Who Can Save Ketchum?
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Jima Rice: Calling Dr. Freud
The person “who can save Ketchum” would be a charismatic leader immune to inertia, with a sophisticated and broad business background, impressive fortitude, and an altruistic streak. We’re going to have to wait for the Second Coming, however, or Mike Bloomberg’s Western retirement.
Meanwhile, Sun Valley Magazine’s question, “Who can save Ketchum?” is accompanied by the suggestion that Ketchum has an “identity disorder.” Huh? Can a town have an identity disorder? Let me paraphrase the medical definition:
Identity disorder: Marked distress over a person’s inability to integrate aspects of the self into a coherent whole, leading to uncertainty about long-term goals, career choice, moral values, and group loyalties, among other issues.
Appearing in late adolescence, the disorder is expressed in negative behavior stemming from a person’s attempt to establish an identity distinct from family or other close people. Identity disorder may also appear in young adulthood or even in middle age if a person takes on new values or questions earlier life decisions.*
All this talk about Ketchum’s identity disorder is misplaced, not to mention pretentious and mournful. It’s not the city that struggles with its identity, it’s the residents who have the disorder!
“We don’t know how to play nice,” applies to elections, public meetings, cocktail party talk, and private gossip.
I’ve lived in the East, the Midwest and now the intermountain West. I’ve consulted for over two decades to major U.S. corporations.
Exposed to the power of both Wall Street and old-line manufacturing business executives, I was surprised to find that the Wood River Valley, a place of safety, generosity, and relaxed life-style, has a large proportion of “I-know-best” types who seek to dictate our future.
Yet, we are a bastion of intelligence, talent, education and wealth that has come here from Connecticut, San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Seattle, Pittsburgh, Minnesota and Texas, among others. How can we be identity disordered?
Dr. Freud: Ah, I zink I see. You are individualists and rebels? In youth, you moved to ze mountains to be “free?” An older person, you moved to escape ze rat race?
Populace: Very apt!
Dr. Freud: You haf had and may still haf lots of jobs, but never ze career? Your contact with ze real world was brief? Your career is based mostly on recreation?
Populace: Quite true!
Dr. Freud: Now, living in ze mountains, you vant to shape ze natural landscape for your personal tastes? You vant for strangers and tourists to be with you everyday? But you call “socialists” people who vant ze Valley’s income more diverse?
Populace: Well-put!
Dr. Freud: You haf a business, but never took ze lessons on how to run it? Your employees are hostile to customers? You left ze big city to make heaps of money in ze small town?
Populace: Most definitely!
Dr. Freud: Ach, I see! It is ze case of conflicted values, non-conformity, hostility to others, poor social skills and resistance to authority (ze father figure)….it is vat vee call ze Identity Disorder!
Populace: That bad, huh? What should we do?
Dr. Freud: You must take 100mg of social skills three times daily; awake ze neurons with learning about economics, town planning and business management; start ze daily practice of humility; apply ze regimen of out-of-the-box thinking and long-term planning.
For long-term health, use a wrecking ball on an entire block of banks to change ze sterile town atmosphere, put lofts in ze light industrial area, and imagine ze valley as teeming with entrepreneurs, as vell as ze tourists and second-home owners.
See you back in 10 years, yah?
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*From the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (Third Edition Revised), published by the American Psychiatric Association.
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Reader Comments:
Freud would probably also recommend the use of certain narcotics to ease the urge to over build, ruin views and destroy what is left of the considerable charms for which the town was once known.