FREE WHITEWATER

Culture

City, Culture, Politics

Barriers to Substantive Change in a Small Town

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Several recent posts here are FREE WHITEWATER are, collectively, a cautionary series on the difficulty of effecting substantive change in Whitewater, Wisconsin. One might want change; realism demands a clear-eyed assessment of its likelihood. Other towns might have better (or even worse) odds; Whitewater is not, by definition, another town. A listing of challenges, with…

Babbittry, Boosterism, CDA, City, Culture, Economy, Innovation Center/Tech Park, Local Government, Police, Press Release, School District

Built Against Substantive Change

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Over time, no matter how small the city, national conditions and trends make their way to the edge of town. Some towns will address these conditions, but others will be resistant to substantive change. For those towns in the latter category, business as usual and rhetorical feints suffice in response to powerful forces to which…

City, Culture, Employment, Local Government, School District, University

Mentoring

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When a small community like Whitewater comes to rely on hundreds of non-resident commuters to provide services (for city, schools, or university), those commuters will have a different work relationship than resident workers. (About these workers see The Commuter Class.) Many will be less attached to the community (as they’ve freely chosen to live elsewhere…

Blogging, Culture, Local Government, Newspapers, Politics, Press

After a News Desert

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A news desert is a community without coverage from a daily newspaper. If coverage means timely newspaper reporting on a city’s principal public meetings and events, then Whitewater has been a news desert since the nearby Daily Jefferson County Union stopped reporting on Whitewater’s common council & school board meetings. If coverage means timely, insightful,…

Babbittry, Boosterism, Culture, Newspapers, Public Relations

Public Relations v. Journalism

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Anyone familiar with a proper newspaper should be able to tell the difference between public relations and journalism: the former advances a corporate or government perspective, the latter reports and assesses that perspective. There are public relations outfits (often called media relations) in big and small communities, with this obvious difference: small communities have few…

Babbittry, Bad Ideas, Boosterism, City, Culture, Local Government, Politics, School District, University

The Lingering Problem of Local Exceptionalism

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A common error in small rural communities is the persistent, false claim that local officials are examples of a local exceptionalism that makes them implicitly immune from the flaws and mistakes that beset the rest of humanity. Under this thinking, while there may be problems in the wider world, there are no local examples of…

Coronavirus, Culture, Police, Public Health, Race

Frontline: Race, Police, and the Pandemic

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As streets across America erupt into clashes over racism during the coronavirus pandemic, Jelani Cobb of The New Yorker examines a connection between George Floyd’s death and the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 deaths among African Americans: “the thing that ties them together is empirical evidence of a phenomenon that had been dismissed otherwise.” Cobb describes how the relationship…

Culture, Diversity, Equality, Integration, Race

Karen Attiah on Diversity and Integration

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This morning, Karen Attiah of the Washington Post observed the difference between diversity and integration. Through remarks on Twitter (@KarenAttiah), in a thread quoted below, Attiah notes the greater importance of integration over mere acknowledgments of diversity  — (1) I didn’t get a chance to say it on @TheTakeaway with @tanzinavega but I was struck when…

Advertising, Babbittry, Bad Ideas, Boosterism, Culture, Economics, Economy, History, Poverty

Boosterism, ’30s Style

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Although the Roosevelt Administration was (whatever its other mistakes) candid about the economic conditions it faced, there was in the ’30s, as there has been over the 2010s in Wisconsin, a delusional impulse to happy talk – regardless of economic conditions – among some politicians and some business groups. Margaret Bourke-White‘s Kentucky Flood depicts the…

Babbittry, Boosterism, City, Culture, Local Government, Politics

Local Voting & Voting Locally in Whitewater

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The spring election, conducted during a pandemic, is now behind Wisconsin. There’s little question that statewide, it was a good night for Jill Karofsky and Lisa Neubauer. (I supported both candidates.) Whitewater – the city proper – also supported these candidates. A majority of the city’s voters did, in fact, prefer these voters even while…

Culture, Politics, Sloth, Television

Preparedness

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Chris Matthews of MSNBC resigned (was pushed out, truly) on Monday night. Much has been made – rightly – of how his comments about his female guests made him unsuitable for his role. In the Washington Post, Margaret Sullivan raises a second objection, worth considering, to Matthews’s work: he was too-often unprepared. Sullivan writes that…