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NY Review of Books, DECEMBER 19, 2019 ISSUE
Another Great Yesterday
Adam Hochschild
Shadowlands: Fear and Freedom at the Oregon Standoff—A Western Tale of
America in Crisis
by Anthony McCann
Bloomsbury, 423 pp., $30.00
No Man’s Land
a PBS Independent Lens documentary film directed by David Byars
The late Ryszard Kapuściński coined a striking term to describe those
susceptible to demagoguery. They were believers, he said, in the Great
Yesterday. In the last few years we’ve seen inflammatory strongmen, from
Viktor Orbán to Narendra Modi to Donald Trump, evoking visions of Great
Yesterdays, from a Greater Hungary to an India without Muslims to an
America without immigrants of color. Besides their shaky connection with
actual history, such Great Yesterdays have several features in common.
One, hinted if not spelled out, is that everyone who enjoyed that golden
era in the past was of the same ethnicity or religion. Another is that
the Great Yesterday was destroyed by malevolent outsiders. And finally,
in traversing the arduous path toward its restoration, the faithful are
enduring a martyrdom that will be rewarded.
All these elements were part of the Oregon standoff in early 2016, when
a small group of militants bristling with semi-automatic rifles occupied
the headquarters of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Harney
County, Oregon, and for forty days defied the federal government to
evict them. The leaders included the brothers Ammon and Ryan Bundy, two
sons of a Nevada ranching family that two years earlier had staged an
armed confrontation with the authorities over their father Cliven’s
refusal to pay fees for grazing his cattle on federal land. They had
other grievances as well, but the most fervent belief of the Bundys and
their followers was that the federal government has no constitutional
right to own vast tracts of land, as it does throughout the Far West.
Instead, the land should be given to the states, which would surely turn
it over to deserving, cowboy-booted folk like themselves. The Great
Yesterday thus restored would be the homestead era, when hardy pioneers
tamed the arid countryside and hardy prospectors staked claims, all
without interference from far-off Washington, D.C.
Anthony McCann is a poet, and Shadowlands, his first nonfiction book, is
the most substantial account to date of the Oregon standoff. It’s a
curious mix of lyricism and trenchant portrayals of the occupation and
the trials that followed, along with abundant meditation—sometimes
intriguing, sometimes overly convoluted—on what it all means. He
assumes, though, that readers already know the basic story. After
gradually introducing a huge array of participants and observers, he
gives no reminders of who they are when we meet them later, and provides
no index, timeline, or cast-of-characters list to help us keep track of
them. Near the end of the book, for instance, the patriarch Cliven
Bundy, who did not take part in the standoff, is with much ado released
from jail, but you have to go riffling back nearly two hundred pages to
be reminded why he was there in the first place.
David Byars’s PBS film, No Man’s Land, also covers the standoff, but in
a bare-bones style that is the opposite of McCann’s quirky commentary.
Nonetheless, it’s an interesting visual counterpart to the book, for it
includes a number of the scenes McCann writes about. Byars’s camera work
gives you a sense of these determined true believers stalking about in
pistol belts and leather vests in their snowbound citadel.
The Oregon standoff caught the public imagination because, in a country
where tens of millions of people blame sinister bureaucrats in
Washington for all their problems, here were bold rebels who seized an
actual piece of federal property. No matter that it was a few low
buildings in a place hardly anyone had heard of, whose name might be
translated as the Bad Luck Refuge. And no matter that the Bundy brothers
had no long-range plan, no specific demands. They were not political
organizers but producers of political theater.
The theater was effective because it evoked other occupations, from the
Native American takeover of the Wounded Knee battle site in 1973 to the
seizure of Massachusetts courthouses by disgruntled Revolutionary War
veterans in Shays’ Rebellion of 1786–1787. The Malheur occupiers
frequently flew the rattlesnake “Don’t Tread on Me” flag of that earlier
era. The film shows one supporter in a pickup truck flying the
Confederate flag, and one of the occupiers told McCann he felt akin to
the Bonus Marchers, World War I veterans who converged on Washington in
1932 during the Depression to demand early payment of their wartime bonuses.
The Bundys and their allies were masters of media, staging daily 11 AM
press conferences and knowing the value of doing so in cowboy hats.
There was a high ratio of journalists to occupiers, and Byars often
trains his eye on the over-the-shoulder TV cameras, boom microphones,
and floodlights on hand. Whenever Ammon Bundy speaks—whether at a press
conference or elsewhere—dozens of reporters and fellow occupiers
brandish notebooks, cell phones, tablets, and other devices to record
every word. You can hear spasms of shutters clicking. For the media, the
standoff was catnip: covering such a spectacle was vastly easier than
covering the complex social tensions behind it. “His head is held at a
slight, sad puppy-dog tilt,” McCann writes of Ammon.
There is no Limbaugh-like apoplexy, no snide Breitbart affect here.
Ammon is a different figure of masculinity—a right-wing version of the
sensitive man. His public face is a pure stream of real-time
concern…delivering his payload of sincerity each and every time. Few,
even among his worst enemies, have ever doubted that Ammon Bundy mostly
means what he says, but the full power of Ammon’s direct address comes
from his ability to make it clear, again and again, just how much he
really means it.
Bundy was also skilled at reaching across the political spectrum by
quoting Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks about the duty to defy
governmental power.
Among the growing number of occupiers, incidentally, were at least nine
FBI informants, one of whom gave the Bundyites rifle training.
Unfortunately, Byars’s film, with its cinema verité style, doesn’t tell
us if the man we see giving live-fire instruction is that agent. Other
characters also showed up at Malheur and appear in the book or film or
both: a heavily bearded supporter who had grown up Amish and delivered
most of his eleven children; a man dressed as George Washington, in full
blue and gold with brass buttons and lace cuffs, who stayed in
character; a pipefitter who rode up one day carrying an American flag,
described by McCann as “a one-man float in the daily parade of the Bundy
Revolution…a kind of color guard for the leaders, accompanying them on
horseback”; a mother-and-kids group of gospel singers, perhaps evoking a
Great Yesterday when women and children knew their place; and an
ex-Mormon turned messianic mystic, blowing a long, curling shofar
“direct from Israel—blessed by a rabbi.”
There were several ironies in the Oregon standoff. The first was that if
anyone had a claim against the federal government’s possession of land,
it was not the ranchers with their pickups and string ties but Native
Americans whose ancestors lived in this region for thousands of years.
Understandably, they had no sympathy for the occupiers, despite hazy
appeals from the Bundyites that the federal government was their common
enemy. The Native Americans McCann talked to saw the occupation as “a
kind of ceremonial land grab, a historical reenactment of white settlement.”
Most other people in Harney County were also unenthusiastic. Years-long
negotiations had led to an unusual degree of consensus among the groups
often at loggerheads elsewhere in the West: Native Americans on a nearby
reservation, residents of the county’s small towns, cattle ranchers, and
the officials running the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. Byars’s film
shows locals angrily speaking out against the armed occupation at a
community meeting. “I should not have to be scared in my own hometown,”
says a fifteen-year-old girl in tears. On the highway leading to the
refuge, townspeople hold up signs saying “Militia Go Home.” This was
surely not the response the Bundys expected.
Although the occupiers displayed many “Ranchers’ Lives Matter” signs,
few actually were ranchers. Clearly none of the dozens of militia
members with bullet-proof vests, walkie-talkies, camouflage pants, and
what McCann calls the “Blackwater strut” who flocked to Malheur to join
the Bundys and live on the abundant food donated by their sympathizers
had any worries about cattle they were leaving back home for weeks. The
charismatic Ammon Bundy came from a ranching family, but for years had
run a truck-fleet maintenance company—with the help, incidentally, of a
$530,000 loan from the Small Business Administration of the federal
government he so despised.
According to McCann, the occupation leadership included only one bona
fide rancher, fifty-four-year-old LaVoy Finicum, who wore a revolver and
“fringed and silver-studded leather chaps.” His face was “polished by
wind and sun, its skin always seemed pulled a little extra taut around
the hard insistence of his skull, as if expressive of the ideological
intensity of this otherwise genial and welcoming devout Mormon cowboy.”
An occupier at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, January 2016
Alex Milan Tracy/AP Images
An occupier at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, January 2016
Finicum would become the standoff’s one fatality. Some three weeks into
the occupation, needing something to revive fading media attention, he,
the Bundy brothers, and a number of others left the refuge for a meeting
in an adjacent county that had a sympathetic sheriff. With warrants out
for their arrest, this rash foray was clearly inviting a confrontation.
On a deserted stretch of highway, FBI agents and the Oregon State Police
stopped the convoy and made arrests, but Finicum yelled, “You want to
shoot me, you shoot me!” He then zoomed away, only to run into a
roadblock a mile later. After veering into a snowbank and getting out of
his pickup, he shouted again, “Go ahead and shoot me!” And that is what
they did—either as an act of trigger-happy madness, his allies and some
critics declare, or, as state police officers maintain, because he was
reaching for his own loaded pistol. As with everything about the
standoff, it’s all on video, which you can see in No Man’s Land, but the
footage can be interpreted either way. In any case, the Bundyites now
had the martyr that every crusade for a Great Yesterday needs, and the
site of Finicum’s death was marked with crosses and American flags.
Finally, the greatest irony is this: If the Bundys’ dream were
fulfilled, and the bulk of federal land were turned over to the states,
who would end up with it? The states would almost certainly sell it to
the highest bidders—and they would not be small ranchers and lone
miners. They would be large corporations. This is what happens when
western land is for sale. For example, Farris and Dan Wilks, brothers
who made a $3.5 billion fortune in the fracking and oil-field service
business, have bought more than 700,000 acres of land, mostly in Idaho
and Montana, for their Texas-based real estate company.1 The even richer
Koch family owns some 460,000 acres of western ranchland. Not
surprisingly, the Kochs’ powerful lobbying network has long supported
the push for western land privatization; for them, a movement whose face
is rugged-looking small ranchers provides useful cover. The Wilks family
donated $15 million to the PAC of Texas senator Ted Cruz, an evangelist
for the same cause.
“In all the hours I have spent listening to Ammon Bundy,” writes McCann,
I have personally never once heard him utter the word corporation. His
Reaganesque worldview seemed only to accommodate the existence of the
People…on one side, and the bureaucrats of the wicked, overreaching
federal government on the other.
There are no huge corporate ranches or mining conglomerates in the
Bundys’ imagined Great Yesterday. “The militants,” says the journalist
Hal Herring2 of High Country News, whose thoughtful comments thread
through No Man’s Land, “saw a fantastical golden age of the cowboy, when
men were men and justice was served and cows went to Abilene and were
paid off in gold.”
McCann is an eccentric guide to the Malheur saga. A passionate lover of
the far western landscape, he never misses a chance to describe it,
sometimes for a page or more at a time, even if it’s the Mojave Desert
in Southern California, which he drives through on one of his many trips
to Oregon. He wanders to yet another state to evoke the part of Nevada
where the Bundy ranch is, with
its roaring wind and silence, its gas-flame blue sky, and its
otherworldly landscape of jagged, alien-looking plant life and brooding
stone. These are…natural homelands of revelation, ready-made for the
slow cooking of heretical doctrine.
Another detour begins, “How have I written most of an entire book about
people taking over a bird refuge and forgotten to talk about birds?”
There is something both distracting and endearing about such
descriptions. He also makes long, rambling digressions about the
Constitution, John Marshall, Thomas Jefferson, Bill Clinton’s best
speeches, watching a solar eclipse, a conversation with a motorcyclist
in Joshua Tree National Park, and much more, including Donald Trump (but
we all digress about him).
If anything, McCann portrays the men and women with whom he spent so
many hours a bit too generously, at times falling under their expertly
stage-managed spell. “Even for someone like myself, who disagreed
strongly with most of the ideology,” he confesses at one point, “it felt
strangely thrilling to be around them.” Honest though he is in
acknowledging it, this feeling leads him astray. He spends far too many
pages elaborating the occupiers’ woolly “cowboy Ayn Randianism,” with
its virtuous People and evil feds, its theological underpinnings (the
Bundys are Mormons and in the film we often see the occupiers bowed in
prayer), and its ardently trumpeted connection to the Constitution,
which all the believers carry around in a pocket-sized edition with
George Washington on the cover.
By contrast, McCann spends too little time exploring exactly what drew
the Bundys and their many supporters, on the scene of the standoff and
elsewhere, to this ideology. After all, people only become enchanted by
a Great Yesterday when their today is not so great. One reason, surely,
is that after a peak in 2014, cattle prices plunged over the next four
years. Obviously that made small ranchers or would-be ranchers feel
menaced by forces beyond their control.
In many other ways as well, tens of millions of people in rural America
have lost ground economically. Jobs on farms, as elsewhere, are being
lost to automation. Young people often leave for better prospects on the
country’s coasts or in its cities: in the film, we see notably few men
and women in their twenties or thirties either among the occupiers or
the townspeople who oppose them. One symptom of the crisis in rural
areas is the opioid epidemic. Another is that the mountain states of the
Far West are the center of what public health officials call America’s
Suicide Belt—and there is something distinctly suicidal about LaVoy
Finicum’s cry of “Shoot me!”
In the face of all this despair, the standoff offered these middle-aged,
often paunchy men a chance to flaunt the symbols of their
masculinity—their AR-15 rifles, cowboy hats, and pistol belts—and the
chance to hitch themselves to a glorious Great Yesterday. The federal
government provides a convenient scapegoat for all ills, a point of view
relentlessly promoted by the far right, with stunning success, ever
since Ronald Reagan began giving speeches for General Electric in the
1950s. The huge acreage evil Washington owns in the Far West further
incites its opponents to portray it as pandering to migrating birds,
tree huggers, city-slicker tourists in national parks, and endangered
species—everybody except the hardworking farmer-rancher-logger
descendants of pioneers that the Malheur occupiers imagined themselves
to be.
Lost in the mythologizing is that corporate ranchers, oil drillers, and
giant lumber and mining companies already exploit much of that federal
land on very generous terms. And this will only increase as Trump puts
wolves in charge of every sheep pen in sight. Of the newly appointed
acting director of the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management,
Koch-funded lawyer-activist William Perry Pendley, a Washington Post
headline says it all: “Trump’s Pick for Managing Federal Lands Doesn’t
Believe the Government Should Have Any.”
Even if someday there are no more federal lands to complain about, the
powerful current of feeling that led to the Oregon standoff will be with
us for decades to come. Nothing is going to easily eradicate the
economic and social malaise that leads so many people in rural America
to yearn for an imagined Great Yesterday.
The legal aftermath of the Oregon standoff was mixed. After the last
occupiers surrendered to the FBI, twenty-six of them were indicted on a
variety of charges. The charges against one were dismissed. Fourteen
people took plea deals, and four were tried and convicted. They received
sentences ranging from probation and a fine to thirty-seven months in
prison. To the great rejoicing of their followers, however, the Bundy
brothers and five others were found not guilty.
One of the last events described in Shadowlands took place when, after
the Malheur occupation was over, Ammon Bundy was in prison, having been
convicted on charges relating to the earlier standoff at his family’s
Nevada ranch. He proved himself just as stubbornly defiant of federal
authority as he had been when free. At one point, he was cruelly
punished by being dragged into a shower stall and left there for
thirteen hours with his hands tightly cuffed behind his back. With flags
flying and the shofar still blowing, Bundy’s supporters carried on a
protest at a roadside “Camp Liberty” they had set up outside the
prison’s walls. To raise funds, and to underscore their hero’s
martyrdom, two of them reenacted his Calvary in plywood reconstructions
of the shower stall, painted prison gray, livestreaming to the world
while attempting to last the thirteen hours in handcuffs that Bundy had
suffered. It reminds you of reenactments of religious martyrdom around
the world, whether Shia Muslims flailing themselves with chains or
Catholic pageants about the crucifixion.
It’s possible that this same harsh punishment might have been meted out
to Bundy in a federal prison—but this was not a federal prison. It was a
profit-making one run by the notorious CoreCivic, which changed its name
from the Corrections Corporation of America after its abusive prisons
were the subject of a prize-winning 2016 exposé by Mother Jones reporter
Shane Bauer, who worked undercover for several months in one of them as
a guard. During the first few months of the Trump administration, the
company’s stock price soared. Despite his many digressions, Anthony
McCann fully recognizes the irony with which his story ends: the great
prophet of privatization jailed in a private prison.
1
For this and much more such data, see Andy Kiersz, “The 20 Biggest
Landowners in America,” Business Insider, April 16, 2019. ↩
2
His “The Darkness at the Heart of Malheur,” High Country News, March 21,
2016, is a fine overview of the occupation. ↩
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