by JEFFERY ST. CLAIR
In early October 1983, I found myself pacing the terminal at the old Weir Cook Airport in Indianapolis, awaiting the arrival of David Brower, the great environmentalist. Brower emerged from the plane, his face aglow with impish triumph. We hustled down the terminal to the airport bar where he imparted the momentous news that his nemesis James Watt, the messianic Secretary of Interior, had just been evicted from his post in the Reagan administration.
Watt had doomed himself by denouncing the members of the federal coal-leasing commission as “a black, a woman, two Jews, and a cripple.” The commissioners had shown the audacity to resist Watt’s demented shale-oil scheme, which sought to transform the Great Plains into a moonlike landscape of craters and toxic slush ponds. So, like Earl Butz before him, Watt’s political obituary was written with a racist slur. It’s probably fitting that he fell from such a self-inflicted trifle. After all, Watt was an instinctive and unrepentant bigot, just like his boss Reagan. Ask any Apache.
Of course, the Christian fundamentalist and apostle of strip-mining from Wyoming nearly lost his job over another bone-headed misdemeanor: his attempt to bar the Beach Boys from performing at a 4th of July concert on the National Mall. Reagan had to intervene personally on behalf of that All-American band, whose music could have provided the soundtrack for the sunny brand of trickle-down utopianism the president was trying to force-feed the country in those days. The Gipper, who, if nothing else, always demonstrated a keen PR sense, may well have lost confidence in Watt at that precise moment.
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