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Written by Steve
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Thursday, 30 June 2011 13:44 |
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When the Army Corps of Engineers announced that they might bust the Birds Point levee to help relieve pressure on the flood walls of Cairo, Illinois, a lot of people complained. While there were some legitimate arguments against the plan--the possibility that it wouldn’t really do any good, questions about whether it would set off an earthquake, and the fact that ACoE’s plans don’t have a great track record for working out as expected, for example. Of course, most people didn’t go with these arguments. Instead, most people went with the same “Cairo is a shithole” argument that got Missouri House Speaker Steven Tilley into trouble. The argument basically went that the few hundred farmers in Birds Point (always presented as all-American family farmers, despite the fact that most of the land there is owned by corporate farms or long-time farming families, the current heirs of which rarely use tractors for anything other than photo ops) were more valuable than the few thousand poor people in Cairo who had let their city turn into such a shithole. A common sentiment was “Cairo can rebuild; the people of Birds Point will lose their homes,” which suggests that the people of Cairo are merely squatters who can’t possibly possess (or at least aren’t entitled to) the same sense of place as their counterparts on the other side of the river.
Read more at Goat Head Gumbo
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