THE WRITING FETISH IN MONTANA

"A fetish is an extremely strong devotion to something."  (Dictionary)

Until I got curious about porn and read some of it -- admittedly old cheap second-hand books with their punch lost since most of the fetishes were too mild to be titillating these days -- I didn't really understand a fetish. But tomorrow I go to the dentist --   which reminds me of that story about the woman who was anesthetized for work on her teeth and woke up to find tooth marks in the toes of her best heels.  The dentist had a shoe fetish which he expressed by biting.  In the end she decided she was lucky he didn't have a thing for belly buttons or something.

Of course, that was a while ago.  Displacement of an unattainable desire onto something accessible has been broadened and complicated to the point of besiegement.  For instance, Edward Said has explained to us how something like national identity or an exotic place can be fetishized into assumptions so shared that they seem like reality.  He was talking about "the Orient", a vague but seductive concept that did include quite a bit of erotica.

I want to mark some more immediate romanticizations that show up esp. among a particular social set.  They are Montana, Indians, Butte and Missoula.  Montana is fetishized mostly through experiences in the mountainous populated places, though the more poetic are fond of high prairie grasslands that are conceived as symbolic of mystic experience and the heroic solitary who dwells there.  

At the heart of all these fetishes is the yearning for social recognition of specialness, esp. the kind of specialness that boys get from their female relatives assuring them they are smarter and better-looking that anyone else's boys.  This causes them to aspire to PhD degrees which they take to be certified specialness rather than the hoop-jumping exercises they really are.  As well as providing a line of academic professorial work for yesterday's special boys if they can't make it on the "best selling" market.

Sometimes this gets tangled up with the fetishization of writing, not "doing it" but being admired by society as a "writer," which is a powerful social fetish.  A woman the other day here in town realized that I write and exclaimed in a portentous voice, "OH!  You're a WRITER!!"  Irritated, I responded, "Did you think I was a giraffe?"  Mean of meIt's not necessary to actually write, but it's necessary to have good connections with the publishing industry because to most people, "writing" is the same as "publishing."  They have to see formal printed and bound paper.  Best if there are awards or an MFA, which can stand in for a PhD.  Hooking up with print systems in Montana is easier because they are small and relatively impoverished.  The "biggies" are coastal.

Montana does make room for female writers but doesn't much fetishize them except in terms of escaping gender roles or surviving ethnic burdens and atrocities.  But Montana endorses the male-as-fetish, esp if the male is young, handsome, and faintly evil, which implies power.  The styles tend to vary according to the nature of the towns they inhabit.

Butte is a big fav because of its storied past when Brit mining heroes drilled tunnels into the mountain until now it's only a vast hole of poisonous water that kills whatever water birds land on it.  Somehow these fetishizers believe that getting drunk on St. Patrick's Day means merging with those small, starved, filthy men raiding resources to enrich Bostonians in Helena mansions.

Missoula is a modern fetish because it involves drugs, which it pipelines to the rez where only the relatively prosperous can afford them, assuring each other that lawlessness is a sign of privilege and independence.  Thus it joins the tropes about "Indians" who will argue all night about what they should be called, a matter of great emotional urgency.  The general rule of thumb is that the more a writer points out that he writes, the less Indian he is likely to be.  Fractionation (low blood quantum) is an ongoing problem, which they resolve with romanticization.  They are neither produced by indigenous culture as it was before contact nor by legal definitions devised by the tribal council.  Neither do they care anything about history, because they enjoy attacking anyone who says anything about them, because they OWN it by fancying they ARE it.

These self-aggrandizing narcissists would be easier to bear if they weren't so snotty.  The REAL tribal writers are quiet, watching.