Cowboy Confessional

I want to plug a place that earned a permanent spot in my cynical old heart.  In this wicked and woeful world, finding people with good hearts, who care deeply and are passionate about life, they are rare finds.  This past week I may have struck the mother lode.

Such is the nature of the Wild Horse Sanctuary, wedged between Redding California and Mount Lassen.  This 5,000 acre plot of Paradise is dedicated to letting wild horses stay wild.  The Sanctuary is a non-profit organization and one still run by founder Dianne Nelson, with help from many volunteers and Diane’s homespun husband Ted. 

The sanctuary was originally started when the Bureau of Land Management wanted to kill 80 wild horses roaming on public lands — such is the blind nature of government.  In a utopian fit of disgust rivaled only by Kinky Friedman’s Animal Resuce Ranch, the founders made a life-altering decision, for themselves and the 80 horses, and instantly established the sanctuary. The bands of horses have thrived, bred, and some are culled for adoption.  I spent two days communing with a paint named Cloud, who was born wild but now works as a trail horse.

(Truth be told, Cloud pretty much volunteered for domestic duty.  See, Cloud is part pig, eating anything he can wrap his lips around.  After seeing that stable nags had their breakfast delivered every morning, he decided being a kept horse was a damn good option).

These good folk can use your help, and they have a variety of needs, from cash to halters to a new computer.  You can volunteer time and labor, or even just buy some merchandise.  And if you fancy getting close to the horses, then sign-up for an overnight trail ride (the fees help keep the sanctuary afloat).

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A long standing theory of mine is that the more individualistic are the members of a political party, the less likely they will take elected office and keep controlling majorities.

The theory is pretty simple:  Every organization must have a consistent mission, and be able to communicate with the consumers of their product.  This includes corporations, non-profits, and yes, political parties.  Whenever a single member of an organization varies from the core product, message, or brand, the entire organization suffers.

Intellectually speaking, Democrats are fish.  They are efficient at reading the positions of other members, creating a mental pack mentality, and thus enjoy the power that a mass of beings moving in unison affords.  But like shad, if their leader(s) guide them into shark infested waters, there will be fewer fish and fatter sharks.

This is in part what happened to the Democrats while Bill “I Feel Your …” Clinton was in office.  When he screwed up by straying (either off campaign promises or off one intern and onto another) the “school of fish” mentality caused fellow Dems to defend his indefensible actions.  The entire party then carried his particular stench, and the voters decided eating beef was better.

Republicans are more like cows.  Sure you can herd them, but it is hard work, they fight you all the way, and then scream loudly when you press the branding iron into their hides.  They have just enough loyalty for the species to survive, but will flee another Republican like a cow flees when a wild bore runs and guts another bovine.  Only once in a while does a bull (think Newt or the Gipper) come onto the Republican pasture and keep the herd bunched. 

If you need evidence of this, just listen to talk radio.  George Bush never got a lot of support from conservative commentators.  They either held their noses and their tongues, or they started ripping flesh from Bush’s hide on the first day.  Bush, being a Big Government kinda fellow (might be a typical Texas-Super-Size-Everything hangover) lost them early on.  Except for Cindy Sheehan, the Democrats have far fewer mavericks — they are swimming along quite nicely (which is what animals with brains the size of fingernails do).

Libertarians are lone wolves.  If there is a larger and more diverse group of individualistic ideologues than the Libertarians, then keep them caged.  Libertarians lose elections in part because they rarely have a cohesive and well explained message (their message makes perfect sense to those who study constitutional history and law, have deep philosophical debates on the meaning and mechanisms of free enterprise, and spend to much time reading Ayn Rand — in short, nerd wonks). Libertarians can’t communicate well among themselves much less the voting public, who don’t even know what a libertarian or a Libertarian are.

Get five Democrats into a room, and you’ll get one opinion.  Get five Republicans into a room, and you get 2-3 opinions and a hooker if one of their senators came along.  Get five Libertarians in a room together, and you’ll get exactly five different opinions and a long explanation about each.

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Who says politics isn’t entertaining?

Normally one has to look to Republicans for self destructive behavior.  Be it the pedophile-in-training Mark Foley (who was the actual reason for massive Republican defeats in the 2006 election cycle), or the happy hooker hiring Republican Senator David Vitter (who must have adopted a prostitute or two to make them part of his family values), the GOP knows how to politically zip themselves in their own fly (ladies, that metaphor may be foreign to you, but trust me on this — it ain’t pretty). 

Republicans — through having slightly more individuality than the Democrats — know better than most anyone how to rescue defeat from the jaws of victory.  At least they seem to be getting laid more.  Of course all a man has to do to cure his sex drive is to look upon Hillary Clinton or Nancy Pelosi.

Which in a sloppy segue brings me to Cindy Sheehan, a women for whom not even beer goggles offer a chance for romance.  Today she displayed an almost Republican trait, aiming her irrational torpedoes straight at her own party.  Divide a group and you divide their mission and message.  Sheehan is doing both.

Announcing that she will run against the speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, for the latter’s unwillingness to defund the Iraq war and file articles of impeachment against George Bush (we’ll ignore for the moment that there are no grounds for impeachment, which explains why D.C. Dem have taken it off the table).  Despite almost no chance of winning, Sheehan will receive oodles of media coverage, force Pelosi to spend time and effort in self-defense, and has already created tactical problems.  When Pelosi speaks publicly, there are Sheehanesque simps shouting her down.

Democrats favor immediate withdraw from Iraq 23% more than Republicans do.  This indicates that at least 10% are pathologically defeatist.  Considering that Pelosi’s seat is in San Francisco — a city that until this war only understood the term “pull out” as a post-coital prerogative — the number of “out or else” local voters in the Democrat party likely hovers the 25% mark.  Sheehan will draw cranky conciliator campaign contributions from all over the planet. This will take Pelosi off mission, message, and medication.

My heart bleeds.  But I might make a donation to the Cindy for Congress campaign to help ratchet-up the entertainment.

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Me?  I support people who dodged bullets to vote instead of those who dodged votes for more bullets.

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Moby Dick is proof that writers should not own a thesaurus. Hell, I had to look up “circumambulate.”

Precise writing is powerful.  Precise word use makes for precise writing.  But precision means choosing the right word for the audience.  Melville apparently tried to prove intellectual depth through employing every arcane word he could identify.  In the process he turned a good story into mucky reading for the average book buyer.

A thesaurus is a good tool (and I highly recommend paying the bribe required by reference.com to use their dictionary and thesaurus without the aggravating advertising).  Refernce.com allows you to bounce back and forth between the dictionary and thesaurus without losing the word in question, and they have a rich set of dictionaries and synonyms available.

The goal for a writer is to chose the best word.  “Best” is not entirely subjective.  Words convey specific meanings, have emotional connotations, and even lend poetic verve to a sentence.

Take for example a line from a Tom Wait’s song.  The line reads “He’s spillin’ whiskey every night.”  Now grab your thesaurus and substitute alternatives for the word spill (ignoring the enhancement of the dropped ‘g’).  Nothing else works quite as well, despite spillin’ being a simple word.

The lesson is to think about the precision of a word.  Does it make the most sense from a definition standpoint?  Does it convey the right emotion?  Or will it make you look like “the liquor soon mounted into your head” (borrowing a good bad example from Melville).

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