Backdrop Series: “What to [the land] is the 4th of July?” July 8, 2024August 12, 2024 Flotilla of rafts with giant American flags, playing music out of speakers, floating past Mallard’s Rest fishing access on the 4th of July. On July 5, 1852, in an address to the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society the great Frederick Douglass asked: What to the Slave is the 4th of July? I do not hesitate to declare, with all my soul, that the character and conduct of this nation never looked blacker to me than on this 4th of July! Whether we turn to the declarations of the past, or to the professions of the present, the conduct of the nation seems equally hideous and revolting. America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future? Oppressions are not separate. Douglass was speaking a decade before the end of the Civil War, before the end of slavery (outside of penal institutions), and yet, he continues to speak for all those who are disaffected by this annual outburst of patriotic fervor: all those who do not live under the sign of Power: Blacks, our Native American neighbors, women — stripped of our right to bodily autonomy in the wake of Dobbs, our LGBTQ friends and neighbors, teachers and libraries, those seeking sanctuary at our borders, who believed the promise on the Statue of Liberty, only to find themselves jailed, trapped behind razor wire, and drowned in the Rio Grande. He also speaks for the land. The land we’ve historically seen as “empty.” The land we see as backdrop, as scenery, as something through which we pass but which has no rights of it’s own. Land we see as “resource” not as sentient being, not as “mountains and rivers endlessly walking.” Yee haw The 4th of July starts here in Livingston on the 2nd, with a parade, and the first of three (now 4) nights of rodeo. In the first decade or so that I lived here, it was kind of sweet. There were floats by local businesses and organizations, dueling drum-and-bagpipe marching bands, the Shriners in their silly cars, mule packing trains showing off fancy moves in the street, a few vintage horse-drawn wagons, fire trucks, and a lot of old cars. People threw candy, we all did some light day drinking, politicians shook hands. It was fun. Then came an unholy combination of the Trump/MAGA folks, and the powers that be deciding what’s going to save us is becoming the party annex to Bozeman. We’re now “the thing to do” on all the tourism sites. Our friend called from Missoula, where she’s watching soccer while recovering from Covid to tell us they’re running TV ads for the parade and rodeo on endless repeat. It’s not a cute small town parade anymore. It’s crowded 4 rows deep with people from out of town, drunk people, lots of MAGA people, and rich people in matching fishing shirts. There’s a lot of jockeying over which of retired movie/music stars are here, where they are, who is talking to them. The rodeo is also no longer the exceptional small town rodeo it once was. When I moved here, you could count on most people knowing what rodeo sports were, count on them knowing that they were seeing top rodeo athletes, count on them paying some attention to the event in front of them. Now it’s just another “experience” to check off your list. To take a selfie with a bucking horse and the mountains behind you. Even more disturbing is the way it’s become a “celebration” of the worst myths of the American west, all delivered by a new sound system so stunningly loud, that those of us who live on this side of town find ourselves inside our houses, windows closed, noise-cancelling earbuds in place, and even so, we can’t escape the braying voice of the announcer and the clown, making all the right-wing jokes about “wokeness”. I stopped going after they dragged an effigy of Obama around the ring behind a quarter horse. Read moreLivingSmall is Getting DirtyI thought of the rodeo when I was reading my neighbor Betsy Gaines Quammen’s new book True West: “The West is a place of diverse stories, symbols, and signals — and inescapable myths. There is the perception of profuse liberty, copious machismo, untrammeled wilderness, rugged individualism, discovered and “free” lands, cowboy heroics, blank slates, conquered spaces, reliable rain that “follows” tilling into arid lands, and enduring frontier. These myths continue to wind through ways of seeing this place and its peoples, creating hurdles in caring for the environment and communities.” Tourism is the commodification of experience, which means that the very place one lives, one’s existence in that place, becomes a kind of backdrop for sale. We, the quaint natives, exist to serve the incomers. I was reading Patrick Joyce‘s new book Remembering Peasants over the holiday, and he notes that: “Folklore is another product of this search for authenticity, the peasantry exiled to the land of the museum … so that, as Bordieu writes, the peasants ‘are assigned to their reserves where they will be free to dance and sing their bourrées and gavottes for the greater satisfaction of ethnologists and urban tourists, so long as their existence is economically and symolically profitable.’ … the last peasants are converted into the guardians of a nature transformed for the consumption of city dwellers, environmentalists these days among them.” When I point this out to my friends, the ones who used to be artists, but who have become gentry, the ones who are busy ingratiating themselves to the rich, when I point out that we’re becoming dancing bears for their entertainment, they stop inviting me to dinner. One of them told me that “without the rich people we wouldn’t have nice things.” Sigh. This holds true for the natural beauty that surrounds us as well. The Yellowstone river, clogged with fishermen and rafts, fishing access sites with boat trailers and cars spilling out into the highway, trailheads with cars lining the road, and of course, Yellowstone Park, with it’s traffic jams and RVs and people getting tossed by bison they didn’t think were real. All of this “brings money into town.” All of this is “good for the community.” To quote Betsy one more time: “Climbers, skiers, kayakers, anglers, moutnain bikers, and various other adventurers arrive determined to rip, shred, bag, and slay in various and sundry ways. It’s as if the land is prey, butchered and consumed through recreation, extraction and acquisition.” The Problem of Backdrop I think a lot about something I call “the problem of backdrop”. Living in a tourist destination makes it really clear how many people do not think of the world as fundamentally real. As real as they are. They think of the world as the backdrop to their human concerns, as backdrop to their wants and desires and projections. You can see it in the photo at the top of this newsletter. A flotilla of rafts (I couldn’t get them all into this one photo) all bedecked in giant American flags, to go on the river. To go out into nature. To go have an experience in the natural world. What is the flag to an eagle? to a trout? to even one of the steers grazing along the banks? They were not out there to have an experience in nature, they were there to go for a ride. When I guided rafts way back in the day in North Carolina, we’d regularly have guests ask us “do you have a bear? They’ve got one at Dollywood, and it jumps out at you.” No, we’d explain, we don’t have a mechanical bear. Our rafts weren’t on tracks. It was a real river and we really do need you to pay attention to the safety talk. We’d get to the take out, and at least once a week someone would ask “is this where we started?” The problem of backdrop is a problem of human supremacy. It’s hardly news that we live in a society structured on human supremacy — which expresses itself as white supremacy, male supremacy, the supremacy of rich over poor, and the supremacy of humans over nature. It’s the essential structure of capitalism. It’s what we celebrate every year on the 4th of July. We are capable of more. Of better. The mountains in the background of the picture at the top of this post, that is the western edge of the Absaroka-Beartooth wilderness area, a vast tract of land that is currently protected by law from incursions by motorized vehicles (and bicycles). We are capable of putting aside land, of protecting ecosystems and migration paths. We are capable of protecting species like grizzlies and wolves, but as we all know, those protections are brittle. They’re under attack. By our current Governor in fact. One of the projects of this newsletter is to keep exploring how our attitudes toward the material world express themselves in our art. For me, a big part of this is trying to parse how art and nature, art and wilderness, art and mountains and rivers endlessly walking are connected. What does it mean to make art in a time of political and climate catastrophe? How do we find the courage to keep doing it in the face of economic hardship and political opposition? The Backdrop Series These are complicated questions, and ones I’ve been thinking about for a long time. There’s a constellation of recent novels I’d like to take a look at in light of these issues. So, over the next few weeks, I’ll take a look at how these kinds of dualisms play out in a few novels. Not only are these novels that have been feeding my soul, but since novels tell us not just stories, but stories about how we perceive the world, stories about what we think is important, and what we do not, I’m hoping this can be a way for us to explore this issue more deeply. As always, I thank you for coming along with me in this project, and for your patience as I use this space to explore how and what I feel about these complicated issues. For me, it’s all connected — making art and making gardens and making clothes and watching animals and living on the side of a mountain. All of these things are connected to my lifelong desire to live lower on the ladder of consumption, to try to live in a way that doesn’t contribute to the degradation of the natural world in which we are so firmly embedded. The origin of the word essay is in the French verb essayer “to try”, which is what we’re doing here. Trying. Trying to figure out how to connect these things that are important to me. Trying to figure out how they will appear in my work. Trying to give us all a space to sit, if even for a few minutes, with these ideas.
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