Making white people look bad (again).

[doctorcaligari]

Yes, Solvang. Opposing the expansion of a Native American reservation is exactly like the Arab-spring revolutionaries' sacrifices of blood and freedom. That's not even sort of an insulting comparison.

I've heard this kind of squawking from the folks out that way before (mostly from people who seem to just hate reservation casinos because well,

Comments

[nagaina_ryuuoh]

....Did I just seriously read about a bunch of whiny, overprivileged white people getting their knickers in a twist over a First Nations tribal community finally pulling itself out of poverty and taking many working class locals up with them? Because that's what I'm getting out of that story.

[doctorcaligari]

Thaaaaat's what I'm gettin'. I'm really not sure what they're seriously afraid will happen even in their worst-case scenario. The horrors of a golf club? The terrors of a water park? The mind boggles.

I don't WANT to think this is simply about a bunch of white people being annoyed that there are still tribes with teeny tiny specks of sovereignty, but I'm definitely getting those overtones.

[nagaina_ryuuoh]

I also get more than a vague whiff of those filthy non-white "gangsters" and their ability to circumvent local government control freakery/exemption from lining the pockets of local government with tax money going on. Given what I know about the manias of local governments, I bet the "immune to local control freakery" thing is what really puts the twist in the knickers -- local level bureaucrats fucking hate being told that they're not actually the lord of everybody else's shire.

[vincentdamour]

Damn those pasty Danes!

[doctorcaligari]

Heh! But actually, I highly doubt the Danish-descended population thereabouts is anywhere near as high these days as it was many decades ago. :-)

[vincentdamour]

When I was in California in '98 I was on several occasions encouraged to visit Solvang to meet "the Danes" and speak Danish to them, but it's my experience that settlers (no matter where they're from) tend to keep a rather anachronistic language (take French Canadian for instance), which makes it virtually impossible to communicate, and - more importantly - they tend to be a whole lot more nationalistic about their home country than the people who stayed behind (I think American Irish people are a shining example of that), and I find it hard to stomach such joy in oneself.

V

[doctorcaligari]

Ahhh, well. (And yes, I know, us Colonials muck it all up, don't we? Look what we did to English!) You'd probably have gagged at all the touristy windmills and whatnot anyhow. :-D