Making MAGA: Irretrievable West Virginia
The Campaign Bros, On The Ground with Two Dogs In This Fight .
Right now we’re here… on the Campaign Trail in West Virginia in the hollows and river bottoms, up the Greenbriar to Hinton then Beckley…and The Cosmic-Karmic Duo is reeling, seeing and feeling the damage done and damage ongoing. The entire state has been plundered, its land and people sacrificed by those faceless captains of industry to fuel the first Gilded Age. Generations of the poor and desperate have been ground down and poisoned, mountains tossed into valleys, creeks turned black and even backwards, endless coal cars streaming out to fuel America’s Industrial Revolution…just a stone’s throw away and another world entirely. Then, as that hard carbon got harder to get and began to lose its luster, the Mountain State’s rivers took up the slack. It was The Chemical-Industrial Complex this time around, both the air and the water just never can catch a break in West Virginia…nor can her people. Hundreds of factories were hidden away, doing what they could not in the real world, fueling the second Gilded Age without remorse…just don’t drink the water in Charleston or eat the fish anywhere… and now it’s rare cancers instead of black lung. Today, now that chemistry has gone global, it’s just the debris field and the people…and one last opportunity. Enter the Sacklers. They would clean the clock…taking life, limb and the pursuit of happiness as well as anything pawnable or not nailed down. One last billionaire getting the very last of it. Right here, right next door.
Frontispiece (from “The MAGA-land Diaries”): “The Seduction Of Kanawha” plays out, the Latest (but surely not the Last) Temptation. In dreams of remembrance, Chuy has seen this act so many times before and like a Greek tragedy, the throes are unavoidable once the bargain has been struck. The Cosmic Campaign is here now with the simple Answer and it is quite simply; Compassion. Riches and power cannot allow it…and after 150 years, so much Compassion is needed here that it should make the Nation weep. These are our people but they do not recognize us.