E T T E R S A dinosaur in the ethics department? I write as one who has grown skeptical of literary publications and magazines. I have seen too many editors start doing “buyer’s sections” for their advertisers that sooner or later slip into so-called editorial. I’ve seen too much bad design masquerading as high art. I have read one too many short stories about short-story writers taking a short-story writing seminar. I have watched too many talented friends put their career ahead of how their talents could serve their community. Even the Atlantic Monthly gave L.A. a shameless glow-job a couple of months ago...I was beginning to think maybe I was some kind of a dinosaur in the ethics department. Then I picked up a copy of CSQ and read it cover-to-cover, something I haven’t done with a publication since they stopped handing out Weekly Readers in elementary school. I xeroxed “The Way it’s Supposed to Be” for three of my friends; I missed my husband’s entrance after work I was so engrossed in “Buntu and I.” “Paralyzed for Life” was a stitch! I didn’t agree with every comma or illustration selection, but your hearts are in the right place—=and though that sounds like a cliche, I mean these words with the fullest resonance I can give them. That’s all the praise and as many exclamation marks as I can put in one letter without getting a little anu- scous. Do keep up the good work. When I win the Reader’s Digest Sweepstakes I’ll donate it all to you. Margaret Lynn Brown Duluth I thought we graduated Regarding the Spring 1988 article on free trade by David Morris on page 28, I have a few comments. First of all, did he take an economics class, or is it based on his feelings? Throughout the entire article he gave no proof for his thesis statement, which was that free trade is a great destroyer. He failed to define his terms, therefore his proof was based on ambiguity and couldn’t be argued with. Free trade, according to Webster’s, means “trade conducted without protective tariffs, quotas, etc.” This means no government intervention. Instead of giving us a definition, Mr. Morris provides us with a list of so-called “postulates.” Where does he get the assumption that “the highest good is to shop.”? A man who saves his earned money to build new factories depends on an ongoing process of production, and money which is lent to others is called investment capital, which represents goods he hasn’t consumed. The investments help a promising beginner start his productions in exchange for the payment of interest. If his venture is successful the producer pays the interest, the profits, which the investor enabled him to make. Consumption is the dead end of production, the worker is not investing in future production but is living like a parasite. Mr. Morris keeps referring back to government interventions which are not part of free trade (according to definition), and calls them free trade, our destroyers. What he is actually pointing out is that increase in government intervention is our downfall. I agree that the Undersecretary of the Treasury proposing to create 5 to 10 giant U.S. bankswill create a monopoly and destroy the economy, however, this government intervention is totally opposite from the definition of free trade. In a truly free-market economy (if Mr. Morris had taken economics he would have known this), businesses are small, independent pricetakers. They try to sell products of the best possible quality for the lowest possible price. Mr. Morris says that free trade destroys community relationships. How would a small businessman do if he had no sense of how to maintain friendly relationships with people? In a free market, his business would go elsewhere because people would have many choices. People hire people who have their shared values in mind. Today, in America, we do not have a truly free market. It is influenced by the government, corporations who get huge tax breaks, and small businesses who get taxed, inspected, and controlled to death. Mr. Morris complains that free trade would destroy “self-reliance and embrace dependence. That we abandon our capacity to produce many items and concentrate only on a few. That we import what we need and export what we produce.” Why would we have to be dependent? His assumptions is only true if we are forced at gunpoint to submit. Free trade has little to do with guns; if we’re not happy with the service we can start our own businesses or find someone who has what we want. Mr. Morris is very observant to point out that in Taiwan strikes are illegal, that in South Korea unions are only organized with government permission, and that South Africa virtually uses slave labor. Yes, those are not free countries, it is an exampfe of the destructive power of the government. Every argument Mr. Morris goes on with is directly against government intervention, not free trade, as he calls it. Government subsidies have not helped the market, he says on page 30. He says, and I agree, they actually cost consumers more in the long run, that is why I say free trade, free of tariffs, is more economical. The only times humans have advanced and benefitted instead of starving and dying are during times of free market economies. A big example of this is the United States in the late 1700s and on. As history will show, the more inventions and more food there was the less power government was exerting. For instance, ever since the war on poverty the government declared, there has been an increase in poverty. My mother didn’t have to go to work because my father made enough money to support the entire family. It could have been vice- versa, the mother making enough to support the whole family. However, today both parents of a family work unless they are already wealthy, they have no choice, because there is less and less money due to the government destroying wealth. If you choose not to believe me, then read David Morris’s article. It says on page 31, “If present trends continue we may have less leisure time in the 1900s than in the 1790s.” Why is that? It is not because of free trade, he has cause and effect mixed up. It is because of the government destroying producers. Ever since the Industrial Revolution, life expectency has increased every year. Before the Industrial Revolution the average life expectency of people was only 35 years. Today people are living longer. Diseases like polio and dying in childbirth are very rare, but they were common before people had money to find cures, before free trade. In the first few years of the United States and in the drafting of the Constitution, most men were new at the idea of having a free country and didn’t predict all the mistakes they could make. The worst thing to do is to toss away the best thing that ever happened to a country because it isn’t exactly perfect. The alternative David Morris offers to free trade could not be possible unless people were forced by guns to obey. I suggest further study of Austrian economics. I enjoyed reading the article. Carolyn Kelsey Roseville, MN Response to Carolyn Kelsey: Ms. Kelsey’s halcyon memories of yesteryear are touching, but inaccurate. The most rapid economic growth in U.S. history occurred behind the steepest protective tariffs. Which also inspired the modern miracles of South Korea and Japan. Internal competition and external protection are the historical ingredients for successful development. Ms. Kelsey makes the mistake of many rabid free enterprise boosters by confusing an argument against planetary trade with one against free markets. Nevertheless this cult plays an important role for they are often willing to carry their principles to their own logical absurdity. Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers, for ex- ample, recommended unlimited migration to “improve economic efficiency,” citing the philosophical inconsistency that allows a Minnesota corporation to move to Mexico to pursue cheap labor while prohibiting cheap Mexican laborers from moving to Minnesota. And what about the military? Does anyone question that the Japanese could operate our military cheaper than we? Ms. Kelsey argues that really “free” free trade is possible only if the government gets out of the way. I half agree. Most public spending goes to reduce the cost of trade. When the Army Corps of Engineers dredges the Mississippi do you think the consumer pays the cost? The military maintains long distribution lines. Railroads were given free land. The car’s true costs are 4 to 5 times the taxes we pay for gasoline. Etc. Add in the environmental and social costs inherent in long distribution systems and we would probably find that in a truly free market self- sufficiency competitive with the planetary economy in almost all cases. We spend enormous sums to subsidize planetary trade, a trade which by its very nature undermines our ability to control our own futures. In return for losing our sovereignty we hope for lower prices. Any such benefits are more often the result of sleight-of-hand accounting tricks than improved production efficiencies. But what if we did save a few dollars a year? I write these words a few hours before the fireworks mark our July 4th celebration. More than 200 years after our ancestors fought a bloody war for the right to control their own destiny what value do we put on independence? David Morris Hero’s Journey Welcome to the Twin Cities community. And convey to Kate Hunt how I appreciated numbering your new magazine among my Found Objects. I liked both her heroic journey and merged assemblages. The Hero’s Journey she articulated, speaks of the individual responsibility each has to ourselves. It is a wonderful, and dreadful, adventure in which our aloneness can become our “inability to affect circumstances and surroundings.” Its dreaded sound is that “silence of unresolved frustration” to which she give visual form. Yet her sculptural journey demonstrates the therapeutic value of community. She merges memories and connections, assembles found objects with traditional materials... bringing together, giving form also to community. The Arts can enhance both individual journeys and cooperative destinations, and I welcome CSQ to reflect the viewpoint. Brian Karlsson-Barnes Minneapolis Arts Commissioner We took the class What a great idea for a mag and what a great issue: the one I have is Vol 10 No. 1. I don’t feel very clear about whether this magazine is a Minnesota magazine or one fourth of another mag syndicate, exactly—but whatever you have it is a great idea and I am grateful to Olivia Lundeen for her incredible insights — immensely helpful. Anyway—what a great idea—to put literature and social-change-wakefulness together. I have just finished teaching a quarter course at Minnesota called Reading as writers: The Short Story— and for a final quiz of sorts, asked people in the class to write what they thought American fiction ought to be in the next 10 years. Our idea was, why should it necessarily just absent- heartedly go on being either chill loser-stories like Ann Beattie’s work or cruel-male-macho-validationstories like Robert Couver's — wouldn’t it be a good idea to decide— like people who can make choices— what fiction should be. Anyway, they wrote ideas that sound so much like your idea—to tie social justice into literature. I am having their answers printed up to be saved. Carol Bly Sturgeon Lake, MN The results of an all-nighter I was walking up North Third Street tonight to meet Jim Sitter. I assumed that he would be somewhere in the offices of the Minnesota Center for Book Arts stroking his Macintosh. But Sitter was sitting on the front stoop. He was reading the first issue of CSQ/Twin Cities. Sitter and I proceeded to the Cafe del Arte to talk MCBA business, the future of publishing in our region, and on and on while I powered down two cafe au lait. I ordered a third to go and returned to my office to face a writing overload and the presence of my son The Mighty Max who turns 16 tomorrow and who has a term paper due and we are together planning an all-nighter. He is writing a piece on the destruction of the rain forests and what he has learned I will not tell you lest you instantly begin to gasp for oxygen. Meantime I was buzzed up and I opened your rag. The writing is wonderful. I am not done but here’s a quick impression. I loved Julie Landsman's piece. She writes wonderfully. But George McKenna’s piece ate me alive. So much good sense, hard-won reality, perspective, wisdom and passion. I have not felt so hopeful about public education since reading, yes The Way It’s Suppose To Be 20 years ago. Was that George Dennison? Actually my faith had been re-sparked earlier this year by participating for an hour a week in my daughters kindergarten class. Just as McKenna advocates, the presence of a parent both helps kids with instruction and role models and helps the parents understand and appreciate the school. Every week I see what a talented teacher can do with an ‘‘impossible” situation. McKenna’s piece is worth the subscription. Not to mention that I have glanced at David Morris’ article and it seems wonderfully provocative as well. I look forward to the rest of this issue. Not to mention the next one. Count me a charter subscriber. James P. Lenfestey Minneapolis 2 Clinton St. Quarterly—Summer, 1988
S T A F F Copublishers Julie Ristau, Lenny Dee Editorial Board Lenny Dee, Diane Hellekson, David Morris, Julie Ristau, Karen Starr, Charlie Sugnet, Jay Walljasper Contributing Editor Kate Sullivan Pacific Northwest Editor David Milholland Art Direction Kate Hunt, Lenny Dee Designers Gail Swanlund, Eric Walljasper, Connie Gilbert, Carol Evans- Smith Contributing Artists Susan Abelson, Oscar Arredondo, Zola Anne Belanger, Tim Braun, Lou Ferreri, David Goldes, Stuart Mead, Ann Marsden, Ann Morgan, Dave Rathman, Gail Swanlund, Valerie Frank Design Direction Gail Swanlund Cover Design Connie Gilbert Proofreader Ann Laughlin Account Representatives Dale Shifler, Kate Sullivan Ad Production Pat McCarty Typesetting JeZac Typesetting Pat McCarty Cover Photographer Gus Gustafson Spiritual Advisor Camille Gage Highpriestess of Roundball Lynda J. Barry Thanks to thee Alex Alexander, Cindy Bartell, Joel Bassin, FACS, Jennifer Gage, Louise Guggisberg, Jim Hare, Nicole Niemi, Musicmaster, Paul Petrella, Jenny Starr, Mike Tronnes, Annette Wawers ON THE COVER Redneck Secrets— William Kitteridge True West, the discreet charm of cowgirls, pickup trucks, and the wide open spaces. Bankruptcy— Robert Sherrill Chapter 11 is the biggest scam since the Trojan Horse and this is how rich corporations use it to grow richer. 12 Couvade— Michael Finley Anxiety and the pregnant man. Another side of a basic question. 16 Nuns—John Callahan More humor from the man who gave us “The Lighter Side of Being a Quadriplegic. 18 Clinton St. Gallery— Lou Ferreri, David Goldes, Ann Marsden, Valerie Frank Some of the Twin Cities finest artists strut their stuff. San Francisco Airport, Summer 1967— Milan Kovacovic Remembering Joan Baez and Vietnam body bags. The author had a ringside seat at the summer of love. 30 The Work of Human Hands— Margaret Todd Maitland A medieval tale set in modern Italy. Ramon—Cathryn A. Camper The Rudolph Valentino of the 11th grade. What makes Ramon run? 40 In Love with Love— Musicmaster Minnesota love sonnets from an unabashed romantic. Queen of Hearts is by artist Mary M. Griep, a St. Paul native whose work is presently part of a group show at MC Gallery. In October she will have a show at Mongerson Wunderlich Gallery of Chicago. This is a self portrait. The Twin Cities edition is published by the Clinton St. Quarterly, 3255 Hennepin Ave. S., Suite 255, Minneapolis, MN 55408 —(612) 823-2103. Unless otherwise noted, all contents copyright ©1988 Clinton St. Quarterly. We encourage your comments, articles and art. All material should be accompanied by a self-addressed, stamped envelope. O UR P A S T O R A L S U M M E R / p t’s ea Ju c l e y4 w ,1i 9 th 88 i a t n s d el A f m a e s ric h a a is pp at y crowds of people indulge all the patriotic homilies that warm our hearts. Yet Yankee Doodle Dandy headlines remind us there is another world out there, not nearly as physically or psychologically secure as our own. When 290 innocent victims plunge to their death as a result of American policy to defend “our national security interests” in a region that pumps only six percent of our oil, one wonders what are the limits of these “interests.” But even close scrutiny of the mainstream media offers no answers to this question. In fact after a full decade of heated hubub about Iran, the media has taught us little of that nation. How many Americans have learned the root cause of the Iran-Iraq war? Or the religious tenets cherished by Iranian believers? Or even a brief outline of their history dating back to the Shah? In a recent interview, novelist Gore Vidal capsulized the peculiar position of America 1988 in a few, memorable words: “I think of the United States as a kind of small, isolated country that’s living under an artificial dome. It really is the Star Wars dream, only this is one that keeps out information and keeps us totally apart from the rest of the world. We don’t play any part in anything anymore except with all these weapons. We make trouble among weak countries because we don’t dare make trouble with the strong countries; we’d be defeated, as we found ourselves defeated in Vietnam. So you have a nation constantly at war. We’ve wrecked the economy, the educational system has collapsed and I don’t see any way out. I’m praying for a huge depression which will wipe out the national security state. Certainly there won’t be any money left for it. We have a federal budget where 90 percent of the money goes to war; this has been going on for 40 years, and there is no war. So they have to keep cooking up one. After you take out social security and entitlement, you see that defense gets half the budget openly. Then there’s foreign aid, which is war; veterans —that’s war; interest on the debt, that’s war. It adds up to 90 percent. You ask yourself why do they let the country go to pieces for this war? Nobody ever believed in it. I’ve known the leading politicians for the last 40 years. I’ve never met anyone who’s afraid of Russia. They’ll talk about it to scare folks, but they just chuckle among themselves about it. Every month our editorial board convenes on someone’s front porch over Cold Spring and jug wine to help crack this “artificial dome” that obstructs America’s view of the world. At times, it’s not an easy task turning up the right articles that castigate America’s shortcomings without shortsightedly ripping away the buoyant American character that makes events like July 4th so spirited. Yet each meeting we come away cheered by the talent and insights of Minnesota’s writers and artists. We’re proud to present another edition of essays, artwork, fiction and verse. And we’re pleased to report the terrific response to our first issue — the buzz on the streets of Minneapolis and St. Paul was nearly all encouraging. But now we face the even tougher task of making Clinton Street Quarterly a commercial success. We need your help—suggestions, subscriptions, submissions, and advertising. Each is crucial to Clinton Street Quarterly. So get in touch with us at our Twin Cities office, so that together we can help raze the roof on America’s artificial dome. Lenny Dee Clinton St. Quarterly—Summer, 1988 3
Redneck By William Kittredge Illustrated by Susan Abelson Graphic Design by Connie Gilbert ack in my more scattered days there was a time when I decided the solution to all life's miseries would begin with marrying a nurse. Cool hands and commiseration. She would be a second-generation Swedish girl who left the family farm in North Dakota to live a new life in Denver, her hair would be long and silvery blonde, and she would smile every time she saw me and always be after me to get out of the house and go have a glass of beer with my buckaroo cronies. Our faithfulness to one another would be legendary. We would live near. Lolo, Montana, on the banks of the Bitterroot River where Lewis and Clark camped to rest on their way West, “Traveler’s Rest,” land which floods a little in the spring of the year, a small price to pay for such connection with mythology. Our garden would be intricately perfect on the sunny uphill side of our 16 acres, with little wooden flume boxes to turn the irrigation water down one ditch or another. We would own three horses, one a blue roan Appaloosa, and haul them around in our trailer to jackpot roping events on summer weekends. I wouldn’t be much good on horseback, never was, but nobody would care. The saddle shed would be tacked to the side of our doublewide expando New Moon mobile home, and there would be a neat little lawn with a white picket fence about as high as your knee, and a boxer dog called Aces and Eights, with a great studded collar. There would be a .357 magnum pistol in the drawer of the bedside table, and on Friday night we would dance to the music of old-time fiddlers at some country tavern and in the fall we would go into the mountains for firewood and kill two or three elk for the freezer. There would be wild asparagus along the irrigation ditches and morels down under the cottonwoods by the river, and we would always be good. And I would keep a journal, like Lewis and Clark, and spell bad, because in my heart I would want to be a mountain man—“We luved aft the movee in the bak seet agin tonite.” I l f e must not gainsay such Western dreams. They are not automatically idiot. There are, after all, good Rednecks and bad Rednecks. Those are categories. So many people in the American West are hurt, and hurting. Bad Rednecks originate out of hurt and a sense of having been discarded and ignored by the Great World, which these days exists mostly on television, distant and most times dizzily out of focus out here in Redneck country. Bad Rednecks lose faith and ride away into foolishness, striking back. The spastic utility of violence. The other night in a barroom, I saw one man turn to another, who had been pestering him with drunken nonsense. “Son,” he said, “you better calm yourself, because if you don’t, things are going to get real Western here for a minute.” eal Western. Back in the late ’40’s when I was getting close to graduating from high school, they used to stage Saturday night prizefights down in the Veterans Auditorium. Not boxing matches but prizefights, a name which rings in the ear something like cockfight. One night the two main-event fighters, always heavyweights, were some hulking Indian and a white,farmer from a little dairy-farm community. The Indian, I recall, had the word “Mother” carved on his hairless chest. Not tattooed, but carved in the flesh with a blade, so the scar tissue spelled out the word in livid welts. The white farmer looked soft and his body was alabaster, pure white, except for his wrists and neck, which were dark, burnished red, While they hammered at each other we hooted from the stands like gibbons, rooting for our favorites on strictly territorial and racial grounds, and in the end were all disappointed. The white farmer went down like thunder about three times, blood snorting from his nose in a delicate spray and decorating his whiteness like in, say, the movies. The Indian simply retreated to his corner and refused to go on. It •didn’t make any sense. We screeched and stomped, but the Indian just stood there looking at the bleeding white man, and the white man cleared his head and looked at the Indian, and then they both shook their heads at one another, as if acknowledging some private news they had just then learned to share. They both climbed out of the ring and together made their way up the aisle. Walked away. Real Western. Of course, in that short-lived partnership of the downtrodden, the Indian was probably doomed to a lifetime on the lower end of the seesaw. No dairy farms in a pastoral valley, nor morning milking and school boards for him. But that is not the essential point in this equation. There is a real spiritual equivalency between Redmen and Rednecks. How sad and ironic that they tend to hit at each other for lack of a real target, acting out some tired old scenario. Both, with some justice, feel used and cheated and disenfranchised. Both want to strike back, which may be just walking away, or the bad answer, bloody noses. obody is claiming certain Rednecks are gorgeous about their ways of resolving the pain of their frustrations. Some of them will indeed get drunk in honkytonks and raise hell and harass young men with long hair and golden earrings. These are the bad Rednecks. Why bad? Because they are betraying themselves. Out-of-power groups keep fighting each other instead of what they really resent: power itself. A Redneck pounding a hippie in a dark barroom is embarrassing because we see the cowardice. What he wants to hit is a banker in broad daylight. But things are looking up. Rednecks take drugs; hippies take jobs. And the hippie carpenters and the 250-pound, pigtailed lumberjacks preserve their essence. They are still isolated, outrageous, lonely, proud and mean. Any one of them might yearn for a nurse, a doublewide, a blue roan Appaloosa, and a sense of place in a country that left him behind. Like the Indian and the buffalo on the old nickel, there are two sides to American faith. But in terms of Redneck currency, they conflict. On the one side there is individualism, which in its most radical mountainman form becomes isolation and loneliness: the standard country-and- western lament. It will lead to dying alone in your motel room: whether gored, boozed or smacked makes little difference. On the other side there are family and community, that pastoral society of good people inhabiting the good place on earth that William Bradford and Thomas Jefferson so loved to think about. Last winter after the snowmobile races in Seeley Lake, I had come home to stand alongside my favorite bar rail and listen to my favorite skinny Redneck barmaid turn down propositions. Did I say home? Anyway, standing there and feeling at home, I realized that good Redneck bars are like good hippy bars: they are community centers, like churches and pubs in the old days, and drastically unlike our singles bars where every person is so radically on his or her own. My skinny barmaid friend looked up at one lumberjack fellow, who was clomping around in his White logger boots and smiling his most winsome. She said, “You’re just one of those boys with a sink full of dishes. You ain’t looking for nothing but someone dumb enough to come and wash your dishes. You go home and play your radio.” A sink full of dirty dishes. And laundry. There are aspects of living alone that can be defined as going out to the J.C. Penney store and buying $33 worth of new shorts and socks and t-shirts because everything you own is stacked up raunchy and stinking on the far side of the bed. And going out and buying paper There are, after all, good Rednecks and bad Rednecks. plates at K-mart because you’re tired of eating your meals crouched over the kitchen sink. You finally learn about dirty dishes. They stay dirty. And those girls, like my skinny friend, have learned a thing or two. There are genuine offers of solace and companionship, and there are dirty dishes and nursing. And then a trailer house, and three babies in three years, diapers, and he’s gone to Alaska for the big money. So back to barmaiding, this time with kids to support, babysitters. Go home and play your radio. "ft here is, of course, another Mon- ® tana. Consider these remarks from the journals of James and Granville Stewart, 1862: JANUARY 1, 1862. Snowed in the forenoon. Very cold in the afternoon. Raw east wind. Everybody went to grand ball given by John Grant at Grantsville and a severe blizzard blew up and raged all night. We danced all night, no outside storm could dampen the festivities. 4 Clinton St. Quarterly—Summer, 1988
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JANUARY 2. Still blowing a gale this morning. Forty below zero and the air is filled with driving, drifting snow. After breakfast we laid down on the floor of the several rooms, on buffalo robes that Johnny furnished, all dressed as we were and slept until about two-o'clock in the afternoon, when we arose, ate a fine dinner, then resumed dancing which we kept up with unabated pleasure... danced until sunrise. JANUARY 3. The blizzard ceased about daylight, but it was very cold with about fourteen inches of snow badly drifted in places and the ground bare in spots. We estimated the cold at about thirty-five below, but fortunately there was but little wind. After breakfast all the visitors left for home, men, women, and children, all on horseback. Everyone got home without frost bites. Sounds pretty good. But Granville Stewart got his. In the great and deadly winter of 1886-1887, before they learned the need of stacking hay for winter, when more than one million head of cattle ran the Montana ranges, he lost two-thirds of his cow herd. Carcasses piled in the coulees and fence corners come springtime, flowers growing up between the ribs of dead longhorn cattle, and the mild breezes reeking with decay. A onetime partner of Stewart’s, Conrad Kohrs, salvaged 3,000 head out of 35,000. Reports vary, but you get the sense of it. Over across the Continental Divide to where the plains begin on the east side of the Crazy Mountains, in the Two Dot country, on bright mornings you can gaze across the enormous swale of the Musselshell, north and east to the Snowy Mountains, 50 miles distant and distinct and clear in the air as the one mountain bluebell you picked when you came out from breakfast. But we are not talking spring, we are talking winter and haystacks. A man we know, let’s call him Davis Patten, is feeding cattle. It’s February, and the snow is drifting three feet deep along the fence lines, and the wind is carrying the chill factor down to about 30 below. Davis Patten is pulling his feed sled with a team of yellow Belgian geldings. For this job, it’s either horses or a track-layer, like a Caterpillar D-6. The Belgians are cheaper and easier to start. Davis kicks the last remnant of meadow hay, still greenish and smelling of dry summer, off the sled to the trailing cattle. It’s three o’clock in the afternoon and already the day is settling toward dark. Sled runners creak on the frozen snow. The gray light is murky in the wind, as though inhabited, but no birds are flying anywhere. The lasting thing we have learned here, is to resist the beguilements of power and money. « Davis Patten is sweating under his insulated coveralls, but his beard is frozen around his mouth. He heads the team toward the barns, over under the cottonwood by the creek. Light from the kitchen windows shows through the bare limbs. After ' he has fed the team a bait of oats, then Davis and his wife Loretta will drink coffee laced with bourbon. Later they watch television, people laughing and joking in bright Sony color. In his bones Davis recognizes, as most of us do, that the principal supporting business of television is lies, truths that are twisted about a quarter turn. Truths that were never 1 truths. Davis drifts off to sleep in his “Son,” he said, “you better calm yourself, because if you don’t, things are going to get real Western here for a minute.” Barca-Lounger. He will wake to the white noise from a gray screen. It is important to have a sense of all this. There are many other lives, this is just one, but none are the lives we imagine when we think of running away to Territory. Tomorrow Davis Patten will begin his day chopping ice along the creek with a splitting maul. Stock water, a daily chore. Another day with ice in his beard, sustained by memories of making slow love to Loretta under down comforters in their cold bedroom. Love, and then quickfooting it to the bathroom on the cold floors, a steaming shower. Memories of a bed that reeks a little of child making. The rewards of the life, it is said, are spiritual, and often they are. Just standing on land you own, where you can dig any sort of hole you like, can be considered a spiritual reward, a reason for not selling out and hitting the Bahamas. But on his winter afternoons Davis Patten remembers another life. For ten years, after he broke away from Montana to the Marines, Davis hung out at the dragster tracks in the San Joaquin Valley, rebuilding engines for great, roaring, .ass-busting machines. These days he sees their stripped red-and-white dragchutes flowering only on Sunday afternoons. The “Wide World of Sports.” Lost horizons. The intricate precision of cam shaft adjustments. x In the meantime, another load of hay. p in towns along the highline, Browning and Harlem and Malta, people are continually dying from another kind of possibility. Another shot of Beam on the rocks and Annie Greensprings out back after the bars are closed. In Montana they used to erect little crosses along the highways wherever a fatality occurred. A while back, outside Browning, they got a dandy. Eleven deaths in a single car accident. Guinness Book of World Records. Verities. The highway department has given up the practice of erecting crosses: too many of them are dedicated to the disenfranchised. Out south of Billings the great coal fields are being strip-mined. Possibilities. The history of Montana and the West, from the fur trade to tomorrow, is a history of colonialism, both material and cultural. Is it any wonder we are so deeply xenophobic, and regard anything east of us as suspect? The money and the power always came from the East, took what it wanted, and left us, white or Indian, with our traditions dismantled and our territory filled with holes in the ground. Ever been to Butte? About half the old town was sucked into a vast open-pit mine. erities. The lasting thing we have learned here, if we ever learn, is to resist the beguilements of power and money. Hang on to your land. There won’t be any more. Be superstitious as a Borneo tribesman. Do not let them photograph our shy, bare-breasted beauties as they wash clothes along the stream bank. Do not let them steal your soul away in pictures, because they will if they get a chance, just as Beadle’s Nickel- Dime Library westerns and Gene Autry B-movies gnawed at the soul of this country where we live. Verities have to be earned, and they take time in the earning—time spent gazing out over your personal wind-glazed fields of snow. Once earned, they inhabit you in complex ways you cannot name, and they cannot be given away. They can only be transmogrified—transformed into something surreal or fantastic, unreal. And ours have been, and always for the same reason: primarily the titillation of those who used to be Easterners, who are everywhere now. These are common sentiments here in the mountain West. In 1923 Charlie Russell agreed to speak before the Great Falls Booster Club. After listening to six or seven booster speeches, he tore up his own talk and spoke. This is what he said: "In my book a pioneer is a man who turned all the grass upside down, strung bob-wire over the dust that was left, poisoned the water and cut down the Trees, killed the Indian who owned the land, and called it progress. If I had my way, the land here would be like God made it, and none of you sons of bitches would be here at all." So what are we left with? There was a great dream about a just and stable society, which was to be America. And there was another great dream about wilderness individuals, mountain men we have called them, who would be the natural defenders of that society. But our society is hugely corrupt, rich and impossibly complex, and our great simple individuals can define nothing to defend, nothing to reap but the isolation implicit in their stance, nothing to gain for their strength but loneliness. The vast, sad, recurrent story which is so centrally American. Western Rednecks cherish secret remnants of those dreams, and still try to live within them. No doubt a foolish enterprise. But that’s why, full of anger and a kind of releasing joy, they plunge their Snowcats around frozen lakes at 90 miles an hour, coming in for a whiskey stop with eyes glittering and icicles bright in their whiskers, and why on any summer day you can look into the sky over Missoula and see the hang-gliding daredevils circling higher than the mountains. That’s why you see.grown men climbing frozen waterfalls with pretty colored ropes. And then there seems to be a shooting a week in the doublewide village. Spastic violence. You know, the husband wakes up from his drunk, lying on the kitchen floor with the light still burning, gets himself an Alka-Seltzer, stumbles into the living room, and there is Mother on the couch with half her side blown away. The 12-gauge is carefully placed back where it belongs on the rack over the breakfront. Can’t tell what happened. Must have been an intruder. Yeah, the crazy man inside us. Our friends wear Caterpillar D-9 caps when they’ve never pulled a friction in their lives, and Buck knives in little leather holsters on their belts, as if they might be called upon to pelt out a beaver at any moment. Or maybe just stab an empty beer can. Ah, wilderness, and suicidal nostalgia. Which gets us to another kind of pioneer we see these days, people who come to the country with what seems to be an idea that connection with simplicities will save their lives. Which simplicities are those? The condescension implicit in the program is staggering. If you want to feel you are being taken lightly, try sitting around while someone tells you how he envies the simplicity of your life. What about Davis Patten? He says he is staying in Montana, and calling it home. So am I. Despite the old Huckleberry Finn—mountain man notion of striking out for the territory, I am going to hang on here, best I can, and nourish my own self. I know a lovely woman who lives up the road in a log house, on what is left of a hard-earned farmstead. I’m going to call and see if she’s home. Maybe she’ll smile and come have a glass of beer with me and my cronies. William Kittredge’s stories and essays have appeared in a number of periodicals including Harper’s and Rolling Stone. This essay is part of Owning It All published by St. Paul’s Graywolf Press. Susan Abelson is a painter living in the Twin Cities. Connie Gilbert is a free-lance graphic designer in the Twin Cities. 6 Clinton St. Quarterly—Summer, 1988 Illustration by Tim Braun
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By Robert Sherrill Illustration by Ann Morgan Design by Eric Walljasper It has been long my I deliberate judgment that all bankrupts, of whatsoever denomination, civil or •r religious, ought to be hanged. Charles Lamb, 1829 That may seem a rather extreme attitude, but in fact not many years before Mr. Lamb’s outburst the courts of England did occasionally hang bankrupts (which was at least more civil than the Roman treatment, dismemberment). Needless to say, America’s rulers—being devoted to capitalism and sensibly recognizing debt as a necessary ingredient of it— have always taken a much more kindly approach to those who fall into the financial ditch. In recent years this humanitarian side of our federal government has been particularly evident in its use of the Bankruptcy Reform Act of 1978 (which we will sometimes refer to as the Code) to protect and enrich financially troubled corporations, and others. Let me put that more plainly. By “others” I mean corporate deadbeats, cheats, high-rolling boardroom gamblers, millionaire fly-by- night polluters and a wide variety of other scoundrels. Indeed the bankruptcy policy of this country, since passage of the Code, has been sufficiently perverse that it has inspired scholarly papers with such titles as “Is the Bankruptcy Code a Refuge for Criminal Offenders?” t used to be that bankruptcy carried a strong taint. No more. Not today. We have entered a new age. “Now,” says Ronald Hoelscher, head of a major commercial real estate firm in Houston, a; city whose leading citizens are often drunk on the elixir of bankruptcy, “it’s something you pull out of your satchel when you need it.” Indeed, some of the corporations that take that route these days are so arrogantly casual about it that they remind one of what Wilson Mizner said of a cocky fellow who went through bankruptcy and came out cockier than ever: “Failure has gone to his head.” Traditionally, bankruptcy was a process by which a business that was going belly up could declare King’s X on all its debts, and then let its creditors line up in an orderly fashion to collect whatever money became available in the company’s liquidation. Bankruptcy still usually means liquidation. But thanks to that magical section of the Code known as Chapter 11, bankruptcy now often means simply “reorganization.” ■/ ,C hapter 11 allows anybody, any partnership, any corporation to seek the shield of bankruptcy. They don’t have to be broke. They can be in fact—as many of our recent “bankrupt” corporations have been—highly profitable. When they are received into the bosom of Chapter 11, these bankrupts, though they could easily pay their debts, become instantly immune from creditors. Immediately they can cancel all contracts, all agreements. Current lawsuits against the company enter limbo; no new lawsuits can be started. To be sure, the bankruptcy court may later decide that some of the contracts and agreements should be revved up again, and eventually the litigation may resume. But for the moment, the bankruptcy novitiate is blissfully free of all care and responsibility, and with any luck this blissfulness may last for several years, with creditors and claimants of every sort growing pale and wan at the factory gate as they wait for the “reorganizing” corporation to emerge from Chapter 11. Three years after the Code was passed, Theodore Eisenberg, a law professor at UCLA, flatly judged it to be “a failure.” Generally he was right, but in one respect he was quite wrong. The Code has been a smashing success as a gigantic loophole through which some of our largest corporations have moved to avoid the demands of other federal and state laws. And they have moved with a rush. In the Code’s first three years, the number of businesses seeking the protection of bankruptcy increased 300 percent. The most dramatic development was not in their number, however, but in the 18-karat quality of some of the largest ones—major corporations in the very bloom of financial health, or at least having no more than the sniffles. □ When Johns-Manville took bankruptcy in 1982, it had a net worth (total shareholders’ equity) of $1.2 billion and was making a nice profit. It’s still in Chapter 11 and still making a nice profit. □ When the pharmaceutical firm of A.H. Robins took bankruptcy in 1985, it had annual sales of more than $600 million and profits of more 8 Clinton St. Quarterly—Summer, 1988
than $60 million annually; Wall Street estimated its net worth at between $1 billion and $3 billion. □ When Ling-Temco Vought, a major defense contractor and the nation’s No. 2 steelmaker, placed itself in bankruptcy in 1986, it was at that time the largest U.S. company (65 subsidiaries, 56,000 workers, 78,000 retirees) ever to declare bankruptcy: LTV’s revenues in 1985 hit $8.5 billion (twice as much as its debts). □ Texaco took the record from LTV in 1987 as the biggest company to declare bankruptcy in U.S. history. It had $3 billion in cash and marketable securities and total assets of more than $35 billion—several times more than its outstanding debts. □ When three of H.L. Hunt’s sons placed Placid Oil Co. in bankruptcy in 1986, the company had $2 billion in assets, more than enough -cash flow and collateral to meet its debts, and it was angling to expand its oil business. .□ When th^trustees of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker’s PTL ministry ' took it into bankruptcy in 1987, their piousjndustry owed only about $60 million and was worth at least $180 million, mainly because it includes the twenty-five-hundred-acre resort (Heritage U.S.A.) near Fort Mill, S.C., complete with a five-hundred-and- four-room hotel, a twenty-one-story hotel tower, condos, single-family homes and a shopping mall built to resemble an early twentieth-century Main Street. As for income, the Christian suckers had historically supplied PTL with about ten million dollars a month. n each of these cases, and in dozens of others that never made it to the front page, the corporations that went into Chapter 11 bankruptcy were healthy. Why, then, did they do it? Because Chapter 11 is one of the pleasanter ways to avoid the underside of real capitalism. As Big Business’s minstrels have told us and retold us so many times that we have suffered a partial lobotomy, the glory of America is that we are a nation that takes risks. They kept telling us that risk is the very blood of capitalism; the lack of it the anemia of socialism. They want us to believe capitalists are all robust daredevils, regular wildcatters, ready to gamble-everything for the big pot, the gusher; ready to lose everything, too, if it comes to that, and then hock their shirt and try again. Hollywood used that plot on us more than once (e.g., Boom Town, with Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy), but everyone who has outgrown folk tales and 1930s scripts knows all too well that much of big business perks along on a riskless capitalism—on a kind of “guaranteed” capitalism or “insured” capitalism or semisocial- istic capitalism. It is capitalism in which most of the risk is to the worker and the consumer, and as little as possible to the producer and owner and financier. he Bankruptcy Reform Act, at least in some parts, is just another ingredient of that kind of capitalism. Tnat can be seen in Francisco A. Lorenzo’s use of Chapter 11. Lorenzo, who entered the airline business in 1972 by taking over bankrupt Texas International Airlines, does not like unions. Not surprisingly, when he started New York Air, he did it with nonunion labor. When he made a move to buy Continental Airlines in Clinton St. Quarterly—Summer, 1988 9
r 1981, its union employees frantically .tried to buy the airline as the only certain way to block him. But they lost and he won, and exactly two years after becoming Continental’s majority stockholder he went into Chapter 11 and (with the bankruptcy court’s approval) canceled all union contracts. Was this a life or death matter? Did he really need to get rid of the unions? Not at all. The airline was not broke; although its income was skimpy enough to make the use of union labor somewhat risky, Continental’s workers were cooperating with management in trimming the budget. In 1982, the first year of his ownership, the pilots’ union had given back $100 million in salary concessions, and just before he declared bankruptcy the pilots and mechanics and flight attendants had agreed to a total of $150 million in give-backs. It was plain that Continental's workers would make any reasonable sacrifice to keep the line going. But that was not enough for Lorenzo, who was determined to rid himself of the need to negotiate with unions under any Chapter 11 allows anybody, any partnership, any corporation to seek the shield of bankruptcy. They can be in fact—s many of our recent bankrupt” corporations have been—highly profitable. u condition, and so in 1983 he dove into Chapter 11, pleading the desperate need for “reorganization.” De-union- izing was apparently the only reorganization he had in mind; in 1984 he climbed out of Chapter 11, thus ending what William F. Buckley hailed as “arguably the most important symbolic economic struggle of the decade.” And within three years, having grown rich from scab labor, Lorenzo was ready to buy Eastern Airlines (again with the frantic opposition of the unions). Devout capitalists may hail Lorenzo’s victory as solid proof of the need of Chaptej 11 to give hardworking managers a breathing space so they “can keep their c6tnpanies alive. There is, however, one significant quibble that must be made to their argument. If Lorenzo went into bankruptcy just to bust the union (as all circumstantial evidence seems to indicate), then he was breaking the law, and the bankruptcy court was a co-felon in allowing him to do so, for there is that quaint piece of writing called the National Labor Relations Act that requires companies to bargain in good faith. The Bankruptcy Reform Act of 1978 is not supposed to be used to obliterate the NLRA. ne feels a bit naive talking about “good faith” in this context. In fact the Code, written by Congressmen who apparently were embarrassed by ethical considerations, makes no explicit requirement that those who take bankruptcy do so in good faith- meaning that they not misuse the Bankruptcy Reform Act to achieve an unfair advantage over competing business, or over labor unions, or over workers who are suing them for damages, or to cover past crimes or to escape penalties for having broken nonbankruptcy laws. The Code is not supposed to be used like an ace up the sleeve or a knife in the boot. If a bankruptcy judge catches a business (or person) using it in that way, he is supposed to throw them out of court. Written into the Code or not, good faith has always been an implicit requirement since the first permanent federal bankruptcy law wap passed in 1898. Nevertheless, in practice it means virtually nothing. Rarely does a bankruptcy judge question the faith of big business. Nowhere is bad faith more pungent than in the Chapter 11 now protecting several sons of the late H.L. Hunt of Texap, once one of the wealthiest men in America and one of the most domesticated, so to speak, for he contrived through a fascinating shell game of matrimony and bigamy to produce three families (fourteen children). Of these offspring, the two who seem to have been stocked with most of H.L.’s predatory genes are Bunker Hunt and Herbert Hunt, close allies in several shady, if not downright crooked, enterprises that we will briefly sketch here as a talisman of their business character. T en years ago Bunker and Herbert first became known for their rapaciousness when they tried to corner the soybean market by buying futures contracts for 24 million bushels —about one-third the total U.S. supply. Federal law decrees that no person, or group acting in collusion, can hold futures contracts for more than 3 million bushels. When the Commodity Futures Trading Commission caught Bunker and Herbert, the boys put on a farcical act of innocence. Collusion? Nonsense! Bunker said he was absolutely bowled over to learn that brother Herbert was also interested in soybeans. And both swore they had no idea their teenage children were buying soybean futures. The CFTC, made up of easygoing rascals, let them get by with it. So a few years later the Hunts set out qn a much more socially devastating adventure—to corner the silver market. When they started buying, silver sold for $3 an ounce. By 1980 their gigantic purchases—at one point they controlled two thirds of the silver in circulation in the world —had driven the price to $50.35 an ounce, giving the Hunt brothers a greater paper fortune than their father had earned in real money in his entire life of hunting oil. Their speculative success caused real pain to the buying public. Film, flatware, the price of anything with a silver ingredient went sky-high. Billionaire.s though they were, the Hunts were not so foolish as to use only their own money for the gamble. They borrowed millions from banks and brokerage houses, which, caught up in the Hunts’ delirium, also bought silver heavily on their own. hen came the fall. Pressures exerted by equally ruthless pirates on the New York Commodity Exchange, the largest silver market in the world, drove the price down to $15.80, and at that point the Hunts told their big creditors that the silver they had cornered would no longer cover their debts and they would not put up any more collateral for their loans. In other words, they were welshing. The financial world went into a tizzy. When rumors spread that several banks and some of the biggest brokerage houses were in deep trouble from playing the Hunts’ game, stock prices dropped to the lowest level in five years. Here was a wonderful possibility. Let’them go under! Business Week appraised the situation correctly: “They played a dangerous game for high stakes. They guessed wrong, and they lost. They should be forced to liquidate other assets and cover their losses—just as any speculators would have to do.” Exactly. If the Hunts had been forced to dismantle 10 Clinton St. Quarterly—Summer, 1988
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