CITY SEWER SYSTEM SYNDROME

When I moved to Valier in 1999, the mayor was an older man who ran a loose ship and most people seemed to like it that way. 

The next was Velda Loch, a person with strong social skills who grew up in the town.

The next is McKenzie Graye, a person from the urban NW with a lot of corporation experience and a feminist skew.  Mayor Loch was plagued with poor health, but knew how to network the state for help with the problems that dog every small town in Montana, partly because the infrastructures are aging out and partly because the population is unstable -- receding very far from the boom days when they were built, but then jerking back into action in response to a new wave of industrial resource development like frakking and wind farms.  

Both recent mayors brought in grants and loans to help pay for a new water tower, an expansion of the sewage lagoon, and some work on the “collection tree” of pipes under the town streets, unseen but vital.    Drought and a sinking well water table made water meters necessary, which some considered an invasion of privacy.  Water access had come to be taken for granted, like rain.  A new well was begun and a new watertower built.

The ladies didn’t get much praise for this.  The town worries about potholes, dust and chickens.  But they are VERY worried about money, so they voted down the levy meant to address the streets.  At the last election the town gadfly, who is sometimes so troublesome that he has had to be escorted out by a deputy sheriff, has been elected mayor.  He had used the work on infrastructure, or more specifically the financing of them, as a wedge issue to imply the same dreads that are chewing on the nation:  corruption, unnecessary expense, connections producing personal gain, and the search for scapegoats.  Now the gadfly has become the mayor.  He will bring his high-lighted spreadsheets, his dubious bookkeeping, his scorn for any regulation, into office.

A contract -- which he opposed -- has just been signed to improve the sewage treatment plant so the town will pass the increasingly stringent standards imposed by the state and DEQ.  At the most recent meeting, the elected but not sworn-in mayor once again objected that he thought it was unnecessary, that he knew better ways, and so on.  The present mayor again explained the steps of logic that led to the contract.  I have sat in many previous meetings as she has explained it to the same man.  

He always brings props.  Flourishing his charts and spreadsheets, he tacked them to the bulletin board (Luther nailing up his objections to the church door) and made the same claims.  The mayor explained again.  Then another time.  This man could not assimilate the information.  The town employee who is closely involved in the matter explained it.  No impact.  The mayor tried again, louder.  A letter from our town water master, quoting difficulties just like ours in Fort Benton, was read aloud.  Brushed aside.

Finally, Shannon Gabbard,  a deputy sheriff and board member, who was not re-elected although IMHO he is exceptionally gifted at this kind of situation, stepped in with new information, reminding us all of atypical weather conditions that have occasionally overwhelmed the lagoon.  He mentioned the illegal access to the sewage lagoon through an unmonitored manhole.  The lagoon has been discovered floating with grease rags, with feminine hygiene applicators, with paper debris that could NOT have come through the town sewage collection system, and with quantities of wheat, most of which came from private “honey trucks” that pump out septic tanks (very few of which are located in town) and which could not be digested by the lagoon bacteria.  Permission for honey trucks to discharge directly into the Valier sewers has been suspended.  Monitoring the manhole would mean an expensive camera which would undoubtedly be vandalized, but the practice seems to have stopped.

The actual construction and function of the Valier lagoon depends upon bacteria digesting sewage.  When the water is “finished,” it goes into the water table.  The state requires testing of effectiveness and will impose fines if the tests are flunked.  Valier’s lagoon began to flunk too often, esp in cold weather.  The Town Council asked engineers to investigate.  The problem seems to be that the aerators are at the top of the water where they can freeze and that the circulation in the water is “short-circuiting” -- that is, by-passing the farther regions.  The remedy recommended is a floating cover and relocation of the aerators to under the water where the air forced through to keep the bacteria breathing will also be heated.  

At the same time as this struggle goes on, state and federal regulatory bodies keep imposing higher standards on the quality of the sewage treatment so though the objective numbers are the same, they are now sometimes technically below par.  The town council was so eager to demonstrate good intentions and so well-prepared on their application for help that the state has given the town a temporary "pass" providing they won’t be fined so long as they keep making progress towards solving the problem.  But each violation is recorded.

What the gadfly and other dinosaurs can NOT understand, no matter how many times it’s explained, is that the state and national government can impose requirements and levy fines.  The balkers seem to classify that with climate change and Obama-care, some kind of flimflam for political reasons.  The realistic bottom line was expressed by Velda Loch, who made an impassioned, eloquent, informed, and generously motivated attempt to get this confronter to see what is at risk:  the welfare of Valier.  At last he shut up.  We are desperately hoping he will not use the same tactics on the state that he used to get elected.  Luckily, the mayor has no power not authorized by the council.

Very few citizens attend these council meetings.  They say there is no use to it, that voting all incumbents out and boycotting meetings is an effective protest against a world that has turned against them.   Yet democracy cannot work if the citizens do not participate beyond playing thumbs-up/thumbs-down at elections as though it were just a video game.  First the co-ops began to fail, then the schools begin to hurt, the volunteer firefighters and EMT’s wear out, the churches shrink, and so on.  One day there is no town.

  An excellent article about the same subject in Bozeman is at http://www.bozeman-magpie.com/perspective-full-article.php?article_id=1060

SYSTEM DYNAMICS & DEFINING STAKES

Every day I read a number of blogs about publishing and bookstores as well as writing and reviews of writing. Also, blogs about art and listservs about environmentalism which has exploded in astonishing ways. Right now they are arguing about ecoporn and whether a passage in Timothy Treadwell’s journal (he’s the guy who was trying to merge with grizzlies and did -- along with girl friend -- when one of the bears ate them) in which he says he’s so moved when he holds his favorite female bear’s scat in his hand, still warm from “being inside her.” (The scat -- not the hand.) In addition, I get practical inquiries about things like genealogies and the viability of teaching jobs here. And, of course, I’m reading about liturgies and shamans, which always brings in a lot of comments that are meant to show how much the reader knows, how much magic power they have. (I mostly zap them.) And there are always Native American issues, which I try to confine to Blackfeet most of the time. This does not exhaust the kinds of reading I do in a day, except that you can pretty well rule out immersive fiction. I try to keep in touch with it, sort of, through a little panel of cousins and friends who love good novels.

What I want to reflect on a bit now is two entwined issues: system dynamics and defining stakes. I suppose you might say I’m prompted by last night’s town council meeting in which a consulting engineer tried to defend himself against a chiding mayor. I don’t understand what was underneath this, except that it was clear that the assumptions of everyone involved -- and even those who were not directly involved -- were pretty much mismatched. I came home to watch the last DVD of the series “Vera” (first season) which plays off the idea of a police commander who looks like someone’s dumpy mom. (Barbara Blixeth played Brad Pitt’s mother in “A River Runs Through It.”) This is not Helen Mirren in the menacing city. One wonders how ever she got into such a job except that it’s way out in a tiny town on the English coast. (Fabulous scenery amped up with cloud-enhancing filters.) The stakes are always murder, with subsets of motivation that vary from one suspect to another. The dynamics are always steady “plodding” as they say over there, mixed with insights that come from knowing the territory since Vera grew up there.

System dynamics are confronting a lot of politicians right now: how should they interpret the “Occupy” movement and handle the very practical issues of a lot of mixed people camped in a park? How should they interpret the economic issues of Europe as they go tumbling along, partly in reverse? Small businesses must also be struggling with what strategies they should use now that they’ve fired so many people that the remainder are cracking from overwork, but the only hope seems to lie in increased productivity. Which brings us to the issue of what the stakes are. Bottom line: profit. Jobs. And a life. Re-election. The survival of a nation without internal chaos.

Here in a small town which sees its survival as dependent on growth, we are seeing new people move in, some of them eager to participate in our local doings. They are quite different in terms of their understanding of process and stakes. Those who have come in from big cities and the corporate world misread local agendas but attract local people who think big city people are sophisticated and informed. I have the opposite prejudice, having worked behind the scenes for too many years to ever be trusting of big city corporate guys.

Heart Butte, the Blackfeet village thirty miles away, has a variation on that prejudice. They hire urban romantics, pull them this way and that in their own interests -- too local to be intelligible to outsiders -- and then sent them packing out of town with all the dissatisfactions and outrages attached to them. The stakes are always contradictory and rooted in history: how does a Native American assimilate to the mainstream culture without losing identity? Can you earn a Ph.D. at a good university without discarding many of the patterns that make you a tribal member? Worse that than, for many people the symbols have displaced the realities. A “good education” is a check list of certificates and entitlements, NOT a transformed way of interacting with the world, which I believe it is. Even in Valier, even in Great Falls, I don’t think this last is a common viewpoint. Money makes the world go around. Money comes from jobs. Jobs come from a check list of certificates.

Like “Vera,” my outsides are misleading. I have her same notion of how to dress and the same tendency to stage outbursts, which are acceptable in men but not women. But that’s minor compared to being interpreted by persons with an entirely different value system, quite a different idea of what’s at stake. When I work on Bob Scriver issues, most people assume I’m trying to get money and status out of it. Because of the Industrial Cowboy Art Cartel, they assume that I’m still in love with Bob Scriver (I am), but only because he was a big shot once. (Right now his bronzes at auction go for less than the cost of casting them. Some collector somewhere is going to clean up when the value of them rises again, which they will.) The idea of thinking about anything for some other reason than making money is just too far from their own lives for them to consider.

What I saw last night was corporate methods applied to a local management problem. Fascinating. Not good for a small town. Somewhere in the background I could hear the hissing friction of hands rubbed together as the vulnerability of this town to schemes and stakes on an international level was increased. The more divided, the more distracted, the more contradictory, the more secrets, the easier it will be to run scams. The easier it will be for a bear market to become a scare market. As if we weren’t already there.

THE REGULATORY CZAR: CASS SUNSTEIN

Decades ago in Portland, Oregon, I attended a conference at Lewis and Clark Law School about exotic animal trafficking.  It is problematic because it strips the originating ecology of that animal and inserts the animal in an alien place where it can become a pest, dangerous, or destroyed.  A man was speaking about the difficulty of writing effective laws and I have never forgotten his advice.  “People are too alert about laws, which must be voted on and reviewed by courts.  The smart thing to do is to concentrate on regulations.  They are not voted on, they are controlled by administrators, easily changed, and too complex for anyone to monitor thoroughly.  That is, it’s hard to pass a law forbidding the importation of tigers, but it’s easy to create a set of regulations so restrictive that no one will want to bother with it.” 

Thus, my eye was caught by an analysis of the seven books (and counting) of Cass Sunstein, dubbed the “Regulatory Czar” or more formally the head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Analysis (OIRA).  The piece is written by Joseph Postell, an assistant professor of political science at the U of Colorado on behalf of the Claremont Institute which announces itself “for the study of Statesmanship and Political Philosophy.”  In fact, it is conservative, right wing, and believes it is defending the original concepts in the US Constitution, particularly free trade.

Regulations, aside from the clever evasion of law, are increasingly problematic in two ways.  On the one hand no one wants to create the expensive machinery of inspectors and their oversight to ensure diligence and prevent corruption (which dependably never quite works in practice).  On the other hand, we have inadvertently developed a system of dueling regulations.  On the political left the regulations seek to create more fair and protective practices for more people (the greatest good for the greatest number) and on the right the regulations seek to protect trade advantages, the gradients that create profit in the name of “freedom” and hard work.

The interesting part of this argument from Mr. Postell is his suggestion of how political stances have developed.  He begins with “progressivism” which is my grandfather’s sort of Republican, that is, based on development usually supplied by engineering as the frontier was “developed” with dams, mines, universities, and transportation systems.  He was a white man, born and educated in Scotland, whose family immigrated to homestead in South Dakota and thought very little about displacing the indigenous people, who were already removed or there would have been no homesteads.  No one in his family smoked, drank, played cards, or slacked off.  They believed in family, Yankee ingenuity, cooperatives and Rodale.  Postell feels liberalism is a degenerate and redistributive version of this.

Postell feels that Sunstein is rejecting these classic values by citing deconstruction in a self-contradictory way.  Sunstein says “meaning is created rather than found” and “no text has meaning apart from the principles held by those who interpret it, and those principles cannot be found in the text itself.”  But he says, “This does not mean that all argument is manipulation or that good reasons cannot be offered on behalf of one view rather than another.”  I take Sunstein to be saying that it is necessary to step back far enough to examine one’s values, which Postell is reluctant to do.  He doesn’t want to admit that his basic values (profit and freedom) are in conflict with those of Sunstein (the greatest good for the greatest number). 

Postell’s idea of the goal of regulation by government is “to protect property rights and enforce contracts, . . . preserve markets and voluntary exchange of goods.”  He objects to the idea that government should “redistribute wealth from one person to another.”  That is, tax the rich to feed the poor, which he feels has become the practice of liberals who want health care and social security, etc.  He says “Sunstein has written that pragmatism is an approach to solving otherwise interminable questions about first things.”  Meaning values.  Instead of beginning with ontology (essential beginnings like the Constitution) Sunstein is going to teleology:  goals and results.  But he is not willing to use regulations in a repressive manner, and his desiderata are not the same as Postell’s.

The wonderful phrase “choice architecture” and less wonderful “libertarian paternalism” get thrown around, both of them coming out of consumer strategy.  The idea is to make it easy to choose what the regulator wants, often by NOT taking an action so that, for example, by default you accept a free trial but are billed for continuing service if you don’t cancel by the deadline.  Or by hiding consequences behind glowing versions of what you are getting.  (Gift VISA cards with many small fees for the user.)

An example belabored in this argument comes from the book called “Nudge.”  It has become obvious that people (many of them poor or kids) live on hamburgers and french fries at the expense of their health.  Bad health means higher social costs.  The right winger wants absolute freedom to keep on selling something so profitable as fast food.  The left winger works to get such food removed from schools or from food subsidies. The “Nudge” compromise is to require the restaurant to print the calorie counts of the foods on their menus.  Postell feels this is an imposition on the freedom of the food seller.  But he does not argue with health inspections to eliminate rats and roaches nor does he argue with TB screening for food handlers.  Would he argue with a requirement to serve only food produced in the United States?  Would anyone argue with the unenforceable requirement that all food handlers must wash their hands thoroughly before returning to work?

The strange part of all this is the passivity of so many citizens except when it comes to consumerism.  People (including kids and immigrants) often know amazing amounts of technical detail about what they buy, whether it’s drugs or washing machines, but know hardly anything at all about how a democracy operates.  Their passive choice IS “libertarian paternalism,” even if it means working in a bar sodden with lethal second-hand smoke.  Their passive choice is not voting, not attending meetings, not finding out the basic information they need for good health -- much less acting on it.  In fact, much of their consumer research is simply thrust upon them by advertising.  So why WOULD any intelligent, enterprising, progressive who only knows people like him or herself want to waste any effort on the lumpen masses?  Let them die.  If they don’t care, why should anyone else?  Now we're partly into religious values and partly facing the practical consequences of poor, desperate, suffering people -- which is social disorder and ultimately revolution. 

What are the differences among a nanny-state, a justified butt-kicking (forget nudging) government, or a fascist elite minority that makes sure all regulations cause the money to run into one corner of the table -- THEIR corner?   Can the difference be found sitting around a government conference table designing effective regulations while NGO’s huddle to push their own causes and across town the corporate lawyers meet to evade all restraints?  I’m skeptical.  Our ecology has changed.  Our value landscape is in turmoil.  Our laws and even our constitution are challenged.

COMPROMISE IS THE HEART OF DEMOCRACY

Compromise is a hoary old bear who messes up rebellion and status quo alike. It is at the heart of democracy. Sometimes if the compromise fails, one side or the other gets its way entirely, but at what cost? It’s better than warfare, but sometimes only barely. (Bearly. Bear market. I always get jokey when I’m worried.) Sometimes the compromise means lose/lose. Sometimes it means win/win.

It seems as though most often it means ambiguity. On the other hand no one really knows what the long-term outcome of our recent political refusals to compromise will be. The immediate moment is survivable so far. Probably. Servetus refused to compromise and they burned him at the stake. Galileo compromised and was simply confined for the rest of his life. De Sade the same, with a little help from his friends and wife. Socrates did not compromise on the larger issue but killed himself rather than be murdered. More than one have chosen to die but on their own terms. So did they win or lose? Ambiguity.

Looking into the unabridged dictionary, I was surprised to see that the original meaning of compromise was to agree to the decision of an arbitrator, an outsider. The second meaning is a mutually negotiated settlement. The third meaning is doing something that endangers someone else or a larger group. “The blabbermouth put the secret spy operation at risk, compromising their plan.”

Looking back over the local controversies as well as national issues, it strikes me that under most intransigence (unresolvable, non-negotiable) is one side operating on principle without regard for consequences and the other side operating in terms of practicality. One group wants “my way or the highway” and the other wants “evolution not revolution.” It’s painfully clear that the more Obama moves towards gradual progress, the more the tea party demands that all compromise be rejected. In terms of NA reservations, those who want sovereignty on principle want flat, inclusive, across-the-board self-determination regardless of funding or loss of service from state and federal agencies. (“Give me liberty or give me death.”) Those who are for practical compromise are willing to figure out which services are best performed by the tribe and which might better be left with outside agencies. (“Let’s make a deal.)

Rarely is such head-butting without history, either that of the larger globe or that which formed the minds and hearts of the individuals involved. Massive cultural transitions -- like the millions of Europeans who flooded America in the 19th century and crowded the Indians off the plains, or like the Internet, or the changes in sexual morality due to medical advances and economic change -- mean that much of daily life will have to be figured out all over again and the infrastructures that coped with the previous circumstances will have to be rebuilt in the most practical and obvious ways. Roads, bridges, schools, jails.

As I write, the water mains of this village are being replaced with great roaring, clanking and inconvenience. We are required to accept water meters for the first time. People are not happy, But they chose NOT to participate in the decisions made, which were largely dependent on funding grants from Big Government which imposed the meters; all made necessary by the march of time which had cracked and threatened the old masonry pipes while lowering the water table of our wells. Many of the small communities across Montana were founded about the same time, so this problem is being experienced by many of them at once, and that’s where the state money goes. The only people happy about it are the engineering businesses who are evaluating and executing the replacements. The greatest danger to the democracy of the village is the vocal desertion of malcontents, who would rather blame than participate but fail to move away. Old story.

It would be better (marginally) if the objectors played the game of “uproar” (overturning the card table when you’re losing at Poker), because then at least they would be in the room. “Funny uproar” is better than violent uproar. Someone just sent me a set of photos of the demonstration against the Pope in England. Pretty clever stuff! And they make some very sharp points, which will be seen and repeated by many, precisely BECAUSE they are funny. I need some good infrastructure jokes.

What strategy can one use if the deadlock is real and seems irresolvable? How can we think about it? One way is to try to find the overarching (or underlying) category that includes the two oppositions. Paul Tillich, a theologian, looked at the contradictory notions of being and non-being and made up a new term: “the ground of being.” Then he could speculate on the nature of “the ground of being.” It’s a lot easier to think about the quality of village life through time -- what makes people live in small rural communities like this and what are the absolute minimum basic needs just for survival: our “ground of being.” At least one person believes it is a well-watered lawn.

Same on a national basis: what is our ground of being? If we say it is democracy, then the basic requirement is that everyone is included and everyone should participate. If that’s not happening, then we have to ask ourselves why. Too busy, too stupid, too lazy, too late?? But the price we pay for freedom is that some of us (us?) have to carry the others.

That’s kind of a blind alley. So let’s think of another strategy, something way off the wall. Maybe this country is just too big to manage, to ever reach a consensus. Let’s break it up into ecosystems: disunite the states. Red on this side, blue on that side, hispanic here, Lutherans there.

That’s not radical enough? Okay, figure out the carrying capacity of each ecosystem, translate that to the number of humans economically viable in it and if there are more people than the carrying capacity, they have ten years to either increase prosperity by inventing new development, or somebody leaves. We could load them into boats back to Europe. Or we could count off by twos and sterilize every other person regardless of gender. Or we could simply stop funding cheap food, medical research, and law enforcement until starvation, disease and crime cut down the population. Attacking all funding seems to be the strategy of choice for Republicans. But there’s also delaying settlement of old debts (like the Native American funds previously embezzled by the government) until everyone in the class action is dead.

Does participatory democracy sound better now? Think we ought to sit down at the table (carefully setting it back on its legs) and see what cards we have?

LOOK OUT!! FALL!!

http://www.artsjournal.com/gap/2009/08/ominous-music-heard-nationwide.html

The Valier ominous early morning music, a high whine quite a lot like a giant vacuum cleaner, is a grain siphon moving wheat either into or out of the storage bins as big as houses. In fact, not too long ago, grain bins WERE little reinforced houses and it’s not hard to find ranch dwellings composed of several of them fastened together. But the newer metal bins are corrugated, round, and mostly inhabited by pigeons who live on them as much as in them, appreciating the scatter of grain always around them. The bins are so numerous they form whole neighborhoods of tin.

A grain siphon or auger is a long pipe on wheels, one end resting on the ground when not in use, and with a screw inside that will lift the grain as though it were water. Moving grain is quite a lot like moving water and one can even drown in a bin of loose grain. But just as dangerous is that screw inside the pipe. If it catches your sleeve cuff, you will be missing an arm. Not the arm of the shirt -- YOUR arm. There’s always been a macabre and ominous side to fall harvest, Halloween as opposed to the midsummer festival when flowering, full of bees, is just shifting into things to eat.

After a cool and breezy summer we’re now into a spate of heat and our light is saturated with smoke, so that the sun comes up red in a red sky and the day continues slightly orange, metallic, the sky whitened and high, the Rockies missing. We see all the things that didn’t get done this summer and MUST be done before winter. The Farmer’s Almanac predicts an unusually cold and snowy winter, as though last winter weren’t. But the leaves aren’t down yet -- just turning now -- so there’s no point in cleaning gutters. The garden is either exhausted or full of root vegetables that can stay in the ground.

My big silverleaf cottonwood, which makes this house so pleasant, has sent fine droplets of sap down all summer so that the pickiup is sticky and so is that side of the house. Washing the windows is pointless. I’ve about eliminated flies this summer, thanks to plastic bag traps with baffles in the top. Even the wasps are trying to get in there, but can’t get through the baffle, so maybe next year I’ll use the kind for wasps, though I don’t mind them. The bait is different. The ants were worse this year and I’ve finally resorted to serious poison from Big R instead of the pet-and-child-safe traps. It appears that the strategy of using peanut husks and coffee grounds to fertilize the flower borders is a bad one. The ants are ecstatic. They ate my Explorer Rose from Canada.

Because it rained fairly often all summer, my sprinkler discipline went to pieces and some things just didn’t get watered enough. On the other hand, the grass has never been so vigorous, except for the sweetgrass, which I would want to encourage.

Because of so many years in school, in academic jobs and in the church, fall feels to me more like a new beginning than spring does. I’ve gotten over the impulse to go buy a new plaid dress (I don’t know why they were always plaid.) but I never recover from the need to buy new pens and paper. So I did. Normally my windows in front have cafe curtains on them, but I took them down to wash, and see eight-year-olds with big backpacks striding heroically off to classes. It’s very confused this year. School started last week, not after Labor Day in the old harvest tradition. Anyway harvest is very late because of rain storms, and Labor Day -- which feels as though it should have been last weekend -- is not until next weekend, the 7th, which is as late as it can get. (First Monday in September.)

I’ve spent every day furiously typing away in my little back bedroom office without even having to run a fan, which meant that energy was high, ideas were flying, and I produced a LOT of print. But now I’ve got to sort and match and fit in all the pieces that Tim wrote. The economy may be re-assembling, though publishing is changing so much and so quickly that no one knows what that will mean about books. The Blowhard called Donald at 2blowhards has a book about popular traditional-style artists who have been very successful but got rolled underfoot by the Manhattan Modernists. He says he’s just about to begin sending his query packet around. This Donald is a very conservative (even old-fashioned) fellow my age who has spent his life as a quant in a corporate environment, so his opinion counts.

But the politics are back to hand-to-hand combat, even with the martyred body of Ted Kennedy in their midst. (Did you see the photo of all the presidents in a row in a pew, looking adult and sober except for George W. making a little boy’s petulant face?) An NPR guest talked about “revanchist politics” -- a term from the French word for revenge. All the insane preoccupation with imagined horror stories is destroying any kind of dialogue -- with the justification being that they are equivalent to the real and proven horror stories of the Cheney years. Payback. (Forget Bush. He’s Pinocchio except he never escaped the strings into reality.)

In this village people anchored in the realities of the seasons, the work, the family, are still easily worried by talk about climate change, water entitlement, global markets, and the possible removal of farm subsidies that represent the only profit some people make. There’s even talk of closing down CRP, the payment for NOT farming that underwrites many retirements. The two old guys across the alley, one alcoholic and the other with an amputated arm, say they’re going to winter together in the trailer. I called the cops Sunday because of the shouting and pounding -- not the old guys, but the young men who try to take sanctuary with them because they can’t find jobs or places to stay. Their families don’t want them. They aren’t imagining it. They are the seeds of trouble.

POLITICS OF IDENTITY & RESENTMENT

Only one time did I claim to be an Indian and even then I only took advantage of preconceptions and it was at the behest of one of my former students, who was supposed to be monitoring RezNet and wanted me to do it for him. This was in the Nineties, so long ago that I was working on a Lisa computer. My printouts from that time were dot matrix. I kept them. (Lawyers form a line to the left.)

It was supposed to be Indians-only, but I was coached not to say anything except, “I’m from Browning.” They assumed no white person would know about Browning and that I was Indian. This was the time of the violent NA on-line flame wars and I had my consciousness raised in a hurry. That’s when I invented the nom d’post of “prairie mary” and began to emphasize that I was old. I was convincing enough that one war-like woman intent on tracking down and killing every plastic shaman invited me to join her little side-operation, an even more secret group. That’s about the time I began to worry and got off the list, confessing that I was white. As it turned out, several people had recognized me and several others urged me to stay, which was very flattering, but I still left.

In fact, when my mother died in 1998 and Bob Scriver died in 1999, I had been much supported by the generosity and sympathy of others in the group, one of whom had just lost HER ex-husband. She lived on one of the islands off the Carolinas and sent me a braid of sweetgrass tied in red yarn. We shared dreams for a while -- they seemed to be visits from our lost ones.

Some of the group were beginning careers in the then-promising field of Native American literature, buoyed by the renaissance of their kind of writing and the attention of the media. Departments and publications were organizing. One of the correspondents was Sherman Alexie. Some were starstruck by him and others enjoyed plaguing him. He was soon offended and left. Others in the group did make names for themselves in the field.

But much of the media support eroded due to identity politics and the eight years of defying the Bush administration, combined with the slow realization that a tribal person who has enough education to catch the eye of a bigtime publisher is probably assimilated. The double bind is that if a tribal person gets a decent education, that person is no longer very “Indian,” or if the person is very Indian, no white people will read him. The assumption of publishers is that no Indians can read, so Native American books are not often distributed to reservation venues, and therefore even if any ordinary tribal people wanted to read them, they wouldn’t know they existed. So why would they write?

Identity politics has supported immersion Native language classes in the near past, but they are -- of necessity -- oral. Not many tribes had written languages so there is no body of literature for anyone to read alone as when Hebrew was brought back to life. Immersion language classes work, especially for little kids, and are worthwhile, but they haven’t had much impact except locally.

The politics of resentment have come to dominate reservations. Of course, it’s always powerful when people don’t feel as though they’re getting the possessions or the respect that they want and feel they deserve, which is to say that poor people are always vulnerable to the politics of resentment. In spite of major advances, the reservations have still not caught up to the rest of society (at least the society they see on television) nor even to the defined treaty obligations of the government, which hasn’t noticed that Indians vote until lately.

Yesterday I was looking for a good example of the politics of resentment that wouldn’t get me into trouble with any Blackfeet families, since I live close enough for retaliation, when Sherman Alexie fell into my email in-box. It seems that on a panel at Book Expo he attacked Bezos as “imperial”, accusing him of preventing ordinary folks from reading books by insisting that they read them on Kindle, which is enormously expensive and therefore “elitist.” [http://www.edrants.com/sherman-alexie-clarifies-elitist-charges/ The best thinking is all in the comments.] In order to defend himself from charges that he is a “Luddite” (against technology), he discloses that his Seattle apartment shelters his iPod, his cell phone, his computer and his HDTV. But “I have this strange, subterranean fear and loathing of the Kindle and its kind. I think it’s really about childhood. Books saved my life, Edward. I rose out of poverty and incredible social dysfunction because of books.” Also, epublishing would cut deep into his royalties.

He confides he has “to make my books available electronically. I have held out on the matter for as long as possible, but I have no author allies in this fight, so I have to submit. I have to sign contracts for eBook rights. I’m doing this in the blind because none of us know what’s going to happen. The last screenwriters’ strike in Hollywood was largely the result of this same issue. The legal issues regarding the Internet and copyrights and revenue are still unclear.”

Poor handsome, achieving, head-of-the-FallsApart-corporation, having to wrestle with some barbarian like Bezos. “I’m worried about the eBook’s influence on the whole culture.” What? We might all start creating Slam Poetry? Stand up comedy? Did I mention that his most recent poem in The New Yorker is about struggling across the desert with your brother on your back?

Which brother was that? One of those guys who sits in Old Town slipping a bottle in a paper bag back and forth among friends? It won’t be Tony Hillerman, whom he “razzed” -- as he puts it -- in “Indian Killer,” a tactical mistake since no one else much resents affable Tony Hillerman. And it sure as hell wasn’t Tim Barrus, whose LA Weekly attacker was encouraged and reinforced by Sherman, all indignant about any white person who pretended to be Indian.

Here on the Blackfeet reservation Sherman Alexie is a big hero, not because he’s Indian but because he’s like a white man. He even managed to make a movie, which means real success. (We don’t read the New Yorker here. Too expensive.) He’s right -- no one here reads from a Kindle. Not many even read books on paper. They don’t read ebooks either. They watch movies and videos. The library has assimilated all the Nat Lit into the other books.