{"id":12386,"date":"2022-12-14T13:14:33","date_gmt":"2022-12-14T20:14:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/BigJimIndustries.com\/wordpress\/?p=12386"},"modified":"2023-01-07T13:16:55","modified_gmt":"2023-01-07T20:16:55","slug":"highway-to-meth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/2022\/12\/14\/highway-to-meth\/","title":{"rendered":"Highway To Meth"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

from The Atlantic via MSN<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Little House on the Prairie\u2014With Meth<\/h1>\n\n\n\n

Opinion by Judith Shulevitz<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"A<\/a>
A home in Colorado’s San Luis Valley \u00a9\u00a0Courtesy of Ted Conover<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

In the many decades\u00a0that have passed since Laura Ingalls Wilder\u2019s\u00a0Little House on the Prairie\u00a0<\/em>books became the most widely read, most beloved account of the American frontier experience, a revisionist view has emerged, not just of what these days is called settler colonialism but of her father, Charles\u2014that is, Pa, the fiddler with the twinkling eyes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As portrayed by Wilder\u2019s biographer Caroline Fraser, Charles Ingalls was a feckless man, if a loving father. He dragged his wife and daughters out of Wisconsin and \u201ca comfortable, established home with plowed fields and a productive garden,\u201d in Fraser\u2019s words, and then from bad to worse: a house illegally built on Native American territory from which they are expelled; a farm in Minnesota prey to apocalyptic locust swarms; a hotel in Iowa next to a saloon, where a man tried to force his way into the young Wilder\u2019s room; and finally the Dakota Territory. Scientists at the time had warned that the Great Plains were arid and infertile and sure to drive small farmers into bankruptcy, but the government, urged on by the railroads, lured people there anyway, giving away homesteads, unleashing land rushes, creating the conditions that laid waste to the prairie ecosystem. When Pa died in 1902, he had nothing to leave his widow and blind daughter but the house they lived in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A century and some years later, Donald Trump wins the presidential election, and the journalist Ted Conover lights out for the territories\u2014well, for southern Colorado, parts of which have indeed become a barren land. An earlier magazine assignment sent him to that part of the state to write about South Park, the real town of TV-show fame, \u201ca place nearly devoid of people that was overlaid with dirt roads from a moribund 1970s subdivision.\u201d After the election, Conover feels compelled to go back. He heads for a settlement not far from South Park in the San Luis Valley, sometimes called the flats, where a transient population lives in one-room shacks or trailers, many without plumbing, electricity, or internet. \u201cThe American firmament was shifting in ways I needed to understand,\u201d he writes in his new book,\u00a0Cheap Land Colorado: Off-Gridders at America\u2019s Edge<\/em><\/a>. \u201cThese empty, forgotten places seemed an important part of that.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[ click to continue reading at MSN<\/a> ]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

from The Atlantic via MSN Little House on the Prairie\u2014With Meth Opinion by Judith Shulevitz In the many decades\u00a0that have passed since Laura Ingalls Wilder\u2019s\u00a0Little House on the Prairie\u00a0books became the most widely read, most beloved account of the American frontier experience, a revisionist view has emerged, not just of what these days is called […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12386","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-weirdness"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12386","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12386"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12386\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12386"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12386"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12386"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}