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My wife will brain me for writing this — but I don’t really care, since I realized that the resurrected Wal*Mart at Steelyard Commons is going to go through because of private, backroom politics.

Not that Wal*Mart is all bad. My wife shops there; it’s a pretty good place to go to buy cheap stuff.

And go back and buy more cheap stuff because the cheap stuff you bought a few months ago broke because it’s cheap stuff…

Shots aside, I’m struck by the comments: Democracy Guy is afire. Tina has more biting words. Chas Rich doesn’t like it, either. Adam waxed poetic (OK, even if he *did* sound a little like Frank Zappa!). George Nemeth is putting on his Organizational Clothes.

Them’s fightin’ words, for sure, and we’re heatin’ up the hall…

Chas Rich talks about backroom deals and how they stink — then and now. They’re trying to recall the mayor in Euclid for doing just that (the Hillandale thing). I’m not saying that Cleveland should recall Jane Campbell — there’ll be no need, for her political capital lost its capital a long while ago.

But Bitter-Girl’s comments have me thinking:

Dave’s Supermarket will probably suffer the most, which seems unfair in light of everything they’ve given back to this city. Who built a brand new market in Ohio City when no one else would? Heinen’s (also locally owned) didn’t step up to the plate. Dave’s did. And now, Wal-Mart’s going to undercut the hell out of Dave’s prices in an attempt to annihilate the competition, probably wounding the historic West Side Market, too. Are you going to be able to buy Ohio City Pasta or Hungarian garlic sausage at Wal-Mart?

I’ve been shopping at the West Side Market for decades. I know scores of folks who work there. By first name. Known ‘em for years. They’ve known me for years. They know what I eat, what I cook, how I cook. We’ve celebrated tears of joy with new jobs and tears of sorrow with unemployment. We trade recipes. I help with their computer problems. We talk sports. We talk food. We talk politics. We talk life.

The recipe for surviving Wal*Mart is to provide something they don’t: in the Market’s situation, that would be exactly what I just wrote, just add in a little dynamite Dormunder Gold bratwurst, or a little Slovenian Sausage (or Hungarian — either works for me — well, any kind of sausage works for me, actually), a fresh strudel or a batch of Ohio City Pasta, with this type of custom service, and they should survive…

… maybe…

No doubt, some of the folks down there will get hurt — and badly — with a Wal*Mart just two miles away. I fear for them — and for one of my old traditions. I fear for the residents of Tremont and Ohio City who gladly walk to the West Side Market to shop. A time-honored tradition might come to a close.

Time-honored? You bet. Almost a century now.

But that’s Cleveland: a city that has no idea where it’s going because it has no idea where it’s been — it’s too busy burying its past rather than embracing it. You must know where you’ve been in order to know where you’re going.

But — what do you expect from a city whose mayor lit his hair on fire with an acetylene torch?

From a city whose first lady declined a White House dinner invitation because it was her bowling night?

From a city who made national headlines for a river that burned (after having burned at least 11 times in the preceding century)?

From the most impoverished, uneducated city in the nation?

From the only city in the country that has actively courted Wal*Mart?