Bermuda Shorts - James Patterson [32]
Richland, as you have already surmised, is a misnomer; a very bad bit of subliminal municipal name-giving perpetrated I’m sure, to put people, and I mean innocent, decent, churchgoing, tax-paying, Winnebago-riding, map-reading, voting Americans, off its foul boot stench. I mean, you look at the map, and there, like some national park, is a big square green patch that reads, “U.S. Department of Energy Hanford Reservation,” right next to a little town called Rich Land.
Now, if you live in an Alternative Universe—you know, the one where Jack and Bobby Kennedy spent sixteen years in the White House? Where Martin Luther King became secretary of state in the second JFK administration? Where there was no Vietnam War and therefore no Military Industrial Complex sucking up a trillion dollars of GDP every couple of years; where the Cold War ended by treaty after Kennedy’s reelection in 1964; where there was no Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush II? You know the one: the Alternative Universe where E. F. Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful idea became the wisdom of our policy wonks instead of a target of Corporate Economy drones to defame progressive politicians like Jerry Brown and Fred Harris; where we spent the 1970s and ‘80s designing and implementing an alternative energy strategy that by the mid-1990s had America and the West energy self-sufficient? Where enough food was grown in the unpolluted oceans to feed the entire planet; where solar panels in space ring the Earth?—well, if that’s where you live (and make no mistake about it, if it wasn’t for Big Oil and the Arms Industry, that’s exactly where we’d be) you might look at the square patch on your North American Road Atlas where the U.S. Department of Energy Hanford Reservation is and say, “Oh! That’s where all those way-cool windmills and solar collectors are designed and assembled! Let’s take the tour!”
Our performance was scheduled for noon the next day in the student lounge instead of the big concert hall. Just as we were about to go on, a student advisor came up to us and asked if any of our material was focused on environmental issues. “Only when we’re not slamming Reagan,” I answered. By way of demonstration we broke into our twisted Simon & Garfunkel harmony and sang, “I know your love is toxic but I cant help reaching out to touch you bay-hey-bee!” (“Ecological Disaster,” by The Pheromones, from the album So Far… So What!) It was pretty tame stuff, now that I look back on it. But one must consider the times before you judge us too harshly. In the 1980s and 1990s, everyone was terrified to squeak out against the Right-Wing Republicans—sort of like now, actually. Still, we didn’t have a song with lyrics like, “Quit your jobs, band together, and let’s shut the fuckers down before they kill us, bay-hey-bee!” and perhaps for that we should be ashamed. Mind you, however, that American liberal politics is remarkable for the fact that if you dare to take a stand, the people who should most support the gesture will crucify you for not going far enough and then abandon the cause, leaving you helpless and out in the open for the opposition to come and have its way with you. Nevertheless, we were prepared to tell the good children of Richland that back in the Capital of the Empire, thousands of miles distant from this troubled outpost, far removed from the barren high desert of America’s post-WWII flirtation with Armageddon, there were two guys ready and more than willing to speak out on their behalf!
Boy, were they gonna love us.
At that point, the student advisor asked us very politely to refrain from any mention of environmental issues as a gesture of kindness to the students, most of whom had a relative or friend who was seriously ill, or dead, from the disease-causing elements radiating from the Hanford Reservation. That was why they were hiring entertainers to come all the way to Richland in the first place. In