Gucci Gulch and the Gulag: Life's pretty good in America
My wife, Holly, and I spend some of the winter months in the Palm Springs, Calif., area, also known as Gucci Gulch. For the past few days, we have been planning the route to southern California from our home in North Idaho. We will drive down in December or January, depending on the weather, and stay a few months.
Because the presidential election is coming soon, I have been reflecting on the articles I wrote this fall for The Cd’A Press, which criticized presidential candidates Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.
Before leaving this part of America, I take this opportunity to appeal to both sides of the political aisle to pause from our debilitating political squabbles — evident from this divisive presidential campaign — and thank our lucky stars for living in America; that with all its faults, it does not have to be made great again. It is still great, and we should work together to fix its faults.
We should do it differently than the way we have been conducting ourselves during the past few years. We spend too much time denigrating our institutions when we should be working to fix them.
By the time we return to our home in Idaho, a new president will be in office. Thus, I also appeal for us to unite to support the efforts of either Donald or Hillary to move the country off its gridlocks.
Because of limited space and time, I cite two of many reasons for this appeal: (a) Filling the Supreme Court vacancies and (b) fixing a budget process that is hindering proper Department of Defense planning. I discuss these issues in more detail in the third article in this series.
I’ll start this piece with some thoughts that entered my mind while I was thinking about spending the next few months in a place in America that is famous, perhaps infamous, for its wealth. My thoughts were triggered while rearranging some files and coming across several books about the Stalin era in the Soviet Union, and Joseph Stalin starving many of his subjects to death.
Yet even today, many people in this world are starving. Large populations in Africa and the Middle East are subject to the same brutalities the Soviet citizens were subjected to during the past century. We Americans could do well to think about these situations before we engage in criticizing our own nation.
During these reflections, I have also dwelled on how bountiful our liberties are in America; on how the Bill of Rights has helped preserve these liberties; on how fitting and symbolic it is for Donald and Hillary to be fighting over the honor of caring for our country’s well-being.
During these reflections, I am thankful I am presently in North Idaho and also will soon be in Palm Springs instead of many other parts of the word. America is so different from the past century’s Soviet repressive regime — and the many brutal regimes that still operate throughout this world — that those societies are almost beyond comprehension. Yet we read about them every day.
For these articles, I decided to use past events in Russia — instead of current tyrannical societies — to make comparisons with today’s America. Thus, I will cite examples of Joseph Stalin’s Gulag prison system and his cruelty to his subjects. Again, I ask you to bear in mind these kinds of atrocities are taking place in today’s world and that we Americans should be thankful we are free from them.
Gucci Gulch and Eating
Palm Springs is so affluent that a driver can leave a Rolls Royce parked on a public street and not worry about someone stealing the hood ornament. One day, during an earlier stay in this area, I saw two Rolls Royces parked — unmolested — in downtown Palm Springs. Passers-by paid them no attention.
Eating is one of the pleasures in life. Therefore, a striking but logical aspect of repressive regimes is to deny this primal need and pleasure to their mostly illusionary enemies. In this piece, we examine starvation in relation to the people caught in Stalin’s Gulag system. We compare these places and periods in history to Gucci Gulch and to America in general.
Abundance and Starvation
During one of our stays in Palm Springs, some of us snowbirds dined at Mr. Parker’s Restaurant in the Parker Hotel, located a few miles from downtown Palm Springs. We feasted on fine cuisine, as well as wines from Napa Valley and France.
While savoring freshly baked bread, my mind drifted to Stalin’s “generosity” to his slaves imprisoned in the Gulag, The great man, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, spent eight years in the Gulag. He wrote this passage in The Gulag Archipelago: “Bread is not issued in equal pieces, but thrown into a pile — go grab! Knock down your neighbors, and tear it out of their hands! The quantity of bread issued is such that one or two people have to die for each who survives.”
The waiter at Mr. Parker’s asked us about our water preferences, “Sparkling or still?” Who cares? Water is water. Well, not necessarily, as Solzhenitsyn writes: “…only one bowl of gruel was cooked a day, and they also gave out a ration of two cups of turbid salty water.” The definition of turbid includes words such as muddy, dirty, murky, and thick. Its antonym is the word clear, something that millions of people on this Earth have never tasted.
I left this fine place and tried to walk-off the results of my one-hour intake of 2,000 calories. I could not shake the notion that Stalin’s patrons subsisted on a near-starvation diet, as do many people today who inhabit other parts of the world. Many of Stalin’s people, the very humans to whom he was responsible for their well-being, lived lives of the destitute.
In the next article, we continue exploring the surreal world of repressive regimes and the wonderment of free America. I’ll continue using food for comparison as it usually acts as bait for all of us.
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Uyless Black is registered as an Independent in the state of Idaho. He may or may not contest the outcome of the Presidential election, depending on who wins. Uyless resides in Hayden, Idaho and Palm Springs, Calif.