CON GAMES: Honk If You’re Stupid

February 2nd, 2007 at 05:49am Michael Conniff 2

You’ve got to love Aspen. I know I do. And if you love something you can’t ever really leave it—right? I mean how many towns will flat out buy the only movie theater in town just because not enough people go to the movies? That’s Aspen for you and you’ve got to love it.

Or leave it—if you can just beat the traffic.
 
Name me another place on this earth or the next where the book store once owned by the most liberal woman in town—a legendary fur-fighter who started the vegetarian restaurant upstairs—can be bought by the swashbuckling Texas zillionaire who likes to sit on the floor and read the books. A place where the guy with the megabucks in the ten- gallon hat promises to keep everything just the way it is right after he passes the tofu to you.

No wonder they say Sam Wyly is wily.

That’s Aspen for you. Or how about this: is there a place on the planet where a company world-famous for fighting pollution is the number one cause of it hereabouts? No wonder Aspen Skiing Company went ballistic about the traffic from Buttermilk to the roundabout. Hello? Skico owns Buttermilk so they ought to be lit up like the blue Christmas tree in front of the Sardy House. Things are so bad that Buffy from Snowmass can’t ski with Muffy at Aspen Mountain. The immediate solution, so they say, is “slivers,” those little patches of pavement and grass that can be appended to Highway 82 so as to make the way four lanes.

We’re down to seeds and stems again. And slivers.

What a town! Where else can the concern for mass transit elude the Anglo masses with such certainty? The kind of place where they can build a new bridge to somewhere over Maroon Creek—and then designate two of the four lanes for buses only. You’ve got to love a town that will choose symbolism over a practical solution every time, a smallish urb on this whirling orb that will continue to argue about the shape of the road into town rather than all the problems that precede it.

Facts and logic? Who needs them when you’ve got opinion and opiates in equal supply?

So I love this town, and I would never think about leaving it. It’s not like we’re going anywhere anyway.

Entry Filed under: Movies, Real Estate, Transportation, Snowmass, Aspen, Colorado, Pitkin County, Con Games, Fractional Post