Toxic Masculinity

Photo by Briana Scroggins, Utah Investigative Journalism Project, 

posted on 7/14/2019 by the Salt City Sinner

Perhaps you always hurt the one you love, and conservatives really do love the great outdoors. More likely, this professed love is simply a conveniently outdated one, like the perennial reminder given us that the Republican Party is the “party of Lincoln.” Maybe, right-wing rapport with nature is just an outright lie, and always has been. In any case, this summer brought a fresh example of a folksy, sagebrush-lovin’ maverick who wrought destruction that would make the oil monster from Ferngully jealous.

It seems that Bert Smith, one of the founders of Smith and Edwards, sold an old building he owned to Ogden city in the years before his death. After he expired in 2016, the city got their first close look at what they had purchased – what Bert, as it turned out, had been stashing there since the 1960s. The Salt Lake Tribune has the incredible story, which originated with the vitally important Utah Investigative Journalism Project (donate here):

 Beginning this spring, a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency emergency response unit and a team of contractors mobilized at the [old Swift meatpacking plant, purchased by the city of Ogden]. Decked out in Tyvek suits and respirators, the crew works 11-hour shifts six days a week, trying to clean up a mind-boggling amount of flammable, explosive and toxic materials abandoned at the property, outside and on every one of the building’s five floors.
 Workers have found tens of thousands of containers with dangerous chemicals stockpiled at the site. The team has yet to do a full inventory because the building is in such rough shape. Years of leaking water have collapsed portions of the roof and floors, leaving two areas inaccessible.

Smith and Edwards, for those of you living outside the blast radius of Bert’s little trove of treasures, is the northern Utah “country boy store” that made its image and based its advertising strategy around down-home, rural values (in a more practical sense, the company was built by military surplus).

It turns out that military surplus may have been a deal sweetened in a very particular way:

 “In the old days, and certainly the Department of Defense has gotten much better at this, they would package lots together. You’d have jeeps, a desk, and all this solvent,” [on-scene EPA coordinator Paul] Peronard said. “So if you wanted the jeep or the desk, you had to buy the whole lot. They were pretty notorious for getting rid of all their old chemicals and stuff by making you buy the whole lot.”
 From 1986 to 1989 alone, DOD reported $5 million in hazardous materials surplus sales. But the department avoided $170 million in costs by selling those materials to the public rather than properly disposing of them.

To put this in the simplest terms possible, Bert Smith, prominent Ogden businessman and longtime friend of the powerful in the Utah Legislature, was a bastard, a hypocrite, and a right-wing grifter. He was publicly quite vocal about the evils of the federal government and the virtues of the self-made entrepreneur, his ingenuity and hard work as opposed to the sloth of the moocher suckling off the teat of the government. While he was spinning this ridiculous public tapestry of bullshit, he took cheap surplus from the same government he so hated (along with thousands of barrels of highly hazardous waste), resold it, and made a tidy sum doing so. He then took the waste he had accepted responsibility for and, instead of paying the cost of disposal, stuck it in the old Swift plant in Ogden until the day he died, whereupon the costs became the responsibility of the government of the city.

In the above arrangement, Bert Smith essentially milked two governments (one federal and one local) of money, and added literally nothing of any value while doing so. He was one of the biggest – if not the biggest – government moochers in Ogden history. Mister outdoors, mister down-home, mister “country boy,” left a toxic legacy that it will take a generation to deal with.

About 400 miles south of Ogden, in San Juan County, lives a man named Phil Lyman. For all I know, he may have occasionally rubbed elbows with Bert Smith, who fancied himself something of a modern-day “Sagebrush Rebellion” cowboy. Phil Lyman used to be county commissioner by profession and is now a representative in the Utah House, although it would be more accurate to call him an activist and vandal. The “vandal” thing isn’t just my opinion. After he led an illegal ATV ride to protest federal protection of public lands, Lyman was found guilty and fined (pay up Phil!).

Lyman’s legacy isn’t as disgusting as that of Bert Smith – at least, not yet. Lyman damaged protected land and led an open and contemptuous rebellion against attempts to preserve sites of cultural and ecological value. Unlike Smith, he faced justice. He faced it as he faces everything -- like a whiny right-wing charlatan trying to wriggle out from under responsibility for his actions -- but justice managed to get done nonetheless. Even better, San Juan County experienced a long-needed electoral readjustment in 2018, and is now represented by a majority-Navajo County Commission headed by Willie Grayeyes.

Then there are the “Diesel Brothers,” David Kiley and David Sparks, two meatheads who sell and modify diesel trucks and are mildly famous for a reality show about them on the Discovery Channel. This spring, they were found legally liable for illegally modifying pollution control mechanisms:

 According to FOX 13, a complaint that was filed in 2016 by Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment President Brian Moench stated the “Diesel Brothers” — known for their reality TV show on the Discovery Channel — were illegally removing pollution control equipment from their trucks, installing defective emission control parts and either selling or operating those trucks.
 “They’re well known and their calling card is dismantling diesel control devices for trucks,” Moench told FOX 13. “These are monster trucks that are putting out monster quantities of pollution.”
 Moench believed that without the proper pollution control equipment, the trucks were producing 30 to 40 times more air pollution, causing a public health issue. Cole Cannon, the attorney for the “Diesel Brothers,” said the environment is an important thing to them and their fan base, and most are huge outdoorsmen.

Why would “huge outdoorsmen” intentionally modify their trucks to put out 30 times more pollution?

Many did this because conservatives have created a fun game called “rolling coal,” wherein they intentionally generate enormous black clouds of smoke with modified diesel engines. 

The point of “rolling coal” is to trigger liberals and throw up a middle finger to environmental regulations, pursuits which seem to occupy a substantial portion of the right-wing male psyche these days. The internationally-notable bad air that Salt Lake experiences during inversions be damned – these jackasses have a point to make, and your health and quality of life don’t matter. Like Smith and Lyman, the Diesel Brothers style themselves manly men, men who love the outdoors and – unlike pointy-headed liberals – get out there and get their hands dirty in it.

In actuality, the brothers are self-promoting capitalists, opportunists who are willing to engage in illegal, stupid behavior that most truck dealers and enthusiasts aren’t, supposedly in the name of sticking it to the libs. The fact that the two have stoked their notoriety with various stunts besides the coal-rolling, and that they have turned a tidy profit from said notoriety, is quite revealing.

What Bert Smith, Phil Lyman, David Kiley and David Sparks (not to mention Cliven Bundy et. al) have in common is a form of toxic masculinity that is literally toxic; a posture of rugged, outdoorsy individualism that serves to mask greed, stupidity, and irresponsible narcissism. These are men that truly hurt what they claim to love – who have actively worked to destroy the environment that they make a big public show of enjoying. They’ve lined their pockets doing it, too.

In the end, Utahns who enjoy the natural beauty of our state have to decide whether we are going to support businesses and politicians that work on behalf of the environment, or poseurs willing to despoil it for their own lazy, selfish benefit.

Utah is the state where I grew up, where I learned to hike, ride a bicycle, fish, and camp. I know that, for me, that isn’t a difficult choice.