Good Listening: I Fought in a War

Certain Sips ☕ The Weekend Brew: June 7, 2025

A weekly cultural and political brief—Certain Sips: the Weekend Brew

---

What does it mean to grow up in a society caked in war paint?

An image that should not exist (Minneapolis, June 3, 2025).

How does it affect your psychological development to live in a land under constant threat, where most citizens are required to endure military conditioning, and the very existence of your country necessitates the maintenance of a brutal, decades-long occupation nestled in your own back yard?

Back in 2020 I was dating a young Israeli woman. We spent most of the summer two hours outside of Minneapolis, first to avoid the big city risks of COVID exposure, and then to steer clear of violent state crackdowns against Black Lives Matter protestors. Every week or two I went back down to do laundry and pick up goods that weren’t available in rural Wisconsin, and on one trip my Israeli partner joined me on the drive to—and through—a wounded Uptown Minneapolis.

Neither of us had ever seen an American city hurting and girding itself quite like this before. The boarded-up storefronts, burnt buildings, and national guard presence upset me, but for my Israeli passenger, these sights evoked a deep well of childhood terror and adolescent anxiety I simply could not understand.

The first year of COVID-19 was already enough to unmoor us pretty badly, but that trip to the city really shook her to her core. We got in and out of the city as quickly as possible, and she stayed up north until well into the fall.

---

---

The summer of 2020 changed everything in Minneapolis, and its Uptown neighborhood will never be the same. But the wreckage of 2020 was only a catalyst for the long-term project of gentrification that was already well underway. It’s an old story; if you know and love a major metropolis at least as big as Minneapolis, you know how it goes.

When I was a kid in the 90s and even into the 2000s, Uptown was still a relatively grungy, dirty cultural core that catered more to the needs of poor students and service workers than the desires of business people and business interests. I was never going to rock a mohawk and pierce my septum, but Minneapolis was much better off when Uptown was a place that welcomed people who did. Smoking bans, skyrocketing rents, and strict zoning laws slowly pushed the lower class and the counterculture out of the neighborhood, and today Uptown has been largely reborn as yet another playground for the small minority of us who can afford it.

Good luck buying a coffee in Uptown for less than $5, anywhere other than a gas station or a McDonalds. And as a struggling coffee addict, let me just add that there is nothing wrong with getting your fix wherever you can. But back in my day, Uptown was the reasonably affordable independent coffee shop capital of the Midwest. Dunn Brothers, in particular, was a cherished spot to post up and do work not only for its intoxicating in-store coffee roaster, but thanks to the ultra-catchy music on offer.

Nothing compares to sipping a latte in the presence of an industrial-grade coffee roaster.

Good Listening

I’ll never forget sipping a latte and staring into my laptop when I first heard the haunting opening lyrics of Belle and Sebastian’s I Fought in a War, the opening track off Fold Your Hands Child, You Walk Like a Peasant, the album released twenty-five years ago this week. I quickly googled whichever lyrics I was able to grasp, so I could identify the song and listen again in the future.

Since then I have enjoyed countless replays of I Fought in a War, which with the kind of artistic flourish that once exemplified an Uptown that no longer exists, was partially based on J. D. Salinger’s 1950 short story For Esmé with Love and Squalor. The story is about literal combat, but Belle and Sebastian fans have found several metaphorical resonances in the devastatingly sad song it inspired.

I Fought in a War is indeed rich and layered, but this week I cannot help but hear it and hold it in my heart at face value. The Uptown Dunn Brothers is gone, but five years after its citizens marched for justice for George Floyd and all victims of state violence, federal goons in military fatigues with semiautomatic weapons have once again returned to the streets of Minneapolis.

Under the transparently farcical pursuit of a “transnational criminal organization,” on Tuesday the Minneapolis Police Department and Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office teamed up with masked agents from the FBI, ATF, and ICE in raids on local immigrant-run restaurants. Despite the deployment of armored tanks and other weapons designed for foreign theaters of battle, locals quickly organized and put themselves on the line to challenge the authoritarian action.

Protestors were temporarily detained, but we have been told that no arrests were made. The Trump Administration successfully cultivated chaos, confusion, and fear, but the forces of local control and democratic security seem to have won the day.

This was a test to see how Minneapolis would react. The Trump team has been iteratively practicing these tyrannical shows of force throughout American cities, learning what to do, what not to do, and how the people show up to protect their neighbors and the rule of law. And they’re escalating their tactics. As I write this, burgeoning groups of pro-democracy protestors here in Southern California are being met with increasingly violent responses from ICE and company. This is a perilous time.

Students of international history describe the imperial boomerang as a nation’s brutal strategies of foreign repression coming home to roost. Students of American history might argue those tactics were here all along—only now they’re being applied to all of us and not just laborers, nonwhites, and political dissidents.

---

---

Uptown Minneapolis slowly died over the course of decades, but that process reached a crescendo in the Trump era—accelerated especially in 2020 when the neoliberal narrative deemed it a “war zone” ruined by civil unrest. This mirrors the slow, multigenerational disintegration of American democratic order, and with it our federal government’s solemn commitment to protect its people rather than kill us and send us off to concentration camps.

In Israel, a coalition protest movement opposing the government’s erosion of democracy has only grown stronger in the wake of a self-destructive campaign to ethnically cleanse Gaza. The government has cracked down on its citizens, but status quo standards of civil rights still appear to hold in Israel—while here in the U.S. we no longer seem to enjoy such protections with any certainty.

I don’t want to fight in a war. Not abroad, not anywhere. I would be one of those guys who fires off a gun and falls on his ass, gets injured and is sent far away from the front lines. But even on dish duty in the mess hall, I have absolutely no interest in fighting a war against fascist armed forces taking direction from the Presidential Emergency Operations Center in the East Wing of the White House.

Earlier this week I shared a harrowing but essential post from

your weirdo friend

, which paints in stark terms the need to prepare to fight and the concurrent need to build community. I hope that the community part of this is all that is necessary; I hope with every fiber of my being that our nation can resolve this peacefully and avoid the path of widespread, internal violent conflict.

Make no mistake old sport, an American insurgency would ultimately triumph over the big tech-white power-Christian supremacist axis of evil. But I pray to god we never have to fight in that war.

---

---

---

ICYMI, check out these related posts:

---

---

---