great expectations often foster great disappointments.

Toddlers don't like Watergate

Community college football on the Range

Iron Range steel

Coal-colored goggles

My first magazine Q&A

Creature Comforts!

Ranger Party

Local child raised by monkeys, talking trains

(This is my Sunday, April 22, 2007 column in the

I’ve learned that when you tell parenting stories you need to distance yourself from claiming any sort of expertise. It’s a little like advertising for mutual funds; past performance is not indicative of future results.

I say this because if you had talked to me eight months ago I might have told you – OK, bragged – that our son Henry didn’t show much interest in TV. He would watch a few minutes here and there, but spent more time playing with blocks or trucks. I might have assumed that the logical progression from this would have been for Henry to eschew TV entirely, build a perpetual motion machine by age five and staff our household with fully-functional, non-evil robot servants before he hit junior high.

This was, of course, before he saw his first “Thomas the Tank Engine” video and got hooked on his 4 o’clock “Curious George” fix. Naturally, both programs have book and toy counterparts. Now we see more trains and monkeys than an Amtrak conductor on Planet of the Apes.

“Thomas the Tank Engine” has been around a long time. I remember when Ringo Starr was the “conductor” who told stories of the cavalcade of self-aware, adventure-prone trains on the fictional Island of Sodor. In the years since, both Alec Baldwin and George Carlin have narrated Thomas stories. I’m pretty sure this is the only thing Ringo Starr, Alec Baldwin and George Carlin have in common. (If you want to blow your mind, watch George Carlin narrate a Thomas story and then put on his comedy album with the “Seven Words You Can’t Say on Television.”)

Thematically, the best “Thomas” video we’ve seen is “Races, Rescues and Runaways (one of the Baldwin videos). This video features a series of adventures in which trains, blinded by pride or power, attempt to do something they shouldn’t with disastrous results. Trains derail, crash into box cars full of jam and burst into buildings full of people. Outside of Sodor their actions would cause a near endless string of drug and alcohol tests for their plastic human crews. In the videos, however, humans show a glib, almost nonchalant attitude toward these rail yard debacles. If real life rules applied, several of these yard workers would be splayed out on tracks while Poindexter the Ambulance (TM) went looking for salvageable limbs.

The video ends with a musical montage recapping the very best of the rail disasters set to a tune called “Accidents Happen.” I haven’t been able to locate the exact lyrics to this song, but to my ear one of the refrains goes, “Accidents happen now and again, people and trains get smashed.” This reminds me of a story an ex-railroader told me about a northern Minnesota town where, when the train slowed to pass through, the railroad crew would jump off the train, run to a nearby liquor store, and run back to the accelerating train with beer. Indeed, people and trains DO get smashed. (I’ve been assured that stores like these are part of a bygone era of railroading, which has since seen massive safety improvements … except in Sodor).

I haven’t analyzed Curious George much here. I won’t have enough space to explore the complex relationship between a bachelor who lives in the city and wears yellow safari clothes every day and his monkey, who in real life would be on the 10 o’clock news every night.

I’m still glad that Henry likes these programs instead of Barney, the Wiggles and the Teletubbies (all horror shows for adults). We may have TV in our lives, which might possibly prevent Henry from getting his Ph.D. by age 20. But I am glad to have learned so much about the travails of jaunty little trains and a monkey who often breaks the law in a very, very cute way. The parenting train just keeps on choogling along.

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Brown on the air -- Earth Day and finding 'Places for Stuff'

BROWN HQ (April 21, 2007) -- I was on KAXE's "Between You and Me" with Heidi Holtan this morning with an essay about the volume of "stuff" in the lives of modern Americans. It was based in part on an essay I wrote two years ago, with some updates and new perspective.

HOST INTRO: We’re talking about reducing and reusing today in honor of Earth Day tomorrow. KAXE contributor Aaron Brown has some observations about the volume of stuff in our lives and the difficulty in finding a place to put it.

A few years ago we moved from town to the country around the same time our first child was born. In a scientific observation of junk accumulation, you could say this created a “perfect storm.” The unpacked boxes of vague, often unidentifiable material from our closets crashed into the tsunami of toys and baby gadgets that traditionally follow a first born. Somewhere at the bottom lies George Clooney and two or three other, less famous guys.

The problem of finding places for things is universal in our relatively prosperous society. In many countries, warlords prevent people from collecting eight years worth of TV Guides or decorative plates. As a result, Americans – especially, it would seem, northern Minnesotans – turn to storage facilities.

Two years ago I wrote a column questioning the number of new self storage units that had cropped up in our region. Not only have those storage facilities hung on, but they’ve reproduced. My Iron Range phone book lists 20 additional mini-storage places since the time I wrote the column. That doesn’t even scratch the surface in the Brainerd and Bemidji areas, where seasonal residents stoke the storage flames. On the outskirts of most Northern Minnesota towns you can throw a rock and probably hit one of two things: 1) somebody angry at the government, or 2) a mini-storage unit. One has been there since they put men in space to spy on us – the other is full of junk.

I did some research and learned that mini-storage, or “self storage” as some industry insiders prefer, is not as easy as building a network of empty rooms and renting them out for people to store cumbersome items. It also involves going to the Self Storage Association 2007 Fall Conference and Trade Show, Sept. 6-8 in sunny Las Vegas.

During my research session, including trips to the Self Storage Association homepage and the pages of the “Mini-Storage Messenger” (the leading trade publication of the self storage industry since 1979), I learned that boat and RV storage is one major reason for rapid mini-storage expansion.

Perhaps the boat/camper factor is fueling the weed-like growth of storage units across the region. Perhaps people are illegally living in storage units. Perhaps constructing storage units seems less daunting than starting a different business – such as, well, anything that involves waking up before 10. Perhaps. Then again, the growth of mini-storage might be because people just keep too much stuff. I do not excuse myself from this. The difference is, my stuff is paper.

Newspaper clippings. Letters. Pages printed off the Self Storage Association Web site. These are the things I keep.

But other people keep bigger things – elaborate items destined to decompose in a dark storage unit void of human contact. Coffee cans full of grease-covered bolts. Inoperable machines built from a strange metal both heavier and more fragile than steel. Eight-track tapes. Home recorded videos of “The Price is Right.” These are the things other people keep.

These things must go somewhere, and that somewhere must be far from spouses or neighbors. So the next time you see a storage facility, join me in wondering what’s in there? Also, join me in asking, but why are they keeping it? If only we had some warlords to take care of this problem for us.

HOST OUTRO: Aaron Brown is a columnist for the Hibbing Daily Tribune, instructor at Hibbing Community College and frequent contributor to KAXE.

Wind Power!

Coming up:

Range news roundup

A few items you shouldn't deduct

(This is my Sunday, April 15, 2007 column for the

Today, April 15, is usually tax day. This year the 15th falls on a Sunday, so instead today becomes a day of deep mediation and prayer that Uncle Sam might forget that you are indeed a citizen who earned legitimate income last year.

Since I have yet to be prosecuted for tax evasion (you’ll never get me, coppers!), I decided to offer some helpful hints to those hurriedly scrawling out their taxes using the only writing utensil left in the house, probably a yellow crayon or mini-golf pencil. Maybe you didn’t save your receipts? Maybe your receipts are in a grocery bag marked “smoked fish?” Maybe your receipts are covered in gravy? Hey, that doesn’t mean you can’t itemize. But in the commotion, here are a few items you probably shouldn’t deduct.

Ninja swords. “Ninja” is not a legally recognized vocation since a ninja’s only income is honor and vast, unfathomable powers of flight and stealth. Ninjas are volunteers and, as such, only mileage to and from ninja fights is deductible. That’s the real reason ninjas travel in groups of 3-5. (Paradoxically, anti-ninja government agents – who are federal employees – MAY deduct their ninja swords as a work-related expense, unless the sword was provided by their employer). Throwing stars, on the other hand, are deemed luxuries.

Beer (unless donated to food shelf).

Bacon (unless pig was documented part of post-1998 IRA portfolio).

Cult dues. Just because the man in the silver jump suit says your “purification fees” are tax deductible doesn’t make it so.

Robot-proof bomb shelter. Maybe you could call it a home office, but unless your income is directly tied to surviving the coming rebellion of the metal ones the tax man won’t buy this.

Pull tabs. Not an investment. Seriously. Not. An. Investment.

Anything from the Acme Corporation. This one is mostly for Wile E. Coyote, but it stands for everyone else, too. I know the roadrunner represents food and that the acquisition of food is a cornerstone of life. But for all that money (and where DOES it come from?) you could buy cases and cases of nice steaks and hire someone to cook them for you. Keep this stuff off your return.

Non-sentient “children.” Perhaps you’ve crafted a child out of butter. Perhaps this “child” has features one might describe as “lifelike.” Perhaps you consider this “child” to be your heir, perhaps even including “him” or “her” in your will. Maybe you firmly believe that one day your “child” will rule your financial empire, including vast holdings in the coal and railroad industries. I’m not judging you. But your butter baby is not a legal dependent. I’m sorry.

Naturally, your ability to sneak these items through your itemized list is directly related to the amount of money you have to hire good lawyers and ply elected officials with campaign bucks to create loopholes in the tax code. (Hence the “Committee for American Ninjas’” active involvement in last year’s Senate campaign and this year’s suspicious “Ninja Tax Rebate” that sneaked through committee). But us regular folks should probably just pay our taxes and move on. Happy Tax Day!

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Brown on the air

BROWN HQ (April 14, 2007) -- This essay was scheduled to air on KAXE's "Between You and Me" with Heidi Holtan this morning. This week's topic is "Home."

“Home on Wheels”
By Aaron J. Brown

HOST INTRO: We’re talking about the sense of home today. KAXE contributor Aaron Brown says even the least glamorous houses can still be home.

Mark Twain said it takes a “heap o’ living to make a house a home,” though it’s hard to say exactly what constitutes a “heap.” For me it’s when you can walk through your house with the lights out, when you know exactly what the furniture feels like before you sit, and when you find objects that cause you to remark, “I haven’t seen this in yeeeeears.” That’s when you’re home.

With brief exceptions, I’ve always lived in Northern Minnesota, but I’ve had many different homes. My family moved a few times when I was a kid, an old mining house in Nashwauk, an old farm house in Zim when I was little. Most of my formative years, however, from age 4 to 12 were spent in a trailer house adjacent to my family’s salvage yard business. Trailers get a bad rap, sometimes deservedly, but I know that a trailer can still feel like home. Life in a trailer home may indeed be different than life in your fancy “attached to the ground” houses, but the memories remain special.

For instance, there’s just a tiny bit of give when you step up into a trailer. It’s not as bad as climbing into a van with bad shocks. But it’s a little like climbing into a van with bad shocks, more so than what Thomas Jefferson probably experienced at Monticello. Though architects would cringe, I fondly remember the comfort of the hollow squeaks when my sisters and I ran from one end to the other, darting around the kitchen table and couch like they were flags on a ski course.

When it rained, the roof rattled and you had to turn up the TV to its highest volume. It seemed like even snow made noise on the roof. Passing a family member in the hallway reminded me of submarine movies. Our carpet was an orange brown. On my first day of school, my mom took a picture of me wearing a homemade jacket and holding a matching book bag she made. The photo shows the carpet, the brown wood grain paneling and our aluminum white door. Years later, I realized that every kid who lived in a trailer on the first day of school has the same picture.

Boondoggle Mesaba project exposed as boondoggle

Adding to the din on Imus

News Quiz

Cancer and the iron mines

Can't win them all

Internet now a cultural anchor

(This is my Sunday, April 8, 2007 column in the

I e-mail. I post. I blog. But most of all, I read. I read faster and more diversely than one could randomly picking up and throwing aside the magazines in a public library. I find it to be better than reading magazines, and I’m not alone. One recent Poynter Institute study showed that people who read news online have longer attention spans and are able to absorb more information from articles.

Just 10 years ago, I entered my senior year at a rural Iron Range high school. I had never sent or received an e-mail. I had never even seen the Internet. Today, I teach half of my college instruction load entirely online, often from my home office which connects to the Internet through a communication satellite orbiting Earth. An average day involves 75 e-mail messages and about 2,000 clicks of the mouse, sometimes much more than that. Some days I feel like a caveman who, 10 years after using rocks to tenderize mammoth meat, now manufactures fully functional George Foreman grills. It’s a miracle.

I don’t always use the miracle for the betterment of society. Often, I read about political gossip or seek out pictures of large, unusual animals discovered by men of girth wearing tank tops. At least, that’s what I did yesterday. Did you know that they found a toad the size of a dog in Australia? For young professionals like me, Internet news and so-called viral videos are as important as any other part of the media spectrum. In fact, I would get rid of my television, my newspaper subscription and even my radio before I got rid of my Internet. Why? Because all those things are available on the Internet. One day soon, most of our media will come to us through a high-speed Internet connection.

It’s not that the shaky, unedited clips you see on YouTube or the rambling blog posts of 13-year-olds are going to shake up the world order; it’s that we now have a fairly reliable and inexpensive way to transmit thoughts and ideas to the whole world. I could wax poetic about the political ramifications, but I’ll leave that to the high brows. I want to know how it affects me.

Have you ever googled yourself? Anyone who says they haven’t is either unfamiliar with the term or is just lying, lying, lying. Googling someone means doing a web search on them; googling yourself means you’re seeing what other people see when they google you. My last name is one of the most common English surnames in the world and my first name was rather trendy in the late ‘70s and ‘80s; kind of like how the “Grey’s Anatomy” character names are now. (I pity the Derek and Preston Browns of the future). Thus, today, there are Aaron Browns hiding in all corners of the Internet, on college football teams, correcting code on tech sites, committing felonies in other states and, more often than I care to consider, dying tragically before their time or after a long, courageous battle with a terrible illness.

But it’s all there within my reach, thanks to the Internet. Even if I’m not the only Aaron Brown in the world I am right there in the hunt. I’m a somebody.

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Week in review

Children's book hero Christopher Robin felled by marketing weasels

Alien vs. Predator

Iron Range college chatter continues

I'm #2

We're going to win, Twins

What next for the sons and daughters of the Iron Range?

(This is my Sunday, April 1, 2007 Hibbing Daily Tribune column).

At the center of every Northern Minnesota economic development project – be it a power plant, steel mill, yarn factory or plutonium mine – rests this argument: “We must do something to keep our young people.”

On the Range, the term “young people” means those under 40 – including high school and college students, young professionals and families with small children. These folks are all lumped together because, demographically, the “average” Iron Ranger is a working middle aged person with older or adult children or a retiree. Whether you’re a 28-year-old lawyer with an engineer husband and two young kids, or a recent local tech college graduate looking for a job in the mines, you’re the people economic development types want to attract or retain.

The Twin Ports of Duluth and Superior, Wis., and the Iron Range have enjoyed a symbiotic historical relationship and are part of the same economic region. Though the two areas are not identical, they face similar challenges. That’s why I read with interest a March 25 AP story by Will Ashenmacher about a recent study relating to the attitudes of people who live in the Twin Ports area. The Duluth-Superior Area Community Foundation commissioned the study, whose findings were compiled by UMD instructor Drew Digby with cooperation from the Harvard University John F. Kennedy School of Government. Among the findings were that young people in the Twin Ports are “highly involved, yet feel alienated from their community.”

The study found that young people voted and participated in community service, but often felt a great sense of frustration. This is merely a quantification of something I hear from many of my friends (bear in mind, I happen to be one of these whipper-snappers), that effort spent to affect change or be creative often seems wasted in a place where tradition and parochialism often reign in the end.

The report’s authors say that part of the problem is that young people might not have an effective bearing on what it takes to be successful in civic engagement. I see that sometimes in young professionals who run for city council or school board offices but have no idea how to actually win the votes they’d need to be elected. But I’ve also seen good people pour their hearts into the arts, community improvement efforts or civic groups only to receive little support for their work.

Our economic problems in northern Minnesota aren’t a matter of there being no room. New mini malls, spec buildings and business incubators are everywhere, and they’re affordable. Our problems aren’t really related to money. We have a business community here and Iron Range Resources still spends millions every year on development projects. Our problems aren’t related to politics. The Range reliably elects Democrats to office, but the Upper Peninsula of Michigan – a culturally and economically similar area – elects Republicans and faces the same issues as us.

Our problem is, in my observation, entirely related to attitude and geography. Indeed, we must attract and retain young people, embrace creativity, and forge new development. But we must then also accept changes to our economy and culture. We are out of the way – nowhere near a major population center or top tier national highway. Our natural resources cannot account for 100 percent of our existence anymore. Thus we must give people an especially good reason to go out of their way to do business and live their lives here – something beyond pretty billboards and talk of good fishing. We can’t count on home run projects that employ hundreds to magically deposit their everlasting glory upon our doorstep. We must do the thinking, building and working ourselves, by starting small and growing. This means entrepreneurship and innovation, using our natural resource strengths with our superior network of educational facilities.

This won’t be easy, but it’s the calling of the sons and daughters of the Iron Range. What can you do?

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Ohio, Florida again exert undue influence upon my life