PACKAGING THE WIND

Speaking with some exaggeration, ignoring the idea that the planet Earth is a sphere rather than a circle and more ovoid than perfectly round, the planet is a wheel -- turning, always turning, going dark and going bright in predictable sequence as it circles the sun. 

We are its products, made persistent by our ability to change ourselves or even change the planet so as to preserve a fit.  But it's not a perfect fit any more than it's a perfectly round planet.  Nor does it move in a perfect circle, but wobbles as it goes while the sun dims, flares, and sends waves of force.

But "perfect" is a concept for wealthy privileged young women whose daddies provide weddings, however many it takes, so their daughters can demonstrate how important and powerful their daddies are.  As the world has turned for thousands of years but particularly for the last centuries, these men have been fortunate, at least some of them have, until now we're beginning to resent the way they use the privilege and blame them  for everything, even climate change, as whole countries slip beneath the waves and another kind of wave, that of disease and climate change, wash through cultures.

China has avoided the disease of predatory capitalism to some degree but it is striking that closing all the factories to keep the fuel of human effort from burning in a virus, has cleared the skies over China.  No more smoke  warming the climate, at least for a while.  In other places instead of dying of famine because crops are too controlled for profit and we're too dependent on repetition, around the world people are suffocating from the lung virus of Covid 19.  It remains to be seen whether this will alter demographics enough to change nations, but it might.  Maybe already.

The linking of empire emanating from small European countries and viruses springing from the Asian side of the continent where people have learned to eat anything they can catch (which is also true of African countries) may temporarily solve the problem of overpopulation.  We eat the planet and we eat each other.

Lately it has become plain that the "old white men", fossilized by doing what they've always done even though the world has changed, are stuck  to the wheel of culture-persistence that meets the road of resources.  They are about to be crushed.  This may be the last year that photos of people in suits gathered around long tables in important places show only white males.  I hope.

They deny and despair. 

"The diseases of despair are three classes of behavior-related medical conditions that increase in groups of people who experience despair due to a sense that their long-term social and economic outlook is bleak. The three disease types are drug overdose (including alcohol overdose), suicide, and alcoholic liver disease."

"Diseases of despair, and the resulting deaths of despair, are high in the Appalachia region of the United States. The prevalence increased markedly during the first decades of the 21st century, especially among middle-aged and older working class white Americans starting in 2010, followed by an increase in mortality for Hispanic Americans in 2011 and African Americans in 2014. It gained media attention because of its connection to the opioid epidemic."

^"Diseases of despair differ from diseases of poverty because poverty itself is not the central factor.  . . . Instead, this affects people who have little reason to believe that the future will be better."

I do not have subjective first-hand knowledge of despair.  But I've lived on a rez for about twenty years and next to the same one for the same length of time.  The deaths of despair have been far more spectacular here:  car crashes, murders, death-by-cop, exposure, large angry animals, beatings of the vulnerable -- "soul murder."  

The early paragraphs of this post are the ideas of Anne Case.

https://www.pnas.org/content/112/49/15078  She wrote the paper pointing this out.  "This paper documents a marked increase in the all-cause mortality of middle-aged white non-Hispanic men and women in the United States between 1999 and 2013. This change reversed decades of progress in mortality and was unique to the United States; no other rich country saw a similar turnaround. The midlife mortality reversal was confined to white non-Hispanics."

If farmers are included in this demographic group, outright suicide by gun or hanging has to be added.  Because they are going broke and their families are dispersing to save themselves.  They only know one way to live and the expertise of Anne Case, a health economist, can only point out the problem rather than offering solutions.

https://www.ft.com/content/6f2ed9b6-582e-11ea-a528-dd0f971febbc

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Case

It's in the Bible, you know:  "in the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus declares that in the world to come, “The last shall be first and the first last.”  Jesus suggested a new planet: the Kingdom of Heaven, but if that has worked out, no one has sent word back to us.  Unless you count "Star Trek."

The policies of old white men that made them rich have also sealed their doom.  Hiding all profits in bookkeeping tricks in secret corners instead of spending profits on the "least of these" and failing to complexify occupations so they make room instead of simply crowding out real people, has now caught up with them.  Globalization has exceeded their ability to package the wind for mercantile purposes.

Sneering, they have said not "let them eat cake" but "let them eat grass," which turns out to be poison in quantity.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/epgmqw/climate-change-could-lead-to-toxic-food-cassava?utm_content=1583247070&utm_medium=social&utm_source=VICE_twitter

And the President who thinks he's the king of the world has to have his food pureed in order to keep from choking on it.  When one thinks about all this in metaphors, one either laughs or cries.  I'll be more constructive next time.

A CASE STUDY: BOY AT RISK

According to this embodied meaning theory, from the very beginning a person is an “organism-environmental coupling”.  Of course, the very beginning is a chromosomal coupling, which then becomes a blastosphere, which divides itself in half so that half can become an infant and the other half can become the spacesuit attachment to the mother’s uterus for the purpose of molecular exchange.  But besides that, the environmental unit containing the baby walks around, makes noise, laughs, sings, embraces other people, plays volleyball or the piano.  I’m saying that from the beginning the environment is moving and changing and therefore the fetus has all that to feel and record on VENN cells.

The “organism/environment coupling” is what creates a human being.  The purpose of a brain is to manage the coupling and the purpose of the coupling is survival.  It is the deluge of sensations washing through the neurons to the brain for sorting and possible action that is the true nature of “thought” — not the introverted reflections of an evasive person in an ivory tower.

But no sooner does the individual figure out how to survive in his particular world than the world changes (birth).  The terms of survival are new, and either the person changes his or her. strategy or they don’t survive.  Which brings us to boys at risk.

Let’s make one up just to play with the ideas without embarrassing anyone.  Pretend this boy is in a bottom-of-the- barrel situation with an unknown dad and a hooked hooker mom.  When she’s clean, she’s fine, but that doesn’t happen often.  She’s just attractive enough for there to be a steady procession of men through the household.  Somehow there was enough order and food for the infant to survive.  Maybe the guy of the moment was from an ethnic group that took it for granted that a man could mother and so this imaginary guy mothered both the woman and the baby.

That means that when the maturation window for imprinting arrived, the baby imprinted like a baby duck on this drake.  But maybe the two adults in their coupling mixed sex with drugs and that meant they forgot about the baby sometimes.  The baby learned that there are long wet cold hungry times but if he could hang on, the care would come back.  Still, he learned not to care, not to want, not to worry, not to be active on his own behalf because there was nothing he could do without adults to charm.  He teetered between the edge of despair (“the hell with them”) and blaming himself.  As he grew older he grew harder and stop believing that things could ever be good.  Cynicism was his shield.

As he grew up, it turned out that he could still charm adults, though he often punished them and they betrayed him because they didn’t expect punishment and didn’t like it, but he didn’t see the connection.  Finally he pair-bonded with someone like that man he had been imprinted with and he didn’t want to punish that close person, didn’t want him to leave.  He didn’t want to just seduce him, but to really be loyal and deeply intimate.  

One day he gets a bicycle, don’t ask how, and then he can travel farther.  He works on the bicycle until he’s a pretty good bike mechanic and gets a job.  Puberty hits and he learns which parts of town he can cruise, because it turns out he’s a YY instead of an XY.  This means that one part of the culture will hate him and try to kill him, and another part will claim him and try to make him conform to their ideas.

The edges and rags of his former strategies keep showing up and cutting through.  He needs help.  He feels blind, unable to understand what was happening.  The old way of being in the world just didn’t work but how does he get to a new way without losing himself, the identity he had had to hack out of an unforgiving world?  Then he tests positive for HIV.  

So let’s look at possible ways to change.  It’s not easy.  The body tries to be consistent, to do what worked last time and the mind’s impulse is to rationalize that, to knit a cover story.  They’re in cahoots.  (Actually they are different aspects of the same thing, the organic being trying to manage itself in an unpredictable world.)

So, this invented person has found an invented significant other, someone he cares about.  What if he’s an illegal immigrant?  Probably, even if he is, this ethnic man likely has a second advantage: community.  Maybe he was raised in a small town with a lot of family.  Maybe he works with a crew doing manual labor and they form friendships. He knows how to be in a community and sets an example.

Or maybe he has a cause, maybe he’s an AIDS activist or is working on a political justice issue, so that he has self-respect for what he is doing.  Or maybe he is a graffiti artist, a really good one who is admired and can draw publicity to issues.  These are all ways of changing while not losing one’s identity.

What I’ve been working towards understanding is how experiencing the sacred can be useful for organism/
environment grappling.  If this loved one is from South or Central America, he likely has some experience with Catholic worship and stories, but how can a guy with no background and a justified grudge against all authority figures, much less a god who won’t get involved, feel anything spiritual -- or whatever you want to call it?  Still, he struggles along and watches others, wondering what they’re feeling.

I could make this story go any number of ways — so many ways that life and this culture will kill you, cripple you, deceive you.  But I’m trying to put in little handholds, the kind of small things or even big things that can transform everything and everybody.  So this imaginary boy survives through the enormous challenge that is finding sexual balance and gets all the way to that mid-twenties flowering of the brain/mind that gives more power and possibility.  Somehow he teaches himself how to read.

He finds a guitar and that penchant for Mexicans he has means that someone teaches him the basics.  Music begins to flow through him and he finds a new lover who also plays the guitar.  They can easily sit together playing duets all night.  

One full moon night they go out to an abandoned gravel pit they’ve found where the quarry walls make a reverb and someone has dumped an old trashed-out sofa intact enough to sit on.  It is a safe place with the moon down so low a person could pat its cool surface.  It is a natural sacred experience.  It won’t last, but at least now he knows what it’s like.  Intense.  Some say it’s worth all the suffering in the rest of life.

I don’t know.  I’m just making this up.  I don’t really know this boy’s life though I carefully watch the vids made by boys like him.  One way to access the sacred is empathy and one way to empathize is to try to imagine other lives even if you get it wrong.  I’ll learn more and try again . . .and again.

THE SONG OF BOOKS

The Strachans: Bruce, Lucy, Mary, Mark, Paul

My father (1903 - 1969) was a problem.  He also evidently had a problem he couldn’t resolve and his search for answers packed our house with books.  He was the oldest surviving child lived 17 days because he was premature.   (The first conception — and I’m aware that probably women lose several conceptions without knowing.) I’m the oldest surviving child of my father’s, assuming all his children were inside the marriage to my mother, which was certainly faithful on her side.  She always thought my father might have a second family somewhere, so to her mind if he were unfaithful, it would be in conventional terms.

I inherited his search for an indefinable solution and acquired as many books, but the difference is that I read mine.  Not just read, but try to tear apart in the interest of understanding.  I couldn’t do this until my books were purchased — one doesn’t harm library books which are community property.  I have always been highly “moral” in the interest of avoiding danger.  But at some point, maybe late high school, I decided that I would follow good evidence wherever it went, though it made my ears sing with adrenaline.

My father traveled with cameras for his job (PR) and took this photo himself.

He had a concussion.

It’s not as though my father would turn out to be a bank robber or a murderer.  He was a “spanker” and a lousy provider.  I decided this was due to head trauma from an accident driving at night in the Oregon Coast Range when a drunk driver hit his car head on.  But maybe there’s more.  His job — except during WWII — was as a traveling man, a “drummer” not to sell things but as a field man for Pacific Supply Cooperative, which supplied things (mostly petro-derived) to farmer co-ops.  Since he grew up on the prairie, partly in Canada, he was highly aware of the power of co-ops, as though they were his church.  Otherwise, he claimed to be an atheist.  But he was certainly a progressive, esp. when it came to things like nudism or birth control — that is, the taboo parts of life.  

My father tried to make taboos pretty and harmless.

I inherited that.

I inherited that, too, though I never really acted on any of it.  Like him, I mostly read books, but the Seventies revealed that a lot of people shared his ideas.  I know some of them now, still, though they’re older.  Rainbow Family, hippies, off the grid.  I’d sort of timidly approach them, but get rocked back on my heels.

My father traveled during the week, came home exhausted but also wanting a little RandR, like movies; wanting to involve his family in hiking.  Consciously or unconsciously, he chose my mother as someone competent who would manage while he was gone.  This worked until my mother, realizing there was never going to be enough money, went back to college to get her teaching degree.  Adding this meant her weekends were jammed and she became less willing.  Also, what she learned changed her.

When my father died, we discovered that hidden behind his conventional books, some of them popular writing (novels, self-improvement, and culturally admired books like Shakespeare), was a lot of porn.  Not sophisticated erotica (he kept his medical sexology books in his sock drawer — Masters and Johnson, Freud, Kinsey) but lurid truck stop paperback porn.  This was female-overpowering, vulgar, violent stuff.  I only read a few before my brother threw them in his pickup and took them directly to the dump so no garbage man could say where they came from.

With all this information at hand, why was my father reading porn in cheap motels instead of continuing his education? (There was no TV.)  He had a BS from Manitoba and an MS from OSU (then a college) — was it their fault that he never progressed to the level of the Saturday Book Review?  He was a magazine addict, very conventional:  Newsweek, Time, Post, Look, Life.  (I read all of them, too.)  My mother had no time to read until she was retired.  Then she read “Book of the Month” sorts of things.   She liked to do what was popular. 

When I was serving the Kirkland Northshore Unitarian Universalist Church (across the lake from Seattle), as an interim minister, the book causing a sensation was Alice Miller’s “The Drama of the Gifted Child.”  This congregation was a cheerful, lively bunch of artists, teachers, counselors and journalists and many of them loved that book.  

They had been raised humanely and loved their parents (mostly) though they tried to live even more ideal lives.  Miller’s premise was that above-average kids tended to break the taboo on criticizing their parents and critiquing their childhood.  They wanted to be original, not owned by family.  Pretty safe with this group — I don’t even remember any alcoholics.  Drugs weren’t in play. 

In those days I knew nothing about incest based on idealism, and little about male gays.  Neither did most other people.  That may have been a quiet pull beneath our lives.  Would it have explained my father?  Was he abused?  Did he abuse my brothers? (I asked the surviving bro, who said, “Certainly NOT!”)  Then what was the fixation on sex about?  Was he aware of some shortfall in his own dynamics, maybe connected to his failure to be aggressive at work?  He was quite fat and about as sexy as Santa Claus, except no beard.  (I find beards sexy.)  His mother developed a goiter later in life, so I wonder whether the iodine deficiency of the prairies affected her pregnancies.

There’s a body of literature about parents who believe that their children should be gently and lovingly initiated into sexual activity by their own parents (same or other) or by a sex worker surrogate while they wait in the next room.  This is a violation of the conventional (Victorian) boundary between the generations and very confusing.  Esp. if the natural desire of the still-child is same sex or just null.  For some people sex arrives as an overwhelming thunderbolt and then the problem is quite different.  It’s also different in a rural setting than in an urban one with many layers and categories of private culture.  And different between English and French.

My mother (1909 - 1998) had three sisters and an intense Irish-descent father who never really succeeded, but kept everything going by taking construction projects which meant traveling.  The family construct was that the three girls were as good as any boys.  One summer my mother used a borrowed mule to raise a cash crop of corn.  The two oldest girls in particular were strong and competent, very attached to their father, comfortable working alongside men.

My father’s sibs were two male and one girl, very pretty and refined.  In fact, that family’s formal position was that women are princesses, gracile, to be cherished, beautifully dressed, and taught to play the piano and paint charming but tiny watercolors.  My father then played the gallant guardian, romantic and faithful, but never sexual.  He tried to pull me into that story (though I found it confusing for him to offer to take me to a burlesque show) but in that aspect I remained with my mother’s take on the subject, which included jealousy of all precious princesses.  As soon as she had an actual son, I was demoted to being her assistant.

Luckily, I had excellent teachers.  It was the Fifties and they were nearing retirement, essentially Edwardian, often single, and unconflicted. Education (liberal arts) was their answer to everything.  It worked and still works.  Of course, I read all those books, but never discussed them until I got to college where the doors flew open.  They were stage doors and from then on life was dramatic, multiple, and incredible.  I like it when my ears sing.

GIVE ME BACK MY CHAINS

Imprisoned by trauma

It’s pretty common for people who have made big changes in their lives, even for the better, to get “homesick” for the old life even though it may have been miserable and the person might have made an heroic fight to get out.  Consider all the immigrants coming out of Syria: can you imagine making the transition to living in the US?  Consider all the Russians who suffered and suffered, won victories, and headed right back into oppression and suffering.  I once read a moving piece about a street dweller who took refuge with Good Will, lasted six months and went back to the street.  For the freedom, he said.

It’s a counselling given that to most people a known hardship is more attractive than an unknown good, an uncertain future.  It’s not rational and it’s not even emotional.  It’s physical, biological.  It is built into all animals to want to stay, even to go back to where they were.  One follows the likelihood of stability, trustworthiness, predictability, which are associated with a known place.

I’m still thinking through the consequences of our narrow understanding of consciousness, esp. in terms of the mantras called “choice” and “discipline”.  Basically, we believe that we are consciously thinking through evidence and are in control of the decisions we make based on them.  By now I don't get up in the morning to write a blog as a matter of discipline -- it's a habit.  I finally figured it out when someone told me that when they had to give up practising the piano every morning, their fingers hungered for the keyboard.

“Consciousness” is only part of thought.  We insist on thinking of it as the “highest” part of us, our identity, that part of us that we can hold accountable, a purified derivation of experience.  In fact, it is foam on the beer, as transient and shifting as any other aspect of a functioning human.  Criminal law only works because of our assumptions about guilt — that bad acts are purposeful and we must be held accountable — and that is enforced by writing out laws and precedents so they will stay consistent.  Otherwise the consequences are too much the result of contingencies, sometimes major factors (a state of war or stigma) and sometimes minor (simply not liking something about a person or yielding to influence from someone powerful).

The media has found that stories about people unjustly punished sell well, though they tend to back off from social categories penalized for being poor, or young, or immigrant.  But this discussion is not about the social desire to go back, to have “do-overs,” to repent of rebellions.  I’m thinking about individuals.

We had a pet eagle who was unable to fly when she was brought to us as a fledgling.  We built her as a big a cage as we could, but it was hardly enough for her to actually fly ten feet.  One day we replaced the wire on the cage, so she was not caged between the time we took the old wire off and put new on.  She did indeed fly up to the ridge of the house and she spent about an hour there.  Then she returned to her cage which she could only do because we left the door open.  It was what she knew, where she ate and slept.  Home.

A golden eagle and a bald eagle are two different birds, though most of the public can’t distinguish except for the white head that was incorrectly called “bald.”  The reason they are so different is that they inhabit different ecosystems:  the bald eagle lives along rivers and eats both carrion and fish.  When the fish spawn, the eagles cluster in large numbers, perching in the big trees along the river.  Plenty to eat, no need to hide.

Golden eagles eat small mammals on the prairie.  They stay high in the sky, using their fantastic eyesight to constantly scan for small hurrying movements.  Then they drop as fast as bullets and pluck up the ground squirrel the same way a bald eagle plucks a fish out of water.  Bald eagles have featherless legs so they’ll shed water.  I could really get off on this stuff.

Because we are not individual organisms at all.  First our whole species is shaped by the environment and next we as individuals only think we are self-contained.  Skin separates us from the environment, but life barely distinguishes between what’s in-skin and what’s out-skin.  The body adapts to whatever food is in the environment, even the timing of ingestion, so that it “wants” whatever it is used to.  The molecules prepare so that the lining of the stomach and the action of the gall bladder excrete a little in advance of what they expect.   

The addiction to chemicals like street drugs are only a more intense version of every creature’s addiction to the world, and the effect of change on the body is also the same.  I mean, if you’re used to coffee in the morning, your body will cry for it.  We so underestimate this sub-conscious effect, this limbic factor, this cellular “thinking,” when we make changes.  

Yesterday someone asked me for something to read that would indicate how I’m thinking these days.  One of the key concepts I pursue is the “liminal,” an anthropological term that addresses the limens or threshholds of life and describes ceremonies that help body, mind, and community cross over them.  Of course, the community helps us remember who we are even as we change and disrupts us if they get it wrong — say on return from the military or from university.  

“Now it is time to broaden the definition of the liminal again. Some of our new liminality comes from the rise of the global citizen, whose work and lifestyle takes them from culture to culture in service of multinational corporations, governments, and nonprofits aiding the developing world. With economies slowing in the West and heating up in places like Turkey, China, India, and Brazil, workers can expect to leave their culture of origin for foreign lands. That includes Americans themselves.”  -- from an article in Nautil.us

Liminality is something like being “through the looking glass” where things are reversed, but also unpredictable.  But it is also like being homesick, where the loved and familiar has not yet been replaced by attachment to a new context, even one that was chosen and wanted, even better suited than the previous home.  There’s something hard-wired-in. 

The research on brain organization and function seems to suggest that one kind of neurons are clustered like computer documents in folders, which can be nested in other folders, deeper and deeper layered.  What I find suggestive is the idea that a “deep” experience can reach the deepest and most inclusive pre-suppositional folders of neurons in order to open them to change.

In a completely different metaphor, I’ve heard people talk about feeling that they were going to drown unless they struggled in the only way they knew.  But when they surrendered and relaxed, they found that the water was holding them up -- they were floating.  There’s a suggestion of suicide about this idea, which makes it scary, but it IS a kind of suicide to let the old self die so that a new self has a space in which to form.  Waiting for a guarantee and preview of that new self is not possible.  You have to “become” into the terrifying future.

It’s best to find a community that can travel together.  Ceremonies of leaving and accepting are as much about the body as the mind.  Helpers must give up the idea that it is something they are doing, that they are “saving” people.  It is only providing the opportunity that helps.  The actual work of leaving and accepting must be done by the individual in his own body.  The rules are not written.  They must be evolved face-to-face.

But cultures and nations often get in the way by trying to hurry, to make rules and appoint panels, to force growth, but never to change the deep forces that are convenient to them as power-mongers, the entitled.

TIPPING TOWARDS SUMMER

This is the day of the solstice, the shortest day of the year, when the whole planet on its wobbly axis pauses and then begins to tip towards summer. The weather out the window looks like a replay of yesterday, blowing hard. It wasn’t supposed to. The winds stopped in the night and it was supposed to quietly snow today, but one weatherman said frankly it was anyone’s guess. Too turbulent to tell. Just like politics.

Change is incessant. For the second time this month the Sunday Great Falls Tribune ran a local story on HIV-AIDS. There are about 500 people known to have HIV or AIDS in Montana with about 20 new diagnoses every year. The Metropolitan Community Church in Great Falls has NO members who are positive for HIV. The disease has drifted from gays to illegal injected drug users, who are not gay but must stay covert to evade the law.

For this story by Erin Madison only one man was willing to be identified and photographed as a person with HIV positive status. He’s Greg Smith, a mental health counselor who grew up in Montana but has spent a lot of time in Seattle where he has a practice. Sitting behind his array of daily pills, he’s a big handsome guy with glasses whose home is in Bozeman, one of the university towns where people are generally sophisticated and traveled enough to accept his status.

We’re on a cusp with HIV-AIDS -- it's tipping. For the first time there has been someone cured of AIDS, almost accidentally because of a bone marrow transplant. The meds are sophisticated enough to maintain a rich person or one in a country that subsidizes them. The sheets have been pulled away, revealing that people’s sex practices are more various than we thought. Many women now have HIV, possibly brought home by husbands or lovers, that they transmit to their babies unless there is treatment. Some African countries now have shockingly high fractions of their population infected with HIV. Orphans are becoming adults in institutions.

Those who have been paying attention know that I’ve been writing at the periphery of a group of “lost boys” who have now grown up. They were handsome, intelligent, seductive and wicked as well as gifted: survivors have turned out well. The time went quickly. That stage has been replaced by an AIDS activism-through-arts website and a Tribeca art gallery sponsored by an Englishwoman. I’m separated from that but continue to read TheBody.com. This year they lost “Dr. Bob,” one of the charismatic and endlessly energized leaders. He died of septic shock, which we used to call blood poisoning. He was gay and in a committed relationship with another male doctor but got the virus from a deep fingerstick when treating an AIDS patient.

When I first moved back to Valier over ten years ago, I worked as a ward clerk for a short time. A nurse there had sustained a similar fingerstick and was sweating out the six month’s wait before tests would show whether the virus had jumped to her. The first AIDS death of a friend was a Canadian ministerial colleague, a young handsome man in a relationship with a doctor who could not save him. At ministerial meetings where he was present, we grew used to the sound of his pill dispenser, which chimed to remind him. I cannot pretend that HIV only infects the “Other.”

This is not our first pandemic: plague in Europe wiped out one third of the people and left the land standing empty. Tuberculosis -- still not eradicated -- took a whole generation. The Spanish Flu, connected to WWI, nearly killed my mother as a child and did kill her doctor. One cannot live by a reservation without awareness of the Euro-introduced diseases, mostly smallpox, that killed far more people than any massacre. The United States kills more people by withholding subsidies for HIV drugs than it does by waging war. There are 26 people in Montana on the waiting list for med subsidies for their HIV.

The planet tips on its axis in the middle of winter. Need and chaos are everywhere. Another article in the paper suggested that times have rarely been so polarized, ignorant, punishing and vitriolic. The papers themselves are in deep trouble. Internet webs have revealed us to each other more deeply than any other media, from our naked silliness to our esoteric piercing sciences. The response of the government has been to try to block, to tax, to regulate -- while our political representatives still include many who refuse to touch a keyboard. Never learned to type anyway. (Only girls type.)

I have not continued to be active with AIDS groups, not because I’ve lost sympathy but because I’m not a one-issue person. I don’t see AIDS as a virus alone but as a complex of forces interacting to alienate people, stunt their growth, wall them off from each other. I don’t see HIV as a gay disease or even as a human disease. (Though Dr. Bob would reassure worrywarts that you can’t catch HIV from a bedbug and if you could, it would be BIV -- not Human Immunosuppressive Virus but Bedbug Immunosuppressive Virus.) I see it as a bit of planetary code -- a bit of the genetic life blueprint of every living being since the first eukaryote grabbed a mitochondria and started building a creature. Now that we begin to read the molecular blueprint, we can intervene more effectively.

If we WILL. We aren’t using the knowledge we already have to make life more human-friendly. We’re told what we need to do -- we just don’t want to do it, mostly because it means change, it means understanding “the Other,” it means giving up our grasping and commodifying that is both based on and built from maintaining a gulch between the haves and the have nots and dominating whatever bridges are thrown up. I’m only a cultural Christian -- my doctrine is everythingist, transcultural. Jesus’ claim that “what you do to the least of these you do also to me” is not that that different from the motto of the Bioneers: “It is all connected, it is all alive, it is all changing.”

Another story in the paper today is about avian flu and our ability to make it jump species. That’s where smallpox and HIV came from. It’s a very dangerous thing to tinker with -- but how else can we find out about it? We are still eukaryotes grabbing mitochondria before we know what to do with them. The planet has tipped many times since that started happening. It tips towards summer as well as winter. Now the light begins to grow in Montana. A hard wind is blowing.

FOUR-CHAMBERED HEART

Two of the most useful diagrams for thinking that I know about are the Venn diagram, which is two or more overlapping circles to show which things are shared and which things are not,  and the quadrants -- the four-paned window like the one Joe and Harry figured out and called “the Johari window.”  It’s really just two perpendicular variables, like an xy graph, and how they sort things out.  For Joe and Harry it was “things you know about yourself and everyone else knows about you/ things you don’t know about yourself that everyone else knows/ things you know about yourself that no one else knows/ things you don’t know about yourself and neither does anyone else.

Today I ran into two new versions of quadrant diagrams.  One was about art versus artifacts, how objects get moved from one category to the other (valuable to not-valuable as well as from art to artifacts and vice versa of both).  Actually, it was two quadrants, one nested inside the other.  I’ll come back to that in a future post.

The other was a thing called cynefin, which is supposed to be Welsh.  Here’s one explanation that’s very nice.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5mqNcs8mp74    

We are so hungry for effective tools that will sort out ideas.  The people using this as a sorting mechanism seem to be cleaning up doing workshops among the quizzical, but there IS some value to it.   For instance, I’m trying hard to understand Heart Butte, partly because I’ve been working on the manuscript I call “Heartbreak Butte,” and partly because the U.S. post office wants to remove their post office, which is a travesty of an idea since that little hamlet is totally dependent on the post office and suffers even if it has a tyrant for a postmaster.   Not having a post office would be a stake through their heart.

I see a strong resemblance between this sorting system and a previous book I’m still digesting, called “Five Percent.”  The idea of that book is that most problems might be difficult, but they can be solved.  But five percent of them are so complex and hidden in crucial aspects that they are insoluble.  Not that that should keep anyone from thinking about them.  I thought about taking on the present national politics and decided that was far beyond me.  That doesn’t really mean that Heart Butte is less complex or even that much different, so this seemingly small problem is worthwhile.  Not seeing it as worthwhile is part of the problem.

The bottom right quadrant (which is where the Piegan Blackfeet reservation is -- the two relevant perpendicular lines being the Rocky Mountains and the 49th parallel) is labeled “simple.”  About the only thing that stays in place in Heart Butte is the Rockies, although erosion carved Heart Butte out of its side.  The weather is controlled by this cordillera as well as the latitude, so that the “snow line” is often at just about the level of the village, but varies quite a lot.  This is a flood plain, which is crucial to the history of development.  Next to Heart Butte are national parks and national forest, which allows some people to be guides and to hunt, but also opens up issues about the “ceded strip,” which is more history.  The simplest theme is that Heart Butte is a jurisdictional place in a geological place, with the two types of order interacting as two main variables.  (There we go again.  Another quadrant graph.)

Probably the top righthand quadrant ought to go to that “complicated” issue of jurisdiction:  boundaries, sovereignty, education, county/state/federal/corporation/tribal stuff, all interacting and messing with each other.  But much of it is written down, at least, in laws and regulations that can be and have been interpreted by courts.  I would put in all the issues of infrastructure: the phone, water systems, the school, the clinic, electricity, gas.  I would include the institutional churches but not “spirituality.”  Law and order.  The housing projects.

So then the top lefthand quadrant, "Complex," which is described as “cause and effect coherent in retrospect that repeats accidentally -- but unpredictably."  Here’s where history counts: the choice of the location by the old-timers, the relationship with the metis, the impact of personalities like Chief Bull, Mike Swims Under, and John Tatsey, plus that story-loop about the police officer dragged to death, the sequence and personalities of the priests like Father Mallman or Sister Edna, and maybe there ought to be attention paid to the “natural history” of the wildlife and even plants, livestock and irrigation.  The Flood of 1964 which moved so many out and then returned so many later is a crucial event.  Maybe athletics belong here in a historical way.  The theme would be complexity but in understandable terms, at least looking back.

And the bottom lefthand quadrant is supposed to be "Chaos," which was the flood, but that’s past and we have no idea what might come next.  We tend to think in terms of catastrophe -- plague, fire, an assassin/terrorist, the loss of the post office.  But there might be something good.  It will be fascinating to see what the payout secured by Eloise Cobell will do.  A wave of drug use and drunkeness beyond compare as the gangs I keep hearing about finally prevail?  A village corporation that pools the funds in order to do some remarkable thing?  Pondera County signing that corner of the rez over to Glacier County?  The reservation becoming a free-standing county of its own?   A gold strike in the cemetery?  A strong, focused and charismatic personality taking hold?  A talking circle that calls the youngsters to account and changes their lives?

Or might it be bigger.  The huge earthquake that some say will eventually grip the whole east slope of the Rockies.  The breaking apart of the United States into ecologies which are small enough to administer in a far more specific way.  A new technology that is a source of free energy everywhere.  A cure for diabetes.

Or will it be spiritual, evolutionary, coming out of that lower left quadrant labeled Chaos as pure potential, out of the most chaotic of sources: the human heart.

THE SKY HAS FALLEN

This is a quote from “Sightings” which is an e-mailing that comes twice a week from the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School where I earned an MA in Religious Studies.  

There are  “varying classes of college-level teachers: tenured and tenure-track; full-time but non-tenure track (such as visiting professors, lecturers, and instructors); adjunct faculty, who are generally paid on a per-course basis; and graduate student teachers and teaching assistants whose teaching is often bound up with financial aid or other program requirements.

“Yet contingent faculty—all those off the tenure track—make up approximately 70% of instructors in American higher education. Of those who hold terminal degrees, adjuncts are often worst off: pay generally hovers around $2,000-$3,000 per course, although some large, wealthy institutions may pay as much as $7,000, and some smaller or public schools pay even less.

“In order to make ends meet, most adjuncts teach at multiple institutions. They earn no benefits, have no job security, and often lack access to other perks that full-time academic employment can bring: eligibility for promotion; an institutional home (avoiding the dreaded “independent scholar” label); budgets for books, conference fees and travel, and professional organization memberships; the ability to sponsor events and conferences; uninterrupted library privileges; a voice in university and departmental affairs; and even office space and supplies. All of this affects their ability to teach, mentor, and research.

“Adjunct positions are disposable, not temp-to-hire; but precisely for that reason, their numbers are increasing: some foresee the day when tenured faculty are primarily administrators for departments consisting entirely of adjuncts.

“. . . the myth of academic meritocracy—including the promise of decently-paid, full-time jobs to all deserving Ph.D.’s—continues to thrive, despite extensive documentation to the contrary. This means, in turn, that after devoting five, ten, even fifteen years or longer to the study of religion, a pursuit they both believe and are told is critical to understanding the contemporary world, even graduates of top schools realize too late how little chance they have of earning a decent livelihood and making a contribution to their chosen field. They are powerless and stuck, exploited by the ones who hold the keys to their professional future.”

So it has happened: the death of the university.  This is not a place corrupted by athletics, booze and carelessness.  This is a vital part of a major respected institution, hollowed out and collapsing -- just like publishing, journalism, financial institutions, political parties, the military, all the arrangements of Western-style humanities -- including third world clients.  Professionals were supposed to be the jobs that stayed, after all the plumbers and welders and other physical jobs had collapsed.  White collar institutions were supposed to be refuges.  High status intellectuals thought they had it made.

Institutions want renewal but without change.  Humanities, as they have been understood, have been linked in an Anglo-Victorian way to the middle class, to prosperity, to status, to decency and respectability.  But that’s suffocating, conformist, zombiliferating.  No wonder we thinking about the Fifties. This is why so much innovation -- whether exploration of sexuality, of black or indigenous culture, of profane or ghetto rhetoric, from substance abuse culture or from disease or rebellion -- has been excluded from the mainstream.  Yet these same forces are the source of new energy.  They sneak back through the music, the same way that religion sneaks back through “spirituality.”  But this time they sneak back with no money -- only the love.  And the kids go to tech school.  

Official humanities have become an exercise in maintaining the status quo, even if that means gradually de-oxygenating the whole culture. Middle-class bias is always to replicate what has gone before: the canon, the hierarchy.  If there is innovation at all, it often comes from looking at high-status people and trying to do what they do, whether it’s relevant or not. Lately the variation has been “crowd-sourcing” everything: what are your friends reading, what movies are they watching, what are they eating?  Here in ag country, everyone is keeping an eye on the next farmer over. Salesmen who pitch “everyone is . . .” will be successful.  It’s a high school sort of way to be.  Of course, the freshman in college goes out of his way to do the opposite and sometimes generates ideas that last a lifetime.  More often he finds out why the opposite doesn’t work and ends the search for alternatives right there.  And soon he may discover the social safety nets of Medicare and Social Security have been removed, because they were in the way.  Labor unions, employer paid health care, unemployment compensation, worker's compensation -- they're bad for business.

Nassim Taleb has been telling us and telling us.  Untested complex assumptions lead to fragility.  If you can’t produce proof, if you have no safeguards, if you have done no testing and considered no consequences, much less alternatives, it's "fragile."  Too much is context-dependent and when that context (maybe the weather) is changing radically, whatever is contingent on it is ended.  Right now in many ways the industrial revolution is withdrawing, partly because raw resources are either running out or being managed by wised-up wogs who want full value or so out-sourced that we’re doing what every army learns not to do: stretching our supply column too far.

The move to understanding and high culture that the internet was supposed to give us has turned out to be kids sexting.  I guess we have to get it out of our systems.  But I was surprised by the reaction to yesterday’s blog about the international high tension lines, which seemed to echo the determination of the oil industry people to truck loads so excessively large that they have to travel at night on back roads.  People seemed to feel that juggernauts crushing through our small roadside lives, in spite of every legal obstacle, or sucking the very wind out of the sails of our small boats, were not just metaphorical.  Aad, the Rotterdam poet, sent me illustrations from Chicken Little storybooks.

The sky IS falling.  No, the sky already fell on Japan, in the Gulf of Mexico, in coal mines -- impossibly.  The sky is always falling -- it lies around us in translucent jagged chunks like azure Jello rubble.  We have to step over it to get anywhere.  You know what was behind the sky up there all along?  The stars.  What did you think?  And pretty soon the sun will come up again and melt all these sky shards.  Expect floods.  Then renewal.