Uphill Towards Money

Are you downhearted? Don't be! When life hands you a drought, build a water park:

A Duluth real estate company is proposing a 200,000-square-foot water park for Buford. In the middle of Georgia's historic drought....

The Buford City Commission rezoned land for an earlier version of the proposed development in November of 2006. Last month, the commission approved a modification to allow the addition of the water park, said Kim Wolfe, the city's planning director. Commission Chairman Phillip Beard did not respond to repeated requests for comment about the water park.

Any idiot can make lemonade out of lemons. What the Buford City Commission's contemplating is a real act of optimism, and therefore of patriotism.

And really, it's not as shocking as the author makes it sound. Ours is a culture that recommends borrowing one's way out of debt and eating oneself thin. It exalts forced choice as freedom, comforts the oppressed by torturing and killing them, fights abortion by promoting sexual ignorance, and sees taxpayer-funded incarceration as a better bargain than taxpayer-funded childcare. Building a redundant water park in a long-term drought isn't an aberration so much as a rather heavyhanded metaphor for business as usual.

It gets better, though:

Georgia officials are pushing a proposal to move the Tennessee border farther north to get access to the Tennessee River.

I'd heard a rumor that the South would rise again, but I never thought there was anything to it 'til now.

One thing is clear: once the first shot has been fired in the War of North Georgian Aggression, there's no telling where it'll end. Tennessee is low-hanging fruit; there's plenty of water in the Great Lakes, last time I checked, and the day may come when America's moribund auto industry is headquartered in Detroit, Georgia, beneath a Bonnie Blue Flag that bears a single star.

¡Viva la Reconquista!

(Photo of Lake Lanier, Georgia, by Robert Iz.)