Riding Herd
“The greatest homage we can pay to truth is to use it.”
by LEE PITTS
– JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
January 15, 2017 • www.aaalivestock.com
Volume 59 • No. 1
A Faults Alarm
My Forgotten Country T BY LEE PITTS
You can’t live a positive life with a negative mind.
T
here’s an old joke about a man and wife and their six girls. Both parents desperately wanted a boy and decided to try one last time. (This was before sonograms took all the mystery out of a baby’s sex.) To their astonishment the seventh time was lucky and they finally had a bouncing baby boy. When the father was asked who the baby looked like he replied, “I don’t know. We haven’t looked at his face yet.” I was reminded of that joke the morning after Donald Trump was elected President. Most of us in agriculture were so elated that Hillary got beat that we hadn’t given much thought as to what a Trump presidency would mean for agriculture.
NEWSPAPER PRIORITY HANDLING
City Versus Country Bias alert! In the race between two New Yorkers I voted for Trump primarily because had Hillary been elected our founding fathers would’ve never recognized the great country they founded. With all the baggage Hillary would’ve brought with her it would have been Watergate to the power of infinity. I had a feeling Trump might win because I didn’t think American voters were that stupid. It turns out a majority of them were, but once again the brilliance of our founding fathers shone through and Trump won in the electoral college. This is how it should be. We simply can’t have idiots on both coasts running roughshod over 95 percent of our land. It’s easy to see who put Trump in the White House. There are 3,141 counties in the USA. Trump won
3,084 of them and Clinton won 57. The disparity was evident even in their home state. Trump won 46 of the 62 counties in the state of New York, Clinton won 16. Clinton received well over 2 million more votes than Trump in New York City alone, which was nearly enough to win the national popular vote. The five counties that make up New York city consists of 319 square miles. There are 3,797,000 square miles in the U.S. Do we really want the folks who inhabit 319 square miles to dictate what happens in the other 3,796,681? As weird as it may sound, rural America elected the New York city slicker. Trump won in 1,299 rural counties with 85 percent of the
vote. Hillary won nearly 90 percent of urban counties. It was a clear case of the city versus the country. As for how ranchers voted, I saw one poll that showed 75 percent of ranchers voted for Trump. It’s fair to say that Trump owes us. After all the hoopla at dodging a big Hillary bullet it’s fair to ask now, what kind of President will Trump be for rural America? Full of Themselves Let’s not forget who Donald Trump is. He was born and raised in the concrete jungle of Manhattan. Granted, I don’t know too many New Yorkers but everyone I’ve met thinks the world revives around New York City. A Big Ap-
ple dweller’s concept of the West is Wyoming County, which happens to still be in the state of New York. A New Yorker’s idea of the West is Buffalo. The city, not the animal. They seem to think we couldn’t get by without their generosity and their guidance. Andy Rooney said, “New York is the cultural center of mankind.” They are a bit full of themselves. New York may control the Dow and our hemlines but they’d shrivel up and die without our food. Yet I heard little talk about agriculture in either Trump’s or Clinton’s campaign. I know Trump has been to California to visit one of his golf courses but he didn’t campaign here. If he’d spent any time at all here he’d know that the 11 million undocumented workers he wants to deport are picking our crops, mowing our lawns, raising our kids and cleaning up our messes. If he is successful in deporting them it will cripple the agricultural economy of the west. Don’t get me wrong, I hope
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Bears Ears and the Ecologically Noble Savage BY BRIAN SEASHOLES POLICY ANALYST, REASON, DAILY CALLER
B
y designating the Bears Ears National Monument, which encompasses 1.35 million acres in southeast Utah, President Obama is unfortunately perpetuating the myth of the ecologically noble savage. Central to the myth is stereotyping Native Americans, as living in perfect harmony with nature, in order to support political and intellectual agendas. While the term “ecologically noble savage” may sound odd, even insensitive, it has been in use in academic literature for twenty-five years. It also has a great deal of relevance to the designation of Bears Ears National Monument at the behest of, and with major financial backing from, environmental pressure groups. “As with earlier noble savage proponents…environmentalists simply add an academic riff to the pop construction of American Indian as primitive savior,” asserts Sandy Grande, then a professor at Colby College. “We [environmentalists] admire Indians so long as they appear to remain what we imagine them and desire them to be: ecologically noble savages symbolizing a better way of life than we ourselves find it practical to live,” O. Douglas Schwarz, at the time an independent scholar and member of New Hampshire Audubon, stated. “The current typification of Indian as ecologically noble savage
serves several functions and the following ‘creative and polemical needs’ of white society” according to Grande, including “to fragment the Indian community by introducing the quandary of identity politics.” White-dominated environmental pressure groups use of Native Americans’ race to pursue their agendas, such as Bears Ears, is disturbing. “Since those involved in the environmental movement are overwhelmingly white, I argue that they too have been vulnerable to this same unconscious desire for an uncomplicated, Disney-fied existence [for Native Americans],” Grande notes. “The presumed power of whites to define ‘Indian-ness’ is an integral component of modern racist attitudes towards Native American peoples.” Regrettably, these troubling issues raised by Grande and Schwarz underpin the process by which Bears Ears was designated a National Monument. While proponents of Bears Ears portray the designation campaign as led by Native Americans, in truth it was created and led by white-dominated groups that used certain Native Americans, whom they portrayed as ecologically noble, as their fronts. The public face of this campaign was the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition, which consists of the Hopi, Navajo, Uintah and Ouray Ute, Ute Mountain continued on page four
here’s an unwritten rule of nature that says when two species share the same territory the weaker one will sooner or later leave or be run off. This is called “competitive exclusion” by educated people who want to show how smart they are. Basically, it’s nature’s way to keep everything where it belongs. It’s why Texans have rattlesnakes, fire ants and spiny brush, why Wyoming has wind, and why New Mexico has red and green chilies. If you can’t take the heat... feel free to get out of the kitchen. I’m a fifth generation Californian and we’re famous for two natural disasters: earthquakes and liberals. In the case of some people who lived nearby, competitive exclusion is working just fine in keeping the riff-raff out and eliminating poor breeding stock. I don’t know where they came from but when these liberals moved close by they thought they’d discovered paradise. It didn’t take long before it started losing its charm. I can pinpoint exactly when the luster started wearing off: about ten o’clock one morning when we had a baby earthquake. It was nothing really, and I probably wouldn’t even have noticed if the doors to my shop hadn’t rattled off their hinges. When you’ve lived through as many earthquakes as I have, 6.0 on the Richter scale is no big deal. A faults alarm, you might say. I hardly looked up from my leatherwork. But from a quarter mile away I heard this terrible scream and my new neighbor lady was running out of her house in her curlers and pajamas looking like she’d just seen a ghost. She ran over to my place seeking protection and yelled “THAT WAS AN AN EARTHQUAKE!” “Nah,” I replied. “Not really. That was just a tremor.” “But my refrigerator was walking across the kitchen floor!” she replied and for a moment there I thought she was going to have “a movement” herself if she didn’t calm down. I tried to calm continued on page four
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