It was the last week of May after a big snow year. My summer job as a seasonal ranger had started, but cutting deadfall out of trails, building water bars, and cleaning wilderness campsites wouldn’t happen for a month. Once you got into the trees on any of the Sawtooth trails, it was a matter of post-holing until you got exhausted, turned around, and headed for home.
Which was why I was sitting in a classroom in the Stanley Ranger Station with twenty other seasonal rangers, learning how to be a law-enforcement officer.
Technically, we were already law-enforcement officers. We all had citation books, which were supposed to be used when forest users violated forest rules.
The instructor was a retired big-city cop and Vietnam vet who brought combat experience to the Sawtooths.
We learned that the public was composed of criminals. They were invading Forest Service territory, and they needed to be controlled, by force if necessary. The camping spots around lakes were strategic hamlets, where campers could be kept from doing what they wanted to do, which was cutting down stands of trees or running around naked or dynamiting fish.
We listened to anecdotes of tourist insurgency. We heard story after story of stupid-camper tricks, organized poaching rings, and homesteaders who built cabins in wilderness and defended them with guns.
Missing from the lecture were any mentions of the mining corporation that had recently built a whole town in the White Clouds as it prepared to open-pit Castle Peak for its molybdenum, or the Northwest logging companies maneuvering to trade clear-cut lands for old-growth forest.
In answer to a question about corporate theft of public resources, the instructor said that sort of thing was beyond the scope of Forest Service authority. We could write our senators and representatives, but we were not to give tickets to mining engineers or anybody with a timber sale. “They know the law better than we do,” he said.
The class suddenly became more interesting. What had seemed like knee-jerk policing was really an arena where discretion was key.
This information was welcome, because to that point in my Forest Service career, I had been lousy at law enforcement. If someone had abandoned a smoking campfire, or buried disposable plastic diapers in the bushes next to their camp, or chopped down green trees to make camp tables, or drove motorcycles miles past the wilderness boundary, I had given them warnings and told them not to do it again. If someone had burned down their campsite, I had assumed they hadn’t meant to and believed them when they said they were sorry. I had felt guilty for warning everybody instead of citing them. But I learned in that classroom that if you were a real criminal, and really intended to steal public property, the law was on your side. It left a lot of leeway for people whose biggest crime was following the survival tips in an ancient Boy Scout handbook.
Our instructor must have noticed at least part of his audience was paying more attention, because the next story he told was about survival in law enforcement. He introduced the concept of the LCD, which was short for Lowest Common Denominator.
He then told us about a big-city police department that issued standard Smith and Wesson .38 revolvers to its patrolmen. For one of the rookies on the force, the .38 wasn’t big enough, and he carried his .44 magnum instead. It was a violation of department policy, but the department had an emphasis on getting the job done rather than following procedures. It was a policy that worked better at the time than it does now, when the chief gets fired and the city pays out a few million in a wrongful-death suit.
The .44 magnum was fired during an arrest in a wood-frame apartment complex. After the arrestee resisted arrest, the .44 slug went through his shoulder, killing him from hydrostatic shock. Then it went through three more apartments and six layers of five-eighths inch drywall and shattered the femur of a woman sitting at her dinner table with her family. Due to the police being on the scene, she got to a hospital quickly and medical personnel saved her life but not her leg.
“The guy with the .44 is the LCD,” our instructor said. He’s the guy that doesn’t have any common sense, who will make the mistake nobody else is stupid enough to make, so you have to make a rule for everybody, but it’s really just for him. Except he doesn’t think it’s for him. He breaks the rule, and everybody gets in trouble.”
Lots of hands went up.
“Should wilderness rangers be armed?”
“What if the public has .44 magnums?”
“How big a tree will a .44 magnum shoot through?”
“If somebody’s on a motorcycle in the wilderness, can we shoot his motorcycle?”
“What happens if you shoot a fish?”
The instructor shook his head. “Just remember the LCD. Every group has an idiot in it that will screw it up for everybody. You end up living in their world whether you want to or not.”
“And no, you guys shouldn’t be armed. Not in a million years.”
We all walked out of the classroom thinking any one of us could be the LCD, which was probably our instructor’s point.
Some lessons stick with you. I remembered the LCDs of that long-ago law enforcement class when Officer Derek Chauvin murdered a handcuffed George Floyd. The image of Chauvin kneeling on Floyd’s neck forever branded Chauvin as every police department’s LCD, the guy who took hundreds of thousands of cops off the street so they could sit in classrooms like the one in the Stanley Ranger Station and listen to lectures about why you shouldn’t murder a prisoner in handcuffs.
Most of the people sitting in those classrooms had the common sense and common decency to not need those lectures, but once you’ve identified an LCD in your group, everybody is under suspicion. The image of George Floyd’s murder became an icon, which is a way of saying that if you stare at it long enough it becomes a world.
It didn’t matter if you thought Derek Chauvin was a brave cop doing his job or a murderer of unparalleled coldness and cruelty. You had to live in the world he had created, and it wasn’t as nice a place as the world you’d left behind.
As I write, the Russians are murdering and burning their way across Ukraine, manufacturing icons of horror and death. It’s clear that Putin is Russia’s LCD, and that we’re going to have to live in his world from now on, no matter how screwed up it is.
I’m not the first person to notice that humans keep creating the structures that allow the worst and weakest among them to assume positions of power, and then to increase that power until they become paranoid and isolated, and then to start killing people. Russia’s particularly good at it.
LCDs never end well, but along their life trajectories, lots of other people are destroyed. For every Stalin and Hitler and Mao, millions have to die, and it doesn’t take much knowledge of the psyche to know that these millions were the victims of horribly incomplete human beings who tried to become whole by making other people die in pain. It’s a fool’s game, but one characteristic that unites all LCDs is that they are fools.
In this country, we have had our own LCD in the person of Donald Trump, and even if our institutions were strong enough to remove him from the presidency, we still live in his world. The trajectory of his authoritarianism is still rising here, and plenty of our citizens are cheering the Russians on because they’re showing that you can torture people who won’t do what you say, whereas Trump only hinted at torturing them.
There are plenty of Americans who think they would make a better LCD than Trump, although they would never put it that way. They think that they know how to get rid of those homeless tents under the freeways of our cities, the rioting Black people, the drunken Indians, the rapist Mexicans, the spineless liberals. They can’t quite understand why Trump hesitated to declare martial law when he lost the election, but they know they won’t once they get the power Trump threw away.
“Trump was an idiot,” they say. “He had control, and he lost it. We’ll make sure that never happens again.”
Another characteristic unites LCDs. They think they can predict the future.
The saddest movie I can remember is a 1985 Swedish film, My Life as a Dog, set in 1958-59 about a boy who becomes fixated on the space race between the Americans and the Russians, and in particular on a dog, Laika, sent up in an orbiting capsule by the Russians with no way back to earth. Due to his awful family circumstances, the boy identifies with Laika, and by the end of the film, the audience knows too well what it’s like to be sent off to die alone for an abstract cause, because they’re identifying with Laika, too.
My Life as a Dog is an astonishingly effective piece of anti-Russian propaganda, because it shows the Russian state as an unsentimental entity that sacrificed pity, love, and decency for the advancement of Soviet science. After the fall of the Soviet Union, evidence came out that the rocket scientists who had sent Laika to her death had been traumatized by her diminishing barks and then heartbeats as she overheated and died during her fourth orbit. They shouldn’t have taken her home to play with their kids, it turned out.
I don’t know that the Russian people have yet realized how many young Russians have been sent off to die for the advancement of Putin’s second Soviet Union, but when they understand what has happened in the last two weeks, they might make a connection with what happened to Laika.
Not that Putin cares. Not that he worries about the world he has created, or its sadness and its cruelty. Not that he will mourn. He has people who do his mourning for him.
I’m a long way from the Stanley Ranger Station at this point, a long way from a roomful of young, naïve, and idealistic seasonal rangers asking stupid questions of someone older and angrier. I’m old and angry myself these days, mainly because the world is once again threatened by nuclear war, but also because I still have what seems like a stupid question: why do appalling human beings keep rising to the top of their tribes, and why do they prosper when they encourage their tribes to destroy other tribes because that’s what the other tribes want to do to them?
It’s a tactic that’s been recognized as irremediably evil for a few thousand years. That doesn’t stop people from still using it to gain power.
That old darkness keeps rising up through the worst of us, and it flourishes because we can’t recognize our LCD judges, legislators, and executives. We can’t even recognize the LCD when it spreads deep into our hearts and into the hearts of our friends, families, and neighbors.
Authoritarianism used to be checked by old age and the inevitable steep decline of intelligence once people started telling a leader happy lies rather than harsh truths. Putin and Trump became too stupid to live a long time ago, but nuclear weapons mean that the people who allowed them power—that’s us—fit the same description.