Lowbagger--Letters To the Editor, March 20

Dear shit-fer-brains,

While reading Mike’s post “Watching TV in Indian Country”, written among the back roads and bars of Montana or whatever state power grid his computer was hooked into, I remembered another time Greenpeace banner hangers visited a national monument and marked their territory, so to speak.

In the mid 80’s while Lady Liberty was boxed up in scaffolding for a needed repair and refit, some GP campaigner thought (the Lady) could use a bit of color and adornment. After all, scaffolding is the perfect climbing medium with lots of handholds and tie points and if the government was going to erect it, we might as well climb it.

So a pithy message like “Give me Liberty from Nuclear Arms” was thought up and something suitable in yellow with black letters was sewn together (XXXX Large). A crack team of climbers was assembled, from those too slow to jump ship before we left the dock, and strapped into their crotch enhancing climbing harnesses. Shoving everyone and their gear into a couple of inflatable boats we motored away from lower Manhattan in the dark of a late August New York night bound for the floodlit statue. Oh yeah, the lights.

The shore of the island was very dark because the humongous floodlights were shining up her skirt like a couple kids under the grandstand at a football game eyeballing the cheerleaders. The climbers were able to get ashore and on the scaffold without the lone security guard seeing them, but how he missed the 50 foot shadows when they were above the lights we never figured out.

All went well, the banner hung straight and no one fell or dropped something clattering through the scaffold to wake the guard. You know that quiet time, post climb after the adrenaline has worn off and the authorities still haven’t seen you? Goofiness seems to set in and you do things that most sensible folks wouldn’t think of. Like licking the very large copper clad nose hovering above you. OK, so it was more of a French kiss with lots of spit and everyone did it, but in different spots.

So the police and press finally get out of bed, everyone does the perp walk and the banner is stuffed into an evidence bag until someone figures out what the heck to charge those econuts with. As with Mike’s Mount Rushmore visit, bodily fluids were never mentioned or the climb crew would probably have spent 6 months with tooth brush and disinfectant swabbing her nasal passages.

Pat Herron
Astoria, OR

Paean to Slime Molds
Dear Editors,
Oh, the awesome slime mold, you gotta love em! Humble icons of shape-shifting power, they offer an inspirational natural metaphor for grassroots organizing especially apropos of lowbagger lifestyle. Neither, or rather both, plant and animal, individual and colony, they defy the system and transcend expected behavior.

Beginning as dust in the wind scattered across the forest, spores come to life as amoeba-like creatures wandering, rummaging and ruminating through rich refuse on the forest floor. At this life-cycle stage it is an independent, self-sufficient animal. Then certain ‘charismatic’ individuals waft chemical stimulants that attract other mobile individuals. They move together and get organized, each cell taking on specialized roles and shapes, forming a stationary, plant-like ‘fruiting body’. Some become structural support, this or that, and some morph into spores which ripen and eventually disperse on the wind, spreading across the forest.

Echoing nature, lowbaggers wander unnoticed, living off the rich refuse of profligate consumption. They eventually come together and cluster around whoever is buying or holding. This precedes organized community. Mobile wandering is replaced by base camps or maybe lock down. Eventually diasporas occur, spreading the culture as the lowbaggers wander off inconspicuously in search of useful refuse only to rendezvous later somewhere in the forest.

Like I said, you gotta love this humble shape-shifting life style that crosses system boundaries. It’s got a rich food source, is hard to pin down and is quite effective at spreading its culture.

Larry Campbell
Darby, Montana

Women Should Be Paid to Clean Up Men's Mess

Dear Editors,
Absolutely. Milk us until we don't have anything left.

We need males supporting our platforms, our beliefs
and compensating us in kind for the work we do.

Everyone wants a free ride. Unfortunately, that's a part
of the problem.

Men are the ones with the power. Men, not women,
have created this mess. So, now you want us to clean
up the mess? And for free? Gee wiz, thanks.

Linda Marina

Areas Where Mangroves Destroyed Suffered Severe Destruction in Tsunami
Hello friends and busy Editors,
I hope that spring time is on its way, soon to hit the Missoula valley. My foot is doing much better, but I am now on watch for preventing infection in tropical weather. I wanted to drop a quick note to Lowbagger, which I read often.

I was just sitting outside thinking about the website. As much as I find Mike's and Josh's writing funny and interesting, I wonder why there has been so little attention to the largest natural disaster in our lifetime, the tsunami, with huge environmental problems associated with it. Massive deaths, destruction and loss of natural habitat from Asia to Africa. A lot of this could have been prevented if people had thought about coastlines and protecting mangrove forests.

It is now evident all throughout Asia, and now seen reported by BBC World communication that unfettered Mangrove forests in Malaysia, and parts of India, had the fewest deaths and most intact marine habitat after the Tsunami. The areas that lacked smart environmental development, and subsequently destroyed their Mangove forests, suffered massive destruction. A little attention for the millions of people affected by the Tsunami, and the global environmental destruction that has taken place should be given somewhere in Lowbagger.

It was good to hear about Mathew Koehler's victory over the Oregon folks in basketball....... Well, All is good. I Enjoy the web page.

Bryce Smedley
Thailand
Lowbagger Bryce broke his foot in a motorcycle accident in Chiang Mai. Watch for more of his coverage on the tsunami's lingering affects.

Red State, Blue State, Would Rather Leave the States

To the editor(s)…

Marilyn Olsen’s piece on Bush is well researched and persuasive. But who needs to be persuaded? Even people who voted for Bush knew he sucked. They only voted for him because the alternative was the same, but with worse hair. In Argentina and England, to name just two places I’ve been skulking lately to stay away from the Kerry types, I can bond with anyone anywhere about how bad Bush is. Pretty much everyone in the world knows how bad Bush is.

Electoral politics, as they say over at CounterPunch magazine, is the lowest form of political engagement. Still, the left in the U.S. had a chance to do something back at the end of 2003 by coming up with some kind of alternative to Bush. Instead, it did what it always does, and what is has done with especially disastrous results in the last two national elections, and supported another corporate warmonger who would need to out swagger the sitting warmonger. Anti-war and green people were asked yet again to not talk about the war or the environment for fear of upsetting the liberals. What we need from the Anyone-But-Bush folks now is an apology, not (just) another lament about Bush.

I’m a man who gave up a position as a professor at a fancy east-coast school in order to be with my kids and stop paying war taxes. So it’s particularly galling to have my fellow women criticizing people who withheld their votes from the warmongers as having indulged in “luxury.” It’s hard to imagine a scenario in which people like Nader could have been more vindicated. The damage done by having voted for Kerry won’t have ended last November, but will go on and on into the future, every time the spinmasters want to know how much the left is willing to degrade itself and vote against everything in which it believes. Doesn't it seem likely that the blood of children in Iraq is on your hands if you voted for Kerry, a man who voted for this war?

I’d urge people with enquiring minds to skim through some articles from last fall at CounterPunch and International Socialist Review, to mention a couple of easy-access sites, and ask themselves who got it right for the environment and for the children of the world, the ABB crowd or those who withheld their vote for the war…

David Thomson
Wivenhoe,

England

Brocklebank Was First
Dear Editors,

I sat on my thoughts for a while, wondering if it was worth my time to
respond.

Now I shall.

How times have changed. And not for the better, I must say.

Maybe I should send this to Counter Punch. But I am not a puncher.

In the fall of 1972, this then 27 year old newly single mother of a 2 year
old (born in Deer Lodge, MT.) attended a meeting of the Lolo National
Forest. The first public meeting about the USFS RARE program. I went
because I had been asked by the deaparting-for-Oregon Sierra Club Montana
Group of the Northern Rockies Chapter Chair, Patty Calcaterra, to take over
her job. Note: Patty was a woman. So was I.

Huh? Well, yes. I can do that.

I had been folding the Group's newsletters. I had read Ehrlich's
Population, Resources, Environment. I cared. My heart ached with my new
found knowledge of environmental devastation by the Republican
indusltrialists. Let me at 'em.

I went to that meeting on the Lolo. And I walked away, thanks to Cecil
Garland, with an awareness and a fire in my belly that saw me through eight
more years of the kind of environmental work that the new ladies of Missoula
may, or may not, have either initiated or experienced. And probably the
young studly guys haven't either. Or maybe they have. My purpose is not to
belittle anyone. Rather, it is to give some historical perspective to the
prancing about I read in the CP piece.

I didn't do bars in Missoula. I did do my work many times with my young
daughter at my side.

I made my own stationery, with a rubber stamp. I wrote letters on an old
Smith Corona typewriter, with carbon paper. I still have the carbon copies
of dozens, maybe hundreds, of the letters I wrote. Scathing reviews of their
EISs. Testimony before Congressional hearings. I spoke for hundreds of
Montanans and the USFS, State Lands, BLM, and Congress listened.

I found the Fred Ward mine shenanigans. I sat on the Rock Creek Advisory
Committee and I made them listen. I worked on domestic animal management as
a counter to predator control. I fought stripmines. I won a public debate,
hands down, with three, yes, three, Westinghouse engineers at UM, who came
to talk about how coal fly ash was better than nuclear waste so we should
stripmine Montana.

I started receiving late night calls from FS employees, tipping me about
something a brewing on this that or the other Forest.

When I grew weary of the cautious approach of the Sierra Club, I switched to
Friends of the Earth. Then Earth First! when Foreman, Kohler and Roselle
were making waves begin to move. I shared a meal and a special friendship
with Ed Abbey. I wrote, campaigned and we passed the Nuclear Free Missoula
County initiative in 1978, when others preferred to try a statewide
Safeguards initiative (a rep from the US State Dept. interviewed me in the
upstairs conference room of the Missoulian, asking the kind of questions
that today's Homeland Security employee would ask).

Did I change anything?

No. Yes.

I know one thing. I did all of this between 1972 and 1980. Almost 30 years
ago. Before Ferenstein. Before Roselle. Before the stupid essay about
young turks and their lack of need of a file cabinet. And the cute bar
scene. I used cardboard boxes for my files. And I still have some of them,
right here in my home, as I type this.

Other women -- Doris Milner and Liz Smith way before me (they were my role
models) did what I did for decades before this shallow Counterpunch piece.

Guys. We have been around, doing work, for decades. Please check your egos
at the door of the Oxford. Betsy, Jennifer, and Bethany ~~ isn't there a
Tiffany in there somewhere? ~~ protecting wild lands, wild rivers and wild
life is not a TV movie. Just do your work. And remember: No fucking
compromise in defense of mother earth.

Jean Brocklebank
We have a place in the file cabinet for resumes of people who take themselves too seriously.

Tumbleweeds for Lowbagger
Dear Editors (Mikey),
Dana Clark, Andrea Durbin and I are being Belgian Tumbleweeds here at Hotel DurbinAud in Brussels. They both say a howdy and pass on a big smooch. Saw your blog after PE sent us the link of the fine feature by David Gordon.

That picture of you on your blog looks like someone else. Coke bottle glasses, beady eyes, and a warped long head. Not the Hollywood Mikey we have come to know. Trying to disguise yourself?

Well we gotta get back to our busy European schedule. Tea time.

Ciaio!
Doug, Dana, Andrea, baby Dylan