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I DREAMED I SAW JOE HILL LAST NIGHT--PAST SIMULATIONS
[TRUCK STOP AT THE END OF THE WORLD, SPRING 2009]
ESSENTIALS
WISE WORDS
"It isn't what they say about you, it's what they whisper."
--Errol Flynn
READINGS
CURRENT WORK
PAST
SIMULATIONS
TRUCK STOP AT THE END OF THE WORLD
Spring 2009
In Truck Stop at the End of the World simulation participants were again situated in the year 2023 to confront the aftermath of a limited nuclear war between Mexico and the United States over issues of immigration and disease control, a war that had rendered most of the western United States, now called El Ouestat, a scarred and lawless wasteland.
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The story (as originally planned) had to do with a mysterious figure, Ricardo Vengador, hero to the Scattered, the resistance fighters who struggled for survival against the putative governing force of El Ouestat, the Federales. The leader of the Federales is a driven woman known in the wastelands as La Pinche Madre, the Cursed Mother, and she is obsessed with apprehending and punishing Ricardo.
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Ricardo may be real or may be a mythic figure supposedly killed in a fiery truck crash outside Agua Fria, NM, on April 30 (Walpurgis Night), 2013 and who has taken on the frightening aspect of a legendary Ghost Trucker who tears through the wastelands in a cobbled together 18-wheel truck nicknamed El Rechazado ("the Rejected One").
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On Walpurgis Night, 2023, sources among the Scattered swear that Ricardo Vengador is scheduled to make his final run, carrying military intelligence and equipment vital to the Scattered's plans for resistance, from Agua Fria to Terlingua, TX, and La Pinche is determined to stop him. The result is a cat and mouse game involving media manipulation of a suicide run under the dark of the moon on a closed highway with a known starting point and a known destination. Their game relies on the manipulation of elint signals, black ops, disinformation, network-centric warfare, propaganda, and intelligence, with the winner determining the future, not just of one but two nations, as well as the diverse enclaves that comprise El Ouestat.
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In terms of creativity (always a key consideration in experiential learning), Truck Stop at the End of the World stands utterly alone. So clearly defined were the warring groups, so precisely faithful to their simulated cultural identities, that they could not come to a common ground regarding the final performance, resulting in a presentation with two endings! Not only that, the class took (what I thought was) the already outrageous depiction of Ricardo as a ghost trucker and made "him" into a time machine ("R.I.C.A.R.D.O." or "Reverse Instant Chronodynamic Attuning Rapid Dilation Object") which permitted the activists of the Scattered to hatch a complicated plot to move the key intelligence through several configurations of time and space.
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Although the intransigent refusal of the two "sides" to cooperate in the simulation might be taken by some as a sign of failure of process, in the experiential learning situation, it signifies full involvement of all the participants, as well a realistic grasp of the external organizational communication principle that some problems in image management simply cannot be solved to everyone's, or even anyone's, satisfaction.
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Fun Facts and Trivia
-- The inspiration for the simulation began with two classic, "old school" country/western songs, Marty Robbins' gunfighter ballad Big Iron (especially the first line, "To the town of Agua Fria, rode a stranger one fine day…"), and Red Sovine's provocative recounting of a "Flying Dutchman" legend involving a martyred trucker, Phantom 309 (as well as Tom Waits' awesome remake, Big Joe and Phantom 309 ).
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-- The final performance begins and ends with the same event, news reporters trading on-air banter, interrupted by a nuclear explosion, which may (or may not) be an homage to Memento--we really can't remember :-)
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-- Matt Kula's hilariously clownish character Ralphie ("Dubba U") Van Auken is a sendup of a well-known politician--we leave it to you to figure out which one.
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