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Since Salida finally got some snow this week, spring must be just around the corner. It worked the same way last year. No snow, and many T-shirt days, during the traditional hard winter months of November through February. Come March, the clouds open and the thermometer plunges, and this might last until late June.
Several theories have been advanced locally for this climatic aberration. One credits Southern California immigrants for bringing their weather with them. That explains a clement December, but it won't cover a cold April. We'll have to find some other scapegoat: graduated income tax, abortion, homosexuals, evolution, illegal immigrants, violent television shows. Judging by the primary campaign to date, one of those has got to be responsible for every problem in America.
One oddity of this winter has been its severity everywhere but Salida. About a fortnight ago, Martha and I ventured down to Westcliffe.
Upon our return, we checked various news reports and discovered that Westcliffe was about the only place we could have gone that day, and even that journey meant contending with some major road work on the Cotopaxi Cut-off.
Every other route out of Salida was blocked by ground blizzards, avalanches, highway work or the train derailment on Tennessee Pass.
Yet the weather was clement in both Salida and Westcliffe -- if you have to be snowed in, that's the way to do it, I guess.
Anyway, spring means spring cleaning, and disposing of
this pile of Items that are interesting but won't make a
full column.
Consider the Afrocentrism dispute in the Denver schools. When unable to escape from some multicultural seminar that was supposed to elevate my consciousness a few years ago, I heard an Afrocentric speaker. He began with a passionate attack on the horrors of Western Civilization, which had degraded, enslaved or exploited the people and land of Africa.
Then he started explaining how Homer, Socrates and Euclid were all really Africans and that Africa was the true home of epic poetry, logical argument and plane geometry.
In brief, his argument was that Western Civilization
has been a total horror, but we invented it.
If I felt
that way about Western Civilization, I sure wouldn't brag
on having created it. I'd be busy denying I had anything to
do with something so terrible.
Not that the Afrocentrists have any monopoly on
imbecility. Another big issue among Front Range (hereabouts
known as the Front Strange) educators is the Edison
Project,
which is a private company that wants to
operate public schools.
This scheme must be named for Thomas Edison, inventor of the phonograph and motion-picture projector and other pernicious devices which are so scandalous now that there are ratings systems to protect children from impure sounds and images that emanate from Edison's inventions.
Thomas Edison attended school for only three months
before he was expelled for being retarded.
His
mother schooled him thereafter. As an adult, Edison
endorsed Vin Mariani, a tonic whose primary active
ingredient was cocaine, and he probably used it copiously,
since he slept only three or four hours a night.
If you really wanted to apply an Edison concept
to the education of children, you'd home-school them and
encourage their ingestion of controlled substances. The
education entrepreneurs probably could have picked a worse
name than Edison for their project, but it's hard to
imagine how.
Then there are the poor, oppressed Denver Broncos, whose owner, Patrick Bowlen, wants a new stadium financed by sales taxes.
Bowlen isn't bringing in as much money as he could from Mile High because he sold the luxury-box marketing rights to some other company a few years ago.
So he needs more luxury boxes to sell, and what better way than to tax a whole lot of people who make $18,000 a year in order to provide better facilities for millions-a-year football players and the corporate fat cats who want to watch them in comfort?
If Ronald Reagan were still president, this would make perfect sense. However, the 80s are over, and we now hear a lot of talk about privatizing functions which were once performed by government.
So why can't we privatize the job of subsidizing millionaires?
We have a similar issue with the epidemic of Enterprise Zones throughout the state. If the state has money to waste on subsidizing new businesses, doesn't that mean that taxes on existing businesses were too high? Wouldn't reducing taxes on existing businesses have the same salutary effect on the economy as taking their money and giving it to other enterprises?
Never mind. Everything is as weird as the weather this year.
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