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Librarian's Comment: Diana Kappel-Smith is a woman,
but in Desert Time, she subtly betrays women, the earth, and her
young son, about whom we hear so much in the narrative, by
becoming a mouthpiece for right-wing, anti-environmental
propaganda. This agenda is neither hidden nor soft-pedaled --
she idealizes ranchers and hunters in the best tradition of the
Reaganite rugged-individualist school of propaganda -- and
ventilates the standard Limbaugh-style ridicule of city-slicker
environmentalists as a species of naive do-gooders lacking the
fortitude or savvy necessary to tackle serious conservation
problems. In her universe, it takes a man with a large-bore
rifle in a camo-suit to do the hard work of regenerating the
wilderness and saving endangered species. The business of
trapping, anaesthetizing, and shipping breeding stocks to new
locations, monitoring herds, and auctioning the right to kill
big-horned animals is too big a job for the Teva-wearing Sierra
Clubbers who trade favors in the halls of the legislatures. In
Diana's universe, they love the earth best who dominate it with
a will, and save it from the misinformed, who would make a
religion out of non-consumption.
Whence comes
this nostalgia for domination, this veneration for aggressive
"management" of the environment?Diana sells her notions through
a personalized narrative that echoes the ruminative style that
has been popularized as nature writing over the last few
decades. She projects her spiel through a post-modern persona,
conjuring the stereotypical fears of a single woman, a single
mother, whose small anxieties, earnestly repeated, add up to a
big fear of the world, and a need for protecting males to rein
it all in, bring it to heel, and restore the balance between
humanity and brutal nature.
In true
post-modern style, she projects insecurity through denial rather
than outright admission. Take this passage where she refers
casually to a sexual dalliance, and dithers annoyingly about a
man she simultaneously wants to possess and reject:
"I found
a nice note card back in Ganado and I'm writing to a man I've
wanted for a long time and whom I spent a night with before I
left home. I'm pretty sure I spent the night with him because I
was just about to leave. I'm fine on my own, see. Even so, it's
only natural that when there are these little chinks in my time
I find myself thinking of him. And I figure I'd be rude -- not
to mention downright transparently insecure -- if I didn't send
him some kind of note letting him know that I'm fine on my own,
but that I think of him sometimes, even though I'm fine on my
own. ... 'I wish you were here. I really wish you were here.'"
Burning
words like this, to go essentially nowhere, should be an
environmental crime in itself, a prosecutable waste of paper,
but in our postmodern age, not knowing how you feel is the new
feeling. A scared woman begins her long day's journey into
night, into a frightening world best-described with violent
metaphors. Come with her if you will, but like watching a David
Lynch movie, it won't be easy.
Later Than You Think -- A Review of "Desert Time," by Diana
Kappel-Smith, by Tara Carreon |
