This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2016, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

Utahns are not so odd in their frequent belief that they are different, apart, maybe even superior to, the rest of the country and the world.

There's that famous, oft-copied old New Yorker magazine cover that features a map of the United States. It shows the nation as basically extending from 9th Avenue to the Hudson River, with some small notice of places of special interest to me — Kansas City and Utah — before petering out in the Pacific Ocean.

In Western New York, they note that the Buffalo Bills are the only National Football League team that actually plays in New York. (The Jets and Giants are now into their second stadium in New Jersey.)

In Kansas, they went through a spell where a particularly wacky attorney general boarded Amtrak trains to stop them from serving alcoholic beverages in the club car and openly pondered the possibility of preventing the same open saloon behavior from occurring on airliners operating in Sunflower State airspace.

OK. That was a long time ago. But it is still introduced into evidence in barroom debates over which state has the goofiest liquor laws.

O. Henry spun an entertaining yarn about "A Cosmopolite in a Café," one E. Rushmore Coglan, who went on for some 2,000 words belittling the idea that any city or country was any better than any other. Until he heard an acquaintance find fault with the sidewalks of his native Mattawamkeag, Maine, and resorted to fisticuffs in defense of his hometown.

Utahns, here and representing us in Congress, also have some behaviors that suggest that we think we are just somehow special. Including some that have little or nothing to do with religion.

The most obvious of these right now involves the attitude of many about the vast expanses of land that happen, by accident of geography, to be within the borders of this state but also happen, by force of law, to belong to the United States of America.

The crusade to have Utah claim ownership of those 30 million acres, by lawsuit, legislation or armed insurrection, has motivated everything from a legislative war chest to mount one of the most bogus legal actions in the history of litigation to proposed laws that would move some or all of those lands to state control or, at a minimum, block the presidential use of Teddy Roosevelt's Antiquities Act within Utah.

The reaction to that reaction has included long-standing petitions for more of that already federal land to be put under additional layers of protection, as wilderness or, in the case of the area around the Bears Ears bluffs in San Juan County, a new national monument.

We're only arguing about this because a small but insistent group of lawmakers and lawyers, not replicated in other Western states where most land also belongs to the feds, is claiming that those lands are, or at least ought to be, Utah's. By which they clearly mean sold to the highest bidder with the biggest shovels.

This is based largely on the similarly bogus belief that the small towns and school districts that are rapidly getting smaller would suddenly thrive if all that lovely dirt were placed on the tax rolls. That's a view willfully ignorant of the fact that towns and schools and stores and post offices are closing in all of America's rural areas, even in states where the federal government owns little or no land.

The shrinking of rural America is a function of the market, not the government.

The most maddening thing about this land-grab movement is that it cuts directly against the supposedly conservative ideal of property rights. All that land is owned — owned — by the people of the United States of America. The argument from such worthies as Rep. Jason Chaffetz and Rob Bishop that these decisions shouldn't be made by "outsiders" is fatally flawed because, when it comes to federal land, no American is an outsider.

It's as if you think your neighbor hasn't built the right kind of house, or doesn't keep his lawn up properly, and so that gives you the right to bulldoze his property and do it right. Because you are tired of looking at it and you know better.

Federal land, in Utah and elsewhere, belongs to Utahns. But it belongs to me, too. It belonged to me when I was born in Missouri. It belonged to me when I grew up in Kansas and Nebraska. It belonged to me when I ill-advisedly shuffled off the Buffalo for awhile. And it will belong to me when I decide I can't afford to retire anywhere but in Costa Rica or Belize.

So when President Obama's farewell to office includes that Bears Ears National Monument, he will be acting completely within his justified powers as lawful custodian of land that the feds own, lock, stock and illegal ATV trail. Ever since we stole it from the Native Americans.

George Pyle, a Tribune editorial writer, has been quite comfortable being an outsider looking in. Less responsibility. gpyle@sltrib.com