Dispatches from the Gulag;

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.