BITTERLY, BITTERLY, BITTERLY

BITTERLY, BITTERLY, BITTERLY

This post is a reaction to a post by T. on Medium.com who just returned from failing to save one of his boys from death. Bitterly, bitterly, bitterly.

There are eleven years between T. and I. At one time that would mean I was too young to be his mother — not now that girls are getting pregnant at nine years old so that they have skipped adrenarche, the years in which people form their identities. Their identity is their baby and their black cocktail dress. The dress is a good thing because then they have something decent to wear to their son’s burial.

Deborah Kerr and John Kerr in "Tea and Sympathy"

Central casting always puts me in a bow blouse or a pastel sweater set. Pearl earrings. “Tea and Sympathy” casting — Deborah Kerr offering a therapeutic mercy fuck. No son and not quite a lover. Not even the Maureen O’Hara Irish shawl.

Maureen O'Hara

T. is right. I was up in the middle of the night to check his blog because I had an idea what was happening. AIDS doesn’t kill one directly, but sits on the sidelines (as long as the money for drugs lasts) and grins while the infections and traumas do the work, a plastic respirator on the mouth as though it were a ball gag and tubes going in, tubes coming out, in places that have better uses: arms and dicks for expressing intimacy. T. sits alongside desperate for the power to do more than hold a hand.

The part I play in this virtual world is the English teacher and the auntie. In actuality I didn’t do either one very well. As T. points out, I’m too much the narcissist.  (See above.)  Just as his own English teachers and aunties were. I think they saw him accurately, and their crime was failing to intervene to stop the torment. They knew his father was abusive, a near-killer, but they needed MAN power, like Woody Allen’s brother who thought he was a chicken and no one wanted to cure him because they needed the eggs. But this man was a rooster and he could kill with the spurs on his heels, aside from treading all the hens.

I’m not supposed to be me in the better version of this story — I’m supposed to be a man, maybe Jack, who can make an author notorious; or maybe that agent who pushed writers to go to extremes (esp. people who were already extreme); or best of all one of those original powerful SM leathermen who are dead or old now. Someone powerful enough to carry a young man’s body in his arms.

It’s not a sex change needed, but rather a cultural pattern they call “primogeniture” that goes back and back and back to when men were the heads of clans and castles, “landed”, in a time when men swore fealty to their lords by putting their hands under their master’s kilt to swear on his balls. No books.

Mr. Garnett

Two other deaths I’m processing this week are both men. One was my fourth grade science teacher, Mr. Garnett, who had been a sergeant in WWII. He was the only person to realize that my scowl was an effort to see. I lived in a blur but no one would believe my complaints until he simply called me to the back of the room and presented a vision chart. They say he was bitter late in life, but not why or how. Mr. Thuringer, who had lost a leg in combat, lectured us about the destruction of war and drove a knife into his wooden leg so we’d believe him. Then one day he disappeared.

Mike Burgwin

The second death was Mike Burgwin, my boss at Multnomah County Animal Control, where success pressed him to process his life. After we got to know each other, he’d call me up late at night and tell me stories, many of them terrible tragedies from his work as a cop. He was a big physical man, highly intelligent, with little formal education. I wrote about him on 3/28/16 prairiemary.blogspot.com. The memorial is soon so what I wrote is being edited for use. I look forward to hearing what others say, but I won’t be there.

T. writes with video, words read by Leighton, “Hypocrisy is my sacred lover and i suck his cock in old canoes/” Their work is not for the faint-hearted, the uninitiated, or the mommies except the ones who go to their son’s burial high enough to bear it. There is a community, but a shifting one, like a classroom or congregation. Still, it’s much bigger than anyone suspects, global.

“Anger is the new pornography.” It’s the old one as well. Dean. Brando. Pacino. “Father Knows best.” (Doesn’t watching it make you indignant? He was lying: he knew nothing, Jon Snow.) “Coronet Instructional Films.” Notice they just give instructions, not enlightenment or challenge. On and on and on, esp. on Friday afternoons when teachers are tired. All those classrooms with little chairs, accommodating the baby boom, boys obediently sharpening pencils (which can be weapons), seeming to be safe and happy.

These kids are the age when they don’t just attract abuse for crying and messing and failing to go to sleep. Now the sexual predators get interested, because the kid is old enough to ask why — “Why are you doing this?” as they ask in “Game of Thrones” and “American Odyssey”. We ask it all the time: why are you doing this? Because it’s so much fun to make you hurt. Because I can control you. Because it means I’m superior because I’m cynical.

from "American Odyssey"

There are escapes and compensations. Today the kids can slip away into tech worlds that adults can’t access. They can directly confront porn as extreme as it can get, crossing over into death. The boys in particular take refuge in movement: surfing, skate-boards, parcours. The adults object, “Oh, that’s too dangerous! Why don’t you go in for football where you will only get concussions or basketball where you will only blow out your knees? Or you could be a wrestler with a big important coach like Denny Hastert.” But the boys go free-form, and around here ride fast on horses, dogs running behind. Fathers say, “I know best. Get out of my house.” Around here you go stay with your auntie a while.

Dangerous is the knife that cuts both ways. One gets respect for beautiful danger, esp. if there’s singing. One can be a movie star. It’s a bit of protection, even in a time when as soon as the new “Star Wars” episode comes out, fans begin writing pornographic versions. It’s arousing. It’s a kick of adrenaline, the true addiction of our time.

Clever danger creates double-binds that guarantee results. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. Tell about these semi-secret, sometimes marketable patterns, and you will be accused of knowing because of participation. (That was in “American Odyssey,” the movie I marathon-watched last night. The heroine survivor witnessed an American atrocity but the perps said she only survived because she was a collaborator. So much for patriotism.)

Don’t tell about the seething pit of violence under our society, and you are accused of being stupid, oblivious, uncaring. Nothing that can be cured by wearing a ribbon or even getting on the board of a nonprofit. So the first thing to do is accept the idea of being damned, but at least out of choice. Observe. Testify. Take the consequences. Which may be death, not even your own. Bitterly, bitterly, bitterly. But with love. Because you can.

CULTURE CLASH IN THE SEMINARY

Dissenting faculty at the General Theological Seminary

Starr King School for the Ministry in Berzerkley is a marginal, energetic, socially conscious outfit where uproar breaks out now and then, not unlike a Unitarian Universalist congregation or the denomination itself.  General Theological School in Manhattan is a dependable, mainstream, dignified seminary in a resilient, well-mannered, tolerant mainstream denomination, the Episcopalians.  What does it mean when they, too, go into uproar?  Especially when the management (president and board) react as though they were Hong Kong officials, firing 8 out of the 10 professors.  They hardly look like renegades.  Their photos show neat, short-haired ladies and gents, all white.  

The Reverend Kurt Dunkle

Their President Dunkle’s manners sound so seriously lacking, so obsessed with sexual imagery and politically insensitive statements, that I think he needs a good medical checkup.  Something has gone wrong.  Big shot white administrators at the top of their game can become grandiose and overbearing without any help, but their lifestyle often includes enough steaks and martinis to invite constricted blood flow to the brain.  This man needs one of those monitoring bracelets.

The Rev. Ellen Tillotson, clerical member of the board who sides with Dunkle.

Consent to be governed is the subject of this post.  If eight out of ten professors do NOT consent to be governed without dialogue, then the institution is in trouble.  (They had asked for a conference, threatening a walk-out, and the management simply pretended they resigned.)  The institution is already in trouble due to high debt levels (of the school rather than the students) which have just been addressed -- successfully, it seems, though by selling off property.  88 (some say there are 70) students is not a large student body.  Will aspiring clergy consent to be educated there?  Ultimately that will decide the fate of the institution.  If I were guessing, I’d say they’re more likely to side with their professors than with Dunkle, certainly if the accounts of his corporation CEO sort of behavior are true and have been observed by students.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Theological_Seminary  for some general background.

Dunkle should not be stiff-necked about this.  If feminists can bring down the President of Harvard University, which also acts as a UU respected seminary, then conciliation would be the wise strategy.  The reports are not optimistic.  http://episcopaldigitalnetwork.com/ens/2013/05/15/kurt-dunkle-elected-dean-president-of-general-theological-seminary/  

Tom Wojtowick and Paul Huff in front of St. Leo the Great Catholic Church in Lewistown, MT.

Here in Montana a young priest, 27, was assigned to the Lewistown Catholic Church.  Arriving full of zeal and eager to get things off to a nice neat start, he informed two gentlemen of retirement age -- the kind of reliable folks who are often pillars of a congregation -- that their decades-long relationship, protected by a civil contract from Washington State but not consecrated by the church, was evil.  They would have to give up their partnership, which surely must be based on sins of the flesh (flesh of the same shape organ-wise), and would not be able to receive communion or any other benefits of the Church.  They had been key members of the choir, which has now fallen apart.  The congregation as a whole is split down the middle.  Pope Francis must be pounding his head on the wall.

Now a secular example.  (I’m resisting jokes about spelling God backwards.)  When I was an animal control officer, I had many opportunities to consider the trade-offs between the letter of the law and what I considered to be just.  The first was early in my so-called career:  a little wire-haired terrier who had been hit by a car.  I took him to a veterinarian.  The official position was that an animal hurt that badly should be euthanized.  The veterinarian said he would not treat the dog for recovery unless someone guaranteed the bill.  

This dog had tags, a red harness, and a recent clip.  I called the office, found out the address of the owner (a very nice, well-kept house), and went there, but no one was home.  I went back to the vet who was administering first aid but refused to go farther, since the bill could rise into hundreds of dollars.  I appealed to my boss.  He said a rule was a rule, deal with it.  So I personally guaranteed the bill.  I had almost no money to spare but it was the right thing to do.  The veterinarian got to work.  Late in the evening the owners came home, found my note, and were grateful.  They were happy to pay the bill for their beloved dog, who was saved.  It was a compassion-based strategy that broke authority, but also saved it.

A few years later, we did a neighborhood sweep where people had become very lax about managing their pets.  The rule of the day was to cite every dog not obeying the letter of the law, which was to be on a leash or behind a fence.  A man I approached was letting his dog run around loose while he worked on his yard.  The dog could easily and quickly have darted into the street or confronted someone on the sidewalk.  I pointed this out and the man gave me lip.  I cited him.  It went to court.  He was VERY indignant!  

The judge was amused, but dismissed the ticket.  I didn’t care.  It cost him time and emotion.  But it was also clear that I had pushed it far enough.  If I had grabbed the dog, put it in the truck, and cost him a hundred bucks to reclaim it (he had not licensed the dog nor gotten it rabies shots), that would have been too far.  I would not have argued with him as much as I did if there had not been five other officers on the block, all paying close attention.  It was an authority-based action, tempered by strategy.

A quote from a paper in Cerebrum (a group that studies the brain) by Peggy Mason, Ph.D.  “Membership in a social group brings benefits that scale with the ability of the group to work together.  Thus social cohesion, more than simple sociality, most powerfully promotes survival.”   Being a seminarian is not a matter of accepting dogma or authorities, but rather social cohesion that derives from knowing each other, trusting exchanges, and feeling secure in one’s position.  GTS, according to Wikipedia, is a liturgically driven institution with theologically prominent professors.  If Dunkle, who comes late to the ministry, is pressing hard to make them “grow the seminary,” then his motto of “Both/And” becomes a compulsion to work double-time.  One solution for strapped seminaries is to go to "low residence" -- one-step above correspondence schools.  No social cohesion.  The seminary is in a gentrifying nabe, Chelsea, maybe a little more "artistic", gay and free-thinking than some Episcopalians might prefer.

Former seminary building sold and converted to fancy condos there in Chelsea.

The personal dimension of leadership, which is the point of ministerial “formation” or the training of a cop (both authority-based), is always the end point of a system.  It’s sensitivity and resilience is key.  Law enforcement people across the country have so fallen in love with the military model that are having to relearn this.  Evidently seminary presidents must also learn not to fire without justification.  Dunkle must know he is looking at lawsuits since most of his life he was a prominent lawyer.  Already he has made his seminary look unattractive to youngsters who want to be peacemakers.  To say nothing of replacement professors.

Bibfeldt

I note two things.  The big new initiative that Dunkle was proposing was called the “both/and” which at the U of Chicago Div School was the key credo of a theologian called “Bibfeldt” like those other “Big B” fellows coming out of German.  He was arguing in contrast to Kierkegaard, whose catch phrase was “either/or.”  Without getting into the contrasting dogmas, the main difference between these two prominent scholars was that Bibfeldt was imaginary, invented as a prank by students.  Over time he somehow managed to write papers, enjoy feschtshrifts, be the subject of seminars, and even publish books.  Some of us began to really appreciate his ideas!  Dunkle should have been there.  

The Reverend Wray Mackay

I see that a former professor, the kind of wise old man that seminarians look for and love, died in a climbing accident last April.  I suspect that there is still unaddressed grief at that seminary.  Losing iconic buildings can also trigger grief.  Compassion would be far more effective than compulsion.  Obedience to authority is Old Testament.  The Gospels are about something else.

CLUTCHING GRIEF

Yesterday I got an indignant comment about an old blog in which I talked about a local woman, someone I knew, whose obituary had been in the paper. I had used it as a springboard for a discussion of Virginia Wolff’s novel about Mrs. Dalloway. The commenter was a great-granddaughter who was sure that I had copied a private letter she had written about her grandmother and who said I should not have written anything about “that other woman” in the same piece. I think it was a young woman writing and that she didn’t know who either Virginia Wolff or Mrs. Dalloway was. The reaction is not unusual on the rez, though I’m also likely to get a comment (and did earlier on this same post) that thanks me for remembering the person.

Emotions about beloved dead relatives, esp. the ones that are old-timey (though this woman was not), are so intense that they are like black holes in space, trying to pull everything into them until the density somehow makes the whole planet stop. They want to suck every detail of the person into themselves and forbid anyone else -- even family -- from knowing anything or ever bringing up the name. They are a total knot of pain and denial. They make themselves a hoard of information, objects, relationships, in a belatedly protective way.

The more usual and, one presumes, healthier reaction is to talk about the person, share photos, be pleased to discover a new person who knew them, share stories, laugh and cry. When grief gets too heavy, too thick, too indescribable, it sits on the heart like a big black ball-bearing, crushing the muscle and stopping the blood.

Grief groups are often organized on this rez. When I was at the Junior High in 1988-89, the counselor, Grant Barnard, organized one. He invited me to participate, I think because he knew I’d been a minister. Neither of us really understood how much I needed a grief group myself. (Bob had not died yet -- it was more a matter of the death of aspirations.) What struck me then was how mixed with other emotions the grief was. Mostly it was thick with rage, sometimes unresolved anger at the dead person. But because these were young people, much of the emotion was despair, that paralyzer. They had no sense that it would end. They felt that healing was a betrayal.

At that first attempt at talking in a group, superstition in the community tried to make it stop, for fear that it would CAUSE death, that it would call back ghosts. Blackfeet have always had that feeling. Avoidance has sometimes served them well, as in the case of smallpox epidemics. Or in grizzly country. When Mr. Barnard went on to try to discuss drug use and sex, the parents drove him out. Sometimes I think the hills of the reservations must be piled with the sprawled bodies of dead messengers no one wanted to hear from.

I try to avoid the conventional moral dimensions of things, or if I MUST look at it, I try to define the specific context and principles of the morality involved, not just that of the participants in the situation but also in a sort of meta-moral way, usually with a utilitarian bias. What are the consequences? But the po-mo crowd likes rule-morality, esp. in their post-colonial version which is what NA students are likely to run into in university classes or just sitting around in a coffee bar with a lot of hip people who get off on Indians. It’s easier to make rules and then enforce them with a lot of confidence, since you don’t have to think about mitigating circumstances.

So -- all white male educated people are wealthy oppressors. Thus, the slacker in the cafe booth is NOT an oppressor because he’s not wealthy, but his anthropology professor (who is only wealthy by rez standards) is ripping off the poor people by making his living exploiting their heritage. This quickly translates into the idea that if anyone portrays anyone or anything on the rez, they are transgressors. For a while the cultural heritage guy in the tribe was forbidding anyone to take photos of Chief Mountain because it is a sacred mountain and therefore owned by the Blackfeet. An old lady was spreading her opinion that Bob Scriver, by making recognizable portraits of Blackfeet, was “stealing their faces.” These ideas are not just protective grief, but also a determination to wring profit out of their identity. There is a long tradition of paying Native Americans when taking their photo or watching them dance. In fact, some artists and anthropologists also pay.

But that’s not the ONLY way to look at it. Another, older, tribal element is very proud to show off what they value by appearing at ceremonies to signtalk the Lord’s Prayer while wearing white buckskin or, more recently, to pray in Blackfeet and bless those present. The message here is that these ways, specific to a place and time, are still part of the American story, just as much as imported European traditions. They accept pay only to compensate for expenses.

Perhaps it is a subterranean alliance between these two approaches that tries (and succeeds) in suppressing everything negative about Indians. No one is allowed to criticize because it is the same as betrayal! This attitude that criticism is betrayal is alive in the general American population, which uses it to suppress Indian uprisers who wear the American flag on their seat of their pants and pour red paint down Mount Rushmore. The relationship of Native Americans to the great Amalgamated Masses of the United States is ambivalent.

But the scales are easily tipped with money. If at some giveaway ceremony honoring this complaining girl’s great-grandmother, I were to show up and contribute blankets, tobacco, or cash, she would be far less inclined to criticize my blog. Why is grief alleviated by money? I don’t think it’s greed. I think that money is a way of awarding value and that valuing someone is a way of healing shame and anger. But writing about someone is also a way of valuing them. This girl doesn’t know that. She doesn’t value writing. The question at this point is who does?

I wouldn’t dare ask that if I didn’t have an answer. The small Catholic charter school in Browning has been encouraging students to write their family stories. Then they are sent away to be bound into “proper books.” Maybe I should go interview them before someone accuses them of stealing the Blackfeet heritage.