Guns and Money

H E A D L I N E    N E W S!

 

John Kenneth Galbraith, in his book The Age of Uncertainty, listed explanations commonly given for why, in an era of abundance (the 20th century), there should continue to be poverty in the world. “...[S]o many different and conflicting answers … given with so much confidence and such nonchalance,” he noted. In the list he compiled were: lack of energy and ambition; race or religion; lack of natural resources; faulty economic system; inadequate education, technical, scientific, administrative talent; consequences of past colonial exploitation, racial discrimination, and national humiliation. Galbraith’s answer is:

 

There is no one answer—obviously. It is because so many explanations have a little truth that so many are offered [my emphasis added]. But one cause of poverty is pervasive. That is the relationship, past or present, between land and people. Understand that, and we understand the most general single cause of deprivation. 

 

The “land question” has long been studied, as has population, but neither has yet been solved. That, however, is not my topic today. 

I have been thinking about another knotty problem, another question to which “many explanations,” each with “a little truth,” have been offered, and that is the question, the problem, the fact of gun violence in America. I won’t go over old ground and list all the various explanations Americans espouse for school shootings and other shootings of multiple people in public places, often strangers to the shooter. Instead I want to propose a parallel to Galbraith's claim. 

 

Might there not be an underlying relationship beneath and behind the epidemic of mass shootings in America? What can it be other than guns and money? All the other explanations play their little parts, but only because the basic relationship exists in the first place. At least, that’s what I’m thinking and what I’m asking others to consider.

 

There are a lot of stories we can tell ourselves and each other. We do it all the time. Some stories help us solve problems, while others—the unquestioned myths--insure that the problems will remain enshrined in our national culture.

 

The Artist as Impresario

For some reason one morning, I thought of my beloved David’s Shushy-Cats, an imaginary troupe of young performers he modeled somewhat after the wholesome Young Americans but without the nonprofit educational slant. In a long-running soap opera of ad-libbed episodes, his story unrolled between the two of us over the years – never publicly or even with friends, just between us. If only those episodes had been recorded! I don’t even remember the first, unexpected “Opening Night,” but the Shushy-Cats put on stage shows at an Up North resort, much like Boyne Mountain, musical reviews with choreography (their signature number was “Hooray for Youth”), even as years went by and many of the cast became long in the tooth. (Isn’t that a wonderful phrase? Think horses.) Once the Shushy-cats came into our life, they never went away. We might be riding in the car or sitting over coffee somewhere or lying in bed of an evening – I never knew when another episode might come my way or what outlandish schemes and revelations it would entail.

 

Whenever I overheard the Artist leaving messages on a friend’s answering machine, I was always amazed that he sounded so conversational, as if he were really talking to another person. It was hard to realize he was only recording. Similarly, when he launched into a tale of the Shushy-Cats, making it all up as he went along, he managed to make those stories sound like real life. “I’ve got an idea for a new number,” he might begin, just as he might start to tell me he had a new idea for rearranging his art gallery, and I could see in my mind the "new number" as he described the staging and named the roles each key performer would fill. Because the cast members all had names and personalities, like the members of the old Micky Mouse Club, personalities built up over months and eventually years of unscheduled, impromptu installments. Sometimes I jumped in to make an observation or protest that the stage number he had in mind was doomed from the start. “You have to consider your audience,” I would remind him, or “How are all those costume changes going to be done so fast? You’re asking a lot of the kids.” 

 

Because he always referred to them as “the kids.” The company had its ups and down, of course, and times only seemed to get harder and harder as time went by. Brian had back pain and trouble lifting girl dancers over his head. The girls – I should say “girls,” maybe – had complaints about their costumes, and it was true that they didn’t look as slim and lively in their cheerleader skirts as they had years before. Younger audiences expected different kinds of entertainment, too: more special lighting effects, a faster pace, sexier moves. The Shushy-cats were “old school,” good, clean family entertainment.

 

Not that “the kids” were angels. Oh, far from it! All believed, in principle, the adage, “There are no small parts, only small actors,” but naturally there were rivalries and jealousies, and one female cast member in particular was never happy if not the star. That was Brie – or Bree – we never wrote down anything, so I never thought about how it might be spelled. Brie (or Bree) could be counted on to complicate every situation, personal or professional, in which she played a part. She even followed us out West, settling in a New Mexico town with a little boy she tried to convince people the impresario had fathered! Can you imagine that? We could! We knew that little vixen Brie! There was nothing you could put past her!

 

Once at a party -- in real life-- a young man commented to me, “Now that we’re living together, it seems we don’t have as much to talk about, because we already know everything the other has been doing.” I told him, “Just make stuff up! That’s what David does,” and I told him about the Shushy-cats. He was delighted and enthralled. I wonder if that young couple ever developed an imaginary life to live alongside their real one.

 

After a while the Shushy-cats disbanded, gone their separate ways, but the story continued, and the impresario couldn’t give up the dream of a reunion. Onstage, of course. It seemed unrealistic to me. They had families now and lived all over the country. How could they afford the time to travel back to Michigan to put on a show together? And would anyone come to see it? 

 

Ah, but now, wouldn’t I give anything to have the whole gang together again, even that little trouble-maker, Brie? I miss them all. 

Back to the Ghost Town

Return to the West, VI: Back to the Ghost Town

How often this past winter I have returned in memory and imagination to last winter in Dos Cabezas! It would not be everyone’s dream getaway, as it was, quite literally, a ghost town: we had to drive fourteen miles (to a real town) to find so much as a cup of coffee, let alone library, post office, and stores; we only met four neighbors during our entire three months’ residence; we had no cell phone signal; and traffic on the two-lane highway past the cabin was limited to other inhabitants of ghost town and neighboring ranches; travelers between Willcox and the Chiricahua National Monument; U.S. Border Patrol vehicles; and cows.

“Cows,” the generic Western label for adult cattle, regardless of sex, and whether natural or “fixed.” Cows and calves. Beyond the area of scattered houses and adobe ruins the land was fenced to keep cattle in, but Dos Cabezas itself, paradoxically, was open range, with cattle guards across the highway at both ends of town. Anyone who wanted to keep cows out of their yards or gardens had to put up their own fences.

The cabin we rented sat high off the highway. It looked down on the highway in front and off through the wash to the mountains in back. In front were two big metal livestock gates, painted green, but no fence surrounding the property. Cows could, and therefore did, come right up to the door. Cow patties could, and did, appear anywhere the cows went.

Javelinas, locally known as “pigs,” were a different matter. Classified as a game animal, javelinas could not be killed except by hunters with a proper license, and permitted numbers were limited, which was a problem because the pigs were notorious garden raiders and despoilers. Coyotes, on the other hand, not classified as game, could be killed without a license in unlimited numbers by various means. No doubt there was a logic to the distinction, but it escaped me.

Our neighbors had gardens and so were pestered by javelinas. We never saw evidence of them around the cabin. Coyotes we heard in the distance regularly, but we were used to that from northern Michigan. Birds, lizards, once a rock squirrel – those were the wildlife we saw. Since we were there in winter, we were not troubled by rattlesnakes or scorpions.

The ghost town, at any rate, was open range to animals wild and domestic.

Once laid out in a grid, with streets and house plats, the ghost town had once had its own school and post office and stores. In its early days, it was on the stage line; later a railroad served the area. Mining was responsible for the boom years, but no great amounts of gold or silver or copper were ever taken, and at last hopeful prospectors went elsewhere, leaving the town to wither and die. Old railroad ties used as fenceposts were one sign of the past, coils of barbed wire another, but the most obvious and picturesque were the ruins of adobe houses and stores. Crumbling adobe walls we looked to as a landmark stood at the bottom of our driveway. Elsewhere nearby, rotted wooden sills marked places where buildings had stood, craters (some fenced to keep cattle from falling in, others unfenced) all that was left of old dug wells. Antique automobile carcasses begged to be photographed, so as not to be forgotten.

Across the road from our cabin was a B&B, but that house, like our cabin, was set far back from the road, and we never saw anyone we could identify positively as B&B guests. Next door to the B&B, also a long way off the highway, was the home of a young couple; the husband was a mechanic, but his shop was in the town of Willcox. As it happened, our 2000 Toyota needed work more than once, and that mechanic was a lifesaver. Once I walked across the highway and up the drive to their house, hoping to meet the mechanic’s wife, but no one came to the gate when I called. Oddly, their dog, lying silently in the shade of the house, did not bark once at my presence. I call that odd because that dog barked every morning about 5 a.m. and at other irregular intervals through the day and night. He barked long before the rooster crowed the sun up. But when a stranger came to the gate? Silence.

Not far past the B&B and the mechanic’s house was the home of the French-Canadian handyman and his wife. Monsieur Jean, as we called him, was another of our Arizona lifesavers. It was Monsieur Jean who replaced the nonworking refrigerator in the cabin for us and loaned us a television and hooked up the antenna to bring in, without cable or dish, as many as twenty stations, including PBS. We owed much of our knowledge of the neighborhood to Monsieur Jean and his wife, a very cordial couple.

Another neighbor, who had inherited from his father property that met, at the corners, the property where our rented cabin sat, was Señor Dan. Some days I would be outdoors talking with Dan while David was deep in conversation indoors with Jean, and later we would compare notes and share what we had learned. It was all “Dan says” and “Jean says,” and I tried to make notes so as not to forget it all.

Those were the neighbors we knew to greet by name, neighbors with whom we conversed: Jean and Cheryl, Dan, and Jared. Others we knew only through stories those four shared with us.

Dan told me people in Dos Cabezas pretty much left each other alone except for the annual cemetery cleanup, an event that included a potluck meal. The cemetery and annual cleanup and potluck seemed to be the community life, from what we gathered, but maybe the ranchers had their own social life. We heard there were some arts and crafts people, and perhaps they got together now and then. But there was no gathering place in the ghost town – no church, no community center, no fire hall.

Still, it was a place, with an identity distinct from Willcox and the rest of Cochise County. People with history in the ghost town felt the ties keenly, particularly those with relatives buried in the old cemetery.

It was a mile from our cabin to the cemetery. One day I suggested to a friend visiting from Michigan that we walk that mile and back. The wind was strong and piercing, and by the time we got back to the cabin the air was filled with horizontal snow, the only snow we saw in Arizona except for what remained high on mountain peaks.

From either direction, approaching either from the north-northwest, from Willcox, or from the Chiricahuas to the south-southwest, entry into Dos Cabezas was clearly delineated by a cattle guard across the highway, a sign announcing Dos Cabezas, and another sign saying “Go Slow – Save a Cow.” From Willcox, the road climbed, and from Chiricahua one wound down into lower elevations, but either way, the cattle guard and signs clearly marked the edge of the ghost town. Whether ascending or descending, from wherever else we had spent the day, when we reached the signs and the cattle guard I felt, happily, that we were home again, but the feeling was most intense when we came from the Chiricahuas, late in the evening, and the scattered lights of houses and ranches sparkled quietly on the darkling desert below us while the stars twinkled in the blackness above. Dear little ghost town!

That feeling lasted three months, until the morning came for us to say good-by to the high desert and make our way across the Great Plains and the Midwest and around the Great Lakes to our home in northern Michigan, there to take up, once again, our well-established life, rich in friends and meaningful work. For months, the ghost town felt almost unreal. And then our Michigan winter came upon us, and my heart began to look back West.