October 7, 2005

• a little bit of personal stuff, and an ambitious proposal…

  This week I am happier than ever about having had my volunteer job
  eliminated.  Although it was only one day every two weeks, those
  trips into town to drive the van from the rehab center to the NA
  meetings took a lot of energy.  There was always expense beyond
  just the gasoline for travel, and when I got back home it took days to
  recover from the effects of the fatigue.  Right now the colder
  weather and mold spores in the air are enough to make me about as sick
  as I can handle.

  I told Greyfox that I was so sick I might as well have gone to town; I
  wasn’t getting any work done anyway.  He pointed out quite
  reasonably that I’d probably be much sicker if I had gone to
  town.  He blogged yesterday about the debilitating aftereffects of
  his recent trip up here for a dental appointment.  Hard on him, it
  helped me out.  He brought groceries and that means I can postpone
  going to town even longer.  So, I have a reprieve, a little
  respite.  I appreciate it.  Now, if some of the myalgias and
  allergy symptoms will ease off, I can enjoy it.

  I can’t stop thinking about Pombo and his accomplices who want to sell
  of 23% of our national park lands to oil and gas developers.  Go
  ahead and drain every drop of petroleum from the planet, burn it and
  pollute the atmosphere, increase the greenhouse effect, never mind the
  long-term damage and destruction.  Just stay focused on this
  fiscal year, the bottom line, and your own comfort and convenience.
    I understand the profit motive of those in the oil
  industry.  What I don’t understand is how easily they gain the
  compliance and complicity of so many others.  Good PR, I guess.

  And speaking of PR, I’ve been thinking about that plan to sell naming
  rights for some of our national parks.  Specifically, I’ve been
  thinking about Mount Rushmore National Memorial.  I have a grand
  plan that would not only bring in ad revenues to the Park Service, but
  would actually enhance and improve the vacation experiences of many US
  citizens and foreign tourists who visit South Dakota.  It might,
  if done right, even take some of the sting out of the defacement of the
  sacred Black Hills for the natives there.

  As far as I’m concerned, they can change the name of Mount Rushmore to
  that of the highest bidder.  Neither Exxon Mobil, nor Jack
  Daniels, nor Betty Crocker, nor JP Morgan Chase would be any more
  objectionable to me than the name of the New York lawyer who is now
  honored there.  But I’d take it farther than that.

  I would install a system that could drop huge banners like window
  shades over the faces of those dead white men, either one or two at a
  time or all four at once, and use them to display advertising. 
  How, you might ask, would that enhance the experience for those many
  visitors who pose before the sculpted mountain for a photo op?

  Well, first of all, the majority of those who go there can’t recognize
  and name more than two of those faces before they’ve read the
  interpretive signs or listened to the rangers’ talks.  Many leave
  there as ignorant as when they arrived.  For those who do know and
  care who is honored there, some of those dead white men are deemed more
  worthy of honor than others.

  White supremacists would surely prefer being photographed in front of
  an ad banner that blocked the entire middle half of the stone
  quartet.  Thomas Jefferson, after all, sired a long and growing
  line of descent with his Negro slave Sally Hemmings, and Abraham
  Lincoln… well, we know what he did, don’t we?

  Teddy Roosevelt can’t be too popular with animal rights activists,
  vegans, and those who still suffer for his encroachments in Central
  America.  I suppose there are even a few people who don’t like
  George Washington, just on principle, as the father of this misbegotten
  and misguided government.

  More than just the revenue stream (ongoing and capable of being raised
  to compensate for inflation), which would be far better than a simple
  one-time fee for naming the place, the mechanism of the banner display
  would provide jobs for its construction and maintenance.  South
  Dakota could use those jobs.  It would even be possible to arrange
  the banners in such a way that once or twice a day those ugly dead
  white men could be covered by a display simulating the mountain as it
  looked before Gutzon Borglum took his jackhammers and dynamite to
  it.  I’d pose for a picture in front of that one.
  

  • 2:54 pm
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