Anger and Exhaustion Stalk Local Elites

Years of asking for money for big-ticket projects for big-talking cronies, and insisting on imaginary successes and fabricated accomplishments, have left local insiders facing community anger and exhaustion. 

Of the two, exhaustion is – by far – the more debilitating to town squires’ plans.

Anger flares over a project, here and there, and sometimes prevails against bad ideas. Exhaustion, by its very nature, never flares – it simply erodes and corrodes confidence in local officials.

In communities near Whitewater, local leaders and their press enablers are encountering some anger over local projects (particularly Janesville, a city with long-term leaders who are stumbling and fumbling project after project). 

Worse, though, than anger is the indifference from weariness that residents display when someone comes along to talk up another big idea.  Leaders want residents to get excited about the Next Big Thing, but residents have heard so many false promises, exaggerations, and outright lies from local influencers that few line up to support new proposals. 

These men quickly look like smooth-talking heels trying to get someone into the back of a car. Far from meeting with success, they’re met with a mixture of disinterest and contempt: You’re joking, right?

Look at something like trying to sell another round of WEDC grants. Who runs a big story touting that supposed triumph?  A newspaper that prints an afternoon daily (and that’s not even printed in its own city).  Fair enough to flack in the media one can find, but that’s publishing to an unrepresentative, aged demographic. 

(Afternoon newspapers are traditionally understood to be skewed old even compared with other papers.) 

I come from a newspaper-loving family, going back generations.  And yet, one should be clear: the only demographic group in America with a majority that reads newspapers daily is over sixty-five. 

(These disappointing data are actually generous to newspapers – they’re from Scarborough Research, a firm the newspaper industry prefers to use. An analysis from media consultant Alan Mutter, for example, is even less favorable.)

WEDC ‘CEO’ Reed Hall and Chancellor Telfer would have about as much community reach if they posted their press releases next to a store’s Geritol® counter. 

Here we are, and other cities, too: a decade of boosterism, with aching needs ignored, and these gentlemen speak to nearly-empty rooms, and through declining papers, to communities that are sometimes angry but mostly exhausted from the big sell of the next big thing.