Word: towns
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...though an economic downturn might motivate us to start making a real mark on the world, it also introduces trouble on the horizon. And I'm not talking about the usual effects of a recession: the blow-dried reporters tromping through small-town cafes, trying to coerce a little vox out of the unemployed populi who glare suspiciously at them; nor am I alluding to eyeball-glazing newspaper business features led by headlines like, "Whither Textiles?" I'm referring to what happened the last time there was a burp in the economy, in the early 1990s: the transformation of harmless...
Fitzgerald's "inexhaustible variety of life" is getting harder to find. My romantic notion of what the wide open American West should be is outdated, but who among us would stand in the way of the processes destroying small-town America...
...also leads to some interesting combinations, like the hip-hop-talking teenager I saw in Belle Fourche, South Dakota, who was wearing cowboy boots and chewing Red-Man Tobacco. The town of Belle Fourche was a hub for cattle roundups and cattle sales for the past two centuries. Apparently, now it is the hub of the rap world, the place from which the next Puff Daddy will emerge...
...what's the solution? We must be aware of the cost of both our new warehouse style of capitalism, as embodied by Wal-Mart and Costco, and the revolution in communications technology. Small-town America no longer exists the way it did when our parents were growing up. You can still find unique places, but they are becoming more and more rare...
...hope that somewhere out there, some town can withstand the onslaught of modern culture and consumerism and retain some element of their history and individuality. And, if that fails, there's always the "inexhaustible" array of useless garbage you can buy at Wal-Mart for those of us still seeking variety. Timothy F. Sohn '01, a Crimson editor, is a history and science concentrator in Adams House...