We're Off To See The Wizard

Below is a screenshot from the all-powerful Twitter account (let me repeat that very loudly: ALL-POWERFUL TWITTER ACCOUNT!!!) of @real DonaldTrump who has clearly spent serious time in the Land of Oz. Please read it carefully, and be amazed:

There. That should take care of any apostates out there who are not yet awash in the greatness of @realdonaldtrump’s ALL-POWERFUL TWITTER ACCOUNT!!! Now let’s move on to the next item.

This is a picture of Elon Musk’s rocket ship. Well, it's actually just a sketch of Elon Musk's rocket ship, a cartoon really, but I couldn't post a picture of the real one because the image I wanted to use belongs to "Getty Images", who want $500 for the privilege of using it. Mark Getty, the chairman of Getty Images as well as one of the heirs to the J. Paul Getty fortune is, like Elon Musk and donald trump, a billionaire, and his wisdom is probably also great and unmatched, by definition if nothing else. However, I didn't send him the $500 to use his picture, although if I thought he really needed my money to top off his grandfather's oil fortune, I would have surely sent it to him right away, because how else are we going to maintain our great and unmatched rich folks if we don't keep them rich? But I decided against it. I didn't really need his "image" after all, since this is such a teeny-weeny blog and I'm such a good artist and can sketch out a rocket ship in the same amount of time that it (apparently) took Elon Musk's engineers to design a real one. You can see the real one here (Elon Musk's Tinfoil Rocketship!). 

Did you look? Tell me if I'm wrong, but I think it looks like what a bored kid with a wad of tinfoil and a half-hour could sculpt to impress her friends at the lunchroom table with. But we're living in a world, aren't we? Where a billionaire president believes he is the Wizard of Oz, billionaire mechanics and build rocket ships with their spare change and billionaire fossil-fuel heirs sell great and unmatched photos to chumps like you and I for $500, all of which is too awe-inspiring to put into mere words. Let's just settle on "great" and "unmatched" then.

Which brings us to human consciousness. Elon says his motives for building his rocket ship are altruistic, that all he wants to do is send human consciousness into outer space (before it's too late, I guess). But who's he think he's kidding? Whose consciousness is going to be able to afford a seat on Elon Musk's rocket ship except a billioniare's? So Elon Musk is building a tin rocket ship to send billionaires into outer space, which, you have to admit, is an excellent idea.

Yusaka Maezawa, for instance, is the Japanese billionaire who bought a seat on Elon Musk's rocket ship. He's a genius, which is self-evident since he made billions selling fashionable ZOZOSUITS online. Who would have known--except a genius--that you could make billions selling suits named "zozo" online? But he did it, and on the strength of that fact alone his consciousness should get what it deserves, which is parting company with its billions here on Earth while his body goes bye bye in the sky on Elon Musk's tin rocket ship. Like I said: this is an excellent idea.

Which brings us full circle back to our Wizard-channelling president, donald trump. Those who may have accidentally read a blog or two of mine in the past, may know that I've been praying for the Rapture for years as the most efficacious way to get these folks off our planet (The Rapture). But I think this is a better, possibly divinely-inspired, gimmick, and we don't even have to pray for it. All we have to do is click our heels three times.

It's true, the actual Oz story does use the narrative device of a hot-air balloon to suck a blowhard liar out of Dorothy's life forever and for good, but I'd argue that the fact that we have to use Elon Musk's tin rocket ship to accomplish the same thing in real life is a mere technicality. Don't forget, trump is a billionaire and, after buying a seat in the Oval Office, where else is there for him to go but up? To "expand his talents", so to speak, all the way into outer space...and beyond. Believe me, he'll buy a seat on that hell-roarer, wouldn't miss it for the world, I'll bet, and, hot air balloon or tin rocket ship, the effect for us will be exactly the same. We will all wake up in our beds with concerned loved ones hovering over us, resurfacing to blessed (non-billionaire) consciousness while realizing that the ugly dream we have been having about evil witches and mean, flying monkeys for the last _____ (fill in the blank) years was the result of a nasty bump on our noggin which wasn't our fault, and that our dog is O.K., too. With proper amounts of dread and veneration, this should righteously be the largest part of any humans’ consciousness who dares to walk the Earth (as opposed to Outer Space) in these most significant times. A happy ending, albeit laced with large doses of Magic.

To repeat: This sending of billionaires off into outer space on tin rocket ships is a most excellent idea. I wish I'd thought of it myself, but I couldn't afford to, so I'll have to thank the great and unmatched Elon Musk and his other billionaire buddies for thinking of it for me! I would only make a few minor suggestions: that some of those billionaires who think chumps like myself owe them $500 for a splotch or two of color should be included on this (hopefully) one-way trip to high-end immortality and that Elon tweek his narrative about "sending human consciousness" into the cosmos to "sending human hubris” into that same void, which, when you think about it, isn’t really such a big change at all and...Voila! 

Blast off, suckers!

And do write when you find work.

For further reading on my great and unmatched theories about Human Consciousness, go to: Cows In Space

Nixon Rock

Nixon Rock

Red River, Idaho

In the summer of 1980 I was working on a trail crew for the Elk City Ranger District in Central Idaho. After four days out on a hitch we would often travel up the Red River to the hot springs resort for a soak and a beer (or two). The road ran right next to Red River and so, along the way, we would always see Nixon, immortalized by geological forces several million years previous. 

The summer of 1980 was the height of the presidential election season between Carter and Reagan, and "Social Media" had not been invented yet. In fact, televised debates between presidential candidates were still something relatively-new, and so we were still blessed with the innocence of judging politicians on their actual behavior combined with facts...and geology.

Nixon was the worst thing I'd ever seen up to that time. He was a crook. Simple. He was ousted from office because of that. Also simple. And this rock was funny because it reminded us that, although progress was geologically-slow, it was fact-based and...simple. President is caught being a crook. President is ousted. Simple. And solid. Like rocks. Ha ha.

Around August we came in from a hitch in the rolling mountain country behind Elk City that should have been designated wilderness but was left out (and still is), and we sat down in the bunkhouse in the back of the ranger station for a beer and a televised presidential debate. Anyone who has come in from a few days out in the woods, away from cars and other worries, knows that when you "hit the asphalt", your senses are sharpened in proportion to how many days you've spent "out", and you're a bit less prone to the bullshit thrown at you by such things that our hyped-up society loves to throw, like the ubiquitous visual imagery we seem to have grown more and more addicted to over time. It was mere TV in those good old days, the flickering blue light, and I honestly don't remember the substance of the debate, and furthermore refuse to "wikipedia" it up for a synopsis. Let's just agree that it was bad enough. 

What always did stand out in my memory, though, was how bad Reagan's "performance" was. He was a joke, especially compared to Jimmie Carter's even, relatively-honest cadence. Reagan appeared--at least to my wilderness-altered state--to be disjointed and dishonest, and on full display for a nation full of TV heads to see! He was obviously pandering to peoples' base instincts for the sake of power. He was a demagogue, a bigot, and not a very good one at that. He was, unlike most rocks I've come to know, transparent, and I remember thinking distinctly, that there was no problem here. People don't want a crook for a president again. Geology will prevail. People will see right through this guy for what he was, and we will go out for another hitch into the mountains that will someday be declared the wilderness that it deserves to be, with all due protections as per the laws of the the Land, the same laws that we use to oust crooks from office (at least when they've been caught) and at least allow us to get a good night's sleep sometimes. 

After resting up for the weekend, we went out for another four-day hitch, and I didn't think anymore about the news. Why should I? The world I had landed in was beautiful, I was healthy and we slept out on the ground with cares washing off our skin with every breath of breeze that also swayed the tops of lodgepole stands. I was duly appreciative. 

Then we came back, hit the blacktop, and what I viscerally remember about our re-entry was the news awaiting us, that Reagan had "won" the debate, had in fact, cleaned Carter's clock and was on a roll. This, of course, came from an already-corrupt mass media that would benefit greatly from a divisive president who would simultaneously "sell product" as a direct result of his divisiveness while giving them giant tax cuts, which I kind of knew already, but this was not what I remember thinking when I learned, in my wilderness-altered state, what had occurred in crazy TV world during my brief sojourn into the sane one.

My distinct memory of what I thought is only two words long, and for all you visual-imagery-crazed fellow travelers of mine who are equally wondering WTF is going on, I will write them down for you here: 

"Uh-oh." 

And I was right.

I took the picture that opens this post with my cell phone when I was passing through the Clearwater country last weekend on a foray to collect some additional insights into my book-in-progress, "What's  Bigger than the Land? The Life and Times of Stewart M. Brandborg". To say that Nixon and Reagan had a huge, negative effect on Brandy and his life's passion of "making democracy work" is a gross understatement. Nixon and Agnew sicced the IRS on Brandy's Wilderness Society (TWS) during their running battle with Brandy over the Alaska Pipeline, and this was ultimately what scared TWS into firing him as executive director in 1976. Brandy saw--and contributed to--the Nixonites getting kicked out of the halls of power--for a bit at least--but he had no such luck with Reagan. After he and his wife, AnnaVee, returned to the Bitterroot Valley in 1986, they fought Reaganism hard and well, mostly in the realm of forest-use and planning issues, but they and their allies were constantly being vilified by the local wing nuts-du-jour, who seemed, like Reagan, less and less attached to facts and more and more attached to hate-enhanced talk-show radio and the ever-more virulent social media pseudo-reality. The Brandborgs never gave up. In fact, they never let it bother them overmuch. It was just part of what you put up with when you stood up and did and said what's right. People have always been...well...people, they believed, and you had to deal with them on that level. Simple.

This week we had a criminal in the Bitterroot (Ammon Bundy this time)whipping up more crazy hate for--what?---a book selling tour? Who knows. But the word is a couple busloads if hate-charged people were seen just below Lost Horse Hill on Highway 93 yesterday, taking a 'stand' against...evil environmentalists?!? Bundy's own public statements are so confused as to be unintelligible, but it seems the gist of his 'stand' is that a property owner is being forced to take down an illegal gate blocking public access to a road behind it. 

Yes, this is the same crazed crowd that in a blink would take the same frenzied 'stand' against evil enviros colluding with an overreaching government to close a road leading to public land (think Jarbridge, Nevada, circa late '90s).

Irrational behavior doesn't even begin to describe the bigotry and nativism that ReaganCo. unleashed in 1980 and that our poor ol' Bitterroot has received (and is still receiving) the full measure of. Trump? He's just a symptom of the disease our society no longer seems able or willing to cure. The kind of crazed support on display that a criminal like Bundy can gin up for such a joke of an "issue" as a locked gate is rooted in the kind of mentality that leads to bloodshed and, in the big picture, war. This, I believe and have believed most of my adult life, is the worst aspect of human behavior, on full display in the Bitterroot this week, and I'm glad to say that, finally, due to the unflinching efforts of our old time conservationists and other progressives like the Brandborgs, the tide is finally turning against them. On this very day there are millions of people protesting against insanities such as a Bundy would peddle, in the name of Climate Action, and I only wish Brandy and AnnaVee were around to see it finally come to fruition.

Yeah, we were all young once, and Nixon was bad enough, but he's just a rock in a river now and so will all of them be someday. Yes, Reagan was worse and had a little more staying power. Four decades is long enough to have been stumbling around in the Dark Ages waiting for things to get bad enough for enough people to rise up. In a sane world, the likes of Ammon Bundy would be in prison, and so, by definition, it's not a sane world yet. But Nixon Rock is still funny, just on the face of what's been possible in the past and will be possible again soon. Brandy and AnnaVee would be tickled to see all the kids who have had the truth thrust upon them and, far from shrinking from it, are willing to act. 

That truth? Without democracy, and all its associated righteous corollaries, we will perish from the Earth.

Simple enough, right?

On Robins, Nuclear War and Bigotry

“If we want to maintain a planet that looks like the one humanity has known, then we’re basically out of time.”

           Dr. James E. Hansen 

           Former director of NASA-Goddard Institute for Space Studies

A couple Februaries ago, I noticed three fat robins in our crabapple tree, picking off the fermented fruit the waxwings inexplicably never came for. That was just one of several odd things I noted that winter. The waxwings usually get most of the crabs before the robins arrive. It’s usually quite a party, but almost March and no waxwings. The shriveled red raisins still beckoned all comers.

I watched a robin fly down to imbibe, then another and another, like leaves falling from the tall green ash by the driveway that had no leaves yet. I looked up and there they were, a whole community of twenty birds, huddled against the wind in the old tree’s unkempt branches. Gossiping, I suppose, like we do at our parties.

Unlike us, though, dreams of worms were in those fat kids’ eyes. They weren’t just winter-overs. They were part of the migrant horde, and they’d settle for fermented crabs and have some fun, but they were expecting the ground to thaw sooner rather than later, the worms to wriggle out of the wet, warming soil. They knew, even if we can’t quite wrap our heads around it through gossip or by other means, that spring was coming weeks earlier than it used to around here.

This past February was looking like it might have been the same, but then we got a month of snow in March. Maybe some robins perished in their miscalculation. 

Like most people, I have a limited understanding of jet streams, but I also have opinions about things I have limited knowledge of. So I’ll opine and let the reader judge. It’s easier that way. 

All life, I think—inculding human life—has evolved over the last few million years around the weather produced by the earth’s jet streams that have swirled around her hemispheres in quasi-predictable patterns for that same amount of time. Cold swaps with heat, wet swaps with dry, spring follows winter, et cetera. But now after a mere couple centuries of burning fossil fuels, in the blink of an biological eye, we’ve fucked it up, like jamming wads of toilet paper down a swirling bowl of shit. The jet streams are slowing down, and the weather won’t flush predictably. It’s clogged and spilling unpredictable pottie water all over the floor. We’ve been three-year-olds about whom grown-up would make excuses for. They couldn’t have possibly known any better, those grown-ups might have said, and maybe that was true once. But it's been two hundred years. We’re grown-ups now, right?

What’s the matter with our heads, then, that isn’t the matter with a robin’s? Is there something about opposable thumbs that is so basic, so atavistic that we can be so clever with our manipulating hands while blocking out the consequences of what we have done? Can we really not help but destroy ourselves and everything around us, ever wobbling toward despotism all the while? Is Democracy just an old Greek word that really means nothing?

We’ve certainly gotten ourselves into a pickle, with this current nest of “leaders” who suggest, openly now, that Democracy is indeed just a silly, old word that should have no bearing on decisions made in air-conditioned rooms. So what to do? 

I suggest you find yourself an old dictionary. I’d recommend a Funk and Wagnell’s, circa 1946. They didn’t use algorhythms to define things then. They just wrote things down the way they were, like poems, measuring out the meanings with synonyms and antonyms. There was a hope once, that by defining things as precisely as possible we could be prompted toward progress, growth, even evolution. They must have thought it would help, at any rate, to simply state the obvious and hope for the best. I'd say we were fairly innocent, but I’m not saying we were wrong. I’m hoping for the best, today and tomorrow. 

In the meantime, here’s to innocence, progress and to pondering what the hell is wrong with us at the very least. 

Reasoning Fairly

                                                Bigotry has not the capacity.

                                                Superstition the knowledge or discipline.

                                                Fanatics have not the patience.

                                                Intolerance the disposition.

Mickey Mouse Will Lose to trump

Or
On the Hazards of Early Voting

Goddam Facebook. I can’t get shed of it. I started up just before I went to the Standing Rock protests against the pipeline because I was told that’s where everybody was. That’s where the information was being posted—daily, hourly, instantaneously—about what was going on, and what you were getting into if you came. 

So I signed up, got an account, lied about my birthdate (a shout-out to all you folks who wished me happy birthday on January 1^st) and dove in, got addicted, and finally learned what selling your time off cheap really meant.

I remember when a long-distance call cost $2.00 for the first minute and 25 cents every minute thereafter. You had to find a supermarket that would trade your five-dollar bill for a pocketful of quarters, then a phone booth, not to mention needing to develop a fast flick finger reflex for when the operator interrupted your call and demanded more change. You had to have an innate aversion to bullshit, in other words. For that kind of money and effort you wanted to get right to the point.

Not so now, and goddam Facebook, because I do so miss that innate aversion to bullshit…

On the other hand, it is incredible, really, what’s out there these days, and how fast it gets around. Talk is cheap and Facebook’s cheaper, so maybe I shouldn’t get too worked up, but (fair warning) I’m going to vent about something I’ve seen on Facebook one too many times and, to be honest, it almost feels like I'm going to puke. Like when you eat some inconsequential sausa left in the fridge a bit too long, a mere triviality of substance and circumstance that shouldn’t have any impact whatsoever on you or what you do, and yet there you are, your stomach suggesting that you vehemently reject this inconsequential nonsense immediately, becoming more and more demanding until you’re rejecting what your stomach told you all along was no good. That’s what venting on or about Facebook feels like to me, disjointed and cathartic at the same time, and I’m sorry. As I'm trying to say, I can’t help it. I have this uncontrollable urge, and some things just can’t be deferred, or even stalled. The times are too epic. I’m gonna puke. So here goes.

This is a sentiment that is appearing over and over. On Facebook. Probably other places. There are variations on the theme, but the theme is now ubiquitous. “I will vote for the Democratic candidate for President no matter who it is. Period.”

Of course what this means is that if Mickey Mouse were to run against Donald Trump, you would vote for Mickey Mouse. And I agree. I would pick Mickey over Donald anytime. At least with Mickey we’d have to admit that we've become caricatures of ourselves, living in a cartoon-reality where there’s at least a fighting chance that the Great Illustrator will give us a break, unlike our chances in the real world. What's more, I have been a believer in this very sentiment since Richard Nixon times, my first election year to vote. And so of course I do agree that in the midst of this horrendous pickle we’re in everyone of us to the left of Atilla the Hun needs to understand what solidarity is, and to act on that understanding.

But this now-ubiquitous sentiment, repeated on wide-ranging platforms ad nasuem for the last year and a half (a full three years before the next presidential election or a full five years if you count the incessant Bernie-bashing) is having the exact opposite effect of solidarity, understanding be damned.

Sad to say, but what I mean to point out to you is that those of us who have been voting reliably for Mickey Mouse since Nixon Times (OK, I'm feeling a little better. Let's modify that to "since Reagan Times"), those whom the Democratic Party machine feels are in its pocket, always counted on, condescended to and then ignored, those kinds of peoples' vote (your votes), do not count anymore, at least as far as getting this current monster and his ex-wife’s anchor babies out of their public housing berth called the White House. I’ll explain.

All of the Mickey Mouses we reliably-blue voters have been casting our reluctant ballots for since Nixon Times (sorry, since Reagan Times), have been tepid, corporate Democrats. Most of us have known this all along (surprise, focus groups!) but we've done it anyways because we really have had no other choice. So now that we have real choices, opportunities to actually transcend and soar above their corporate wrecking balls and so many millions of you are getting scared off by talking TV heads with fluff between their ears??!! You’re prepared to admit to the world (so to speak) that you prefer being a corporate shills’ vote-o-matic over something better—and possible??!! Even more to the point, now that all the non-voters who will be the ones to decide this next election (not you, reliably-blue voter who will vote for the Democrat no matter who) finally MIGHT be given a real choice to vote for real hope if we allow the possibility, and so many millions of you are going to actively and irretrievably work to crush those hopes—and any chances for our own political, cultural and physical survival???!!! 

This, dear reader, is madness (or WTF in Facebookian). The elections are a year and a half away, and now is NOT the time to be “negotiating” like a corporate Democrat (read: from a position of capitulation). Mickey Mouse (aka: Joe Biden) will lose. Let me repeat: Mickey Mouse (Joe Biden) will lose, no matter how many times you vote for him anyway. If you want to be the responsible voter like you demand others should be you will not be giving aid and comfort to those deep pockets who are putting Joe Biden up as our only choice and and seem perfectly happy to usher us further into this existential pickle they're in large part responsible for. If, as you apparently are willing to think, we are doomed to have yet another corporate-tangled caricature of a human being up there at the convention podium next summer giving his calculated acceptance speech, you better be working now to make damn sure that the Great Illustrator makes him give a speech that, under no circumstances, should be anything but transformational. That means that, like any good caricature in a long-running farce, he will be predicting his and his handlers’ own end, politically-speaking, and that he will be convincingly-ready and willing to usher in the real change that those non-voters who will decide this next election will demand if he (and his backers) really want to see those non-voting fannies at the polls or their own fannies in any position of power, ever again.

Sound likely? Of course not, but it goes without saying. We need solidarity, now more than ever. Now then, now that we finally (FINALLY!) have a real and generational chance for something better, why, why, why (!?) are so many millions of you (reliable blue voters all) so bent on defeating the intensely-important goal of doing better by giving Mickey Mouse your vote a year and a half before the election and hoping for the best?

Human nature, I guess, which doesn’t speak well of our chances given what that kind of nature has gifted us these last few years. So let’s broaden the thread a bit about those seemingly-inevitable and unchangeable things, like Nature. Let’s talk in meta-terms for just a minute, and why not? If you’re casting your vote a year and a half before it has any meaning other than a bad one, you’re basically admitting that we have plenty of time to be reflective. So let’s do that, and here, finally, is my parting rant, which is also the only hope I’m still clinging to in these dreary times.

How ‘bout we quit parsing clever words over which focus group with the most talking-head time on TV gets to decide whether Americans can handle “socialism”? Socialism is as American as rhubarb pie and is in fact an integral facet of democracy and vice-versa. That’s why “they” hate democracy and, by extension, “socialism” so much. “They” have been saying so for decades in case you haven’t been paying attention. Literally. What do you think Koch-flavored libertarianism is about, if not corporate rule enforced by a strong Leader (Mussolini's definition of fascism)? “They” who would rule by caricature (fascist) hate the fact that democracy (and by definition, “socialism”) has been here long before the Pilgrims started parsing words in the hold of a fetid ship to better beat their world view over the heads of all who disagreed with that particular world view, which, to non-believers amounted to the above-mentioned fascism (Don’t take my word for it. Ask them). “They” and so many millions of you, haven't considered the possibility that, far from being democracy’s creators, modern-day Americans are merely its host species and that we ignore this symbiotic relationship at our own great peril. The proof's in the pudding. Democracy (and by extension, etc.) is part and parcel of the flora and fauna that the original inhabitants of this place reflected, that we mimicked and that “they” now seem so bent on destroying, along with us and “their” fetid world view. I may be struggling with words here, but after living in close proximity to relatively-intact ecosystems for so many decades (Western Montana) I think all this is obvious.

So how ‘bout it? Why not admit that unless we think and act otherwise, “they” are, by default, us, even those of us self-righteously voting a year and a half early? How ‘bout we look at the Big Thing, not the words, like the fact that, since democracy (and by definition, etc.) was here long before “we” showed up and started breathing oxygen from Her trees, then She'll be here after we're gone, and what does that mean? If you don't have any ready answers to these rants of mine, how ‘bout, at least you many millions of reliably-blue voters who will not decide this next election (please remember that if you reject the whole rest of this mess), acknowledge a couple basic, self-evident, ecological, social truths that may not be fully understandable but that we ignore at the cost of our very existence? 

It should be plain as the above-mentioned pudding by now to everyone whose worldview is not fetid that: 1. Nature (the non-human kind) does not necessarily have to include us in Her future plans, and, 2. that by giving up before we even begin to reflect on HOW we got here, by aiding and abetting in the non-voters not showing up next election day, your vote not only does not count. It’s toxic. 

In terms of (human) Nature then, how ‘bout we make more room for possibilities and less for fear. How 'bout we evolve or something? 

It’s just a thought. 

Note: The above is not meant to be an attack on anyone, including Joe Biden who, I'm guessing, is a "nice enough guy". It a commentary on his calculated public political persona combined with his unenlightened policies over the decades. To present such a demonstrable corporate neoliberal as a "progressive" to the tens of millions of potential voters who will actually be the ones to decide whether the trump crime syndicate goes or stays is either a bad joke...or a good cartoon. I rest my case.

Museum of the Future. Coming Soon

"Are we there yet?"
"Hope so."

Stewart Creek and the Salvation of the Magruder Corridor

Brandy Peak, Bitterroot Valley, Montana

“The earth is not a resting place for any Brandborg.”

                                                                                                          Big Brandy

Note: Both Stewart and Guy Brandborg were known as “Brandy” throughout their careers. This is vexing to a would-be biographer of Stewart (like myself) who realizes that he can’t tell the story of one without referring often to the story of the other. Their family had a way to solve this conundrum by simply referring to Guy as “Big Brandy”.  When I can fit it into this narrative without overly-confusing the reader, I will also use Guy’s family handle.

Stewart M. Brandborg’s dad, Guy M. Brandborg, often came to visit his son’s family in the Washington, D.C. area when Stewart was working for The Wilderness Society during the ‘60s and ‘70s. It was on one of these visits, when Stewart had an appointment to meet with Lee Metcalf, that Big Brandy asked to come along.

            “Are you sure you want to go?” Stewart recalled asking him, to which his dad replied “oh yeah, let’s go. I’m ready.” And off they went.

            This was sometime in the late ‘60s, during the middle stages of the Magruder Corridor controversy, which involved a scheme the Forest Service and the lumber companies were colluding on to arbitrarily exclude hundreds of thousands of acres from the new Wilderness Act, that Senator Metcalf had helped the younger Brandborg champion. There was a road there, the only one in those mountains, the so-called Magruder Corridor, built in the 1930s by the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) between the small Montana lumbering town of Darby and smaller lumber and mining town of Elk City, Idaho. The Forest Service and the timber industry were ready to use the road for the purpose it was originally built, to “get the cut out” and to “develop” the vast, wild area the way that God (or at least a certain version of Himself) desired those last wild areas to be developed, with roads and clearcuts and picnic tables. Of course. That sort of thing.

Conservationists were working the issue hard because, aside from the fact that the Upper Selway country (the Magruder Corridor) was a vast, unspoiled area in its own right, it would be a watershed precedent for them if they could get it designated as wilderness even though a perfectly good road existed right through the middle of it. 

But the Forest Service was run by foresters, and after the passage in 1964 of the Wilderness Law that directed their agency to identify areas within their domain that qualified for inclusion into the newly-mandated system that disallowed practicing their profession, their natural inclination was to drag their feet. And so they did, by coming up with a set of criteria that set their wilderness-designation bar so high that any area that wasn’t “pure” like a vast, wild tract with a primitive dirt track scratched through it in the ‘30s by a crew composed of young men who were wearing their first pair of shoes, for instance, would be disqualified and released for “multiple use”, which in forester-speak meant more roads and career-enhancing board-feet. And yes, picnic tables. This became known as the “Purity Doctrine” and has skewed wilderness conversations ever since, away from protecting and preserving the Land for its own sake towards the foresters’ preferred altnerative, the slow but irrevocable attrition of Death by a Trillion Cuts. All relatively-intact ecosystems rendered “impure” by the presence of a road, primitive, ill-advised or anything in-between, would be forever vulnerable to logging, roading (and picnic tables) no matter how economically or environmentally silly those activities might be, and in a place like the Magruder Corridor, which was many rough miles away from any mill or road maintenance crew, the prospects for such silliness at the highest levels were all but assured. At the time the Brandborgs visited Lee Metcalf, in fact, the foresters and lumbermen had figured in the Magruder Corridor as a fair-and-square part of the region’s timber base, largely because of the road’s existence. Metcalf, while not so keen on “getting the cut out” was on board with the developing of the Magruder Corridor for political considerations, even though he is remembered today as one of Montana’s premier progressive politicians, which includes his championing of watershed environmental issues like the Wilderness Act. For his part, Big Brandy had been working the Magruder issue hard back home, including the currying and advising of a new activist in Hamilton, Montana, Doris Milner, to take the front role in pushing for the Corridor’s salvation. Metcalf had been hearing a lot from Doris by this time, but he either didn’t know that the Brandborgs were also thick into the controversy or, more likely since he was a consummate politician, he may have known and strategically didn’t let on.

            So father and son drove to the Capitol and went to see Lee. They sat on deep leather couches that interior designers of Senate offices still prefer, and they talked, Lee and Big Brandy, about many things. Lee and Big Brandy, you see, were old friends. Lee had grown up in the Bitterroot when Guy was the Forest Supervisor there. They were both counted within the post-World-War-Two Montana intelligentsia that included Bud Guthrie, K. Ross Toole, and other progressives who were beginning to stand up to the Anaconda Copper Company's bullying grip on Montana's politics and resources. In 1949, for instance, Lee (as a Montana Supreme Court justice) had been one of Guy’s defenders at his infamous House UnAmerican Activities (HUAC) inquisition in Missoula. The "Company" didn't like the way Big Brandy was preaching about Pinchot's "social forestry" designed to conserve resources for the long-term benefit local, rural communities. More to the point, the Company intensely disliked a Bitterroot Forest Supervisor's (Big Brandy's) advocacy for more government regulation on private company tracts in the Bitterroot that they were in the finishing stages of skinning the "golden stream" of ancient Ponderosa Pine off of. They sent a man to his office in Hamilton one day to warn him off, to tell him he better lay off of that "social forestry" stuff or else, and Big Brandy had told him to go to hell. It wasn't long after that that he received an impersonal letter ordering him to appear before an inquisition in Missoula, which resulted in a great victory for Big Brandy. The list of defenders at that hearing represented a virtual Who’s Who of Montana’s progressive activists--including Lee--who testified (according to Stewart six decades later) that "the last thing he would be would be is a communist because he's so in love with making democracy work." These were the golden days, at least in Montana, and they succeeded in beating back the McCarthyites in that instance. Lee, in other words, had long-supported Big Brandy staunch advocacy of Gifford Pinchot’s early version of tree-based democracy, based on favoring sustainability of both forests and local jobs over corporate greed. Simple enough, and in those days it was natural for intelligent people who were active in Montana’s politics to be on board with Pinchot’s vision and with Guy Brandborg’s garnishing of that vision with his famous socialist twist (although Big Brandy never referred to himself as a socialist), and so he and Lee knew and regarded each other well. Guy's vocational specialty was rangelands, and Lee, who was forever in the midst of the resource wars that constantly whirled Congress by the tail, must have welcomed Guy’s refreshing homespun expertise as a tonic against the professional lobbyists he must have been obliged to also entertain on the very couch the Brandborgs were currently occupying.

            There was a fly in the ointment, though, and after an unspecified length of warm discussion, Lee’s voice became low and he started in on a new subject.
"But there’s one thing…” he began, his deep quiet tone gathering steam as one word followed another, “…that’s driving me up a wall…”, his voice rising like a slow moving tsunami until by the end of the sentence he was literally shouting, “…is that goddam Magruder Corridor!!”

            Six decades later, Stewart recalled an eruption, a venting, a mushroom cloud of frustration that the Brandborgs little suspected Metcalf had on the subject. “Wasn’t millions of acres of wilderness enough!?” Lee fumed. 

            Of course, being the consummate political animals they also were, the Brandborgs never let on that they had anything to do with trying to save the goddam Magruder Corridor. After all, Lee was a senator now, and as advocates for sound forestry practices in the Bitterroot and wilderness designation for qualified areas, Big Brandy and his son wanted something from him in that context. So all they could do was “sit on that couch and grip leather”, like cowboys trying to stay on a sunfishing horse, as Lee went on and on about the goddam Magruder Corridor! 
          But the Brandys had their way in the end, and too many of us who have enjoyed those unravaged, wild areas that he, his dad and Doris saved for these last forty years take for granted the fact that eventually Doris won Lee over to the the conservationists' point of view and that the Magruder Corridor is now part of the largest contiguous unloaded (except for one) wilderness area in the lower 48 and not a road map to Hell. 

Lee Metcalf eventually had a wilderness area and a wildlife refuge named after him in gratitude for his environmental advocacy. The Brandborgs, for their part, disapproved of the naming of geographical features after mere humans, but they let that go after their fashion. Big Brandy actually ended up having a peak named after him while Metcalf was still a sitting senator. Brandy Peak is the first one you see at the mouth of the Lost Horse drainage in the Bitterroot Mountains when you look up into it from Highway 93. Other than expressing pleasure that a mountain would be named after his old friend, Metcalf’s only other recorded comment was the gruff statement, “Well, now the Bitterroot Mountains have an active volcano!” 

Stewart, too, has a creek named after him, in the Upper Selway country. This happened in 1937, when his dad, Bitterroot National Forest Supervisor at the time, had a CCC crew punching a road down to Paradise from Magruder Station with the newfangled bulldozer, ironically just below the Darby-Elk City road being built at roughly the same time. The foreman of Big Brandy's crew, Charlie Engbretzon, had befriended twelve-year-old Stewart and led him up a steep unnamed drainage that emptied into the Selway just above Paradise Guard Station where Stewart shot his first deer. Charlie then had a CCC boy make a simple wooden sign that read “Stewart Creek” and nail it to a tree where the creek crossed under the new roadbed Charlie and his crew were in the process of creating. That sign apparently lasted long enough for the name to stick onto the maps of the protected wilderness lands that would have been logged and thoroughly roaded long ago if not for the creek's namesake, along with several hundred other “elitist” nature-lovers who pestered Metcalf until he caved to their side. Stewart would qualify this story told decades after the facts with a simple addendum, that he didn’t think Stewart Creek should be named after him. After all, that creek had a destiny of its own long before he showed up.
       Consummate politicians—the good-hearted ones, anyways—are in such short supply today, but the arc of environmental justice is always slow and accurate. Every once in a this arc is even observable among committed creatures within the human species. We’d all do well to remember the physics of that kind of justice that doesn’t necessarily have to include us in her sweep.

Making Democracy Work

                            Stewart M. Brandborg (1925-2018)

                           

                   On Word Games and the Nature of Nature

(Note: This is an excerpt from my book-in-progress, "What's Bigger Than The Land: The Life and Times of Stewart M. Brandborg,"  which appears elsewhere in this blog. I repeat it here as a sort of an antidote--for myself if for no one else--against the word games people are playing in this interminable run-up to the 2020 elections, with handles like "democracy" and "socialism". I hold that they are not only peas in the same pod, but that if you didn't have the whole pod (the Land) you wouldn't have either pea.

People love word games, and we've been here before, with words like "wilderness" and even "nature". Annoyance, which seems to be my primary prompt for writing, motivated me to write the below in response to the techno-thinking a few years ago of our modern-day problem-solvers to the then-emerging land-based (if you will) existential threat, which I usually call "global warming" out of that above-mentioned, natural orneriness within my system. There were (and still are) the so-called "neo-greens", who would claim the post-modern mantle of environmentalism by arguing (quite articulately) that this new, sick world of ours is the new "nature", that noxious weeds are the new native plants, that since humans are part of nature, anything we do is "natural" ...(!?!) So just get over it. Let those mountain bikes rip into the last wild places not yet included within the wilderness system cuz, y'know, they're quiet. Enjoy the weird weather 'cuz nothing lasts forever anyway, but fix the whole thing if you insist, by throwing zillions of mirrors into the atmosphere and break out the sunscreen. Then, when the inevitable problems from such a hubristic act start falling down on our heads, just "fix" that, too. It's all good, cuz we're animals, just like the birds and the bees we have no problem engineering out of existence to suit our "natural"  inclination to screw things up. Serendipitously, the song of the Neo-green (or neo-environmentalist as I prefer) is the same one you hear in the Bible, which is a whole 'nuther ornery blog I won't get into now! Suffice to say that belief is its central ingredient, and now everyone to the left of Atilla the Hun are fixating on the belief that "socialism" and "democracy" are somehow different and therefore, since we're such linear-thinking biomasses of cognitive proteins, incompatible. 

I stuck to the tandem of "wilderness" vs "democracy" in the little thing below, but I think you can silently slip in the word "socialism", too, where you think it colors a sentence right, and come up with the same conclusion.

I did, and since I thought it was a fun exercise, I reprint it here.                          

"Wilderness? Wilderness!!!?" you'll hear them whine, more and more with a roll of a condescending eye about a thing within which their lives are less and less entwined, even those who now claim the mantle of Environmentalist. “That’s so Sixties!” 

Well, it is just a word after all, and an expeditious one at that. But how about “democracy”? That’s just a word, too, but it describes a living organism, a land-based one, and wherever you find the Land you’ll find a different species of democracy native to that place. Here in North America, there was a vibrant form residing in human populations long before the Atlantic Ocean washed an equally-vibrant (albeit predatory) Greco-Roman form upon its shores, where they crossbred. We tend to forget that our cherished American democracy is a hybrid, a mix of the native and the non-native, a cut-bow trout swimming in the ever-more-sacred waters of an industrialized world on the very verge of polluting those waters to the last drop and then privatizing the toxic result. Then there will be no trout, no water, no democracy at all. We tend to forget that, far from being democracy’s creator, we are merely its host species, and that we neglect this symbiotic relationship at our peril. 

I have allowed myself to become convinced that within the political template created by the early conservationists (many of whom self-identified as socialists) and the various other progressives to meld their depthless love of wild places with political realities, to get people to see the essential value of a mere word—Wilderness!--and to fight for it, are the same nuggets that could save the Land, and possibly us, from our accumulated foolishness. These stories and insights may be centered around the Northern Rockies, but it seems to me that the extreme and even violent politics we have seen here in Montana as well as throughout most of America’s rural landscapes for the last thirty years or so (the militia movement, the “Tea Party” phenomenon, the current trump presidency) are the universal metaphors for the illness--or lack of vision--that plagues us if you have the inclination to look. Old-time activism, the kind practiced in the mid-twentieth century by Big Brandy (Guy M. Brandborg, Bitterroot National Forest Supervisor, 1935-55) and his son, Stewart (Executive Director, Wilderness Society, 1964-76), is a pretty good recipe for fighting despair (our real enemy it seems to me) and maybe better than most given what we’re left to work with. It’s grounded and doesn’t put Jesus to sleep.

Ah, Jesus...we tend to kill our prophets, don't we? By boredom if not by other means, or at least ignore them if they're lucky, along with the core truth that burns at the heart of their misinterpreted reveries, the one about humility, about us being frogs in a slowly boiling pot of our own stew resulting in our misinterpreting that simple lesson. We beg our own set of questions, then, which are at heart not modern ones at all: Is it really about what the environment can do for us, or about how pretty we think things are? Or if some of us believe that sunsets are the eyes of God shining down to enlighten our path? Or if others believe that coal is the gift of that other god, the Old Testament one with the warped sense of humor? Is it even about belief at all? Is our task merely science, then? To measure “ecosystem services” so that they may be more easily parsed up and dealt out between the various human “partners” at the negotiation “tables”? Might there be a missing ingredient in our land-based debates we’re having these days? Might it be that humankind needs as much wild country (and its evolving, resident democracies) as we can possibly nurture for the simple sake of our continued survival on this planet? Might we need to save what’s left of our remaining wilderness,  not as a matter of sentimentality, belief, or “ecosystem services”, but as a matter of fact? 

Our times are nothing new, and it’s never been too hard to see the mountains past the hype. Either by intent or ignorance, most of us tend to miss the forest and the trees, and if you’ll indulge me a bit further I’ll re-iterate that what is usually lacking in our armchair discussions about the Land is that democracy, the main ingredient in any solution of epic human concern, needs vast swaths of relatively intact ecosystems to burn in and to rejuvenate, to evolve in and to survive, and that democracy is what is lacking in the Land.

It’s something to think about, anyway. 

Stories That We Sing

Pastel by Daniel Lacroix

In May of 1846, Thoreau and Emerson had a discussion about the Mexican War. Thoreau had gotten himself arrested for refusing to pay his paltry taxes to support what he considered an imperial war of aggression. Emerson counseled his friend that one can supersede the transgressions of a well-meaning State by other means than getting oneself arrested. In Emerson's world, this "other means" meant the Muse, the telling of good stories that people would read and learn from. Literature in other words. Thoreau wasn't so sure that the State was so well-meaning or that the Muse alone would be enough to supersede it. But he redefined Emerson's "other means" to suit his own purposes and combined both the Muse and "other means" to our everlasting benefit. Ever since then, Civil Disobedience (or Applied Poetry as Thoreau pioneered it) has always been his child, in large part because he raised it to the level of Literature. Meaningful action requires a Muse to be lasting and effective, and vice versa. Thoreau only spent a night in jail, and his aunt bailed him out with the paltry sum he refused to pay on principle, but he wrote the thing down, eloquently, and so his lesson endured. How, Emerson seemed to challenge his younger friend, would anyone know what the hell you were trying to do otherwise, let alone emulate it, unless you wrote it down eloquently enough for other people to want to read it? Thoreau agreed, and it seems it's time that we should, too.

The problem with Progressives today, I think, is that we let other people, Rupert Murdoch, the Koch Brothers (and Sun Myung Moon!), tell our stories, and their Muse doesn't mean us well. We don't plug our Muse into our political discourse very much, and that's a big mistake. Mark Twain, for instance, didn't make that mistake, and he was among the first American Writers to use the new-fangled typewriter. Why do we children of Twain, Emerson and Thoreau ( and fill in the blank) make that mistake now with our new-fangled computers? 

For all their faults, Murdoch, the Kochs (and Moon!) understood that people are story-based critters, like it or not, and I think we progressives should like it. By definition, people make many important social (read: political) decisions based largely on who's the best storyteller. It’s in our nature, and Corporate Media is a classic example of how Nature abhors a vacuum. We’ve collectively created a cultural ‘narrative’ vacuum by allowing ourselves to be so easily entertained by—Corporate Media! And Nature hates that. She’ll allow the same garbage responsible for the vacuum (Corporate Media!) to be sucked in and to rattle around until it ruins our cognative motors before she’ll let that sad state of affairs stand. Consider: Rupert Murdoch is from Australia and lives in China. Sun Myung Moon (The Washington Times, UPI) was from Korea with deep ties to that country's intelligence agency. The Koch Brothers, of course, are from the sheikdom of Texas. All obscenely rich, so much so they (apparently) believed they owned America because they paid for it, and we collectively let them define who among us are “real Americans”?! C'mon! 

Although it helps to strive toward the goal, progressives don't have to be great writers. We simply have to acknowledge that we have the better stories and we’re sitting on our best ones. Our truest ones. This is the decrepit state of latter-day Liberalism that we Progressives can fix. Liberal centrists (if you will) when given power, will negotiate our rights away from a position of capitulation, from an internalized sense that our stories don't count for much if they aren't vetted on Fox News first. We shouldn't put up with that. Why do we? 

Like any historic attempt, we need to find our Voice. Significant action will come only after our contemporary political muse matures, which it hasn't yet, notwithstanding funny memes on social media and that's the thing, isn't it? We depend too much on two-dimensional images to tell our stories for us, and Corporate Media has us outgunned in that arena. Stories, even as they're written down in two-dimensional form, or spoken in equal dimension, are three-dimensional beings. The reader has to use her imagination more than allowing special effects do it for her. And, by the way, if history's still a guide--and I hope it still is--when any given political Muse matures it has generally evolved into the baseline for much of Western Civilization’s meaningful and therefore lasting literature. 

I think we can (relatively-easily) reclaim the higher ground by simply elevating our critical modern discussions out of Fox-news-landia back to where intelligent Americans can find their feet and fight back, either with the Muse, by other means, or both. It’s not up to some talking head to write the narrative. That’s up to us. So by definition we still have as good a chance as we ever had. Maybe the noise is a little louder these days, but it’s always been that way, at least in literate societies.  

In other words, like Emerson advised and Thoreau partially agreed with: stories matter, and may the best Muse win.

Click to listen:    Stories That We Sing