Good morning.
Wednesday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of 73. Sunrise is 5:18 AM and sunset 8:27 PM for 15h 08m 37s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 3.7% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1980, Cable News Network (CNN) launches.
Every town, big or small, has some tiny number who will, when in disagreement, ask ‘Don’t you know who I am?‘ The right reply — in the full meaning of right — should be ‘Well, yes, you are no more or less than any other.’ For those who ask the arrogant question, the right answer will be unexpected and unsatisfying. Someone could drain a bottle of Chivas and not be half so drunk as a man drunk on pride.
It’s not, however, the predictable presence of a few self-important people that defines a culture. It’s the presence of more than a few, holding sway over others, that defines a culture. In Whitewater, the status culture that led to the question ‘Don’t you know who I am?‘ has passed. There may be some in Whitewater who still ask the question, but they’ve no significant social group behind them. They perhaps imagine that they do, but then people imagine many things, and kid themselves about many things.
Here’s why, the question DYKWIA?, a question that emerges in status-based cultures, is now longer significant in Whitewater:
1. The Great Recession. Economic declines needn’t alter a culture, but unaddressed declines will. So it has been in Whitewater: the Great Recession, lasting from 2007-2009, brought change from which Whitewater’s status-based culture could not recover. The Great Recession was a plague that brought other plagues. From that recession came stagnation, addiction, and an erosion of social bonds. Old Whitewater did not understand the significance of the Great Recession on the community, and so carried on with boosterism during and after that economic downturn. This was a fundamental — a decisive — mistake.
Whitewater went from a sunburn to melanoma, but Old Whitewater went on applying cocoa butter.
2. Consequently… From that inability to shift course, local, state, and national stresses moved different groups within the city in different directions. Some moved left, some right, some others into debilitating malaise. The center-left became more active after Act 10, and the right moved from Walker to Trump so completely that Walker soon became an afterthought.
By the mid-Teens, during Trump’s rise, Whitewater’s existing demographic splits (students and non-students, Latinos and Anglos, working class and middle class) became yet more fractured by ideology and socio-economics).
3. Under Division, ‘DYKWIA?’ Means Much Less. Two years ago, when I wrote about a local politician’s misplaced notion that a particular family name was the most important in Whitewater, I wrote about it as an ethically mistaken way of seeing Whitewater through the names of a few families.
I always intended, but never completed, a second part to that post, about the factually mistaken nature of the claim. By the time (in 2017) that the councilman rebuked a student reporter for ignorance of “undoubtedly the best known surname in Whitewater” it should have been evident to him that Whitewater no longer had a single best-known surname. The city had become too diverse, with different groups too particularly occupied, to care about a given family name.
Perhaps the councilman cared, and perhaps he truly believed, but his horizon captured only a part of the city’s fourteen thousand residents. He wanted to rebuke a student reporter for not recognizing a family name, but it should have been obvious that most students on campus, and most residents beyond, cared more about the use of buildings than the names on the side.
When that politician (now out of office) ventured an opinion about the Whitewater’s society, he thought that he was writing about the society in the present; he was instead writing about an irrecuperable past that had already faded by 2017. Stand too close, and one cannot see the forest for the trees…
There’s a sad irony in the decline of ‘DYKWIA?’ This libertarian blogger, and many others in Whitewater, wanted Old Whitewater’s small-minded status culture to end through a universal recognition of the equal value of each person. Instead, that status culture ended for another reason: the city became too fragmented for the question ‘Don’t you know who I am?’ to resonate widely.
Previously: Old Whitewater’s 3 Big Mistakes.
Egypt unveils massive haul of newly discovered ancient artefacts in Saqqara: