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It's at least a year before anybody in his right mind should pay more than passing attention to the presidential campaign, but already I see learned analyses about whether the U.S. women's soccer team triumph will benefit:
· Al Gore, because he's supposedly popular with the soccer-mom crowd, and he was sitting as something of an incumbent when this great moment occurred.
· Bill Bradley, because he has an athletic background, and millions of voters are now feeling good about sports of all sorts, which should rub off on him.
· Pat Buchanan, because the American team beat the Chinese team, just as the U.S. ice-hockey team beat the Soviet team in the 1980 Winter Olympics. This presaged the American triumph in the Cold War under a conservative Republican president, and Buchanan is the most conservative Republican running.
· George W. Bush, because he appears more
mainstream now for not having anything to say about this,
or most other, current topics. A real Republican candidate
like Dan Quayle would have issued a ringing denunciation of
Brandi Chastaine for removing her jersey in public, along
the lines of this shocking exercise in gross indecency
and immodesty is yet another elite liberal assault upon the
traditional family values that made this nation
great.
But this will pass, and we'll have to get down to some
real issues. One of them -- sprawl -- seems to belong to
Al Gore, but it keeps popping up all over, from the
newsweeklies to the local paper, where I just learned that
my county has one of the 10 worst developments
in
Colorado, according to some do-gooder outfit.
To tell the truth, I was relieved that Chaffee County had only one of the ten worst, given how many strong contenders we have.
Curious about the emergence of sprawl on the national agenda, I called my favorite inside Washington source, Ananias Ziegler, director of media relations for the Committee That Really Runs America.
We're kind of surprised by it, too,
Ziegler
confessed. It's amazing that there's so much opposition
to suburban sprawl, when you consider how many benefits it
offers.
Benefits?
Start with the large lots that are typical in these
new developments,
Ziegler explained. That means big
lawns, which is good for sprinkler, fertilizer, herbicide
and riding-lawn-mower sales. And out there in the desert
where you live, these yards consume a lot of water, which
has to be imported from other basins, which means good
high-paying jobs for lawyers, engineers and the skilled
construction trades. Everybody's in favor of good,
high-paying jobs, right?
Of course, I agreed, and Ziegler kept going.
A sprawl zone means plenty of driving, too,
he
observed, so people have to buy cars, and that provides
gainful employment for retired football players and other
car salesmen. They need insurance for the cars, and that
supports thousands of jobs, from clerks to agents to claims
adjusters. And they need gasoline, most of it imported, so
we have a big military establishment to protect the supply
-- more jobs all the way around.
I'd never thought of sprawl as a great American job-creating machine, and Ziegler had more.
When people spend a couple of hours a day in their
cars,
he pointed out, they invest in CD-players, GPS
systems, cellular telephones and the like. This is one of
the bulwarks of our important consumer electronics
industry. Have you seen the new mini-van that has a VCR
player?
Some innovations are slow to appear in Salida, I pointed out.
Too bad,
Ziegler said. Your poor passengers
get stuck looking at the same old mountains, forests and
canyons, instead of enjoying the best that Hollywood has to
offer -- you're not doing your part for the Gross Domestic
Product.
I've been accused of that before, I said, then asked if there were social benefits, as well as economic benefits, to sprawl.
Sprawl residents tend to drive a lot when they're
shopping, which means they tend to go to a regional big-box
outlet, rather than some nearby ma-and-pa store. By
replacing independent entrepreneurs with obedient corporate
drones who take urine tests, sprawl has made America a much
easier nation to govern.
So why would any sane candidate oppose sprawl?
Oh, we're not worried,
Ziegler said. It's
like being opposed to drug abuse or government waste. They
all say they're against it, but so many people are so
dependent on the current system that nothing will ever
change.
In fact, a war on sprawl sounds like a pretty good
idea -- more job opportunities for consultants, attorneys,
advisers, you know, the people who come out ahead no matter
what the candidates say.
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