Some of you may not believe that they serve crack at city council meetings, so you should read
http://www.fayettevillenc.com/story.php?Template=local&Story=6853802 for confirmation. Essentially, the city wants to become a Tourist Destination. To do so we are now going to try marketing ourselves as America's Most Patriotic City.
Some of their ideas are okay, like creating a walk of fame.
Some are essentially harmless, like dressing someone up as George Washington and having him walk around the two or three downtown events we hold to entertain the crowd.
And some are really stupid, like passing a county law requiring all restaurants to serve apple pie and hot dogs--almost all of the restaurants here are either chain restaurants or fine-dining establishments that wouldn't serve hot dogs anyway. What's left is Wiener Works, and passing a law requiring them to serve hot dogs is like passing a law requiring stop signs to have eight sides and be red--they were gonna anyway.
Here's my response...
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I read "Boosters want city to wave the flag" in the February 19 issue of your newspaper.
Uhh...folks, if you do this you need to do one other thing: call the post office and ask them to officially change the name of this city to Fayettenam. Rather than making Fayetteville lose its rough-and-tumble war-zone "Army town" image, all we're going to do is reinforce it.
I read that whole article and one word repeated itself in my mind: desperation. Certain civic leaders have decided to base our civilian economy on tourism--specifically, on making Fayetteville a tourist destination. The "let's cover Fayetteville in museums" plan didn't work. The "let's get people to come here to revel in the six blocks of Hay Street between the train station and the Market House" plan didn't work. And the "let's get people to come here to see the locations of the really neat historical things that were here until Sherman's troops burned the whole city down" plan definitely didn't work. So now we're going to dress someone up as the pirate Blackbeard and have him walk up and down Hay Street during Sunday on the Square and the Dogwood Festival, paint the streets like the American flag, and require Pizza Hut and Trio Cafe to serve hot dogs. I like the flag-saluting ceremony and the playing of the National Anthem downtown--the same bells that play at noon could also be programmed to play the Anthem at 7 am--but the rest of the plan looks like a civic version of the kid no one likes jumping up and down screaming "Hey! Look at me!"
By the way, so long as we're going to be portraying criminals like Blackbeard the Pirate as American heroes, let me know when the casting call for men to portray Mafia dons is.
We'll also get some challenges for the moniker "most patriotic city." I seem to remember that Boston, Washington DC and Williamsburg have been highly patriotic for two centuries, and that there are several towns with large military bases, like Killeen, Texas, and Colorado Springs, Colorado, who could also claim the title.
This plan won't work and no follow-on plan for converting Fayetteville into some sort of tourist destination is going to work because there's not enough things to do here to keep tourists who don't play golf interested for more than a couple of days. Assuming we completely implement this "America's most patriotic city" plan--which is a stretch because we are experts on drawing up grandiose plans then forgetting about them--you've got a setup where someone can see everything there is to see in a day and a half before getting back on 95 South and going to Orlando where there is too much to do.
The major objection I have to any tourist-centered plan isn't the money we don't have that we'll need to spend to hold daily parades celebrating America. It's not the fact that one of the biggest planks in the platform--weekly Special Operations demonstrations--will require the military to spend money they don't have on entertaining civilians. And it's not that everyone outside Fayetteville is going to think we're pushing the Fayettenam act past its logical limits. It's the kinds of jobs tourism creates. A tourist economy revolves around people staying in rooms cleaned by minimum wage housekeepers, eating food cooked by minimum-wage line cooks and served by minimum-wage waitstaff, and buying gas sold by minimum-wage attendants to get home. And if we can get them to fly to Fayetteville, there's another whole pantheon of minimum-wage employees--baggage handlers, fuel handlers, gift-shop workers, car-rental employees and airport cleaning staff. There's an added bonus: except for the huge tourist centers like Orlando, Branson, Myrtle Beach and Las Vegas that draw guests year-round, tourism is extremely seasonal--tourists come for three months in the summer, Christmas season and a week in the spring, and in the times between those periods you could roll up the sidewalks if Fayetteville had any.
Why are we trying to increase the number of minimum-wage jobs in Fayetteville? We have too many of those as it is--and tourism is grossly overdependent on them.
It is time to face reality: this is a military town. It has been a military town for decades and so long as the United States needs a strong military it will remain a military town. Which is why we need to forget this tourism crud and start convincing defense contractors to build weapons manufacturing plants in Fayetteville.
Fayetteville is, in fact, the perfect place to build weapons plants. We have a number of empty buildings that are large enough to turn into factories. There is a federal law requiring the military to buy American-made weapons, so we don't have to worry about waking up some morning to learn that a weapons plant is moving to China. You'd have no worries about complaints from all of the noise generated by testing new weapons; we're used to the sound of artillery. We have a perfect place to test newly-developed weapons--the second-biggest army base in the free world. We're close to Interstate 95. We have a navigable river for use in shipping large systems by barge. We have an airport that currently has very little traffic, and that could easily absorb a lot of cargo flights. One of the biggest users of those companies' products is Fort Bragg, which is right up the road--read "no shipping expenses." Thousands of Fort Bragg and Pope AFB personnel leave the military every year, giving the defense contractors a large pool of qualified applicants who have security clearances and knowledge of the contractors' product lines. And you have barracks after barracks of soldiers who would be overjoyed to come out to the factories on weekends to test the new weapons--most of whom would do it for lunch and gas money.
Say no to tourism. Say yes to arms manufacturing.
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