March 26, 2008 at 02:23:20

A Western Fable: Waist-Deep in the Big Muddy (Again)

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By Bernard Weiner, The Crisis Papers

My neighbor's cattle operation had a huge number of prized Black Angus steers and Holstein dairy-cows. I wanted them and the lush range they fed on. I tried making some sort of deal with the owner, but he was one ornery sumbitch.

He knew his Double I-Ranch was prime real estate, with super cattle herds, so he made sure to hire the strongest guards and gave them the latest weapons so nobody would consider making a move on him. He was taunting me, telling me he wouldn't deal, that I could go to hell. He needed a good lesson in humility.

Over the years, the guy had been getting old and his security system had slipped into disrepair. He ran his ranch as a kind of corrupt one-man show so I knew he'd be a pushover if I moved on his property and just took it, got rid of him and set up my own manager of the place who would run it "independently" but take his cues from me, if you get my drift. I'm the most powerful land baron in the area now, so why not? Nobody could really stop me.

But I couldn't just march my assembled gunslingers and cowhands in there and openly take it. I'd have to attack under cover of "the law": helping the poor downtrodden residents who live there, that sort of thing. So I went to the County Council and told them all sorts of scary stories about huge caches of weapons, including some really dangerous experimental ones, that were stockpiled on his ranch. I said he was planning on using all that ordnance against us and his other neighbors and his own people.

I also told them that the rancher had been involved in the Oklahoma City terrorist bombing, even though I knew he hadn't been. Oddly enough, I could get only one other major neighbor to join my plan, a suck-up kind of poodle who thought he'd hitch his small ranch to my power-star.

ATTACK BEFORE ANYONE CAN PREVENT IT

I urged the County Council to pass a resolution saying the rancher better disarm or else face an attack. But before agreeing, the county authorities (those suspicious a-holes!) didn't want to take my word about the weapon-stockpiles and sent in arms-inspectors who, not surprisingly, weren't finding much of anything.

I knew if I got all balled up in those inspections and in County Council politics, I'd never be able to take control of his ranch, and later the surrounding properties that also seemed ripe for the plucking. So I decided to attack first, "pre-emptively," so to speak, before he could do any damage and before anybody could try to stop me.

Word got out about my impending attack, and lots of folks from all over the county, and even the state, demonstrated in the streets against me, warning about all the things that could go wrong if our guys attacked without a solid moral reason, without an imminent threat against us, and without a large coalition of friends and neighbors.

But my top ranchhands and some former residents of Double I-Ranch I consulted about the coming attack told me it would be a "cakewalk," would be over real quicklike, and that all the abused workers on the ranch would be so happy to be freed from their tyrannical boss, they'd be grateful to us forever.

NOT SO FAST WITH THAT "VICTORY"

So we hyped all those scary stories about weapons and fooled or paid off enough County Council members, and soon we were mortaring the bejusus out of the next-door ranch -- it was awesome! It didn't take long for our guys to get to the main ranch-house. The hired guards didn't put up much of a fight -- in fact, they seemed to have melted into the general population. So I held a press conference announcing, under a big "Victory Is Ours" banner, that our guys had "prevailed" in the fighting. Double I-Ranch was now "under new management," which meant we began setting up friendly crew-chiefs who would do our bidding.

But then all hell broke loose. Turns out that our guys had pretty much wrecked the place and weren't able to reconstruct much of this broken ranch. The contractors I hired couldn't rebuild the ruined corrals, stockyards, water-delivery and electrical systems, and so on. (They did waste and steal a lot of the reconstruction funds, but I thought it was worth looking the other way to keep them happy.)

The local Double I-Ranch residents, including a lot of former guards, were getting surly. They started fighting us, using abandoned weapons caches our guys hadn't bothered to secure, since so much of our attention was focused on getting the Black Angus and Holstein herds to market and to expanding and protecting our new grazing lands.

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Bernard Weiner, Ph.D. in government & international relations, has taught at universities in California and Washington, worked for two decades as a writer-editor at the San Francisco Chronicle, and currently serves as co-editor of The Crisis Papers (more...)

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