The Real Grandmas of Lake Geneva — And You Voted for Them

Nobody warned you. There was no surgeon general’s warning stapled to the voting booth curtain, no emergency broadcast on the radio, no sweating precinct captain pulling you aside to say listen, friend, I need you to think carefully about what you are about to do in there. You walked in off the street on the first Tuesday of April like some kind of functioning citizen, you pulled the lever, you drove home in your car, and somewhere between the driveway and the refrigerator the city of Lake Geneva quietly slipped into the hands of grandmothers. Six of them. Six grandmothers now hold the majority on the Common Council of this small and occasionally bewildering Wisconsin resort town, and the other two alderpersons are men who have presumably considered their situation and made their peace with it.

This is not a metaphor. This is the actual government.

You think this happened by accident? You think six grandmothers end up controlling a city council through some random churning of the electoral cosmos? Brother, grandmothers do not do anything by accident. Grandmothers are the most deliberately organized force in human civilization. They outlasted the Roman Empire. They will outlast whatever is currently happening in Washington. While you were home eating chips and watching something loud on television and absolutely not attending the Plan Commission meeting, these women were in the room. Every room. The budget hearings. The intergovernmental agreement discussions. The special called sessions on a Thursday night in February when it was twelve degrees outside and the parking lot was empty except for their cars and one idiot reporter with a notebook. They were there. They are always there. And now they have the votes.

You did this. You specifically. You drove to the polls on a Tuesday in April— a Tuesday in April, when every rational impulse in your body was telling you to stay home and tend the garden — and you voted for these women one by one and then you went about your life as though nothing of consequence had occurred. And now the grandmothers control the zoning. The grandmothers control the tourism fund. The grandmothers will be asking pointed follow-up questions about the intergovernmental agreement with the Town of Linn and they will not be satisfied with a non-answer and there is not enough coffee in the municipal building to get the city attorney through what happens next when one of them says I just want to make sure I understand this correctly in that particular tone of voice that means she understands it perfectly and somebody in this room should probably have a lawyer.

And before you construct some comfortable fantasy about what six grandmothers on a city council actually means in practice — before you picture knitted afghans and hard candy and a gentle request that everyone speak up, dear — let me disabuse you of that notion right now while there is still time. These grandmothers have read the backup materials. These grandmothers have cross-referenced the backup materials against the minutes from the previous meeting. These grandmothers will look a developer in the golf shirt directly in the eye and ask him to explain, slowly, the precise mechanism by which his proposed development benefits the residents of Lake Geneva rather than exclusively himself, and they will wait, quietly, for an answer, and the silence in that room will be the most dangerous silence you have ever heard in a municipal building in your life.

You voted for them. Every last grandmother. On the first Tuesday of April you walked into that booth a free citizen and you made your choices and this — this — is the democratic republic you built. Six grandmothers and a gavel and a city full of people who are about to find out that accountability has gray hair and comfortable shoes and absolutely nowhere else to be.

You voted for the grandmothers. Six of them. God help the rest of us. They are handling it.