while the central area of the county is industrialized with the Boeing complex, a maritime and fishing industry, a paper products industry, and a new Naval Homeport. The northern part of the county is primarily agricultural. Moving eastward in the county, one traverses the urban-suburban-rural-logging-primitive landscape eventually ending in the Cascade Mountains. Whatcom County is home to a regional university, a maritime and fishing industry, a paper products industry, an oil refining industry, and one of the nation's largest aluminum production complexes. The northern part of the county is agricultural with a large dairy industry, while logging operations continue in the eastern areas of the county. As one gets nearer the Cascade Mountains, the primary occupations are the hatching of conspiracy theories and keeping watch for the invasion of United Nations troops.
Political and Philosophical Character of 2nd WA
Although the 2nd District of Washington had prior to 1994 always elected Democrats, and relatively liberal Democrats at that, the political and philosophical character of the district has been in a period transition since the late-1980s as inward migration brought new residents from politically more conservative areas of the United States. The new conservatives were variously enraged or threatened by the failure of welfarism to contain black poverty, the horrors of drug abuse, the spread of sexual permissiveness, urban decay, and the decline of American hegemony in the worldùall of which they blamed on the liberalism of the political and intellectual elites who had been dominant in the United States prior to the advent of the Reagan presidency.
Fundamentalist Christians, the conspiracy-afflicted, and militia types (characteristics often found in a single individual) poured into the sparsely inhabited rural and forest communities in the 2nd District from the southern and Midwestern states, many seeking the free...