The Decline of the County Fairgrounds

Today I visited the Alameda County Fairgrounds in Pleasanton, California. Of course, most of the normal activities that one would attend at a fairground — like a fair!, or a crafting show, or an expo about Marijuana — all are cancelled, thanks to the COVID virus and our countrymen’s stunning inability to follow basic health instructions to stop the virus spread.

So, today, I was at the fairgrounds to instead attend a “drive-in” animal show. For 30 minutes, I sat inside my car (it was 108 degrees outside), tuned my radio to the drive-in broadcast channel, and watched from about 30 yards away as animal handlers brought out a sloth, armadillo, Burmese python, snapping turtle, alligator, desert fox (not Erwin Rommel), and lemur. None of these are particularly amazing animals, but the event was a fund-raiser for the animal rescue operation on-stage and frankly, after six months of mostly sheltering-in-place, any opportunity to see something — anything! — new is welcome.

After the show, we decided to explore the rest of the fairgrounds. There was a section for drive-in movies and another for a weekly carnival food event, because who wouldn’t want to pack on a few thousand calories of grease and fat every week!

There were also a few cow statues designed by local artists, with one proudly wearing a face mask (we can learn so much as a society from fake cows).

The Big Problem with the Sky Ride

I have to admit that I was initially surprised and impressed that this ride debuted in 2018. I had assumed that this was a relic of a bygone era, when communities used tax dollars to build things like schools, parks, swimming pools and even cool rides at fairgrounds. So shame on me for not believing in the American dream, right?

Prior to the 2016 election, I created my own economic theory that I called neo-capitalism. The concept was basically borrowed from Marx and Hegel: if a large portion of the public stops believing that “anyone can make it in America if they just work hard”, these people would eventually revolt against the system. As such, capitalists needed to abandon their religious belief in the free market and adopt some sort of hybrid model that allowed for innovation and the reward of risk takers, but also made significant investments in safety nets and the betterment of the lower and middle class.

Like Marx and Hegel, my assumption was that the revolt against capitalism would be one of socialism — that the masses would move far to the left in an attempt to flatten the wealth disparity.

Instead, what we got was Donald Trump, a populist who used the despair of the millions left out of the free market to come to power. The states that he carried in 2016 — Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio and so on — were all traditionally democratic safe havens because blue collar workers believed that the Democratic party was their only hope to fight the ever-increasing power of Wall Street elites. Trump gave desperate workers in these states no actual promises of policy whatsoever — all he did was acknowledge the failure of our current capitalist structure by blaming foreign countries, immigrants, technology, and coastal elites for creating the conditions that destroyed the Rust Belt.

The Alameda County Fairgrounds represents what so many conservatives dream about: 1950s America — when we were proud of (and invested in) our local public schools, our parks, our fire departments, and our country. And it also represents what conservatives demand today — not a single penny of my taxes should be used for improvements of the public square.

So long as populists can distract Americans with hate campaigns against China, or Mexicans, or The New York Times, fairgrounds will continue to crumble. Sure, there will be some 80/20 profit shares on a few new rides here and there, but that’s not enough to truly rebuild our society and give every American a fair chance at the American dream.

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