You Had Me at ‘No Dysentery’

Clean water, the Brewers, and an opinion I’m willing to abandon

There’s a scene in the movie Wayne’s World where Alice Cooper explains that Milwaukee had at one point elected three socialist mayors. To which a dumbfounded and starstruck Wayne replies, “Does this guy know how to party or what!?”

When I first watched the movie as a 17-year-old in 1992…my response was just like Wayne’s. I came for booze and hot chicks, not a dissertation on municipal government. Thirty-four years later, I’d like Wayne to shut up and let Alice finish.

With an election this week and the Brewers winning the World Series, I’ve been thinking a lot about how Milwaukee fits into the broader discussion of America. Before you pull a Wayne and exit early, please bear with me.

There will be fertilizer.

At the trade deadline, many believed Milwaukee should’ve gone “all-in” for pitcher Tarik Skubal. The Brewers made several offers but wouldn’t include their top prospect, and Skubal wound up elsewhere. “All-in” is an especially attractive philosophy when you’re tweeting about somebody else’s chips.

Now the Brewers are World Series champions, because their front office brilliantly “trusted its people.” Had they lost, we’d be talking about “A Culture of Complacency,” which is the polite way of saying the dumbasses refused to get better people.

In America, we wait until the game is decided before explaining why the result was inevitable.

As a college football coach, part of my job was studying other programs to figure out what concepts I could steal. Some of the best ideas came from places you might never think to look. Places like the University of Chicago. Oh sure, people know the school produces brilliant minds. They just assume those minds are working on nuclear fusion, not how to attack a 3-5 stack.

At smaller programs, you have to figure out what the players you actually have can do, and find inventive ways to make that enough. Sure, you can wear the same brand of polo as Nick Saban at Alabama - but unfortunately it won’t come with the same defensive line.

Hal Mumme and Mike Leach teamed up at tiny Iowa Wesleyan in 1989 and developed the Air Raid offense. Three years ago, the school went belly up. But the ideas those coaches put into action are still in use today, by big and small programs alike.

Sometimes as a coach the answer isn’t just to go get better players - because sometimes you can’t. Which means you have to take a harder look at what you already have. I encountered this philosophy constantly in football but have resisted applying it to my golf game for years.

Because why take a $50 lesson when I can instead go buy a $500 driver?

Milwaukee’s socialists faced a similar management problem. An industrial city full of working people needed clean government, decent services, and water that didn’t involve a bout with dysentery. Between 1910 and 1960, three socialist mayors held office for a combined thirty-eight years.

In today’s political climate, we often skip directly from “socialist” to Stalin. Milwaukee took a detour through the budget office. Its socialists believed in workers’ rights and public ownership, and developed a reputation for honest administration, public health, and making the city work¹.

Emil Seidel’s administration even held a public exhibition explaining the city budget. Imagine trying to build an attack ad around that. “Emil Seidel wants you to understand the city’s budget. Haven’t you suffered enough?”

They invested in parks, education, and sanitation. Harmless enough, until someone calls it socialism. Then you have to explain how a functioning slide leads to the collapse of Western civilization.

Milwaukee’s sewage-treatment work even produced Milorganite, a fertilizer made from the nutrient-rich microbes left by the process. Production began in 1926 and continues to this day. Meaning there is a good chance I’ve taken a divot on golf course turf fertilized by my neighbors’ shit.

🏌🏽‍♂️ 💩 🏌🏽‍♂️ 💩 🏌🏽‍♂️ 💩 🏌🏽‍♂️ 💩 🏌🏽‍♂️ 💩 🏌🏽‍♂️ 💩

I’m beginning to suspect we sometimes overlook useful people because they don’t come packaged the way we expect them to:

• A coach at Iowa Wesleyan.

• A mayor interested in wastewater.

• A character actor who makes every movie he’s in infinitely better.

A century ago, Milwaukee’s public servants figured out how to make something useful out of sewage. Last week, their baseball team did the same with a roster of players many organizations would’ve shipped to the Island of Misfit Toys.

Of course, I’ve arrived at all of this because the Brewers won. Had they lost, this would’ve been an essay about how baseball, like the American economy, is rigged in favor of the rich.

But hey, there’s always next year.

This week’s book recommendation

Maverick hasn’t read it yet, but he’s an opinionated sucker. I’m sure he’ll have a take.

Malcolm Gladwell is one of my favorite authors, and I had been saving his newest book, The American Way of Killing, for later this winter. But when I had an unexpected plane flight to take (thank you Brewers!), I couldn’t resist.

It did not disappoint. By the time we flew to Tampa and back, I was about 95% done. I savored that last five percent over the course of the next few days because I didn’t want it to end. It made me reconsider what I thought I knew about the Second Amendment - which stinks because I enjoy having opinions. Having to adjust them is becoming a bit of a burden.

And joining the book and Maverick in the picture is one of those narrow pieces of cardboard I mentioned a few weeks ago. Thanks to all of you who’ve become paid subscribers since then!

STAY THIRSTY MY FRIENDS

1. In fact, they did such a good job of it that the Democratic Party adopted many of its causes.