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JustPlainBill's avatar

The good folks of East Palestine certainly shouldn’t be there, but where are they going to go? Firstly, is it possible to get far enough away to be safe? Secondly, can they even afford to relocate, and if so, for how long?

Someone who visited a few months ago commented on how troubled the town looked even pre-disaster. This is easy for me to believe; I lived and worked in western Pennsylvania for several years back in the late 90s/early 2000s, and once drove through East Palestine myself. You could say even back then that the town was far from prosperous. In fact, the entire region had seen better days, to put it mildly, and I doubt if it has improved since then.

I have a good friend from the area who moved back there to retire. He’s only about 15 miles away from East Palestine, yet when I spoke to him the other night, he seemed curiously unworried about the whole thing. But he doesn't worry about things much in general, saying that since he can't do anything about it, there's no point in staying informed. Here in a nutshell is what is ailing our society.

Reading your observation of the Cambodian resentment at its historical losses reminded me of a book I read years ago, "Balkan Ghosts" by Robert Kaplan. Every ethnic and cultural group in the Balkans had a period in the area's history where its influence and territory was at a maximum, and each of them harbors the irredentist (?) hope that it can regain that pinnacle once again. It may have been where I first realized that the hatreds some of these places harbor are fueled by perceived grievances that go back centuries, sometimes even millenia. Most Americans, including (or especially?) those in the leadership class, have no sense of how big a factor this is in relationships between older cultures in other parts of the world. The US tends to get chummy with former enemies quickly--I wonder if this will change when it is no longer the world's top dog (coming soon to a theater near you!)

As for whether there is any safe place left in the USA, I’d expand that to ask if there is any safe place left in the world. The trick is to figure out how to stay clear of the thrashing elephant in its death throes.

And on a final note: sorry, but I can’t eat the bugs. Not hungry enough yet, I guess--I’ll try going vegan first, if it comes to that.

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Isha Drew's avatar

'Silky outside but squishy inside, it’s suspended between meat and fruit, a paradox indeed, with a complex, nutty taste redolent of some distant, prelingual past, though not without hints of your totally fucked up future, as embodied and ensouled by its nagging bouquet. The velvety Tenuta Casenuove would make a perfect accompaniment, but if you’re broke, the pissy Ganzberg beer, if you want to call it that, is fine.'

Why I drop everything and sit at my laptop to read the latest offering from Dinh Hoang Linh instead of doing what I intended to do this morning. Thanks go out as ever. There are an awful lot of Mr, Mrs, Ms etc Nguyens in Australia. Now usually prefaced by an English first name.

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