[Shouting. Laughter. Disturbance.]

Do cowboys work hard? Sometimes. But most ranchers don’t work very hard. They have a lot of leisure time for politics and bellyaching (which is why most state legislatures in the West are occupied and dominated by cattlemen). Anytime you go into a small Western town you’ll find them at the nearest drugstore, sitting around all morning drinking coffee, talking about their tax breaks.

Is a cowboy’s work socially useful? No. As I’ve already pointed out, subsidized Western range beef is a trivial item in the national beef economy. If all of our 31,000 Western public-land ranchers quit tomorrow, we’d never even notice. Any public school teacher does harder work, more difficult work, more dangerous work and far more valuable work than the cowboy or rancher. The same thing applies to registered nurses and nurses’ aides, garbage collectors and traffic cops. Harder work, tougher work, more necessary work. We need those people in our complicated society. We do not need cowboys or ranchers. We’ve carried them on our backs long enough.

[Disturbance in rear of hall.]

“This Abbey,” the cowboys and their lovers will say, “this Abbey is a wimp. A chicken-hearted sentimentalist with no feel for the hard realities of practical life.” Especially critical of my attitude will be the Easterners and Midwesterners newly arrived here from their Upper West Side apartments, their rustic lodges in upper Michigan. Our nouveau Westerners with their toy ranches, their pickup trucks with the gun racks, their pointy-toed boots with the undershot heels, their gigantic hats. And, of course, their pet horses. The instant rednecks.

[Shouts.]

To those who might accuse me of wimpery and sentimentality, I’d like to say this in reply. I respect real men. I admire true manliness. But I despise arrogance and brutality and bullies. So let me close with some nice remarks about cowboys and cattle ranchers. They are a mixed lot, like the rest of us. As individuals, they range from the bad to the ordinary to the good. A rancher, after all, is only a farmer, cropping the public rangelands with his four-legged lawnmowers, stashing our grass into his bank account. A cowboy is a hired hand trying to make an honest living. Nothing special.

I have no quarrel with these people as fellow humans. All I want to do is get their cows off our property. Let those cowboys and ranchers find some harder way to make a living, like the rest of us have to do. There’s no good reason why we should subsidize them forever. They’ve had their free ride. It’s time they learned to support themselves.

In the meantime, I’m going to say good-bye to all you cowboys and cowgirls. I love the legend too—but keep your sacred cows and your dead horses out of my elk pastures.

[Sitting ovation. Gunfire in parking lot.]

Theory of Anarchy

THE BIBLE SAYS that the love of money is the root of all evil. But what is the essential meaning of money? Money attracts because it gives us the means to command the labor and service and finally the lives of others—human or otherwise. Money is power. I would expand the Biblical aphorism, therefore, in this fashion: the root of all evil is the love of power.