We’ve grown accustomed to thinking of the world as ours. The U.S. Geological Survey has even gone so far as to declare this era the Anthropocene. Personally, I prefer the Obscene myself. Shoes from China, beef from Argentina, tomatoes from Mexico, steel from China, plastic geegaws from China, and oil from Saudi Arabia. Us Americans live on the cup of a gangster financial Ponzi scheme. But alas the wave has passed. Americans are fast becoming closer to “third worlders” and it’s us Americans who are moving. Backwards. Oh and how the rednecks howl. Bay like hounds they do. I heard a few complaining in a white bread restaurant in Sidney, Nebraska a few days ago across the street from Cabela’s. If there is ever another populist uprising in America it would be white conservatives. But they’re all too old now, far too fat, and too far in debt.
So the world breaks up, balkanizes as they say. Each region comes to live with it’s own arrogant delusions, on it’s own garden-grown salads and backyard hens, clinging to tarnished symbols of freedom and oil plenty. St. George, Utah, was the next place to happen. The beautiful pine tree mountains were going to be the new Pine Tree Mountains subdivision. Rich folks halfway up the mountain and trailer trash crowded down by Interstate 15, as God intended it. All that was needed was a pipeline to Lake Powell. I followed the Colorado River down from Rocky Mountain National Park to where it dives into canyons west of Grand Junction, Colorado. It could grow a south Salt Lake City mirror image if it weren’t for Las Vegas, Los Angeles, San Diego, Phoenix, Tucson, and all the others. It’s the minimum resource that ultimately limits population demography.
The locals are still getting ready for the boom, driving contractor’s trucks with contractor’s license numbers, waiting, twitching, for the next big thing. Racks of landscape crawling off road vehicles lashed to a trailer behind the macho big tire machine; past bulldozed land, growing over with weeds; monolith construction water tanks standing like monuments to exuberance past. Yes, it’s over, and all the former down winders have to show for it is a few relics rusting outside the prefab shack down wind from freshly bulldozed and ruined land for sale.
Que tristes van a vivir los niños en este país. |
