PAWNS UNDER GLASS

My new friend and his wife have gone on telling me Valier stories and I’ve responded with what I know.  They came to their house newly married forty years ago.  I came alone twenty years ago, but it was a return from much earlier.  We talked about one incident that was still vivid in both our minds, though it happened a while back.  

Lake Francis is the result of damming water for the irrigation project but this is not about the dam.  The lake is freeform, following the contours and depths of the stream valley that pre-existed.  Between the town and the Lighthouse, which was until a few years ago a fine restaurant with a bar, there is an arm of the lake you can see across.  Because it is rather shallow, it’s often stronger ice than in other places and the reckless will take a shortcut across it.  On this occasion two men in a pickup went through the ice and drowned.  They said the dog in the back bed escaped and went home.

On the next day I was standing in the yard talking to Rick, the fixit man, just hearing the story when a small plane began to overfly the lake, very low.  Rick explained that it was looking to see where currents and drift had taken the pickup under the thick ice.  Pretty soon the plane landed in our little airstrip and we could hear a chainsaw running.  Rick said, “They’ve found it.  Now they’re cutting the ice to get the bodies out.”

The two long-time Valier residents knew every person involved, their relationships, and the rumors.  Stories about fatal accidents here tend to split out into two sides: versions that repeat evidence of death being the fault of the recklessness of the victims or accounts that blame the situation and let the victims be innocent.  Most people agreed that the two men had been drinking heavily at the Lighthouse but drinking here is not as much of a crime as it is other places.  It was said that there was known open water they should have avoided.  Some said they had been showing off, cutting cookies, driving in circles, not wearing seatbelts.  No one knows who witnessed that or whether it was just their style -- so presumed.  Women tended to talk about the relationships, the intimates who had to be told of the loss.

Usually in winter the ice stories are on the Missouri River where it runs through Great Falls, where ice breaks apart, stranding people or big dogs.  That water/ice is always on the move, unpredictable.  Tough to rescue people but more likely to see they are in trouble.

One of the psychological thrillers I tend to watch was about a damaged man who killed people.  The damage was traced back to a moment in his childhood when he went with a small girl to a body of frozen water where she somehow went through the ice and the water current carried her along.  The boy child had run alongside her moving floating body until it stopped under ice clear as glass and then the boy watched helplessly as, face up, she drowned looking up at him.  The murders were reenactments of that event but the grown man blocked all memory of them even as he repeated them.  There are two psych clichés: that early trauma is a cause of a person’s malformation to the point of evil, and that it is unconscious.

Here’s where I’m going with this on this blog.  

https://www.thedailybeast.com/spaceship-earth-tells-the-wild-story-of-biosphere-2-steve-bannons-eco-cult-disaster  This is a fascinating effort, this Biosphere impulse, just as a recurring dream of being able to recreate a protected Eden like that of Adam and Eve.  You can buy little glass balls with life in them and play God while holding the little world in your hand.  The article linked above has ideas this about the origin this idea of a biosphere in plutocracy mixed with scholarly idealism and keynotes of the Seventies.  I’ll want to read it several times and think about it more.  

But the image that sticks with me is someone’s description of Bannon standing outside the glass, staring in at the slow distress of the occupants, fascinated.  He’s a death voyeur and it’s easy to imagine Stephen Miller standing beside him.  It will take decades to figure out what made them that way.  Bannon was actually in charge of the ecosphere effort and supposed to be helping it to succeed, but he did nothing, the same as the Senate today, watching so many die without doing anything.  Trump.

Is it vengeance, retribution, or just emptiness?  Centuries of books will be published.  It’s hard to believe that such widespread destruction-by-omission as Benen carefully describes in "The Impostors: How Republicans Quit Governing and Seized American Politics" can be unconscious.  Seemingly, it’s deliberate, part of a shared ethos in a power community that confirms itself by dehumanizing everyone else.

In the end of Biosphere 2 someone finally acted by taking up a blunt object and smashing glass.  I imagine there was a great whoosh as the air pressure equalized.  Some must have been distraught that the experiment was ended, but others had realized the danger of being over-idealistic.  Now they could live.

It’s hard to get across to the ordinary guy chatting over coffee that Trump is already impeached: indicted, convicted, and labeled.  We could get him out of office in days if the Senate merely voted to remove him.  That’s the step that was prevented by McConnell.  He’s the guy who truly IS wealthy beyond reason with a wife who literally rules the seas, beyond the reach of any nation.  Trump is demented.  McConnell is not.  Or maybe he is the one who is unconsciously evil.  I don't believe that -- I see vengeance.

We’re coming to understand that individuals must fit the culture and the culture must permit individuals — it is a codependency that depends upon enabling.  What would normally be living boundaries between one person and others, an identity boundary, becomes a glass barrier between classes of people.  We have never quite recovered from the delusion that people who are not just like us must be inhuman, merely animals.  Worse, pawns under glass.  We watch them die under the glass of our screens.