Apparently the guy who founded Cabela's, the behemoth of an outdoor store that figures prominently in the exurbs of many of the large cities of this great nation, passed away last week. I don't know anything about the man. I don't know much about the stores. I think I bought a pair of pants at the one in Denver before a backpacking trip. I also think it would be cool to take Owen to the one in Wichita sometime and blow his toddler mind. That said, I have a limited dog in this fight. However, reading Amy Merrick's brief account of his life in the New Yorker, I couldn't help but feel how ridiculous her view of the man's life is. Now, this is the New Yorker. If you are looking for a nuanced take on Middle America it is probably not the place to go. I think that in order to be hired by that esteemed publication you have to register a "San Francisco vegan gardener" on the smug scale.
Merrick gives short shrift to Dick Cabela's literal rags-to-riches story, instead focusing on his connections to the NRA ($1 million in donations for a company doing $3.5 billion in annual revenue does not strike me as extreme, especially seeing as they sell firearms) and how he is just like those Duck Dynasty guys who we all know are knuckle-dragging homophobes. Therefore, he is probably a gun-loving, knuckle-dragging, homophobe himself who Merrick somehow crams into the problem of gun violence among inner-city youth. Seriously. Here is the final paragraph:
Of course, what it looks like to have guns in the hands of kids depends on where you live: Do you envision 4-H members shooting at a paper target in an empty field, or teen-agers settling a dispute in an urban neighborhood? In his interview with LaPierre, Dick Cabela lamented his struggles to attract a younger audience, presumably unaware of the double meaning of his words, “We’re losing our youth, big time, especially in the inner cities.”
I don't know that Cabela's explicitly caters to the gangbanger set, and I don't know that many an inner-city murder is committed with a hunting rifle, but this is the standard crappy journalistic practice of guilt by contrived association. Notice it is entirely unclear the context of Cabela's quote in this article. Is he lamenting the fact that inner-city kids are not buying guns at his stores? Plausible, but unlikely. More likely is the fact that kids these days, especially city kids, can hardly be bothered to go outdoors. But that would mean reading Cabela with charity (as well as crediting him with some degree of business acumen).
The most frustrating part of Merrick's article is that there is the seed of a legitimate point here. When I began the article I had thought I was going to enjoy it. We do mythologize the outdoors as we pave it over with parking lots and condos and strip malls and Cabela's stores. But anyone who has listened to "Big Yellow Taxi" in the past 40 years could tell you that. I wanted Merrick to go deeper. Was Dick Cabela somehow cynical about the outdoors and using our idealization of nature as a convenient way to make a buck? Do Cabela's customers prefer their outdoor experience to be climate-controlled and taxidermied? We don't ever get a meaningful answer to these questions.
Further, these critiques always strike me as a bit silly coming from people who live in gargantuan cities. Merrick cites the St. Louis store and how the building of Cabela's wiped out forest and wetlands. Which is true, no doubt. But do you know what lies just west of St. Louis and stretches for about 700 miles? Open space, wetlands, and forests. Punctuated ever so briefly by Kansas City, Topeka, and my fair city. So while I am not a huge fan of urban sprawl--the one thing that frightens me about the prospect of moving back to Denver someday is having to drive through that hellscape on a regular basis--I wonder if the same complaint would register from liberal quarters over the building of some All Faiths Peace and Love Center or some such nonsense. I guess what I am driving at is that it is chic these days to support the outdoors, perhaps nowhere more acutely than in cities where nature is mostly eliminated and always safely contained. It is easy to be romantic about something you never experience. These people want the great outdoors to exist in case someday they choose to partake. Whereas if I walk three miles in any direction from my home I am in the middle of nowhere.
The most striking part of Drew Magary's GQ piece on the Duck Dynasty clan was how much he was awed by their actual abilities and willingness to live out their ideology. He saw himself as a pansied city boy and he felt like he was missing out on something with his coddled life. I wonder if what Magary saw in Phil Robertson couldn't be said about Dick Cabela. That he was a true believer in the power of nature, but also a shrewd businessman. Merrick makes these two positions out to be contradictory but I don't see how they are. Davy Crockett also embodied the frontiersman and he was a self-promoter and a politician. It takes little imagination to unite the two.
While I doubt the title of Merrick's article was selected by her, the obit in no way answers the principle question in any meaningful way. That might require research. Better to listen to one interview, raise the specter of the NRA, and make dubious connections. In the end we don't really know anything more about Dick Cabela, the store he built, the nation that supports it, or the plight of inner city youth. Just more confirmation that those people in flyover country say and do the darndest things.
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