BOOM !!

If I’m going to be critical of Medium, I should include POSITIVE criticism, and just in time, here came an article that blew my eyebrows off. When I first signed up for Medium, I expected much more writing like this piece linked below. Instead what appeared was a deluge of what they call listicles, “ten ways to wear lip gloss” and the like.

https://medium.com/@UptheCypherPunx/why-this-radical-leftist-is-disillusioned-by-leftist-culture-63419aa85a58#.kqfmq2och

This is as good a partial answer to why I left the Unitarian Universalist ministry as any I’ve read. (There were other reasons, too, like being pulled irresistibly back to the Blackfeet rez and the East Slope of the Rockies.) The comments should be read with the article, though they may make your bangs flop. They’re pretty polarized and some comments are along the lines of “if I don’t get my way, I’ll hold my breath until I turn blue.”

This is my ministerial robe.  Was.

How does one stand apart from the main culture because of believing it has gone radically wrong, and yet keep solidarity with all the good and conscientious people one lives among. Do you go join a commune? Do you turn academic and make distance that way? Do you just plunge into a book? (That’s my choice.) Do you get a custom t-shirt made? (That’s recently been the UU way.) Do you curse and shout and slam things?  (All the cats disappear.)

Never did I consider the possibility that I might align with “punks” or even “cybers”, much less cyberpunks. But here I am. Not even an official Lefty. It partly comes from being poor and old. (Trigger warning.) Partly it’s because my thinking is now world-based instead of bourgeois-based. (Trigger warning.) Partly it’s raging sorrow over what happens to those I care about. (Trigger warning.) Etc. Partly it’s just my temperament. (Red-headed — what can you expect?)

These examples dawn life were found in China.

I don’t want to digest the article for you — I’d prefer you to read it. But if you can’t or won’t, that’s okay. It might trigger you as much as it does me. Maybe the BOOM of it is the collision between indignation and reading about “deep time” before any fossils at all — pre-Cambrian and before — and cutting edge neurology research. We’re so fungible. (The first time I heard that word it was about money.)

Once I talked about “pre-Cambrian life” in a UU sermon and was mocked because, the man said, that’s an oxymoron. There WAS no pre-Cambrian life. As it turns out, there was merely none perceptible at the time (’80’s) but now , see above. This same sort of man (WEIRD, the acronym) becomes very angry over the idea that their identity should exist apart from their wordy consciousness. They are what they say, which they consider to be logical thinking. The idea that their brain was working while they were asleep, that the body needs constant neurological action as much as blood circulation — or the body dies — was simply invisible, inconceivable.

We must abandon “me and mine,” sequestered and guarded from harm, and everything else denied except a reflection of “me” on the bottom of the clouds that is imagined to be in charge of everything. We must admit that our boundaries are imaginary and arbitrary — we are a part of everything and must begin to perceive the imperceptible. Even the primordial beginnings that religion used to think they owned and which may still be echoed in what people are now calling “spirituality.”

I’m not talking about the magpie accumulation of cautionary insights nor about the pillow-fluffing of some religionists. I’m talking about acceptance of the shit and pain and cum of life right alongside the glorious moments when everything is fulfilled — for a split second. Even without the idea of God, the theodicy issue still grips us. We know in our gut that the survival of one is linked to the survival of all.

But we are not sufficiently aware of how many have died in the past to bring to us where we are. I’m talking about the brutality of childbirth, war, and famine. We’re getting all sad about the loss of every preemie or distorted baby among the people we know, but have forgotten that until germ theory was well-developed, women (like my great-grandmother) often died of child-bed fever and how much of the war between the sexes started with war between the stepmother and her predecessor’s children, making room for her own children. I mean my grandmother was mocked and blamed, with consequences to my mother. Or how much longer after that it took to allow women anesthesia.

If a person tries to enlarge awareness, never to turn away consciousness of need and suffering, identity can get stretched to the point of explosion or poisonous judgmentalism. You can’t just go around raging all the time, nor can you sit at home doing needlepoint and waging war on dust. Well, you can, but it won’t make you live longer. And it may cut off your access to joy and delight, your ability to get blissed out — which can be a potent antidote to psychic bruising and avascular necrosis (bone death). The hell with listicles — I want testicles. Not because it’s so funny when someone kicks them (how did we ever get to that idea?) but because they are the containers for what is inserted in the act of love, no matter the gender or even — (HERE’s a trigger!) species.

The realization of the day is that the world is seminal. Change, mutation, and destruction shape the process of time into creatures and their creations, whether we are talking about what insect legs look like or about how to run a bank that succeeds. The innovations/the destructions proceed holding hands, but the results can be near-impossible to bear. Impossible indeed for those who don’t make the cut, like the dodo. How does one be progressive or even optimistic in the face of this?

This house is full of cats. They teach me one-day-at-a-time and that stretching in the morning sun alongside me is the key to the universe. They also use their claws and make the most gawdawful sounds when I step on tails or toes. They are NOT human babies. They are NOT lovers. But I love the feel of them purring away like little engines while they sleep draped over my ankles in the night. I try to resist strangling them when they destroy things. Simple existence is enough for them. (And if you won’t feed them, they’ll feed themselves.)

The Striped Terror arrived uninvited as a starved kitten.

And I try NEVER to forget that there are babies going to sleep with bottles of Mountain Dew rotting their teeth, having eaten less than any of my cats, trying to suck life from an old unsterilized nipple. (If Medium is perceptible to the hidden underground of advertising, I will soon be getting ads for Mountain Dew and disposable baby bottles.)

QUESTIONING AUTHORITY

A set of questions called the ACE Study has been going around.  The idea is that if you answer most of these question in the positive, it predicts that late in life you’ll have major health trouble in the main ways:  heart attacks, kidney damage, liver disfunction.

The CDC’s Adverse Childhood Experiences Study (ACE Study) uncovered a stunning link between childhood trauma and the chronic diseases people develop as adults, as well as social and emotional problems. This includes heart disease, lung cancer, diabetes and many autoimmune diseases, as well as depression, violence, being a victim of violence, and suicide.

The first research results were published in 1998, followed by 57 other publications through 2011. They showed that:

Childhood trauma was very common, even in employed white middle-class, college-educated people with great health insurance;

There was a direct link between childhood trauma and adult onset of chronic disease, as well as depression, suicide, being violent and a victim of violence;

More types of trauma increased the risk of health, social and emotional problems.

People usually experience more than one type of trauma – rarely is it only sex abuse or only verbal abuse.

“A whopping two thirds of the 17,000 people in the ACE Study had an ACE score of at least one – 87 percent of those had more than one. (By the way, lest you think that the ACE Study was yet another involving inner-city poor people of color, take note: The study’s participants were 17,000 mostly white, middle and upper-middle class college-educated San Diegans with good jobs and great health care – they all belonged to the Kaiser Permanente health maintenance organization.)”

Prior to your 18th birthday:

1. Did a parent or other adult in the household often or very often… Swear at you, insult you, put you down, or humiliate you? or Act in a way that made you afraid that you might be physically hurt?
   
2. Did a parent or other adult in the household often or very often… Push, grab, slap, or throw something at you? or Ever hit you so hard that you had marks or were injured?
   
3. Did an adult or person at least 5 years older than you ever… Touch or fondle you or have you touch their body in a sexual way? or Attempt or actually have oral, anal, or vaginal intercourse with you?
   
4. Did you often or very often feel that … No one in your family loved you or thought you were important or special? or Your family didn’t look out for each other, feel close to each other, or support each other?
   
5. Did you often or very often feel that … You didn’t have enough to eat, had to wear dirty clothes, and had no one to protect you? or Your parents were too drunk or high to take care of you or take you to the doctor if you needed it?
   
6. Was a biological parent ever lost to you through divorce, abandonment, or other reason ?
   
7. Was your mother or stepmother:
   Often or very often pushed, grabbed, slapped, or had something thrown at her? or Sometimes, often, or very often kicked, bitten, hit with a fist, or hit with something hard? or Ever repeatedly hit over at least a few minutes or threatened with a gun or knife?
8. Did you live with anyone who was a problem drinker or alcoholic, or who used street drugs?
   
9. Was a household member depressed or mentally ill, or did a household member attempt suicide? 
10. Did a household member go to prison?

Another organization thought that there ought to be a counter-set of questions about what would make kids able to survive the difficulties above and they brainstormed these items.

RESILIENCE Questionnaire

1.  I believe that my mother loved me when I was little. 

2.  I believe that my father loved me when I was little.

  

3.  When I was little, other people helped my mother and father take care of me and they seemed to love me.

4.   I’ve heard that when I was an infant someone in my family enjoyed playing with me, and I enjoyed it, too.

  

5.  When I was a child, there were relatives in my family who made me feel better if I was sad or worried.

  

6.   When I was a child, neighbors or my friends’ parents seemed to like me.

7.  When I was a child, teachers, coaches, youth leaders or ministers were there to help me.

8.  Someone in my family cared about how I was doing in school.

  

9.  My family, neighbors and friends talked often about making our lives better.

10.  We had rules in our house and were expected to keep them.

11. When I felt really bad, I could almost always find someone I trusted to talk to.

  

12.  As a youth, people noticed that I was capable and could get things done.

13.  I was independent and a go-getter.

  

14.  I believed that life is what you make it.

If one were being honest about it, neither list has anything directly to do with being poor, belonging to a minority, enduring some kind of massive tragedy like a flood or earthquake, going through an economic depression -- all those forces that are arrayed against human beings trying to stick together and help each other.  And yet we all know that the first of these lists have a LOT to do with poverty, bad nutrition, disorderly schools.

And here’s another dimension:  “The Locust Effect”, a new book by Gary A. Haugen and Victor Boutros, describes places that are not just grappling with poverty. They are marked by disorder, violence and [hu]man-inflicted suffering.  “The relentless threat of violence is part of the core subtext of their lives, but we are unlikely to see it, and they are unlikely to tell us about it. We would be wise, however, to not be fooled — because, like grief, the thing we cannot see may be the deepest part of their day.”  Yeah, I bring this up because it applies to reservations where law enforcement is underfunded and confused by jurisdictional questions, distances are long so response times are long, and people have just gotten used to accepting low standards.

“The primary problem of politics is not creating growth. It’s creating order. Until that is largely achieved, life can be nasty, brutish and short.”

Order and dependability support growth.  This is true of the electricity supply, true of employees, and true of police response.  The answer is NOT vigilantes or outbursts of rage and punishment, which only create more confusion.  Schools, churches and shops must be safe, orderly places, not because of force but because that's what they want to be. 

It was sad that the superintendent of Heart Butte Schools and his wife were so shaken by threats from a punk kid that they actually packed up and left before the term had ended.  They could not have been so panicked unless they listened to stories that are a kind of secondary violence in a town that takes a sort of secret pride in being a place for badasses.  Like it means being powerful.  I’ve lived in Heart Butte, I’ve heard the stories, and I’ve known some of the punk kids.  I’ve also known many creative, dependable, cooperative families and their successful kids.  Nor did they have to leave to be like that.  They just wanted to be that way.

Heart Butte student activists

I say to Heart Butte,  “Don’t accept this picture of yourselves.  Look at these questionnaires above.  You can address every question.  It’s not a matter of money or race -- it’s a matter of motivation.  And helping each other.”

Taja

THE POVERTY LINE

What IS official poverty in the United States?  After considerable digging, which mostly revealed how many people administering Social Security and other “help” programs know nothing at all about what they are administering, it appears that defining “poverty” comes from a set of guidelines that are themselves determined by poverty “thresholds” which were originally defined by the Department of Agriculture by determining the cost of four “market baskets” for diets of people on farms and off farms, ranging from poor to superior.  

At the time these four levels of diet were arbitrarily defined, there was no allowance for contemporary nutrition standards, nothing about ethnic differences, nor about diets for chronic diseases, nor about processed foods. Far more people at the time lived on farms because the post-WWII migration to the cities was still in early stages.  Farm crops were not so involved with chemicals or genetic tinkering, nor were they so industrialized.  There was as much concern about farm income as about the hunger of people.  There was no allowance for how food shopping is affected by long driving distances to market sources or ghettoes where food prices are artificially high for captive consumers.  The shift of the labor market from basic work to specialized and computer jobs had not happened yet.

Thresholds and guidelines are renegotiated constantly, so that a person can be moved in and out of categories because of politically desirable standards based on non-personal characteristics like the current national resentment of any kind of social safety net.  The same income might be on either side of the cut-off line: sometimes at 120%, sometimes at 90% of the poverty threshold.   http://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/progdesc/sspus/appenv.pdf

Federal Poverty Guidelines  (abridged):    “Some programs use the poverty guidelines as only one of several eligibility criteria, or apply a modification of the guidelines. For example, the eligibility level may be set at 130% or 185% of the guidelines rather than 100%. Other programs, although not using the guidelines as a criterion of individual eligibility, use them for the purpose of targeting assistance or services. The guidelines become effective on the date they are published in the Federal Register (unless an office administering a program using the guidelines specifies a different effective date for that particular program) and remain in effect until the next update is issued.”

No wonder that none of the multitude of people trying to answer questions on government hotlines or trying to sell me insurance had any idea what it meant that in 2011 I was moved from Level 4 to Level 1, or what the “levels” themselves meant.  Which "market basket" was a plunked into?  Is 4 the top or is 1 the top?

Poverty guidelines, or percentage multiples of them, are used as an eligibility criterion by a number of Federal programs, including the following:

1. Department of Health and Human Services

2. Community Services Block Grant
3. Head Start

4.  Low-Income Home Energy Assistance 

5.  Hill-Burton Uncompensated Services Program  (in connection with previous medical facilities construction and modernization assistance to hospitals or other health care facilities)

6. AIDS Drug Reimbursements (under Title II of the Ryan White Act)

7. Medicaid (The guidelines are used only for certain parts of Medicaid; however, the rest of the program — which probably still accounts for a majority of Medicaid eligibility determinations — does not use the poverty guidelines.)

8.  Department of Agriculture

9.  Food Stamps
10.  Special Supplemental Food Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC)
11.  National School Lunch Program School Breakfast Program
12.  Child and Adult Care Food Program Special Milk Program for Children

13.  Department of Energy Weatherization Assistance for Low-Income Persons

14.  Department of Labor

15.  Job Corps
16.  Migrant and Seasonal Farmworkers
17.  Native American Employment and Training Programs 

18.  Senior Community Service Employment Program Corporation for National Service

19.  Foster Grandparent Program Senior Companion Program

20.  Legal Services Corporation. Legal services for the poor

The following Federal programs do NOT use the poverty guide-lines in determining eligibility:

Aid to Families with Dependent Children and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families

Supplemental Security Income

Social Services Block Grant

Department of Housing and Urban Development’s means-tested housing assistance programs

The article at the following url is very enlightening.  It shows that the original thinking came out of the Great Depression and was then somewhat revised for the purpose of the Johnson War on Poverty.  http://www.ssa.gov/history/fisheronpoverty.html

The "generally accepted" standards of adequacy for food that Mollie Orshansky used in developing the original “thresholds” were the food plans prepared by the Department of Agriculture.   With family roots in the Ukraine, Oshansky (b. 1915 in the US) was one of six children who were raised in the Bronx.  This family information was sometimes used in an attempt to discredit her standards so the poverty level could be raised.  In fact, a West Wing television series plot aired November 21, 2001, was called “The Indians in the Lobby” and was based on a story by Allison Abner that addressed the issue.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pt0tvWSbirY  is a short clip of Abner in person.  She is now involved in the issue of child sex trafficking.  All these issues are inter-related.

So many aspects of contemporary society demand a global re-thinking.  There is a movement away from statistics and politically-controlled issues towards practicalities.  Recently I saw a list -- which would not be universal, but an excellent beginning -- of questions for someone trying to determine poverty levels:  

1.  Do you have a warm winter coat?

2.  Do you ever have to miss a meal or go to bed hungry?

3.  Must you choose between medicines and food?

4.  Can you easily get to a store for your necessities?

5.  Do you always have clean underwear?

6.  Is your sleeping arrangement comfortable and safe enough for eight hours of sleep?

7.  Are your shoes comfortable?

8.  Do you eat the school-provided foods?

9.  Are you ever too cold/too hot?

10.   Can you afford public transportation?

I would add things like:

Do you have a library card?

Do you own any books of your own?

Can you afford a pet?

Can you afford to go out for sports?  Or attend games?

This list is mostly for school children.  A list for older people might include things like whether there is enough money to join the local morning circle of coffee-drinkers or enough money for proper hair care.  

What people really need in order to have an endurable life is not always definable from one group to another.  For some, being gregarious is basic; for others, solitude is far more important.  Some wish to be around children, others want to be away from noise and mess.  The costs will differ.  Now, of course, we’re looking at a technological divide, which is a HUGE leap in the necessary assets, though libraries with computers and personal smart phones are taking up some slack, even in the Third World which is partly internal to the USA. 

I figure that if all else fails, I’ll get to Mexico somehow, look for a village with clean water, and never wear shoes again.  But what about the cats?

If you have Netflix, here's the code for the West Wing episode in question.
http://movies.netflix.com/WiPlayer?movieid=70157152&trkid=13462769&tctx=6%2C5%2C7edbede4-6803-453b-a60e-79fbbe8d14d4-38806961#MovieId=70157152&EpisodeMovieId=70262134

PANDORA'S BOX -- NOT EMPTY YET

Reading David Quammen is like opening Pandora’s box.  The trick is to keep the lid up long enough to get to the bottom.  I’ve just finished “Song of the Dodo,” which is his early (and long) book about extinction, particularly due to isolated and extinguished populations, as on islands.  Scary stuff.  Rats rule.

Nationally it's a terrifying time.  Paul Krugman says the war on poverty has shifted into being a war on the poor.  I see that.  Stigmatizing people is a basic human (possibly mammal) strategy justifying extermination, but wealth has always been an effective defense.  For people who have no wealth, there is no defense except compassion, which is basically extortion, and as many remark, we're about exhausted on that front.   Justice is a lost concept.  Pigs are the man.

The factor that is ignored by Republicans and others is connectedness.  The Washington lawyers are so absorbed in playing their games that they do not see that a welfare mother in the deep South is actually connected to them and that if they let all the Alaskan villages sink into the sea due to global warming, they will drown as well.  Because government operates on trust and benefit to the whole, the order that comes of it is VOLUNTARY.  Without consent it's the end of the nation and the end of the nation is the end of politicians.  But politics played by withholding consent means our representatives are only obstacles, which we don’t need and don’t want.

At the moment human beings are more connected than they ever have been, mostly because of little gizmos like cheap cell phones and transistor radios.  I cherish the image of the Vietnamese peasant planting rice while singing along with the little radio in his pocket or slung around his neck.  I love the idea of the African “apron woman” whose wealth is her cell phone in her apron pocket: she is a walking phone booth.  These are not the playthings of the middle class -- the four-foot-across blu-ray flat screens with every chair pointed at it while people watch plane crashes, shooting incidents, and the hatching of bot flies.

But as soon as someone realizes that whoever controls the power sources and the tower/satellite infrastructure and the huge data centers that support the “cloud,” then that person will control the masses.  That “person” is not going to be human, but rather a “pretend” metaphor: a corporation.  Nor can it be regulated by a nation because -- difficult as boundaries surveyed on the surface of the planet can be -- the ones based on solar and wind power and motivated by individuals connected by self-generated affinities and services will be FAR more difficult to control or even detect.

As soon as something is stigmatized -- whether booze, sex or intellectual defiance -- it goes underground where -- like the mycelia of mushrooms -- the connections proliferate and provide nourishment.  The attack on them might be carpet-bombing with poisonous molecules, like whatever it is that the loggers are spraying on their deadfall trash that makes the elks’ feet rot or the known substance that Syria used on dissenters.  The trouble is that it’s uncontrollable.  Bear spray only works if it's pointed at the bear and the wind is right.  I was always impressed by Paul Fussell’s insight that the criminal, the insane, the wealthy and the powerful share the characteristic of being sequestered, living in an unreal and narrowly delineated world.  A teakettle world.  Vulnerable to in-breeding.  Pot bound.

Recently I’ve been attending “talks” at the Blackfeet Community College.  I don’t normally get out much, except in terms of books and google-stuff, which is enough of a chore to digest, but listening to the grandchildren of people I once taught, now much more like each other since whites have pretty much left but with a strong influence from south of the US border, I see what the reservation has created: ironically, a precariously middle class sort of people with similar faces, driving big pickups.  The talks are, presumably, in preparation for a certificate-granting course of study that will prepare mental health emergency responders.  An alternative to cops.  People who do what powerful aunts and grannies used to address:  freakouts, despair, violence, getting stuck, neglect.  We can’t just put everyone in jail.  This is where the action is -- NOT with politicians who are unwise in their choice of watering-holes.

But there is a possibly demonic side to it, slipping from the war on suffering to an attack on those who suffer.  I live next door to a conservative right-wing church whose minister is determined to get me under control for his own purposes.  He sends his little wife and she shepherds little girls to my door with gifts: homemade jam and art projects, a photo of the family enjoying a Hawaiian vacation and all making the sign language for “Love”.  (Remarkably similar to the sign for a cell phone.)  How he mistakes me.  How people mistake Indians.  How we all mistake poor people.  Even Krugman.

The problem with helping the poor is in the “helping” part.   Easy to be poor, hard to know how to respond to their variousness. More than any food bank (vital as those are) what counts is paying attention: listening and understanding.  The understanding part can detect patterns of dormancy, like all those little frogs who are hidden in the ground until one day it rains -- then they are singing their song everywhere.

But maybe the “poor” are not all one blob and maybe they are not impoverished at all.  Maybe the guy in the suit in the limo in the power center is the impoverished one.  The alternative media are always making a case for it -- the person who has everything, except his or her self.  It’s Dark versus Shepard.  Which one has the wealth?  What IS wealth?  In a world where the Pope dares to ask his parish priests just how many of their parishioners are quietly practicing birth control, the next scary question might be “what shall we do about it in a world that’s too crowded?”  According to the rules, they should all be excommunicated -- then, because there would be so few people left, there would be enough priests at last.  No more pressure to ordain women and husbands.

Seems to me that wealth has something to do with reality, though it is usually described in terms of the ephemeral and theoretical -- just marks, iou’s, tricky bookkeeping on a page where the columns are always swapping sides, going far beyond double-entry bookkeeping into roulette with a fixed wheel, the dealer operating a lever with his foot under the table.  All you win is plastic markers, little more than tiddlywinks.

The opposite of species extinction is the creation of new species, which normally happens among sequestered but dynamic populations, a condition not common these days of interdiction, parceling, dead zones.  But human evolution, though it happens right in the midst of all the other species, is NOT about a species.  Speciation is only the code changes that happen in the genome, drastic enough to prevent cross-fertilization between two variations.  Human evolution is cultural, through the “cultureome” -- the memes.  They can change fast and even by flipping to the opposite overnight.  They can be stochastic: black swans.

We seem to be splitting into the world that H.G. Wells described in a story I read long ago:  it was class stuff, of course.  Genetically expressed in terms of near-species.  Underground thick and brutal people did all the work to support an elegant elfin class of helpless but beautiful people.  There was a love affair that crossed the division.  May there always be love affairs that cross the division.  But, Pandora, be careful with that box of yours.

FEMALE SEX TOURISM

In reading about violence, whether between equals or imposed by a powerful person on one who is vulnerable (child, aged, female, slightly built, inebriated), the testimony that has impressed me most is the man who lost his marriage because of violence and too late realized that he had been abusive.  He genuinely didn’t know he was abusing his wife and children by yelling at them, insulting them and occasionally slapping or spanking them.  He said every man he knew, including his birth family, acted like that.  His standard was the same as for the United States in defining torture:  it’s okay as long as you don’t damage a major organ.  Bruising, cuts, and even broken bones are not considered to be damage to organs.  (But skin IS an organ.)  The man thought that acting this way was “keeping” order rather than destroying order.  To his mind “order” was a matter of rules, HIS rules.

So now I’m going to throw a curve.  Sex tourism, with female tourists.  Does anyone recognize it?  I recently watched “Heading South,” which might be considered romantic by some, soft-core porn by others and social criticism by the most sophisticated.  It is based on three short stories by Dany Laferriere, a Haitian who now lives in Canada.  The plots entangle three white women, a Wellesley professor of French literature; a conventional but needy wife from Savannah, Georgia; and a factory worker from Quebec.  They are sexually taking advantage of the poverty and youth of black boys in Haiti in 1970.  Living in a resort hotel where the boys are not welcome, the women swim and screw with them on the beach.  The women have no sense of consequences or context, either about the boys’ families or politically.  Their best impulse is to take these older teens home like puppies found while on vacation, which they are sure the boys will welcome.  They forget all about the American reaction to “miscegenation” or the boys’ ability to manage their lives in a foreign country.

The reason I ordered the film in the first place (it streams from Netflix) is that the professor is played by Charlotte Rampling, whom I admire as an actress, and who is, in the plot, the character who comes the closest to understanding the situation -- not that she hesitates at all in doing what she knows is treating real human beings like something less.  None of the three women is capable of recognizing their own vulnerability, their inability to distinguish between love and sex.  How does a college professor have an intimate relationship between equals with an illiterate beach boy?  The women all groan that they can’t get laid at home, but they don’t examine why that is or whether any of it is due to their own actions or whether there might be something else worth doing with their lives.  The working class Quebecois woman comes closest to just staying in the moment: her lover is apparently the oldest.  There is a child who aspires to being a gigolo but, to the credit of those in the story, he’s rejected.  In real life, he is more likely to be preferred as more easily controlled, less likely to object to anything.  Neither STD’s nor drugs are introduced except that the woman from Savannah is hooked on tranqs and they all drink a LOT.

The other dimension for those who are socially conscious, is that Haiti has been corrupt for a long time and runs on the rules of criminals -- “Deadwood” rules.  The most appealing black lover attracts a woman “owned” by the powerful, who kill both of them and leave the naked bodies in front of the resort hotel.  On the black side of the equation it is the black older male manager of the hotel who understands what’s going on, but he doesn’t explain very much.  He is fatalistic.

This movie is actually about sex trafficking, criminal exploitation, and the American appetite for sex that fuels the system.  If you think it only happens in Haiti, you’re an ostrich.  Think of the possibilities of a Native American reservation:  poverty, lots of idle young men with considerable appeal and no particular concern for propriety, plus major romantic notions about falling madly in love with a man who wears feathers.  And the inevitability of simply going back home, leaving all the difficulties behind.  

The first time I saw this scenario acted out was in the early Sixties when Ruth Beebe Hill -- who was our guest at the time -- insisted on receiving a “wonderfully untouched young Blackfeet trapper” while she was arranged in bed.  Research for her novel, “Hanta Yo!” maybe.   The guy, who turned out to be one of our hired men, was scared to death and only stood in the doorway, so it came to nothing.  We were too impressed by Hill’s credentials (mostly her friendship with Ayn Rand which included caretaking in Rand’s fancy house while pretending it was hers) but also so incredulous and amused that we did nothing to prevent this charade.  Nothing happened anyway.  But the pattern was there.

The point is that there is nothing simple about sex trafficking: entwined with criminals, drugs, tourism, violence, domination, privilege, and fantasy.  And disease.  It seems to be an impossibly coiled complex of causes.  But the point of access for making change might well be simple consciousness-raising.  We did it for littering, we did it for smoking, we did it for some aspects of feminism.  Why can’t we get people to understand that messing around with kids, even if they are boys, and esp. if there is money involved, is damaging to all concerned -- including the larger society?  

The idea of wickedness has a multiple role:  what the women are doing is wicked by the standards of their own society and they are titillated by it.  Such swaggering boys often feel that being wicked is a source of power and even protects them.  The people like the older resort manager who feels that the boys are wicked stigmatizes them.   The system that supports criminals -- feeding their appetites -- is the most wicked of all.  Not just the criminals -- the SYSTEM, including the fatalistic assumption that this is the natural way for things to be, so enforcing it with violence is justified.  Truthfully, what else can the boys do to earn money?  And the women want it.

Leferriere, I feel sure, did not write his stories for the erotic amusement of middle-class Americans who will consider this an exotic little adventure with just enough danger to be exciting.  Casting an actress as strong as Rampling means that for those who are smart enough to figure it out, they will see the evil at the heart of the apple.  The problem then becomes what to do about it.  The solution for these women is simply to escape back to home.  But there IS no escape: Haiti is entwined with America even at Wellesley.  No longer can we just leave foreign countries behind, but what comes back with us is not innocent boys.

SMALL TOWN WEALTH

The newspapers are full of statistics about how many people are living in poverty, which is defined only by income: $11,139 for a single person and $22,314 for a family of four.  But the circumstances of other factors are not at all considered.  Let’s reflect on them a bit, since I’m roughly at the poverty level for a single person.  

First, I’m mystified by that $139.  That’s a little over ten dollars a month. But it DOES make a difference.  Until the last few months I could buy everything I truly needed in a month and still have $5 left at the end.  Now if I bought everything, I’d end up $5 in the hole.  But in the past there was a nearby book store that would buy my used books, which sometimes boosted my monthly income by as much as $60.  Now that book store has left.  There is a free-lance market here in Montana that would buy stories for $40 each, but that market is faltering.  Small amounts make a big difference.

A few years ago I could see that something was going wrong with the Big Picture of money management, so I consolidated all my debts and credit cards into one big loan with a payment of several hundred dollars a month.  That payment is what is crimping me badly now, but it will be paid in a year.  When my mother died a decade ago and left me $30,000, I bought this house for that amount.  Some of the consolidation debt had gone to appliances and small upgrades of kitchen and bathroom.  Because I borrowed, I’ve enjoyed those for the past ten years.  If I had to pay rent, it would mean twice what my loan consolidation payment is and I would always be in danger of landing in the street.  Even now, my tax bill is sometimes delinquent and the sheriff threatens me with auction.

But the lesson that I was slow to learn and that the Town of Valier still has not learned, is that when someone buys something, that doesn’t mean it will be cost-free afterwards.  Maintenance is often roughly what the cost of acquisition was.  So the “free” flowerbeds in front of the Town Hall are now a continuing expense for labor, water, and flower starts.  (They replace two “aged out” trees which had only been watered.)   Being poor means owning something you can’t maintain.  On the other hand, as soon as I became a house-owner, my credit went up and a lot of coaxers paid attention.

Some things vital to a writing life cost nothing now, like my carefully acquired library of reference books.  (Almost every book printed about Blackfeet, for instance.)  But others are vampires:  a printer can suck up $100 in toner per month.  The computer and Internet costs $85 a month for a telephone connection and Internet account.  On the other hand, the cost of xeroxing a manuscript and mailing it is pretty much obsolete.  Going in the other direction are “reading fees” from the agent or editor who handles the slush pile.

But every household is ASSUMED  to have internet access now, if only at the library.  The pharmacist found an old prescription the other day, not very expensive (a good example of this same thing -- blood glucose test strips at $1 each for a little machine that cost about $40), and casually debited my bank account, throwing me within $1.50 of being overdrawn.  If she hadn’t included a bill when she mailed me the strips and hadn’t hurried to reverse the debit when I called her on the phone, I would have been overdrawn for a cost of $30 penalty, which would have thrown every subsequent check into overdraft.  The banks do not notify people of overdrafts, even though they have my email and could do it for no cost.  If I didn’t pick up my mail daily, check my bank account electronically every day or so, and have a phone to call her right away, I could have run up hundreds of dollars in debt.  In short, without the ability to constantly and electronically monitor one’s finances, there are tiger pits.  

One of the major variables of poverty is population density.  Travel in Montana is a matter of individual vehicles -- the public transit of the Sixties is much diminished.  Gas, of course, is far more expensive.  Maintaining a vehicle is more expensive since they acquired internal computers, since insurance has become mandatory, since the standards for emissions and so on have risen.  It costs me about $30 to drive to Great Falls.  The city dwellers do NOT drive to the outliers.  That means a conference with the Montana Historical Society about Bob’s estate costs me about twice my monthly Great Falls grocery trip.  I can no longer cross the border into Canada because I would have to pay $100 to renew my passport -- I didn't use to need a passport.  

Some costs are out of one’s control and personal money may not make a difference.  Valier’s electricity is undependable -- there was a two or three hour “brownout” on Sunday at suppertime.  Three Rivers, my internet provider, is so overloaded by school kids after supper that I can’t get online to do my own research.  In this part of the world the Internet is not seen as an instrument of business except by ranchers watching the stock market, even though many transactions are online if you think about swipe cards in restaurants and service stations.  The US government is considering subsidies for infrastructure upgrades but only for the cities where people live on their Smart Phones.   A quarrel about siting a cell tower in Valier has left us continuing the practice of going outside to make calls.  “Can you hear me now?” 

They talk about closing the post offices.  The city people say,  “Oh, no problem.  I just use the package service in my local mall.”  Valier has no mall, only one small family store.  Then why live here?  Because I don’t have to take a vacation to Glacier Park -- I already live here.  I escape the steady Walmartian pressure to acquire a new whatever instead of fixing the old one. I have clean air (when there’s no forest fire).  

But the state keeps enforcing higher and higher standards for the management of water and sewer, so those costs are rising.  The guy who sends in the water tests says they are so detailed and numerous that he devotes one workday a week to the task.  But, of course, we could buy a machine that would do that for $10,000.  Which came first?  The machine or the requirements?  The Town has just approved $25,000 for an engineer to find out why so often we don’t comply with the state requirements, since our system is relatively new.  You think the engineers didn’t lobby for higher standards?  Yet authorities permit “frakking” of old oil wells that may contaminate the ground water for the whole region.  There is a high cost in terms of time, effort and alertness in a rural place.  

We even keep an eye on each other.  According to the statistics keepers on the monitoring websites, Valier has two sex predators.  (We already know.  One is so ancient he can barely walk.)  I was once told we had three active drug peddlers.  We have a few soreheads, an excellent library (still people who read paper books), a lot of growing families, dozens of old solitary people (like me), a newly remodeled Catholic church, a stable school system, people who know how to fix stuff and do stuff, and so on.  Not bad for a few more than 300 people.  The real point is that we know each other -- or think we do.  Some of us are too impressed by prosperity and appearances.  Some of us are hustlers.  Most of us are pretty solid.  That’s the wealth that cannot be measured in dollars.

SERIOUS PLEASURES

One of my great pleasures is raggedy old paperback textbooks in arcane fields like Cultural Anthropology.  It used to be that people told stories about other people without dragging a lot of analysis and politics into it.  They just laid out the givens of the ecology, some history, and then gave you vignettes.  “Other Fields, Other Grasshoppers” (1977) is edited by L. L. Langness, a retired professor married to another anthro prof and living just over the Rockies a ways.  I think I had to shell out a little more money than usual.  I mostly spend a dollar for a book plus four dollars for postage.

There are familiar people here:  Colin Turnbull, Peter Freuchen, Peter Nabokov, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, Carlos Castenada, Oscar Lewis.  One grows to know the anthros as well as their chosen cultures.  The best ones are not all that objective, but take positions that are at least implied.  Castenada is almost proselytizing.  Elizabeth Marshall Thomas turned her observations to animals -- with good results.  Peter Freuchen married one of his subjects.  Colin Turnbull made everyone angry by showing the Ik as a dreadful people, distorted by starvation.  People are not nice once they get deprived enough, as holocaust survivors will testify.   Sympathetic inquirers understand that until the persons concerned get angry at the inquirers.

An interesting example was on “All Things Considered” this morning.  A female Norwegian journalist Åsne Seierstad, went to Kabul, entered a bookstore wearing a burka which allowed her to pretend to be local, and became close enough friends with the bookseller Shah Muhammad Rais, owner of the bookshop at the Intercontinental Hotel and another near the Mustafa Hotel, to invite her to live with the family for a few months.  She “novelized” the best-selling book, published as “The Bookseller of Kabul.”  But Rais said he was identifiable anyway, that she misinterpreted everything -- which caused him grief -- and sued Seierstad in Norway.  He won.  He also wrote his own version called, “Once upon a time there was a bookseller in Kabul.”   Not a best-seller.  The crux of the problem is that Rais sees himself as liberal and progressive but Seierstad portrayed his treatment of his two wives, one teenaged, as anything but.  Seierstad did not expect that Rais would be sophisticated enough to hire a lawyer to sue her and use the ensuing furor to apply for asylum in Scandinavia.  Neither of them seemed to have predicted that the first book would be bootleg-translated into Persian and a source of local foment.

It appears that Seierstad needed a little more training as a social anthropologist.  (She is noted as a war correspondent.)  One of the first things to figure out is how people see themselves.  “Truthiness” (to use Oprah’s concept) has to do with whether the reporting fits the preconceptions of the reader -- probably also the agent, the editor and the publisher, to say nothing of reviewers and interviewers.  “The Bookseller of Kabul” fits the hyper-feminist culture of Norway when it says that Rais is a tyrant in his household.  It fits Seierstad’s opponent-based world-view.  It does NOT fit Rais’ self-image as a savvy, educated, in-touch-with-the-world urban merchant.

How do we ever get a true notion of each other?  So many assumptions, so little communication.  I’ve seen perfectly ordinary Native American men slip into stereotypes, either far more ignorant and primitive or far more “spiritual” and generous than they are.  I remember when Cosmopolitan magazine sent a writer to Browning to see what NA women thought about NA men.  She disguised “Peaches” as “Cherry.”  Of course, we all knew who she was.

The anthropologists in this text who impressed me most were the ones who were with their people more than weeks or even months.  Rena Gazaway http://wotantue.us/GGU/Duddie lived with the people of a tiny isolated Appalachian community for years.  Her book “The Longest Mile” (1969) portrays lives worse than those of people living on the streets, because the community was locked together in mutual ignorance.  She slept in urine-soaked beds with huddles of their children, ate their abominable food (US commodities, which become dumping grounds for outdated and surplus food of low quality) and recorded their ideas.  They had little concept of what she was doing -- just took her at face value and appreciated it when she intervened in small ways.  (She had been trained as a public nurse.)

The moral dilemmas of people crossing cultures, whether by travel or by walking up the street to visit a Section 8 house, are huge.  Normally we manage our decisions by consensus within a group that has more or less settled on a “way” to do things, with beliefs that support them.  Usually the “way” is defended enough and works well enough for the “ecology” to continue itself over time and become beloved, part of the identity of the people.  (Rena took a fourteen-year boy home with her to the comfortable city.  He hated it and went back home.)

But then the economy changes -- something comes, like the Internet, or something leaves, like Anaconda Copper Refinery -- and the whole system falls apart into misery and confusion.  How can outsiders help when the strongest wish of the people involved is simply to restore what they know?

The impact of television and the internet on this problem has been mixed.  On the one hand, people are aware that there is an outside world and that one can successfully go out there.  On the other hand, they get the idea that there is only one “other” world: the one in sit coms.  Gotta have a sofa like that.  Gotta dress like that.  What do those people do for work?  People in sit coms go out to eat.

There are still American people living in hovels, lucky to have a working radio.  Have you read about the snowbanks melting in New York City, revealing abandoned sofas full of rats?  Did the rats move with the sofa or come there at the curb?  I’m talking the USA.  If you want to talk “third world,” that’s a situation of such different dimensions that it’s a different kind.

Or is it?  “Forcing” people to buy health insurance is laughable to someone living in a cardboard box, waiting to die of AIDS and TB and malnutrition but still proud enough to fight off attempts to grab them and reform them against their will.  Sooner or later the do-gooders just can’t stand it anymore.  

What ever happened to Rena Gazaway?  What happened to those stunted children and near-medieval adults?  There’s an interesting discussion at  http://wotantue.us/EvPsy/Comm.Week3    They say Rena was herself raised in what might be called a hillbilly hollow, though not one as catastrophically pathological as Duddie's Branch. She left the hollow behind and became Rena Gazaway, R.N., M.A., Ph.D.

So I don’t want to read any more about the “hollow.”  I want to read a book about Rena Gazaway and how she made her getaway.   What’s even more interesting is how she found the courage to go back.  Most of the escapees from poverty I know are terrified of slipping back into that trap.  They try to ignore all that -- even deny it.