SIGNS OF AFFILIATION: CIGARS, MAGAZINES, GOVERNMENT

Long ago, still stinging at one of those intervals when I'd been thrown off the rez, I went to a local Starbucks on a Sunday morning with a NYTimes under my arm.  People were settled in small groups at tables carried outside because it wasn't raining.  I was just becoming absorbed in reading when another woman my age came over, grinning, and asked to have a section of my paper, expecting to sit at my table.

I blew up.  I was invaded.  A NYT was an expensive luxury I had no intention of sharing.  I gathered it up and stalked off, leaving the suburban white woman with her mouth hanging open.  She had thought she was trying to make friends through the trivia of news.  NOT.  In my world no one approached a white woman in a café unless they were drunk or wanted to borrow money.  Newspapers arrived in the mail and were treated by those rules.  You don't ask to read someone else's mail.

When I had been back in Portland longer, I was working at the County Courthouse and new magazine shop opened, an imitation of men's clubs in Washington, DC, with cigars in wall-to-wall humidors and big leather chairs for those who wished to rest a bit.  In those years I was living through shiny magazines and at first marched in to buy them.  Realizing slowly that this was meant to be for power men only, I enjoyed sitting down to look over which magazines I intended to buy while the clerk scowled at me.  He didn't quite dare throw me out as ruining the atmosphere.  Not welcome.

I never bought any cigars, but it turned out their magazines didn't interest me either.  I had better luck at Rich's Cigar Store which carried a wide variety of 'zines but had no place to sit.  Not only was the new shop so limited that it finally closed, but the ethos from one cigar/'zine shop to the next was different.  Being able to pick up on the rules is part of the ability to relate.

Social relationships are cultural, but also biological.  Research shows that the brain is organized by establishing connected circuits between neurons, based on recording experiences through the senses and thought, which includes the introception of the body reacting -- digestion, heart beat, tuning of metabolism.  Since biology never forgets a good pattern once it is found, this also becomes the basis for social organization.  The motive is even the same: safety, preservation of the entities through relationship and belonging.  Most basic is family; most troubled today is nation.

Humans who try to be individuals are exceptions and often don't replicate physically, which is a lot easier now that contraceptives exist, so individuals don't carry over through generations.  The universal basis of social relationship has been the virtual "space" that opens between the infant and the caregiver through feeding and cuddling and baby talk.  This magical rapport is the basis of communication throughout the rest of life from the intimacy of lovers to the ecstasy of crowds acting together.  Those who teach or preach and are praised for it, are those who know how to kindle communication by speaking.  Art forms reach for it, but art begins in the virtual space between the artist and the world, or maybe just between the artist and the canvas that teems with potential.

We have greatly damaged this ability to give each other safety by separating ourselves with our little cybergizmos.  The group experiences like theatre, concert, opera, festivals, have been seized commercially or just recorded.  The feeling of belonging to society that I once got from my stacks of magazines are replaced and changed by websites.  Here at my keyboard I keep in touch with one sort of systems but by writing conjure up either memory or virtual people.  I construct a fragile safety.

People who don't feel safe are likely to be hostile, to close off, to make bad choices, like joining toxic groups that seem to be powerful.  The key to success in many life-paths is to construct systems of connection but not all of us have had infancies and childhoods that taught how to make those connections -- maybe in some permissive setting if we are drunk or need money.  Everyone wants money, dues, even the church.  We obey bossy sentimental requirements like poinsettias for Christmas.

In their youth my parents and their sibs were country people and family was powerful.  For a while when I first came to consciousness during WWII and just after, those ties and obligations persisted and I remember the welcoming hugs, the food gifts, the memories and expectations.  By the time we were adults, that was pretty much gone.  We'd scattered over the continent and into quite different social contexts.  No one realized how much the relationships were moral, setting a standard and speaking plainly to those who went astray.  For immigrants whole social systems and contradictions must be reconciled.

Porges argues that this most basic safety for humans was made possible early in the dawning development of humans and then allowed cooperation on projects to begin advancing "civilization" beyond what one person could do alone.  We could explain things to each other and accept different roles.  Partly this was a matter of language but, more than that, the capacity for empathy -- the ability to look at another person and feel as they feel.  Not "sympathy," which is identifying how they feel and making room for it, but real sharing of what the other person is thinking.  

I'm slow realizing that not everyone can do this.  It is an evolution that hasn't reached their personal variation on the genome or maybe has been suppressed by their culture.  For instance, both science and business culture has actively resisted any emotional attachments or "gut feelings" because the model has been math, which is thought to be abstract.  We're still very attached to data, often about a mass of people, averaged, which is esp. unhelpful when the average tells nothing about the individual.

The tension between individual and community goes on and probably always will, because often progress is made and boundaries are found by non-conforming or even defiant individuals.  But people welded into institutions that act in unity can steam roller everything else with their power.  We're witnessing that now with Republicans in Congress.  What they fear is that differing from the group that protects them will cause the group to kill them.  Hmmmm.

HOW WE GOT HERE

My first job was teaching English in Browning, Montana.  The school district there is a state function performed in a place supposedly governed by a tribal council with federal "support", which meant the Bureau of Indian Affairs second-guessed and controlled everything.  Today's federal pattern of career people trying to do their jobs while being second-guessed and contradicted by international corporations is very similar.  The additional complication was the underlying family and clan patterns based on personal connections going back centuries, which overrode any thing on paper, rather like the mafia undercurrent in our own government, which first came to attention when local Sicilian families filled the vacuum left by a receding officialdom.

My second "career" overlapped and was based on my attempt to be safe, which meant hooking up with Bob Scriver whose income came from taxidermy and then Western Art, a growing -- exploding -- field where he excelled.  Locals admired him, grew up with him, and hated him in a sometimes racist way.  Like Bob, I was a minority -- everyone else was indigenous.  His culture was Native American in a kind of wrestling match with his mother's brand of Brit worship from Quebec where his parents grew up on adjoining farms in the 19th century.

Then came animal control, which people mock and stigmatize and stereotype.  I was an officer on the street going to homes and neighborhoods, first-hand observing both genteel scuffles over barking and fecal indiscretions, and (as the first woman) venturing into the underworld of drugs and madmen.  It was the beginning of public non-compliant sex roles like cross-dressing and massage parlours.  It was a struggle to figure out the key to problems while overcoming people's hatred of uniforms and violent resistance to control.  Going to court weekly was an education in the Rule of Law.

Overlapping that, mostly through moral questions and the effort to be a respectable citizen, I was becoming involved with the Unitarian denomination where I was quickly sucked into the just developing Organizational Design ideas presented in a week-long intensive workshop along with the Big Ideas like Evil, Death, Metaphor, and Idealism.  The men in the Pacific Northwest District of the Unitarian Universalist Ministers Association were big, handsome, potent, well-educated and elite.  They had organized a buddy system in which each was assigned to look out for the mental health and career success of another. (A few got into very bad trouble.)  I wanted in, so I wangled my way to a little seminary attached to the University of Chicago.  The little seminary was collapsing.  The U of C was a massive, irreproachable, hard, cold place where I thrived on the ideas and the guarded approval of Richard Stern, a major novelist.

For three years I rode a circuit in Montana of four reluctantly cooperating fellowships, each with only a few dozen members, stirring up ideas as though I were making grasshoppers leap from the grass.  Then was Kirkland, an interim year of delight across from Seattle with a congregation of artists and therapists. Denominational rules prevented me from staying.  Then Saskatoon where a little enclave of wanna-be Brits held a fort against dispossessed indigenous people taking refuge in drugs and alcohol, bitter academics, and Ukrainians who somehow escaped from Stalin's famine.  Two years there and I left the ministry.

I went back to Browning, Mt., where I was sort of the Methodist minister for a year, then on the first high school faculty at Heart Butte in bear country on the foothills of the Rockies.  Two years until being thrown out of there.  After an eight month gap, I took a civil service job with the City of Portland Bureau of Buildiings -- data entry and answering the phone -- at a time when the streets were full of armed drug gangs and my home neighborhood had gone Black with gangs in shooting wars across the lawn of our house where my aging mother and brain-damaged brother tried to live normally.

When my mother died, she left enough money for me to buy this disintegrating little old house in a tiny village next to the rez, where I have barely enough retirement to stay afloat but my internet connections have made me part of the world conversation of panic over climate change and governmental corruption.  It's been twenty years now, and I feel as though the whole story has been continuous, leading directly to where we are now, both myself and everyone else.

I "talk" to people I would have no access to without the internet.  My reading is lay versions of a remarkable change in knowledge as technology opens up a whole new vision of everything we thought we knew, including the idea of Empire and what we've come to call Predatory Capitalism.  Now we analyze traces in rocks back to the beginning of the galaxies, we collect bits of hominins that stretch millennia to the first mammals or even the structure of fishes, we delve into our own bodies to discover how cells work together -- though some were distracted for a while by the idea that computers are us and we are essentially brains in a bucket.  Finally, we came to our senses and for some this is a love affair with the world and the arts, the deep story that we carry in our whole bodies, the unity we can find when we reach through our skins to the world.

What we finally come to is our capacity to destroy each other and possibly all life on this planet.  I myself am coming to the end of my life with no regrets and deep resignation, but also determination to figure it all out before I end.  Every job I've had -- mostly unchosen -- has taught me useful things about the stubborn tragedies we seem to face everywhere.  Stubbornness is what I'm good it.  My personal morality -- no smoking, drinking, lying, fooling around, hoarding, and so on -- is stubbornness-based.  I like to call it tenacity, or maybe integrity.  Depends on your point of view, I guess.  I value the ability to change one's point of view, since everything always changes around us, sometimes because of our bad behavior.

Surprisingly, the highly respected magazine called "Nature" offers a whole set of articles about leaving one discipline and finding a new one.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02123-4?utm_source=Nature+Briefing&utm_campaign=e95060d7d5-briefing-dy-20190705_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c9dfd39373-e95060d7d5-44122505

A LIST OF TRANSGRESSIONS that pointed to now:

60's:  For some people, violence is as good as sex.  Cops were beating up kids. I let them talk about it. My superintendent defended me to the Chief of Police, but then instructed me never to talk about such things.

Bob Scriver started out blameless, but as he became more famous, he left aside kindness, patience, and independence.  Big shots began to control him.

70's:  The supposed head of Animal Control was a Portuguese German whose parents had died early in his life.  He had gotten a woman pregnant, married her, divorced her, and was hired for AC by a county commissioner who wanted her alimony to continue.  The assistant really ran AC while he went on with a horse stable that hired a lot of teen girls.  He always had a pocket full of plane tickets to Hawaii.  You connect the dots.

80's:  The church had a secret committee.  When it was time to ask for money, this committee (banker, doctor, real estate salesman) met to estimate how much money each member had, so therefore how much to ask for. They used a little muscle.

90's: At one point my cubicle was close to that of the low level City Attorneys. Interesting deals through law suits.  I deny everything.

After that:  Villages are always a trip.  After a while you know who is lying and who is simply silent.  I attended town council meetings for years until a pugnacious couple determined to force people to meet their standards.  They were from a city.  Still haven't really given up, unevenly enforcing laws against people they don't like and ignoring friends, a pre-existing practice.

This is the little stuff that is almost funny until it accumulates and reaches all the way up to international matters.  On this low level it is often what adjusts justice to sidestep law.  It can be humane and even necessary.  Or not.

THE CULPRITS

Below is a link to the posted article that kicked off this line of thought.  It begins with the world of High Fashion that was so spectacular when the pictorial magazines ran startling photography of clothes by the giants of haute couture who are dying of old age now.

https://m.dailykos.com/stories/2016/10/6/1578544/-The-Untold-Story-of-Trump-Model-Management-A-Daily-Kos-Exclusive-Part-1

"In the 1970’s the industry began to change. It began moving away from fashion as a utilitarian concept, and into a kind of pop culture theater of costumes and performance art, all the while promoting an increasingly unattainable ideal of feminine beauty, and blurring the boundaries between women and girls, exploitation and art. There were a number of reasons behind this transformation-but one of the driving forces was the sexual liberation movement, and the dark side of its gains. In the words of writer Rebecca Solnit, reflecting on her experiences as a young teen in the 70’s, “the sexual revolution had deteriorated into a sort of free-market free-trade ideology in which all should have access to sex and none should deny access”

"Pop culture was also influenced by the emergence of Playboy magazine-with its clever use of genuinely good editorial content from respected writers interspersed with pornographic images, was able to re brand what had previously been seen as smut into something almost classy. Cloaked with the veneer of sophistication, and by publicly aligning the brand with the causes of feminism, civil rights and free speech, Hugh Hefner was able to mainstream the objectification of female bodies in a way that had never been done before. He made porn fashionable-and it was only a matter of time before fashion embraced this approach as well. 

This is about Trump and another man, quite like him but more charming, named John Casablancas.  (translates to White House!)  This article, which is only part one, doesn't discuss Epstein, who is also in the same mold.  That there are three men playing this "game" suggests that there may be more.  Some of us will suspect other countries giving rise to them.  If you want more material about Epstein, try this:  https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2003/03/jeffrey-epstein-200303

Circumstances have allowed a "hand of cards" to form.  The cards themselves are Wealth, Secrets, Sex, Blackmail, Status, the ability of certain Plutocrats to rise above nations, a bored and burdened ordinary person's Hunger for scandal as long as it's someone else, and Gaming the Rule of Law.  The Ace in this deck of cards is Murder.

The sins are not necessarily different from what is local  A man where I worked in this village was not long ago caught in an FBI sting that offered a 12-year-old girl for $200, which caused locals to only say they never liked him anyhow.  (Three others were also caught, but they weren't from here.)  A previous mayor of Great Falls was running a bordello out of the back of his bar, but people said it was okay because it was outside the city limits.  Our society has shifted drastically.  Maybe too much, or using the wrong cards.   But what can we do?  

We have grown more tolerant and analytical about secrets, much diminishing the power of the sex trade to control famous people, it has made some wonder about the wisdom of stigmatizing and criminalizing something so common as sex among humans.  What is hidden and dangerous is always worth more money.  The enormous shift from marriage to cohabiting and the resulting confusion of marriage and family, has called into question government or religious control.  Alongside, giving ownership of women to themselves instead of making them the chattel of men along with their children, has outraged loser men challenged to be worthy.  Working women must split their allegiances between bosses and husbands, but they no longer work at ribbon counters.  They may be major players in federal government.  This card is a Joker.

Another dimension of the movement to make sexwork positive, is that being outside the law can make a person seem dangerous and powerful.  One who seems to have shady contacts may be protected.  Sometimes Trump seems to rely on his mafia family connections to make people back off.  When one gets to the point of needing assassins, they are a double-edged sword.  So many TV plots rely on someone in danger because they know too much.  Anyway, modern illegal business is finding it profitable to be respectable enough in some aspects to eschew relying so much on protection schemes based on violence.  It's bad presentation -- not a good "look."  

I'm not interested in the individuals who appear in these revelations.  But there is a fractal aspect to their stories:  big crimes come from circumstances that cause their echoes in little crimes, or maybe it's vice versa.  Anyway, the changing nature of, for instance, what sex means in our society is plate tectonics in terms of what else happens.  Not every rich man uses Sex as a card -- we're told that some are going to Art now, part of that shift from gallery to auction that is sensational and emotional enough to be worth the effort.  Partly due to a time distance from the WWII stolen art, enabling lawsuits, restorations to original owners, and daylighting of stolen works.  Anyway there's the problem of so many people reacting to powerful men raping little girls is . . . so?

It's not the notorious individuals who hold the keys to scams, but their surrounding and supporting characters who have the expertise and maintain the contacts.  They are invested in keeping the tentpole individuals prominent.  I'll repeat again my joust that when a person becomes a certain amount rich, they must be managed by a system, an organization, which then owns him.  (Very few "hers" out there, so far.)  Maybe he thinks he's making decisions, but all his evidence and considerations (the ones he knows about) come from supposed "underlings."  This is as true of school superintendents and county treasurers as bigshots.  They are no longer independent persons.

How do we design something that will take these perps by the back of the neck and bring them to social norms -- the ones we used to have?  At least ones that protect instead of destroying so many.

DARK MATTER, DARK MIND, DARK GENOME

David Schramm, astrophysicist

In 1980 I was in a writing class that consisted of four uppity women taught by Richard Stern   -- conservative, courtly, curious. One of the women, teleiophilic (loves older ones) like me, married David Schramm, the astrophysicist -- a rambunctious daredevil, quite unlike the quiet astronomers we’re used to.  Through direct reports from the household we learned about dark matter and how Schramm came down to breakfast one day ecstatic that he had finally found a mathematical proof that it existed, which resolved a major Big Bang problem.  For most of us, such a concern is not so much a part of our daily life.  It mean, it’s there, but we don’t think about it.

But the pattern sticks in our minds, the phrase that journalists love because of our culture’s association of “dark” with danger, foreign, maybe even evil which we consider seductive. There are two ways the phrase is being used in the genetic realm.  On the sub-micro level, it is the 95% of the genome that doesn’t seem active.  People referred to it as “junk” DNA but we’ve learned to be a bit cautious.  Now one theory is that it is precursor or initiator for RNA, the template for proteins that affect the function of the DNA.

Nathan Wolfe

The macro-level of gene code, possibly planetary, is simply undetected code shared and netted everywhere but almost totally unstudied.  Now we’re at risk for an ebola pandemic, possibly followed by lassa fever, both of which are hemorrhagic viruses once sequestered in remote African forests.  Nathan Wolfe, another vigorous scientist like David Schramm, has gone into those primal territories to study bush meat, the main vector of dark viruses (which have DNA) and prions (which have no DNA but are still somehow infectious). 

Bush Meat

Taking blood samples and nose swabs everywhere, from locals, prey, and any other source he can think of, he is not only amassing an enormous amount of data -- we could not have handled it before computers -- but also beginning to get a sense of the galaxies in which our flesh is embedded.  The TED talk video in which he is seen meeting hunters on a trail and collecting their sample papers is deeply moving.  He is not just being the guy in the white coat from some fancy lab -- he is a human among humans, sharing.  These are ebony men.

http://www.ted.com/talks/nathan_wolfe_hunts_for_the_next_aids?language=en

And that’s the real subject of this post, dark SOCIAL matter.  The dark matter just now being perceived by the machinery of neuro-research is one thing, terrifying and hopeful at once for those of us who struggle with what is unknown within us.  I don’t mean the psychoanalytic introspection categories of well-paid shrinks.  I mean the much more sinister deep dynamics of the body itself, left over from when we ourselves were bush meat.  The individual sources of unaccountable murder, cannibalism, and atrocities unimaginable and unpredictable.  Once we were all black as night.

Ebola victim

One anthropologist, studying extreme rituals, suggested that the source of violence and embracing of pain was in our need to belong, either as groups bent on destruction and domination like street gangs, terrorists, or in common war -- or as groups united by ecstatic exultation, lifted up in joy,  blissed out.  This triggered a bitter comment:  “It suggests that cohesion cannot exist without conflict and otherism, and that growth of sociability, or any semblace of decency cannot exist without torture, destruction, or sadomasochism.  As well to abandon empathy and just get on with Cthulhu’s orgy of destruction.”

Cthulhu

Cthulhu, for those who don’t know sci-fi figures, is the modern equivalent of the Devil.  A winged monster with a face full of tentacles but a massive humanoid body, it inhabits all three levels: air, sea, land.  It stands for overwhelming ghastly destruction, encompassing not just human destruction, but also the eruptions, tsunamis, earthquakes, meteor strikes, famines, droughts, and pandemics that sweep the planet without motive, bargaining or mitigation.  Eventually it will destroy our species.  Eventually it will destroy the planet itself.  Souls have nothing to do with it.

Nathan Wolfe and team member

So now, to speak symbolically, Nathan Wolfe is after the DNA of Cthulhu.  Or lack thereof, because it appears that the biogenerated mineral dust that I touched on a few days ago has become a fertile slime of near-atomic particles (which are made of particle/energy) which is the substrate of ordinary existence, rippling and buckling and baffling us even as it constitutes us.  BECAUSE it constitutes us.  We live in tension between awareness and a null void.  We’re not tightrope walkers -- we’re walking on nothing.

Okay.  Got that.  Great concept for a video.  So?

Must human society be the constant striving of one group against another?  Is the only happiness belonging to a congregation of some sort?  Maybe.

In the meantime, there seem to be “reservoirs” of disintegration and suffering everywhere.  Some of us join the network of people trying to understand how to get to them, how to help them.  What will draw them into care and give us more insight into their lives?  The issue is pressing enough in the medical context that it’s beginning to be seen as forming a new “third force” of healing.  Why do one-third of all people with chronic conditions that can be pretty much ameliorated by meds, therapies, exercise and so on, simply fail to include them in their routines?  (I’m in this category.)  Why do the one-fifth who are addicted to substances reject all attempts to “help” them?  Why do families, which are supposed to be an arrangement that faithfully sustains all members, turn into grinding machines that spit out the most vulnerable?

Cthulhu again!

Cthulhu is a personification, deifying xenophobia on a cosmic level.  He’s outside everything, pushing us all into defensive gangs.  In the world of Lovecraft, the seminal writer, “this was first established in "The Call of Cthulhu", in which the minds of the human characters deteriorated when afforded a glimpse of what exists outside their perceived reality. Lovecraft emphasized the point by stating in the opening sentence of the story that "The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.”  

We’re back to Jack:  we can’t handle the truth.  Stop peering into the dark.  You’ll go out of your mind.  This is Biblical stuff, all about God the omni-everything and how most of it is none of our business.  But Jack goes up the beanstalk to see what’s up there anyway, even if it’s a giant called “Cthulhu” with a beard impossible to barber.  He throws back down a harp and a hen.

Jonestown

The real social dark is not a person but rather the state of despair.  As our instruments grow more powerful, our social structures seem less able to cope with what we know.  A hundred thousand refugees pour from one country to another.  Homeless people sleep in rows against buildings.  And death from ebola mounts up and up while drunk drivers kill far more people in even more gruesome and prolonged ways, including the drunk.

The answer is not scientific, but rather in the human felt knowledge of the arts: ritual, if you like.  Experience that opens instead of closes.  Not just meta-thinking, but also meta-feeling  -- so the guy who gave us the cthulhu is named “love” and “craft.”  Empathy and communication.  The cthulhu doesn’t have any of either.  He doesn’t even exist.  We do.

Martin Marty in his “Sightings” post this week lifts up the phrase “resident alien,” which is not from sci-fi, but rather from religion.  (Not very different.)  The idea is that a person can and probably ought to be one who dwells within a community with gratitude and fidelity, but can think about what’s outside anything known.  We call it “outside the box.”  Fancy theologians call it, “outside the theological circle.”  Out there in the un-named.