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The valley of ashes: popularity is waning on all sides as US elections loom.

Article Excerpt
Along the Connecticut border, housing developments have made incursions into the Woodstock farmlands, which have been farmed since the early 1600s. 'McMansions' cluster cul-de-sacs like oversized playtoys, price tags dangling off their cheaply shingled roofs. There aren't many election campaign signs along those treeless streets, but in front of the old farmhouses, Ned Lamont signs guard many a road.

Lamont is the millionaire businessman who this August knocked Senator Joe Lieberman out in the Democratic primary. Lieberman has been senator since 1988, and was the vice-presidential candidate who, with Al Gore, surrendered the 2000 election to Bush and Cheney. With the help of a small army of bloggers, Lamont sacked Lieberman primarily because of Lieberman's support of Bush's war on terror.

The media have used the Lamont insurgency as a way to analyse anti-Bush sentiment, the power of blogs and the Iraq tragedy. While 'The Fall of Lieberman' does focus some things, a larger shadow is moving through American political life. Both Lamont and Lieberman are from the same town, Greenwich, quite a ways south of the cornfields and cowyards of Woodstock. Greenwich is a Connecticut town that has been immortalised in American fiction by F. Scott Fitzgerald and John Cheever, a land pinched between the Atlantic Ocean, the sand-grass harbours of Long Island Sound, and that enormity of American culture and wealth--New York City. Here's Fitzgerald's depiction of it in The Great Gatsby:

About half way between West Egg and New York, the motor road hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as to shrink away from a certain desolate area...

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