Playing God in Yellowstone

...All this foolishly upset the natural balance...

...Their father, an amateur theologian of independent means, shuttled them all over Europe and the Eastern seaboard to expose them to as many cultures and ideas as possible...

...They feel that profits are made through sharp business practices and exploitation...

...Although they may have summered there during prehistoric times, they regularly left Yellowstone's high plateau during the winter for lower pastures...

...Howard Fein-stein, in his brilliant Becoming William James (1984), thinks that this plague of neurasthenic disorders was related to the problem of vocation...

...Taxpayer Award f`:OEFEro YOUR RIGHT Print and shirt colors are appropriate to designs...

...Eliot's two essays on James, written in 1918, are the most snobbish ever written by a major American critic...

...Withthe publication of the first volume of Leon Edel's magisterial biography in 1953, however, whose five large volumes have now been compressed and to some extent rewritten, James emerged as a fascinating personality in his own right, a large-souled man whose career was one of the noblest and most courageous of any American...

...Erik Erikson, writing about William's prolonged identity crisis, once referred to Henry Senior's method of bringing up his children as a "tyranny of liberalism...

...For those who did not know what to do with themselves in work-oriented America, invalidism "provided social definition, sanctioned pleasure, and protected from premature responsibility...

...In any event, a lot of Marxist critics suddenly had no quarrel with a novelist who could write of the "black and merciless things that are behind great possessions...

...By this, Moynihan means that if someone, presumably the state, would provide female-headed families with greater in-come, more "parental contact time," male role models, the means of stronger discipline, and so on, the children in such families would function with few difficulties...

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...vice of knowledgeable scientists...

...In the six to eight hours a day he spent at his writing desk, James transfigured this life of observation into art...

...His native country was slow to appreciate him on both counts...

...Secondary factors are the important elements, he says...

...The average business receives under 5 cents profit per dollar of sales - hardly an obscene or exploitative figure...

...A few maverick scientists—whose books have beenbanned from Yellowstone's bookshops—have continually urged the service to go back to feeding the bears, arguing that there is not enough "wild" in the park for the bears to inhabit...

...Yet Moynihan chooses to ignore the implications...

...During the 1920s and 30s, however, the Park Service became obsessed with "predator control...

...there have been more maulings and deaths in recent years than at any time in Yellowstone's history...

...The debate over whether James took a wrong turn later in his career will never be resolved, because one's judgment of the late James is primarily a matter of temperament...

...Profitable companies pay more in taxes to support schools, services for the needy, and other state, local, and federal activities...

...Yet still the Park Service persists in "letting nature have its way...

...But he has pierced the shrouds of superstition that now surround much of the environmental movement...

...he certainly would never have written anything like The Portrait of a Lady—or, for that matter, Washington Square...

...Forced out of their adopted habitat, the grizzlies began pushing into human settlements...

...And out of this admittedly selfish pursuit of gain they pro-mote the economic well-being of all...

...And so it may seem at first glance...

...Still, it is astonishing to pick up Alston Chase's Playing God in Yellowstone and realize that the very "ecology" of Yellowstone has become as malleable as the Washington political landscape...

...These same programs, though, did accelerate family breakdown by also training black women, who have proved able to translate their training into successful employment and—with their "independence factor" enhanced —quick divorces...

...In this thoroughly troubling account, the animals of Yellowstone emerge as a species of low-level political appointee, subject to every change of administration...

...Henry and his four siblings were the ultimate "hotel children...

...Good News/Bad News 'first, the good news, "Business profits are up...

...Every time a corporation issues a new, glowing profit statement, people respond in one of two very different ways...

...ticularly in the area of tax relief...

...Cavalry officers, fought off participation by scientists for decades, and is still very good at shrugging off criticism...

...surveys of American letters...

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...Under a new policy, garbage was incinerated, and the bears were driven back into the wild...

...Successful firms reinvest profits in expansion, generating more jobs for more people...

...Both father and children were participants in the epidemic of invalidism which broke out in the cultured environs of Boston after the Civil War...

...The opportunity now exists to create an American family, policy that might actually help families...

...Alone, it seems merely punitive...

...Honest 'N...

...Environmentalists, on the other hand, have contributed little more than an over-romanticized view of nature...

...The answer is, they hope to receive a larger-than-average profit...

...One day I saw a senior fire warden head off into the woods with a horse and packmule for a two-week patrol of the remote wilderness...

...In Europe he availed himself of an astonishing education...

...It felt like the Old West...

...The Marxist Sanclnlsta government of Nicaragua and Its ales are con-ducting an Intense propaganda campaign In the United States in an effort to discredit President Reagan's foreign polcy htiatives in Central America...

...It is an inestimable blessing to me...

...of the five children, three cracked up and two became geniuses (not a bad average, when you think about it...

...Hunger made them more aggressive...

...As I was walking back to the cabin one night, a bear crossed my path about ten feet in front of me...

...For example, he does note that in Project Head Start "we were .. . paying women...

...Ungulates like elk and deer, formerly kept under control by predation, began multiplying beyond all reasonable proportions...

...Forced out of these attempts at human intervention, the Park Service has settled on a policy of "letting nature have its way...

...Resistance came almost at once from the new environmental movement...

...and then there are those like Percy Lubbock, Louis Auchincloss, and Graham Greene (all practicing novelists) who feel that novels like The Golden Bowl represent the summit of James's art...

...There are those like F. R. Leavis and Van Wyck Brooks who consider his late manner to be nothing more than the blowing of baroque air bubbles...

...James, of course, always had his champions, but their writings only seemed to play into the hands of his detractors...

...Van Wyck Brooks and V. L. Parrington seemed downright embarrassed by James in their influential (and facile) George Sim Johnston is a writer living in New York...

...In order to deal with this new "population problem," the Park Service has been quietly slaughtering bears in large numbers—even though the grizzly was on the endangered-species list until recently...

...They prefer to see nature, Chase concludes, as "too complex and too sacred to be defiled by manipulation or analysis...

...tionist, and his demands for the park systems are high...

...H. L. Mencken dismissed him as an overly fastidious gentleman who, instead of going to Europe, should have traveled in the opposite direction and taken a good whiff of the stock yards...

...propriateness of government to adopt a single model of family health...

...Even sadder is the fate of the Yellowstone grizzly...

...Rahv later turned in his card for political reasons...

...In fact, that figure is less than could be earned in interest by depositing the invested money in a risk-free bank account...

...His development was not rapid...

...His history of the Park Service is a fascinating ac-count of one of the many turf wars that have taken place among blue-collar and white-collar workers over the past twenty-five years...

...There is something to Eliot's remarks about James, in that by becoming so saturated with Europe, James was able to see America in novels like The Bostonians in a way that no American writer of that age could, just as, as an outsider, he was able to understand England (and not just its upper classes) in a way that eluded English writers of the time...

...He submitted to the rigors of the London "Season" and found his way into the penetralia of English society...

...When tourism first came to the park in the late nineteenth century, the bears quickly adapted to the human presence by feeding on human garbage...

...Drowning, she said, was just "nature's way...

...That's the good news we seldom hear...

...if he had stayed he perhaps would have kept writing the crude melodramas with which he began...

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...Moynihan's lengthy quotation from British anthropologist J. D. Unwin's Sex and Culture also reveals full understanding that the male-female issue—the question of gender roles—lies near the heart of the poverty problem...

...Like his brother William before him, Henry James first visited Europe on his own in 1869 to recover from an illness...

...Chase recommends a greater professionalism among park rangers and an environmental vision that makes room for man's place in nature...

...But no one reading Edel's account of James's astonishing career there can argue with James's own account of his decision in 1881: My choice is the old world—my choice, my need, my life...

...This new competition generates more and better products at lower prices for consumers...

...The Park Service, originally manned by retired U.S...

...As part of a comprehensive effort to re-create families with employed fathers at home, this effort would have a place...

...In the end, Senator Moynihan resigns himself to the inability or inap'See Travis Hirschi and Hanan C. Selvin, "False Criteria of Causality in Delinquency Research," Social Problems (Winter 1966...

...HENRY JAMES: A LIFE Leon Edel/Harper & Row/$24.95 George Sim Johnston 42 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1986...

...Exclosures"--small patches of land fenced in for scientific comparison—are now lush oases in the midst of a sea of disappearing vegetation...

...James was born in 1843, nominally in New York City, but actually in "the country of the James family," as his brother William once put it...

...think of the alternative...

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...In other words, there are only James and Eliot himself in the inner circle . . . everyone else, you see, being a trifle gauche...

...His independent perspective bores right through the bureaucratic bungling and sentimental idealism that has characterized so much of our approach to nature in re-cent years...

...The service, dominated by rangers whose main background is law enforcement, has long resisted the adWilliam Tucker is The American Spectator's New York correspondent...

...By the early 1960s, the rangers were forced into the painful task of thinning the elk herds through entrapment and slaughAntlerless Lawyer Season Obscene, Profits BELIEVE IN SOCIAL SECURITY 'THECHECK5INTHEMAIL POLITICAL PROMISES 'I 110Ell,TI-.1111N.V my wife -YES my dog -M/MBE my gun NEVER...

...The rangers carried out a brutal extermination campaign that was largely successful...

...He actually buys into one of the great myths of modern sociology, that "as such, youth from female-headed households are not necessarily more likely to have difficulties than other children" (emphasis added...

...The most tragic episodes Chase re-counts concern the fate of the Yellowstone elk and the grizzly bear...

...up to $9.20 an hour to look after the children of men who couldn't make $1.50 an hour...

...The result, by Chase's account, has been a disaster...

...A second look, however, reveals how profits serve employees and consumers...

...It is not too much to say that T.S...

...If you think profits are bad news...

...All the while, a young ranger stood by doing nothing...

...Many of these critics were on the political left, and, as Leon Edel has pointed out in an introduction to a collection of essays about James, the fact that the Hitler-Stalin pact preceded the James centenary by a few years may have contributed to the revival...

...We wholesomely breathed inconsistency and ate and drank contradictions," Henry • re-marked of his childhood...

...I suggest that those who have trouble with James's late novels try reading them to someone the next time the VCR breaks down...

...Another group—mainly workers and consumers—is angry and resentful...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1986 41 Instead of sticking with scientific realities, environmentalists have gone off into mystic cosmology, Eastern religions, and "deep ecology" (apparently ecology for "deep thinkers...

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...Now the bad news, "Business profits are up...

...James lived in Europe—felt, thought, learned, produced—to a degree that would have been impossible for him in post-Civil War America...

...The American writer] must deal, more or less, even if only by implication, with Europe...

...If the party of the elk gets the upper hand, the Northern Yellowstone Elk will thrive, perhaps too much for their own good...

...As a bonus, we will also send you a free subscription to our monthly journal Imprimis...

...It is the final perfection, the consummation of an American to become, not an Englishman, but a European—something which no born European, no person of any European nationality, can become...

...Fifteen years ago, for example, Yellowstone gave up fighting forest fires altogether and adopted a "natural burning" policy that is supposed to rejuvenate vegetation more quickly...

...My work lies there...

...James dictated these books, and the serpentine sentences become remarkably lucid when read aloud.' James is the only American writer whose work as a whole gives the impression of an imperium in the manner of great European writers like WHO DO YOU TRUST...

...Indeed, he goes on to adopt the feminist solution to family breakdown: punish the men...

...Of course, it is no coincidence that this list of needs suspiciously resembles those traditionally met by a father: a perfect example of circular reasoning...

...His early stories were derivative and melodramatic...

...And he brought to his travels through France and Italy a generosity of impression which would have startled Goethe...

...Wolves, coyotes, and mountain lions were dubbed "Nazis of the forest...

...His nervous system was not wired for the America of Mark Twain and Frank Norris...

...While this is certainly a worthy principle, he translates it exclusively into a federal campaign to track down illegitimate daddies and make them pay...

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...Social conservatives are eager to translate the "pro-family" label into policy, parWhen I was in college I spent two wonderful weeks in a remote Yellowstone cabin where a friend was working as a smoke ranger...

...Soil erosion has become a serious problem...

...Some of the sites eventually became tourist attractions...

...In any event, the results were dramatic...

...Still, environmental purity remains the standard...

...When a pink-eye infection spread recently among mountain sheep, the rangers elected not to make simple inoculations, even though the disease results in temporary blindness that causes the animals to fall to their death...

...James was always the over-refined, baffled aesthete whose quiet life, apart from the "pilgrimage" to Europe, had no intrinsic interest...

...As is often the case, his reputation reached its nadir around the time of his death in 1916...

...The elk were never more than one group among large populations of mule deer, mountain sheep, beavers, antelope, moose, bisons, wolves, coyotes, mountain lions, and other wildlife...

...Unintentionally echoing George Gilder, I LIBER TEES A collection of somewhat outrageous T-shirts All designs copyrighted by B.M.G...

...E R. Leavis, Philp Rahv, F. O. Matthiessen, Stephen Spender, and R. P. Blackmur were among the many who became card-carrying Jamesians...

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...PLAYING GOD IN YELLOWSTONE: THE DESTRUCTION OF AMERICA'S FIRST NATIONAL PARK Alston Chase/Atlantic Monthly Press/$24.95 William Tucker 40 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1986 ter...

...In another typical incident, Chase describes a scene where four men with snowmobiles tried unsuccessfully to rescue a buffalo that had fallen through the ice near a park hotel...

...whereas no European is obliged to deal in the least with America...

...Profitable companies can offer greater job security, better conditions, and higher wages to workers than unprofitable ones...

...Profits made in an industry lure companies from less-profitable sectors of the economy...

...While the bears had previously remained in the park, they have now invaded surrounding towns...

...The elk—now the dominant species in northern Yellowstone—are apparently not even native to the park...

...The iron will that William and Henry displayed throughout their lives—William in pursuit of his sanity, and Henry in pursuit of his art—was a necessary propellant to free themselves of their background...

...Smoke rangers are now a thing of the past...

...This classic Soviet "disinformation" network and Its effects on Congress and American pubic opinion are exposed In two important publcations now avdlable from the Council for Inter-American Security...

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...It would be tragic if his recently acquired ideological shackles left him crippled at the very moment he was needed the most...

...Family life was an ongoing pedagogical experiment...

...They are also able to con-tribute generously to cultural and recreational programs and charities...

...The painter of manners who neglects America is not thereby incomplete as yet...

...As critics of sociology long ago explained, the use of terms such as per se, as such, and in itself in social research almost invariably signals serious logical difficulties.' Moynihan knows this, but the feminist beast must be appeased...

...As one exasperated nature-lover told Chase, "If we can't have wild bear, we're not going to have any bear at all...

...Realizing its mistake, the Park Service has still found it impossible to re-establish the lost populations of wolves and cougars (although it apparently faked a "comeback" of the original wolf population during the 1970s...

...The grizzlies, after all, do not know that Yellowstone's boundaries define the limits of their "ecosystem...

...but a hundred years hence—fifty years hence—perhaps he will doubtless be accounted so...

...They have idealized American Indians as "early ecologists," for example, but have forgotten that the Indians' main hunting technique was to set fire to forests and prairies in order to flush wildlife and make room for more game...

...One grot Ipchiefly stockholders and management—is pleased...

...This is an unfortunate conclusion coming from one of our nation's few authentic politician-philosophers, particularly one who argues that a clear theory of family must lie at the heart of effective policy...

...There are hints that he's aware of re-cent research showing that $80 billion worth of federal job training and job creation programs since 1960 have produced no positive results among black males...

...But the image of the man himself remained incomplete...

...By the time he came to write The Portrait of a Lady, however, he had found his way into the company of the greatest...

...Primarily, Chase believes, the animals of Yellowstone have been caught in a squeeze between a sluggish Park Service bureaucracy and a misguided, other-worldly environmental movement...

...Moynihan has the knowledge, background, and sense of conviction to become a leader of this emerging coalition...

...Henry's eventual choice of Europe as his residence was for a long time regarded as a criminal act by America's literary politicians...

...Once the revival got going, criticism of the novel in general came to be dominated by a Jamesian calculus...

...So why do investors risk all in the business world...

...This peaceful coexistence lasted until the early 1970s, when environmentalists decided it was "unnatural" for grizzlies to be "hooked on garbage...

...Liberals such as Bill Moyers and Ellen Goodman have also recently discovered the plight of the family, and are searching for ideas...

...As a result of this noninterference, the burgeoning elk herds are now stripping the ranges bare...

...Moynihan concludes that "a credible family policy will insist that responsibility begins with the individual...

...everything was open to question...

...As a result, a series of disastrous policy decisions has brought about radically adverse changes in Yellowstone's natural environment...

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...Because grizzlies can be dangerous, park officials set up out-of-the-way dumping grounds where the bears could feed...

...The hard-grazing-and-browsing elk have pushed out the mule deer, ante-lope, and beaver, and have put severe pressure on the moose and mountain sheep...

...Environmentalists, who might have sup-plied the missing expertise, have concerned themselves only with "separating man from nature...

...WE MANE MONEY THE OLD FASHIONED WAY •WE STEAL IT!he suggests that if job programs in the 1960s had concentrated on male employment, the "underclass" problem might have been nipped in the bud...

...If the party of the bear loses power, the grizzlies may be out of luck...

...The writer who had once been dismissed as an elegant trifle became the measure of the literary genre of modern times...

...Although we tend to think of such images as eternal, we know they are not...

...He met everybody: Flaubert, Maupassant, Zola, Turgenev, Browning—as well as public figures like Gladstone and Rosebery...

...Chase himself is a strong preservaHenry James is the only great American writer who was also a great man...

...By the late forties, however, James had achieved the widespread critical appreciation he had craved during his lifetime and never received...