Conspiracy Theory

The 1995 film Desperado is set in a small town where most people in town work for a drug lord. From Wikipedia:

He learns that the kid is being used by his father to mule drugs hidden in his guitar. The boy reveals that most people in the town work for Bucho. 

Even the local bookstore is a front for drug dealing and I've never quite known if Carolina means her money was hidden in the books or invested in the books when she tells El Mariachi that with the bookstore burned down, she's broke. The money is gone.

I lived for a few years in Aberdeen, Washington and shortly after moving there, I applied for a job doing community development work. This led to years of stupid levels of drama and I've blogged about that on this site and at least a couple of others.

I actually invented the name Eclogiselle years before I moved to Aberdeen, but the current website by that name grew out of the fact that locals strung me along for a couple of years with suggesting I might yet get the job because the guy they hired, Wil Russoul, wasn't really qualified.

I spent some time trying to figure out how I would actually solve the development challenges the town had on the theory that I would need a plan in hand if they actually hired me. And then I spent a few years trying to pivot all that research into some kind of business to try to support myself and not waste all that research and none of it has done anything for me as far as I can tell.

In May of this year, I wrote a piece titled This is a Failed Experiment and stopped updating the site. Here is a blurb from that piece:

I suspect that, most likely, small town America is withering on the vine because that story is probably not unique to Aberdeen. I think criminals intentionally move to small towns, get on local boards and intentionally strangle development hoping to keep their hideout from growing.

All that research into how to effectively develop a small town with limited resources as a one woman shop led me to believe that the Main Street America program is not effective. I've written about that in multiple posts on Eclogiselle tagged Main.Street.

They don't really have any competition in this space of helping small town America with local economic development and if small towns really wanted to thrive, it seems to me if they learned of a viable alternative, it would become all the rage in short order.

Eclogiselle gets a shocking amount of traffic for work by a lone blogger with no traction. I have something like 14 Patreon members and my last post there has 235 views, yet that traction isn't leading to people emailing me or supporting my Patreon, etc.

In January of this year, I wrote a piece stating basically Aberdeen, Washington should probably be declared a Superfund site.

None of this nonsense has EVER made any sense to me. Here lately, I find myself increasingly entertaining a conspiracy theory that I feel would explain the different pieces of all this stuff.

What if the national Main Street America program is a Mafia organization and what if they establish local programs intended to strangle development in small towns they are using to have hideouts for people and other activities?

And what if Aberdeen, Washington is being intentionally strangled in part because it's a place they do illegal dumping of toxic chemicals?