ellen meloy the anthropology of turquoise

She lives in the West, the American West, and does not have a gun! Yet lives to tell about it.Ī sheriff’s deputy said, “Get yourself some guns.” Her husband Mark has an old shotgun, but Ellen Meloy, who describes herself as a “token, squishy, white doughball of liberalism who still believed that if you hated government, maybe you should do something really radical to change things, like vote,” does not have a gun. Roadblocks, canine units, sheriffs and cops, and SWAT teams are everywhere. The subject becomes important when “three anti-government extremists” who have killed a policeman in Colorado turn up not far from the Meloy place. One of her best essays, “Bluff,” (below) is about guns. “What,” she says, “has become of the honorable and decent public servant? You won’t find one in either political party, so kill your television.” And she turns hers off. In November of 1996 Ellen Meloy was utterly sick of election jabber, of the inescapable faces on television and the incessant brainless repetitive rhetoric. Some of the essays seem to have been written last week, so fresh are the topics. Humans also are animals, she says-face it. against a suffocating culture of meaninglessness.” And she could fire off hard truths dipped in sarcasm, as in “Animal News,” which works up from an unnamed man’s statement that wolves should not be reintroduced in the West because, as he says pejoratively, “The wolf kills for a living,” to her point that we are “so estranged” from the lives of wild creatures that we offer them the choice of only living lives that suit us or dropping dead. Some of the essays are less than benign, as “California” with its acid takeoff on the provocative bumper sticker “I’d rather be hunting and gathering” pasted on a luxe-mobile, or “Cracking Up” with its call to “small acts of defiance. “Tourists in the Wild” lampoons New Yorkers lost in the terrifying Great West with a reference to bears, which we all know are spaced about twenty feet apart from the left side of the Rockies to the Pacific Ocean.īut her essays were not all wit and amusement.

Ellen meloy the anthropology of turquoise