Walter Russell Mead on The Energy Boom

Wanna read a devastating take-down of the New York Times to get your Sunday off to a great start?  Take a look at this piece, which WRM eviscerates the New York Times' coverage of the oil boom in the midwest.  One wonders whether NYT would be so moved were it solar panel manufacturers and windmill placers who were blotting the landscape.  A sample of this thoroughly entertaining piece:

This is what economic growth looks like.  It is sudden, disruptive, often inconvenient.  It messes with the status quo.  New stuff gets built and not all of it looks like the Cloisters.  All kinds of rough and hungry men flock to it; they sometimes misbehave.  They spit on the ground, say unpleasant things about women, and generally fail to meet the behavioral standards of the Upper West Side.
Decline is so much more decorous.  Prairie towns slowly wither on the vine; the young people quietly leave, the stores gradually empty and close.  Reporters from the Times write haunting and moving stories about the gentle, drifting sadness of it all. Novelists in creative writing programs can write delicate tales of rural decline; filmmakers can make understated little films about the lost hope and vanished promise of the American dream.

H/T:  Instapundit