Wasco Football: Oasis in a Desert?

Wasco seems to have a good football team this year. There are even some suggestions that they are building a genuine program with a local guy, Russ Prado, at the helm who is committed to building for the long term. I wish them well, but the question remains whether the deep flaws in the collective character of Wasco will undermine this effort. I've noted before the disorder and confusion expressed in the naming of the town. Then there is the suggestive fact that Wasco city fathers have decided to let rivers of their own feces run across the land. All of this has left the city with some confidence issues.

I am not the first to notice the depth of Wasco's challenges. In a justly famous 1947 study of agriculture and community life in the Central Valley, As You Sow, anthropologist Arthur Goldschmidt saw Wasco as a good example of what can go bad. It is worth reading in its entirety, but perhaps the best line is a seemingly exasperated aside as Professor Goldschmidt,writing of an effort by dairymen to work together on marketing, notes (on page 46 of the 1978 edition) "Like most co-operative effort(s) in Wasco, it proved unsuccessful..." History, as they say, doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme. Maybe football will be different.