[lit-ideas] Re: Feeling Safe isn't safe
- From: "Mike Geary" <atlas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 1 May 2007 21:44:15 -0500
Lawrence reminds me of Alice, the one who said: "If I had a world of my own,
everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is because everything
would be what it isn't. And contrary-wise; what it is it wouldn't be, and what
it wouldn't be, it would. You see?" Rugged individualism indeed! Lawrence is
the last true believer in Herbert Hoover. God love him, he's persistently
consistent in his madness. Rugged individualism - yes, yes, that same rugged
individualism that won the west! Except, of course, for the role the US
government played, for example there were the massive land purchases and
giveaways, there was the Homestead Act, the Pony Express, agricultural
colleges, rural electrification, telephone wiring, road-building, irrigation,
dam-building, farm subsidies and foreclosure loans, the name just a few. And
of course there's the "rugged individualism" that historian John Farragher
describes as "a community experience...Sharing work with neighbors at cabin
raisings, log rollings, haying, husking, butchering, harvesting or threshing
were all traditionally considered communal affairs...[A] 'borrowing system'
allowed scarce tools, labor and products to circulate for the benefit of all."
One pioneer told prospective settlers: "Your wheel-barrows, your shovels, your
utensils of all sorts, belong not to yourself, but to the public who do not
think it necessary even to ask a loan, but take it for granted."
Oh, and here's some more about the rugged individualism that Lawrence's paeans
praise so masterfully:
"By the turn of the century, the government had distributed a billion acres of
land, but only 147 million became homesteads. Sociologists Scott and Sally
McNall estimate that "probably only one acre in nine went to the small
pioneers." Some 183 million acres were ultimately given to the railroad
companies. (It was these federal giveaways that created the major logging
companies, not family businesses.) Four out of five transcontinental railroads
were built in this way, and Congress approved loans up to $48,000 per mile to
build them.
The West has a rich tradition of dependency on government. As historian
Stephanie Coontz says: "It would be hard to find a Western family today or at
any time in the past whose land rights, transportation options, economic
existence, and even access to water were not dependent on federal funds."
Paradoxically, however, the West has also enjoyed a long tradition of
anti-government sentiments. When John Wayne punched out "Mr. Government
Bureaucrat" in a Hollywood Western, he was acting out the misplaced rage of
many Western Americans."
http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/L-west.htm
Mike Geary
Memphis
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