In the 1950s Cheyenne Mountain, a granite colossus towering above Colorado Springs and named after a nearly exterminated Native nation, was hollowed out to serve as a military headquarters during the upcoming war. Even if the rest of the country were being incinerated, the commanders could still fire intercontinental ballistic missiles on the Soviets from there. The new Air Force Academy near Colorado Springs was training the next generation of bomber pilots and missile experts. The Rocky Flats Arsenal near Denver produced hydrogen bombs and contaminated the air, land, and water with radioactive poisons. The uranium used to make the bombs was mined in the state under negligent supervision, resulting in toxic residues and increased cancer rates. Denver was also the manufacturing site for the state-of-the-art intercontinental missile, the Titan. Colorado was where the wild-west mentality merged with foreign policy.
All this is madness of course, a monstrous psychosis, and it affects our minds on the subconscious level. The psychotics among us are particularly sensitive to these signals, and they act on them. It's no accident that Denver has been the site of so many mass murders. The first one was in 1955 at the height of the H-bomb terror. A fault line in the collective consciousness cracked under the stress, and a young man put a bomb in his mother's suitcase as she was flying away for a trip. Everyone in the plane died. This was the first time anyone had done anything like that, and the country was aghast. But the man proved to be a pioneer; since then mass murder has become commonplace. The people follow their leaders. The Columbine School shooting in 1999 happened in the same suburb as the Titan missile factory. The Dark Knight shooting in 2012 happened only a few miles from Rocky Flats Arsenal. Colorado is also home to Guant á namo West, the new supermax prison for terrorists. And Colorado Springs has become a center of the evangelical Christian movement, fundamentalists praying to their patriarchal God to spare them from the fires of hell.
My mother was a moderate Christian, sincere in her Presbyterian faith but seeing the institution as a practical arena for getting ahead. As befitting my father's rank, we lived in a lower-middle class suburb of Denver (Aurora, the site of the Dark Knight shooting). As their marriage crumbled, largely on account of father's drinking, mother had the foresight to develop a strategy for advantage. Shunning the local Presbyterian church, she joined one in the old rich section of Denver and hauled her children there every Sunday for services. She became active in the church, and after the divorce she was elected chairperson of the middle-aged singles social group. One of her duties was to welcome new members into the group. When a wealthy older man, recently widowed, joined it, her ample beauty and charm soon won her a new husband. She was a dutiful and attentive wife, and he was happy, not knowing that she never loved him.
His father had owned a rock quarry and amassed a small fortune by paying his workers (miners of a sort, like my father and his father had been) just enough to keep them working. My genteel last name comes from him. I started life as a Schuster.
My mother's leap into the upper-middle class gave her children advantages, enabling my brother and me to attend Ivy League universities. We've been able to get ahead. Now the family fortunes are restored to what they were in the days of slavery. Success!
The American Dream is built on the American Nightmare.
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