WALLACE, Idaho — As anyone who has faced the mirror (sorry, that's a Charles McCabe-ism - McCabe being the famed San Francisco Chronicle columnist and devotee of Rainier Ale [a.k.a. the “Green Death”] who died in 1983 and was this writer's mentor) must know, our saloons lately have been infiltrated by Law Enforcement.
Presumably, these Law Enforcement personnel emit from the state of Idaho's liquor board, its state police department, or perhaps from some outfit authorized to fly armed drones over unarmed civilians. In this goofy age it does not matter: consider yourself and your behaviour under constant surveillance.
The bummer about the Feds' festering presence here in the Silver Valley is that our prostitutes have had to look for other work at Wally World and our plethora of car washes and posh resorts until their legitimate business resumes. We've also had to scrap our Roulette wheels and card tables: Pan is only a word if it is preceded by Peter, or frying. And, Heaven forbid, minor children might, three years older than the minimum age to handle a machine gun under the loving care of Uncle Sugar's military, be permitted to purchase cigarettes.
Heaven also forbid that we should have any fun. (Isn't that the definition of a Liberal - or as they call themselves these days, a Progressive? A person who loses sleep at night fearing that someone, somewhere, is having fun.)
The United Snakes Environmental Protection Agency and the overlords of the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration straddle us like we are so much unbroken ponies. Notice those sweet words? Protection? Health? These alphabet soup outfits provide neither. They are meter-maids and trash collectors packing the power of the gun.
I wonder, in my darker and most paranoid moments, if Shoshone County hasn't been singled out for some sort of social experiment. (I wonder that about frequent flyers enduring the trepidations of the Transportation Security Agency, too, if the TSA was created for the sole purpose of finding out how far the government can push people without blowback.)
Revisit the events of June 23, 1991, here and ask yourself the same question. More than 150 Federal (there's that word again) Bureau of Investigation agents smashed down doors and swarmed more than 50 establishments here. And for what? A few card games and poker machines. The feds even demanded the the Wallace Elks give up their building for illegal gaming because they kept some antique slot machines locked up in the basement.
Apparently the government doesn't like competition. You can buy a national lottery ticket in a Wallace bar, perfectly legally, but to expect (or to give) a pay-out from a video poker machine puts you in the cross-hairs of “law enforcement.”
The storm-trooper nature of that 1991 raid garnered national headlines, and was, as confessed one harried FBI Special Agent in Charge to this reporter, a training mission for the later murderous assaults on Randy Weaver at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, and the bloodbath that was the Branch Davidian commune in Waco, Texas.
Remember 1991? The local economy was absolutely in the ditch, thanks to the action of the Federal (there's that word again!) Reserve Board's banks to depress commodities, among them silver, lead and zinc. While the Fed and then-president Ronald Reagan are given credit for cooling down the inflation of the Johnson-Nixon years, what's neglected by historians is that they did so breaking it over the back of the working man. Shoshone County was a prime example.
So into this milieu of a crushed economy stormed the jack-boots, seizing, by their estimate, a half-million dollars worth of private property.
Hey, the mines were down, the smelter was shuttered, multiple thousands of folks out of work, grocery stores closing right and left, the population shrinking by a dozen families a day. Why not kick them while they're down?
And did we take up arms against this sea of troubles? No. We put up with it, just wishing the whole nightmare would go away. And thus the feds learned a potent lesson. You can kick somebody pretty hard when they're down and get away with it. To a despot this is good news.
Was this all about an allegedly crooked sheriff? Two juries — one hung — thought not. Was it about money? One can only suppose that the claimed half-million bucks in seized property, much of it later returned, barely covered the cost of the raid.
Or was it that the live-and-let-live ethos of Shoshone County gets up somebody's nose in Washington, D.C.?
Time will tell. Meanwhile, until EPA and MSHA let us go mining again, can we have our hookers and our poker tables back? Trust us, Uncle Sugar. We'd rather work than screw around but we ought to be able to do one or the other.
David Bond is a freelance writer and author. Feel free to email him at 999silver@gmail.com
