Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 553

Assad Regime Raising Cash with Kidnappings

The Assad regime is raising cash through kidnappings, Amnesty International alleges. Syria Deeply reports:

According to Between Prison and the Grave: Enforced Disappearances in Syria [an Amnesty International report], more than 65,000 people – 58,000 of them civilians – have been forcibly disappeared in Syria since 2011.

Those detained by the members of the Syrian state or its conduits are usually held in appalling conditions in overcrowded detention cells, completely cut off from the outside world. Many detainees, Amnesty said, die as a result of torture, rampant disease and extrajudicial execution.Amnesty’s report says that enforced disappearances in Syria have become so systematically entrenched that they’ve given rise to a black market network in which “middlemen” are paid bribes – sometimes in the tens of thousands of dollars – by families attempting to determine where their loved one is, or simply to verify if he or she is still alive.According to a Damascus-based lawyer who spoke with Amnesty, these bribes have become “a cash cow for the regime … a source of funding they have come to rely on.”

ISIS thrusts its practice of taking hostages into a media spotlight by broadcasting graphic executions. (ISIS hostages were also in the news recently in Iraq, where the first U.S. serviceman to die in the renewed fight against ISIS was killed in action during a rescue operation.) But while ISIS kidnappings and executions are more lurid, this Amnesty report reminds us that the Syrian regime’s can end just as horribly—and be more widespread.

The same can be said of the violence in Syria more generally, where the regime has killed the majority of the civilian casualties of the civil war. Western revulsion against ISIS has prompted some to argue that we should make a deal with the devil and accept Assad. Certainly the Syrian regime would like this, and now that Russia is backing Assad, it will be hard to topple him without risking a wider war. But we should never forget that ISIS’s brutality is matched by the regime’s own. And in a civil war, the brutality of one side often feeds the brutality of the other—which will leave the well poisoned in Syria long after the fighting stops.

Moving the Climate Goalposts

It seems the closer we get to the much-hyped climate summit in Paris, the fuzzier the numbers seem to become. The UN’s own climate chief has previously written off working towards averting 2 degrees Celsius of warming as compared to pre-industrial levels (a benchmark scientists have rallied around as a kind of threshold past which the effects of climate change get scarier). But a recent UN Environment Program (UNEP) report isn’t ruling that 2C target out as we head into what’s being heralded as a historic conference in Paris later this month. As the AP reports, UNEP is able to do that by backloading emissions cuts in its models:

In its first four annual emissions reports in 2010-2013, the United Nations Environment Program said emissions must not exceed 44 billion tons in 2020 for the world to limit global warming to 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F). But with real-world emissions rising far beyond that level, UNEP has since last year downplayed its focus on 2020 as a make-or-break year for emissions reductions.

In this year’s Emissions Gap report, a summary of which was released Friday, UNEP says the world can still reach the 2-degree target with emissions of 52 billion tons by 2020, which is just slightly below today’s level. The new analysis assumes that emissions cuts will drop faster after 2030 than was assumed in previous reports.

It looks a lot like UNEP is fiddling with the conditions of its climate modeling in order to produce a politically expedient result. There’s something deeply unsettling about the fact that the UN program can revive a goal that seemed to be all but dead these recent months with some behind-the-scenes tinkering.

And that’s not the only bit of news out this week that will make you question our climate models. As Reuters reports, we know precious little about China’s emissions:

No one currently knows how many tonnes of carbon China emits each year. Its emissions are estimates based on how much raw energy is consumed, and calculations are derived from proxy data consisting mostly of energy consumption as well as industry, agriculture, land use changes and waste.

Many outside observers view the accuracy of those figures with skepticism.

Whether you focus on inputs or conditions, there’s plenty to be concerned about when it comes to the state of climate modeling. We can clearly sketch the problem out at the most basic level: Greenhouse gases raise global surface temperatures, and industrialization is rapidly increasing the atmospheric concentration of those problematic gases. Beyond that, though, climate science quickly breaks down into uncertainty, verging on guesswork.

To call this science “settled” is laughable, not just because our best models have failed to predict a recent plateau in warming, but also because our climate may be the most complex system we study. The sheer number of variables, not to mention the interplay and feedback loops that exist between them, has proven time and again complex enough to confound our expectations.And it certainly doesn’t help when the country that likely emits more than any other is so bad at transparently providing emissions numbers. And while the UN may have hoped its re-jiggered model would inspire hope at the COP21 talks in Paris, all it has really done is shown how tenuous a grasp we have on all of this.

CAP Crushes Staff Revolt Against Netanyahu Appearance

Leaders at the Center for American Progress (CAP) are trying to manage internal uproar ahead of Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to the think tank tomorrow, according to Foreign Policy:

A simmering internal disagreement at the Center for American Progress over the think tank’s decision to host Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu this week escalated into open dissent and in-fighting during an intense but civil all-staff meeting on Friday, according to two people with direct knowledge of the exchange.

The powerful liberal think tank — known in Washington simply as CAP — will host Netanyahu on Tuesday as a part of the Israeli leader’s closely-watched visit to the U.S. aimed at repairing ties between Jerusalem and Washington following the bruising debate over the Iran nuclear deal. Netanyahu met with President Barack Obama at the White House on Monday morning and will finish the day at an award dinner at the conservative American Enterprise Institute.

A think tank is supposed to be a place for scholars and researchers to study and to learn about what is happening in the world in order to provide better analysis and advice to the general public and policymakers. Successfully pursuing that mission sometimes requires meetings with people with whom you disagree and of whom you disapprove. Some staffers at CAP, apparently, do not understand or appreciate this.

When I was at the Council on Foreign Relations, we had speakers ranging from the foreign minister of Yugoslavia (at a time when NATO warplanes were bombing his country) to Muammar Gaddafi and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. At other times, I’ve met with extremist settlers in the West Bank, Hamas and Hezbollah representatives, Yasser Arafat, Bibi, and many others. I’ve often found myself disagreeing with—and even offended by—what I hear, but I always come away with a much better understanding of how people in a world full of unsavory characters think.Luckily, CAP’s leaders are standing up to internal and external pressure, and haven’t canceled their invitation. That is exactly as it should be, and the protesting staffers should understand that they are telling the world that they are not intellectually or emotionally ready for responsible positions in government. This is not an Israel question, or even a Netanyahu question, and meeting with an important world figure in no way conveys approbation of his policies. Rather, it implies curiosity about his policies and a desire to understand how a particular figure sees the world. This is as true of historical monsters like Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, and Mao as it is of controversial figures like Netanyahu.Foreign policy think tanks are not “safe spaces” and the study of world affairs involves dealing with one trigger warning after another. This is no field for Special Snowflakes and moral poseurs—if you aren’t prepared to get your hands dirty, you need to find another field to work in. The real world is full of people whom Americans of various political beliefs and moral tendencies find repugnant. People who go into foreign affairs as a career must expect to spend a fair amount of their time studying with, associating with and, yes, being civil to people of whom they disapprove.University administrators and professors should pay attention to stories like this. You are not doing your students a service if you encourage them in the illusion that you can be a Special Snowflake and have a meaningful career in international affairs. Learning to cope with the shock of the disagreeable and the offensive is part of the basic skill set people need in this field, and given that this seems a difficult lesson for young people to learn in the hothouse climate of American education today, schools who care about their students’ prospects in life need to think hard about helping those students acquire the mental toughness that the harsh world around us requires.

VW Cheated on Carbon Emissions

The fallout from the Volkswagen emissions cheating scandal continues to spread. The company has now admitted to manipulating its carbon emissions data, expanding the scope of its chicanery from relatively localized pollutants (nitrous oxide emissions) to what greens would label a global problem, thanks to carbon dioxide’s role in climate change. Reuters reports:

Several Volkswagen engineers have admitted manipulating carbon dioxide emissions data, saying the ambitious goals set by former Chief Executive Martin Winterkorn were difficult to achieve, Bild am Sonntag reported. The paper said VW engineers tampered with tyre pressure and mixed diesel with their motor oil to make them use less fuel, a deception that began in 2013 and carried on until the spring of this year. […]

According to Bild, Winterkorn declared at the Geneva auto show in March 2012 that VW wanted to reduce its CO2 emissions by 30 percent by 2015 and the engineers did not dare to tell him that this would be difficult to achieve.

VW seems to be engaged in its own separate struggle over picking its scapegoat, with the leading candidates being the engineers mentioned in the above report and the former CEO Martin Winterkorn, but it’s hard to imagine pinning this brouhaha on a single patsy.

The German carmaker sought and even actively carved out regulatory blind spots in order to boost its bottom line. It wasn’t the first company to do so, and it certainly won’t be the last, but its humiliation in these recent weeks ought to serve as a reminder that there remains plenty of profit motive for the unscrupulous to package products as eco-friendly without actually doing the due diligence to back those green claims up.

BRICS, RIP

The end of an era: Goldman Sachs—whose 2001 report coined the term and set off more than a decade of feverish speculation about the decline of Western economic dominance—has dropped its BRICS portfolio. Quartz reports:

The handy acronym BRIC made its debut in a 2001 report by Goldman Sachs economist Jim O’Neill, when the four nations it referred to made up just 8% of the world’s total economy. For more than a decade since, the theory that Brazil, Russia, India, China (and later South Africa) should be treated as a linked economic force representing the rise of emerging markets has driven everything from the creation of new financial institutions to billions of dollars in investment decisions from fund managers and consumer companies.

So the news that Goldman Sachs quietly shut its BRICS investment fund last month, merging the over $100 billion in assets-under-management fund with a larger emerging market one, marks what Bloomberg calls “the end of an era.”

The utility of grouping Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa together under a single acronym has always been quite limited, no matter how easily it rolls off the tongue. These are wildly different countries that span four continents, speak different languages, and have distinct cultures, histories, and political systems. In recent years, it’s become increasingly clear that these countries don’t have that much in common, and that their economies will not grow to the sky (or even grow meaningfully at all, depending on which BRIC we mean). China is still trying to claw its way out of a serious slowdown, Moody’s recently downgraded Brazil after years of stagnation, and Russia’s economy is in deep trouble.

We hope that over the long run, BRIC countries liberalize and continue to grow. This would be good for American foreign policy and global stability in the long term. But convenient narratives about the decline of the West and the rise of the rest should always be taken with a grain of salt.

The Regulatory Goose Chase Degrading America

American colleges are diverting more and more money away from serving students and instead using their funds to develop a massive D.C. lobbying force. The Wall Street Journal reports:

Colleges and universities have become one of the most effective lobbying forces in Washington, employing more lobbyists last year than any other industries except drug manufacturing and technology. There are colleges in every congressional district, and 1 in 40 U.S. workers draw a paycheck from a college or university […]

Public universities, private colleges, vocational schools and other higher education institutions employed more than 1,000 lobbyists last year and spent more than $73 million on lobbying, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics […]“Pretty much any elected official will take a phone call from the president of the college in their district,” says David Bergeron, a senior Education Department official until 2013.

Federal mandates impose huge costs on colleges, just as they do on other industries, and federal subsidies (student loan programs as well as direct funding for colleges) are a crucial source of colleges’ incomes. It’s small wonder then that as the federal government becomes increasingly vital to their financial health, colleges devote an growing portion of their resources toward influencing federal officials. The result, of course, is the kind of regulatory capture we see in so many federal programs, where industries organize to ensure that the regulators serve their interests rather than the needs of the public.

And, of course, regulatory capture exists side-by-side with expensive regulatory compliance, which colleges can’t avoid. Despite the lobbying by higher ed institutions, there are many ways that federal involvement in higher education forces colleges to divert attention from what ought to be their core mission and apply it instead to regulatory compliance. According to one study, colleges spend $27 billion dollars annually complying with a whole range of regulations, including those issued by thought-policing Title IX bureaucracies and all the other well-paid bureaucrats (whose numbers continue to grow).And all of that in turn makes the colleges even more dependent on federal subsidies than ever, so they hire more lobbyists to get more power over legislation and implementation. In industry after industry, this kind of wild goose chase consumes more and more of America’s energy, attention, and money every year—leeching the vitality out of our system, degrading the performance of key institutions, and making government less effective even as it keeps getting bigger.How long it will continue and how much more damage it will do is anybody’s guess. But ultimately U.S. policy is going to have to undertake a serious change of direction, or the country will slowly strangle itself.

Another Setback for Modi

After spending weeks campaigning for candidates from his nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party in the populous northern state of Bihar, Prime Minister Narendra Modi was handed a stinging rebuke by the electorate, according to The Telegraph:

The vote was widely regarded as a referendum on the prime minister’s popularity after 18 months in office as he campaigned hard for a victory that would have helped him pass a stalled national economic reform programme.

The defeat will embolden his opposition and dampen the mood as he heads to London for a visit that will include a sold-out rally with British-Indians at Wembley Stadium, lunch with the Queen at Buckingham Palace and an overnight stay at Chequers hosted by David Cameron.

During the campaign, Modi and the BJP used tactics aimed at exploiting caste and religious divisions. That strategy appears not to have worked, and it comes amidst complaints from artists and scientists that Modi has created a “climate of intolerance.”

Modi’s nationalism and partisan style helped him rise to power, and presumably he hoped that this style would also help him to build ongoing support for his political and economic reform strategy. But his recent failures to push through such reforms, and his inability to deliver electoral victories for the BJP, suggest that this approach is yielding diminishing returns.

Pivot to the World

The U.S. military is asking to pivot back to Europe, in order to deter Russia. The Wall Street Journal reports:

Senior U.S. military leaders have proposed sending more forces into Europe on a rotating basis to build up the American presence and are stepping up training exercises to counter potential Russian interference with troop transfers in the event of a crisis with Moscow.

The new steps would allow for the presence of multiple U.S. brigades in Europe at any given time, increasing that number above current limits.

Meanwhile:

NATO countries are discussing increasing the number of troops stationed in members bordering Russia and putting them under formal alliance command. The next talks on that idea are likely to come in early December, when foreign ministers gather and begin discussing proposals to be formalized at a Warsaw summit in July.

Poor management of America’s foreign policy portfolio now means that instead of reducing America’s overseas commitments and responsibilities, President Obama—and his successor—will have to increase them. And because other countries now believe that the U.S. seeks to avoid risks and confrontations at all costs, we will have to deal with more confrontations as others test us.

This is exactly the opposite of what President Obama hoped his foreign policy would lead to, but it’s the entirely predictable consequence of the course he’s taken.

How to Make a Mountain of Coal Disappear

British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli is known to have said that “there are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” It seems there is now a fourth kind: Green lies. Only a month before representatives from almost every country are set to meet in Paris in an attempt to hammer out a globally binding regime on greenhouse gas emissions, China, the world’s number one greenhouse gas emitter, suddenly revealed in its official statistics that the volume of coal burnt annually in China has in fact been 17 percent larger than previously reported. Oops.

The degree of the revision by the very same government that only last year declared that its coal use was in fact dropping and that it would cap coal use by 2020 is both mindboggling and illuminating. Mindboggling, because it accounts for 600 million tons of unreported coal use—an amount equivalent to more than 70 percent of the coal used by the United States, enough coal to fill 240,000 Olympic swimming pools. How could such a gigantic pile of coal go missing? And the revelation is also illuminating, because it exposes the opacity and unreliability of Chinese energy statistics. What good are China’s recent pledges to achieve peak carbon dioxide emissions by 2030 or to double its use of non-fossil energy by the same year if it cannot even establish a credible base line from which to begin the march toward a greener future?Exporting the war on coal to developing Asia, where the commodity makes 70 percent of electricity generation, ‎has been a top priority for the Obama Administration—even if the price of doing so will condemn hundreds of millions of people to energy poverty. To that end, Obama spared no effort to lure China into the West’s green agenda. To understand how central environmental issues have become to the framework of official U.S.-China relations, consider this: Of the 127 areas of cooperation agreed upon by the two countries as part of the June 2015 round of the ministerial level U.S.-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue, 43 areas had to do with climate change and the environment. No other issue—foreign policy, defense, cyber, terrorism, trade, finance, and science—came even close.Realizing Obama’s taste for all things climate, Xi Jinping chose to announce that in 2017 China will start a national emission trading system—also known as cap and trade—during his September state visit to Washington. For Obama, who tried—and failed—to pass such a scheme at home through Congress, this was a wonderful gift. “Shame on us,” climatists can now argue, “if the Chinese do it, how come we can’t?” For Xi the gesture of making the announcement in Washington rather than in Beijing or Paris was a deliberate tactic aimed at improving the atmosphere of the visit, which would otherwise have been soured by thorny issues like cybersecurity, the South China Sea dispute, and currency manipulations. Xi certainly knew his host all too well.The newly discovered “statistical error” on China’s coal use was published only one day after Xi and French President François Holland issued in Beijing a joint presidential statement on climate change. There are two possible explanations. Either the Chinese government has never had reliable data on its economy to the degree that some have thought or, perhaps more likely, the upward revision is a clever way to establish a new benchmark from which the Western desired commitment to achieve future peaking in coal use would be easier to meet. In other words, China’s books are either messy or cooked. Either option emphasizes the Potemkin nature of a supposedly binding global climate accord.No matter what feel-good statements and ambitious climate goals Paris will yield next month, these will be hollow as they are based on a shaky information foundation. Like lines drawn in the sand energy statistics and climate goals can be moved back and forth at will to create a perception of progress. Many world leaders who fail to demonstrate tangible results in growing their economies, fighting terrorism, or protecting their borders in the face of mass migration prefer to operate in the climate arena, where shifting the goalposts is a common practice and where perception of progress, rather than progress itself, is still rewarded. Climate fixation is an indulgence neither China nor the U.S. can afford. U.S.-China relations are too delicate and too critical for the future of the world to allow climate issues to suck up so much oxygen at the expense of far more pressing strategic matters.

A Cowboy Life in Poetry

Who would have thought that real cowboy versifying was still around as late as the 1950s? Those years were deep into the Hollywood singing cowboy era, when real cowboy songs got mixed up with Tin Pan Alley approximations. Since Gene and Roy Rogers and the Sons of the Pioneers, there has been a spate of contemporary cowboy verse. But it ain’t authentic, as far as I’m concerned.

Some years ago, I learned from John Dawson Pierson, my great uncle Leonard’s son, that his father had written a cowboy poem during the winter of 1952–53. It was described to me as an “epic” in length and scope. This I wanted to see. It took a while for John to find it, but eventually he did and supplied me with a copy.Leonard Pierson, who was born in 1891, was a real cowpuncher in northeastern and (later) northwestern Colorado. By real, I mean he thought of himself as an original American cowboy and didn’t approve of anything much, say, that happened after the World War. The family story of the Colorado Piersons had been passed along to me by my maternal grandmother, Leonard’s sister. The two great figures in that story were Leonard and his father Chuck.According to family lore, Chuck was the star of the story. Inasmuch as his grandson John looked closely into his history, a star he genuinely was, a legendary Colorado cowboy from the early days of cattle spreads in northeastern Colorado and Wyoming—Michener’s Centennial country. Chuck was a combination of expert cowpuncher and entrepreneur. (Indeed, he was enough of a self-promoter to get written up in the Police Gazette for shooting up a saloon.) While he worked for A.C. Sterling and other early Eastern Slope Colorado cattle barons, he also kept a string of ponies to allow him to take easterners out hunting where the deer and the antelope play. For a short while, he and his wife even ran a hotel. Chuck was regarded as the best open-range calf roper in those parts, a fact noted in the book Wyoming Cowboy Days, which also included pictures of him roping—upwards of 400 head a day, it was said.Leonard’s story was different. Although he was his father’s son and as skilled at cowpunching, he was not of a disposition to be a “character” and sell his services by dint of charm. Leonard, however, married well: that is to say, into the Dawson family, the biggest cattle people in northwestern Colorado. He ended up with his own spread, which his father never did.The greater Pierson family was especially taken with Leonard’s wife, the former Geraldine Dawson. Where Leonard was crusty and dusty and as “old-timey” as they came, Geral was “a real modern lady” with a head on her shoulders. Somehow, she got sent off to Oberlin College, but chose to come back to marry Leonard (who, if we’re to believe him, dropped out school after the second grade) and live in a ranch house without electricity, using a hand-pump to raise water into the kitchen and cooking on a wood stove. This was in the vicinity of Hayden, Colorado, on the Western Slope of the Rockies.Now, there were a few more events of Leonard’s life we know about. He was a soldier in World War I, serving somewhere “back East”, so his every moment wasn’t spent punching cows and braiding rawhide. Sometime after his children were grown and gone, emphysema, and perhaps the local economy, drove him out of ranching. With Geral in tow, he wandered first to Oregon and eventually into southern California, where his life ended. Rumor has it that, along the way, he played polo with Will Rogers and taught him how to twirl a rope.Before going on, probably something should be said about the broader Pierson family. Leonard and Chuck were members of what my clever (very distant) cousin Tad Friend (of the New Yorker; his mother was a Pierson) dubbed the “outdoor” branch of the family. Both indoor and outdoor Piersons descended from folk who came to the Connecticut Colony in the early 17th century. Abraham Pierson the elder was a preacher who founded parishes that grew into what are now Southampton, Long Island, and Newark, New Jersey. His son, also Abraham, was one of the founders of Yale and its first rector.While the indoor Piersons stayed in civilized parts and repaired to Wall Street eventually, the outdoor branch moved on to Shelburne, Vermont, just south of Burlington. In March 1778, Moses Pierson, who had a blockhouse of sorts on Lake Champlain, defeated a group of Indians and Canadians who had skated down the lake to make raids against the rebellious colonists to their south. The story is not of a major Revolutionary War encounter but of the fact that three barrels of good ale were used to put out the fire to the blockhouse that the attackers had set. There’s a marker to that effect at the Shelburne public beach.Moses’s progeny lost their land in Vermont at some point and went West. In this case, “West” was, first of all, Milwaukee. After possibly leaving some offspring in Wisconsin and Illinois, they continued on to Colorado in the late 1840s. The outdoor Piersons became like most Coloradans before, during, and after the Civil War. They had a mining claim, (eventually) a land grant, and a long career as farmers…and cowpunchers. They lived close enough to disaster to sign up when Colorado’s Governor created hundred-day paid militias to fight Indians. And yes, there was a Pierson involved in the infamous Sand Creek Massacre.Despite their preference for relatively primitive outdoor life, they carried with them their family heritage replete with highly accurate understandings of the history their ancestors lived through in New England. Their progeny were duly educated in these things. As my mother’s and my generation have discovered, there wasn’t a single family story or description of events that was even an exaggeration of the absolute truth. There was both understanding and pride in the family’s and America’s past.Now back to the main story. Winters in a primitive ranch house in time became just too much for Geral and her two children. Accordingly, they repaired to Dawson digs in town (not Hayden, but Craig, Colorado) and left Leonard to winter in place and feed the stock. The story has it that Leonard spent a great deal of time at the kitchen table, presumably close to the wood-burning cook stove. He had a habit of laying out his favorite things in front of him. They included his revolver, his father’s and his own rawhide work, a pair of Chinese handcuffs, and his fiddle.During the winter of 1952–53, when he was in his early 60s, Leonard decided to write a poem. I reproduce it below unedited (warts and all) and follow it with some notes. My initial impression of what this “epic” would turn out to be had to do with the story of how fifteen-year-old Leonard and his father Chuck decided (in 1906) to leave northeastern Colorado and cross the Rockies on horseback for less populous parts west of Steamboat Springs. While this is mentioned, the rigors of such a crossing unfortunately go untold.The “color” in the poem is really quite remarkable. It takes one from the 1890s into the 1950s out on the high plains and intermountain West and demonstrates that even the old-timers paid attention to the rest of the world. Whoever moved from wherever to wherever else brought things with them. Just because the first cattlemen of Colorado came up from Texas and New Mexico didn’t mean that the place was bereft of other sorts until the Colorado part of the Sunbelt became a fashionable relocation place for Midwesterners. And the early newcomers, like the Piersons, brought much of the rest of America and the wider world with them. Anyhow, without further ado, here’s the poem.Untitled

By Leonard Pierson

Winter 1952-53Well, he (1) told about the present days

            And tales of long ago

And how he had to walk to school

            A-wading through the snow. It was ten miles or twelve miles

            As down the trail he went

His lunch was seven pancakes (2)

            He knew his Ma had sent. He made first grade and second grade

            And then he hit the fenceHe figured third would be tougher

            And he didn’t have the sense. So he saddled up old Banner F (3)

            And then he lit a shuck (4)

He headed for the sand hills (5)

            To punch the cows with Chuck.Now Chuck Pierson was a cow-man

            And a raw-hide man of fame (7)

So he thought he’d just go out with Dad

            And try to learn the game. He worked with all the roundups

            From Cheyenne down the Platte (8)

‘Til he began to think he thought he knew

            Where everything was at. Then there was buffalo grass and cactus

            And rattlesnakes and rains

It was a cowboy’s Heaven then

            Way down upon the plains. He said we always ate our neighbor’s beef

            It always seemed the best

So he let it rock along like that

            He never run a test.He said we always ate good beef steak

            And sourdough biscuits on the side

He had a roping horse and a cutting horse

            That was a cowboy’s pride. He rode an old Mex saddle, (9)

            With rawhide rope and reins

That seemed to be the custom then

            Way down upon the plains. He said the cowboys then wore O K spurs (10)

            And bridle bits were spades (11)

He said we had some range wars

            And then we made some trades. Then a steer was worth five cents a pound

            No one was in the red

You could figure on a good night’s sleep

            When you finally got to bed. Now all this was way back in childhood days

            [It was before the tax]

           [It was before the income man began to grind his axe.]

Now this country that I talk about

            Was velvet ’round and ’round.’Til the nesters and the mole board plow

            Began to spoil the ground

So they fenced us in and fenced us out

            Then nature took her course. So we seen the writing on the wall and saddled up a horse

            Then we headed for the mountains, we knew it was a must (12)

For any fool could plainly see,

            That all they’d raise was dust. (13) Well, we rode due west for thirty days

            Then we camped down on the Bear (14)

The people seemed real friendly

            So we knew we’d settle there. There were deer and elk up in the mountains

            The creeks were full of trout

So we pulled the saddles from our horses

            And settled down in Routt. (15) Now the people there were mostly white (16)

            Cow-outfits was their game

So I turned around and looked at Dad

            He said “I’m glad we came.” Well, there we punched the cows again

            For twenty years or more

‘Til depression hit the country

            And broke the cowmen by the score. Then the Banks took on a dying look

            Just like an old sick cow

And the ranches and [the] cowmen

            Began to wonder how With taxes, bills and notes to pay

            It was the dealer’s choice

So the ranchers lost their ranches

            And the cowmen lost their voice Now, say, a hundred miles right west of there (17)

            When things were going fine

The cowmen established what was known

            As the old Winchester line. Then if a band of sheep were sighted

            The news soon got around

For everyone to bring a gun

            And try to hold the ground. Well, the cowmen took a beating

            And were pretty much asleep

Then here come the Mormons, Greeks, and Jews and dogs (18)

            With about a million sheep. The forest rangers met ’em

            It seems with open Arms

Then the sheepmen grazed the forest

            And bought up most of the farms. Now with this Taylor Grazing Act and long permits (19)

            It don’t look good to me

It looks like the top soil of Colorado

            Is a-going to the sea. The watershed is ruined

            And the rivers are all mud

Then the beetles took the forests

            And you’d hear an awful thud When the great big pines begin to fall

            It will be an awful mess

And now when lightning starts the fire

            Is anybody’s guess. Now I bellyached because I am mad

            So let’s get up to date

Let’s glance around and try to see

            What Ike’s got on his slate. From what I get on the radio

            And from what I read and smell

It seems to me that Washington

            Is going straight to Hell. Well, we voted for Ike to take this job

            And pull us from the ruts

Now I for one do still believe

            That Ike has got the guts. From the very start I believed in Ike

            And it’s still my fondest hope

That he will scrub the White House out

            With granulated soap. Now here’s a tip I’ll slip old Ike

            We won’t allow for duds

“Tide is the finest soap in town

            Tide makes the finest suds.” Now when Ike grabs his mop and broom

            And the dust begins to fly

He’ll probably find a spot or two

            Where he’ll have to use some lye. It seems the communists are in his face

            The Russian Bear at his back

And a lot of disgruntled Democrats

            A-coming round the track. If I were Ike, I believe I’d buy

            A single-action Colt

And when I’d laid the hammer back

            I’d see who’d take the jolts. Now this Malenkov, an aggravating person

            And talks like he is tough

I’d wrap a pistol barrel around his neck (20)

            And try to call his bluff. And while this Russian Bear is growling

            And putting out the sass

I’d head him north from going south

            Then kick him in the “pants.” Then I’d saddle up my walking horse

            And never crack a grin

And at the first false move a Russian made

            I’d start a-moving in. We rode a lot of country

            And some of it was rough

But I never met a yammering man (21)

            I thought was very tough. Well, this story has no moral

            And it seems to have no end

It seems to be an old man’s gripe

            About the if & but and when. Now if I had been a learned man

            I might have been of great renownSo now I’ll saddle up my unicorn (22)

            And lope him out of town.Notes to Leonard Pierson’s Untitled PoemI need to express my appreciation to Leonard’s son, John Dawson Pierson, for the retrieval and use of the poem and explanations that made some of these notes possible. No doubt, were John writing this, he would make different sorts of comments and observations. Nonetheless, I’ve tried to report faithfully all the things he’s told me. Similarly, I’m indebted to my grandmother, Lora Hannah Pierson Joseph, for a great deal of the “lore” that has informed my reading of the poem.

“He” here means the poet—namely, himself. “He” in the eighth verse and forward may be his father, but this is neither clear nor much worth worrying about.
Leo’s father had a nasty habit of telling his wife Gertrude to stop making pancakes in the morning when he’d had his fill. She apparently paid no attention to him and made at least 21 more: there were three children who took seven pancakes each to school. I understand that she rolled leftovers up in the pancakes and that the kids ate them like hotdogs.
Banner F was the name of a cattle brand. It may have been the family’s but, more likely, it was the name of some other cowman’s brand. Leo’s father never had his own spread. Somehow Leo got himself a horse named after the brand.
The meaning of “lit a shuck” is obvious, but its use is curious. The expression was commonly used as in the following: “Can you stay for dinner or did you just come to light a shuck?” “Light a shuck” here means something like “on an errand.” A “shuck” is a dried corn cob, which the old timers sometimes used as a torch to light their way or as a way of borrowing fire from someone to light a dead fire of their own. If one were doing either, he’d have to move fast: shucks burn pretty quickly.
Which sand hills are referred to here is anyone’s guess. They could have been almost anywhere in northeastern Colorado. Probably they were in a triangle with Denver, Fort Collins, and Sterling as its vertexes. Leo appears to have been seven or eight at the time. Inasmuch as he was born in 1891, this would mean that he left school and commenced cowpunching in ’98 or ’99. Whether he really started punching cows as, say, an eight-year-old, remains unknown.
Leo’s father, Chuck Pierson, was a notable cowpuncher in his day. Before 1906, he had made a name for himself in northeastern Colorado and Wyoming as a premier open-range calf roper, snagging as many as 400 a day on open ranges. He’s briefly immortalized, complete with pictures of him roping, in a book called Wyoming Cowboy Days. Chuck also had a string of horses and took “dudes” into the country to hunt. We know that he made it at least as far as Omaha doing cattle business (one of his children was born there), but little else about his peregrinations aside from those in Colorado. (His siblings seemed to have been all over the place. For example, his brother Bert was a noted horse trainer and breeder in Alberta.) The family assumption is that Chuck went from one cattle spread to another in Colorado and Wyoming as a drover. His first child (my grandmother) was born in a sod house on a 140-acre land grant belonging to her mother’s family near Barr Lake (present-day Brighton) Colorado in 1888. Part of her childhood was spent on the A.C. Sterling Ranch. Sometime before 1906, the family had settled in Kersey, near Greeley, Colorado. Chuck was apparently a mean fiddler, and so was Leo.
Leo refers here to his father’s skill at rawhide work—that is, largely braiding. If one were skilled, one could make a thirty-foot rawhide rope out of one old, sick cow, with each of its strands continuous. Chuck taught Leo the craft, and extant examples of their efforts are indeed impressive works of design, utility, and patience.
The Platte, here, is the river, of course. Given that the Platte runs into the Missouri, they may have gone far afield, indeed.
The kind of “rig” mentioned here apparently was widely popular. Very likely, Mexican saddle designs had made their way up from Texas and New Mexico as the cattle business moved north after the Civil War. Leo himself favored a Mexican saddle horn. This was much larger in diameter than those on regular western saddles. While one probably could still tie a rope off on one, they were designed to wrap the rope around a couple of times for friction. A big cow (or, for that matter, a buffalo, which Leo once roped to his regret) could easily pull a horse over if the rope were tied off.
Leonard in Hayden with his “Mex” saddle
O K spurs are hard to describe. Let’s just say that they were (are) offset, vertically, and leave it at that. Leo had a strong prejudice against riders who used sharp-pointed spurs: it indicated a weakness in their riding skills.
“Spades” refer to the bits of bridles, the bits being inside the horse’s mouth. This sort of bit would only be used by expert riders with experienced horses. It makes possible controlling the horse by the bridle and reins alone. Tough on a horse’s mouth if not properly used, Leo’s use of this bit was another indication that he preferred finesse to force when it came to handling horses.
In 1906, Chuck and Leo decided to leave northeastern Colorado for the Western Slope. Whether this was because farmers had pushed the cow-outfits out, or because cowpunching was no longer quite as primitive (that is, open-range) as previously according to their purist tastes, is not known. What is known is that Leo’s two siblings and his mother took off for California at some point. Whether this was before or after the trek across the mountains that Leo describes is unknown. Whichever, the family was breaking up. Chuck and Leo, and a string of horses, took a month to go from Kersey to the area west of Steamboat Springs. No tales are told of the crossing. It would likely have been routine rather than heroic work for them.
The mention of dust here is doubly ironic. For one thing, the farmers in Weld County, Colorado (in which Kersey and Greeley are situated) managed to turn the place into one of the wealthiest agricultural counties in the U.S. Clearly, they raised more soybeans than dust. Leo ran from farmers and tried to stay a cow-man. He ended up growing wheat in Hayden, Colorado, before he gave up working the land altogether. (But he didn’t like doing it one little bit.) And, of course, cowpunching is dusty enough in its own right: Leo ended up with emphysema.
The Bear here is the Bear River, in northwestern Colorado.
The Bear was in Routt County, home to places like Hayden, where Leo and Chuck ended up, and Craig. One of the big cattle ranchers in the Routt was the Dawson family, into which Leo would eventually marry, thereby acquiring a ranch of his own.
The use of “white” here is a simple description of the color of the people there. Leo had his prejudices, as we’ll see. But certainly the use of the term was not intended to draw a contrast between the Routt and the place from which he and Chuck had come.
A hundred miles west of the Routt would have been the area east of Vernal, Utah. The land between Salt Lake City and the Colorado Rockies filled up from a number of directions. The Dawsons came up from Texas to New Mexico, and then to the Routt. Others came from the east (“way east”—the Mediterranean—in some cases) and west, as we see further along.
This unpleasant reference to kinds of people had less to do with what they were as it did with what they raised—sheep. Mormons from Utah and further west in Colorado used to bring their flocks into the Routt at the end of the growing season to graze on farmers’ stubble and in the National Forest. Leo was known to do business with them, but he wasn’t fond of them because they were sheep-men. As far as the others are concerned, Leo’s reference to Greeks and Jews was made on the basis of knowing about (not apparently knowing) one Greek sheep-man named Maniotis and one Jewish cow-man turned sheep-man named Isadore Bolton. There was no influx of Greeks and Jews, but, along with the Mormons and plain old sheep-men, they were clearly dirty dogs in Leo’s estimation.
The mention of the Taylor Grazing Act here makes the time frame Leo is talking about the 1930s. The Act was passed by Congress in 1934. “Long permits” refers to permits to graze sheep in the National Forest. Another of the poem’s ironies is that Leo ended up running sheep himself before the end.
Leo’s reference to wrapping a pistol barrel around Malenkov’s neck expressed a longstanding prejudice of his that, when pistol-whipping someone, you use the barrel of the gun, not the butt. He figured that doing it the other way was an invitation to shooting oneself by accident. To the end of his life in southern California, Leo carried a .38 revolver, which we know he used at least once to pistol-whip some young punk in an elevator. This gun had a singular feature: one of its grips was Lucite and contained a picture of a well-endowed woman with breast(s) caught in a washing-machine ringer.
In this verse, Leo is not taking time out to take a shot at blowhards in general. “Yammering men” were to him cowboys who thought well of themselves because they knew how to rope on foot in corrals. To him, you weren’t a real cowpuncher unless you had to chase calves on horseback on open range, through trees, under bushes, etc.
There is some debate in the family as to what Leo was doing by injecting a unicorn into the proceedings. His son John Pierson suggests that it may have been to irritate Leo’s wife, Geral, who’d gone to college at Oberlin and may have thought Leo’s versifying was not literarily up to snuff. I once thought that Leo was claiming a storyteller’s right to a fanciful steed: he may have thought, I figured, that since he could write a poem, he had as much claim to speak of unicorns as anyone else. But the real reason for it, probably, is that (Don Quixote-like) Leo was tilting at the windmills of a present he didn’t like. A unicorn would be as good a mount as any as attached to the past as he was.

When he left it, Leonard’s ranch was purchased by Farrington Carpenter, himself a legend in those parts and one of the subjects of a charming April 2009 New Yorker piece, well worth the read. “Ferry”, as he was called, was a greenhorn who came out from Evanston, Illinois (and after graduating from Princeton), to follow his dream of ranching. He’s famous for starting a school district where there hadn’t been one, and his efforts to lure young single women from the East out to Colorado to teach. He had an ulterior motive, however: he wanted more “stock” from which ranch hands could lasso wives. I’ve always been pleased that Ferry got an honorary doctorate from the University of Colorado on the same day I got my ordinary one in 1975.