I’m still scratching my head over Governor Dennis Daugaard’s New Year’s Eve column. In my most generous reading, it appears the following conversation took place on Second Floor:
- Hey, we need some New Year’s fluff, and we haven’t written anything about The Revenant yet.
- Kelly Prior’s 2009 direct-to-video Iraq veteran turned zombie vigilante film?
- Close, but no. The new Hugh Glass movie.
- Do we want to mention that? They shot most of it in Canada. We promote the film, people come here, they ask, “Where the heck are the mountains?”
- Just write the column. Hugh Glass. Happy New Year, rah rah rah. Go.
Out comes this meander:
- Governor Daugaard recognizes that “the New Year brings an opportunity for new beginnings.”
- Hugh Glass’s “tale of renewal” began in August, 1823, when a grizzly bear mauled him and his friends left him for dead. (The Governor fails to reach for the obvious tie-in to the need for Medicaid expansion to save the lives of the working poor.)
- Glass crawled pretty much from Lemmon to Chamberlain and forgave the men who abandoned him.
- Hugh Glass had stamina and courage (and, not mentioned by the Governor, Indians who gave him food and weapons and sewed bear hide to his back to cover his wounds—pause to explore that symbolism)—so should you!
The opportunity to start fresh often comes in an unexpected way. I am excited for the possibilities in 2016 and I hope you have a great year! Whatever may be your New Year’s resolution, I wish you the stamina and courage of Hugh Glass. You can do it! [Governor Dennis Daugaard, press release, 2015.12.31]
Translation: Never mind the maggots; getting mauled by a bear is your chance for renewal!
The Governor starts with good intentions, but his essay just doesn’t hang together. The Hugh Glass story doesn’t fit on a New Year’s card. Cheery self-helperism is not what Hugh Glass crawled to Fort Kiowa to spread. The Governor can tackle both topics, but he needs to do them separately. If he wants to wrap his New Year’s wish in cinema, he can talk about Finn realizing he couldn’t be a Stormtrooper and encourage us to critically evaluate our own commitment to our moral codes. Then he can do a separate column on Hugh Glass’s epic physical and moral journeys, look for connections to contemporary South Dakota issues, and suggest that we watch out for bears. But putting both issues in the same column trivializes the Hugh Glass story and makes his New Year’s wishes amusingly macabre.
Citizens in South Dakota are safe from bears and big bad wolves. Hepler comes from a GFP which has run most of the scientists and biologists out of Alaska and decided the best practice to ensure more moose and caribou for wealthy friends of the establishment was to shoot all the bears and wolves from the air.
GFP also got rid of the bufferzone around Denali that protected some of the most intensely studied wolves in the world. The buferf was opened to trapping and soon after some of those wolves were trapped. Many tagged and radio-collared wolves were shot,ending decades of federal studies. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A23709-2005Apr3.html
So,I guess there is little chance one can be mauled by a bear in SD. There goes your chance for renewal,unless a certain wingnut grifter from the Mat-Su Valley decides to infest your state with her hubby and cubs.
A gov with an extremely small mind and narrow view of the world and a corrupt administration combined with a regressive legislature leads to many more attacks from the bears on all sides.
That conversation above didn’t happen on the second floor of the capital. It happened at Larry the Shiller. The same people who sold SD on the “Don’t spank your monkey and drive” billboard campaign. The same people who advertised SD as, “Hey! It’s better to live here than to die on Mars.” The same people who get the big no-bid contracts to turn out sh!t and tell us it’s steak. The same people who took a huge payout to subcontract the Macy’s float last week. The same people who employ Gov. Daugaard’s child. That’s who writes this stuff. They get paid to think of crap like this, and the quality of that column screams Larry the Shiller.
Rose Bowl float. Sorry Macy’s for associating you erroneously with the worst ad agency in the country.
Thanks for the reminder of our state government’s love of Lawrence and Schiller. Funny: if that’s who’s really writing this dreck, they serve as a stunning counterexample to the argument that privatization brings better results.
On face, regardless of who wrote it, Daugaard’s column is blatantly bad writing, right?