America is a land of the free and a home of the blamed 

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My grandmother was born in a log cabin in 1899 in Dry Fork, Utah. I was last there maybe 15 years ago or so, and the cabin was still standing.

Dry Fork is an area just up from Vernal. Besides being known as among the ancestral homes of my great-great grandfather and Mormon Battalion member Matthew Caldwell, it is also known for some very nice and well-preserved petroglyphs at the McConkie Ranch. I've been there, too, and yes, way cool.

I've mentioned all of these little facts in prior columns, in part to see who among the readers might also know of Dry Fork or of the petroglyphs. For others, we find out that although we're on different political fences today, we were grazing the same grass in years past. Matthew Caldwell had five wives (making it entirely possible that the folks producing Five Wives Vodka at Ogden's Own Distillery gained inspiration for the name via my family), and he left scads of offspring.

A fair number of them have reached out to me over the years, at times to 100 percent verify that's it's possible a "saint"—such as my great-grandfather is decreed—might be liable to some degree of DNA for a "sinner" such as me, so described on the single predicate that I am not a Saint. Well, Caldwell boys and their cousins rambled with Butch and Sundance all over eastern and central Utah so, yeah, it's entirely reasonable that not all "saints" are created equally.

And with all else going on in the world—people killing each other all over the globe—it seems best to nary quibble about who qualifies as a saint and who does not.

Thirteen years prior to my grandmother's birth, in Gavalohori, Crete, the man who would later become her husband was born. I've visited his Cretan village a number of times and have eaten in the home he lived in for his first 20 years, leaving Crete for Utah in 1906. The home looks to me to be a sound structure, constructed of some combination of stone and mortar. I'm not sure if it could withstand a strong earthquake, both floors at least, and I do pray I never find out.

When my grandmother was born, Utah had barely been settled (stolen?) and was only three years into U.S. statehood. Meanwhile, in the Mediterranean Sea, Crete was over 200 years into its fight for freedom against the Ottoman Turks, who took control of Crete in 1669. Another 200 years before that, the rest of Greece had already fallen, which begat a 400-year war of resistance by the Greeks against the Ottoman occupation.

That's what I always think about when I visit Greece, where I spent this past September. When Greece fell to the Ottomans, Christopher Columbus was yet to sail the ocean blue to leave his germs on you know who. The Minoan civilization on Crete dates back 4,000 years and in Gavalohori itself there remains Roman-era wells and Venetian architecture. Meanwhile, it wasn't that long ago that my Utah relatives were born into log homes.

We Americans are mere pups when it comes to the world stage. Too many Americans, however, can't find Crete on the map, nor even care to know where it is.

It's not important to know geography or world history these days, I suppose. As Exhibit A, I submit former President Donald Trump, who on plural occasions was challenged by world maps or historical events. It is also true that many Cretans or Greeks can't find Utah on a world map, so maybe they don't do a bang-up job on world history, either.

I kinda doubt that a dumb Greek could ever rise to the presidency of that country, however. Yet, at every level of American governance, I look around and find another dumb politician. Not all politicians are dumb—some are also conniving liars and opportunists. And but for the grace of whatever God or symbol you worship, a good many American politicians are fine, quality people, men and women who work for all of us and for our greater good.

But they seem to be rare, don't they? I must be guilty of wearing my own rose-colored glasses, because it was only recently that I looked around to discover that the number of dumber and meaner politicians has at least quadrupled these past few decades. Somehow, we quit electing men and women predicated on the notion that they would work together on our behalf. We're getting worse at elections.

Blame it on tribal politics. Blame it on one-hit wonders in Congress who come for the attention and go for the dough. Blame it on the weather. Blame it on a populace that continues to slide downward on the scales of basic education. But at some point there must be a reckoning that we are not the only people in the world with an exalted sense of what it means to be free, what it really means to fight for it—in this country and elsewhere.

Blame it on yourself for voting to elect the likes of Mike Lee, who as @basedmikelee spends more time being smartass against people with 20 followers than he does acting on behalf of his constituency on real matters.

Blame it on log cabins and the people, like me, who are just one generation removed from them. Or also blame it on immigrants and the people like me, who are just one generation removed from that as well. But, by all means, find someone or something to blame. That's the new code. CW

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