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Methow Valley News
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
More Opinion
Writers on the Range
Clean Slate
What’s good for GM, revisited
Got your deer yet? Got your deer yet? It’s a far more complex question than it appears. In one breath, it asks, “Are we friends?” “Do you approve of firearms?” “Do we share an ideology?” and, naturally, “Do you want to hear about me getting my deer?” Even more significantly, the question assumes that if you live in the West, you must hunt. Right? Nope. I don’t hunt though I have hunted – birds and varmints and deer, mostly – but I never really caught the itch. Why not? Simple. I have plenty of food, and I’d rather do a lot of other things like biking, hiking or skiing during hunting season. I don’t have anything against hunters, and I strongly encourage my hunting Drew Pogge friends to share their success with me; it’s tough to beat a grilled elk tenderloin. But back to the question. I can’t figure out why I keep being asked about “my” deer. The question’s not offensive, but it bothers me. It assumes that I do hunt; moreover, it suggests that I should hunt, if in fact I don’t already. Now, why should those things be assumed and suggested, and why are people asking me this question in the first place? What’s the big deal with hunting? For one thing, I’ve never figured out what makes it a sport. Whenever I’ve gone, it’s been a matter of stumbling across an animal, pulling the trigger and causing the animal to cease to exist. End of story. There’s no Hemingway-esque battle between man and nature because the advantage seems to be all on our side. There’s no beauty of the kill and no real “sport,” just a dead animal. It’s kind of exciting, sure, but we humans have a fantastically large brain, opposable thumbs and weapons that can hurl a piece of highly engineered, searing-hot lead several hundred yards accurately and consistently. What’s so sporting about going head-to-head with an animal so dumb that it will leap in front of your truck? I realize not everyone hunts with a rifle. I have the utmost respect for bow hunters, though with compound bows and razor-sharp broadhead tips, arrows suddenly start to resemble funny-shaped bullets when it comes to killing efficiency. Shouldn’t we be hunting with spears, or slingshots or something more primitive, if the goal is to keep it sporting? I met a
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man once who hunts 300-pound tusked boars in Arkansas with a two-foot-long dagger. He jumps on their backs from trees, Rambo-style. Now, that’s hunting. At one time, in order to eat meat, we had to hunt and kill an animal. It was an honorable task that put food on the table. But the minute people began paying mortgage-like sums of money to fly to another state, hire a guide and finally execute an elk, goat, sheep or other Western big game “trophy,” the legitimacy of subsistence hunting went out the window – particularly if what’s hunted is a farmed elk that’s within a fenced enclosure. Few of us these days have to hunt for food, and I find it irksome when people claim to hunt for subsistence. It’s far more expensive to buy weapons, go hunting and process the meat into frozen and wrapped cuts than it is to buy a T-bone at the grocer. So hunting an animal isn’t about providing one’s family with food, at least not entirely. That leaves cultural tradition. Hunting and fishing (and of course, the Second Amendment!) are almost as ingrained in the Western psyche as the fear of wolves and distaste for government. And that’s part of what makes the West so great: we like to be outside, and to be left the hell alone – sidearm optional. I don’t have a problem with that, and now that I’ve thought it through a bit, I don’t think I really have much of a problem with being asked about getting my deer. At its heart, the question comes down to the same cultural tradition that makes the mountain West what it is, at least in the places that haven’t been “Front Ranged” yet. It’s the same tradition that supports our publicly-owned land and water rights and increasingly taut environmental management to protect those rights. It’s the same tradition that wants government to keep its distance and supports personal freedom as well as personal responsibility. The Western cultural tradition – hunting included – is pretty special. I’d rather be a part of that tradition, even as a ski-bumming sideliner, than not at all. Especially since this particular tradition comes with tasty meat dishes and friends who like to share. “Got your deer yet?” Drew Pogge is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High Country News (hcn.org). He is the editor of Backcountry Magazine and lives in Fort Collins, Colo., on the dreaded Front Range.
OK, so maybe I got a little carried away. Like when I called General Motors a “staggering Hummosaurus,” arguing that any federal bailout was both wrong and doomed unless it included a commitment to quickly double fuel economy. Or when I accused GM’s management of commercial suicide, because I couldn’t think of any other explanation for their aggressively inferior product quality. Sure, I got a little hot, but GM asked for it. They fought against stronger fuel economy and emissions standards tooth and nail. They screwed their workers and the planet with a business strategy based on convincing us that real men drive tanks. They dragged America into the economic and geopolitical quagmire of fossil fuel dependence. They contributed lavishly to campaigns denying KC Golden the science behind climate change, costing us 20 years' worth of solutions and pushing us to the brink of crisis. Then they crawled (in private jets!) to Congress for a public bailout, while continuing to prosecute lawsuits against state Clean Car standards. So I come by my animosity to GM honestly. I didn’t regret a word of what I said. Until I heard this: Chuck Todd, chief political analyst for MSNBC – an oracle for political junkies – was speaking to a ballroom full of them in Seattle earlier this month. Todd talked about politics the way Bob Costas talks about sports – with lots of statistics and strategic insight and colorful metaphors. He called the news like a game. Engaging. Fun. Clever. Fun, that is, until he talked about the continuing crisis of confidence in government – the doubt so many of us share about whether government can deliver big solutions to big problems. And then he dropped a bomb: he said the watershed for faith in government – the acid test of whether our public institutions deserve our trust or our scorn – is whether GM pulls out of bankruptcy and becomes profitable again after the bailout. I felt like Redd Foxx: “This is the big one! I’m comin’ Elizabeth!” Our confidence in public institutions – and any hope we might have of real solutions to the big problems that require collective action – depended on GM’s business acumen? Our only prayer is to restore faith in democracy one crappy Aveo and bloated Escalade at a time? For those of us who have spent much of our lives fighting this company’s ruthlessly ecocidal rampage, this was a cruel, sick joke. Talk about your karma running over your dogma. But even for those who don’t carry this chip on their shoulders, the prospect of the future of democ-
racy riding on GM’s business savvy should be petrifying. This is a company whose private management drove the stock price from nearly $100 to a buck and change. While their Japanese competitors were innovating and inventing and engineering, they were litigating and stonewalling and marketing junk. It’s hard to imagine how the company could have done more to undermine its own competitiveness, or that it can overcome a culture of mediocrity that took decades to build. And now Todd says the success of this basket case is our only hope. But I get what Todd meant. He figures that we figure it like this: bailing out GM was a pretty dubious deal. The company reaped what it sowed, and now we’re expected to throw our money down the rat hole they dug? But there you have it, that’s exactly what we did, and now that there’s no turning back, it better damned well work. Of all the bailouts, GM is the one we’re most likely to identify with. Wall Street is more abstract and unsympathetic. Who really knows what Morgan Stanley does or cares whether they go down? But with GM, there are a lot of people’s livelihoods on the line – real people who make stuff. And despite all the garbage that has rolled off their lines, their brands are emblazoned on the national psyche. Don’t you wonder what she does there in the back of her pink Cadillac, her paaank Cadillaaac? How we gonna get to the levy without the Chevy? All right, all right, I can get with the program. In fact, I’m way ahead of the curve. Before I heard Todd’s speech – on the last day of the Cash for Clunkers program – I went out and bought me a '76 Chevy three-quarter-ton pickup. Bicentennial vintage – the year I got my driver’s license. Rescuing a clunker (even though it wasn’t eligible) seemed like a nice way to shake my fist at the insanity of it all – spending billions of tax dollars to get tiny improvements in fuel efficiency by scrapping cars that never should have been built and bribing people to buy new, barely more efficient ones. (This is like pumping Red Bull into the economy to promote recovery: nice little jolt but not much nutrition there.) Yes, I know, buying a 33-year-old truck won’t keep jobs in Detroit. But you should see this baby – gold and white, with those sweet iridescent Chevy insignias on the grill and hubcaps and steering wheel. I won’t drive it much, but just owning it certifies my commitment to restoring faith in democracy and public institutions. And, to certify my determination to leave a recognizable planet to my kids, I’ll leave it parked after I get the wood in. KC Golden, a part-time valley resident, is the policy director for Climate Solutions, a Puget Sound-based non-profit group that focuses on solutions to global warming.
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