Loading ...There have been four essays here at TCM written by Cincinnati outsiders sharing their opinions of our fair city, or area, or whatever you might prefer to call it, and I can’t say that there’s been much suprise to these folks’ overall impressions. We’ve seen mentions of The Big Red Machine, the ‘90 Reds, Marge Schott, and the annual bed-shitting of the Cincinnati Bengals. We’ve seen WKRP mentioned more than once. On the flipside, we’ve seen references to times past that are obscure and perhaps shouldn’t be.
There's only one thing to do. Make great stuff. Produce great things that people notice.
Here’s the question: what can we learn from this?
I don’t mean the question to be flippant. I’m genuinely interested in improving Cincinnati and, perhaps just as importantly, seeing something happen that changes the outsiders’ responses for the better–or at least more for the more recent.
The streetcar debate, no matter which side you take, is a pretty good example of citizenship at work. It shows that we have an engaged public who cares about what happens in our city, and at a minimum, that’s a step in the right direction.
Aside from the not-yet-existing streetcar, there are quite a number of projects happening at the moment that will at least change the apparent face of Cincinnati, and with a measure of success, these projects will soon find themselves woven into the fabric of our (and hopefully everyone’s) conscious perception of the city.
Still–the question remains: how can we tune people in to that perception instead of, quite frankly, nostalgia items from the 1970’s? There’s only one thing to do.
If you don't admit that the WKRP theme song plays in your head, just a little, when you see the Genius of Water, you're lying to yourself and everyone else.
Make great stuff. Produce great things that people notice. Have great sports teams, develop great ideas, make art worth noticing, have events that everyone wants to go to, and do things that people want to see. That’s how you change a perception. We avoid change by accepting an annually-failing-by-July baseball team makes everyone think about how great they were in 1975-76, and again in1990; or by continuing to love a terrible football team makes us pine for the days when they lost to the 49ers (fuck Joe Montana, btw).
This isn’t to say that we’re not producing great things right now. I’m reasonably certain that we are. But why aren’t we holding those things up as the great things Cincinnati has to offer? If it’s all in how you market yourself, why are we letting stupid-ass studies that fudge the numbers give us a reputation of being a dangerous place to be? Shouldn’t we be talking about the great music that we have to offer, the great beer that comes from here? The idiosyncratic food options? The varied and diverse architecture that we have to offer? Seriously, it’s an endless list. Let’s see what we can do to exploit it. The way outsiders see us deeply affects the way we see ourselves–and it’s just depressing sometimes the way we see ourselves.
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Photo credits:http://www.flickr.com/photos/brent_nashville/ / CC BY 2.0
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