2 posts tagged “the west”
We've heard a bunch of these recently:
Most of the ideas for wrestling with the economy and unemployment were more traditional and predictable...A strongly advanced remedy was buying, or "buyology" as a San Francisco Examiner editor put it..The Los Angeles Times ran a feature entitled "Now Is the Time to Buy," which pointed out opportunities for cheaper purchases brought by the deflated dollar. The Times exhorted consumers not only to step up their purchases, but also to buy locally manufactured items. San Francisco's celebration of "Buy at Home Week"...provided no remarkable results in retail sales figures.
Now, don't go searching the recent archives for either paper mentioned to find this upbeat hooey. The strategies above were proposed in 1930. Yes, for the twelve months following Black Tuesday, we were convinced things were mighty different out West. Cynicism and nay-saying were for those over-educated slickers back East.
I admit my first impulse on hearing that Bay Area real estate prices have tumbled from the insane to the merely stratospheric was full-on Schadenfreude. But news of exurban foreclosures has chastened me: the nationwide recession is here. Just because I don't personally know any people ruined by sleazy mortgages doesn't mean my life will proceed as before.
Instead of heading out to indulge in "buyology," I'm thriftily haunting the UC Berkeley library, grabbing books about the Great Depression. A lot of the titles have been checked out already: it looks like somebody's getting a jump on researching the same topic.
I was not so comfortable on the plane, but that's not unusual: I never am. Maybe if I were flying first-class on one of those full-service international airlines, instead of the airborne MUNI bus Southwest used to tote me to Denver, I would be less irritable, but perhaps not.
Anyway, I had plenty of time to get into Beyond the Hundredth Meridian, which I've been meaning to read for years. It's Wallace Stegner's paean to John Wesley Powell, of whom, if you're an eighth-grader in Arizona, you learn a dry, one-sentence summary of his career as an audacious explorer of the Grand Canyon. It takes Stegner's book to correct the impression that Powell was just another guy floating down the Colorado.
What I'd never learned was that Powell had explored other regions. The plane had taken us to just outside Denver when I was reading about Powell's 1868 meander through the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains; I looked down from the plane window...and there was the same territory, now so safe and accessible, just another place on the U.S. map.
