Christopher Ketcham wrote the 2019 book,
This Land: How Cowboys, Capitalism and Corruption are Ruining the American West. This is my 2nd part of my two-part review of the chapter (
part 1 is here). Ketcham writes:
“The rainless country was the last frontier,” wrote Bernard DeVoto, who told the story of aridity in the West perhaps more eloquently than any American. If beyond the 100th meridian is the true West, its end lies at the end of the High Sierras of California and the cascades of Oregon and Washington, at the mountain rain shadow cutting off the Pacific Ocean air. (The West does not include the relatively lush California coasts or the temperate rain forests of Oregon and Washington, essentially the Pacific Rim.) .... The forests back of the hundredth meridian had fallen in short order, but the aridlands could not be homesteaded so easily.
.... In the aridlands, the pioneer faced an “iron determinism” where “the limits set by nature were narrow and the terms rigid,” where civilization as we know it was possible only in a “very narrow life zone.” The mountains where the rain and snow mostly fell, and where the tree held the snowpack were uninhabitable, as they couldn’t be farmed. .... America’s ideology of limitless growth was here rebuffed. This is the key to understanding why so much of the land in the West remains out of private hands and in public ownership.
DeVoto was the first major historian of the West who was also an environmentalist and an activist, the first chronicler of what Wallace Stegner called “the West's curious desire to rape itself.” DeVoto was a Westerner, raised in Utah. He suffered in the provincialism and intolerance of Mormon country, went east to study and then teach at Harvard, settled in Cambridge, but never forgot the beauty of his native ground (“loving the land and history,” said a magazine profile, “but loathing the society”).
.... He called the West “a plundered province,” a resource colony for corporations and absentee landlords who practiced an “economy of liquidation.” He was broad in his attacks on the liquidators. He went after the timbermen, the mining companies, the stockmen, the cattle barons, the opilmen and gasmen, the overgrazers, the deforesters, the denuders, the profiteers of gold rushes and grass rushes. He named the bankers and congressmen who abetted the plundering. The Western hogs, he called them.
.... Ironically, the users in their race to liquidate, helped drive the creation of the public lands system we know today, as they proved the need for federal stewardship to stop their abuses. Massive timber frauds in the 19th century, the largest land frauds seen in the West, led directly to the establishment of the Forest Service in the 20th century, its purpose to stop deforestation. Out-of-control cattle numbers in the steppe, overgrazing that turned the fragile soil to dust, led directly to the federal grazing regulatory service that eventually became the Bureau of Land Management.
I quote this to point out that the modern CARRRP (corrupt authoritarian radical right Republican Party) considers any restraints on exploitation of public federal lands to be evil deep state socialism that must be completely obliterated. The tactics and deeply selfish attitudes and mindset of American capitalists with the rape everything and to hell with social conscience are no different than the tactics and mindset of cruel colonial imperialists that (1) Hannah Arendt described in brutal detail in 1951 in The Origins of Totalitarianism, or (2) Joseph Conrad painfully but beautifully described in 1899 in Heart of Darkness.
Not a damned thing has changed. Humans are going to be human. That includes deceit, brutality and shameless cruelty to people and nature. The plutocratic elites of the modern CARRRP are essentially no different than what Ketcham, Arendt or Conrad wrote about. The CARRRP (and libertarians) hate government and regulations that protect both people and the environment. They glorify the alleged infallibility of unregulated free markets running wild and butt naked as the best hope for freedom, prosperity and peace. They are both wrong and a deadly threat to democracy, civil liberties and the rule of law. They are not democrats, they are brutal tyrants and plutocrats.
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“To think of these stars that you see overhead at night, these vast worlds which we can never reach. I would annex the planets if I could; I often think of that. It makes me sad to see them so clear and yet so far.” ― Fabulously wealthy imperialist and brutal exploiter of people and nature Cecil Rhodes (1853-1902) expressing his sincere sadness at not being able to take control of the entire universe and exploit it to dust, including any living creatures in it for his personal wealth,
The Last Will and Testament of Cecil John Rhodes; With Elucidatory Notes to Which Are Added Some Chapters Describing the Political and Religious Ideas (the guy that Rhodesia and Rhodes scholarship were named after -- there was not one shred of social conscience in Cecil)
In my book a pioneer is a man who turned all the grass upside down, strung bob-wire over the dust that was left, poisoned the water, cut down the trees, killed the Indian who owned the land, and called it progress. If I had my way, the land would be like God made it and none of you sons of bitches would be here at all. ― Chris Ketcham quoting Charlie Russel, the Cowboy Artist
I don't recognize the United States Government as even existing. ― Cliven Bundy, expressing the unflinching attitude of a virulent government hater (also a man of no social conscience;
Bundy advocated for limited federal government involvement in local affairs, particularly in ranching. Bundy supported the ideas of the
sovereign citizen movement. Many movement adherents argue that the federal government is illegitimate and does not have jurisdiction over individuals, meaning that laws do not apply to them.)
