What Would it Be Like to Care About Wisconsin? Imagining an Alternate Political Self

I'd have to be one of those people who think of teachers in the way that Hollywood asks us to in those hit movies where a failing school wracked by ill-discipline at every level is gradually led by a person of simple tastes, unsexy habits, and not-for-profit hair through a painful but redemptive process of acknowledging, pursuing, and satisfying its latent desire for greatness. I'd also have to be able to forget my actual teachers, who often dismissed or ridiculed my overt desire for greatness and whose unprepossessing looks and manners seemed less to suggest nobility of spirit than uncertainty of body.

I'd have to be one of those people who aren't distracted, when watching TV or browsing on the Internet, by lurid celebrity gossip; or, rather, who are distracted by such gossip but know it to be merely that, a lurid distraction, and whose intellectual compass needles reliably return (after some wiggling) to topics such as fiscal years, parliamentary procedure, and collective bargaining.

I'd have to be able to sustain aesthetic interest in Governor Scott Walker's face, a sort of embryonically indistinct contemporary male conservative visage that seems, like a stem cell, capable of growing into the faces of most of Walker's peers, but particularly Mitt Romney's. Which may be another way of saying this: Walker's face appears to be the average of the family of faces that Romney's is the ideal of.

I'd have to be able to shift cultural perspectives and take the state of Wisconsin seriously as a stage for Vital Political Dramas With Ramifications for Our National Future rather than continuing to see it as a comical repository of dated White Ethnic folkways, one of which is belonging to labor unions and others of which are eating sausage and bowling.