- Feb 12, 2007
- 59,439
- 24,106
Victor Davis Hanson has an excellent piece on why so many people are sympathizing with Clive Bundy.
One observation: in the U.S., we have an increasingly lawless government which uses the law to reward friends and punish enemies. As Bundy really wants nothing more from the government than to be left alone, he is an enemy. And hence, is very way of life must be eliminated.
Hopenchange!
...So we are not threatened by the likes of Cliven Bundy. Instead, the scary lawlessness extends to the bureaucracy itself, given that under Obama the government is becoming tainted and an ideological tool of social transformation. After just six years, we shrug that, of course, the IRS is biased. The Justice Department is politicized; ask Dinesh DSouza or the AP reporters. No need to mention the NSA. The EPA makes laws up as ideologically required. No one believes the State Department that in the weeks before the election a video-caused riot led to expert jihadists zeroing in with their GPS-guided mortars on a CIA annex in Benghazi. And so on.
Bundy is just different from what is now America he looks different, talks differently, and dresses differently. These are the superficial veneers to someone who lives mostly through different premises from those of Pajama Boy nation, the world of Jay Carney and his cute Stalinist posters, the cosmos of Anita Dunn and her Mao gushes, or the metrosexual networking that is the gospel of Silicon Valley or the DC beltway. Few of us rely on human muscle anymore to survive one more day. Fewer of those who do combine that with horse-power, and its world of leather and wood and rope. Bundy is self-employed, without an SEIU union, a PERS pension, or a GS-15 health plan.
Given all that, I suggest Cliven Bundy is far more endangered than is the desert tortoise, and that his kind will be gone shortly in a way the federally protected tarantula and Gila monster or delta smelt will not. He, not they, is in the federal crosshairs. So, yes, I can make some allowances for the nihilism of Cliven Bundy. We could not live in a modern, high-tech world only of Cliven Bundys, but perhaps we cannot live in a world without a few of them now and then to remind us of what we have become.
Almost everything, natural and human, has conspired against these sorts: a hail storm that wrecked the plum crop two days before harvest, or a swaggering psychopathic neighbor who stole the irrigation canal water until stopped, or a no-good who filed a phony workers compensation claim for a stubbed toe, or an ancient wobbly grinder that sliced off a finger, or the thieving Packing Company that always sent back slips each year saying 45% cull rate, whether the fruit was small or big, scarred or smooth, ripe, overripe, or green.
To be a cattleman in the Nevada desert in America of 2014 is to live on Mars, or rather to live among 24/7 enemies, human and animal alike. How a man survives from cattle ranching on leased land in the Nevada badlands I cannot imagine, but I wonder nonetheless and in that amazement wish to see him continue....
Works and Days » Cliven Bundy and The Rural Way
One observation: in the U.S., we have an increasingly lawless government which uses the law to reward friends and punish enemies. As Bundy really wants nothing more from the government than to be left alone, he is an enemy. And hence, is very way of life must be eliminated.
Hopenchange!
...So we are not threatened by the likes of Cliven Bundy. Instead, the scary lawlessness extends to the bureaucracy itself, given that under Obama the government is becoming tainted and an ideological tool of social transformation. After just six years, we shrug that, of course, the IRS is biased. The Justice Department is politicized; ask Dinesh DSouza or the AP reporters. No need to mention the NSA. The EPA makes laws up as ideologically required. No one believes the State Department that in the weeks before the election a video-caused riot led to expert jihadists zeroing in with their GPS-guided mortars on a CIA annex in Benghazi. And so on.
Bundy is just different from what is now America he looks different, talks differently, and dresses differently. These are the superficial veneers to someone who lives mostly through different premises from those of Pajama Boy nation, the world of Jay Carney and his cute Stalinist posters, the cosmos of Anita Dunn and her Mao gushes, or the metrosexual networking that is the gospel of Silicon Valley or the DC beltway. Few of us rely on human muscle anymore to survive one more day. Fewer of those who do combine that with horse-power, and its world of leather and wood and rope. Bundy is self-employed, without an SEIU union, a PERS pension, or a GS-15 health plan.
Given all that, I suggest Cliven Bundy is far more endangered than is the desert tortoise, and that his kind will be gone shortly in a way the federally protected tarantula and Gila monster or delta smelt will not. He, not they, is in the federal crosshairs. So, yes, I can make some allowances for the nihilism of Cliven Bundy. We could not live in a modern, high-tech world only of Cliven Bundys, but perhaps we cannot live in a world without a few of them now and then to remind us of what we have become.
Almost everything, natural and human, has conspired against these sorts: a hail storm that wrecked the plum crop two days before harvest, or a swaggering psychopathic neighbor who stole the irrigation canal water until stopped, or a no-good who filed a phony workers compensation claim for a stubbed toe, or an ancient wobbly grinder that sliced off a finger, or the thieving Packing Company that always sent back slips each year saying 45% cull rate, whether the fruit was small or big, scarred or smooth, ripe, overripe, or green.
To be a cattleman in the Nevada desert in America of 2014 is to live on Mars, or rather to live among 24/7 enemies, human and animal alike. How a man survives from cattle ranching on leased land in the Nevada badlands I cannot imagine, but I wonder nonetheless and in that amazement wish to see him continue....
Works and Days » Cliven Bundy and The Rural Way
Epic post
