There is something about the Foxconn 'development' in Racine County that keeps keeps displaying a penchant for parody.
You can begin with Donald Trump saying the promised complex would be The Eighth Wonder of the World. You knew as soon as you heard that there would be heartbreak dead ahead.
Because the days of building destinations like The Great Pyramid of Giza or the Hanging Gardens of Babylon were long gone, especially if the guy who was making the pledge was the same guy had managed to run three casinos into the ground in Atlantic City.
For another thing, Trump, the company and Team Walker decided that the bulldozing of wetlands, homes and farms for this wondrous project would take place in a Village named Mount Pleasant. This image following a not-so-unusual Wisconsin rainstorm after the bulldozing had begun -
- suggested that something really unpleasant and out of character was taking in Mount Pleasant.
Which was literally undermining the message and the way things had been there.
Then there was Walker's insistence that the bulldozed site was to be known as "Wisconn Valley." Where he said "a whole 'entire ecosystem," complete with 13,000 high-paying jobs, would be created:
Gov. Scott Walker: Foxconn jobs will create an entire ‘ecosystem’ in ‘Wisconn Valley’
Again. There is no Wisconn Valley. It's like Narnia or Dune. You can't find it on a legitimate map. I don't even think nearby restaurants have put it on their paper placemats for the kids to color on, if that's still a thing.
Wisconn Valley [sic] was Walker's clumsy effort to associate expensive campaign prop with California's actual "Silicon Valley" at the expense of an existing agricultural ecosystem that was literally to be dug up, hauled away, and paved over as part and parcel of one of the most extensive and expensive campaign photo op in Wisconsin history.
But all Walker managed to do with the word-smithing - and not his strong suit - was contrast the world-renown Silicon Valley with his made-up, self-serving imitation that hard-landed on 'con,' just as some of his critics had been alleging.
And there is this latest bit of parody in the label affixed to the project that underscores its continuing shape-shifting from Eighth Wonder of the World status:
Days before the state declined to give the Foxconn Technology Group tax credits for work done in 2019, officials wrote that the Mount Pleasant facility "may be better suited for demonstration purposes rather than as a viable commercial glass fabrication facility."
To which I say that the project has been a demonstration of everything imaginable that could be done with public money for partisan purposes by shallow politicians including a GOP President, GOP Governor and GOP legislators at the expense of the land, water, the people's treasury and public trust.
This is not the exact definition of 'demonstration purposes' that Walker and the company had in mind, but it's what's been demonstrated by three years of reality checks and failed promises.