Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [200]
In the Congress, water projects are a kind of currency, like wampum, and water development itself is a kind of religion. Senators who voted for drastic cuts in the school lunch program in 1981 had no compunction about voting for $20 billion worth of new Corps of Engineers projects in 1984, the largest such authorization ever. A jobs program in a grimly depressed city in the Middle West, where unemployment among minority youth is more than 50 percent, is an example of the discredited old welfare mentality; a $300 million irrigation project in Nebraska giving supplemental water to a few hundred farmers is an intelligent, farsighted investment in the nation’s future.
Among members of Congress, the intricate business of trading favors is commonly referred to as the “courtesy” system, or, more quaintly, the “buddy” system. Among its critics—a category that extends to include anyone who has not yet benefited from it—it is called log-rolling, back-scratching, or, most often, the pork barrel. (The phrase “pork barrel” derives from a fondness on the part of some southern plantation owners for rolling out a big barrel of salted pork for their half-starved slaves on special occasions. The near riots that ensued as the slaves tried to make off with the choicest morsels of pork were, apparently, a source of substantial amusement in the genteel old South. Sometime in the 1870s or 1880s, a wag decided that the habitual efforts by members of Congress to carry large loads from the federal treasury back to their home districts resembled the feeding frenzies of the slaves. The usage was quite common by the late 1880s; and in 1890 it showed up in a headline in the New York Times, assuring its immortality.) Members of Congress who believe in the system—there are many who fervently do, and probably an equal number who dislike it but go along—argue that it benefits the nation as a whole by distributing public-works money to all the fifty states in more or less equal proportion. It doesn’t. Anyway, to say the Congress cannot function without the “courtesy” system is to say that it cannot conduct its business without indulging in bribery, extortion, and procuring.
Ideology is the first casualty of water development. Senator Alan Cranston of California, who is well out on the left of the Democratic Party, spearheaded the successful effort to sextuple the maximum acreage one could legally own in order to receive subsidized Reclamation water. Having accomplished that, Cranston, heavily financed by big California water users, launched his presidential campaign, railing against “special interests.” Senator Ernest Gruening of Alaska, who built a reputation as one of the most ardent conservationists in Congress, also campaigned mightily for Rampart Dam, which, if built, would have destroyed more wildlife habitat than any single project ever built in North America. In 1980, Steve Symms of Idaho, a right-wing small businessman, ran against and defeated Senator Frank Church, one of the Senate’s most respected liberals; the one thing they ever agreed on was that the Bureau of Reclamation ought to build Teton Dam.
“New Age” politicians who strive to disassociate themselves from the old Left or the old Right seem to fall into the same old habits where the pork barrel is concerned. In 1984, Senator Gary Hart of Colorado ran for president as a neoliberal and a self-proclaimed expert on how to trim the federal budget; he also supported, consistently, a couple of billion dollars’ worth of unbuilt Colorado reclamation and salinity-control projects, most of them sporting costs far greater than benefits. Former Governor Edmund G. Brown, Jr., of California flew to London at his own expense to attend the