A Message from the Desert
The film Bugsy appeared late one night on a cable channel recently, and by the end, I couldn't help feeling sorry for the ruthless gangster Ben Siegel, as played by Warren Beatty. He had the crazy idea to build a lone casino in the middle of the Nevada desert, before there were commercial jet airplanes and decent highways for people to get there, and before there was even enough water to make the place habitable. Yet Siegel persists (somewhat psychotically), even as cost overruns make his mob partners very unhappy. Betrayed by the woman he loves, Siegel is gunned down in the climactic scene, and he never knows what becomes of his dream. The final titles, displayed over a panorama of Las Vegas in all of its eventual glitzy glory, tell us that the six million dollars invested in Siegel's Flamingo casino had generated one hundred billion dollars by the time the film was made in 1991.
Nine years after Siegel's death, a group of men in North Carolina organized around a similarly preposterous idea. (One of them, a local contractor, even had a made-for-Hollywood name: Romeo Guest.) They would raise over a million dollars to purchase land and develop a high-technology research park in the middle of a pine forest.
Remember, this was the 1950s. There was no Internet. Not even fax machines or advanced telecommunications. Interstate highways were just getting started, and air travel was still limited.
Furthermore, North Carolina at that time was one of the poorest states in the nation, as measured by per-capita income and most other benchmarks. Its economy was dominated by agriculture, manufacturing, and textiles—hardly an intuitive place for a high-tech center. And the initial concept, as dreamed up by sociologist Howard Odum, was to take advantage of the area's three universities (Duke, North Carolina State, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), none of which were particularly renowned at the time.
But somehow, in spite of all of these obstacles, the committee raised the money, bought the land, and, like Las Vegas casinos rising from the desert sand, companies began setting up shop amid the pine trees of North Carolina. When IBM decided to build a major facility there in the mid-1960s, the project was on a course to fulfill its founders' improbable ambitions. Now the Research Triangle Park is home to almost one hundred and fifty companies, including many of the major pharmaceutical and computing giants.
More significantly, the local communities have been transformed by the highly educated, well-paid workers who live there. UNC and Duke have joined the ranks of the leading universities in the nation, and the quality of life in Durham, Chapel Hill, and Raleigh is the envy of many cities around the South. (In fact, a May 2010 study by Portfolio.com found that Raleigh offered the best quality of life among major metropolitan markets in the United States, due to factors including its healthy economy, moderate cost of living, light traffic, attractive housing stock, and robust educational system.)
There is a lesson here, of course, but it is not simply that every Southern state needs to develop a research park. The more important message is that the South can thrive in direct proportion to the amount of bravado, imagination, and determination we apply toward defining ourselves and our future.
The parts of the South that have suffered the most in recent decades are the ones that have failed to most aggressively anticipate the future. When other parts of the country made the transition from agricultural economies to industrial economies in the first part of the twentieth century, many Southern communities didn't move in that direction. Now that the industrial sectors are giving way to information-based technologies, many Southern states are fifty years late in fighting one another to land car plants. And while some Northern cities enjoyed the fruits of automobile manufacturing during its prime, their loss isn't necessarily our gain, especially as the future of traditional four-wheel transportation and its attending energy sources are in doubt.
What's worse is that we happily pay a premium for these hand-me-downs through cash incentives, tax breaks, and lower wages for our workers. We are so desperate for jobs, and so unimaginative and risk-averse, that we take the first offer presented to us, no questions asked.
We sell ourselves short in other ways, too, most notably as a willing participant in our own environmental degradation. There is something unfortunately retro about those refineries along the Mississippi River in Southern Louisiana, with their constant streams of smoke snaking up from their twisted-metal architecture. And there is something tawdry about the natural-gas wells popping up across wide swaths of the South, with landowners giving over their rights for cash on the spot, not considering the long-term consequences. A similar kind of vulgarity was on display after the recent oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, when Louisianans' legitimate outrage toward those responsible for the disaster was suppressed so as not to offend the oil companies that are among their largest employers, lest the offshore rigs move to places like Nigeria. It is humbling and humiliating to suffer abuse and then beg the abuser not to leave you for someone who won't be so...unappreciative.
This kind of subjugation is the consequence of remaining fifty years behind, and the only way to control our future is to summon the courage and confidence and intellect and energy to create the South that we would like to see fifty years from now.
We can begin with a difficult question, such as: How would the vast rural areas of the South survive without cars? We can set impossible goals, such as: How do we eliminate poverty in the South? Or we can pool our resources toward a common cause, such as: How can the South become the incubator for the major medical advances of the twenty-first century?
The only thing that is certain is that the future of the South depends on a crazy idea that no one has come up with yet. Or maybe they already have and we just don't know it. Either way, it's time to get started.
Vegas, baby. Vegas.
“Terranauts” (2009) by Scott Parry.
