Ryan (The Gulfstream Cowboy) Zinke, who presides over the Department of the Interior with all the devotion that a scythe has for wheat, has managed in less than a year to do something that I didn’t think was politically possible. He’s screwed up the national parks. Nine of the 12 members of the National Parks Service advisory board quit this week because Zinke who, I remind you, is the Secretary of the freaking Interior, refused to meet with them, At all. From The Washington Post:

"For the last year we have stood by waiting for the chance to meet and continue the partnership between the NPSAB and the DOI and prescribed by law."

Even by the standards of this administration*, screwing up the national parks is malfeasance of a spectacular kind. People love the national parks. Ken Burns’s PBS series on them was subtitled, “America’s Best Idea,” and he wasn’t far wrong on that. They represent a commitment by the country to the value of the wilderness and they are the most conspicuous demonstration of the idea of a political commonwealth.

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“The land, the earth God gave to man for his home … should never be the possession of any man, corporation, (or) society … any more than the air or water,” said Abraham Lincoln. “Laws change; people die; the land remains.” And Theodore Roosevelt, the Republican president who put the power of the national government behind the idea, went into quasi-religious ecstasy at the prospect of camping in Yosemite.

“It was like lying in a great solemn cathedral, far vaster and more beautiful than any built by the hand of man. A grove of giant redwood or sequoias should be kept just as we keep a great and beautiful cathedral."

Of course, Zinke’s brief is different from that of other people who have held his job, with the possible exception of the legendary James Watt. It is his job to be the moneychanger in the temple. It is his responsibility to make Lincoln a liar. These really are the fcking mole people.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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