Don’t get in the whey of Wisconsin’s true identity

Sometimes you have to acknowledge what you are and embrace it, even if part of you doesn’t like it.

I might wish I were tall and famous and a candidate for People Magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive. You might wish you had invented Google and appeared on the cover of Forbes. But that doesn’t change the fact that we’re regular schmoes from Wisconsin whose appeal has, to date, gone unrecognized by national periodicals.

What are we to do, attempt to pass ourselves as something we’re not in hopes of getting attention? I could spend my days strutting about in pantaloons, munching on baguettes and humming “La Marseillaise,” but that wouldn’t make me the king of France.

Alas, some in Wisconsin want our state to deny its nature and create a new identity in hopes of impressing others. They want to discontinue the state’s slogan – “America’s Dairyland” – and replace it with something that isn’t quite so, well, cheesy.

This fall the Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce business group pushed to remove the slogan from license plates. Business leaders want the world to know there’s more to Wisconsin than cheese wedges. On this point, the organization is right: There’s also sausage, beer, Harley-Davidsons and the Green Bay Packers.

But those are just the kind of traditional – they might call them tired — images business leaders want Wisconsin to shed. They want to promote exciting things happening in the state’s economy outside the agriculture sector. They point to the Taiwanese company Foxconn’s plan to build a massive high-tech manufacturing campus near Racine with help from a $3 billion state subsidy. 

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