HEROES AND ANTIHEROES

The great advantage of frontiers is that people can change their identities.  In fact, they almost MUST in order to survive in a tumultuous environment that displaces people from their usual practices and supports.  Many of the great stories are about these transformations from one category of roles to another, either a fall from privilege or the leap to greatness that had no use in the old situation.  Always dangerous.

Maybe we haven’t thought enough about identity in the cyber-age, particularly when so much of identity now depends on documentation, google, self-presentation on social networks -- all of which can be faked -- but also can be confirmed by fingerprints, DNA, retinal scans, face biometrics, and (vaguely) by video surveillance.   Add to that our need to confirm skills, reliability, confidentiality, and simple virtue in jobs and public roles -- which is always tearing holes in our assumptions about what people are “supposed to be,” particularly in public life.  We are obsessed.

This shows up on the “frontier” that is now communication -- should I say communication “arts”?   Playing with identity and role are major elements of creation, but we are so uncertain and spooky that accusing an author -- Greg Mortenson, author of “Three Cups of Tea,” comes to mind -- can cause him to be accused of “misrepresenting” that cost him thousands of dollars in lawyer fees, loss of his vocation, and damage to his charity work.  Mortenson’s co-writer, David Oliver Relin, who did more of the writing than Mortenson, committed suicide.  The accuser, Jon Krakauer, was paid for his story.   The handful of upscale self-righteous readers who sued claimed they were each defrauded of $15 because they bought the books believing they were getting the absolute truth.  To me they are simply predators. 

Mortenson & Relin

Krakauer

One wonders where they were educated to have such expectations in the modern world.  Or, for that matter, the old-fashioned world. Quite apart from philosophical ideas about the knowability of reality, what makes these readers think they in particular are “entitled” to the absolute truth?  Wouldn’t you think the price would be higher than $15?  Will the next step be suing the church because absolute virtue turns out not to save people, though the church is assumed to promise that?  If we can demand the birth certificate of the President of the USA, should we demand the birth certificate of Jesus?  Speaking of God -- and Jesus -- those two identities are so controversial that people are actually selling biographies of them.  Are affronted readers suing the authors for not being literally factual?   Jesus doesn’t ask “Who am I?”   He asks “who do men say I am?”  But who knows what the implications are if you’re speaking Aramaic, which he was?

Terribly sophisticated post-everything French-speaking writers have been trying to get us to see the politics underneath all writing, the covert motivations and goals, and how they control writing.  Under “Three Cups of Tea” is a roiling lethal set of opposing forces about mountain climbing, some of them informed by the location of the famous mountains, often places that are Third World or conflict-ridden.  In the case of Mortenson, there is a formal charity in question and -- properly -- its vulnerability was addressed and remedied.  But that wasn’t what the readers were angry about -- they could have addressed that directly through existing law.  Instead they were sniffily offended by not being told the “truth.”  Evidently thousands of other readers didn’t share their unreal expectations.

Jon Krakauer has based a whole career on sensational and controversial competitive exploits.  I don’t know who has checked him for accuracy, if anyone.  His writing philosophy seems to be informed by the scandal angle, revelation compilation.  Publishers dearly love it, since it sells copies and makes free publicity.   Behind the scenes publishers use their power to edit, their ownership of the capital and contacts that make publication possible, and negotiation of the author’s payment to intensify, sharpen, urge risky assertions -- sort of like Photoshopping an ordinary sunset into flourescence.  They say they are “finding the REAL story.”  This is deceptive talk:  they subscribe to the doctrine of always choosing the myth rather than the actuality -- a long-standing policy of media.  Then they shamelessly claim they are deceived victims of the authors to avoid lawsuits.  The public is so convinced of the authority of book publishing that they never figure it out.

In my senior class play (1957) I portrayed the Dowager Empress Marie Feodorovna, who was trying to determine whether a stray young woman (one of several) were Anastasia, the rightful survivor and inheritor of the assassinated Romanovs when Revolution took hold.  The ambiguous story is romantic and political enough to be recreated over and over in various media.  In the end the “truth” is a choice: yearning for a reunited family and restoration of a beloved past are facing grim forensic evidence about a mass grave, things we might not want to know as facts.  (We are so determined to find the original identity of remains.)  Examining the consequences of whatever decision is made may be the most sensible way to proceed.  It is vital to keep alive the awareness that new evidence might surface that changes everything.

Krakauer got his start the same way that Quammen did, writing for Outside magazine.  But Quammen took his exploits in a different direction, combining it with literary natural history and hanging out in the library, while the others kept the testosterone level high.  In general, this whole context of mountain climbing is a Pacific Northwest sort of deal.  (My father was a Mazama and climbed the iconic Cascades, including one climb now impossible:  Mt. St. Helens, which we could see from our house in Portland.)  I have a passing acquaintance with Bozeman, where there is also a successful culture that combines the Outside zeitgeist with ranching.

Our cultural frontier seems stuck at the identity confrontation between hero and anti-hero.  Who should we admire?  Jesus or Lucifer?  Esp. now that we’ve been badly tricked by fake chest-pounders into loss and expense over drummed-up wars.  Outside thinks it is on the side of the right -- which evidently boils down to corporations who sell outdoor equipment and  travel venues.  They think they stay willing to unmask wickedness, if you can figure out what that is in a world where we are aware that religious institutions fuel war and injustice, and that compassion is often a disguise for control.

In the end, the real deception is the cover and title of “Three Cups of Tea,” which suggest a doll’s teaparty.  In fact, the three cups of tea are ceremonial preparation for survival councils among fierce mountain chieftains trying to keep their people alive in the face of economic hardship and American attacks.   The equivalent in Montana college towns might be three shots of whiskey, three mugs of microbrew, or three lids of weed.  Men’s drugs.  Literacy is of little use to little girls who have been gutted by predator drones.  This is what Mortenson’s complainants should have addressed.  What they hated was facing the reality.

THE BROTHEL BOY by Norval Morris

One of my little “elitisms” is having attended the University of Chicago, but I didn’t do it for the coursework. I’m a firm believer in the value lodged in people, both faculty and fellow students. The courses are just chances to interact since the content and method of most courses change over the years (or SHOULD) and often radically as they respond to new insights.

Once one knows who is there and how they work, it’s possible to follow them (or even double back and retrace their trail) simply by reading books. I don’t know how internet vids will fit into this, but for now books are at the heart of the “company of scholars” that Hannah Gray welcomed us to when she handed over our Master’s Degree velvet hoods (which are not really hoods anymore -- just a velvet drape to wear over one’s black gown.)

One of the professors who made a huge impression on me without me ever taking a course or having a long conversation was Norval Morris. I was typing for my “supper” at the U of Chicago Law School and technically assigned to the newest profs, but occasionally -- since it was a typing pool -- given work that was overflow from someone else. Thus, I typed a chapter from “The Brothel Boy and Other Parables of the Law.” The chapter was called “The Planter’s Dream,” in which a white man was taking advantage of his wife’s absence by sleeping with his Burmese mistress, dreamt that she was being raped by a mysterious “black man” and shotgunned the intruder, who was not there. His mistress was destroyed. Was he a murderer?

Morris’ work was focused on the insanity plea, but within the context of the hard work of trying to get justice to bear some relationship to the law -- or the other way around -- esp. in places where an empire-mongering nation had come in over the top of an ancient pre-existing way of doing things. In order to do this in a class discussion without either free-floating in theory or invading someone’s privacy (often legally forbidden) and in order to make sure the salient points were covered, Morris wrote up what amounted to short stories, all composed around the invented career of Eric Blair, better known by his nom de plume, George Orwell. Most people who have made it to the graduate level of a good university have read at least one essay (the one about having to shoot an elephant in order to save people and crops, but hating every moment of the task) and have at least heard of his novels, “1984” and “Animal Farm.”

Morris decided that he would write taking Orwell’s real name as his nom de plume. Orwell/Blair is considered one of the finest of writers of his type. Morris pretended -- as has often been done, maybe more commonly with paintings -- that he had found a cache of long-lost manuscripts. Morris, as an Aussie, was rather audacious. The trouble was that since he could write as well as Orwell, his faux essays were picked up by the credulous media as real. So he had to get a friend to label him a hoax. It happened that I was typing for him and even answering his phone (his secretary must have been on vacation) when the media began to call about the “hoax,” which excited them as much as the original “discovery.” I went over to the Faculty Club where Morris was playing tennis to give him the “urgent” messages. What I remember was that when I poked them through the cyclone fence, he looked at me sharply and said, “You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?” And I realized that I WAS. I had an appetite for the strategy and excitement. Something to watch out for in the ministry. A path into the swamp.

Back to the book, which I ordered because of “wrestling alligators” alongside Barrus and hoping that I could pick up some inspiration. Absolutely, I could. And enjoyed every minute of it. Norval Morris was a witty and humane man, much mourned when he passed away.

The title chapter “The Brothel Boy” is obviously meant to attract attention and titillate the reader, but it is a very closely reasoned account of a retarded boy in Burma in the 1920’s who had been produced and sheltered in a brothel. His job, among others, was to be the fan wallah. That is, while customers panted and sweated over the prostitutes, he shared the room and kept a big sheet of fabric waving back and forth over their heads to create a breeze. Often he would lie back and loop the rope over his foot while he nearly slept, so it wasn’t exactly onerous work. He made a tiny bit of money and witnessed both acts and payments. At some point in his physical maturation he tried the act with a laundry girl, who did not cooperate. In the tussle she hit her head on a rock which killed her. He put the money in her pocket and did not seem to realize she was dead. To him, so long as the woman was paid, everything was fine.

So “Eric Blair” had to unravel all this to the satisfaction of the community, his Brit superiors, the boy’s employer/family, and his own conscience, newly challenged by this foreign context. In the story the boy ends up hanged, so it’s lucky he was fictional.

Sometimes Morris rewrites actual cases so as to sharpen the issues and close down the loopholes or create new loopholes. His character of “Blair” is joined by the local doctor, a man of vast experience from India, and a Burmese Buddhist politician who -- with good humor -- loves to exploit Blair’s missteps. Sometimes there are other outsiders, like the overseeing officer and his wife who become involved in the death of a baby out in a village.

A Brit family employ a very pretty Burmese girl who has a baby she leaves in the care of her aged and erratic mother. They are so poor that when the baby’s teeth become abscessed, the problem progresses to gangrene which becomes fatal. The girl brings her dying baby in from the village and shows her to her white employers, who are unsympathetic and direct her to take the child to a doctor but not before serving dinner to guests. The delay contributes to the death. The matter is complicated by the gender of the baby, since females are not valued, and indications that the father may be the husband-employer. Discussion is enriched by the opinions of the beautiful wife of the supervising officer who arrives to make sure “Blair” does the right thing -- whatever that is.

These puzzles are not Sudoku. They are human dilemmas. But fiction. Based on fact. Like much of Tim Barrus’ work. Like my “Twelve Blackfeet Stories.” This sort of inquiry is key to the values of a humanities education. And to religion as well as law. Parables.

BEEN FOOLED YET TODAY?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TWO-STORY SNOWDRIFTS

Yesterday we got another wild calf-strangling blizzard with intense winds stacking up feet and feet of snow. I’m only exaggerating a little bit. I almost had to resort to my roll-up garage door get out, but managed by pushing the storm door hard and reaching around to scoop away enough snow to squeeze out and stand on a cleared spot while I shoveled properly. Then I punched my way over to Rose’s place, crossing four foot drifts, then clear ground, then a drift, and so on. I saw that the Crawfords in their mighty pickup had crashed up the alley with no trouble --powerful engines (F350’s), four-wheel drive, high suspensions. It’s what they need to feed cows in this country. And those nickel plated bull-balls, of course.

I was up in the night as usual. At 3AM the Internet is good for cruising. The sky was clear velvet black with star prickles all over it. If I’d been more dynamic, I’d have done some shoveling then. The temp was relatively mild. Instead, I wrote for an hour or so, then a round of catfood and back to bed. Crackers and I had some negotiating to do over who got to sleep on which side and where the covers ought to be and other minor problems. She is not a smart cat but she is a very determined one. She likes to head under the covers towards my feet, then turn and hurl herself into my armpit, but if she doesn’t get the angle or force quite right, she ends up with her head too far north for it to be on my arm. Then she has to go through the whole routine again. Squibbie sleeps out in the front room in my “company chair,” the wicker one I bought out from under a guy in a service station in Alberta and painted gloss white.

But she only sleeps out there until it gets cold, which is part of the reason we all get up at 3AM or so. This morning she declined to go outside on walkabout. My screen door, slipcovered in plastic sheeting, has a hole cut in both screen and plastic for the convenience of cats. There was a long low drift from hole to the middle of the garage. I turned on the cat incubator lamp next to my computer, but Crackers went back to the electric bed. When I finished my stuff, I went, too. About eight AM Squibbie arrived to occupy my other armpit. We snoozed on for a while. The church carillon next door doesn’t start until nine.

Fortified with more cat food and some hot coffee (not TOO hot, since the latest health news says it will give you cancer of the esophagus, or at least it does in Afghanistan where they did the study), I went to check my email. Modem showed red again. Off. What? MORE maintenance??

Reached a cautious arm out the front door to snag the newspaper, which is Squibbie’s cue to rush for the Great Outdoors, but this time she was confronted with the Great White Barrier Drift. The newspaper, smaller and smaller every day, was quickly read, the best comics and articles torn out which is why I need paper. Back to the computer.

Nothing.

Where did I put that sticker with the Techie number? Much rummaging. I suppose I should stick the sticker up someplace. The cats watched critically but declined to help. Sticker showed up in a safe place. I forget where.

So I talked to Brian in Great Falls and we spent a half-hour walking through a protocol made necessary by a mysterious change they made at the provider (eighty mile drive) at 8AM. “Um. Yeah. Oh, I see. Um. Uh-huh.” This was all Brian. Pretty soon, “go to your *(&^(*$# and type in *&$$#^.” Oh, sure. Glasses slipping, hair in my eyes, fingers stiff, mind not quite in contact with reality, which wouldn’t be all that helpful anyway.

It works. I’m in like Flynn. (Yes, I’m aware of the derivation of the expression from the love life of Errol Flynn, who is lucky he didn’t have to struggle with condoms in the shower.)

I check my email and there’s hardly anything in it. Not much in junk. The nifty new SPAM quarantine doesn’t have much in it. What’s the deal? Has everyone given up on blogging as a civilized enterprise and gone to twittering -- “twitter-pated” as it were? The Great Falls Tribune confirms than they have. Well, I’m not gonna do it.

Whiskey Prajer (pseudonym) has sent me a fascinating little book about “Fakers.” It begins with the fact that “Robinson Crusoe” was not written by Robinson Crusoe, who was fictional even though he appears as the author. Gasp. Then launches into a description of Paul Maliszewski’s own adventures in fakery, beginning in the fifth grade when he produced a phony letter, complete with felt-tip drawn stationary head, drafting him into the professional sports world. Then goes on to an account of his boring job writing business news, which he decided to liven up by sending satirical “free-lance” articles to his own paper. The trouble was that the manager, who seems to have had the same pointy-headed hairdo as the manager in Dilbert, thinks they are real. Worse, they attract fans who take them seriously. Later, when he confesses to his deception, some sophisticates say they knew it all the time. Uh, huh.

Paul M. then goes after a few Internet hoaxes, like a story about a giant grizzly in Alaska so big it can look over the top of a two-story house. Right. His first mistake is right there: the big brown bears in Alaska are Kodiak bears, not grizzlies though closely related. Which makes one of his main points, though he didn’t realize it: hoaxes are all in a context which what gives them their believability. If you live in a part or stratum of the world where the phenomenon is unlikely, you might be more willing to believe that bears can look over two story buildings. If you live in Alaska, you might say, “No way, Baby. The biggest can only look over one story buildings.”

And that’s the next tip about hoaxes: start with the truth. Then add dimension: “Yesterday hurricane force winds piled snow in Valier to the height of a two-story building!” Here’s the truth: we finally have the normal amount of moisture. About those bull-balls... Oh, sorry. Gotta go. The cat wants in -- er, out. (Another rule, throw in a lot of irrelevant detail.)