Ashes to Ashes

Posted on January 7, 2008 by David

There is an impressive, but flawed, database out there at work. Donate 20 bucks to the ASPCA, and within weeks, 8 different animal-protection agencies start to bombard me as frequently as Chase. The flaw being the annoying fact that the ASPCA becomes one of the 8 in the rotation–good to know that my annual donation has been spent on 7 separate mailings to me asking for still more money in the past year.

But, still, the algorithm works like magic–nary a request for cash from the NRA arrives, but rather far nobler requests for cash. The most recent delight spawned by its prescient demographic-tapping is the bargain rate offer for a National Geographic subscription. Best dollar-a-month purchase I’d made in some time. Until recently, my only experience with the magazine was as a porn-proxy back in grade school.

That grade school, incidentally, was recently the latest victim in a series of razings in my 800 person and counting prairie hometown that I may well never revisit. But this month’s issue of National Geographic provided a new kind of porn, a window into the world that I and countless others like me have left behind, for better or worse:

That’s the rub in rural North Dakota, a sense of things ebbing, of churches being abandoned, schools shutting down, towns becoming ruins. And all this decline exists amid a seeming statistical prosperity: Oil is booming, wheat prices are at record highs, and, as the average farm size grows, the land is studded with paper millionaires living in the lonely sweep of the plains, with surrounding community gone to the wind.

» Filed Under

Comments

Comments are closed.