Breaking Point
Mr. C.J. Box can write a hell of a western yarn. When I was stuck in bed for a couple months last year, I read the whole series of his mysteries featuring Wyoming Game Warden, Joe Pickett.
Pickett is an awesome character. He is human and frail, and he gets mad and sad by turns, and he is committed to the land and the animals he is sworn to protect. As a Warden, he takes the low pay and vast open spaces in stride, and his family is front-and-center in all the tales.
If you want some page-turners (I know, where the hell did the summer go!) the Pickett series is a good place to start, and a gateway drug for Craig Johnson’s fine law-and-disorder westerns featuring Sheriff Walt Longmire of Absaroka County just north of Joe Pickett’s country in the Powder River district of Big Wild Wonderful Wyoming.
Anyway, a pal had just finished the latest Joe Pickett yarn, which has the plot hook featuring an out-of-control EPA, which terrorizes an ordinary family over land use policy. He wrote a long and thoughtful note about the militarization of local police forces and the appearance of SWAT Teams on the rolls of such institutions as the Department of Education, Agriculture and the Social Security Administration.
It is all sort of crazy. I know this is neither new nor unexpected, but it is sort of startling.
This is not a political rant, or rather, at least it is not partisan. I think Mr. Nixon started it all, way back when, and Presidents as diverse as Reagan and Clinton have presided upon it all. The ill-conceived War of Drugs is part of it, the strange and corrosive program that has incentivized law enforcement to arm its various echelons to the teeth, and use confiscation of private property as an extra-budgetary funding mechanism.
That was all bad enough, but the post-9/11 militarization of just about everything started by Mr. Bush and continued by the current Administration is nothing short of stunning.
My pal sent a note from the Alaska Dispatch that he fond illuminating:
When agents with the Alaska Environmental Crimes Task Force surged out of the wilderness around the remote community of Chicken wearing body armor and jackets emblazoned with POLICE in big, bold letters, local placer miners didn’t quite know what to think.
Did it really take eight armed men and a squad-size display of paramilitary force to check for dirty water? Some of the miners, who run small businesses, say they felt intimidated. Others wonder if the actions of the agents put everyone at risk. When your family business involves collecting gold far from nowhere, unusual behavior can be taken as a sign someone might be trying to stage a robbery. How is a remote placer miner to know the people in the jackets saying POLICE really are police?
Miners suggest it might have been better all around if officials had just shown up at the door – as they used to do – and said they wanted to check the water.
I wrote him back and said it was sort of passé, and had been going on for years. In “Breaking Point,” the EPA District Administrator character is so vile as to resemble Snidely Whiplash.
The reality of the back-story is even worse and indicts the whole system in much the way that the “two rogue IRS agents in Cincinnati” story was actually a symptom of an agency completely out of control from the Administrator on down.
The artistic rendering of an oppressed family in Breaking Point was lifted almost in its entirety from the real-life story of Mr. and Mrs. Michael Sackett, of Priest Lake, Idaho. If you do not recall, I will touch on it briefly, since it defies reason.
(The Sackett property, high and dry.)
The Sacketts attempted to build a house on their half-acre of land, intending it to be their retirement residence. The property was bracketed by other existing homes and their land already had sewer lines in place. After they broke ground, the EPA showed up, claiming the family had violated the Clean Water Act by placing fill materials into “wetlands.”
Their property was designated- arbitrarily and capriciously- as such and thus under the jurisdiction of Washington. I have no idea how they were selected for persecution- but the legal system said they had no recourse.
The lot did not- and does not- not harbor a lake, pond or stream, yet the EPA http://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/united-states-environmental-protection-agency/ required them to obtain a building permit that would cost more than the value of their land. The Sacketts filed suit, but their request was dismissed by a federal judge. Eventually, on appeal, the Supreme Court ruled against the EPA.
(The Sacketts, dangerous defacers of the mud, and enemies of the State.)
The horror show of EPA’s harassment included a $30,000 daily fine for non-compliance clearly intended to intimidate and cow the family- it potentially amounted to millions. It was a demonstration of Federal over-reach that was quite extraordinary. Some additional tales of the unexpected (and unconstitutional) over-reach of the EPA are at the link below.
My sister has a life narrative with application to the Alaska angle. She fell in love and married wild David, a Seattle guy who became enamored of the idea that there was a business case to re-file for expired mining claims in Alaska. The married and decamped for the Gold Fields.
The Klondike miners of the Gold Rush were a brute-force crowd, and the theory- accurate, as it turned out- was that they left a lot behind in the tailings from their initial digging. The business case was that the increase in the price in gold made it worthwhile to re-process the tailings with better technology.
In the context of the Oil Shock of the day, it was completely true. I have a nugget tie-tack around somewhere (or not) pulled out of the waste left behind by the wildcatters. The issue swiftly became a spark of contention between the feds and the miners.
The miners were a wild and wooly lot, and given the remote places and abundant two and four-footed wildlife around the claims, naturally were armed.
The Park Service took issue with the fact that the miners had a reasonable expectation that they could access their claims. They prohibited the construction of access roads, and perhaps there was an initial case in which the Rangers showed up in Smokey Bear hats, asked politely for the miners to cease and desist trying to get access to legally filed and perfectly legal mining sites. Maybe.
But the situation and acrimony swiftly devolved to armed Feds confronting armed miners. So I completely understand how the EPA might think that a water inspection might require a full-blown SWAT team.
The point of all this, directly, is that the militarization of the Regulators and the police has proceeded apace since those long ago days. The Federal courts have repeatedly validated the intrusive and illegal antics of the Agencies.
Up in Alaska, the price of gold fell and that generation of miners moved on to other things. Given these unsettled times, their sons and daughters are back in the gold fields, and the Greenies who drive the anti-energy, anti-growth, anti-mining agenda of the central Government are again facing armed citizens in the wilds.
Something must be done about them, right?
A perspective from the Feds is possibly in order. Robert W. Service was right about the vast North.
“There are strange things done in the midnight sun
By the men who moil for gold;
The Arctic trails have their secret tales
That would make your blood run cold;
The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,
But the queerest they ever did see
Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge
I cremated Sam McGee.”
I wish I could say this was just an aberration from the Last Frontier, but as the Sacketts found out in Idaho, this is happening all over.
I did not mention the SWAT Team in Kenosha, WI, that appeared at the animal rescue center to confiscate and kill a fawn named Giggles. I wish I was making this up, no kidding:
We are much more accustomed to the abuses of law enforcement. I could give you a list of innocent civilians shot and killed in drug busts gone wrong- but it is too depressing. The Cato Institute has a nice white paper on the results of the 40,000 SWAT raids conducted annually in America:
http://www.cato.org/publications/white-paper/overkill-rise-paramilitary-police-raids-america
It occurs to me that my property in Culpeper is bounded by two streams which, after a storm, run swift and loud enough to be heard up on the deck on the house.
I am lucky the EPA was not monitoring the construction of the house and outbuildings in 2003. But of course, that means I am under their jurisdiction and should probably not defame the fine (and heavily armed) bureaucrats.
I don’t think I am a wetland, nor close to a breaking point, but of course, that is a matter entirely up to a benevolent government to decide, isn’t it?
Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303
