The tunnel only gets darker. You think things are okay, that they can't do that anymore. Then the faint light so far off in the distance disappears, an illusion after all, a trick of the mind. Because the game is only a game, it isn't close to real. What's real is money, and its appeal never wanes. It far outweighs any other argument.

In this case, money grows on trees, but you have to get to those trees first, so you carve into the wild with your mechanized, temp-job supplying, oil-gulping yeller monsters & you pluck, one by one, the flowers of your wealth, chop off the heads and the roots, strip off the bark, whittle down the trunks into logs and boards and mash the rest into pulp. You ship it to Mexico or China or wherever the labor's cheapest. The kids there turn the wood into sagging DVD cabinets, futons, wobbly coffee tables. They even make the boxes to store pre-constructed wares at Ikea or Wal-Mart, repositories that stretch over what used to be farm fields, formerly prairie. Employed by this for a brief time, some happy poor people buy booze, cartons of smokes and psychic readings, Happy Meals and give some money to the church. In China, the job doesn't matter, there's more work to come along because Americans, heads turned by that flickering box on their brand-new media cabinet, haven't noticed that their whole founding identity, the wild, the great expanse that was once America, is...