"Drain the swamp!"
I've been hearing that rallying call for years from the right. Never really understood it for a few reasons.
One is that they seem to mean it as a metaphor for getting rid of bad people and replacing them with good people. But it sure seems like they are doing the exact opposite. Kristi Noem is just the latest example.
The other is that it's a strange metaphor for "bad."
In the early 1990s, Saddam Hussein declared war on the Marsh Arabs (the Ahwari) who were a group of indigenous Arabs living in the Mesopotamian marshlands in southern Iraq. George Bush had made a radio plea for the Iraqi people to rise up against Hussein in early 1991, and the Ahwari mounted a halfhearted uprising. It was quickly quenched.
Hussein thought the best way to punish them was to drain the swamps they relied on for food, transportation, water and their way of life. So he constructed massive civil engineering projects to divert that water and dry out the region. It worked; the Ahwari were effectively destroyed as a people. Thousands of Arabs died and hundreds of thousands were displaced. Only when the swamps were re-established after Hussein's ouster could the much diminished Ahwari return home.
Taking a metaphor that Saddam Hussein literally used for attempted genocide seems ill conceived. (Unless, of course, the point is to create fear.)
Even personally that metaphor doesn't make sense.
In high school I played Trapper John in a high school production of M*A*S*H. In that play, the swamp was a refuge for the surgical staff from the pressures and dangers of living in a war zone. It was their home-away-from-home where they'd gather, drink and de-stress after a day of sewing people back together. It was the one good place in Korea for them.
Earlier, when I was a kid in elementary school, we only lived about a mile from school - an easy walk. But we were forbidden to walk to school. There were only two routes we could walk on the roads. One went by Mill Pond and the other went by the Projects. The Mill Pond route was out because the last stretch of that route took you along Lake Avenue, a road with no sidewalks where people regularly drove 50mph (on a road that has a 25mph speed limit) with both curves and hills that made visibility very poor.
The other route, coming from the south, was out as well. That stretch of Lake Avenue was a little more hospitable, but it went by the low-income Projects where "bad people" lived. (That fear was way overblown, I later learned, but was a thing at that point.)
So we carpooled. My mother traded off with the Van Ripers to drive us to school to avoid those roads.
But I often agitated to let me walk home. There was a route that I had found that went up Underhill then down Mill River Road (both perfectly safe.) Then behind the convenience store I would drop down into the swamp and cross to Lake Avenue, where I could make one crossing onto our house on Ski Lane. To my 10 year old mind it was an elegant solution to the Lake Avenue problem.
My parents were generally against this, since the swamp was a wild place and they thought I'd constantly be falling in the river (stream) that passed through it. They may have thought this because I would often come back muddy from the swamp. But there was only one crossing you had to make and unless it was raining it was an easy 2 foot jump for a 10 year old, as long as that 10 year old wanted to avoid getting wet. So although it was a piece of cake, I would generally get told no.
But there were the days where neither parent could make it and I'd walk home that way. It was a great place. The south (upper) part of the swamp was all culverts, streams and rushing water, with dirt banks on both sides of the stream. The lower part (which was easy to avoid) was the true swamp where the river gradually transitioned to Mill Pond. It was an oasis full of skunk cabbages, frogs, dragonflies and fish, and was endlessly diverting. I'd go down there on weekends and build dams, divert streams, build boats and explore the depths of the swamp. There was a berm where Lake Avenue had been built, and people would sometimes use that as a dump - and therefore there was a good source of wood, plastic, old tarps, bottles (for flotation) and string for projects.
When I was 15 we moved a few miles to a new house, big enough to fit the six people now in our family. And I moved on to new pursuits on the weekends and stopped visiting the swamp. Still, a lot of my strongest memories of childhood took place in that swamp. It was a great place, and draining it would be a crime.
"Keep the swamps!"
I've been hearing that rallying call for years from the right. Never really understood it for a few reasons.
One is that they seem to mean it as a metaphor for getting rid of bad people and replacing them with good people. But it sure seems like they are doing the exact opposite. Kristi Noem is just the latest example.
The other is that it's a strange metaphor for "bad."
In the early 1990s, Saddam Hussein declared war on the Marsh Arabs (the Ahwari) who were a group of indigenous Arabs living in the Mesopotamian marshlands in southern Iraq. George Bush had made a radio plea for the Iraqi people to rise up against Hussein in early 1991, and the Ahwari mounted a halfhearted uprising. It was quickly quenched.
Hussein thought the best way to punish them was to drain the swamps they relied on for food, transportation, water and their way of life. So he constructed massive civil engineering projects to divert that water and dry out the region. It worked; the Ahwari were effectively destroyed as a people. Thousands of Arabs died and hundreds of thousands were displaced. Only when the swamps were re-established after Hussein's ouster could the much diminished Ahwari return home.
Taking a metaphor that Saddam Hussein literally used for attempted genocide seems ill conceived. (Unless, of course, the point is to create fear.)
Even personally that metaphor doesn't make sense.
In high school I played Trapper John in a high school production of M*A*S*H. In that play, the swamp was a refuge for the surgical staff from the pressures and dangers of living in a war zone. It was their home-away-from-home where they'd gather, drink and de-stress after a day of sewing people back together. It was the one good place in Korea for them.
Earlier, when I was a kid in elementary school, we only lived about a mile from school - an easy walk. But we were forbidden to walk to school. There were only two routes we could walk on the roads. One went by Mill Pond and the other went by the Projects. The Mill Pond route was out because the last stretch of that route took you along Lake Avenue, a road with no sidewalks where people regularly drove 50mph (on a road that has a 25mph speed limit) with both curves and hills that made visibility very poor.
The other route, coming from the south, was out as well. That stretch of Lake Avenue was a little more hospitable, but it went by the low-income Projects where "bad people" lived. (That fear was way overblown, I later learned, but was a thing at that point.)
So we carpooled. My mother traded off with the Van Ripers to drive us to school to avoid those roads.
But I often agitated to let me walk home. There was a route that I had found that went up Underhill then down Mill River Road (both perfectly safe.) Then behind the convenience store I would drop down into the swamp and cross to Lake Avenue, where I could make one crossing onto our house on Ski Lane. To my 10 year old mind it was an elegant solution to the Lake Avenue problem.
My parents were generally against this, since the swamp was a wild place and they thought I'd constantly be falling in the river (stream) that passed through it. They may have thought this because I would often come back muddy from the swamp. But there was only one crossing you had to make and unless it was raining it was an easy 2 foot jump for a 10 year old, as long as that 10 year old wanted to avoid getting wet. So although it was a piece of cake, I would generally get told no.
But there were the days where neither parent could make it and I'd walk home that way. It was a great place. The south (upper) part of the swamp was all culverts, streams and rushing water, with dirt banks on both sides of the stream. The lower part (which was easy to avoid) was the true swamp where the river gradually transitioned to Mill Pond. It was an oasis full of skunk cabbages, frogs, dragonflies and fish, and was endlessly diverting. I'd go down there on weekends and build dams, divert streams, build boats and explore the depths of the swamp. There was a berm where Lake Avenue had been built, and people would sometimes use that as a dump - and therefore there was a good source of wood, plastic, old tarps, bottles (for flotation) and string for projects.
When I was 15 we moved a few miles to a new house, big enough to fit the six people now in our family. And I moved on to new pursuits on the weekends and stopped visiting the swamp. Still, a lot of my strongest memories of childhood took place in that swamp. It was a great place, and draining it would be a crime.
"Keep the swamps!"