It is from little ideas that great movements are sometimes born. And this might be another such case.
It starts with the Milwaukee Brewers and their "Take Back Miller Park" promotion. It's a simple idea.
Because they had bad teams in the past and trouble selling tickets, the Brewers tried to sell tickets in Chicago and St. Louis for games against the Cubs and the Cardinals. And they were very successful.
Now, however, optimism reigns and hopes are both legitimate and high and the Brewers want to escalate that feud with Cardinals and Cubs fans and try to sell those tickets to Brewers fans and shut out the other two groups.
It's a great idea. But it doesn't go far enough.
Let's face it. From conflicts and rivalries wonderful things are born. Think World War II and the Hummer.
What Milwaukee needs is a rival. We spend a lot of time in this city talking about how wonderful things are. But, compared to what? We don't have a rival that we can compete with. Dallas has Houston. Miami has Orlando. New York has Chicago. Philadelphia has Pittsburgh.
Picking a rival is tricky business. It's not like picking a sister city. I think we have sister cities in Central America, South America and Europe. But we really don't have much to do with them, with the exception of sending occasional CARE packages.
A rival city is much different. You've got to have regular contact with them. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel would have to set up a bureau in the city to report on all the bad news that happens there. OnMilwaukee.com would have to run a calendar of things to do in the rival city, but would have to leave half the things off so it looks like a desert with an occasional oasis of entertainment.
So, geography is kind of important. You want to be able to actually see how much better we are than our rival.
The other main consideration is how good our rival is. Do we want a city we can beat up on, thereby making us feel superior? Or do we want a city we have to catch, thereby making us the Little City That Could?
If it's that we want to feel superior, we've got lots of candidates. In-state it could be Madison, which thinks it's an oasis of intellectual brilliance and all things cool, or Green Bay which has the Packers. I'd hesitate to go against the Packers.
If we want to go out of state we've got a trio of candidates: Dubuque, Iowa; Red Wing, Minn. and Rockford, Ill. We've already got them crushed by almost any measure. So that's our built-in slogan: "Milwaukee -- We Are Not Dubuque!"
Dubuque may work in the short term, but after we've got everybody believing, where do we go from there. The Iowa town may not have the cachet needed to be a true rival city.
The other choice for a rival is to pick a city that's got more than we do and whom we are trying to catch. There are only two contenders in our area, Minneapolis and Chicago.
Minneapolis is a close call. It's a great, great town for live music, it's got the Guthrie Theatre, their symphony isn't very good, the weather sucks and it's got a city ego that is out of control. They've got all the sports, although they almost never win anything. And the population of the Twin Cities is similar to Milwaukee's.
They you've got Chicago: City of big shoulders. Big music. Big theater. Big restaurants. Big banks. Big population. Big, big ego.
Chicago may be ripe for our rival city. Its attention is diverted by trying to be New York. We could sneak up on them.
We already have a lot of things that are better. Our sports teams are better. Our symphony orchestra is arguably better. We have a better Shakespeare company. Our streets are cleaner. Our people are nicer. We don't have as many murders.
We can run stories in the newspaper and on television and online about how good we are compared to Chicago. And pretty soon we will start to believe it.
I can see the new slogan now.
"Chicago -- The Milwaukee of Illinois."
