"DMC" on the Wheel of Fortune

Detail from the painting "The Sacrificial Lamb" by Josefa de Ayala, ca. 1670-1684. (Wikipedia)

Rhetorically, a scapegoat functions as a synecdoche in that it substitutes a whole for a part. Consistent with the employment of a scapegoat as a synecdochic representative, an effect can be made to stand in stead of a cause, or vice versa. - Beth Eddy, The Rites of Identity: The Religious Naturalism and Cultural Criticism of Kenneth Burke and Ralph Ellison

One needn't worry too much about the cost projections for either the Chateau Theatre or the Heart of the City. Not likely either will unfold as planned - if planning is even the right word anymore for what has been going on.

We'll get through to the other side of the Great Downtown Placemaking Scare of the Twenty-Teens soon enough. It will have cost us several millions in foam core fairs to be sure, but nothing near the tens of millions on display. Discovery Square is much more likely to rise as expected. It's familiar territory that follows a trend of siting corporate parks back into the city core. This one rendered even more trendy with an overlay of the rhetoric of social physics. None of this takes away anything from the honest to God remarkable work that might very well happen there.

"DMC" is the Wheel of Fortune answer to "Three letters that stand for 'growth' in Rochester, MN." Perhaps that's "scapegoating" if it's used as a shorthand for the growth someone doesn't like it, change someone resists, or inequity someone abhors. But, it may turn out that it's only the scapegoating that is keeping DMC at all relevant. We wouldn't have much to say about it otherwise, finally understanding it has so very little in the end to say about us.

Odd that the defense of DMC is now reduced to: "It's not about you." Odd, but true. The issue is growth, the challenges are the economic and social challenges of growth. DMC is about a "medical business entity," as it was referred to in the legislation, that remains the main driver of that growth. Beyond that, whatever else DMC is is either real estate or bad pr.

All the rest - all that is not DMC properly so called - is a city being a city with all the problems a growing city has.There's hardly much comfort to be had in that, but it should at least direct one's attention more productively in the proper direction.