The war against liberals can drive me nuts. The symptoms are obvious: grinding teeth, flaring nostrils, throwing paperweights at the TV whenever Tom Daschle appears. In her usual wisdom, my wife found the perfect place to get away from it all … a vacation to the desert southwest.

The Grand Canyon! Arches! Rainbow Bridge! The American desert is amazing. After browsing around, we came across Mesa Verde National Park. About 900 years ago, the Anasazi Indians built cliff dwellings there. Today, tourists gawk at this collection of sandstone ruins.

A young, fresh-faced park ranger greeted our group. Part Native American, she spoke with that strange "rez" cadence, spoken on Indian reservations. We climbed around the rocks and pathways to the primitive buildings hidden in the cliffs. Our ranger offered a flowery story of how the Anisazi struggled mightily to survive in the harsh desert. Then, a curious 12 year-old girl piped up, "So why did they leave?" The ranger had the perfect scripted answer. "They overfarmed, cleared too much land, and a famine struck. They abandoned the entire site, never to be seen again." The little girl persisted "How do you know?" The ranger beamed "We study modern Indian oral history." Then, she sidetracked, "The word ’Anasazi" means ’ancient enemy.’ But today, we call them ’Ancestral Puebloans’, because we can’t find evidence of the Anasazi fighting anyone." Heads nodded.

No evidence? HELLO!!! What happened to that infallible oral history? Good enough, unless it doesn’t suit the current crop of revisionist historians? Did anyone stop to think they were called "ancient enemies" because they might have actually beat people over the head with war clubs?

Relax, Tom. You’re on vacation…

We climbed over a few more rocks and sat down for another speech. Our rangerette gushed on about the wonderful Anasazi culture, claiming that women headed this clannish, leaderless Utopian social structure. The little girl struck again: "How long did they live here?" The ranger paused uncomfortably, then stuttered "About 100 years."

That’s all?

In 1300, the Tower of Pisa was leaning. Castles towered all over Europe. The Great Wall of China defended against Mongol Hordes for almost a century. The Coliseum had entertained Romans a thousand years. Greek temples were built, destroyed, and rebuilt. The Great Pyramid stashed Cheops for three thousand years. In fact, all the Seven Wonders of the World stood thousands of years before the last Anasazi glanced over his shoulder and saw Mesa Verde disappear over the horizon. Now, 700 years later, a silly park ranger is breathlessly extolling the political virtues of a culture that couldn’t write, couldn’t farm, existed only 100 years, and managed to leave behind a few 20 square foot, two-story sandstone dwellings scattered among the desert rocks. I turned to a fellow tourist and stated loudly, "So I guess Communism really doesn’t work, eh?" My wife nudged me. But I couldn’t help it. I traveled 2000 miles, by plane, car and foot, trying desperately to escape those stinking liberals. And here I stood, listening to a clueless, politically sanitized ranger in a taxpayer-funded national park dedicated entirely to preserving a spectacular specimen of socialist failure.

It was time to leave Mesa Verde.

Ahhh … the sun, the sky, the open road… I was about to purge the P.C. park ranger from my thoughts, when I saw a sign:

"Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument."

Sigh.

I couldn’t win. Here it was, the famous Clinton land grab. As we drove by the trailer parks, abandoned buildings and nondescript landscape, it became obvious the most impressive aspect to this vast wasteland was endless dirt. The Escalante "Monument" served no apparent purpose other than to lock away America’s only low-sulfur coal, so Indonesia could jack up prices on their low-sulfur coal and sell it to the American consumer. This was Bill Clinton’s obvious payback for the $3,000,000 Riady campaign election bribe. The more we drove, the madder I got. This was supposed to be my vacation away from politics. Now, I found myself literally in the middle of the legacy of the biggest liberal icon of them all.

That was it. I’d had it. I needed revenge, and I needed it now. So I did what any self-respecting conservative warrior should do ... I got out of my car and, shall we say, "watered" the nearest rock. If I can’t whiz on Bill Clinton, I may as well whiz on his legacy.

I smiled. I guess this wasn’t such a bad vacation after all.

You can e-mail your comments to Tom at Coolhair1@aol.com.

Tom Adkins is publisher of commonconservative.com

Copyright © 2001 by Tom Adkins.
All Rights Reserved.

-Published with permission