SAME AS IT EVER WAS

CULTURE APPROPRIATION AND DISPLACEMENT IN THE BEST OF THE WEST

The Chuck-A-Rama anthropologist in me believes denigration of working-class culture masked by NIMBYistic environmentalism, appropriation of the Navajo Way by even marginally affluent Americans, and Navajo political opportunists rendered untouchable by invoking “sovereignty” and playing the race card lie at the core of the rift in San Juan County, Utah — a snapshot of the social, political and economic dynamic transforming the best of the West.

Marvin Hayden Washington survived the aftermath of a world war aboard an armored cruiser anchored just off the Russian port of Vladivostok, a global pandemic that killed millions, and the Great Depression. He worked at whatever jobs came along during the oil boom days of the 1920s in Texas.

My grandfather, Hayden, was a soft-spoken Baptist who grew up in south Texas during a period when converts were taken to a muddy creek and, well, dunked “in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Amen.”

He practically froze his keister off aboard an armored cruiser on station off Japan, China and Russia as part of U.S. strategy to contain the Bolshevik Revolution after World War I.

Hayden worked at whatever jobs came along, including leading a surly mule team delivering ice to sweltering rich folks in Houston. He was affectionately known as “Peachy” because of his lifelong sweet tooth for fruit of the family orchard.

Once upon a time, we harbored a soft spot for his kind as a class that built the juggernaut called “America.” Art and yarns of popular media of the day reflected and amplified that respect.

“Camp with Oil Rig” (Jackson Pollock, circa 1930–1933, when he was a student of Thomas Hart Benton)

I still enjoy those stories. One of the taller tales was about the life and times of Gene McCarthy, a larger-than-life role model for many of us baby Baby Boomers in Texas.

From Texas Monthly:

“Remember the time he (McCarthy) made a half-million from a field that all the oil companies said was dry? That’s nothing, once he was a million and a half in debt, so he built a $700,000 house just for the hell of it. And remember the Shamrock opening in ’49, broadcast nationally on radio, when everybody who was any¬body was there? And the time the Houston Country Club wrote him a letter saying that, all in all, they’d rather not have him around the place?”