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The real reason Democrats are in trouble in the West

Published 9-Oct-1994 in the Denver Post
Copyright ©1994 by Ed Quillen. All rights reserved.

Living near a spiritual vortex really does offer some insight into the cosmos.

Our neighborhood vortex, a/k/a/ the environs of the town of Crestone in northeast Saguache County, has been proposed as the site of a 400-foot pink granite pyramid. The proposal comes from various enlightened folk of the Trinity Foundation who've been channeling with Kuthumi, an Ascended Master.

More than a few folks in Crestone wondered why it was necessary to build a pyramid when they sit right under a cluster of 14,000-foot peaks -- Crestone Needle, Crestone Peak, Kit Carson Peak, Mt. Humboldt, Challenger Point -- but they're a fairly tolerant bunch.

Anyway, when the pyramid proposal first emerged in 1992, the monument was supposed to be completed by 2000.

According to those with connections to the fifth-dimensional etheric field, Kuthumi, silent for two years, has just issued a new timetable. The pyramid's completion date is postponed to 2012.

And now the rest of us know what Kuthumi, the master of the cosmos and the timeless avatar of procrastination, was doing during the interim: consulting on the construction of Denver International Airport.

But there are bigger mysteries, such as why every pundit says the Democrats are in big trouble in the West this election year.

Unable to contact Kuthumi, I resorted to a Qwerty board. It was connected to a powerful box which contained a crystal which resonated 25 million times a second. Before me was something very like a crystal ball, called a CRT monitor in the arcane dialect of the bytehead cult, and I gazed into it for the answers.

Soon the ethereal network had me channeling with Ananias Ziegler of Washington, D.C., media relations director of the Committee That Really Runs America.

Our plan is to run Ronald Reagan against Bill Clinton, Ziegler transmitted.

But Reagan is getting pretty long in the tooth to be a candidate, I observed. And the constitution forbids him from running for another term.

Ziegler sent some smiley faces. What the constitution says is of little concern to the Republican victory campaign, he wrote. Look at Ollie North.

I'd rather not. Besides, we're worried about the West, not Virginia.

Well, that's simple. You're a bunch of idiots.

Strong talk from somebody inside the beltway. Remember the saying about stones and people who live in glass houses.

Cut the cliches, Quillen. Here was the American West, growing like crazy under the horrible double-digit inflation of the Jimmy Carter years. Remember when Climax Molybdenum was hiring 100 men every week? When Cyprus and Homestake had big uranium projects planned on both sides of Salida? When your quarries and sawmills were running full blast?

Of course I remembered that, so I sent an electronic nod.

And here comes Reagan, friend of the West. Your economy went down the tubes. By 1984 you couldn't give away real estate in your abandoned little backwater towns. And how did you people vote that year?

Reagan got an even bigger margin. I could see where this was heading, but I was powerless to stop him.

And Bush did pretty well in '88, Ziegler continued. Eventually, even you rubes got sick of being poor, and so Clinton carried much of the West in '92. And almost immediately, your economy turned around.

He was right, and I told him so. For sure. We've now got parking problems in downtown Salida. The school district has trouble finding houses for teachers, who never used to have trouble because they were the best-paid people in town. People honk at you if you stop in the street to talk to a friend. I'm not sure I like this, but it is true that the local economy has improved by an order of magnitude since Clinton took office.

Ziegler sent some mysterious symbols before returning to English. So Clinton should be popular, and yet most of your candidates would rather be seen with Jeffrey Dahmer. You've got to look for the deeper significance, Quillen.

I stopped looking for deeper significance in about 1974, when I dropped out of college for the last time, so I pressed Ziegler.

Part of it is just idiot masochism in the West. The better you do under a given regime, the more likely you are to vote against. Conversely, the worse off you are, the more likely you are to support a Reagan. You have to realize that most of your exalted pioneers were anti-social misfits incapable of understanding much of anything -- that's why they headed West -- and you're from that tainted gene pool.

I couldn't really argue with that, but there had to be more, and there was.

You've also got your usual mossback greed-at-all-costs Republicans to support the GOP in the West, Ziegler continued, as well as the national environmental groups.

What? They hated Reagan and James Watt...

He interrupted before disconnecting. And their membership rolls swelled then, and have been falling off ever since. They need the GOP to be in charge too.


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