When it comes to the cleanliness of water in New Mexico and the American West, the incompetent rapscallions of the Trump Administration have already done major damage to the natural systems that filter as much as 40% of our potable water supply. By drastically undermining the anti-pollution protections of ephemeral streams and wetlands in the Clean Water Act of 1972 in Trump’s first term and then doubling down on those rollbacks this year, the political quacks running our government have callously endangered the health of millions of people in the Southwest.
It has all happened, apparently, without a qualm of conscience and seems suspiciously like an outright act of political revenge against the blue states of the West. Water and pollution, of course, know no political boundaries. So in reality, Trump’s own people in red states are in just as much danger of pollution as his enemies. But reality isn’t Trump’s strong suit.
Our government these days is so preposterously deluded and malign that it feels to many of us as if the abysmal follies of the moment are utterly unique in American politics. Some even worry our democracy might fail to survive it.
I take comfort, albeit very chilly comfort indeed, that the best language to describe what we’re going through right now was written more than a 150 years ago by the true angel of America’s better natures, Walt Whitman. Walt had ridden the fiery rollercoaster of politics for years as a journalist. After the assassination of President Lincoln, Walt wrote a series of essays on democracy to vent his rage at what he saw as the spoilage of the sacred virtues of the “real America.” One essay is called the “Eighteenth Presidency.” It’s about the administration of Ulysses S. Grant. He could just as well have been writing about the 47th president and his administration that’s working feverishly now to make life miserable for all of us.
Every “trustee of the people,” Walt wrote, “is a traitor, looking out to his own gain, and to boost up his party.” Offices are “bought, sold, electioneered for, prostituted, and filled with prostitutes. … swarms of dough faces, office-vermin, kept editors, clerks, attaches of the ten thousand officers and their parties, aware of nothing further than the drip and spoil of politics — ignorant of principles, the true glory of a man. … (There are) no end of blusterers, braggarts, windy, melodramatic, continually screaming in falsetto, a nuisance to These States … altogether the most impudent persons that have ever yet appeared in the history of lands, and with the most incredible successes, having pistol’d, bludgeoned, yelled and threatened America … into one long train of cowardly concessions, and still not through, but rather at the commencement. Their cherished secret scheme is to dissolve the union of These States. … Where is the real America? … Where is the spirit of … common-sense of These States? It does not appear in the government. It does not appear at all in the Presidency.”
When I read that again, it felt as if I was listening to Walt over lunch yesterday. Where is the real America today? Where are rationality and common sense? Where are the scruples that keep people in power from making fools of themselves and smearing greed and corruption over the common good?
It certainly isn’t in the White House or around the cabinet table crammed tight with partisan hitmen, some of whom can think of nothing better to do than dismantle the Clean Water Act and junk the regulations that are meant to keep us all safe.
In New Mexico, the neutering of the Act is causing particular concern over the upper Pecos watershed. U.S. Senator Martin Heinrich and the New Mexico delegation has called the rollback of protections a ‘’direct threat to New Mexico’s waters, cultural identity, and way of life.” New Mexico Wild states that the Upper Pecos feeds many of the state’s “most important watersheds” with some of the cleanest water around. Now, new mining claims and leases, with their polluting tailings, will be permitted on about 165,000 acres. This could have terrible consequences for northern New Mexico tribes and acequia cultures.
Things could get a lot worse. There’s serious concern among some water managers in New Mexico, Colorado, and California that Trumpian political vengeance could find its way into ongoing, but currently stymied, negotiations over the Colorado River Compact of 1922, which oversees water distribution to 40 million people in the blue-leaning West. The fear is that Trump could arbitrarily decide to give more water, and more money for dams and water infrastructure to red states, bypassing the Colorado Compact altogether.
Something close to that already happened last year. CNN reports that an analysis of the Army Corps of Engineers construction budget show that only about 33% of it went to blue states. Democrats called it political retaliation. CNN quoted a Republican official in Texas as saying, “There is your incentive to be a Republican state.” It’s hard not to conclude that money for flood control projects, levees, and navigation infrastructure is being doled out with what CNN illustrates as a partisan bias.
While the Colorado Compact is a binding legal document that the White House can’t just simply rewrite, there’s nothing to prevent the president from issuing executive orders that circumvent existing agreements and allocations, throwing the water world of the West into chaos as it waits for lower courts to make their rulings, and then has to suffer more inevitable delays at the Republican-controlled U.S. Supreme Court.
What would Walt make of all this? He might go so far as to affirm what he wrote in Democratic Vistas, “Never was there, perhaps, more hollowness at the heart than at present,” in the United States. “Genuine belief seems to have left us. The underlying principles of the States are not honestly believ’d in, nor is humanity itself believ’d in. … The spectacle is appalling. We live in an atmosphere of hypocrisy throughout.”
I’m afraid that that’s the real America at the moment, even though far more than half of us are fighting tooth and nail against it.
*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it
NOTE: The Mercury Messenger is taking an early summer vacation this May and early June. We hope to return refreshed and ready to greet the doings of the world with renewed enthusiasm.
(Rio Grande photo by Alan Gross)
V.B., thank you.