Hesselberg: Don't throw state in dumping debate
10:57 PM 6/11/04
George Hesselberg Wisconsin State Journal

Whenever someone starts a sentence with the words "don't you feel sorry for Wisconsin," you know that whatever you hear next, you're not going to like. <

So it was Wednesday, when Chicago Sun Times columnist Neil Steinberg started a sentence with those very words. <

Even worse, the sentence before that sentence was: "Have some pity." <

Pity? For Wisconsin? Where pity is almost the official state angst? <

Steinberg was casually chiding his congressman, Mark Kirk, for describing Wisconsin waste polluting Lake Michigan as "cheesehead sewer water." <

As he wrote: "While I'm normally indifferent to the feelings of the justly maligned, this is Wisconsin we're talking about. Have some pity. Don't you feel sorry for Wisconsin? I sure do. So close to Chicago, yet still an isolated nowhere of cows and dogtracks and cheese, populated by those who never got their lives together enough to move here. Wisconsin is like the dim brother who lives in the basement and nobody talks about. You don't want him teased." <

Well, uh, thanks. <

Steinberg and his amusing friend are correct about the sewage, though there is a perpetual debate within the confines of nowhere (Wisconsin) about whether Milwaukee area residents qualify as "cheeseheads." (Even though the spongy non-cheese-colored headgear was invented there.) <

The sewage? Last month the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District dumped 4.6 billion gallons of untreated sewage - known also rather untastefully as "raw" sewage - into Lake Michigan, where it disappeared. I guess Chicago found it. <

Recent news reports from Milwaukee quote Environmental Protection Agency officials as considering this to be "extremely serious." (I wonder how many billions it would take for it to be "great, big, huge, honking intolerable.") <

The solution, the officials predicted, will be "complex, expensive and time-consuming." <

A person almost - almost - might prefer to dip a pinkie into the pretty, multi-colored waters around Navy Pier. <

Why any city would want to dump bad things into the body of water upon which it places some pride and a few big boats is beyond me. In Madison, we do it the old-fashioned way. We simply spread it on our lawns and let nature take its course. We would prefer, ahem, that Milwaukee and Chicago keep this exchange of, um, inflammable rhetoric, between themselves. <

But Steinberg had to throw the whole state into the mix, which makes some of his pity well-aimed. We, too, pity Milwaukee. <

Except for that part about "Wisconsin is like the dim brother who lives in the basement and nobody talks about. You don't want him teased." <

He's got this all wrong. <

That's not our brother in the basement, that's our cousin from Illinois. <

Please pass the pity, and when the wind is blowing just right in Chicago, you know they have just flushed in Milwaukee. <

Which just shows, though we may have never gotten our lives together enough to move to Chicago, parts of us just seem to belong there. <

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Reach George Hesselberg at 252-6140, or at the Wisconsin State Journal, P.O. Box 8058, Madison, WI 53708 or at ghesselberg@madison.com.