STINK STACK ADVENTURES

Lighting candles to Saint Cloacina again.  We never put her statue away around here.  For a few months there we neglected her and were sorry because we flunked the sample tests on the town’s sewage lagoon during the cold months.  Now that the candles are properly lit, we’re passing the tests and have stopped receiving warnings.   The thing is that cold "bugs" don’t eat shit.  So we have a new engineering scheme for warming and moving the water in winter.  

The state is watching small municipal water and sewage systems VERY closely, so much so that one of Valier’s workers spends almost two full days a week sampling at given intervals and in certain ways, labeling, and sending the results to the state, which must be allotting major money in terms of time and persons to analyzing them and reporting back.  The reports go up on the post office bulletin board.  We are VERY nervous about the contamination of our ground aquifers and with good reason.  Frakking, even without the possibility of injecting chemicals bad for humans into the watershed, is meant to break open rock formations, which can change subterranean waterflow patterns drastically.  Springs stop. 

A friend got a lesson in water flow "after usage" (sewage) when a naive young roofer shingled over the waste standpipe, AKA the septic system stack or more plainly, “the stink stack.”  If fluid is leaving a piped system “tree,” it pulls air behind it and pushes air ahead of it.  If a vacuum forms, everything stops.  Waste stacks (I call it “the gasper”) doesn’t DO anything except let air in and out and considering the content of the sewer pipes, the "out" air stinks.  The top end is one of those mysterious pipes through the roofs of houses.

There are two systems to consider.  One is the house-by-house pipe “tree” (one half “innie” and one half “outie”) and the other is the entire town sewer system which works by gravity except for some low spots that have to have “lift stations” (pumps to move things along).  The water system is powered by the height of the water towers -- the water pumped up there and then pushing down through gravity.  Towns on hills put their water tanks at the top of the hill instead of using stilts.  For sewage, of course, the flow must also go down and Valier is on just enough of a gradient to let gravity do its work except for a few pockets that were once swales.  There are no houses built-on those lots because of the expense of the lift-station. 

Behind the water tower and under the long descending slope of the prairie uplifted on the west of town, east of the mountains,  by the heaving up of the Rockies from underneath, there is a steady flow of water from the snow on the mountains.  At one time the underground gravity pressure created artesian springs (bubbling up and even spraying) out onto the prairie, but those are far and few now that so much water is being used and so little is falling as snow.  Valier has several wells, all dependent on pumps.  They're working well.

But my own little branch of the town sewer was suddenly producing ghastly stench.  The worst fear was that the sewer branch to my house had broken.  $1,000 to hire a backhoe so as to fix it.  Leo, on the village staff, was hot to dig.  I began to do research on sewers, thus my sudden extensive knowledge.  I found three wise men to advise me:  Roger, who is the thinker on the village staff; Paul, who does property maintenance in Idaho; and Corky, whom I’ve known since he was a little kid.  (His father helped us build the bronze foundry in the Sixties.)

Then the evidence.  My neighbor across the street also got a whiff, though not as much as me.  It was coming in the waste-water line of his washing machine so running a load of wash got rid of it.  There must have been a lot of stink in the whole line, but my “gasper” stack was a suspect from the beginning.  It is cast iron which means it can rust shut.  The angle where it turned from vertical to horizontal had previously sunk and been propped up by sticking some boards under it.  

At that time I was warned if they slipped out, I’d have problems because water would again collect at the elbow and block air, which is the way the P-traps in the drains under sinks work.  But it was in a place under the floor where the crawl space -- which is a deep hole on one end -- would barely let a normal person skinny through.  In the night I had a brainstorm and drafted Corky, who brought up his tool box and cut a hole in the floor right beside the gasper.  The pipe angle is okay.  And now I have a trap door that gives me easy access to the pipes in the bathroom.  

Roger’s idea was to check every drain in the house to make sure that in warmer weather the traps hadn’t dried up.  So I went around with my watering can to fill them up.  Paul suggested a tablespoon or so of vegetable oil after adding the water to slow evaporation.  People in the past have suggested filling p-traps with antifreeze in winter if the house is not occupied, but this is hard on the lagoon bugs.  NOT recommended.

In fact, when I took out the washing machine in this house (I use the laundromat at the county seat.) the drain pipe was left open except for an old t-shirt stuffed into it.  In fact, I’ve never looked at those pipes from underneath, but I poured in water enough to form a seal, added peanut oil (hope it isn’t allergic), and devised a cap from a glass jar.  This morning there were no smells.  I hope this keeps working.

I have a plan for the future.  From Google advice, I see that I can take out my stink stack from inside the house: just saw it off.  I’ve found a thing called  “Durga valve” which replaces the need to vent outside because it closes whenever air tries to escape through it but allows ambient air to enter.  They’re cheap and well-tested, so I'll cap the waste stack with it.  The hole in the roof already leaks around the stinker, so patching the hole its removal leaves is a good idea already.  I’ll report results in August.

Around here many people built their own houses in the early days -- obviously before there WERE any town-piped water or sewer lines.  There are still a couple on septic tanks.  Electricity and telephone lines were also late.  (Places like Helena and Butte had them as soon as it was known what copper wires would do).  I don’t think it’s unfair to say that optical fiber service is incomplete.  I don’t know about microwave services since I don’t use them, but I read in the paper that cell towers are still far between and contractual reciprocity among the operators is fluid.  Fluid.  Moving.  Carrying info.  Interceptible.  Interdictable.  Infrastructure.

The point of regulating water and sewer is to control disease, esp. microbes.  But now water is life-itself and the focus has moved to toxins.  We’ve resolved most contagious diseases except the air-borne flu and the blood-borne HIV.  The biggest problem with contact microbe transmission (fecal/oral) is failure to wash one’s hands.  Some things you can control without equipment, just a little thought.  And a bar of soap.

DREAMING OF ARCHITECTURE

The current theory about dreams is that they are the result of neurological processing -- at least when everything works the way it’s supposed to.  If the brain can’t finish the job, it evidently wanders a labyrinth, trying to find the right place to store (I imagine a police evidence lock-up) or discard (I imagine a waste chute like a tall apartment building’s disposal out in the hall) impressions from the day.  Since I usually watch movies in the evening and since they are usually mysteries, cop shows, procedurals --  which covers a lot of territory -- I dream images from them.

Contemporary movies of this type, especially the American and Scandinavian ones (I’ve become a big fan of several standout Danish actors:  Mads Mikkelson, Thomas Gabrielson, Jens Albinus and others.)  But also I am a fan of the cinematography and sets.  Because these sorts of film are normally attached to cities there are fabulous helicopter shots of skyscrapers with their light patterns and finial tops. 

Portland, Oregon

We look along the streets and, esp. in the Scandinavian and New York shots, see the sky over harbors, often at sunset or sunrise, sometimes with huge ships sliding along.  The incredible wealth of a major city shows in the glass-doored luxury buildings while the dark underpinnings and infrastructures become night scenes of Bruegel-people in temporary cardboard villages and elevated trains make their terrible screams overhead when going around a corner, pushing walls of hot air ahead of them -- but those aren’t photographable, just dreamable. 

The Scandinavians live indoors in winter but outdoors in summer, so there are always scenes in summer fields, small rough cabins or the kind of country houses the east coast of America used to call “cottages.”  Americans scattered to the countryside before there was air-conditioning, but now the wealthy go to warm shores in winter.  In the days when I was more likely to read magazines in the evening, I dreamt house interiors because most of the magazines were high end “shelter mags.”  Now I’ve stopped, in part because I’d have to subscribe to have access, and anyway they’ve slid over to being celebrity mags -- the houses of the rich and famous -- and I don’t care about them.  No one really lives in them anyway.  Sometimes I’ll flip through the mags about “cottages” in the more modern sense: small old-fashioned buildings with clever recycled furnishings.  But I never dream about them.

Nor do I dream about the American luxury bedrooms which always have acres of mattress and dun-colored bedding because human skin looks better against it.  (Cinematographers hate white.)  Print has disappeared again, but sometimes there are navy blue or espresso sheets.  Headboards are interesting to watch.  But bedrooms of the Great British Houses are still the most suggestive.  Some of their coverlets look to be several hundred years old.  I don’t dream about them.

It’s the rushing modern streets (not sheets) I dream of, because they connect with sense memories from the Nineties when I was working for the City of Portland and using my lunch hour to circle through Meier & Frank to Rich’s Cigar Store where I picked up any new mags -- stopping briefly to scan the bead stores -- then through the Galleria which was a restored atrium with an Asian import store at the top level and Mother Goose, the nearby luxury artisan object store where my cousins have worked; on around through Nordstrom where a three story escalator goes up alongside a wall of mirror while a grand piano tinkles away at the bottom, played by a young man in a tux; and finally through the new-built shopping atrium, Pioneer Place, where the escalators seem totally unsuspended or supported and it took me months to work up to enough vertigo tolerance to step onto them.

Pioneer Place

Just now online I looked for photos and found a few, but Portland -- maybe because of the rain -- is a books and cafés sort of place.  What I know is the neighborhoods, the arteries and seedy parts that I drove as an animal control officer.  I don’t dream about them much, but I do think about them as a waking, pondering, remembering person.

In dreams I wander downtown Boston, Philadelphia, Hartford and Oxford.  (I've never been in that last.)  Most of all I go back to academic settings -- not the pleasant campuses and bland buildings of Northwestern at the end of the Fifties when I was an undergrad -- but the indoors labyrinths and catacombs of stone quads, built like Gothic forts around a square of grass.  (There are usually warnings to keep off the grass.)  Some say quads are descended from religious cloisters.  The effect of them -- since they can be closed off from the surroundings -- is to allow a protected environment even in a ghetto like the South Side of the Chicago.  However, protection is only another word for confined.

Some say dreams are records of unfinished business and I suppose that’s true.  Indeed there are loose ends in my ’78-’82 sojourn.  The degrees were granted and all that.  I’ve finished the possibilities of my professional arc as a Unitarian Universalist minister.  So what is it that’s undone?  Unsolved. Unresolved.  It’s not about me, I think.  It’s about institutions, whether housed by academic quads, commercial shopping atriums, or governmental office buildings.  

Yesterday I watched a TED talk by Louis Kahn’s son. as he visited his father’s masterpiece: the capitol complex of Bangladesh, the poorest and most endangered of all nations.  It is built on a flood plain, with workmen using bamboo scaffolds instead of steel, and concrete technology that my grandfather and his brothers used to create the concrete silos of dairy farms on the flood planes of Washington State at the beginning of the 1900‘s.  But not even they carried the concrete to the top of the forms in baskets. Here’s the Kahn building:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMjWPoixRzA  The man himself was ugly and rude, totally preoccupied with his work, hardly knew his children, but he created this very beautiful simple complex with huge vaults of space that inspire a people desperate for inspiration.

I love architects.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TK_gGQ91rmQ  This is a short clip of Douglas Cardinal, Calgary-born architect who is well-known and much-admired in Canada.  He is Blackfoot and Metis and has made it a point to claim his heritage.  His basic geometry is not the quad but the serpentine curve and his material is more likely to be brick than steel.  Some of his buildings are only a few hours’ drive from here.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIgR4d9p5dQ is a TED-like talk of Cardinal talking.  He is five years older than me, but looks much younger.  Not in a “suit” but in khakis and polo shirt, he stands before a screen that shows his work.  Locals, even the Blackfeet, don’t know it.  Cardinal says that his key is living in the questions instead of the answers.  

This is how one gets to dreams: questioning.  That’s what’s not finished, nor should it be, even in the square stone Gothic boxes of universities.  And yet in the square-cornered sheet of paper lurks the organic.  One only has to set it free.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwJB7KzDEbQ   

MONTANA EAST SLOPE/NORTHWEST SHORE

People talk about bi-coastal culture, mostly based on the megacities and culture capitals of Manhattan and Hollywood which are secretly powered by the urban ghettos of blacks and hispanics.  That is, a kind of arch glamour exploiting really bad but energetic and ground-level phenomena.  No risk.  The whole thing is governed by an oligarchy that pretends it’s about merit, awarding prizes interpreted in terms of money.  It’s actually a closed mono-culture.  It all depends on connections.

Washington DC is simply irrelevant to this paradigm, down there in the swamp throwing levers and making much ado about nothing.  If they start making too much trouble, the few dozen people who control everything either throw money at them or mock them in a popular movie.  That cuts them down to size because it controls the pretense of elections which are really a popularity contest.  (Pretty face, rich backers.)  If the legislators weren’t all lawyers, it wouldn’t work.  They’re used to manipulating juries with hints and teases.  This bi-coastal thing is mostly American, though it operates on assumptions from the British/German class culture that produces royalty.  For decades now people have said the pattern is exhausted.  But it doesn’t change.

The alternative is one I inhabit.  It is also a unified binary:  the Northern-Pacific-Coast-Asian-derived and the East-Slope-of-the-Rockies-indigenous-based matrix -- both often rural.   Forget the numbers “chicken farm.”  This metaphor is about taking an eagle lifestyle, and don’t gimme any of that patriotic bald eagle stuff (they eat carrion and fish) -- I’m talking golden eagle, cruising in search of what is alive and seizing it whole.  Ideas as burrowing squirrels, lively and elusive.

You can see the two cultures interacting in Ursula LeGuin’s sci-fi which often hinges on contrasting ecologies: one lush and hedonistic and the other ascetic and idealistic. I know people who shuttle between these two, either physically or mentally.   (I would if I had the money.) They tend to be sophisticated, educated but without certification, skilled at something physical, whether art or craft or service.  The combo of two contexts seems to develop people more fully.

I am NOT talking about all the people who wanna-be famous and prosperous and who have recently gone from being Montana carpet-baggers to Portland latte addicts.  The difference is not that I went the opposite direction, growing up in Portland and coming to grips with Montana in 1961.  The difference is that my Portland is WWII, ‘70‘s culture rebellion, and ’90’s shelter issues.  My Montana is persisting 19^th century reservations and enduring geology.  Being a famous Montana writer is impossible now.  The national people who bought books are narrative hounds but they’ve gone to vid.  Local Montana people still read books, but there’s only one bookstore in the state that reports to the NYTimes, whose little best-seller list is the keystone of fame, now fatally distorted by Big Box stores. 

I can’t get too carried away with technology because in small-town Montana the infrastructure barely exists to support cell phones and commerce.  I’m blogging over the old copper wires of original telephone lines.  You can’t watch PBS here without a cable.  The wind farms that look so futuristic merely interfere with the quality of our local electrical supply.  We worry about water, which was recently described by a coastal as a “sale-able commodity like any other.”  Smart phones are going down for a week because of contract dispute about using cell towers.

Social push-through from youngsters and immigrants (both coastals and Euros) tends to be just that -- they come and they go.  They fall off the mountains and find horses kind of scary.  Local people around here don’t really bother to focus on anyone who hasn’t lived here a few decades.  Nevertheless, because they remember back through history for at least two centuries, the locals have a keen sense of things changing, always being in process.  The default “race” of people on the Pacific and the prairie is brown.  Whites are temporary.  Blacks?  What blacks?  Oh, on the coast.

If you’re an old white busybody who writes and who once had fantasies of being significant -- not famous but making some kind of contribution -- what should be your goal?  Or do you need one when you’re 74?  Why can’t I just sit here and keyboard all day without any particular reason or any recognition?  I so enjoy the feeling of ideas forming into sentences, like silk scarves running through my hands.   All the colors, all the patterns, all the clever knots.

Books are only a delivery system.  They mostly replaced talk and then only among certain people.  The kids I taught used to discard them anywhere.  Slick hundred-dollar brightly illustrated bullshit guaranteed to cover the administration’s butt when parents complained.  Only a few people here ever read much of anything except in winter.  They are radio people where they can get decent reception, but the east slope is full of coulees and the transmitters are never high enough and the wind rips them up.  That guy on the white horse at the top of a ridge yelling,  “Can you hear me now?”  That was here.  Anyway satellite connections are a loss of quiet, not a gain in ideas.

The idea stream is what counts.  How it gets to you is only marginally relevant.  The idea stream on both the West Coast and the East Slope is a moving pattern of information crucial to how one survives between parameters that are connected to the planet.  Watch for tsunamis and mega-blizzards.  Watch for the right weather for what you do, tides for clam digging, ground moisture for planting.  Steady practice day-after-day in a location well-known will become both culture and religion.  It will bestow both humility and dignity.  It will keep you from hoarding your own little life at the expense of all the others.

Until the time I came back to the East Slope, I accumulated stuff.  I haven’t bought clothes since 1999 except a much heavier coat.  I wear the same old yellow slicker I bought at REI in 1993.  But I buy books.  I never buy the books they recommend on NPR or the ones that are promoted at Montana Festivals of Books and Chambers of Commerce.  Those are commodified little horse biscuits for the trendy.  Mostly I buy whatever seems to hold what I need to know, which is sometimes in sync with others -- like brain neurotheory.  I don’t mess around with ebooks because I want to scribble in the margin, highlight, save stuff between the pages.  Books are TOOLS, not ends but means.  Many of mine cannot be resold.

I ask people “have you read such-and-such” and they get mad, because they think I’m trying to put them down as dunderheads for not keeping up.  But I really want to know whether they have the info so we can talk about it.  They don’t know “talk-about-it.”  Not bicoastal cocktail-time quips, but sitting around a firepit in the dark, musing while the shooting stars write on the sky.  Books, like everything else, are prey to hook-up culture.  But grass is not, whether it is short-grass on a windblown ridge of glacial moraine or sea grass on a windblown dune that’s moving inland.  Boats or horses, pickups or gliders, books or video -- the necessity is to keep moving, even if it’s only with your head.

But time may be running out.  I was startled to read what Mary Moe said today.

http://www.greatfallstribune.com/article/20130615/OPINION/306150018/Reduce-influence-rich-campaign-donors

TIGHTER AND MEANER

There it is on the “religion page” -- a short theory of religious “clumping.”  Of course, the dividing and merging, reconciling and declaring war between human beings is always driven by economics and circumstances.  People group into affinities and oppositions and the only difference with religiously-based congregations, denominations, and even world religions is that they claim justification for their life-managements as endorsed by some supernatural force, maybe historical and maybe recent.  Their “metaphor” for their position is often expressed in some kind of ceremony like communion or fasting, bathing or traveling to some important spot.  Or a book.

The examples in the newspaper stories were Pope Francis meeting with the Archbishop of Canterbury to talk over their relationship since their constituencies split in 1534; a sub-group of Buddhists trying to understand how to achieve peace with Muslims; and the Southern Baptist Annual Convention trying to recapture mainstream America, now that the generations have so radically redefined what the mainstream is.  Already the Southern Baptists, who split with the main body of Baptists over the issue of slaves -- Southerners being dependent on owning African-Americans for their economic survival -- have re-elected The Rev. Fred Luter, their first black leader -- without opposition.  Mainstream Southern Baptists now oppose human trafficking, child abuse, and the high rate of incarceration.  All of them forms of slavery.

But Southern Baptists are associated with white, separatist, male-dominated, Republican, conservative positions.  These categories are diminishing -- even more than was thought before the last national elections proved the point.  Every group -- religious or not -- is composed of three groups: the one that goes into the future, perhaps experimenting; the one that clings to the past, perhaps out-of-touch; and the main group that shows up every Sunday and pays the bills.  Just as the nation has a middle class, every denomination has a middle class.  But just like every middle class, the ultimate goal is to preserve the group even if the old-fashioned faction has to be abandoned, even if the cutting edge out front has to be accepted.  So Southern Baptists accept dark-skinned people, missionize the north, and allow women to take leadership though still not the pulpit.  They still pretty much oppose abortion, gay marriage or homosexuality in general, though they didn’t break affiliation with the Boy Scouts over it.  The Boy Scouts are too strong an indicator of middle class virtue in America, even though the roots of THAT clump are in English military-based elite schools plus romantic ideas about Native Americans.

There is a sub-clump of Southern Baptists that has gone ultrapolitical, trying to make common cause with the Right Wing Republicans who badly lost the election: the people often called the “Tea Party,” because they took as their model the American rebellion against English domination through taxation, demonstrating by dumping English tea into the ocean while disguised as Native Americans.  (It's hard to tell whether these guys are the future or the past.)  The United States formed out of the crunch between the English and the Native Americans by creating a new category: Americans.  The Baptist denomination formed out of the crunch between the Anglicans, which was the official church of England where the King/Queen is STILL the head of both church and state, and the wilderness.  Like the laws, religious opinions were still handed down from England until citizens formed their own congregations.  Then that solidarity split in the War between the States, the same as European Protestants had much earlier split from the Roman Catholic Church.  (Native Americans, of course, were busy doing their own clumping and splitting.)

Tea Party Christians dominate the Super Conservative Republicans, which are in the process of splitting from the mainstream of Lincoln, Eisenhower, and Reagan Republicans, and who try to capture as much of the mainstream as possible by claiming God is with THEM.  Because God is very much like THEM.   (They don’t mean Jesus -- they mean Jehovah.  Why truck with the Son when the Father is at hand?) This incredibility of God being on both sides has been assumed in every Christian-against-Christian war, notably WWI and WWII.  No one questions that God is in favor of war, given the amount of war in the Old Testament.

Catholics try to force their membership to toe the line by making the line a matter of criminal law, imposing their standards on the whole country.  Contraception is a sin, remarriage after divorce is a sin, both punishable by excommunication, meaning prevention from taking communion -- the rite of belonging and forgiveness.   That’s supposed to be the punishment that fits the crime.  But the mainstream American Catholics no longer take excommunication very seriously.  They believe in marital self-determination and small families they can afford to support.  In particular the youngsters also have friends who are black or gay or promiscuous, etc.  and don’t have a very strong concept of either God or Heaven.  In a culture where priests assault children, it’s hard to want to serve at Mass as an altar-juvenile.  And the Catholic church is reluctant to let ordinary criminal law deal with those priests.

The Tea Party is more explicitly based on prosperity, the Holy Grail of our culture.  This strategy works best among people who are poor, feel excluded, are in places where the economy is shrinking or shifting to jobs that require higher education or in rural places, and whereever fear creeps around chilling people.  Places where people comfort themselves with alcohol, rage, and abuse of the weak.  They hold up the Good Old Days as a Paradise Lost and need guns to feel safe.  And the Evangelicals say that joining them in ecstasy will make their members rich.  In short, the faction of the Southern Baptist mainstream that is far to the right is trying to push America back into the conflation of church and state, so that THEIR rules will become the laws of the land and force us all to do what THEY think is right, whether we agree or not.

They feel that the more liberal and successful people of the country have forced “pagan law” on them, and therefore they are justified in fomenting discord -- because to them everything is war and conflict, a fight for domination.  They intend the economic split between the very, very wealthy (a small elite which they aspire to join) and the rest of us to remain, a replication of the southern world before the slaves were freed.  Or the British Empire before the coal that fueled the industrial revolution ran out. 

Now coal and oil are not so much running out as shifting to natural gas, of which there is a huge abundance on the North American continent.  This means the Middle East oil supplies will matter less and we will be less inclined to need peace with the Islamic world or to participate in their quarrels among themselves.  Now we can be more separatist, but since China will probably remain oil and coal dependent, we ought to be thinking about their religious positions, which do not so much guide as reflect their world views.  Many of our progressive go-ahead people, esp. hip youngsters, have been interested in Buddhism for a long time.  Few express interest in Shinto, the Japanese conservative religion.  In China the advancing edge might be Taoism and the mainstream might be Confucianism, with the lagging group being atheist communism.  I can guarantee that it will always be about economics and it will always be about an elite trying to control everyone else.   Ask Israel. 

THE CATCHER IN THE JAIL

Once I remarked to a nice liberal person (long before I came back to Montana) about one of the recurring news stories giving statistics about the overwhelming number of people in jail in the United States, disproportionately minorities, immigrants, males, drugs users, and so on.  I thought this was an indicator that as a society we were doing something wrong.  But the nice liberal person had no use for anyone anywhere whom any court had sentenced.  They were believers in inerrant courts.  Their defense was that in other countries lawbreakers were killed, so that’s why they didn’t show up in prison statistics.  I’ve pondered that ever since.  

It seems clear to me that prison is also deadly, though recently a story claimed that black men in prison live longer than black men on the streets.  That might be true of Native Americans as well.  But a body walking around can be dead.  A body living on macaroni and low-quality cheese for years and years, locked into a solitary cell or crammed into a cell too small for the number of people, constantly exposed to danger from guards and other inmates, then one day dumped back into the general population with no money, no job, one set of clothes, broken family relationships -- is such a person still a functioning human?  No wonder they are so good at committing suicide in jail.  I haven’t seen statistics on how many commit suicide soon after release.

There are two sets of people that nice liberals mostly agree shouldn’t be sent to jail.  One is the mentally ill (I mean the ones who were deranged BEFORE they were sent to jail, not driven mad while in there) and the other is children.  We’re on the fence about illegal immigrants, but reasonable people would have to admit that being “legal immigrants” is a category with moving edges and if the person in question “looks” like an illegal immigrant, they are likely to be treated as one.

Our society has a great reluctance to straightforwardly kill people in our own country, though we will send predator drones to eliminate whole families in other countries.  Instead we incarcerate people at great damage to them, enormous tax cost, and little effectiveness in preventing crime or providing rehabilitation.  Sometimes the original crime is minor, only criminalized in one local jurisdiction, never really investigated, and defended by incompetents.  This makes no sense.  Why do we do it?

Partly, of course, it’s the money.  We are “farming” the vulnerable, not just in prison but also in a swarm of institutions originally organized to protect these same people:  nursing homes, reform schools, drug rehab, group homes, shelters for the homeless.  At one time these were created by government as part of the people’s service to the people -- no less a communal effort than the national highway system.  The money that was meant to be allocated for supporting these institutions has attracted sub-contractors who skim as much profit as possible and leave only enough to keep the people alive who justify the system.  Technically alive. 

These sub-contractors, often national and quite powerful, employ clever lobbyists who rig state and national laws to help keep those institutions full and prevent full disclosure of what goes on there, particularly the bookkeeping.  Unless people have a family member who has gone to jail or is in a nursing home or is seriously retarded or put into a foster home, no one makes a public outcry because of the stigma so often attached to the vulnerable.  They “deserve” neglect.  Of course, there are always determined groups of folks working in the opposite direction, trying hard to enlighten us all in the name of positive change.  Many of the captured people are vulnerable because they have no voice, maybe even literally, and cannot tell you what happens to them behind closed doors.  Sometimes the victims don’t even realize that anything is happening to them or that it is wrong.

Laws in the United States or elsewhere are in levels and overlaps.  Treaty law is the highest, then federal, then state, then local -- but there is another level or set of levels beneath that:  regulations, inspectors, supervisors.  At that level change is even harder.  Again the insanity of laws passed by out-of-touch fat cats in Armani suits cruising our capitols in limos, pretending they are legislating (when actually the laws they propose are researched and written by their staffs who will lose their jobs if they fail to get the boss re-elected).  

We know a great deal about how to address social problems including families failing to protect and guide their children; the inappropriate use of force against children or women or the elderly; sexual abuse; substance abuse; and a huge range of physical problems like dementia, PTSD, diabetes, blindness, HIV-AIDS, TB, Hep C.  ALL of them demand money, time and attention.  But they don’t get it.  Why is that?  We don’t kill people but we don’t cure them either -- we warehouse them or we leave them to wander the streets, spreading the very diseases that cause them to be stigmatized but not stigmatized enough to prevent losers from catching their afflictions.

The efforts of savvy people to make sure justice is brought to bear can only do it through convoluted, time-consuming, inaccessible and expensive courts and systems meant to sort and deport in timely fashion, but the system itself is in shackles because there isn’t enough money nor enough competent people.  Pointing this out does not mean that the general public will authorize enough money to do what they expect to be done.  They figure they have their own troubles.  A person who is really invested in justice will not be elected nor even appointed and, yes, I’m including the US Supreme Court.  Decisions are made on the basis of strategy, consequences -- to them and “their” people, not some helpless and lost person in the system, whether a disruptive and ornery child or an old sick black man who smoked too much weed in the Sixties and has been in prison ever since.

During my decade in the ministry I found it a major challenge to be the representative of moral inquiry.  I had more power and legitimacy when I was an animal control officer on the street -- but slightly less than as an English teacher in a classroom.  Somehow moral reflection has been replaced by criminalization, power and money, which in turn have become the very definition of success.   Perhaps at last we have come to a turning point, signaled if not signified by replacing an opulent Pope with one who takes St. Francis as a role model.  Maybe the burden of all these semi-secret, self-righteous, often force-based enclaves of captives will fall of their own ineffective weight, releasing generations of desperate people.  Then we will have to pray for survival and forgiveness.  But to whom?  We used to think about God’s law, but now we have no use for the least of us -- regardless of what Jesus or Mohammed or Buddha might have said.

Still, not everyone is cynical.  There are always a few good people.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/16/books/review/creative-writing-in-a-massachusetts-prison.html?nl=books&emc=edit_bk_20130614&_r=0

OH, THOSE YANOMAMO !!

So we’re in the “anthropocene era” or epoch -- what’s scary is not knowing what an “anthro” really is.  How much of what we are as human beings is biology?  Isn’t there anything special about it?  How much are we what we intend and how much is controlled by who-knows-what?  Historically and theologically, this dilemma has been a live one for a very long time.  Today most people have dropped God out of the discussion.  Thank God.

Even so, there are extremely complex and tiny (atomic-level) forces as well as unimaginably vast (cosmic-level) systems that are interacting to cause us to “emerge.”  To complicate the matter even more, we are closely examining our own minds as instruments, finding them flawed, distorting, inadequate.  So there is a welcome simplicity and human engagement in the anthro study of “pristine” tribes like the Yanomamo.   The Edge.org just posted an interview with Napoleon Chagnon.   http://edge.org/conversation/napoleon-chagnon-blood-is-their-argument#pinker   Three senior anthros asked the questions, so it’s a bit puzzling sometimes -- they assume you know things that you might not.  But in the end what they are after is trying to define what these people show us about US.  Chagnon is such an engaging fellow that his stories hold us close.

First, he proposes that this tribe is not so “original” and primitive as was first thought.  True enough, they live entirely naked (except for a “penis string” whatever one does with that) and use poisoned arrows for hunting, true that they oppress women and don’t know they’re speaking “words” much less a language.  They don’t know what reading is and can’t count above “one, two and more than two”.  People do what the others around them will tolerate, which in the case of the powerful leaders means they can do what they want, including murder.  And so on.  But the real warning to the rest of us is that rather than being Adam and Eve, these people are evidently remnants of what was once a large and sophisticated civilization based on irrigation.

In the end all human life, like all other life, depends upon the food supply.  The kind and quality of all the other arrangements are dependent on the means of survival.  The Yanomamo live in small groups with a top limit of about 400 people (about the size of Valier).  They live off gardens and hunting and they do have a little bit of contact with the larger world for the purpose of getting medical help.  Chagnon’s “monetary” reward system was based on aquarium tetracycline, which cured their chronic eye infections, and fishhooks which he bought in huge quantities and that the children put to good use.  An accusation against Chagnon is that he has changed the Yanomamo culture by bringing in machetes, axes and even firearms.  But he brought only ONE shotgun, which he kept at hand next to his hammock to protect himself.  Sometimes he could avert attacks from other groups by firing the shotgun into the air.

In fact, people had been bringing in the machetes and axes in quantity for a long time.  It is the missionaries, he says, who are willing to bring in shotguns because (just like the high prairie centuries ago) it attracts converts.  These mission people are so driven by the need to rack up numbers of “converts” (there are always questions about how much the converts understand about what’s happening) that they care nothing about real world collateral damage.  When one group gets shotguns, they prey on the others until those also get shotguns.  Then conflicts turn deadly.  Same old story.

Chagnon says that every village must be able to “field” at least ten big strong men willing to fight in order for the village to survive.  The lowest level of warfare is that the two sets of men pair off into couples and pound on each others bodies until it’s just too much.  The first level of escalation is that one side ignores the “rules” and carries stones in their fists, the equivalent of brass knuckles.  The next level is carrying sticks, then bats.  There don’t seem to be archery barrages but they line up that way.   The goals are food and women.  One strategy is to invite a neighboring tribe over for a feast, then imprison the women and drive the men off.

Back in the civilized world, the missionaries (Salesians, a Catholic sub-group) attacked Chagnon by accusing him of infecting the Yanomamo with measles just as the Native Americans on the North American continent were attacked by smallpox.  Courts and academic arbiters who investigated this cleared Chagnon.  Still, it interfered with his ability to do his work.

Food (communal gardens and group hunting) and sex are about group survival.  One of the consequences of supplying machetes and axes, which transform the ease of removing trees, is that gardens expand so that more female gardeners are needed.   But the larger gardens can only allow the village to grow until it reaches the new limits.  If some force -- climate or pests -- then diminishes the garden, people die. One response to the threat is to raid neighbors.  If groups get too large, they can spin off “daughter” communities which will be smaller and may have trouble managing their feelings and interactions with the “mother” communities.

The ability of individuals to separate themselves from “groupthink” was interesting.  When Chagnon asked about mythological tales that represented events in unscientific ways, some men would dutifully report the standard story, then say,  “Do you believe that?”  Then they smiled, clearly skeptical.

In the end this Edge panel asked Chagnon what the Yanomamo thought he was up to.  Did they think he was raiding their world for valuables?  No, because they had no concept of any world except their own, no notion of what might be out there.  After all, he didn’t cart off food or women.  Did they think he was a powerful person taking advantage of them?  No, because they considered him weak and, indeed, nearly killed him a few times.  Finally, the real thing they assumed he was doing was trying “to learn how to be human.”  They assumed that they were the real humans.  So many of us do!

In fact, small towns in America congratulate themselves and persuade others who are sentimental that they are the only “real” way to live.  Mayberry, USA.  Norman Rockwell.  Both imaginary constructs.  But the cities think THEY are the ones who are “real,” the only ones who have the modern equivalent of shotguns, who therefore have the power to control everyone else.  The major cities of the planet assume that they are the centers of everything and produce the wisest ideas, but their reality may be more like the now-extinct irrigation empires of the Amazon jungle.  Controlling the water may be the ultimate weapon, the most fatal warfare.  So far.  In the anthropocene now, we even control the air.  Or ought to.

Books by Napoleon A. Chagnon

(1968), Yanomamö: The Fierce People.

(1974), Studying the Yanomamö, New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.

(1992), Yanomamo – The Last Days of Eden.

(2013), Noble Savages: My Life Among Two Dangerous Tribes – The Yanomamö and the Anthropologists.

RUMORS AND STRUGGLES

In a little town like Valier there are only 400 + citizens but fairly substantial amounts of money to manage.  Crime, though forecast, has not materialized.  The most common violence is someone crashing into a deer on the highway.  This sometimes deceptive peacefulness is partly due to the lack of bars so that belligerents go to the nearby towns that DO have a high incidence of public violence.  (We have an occasional incident of domestic violence.)  Anyway, most people are busy making a living and are from sturdy Belgian stock that mind their own business. And yet dealing with troublemakers and obstructionists at town council meetings is a constant problem.

Maintaining self-government in a small town in a time of anxiety and polarization has become difficult everywhere, esp. since the towns of the Montana High-Line were built-out about a hundred years ago when the open range was fenced off.  Infrastructure is in dire need of renewal.  Even the trees planted then are about aged out, whether cottonwoods or elms.  Since this is true of most of the small towns across Montana, the state is hard-pressed to help out, but they do offer grants and loans.  At the same time, technology has changed, standards have changed, organizational structures probably need to change, and the demographics of the state skew to the elderly.  The bottom line in all this is paperwork -- a LOT of paperwork.  

Valier has been through several phases since 1999 when I moved back here.  At that time we had a patriarchal mayor who had been unchallenged for a long time until he too finally aged out on the job, leaving a lot of undone and difficult issues in a semi-collapsed town.  Velda Loch stepped in as the next mayor.  She is a skillful woman with a lot of connections, a “people-person,” who worked with state and federal grant agencies to catch up.  However health issues forced her back off.

The next mayor was a newcomer, Mackenzie Grey, with quite a different style since she was from the urban Northwest.  A computer adept, she was able to navigate the mounds of technicalities necessary to secure grants.  About the same time a man arrived from the same area, but with much less grasp of what was essential or useful.  His contribution was that he had run a sprinkler business and so realized that a hydrant used for major truckloads of ag herbicide and pesticide mixing had no backflow valve on it, and in fact the same water line also fed into the schools.  Under the right conditions, the entire school population could be poisoned.  This was immediately rectified and the county stepped in to stop the storage of the toxins in town.  However, the trucks still use the hydrant.  As it turned out, this citizen also lacked a mental “backflow device” and has returned to address the council again and again with misunderstandings, technicalities, confusions and accusations, evidently hoping to match his first success.  I’m watching “Deadwood” in the evenings and often hear the echo.

The town employees, often caught in the middle, began to be stirred up.  The cry of “throw incumbents out,” which seems to some to be the sovereign remedy for everything in some minds, found voters.  The town councilmen, after the election, were newly chosen major business owners determined to get a grip on the situation.  They squeezed hard but results were not what they expected.  The situation exploded.  Lawyers appeared.  Councilmen realized they could be sued and disappeared.  A new council was formed -- with difficulty.  No one wanted to walk into such a storm.  Except Mr. Know-It-All with his charts and databases and accusations.

Engineering projects were his meat and he pored over spreadsheets and maps to find new shortfalls, diversions, and failures to take his investment advice.  In fact, some of the engineers did fell short and there was conflict with the mayor.  The sewage lagoon “bugs” failed to perform, the wells were getting perilously low and their walls were caving in, the sewer “lining” turned out to be troublesome, and so on.   We were told we needed a new watertower.   At the same time some citizens wanted the town more “civilized,” meaning no chickens or horses and constant spraying of dandelions and mosquitoes.  “Green” meant to them only square lawns of a specific height.  They were not interested in any other issues except the streets.  They demand urban-quality streets with curbs.  People who think they can move here to find peace and quiet are sadly mistaken.  Instead the movement was for vigilantes to patrol the streets at night and for ladies to take shooting lessons.  Too much television all the way around.

A possible oil boom hasn’t materialized.  No one pays any attention to the wind farm just a couple of miles out of town, nor the grain elevator that looks to be closed down in favor of a much larger operation in Conrad.  There IS a bit of excitement about the Pondera Canal Company water rights, which were not historically allocated according to the law and treaties.  When the water is re-allocated, the PCC will take a loss that -- combined with drought and the failure of snowpack to form -- will put some people out of business.  All of this is almost too scary to think about except in the brash, swaggering terms of old guys who feel they’ve seen it all.

Since I’ve been watching “Deadwood” but not liking it, I was relieved that Keith Carradine says it’s NOT a Western.  Indeed, David Milch (the originator) made his bones writing about Manhattan cops, though he was collaborating with Steve Bochco who was not so literarily pretentious and knew his territory personally.  In fact, “Deadwood” was supposed to have been about ancient Rome, but another series (cleverly called “Rome”)  bumped it over to South Dakota.  Clearly, Swearingin (who was an actual historical person) is an alter-ego for Milch, who even looks a little like him.  Swearingen’s character is as amoral as Milch’s, a movie director intent on control and profit through sensationalism, thinly disguised by undergrad philosophy and a lot of pseudo-Shakespearean language.  He claims deep research and historical accuracy -- but all concerned emphasize that there is really no way to KNOW how things were.  The story, like every story is a mirror of the storyteller.  And just so is Valier a mirror of its citizens, actual not-yet-historical people struggling to sort out what to do and interacting -- sometimes with considerable skill and success and other times making each other miserable.  Sometimes we could use a better script, and sometimes it is the fault of the actors.  No one seems to be directing and why should they?

Coincidentally, someone sent me evidence of a town problem that the council never could resolve but that time solved for them: a paranoid schizophrenic holed up in a collapsing old warehouse with an uncountable number of feral cats who posted about black box cars on the elevator spur that were equipped with iron shackles and chains for use in a FEMA emergency.  He often noted black helicopters rising from the depths of Lake Francis alongside the town.  He aged out.  Time presents problems, but it removes them as well.  Even broken treaties.