When I was in my early teenage years one of my favorite activities was going to Enterprise Square, U.S.A. It was located on the campus of Oklahoma Christian University and was a monument to anti-government extreme capitalism. It was kind of a museum, kind of video games place. For $3 it wasn't at all a bad day for a 13-year old to spend a fall afternoon. Mom would drop me off, I'd quickly make my way through the museum portions to play the video games, and several hours later I'd finally get sick of going bust on the Oklahoma oil fields and have my mom come and get me. I'm guessing the combination of growing up in Oklahoma to conservative parents and visiting ESUSA probably 20 times in two years (remember, this is the time of my life of video game obsession before girls were on the radar) made me the supply-side Republican that I became throughout my early 20s.
Enterprise Square opened in 1982, and even then I thought the museum portion a bit cheesy. Singing presidents made to be Reagan-era capitalists, Bob Hope reading off of cue cards, aliens crash-landing on earth to examine our way of life...yeah. That's why I would usually go straight to the video games. There was always something wonderful about mowing yards and fighting off government regulations and being a truck driver that was something appealing. It was, after all, the very, very best way to live. the American way. Even now I still have within me the suspicions of government...though I'm probably more suspicious of large multi-national corporations whose only interest is profit and owe no allegiance to anybody but their biggest shareholders.
Sadly, the thousand visitors a day never really materialized. Even in the mid-1980s the place already had a kind of run-down feel to it. Nothing was ever updated, and the building has set mostly empty since it closed down over a decade ago. Mocked and now mostly unloved, it's a living reminder that capitalism is a dangerous proposition. When it fails, it fails miserably.
One final side note...only in recent years have I found great irony in the fact that a Christian institution, which Biblically speaks to the nature of fellowship and helping out the poor, allowed such a monument to be built on its campus. As I remember it now, Enterprise Square loved the individual and spoke to the glories of unfettered capitalism...but where was God in all this? What about the poor? Do we just let them get crushed by the overwhelming world economy? What about those who have been in jail and have no real future? Do we say sorry, you don't fit into the model of supply and demand? Nowhere in my memory do I remember anything about God at Enterprise Square. Reading the prophets of the Old Testament as much as I have for the last few years I have been struck by its call for economic justice and its warnings about the rich growing richer while the poor get left behind. This, more than anything, has pushed me away from the extreme conservatism of my youth.
