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You Might As Well Tack Up A Wall Of Disneyland Signs At The Rockies.
By Gregory McNamee
Lasso the Wind: Away to the New West, by Tim Egan (Alfred
A. Knopf). Cloth, $25.
YOU MIGHT AS well tack up a wall of Disneyland signs at
the Rockies, suggests New York Times Pacific Northwest
correspondent Timothy Egan in this curmudgeonly look at the Mountain
West: The region is all a sideshow these days, trading on the
myths of its past, selling its future to developers and junk-bond
salesmen and other hucksters. Although the West celebrates stalwart
do-gooders, lone heroes, and desperadoes in places like Deadwood
and Tombstone, in fact it is and has always been highly corporatized,
with a curious boss-driven politics that persists in the present.
B-movie actor Bruce Willis found this out, Egan writes, when
(after buying up much of the little Idaho town of Hailey) he decided
to launch a ballot initiative against nuclear-waste dumping in
the vicinity. "In the election," Egan writes with evident
glee, "he was outgunned by fellow Republicans who favor a
nuclear presence. He could have learned something from the Copper
Kings: They never lost unless it was planned." Similar clashes
between old sensibilities and modern mores fuel much of Egan's
narrative. He writes of a New Mexico man who, "hiding in
the woods of custom and culture," has exploited local anti-government
sentiment to defy U.S. Forest Service restrictions on cattle grazing
in wilderness areas; of a Colorado entrepreneur who believes the
future of Western agriculture lies in ostrich ranching; of the
present Interior Secretary, Bruce Babbitt, who has "somewhat
meekly" been working to undo environmental damage wrought
over the last century; and of out-of-the-way places and people
caught up in this rapidly changing region.
Backing his observations with solid reporting and storytelling,
Egan writes with grim humor and thinly disguised anger, the justifiable
rage of a native son fed up with the seemingly endless development
and destruction now being visited on the West in the name of progress.
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