Roosevelt and the Rough Riders

The seat of Yavapai County, Arizona is nothing short of iconic America.

This is the West. Capital W.

In Downtown Prescott, the western iconography is unblemished. Like a bomb blast of unabashed historic splendor, the town of 42,000 radiates outwards from its epicenter at the Courthouse Plaza toward the proscenium arch of Granite Mountain and the Prescott National Forest beyond.

A rugged collection of well-stocked antique stores, flourishing family restaurants and a row of historic saloons known as “Whiskey Row” enchants the lines of bikers, tourists and snowbirds who stream in to town.

The piece de resistance is an imposing equestrian statue forged by sculptor Solon Borglum, a latter-day Remington, in the dog days of 1907.

Known alternately as the Buckey O’Neill Monument or the Rough Rider Monument, the statue harkens back to the heroism of the Spanish-American War when brave westerners like Prescott’s own O’Neill relished the opportunity to fight for liberty.

The Buckey O’Neill Monument in Prescott, AZ

In an auspicious moment on July 1, 1898, Buckey merged with the infinite in quintessential western fashion. Despite coming under heavy Spanish fire, O’Neill refused to take cover. Instead, he kept smoking and even bragged that the “Spanish bullet isn’t made that will kill me.”

Unfortunately, Buckey miscalculated. He dropped dead before his commander, Teddy Roosevelt, could charge up San Juan Hill towards infamy.

Standing before the monument on a warm Saturday night, I’m struck with a sense of dissonance.

There’s a school-age girl behind me, fiddling out a version of “Ashoken Farewell” from Ken Burns’ Civil War while her parents look on. A few dozen yards away, the din of drunken grandstanding emanates from the Palace Saloon where a gaggle of disinterested bartenders dressed in faux-historic corsets pose for photos with inebriated customers who are actively pretending they’re Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday.

Down Cortez Street, I can buy my body weight in turquoise. Elsewhere in town, there’s a Ruger production facility making guns, two of which I happen to own. Here I am, at the central altar where the symbolism of Western certainty carves away all ambiguities in an attempt to hone down the visitor’s perceptions into a finely sharpened blade.

If I didn’t know any better, I might think Prescott is the very center of the West. Less a place and more an omnipresent condition of thought available where-so-ever the hand-picked myths of American Exceptionalism are cobbled together into a full-blown condition at the cost of objective reality.

In this sense, the West as embodied by Prescott, Arizona is the apparent culmination of manifest destiny. The westward march of civilization. The “taming of the continent” as Donald Trump might call it. The grand spectacle of American apotheosis.

For a country raised on John Wayne and Gary Cooper, the idealized West looms large. It permeates our culture. We elect cowboy presidents in the hopes they’ll shoot from the hip. We imagine the world in simplistic narrative binaries between good and evil. We like the idea of a steely-eyed showdown.

Despite the many cinematic qualities of life in America, this country is not a film. It lacks the real-time clarity and cohesive story-telling that makes a silver-screen epic so palatable. Instead, it is a muddy, confused, noisy, unwieldy thing that we are forced to come to grips with after the fact and often erroneously.

This too is the West, a region defined less by courageous shootouts, brilliant snap judgements and the ultimate triumph of justice over oppression and more by a matrix of exploitation historian Patricia Nelson Limerick most eloquently reduced to urbanization and extraction.

Perhaps a greater primer on the truth of the West is available on the streets of South Los Angeles rather than six and a half hours away in bucolic Arizona. In Los Angeles, where I make my home, there is a palpable sense of the catastrophic failures that undergird the boom/bust cycles of the West.

Here in LA, the highest hopes of the West shattered against the Pacific Ocean in the midst of the 20th century. There is myth here also — one staked on fame, fortune and unfettered material freedom that feels as natural to the privileged Angeleno as the clutch of a pistol grip feels to a rural Arizonan.

For many of the hundreds of thousands who made the trip west of the West to participate in booming industry and live out the American Dream rendered in suburban form, the promise of the premise paid out dividends in disappointment.

It is a story familiar to inner city African-Americans with Texas roots as much as it is an enduring sore spot for disenfranchised Dust Bowl refugees caught in a tumultuous city emptying of opportunity for its least likely constituents.

Poverty, drug addiction, violence, intergenerational trauma, ecological tumult, mass incarceration — these are important facets of the West that are just as essential in Yavapai County, Arizona as they are in Los Angeles.

The myth of the West holds the two as separate. Wander the streets of Prescott and you will inevitably find those who have escaped far-off dystopic Southern California for good.

One woman touted family values and cleaner air. Another man recited a yarn about the ’92 riots and the coming interracial bloodshed that would soon redefine his once and former city, and me with it.

Like the statue in the Courtyard Plaza, it is easy to be seduced by a supposed heritage of a West that stands apart from the woes of the world. It is incredibly convenient to see the crises of our times as distant abstractions, things that belong to an untouchable outside.

The fact remains that the rampant dystopia of the modern metropolis is a response to the failures of the rural West and its ironclad myths that perpetually buckle beneath pressure.

I know this process intuitively. It is in my blood. My people were sodbusters, ranchers, miners, outlaws, preachers, law men, fiddlers, country barbers, trackers and all the other action-figure archetypes of the American West.

Our trip westward began in the Appalachian backwoods in the late 1600s and proceeded mostly on foot or horseback with nary two dimes to rub together over two and a half centuries of boom and bust.

When the Colorado mineral boom petered out, my grandmother’s brothers turned to drink. When the Depression turned Big Country, Texas from a hard-scrabble haunt to a full-on catastrophe, my great grandmother succumbed to scurvy.

Like so many other refugees from the inhospitable reality of western life, my grandparents lived out their lives in California with lucid memories of a pilgrimage toward a better life that yielded mixed results.

In his Wisconsin Death Trip, historian Michael Lesy describes the psychology of this impulse toward urbanism in the years before the 1920 census proclaimed more Americans were city-dwellers than proud rurals.

“The country people knew that the cities were theirs and would receive them. They believed them to be places of refuge. They felt them to be filled not so much with jobs and running water as with magical devices that could overcome and perhaps even eliminate fate.”

As the housing crisis in Los Angeles will attest, the sense of refuge has largely disappeared. Instead, places like Prescott, Arizona have cast themselves as a safe harbor for those fleeing the malaise of urban life.

Herein lies the rub of appeals to western identity. While we deal with dystopic futurism in LA, the entire frontier West shtick in Yavapai County is staked on notions of nostalgic utopianism.

“There once was a place called the West where men were free,” the fairy tale begins.

And fairy tale it is. Because the dominant motifs of western idealism disavow any sense that whole generations have been exploited and discarded here. The critical eye shineth not on the statuary symbols of Prescott, Arizona because the great image of the West is more than a tourist racket — it is a philosophy of restricted thinking that exists to facilitate yet another dubious boom.

House in Prescott, Arizona

In Prescott, no one howls louder about what the West means than Congressman Paul Gosar, D.D.S.

The dentist turned four term representative is deeply enamored with the rhetoric of Western Exceptionalism. Or so he pontificates in his ever-growing collection of broadside invectives delivered in partisan op-ed after partisan op-ed.

The West, he contends, is a place for freedom. Freedom to use the land however one sees fit. Freedom to practice religion. Freedom to own a gun. Freedom to not be crushed by the wicked Federal Government.

There is no more potent word in Arizona’s 4th district than “freedom.” It is shorthand for every value cherished in a plot of geography so traditionally conservative and anti-federal that Timothy McVeigh called it home for a time.

In a world where the best intentions of government have wrought urban blight, it stands to reason that most Arizonans would relish the opportunity to determine their own fate and preserve their immediate world.

By way of recognition for their support, Congressman Paul Gosar, D.D.S. provides his loyal constituents with a typical western sideshow.

Like a new era Buffalo Bill, Gosar creates a powerful fiction that his followers so desperately want to see enacted in real life. He sets up clear cut distinctions that pit good vs. evil, right vs. wrong, us vs. them.

In Gosar’s version of Arizona politics, it’s about good Americans vs. illegal immigrants. Gosar went so far as to call up the Capitol Police before the 2018 State of the Union to encourage the arrest and deportation of all DREAMers who attended the speech as guests.

Forget that DREAMers came here not of their volition and are actively pursuing productive means to stay in this country, Gosar himself is not two generations departed from the Old World. His grandparents were born in Stara Loka, Slovenia, Skofja Loka, Slovenia, Banca, France and St. Etienne de Baigory, France, respectively.

It goes on.

Like a self-styled Marshall Will Kane, devoutly Catholic Congressman Paul Gosar, D.D.S. stood up against his own pontiff in 2015, electing to boycott the Pope’s speech to congress over perceived liberal activism in the Holy Father’s global warming rhetoric.

In an op-ed published on Town Hall, Gosar mused, “More troubling is the fact that this climate change talk has adopted all of the socialist talking points, wrapped false science and ideology into ‘climate justice’ and is being presented to guilt people into leftist policies.”

Here comes the grand finale to the Gosar Wild West Revue, by which he wrangles the hostile war party into a reservation and makes America safe again:

In late 2017, Prescott’s own Paul Gosar did an interview with Vice News that was ostensibly about his penchant for blocking contrarian Facebook users. Gosar redirected the conversation into a perplexing non-sequitur, claiming that the Neo-Nazi demonstration at Charlottesville was actually a false-flag operation promoted and financed by liberal mega-donor George Soros who Gosar contends “turned in his own people to the Nazis” during the Holocaust.

That last sound bite earned Congressman Paul Gosar, D.D.S. a public rebuke in the form of a letter signed by seven of his siblings and printed in the Kingman Daily Miner.

“Those aren’t our family values or the values of the small Wyoming town we grew up in. Character assassination wasn’t revered,” they wrote. “Lies and distortions do reveal much about the character of the congressman of Arizona’s 4th Congressional District.”

Indeed. Beyond the six-shooter bluster that finds Congressman Paul Gosar, D.D.S. bellowing about freedom in the face of tyranny is a larger effort on behalf of a whole other set of western values.

Less Buckey O’Neill rushing off to save the country and more Hedley Lamar trying to run a railroad through an otherwise peaceful town, Congressman Paul Gosar, D.D.S. plays the role of extraction advocate while masquerading as a hero.

The most acute freedom Congressman Paul Gosar, D.D.S. advocates for is industrial freedom. He espouses the view that the woes of the West are solely the result of restrictive federal policy that strips land from local owners and saddles them with suffocating regulations.

This resonates in the West where there is a long-standing thought that the region is nothing more than a colony for eastern interests. So too does the prospect of increased local employment with mineral extraction jobs play positively in a region whose poorest perennially suffer from under employment.

Gosar’s words produce a similar narrowing effect as the statue in his home town. They induce the listener to ask the questions to which Gosar already has the answers. What’s so bad about job creation? Isn’t the West built on mining? Shouldn’t we be able to use our land for our own purposes?

We are made to believe that these are questions that can be answered by western heritage.

Unfortunately, there are some details Gosar neglects to mention.

Most importantly, his financial connection to companies that stand to benefit from the broad deregulation for which Gosar advocates in the House. He has received substantial campaign donations from the Pinnacle West Capital Corporation. As owners of the Arizona Public Service utility, Pinnacle West has benefited greatly from Gosar’s unending assaults on the legitimacy of the Environmental Protection Agency.

In April of 2018, Congressman Paul Gosar, D.D.S. called in to Breitbart to give kudos to Scott Pruitt, the chief vandal who has overseen the complete regulatory capture of the governmental body tasked with monitoring industrial impact.

“Scott Pruitt has been probably the best — if not one of the best — people within the cabinet. His jurisdiction and the way that he’s taken on the job has been incredible,” gushed Gosar.

Coincidentally perhaps, the “EPA Environmental Regulations” section (beginning at pg. 43) in Pinnacle West’s 2017 Stockholder’s Report plays like a wish list on which Scott Pruitt largely delivered.

Regional Haze Rules? The EPA has danced around the issue by setting a precedent of walking back Regional Haze regulations in states like Texas and Arkansas. Coal Combustion Waste? On March 1, 2018, Pruitt amended standards for coal ash disposal. Ozone National Ambient Air Quality Standards? Don’t worry, Pinnacle West — Pruitt was walking those standards back when he resigned in July.

This is a treacherous form of freedom. One the founding fathers never had to grapple with. Environmental catastrophe was unthinkable in their time as it is in ours. Jefferson himself staked the prospects of an enduring American republic on an inexhaustible supply of land that would sustain us.

The earth gave out far earlier than expected. Between Jefferson’s death in 1826 and Frederick Jackson Turner’s declaration of a closed frontier in 1894, the land of the West gave up more than Jefferson could have ever anticipated.

The creation of regulatory apparatuses to preserve that wealth for future generations first emerged then and has endured subsequently due in no small part to a crystalline concept that individual freedoms are still tied to the health of the land. In the West, those freedoms are mutually exclusive from the freedom of a corporation to make a profit at whatever cost.

Buckey O’Neill’s former commanding officer, Teddy Roosevelt, made this battle one of the most important of his life.

In his “New Nationalism” speech, Roosevelt opined as much.

“The absence of effective state, and, especially, national restraint upon unfair money getting has tended to create a small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men, whose chief objective is to hold and increase their power. The prime need is to change the conditions which enable these men to accumulate power which it is not for the general welfare that they should hold or exercise. We grudge no man a fortune which represents his own power and sagacity, when exercised with entire regard to the welfare of his fellows.”

This powerful vision of western values has been steadily corrupted and usurped by the very same culture that gave it rise.

In today’s West, there are many noble things on display: a connection with nature, an impulse for self-sufficiency, a code of honor and commitment to family.

These same ideas face the worst bust in human history. Despite all industry-financed denials of global warming and the general pernicious effect mankind has had on its eco-system, the finger prints left on the land have grown deeper and more destructive over the centuries.

When that bubble busts, there will be little in the way of symbolic heritage to save the West from a gruesome fate. No amount of wishful nostalgia can salve the wounds that we self-inflict.

Prescient placard from the Sharlot Hall Museum in Prescott, Arizona

Forty miles west of Prescott as the crow flies is Bagdad, Arizona. This too is the West. It is a mine town where an open-pit copper mine builds off of one hundred and thirty-six years of operation to provide $206.9 dollars in yearly direct and indirect economic impact on Arizona.

Freeport-McMoRan, the mine’s operators, run a tight operation that has been carefully regulated by the federal government. They, along with their legal counsel at Snell & Wilmer and an associated PR firm called Integrated Web Strategy, donate heavily to Congressman Paul Gosar, D.D.S.

Elsewhere, Freeport-McMoRan have grown accustomed to the sort of grandiose profits that come with near complete deregulation.

They also operate the famous Grasberg gold mine in Papua, Indonesia. The site is such an imposing swath of scorched earth amidst the otherwise lush Lorentz National Park that it can be seen from space.

The New York Times reported that Freeport-McMoRan facilitated $20 million dollars in bribes to the Indonesian military between 1998 and 2005. In exchange, they were allowed to operate with near carte blanche.

For some, this is the ultimate fantasy of an invisible hand freed from unnecessary government. For those who live downstream from the mine on the Ajkwa River, the introduction of over 80 million tons of waste debris to their water supply has been an unqualified tragedy.

More than boasts and tall tales, the history of the American West is a story of softly spoken laments sung out in the aftermath of yet another boom turned bust. I have heard these same songs in my own household. The sorrow of broken hopes and loss oozes down the family tree in whispers that sound remarkably like the words spoken by those who live in the Ajkwa watershed.

In Prescott, Arizona where the local water table has shrunk twenty-seven feet in the last twenty years, the time for lament is fast approaching.

Until then, a statuary West built from wishful legend, hollow appeals to freedom and the presumption of unending bounty endures.

It’s bigger than mines and politicians and cities and small towns. It is culture — a set of assumptions and ideas that convincingly present themselves as natural so that few question their fundamental validity.

In the West, the time has come to knock on the old faded statue and see if it rings true.