by Mark Harvey
All the territorial possessions of all the political establishments in the earth–including America, of course–consist of pilferings from other people’s wash. —Mark Twain, Following the Equator
There’s a wonderful story from Paul Bunyan Swings His Ax about how a heat wave in Iowa made all the field corn pop until the whole state was covered in ten feet of popcorn. Then a terrific wind blew all the popcorn over to Kansas, where cattle mistook it for snow and froze to death. Somehow that story captures the absurd myths about the West that drew settlers into a dry forsaken land. Myths about the West and how it was “won” abound and some of them were meant for the movies before movies existed. But much of western mythology has to do with square-jawed cowboys fighting for what’s right, and one day meeting a bonneted school mistress transplanted from the east. After a gunfight or two defending the lass’s honor, a golden life on the prairie begins.
The real history of the West is far more colorful and much less savory. It has a lot of graft, fraudulent misrepresentation, speculative puffery, and truly clever schemes to outwit the government and the gullible. If cinema truly captured the Wild West, it would be less John Ford and more Steven Soderberg. Where to begin?
The tools of western conquest in the cinematic version are six shooters, covered wagons, and fleet horses. There was some of that, but much of what moved thousands of people to the western states and made some men rich and others desperate had more to do with stuffy laws written in Washington, The General Land Office, survey chains, and crooked speculators. Start with the Homestead Act of 1862.
The Homestead Act promised a simple bargain: any adult citizen could claim 160 acres of public land, and after living on it for five years the property was theirs. In a progressive twist for the time, the law allowed women and Black Americans to claim land alongside white men. The act had stalled in Congress for years because Southern legislators feared it would create new abolitionist states and upset the balance of power in the Senate. It finally passed only after the South seceded from the Union. Read more »
If you had to design the perfect neighbor to the United States, it would be hard to do better than Canada. Canadians speak the same language, subscribe to the ideals of democracy and human rights, have been good trading partners, and almost always support us on the international stage. Watching our foolish president try to destroy that relationship has been embarrassing and maddening. In case you’ve entirely tuned out the news—and I wouldn’t blame you if you have—Trump has threatened to make Canada the 51st state and took to calling Prime Minister Trudeau, Governor Trudeau.
It doesn’t take a lot of effort to be a bootlicker. Find a boss or someone with the personality of a petty tyrant, sidle up to them, subjugate yourself, and find something flattering to say. Tell them they’re handsome or pretty, strong or smart, and make sweet noises when they trot out their ideas. Literature and history are riddled with bootlickers: Thomas Cromwell, the advisor to Henry VIII, Polonius in Hamlet, Mr. Collins in Pride and Predjudice, and of course Uriah Heep in David Copperfield.
There is something repulsive about lickspittles, especially when all the licking is being done for political purposes. It’s repulsive when we see it in others and it’s repulsive when we see it in ourselves It has to do with the lack of sincerity and the self-abasement required to really butter someone up. In the animal world, it’s rolling onto your back and exposing the vulnerable stomach and throat—saying I am not a threat.
In daily life we get along okay without what we call thinking. Indeed, most of the time we do our daily round without anything coming to our conscious mind – muscle memory and routines get us through the morning rituals of washing and making coffee. And when we do need to bring something to mind, to think about it, it’s often not felt to cause a lot of friction: where did I put my glasses? When does the train leave? and so on.
In the game of chess, some of the greats will concede their most valuable pieces for a superior position on the board. In a 1994 game against the grandmaster Vladimir Kramnik, Gary Kasparov sacrificed his queen early in the game with a move that made no sense to a middling chess player like me. But a few moves later Kasparov won control of the center board and marched his pieces into an unstoppable array. Despite some desperate work to evade Kasparov’s scheme, Kramnik’s king was isolated and then trapped into checkmate by a rook and a knight.