Better known as PunDMC!, Dennis Marden Clark is a retired librarian living in Orem, Utah. When not writing, he is often out riding his recumbent bicycle, either grinding his way up the Provo River Trail to Vivian Park (and whizzing back down), or sedately pedaling on the Murdock Canal Trail with Valerie Clark, also a retired librarian.

POSTED: DUMPING PROHIBITED IN UTAH LAKE, or, DON’T TREAD ON ME AND OTHER USEFUL COCKAMAMIE

Lee Olsen

Circumnavigate Utah Lake. Then spiral outward. 

Witness Utahns treading heavily. We pipe water, bulldoze dirt, exploit nature as a mere resource, and treat watersheds like sewers. 

Note the striking vistas punctuated by overgrazed, charred, and eroded hillsides, landfills, open-pit mines, refineries, factories, suburban sprawl, malls, temples to multilevel gods, weapons incinerators, fenced-off playas strafed and cratered.

Interpret the shot-up road signs, which neatly symbolize our conflicted libertarian ethos, our cockamamie notions of rugged individualism:

SPEED LIMIT / 55 / 65 / 80 MPH

“Don’t tell me how to live my life?!” BANG!

NO DUMPING / HUNTING / TRESPASSING / ATVs

“Who the hell do you think you are?!” BANG!

We tread heavily yet complain about being trod upon. Green rattlers on yellow Gadsden flags sag in the hot, dusty air. Actors acted upon, we’re complicit beneficiaries of extraction, dumping, and development (so-called). Our ideologies etch the landscape.

…

Circle in again. It’s a wonder, Utah Lake: a troubled oasis in an increasingly arid desert. It’s a wonder what we’ve done to it. Geneva Steel obscures the shallow lake in my earliest recollections, from family trips down I-15. An anxious child perturbed by that “dark Satanic mill,” I preferred to gaze at Nebo, Timpanogos, and Lone Peak Cirque.

In the 1940s, the Roosevelt administration, national cooperation, and the Allied war
against fascism (over there!) built that smoldering, lucrative sanctum of industrial alchemy on

Utah Lake—a $144,000,000 taxpayer-funded complex sold to U.S. Steel for $48,000,000 (did we howl at that massive government giveaway?). For decades, domestic steel undergirded development and created jobs. But eventually, Geneva was stripped, “offshored,” and disappeared—for better and worse—like countless U.S. factories. 

I’m old enough to drive myself to Utah Lake, but I don’t. I picture poisons accreted in soil and groundwater, toxic algae blooms, trash, dead carp. My in-laws’ parked jet-skis whisper, “Can’t get in the lake anymore …” 

Proposals abound: restore it, manufacture Tahoe II, leave it the hell alone. A layperson, I
trust ecological, democratic approaches to healing poisoned places. We ought to avoid
treading on the locals (human, snake, fish, fowl); integrate public and expert participation; avoid
exacerbating problems with “solutions”; and ask who gains, who loses, when public resources
are privatized and “developed.” 

…

We ought to interrogate cockamamie schemes.

Cockamamie, another product of the 1940s, means fake, implausible, or harebrained. 

For example: “Their luxury island scheme is cockamamie.” A mutation of “decalcomania,” the transfer of images/words onto surfaces—decals, temporary tattoos—from the French calque for copy or trace, from the Latin calcare for press or tread on, from calx for heel. 

In linguistics, a calque is a literal, ofttimes nonsensical, word-for-word translation. For instance, a dubious online source on U.S./Geneva Steel features a photograph of a barbed-wire fence and a rusty sign—backgrounded by a wasted pond and the shore of Utah Lake—calqued efficiently with a whimsical flourish: “DUMPING PROHIBITED / United States Steel.” Standing so close to the shoreline, the sign bleeds irony and hypocrisy. Nonliteral translation: “Dumping for we, not for thee.” Defiant deadeyes pressed the sign forcefully with bullets and BBs (“Prohibited, huh?!” BANG!).

Recall this when you see Gadsden flags, decals, tattoos. “Don’t Tread On Me,” viz.
“Keep your goddamn heels off me.” 

Westerners ought to recognize good cockamamie. In our lovely Deseret, we’re loaded with double standards, absurd expectations, and dangerous ironies. We calcare but we shan’t be calcare’d upon (“My body, my choice. Your body, also my choice”). Hypocrisies compel questions: Who gets to tread on whom? Where might we seek remedy for grievous treadings upon? Where should we direct our ire, beyond inanimate road signs? At government, business, developers, neighbors, scapegoats, coastal elites?

We scorn governments yet allow unscrupulous developers, think tankers, pyramid schemers, and snake oil marketers to manipulate, extort, and poison us. Libertarian ideologies plainly don’t translate for the people as they do for corporations and governments. The willful mistranslation is too obvious, too convenient. They dump, we get dumped on. We’ve been hoodwinked. Fatally distracted. 

…

To wit: Flashy billboards:

BORROW, REFINANCE, DRIVE AWAY TODAY, MOVE IN TOMORROW!

“You betcha! Tell me where to sign!”

TRIM DOWN, AUGMENT, WHITEN, RESTYLE, COMFY BLANKETS!

“Make me beautiful and happy like them, please!”

Meanwhile, lurking behind the signs, a suspiciously similar crew runs our anti- government governments and our pro-business businesses. (Hey, isn’t that investor also a state legislator?) 

Disavowing the clear conflicts of interest, they intone slogans ad nauseam (recall the calque; interpret shrewdly):

DEVELOPMENT, INC. BOLSTERS THE ECONOMY AND CREATES JOBS

“Wow! The Economy? What sort of jobs? Salaried, benefitted?”

REGULATION DESTROYS LIBERTY

“You mean your liberty to tread on us?”

ENVIRONMENTAL DEGRADATION IS THE PRICE OF PROGRESS

“That doesn’t sound right.”

THERE IS NO ALTERNATIVE

“Now wait just a goddamn minute . . .”

…

When you hear the latest proposal, the shopworn slogans, recall: cockamamie, decal, calque, calcare, calx. Unchecked politicians, developers, and con artists will tread and dump on us with impunity. They’ll dump in our lakes, rivers, and air. They’ll market glitzy sandcastles built on dredged sludge. They’ll litigate us for slander (SLAPP!) when we resist, and their police will arrest us. Or shoot us. (Us: “Don’t tread—” Them: “Shush your cockamamie!” Crack! BANG!)

For hellsakes, our fearful leaders allowed over 900 upwind nuclear bomb detonations, denied the cancers, preached patriotism – and the Gadsden snakes/flags melted like blasted sand and sagebrush. A better example of their heels treading on our throats, please?

…

There are alternatives. We know it in our bones. So, let’s surpass the decal ideology, shelve our guns, temper our rugged individualism, and collaborate. We can continue building a less toxic future and compel governments and businesses toward restoration. At Utah Lake, we ought to at least enforce U.S. Steel’s boldfaced command: DUMPING PROHIBITED.

Don’t tread on us. Or snakes. 

Or lakes.

Mad Bear’s Prophecy

Thomas W Murphy

“We are here today under our grandfather the Sun who is our witness and we have come here to deliver a message to all of you people, to all of our brothers and sisters to tell you that there are many things that are happening in this world now, and that we who are close to the forces of nature, close to the land and the spirits, and close to the Creator, know how to interpret these things, according to our prophecies,” warned Wallace “Mad Bear” Anderson (1927-1985) to a group of Latter-day Saints gathered in a city park in West Jordan, Utah on August 17, 1972.

Mad Bear, a Tuscarora activist, traveled with the North American Indian Unity Caravan in its tour of Turtle Island (North America) that began on August 21, 1967 at the Tonawanda Seneca Nation near Bethany, New York. 

“We have met with many nations and many people, and I must tell you people here, the community, that this is the first time we have permitted a meeting with non-Indian people. We want you to know this. Time is short! We have to tell you these messages,” lamented Mad Bear. Latter-day Saints were the only non-Indigenous community the caravan addressed as it wove its way back through the traditional lands of the Timpanogos, Ute, Shoshone, Paiute, and Goshute peoples, en route to its circular culmination at the Kahnawa:ke Mohawk First Nation near Montreal, Quebec on September 4, 1972.

“We, Indian people, believe that this Earth is our mother, that without her help, all life will die. Everything comes from our mother the Earth. Many times our people have neglected to take care of our Mother Earth. Many times our brothers and sisters from across the waters have not had that feeling from the soul and the heart, and the mind to the attachment of our Mother, the Earth.”

“There have been vast areas, thousands and thousands of acres of topsoil that has been ruined because of ruthless mining, and all these other things. Our Mother, the Earth, has suffered terribly. Mines have gone in and taken the minerals from her ground. The wealth of these resources has not been put to proper use,” noted Anderson.

The North American Indian Unity Caravan emerged from the lands of the Seneca (one of the Six Nations of the Haudenosaunee, or Iroquois), the same place that gave birth to Mormonism, a religious movement whose largest denomination, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, is now headquartered north of Utah Lake, in Salt Lake City, Utah. Mad Bear found common cause with Zula Brinkerhoff (1914-2002), a Latter-day Saint woman who hosted the Indigenous entourage. Mad Bear viewed the parallel teachings of Joseph Smith and those of the Seneca prophet Handsome Lake as akin to a two-row wampum, like a couple of canoes traveling side by side in the same direction. 

In stories that Mad Bear spread far and wide, followers of Handsome Lake collaborated with Joseph Smith in the production of the Book of Mormon, but the result was more Christian than the Seneca had intended. Anderson told Brinkerhoff of Jesus and Joseph Smith appearing to him in vision and holding out the hopeful possibility that “there was a people here who would eventually be numbered with the righteous Indians and be preserved and spared from the destruction that had been decreed by the Almighty upon this land.”

More than a decade earlier, Mad Bear had told the journalist Edmund Wilson about a similar prophecy. Centuries ago, the Peacemaker “told the people that they would face a time of great suffering. They would distrust their leaders and the principles of peace of the League, and a great white serpent was to come upon the Iroquois, and that for a time it would intermingle with the Indian people and would be accepted by the Indians, who would treat the serpent as a friend.” 

Mad Bear noted that in time this white serpent would “become so powerful it would attempt to destroy the Indian,” choking the life’s blood from them. In the midst of the struggle, “a great message would come to them, which would make them ever so humble.” In a state of humility they would await “a young leader, an Indian boy, possibly in his teens, who would be a choice seer.”

The seer would receive “great power, and would be heard by thousands” who he would gather in the “hilly country, beneath the branches of an elm tree.” His Indigenous audience would “number as the blades of grass and he would be heard by all at the same time” as he called upon the Peacemaker by name. In this darkest hour the Peacemaker would return. Then, the white serpent would fall in defeat.

When the white serpent revives after the battle he will swim away. Yet, “a portion of the white serpent” would make “its way toward the land of the hilly country, and there he will join the Indian People with a great love like that of a lost brother.” The rest of the white serpent “would never again be a troublesome spot for the Indian people.” 

From West Jordan, Anderson’s words echoed across a once fertile lake. “We are living in a dangerous time! If you continue to ignore this, you will have to pay the supreme price. If you do not get back and consider the first people; my Indian people, you will have to pay this price.”

“A Great Spirit has placed us here upon this land with very special instructions. He has told us that Mother Earth was handed to us by her for the protection and for the benefit of our future generations, of our children’s children, who are not yet born,” Mad Bear warned the settlers.

“A Great Spirit gave this land to us. It belongs to us, and if this mess is not straightened out soon, many lives will be lost by the forces of nature, because the Great Spirit will take this land back, purify it, and then return it to our people.”