The most amazing thing about the X Games has nothing to do with The Flying Tomato doing a 4860 or local hero Gretchen Bleiler throwing down an extra twist as she rises up above the spine of the pipe. It has nothing to do with snowmobiling or dudecross or any of the inexplicable sports now underway at Buttermilk.

Nope: the most amazing thing about the X Games is the set.

You can, of course, see it famously from the highway. You can see it from Aspen Meadows. You could grow all the herbs in your greenhouse with the light the hyped-up television set throws off. The bright lights make all the sense in the world for Aspen. Like the fur coats and the dopey cowboy hats, the X Games is Generation X, Y, and Z’s way of showing they can turn Aspen into a playpen that morphs to their needs.

And it’s all for the goddess of television.

Aspen, in the context of ESPN, is little more than a set for something that the latest chunk of visitors to define us for the world. Like it or not, what people see over the next set of days is what they will get when it comes to Aspen. Like retirees angling for an ogle of Jack Nicholson, the young and the nestless will have a chance to make Aspen their own.

Perhaps malleability is our most pungent trait. People who come to Aspen are slackers of the most obvious sort–a fashionista snapshot in time–and I’m not just talng about evergreen boys who keep their voices and their pants low. A man of means can do his own slacking in a Lacoste shirt: the whole lot of them are at a point in their lives where they don’t have to worry so much what the world thinks–until they leave town.

But here’s the rub. We provide the set but we let others provide the action. Like a Hollywood soundstage, the actors and directors and producers come and go here and there and use Aspen as nothing more than a set that is far more fantasy than Google Earth. Those of us who live here become prop boys and girls, providing the van or the meal for Van’s. We start to live in a place that becomes more about fantasy than fact, more about television and reel life than anything we might happen to be living.

There’s a real danger there, and we live it every day–the danger that once they strike the set there is nothing left behind beyond an HD cable leading nowhere. Even in 3-D, television is two-dimensional. You can’t see inside. What happens when you live where there’s no there there?