Opinion-Columns.com

Parachuting In

My God, what a novice I proved myself to be yesterday (The Wall Street Welcome), suggesting that the golden parachutes of departing CEO’s were out of hand.  How naïve to think that the new and improved Boards of Directors would even wait to see if the new chief fits their preconception of what he must be.  It’s absolutely obvious.

The first thing he must be is financially overwhelmed.

Parachuting in as well as out of the corner suite has become the norm, the standard set by Honeywell and now confirmed by Hewlett Packard.  The Old-Boy-Club gets younger every day, but it has its marching orders and the CEO who sits on multiple boards is busy setting precedents, making sure that when it’s his turn to jump ship, he’ll parachute both ways as well.

And we let them persist in this vast circle-jerk that has come to call itself corporate governance, without so much as a whimper.  The financial pages of this or that newspaper are bowed in awe rather than outraged and thus the circle closes. No one gives a shit . . . let the last greedy sonofabitch turn out the lights.

In case you missed it, Mark Hurd’s contract to run Hewlett Packard includes

• A $2 million signing bonus
• $2.75 million to relocate, approximately $1,000 per mile from east to west coast.
• One million, one hundred fifty thousand HP shares under option
• 400,000 HP (restricted) shares outright
• Reimbursement for any sag his parting might cause in his already-owned 850,000 shares of NCR
• Annual salary $700/hr, $1.4 million.
• Guaranteed annual bonus, an extra $1,400/hr, $2.8 million, could go to $4,100/hr, $8.4 million.  Hell of an hourly wage, huh?
• Long term incentives of $4-12 million a year.

Incentives for what? $5,000 an hour isn’t enough to keep motivated?  It wasn’t for Carly Fiorina, who got so full of herself that she forgot to run the company.  Much of this stock option compensation is to make up for what Hurd left at the table at NCR, so now corporate boards have widened the mandate to include not only what’s offered, but what’s to be paid to get kicked out as well as the worth of what’s left behind.  Can ‘what he would have been worth had he become Bill Gates’ be far behind?

Somewhere down the chain of command (and not very far down) at Hewlett Packard is a trustworthy, hard working, intelligent guy (or gal) who would have made an outstanding CEO and whose dreams and faith in the company are now thoroughly trashed. In this Disneyesque scenario corporate boards create, is there any reason to work in the best interests of the company?  The overwhelming message is that reward comes to those who work in the best interests of self, who put self above all else, keep the curriculum vitae out there all the time and leverage, network and ass-kiss their way to stardom.

If you can make a contribution to the company at the same time, so much the better, but that’s a way-down-the-line priority.  The successful executive takes the current job with his eye on the next.  He rakes in the chips, squeezes the quarterly profit, maximizes the short-term stock price and moves on, baby.  HP was a mere stepping-stone for Carly and she’s never looked back, having become the hottest property in the babe-CEO category.

It’s a short-term disastrous way to run a corporation, but a hell of a way to leverage a career.

The Wall Street Welcome

Hewlett Packard has a new CEO named Mark Hurd and while the level of enthusiasm is smiles all around at the Board of Directors as well as Wall Street, one wonders about the numbers.

Carly Fiorina’s exit package is still causing enough turbulence to rock all incoming boats.

Does it seem strange to you that CEO salaries are often dwarfed by the negotiated exit parachutes?  It does to me.  It seems counter-productive to offer such a huge incentive to get yourself fired. We knew about Carly’s $1.4 mil salary, but the $42 million newspaper in which her severance fish was wrapped came as a surprise.  She was there a couple years, screwed up the job and got thirty years pay for it.  Nice deal.  Tidy for everyone but the investors.

Equally, and some would say democratically, we are not privy to Mark’s getting-out-of-town money.  But precedents are set by such things and it’s hard to settle the new guy into the chair without either coming up with similar loot or making him (or her) feel neglected, out of sorts and downright crabby.  The first question on everyone’s lips, from best friends to those who didn’t make the cut, is not the signing package but the severance.

“Honey, I got the job.”
“Great, sweetie.  I knew you had it in you.  What’s the severance?”

Very important people go entirely through very important lives, doing very important things and never accumulate anything approaching a million, much less tens of millions.  And of course the exit money is an expense, which means it is deducted from what would otherwise be profit and that which is not profit cannot be used for such otherwise useful purposes as research and development, building new factories or that most pleasant of all purposes, return on investment. 

Return on investment are what Mark and Carly were hired for in the first place, by a Board that (presumably) had the best interests of their investors in mind at the time of hiring.  What then, could so abruptly turn them against their advocacy of the investor when it came time to play Good Night Ladies and dim the lights for the end of the dance? 

Hush money, probably. 

Go quietly money, without any mud-slinging and all that nasty finger-pointing that might throw a little light on how ill-advised the Board’s original insights had been.  Tipping the lady (or man) who somehow inconveniently ends up in your hotel room at four in the morning (and then gets noisy) is still the far wiser solution to calling the house dick. In the non-corporate world there are a lot of names by which this extortion is called, but none of them are severance pay.

Not to second guess the Mark Hurd choice so early in the honeymoon, or at all for that matter.  His NCR credentials are impeccable and he’s a hands-on manager type more interested in the personnel than the personal.  A good man by all counts and even the rumor of his choice put HP stock up 10%.

When Mark steps down from HP, let’s hope it’s at a retirement party rather than a gunfight at the OK Corral.  HP’s Board has seemingly done a wise thing by bringing Mark on board, but they’ve got a long way to go to vindicate the $42 million decision to get Carly to go quietly. And they've done damage to business credibility as well.

Like my old daddy said, Wall Street is made of the sheep and those who shear the sheep.

Dear Valued Customer

As soon as they call you that, you know the scam is on, these same PR types responsible for the endless ‘hold’ on the phone, breaking in from time to time to assure you that your call is important.  In this case, I am the valued customer of Wal-Mart and their e-mail follows:

Dear Valued Customer,

Thank you for contacting us at Walmart.com regarding women’s
prescriptions for birth control. Your comments and concerns are very
important to us as we strive to meet your needs. 

Wal-Mart does not carry emergency contraceptives. Our pharmacists may
decline to fill a prescription based on personal convictions. However,
they must find another pharmacist, either at Wal-Mart or another
pharmacy, who can assist you by filling your prescription.

Again, we thank you for your comments regarding this issue.

Sincerely,

Customer Service at Walmart.com

Of course there often isn’t another pharmacy without driving forty miles and ‘emergency contraceptives’ is the Wal-Mart code-word for the morning-after pill.  But just as the mentally impaired aren't allowed to pilot commercial flights, Christian Scientists mostly avoid becoming  doctors and conscientious objectors are not often put on the front lines, it seems somehow out of whack to hobble pharmacy by individual religious conviction.

Particularly as an institutional parameter presented as doctrine in the largest retailer on the planet, which is often also the only pharmaceutical provider to an area. 

I have no objection to someone who feels morally opposed to contraception, I just don’t think it’s appropriate for them to take up the profession of pharmacy when there are other choices.  Sort of like an animal rights advocate working in a slaughterhouse or butcher shop.  If you think contact lenses are against God’s plan, why become an optometrist?

Or, as Harry famously said, “if you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.”  But does it make sense to advertise that kitchen, invite your ‘valued customers’ into that kitchen and then tell them that the chef may ‘decline to feed you a steak based on his or her moral conviction?”

That’s absurd.  My moral convictions and your moral convictions are personally held and perhaps sacred, but they are just plain wrongly imposed by me on you.  More wrongly yet when a commercial operation such as Wal-Mart magnifies the moral attitude of an employee to company-wide status.  At that point it’s an insult for them to address me as a ‘valued customer’ while turning me away from a legal product prescribed by my doctor on the whim of their sales person.

With all that Wal-Mart heat and so little Wal-Mart light, one can imagine pharmacists of that particular moral conviction flocking to Wal-Mart personnel offices across the country.  Where else you gonna find job security and self-defined moral superiority behind a single counter.

It may even pay more than minimum wage.

Nah.  Not at Wal-Mart.

Spring Plowing on the Fish Farm

Been a long, long time since the head of the household walked into nearby woods to shoot something for dinner.

Yet there’s a lot of resistance to fish farming, as if it was really all that different from raising cattle. Conjure up an image of huge machines combing the forests with nets twenty miles long to catch meat for the dining table.  Squirrels, rabbits, raccoons and ground hogs along with deer, bear (for those with lustier appetites) and wild boar all tumbling into the nets as the forest floor is scraped clean of all vegetation. Not much left to eat and no shelter for whatever animals missed the nets.  That’s okay, there’s always another forest out there . . . or is there?

We gave up hunting with spears, bows and guns when civilized man divided up the chores and manufacturers made pencils, ranchers raised cattle.  Somehow we never gave up fishing in the wild, although we kept on improving the equipment while fish stocks worldwide went in the dumper and man kept on scouring the oceans. Possibly it’s because all this depletion-of-the-wild-species we call ‘commercial fishing’ occurs out of sight that we are so unconcerned by the duplicitous character of the industry.

I’m reminded of ‘market hunters’ providing wild ducks for the restaurants of Chicago during the thirties and forties. Using sneak-boats equipped with what amounted to small bow-mounted cannons, they 'sneaked' up on rafts of sleeping ducks in the southern Illinois flyway.  At an appropriate moonlit moment, they whistled, and when the ducks all raised their heads in alarm, fired off the bow gun.  A market hunter could kill a thousand ducks a night that way and did, until the mallard population dropped so precipitously that sporting wildfowlers lobbied for stricter controls.

There’s no one to lobby for ruined sport fishing, although trout fishermen are coming out against fish farming on the complaint that escaping farmed trout interbreed with wild trout and interfere with the species.  So far as I know there has been no parallel problem with Montana domestic sheep getting loose and ruining the genetics of the wild mountain sheep.  Hunters and fishermen value them equally, but I’m willing to agree that trout may be different.

Even so, protecting the wild trout seems too high a price for not farming various varieties of fish, lobsters, oysters, mussels, shrimp and whatever else market pressures may advance.  What we can do and should do is take a very close look at fish feeding, fertilization and antibiotic requirements and establish continually monitored acceptable rates.  That precaution has not been taken with meat production and we pay a huge price for that lack of intelligent control.  Ask anyone who lives near a hog operation.

So, fish farming will happen because it needs to happen and because the alternative is permanently damaged and dying oceans.  Not an option, no matter the opinions of trout fishermen.  But the trout fishermen remind us we need a 'canary in the mine' when it comes to safety issues in fish farming and for that we owe them thanks.

Minimum Wage With the Emphasis on Minimum

I know all the arguments; that it’s only kids getting it, an increase will lose jobs and no one actually lives on minimum wages. 

The arguments are wrong.  According to The Heritage Foundation;

• "One-half are teenagers or young adults under the age of 23.”  That tells me that trying to get started in life when you’re already a third of the way through it is pretty grim on $5.15 an hour.
• “Two-thirds of these young workers live in families with incomes two or more times the official poverty level for their family size.”  That’s two thirds of the one half, which is one third. Let’s keep the figures honest and this figure doesn’t address the issue of how to leave that family when you’re only making five an hour.
• “ Just 14 percent live in poor families.”  Great!  Someone in the family must be making a decent wage.
• “Almost 74 percent are enrolled in either high school or college.”  Ever try to carry full course credits and pay for college at $5.15?   
• “Just 5 percent are married.” The gutsy 5%, ‘cause how you gonna do it on five bucks?
• “Over 88 percent live in families with an average income of almost $63,600 per year.”  Whoa now. Is that 88% of the 50%?  Otherwise, I just don’t believe it. As Bill Clinton might have said, “Define family.” 
• “The average income for single young workers is $10,000, but their average household income is $47,100 because 81 percent live with two or more people." I love these percentages. And if you stuff enough poor people into one shack, the ‘household’ income soars.

Approximately 83 percent of workers earning minimum wage are single and 60 percent are female.  Your eyes are glazing over with percentages.  I don’t blame you. 

Maryland is upping the minimum wage a buck. (Pause for applause or boos)  A number of states have taken off on their own on this issue because the national figures are so embarrassing.  In Santa Cruz, California the minimum is $12 . . . those crazy Californians, what will they think of next.  Even so, a Maryland Delegate in the issue at hand complained that the increase would cost Maryland small business $67 million next year in wages and taxes. Of course he could have said that the bill would increase business income within the state next year by $67 million because I doubt much of that additional paycheck will disappear into the stock market.  It’s going to be spent on food, clothes for the kids and maybe a little newer used car.  All consumables, all spent within the state, because the poor don’t travel all that much.

Henry Ford caught the same kind of flack from whatever served as The Heritage Foundation in 1914, as well as from his industrial baron friends, proving that some lessons are never learned. Henry saw all those Model-T’s coming off his assembly lines and wondered who would be able to buy them.  He’d made an inexpensive car and the rich were buying Pierce Arrows. It seemed to him that with $5 a day jingling in their pockets, his factory workers could pony up $200 for one of his cars and so it turned out. Instead of the ruination of the Ford Motor Company, Henry’s five bucks lit the fuse of the consumer revolution that took America to untold heights.*

Today, we have 40 million Americans living in poverty.  In average households of four, that’s ten million refrigerators that can’t be bought, five million automobiles unpurchased, a couple hundred million pairs of pants gone begging and an equal number of coats or skirts or pairs of shoes.  Argue with the numbers, pick on this or that choice to make your point, but the fact still remains that wages in America at that level go directly back into the business cycle.

By crippling forty million of our neighbors senselessly and needlessly we simply shovel sand into the engines of productivity.

Henry was right ninety-one years ago.

*Now don't write me about Henry's sneaky morals police, his strike breakers or his fascination with Hitler . . . I know all that dark side . . . we're talking about an economic result of paying workers better wages.

GM’s Cocooned Fourteenth Floor

It’s typical of a company that’s suffering from a stultified executive culture to grab at a marketing effort to gloss over decades of failed imagination.  Such is the case at General Motors.

The air on the fourteenth floor at GM Headquarters is rarified by its old-boy culture, allowing only those chosen by insiders from among insiders to occupy an office among them.  Fourteen makes membership at Augusta National Golf Club look egalitarian by comparison.  Possibly the executive floor is jinxed.  It is, after all, the thirteenth floor . . . who’s kidding whom when the elevator sails directly from twelve to fourteen?

No matter the floor number, GM has been building the wrong cars, marketed at a declining buyer base for decades now.  Living up to an old-folks mentality, it continued developing old-folks cars as it did with great success in 1959 when my old daddy bought his first new Cadillac. Daddy’s car was very starchy and proper, in the seventeen-foot-long, tailfinned definition of proper from those days and the fourteenth-floor execs never really got over the shock of that market disappearing out from under their yellow brick road.

Side issue: From 1946 to 1956 there was virtually no existing automobile manufacturing facility         outside the continental United States.  What Detroit interpreted as cutting-edge design development     and customer satisfaction was, to a large degree, merely a desperate world buying whatever they         could get.

Since those salad days, Detroit has been the last to innovate, the last to concern themselves with customer preferences, the last to bring anything exciting to their loyal buyers and the absolute last to disconnect themselves from reliance on big-platform, high-profit behemoths.  GM distinguished itself by being the last among the last. Every innovative trend at GM has earned halfhearted acceptance and the attitude up on fourteen drove good people elsewhere. Saturn, which might have been a model for the corporation, had to be developed as a separate entity because it's premise was so alien. General Motors finally, in desperation, turned to a retired Chrysler executive to take over the Vice Chairmanship for Product Development. What does that say about the once-largest auto builder in the world, that they were and are so inbred and incapable and incompetent as to have to go outside for product development.

Over the years I’ve owned Oldsmobiles (2), Pontiacs (3) and Chevrolets (7) and I’m mostly angry because they were damned fine automobiles in their day, but their day is long gone, lost to the hubris of the fourteenth floor. It’s a shame. I haven’t owned an American automobile (or motorcycle) since 1978 and I loved my GM cars, but they’ve become overpriced, behind-the-times pieces of junk and without rebates (essentially a kickback to the buyer) no one in their right mind would buy one.

I didn't leave America's auto industry, America's auto industry left me. Instead of listening to the world in terms of features and benefits, GM is betting on Mark LaNeve to market it out of its stagnation, decline and ultimate demise.  It won’t work.  Marketing is not the problem. It’ll buy some time, but it won’t work. 

The Japanese have too great a lead, with over three decades of fourteenth floor avoidance leaving the field of innovative development wide open, and now the Koreans are coming on strong. GM has over 6,000 design employees for eight products. What do seven hundred fifty design people do at Buick, get each other coffee? These are shared-platform cars, not custom built one-offs.  The wildly popular and enduring Mazda Miata was designed and brought to market in blazingly fast time by less than a dozen designers, outsourced by Mazda. I owned a Miata. It was (and is) an elegant little spitfire of a 2-seat roadster that sets your pants on fire and makes you smile every time you settle behind the wheel.  When did GM last make you feel like that? The 1954 Corvette?

Industrial goliaths the size and complexity of General Motors, much like super-tankers, are unwieldy masses of inertia that resist quick changes in course.  GM is at a crossroads right now that might have been avoided, could have been avoided, should have been avoided in the years since 1960.  To any forward looking, reasonably efficient and competitive industry, an influx of successful foreign product would have rung an alarm on the management floor. Fourteen at GM was complacent.  Hubris and in-house chefs were the order of the day.  Bonuses reinforced the status-quo and denial dominated long term planning.

If GM can be saved, it won’t be by the guys on fourteen.  Ford, Chrysler and GM have done takeover deals with foreign competitors for years, always (up until now) from the driver’s seat.  Don’t be surprised if one of these days Hyundai or Kia swoops in to take over what’s left of GM.

One thing’s for sure, it’ll be a fire-sale but it'll be good for product and good for the buyer of a GM car.

Why Protect Bob Novak?

Am I the only guy in the world who wonders what these 'investigators' hope to learn from Judith Miller and Matt Cooper that they couldn't just ask Robert Novak?

Bob Novak wrote the column that outed Valerie Plame more than eighteen months ago and no one's threatening Novak with jail time.  Why?  Does Patrick Fitzgerald, head of the Chicago office of the U.S. Attorney, think Novak doesn't know who tipped him to Valerie's name?  And what is the Chicago office doing in this anyway? 

C'mon, Patrick . . . have enough guts to ask the guy who wrote the article what he knows instead of playing at schoolyard bully with a couple of minor journalists.

A Wolf at the Door of the World Bank

Or a Wolfowitz, but it was hard to not use the wordplay.  The interesting thing to me is how quickly opposition polarized based on Paul Wolfowitz’s record within the Bush administration on Iraq policy. I’ve been particularly hard on him for his role and can’t say I’m his biggest fan, not on Iraq. In a before-we-went-to-war commentary I named Paul as “one of the five” who were taking us to a war no one wanted, that would serve no preventive terrorist purpose and would cost us an arm and a leg both in terms of casualties and money.

Having said all that, is it relevant regarding the World Bank Presidency?

You might call this a reach, but if I don’t happen to care for Tiger Wood’s politics (and I don’t know his politics) does that make him any less effective a golfer?  Does being liberal, conservative, new-age or Presbyterian add or detract anything to his 300 yard drives?  In another example, I don’t have to agree with my surgeon’s aggressive opinions at a dinner party and the wreck his marriage has come to be to trust him with removal of my gallbladder.  These days a huge and growing number of personally disagreeable executives have run excellent companies.  Okay, that last example is a stretch, but you get my drift.

Wolfowitz, from all that’s been said or written of him by friend or foe, has a formidable intellect.  That (I would like to think) allows him to separate and compartmentalize disparate issues such as the World Bank’s focus on alleviating world poverty and his participation in the administration focus (or lack thereof) on Iraq.  Candidates often surprise when they get elected, selected, chosen or appointed, a good example being Arnold Schwartzenegger who surprised us all and perhaps even himself.

Wolfowitz has no reason to want this job beyond his stated determination to bring all his skills into focus doing something that is important to him personally, alleviating poverty in third-world countries. He says that’s what he wants to do.  He claims to understand he is an employee, answering to the Board of Directors.

It might be well to listen to what Wolfowitz says about his plans for the bank, rather than jump to any ill-conceived conclusions.  My old daddy had a tree-nursery that was such tough clay you could hardly stick a spade in the ground.  But everything that came out of that nursery grew just fine . . . daddy claimed it was because the trees were so damned glad to be elsewhere. 

Paul Wolfowitz might be just like one of those trees.

Not to be Missed

. . . be sure not to miss this

Who's Afraid of Intelligent Design?

By Jay Mathews, Washington Post
Wednesday, March 23, 2005; Page A15

My favorite high school teacher, Al Ladendorff, conducted his American history class like an extended version of "Meet the Press." Nothing, not even the textbooks other teachers treated as Holy Writ, was safe from attack. I looked forward to that class every day . . . for the rest of the editorial click here.

Wild Horses Couldn't Drag Me . . .

I stood at the head of kind of quiet looking wild Mustang my friend Angie had brought from Montana and I talked to it gently while she adjusted stirrup leathers on the saddle we’d been walking this horse under for a week.  It was zero-hour and time for her to ride him for the first time.  This was to be no wild-west show, the object was for Angie to merely put weight on the saddle and, if all went well, ease up and then on his back for just a few moments---not even move forward, just build tolerance, from which we hoped would come trust. That would be the limit of our small day’s progress and then we’d put the stallion away. We’d been handling the horse for two weeks and for the most part had avoided all confrontations.

This was 1955 and Angie was among the first eastern rich kids to try and save wild Mustangs from the killer yards by adopting.  You had to be rich to dabble in this dubious venture. Vanning a fractious, unbroken Mustang from Montana to Illinois and boarding it long enough to know if you had anything workable was expensive.  In those early days it was supposed that mature wild horses could be gentled and ridden for pleasure.  Wild Horses Wyoming and the Black Hills Wild Horse Sanctuary have since learned better and now limit their rescue operations to returning wild horses to relative wild, the private wild of big spreads in private hands.  At any rate, there I was, standing in front of this late-learner, holding the bridle and soft-selling all the gentle horse vocabulary I could think of in a near whisper as Angie applied her weight to the near-side stirrup . . . slo…wly, ever so slowly.

It was over so quickly I really have no idea what happened, but in less time than it takes to apply the period to this sentence, the stallion had snatched his bridle out of my hands, turned 180 degrees and kicked me hard enough that I landed some ten paces across the indoor arena in a heap.  Breathless and writhing, he’d apparently caught me with his leg rather than a hoof and I was uninjured other than having had the wind and considerable pride knocked out of me.  Accomplishing what he no doubt felt to be rough justice, the stallion just stood there, head a bit lowered and waiting for our next move.

Our next move was to put him away and Angie sent him the following week with a shipment of show horses headed west, to a friend’s ranch in Wyoming.  Our experiment ended with much money spent, good intentions thwarted and a much annoyed wild stallion turned back onto the range.  Fifty years later, absent the Horse Whisperer, that’s still the best most of us can manage.  Like Zebras, wild Mustangs are meant to live wild and the Bureau of Land Management and Department of Interior are left with the unenviable job of managing the herds.

‘Managing’ in bureau-speak usually means shooting, but 16 years after my humiliation at the south end of a Mustang headed north, Congress protected them from the bullet and instead allowed their slaughter for meat.  I have my own thoughts about that, arguing that it’s more trauma to a wild thing to be rounded up, transported, corralled and slaughtered than it is to be shot in the wild.  But Congress and a good many ordinary citizens have a problem with this particular kind of gun control.  The present herd of 37,000 horses is deemed by the BLM to be 9,000 too many for the range to sustain.  So, they’re rounding up and selling, as is their mandate.  Dog food, horsemeat to France for dining tables, or buy ‘em for retirement, take your pick of the not-so-pretty options.

Black Hills Wild Horse Sanctuary currently has about 400 horses and says that’s all they can manage.  Angie and I couldn’t manage even one, so I know their plight.  Wild Horses Wyoming bought out the last auction at about $50 a head and plans to provide for an ultimate herd approximating 5,000. The long-term logistics of these solutions shake out pretty quickly and it’s obvious that no matter how well-intentioned, adoptions aren’t going to do the trick.

It seems there are three possible solutions:

• Leave everything be and let nature set the rules as nature does with all things. If 37,000 horses are too many for the range, the weak ones will starve off and the herd will balance.
• The government has a lot of land . . . open up some more range and wait for that to overcrowd.
• Get seriously in the meat business.

My own vote tends toward nature setting the rules, because I think that man, no matter how well intentioned, usually comes up with awkward solutions.  There are exceptions, but those mostly have to do with hunting game-stocks and wild Mustangs are not game animals.

Nationwide, Mustangs are the small tip of an iceberg whose immense bulk is substantially the whitetail deer population in the suburban East.  A more immediate problem, people there are frustrated and desperate enough to shoot Bambi if only it were possible within crowded populations.  But Laramie, Wyoming (where the wild burros and wild horses play) remains the mystical (and mythical) American West in the eyes of congressmen and animal activists. 

I applaud their sensitivity but think the world is becoming less and less a place where the truly wild can find accommodation alongside man.