The Range, isolated as it is, is like all the worlds garbage
dumps.
The modern world consists of destroying places, extracting
everything as in ripping teeth from its
jaws, to resurface other places. This,
so we can sit in front of electronic
screens and pretend we enjoy what we are doing. Very few are human anymore.
Somehow we let them take that from us.
The human capacity for social idiocy and fetish is what will
kill us, not the dreams of meteors or planetary – galactic alignments, but our
capacity to destroy the world so that we may look good in leather and have the
proper deodorant. We are destroying the world for cheap shit from Walmart. And
the worst of it is we know it all falls apart soon after we buy it.
There are, simply, too many of us. Too many of us wanting
flames painted on trucks, shoes with the proper colored laces, the freedom to
wear plastic bunny ears with miniature batteries and mercury switches, soon to
be left on the street and later swimming in the air and water as plastic film
and organo-chlorines. We are poisoning the earth and ourselves for the right to
be drunk and pose to each other. America has long since reached its zenith; it
is now scraping the bottom of the outhouse pit. The country of Lincoln's
literacy now watches Snooki.
The Range is like any other place we want to destroy. The
people, five generations into the proud process, hope that they and future
generations will advance civilization by mining sulfides, from whence we can
create more mercury switches and electronic screens projecting delusional
images and pictures of dogs with clothes. This absurdity is most poignantly
displayed from last year; the very same people battling the building of a new
school demanding the quick opening of a sulfide mine. Unlike the supposedly
backward inhabitants of the Amazon, the co-opted, well trained dogs that pass
for humans on the Iron Range know that progress means destroying the place for
the benefit of foreign investors; since they will receive a pittance of the
profits, this thus means all of mankind will benefit. Anything for an ATV and a
new gun.
The Range was once a place of progressive activism; it has
now become a caricature straight from Orwell. Earthfest was sponsored by a
mining company; it refused money from an environmental group so as to not anger
the mining companies, generous benefactors that they are. Its meaning is now
perfectly Orwellian: The numbers of over-sized vehicles inhabiting the parking
lot marked a carbon footprint rivaling a small Nascar event. Sustainability has
arrived Iron Range and American style, in a Ford F 150 with aluminum rims and a
plastic imaged travel coffee cup given as advertising; the ATV has today
remained at home. The population is split into the haves and have nots, or
better, the co-opted and the desperate. Some fit into both categories,
ingesting methamphetamine, alcohol and weed to numb the savagery. The lucky
receive theirs by legal prescription and avoid the possibility of jail. The
truly co-opted kiss the boots of the corporate masters and destroy the world
for a lake home and a new vehicle. Some are concerned for the future and plant
the occasional tree; the truly honest get drunk and drive their trucks off the
mine's cliff edge as symbolic gesture. At least they are not pretending.
Like all of America, we have reached a cultural tipping
point. The decades of mind numbing rants from the extreme corporate right wing
are reaching the masses who have long
since forgotten the emptiness of the
co-opted Democratic coalition. The unions often now consist of old white
guys determined that any new subsidized project, no matter how absurd, is a
gift to be given to them. Daddy needs a new Harley. We live in a fake world,
use fake money, eat fake food and live in fake cultures. Nothing this unreal
can survive for very long. Someday it
will all end.
The local festival, Land of the Loon, is perhaps the best
example. A giant artificial loon is placed on a lake so worn from its
industrial past and altered landscape it
is resupplied by enormous pumps from a
mine pit. The beach, opened last year, provided many with the joy of swimmer's
itch. People walk around an asphalt roaded park, looking at trinkets and eating
local delicacies such as hamburgers. An early morning parade, replete with
drunken clowns and marching bands. In the evening, a fine debauchery as the laws are forgiven and alcohol is served.
Most of the outdoor audience is young; like most Range cities this place is
beyond old, the active cohort long since moved on or avoiding the delusional,
confused state that is the reality of a half shuttered downtown and filthy
bars.
That perhaps best describes the Range; since we have destroyed
it, we might as well drink ourselves to oblivion and burn the place down. That
is the truly proper way to end it.
