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Show 477 fire "as long as their own fences and buildings were not threatened." They would never fight a corporation as long as their own interests were not threatened. Even in Congress a sizable chunk of gold, carefully concealed, will outtalk and outfight all the nation on a subject like forestry, well smothered in ignorance, and in which the money interests of only a few are conspicuously involved. Muir was coming to know this truth more and more, as he paradoxically relied heavily on Harriman's influence when it came to affairs in Yosemite. If money could talk for the Forest Reserves, Muir would have been happy to hear it speak. On a lower and subtler moral level, Muir suggested that the real culprit was the American attitude that the best work was the easiest, quickest way to money, where "you're your own boss, and the whole thing's fun." The shake-maker who used ten or twenty feet of a massive sugar pine was at one with the happy fellows who killed ducks, doves, quail, deer, bears, but not grizzly; "they want a cannon to kill em." Shoot 'em, tie 'em, and send 'em to San Francisco, where the poets could eat 'em without a qualm. That, Muir thought, represented an American parody of individual initiative. Living off the land was an odious enterprise, but it was American as hell. "They buy no land, pay no taxes, dwell in a paradise with no forbidding angel either from Washington or from heaven." This had always been an American Dream. Why even today, in 1981, we have just elected a President |