Sexican Mexellence.

[Joe Wordsworth]

I've a long boring day of auditing this hotel I'm at now (a Comfort Suites in Central Mississippi that should be not just shut down, but burned to the ground with the ashes buried with shovels and then bury the shovels).

As I'm back for a while, I'm posting.

Seems the AH is in a mellow period or transition or something.

Doesn't appear to be anything to argue about.

 

[Guest]

I've a long boring day of auditing this hotel I'm at now (a Comfort Suites in Central Mississippi that should be not just shut down, but burned to the ground with the ashes buried with shovels and then bury the shovels).

As I'm back for a while, I'm posting.

Seems the AH is in a mellow period or transition or something.

Doesn't appear to be anything to argue about.

I'm sure someone can think of something.

Did you say you wanted in on the AH card thing? I don't think I have a PM from you, but I thought I saw it on the thread.

 

[Joe Wordsworth]

I'm sure someone can think of something.

Did you say you wanted in on the AH card thing? I don't think I have a PM from you, but I thought I saw it on the thread.

I'm in. I want the three of clubs.

 

[cantdog]

Justin has gone; it's Mother's Day, so he went downriver to hang with the family. Yesterday was a luminous day. No rain, but we were shielded from the sun most of the day; hours on the water with an engaging task-- fly fishing. When we came home, filet mignon with friends, followed by a long walk in the long evening with other friends. Wow.

He reflected this morning that it was the sheer ease with which a person can get into the woods here that sets it apart. I told him it was illusion, nowadays. In the Portland area, one is hours from it, always. The obscenely overdeveloped coast narrows as you go east, but none of it has to do with woods. It's hardly even rural through the whole western half. So it's more like Michigan or New Hampshire down there. The woodsy character you speak of is being attacked, year by year; more and more development is always in train.

People have, up here, this resource, which is wildness, and which is irreplaceable, but they see no advantage to preserving it if, say, sixteen more Jobs can be Created by the wave of a developer's wand. These are not big businesses, usually, either, barring Irving and WalMart, but small business, which is the real enemy.

Small business insists on the particularity of property. We hold nothing in common, they say. And if one holds a property right over something, one owes no consideration to any community at large or any heritage to follow.

Small business makes all decisions on money and decides all community and posterity questions on money. It is therefore the greatest force for crassness and irreflective self-indulgence. It insists that all questions of the common good are moonshine and gossamer. Far from being the backbone of community, they are its opposition in every case, reducing to dollars every good, and keeping score with dollars in each measure of mankind's life.

Behold a sweep of complex and beautiful majesty from headwater to the big lake. Who owns that, exactly? Well, then, he can destroy it, of course. Next question.

A culture? A civilization? Future generations? Larger issues? None are allowed to impinge on development. Wildness is merely a tourist draw. You can make much more money by converting it to tract homes.

Culture, civilization, and future generations are mere words to spice up an ad campaign. If we believed we owed anything to our children's children, we would have acted like it and saved something for them. If we really imagined we participated in a civilization or possessed a way of life worth improving or preserving, we would have made at least one decision which gave those things any regard.

And yet, they tell us that Small Business is the central term of life itself, the heart of the culture and the backbone of the community. What makes you think your desire to step into a canoe in a place where you can no longer hear the highway should carry any weight whatsoever? Whereas it is wildness, not my canoe, which is at stake.

This was a democratic republic, once, with a capitalist economy. Now it is entirely a capitalism. People have no bearing on policy, except that we may need more cops to preserve the policy from its domestic victims and a bigger army to protect policy from its foreign victims.

 

[TheEarl]

That's just mean, Cant!

Evening Joe. Nice to see you.

The Earl

 

[cantdog]

Not at all. Joe always relished an argument. I thought, reading his post, that he was soliciting one.

 

[Aurora Black]

The obscenely overdeveloped coast narrows as you go east, but none of it has to do with woods. It's hardly even rural through the whole western half. So it's more like Michigan or New Hampshire down there...

Hey! Michigan isn't that bad. You're mean.

 

[cantdog]

I stand corrected. Can you get from Chicago to a piece of woods where you can't hear the highway in under two to four hours? Because I know a little wolf in the area who would love to have the directions to that place.

 

[cantdog]

Same for southern New Hampshire. Seriously.

 

[cantdog]

I was in upstate Indiana for a while, DeKalb, you know. I bet the duck hunting, gun or camera, either one, is fantastic in Indiana. They fly so low. I saw several vees of them, looking across to them instead of up at them. Awesome. But the woods are never away from a main road. They're just little chunks of swamp, very small and scattered. Maybe it's better down by the big river, I couldn't say. But I saw no sign of wildness left out for later generations in Indiana.

Michigan's UP has a better rep. Hell, Maine has a better rep, but I live here, and I've seen it get harder and harder to get out of earshot of the truck tires on the highway, just in my lifetime. It's not really a policy, per se. I mean, no one says, "This century, let's ruin it all." But it is a very consistent pattern. A pattern of development.

Once a piece of land is subdivided, it's gone. It's no longer wild habitat. And the permits are always granted, and they're always granted for the same reasons.

I know, I have been warned. You can't tell the uninitiated the secrets. Those of you who have no experience of wildness ought not to listen to the arguments for preserving it, and I am a fool to present them. But it's important.