As the two of them went on together, Isaac spoke up and said to his father Abraham, "Father?"
"Yes, my son?" Abraham replied.
"The fire and wood are here," Isaac said, "but where is the lamb for the burnt offering?"
Abraham answered, "God himself will provide the lamb for the burnt offering, my son." And the two of them went on together.
When they reached the place God had told him about, Abraham built an altar there and
arranged the wood on it. He bound his son Isaac and laid him on the altar, on top of the wood.
Then he reached out his hand and took the knife to slay his son.
Genesis 22:7
Where to start is the problem, because nothing begins when it begins and nothing's over when
it's over, and everything needs a preface: a preface, a postscript, a chart of simultaneous events.
History is a construct . . . Any point of entry is possible and all choices are arbitrary. Still,
there are definitive moments, moments we use as references, because they break our sense of
continuity, they change the direction of time. We can look at these events and we can say that
after them things were never the same again. They provide beginnings for us, and endings too.
Margaret Atwood
The Robber Bride
Years later I remember both days. Though separated by more than a year, in my mind they seem tied together, as if the meaning of one required an understanding the other. Of the first, I have a picture pinned to bulletin board in my bedroom. I see it every morning when I wake. It is of Gene feeding his horses. He is dressed in white, tall and dignified. I keep it because the next day he would be dead, his body mangled almost beyond recognition in a plane wreck.
Of the second, I have no picture, and have no need for one. It was the day my mother died. Her suffering had been long and cruel. Breast cancer. The cancer went to her liver and it started releasing chemicals that confused her mind. Still, when she died, she died peacefully, her breath a bare whisper that tapered off so gently that only an angel could have heard the last.
Two more different people never walked the earth. Gene Huntley had been a prominent attorney, loved by his clients, feared by his opponents. My mother had been my mother, loved by everyone, feared by no one. They each died entirely different deaths--Gene instantly, in a way that he could not have foreseen; my mother slowly, anticipating the end years in advance.
Nothing about their lives was the same, except they both knew and liked each other. Nothing
about their deaths was the same, except both have haunted me every day since. Without fail, my
thoughts daily return to them, and again I try to make sense of their deaths. This book is my
attempt to understand.
Superior, Montana--With a show hands, Superior residents politely--but firmly--told Ross Electric Co. Thursday that they don't want a PCB incinerator in their town.
More than 350 people raised their hands at a town meeting in the Superior High School Gym when County Attorney Shaun Donovan asked how many wanted Ross to take its controversial furnace elsewhere.
Eight people raised their hands in support of Ross
Replied Gerald Ross, president of the company and the Ross family patriarch, "We will just drop the whole thing right here, then. I don't see any sense in continuing if we are not welcome."
"You look like honest working people," Ross said. "There's no hard feelings on my part. We'll still stop and gas up our trucks here and eat our lunch. But if you don't want us, we won't be here."
The crowd applauded. Donovan asked Ross if he was serious. "Are you saying that Ross Electric is not coming to Superior?" he asked.
"That's right," said Ross. "We are no longer interested. The people make the decision in any
community you go into."
"Ross Rejected Again"
Sherry Devlin of the Missoulian, March 21, 1992
Baker, Montana--Ross Electric Company has decided to move to Baker.
Al Ross, a consultant for the family-held firm, said Wednesday afternoon in a telephone interview that the company has paid earnest money for a site just north of Baker on Highway 7.
"Yes, we're definitely going to come here," Ross said. "We found a piece of property we want.
We have an attorney in Helena working on permits, and we're working with Mr. (Richard) Menger (district sanitarian) on permits."
Ross said he is not sure what the construction schedule for the company's new plant will be.
"We're hoping to be here before the snowballs fly. I would hope it would be late summer. Mr. Menger said it takes 60 to 80 days to get a permit, and we have to get people to bid on building and things like that."
"We're glad to be here, I'll tell you."
"Ross Electric Picks Baker"
By John Halbert, Miles City Star, April 2, 1992
The earliest records we have from the State of Washington Ecology Department on Ross Electric start out ominously:
On the morning of January 8, 1980, Gerry Calkins and I inspected this company's (Ross Electric's) Coal Creek Road site. Our visit was prompted by an anonymous letter dated December 28, 1979, detailing concerns of improper handling of PCBs. This company scraps and rebuilds transformers from several states.
On the same page, the memo written by Jim Oberlander, the Washington Ecology inspector, goes on to describe the PCB screening system used by Ross then:
Ross Electric does not do any sampling for PCBs. They rely on transformer name plates and smell to alert them to PCBs. . . . Mr. Ross was not aware the PCB contamination of mineral oil transformers is common. No detailed records are kept on transformers they handle.
Even though it was winter and they had to deal with ten inches of snow, the two Ecology inspectors proceeded to inspect the grounds:
The first thing we discovered on the yard tour was a large tanker (approximately 7,000 gallons) receiving oil pumped from the underground storage tank was overflowing. We immediately alerted Ross's to this; stopped the filling and had them catch the spill. We sampled this spillage and took 35 mm photo's.
They also sampled a nearby stream bed, Coal Creek. Earlier, "Mr. Ross had told the Ecology
inspectors" that his company had sold some transformer oil to Pacific Sand and Gravel to fire the
boiler they use to heat asphalt. Concerned that Ross might be selling oil with illegal PCB
concentrations, the Ecology inspectors visited the manager of Pacific Sand and Gravel. The
manager told the Ecology inspectors that the boiler only reached a temperature of 325 degrees
Fahrenheit, a quite low temperature, unlikely to destroy PCBs effectively.
After the Ecology Department received an analysis of the samples the inspectors had taken at the Ross site, Jim Oberlander wrote a letter to Ross Electric:
We have received the analysis report on the samples we took at your Coal Creek site, January 8, 1980. The results on the levels of PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls) concern us greatly. As you may be aware, PCBs have been shown to cause toxic effects in many species, even when exposed in very low concentrations.
The samples were analyzed by the Environmental Protection Agency's Laboratory, Manchester, Washington. You will recall, our samples were taken from an overflowing tanker and from the area's drainage ditch bottom before it enters Coal Creek. Respectfully, the results were 54 ppm (tanker spillage) and 22 ppm. A testing accuracy of plus or minus ten percent is possibly reflected in this data. . . .
We must call to you attention that current industry data shows, 25 to 40 percent of the existing
mineral oil transformers are contaminated with 50 ppm or more of PCBs. Thus, your practice of
relying on name plates and smell to identify PCBs fluid transformers/capacitors is not sufficient.
It will be necessary to test incoming units and/or each batch of waste oil prior to sale or disposal
for PCB levels. Deliberate dilution to circumvent the law is prohibited. Records of origin,
testing, sale or disposal of your transformer oil is necessary. (Emphasis in original.)
Upon further testing, this site became a National Priority List Superfund Site. According to the
EPA's record of decision on the site, the area Ross operated was heavily contaminated with
PCBs:
On-fill soils have been sampled extensively to characterized PCB concentration. Based on soil sampling between 1982 and 1989 concentrations in surface soils range from 1 part per million (ppm) in the extreme northeast corner of the site to 1,000 ppm in the southwest corner of the mound. PCB concentrations are highest between depths of two and eight feet in the fill mound, reaching levels as high as 21,000 ppm.
Because of this, the site made the EPA's National Priorities List. According to the EPA, the concentrations of PCBs at the site had a "lifetime cancer risk of three in one thousand for long-term residential exposures."
Since 1983, the site has been known as the Ross Electric Superfund site, though the Ross family has protested that others were responsible for the high levels of contamination found there. The EPA finished the cleanup at the Coal Creek site in 1994. Total cost: $12 million.
No longer allowed to operate at Coal Creek, Ross Electric moved to another site just outside Chehalis, Washington. At their new location, the Washington Ecology Department fined Ross Electric often for violating the law, resulting in fines totaling at least $190,000. Among many other things, Ross Electric was caught operating its incinerator for weeks without a temperature probe to insure the proper operating temperature, failing to keep adequate tracking records, failing to follow proper safety procedures, and transporting hazardous materials on a truck with false license plates.
When the Billings Gazette eventually asked Gary Ross to explain Ross Electric's fines, he said that it was just a vendetta by an Ecology Department compliance supervisor, Kay Seiler: "It's the same gal that's been harassing us for about 10 years . . . It's a personal thing. I'd just as soon not comment on anything she says and get into a mud-slinging type deal."
After moving to Chehalis, the city of Centralia caught a Ross Electric employee dumping incinerator ash in its landfill. Because Ross Electric's incinerator ash was classified as dangerous waste, and, had to go to a specially designed landfill, the Ecology Department filed an administrative order telling Ross Electric to stop. Soon after that, however, Ross Electric was again caught dumping incinerator ash in the landfill. According to Ecology Department employees, the envelope that the court injunction was mailed in was found in the ash.
The cost of cleaning up this second Superfund site, which has also made the EPA's National Priorities List, is going to be at least $8 million, and may reach $20 million. When asked to pay for the cleanup, Ross Electric, pleading poverty and denying responsibility, refused to pay, and the city of Centralia and its partners have been forced to assume the full cost.
Not long afterwards, Ecology Department inspectors caught children playing in incinerator ash at
the Ross Plant. Kay Sieler, an Ecology inspector, describes the incident this way:
When we returned (from lunch, apparently unexpected), we found there were two children
playing on-site. While we watched the two children, approximately 9 or 10 years of age, one
driving a motorized go-cart, the other on a bike, rode around building #1 in a clockwise fashion,
through the breezeway, around the front of the building again, through the area just north of the
incinerator, and around again. When they went through the area between the incinerator and
Building #1, ash-like material was kicked up off the concrete by the wheels. By this time I had
my camera out and when they reached the area north of the incinerator again, I got some
pictures of them stopping and looking back at us. When they realized I was taking pictures they
exited quickly through the breezeway and out of the facility.
Kay Seiler, an Ecology Department compliance supervisor who participated in many later inspections of Ross Electric, summed her experience of the way the Ross family operated its business this way: "I am concerned as an environmental officer and I would be concerned as a neighbor." In December 1993, the attorney general of Washington filed a negotiated settlement that stated: "Ross Electric and all affiliated corporations, partnerships, sole proprietorships, and Ross family members associated with the Ross Electric business are temporarily enjoined in the state of Washington for a period of three years from the date of entry of this decree from operating a transformer incinerator or transformer scrapping facility within Washington State. . . "
It all began for me when I was getting a haircut in Baker, a small town 20 miles north of my family's ranch. My barber, was giggling because she was trimming my moustache, and she knew that it was an unbearable torture for me. The vibration of the clippers tickled.
"Just about through," she said between giggles, trying to control her hand.
"Please hurry," I gasped, afraid that if I twitched my head she would take a big gouge out and leave me marked forever.
"All through," she chimed musically.
"Thank God! That was hell. You know, if you ever wanted to get a secret out of me, that would be the way to do it. Just keep on trimming my moustache until I confessed."
"I'll keep that in mind," she said laughing. As I stood up and my barber shook the hair off the cloth sheet, a middle-aged woman that I vaguely recognized breezed in. Her family had a ranch north of town.
Barely pausing for a greeting, the entering woman came right to the point. "What's this I hear about the Buffalo Commons group inviting a PCB incinerator to town?" she asked the barber.
"I don't know much," the barber said, "but Barbara Weiss, the new librarian, says that they were run out of Washington State for a lot of violations and then out of Missoula when they came to Montana. She says that they are responsible for some Superfund sites."
"Isn't that just what we need?"
"Well, you know that group."
"Yeah, do I. First it was the megalandfill. But the Legislature put the kibosh on that by banning any out-of-state garbage. Then it was the Industrial Park outside town. Now this. What is that group trying to do to this poor town? Invite every polluter in the world to come here and poison us?" The woman was fuming as she sat in the chair.
"Well, they think the new business will be good for us."
"Yeah," she said sarcastically, "good for them." Then she changed her line of thought. "You know, I saw one of the Rosses. He had these horrible pimples all over his face. I never saw anyone so disfigured. They were huge."
"Really?"
"Someone told me that when one of the Rosses walked by her on the street her baby started crying."
"I heard that too, and I heard that dogs growl and bark at them too. And Barbara Weiss says that when she shook hands with one of them her hand felt icky, slimy, afterward. She says she still wants to wash her hands whenever she thinks about it."
"Babies, dogs, and librarians--none of them like these people. There is something wrong with them."
I wanted to listen to the rest of the conversation, but I felt like I couldn't just stand there, gaping. It wasn't polite. I paid for my haircut and went home.
But, 20 miles later, the Ross family beat me home. When I pulled into the yard, Jerry, my uncle, was in front of the shop talking to one of the neighbors. Both of them were leaning over a pickup box, facing each other from opposite sides. Apparently, our neighbor had come over to borrow something. They had been talking awhile, but when I walked by I heard the Ross name mentioned again. Though I was supposed to be headed out swathing, I stopped to listen.
"Well, it isn't over yet," Jerry said. "They still have to get a permit. I hear that is a pretty long and involved process. All sorts of hearings. If the Rosses make it through that, maybe they are OK."
"Oh, I don't know. Our local boys can screw anything up if they try hard enough. That God damned county planner of ours has a knack for that. As soon as he convinces the county commissioners that it is economic development, they are ready to beg, roll over, and play dead--whatever is needed."
Jerry laughed. "Well, it has happened before. If the Legislature hadn't put a ban on importing waste, we would have had one of the biggest landfills in the nation right here. Everything Minnesota had to send us."
"It did kind of make sense, in a half-assed sort of way. All those coal trains coming back empty to Montana, right through Baker. What a waste. They might as well carry something back. We don't have much rain, and the soil around Baker is perfect for it, bottomless gumbo."
"But why should we take care of someone else's garbage? If they make it, they should take care of it."
"Exactly right. Who knows what could go wrong."
Just then my mother, Lucille, came walking up. "I just got off the phone with Jean. She says that someone is going to build a PCB incinerator in Baker. The whole town is in an uproar about it. It's worse than the landfill. That new librarian is going around organizing a group to stop it."
"Old news," our neighbor said. "I really thought Jean was faster than that. Must be losing her touch."
My mother turned to Jerry. "What's this I hear about you being appointed to a board to study this?"
"The county commissioners decided that it was too ugly for them to handle so they appointed a fact-finding board to investigate the proposal, four in favor of it, four opposed. Gene is going to chair it."
"You sure you want to do this?" my mother asked. "Sounds like a mob of people carrying scythes and pitchforks will be chasing you through the streets of Baker if you make the wrong choice."
Our neighbor laughed. "She's got you there, Jerry. You could become famous, the first person hanged by a mob in Fallon County."
"It still should be checked out," my uncle insisted. "I've been talking to this guy in Missoula, Mike Cohan. He was chair of this group of physicians that ran them out of town after they moved in from Washington. He has done a lot of research on them and he says that they have Mob connections."
"Mob connections!" Our neighbor gasped. "Really?"
"We should find out if it is true," my uncle said. "We can't be running people out of the county based on rumors."
"There must be something to it. I remember from the papers that there was a hell of a battle when they tried to set up this incinerator in Missoula. Thousands of people signed petitions, radio ads, all sorts of news stories. The enviros wanted rid of them bad. Then, after all this controversy, our county government invites them to come here. That's what gets me. Shouldn't someone have been a little suspicious?"
"Well, I guess the county commissioners are trying to do the right thing if they are setting up this fact-finding board," my mother said. "They should have done it before they invited them in, but it is better late than never."
"That's right," my uncle said. This Mike Cohan is coming down from Missoula with one of his friends tomorrow. He says they have the documents to back up everything."
"But the fact-finding board meets tonight at 6," my mother observed, "which is an hour and a half from now. You better quit gossiping and get cleaned up."
As everyone went their ways, I went out to the hayfield. The whole discussion left me feeling uneasy. Though I considered myself a knowledgeable environmentalist, I knew nothing about incinerators or why they were so bad. I could discourse for hours about nuclear reactors-- the ways in which they could melt down, the radioactive toxins they produced, their vulnerabilities to sabotage, the ways in which they produced and then required an elite core of specialists that began by managing the plant and ended up managing society. But there were no nuclear reactors in Montana. We were getting an incinerator.
However, that was only part of the problem. Though I had a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, being a political activist outside my experience. This may seem strange to you, my reader, that a political scientist wouldn't know much about political activism, but I am a political theorist. I was educated to deal with more philosophical issues, like truth, legitimacy, and ontology. I read people like Heidegger, Foucault, and Nietzsche. In the realm of ideas, where you change things by changing the way people think about the world, they are indeed activists (and perhaps engaged in the most important kind of activism possible), but we clearly weren't dealing in that realm here. Conventional political science, which deals with elections, bureaucracies, and institutions, would theoretically do that. However, there is a big problem with mainstream political science: Even though it is supposed to deal with the practical kinds of problems that people involved with politics are dealing with, it doesn't. Pick up a copy of the American Political Science Review, the flagship journal of political science, the next time you are in a library and you will see what I mean. If you page through the journal and read the abstracts of the essays, you will see that political scientists, at least the kind that publish in the APSR, never ever write about politics. Really. Pick a political issue, any political issue--abortion, global warming, AIDS, environmental justice, crime--and you will see that there are no essays on it. Neither are there any essays on organizing a grassroots movement, dealing with the opposition, abusive authorities, or irresponsible government--in short, nothing a political activist would use.
Why? I believe that the political science profession, at least the mainstream arm of it, suffers from a disease of method, the relentless need to quantify everything. To be a political scientist in good standing in the profession, that is to say someone who gets published, gets tenure, and gets paid to go to the American Political Science Association's annual convention, one must try to be objective, value neutral, and rational. If the meaning of these virtues is always up for grabs, the certification of them is not. One's height on the professional totem pole can always be increased by publishing a paper in the APSR. Truth, for most political scientists, is but a number. If you can't count it, it doesn't exist. Or, at least, it isn't going to get you tenure.
Which, despite the name of the profession, means ironically that politics is ignored. If it erupts anywhere, politics erupts in a space where objectivity, value neutrality, and rationality are, at best, contested. By framing truth as something that isn't contested, that is objective, value neutral, and rational, the political science profession effectively eliminates politics as an object of study. Political scientists need to do this because being political takes them off their seraphic thrones of science, making them into partisans like the rest of us, mired in rhetoric, ambiguity, and opinion.
Much is sacrificed to avoid this descent into the profane. To quantify something it must be operationalized. This means rigorously defining it, setting it in a framework where much of the stuff of life, the poetry, mystery, ambiguity, irony, and intricacy, is eliminated. Once this is done, the object can be represented by a symbol and then set into a precise relationship with other symbols, which can then be mathematically manipulated. The end result is the mathematical gibberish that decorates the pages of the APSR. With some effort, this gibberish can be translated, without loss, into ordinary language. When it is, though, the authoritative mystery of it evaporates. Invariably, all it means is something like: Republicans are more conservative than Democrats, something any damn fool knows.
Months later, after the Ross affair exploded into a major confrontation, thinking I might be missing something, I returned to my 10-year-old collection of APSRs, hoping that I would find something, anything, that would help me interpret the situation in which I found myself. I went through the entire pile, read every abstract, and found nothing, absolutely nothing, that could in any way help me understand the conflict in which I was caught. I was equally sure that there was nothing that would help my opponents. As the years went by, and I became more involved in Montana's environmental movement, meeting every variety of political activist, I found out that they all had something in common: None of them ever read the APSR, not liberals, not conservatives, not environmentalists, not polluters. The most professionally authoritative journal on politics. Isn't that strange? And it isn't like there was some sort of professional obstacle, an intellectual boundary that forbid it. All the political activists that I know would read anything that would give them an advantage over their opponents. They didn't read the APSR because it just wasn't worth the effort.
Political scientists who publish in the APSR insist that they are doing something important, something that justifies the prestige they demand and the large salaries they are paid. But I am damned if I know what it is. If a political activist can't use political science what is it good for? Mostly, I think, political scientists publish in the APSR to jack their egos off. Indeed, if it were not for the efforts of a few dissident feminists, postmodern leftists, and environmentalists, that is about all the American political science profession is, a mutual masturbation society in which respect is swapped for reputation. Because of the standards of the profession, no one is allowed to do anything that matters--clean up the environment, stop global warming, promote biodiversity, or insure social, economic, and environmental justice. These trivial matters are left to housewives like Lois Gibbs, the founder of The Citizen's Clearinghouse on Hazardous Waste.
When I went through my pile of APSRs and found nothing useful I was so mad I got revenge by fantasizing about rounding up every political scientist that wasn't ashamed of their profession and locking them up in a concentration camp in Nevada, somewhere on top of a nuclear waste dump. For added fun I imagined what would happen when I tossed a few cans of dog food over the fence every now and then. How many political scientists does it take to open a can of dog food? And how would they distribute it afterward? Who would get what, where, and how? However, I am a nonviolent person. I could never actually cause that kind of suffering, even if it were totally justified. Instead, I canceled my subscription to the APSR.
If political scientists ever wanted to escape my wrath and do something useful they could throw away their SPSS manuals and study something like gossip. Gossip, I have learned from my efforts as a political activist, is where power operates. In the years that followed my initial introduction to environmental activism, I learned a lot about gossip, how that it silences people, entitles them to be heard, determines their self-esteem, and either enables or limits their prospects. Enormous power circulates with gossip, raising people up and lowering them down. Through gossip, communities decide what they will become.
As the Ross family became a frequent object of gossip in our community, sometimes throughout the state, it was only because we were all engaged in a struggle over our future together. When we talked about the Rosses in coffee shops, cafes, on the radio, in the newspaper, in letters to the editor, and in endless meetings designed to either run them out of town or keep them, we were talking about what was going to run our community. Would money be first, or would it be health? What would we give up to get what we wanted? At first only the Ross's were gossiped about, but eventually their opponents became targets, and then, because we were not helpless at the art of gossip, their supporters.
If Gossip has a bad reputation for circulating malicious fiction, subverting people's ideals of
themselves, that doesn't make it irrelevant. Malicious fiction reveals a truth about longstanding
relationships in the community. The source of a malicious fiction may be resentful, envious,
jealous, or insecure, and that is why they tell an untruth. However, the truth in this malicious
fiction is that they inescapably have cause for feeling this way. Something has happened,
something about a person's situation in the world--their needs, their desires, their wounds--that
makes this person defend their interests by with gossip. If a fact or a detail doesn't have a
connection to this community of gossip, have meaning within it, it won't circulate. It is irrelevant,
an untruth. Boring. When people gossip they are distributing power, structuring difference, and
redressing injustice. Gossip is important. You simply cannot understand politics, or succeed as a
political activist, unless you understand its shift and flow.
In the past few weeks, a group of Baker citizens has been actively opposing the possible relocation of Ross Electric to Baker. Eastern Montanans Against Ross was formed and the group has distributed printed sheets declaring their opposition. The size of the group is not known. "The group is organized," Rory Ketterling said, "but we don't have any membership fees or anything."
EMAR members and others in the community opposed to Ross were interviewed and presented the reasons they are opposed to bringing the company into this community. Present at the interview were EMAR members Barbara Weiss, Rory and Julie Ketterling, Kristi Brum, and Louis Jensen. Also present were Gene and Cathy Huntley, Esther Jones, and Glen Rugg.
Those opposing the relocation of Ross Electric to Baker have five major points to support their
contention that Ross should not be welcomed into the community. Those points are: 1) PCBs
pose a danger to the environment and to health. 2)Ross will be disregarding the state's
moratorium on importation of solid waste if they do business in Montana. 3) Fines and
violations in the State of Washington reveal the lack of proper management, and the business
would not be monitored closely enough in Montana. 5) There is not enough information
available about bonding or insurance should the company create a toxic site in Baker.
"Ross Opponents Present Their Views"
Nancy Schillinger, The Fallon County Times, March 26, 1992
In the past month, I have personally investigated more accusations about Ross Electric than I
care to discuss. I have received telephone calls, faxes, and letters from Missoula. I have also
spoken with one of the "friends of Baker" who traveled to Baker from Missoula. Each
accusation has proven to be misinformation, deceit, or stupidity. Our experience with Ross
Electric is that they were open and honest with us from the beginning. Their statements have
held up under the most extreme scrutiny.
"Concerns Addressed"
Quote from Mike Madler, county planner
The Fallon County Times, April 2, 1992
For the next couple of months, I stayed on the ranch, planting mostly. Besides what I read in the papers, I learned about Ross mostly from my uncle. Almost every night, my uncle went into town, attending the meetings on Ross. He took his appointment to the fact-finding board seriously. I later found out that the people that came down from Missoula got quite an interrogation from him. "Are you sure?" "Can you prove it?" "Who says so?" "Can they be believed?" One of the people from Missoula, Mike Cohan, it turned out, was a retired Army officer. My uncle was a helicopter pilot in Vietnam, so they had a lot in common. Eventually, they had a meeting of the minds. Mike Cohan later told me that it was hell, but he was glad that my uncle started out being skeptical. He didn't trust people who were easily convinced. Their opinions were weak, easily changed. When he left, he was sure that no one was going to con my uncle about Ross.
While the fact-finding committee was holding meetings, the Ross issue continued dividing the community. Nancy Schillinger, the editor of the Fallon County Times wrote an editorial in the March 26, 1992 issue about how that her stand in favor of Ross was affecting her. Under the headline "Just About Anything," she wrote:
Last week, I went to DD's Super Value to purchase an item. I did not get waited on. Several things that happened that day made me question the reason I was not waited on. It was later explained to me that I was not waited on because no one saw me in the store, or heard me when I spoke.
The story made its way around town quickly, as gossip does, and it changed greatly along the way. I have heard that I was kicked out the store, that I was told to keep my money, that my business was not wanted. That is not true, and I never said that it was. I simply spoke to some friends about something that concerned me. I did not intend for my concern to become a subject of public speculation.
But it has.
And I think it is a strong sign of the discord in the community since the Ross Electric issue came up.
There are citizens who hesitate to say whether they support Ross or not, because when they take a stand they are open to personal attack by people who do not feel as they do.
It used to be that people could argue with friends about something, with no hard feelings. You're entitled to your opinion and I'm entitled to mine. When it comes to Ross, that is no longer true.
When Missoula considered Ross, did their town split so strongly? I doubt it. Missoula is too big. People on one side of the issue probably didn't have to see the people on the other side very often. In a place the size of Missoula, it's more easily done than it is in a community our size. We see each other on an almost daily basis. And tensions boil when we are confronted with this issue every time we turn around.
A fact-finding committee has been established to check into all the aspects of Ross. Let's let them do it.
A member of the Eastern Montanans Against Ross group was quoted in the Miles City Star as saying she fears the fact-finding committee was intended to rob EMAR of its momentum. She is not willing to let that happen, and further was quoted as saying "Our numbers will grow, our petitions will grow, our anger will grow . . . "
Perhaps we should let our knowledge grow first, then decide whether or not petitions and anger should grow.
I would hate to see Baker become the subject of a sociological study on the way to kill a small town.
Let's get back to being friends, to being families, and to being a community members who
support our businesses or business people who serve our community. No matter what we feel
about Ross Electric.
Gene Domagala, the owner of the Super Value, the store where this incident happened, had a
letter to the editor in the same issue. He wrote:
I was really shocked and in dismay when I came home Thursday night and heard such a vicious bunch of gossip. I don't know what is happening to our community. I just weathered one storm and didn't need another one. Some people were really vicious when I couldn't see very good. They didn't bother to check out why I didn't wave at them or talk to them. I didn't even see them. I was criticized and abused for something I couldn't help until I got my transplant. That opened up a whole new world. I had hopes of turning my store around. I could cut meat again - order - stock shelves - get my accounts in line and make the store financially sound again. It has been a hard struggle. I have never been a quitter and I never will be. I am going to keep going as long as I can. Things have to get brighter and they will if the community works together.
I am not blaming Nancy, she was a victim of circumstances. She has been under so much stress and abuse from people that call her and don't have nerve enough to identify themselves. I got these kinds of calls and threats too on Friday.
Nancy and I had a good talk and shed some tears about what happened. But it shows what gossip can do and how fast things can spread and how people can get hurt.
Nancy is a hard working lady in this community and I hope she keeps on doing a good job of writing. It isn't always easy she takes a lot of hard knocks.
Now on Ross Electric which this started over. I should have a right to my own opinion. I agree we sure could use the additional business but do we want something that could leave a long time effect on our community after Ross is done and gone.
On a delicate business as this one it has to be checked out and studied very intensely. Until all the facts are in and proven true, I am against it.
Our farmers and ranchers also have a lot invested. I would hate to see - not saying it would - something happen to the air or water that could ruin them because agriculture is still the backbone of the United States.
As Schillinger points out, conflict is easier to handle in large communities because there gossip goes unchallenged. In large cities like Missoula, those who are gossiped about don't get as upset about it. There is anonymity in numbers. However, in small communities, the other we gossip about is always close by, able to disrupt our dream of community by initiating gossip about us that would, in turn, exclude us from belonging in the community. And so, disputes are harder to handle in small communities. The other is nearer, more closely implicated in the community. You are always encountering them at family picnics, in business exchanges, and at church gatherings. Their involvement in the community makes the other a greater threat, and so there is greater need to get them under control.
As a practical matter, gossip is nothing more than an effort to discipline a consensus, to form community. We gossip about those who fail to meet the norms of our community. We punish them by making them other to it. And it happens most easily when those who are other to it are not there to dispute what we are doing to them.
When a divisive issue like Ross irrupts in a small community, and the truth is in dispute, people become anxious, unsure where they belong in the politics of gossip. Everyone's belonging in the community is up for grabs. And so anything bad about the other becomes an item to be used, a weapon to be brandished. When Schillinger mistakenly assumed that she was not served because she was a Ross advocate, she used this item to attack and isolate Ross opponents. She circulated it as evidence to prove just how mean and wrong the other side was. People who were as eager as she to secure their belonging in the circle of gossip, seized upon it, expanded it, and spread it. Apparently anonymous phone threats and insults were exchanged, and when Domagala found out, he had his own item that he started circulating, with much the same results. However, before total war broke out, Schillinger and Domagala both realized how distorted and vicious the dispute had become and acted to dampen it.
Belonging is an essential need for a self implicated in community. When that belonging cannot be secured by attacks that, themselves, become the subject of gossip, pressure accumulates for reconciliation. People start looking for ways to suppress the debate, to isolate the trouble, to unify the circle of gossip to be more inclusive. As a result, differences are repressed, papered over, and concealed without ever really being worked out. There they remain, hidden, festering, waiting to irrupt again.
The fact-finding meetings that both Domagala and Schillinger hoped would resolve the issue did not go well. At first my uncle came back from them confident that it would be quickly over with. The record of the Ross family was so bad in Washington state--Superfund sites, endless violations, huge fines--that anyone with good sense could see through their con. They were here to pollute, to avoid the law, nothing else. It was obvious, and eventually everyone would see that, my uncle told me.
It didn't turn out that way. The Ross supporters on the board didn't agree with my uncle, and the war was on. The site where the Ross family had first located their incinerator in Washington, alongside Coal Creek, became a national priority list Superfund site when the EPA found high levels of PCBs there. Though listed as a responsible party, the Ross family didn't have enough money to pay for the tens of millions of dollars it took to clean up the site, so the costs fell on the utilities that had contracted with the Ross family to dispose of the transformers. Montana Power was one of them. Asked about Ross, a Montana National Guard friend of Jerry's that worked for Montana Power told him never again--it cost Montana Power too much last time.
Given this report from his friend, the obvious question was what would happen if Ross did what they did everywhere else and created a Superfund site here? Who would pay for it? Jerry moved that the fact-finding board should get the Dun and Bradstreet report on Ross Electric and see if they had enough assets to cover a Superfund site. It seemed logical, but the Ross supporters didn't see it that way. Ugly words were exchanged. Richard Menger, county sanitarian and vehement Ross supporter, argued that the committee couldn't be prying into the Ross family's financial affairs. Bonding and insurance companies would take care of that. The issue was a scientific and technical one, he argued, whether the incinerator would destroy all the PCBs. It would, he assured everybody, and, because he was an expert on such matters, that should be the end of it. Any objection to the contrary was just environmental hysteria. Period. When Gene Huntley, the chair, disputed his argument, Menger apparently called him things like a pompous ass, a bully, and a know-nothing. Rising to the bait, Huntley called Menger a mini-mind.
After that enlightening exchange, the committee broke up, each half returning to its supporters to complain about how unreasonable the other half was. Of course it all ended up in the newspapers. Jill Sundby, a reporter for the Billings Gazette, came from Billings, which was more than 200 miles away, to attend the meetings. She later told me that the Dun and Bradstreet report was relevant information, and it should have taken the committee just a few minutes to decide to get it. But, of course, she couldn't say that in her stories.
This is the story she wrote for the Billings Gazette on March 26, 1992:
Baker-- The Baker committee charged with finding out the facts about Ross Electric Co. dissolved Tuesday night when the two sides could not reach agreement on even basic issues.
A proposal by the Chehalis, Wash., company to set up shop in Baker is tearing this southeastern Montana town apart. Some people want the economic boost the new company would provide: others fear environmental contamination.
The company incinerates used electrical transformers to recycle metals.
The 10-person fact-finding committee was formed to cool down the dispute that had been generated at Baker over Ross Electric. Made up of five Ross proponents and five Ross opponents, the committee was to determine the plain, unarguable facts about Ross Electric.
Apparently, those facts aren't so unarguable.
"There was obviously no way to make any progress at all at any time, the way that committee was composed," said committee Chairman Gene Huntley, a Baker attorney. Huntley terminated the committee at its third meeting Tuesday night.
Huntley said that at its first meeting, the committee agreed to investigate Ross' financial standing to determine whether it could pay employees, dispose of waste and pay for any cleanup that might be needed.
However, a motion to get a Dunn & Bradstreet credit rating on the company failed on a 5-5 vote.
Then, Huntley said, on Tuesday night "there was no agreement that undiluted PCBs were a hazard to the environment. We couldn't even agree on that. Plus the tactics of one committee member, Richard Menger, were so obstructive and insulting that it was impossible to conduct committee business of any kind. Anyone who differed from Mr. Menger's views was simply shouted down."
The five opponents-- Huntley, Glen Rugg, Rory Ketterling, Louis Jensen and Jerry Sikorski-- left the meeting and formed a new committee, Citizens for the Health of our Children. They invited all the other committee members except Menger to participate in the new committee.
In addition to proponent Menger, the four other proponents are Mike Madler, Jan Kenitzer,
Russell Culver, and Dave Baker.
Temporary breakup?
Huntley said that the new committee will "do some rather extensive investigating" and will issue newsletters. Ketterling is the chairman of the new committee, and Huntley is secretary.
Madler, who is the Fallon County planner, said he hopes that the breakup of the f act-finding committee is just temporary. "I hope that they decide that it's worth pursuing and come back," he said. "I think Rich (Menger) may have been a little impatient with them because they weren't as well-versed on the scientific part of it as he was. I think they should have been a little more tolerant."
Menger is the county sanitarian, a biology teacher and has a master's degree in biology.
Solid waste laws
"It's the old story of don't confuse me with the facts," Menger said of the Tuesday night meeting. He said that Huntley "was the only one who raised his voice in any fashion.
"What they didn't like, last night was I presented the laws as they relate to solid waste directly from the administrative rules of Montana. Waste means useless, unwanted or discarded materials . . . The term is not intended to apply to byproducts or materials which have an economic value."
Because of this definition, Menger said, Ross should not need a state solid waste permit-- only a state air quality permit.
Madler said proponents would not consent to get a credit rating on Ross because the company would have to provide financial assurances during the state regulatory process.
"We just felt it was none of their business," he said.
Madler said that at the Tuesday night meeting, Huntley asked whether everyone could agree that PCBs in their pure form are hazardous material. "I said I'm not qualified and that I didn't think it was relevant because we're not talking about anything in its pure form (in Ross' transformers); we're talking about dilution."
Some old electrical transformers contain various levels of PCBs.
Huntley said that "the fact that undiluted PCBs are hazardous is commonplace in our culture.
PCBs have been banned from manufacture in the U.S. since the mid '70s."
Family wants to be welcome
Madler said he didn't know how the committee dissolution would affect Ross Electric's timetable to move to Baker. He said that Ross has picked a site but not purchased it yet. He added that Menger said it would take 75 days to get an air quality permit from the state and no construction would start until all permits are in hand.
Madler said Ross doesn't need community approval or a community vote to locate in Baker, but
"their families are going to live here and they want to make sure they're welcome in the
community."
My uncle was livid with rage the day after. "You know," he said, "I bet I could whip the arrogant cocksucking sonofabitch Menger. He is in better shape than I am, but I am madder. I'd deserve to win." For days he ranted like that. He'd be silently doing something, apparently lost in work, but then, out of the blue, he would burst out "that cocksucker," as if the wind needed to be persuaded of it. "Cocksucker" became Menger's last name and "arrogant" his first.
After the breakup of the fact-finding group, the new group, which called itself the Concerned
Citizens for the Health of our Children, decided to hold a public meeting at the Exhibit Hall on the
Baker fairgrounds. There, the former fact-finding board members would tell the public what they
found out. When the Fallon County Times refused to do a story on the meeting or on the
information CCHC had collected, Gene Huntley paid to run it as an advertisement. Miffed,
defensive, and contentious, Nancy Schillinger defended her actions in an editorial published April
9, 1992:
As I told Mr. Huntley when he came in, the Times could print one side of the story this week,
then the other side of the story the next week, then back to the other side . . . and on and on for
twenty years. We're not going to do that. The issue has received lots of news coverage. Enough
news coverage, unless something really important comes up on the story -- like permits being
issued or not, or the discoveries of an official fact-finding committee.
When CCHC held its public meeting a few days later, on April 14, not a word of what went on was covered in her pages, although 200 people--a good proportion of the residents of Fallon County--attended and CCHC raised more than a thousand dollars! Afterwards, people started calling Schillinger "Ms. Pravda." Like the infamous Soviet newspaper, she only printed the news she liked.
Editors are supposed to love controversy. It sells papers. But not this one. This one had a policy
to protect. Facts were facts only if they had a stamp of official approval on them--and the official
line was that Ross was good for economic development. People who felt otherwise didn't matter.
As a result, the Fallon County Times became a very boring paper. Ross would be a front page
story in the Billings Gazette and the Miles City Star often in the years ahead, but hardly ever in
the Fallon County Times.
The meeting out at the Fallon County Exhibit Hall was a turning point in my life. It is strange the way these things happen. I was going along, making plans for my life, dreaming of the way it would turn out--a book, a job at a university, adoring students, more books, fame, then tenure. One thing after another, following like ducks in formation. And it would all happen somewhere else, probably far away. So what happening in my community didn't seem all that relevant to me. More of an amusement than anything else, I went to the meeting because of the swear words my uncle used when he talked about Ross and Menger. Once there, the whole issue swallowed me up. I guess life is what happens while you are making other plans.
I came early, and sat down in the front row, beside Cathy Huntley, Gene Huntley's wife, and my aunt Kathy. My parents were in the row behind us, and all around us were our neighbors. I couldn't remember ever seeing so many of them at one place for anything except to cheer one of the high school sport teams. The members of the committee sat at a long table in front, piled high with the papers the group had collected. The Exhibit Hall was a large airy building, built when I was a kid. For a while, during the first part of the oilfield boom around Baker, it made double duty as a schoolhouse. Like all public buildings in Fallon County, it was spotlessly clean and well kept.
A skilled courtroom lawyer, Gene Huntley started the meeting by describing the turn of events that had brought us all there--the breakup of the fact-finding committee, the problems with Menger, the concerns with the Ross record. Then I heard him use a word that would occupy my thoughts for years: dioxin. I'm sure that I had read about it before, but this was the first time the word mattered. Gene described it as the most toxic chemical known to science, and he said that the incinerator would release a lot of it. It would cause birth defects, cancer, immune problems, and reproductive problems. Then he went on to describe what each member of the committee would talk about.
Glen Rugg, a rancher and former state senator, was the next to speak. Glen and Gene were old rivals. More than a decade earlier, they had run against each other for state senator, and it was a bitter race, Glen as a Republican and Gene as a Democrat. Both men nursed a bitter grudge against each other until they ended up on the same side of the Ross issue. Glen described the irony this way: An old political friend of his had called him up when he found out that both he and Gene were fighting on the same side. He wanted to know what could possibly be so horrible to force these two old antagonists to take up common cause.
Glen's answer was that Ross was a corporate outlaw. A really bad one. Opposing a business proposal on environmental grounds was awkward for Glen. He was very much an advocate of economic development, regulatory restraint, and property rights, and, as state senator, he had resisted many of the stringent environmental laws that the Montana legislature had passed when he was there. Nevertheless, on his view, Ross Electric did two things that he could not abide with: The Ross family broke the law, repeatedly and contemptuously, and then lied about it.
There are, I think, two contradictory tendencies in the Republican party, a radical, insurgent, and aggressive tendency--which Newt Gingrich has embodied--that is contemptuous of government, preferring the anarchy of the marketplace to the stability of tradition, and a cautious, establishment-oriented, and conservative tendency that places morality, law, and religion before all else. Republicans are usually a mixture of these contradictory tendencies, taking on whichever one suits their purposes at one time. Glen tended more to the law and order part of the mixture. This tendency can be a real pain in the rear when you want to change the system, improve it or make it more just, but when you are opposing a corporate outlaw--like Glen believed Ross was--it can be quite helpful.
To everything there is a time and a season. When it is time to judge and condemn it is best to turn it over to a pro, and no one does moral outrage as well as a truly conservative Republican. Nothing offends them as much as someone who makes light of the law, even if it is a law they, themselves, doubt the wisdom of it.
Contrary to what one would expect, many of the first people who first moved to oppose Ross and the community leaders who invited them in were Republicans. The first meeting to organize the opposition was at Ida Wild's house, the chair of the county Republican central committee. Later on, many of the people who got involved in the groups to oppose Ross were Republicans. And Rolph Tunby, our district representative who was later instrumental in passing legislation that helped limit Ross, was a Republican. In fact, since Fallon County was strongly Republican, and even Democrats agreed with much of the Republican program, the controversy over Ross could be almost be reduced to a struggle between to two contradictory tendencies in the Republican party, between economic development and law and order. Of course, it wasn't all that, but that captured a good part of it.
This is what Glen Rugg later wrote about Ross for the O'Fallon Fact Finder, a newsletter he
helped organize. Though it is not a direct quotation of what he said, it captures the essence of
what he said that night:
During its stay in Washington State, Ross Electric has repeatedly been fined by Washington State Department of Ecology, has generated a Superfund Site that federal taxpayers must pay for, and has refused to acknowledge any wrong doing or accept any responsibility for the damage it has caused.
From 1972 to September 1983 Ross Electric operated at Coal Creek. In February of 1983, due to heavy PCB contamination, the Washington State Department of Ecology issued an order to Ross Electric as operator and Lewis County Public Utility District as owner to investigate and clean up the site.
Ross Electric moved their incinerator to the Logan Hill in 1983, and terminated their lease at Coal Creek. In defiance of both the Washington State Department of Ecology and the Federal Government, which had classified it as a Superfund Site, Ross Electric refused to accept any responsibility for the contamination at Coal Creek or pay anything toward the cost of cleaning it up.
In January of 1985 the Environmental Protection Agency--it isn't just an over zealous Department of Ecology as Ross Electric would have it that is giving them so much trouble--fined Ross Electric $23,000 for burning waste oil with concentrations of PCBs at 94 ppm. According to EPA regulations, they were only allowed to incinerate contaminated waste up to 50 ppm.
On August 11, 1986, the Washington Department of Ecology fined Ross Electric $25,000 for two different spills of incinerator ash, falsifying incinerator reports, and leaving hazardous containers unlabeled.
In August 1986 Ross Electric was caught dumping ash from their incinerator at the Centralia, Washington landfill. The Washington Department of Ecology fined Ross Electric $75,000 for this. Ross Electric protested the penalty, and Ross Electric and the Department of Ecology settled for $48,000, with $27,000 deferred, if they had no further Class 1 violations. But when Ross Electric made further Class 1 violations it made them "a high priority violator," and the $27,000 deferment was made payable. Ross Electric is appealing.
In August and November of 1990, the Department of Ecology fined Ross Electric $90,000. This time because Ross Electric had operated without a temperature probe from August 2 to August 27. (The probe is essential to determine if the temperature is high enough to destroy all the PCBs.) Besides that, their record keeping was so disorganized that the Department of Ecology could not determine whether the oil they were incinerating was under 50 ppm.
The Department of Ecology gave Ross Electric an ultimatum in May of 1991. Either Ross Electric had to start complying with the law or submit a plan for closing their plant down and disposing of all the hazardous wastes that had accumulated at their site. Ross Electric has refused to draw up a plan and to provide sufficient financial guarantees to assure that it is carried out. Now they are attempting to move into Fallon County.
As this lengthy list of penalties and court actions shows, Ross Electric has never been in
compliance with the laws of the State of Washington. They have provoked several actions by the
EPA. And they have refused to accept responsibility for the damage they have done or the costs
they have forced on the taxpayer. There is nothing in their history to suggest that they have
changed their ways or that they will do any better in Fallon County.
Rory Ketterling was the next person to speak. Unlike the other members of the group, Rory was relatively young, and he had helped organize the first group in Fallon County to oppose Ross, Eastern Montanans Against Ross. Unfortunately, I do not have a record of what Rory said that night, but I do remember that he spoke well, adding to Glen's comments about Ross's record. Rory's biggest objection to Ross was that there was no indication in what the Ross family said or did that indicated they were going to act any differently in Montana than they did in Washington. The problem, the Ross family had argued, was oppressive environmental regulation, not anything the company did. They were the victims, not the violators. And so, they were moving to Montana was to get away from strict environmental laws and enforcement. This, Rory told the crowd that night, was an acknowledgment that they had learned nothing from all the fines and violations and were going to do the same things here that they had done in Washington.
My uncle came next. His job was to refute the mantra that the county planner and the county
sanitarian had been chanting since the whole affair had started: "The solution to pollution is
dilution." Holding his notes in shaking hands, he began:
Richard Menger and Ross Electric have argued that the concentrations of hazardous chemicals Ross Electric wants to bring into Fallon County are too diluted to be a threat to human health or the environment. On the radio Richard Menger compared the concentrations Ross Electric would be dealing with to "a teaspoon in Baker Lake." First, the concentrations are not nearly that diluted, and secondly, very diluted concentrations of chemicals can have a dramatic effect on the environment.
PCB, one of the hazardous chemicals Ross Electric will be releasing into the environment if they come here, is regulated in parts per million (ppm). Since Baker Lake was mentioned, let us use that as an example. Baker Lake, on the average, contains 600 acre feet of water. That turns out to be about 195 million gallons. So, 1 ppm would be 195 gallons of pure PCBs in Baker Lake. And 50 ppm would be 9,750 gallons of pure PCBs in Baker Lake. Considerably more than a teaspoon.
But still, that does sound like it would be considerably diluted. Too diluted, it would seem, to cause anyone any harm. But let's consider an example of how chemicals in just such diluted concentrations can cause a dramatic effect on the environment.
Ally is a common agricultural chemical, registered by the EPA to control weeds in small grain
crops. The recommended application rate is 8 oz. of Ally per 80 acres of cropland. Ally is 60%
active ingredients and 40% inert ingredients, so actually the rate is 5 oz. of active ingredient per
80 acres, or only .0625 oz. per acre. For optimum results, 1 inch of rain is required after
application. One inch of rainfall over an acre turns out to be 3,477,376 ounces. A dilution rate
of .0625 oz. to 3,477,376 oz. turns out to be only 0.18 ppm. That 0.18 ppm--a much smaller
concentration than in the transformers Ross Electric will be bringing into the county--will
control or destroy most broadleaf weeds for a 6 week period.
So much for the county sanitarian. The next step was to argue that the incinerator that the Ross
family was proposing would release PCBs into the environment. My uncle was a member of the
South Dakota National Guard, and, having flown a helicopter over every corner of the state, he
was aware of some incinerators that the Ross family owned in Coleman, South Dakota. After
checking around, he found a paper on PCB accumulations around the plant. This is how he
described it:
A research paper published in Pesticides Monitoring Journal (September, 1977) by Yvonne A. Greichus and Barbara A. Dohman indicates that PCBs are released from an incineration plant like the one Ross Electric intends to operate in Fallon County.
In their study, numerous soil, corn leaf, and foliage samples taken over a number of years from relatively noncontaminated areas of South Dakota revealed a background level of PCBs of less than 0.1 ppm. However, 50 yards south of one of the factory lots, the outer leaves of corn plants contained 1.1 ppm to 2.2 ppm PCBs--10 to 20 times higher than the normal background.
About 4 years before the study, the furnaces were equipped with special afterburners to destroy PCBs. However, the presence of high levels of PCBs on the corn leaves suggests that the afterburners are not completely effective.
The two researchers also collected samples of body tissue from earth worms and small rodents (mice) from north and south of the factories and from areas near Brookings SD, which was about 20 miles away.
PCB levels in rodents near the factory ranged from 4.9 to 17.2 ppm in liver tissues and from 3.4 to 6.9 ppm in muscle tissues. The PCB level in the rodents indicated that the rodents near the factory had 2 to 3.5 times the PCB content in their livers than rodents some 20 miles away had.
This level of PCBs in the bodies of animals is not insignificant. According to Buck, Osweiler, and Gelder in Clinical and Diagnostic Veterinary Toxicology (Dubuque, Iowa: Kendall Hunt Publishing, 1976), p. 98, PCB exposure that resulted in minks accumulating 11 ppm in the brain and 4-5 ppm in the liver would kill them in three to six months. Different animals have different tolerances to PCBs, and predators like minks seem to be particularly vulnerable.
Greichus and Dohman concluded that: "Bioaccumulation is occurring because PCB levels in
earthworms and small rodents collected near the factories were considerably higher than levels
in the same types of animals collected from other areas."
Then, just as he was ready to finish, my uncle switched subjects, taking a path that surprised me. He told the audience how that he had flown a helicopter in the Vietnam war. He said the reason that he was sent there was to fight tyranny. He said that he never thought that he would come home and find himself fighting the same thing here. I didn't have the faintest idea what he was talking about. His objections to the county sanitarian and the county planner seemed personal, not political. I would find out later what he meant.
Louis Jensen, a retired ASCS employee and farmer, got up and read an article on dioxin from the US News and World Report. In 1990, the Chlorine Institute and other industry advocates successfully got the EPA to do a reassessment of dioxin. They argued that the EPA had exaggerated the risk from dioxin, and that things like the evacuation from Times Beach, Missouri, was unnecessary when a corrupt businessman had sprayed wastes containing dioxin on land in the community. According to one scientist, the risk from the dioxin was no greater than from a week's worth of exposure to the sun.
However, according to the article Louis Jensen read to the crowd, industry didn't get what it wanted from the reassessment. Instead, after reviewing all the scientific literature on dioxin, the EPA was in the process of concluding that dioxin was worse than it had earlier thought. Not only was dioxin a carcinogen in vanishingly small amounts, it could harm the immune system, impair mental functioning, disrupt sexual development, and impair sexual functions in even smaller amounts. Louis awkwardly stuttered over the passages on sexuality, but gamely went on.
With the presentations done, Gene played a tape recording of the conversation that led to the breakup of the fact-finding committee. Hearing the words over the speaker system was hard as Gene held the tape recorder up to the mike, but Menger's voice was loud, angry, and belligerent. Gene's voice--he held his hand up and, smiling mischievously, pointed his finger to his head when he started talking on the tape--was calm and confident. The tone of the voices made it pretty clear what had led to the breakup of the group.
After that, Gene invited questions and comments. There were a lot of them. His group had set up a microphone in the back of the crowd, and soon a line of people formed behind it, waiting to speak. I don't remember the questions, but I do remember some veiled references to county employees being intimidated. It was as if everyone knew about it, and condemned it, but didn't want to say what it was in public. I felt left out because I didn't know.
Then came the obvious question: What to do now? For the first time in my life what Gene did shook me. He said in public, before a large crowd of people, that he didn't know. He said it flatly, honestly, and without apology. Gene Huntley had always been a tall and handsome man, with an elegant and polished courtroom appearance. When he spoke, his style was careful, precise, and measured. He had a low melodious voice that could draw you in, resonant with your soul, make you want to believe him. He was an awesome figure, and a truly formidable lawyer. He won over 95% of his cases, was one of the very few lawyers in the nation allowed to practice before the U.S. Supreme Court, and was rated as one of the best medical malpractice lawyers in the nation. But when he said he didn't know, I noticed for the first time that night how old and tired Gene looked, his hair was mussed, his suit was rumpled, and his face had tired lines in it. He was having serious health problems, and they showed then.
Gene not knowing what to do? I felt like an anchor in my life was slipping. Gene had long been a friend of the family. I remember several long, involved, and complicated suits he won for my family when I was a kid. It seemed like he was always out at our place or Dad was in town at his office or home talking about a case. The cases were emotionally draining for my family, but Gene always knew what to do. He was always a beacon of confidence, certain he had what it took to win. Now that beacon seemed to be fading.
I have never liked public speaking. I get before a crowd of people and suddenly a black feeling swallows my gut and my brain. I can't think of what I want to say and I go incoherent, start babbling. If I can focus on my breathing and what I am saying, I'm OK, but if I start thinking about what others are thinking about me, I am lost. It really is best if what I have to say is written down. But I got up before the microphone and managed a few suggestions. I suggested that Gene's fact-finding group continue to meet and check on Ross, and that they publish a newsletter. Then I suggested that everyone make a donation to cover the expenses. A political scientist really should be able to come up with something better than that. Like a black belt in karate, we should know just where the pressure points in the political system were, and we should know how hit them. But I didn't.
Fortunately, no one had any better ideas than I did, and that was more or less the end of the meeting. Gene, in closing, thanked everyone for coming, and said that Barbara Weiss, the county librarian, had a petition against Ross that they could sign as they went out. Everyone got up and broke into little knots of conversation. I started folding chairs. I liked that because it kept me busy and I didn't have to talk to anyone, and I could be alone in my thoughts. However, soon the chairs were all folded, the tables put away, and the speaker system boxed up. By then, almost everyone was gone.
I stopped at the table where the petitions were. For the first time, I met Barbara Weiss. She was a tall slender woman with dark hair. Quite attractive, really. Her voice had a melodious nasal twang. We started talking about her problems as librarian. I had remember reading a story in the Fallon County Times about a big uproar over her opposition to Ross, how that it might cost her job. Remembering all the veiled references to the intimidation of county employees that night, I asked her what was going on. She hesitated, looking in my eyes to see if she could trust me, then, apparently reassured, she started to tell me about her problems. It was kind of awkward because there were still plenty of people around, but she managed to give me the quick version. Later, she would describe things in more detail.
Barbara and her son had only moved to Baker a few months earlier. She had a Master's degree in Library Science. The county commissioners had wanted to bring in a professional to upgrade the library. When Barbara first got here, she felt she had hit the jackpot. She was in charge of a beautiful, well financed, and well-supplied library in a community that obviously was eager to support it. She liked her job, her staff, and the community.
However, it wasn't long before things started falling apart. I'm not sure what started it, and I doubt if she does either: It might have been the first time she shook hands with a Ross and felt something slippery, it might have been when someone came into the library and asked for information on Ross, incinerators, and PCBs, or it might have been the attitude of the county planner, Mike Madler, and his economic development friends. Whatever it was, Barbara was soon collecting all the information she could on Ross. It was her job, after all.
What she found alarmed her. She collected a thick pile of inspection reports on Ross from the Washington Ecology Department that showed a shocking disregard for the environment and the law. She also collected a thick pile of scientific papers on incinerators, PCBs, and dioxin that indicated that, even under the best of circumstances, incinerating PCBs seriously threatened the environment. And she started talking to people on the phone--the Washington Ecology inspectors, the activists in Missoula that had run Ross out, and environmental organizations around Montana. Every bit of information that she collected made all the rest seem worse. And she had a lot of it.
One of the first things she did was take it to the county planner, Mike Madler. His response surprised her. He was not grateful, and, scarcely concealing his irritation, he assured her that he had checked it all out and she was worrying about nothing. A county delegation, including him and the county sanitarian, had toured the Ross plant in Chehalis, Washington. It looked good him. Ross wasn't that bad, he told her, just a victim of bad press and overzealous environmentalists. And the community needed the investment and the jobs. She should quit rocking the boat, he argued.
Barbara didn't. She felt she had a professional obligation to give people accurate information, especially if they were asking for it. In response to the information that she was distributing, Madler prepared his own information packet on Ross. It talked about Ross's record and how that the Fallon County Economic Corporation, the group that had invited Ross to Baker, had hired a Western Montana consultant to check on Ross. When she saw it, Barbara was not reassured. Many things in it contradicted sources that she felt were more reliable. Besides that, the consultant asked to remain anonymous, a warning bell to Barbara. The report that Madler gave her also had an unprofessional appearance to it. "Chehalis," the city in Washington where the Ross plant was located, was misspelled and the whole report had a sloppy and unprofessional look to it.
Suspecting that the people of Fallon County were being conned, Barbara moved from passively distributing information to those who asked for it to actively giving it out. She, Rory Ketterling, and Kristi Brum formed Eastern Montanans Against Ross. They prepared a fact sheet on Ross and started handing it out, along with some little orange signs with "Ross" slashed out for people to put in their windows. Soon little orange signs were popping up all over Baker. Barbara also set up a small educational display in the library on Ross and incineration. It listed pro and con arguments, including the information packet that the county planner had developed.
This, to put it mildly, did not go over well with the group of people who had invited Ross to Fallon County. Barbara became the focus of much gossip, which swept through Baker like an avalanche. Some said she was an undercover agent from the Sierra Club sent to Baker to destroy Ross and the economic development groups. Others said that she was using her position as librarian to distribute environmental propaganda. The county planner claimed she had broken into his office and had stolen a file on the Ross family. Bernie Heiser, the owner of a bar on Main Street, distributed his own "fact sheet" on Barbara, which claimed that she was violating the rights of the community by opposing Ross. She had set friend against friend, poisoned people's minds with lies and false accusations, and was tearing the community apart, according to Heiser. Truly, a modern day witch.
Late one night, Barbara got an anonymous caller who told her that she was "digging her own grave." Rory Ketterling got a similar call. To sleep at night, Barbara started unplugging her phone. But that didn't help her during the day. Then, she had to cope with angry glares, endless minor confrontations, and the nagging certainty that people were saying awful things about her behind her back. However, soon enough they grew bold enough to say them to her face, in public.
Barbara was hired by the Library Board, a committee appointed by the commissioners to supervise the library. At the end of a six-week trial period, the board was set to decide whether they should permanently hire her. As is customary in Montana on issues of any public interest, they invited comment from the public in a public hearing. This time, the board got a lot of it, all of it ugly. The room where they held the hearing was packed full of angry and vindictive people. One after another they got up to denounce Barbara. It was awful. Yet strangely, no one said that she was a bad librarian. They were attacking her for her politics.
Much was made of the small educational display she had set up in the library. Yet that was balanced and factual, and even the county planner had participated in setting it up. Libraries, as Barbara pointed out to me, play an important role in a democracy. A democracy can work well only if good libraries are around to provide information freely to everyone. If information is restricted at a library, censored because someone fears it, then the public as a whole will be making decisions based on information that a minority has manipulated. Control information and you control policy, intimidate librarians and you threaten democracy. Gene Huntley was one of the few who got up at this meeting and spoke for Barbara. He argued that dismissing Barbara because of her politics would be violating her civil rights.
The Library Board had earlier given Barbara a strong review of her work as librarian. She had made a favorable impression on the members, and the board was inclined to keep her. However, the members were disturbed by the intense hatred she had stirred up in the community. Instead of hiring her permanently, the board extended her probationary period. The board had stood behind her, refusing to give into the mob and fire her, but she would have to go through this all again later.
That was where Barbara was at when I talked to her that night, her job hanging in the balance. I
understood then that I was talking to a person of rare courage. I told her that she had my support
and my sympathy, but I knew they were just words. I went home wishing that there were more I
could do.
We, the Citizens For The Health Of Our Children, would like to begin by saying that we respect the intentions and appreciate the efforts of those who have been trying to revitalize the economy of Fallon County. We agree with them that something is seriously wrong with the economy of our community. We have seen all too many of our friends and neighbors lose their hopes and dreams in a drizzle of bank foreclosures, bankruptcies, and unemployment notices. Something does need to be done if our community is to have a future.
Nevertheless, it needs to be done carefully, thoughtfully, and in full appreciation of all the consequences. Desperation sometimes breeds carelessness, blindness, and wishful thinking.
We formed Citizens For The Health Of Our Children to investigate and report on the consequences of inviting Ross Electric into our community. After careful and extensive investigation, we have concluded that it is a very bad idea to allow Ross Electric to set up anywhere, let alone here.
Not only is there considerable risk from the hazardous chemicals that Ross Electric would bring in and incinerate, even under the best of circumstances, but Ross Electric has, by its record, proven itself unusually irresponsible. It has neglected important safety procedures, thwarted regulatory efforts, ignored legal injunctions, and deceived the public.
Besides that, we have unanswered doubts about Ross Electric's willingness and ability to assume liability for any of damages it might cause here.
For all of these reasons, we believe that the Fallon County Commissioners should quickly move to prevent Ross Electric from setting up here. They have the power to do this--and the responsibility. Since they are decidedly reluctant to do this, we encourage the public to write them letters, call them, and go in and talk to them. Perhaps they will change their minds if they know that people don't want Ross Electric here.
We have tried very hard to make sure that the information we are presenting to the public in this
newsletter is fair, accurate, and responsible. But, being human, we know we might have made
some mistakes. If we have, we would like to know about it so that we can correct them. We are
hoping to put out other newsletters. So, if anyone has any corrections, critiques, or comments,
we would like to hear them.
Opening Editorial in the first issue of the O'Fallon Fact Finder
Not long after that meeting, one night when Gene and his wife came out to the ranch one night for dinner at my parent's house, I told Gene that I wanted to be involved. Amused, pretending that he had to consider it, he paused and said, "sure, I suppose we can find something for you to do." The group met at Gene's office in Baker weekly.
I rode in with my uncle the first time in his Volvo. "Lock the doors," he said when he pulled up at Gene's office, pulling the keys.
"Lock the doors?" I asked, surprised. No one ever locks their doors or pulls the keys in Fallon County. At least I never did. It was risky and a hassle. Seldom used, they could stick, leaving you locked out.
My uncle insisted, "Lock the doors. I don't want to them open, not here in front of Gene's office." Suddenly, this wasn't the community I grew up in anymore. My uncle locking his doors. But he must have his reasons. Silently, I complied.
Gene, Barbara, Glen, Louis, Rory, my uncle, and I were there that night, the hard core that usually showed up over the months ahead. Others, would come and go. Sometimes Gene's conference room would be packed to overflowing, perhaps 15-20 people, and we would have to scramble to find chairs. Other times there would be just a few.
The newcomer, I sat silently while I watched the others take up the strands of unfinished business. They all seemed so familiar with each other, like rocks that had worn against each other for a long time, referring to issues that I knew nothing about. Each person took their turn telling the group what they had found out since the last time they met. Like reporters at a newspaper, each had their own beat that they worked regularly. Glen routinely called Kay Seiler at the Washington Ecology Department. Barbara talked often to Mike Cohan, the leader of an environmental group in Missoula, following up on leads he suggested. Jerry, my uncle, checked up on the branch of the Ross family that operated incinerators in South Dakota. And Gene was working with what then was called the Montana Department of Health and Environmental Sciences, later renamed the Department of Environmental Quality, on some legal issues.
Barbara was excited. She had found out through a long chain of phone calls that Al Ross had stirred up a lot of trouble in Kellogg, Idaho, where he had apparently dumped some transformer oil. People there had hard feelings, she reported. When she said "Ross" to someone who lived there, it was like an explosion. He hadn't heard the name Ross in years; he didn't know where they had gone. He was just glad they were gone. But now that he knew the family was settling in Montana he wanted to come all the way from Idaho and tell us how awful they were.
That was the really awesome thing about the Ross family, I decided. The rage they left people with. They would happily come a thousand miles, at their own expense, just to shit on a Ross. Barbara told him that we would like to hear what he had to say, but perhaps later.
Gene had been looking into some legal issues. The Ross family's lawyer, the county attorney, and the county sanitarian were arguing that Ross didn't have to get an air quality permit from the state because Ross wasn't disposing of waste. They were recycling materials. The state, however, disagreed, Gene found out. According to several letters that he got, one of them from Dennis Iverson, Director for the Montana Department of Health and Environmental Sciences, the materials that Ross Electric would handle were, in fact, solid waste, and would be subject to the laws requiring state and local permits, licenses, and hearings. Too bad for Ross!
Jerry had been looking into the federal law on PCB disposal. He reported that the feds could not do much, as long as Ross didn't incinerate anything that had a concentration more than 50 ppm of PCBs. (Though Gene would later find a passage in the law that wouldn't allow Ross to incinerate anything more than 2 ppm.)
The conversation shifted to the trip that Menger, Madler, one of the county commissioners, and others in the community took to go check out the Ross plant in Washington. Barbara was fuming. She felt there was something sleazy about the whole affair. Ross paying for people to go there. And then everyone coming back and reporting that there was nothing wrong with Ross.
Glen agreed with her. "Del Kenitzer said he couldn't see anything coming out of the smoke stack. I guess that should be good enough for the rest of us." Everyone snorted at that. Kenitzer, the local boss of the Montana Dakota Utilities, seemed to have generated a solid group consensus that he was nothing but a hot-headed blow hard, a pimple on the butt of humanity.
"But do we know that Ross paid for these trips?" my uncle asked. "Didn't Kenitzer say he did?"
"But then Ross reimbursed him. Remember?" Barbara replied.
Gene said that he would check it for the next meeting. "But first," he said, "we have to decide what we are going to do about putting out a newsletter. Wade, here, has graciously consented to be the editor." I don't really know how that happened, how I became the editor. Maybe it was natural choice, maybe Gene was looking for something to keep me busy. Anyway, I sort of slid into it.
"All of you have been doing the research on Ross and dioxin. I can't hope to match what you have been doing for the last month, but maybe I can edit it." No one objected to that, and so I was the editor of our newsletter. But what to call it.
Gene had some ideas. In fact he had his secretary, Karen Brown, designing different mastheads. He passed some samples around and everyone ohhhed and ahhhed. The name he proposed was The O'Fallon Fact Finder. Most of the people at the table, including me, weren't familiar with what could be done with a computer and laser printer. Underneath the mast mock columns were neatly laid out.
Gene said that we could put the articles on his computer, print them out, then run copies on his copier. "Might as well get some use out of the damn machine," he said. The other option was to have the Miles City Star print it for us. Gene gave some prices and it seemed surprisingly affordable. Then he told us he had talked to the Post Office and he had found out that if we got a bulk mailing license we could afford to send a paper to everyone in the county. It was all fitting together so easily.
"If the Fallon County Times won't do it, we'll do it ourselves, by God!" he said. After a short discussion, we agreed that having the Star print it would be best.
By then it was late. Everyone was tired. And we went home.
I was impressed. There was so much energy in the room that night. Not only that room but the whole community, as if everything was electrically charged. I was excited, invigorated. For years I had been at a loss with what to do with my life. I was drifting, rudderless, looking for something to give it meaning. I was glad Ross broke into my life. It was like a gift from heaven, a distraction from thoughts too horrible to think.
My dissertation had been a meditation on the nihilism embedded within the institutions and technology of our age. Nihilism is not, let me assure you, a thought that anyone would ever dream of advocating because it solves nothing. It's a truth you cannot escape, one that you can, at best, only hope to endure until the turning happens.
I wasn't handling it well. This is a poem that I wrote about that time:
Hopes and Dreams
lie shattered on the floor
broken bits of glass that
tear the flesh
torture the soul
For a while despair . . .
Then, timeless and dark,
the endless night rolls in
And Life becomes
A whisper echoing
in ears that do not hear
A dream that is no more
The problem with the modern age is that it has no end, no telos that gathers our efforts up and makes them serve a purpose. Everything has become a means, an instrument for the will to will, a technique for Man to secure his domination over the earth. Even, and especially, morals. Morals in our time are often rethought as customs, traditions, and, worst of all, as values. Perhaps once morals were a reflection of God's design, a calling that summoned our aspirations to celestial heights, but now they are something we will, choose, control. It isn't just the atheists, humanists, or secularists who have made morality into an instrument of the will, and thus as meaningless as it is directionless, it is first and foremost Christianity itself. Nowadays, even the most conservative Christian is committed to this newfangled thing called "Christian values." But what is it when something becomes a value? It is something willed, chosen, something done by a human being. It isn't God who is doing the valuing; it is humanity. We humans are the ones who are choosing Christian values. Willing our will as a value, one among any possible. And then even God becomes a value, one among many, a choice to be made.
Devout Christians protest that they are only doing God's willing, surrendering to his will, but in fact, when they describe their morals as values, they are the ones who are doing the willing. They are the ones who are making morals into a material that can be manipulated by human beings, something available for humanity to grab hold of and make more appropriate. Thus, by placing man where God was, they kill God. He, along with his morals becomes a value, a human value. The obsessive concern many Christians express for teaching children Christian values betrays a secret anxiety, a subtle nihilism in their thought, that quietly shows that they know well enough the danger in choosing values. Children could value anything, since there is no direction within the will willing its will, and so they must be made to value rightly.
All of this talk about Christian values is a very modern invention, despite some proponents' belief that it is all just part of that "old time religion," if not based on a literal reading of the Bible. The Church founders, and all the ancient theologians like Augustine, never spoke of Christian values. Morality and ethics yes, values, no. Only in modern experience has anyone ever found in the Bible their "values." If in the Beginning God created man, modern religion has found it convenient to return the favor by "valuing" God. As if, were it not for man, God would not be valuable. Though it is not immediately apparent that there is a connection, this development of human valuing is coincident with the development of modern technology. The way we read the Bible, how we interpret the Word, governs the world we build.
According to Heidegger, modern technology is a temporally situated way of revealing things that captures everything--God's majesty, all the earth, and even Man himself--and makes it into an object of Man's will. Everything, even the Bible, becomes a means for Man to secure his will. That is the telos, the great cause, of our age--ever greater power for Man. But the problem is that there is no end to it, no cause at which the willing stops. Like a dog chasing its tail, the modern age makes everything into a means for something else. The only thing we end up doing anything for is more power for Man. Power for the sake of power. And the tragedy is that so many cannot understand this. Our age has only grudgingly blessed some with the possibility of seeing beyond it, to dream of a return of the gods, of a cause before which willing would stop willing and call the world to its care.
These were the thoughts that I was thinking when Ross came to town. I will forever be grateful to the Ross family for taking me away from them. An opponent can be one of life's greatest blessings. They make you care about something, make things matter. Ross was an especially valuable opponent for me because nothing seemed to matter to them, not the land, the air, or the water, not truth, not the health of their neighbors or even the health of their own children. Because of their nihilism, their careless disregard for life, I found out that I did have things to care for.
An amazing discovery. The mystics say that you only get in life what you truly need, the
challenge to your identity that will make you grow. I wanted a job, I wanted to be published, I
wanted fame, and I wanted money and lots of friends. Instead, I got Ross. A corporate outlaw.
Who says that the world happens without meaning, purpose, or mission?
Spring continued. Mostly, I worked in the fields, but whenever I could I stole time to work on the Fact Finder. Slowly articles would come in. I would type them into my computer, edit them, and then send back to the authors for final approval. I was surprised at how much time it took, but my family didn't object to my absences from the field. My uncle said that what I was doing for the Fact Finder was more important.
Meanwhile, Gene was appealing a case to the U.S. Supreme Court. It had been working its way through the appeals system for at least a decade. Gene didn't lose very often, and when he did, he appealed, and appealed, and appealed until there was no where left to go. He wasn't a graceful loser. I remember once when I was a kid in grade school, Gene lost several cases in a row. In a row! It was a black time. He was ugly and depressed. No one wanted be around him. I remember my father teasing him about it and getting a stony glare. I can't remember whether he went voluntarily or whether his family and friends banished him, but he went off by himself on a hunting trip in the mountains. Something must have happened up on the mountain top because when he came back he didn't lose anymore.
He did whatever it took to win. Once, when a judge issued some rulings that he didn't like he got the judge thrown off the bench. He had refused to listen to Gene's arguments, and Gene wasn't going to have it. When another judge did the same thing, Gene got him thrown off the bench too. He was the only lawyer in Montana who ever did that. As a result, judges paid close attention to his arguments. He had a body count.
Gene did not attend our meetings for a couple of weeks while he was working on his brief for the Supreme Court. We would still meet in his conference room, but he would be off working somewhere else. Finally, one night in the middle of April he came into the conference room and said, "Hey, everybody look at this." He proudly plopped a book down on the table and opened it in the middle, clicking his tongue and gesturing his arms outward as if he were performing magic. Every page stayed exactly where it was. To emphasize the magic, perhaps because we were a little slow to appreciate its enormity, he closed it and did it again, and again every page stayed where it was. Then he did the same thing with another, thicker, book. "Isn't that amazing? You don't know how hard it was to find a binding that would do that," he said. Then, he explained that the books were his Supreme Court brief. He had to print something like forty of them, and they had to meet very exacting standards--size, color, paper quality, binding. The briefs had to look right on the self. Everything went OK except the binding. Gene said that he looked everywhere to find someone who could do it the way the Supreme Court wanted it. Finally he found someone. Gene was happy.
Now he was ready to go after Ross.
He told us that he had been interviewing people about the trips Ross had paid for back to Washington. One of the first people he talked to on the phone was Richard Menger, the county sanitarian who would supervise Ross Electric's compliance for the county. When Gene interviewed him on March 20, 1992 Menger said that he had made a trip to Seattle "about 3 weeks ago, leaving on a Friday afternoon and returning on a Sunday night." He said that bills for the trip had been turned into Del Kenitzer and that Mike Madler had planned for the trip. He said he hadn't made any claim to the county, as sanitarian, for making the trip, but he said he didn't know who paid for the trip. He added, however, that it wouldn't be "atypical" for the industry to pay for such a trip.
When asked, Menger also said that Robin Gundlach, the sheriff's daughter, had accompanied him on the trip and he volunteered that she went with him to write an article for the Fallon County Times. (Robin Gundlach, who later married Menger, never wrote an article on Ross.) Apparently Menger didn't like the drift of the conversation, and he hung up on Gene. A bemused expression on his face, Gene raised his hand and pretended to hang up the phone.
Gene also talked to Del Kenitzer, the president of the Fallon County Development Corporation, the group that had invited Ross to town. Kenitzer told Gene that he'd gone with a group of people from people to Seattle, Washington. The group included, among others, Mike Madler, the county planner. He told Gene that Richard Menger, the county sanitarian, had gone to Seattle later. Kenitzer said that he had paid all the expenses of the group personally, that the airline tickets costed $334 each, round trip, and that Ross Electric reimbursed him for these expenses, but, Kenitzer complained, he didn't "get it all back." However, Kenitzer apparently didn't like the direction the conversation was going either, and before the interview was completed, he hung up the phone. Again with a bemused smile on his face Gene held up his hand and pretended like he was hanging up a phone.
So he tried the county planner, Mike Madler. Perhaps Kenitzer or Menger had briefed Madler on what Gene was up to because Madler simply refused to answer any questions at all about the trip. He, too, hung up the phone in Gene's ear. Again, a bemused smile on his face, Gene pretended to hang up a phone.
Since the word was out on him, he went to see Nancy Schillinger, the editor of The Fallon County Times in person. In contrast to the defiance of the others, she was less combative. Gene said she seemed guilty. She told Gene that she had gone to Seattle and that either Ross Electric or the Fallon County Development Corporation paid for the airline ticket. She said the hotel room was paid for by Ross Electric, but later said that she wasn't sure who "set it up." Asked why she accepted a gift from someone she was doing a story on, she told Gene, "the newspaper can't afford to send me anywhere." Then added, guilt in her voice, "nobody told me what to say."
"Here is the headline for the story": I said. "Bought and paid for."
"God no," Gene said, pretending horror.
"How are these people supposed to be neutral observers if Ross paid for the tickets?" I asked. "They make this trip to Chehalis, courtesy of Ross, and then we are supposed to believe them when they tell us everything is fine? What would they say if the Sierra Club paid for us to go to Washington, gave us a guided tour, and lectured us on the dangers of dioxin and PCBs, and we came back home and said that Ross was awful? They would say that we were duped by environmental propaganda!"
Everyone seemed to agree with me. How could we trust the sanitarian to protect our health after he had so carelessly allowed at least the appearance of impropriety? A year or so earlier, I was a temporary Assistant Professor at New Mexico State University. One night while I was there, I went to a forum on journalistic ethics. Several people on the panel talked about the ethics of accepting gifts from someone you were doing a story on. Basically, it was forbidden, though perhaps a journalist could be forgiven, an editor from a local newspaper said, if they accepted a basket of cookies from a little old lady for doing a story on her garden club. There was no need to offend her by refusing her gift. But other than that, it was wrong. No expense paid trips to do the story, no booze, no food, and certainly no money. The only exception was in a war. To get to the story in wartime, a journalist would often have to hitch a ride on a military helicopter or plane. Other than that, either the journalist or the organization they were working for had to pay. Gifts from those they were doing the story on compromised the integrity of the story, even if they were sure it didn't.
I also remembered from that panel some discussion about a landmark case where a sanitarian accepted a fare from the businesses he regulated to go to a convention to receive an award for being an outstanding sanitarian. When the sanitarian returned home, he was fired. He sued, and the court upheld his dismissal. This was an excellent case, I remember hearing that night, because it was so extreme. No evidence was offered that the sanitarian failed to perform his duties properly. Indeed, he was getting an award for being an outstanding sanitarian. All he did was accept the gift, not even knowing who had contributed how much to it. And that was sufficient to fire him. Ever since then, I was told, this case has been used to set the standard for journalistic integrity.
When I said this, Gene went back into his library. When he came back, he had a book on Montana law. "Look's like Wade is right," he said, peering into the book. "The law is really quite clear on this."
There are times when you wish you weren't right. Years have passed, and I still fantasize about how easy things would have been if I had kept quiet, and Gene had not checked the law. Sometimes it is the smallest of efforts, the most innocent of desires, that sets off the domino of events. The group was looking for leverage to get rid of Ross. Without thinking about the consequences, without even imagining that there would be any, I offered what I knew. And nothing has been the same ever since.
The first issue of the "O'Fallon Fact Finder hit the community like a slap in the face. Everyone read it and took a position on it. Gossip about what we were doing swirled through the community like a storm. The Buffalo Commons group, met hurriedly out at the local radio station, where they often held their meetings. What we did deeply angered some people. We were tearing apart their carefully laid plans for economic development. When I walked down the street, I caught people doing double takes. Some pointed at me across the parking lot. Before I was invisible, now everyone wanted to know about me, the editor of that newspaper. Running into people was like playing Russian Roulette. Some would greet me in unusually friendly terms, others would shun me, as if I had AIDS, and others would glare angrily at me. I didn't know what to expect. Most of the time I didn't know who any of these people were. I had never talked to them, worked with them, or heard anything about them. But they knew me.
Soon, the only people I wanted to be around were those I knew well. And invariably, I was glad when I went home and wasn't around anyone. I had an escape, the isolation of our ranch and my earth-sheltered house. However, Barbara and Gene and some of the others weren't so lucky. They had to play this game of Russian Roulette with people all day, every day. It was exhausting, wondering what people were thinking about you. You knew that they were, but you didn't know whether they were thinking good or bad thoughts, whether they were keeping their opinions secret or talking about you behind your back.
When I first met Barbara Weiss, the county librarian, she exuded a sense of confidence, an aura of security and conviction. However, as the weeks wore on, then the months, she lost that. She became increasingly nervous, anxious, and insecure. The gossip was wearing her down. Sometimes she would lash out at me angrily, as if transferring the anger she couldn't safely express to those who had caused it to me. She told me she was having problems sleeping at night. Eventually, she even went to the doctor and demanded a sleeping pill that would put her out for just a night.
Gene handled it differently. I remember meeting him one afternoon outside his office before one of our meetings. As we walked across the street, a pack of high school boys in a pickup drove by. They shouted "Fuck-you," "assholes," and "why don't you leave?" at us, and gave us the finger. I was frightened. I looked at Gene and he just ignored them, but in a curious way. He didn't react, he didn't look at them, he didn't comment. His face was blank.
There is a difference between ignoring something too contemptible to be acknowledged and repressing it from consciousness. When I looked at Gene, and saw his face blank, I wondered which he was doing. For a moment, his face scared me more than the boys in the pickup.
Life was not easy for any of us, but we weren't making it easy for those we were opposing either.
For every action, the physicists tell us, there is an equal and opposite reaction. That is physics,
but it might as well be for politics and gossip. You cause trouble and you get it back. This is the
editorial that we summed up our first newsletter with:
In Closing . . .
We believe that it is very clear Ross Electric should not be allowed to come here, or go anywhere else. The process Ross Electric is using is simply too dangerous and Ross Electric is simply too irresponsible.
We call on the County Commissioners to prevent Ross Electric from coming in. We would like to meet with the full board of Commissioners in an open public meeting and present all of our findings. We are concerned that the risks with having Ross Electric here are not fully appreciated by the County Commissioners, and we would very much like the opportunity to present our case to them.
We also call on all those who have received gifts from Ross Electric to promptly return them. Anyone who has a public trust for presenting accurate information and investigating threats to the public's health and well being should not allow their credibility to be damaged by accepting gifts of such significance from the people and corporations they are looking into.
It is also possible, in the case of county employees, that laws were broken. We call upon Denzil Young, the District Attorney, to investigate and take appropriate action.
And finally, we call upon the public to not let Ross Electric move in. In spite of the moratorium
and various national and State laws, Ross Electric may still be able to come here and begin
processing deadly chemicals--unless there is a great deal of public outcry. You are needed to
keep Ross Electric out.
We made a lot of demands, and we would get an answer back, though not exactly what we imagined or hoped for. We did ask for money and we were gratified at the amount that came in. We had plenty to put out several more newsletters. But nothing else went well.
One night, Barbara brought in some documents on Ross. She was quite pleased with herself, and
somewhat secretive. She wouldn't tell the group how she came across the documents, though she
had told Gene in private. The documents were quite incriminating. The first was a fax from
someone who claimed to know all about Ross. It was addressed "To Whom May It Concern,"
and confirmed all our worst fears about Ross. It had a phone number and a name to call. The
other had an EPA letterhead, described itself as an "INTERNAL MEMO," and categorized itself
as "CONFIDENTIAL." Addressed to a "Jim," it went this way:
"It appears that the information you received is valid. I have investigated the claims made by the local group from Gerlach against Ross Industries, Inc. It is apparent that there has been some intentional polluting in an isolate area East of Gerlach. A transformer scrapping firm from Washington state has purchased a 120 acre plot and is apparently disposing of PCB (?) contaminated oil on site. They have no permits to carry on business in Nevada and are working under the guise of a recreational retreat. The owner of the property is a G. Ross. A full composite of the company will be forthcoming in the next week.
I am concerned that this may be more than we can handle through our office. I would feel much
better about calling the State Police or better yet the FBI. As you look at the composite you will
become aware that we are not dealing with your typical small-time litter-bugs. We had better do
this by the book and take some precautions.
The letter was signed by Robert Ingman, Special Investigations. A enigmatic handwritten note on the memo said, "Ingman, died in 1912 from an overdose of deceit."
The initial reaction in the room was amazement, followed by jubilation. We had Ross now. But then, as we thought about it, the documents had a strange, twisted, almost pathological, character to them. Too good to be true. "How do we know we can trust the person who sent these things?" my uncle asked. "Is there any evidence that he has access to classified government information? And what a kind of person in a position of trust on an ongoing investigation would leak confidential information?" Barbara said she had no way of knowing. She said that we were going to have to find out.
Gene was more skeptical. "The whole thing has an odor of fraud about it." This set him off on a reminiscence about a trial where he was set up. As Gene talked, I watched Barbara. She was lost in a trail of unhappy thoughts that started when Gene said "fraud." Then, as others talked, she cringed as if someone had hit her.
"My job, they are going after my job," she said desperately, more to herself than anyone else. I was puzzled at what she said. I would have asked, so would others, but her mannerism suggested she didn't want to talk about it. She looked afraid, lonely, angry, and humiliated all at once.
Gene checked everything out. The EPA disowned the memo. It was a fraud. The phone number in the first letter belonged to a confederate of the county planner's. Barbara had been set up, the target of a "sting" operation, as her enemies in the courthouse were telling everyone the next day. She had, they said, interfered in an investigation by the sheriff, copying documents she wasn't authorized to look at, and then, like the snoopy busybody they believed she was, ran to Gene with them. It sounded like a good case for dismissing Barbara, but this, as Paul Harvey would say, is the rest of the story.
The phoney faxes were left out in the open on a table by a fax machine everyone in the courthouse used. (The library in Fallon County was connected to the courthouse.) The faxes had only a cover sheet on them, with the "Subject" listed as "RE." For several days, Barbara ignored it, but then she started wondering if "RE" referred to Ross Electric. Casually, without thinking she was looking at anything that was important because it was left out in the open for days, apparently ignored by everyone, she looked underneath the sheet. Of course, when she found out it was about Ross, she couldn't resist reading it. Since they addressed the letter underneath "To Whom it May Concern," she copied it.
That was it. She didn't break into the Sheriff's office, steal his mail, or anything like that. She just copied some faxes that had been left for days on a table to which almost everyone in the courthouse had access. Hardly a big deal, but her enemies made it into one. They put the word out that she was a threat to courthouse security, a lawbreaker that couldn't be trusted, and, by implication, had be dismissed. The gossip about her swirled through the community like never before. The tone that her antagonists used, even when they talked to me about it later trying to convince me that they were reasonable people, was amazingly derisive, contemptuous, and hateful. Sort of like she was a bad little girl--immature, irresponsible, deceitful--but with worse consequences: A viciously destructive busybody, willing to spy, break the law, foment disorder, and lie in order disrupt their dreams of economic development.
Ironically, however, it is a crime to fabricate government documents without authorization, as Gene pointed out. As it should be. Think about what it means to fabricate an EPA document. By putting lies on a federal government letterhead they become more authoritative, more believable, more effective as an instrument of fraud. When people read government documents, they expect them to be truthful--at least those who aren't hopelessly cynical do--and much harm can be done to someone's reputation, career, or business if they aren't. That's why fabricating government documents is illegal.
Because the sting operation looked a lot more like harassment and a violation of Barbara's civil rights than a legitimate law enforcement effort, Gene felt that Barbara had a good case against the county and the people who were trying to intimidate her into silence. Because he represented the county in other lawsuits, he couldn't take hers--that would be a conflict of interest. Nevertheless, he did help her get another lawyer, Grant Parker, who took her case with enthusiasm.
A short time after our first issue of the O'Fallon Fact Finder was out, the county commissioners
put a letter by Denzil Young, county attorney, in the June 25, 1992 issue of the Fallon County
Times. It was a response to our demand that the county attorney investigate whether various
county officials accepted gifts. Unsurprisingly, the county attorney decided that no gifts were
given to county officials. He wrote:
It is my opinion as County Attorney that the reimbursement of some of these traveling expenses
and payment for lodging and meals in certain instances did not constitute a 'pecuniary gain' as
contemplated in any statutes of the State of Montana. The trip was not for the benefit of any of
these individuals. There is no law which says these individuals are prohibited from enjoying a
business trip . . .
In case that wasn't pointed enough, the county attorney went on to add:
As to the 'Full Disclosure Time' and the demand for an investigation made by authors Gene
Huntley and Louis Jensen (Another mistake by Denzil. Louis Jensen didn't write the article
demanding an investigation; I did, as editor for the whole group.), the inquiries which I have
made lead to the conclusion that those accusations are based entirely on speculation, they are
totally without factual support in my opinion. The fact that the Development Corporation
organized the visit to Chehalis, Washington, and offered to pay the travelers' expenses but in fact
Ross Electric picked up some of these costs--in my opinion this in no way justifies criticism of the
several persons who took this trip.
When I read the letter in the Fallon County Times, I was furious--the phrases "based entirely on
speculation" and "without factual support" were as ridiculous as they were insulting. Denzil,
himself, had concluded that Ross had paid for at least part of the expenses, and why that wasn't a
"pecuniary benefit" escaped me. When I talked to Gene, he was furious too. Both of us had
been ready to let the issue rest after we had made our point. Instead, the county attorney insulted
our intelligence and denounced us for making unfounded accusations. Now, neither of us could
ignore the issue.
Make a tree sound and its fruit will be sound; make a tree rotten and its fruit will be rotten. For the tree can be told by its fruit. Brood of vipers, how can your speech be good when you are evil? For a man's words flow out of what fills his heart. A good man draws good things from his store of goodness; a bad man draws bad things from his store of badness. So I tell you this, that for every unfounded word men utter they will answer on Judgement day, since it is by your words you will be acquitted, and by your words condemned.
Matthew 12:33-37
One of the things I liked best about going to the weekly meetings on Ross was the gossip. It was deliciously vicious and wicked. The stories I heard! The county attorney, the county planner, the county commissioners, the county sanitarian, the members of the Buffalo Commons, and, of course, the Ross family all took their turns as truant guests of dishonor at our table. Meanwhile, I'm sure, across town, in the radio station and the courthouse, each member of our group took their turns as truant guests of dishonor around a similar table. It would have only been fair. Yet I don't have a clue what they said there about me, though I wish I knew. (If only for the purposes of science.) I have so few faults I'm sure it couldn't have been much.
But I want to tell you, my reader, did we have dirt! Barbara, who was new to our community, was often left open-mouthed. "No, that can't be true! It's just too much!" But no, heads would nod in unison, everyone has heard it. It has to be true. Corruption, petty and felony theft, professional negligence, adultery, wife and child beating, voyeurism--you name it, one of our opponents had done it.
One of my favorite stories was about the county attorney, Denzil Young. Years ago, the story went, Baker had a Peeping Tom. Someone would look up and see a face outside their bedroom window. They would call the police, but, strangely, instead of quietly pursuing the intruder like police departments the world over would do, ours set off the town siren. It would wail and the Peeping Tom would take off running. Some said the law was worried about who they would catch if they showed up unannounced. One report had it that a woman pulled back the drapes and looked the county attorney in the eye, inches away. Another report had it that an enraged husband gave chase, but the Peeping Tom, wearing jogging clothes and running shoes, easily outran him. This further implicated Denzil, who was a familiar figure jogging along Baker's streets--tall, bronzed, half naked, and very well toned. Nobody could out run him.
"Gossip," Denzil once snorted when I brought another rumor up, "I never pay any attention to it." He added as an after thought, "Once, a story was going around that I was dead." Fair enough. We do know that stories were circulating about Barbara that were not true. I have heard stories about Gene that were not true as well. And I have heard more than a few stories about my family that I know were not true. Nevertheless, I suspect the worst of Denzil being a Peeping Tom. He is a Republican--a Republican prosecutor, nonetheless. And after Ken Star, we all know that Republican prosecutors have an inordinate interest in other people's sex lives. They have to know to make sure that others are managing them properly. When I was growing up, the Republicans in my community all made the facts of life terribly confusing. The way they talked, it was like they reproduced without having sex. The stork, immaculate conception, artificial insemination--something like that. Babies just sort of appeared. Probably as a rebellion against Republican supervision of their sex lives, my High School class had to be summoned into the school auditorium and lectured about sexually transmitted diseases when I was a Senior. Turned out our high school had the highest VD rate in the state then.
Given that sex was a forbidden pleasure, I suppose the county attorney could have been curious. How did those others, who weren't so pure, do it? (Montana, by the way, does have a rather kinky sodomy law. Maybe the prosecutor was just performing his duty . . .) If Denzil Young wants to deny that he was the Peeping Tom, as I am sure he will (Republicans would rather die than admit prurient interest), I won't assert it as fact, only that I heard it presented as fact--more than once. Surely everyone will understand the difference. This is gossip we are talking about. Sometimes it is true, other times it is a bit more creative . . .
In one of the first issues of the O'Fallon Fact Finder, I made the mistake as editor of asking people to send in their comments. I wanted to have some idea of what they were thinking, more importantly, of how they were gossiping about us. I should have known better. "Ask and you shall receive," the Bible says, and few of our opponents were inclined to deny us a piece of their minds. We got about 60 letters, about half supporting, the other half opposing. The opposing half went pretty much like this:
One woman wrote to me saying: "(T)he poison you are spreading in this community with your actions and attitudes is way more cancerous than the pollutants of Ross Electric. This community can certainly do without you too if you will not change your attitudes."
Several other people issued us a similar invitation to leave: "If you don't like our community with Ross Electric in it, I'm sure that you could find another place to live in--where you can stir something else up."
Another wrote, identifying the agent of dis/ease in the community, "Your big issue on those "free gifts" is sick. Who cares? I'd probably accept money to go check them out too." This letter continued, " . . . (T)hey got into this very innocently, and YOU'VE exploded it into something that none of us like. YOU have turned this county into a nut shell. YOU have caused the problems. YOU may have followers, but I wouldn't want to be seen with YOU. YOU are a bunch of radicals. YOU talk about keeping an open mind, but YOU only have a one track mind."
One person wrote, "I am for Ross Electric. If you are against it, you better stop and think! I am tired of hearing your mudslinging. Many doors have closed already. Maybe you want Baker to go down the drain or be a ghost town."
And finally another wrote: "I have tried to be very open minded on this issue. BUT for the most part most of the people against Ross Electric have made a total ASS out of yourselves. It seems OK for you people to voice your opinion but it is not for people for Ross. I've read your papers and you make it sound like you are being threatened with your life or your jobs. Bull! Who has been threatened?"
The accusations were as harsh as they were ridiculous. How could we possibly want our town to turn into a ghost town? How could we wish bankruptcy on anyone? And what had we done that had caused any of the economic problems in the community? We were guilty of none of these things, and yet all these people were willing to throw us out of town because they believed we were. The letters we got deeply disturbed everyone. We had no idea that many people were so angry with us. The next meeting we passed the letters around, and I remember the pain on people's faces as they read them. Everyone became quiet, withdrawn. When Barbara read the letters she looked like she wanted to curl up in a ball in the corner. It hurt a lot to know that our neighbors hated us so much they wanted us gone.
Almost invariably, the people who sent letters that were critical of us were anonymous and those who sent letters supporting us were all signed. They wanted us gone, but they weren't willing to sign their names to it, allowing us to know who they were. While they were sending us anonymous letters, they were also busy finding out who we were and what we were saying in our meetings. More than once we looked up to find the sheriff outside, parked in the middle of the street, apparently taking down our license plates. Later, when our group affiliated with the Northern Plains Resource Council, and we had a big public meeting to make it formal, the sheriff recruited one of our potential members to tape our meeting secretly. The next day, they had a transcript of our meeting available for those who weren't brave enough to attend.
After the sheriff bugged our meeting I was, indeed, in the mood for retaliation. When he came up for reelection, I wrote an open letter to the sheriff taking issue with the way that he had treated the librarian, supported Ross Electric, and spied on us. I told him that I was going to do everything I could to keep him from being reelected, if not get him prosecuted for abusing his office. The strategy worked well. Complaining that I was slandering him, the sheriff carried my letter with him everywhere he went, showing it to people to get their sympathy. Apparently, they politely agreed with him that my letter was an outrage--then they voted against him. He suffered a humiliating defeat at the polls.
Sometimes being gossiped about is a good thing. It is always a powerful thing. When I wrote my letter to the sheriff, I only gave it to a few people, but it did get around. Before the election was over, almost everyone in the county had heard of it. By being an outrage, it got more attention than any letter to the editor I have published in the Fallon County Times. (And so, a note to aspiring trouble makers: Don't be afraid of people saying bad things about you. Their condemnation is power. You can use it to get your message out. Being a focus of gossip is sometimes better than owning a printing press.)
When a county commissioner saw my letter to the sheriff, he wrote me back a letter. He was
concerned about my reputation, the harm I was doing to myself and the community, and, in a
fatherly way, wanted to gently correct me by quoting sections of the Bible and a religious
magazine. The quotations he sent me likened the tongue to a computer virus that, reproducing,
invading, and poisoning, can disrupt the complex and interdependent structures of society and
threaten everything with destruction:
. . . A virus then copies itself and sends those copies to other computers where the chain of infection is continued. If the apostle James lived today, he might compare the power of the tongue to a computer virus. Although it is tiny, it has the power to destroy the information contained in a whole network of computers. Instead, he compared it to the bit in a horse's mouth, or the rudder on a great ship. . . . Like a spark that sets a forest ablaze, so a single word can cause incredible damage. To James, the tongue was a "world of evil." Hatred, jealousy, dishonesty, and blasphemy--all can be spoken by the tongue.
Not only does the tongue defile our personalities, it has the power to destroy the successive
stages of life. Once a destructive word is spoken, consequence follows consequence and the
whole course of our lives is set ablaze. Where does the fire originate? James identified hell as
the ignition point . . . As fruit reveals the nature of the tree that produces it, so our words reveal
the nature of our hearts. Only God's Spirit can control the tongue.
To back up his point, the county commissioner went on to quote James 3:5-12 to me. I felt as if
Jerry Falwell himself was shaking his finger at me, demanding that I tame my tongue or face the
eternal wrath of a righteous God. And I was flattered by the image of my tongue having such a
powerful effect, dis/easing the whole community and disrupting its systems of power. (I could
only hope it was as true as he feared it was.) Yet I was not so sure that God favored a tame
tongue in the face of injustice and intimidation. I wrote back to him:
(W)here did these angry words come from? Were they not a reaction to a violation of the traditions of freedom and openness that this country was founded to protect? Sometimes anger and angry words are justified when they are used to protect something valuable, even when they cause harm. I feel that the rush toward economic development in this county has made some people forget that there are some things more important than money.
Peace is the ultimate good, but when rights are being violated, and peace is possible only by
silencing those who protest injustice, there is no peace and it is no virtue to be silent.
The county commissioner never responded to my letter. However, he was not the only public official that thought I was a gossip and wanted me to tame my tongue. Perhaps Denzil Young, had me, and in particular my campaign against his friend, the sheriff, in mind when he quoted these words by a former Kansas governor to a Billings Gazette reporter: "There is so much good in the worst of us, and so much bad in the rest of us, that it hardly behooves any of us to talk about the rest of us." While I do have to agree with the call to appreciate the virtues of the other expressed in this quotation, and approve of its observation of the ambiguities of moral life, somehow when this prosecutor cited it, given all the ways that he had failed to do his job, it seemed to me like something else was going on. The county attorney was moralizing against gossip only because it was having an effect, and he was feeling an erosion of support for his decisions. He was retaliating by dismissing me and my friends as gossips, which, I have to admit, is an effective counter strategy.
Because they are sometimes maliciously creative about other people's reputations, gossips have a bad standing in the community, and are routinely denounced by anyone who would have a good reputation. Gossips are trouble, we all know, and they are often used as a scapegoat to establish the identity of those who would be thought of honest, respectable, righteous, and courteous. No one wants to be a gossip--a blabbermouth, a tattletale, a chatterbox, a snoop, a busybody, a meddler, a scandalmonger. And the quickest way to discredit someone's criticism is to dismiss it as gossip. By evoking malice as their motive, they are isolated and silenced. But where does gossip end and civic duty begin? It isn't so easy to tell. Perhaps truth has something to do with it, I would certainly hope, but just as one person's freedom fighter is another's terrorist, so too one person's gossip is another's moral crusader.
The best gossips, ironically, are those we never think of as gossips. They are above it, always speaking truth, too dignified to descend to the depths of malice and revenge. There are, you see, these others out there, these sinners who fail to meet the carefully cultivated standards of all rightly thinking people. And so we must talk about them, criticized, denounced, corrected, made an example of. They are a scandal to the community, and people should know that. Being a gossip is a heavy moral burden, and a highly skilled one: It requires observation, communication skills, judgment, and a refined sense of taste. Gossip is the means by which a community legislates morality, and the gossip is nothing less than the community law giver. We may not like the practice--no one loves a moralizer--but we all participate in it. It is a communal obligation. We wouldn't be human if we didn't gossip. The key is whether we do it for good or bad, whether we censure those who truly deserve it or not.
Something holy is invoked whenever we gossip. Gossip was originally Godsip, an Anglo Saxon combination of God and sibb or race. To be a gossip was to be related through God, as in Godfather, Godmother, Godchild, though sometimes a gossip was a woman invited to attend at a birth. Attending a birth can be quite emotional, as we all know, bringing forth in succession anxiety, relief, and celebration, all of which can turn the most dignified woman into a chatterbox. More commonly, the gossip attended baptism, where they established a spiritual affinity to the child by acting as a sponsor. In contrast to the blood relations of mother, father, and so on, the gossip was related to the child by means of a sacred practice, a holy invocation. As one related to God, being a Godsip meant taking on a responsibility to guide the child, see to their spiritual growth. In other words, when the gossip gossips, they are bringing God's word to those who lack understanding, gently correcting those in need of it.
Is that a cynical laugh I hear, my reader? Shame on you! You really must have more respect for holy relationships!
A gossip spreads the gospel, then, which originated from the Old English godspell, either God's tidings or good news. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are, as the authors of the Gospel, gossips. They, along with the other apostles, spread the good news to the world. Nevertheless, we all know that gossips sometimes spread bad news--eagerly, maliciously, untruthfully, with a view to their own aggrandizement at the expense of others. Why is this?
Perhaps Nietzsche would not protest if we described him as the man who found the gossip in the Gospel. His genealogies reveal the bad news in the good news, how that Christ's teachings became the shadow of everything Christianity taught. Stop and think, my reader. Isn't it strange that the man who taught peace and love became, for many centuries, the primary justification for war--the Crusades, the Inquisition, the conquest of the New World. The man who befriended prostitutes, tax collectors, and Roman soldiers became the one in whose name heretics were burned, witch hunts were conducted, and Jews were persecuted. Someone was spreading malicious gossip. But why? According to Nietzsche, truth is a feeling of power, and to a crafty old gossip like Augustine and the other Church fathers, truth was whatever would vanquish their enemies. And they did have enemies--pagans, heretics, unrepentant sinners--who, whatever these gossips said of their loving motives, they did indeed hate. Because of their hatred for their others, the "truth" these gossips spread was infected with hatred, malice, and resentment, turning the gospel of peace into the gospel of war.
According to Nietzsche, everything--all of life, morality, metaphysics--can be reinterpreted as will to power. It comes in two forms: the power of the strong, which, because it rules, freely and without inhibition expresses itself, and the power of the weak, which, because it must submit, is frustrated and unable to express itself honestly and directly. While the strong are noble and worthy, the weak are much more interesting because they must be so much more dishonest, subtle, and poisonous. Contrary to expectations, the weak are the ones who end up governing the world, imprisoning the strong in slave morality, a bad conscience.
Nietzsche doesn't explicitly write that much about gossip, focusing on the genealogy of slave morality, but gossip is how the weak do it, bending the strong to their will, or rather to the authority of a bad conscience. According to Nietzsche, the strong are like predators, taking what they want from those too weak to resist. Forced to submit, the weak simmer with resentment and hatred, bidding their time. While they wait, they talk to each other about the strong, gossiping about those who have caused them so much pain--the lingering effect of rape, theft, murder, torture, humiliation, and slavery. Hating the strong, the weak fabricate a God, a moral code, and a metaphysics of truth that condemns the strong for what they are, for what the strong have done to them. Unable to confront the strong directly, the weak spread the word, the good news, among themselves about a God that loves their weakness and hates the strength of the strong. A God that condemns those who pillage, plunder, and rape. The meek shall inherit the earth, heaven, and God's love, while the strong will burn in hell. This is all very comforting. One day there will be justice . . .
At first, the resentful muttering of slaves is nothing to the strong. Who could ever respect it? The chatter of the defeated. However, after generations of oppression, the slave becomes wily, crafty, devious. Inhibited, intimidated, and resentful of their condition, the slave ponders their condition, developing a framework for interpreting it, conjuring up and invoking a whole complex world of punishment, justice, and morality to use against the strong whenever they inflict their joyous cruelty on the weak. Where the strong act out of nothing but a joy in life, without a regard for the feelings of others, the weak develop systems of judgment, moral principles, ethical standards. The strong may do whatever they will, but the weak are always there to judge them. Slowly, the judgment of the weak infects the strong, making them turn against themselves, the beginnings of a bad conscience. The strong are too powerful for the weak to stop directly, by the power of force. Instead, the strong must learn to contain themselves, the weak argue. Unless they contain themselves, conform to the principles of the weak, they are evil, immoral, sinners, they say. They must develop a conscience, a self that wills against itself, hates itself, would destroy itself if it could. And so, Nietzsche calls this slave morality a disease. It turns life against itself, making it say "no" to life when it should say "yes." Where once there was a joy in life, a simple self freely expressing itself, now there is a sickness, a complex soul, at war with itself.
The motive behind this massive transformation of the self is not love, as the gossips of slave morality would have it, but hatred and resentment. The weak hate what the strong are, and so they judge them, condemning them and punishing them with ostracism. Exclusion.
The herd is the greatest threat, for Nietzsche, because it is the most seductive comfort. Together, the weak affirm each other, giving each other a will to go on. Acting alone, the strong must affirm themselves. They have no one, but themselves, to draw upon. And so the strong are vulnerable to the judgment of others. When someone judges them bad, they have no one else to turn to for affirmation, no system of justice or morals to justify them. Without the power to resist, the judgment of the weak slowly infects their image of themselves, and they see themselves as the weak see them--cruel, destructive, and exploitive.
Once you use the language of a community, you are implicated in its life, its interpretation of the world--its time and place, its hierarchies, exclusions, and alterities. Language has the power to reveal and conceal, and what it reveals is the way people dwell in that land. Once they begin using the language of a community, not even the strongest of the strong has the power to resist the identities it confers. They are infected with its differences.
What gossip does most of all is draw differences, establishing what is other to the community of gossip. When a member of a community of gossip is given an identity that is other to it, to the extent that they participate in the community, they must eventually come to see themselves as the community of gossip sees them. That is the language they are using, the moral standards they are participating in. Rejecting the other, they turn against themselves.
However, it isn't just the strong that are infected with this kind of difference. As the community of gossip does it to its others, each member of the community does it to that part of its self that is like the other it is participating in excluding. Gossip is not just a way of excluding and disciplining others, it does the same for the self. If we denounce and criticize another during a gossip session, that part of the self that is anything like the other is thrown into the shadow of the soul as well, repressed and denied. Gossip about others disciplines the self as much as it does others. Eventually, over an individual's lifetime, and a civilization's history, it builds systems of justice, morality, and truth.
An ambiguous accomplishment. It makes many things possible, but it throws much of ourselves into the shadow. As a result of gossip forming our character, we have come to fear the deepest cravings within ourselves that would transgress its standards. By keeping large parts of ourselves suspect, gossip keeps us docile, loyal, and obedient, and causes us to accept as necessary and rational many aspects of our own oppression.
The "They world," as Martin Heidegger names it, is an inescapable part of the human condition.
While we experience the world as an "I," a unique being for which the world happens, we also
know that others are a part of this experience. As Heidegger writes in Being and Time:
In utilizing public means of transport and making use of information services such as the
newspaper, every Other is like the next. This Being-with-one-another dissolves one's own Dasein
completely into the kind of Being of 'the Others', in such a way, indeed, that the Others, as
distinguishable and explicit, vanish more and more. In this inconspicousness and
unascertainability, the real dictatorship of the "they" is unfolded. We take pleasure and enjoy
ourselves as they take pleasure; we read, see, and judge about literature and art as they see and
judge; likewise we shrink back from the 'great mass' as they shrink back; we find 'shocking' what
they find shocking. The "they", which is nothing definite, and which all are, though not as a
sum, prescribes the kind of Being of everydayness. (P.164)
This They world governance is a dictatorship because we must submit to it. Although we experience ourselves singularly, we do it as They would. Participating in a world of Others, their presence, even when we are most alone, bears down heavy on us. They are with us, defining how we should feel about ourselves, what we know about ourselves, and what we should feel and know about others. They expect us to see, hear, feel, and be a certain way, and so we do. The They world frames our experience of self and others. Once we start communicating with others, acknowledging them as beings in the world like ourselves, we are lost to the They world.
The They world is never merely a specific other, a parent, a friend, a lover, an enemy, it is much more vague than that, and so, much more powerful. While a specific individual may do much to give us our identity, marking us out as moral, virtuous, reliable, pure, innocent, or lacking in any one of those qualities, their interpretation of ourselves only has authority and power over us if they can invoke the They world in their judgments. We can resist the opnion of one, or even a whole group of people, but resisting the They world is much more difficult. One person may condemn us for our failings, but we only become small and ashamed of ourselves if They would concur. The judgment of the They world is beyond appeal, higher than the Supreme Court. Like God's, because it knows everything God would.
Because the They world is unassailable, beyond the control of individual or group, its judgments are inevitable, a part of what we are, what we dwell amid. People do it when they know they shouldn't, as the passage from James argued: "After all, every one of us does something wrong, over and over again; the only man who could reach perfection would be someone who never said anything wrong--he would be able to control every part of himself." But the one part of the self that cannot be controlled is the tongue: "Wild animals and birds, reptiles and fish can all be tamed by man, and often are; but nobody can tame the tongue--it is a pest that will not keep still, full of deadly poison." The tongue cannot be controlled because it is not under human control. Rather, the They world--its standards, judgments, and morals--are what sets the tongue to wagging. If a neighbor, friend, or enemy fails to live up to expectations, the tongue singles them out, and sacrifices their reputation to the They world. The tongue cannot be controlled because the thought that sets it into motion is not its own but the They world's. Someone has violated the community, transgressed against heaven and all propriety, and they must be marked out. Everyone is called to this sacred practice, this sacrifice of the self to the They world. As they do so, the shadow aspects of the self, the parts of the self that are unacceptable to the They world, festers and poisons the world with its wicked tongue.
Though a holy sacrifice, there is still something ugly and violent about it. James condemns gossip the way Nietzsche condemns what the weak did to the strong: "Among all the parts of the body, the tongue is a whole wicked world in itself: it infects the whole body; catching fire itself from hell, it sets fire to the whole wheel of creation." A poetic way of saying it. The tongue, by sacrificing the shadow aspects of the self to the They world, infects everything with judgment, condemnation, resentment, and fear. And Christianity has not been the same ever since. Where Jesus was inhumanly free of resentment, truly and deeply forgiving those who hurt him, his followers were all-too-human. They resented sacrificing their power to the They world, hated it, and got a subtle revenge for it. They sacrificed everyone to its tyranny.
Read from this perspective, the words of Matthew, quoted earlier are haunting and filled with the irony of history: "Brood of vipers, how can your speech be good when you are evil? For a man's words flow out of what fills his heart. A good man draws good things from his store of goodness; a bad man draws bad things from his store of badness. So I tell you this, that for every unfounded word men utter they will answer on Judgement day, since it is by your words you will be acquitted, and by your words condemned." An astonishingly harsh judgement against the They world!
Nietzsche said that the last Christian died on the cross because Christ was free of the resentment, the hatred, and the need for revenge that set his follower's tongues to wagging. And probably, Nietzsche appreciated most the words of Christ when he said, "many are called, but few are chosen." When we all sacrifice so much ourselves to the gossip of others, we fill ourselves with what we condemn--rage, resentment, hatred--and so, how could we ever be among the chosen? On Nietzsche's ironic reading of Christianity, it is precisely those gossips who thought they were the most holy, the most able to judge others for their sins, who failed Christ's teachings the most. They are the most full of the hatred Christ condemned. No wonder Christ preferred the company of prostitutes and tax collectors--those other to all gossip--to holy men. What matters, as both Christ and Nietzsche insisted, is what is in the heart--and the heart of all gossips is poisoned. Judge a tree by the fruit it bears. But let he who is without sin . . .
Gossip violates a person in a way that direct physical violence does not. It attacks a person's identity in society, their position among peers and friends, making them less than they were, undercutting their status, reserve, and power. Something is killed at gossip circles because something is banished to the shadow. Gossip is murder, but in a different way. Where physical attacks work on the body, gossip goes for the soul. No blood is drawn, but, as a substitute, reputations are ruined, relationships are poisoned, and careers are harmed. Whatever good people would think of themselves is taken away.
In a real way, gossip is a ritual of sacrifice, a substitute for blood. According to Rene Girard in Violence and the Sacred, "The purpose of the sacrifice is to restore harmony to the community, to reinforce the social fabric." And that is exactly what gossip does. By verbally attacking someone, the gossip forms a community, the gossip circle. The victim of the gossip circle, by taking up their place in the center, where they are metaphorically stoned, invariably embodies the characteristics most able to unify the gossip circle--some sort of deformity, abnormality, grotesque alterity. This aspect, while being a characteristic of the other, is nevertheless a part of the self. And this aspect of the self is sacrificed at the gossip circle to keep the shadow self under control. Unless it is condemned in the other's conduct, the self would express it, and that would never do. Expelling the other, the circle closes in on itself, becoming unified.
The less unity is, the more need there is for sacrifice. Girard argues that collective violence, like that of mythic times or the middle ages, is provoked when community is absent, differences are invisible, and confusion reigns. By sacrificing a victim, and involving everyone in what they all deplore, the circle of murderers establish a common identity for themselves. They suppress troubling differences within the community by revealing the enemy outside it.
Though ritual sacrifice typically originated with the sacrifice of a god or king, those typically murdered in sacrificial rituals were prisoners of war, oppressed minorities, the physically deformed, or foreigners. Though they resembled the humanity of the members of the community, and could substitute for them, they were not functioning members of the community. This was important because if the victim were a member of the community to whom various members had strong bonds, the unifying effects of the ritual risked being undone. The sacrifice might cause dissension within the community. However, if the victim can generate unanimous hatred, securing the condemnation of the shadow aspects of the self, the sacrifice will build community.
According to Girard, the founding of the state depends upon sacrifice, though originally it was not an outsider or deformed individual, but a principal leader. Reminiscent of Hobbes, who deploys violence to maintain the state, Girard believes that the violence of collectively murdering the leader formed the bonding necessary to form the state. Without this sacrifice, the members of the community would just be individuals, lost and wandering, without cause or identity. However, the collective murder unites them in unanimous hatred, giving them a common purpose.
Ironically, once the victim is identified with the founding of the community, they cannot be separated from it. They assume mythical proportions, even sometimes, Girard contends, becoming gods. The object of a collective act, they are the power that binds the community together, and so they are identical with the virtues that the community celebrates. Over time, Girard believes, the murder at the founding of the community is forgotten, and the victim becomes a founder or a god. According to Girard, Romulus was the victim of collective murder, as was Moses. Because their death was the result of a unanimous collective effort, the community tended to suppress and conceal the murder, reversing the effect that had excluded them. In the case of Moses, hardly a trace of violence remains.
Whether Girard historically right or not, we can understand the dynamic. We practice it on a
daily basis when we gather round and talk about others. The others we condemn become very
important to us, defining our relationships, our belonging in a community. We need to sacrifice
them because we need to belong. Gossip is murder, and we wouldn't be what we are without it.
After that came a false, treacherous and contemptible swine: this was shameful Israel, the wicked and disloyal who hated good and loved everything evil, who gave so much gold and silver and promises to Christians, who then poisoned several rivers and fountains that had been clear and pure so that many lost their lives; for whoever used them died suddenly. Certainly ten times one hundred thousand died from it, in country and in city. Then finally this mortal calamity was noticed.
He who sits on high and sees far, who governs and provides for everything, did not want this treachery to remain hidden; he revealed it and made it so generally known that they lost their lives and possessions. Then every Jew was destroyed, some hanged, others burned; some where drowned; others beheaded with an ax or sword. And many Christians died together with them in shame.
Guillaume de Machaut
Judgment of the King of Navarre
It is hard to have enemies, worse to lose them. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, many Americans have been adrift in a sea veiled in fog. So much of what we were was tied up in what our enemy was. If the Soviet Union was a land of totalitarian oppression, thought control, and mass extermination, ours was a land of democratic freedom, tolerance, and respect for life. If the Soviet masters manipulated the masses with propaganda and deceit, our leaders were elected and held accountable by a free press. If the Russian people knew nothing but lies and half truths, the American people were free to find truth. Perhaps much of this difference between us and them was but a projection of our shadow selves, and what we knew about ourselves we knew only because we resisted the Red threat. Now the Soviet Union is gone, and with it the secure identity we gained from our struggle with it.
While this may seem like a distant issue, it has a lot more consequences than might be assumed. Throughout the cold war, Americans made many sacrifices. The most obvious was a heavy financial commitment to supporting a large military, particularly our capability for nuclear war. Less obvious were the moral and legal sacrifices we made to secure our identity.
America was supposed to be good, humane, tolerant, and free, we told ourselves. We would never kill without cause millions and millions of people, but our enemy would, our fear assured us. And so we built the bomb. However, as we did so, we blinded ourselves to the fact that the pathological intent for genocide that we condemned in our enemy we, ourselves, possessed. We, after all, did build the bomb first--developed it, deployed it, and, worst of all, used it.
Yet possessing the bomb did not make us feel secure. Ironically, the more weapons of mass extermination we built, the more we found in our enemies an intention to exterminate us. We could not accept such genocidal intentions in ourselves, and what we were becoming, so they became our enemy's. A projection of what we were becoming, our enemy became so totally inhuman, so totalitarian and evil, that he would not hesitate to murder our entire population to further his plans for world conquest. To defend ourselves against such incredible hostility, we had to assure our enemy that we would return whatever was given us, and more.
Built to protect our dream of ourselves, the bomb made us do things we would never do otherwise. By its sheer horrifying existence, the bomb placed monstrous and implacable demands on the soul of America, twisting it into abominable shapes. To make sure our security was not threatened, the United States had to convince our enemy to believe our threats to use the bomb. To prove our resolve, we had to establish our credibility, make our enemy believe that we had murderous intent enough to use our vast arsenal of nuclear weapons. And so, we committed ourselves, our entire nation and all its resources, to the production of credibility. Everyone had to play their roles exactly. Dissidents from their roles had to be silenced, excluded, made invisible, or the whole display would be meaningless to our enemy, the Soviet Union.
Credibility was why we dropped the Bomb on Japan at the end of WW II, we now know from internal documents released under the Freedom of Information Act. Japan was already defeated, looking for a graceful way to surrender, and everyone in military intelligence knew it at the time. Nevertheless, we still dropped it because the President Truman and his advisors wanted to make credible our threat to use the bomb against the Soviet Union. We bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki not to end WW II but to win the Cold War. All those who died were scapegoats offered up as a sacrifice for a war that was not theirs. It was the same in Korea and Vietnam. Both of those wars, and so many other smaller incidents like them, were really nothing more than a display of horror for benefit of the Soviet Union's leaders. They showed our willingness to inflict pain, blood, horror, and death on our enemies and to shoulder indifferently all its moral and economic burdens. To make sacrifices, not only of ourselves, but of others.
However, too many Americans refused to make those sacrifices during the Vietnam war. They started massive antiwar protests. Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger complained at the time that the protesters were undoing everything that America was doing in Vietnam. The image of pacifism and nonviolence that the protesters presented of America to the Soviet Union dramatically undermined our credibility. So, it became necessary to sacrifice our civil rights to the need to deter our enemy. FBI agents infiltrated the antiwar movement, illegally bugging its leaders, and sabotaging its efforts to express and organize itself.
If we understand America as a place where thoughts can be freely expressed, dissent openly voiced, and then communicated to other people without any sort of control or limitation, then the bomb, our own tool of destruction, was destroying America without ever going off by forcing us to become our enemy. For the sake of the bomb's peace, dissent had to be controlled, conquered, and made invisible. This is the implacable and totalitarian necessity that the bomb imposes on any nation that would use it as an instrument of peace. An unholy force of destruction, it gathers every thought, image, or action up and manages them to protect the security of the nation. And so the bomb made America un-American.
When we built the bomb, and then submitted to its logic, we sacrificed the best part of ourselves to the worst. What madness was it that possessed us, and made us think that it could ever be otherwise? That the bomb, like an angry god, would not demand unending sacrifices? How could we have assumed such awesome authority over the fate of the earth without ceasing to be ourselves, or that such absolute power could ever become an instrument of freedom?
Perhaps we, as Americans, built the bomb because it intoxicated us with its apocalyptic splendor. Threatening the whole earth with total destruction, the bomb gave us the power of God. Before the bomb, only God had the power to destroy the earth. Now man had that power, and that meant that man had the power to judge the earth, to decide when it should end. In a real sense the death of God can be dated. It happened when the first mushroom cloud rose up over Japan. And it was America, the most pious of all the nations on earth, who killed God. Ever since that day, because of what America had made imaginable, God no longer had the exclusive power to decide the fate of the earth.
Having displaced the authority of God, we needed an enemy to justify our deicide, our murder of God, someone to acquit us of the greatest of all sins. We needed a scapegoat, a Satan to justify our crime against heaven. We did it, we convinced ourselves, because the malevolence of our enemy required it. Therefore, we were absolved. So simple, so logical, so deceitful.
As an enemy, the Soviet Union had a marvelously unifying effect on Americans. Confronted with this evil empire, we submerged our differences and offered up sacrifices to the common good. We Americans paid our taxes, supported the military, demanded patriotism of protestors, accepted limits on our freedom, and did not rebel when the FBI and various other law enforcement agencies illegally suppressed dissent. Most of all, our opposition to the Soviet Union allowed us to conceal from ourselves the horror of the sacrifices we were offering up, the shadows we were disowning. These sacrifices of the American way were balanced, we pleaded to ourselves, against the threat to our security, which, given the absolute evil of our enemy, was overwhelming.
Yet was it really? Now that it has collapsed, the Soviet Union appears more pathetic than evil. The truth is that when America struggled against the Soviet Union we were fighting our own shadow, the aspects of ourselves we denied, more than we were a foreign state. We saw in the Soviet Union only what we needed to find, an enemy worthy of our hatred, our sacrifices, and our crimes. We needed the Soviet Union to justify what we did for the same reason that mediaeval Christians needed Jews to blame for the plague. The scapegoat takes away all sin.
However, now that the Soviet Union has collapsed, who is going to take on this role? Unable to find a worthy enemy outside the United States, the right in America has begun hunting down the enemy within. If America is no longer threatened by the evil empire, it is, we are told, threatened by feminists, homosexuals, liberals, and, most relevant to this book, environmentalists. They are to blame for the lack of economic development, the collapse of the family, the deterioration in morals, and the decline of religion. Yet the threat that these movements pose to the identity of those in the right in America is not real so much as needed, imagined, projected. If these movements didn't exist to scare the right, the right would have to invent them. They are needed because a scapegoat is needed for the right to justify its hatred.
Look at the impeachment of Bill Clinton. Isn't it just a little bit strange that he would be the impeached for lying about sex? Perhaps he did lie, but which modern president hasn't lied, and about things of much more public concern than his sex life? Lyndon Johnson lied about the Gulf Tonkin, when he falsely said North Vietnam had attacked American ships, and then used this "attack" to justify deeper involvement in the Vietnam war, which cost many lives on both sides. Richard Nixon lied about a secret undeclared war in Cambodia, where without any knowledge of Congress, he ordered more bombs dropped on that small country than were dropped on all sides in World War II. And then he lied time and time again about CIA involvement in the internal affairs of foreign countries, overthrowing, for example, the democratically elected government of Chile and replacing it with a brutal tyranny. Ronald Reagan lied, or at least permitted Ollie North to lie for him, to Congress about his support of the Contras in Nicaragua when the Boland Amendment prohibited it. Against these lies, Bill Clinton's lies about his sex life amount to nothing, nothing at all. And yet of all these lies, only Bill Clinton's were sufficient to justify overturning an election. Why?
Without our old enemy, the Soviet Union, the right needs someone to blame for the problems in
America, someone who is a danger to the "American way," and can unify the public behind its
agenda. If Bill Clinton's sex life isn't quite up to the bill, others can be found. Michael S.
Berliner, the executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute at the time this was written, identifies
environmentalism as this danger on the institute's website:
The fundamental goal of environmentalists is not clean air and clean water; rather it is the demolition of technological/industrial civilization. Their goal is not the advancement of human health, human happiness, and human life; rather it is a subhuman world where "nature" is worshiped like the totem of some primitive religion.
If the good of man were the aim of environmentalists, they would embrace the industry and technology that have eradicated the diseases, plagues, pestilence, and famines that brought wholesale death and destruction prior to the Industrial Revolution. They would embrace free enterprise and technology as the only solution to the relatively minor dangers that now exist--minor compared to the risks of living in a non-technological world.
But by word and deed, they demonstrate their contempt for human life.
In a nation founded on the pioneer spirit, they have made "development" an evil word, attacking the man-made as an infringement on pristine nature. They inhibit or prohibit the development of Alaskan oil, offshore drilling, nuclear power--and every other practical form of energy. In the name of "preserving nature," they undermine our quality of life and make us dependent on madmen like Saddam Hussein. Housing, commerce, and jobs are sacrificed to spotted owls and snail darters. Medical research is sacrificed to the "rights" of mice. Logging is sacrificed to the "rights" of trees. No instance of progress which brought man out of the cave is safe from the onslaught of those "protecting" the environment from man, whom they consider a rapist and despoiler by his very essence. . . .
The guiding principle of environmentalism is self-sacrifice: the sacrifice of longer lives,
healthier lives, more prosperous lives, more enjoyable lives, i.e., the sacrifice of human lives.
But an individual is not born in servitude. He has a moral right to live his own life for his own
sake. He has no need to sacrifice it to the needs of others and certainly not to the "needs" of the
non-human. . . . To save mankind requires the wholesale rejection of environmentalism as hatred
of science, technology, progress, and human life.
Environmentalists sacrificing the lives of others, having contempt for human life, and worshiping false idols? Let's look at who is actually doing this. In Montana recently, a Republican legislature passed, and a Republican governor, Marc Racicot, signed into law a bill that allowed mining companies to release enough arsenic into state waters to give 1 in 1000 people cancer. The previous standard had been 1 in a million, but in order to assure the development of the mining industry, which was feeling much beleaguered, the Republicans let the mining companies take 1 in a thousand lives with arsenic. Montana has about 800 thousand people, so imagine 800 people, randomly selected from the state population, lined up and being execution on the steps of the Montana Capitol, and you get a sense of the enormity of what was done. But only part of it. Montana is at the very top of the nation's watershed. Water from Montana flows through many other states on its way to the ocean, and the people who drink it are making same sacrifices for the mining industry in Montana that Montanans are.
Against this kind of sacrifice, which he would presumably support, why is Berliner so intolerant of the sacrifices environmentalists would make--housing, commerce, and jobs to spotted owls and snail darters, medical research to the "rights" of mice, and logging to the "rights" of trees? If he thinks free enterprise and technology require only "relatively minor" sacrifices he is greatly misinformed about the extent of the sacrifice involved. Nevertheless, I think he knows, if unconsciously, what is involved, and that is why he is so concerned about environmentalism. If capitalism required no sacrifice, how could environmentalism ever be a threat? Who would give up so much-- "longer lives, healthier lives, more prosperous lives, more enjoyable lives"--for so little, snail darters, spotted owls, and old growth forests? How could people be seduced to make the sacrifices environmentalism proposes, unless there was something terribly compelling about it? Berliner could only make the extreme statement he does because he knows that the unity necessary to maintain the civilization of productivity is threatened, facing a legitimacy crisis, and he is seeking to sustain it by sacrificing environmentalists as scapegoats for its failings.
The right in America needs environmentalists as enemies because it is no longer sure of what it is.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, nothing fits in the proper place. Heaven and earth are
upset. Old categories of logic no longer matter because the other is no longer there to discipline
thought, keep separate what must be kept separate. Unlike most versions of feminism,
environmentalism, and postmodernism, which affirm dispersion and nonhierarchical multiplicity,
the American right needs a vigorous bipolar contrast, the threat of extreme otherness, to gather
itself together and secure the ground under its feet. Now, with the Soviet Union gone, everything
is in flux, lost in fields of complexity and chaos.
The Wise Use movement emerged in the American West in the 1980s when Westerners dependent on the use of public lands for profit--ranchers, loggers, and miners, mostly--organized to stop environmentalists from restricting their exploitation of public land. Environmentalists, they argued, were watermelons, green on the outside, red on the inside. Seeking to limit and regulate the way people used the land, environmentalists were threatening property rights. Protecting endangered species, stopping the release of toxins, and, in general, protecting the health of the biosphere meant controlling the use of resources. As advocates of the wise use of the nation's resources, the Wise Use movement contrasted itself with the "fanatical extremism" of environmentalists, who, its leaders claimed, only wanted to allow a single use of the nation's public lands--preservation of scenic wilderness.
The novel thing about the Wise Use movement was that it imitated the grassroots style of the labor, feminist, and environmental movements. Ordinary people, or so it appeared, were actively promoting ranching, timber, and mining interests, trying to protect their jobs and promote economic development. Yet in many cases, though not entirely, this was an illusion-- a false grassroots movement, astroturf financed by multinational corporations. Though People for the West, the largest Wise Use group, claims 20 thousand dues-paying members, the largest portion of its budget comes from corporations with heavy interests in mining and logging, such as Pegasus Gold, Homestake Mining, Chevron, Magma Copper, the American Mining Congress, and Stone Forest Industries. Radical right-wing organizations like Rev. Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church also have supported it and other Wise Use groups.
While the Wise Use movement has the appearance of a populist movement, and expresses the rhetoric of rights and a return to democracy, it is more like the fascism that consumed Germany and Italy after World War I. It uses hatred to generate mass support for policies that are counter to the interests the people involved. The boards of directors of Wise Use groups like People for the West are mostly representatives of large resource-extracting corporations, and the purpose of these organizations is little more than propaganda efforts on their behalf. However, instead of using media advertisements to lull people into passive acquiescence, they go out and cultivate people's fear, anger, and resentment and use them to act against their own interests. According to Jim Baca, a New Mexico state lands commissioner, the Wise Use movement has formed alliances that "don't make sense." Playing upon people's fears, such as job loss and the effect that would have on their children, it has brought together unions and companies known for anti-union activities to defeat efforts to protect the environment. "They make people believe the communists are gone, now the environmentalists are the most evil people on Earth. It's real hate-mongering, David Duke kind of stuff." Yellowstone National Park Superintendent Robert Barbee found out how virulent the hatred could get when he participated in hearings on a Greater Yellowstone "vision" document in 1991: "I was Saddam Hussein . . . a communist. One lady got up there, jaw quivering, used her time to say the Pledge of Allegiance, then looked at me and called me a Nazi."
Kenneth Stern describes what it is like to be a target of Wise Use hatred this way:
Forest service employees in Catron County (New Mexico) received orders to travel in pairs. In the spring of 1995 their colleagues across the west were encouraged to do likewise, and to keep in contact with their offices by radio. Their families--even their children--have been threatened. The Washington State Department of Ecology thought it too dangerous for its employees to drive in cars with state logos. The insignias were erased.
In Nevada, Forest Service employees reported that they were being treated like lepers. No one
would share a pew with them at church; their children were ostracized at school. In a video
store and a family-style restaurant in the eastern Oregon town of Burns are signs reading: "This
establishment doesn't serve federal employees." An area rancher whose grazing permit was not
renewed told a federal employee that "he was going to tear [another employee's] head off and
shit down his neck." He also said he would kill Forrest Cameron, the area refuge manager . . .
Cameron's family was threatened; one caller said he would toss Cameron's twelve-year-old son
down a well. Mrs. Cameron moved a hundred miles away with their four children.
This kind of violence and hatred is not mere rage. It is the expression of an ideology. The
Alliance for America, a Wise Use organization closely tied to resource extraction industries,
describes its mission on its web page this way:
Human needs come first. We value animals, but we reject the view that elevates animals rights above human needs, and plant communities above human communities.
Unlock our natural resources. Economics must inform what is environmentally feasible.
Protect private property rights. Property owners are being trampled in the name of the
environment. Congress must balance "the public interest" with the Constitutional rights of
compensation for property owners.
The purpose of Wise Use then, is to make nature available for man, and in particular to large corporations. Environmentalists have been obstructing this by calling into question the authority of man's self-given right to do with nature what he will. Economics, not ecology, must set the standard for the use of nature. Everything has value only as a human value. Disputing this means being out of balance, giving higher priority to something that should be lower. Environmentalists, according to typical Wise Use ideology, fail to balance environmental protection against economic activity. They tip the balance away from humans, toward insects, trees, and animals, ignoring the jobs they sacrifice in the process.
Montanans for Common Sense Water Laws, for example, distributed a pamphlet in a 1996 campaign against an initiative sponsored by the Northern Plains Resource Council, the Montana Environmental Information Center, and other smaller groups, which would require mines to meet Montana standards before pollutants were discharged to state waters, that showed a teeter-totter. On one side was "Economic Activity;" on the other "Environmental Protection;" and above it "Montana: The Need for Balance." The rhetorical effect of invoking the image of a balance is to appear reasonable, moderate, and thoughtful. Who, after all, can argue against balance?
But, actually, the strategy was the exact opposite. The image established a structure of alterity, a field of difference in which environmentalists were set up as the other to reason, moderation, and science. By insisting on the need for "balance," it implied that environmentalists were against it. By presenting themselves as "moderates," Wise Use cultivates a sense of victimization and danger and then legitimates hatred against environmentalists.
Wise Use deploys other similar rhetorical strategies to marginalize environmentalism. For
instance, the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise on its World Wide Web homepage,
contrasts Wise Use beliefs to environmentalists this way:
Environmentalists tend to be catastrophists, believing that any human use of the earth is "damage," and massive human use of the earth is "a catastrophe." An environmentalist motto is "We all live downstream," the viewpoint of helpless victims.
Wise users, on the other hand, tend to be cornucopians, seeing themselves as stewarding and nurturing the bountiful earth as it stewards and nurtures us. A wise use motto is "We all live upstream," the viewpoint of responsible individuals.
The difference in our sense of life is striking. Environmentalism inevitably promotes feelings of guilt for existing, feelings the eventually degenerate into dark pessimism, self-loathing, and depression.
Wise use by its very nature promotes feelings of competence to live in the world, generating curiosity, learning, and bright action toward improving the earth for the use of future generations.
The glory of the "dominant Western worldview" so scorned by environmentalists is a metaphor of
progress: the starburst, an insatiable and interminable outreach after a perpetually flying goal.
Environmentalists call humanity a cancer on the earth; wise users call us a joy.
Honest, that's what it said. I'm not making this up. This is what the organization that, more than any other, founded the Wise Use movement believes: "We all live upstream," and this is the viewpoint of "responsible individuals!" When the environmental movement argued that "we all live downstream," it was, in a neat little slogan, arguing that we had to accept responsibility for the consequences of our actions. We had to treat those who lived downstream from us, who would be drinking whatever toxins we put out, the same way that we wanted to be treated. Pretty Biblical for a bunch of pagans! Yet more than a moral injunction, the motto reflected a deep understanding of nature's economies: We always end up dealing with the environmental consequences of our actions. There is no upstream because in nature everything is tied to everything else, swirling around, returning, rippling outward in consequence after consequence. Disturb one thing and you disturb everything. And so, you can't avoid the consequences of your actions; they always return to you, if in complex ways that are impossible to anticipate.
However, the responsible thing to do, according to Wise Use ideology is to ignore these connections, this theory of environmental karma, and assume that there will be no consequences for our actions. That is the foundation of progress. Environmentalists, with their dark and gloomy meditations on consequences, are holding us back, preventing us from realizing our future. Notice the structure of alterity here: Optimism versus pessimism, freedom versus constraint, joy versus depression. Who could not, at least for a moment, be seduced by such a structure of difference? It is so comforting to dismiss the dangers raised by environmentalism. According to Wise Use theology, we are free of our past, free to do what we will, without consequence--if we could just shut those damn environmentalists up. Once we accept the dream that we all live upstream we are free of all environmental worry, able to march onward toward the future like a "starburst, an insatiable and interminable outreach after a perpetually flying goal."
Another Wise Use strategy is to isolate and then displace environmentalism by claiming that what
most environmentalists are doing is not really protecting the environment. The people who do the
polluting, that is to say, as the Alliance for America describes them, the landowners and
recreationists, the harvesters and hunters, the farmers and ranchers, the loggers and miners, the
fishermen and trappers, are the real conservationists. No kidding, the homepage of the Alliance
for America actually says that. This is their reasoning:
Without the steward, the resource is unprotected.
Without the shepherd, the flock will scatter.
Without the guardian, the ocean is at risk.
Without the caretaker, the forest will burn.
In other words, without Exxon, Pegasus Gold, Stone Container, and other companies like them,
nature would destroy itself. Nature needs man to stay healthy, specifically the kind of men that
we have already mining the ground, logging the forest, and harvesting the seas. You know--the
same group of characters that has been creating one Superfund site after another, overgrazing
public lands, over fishing the seas, and begrudging every tree in which the spotted owl needs to
nest. Nature needs them or it will become sick. After identifying itself as an organization made
up of "fishermen, farmers, loggers, miners, and others involved in resource and food production,"
the Alliance for America goes on to describe its membership this way on its homepage:
We are the stewards.
We are the shepherds.
We are the guardians.
We are the caretakers.
We are the true conservationists.
Really and truly my reader! That is how they describe themselves. And these are the moderates, the ones who are looking for "balance." Although this rhetoric is, on the face of it, absurd, it works for a certain group of people. It fortifies them, convinces them that they don't need to have a bad conscience as they go about their work, destroying nature. They are actually protecting it, and the reason that environmentalists don't appreciate what they are doing is that they are just too ignorant to understand. Mostly, the story goes, environmentalists are rich elitists who never ride the prairie, log the forest, or go into the mines--the kind of people who never get their hands dirty with real work.
Nothing threatens Wise Use as much as a search for truth and so it sets up every barrier possible to it. Science that disputes its dogmas is assumed to be "junk science." When studies come in that show that dioxin, PCBs, DDT, or something similar is a serious environmental threat, causing cancer, birth defects, or reproductive failure, the typical Wise Use strategy is to adopt the most extreme standards of scientific certainty. If the overwhelming majority of scientists agree that there is a problem, Wise Use will point to a few dissident scientists, usually paid by industry, who disagree and claim that the issue is still unresolved. The word of one scientist is taken as a refutation of the work of hundreds of others. Because of this standard of truth, it is an article of faith among many Wise Use adherents that forest fires create dioxin, PCBs are created naturally, global warming isn't happening, the ozone layer isn't being destroyed, and DDT has no harmful impacts on the environment. Although the vast majority of scientists would strongly disagree with these assertions, adherents of Wise Use insist upon them. After all, it isn't "science" unless we are absolutely certain, and it isn't certain that technology is harming the environment until allscientists agree it is. We must be as certain of these things as we are in Newton's laws or Einstein's theory of relativity. Until then, we should assume, as the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise does: "The Earth and its life are tough and resilient, not fragile and delicate."
Because of this article of faith, it must be proven beyond any possible doubt that something is harming the environment before preventive action is taken. Where environmentalists typically subscribe to the precautionary principle, the idea that something should be proven safe before it is allowed, like the FDA does with drugs, Wise Use inverts the principle and insists that something should be proven dangerous before it is prohibited. Unless this inverted principle is followed, Wise Use warns, the government will start violating private property rights.
The free use of private property is fundamental to the Wise Use movement, the key to understanding its position on virtually every issue. Anything that will limit the use of private property, like the Endangered Species Act is most commonly accused of doing, is taken as a threat. Private property rights are absolute, the essence of freedom, and environmentalism is perceived often only as a secret strategy to undermine private property rights. If the communists couldn't do it one way, they are going to do it another.
Why this paranoia over property rights? The Soviet Union has collapsed, and the notion of collective ownership with it. Not even leftists are much interested in communal ownership anymore. So why is the Wise Use movement so worried about losing their property rights? Perhaps because reality is sinking in. When people do with their property as they please, they tend to do things that harm other people and the environment. This didn't used to be apparent, especially not in America, where settlers could just move farther west if they exhausted the land where they were. However, now the consequences of using the land in a thoughtless way are starting to return to us. Environmentalists are the ones in this society who are pointing this out: Species are becoming extinct, reproductive problems are appearing in all species, diseases, like cancer, are rising. The trends are all ominous. The conclusion is that we can't do things the way we have been, we can't let people use property just as they please.
The Wise Use movement understands this probably better than the environmental movement, and it is very worried. Even if environmentalists aren't trying to eliminate private property, the justification is there in what is happening to the planet. The anxiety Wise Users have about their private property rights betrays an unconscious knowledge that the liberal experiment is dying along with the endangered species it is killing off. Every dangerous delusion, I believe, contains within itself a reflection of the truth, if only as a shadow repressed into the unconscious, and this is especially the case with the Wise Use movement. The fervor with which it protects private property betrays an unconscious and disowned understanding that unconstrained capitalism is no longer a responsible way to control resources. If the problems with maintaining private property rights weren't so great, the call to action to preserve them would not be so strong.
The mass of shock troops in the Wise Use movement who are goose stepping along with the corporate agenda unconsciously understand how absurd their positions are, but they can't admit this to themselves or others. Their identity is so caught up in the myth of America that they dare not admit the truth, and so they must disown and repress it. A movement like this is as vulnerable as it is dangerous. When you can't admit the truth to yourself, it isn't long before it grabs you by the throat and forces itself upon you. Pursed by its shadow, the Wise Use movement does not have a happy future, no matter how optimistic its leaders pretend to be.
To avoid the truth, right wing extremists have been seeking to isolate themselves from the world. Home schooling, where children can be properly indoctrinated, is often recommended, as are underground newspapers, which will properly inform people when the mass media is only going to undermine their faith. Yet most of all, the doctrine of local supremacy, where patriots can get together and run their lives as they please, are increasingly being advocated by the extreme right. When the Freemen set up "Justus Township" in the middle of Garfield county near Jordan, Montana, they weren't being creative; they were just doing what everyone else on the right talked about. Inverting a long accepted hierarchy of powers, the county supremacy movement believes that the most legitimate level of government is the county government and that the local sheriff is the highest law enforcement officer. Once the authority of federal and state law is called into question, needless to say, local officials are no longer obligated to obey it if they don't want to. Kenneth Stern, who maintains that the Wise Use ideology of county supremacy is closely aligned with the militia movement, writes: "When a political movement rejects the idea of common basic American values and says, "Let me do it my own way," it usually means it wants to do things that are objectionable, and yearns to do them undisturbed and unnoticed. Otherwise, the issue wouldn't crop up."
The whole notion of county supremacy is a bit bizarre and it has left me wondering if some of my neighbors aren't a bit hazy about who won the Civil War. These efforts by various right-wing extremists to independent sovereignty have been the source of much hilarity throughout Montana. The first mistake of these extremists, some had it, was to think anyone wanted to keep them under control. The problem wasn't how to control them but how to get rid of them. A joke circulated about Fallon County, when local officials proposed asserting county supremacy through a county plan, went like this: "The good news is that the Montana legislature hasn't passed a law giving Fallon County to North Dakota. The bad news is that the federal government wants to give it to Canada."
In a certain way, the county supremacy movement is an understandable, if not fully justified, reaction to corporate domination of the economy. No matter how much the good patriot might try, the corporate economy is going to invade the boundaries of their township. The modern world is complex, interdependent, and, as a result, implicates the self in networks of control that it cannot possibly master as soon as it participates in smallest part of the economy. The interconnections of the global economy, the hierarchies and immensity of corporate and governmental structure, and the complexity of modern technology all combine to remove all meaningful choices from the individual. We may be able to decide what kind of breakfast cereal we want, what color we want our hair to be, and what kind of clothes we want to wear as never before, but the really important things, like the power to control the workplace, make the government do what we want, or get the economy to reward us for our efforts is all far removed from us. The free rider has been fenced in. The government is regulating him, environmentalists want to tell him how manage his property, and liberals want to take away his guns in case he doesn't like it. Given the value they place on individual freedom, the patriot can only interpret what has happened as a betrayal of America.
The word "betrayal" is the key. Understanding freedom as individual choice, and taking the causal efficacy of individual will as an article of faith, the Wise Use patriot can only conclude that he has lost his freedom because someone, with deliberate intent, took it away from him. Bad things, like losing the farm or the business, happened because someone wanted them to happen that way. Things are the way they are because someone intended it. They plotted it. More sophisticated people who understand the dynamics of the economy would say that intentions had nothing to do with it. Not individuals but the system determined the outcome. However, believing in the individual, the patriot knows better: it was a conspiracy. Power has been taken, the individual's freedom is threatened, and may soon vanish, and the only way that can happen is if someone intended it, designed a conspiracy to make it happen. In order for patriots committed to the American tradition of possessive individualism to celebrate their identities as free individuals, people who are responsible for what they are, choose the life they have, and get what they deserve in the modern world, they must interpret their failures to live the American dream as someone's fault. They tried, they tried really hard, but things didn't turn out the way they were supposed to. They worked hard but never made any money; they celebrated democracy but didn't feel free; they sought respect and dignity but didn't get any.
A recurring theme for the Militia of Montana has been that the weather is being secretly manipulated. According to this theory, a secret group of conspirators--first the Soviet Union, but then when it collapsed, now the UN and the New World Order--is plotting to get control of the weather. Once they had that, they could control the world by disrupting food supplies. When food becomes scarce, the conspirators behind the famine can dictate as they please. That's the secret plan. According to the Militia of Montana, the Soviet Union had this exotic electromagnetic system that could disrupt the weather, cause earthquakes, and affect human behavior. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the Militia of Montana conveniently discovered that a similar device was operating in Alaska, the HAAARP project. This device apparently bombards the ionosphere with high frequency electromagnetic radiation, causing local changes in the weather, damage to electronic equipment earthquakes and tidal waves. Besides that, it affects human behavior.
Almost each issue of "Taking Aim," the official newsletter for the Militia of Montana, interprets recent changes in the weather--floods, earthquakes, killer heat waves, droughts--as ominous signs of the conspiracy. These weather changes, along with black helicopters, movements of UN motorized armor, bar codes on highway signs, and various efforts to disarm the patriot movement, are the sure signs of the UN preparing for a takeover.
Yet isn't this ironic? Almost every scientist that studies the climate believes that human activities are changing the weather. Modern industry is changing the weather by injecting--in a very visible way--huge amounts of pollutants into the biosphere. Taking scientists at their word, the environment movement has been trying to stop the release of greenhouse gases, the clear cutting of tropical forests, and the other human activities affecting the complex feedback loops that shape the planet's weather systems. Yet the radical right, ignoring all this scientific evidence, if not their own eyes, and focuses on a secret conspiracy of absurdly complex and malevolent dimensions to the same effect. Isn't this strange? We aren't changing the weather with the millions of cars on our highways, or the thousands of smoke stacks in our cities; it's being changed by a machine somewhere in Alaska. How is this flight from reality possible?
Perhaps John Trochman, the leader of the Militia of Montana, is truly crazy. Probably he belongs in an institution. But that wouldn't explain the followers he has. I remember what it was like when Trochman came to Glendive, Montana, a town a short distance from where I live. With just a small ad in the paper, a few flyers to people in the area, and a little advance organizing, he can pack a large conference room. Surely more than a hundred people.
As I sat there that night, my arms nervously crossed like they could ward off the hatred seething around me, listening to him talk about weather control, black helicopters, the UN, and the New World Order, I watched the audience as much as him. Other than a few journalists who looked like they wanted to vomit, most of the people there were of one mind with him. Heads nodded in agreement at the appropriate times, brows furrowed in fearful worry at the mention of the concentration camps being built for them, and people openly expressed anxiety about what would happen to their families when the UN came in. It is one thing for Trochman to be crazy--institutions are full of people who think they are Napoleon--but it is another thing for him to have such a following. That can only happen if he has touched a nerve, said something that matters to people. What is it?
Trochman offers a vision of the world in which people don't have to confront their identities, risk the discomfort of truth. The environmentalists who are presenting evidence for global warming, the destruction of the ozone layer, the extinction of species, and the accumulation of toxins in the environment are asking people to do something very hard. They are asking them to call into question the way they live their lives. Environmentalists are saying that things have to change, what we do with our property, how we live, and what we think. That is hard. However, Trochman offers an escape from self-examination, and the self-reproach it might bring. It is not we who are at fault, who are to blame for all the horrible things that are happening to the environment around us; it is this secret conspiracy by the UN. Stop the conspiracy and the birds will return, the rain will fall, and the land will be bountiful, like it always was. By offering up a conspiracy to blame for the disruptions in the weather, Trochman absolves his audience of any responsibility for it. They can continue to be the God-fearing patriots they have always been. That is why they are ready to listen to him. He takes away all the anxiety that is troubling them. When the news doesn't bear his theory out, they keep coming back for more. They believe his lies because failing to do so means calling into question their dream of themselves. And dreams are hard to kill.
The people of my community should know. They live in a place where nothing has ever turned out the way they dreamed it would. First, the land is as harsh and unforgiving as it is vast and magnificent. Droughts, hail storms, and winter blizzards, are as common as bank foreclosures. Western Montana, settled first because of the discovery of gold, then silver, then copper, has an entirely different landscape than eastern Montana. It has mountains, pine trees, and rushing streams. It is beautiful in a way that makes your eyes hurt. Anyone can love western Montana. Eastern Montana is different. No one takes pictures of the prairie and makes it into a postcard. The sky is always too big, and the people too small. There are no mountains, few pine trees, and flowing streams are rare. The wind blows, the summers are hot, and rain is always prayed for. Loving eastern Montana isn't easy.
Growing up, I always wished that my end of the state were like the other end, full of trees and secret places between the rugged mountains. I love trees; I can sit for hours and just watch them grow. As a child, I wanted to live in an endless forest of them, tall, graceful, whispering in the moist and fragrant breezes. Trees shelter and protect. They hide things and keep them safe--stalking predators as well as timid prey. However, there is no shelter or protection in eastern Montana. Everything is out in the open, naked to the sun and the wind. In this way, perhaps, the land is more truthful in eastern Montana. It does not shelter foolish dreams, arrogant ambitions, or greedy endeavors. In time, they are all exposed for what they are.
In some pastures on my family's ranch there are traces of old plow furrows in the most unlikely places, straight up hills so steep that you dare not drive a pickup down them. My father told me that they were left by a huge land company that once tried to farm eastern Montana like a factory, using the most advanced technology of the time. At a time when many farmers still were using horses, this company brought in huge steam tractors to pull long strings of plows. These tractors were basically locomotives on big wheels. Because turning these behemoths was difficult, the operator would simply start from headquarters in the morning and go in a straight line for half a day, going over sandy hill tops and through creek bottoms without ever lifting the plows out of the ground, and then turn around and return. Of course the hills blew out, the gullies washed out, and within a few short years the huge land company was broke, wealthy arrogance humbled to poverty.
This land company wasn't the only one to be taught humility by the land. At the end of World War I, the railroad brought in a flood of homesteaders. They thought eastern Montana, with only a fraction of its rainfall, was Kansas. For a few years, when they first came, the rains came regularly, and the homesteaders harvested good crops. Then the 30's brought drought and grasshoppers. Now, my family's ranch is made up of a dozen of these old homesteads. The trend that began in the 30's hasn't stopped. Every year there are fewer people here than the year before.
Montana was hard hit during the farm depression of the 80's. Many farms and ranches were lost because of overproduction and depressed grain prices. If anything, things were worse in town. Many businesses went broke because their main customers, the local farmers and ranchers, didn't have the money to buy anything from them. When I was a child, Baker had a long list of equipment dealers--John Deere, Case, International, and Versatile. By the end of the 80's they were all gone, the victims of a weak farm economy. Besides that, the oil field, which had brought an influx of jobs, investment, and tax revenues into the community, was in decline. Due to declining oil prices, the oil rigs were no longer operating and the operation of the oil field was increasingly automated. Young people were leaving the county because there was no future for them, and old people were dying off. The population of my county, Fallon County, has fallen from 4,050 in 1970 to 3,103 in 1990--almost a quarter of our friends and neighbors in two decades.
After all this, people were vulnerable, angry, and resentful. Much like the people who became involved with the Freemen in Jordan (which, by Montana standards, was only a short distance away), they were looking for an explanation for their troubles--someone to blame, a way to understand their problems. Starting in the 1980's, The Wise Use movement came and gave the people in my community who were looking for it what they wanted. Dr. Dennis Winters, a Wise Use organizer sometimes associated with People for the West, but more frequently with the Western Environmental Trade Association started coming to Baker on a regular basis. Winters had earned the lasting enmity of environmentalists in Montana in 1991, when he told a crowd in Libby, Montana, that the Greater Yellowstone Vision plan, a plan for protecting the environment around Yellowstone Park, would cause 30 percent unemployment and lead to "wife batterment, child molestation, and all the rest of it." According to Winters, environmentalism was identical with "unemployment, alcoholism, child abuse, Satanism, and paganism." His involvement in the affairs of our community was frequent and significant. When Fallon County was hiring an economic development coordinator, for example, he volunteered his expertise for free. He interviewed the candidates and selected the daughter of the sheriff and the wife of the county sanitarian, Robin Gundlach-Menger.
After years of fighting Ross, I had heard a lot about Dennis Winters, and I always wanted to see him in person. I was told that he was a mesmerizing speaker. He could bring tears to peoples eyes, sort of like those slick Born Again ministers you see on TV. Some environmentalists referred to him as the "Prince of Darkness." About the time that I really wanted to check him out, he left. His parting words to the people of Baker were that he was going to the Pacific Rim countries to promote economic development. Years later, when he came back to Baker, I had my first chance to see what he was like in person and assess what was behind all the trouble in my community. So, overcoming my reservations, I went to a speech Winters gave at the American Legion in Baker.
By this time the economic development groups he had set up in Baker had started fighting over various things, especially the failure of an industrial park scam. Apparently, he was there to fix things. He showed up in an expensive suit, which stood in stark contrast to the dressed down look of everyone else in the room, mostly Main Street businessmen and women. He started in a low key, saying that he liked the people better in Baker than any other town he organized in. He said that the people here showed more courage and pluck than any other group he had ever worked with.
Then, he told them he had been up to important things since he left Montana. He had been a speech writer for the Prime Minister of Thailand. He had also worked for the development minister in Saudi Arabia. He didn't say it then, but according to the Fallon County Times, he had worked in Indonesia and some other Pacific Rim countries too. Amazingly, every one of the countries he promoted economic development in was either deep depression at the time, or looking into the abyss. I had to laugh to myself at the irony. Was he back voluntarily, or they had thrown him out?
But then I started wondering: A speech writer for the Prime Minister of Thailand! Forgive me, dear reader, if I stopped to ask what is wrong with this picture. We start with this--the way he described himself--underpaid organizer going around Montana altruistically promoting economic development. He said he had little money, but he was dressed like a CEO. With his Ph.D., his skills, and his close affiliation with large corporations, he could have been making lots of money, but he is slumming around in southeastern Montana--which is about as close to the edge of the world as you can get without falling off. Something didn't ring true. Altruism in the name of greed? If he was so into money, why wasn't he out making it? Despite his protests of poverty, I suspected he is being well paid by someone. But who?
The mining industry was the obvious culprit, but maybe he had other connections. Look at it this way: a lowly economic activist starts in Montana, feeding the gullible all sorts of horror stories about the evils of environmentalism, then he ups and gets a job as a speech writer for the Prime Minister of Thailand. Just like that. Then he lands all sorts of other high level positions in foreign governments, one after another without taking a breath. Quite a resume. Yet a very suspicious one. A speech writer is in a unique position to know everything and influence government policy. An economic development advisor for a foreign country would get a hold of all sorts of economic data. The CIA would kill--and, no doubt, has killed--to get an asset in positions like that. So would multinational corporations. Even more than the CIA they would want to know the inside scoop on host governments.
Though, I have to admit, exactly what a CIA agent would be doing in eastern Montana escapes me. Maybe he was being punished for something, like failing to stop a people's insurgency somewhere, overthrow a democracy somewhere else. (After all, J. Edgar used to send agents to Butte, Montana to punish them.) And he was sent to Montana to practice on environmentalists. Of course, this is all too weird, but the more I sat in the Legion that day, listening to Winters, the more I doubted that he was what he said he was. His cover story just didn't wash with me.
Whatever Winters was, I have to say he manipulated the audience like a master. He alternated between praise and condemnation, generating first anxiety then hope. The alternation of blame and praise brought up emotional energy, anger mixing with gratitude, and tied people to him. First, he would tell the people of Baker how good they were, how worthy, and how much he respected them. Then, he opened up wounds of insecurity and inadequacy, mentioning things like bankruptcy, shabby communities, children leaving because they have no future. Then, amazingly harshly, he criticized his audience for not doing enough. They were letting this happen and were failing their responsibilities. However, just at the point where the audience was at the point of rebellion, he changed directions again and told people how good they were, pointing to all the things they had achieved, dismissing their failures as noble efforts. By going back and forth like that, he got more power each cycle, increasingly making the audience dependent on his interpretation of what they were.
Occasionally, he would start in on a political theme, like the Poppers and the Buffalo Commons, then look at me and cut it short. Perhaps my presence--and he did seem to know who I was--changed the dynamics in the room. He seemed to feel if he went on about environmentalists that things might get too hot. I would rat on him and make a big stink, like I was known to do. Instead, he referred to the turmoil in Baker obliquely--saying things for the benefit of those who knew, without saying them.
Winters was at his best when he was telling stories. Most of his stories were about Eureka, another small town in Montana that he tried to organize. In a secret confiding tone, like the one uses in a gossip circle, he told us about how shabby downtown Eureka looked, and how that no one bothered coming to the meetings. A rancher there told him that he would give Winters all the money he needed to get things going. Winters said that he didn't want money, he wanted him. He wanted the rancher to DO things. Try as he might to enlighten them, they all had the wrong attitude, Winters concluded, and he stormed out of town, shaking the dust off his feet as he left. Baker wasn't like that, he said. Everyone here was motivated, courageous, and community minded. By condemning the people of Eureka, those failures, he disciplined his audience. Now, the standard set, the people of Baker had to live up to Winter's expectations.
Although the room was filled mostly with men, Winters talked about how that women were more effective than men at organizing. Looking the men straight in the eye, he said that there was just something about the cognitive hard wiring of men that prevented them from effectively networking. By saying this, he psychologically emasculated the men in the room, setting himself up, sort of like a cult leader, as the primary male. He would be the one to which they all deferred. Very neat.
I left the meeting very impressed. Winters was a master manipulator. I noticed however, that the audience seemed to show some resistance. They interrupted Winters, asked impertinent questions, and laughed sometimes (though politely) when they shouldn't. This meeting was after most of the things I am telling in the book had run their course. By then the good people of Baker had learned a thing or two, and they looked to me like they felt a little burned, lead down the garden path. But I am getting ahead of myself.
When Winters first started organizing in Baker, one of the first groups formed was the Buffalo Commons CORE group. The group got its name reacting to the ideas of Frank and Deborah Popper, a husband and wife team who teach at eastern universities, Rutgers and New York University in New York City. The Poppers wrote a couple of essays arguing that the population of the West is economically unsustainable, and that the best of a bad situation could be made by deprivatizing the land that wasn't already public, turning the whole area into a huge Buffalo Commons.
The Poppers are the professors the Wise Use movement loves to hate. In Wise Use propaganda, their names are used like swear words. The way they are demonized, they should be extraordinarily influential people with ties to shadowy foundations, global conspiracies, and furtive think tanks. But actually, they are just ordinary college professors who spend their days happily writing scholarly essays for obscure journals that, in normal circumstances, would be ignored by everyone except a few friends. However, the Poppers were saved from this anonymity because Wise Use could use their ideas and status to serve a political purpose: As easterners, they could be cast as outsiders; as the advocates of resource policy in the West, they could be cast as intruders; as intellectuals, they could be mocked for knowing nothing about how real people lived. If the Poppers didn't exist, it could be said, Wise Use would have had to invent them. But actually, they were invented. The fame the Poppers have gained isn't so much a result of their own efforts, worthy as they were, as it was a Wise Use deployment to discipline the way people think about the West. By casting the Poppers as other, as infamous conspirators plotting to depopulate the West, Wise Use incited people dependent on federal resource policy to resist efforts to reform laws that benefitted corporate interests.
In his book, War on the West: Government Tyranny on America's Great Frontier, William Perry
Pendley, the president of the Mountain States Legal Foundation, argues that their plan to
depopulate the West goes like this:
How do the Poppers propose to "reinvent" the Great Plains? They have an assortment of
weapons in their arsenal: designating vast areas for single use; purchases by the federal
government's land agent, the Nature Conservancy; outright purchases by the government;
regulating cattle and sheep off federal lands; and using the Endangered Species Act (ESA) to
lock up land. Despite their assertion that the free market is helping to achieve the Buffalo
Commons, the Poppers admit that, of the "potential building blocks for the Buffalo Commons,
most of them are federal." The weapon of choice, of course, is the ESA, or as it is called by
environmental extremists, "the pit bull of environmental laws."
A scapegoat is something of less significance sacrificed in the place of something of more significance. Originally, a goat was offered in the place of human sacrifice, thus scapegoat. In the same way, environmentalists are blamed for the wounds of our world instead of capitalism because it is so much easier to gather around and cast out environmentalists than it is to confront the identities a capitalist economy needs to maintain itself. According to conventional economic theory, the market, as long as it is a free market, is an inherently rational means of distributing burdens and benefits. Costs are fully reflected in market prices, and the hidden hand of the market aligns demand and supply in the most rational way possible. Always. If this is assumed as a given, as it must be for any real American, then any economically irrational result has to be the result of human intervention, a conspiracy against the free market. Unable to acknowledge the possibility that a free market could result in unjust, harmful, or irrational results, Wise Use needed a scapegoat to blame for the depopulation of the West. It wasn't the economy, especially, it wasn't the free market, someone had launched a "war against the West." That was why people were forced to leave their homes. Someone was driving them out. If hard work and sacrifice are not rewarded in the marketplace, as the myth of capitalism says they should be, then the lifelong commitments people have made to them are misplaced. Changing capitalism means admitting something ugly about one's own efforts and life. That is too hard to do, and so, by blaming environmentalism for the problems in the economy, a lesser thing, a scapegoat, is offered up to protect something greater.
More than anything else, Wise Use is about a system of sacrifice, and, under its governance, a lot
of things the people of my community valued highly, like the rule of law, toleration of dissent, the
health of friends and neighbors, and simple honesty, would come to be sacrificed. In a very real
way, my community sold its soul for "economic development."
Sometimes things just don't happen the way that you expect them to. Sometimes people that you count on, need, and always expect to be there for you, just aren't there anymore. And sometimes it happens so suddenly that it seems impossible. And you go on making plans like they are still able to help you with them. Then you realize in a flash of disappointment, and then grief, that they can't help you anymore. They are gone.
Those of us who had been working with Gene to stop Ross Electric from coming here have felt like that a lot since he died. We had so many plans we expected Gene to help us with. Of course he was going to be there. How could it be otherwise?
He was going to investigate this and that for us, talk to a whole series of influential people that only he could talk to, organize various events, and, as always, work his special magic with the law. Gene was definitely someone you wanted on your side in a fight. We will miss him greatly in our struggle with Ross Electric.
But he was a lot more to us than just our champion. Gene Huntley had a way of honoring the best in people. He would look for it, cultivate it, and help people find it in themselves. Sometimes it was courage he found in people, sometimes honesty, sometimes a special skill, but whatever it was, after they knew Gene a little while, they had a little more of whatever it was they had. It was strange how that worked, and how often it happened, quietly, unobtrusively. We are most grateful to Gene for the ways he made us all more than we would have been.
We were impressed with how loyal Gene was to his friends. We remember watching in amazement when Gene refused to attack an old friend of his, who, we all felt, was doing a serious wrong. He just couldn't do that to a friend, no matter what, he told us. Doubtlessly, no court of law would have been impressed with the argument that Gene gave us, but perhaps he could have won on appeal to a higher court. . .
Friendship, to Gene, was more than pleasing people and being pleased by them. Sometimes it meant confronting people, sometimes it meant ignoring things that could not easily be ignored, and sometimes it meant being someone's friend even if they weren't yours. Friendship was never something frivolous to be cast aside when things became difficult, and it never came without obligations and responsibilities.
Perhaps that is the thing we cherish the most when we remember Gene--his commitment to his
friends and the noble ideal of friendship. . .
"In Memory of Gene Huntley"
The O'Fallon Fact Finder
Not long after we had the first issue of The O'Fallon Fact Finder out, John Huntley, Gene's son, returned to Montana from completing law school. He was going to study for his bar exam. After he passed, he was going to slowly take over his father's law practice. His return was timely. Gene's health was failing him, and he needed help with his practice. Earlier, Gene had made a trip to Rochester, Minnesota, for a diagnosis, and the report that we got back was that the doctors were not sure what was wrong with him, though they were sure that it was serious. Something to do with his heart. He couldn't work and, worst of all, he couldn't fly his airplane. Daryl Espeland, his personal physician in Baker, ended up grounding him for a while, and Gene made his life miserable. Imagine being a physician and grounding one of the best medical malpractice lawyers in the nation. It is not done lightly, and it is lifted at the barest indication of recovered health. With Espeland's reluctant consent, Gene eventually returned to work and flying, but not with the same abandon as before. Perhaps he felt his mortality hanging over him.
John became his father's shadow. Everywhere Gene went--Ross meetings, Democratic Central Committee meetings, court cases, out to their place in the country--John wasn't far behind. Perhaps they were trying to make up for lost time. For some reason, unlike the other Huntley children who attended the local schools, John was sent off to a private High School. He didn't see much of his father when he was growing up. Now, they seemed to be obsessively close.
I never really understood what was going on between John and his father. I saw them together, but their relationship never really made sense to me, as if there was a great deal going on that I knew nothing about. Sometimes their relationship seemed to be the ideal apprenticeship, other times it seemed to be excessive, neurotic, distorted by unmet needs. Whenever John spoke of his father, his words were tinged with a mixture of awe and mystery. Almost every conversation about him started with a recitation of all the awards and cases his father had won. Yet his voice also betrayed feelings of inferiority, abandonment, and isolation, enforced by a haunting ignorance about who his father really was. John wanted desperately to be a chip off the old block, but he seemed to have doubts that he was up to it.
After the initial frenzy of organizing to stop Ross, people seemed to fall into a sort of exhaustion. The number of people attending our weekly meetings dwindled. Sometimes they were canceled. I was feeling frustrated. Planting was done. I had more time to work on Ross; I wanted to do things. The county attorney, Denzil Young, had contemptuously dismissed my editorial in the first issue of the O'Fallon Fact Finder calling for an investigation of the gifts that the Ross family had given to members of the local government. He wrote a letter to the county commissioners, which they had then printed in the Fallon County Times, that dismissed any possibility of illegal or unethical acts by the county sanitarian and county planner when they accepted the plane tickets from Ross. When Denzil's letter came out, I thought that we had to respond to him. I called Gene and he agreed with me. He called a meeting.
The day was beautiful, a pure blue sky, no wind. The perfect June day. By the time, I got to town, the shadows the trees cast were stretching out across the street in front of Gene's office. We waited awhile inside, but only I, Gene, John, and Louis Jensen showed up. I started by ranting about the county attorney's letter in the Fallon County Times. "Something needs to be done about this," I said, holding the Times up. "We can't let them thumb their noses at the law like this!" It was like the county attorney was calling black, white; a crime, an altruistic act. "If we let something like this pass, aren't we as guilty as they of ignoring the law?" I argued. No one disagreed with me.
In fact, Gene heartily agreed. He talked about the case against the county sanitarian and the county planner for a while, then asked, "Do you want to get a court order to force prosecution?" He looked at everyone in the room, one by one. I vehemently nodded yes, so did everyone else, though less vehemently. "Done then," Gene concluded, with a resolute look in his eyes. "I'll get a court order when I get back from our trip."
I felt my gut tighten. Getting what I wanted, I started wondering about the consequences. I hadn't thought about them.
Everything finished, Gene and John started nonchalantly talking about a vacation in the wilderness they were going on in a few days. Gene would fly his plane to Billings, where he would get it repaired. John would follow in the car, and they would continue together in the car. Yet I was only half listening. I was lost in edgy thoughts. This was going to divide the town like nothing we had done yet. Careers were going to be destroyed, reputations ruined, lots of money lost, and people might even go to jail. One thing would lead to another, anger would grow, and there was no telling where it would end. As I sat there, I felt like I could see myself from behind, an actor in a movie, and I was a camera scanning the room from the doorway behind me. The air seemed heavy and the room was getting dark as the sun went down.
Later, I would wonder if our conversation, and Gene's commitment to escalate to legal action, were not heard by more than those present in the room.
The next day it started raining. This was the answer to everyone's prayers, but it came at a terribly inconvenient time for Jan and Dennis Bowmer. Jan and Dennis Bowmer were relatives from Las Vegas. They ran a successful appliance business and had just bought a ranch in the neighboring county, which my family operated when they were away. They had spent a lot of time fixing the place up, turning it into a show place, and they wanted to throw a party for all the neighbors and the people who had helped them. When Jan and Dennis throw a party, they throw a party, complete with catering and prime rib. It was going to be outside, but Dennis looked at the sky and decided he couldn't have his guests getting drenched, so we all went indoors to eat. There must have been at least 50 people there, and although the house was large, it was crowded. The tables were set up in the basement, and there was barely enough room to squeeze between the chairs to sit down.
I finished eating and was talking to a woman who taught school in Baker, when Gene awkwardly approached me. He seemed distracted, his face vacant. As he came near, the woman I was talking to turned away from him and said, "I can't talk now." To look at her, she was being openly rude, but it couldn't be that. This was a woman that I knew to be kind, invariably polite, and generous. When my mother was in the hospital, she came by often, and had a manner about her that made everyone feel good about themselves. I was sure she would die of shame if she ever breathed an impolite word, and yet here she was, visibly rude to Gene. I was baffled. It couldn't be about Ross. She was quite friendly with me. Then, suddenly feeling the subtle ripples from a distant storm of emotions, I realized it must have been about an old lawsuit. But this was amazing. It had to have been a decade ago. I knew that most of Gene's suits were out-of-town now, often out-of-state, and that they were mostly medical malpractice. It had been a long time since he practiced the kind of lawsuit this woman would have been involved in, and yet here she was, reacting as if it were yesterday.
However, that was the kind of lawyer Gene was. He didn't believe in this newfangled holistic law crap, a win/win outcome. He won lawsuits the way gunfighters won fights in the Old West. When he was through, everyone knew who had won and who had lost, and the losers never forgave him for it. They were left with wounds that never healed. This was what everyone wants when they hired a lawyer, I suppose. They want to win, to hurt the other, but it leaves a lot of unfinished business, storm clouds that could boil up in an instant. As I think back to that party at Bowmer's and other times when Gene was around different people, I remember how that he could bring up memories on people's faces as he walked among them, like he was turning the pages of a chronicle of the community's rivalries and feuds. Some would brighten, greeting him with deep delight, others would shrink away, clutching old wounds. In a way, Gene was the embodiment of our community's past, the nexus of its most troubling conflicts. When Gene joined the fight against Ross, all his allies took on the burden of his enemies and the strengths of his friends.
"I need a favor, Wade," he said over the woman's back.
"Sure, anything."
"Could you come with me? We are going to leave early in the morning and I need to show you something."
"Sure."
"We will meet you outside in a few minutes."
When he left, the teacher started talking to me again, as friendly as before. I felt conflicting loyalties. Like her and Gene, I pretended nothing had happened.
When we met outside, it turned out that Gene wanted me to take care of two of his horses while he was away. I followed the Huntley's to their place in my car. When we got there, I found out that the horses were young, unbroken, and Gene and John were going to train them to be a team. To make it easy to catch them every day, Gene had brought them into the corrals, where he and John could work them. Since they were locked out of the pasture, they had to be fed and watered every day.
The land that Gene owned was small by Montana standards, less than a thousand acres, but it was beautiful. It was right beside the Medicine Rocks, a State Park. The distinguishing feature of the park was its towering sandstone formations, sometimes almost a hundred feet tall, mostly around twenty or thirty feet tall. The Indians thought they had power, which they thought of as medicine, and so the name of the park. Looking at the rock formations, you could understand why.
Tall and tan, the formations were haunting sculptures of nature. The shifting dynamics of wind and sand had swirled against the hollows and fissures for endless years, creating torturous and intricate surfaces and caverns that the wind whistled around and through. Between the formations, sometimes on top of them, and in cracks between them, pine trees struggled to draw nourishment and water out of the sandy soil. The Indians had used the place for vision quests. In some caves you can still find marks they carved into the rocks.
About a third of Gene's place had these rock formations and pine trees on it. The rest turned to clay and barren prairie. None of the soil grew enough grass to amount to anything for pasture. However, Gene hadn't bought it for that. It was a retreat to escape from the pressures of his law practice.
I noticed a remarkable change in Gene's demeanor when we got there. Distracted and absent at the party, he brightened and became exuberant as he got out of the pickup and walked toward the horses. His voice became mellow and a twinkle settled into his eyes when he greeted the horses. John and Gene put halters on the horses, and we started walking them to the spring, which was perhaps a quarter of a mile away. Cathy, Gene's wife, stayed behind, taking pictures as we left. Some of them hang on my wall now. Gene was dressed in white, the day was quiet, damp, and misty. That day, as I watched Gene effortlessly walk with the horses, I felt a sense of relief. His health problems were getting better, I felt. He was handling the walk easily, talking happily while he walked. When we got back, Gene had no problems lifting a heavy feedbag and spreading some hay for the horses. I had been worried about his back, because it had been giving him problems, but watching him there that day I was convinced that my concerns were groundless.
Gene's mood seemed to be infectious. I started to feel a glow, like the moment was special, magical. Like the mist that lightly surrounded us was a current of flowing energy--healing, promising, connecting. It was as if Gene were entrusting something powerful to me, and the horses were but the appearance of whatever it was. As I think back to that twilight, the peaceful energy of the mist, the rocks, the pine trees, and the horses still haunts me. I have not often felt that calm and serene.
The next morning it started raining. The clouds were low, promising yet more rain. The road down from my place to the main yard on our place was a river of mud and standing water. As was my custom, I got the mail. But then, worried that the usual pickup I drove might get stuck in Gene's pasture, I hopped in one of our four-wheel drives and went to feed his horses. Everything was backwards. The first horse was very cooperative, the one that wasn't supposed to be. I quickly put a halter on him and took him to the spring for a drink. The other horse resisted me, as if something were bothering him. I wondered what could be causing the reversal. Every time I tried to put a rope around the neck of the horse that was supposed to be gentle, he shied away. I tried to trap him in a corner, but he was a better strategist that I was. He kept turning away, then when I tried to get up closer to his head he would push me firmly up against the fence with his ass. "Damn it, horse," I protested, "I'm just trying to give you a drink of water. You know that. Why are you being so obstinate?" Nevertheless, the struggle was on, and the horse was bigger than I was. After a half hour of various tricks and efforts, I gave up, and carried water to the horse. "Damn fool horse," I muttered under my breath, wondering who was taming whom.
When I got home, the clouds were settling in closer to the ground. I sighed. There was going to be no work in the fields for days, maybe not for another week. I was going to have to work in the shop, something I dreaded. When I pulled up, everyone else was there in the shop, my father, my uncle, and Shay, our hired man. All of us were resigned to rainy day work. Then the phone rang in the shop, and Dad answered it. It was John Tronstad, a neighbor who was on the Fallon County Airport Board with Gene.
John had bad news. Gene's airplane had gone off the radar scope just outside Billings. They were organizing an air search party to look for him, but the weather was making it difficult. Dad and Jerry started talking about using our plane to go look for him. It didn't have a good enough radio for landing at big airports, but they wanted to do something. Then John called back. They found the plane wreck. Gene was dead.
The moment seemed surreal, dreamlike, hallucinogenic. I was numb, frightened, and confused. "This can't be happening," I thought, "not now." Still, it was. The dream was real. I thought about our last Ross meeting, and I thought, "they got him before he could do it." Then I thought about the consequences of making these kind accusations unless I was sure. I didn't even want to think about them because if he were murdered then that meant things were happening that didn't happen to people like me. I was at risk. Maybe it was just an accident, I comforted myself. The weather was bad, the clouds were close to the ground, and Gene was not a very good pilot. Maybe he just made a mistake. Pilot error. It happened all the time, and to better pilots than Gene.
Gene did not have a reputation for being a good pilot. His attention wandered. The last time my uncle flew with Gene to Rapid City to check on the Ross family in South Dakota he said that Gene forgot to retract the landing gear, and then he got lost. In fact, to hear the stories of the pilots that had flown with him, he was probably as bad at flying an airplane as he was good at practicing law. Which meant that the FAA, if it were a responsible organization, should have stopped him before he so much as ever touched an airplane. Still, he loved to fly, and everyone who knew him, knew that it was futile to try and stop him. Better just to pray that he didn't kill anyone.
But perhaps calling it pilot error was too easy and too soon, a voice inside told me. I didn't know what had killed Gene. All I knew was that he was dead.
Gene's funeral was a huge affair. I had never seen the Catholic Church in Baker packed so full. The whole town was there it seemed, and a lot of lawyers and judges besides. The Knights of Columbus were on display, with their swords, their sashes, and their black suits, trying to look like soldiers. If only their tummies didn't hang over their belts.
During the service, Gene's children got up and, one by one, talked about their father. Patti, his youngest daughter, talked about interrupted conversations. Many people cried. Jeanne talked about the things Gene taught her. John, his voice dull and exhausted, talked about the example his father provided him.
Then everyone went up past the High School, toward the town water tank, to the cemetery. Gene was laid to rest beside his son, Ray, who had died a few years earlier of cancer. After Gene was laid to rest, some planes flew over in formation.
It was all lost on me. I felt empty and awkward there. The emotions of other people troubled me, and I wanted to be alone for a while, away from them, so I walked back down to the church while the others were watching the planes. As I left the crowd and was crossing the paved road behind the High School, I saw the sheriff, Leland Gundlach, unlocking the door of his patrol car.
The way he held the key, the expression on his face, the way he moved still haunts me. His movements seemed heavy, slow, nauseosus--like something was haunting him and filling him with regret. Leland and Gene didn't like each other, and it began long before Ross came to town. Just after I had started Graduate School in Amherst, Massachusetts, my mother called up and told me that Gene and Leland were fighting. Leland had borrowed Gene's horse trailer, but when Gene asked for it back, Leland denied that he had borrowed it.
"You're kidding me!" I told my mother, aghast. "That's too weird!"
"No, that's what happened."
"So what did Gene do?"
"He got a hurt look in his eye, and went out and bought another horse trailer."
"That's all he did? He didn't turn the sheriff in?" I asked, gasping.
"No, that's it," my mother insisted.
So I really doubt that Leland was mourning the loss of a friend that day. It was more like he was guilty. Still, about what? The horse trailer incident was more than a decade old. Leland had the manner of someone troubled by something more recent.
I know that is a lot to read into someone's gestures, but I had known Leland a long time. Before he became the sheriff, he had worked for years for my family, mostly at a liquid fertilizer business that he managed for us in town. He was even related. His sister had been a hired girl on our place, and had married one of my uncles. Of all the times that I have seen Leland, the memory of how he held the key as he unlocked the door to his car is the one that keeps returning to me. The sheriff was thinking about something dark and troubling that day, something that was eating away at his gut.
Not long after Gene was dead, I talked to Mike Cohan, the environmental activist from Missoula who had come to Baker to tell us about Ross, on the phone about the possibility that Gene was murdered. I said that it all seemed so suspicious. Gene was investigating Ross, and various Ross supporters in the county, uncovering a lot of dirt. Just a few days before he died, he had committed himself to getting some of our opponents prosecuted. And the atmosphere seemed so hostile. Barbara and Rory were getting death threats.
"You know," I told Mike, "I wonder why Gene didn't get any death threats." There was a long pause on the other end of the phone, and I knew what was coming.
Mike's voice was strained, and like he was dreading the consequences of what he was going to say. "He did get them. I told him that I was getting them when Ross was here, and he told me then that he was getting them too."
I was aghast. "He never told me that."
"He wouldn't. He didn't want to make a big thing about them."
"Did he tell you anything else about them?"
"No, just that he was getting them."
I turned Mike's words over in my head, weighing them carefully. Did the fact that Gene was getting death threats really mean anything? After all, Gene must have gotten many death threats in his years as an attorney. Besides that, Barbara was getting death threats, and she was still alive. Still, then again, she wasn't nearly the threat that Gene was. If anyone was going to be murdered, it would be Gene. Gene was, by far and away, the largest threat the Ross family faced. If he got them in court, they were done. Gene won more than 95% of his cases, and he always won when it mattered.
I was thinking about what Mike had told me when, a few days later, I went into town and stopped by Gene's office, where John was now taking care of his father's business. We were going to put out another issue of the O'Fallon Fact Finder and I needed to talk to John about it. Before he died, Gene had written a long article rebutting the county attorney's argument that the county sanitarian and the county planner had broken no laws when they accepted gifts from Ross. We were going to publish that and an article that John was preparing.
I felt awkward talking to John about his father's death, opening the wound again, but finally I blurted it out. "Mike told me that your father was getting death threats. Was he?"
"Yes he was, many them," John told me.
"Is it possible he was murdered?"
John paused, then seemed evasive. He never answered that question directly, but everything that he told me that day in a conversation that lasted for hours implied that he believed that his father was murdered. He told me that he thought that his father's plane had been tampered with. Some switches were left on, and the morning before the wreck they had to boost the plane's batteries to get it started. Besides that, John thought that some stuff had been moved around in the hanger. Over the next couple of weeks, I had several more conversations with John to the same effect. Later he told me that someone had seen some strange people hanging around his father's hanger the day before the wreck.
John told all these things to me in the strictest of confidence. I wasn't to repeat them to anyone. He told me that he was checking on things, and that he couldn't tell me much. The investigator for the National Transportation and Safety Board had asked him to keep all this information secret. I was just supposed to trust him and the government. With that, I assumed that John was going to take care of everything. So I left it at that for several months, though I did send off for the National Transportation and Safety Board's reports on the wreck, which I was told might take half a year or more to finish.
After Gene died, I started getting strange phone calls. Other people were getting anonymous death threats over their phones, but I never did. I would just get hang-up calls. Several times a day, for a month or two, then they would stop. Usually, I would just hear a click as I picked up the phone, sometimes I would hear breathing, occasionally a radio in the background. Sometimes the other person wouldn't hang up. In that case, I would lay my phone down for a half hour, running up their phone bill. I could predict almost exactly when word of a letter that I wrote to the DEQ, the EPA, or the county commissioners got back to the Ross family or their supporters. The phone calls would intensify.
I suppose the intent of the calls was for me to know that they knew I was home. I was supposed to think: They knew where I was. They could come hurt me, maybe worse. A subtle death threat, I suppose, but that was all I ever got over the phone.
Perhaps the reason was that a call to me from Baker was long distance. A death threat over the phone is a crime, and if you are going to do it, you don't want a long distance record of it. Hang-up calls, where nothing is said, and everything is implied, are impossible to prosecute. Or even to get a search order for, I found out. I tried to get one from the attorney general of Montana, but he blew me off. He couldn't intervene in a local problem without a request from a local official. I should try the county attorney.
Yeah, like I was going to get the county attorney to do me any favors when I was ripping him every time our newsletter came out. Eventually, when all other avenues were exhausted, and I despaired of anyone doing anything to help me, I did try Denzil, and, sure enough, he blew me off. According to the county attorney, I couldn't show probable cause. Like the air wasn't drenched with hate, and no one was being threatened!
"It was all my imagination," he told me.
The phone calls flattered me more than anything else. They were a gauge to tell if I was irritating people. I only got them when I was hitting a nerve. However, I quit being flattered when I found out my mother was getting them too. Apparently, whoever was doing it eventually despaired of ever affecting my behavior. I kept right on writing rude editorials in our paper, sending letters to government officials, asking questions, and causing trouble. And so, apparently despairing of getting to me, they started targeting my mother. Several times when I was in the basement of my parents' home, I heard the phone start ringing. I knew my mother was upstairs, and that it would be for her, so I didn't answer it. Yet she just let the phone keep on ringing. She would never do that unless she knew who was calling and really didn't want to talk to them. And so I knew. The first time, I let it pass without commenting. The next time I did too. And the time after that.
She never told me why she wasn't answering the phone, and I couldn't ask her because I knew she didn't want me to worry about her worrying about me. I knew that she wanted me to keep on doing what I was doing. Perhaps she was proud of me, and didn't want me to stop because of her. So she kept silent. And I didn't want to take away her heroism by telling her I knew. So I kept silent.
About the time these phone calls were happening, my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer again. Almost 4 years earlier, she had a breast mastectomy. We thought she was cured, but then in the beginning of the Ross episode, the doctors discovered it again. This time, it was moving throughout her body. The first sign was a small lump on her neck. She showed it to me one day and let me touch it. Just a small bump, so innocent. What she didn't tell me, and what I later found out by searching the Internet, was that when breast cancer moves outside the breast it is considered incurable by the doctors. She was dying.
And she refused to tell me that too.
I felt helpless and confused. I wanted to do something, but she was my mother. I couldn't boss her around. And what was I to tell her anyway? I had told her all that I knew about psychoneuroimmunology, and vitamin therapy, and I had given her all the considerable number of books I had on the subjects. I couldn't do anything more, except pretend I didn't know her secret.
At first, I thought the hang-up calls were just an effort at intimidation, but then I realized there might be something else going on. I forget what made me start thinking my phone was bugged. Maybe it was John telling me that he had his phone tested for bugs. Or maybe it was the inordinate interest the Ross supporters seemed to have in our activities. By way of gossip, we heard that some members of the Buffalo Commons were disenchanted with their meetings. They wanted to do things with economic development, and all that anybody ever talked about at their meetings was who was going to drive by when we were having ours and take down license plate numbers. They did, indeed, keep track of us. At various times we would look up from our meetings at Gene Huntley's office and see Leland Gundlach, the county sheriff, outside in his patrol car, parked in the middle of the street, taking down license plate numbers.
Really. Like we were criminals, plotting revolution or something.
For whatever reason, after about a month of getting several hang-up calls a day, I called my uncle and started talking about finding out if my phone were bugged. He told me to try calling the phone company in Ekalaka, the small town to the south of us, where we get our service. He said they had ways of finding out. I called the number he gave me, but no one was there. I was busy the next couple of days, and never followed up.
Still, here is the really interesting thing: Immediately after I made those two calls, the hang-up calls stopped. Not one for months.
However, I continued my rabble-rousing ways, and I did something that apparently pissed someone off 3 or 4 months later. The hang-up calls started again, one or two a day. After a week or two of this, I called up the phone company again. This time I got a hold of someone. I told them about my problem and asked them to find out if my phone were bugged. He told me I was being paranoid, that my phone wasn't bugged, and that I should quit worrying about it. No one's phone in the entire area was bugged he assured me, like he somehow knew without bothering to check.
Again, after that one phone call, the hang-up calls stopped. I have never gotten one since. At least not one that wasn't clearly linked to the telemarketing bastards.
People roll their eyes when I tell them my phone is bugged. But I don't know how else to interpret the situation. I went through two periods where I was getting a steady stream of hang up calls and both times they stopped just when I started trying to find out if my line were bugged. Coincidence, I suppose.
So it was with some feeling of vindication when, years later, after John Huntley was elected
county attorney, and he told me maybe there was something to my paranoia. Something or other
about Ross had come up, and he needed to talk to me, but he didn't want to talk about it on the
phone. Instead, he drove the 20 miles out to my place to tell me about it. Sitting on my couch,
he told me he had physical evidence of some sort that someone in Baker was putting wiretaps on
phones. There was an investigation underway, John told me, but it wasn't making enough
progress to indict the person doing it. John said that the person they suspected was a good liar
and was good at covering his tracks. That was all I ever found out. John never told me who, and
charges were never filed.
. . . No issue has divided our community like the prospect of Ross Electric moving into town. And, sadly, it has not always brought out the best in us. Angry and false accusations have circulated, people have been threatened, and their jobs placed at risk.
One particularly unfortunate example of this is the treatment Barbara Weiss, the county librarian, has received here. When it first became apparent that Ross Electric wanted to set up here, she was one of the first to speak up. She collected facts, she talked to people, she set up displays, and she circulated petitions. She did, in short, what everyone in America is supposed to be able to do.
But some people were threatened by what she did and they started threatening her, trying to make her stop. When her probation came up for a hearing, they attacked her in public. She was being too political for a librarian, they felt. Because of their pressure, she did not receive permanent status as librarian. She still has her job, for the time being, but she in a very precarious position. She has to worry about losing it every day, and she is forced to think about what effect it will have on her career. It must be a horrible position to be in.
No one, not even her harshest critics, has disputed the fact that Ms. Weiss is anything except an excellent librarian. As far as her keeping her job, that is all that really should matter. How good a librarian she is. Any consideration of her politics should be set aside by those deciding her tenure.
If she does eventually lose her job because of her politics, it would say the most horrible things about what we are as a community. The measure of our character as a community depends upon how much we are willing to tolerate and accept the politics of the dependent and vulnerable members of our community. We hardly need to protect the freedoms of those who are powerful and whose status is secure. Even the most oppressive of tyrannies protects theirfreedom to say what they want. But, if our community is going to cultivate a culture of democracy, those who are dependent and vulnerable deserve, and should receive, special protection and assurances.
They shouldn't have to worry for their jobs because of what they think or believe, they shouldn't have to take positions that please their superiors, and they shouldn't be afraid that they will be punished for expressing their opinions, especially not if they do it when they are off work, as Ms. Weiss has been most careful to do.
What is happening to Ms. Weiss is only the most glaring example of what is happening throughout this community. A number of county, federal, and private employees have felt the chill of disapproval by their employers for their beliefs, and are afraid that if they express them in any form they will be punished for it.
We have received donations from a good number of people who have wanted us to be very careful to keep their identities a secret, worried that they or their spouses would be fired if their bosses found out. We have also gotten a number of anonymous letters from county employees encouraging us on and providing useful tips of information, but also certain that if the commissioners found out they would be in a lot of trouble. We know of instances where people have been ordered by their superiors to remove anti-Ross material from their cars. And we know of a number of other instances where people have been ordered not to talk about Ross while they are on the job, not even in the most casual way.
Is this really the kind of community that we want to live in? Is this what we want to teach our
children? Is this the future we want for ourselves? Threats, intimidation, silence, and fear? If
not, we really should not allow people to be treated the way that Ms. Weiss has been treated. It
is way past time that her status was made permanent here. We are very lucky to have her as our
librarian, and it would be a great disgrace to this community if we lost her.
Editorial, O'Fallon Fact Finder
When Gene died, Barbara was at a librarian's convention in San Francisco. She drove there in her subcompact, and slept in it at night. She took the long way to San Francisco, through Chehalis, Washington. She checked the Ross plant out. There was something ironic about where it was located. "It was beautiful," she told me. "Trees everywhere." But then there was the plant itself. "People are living right beside it!" she told me in horror. After checking out the plant, she started talking to the neighbors. They were not happy about Ross being there, at least until she told them that Ross was moving to Montana. Then they were happy. Though, when they realized what it meant to us, they became ashamed and apologized for it. They had fought hard to keep Ross from moving in after Ross had left a Superfund site at their first location. The neighbors told her that the trucks showed up mostly late at night, which seemed suspicious. And they told her that they could see much black smoke at times coming from the stack. One of them suspected that Ross was dumping. There was a big trench in the back. From the neighbors, she went to the Centralia Chronicle, where she collected some news stories on Ross.
Barbara was hit hard by the news of Gene's death. She missed his funeral. Despite John's wishes that I keep what he told me about his father's death secret, I told Barbara. I thought she should know because if Gene had been murdered, she was in danger too. Yet she didn't think of that first. "He'd be alive now if I hadn't gotten him involved," she told me. "It's my fault."
"We don't know that. We don't even know that he was murdered, and even if he were, you weren't the one that did it. Someone else did, and you can't be held responsible for their actions."
"I should have known."
"You should have known that we were dealing with murderers? And kept silent about everything so they could do as they pleased? Wouldn't you be guilty of something worse then? How would you feel, years later, when people started getting cancer because you kept silent and didn't do anything? Besides, you are hardly the only one guilty of provocation. I was the one pushing Gene hard to prosecute the Ross supporters. If any of them knew what we had decided to do at the last meeting, they would have had as good a motive for murder as anyone ever has. Gene was going to get them prosecuted for a felony. I don't feel guilty about his death, and you shouldn't either. We weren't the ones who did anything wrong. Gene knew as well as anyone what he was getting into. He was the one who was trying to find out if Ross had any ties to the Mob. And he choose to do it anyway."
I thought my argument was reason itself, but Barbara was not convinced. She insisted she was responsible.
Barbara did not do well after she got back from her trip. She told me that she couldn't sleep at night. It was so bad that she had to go to the doctor and ask him for something to put her out at night. He would only give her a pill for one night at time. She would sleep the clock around, then spend the next night sleepless. She was also gaining a lot of weight. When I first saw her, she had a figure that any woman would want. Within a few months, she was wearing baggy sweat suits most of the time.
After Gene died, Barbara kept as low a profile as she could. Though she attended our meetings, she did not write any articles for the issue we were preparing. She told me that she was talking to a lawyer about suing the county. He had told her to be very careful about what she did. When the case went to court, he wanted her halo on straight. Nothing for them to make an issue of.
I spent quite a bit more time working on the second issue of the O'Fallon Fact Finder. Gene had done most of the work on the first issue. I was busy planting, and he arranged for the Miles City Star to publish it and for the post office to distribute it. The whole effort was quite a bit of work, and with Gene dead, most of if fell on me, which I was delighted to accept. It was exciting learning how to put out a paper, and there were endless details to take care of--the layout, price negotiations, distribution. Then, there were more gripping issues: I got a crash course on libel from the editor of the Billings Gazette.
The first thing we ran in the next issue was an eulogy to Gene; the next was the story he was
preparing before he died. He had told me that he still wanted to tinker with it some more, but,
after reading it, we decided to leave it pretty much the way it was. Gene's story was very
aggressive, and I was worried about the kind of reaction it was going to get. A lot what
happened, I think, hangs on it, so I am going to quote it in full here:
Full Disclosure Time
By: Gene Huntley
In the first edition of this newspaper we reported that it appeared that county employees, Planner Mike Madler and Sanitarian Richard Menger and Newspaper Editor Nancy Schillinger had violated ethical laws and standards and that Mr. Menger may have violated criminal law in accepting free travel from a proven polluter, Ross Electric, which was attempting to start up its business here in Baker. We called upon those people to make a full disclosure of everything they had received from Ross Electric and promised to publish their disclosures in this newspaper.
We have not received such a full disclosure but have seen a partial disclosure. Mr. Young, the County Attorney, has undertaken to defend the actions of Menger, Madler, and Schillinger and has written an exculpatory letter to the county commissioners of Fallon County which they have caused to be published in the last edition of the Fallon County Times (June 26, 1992) under the heading "County Commissioner's Proceedings." In this letter Mr. Young acknowledges that the individuals received at least some money from Ross Electric: "And so far as I can tell, in each and every instance each individual received only a partial reimbursement for his or her traveling expenses . . . It is my opinion as County Attorney that the reimbursement of some of those traveling expenses and payment for lodging and meals in certain instances did not constitute a 'pecuniary gain.' . . . but in fact Ross Electric picked up some of these costs . . . "
We take it as established by these statements of Mr. Young that Mr. Menger and Madler and Mrs. Schillinger did receive at least some of their travel, lodging and eating expenses from Ross Electric.
Mr. Young argues that the receipt of this money did not break the law. He says, "from all the information supplied to me and resulting from my investigation, it appears that there were no pecuniary benefits as defined by law . . ."
Mr. Young does not cite or quote any rule or law on this point and it is apparent that he never looked up any.
With respect to our concerns about Mrs. Schillinger, the Editor of the Fallon County Times, we quoted from "The Code of Ethics for Journalists," as published by the Society of Professional Journalists, which provides: "Journalists must be free of obligation to any interest other than the public's right to know the truth . . . Gifts, favors, free travel, special treatment or privileges can compromise the integrity of journalists and their employers. Nothing of value should be accepted."
We don't think that there is any question but that the editor of the Fallon County Times acted unethically. With the concessions in Mr. Young's letter that Mrs. Schillinger did accept free travel to Washington, there isn't anything more to say.
With respect to the violations by the county employees, see 67 ALR 3d pp. 1242-1245:
The acceptance of the payment of a convention hotel expense was held to constitute a violation of a state statue which prohibited a public officer, acting in behalf of a principal in any business transaction, from receiving for his own use, directly or indirectly, any gift, commission, discount, bonus, or gratuity connected with, relating to, or growing out of such business transaction, in State v. Prybil (1973, Iowa) 211 NW2d 308, 67 ALR3d 1222, where a county supervisor was accused of violating the statute by accepting convention hotel expenses and other gratuities in connection with county purchases.
. . . .The acceptance of travel money to enable a sanitarian to travel to a sanitarians' national
convention to receive an award for outstanding scientific service in the field of sanitation was
held to be good cause for dismissing the sanitarian from his civil service position, in Miller v.
State Dept. of Health (1961, La App) 135 So 2d 570, the court affirming an order dismissing the
sanitarian, where the sanitarian accepted the money, donated by the businesses which were
routinely inspected by his assistants, knowing it came from such businesses, but without
determining its exact source.
There are many other cases of the same tenor. See 38 Op. Atty Gen. Mont. 264:
In order to prove the misdemeanor offense of the receipt of a gift by a public servant under
section 45-7-104, MCA, the statue governs situations [*3] where a pecuniary benefit is bestowed
upon a public servant by one who is or may be subject to that public servant's regulatory or
investigatory jurisdiction even absent a present intention to influence an official action. The
statute punishes the appearance of or potential for improper influence.
Also, Montana has a much broader statute, quoted by us in our first paper but not addressed by Mr. Young in his letter in the newspaper, MCA 2-2-104, which provides it is a breach of fiduciary duty for a public employee to accept a gift of substantial value ". . . which would tend improperly to influence a reasonable person in his position to depart from the faithful and impartial discharge of his public duties . . ."
There is no question but that an expense paid trip to the West Coast is a "gift of substantial value" no matter for what claimed laudable purpose it was made. And there was no explanation, even in the poor excuses made in Mr. Young's letter, for sanitarian Menger taking a friend along on the West Coast trip.
Expensive gifts to public employees by those who do business with the public is forbidden by law. The receipt by county employees, Menger and Madler of expensive gifts from a known law breaker, Ross Electric, showed especially bad judgment.
A full disclosure hasn't been made. We don't know how many gifts Ross Electric made to Menger and Madler and we don't know how large these gifts are. We do know that Ross Electric has made gifts to them and we know also that these public servants who we would expect to be even-handed and impartial are, in fact, zealous advocates for Ross Electric, a known creator and disperser of deadly poisons.
Before the next issue of this paper we would like to have a full disclosure with the number of
gifts, when they were made, and the amounts of the gifts so that if these officials are not to be
prosecuted the public will, at least, have the information to weigh their culpability.
I joined Gene in criticizing the county attorney's opinion in a shorter commentary, and much of the rest of our newsletter was taken up by reprinting a story on dioxin from US News and World Report. This time around, we managed to put out a cleaner copy. Instead of having the Miles City Star type it into their computer, I was able to get it translated into the computer language they used. This eliminated a lot of typing mistakes. I am a lousy proofreader. I just never see misspelled words, and I felt a lot better knowing that we were able to run a spelling check program on it this time around.
We still ended up with some errors though, mostly with the way paper was laid out. I had gone over the layout endlessly before we printed it, but somehow I missed things, like capitalization, use of italics, and spacing. After everything was printed, I could, of course, see the mistakes twenty feet away. Sometimes life is too cruel to be taken seriously.
We had a meeting in Gene's office the night we turned the paper into the Post Office. It went late, the way these meetings usually went. Everyone was in a festive mood. We got the paper out! Instead of going directly home, the way we usually did, my uncle wanted to go to the American Legion to eat. I wasn't too thrilled about that. I didn't want to be anywhere close to town when our paper got into the mail. When the Ross supporters read Gene's article it would be like he rose up out of the grave, grabbed them by the collar, and said, "Wait a minute." They would not be happy with the editor. Yet it was almost closing time when we got the papers to the Post Office. Surely there hadn't been time to put it into people's boxes. Going out in public tonight would probably be OK, I thought. Tomorrow would be another story. Might as well enjoy life while I could. Kathy invited Barbara to join us, but she was as shy about going out in public as I was and she turned us down.
Dinner seemed uneventful. One of the sheriff's daughters took our order, and we ate it peacefully. Just as we were getting ready to leave, the sheriff's daughter told me that someone wanted me on the phone. I was amazed. How could anyone know that I was here? When I answered the phone, whoever was calling me hung up immediately. I asked the waitress who had called me. She didn't know. I asked her what sex, and she told me male. As I talked to her, I noticed that she looked guilty, as if she were lying to me about something. As the sheriff's daughter went to serve someone else, I started feeling uneasy. People at the bar seemed to be glaring at me, one big fat guy in particular.
Then suddenly, I felt a powerful force grab me from behind and start dragging me through the bar, across the dance floor, toward the backdoor. I twisted enough to see that the powerful force was a person. "Who are you?" I asked.
"Mike Madler," was the reply. Quite an introduction. Despite living in a small community, and exchanging many rude opinions of each other, we had never met before that. Something of a hermit, I didn't go into town or socialize much. Apparently the newspapers were out, and the county planner wanted to have a heart to heart talk with me. He called me a "chicken shit" several times as he dragged me across the floor. I tried to struggle out of his grip, but he was amazingly strong. And big. His chest felt like a rock, and his arms looked like they were as big around as my legs. It began to dawn on me that I was, indeed, going to get the shit beat out of me.
The county planner was a ring leader in the Wise Use groups in town. Before he helped invite Ross into town, he had been pushing a megalandfill outside town for Minnesota garbage. The Montana legislature was not too keen on the idea, and he spent much time lobbying in Helena for it, antagonizing environmentalists in the process. They started calling him "the county planner from Hell." They didn't know the half of it.
As we reached the backdoor, the county planner threw me up against the wall, and looked like he was going to say something to me--which was going to be hard because he was shaking so bad he could hardly talk. Fortunately, my uncle showed up just then and pulled the county planner off me. The county planner threw me down on the ground, and turned on my uncle. He grabbed him around the shoulders and the throat and told him, "I'll kill you both." He might well have if several more people hadn't shown up. They grabbed Madler, and escorted him out.
I was relieved. "No one is going to get hurt," I thought. Jerry, Kathy and I waited for a while, then we started out. Unfortunately, Madler was in the hallway leading to the exit with a friend of his, the boss who ran the Shell Oil field around town, Curt Kyle. If it weren't for the size of the two men, it would have looked like the Shell Oilfield boss was consoling a little child. Madler's head was on the shoulder of the Shell boss, almost like he was sobbing with rage. Kathy and I gave them both a wide berth, but Jerry walked down the center, like he normally would. He told Madler, "I don't have anything to say to you, Mike." Roaring with rage, Madler grabbed my uncle around the throat with both hands and threw him up against the wall, lifting both of his feet off the ground. I turned back again to try and stop Madler, but the Shell oil boss broke them up before I got there.
When we got out to the car, Kathy insisted that we go down to the courthouse and file charges. "Let's do it now. If we wait until morning, you will never do it," she said. As mad as Madler was, it didn't seem like a bad idea at the time. However, we all had forgotten who the sheriff and the county attorney were, or rather choose to pretend they would do their jobs. Only the dispatcher was in when we went down to the courthouse, so we had to wait outside, on the street, until the deputy sheriff showed up. It seemed like forever. Every time a car came by, I wondered if it wasn't the county planner coming back for us, this time with a gun.
While we waited, I found out that Jerry and Kathy had each repeatedly told Legion employees to call the police. No one did. Apparently someone wanted Madler to hurt us. Besides that, someone had to have called Madler to tell him that we were at the bar. How could he have known we were there? He wasn't there when we came in, and it seems improbable that he would have just wandered in after reading our paper. The hang-up call that I got at the bar also suggests that others were involved. Apparently no one knew who I was, what I looked like, and they needed the fake phone call to see who answered the phone. Madler couldn't have done it alone.
Finally, the Baker police, then later the deputy sheriff, showed up and we filed our complaints. It was late, and we went home.
Our little confrontation made the front page of the Billings Gazette the next day, the largest daily in Montana. Jill Sundby, the reporter, quoted Madler this way: "I was reading their newspaper and I guess it had just been building up the last three months, and I felt that somewhere there's got to be some accountability." This was an excuse that was as ironic as it was disturbing. I can understand why Madler was mad at me, but I don't understand why I, the editor of a newspaper (however humble), was not being accountable when our newspaper printed facts that no one, not even the most militant Ross supporter, disputed. The Ross family did end up paying for the tickets that Madler, Menger, and Schillinger used to go to Washington. These people, themselves, all more or less acknowledged that. While they and the county attorney did dispute that this was a violation of law, surely we were within our rights to disagree with their interpretation and argue our own. What else are the freedoms of speech and press for? Yet I don't think that was what Madler meant by being "accountable." It sounded more to me like I was supposed to print, as a matter of civic duty, only the kind of things that promoted economic development in the community--like the Fallon County Times and the radio station did. Yet this attitude, as any civil libertarian might agree, is very dangerous. Why should I, the editor of a newspaper, ever be held accountable to a government employee's notion of civic duty?
Nevertheless, apparently many people in the community agreed with the county planner's philosophy. When Madler was arrested and brought into the courthouse to post bond, according to the same story in the Gazette, "within 30-minutes' notice more than 40 Fallon County residents donated over $2,100 to raise money for Madler's bond." To my knowledge, nothing like this had ever happened in Fallon County before. A political protest, but a very ugly one. Everyone there had to know that I had been assaulted. That was obvious from Madler's rage, which everyone was gossiping about. Yet despite that, they protested me filing charges against him. Apparently, I was beneath the law, and had no right to claim its protections. Ever since I found out about that "protest," I have never felt safe walking the streets of Baker. Years later, I can count the number of times I have walked into a bar in town after dark on one hand.
Before Madler could be prosecuted, Jerry and I had to return to the courthouse to sign the complaints. I asked Justice of the Peace Charles Larson for a copy of the complaint. He told me that he had to go the copier. I followed him, for some reason, about 30 feet behind. The copier was around a corner. When I turned it, I saw Don Reiger, a county commissioner, talking to the justice of the peace. The county commissioner's back was turned toward me, so he didn't see me coming. The county commissioner was telling the justice of the peace how upset he was about the charges filed against the county planner and how that he wanted to make a donation to Madler's defense fund. As I walked up, he was handing money to the justice of the peace. His face turning red, the justice of the peace tried to signal the county commissioner with his eyes to look behind him, but the county commissioner ranted on. Finally, when I stepped up beside the county commissioner, he stopped. Without blinking an eye, the county commissioner politely greeted me, "hello Wade." Yet after that there was a long, awkward silence. Knowing what to do in these circumstances is hard, so I politely took the copy of my complaint and left.
Amazingly, Madler pled guilty to assaulting me. However, perhaps because he had several more days to think about it, he pled innocent to assaulting Jerry twice. So there was going to be a trial. This was not good. Needless to say, the county attorney, who would ordinarily prosecute the case, was not exactly our friend anymore. So Jerry asked to have the city attorney, Russ Culver, prosecute the case. This was better, but not good either. Russ Culver was a Ross supporter, an officer in one of the economic development groups that invited Ross to Baker. He was also a friend of Madler's, who he took to be something of a son. Still, when we talked to him, he did make it clear that he felt that Madler was wrong to assault us, and he was willing--though, it should be said, hardly enthusiastic--to prosecute the case. So Jerry went ahead with his complaint.
Meanwhile, things were not going well for Barbara Weiss. Her son had gotten in trouble at school. I talked about it with her, and she said that it probably wouldn't have happened if it weren't for the attacks against her. That was the last straw, Barbara decided. If it was going to harm her son, it was time to quit. Her law suit against the county would have been the strongest if she had waited until the Ross supporters pressured the library board into firing her, but she was too exhausted to wait. She turned in a letter of resignation the same day I was assaulted. Yet she still had to meet with the library board to explain why.
The only announcement for the library board meeting was a note taped to the library door, but when I showed up, the library was packed. I found out about the meeting because Barbara had told me, and we thought that it was only going to be me and her and the library board. However, the word was out, and all of Barbara's enemies were there to gloat. Because there were so many people, we moved to the courtroom, which was a short distance away in the same complex. I sat by myself on the left side, while all of her enemies sat on the right. The library board sat around a table below the judge's platform. As her lawyer had advised her, Barbara brought a tape recorder and asked the board permission to record the meeting.
As the board took care of preliminary business, I looked across the aisle to see who had come. The Fallon County Times was there, so were several people from KFLN, the local radio station. A county commissioner was there, Alan Rustad, and so was Robin Menger, the county sanitarian's wife and also another one of the sheriff's daughters. All told, about 15 people were there besides those on the library board.
Mike Madler walked in late, and sat at the back of the courtroom. I carefully surveyed the faces of everyone who had come, trying to read the room. The members of the library board were upset and torn. While they were angry with Barbara for resigning, they were also angry with the people who were attacking her. The emotions on the faces of the people in the audience on the other side of the courtroom were much less complex. Some of them were blank, some of them were gloating, none of them seemed to have a trace of compassion for Barbara, and a few of them were full of hatred, Robin Menger's especially. Considering the emotions in the courtroom, I half expected to be attacked any moment, and the odds were much worse than they were at the Legion. Just Barbara and me against a whole mob. I really didn't want to be there, but I couldn't let Barbara go through this all alone. When we saw the crowd that was gathering in the library, I promised Barbara, in a faint attempt at humor, that I was leaving either with her or in a body bag. She didn't laugh.
Tom McPhee, the chairman of the library board wanted to avoid a discussion of past problems and go directly to a discussion of Barbara's resignation. Yet that was not what the audience was there for. Allen Rustad, one of the county commissioners, asked to speak for the record. He said that he disagreed with Barbara's argument that her problems were due to her stance on Ross Electric. "Her problems with courthouse staff began long before Ross Electric," the commissioner said. "Ross Electric was a moot point."
Barbara did have a disagreement with the clerk and recorder over health insurance. She felt that both she and the library employees she hired should be covered by health insurance as soon as they were hired. The clerk and recorder didn't think so, and so they went round and round. This was hardly a fault. The fact that she got in a tussle with the clerk and recorder right off the bat showed good taste. Everyone had a problem with clerk and recorder, though few people had the courage to stand up to her.
After the county commissioner spoke, Mike Madler got up and wanted to add his bit to the record. He said that he couldn't prove that Barbara had broken into his office, only that he was sure someone had. Barbara said nothing, but glared at him in contempt mixed with pity, as if he didn't have a clue. She was leaving in no small part because of the gossip campaign he had launched against her, and now that he had what he wanted, Madler was trying to wash the blood off his hands. The reaction from the library board was a weary sigh. They were sick of it, and it was irrelevant now anyway. Barbara was leaving no matter what, and they didn't seem to want to help Madler wash his reputation.
The county planner's efforts to duck the blame for her resignation were too much for Barbara. She asked to close the meeting to the public, and the board went along with her decision. Under Montana law, all government meetings have to be open to the public unless they are dealing with the personal problems of employees. Barbara had the right to close the meeting to the public if she choose. And so, Barbara was left to face the library board alone, and I was sent to the lobby to face her enemies alone.
I looked at Madler. He really was as big as I remembered, and, what was truly remarkable about him, he had no neck. None at all. If you were told to look for a person with no neck in a crowd of 10,000 people, you would pick out Madler without fail. I wondered how it got that way. Was he born with it or was it the result of football, military service, or a bar fight? Someone bigger than Madler picking him up, turning him upside down, and pounding his head into a concrete floor? The more I thought about it the more I was sure that Madler's neck, or rather its absence of one, had to be the effect of some sort of macho ritual hazing that only a true masochist could survive. It seemed like a good time to run for it.
Still, I stayed. I staked out a corner close to the exit, and the Ross supporters took up the opposite side of the lobby. I had my back to them, but I watched them carefully in the reflection off the large glass windows at the entrance to the courthouse. I didn't want them to see me watching them. They worked equally hard at pretending to ignore me. Mostly, Madler chatted pleasantly with his friends. All the time I was there, I never moved my eyes off Madler's reflection, every gesture he made, every step in my direction. It seemed like forever, but eventually one of the board members came out and we were told we could come back in. Barbara was looking for me, and was visibly relieved when I made it safely back into the courtroom. The rest of the meeting was anticlimactic. Barbara said little, and the library board talked mostly about what to do until they could replace her.
After the meeting was over, and we were alone, Barbara and I hugged each other in relief. We had survived it, but now it was final: Barbara was leaving, and, though I wanted her to stay, I knew that it really was best for her. The Wise Use crowd was out to get her, and no matter if she were a good girl for a hundred years, they would still be after her, looking for a way to get even. After seeing Robin Menger's face during the meeting, I knew that for sure.
Jill Sundby wrote a story about Barbara's resignation for the Billings Gazette, called "It's Hard to
be Neutral," that was one of her best, capturing in a few words the turmoil going on in the
community:
Tension over Ross Electric in Baker is taking its toll not only on people's nerves but their jobs.
Fallon County Librarian Barbara Weiss submitted her resignation to the library board on Friday. On her personal time, Weiss had organized opposition against Ross Electric. As a librarian, she put up an educational display of both pro- and anti-Ross materials.
She said that she received good evaluations on her performance as a librarian, but that the library board bowed to the pressures of the pro-Ross group. "My resignation is a direct result of my participation in the Ross Electric situation here in Baker," she said.
"This has been really sad for me. I really loved my job, and my son and I were both happy here in Baker . . . but I was punished and ostracized for my opinions. . . . The people in power here . . . prevented me from being offered a permanent position and made my life so miserable that I quit."
"I think the principle of the situation here is important. The principles of our country revolve around free speech."
She said that the library board on two occasions decided to continue her probationary position and not make it permanent, so she feels she has no option but to resign. Her last day will be August 5. She will leave Baker but doesn't know where she will move and has no job lined up.
Controversial subjects such as Ross Electric are especially intense in small towns. Weiss, a vocal Ross opponent, works at the courthouse complex along with Planner Mike Madler, a vocal Ross supporter.
In a small town it's hard to be neutral or even appear neutral. The city attorney is on the pro-Ross group; the police chief is brother to a major Ross opponent; even grocery stores are seen as pro- or anti-Ross.
The former local newspaper editor, Nancy Schillinger, also quit her job but she declined to say why. Schillinger was attacked by the late Gene Huntley for accepting travel expenses from Ross Electric, which Huntley said violated the code of ethics for journalists.
In August, Barbara moved to Missoula, which was at the opposite end of the state, more than 500 miles away from Madler. Because she had resigned, she was not eligible for unemployment, but her lawyer, Grant Parker, got a hearing, which I participated in over the phone, and we proved that they harassed her into resigning. She was awarded unemployment. This helped a lot because she hadn't built up much of a nest egg in Baker.
Barbara and Grant Parker were preparing a bigger suit though, a 20 million-dollar civil rights suit against the county. Grant told me that it would be difficult, but he was confident that he could win the case. Unfortunately, he never got the chance.
When she left for Missoula, Barbara didn't tell anyone, including me, what her address was. She got an unlisted phone. Nevertheless, shortly after she got there, she started getting harassing phone calls. Someone had apparently gone to the effort to hunt her down, and they wanted her to know that they knew where she was.
Late one night, Barbara called me. She told me she was leaving Montana, but she wouldn't tell me where for. Mike Cohan, who lived in Missoula and had taken Barbara under his wing when she moved up, told me that he got a similar call. She told him she was leaving. He asked her if he could help pack, but she said no, it was done, and she was leaving. In the dark of night. Barbara never told me where she was after that, though she did call me from time to time. If I wanted to mail her something, I sent it to a friend, who then forwarded it to Barbara.
I eventually found out she dropped her suit. Her lawyer, Grant Parker, was disappointed and frustrated. He was all set to go, and she just left without ever explaining why. Barbara told me that she would tell me someday what they did to her, but she never did.
I have always wondered what happened. I suppose that a 20 million-dollar lawsuit might motivate people to do some very desperate things. They might make quite ugly threats, especially if it looked like they were going to lose.
Barbara did tell me one other thing. She was a fanatical fan of "General Hospital." In her wanderings after she left she apparently came across one of the writers. Not long after that, "General Hospital" developed a story line about a bad incinerator company that corrupt politicians were inviting into a community. That was our Barbara.
Meanwhile, Mike Madler's trial came up. It did not go well. It was clear that Russell Culver, the county attorney we asked to prosecute the case instead of Denzil Young, disapproved of what Madler did, but his heart also wasn't in the prosecution. It did put him in an awful bind. He was going against all of his friends, risking their deep enmity, and prosecuting a friend. I'm sure he paid a heavy price. He didn't trust us, and we didn't trust him. The outcome was predictable, though my uncle, my aunt, and I somehow just refused to see it coming.
Never, dear reader, never go into court with a lawyer you don't trust.
Perhaps Russell did his best, but with so many conflicts of interest, he really should have recused himself and brought in a lawyer from out of town. However, if he did that, he knew that my uncle, my aunt, and I wanted to go with much more serious charges. Another prosecutor might have been concluded that Madler was violating basic civil liberties, such as freedom of speech and freedom of the press. He might have wanted to press charges on intimidation, perhaps witness tampering. The only way Russell Culver could prevent that would be to prosecute Madler on assault. Russell told us that this was a small issue, and that it would cost too much to bring in another prosecutor. Looking back on it, I don't think so. I wasn't hurt, but I have no doubts about what Madler was doing there. He was trying to intimidate us all into silence.
Somehow, a disproportionate number of Madler's friends (and none of ours) ended up on the jury list, as did two elderly women who raised Madler as a baby, and a member of one of the economic groups that invited Ross to town. The deputy clerk of court was the wife of the radio station manager, a key supporter of Ross Electric. Somehow, an unusual number of her friends ended up on the jury list. Russell Culver did dismiss most of the most biased jurors. But, after the trial we found out that one of the people who served on the jury had been heard saying downtown before the trial that she really wanted to be on the jury because "Mike Madler needed a friend on it"--a bias she somehow forgot to report during jury selection.
The trial itself was ugly. Since he was pressing the charges, my uncle testified first. I had to wait outside until they called me. Finally, they called me in. The courtroom was packed full. I felt like everyone was looking at me, and of course they were--from head to foot, trying to find any sort of indication that would justify how they felt about me. I wanted to run, but I numbed myself and took the stand. Russell Culver asked me straightforward questions that I answered directly. What happened when my uncle pulled Madler off me, then what happened when we started to walk out. I don't remember much about his questions.
Then Dennis Corbin, Madler's attorney from Miles City, cross-examined me. Corbin's courtroom manner was a curious mixture of poisonous contempt, abusive intimidation, and polished presence. Almost immediately, I was struck by how his mannerisms imitated Gene's--the way he thoughtfully held his reading glasses, the theatrical pause before he launched a line of questioning, the rehearsed tone to his voice. He had obviously studied Gene's courtroom style and was imitating the master. Yet he had none of Gene's subtlety, depth, or skill. Instead, he went for the throat with a brutal intensity designed more to punish than anything else. As Corbin walked back and forth like a snake stalking prey, he persisted in mispronouncing my name, saying it like it was a swear word that named something obscene and vulgar. I had been told to answer my questions looking at the jury, but that was impossible. I couldn't take my eyes off Corbin stalking me.
He started in by trying to exploit differences between what I had written down the night Madler had assaulted me and what I was testifying to now. The police told me that the details didn't matter, but they did to Corbin. I hadn't put in my affidavit that Madler had said, "I'll kill you both," when he turned from me and grabbed Jerry by the throat. Yet I was saying that now. It didn't seem to me like a significant detail. That night I was much more impressed by Madler's body language than by what he was saying.
Corbin also tried to trip me up by telling me that my uncle had just testified that I was down on the floor when he came in. I wasn't, and my uncle had never said I was, but Corbin was going to try to destroy me by getting me to say I was. Then he was going to go after everything else I said. But it didn't work. My uncle was almost jumping out of his seat as I insisted I had been standing. Madler threw me on the ground when he turned to my uncle. Finally, Corbin looked at me, waved his hand as if throwing out garbage, and sneered, "I have no further questions." I got down, relieved. Corbin hadn't got to me. People told me later that I was a good witness.
Not once during Corbin's abusive interrogation did Russell Culver object to anything. He just let Corbin rage on. My aunt, Kathy, testified next. I don't remember her testimony that well because I was thinking about what I had wanted to say and hadn't gotten in. I do remember that, unlike me, she did manage to look at the jury while Corbin was interrogating her.
After that Curt Kyle, the manager of the Shell oilfield in Baker, took the stand in Madler's defense. Kyle testified that Jerry had provoked the second attack and that Madler had never thrown my uncle up against the wall or tried to strangle him. Jerry, Kathy, and I had all testified to that effect, and yet Kyle lied about it. When his turn came, Russell Culver did not undermine Kyle's testimony by exploring the possibility that he may have been involved in the little plot to get me to answer the phone or that he may have been the one to call Madler up and tell him that I was down at the Legion. If that had come out in the trial, Kyle's testimony would have been a lot less credible. Besides that, we might have gotten to the bottom of who was behind the phone call, and who invited Madler down to the Legion.
Finally, the trial was over, and we went to the Huntley's house to wait for the jury to come in. It took a couple of hours, but they finally called us back. Innocent on both counts. Afterwards, my uncle announced that he now knew what it was like to be "a black man on trial in the South." Madler had been the one on trial, but Jerry, Kathy, and I all felt like we were the ones being convicted. It was that bad.
That night, I woke from a nightmare, absolutely convinced that there was a snake in my bed,
coiling around my legs. But there wasn't. I had to pull the covers off my bed to make sure.
Intimidation tactics depend on the spread of rumors and on a group's failure to bring the
problem to the surface. Name-calling, nasty rumors and other kinds of intimidation often make
our upstanding, law-abiding members feel guilty--we must have done something wrong, to
provoke this trouble--if they don't know why it is happening. Members may begin to think,
"maybe this group is too radical," or "I don't know if it's worth it, to have my neighbors think I'm
a kook." But if you talk about what's going on and why--your opponent is desperately trying to
shut you up because you are taking effective actions--your group can feel a sense of
accomplishment, instead of guilt and fear, in the face of intimidation tactics . . .
An attack on any member of your group is an attack on the whole group. Your opponent wants
to spread dissension in your ranks. This is no time to fight with each other. Involve everyone in
analyzing the problem, planning your response, and fighting back. You don't want heros who
take all the heat, or dictators who make all the decisions.
"How to Deal with Intimidation"
A guide by the Western Organization Of Resource Councils
At first, Gene's death seemed to invigorate our group. We felt that we were obligated to finish what we had started with him. Before he died, Gene wrote a brief about the levels of PCBs that Ross was proposing to burn in their incinerator. Ross had been permitted to burn up to 50 parts per million in Washington. However, Gene found a law that said that the kind of incinerator they were proposing could only burn it up to 2 parts per million, a substantial drop that if applied to Ross should have reduced their income significantly. Gene had addressed the brief to our group, but after he died, Glen Rugg sent a copy of it to the EPA. Less than a year later, the EPA ruled in our favor. Ross couldn't burn any PCBs more than 2 parts per million. What was better, not only couldn't Ross do it, but no one else that had an incinerator similar to theirs anywhere in the nation could do it either. I was amazed. The EPA made this ruling effortlessly. Just crunch. And I thought this was supposed to be hard.
After Gene died, his son, John, seemed particularly eager to stop Ross and all its supporters. He told me repeatedly again that we should "rip their heart out and make them eat it." I was delighted with his predatory metaphors. After his father died, John continued to work on getting Madler and Menger prosecuted for accepting gifts from Ross. Gene had planned on getting a court order forcing prosecution, but John decided that wouldn't work. He wrote a letter to the Montana attorney general, Marc Racicot, asking him to prosecute the case. The attorney general, a friend of Denzil Young's, refused to intervene. The attorney general argued that Montana law, while it did grant attorney generals some supervisory power over county attorneys, did not allow them to overrule a decision not to prosecute unless there was a conflict of interest. In other words, according to Racicot, there was no way to appeal the county attorney's decision. Looking back, Gene's idea to get a court order would have been the way to do it.
Nevertheless, John had another strategy. He was going to run against Denzil Young for county attorney. When he won, he would prosecute everyone Denzil had refused to prosecute. I was worried that the statute of limitations would expire before that had happened. He told me, as his father himself had said, that while the violation that Madler had committed was probably a misdemeanor, and would soon expire, Menger had, as sanitarian, committed a felony, and there was plenty of time left on it.
I asked John directly while he was running for county attorney just to make sure, "Are you going to prosecute Menger if you become county attorney?"
"Yes," John told me, "but don't tell anyone. I have to win the election first."
Deep in my gut, I had doubts about John's strategy--it just didn't feel right--but he seemed so confident that it would work I didn't argue with him. I decided just to let things slide for a while. Besides that John kept hinting that he had information that he couldn't tell me, information that was too important to tell anyone about--something or other about investigations by the FBI, unnamed sources, and so on. He alternated between telling me things in total confidence or not telling me and demanding that I trust him to handle the situation. This went against my grain. I felt like John was making a power grab. All by himself, he was deciding what secrets should be kept and what should be public. Word got back to me that he was telling other people that I was too radical to be trusted, too willing to take risks, and would get them all in trouble.
Our representative at the time, Pat Williams had made a couple of trips down to Baker to campaign or meet with the public. Whenever I had a chance, I would pull him aside and tell him about Ross and about Gene. Several times I mailed his office information. He was quite concerned.
He wrote a letter to me, dated March 23, 1993, that said:
As you know, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has opened a file on this matter, but the FBI's
policy allows no comment on an investigation in process. I have been in contact with both the
Environmental Protection Agency and the Montana Department of Health and Environmental
Sciences to be sure that they are following up on your complaints.
I know that you are aware that both these agencies have jurisdictional constraints in this matter.
I also want you to know that both agencies are taking this matter seriously and are coordinating
their efforts to see that no state or federal laws are broken in Baker.
Contrary to what Pat Williams assumed, I did not know that the FBI was investigating Ross. John had hinted darkly that someone was investigating Ross, but he also made it clear to me that I would be harming the investigation if I became involved. When I got Williams' letter, I assumed that the FBI was investigating the possibility Gene was murdered--John had suggested that someone was. When I got it, I started copying it and distributing it to other leaders in our group. The first person I mailed it to was John. When he saw it, he went through the roof. He immediately drove all the way out from town. He told me that I couldn't give it to anyone or tell anyone about it, otherwise I would ruin everything he had going.
I was getting tired of John playing "I got a secret" with me. My voice raising, I argued that if Pat Williams sent a letter to me there was no reason to keep it a secret, especially not if he didn't ask me to. Pat Williams was a very experienced and very responsible representative. He simply wouldn't do anything that would interfere with an investigation. I was only going to inform the members of our group about it so that we, together, could discuss what to do about it. That seemed like the democratic thing to do. Besides, maybe there was some way we could help the FBI. I had no intention of going to the press with it, certainly not yet. An investigation is not an indictment, and there was no evidence that there would be one.
Our exchange escalated, and John called me a traitor, his exact word. His accusation left me speechless and angry. I was not betraying anyone. I was simply giving the members of our group information they surely would like to know. Defiantly, I told John that I was going to give it to our group, and when we had our next meeting, we all could decide if we should keep this secret or not. John stomped out of my house. I felt like shouting to his back never to set foot in it again uninvited, but I didn't.
Not long after John left, his sister Jeannie called me up. Her voice was silky smooth, carefully controlled, like a corporate public relations specialist on a mission. She told me that I had gotten a hold of information that I really shouldn't have--someone had made a mistake--and the responsible thing for me to do was not to share it. Things were happening, she told me, that I knew nothing about, and if I did know about them, I would agree that I should keep them secret. I hated this argument. It's the one that I, as a political scientist, knew lead to all sorts of abuses of power. People using their power to restrict information to manipulate and deceive others. I think the Iran-Contra scandal was in process at the time, and I believe that I referred to it. I am sure I referred to the horrors the CIA was guilty of committing in Chile, Nicaragua, Iran, and a hundred other places around the globe in the name of national security.
Jeannie told me that I was taking a very noble stand, that I was unusually knowledgeable and well educated, and that if everyone in the world was as honorable as I was, we wouldn't need any secrets. "But they guys we are dealing with here are really bad," she told me. "We want them to think they can get away with something, and if you go ahead and let this information out, they will scurry back under their rock." I think that I would rather be insulted by John than manipulated by Jeannie. She was setting me up to take the blame if the FBI came up dry. I could just see how the gossip would swirl around me, behind my back, ruining my reputation in the community and our group. Just underneath her smooth voice, which was so respectful and flattering, lurked the certainty of a gossip's revenge if I didn't do what she wanted.
I gave up. I could ignore John's bluster, but I didn't have what it took to take Jeannie on. I didn't send the copies of William's letter out, and I sat through our next meeting like a bump on a log, hating myself for being a wimp. As it turned out, the FBI's investigation did, despite my silence, turn up dry. Quite awhile later, when it was clear to me that nothing was going on, I talked to the agent who did the investigation, both in person in Billings and several times on the phone, and he told me that he had found nothing to indict Ross on. In contrast to what John and Jeannie had told me, the FBI agent didn't seem to be terribly concerned about keeping his investigation a secret. In fact, he told me he deliberately let it be known that he was doing an investigation in Baker. That way, even if he didn't find anything, he could scare the hell out of Ross, maybe scare them straight. I also found out after I talked to the agent that I had leads that, had I been interviewed at the time, that might have led to different results. Apparently, John had steered the agent away from me. The FBI agent also told me that he didn't investigate Gene's death at all. He felt that the rules wouldn't allow him to do it. If Gene were murdered, he told me, it was a state or local responsibility, not one for the FBI.
The double standard shocked me. Our librarian was run out of town because of her politics, I was assaulted because of what I wrote, and Gene may have been murdered because he was an environmental activist, and none of this raised any civil liberty issues as far as the FBI was concerned! Of course not. We were on the wrong end of the political spectrum. If any of us nasty environmentalists had done to the Buffalo Commons what they were doing to us, bugging our meetings, assaulting people, and spreading death threats, I'm sure the motel rooms in Baker would be packed with FBI agents. I read once that J. Edgar Hoover once ordered his driver to never make any left turns. He would be happy to know that the modern FBI is not willing to make any left turns either.
I am sure there is still a lot that John, Jeannie, and others are keeping from me about the whole episode, but from what I can see, secrecy just didn't work. Sharing information would have lead to some lot better results, I believe. If more people had known what was going on, everything they knew could have been pooled. Details that seemed irrelevant to some people might have become important if others knew about them. With all the pieces in one place, we would have had more leads, and maybe they would have lead somewhere. However, worse than lost leads, the effort to keep the whole affair secret poisoned everything it touched. I felt that information was being kept from me, and I resented being conned into keeping information from others. The more this went on, the more I uncomfortable I felt around the members of our group. I suspected them of being dishonest with me and I knew I was being dishonest with them. I wasn't telling them information they would have wanted to know--like Gene getting death threats, the FBI investigating, and John believing his father had been murdered. If they found out, they might surely be angry with me. Anticipating this, I ended up avoiding everyone. As a result, I'm sure, we didn't accomplish everything we might have.
If that episode wasn't enough to convince me of how poisonous secrecy was to a grassroots effort, a later episode confirmed it for me. Communications were quite poor between John and me after he called me a traitor, but it was obvious to me that John was having problems. He had started out being really aggressive. He talked about how he was going to rip people's hearts out and then make them eat them, but then he suddenly withdrew. He often skipped meetings, and didn't say anything when he did attend. I heard him complain about how much of a burden working on Ross was, like he wanted just to wash his hands of it. It was a distraction from the plans he was making for his life, and he wanted free of it. He told me he was studying for his bar exams, but something else seemed to be going on. Suddenly John started gaining weight--44 pounds in less than two months time, almost a pound a day. Something was eating John, and I didn't know what it was.
Then one night Barbara called me. She was still in Missoula. She asked me what was going on, and I told her not much. Everything was quit. She was shocked. "You and John aren't talking anymore, are you?"
I didn't want to explain to her why, so I changed the subject: "is there something wrong?"
"John told Mike, and he told me, that someone put a severed pig's head in the front seat of John's pickup."
"A what where?" I exclaimed. I was totally caught off guard.
"Pig's head in the front seat of his pickup."
I pressed Barbara for details, but she didn't know much more, so I hung up and called John.
"Barbara shouldn't have told you," he said.
"But it is true? Someone put a pig's head in your pickup?"
"Yes."
"And you were going to keep it a secret?"
"It was a red herring, a High School prank. I really think so. I don't want to make a big deal about it."
Yet it was a big deal. Here John was, getting a heavy duty death threats, and he was keeping it secret from me--while I was out rasing hell. By keeping it a secret, he was keeping information from me about what kind risks I, and others, were really facing. This was not exactly an act of courage. John might have wanted to me to believe that it was no big deal, but it clearly was to him. His behavior changed radically about the time the incident had happened. He withdrew from involvement in our group, he started overeating, and he picked a fight with me as an excuse to withdraw. Whoever put the pig's head in the front of John's pickup got exactly what they wanted, an intimidated candidate for county attorney. I told John that and he vehemently denied it.
"I'm not intimidated. It's a red herring, it really is. I'm just not going to make this into an issue. I've got more important things to do, like passing my bar exam."
I threatened to tell everyone about it, but John became very angry. He told me that if I did, he would deny it. Tell people that I was making it up.
Yet if it really was so unimportant, I thought, why was John so afraid that other people would find out about it? Perhaps he felt they wouldn't believe him, that they would gossip about him and ridicule him behind his back, and say that he was making the whole thing up. Or perhaps he was convinced that his father had been murdered, as he had told me and others, and he felt that he was going to be next if he didn't change his ways. Or perhaps someone got to John some other way, either by blackmail or by threats of violence, and he didn't want anyone to know that he, a candidate for county attorney, had buckled under. Despite John's demands that I keep it a secret, I quietly told other people, though only close allies at first, thinking that they could prevail upon John to change his ways. It turned out that John had told no one in his family about the incident, not even his sister, or his mother, with whom he was living. When they found out and confronted John about it, he was very angry with me for letting it out.
"You're treating me like a child," he told me.
True enough, I was, but only because he was acting like one. I decided to go against John's wishes and tell more people when I found out that the severed pig's head was only part of the campaign of intimidation against the Huntleys. John was also getting death threats over the phone--one of them was even left on his answering machine. Several times a verbally abusive man called who never identified himself. He told John that what Ross did was none of his business. Why ruin his life and career by getting involved in it? John's mother, Cathy Huntley, was getting it too. She told me that she was getting calls that were unbelievably cruel. Someone would call her and ask, "Is Gene there?" and then start laughing uncontrollably. Jeannie Huntley, who lived more than 50 miles away in Glendive, went out one morning and found that someone had left a severed deer's head on top of her car, covering it with blood. She told me that she thought it was a joke by friends, though it seems to have happened almost the same time the pig's head was put in John's pickup.
As a pattern, these incidents were something much more than "High School" pranks. And despite what he was telling me, John knew they were because he was carrying guns with him wherever he went, like he had visions of an Old West shootout. I told him that guns only worked in Hollywood. In real life, they don't protect people, only publicity does. Break the silence, and the rats would scurry back into the shadows; keep silent, and they would only be emboldened.
Mike Cohan and I talked about it on the phone and we agreed that was why neither one of us got nearly as much trouble as John did, although we were causing our opponents at least as much trouble. When I was assaulted, I pressed charges; When I was threatened, I told people about it, and I never got a fraction of what John got. "They must have decided that we are hopeless causes," Mike told me. The best response to intimidation is to talk about it and expose it, even if it is hard. That is what stops it. Keep it a secret and it gnaws away on you forever, poisoning not only your life but the lives of everyone involved.
John did pass his bar exam, quite handily at that, and he was elected county attorney. (He ran unopposed. Denzil retired.) Yet once he had the power to do what he promised me he would, he never prosecuted Madler or Menger. I was angry, and I didn't bother keeping it a secret. I felt betrayed. After he was elected, I circulated an essay that described the pig's head incident, among other things. John came out to my place and we had a big argument. He told me that he hadn't promised me he was going to prosecute Madler and Menger. He also told me that he never said his father was murdered.
When John told me that I was flabbergasted. I had always thought that the phrase "my mouth fell open" was just a metaphor for surprise. Even extreme surprise didn't actually didn't do that to people, I thought. Yet when John said that to me, I felt my jaw go slack.
What was John thinking? Why was he lying to me? How could he have forgotten our conversations? How could he sit there on my couch and say they never happened?
After John had convinced me that Gene could have been murdered, I had sent off for the National Transportation and Safety Board's report on the accident. An initial report quickly came out, but it had little information. I had to wait better than a year for the factual report. It was thick, almost like a book. When I read it there was nothing in it, contrary to what John had told me he thought possible, to suggest that any kind of tampering had caused the crash. According to the NTSB's report, all available evidence indicated that the plane simply flew flat and level into the hillside at full power. Nothing was wrong with the plane that would have, by itself, caused the crash.
However, deep into the report, the Federal Aviation Administration filed a toxicology report that indicated that Gene had 57.7 ug/mL of quinidine in his blood and 63.4 ug/mg in his liver. Quinidine was a prescribed medication that Gene was taking for heart problems. According to the report, "The therapeutic concentration range of quinidine in plasma is 2.0 ug/mL to 6.0 ug/mL. The level of quinidine found in this case would most likely impair the pilot's ability to fly an aircraft."
Saying that this level would "impair the pilot's ability to fly an aircraft," is something of an understatement, I found out. When I contacted the FAA laboratory where this report was done, and asked them to interpret the results for me, they told me that 30 ug/mL had been known to cause death. Gene had twice that amount in his body. When I asked Pete Mangum, the NTSB investigator on the case, to explain this apparently fatal dose of quinidine in Gene's body, he told me that he had investigated it and could not explain how it got there.
When I interviewed him in his office in Billings, Kenneth Mueller, the forensic pathologist who did the autopsy on Gene, was as perplexed by the results as I was. They were so high, he told me, that his initial reaction was that they were a laboratory error. He assured me that laboratory errors are more common than is generally known. His working assumption was that something is wrong with one in twenty. However, as he reflected on it, he said that there was no indication that Gene's toxicology report was unreliable. Both the blood and the liver results were consistent with each other, and laboratory errors are not usually so extreme as these results. It was probably right.
Gary Dale, Montana's chief medical examiner, told me over the phone that the blood and the tissue the samples were drawn from could have been contaminated when the wreck tore open Gene's digestive tract. Yet he also told me that most of the quinidine, if Gene had taken it a few hours before, would have been absorbed by the time of the wreck. There wouldn't have been anything there to contaminate the results. Besides that, Mueller told me that contamination wouldn't ordinarily cause results as high as those Gene had.
Many people have different theories about how to explain the FAA's toxicology report. Several officials have told me that it is possible that Gene, himself, took the overdose. While that may be a possibility, I saw nothing in Gene's behavior that would have suggested he was contemplating suicide. In the months before he died, I never saw Gene brooding about death, complaining about the uselessness of his life, or saying that he would be better off dead. On the contrary, I saw him busy formulating many long-range plans--stopping the Ross incinerator, helping his son get started in his law practice, breaking his horses, and, somewhat less plausibly, becoming an Olympic figure skater. And the last time I saw him--perhaps less than a dozen hours before his death--he was cheerful, talkative, and relaxed, looking forward to the vacation that he was going on for a few days.
Ken Mueller, however, maintained that all that could be and he still could have taken the overdose. "People live multiple fantasies," he told me. Gene could have been living one when he was with me, and an entirely different one when he was by himself, away from others. "I see it all the time in my practice," Mueller insisted. According to Mueller, Gene could have taken an overdose not so much because he was intending suicide but because he was frustrated with his health and did it on an impulse, without thinking about the consequences or intending them.
Perhaps. However, Cathy Huntley, Gene's wife, told me that the NTSB recovered all the extra quinidine that Gene was carrying with him from the wreckage. There appeared to be nothing unaccounted for. Unless Gene had a secret stash somewhere, there wasn't enough missing, either at home or in his plane, to explain the high dose in his body.
Another possibility is that the quinidine was accumulating in Gene's body from therapeutic doses. Still, the night before he died, I watched Gene effortlessly walk half a mile, pick up a heavy feed bag, and work with his horses. He seemed in relatively good health. Perhaps his complexion was slightly white, but not unusually so. According to all the toxicologists and physicians that I have talked to, if Gene's liver had failed and he was accumulating high levels of a toxic drug, he should have shown some symptoms of it then. In fact, he should have been really sick days before the crash, certainly in no mood to get into a plane.
Another possibility, offered in a letter to me by the former county attorney, Denzil Young, is that: "Gene's system (may have been) acclimated to the use of that prescription drug, and he may have been able to tolerate without harm this additional dosage. Indeed, Gene may have taken extra medication because he felt symptoms which he thought justified or required the extra medication." There is, I found out, no ground at all for this speculation. If there is anything all the experts in toxicology that I talked to agree on, it is that the level of quinidine the FAA found in Gene's body was very high and could only have been expected to cause considerable harm, if not death. There is no possibility that he could have become acclimated to that level of quinidine or gained therapeutic benefit from it. Besides, Darryl Espeland, Gene's personal physician in Baker, told me that he had done a complete physical on Gene shortly before the wreck and he had found that Gene's quinidine levels then were in the low therapeutic range. Apparently Gene's symptoms were being controlled with the doses of quinidine he was taking.
Yet another way to explain the results away is that quinidine is widely distributed throughout the body, and that it binds to hemoglobin, the liver, heart, kidneys, and skeletal muscle. After death, the argument goes, and especially after a traumatic death, the red blood cell contents leak into the surrounding plasma, leading to artificially elevated concentrations of quinidine. According to this argument, death and the trauma of the crash hopelessly confound the test, making it unreliable. Furthermore, the argument goes, the liver metabolizes quinidine, apparently accumulating it in the process, and having a high concentration after death would be normal for it. In general, according to these arguments, post accident concentrations do not reflect true serum concentrations.
However, neither the FAA laboratory, nor Gary Dale, nor Ken Mueller thought that this argument was plausible when I specifically asked them about it. Toxicologists, forensic pathologists, and other scientists are well aware that death can change things and they take considerable precautions to make sure that lab reports allow for things like this. In fact, the FAA laboratory, itself, was conducting research into the movement of accumulations of drug doses in the body after death and, I was told, it was small.
The FAA, when I contacted them again a year or so later, just to make sure, still maintains that its report is reliable. While they were more skeptical, both Gary Dale and Ken Mueller told me that they are more inclined to believe the report is reliable than not. So Gene probably had a fatal dose of a drug in his body when he died and there is no reason to think that he was suicidal. Given this, why did John Huntley reverse himself and tell me that he never said his father was murdered?
Several years after Gene was dead, I read in the Billings Gazette that Cathy Huntley was suing the FAA for wrongful death. I was amazed. The thought hadn't even occurred to me that the FAA had any responsibility for the crash. So I went into the Federal Building in Billings and got a copy of the disclosure statements to see what the argument was. According to the pre-discovery disclosure statement written by Terry Hansen, Cathy Huntley vs United States of America, "Had the air traffic controller maintained a proper scan on the radar scope it would have been discerned that the aircraft was not complying with a safe altitude clearance and the air traffic controller should have issued a low altitude alert wherein the impact with the earth would have been avoided." The argument was that the control tower should have warned Gene that he was flying below the hilltops. The control tower didn't, and so, the FAA was responsible for Gene's death. The Huntley family was suing to collect "wrongful death" damages.
In her pre-discovery disclosure statement, Mary Jo Moltzen, assistant attorney for the Federal
Department of Justice, disagreed that the air traffic controllers were negligent. She contended
that Gene Huntley did not have an instrument rating, which, by law, meant that he could not fly
into the clouds. He had also requested an approach under Visual Flight Rules, which a pilot is
obligated to only request if he can adequately see the terrain. Gene did not report that he was
having problems with the weather, and he did not declare an emergency. The air traffic control
radar scope does not typically show clouds, or terrain elevations, and so it would have been, at
the very least, inconvenient for the control tower to know if Gene was flying into a concealed hill.
According to Moltzen:
"Pilot Gene Huntley had an obligation as pilot in command to be familiar with all available
information concerning his flight, including appropriate aeronautical charts that display
minimum safe altitudes along the route of flight. As a noninstrument rated pilot, Pilot Huntley
also had an obligation to maintain flight in visual meteorological conditions under visual flight
rules. If continued flight in VFR conditions was not possible, Pilot Huntley was required to so
advise the air traffic controller, indicate the lack of an instrument rating, and declare a distress
condition."
In other words, if Gene had obeyed the law, something that a lawyer, of all people, could be held accountable for, the wreck would not have happened.
Besides having a strong argument that the air traffic controllers were not responsible, Moltzen also had a strong case that a series of misjudgments caused the wreck by Gene--flying too low, flying into the clouds, and other things. These misjudgments could be easily be explained by the quinidine overdose, which commonly causes confusion, disorientation, and impaired coordination. Nothing that I saw in the court documents persuaded me that the FAA toxicology report was in error, or that the NTSB was wrong in concluding the overdose impaired Gene's ability to fly the plane.
I would very much like to find out what happened to Gene that foggy day outside Billings. The question is, do I, or does the public at large, have any right to know? Members of the Huntley family have heatedly told me that I do not. They feel that my efforts to find out violate their privacy. When she found out that I knew that Gene had a fatal dose of a drug in his body and was trying to investigate it, Jeannie Huntley called me up and, using extraordinarily brutal terms, told me to "stay out of her father's death." Immediately after she found out that I was writing about the events surrounding Gene's death, Cathy Huntley, too, called me up and in at least as brutal terms told me not to publish anything about Gene's death.
At the time of these conversations, I didn't know that the Huntley family was preparing a lawsuit against the FAA. After I found out, and read what the Huntley family was arguing in the disclosure statements, I was no longer persuaded that it was a private matter. They, themselves, were making everything public by suing the government. They didn't want me coming up with anything that disputed what they were telling the court.
Eventually, the Huntley family dropped the suit against the FAA, without prejudice. The taxpayers got their money's worth out of the government's attorney, Ms. Moltzen. She had the precedents lined up six deep to argue every point of law. From the tone of her briefs, she very much wanted to the case to go to court, despite her motions to dismiss, just so that she could kick ass. This was not the kind of woman you wanted to meet in court--or a dark alley. Apparently, the Huntley family came to the same conclusion, and agreed to drop the suit.
I was very hurt by the reaction of the Huntley family to my efforts to find out the truth about Gene's death. While I do regret the pain my investigation caused them, and do acknowledge that it raises issues the family might want to keep private, I only did it out of the most honorable motives. I feel that I have a responsibility to find out what had happened, especially since the local law enforcement seems so compromised, and John himself seems to have been intimidated into not prosecuting a case he had earlier thought strongly merited it. If Gene were murdered for political purposes, it is not just the family's problem. It is everyone's. When justice is obstructed, people are intimidated, and perhaps even murdered for political purposes, it isn't private matter anymore. It is a public one, and the public has a need to know about it. Furthermore, I know that if I had died under mysterious circumstances Gene would have left no stone unturned finding out what happened to me. I feel that I owe as much to him.
I am writing about this episode, despite the ugliness of it, because I think it suggests what kind of grotesque knots people can get into if they don't deal with intimidation openly, without denial. People don't succumb to intimidation in a simple linear way, each reaction to intimidation leaving marks that can be neatly traced back to the initial cause; instead, they do it in complex ways--ways that conceal the initial act, making it obscure by concealing it in denial, self-delusion, and secrecy. We admire people for standing up to intimidation, and condemn them for giving in to it. And so when people are intimidated, and they give into it, they will deny it, disowning the weakness that made it necessary. Though they acted out of weakness, they did what they did, they will tell us, not out of fear or necessity but out of courage and choice. Having given in to intimidation, such a lie is the only way to maintain dignity. And so the victims of intimidation do exactly what the aggressors want: They cover the crime against themselves up. When they are through, the truth, ironically, becomes as great a threat to the victims as it is to the perpetrators. From the viewpoint of the victims, anyone who would expose the crime would expose their humiliation, and they become as great a danger as the one who committed the crime.
When intimidation succeeds, and lies prevail, the fault is not with individuals but with the whole community, I believe. If a victim of a crime conceals the truth, they do it because they do not trust the community to accept the truth. Before anyone can be intimidated, they must be isolated within the community. They must be made to feel weak and small, unable to resist--afraid to tell the truth to others. Then, and only then, will they conceal a crime against themselves. To prevent this from happening, a community must insist upon the truth from individuals, and must make it possible for them to tell it.
This sounds easy, but sometimes nothing is so hard to tell as the truth. We are all desperately dependent on the opinions of others for self-affirmation. We are what we are to ourselves only because others find it in us, tell us about it, and affirm it. If telling the truth will cause us to be ostracized and attacked, excluded from the community, and gossiped about, then who would not rather let a lie prevail? We risk so much when we risk our belonging in our community. When the truth would place our belonging at risk, only the strongest can resist the temptation to disown their own experience and thoughts.
Afraid of what they would become to others, those who aren't as strong will conform to the judgements of the They world. Unless they conform, they would have to deal with the consequences of telling what others would angrily deny, becoming a target of gossip. This weakness is not anything we choose or are responsible for, it is something that gossip cultivates in us. A community that has secrets, and fears the truth, does not cultivate strength in its members. Instead, it prefers people to be weak and afraid, willing to accept the disciplines of the They world over personal knowledge. That way, the community won't have to deal with the truth they might tell. Once everyone accepts their belonging in a community like this, and accepts their responsibility to gossip about those who don't, no one trusts their inner experience, and everyone gets lost in the They world. However, when no one is able to insist upon the truth, things get very ugly. Crimes go unreported, friends attack friends, isolation grows, lies are passed off as truth, and everyone begins hating themselves.
That's what happens when a community that undermines the strength people need to tell the truth. Succumbing to intimidation in a community like this is not a personal fault, it is a collective failing, and nothing will be improved until it is addressed as a collective problem. The community has to make it its responsibility to let individuals tell the truth as they know it, no matter how ugly it is, or how angry, awkward, and uncomfortable it makes people feel. It has to accept the fact that it isn't always going to hear what it wants to hear. Still, the sacrifice is worth it. Instead of living in a community of lies, secrets, resentment, fear, and hatred, people are living in a community of truth and acceptance. While truth can be unpleasant, and is never an unambiguous achievement, a community where we hear and honored it is always a happier place for accepting it.
While truth always begins with individuals, they are never enough. Those who hear it, and do not
fear it, are at least as important. Just as it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a village to tell
the truth.
Hormonally active synthetic chemicals are thugs on the biological information highway that sabotage vital communication. They mug the messengers or impersonate them. They jam signals. They scramble messages. They sow disinformation. They wreak all manner of havoc. Because hormones orchestrate many critical aspects of development, from sexual differentiation to brain organization, hormone-disrupting chemicals pose a particular hazard before birth and early in life.
Theo Colborn, Diane Dumanoski, and John Peterson Meyers
Our Stolen Future
Back in the '60's people flagged the passes for spray planes, and it was considered acceptable work for children. So, my father took my sister and me out to show us how to pace off the distance for spray passes. We thought it was fun, and we made a game of it. It was war, sometimes WWII, sometimes Vietnam, and the plane was swooping in to strafe us. Most of the time we heroically escaped, but sometimes we pretended the plane had shot us, and we fell dead to the ground, letting it fly over us, covering us with spray. After it had passed, we would get up laughing, alive again.
My sister only went out flagging only once or twice, but I went out every summer from the time I was in the second grade until High School. Some of my most vivid memories of my childhood are from when I helped spray the crops. First, there was the unmistakable smell of the chemical: sweet, pungent, slightly intoxicating. Then, there were the assorted spray pilots that, like migrating ducks, would land in our back pasture, live with us for a month or two, then fly off to spray somewhere else. They all belonged in asylums.
The first one that I worked with, all by himself, convinced me of this. The others merely added detail. Once, when it was late in the morning of a hot summer day, too breezy to spray anymore, so I was walking across the pasture to go back home. Suddenly, I noticed a shadow growing over me. It grew too quickly for me to grasp what it was. I just sort of stood there, baffled. Then, feeling like a mouse the moment before an eagle swooped down on it, I knew. I fell flat on the ground, and the sound of the spray plane exploded in my ears as it abruptly broke off the dive directly on top of me. The plane was so close, I swear, that if I hadn't fell to the ground when I did, it would have ground me up in the propeller blade.
The pilot--his name was Bob Skaggs--was just having fun. He had an old biplane with an open cockpit, just like the kind that flew in WW I. Apparently, when this kind of plane went into a dive, it developed enough lift to turn up suddenly. While it was diving downward, the sound all went backward. You couldn't hear it coming, not until it was there. It was perfect for playing "eagle and mouse." Skaggs would wait until he was through spraying, then, when he caught a flagger helpless out in the open, he would duck behind a hill then dive down out of the sun on them. Once, he caught my uncle out in the middle of a big field and he played with him for an hour like that, waiting until my uncle would think he was gone, then diving down out of the sun on him yet again. Eagle and mouse was great fun for the eagle, total terror for the mouse.
Unfortunately, we didn't have Skaggs all the time. It got worse. One pilot that flew in, flew his plane quit a bit faster than the others. At the end of the field, he would go straight up, stall on his wing, come straight down until he was just off the ground, then pull up and come straight at the flagger. Most pilots would aim the outside of the wing at the flagger, but this one went straight at them. Which meant that you only had a few seconds to get out of his way. When he first came, he looked straight at me and said that he got a flagger every now and then. I believed him.
Fortunately, one of my uncles pumped the fuel into his plane a little too fast one day and got some water mixed in. The plane sputtered a little in one of the maneuvers and the pilot immediately landed and accused my uncle of trying to kill him. Shaking with rage, he took off and never returned. I was glad.
Cal Oman was another pilot we had spray for us. I liked him because he gave me plenty of room to get out of the way. Still, there was a problem with him too. He drank. A lot. Especially when he was flying. He had a habit of buzzing our place just before a storm, looking for a refuge. Once, the wind was blowing so hard that he couldn't fly into it. The plane would hoover in one spot over the ground, making no headway. So Cal would duck behind a hill, fly up a valley where he was protected from the wind, and work his way to the runway. When, somehow, he got it safely down, and was idling down the runway, my uncle and some hired men ran out and grabbed the wings so that it wouldn't turn over. When they got it safely tied down, Cal crawled out of the plane and promptly fell flat on the ground, too drunk to walk.
Cal always did that. When my family sat around and talked about the spray pilots that had worked for us (and this was a frequent topic of conversation around the dinner table), no one could ever remember Cal getting out of the plane and not falling down. He always did it. It was like he always landed twice, once with his plane and once with his ass. We really should have put a mattress underneath his wing every time he got out, but that seemed a little presumptuous. Besides, Cal always bounced off the ground unhurt. Which was really quite remarkable because he was quite fat. Of all the guardian angels in heaven, Cal's worked the hardest.
My mother was not terribly happy with the whole thing, me flagging for the spray plains, and she said so loudly, but everyone reassured her that it was safe. She would have worried about the possibility of accidents, if anyone had told her about the stunts she never saw, but instead she worried about exposure to the chemicals. The spray pilots told her that they often used children as flaggers, and that they had never seen any ill effects. Besides that, they told her, a big company made the chemical and it had many scientists working to make sure that it was safe. And the government would never let them sell something that wasn't safe, would it?
Years later, after I started doing research on the toxins the Ross family would release if they were allowed to operate their incinerator, I came across some drums that the spray had come in. They were orange. In large yellow letters, faded with the years, I could still make out the markings, "2,4-D and 2,4,5-T." Agent Orange, in other words--the same chemical that destroyed the health of so many people caught up in the Vietnam War. There were, I should note, no warnings anywhere on the drums.
After I thought about it awhile, I even remembered seeing "dioxin" on the list of ingredients of one of our drums a long time ago. I remembered it because I had read an article in Mother Joneson dioxin in the Agent Orange sprayed in Vietnam. After I read the article--it must have been in the '80s'--I came across one of our old 2,4-D drums. I saw the word "dioxin" surrounded by all these other complicated words. I tried to reassure myself that it wasn't the same stuff because there were all these other words around it, "dibenzo-p" or something like that. Thinking it couldn't be the same dioxin, I put it out of my mind until Ross.
I was a sickly child. It seemed like every cold that went around, I caught. I also suffered from severe headaches, rashes, and bladder infections. When I was a junior in High School, I my urinary tract closed in on itself and I could hardly pee. Sometimes, I noticed blood in my urine. The doctors that I went to were baffled. This was a problem they expected in an old man, not a teenager. It did not turn out to be cancer, just a growth in my urinary tract that obstructed the flow. The doctors treated it by dilating my urethra, a quite unpleasant procedure that I had to go through often. When I started doing research on dioxin, I discovered that exposure to it was associated with urinary tract problems, though perhaps not commonly the kind I had.
Eventually, I would develop severe allergies. When the nurse, who had many years of practice, saw the results of my first IgE test (a common test for allergies), she was sure it had to be wrong. She had never seen anything like it, but the test wasn't wrong. I had allergies that bad. During one attack, I coughed so hard I broke my ribs. Things got better when I took prednisone and started the shots.
Of course, I have no idea if my exposure to Agent Orange caused these health problems. Still, my family has had so many health problems. Besides my mother's breast cancer, my father developed a rare, but usually fatal, blood vessel formation around his spinal cord that would have choked it off. Fortunately, he found a doctor that was able to operate successfully on it, and, though he is almost crippled, he has survived. Like myself, my sister has problems with allergies. My cousin, who was born just about when the Ross episode started, developed childhood leukemia. My aunt has a bad case of rheumatoid arthritis. And so on. Farm families are routinely exposed to many toxic chemicals--pesticides, hazardous materials in fertilizer, solvents in the shop, used oil, and so on. On top of that, the emotional stresses of farming, trying to stay in business when commodity prices are chronically low, according to at least one study that I have seen, exceed the work-related stresses of air traffic controllers, which are among the highest of all professional groups. Saying that one thing caused my family's health problems would be impossible.
Still, the dioxin in the Agent Orange we used surely contributed to them. I remember how my mother used to flag for the spray planes. And I remember how sick my father got whenever he was around the spray dope too much. When he got too much, he would quit and come home feverish and dizzy. Saying that it was just the chemical, he would go to bed and assure us that he would be better soon. Sometimes, during these spells, he got so disoriented he couldn't recognize us. He would roll around in bed, moaning and delirious. Once, entirely unaware of what he was doing, he got his head caught in the headboard of the bed. Mom had a lot of problems getting it out. Still, we didn't go to the hospital because, "it was just the chemical, and it always did that." In the morning, true to his word, Dad would be better. Yet later he developed these huge ugly pimples that wouldn't go away. The doctors were mystified.
They suggested scrubbing his back with a stiff brush to remove dead skin. That didn't work, but a prescription of tetracycline did. Ever since I was a little kid, Dad has been on it to treat his skin problems. Dad's theory for his skin problems was that they started when he took some prednisone. However, as I found out when I started doing research on the incinerator the Ross family was proposing, exposure to dioxin commonly causes chloracne, a serious skin disorder that fits perfectly with the symptoms Dad had.
Dioxin, and all the chemicals like PCBs and furans that resemble it, are amazing toxins. They are all what the EPA calls environmental hormones. This means that they are toxic not because they damage or kill cells, or because they attack DNA, causing mutations that can lead to cancer. Instead, they are toxic because they disrupt the information systems that regulate the body. Unlike conventional toxins, environmental hormones are pieces of information. It doesn't really matter how much of them are there, only that they are there. Letting dioxin or PCBs get into someone's body is like altering the code of a computer program. A few key strokes and everything is messed up. Changing one word in a line of code, like putting an "and" where an "or" is, changes everything. Think of all the problems the Y2K bug can do in a large computer program. Because one bit of information can do so much, you cannot assume that just because you can't measure the amount of PCBs or dioxin present in something it is safe.
Perhaps modern science has placed too much responsibility upon our genes for what we are. Genes, it would seem, are responsible for everything we are--inherited diseases like cystic fibrosis, predispositions to cancer, mental and physical abilities, and about everything else. In fact, genes are only partially responsible. Genes may be the blueprint, the design of what we are, but they do not exclusively determine how we are built. The building process, and what we become because of it, are shaped by many things that have nothing to do with genes. The hormonal environment the fetus develops in is crucial.
As Colborn, Dumanoski, and Peterson point out, human intelligence is affected as much by the
amount of thyroid hormone reaching the brain during a crucial phase of development as it is by
genes. A young man may develop testicular cancer not because of his genes but because of
abnormal levels of hormones in his mother's womb. When hormonal messages are disrupted early
in life, they disrupt everything afterwards. Colborn, Dumanoski, and Peterson use this kind of
metaphor:
Imagine what would happen if somebody disrupted communications during the construction of a large building, so the plumbers did not get the message to install the pipes in half the bathrooms before the carpenters closed the walls. Imagine that the wrong instructions arrived when the program for the climate control system was being set up, and the building thermostat was fixed at eight-five degrees rather than sixty-eight. Imagine what it would mean if, through a communications mix-up, the high-rise ended up with only one elevator instead of eight.
In other words, the construction of anything is as important as the blueprint, probably more so. Genes are not destiny. Hormones are. As the body's messengers, they are the instructions that activate genes. If the fetus were bathed in counterfeit hormones during development, falsely instructing it to do things it would not normally do, it would turn out much different from the genetic blueprint. As a result, the cancer paradigm, which the EPA has used to set standards for toxicity is inappropriate for environmental hormones. Industry advocates like to argue that there are thresholds to toxicity. They argue that we don't have to eliminate all carcinogens from the environment because carcinogens are toxic only above certain levels. Below those levels, the body can repair the damage done because it has evolved mechanisms to repair damaged DNA.
However, while the body can repair damaged DNA, which will lead to cancer, it cannot tell the difference between environmental hormones and natural hormones. It reads them the same way. Cells are prepared to accept hormones. They have to be to perform their function in the body. And so, they have no way of telling if the hormone is a real hormone, naturally and appropriately arising in the body, or not. If something fits into a cell's hormone receptors, the cell reads it as information and responds accordingly. The body has no way of knowing it is being damaged, and so, the toxicity of environmental hormones is completely unlike that of mere carcinogens.
Because hormones are information and will affect body processes in very, very small amounts, environmental hormones can cause damage in vanishingly small amounts. Conventional toxins, like arsenic and cyanide, are measured and regulated in parts per million. Dioxin, on the other hand, is typically measured in parts per trillion, sometimes in parts per quadrillion. The EPA has had to go to such extremes because it has found no threshold below which dioxin does not have an effect. Unlike conventional toxins, where the dose makes the poison, chemicals that mimic the effect of hormones will be toxic in any amount. Indeed, quite unlike conventional toxins, environmental hormones can actually be more toxic in smaller quantities than they are in larger ones.
According to Fred vom Saal, the toxic effects of exposure to environmental hormones will increase with very small doses, achieving significant biological impact, but then decrease afterwards. The result, once plotted on a graph, is an inverted U, not a smooth linear line rising upward. Because a small dose can be more toxic than a larger dose, dilution is not the solution to pollution, at least not the kind of pollution environmental hormones pose. Once environmental hormones are in the environment, no matter in how small a quantity, they can bioaccumulate until they become a problem. Both dioxin and PCBs, accumulate in body fat, remaining in the body for many years without being broken down or excreted. As a result, they can increase in concentration many thousands of times as they go up the food chain. Because of this, no amount released into the environment is safe.
Concern about the toxic effects of dioxin and PCBs would be moot if in fact the average person was not accumulating enough of them to have toxic effects. Not long ago, the EPA released a draft of its reassessment of dioxin. According to the studies that it cited, the typical American eats 119 pg/day of dioxin (TEQ). Of that 37 pg comes from eating beef, 24 pg from dairy, 17 pg from milk, 13 pg from chicken, and 12 pg from pork. And the EPA believes that the typical American is already close to the threshold where dioxin will begin having a toxic effect. The average level of dioxin in a middle-aged person is 9 ng/kg, or 9 parts per trillion. However, according to the EPA, the immune system begins to be suppressed at 7 ng/kg, 2 units less than what most of us have. At 14 ng/kg, human glucose tolerance is altered and testes size is decreased. At 19 ng/kg, monkeys, which are good laboratory models for humans, show learning disabilities.
According to the EPA, the dioxin present in the average American's body is enough to cause perhaps as many as 1 in 1000 people to develop cancer, a much higher incidence than any other carcinogen the EPA has ever studied. In other words, the average American is not only close to the threshold where environmental hormones will begin to affect their health, they are actually over it.
Much research shows that environmental hormones like PCBs are causing significant harm. To begin with, PCBs have been associated with cancers involving reproductive tissues. Fifty years ago the incidence of breast cancer was 1 in 20. Now it is 1 in 8. From 1940 to 1980, breast cancer rates increased by 1.2% each year. However, since 1980 the rates have been increasing by 2% a year, though recent reports have argued that the upward trend is leveling off. Worse than that, breast cancer rates for women less than 35 have been increasing too, and women in this age group have the poorest survival rate. Since, at the most, only 5% of the cases of breast cancer can be attributed to genetics, and 50 to 70% occur in women with no conventional risk factors, a growing number of researchers have been attributing the increasing incidence of breast cancer to the accumulation of environmental hormones in body tissues.
The theory goes like this: Breast cancer is strongly associated with total estrogen exposure. The earlier a woman enters puberty and the later she enters menopause, the more likely she is to develop breast cancer. If environmental hormones mimic estrogen, as some PCBs in fact do, exposure to them should increase a woman's chance of developing breast cancer. One of the things that suggest that environmental hormones are behind the epidemic of breast cancer is that researchers have been reporting that an increasing portion of breast cancer cases are estrogen responsive.
In a study in 1992, Frank Falck, Mary Woff, and associates found a strong link between exposure to PCBs and breast cancer. They compared chemical residues in the breast fat tissue of 40 women with palpable breast masses. After these women were screened for breast cancer, those who had breast cancer had 50 to 60% higher levels of PCBs, DDT, DDE, and other hydrocarbon-based pesticides than the women who didn't. The women who developed breast cancer had, on average, 1,965 ppb of PCBs in their breast tissue, about 1,000 times higher than what the FDA considers safe in food. A high fat diet has long been identified as a risk factor for breast cancer, but it may not be the fat that is the problem but the environmental hormones that accumulate in the fat.
Breast cancer is not the only cancer linked to environmental hormones. According to the National Institute of Health, the incidence of cancer of the testicles increased 115% from 1950 to 1989, and the incidence of prostrate cancer increased 109%. Since hormones regulate testicle and prostrate function and development, environmental hormones might be behind the increased incidence of these kinds of cancer too.
It should be acknowledged, however, that some studies have failed to find a link between breast cancer and PCBs, most recently a study by a group of researchers led by David Hunter. Some have argued that this study, along with a few others that have found similar results, proves that estrogenic environmental hormones are not a cause of breast cancer. However, this cannot be an argument based on the evidence. Eleven studies have been published on the relationship between organochlorine compounds, such as PCBs, and six of them have found a relationship between these chemicals and breast cancer, while four have not. One was ambiguous. The relationship between PCBs and breast cancer is, no doubt, complex. Only some PCBs are estrogenic, while others are even anti-estrogenic. So it is possible that different mixtures of PCBs will act in entirely different ways. The fact that some studies have not found a link between PCBs and breast cancer does not mean that we should discard the ones that have. On the contrary, it only means that we need more research. Meanwhile, until science can explain the high incidence of breast cancer, the most reasonable course of action is to be very skeptical of any activity that would release organochlorines into the environment. Even very small amounts.
Here is why: In 1998, researchers at the University of Birmingham in England exposed pregnant rats to small amounts of dioxin on the 15th day of pregnancy. The dose was small enough that the female offspring were born normal. However, by the time they were 7 weeks old, their mammary glands developed a high number of "of terminal end buds," which 4 different studies had earlier established are directly correlated with breast cancer. (The more buds the more cancer.) The researchers then exposed these rats to a well known carcinogen. The dioxin-exposed rats developed more breast cancer than rats not exposed to dioxin, but also exposed to the carcinogen.
The implications of this study are large. It means, first of all, that the levels of dioxin in the environment may explain many more cancer cases than the EPA has assumed. It also means that present methods of testing possible carcinogens are entirely inadequate. If prenatal exposure to an environmental hormone increases the risk of cancer when it would not do it otherwise, the laboratory procedures the EPA has been using to measure how toxic a carcinogen is simply are asking the wrong questions. It may be nice to know if a chemical is a carcinogen to an adult, but it would be more relevant to ask if it is a carcinogen to a fetus.
As we saw above, since environmental hormones act in entirely different ways than conventional toxins, they can be toxic in even very small concentrations. More than that, because they concentrate and persist in fatty tissues, PCBs biomagnify dramatically as they go up the food chain. By the time PCBs move up the food chain in the Great Lakes, for example, starting with phytoplankton and zooplankton, which larger species like mysids eat, which are eaten by smelt, which are eaten by trout, which are eaten by herring gulls, they can be concentrated 25 million times. PCBs might not be detected in the lake water, but by the time they reach the top of the food chain they become a deadly threat to species like the bald eagle. In other words, because PCBs can be biomagnified so many millions of times, the differences between concentrations of only an order of magnitude or so, like the differences between 2 ppm, 50 ppm, and 500 ppm, are almost irrelevant. Released into the environment, PCBs end up becoming concentrated in human fat tissue, very possibly in concentrations large enough to cause cancer, whatever their original concentration.
However, as Theo Colborn insists, cancer is not the most threatening aspect of environmental hormones. The other effects are potentially much more of a threat to our civilization. These include immune system dysfunction, endocrine disruption, declining sperm counts, rising infertility, diminished mental capabilities, birth defects, and behavioral problems.
According to a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine by Joseph and Sandra Jacobson, children exposed to low levels of PCBs in the womb have lower IQ's, reduced reading comprehension, attention problems, and reduced memory. The children who had these problems were exposed when their mothers ate 2 to 3 meals a month of fish from Lake Michigan for at least 6 years before becoming pregnant. The greatest deficits were in the children whose mothers ate the most fish. They were twice as likely to be two years behind their peers in word comprehension. They also had more coordination and behavioral problems.
Significantly, how much fish the mothers ate while the children were in the womb was not as important as the total amount they ate in the years before becoming pregnant. This means that mothers cannot protect their children by controlling what they eat during pregnancy. Cumulative lifetime exposure is the deciding variable. A study of North Carolina children also showed that those with the higher levels of PCBs in their bodies did worse on tests requiring fine motor coordination.
Reproductive dysfunction also is associated with exposure to PCBs and dioxin. Boys in Taiwan whose mothers consumed PCB-contaminated rice oil while they were in the womb during 1979 developed smaller penises than other boys who were not exposed. Some species of wildlife are having similar problems. Alligators exposed to environmental hormones have penises one-third to one-half normal size.
According to more than 60 studies, the sperm count in men world wide has declined dramatically over the last 50 years. In most of the studies, the decline approaches 50%. A long series of studies have shown that exposure to environmental hormones decreases testes size, decreases accessory sex organs (penis, prostate, seminal vesicle), lowers sperm count, lowers testosterone level, decreases sexual behavior, and causes abnormal testes. According to one study, these kinds of effects can come from a single dose while the fetus is developing. In this study on rats the dose was small enough that the males showed no effects at birth. However, at puberty the sex organs of the exposed rats were smaller, testosterone levels were lower, and sperm counts were low. Furthermore, when the dioxin-exposed males were placed with females, they took much longer to mate, they had to try several times to achieve ejaculation, and they took a lot longer than the controls before attempting to mate again. When these same males were placed with other males, they assumed a female mating position.
The effects on men exposed to environmental hormones are similar to laboratory animals. Men exposed to dioxin in accidents or from occupational exposure consistently complain of reduced sex drive and difficulty with erection and ejaculation.
Disruptions in the reproductive system may even be more serious for women. Hormones, particularly estrogen, trigger the onset of puberty for females. In 1820, according to Stephanie Coontz, the average age girls reached physical maturity was 16. In 1900 it was 14 and in 1940, when the chemical industry really took off, it was 13. Now, according to a recent study, breast or pubic hair development begins at 10 to 10 for whites and 9 for African Americans. That's the average age. The same study also found that 1% of white children and 3% of African American children had either breast or pubic hair development at the age of 3. The age of 3!
At least one study has linked early onset of puberty in girls to exposure to PCBs. This study monitored PCB levels in the blood and breast milk of hundreds of pregnant women. After birth, the development of the children was monitored. Girls with the highest prenatal exposure to PCBs entered puberty 11 months earlier than girls with the lowest exposure. It is important to note that this study was of women and children exposed to only normal levels of PCBs. This means that there is no safety margin left. Any additional amount of PCBs released to the environment, no matter how small, could push the average age of puberty downward.
Laboratory experiments have yielded similar results. Young female rats treated with Arochlor 1221 (a PCB) on the second or third day of life achieved sexual maturity in 28 days, but untreated rats did it in 42 days. In other words, exposure to a PCB made female rats achieve sexual maturity in almost half the time they normally would.
Many politicians have been elected blaming the epidemic of children having children on working mothers, absent fathers, feminists, sex education in schools, and the decline of family values. However, in doing so, they have overlooked their own moral responsibility to provide every child with a clean and healthful environment. The simple truth is that much of this epidemic of children having children could not be happening if the age girls reached puberty had not declined so much.
Environmental hormones are biological disinformation. They disrupt our bodies and the
functioning of the environment in subtle, though dramatic, ways. They are very dangerous, but
probably not nearly as dangerous as the disinformation that industry and its child, the Wise Use
movement, have been putting out about them. Because of this disinformation, we have not been
doing nearly enough to deal with this deadly threat to our lives and the environment. If children
are no longer used as flaggers for spray planes, they are still being exposed to these amazing toxic
chemicals in a thousand other ways--only now our government no longer has the excuse of
ignorance. Industry likes to call our exposure to these chemicals "risk," I call it something much
more truthful--random premeditated murder. Why not? We know that they are killing people,
and in large numbers. How we conceal, this from ourselves is the subject of the next chapter.
Aaron is to offer the bull for his own sin offering to make atonement for himself and his
household. Then he is to take the two goats and present them before the Lord at the entrance to
the Tent of Meeting. He is to cast lots for the two goats--one lot for the Lord and the other for
the scapegoat. Aaron shall bring the goat whose lot falls to the Lord and sacrifice it for a sin
offering. But the goat chosen by lot as the scapegoat shall be presented alive before the Lord to
be used for making atonement by sending it into the desert as a scapegoat.
Leviticus 16:9
After Jesus and his disciples arrived in Capernaum, the collectors of the two-drachma tax came to Peter and asked, "Doesn't your teacher pay the temple tax?"
"Yes, he does," he replied.
When Peter came into the house, Jesus was the first to speak. "What do you think, Simon?" he asked. "From whom do the kings of the earth collect duty and taxes--from their own sons or from others?"
"From others," Peter answered.
Then the sons are exempt," Jesus said to him. "But so that we may not offend them, go to the lake
and throw out your line. Take the first fish you catch; open its mouth and you will find a
four-drachma coin. Take it and give it to them for my tax and yours."
Matthew 17:24
My mother died of breast cancer on April 15, the day that taxes are due. The date of her death has haunted me. Some would say that this was just a meaningless coincidence, an irrelevant fact irrupting from the random flux of events, and had no connection to her life. That is an explanation conventional science would support. But, as I remember my life with her, that coincidence nevertheless means something.
The word "tax" is derived from telos, a tax for the gods, which in turn was related to telesma, a payment made at the boundary of the temple to fulfill religious rites. In the ancient world, taxes were due upon crossing a boundary. The god of the territory had to be acknowledged, prayed to, and on a more practical level, supported with payments. That is what a tax was, a sacrifice to the gods.
The payment of taxes at the temple's boundary (and the temple's boundary was in many ways identical with the state's authority) acknowledged and exalted the god of the state by raising a toll up to them, as is called for by custom (another word that meant "tax"). A tax was a duty expected at the state's boundary. If the duty is faithfully sacrificed to, the bearer became tolerable (another word linked to "tax") to the god or the state. To be taxed or tolled is to be called, possessed by one's duty to acknowledge, obey, and exalt the gods of the state. By offering a sacrifice to the gods at the boundary, the dutiful tax payer accepts the gods authority to define inside and outside, foreigner and citizen, good and bad.
That my mother died on the day taxes were due has left me wondering what was taxing her.
We moderns live in a world of great danger, cruelty, injustice, and inequality, though much of it is concealed, dismissed as unavoidable, or trivialized by powers that benefit from allowing it all to continue. If the prospect of massive nuclear war is no longer as likely as it once was, we face the probability of ecological disaster caused by the population explosion and pollution. Not only that, but modern industrial civilization, and especially the American version of it, has built a world of alienating labor, gross inequality, patriarchal hierarchy, minute disciplinary control of many aspects of life, unrealistic and oppressive standards of sexual beauty and physical attraction, and an ideal of consumerism in which few are fully able to participate. The homeless crowd our streets, those disaffected from the civilization of productivity crowd our prisons, and everyone is buying guns and locking up their property.
The gods the modern world offers up taxes to are not benevolent.
Entangled in this world we have built, most people, paying their taxes to our civilization of productivity, sacrifice large aspects of themselves to its shadow, projecting their disowned desires and faults onto others, and punishing them for the disciplines the modern self must assume, and resents deeply. As William Connolly has argued, the unemployed, the welfare recipient, the person of color, the delinquent, the mentally deranged, the sexual deviant, the drug user, and so on are the others we sacrifice to our condemnations to build our "virtuous" self, the part of ourselves that would be honest, hardworking, and normal. This "virtuous" self can affirm its identity only when its counter-identities are sacrificed, condemned, and dismissed as other. Entangled in these others, these scapegoats we send out into the desert, the identities we need to maintain our civilization of productivity conceal a great deal of cruelty, exclusion, repression, and exploitive discipline. A lot that is--and should be--dis/easing, to those who think about it. Though the virtuous self maintains it is not its other; it is, in fact, inextricably entangled in the other's agony. A part of it. If we ever admitted it, acknowledged the sacrifices we all make to false gods, the truth would shatter us all.
During the 1980's my family's ranch, like many farms throughout the nation, experienced serious financial problems--what farmers around here call the Great Farm Depression. When land prices appreciated during the 1970's, my family borrowed heavily. Until the 1980's, going into debt to expand production seemed safe, if not wise, and our bank, expecting land values to go up forever, encouraged us to do so. We would always have the assets to cover them. But then the Federal Reserve Board started getting very serious about fighting inflation, and interest rates increased dramatically. That increase did not hit everyone equally. It hit those with the least political power, the lowest income, and the most debt--industrial workers, individual entrepreneurs, and farmers--a lot harder than those who were more advantaged, particularly those who owned debts.
Once the Federal Reserve Board launched its war on inflation, many farmers quickly found that they didn't have enough income to service their debts, even if they had been conservative borrowers. In my family's case, most of our income had to go to service dramatically escalating interest rates, perhaps triple or more what we were used to. We had no choice but to go deeper into debt. But banks, suddenly realizing the folly of encouraging borrowing against appreciating land assets without looking at cash flow, were unwilling to share the burdens of the rough times that they had promoted by encouraging farmers to borrow heavily. Because banks were no longer willing to loan farmers money, land prices started falling dramatically, sometimes to a level of less than a third of what they were at their height.
Despondent with their job of foreclosing on farmers and ranchers, our bankers started resigning, one after another. When the bank brought in new people, mostly young, inexperienced, and naive, to carry out its orders, they too resigned when they found out what their work was going to be. It was amazing really. One day a new banker would show up on our doorstep, asking us to show him our operation. A month or two later, sometimes only a week or two later, he would be gone, and another banker would be on our doorstep, politely, though somewhat more anxiously, asking, "Could you show me your operation?"
But finally, the bank found someone who would do it. No one could have found a better (or worse) banker. If Hollywood were casting for a cold and heartless banker to foreclose on someone, they would never have picked our new banker because he so perfectly matched the stereotype of such bankers that no one would have ever believed him playing the role. His face was made of stone (I swear it was gray), he wore only black, and he never ever smiled. "It's just business," I remember him telling my father one gray winter day when he came to take inventory of our equipment.
To make a long story short, he got the job done with the ruthless efficiency you would expect of such people. We were out on the street in short order, looking for another bank to take us in--and no banks were willing. Not with interest rates the way they were.
Less than two years later, the doctors diagnosed my mother with breast cancer. According to a number of studies in psychoneuroimmunology, serious diseases, if they happen, will happen within 2 years of a distressing life event.
Much of this book has been about how toxins cause disease, things like PCBs and dioxin. That is an oversimplification. The cause of all disease is doubtlessly over-determined, the effect of many things working in a complex and secret alliance with each other, each combining in a synergy to make the others worse, until a threshold is crossed and health becomes disease. Inescapably, exposure to industrial pollutants, like dioxin, has a lot to do with my family's health problems. We were all exposed to a wide assortment of them when we used agricultural chemicals on our ranch. And, doubtless, there are other, more general, chemical causes as well, from the contamination in the food we bought at the grocery store to the household chemicals everyone uses. Each one of these things increases vulnerability to disease while none of them, by themselves, assures it. No doubt, various toxins were accumulating in our bodies for a long time, and perhaps certain genes were just biding their time, but they did not dis/ease us until circumstances shattered our dreams of security and future. Then it was all one nightmare after another, each swirled around the other, multiplying bad effect to bad effect.
Industrial toxins do cause disease, but taxes to an corporate controlled economy that demands endless sacrifice to maintain its profitability is a cause too.
My mother was born beautiful. In a different place, and with a different childhood, she could
have become a model or an actress. She looked something like Lee Grant, the movie star, though
her hair was a brighter red and her features softer. Despite having an appearance that most
women would envy, my mother never seemed to think of herself that way. Nevertheless, having
cancer must have hurt her self image deeply. We never talked about, but I knew that it upset her.
The way she carried herself. When I read Sandra Steingraber's book, Living Downstream, and I
found a passage where she described what it felt like to have cancer, I think I learned what my
mother felt like.
Like a jury's verdict or an adoption decree, a cancer diagnosis is an authoritative pronouncement, one with the power to change your identity. It sends you into an unfamiliar country where all the rules of human conduct are alien. In this new territory, you disrobe in front of strangers who are allowed to touch you. You submit to bodily invasions. You agree to the removal of body parts. You agree to be poisoned. You have become a cancer patient.
Most of the traits and skills you bring with you from your native life are irrelevant, while strange new attributes suddenly matter. Beautiful hair is irrelevant. Prominent veins along the soft skin at the fold of your arm are highly prized. The ability to cook a delicious meal in thirty minutes is irrelevant. The ability to lie completely motionless on a hard platform for half an hour while your bones are scanned for signs of tumor is, conversely, quite useful.
The first time she got cancer, my mother fought hard. She didn't want to die. She changed things in her life, became more assertive. But then, after she was diagnosed the second time, she seemed to give up hope. Certainly, there was nothing the doctors told her that justified hope. Metastasized breast cancer is considered terminal. She seemed to be waiting for the end.
It took a long time to come.
I understood early that my mother was going to die but it took me a long time to know it. It started with backaches. My mother assured me that they had nothing to do with her cancer, that it had not metastasized to her bones, but I was not convinced. She was so tired, withdrawn, and indifferent. And in so much pain. I wanted to do something, but what? Mostly I just pretended that nothing was happening, and that it would all go away. That worked until just before the Christmas of 1993. My mother had not been well the last couple of days. But just as a winter storm settled in, and the highway was covered with a deep layer of snow, she became worse and I had to take her into the hospital. Dad was too sick to do it. My mother looked and sounded awful. Her face was white, her breath came in only horrible grating sounds. She sank into the corner of the four-wheel drive pickup. I thought that she would die on me then and there.
We went to the emergency room and waited for the doctor to come. While we were waiting, the nurses drew blood, and I heard my mother ask them to slit her wrists. Without reacting in surprise, as if such comments were as common as asking for help to go to the bathroom, the nurses said they couldn't do that. The next day I heard her quietly ask Darryl Espeland, her doctor, to just leave her a bottle of unmarked pills. Darryl laughed as if she was making a joke, and so did I, knowing that if we let her know that we took it seriously we would open up something we couldn't handle. Then my mother shifted tactics. She talked about stopping the radiation treatments, saying that they were causing her more pain than they were doing good. Darryl disagreed. He thought that after the swelling went down that she would start to feel better. Radiation wouldn't stop the progression of the disease as much as it would shrink the size of the tumors, reducing the pain.
When I first told my mother about the fatal dose of quinidine in Gene's body she was standing in the kitchen reaching for a bowl on the top shelf. It was after she knew she was dying, but before she really became sick. The words hit her like a revelation. Reaching upward, her body flinched like she had been hit. Bringing the bowl down, she turned to listen to me explain. She said nothing to disagree with my suspicion, as I explained it to her, that Gene had been poisoned, but her face told me that she believed that a fellow sufferer had committed suicide to end the pain. It was over for Gene. She believed he had done it himself because she wanted the same for herself. To have it over.
The diagnosis that Christmas Eve was pneumonia. Untreated, it would have quietly, quickly, and almost painlessly have killed her. But that would not be allowed. That would have been negligence for us all. Darryl announced that Mom needed to check into his fancy hotel. I concurred. My mother didn't disagree. I stayed a couple of hours, waiting until my mother got settled in. They treated her lung congestion by having her breathe in through sort of an inhaler. It helped. Satisfied, I went home.
This did not go over well with my father and sister. They thought I should have stayed at the hospital all night, sleeping in a chair beside my mother, as if sacrificing my comfort would make her better. I disagreed.
When I am sick and feeling bad, I do not like having people around me, intruding. I like to let my thoughts wander where they may, instead of having other people there, forcing me by their presence to see the world as they do. By staying, I would have been reminding my mother that I was in distress about her condition. She would have started thinking about me, how that I was feeling, and tried to make me feel better when she should have been thinking about herself. Healing, I believe, requires going within yourself, accepting what is within, finding your own truth. It is thwarted when you have to deal with the insistent needs of other people, especially their need to make sacrifices for you. When you are dealing with the truth that you are dying, and must come to terms with it, other people, there at the wrong time, for the wrong reason, get in the way. They can help by accepting your needs and emotions, validating them when you cannot, but they have no business imposing their needs, making sacrifices for you when they can do no good.
Besides, I knew that my mother didn't want me hanging around her bedside all the time. She told me so. While we were driving in, and as I tried to see through the swirling snow, she said she didn't have children to wait on her like this. I assured her that nothing made me happier than to help her, that I wanted to do this. But she was not convinced. It was like this mother-son thing was all supposed to be a one way relationship. She did the nurturing, and I accepted it. The wheel was not supposed to turn, and my mother never felt so helpless as when she was constrained to accept the help she had long given. It took away her power.
Dad came in the next day, and stayed. I came in that evening and visited a few hours. By then my mother was on a heavy dose of pain killers. She couldn't manage to dial the phone, even after several tries. I had to do it for her. A lot of people saw her that day. Lots of flowers accumulated in her room--and dolls and balloons. People did care about her. And why not? She has done a lot to care about. The next day, my mother was throwing up a lot. She wanted to come home, but Darryl quickly ruled that out of the question. He put her on IVs.
The end of December, my mother went home, but by January 1, she was back in the hospital, looking horrible. At home she quickly lost ground, and Dad took her back in the afternoon. When I saw her the next morning, she looked like Hell. Her hands and face were all swollen up. It was a rather dramatic change from one day to the next. Apparently that night she gave the nurses a lot of grief. Around midnight she demanded that John Huntley be brought down to get her out of there. She was being held there against her will.
Her attitude when I saw her was horrible. She just wanted to be left alone, and didn't mind telling people that. She was so unlike herself. Kathy, my uncle's wife, complaining a lot about how that my mother just wasn't herself anymore. Others noticed that to. At night, my mother had horrible nightmares. Jean Bruski, a close friend of my mother's said she was wrestling with the devil. An apt metaphor. However, I guess that is the way people die. According to the books I read at the time, when people are dying the aspects of themselves that they have long denied tend to come out. My mother had tried so hard to be good all her life, so hard to control her anger and resentment, and now there was nothing left to limit her feelings because the fear that kept them in check was losing its power. She had nothing left to lose, so she let her shadow go. According to the books I read, this is suppose this is a good thing, a healing thing, if only because it is inevitable, but it was disconcerting.
I blame gossip. We all develop a shadow side because of gossip. To protect ourselves from it, we disown the parts of ourselves gossip would condemn. Wanting to belong, we present an image of ourselves to the world that is other than what we are. But eventually, if only at the end of life, this other side of ourselves comes out. This wouldn't happen if we accepted the full truth about other people, which would include their anger, resentment, and fear, but that can't happen in a world made of gossip. There is too much hierarchy, exploitation, and silence in our world, and because of them, too much anger, resentment, and fear for us to accept all the aspects of a person's character. We don't tell the truth about ourselves because we know what will happen if we do. And so the denied self never outs. Not until we die.
Toward the middle of February, my mother eventually returned home. Though I felt her care at the hospital was excellent, she didn't think so. She wanted to die at home. Darryl said that it would be difficult, but possible. We all decided we would try to do it that way. But when the time drew near, it became impossible. The day came when she couldn't walk, couldn't eat, and we couldn't take care of her. Dad couldn't lift her to take her to the bathroom, and she didn't want me to do it. So we decided to take her back to the hospital. She didn't protest.
It was the saddest day of my life taking my mother out to the car. She couldn't walk, so I put her in Dad's wheel chair and slowly let her down the steps to the car. I lifted her into the car, folded up the wheelchair, and put it in the trunk. I paused, knowing that it was my last chance. I went to my mother, put my arms around her, and, crying, told her "I love you." Surprised, and crying too, she told me "I love you too." It was the first time we had ever said to each other. It was the last chance we had.
When she left home, my mother was coherent, pretty much her old self, though withdrawn and depressed. However, the next day when I went in to the hospital, her mind was all confused. The cancer had gone to her liver, and it started flooding her body with enzymes, driving her insane. She started hallucinating. She told me about a man sitting in the corner, but there was no one there. She told me that she wanted to go home. When I stopped her from tearing out the IV tubes and getting out of bed, she glared at me, more angry than she had ever been in her life. When I wilted and someone else stopped her, she asked me to call a center for abused women.
It was like that for several weeks. Someone had to be there with her all the time. The nurses couldn't handle her. As soon as they left, she would try to get up and go home. Much as we wanted to give her what she wanted, we knew that we couldn't possibly keep her comfortable at home. And so Kathy stayed with her at night, Dad stayed with her in the morning. I stayed in the afternoons. When I had to start planting, Kathy Huntley and Jean Bruski, and Judy Yeger, spent the afternoons.
As the days went by she became less aware of who was there. She often didn't recognize me. Toward the last, when we knew the end was near, I brought Bailey, our German Shepherd dog in, so they could say good-bye. The hospital policy was "no dogs" so I snuck her in through the back door. One of the nurses caught me, but she just smiled. Bailey had an awful time handling the slick hospital floors. They were like ice to her, she was nervous, and she could barely stand up. Still, she was delighted to see my mother. She licked her hand lying on the bed and tried to move it so my mother would pet her, like she always loved doing. However, she couldn't even move her hand by then, though perhaps there was a smile on the corner of her lips.
The last few hours of my mother's life were much more peaceful than the weeks before. I had come in for a banquet at the American Legion for the Democratic Club. When I stopped to visited her before it, she was breathing frantically, in a coma. Dr. Jones was there, and he didn't think it was going to be more than another day. She had developed a blood infection. There was all sorts of discoloration on her legs. Kris and Mandy were going to stay instead of Cathy or Jean.
Thinking I would have time, I went to the Legion to hear the campaign speeches for the upcoming election. I was a member of the Democratic Central Committee. I had finished my meal when one of the waitresses told me that there was a call waiting for me, shades of the night Mike Maddler assaulted me. Nervously, I answered, but it was Mandy. She told me that Dr. Jones had said that the infection was wearing my mother out faster than expected. When she was completely exhausted, she would fade fast. Mandy had called because my mother was breathing only 24 times a minute now. She didn't have long. When I got to her room, everyone left me alone with her. I watched gratefully as her face slowly became more peaceful. Dad came in later, and I left her alone with him. I went and waited with Kris, Shay, Kathy, and Mandy. After awhile, I went into her room again, and she was hardly breathing. I don't know when she died, it was so gradual, but she did die with a peaceful expression on her face. The frown softened, and I was surprised at how beautiful her face became. She had finally found peace.
There is a big empty spot in my life now. Gloomy, depressed, as usual, but somehow different, more black. I don't care about many things now, though I am more angry about others. I keep thinking about all the suffering my mother went through because no one could let her go. It could have ended so painlessly with an overdose of drugs, and yet all of us--she, my father, my sister, me, the doctor, the nurses, the priest, the minister, the rest of my family--could not accept the possibility of ending her pain by letting her end her life. The injunction against taking life was too threatening to risk. We would all rather sacrifice my mother to horrible suffering than let her choose to die. Why?
The more I think about it, the more troubling this is to me. Look at what my mother died of--breast cancer. In the early 60's only 1 in 20 women could expect to get breast cancer in their lifetime. The year my mother died, 1 in 9 could expect it. That increase, over 1% a year, had nothing to do with genetics, cosmic radiation, or random fate. It was the result of a polluted the environment.
The lives of these women were taken so that we could live the lives we have, and yet when they are dying a tortured death we are not permitted to end their suffering. That would be euthanasia, and wrong. How can we be so hypocritical? Cancer is a political disease, not a natural disease. It is something the politics of our time allows, and yet when a life is drawing near to an end because of it, we cannot let the victim choose to cut their days short. We don't allow it because we place, we tell ourselves, such a high value on life.
Like hell we do!
According to a study by the World Health Organization, 80 percent of all cancer is attributable to environmental influences, which is to say that it is not caused by spontaneous mutations, heredity, or cosmic radiation--something that is a given part of the human condition. It is caused by the toxins our civilization of productivity produces. The World Health Organization reached this conclusion by comparing the cancer rates of countries with low cancer rates with countries with high rates. The low rates it turned out, were mostly in countries with low industrial development and with little toxic pollution, and the high rates were in industrialized nations with high rates of toxic pollution. And these rates were age-corrected so that only people in comparable age groups were compared with each other.
We don't place a high value on life, we only like to tell ourselves that we do. And we do that only because we could never live with ourselves if we admitted the truth.
By law, when a person takes another person's life, it is murder. We have always understood that, the Bible insists upon it, and yet when it comes to releasing deadly industrial toxins into the environment, this taking of life is reinterpreted as "risk." Mere risk, something that is balanced by benefits to the economy. That changes everything by reinterpreting it. We "risk" one in a million people developing cancer, but we gain so much more--control over weeds and insects, fancy paints, a comfortable life style, increased wealth. The "risk" is well worth it. At least, we imagine, on the collective level. The person who loses this lottery might not be so convinced. They sacrifice everything for everyone else. And so, unless we condemn ourselves by admitting their lives were taken without consent, it is important they somehow consent to it, at least implicitly.
When an industrial device like an hazardous waste incinerator is proposed, our civilization of productivity sanctifies the lives it will take in a rituals known as "risk assessment, public comment periods, and environmental impact statements." To the uninitiated, these rituals seem the essence of rationality, science, and democracy. The risks of the project are assessed, reviewed, commented on, then, if they are acceptable, endorsed. Everyone who is interested participates, implicitly lending consent for everyone else. Anyone could be there, but they aren't, so they consent.
But that is a lie. Risk assessment is not science or democracy, it is a form of ritual sacrifice. Through it we legitimize the taking of life. Then, dishonestly, we cleanse our consciences of this act by concealing it from ourselves.
This became clear to me when I participated in rule making with the Montana Department of Environmental Quality. In Montana, when a law is passed giving a regulatory agency authority to develop a rule, the agency is supposed to develop the rule through a consensus process. Everyone who is interested is invited, industry stake holders and environmental advocates, and when all these people reach a consensus--by law a unanimous consensus--the rule is passed on to the appropriate board, where it is approved. (At least on most environmental issues.) In our case our incinerator rule discussion group would draw up a rule for incinerators, and the Board of Environmental Review would approve it. The law authorizing our rule making said that incinerators should pose a "negligible risk to the public health, safety and welfare and to the environment." Since the legislature didn't define what that meant, it authorized the DEQ to quantify what "negligible risk" was, how that it would be calculated, and how it would be implemented.
Yet there is a trick to this: Once the definition of negligible risk is framed mathematically, the die is cast. Risk is limited to whatever can be counted. If something can't be counted, or at least cannot easily be counted, it won't be a part of the risk assessment. And so, using laboratory testing and epidemiological data, a risk is quantified for one toxin--so much toxin so much cancer. This risk is added to the risks from other toxins for a total risk. If this total risk is less than what a "negligible risk" is--something like 1 cancer in a million, or 1 cancer in a hundred thousand--then the incinerator will be given a permit to operate. If not, the operator has to either give up or design a cleaner incinerator or, more likely, develop a more dishonest risk assessment.
The first problem with this system is that not all risks, probably not even the most important, can be easily quantified. And nothing illustrates this better than the history of the Ross family. As we saw, the Ross family was a responsible party to two Superfund sites that made the National Priorities List, was banned from operating in Washington State, and had a long history of almost Freeman-like defiance of environmental laws. The Ross family just didn't care. One might justifiably conclude that an incinerator operated by them posed an entirely different risk to public health and the environment than an incinerator operated by someone who was responsible. After all, how could anyone say that the risk of having the Ross family operate an incinerator, whatever the risk assessment said, was negligible? Because caring, competence, and responsibility are intangibles that cannot be quantified, I couldn't get the DEQ to accept that there was real risk here.
Focusing on quantifiable risk, risk assessment ignores other kinds of risk too. For example, risk assessment is largely limited to analyzing the toxic effects of chemicals separately. The possibility that an emission from an incinerator will combine with another pollutant and create a toxic effect greater than they each would separately is not considered in risk assessment, mostly because it would be too hard to quantify or research. Researching the effects of combinations of chemicals, so that they might be quantified, is simply impossible. There are too many chemicals and far too many combinations to ever do laboratory trials on the toxic effects of all possible combinations.
Still, the risk is real. For example, when farmers are spraying Roundup, a herbicide that kills all plants, on their fields, they often add ammonium sulfate. By itself, ammonium sulfate is only a fertilizer, not toxic except in very large does. But when combined with Roundup, it significantly increases the toxic effect. Acting as a fertilizer, the ammonium sulfate stimulates the plants to take in more Roundup. The differences between spraying on straight Roundup and adding a little bit of ammonium sulfate are considerable. With just Roundup, the weeds take weeks to die. And sometimes they don't. With a little fertilizer, they fall over, turn brown, and die much more quickly. Every farmer knows this, and yet this principle is "unproven" to the technicians of risk assessment--I suspect because if they admitted it was true they would be admitting their calculations of risk were virtually useless.
Besides this, there are other problems. Risk assessment typically does not even acknowledge baseline risk, the risk from toxins already present, accumulating in the background from other sources. We live in a polluted environment, and because of it, we already have significant body burdens of various toxins. If these toxins have a threshold, a point below which there is little effect, but above which a little bit more suddenly becomes toxic, then adding a little bit more to a body burden that is already high is an entirely different kind of risk than if the body burden is low. Even a small amount of toxin, insignificant by itself, from, say, a new incinerator could push people over their thresholds, killing more people than the public would ever know about from reading the risk assessment. Not taking into account background accumulations results in numbers that are entirely divorced from reality. This makes risk assessments no more honest than the entries people get in the mail from lotteries like the Publisher's Clearing house. The real odds are entirely different than the ones they tell you about. When people see risk like 1 in a million, they will think that is the risk they face. However, in the fine print, things read a little differently.
The incinerator rule the Montana DEQ eventually adopted did not assess background accumulations. When I objected at a meeting, an industry spokesman looked at me like I was crazy. "You mean you want us to test people to find out the background levels?" he asked incredulously. "Do you have any idea how much that would cost?" I did, and I didn't particularly care. Neglecting to assess the added risk from background accumulations yields absurd results. The DEQ could permit incinerator after incinerator, maintaining that the emissions from each would have no observable effect, and yet the collective result of all these incinerators approaching the threshold of toxic effect, but not individually crossing it, would be to allow toxins to accumulate in people's bodies until they killed off everyone in the state. When I thought about this, I imagined DEQ officials walking among all the dead bodies, shrugging their shoulders, and saying, "At least it wasn't our fault. No standards were exceeded!"
I came away from my incinerator rule meetings convinced that risk assessment was a fraud. It wasn't science, it was a way of letting us deny to ourselves the sacrifices we were forcing upon the public. One in a million, why that's safe. It certainly won't be me. By lying to the public about the real risks, risk assessment allows us to take the goodies modern technology offers without having to admit that there was a price to be paid. Through the arcane mathematics of risk assessment, a cancer epidemic becomes negligible risk, and death is dismissed as an acceptable payment for "progress."
In the end, risk assessment is but a license to commit random premeditated murder. Between 1950 and 1998, when risk assessment should have been reducing risk, the overall incidence of cancer in the United States rose about 60 percent. For non-Hodgkins lymphoma and multiple myeloma, the increase was 200 percent. Breast cancer has increased 60 percent, prostrate cancer, 200 percent, and testicular cancer for men between the ages 28 to 35, 300 percent. Now, in 1999, one in two men in the United States, and one in three women will get cancer. In 1950, only one in four ever developed cancer. This isn't 1 in a million, it is you and me.
We like to think we are civilized. We like to think that we offer up no human sacrifices to false gods. We like to tell ourselves that ours is a humane civilization, enlightened and responsible. There is in us none of the barbarism so frequent in ancient times. We do not, unlike the ancient Aztecs, drag human victims up the steps of tall pyramids, tie them across an altar, rip out their hearts, and raise them up, still beating, to the sun. We like to think that, but how true is it?
Given the evidence of our cancer rates, and our knowledge of the toxins behind them, are we not deceiving ourselves? As much as we would like to pretend otherwise, the gods we sacrifice to are at least as demanding as the Aztec gods ever were. However, unlike the Aztec gods, they are ashamed to openly admit the violence underlying their rule because they know that people would never sacrifice to them if they did. They are too unholy. Unlike the Aztec gods, our gods are hesitant to claim the sacred. Instead, they cloak themselves in secular practicality: Without releasing toxins into our air, water, food, homes, and bodies, our priests of technology anxiously reassure us, the economy could not function. There would be no food on our tables, no heat in our houses, no electricity to light our nights, no cars to carry us to work, no medicine to heal our sickness. The engines of industry must turn or we would become, we are told, savages again, naked, cold, and hungry. And so, to keep our lifestyle, we must make little sacrifices, take a small, insignificant, risks--one in a million, maybe one in a hundred thousand. Do that, and the sun will never set on our economy. That is how we are recruited into the great cancer lottery.
Human sacrifice has long been used to demarcate the boundary of the sacred. The sacred begins where humans are willing to offer up their lives. Jesus offered up his for us, the ancient Celtic kings offered up theirs for the earth, and we do the same. Look at what people will die for and you know the character of the gods they live for. We misunderstand sacrifice if we think it is something that is unwillingly offered, something forced and hated. A sacrifice, if it is truly a sacrifice, is not a burden but a joy, a celebration of the gods. In ancient tradition, a sacrifice is holiest when the victims choose it. It is best when the victim offered is not a prisoner of war, a condemned criminal, or the old and infirm, but the highest and most pure--virginal girls, the most noble members of the tribe, if not the king himself. The Aztecs offered their Unblemished Youth, a victim selected by the gods through the priests. Before his sacrifice, this victim would be treated as King. Four maidens would serve every his every wish, granting every pleasure possible. Yet at the end of the year, after having received every honor possible, he would be sacrificed to replenish the earth and renew the daily return of the sun.
The ancient Celts went further. They offered as sacrifice their King, the leader most capable in war and peace. By offering their best to the sacred, the Celts showed their commitment to the gods, gaining their favor. Later, when the gods became less demanding, the Celts developed a new institution, the King's Substitute. Instead of sacrificing the King, and losing their most capable leader, they sacrificed someone who would stand in for the King.
The selection process is revealing. At first, the druids would find a willing sacrifice from among the nobles, but later a lottery was devised. By turning the selection process over to chance, which no mortal could control, but which the gods could, the lottery revealed their pleasure. Chance selection made the victim holy, a worthy sacrifice, because the gods guided it.
It might seem that the change to a lottery diminished the offering, reflecting a reluctance to offer up the best to the gods, but I don't think so. By participating in the lottery, everyonereveals their commitment to the gods. Instead of offering up the King, they offered up something even more valuable, themselves. This greatly intensifies the emotional commitment to the gods and the community. If the gods matter so much that I would offer up not just someone else, however noble they are, but myself, I am saying that my gods matter as much as anything possibly can. I am willing to offer the only thing I really have to them, my life. Even more, when everyone participates in this lottery, and we join together in offering our lives to random fate, we build a community of sacrifice. Sacrificing ourselves together, we belong together. This is as powerful a bond as anything can be.
We moderns play a similar lottery, but much less consciously or honestly. By fulfilling our roles as workers, taxpayers, consumers, and citizens--by paying our taxes--we participate in the risks of our civilization. Buying, building, or using a product that pollutes the environment, we offer up our lives to it. We release carcinogens into the environment, take on a body burden of toxins, and give them to others in turn. Things like dioxin, PCBs, pesticides, toxic metals, fine particulates, CFCs, and greenhouse gases. We sacrifice the harm these things do, the lives they take, to get the blessings they return. As we do so, we bear witness to what matters most to us, do we not?
Let us see now, that would include weed-free fields and lawns, sport utility vehicles, plastic toys, disposable eating utensils, and air-conditioning, just to begin listing our comforts. All the things that companies like Monsanto, General Motors, Exxon, ConAgri, IBP, and General Electric spend large amounts of money trying to get us to buy. However, stated that way, in terms of the profit margins of large corporations, our sacrifices have a certain legitimacy problem. Who really wants to sacrifice their lives to support Monsanto's profit margin?
Where the ancient gods were not ashamed to openly ask for human sacrifice, our gods know that they dare not do that. They are much too unworthy, tawdry, and unholy to ask anything like that of us. The sacrifices we make on their behalf must be small, very small--something like 1 in a million. Otherwise, people might not join the lottery. And so our gods have given us risk assessment, where we allow them to deceive us about the size of our sacrifices.
Living our lives the way we do, polluting the air, poisoning the land, we kill others. It is a simple, undeniable, fact, that we have nevertheless managed to deny. We do it because if we ever acknowledged the truth, we could never permit ourselves to do what we are doing. The gods we sacrifice to are too low, pathetic, and dishonest to be worthy of what we give to them. And yet we do. We offer ourselves to something that is entirely unworthy of the sacrifice.
Perhaps this is what my mother revealed by dying as she did, on the day taxes were due. She died
a tax protester, unhappy with the sacrifices she had made.
Up the rugged mountain top of controversial thought,
And through the vastly complicated social glen,
We dare not go a-hunting truth
For fear of little men.
Hobart McKean
How to live in a community where the truth is forbidden? Only with dishonesty, and by suffering misery. When the truth is denied, and those who know it are afraid to speak it, it becomes an enemy. It must be warded off, denied, feared. Because if it were ever spoken, even briefly, a whisper on the night wind, what worlds would end?
Throughout this book I have named names here and there, protesting the wrong these people have done, but, I believe, my quarrel is not so much with them--the county attorney, the sheriff, the county planner, the county sanitarian, the county commissioners, or even with the Ross family--but with something larger than they are, the air we breathe, the dreams that build this community. The fear that haunts us all. Within each of these individuals, I believe, lies the shadow of something much larger than themselves that keeps us all from speaking truth to power. If my community has become a Wise Use polity, full of hatred, and even those who oppose it are drawn up into its necessities, letting lies go unchallenged and crimes go unprosecuted, it could only have happened because few, if any of us, had it within ourselves to resist it.
The wrong in my community, I wish to make clear, happened not because of individuals acting alone or with others but because of ideas shared throughout my community. While I would like to see justice done, and all the people who have committed crimes against the best part of our political traditions prosecuted, nothing will be resolved by merely doing that. Much more than that, the ideas that possessed their acts must be unmasked for what they are, so that they no longer inhabit people's lives, poisoning our community with denial and delusion. Since the responsibility for their acts greatly exceeds them, the individuals who populate my account are not guilty so much as they are the victims of a mass delusion. Their fault lies not in being evil but in never thinking, never seeking truth except in a feeling of vindication.
While it begins with one person, telling the truth is a collective achievement, one that involves hearing, discussion, acknowledgment, validation, and respect. To be more than mere gossip, a rumor spread to gain power and silence dissent, truth must be tested in debate, justified with evidence, and, in the end, accepted for what it is. As I think back over the story of my community, so little of that has happened. The people in my community could not search for truth together. Some of us feared it too much. If truth is going to happen, an ethic that allows it to happen must be cultivated. Changes in language usage might suggest an ethic that will do this.
As I think back over the language that everyone in my community, both Ross supporters and Ross opponents, has used during this dispute, I remember how often the word credibility was used, especially the way it was used. When the word credibility is used as a substitute for the word truthful, it can be very helpful. It is a more polite to say that someone is not credible when they are not being truthful. Used that way, credibility softens an accusation, maintains civility. Instead of saying flat out that someone is lying, using the word credibility says "I don't believe them," shifting the focus from an assertion of truth to what I believe is the truth. When the truth is being disputed, that is often the more responsible path to take. After all, we have all been in situations where what we believed to be true wasn't, and it is useful to make a distinction between what I believe is true and what truth is. It gives us room to learn, and change our minds.
However, while there are occasions when the word credibility is both useful and appropriate, the angry and vindictive use of it can create a mood that will prevent the happening of truth. During our dispute, the word credibility was often used in a way that called up fear, was used to silence, conceal, discipline, limit, restrain, discredit. Tame troubling tongues. It was the weapon choice in our war of words. The difference between the word being used for good or for harm seems to revolve around what I believe to be credible and what they will believe credible, between judging something credible, and being credible. When someone says, "I don't believe this is credible," they are giving authentic witness. They are telling you what they believe. However, when someone says, "they won't find this credible," truth may have little to do with it. Used this way, the speaker is dwelling in the they world, in what others believe, and so, they are submitting to the reign of gossip.
The word credibility would seem innocent of such indictable possibilities. It originates out of the Latin, credo, to profess trust or belief, as in the Christian confession of faith, the Credo, a confession of truth. It is related to credere, creditus, and creditum, which all deal with one's credit, being creditable, being able to draw upon one's reputation, to get the trust of others. While it is good to be trusted by others, a goal that is worthy of pursuit, especially if they are worthy others, the problem with trying to be credible, with using one's reputation (instead of the truth) to win struggles, is that it steals the self's power from itself and places its worth, its being and its value, in the opinion of others, in the They world. In gossip.
Telling truth in the They world doesn't matter, only being believed does. Everything becomes a matter of appearances. And so, if one is going to be creditable, held in good reputation by others, it is important not to dis/ease them with a truth they won't believe. Better to lie, to not protest a wrong, to let things slide. Let appearances govern. Credibility, when it is used like this in the heat of argument to intimidate people before the opinion of others, is a word that makes people weak, fearful, powerless, and indifferent to truth. And full of anger and hatred. It is also a deeply conservative way of being in the world because it disciplines people to accept what is acceptable to others.
In contrast, the word persuasion evokes a more powerful, more honest, more gentle, more truthful way of being, a way that is much more likely to change things. The self's worth is not located in others, but in its own ability, in its power to sway another. Persuade is derived from the Latin suadere, to lead someone to like something. It is also related to suavis, or sweet and gentle, which has become the English suave. So, to persuade someone is to gently engage them on a matter of dispute, to sway them--another word persuasion is linked to. As a mode of engagement with others, persuasion does not require, as being credible does, giving up one's power to them. It does not require the self to interpret itself as they would, becoming a slave to gossip. As such, offering a self to the other that is authentic, persuasion is a more respectful mode of being. From the moment a persuasive effort begins, the other's ability to know truth, to ultimately acknowledge it, is an assumed possibility. For credibility, as long as it is setting its standard by the They world, it is not. In the gossip world, where each seeks their credibility, the other is an object to be used in a theater of exploitation. And so, credibility affects only the images we present to each other, and only to the extent that others will accept them, while persuasion reaches deeper, past acceptable appearances, to truth. As a result, being persuasive changes things; being credible does not. Because it accepts what "they will believe," being credible is inherently limited by what they will believe. If they, that is to say the people in power, don't believe dioxin is dangerous, maintaining your credible with them is never going to change their opnion of dioxin. Revolutionaries are never credible to the people in power.
Besides that, being credible is often not so much based on what others actually find creditable but on a projection of the shadow self, the gossipy aspects of the self that are the most dis/easing to the self, disowned and concealed. And so "they" become manipulative, suspicious, skeptical, and untrustworthy, and if the self is going to engage them, be believed by them, it must disown its own truth to gain their respect. Where being persuasive requires summoning up all the self's powers to sway another, being credible requires the production of a false self to present to them, a self that can stand the trials of gossip. And so being credible must dis/ease the self by forcing a split between appearance and reality, repressing anything the They world would find dis/easing, and cultivating a hatred for it. The gossip self is not authentic, but false; and living this self as if it were true requires a great deal of inner repression. Silence.
It also, when this dynamic gets going, requires a great deal of external repression. And silence. When the false self is challenged by others, threatened with exposure in the trials of gossip, it has to repress the other's truth. Make them silent. Having disowned its own truth for the sake of credibility, it must require the same of others, for fear they would harm its credibility. And so, projecting its disowned shadow onto them, it attacks them relentlessly, seeking their submission and their silence. And hatred for the other grows. The end effect of living for one's credibility, as has become common in our Wise Use polity, is to prevent the happening of truth, first through repression, then silence, and then through apathy. For fear of the They world's judgments, punishments, exclusions, and condemnations, we prefer peace and security to truth.
The pursuit of credibility supports an epistemology of hatred, a philosophy of gossip, which takes something as true not so much because it is true but because it strengthens feelings of hatred for another, justifies them, and allows people to escape the shame of feeling them. The Freemen, the Militia of Montana, and the Wise Use movement have all come up with the most incredible theories of victimization, beliefs that fly in the face of all available evidence. And yet these extremist movements find plenty of people to believe in them, who find them credible. Why? Perhaps because, having lost their souls to the They world and the seductions of gossip, it feels good to hate, to have an excuse for expressing it. That is what the followers of these movements are looking for--the belonging gossip gives them within their narrow circles, not truth.
I first really noticed the power gossip has to repress truth when various people in our group were getting death threats. The people targeted invariably wanted it to be kept secret--the county librarian, the future county attorney, the first president of our group, and even Gene Huntley. Despite having done nothing wrong, they felt shame when they were attacked. They believed that if they told the truth, people would speculate about their motives, ridicule them if they found them reprehensible, and punish them by undermining their status in the community. Despite many misgivings, I gave them all what they wanted, secrecy--at least for a while. However, that was a mistake. Secrecy isolates the victim, increasing their fear of the They world, making them withdraw even more into their insecurity. And the more they withdraw, the more they want the crimes against them kept secret. In the They world they will be accused of making false accusations to make a political point. They will be described as pathetic weaklings, seeking recognition by telling lies. The more the isolation increases, the more the pressure builds, and eventually the secrecy makes the victim doubt themselves. The gossip they project upon others becomes the truth they accept for themselves: They did something to deserve what was done to them, they crossed a line of acceptability, and they hate themselves for it. The They world, even if it has never spoken, has justly convicted them, and to themselves they become the criminal, not the victim.
Silence is destructive. Because of it, many things that were very wrong in my community went uncontested and were left unresolved. The death threats against the Ross opponents. The humiliation, harassment, and intimidation of the county librarian, which very possibly could have amounted to a violation of her civil rights. The possibility that Gene Huntley was murdered to stop his investigation of Ross and prevent his effort to prosecute the county planner and sanitarian for accepting gifts from Ross. The possibility that justice was obstructed during the county planner's trial for assaulting my uncle, when the jury looked like it had been tampered with and the judge may have been bribed. The possibility that justice was obstructed again when John Huntley did not prosecute the county sanitarian when he was elected county attorney because he was intimidated by the pig's head put in his pickup. And the possibility that the phones of Ross opponents, including my own, had been bugged. None of these things were investigated or resolved because too few in my community were willing to insist upon it. Doing so would have risked their reputations.
I am writing this book to end my own silence. More than most, I have protested the wrongs done in my community--few of my opponents would list silence as one of my virtues--and yet I, too, have been silent. I have seen all this go on, knowing that it was wrong, and yet let it slide. A good citizen, I did write many polite letters to the attorney general of Montana, the governor, the federal attorney, and the FBI, explaining what was happening in my community and asking for an investigation. However, when they sent equally polite letters back to me, offering their sympathies but giving me no investigation, I merely returned their politeness, letting their judgment stand when I should have insisted on mine. My sin has been politeness, civility when nothing was civil, and I write this book to redeem myself. Politeness has its place, but not when friends are being assaulted, intimidated, banished, and possibly murdered.
So, let's start with the worst of these and talk of murder, then, but let's start with a qualification for the benefit of the lawyers: I am not certain that Gene Huntley was murdered. All I know is that he is dead, that he died getting death threats, and that he died with a fatal dose of a prescription drug in his body. Perhaps it is possible the FAA's toxicology laboratory made a mistake, but I doubt it. Perhaps it is possible that Gene, in a moment of weakness and despair, took the fatal dose himself, seeking an end to his pain, but that too, I doubt. What I do not doubt is the air of violence that preceded his death, and that is what makes me insist that it is also possible that he was murdered.
By itself, and in ordinary circumstances, the fatal dose of quinidine in Gene Huntley's body at his death, might justify the conclusion that the authorities have apparently made, that he took it himself. That certainly is the easiest explanation. However, Gene died in no ordinary circumstances. He died with many people wishing him dead. While the anger of his enemies proves nothing--coincidences do happen, as the FBI has told me--it does justify a murder investigation when they would not otherwise be done. If he were murdered, Gene's death was no ordinary murder, born of mundane motives, limited to the greed, fear, and resentment of individuals involved in his life. The events around his death suggest a sacrificial death, a collective murder done more for political, symbolic, and mythic purposes than practical or personal ones.
I offer this opinion as a reader of Rene' Girard's, the author of The Scapegoat and Violence and the Sacred. According to Girard, collective murder serves a vital social function: It unifies the community. Collective murder is most likely to happen when a community is in crisis, when the boundaries giving each member an identity within it are threatened and ambiguous. The act of casting out a scapegoat, dissolves differences within the community and unifies it.
Certainly, my community was in a crisis. As I wrote earlier, many businesses, especially those involved in and supporting agriculture, were going broke. Conflicts were breaking out all over--between businesses unable to collect bills because the people who owed them were broke, between bankers and farmers, between town and country, and between generations. The agricultural crisis put the pinch on everyone. Homes, farms, and businesses were being lost. The young generation had to leave because the older generation had failed to prepare a place for them. Everyone was angry.
And so, frightened at the disorder around them, some may have felt a deep atavistic need for a
scapegoat to unify the community. Someone to gather around and stone. The most prominent
member of the community by far, Gene Huntley was an excellent candidate to provide this
unifying effect. By being important to the community, its claim to fame, Gene was the one
sacrifice whose exclusion would have been powerful enough to overcome the forces tearing the
community apart. Perhaps surprisingly, people like Gene are likely targets of collective violence
because, as Girad observes:
Certain accusations are so characteristic of collective persecution that their very mention makes
modern observers suspect violence in the air . . . First there are violent crimes which choose as
object those people whom it is most criminal to attack, either in the absolute sense or in
reference to the individual committing the act: a king, a father, the symbol of supreme authority,
and in biblical and modern societies the weakest and most defenseless, especially young
children.
The more the community is threatened, and the more its members are angry with each other, the greater must be the sacrifice to restore unity. An ordinary member of the community, of no great distinction, will not do. When times are bad, and everyone is angry with everyone else, the scapegoat must be someone that everyone respects, fears, or admires. Only such an eminent person, by being excluded and murdered, can renew the bonds of community. By no longer being part of it, a scapegoat cast out, the eminent person's exclusion and death creates a bond of unity within the community that overcomes the forces tearing it apart.
A harsh charge, ugly and angry. Nevertheless, let me explain by invoking a parallel that would explain why I think it justified. When World War II was over, and the horrors of the Holocaust became public, the mass of the German public apologized by saying "We didn't know." Perhaps they didn't know the details, the numbers, or the cruelty, but they knew. They knew because the Nazi's deployed the hatred of Jews to come to power and maintain their power. They knew because they knew how hated the Jews were, if only because they participated in it, wanting the Jews dead. They knew because they saw Jews being taken from their homes, forced from their jobs, forbidden to marry or have sex with good people like themselves. They knew because they saw the cattle cars rumbling through the night, and because the places where cars unloaded smelled funny. They knew because they kept themselves from knowing.
In the same way, the people of my community knew. They saw the anger directed at Gene, Barbara, and others, how ugly it was, how capable of violence it was. They knew that because they attended the meetings where they collectively tried to expel our librarian from the community. They knew what they said about Gene and Barbara and others, and they knew how angry they were when they said it. They knew, if only because I told them, that Gene, Barbara, John, and others were getting death threats. They knew, also again because I told them, that Gene was on verge of prosecuting the county planner and the county sanitarian for accepting gifts from the Ross family. They knew, as an item of gossip, that Gene had helped Barbara pursue a massive civil rights suit against the county, threatening not only the reputation of the community but the finances as well. They knew that we all were investigating the truth of all the claims Wise Use leaders told in the name of economic development. And, most telling of all, they knew how much quinidine Gene had in his body at his death because I gave the FAA document reporting it to a number of them.
With all this, they know that Gene could have been murdered, and the best evidence of their collective guilt is that, despite all they know, they have not insisted on an investigation. If the truth were not a threat to anyone, and the community's most respected citizen could not have been a victim of anyone's anger, why not find out what happened? Why let the possibility of murder hang heavy in the air with no calls for an investigation, no reporting of the quinidine overdose, no acknowledgment Gene was getting death threats, no concern about who was doing it? Only silence by the Fallon County Times and KFLN, the local radio station and the local government. Why? Could the truth be that awful? Must it be warded off, denied, and feared like that?
If Gene were murdered, it was done by only a few individuals. Still, the guilt cannot be limited to those few because the rage was not. Even if others took no direct part, know nothing of the facts, and have no responsibility for the act, they have share in it because they have shared the silence. And in their silence, the hatred that bound them together.
The day Gene was buried, and I stood before his open grave beside his son's, Ray Huntley, who had died five years earlier of brain cancer, I saw something has haunted me ever since. According to his tombstone, Gene was born on May 17, 1927, and died on June 29, 1992. According to his tombstone, Ray Huntley was born on April 17, 1962, and died November 29, 1987. Father and son--each were born and each died on the same day of the month. As I stood there, waiting for Father Tobin to say his final prayers, a chill seeped through my bones that warm summer day.
What would it take, atom colliding with atom, body with body, event following event, over two separate lifetimes to come together in such a coincidence? What god would have the patience to shape the timing, starting 65 years earlier, to make it all end that way? Even less, what force of nature could ever intend such an end? Such a coincidence of dates.
Enlightened people, whether religious or scientific, doubt such signs nowadays, and so, such a coincidence would mean nothing in a court of law. No judge would ever allow a jury to consider the tombstones as evidence for what I am saying. Even less would a physical scientist allow it to be interpreted as anything more than random chance. Nevertheless, in the language of dreams, poems, and myths, which we moderns have long forgotten, a coincidence like this always has meaning.
While conventional psychological theory has no ideas to interpret a coincidence like this, the great psychoanalyst, Carl Jung has. He calls them an acausal synchronicity, a meaningful connection between the inner mind and the outer world that causality cannot explain. In his practice, Jung noticed that when his patients were making progress in their therapy, there would be strange coincidences between their dreams and the outer world. A patient would dream of rare kind of bug, one that had deep symbolic meaning in ancient mythology, and then, just when the patient was telling Jung of her dream, the rare bug would fly into the room. According to Jung, synchronicities like this could be interpreted like a dream because they were symbolic events, like a dream.
So what does it mean when a son, who died of cancer, dies on the same day of the month as his father, who died fighting an incinerator that would release deadly carcinogens? Born on the same dates, dying on the same dates, did they not die of the same thing?
As we saw earlier, cancer is not a natural phenomenon; it is a political disease, caused by the pollution of the environment. When 4 out of 10 people will develop cancer in their lifetime, it becomes necessary to deny the reality of what is happening, to pretend otherwise. If people ever admitted to themselves the harm they cause friends and loved ones when they participate in our toxic economy they could not live with themselves, or interpret themselves as the kind, caring, decent people they want to see themselves as. If they ever admitted the truth, they would know that cancer is a form of collective murder, a sacrifice made to the civilization of productivity. By living our lives the way we do, participating in a toxic economy, we kill people. They die of cancer, and we allow it to happen to them because our way of life needs the sacrifice.
This is a very hard truth of ourselves to accept. It is so much safer to dismiss cancer as an accident of fate, God's will, genetics, or isolate it as a personal fault caused by bad lifestyle choices like smoking or a high fat diet--something we had nothing to do with. We deny that they were sacrificed so that we can go on living the life we live. That way there is no guilt for the intense suffering and death cancer brings others. Truth, sometimes, is hard to live with. Lies and denial are so much more comfortable.
Still, as I stood before Gene's open grave, looking at his tombstone and his son's, I knew the truth
cannot be forever denied. The day we can no longer speak, the truth ends up, somehow, on our
tombstones, a witness to what was sacrificed.
When I started writing this book, despite knowing better, I intended it to be a complete history of everything that happened in my community. In a strictly linear way, event would follow event, and, in the end, everything would be told--completely and indisputably. That was my dream, but I couldn't write that book. Whenever I started writing it, I suffered doubts. Did I accurately remember someone saying that? Did I forget something? More deeply, did I really understand them? Would it be disputed? Were things what they appeared to be?
If I were going to be an omniscient narrator, as I dreamed of being, I had to know the answers to everything. However, there were so many obstacles to finding the complete truth. Besides my unreliable memory, some people wouldn't talk to me, and even if they did, I couldn't trust them to tell me the truth. Too many people had misled me, kept important information from me, and opposed my efforts for me to be sure about anything. Reconstructing conversations with people seemed particularly hazardous. Even if I remembered everything perfectly, which I doubt I ever did, experience has taught me that people will still dispute it when they feared my opinion. Measuring my work against my dream of it, I found my story hopelessly inadequate. For years, my book sat on the shelf partially written, an abandoned aspiration. I wanted to tell the truth, but how could I ever get away with it? It was only when I gave up my dream of writing a complete account of the events in my community, and wrote only as a witness to them, accepting the limits of my memory and my understanding, that I started writing again. This may make my account flawed as a history, but more truthful as a story.
So, this is my story, and I do not, in any way, pretend that it is an objective, neutral, or final account of the events that transpired in my community. I write as a participant and not as a historian, as an environmental activist and not as a journalist. Given my bias and what I do not know, I will not deny the possibility that there are other ways this story could have been told, and I do not insist that my account is free of error. If I knew everything and if everyone were completely truthful with me, I'm sure that I would write it differently. Also, if I were not emotionally involved, by turns angry, frustrated, disappointed, frightened, and alienated, I would have written it differently too. However, I say this only to acknowledge the inevitable. As a reader of Martin Heidegger, I believe that all discourse is situated and temporal, that truth is not a correspondence with an absolute but something handmade, made by dwellers. I tried to avoid epistemological and ontological issues throughout this book, knowing that they would bore too many readers, and I will not will change my policy here, except to say is that I told this story the best way I could, telling the truth as I knew it.
If someone disputes the account I give in this book, as I do expect someone will, I will not say that they have no cause, only that they are unlikely to know better than I what I felt, saw, heard, or believed. That is what this book is about, my interpretation of events. If upon reading my account, others wish to offer their interpretation of what happened, I welcome it. They can write their own book. Indeed, part of the reason I wrote this book is to encourage people to come forward with what they know so that I would better understand what happened. This book is offered as a beginning, not a conclusion.
There would be much that they could tell, if someone were so inclined. For instance, they might write about when the famous environmental activist, Dr. Paul Connett, came to Baker and gave an excellent presentation on dioxin and incinerators. He told us how that, though small, the incinerator the Ross family was proposing would release large amounts of dioxin. He would have been part of a panel that included the Ross family, a county commissioner, an activist from the Northern Plains Resource Council, and my uncle. Yet the Ross family and the county commissioner never showed up. It was quite a spectacle.
If someone wanted to write this episode as a story about good triumphing over evil, and not an investigation of what Wise Use would sacrifice, as this is, the climaxing chapter would have been about the Ross family finally giving up their incinerator plans, as did eventually happen, years after the events I describe here. During this period, the Ross family filed permit application after permit application, but the Department of Environmental Quality always ruled them incomplete. The inadequacies of the applications were quite serious. The DEQ found mathematical miscalculations, unfounded assumptions, and undocumented claims throughout the applications.
One issue was particularly telling. When Paul Connett gave his presentation in Baker, he argued that incinerating PCBs wouldn't be the only source of dioxin from the incinerator. Most electrical insulation has lots of chlorine in it, and copper acts as a catalyst for converting chlorine into dioxin. Simply burning the insulation off the copper wire could be a major source dioxin. When the Ross family heard this, they denied that there was any chlorine in the insulating materials, and they adamantly maintained it in every application. Nevertheless, they were never able to document what was in the insulation. Since describing what will be burned and how it will be burned is what a permit for an incinerator is all about, the DEQ quite reasonably insisted on this point. Despite the DEQ's repeated insistence, the Ross family never reported what it was. My guess is that Connett was right. There probably was a lot of chlorine in the insulating materials, which meant that the dioxin emissions would be higher than the Ross family was arguing, and the Ross family just couldn't bring themselves to admit that they were wrong after they had so harshly condemned Connett for being wrong.
All in all, the applications were poorly done. The Ross family just couldn't get it right, even the most basic and simple stuff. The DEQ would explain it to them over and over again and the Ross family would get it wrong over and over again. It became very frustrating to the DEQ. I told a DEQ staff member once that the Ross family was proof positive that exposure to PCBs impaired mental functioning. The person I told this to was someone who took his job as a public servant very seriously. He wanted to be fair and impartial, and he tried valiantly not to laugh. Still, as I said this, he cringed, turned from me, and made an awful choking sound suppressing a laugh. I knew then that the incinerator was doomed.
Another way this story could have been told is as an organizing effort by the Northern Plains Resource Council. After Gene died and Barbara left, our group became an affiliate of the Northern Plains Resource Council. Our new name was the Southeastern Montana Alliance. The Northern Plains Resource Council was originally organized by ranchers in Montana who objected to massive plans to mine coal in the region. With its efforts, Montana passed some of the best environmental laws in the nation. (Unfortunately, in the 1990's the Wise Use movement badly undermined many of these laws.) NPRC helped pass an incinerator bill that proved crucial to stopping Ross. It also worked hard on bad actor bills, a referendum on siting facilities like incinerators, and other things. NPRC also helped us work with the EPA, filing freedom of information requests, and other things.
So, you see, I left many important things untold. I did not go into them because I wrote this book to remember and interpret a series of wrongs that deeply troubled me, fearing that the memory of them would disappear forever unless I put my protest in print. That is why I wrote this book as I did.
As of this writing, the Ross family remains in Baker. They say they are only using their facility as an overnight stop for their trucks before they continue on to an incinerator the Ross family operates in South Dakota, but I am skeptical. They told us that they would only drain transformers that were leaking there, but it turned out that there were routinely draining transformers, storing the oil, and using it to fuel their trucks. So, instead of burning the transformer oil in an incinerator, they are doing it in their trucks. Unfortunately, this is legal under federal law, as long as the oil has no more than 2 ppm of PCBs.
When Denise Roth, our Northern Plains organizer uncovered what the Ross family was doing, the DEQ ruled that the Ross family had to get a permit. Unfortunately, the DEQ does not have enough staff to process the permit, and no resolution has been reached on this.
So, if you are in the Montana, and happen upon a truck owned by the Ross family, you would probably be well advised not to breathe its exhaust. It doesn't have just the usual crap in it . . .