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Politics : Sioux Nation -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: coug who wrote (33274)	8/15/2005 11:26:11 PM
From: SiouxPal	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 361249

Meet Edward Paul Abbey, twentieth-century polemicist and desert anarchist, a character of elaborate contradictions and eccentricities whose words either infuriated or delighted his readers. In a career spanning four decades, he wrote passionately in defense of the Southwest and its inhabitants, often mocking the mindless bureaucratic forces hell-bent on destroying it. "Resist much, obey little," from Walt Withman, was this warrior's motto. While he was alive, attempts to label him in conventional terms nearly always fell short because he was neither left-wing nor right-wing, nor was he an outlaw. Abbey was a genuine rebel who simply did not believe in the moderns industrial way of life. He wrote against the grain, always choosing the path of the greatest resistance. Beginning in the 1950s, he depicted the Southwest not as a virgin utopia peopled by rugged individualists, but as a region under siege because of government and corporate greed, its people at risk of being cut off from the primary wellspring of their spiritual strength - the wild places. He's been dead for a while now, but the legend keeps in growing. Edward Abbey became known as an "environmental writer". This title was not of his choosing, nor to his liking. He preferred not to categorize his style at all, but rather to "let his prose do his talking for him." Placing a label on Edward Abbey's style would be akin to picking up all the grains of sand in the desert South-west, putting them in a large glass container, and labeling that container "Desert". What Ed wrote about was the Earth, and his deep love of it. Whether he was writing about two snakes engaging in a mating ritual in Utah, or about a slow train ride across the Australian desert to Alice Springs, the Earth itself functions as the medium, and not something made up or manufactured by the author. To begin to understand Abbey, you must first take his advice to heart: "Do not jump into your automobile next June and rush out to the Canyon country hoping to see some of that which I have attempted to evoke in these pages. In the first place you can't see anything from a car; you've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk, better yet crawl, on hands and knees, over the sandstone and through the...cactus. When traces of blood begin to mark your trail you'll see something, maybe."