CLAMATO AVENGED IN MONTANA TOWN

Last weekend at a bar in Hamilton, which is a sometimes fancy and rather nutty part of Montana west of the Rockies, there was a passion-packed weekend.  Both idealistic love and religious piety caused gunfire to ring out.  Monte Hanson, 59, was outraged when Joe Lewis, 29, the bartender, served him a red beer with Clamato in it instead of tomato juice.  Hanson claimed he was Jewish and that clam broth is an offense against his religion.  The more he thought about it, the more he became righteous, though the bar was now closed.  He went over to Lewis home to get revenge, saying he intended to shoot him to death.

The love part was that Lewis’ “red nose” pit bull, which had recently had a toe amputated, was in a cast and had to be carried outside to pee.  That’s when Hanson fired.  The bullet hit Jackson, the pit bull, in the head and was deflected enough to go into Joe Lewis’ ribs and out his back without hitting major organs.  He will survive.

Who wouldn't love a face like that?

Lewis was not at the ritzy end of the class structure.  He cut wood and tended bar.  A tough guy, he’s out of the hospital but he’ll be out of work for at least three months.  Monte Hanson is in jail with bail set at $250,000.  No information on whether the jail meals are kosher.  He has a public defender.  Some think the bail is too low.

http://www.nbcmontana.com/news/hamilton-bartender-shot-over-wrong-drink-order/32949116

On the one hand, this is so ridiculous and backwoods that it’s just a joke.  On the other hand it is very, very real.  More than one guy is attached to his dog more than any other living thing and more than one guy uses some ancient “religious” jot-and-tittle rule to justify being out of control and stupid in the first place.  I can understand loving a dog a lot easier than understanding an ancient Hebrew god who forbids clam juice to the point of shooting someone.  But then, “Monte” (which is not exactly a traditional Jewish name) also claimed he had the right to kill Joe.  He’s been watching the news about “Sharia” law.

Monte Hanson

There’s a lot of this kind of stuff going around, esp. during a cold late spring in a dark timber valley saloon.  But the incident is useful in terms of reflection.

First, let’s look at the love of the dog which was NOT shot at the bar, but in the hallway of an old brick building converted into apartments where both Monte and Joe had apartments.  Monte fired five bullets but only hit the dog and Joe once, the single bullet penetrating both targets.  Joe had a girl friend in residence.  The two men knew each other.

Pit bulls are sturdy, protective, strong-jawed dogs often trained to fight each other.  People who buy them might want to represent power, and self-protection.  When I was at animal control, we often held them in protective custody.  They came in lean, mean, scarred, and scowling.  Since we enjoyed coaxing them by sharing bits of our lunches and because the trial system works slowly, they often went out fat, sleepy and grinning.  Dogs respond to the way they are treated.  How this dog lost a toe we are not told.  He was not attacking, but held by Joe against Joe's chest -- you might say over his heart.

Joe Lewis and Jackson

Monte, in his claim that Clamato was against his religion must have been thinking of Leviticus, where rules for healthy living include a taboo on shellfish.  Leviticus 11-12

“Anything living in the water that does not have fins and scales is to be regarded as unclean by you.”  Leviticus and Deuteronomy are full of good advice that fit those times and the convictions of authority figures, but the times change.  The prohibition on mixed fabrics can hardly apply to spandex and fleece.  The prohibition on homosexuality comes in part from these lists.   Some people are as emotionally dedicated to the evils of gayness as Monte is  convinced of the evils of Clamato -- enough to want to kill the bartender.

Most of what we call “religion” is systematized understanding that arose in a specific time and place, inspired and endorsed by certain convictions about how to act in order to survive.  Clams can be toxic at certain times of year and in polluted water can harbor harmful bacteria.  Monte’s idea probably came from the practice of trying to torture prisoners mentally by forcing them to break taboos.  In both Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, Islamic prisoners --whose taboo systems are much like Old Testament rules because their habitats are similar -- were forced to eat pork.  In Africa where the Biblical taboos are not known, such strategy is escalated to making kids fuck their mothers.  This specific incest taboo has a deep biological source meant to protect families.  Christianity succeeds in places where the values of sustaining family integration are a key to survival.  This means much of the symbol system is portable, less dependent on ecology as in the tribal and often war-like Old Testament.  

TV fans the flames.

The books of the Old Testament were largely written in a time when erosion of the land and tribal rivalry meant that warriors were valued.  Power counted.  Monte sort of senses that in his muddled way. Today's times are shrinking economically and he is sinking into old age.  He wants power and figures that if he aligns himself with religious patriarchs, that will trump Joe -- young, handsome, and, as the bartender, the boss of the tavern at that moment. 

I doubt Joe had any intention of offense by using Clamato.  They don’t think much about clams in Ravalli County.  More probably he thought Monte had had enough and cut off his supply.  Monte then wanted to claim he was the righteous victim and was clever enough to resort to an old religious instruction.

Pigs/pork is taboo because they need a lot of water which may not be in abundance, because they are enough like humans in physiological terms to swap diseases with humans (a bridge from bird flu, for instance), because they can be big dangerous animals, and because they and pariah dogs clean streets in primitive places -- that is, they eat shit and corpses.  Even in our modern supposedly sanitary and inspected circumstances, we are advised to cook pork thoroughly.

It’s interesting that Old Testament laws are often meant to push women down under the power of the patriarchs, so they will be compelled to stay home and have babies.  We are still struggling with those assumptions.  In places with Sharia law, women are still stoned to death, flogged, amputated, for taboos the rest of the world consider perfectly normal behavior, like driving a car or going around unmasked.  But if you look at the video linked above, it’s clear that both the judge and the public defender are female and attractive.  They have the power.

Poor Monte -- he no longer fits the world.  He wouldn’t like Sharia law since there’s a major taboo on alcohol.  Joe is a known and liked local boy with a protective brother and a community that’s already building up a fund for his hospital costs.  No one is taking up a collection to defend Monte.  Why would they?

One of the effects of globalization is that religious systems get torn into pieces and then mismatched for purposes they were never meant for.  Right now a new system that is not under the control of institutions, even churches, is emerging from loose family and community life, like Joe’s. It looks like Monte is going to find a community behind bars.  The tragedy is that he’ll probably fit right in.

BEWILDERMENT IS COMPREHENSION

Bewilderment is the true comprehension.

~Martin Luther

It’s not the bewilderment -- it’s what you do about it.  It’s being aware that you are bewildered and admitting it, even liking it.  Look at the root of the word:  “be wild.”  Wild is potential.

When anthropologists started realizing that other groups in other ecologies (desert, jungle, Chinese cities, African pastoral tribes) organized things differently for the sake of their survival, they talked about “structure.”  The social rules and economic arrangements.  But as soon as one recognizes a concept, it’s interesting to turn it inside-out:  non-Euclidean geometry, non-Newtonian physics.  So what would non-structure be like?  Would it be madness or would it enable a leap in “growth” -- i.e. a better adjustment to the conditions of life?  We're finding out.

 http://alexoneill.net/Liminality
All following illustrations are by this photographer.

This is partly what “liminality” is about: a way to escape structure for an interval.  There is a great deal to read about these theories but it is best to start with Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner who wrote before our trivializing society turned it all into “birthday cards.”  A person like me wants “religion” to be raw, re-structuralable, open to renegotiation, surprising and intense.  Many people find this disconcerting.  I was disconcerted to realize that my cousins do not want their boat rocked.  (Not that they have escaped the waves, but that risk is something they want never to repeat.)  I will not judge them.

Some of the aversion to change, danger, new information, and so on is probably physiological, which is why I look at my cousins so closely.  At the level of brain neurons (temperament), they have core assumptions about a rightly lived life.  Interestingly, they are not church-goers.  They will not talk theology.  They are domestic family women and one does not go white-water rafting in a nest.  It’s not just a matter of marriage, since I have cousins who never married but express domesticity through teaching and the like.  But even spinsterhood is not definitive, since I am hunkered down alone in a house (15 years now) where I change very little.  The difference is that the quote taped up over my computer is “Be regular and orderly in your life so that you may be violent and original in your work."  I think as wild as I can.  But I feed the cats on time.

Liminality is something like being “through the looking glass” where things are reversed, but also unpredictable.  It is also like being homesick, where the formerly loved and familiar has not yet been replaced by attachment to a new context, even one that was chosen and wanted, maybe better suited than the previous home.  There’s something wired-in, physiological, about confronting difference.  

The research on brain organization and function seems to suggest that some kinds of neurons are clustered like computer documents in folders, which can be nested in other folders, deeper and deeper layered.  What I find suggestive is the idea that a “deep” experience can reach the deepest and most inclusive pre-suppositional folders of neurons in order to open them to change.

This photo is an exception -- not O'Neill.

The original thought about liminality was related to coming-of-age ceremonies in indigenous tribes, a way of “killing” the child who was dependent and incompetent, in order to “create” the adult who would now be reliable and productive.  Or at least try to be.  I don’t know whether anyone has written about “boot camp” as a way of making a random bunch of teenagers into warriors.  Probably.  I recently watched “Blood Diamond” in which it was demonstrated how a good boy could be made into a vicious renegade who would turn on his own father, simply by forcing the son to do things so repugnant that they tore him out of his identity.  

The human ability to re-form psychologically is part of our great success in so many ecologies.  It is the heart of adaptability.  But there are other forces trying to hold us into groups on many scales, trying to keep us committed to some ideal loyalty.  Preventing any different in the profitable status quo.  So white “Christian” “American” people try to send brown Indio children back to their gang-ridden deaths rather than letting them be admitted to the US.  

Somehow in some minds, burning a boy alive (Muhammad Abu Khdeir, 16) was equivalent and justified as revenge for the deaths of three boys on the “other side.”  But horrific acts, like the death of Mathew Shepherd, can force us into the wilderness of true comprehension or at least make us seek it.

Or sometimes they don’t.  One school shooting after another does not pry the fingers of the NRA off gun triggers, but only makes them strengthen their commitment to arming everyone.  The symbolism is obsessive, locked, a kind of repetition madness.  Could liminality ceremonies move such people into a new context -- make them understand the world differently? What is it they see that makes them believe they are under attack, in danger of being destroyed, forced to take extreme measures?   What is our fascination with the “extreme” about?  Does it indicate power?

Such madness has got to be physiological, inscribed in the neurons, connected to identity, beyond the reach of rational thought.  Some have suggested forcible ingestion of Ecstacy, the drug, or at least LSD.  But it is also possible to evoke auto-secretions of mind-opening drugs.  Sweats.  Retreats.  Yoga.  Snake-handling.

Sunday morning services can’t always be major experiences, life-changing at some deep level.  It would just exhaust us all.   But most ministers who are effective preachers have had someone burst into tears or even cry out, reacting to something that was said or possibly just released by the experience of a peaceful place with music and people of good will.  They only needed a trigger.  Possibly there is some kind of reverse-parallel with a destructive shooter’s sudden paroxysm of violence, willingness to cross a line, a compulsion to do so.

I do not think obsessed people are bewildered people, but rather over-committed to their own preoccupations without realizing anything outside that bubble.  But Luther, compelled to go into the wilderness by his broken trust in the Roman Catholic bureaucracy, discovered that there was a plenitude to comprehend.

In a completely different metaphor, I’ve heard people talk about feeling that they were going to drown unless they kept struggling in the only way they knew.  But when they surrendered and relaxed, they found that the water was holding them up -- they were floating.  There’s a suggestion of suicide about this idea, which makes it scary, but it IS a kind of suicide to let the old self die so that a new self has a space in which to form.  Waiting for a guarantee and preview of that new self is not possible.  You have to “become” into the terrifying future, only partially glimpsed.  But sometimes all you have to do is to stand up -- you may be standing in shallow water.  A Sunday morning service can get us all on our feet.

____________________

interview with the photographer at http://cargocollective.com/savikuruppu/Photographer-Alex-O-Neill

BATMAN WEEPS

This post has had to be started over three times.  It began as a Sunday post about a minister who survived a midlife crisis but left the ministry.  Then it got pulled out of shape by my reading of an invaluable book about Hutterites, called “The Forgotten People,” because it is such a clear alternative to the society that creates a much-admired mainstream minister, but then leaves him hollow and blames him for being a “narcissist.”  To the Hutterites all this would seem like nonsense, but to the author Michael Holzach it would be clear.  His huge achievement was to be curious and nonjudgmental in experimentally moving from his upscale and mainstream life in Germany to the medieval communal peasant life of a Hutterite colony a little over a hundred miles north of here, outside Lethbridge, Alberta.  He just wanted to write a book, but it turned out to be much more.  I’ll come back to that later in the week.

Because as I was writing, along came the shooting in Aurora, Colorado, and its many questions about society.  The most useful thoughts for me showed up on Warren Olney’s NPR program, “To the Point”,  The first shocker was the statistic that in the USA these incidents (mass shootings involving more than four deaths) happen a couple of dozen times a year.  The media only picks up on the sexy ones with an angle.  The headline in the GF Tribune Saturday morning was “SLAYING SUSPECT WAS BRILLIANT STUDENT” which captures some of the Montana suspicion of fancy educations and the high expectations that go with them.  If you make it to grad school, you’re supposed to be bullet-proof.  But in this part of the world, contradictorily, being a smarty-pants is worse than being a gun nut.

Richard Florida in “The Geography of Gun Violence” http://www.theatlanticcities.com/neighborhoods/2012/07/geography-gun-violence/2655/  suggests there is a difference between the nature of mass shooters in terms of grouped statistics and the nature of mass shooters as individuals.  If you look at state by state, the slightly higher incidence is in states with a lot of working class people who are conservatives, NRA members, and in economic difficulty.  If you look at individuals, you see something different.  Roger Ebert, in an effort to prevent the idea that a Batman movie caused the incident, picks up on this, suggesting that James Holmes, like other shooters, felt a “deep, inchoate insecurity and a need for validation.”  Florida says there is a definite connection to the rise in instant witness media.  Shooters know they have an audience, possibly worldwide and simultaneous.

My question is not why Holmes escalated his despair when he got into school difficulties.  It’s plain to me that his academic choice was an attempt to understand himself -- not unlike a lot of heavy drinking or drugging at that age and evidently equally useless for him.  This is not different from the case of the shrink who became a recent mass killer.  I’ve personally witnessed that a lot of mainline professionals and working class men (put military men where you like)  carry this same “deep, inchoate insecurity and a need for validation.”  They often look to women to resolve this and can become violent in their demand.  Some sublimate violence to sex, other sex to violence.  Institutions do not question this because it would lead directly to challenging the assumptions on which they rest, like the nature of authority and what a worthy man is like.  It would challenge the idea that they are effective and relevant.  

Hutterites are pacifists who arise from the same roots as Unitarians (NOT Universalists) but the Unitarians dropped communal ownership and then later the all-powerful God.  Today they are quite mainline.  But Hutterites in Montana moved north to Canada during WWI because their German origins and stubborn pacifism caused them to be stigmatized and tortured to the point of death by American authorities.  They have remained stubbornly sequestered in Medieval communal agriculture with some tech improvements.  The burdens their men carry are shared.  Deviators are counseled and -- if intractable -- put outside the circle.  Gender differences are clear and again the women's hard work is shared.  Around the outside of the colonies is a ragged edge of interaction with the larger culture.  The Valier library checks out hundreds of “Christian romances” to the women and the men come to use the computers for business.  At night I can see the lights of the nearest colony just across Lake Frances.  

Once I stepped into a major quarrel across the alley where a runaway boy had taken refuge with a couple of alcoholic old men.  A sheriff’s deputy finished the intervention.  

Once I stopped at a colony to buy vegetables and the senior patriarch who sold them wanted to find out why a middle-aged woman was driving a van alone on the back roads of Montana.  I was a circuit riding UU minister.  This REALLY got his attention.  “Do your people obey you?” he asked.  

“No, they INSIST on thinking for themselves!”

“Sister, this is terrible!  You must get them under control at once or their souls will burn in hell!”  A lot of non-Hutterites agree.

Go back to that entitled but deeply burdened and obligated mainstream minister, whose fancy education did not prevent him from a crisis and whose devoted wife could not save him.  (I don’t want to name him because as the saying goes,  “God is not through with him yet.”)  Why didn’t his colleagues see what was going on and step in?  Why didn’t Holmes’ classmates and teachers step in?  Was it that they felt they didn’t have the right or because their sense of what is “right” was too weak?  Or were they too busy thinking about their own issues?  Or did he successfully deflect them?

Ministry gets a bad rap these days, often with good reason.  The pattern was supposed to be “A Man Called Peter.”  (Now THERE was a movie!!  Right?  http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0048337/plotsummary)    This contemporary minister whose book I read now runs secular workshops for professional men.  They’re “suits,” living in as much of a bubble as ministers.  (I suppose one could call it “Mad Man Syndrome.”)  His work is worthy, sounds effective and -- maybe most of all -- keeps the lot of them from picking up assault rifles.  The emphasis on women in this book is not of much use for gays, but I think that will change.  The larger world seeps in everywhere, even among sequestered executives.  

Too much depends on “success” in an uncertain world.  We cannot prevent the chaos of the planet -- it is what creates and sustains us.  But we can certainly redefine success, whether as a communal group or as individuals.  It is more than being famous.  Even those who seem to have it made can be secretly desperate for a little help.  We need the sharp focus on each other that the elders provide in a Hutterite colony, but without forcing conformity.  And we can reach out to each other BEFORE we leave bloody handprints.