On the plane, I’m stuck in the middle seat. Bob gets the window, but he ignores the view for the duration of the flight. Instead, he reads the Wall Street Journal, every page. He is a nervous reader, biting his nails, mining his nose for nuggets, then biting his nails some more, oblivious to the thought that anyone could be watching him. His legs are restless, twitching, bouncing like springs, rattling my seat. His size fourteen Nikes show old, smell old. For a while, I think he just has gas, until I make the connection to his running shoes. I know that he’s probably only had them for a few months, but he wears them every day, so they look like they’ve been through ten marathons already. He always seems to be racing. He’s not a runner, though. He just moves abruptly, with severe determination, from place to place.

I deflect my attention to my father, who is engrossed in yet another one of his arch-conservative tomes. This one is written by a woman named Ann Coulter, some Fox News neo-Reaganite pundit. I recall her picture on the cover, blond haired blue eyed, a handsome woman with a cold glare and a buttoned collar. I sneak a look at page eighty-five. Ann is railing on about how us evil Liberals are so concerned with gender issues, gender equality, that we’ve actually robbed women of their femininity. We’ve pushed women out of their traditional roles by encouraging them to pursue standard male-dominated professions, erasing their naturally submissive and nurturing personalities. Ann carries the argument further on page eighty-six, where she moves from gender issues to race issues. We are all so focused on race that we are actually racist, always bringing race into the social and civil process. In fact, Liberals are so focused on race, they have more in common with Nazis and the neo-Nazi movement than anything else. I have just been linked to genocide. I shake my head, disgusted, and pull my own book out, find my place, and begin to read. After a while, my father looks my way. “What are you reading?” he asks. I just show him the cover, and say nothing. I’m reading chapter nine of Black Elk Speaks, “The Rubbing Out of Long Hair”, we know it as Custer’s Last Stand. The words of Black Elk are still fresh in my head, We were in our own country all the time and we only wanted to be let alone. The soldiers came there to kill us, and many got rubbed out. It was our country and we did not want to have trouble....Wherever we went, the soldiers came to kill us, and it was all our own country. It was ours already when the Wasichus made the treaty with Red Cloud, that said it would be ours as long as the grass should grow and the water flow. That was only eight winters before, and they were chasing us now because we remembered and they forgot.

* * *

Bob chooses the rental car, a Ford Expedition. After all, we are headed into the outback, into the mountains towards the Green River in the Northeast corner of Utah. While he drives, Dad scans the radio stations, country music and religious zealots, until he lands on the Rush Limbaugh show. Rush is pontificating about how the Palestinians are the lowest of all the Arabs, how all the other Arabs hate them, and then he begins wondering why there’s so much resistance from the rest of the world over our current effort to liberate the Iraqis. The nerve of people protesting the war. Do they really think it’s imperialism, that we really want to control the region? How ridiculous! It’s about freedom, and by God, we have a right to protect ourselves from future terrorist acts. “Hidden agenda?” chants Rush, “I don’t think so!” Dad chimes in, “Exactly. These protesters are so off base with this blood for oil nonsense. Ignorant traitors!”

I think of the Crusades, the forming of the region after World War Two, the British and Rockefeller and Standard Oil, the annexation of Palestine, and the SUV we’re riding in, which gets about twelve miles per gallon. We are near the ski resorts now, and the hills are still white with snow. I can even see the ski jumps at Park City, where we held the recent Olympic events, and where in the closing ceremonies we celebrated World Unity, Tolerance, Love. A half a day’s drive from here, two tanks of gas, eighty dollars, is Ketchum, Idaho, where Papa Hemingway put a shotgun to his forehead; is the Nez Perce trail, where Chief Joseph finally surrendered in his vain attempt to lead his people to freedom in Canada after being hunted by Colonel Miles Nelson and the Seventh Cavalry of the U.S. Army; is the Valley of the Greasy Grass, the Little Bighorn, where Nelson’s predecessor lost his life in his search for glory and gold, killing “savages”, grossly underestimating their desperate fortitude.