Welcome to Political Playland

Traditional amusement parks are themed to cartoon characters or movie studios or magic kingdoms or even country music like Dollywood and Opreyland. New ones are all about politics. Two examples are "Stalin's World" and "Caminata Nocturna."

Built near Vilnius, Lithuania, Stalin's World reproduces Soviet Communist Hell. The park is patterned after a Siberian prison camp from the good old Gulag days, featuring wooden walkways, guard towers, barbed wire fences and Lenin statues. "Children just love this place," crows the millionaire owner in an AP article.

Caminata Nocturna (Night Hike) is a Mexican theme park that simulates the experience of sneaking across the US-Mexican border.

For $18 apiece, park-goers can spend several nighttime hours running down dirt paths, slithering across riverbanks, slogging through stinking swamps and hiding under bushes and brambles, all while evading "capture" by khaki-clad "US border agent" park employees in patrol cars with flashing red and blue lights.

The Christian Science Monitor article quotes a park spokesman who explains that the purpose of the park "is to pay homage to those who must leave Mexico to earn money for their families." (And make some pesos for the enterprising ones who stayed.)

These are real. They're way too outrageous to make up. Which means that any day now we'll be seeing internet pop-up ads for these fun filled venues:

Welcome to Xtreme Lib-Zone USSA

Admission requires proof of membership in any racial, religious, trans-species, or other politically protected diversity category. All park entertainment consists of "group activities" which require you to join a "Visitors Labor Union" and do exactly what the uniformed "Central Planning Park Guides" dictate.

Today's Adventure: don your bandoliers and fatigues and go on a collective virtual raid with revolutionary poster boy Che Guevara. But don't worry, as bourgeois liberal Americans you won't get your hands dirty or break a nail. And we'll all pretend together that Che was not a psychotic murdering thug.

Tomorrow's Fantasy Event: join a "natural foods" co-op and spend several hours stooping over and picking tomatoes with illegal but sensitive and caring Latinos. Hey, watch out for stinkbugs! Haha!

Grampa Gore's Inconvenient WarmWorld

Pull on your hip waders at the entrance to Just-Around-the-Cornerland, where Hometown Main Street USA is flooded to simulate the Land of Tomorrow where all the glaciers and icecaps and snowfields have melted and the world's oceans have risen three feet.

In Transpo Land you can drive a Greenmobile. Tickets are $50 each. That's expensive because Greenmobiles run on ethanol, and converting corn into ethanol takes 29% more energy than the energy you get out of it. But don't worry about the coal-fired power plants that produce the energy that's used in the ethanol production process. Those nasty old refineries are hidden far away from your middleclass liberal homes, located in somebody else's backyard.

Then follow the carbon footprints to the Natural Food Boutiques. They're all very expensive, of course. Corn on the cob costs $7 apiece. There's a shortage of corn to eat because most of it is being converted to biofuel.

Too bad you'll never get to visit WarmWorld. Someone has to pay for all the subsidies and taxes and pork that were used to build this park, and that someone is you.

Bye now!

Live Free at LibertarianLand

Be a Libertarian for a day! Experience the thrill of doing as you please as long as you're not harming anyone else while doing it. No asking for government permission, no buying a license, no obeying mindless bureaucratic regulations.

But remember, freedom comes with responsibility. Since you're playing on private property you must respect the owner's rules when you snap off a few rounds at the "Assault Rifle Range" at targets shaped like IRS and BATF and DEA agents. Or take a spin on the Fossil-Fueled Belching Gasshogg without wearing a seatbelt. Or chow down on a non-FDA approved hot dog.

Then take a stroll down Freedom Street where no spycams are watching your every move and no cops are hassling you about that six-shooter on your hip or the doobie dangling from your lip or the beer in your grip. You can even marry your same-sex partner at The Little Chapel of the Significant Other.

Or take your kids to The Little Red Private Schoolhouse and teach them your own concepts of religion and morality and individualism without interference from the federal education cartel.

Just have fun doing whatever mainstream fundamentalist coercive society thinks it has the right to forcibly prevent you from doing.

Smokers welcome!