A world of hurt. A state of confusion.

It’s almost too easy to poke fun at Nevada’s new multi-million dollar marketing slogan developed by an out-of-state advertising firm: “Nevada: A world within. A state apart.” Although Gov. Brian Sandoval called it “a grand slam” and Lt. Gov. Brian Krolicki said the firm “nailed it,” others have been less impressed, despite a brand new commercial featuring a catchy song, “Don’t Fence Me In,” by a Nevada-grown band, The Killers.

UNLV professor Robert Lang, a co-author of the study that informed the state’s economic development plan approved by the 2011 Legislature, wrote a guest editorial in the Las Vegas Sun deriding the slogan, saying “as an economic development label, it is a complete disaster. A key finding in my study was that Nevada’s global connections—not its remoteness and separateness—are its best assets.”

The Las Vegas Sun published its own incensed editorial, excoriating tourism officials for portraying the state as the Wild West full of cowboys on the range and forgetting about the vast majority of the state’s population generating the revenue for the state’s coffers in Las Vegas. The editorial pointed out the unique attraction of Nevada’s status as one of the nation’s most urban and most rural states, offering tourists fun experiences in both environments in one trip and questioned the emphasis on the romanticized portrayal of rural Western scenes in a statewide marketing campaign.

Even the Sacramento Bee reflected on Nevada’s new slogan, with a reporter suggesting the “shameful” policy of shipping the mentally ill to other states via Greyhound Therapy certainly sets our state “apart.”

Within days, a statewide parlor game broke out with many wags offering their own multi-million dollar concepts, Mad Men style, often invoking Nevada’s less pristine history involving brothels, nuclear waste, or last place rankings in just about everything.

The new and forgettable tag line is almost as bad as Reno’s proposed slogan a few years ago, “A Little Left of Center,” which at least had the advantage of making you think a few seconds before discarding it as ridiculous.

In the end, even the state’s sunniest tourism boosters had to admit this slogan was not nearly as good as the last: “What Happens Here, Stays Here.” That slogan was easy to remember and played to Nevada’s seamier reputation as a state that would forgive the occasional indulgence. It sounded a lot more like the truth than “a world within” or “a state apart.”

The $8.5 million cost of the underwhelming branding slogan, website and public-relations campaign is insulting to a citizenry whose children don’t have universal access to kindergarten, never mind pre-school, whose mentally ill suffer on the street, and whose state workers have endured untold indignities during the recession as they watched their salaries shrink along with their health benefits. It’s offensive that legislators who insist on outcome measures for every penny spent on full-day kindergarten shrug their shoulders when confronted with spectacular failures in the business sector, continuing to insist we need to spend millions on a slogan to bring in more tourists to pay our taxes so we won’t have to.

The word around town was that the state should have copied the Reno eNVy concept and used it to tell tourists they would eNVy our natural resources, our gaming entertainment, our weather, etc. In fact, the Reno eNVy website offered a description that might have suited the new campaign much better: “Reno eNVy is about pride and pioneering spirit. It’s about reverence for the past and an irreverent celebration of individuality. It’s about personal expression with an edge. It’s a misfit culture with its own set of values. It’s about good times in God’s country. Go ahead and do it. Nobody’s looking, and even if they are, who cares?”

That sounds more like Nevada to me.