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[TRANSCRIPT]

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I drove past a sign advertising “Pioneer Village” in a place called Minden and obviously had to check it out and guess what? It’s like Colonial Williamsburg—some guy in ‘53 decided he wanted to create his own little frontier amusement park. The place is half old west ghost town and half...random inventions from through the ages. Old airplanes and cars, guns, farming equipment, early electric lights...if I could figure out a way to get the power going again, I’m pretty sure I could live there for the next hundred years. Really homestead it up.

What is it with America’s obsession with the past? Why do we create these towns that let you pretend you exist in a time that was more unpleasant for pretty much everybody?

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God, I mean, talk about choice, right? The people who built this pioneer village - who claimed to have built this whole country, those are the people who have had every possible choice in front of them at all times. And so often they used it to make everyone else’s lives worse. And I’ve —I’ve never understood that.

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I think—I’d like to think if I had that kind of control over other people, I’d just leave everyone alone. Is there something about getting to that level of influence that just rots away at someone’s brain? How do people care that much about what other people do for a living or what god they pray to or what they get up to in the privacy of their own homes?

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Sorry, Birdie. I’m maybe getting a little off topic here. It’s only...well, I was thinking about upstate New York and my friend and Francis Lennon and a lot of different people I’ve known in my life who were, you know, maybe a little different than the norm, and therefore had fewer choices in front of them.

Myself included. My life has been a series of diminishing crossroads.

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And here we have a monument to ‘pioneers’, but what did they really pioneer? What ground did they break, what progress did they make? What did they have to do in order to claim that variety of choice on where to live, how far west to go, how to make their money. Who did they have to drive over? Who did they have to kill?

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Don’t worry, I recognize the irony in me saying all this. Here I am, with the whole nation as my personal playground. A glut of choice. And it... well, it really feels like no choice at all.

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Maybe that’s what happens to people at the top. They go insane with excess.

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Alright, Birdie, hope to hear from you soon. Whiskey out. [click, static]

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