In 1965, at the height of his substance abuse, Johnny Cash was called in to make a deposition, but not about possessing drugs. Instead, the singer was in trouble for leaving a burning truck at the side of a road in Los Padres National Forest in California. The flames had started a forest fire that jeopardized not only the refuge itself, but the lives of nearly 50 critically endangered California condors, which at that time made up a sizable portion of the global population. Facing the prospect of a lawsuit, and filled with “amphetamines and arrogance,” as his autobiography put it, Cash defiantly told his government questioners, “I don’t give a damn about your yellow buzzards.”
--Peter Cashwell, New York Times
When men seek to do something really outrageous, first they try to change the past, or our perception of it, and then they claim their enemies of the present have defiled what once was a veritable Garden of Eden by valuing yellow buzzards over freedom.
As Nancy Langston details in her wonderful Op-Ed piece in the New York Times, about the history of the American prairie, the men under the command of Ammon Bundy at a bird sanctuary in Oregon are facing the cameras, spinning a myth about how wonderful everything was in the West until those muddle headed liberals in Washington got it into their heads to control every blade of grass on the Great Plains and to save some birds and frogs nobody should care about and to save wolves and coyotes which were ravaging the herds honest ranchers and farmers were struggling to keep alive.
Their lips dripping with derision, loggers have inveighed against restrictions on denuding hills of old growth forest for the ridiculous purpose of saving the spotted owl when loggers' families are starving; condors, nothing more than "yellow buzzards" are nothing compared to the rugged Marlboro men who ride the range herding cattle and earning a tough living only a man could earn. There you have dream spinning in an American way.
The truth, as Professor Langston documents so well, is the great outdoors west of the Mississippi was dominated by land barons who would make today's Wall Street tycoons look like Mr. Rodgers in cardigan sweater, singing to your kids. They ruthlessly monopolized water and land and there was no freedom but the freedom of the few oligarchs to control vast swaths of the Western landscape.
This is the same sort of fable spinning we hear from gun advocates, who yammer about how free we were in the days when every hearth had a musket hanging above the mantle, in the 18th century, which is why the founding fathers wrote the Second Amendment, because they knew to keep this paradise of liberty called America, every man needed a gun. (Of course the founding fathers wrote no such thing--they were talking about a "well regulated militia" not some unregulated neurotics running around brandishing AK-15 assault rifles in shopping malls, or some lunatic with Glock 9 hand guns shooting at the driver who cut him off on the freeway.)
For Donald Trump and Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, today's present is a living apocalypse and the past was a serene oasis of liberty and self fulfillment.
Of course, Mr. Bundy is a Mormon, and as anyone who has seen the Broadway show, "The Book of Mormon" will know, you have to be able to believe in a pretty bizarre back story to be a believing Mormon--and we do not know Mr. Bundy is that.
But belief continues to be a wondrous thing.
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