GTAC Finds More Wetlands Than It Initially Expected In Penokees
Discovery Could Lead To Increased Costs For Mining Company

Gogebic Taconite has announced that it may again have to readjust its plan for mining iron ore in northern Wisconsin after discovering more wetlands in the Penokee Hills than it initially expected. The announcement comes a week after GTAC said it was pushing back its timeline to apply for a mining permit from next spring to next fall.

GTAC Spokesman Bob Seitz said the company will need to do more drilling and configuring. “Really we’re required to re-evaluate how the site is laid out because the law requires us to avoid wetlands — avoid, then minimize, then mitigate,” he said.

Wisconsin Wildlife Federation Director George Meyer said he’s not surprised that they’ve found more wetlands. He said with Lake Superior-effect snow piling on that region, the Penokees have the highest precipitation in Wisconsin. The National Weather Service office in Duluth says the average annual snowfall in the Hurley area is 167.5 inches.

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The Bad River Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe is downstream from the proposed mine. Tribal Chairman Mike Wiggins said that he’s worried the groundwater has already been degraded from drilling and sampling by GTAC, and that more testing is needed. “The thing about the way the laws were written is objective scientists and a regulatory framework essentially don’t exist,” said Wiggins. “So how do we know there isn’t something really negative going on there?”

African-American children still face dismal odds in Wisconsin. The state ranks last in the country in the overall well-being of African-American children based on an index of 12 measures that gauge a child's success from birth to adulthood, according to a new report being released Wednesday by the Wisconsin Council on Children & Families.

The measures, while not new, are bleak:

■ Four out of every five African-American children in Wisconsin live in poor households, compared with roughly two out of three Latino children and three out of 10 white children.

■ Seven out of 10 African-American children live in single-parent families, compared with fewer than four of 10 Latino children and roughly two of 10 white children.

■ Fewer than one in 10 in eighth grade are proficient in math, compared with almost one in five for Latino children and a bit less than one in two for white children.

> When Wisconsin volunteers marched off to the Civil War the state’s governor, Alexander W. Randall, was authorized to use $100,000 for defense.

> The state’s total military equipment at the beginning of the war was six obsolete brass cannon, 135 flint lock muskets, 796 percussion muskets and 811 rifles, all outdated. There were also 101 old pistols, 158 sabers, 44 swords and 56 tents. The first Wisconsin regiments sent to the Union army went east without weapons.

> Twice as many Wisconsin men died of disease as were killed in Civil War battle.

> Some Wisconsin regiments were made up of nationality groups. The 15th infantry regiment was largely Norwegian and was illustrated by the fact that 115 out of 899 men were named Ole.

David Foster Wallace (Credit: Hachette Book Group)

Percy Shelley famously wrote that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” For Shelley, great art had the potential to make a new world through the depth of its vision and the properties of its creation. Today, Shelley would be laughed out of the room. Lazy cynicism has replaced thoughtful conviction as the mark of an educated worldview. Indeed, cynicism saturates popular culture, and it has afflicted contemporary art by way of postmodernism and irony. Perhaps no recent figure dealt with this problem more explicitly than David Foster Wallace. One of his central artistic projects remains a vital question for artists today: How does art progress from irony and cynicism to something sincere and redeeming?

Twenty years ago, Wallace wrote about the impact of television on U.S. fiction. He focused on the effects of irony as it transferred from one medium to the other. In the 1960s, writers like Thomas Pynchon had successfully used irony and pop reference to reveal the dark side of war and American culture. Irony laid waste to corruption and hypocrisy. In the aftermath of the ’60s, as Wallace saw it, television adopted a self-deprecating, ironic attitude to make viewers feel smarter than the naïve public, and to flatter them into continued watching. Fiction responded by simply absorbing pop culture to “help create a mood of irony and irreverence, to make us uneasy and so ‘comment’ on the vapidity of U.S. culture, and most important, these days, to be just plain realistic.” But what if irony leads to a sinkhole of relativism and disavowal? For Wallace, regurgitating ironic pop culture is a dead end:

Anyone with the heretical gall to ask an ironist what he actually stands for ends up looking like an hysteric or a prig. And herein lies the oppressiveness of institutionalized irony, the too-successful rebel: the ability to interdict the question without attending to its subject is, when exercised, tyranny. It (uses) the very tool that exposed its enemy to insulate itself.

So where have we gone from irony? Irony is now fashionable and a widely embraced default setting for social interaction, writing and the visual arts. Irony fosters an affected nihilistic attitude that is no more edgy than a syndicated episode of “Seinfeld.” Today, pop characters directly address the television-watching audience with a wink and nudge. (Shows like “30 Rock” deliver a kind of meta-television-irony irony; the protagonist is a writer for a show that satirizes television, and the character is played by a woman who actually used to write for a show that satirizes television. Each scene comes with an all-inclusive tongue-in-cheek.) And, of course, reality television as a concept is irony incarnate.

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Skeptics reject sincerity because they worry blind belief can lead to such evils as the Ku Klux Klan and Nazism. They think strong conviction implies vulnerability to emotional rhetoric and lack of critical awareness. But the goal of great art is the same whether one approaches it seriously or dubiously. To make something new, to transcend, one must have an honest relationship with what is: history, context, form, tradition, oneself. Dishonesty is the biggest obstacle to making original, great art. Dishonesty undermines a work’s internal integrity — the only standard by which a work can succeed. If the work becomes a vehicle for one’s ego, personal or political agenda, self-image, desire for fame, adulation, fortune — human as these inclinations may be — the work will be limited accordingly. Even a desire to affirm human dignity and elevate the human spirit can be corrupted by dishonesty in the form of sentimentality. For James Baldwin, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” serves as a prime example. Baldwin writes: "Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel; the wet eyes of the sentimentalist betray his aversion to experience, his fear of life, his arid heart; and it is always, therefore, the signal of secret and violent inhumanity, the mask of cruelty."

In a brief filed today in the Seventh Circiut Court of Appeals, prosecutors directly say that the John Doe investigation is into "a candidate" that illegally coordinated to "circumvent state contribution limits and reporting requirements":

Specifically, the John Doe Proceedings were commenced to focus on coordinated expenditures—in the form of coordinated issue advocacy—that were secretly coordinated between a candidate, the candidate’s campaign committee and the candidate’s agents and various outside groups, including 501(c)(4) organizations, in order to circumvent state contribution limits and reporting requirements.

Later the brief says "five different district attorneys and the John Doe Judge found a reasonable belief that a crime (i.e., secret coordinated issue advocacy) occurred."