As I keyboard here on the high prairie, I’m listening to WFMT, the classical radio station in Chicago. Because I brought my interests and networks with me back from “outside” this small town, both in the form of print subscriptions and as computer network access to faraway radio stations and memberships in environmental, arts, educational, religious, and social action groups around the planet, I get an entirely different set of information and interpretation about everything than what is available locally. In fact, the steady stream of ideas that are my identity have been different from those of my extended family ever since I went to college in Chicago where I listened to WFMT both as an undergrad (’61) and graduate student (’82).
On my father’s side my cousins are still pretty much the careful non-smoking, hard-working people that the Strachan patriarch was when he brought his wife and grown children to South Dakota to homestead. Because they were from Scotland, they valued education and books. Five generations later, there are college-graduates, teachers, and middle-class liberals among those cousins. But they are mainstreamers, mostly not church-goers, and watch TV news but complain about violence. On my mother’s side the cousins are neither Pinkerton nor Cochrane, middle-class mid-Westerners who came on the Oregon Trail. They WERE church-going (Presbyterian and Baptist of the northern sort) but the generation before me all of them married gentrified hillbilly rednecks whose religion had become prosperity. One branch runs a string of titty bars down the Willamette Valley. One branch married lawyers.
If I had to put myself in a category it would be Generation X -- over-educated/low-income. The first half is invisible in this town and the second half marks me as no-account. To live below the poverty line in order to read and write full-time is unintelligible to locals, though there are more like me in the rez/resort towns. I am not enough like the do-gooders and “green” people across the state to get involved with them, though I know and value many of them and have for decades. Not as long as I’ve known the part of the Industrial Cowboy Art Cartel rooted in the mystique of white male domination of the West, though most of them are dead or dying now. And as long as I’ve known the Blackfeet, who cannot be shoved into any category. Some of them are more like me than anyone else in Montana.
People get lumped together in various ways and split out over various issues. One of the main differences is between those who try to force everyone else to be just like them, and those who are willing to live and let live. But the first step is realizing that other people DO see the world differently -- there is not just one point of view, one way of interpreting things, one way to live, one way to define what is important. This was the most amazing discovery of the sailing ships beginning in about 1600: that there were many civilizations, quite self-contained and equally valid so long as they fitted into their ecology. The land-locked Europeans who had been battling over territory for centuries realized over the next four centuries that the planet is based on pluralities and the best way to reconcile them is trade and law: democracy. But, of course, there’s always humor and demonstrations.
Actually, the revolution hasn’t been all that sudden and the realization has not reached a lot of places, but trade and law expand constantly. Africa and the Middle East extending into Eurasia are now fighting the wars that Europe fought in Medieval times (“Game of Thrones”) and China fought even earlier. (A host of Chinese “Westerns.”) In America it was the war between brothers, then against the indigenous, and now it is an economic war cloaked in religious terms -- urban against rural. We don’t demonstrate much for fear the law will get out the old fire hose, tear gas, and dogs -- tools against the “other” whether blacks or hippies or gays. We know they’re listening.
Humor’s one of the big identifiers of groups: Montana folks tell South Dakota jokes, Garrison Keillor tells Lutheran and Unitarian jokes, Unitarians tell fundamentalist jokes. Fundamentalists don’t tell jokes -- they’re like radical feminists. Life is SERIOUS. Certainly it’s not if people in power could impose penalties as harsh as these: “theft punished by the amputation of a hand, rape and murder by public execution; married adulterers stoned to death,” there would be a major loss of tax-payers around here. So we don’t do this officially -- only out in the alley behind the bar after closing. The most insidious restrictions are imposing ignorance for children and slavery for women, both enforced by abuse. If you had a confidential talk with law enforcement or child and family services around here, they could name you some people who do that.
Between Americans now is a major split between those who think our government is out of control in its secret militaristic dealings around the planet (we almost certainly subsidized the Taliban through the CIA in Pakistan before they turned on us) and those who want an internal military against the citizenry for the sake of “safety.” Osama bin Laden’s interests in college included “writing poetry, reading, with the works of Field Marshall Bernard Montgomery and Charles de Gaulle said to be among his favorites; black stallions; and football.” The difference is in the use of religion to oppress others. When we interpret our citizenship in the US as being the same as any particular religious point of view, we become oppressors -- sometimes of ourselves. Recently there have been laws proposed to ban all religions except Christianity. Luckily, many people are enough like Jesus to reject that nonsense.
People feeling this tendency in our own country begin to talk of American Fascism and the American Taliban. Any time an individual or group begins to claim God is on “their” side, splits up God into a diminishment. It means they think they ARE God. The juice they get from this will last until their economic advantages collapse. Virtue is almost always rooted in the idea that being good will mean getting rich. They don’t consider the other side: that being rich might make them good, because it won’t. They’ll still be the same rigid rotters they always were.
People who want to be big frogs love little tiny puddles. Personally, I’d rather be small -- even unnoticed -- and swim throughout the world. Just for fun, I looked up some frog jokes: “What did the frog order at Macdonald’s? French flies and a big croak.” If you think ordering French flies is unpatriotic, the joke is on you.
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