Paul Soglin hits the great American selfie highway.
UPDATE (April 30, 1 p.m.): Soglin appears to have gone on a Twitter blocking rampage, with several local journalists, media outlets, and others, including me, discovering that they’re blocked.
Paul Soglin has never been much of a Twitter user, or even seemed interested in letting some capable staffer spruce up his social media presence. His feed is a choppy one, full of truncated pass-through posts from Facebook and the occasional stab at bizarre political humor. How invested can you be in doing good tweets when your whole deal is Being Very Busy Being Mayor? To that, he might well say phooey.
But Soglin has been using the platform vigorously for the past few days, posting not-very-smiley selfies from the road, getting very far away from Madison and conspicuously letting us know how little he’s thinking about the city he so serially mayored over. Doing emphatically great at accepting Satya Rhodes-Conway’s resounding victory in the mayoral election not one month past, our man Paul is kicking up dust. Yippee!
So jilted does he not feel, Soglin has changed his Twitter bio to “Mayor Madison WI 22 years; now living in peace.”
While hauling southwest along Route 66, Soglin is also giving us a jowly remote tour of noteworthy roadside attractions, with an emphasis on organized labor and the New Deal. The tweets began in Virden, Illinois, where Soggy visited a monument commemorating an 1898 coal miners’ strike that turned tragic. As he put more and more dusty ground between himself and a state where he’s at utter peace with not being governor, he paid particular attention to sites related to the Civilian Conservation Corps and Works Progress Administration.
WPA underpasd #route66 for school children to avoid crossing highway. Now used by Sayre OK as storm shelter. pic.twitter.com/PWwnJlOHbd
— Paul Soglin (@Paulsoglin) April 27, 2019
For a couple days there it was all settling into an educational, almost endearing rhythm. Then he dropped two Eagles references within 24 hours. When a boomer dude who’s got no grumbles whatsoever about his place in the political firmament approaches Winslow, Arizona, it’s bound to happen. We’ve gotta be talking about hundreds of miles of just workshopping some kind of “Take It Easy” line. Sure hope I see a girl in a flatbed! Is this anything? God help us if he spent the night in Winslow and wakes up ready to deliver yet more material in this vein.
#route66 #winslowaz #eagles I'm standing on the corner, there's a flatbed Ford. Where's the girl???? pic.twitter.com/rSMPxHndhL
— Paul Soglin (@Paulsoglin) April 29, 2019
Nope, nowhere in that dour visage is there a faint hope for a chortle from back home. He doesn’t miss us at all.
