any american tradition that still had a shred of vitality

On the second day of her visit the previous summer, after a cocktail party at a neighbor's five-million-dollar cabin, Laura had unloaded at length. Her diatribe was so acute and curious he'd copied it down in his journal that night, while she talked on the phone with her latest boyfriend. The core of it was that the transplanted rich in the new West were desperate to attach themselves to any American tradition that still had a shred of vitality—in this case, cattle ranching. They didn't want to actually run cattle; they just wanted the feeling of ranching. For unclear reasons, they often built vast log homes—one had recently sold for twelve million dollars—which would have been unthinkable to real pioneers and ranchers, because of the difficulty of heating them. The houses were full of all sorts of non-indigenous flummery—Adirondack furniture, bibelots from the Southwest, native art from anywhere, since natives were largely interchangeable to these people. The men teetered in expensive cowboy boots and talked more loudly than they did back East; the women wore flowing, old-fashioned dresses to social occasions. Shiny S.U.V.s abounded. These people readily assumed the hard-bitten, right-wing opinions of the local ranchers, who, unlike them, had to live with long-term disappointment, owing to ever-declining cattle prices—even rich Americans are tightwads when it comes to meat. To Laura, it was all as ridiculous as the old photographs of Ronald Reagan chopping wood in a cowboy outfit.