“We have our own sovereignty; we have our own land; we take care of our own people,” he answers.
Why not join the melting pot of America?
“We have our own way of life. We have tribal traditional law, and we still have our sovereignty; we have our own government. We have our own tribal law-and-order code. If you drink liquor, if you are intoxicated, you get arrested for that!”
You have a prison here?
“We have a jail here.”
How many people are in jail?
“I’d say about, in a month, for intoxication, 150 to 500 in jail.”
How long do they stay in your jail?
“It depends.”
On what?
“Usually a night.”
You have five hundred criminals, I mean those who got caught; is that the reason to have a sovereign state?
“No, I don’t think so.”
So, why have a sovereign state?
This he cannot answer, except for saying that other tribes have reservations and so should his tribe. I like this Winfield, but I don’t get him.
“Notice,” read the signs on walls of public buildings here. “The use of loud and abusive language will not be tolerated on these premises. Section 7-7-5 of the Northern Cheyenne Law and Order Code defines such activities as disorderly conduct.”
They have their own law books here, and Winfield proudly tells me that “I served my country. I was in the Marine Corps. I served in Vietnam.”
And he tells me something else: “Seventy to 80 percent here are unemployed; they get assistance from the federal government.”
Winfield says all these things but he’s not happy with the picture he’s painting for me, and so he tries his best to add some cheerful color to the portrait. Not all is bad, after all, he now says to me. Lame Deer has a college, and there, he wants me to know, residents study the ancient language of their ancestors. Would I like to attend a class and see for myself?
We drive over to Chief Dull Knife College. What a great name for a college! And, yes, there’s a class here for the Cheyenne language.
I join the other students. The assignment for today’s lesson: translate Elvis Presley’s song titles into Cheyenne.
The class is divided into groups, and each group is assigned to translate some titles.
For example: “Love Me Tender,” “Heartbreak Hotel,” “Love Me,” “I Forgot to Remember to Forget.” Fifteen students attend the class. The youngest is forty years of age; all the others are past retirement age.
Not one young soul.
Outside the class, in the hall, I read the following: “Attention! The use of loud, abusive language and/or physical violence on the Chief Dull Knife College Campus or at College sponsored activities, shall be considered assault and will NOT be tolerated.”
I guess there are some problems of language in this reservation.
Here’s another public notice on the wall: “ATTENTION! All sex offenders must come into the Office of Adult Probation and update all pictures, physical address and file information A.S.A.P.”
I leave the reservation and go to Malibu. I think I should keep going west to Washington State, where it’s legal to buy marijuana and all kinds of cannabis goodies. I need that stuff!
• • •
Before I drive, I sit inside Malibu and try to collect my thoughts. What have I seen thus far in America? I ask myself.
–Native American spirituality is a prime candidate for next year’s Nobel Prize in the fiction category.
–When one black dies, cry. When many die, ignore.
–Cowboys and cowgirls live in Jurassic Park.
–Whites flee, blacks conquer.
–American cultural institutions are escapism labs.
–Jews like to hang on a cross.
–Smoking is a crime against humanity.
–In a changing climate, Palestinians shine.
–Jesus is fun.
–Hezballah is great.
–Expressing your political views is a dangerous activity in the Land of the Free.
–The Home of the Brave is a baseball stadium.
–One hundred guns per two people is not enough.
–Yoga is what Jews do in their temples.
–Blacks kill blacks because that’s nigga culture.
–Knife is a name of a college.
–Quakers love silence and Palestine.
–My fat fingers will break my iPad.
There is more that I learned in the past couple of months, but I stop thinking.
I light up an Indonesian cigar and watch the smoke stream out of my mouth. There will be a $250 fine if the rental people catch me smoking in the car. Fortunately, the Spanish employees who gave me this car don’t enter Indian reservations and will never catch me smoking.
• • •
Before I inhale some cannabis into my system, I decide to stick around a little longer in the Fossil State. Montana, which is rich in oil deposits, has recently gone through a financial boom due to “fracking,” a newly developed oil exploration technique.
I want to meet people who are in the oil business. Preferably rich, and better yet, very rich. And in less than twenty-four hours, after I connect with somebody who knows somebody who knows somebody, I get to meet a multimillionaire by the name of Carter Stewart. You don’t have to ask whether Carter is red or blue; you get to know what he is by paying a visit to his bathroom.
Yeah.
How?
The rolls of toilet paper have the image of Obama printed on them.
I saw something similar in Ukraine; there, the toilet paper carried the image of the Russian leader, Vladimir Putin.
In any case, and once I have paid nature its due, Carter talks. First, he talks about America: “We have watched our freedom erode for the last thirty years, and little by little some of our individual freedoms are being taken away.”
Give me an example.
“Okay, I’ll give you an example. If you find a sunken ship or a treasure out on a federal land, you don’t get to keep it; the federal government keeps it. It used to be that you, as an individual, would get to keep it.”
Abrogated freedoms or not, Carter owns three guns. He also has a (fake) million-dollar bill on his desk with a picture of Obama in the “dead president” portrait. In addition, the slogan “In God We Trust” is here delivered, “In Obama We Trust.”
Multimillionaires can be funny people.
Has freedom of expression also been curtailed in the last thirty years?
“It has been, by the politically correct crowd – the people who say, ‘You can’t say this word, or you can’t say that word.’”
Which word are we talking about?
“I don’t want to use the word.”
Use it!
“No, I’m not gonna use it. You know exactly what word I’m talking about, the one that refers to black people.”
Are you talking about the nigger word?
“Yes. But that’s just one example.”
He gives me another example: the Confederate flag. “I can understand why some people don’t want to have that symbol. But if some people want to put it up, to remember their heritage, because their ancestors fought and died in that war, why take it away from them?”
Carter, as you might have guessed by now, is pro-life, against gay marriage, against the Iran deal, pro-Israel “all the way” and believes that “there’s no such thing as climate change.”
“I’m a geologist,” he says. “Geology means the study of the earth. I’ve studied the earth since I started going to college, and I still study the earth, on a daily basis. So, I know that thing is as phony as can be.”
• • •
I think we’d better be talking about oil markets, not politics.
Why did the oil market fall so sharply?
“Saudi Arabia flooded the market about a year ago.”
Why did the Saudis do it?
“They wanted to regai
n a 5 percent market share they had lost. But even by their own accord, now they say it wasn’t a bright idea. The price of their export now is 50 percent of what it was. It was a bonehead move on their part. They are trying to put the pressure on us and drive us out of business.”
How much are you worth?
He tells me he is worth about half of what he was worth this time last year, but that he really doesn’t know how much he’s worth now.
How much were you worth last year?
“I’d say about $150 million.”
So, your net worth now is seventy-five million?
“Probably.”
You lost $75 million?
“Probably.”
Because of the decline in the price of oil?
“Yes.”
Are you worried?
“I’m worried about the short term, because we are now having to take all of our money and give it back to the bank, because we are leveraged. We do what we can do to make it, to pay the bank every month, and we keep working on trying to sell different assets.”
What’s the worst that can happen to you? How much lower could your seventy-five million go?
“It can always go to nothing, but I don’t think it’s gonna because we still have assets that bring in money.”
Paint for me the worst picture. “The worst picture is that oil goes down to ten dollars a barrel again, or nine dollars a barrel.”
If that happens, what will you do?
“I’m a pretty talented guy; I’ll think of something.”
Are you worried?
“I am. I think about it every night, you know. I think about it every day, about solving the problems every day. It’s part of working.”
Do you lose sleep over it?
“No.”
Give me an estimate of much you think you will be worth ten years from now.
“Half a billion.”
Did you grow up with money?
“No. Not whatsoever. I buried my dad with my own money, with my last $2,500.”
Carter presents himself as a man with much self-confidence, ever sure that what he believes in is the only truth. But, first of all, he is a businessman.
“There’s a lot of wealth in the ground out there. When the price goes down everybody quits, a lot of leases come open, and this actually creates opportunity. I was talking to one of my friends about the price of oil and he says, ‘Well, it’s all the big Jewish firms on Wall Street that are basically shorting all the oil companies and shorting the price of oil and driving it down.’”
You think that this is really what’s happening?
“I think that possibly this is what is happening. They have driven the price down again.”
Being pro-Israel, how strange, does not necessarily mean lack of anti-Semitism. You can love Israel and still think that there are a bunch of Jews out there who control world markets and world finance.
I think of Abe Foxman and of what he told me: “Americans are prejudiced.”
An idea comes to my mind. I obviously need a break from the liberals, the conservatives, the ever-fearing whites, the gangs, the Jews, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the anti-Semites, the Indians, and all those in between. Why, then, don’t I go to Yellowstone National Park?
I’ve heard that the park is a fascinating place, but I don’t know much about it.
Montana’s office of tourism defines Yellowstone National Park as “the best idea America has ever had.” This national park is America’s first national park, and, according to Montana’s tourism office, it is also “the world’s first national park.”
Let’s go!
• • •
Getting to Yellowstone takes some driving. But what driving! I take the Beartooth All-American Road. What is an All-American road? The tourism officials define it thusly:
Designated an All-American Road in 2002, the Beartooth Highway has been described by former CBS correspondent Charles Kuralt as “the most beautiful drive in America.” Reaching heights of nearly 11,000 feet, this 53.7-mile, 3 hour drive offers skytop views of snowcapped peaks, glaciers, alpine lakes and plateaus. Seasonal.
More or less, as far as I experience it, they got it right. It does take forever to drive, because of sharp turns, narrow roads and low speed limits, but this is indeed a most beautiful drive. It’s driving and nature at their best. The weather changes drastically, falling more than fifty degrees once you reach the top, and it is awesome! The mountains are wonderful, and the place is practically unsettled except for animals.
In general, Montana is a huge state but has very few people. I think we could settle here all the refugees of Syria, Libya, Sudan, Palestine, Afghanistan and practically every other conflict area the world over, and there would still be enough empty land in Montana for all its surviving cowboys.
Yellowstone Park itself, once you are in it, is a bit of a letdown. But two and a half hours into the ride in the park I reach “the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone.”
Imagine if a master artist, the same guy from Lake Superior, had taken a big swath of rocky area, torn it to huge pieces, formed previously unknown shapes from the huge rocks and then painted them masterfully – how would you react? This work of art is otherworldly: naked rocks, very deep and very high, in various formations; shapes and colors paying homage to streaming waters far below, giving the impression of life and death combined, at once heavenly and earthly.
For Bible followers, this awesome imagery is evidence of God’s brilliant imagination; for believers in Evolution, it is a testimony to the brutality and beauty of nature.
The Austrian Alps, my former beloved, are eclipsed by this beauty.
Sorry, Austria.
Ahead of me I see cars parked at every available spot and people amassed on every hill in sight, some equipped with long-lens cameras and binoculars, all facing a point far away. Some have parked their cars and vans on the hills and are standing on top of their vehicles for a better view. What is there on the other side to see? A bear, I’m told. Have these people never seen a bear before?
Well, there is a story attached to this frenzy on the hills. Last week a sixty-three-year-old hiker was attacked by a grizzly bear in Yellowstone, and his body, partially eaten, was found by a park ranger at the scene. Is this the same bear? The people want to know. Is this the brother of that bear? Its offspring? Nobody knows, but everybody wants to see this very bear.
To me, the sight that’s more interesting is the mob trying to catch a glimpse of the bear that might have eaten a man.
This is also America. I keep moving.
Until I reach Mud Volcano, which is another wonder to behold. Colored liquids spring forth from the belly of the earth. Near the volcano, buffaloes roam, some sauntering toward Malibu, but luckily they don’t consume her.
More interesting sites lie ahead.
Geysers. There are three hundred of them in this park, I learn, and they are feasts for the soul, eye and heart.
At first, they remind me of New York streets: a hole in the ground and a hot white steam bursting from the subway trucks beneath. Only there’s no subway here. In addition, it’s not just steam but bursts of boiling liquid that come gushing out and up. No, this is not New York, this is Wyoming. (Yellowstone is partly in Montana and mostly in Wyoming.)
This here, let me tell you, is America’s real melting pot!
Imagine Berlin and Warsaw during World War II, with all the explosions and clouds of smoke, only nobody is dying here and the clouds are not smoke but steam and water. It is Earth at its liveliest interaction with itself, telling of the wrath of the earth beneath our feet. Moving, yelling, laughing, screaming, crying, bursting and all-out dancing.
I spend eight hours in the park – Malibu looks beautiful in Yellowstone, by the way – and in the ninth hour I drive back to the “real” world.
• • •
I reach downtown Bozeman and check out the city. Bozeman is a cool city with really cool, posh stores for people who have the
urgent need to transfer cash from their savings accounts into the pockets of the mountain people.
There are also many students here, from the local Montana State University, which gives Bozeman a cultural edge.
I meet Todd, for example. Todd, a man worried about climate change, is into nature: marijuana and hashish. He is actually on a mission to make them legal in the state.
And he is anti-smoking. Cigarettes no, joints yes. He is what you would call a “progressive liberal.”
“People should not go to prison for cannabis,” he pleads with me, as if I were Montana’s chief justice and could do something about it.
Todd has other issues on his mind besides weed. He is, he tells me, pro-choice, pro-environment, pro-gay, and pro-Palestine. Nice to know.
Of the millennials I met in North Dakota and Montana, both red states, many of them held more leftist views than the older generation. Is this the general tendency of the young? I ask Todd.
Todd responds that this is indeed the case. “People are just starting to realize that we have been lied to for a really long time, and the younger generation, I think, is more in tune with that, and realizing that most things you see on television are lies or fabricated. That’s what I think.”
As I’m about to leave Montana for good I ask myself: Will I never, ever see a cowboy with my very own eyes? Perhaps I should give it a little stronger push, maybe even check with the NSA folks, or some other nerds, and see if somebody out there can come up with something.
I get a tip from a top-secret source, and I follow it.
• • •
I drive on. And am rewarded. After driving over endless lonesome roads, some unfinished, I make myself comfortable at Mike’s ranch. Mike takes me for a walk on his 2,500-acre ranch and chews tobacco continuously as he explains the ranch to me, spitting every third or fourth step of the way.
Is he the personification of a cowboy? Maybe. Who knows?
Mike is a “Christian, not of any established church. I go to church once a year, on Christmas,” and absolutely does not like the “son of a bitch” Obama. He wears a cowboy hat and is firmly against gun control laws. “You don’t control your gun, you hit nothing,” is how he phrases it.
You need a PhD in philosophy to understand cowboys. Mike is neither Republican nor Democrat. “Don’t start me talking about politics.”
The Lies They Tell Page 16