[MD] Sin Part 1

[Case]

[Case]
So Laramie does that mean you think we should return the slaves to their
masters and put women back in their places? You endorse depriving people of
their civil rights without so much as a charge? You think it is acceptable
to steal people's lands and force march them off to the stinking dessert?
You think it is fine for the leader of the free world to lie for political
gain and invade foreign countries for purposes of "nation building"? You
applaud presidential contempt for our government?

[Laramie]
No, Case, one should not confuse feudalism with laissez-faire.

[Case]
The period I am talking about is the birth and hey day of laissez-faire. In
it one man could claim another man as property. Families were sold and spilt
apart at free market rates. When the Civil War ended that little economic
experiment the railroads were built.  

Completed in 1869 the transcontinental railroad was a ribbon of DQ spanning
a continent. Branches sprouted and feeders spread. You can see its broad
outlines still on any Rand McNally. Townes arose at railway crossings the
more DQ tracks intersected the bigger the town. Chicago, New York, St Louis,
pick a major city... at some point the city becomes a nexus for DQ,
attracting more DQ, shaking up old static forms as new ones settle out of
the dust.

Just the presence of three tracks intersecting invites four. Four might even
be willing to go out of its way to meet the others. But it all started when
the Central and Union Pacific tied 1,700 miles of native lands together.

The assault of the plains peoples included a campaign to hunt the buffalo to
extinction to starve out the horse peoples. It didn't help when gold was
discovered in Lakota lands.

Free land, all you can take and hang onto, created something of a tizzy
among the laissez-fair set.

I pulled this:

"The other advancement was the development of the repeating rifle, allowing
hunters to kill buffalo in huge numbers.

Beyond the technology, the United States government also encouraged the
slaughter of the buffalo as a strategy to conquer the American plains
Indians. American General Phil Sheridan said, "Let them kill, skin and sell
until the buffalo are exterminated. Then your prairies can be covered with
speckled cattle and the festive cowboy." 

>From here: 
http://history.cbc.ca/history/?MIval=EpisContent.html&lang=E&series_id=1&epi
sode_id=10&chapter_id=2&page_id=2

The first reason for the slaughter was a technological process for tanning
buffalo hide. It enhanced the Value of buffalo leather. In laissez-faire
this marriage of economic and military interest was a natural. In 1870 the
wild buffalo herds were estimated at 50 million. The buffalo was an
endangered species by the end of the decade.

During this time the railroad capitalists shaped the west. It was a time of
clashing lifestyles. Native Americans were prehistoric people they had only
oral traditions but they had a wide variety of social patterns. Patterns
shaped by time and the land. Suddenly this lighten bolt of DQ surged across
the land dumping 100s and 1000s of settlers in its path. What had been a
trickle along the Oregon Trail became a flood. 

I mentioned once before that I would include Black Elks Speaks among the
books in my personal canon of scriptures. Black Elk was a Lakota prophet he
tells the apocalypse of his people. He was a child at the time of the Little
Big Horn and he was at Standing Rock Reservation at the time of Wounded
Knee. He traveled with Sitting Bull during Buffalo Bill's Wild West tour.

Not since Rome had technology and transportation doomed so many cultures to
assimilation. Black Elk mentions the apocalyptic revival called the Ghost
Dance that spread amongst the tribe in the late 1890s. Federal troops were
mobilized in mass by rail to suppress religious services among the peoples
of North and South Dakota. 

This behavior was justified intellectually by Social Darwinism and Manifest
Destiny. Both found expression on the wild and woolly days of the West.

You bare the name of a television show where two brothers started up a
stagecoach operation after their father is killed by land grabbers. This is
pure laissez-fair. 

The Code of the West. 
Scoundrels and gunmen, 
card sharks and dance hall girls. 
>From Jeremiah Johnson to 
Bart and Bret Maverick 
this is the height and 
flower of rugged individualism. 

The 26th President was a Rough Rider. 
The 40th hosted Death Valley Days for 20 Mule Team Borax.

 [Laramie]
Bravo to those who appreciate Individual rights.

Your contributions to this forum are almost always intelligent.  

[Case]
Pirsig cites Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in Lila. Let me suggest
another western for discussion. It is a morality play about world views in
collision. Directed by John Ford in 1962. In "The Man Who Shot Liberty
Valance" Jimmy Stewart plays an idealistic lawyer driven to bring the rule
of law to the people of the west. Liberty Valance is an outlaw lord, who
rules by the power of his own mighty hand and the Code of the West. John
Wayne is the rugged individual, a gunfighter committed to the Code in a
personal way respecting honor, the keeping of a man's word and self
reliance.

Jimmy Stewart does help bring the rule of law to the territory. After being
credited with slaying Liberty Valance in a gun fight, he is elected governor
and senator. But in reality John Wayne the man of honor ambushed Valance. 

It is a complex tale of personal and community values in conflict. It is
about honor in the face of violations of personal and spiritual Values.

Have you seen it?