WHO ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?

When I read websites where a lot of people address contemporary issues, some of them quite rarified and theoretical and others life-changingly practical, I constantly ask myself, “Who are these people talking about?”  Almost always they are talking about themselves.  

For instance, I just a read a piece on the right to have legal abortions.  It was clear that the discussers, even the men, had access to medical care already — legal or illegal — and they thought of surgeries as a little risky but entirely justified, elective.  A nearby argument was about plastic surgery.  Not addressing the kind of damage that makes people turn away in revulsion or anomalies that prevent function, but rather a matter of improving looks.

My reference point is always the starving Somali woman staggering across a barren landscape with her dead baby in her arms.  Did she have access to abortion?  To plastic surgery?  She didn’t even have access to food.  

Another reference point is the still-teenaged girl in an unstable family who barely realizes that she’s pregnant though she’s been inseminated many times by many men.  Do educated upscale people, often talking over a table loaded with good food, have anything to say to these women?  What is an illegal abortion next to the prevailing abuse — which is also supposed to be illegal?

Let me say right here that I’ve never been pregnant.  The docs write on my chart “null partum” and ask whether I’m sterile or a nun.  The only answer is that I have no idea, since I’ve had sex, but only with men who had a vasectomy and an income.  One CAN have sex without insemination.  At my age I don’t have to think about it anymore, but I think I should anyway, since creating a new human being ought to be a serious moral issue that affects the whole human community.  

But it isn’t.  It is a biological imperative that through the aeons (MORE than millennia) has been selected for again and again — that’s the definition of “selected for”— except that part of the selection is raising the next generation to the point that they can create and sustain the next next generation.  At that point one is on the ground of culture — is aborting a child worse or better than aborting a culture?  (Genocide.)

The force to make babies has pushed through 200 versions of hominins.  Ours was the only one to survive this far and we may not last a whole lot longer.  We all want to know what happened to end the 199 rough drafts of humans.  Was it war?  Disease?  Climate change? (It’s not unusual; this is just the first time it was human-made unless you count humans acting as vectors for disease that cut down enough people to allow forests to grow back, creating an abundance of carbon dioxide.)  

We are the first generation to intervene to sustain pregnancies and babies who would have been winnowed out in previous times.  Our problem is not medical skill or — for some classes — access to money, but rather this huge psychological syndrome that makes babies emotional firestorms.  I’ve already said that my father was a fan of Margaret Sanger and believed in the efficacy of condoms, which were illegal then and had to be ordered in the mail, arriving in a plain brown wrapper.  His sibs each had two children, as decided.  But my birth family was three, which I finally came to suspect was unplanned.  There was a pinhole in the condom or it slipped or things were too exciting to stop and find one.  

The extra child was the difference in the finances of the family ever after.  There was never quite enough.  My mother took up the slack, as was our pattern.  First, she had “repairs” after the third child, which included sterilization.  Her choice.  Then she went back to school to finish the degree cut short by the Depression, so she could teach.  This turned out to finally give her the benefits she had imagined were a feature of cities, a raised consciousness.  It kicked my father to the curb emotionally.

Mary, Mark and Paul Strachan

When I suggested to other family members that the third child was probably unplanned, I was taken aback by the ferocity of their reaction — it was as though I’d suggested something entirely immoral — as though she’d had an abortion!  I don’t think my parents would ever consider such a thing.  But I don’t think my father ever faced up to the necessity of making more money.

One of my new continuing series favs is Canadian, “Flashpoint,” about the next step after SWAT teams, called “Strategic Response” and including many psychological skills like talking people down from suicide, hostage-holding, and mass killings.  A recent episode was about the effect on members of the team when they try, almost succeed, and then fail.  The key example was a little girl who had nearly drowned, but — thanks to the extraordinary efforts of one officer who gave her mouth-to-mouth respiration for the entire distance to the hospital — survived.  But she was in a vegetative state and remained that way.  So did he save her?  What about all the miracle babies we celebrate?  What were their lives like?

Ed Lane from "Flashpoint"

This third child in my family, my youngest brother, fell hard as an adult and suffered a concussion, so my mother supported him until her death, after supporting my father until his relatively early death.  What she gave up was a pleasant retirement in a safe place.  She kept saying she wanted to talk to me, but then didn’t, as though a concussion were shameful.  There wasn’t even much research at that point, though ironically one of the world experts was right there in Portland.

The reason I had no children is that I intended to live as a writer and knew there would be little or no income, as well as selfishly wanting to be free to pull up stakes.  It’s true that at several points in my life, if I’d been supporting a child, I would have been forced into immoral choices.  Nothing dramatic like rape or robbery, but not getting fired for opposing authorities.  For instance, I turned in abuses of students and patients, which were required by law and forced the authorities to take action.  I knew this would get me fired.

But that third child, when grown up, created a new human being with the adult cooperation of his girl friend/student.  Someone wanted that child and was not using prophylactics.  Whatever, that child is my only blood descendent (collateral) and whatever happened is now justified by her life which is not just healthy but a joy.  She was kept secret from our extended family, but her mother had strong family support: money, education, counselling.  Things turned out well.

But what about that Somali woman, that hooked teen?  No doubt their bodies rejected some pregnancies.  My father-in-law was one of three surviving sons from at least twice as many pregnancies.  He himself was premature, on the edge of survival.  His incubator was a shoebox in the warming oven of the woodstove on a Quebec dairy farm.  He turned out small but tough, chose a big healthy woman, and raised two strong and potent sons who ran headlong into World War II and were never the same.  What does it mean?

All mammals create babies at high cost and through a multitude of small connections and flip-overs of molecules that can go wrong.  It’s not hard to see that every baby is a miracle but then the next step is much harder: the individual decisions and will-power necessary to take them to adulthood.  And then the next step is as full of consequences as those for an individual family — the feeding of whole populations of mothers and babies.  MY surviving baby is a miracle.  YOUR surviving baby is threatening the planet.

Stigmatized babies face death all their lives.  An abortion is only one crunch point.  Not so long ago — and probably still in some corners — young stigmatized women whether the wrong color or considered “immoral” were covertly sterilized.  It always makes me think of lions killing the progeny of their competitors so they can re-inseminate the lioness with their own genes.  Morality is overruled by biological effectiveness.  Morality responds to “necessity”, even if it is that of imagined superiority.  

But it backfires when we obsess over individual women, their needs and crimes, while neglecting the larger situation — like the limited carrying capacity of the planet.  

ON AN IDYLLIC DAY IN METIS COUNTRY

"Many Tender Ties"  Women carry the heritage.

June 5, 2015, on the Montana East-Front High-Line was as idyllic as this place gets.  In fact, it was almost exactly like June 5, 1961, when my parents and I visited -- heading from my graduation at Northwestern University with a BS in Speech Education (actually theatre) back to home. We were on the way through Glacier Park and stopped at the Museum of the Plains Indian.  I got out of the car, where I’d been sulking the whole way, stood there in fragrance and said, “Just throw out my stuff.  I’m gonna live right here.”  And I did, at least for more than a decade.

In 2015, now old and living in Valier just off the rez, it was warm enough to drive with my elbow out the window and a big enough occasion to wear a silk shirt and a straw hat.  I was going to listen to a talk by Nicholas Vrooman who has just finished a study contracted by the Little Shell Tribe, which the US government refuses to recognize.  (The state of Montana does recognize them.) The talk was a redacted pictorial slide version of Nick's book, “The Whole Country was ‘One Robe’”: The Little Shell Tribe's America," funded by the State of Montana.  He is not an anthropologist but a folklorist.  The distinction is lost on me, but I wonder whether there is such a thing as salvage folklore.  Salvaging “folk” instead of ceremonial objects as in “salvage anthropology.”

blooming chokecherries

Going north up the Old North Trail, now called Highway 89, one travels along the the Rockies as people and animals have done for millennia, moving in swirls and cycles through the seasons.  I think that at the low altitude the berries of several sorts are blooming now.  The good thing about living on this long slope is that as the summer heightens, the berries develop a little higher and will bloom a little later, extending the season.  

There are two kinds of “refugia” in this country.  One is the volcanic mountains out in the middle of the prairie that were never entirely scraped by the glaciers and therefore still harbor pre-glacier species and a cool place for summer lodges.  The other is the many-fingered east slope where valleys reach back into the cordillera, offering shelter for hunted folk, esp. the Metis, the mixed people -- down south they might be called Meztizo or even Creole. 

Little Shell and his council.

Mostly they’ve been thought of as “white-and” -- Indian hyphenated French, Scots, African, Irish and English.  As they were pushed out of their previous places in a turbulent and greedy Europe, they wandered into the prairies inventing new things (the Red River carts with two giant wheels that could handle prairie travel -- Nick calls them the equivalent of pickups and showed a photo of Sitting Bull in front of his lodge with four “pickups” parked nearby, one for each of his wives.) and improvising to make up for losses, dressing in wool “citizen’s clothes” because there was no more buckskin or buffalo robes.

Gradually they sorted themselves out along a continuum so that one photo showed three brothers, each at a different point between “Indian” and “white”.  The mixed people were inevitable because men came without wives and found females among the indigenous.  They brought fiddles and jigging, finger-woven sashes and beards, so that all those things are part of life in Heart Butte, near here and one of those valley refugia.  The smooth hairless full-blood Blackfeet called them “hairy noses.”

Charlie Russell wore one of these.

Pickup of the Plains

The spectrum of indigeneity was overlain by a spectrum of economic opportunity.  Nick’s talk explained the nature and self-declared identity of the small groups who traveled and settled together and why some settled into poverty that made dump grounds into a source of survival and some assimilated, building nice homes and dressing well.  Dominant whites judged them according to their prosperity.  They thought in categories: tribes, nations, affiliations, but not all these mixed people even considered such distinctions.  They were busy staying alive.

So the government decided on a strategy they have managed ever since to keep secret, knowing it was scandalous.  They sent out the “buffalo soldiers” (black cavalrymen produced by the Civil War) to circle through all Montana communities big enough to have dump grounds or shanty towns, to round up the people -- hundreds of them -- and push them into Canada at least as far as Lethbridge.  The money allocated for transportation was as usual not enough, so the People ended up on foot being herded across the vast land in the wind and sun.  It was a genocide.  No one knows how many died.

Hill 57 near Great Falls

Of course, many of them managed to escape and slip back “home,” fueling the resistance that became the Red River Rebellion and ended in the hanging of the leaders, including the extraordinary visionary named Louis Riel.  Many “Blackfeet” names are from those people.

Nick’s slides started way back at first contact with drawings of people and communities and worked forward through photographs until he was naming the grandparents of those in the room.

This museum is not a patronizing white institution teaching about the curiosities of the Red Man, though it was founded on assumptions about Blackfeet crafts.  Nor is it an AIM-powered demonstration of emotion.  Gregg Paisley is from the half of the tribe that lives in diaspora, pulled away by the World War II need for workers and much transformed by Internet technology.  http://www.americanindianpartnership.com/the-blackfeet.html is meant to support friendship.  One way to avoid the stigmatizing of “mixedness” is to keep on mixing, celebrating the richness of what is sometimes called “thick description.”  

Another way is by adding image to print.  This museum has specialized in lifting up Indian artists.  Below, I scanned-in the work of Louis Still Smoking, the current exhibitor.  The manager of the art scene in the museum is David Dragonfly, an artist himself.  I know these families though it’s been fifty years so I mix up individuals.  David’s mother, Dorothy Dragonfly, I confused with Delores Butterfly, whom I taught in 1961 when she was in the Seventh Grade.  She herself became a teacher.  But David recognized some of the names: Gerald Butterfly, Geraldine his twin.  He knew I felt real relationship.

After the talk Nick and I walked across to the “gambling den,” Glacier Peaks Casino, to sit in the sun and gossip.  Along came a “character” intent on sharing his part of the movement to revitalize the Blackfeet Language.  “Oki,” he said, and in Blackfeet welcomed us.  “You understand what I said?”  I did.  He was staggering drunk and transparently leading up to asking for money.

“What’s your name?” I asked.  He turned out to be the son of Alfred Guardipee and he’d mistaken us for strangers.  Alfred was also in my classes that first year, called “Small Fry” then, and part of a sort of spontaneous family out at boarding school.  They traveled together and protected each other.  There was adult “supervision” but that always turns into “us against them.”  They left their imprint on me in ways I didn’t even recognize.

Nick knows the family names and origins of almost everyone on the big prairie spread, not just the Blackfoot Nation but the one next to the east, mostly Chippewa/Cree/Assiniboine.  Plus the white settlers.  It’s a jigsaw puzzle except that the pieces don’t come to rest.  Darrell Kipp used to call the moving forces “the hydraulics of the prairie.”  Of course, they fit into the hydraulics of the planet, where we are all fish following currents.

It is to the credit of Montana Humanities that they have pulled Nick Vrooman into their speaker bureau and made him available to everyone across Montana.  Metis have always been moving out of consciousness, not like the scattered “sheep” cumulus that filled the sky yesterday -- more like the thin silk sliding shadows they make against the land.  The Metis learned to keep their heads down in order to survive.  But that’s over now.  Mostly.

The cover image of the boy is by Louis Still Smoking.  Dorothy Still Smoking was also in those first classes I taught.  Dorothy earned a doctorate 

and presented her thesis at a conference in London, England.

A THEORY OF RELIGIOUS AFFILIATION

The new UUA headquarters.  Not a cathedral -- a manufacturing warehouse

The Unitarian Universalist denomination, which I don’t mention in a proselytizing way but rather because that was the context in which I did most of my “religious” thinking (meaning institutional thinking about religion) has two opposing forces within it.  Today I would claim that they correspond to Ray Rappaport’s ideas about survival of the group versus survival of the individual and the tension between the two.  Rappaport was an anthropologist, not a theologian.  He's outside the theological circle.  Maybe I am, too.

In practical institutional terms, the UUA is more open to the larger culture than most other denominations, which often base their identity on standing against change, science, and forces like commodification or the sexual revolution.  But because the purported basis of the UU consensus is the obligation of each individual to find his own set of values (within the principled guidelines) the persons may find themselves in opposition to their own congregation and denomination.  Even in opposition to their own previous selves.  So I’ll try to outline my own position in this post.

The central problem of the monotheistic religions is “theodicy,” meaning that if there is an all-powerful God he/she must be a monster to allow the evil we see in the world.  Solutions to this problem include the idea that humans deserve suffering, or that it’s all an illusion, or that there’s a second “force” named the Devil and we’re merely the ground of struggle.  And so on. Science, which is a worldview with the power of historical religions, deals with the problem by dispersing God.  I go with that.  There is no God, no matter how defined.

But then the problem of Evil becomes more pressing.  If there is no authority figure to force people to be good, won’t people run rampant over each other and destroy each other and the environment?  The answer is yes.  Some of them in the name of God.  But for those who want to find another way, what guidance is there?  I say it is a kind of ultimate ecology in which each small but deeply related part of the Everything is so connected that whatever they do will affect everything else.

Time rushes through you, making you the conduit between your tiny past and future because, no matter how small they are, they are a piece of the whole.  You know those stories about going into the past and accidentally making some change -- maybe stepping on a bug -- that evolves into a different world you didn’t necessarily want?  That’s what’s always happening in the present:  you’re making the future for yourself and all of existence.  This is part of the appeal of the idea that existence is infinite in its variations so that every possible eventuality is playing out at the same “time” -- somewhere unaccountable.

While the individual is moving through time, the culture is also transforming and pressing against the “givens” of the person.  What is bad behavior in one place and time might NOT be bad behavior in another place and time. This is confusing unless we give up thinking of both person and culture as something unchanging and rigid as a Pythagorean triangle.  There is always an interface and it is always transforming.

Evil is part of that transforming.  It is human, both in origin and execution.  Therefore, we can change it.  Evil feels as though it is an outside force, a malevolent oppression that comes out the sky, too powerful to resist.  Sometimes it feels like a seeping, creeping, sneaking dark (hard-to-see) bile that oozes among us, waiting for a weak moment.  These images make it easier to give up, to accept the evil we make, or at least claim it’s not our fault.

Others define evil, or at least sin, as an estrangement, separation from all that is meaningful, a kind of paralysis outside the home or sanctuary.  There is an evil called genocide that sweeps away whole categories of people with hatred and frenzied violence, or sometimes with clinical detachment made possible by technology.  It’s always incomplete or why would the young soldiers who sit in middle American operating the predator drones by satellite control develop PTSD?  http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/23/us/drone-pilots-found-to-get-stress-disorders-much-as-those-in-combat-do.html?_r=0

More deadly is bureaucratic genocide, done with a pencil by cutting funding for those who starve.  The banal evil of bureaucracy is easy to overlook except for those who need money to do their jobs of opposing suffering whether emergency responders or shelter providers.  To separate empathy from response and reform is to leave suffering pointless, because empathy evolved to cause mercy and justice which saves the group.  Lacking awareness of suffering -- and I mean sensory firsthand knowledge of the sound and smell of great numbers who need help -- or diluting it into news reports and video extravaganzas of “ain’t it awful”  (another of Eric Berne’s games) that lets people stand at elegant cocktail parties or in the caverns of car dealerships, making tongue-sounds instead of looking for meaning.

Hierarchy of angels by Zombiesmile

The early versions of public self-governance were oligarchic: shared kingship for the landed gentry and ecclesiastical authorities.  Then hierarchies developed: many treatises about the hierarchies of heaven: which angels are more important, who’s in charge of what, which saint to pray to for which problem -- the Great Mom, Mary, who somehow evades the Great Dad, is always the ultimate.  It has not been easy nor in some cases possible to separate religious concepts based on infant versions of the world, from arranging things for the greater good even when they are new and unfamiliar.  (An Internet Tzar?  Isn't there one?)  The United States tried hard to build in structure that would increase justice -- or at least reality.

So then we went the bureaucratic route: don’t fight, legislate.  But it gets so far out of whack that the people stop voting -- deserting the core of democracy -- and start running in the streets, screaming and setting fires.  At first the written rules worked pretty well, but then they were taken over by schemers who made sure all rules went their way.  The USA representatives and senators have gone to law school to make sure they know how to do this -- and to make inconvenient rules impossible to enforce by not funding monitors.  So now where are we?

Only as trustworthy as the humans

As I write, I hear bombers from Malmstrom practicing in the sky.  I won’t go out to look for them -- it’s eleven degrees below zero and they fly too high to see.  Are they evil?  Who is suffering?  What is justice?  Safety?  If they are only potential, are they still evil?  I read they want to have more prairie sky territory in order to practice for war.  What are they not telling us?

My philosophy (no theos, so it can’t be theology) is bleak and tough, which fits my high-prairie, thinly populated ecology where constant vigilance and planning is necessary.  Whatever does not adapt either by evolution or by human provision, is doomed.  We commodify everything: the soil, the wind, the depths of stony fuel reservoirs -- war.  Somehow it is all owned by people far away, which is what capitalism means -- absentee landlords who only want profit.  Even within our small community, some try to corner all the wealth and control.

U.S. Air Force Senior Airman Matthew Dubon, 341st Security Forces Group tactical response force sniper, poses for a photo holding a M-24 Sniper Weapon System at Malmstrom Air Force Base.

It’s well established that the relationship between institutional religion and economics is so enmeshed they nearly merge.  American denominations are commonly described by the economic/educational levels of their constituents.  The UUA is generally ranked as near the top by these measures.  "We" are open to the general culture, which brings us trouble over issues of suffering like war or sexual predation or poverty.  The first reaction is talk, then writing out guidelines, then moving to a new topic and never really implementing the old one.  This gives the satisfaction of feeling that something got done without it ever really costing anything.  But, as I say, “open to the culture” and that’s the pattern of the whole.  It's not just us.

http://montanawildlifegardener.blogspot.com

There is a growing but not-quite-visible number of people who speak of “spirituality” and make their modest homes and neighborhoods into gardens.  The larger culture (esp. movies) looks at them in terms of dystopia, desperate but resourceful survivors of the catastrophic destruction of the Old Order.  But why wait?  Let Evil starve in the board rooms, sitting at their long polished tables before their portfolios of paper.

"GENOCIDE" by Tim Barrus: A Review

This is a set of reviews of eleven short stories anthologized in “GENOCIDE” by Tim Barrus, published in 1988 by Knight's Press.

Ten of the stories are accompanied by a poem, which will be considered as a group at the end of this series. These stories are written in the context of radical gay men (as contrasted with conventional gay men) during the Eighties, when the expansion and experimental edge of the culture was still persisting, but in the face of the terrible plague of HIV virus.  The language and descriptions are on the edge for the mainstream, but not for the community of the author.

Do not expect to find out what is true and what is not.  When a writer is working, the two are both raw material for the story.  That’s the way it works.  If you don’t like it, don’t read fiction.  Maybe you shouldn’t read nonfiction either.  Maybe you shouldn’t read at all, since reality is always filtered and composed.

When these stories were published by Knights Press, leatherfolk were still mostly underground.  You could not yet get the directions for extreme sex on YouTube.  One literal arson holocaust was at the gay Upstairs Lounge in New Orleans in 1973.  32 people died. 

“The Dependency of Variables”

Two cosmonauts are sent into space in an “intelligent” spaceship.  The ship, like the predecessors “Hal” or “Mother,” will define concepts if asked.  “Genocide comes from the ancient Greek word: genos, meaning race or kind and refers to the systematic extermination of a people.  The Romans bastardized the word and turned it for their own cultural purposes (they were very good at committing genocide) into: genius.  A genius was a powerful guardian spirit assigned to a person at birth.  Genocide connotes destruction while genius connotes an influence over destiny.  End of definition.”  

The ship, named Tsan, who appears to also be male, becomes jealous of the two humans, who are lovers, and freeze-locks one of the crew behind thick glass.  The other broods masturbating in the crystal nose-cone where the ship can’t “see” him until he can’t stand it anymore and breaks open the glass on the freeze-locker.  

The ship is very upset, so the two men allow him to come into the bow to deep-empathize while they make love.  Before that, the ship defines love as “Damage.  Pain. To give.  All is program.  End of definition.”  

After the experience the ship defines love as “Lacking limits or bounds.  Extending beyond measure or comprehension.  Endless power.  Greater than finite.  Burn.  Faster than Tsan. Madness.”

It’s an effective compact plot with an excellent philosophical point to make (jealousy comes from not understanding) but what makes the story remarkable is the language, a mix of terminology from math, science, and intensely romantic poetry.  “This part of the virus universe was dense with the light from stars; it was fluid-like and white.”

“Chinatown Chinatown”

If you take Auschwitz and a leper colony, mix them with Vegas and any small town traveling carnival (carne = meat), then think about Guantanamo, Japanese internment, and all the other attempts to confine and destroy some category of people, you’ll have the premise of this story.  It plays out in terms of two boys (Star and Adonais) who are “body scrapers” whose job is to pull body parts out of the slush sump under the thriller rides.

Scraping was best at graytime.  Most INCAMP, most Newkoomer, slept during graytime, that silent betweenspace which breathes with quiet unquestioning lust in the place where the night is not the day and the day is not the day.  Graytime in the desert literally seethes with graytime shadow when the heat is not the heat and the bite-me cold slowly heroin warms itself into the stark reality of morning.”   Think “dissociation,” when one’s mind goes some other desolate place in order to escape the unbearable.  Think the Plains Indian Sand Hills.

Goya, the dwarf and wiseman, is there to give advice.  He tells about Isaiah (who is an even more resourceful computerist and wizard).  This is an apocalyptic story so they find Isaiah, and that’s the end of the story.  (Both Isaiah and Adonais are ancient names for the Jesus figure.  Star is the name of a Blackfeet equivalent hero.)

This vision of the deadly carnival -- or something very like it -- was brought to life in the movie “A.I.”  (Artificial Intelligence.) by Spielberg with Jude Law as a sort of “goat-footed balloon-man” leading us along. A few days ago a young man got his head knocked off on the Batman roller coaster.  This story is not as extreme as it might seem.  In fact, that’s the point.

“Trespass”

Angel Island is more remote than Alcatraz and the location of a detention center for immigrants, often from China and therefore “other”.  They were detained unreasonably for long periods of time, even years, under harsh prison conditions.  The author takes his lover on a tour there.  They dawdle and are locked in.  This is a real life experience that is buttressed with library research, universalization through the knowledge that this cruelty and suspicion is still repeated around the planet.

“Today the deserted streets of Angel Island seem ethereal.  Echo echo.  Many of the long dormitory structures have been fenced off.  Trespassing is forbidden.  This place is somehow windswept moon-sweet silent soundless like the desert.”

He summons up the figure of an old man once confined there, Yu of Taishan.  When leaving, he looks back, “the forms and shadows saddened me; upon seeing the landscape I composed a poem.”  The prisoners had scratched such poems on the walls of their confinement.

“Pull”

This unrestrained Henry-Miller-style ecstasy of sex and terror works both as an account of the Weimar Republic just before the holocaust and as a portrait of the unrestrained gay obsession with wealth and privilege just before the HIV plague triggered rumors of quarantine camps like leper colonies.

“Haunted the deathsoaked spirit of autumn in a place where mist pulled at your eyes, your conscience, and pulled at autumn as if autumn could be budged.  The seaside gloom, the mist of France, could not be permeated.  Not even by an over accumulation of rumor.”

“Midnight’s Knock on the Madness Door”

The simple version is that a Chilean young man needing help because of politics knocks on the door of two lovers.  All are paranoid because they are “outliers,” “Others” -- stigmatized.  It is dangerous but the two lovers willingly expand to a triangle.  Then the refugee becomes very ill, which means getting him into a clinic.  But they manage it.  What they must do is terrifying, but it is balanced by the ecstasy of sex mixed with love, graphically and poetically described.

“Sometimes it is a fulltime job keeping the madness on the other side of the door; sometimes it is impossible and the madness comes in and takes a seat, has a cocktail, sometimes two.”

At present homosexual acts are punishable by death in some African countries.  Technically, homosexuals were forbidden in Sochi during the recent Olympics.  In those places, no one wants to hear a knock on the door. But being gay is not the only way to be marked for death.

“Warrior”

Yes, this is Native American warriors, two of them, lovers, and armed with modern firearms.  They are resisting genocide in a time of dystopia.  “Their morality was the morality of survival.”  This time there is a ten-year age difference between the lovers, which seems to play out in a man/woman (top/bottom) sort of way.  Both hunt (with bows and arrows) but Tewa, the softer one, cooks.  Pawnee restricts Tewa as a way of protecting him.  They are doing well enough that they become the nucleus of a tribe, but they end up digging a lot of graves.

“Sometimes it seemed as if a powerful light emanated -- blazed -- from every grave they dug.”

“Demonic Baptism”

The premise of the story is that two lover/brothers are in a post-apocalyptic time when the world is radioactive and lack of water has reduced the land to sand.  “The only extremes left to it were the extravagant temperatures of natural extremes.”  Human babies, if they lived long enough to be born, were “twisted and twisting in grotesque and strangulated forms of pain.”  

The boys live by killing sand wolves made man-eaters by consuming the debris from burning virus camps, burnt to sterilize and eliminate.  Stumbling, sharing body fluids, they barely make it to an oasis and find there a man named Zealot, another of those Hebrew/Greek blind visioneers.  He asks them to make love so he can witness and experience their desire second-hand.  Then he dies, content, and they bury him.  It is a Dionysian defiance of death before the planet dies. 

A figure called Athanasia (A-thanatos, NOT death) appears.  “Above their canyon, Athanasia with her carnivorous skywinds sang and laughed and danced and bitched with her inevitable treachery.”  The story ends:  “It had once been a great planet of war and slavery.  It had once been a great planet of demonic fools.  Genocide.  It was now a great silent baptised planet of eternal sand.  Lullabye lullabye.”

“A Farewell to Love”

A successful writer is old enough to be gray (48).  He’s living in New York City in a winter like this one and he’s got writer’s block.  In the time of the book, one had to have papers about HIV in order to travel between countries, but his are in order.  He goes to Mazatlan, which is very rural, at least at this time.  Naturally, he falls in love with an innocent beautiful Mexican boy whose toothlessly grinning mother sends him over.  The time comes for him to return to Manhattan, but at the last minute he decides not to go, which means -- probably -- he will never be able to go back.  It’s an erotically baroque fantasy fit for Zorba the Greek.  The title is ironic.

“The first time is always an explosion of awareness that is better than any fantasy could hope to be.  Better even than death’s malicious promise of an orgasm.  Worth the risk.”

“Renegade”

Leatherfolk iconography includes a motorcycle, black leathers, ordeal flights across the country, revisiting old haunts, including all races but only one gender, being always a fugitive from capture, and experiencing service in Vietnam where all the rules were broken.  In this story a white man with a black lover must flee to a Native American former lover.  He hides with Jimmy Dog until the Indian man takes the motorcycle to go into town, where he is captured, never to return.  All three are united by being faggots.

The lonely sound of trains on the prairie is conflated with the box cars that once transported Jews to crematoria.  “It was after three, somewhere off the road.  Somewhere quiet and inviolate.  Somewhere where the owls stood watch.  The Harley cooled with an almost evil seethe.  Sean could hear the soft, enigmatic sound of a train in the raving distance.  The whistle of the train.  The far-off approaching rhythmic horror of the train.  The trains were always full of faggots.”  The men who escape do not weep.  They stand drenched in rain, “renegade soaked in the pouring rain.”

“Rainfuck”

Rain is the theme and symbol of this story.  It could easily be a Sam Neill film.  A repressed priest (that’s Sam) and a wanton young male lover (Jude Law?) who is the indulged son of a French Marquis are coincidentally and for different reasons banished to a small Polynesian island.  The priest tries to get control of the Marquis’ son -- and himself -- but instead is thrown into madness.

Joseph Joseph is the native lover of Justin Bovee, the son of the marquis.  “His culture had many stories about gods (and such) who had made love in rain.  It was supposed to be somewhat magical.  The two of them often went to the grassy spot when it poured.  As the water fell, and the forest around them steamed with aquatic humidity, Joseph Joseph showed Justin Bovee other things that he had not yet learned.”

“The Forest and the Echo”

Star and Adonais return in another story.  This time they have escaped INCAMP, which is described in the most horrible of terms.  The desert they must cross is an ordeal that nearly kills them.  Just in time they are rescued by the quiet ones and agree to be enslaved by Coriaceous (Leather) Pawnee, who is the head of the tribe.  Lawrence of Arabia has found the Tauregs.

“It was now safe for the brothers to look into the fired redness of the witchy indigo sun.  It was the wonder of wonders; Star and Adonais could read into themselves to look at themselves in sweet rich starless midnightblue fuckingboy awe.  Lullabye lullabye.   Heroin razzle heroin dazzle.”

"GET 'EM ALL! KILL 'EM!" by Bruce Wilshire

In the first book by Bruce Wilshire that I read, “Wild Hunger,” I left him sprawled in a hammock, zonked on ayahuasca.  Sheesh.  But I’d already ordered other books of his and now I’m reading  “Get ‘em All!  Kill ‘em!”  Sub-title:  “Genocide, Terrorism, Righteous Communities.”  Reduced to its bare bones argument, Wilshire is proposing that the horror of genocide comes directly from the horror felt by a righteous community when the bottom drops out of their world, whereupon they blame some expendable population and try to eliminate them as disease, corruption, and the source of trouble.   He is specific about “horror” -- he means that specific emotion.  Makes sense to me.

Wilshire keeps me reading in part because he can turn a phrase as few others can, approaching poetry even as he is analytical.  But also I know this body of references he uses and if I had had support for them in seminary, things might have turned out very differently.  (William James they would accept:  Suzanne Langer and Mary Douglas -- well, they were women, weren’t they?)  Emerson they were forced to accept, since he is celebrated in the UU community, but they did NOT read him the way Wilshire does.  Anyway, Wilshire in this book is tempering his knife to a sharp edge so that it can cut deeply into contemporary phenomena.

He is the first person I’ve heard identify “witch hunting” in the 15th through 17th centuries as a genocide of dangerously uncontrolled old ladies.  But also he is choosing some familiar examples:  the Fascists, Bosnia, Rwanda, and the California “digger” Indians, which is a story rather different from that of the Plains Indians.  I think that he would agree with an assessment that the treatment of HIV-AIDS patients is genocidal, particularly the young male ones, particularly the gay, the poor, the dark, the sex-workers, those separated from families and living in the streets.  The reasoning goes that they must be “bad” in some sense and therefore the relevant emotion THEY should have -- which onlookers would like them to admit so the onlookers won’t have to look in the mirror -- is shame and guilt.  But Wilshire is saying that’s NOT the key.  The key is specifially horror, the HORROR of treating them this way, the HORROR of Whoredom, if not sexual then as hospital fodder for the subsidy money going to the hospitals and clinics, when the government feels interested in the project.  (Meaning whether the voting population will go for it.)

One doesn’t really get interested until the risk comes home.  Old people are also hospital fodder and a pharmaceutical bonanza.  I could so easily be defined as a witch, though it would be expressed as heretical, immoral, poor, unclean, a loser, a safe target, a challenge to local values like a nice lawn.  This is a motivating self-interest and another reason to throw in with outsider boys.  

The revulsion of the people convinced of their own worth -- because of the community to which they belong -- is compared by Wilshire to a “flood of diarrhea” that MUST be addressed by any means available, even deadly force.  But it goes beyond that.  In full-blown genocides, dead pregnant women are torn open in order to make sure the fetus is also dead, to have the certainty of actually killing it.   Get EVERYONE.  Even Ishi, the last of his tribe, was dismembered for autopsy against his wishes, although in the most scientific way.  And reciprocally, Little Dog made sure his white cavalry officer persecutor was really dead by de-boning him and throwing the bones in the river.  This stuff works both ways, which is part of the reason it goes on and on. 

It’s not that the offended community is promoting survival of the fittest by eliminating the worst sub-categories:  by the standards of the blonde healthy strong-minded Aryans he was supposed to be defending, Hitler -- little weenie with coprophilia -- should have been the first to go.  Rather, the Jews eliminated were those seen to be privileged, gifted, at the top -- but in some illegitimate way, as though they had stolen their wealth, their minds, their education from Aryans.  The irrational notion was that if the these undeserving people were eliminated, suddenly there would be Aryan millionaires, scientists, brilliant leaders.  It did not happen.  In fact, Pol Pot and the Chinese Red Revolutionaries eliminated all the people who had made their culture rich and valuable -- all the professors, the international figures, the artists.  To unjustly blame and destroy these people badly damaged the countries the leaders said they were protecting.  They can only catch up by sending their young people to study in America.

Wilshire is not bashful about claiming the 9/11 disaster is an example of a striking-out Arab world that feels their foundations slipping from under their feet, but a little less open about pointing out that this vulnerability had the same effect on Americans feeling thrown into disaster, disorder, and contamination.  Here’s a sample of his rhetoric:  “As the colossal World Trade Center towers sank down from the sky and into themselves, they spewed out their burned guts in an impossible fountain of horror.  Impossible and unthinkable, yet it was happening all right.”   It was easier to blame 9/11 on “North Atlantic secularism” provoking retribution than in the next catastrophic challenge: Hurricane Sandy.  I’m more enthusiastic about the target for blame in this flood and blackout:  corporations and profiteers.  We’re back to the equivalence of money with shit as we shovel the mud-diarrhea out of the art galleries of Chelsea and Tribeca, identify the bodies, and add up the insurance payout.

Wilshire says,  “Some deeply believe that any attempt to explain genocide is a tacit exoneration of it.  One thinks:  “To explain it is to adduce causes such that those caught up in them cannot do otherwise.  So they are not responsible.  So they cannot be blamed.  No, genocide is absolute evil, the work of weird demonic forces beyond natural understanding.”  

“But I believe this is an inverted form of dogmatism, group mystification, a version of tacit supernaturalism.  It is to claim to know we cannot know evil, and without even trying to know it.  It cannot face the actual facts of our weird emotionality, our ephemeralness and vulnerability, our limited point of view, and the devious ways of denying these painful actualities.” 

“If we begin to explain evil acts it will not be to deny that they are evil.  It will deepen our sense of that evil, how wretched, pathetic, horrible, and deplorable it is.  Evil is an ever-present possibility of the human condition, I believe.  We must try to stop it. “