My wife and I watched the last half of the Wizard of Oz Thursday night. I’ve loved the movie since I first started watching its annual showing on network television as a kid. Now its on cable.
My Mother and her sister had fallen in love with all the Oz books as kids growing up in Salina, Kansas. (J K Rowling has a way to go to catch up with Frank L Baum.) Dorothy Gayle was a Kansas girl living in tornado ally just like my Mom. When I was young she read most of the books to me.
Consequently, I’m always a little pained to hear David Ross, the CEO of our Chamber of Commerce describe Duluth as “our beloved Emerald City on the Hill .” He used the phrase again today to hint, unsubtly, that the public dollars being levied for the Red Plan will be a great boon to our economy.
I hate to see the Oz books being used to shill for JCI’s unconscionable business practices; the exorbitant public borrowing feeding their greed and the dubious “legal” avoidance of a public referendum. Building McMansions for people who can’t afford their mortgage has only unbalanced America’s economy and plunged the world’s economy into crisis. I’ve seen little in the Red Plan that suggests its fruits will be any less bitter.
One line from the Wizard of Oz keeps haunts me every time I hear Mr. Ross opine on the Red Plan: “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.”
