This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2017, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
[Video: A wild night out with Scarlett Johansson.]
It's a joke attributed to various wags and wits from years past. Winston Churchill. George Bernard Shaw. Lord Beaverbrook. Groucho Marx.
A man at a fancy dinner party says to the woman next to him, "Would you sleep with me for a million pounds?"
The woman says, "I suppose I would."
The man says, "Would you sleep with me for 10 pounds?"
The woman, no longer amused, says, "What kind of woman do you think I am?"
The man says, "We've already established that. Now we're just haggling about the price."
As we watch the drive among Utah politicians to cancel the creation of the Bears Ears National Monument, and perhaps its sister the Grand Staircase-Escalante, it's clear what kind of people we are talking about. And stunning just how low their price is.
Oh, they want us to think that if mean ol' Bill Clinton hadn't stood in the safety of Arizona when declaring the Grand Staircase monument — stopping a possible coal mine and sucking up to environmentalist voters in any state but Utah — that the population in that neck of the woods would soar and the economic possibilities and accompanying tax base would be a sight to behold.
And they are trolling Anglos and Native Americans alike with the fantasy that, if that guy with the strange name who says he's from (yeah, right) Hawaii hadn't left that poop-in-the-woods Bears Ears in San Juan County on his way back to (oh, sure) Chicago, then we would all be able to ride our ATVs right to the promised land.
And if there were a trace of a reason to believe that boom times would follow the repeal and replace of those monuments, then that might be a discussion worth having.
But there isn't. And it isn't.
The facts are these: Coal is dead. Oil is way too cheap for any sane person to try to draw it out of the ground in remote areas, much less try to cook it out of rocks using unproven — and potentially destructive — technology.
Grazing cattle in those parts might hang on, by the skin of its federal subsidies. But, as has been noted in this space before, the idea that legacy economic models deserve protection from new ways of doing things just for generations-of-man-and-boy nostalgia wins no sympathy from anyone in the hollowed-out-by-Craigslist newspaper game.
No, politicians and elected officials from county courthouses to the Utah Capitol are sleeping with these phony ideas and accepting the lowball offer.
There's no oil, coal, uranium, cattle, potash or gold fortunes to be made there. The only discernible benefit to those leading this snipe hunt is to win votes and campaign contributions by puffing themselves up in a contest to be the biggest enemy of the federal government — that is, of all Americans who don't live here.
And in a race to administer one last big humiliation to the Native Americans we've been beating down for hundreds of years. Before the Census Bureau learns to properly count Navajos and the local and state officials elected from down yonder reflect the true population.
It is hard to come to any other conclusion but that Bears Ears is such an emotional point of controversy because a nonwhite president made a deal with some nonwhite original inhabitants of the region to start putting the land to its highest and best use — that of a living repository of Native American knowledge and spirituality which, by provisions written into the monument declaration, the affected tribal governments will finally have a say in managing. And from which they and their nonnative neighbors may legitimately make some coin by taking greater advantage of the growth, if not boom, in tourism that will inevitably follow.
Those who claim that Utah would be better off without the monuments, without common national ownership of all that land, are about as pitiable as Napoleon Dynamite's Uncle Rico who, years after the fact, was certain that he could have won the state high school championship football game. If only they'd let him play.
Or, to call back to our somewhat suggestive beginning, those who promise wealth and power if we would only shake off the chains of the federal government sound like nothing so much as a grumpy old man who is absolutely sure he would be spending wild weekends with Scarlett Johansson, if only he weren't married.
He just needs to treat his wife better. And the rest of us need to respect the land.
George Pyle, the Tribune's editorial page editor, has lived in tiny towns that were rapidly getting tinier, in states with no federal land to be seen.