SYSTEM DYNAMICS & DEFINING STAKES

Every day I read a number of blogs about publishing and bookstores as well as writing and reviews of writing. Also, blogs about art and listservs about environmentalism which has exploded in astonishing ways. Right now they are arguing about ecoporn and whether a passage in Timothy Treadwell’s journal (he’s the guy who was trying to merge with grizzlies and did -- along with girl friend -- when one of the bears ate them) in which he says he’s so moved when he holds his favorite female bear’s scat in his hand, still warm from “being inside her.” (The scat -- not the hand.) In addition, I get practical inquiries about things like genealogies and the viability of teaching jobs here. And, of course, I’m reading about liturgies and shamans, which always brings in a lot of comments that are meant to show how much the reader knows, how much magic power they have. (I mostly zap them.) And there are always Native American issues, which I try to confine to Blackfeet most of the time. This does not exhaust the kinds of reading I do in a day, except that you can pretty well rule out immersive fiction. I try to keep in touch with it, sort of, through a little panel of cousins and friends who love good novels.

What I want to reflect on a bit now is two entwined issues: system dynamics and defining stakes. I suppose you might say I’m prompted by last night’s town council meeting in which a consulting engineer tried to defend himself against a chiding mayor. I don’t understand what was underneath this, except that it was clear that the assumptions of everyone involved -- and even those who were not directly involved -- were pretty much mismatched. I came home to watch the last DVD of the series “Vera” (first season) which plays off the idea of a police commander who looks like someone’s dumpy mom. (Barbara Blixeth played Brad Pitt’s mother in “A River Runs Through It.”) This is not Helen Mirren in the menacing city. One wonders how ever she got into such a job except that it’s way out in a tiny town on the English coast. (Fabulous scenery amped up with cloud-enhancing filters.) The stakes are always murder, with subsets of motivation that vary from one suspect to another. The dynamics are always steady “plodding” as they say over there, mixed with insights that come from knowing the territory since Vera grew up there.

System dynamics are confronting a lot of politicians right now: how should they interpret the “Occupy” movement and handle the very practical issues of a lot of mixed people camped in a park? How should they interpret the economic issues of Europe as they go tumbling along, partly in reverse? Small businesses must also be struggling with what strategies they should use now that they’ve fired so many people that the remainder are cracking from overwork, but the only hope seems to lie in increased productivity. Which brings us to the issue of what the stakes are. Bottom line: profit. Jobs. And a life. Re-election. The survival of a nation without internal chaos.

Here in a small town which sees its survival as dependent on growth, we are seeing new people move in, some of them eager to participate in our local doings. They are quite different in terms of their understanding of process and stakes. Those who have come in from big cities and the corporate world misread local agendas but attract local people who think big city people are sophisticated and informed. I have the opposite prejudice, having worked behind the scenes for too many years to ever be trusting of big city corporate guys.

Heart Butte, the Blackfeet village thirty miles away, has a variation on that prejudice. They hire urban romantics, pull them this way and that in their own interests -- too local to be intelligible to outsiders -- and then sent them packing out of town with all the dissatisfactions and outrages attached to them. The stakes are always contradictory and rooted in history: how does a Native American assimilate to the mainstream culture without losing identity? Can you earn a Ph.D. at a good university without discarding many of the patterns that make you a tribal member? Worse that than, for many people the symbols have displaced the realities. A “good education” is a check list of certificates and entitlements, NOT a transformed way of interacting with the world, which I believe it is. Even in Valier, even in Great Falls, I don’t think this last is a common viewpoint. Money makes the world go around. Money comes from jobs. Jobs come from a check list of certificates.

Like “Vera,” my outsides are misleading. I have her same notion of how to dress and the same tendency to stage outbursts, which are acceptable in men but not women. But that’s minor compared to being interpreted by persons with an entirely different value system, quite a different idea of what’s at stake. When I work on Bob Scriver issues, most people assume I’m trying to get money and status out of it. Because of the Industrial Cowboy Art Cartel, they assume that I’m still in love with Bob Scriver (I am), but only because he was a big shot once. (Right now his bronzes at auction go for less than the cost of casting them. Some collector somewhere is going to clean up when the value of them rises again, which they will.) The idea of thinking about anything for some other reason than making money is just too far from their own lives for them to consider.

What I saw last night was corporate methods applied to a local management problem. Fascinating. Not good for a small town. Somewhere in the background I could hear the hissing friction of hands rubbed together as the vulnerability of this town to schemes and stakes on an international level was increased. The more divided, the more distracted, the more contradictory, the more secrets, the easier it will be to run scams. The easier it will be for a bear market to become a scare market. As if we weren’t already there.