Jonathan Hanson takes an elemental look at liberty and culture
My best friend Steve Bodio (yes, the ‘spook‘ who was referenced here some time ago) and I are both freelance natural history writers who live in the rural southwest U.S. We are both strongly pro-environment, pro-gun, hunting-and-fishing libertarians who love watching birds as much as shooting them, drive, respectively, a 20-year old Ford truck and a 30-year-old Toyota Land Cruiser, and live in houses that wouldn’t qualify as closet space to some of the new, liberal enviros who are flocking to our overburdened area of the country. Both of us despair that the battle to save the last open spaces in the American West will be lost, thanks to these self-satisfied ex-urbanites who want to mandate to those of us already here how they think it should be saved.
In Steve’s splendid 1998 book of outdoor essays, On the Edge of the Wild (which everyone here should buy), he wrote two paragraphs comparing the “old” residents of our rural landscape to the “new” ones, to sum up these meddlesome invaders. But on a re-read yesterday, it struck me how well the passage buttonholes a much wider spectrum of the close-minded liberal sheep who are laying waste to freedom and individuality in both the old world and the new. Pay particular attention to the last line.
What the old ones really knew in their bones was that death exists, that all life eats and kills to eat, that all lives end, that energy goes on. They knew that humans are participants, not spectators. Their work and play and rituals affirmed and reinforced this knowledge.
The new ones want to evade death and deny it, legislate against it, transcend it. They run, bicycle, network, and pray. They stare into their screens and buy their vitamins. Here, they want the street drunks locked up, cigarettes banned, drunken driving met with more severe penalties than armed assault. They fear guns, cowboys, Muslims, pit bulls, whiskey, homosexuals (though they’ll deny it), and freedom. Strong smells offend them.
“Strong smells offend them.” Couldn’t those four words describe concisely all those who are determined to homogenize our entire society?
Strong smells offend them.
Jonathan Hanson
