Transmitting from the Mojave Wilderness in Joshua Tree, California, now is the time for Desert Oracle Radio, the voice of the desert.

Night has fallen on the Mojave and because there is

rarely much in the

way of national news

from the desert wilderness

when some weird

little story does manage

to capture a fleeting

position on the American news cycle

it must adhere

to certain notions about the desert.

It must feature a crackpot of some kind.

The more obvious, the better, but always on the relatively harmless scale.

Neo-Nazis taking over a forgotten desert town.

Now that's lacking in fun.

They'll get their front page profile on the New York Times eventually,

but such stories must pretend to be somber, also squirming merrily in the filth of humanity.

You want some crank who believes, say, in Bigfoot or the gold standard or whatever.

You want a dryly sarcastic headline, or at least you'll try for it.

Words are hard to manage these days when everybody hears them as differing types of code.

You need your desert crackpot story to reinforce the city people idea of the desert as some

vast uncontrolled landscape where anybody can do anything instead of being what it is.

...