I have written a few overview posts, these past two weeks, highlighting unusual and curious aspects of life here. I will resume a more conventional posting schedule, with a daily morning feature, beginning next week.
In the meantime, I will finish highlighting some of the ways that we’re just not the rural town that the rest of America, and even we, might expect to find in a place of our size and location.
First, we are more regulated and restrictive than a place founded on individual, private initiative would be expected to be.
Second, we have in our community a small group that despises the two great advantages – students and immigrants – that set us apart from other rural communities. What is a blessing to us, some receive only as a curse.
Third, we often emphasize management, projects, plans, and proposals over the fundamentals of governance. Where equitable administration of the law from open and honest government should be, we find schemes billed as the next big transformation, etc., of our small town.
We would do better to govern well than plan well (should planning ever go well), to be good rather than insisting that we look good.
That brings me to the fourth oddity of our town, that there’s an inexplicable desire to insist that there are no problems here, and that saying, even hinting, that there might be is a betrayal of Whitewater, Wisconsin.
Those who have read this website regularly know that I think the opposite is true: Whitewater is made better when she embraces the true honest and accountability of the American political and legal traditions. Whitewater is worthy not merely as a small town, but as a small American town.
A local exceptionalism that departs from genuine American exceptionalism condemns the town to relative decline, greater poverty, and a gradual withering.
I cannot account for this stubborn, ignorant, and destructive desire to insist that all is well. I have no easy explanation. I see only that it is the opposite of the candor and honesty so many hope a small town to display.
There’s a close cousin to this cheerleading, this boosterism: an inexplicable veneration of every politician, bureaucrat, and bureaucrat’s program as wonderful and astonishing.
Consider these remarks, appearing on the website of a local politician and online publisher, about our City Manager, Kevin Brunner:
The Whitewater Kiwanis Breakfast Club was fortunate to have City Manager, Kevin Brunner, present to explain the attempts recently to be more sensitive to the environment as a municipal government and to create greater sustainability in the world around us.
Kevin covered the many projects already undertaken or the planning being made for the future, including the applying for grants to assist in the heavy up-front financial commitment necessary to begin a project with the pay-off coming in a few years due to the savings possible. He was very keen on the treatment of the downtown lakes to make them a lasting resource for the community. Much city effort is devoted to managing the storm water runoff into the local watershed.
I am sure our local Kiwanis chapter was glad to have a guest speaker; I am not sure the attendance of our city manager, a career bureaucrat working in a small town, is a matter of good fortune.
(Note: My remarks are not specific to Kiwanis, or any other civic organization; it’s the overdone characterization of an official’s presence and role that interests me.)
Wouldn’t one expect him to show up? One of the supposed benefits of small town life is that people are humble and unpretentious. I don’t mean merely that they pretend to be, but that they really are.
We’d be fortunate if a great scientist came to town, or an eminent theologian preached at a local church. Those would be rare and unexpected events, out of the ordinary.
It’s odd enough that the presence of the town’s manager seems a matter of fortune, but the emphasis on the municipal government’s role in assuring sustainability is overdone.
The idea of an indispensable city government – fixing all sorts of problems, saving us as we supposedly need saving at its hands – is just the self-absorption and narcissism of a few politicians and bureaucrats.
Our town was not built on this self-absorption, and the notion that local government is indispensable.
We’ve no reason to be star struck by the ordinary. Its foolish and embarrassing to describe events of the town as with a tone suitable only to Tiger Beat.
How this view and tone began I cannot say, but it has infected so much of local talk and our local press that we have lost our way from a clearer and simpler, unpretentious standard.