God Forbid! The Gunfight At The OK Corral Redux - The Return Of Rugged Individualism And Prairie Justice

Betty Barker turned off the eleven o'clock news and promised herself once again never to watch so late.  Donald Trump kept her up, and the stations she watched - CNN and MSNBC - were so decidedly angry at the insanity of the man, that they made her blood boil, not the recipe for a good night's sleep. 

As a young child and the sister of an older brother, she watched old Westerns on Saturday morning and then sat through a double feature of shoot-'em-ups at the Strand theatre matinee in the afternoon. She, despite her natural tendency to prefer frills, princess outfits, and baking cakes with her mother, dressed in boots, chaps, and ten-gallon hats, strapped on six-shooters and had it out with her brother and his neighborhood friends in the back yard. 

She hated herself for having so complaisantly followed in her brother's violent fantasies - they were nothing more than the testosterone-fueled early imaginings of the typically aggressive male, the fully-formed adult expressions of patriarchal bullying against which she now so vehemently fought.  

She loved her brother, and resented him less than the macho culture which made him and drew her in as a side-kick. America started off as a gun-slinging, trigger-happy country and never once took its foot off the gas. Just as the fabled Westward Expansion and Manifest Destiny were responsible for the slaughter of thousands of Native Americans, on-the-spot hangings of presumed cattle thieves, and the settlement  of disputes at the end of the barrel of a gun, Donald Trump was carrying on the tradition of prairie justice. 

What else could be said for the rounding up of needy asylees like so many stray cattle, herding them into holding pens, and then shipping them back across the border?  How was ICE any different from the Union Army which cleared the land of Sioux, Cherokee, and Comanche to make way for white settlers?

Some of Betty's anger might have been mitigated, and she might have taken a more comprehensive look at American history if the President wasn't so much like a cowboy, full of himself, a swaggering, six-gun-on-the-hip, rider of the plains ready to shoot first and ask questions later.  

Trump embodied the most absurd gunslinging television heroes she had been forced to watch as a child. He was so much like them, such an exaggerated version of them, that he was a caricature. With a cowboy hat, leather chaps, and boots, he could be John Wayne or Tom Mix. 

The President's supporters saw exactly the same thing, but cheered loudly.  This is the macho man the country needs, especially after that gay, mumbling, errand boy of the progressive Left, Joe Biden. 

The contrast between the two men could not be more stark - the feminized, castrato and the tough, undaunted, fearless, and resolute president currently in the White House, a man with not an ounce of give in his body, not a scintilla of compromise. 

'The Art of the Deal' was not negotiation, give-and-take, and consensus. It was intimidation and threat. To gain he did not give but forced others to back down.  What other way to do business on the mean streets of New York? 

The trading floor of the bond market was in the words of one observer, 'the last bastion of naked capitalism', a savage dogfight with packs of feral animals at each other's throats. The New York real estate market was but a few steps up the ladder from that, and Donald Trump was a master. 

The ordinary American tries to avoid law suits, is afraid of courtrooms, and will do anything to negotiated a peaceful, accommodating settlement.  Not so Donald Trump and his cohorts in New York.  They sue each other for a living, using the law as yet one more cudgel, one more howitzer in the armory. 

The Trump legions see a return to the Old West, to rugged individualism, to the OK Corral, hanging, machismo, and summary justice. Enough commiseration, compromising kindness, sweetness and light, welcoming kisses, turning the other cheek, and loving everyone. 

World leaders are following in Trump's footsteps. President Bukele of El Salvador has rounded up thousands of MS-13 Mara Salvatrucha gang members and summarily locked them up.  'We are for the civil rights of the good people of El Salvador', Bukele said, 'and their right to live in peace.  Criminals have no rights in this, our republic of democratic reform'.

The new president of Colombia has vowed to take the same approach with the narco-terrorists who have for so long disrupted civil governance.  They will be found, captured, incarcerated, and executed, the President went on to say. 

Former Philippine President Duterte was unequivocal.  He would root out Islamic terrorists and domestic criminals and return the nation to peaceful civility. 

Leaders of European nations are taking similar no-holds-barred positions on illegal immigration, and will aggressively and summarily deport all those in country illegally and those who refuse to abide by European laws and traditions.  'I am a woman', shouts Giorgia Meloni, President of Italy. 'I am a mother.  I am a Christian.  I am an Italian, and I am a European', sounding the alarm for those who want to turn the continent into an Islamic caliphate. 

'Democracy is the world's worst political system', said Winston Churchill, 'except for all the rest', but the Diversity Equity Inclusion democracy of today, responsible for the chaotic disassembly of coherent European, Christian societies needs to be reexamined.  No one said democracy or any other form of government for that matter is divinely ordained.  It is time to recalibrate, rethink the social equations, reassess cost and benefit. 

Although Americans have gotten used to an intrusive, autocratic, interventionist state and cannot quite conceive of a life without some form of solicitous government, enough is enough.  They are willing to take their chances, to fight those who intend to undermine the fabric of American culture, introduce foreign concepts antithetical to Christian ethics and morality, and turn the tolerant political process into a corrupt and insidious tool to achieve their own ends. 

Yet the American Left, despite Donald Trump and ultra-conservative political successes in Italy, France, the UK, Germany, Holland, Poland and other nations, still believe in socialist idealism.  They see open borders not as contributing to social disorder and the rejection of foundational values, but the new age of diversity - a One World utopian collective.  

They see police-free cities of higher moral value than those which put a premium on keeping order.  Minorites, for so long victims of white oppression, must be given a pass when expressing their frustration. 

The American Right sees all of this as fractious, disassembling, dangerous, and perilous.  They look to Europe whose new, young leaders are challenging old assumptions and forging new grounds of governance. 

'La lucha continua', said Betty to a group of women invited to her home to plan a more coherent, aggressive strategy to promote the progressive agenda and to remove Donald Trump from office. Every one of the guests were oldline liberals, veterans of civil rights, freedom rides, hand-in-hand marches led by Martin and Ralph, world peace, the environment and social harmony. 

Yet there was no stopping the newly energized, determined, and aggressive Right - a conservatism which embraced the Old West and its philosophy of individualism, enterprise, prairie justice, and survival of the fittest. 

Betty and her elderly colleagues would never understand these sentiments, and until they took their last breath would argue for a more compassionate, inclusive, considerate world; but all would live long enough to see the disastrous results of such fanciful idealism, such complete ignorance of history, and such pie-in-the-sky adolescent dreams. 

A Widow's Journey - River Cruises, Castles, And Yale Docents, A Booming Industry For The Happily Bereaved

Vicki Adams had been married for fifty years when her husband, Arthur, passed away quite suddenly, unexpectedly, and accidentally.  He had choked on piece of lamb gristle, and no Heimlich, even if applied properly (she hauled him around the room in a bear hug until he turned blue and passed out) could have saved him. By the time 911 arrived, he was as cold as stone. 

She was a practical woman.  Death was a part of life, and only God knew when it would come; and more importantly she had put up with the man for more years than she should have.  A question of sunken costs - children, homes in Washington and Sarasota, case-hardened joint trusts - and varied outside interests (hospital volunteering, campaign worker, ceramics) which took her mind off her marriage and the rather pedestrian affair it had become. 

So Arthur's passing while mourned and regretted, was a blessing in disguise. Despite so many years of marriage, she was still a relatively young woman by today's standards, and there were things she wanted to do. 

Like most widows, the first thing she did after her desk was cleared of deeds, contracts, financial statements, and tax forms, was to engage a travel agent.  'Take me someplace', she said. 'I don't care where'. 

Her request was not as cavalier or indifferent as it seems.  It was the trip itself which mattered, a longboat away from Northwest Washington to parts unknown.  It was a loosing of her moorings, unfurling of her sails, and motoring out to open water which mattered, not the axis of the compass. 

Being practical, however, and attentive to detail - forks always in the right drawer, pickles and olives on the second shelf, and hospital corners on the beds - she had to consider destination.  Without a place in mind, the travel agent could do nothing, so she picked the simplest, most tried and true, and most frequently sailed - a river cruise down the Danube. 

 

Now, to be honest, Vicki wasn't exactly sure where the Danube was or which way it flowed, but it was enough to know that it would be luxury accommodations, a learned guide, and congenial, likeminded fellow passengers. One was expected to eat communally and share experiences, so the clientele list was of considerable importance. 

'We are an exclusive cruise line', the brochure read. 'Catering to those who appreciate good food, good company, history and culture, and beautiful scenery.  We do not disappoint' and when Vicki met Samantha, the woman in charge of recruiting, selecting, and placing customers she was delighted.  The young women expressed just the right amount of sympathy for Vicki's loss, the right measure of enthusiasm for her decision to travel, and just the right amount of professional guidance.  

Many of these river cruises catered to the recently 'singled'  - youngish widows and widowers interested in meeting someone with whom to share declining years - but Vicki was not, or rather not yet, in the market for marriage.  She at least wanted to let the dust settle - a rather unfortunate slip of the tongue since poor Arthur was now ashes in an urn - before thinking of partnership or something more. 

No, this river cruise was simply a means of getting away from tax forms, condolences, and best wishes.  She wanted intellectual and social co-equals.  The rest could be shelved for later. 

The trip was not exactly a disappointment - the food on board was indeed first rate, the weather mild and sunny, the accommodations left nothing to be desired - but the passengers were, well, a somewhat diminished lot.  The years had taken its toll in particularly unkind ways to this particular group of travelers, and the designer clothes, plastic surgery, and stylish coiffures did little to help the dour, pasty look of most of the women. 

As far as the men were concerned, there were few.  Despite the agency's desire to equalize the demographics, older men had either died off or were not interested in sitting in deck chairs listening to lectures about Leopold and Hermione or the turrets on the king's castle. 

These men who never really understood women in the first place, stumbled over themselves now that they were on the market again, had two left feet when it came to courtship or even an exchange on the most banal of subjects. Women, always the most steady and forward-looking of the sexes, had no trouble steering their way through first contacts. Life was simply what it was, newly configured, and to be navigated no differently than any other phase. 

A waste of money, Vicki concluded.  She could have taken a long-term Air B&B rental on the Left Bank for what she spent on the tour, moved at her own pace, engaging or not engaging as the mood and circumstances demanded; but once she tried that, she found that her days were long, spiritless, and quite empty.  Even the clueless men on the Danube trip at least provided some chatter and desultory interest.  Wandering the streets of Paris, dining alone, and sitting for hours by the Canal St. Martin was not exactly an anodyne for the departed Arthur. 

 

'Give it another try', said her Wellesley classmate, Brenda, 'and come with us'.  An extended girls night out is what Brenda suggested, former college friends who would have a great time getting to know each other again and to face the new world of 'singlehood' together.  The trip would be down (or up) the Rhine. The cultural, historical character of the cruise really didn't matter, for the purpose of the trip was to distance oneself even further from the years of dutiful marital engagement, and be girls again.

It turned out that despite their college pedigree, the five women on the tour had somehow lost their good sense over the years, and the much anticipated reunion turned out to be little more than a gossipy, hen party.  If this is what had been tamped down after fifty years of marriage, God save me, thought Vicki who thanked them all for including her, said 'We must do this again', and offered fond goodbyes on the dock. 

What gets into these widows? What's wrong with staying put, continuing one's life as it has been led?  Why these river follies?  These eager docents ('Notice the cornice')? This peripatetic money in the bank for cruise ship owners? 

Doing something, that was it. Staying at home would be considered moping, whereas the modern woman had too many inner resources to mope, and busyness, especially the foreign kind expressed their real selves in fine form. 

Loneliness has a way of eroding the most adamant resoluteness, and before long Vicki was again on a cruise, this time up and down the Norwegian fjords. The austere surroundings, the cold weather, the absolute silence of the narrow passages through the glaciers, were inhibiting to any kind of emotional renewal. It made her think of death which was certainly not what she paid good money for. She and her shipmates drank Norwegian aquavit and botanical gins without thinking, and before long the whole trip became a maudlin, weepy affair.  

'Modulation', Vicki concluded.  The National Gallery on Monday, lunch at the Four Seasons on Tuesday, a weekend on the Northern Neck, Thursdays, Kant, Schopenhauer, and the Intellectual Mystics of the Nineteenth Century, and Fridays flower arranging, all of which became the caricature she had always hoped to avoid.  She was interested in none of these things, and did them only to fill time.  What past sins required such penance?

 

Speaking of which, the answer might be religion.  A nunnery perhaps, a return to Sunday mass, tryouts for the choir, prayer, organ recitals.  But that too was a caricature - old women on their knees in abject prayer, facing eternity and asking for a divine light to show the way. 

So she was left with nothing in the cupboard or in the tank. And so it was, despite everything that she went on another cruise, again down the Danube; but the tour operator called her two weeks before sailing to tell her that because of prolonged European drought, the river had dried up and the tour had to be cancelled.

That was the way her day had been going, she laughed, and for the first time felt glad that she had finally shed Arthur and every last possible river tour. 

An Environmentalist Goes Rogue - Nature Isn't All It's Cracked Up To Be

Harley Finch was an environmentalist. He began his journey back in spotted owl and snail darter days, and spent most of his time either in the Oregon woods or the steps of the Capitol.  He was one of the first environmental activists at a time when most Americans thought of nature as a given, a place of recreation - picnics, campgrounds, a stroll in the woods.  

Harley knew however that nature was the lungs of the world and its spiritual home.  Thoreau was right when he wrote of his epiphanic Sunday afternoons by Walden Pond but Harley was still called a 'tree hugger' 

 

The country caught up with him in a few decades, and conflated the snail darter with global climate change.  Environmentalism wasn't just protecting endangered species, but a movement to save the planet. 

Now, after many years in the trenches, he seemed to be fighting what seemed to be a losing battle as environmental issues were far off the front pages.  If anything the media only reported contrived naysayer data about increasing Arctic ice, stable sea levels, and normal weather activity.  However, as Harley knew, the crisis had not gone away and in fact the doomsday clock was closer to midnight than ever.  Americans however, were paying no attention and have gone back to their backyard barbecues, PTA meetings, and summers at the beach. 

Because of this growing apathy, Harley became even more activist.  He needed to take the fight to the people, not simply let them mull over the facts, flip through the pages of the morning newspaper, dismiss articles citing new climate data, and turn to the sports page. 

In a speech at Duke University, a friendly venue, one always hospitable to progressive speakers, an academic setting where every aspect of the canon was embraced, Harley knew that he had a receptive, welcoming audience, and although this was not exactly bringing the fight to the naysayers, it was a warmup, a run through for his new more aggressive, demanding presentations. 

He hammered on about the melting polar ice caps, the warming oceans, the never before seen potency of El Nino, the further encroachment of the Sahara, the withering crops as far north as the Dakotas, and the invasion of parasitic flora and fauna which would soon take over farmland.   'It is not time to sit back, recline in the Barcalounger, watch some football, but to act'. 

The audience, more sparse than he had expected, gave him polite applause but only after Dean McPherson had prompted them with a 'Let's give Dr. Finch a big round of applause'.  Not even five years ago, the hall would have resounded with cheers, shouts of defiance and solidarity.  What had happened?

Environmentalism had petered out, faded and disappeared just like every other faddish cause that sweeps from California to the East and disappears into the Atlantic.  The weather in Washington this year had been no different than any other - temperate, some bad thunderstorms in August, a foot of snow in January, but nothing out of the ordinary.

Rehoboth, Dewey Beach, Ocean City, popular seaside resorts only a few hours from the city were just as they always had been, even tides, pleasant sea breezes, the usual crowds, cotton candy, ice cream, and Coppertone.  India suffered through summer heat just as it does every year, tropical storms battered Mindanao and Java but no worse than before.  Life goes on. 

'The silent killer', shouted public health officials hoping to address the issue of high blood pressure, a growing problem in fat, diabetic America; and Harley took it as his own meme, a pertinent message to those who were looking for signs of climate change they could recognize.  This killer is insidious, he said, coming in 'on little cat feet', quoting Sandburg and hoping to raise the level of inquiry

The fog comes
on little cat feet.
It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on

Nothing. Those few students who came to listen to him sat on their hands, checking their phones, attending to other business leaving Harley standing alone, emptied, and disconsolate. 

This sparsity, this diffidence, this shirking ignorance, this absolute unconcern was particularly troubling for Harley because he had spent his whole adult life advocating for a sensible environmental policy and the existential danger of climate change.

'If the rule you followed led you to this', the Cormac McCarthy character Anton Shugur says to Carson Wells whom he is about to kill, 'of what use was the rule?' and so it was with Harley.  If environmentalism had turned out to be a silly cipher in the scope of things, of what value had his life had?

'I need to get away', he said to his wife one Friday. 'To the Shenandoah'.  Corinne knew exactly what was up.  Her husband was going through 'one of those sticky patches' that only the deep woods could cure.  Getting back to the motherlode, the spiritual center, his own Walden Pond. 

Yet this time as he walked the Blue Ridge Trail, ordinarily the one which loosened his collar, and let him forget Washington, he couldn't shake the empty halls, cancelled colloquies, and diminishing requests for articles in the Environmental Defense Fund journal and the Op Ed page of the NY Times. 

Recently he prayed for cyclones, hurricanes, and flooding tides.  The life led had to have some meaning; and now as he scanned the horizon for rain clouds but saw nothing but bright blue, his funk deepened. 

The fluttering leaves on the trees which once gave him a poetic sense of justice and profound happiness were now just leaves.  Fluttering was physics.  The magic of the woods, the spiritual sanctuary he had always sought had become simply a buggy, hot place he wanted to leave. 

Were Thoreau and his Transcendentalists crackpots? Outliers? Crazy hermits fleeing what was humanity's best and most enduring expression - cities? What was nature after all but a place to be transformed into Westward Expansion, Manifest Destiny? Was Genesis wrong?

And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness, and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the fowl of the air and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and on every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth 

What was he doing in the woods, far from anyone or anything.  Who was he kidding? And so he returned home.  He had not had the epiphany he sought, but an epiphany nonetheless. Copses were not the spiritual idylls of the deep woods.  Glades were only incidentally infertile bits of ground not miraculous visions.  Susurrus was not a verse from heaven but equation - wind + pine trees = sound. 

Harley had been sold a bill of goods - or rather had bought the goods from a snake oil salesman.  Nature was nothing but rocks, trees, and vines. Louis XIV, the Sun King, revised nature, cleared the land and built the Gardens of Versailles. That was something to reflect upon. 

One of the latest in snake oil chicanery is the Ecotherapy movement, a program which promotes the improvement or restoration of the ‘human-nature’ relationship, and by so doing aims to rebalance our lives.  Americans spend between 85-99 percent of their time indoors, advocates say, thus distorting the psychological, spiritual, and physical balance we once had in an earlier, more pastoral age.

'Ecotherapy' refers to healing and growth nurtured by healthy interaction with the earth…Ecopsychology, the study of our psychological relations with the rest of nature, provides a solid theoretical, cultural, and critical foundation for ecotherapeutic practice. This perspective reveals the critical fact that people are intimately connected with, embedded in, and inseparable from the rest of nature. Grasping this fact deeply shifts our understanding of how to heal the human psyche and the currently dysfunctional and even lethal human-nature relationship.

The originators of Ecotherapy, on the other hand, believed no such thing; and knew that there was money in ventures strengthening the bond between man and nature.  They understood New Age philosophy, the spiritual nature of Environmentalism, and the anger and frustration of Americans living in a politically divisive, increasingly fragmented society. Their angst was real. ‘The talking cure’ was expensive and increasingly irrelevant.  Xanax, Zoloft, and Prozac were quicker, cheaper, and easily available; but pacified rather than cured.

A return to nature was the perfect solution – it was organic, pure, and inspirational.  An old-growth forest of 2000 year-old redwoods was as close as one could get to the Garden of Eden. Southern swamps were primeval and spiritually fundamental. Midwestern prairies simulated the inspirational wilderness of the Holy Land.

The commercial opportunities are endless. In addition to the hundreds of ‘clinics’ which are springing up around the country, books, skincare products, and ecological gifts are big revenue-producers.

P.T. Barnum famously noted that 'a sucker is born every minute', and no land has ever taken to the exploitation of that nostrum more than America. Ecotherapy is but the latest in a long history of con men, shell gamers, Ponzi schemes, and get-rich-quick follies. 

It wasn't that Harley gave up on the woods.  Let it be for the inspirational and idealists among us; but for him it was Versailles West that provided the inspiration, energy, and satisfaction he needed.  The Big City, the heart and soul of human enterprise, its best and most enduring expression, its...

Here he stopped himself from sounding like his old lecturing self.  Bullshit. He had simply given up on the notion of Nature holiness, Gaia, Thoreau, and all the Walden Ponds.  And who wouldn't? Was a buggy outing really that epiphanic? 

He admired the Ecotherapists for making a buck out Nature.  Logging, oil and gas, rare earth minerals were one thing.  Getting thousands of credulous Americans into the woods and making it into something extraordinary and uplifting takes genius.