It's the entire goddamn media landscape, the fundamental makeup of the country, the basic elitism of everywhere that was a state prior to 1872. It's the fact that oh holy shit the coal miners are starving now as if it didn't happen to the peat miners in Scotland before them.

I grew up surrounded by Anasazi ruins. Careful where you hike, there's a pitfall dug a thousand years ago over there. What happened to the Anasazi? Drought, cannibalism, internecine warfare and collapse. What rose up? The Pueblo indians (farmers) and the Apache and Navajo (reavers). And the farmers fortified against the reavers and then the Spanish came and wiped out the farmers and the reavers got guns and it wasn't until the US Army bribed them with cattle that they stopped harassing farms because fuckin'A that had been their way of life since 1100AD or so.

I also grew up with gas stations that no longer exist, farmsteads that vanished when the water rights were traded away, barbed wire fence that haven't been tended in 60 years because nobody's running cattle on this land anymore and guys who would shoot at you if you decided to hike across their bazillion-acre ranch (now one of the principle filming locations of Longmire, I might add). And whenever somebody left their land, they were ruined, pure and simple. It's not like they got a realtor to sell it to some other bastard. Nope. That shit's gone. Wanna see the kleinbl00 family homestead? Google up Claunch, NM and have yourself a street view. Perhaps you'd prefer Hope, AZ? Pick just about any place you've never heard of. You wanna know what global warming looks like, have yourself some virtual tourism in AZ. But OH FUCK any of that shit starts happening east of the MIssissippi it's a goddamn cataclysm.

And I can tell you why.

Gary, Indiana, mutherfucker. A '60s interpretation of a '50s vision of a '20s America in which Norman Rockwell painted the beautiful white truth of wholesome families and the permanent, perpetual safety net of Midwest American manufacturing and agriculture, a glorious post-war retconning of America Fuck Yeah for the 'boomers to hold close to their heart and understand that the USA was the greatest nation on earth and always would be and change would never come for them no matter how much Ike started ranting about a military-industrial complex, so long as we keep the Commies from corrupting our kids it's all gonna come up Rogers and Hammerstein. Because that's America, you see. Tom Joad? he's a fictional character. Dust Bowl? That happens to other people. Change? Well, the West is dynamic. Chicago is now and shall always be the 2nd largest city in the world, second only to the New York (and without all those pesky immigrants).

And now they're addicted to heroin and their life expectancy is dropping and their kids scooted as soon as they were able to those Sodoms and Gomorrahs full of gay marriage and needle exchanges and abortion and if we just vote angry enough the Music Man will come back.