Dear HCN,
I fell asleep in my
overstuffed chair in front of the TV the other
night.
Suddenly, gunfire broke loose on the
street outside my door and I was snapped into full
alert.
I leaped to my feet and grabbed my trusty
Benjamin air rifle and gave it a couple of pumps. Thinking it was
Bruce Babbitt in a tank coming to seize my land, I ran onto the
porch and drew a bead, but suddenly realized it was only backfiring
from a Ford pickup with the ignition timing
retarded.
I thought the War on the West the
campaigners had been talking about had finally begun. The rest of
the night was spent tossing in fitful dreams of Hillary leading a
squadron of Greenpeace airplanes in a napalm attack on our one
functioning oil refinery.
Visions flooded my mind
of Gestapo batons pounding my door down. Surely this must be
Clinton’s shock troops coming to seize my guns and leave me
vulnerable to the hundreds of armed criminals that lurk about my
driveway daily.
Giving the Benjamin a couple of
extra pumps, I slowly opened the door with the black muzzle and
peeked out. Oh, it was just the paper boy delivering the Casper
Star-Tribune. Knowing that continuous vigilance is the price of
freedom, I hastily scanned the paper to see if anyone had yet
stopped the insidious encroachment of the feds by throwing up
barricades to cut off federal Interstate Highway
25.
And there it was. Right on the front page of
the Aug. 23 paper: Former Energy Secretary Donald Hodel revealed
that “the Reagan administration waged a secret economic war against
the Soviet Union by pushing for lower global oil prices.”
Suddenly it all came flooding back to me – the
bankruptcies, the bank failures, the mass exodus, the abandoned
housing projects, the collapsing school funding, the mortgage
foreclosures, the failed oil industry.
The
economic free-fall that started in July of 1982 had in a decade
left a scorched and wrecked earth across all Wyoming towns worse
than that left behind Sherman’s march to the
sea.
It looked like a war, all right – one we
clearly lost. The war against the West then is not a fantasy.
Except it is already over. Saudi Arabia 100, Wyoming
0.
So if the Clinton administration’s attempt to
cut down welfare payments to ranchers renting federal land can be
called a “War on the West,” or “genocide” against ranchers in
Wallop’s terms, then what the Reagan administration did to Wyoming
as he tilted against the windmills of the dying Communist state by
flooding the world with cheap oil can only be called a
holocaust.
War victims unite! We demand
reparations!
Lloyd Agte
Casper,
Wyoming
The writer is a professor of English and film history at Casper College and an adjunct English teacher at the University of Wyoming.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Oh, what a war on the West!.
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