Sarx

OMEDIAN Sam Kinison (RIP) used to do this routine during the Ethiopian Famine. He’d yell at starving Ethiopian Children on TV. “See this? You know what this is? SAND! You know what it’s gonna be in a hundred years? SAND! Nothing grows in a F’in Desert!” (You can see this rather infamous routine here at about the 4:45 mark – there’s a LOT of cussing.) In the middle he says, “Yeah, we have deserts in America, too, but we don’t live in ‘em…”

This AM, NPR puts the lie to that line. Almost all of Southern California is just such a place. We carved out the farms – and Los Angeles – straight from the Desert. It should never have happened. And it’s getting impossible to sustain.

What do we do now?

Since it’s LA and I’m a Northern California supporter, the answer is easy: Let LA Die – and Las Vegas, and the Central Valley.

But I’m sure that there are others with different opinions.

The story is amusing – betrayal, drug addiction, national ego, stupidity all show up. The farmers’ families, seemingly unaware they are doing something as as unnatural as the gay marriage they recently voted against, are all whining like wellfare recipients about the loss of a gov’t subsidy. When I was listening to it, in addition to being reminded of Kinison’s famous line that we don’t live in our deserts (ironically delivered in LA, thus, in a desert), the very first thing I thought of was Terri Schiavo. Remember the fight over her life? No one was asking the real question: why did Doctors put her on life support in the first place? Just because something can be done doesn’t mean it should be done.

The Southern California irrigation project was part of the great works projects at the middle of the last century. We did all of that in the middle of one of the wettest periods in 1200 years (according to the geological record). As the weather patterns out there return to a more-normal, drier phase – for the next thousand years – we need to ask why we put the area on life support in the first place. We need to evaluate our current round of works projects in the long term: let’s not build another national treasure in the middle of a desert.