All Beans and No T-bones

Glorious

All Beans and No T-bones

Vainglorious

By Stephen L. Wilmeth

            If an assessment was made, the week could not be described as glorious.

            It certainly did not fit the model of silver screened Westerns anyway. Not once were we horseback riding down the canyon in the calm of the evening listening to the wail of the coyotes. There was no cantina time. There wasn’t a single minute of strumming the guitar, either. As for drama, the attempt to construe daily events into anything resembling profound discovery simply cannot be proclaimed. It was not the best of times to highlight the American cowboy way of life. The week was dreary.

It was all beans and no T-bones.

Any hint of a baile was woefully absent. The Little Cowboy was retrieved off the fence job that was really most important. He had to assist in digging up several valves that have become impossible to open or close because of precipitate buildup. That plays havoc in the attempt to distribute water at the very time the weather is deciding to make the change from spring to summer.

He was there with his backhoe attachment to install a larger diameter inlet to a trough that has had too many cattle depending on it, too. The outcome was a success although the accomplishment was more of an exercise in muscle and endurance rather than any engineering marvel. We had to hot tap the side wall of the trough to install it. By the time the dust settled, we had cattle in our hip pockets bawling for a drink.

That is always a real nightmare.

Then, there was the late afternoon texts that cattle were out on the freeway at mile marker 114. Holy Cow! Since our cows were on the north side of the ranch and not the south against I-10, it couldn’t be ours, but our neighbors might be in trouble and that becomes a community affair. Everybody needs to come to the resolution of that calamity.

We all live with that fear.

As it turned out, it was a false alarm, but early evening sleep was interrupted before the lights were turned off to shut the world out at least for a moment. Then, there was the U joint failure. Actually, that will not be fixed until Frank gets his first look at the draft this morning. There is nothing more confounding than laying on your back flinching and dodging when grease and dirt hit you in the face changing a U joint. It is kind of like killing rattlesnakes. There is no glory.

It’s part of cowboy lore, though. There are times when you just can’t delegate it away. You have to face the tough duty yourself, and, that … seems to be a major pitfall in the history of mankind.

Glorious

There is a rising tide of evidence that suggests that New Mexico is exactly the problem child that many eastern legislators predicted prior to statehood.

The criticism was couched in ethnic and racially divisive wordsmithing that overtly suggested the citizenry could never rely on itself to become productive participants in these United States of America. In a recent summary ranking the states on the basis of dependency on the federal dollars, the evidence of that expectation only comes into sharper focus.

This state in number one among all states in dependence on national treasury transfers. Now, the detail is woefully absent in what goes into such a conclusion, but the evidence across the landscape certainly supports the ranking. Pick any starting point of review and the outcome is only more conclusive.

Yearly, there is the reminder that over 1/3 of the state’s budget consists of direct transfers. Then, there are the poverty and educational rankings that chain into outright federal infusions or matching dollars inflows. Then, there are the federal land reservations that include military installations, national laboratories, forest preserves, national parks,, national monuments, national wildlife reservations, wild and scenic rivers, Indian reservations, and the vacuum of federal lands that is managed by the BLM that generates zero property tax harvests.

Government in one form or the other owns 47% of the state.

If eastern New Mexico was granted back to Texas, the stranglehold of remaining title would reach proportions of ownership that equates to Alaska and Nevada where government owns upwards of 90% of the landscape.

William Tecumseh Sherman may well have been right. Maybe America would be better off if war was declared again on Mexico and … force them to take the tax drain of New Mexico back.

Vainglorious

When New Mexico was finally granted statehood as the 47^th state on January 6, 1912, its citizenry had been ruled an amazing 314 years by unelected officials. There was always an appointed overlord who, at times, had outright disdain for his assignment.

In order, Spain, France, Britain, the United States, Mexico, Texas, the Confederacy, the Union, and, again, the United States and the multiple states carved out of New Mexico Territory all controlled the direction and the absence of sovereignty over the citizenry. The landscape was a crossroads of foreign and domestic terror. Unlike the original states, especially Massachusetts and Virginia, where a high degree of self-governance spawned a revolution and the American model, New Mexico never developed self-identity.

There was a continuum of haves and have nots. There was also an absence of tradespeople, farmers and ranchers, and other middle-class frontier settlers who, collectively, had enough political and social clout to band together to embrace and take control of their own destiny.

That continues to this day.

The western half of the state remains the issue. It is there ¾ of the landscape is still overseen by unelected federal officials. If history is honest, it will be revealed this was never a state, but, rather, a combination of continuing Territory with the unfulfilled promise of statehood.

Stephen L. Wilmeth is a rancher from southern New Mexico. “Is there a term for hybrid Territory and state combination?”

When New Mexico was finally granted statehood as the 47^th state on January 6, 1912, its citizenry had been ruled an amazing 314 years by unelected officials. There was always an appointed overlord...

The western half of the state remains the issue. It is there ¾ of the landscape is still overseen by unelected federal officials. If history is honest, it will be revealed this was never a state, but, rather, a combination of continuing Territory with the unfulfilled promise of statehood.

I hope folks recognize the significance of what Wilmeth is saying here. The courts have ruled that Article IV of the Constitution, originally referred to as the territorial clause and now referred to as the property clause, confers power "without limitation" upon Congress. Thus we have within a state where federal property exists, "unelected officials" (federal land managers) exercising Article IV jurisdiction, just as they did over territories before they were admitted as states. This sets up the hybrid situation Wilmeth describes, which has vast implications for state sovereignty and the rights of individuals.
---Frank DuBois