Fast Food Nation: What The All-American Meal is Doing to the World by Eric Schlosser Page B

being designed and tested at Schriever Air Force Base, a dozen miles east of the city. And Peterson Air Force Base now houses one of America’s newest and most high-tech units — the Space Command. It launches, operates, and defends America’s military satellites. It tests, maintains, and upgrades the nation’s ballistic missiles. And it guides research on exotic space-based weaponry to attack enemy satellites, aircraft, and even targets on the ground. Officers at the Space Command believe that before long the United States will fight its first war in space. Should that day ever come, Colorado Springs will be at the center of the action. The motto of a local air force unit promises a new kind of American firepower: “In Your Face from Outer Space.”
    The presence of these high-tech military installations attracted defense contractors to Colorado Springs, mainly from California. Kaman Services arrived in 1957. Hewlett Packard followed in 1962. TRW, a southern California firm, opened its first Colorado Springs branch in 1968. Litton Data Systems moved one of its divisions from Van Nuys, California, to Colorado Springs in 1976. Not long afterward Ford Aerospace sold ten acres of land in Orange County and used the money to buy three hundred acres in Colorado Springs. Today a long list of defense contractors does business in the city. The advanced communications networks installed to serve those companies and the military have drawn computer chip manufacturers, telemarketers, and software companies to Colorado Springs. The quality of life is a big selling point, along with the well-educated workforce and the local attitudes toward labor. A publication distributed by the Colorado Springs Chamber of Commerce notes that in the city’s private industry, the rate of union membership stands at 0.0 percent. ColoradoSprings now views itself as a place on the cutting edge, the high-tech capital of the Rockies. Business leaders promote the town with nicknames like “Silicon Mountain,” “Space Mountain,” and “The Space Capital of the Free World.”
    The new businesses and residents from southern California brought a new set of attitudes. In 1946, R. C. Hoiles, the owner of the
Orange County Register
and later the founder of the Freedom Newspaper chain, purchased the largest daily newspaper in Colorado Springs, the
Gazette-Telegraph
. Hoiles was politically conservative, a champion of competition and free enterprise; his editorials had attacked Herbert Hoover for being too left-wing. In the 1980s the Freedom Newspaper chain purchased the
Gazette’s
only rival in town, the
Colorado Springs Sun
, a struggling paper with a more liberal outlook. After buying the
Sun
, Freedom Newspapers fired all its employees and shut it down. In 1990, James Dobson decided to move Focus on the Family, a religious organization, from the Los Angeles suburb of Pomona to Colorado Springs. Dobson is a child psychologist and radio personality as well as the author of a best-selling guide for parents,
Dare to Discipline
(1970). He blames weak parents for the excesses of the sixties youth counterculture, advocates spanking disobedient children with a “neutral object,” and says that parents must convey to preschoolers two fundamental messages: “(1) I love you, little one, more than you can possibly understand… (2) Because I love you so much, I must teach you to obey me.” Although less well known than Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority and Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition, Dobson’s Focus on the Family generates much larger annual revenues.
    The arrival of Focus on the Family helped turn Colorado Springs into a magnet for evangelical Christian groups. The city had always been more conservative than Denver, but that conservatism was usually expressed in the sort of live-and-let-live attitude common in the American West. During the early 1990s, religious groups in Colorado Springs became outspoken opponents of feminism, homosexuality, and