News From Nowhere

By Wiley

Laramie, as a community, is composed of one of the most diverse and interesting populations in Wyoming. Largely thanks to the influence of our local university, an astounding agglomeration of characters populates this bucolic burg, creating an environment with enormous potential for social interaction. This is not to say that Laramie owes a cultural debt to the University of Wyoming for edifying an otherwise-backward small town; indeed, the most potent cultural influences in Laramie originate in the town proper. Certainly, Laramie is a unique place to be. The intersection of a state-funded semi-cosmopolitan academic behemoth with an antiquated small-town mentality can produce interesting results. As with most college towns, there exists a tangible economic hierarchy, wherein the local government and business community must essentially whore themselves out to students, professors and visitors to stay afloat. The shadow cast over Laramie by the university is quite significant when considered in this respect. Without delving too far into the intricacies of the situation, it is no coincidence that Albany County falls far below state and national averages for median family income, per capita income, and median household income (in which category Albany County is the poorest county in the state), despite the massive influx of money into our area.

By The Motley Fool

Governor Mead recently unveiled his budget plans for the next two years, and hidden away in the facts and figures was an inclination to fund a new Engineering wing instead of fully funding the new Performing Arts center sought by the University of Wyoming. Now, engineering is a fine thing. Miracles of engineering have improved our lives (for instance, the Grand Coulee Dam in eastern Washington produces more than 6,465 megawatts of electricity – more than three times more than the thousand-turbine wind farm planned for Rawlins). Miracles of engineering have also caused us problems (the Grand Coulee Dam wiped out the run of king salmon that once supported an entire fishing industry with thousands of jobs along the Columbia River). These days, between our burgeoning human population and destructive assaults on the planet, we’re going to need a LOT of engineering miracles to get us out of the messes we keep creating for ourselves. So we’ll need plenty of well-trained engineers. Engineering makes life simpler, easier, and more convenient. It shrouds us in a cocoon of technology, safe from the outside world. Art makes people think, feel, and connect with the world around them. It prods us out of complacency. At its best, it’s provocative and makes us think. Art is the antidote to technology overload.

How is art going to fare in the years ahead? Can literature survive the blogosphere, tweeting, and text messaging? The form in which language itself will survive is an open question. Can art cinema survive the endless replay of television shows on the web, or the viral spamming of YouTube videos through social media? Will new and unexpected art forms arise? The answers will come in significant part from our universities.

While engineering provides function, art provides form, like ying and yang. For instance, marry art and construction engineering and you get architecture. Engineering without art can be sterile and soul- crushing. Consider the metal-sided industrial sheds scattered across the north end of Laramie. Nobody gets homesick for those.

By Rod Miller

Scarcely a year after statehood, Wyoming was embroiled in a civil war as divisive as the conflict that had recently ended at Appomattox. The Johnson County War pitted homesteaders in northern Wyoming against oligarchic cattle barons (mostly British interests) based in Cheyenne, over the question of who would control the state’s vast grassland resource and its cattle herds – the hydrocarbon of the day. For months, the economic and political life of the young state was in gridlock, and the whole world was watching.

In essence it was a battle between large and small, domestic and foreign, democratic and monopolistic, common and elite, and headlines generated by the war on Powder River would not be out of place today. It was at its root an “occupy” movement, and a class conflict that proved Clausewitz’s truism that “war is merely politics conducted by extreme means.” When the dust settled and the gunsmoke cleared, what remained was a cultural paradigm in Wyoming that prevails to this day.

(Keep in mind that this snapshot necessarily neglects the history of the aboriginal peoples who were Wyoming’s first inhabitants and confines itself to that of recent European interlopers.)

While it may be impossible to pinpoint a flashpoint that ignited the bloodshed, two laws set in motion a chain of events that could only result in one outcome.