Friday, November 04, 2005

Construction Riff

A Starbucks morning. It's a new Starbucks they've built 15 miles north of town, out where I live.

They took a couple thousand acres of trees and streams and deer and turkey and bulldozed it flat so they could put in a Harris Teeter and a Chevy Chase Bank, a Target and a TGI Fridays. A bunch of fancy houses. And a Starbucks.

All the loose clay washed downstream to the lake down the hill from me, turned it mud brown and killed all the fish. For weeks you'd swing out to the main road and drive past road kill – dead raccoons and turtles and possums trying to escape, and not having anywhere to run to.

We got ourselves a whole suburban center here. Guess the PTB figured it was a good idea. I dunnoh.

I shop at the Harris Teeter and I sit in the Starbucks and write. Makes me part of it.

The flaw at the heart of free enterprise democracy is the myth that the ordinary man holds power. He doesn't. When the special interests groups have scrapped it out ... there's a flat, dismal, empty space left at the center. We all end up living there.

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