Drought

Residents come in and out of the local Dairy Queen at Coleman, a town that brags of 22 churches on the billboard at the edge of town. They wear camouflage clothing and drive massive four-wheel drive pickups. I wonder how they'll survive if this false economy in which we live collapses. They seem to be doing OK. But I can't help but think they have no clue how precarious life can be. There's not much meat on a deer. Do they know how unforgiving that parched earth outside their door can be? I know the old ones do. I do. I've struggled with it most of my life. But few my age have. The walls are plastered with old photos of huge herds of cattle and gatherings of people. Times were tough in those days but the town seemed to be hustling and the people optimistic about the future. I don't sense optimism now. It's as though the town is in a state of decay. Lots of houses have for sale signs posted. Most who are young flee to a city at the first available opportunity. Many are gone, fighting in a foreign war. Faces of the local football team stare from the wall, waiting their turn to leave. The churches and the funeral home do good business. We're addicted to Imperialism, from sea to shining sea. This country no longer works from the bottom up, but from the top down. Even those producing something wait for the government to bail them out. Can a correction fix this? Or has it gone beyond that? I don't know. Guess we can pray it can. Or pray we'll survive when it doesn't. I can't give up on praying but there are those that have. Lots of them. Then there are those that aren't even aware just how bad it can be in this world. And that is most of us in these United States. Here's the forecast. Sunny, dry, windy . . .

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Addiction

The key to the stupidity evinced by Mr. Bush's speech is the assumption that we ought to keep living the way we do in America, that we can keep running the interstate highway system, WalMart, and Walt Disney World on some other basis besides fossil fuels. The public probably wishes that this were so, but it isn't a service to pander to their wishes instead of addressing the mandates of reality. And reality is telling us something very different. Reality is saying that the life of incessant motoring is a suicidal fiasco, and if we don't learn to inhabit the terrain of North America differently, a lot of us are going die, either in war, or by starvation when oil-and-gas-based farming craps out, or in civil violence proceeding from failed economic expectations.

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Welcome to Middle-Class Lockdown
Now shut up and buy something
by Joe Bageant

"Take away America's Wal-Mart junk and cheap electronics and what you have left is a mindless primitive tribe and a gaggle of bullshit artists pretending to lead them." -- James "Mad Dog" Howard When I was a boy on my grandparents' farm in the 1950s the neighbors always banded together to make lard and apple butter, put up feed corn, bale hay, thresh wheat, pick apples, plow snow off roads. One neighbor cut hair, another mended shoes and welded. With so little money available in those days in rural America, there was no way to get by without neighbors. And besides, all the money in the world would not get the lard cooked down and the peaches put up for the winter. You needed neighbors and they needed you. From birth to the grave. I was very lucky to have seen that culture which showed me that a real community of shared labor is possible -- or at least was at one time in this country. And if I ever doubt it I can go up to those hill farms and look into the clouded old eyes and wrinkled visages of the people who once babysat me as a child and with whom I shot my first rabbit and quail. They are passing quickly now and I drive by more than a few of their graves in the old Greenwood Cemetery when I visit to that place where there are still old men who know how to plow with horses and the women who can chop a live copperhead snake in half with a hoe then go right on weeding the garden. "Yew kids stay 'way from that damned dead snake, ya hear me?" Fifty years later nobody cans peaches any more, or depends upon a neighbor to cut their hair or get in the hay crop. And fifty years later I found myself in the middle class and softening like an overripe cheese. Given my background, I never guessed I'd see the day when I would be bitching because I could not get Hendricks gin or fresh salmon delivered to my door. (But when you're too drunk to drive or even walk to the supermarket ...). Such is the level of self-insufficiency to which some of us weaker souls devolved. Whatever the case, we no longer depend upon community and other people around us. We live in our houses, idiotically sited vinyl "Tudor-esque" fuck-boxes with brick facade (sorry Neddie, I just had to steal that lick) which grow bigger each year in order to accommodate our massive asses, egos and collection of goods, and we "order out." Or go shopping for it at the mall. Beyond the need to get laid, there is little real reason to be together with other thinking, feeling adults. We do not need each other to do anything important in our lives, because all those things are performed by strangers, often as not thousands of miles away. Including the sex, if your are an internet porn fan. Which leaves us strangers to the natural human community.

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