Author Interview: Bruce Bytnar Recalls 'A Park Ranger's Life'

National Park rangers are “almost 12 times more likely to be assaulted than a Border Patrol agent,” says retired park ranger Bruce Bytnar.  In fact, he says, they “are by far the most assaulted of all federal law enforcement agents.”

Bytnar should know.  After more than three decades in the profession, serving most of that time on the Blue Ridge Parkway in Virginia, he wrote a book called A Park Ranger’s Life:  Thirty-two Years Protecting Our National Parks (Wheatmark, 2009).  During those years, he said, more than 12 rangers were killed in the line of duty.

A resident of Rockbridge County, Bytnar was one of 36 authors present at the second annual “Meet the Authors Book Signing Event” at the Holiday Inn in Charlottesville on November 19.  He graciously answered my questions about A Park Ranger’s Life in a brief interview.


Bears, bad guys, and ghosts
The book, he explained, is based on his experiences “from my career as a park ranger.  It has everything from stories about bears and bad guys [to] lost hikers.  There’s even a ghost story from early in my career from a haunted house I had to work in for two weeks.”

The book also “attempts to show what it’s really like to be a National Park ranger, as well as lots of tips for people about when they come to parks, how they can travel and be in the park safely.”

In the year since it was published, A Park Ranger’s Life “has also been adopted by three universities as required reading for students:  Ohio State University, Northern Arizona University, and Slippery Rock.”  In addition, Bytnar said, five other colleges have added it to recommended reading lists for students of resource protection who aim to become park rangers.

“Part of the reason that the universities have adopted it is the fact that it’s an honest reflection of what it actually is to be a park ranger,” Bytnar explains.  It has “not only the good, fun stories and the successes but also the frustrations, such as dealing with budgets, park managers who don’t really like what you do,” and also something most people don’t think about, negative effects on rangers’ families.

Bytnar began his career in 1975 at Fort McHenry in Baltimore before moving to the Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park in Virginia, finally settling into a job along the Blue Ridge Parkway, where the stability was good for his family.

Three decades of changes
Did Bytnar observe changes over the three decades he was a park ranger?

“Definitely, definitely,” he said, pointing to “lots of changes in the way things were done, changes in visitation patterns, changes in the way management viewed our work.  Lots of things changed,” including the cars and all the equipment that rangers use on the job.

As for the years to come, Bytnar said, “the National Park System has a bright future as long as the American people still stand behind it.”

Americans, he explained, “have to realize what an important treasure it is that we have, and support it” not only financially and by soliciting support from their legislators, “but also by visiting the national parks.”

To complement his book, Bruce Bytnar maintains a blog, also called “A Park Ranger’s Life.”

(An earlier version of this article, in slightly different form, appeared on Examiner.com on November 20, 2010.)

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Author Interview: Jim Bacon Predicts Economic 'Boomergeddon'

On August 20, Richmond-based Oaklea Press released a new book called Boomergeddon: How Runaway Deficits and the Age Wave Will Bankrupt the Federal Government and Devastate Retirement for Baby Boomers Unless We Act Now, written by James A. Bacon, Jr., founder of the on-line political newsletter, Bacon’s Rebellion.

That mouthful of a title was the topic of a conversation between Bacon and me in early August in Richmond, at a meeting of political activists and policy experts sponsored by the advocacy group Tertium Quids.

'Deep Doo-Doo'
“Boomergeddon basically makes the argument that we’re in very deep doo-doo,” said Bacon.

“The federal government,” he explained, “is going into default within the next 15 or 20 years.”

This will “precipitate an unbelievable series of events,” said Bacon, starting with “a massive Keynesian contraction which will probably push the country into a steep recession, if not a depression.”

The federal credit crunch will also “lead to the collapse of the American empire,” and hinder the ability of the United States “to project force overseas” with “complications and ramifications” that will particularly affect world trade.

Finally, Bacon said, “it will lead to a total shredding of the social safety net. Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid will be decimated.”

Baby Boomer Retirement
The book is “addressed to baby boomers,” added Bacon, those who will be retiring through the next 15 years and who “haven’t saved enough money for our retirement.” Boomers will not “come close to being able to replicate our lifestyles that we’ve enjoyed until now.”

The problem is, Bacon noted, that “if we’re counting on Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid and all those things to back us up [and] to create a nice retirement then we’re all be very disappointed. It’s going to be really, really, really ugly.”

The causes of this coming crisis include health-care costs, which, Bacon points out, even President Obama recognizes as “the biggest driver of all, driving the cost of Medicare and Medicaid.”

Bacon said that in his book he “dissects” how the president tried to address this looming issue through Obamacare, but he concludes that the new health care plan “is not going to bend the cost curve downwards.”

National Debt Bomb
A second cause is the national debt, which “will continue to mount, even by Obama’s calculations, up to $20 trillion within the next ten years.” This will cause a global capital shortage and higher interest rates passing 10 percent.

When interest rates go get that high, Bacon said, “the only way you can cut back is to default, and that’s going to precipitate what I call Boomergeddon.”

There are what Bacon calls “theoretical solutions” that could prevent the crisis he foresees.

Strategy to Prevent Boomergeddon

He lays out a strategy in the book to “bring the budget back into balance by cutting about $800 billion in annual expenditures through a combination of things like a fair tax, cutting defense spending, cutting discretionary spending, and cutting corporate welfare and a variety of other means.”

He doubts that Congress and the Executive will be able to do that, however, “given the hyperpolarization we have in the capital and the blindness to what’s happening.”

(A slightly different version of this article appeared on Examiner.com on August 19, 2010.)

'A Law Unto Itself: Power, Politics, and the IRS'

This book review was originally published on Wednesday, March 28, 1990, in the New York City Tribune.



RICHARD SINCERE
Fanaticism of IRS Seen as Proof That Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely


A Law Unto Itself: Power, Politics, and the IRS, by David Burnham, Random House, $22.50, 420 pp.

Investigative reporter David Burnham is worried about cynicism in America. He worries, he told a gathering at the Cato Institute in Washington, because cynicism is destructive and it leads to corruption. Cynicism, he said, is particularly destructive of the Congress, the Internal Revenue Service, and the American taxpayer.

During this tax-paying season, it is obvious that Americans direct an enormous amount of cynicism toward the IRS. Burnham’s complaint is that there is too much cynicism and not enough skepticism. Webster’s defines a “cynic” as “one who believes that human conduct is motivated wholly by self-interest” and a “skeptic” as one who has “an attitude of doubt or a disposition to incredulity either in general or toward a particular object.”

If too many people believe that human activity is fundamentally selfish, few are willing to act selflessly; leading inexorably to corruption. Healthy skepticism, on the other hand, leads to the questioning of corruption and corrupt institutions.

Burnham has found that even among the media, there is not enough skepticism regarding the Internal Revenue Service, which as an investigative bureaucracy is five times bigger than the FBI and twice as large as the CIA. The IRS, Burnham warns, is hugely powerful and its power is hugely corrupting.

The institutions that should be watchdogs of the IRS -— the press, the courts, and the Congress — simply do not do the jobs. No major newspaper, Burnham says, has assigned a reporter to a full-time IRS beat. Ne notes that when the Washington Post asked a reporter to cover one of the rare IRS oversight hearings on Capitol Hill, she decided not to go simply because the IRS commissioner himself was not testifying. If the information does not come from the top, her inaction seemed to say, it is not worth pursuing.

Judging from Burnham’s new book, A Law Unto Itself: Power, Politics, and the IRS, there is a lot worth pursuing. The book is a catalogue of abuses, corruption, attacks on average citizens and prominent politicians, and simple incompetence that seems endemic in a government agency that touches the lives of everyone. The IRS has powers that no other police agency in the country can claim. And hardly anyone is willing to stand up to the IRS.

IRS agents distrust the American people. Burnham writes that one of the fundamental attitudes that motivates IRS agents is this: “Taxpayers suspected of not complying with the tax laws are considered guilty until they, the taxpayers, prove themselves innocent.”

This can be an expensive proposition. One Pennsylvania businessman who was unjustly accused of owing back taxes paid $75,000 in legal fees to prove his innocence; his girlfriend, whose assets were wrongly seized by the IRS during the course of the investigation, paid an additional $30,000. Because of the energy and expense used in proving his case, the businessman told the Senate Finance Committee, “I am now broke, I have no job, no insurance policies, and no car. We did nothing wrong, nothing illegal. We are the victims of an IRS mentality that believes all taxpayers are criminals who should be punished.”

This is no isolated incident. An IRS collections agent in a southwestern state told Burnham “the single word we often use when referring to the public. That word is ‘slime.’”

The IRS has also been used as a political tool. Although the political use of the IRS is most often associated with the Watergate scandal during the Nixon Administration, Burnham argues that every president has used it. Franklin Roosevelt was worse than Nixon, he says, but abuses came about during the Kennedy and Johnson Administration as well.

For instance, the Johnson IRS began a 10-year, time-consuming and expensive investigation into the National Council of Churches because of the ecumenical organization’s “open political involvement in the battles to end racial segregation and the Vietnam War.” During the 1950s, the IRS seized the assets of the Communist Party of the USA, forcing that party — which was and is a perfectly legal political party — to operate on a cash basis. The IRS’s argument was that the Communist Party had not paid taxes in a number of years, even though the Republicans and Democrats had also paid no taxes during the same period of time, and were not required to do so.

Conservative groups have also been targets of IRS attempts to curb unwanted political beliefs. President Kennedy himself ordered investigations of mainstream conservative and far-right groups, including the Christian Anti-Communist Crusade, the Conservative Society of America, and the John Birch Society. Burnham writes: “According to a 1963 report by [IRS Commissioner Mortimer Caplin], the agency recommended revoking the exempt status of H.L. Hunt’s LifeLine Foundation and of Dr. Fred Schwarz’s Christian Anti-Communist Crusade. Similar action was not recommended for the John Birch Society because it did not claim tax exemption. But Caplin informed the White House that the IRS investigations had discovered that some taxpayers contributing to the John Birch Society had improperly claimed business deductions for their subscriptions to American Opinion magazine, the society’s publication.”

Given the IRS’s power, it is easy to understand why politicians would be shy about criticizing the agency. Burnham gives three basic reasons: (1) Congressmen want to send money to their districts, and they worry that if they try to mess with the IRS, they might upset the money machine; (2) Congressmen personally fear the IRS; through public audits and false accusations, the IRS can and does destroy political careers; (3) Burnham calls this “subtle and infuriating.” Every tax reform measure brings in campaign contributions for congressmen and senators — after all, businesses benefit from such reform — but each tax reform increases the power of the IRS, which alone can interpret the new rules without fear of retribution or oversight.

It seems clear that more investigative reporters like David Burnham should be piercing the IRS, looking for corruption and abuse. Any American can be the target of misplaced IRS ire. All Americans should be concerned about this “law unto itself.”

Richard Sincere is a Washington-based issues analyst and writer.