[-empyre-] a week to go on the trump effect

[Alan Sondheim]

Hi Lawrence, and thanks! I haven't heard the broadcast (kind of jammed 
here), but I think the dream actually goes back to the 19th-century 
immigration pamphlets/books/broadsheets which I've seen. "Go West, Young 
Man" was actually a call for untoward riches - so this root is much 
earlier. I think even Twain's writings, for example, on the Mormon's 
contributed to it, as well as Whitman of course.

And the dreams from the Gold Rush, etc., were dreams of getting rich, 
while there were parallel ones, of living a better life, that filled a lot 
of the trails to the west. This is something that's fascinated me and 
might oddly be paralleled by the notion of 'Quebecois Man' (trans.) that 
figured in the rhetoric of Levesque in the 80s. Even Curtis' images of 
Native Americans played into it in a convoluted way.

As has been pointed out here, however, time and time again, the dream is 
problematic today: the example that keeps coming up is 'big coal'. I'm 
from Wilkes-Barre, PA, which has the largest anthracite veins I think in 
the world - and it's first of all unprofitable to mine them because the 
coal's too hard-burning, and second, the mines flooded out in 1959 in the 
Knox Coalmine disaster. This is one of the areas (Luzerne County) that 
voted hightest for Trump - but he can't do anything about it. And as we 
know, increasingly wind/natural gas/solar/power are increasing their 
share, at this point already way more than coal - and that's where the 
jobs are. In West Virginia, where the mountain-topping still goes on, by 
the way, the stripmines are so automated, it takes, I believe, only maybe 
a hundred people to do the job.

- Alan