The story of alleged civil disobedient Tim De Christopher is making its way from the blogosphere onto the mainstream media’s radar and already the opposing camps have set the issue of this young man’s actions in concrete: hero or villain, saint versus sinner. But if the last eight years have taught us anything, it’s that things are rarely what they seem.
 
In the interest of a broader context, let’s recap Mr. De Christopher’s civil disobedience curriculum vitae. By his own admission, he has been an environmentalist for most of his life, having marched, held signs, written letters and spoken to his Congressman. As if this wasn’t enough to raise red flags about Mr. De Christopher’s state of mind, he built trails and removed invasive species in National Parks. In an ominous foreshadowing of events to come, he even went so far as to have educated friends on climate change, while also donating to a dozen different environmental groups.
 
But all of this is mere prelude to what happened last December 19th when Mr. De Christopher joined 200 protesters in a peaceful demonstration to oppose the Bush Administration’s Blue Light Special on oil and gas leases by the Utah Bureau of Land Management.  DeChristopher registered and participated in the auction, driving up the sale costs of some bids, while outright winning some of the leases he bid on to the tune of 1.8 million dollars or roughly the equivalent of the average American CEO’s monthly salary.

Interestingly enough, DeChristopher never had the money and never intended to pay! (I have no idea whose italics those are.)

Now any hack investigative reporter could get side-tracked by the obvious journalistic hook here, namely the burgeoning credit crisis and its impact on young Americans seeking to derail the runaway train of the outgoing Administration—why can’t Tim DeChristopher borrow the money he needs to secure these fraudulent bids? But I think there is a larger issue to be addressed here. One that runs deeper than the oil and gas that sits beneath the Utah soil.

And the tip of that issue was revealed in a blog by Cliff Lyon of OneUtah.org, dated January 4, 2009, in which Mr. De Christopher corrects Mr. Lyon by telling him that his actions make him liable not for jail, but for federal prison.  (Ok, I’m pretty sure those italics are mine…)
 
“Federal prison,”—sound familiar? Right, Club Fed! (…and that’s definitely my exclamation point.) The place where we send the crème-de-la-crème of our white collar criminals to serve a few tokens years, where they perfect their tennis game while wearing designer ankle bracelets, finding religion, only to get out, write their memoirs and become part of the celebrity-lecture complex. Or better yet, these felons emerge and then consult to the very industries they “defrauded” in the first place.

The genius of Mr. De Christopher’s ploy here is that he has wrapped his actions in the gauzy cloak of civil disobedience, seemingly allowing the casual observer to see what he is doing, when in fact just the opposite is true.

The question remains whether he is an agent of neocon Darwinism in its latest incarnation or some rogue strain of sleeper cell, bent on wreaking havoc on the body politic he was supposedly serving when he was doing bad impersonations of Henry David Thoreau.
 

 
The story of alleged civil disobedient Tim De Christopher is making its way from the blogosphere onto the mainstream media’s radar and already the opposing camps have set the issue of this young man’s actions in concrete: hero or villain, saint versus sinner. But if the last eight years have taught us anything, it’s that things are rarely what they seem.
 
In the interest of a broader context, let’s recap Mr. De Christopher’s civil disobedience curriculum vitae. By his own admission, he has been an environmentalist for most of his life, having marched, held signs, written letters and spoken to his Congressman. As if this wasn’t enough to raise red flags about Mr. De Christopher’s state of mind, he built trails and removed invasive species in National Parks. In an ominous foreshadowing of events to come, he even went so far as to have educated friends on climate change, while also donating to a dozen different environmental groups.
 
But all of this is mere prelude to what happened last December 19th when Mr. De Christopher joined 200 protesters in a peaceful demonstration to oppose the Bush Administration’s Blue Light Special on oil and gas leases by the Utah Bureau of Land Management.  DeChristopher registered and participated in the auction, driving up the sale costs of some bids, while outright winning some of the leases he bid on to the tune of 1.8 million dollars or roughly the equivalent of the average American CEO’s monthly salary.

Interestingly enough, DeChristopher never had the money and never intended to pay! (I have no idea whose italics those are.)

Now any hack investigative reporter could get side-tracked by the obvious journalistic hook here, namely the burgeoning credit crisis and its impact on young Americans seeking to derail the runaway train of the outgoing Administration—why can’t Tim DeChristopher borrow the money he needs to secure these fraudulent bids? But I think there is a larger issue to be addressed here. One that runs deeper than the oil and gas that sits beneath the Utah soil.

And the tip of that issue was revealed in a blog by Cliff Lyon of OneUtah.org, dated January 4, 2009, in which Mr. De Christopher corrects Mr. Lyon by telling him that his actions make him liable not for jail, but for federal prison.  (Ok, I’m pretty sure those italics are mine…)
 
“Federal prison,”—sound familiar? Right, Club Fed! (…and that’s definitely my exclamation point.) The place where we send the crème-de-la-crème of our white collar criminals to serve a few tokens years, where they perfect their tennis game while wearing designer ankle bracelets, finding religion, only to get out, write their memoirs and become part of the celebrity-lecture complex. Or better yet, these felons emerge and then consult to the very industries they “defrauded” in the first place.

The genius of Mr. De Christopher’s ploy here is that he has wrapped his actions in the gauzy cloak of civil disobedience, seemingly allowing the casual observer to see what he is doing, when in fact just the opposite is true.

The question remains whether he is an agent of neocon Darwinism in its latest incarnation or some rogue strain of sleeper cell, bent on wreaking havoc on the body politic he was supposedly serving when he was doing bad impersonations of Henry David Thoreau.