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February182005

If you want to be a badger

Filed under: Looked Into   Tagged: , , , , ,

"Madison has its own reasons not to feel warm and fuzzy where The New Yorker is concerned," writes Doug Moe of our mutual hometown (and Lorrie Moore's adopted one). Like many Midwesterners I know, Madison has a quiet countenance and a long memory, and Mad Town has endured more slights to its good name than Oconomowoc has syllables. Moe describes a wound as deep as a chainsaw cut through ice:


In the fall of 2001, just weeks after the terrorist attacks in New York City, another New Yorker writer, Mark Singer, came to Madison after hearing the city was in an uproar involving the School Board and the Pledge of Allegiance, which eventually resulted in the ultimately unsuccessful effort to recall School Board member Bill Keys.

I spoke to Singer while he was preparing his piece, and he was full of good will toward Madison. "I have never been in a place where people were more willing to talk," he said. "It's a fascinating story. You're lucky. Madison is a great place."

Then Singer's article came out, and for much of it he gave a well-written analysis of both sides of the contentious pledge debate, only to change course in the last paragraph and savage us for unseemly self-indulgence:

"Underlying the rhetoric about what a valuable civics lesson Madison has witnessed," Singer concluded, "there's a less noble quality, a failure to acknowledge the self-indulgence implicit in all the carping. The semiotics of the Pledge of Allegiance and the national anthem and the schoolhouse are abstractions that one has the luxury to dwell upon when the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and dense concentrations of grieving survivors happen to be several hundred miles away. 'Democracy' is one way to define the dialectic. Other terms apply as well."

That was nasty, as well as wrong-headed. As a letter writer to the magazine noted of our pledge debate: "At a time when political discourse is dominated by almost menacing calls for ideological unity, it is hard to imagine an issue more timely."

Well, that was almost four years ago now. I hate to break ranks with Jimmy Breslin [who called the mag pretentious after it teased him in the '60s] in on anything, but my feeling is that we should forgive and remember, to quote Lee Dreyfus.

Which would be exactly in character for a town that's repeatedly sunk the Statue of Liberty in Lake Mendota, but not all the way. Moe encourages his fellow citizens to go see Hertzberg, Chast, Gladwell, Borowitz, and the gang on the New Yorker College Tour's March 8-10 Madison stop, since "it really is a great magazine, and worth supporting." In the phrase of Wisconsin Hamlet, a character invented by my childhood friend Diane Schoff, "Ta be...er no?" In Madison—voted one of Utne Reader's Ten Most Enlightened Cities and Outside magazine's Dream Town—it's always Ta be.

New Yorker, talk of our town [Capital Times]
Lady Liberty on Lake Mendota [Museum of Hoaxes]
Madison, Wisconsin [Runner's World]
Oh, Madison [Nipposkiss]
Another Round [Jimmy Breslin review of Joseph Mitchell books, NYT]

2 comments

Comments

Few things are as satisfying as that picture of the lawn of the UW-Madison administration building covered with pink flamingoes. Oh Pail & Shovel Party, where are you when the beleaguered Madison liberals need a little humor?

AnonymousFebruary 18, 2005

Don’t forget: Madison also ranked the “best city for men to live” in the U.S. recently, in Men’s Health (http://www.visitmadison.com/uploads/media/menshealth.pdf) — though it also ranked “best binge drinking city” in the same magazine. Hm. Guess those aren’t actually incompatible.

AnonymousFebruary 18, 2005

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