Illinois wants to give Indiana a permanent wedgie. Indiana wants to lock Illinois in a porta-potty and tip it upside down.
I can appreciate their point of view, which Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner effectively coagulated last week while meeting with editors.
“Believe me, I am going to … rip the economic guts out of Indiana.”
Don’t worry. Rauner talks like that to everybody.
Indiana replied as Hoosiers often do to such threats: Yeah, you and who else?
As Indiana state Sen. Brandt Herschman counterpunched: “Funny stuff. High taxes, regs, and drowning in debt. Like a boat race between a catamaran and a leaky dinghy. We win.”
Both sides have ben ratcheting up the trash talk, but until recently Indiana played Fredo to Illinois’ Michael Corleone.
Then in 2011, Gov. Mitch “Mister Charm” Daniels approved of Indiana’s border signs that asked Illinois drivers if they were “Illinoyed” by higher taxes.
Could Illinois take a joke? Patience ran out when Indiana bought ads in Chicago newspapers flirting with disenchanted CEOs: “Admit it. You find me fiscally attractive. …Envy is a sin, but moving here isn’t.”
So let us count the ways Hoosiers hate Illinois:
1. You have a big-mouthed, insulting governor; we have a big-mouthed, insulting governor who thought he was going to be president. Sort of a tie.
2. You have Deep Dish Pizza. We have Christian Pizza, although our anchovies remain agnostic.
3. Sure, quarterback Jay Cutler grew up in Santa Claus, Ind., but you have Cutler now, and we’re absolutely not taking him back.
4. We don’t have Major League Baseball parks in Indiana, but all of our minor-league parks have 20th-century toilets that work most of the time. The Cubs’ perfectly genius plan to win the World Series any day now seems somewhat less inevitable, flowing as it does from management planners who couldn’t get lavatories to work for the season opener.
5. When we build a really big building, it keeps the name we gave it. You change the name every time somebody offers you $20 million. One of these days, we’re going to build a really tall building, too. In the meantime, you just better hope a giant maker of feminine hygiene products doesn’t want to rechristen Willis Tower.
6. Two words. Rod and Blagojevich. Three more words. Jesse and Jackson and Jr.
7. We have John Dillinger. You have John Wayne Gacy. Says it all.
8. We actually play college basketball well enough to have our teams invited to the NCAA tournament. And they played the Final Four in Indianapolis. You had the same number of college teams invited to The Dance as Guam did.
And now for eight reasons that Illinois believes it has the upper hand on Indiana:
1. Sure our state legislature has bigger crooks, but your legislature is dumber. Plus, we steal more because we have more money here. And ‘fess up. If you could live in a 20th-floor Chicago condo overlooking Lake Michigan just by renouncing Indiana citizenship, you’d do it.
2. We have John Wayne Gacy. Even our evil is bigger.
3. But our good guys are really good. James Butler “Wild Bill” Hickok and Wyatt Earp were both born on rural Illinois farms, although we will stipulate that they had to leave the state to find a good time.
4. Your state House of Representatives once voted to make “pi” equal 3. Just plain 3. The mathematical constant describing the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter is actually 3.14159265359 taken to infinity. But Indiana officials believed that thinking of a number that humongous might make Hoosier heads blow up. We consider that fear to have been warranted.
5. Our governor is richer. We think your governor has albino hair and a chemical tan. Our politicians win elections the old-fashioned way: they buy them.
6. Your college sports fans would laugh at this joke if they got it. Q: How did the IU football fan die from drinking milk, the stolen joke asked? A: The cow fell on him.
7. Sure, Abe Lincoln grew up in southern Indiana, but he couldn’t stand to live there. Where did he go? Oh, yes. Illinois. He left because all the festivals in Indiana are named after a fruit, vegetable, grain or meat.
8. You actually have a college named Ball State.
Of course, the topic is endless. Send me your suggestions. No cursing.
