The first two episodes of the new AMC series The Prisoner were televised last night. I expected only one; two episodes were a surprise treat. I will post a review of the first episode today, and the second tomorrow (a change of plan, as I didn’t know that there would be two episodes last night).

Spoiler Alert – this review will reveal sundry details of the episode.

The Prisoner is the story of a man who finds himself in a small, mysterious community called The Village (the definite article is always capitalized). He doesn’t know how he got there, where it is, or who runs it.

As for his own life, only fragmentary memories remain of time spent somewhere else, and he finds that instead of a name, he is now only a number: Number 6. An older man, named Number 2, seems to run The Village, or at least is the most visible authority in the community. The Village has no apparent nationality, so one doesn’t know Number 2’s connection to any country or agency.

There are aspects of the story that are oddly funny, and applicable to life in an eccentric rural town. When Number 6 is surprised that a shopkeeper he’s never met greets him by his new, numerical name, the shopkeeper reassures that there’s nothing odd, as “everybody knows everybody.”

There’s some of that familiarity in small town life, but even more, sometimes the expectation of it. Not knowing someone can be jarring to longtime residents, in a way it would never be to someone in a far larger place, without the presumption of familiarity.

In the episode, Number 6 finds that The Village, though small, is a uniform and planned community. Many of the houses look the same, and he finds one marked 6, intended just for him. (He’s simply expected to move in; no deed required.)

I’m sure that when people think about the small-town Midwest, from places far away, they think about a simple and unplanned life. In urban communities of stifling regulation, a town like Whitewater, Wisconsin must seem like an oasis of simplicity.

We were surely less regulated once, but we’re far more so now. Though we have thousands instead of hundreds of thousands, we’ve still fallen prey and under the sway of community planning.

Only recently, our city’s planning commission – we have one – reviewed a comprehensive plan for the town. The plan is proposed to guide community development for the next twenty years.

What will be useful of it, or from it, by then no one can say. It’s available online, at Comprehensive Plan.

There’s another aspect of life in The Village that Number 6 encounters not long after arrival – the unwillingness of most fellow residents to admit that there might be something outside the town.

Two people Number 6 meets, Numbers 93 and 313, have drawn pictures of things they hazily recall seeing before arriving at The Village. (I won’t say what they draw, except to note that both pictures are landmarks from two great cities.)

Number 6 also finds that those who recall something beyond The Village don’t seem to fare well; they have a reduced life prospects. The Village isn’t a place that favors too many questions, where even one is the beginning of too many.

Is there anything good about The Village? Well, it’s sunny, and everyone seems well dressed.

I doubt, though, that clothes truly make the man.

Some months ago, at the suggestion of a particularly sharp reader, I created a weekly feature called Prisoner Monday, in which I posted video excerpts from the British television series The Prisoner.

The series describes the adventures of a man who finds himself in a mysterious place called The Village, and his quest to find out who he is, what The Village is, who runs it, and to return to London.

The AMC cable channel now has a new version of the series, beginning this Sunday at 7 PM central time.

So, is Whitewater, Wisconsin like the Village? Well, the taglines of the new series – there seem to be two different ones – are “You Only Think You’re Free” and “No Man is a Number.” On the AMC website, clicking on a map of The Village activates a voiceover that says, “Welcome to The Village: Everybody Knows Everybody!”

I believe in free will, even in conditions of stodgy town fathers and petty planners, so I’d probably disagree with the first tagline. If it were true that there were no free will, then I’d probably not be able to publish an account of life in Whitewater as candid as the one I write.

The second tagline is true – no man is (merely) a number.

The third – about everybody knowing everybody – is just funny. It often seems that everybody knows everybody else, sometimes to comical effect.

That brings to mind a truth about cheerleading here – it’s completely humorless, bland, oh-so-earnest, and so terribly serious.

It’s normal to tease about a place, any place, as well as criticize or praise. It’s only in a place that has gone dry and become humorless that even normal commentary seems an affront to life itself.

And that, candidly, is the kind of life one would only expect in The Village, and not an American small town.

Update, 1:32 PM: I carelessly forgot to mention that I will offer commentary on each episode of the new series, with reference to Whitewater’s political and social scene. I’ll post on each episode the day after it’s first televised.

Somewhere, there must be books that describe how one should properly and appropriately set table, with the correct and approved position of plates, glasses, knives, forks, and spoons.

I have never read any of those books, nor felt that I should. When I go to a restaurant, I assume that the owner has figured all that out, and I’m not going to spend time wondering, in any event. At home, at table, I am interested only with the conversation, and not the place setting. The arrangement of glasses and plates adds nothing to me, or to anyone else with me.

A man is more than things, and more than their fussy arrangement.

But you know, and I know, that these things matter to some people. There’s a sense of meaning, and worse, a sense of hierarchy, for some in the knowledge of these rules.

One of the great advantages of American and Wisconsin life – now disappearing – is how causal we are. We are not a fussy people. One often assumes that residents of small towns follow this simpler life.

In many ways we do; in others we have become overly concerned about what’s polite, appropriate, and proper. We are reputed as simple and straightforward, but we have become mannered, complicated, obscure, and fussy.

There’s a good deal that’s self-serving in this change, a way to impose a barrier or objection to someone at a meeting, or to disqualify objections to policy.

There’s no natural reason in any of this; it’s an artificial objection from those looking for a easy, if empty, way out.

Consider the urban chicken movement, one that your city, if far from rural America, may have adopted. Urban residents are permitted to own a chicken or two, for fresh eggs, and perhaps as part of an effort at greener living.

I am not sure how convenient it would be, or how green. No matter: in many rural towns, it would be both illegal and objectionable.

Whitewater has an ordinance against livestock on land of less than two acres, and although the ordinance does not mention chickens, it is written broadly, to implicate species not expressly mentioned.

(This presumably allows the city to rule against someone who might splice together a pig and a cow, calling it a pow, and putting it in his backyard. Many of our ordinances are written broadly, in a way that permits the city to rule restrictively and expansively. Some, although not this one particularly, are likely unenforceable at law as overbroad, vague, or contradictory to state law.)

But let’s be clear: urban chickens would be unwelcome here for social reasons – because they remind some of rural origins they would otherwise like to forget, now imagining themselves more sophisticated than mere farm life.

That brings me to the AMC television program Mad Men, and one of its characters. One of the leading characters in the third season is an English executive who leaves London to oversee an ad agency in 1963 Manhattan.

He finds New York a refreshing and liberating change after the stuffy and restrictive manners of early 60s London. He tells his wife, happily, that even after months working in Manhattan, no one has bothered to ask where he went to school. The English executive learns that the go-getter Americans just don’t care as much as his native countrymen would.

The American way, I am sure, was and is better; it just shouldn’t matter so much.

We have adopted empty manners, and servilely expected deference to them, in contradiction to the more direct and casual small town way of life.

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.

Whitewater, Wisconsin has a common council form of government. There are seven members to the common council, five elected from districts across parts of the city, and two elected city wide, from across the town. Together, they are both the legislative, and executive, authority in town.

We have not merely a common council, but also a city manager, an appointed official who serves for a specified contractual term. Often, one will hear that we have a council-manager form of government.

The city manager’s position is not a true executive, as an elected mayor would be. It’s an appointed position for a term, and it has no independent power apart from the common council that appoints. There are specified duties, under our ordinances and Wisconsin law, but the authority of the position does not derive from, for example, a direct election of the municipal manager by the town’s voters.

Nor is the managerial authority like that of a parliamentary system, where the executive authority derives directly from the legislative, as a British government would derive from Parliament itself (and be liable to dissolution and new elections without sufficient legislative support).

You may have heard, and imagined, that small towns like ours must surely have a mayor, elected by the townsfolk, who governs wisely and well with their support.

We have no one so elected. We have a manager, and not a mayor; unelected, and not a direct choice of the people; responsible for conventional tasks, but never with a popular mandate.

Our situation produces several problems that make governance hard. First, our elected officials often come to office with only a hundred or so votes, from a population – large to us, if not the outside world – of fourteen thousand.

Even an at large representative will likely come to office with only several hundred votes, still a small fraction of the entire town.

State and federal candidates typically receive far more votes city wide than our local politicians.

There’s no one who can claim a mandate under those conditions. We had a candidate recently declare herself, I recall, The Voice of the People, but that would only be convincing if all the town had laryngitis.

Second, the position of city manager may by design be meant as a limited and appointed task, but it’s not long before the manager-bureaucrat begins to assert himself as though he were elected by acclaim.

So, even in a rural town, one hears about the city manager’s vision, etc. It’s not long before a career bureaucrat becomes instrumental – at least in his own eyes – to the survival of a small town founded without any bureaucrats at all.

Worse still, there may slowly develop the habit of cherry picking popular tasks, or shifting between insistence that managerial authority is broad (so that the city manager can insert himself in local matters he finds interesting or laudable) and that it’s narrow (and so problems are really the common council’s fault).

Third, it’s governance that suffers in this arrangement – the basic and fundamental assurance of a citizen’s or resident that rights will be respected and laws enforced fairly.

That’s the promise of America for all Americans, and small towns are respected, from among many reasons, for the individual respect and consideration each resident would like.

Some in Los Angeles would have to spend hours just to get to a city office, and then sit while hundreds of people milled around, a significant portion of them having no idea why.

We don’t have that problem; we can find city offices without a battle against traffic.

Yet management and governance are not the same. We have a small town that has acquired urban conceits of management, planning, and public relations over simple yet fundamental governance.

One of the attributes of many small rural towns is that they risk stagnation, and thereafter decline, either relative or absolute.

For many in America, the idea of any decline seems absurd. Residents of a Maryland suburb may worry about too much growth, and crowding.

Believe it or not, we have some who share the same worries about growth. Your Maryland suburb might be ten times larger, yet we have residents in our rural town who would be as vexed about growth here as your neighbors in Maryland might be.

Yet even though we’re a small town, among us there will be different views, and a different impact, to and about growth. Not everyone will feel stagnation and decline in the same way.

A merchant may quickly notice a drop in traffic, in town, and thus in her store. The same cannot be said for city bureaucrats, or workers with private-sector jobs not dependent on the city’s economy. For them, less is not so immediately painful. A five percent decline in retail traffic may mean nothing; for the merchant, the same will not be true.

There’s a gap of this kind, even in a small place – between those who feel stagnation and decline acutely, and those who feel it scarcely at all.

It’s only after several storefronts and businesses are shuttered that residents may notice; it may be far longer still until those residents feel a damaging influence from the closings.

A bureaucrat, with a publicly-supported income, has even less reason to worry. After a while, a place that was built on individual initiative becomes a place where a few regulate without a feel for those who have to make their way in the world on private achievement.

It’s easy for a bureaucrat to talk about customer service, when his customers are a mostly captive audience. It’s hard to see how it happens in a place that’s not very large, and where city politicians and career-appointees should be close to their constituents.

Yet, even when those constituents are described as customers, the result is the same: a surprising gap between bureaucrats and ordinary residents.

In my next post, I will discuss how thin and fragile is the constituency for local leaders.

America is a dynamic and competitive place. The rise of America, from defeat of a haughty empire, her expansion across an entire continent, to her current prosperity owe to individual liberty, free enterprise, and a hope for peaceful commerce with the world beyond.

A people with these values could not be expected to stand still, live complacently, or remain unchanging. The liberty we enjoy as a right requires no fixed outcome. America has no definite end, no fixed objective – liberty is a daily condition, to be exercised and expressed as each generation sees fit.

Those who founded the city lived in conditions different from our own, and we’d have had no progress at all if we lived in the same conditions of industry, medicine, and technology. Machines they could scarcely imagine – and surely could not create through planning – improve our daily lives.

America’s invitation to the American dream is not an invitation to an unchanging, white-tie affair. She is not so formal and fixed in her invitation – America sends out only come-as-you-are invitations.

There are some here, perhaps a few hundred, who are very sure that they have a right to rescind America’s genuine invitation, and replace it with a substitute. No matter how shrilly they insist that the substitution represents a genuine representation, it’s a betrayal of both Whitewater’s actual origins and America’s dynamic promise.

The students who came here more than a generation ago sometimes lived as borders in local homes, taking a room within a private homeowner’s house. Those where the conditions of student life in many places at that time, decades ago. That arrangement was surely comfortable for otherwise suspicious locals, who had students under their watchful eyes, in metaphor and practice.

Yet, beyond our small town, American college life was changing. As we grew richer, so did our children, and in their waxing prosperity they came to expect places of their own, with other students, without status as borders in a house.

Increasing prosperity for our nation changed expectations and abilities for students. You can imagine how this has affected some longtime residents – how it has unsettled them, how they long for the old way of borders and busybodies.

Too bad for those who want that older way – American success and advancing standards have swept these old ways aside, and they will never be back. Those who wish we might go back, as a city, have no hope whatever that their wishes will be fulfilled.

America extends an invitation to students with modern and prosperous expectations, and nothing a few hundred complainers will say or do can resist that changed national standard.

What these small and selfish people want – to hold others back through every addled and asinine regulation imaginable – cannot succeed. Three hundred million people across this continent have established a new standard that no one here can roll back.

That doesn’t mean they won’t try. Try they have, and will. The outcome will be the same, there efforts amounting to nothing.

And what of the many immigrants, most from Mexico, who have come here? They are more numerous than our last census count suggests, and now are surely more than one in ten of our population.

Other rural towns would consider it a deliverance that any number so large might move among them, stay, and raise families. We have the dream of so many other places, and yet a few here secretly and quietly consider it a nightmare.

There are few things more disgusting, despicable, and empty than Americans – of all people – who despise immigrants. It’s as close to a perversion of the American dream as one can imagine.

It’s also imprudent and self-destructive. Our economic future depends on attracting others, to come and live among us. We should be grateful for every last one.

When some oppose students, or immigrants, on the basis of what’s supposedly good for Whitewater, we should be clear that that opposition is in opposition to American progress and principle.

Small rural towns in America have their best chance of survival as small, rural, American towns.

By contrast, opposition to American opportunities and progress only condemns a town to comparative decline, no matter the steadfast opposition of a dimwitted, listless few.

If you’ve read recent studies or articles about small town America, then you have read that many rural towns struggle to maintain residents. They find themselves shriveling and withering, unable to assure a prosperous future for the next generation of residents.

It’s a hard problem, and efforts to overcome a decline in population – no matter how strenuous and sincere – often fail. The best efforts of these places might seem laughable, were they not so sad.

Whitewater, Wisconsin does not confront the desiccation that afflicts these other places. Two groups – vibrant and energetic – give Whitewater opportunities and hope that shriveling places elsewhere do not have.

We have thousands of students on a campus in town, and thousands of immigrants, mostly from Mexico, who have come to Whitewater. These groups offer us possibilities that other rural towns cannot hope to match.

Without them, this town would collapse – as it once did – into poverty and disgrace. The City of Whitewater, and all its proud Scandinavian and German residents, would live in a bankrupt and decayed shell of a town without students on campus and so many immigrants willing to venture their futures here.

Why did they come? America brought them here – the American dream of an education or a job, the hope of a good life regardless of race or ethnicity or class. America at her best supports and encourages as much, as part of the dream of a better life.

We are a nation of individualists and optimists, and the American way encourages respect and tolerance for diverse dreams and ambitions. It hasn’t always been so, surely. Some of our worst moments have come when we have departed from our fundamental principles.

In their hopes and ambitions, the students and immigrant newcomers to our community are closer to the founders of this town than to those who now claim to represent their legacy.

They’re far closer – regardless of age or ethnicity, those who come here for an education or a place in the community embody an ambition and adventurous spirit more like those who settled here than long-standing residents who decry their presence.

They did not come uninvited – America extended an invitation, and a certain and specific one. In my next post, I’ll describe that specific American invitation, and why it threatens a certain, small group of stodgy, dull, and listless residents.

Walk around Whitewater, and talk to those who are elderly, lifetime residents, and you’re sure to catch their nostalgia for an older Whitewater. About the Whitewater of their youth, and how the town has changed, I will comment later.

For now, I’ll describe how the present day residents, often Scandinavian-American and German-Americans, among our town’s elderly are mistaken to think that they embody the same industry and initiative as their forebears.

They don’t represent that settler’s initiative, and they don’t represent modern American trends well, either.

First, our past. We’re big in nostalgia, on that hazy backward glance, without the real reflection and pain that the glance might occasion.

Those who came here came to hard conditions, and faced those conditions alone. They brought their families with them, or had children here, in conditions more primitive than those on the east coast. Children were born, raised and taught, and set out on their own, in conditions that would call for the intervention of child welfare officials today.

In writing as much, I may sound like one of those elderly residents myself. I have a different point to make. Having lived here and claimed a heritage that was built on initiative and improvisation, they now find themselves opposed to others, against the initiative and improvisation of newcomers.

This is a dynamic in many places, but in ours, too: that the elderly whose place in the community owes to settlers and pioneers now contend against a modern-day pioneering spirit of newcomers, from elsewhere in America or from Mexico.

You can guess that the original settlers to this place were a hard scrabble lot. These were not fancy people. Many were rough and tumble, having come from European villages that were little more than shabby, dank hovels.

Now, though, one would think that every Scandinavian or German background was one of opulence and privilege, and that it is only others, from other parts of the world, who are vulgar.

Hardly.

Now I have mentioned the elderly, but it’s not only some of our septuagenarians and octogenarians who feel this way. There’s a certain kind of working class or middle class resident, of any age, who feels the threat of the new.

And in response to this threat, they support regulations, restrictions, and requirements that would never have been placed on them. Like graduates of a college who demand higher standards only after receiving their degrees, these residents want to raise the entrance now that they’re in.

From the individualism on which America was founded, they now espouse restrictions for others, all in the name of preserving a community that could not have come into existence under similar restrictions.

What, specifically, of the new threatens our elderly or long standing residents? They are among the greatest advantages of our town, ones that preserve us, and offer hope for the future, but are the very things that some residents find most threatening.

I’ll consider both in my next post.

In 1837, a group of settlers left Milwaukee for the area now Whitewater, and arrived after little under a week’s travel. They were the first settlers to arrive at a place where only tribes had lived before.

If you’re reading from the east coast, 1837 may not seem nearly as early or as hazardous as original settlements in your home state. It was hard, though, to travel the distance from Milwaukee, over uncertain terrain.

Those early settlers came to Whitewater with ambition, commitment, and dedication to a hard task. Yet they came without something that so many earlier colonial settlements had – they came without the backing of king and financiers, without a great court behind them. They came as a group, risking as individuals and families.

There is, in that settlement, and so many others like it throughout the Midwest, a fundamental belief about small-town America. In stories and film, small towns like Whitewater are often exemplars of individual effort, endurance, and achievement. The individual liberty and enterprise that America’s founders saw as part of the American promise is supposed to be a cardinal virtue of small town life.

Perhaps America’s lost her way, grown jaded and soft, but surely that’s not true for a place like Whitewater, Wisconsin. The admirable and the good of American individualism and private energy should be alive here, in my town, if anywhere.

One of the themes of this website is that small-town Whitewater has lost its way, drifted from the ambition and energy and private ingenuity of America, into the habit of declaring success rather than achieving it. The more we insist – sometimes comically – on our own exceptionism, the farther we slip from what is truly exceptional and astonishing about America.

I’ll not speculate about whether the kind of individualism and commitment Whitewater’s settlers exhibited flourishes elsewhere in America. I am quite sure that it does. Sadly, we’ve abandoned it here, in favor of a culture that resists private initiative, and insists on the role of a small but intrusive local government in residents’ lives.

Whitewater’s an example of what goes wrong, what still goes right, and what could be far better, if we set aside an empty and self-serving local exceptionalism for the true and American exceptionalism of individual liberty, private initiative, and openness to new people and ideas.

America began as a collection of villages and towns, of tribes, settlers, colonists, and later, citizens. We had no indispensable great city, no Rome or London, on which all depended.

We still don’t. Yet, we have changed, so very much, and America is no longer a collection of small, rural towns. When we refer to small-town America, we refer to something now the exception. We’ve become a nation of big cities and suburbs, with rural America more a matter of geography than population.

I live in Whitewater, Wisconsin, a small town of fourteen thousand in southeastern Wisconsin. You may have stumbled on this website one way or another, and are curious about life here.

It may not be what you think. When people ask me about small town America, I often ask them in reply: What do think rural America’s like?

I find people from suburbs or big cities often have two ideas about life in a small, Midwestern town: that there’s a lack of cultural offerings, and that everyone is like something out of Mayberry RFD, happy, honest, and homespun.

Neither’s true. We may lack the prominent museums of major cities, but easy travel and an easier Internet brings art and theater and music to an entire continent, of which we’re no less a part. We’re home to a college campus of the University of Wisconsin system, and we have the benefits of music and theater there.

We’re also a more prickly, difficult, and uncertain place than a Hollywood depiction or local marketing campaign would suggest.

There’s a scarcely noticed irony in Whitewater, a town that proudly describes itself as an exceptional community: the more we insist on our exceptionalism, the farther we fall from what is truly exceptional about small town America, and all America. The insistence on looking good, and insisting that all is good, makes neither truly possible.

Rural America – like all America – was built on genuine principles that required neither embellishment nor insistence. Somewhere along the way, Whitewater (and other towns, surely) lost confidence in the embrace of fundamental American principles of individualism, openness, and accountability.

Beneath the empty cheerleading and shrill insistence that all is well, wonderful, and exceptional, there’s a real town – sadder, harder, less confident, and more troubled.

Yet, more beautiful, too, than any saccharine account. Our town is better, and can be far better still, when we face the truth of our condition. The solutions to the problems of rural America are not hard to find – they’re right before us – in an abandonment of the slogans and gimmicks, and in a return to initiative, enterprise, and integrity.

Over the next month, I’ll describe some of the places and people of our town, looking behind the superficial, to tell you more about what Whitewater, Wisconsin’s truly like.