SUNBELT PSYCHOSIS
Alderson, Jeremy Weir
Sunbelt Psychosis The day I knew, I mean really knew that I'd left Los Angeles was the day I heard a Syracuse weatherman giving the national weather extremes. "It's a beautiful 82 degrees in...
...Take the food from the mouths of babes...
...Now that we've got TVs, toilets, telephones, and transcontinental vegetables, the Northeast is depressed amidst a widening Sunbelt migration...
...487...
...I knew I wasn't in L.A., because in L.A...
...In fitful desperation, the dreamers kept themselves asleep by imagining a kindly king presiding over this acid territory...
...It's at the coldest regions of the world that you find a preponderance of warm-blooded animals— seals, and polar bears, and penguins...
...It'll all work out .. . somehow, just as surely as tomorrow we'll all "have a nice day...
...Trouble is, the winter teaches that tomorrow isn't always nice...
...What does Ronald Reagan know about them...
...Ronald Reagan is Sunbelt all the way...
...It's a beautiful 82 degrees in Waco, Texas," he said with the bouncy enthusiasm typical of his breed, "and in Duluth, Minnesota, they've got a kind of beauty all their own, a cold crystalline beauty at 14 below...
...By contrast, the Sunbelt migration has had less to do with the true wisdom of warm geography than with dreams of ease that stretched from California's gold rush to Florida's gold coast with a few carefree retirements in between...
...When the cold sears so severely that lying down means not getting up again, you can't kid yourself into believing we were all meant to cavort like little lambs enjoying the "don't worry about tomorrow" beneficence of the cosmos...
...The ascendancy of the Northeast was synonymous with the ascendancy of America, because it reflected a national belief in the winter-induced ethos that the road to heaven isn't paved at all...
...The harsh realities of life...
...Since there was no such person, an actor was hired to keep the fantasy real...
...FACING WINTER means facing the cruel face of nature and, beyond that, the cruel face of life itself...
...His cloudlessly habitual smile knows no winter of discontent, nor, unfortunately, does it seem to know much else...
...To dismiss this as a merely political or economic phenomenon is to miss the parallel between this population shift and a more ominous shift amidst the darker currents of the national psyche...
...The inherently destructive nature of these dreams bothered no one so long as the rainbow could abandon the wretchedness in its wake, till finally it had nowhere left to dangle its elusive pot of gold but a nonexistent realm of easy solutions no one could actually inhabit...
...It's in the hot regions that the reptiles take over...
...What with going to the outhouse, there was no retreat from the cold, but there was an unavoidable retreat from society when traveling meant fighting biting winds a horse couldn't conquer...
...Watching snow descend like a blessing on the fields beyond my window, I can't help but wonder at the Sunbelt psychosis that 486 seems to have slipped even more silently over the American mind...
...Oddly enough, though, it was just when conditions were this harsh, that the Northeast flourished...
...the weatherperson would have said something like, "It's a bone-chilling 14 below in Duluth," and the anchorperson would have segued in with a shuddering, "Brr . I'd rather be stuck on the freeway...
...The winter forces us to admit that the suffering implicit in the "God helps those who help themselves" struggle for survival is itself divine, and so prepares us to perceive the spring not only as joy but also as mercy...
...We elected Ronald Reagan...
...Time was when winter in the rural Northeast meant chopping wood for inefficient pot-bellied stoves that couldn't maintain "room temperature" in the uninsulated homes they were meant to heat, and people lived without tasting fresh vegetables for months at a time...
...If our national priorities have gotten a bit cold-blooded under the Reagan administration, it's probably not a coincidence, and you may be sure that the state of the nation won't improve, until our Sunbelt psychotic hell freezes over...
Vol. 29 • September 1982 • No. 4
