20 February 2016
Malheur at night, and Flathead Memo maintenance day
We’re mostly working under the hood at Flathead Memo today, tuning-up the HTML code and working on new features that will appear soon — if we spend some time under the hood instead of at the keyboard.
Meanwhile, here’s an image that may help my friends and family in the nation’s more densely populated areas understand how isolated the Great Basin’s high deserts are. Below, I’ve identified urban clusters west of the 111th meridian on NASA’s Earth at Night image.
Cliven Bundy and his sons live in one of the most sparsely populated areas in the Lower 48 States, the high and dry basin and range country that runs from southeastern Oregon to just over the California border. Making a living here produces hard men and women — some so hard-headed and independent that they live in a separate reality. It’s not that they’re Mormon, although some are, nor that they live within the proposed State of Deseret, although they do, it’s that socially and politically isolated in their little kingdoms, seldom challenged, unwavering in their idiosyncratic beliefs, they’ve become cult-like to their own detriment.
They’re not terrorists, but some are thugs — and all are clueless about American history and government. They occupied the Malheur Wildlife Refuge to mount a soapbox and amplify their grievances, imagined and real, against the government. They sought to be heard, and were. Were they seditionists who sought to declare the Malheur Free State and start a civil war? Some preened and strutted as though they were, but in my view they were merely simpletons conducting lowbrow street theatre in just about the most stupid way possible. Now, removed from their soapbox, but probably still not grounded in reality, having earned their fate, but perhaps not having learned their lesson, many are destined to spend years in a federal lockbox.
