The F250 story is not officially over yet, but it is, probably, a dead issue. Tonight I’m honestly believing that my incredulity about that low low price actually shook up the salesman and his manager to the point where they started to reconsider what the hell they were doing, as a for-profit business.
I’m supposed to hear more “tomorrow” but I decided to move on from thinking about it, pending that, and I had a very productive day doing little things that don’t translate well into a post for you to read.
So … I’m going to talk briefly about The Milagro Beanfield War and its author.
It’s a book I started to read in the distant past when I first got very interested in New Mexico. I’m sure I didn’t finish it back then. The first chapters are hard to get into–the reader is so flooded with characters, and has so little idea which characters actually matter, that it turns into a slog.
This time I persevered and was rewarded accordingly.
It’s a giant sprawling mess of a novel and it suffers some, from daring to dip about a toe and a half into magical realism without committing fully.
The basic premise: a town full of hard luck characters, mostly Chicano/a, mostly calling the town of Milagro home for many generations and hundreds of years, eventually find common cause in wrecking the ruinous plans of a white developer backed by every level of state government, and eventually succeeding in that aim against all odds.
The book has two sequels and I’m just starting on the middle one in the trilogy, which so far promises to be a much less happy and quirky tale–early on, the bad guys are winning, and given the fact that as readers we know that the fictional Chamisaville is actually Taos, another miracle seems historically unlikely this time.
These are novels about how greed works in the real world, and about how it turns everything it touches to shit, usually.
John Nichols is the author. He tells how he got interested in questions of greed and empire here in four minutes.
What He Saw In 1964 Blew The Top Of His Head Off & Radicalized Him
I think he’s pretty much right on with his opinions on everyday realpolitik, whether in northern NM or Guatemala or anywhere. It all dovetails nicely with my own views on how human nature leads (perhaps inevitably) to civilization, and how civilization exploding out of control, fueled by ever larger piles of money and power (perhaps inevitably) dooms us.
In this he and I differ from the Marxists. Our shared vision is essentially anarchic.
There’s something comforting and also … final, I think, in hearing someone else say it. As if some basic question has now been settled and can be put to rest without being compelled to think about it constantly.
Unless it’s for distracting fun.
And in that spirit, here’s today’s political link. Based on what I just said, you can feel free to ignore it of course.