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The temptation sometimes strikes to sit in the Victoria Tavern and gaze out a window, across the F Street bridge to where the Rio Grande depot stood before it was razed. The only reason there ever was a Salida was so that people could get on and off the train; when that's gone, you begin to wonder just what you, or anyone, is doing here.
That may be why gazing out the tavern window and feeling wistful is so appealing, especially in an election year. This backwater once sat in the mainstream of America. Every president from Ulysses S. Grant through Harry S Truman passed through here. When the campaign special stopped to change crews, the candidate delivered a short speech.
If that happened now, what would a candidate say? What can anyone say in these fly-over towns that have lost their reasons for existence? In railroad towns where the trains no longer stop, in mining towns where the mines have closed, in logging towns where the sawmill has been stilled, in farming towns where the farms have been foreclosed?
It is a political adage that people vote their pocketbooks, but that isn't true in the West. No region has supported Ronald Reagan more enthusiastically, and no region has suffered more horribly under his economic policies.
During Jimmy Carter and double-digit inflation, our mines ran, our farms prospered, our real estate appreciated, our cities sprouted new buildings. Reagan put an end to inflation -- and in the process, killed the old extractive economy of the American West.
This may be for the best. The old breed of Westerner
held a profoundly contradictory attitude about the federal
government. He proudly proclaimed that I'm a rugged
individualist, the descendant of pioneers that carved out
an empire without crying for help from Washington.
But his ancestors relied on a federal army to remove the Indians. Those pioneers got rich on federal silver subsidies and later, federal sugar import quotas; the cheap water for those sugar beets came from federal reclamation projects and the cheap field labor came from the federal bracero program.
The easy days are over. Although many towns that were once significant are now isolated backwaters, it is also true that as individuals, we are all in the mainstream now.
When the Chilean government subsidizes copper mines that produce molybdenum as a by-product, then miners lose their jobs in Leadville. When Korea exports cheap steel, the blast furnaces grow cold in Pueblo and our limestone quarry closes. When my business, which is about as tiny and isolated as a business can get, needs to upgrade a computer, I have to follow the yen-dollar fluctuations.
With an open global economy, the federal government grows increasingly irrelevant. Just as we are no longer important enough to have potential presidents speak here, what any president might say or do no longer seems all that important to us. He can no longer protect us, with subsidies and quotas, from that competitive world out there.
So it may be just as well that special campaign trains no longer rattle through the Rockies and across the farm belt. The candidates don't have anything to offer us. They just appear with the other contrived images on television.
When you gaze out the window at the Vic, you see the depressing reality of a region that hasn't figured out where it might fit in the new order of things. No candidate is going to stop by and announce a solution. We don't matter to him and he really doesn't matter to us. It's up to you to sip your beer and come up with your own way to hustle a living.
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