The daily digest of Twin Cities culture | Secrets of the City

Located on a hellish strip of University Avenue in St. Paul, the utilitarian structure sports the name of the candidate - a name which sparks equal amounts of love, hatred and a lot of stuff in between. The drab walls within, like those for any campaign headquarters, are sprinkled here and there with images of the contender, whose mug, for over thirty years, has graced TV screens, movie screens, book covers, placards, post cards, and, yes, perhaps, even mugs.

How much of a story can be told by looking at a photograph? What is considered fact and proof? Is seeing truly believing?

It’s Friday, and like that girl you had in the backseat of your dad’s Buick back in ’82, Spring just ain’t giving up the goods. And while the putrid grey color of today’s sky and frozen water the clouds vomit forth inch by cursed inch may bode well for today’s opening of the new North Face store in Uptown, it may well drive many in our fair state to crack open a bottle of Jameson and toast to today’s freezing over of the Nine Hells.

The administrative areas at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts can be rather labyrinthine, and are also closed off to the general public, so Corine Wegener, the diminutive assistant curator for the Department of Architecture, Design, Decorative Arts, Craft, and Sculpture, agrees to meet me outside the gift shop. After we pass through the security doors behind the shop, the lighting grows dimmer and the corridors narrow. “I don’t notice the darkness anymore,” says Wegener with a laugh. Suddenly, she takes a hard right into the copier closet that has been repurposed as her office.

Twenty-seven years ago, I left Iraq on the first leg of a journey that would take me to the United Arab Emirates, Germany, and finally the United States. Today I am an American citizen, a businessman, and the father of three sons. Because my small business, Sindbad’s Café and Market, has become a crossroads for people from all over the Muslim world, and for non-Muslims as well, I am often invited to speak at schools and churches.

“We have to speak up about this war. Now we don’t even count the bodies. We only count the American bodies. Woo-hoo. That’s even more self-obsessed. We kill hundreds and hundreds of Iraqis, and we don’t pay any attention to how many there are. We don’t call up the hospitals; we don’t call up the morgues. Let’s count the Iraqi bodies over again. Maybe we can bring them over to this country. Prop them up at some of Bush’s speeches, so we know what the money is going for. Americans want their money’s worth.

The military has gotten very good at using the media for its own purposes. I should know—I taught them how to do it.