Anthony McCann's "Shadowlands: Fear and Freedom at the Oregon
Standoff" is one of those extraordinary books that seems to be about one
thing, and turns out to be about almost everything. I raved to people a
lot while I was reading it, drawing unwise comparisons to "
Moby-Dick" and "
Beyond Good and Evil." I'm still somewhat OK with those analogies. But rather than going
deep on the lit-crit, I would more soberly suggest that "Shadowlands"
belongs on the shelf beside Peter Matthiessen's "
In the Spirit of Crazy Horse" or Edward Abbey's "
Desert Solitaire," as a work of political nonfiction that isn't really "political," at least not in the narrow, normative use of that word. McCann is a poet and writing teacher who lives in the Mojave
Desert of Southern California, and was drawn into the now-half-forgotten
story of the 2016 "Oregon standoff" by his interest in the geography of
the West, Native American messianic spirituality and the way those
things intersect with the uniquely American theology of the Latter-day
Saints. (Who have officially requested that we no longer call them the
Mormons: Everybody gets a safe space.) I want to let my fascinating conversation with McCann tell most of
the story, but let's just say that whatever you think you know about the
Oregon standoff — when a handful of libertarian loons, associated with
the notorious Bundy family of Nevada and drawn together by the internet,
took over the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in the remote desert of
southeastern Oregon — is probably wrong. The Malheur occupiers relied on
a thoroughly nutty interpretation of the U.S. Constitution, and most of
them came from the fringes of the far right. But they weren't white
supremacists, mostly weren't gun-totin' militia types (except for a few
hangers-on), and never resorted to violence or even seriously threatened
to do so. ou don't have to agree with anything about the occupiers' understanding
of America or God or freedom — and McCann certainly doesn't — to agree
that they were responding to something real: a notionally democratic
state that has lost much of its popular legitimacy, and a civil society
that often feels unmoored or uprooted. Something else, of course, also
happened in 2016, and McCann's book becomes an inadvertent chronicle of
the weird stew of discontent, on social media and IRL, that led to the
election of our current president...
MORE
No comments:
Post a Comment