THIS BOY WITH HIV

19th Century:  Pratt:  clothes and hair make the man.

1950's   A few generations later.

2016  Denise Juneau is running for the US Senate.

Her father was in one of my English classes in 1962.

When Colonel Pratt decided to make whites out of Indians, he had the idea that if they were cleaned up, given proper haircuts and clothes, and made to mind their manners, that would do the job.  Likewise, people tend to think that if they take a feral boy off the street who has survived on his own for most of his life and do the same cosmetic things, the boy will be grateful and become just like the savior.  But first the rescuers want his diseases cured or at least addressed to the level of chronic and noncontagious.  The problem is that the change involved in all that -- changes in habit patterns, internal molecular loops, and just general ways of being in the world -- are too much to address while still hungry, shamed, guilty, terrified, and essentially alone.  These are matters of identity and losing one’s identity will only cause panic and rage.  So it becomes a loop: I won't help until you want to be like me. 

One thing at a time.  Starting to take AIDS meds -- even assimilating the fact of being infected and figuring out what it means (esp. if you’ve been told it’s a death sentence) -- might be sort of down the list.  The FIRST thing is a trustworthy human contact when you don’t even know what that feels like, so you never look for it and maybe don’t appreciate it when you get it.  The person contacted must not judge.

Liz Taylor was not inclined to judge.

Consider that there are plenty of grownups who have the same problems as listed above; even the ones who live in “natural” African villages might not have a trustworthy human contact, which might account for ill-advised out-on-the edge sexual behavior.  There must be a high proportion of incarcerated people with no idea how to guide their own behavior and who will die before they ever find out.  There must be people who function only with constant professional support.  And somewhere there must be people who have their boundaries established, keep within the limits of their bodies and minds, live in a supportive community, and still (or maybe consequently) have more energy and insight to offer others.  The "nice" people still might catch AIDS.

The tragedy is that most diseases that can be addressed to the point of becoming chronic must do so in terms of behavior much more complex than taking a pill.  Just taking a pill on time and in the right amounts, just facing the diagnosis which is no longer death but still a lifetime ahead of monitoring and paying. Paying. Getting the meds (even at a free clinic), are an ordeal that presume no competing activities, like a job or even school.  It means stigma, that blood sucking leech.  One is forced into communities of oppression in the name of monitoring one's health, meaning constant blood, urine, fecal and semen monitoring, all of which are usually private.  They expect gratitude or at least obedience.  If you're not paying, they don't feel obligated to
provide privacy or nice manners.

It seemed so simple.

But not all boys who behave badly have HIV.  Not all nice boys who have done very little to break rules will escape HIV.  It’s a virus, an opportunist, and skips through the land like a forest fire, creating a mozaic of infection that is undetectable at first without deliberate testing.  It will be years before the HIV impact on the body may be detected, long after the point of contagion could be identified.  Only recently has it been possible to reduce the HIV viral load below the contagious point.  The good news is that what will control HIV will bring the body into homeostasis and good-enough health that will address a lot of basic needs.  The bad or at least daunting news is that some turnaround in emotional life and the personal power -- that even a boy has -- must be brought into alignment.  Art and community can do the job.

I’m the last person who ought to write about community.  I’ve threaded my way, trying, rejecting, pandering, finding a powerful protector, getting official certification of value, learning high theory and analysis, taking diagnostic inventories, querying family, making natural categories, embedded observing, and so on.  I’ve got bibliographies, actual books, saved downloads, printed out manuscripts (including typed and xeroxed), scraps of memoirs, genealogy charts — on and on.  But I still rarely go through a day without being mad at someone for not understanding me and what I’m doing.  I’ve studied organizational design and thought it was brilliant, but can’t get my house organized, or my time organized beyond writing most of the time.  Organizing cats, of course, is hopeless.

David Barr, effective early activist

But I have a kind of virtual community that includes fictional characters, figures of dream, real people I have never met, and the population of this town and area who all greet me by name though I can’t remember their names.  Some of these people I've known for half-a-century.  Boys with HIV are part of that world, some of them former students who are dead now.  Often the ones who were the best writers, the ones who ventured to the edge.   Natural leaders.

Terrierman, who blogs and lives near Washington DC, rarely recommends a movie.  This time he said, bluntly, “Sit down and watch this!”  It’s a movie called “Human” and it’s on YouTube in several versions, some an hour and an half long and some short.  Here’s the trailer.  http://www.human-themovie.org   This is or ought to be everyone’s community, both human and landscape-sized.  This ultimate community does not know itself and so this movie becomes vital.  Everyone speaks in his or her own language but with sub-titles.  Some are silent.  All are eloquent.

Francine, "Human" (from my cohort)

Sub-groups could create video testimony like this, maybe not so fancy.  But a place like here on the high prairie has as many wise and lived-in faces, as many love affairs, and as much mystical landscape as this film.  Our girls ride their ponies fast over long ridges with mountains in the background.  (That's my favorite section.)  These days cameras are easy to operate and there are local businesses that produce local vids. It only remains to think of it.

But this post is about boys with HIV, esp. HIV acquired by doing criminalized and desperate things.  They cannot show their faces because the stigma will follow them — faces are like fingerprints these days, the iris of your eye is a code that can unlock doors.  But anyone can record themselves if they have simple equipment and — more than education — the motivation.  This is the conviction that created http://real-stories-gallery.org/node/1143  and the groups that have derived from it (Cinematheque, Show Me Your Life, Smash Street Boys, and Shatter Boys UK).  These are ways to create community networks that wrap around the planet.

Boys are the demographic most easily discarded, esp. boys considered dangerous, contagious, destructive, and obstinate.  Maybe gay.  First we render them invisible because they are scary, then we throw them out of schools as ineducable, then we don’t allow them on the job market which almost forces them to join the sub-culture of the forbidden.  They have nothing to sell but themselves.  Luckily, that’s an infinite resource, constantly renewed.

"THE LONG GAME" ON THE REZ

The “long game” of the FBI is paying off (from their point of view) with raids that appear to be effective roundups of criminals: financial corruption, child trafficking, drug cartels, and the like.  It is a two step technique perfected in the continuing sand wars.  

The first step is to bring up the evidence for wrong-doing, vivid enough to rally public outrage.  Soon a committee will be formed “demanding” some action from the FBI.  They will have strong views, which they will indignantly express in what they assume is confidential testimony.  

In response, there will be a number of obvious offenders brought in and interviewed.  They are accused, pressure-interviewed separately, and the information triangulated and evaluated.  They are arrested, charged, and quietly released -- people assume because bail has been posted.  There is negotiation about indictments.  

Costs of litigation are very high and it is suggested to people that it may be sensible to simply plead guilty.  Or that sentences may be mitigated by cooperation.  As those accused sweat over the coming time, there are hints about cooperation.  As time goes on, the suspects become more willing to offer names and tell tales.  Nothing much seems to happen.

Maybe a year later, the accumulated information is used to dragnet the real targets, now well-enough documented to make conviction easy.  Often they are relatives of the original committee and/or the first accused, because that’s the information that is effective in getting  deals.

Reservation people are not good at long-game.  Poverty, war, culture-difference teaches people to grab today (Hey, what would that be like in Latin???) because there might not be another chance.  Until a century ago, the bands were held together by a common language, the need to cooperate in order to survive, and religious ceremonies that were an opportunity to make amends, get back into harmony with the universe.  Those have been destroyed.  

In a poverty setting a new economy of secrets grows up, because that’s all people have for barter and to form alliances.  Negative information is more potent than positive.  Sweet deals behind the scenes are the way business was done on the frontier, particularly with the government and especially after the Civil War.  (Still that way.)  Distances were great and many languages were spoken.  The status of Indians -- not citizens until late (though not as late as women) and just recently enemies -- was ambiguous at best.  It was a place where information was as crucial and faulty as it is on today’s internet.  Emotions were high enough that anyone believed anything and probably ought to.

The dictionaries claim that the term “long game” comes from golf and refers to the skills of a player in the phase where the ball must be hit hard enough to travel a long way, as compared to “putting” the ball in the hole once it’s on the green.   But the blog called “Britishisms” suggests that the term has jumped to something much bigger:   “The most common contexts have been diplomacy, espionage, and statecraft, as in a 1944 comment in The Times that “ … so well and successfully have conspirators played the long game.” But it’s been used in all sorts of ways. In 1917 an anonymous author in The TLS intriguingly commented, “We are reminded of a pregnant saying of Hart’s that the long game is the Church’s game.” A 2005 episode of the BBC series Dr. Who was titled “The Long Game. . .”  There are video games and blogs called “The Long Game.”

On a reservation the short term “game” is at least surviving the next election (as it is in the whole country now) or maybe even as short as surviving a night of revelry or a weather emergency or a family row.  The white long game is about ending reservations and dissolving Indian identity.  This has been in play since Eisenhower.  In a sense it began when the first ships arrived from Europe.  There is a kind of apartheid always at play.  There is never any such thing as “separate but equal.”  Law on reservations is different -- not just for Indians, but for everyone on location or doing business.

The more Indians work for reparations to compensate for past injustices, the more they are risking the government (and the public opinion that gives it permission) being able to say,  “Okay.  We were wrong.  We’ve paid you off.  Now we’re even.  Don’t ask again.”  Since so much of the economy depends upon federal subsidies and compensations for the lack of state taxing power, this means that tribes will be crippled.

Corporations also play the “long game,” so that decades ago the leases were negotiated for laying the groundwork for present and future drilling.  Natural resources, including the marketing of scenery and the law differences (casinos), may seem like the way to guarantee sovereignty with economic viability.  The problem is that the kind of education that allows tribal people to operate on a level playing field with corporations and European governments is an education that will erase tribal culture in general and the identity of individuals in particular.  

“White” codes of operation and “Red” codes of operation are based on different assumptions.  The assumptions of the red man are cooperation, protection of the vulnerable, harmony with nature, because that’s what worked before “civilization” arrived.  There were other, less idealistic assumptions: for instance, always go to the limits of your capacity in conflict, even murder.  Or going out of one’s mind is a good thing (before alcohol).  White codes mostly boil down to control and profit.  Tight moral rules about sex, came in with the Christian missionaries and lent much energy to stigmatizing relationships that hadn’t been formally sanctioned by whites.  These are playing cards in the “long game” as well as putting on the green, getting reds into the hole.

The real long game pits sovereignty against assimilation.  The FBI has nothing to do with this except in the short term.  When there is true sovereignty on the reservation, which would mean self-determined and self-controlled law, a huge part of the FBI bureaucracy will be destroyed.  (This is also true of the federal Native American agents and systems, such as the Indian Health Service.)  Attacking these entities is in the short term a move towards sovereignty: demanding to self-prescribe the agenda and rules.  In fact, it is playing into the long term goal of simply abolishing those bureaucracies.  

In the long game, criticism of the governmental oversight and “meddling” can only be justified by assimilation, Indians being just the same as anyone else.  The reservation system was created because Indians were so very different from “whites,” but as they become more and more like all people, the justification can only be an historical remnant.  The People should have started Blackfeet language lessons the day the reservation was invented.  The government figured that time was on their side and that Indians would simply age out.  For the most part, they have.  

But the strategy also created a new category of people who are unregulated and hard to govern:  mixed bloods.  They have no long game.  This means their loyalties must be captured by other means than money and territory.  Thus we see the FBI strategies of stings, division, ambiguity, long waits, impenetrable rules and laws, intimidation and possibly even black ops.  All meant to separate the “swing citizens” from the tribal agenda.  Mixed blood people (who are more than just red/white but also red/red, red/black, red/yellow, and so on) can play on both sides.  They call it “code-switching.”

http://cutbankpioneerpress.com/articles/2013/08/14/glacier_reporter/news/doc520a745e94cc0444857678.txt   Recent indictments.

(There is no FBI field office in the state of Montana, though there are nine tribes located in Montana.)  

Dunno about you, but I really liked the Inauguration poem by Elizabeth Alexander, so I was pleased when Garrison Keillor put a second poem by her on his daily NPR radio snippet, A Writer’s Almanac. Here it is:

Ars Poetica #100: I Believe
by Elizabeth Alexander

Poetry, I tell my students,
is idiosyncratic. Poetry
is where we are ourselves,
(though Sterling Brown said
"Every 'I' is a dramatic 'I'")
digging in the clam flats
for the shell that snaps,
emptying the proverbial pocketbook.
Poetry is what you find
in the dirt in the corner,
overhear on the bus, God
in the details, the only way
to get from here to there.
Poetry (and now my voice is rising)
is not all love, love, love
and I'm sorry the dog died.
Poetry (here I hear myself loudest)
is the human voice,
and are we not of interest to each other?

One of the reasons I like Alexander is that she is so unlike what so many people think of as poetry -- as she puts it, “love, love, love and I’m sorry the dog died.” There’s another poetry program, “The Poet and the Poem,” which comes on ypradio.org on Thursday night at 9PM my time. (You could stream it.) It’s very “yummy” and precious with a hostess who speaks in hushed tones of beloved topics, tragic though they may be.

Alexander not only writes briskly and about ordinary human things, but she speaks her words with clear crisp consonants and carefully shaped vowels. This raises an interesting topic: the artist’s voice. Compare Alexander with, say, Aretha Franklin, the voice of soul: elided, syncopated, surprising.

When I was working at the City of Portland a decade ago, one of my fellow clerks was a 3X-sized woman, very dark-skinned, who compensated for her bulk by carefully maintaining a $60 acrylic-nail manicure and wearing the tiniest of high-heeled sandals. Thus she was missing in action a lot of the time due to sprained ankles. But I liked her, because she was such a character and had such spirit. Also, she never failed to politically outflank our mean little hen of a boss.

Part of our job was to take phone calls from the general public, most of them from people either complaining about nuisance neglected properties or complaining that they had been cited for not maintaining their property. Most of the complaints came from whites. Most of the citations went to blacks, though their landlords were usually white. One day my colleague and I had an argument about whether we could tell over the phone who was white and who was black. Actually, we could -- at least mostly -- and they could tell about us, too. It was instantly apparent that my colleague, with her rich Southern accent, her querulous voice “melody,” her choice of words and so on, was black. I suppose I was as obvious, though no one is all that conscious of their own “accent.”

Actually, this person was a second generation Oregonian, her parents rather than herself having been imported from the south to work in the Kaiser shipyards during WWII. The much lighter, taller and slimmer black man who had moved to Oregon from the Texas/Mississippi border as an adult had a far softer and more melodious voice, to say nothing of his manner.

On NPR, reacting to Alexander’s poetry reading (you could almost hear her practicing the speech teacher’s mantra: “the tip of the tongue, the lips and the teeth”) and Obama’s speech patterns (which are different again) the hosts were discussing accents and the woman (I forget which one) disclosed that she is black. But she doesn’t at ALL “sound” black! In fact, there are several black hosts on NPR and the only ones I would easily identify are the ones from the Caribbean, who have rich and careful British accents. I love the voice of Charlayne Hunter-Gault.

On the same program there was discussion about whether the tear spotted in Jesse Jackson’s eye was real or not. Consensus was that it was a real tear: Jesse could see the promised land, but he couldn’t get there. His style is now old-fashioned, his strategies are ineffective. Misery no longer evokes help, being different no longer attracts sympathy. The New Black Man is competent, he comes to the rescue of the white folks. And he’s not that black anyway. Just twenty years ago black folks were assumed to be like Clarence Thomas: very dark, short, inarticulate, always indignant and more-or-less “owned” by aristocratic white patrons, Thomas probably could not be elected for anything today.

The same problem exists for Indians and red-necks. The original stereotypes of the categories are grandparents now. Many of their grandchildren and great-grandchildren are no longer “blanket Indians” or hillbillies because of affirmative action programs that got them educated, socialized, and competent along with the rest of the best. This is the great irony of education for achievement, that the means for getting there transform the “different” into something the same: assimilated. The great test now will not be the racial or social tensions between categories of people, but within the generations of those categories.

If poetry is where we are ourselves, can we still write poetry that isn’t “love, love, love and sorry the dog died” if we have become someone else? I used to ride the bus to work every day and since I lived in NE Portland, where those shipyards employees lived after the Vanport flood destroyed their original housing, I overheard plenty on the bus. What’s most relevant today was a tall, aristocratic-looking black woman who announced to her friend, “Honey, when I have money, I SPEND it! When I don’t, I do without.” I think of her often.

They say the older Kaiser workers have been moving back to the south where the world is still closer to what they know. The younger ones who don’t go off to college? They marry Hispanics, Asians, Native Americans and they don’t assimilate to the white culture so much as they create a new one. They are “idiosyncratic, the only way to get from here to there.”