We gots a flood of {ugh} entrepreneurs each.. wanting to Out-build the next - with Yuppie Spa 500/night water-wasting, night destroying Villas

AND

Many of the local owners (and absentee-) of once fallow fields, pastures - all racing to put in vineyards (talk about Coals --> Newcastle, in declining mass-winemarket) before a certain local dealine: grapes rilly suck up the water.

All This: further depleting the ground water for many many (uncounted) wells, a metric which has hardly been studied at all - and which is News to the bumbling or Old-boy dregs who have wearied theyselves over years.. onto the ruling City Council [not in this valley either, but up the highway in a med-sized city].

ie everywhere you look, not just the crumbling mains and infrastructure of most-all US cities - but on down to the small places: Muricans have yet to figure out that

WATER IS GOLD.

(Except of course the excesses of Agribizness - and their persistence in highly wasteful irrigation methods which evaporate away some hideous portion of.. what used to be the Colorado River, Hetch Hetchy Canyon, etc. Those Water Wars are of course - ancient history: these were the CA equivalent of the Robber Barons)

I tend to the view that the litmus test for Murican water awareness is Vegas: so long as we ripoff the dregs of the Colorado, always screwing Sonora, Mexico, of course: to keep afloat this tawdry Disneyland for Sots - in the middle of a desert! for that long, Muricans will watch us head for a mini-version of perpetual Middle-East water wars. You can bet that the Middle East Knows:

WATER IS GOLD.

We? we don't know shit about a plethora of matters having to do with running a planet for something other than Profit for a few. Best choices?

A) We wise up, however kicking & screaming.
B) We die out violently - as Will be our chosen method.


flip coin

He of [link|http://www.library.csi.cuny.edu/dept/history/lavender/momism.html| Momism] and [link|http://www.centerforbookculture.org/dalkey/backlist/wylie.html| Generation of Vipers].

Perhaps the most vitriolic attack ever launched on the American way of living--from politicians to professors to businessmen to Mom to sexual mores to religion--Generation of Vipers ranks with the works of De Tocqueville and Emerson in defining the American character and malaise. Wylie's classic, written with devastating wit and a pen as sharp as a barber's razor, wages war on all forms of American hypocrisy. Remarkably, or perhaps not so, what Philip Wylie has to say rings as true today as when he first wrote Vipers in 1942, and no doubt it will continue to offend and outrage both the Left and Right. Harsh, bitter, and filled with venom toward those who have corrupted the America that "could have been," Generation of Vipers will be read with pleasure and indignation a century from now.

"A raging set of lay sermons about the human predicament as examined in terms of 'you--your home and kiddies, mom and the loved ones, old Doc Smith and the preacher, the Brooklyn Dodgers and the Star-Spangled Banner--in short, the American scene' plus the still uglier clutter backstage. Wylie's high desire is to save the human race from its own worst enemy--itself."--Time

"Wylie is a good showman, and he cracks his prose over his opinions like a bull whip. His chapters on the common man and the common woman, sex, science, professors, 'mom,' Cinderella and education are tumultuous reading. Each reader will find a place where he will wince, but that will be made up for by the places where he can laugh at his neighbor and read passages aloud to his wife. . . . A helter-skelter book that is as full of things that provoke laughter as it is packed with pages that induce thought. Mr. Wylie wrote the whole thing at the top of his voice."--New York Herald Tribune

"[Wylie] could give H.L. Mencken a run for his money as the most opinionated person of the 20th century. Considering the world hasn't improved much in the last 50 years, much of what he says has great relevance today."--Library Journal

I remember a vivid moment, during my summer gig in Lewiston, Idaho - one of the locals catching my drift and whispering.. "Kid, what you need is.. to read some Philip Wylie.. y'know? {wink-wink}" Ummm I did and -

I believe HST Must have read Wylie. At some stage. But s'OK - his shtik is His.


Ashton