the timboucher experience

Over the summer, an Oklahoman told me a joke about the Dust Bowl. He said, “You know the Okies?” Referencing the people who left areas which had been devastated by nature or by foreclosures and fled West to California, to find the fabled land of song. Anyway, he didn’t word it like that, that was just me adding in some flavor and coloring. The punchline of his joke, I feel a little embarrassed to say, still eludes me in its exact meaning. He said something about both states getting smarter, or bringing the average IQ up or something. I’m guessing he means all the stupid people left Oklahoma, and that stupid in Oklahoma standards is smart compared to someplace like California. I’ve never been to Oklahoma, but I’ve had some times being stupid myself in California.

Another friend of mine out West spent some time in Portland, OR and I remember him talking about Hurricane Katrina survivors having been given special opportunities and incentives by the Portland authorities. The result being an unusual melting pot hybridization of several different regional cultures and migration patterns. Humans are herd animals, let’s face it. We tend to do what we see other people do, and then call it something lofty and important like “fashion”.

But with something like Hurricane Katrina, natural forces (coupled with mixed human factors) pushed people out of their homes. The history of the American people may be something similar: a series of small diasporas, survivors, strugglers, always reaching out to the edges and the fringes when the chips are down. Let’s take that same trend and, say, look at modern times. I feel frantically uncertain of what the next few weeks bring economically and politically in this country. In such circumstances, I look at trends and try to create predictive theories about what could and will happen and why. This traditionalist American aesthetic of re-location, of exodus, of traveling and near nomadism in search of work, and the actualization of the “American Dream”: it last ran strongly during another economic crisis-turned-Depression. So it only makes sense that we’ll see this again: refugees streaming from one blighted area to the next, in search of miniscule wages, rushed on from the back by natural and invented disasters. Money and population flooding from city to city. Entire voting blocs and power balances being completely overthrown by single historical events. Suddenly new cultures appear, as though fully-fledged over night from the chaotic mixing of random elements in an urban boiling pot. Real estate becoming very cheap in the wake of such disasters and the mass human migration patterns associated with them. What happens to the carefully acquired balance of power in the US Senate or the House of Representatives if an entire state’s (or region’s) population were suddenly eliminated or relocated? Who would get smarter?

• Aristotle on Nature
• Home Automatons & Roman Genius Locii, Convergence of Animism & Shamanism Aesthetic w/ Ubiquitous Computing
• Saving Business
• “Make It Look Natural!”
• Napoleon = Badass