I spent last week in St. Paul, seven days, five of them gorgeous and sunny with bright fall colors preceded by two wretched cold rainy days, serving as contrast, just as Muzak makes you appreciate Mozart, and it put me into a mood of wild unreasonable optimism, the very thing our country was founded on, if you ask me. Conceived in hope and dedicated to the proposition that tomorrow may bring something truly astonishing.

The Midwest I grew up in didn’t encourage wild hopes. “Ikke tro at du er noen,” said the Norwegians and you could tell from the tone of voice what it meant: don’t think you’re somebody, mister. Don’t get your hopes up. Look out you don’t trip on your shoelaces.

So if people compliment me, I fend it off. Change the subject. Bad luck.

But my people didn’t encourage whining or whimpering, griping or grousing either. You didn’t talk about how happy you were, lest it be taken as bragging. You needed to maintain a balance. “It could be worse” was the rule. Grown-ups might recall the Great Depression when people went hungry and families moved in with relatives. They said, “Plenty of people would feel lucky to have what you have.” This still holds true. The only real complaints I heard all week were about hearing-aid malfunction (due to earwax buildup, it turns out) and the tendency of young people, when you say, “Thank you,” to reply, “No problem” rather than “You’re welcome.”

Growing up, I absorbed ideas of propriety from my parents. My father grew up on a farm and was a man of dignity. He never boasted and he never belittled others. My parents raised six kids on a slim income and never complained about it. They loved each other. I recall other women making fun of their husbands but she never did. He was gentle, not judgmental, and sought to be helpful to friends and family.

They were devout Christians who contemplated eternity but ignored government and politics. Family and the fellowship of other believers was their world.

My generation, the one that came of age in the Sixties, latched into some great causes — civil rights, anti-war, gay rights, Women’s Movement, Earth Day — and we became helplessly addicted to righteousness, and as the causes became widely accepted and written into law we founded new and more specialized causes such as disabled anti-paternalistic Chicano feminists or non-gender Native American nonagenarians, and inevitably Middle America got weary of the dissent and disputatious demonstrations denouncing injustice and inequality and all of the bumps on the highway of life and they found a real-estate tycoon running for office and they elected him to the White House for one reason, the fact that he drove the rest of us nuts, and now the single lasting political accomplishment of my generation is this 79-year-old troll who gave a speech to the troops aboard the aircraft carrier George Washington in Japan about America being the most respected country in the world, the hottest country in the world, which can go in and blast the hell out of other countries because we got a great Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, incredible guy, doing a fabulous job, and now there’s no Navy even close to ours, not even close, and no military like ours, not even close, the most powerful military in the history of the world because nobody’s got weapons like ours — the best ships, the best airplanes, the best submarines — the best people, good-looking people, and that’s why we had to win the election big, too big to rig, and we won on November 5th and we went from being a country that wasn’t respected to the greatest economy in the history of our country.

What was I talking about?

Minnesota. Greatest state in the Union, no other is even close. Not even close. Now that I’ve moved to New York I’m free to say so. Incredibly modest people. Fabulously modest. Greatest winters. Most beautiful autumns. The Mississippi River comes out of Minnesota. Maybe you weren’t aware of that. Lake Superior is the greatest Great Lake of them all. Iowa is an eyesore, Wisconsin is a waste of time, the Dakotas are decadent and disgusting. Illinois is an annoyance. Back when Republicans were running things, we were on the verge of collapse, but now that liberals are in charge, we can beat the hell out of every other state. If you don’t think so, nuts to you. I got nothing more to say to you. Beat it.

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