Text 21, 263 rader
Skriven 2004-07-27 19:48:25 av John Hull (1:379/1.99)
Ärende: Call us Cowboys?  You bet!
==================================
The following helps explain why we Americans are the way we are.  Its a good
read, and right on the money.  Two parts.




 
ON THE FRONTIER

Go Ahead, Call Us Cowboys 
A visit to the Alaska-Canada border brings home the differences between the
cultures. 

BY ANDREW KLEINFELD AND JUDITH KLEINFELD 
Monday, July 19, 2004 12:01 a.m. EDT 

Everywhere, Americans are called "cowboys." On foreign tongues, the reference
to America's Western rural laborers is an insult. Cowboys, we are told,
plundered the earth, arrogantly rode roughshod over neighbors, and were
addicted to mindless violence. So some of us hang our heads in shame. We
shouldn't. The cowboy is in fact our Homeric hero, an archetype that sticks
because there's truth in it.

Cowboys were of course plainsmen--Midwesterners operating from Texas to Kansas
to the Dakotas. But their ideas and ideals spread across the continent to our
Mountain West as well, even as far as the Alaskan West.

A few years ago, a Canadian anthropologist explained to us how different her
countrymen are from Americans. She had a perfect comparison to illustrate this.
She suggested that we go to the extreme western edge of Canada and have a look
at two small towns named Stewart and Hyder. Stewart is situated in British
Columbia, Hyder at the southeastern tip of Alaska. Though just two miles apart,
these towns are very different in their "habits of the heart." If we visited
them, our anthropologist friend implied, we would immediately understand the
superiority of Canadian culture.

We decided to take up her challenge.



First we called up the respective town authorities. Hyder, the American town,
turned out to have no town authorities--and, technically, no town. The
Hyderites chose not to incorporate as a municipality, creating instead a
community association--a private nonprofit corporation. Stewart, the Canadian
town, is a real municipality with a traditional government.

When we phoned Stewart, the government agent refused to answer any questions
until they were submitted in writing. The Hyder community association
representative said, sure, she'd tell us anything we wanted to know, right now,
on the phone. But to make it a fair comparison, we faxed written questions to
both parties, and got written answers back.

The Canadian government official, evidently aspiring to create a faceless
bureaucracy in this 700-person outpost, signed the response as "Government
Agent"--capital letters but no name or sex--and explained that Stewart had a
"Municipal Government incorporated under the laws of the Province of British
Columbia," with a mayor and a city council of six members. As to Stewart's
nearby neighbors, Government Agent from Canada said diplomatically, "I'm not
sure how Hyder is governed," but expressed polite disapproval of its apparent
libertarian streak.

Stewart developed very early into a regulated community, explained Government
Agent, while Hyder chose to follow the path of less community and more personal
freedom. Hyder is a collection of individuals first and a community second,
while Stewart has a "community first" attitude, according to Government Agent.
"We are generally more accepting of government's involvement in our day-to-day
lives."

The Hyder representative--definitely not a Government Agent--signed her name,
Caroline Gutierez, to her answers, which she sent on her personal stationery
advertising her several businesses. She runs Boundary Gallery, where she is
proprietor as well as artist, and Wood Bee Lumber Enterprise, as well as
filling eight community positions ranging from music teacher to curator of the
town museum. "I came with my family to Hyder on a summer vacation and am
pleased to say I am still on vacation," Ms. Gutierez said. She applauded the
very same cowboy attitudes that Government Agent disdained. Hyder, she said,
was "spirited, rebellious, and independent," while Stewart was "cautious and
cleaving to Mother England."


The differences in these answers were interesting enough to convince us to
undertake a three-day, 1,200-mile drive from our home in Fairbanks, Alaska. We
arrived first at Stewart, Canada, an orderly, well-kept town with paved
streets. Then we drove off the blacktop into Hyder, USA--a mélange of disorder
where at dark we could find little but a raunchy-looking bar and lodge. We
stayed on the Canadian side, at the King Edward Hotel. At our lace-and-doilies
Stewart breakfast spot, we found a promotional map. It showed that Stewart had
a neat grid of streets and municipal facilities, but not much else. Hyder, on
the other hand, with about one-seventh the population and no straight or paved
roads at all, had 23 business and community enterprises.
Driving back and forth in daylight, our initial impressions of Stewart as solid
and prosperous, Hyder as wild and ramshackle, turned completely inside out.
Stewart is definitely much more attractive and inviting, with sidewalks, flower
boxes and bicycles to borrow free at the well-staffed government tourist
office. But Hyder was the confident, prosperous community. Stewart's houses
needed paint. Its shops needed tourists. Its roads needed traffic. It was a
semi-ghost town, bravely struggling on. With mining and logging drying up
(environmentalist-orchestrated bans on logging in Alaska's Tongass National
Forest and the closing of Ketchikan's pulp mill devastated the lumber economy
in this region), many of Stewart's businesses, elegant restaurants, and small
tourist attractions (e.g., the world's leading toaster museum) had discreet
"for sale" signs in the windows.

Hyder, meanwhile, turned out to be a lot more productive and enterprising than
it had looked at dusk. The Hyderites had evidently found other ways to make
money when the mines and mills were shut down. The pickup trucks in Hyder were
newer and better, and there were a lot more satellite dishes.

The best restaurant in the Hyder-Stewart metropolitan area, we discovered, was
an old school bus and tent in Hyder serving fresh fish. The proprietor had
traded a snowmobile for the bus, gutted it and turned it into a kitchen. She
served halibut and charcoal-grilled salmon supplied by local fishermen. She had
the highest prices in town, yet her restaurant was the only one with lines.

Hyder's most visible business (aside from the bar) was the "Border Bandit
Discount Store." Between two giant American flags, this emporium expressed the
town's style on its sign:


Hyder Alaska--a town of about a hundred happy people and a few old s---heads.
Discount tobacco
Tax free bed & breakfast
Tax free storeboat rental
Custom importing
Pawn, buy, sell, gold
Sporting goods guns & ammo
Marine supplies
Industrial materials
Almost anything else

We chatted with a Hyder resident (retired, so he had time to talk) who was
definitely among the "hundred happy people." He'd built a $2 million business
in this tiny frontier town from such enterprises as selling discount appliances
and charging $25 in Hyder for a carton of cigarettes that costs $50 in Stewart.
People drove to his store from all over northern British Columbia and the
Yukon. Hyderites, he explained, made money on "everything that's legal or close
to it."


Doubtless the academics would say that Hyder illustrates the immorality of
markets and the lamentable limitations of sovereignty, which prevented Canada
from imposing its higher taxes and fewer commercial freedoms so close to its
borders. A case history of the commercial anarchy that results from lack of
government.
There was no arguing the lack of government. Not only is there no municipality
in Hyder, but no border station either. Once there had been one, but the
Hyderites had protested the nuisance of having to stop when they drove back and
forth. And after all, no such municipality as Hyder exists--a nonexistent place
doesn't need a border station.

Stewart, on the other hand, has a well-maintained government border station
with numerous polite and apologetic employees staffing three shifts. Each time
our Jeep passed back and forth between the two towns we answered the same
litany of questions to people who quickly got to know us and our answers. We
asked one of the Canadian border guards what Hyderites were like. "Free
spirits. Wild. They have guns, you know." We were asked if we had any guns each
time we drove back to Stewart, since handguns (a near-universal in Alaskan bear
country) are contraband in Canada.

We made this trip in the first week of July. The "Canada Day" celebrations that
took place in Stewart on July 1 were very vanilla. They included a "jaws of
life" rescue equipment demonstration, a Name the Babies Contest, and the Annual
Community Potluck Dinner in the early evening.

Three days later on July 4, Hyder spiced its national celebration with dashes
of politically incorrect cayenne. There was an Ugly Vehicle Contest featuring
pickups held together with duct tape and decorated with moose antlers (unlike
the shiny ones in the driveways). There were parades of children with pets, toy
guns and cowboy costumes. There was a Wilderness Woman Contest. Contestants
raced to split wood, wash clothes, shoot a bear, flip pancakes, change a baby,
and put on lipstick. The winner did it all barefoot.

Even Hyderites recognize their limits--in an earlier year's self-staged July 4
fireworks display, they had accidentally burned down their fire hall with the
fire engine inside. So this year Hyder hired Canadian experts to stage the
pyrotechnics. The show started around midnight, during the late evening
barbecue. Stewart residents courteously joined in the fun, bringing new
government trucks and a poodle.


The people of Hyder and Stewart are not nearly so different as they make
themselves seem. They're friends, they go back and forth frequently, and they
do a lot of the same kinds of work. It's not so much that they are different as
individuals as that they choose to be different as communities.
The enterprising and economically productive Hyderites pretend they're just
fooling around. Hyder's most available T-shirt shows a logger with red
suspenders and a bottle of something warming, and the slogan "I've been
Hyderized." The Stewartites pretend they're upright Victorians. Their most
featured T-shirts display the official seal of the Royal Canadian Mounted
Police.

It is striking how people doing exactly the same thing can portray their
activities to themselves in opposite ways. Different cultural spectacles affect
what citizens see and feel. In Stewart and Hyder, people mostly seek the same
thing from government--money. Stewart needs jobs, and so welcomes all the
customs officers and government officials and employees it can get.

Hyder also got government funding--for a 73,000-square-foot water-bottling
plant on one of its mud roads, to sell Alaska Glacier Blue water from a
glacier. The plant is expected to employ 40 people (not bad for a town of 100).
But the people of Hyder didn't interpret their public funding as Canadians
would have. The Americans saw themselves as independent and self-reliant people
taking something from their government. The Hyderites saw the water-bottling
plant as clear evidence of their aggressive enterprise and ability to get what
they wanted through hard work together. The Canadians, on the other hand,
generally see themselves as dependents of government, as sometimes grateful but
sometimes resentful receivers of government alms.

Canadian sociologist Kaspar Naegele compares his country and the U.S. this way:
"In Canada there seems to be greater acceptance of limitation, of hierarchical
patterns. There seems to be less optimism, less faith in the future, less
willingness to risk capital or reputation." American sociologist Seymour Martin
Lipset concludes that Canada is a "more law-abiding, statist, and
collectivity-oriented society" than the U.S.


If we made a checklist of objective facts about a desirable place to live,
Stewart would probably come out ahead. The Canadian way has virtues--clean
paved streets, free medical care, a border station with a government presence,
free bicycles. We had, after all, chosen to stay in Stewart, not Hyder. The
American way, on the other hand, celebrates wildness. It celebrates common
people and tolerates vulgarity. It is less interested in reprimanding
iconoclasts.
But when we reacted to these two towns emotionally, instead of with checklists,
Canada left us feeling flat and constrained. It was nice, but it wasn't us.
When we crossed the border a couple of days later, out of the calm Canadian
dusk into American neon lights, Joshua, our Yale philosophy major son, put his
finger on our collective feelings. "America is thumos," he said. Thumos, an
ancient Greek psychological concept, cannot be translated directly into English
because it combines the qualities and emotions of passion, spirit, energy and
courage. Thumos has a negative side--the anger of Achilles, or the Hyderites'
reckless burning down of their own firehouse. But it is also a creative force
of great and positive life powers.

Cowboys, venture capitalists, brilliant scientists, businesspeople like Bill
Gates or Carly Fiorina, warriors like George S. Patton--have thumos. Modern
people often ignore the role of "spiritedness." Psychologists measure
intelligence, attitudes, emotions and values, but spiritedness is not a
category of much academic interest. For ancient people, in contrast,
spiritedness was central to an understanding of a society and the individual
psyche. Socrates divided the soul into three parts: reason, thumos and
appetite. Critics disdainful of America today often mischaracterize as
aggressive or greedy "appetite" what should more accurately be interpreted as
"spiritedness."

The role of freedom in creating prosperity has been the central discovery of
economics over the past two centuries. What still tends to go unappreciated is
that individual freedom has an emotional and spiritual value at least as
important as its economic value. When one's activities are freely chosen and
freely pursued, they create pleasure in themselves, not just through what is
produced. That's why Caroline Gutierez of Hyder saw herself as "still on
vacation" despite her two businesses and eight volunteer positions.

------------ continued in Part Two


John 

America:  First, Last, and Always!
Go to www.madgorilla.us for all your Domain Name Services at the lowest rates.

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