the town dandy / By Hank Sims

Standing Tall

(March 11, 2010)  Swooping, now, like the proud red-tailed hawk surveying his demesne, we travel from the mountaintop to the flatlands, saluting the old hippie coot in his Class K shack before paying our respects to his brother the tea bagger, now chamoising a 4x4 outside his tract home. This is Humboldt County. The lowlander desperately wishes to wring the hippie’s neck forever, more out of habit than anything else. And vice versa. Both are certain that they will soon taste victory.

One thing about our boys, though — they are far more alike than they would like to admit. How so? They are both inordinately fond of their own self-sufficiency. To hear them tell it, neither needs anybody for anything. They go it on their own, paying their own way. And they have a common enemy: the government. The government, which would steal their money and regulate away their freedom to piss outside.

Here’s the irony, though. To the hippie, the government looks like the redneck writ large — bigger biceps, quicker to violence, speeding toward the next ass-kicking in a fleet of armored vehicles with even poorer fuel efficiency ratings. To the redneck, the government looks like a sneakier and more sinister version of the hippie — tweedy, elbow-patched illuminati coldly calculating their takeover with protractors and slide rules and unreadable European theoreticians. Thus do we all navigate the world by the maps we make of our own psyches.

Now, though, to the good news roundup! In Humboldt County, big government is on the run!

FACT: For years, local bureaucratic busybodies have been seeking to “blow a hole” in the Redwood Digicurtain by seeking to acquire what they’re calling a “redundant fiber line.” Right now, there’s a cable connecting all county Internet, cable and telephone services to the grid. That’s bad enough, but government wants more. See, whenever a backhoe severs the line, dweebish city types can’t fiddle with their BlackBerries until someone fixes it. So they want to double the amount of outside data coming into this pristine land of ours, and they want to export our hard-earned data to the world. Also, they figure that if they can sneak this thing down our throats they can persuade a bunch of digital Auslanders to come and set up shop on our turf.

So where do they go to get money to build a redundant line? Naturally, they go running straight to the teat of big government — the feds, in this case. Obama and his team of tax-and-spenders are giving away $7.5 billion of your money to fund insane schemes like this all across the country, and in the first go-around there were no fewer than three Humboldt County proposals conspiring to get their hands on the cash.

The good news: Last week, word came that all three had failed! Let other communities live with the shame of accepting those massive handouts, and let them suffer the spiritual consequences of their digital integration with Babylon Amerikkka. We don’t need redundant broadband, or any kind of “broadband” (scare quotes, ridicule) at all. We must stay vigilant, though — the tax-and-spend liberals are planning another round of funding, and there’s always a chance that the corporations could fund this evil fiber line with their own dirty money.

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