VOLLMAN GOES TO THE MOVIES: "The Proposition"

Catching up with William T. Vollman’s writing output is hard to do. Even as I was finishing up his condensed version of his seven volume series called “Rising Up and Rising Down,” he himself was just seeing into publication his fat new book, “Imperial,” about the illegal immigrants crossing the border in the Imperial Valley of California and Mexico. He is a poetic journalist, if you can accept that category, who mixes his fact-finding and interviews with evocative images. There’s an excerpt at the NYTimes today if you want to see for yourself.

“Rising Up and Rising Down” is an attempt to come to terms with some kind of moral rules that will help us make decent [sic] decisions about violence, mostly based on relationships. He has gone into war zones and ghettos to see what is there and has not been a fellow in a lab coat but rather a companion to those in trouble. He leans on the lip of the great maw called “Violence” that swallows so many and counts its bloody teeth. I was wondering how I could make any of this new when we stare at so much banal violence in the daily newspapers and television. What reference point can we share?

Netflix to the rescue, as so often. Last night I watched “The Proposition,” a so-called “Western” but set in Australia, an even harsher and more ancient frontier than the American Desert. It directly confronts these kinds of moral boundaries: spouses/protection, family/allegiance, races/oppression, settlement/disorder, colonialism/genocide, and righteousness/punishment. The story is balladic: there are brothers, the youngest can only be saved by sacrificing the oldest, and the outcome hinges on the decisions of the middle brother. The point is not really how the plot ends: it is all in the getting there and like Vollman, the writer (a song writer of considerable stature) sees poetry everywhere. As the actors commented, the intensity is increased by the fact that people went to America willingly and in search of a New Eden. The founders of Australia were felons deliberately banished to Hell.

BILL’S OBSERVATION: “Give me a soldier anytime. For straightforwardness a soldier cannot be beat. Like cops, doctors, mothers and whores, they’ve been through it and they cannot be fooled.”

Therefore, the real pivot of this story is the Captain who is supposed to protect the settlement and dearly wishes to protect his wife. He suffers over ends/means as he tries to obey Vollman’s SHEPHERD’S MAXIM: As authority enlarges itself, its obligation to protect from violence the individuals it controls increases, and the ability of those individuals to defend themselves from violence correspondingly decreases.

The self-appointed mayor and “owner” of the town obeys CAESAR’S MAXIM: Should I extend mercy beyond expediency, then I have the right to commit whatever aggression I please. Though I didn’t notice much mercy as he orders the youngest brother to be whipped to death to satisfy the blood thirst for vengeance in his town dwellers. He’s also a believer in TROTSKY’S MAXIM: No one who disagrees with me is allowed to judge me.

The Irish Murphy brothers’ principle is THE AMERICAN MANTRA: Because the right to self-defense remains inalienable, each of us can and should maintain a self-reliant distrust of authority. This idea was undoubtedly born in Britain where England and Rome struggled to control the pre-existing tribes but Robin Hood always wins over the Sheriff of Nottingham. Because of the colonialism of this little island, Australia shares this conviction -- at least in the Outback -- and no displaced population more so than the Irish who arrived in chains.

So the Brit attitude has been governed by CORTES’S MAXIM: In order to secure and defend my ground, I have every right to conquer yours.

That quickly drifts over from land ownership to people ownership, as blacks of both America and Australia know, so then operations are governed by THE KLANSMAN’S MAXIM: If I believe your race or culture threatens mine, I have the right first to threaten you back, then to remove your threat by violence.

This in turn triggers in both America and Australia (and oh-so-much in Ireland) THE VICTIM’S MAXIM: If any members of your side harmed any members of my side, then your side is in the wrong.

There are other assumptions like this buried in the minds of voters, politicians, businessmen, teachers, and so on -- none of them dug out, defined, examined and either rejected or reformed. All of them can lead to horrendous violence, if only the slow self-destruction of drugs and alcohol.

There are two interacting assumptions that Vollman doesn’t directly define but that I’ve been pondering here in Montana. They both come from sports violence, which seems to be increasing regardless of lip-syncing about “sportsmanship.” They are particularly strong in the small towns and reservations of this high prairie or maybe I just think so because I see it first hand.

One is that Winner takes all. The other is that Being the “last man standing” is the same as winning. In a place where survival is tough, the idea of controlling everything is a very attractive one. Not only does it protect the group to which you have allegiance, whether family, tribe or town, but also it increases power because other people will have to come to you to beg for survival.

That’s when the other rule kicks in: if winning depends more on the weakness and neediness of others than it does on true excellence of leaders, then it is always a temptation to cut the minority losers down, regardless of what they deserve.
Weak persons then begin to turn to the victim’s maxim and the Klansman’s maxim, keeping track of offenses against them and waiting for a moment of weakness in the winner, which always comes sooner or later.

Aside from the Golden Rule, worthy religions oppose the “winner takes all” idea with the principle that if the weakest among you are protected, then also the strong can prosper in peace, because there will be no need to accuse and suppress them.

Would someone please write out this idea on paper, wrap around something heavy enough to be thrown, and heave it over the wall into the Republican party? I don’t think they are enough in the modern times to read a blog. Or particularly books as fat and frequent as Vollman’s. Anyway, if you drop Vollman on them, they’ll be squashed. Maybe they would sit through “The Proposition,” but they might not get the right message.

BEEN FOOLED YET TODAY?

Maybe it’s just my own situation but I’m not noticing many April Fool jokes. Isn’t it enough to have barely survived (maybe we haven’t) eight years of hoaxes from our elected officials and corporate CEO’s? And today the news reveals that the Catholic Church from the Pope on down knew about sexually abusive priests as long ago as the Fifties and did not respond, though one dedicated priest -- redeeming his calling -- spent twenty years battering away at the officials to take action and even tried to buy an island where the predatory priests could live out their lives away from victims. Though we might not be willing to invest money and though today even islands are not sequestered enough, we’re fed up with being lied to and fooled.

Yet how do we find out the truth with newspapers shrinking and television going to sensation and celebrity shenanigans? Someone else on the radio (I listen as I go through the day) said that the failure of the big city newspapers wouldn’t be so bad in this time of so much other media, including blogs, except for our congressional representatives: senators included. He said it’s up to each state to closely monitor what those powerful people are doing in Washington, D.C., and only a big high-pay, high-power, state-by-state, networking newspaper has the chops to keep track of them. He suggested that our elected officials get up to some very strange things indeed. Tell us about it!

One evening on my way to the town council meeting I noticed a well being sunk on an empty lot. Nosy as always, I trotted over to ask whether they thought they might solve our budget problems by striking oil. But they said they were venting gas contamination from an old gas station leak. They said they were surprised to find it even thirty feet down. When I got to the town council meeting, they assured me that there was NO contamination.

Were they scheming? Misinformed? Careless about what they remembered? Or did they simply not want to know about the problem? Maybe they already had enough worries and denial was a way of controlling things. They say that dogged whistle-blowers turned in Madolf over and over, pointed out EXACTLY how he was running a Ponzi scheme to PRECISELY the people who had the tools to investigate. Nothing happened. They evidently weren’t paid off or in on the scheme. They just didn’t want to know.

I’m reading “Fakers” by Paul Maliszewski, which begins with an account of his own “faked” letters and articles to his own newspaper -- meant to be satire and preposterous, but immediately accepted as valid by the editors. (Reference Dilbert, the comic strip.) The rest of the book is various essays on hoaxes, masks, con artists, counterfeiters and Great Pretenders, many of them literary. It becomes very clear that pretenses and minor sleight-of-hand are woven through our daily lives everywhere and only recognized when it becomes of benefit for someone to “reveal” them.

One big illustration of how a situation calls out hoaxable circumstances and then presents the opportunity to profit from their refutation is the craze for memoir, which is “memory,” notoriously tricky and inclined to be embellished or overdramatic. A little cluster of unreliable memoirs (caroming off the assumption that biographies and autobiographies are or should be accurate or even CAN be accurate beyond the rough outlines) was almost irresistible for blood-sucking journalists, who then created a “trend” of exposures of cases that were in fact nothing alike.

Frey exaggerated reality in the conventional Hollywood way, making himself a badder boy than he was. JT LeRoy went for the big leap and invented a fantasy, also an underclass tale, because what nice readers would know the diff anyway? And Nasdijj (Tim Barrus) told the truth but changed the names and identifying circumstances, the way doctors do and for similar reasons. But in the past he’d been the baddest boy of all. Frey was soon seen for what he was and, enabled by Oprah, went back to work. JT had to pay or (one hopes) return an enormous amount of money on grounds that she defrauded her publisher. (Hard to believe.) And Barrus became an expatriate, which has made him grateful considering how things have gone in publishing ever since.

Not much has been done with the third step in this sequence: unmasking the motives and methods of those who identify hoaxes. How much money did they make? And who were their witnesses? In Barrus’ case, they were mainly a former brother-in-law with a felony record, a pornographer still angry from Barrus -- then an editor -- rejecting his manuscript, and a non-American living in Cyprus and purporting to be an expert on Native American writing. Don’t we all have people like that floating around at the fringes of our lives? I do. My former students alone could probably come up with enough accusations to... what am I saying? Don’t tell the kids not to put beans up their noses!

One of the lessons of Maliszewski’s inquiries is that people who are hoaxed WANT to be hoaxed. Much like grief-sticken mothers hoping to contact their lost children “on the other side” and therefore willing to be ripped off by spiritualists and table-rappers, or people with terminal illnesses hoping for a miracle (remember Katherine Kuhlman in her diaphanous nightgowns crooning “I belieeeeve in Miracles!”), or wives not wanting to confront what their husbands have been doing to their children, the American public wants to believe that our mighty leaders really ARE mighty. We NEED to believe our doctors and lawyers are competent and honorable. (They used to want that, too.) And yet we are so quick to believe that this one and that one did something horrid and should be tried on the front page of the newspaper.

Right now we are especially vulnerable since there is no consensus on reality, much less culture. People in this town will fight you if you say global warming is real. We seem to have a great need for conformity in our cohort, and enforce the consensus by labeling dissidents as hoaxers, liars. This is not just a right wing phenomenon.

I was interested in a statement I read yesterday: that liberals are very willing to accept all sorts of differences: color, ethnic origin, gender, age, sexual orientation, disability, prosperity, education and all the rest -- SO LONG AS they thought like the other liberals in the group.

But thoughts can be disguised. And who has the broad experience to pick up real dissemblers? Not our professional spies, it seems. And how can unknown bloggers be truth-checked? Even Snopes can’t always know. Sooner or later we’re all bound to be April Fools, right around the calendar.

DARWIN'S DOGS

When I first began to blog, I found another blog (http://stephenbodio.blogspot.com/) called “Querencia” after Bodio’s novel by that name. This blog touched on many of my interests (high east slope prairie, archeology, ranch culture, Bozeman literati, and dogs). The phenomenon of blogs touching blogs touching blogs (called “linking”) is what makes a technological phenomenon into an organic human network coming from real-life knowledge and pursuits. This is parallel to, uncontrolled by, and often far more honest than the usual media outlet networks.

One of the great dog blogs is http://terriermandotcom.blogspot.com/ which is written by Patrick Burns, one of the most literally grounded dog people on the planet. As a former animal control officer and constant dog companion, I find him a joy and a source of insight. His special interest is in “digging on the dogs” which consists of taking working terriers into the fields, chasing varmints (groundhogs, possoms, foxes, raccoons -- those smallish pesky mammals) down their holes, and then digging them back out. (The opposite of using hounds to tree a big cat.) What happens to them then varies, depending on the local population, the health state of the critter, and so on: some are set free. There are often photos. It’s got to be one of the most aerobic sports possible.

Terrierman links to a whole circle of dog people full of common sense. Lately this circle has begun to form and toughen into a counter-movement responding to HSUS and other publicity machines intent on raising money by monopolizing the subject. I’ve known the latter since my animal control days in the Seventies when HSUS was trying to discredit other humane organizations, esp. the American Humane Association. Their tactic is to portray something as an atrocity (in those days a high-altitude machine as a method of euthanasia), tie it to their enemy, and thereby demonize the enemy into extinction. In this case they didn’t manage to eliminate AHA, but they did make that method of killing impossible to use anymore.

When the public gets it into their heads that something is demonic, there’s no arguing with them. Also, if they get hold of the idea that something is linked to high status and possibly big money, they hang on just as hard. An example is the American Kennel Club. Based on British class system assumptions plus early domestic animal breeding, for a century or more dog “breeds” have been defined and enforced by the AKC, convincing people that having “papers” means a dog is worthy in both senses. But, also like the Brit landed gentry, the control of pedigree by inbreeding has created dogs with deep genetic flaws and validated the assumptions that make puppy mills possible: forget the dog itself -- consider the piece of paper that comes with it.

The AKC makes money by issuing these “birth certificates” that claim a particular provenance (parentage) without any information about the actual genetic inheritance of the pup, which can be badly compromised by various forces, but esp. the practice of canine incest. Incest, as defined by law, is not meant to be a moral law handed down by God and the Bible, so much as a practical prohibition to prevent damaged babies. But a dog that is prone to joint trouble, deafness, heart trouble and so on is still considered valuable if it has papers. In the early days the faulty pups were destroyed. Because of their “papers” they are now commodified for the gullible as pets.

But that’s not all. Having co-opted the idea of certain classes being “better” than others, based on appearance, the practice of “dog shows” arose. In fact, back in the days before Hitler showed where this would lead with his strange notions of an “Aryan” breed, for which he himself didn’t qualify, county fairs used to hold the equivalent of dog shows for humans, which were generally won by big blonde people. Appearance-based dog shows, added to the idea of provenance or inheritance, have created dog “breeds” with cruel, life-shortening defects. Ask any veterinarian.

The circle of dog people who write blogs I read are also fond of forming loose organizations based on dog breeds but their “breeds” or types of dogs are not grouped according to appearance. Rather they are based on performance. So terriers (terra=earth) are suited by size and temperament to pursue critters more or less their size and chase them down holes -- then dive into the holes after them. This is only helpful if the person with the dog has a shovel and spud bar, plus the energy to dig.

So what’s a “good” dog in this way or in the many other ways that dogs work with people -- specialization that formed the breeds in the first place, esp. since the specialties tend to be local -- is an effective dog, a dog that can be shaped by circumstances, evolved. Patrick is constantly reminding us that a dog with a large chest can’t go down a groundhog hole, no matter how motivated it is. And a high energy terrier kept as a pet in an apartment where no one is home all day, is going to raise hob, quite aside from the fact that as Temple Grandin remarks, a dog that lives in solitary confinement is suffering more than a hog in a factory farm, where it at least has companions. Dogs need things to do and friends who are present to do them with.

Though dogs can “speak” and defend themselves, in the face of intractable and predatory humans they are -- um -- out-manned. Therefore Patrick and his friends have made themselves into publicity terriers and are providing polemic artwork, often based on the idea of evolution. At Patrick’s website you can find examples, in case you want to go walk around the Crufts Kennel Club show, “barking” visually.

Around here people are not sentimental about animals. They love their companions and take good care of them, but they also deal with livestock as their living and know that fancy credentials don’t guarantee conformance or performance. The result of reproduction might simply be the usual hamburger. They want to see the genome, since often they buy only the sperm of the bull, not the bull.

Neither will they tolerate cruelty. Right now the Montana legislature is wrestling with the problem of how to write a bill to close down “animal hoarding” and puppy mill operations. Not easy, since hoarders are often certifiable dementia sufferers who think they are being kind to confine animals they cannot feed or care for and puppy mills who think they will get rich. They are protected by those sentimental enough to approve of outfits like HSUS who show up, offer sound bites to the media, accept checks, and leave.

As we struggle to dis-commodify so many things by restoring them to their rightful value, dogs should take a high priority.

DARK-HEARTED VALENTINE

Sometimes the one you Love is the one you Hate

Cheating lovers, neglectful mothers, abusing fathers, ungrateful children -- they’re out there. Sometimes it seems like the big Hallmark Special Day campaigns are just ways of taunting people who are trying to cope with their feelings about people they are supposed to love but can’t help hating -- with good reason.

And yet, some writers and psychologists will suggest that it’s possible to love your torturer, admire your oppressor, forgive those who crucified you. Pretty unreal.

For one thing, it’s not just an act of will. Hatred, REAL hatred, is embedded in the cells and neurons, coded to trigger reflexive jumps in adrenaline: rage, fear, despair, opposition. REAL hatred is trauma-based, not arguable, not accessible to therapy in the ordinary sense of talking it out. It takes up the entire foreground and leaves no room for anything else. It is obsessive, teaching that only one reaction is enough: total warfare.

And yet love is not the opposite. Love is the same thing: obsession, total arousal, except that this time the move is towards inclusion -- maybe control. Constant contact.

The opposite is stillness. Not indifference, but rest, patience, quiet. It can feel like death.

Well, those are the beliefs I work with. I don’t think they’re true for everyone. I think some people just don’t have any strong emotions; they haven’t got the energy or focus. And others have such strong emotions that they are torn apart with violence, drugs, and accidents they didn’t see coming.

My own solution has been in large part to withdraw from other people. I’m criticized for this as though it were a disability, a failure, but I see it as a choice. I’m not withdrawing from society, I’m coming to a place where I can see it more clearly, where I focus on one small piece and address it as truly as I can, stepping aside from ideas of obscenity or success or charity. Sure, you can call it cloistered if you want to.

Some cloister! No protection. Pretty exposed here. On the other hand you have to want to come here.

The most difficult love/hate knots are the ones from infancy, maybe from implantation in the womb wall. That first umbilical lifeline is the first ambivalence, the child sucking what it needs from the mother and the mother -- what does the mother do? It could end there. I’m pro-choice.

But if the choice is made to continue, either because of social pressure or simple passivity or real desire and love, then the next commitment has to be to the living child and that’s where the problem has been in our affluent society. Once that baby is born, it is the possession of an individual and too often no longer defended by the community. It is at the mercy of caregivers except for being able to squall which may not be a helpful strategy. You mother may strike you, throw you, bash your head. And if you die? She may double bag you in garbage plastic and stuff you in the trunk of the car. (Notorious case in progress at the moment.)

When both love AND hate are present in the same bond, it is twice as strong as one or the other. The emotions draw strength off each other and pretty soon the person carrying them is blinded and bound by the sheer power, never able to leave that cathexis without missing it, feeling empty. And yet the ambivalence can become unbearable, demanding relief even if the only escape is suicide.

The good news is that not all or even most people get into this extreme a fix and then mostly in youth so they can “grow out of it” -- although it’s more like “fade out of it.” I mean, one’s juices do eventually become diluted. Or dry up. Something.

But Heathcliffe/Kathy relationships fascinate us all, draw us in, warm us with their unreasonable heat. So there’s another good thing -- if you think powerful art and writing can come from irresolvable love/hate. Some people can do it and others can’t. One wonders what was so intense in the Bronte household. (The movie in which Michael Kitchen plays the brother who died young suggests some answers. Alcoholism. Calvinism. Too much emphasis on success.) I don’t think one can really write about it from the outside all that successfully. But maybe.

Maybe that’s the only real way it can be written about because anyone who is in it is often rendered mute or babbling or so full of cursing that the message can’t be tolerated. They attack helpers. They can’t think of options and can’t accept help from outside the deadlocked emotions. Especially in a child there’s a sense that the child is to blame and therefore -- connected in weird logic -- they ought to be able to undo the problem if they could only hit upon the right approach. It seems to be their task. Therefore, they don’t want an outsider who couldn’t possibly understand to mix things up.

Oh, hell. What do I know about it? I’m talking nonsense. Not Freud, not Jung, not Perls, nor anyone else really knows what works. They have some theories, try them, adjust them, and sometimes they work. Now we’re into brain function and running people through the scanner to see what that can tell us. Not much.

All you can do in life is to present yourself, be as open as possible, and see where it goes. No guarantees, no red hearts or boxes of chocolates. If you find you are locked into a true love/hate relationship -- take notes. Try to stay alive -- worry about staying sane some other time.

BUMBAUGH'S DECLARATION OF LIBERAL RELIGION

In January the Reverend David Bumbaugh, who is retiring from being the professor of preaching at Meadville/Lombard in Chicago, my seminary of origin, gave a convocation address in January that I find quite powerful. I know my environmental friends will like it, too, though it’s about Unitarian Universalism and that’s the point of the speech. Two denominations, Unitarian and Universalist (Bumbaugh’s original affiliation as a minister -- he was raised Salvation Army), merged in 1961 but the result has been a denomination as unwieldy as the name. Bumbaugh’s position is that this is because the Universalists had gathered around the idea of finding a new theology (universal salvation), while the Unitarians were interested in organizational growth (and the rural but frugal Univeralist’s assets).

The Montana circuit-riding ministry that I did http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif1982-85 was financed in part by Universalist money that was hidden to keep it from being merged. Russ Lockwood and Emil Gudmundson knew where it was and thought that the comparatively rural ministry to Montana fellowships was in line with Universalist values.

Bumbaugh’s tone is divided between the elegiac and the prophetic. His respondents scold him, diagnose him, and simply don’t “get” him. I won’t put the whole speech and response in this blog (go to www.meadville.edu -- you might notice that Lombard got gobbled up in the address.) His message is that there is an essential contraction between commodifying religion to market it for the sake of growth and the actual pursuit of meaning and community that the denomination is supposed to support. The means overtake the ends. I strongly suspect that this is the essential human contradiction in many realms: politics, the arts, settlements, and so on. The tribe eats the Indian. The nation eats the citizen.

Many of the people who rail against religion are totally unaware of the huge Liberal Religion body of thought. Far from knowing what it might include, they don’t know it exists today, much less historically. But Bumbaugh has not forgotten. Below is his beautiful, true, and moral list of beliefs in the age of cosmic physics, evolution, fMRI’s and the genetic basis of life itself.

We believe that the universe in which we live and move and have our being is the expression of an inexorable process that began in eons past, ages beyond our comprehension and has evolved from singularity to multiplicity, from simplicity to complexity, from disorder to order.

We believe that the earth and all who live upon the earth are products of the same process that swirled the galaxies into being, that ignited the stars and orbited the planets through the night sky, that we are expressions of that universal process which has created and formed us out of recycled star dust.

We believe that all living things are members of a single community, all expressions of a planetary process that produced life and sustains it in intricate ways beyond our knowing. We hold the life process itself to be sacred.

We believe that the health of the human venture is inextricably dependent upon the integrity of the rest of the community of living things and upon the integrity of those processes by which life is bodied forth and sustained. Therefore we affirm that we are called to serve the planetary process upon which life depends.

We believe that in this interconnected existence the well-being of one cannot be separated from the well-being of the whole, that ultimately we all spring from the same source and all journey to the same ultimate destiny.

We believe that the universe outside of us and the universe within us is one universe. Because that is so, our efforts, our dreams, our hopes, our ambitions are the dreams, hopes and ambitions of the universe itself. In us, and perhaps elsewhere, the Universe is reaching toward self-awareness, toward self consciousness. We believe that our efforts to understand the world and our place within it are an expression of the Universe’s deep drive toward meaning. In us, and perhaps elsewhere, the Universe dreams dreams and reaches toward unknown possibilities. We hold as sacred the unquenchable drive to know and to understand.

We believe that the moral impulse that weaves its way through our lives, luring us to practices of justice and mercy and compassion, is threaded through the universe itself and it is this universal longing that finds outlet in our best moments.

We believe that our location within the community of living things places upon us inescapable responsibilities. Life is more than our understanding of it, but the level of our comprehension demands that we act out of conscious concern for the broadest vision of community we can command and that we seek not our welfare alone, but the welfare of the whole. We are commanded to serve life and serve it to the seven times seventieth generation.

We believe that those least like us, those located on the margins have important contributions to make to the rest of the community of life and that in some curious way, we are all located on some margin. We believe that all that functions to divide us from each other and from the community of living things is to be resisted in the name of that larger vision of a world everywhere alive, everywhere seeking to incarnate a deep, implicate process that called us into being, that sustains us in being, that transforms us as we cannot transform ourselves, that receives us back to itself when life has used us up. Not knowing the end of that process, nonetheless we trust it, we rest in it, and we serve it.

Both Unitarianism and Universalism were reactions to the harshness and illogic of Calvinism (Puritans, Taliban, Fundamentalists) but the Universalists took on the harshness while the Unitarians took on the illogic. Both were reform movements. Now the harshness and illogic are back but ineffectively opposed by religion because we’ve gone to “therapy” and commodification.

I remind you of my own exo-UU (not former, but outside) credo: “Everything is connected, everything changes, every change you make in yourself changes everything else, the God you get is the God you make.” I’m not inedible, but I hope I’m gristley. (Not grisly -- just indigestible.)