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by Christopher Ketcham
Good party for the 4th here at Pack Creek Ranch: beer, fried
turkey, music, starlight and moonrise and many friends. But little talk about independence, or the
U.S.,
or the Constitution, its crafting under duress. No surprises: I am 34 and for my entire life the 4th of July has been
meaningless except as an excuse to drink, gather, eat meat, watch explosions in
the sky. Which is fine. The dudgeon and pretense of the holiday
should therefore be excised and July 4 renamed “Get Wasted and Blow Shit Up
Day” or something more in tune with the American mind.
Better yet, if we wish to commemorate the degeneracy of our
historical moment, our peculiar fallen stature as a people and a republic, we
might try simply Dependence Day. Here
in Moab, Utah, the dependence is utmost: strung out at the far ends of
industrial foodism and carbon fuel addiction in the red rock, a desert people
piling too many into a place with too few local resources for real sustenance:
the trucks on the highways bring us the life of a 2,000-mile supply line, and
the long strings of the power plants bring us air conditioning in the 108
degree days (growing hotter every year), and the lights at night and phone line
that keeps me jabbering onto the Internet, and the fridges that keep the ice to
cool the brain from the mashing of the sun – all of it the function of
large-scale, far-flung, giantist systems of dependence whose links, if severed,
would bring about an apocalypse of such proportions as to render moot our
partying, this writing, intellect, politics, freedom itself: behold the purest Malthusian
struggle, bug-eyed cannibalism, many young and old reduced to a mental, moral,
physical fetal position.
A few facts we know, ought to know, or know and don’t speak
of because unacceptable in the current hologram of wellness and self-regard: it
comes home to me in the memory of a crack whore among the warehouses at 9th
Street and 2nd Avenue in Brooklyn, a toothless creature no more than 30 years
old and looking 70 who was starved and told me, “Mistah, I’ll suck yo dick for
five dollars – please.” I bought the
woman a sandwich and avoided the blowjob…but here she is in the sage and under
the moon haunting my imaginings of the U.S. as “independent”: We suck the dick
of foreign oil, imports whose slightest shiver in supply would send us into
chaos; we suck the dick of foreign lenders, the Chinese and Japanese buying up
our bond reserves, propping up our markets with cheap goods that we hoover like
apes at the totem of a banana and without which the sand and spit foundation of
U.S. home mortgages would collapse like beach to the sea. The perversity in these overseas relationships
is that we bow for blowjobs while pointing a gun at the blow-jobbee, crying out
By god we will keep sucking dick or shoot you.
Which brings me to the issue of the bald eagle as national
symbol: I went hiking a few days ago in Salt Creek Canyon in Canyonlands park,
finding again and always that the flora and fauna of the
redrock country serve as a kind of metaphor and lesson plan for a
true conservative conduct that so-called conservatives in the U.S. have
abandoned. Here heat, sun, lack of
rain, the thinness of soil, the vastness of scarcity makes moderation,
modesty, self-reliance the norm and the virtue. And the eagle has no place.
The bald eagle with its great strength and
noble visage and razor talons is a fraud. He survives not by
prowess and creativity but by theft and the strong-arm, by dive-bombing
smaller birds to make them drop the rats or rabbits or fish these more
enterprising avians catch through lone hard work. The
behavior of the bald eagle hence falls under the rubric of
kleptoparasitism, which makes the bird a fitting symbol of the
U.S.
government, especially as regards foreign policy.
But kleptoparasitism is an aberration in the desert,
which is why the vicious beady-eyed bald eagle finds a hard row to hoe in
zones of self-reliance such as the redrock country. Instead, desert
life teaches more admirable lessons, lessons that jibe, for example, with the
so-called paleoconservatism – awful usage – of a Barry
Goldwater, himself a desert rat who late in life rafted the Green and
Colorado Rivers where they confluenced in Utah, toppling down the canyons
in whitewater, and who was thus converted from conservatism to conservation
in understanding that wild places should be kept
wild. Desert flora foremost show that wildness – a sense
of distance, keeping an arm's length, not getting in each other's
way or invading mutual space – is key to a happy co-existence: among
the top flora such as the sagebrush and the pinyon pines and the juniper,
there is always spacing for each to have enough water and to cull the nutrients
from that thin soil.
Hence no ostentation among these plants, no waste,
no profligacy. The flowers such as the evening primrose or the
four o'clock show-off bloom white and cream or magenta and
crimson only when night falls, but come daybreak they close to no one's notice
(the scream of the sun would take their life in an hour's
time). Modesty is their virtue and also their survival.
Meanwhile, some of the most beautiful and most damned of
the lifeforms are armed to the teeth, showing that the best defense is a
good offense: the claret-cup cactus, spiny to the point of impossibility; the
scorpion, who hunts little bugs but rarely deploys his terrible piercing
stinger against human beings. Above all, there
is self-sufficiency in these lifeforms, suffering terrific extremes and
the better for it, more economical, tougher, more muscled, more
careful, more free than their counterparts in the easy climes of the temperate
East.
The notion of a desert conservatism is not new and it haunts
the thoughtful newcomer to the desert as much as an idea of Eden: it has its
precedence in the mountain men loners who came west before the en masse
migrations of the pioneers, before the gold bonanzas and the cattlemen welfare
queens (the hardest tit-suckers of the West), before the railroad corporations
conjured the first of the big real estate scams. And, in modern times, it
finds expression in the throwback orneriness of writers such as Ed Abbey,
who in Desert Solitaire of 1968 envisioned the deserts of the
Southwest as a safe house of political liberty, the “base for guerrilla
warfare against tyranny.” (Goldwater, an Arizonan, also spoke about this).
Abbey wondered aloud in Desert Solitaire as to the necessary
steps an American government might take to quash democracy. First, he suggested, encourage overpopulation
and “concentrate the populations in megapolitan masses,” where they are easily
surveilled and controlled. Second,
mechanize agriculture so that food production sits in the hands of the few,
eliminating the fundamental source of independence in self-sufficient communities
(siege starvation is the ultimate strong-arm, barring the bullet). Then, fight wars against distant, mostly
chimerical, threats overseas, “divert[ing] attention from deep conflicts within
the society” and rendering “support of these wars a test of loyalty.” Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, the
wilderness is to be razed, paved over, developed, rigged with roads and
cellphone towers and WalMarts and utility corridors, means of access,
centralization, control – because it is here that the last of the
self-reliant tribes will find their hold-out, a perch unacceptable to forces of
dominion. In short: create a system of dependency
and thou wilt prevail…not news and surely an algorithm in the books of the
sociopaths in the White House. Like his peer of a generation earlier,
poet Robinson Jeffers, Abbey saw in the vanishing of desert wilderness the
perishing of the republic, the freedom for which it stood.
And here in my hypocrisy of this screed, sitting up late on
the Internet burning the coal of the power plants, I notice that even Google
shows an image of the bald eagle, wings spread, descending in hero’s flight…holding
perhaps an olive branch…or a stolen sprig from the mouths of children.
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