Cliven Bundy and The Rural Way: We'd rather be wrong with Clive than right with Harry Reid

I’m sure that Cliven Bundy ^[1] probably could have cut a deal with the Bureau of Land Management and should have. Of course, it’s never wise to let a federal court order hang over your head. And certainly we cannot have a world of Cliven Bundys if a legal system is to function.

In a practical sense, I also know that if I were to burn brush on a no-burn day, or toss an empty pesticide container in the garbage bin, or shoot a coyote too near the road, I would incur the wrath of the government in a way someone does not who dumps a stripped stolen auto (two weeks ago) in my vineyard, or solvents, oil, and glass (a few months ago), or rips out copper wire from the pump for the third time (last year). Living in a Winnebago with a porta-potty and exposed Romex in violation of zoning statutes for many is not quite breaking the law where I live; having a mailbox five inches too high for some others certainly is.

So Mr. Bundy must realize that in about 1990 we decided to focus on the misdemeanor of the law-abiding citizen and to ignore the felony of the lawbreaker. The former gave law enforcement respect; the latter ignored their authority. The first made or at least did not cost enforcers money; arresting the second began a money-losing odyssey of incarceration, trials, lawyers, appeals, and all the rest.

Mr. Bundy knows that the bullies of the BLM would much rather send a SWAT team after him than after 50 illegal aliens being smuggled by a gun-toting cartel across the southwestern desert. How strange, then, at this late postmodern date, for someone like Bundy on his horse still to be playing the law-breaking maverick Jack Burns (Kirk Douglas) in (the David Miller, Dalton Trumbo, Edward Abbey effort) Lonely Are the Brave.

But the interest in Mr. Bundy’s case is not about legal strategies in revolving fiscal disagreements with the federal government.

One, he called attention to the frightening fact that the federal government owns 83% of the land in Nevada. Note that “federal” and “government” are the key words and yet are abstractions. Rather, a few thousands unelected employees — in the BLM, EPA, Defense Department, and other alphabet soup agencies — can pretty much do what they want on the land they control. And note, this is not quite the case in Silicon Valley or Manhattan or Laguna Beach. The danger can be summed up by a scene I see about once a month on a Fresno freeway: a decrepit truck stopped by the California Highway Patrol for having inadequate tarps on a trailer of green clippings, just as a new city garbage truck speeds by, with wet garbage flying over the median. Who will police the police?

Two, this administration has a long record of not following the law — picking and choosing when and how to enforce immigration statutes, depending on the particular dynamics of the next election; picking and choosing which elements of Obamacare to enforce, again depending on perceived political advantage; and picking and choosing when to go after coal companies, or when not to enforce the Defense of Marriage Act, or when to reverse the order of the Chrysler creditors, or when to allow Lois Lerner to destroy the credibility of the IRS for partisan advantage.

In other words, the Obama administration regularly breaks the law as it sees fit. So we wonder why a federal agency sends out swarms of armed security agents to the empty desert on behalf of a tortoise, when it could just as easily storm Jay Carney’s press conference and demand that the president promise to enforce the Affordable Care Act. Or start apprehending those who are not just violating immigration law, but also serially signing false federal affidavits or providing employers with fraudulent identities.

Finally, Bundy, for all his contradictions, is a throwback to a different age. As the photo atop this article suggests, I had a Bundy-like Swedish grandfather — gassed in the Meuse-Argonne ^[2] and left with charred lungs — who became a sort of recluse. He broke horses for a living and in his long widowhood survived on his chickens, goats, rabbits, cows, and sheep, in subsistence fashion from 40 acres. He taught me how to dress out a pig, skin goats, and shoot. He also gave me lessons about the world of riding bareback on matched mules. He slept with a bottle of port on his nightstand and a loaded .30-40 Krag leaning against the headboard.

When we acted up, he “locked up” his grandchildren for ten minutes in his six-foot high birdcage with the quail and pheasants. I can remember his Swedish accented “eye yeye yi” each time one of us got bucked off his horse (one was called “Paint,” of course). He raised Fox Terriers for sale with names like “Rex” and “Skipper.” Frank looked like a Cliven Bundy, or a Slim Pickens (whom he knew well as a fellow Kingsburgian cowboy), and sounded exactly like Douglas Spencer (“Swede”) in Shane or John Qualen (“Lars”) in The Searchers.

My other grandfather was a refined Welsh version of the rural way, but no less independent as a small farmer who worked all his land himself until he quit one day at 86 and died that night in the hospital. He was as wiry as my other Swedish grandfather was a hulk. The one was a master horse rider, the other an expert at plowing with horses. Growing up with them, I never much learned about the secrets of “business” or “how to make it” (sometimes I wish I had). Making it, as I at sixty look back at them now, was probably defined as talking bluntly, gaining a reputation for “straight shooting,” paying all your bills on time, never making excuses for failure, and in general being loyal to friends and of some worry to enemies. To understand Bundy’s fatalism is to appreciate the rural way and its polite contempt for the softer world of the city and the mush that now passes for making it. Losing nobly was preferable to winning badly — Old Ajax to the core.

So we are not threatened by the likes of Cliven Bundy. Instead, the scary lawlessness extends to the bureaucracy itself, given that under Obama the government is becoming tainted and an ideological tool of social transformation. After just six years, we shrug that, of course, the IRS is biased. The Justice Department is politicized; ask Dinesh D’Souza or the AP reporters. No need to mention the NSA. The EPA makes laws up as ideologically required ^[3]. No one believes the State Department that in the weeks before the election a video-caused “riot” led to expert jihadists zeroing in with their GPS-guided mortars on a CIA annex in Benghazi. And so on.

Bundy is just different from what is now America — he looks different, talks differently, and dresses differently. These are the superficial veneers to someone who lives mostly through different premises from those of Pajama Boy nation ^[4], the world of Jay Carney and his cute Stalinist posters ^[5], the cosmos of Anita Dunn and her Mao gushes, or the metrosexual networking that is the gospel of Silicon Valley or the DC beltway. Few of us rely on human muscle anymore to survive one more day. Fewer of those who do combine that with horse-power, and its world of leather and wood and rope. Bundy is self-employed, without an SEIU union, a PERS pension, or a GS-15 health plan.

Given all that, I suggest Cliven Bundy is far more endangered than is the desert tortoise, and that his kind will be gone shortly in a way the federally protected tarantula and Gila monster or delta smelt will not. He, not they, is in the federal crosshairs ^[6]. So, yes, I can make some allowances for the nihilism of Cliven Bundy. We could not live in a modern, high-tech world only of Cliven Bundys, but perhaps we cannot live in a world without a few of them now and then to remind us of what we have become.

Almost everything, natural and human, has conspired against these sorts: a hail storm that wrecked the plum crop two days before harvest, or a swaggering psychopathic neighbor who stole the irrigation canal water until stopped, or a no-good who filed a phony workers’ compensation claim for a stubbed toe, or an ancient wobbly grinder that sliced off a finger, or the thieving Packing Company that always sent back slips each year saying “45% cull rate,” whether the fruit was small or big, scarred or smooth, ripe, overripe, or green.

To be a cattleman in the Nevada desert in America of 2014 is to live on Mars, or rather to live among 24/7 enemies, human and animal alike. How a man survives from cattle ranching on leased land in the Nevada badlands I cannot imagine, but I wonder nonetheless and in that amazement wish to see him continue.

My cowboy grandfather, Frank Hanson, died at 80, while Reese Davis, my maternal one, died at 86, in a world where the former never, until his last day, went to the doctor after his year in a Belgium hospital (he was a Lewis machine gunner before the gassing), and the latter went just twice. Theirs was a pre-cholesterol-testing, no-colonoscopy world, in which you just chugged on eating the wrong food, getting up to hard physical work each morning until you “got a cancer” or “the ticker quit” and at your funeral the neighbors said “ya, he worked hard” and went home. I remember the oncologist saying to my father about his dead father, “Are you sure he didn’t smoke? Take a look at those burned lungs on the X-ray.” And my dad curtly answered the specialist, “That’s what mustard gas does.”

The point is Mr. Bundy is no Rahm Emanuel, Al Gore, or Jay Carney. He is no Jay-Z or Sean Penn. He is a world away from the Kardashians and the BMW meets Mercedes crowd of the California coastal corridor or the psychodramas of brats at Dartmouth. Bundy does not have the white privilege that those who have it — mostly liberal, wealthy, and seeking an apartheid existence — damn in others.

Money is not Bundy’s point. Pleasing Harry Reid or the federal bureaucracy is not either. Making a living from the scrub of a desert by providing people good food probably is.

Grant him that. He’s our past, Harry Reid and the bunch in Washington our future. To paraphrase the ancients, sometimes we’d rather be wrong with Cliven Bundy than right with Harry Reid — and the SWAT teams that will revisit Mr. Bundy and his clan very, very soon ^[7] to enforce a dispute over grazing fees and insensitivity to a tortoise.

URL to article: http://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/cliven-bundy-and-the-rural-way/

[1] Cliven Bundy: http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2014/04/13/is-harry-reid-involved-seven-answers-to-seven-questions-youre-probably-asking-right-now-about-the-nevada-rancher-situation/

[3] as ideologically required: http://pjmedia.com/eddriscoll/2014/03/18/of-friendly-lawsuits-and-potemkin-protests/

[4] Pajama Boy nation: http://pjmedia.com/eddriscoll/2013/12/20/oh-that-death-of-the-grown-up-2/

[5] his cute Stalinist posters: http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2014/04/14/what-if-the-presidents-press-secretary-had-nazi-propaganda-on-his-walls/

[6] is in the federal crosshairs: http://hotair.com/archives/2014/04/18/protip-from-reid-bundy-supporters-are-domestic-terrorists-yknow/

[7] very, very soon: http://hotair.com/archives/2014/04/15/harry-reid-on-the-bundy-ranch-standoff-this-aint-over/

Again, you people who haven’t actually farmed or ranched (or dealt with the BLM) in Nevada should load up on some facts before spouting off.

First, the reason why there is so much “federal” land in Nevada has NOTHING to do with “what people didn’t want.” It has to do with the Republican political leadership of the state stampeding to get the state admitted to the Union in 1864 and commit the silver and gold reserves found in the state to the US Treasury to prop up the US government, which was issuing a ferocious amount of debt in the days after the end of the central bank of the US.

Basically, the interests in Carson City said “anything that isn’t already deeded is federal.” There was no time for anyone to claim interest(s) in the land. The Republican political forces basically reckoned that the private lands from the Walker River north to the Truckee were about all that concerned them, and the silver mines in Virginia City were their primary concern, and in they rushed to the Union.

The lands claimed by the DOI in the 19th century were open to settlement, but the process was ended in 1976 by FLPMA.

One of the problems with the homesteading laws (which included the Stock Raising Act and Desert Land Entry) is that until powered irrigation became common, these acts, which had been predicated upon the amount of land a farmer could farm in places like Kansas, were far too little to be economically viable. If I want to run 300 head of cows in Nevada, I don’t need a section; I need 100’s of THOUSANDS of acres. One AUM is 50 to 70 acres in the high desert of Nevada, and probably closer to 200 acres in the lower desert (south of US Route 6) in Nevada.

What did the homesteading acts allow? 640 acres (one section) per family. OK, that’ll allow you to run a couple cows, year-round.

And that’s those states.

In Nevada, the BLM has a policy of “no net loss” of land. So when Dusty Harry cuts loose a section in Clark County for his buddies at Del Webb, the BLM pursues buying up ranches in the rest of the state.

Now, here’s where there’s another wrinkle: Reid put in some legislation to have the BLM use the proceeds of selling off public land at auction in the south of the state to buy up private water rights in the north of the state... which Harry and his evil spawn Rory would like to pipe to Clark County.

You are quite correct that the homesteading act was designed with eastern and midwestern lands in mind. That’s where almost all the congressmen who passed it were from and what they were familiar with.

The problem with the notion that the federal government retaining ownership of much land in Nevada after it became a state is that it just isn’t true. Most states had land still owned by the federal government after they became states. Above I’ve posted links to documentation of public land sales in the 20th century in MO and FL.

Here’s some from a single county in MS. Feds still selling off public land more than a century after statehood in 1817.

Comparing the land disposal in eastern and midwestern states to the western states isn’t fruitful.

Those state records you’re pointing me at show disposals of piddly little parcels - “quarters of quarters” or 40 acres.

That, in those states that could grow tobacco was enough to live on.

In the western states which came into the union in the latter half of the 19th century, the policy out of DC became one against land disposal, and then only in split estates. It is far easier to get a mining claim in Nevada than to gain control of the surface rights. In those other states you mention, when you gained land, you gained it all. They usually didn’t have split estates.

In no other state does the US Government control such a large proportion of the overall land mass in the state as Nevada. Other western states were far smarter than Nevada was, because they reserved proportions of the state for state lands. Nevada didn’t do even than. For example, here in Wyoming, we have “state sections” where graziers pay the state of Wyoming for the grazing rights. This is used to fund schools in the surrounding county.

Then there’s a little tidbit that most people who have never lived, farmed/ranched/mined in Nevada don’t know: Several of the BLM offices in Nevada are “penalty duty” for DOI employees the DOI would like to make quit. When you’re dealing with the BLM on land disposal issues in Nevada, you have pure, simple stupidity standing in your way as well as the other factors.

There were federal lands for homesteading up until 1976.

All of conflict about Bundy is about FLPMA and FLPMA ended homesteading.

But there is still a lot of landswapping going on and if you need some BLM land, or Forest Service land, you go out and buy some private land that the land agency deems to be desirable and they will gladly swap with you. In my neck of the woods, for the last 25 years, Weyerhauser has been swapping with Forest Service, FWS, and state agencies in which Weyerhauser is trading away acres for board feet.

The money available to the land agencies to buy land is mostly from the Land and Water Conservation Fund(1965). And that act requires that 60% of the money appropriated be used to buy more land. For each forest and each BLM unit there is a lot competition for this money. Sometimes, Congress will make a special appropriation as they did in 2000(1 million) to buy the Baca #1 ranch in New Mexico to create the Valles Caldera, on which they lease grazing. They charge a tourist $10 per day to hike and a rancher 55 cents per day to graze one cow-calf unit.

I don't look at it that way. You may focus on the county sheriff whereas a would focus on the county govt to include the sheriff the prosecuter, and to commissioners or supervisors, and the executive if the county has one.

There are urban counties and many rural counties, who are collectively powerful.

This whole subject of the feds imposing on the western rural counties is not accurate.

CARA, and CARA 2000 included Payment in Lieu of Taxes(PLT). The premise behind PLT was that as the federal land agencies reduced economic activity on these federal lands, that reduction in economic activity would reduce the tax base and income to county govts and school districts in these rural counties thru-out the west, creating hardship.

So CARA didn't pass but the CARA compromise did and PLT was part of the Compromise. PLT took the form of the Counties Payment Bill and was supposed to last 7 years. You may recall that many freepers griped and complained about this govt giveaway.

So anyway, as it turned out, The GOP was trying to open Area 181 in the Gulf to drilling in 2006, but they needed some dem votes, so they told these western states dems that if the dems would vote for this offshore drilling, the GOP would vote to extend the Counties Payment Bill when it expired the following year.

Nothing ever dies in Congress, it just lives on.

So, the premise that these rural counties in the west are getting hurt by reducing logging or grazing, is not accurate, they are being compensated.

Ben Ficklin is a liberal implant here who has been all over these threads the past few weeks. I'd also like to point out that the only person who has advocated killing judges or "starting an armed revolution" is Ben Ficklin.

The purpose of the Oathkeepers and militia arriving at Bundy Ranch was to prevent another Waco or Ruby Ridge, not to start an armed revolution, and they managed by grace of God to pull that off and come to a peaceful resolution.

Ficklin seems quite put out that a hundred or more weren't massacred under that bridge. Talk about blood lust. And that's just when he's not sneering down his nose at the "uneducated peasants" here at Free Republic.

Does VDH not realize that Cliven Bundy is one of his contemporaries? The man is 67 years old, and Hanson is 60.

The Bundy Ranch situation has nothing to do with preserving a relic from our distant past, and keeping the ranching lifestyle as some sort of Colonial Williamsburg living museum. This is about a corrupt criminal enterprise deciding that it wants what is yours and is going to do whatever it has to do to take it, come hell or high water.

If some corrupt senator decides that they want Hanson's vineyards, they're going to find a way to take them. If they can't buy him out, they'll tax him into bankruptcy, rig the court system, plant evidence (marijuana), declare his land a fragile ecosystem, bring in SWAT teams and burn him out... whatever they have to do, they will do it if it serves their ends. And as long as we keep putting up with it, it is going to keep happening.

Eventually, every one of us who believes in the Constitution is going to be considered an ancient relic who is in the way of "progress."

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