In the ten years since the U.S. invaded Afghanistan, 1889 American military have been killed. Nine Montanans, including two from Missoula, lost their lives fighting this pointless and unwinnable disaster. —numbers from icasualties.org

"My own view is that this planet is used as a penal colony, lunatic asylum and dumping ground by a superior civilisation, to get rid of the undesirable and unfit. I can't prove it, but you can't disprove it either." —Christopher Hitchens

"There's nothing more English than bad sex." —Rowan Somerville, winner of the eighteenth annual Literary Review Bad Sex in Fiction Award. One of Rowan's lines: "'Like a lepidopterist mounting a tough-skinned insect with a too blunt pin he screwed himself into her."

"Why are all barrel racers cremated when they die? Because the ground is never good enough." —rodeo humor

"I believe the best way to become an aetheist is to read the Bible."  —Penn Jillette

"Quit attacking Mitt Romney as a member of a cult. Members of a cult actually believe in something."  —Bill Maher

"The civil-rights war that engulfed the South for the rest of the decade . . . happened without e-mail, texting, Facebook, or Twitter."  —Malcolm Gladwell

"In terms of making a living as a writer, you better have another source of income." —Nan Talese

"As we've learned from the disastrous implosion of AIG, there is no such thing anymore as a giant company dying alone." —Matt Taibbi, writing about British Petroleum

"Las Vegas is a pilot project to see if man can live on the moon." —Chef Paul Bartolotta

"I was completely aware that I was writing crap. I hope to God people don't read my advice on how to make gin at home because they'll probably poison themselves. Never trust anything you read on eHow." —a former Demand Studios 'content farm' writer

"I try really hard not to think about how old and creepy I am." —David Crosby

"Me and your wife have something really special going on. Please don't mess this up for me." —from the film, Extract

"Let Uncle James translate what Tea Party Republicans really mean when they say they want to 'take our government back.'
Kentucky's Rand Paul opposes the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Nevada's Sharron Angle is itching to dismantle Social Security. And California's Carly Fiorina dismisses climate change concerns as fretting about 'the weather.'"  —James Carville

"Ron Galella is the price tag of the First Amendment." —Floyd Abrams, famed media lawyer, discussing the photographer sued for harassment by Jackie Onassis

The disclosure that Facebook has "routinely turned over data-mined information to advertisers should not come as a surprise. Privacy groups have been telling regulators—especially the FTC— that consumer privacy has been at risk." —Jeffrey Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy

The media are entrusted to report and comment on the news. Yet every time a sportswriter or sportscaster casts a vote for an award or honor, that person is thrust into the middle of a story. For sports journalists there's only one solution: Stop voting. —Jay Mariotti, sports columnist

"Journalists attending a long trial together develop a special camaraderie born of a shared good mood; their stories are writing themselves; they have only to pluck the low-hanging fruit of the attorneys' dire narratives." —Janet Malcolm

"More than half of Americans who use social networks are posting online information that makes them vulnerable to crime, in both the cyberworld and the real one." —Consumer Reports

"My life is light, waiting for the death wind, like a feather on the back of my hand." —T.S. Eliot, from A Song for Simeon

"If it's allowed to take hold in the consumer's mind that a book is worth ten bucks, to my mind it's game over for this business."
— David Young, a book publishing CEO, discussing the Amazon Kindle

"We are indeed, and we are today, the last best hope of man on earth." — Ronald Reagan, in a 1974 speech

"Even before the Democrats got to take a single victory lap they were already being warned not to get used to the feeling, and not to get drunk with power. I disagree. All you Democrats: do a shot, and then do another. Get drunk on this feeling of not backing down and doing what you came to Washington to do." — Bill Maher

"Conservatives and Republicans today suffered their most crushing legislative defeat since the 1960s. It's hard to exaggerate the magnitude of the disaster." — David Frum, former aide to George Bush, discussing the health care bill

"Maciel was a sexual criminal of epic proportions who gained the trust of John Paul II and created a movement that is as close to a cult as anything we've seen in the church."  —Jason Berry, director of Vows of Silence, a documentary about the priest who founded the Legion of Christ in 1941

"I'm concerned about your willingness to settle down and commit to a serious polygamous relationship." —Big Love

"The health care system in the U.S. is controlled by the pharmaceutical industry, the health insurance industry, and Wall Street . . . I'd rather see Obama go down with a system that puts patients back in the care of doctors than succeed with some watered-down measure." —Bill Moyers

"Guys who play golf are too fat to play tennis." —Molly Shannon, in the film Serendipity

"What shall we do with all this useless beauty?" —Elvis Costello

"There is something that can be done [to save newspapers], and the federal government ought to do it: allow sports betting on newspaper websites." —Mort Zuckerman, New York Daily News owner

"If instead of sweetened beverages the average American drank water he or she would weigh fifteen pounds less." —Eric Finkelstein, co-author of The Fattening of America

Notes from the Squalor Zone  By Bill Vaughn

Newspaper News. The High Country News, which publishes books, a terrific newsmagazine and a website, has been the best source of writing about environmental and political issues affecting the Rockies and the Northern Plains for years. Now the publishers are asking for help. “Redirect some of your tax dollars away from our squabbling government and put it into the hands of hardworking journalists,” the News pleads, by making donations to the High Country News Research Fund.

So instead of wasting your donation to one of those phony charities that will eat up your money paying “administrative costs,” why not get a tax deduction and something good to read at the same time? You’ll be helping fund journalists such as Brad Tyer, who’s writing a book about the removal of Missoula County’s odious Milltown dam (and whose left-handed forehand on the tennis court we have so far found impossible to overcome). (12/28/2011)

More Newspaper News. Disgruntled staffers the New York Times are pissed at management because of almost everything, not the least of which are issues of pension, contract, pay, layoff, buyouts, you name it. Over the last week more than 270 current and former employees have signed a letter expressing their “profound dismay” with company decisions (of course, these pussies haven’t gone out on strike. But still).

Here at Dark Acres we have minor first-hand experience with the disarray at the Times. Today, they emailed us and asked us to renew our subscription to the Sunday paper (we cancalled this ten years ago because our neighbors were stealing the bulky monster from our mailbox, located far from the house on a country lane). Then, an hour later the Times emailed us back: “You may have received an e-mail today from The New York Times with the subject line Important information regarding your subscription. This e-mail was sent by us in error. Please disregard the message. We apologize for any confusion this may have caused." (12/28/2011)

Extortion. Even before the .xxx domains went on sale from vendors such as namecheap, colleges scrambled to buy them up in a special offering in order to block their use as porn sites that might sully the good name of the institution.

Take kansas.xxx, for example, or kunurses.xxx. Indiana University spokesman Mark Land said the school spent $2,200 to buy hoosiers.xxx and 10 other such domains. Other Indiana schools took the same step, including Purdue University and Ball State University.

But apparently not the University of Montana. If you want to put smut online you can still buy montanagirls.xxx, grizzlygirls.xxx, universityofmontana.xxx, and blowmontana.xxx, to name a few. (12/12/2011)

Flame-out. For years after we moved to Dark Acres the silence in our sleepy backwater was broken only by the occasional duck hunter or those guys who fly around in helicopters taking pictures they sell to landowners who like to see their places from the air.

But one lazy summer day a couple of years ago the shit hit the fan. The sudden bedlam blaring from the Clark Fork River sounded like someone had opened a massive go-cart track. But when we ran down our path to investigate, we discovered that the racket was coming from two jerks on jet-skis, churning the water, terrifying the wildlife, ruining the day for our rural neighborhood and for the gangs of people floating the river on inner tubes.

As that summer wore on the noise grew louder. And last summer it got even worse. I began to visualize a scenario involving a 200-yard length of steel cable that had been washed onto Radish Island by one of the floods; a scenario involving one end of the cable bolted to a cottonwood on the island, and the other end disappearing into a juniper thicket on shore where, concealed in the brush, is me.

But thanks to the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks Department extreme responses won’t be necessary. That’s because the state, bowing to overwhelming public disgust with jet skis, has ordered them banned from our stretch of gurgly, sparkly river. (12/5/2011)

Spinners. Reporting a business story about a newspaper, in which the reporter limits her sources to publishers and other suits, is like letting Herman Cain cover women’s issues. For example, on Dec. 2, the Missoula, Montana Missoulian reported that its parent corporation, Lee Enterprises, would be entering a “voluntary, prepackaged Chapter 11 bankruptcy process.”

According to Mary Junck, Lee's chief executive, “the process will simply provide a favorable legal framework for implementing the pre-negotiated refinancing on an expedited basis while business continues as usual with no impact on employees, vendors and customers." According to Missoulian publisher Jim McGowan, Lee’s scheme is “a positive outcome for the paper, and will allow us to move forward, business as usual, to deliver top-quality news and advertising products for many years to come."

This anemic, half-baked squib sez nothing about why Lee is headed to bankruptcy court. In fact, the corporation  is wallowing in debt. Some of this $875 million burden was caused by Lee’s decision in 2005 to pay $138 million for the Pulitzer chain of newspapers, whose flagship is the venerable and venerated St. Louis Post-Dispatch. (Today’s equivalent in stupidity would be buying stock in Netflix.)

But wait, Lee gets dumber. Under the scheme the corporation will not relieve itself of any debt, and it must pay a higher interest rate to all of its lenders. That is, 9.2 percent, on the new financing, as opposed to the 5.1 percent rate it’s paying now, in exchange for moving the maturity of its ill-advised loans from April of next year to 2015 and beyond. This is like me getting a high-interest credit card to pay off a low-interest card. How will this absurd business plan affect the quality of reporting at the Missoulian?

Financial analysts said the higher interest rate, producing higher debt payments, will put even more pressure on Lee if its money stream continues to fall after it exits bankruptcy. That's because Lee's lenders get to eat at the trough before the slop is shared with anyone else. That means less money to pay reporters and their expense accounts. One sort of happy result, however—the Missoulian's business coverage can't get any worse. (12/4/2011)

Hicks Nix Sticks Pix
But the Civic Center is still the best place in Montana to see a film,
for all kinds of reasons. By Bill Vaughn

AS THE HOUSE LIGHTS FADED the anticipation grew. But midway through the film the mood in the audience began to shift from uneasiness and discomfort to embarrassment. Oh, it wasn’t the acting. The stars, Ryan Gosling and David Morse, turned in searing, nuanced performances. Nor was it the direction or the production values. And it certainly wasn’t the sets. After all, these Montana farmers and ranchers were foregathered here in 2002 at the old Civic Center in downtown Great Falls, whose elegant theatre hadn’t shown a film in years, to watch the world premier of The Slaughter Rule because this coming-of-age story had been shot in their own back yards, and they’d heard it was an homage to the true grit it takes to wrest a living from these parched and windy prairies. 

The story begins when Roy, an alienated teen played by Gosling, gets cut from his high school football team soon after the father he hasn’t seen in years dies. This isn’t regular eleven-man football, but the smash-mouth, six-man variety played with brutal abandon by the little Class C schools across rural Montana. Enter Gideon, a loner who ekes out a meager living hawking newspapers and singing in redneck dives, who’s recruiting players for his independent football squad. Roy joins the Renegades, and he and Gideon strike up a nervous friendship. When Gid's eager interest in Roy begins to lend credence to the rumors that Gid is a homosexual, Roy starts to wonder why he was asked to join the team.

While the proverbial seven percent of backwater Montana is as Dorothy as any big city leather bar, this is still not the sort of love that can speak its name, at least not on a small-town football field nor to a crowd of Republican Christians. It wasn’t so much the homosexual undercurrents of the film that bothered the audience—as long as the queers keep to themselves in San Francisco and New York, it’s pretty much live and let live. But like Brokeback Mountain, The Slaughter Rule suggests that what is perceived as an urban disease may have crept into God’s Country, as well, and will spread if it’s talked about because it’s a choice, after all, the reasoning goes, not a command.

At the reception afterwards I joined a group of cattlemen I knew. Finally, one cowboy looked at his brother-in-law. “What in the bejeezus was that?” he said. Everyone laughed in relief.

Standing there, I felt like a kid again. Oh, not because of the film, which I liked, and admired in part because it made mainstream people uncomfortable, and therefore catered to my juvenile need to see the squares squirm (although how hip can a middle-aged white guy with a college degree, a wife of thirty years and an IRA claim to be?). In fact, I was glowing with pleasure simply because I was back in the Civic Center again, site of many of the joys of my motherless childhood, half a century after my last visit. [read more]

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Notes from the Squalor Zone  By Bill Vaughn

Slip-Slidin Away. The big day has finally arrived. Well, yes, the Griz-Cat game, but also the first day the ice on the Mabel has been thick enough to support our weight. So at halftime we threw on our skates and skate guards and walked crab-like down the hill to our beloved swamp, named after my grandmother, who was a public-health nurse. The surface wasn't perfect because some animals had crossed it and left behind their presence by melting the shape of their claws and hooves in the ice. But it was good enough. After banging around the puck and then sprinting a dozen quarter-mile laps, we headed back to the house, ready to take on another winter. (11/19/2011)

Subdivide This. The Missoula County Planning Board did the right thing when it decided Nov. 15 to advise the County Commissioners to rule against a proposed 23-lot, 116-acre subdivision north of Lolo. Voting 6-0, the Board said developer Ken Allen’s ludicrous scheme would cover prime farm land and wildlife habitat with houses—the last thing Missoula County needs right now. Allen, you probably remember, asked the Commissioners to approve his 2007 scheme to dig a gravel pit and fabricate asphalt on the very same property. After the troika bowed to public pressure and said nunh-unh, Allen sued all the way to the Montana Supreme Court, which ruled against him in 2009. Boo-hoo.

[On Dec. 7 the Commissioners slapped down the Planning Board and voted 3-0 to approve this badly planned subdivision. Note to self: Commissioner Jean Curtiss is up for re-election next November. 12/8/2011)

Too bad the current Planning Board wasn’t around a couple years ago when the estate of departed veterinarian Earl Pruyn was awarded subdivision permit for 15 houses to be built on a 75-acre parcel in Dark Acres that has always been a grain field or a grazing pasture. Moreover, the land sits squarely in the flood plain of the Clark Fork River. In fact, it sits on a relief channel the river used during flooding in 1997, and will surely use again, giving the cliche “A River Runs Through It” new meaning.

During “discussion” of the scheme at a meeting of the Commissioners, representatives from the Office of Planning and Grants were embarrassed when aerial photographs of the land were presented by a neighbor (me) that clearly show flood water rushing through what the developer decided to call “Blue Heron Estates” (these jerks like to name their odious subdevelopments after the wildlife they displace.) The water breached the county road, and washed a portion of it into the river. Gee, a fine place to raise your family. But in the high water months of May and June just be sure you don’t let the kiddies stray too far from the playpen. (11/18/2011)

And the winner is . . .  Our pal, Deirdre McNamer, who teaches fiction at the University of Montana, will be presenting the fiction prize at the National Book Awards dinner in New York City on Nov. 16. For the first time, the awards gala will be podcast live from New York on www.nationalbook.org at 6 p.m. Mountain Time. McNamer was tapped for this honor because of her four acclaimed novels and because she headed the panel that selected the list of what she and her fellow judges decided were the best five works of fiction published in the U.S. in 2011. John Lithgow will host the event. (11/15/2011)

Pack a lunch. We love Restaurant Impossible, the reality show that airs on The Food Network, because week after week it confirms our belief that the worst places in America to eat are the restaurants. People who’ve driven their businesses into the ground with bad food, bad service, bad money management, bad decor, or all four are saved by Robert Irvine, former sailor in the Royal Navy who was a White House cook and the executive chef for Donald Trump’s Taj Mahal Resort and Caesar’s in Atlantic City. Chef Robert charges into these odious dives, furiously changing menus, re-educating staffs, imposing budgets, launching marketing schemes and remodeling, all in 48 hours on a $10,000 shoestring.

Irvine’s most recent challenge was McShane’s Restaurant and Pub in Syracuse, New York. This dump had been on the verge of bankruptcy not just because there was only one item on the menu that was edible, the place was actually a health hazard reeking of mildew, rot, garbage and pools of yellow slime infected with bacteria. We wondered why the Onondaga County health department hadn’t shut it down, so we wrote them. When and if we hear back we’ll pass along their response. (11/11/2011)

Pretender. Montana Senator Max Baucus was named to the Debt Reduction Committee because he’s a spayed cat who’s not likely to ruffle the feathers of the many industries that enabled him to earn the distinction as the Senator who has taken more campaign money from vested interests than any of his colleagues except former Majority Leader Bill Frist. So we had to laugh when we got an email from Max advocating the swift conclusion of the war in Afghanistan as a cost-cutting measure.

This is the same land war in Asia Baucus voted to fund in 2008. While we believe U.S. involvement should cease immediately, we assume Max knows that the Pentagon isn’t really planning to pull its forces out of the Muslim World even if it leaves Afghanistan. According to the Oct. 30 New York Times, the U.S. military is seeking an increased ground and air presence in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Oman, and more warships patrolling the Persian Gulf to shore up our crumbling
empire. (10/30/2011)

Gov, can you spare a dime? According to the U.S. Census, three of the top ten poorest cities in America are in Texas—Laredo, McAllen and Brownsville. And yet Texas Governor Rick Perry continues to flaunt his alleged economic "plans" to bring America out of the recession. To us, this is further evidence that the due diligence in the the selection process for candidates in the beleaguered Republican Party has taken as its model the signing of contestants on the old Gong Show—fun people, but clowns at heart. (10/24/2011)

Class Actions. Occupy Wall Street is an evolving movement whose focus, we think, should be a general strike of union and non-union workers maintained until Congress:
1. Nationalizes all banks that do business across state lines
2. Nationalizes all utilities doing business across state lines and puts local community councils in charge of administering their operation
3. Prevents the wealthy from parking their money offshore, and  
4. Rewrites the tax code and the tariff system to bring manufacturing and service jobs back to the U.S. from overseas, China and India especially

While we wait for these developments we’re gleefully spending the money we’ve received so far as part of the classes filing suits against a couple of big banks. We got a settlement check from the odious Bank of America because the mortgage company BOA bought, Countrywide, allowed its security to erode to the point that an employee hacked into accounts and sold information valuable to identity thieves. And we’re awaiting another check from Chase after they caved on charges of false advertising in the matter of credit card offers, and agreed to pay recipients of these offers some go-away money. While these are slaps-on-the-wrist, we think they signal a larger consumer war looming against the banking industry.  High time. (10/23/2011)

Job Shortage By Bill Vaughn
Are there any Republicans not running for Governor of Montana?

THE FLURRY of Gopers announcing their campaigns for Governor of Montana reminds us of those mini-cars that pull into the center ring of a circus and disgorge more Bozos than can realistically fit in the car. Still, a couple of these clowns have a good shot at moving into the mansion. For example, Rick Hill is a former Congressman from Montana who served during an era when not every member of his party was a total lunatic-fringe, Jesus-humping asshole.

The last four Bozos out of the car, however, have no chance of winning. The most recent of these, Jim Lynch, is a carpetbagger from Washington State who was fired in August by Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer after The Gov learned that the agency Lynch headed, the Department of Transportation, had hired Lynch's daughter. However, nepotism wasn't the real reason Lynch was canned. In July, a District Court judge ruled that Lynch's ludicrously flawed assessment of Exxon Mobile’s plan to move an entire refinery piece by piece through Montana to Canada over winding, two-lane blacktops—instead of the interstate, which was designed to accommodate the Defense Department by facilitating the transportation of massive loads—violated the Montana Environmental Policy Act.

Maybe it was Lynch’s love of asphalt that compelled him to greenlight the oil giant's scheme. In the early oughts Lynch worked as a “policy adviser” for Old Castle Materials, a leading U.S. purveyor of asphalt. While fellow pavers such as the Montana Contractors Association will do doubt pour money into Lynch’s campaign, he’s not going to get a lot of support from the largest metropolitan area in Montana, Missoula-Ravalli Counties. It was the Missoula County Commissioners, in fact, who led the fight against Exxon Mobile and the corruption at Transportation. (10/15/2011)

Robert T. Fanning, Jr., is a carpetbagger from Illinois who moved to Montana because he enjoys shooting animals. Fanning is the retired sole shareholder, director and head honcho of M.H. Detrick Company, which until it filed for bankruptcy in 1998 was a leading supplier of linings and tiles used to insulate industrial furnaces, ovens and boiler pipes. Fanning’s company went belly-up after it was sued by thousands of people exposed to the high levels of asbestos in the company’s products. Asbestos, as people in Libby, Montana know all too well, has been proven to cause mesothelioma, a rare and virulent form of cancer.

While Fanning’s launch Oct. 3 vented the usual right-wing gas about the evils of the Federal government and the need for Montana to create jobs by exploiting its natural resources, his real agenda has something to do with gutting the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks because “Marxist Progressives” hell-bent on reviving the wolf population are controlling its policies. The reason Fanning doesn’t like wolves is because they sometimes kill and eat the elk he likes to kill and eat.

Whatever, Fanning does have some admirers. Certain Tea Baggers like him because he attended a lecture about the alleged socialist agendaf the United Nations, and because he subscribes to the Old Testament nonsense that God wants man to have “dominion” over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, the creeping things that creep on the earth, etcetera.

Like a used car salesman who runs for mayor in order to advertise his junkers, Fanning’s campaign for the governor’s mansion seems to be less about winning and more about peddling reactionary dogmas that are extreme even by Montana standards. Or maybe he figures the campaign will help him unload the white elephant of a hobby ranchhe owns near Pray, Montana (these 21 horsey acres can be yours for only $750,000!). (10/4/2011)

Drew Turiano is a carpetbagger from New York who was communications director for the failed U.S. Senate campaign of Michael Lange, former Montana House Majority Leader who embarrassed the Treasure State with a potty-mouthed tirade against Governor Brian Schweitzer that went viral on YouTube.

Here’s what Turiano says about his “politics”:  “I’m anti-illegal-immigration. I’m 100 percent pro-life. I believe the state should have the right to nullify federal laws. We should be able to nullify those federal laws that have banned school prayer and the Ten Commandments and the Bible in our schools. I think we should bring those things back into our schools.”

We think that instead of wasting their class time with Hey-zoos we ought to teach our kids how to read. Maybe if Turiano had spent a little more time with books he wouldn’t have written George Buchanan Enters the Wormhole, a self-published sci-fi “novel” you can read on your Kindle for 99 cents. Filled with “plasma shields” and robots and dinosaurs, oh my, and written with a clumsy and deadening Leave It To Beaver ernestness, this is the sort of drivel I stopped reading when I discovered Ray Bradbury and Robert Heinlein when I was ten years old. (10/7/2011)

Some old men like to write their memoirs, or traipse around in their RVs. Helena native Neil Livingstone III decided to write his memoirs, traipse around in his RV and run for governor of Montana. Although a radical right-wing Republican, Livingstone is hardly one of those Hooterville wingnuts that infests the Tea Party and the GOP in Montana; he’s extremely well-educated, the author of nine books, and semi-famous from his numerous appearances on the tube discussing terrorism, on which he’s considered by some to be an authority.

However, one of the many problems facing him in the campaign for the governor’s mansion is the fact that he hasn’t lived in Montana for three decades and doesn’t know squat about our land of oro y plata. He spent much of that time in the Beltway, working with Oliver North, selling security advice to war profiteers exploiting the U.S.-sponsored chaos of Iraq, and getting sued for allegedly stealing clients from a consulting firm he worked for in order to start his own. “Think of us as a private CIA and Defense Department available to address your most intractable problems and difficult challenges,” is the shadowy language he used to pitch his new enterprise, Executive Action, which was purposely named for the CIA’s fun phrase meaning assassination.

One of Livingstone’s “ideas” for Montana is to eliminate the tax on business equipment. This is hardly new; it comes up every two years at the Legislature. And every two years the measure is defeated. Although you’d think that this tax would finally have been killed during the 61st session concluded last spring, dominated as it was by Gopers whose mantra was Job! Jobs! Gobsa Jobs!, House Bill 325 went out with a whimper, tabled in committee and allowed to die.

Jim Standaert, a legislative fiscal analyst, was quoted by reporter Charles Johnson to the effect that removing the business equipment tax would shift property tax burdens to other types of property. Property tax bills for homeowners would rise by 4.1 percent, small businesses would have to pay 9.7 percent more, utilities pay 7.8 percent more and agricultural and timber businesses 9.1 percent more.

Livingstone should have done his due diligence on the matter of tax burdens in Montana, but obviously didn’t, apparently figuring people here are too stupid to understand their own financial matters and would cream their jeans for a guy who promises to lift the weight of government from their shoulders.

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IN 2002 I met with James Welch at his home in Missoula’s Rattlesnake Valley to ask him about the cultural and spiritual aspects of his debut novel, Winter in the Blood. What I was looking for was material for an essay I would publish in Outside magazine about places on the landscape the tribes of the Northern Plains consider sacred. Less than a year later Welch would be dead, at the age of 62, from lung cancer. His funny and depressing novel is being produced as a movie by those other filmmaker brothers, Alex and Andrew Smith, and is slated for release in 2012.

Vaughn: Jim, why didn’t you give the narrator a name?
Welch: I didn’t know how to write a novel, first of all. I was writing the story, and getting involved in the story, and I had this guy and he had a past and he was meeting people and so on. It didn’t occur to me until I was probably about
30 pages into it that he didn’t have a name. And then I thought, well, maybe like with the old Indians he’d have to earn his name. He’d have to do something. I guess I decided to keep him nameless when he pulls the cow out of the slough. Even though it’s a pretty failed attempt at least he does something positive. But by then I figured it was way too late in the book to give him a name. It would have been very obtrusive to suddenly start calling him, say, Jack.
Vaughn:  In your own mind did you ever give him a name?
Welch: No. I never did.
Vaughn:  Did you intend this passage to describe the psyche of your nameless narrator, or Indian people in general. “ . . . the distance I felt came not from country or people; it came from within me. I was as distant from myself as a hawk from the moon.”
Welch: I don’t know if I meant it for the whole Indian culture. There were then and still are traditional Indians. But there are also a lot of Indian people who are kind of lost. This was written thirty years ago at a time when younger Indians were starting to think about their heritage. There was a whole reservation period before this when we were encouraged to forget our culture. I think a lot of young people just floundered. They turned to booze, and just wandered around trying to find something.
Vaughn: “Again, I felt that helplessness of being in a world of stalking white men. But those Indians down at Gable’s were no bargain either. I was a stranger to both and both had beaten me.” Do you think this also describes the reservation Indian of 30 years ago?
Welch: There were a lot of young people who had a hard time identifying with anybody. They felt alone. I remember reading a statistic in a newspaper about
[read more]

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Notes from the Squalor Zone  By Bill Vaughn

Stop the Rain. It was only a matter of time before people finally got fed up enough with financiers and their bought-and-paid-for politician whores, fed up enough to take to the streets. It's not just that America's financial institutions colluded with Washington party dolls like Montana Senator Max Baucus in bringing about the Great “Recession.” Now they're trying to extract even more profit from the the working class and what's left of Middle America. An event/protest/demonstration/flash is scheduled in Missoula Oct. 8 at 10 a.m. at the Farmers Market in solidarity with the burgeoning crowds occupying Wall Street. To learn more go to the Missoula website of these righteous malcontents. And if you feel like venting at a banker there's no one more qualified to hear your complaints than House District 100 Representative "Champ" Edmunds, an odious Bible-humping mortgage banker for Wells Fargo in Missoula. Because Edmunds claims he specializes in mortgages for veterans we're eager to see the results of a whistleblower lawsuit brought Oct. 4 against Wells Fargo and other banks alleging that they charged veterans illegal fees in the refinancing of their mortgages. Anyway, here's the guy's email: champ.edmunds@wellsfargo.com. (10/6/2011)

Click and Switch. Not. Cellular One has been sending out humongous postcards offering potential cell phone customers six months of free service if they switch from AT&T or some other equally dreadful company. The truth is, the six free months will be parcelled out over the course of 30 months, one free month for every six months of service, after you sign a binding 30-month contract. Not much of a deal, especially when you have to wait a couple of hours in one of their stores, and then spend even more time transferring the apps, phone numbers, address books and whatnots from your current phone to the Android phone the company will give you, claiming this little piece of junk is a $250 value. (The postcards claim you can make the switch through Cellular One's website, but we couldn't find any way to do this.) And extra especially because you're stuck with Cellular One like a hapless bride in an arranged marriage. (9/23/2011)

Dead Nazi. LeRoy Schweitzer, 73, the former leader of the Montana Freemen, died September 20 in his cell at the Supermax prison in Florence, Colorado, according to the Huffington Post. An autopsy is scheduled to determine the cause of death.

Schweitzer, a self-styled “Christian Patriot,” was serving a 22-year sentence for conspiracy to commit bank robbery, wire fraud, failure to file tax returns and fugitive possession of a firearm in connection with his efforts to overthrow the Federal government, or at least the low-tech shoebox government of Montana.

As leader of the ludicrous Montana Freemen, a far-right collection of Caucasian wing-nuts, Schweitzer became infamous in the late 1970s for white supremacist hate propoganda. Acccording to the Anti Defamation League “the Freemen created phony money using complicated schemes involving the filing of liens worth millions of dollars against various Montana property owners or the U.S. or Montana governments. Until they were found invalid, bank computers might list these liens as assets. This in turn created a window during which banks might transfer money against these assets. So Freemen would deposit fake money orders in other banks, to be drawn upon the bank listing the lien.”

The Washington Post estimates that Freemen, under the guidance of Schweitzer, were responsible for the distribution of at least $20 million in bogus money orders from the 1970s through to 1996. Schweitzer’s pokey time began in 1996 after a standoff with the FBI on the Freemen compound called “Justus Township” near Jordon in impossibly isolated Garfield County.

Schweitzer’s passage saves taxpayers money, although the Federal government he hated will use the savings to squander on one war or another. (9/20/2011)

Broke. According the U.S. Census, Montana is the sixth poorest state in the union in terms of median income. While 13.4 percent of our citizens live in poverty (24th highest), 16.3 percent of us can’t afford health insurance (16th highest) 7.7 percent are unemployed (18th lowest, due to the fact that many Montanans are self-employed farmers and ranchers), workers in the land of oro y plata make just over $42,000 a year.

That sucks big time, especially when compared to New Hampshire, whose median income leads the nation at more than $66,000 and whose unemployment rate is only 5.2 percent. And it double-sucks because the cost of living in Montana is no bargain when the high price of food is factored into the high cost of housing and utilities. Of the 10 poorest states in the U.S. Montana is the only one that’s not in Dixie, y’all. The western states of Colorado and Utah rank are among the richest 10 states in America.

These figures put a spotlight on the reactionary morons who voted Republicans such as House District 100’s “Champ” Edmunds into dominant control of both houses of the Montana legislature last November because they promised to “help” the state’s economy. As it turned out, Goper-sponsored legislation did nothing more than strip social programs, resulting, for example, in the fact that 20 percent of Montana’s children now live in poverty. (9/16/2011)

Upward Mobility. While millions of Americans can’t find work some of us get to pick and choose our jobs. Take Jonathan Weber, for example. A talented journalist, Weber was the editor of the influential but low-circulation magazine Industry Standard, a three-year flash-in-the pan that was called the Bible of the internet economy; it sold more ad pages in 2000 than any other magazine in America. A book was written about the publication, Starving to Death on $200 Million: The Short, Absurd Life of The Industry Standard. Weber went on to found New West, a Missoula-based online magazine whose earnestness borders on tedium. Weber left New West a couple of years ago to edit the non-profit online journal The Bay Citizen, in San Francisco. Less than a year later Weber, according to a corporate press release, has accepted the position of West Coast bureau chief for the international wire service, Reuters.

I like Jonathon and wish him the best. When he edited New West he actually paid me $400 for an essay about the video game, Sim City 4, which I wrote as a parody of Missoula mayor John Engen. (9/12/2011)

More fun with scams. Anyone using email has received a request from certain Nigerian gentlemen to help them deposit significant overseas funds in a U.S. bank, that is, your bank. But, of course, the gentlemen will need your account information. And most of have been surprised to receive a message from a distant relative about the theft of their luggage and passport, stranding the hapless traveler in some foreign port until family members can wire money.

Comes now a new scam, one targeted to horse people. The following note is obviously the bait; we’re waiting to hear what the switch might be:

"Hello. Good day and how are you doing, i am Samuel Montel, i would like to make an inquiry about your services, i would like to know if you can train my Horse, i just bought (Quarter Horse Mare) and i would like it to be trained for me for at least 2 month. the horse as never gone through any form of training since birth. so just bought this Horse for my personal use. i have the form of training i would love the Horse to go through.and also i would like to know the charges for 1 month for the training

Human Training
Ground Training
Basic Training

Advise which of these you do
 
Western Discipline Training
English Discipline Training.

I want you to know that i would be making your full payment,and the payment will be via cashiers check.so i would want you to know that i will the horse is currently with my Brother.i will be going Offshore soon,so i want everything taken care of before i leave.email me with your total cost for one month for any of the training you offer.and as soon as that is done i will have a shipping company deliver the horse at your location to start training as soon as possible

Expecting to read from you

Thank you
Best Regards
Samuel Montel"   (9/8/2011)

Lucky Charms. Because the denizens of Dark Acres are only a couple generations removed from Ireland (County Waterford and County Clare), we grow oats. Oh, not for food—although our small harvest provides the horses with a few meals—but for luck. While we consider Christianity a fever dream filled with grotesque delusions, we believe the unseen forces that compelled our pagan ancestors are still at large in the Gaelic world, tied up in certain plants and animals that have always lived among the Irish. That’s why we like to adorn the hawthorns growing on the banks of our swamps with dollar bills and colored ribbons. The largest Black Hawthorn in Montana grows a stone’s throw from our back door. Named Maeva, after the Irish warrior queen, she’s decorated with so many baubles she looks like a Christmas tree in the house of a witch.   (8/31/2011)




East Coast People Are Wussers. Really. Get over it. Stay inside. Watch the championship game of the Little League World Series. Have a drink. Or two. Make love. Sleep late. Life is short. Grow up. Enjoy. My town, Missoula, has been burning for days and no one on your side of the Republic knows squat about it. And even if you did, you wouldn't care because it’s not about you. (8/26/2011)

What Goes Around. During the middle of a work day we happened to switch from the Food Network to Comedy Central and came upon that 1986 classic, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off just as Ferris, Sloan and Cameron glance out from their cab to see Ferris’ father in the cab next door. Bueller the Senior is reading the Chicago Sun-Times, which, as we remember, carries a piece below the fold headlined “Community Rallies Around Sick Boy.” The boy, of course, is Ferris, who’s not sick at all, but has decided to take a Day Off. What we’d forgotten—or, more probably, never registered, was the headline above the fold: “Riots Flare in Britain.”    (8/16/2011)

Foxes and Henhouses. Harry Reid’s appointment of senior Montana Senator Max Baucus to the Gang of Twelve “Supercongress” debt-reduction committee comes as no surprise. Baucus is serving his last term, hasn’t distinguished himself as a lawmaker in any way, and has close ties to the engines of capital; that is, since 2005 Baucus has taken 5.2 million dollars in campaign contribuitions from the finance, insurance and real estate industries.

Attempted Smish. During the dog days of summer some Montana banks are experiencing an embarrassing siege of thieves using the good names of these financial institutions to attempt the extraction of information about the accounts of people who have debit cards.

The scam is called “smishing.” Similar to phishing, smishing uses cell phone text messages to deliver the “bait” to get you to divulge your personal information. The “hook” (the method used to actually “capture" your information) in the text message may be a web site URL, however it has become more common to see a phone number that connects to an automated voice response system.

We got one of these text messages on August 2 that informed us our “card” had been “deactivated” and to “activate” it we would have to call a number at First Montana Bank. We don’t have an account at First Montana Bank, much less credit or debit cards, and alerted them to the scam. This was the bank’s reply: “Good Morning Mr. Vaughn, we apologize for the inconvenience. This is a type of scam called ‘smishing,’ a takeoff of SMS text messaging and phishing, whereby thieves attempt to gain debit card information. Thank you for alerting us.”

Molasses. Montana is ranked 4th worst in the nation in terms of the speed its internet providers supply customers with the Web. This is according to Pando Networds, an outfit that specializes in cloud-based media delivery.

Pando said the fastest state was Rhode Island, at an average of 894 KBps,which was almost three times faster than the slowest state, Idaho, which had a dismal rate of 318KBps. Montana's average download speed was an abysmal 352 KBps, and its average connection completion rate was only 82 percent. This poor service is one of the reasons high-tech companies aren’t flocking to Montana.

At Dark Acres, our relationship with our internet service provider has been rocky at best. Located in Missoula, the company’s wireless internet service has been down at least six times in the last two years, most recently on July 28, and its speed varies wildly from slow to slower on any given day. One of these outages lasted for 72 hours, causing us to send them an invoice for lost revenue, which the company reluctantly paid. If you email us we’ll tell you who they are.

Rainy Days and Mondays. On August 1 readers in western Montana clicking to the online version of the Missoulian newspaper were jolted by the announcement that the website had thrown up a paywall. What this means is that if you want to read more than 20 news stories a month you have to pay $2 monthly if you already subscribe to the inky version, and $5 per month if you don’t.

It was like your fuck buddy suddenly announcing that you can no longer get any till you say “I love you.”

The other Lee Enterprise dailies in Montana made their announcements about their “metered” content plan on Sunday, at least giving readers a fitful night to make up their minds about whether to pay for something that has always been free.

Lee’s move follows the lead of the New York Times, which threw up its paywall in April to a chorus of boos from readers and media pundits who said the Gray Lady would never reach its goal of signing up 300,000 digital subscribers by the end of 2011. As of last week, however, the Times claims it had already signed up 224,000 online subscribers who pay $15 a month to read the rag on their smartphones, or $35 a month to get all the news that’s fit to print on any and all devices, including online.

Of course, there are several end runs available to get around these sorts of flimsy paywalls. If you want to do a little light browsing you can easily find them on the Web.

We tested the paywall at the Missoulian by clicking on a hundred news stories, and at no time did any digital cop say “Nunh-unh.”
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