WINTRY THOUGHTS: It was the 19th of March, one day before the official beginning of Spring.
I was returning my bus to its parking place at the middle school after my
morning route; winds of 30 to 40 mph pushed the recently-fallen snow into
fantastic swirls, whipping off the mountains of snow that the plows had left at
the edge of the lot. In the distance, to the north and west, the snow looked
like ocean waves. The sky was white at the horizon, the
"inside-of-a-ping-pong-ball" harbinger of complete whiteout. The
ambient temperature was 11 degrees, the wind chill way, way to the south of
zero.
And I said to myself (quoting one of my all-time quotemeisters, Frank
Zappa), "This is the life."
It takes a special kind of person to live in Wisconsin. The kind that, to
quote Clint Eastwood in Gran Torino,
doesn't mind "living in a place where there's snow on the ground
nine months of the year." It's not an easy place, or a particularly
welcoming one. The people are stiff-upper-lip Germans and Scandinavians, and it
takes awhile to get to know them.
The first day of Spring in my backyard. What's wrong with this picture?
But my memories took a holiday later in the day, when I took a busload of
third-graders to visit Monona Terrace in downtown Madison. This is the famous building that Frank Lloyd
Wright designed for his beloved adopted
city in 1938, but that wasn't built until nearly 60 years later (around the
same time as Madison's first municipal swimming pool), earning Madison the
well-deserved title of "the city that can't put two bricks together."
Yet there were always irritating little things about Madison, and about
Wisconsin in general. After more than a quarter of a century hereabouts, I'd
gotten used to them. There are minor annoyances to living just about anywhere,
and as someone who has lived in every part of the United States except the Deep
South, I feel qualified to make that judgement.
The first thing I felt on my trip downtown (it's been awhile; I avoid
downtown Madison to the extent that it's possible) was a profound sadness. I
drove past the Government East parking lot where I used to leave my state
vehicle so often in the late nineties, when the IT department of the state
agency I worked for was located on the western fringes of the city and many of
our clients were holed up in the faceless government office buildings downtown
(the "GEF," or "General Executive Facility" buildings).
I dimly remembered how proud I had felt to be a state employee, in my
fuel-efficient car with the red State license plate. Wisconsin was a great
state (for all that it could be very, very cold and had very long winters), and
it had an unusual mix of conservatives and liberals that seemed to make it more
interesting than profoundly liberal Minnesota to the west, or profoundly
corrupt Illinois to the south (hence the old saying: "Wisconsin: To The
Right of Minnesota and Above Illinois").
Even on wintry days like today, you'd always see a lot of state employees
on the streets downtown, laughing and huddling in little groups on their way to
lunch or to meetings in other state buildings.
Now all you see is winos. (And attorneys, recognizable by the suits that
hardly any state employees wear.) State employees now have public-enemy status
in Wisconsin, and if that wasn't enough to keep them off the streets, they
don't have enough money these days to spend on extravagances like lunch at the
Great Dane.
You take away that interesting mix of the "conservative
watchdogs" and "proud progressives" that always made Wisconsin
tick like few other states in the union, and what you're left with is an empty,
windswept place that looks and feels like Antarctica, with buildings.
And to think we owe all of that to one man.
On one hand, it's easy to sympathize with Scott Walker. Always the
perennial loser, the kid other kids made fun of and dunked in the toilet bowl,
young Scottie plotted the kind of revenge common to other perennial losers--but
on a larger scale. He wouldn't shoot up his school building or take hostages;
he'd make an entire state pay for its crimes against him.
At some point, probably in his failed attempt to attend university, someone
introduced him to Machiavelli and, most likely, Mein Kampf. That's when
he developed his hothouse ideas of ruling by turning people against each other.
And since he, as a transplant from other states (probably one of the reasons he
got his head dunked in the toilet bowl) hated the people of Wisconsin to begin
with, it was only a matter of time before he realized that holding high office
was the best means to effect his twisted ends.
It was probably Paul Ryan, no stranger to kissing up to corporate
criminals, who explained to the young Walker that there were plenty of amoral
corporate barons in Wisconsin who would give him limitless amounts of money if
he would only bring the unions and the working class in general to heel and
make them beg for every scrap they received. And Ryan, always worried about his
image and how to best strike a pose in expensive suits, realized that Walker
was exactly the kind of soulless thug to carry out that agenda--a Sonny
Corleone who didn't give a shit who wound up dead or what kind of damage he
inflicted, as long as the people of Wisconsin were made to pay.
It was around that time that Scott Walker had his first invite to Monona
Terrace.
Monona Terrace Convention Center (foreground). Courtesy legis.wisconsin.gov
That experience sealed Wisconsin's fate. The plush dining rooms, the
terraces with their expansive views of Lake Monona, the expensive foie gras and
roast leg of lamb with wild rice, the jocular mil- and billionaires with their
Bucky Badger cardigans and twentysomething trophy wives--it was a reminder to
an impressionable wannabe that schmoozing with the right people could make him
something that those snooty kids at Marquette (the ones who dared chastise him
for rigging a student election) could never be: really, truly, and dangerously
powerful.
A few months later, he was the Milwaukee County Executive (shoehorned into
office by the contributions of those wonderful folks he met at Monona Terrace).
And, just a hop, skip and jump later, he was Wisconsin's governor. Now the real
fun could begin.
In order to "divide and conquer" the state, as he had promised
(unfortunately, on videotape) to his billionaire patroness Diane Hendricks,
Walker had to find a handy scapegoat for all of Wisconsin's problems. Taking a
meme from Mein Kampf, Walker knew that he couldn't blame the Jews--there
weren't enough of them in Wisconsin, and it might be a tad too obvious--but
government employees would fill the slot nicely in their stead. This was
probably Walker's single most brilliant move (although, again, the genesis of
the idea probably came from Ryan); government employees, having made the conservative
bet of accepting lower wages for better job security and dependable benefits,
had weathered the New Depression better than many. Now Walker saw that he could
quickly turn private-sector Wisconsinites, who had seen their wages and
benefits ruthlessly slashed by the same corporate overlords who funded his
ascension, against these "taxpayer-funded leeches" who plowed their
streets, taught their kids, and issued their drivers' licenses.
It was a page right out of Hitler, and it worked better (or worse) than
Walker could have even imagined. Soon, Wisconsinites from Superior to Racine
were howling for the blood of civil servants, the very same folks they'd lived
alongside and invited to their backyard brat cookouts for years and years.
Kinda like no one in Germany had really noticed that Jews were Jews, until
Hitler reminded them that Jews were the cause of all their problems.
That was two years ago. Wisconsin today is a very different place from the
place I moved to in 1987, and I don't think I can ever look at the state the
same way again. Just as the Germans should have known better to accept Hitler's
claptrap about the Jews, the people of Wisconsin should have seen through
Walker's ruse that blaming civil servants for the ills of the state would solve
anything at all. And if they were just a little bit more clever, Walker's
backers might have seen the similarities between Walker's gambit and Hitler's,
and realized that they had been played. (And by a not-very-intelligent
man at that.)
It's not the kind of thing that
makes you want to put up with twenty-below wind chills on the first day of
Spring. That's why no one with a brain is going to hang around here for long,
whether or not Wisconsin is "Open For Business!". Good luck with your
Great Experiment, Scottie--you and your fevered admirers can race yourselves to
the bottom and perform social lobotomies on each other till the cows come home.
(Poor cows. They did nothing to deserve this, and they'll be remembered
long after Scott Walker is gone for their part in [once] making Wisconsin
great.)
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