I like Charles Pierce. You might even say I love Charles Pierce. He’s one of the finest journalists in the country, bouncing from politics to sports with little hesitation or brake. That’s why it was so jarring to read this in his otherwise wonderful Cotton Bowl piece on Grantland:
Cowboys Stadium is a spectacle all on its own, looming above the Walmarts and brake-and-lube joints, the empty luxury housing developments and huge, blank-staring abandoned office parks, and all the rest of the essential archaeology of the latest collapse of the American economy, for which the area in and around Arlington, Texas, looks like ground zero. It is what’s left there, after the ambulances go, as Dylan would say. It is not, in any case, where the Cotton Bowl game belongs.
Is Arlington pretty? No, it’s not. But to make it sound like some sort of Cormac McCarthy crater dotted with Exxons and cheap groceries and full of wandering, job-hungry zombies is disingenuous.
