Everyone in Wisconsin works on a dairy farm. Not the same farm, of course.
And because dairy farms never-ever shut down - milk does not take a holiday - that means that nobody in Wisconsin ever has a day off. And so anyone you see working any other job, mowing lawns, putting out fires, waiting tables, running the friendly bank, comes from somewhere else, an immigrant. A day without a Minnesotan, they couldn't do it here. It would spell disaster.
Hey.
Okay.
We take fires very seriously.
Why couldn't we also have a big, brick building in every town and big, shiny trucks, and when somebody is lonely, or has to make a choice between working for an a**hole boss or facing an angry wife, these guys put on their big, red helmets and slick yellow coats and leap into the truck.
How about if somebody wants to work and has little kids and a wife and is walking to Wisconsin from about a million miles away, just to try to get a little house for the wife and the kids on a school bus route.
Hey.
Here's a little more about my book, "The American Dream" - the reason I am sitting here in a safe house in Wisconsin, surrounded by resistance fighters smoking thin brown cigarettes, wearing black berets, speaking quebecois and sporting Tommy guns over their shoulders, on the lookout for white-haired couples trying to return me to Iowa.
Okay, listen up - there are kind of three layers to why it's called "The American Dream."
One: our history is fake: Gulf of Tonkin, John Kennedy assassination, Robert Kennedy assassination, Martin Luther King Jr. assassination, stolen elections, 9-11, propaganda distributed daily by our mainstream press organizations, etc. etc.
Two: the obscenity of pursuing the American Dream while people all over the world struggle to get enough to eat each day.
Three: the futility of pursuing the American Dream - we work two, three, twelve jobs in order to give our children a "good" life - get up at 5 a.m. to take the kids to daycare, then 4 a.m., then 3:30, and people like the Bush family, and other very, very wealthy people keep moving the carrot further and further out of our reach. We can never-ever reach it. The game is rigged.
Hey.
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