October 1994: "Don't label me a liberal, you conservative fascist swine!"
by Jim Stiles
"Don't label me a liberal, you conservative fascist swine!"
Sometimes Hank Rutter drives me crazy. My buddy's slightly to the Right of Rush opinions grace the pages of this newspaper every other month or so, and I must admit that I instinctively flinch when he shows up at the office, computer disk clutched in his conservative little hands.
The disk, of course, is a blessing of sorts. I don't have to re-type his polemics; I merely format them for margins, fonts, and type size, and print them out on the old Panasonic Postscript. If I wanted to, I could cut and paste the galleys right on to the boards and never even read them, and then I wouldn't get upset or become discouraged about the human race.
Yeah...Right.
And yet, even though his opinions often leave me feeling like I've been dragged through a cactus patch, I dutifully read each and every word he writes, knowing that if I don't, Hank will be crushed beyond words (even conservatives can be sensitive lugs). Still, Rutter sometimes gives me food for thought. I mean, after all, he's bound to be right sometimes. Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.
OK. I'm being too hard on the guy. The fact is, I like Hank and we often surprise each other on issues we thought divided us by light years. Last month Hank raised the issue of labels. Not soup can labels. Political labels. Hank observed that calling each other names ("Take that, you...Republican! "Up yours, you...Democrat!), leaves precious little time for resolving the problems that confront us. "If Stiles and I stopped irritating each other by name calling," Hank noted, we might have a meaningful discussion about how to fund county government."
Maybe so. And maybe we need some new labels that better define who we are and what we think and feel. In a politically labelized world seemingly defined by Radio's Rotund One, Rush Limbaugh, there is little room for doubt...we are either flag-waving, God fearing, apple pie eating Conservatives, or weak-kneed, pro-pornography, kiss-a-fish/kill-a-human, tax squandering Liberals. The battle lines are well-defined and every citizen better make up his or her mind which side of that line they prefer to stand.
Well hold on a minute. Do these "definitions" really fit? For starters, I reached for my Webster's to get a dictionary definition for the two emotionally charged little words and here is what I found:
CONSERVATIVE: Marked by moderation or caution; marked by relating to traditional norms of taste, elegance, style, or manners.
LIBERAL: One who is openminded or not strict in the observance of traditional or established forms or ways.
My take on these definitions is that it would be pretty difficult to label anybody in this town either a 100% liberal or a conservative in the purest form of the word. For example, the fact that I don't want to see the population of Moab triple, as has been suggested by some real estate developers, should make me a conservative and them a bunch of radical, wild-eyed liberals. My attitude is certainly "marked by moderation and caution." Preferring to see an orchard remain along the Colorado River corridor, as it has been for decades is a conservative concept. Wanting to turn it into a convenience store/campark is a liberal view.
Supporting the concept of wilderness, of conserving what little is left of the wild country, smacks of a traditional conservative ethic. Destroying what has been left alone for millions of years sounds pretty liberal to me, at least with regard to the land itself. I will admit that destroying the Earth has become a tradition of sorts, to some people, and I would have to give their rebuttals to my argument (on that point) serious consideration.
Wanting to maintain a small-town atmosphere in Moab, with a low crime rate, clean air and few traffic congestion problems is a conservative view. Taking the risks associated with dramatic population increases is liberal.
On the other hand, when it comes to the many social issues that confront us, I find myself falling on the liberal side of the fence. Racism, gender discrimination, poverty, the lifestyles people choose to live, may not fulfill the "traditional or established ways" of our society, but I never thought that slavery, for instance, was a particularly noble tradition.
I admit that using slavery as an example is an injustice that (legally) none of us has to confront in America in 1994. But the injustices that our society faces today require just as much courage as the slavery issue demanded more than a century ago. And I admit they require some creativity, which many liberals sorely lack these days.
For instance, a friend of mine and I were recently discussing the tragedy of the welfare system in our country. Living here in the relative safety of southeast Utah, neither of us has experienced firsthand in decades the decaying cities and the ever growing nightmares within them. I left my job as a social worker in Kentucky almost 20 years ago. It was disheartening then; I can't imagine what it's like now. Still, I know how complex the crisis is, and how personal it can be when you take the time to become a part of it. So when my friend shrugged and said, "All we need to do is cut off their welfare completely, right now. Stop the checks and cut out the food stamps. They'll have to get a job then," I could only shake my head...the old Reagan "Make them pull themselves up by their own bootstraps" philosophy. Sounds more like an invitation to anarchy, if you ask me.
So if being a conservative means thinking like that gentleman, I want no part of the conservative label hung around my neck.
But on the other hand, if the liberal response is to create yet another government agency, another bureaucracy full of pencil pushing robotrons, where 90% of the funding goes to push those pencils, and little if any of it ever reaches programs that can help ease the problems the agency was created to solve in the first place, then don't call me a liberal either.
Millions of Americans who would rather die than be called conservatives are just as sick of the government dictating to its citizens as Hank Rutter. I am personally disgusted with government waste and ineffectiveness. The difference between me and most Rush Limbaugh Conservatives is the perceived motivation behind "Big Government's" actions.
South of here, in Blanding, Utah, my friend Niel Joslin puts out an entertaining and informative weekly newspaper called the Blue Mountain Panorama. But it definitely carries a conservative slant. Two of his regular columnists, Joe Lyman and Jim Shumway, leave me in tears almost every week. Are they tears of laughter or tears of stunned disbelief ("Did they really say that?")? I'm never sure. For Joe and Jim, the Federal Government in general, and the Clintons in particular, are all part of a great big sinister conspiracy to take over our lives and control our brains. Both believe the president has the moral convictions of Charlie Manson. Lyman frequently compares Clinton to Lenin...even calls him President Lenin from time to time (the Commie Threat is alive and well in Blanding, Utah). They believe that somewhere in Washington, D.C., in the wee hours of the morning, the plotters gather in darkness to plan the next phase of the Big Takeover. There are more plotters in this conspiracy than there were gunmen on the Grassy Knoll.
If it were only that simple. There's no sinister plot driving the federal government as Lyman and Shumway and millions of other conservatives suspect; what drives the Government to become an ever increasing intrusive influence on our lives is a need we can all understand. It's called job security. The federal government is one of the last great work places where its employees can make themselves indispensable.
We live in a country that has almost doubled its population in the last 50 years. At the same time technology requires fewer and fewer of us to run the country efficiently. Private industry, motivated by profit, naturally wants to run as smoothly as possible. What's left but Government? And what really can anyone do about it? What if you streamlined the Federal Government? Cut out all the inefficiency and dead wood? What would happen to those millions of newly unemployed? Hell, they'd be collecting food stamps too in a matter of weeks.
And that is where my friend Rutter and I agree on a very critical matter. If you want to return to the simpler life of yesteryear, if you wish this country faced the social problems we grappled with in 1954, remember there were a hundred million fewer of us to cause social problems in 1954. Rutter scoffs when I call myself a "progressive traditionalist," but I stand by my self-imposed label. I miss the simplicity of the 50s, or what I can remember of them. I appreciate the fact that I grew up in a safe neighborhood with both a mother and a father at home each night. But I also remember Blacks being forced to ride in the back of the bus. And learning what the A-Bomb was at age five...I miss the traditional lifestyle of my childhood but we can't turn a blind eye to the hardships and injustices that exist for others.
Here in Moab, the labels fly fast and furious. But self-proclaimed conservatives like Rutter (among others) confuse me. Hank once wrote in this paper that he had no problem seeing every horse and cattle pasture in the proximity of Moab turned into a subdivision development. What kind of cautious, moderate, and traditional approach to change is that? Hank...you rascally liberal you. Come out of the closet!
And in the latest Catalyst magazine (published in SLC), my eternal adversary, realtor Joe Kingsley, attempts to rebut the "Pork Belly Housing Boom" story I wrote for its August issue, calling anyone who hopes to maintain some kind of small town atmosphere in Moab an "isolationist." One more label to grapple with. But while Joe claims that the "isolationists" constitute a "very small segment of the population," I think he's wrong. A very small segment of this community shares his vision of a future Moab with a population of 15,000 people. That's about how many people are in Moab over Jeep Safari Weekend. How does that sound? Every day. Day after day. For the rest of your life?
What most of us are concerned with as we make our way through life is the quality of that life. Many of us found that quality in Moab. We are "Quality of Lifers," the vast majority of us. Forget the liberal, conservative, environmentalist, isolationist, obstructionist labels. It's the intangibles, the qualities you can't put a price tag on, that still make this place special, not "3 Bdrm/2 Bth Condo w/ sauna. View. Low 100s."
Quality of life. Ultimately it's all that matters. It's everything.
* * * *
"We want to keep baseball going as the highest baseball sport that has gone into baseball and the baseball angle. I'm not gonna speak of any other sport. I'm not here to argue about any other sports. I'm in the baseball business. It's been run cleaner than any baseball business that was ever put out in the hundred years at the present time."
Casey Stengel
Casey Stengel was manager of the New York Yankees when he made that statement in 1958 before a Senate sub-committee. He was, believe it or not, responding to a question about baseball's exemption from anti-trust laws, an issue that will get serious consideration this winter. When Mickey Mantle was called before the Senate and asked the same question, he said, "I share Casey's views."
I miss baseball. I don't miss the sport that was canceled last week. I don't miss the game that will play no World Series in October this year. I don't miss the million dollar cry babies who are "in the business," whether they're players or owners. But I miss Baseball.
My first hero was Mickey Mantle. It wasn't just that he could hit home runs into the upper deck of Yankee Stadium from both sides of the plate, or that he could drag bunt better than anyone who ever played the game, or that he turned doubles into routine outs as he covered the vast expanse of deep center field. He played the game with passion, but also with dignity and grace. He played for money, but he also played for love. And he performed miracles. When it appeared all was lost, when the Yankees were down by three in the bottom of the 9th, his teammates knew what he could do. And they'd find a way to load the bases. And Mickey would bring them home.
Baseball was fun to watch, fun to play, and fun to imitate. I still remember a pitcher who played for the Giants named Jack Sanford. He had an unusual leg kick that was part of his delivery. My neighbor Timmy Kremer's exaggerated Sanford Leg Kick made me laugh so hard, I'd lose my concentration and strike out time after time. All of us imitated the great tobacco-chewing Nellie Fox of the White Sox by wadding up a few pieces of Wonder bread and stuffing it in our cheeks.
During my Little League years, I played on championship teams and on teams that couldn't win a game. I liked to win but I learned how to lose.
This year, with the season canceled and 1995 in jeopardy, everybody lost, but the game itself may have lost more than any of its many parts. Watching Ken Burns' Baseball on PBS last week, I felt like I was watching history, something that was once grand and glorious and is now no more.
You have to wonder, if baseball is still our national pastime, what does that say about the country itself?
