Something about Idaho

You might be confused reading about the domestic terrorists infesting Idaho: the fascists, the racists, and the proud swastika waving American Nazis. How can a place so overwhelmingly blessed with natural beauty, abundant resources, and spectacular weather be cursed with the scum of the European invasion? Read a little history and you’ll discover Idaho has been cursed with these human monsters almost from the moment silver was discovered in those mountains and giant, corrupt assholes like Rockefeller, Morgan, Mellon, Crocker, Vanderbilt, Carnegie, and Hill mined Washington D.C. for free access to every penny that could be squeezed, crushed, dynamited, cut, or burned out of the western states. They did all of that damage with the help of exactly the kind of people who are waving treasonous Confederate and Nazi flags, carrying guns into public meetings, threatening “liberal” public officers, and generally crapping in the streets to demonstrate their general lawlessness and love of chaos. These are not a new sort of Idaho resident, although many of them are recent California immigrants, running from expensive California real estate and employment competition from actual human beings. Riverside County is puking up the kind of garbage people the place has been known for since it became the home of the KKK and American Nazi Party back in the Reagan years and Idaho and Texas appear to be catching the bulk of that faux-Christian vomit.

At the turn of the last century, Idaho and Montana were originally infested with exactly this kind of European immigrant. As Timothy Egan describes in The Big Burn, Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America,  a book about the early history of the under-resourced and disrespected U.S. Forestry Department, Taft, Idaho in the early 1900’s was “a town . . . with one prostitute for every three men and a murder rate higher than that of New York City . . . You could buy the basics in Taft: a woman, a man, a horse, a place at a card table or a spin of a roulette wheel, a fat steak for $1, a quart of whiskey for $1.25, a bunk for 25 cents. One nearby shot advertised ‘shoes, booze and screws,’ and they weren’t talking about hardware.” Those were the people imported to rape and plunder the forests, mountains, and water resources of Idaho in 1900 by the infamous robber barons. Before Teddy Roosevelt, the Republican Party (like today’s Republican Party) was convinced it’s primary duty was to provide free and easy access to the nation’s natural resources to the highest bidder in exchange for some dribble-down economics. Some of the robber barons, like some of today’s Congresscritters, took a more direct path and became Senators, in the days when U.S. Senators were appointed rather than elected, so they could pay themselves for the privilege of plundering the continent.

It’s not a stretch to imagine that the kind of people who would work for Anaconda Copper (aka “The big snake”) and the other mining giants, the railroad trusts (the biggest corporate welfare recipients in U.S. history), and the logging trusts would also be of low-to-non-existent moral character and easily fired up to maintain a constant level of instability and violence to keep the misdirection going and the money flowing into the smallest number of huge pockets possible. These are exactly the people Orwell was talking about with his “four legs are better than two” sheep chants.

Nothing has changed today, corporate con artists like Trump, the Bundys, Vandersloot, McGeachin, and a collection of fake news propagators are pumping up the Marching Morons to self-destruct themselves and the state they claim to love in the interests of outside profiteers. The Bundys made their fortune poaching grazing land from the public spaces and have turned poaching into a right wing “liberty” for the few who have the guns and political power to chase everyone else off of those spaces. You have to give them some credit for having the gall to pull that one off. If you can mobilize a pack of idiots to arm up and protect your “right” to steal from those same idiots, you are definitely some kind of salesman.

Trump regularly chanted that the rest of the world is laughing at us. He distracted that attention by claiming that it was because of our immigration policies. We wish. No, the intelligent people of the world are laughing at the USA because of the number of well-armed, easily-misled, insanely violent, and grotesquely entitled “citizens” this country has created and inspired to overthrow a political system that has provided them with more freedom, resources and opportunity, and space than any in human history. For the most part, these wingnut revolutionaries are doing the work for people, organizations, and states who have been labeled “enemies of the state” since before WWII and they’re actually even waving our enemies’ flags. Now that is salesmanship.