Most experts have scoffed at the suit. But it's made all the more bizarre by the fact that participant North Dakota Attorney General Wayne Stenehjem is also currently party to the legal challenge to "Obamacare," which accuses the feds of attempting to "usurp the general police power reserved to the States."

The AG's hypocritical participation in the coal lawsuit exemplifies how North Dakota is slowly becoming a proxy petrostate base of operations for the energy industry to launch a war against federal regulation.

On November 2nd, the North Dakota AG issued a "fact sheet" on the Next Generation Energy Act, which is a gem of Big Energy passive-aggression. It calls the law "purely a symbolic gesture that could only have a negligible impact toward actually achieving the purpose of reducing greenhouse gases on a global scale." When it mentions global warming, it puts the term quote marks.

The document concludes with a line that is 100-percent "Minnesota Nice": "As Minnesota seeks to rebuild its economy, it will need energy." It then goes on to, more of less, call Minnesotans too dumb to know what's for good for them. And that's essentially what the lawsuit boils down to: one state telling another state it's too stupid to know what's good for it.

In the press, the Attorney General didn't even bother with the passive-aggression, telling the Star Tribune, "With all respect to regulators in Minnesota, we love our environment more than they do."

* * *

A recent viral video stitching together time-lapse footage from the International Space Station wowed viewers with a view of earth never seen before. But what everyone missed except one eagle-eyed writer at Midwest Energy News was that the video featured the glowing lights of one "enormous 'city' in the middle of nowhere." That "city," Ken Paulman discovered, was in fact the fires of natural gas being flared off from thousands of wells in the Bakken oil shale formation. Without a pipeline nearby, 35 percent of all natural gas produced from oil extraction is flared. In a region where average daily temperatures this time of year range from 3 to (a high of) 24 degrees (before wind chill), the sight of a frozen landscape blazing with "Dakota candles" is truly apocalyptic.

The Bakken formation stretches from Montana through western North Dakota through Saskatchewan. The heart is near Williston, North Dakota, a town that has gone from a population of around 12,000 to 20,000 in just a few years. When a new Motel 6 opened last week, Hallibuton immediately offered to rent the entire thing. By the end of next year, North Dakota will be the nation's number two oil producer. Every month, the state sets a new record for output. The U.S. Energy Information Administration animated map of Bakken drilling activity between 1985 and 2010 is shocking.

Thanks to advances in a process called horizontal drilling, and the growth of hydraulic fracturing (fracking) as an extraction process, the hard-to-reach oil of the Bakken is now affordable to extract. The absolute best source of exactly how this process works is an industry video.

What the video doesn't mention is exactly what chemical mix goes into fracking fluid. It doesn't mention that intentionally, of course. A Clean Water Act Safe Drinking Water Act exemption (called the "Haliburton loophole") allows fracking fluid recipes to remain undisclosed as a proprietary secret. Kind of like Coca-Cola's secret recipe, if that secret recipe contained poison and was being injected near drinking water.

Questions about the safety of fracking are widespread, ranging from tapwater that catches fire and mutating farm animals to simple unpleasant odors and the unsightliness of towering gas flares. It remains to be seen how dangerous it is; it's certainly not good for the earth.

But then, a lot of human activity—maybe most—is not good for the earth. The glowing screen upon which this text currently hovers takes power. Where is that power going to come from? Things Americans like (and like more and more) require power. As for oil, North Dakotan skepticism about a new fuel revolution is well-founded, especially in personal experience. Cell phone batteries struggle to respond on January days in Grand Forks, why would an electric car be any different? (Psst. They aren't.)

This is to say nothing of how North Dakota's drive to drag the nation to some semblance of energy independence and better job numbers (those roughnecks making six figures all pay federal income taxes) inspires associated economic development elsewhere. To supply fracking operations, fine silica sand mining is booming in states like Wisconsin, bringing jobs (and associated concerns.) Duluth, Minnesota, is hoping fracking will lead to more work for its port.

This is why fracking will continue and why the Environmental Protection Agency is about to release new guidance for states to use when issuing fracking well permits. Not to get into the boring technicalities, but the rules concern the use of diesel fuel in the fracking slurry, a measure especially necessary when fracking in extremely cold regions. North Dakota, as noted, can be cold. Cue the sky falling.

During his "oops" debate moment, Texas Governor Rick Perry joked that one federal agency he would eliminate was the EPA. When asked if he was joking, the governor said, no, it only needed to "be rebuilt." But guaranteed, in the fellow oil-state of North Dakota, cheers erupted at the thought.

In 2010, Lynn Helms, the director of the state's Department of Mineral Resources and the gatekeeper to North Dakota's oil, said in a weekly address that "the threat of federal regulation of hydraulic fracturing has diminished." Jump ahead nearly two years and Helms, backed by most of the state's top politicians, is banging the EPA bogeyman drum. In November, Helms was quoted in the Bismarck Tribune speculating that the EPA was "on track to stop fracking as soon as January." Naturally, everyone freaked out.

It should be noted that Helms is a former Hess oil executive. That's the North Dakota equivalent of the Goldman Sachs-U.S. Treasury relationship.

Later, Helms more or less called the reporter a liar. A regional administrator for the EPA penned a follow up piece for the Tribune, writing that Helms' claim was "grounded in inaccurate information and is misleading." (The piece was run in the op-ed section.)

Many in North Dakota sought further "assurances" than the word of the EPA. In a recent flood-relief and highway patrol bill, Governor Jack Dalrymple even included a million dollars to pay for a potential lawsuit against the EPA over new fracking regulations.

The industry is seeking even more assurances by turning the entire state of North Dakota into its proxy.

The candidates for national office coming out of North Dakota are beholden to the state's energy industry hydra. Republican Representative Rick Berg, who replaced the Democrat Earl Pomeroy in 2011, is now running for the Senate seat being vacated by the state's single remaining federal Democrat, Kent Conrad. Berg regularly speaks out against the EPA and has supported fracking for oil in Teddy Roosevelt National Park as a way to pay for Social Security. After the EPA stated it would not suspend fracking, Rep. Berg stated his distrust, adding, "What we need to do is we need to ensure that the states are going to regulate this." (Like Minnesota did.)

"What threatens to SHUTDOWN the Bakken," hollers the website of State Representative Bette Grande, a Republican native of Williston, running herself to replace Rick Berg. There is no question mark and the only two click options available are "Federal Government" and "The EPA." As if the two were different.

Grande, who now lives in and represents Fargo (330 miles from the fracking in Williston), recently launched the campaign FracBabyFrac.com which won the Orwell Grave-Roll Doublethink Award for 2012, with its motto "Let's Save the Bakken." When Grande implores "We can protect the Bakken!" what she means is that we can save the Bakken from government regulation (hint: "The EPA"). She calls the state's oil industry "over-regulated" and has called the EPA the "Employment Prevention Agency." In Grande's view, as with many others who have bought the federal regulations boogeyman story, the EPA wants to shut down oil production because it has a personal grudge against North Dakota. Even among North Dakota's pro-oil, anti-EPA candidiates (which include most Democrats), Grande stands out in her desire to turn North Dakota into a de-facto petrostate.

It's noteworthy that State oil director Helms' position on the EPA is simply that it needs oversight by those elected to Congress. (You know: politicians like Grande and Berg.)

It's the sort of enthusiasm displayed by Grande that is most worrisome to many North Dakotans. Like any sane, realistic, reasonable people, most residents understand that fracking, and the energy industry as a whole, are an economic necessity for a state whose other industries (such as defense) rely on the exact kind of federal subsidies that are increasingly falling out of favor. But the gung-ho sentiment that an endeavor like fracking is somehow almost "good" for the plains is absurd. It's an attitude that leaves many wishing for former Governor Art Link, who died last year at the age of 96. Link, who served from 1973 to 1980 in the heart of North Dakota's first oil and coal boom, is most famous for "When the Landscape is Quiet Again" his passionate 1973 address pleading for a measured approach to energy development.

North Dakotans may be seen as rubes, and many may actually be, but even a rube knows injecting tons of poisonous chemicals into the earth is, at best, only moderately dangerous. This is to say nothing of the ancillary "benefits" the energy boom is bringing to the state, such as massive jumps in crime, $7-a-gallon milk, and elderly residents thrown out of their apartments as rents skyrocket. Massive "man camps" that house rig workers come with the expected crime increase. In the northwest region—the heart of the Bakken boom—the highway patrol just reported a 100% year-over-year jump in road fatalities. Double, in one year. Still, it's common that pro-energy development interests paint any citizens concerned about these things as pro-EPA radicals who want to send the state back into financial hardship.

* * *

Kris Kitko, the founder of Bakken Watch, a site that's chronicled some disturbing instances of fracking side effects, tells me the organization has no official stance and its members "range from 'don't halt but regulate or slow down' to 'halt.' Personally, she said, "I understand that jobs, etc. are at stake. But so is the land we grow our food on and the water we use to make it grow. I don't have an answer as to 'what to do,' but at the very least, fracking needs to be studied and chemicals need to be disclosed." She believes closing the "Halliburton Loophole" would at least be a start. Right? Typical hippie nutjob with her ludicrous peace, love and "disclosure" claptrap.

Wary of the increased skepticism of how the energy developers are changing the state and how activists are gaining momentum, industry groups have launched extensive PR efforts such as "Oil Can!" An adorable pun, "Oil Can!" is the propaganda effort of The North Dakota Petroleum Council, whose logo of a massive nodding donkey juicing the entire state could not better explain the organization's true desire.

There is also the site Fracfocus.org, a "joint project of the Ground Water Protection Council and the Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission." It is also a project of an Oklahoma PR firm which counts among its energy industry portfolio America’s Natural Gas Alliance, the Kansas Oil & Gas Resources Fund and the American Clean Skies Foundation. That last uses the wonderful line "It's not a drilling rig. It's a factory."

Meanwhile, in community after community, oil groups are hosting town halls and sponsoring local picnics and make-nice community events. Truckers who wheel the thousands and thousands of heavy semis through small towns have been given candy to toss to children. The efforts are not all that different than what one would expect in war zone where winning the hearts and minds of the locals was a necessary battle for winning the war.

Just a month ago at an oil conference in Houston, one presenter called pushback against the industry "an insurgency." He went on to recommend that PR experts in the industry make it a top priority to download the Army and Marine Corps counterinsurgency manual, as "there are a lot of good lessons in there."

But it's not just the local populations or helping send fracking-friendly candidates to the halls of government. The oil industry is also rolling out the big guns for a national information campaign to spin North Dakotan oil production as the solution to national energy independence.
An October Wall Street Journal piece on Harold Hamm, the CEO of America's 14th-largest oil company and the man credited with "discovering" the Bakken, surely rankled some very Christian residents with the title "How North Dakota Became Saudi Arabia." But the message of a man whose company sits on hundreds of millions of barrels of proven Bakken reserves got a warm reception. The federal government, Hamm said, is "sticking a regulatory boot at our necks." Hamm goes on to complain that the feds sued his company for killing migratory birds; "It's not even a rare bird. There're jillions of them." Coincidentally, this bird preposterousness is a favorite storyline of one Ms. Bette Grande.

In case the boot of Mr. Hamm's point wasn't squarely at the reader's neck, the Journal added, "It's hard to disagree with Mr. Hamm's assessment that Barack Obama has the energy story in America wrong." The article has been Facebook-shared nearly 7,500 times.

There is a legitimate argument that if America is to gain energy independence and destroy some of itself in the process, why shouldn't it be a part that most Americans (and many North Dakotans) will never bother visiting? At some time or another, every spiritual North Dakotan will openly wonder of the Bakken, "God could not have intended human beings to live here." Atheists have no such doubts, of course; evolution confirms to them that humans were not meant to live there.

The Bakken boasts its particular wonders and beauties, like everywhere else. And it's very easy to not care about the future of the far reaches of more or less unpopulated North Dakota—even within North Dakota. But you don't have to visit to understand that, as goes North Dakota energy policy, so goes, eventually, the comparatively hospitable state you live in.

Abe Sauer is the author of the book How to be: North Dakota. He is on Twitter. Email him at abesauer @ gmail.com.

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Here is the PSA that's running in North Dakota now, to educate people about housing discrimination.

Age, sex, gender, disability... Oh right. Notable what's missing, right? Correct. It's still open season on the gays in the land of liberty.

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The event was sponsored by Grand Forks Hope Covenant Church and was titled "Balancing Truth & Grace: A Christian Response To Homosexuality." Their intent was "to inform in the spirit of truth and grace to fully understand the issue and be equipped to minister to someone dealing with same-sex attractions." Speakers at the event included Melissa Fryrear (of Exodus International) and Jeff Johnston, who is the author of the must-read report "Childhood Sexual Abuse and Male Homosexuality."

Zack was not arrested. He has mostly good things to say about the church and how welcoming they were. The police were called more for his safety than anything else. And Zack had managed to motivate a group of people to join him in the peaceful protest. He told me all this when I met him for beers later at a bar in downtown Grand Forks.

Zack has written letters to the editor of the Grand Forks Herald about gay rights. One supported the passage of North Dakota state bill SB2278, a sexual orientation rights bill which would make it illegal to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation for employment, housing, and other services. The bill made it all the way through the state Senate before being killed, in April, in the House.

This means that in North Dakota, you can legally be denied a job or bank credit, or be evicted, because you are gay. Meanwhile, the North Dakota Family Alliance asked the governor to designate November 15-21 as "Family Week," to "honor the family and encourage families to spend time together." Because Governor John Hoeven is spineless, he immediately did so.

Zack actually wrote letters to the editor in support of this bill after it died ("Bill would have let gays 'live as themselves'"). A month later he wrote another one ("No turning back tide of gay rights"). He did this under his full name.

Not long after these letters appeared, Zack lost his housing and job at the Masonic Temple, where he was also a building manager. The reason given for his firing and eviction was tight funding. That may be true. But even if it was because he was gay, that is a totally legal reason.

After that, Zack moved in with his parents. After the typical initial shock, awkward discomfort and distancing that comes with having a child "come out," they treat him as any plain old loving parents would.

Zack is 21 and he works two jobs. He is a proud North Dakotan who, in true regional character, wants government out his business and the right to work hard and have a nice home. To be his Facebook friend is to be inundated with updates about a guy perpetually at, going to, or coming from, work. He is a mechanic at a locally-owned gas station. He learned to fix cars from restoring his own "projects," including a decrepit 1970 Coronet that he pulled out of a field one summer. He dropped a 500-horsepower 440 with a built 727 into it (with plans of adding a set of headers and 2.5 exhaust with cutouts with 3.55 sure grip and slicks). The Coronet then exploded, due to too much power. He's going to start over.

His other job has been managing shipping inventory at one of Grand Forks' warehouse retailers. He needs the money because there is this great old house in town he wants to renovate-and he wants to get his own apartment again. But he just lost this warehouse job; that particular national retailer (Target) frowns on moonlighters.

Gay life in Grand Forks, North Dakota is not the black hole one might imagine. The North Dakota Ten Percent Society is active at the university. They throw parties from time to time. But it's still a small town and being openly gay is to take your safety into your own hands.

He often thinks about leaving, because... come on. "I would love to settle down with somebody and have a kid someday," he said, with the emphasis on "someday." "But what happens at school during parent teacher conferences? My two dads are going to go in there? That's crap. I mean, I can take it. But I can't put a kid through that here."

But without any connections in larger cities like Minneapolis, or the savings to make that kind of move, he probably can't leave. And, anyway, Zack loves North Dakota. That is a tremendous tragedy because North Dakota does not love Zack.

Meanwhile, Levi Johnston is a sex symbol (even, inexplicably, a gay one). He has been in pistachio commercials and magazines and on red carpets. The feckless media that have pathetically wallowed in the mud to take advantage of (and subsequently enrich) Johnston include Vanity Fair, GQ, and New York magazine. Gawker exploited him by giving him an award. Playgirl, a tug rag that never pretended to be about anything but exploitation, came out in the end as, surprisingly, the most principled. Levi Johnston became a celebrity, and a wealthier man, all because of how much the people who write for these publications hate the woman he is tangentially connected to. (The enemy of my enemy is my intellectually-shameless disposable fetish-object.)

Levi Johnston's only accomplishment is displeasing a woman that a bunch of so-called free thinkers are displeased by-and he accomplished that largely by not wearing a condom. That is his only real accomplishment. That is his only attempt at a real accomplishment.

Zack P. is not from an out-of-touch family that is famous or rich or of political royalty. He is not a pointy-headed elitist coaster who knows what's best for everyone. He carries no baggage from the 1960s. He's young. He's a hard-working guy from Middle America and he gets down and dirty politically and risks his neck for what he believes in. He should be the left's future. He should be the left's poster child, its goddamn sex symbol-not some actor who happens to lend his good looks to whatever "awareness" campaign is hot. Zack is not the future America deserves but he's the one it needs. Zack should be one of this pitiful nation's sexiest people.

To this end, The Awl has put together a 2010 benefit calendar of sexy Zack goodness. The calendar features a collection of photos that are preposterous, topical, sexy, poignant, naked, embarrassing and bad-sometimes all at the same time. (If you are a nit-picky art director, you may have some complaints about the execution, in which case, you are welcome to art-direct next year's calendar-pro bono, of course. Also, the online preview looks terrible, but it looks much better in print!)

All proceeds go to Zack, to be used for making protest posters or buying extra locks for his new house (cross your fingers!) or for taking a trip to somewhere warm. (The details: Manufacturing cost is $12.49, Lulu.com takes $1.50, and the remaining $6 go to Zack.) And in the unlikely event that this is an overly-successful venture, he will be donating a portion of the profits to the Matthew Shepard Foundation.

Abe Sauer would like you to buy this calendar.

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Both the Sioux and the Redskin names and logos have been challenged. Last week, a federal judge in North Dakota granted a temporary restraining order against the state board of education's attempt to retire the Fighting Sioux nickname. And earlier last week, the Supreme Court refused to hear a decades-long case against the Redskins-not because The Court disagreed with the plaintiffs' assertion of the logo's racial insensitivity (which would bar it from trademark protections) but because the claim was brought so long-25 years-after the Redskins trademarked the name.

While the Redskins debate is fairly straightforward, the Fighting Sioux case is characterized by paradoxes and ironies. That a debate about the offensiveness of a logo depicting people who once freely roamed the central plains area is being settled by stuffily-named committees in cheap folding chairs under florescent lights. That "Sioux" itself was a derogatory term from the French. Or that the "Dakota" in "North Dakota" refers to the region's natives so "North Dakota Fighting Sioux" is a lexiconic absurdity. That the Fighting Sioux name was chosen to replace Flickertail because of the perceived fearsome nature of the latter; yet, the Sioux were systematically exterminated and subjugated while flickertails still wreak havoc on the region's settlers. Or that logo-defending rhetoric about maintaining "tradition" conveniently overlooks that it was tradition that was changed to accommodate the Fighting Sioux logo. Or that the logo that "honors" the Sioux has changed over the years from a cartoon to an image also used by the Chicago Blackhawks, ostensibly to honor the Blackhawk tribe. Most absurdly, the ruling by the National Collegiate Athletic Association requires the University of North Dakota to secure approval from the state's two Sioux tribes for at least 30 years, essentially meaning it has to get approval that the logo does not offend right now.

At the heart of the matter is "The Ralph," a hockey arena named for its patron, the late Ralph Engelstad, whose donation of $100-million is still one of the largest ever in the history of college gifts. A former UND hockey player, Ralph was once one of the richest men in America and owner of the Imperial Palace casino in Las Vegas.

At the turn of the millennium, Ralph was dying (not of shame). With the future of the Fighting Sioux logo grim, he did what any rich crazy person would do and wrote the university president a letter about the status of his generous donation:

If I walk away and abandon the project, please be advised that we will shut off all temporary heat going to this building, and I am sure that nature, through its cold weather, will completely destroy any portion of the building through frost that you might be able to salvage... Please do not consider this letter a threat in any manner, as it is not intended to be. It is only notification to you of exactly what I am going to do if you change this logo and this slogan.

Surprising only to those who had no knowledge of the threat (which was everyone), the state board of higher education reversed its long-held position that the logo was offensive. "Fighting Sioux," scheduled for mothballing, was revived. The whole subtle letter is available online as a black eye to higher education. Also, just to be sure, Ralph had thousands of Fighting Sioux logos placed throughout the arena, including a massive marble inlay one, so as to make removal prohibitively expensive. (A bit of trivia: It was the Chicago Blackhawks-like logo that Ralph wanted UND to re-adopt to "honor" the Sioux. When the idea was nixed by the UND president, the current logo, an approximation, was commissioned. A coincidence then that Engelstad's hockey career peaked with a tryout offer from the Blackhawks? Looking at the two together it's easy to see the influence honor.)

Finally, it's noteworthy that the attorney who filed the restraining order on behalf of several North Dakota Sioux just happens to have done work for the Engelstad Arena in the past. Engelstad spokespeople insist this is a coincidence.

American Indian Cultural Support estimates that about 2,500 kindergarten, elementary, middle and high schools use American Indian mascots. Then there are the colleges and professional teams. In recent years, many schools, faced with requests from the American Indian community, have quickly and willingly changed their logos. Many, many others have not.

So, are these logos offensive? Maybe. Certainly some are, such as Cleveland's Chief Wahoo. But in general, nobody agrees at even the most basic level: many who believe one logo is racist see a similar one as acceptable. Further exacerbating the complexity is that many American Indians themselves see variety, agreeing that a logo like the Fighting Sioux is inoffensive while that of the Washington Redskins is racist. Or that a logo may be offensive but as long as it has the approval of the tribe, it's acceptable. A further complexity is that even if a team name itself is not overtly offensive, it invites offensive statements from "fans" and even national media outlets, such as the Washington Post. Then there is the awkward merchandising, such as the opportunity to wipe one's feet on an image ostensibly honoring a people.

There are several popular defenses for continued use of such symbols.

To get a better understanding of the reasoning of supporters, I spoke with two of North Dakota's popular writers on the Fighting Sioux mascot. First is that these logos "honor" American Indians. This reasoning is used in both the Fighting Sioux and Redskins cases.

I started by asking The Whistler, a syndicated writer for Say Anything, what he would say about how some might find this an odd honor for a group that has seen little in the way of honor in any other form.

"I don't believe in any sort of collective guilt. What some people who are dead did to some other people who are dead is irrelevant. Another factor is that by the standards of their time what happened was being done all over, even by the Indian tribes themselves. I'm just saying that things were different back then and if we go to correct historical wrongs where would we ever end it? Cain and Abel?"

In 1887, Congress established the Indian Trust. Probably as early as 1888, the American government began dishonoring that agreement. The trust incorporated millions of acres of Western land once owned by individual American Indians. Believing these people could not effectively and reliably manage the wealth these lands would certainly soon produce, the Department of the Interior was installed as trustee. In simple terms, the US took the land, promised to act as the executor of the trust, and then more or less never returned any calls. The fact that the Interior Department maintains an Indian Trust site that claims "We have proposed an initiative to improve and fix the Indian trust program" should be about all one needs to know.

A Native American leader named Elouise Cobell sued for the mismanagement of the trust's royalties. The case has been ongoing for, it seems, as long as the trust has existed (actually since 1996). In a ruling on the case, U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth wrote: "What remains is the raw, shocking, humiliating truth at the bottom: After all these years, our government still treats American Indians as if they were less deserving of the respect that should be afforded to everyone in a society where all people are supposed to be equal" and that the Interior Department was "the morally and culturally oblivious hand-me-down of a disgracefully racist and imperialist government that should have been buried a century ago."

Lamberth was rewarded by being removed from the case by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit, which claimed he lost his objectivity. Lamberth was succeeded by Judge James Robertson who, in 2008, wrote that the Interior Department had "unreasonably delayed" the case and that "a remedy must be found for the department's unrepaired, and irreparable, breach of its fiduciary duty over the last century." At the time of Robertson's ruling, he was the tenth circuit judge who had been involved in the case whose docket had 3,504 entries. He compared the case to Bleak House.

The Bush administration (as with the administration before) had, to date, "honored" the government's responsibility for mismanaging the trust by fighting the case tooth and nail, going as far as attempting to remove judges. Congress strangled the Interior Department's funding, effectively gumming up the process of finding an adequate accounting (of this move, Judge Roberts criticized Congress for an "unwillingness to fund such an enterprise"). It's an incredible case that finally got its due in an eviscerating cover story Parade magazine... published Sept. 9, 2001.

And while the case is not yet over, the original amount sought (tens of billions of dollars) has been whittled down to an award of $455 million, which works out to honor every possible claimant to the tune of about $900. Keep in mind, this is not a case about reparations for government-sponsored genocide, which will never come to pass. This is a legally-documented trust of Indian holdings in timber, oil and resources that the U.S. agreed to manage and then proceeded to gut. Our defense? Those records are all gone, so how can we pay anyone? So, as The Whistler said, it all happened between people who are long dead and not worth revisiting, right?

I also spoke with Goon, a columnist for for Illegal Curve and other Sioux sports sites. He said:

"Many Native American have said they think that the Fighting Sioux name is an honor and are very proud of it. Being in North Dakota, I see a lot of Native Americans wearing Fighting Sioux hats, shirts and jerseys. So do we disregard these people's opinion? Why is a vocal minority speaking for the whole Sioux Nation? I have seen Native Americans talk disrespectful about the Native Americans that are for the Fighting Sioux name. Also, a lot of the people that are against the Fighting Sioux name are white liberal professors or native Americans that aren't even of Sioux decent.

Like many who support the Fighting Sioux nickname, and American Indian logos in general, Goon and Whistler often point out that those offended are "a very small vocal minority" and that an "overwhelming majority of Indians" are "in favor of sports teams using their names for their team names." They back these claims up with surveys and polls. These include an April 2009 Spirit Lake tribe of North Dakota Sioux referendum, in which 67% of its members voted to retain the nickname, and a 2002 Sports Illustrated survey that found 81% of American Indians didn't find such nicknames offensive.

What everyone who cites the Sports Illustrated poll fails to mention is that the 81%number was for those Indians living off reservations. For those who lived on reservations, that number drops to 53%. Meanwhile, a 2005 poll found that 61% of North Dakota American Indians (and 95% of overall state residents) were "not offended" by the nickname. (It's noteworthy that in supporters' rhetoric, poll numbers based on "not offended by" questions were characterized as "support for.")

The polls cited by both Goon and Whistler demonstrate anywhere from, at most 37% (Goon) to, at best, 19% (Whistler) of a group of people are offended by the names. I asked both if this was the case. Of the 37% of Spirit Lake tribal members finding the Fighting Sioux logo offensive, Goon said, "The Tribe has voted and that's acceptable to me." Whistler agreed. He said, "One final thing with the poll is that a lot of the people against it have been influenced by the loud minority over what they should decide. I'm not saying the poll is invalid, but I think some peoples opinions have been influenced by the antis. In the absence of any public debate (the time is of course past for that), I think even more would support the name."

This "vocal minority" or "very small vocal minority," to use their language, is something like 1/3rd of American Indians in North Dakota.

Of Whistler's reasoning, it's especially noteworthy that when he finds himself in the minority, he sings a different tune, very vocal tune. For instance, his criticisms of Senator Byron Dorgan (D-ND); Dorgan was opposed by about 32% in his last election.

American Indian logo supporters often appeal to "democracy" to settle the issue. Voting is America's foundation, right? But as anyone who is not a member of a majority knows, resolving ethical or civil rights issues by majority vote is not the least bit American. Certain residents of California and, recently, Maine understand this well.

But what makes the "honoring them" line hardest to swallow is that America's effort to honor American Indians doesn't seem to extend past using them in iconography to represent our sports teams.

American Indians rank at the bottom of nearly every social statistic: highest teen suicide rate of all minorities; highest rate of teen pregnancy; highest high school dropout rate; lowest per capita income; highest unemployment of any American demographic. Newscasters go crazy about areas of Michigan with near 20% unemployment. Yet, un- and under-employment at North Dakota's Standing Rock Reservation is more than 70%, compared with something like 5% for the state overall. And Standing Rock is not the worst.

A 2003 United States Commission on Civil Rights study assessing federal funding for American Indians found extreme disparities in the areas of health care, transportation, public safety and education. And yet, under Bush, American Indians were "honored" by the reorganization of the Department of the Interior's trust fund management structure. Cuts included more than $7 million for Indian housing programs and more than $4 million for Indian home loans. Bush then broke the back of American Indian entrepreneurship by dismantling tribal business information centers, the Small Business Authority's only program targeting American Indians. He tried to cut all funding for North Dakota's United Tribes Technical College. The Army Corps of Engineers re-launched large water projects that have been identified as threatening sacred sites.

Then in 2008, Bush took his hatchet again to Indian housing services grants, going after 15% of its funding, about $100 million. The cowboy capped it all off, in one of his only public mentions of American Indians, by "honoring" them for getting preferential consideration at the University of Michigan: "...some Native American students receive [extra points] not because of any academic achievement or life experience, but solely because they are Native American." Had Bush been in his prime, he would have made that speech at Illinois or Florida State... or North Dakota.

These economic insults are dwarfed by the travesty that is public safety on Indian lands. Justice Department data says that 30% of all American Indian women will be raped in their lifetimes. And thanks to the 1978 Supreme Court ruling in Oliphant vs. Suquamish, only federal prosecutors can prosecute crimes on reservations. Because they are not exactly high on the fed's priority list, rapes are almost never prosecuted. The 1978 ruling also means that tribal police (of whom there are few) can often only prosecute American Indians, not off-reservation offenders. This essentially means that, in some parts of the country, anyone can go onto a reservation, commit a crime and most likely get away with it. It is unsurprising then that the Justice Department says that about 80% of reservation rapists are non-Indian men.

In the end, tribal police turn the rape cases over to the feds, who decline to file charges in nearly three of every four. It is estimated that about half of all murders on tribal lands also never see prosecution.

To return to logos, one great irony of the North Dakota Highway Patrol is that their emblem features the symbol of Red Tomahawk, "a Teton Dakotah (Sioux) Indian who lived on his land near the Cannonball River on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation near Mandan, North Dakota." The Highway Patrol is largely not allowed to police Standing Rock.

For more information about how reservations in the United States can make our worst, most blighted urban centers look warm and inviting, check out Herbert Hale's story or, better, Matthew Powers' outrageous "Ghosts of Wounded Knee" in the latest Harper's.

It's worth mentioning that tribal governments themselves, often insisting on independent jurisdiction even at the expense of maintaining order, bear some of the blame for the utter preposterousness of such a public safety "system." But again, they're not the ones claiming to be honoring anyone. And while many say these atrocities on tribal land are solely the fault of the tribes themselves, recent Obama administration actions and comments about "making good" are evidence to the contrary, such as Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar's recent remarks about the "federal government's pattern of neglect" and Obama's goal to motivate the justice department "to improve public safety on tribal lands."

The most popular, most common defense of the use of American Indian logos is "but, but, the Fighting Irish!" While there is the matter of Notre Dame selecting the name for itself as a Catholic institution with Irish roots, this reasoning is far more flawed.

The Notre Dame Fighting Irish comparison should, if anything, testify to the offensiveness of American Indian logos. From a social level, there was never an attempt in the US, both locally and on the part of the government itself, to exterminate the Irish. The fundamental point of American Indian logo usage is that these logos "honor" people we largely tried to kill by any dirty mean available. One wouldn't expect to find a Turkish basketball team called the Marching Armenians or a Srebrenican hockey team called the Battling Bosniaks. There is no other people so singularly "honored." Except the Fighting Irish. The Irish logo should be the exception that proves the rule. Instead, in typical reactionary logic, it is the rule. For a comprehensive collection of research and commentary on this issue, visit Blue Corn Comics, a publisher of comics focused on American Indians.

The fundamental bizarreness of the logic supporting the use of American Indian logos logic is evidenced when the subject of other American Indian logos is raised. I asked Whistler and Goon about their thoughts on Cleveland's Chief Wahoo and the Washington Redskins.

Goon:

"Chief Wahoo is negative, it's a cartoon character, and I can see the reason people think the Washington Redskins is offensive but the Fighting Sioux logo is not portrayed in the same light, it was drawn by Ben Brien, a person of Chippewa decent and who is married to woman of Sioux decent."

Whistler:

"I haven't been a NFL fan for a lot of years, although I was a fan of the Redskins during the Hogs area. At the time I didn't think that the Redskins name was a negative in any way. Now I wouldn't call an Indian a 'Redskin' today, but given the tradition of the name I don't see that being bad."

Got that?

The fetishization of American Indians is by no means the sole province of athletic programs. Commercial interest from Indian Motorcycles to Leinenkugel Brewing Co. to Land O'Lakes Dairy leverage American Indian iconography to sell products with no relation at all to native culture or history. Halloween costumes and other debris round out the inheritance of insult. But the athletic logos are the most widespread and most egregious simply because they are employed by organizations whose foundations are predicated on equality, opportunity and absence of the inescapable judgment, habit and bigotry of the "real world." We are so quick to see it, even when maybe unintentional, in political cartoons, Vanity Fair covers, "chink eyes," protest posters, Australians, illegal alien costumes, sports movies, Nick Douglas Internet theories, movie posters and other nation's outrages. Asian women trigger our outrage but not Indian faces?

Can anyone even imagine a world where "Indian" is interchanged with another people in features editor Jaine Treadwell's recent, hard-to-believe-it-got-published ruminations for The Troy Messenger ("Circle the wagons, the Indians are coming") and it still gets published?

Were the Fighting Sioux logo the only of its kind, a lot of this might be easier to swallow. But the American Indian logo whole is more offensive than the sum of its fighting, brave, warrior parts. It's the pervasiveness. The Sioux or Seminole or Illini or Braves or Redskins or Chiefs cases are always fought individually, with no reference to how they might impact the whole. It's always: "Does the Redskins logo offend?" Not: "Does the widespread use of American Indian logos for sports teams reinforce a single, one-dimensional stereotype and offend?"
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And while the use of American Indian logos for sports teams stinks of a legacy of discrimination, their defenders smell of the cult that sees anti-political correctness as reason. Like almost every progressive achievement in the United States, the fight to retire the use of American Indian logos is opposed by a population of white male reactionaries with persecution complexes. Within the last year, the U.S. did what a generation ago seemed impossible, and elected a black man. He happened to be born around the same time as the passage of the Voting Rights Act-a law that, interestingly enough, probably would have died in individual state referendums. And now that man holds post-racial "teachable moment" beer summits on race in a city with a professional sports franchise named "Redskins."

Abe Sauer still likes sports though.

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Far, far less racism than in April. (And far less than found at many of the tea party website message boards.) During the entire two hour evening event, featuring dozens of everyman speakers and dozens more signs, only one guy mentioned Barack Obama's illegitimate birth and that he's Muslim. And that was only in passing on his way to a point about something, I forget. Probably "socialism."

So, you people of the coasts: what do they want? They want Washington to "listen." They want to not be "treated like sheep." They want better education (maybe). They want Ronald Reagan bon mots. They want jokes about moving D.C. to North Dakota because the cold would "force politicians to keep their hands in their own pockets." They want to sing God Bless America. They want, in one speaker's words, "to take it back for the United States Constitution for liberty." They want, more than anything, lower taxes.

This last item is where the irony begins, because North Dakota is one of the greatest of all federal welfare states. It receives over two dollars back for every one paid in taxes. If anyone has reason to complain, it's the Minnesotans, who get back only around seventy cents for every one of their tax dollars. Minnesota, by the way, is only about a quarter mile away from this particular tea party.

North Dakota is home to protectionist policies ranging from agriculture co-ops to state-run insurance to a law demanding that all pharmacies be locally owned (banning the only advantage of a Wal-Mart: cheap drugs). There is the state-run Bank of North Dakota, which in a year that saw private banks taking federal bailouts, returned $30 million to the state's general fund. More importantly, these state organizations operate in competition with private business, a fact that keeps everyone honest and is a system that, while quite successful and popular here, is clearly going to destroy America if partly implemented on any national scale, such as with health care.

So this "Anti Tax Tea Party" is a bit like a grunged-up trust fund kid begging for change on the street-at the Mexican border crossing.

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The MWF bills itself as "the worlds [sic] most professional Micro Wrestling athletes," which raises questions about the world's less professional midget and dwarf wrestlers. Founded in 2000, the MWF tours year-round; it played a brutal schedule of 65 shows in 2008, and claimed an average audience of 500 people per show. MWF events can be booked in three classes: six-midget, eight-midget, and the ten-midget event (known as "MidgetPalooza").

The official line from the MWF goes through the expected empowerment messaging that society has come to expect from our freak shows: "[Fans] walk away from one of our unique events feeling as though they know the Micro Entertainer as a talented performer." It's not all that different from the empowerment messages often thrown around with porn stars or strippers. Or bloggers.

What you get when you book an MWF show is really all in their promo video. Voice-over done by the exact same guy who does all the nation's monster truck rally commercials. A drunken crowd cheering "Midgets! Midgets! Midgets!" An audio clip of Mike Myers doing the Austin Powers fat Scotsman "Ahhm bigger than yooo ahhhr. Ahm 'iyer on the food chain." Explosions. A fat midget with no pants on. A Lilliputian chipmunk-voice yelling "Be there!" A midget getting hit in the nuts with a pool stick? Of course! And a call to "support midget violence."

Bucks is typical of the venues played by the MWF, although sometimes they play Knights of Columbus halls and labor temples. The walls outside and in are decorated with the now-common nostalgia items from the good old days-the days when no self-respecting American would have entered a place so shamelessly soulless. When I arrived at 9 p.m., the (plentiful) handicap spots were all full.

The cover was $20, the average door for these events, and upon entering I was immediately hit with a wall of rock. Speaking as a rural headbanging teen at the time of its release, I am qualified to say that Motley Crue's "Dr. Feelgood" still has tremendous legs. Like so many of their songs, it is bound to endure to see the day when it is regarded as the most top-notch of its stripper-friendly early-90s peers. The other wall of stuff I was hit with was smoke. North Dakota does not yet have a ban.

Also boding poorly: a guy in the front row in a Michael Vick jersey.

Midget wrestling has probably been around since the middle ages. Midget wrestling, as we know it, has been around since the early 20th century. The height of the sport's popularity was the 1950s. It has flirted with the mainstream: Wrestlemania III in 1987 (which featured the legendary Hogan vs. Andre the Giant match) saw two "full size" wrestlers-King Kong Bundy and Hillbilly Jim-team up with four midget wrestlers-Haiti Kid, Little Beaver, Lord Littlebrook, Little Tokyo-in a main-event match. Beaver, 52 at the time of the match, suffered a devastating back injury from Bundy; he died eight years later.

Midget wrestling lost much of its popularity after that. Still, the WWE has brought back midget wrestling in limited amounts; its most renowned character, Hornswoggle, wrestles in the guise of-wait for it-a leprechaun.

In what CNN's Lou Dobbs would consider representative of labor markets in general, Mexican midget wrestlers have remained popular despite their American counterparts' decline.

The show began. "Standing four-foot-four and weighing 292 pounds... it's... Meatball!!!!" A small man, who looked as if he does in fact weigh 292 pounds, strutted in from somewhere in the back of the bar, through the crowd, to the ring. For anyone who has never seen one of these regional insanities, it can best be described by the scenes in last year's Oscar-nominated The Wrestler. There is no gangway. No explosion of fireworks. It's poorly lit. The ceiling's low. It smells of beer and smoke. The chairs are metal and fold. The ring is in the middle of the bar and the midgets, each in character, fling one another against ropes, suplex, pile drive and generally fly around even when only slapped across the chest with a weak backhand. They dive off top rungs. They kick out on two-counts. Also just like the WWE: before the first event starts, the crowd is cheering "Fight! Fight! Fight!" and "Kick his ass!" but after the third two-count kick-out, a lot are back to ogling the shot girl and texting.

Also, a girl goes about selling roses to couples, as if this were a quiet Italian restaurant. One guy, clearly slouch-slurring toward the title of "Drunkest Dude of the Night," buys one.

The MWF is terrifically well managed. There is a soup-'em-um phase in which the MC introduces the wrestlers. And then a long break before and between matches so the excited crowd can hit the bar for $2 Buds. It's not just that the well-oiled show is choreographed for Dick and Jane's enjoyment; it also has the profitability of the bar in mind. Also, twenty dollars is a staggeringly high ticket price here for anything. There were at least three hundred people in the bar, a tremendous crowd for a North Dakota event that isn't a Fighting Sioux hockey game or a Tea Party.

Here is some of the commentary by the crowd, executed over a span of about fifteen minutes:

"Choke that goddamn beer!"

"Ric Flair bitch!"

"...pop your cherry..."

"Woooooooooooooooo!"

"She can't stand 'cause she's got a pin in her leg."

"He's pretty cut for a midget."

A note about the "shot girl." The classic shot girl is a woman who has the job of pushing through a forest of horny drunk Neanderthals to sell what looks like Windex out of high-school chemistry test tubes. It may pay better than some other jobs but it is thankless and tragic to watch. At this event, it appeared that the classic test tube shots had been augmented with a new "syringe" shot. In utilizing these beverages, mooks buy a giant plastic medical-looking syringe and inject the terrible drinks down their gullets. I am shocked; growing up on a working dairy farm, the last time I saw these exact same syringes was when they were full of bull spunk and the vet was using them to artificially inseminate heifers.

Besides the "is it exploitation?" stuff, the MWF has flirted with controversy before. A show in Ohio last year drew the attention of Canton Liquor Commission. From the local paper's report: "...complainants have said only the women in the Micro Wrestling Federation wrestling group were nude and have alleged at least one was a porn star."

Ignoring the fact that it's not illegal to be a porn star, yet, one has to wonder who would attend an MWF event and complain about anything. The Ohio bar owner claims he was set up by his jealous competition. The city suspended the bar's license; the bar sued the city. And so goes the drama of small town entertainment industry.

No such luck for me. The performers were all men. Trixie Dynamite, the sexed up star of the MWF circuit who is supposedly soon to appear in Playboy, was not here. I was bummed, because I understand her entrance music is Warrant's "Cherry Pie," which begins: "Ahhhhhhhhhhhhh Dirty! Rotten! Filthy! Stinkin'!" and just gets better.

Regarding "midget." If the inclusion of a single midget at a "normal" wrestling event is an exploitative side show, then what is a midget wrestling event made up only of midgets? The MWF position on the term is that it is inoffensive "as long as its [sic] used to promote the Micro event and not used in a derogatory manner towards little people." Seems understandable. The advocacy group Little People of America disagrees, saying the term is no different from a racial slur.

But for an advocacy group like Little People, the paradox, lost on nobody, particularly the Micro Wrestling gang, is that it is hard to claim on one hand that little people should be able to do anything "normal" people can do but then on the other hand protest midget wrestling, which is in no way different from normal wrestling, except, you know, with midgets.

One irony of this event was that even though the crowd certainly wasn't all that altruistic, most of the worst exploitative jargon came from the MWF show itself. In one instance, to goose the crowd, the MC yelled, "Who wants to see some midgets fight?!" Later, during one event where two characters taunt each other pre-fight, one said: "You look like a midget Mighty Morphin' Power Ranger!"

I would propose that the MWF is both exploitation and not at the same time. It is all intent. Take this particular crowd. Whatever the giving-it-their-all MWF performers want to think about their audience's attitudes, the fact is that it seems many came only here for the "freak" value. That isn't to say the MWF should stop, or even that this is necessarily "bad," as much as it's just universal. When the Lower East Side's Arlene's Grocery hosted an amateur female Jell-O wrestling contest, there were probably a good number of reasons given for attending, with the real one being "exposed boobs."

When I got home, I was a little wired from the Buds. I turned on the TV. I had the option of watching plus-size people dance competitively to lose weight and win prizes, amateur hookers throwing themselves at a washed-up rock star to win prizes, a "matchmaker" pimp serving willing, live sex dolls to shameless millionaires, women who didn't know they were pregnant giving birth, WWE wrestling, a psychopathic ex-wife of a Sheen boy, numerous addicts living out their possibly premature recoveries, two pathetic egomaniacs raising eight doomed children, a gaggle of narcissistic middle-age women trying to be models for prizes-and a family of midgets, just being midgets amongst others.

Previously: The Great American Teen SUV Death Race

Abram Sauer writes about things that are far away.

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