America the Twisted

This is a typical building in Georgetown, DC. I lived in Northern Georgetown for a year and never tired of walking the brick sidewalks. I felt like I had stepped into colonial America. At any moment Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin would step out onto the sidewalk! At the same time, it all felt so foreign to me and a little surreal.

When I was in school I learned the traditional seasons of the year, like all children, with trees in various states. For a kid growing up in California's Central Valley, only two of these seasonal icons made any sense- Autumn and Summer. Had they made my seasons, Winter would have been a leafless tree obscured by tuley fog. Spring would have been green trees blown over in the wind. Summer would have shown the bloody tree wilting!

It's symptomatic of our regional biases, this idea of that the only "real" winter is one when you have a couple of good blizzards. Telling me that California has "no seasons" is just as insulting as calling the Mid-West "fly over country". It's no wonder we find ourselves lacking cohesiveness as a nation these days.

The America of the West is very different from that of the rest of the country. I never knew what "blue mountain majesty" meant until I stopped at a vista point in Virginia and saw the Blue Ridge Mountains. This is the case of many of our icons. Many of them most of us will never see.

My America starts as a Spanish colony where grizzly bears rather than turkeys roamed; where Spanish missions and rancheros were built rather than brick state houses and plantations; where wars were fought against Mexicans and Spaniards rather than the British. We don't have "amber waves of grain" here, but we do have golden rows of vines and budding orchards of fruit. The poor Hawaiians have to improvise with volcanoes and pineapple fields. Talk about diversity!

I have often wondered how wise it is to have the nation's capital so far from the center of the country. If I were to re-locate it, I'd place it in Belle Fourche, SD, the geographical center of the 50 United States (remember that Hawaii and Alaska are states too!) A perfect spot, nice and remote, inhabited mostly by sheep. I wonder how our politicians would like that.