The Eagles of Libby Montana

It is almost November and old man winter is breathing down my neck. Already my thoughts are drifting toward summer and a new adventure. Yet I get ahead of myself sometimes. I've been reading portions of Henry David Thoreau's Walden and I'm drawn to thoughts of one of my friends who is now, as we speak, finishing off a cabin he is building not too far from Libby Montana. It's actually closer to Troy Montana but since this post was intended to be written about Libby, I shall confine my observations to the town of Libby, where I spent two days during my trip to Montana last summer. The reason I mention my friend(or Walden for that matter) is that he is the one who introduced me to Montana three years ago. Now Bruce, that's his name, is something of a solid fellow; a decent harmonica player even though he is tone deaf, a fan of Steinbeck(especially Cannery Row!) and pretty stubborn about finishing off what he starts. Last spring he said he was going to buy land in Montana and build a Cabin there. I know this blog is supposed to be about Libby, but bear with me, I think I'll be able to tie this all up into a neat bundle by the end of this post.

Anyway, I'll be damned if he hasn't gone and done it! I can understand why he has. Montana is like Coney Island, it is more of a state of mind than a geographic location. I would buy land and build a cabin there myself but why bother when I can just move in on my friend Bruce

(assuming he still is after he reads this post)and

stay in his cabin. after all what are friends for, right? Actually I'm just kidding about this. My couch surfing days ended many years ago.

. Getting back to Libby, there is an interesting story about the town and how it was victimized and exploited by the W.R. Grace Company for a

period of time. Now as you may have guessed, Libby, in addition to being a mining/logging town is also a nesting spot for American Bald Eagles. There is even a website that you can go to, www.libbyeagelecam.com, to follow the latest adventures of some of the local eagle residents.

I guess I should tell you about the W.R. Grace Company at this point. Back in 1881 gold miners discovered vermiculite in and around Libby. By 1920 the Zonolite company began mining the vermiculite for use in fertilizer and building insulation. W.R. Grace bought the operation in 1963 and according employee memo's unearthed by investigative journalists, was aware of the asbestos problem even back then. Turns out that the vermiculite was contaminated with a "highly toxic form of naturally occurring asbestos called tremolite actinolite asbestiform mineral fibers". Sounds pretty toxic to me. Being the good citizens that they were, Grace continued to mine the vermiculite as long as they could while covering up word of the contamination. Then after they sold the mine, for a long time denied any responsibility for the staggering health problem created from the asbestos. It is estimated that upwards of 1000 people in the Libby Troy area have died from asbestoses. A proposed criminal indictment to try executives from Grace was recently dismissed however on June 17, 2009 the EPA declared it's first ever health emergency at the asbestos site. Grace is beginning to pony up finally after being in offical denial for almost twenty years.

Well, getting back to the eagles, they kind of symbolize the spirit of the people in Libby, a town that may have been on the ropes thanks W.R. Grace, but has gotten up off the mat and is ready to dance for a couple more rounds. Here's an example of the kind of businesses that have sprung up in Libby recently:

Little Mom and Pop stores of one description or another, valiantly trying to survive in the post Bush depression era. My friend Bruce has told me that he regularly sees grizzly bears and mountain lions wander across his property. He is living his dream up there in Montana while I'm dodging cars in the Key Food parking lot here in Brooklyn. All things considered I think I'd trust my chances with the grizzly bears and the mountain lions.

Healthcare and the Paranoid Style

With regard to the coming battle over health care, Obama's declining popularity in the polls and the fear of including a government option, this despite the fact that 40 percent of health care is already run by the government, I would like to quote from Richard Hofstadter from his essay The Paranoid Style in American Politics: "...much of our national anxiety can be traced to the fear that the decline of entrepreneurial competition will destroy our national character, or that the same effect will be brought about by our hedonistic mass culture and by the moral laxity that has grown up with and is charged to our liberal and relativistic intellectual climate." In other words, the real economic issues, other than "higher taxes", become obfuscated by so called cultural issues i.e. family values, abortion, secular versus religious morality etc. in a shit storm of calculated and cynical bluster and hot air as put forth by the right wing media, and as supported by the lobbyists, special interests and their stooge politicians who are bought and paid for by these interests. They dial up the fear and hysteria, overstate the obvious, invert the arguments of the opposition, exagerate or twist the intentions of many facets of the health care bill and when all else fails, they lie through their teeth.

According to Hofstadter, none of this is new. Two hundred years ago they were slandering the Masons and the Illuminati. Then it was the Catholics(read immigrants!), the Jews(international Jewish banking conspiracy), and then it was the labor movement, the communists, and now "terrorist's". By the way, while you're at it, why don't you go ask someone in Baghdad, Damascus, Beirut, Kabul or Islamabad who the terrorist's are? You probably won't like the answer, but this is the way much of the world thinks of us as. The Paranoid Style is alive and well.

No City for Old Men

Most of Butte Montana looks like a Walker Evans photograph. The buildings, and many of the people, look as if they had been preserved by a time warp. In the middle of an average business day, the streets are virtually empty. The normal hustle and bustle of a thriving metropolis is absent. Coffee huts and cottage industries of one sort or another dot the landscape. But ultimately, Butte is embroiled in a desperate struggle to survive; to create an identity for itself as a living museum for what was once the greatest mining city in the world.As of this writing, the only active mine in Butte is the Continental Pit. In a city which boasted Morgan Earp as a policemen and where the writer Dashiell Hammett worked as an operative for the Pinkertons in 1917.  He would resign from the Pinkertons when he became disillusioned with their union busting tactics, probably after the murder of IWW organizer Frank Little that same year by six masked men.  No surprise that the crime was never solved.  The preservation of Butte's once thriving mining history, with its glorious intrigues, labor disputes and violence, has become the predominant industry in Butte.

Today, the primary inhabitants of Butte seem to be poverty stricken men who wander the streets aimlessly in search of something to do. I suspect that a lot of disabled men and women end up in Butte because of the cheap housing.  I observed this fellow poking his head into various shops and then proceeding as if he were in a great hurry, but seemingly, with nothing actually to do. The only places where business seemed to be booming were the local taverns, where I could hear loud boisterous conversations and raucous laughter. During the bust year of 1893, the year that silver crashed and many banks closed, there were 212 saloons in operation in Butte, proving once again that during times of economic hardship, the entertainment and

hospitality industries thrive.

Approximately 40 abandoned mining rigs dot the landscape of Butte. Each night they are lit up in red. To the east of town, Our Lady of the Rockies, a ninety foot statue can also be lit up at night for a small fee to honor a departed loved. The installation of the lady, a cross denominational effort, is purportedly in honor of all mothers.

Perhaps she is a reflection of the city's diversity. Irish, Italian, Finnish, Chinese, Eastern

European, Jewish, Black and who knows how many other ethnicity's worked in and around the

mines.

Today the artifacts of these various cultures can be found strewn all over the city. A kind of "Italian" coffee shop on S Montana street called the Palace serves mostly generic American food while subjecting the eater to the sounds of Al Martino, Perry Como, Jerry Vale. All of a

sudden the lyrics from theMichael Maltese song Attsa Matta for You, from the old Bugs Bunny cartoon A Hound forTrouble wafted across the room:

Attsa matter, attsa matter??

Hey!!

At'sa matter for you?

You eata my raviola

And my pasta fagiole too

I'mma give you caccitore

and a pizza that's good to chew

Attsa matter you no like??

Hey!!

Attsa matter for you??

The skewed angularities and planes of many of the images I am showing you are in part caused by the limitations of the lens on my camera, but many of them also reflect the nature of the age and infirmity of many of the buildings in Butte. I think that some of them are so old and neglected, not to mention that they have been built on steep hills, that they are literally sinking into the ground.

Maybe it's just my imagination.

The miners union organized their first strike when the "Copper Kings" decided to cut wages from $3.50 to $3.00 a day. No doubt these trust magnates would still be paying us three dollars a day if it wasn't for the heroic efforts of the Wobblies and other unionists. The worst mining fire in American history occurred in Butte on Nov. 16, 1917. 168 miners were killed. The "Copper Kings" finally consolidated their interests and formed the monolithic Anaconda Copper Company. It's ironic that they named themselves after a snake that kills its victims by strangling the life out of them.

Teddy Kennedy

While I was up in the middle of the back country in Glacier National Park. I got into a more or less friendly conversation with an older hiker who worked as an "outdoor sports" columnist for a paper in Colorado. He knew a great deal about conservation issues and although he was a bit of a blowhard(basically he talked over anything anyone else said), I had to admit to myself that he was knowledgeable enough to force me to reexamine many of my notions about environmental issues.

Suddenly, out of the blue, he blurted out: "I can't believe that a murderer like Kennedy is getting so much sympathy." What could elicit such a remark from what I would consider an otherwise reasonable man? I stiffled my initial urge to point out that there are many who consider BUSH-CHANEY-RUMSFELD war criminals and conceivably, under different circumstances, might be indicted for war crimes, as being a cheap shot and in any event irrelevant to the fact that many people in America feel that Teddy did get away with murder. I pointed out to this man that first of all, indicting the last surviving Kennedy brother for what at the worst might be considered involuntary manslaughter, in light of the unbearable tragedies that have befallen the Kennedy family, was inconcievable.

I think that in the final analysis, his ultimate acts of contrition were Ted Kennedy's enormous contributions to the public interest and to democracy itself.

Censorship

I started this blog because Facebook censored one of my posts. This post was a relatively benign rant against what I termed "bad capitalism". Take a look at this picture of the Berkeley Pit in Butte Montana. This mile in diameter sludge pit(some might call it toxic cesspool) was created after the Atlantic Richfield company abandoned their strip mining operation at this site. After turning off the pumps the pit began filling up with ground water which was caused by the numerous mine shaft's that perforate the area in, around and under the pit. Ultimately, the "villainous" EPA stepped and forced ARCO(now a subsidiary of BP) to show some corporate responsibility and start monitoring the pit.

I guess that Facebook found my comments "too provokative"(misspelling intentional). If I can't speak my mind on Blogger, I'll create my own website if I have to.

So long for now.