Is everyone else as tired as I am of having arrogant jerks flail away with the cross and the flag to disguise the fact that they don’t have a leg to stand on?

I was watching the farmers in the Klamath parade before the cameras, waving their flags and their bibles and whining copiously about how everybody prefers the damn sucker fish over loyal, god-fearin’ Emerkins like them.

Well, at least the fish doesn’t whine. There’s that to be said for it.

It was a litany that those of us in the same time zone as the Klamath River have been hearing over and over. Bellicose and truculent farmers, armed with weepy wives and dazed-looking children, spout off about how the eeevil out-of-control federal government is out to destroy a way of life and just doesn’t care about those good, salt-of-the-earth farmers who do nothing but work hard, pay taxes, praise Jesus, and send their kids off to fight our nation’s wars. So the farmers are going to be manly men and show all those pencil-necked blue-state bureaucrats and just go ahead and steal water that is not theirs! Of course, they just call it "taking back what is ours" – like most common thieves, they feel they are entitled. They are joined by opportunistic right wing politicians and perpetually irate "wise use" goons, who hourly present their seething hatred of all things environmental and declare global warming a liberal plot.

The Klamath Valley is high desert, in a rain shadow created by the coast range, the beginning of the Cascade range, and perturbations in climate caused by the vast bulk of Shasta to the south. It averages less than 12" of rain a year, in some areas averaging less than four. It’s not a friendly place, with searing heat in the summer and cold, dry winters where burrowing animals know they can’t even count on the insulating effect of a blanket of snow. It’s not a place that most people would find hospitable, with dark lava beds to the east and rain-blocking mountains to the west.

It’s never been a place for a large population, and it still isn’t. Even counting the towns in the area such as Klamath Falls, the population is less than 10 per square mile. There was some logging there, early in the century, until they realized that a forest generation, just 45 years on the south side of Shasta or west of the Cascades, was well over 200 in this sere, hot land.

The native American tribes – Klamath and Karuk, mostly, and some Modoc – lived from fishing and what little hunting was to be had. The elk have returned to this region after being nearly extinguished by white sportsmen, but in nothing like the numbers recorded in the 19^th century.

At the end of the century, the federal government, still aggressively pushing homesteading, encouraged farmers to come to the Klamath with promises of copious amounts of water and lush, green fields. The farmers came, and planted their fields, and did well enough. You can’t help but respect those men, who were willing to take on such daunting terrain armed with little more than a strong back and willpower.

Dams were built, and the acreage under cultivation, tiny at first, grew to a respectable amount. Much of the land, churned in recent epochs by volcanoes and deserted by the moist air streams off the Pacific, would never be arable, but the land which could support crops soon did.

Droughts came and went, and a drought in that region could mean less than an inch of rain in an entire year. Many of the farmers drilled private wells, realizing that the acreage under cultivation would reduce the local lakes to cracked mud puddles if two consecutive bad years should strike.

The dams and irrigation often reduced the Klamath River to a mere stream as it flowed into California. Local tribes complained about the decline in the fish population, caused in large measure by the elevated temperature of the torpid water, which reduced the oxygen available for the fish.

Additionally, ocean fisherman noted a decline in coho salmon and other fish that depended on the cold, aerated, mineral laden waters of the Klamath, and who went up the Klamath to spawn.

The next time you see the pictures on TV of the group of farmers brazenly stealing water from the Klamath in a demonstration that their greed supercedes any law or agreement made, and they snarl that the government isn’t doing its job, but rather is destroying a way of life, here’s a few facts to consider:

First, agriculture is only one percent of Klamath County’s economy. It is, after all, high desert. The farmers who are being devastated by the drought are, in turn, a small portion of that industry – perhaps 20%. The other 80% all exercised a little foresight and dug wells. They’re doing just dandy, thank you very much. Their fields are lush and green, and they’re actually having a good year. Of the farmers who have lost their crops, some didn’t have access to a water table, but most couldn’t be bothered, reasoning that it was stupid to buy a cow when milk was cheap, and kept their mouths firmly on the public tit, federal irrigation.

Second, it isn’t just humans being hurt by bureaucrats getting weepy over the damn sucker fish. It’s the living of the tribes, who own some of that water, and it’s the living of the farmer’s erstwhile allies in fighting the ESA, the coastal fisherman. Ironically, fishermen enlisted the aid of the farmers in the early nineties to help fight against having the coho, already deemed "threatened", listed under the much more restrictive "endangered". Fishermen, who had fought alongside ranchers and farmers and loggers against federal imperialism, were the ones who suffered as the streams to the ocean arrived hot and deoxygenated from areas of intense irrigation, laden with debris and silt from logging areas, and loaded with toxic amounts of bovine excrement from the ranching areas.

Finally, there’s the fact that the farmers were largely subsidized right along, and quite a few of those subsidies dried up (so to speak) as Republicans pushed for an end to such subsidies. It’s ironic that the so-called red states were hurt the most by that decision. Apparently farming doesn’t require much in the way of brains. With the subsidies gone, the pampered recipients of federal monies and water found themselves up the creek with no water.

One fifth of one percent of Klamath County’s economy. They won’t be missed.

In fact, I respect the farmers for what they were, and what most of them are, even as I express contempt for the motley group waving their flags and bibles at us and encouraging us to hate our government because their free ride has come to an end. Most of the farmers up there did work hard, did try to make it work out.

But they don’t belong there. It’s high desert, a wild and desolate land. It belongs to the elk and the coyote, the manzanita and the chaparral. It is the dark land, the rain-parched, the land of fire and brimstone. It wasn’t meant for potato crops.

Congress is hoping to allocate $750 million to buy out some of the farmers, offering fair market value on the land, and getting them someplace where they can make a living. Most don’t want to go, and while I don’t blame them, I don’t have much sympathy.

The land needs to be itself. And there is little room in that picture for farmers.