STRUCTURE:
1. “That which is constructed, as a building.”
2. “Something organized or organized according to a plan or design: the political ‘structure’ of a republic.”
3. “The manner of such organization: a hierarchical ‘structure.’”
4. “The arrangement and relationship of the parts of a whole, as organs in a plant or animal, atoms in a molecule, etc.”
Construction/Deconstruction, Infrastructure, Instruction, destruction.
I have a storm, a chaos, of concepts having to do with structure. In an effort to “order” them, I’ll try an essay here.
First, I want to mention that someone whose name I didn’t catch was on NPR noting how different cultures are, both in their tolerance for disorder and their approaches to keeping or restoring or creating order. This was in reference to the recent major hurricanes. He spoke of the orderly Germans, who will impose order by force if necessary. And he spoke of the orderly Japanese who will appeal to the greater good of the whole and the honor of one’s family. But, he suggested, there is something in American character that loves chaos and that’s what showed up in our response to the disasters. We hate reading instructions. We like to wing it by the seat of our pants. (A mixed metaphor that suggests rotors on our britches.)
Partly our mental picture of a disaster is heroes rising above the bothersome restrictions to save the victims. But this specific disaster stripped the covers off of an economic structure that no heroes had risen above -- the poverty of often-black people not supported by political “will” on any level and an infrastructure so fragile that it was bound to collapse, just like their little houses.
Let me start over. When I went to seminary in 1978, I got there in the middle of a huge discussion about “deconstruction.” The idea was that if you ignore the predictable surface meanings of books, you can look deeper into them and see the pentimento of class and education. In the assumptions of the author, you can make out their prejudices, which are often self-serving and not always very nice. Take for example the little story called “The Indian in the Cupboard,” which many whites consider charming. Then ask yourself what’s charming about a white child who can entrap a real human being, miniaturized, for a toy and keep him away from the Indian’s real life. Why are Indians, real human beings, so often seen as children’s toys?
People got so good at this deconstruction business that they could find faults and blame everywhere. A presumably intelligent local Indian woman recently told me that Bob Scriver copied because all his sculptures of Blackfeet look like Blackfeet. She’s evidently never heard of portraits.
Let’s start over again. Yesterday I drove to Great Falls for my monthly load of groceries. On the way I was thinking about a book I thought would be a good idea: “What Are You Looking At?” It would describe and explain both the built and the natural infrastructure of the land. “Natural” being streams, soil, wind, temperature, and underground configurations from ages past. “Built” being the roads, power lines, underground pipelines, above ground fences, communication towers, shelter belts and fence rows, rocker pumps and then the towns clustered along the way -- most of them gradually deconstructing. The way of the Native peoples here was to adapt to the natural infrastructure with one huge exception: they used fire to maintain the prairie. Probably our major recent unnatural structuring has been dams and pumping things out of the interior of the earth.
Let’s start over again. I talked about this theory of how Americans love chaos with a Native American lit professor. He pointed out how chaos allows thieves and oppressors to get away with lots of bad stuff, because the confusion means that no one really sees it and all monitoring agencies are missing or disabled. I thought of Eric Berne’s ideas about “Games People Play,” like “Uproar,” which is like upsetting the table when you can see you’re going to lose at chess, or “NIGYSOB” which written out is “Now I’ve Got You, you SOB,” and plays out as a form of entrapment -- provoke someone until they strike out at you, then claim to be attacked. Does this remind you of tribal politics? Or maybe DeLay? But on the other hand, sometimes so much chaos manages to keep the foot of the oppressor off the neck of the vulnerable.
David Loehr, a friend of mine from seminary, has written a book; actually it’s a collection of sermons, like my “Sweetgrass and Cottonwood Smoke.” David’s book is “America, Fascism and God” and came about when one of his sermons along these lines -- which is very hard on politicians -- caught fire on the Internet and swept across the country. More about that in a minute. First I have to justify how I can talk about David down in Austin, Texas, can appear in this “place-based” blog.
Actually, he came to visit me in 1989. Down on his luck and out of money, he badly needed to escape from the church scene, so he bought a See America ticket and traveled among friends along the railway. I had just been hired to teach English in Heart Butte Actually, I was darned lucky it turned out that way -- the superintendent had told me I had the job but he “couldn’t find the contract” for me to sign -- while he continued trying to find the young man he really wanted to hire because he could coach basketball. Luckily for me, the young man had gone off on an adventure and couldn’t be found. His disorder saved me from being stranded with no teaching job in September.
I picked up David at the train station in East Glacier and took him cross-country out to my new teachage apartment in Heart Butte where the hot water heater was broken and he had to sleep on a mattress in the front room. He said it was like being back in the army. On the way in the dark we came around a corner and almost hit a colt in the road. David was very concerned and thought we should take it along with us -- where was its mother? So we can grant that he doesn’t know much about Montana.
But he’s been doing a lot of reading and thinking about fascism. Also, he has a sort of pocket version of the final report of Martin Marty project on Fundamentalism, which was just firing up when we left. (Martin Marty was one of our most beloved and powerful professors, though a very humble, pastoral sort of person. Someone gave him millions of dollars which he used to fund grad students going all over the world to study the “fundamentalist” version of the religions there --ALL the religions. Incredibly, when they all came back together after years of study all over the globe, their accounts of what drives fundamentalism were eerily similar. What was under it, the pentimento of fundamentalism, is biology, they suggested.
Our species evolved in beings gathered into bands with big strong men who could fight or hunt and nurturing protective small women who could keep a camp and raise children. They protected their territory, resisted “others,” and maintained an infrastructure of ceremonies. All this is still in place. Not just on reservations, but also in cities, in the Superdome.
More later. Gotta think some more.
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