GET REAL!

If I were to do my education all over again from grade school on, I would get a list of the books Delancy Place.com draws from and read them all.  

The “mother ship” for this daily automatic email quote, short but pithy, is self-described as follows:  “The Governor’s Woods Foundation is a private, not-for-profit philanthropic organization based in Philadelphia. Our interests and commitments are primarily focused in two areas: cultural development and progressive realism in government policy.”  I suppose it’s a little like the website Aeon, except that it’s specifically American and deals with history of government and culture, including pop culture.

The trouble is that I could NOT read all these books in the Fifties because not only had some of the events not happened yet, but also the point of view had not developed and couldn’t until another decade or so and the Vietnam War had broken up the WWII solid front.  Until war was truly over, we could not afford to give up all the “great men” and triumphalism that was the focus of history — still is out here in the Montana boonies.  The idea is a source of courage.   

“A People's History Of The United States” by Howard Zinn is not generally read or taught here except in the university towns.  Ken Burns’ television histories are well-loved because of the photos, even though it may support a focus on conflict.

Ken Burns

When I was in high school, the subject of history was taught by the coaches because they were really there to coach sports with the goal of winning and had to teach something.  They continued the triumphalism, the mono-focus on only Brit/white history, which was seen as “our” history.  All dates of battles we won and names of people who succeeded.  In Montana a law had to be passed to force the teachers to include Native American history in spite of the many NA people in the state.  White people thought it had nothing to do with them. 

With that as my sympathy, one might think an article by Paul Mason in the Guardian, which also comes to me as email excerpts, would appeal to me, but it does.  The header says, “The problem for poor, white kids is that a part of their culture has been destroyed.”  It hasn’t just been NA kids, though they are not addressed in this article, but most rural white kids have had their culture damaged as well.  Black kids are separated.  Red kids are ignored.  Yellow kids prevail.  ("Yellow" has too many connotations -- let's call them "golden kids.")

Paul Mason

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/apr/04/the-problem-for-poor-white-kids-is-that-a-part-of-their-culture-has-been-destroyed.

Long ago (eighties?)  I attended a conference at the College of Great Falls where Wendell Berry spoke, mourning the loss of the rural relationship to land and family.  At the end when there was time for questions, Darrell Kipp stood up and said, “Ranchers and farmers had better pay close attention to what happens to Indians, because they are tomorrow’s Indians.”  Exactly what he meant is probably what Denise Juneau needs to address in her campaign for the US Senate.  The loss of culture is a poverty.  

Mason was addressing Thatcherism, which is the British version of Reaganism, which I am just figuring out is Neoliberalism, deliberately misnamed for something quite like Oligarchy.  The idea is the same old smug self-congratulation of those who have it made, trying to promote it as due to their natural talents and energy in a laissez-faire environment.  In fact, it has been a matter of withdrawing all the necessary features of the Commons, like infrastructure, of which education is a part.  The bridges, the pipelines, the highways go down, and so do the kids.  Health support, service regulation, investment in public systems, all go down.

In his article Mason was remarking on the failure of poor and working class white kids (esp. boys, I think, though he didn’t say so) to do well in school.  Specifically, he’s reflecting on a study by CentreForum, “An independent, liberal think tank seeking to develop evidence based, long term policy solutions to the problems facing Britain. . .  CentreForum's driving principle is to promote opportunity for all and particularly for those in disadvantaged circumstances.”

At first the kids are okay, but then they begin to fail and drift so that they slide away from school or ordinary jobs or even their families.  Unless they see themselves as part of the winning classes, or at least the honored classes -- which working classes once were when they were pulled into service as the backbone of a working army.  Or when they organized in labor unions and progressive groups.

Montana is not so mixed as England, but here’s how the cards come down for English groups:  “The detailed ethnic breakdown in the report makes for depressing reading. The worst performers are white Irish traveller children, then “white gypsy/Roma” children – both of which school fails by a long chalk. They are followed by mixed-race children with Caribbean backgrounds, then white British. These are the only groups who collectively go backwards in the two years researchers have been crunching the numbers. By contrast, black Caribbean, and white Irish children go forward a bit, and Chinese and [East] Indian children a lot.”  The recent wave of immigrants was evidently not included because this is a study over years.

Mason says,  “It’s 30 years since I taught in the school system – at a high school and then a special unit for behaviourally disruptive teenagers in Leicestershire. So the only relevant first-hand knowledge I can bring to this debate is that the same problems were apparent then. By the late-1980s people from a white, working-class background already knew we had a problem.”. . . “It has nothing to do with being “overtaken” – still less with any reverse discrimination against them.  It is simply that a specific part of their culture has been destroyed. A culture based on work, rising wages, strict unspoken rules against disorder, obligatory collaboration and mutual aid. It all had to go, and the means of destroying it was the long-term unemployment millions of people had to suffer in the 1980s.”  

Valier and the other High-line ag and resource towns are struggling with the same issues now.  In Mason’s words: “To put right the injustice . . . requires us to put aside racist fantasies about “preferential treatment” for ethnic minorities; if their kids are preferentially treated, it is by their parents and their communities – who arm them with narratives and skills for overcoming economic disadvantage.

“If these metrics are right, the present school system is failing to boost social mobility among white working-class kids. But educational reforms alone will barely scratch the surface. We have to find a form of economics that – without nostalgia or racism – allows the working population to define, once again, its own values, its own aspirations, its own story.”

Mason pins his story on a lovely little movie called "Kez" about a boy and a sparrowhawk he trains.  In the cruelest Arab dictatorships not only are racing pigeons -- kept with as much tradition and pride as hawks -- forbidden and killed, but also their owners even if they are boys who had little else.  The world is more bitter and deadly than it used to be.  There was a nasty little story in one of my feeds today about how it was human sacrifice that enabled the shift from hunter-gathering to hierarchical town life.  I'll have to search that further.

Ancient breeds of Bagdad pigeons

http://stephenbodio.blogspot.com

The problem has been to find a counter story.  What counts?  What are the abilities and attitudes that will support growing individuals?   How can they stay in their communities and still make a living — not just a minimum income but enough to support marriage and children?  What are the rural stories as opposed to the bi-coastal television series lives that dominate the media?  Is the answer in the Internet?  Is it in the priorities of the schools?  Can populations like the Rez maintain their identity without leaving the larger world?  How can the mourning for a world now gone finally be completed or at least fortified by a new vision?  Is war the only way to achieve solidarity?  Human sacrifice?

Reading "Delancy Place" quotes every morning gives me perspective that is world-based with an American focus.  It suggests many stories, some of them revisionist, that are NOT pinned to conflict and the need to have heroes.  Maybe that will suggest a story we can share.  

THE OTHERNESS WITHIN US

“Brown” people have come to be a kind of category of people indicated by their general skin color, which might not be technically so brown.  Roughly they tend to be indigenous people, from America, Asia, or maybe Australia -- free from the white Euro pattern, particularly that for men.  Their relationship to women, in particular, tends to be different from that of white men.  But not like the African black man.  (This is all fanciful and not particularly related to any surveys, statistics, or whatever -- kind of literary.)  I’ll let this part go until later.

Iain Glen

For now I’ll set up a new category:  “ginger” men from the redhead countries: Ireland, Scotland, the Nordics.  Oh, there are “ginger” women, too.  And a whole new set of relationships based on the runaway man, often one who goes to sea.  So in terms of gender roles, women must “stay put,” maybe under hardship conditions like a stone croft dependent on oats or potatoes or small domestic animals like chickens or goats -- high labor necessary for survival -- often using the herbal crafts and the nature-weaving of trees and standing stones, the stories of storm and sea.

But in terms of gingermen, they must be a hardy lot capable of aggression and drive, charismatic enough to secure the faithfulness of resourceful women and protective enough to return to her and her children.  They are sometimes impossible men -- going against the larger society for reasons of their own and resorting to physical violence when trapped, though hopefully not violent with their intimates.  And oh so vulnerable to alcohol, the dreaming, the dissociation of it, the narcotic temporary relief of pain.

This is the material of song and story -- usually with a tragic end.  Added to a seafarer’s personality (I have sea captains on both sides of my genealogy) is the 18^th century revolution of the Ulster men that reinforced stubbornness, resistance to imperiums and authorities, bands of acid-based men ready for revolution, rationalism and enlightenment, idealism, subterfuge -- their backs against the wall.

I’m not talking about a cookie.  Not “inclusivegenderman” who combines the binaries, but the kind of person supposedly portrayed by John Wayne in “The Quiet Man,” which was directed by John Ford with echoes of John Huston. (They were fierce Johns.) This is the post-WWII man, a man who can’t “stand down,” not just because of himself but also because of the society.  I’m saying that elements of society push ginger men into behavior and attitudes possibly described as PTSD.  The kind of man it’s pretty tough to stay married to.  And yet that’s what some of us want:  to become beloved by an impossible genius fighting injustice.  Then maybe it becomes a relief that they are often away.   Maybe such a woman is herself culturally more male than mama.

Lately there has arisen a new explanation for this “type”.  It appeals to us because it fits into old ideas of how people fall into tribes and tropes that are convenient for our prejudices and labels that justify what we wanted to do anyway — like stigmatize the Other, even criminalize them to give ourselves an edge in the great competition of life.  We don’t admit this, of course, which means it interferes with ever being dealt with.

I’m talking about the discovery that Neandertals intermarried with “us” and left their imprint as surely as Genghis Khan did.  No question about it, in a tough world that depends on strength it’s the guys with the muscles and the bonded buddies who get the chance to make babies and also the fulfilled obligation to protect them to adulthood.  It’s so strange to look at the world through genetic implications — and they ARE only implications, not facts or even dependable images or fossils.  No one has ever seen a Neandertal or even the entire skeleton of one.  Except for things made of stone, their material culture is unknown, decomposed from hides, wood, and plants.

Ron Mueck's small scale lovers

When artists of the hyper-real began to create works like this by Ron Mueck, they made possible scary-real creations like this above.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2514500/Are-life-like-sculptures-produced-Artist-creates-hyper-realistic-models-humans.html  These are not idealized figures, but actual worried, stressed, emotional people — it’s not just their realism, but their emotional content that impresses us.  Mueck plays with scale, so that some figures are huge and others are just parts.

So now it's possible to bring Neandertals "alive" as lovers, whatever form marriage took in those days.

Neandertal simulations  Maybe by Kennis and Kennis brothers.

Hyper realistic baby dolls are produced by named artists, just like anything made of marble or bronze, both because of the technical skills of artists and because our culture allows us to look at such things publicly, seeing ourselves. Valuing.

These baby dolls are so real they almost displace our own imagination.  They are used in therapy to help people deal with fantasies about babies.  And then there are ginger girls.

https://www.google.com/search?q=Laurence+Ruet&client=safari&rls=en&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi2lfymmPXLAhXJLmMKHavvAAAQ_AUIBygB&biw=1416&bih=957#imgrc=lkBzUUjAiosmWM%3A
Ruet specializes in red-headed children, who arouse the same sort of ambivalent bond as images of the Neandertal or the nude — that is, they allow scrutiny that would be impolite or impossible in the ordinary world.  Genes for red-hair are connected to a change in the function in chromatin and have arisen at least twice from different mutations, but the genes for only one variation were found in the neandertal genome.

The other intriguing gene find is that for FOXP2, which has something to do with language, but no one knows quite what or how.  It just implies that these people might be speaking with more than their eyes.

All of this is part of our efforts to come to terms with what it is to be human.  Clearly, it has to do with the emotional content of the body, which arose from its evolved heritage as primates, but is now human and most clearly expressed in our faces, especially eyes which almost seem to be projecting beams of sight, something that can be felt even if you don’t really know anyone is looking at you.  

In fact, we can “read” each other emotionally even without talk or seeing eyes, simply by seeing posture and movement.  We are an expressive animal that can create bonds with others, maybe not even other humans, but maybe dogs or horses.  But even wild animals — very occasionally a shared moment with a bear or a stag.  That’s part of what taxidermy is about, the illusion of relationship, NOT trophies, NOT domination, NOT owning.

Science gives us only clues for the possible variations a genome can create.  It takes art to create something realistically ginger, convincingly Other in some way.  But I like to watch episodes of “Jack Taylor” or “Game of Thrones” because Iain Glen is a Gingerman who looks like my brother Paul.  I mean, it's not an Otherness, it's a similarity, incomplete.

THE TRAIL NARROWS

The urge to leave a record.

This morning I woke with a new plan for spring.  To discard many boxed things I’ve loaded into one You Haul after another, carrying them across the continent because I believed they were important, even valuable.  I come from two lines of hoarders, maternal and paternal, who believed in paper and saved the documentation of the family back far enough that letters from Andersonville have come down to my generation.  (For those who don’t know, Andersonville was the notorious Civil War prison in Georgia where Union soldiers were held under Auschwitz-like conditions.)  

So here’s a list of what I’m going to discard now.

My boxes of old Glacier Reporters, because bound books of them have been given to Blackfeet Community College.  When I started in 1961, there WAS no BCC with a library and the Museum of the Plains Indian had a limited archive that has been raided several times: once to weed out anything that wasn’t relevant to the material culture of the 19th century and once to weed out anything about white people.  In short, politics break through scholarship on the rez.  It's print stuff in an oral culture.  But the people themselves are capable of wrestling with that now.  The Millennials will decide.

I hope they value it as much as the people who constantly come in from outside, determined to squeeze more out of the 19th century.  It’s time for the rez folks to get into the BIA and FBI files.  The descendants of the demonized early whites have already destroyed much of their trader records which were mostly about buying and selling anyway.

I’m just now beginning to reorganize my library of books about Blackfeet and what we used to call “vertical files” of articles and tear-outs.  The death of Darrell Kipp has shaken some of my ideas.  At one point Piegan Institute was supposed to be an archive of scholarship as well as an immersion school.  

I’m putting a list of all my Blackfeet books on prairiemary.blogspot.com, which is taking a while as I add a dozen books at a time.  If you’re looking now, come back in a month.   I don’t think most Blackfeet scholars even know about all of them.  Like university classes, media pieces and published books go over and over the same old worn out stuff and ignore the cutting edges.  Of course, the post-colonial stuff is almost unintelligible and rarely digested.  There’s a great need for translation, esp. the things written in European languages.

I have one four-drawer cabinet and a few scrapbooks of materials about Bob Scriver, but I’ve already discharged my obligation to testify to his life.  The book is “Bronze Inside and Out, A Biographical Memoir of Bob Scriver.”  The Montana Historical Society has tricked and ignored me, so I do not feel good about giving them anything.  We don’t live on the same planet.

Alvina Krause

A few materials remain in my possession about Alvina Krause (my B43 Acting Class journal, for instance) and have already been offered a home in the Northwestern University archives.  I managed to get an article about her published in the Stanislavsky Studies international journal, for whatever that’s worth.

The materials from my ministry (newsletters, correspondence, pamphlets) seem curiously irrelevant now.  The individual congregations turn over their membership and their focus much more than they realize, but esp. the Montana people — the most ephemeral — have no time, energy or central location interested in these materials.  I’m divided between stuffing them into mailing cartons and sending them to the individual groups or just taking them to the dump.  The denomination and districts are so absorbed by the need to “market” — meaning increase membership and income — that they see nothing of value in the little low-population edges far away from Boston.  They have become an urban phenomenon, or maybe the Unitarians always were.

Aside from that, I think that the UUA and the whole concept of denominations is on its way out — again.  They are luxuries and when low status populations like women and people of color manage to get into the leadership, they are no longer valuable to the old white men who have the money, since their idealism clings to Edwardian British values. 

For a while I saved a lot of material about Cut Bank High School which I intended to digest into a novel about how we destroy our children: the boys by encouraging violent sports, extreme street fighting for betting, and substance abuse; the girls by discarding any who don’t look like movie stars and put out like whores — except for a few destined to be moms sustaining the grudgingly necessary families.  By now none of these forces are undocumented by the media or even unstudied by sociologists.  The destructiveness of American schools is no secret, nor is it unconscious any longer.  Now what I have is redundant.  I liked the kids, so I’ll keep the yearbook.

The family archive on my father’s side rests with my cousins except for the little book I made from photos of all the places the Strachans lived, mostly pretty minimal rural prairie houses.  Everyone is much more comfortable now.  Even my house would count as pretty nice.  Beulah Strachan raised her children in a tarpaper shack.  But that much of the story is told and the other relatives are intent on silence.  I might do an end-run around them to the five emigrant Scots sisters who originally came to America, but it would have to be fiction.  Still, they had very suggestive divergent fates.  There is another writer among their descendants, Kathy Rouzie.

Beulah Swan Finney Strachan, my grandmother

What I will save, burdening my niece Adrienne Lulay who is my inheritor and executor, the family photo albums, partly because I still want to use them for my own memoir.  I need to learn more about layout and the kind of programs used to do tricky things like montages.  There is no video, but I’ll go to CD technology maybe.  None of the current cyber-technology can keep itself from transforming and updating.

On my mother's side I'm alienated enough to tell the double story of the Hatfields/Pinkertons with no restraint, maybe as fiction.  The Hatfields and McCoys are nothing compared to Hatfields against Hatfields with Pinkertons trapped in the middle.  (My mother was the only sib of the Pinkerton girls who didn't marry a Hatfield.)

Pinkertons - my grandfather on the right, seated

I may not have time to finish one small part of this project, but again a death hustles me along, this time the recent death of Mike Burgwin who did so much to professionalize animal control.  I did get a book self-published ("Dog Catching in America"  but I see that www.lulu.com/prairiemary is marketing it as a PDF instead of the Print On Demand that I expected.  Animal Control has developed much farther since our time, so maybe it’s just a collection of war stories by now.  In the background the study of the relationships among animals — including humans — has expanded and become more startling and absorbing than anything we expected.

My life has been a series of lives:  theatre, the Blackfeet reservation in all its aspects, animal control, Unitarian-Universalism both as scholarship and as practicum, a return to the reservation with special attention to geology which has persisted even after the forced return to Portland, OR, where the interest in geology — this time in regard to cities — grew deeper: the basic engine of ecology and therefore of mutation that drives evolution.

Now that I have the great privilege of living in a quiet, safe place where I can write, I’ve tried to do as much as I can towards developing skill.  Since 2005 blogging has replaced publishing (it IS today's publishing) and I’ve had a writing friend of great force and daring (Tim Barrus) who has pushed me along.  Now I’m looking for master concepts that can project a future I won’t share and don’t much want to.  We knew it was coming, this present quandary produced by too many people, the exhaustion of resources, technical shifts that get out ahead of our ability to assimilate them, global warming and so on.  But we had thought maybe 2025 was a good predicted onset.  We’d be gone.  Now we know a lot of people are likely to be underwater.

When I’ve fallen in love with a writer, I’ve expressed it by buying and reading all their works, so Peter Matthiessen is probably the next death that has prodded me.  Wendell Berry is still a bit in the future.  A.B. Guthrie, Jr. died quite a while ago, also Norman McLean and Richard Stern.  The whole category of “Montana writers”— which was kind of invented anyway — is dented by the death of Jim Harrison.  Wallace Stegner and Jim Welch are gone.  I don't want to write like a lady.

The big secret about publishing is that it is the publishers who control the fates of writers and these days do it only in terms of sales.  No one cares about the quality of the writing. Publishers have concluded that Indians and women don’t sell except in romantic genre eBooks.  Of the major publishers of literature of the West based in universities, one is captured by self-aggrandizers and the other fell under the ax of the post-structuralists.  The real action is in Canada but even there it’s a bit of a struggle.  No one in the US knows their work, not even the tribes that are on both sides of the border.

My shelves of psych and communication insights have somehow become outdated.  Eric Fromm, though he was a death camp survivor, is not adequate to the AIDS pandemic, a country like North Korea where the whole nation is a death camp, or the total questioning of everything, even male/female or the nature of reality as managed in the brain.  Now I have shelves on neuron research, hominin evidence, revisionist long history (pre-human).  They are the only way I participate in the frenzy of acquisition around me.

There’s plenty to do and some of it will be muscle work like sorting and carrying books.  I’d better do it while I’m still only 76.

KAREN ARMSTRONG V. URSULA LEGUIN

Karen Armstrong

This is a “compare and contrast” exercise between two women who approach “religion” in quite different ways.  One is Karen Armstrong, an Irish woman who began as a nun and through scholarship about the world’s “great” religions has reached “success” as a speaker and historian of religion.  She is explicitly a promoter of compassion and peace who has organized a “non-profit” called “Charter for Compassion” whose symbol is the sign for infinity that is fraying on one end.  I don’t quite get it.

Anyway, this is the definition of a charter:  “a written grant by a country's legislative or sovereign power, by which an institution such as a company, college, or city is created and its rights and privileges defined.  Synonyms:  authority, authorization, sanction, dispensation, consent, permission.”  It looks to me as though you can take the girl out of the convent, but you can’t take the convent out of the girl.  There’s gonna be a pope in here someplace and I can only hope his name is Francis.

There are all kinds of dimensions, meetings, sub-organizations, and even a store where you can buy t-shirts.  To join, one simply signs up, as though for any other non-profit newsletter (which will be the mailing list for request for money, like the Humane Society of the United States, another compassion-based organization) or for a Unitarian Universalist fellowship or church, though that sign-up will be in a book.  Lists are the basis of organizations — even nations.  This is why the churches have always been willing to keep the lists of who’s born, who marries, who dies.  Religious institutions are founded on organization.  They are sales franchises.  The dogma is just a sales pitch.

http://www.charterforcompassion.org/index.php/component/k2/item/298-the-charter-for-compassion-market-place-opening-nov-2015

Ursula LeGuin

If you think religion is organized and structured, justified by theology, kept effective by hierarchical management and money, then you will not think the other woman I want to talk about is even religious.  Her specialty has been iconoclasm.  Ursula LeGuin is a self-described anarchist and pacifist — so the two women both want peace.  But LeGuin plays with structure, knows that it is rooted in the environment’s requirements for survival, and understands that everything is always subject to unpredictable consequences.  She plays with the core ordering concept of sex and gender roles.  Her characters (fiction) change genders, are intra-gender, just as they are flexible about “races”, sometimes treated as almost different species — so what if they were?

Ishi

Behind the figure of LeGuin is not the Pope, but the phantom of Ishi, the last of his indigenous tribe, who was rescued by LeGuin’s father and written about by her mother.  She herself was born too late to have met him.  I do not travel in the rarefied circles of Karen Armstrong who received a prize for her work — not from Templeton but TED.  But I used to run into LeGuin every now and then when I lived in Portland.  I lived a couple blocks from a feminist bookstore on NE Broadway and she was in and out of there.  She even sold homemade stapled booklets from their shelves, one of which I regret giving away:  it was a gentle mockery of liturgy that included the directions for doing the schottische if you’re a scottie dog, with the usual little diagrams for where to put your paws — er, feet.

When people in general think of “religion” they think of Karen Armstrong’s world.  The anonymous Wikipedia says:  “In 1984, the British Channel Four commissioned her to write and present a television documentary on the life of St. Paul, The First Christian, a project that involved traveling to the Holy Land to retrace the steps of the saint. Armstrong described this visit as a "breakthrough experience" that defied her prior assumptions and provided the inspiration for virtually all her subsequent work. In A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam (1993), she traces the evolution of the three major monotheistic traditions from their beginnings in the Middle East up to the present day and also discusses Hinduism and Buddhism.”  They have to be “great” as in “great big” and they have to be bureaucratic.

The contrast in terms of LeGuin is Dao/Tao.  (Do you say “saddle” or “sattle”?)  “Taoism is not a religion, nor a philosophy. It is a "Way" of life. It is a River. The Tao is the natural order of things. It is a force that flows through every living and sentient object, as well as through the entire universe.”  (Ellie Crystal)  The most recent scientific work on “deep time” and “big history” is very much along these lines and pulling those who work with the concepts into a kind of mystical regard for existence that will probably form itself into an influence on governance and boundaries.  Not by signing everyone up and making them pay taxes, but from a kind of ethical point of view that understands symbiosis and does not think profit justifies death by neglect — neither humans nor landscapes.

It’s telling that the British Channel Four considers St. Paul the first Christian.  I know what they mean: Jesus was a Jew boy.  Only when there was an organization were there "Christians."  But surely there is something ironic about Jesus Christ not being the first Christian.  Was it Gandhi or some other wry commentator who was asked what he thought of Christianity and said, “It sounds like a good idea.  I think they should try it.”  

Forgiveness, lunching with whores, going fishing with brothers, overturning the tables of money-changers, telling stories.  That’s Jesus.  Writing endless letters to little congregations to get them to grow, that’s Paul.  (The latest thing in seminaries is preparing ministers for a congregationless, denominationless world.  It’s been tried before, usually because the franchises are shrinking and are suddenly inspired to throw in together.)  Paul is a good manager trying to improve performance.  It would be more honest to call Christians “Paulists.”  Of course, real Paulists send women back to the kitchen.

LeGuin writes fiction and poetry, not rules and dogma.  She says, “In my own mind I’ve moved on quite far from the utopia of The Dispossessed to the semi-utopia of Always Coming Home, where I did try to make it simply a lifestyle. There was no political basis at all, in the sense of European or large nation politics, therefore people think that I was trying to idolize the American Indians or something. What I took from the Indians was, essentially, running your lives without a central government and using consensus as the basic mode, which you can’t do in a big society, it’s a matter of numbers. But I wanted to think out what it might be like.”

We need a word for “way of life” that’s not “lifestyle” which implies buying a lot of stuff for your house, clothes closet, and kitchen.  More emphasis on what one does, what one produces, how one relates to everything else.  “Commodification” and national boundaries are about exhausted except in the Third World.  So here’s what LeGuin is thinking about now:

“Epicurus (341–270 B.C.) founded one of the major philosophies of ancient Greece, helping to lay the intellectual foundations for modern science and for secular individualism. Many aspects of his thought are still highly relevant some twenty-three centuries after they were first taught in his school in Athens, called “the Garden.”  “Epicurus's philosophy combines a physics based on an atomistic materialism with a rational hedonistic ethics that emphasizes moderation of desires and cultivation of friendships. His world-view is an optimistic one that stresses that philosophy can liberate one from fears of death and the supernatural, and can teach us how to find happiness in almost any situation. His practical insights into human psychology, as well as his science-friendly world-view, gives Epicureanism great contemporary significance as well as a venerable role in the intellectual development of Western Civilization.”  www.epicurus.net  

ACTING OUT: A RESULT OF GUILT AND SHAME

A few nights ago I was looking for illustrations for something or other I was writing and — as happens every once in a while — I ran across something that stunned me.  It wasn’t one of those pay-for-tattling websites, but just an ordinary newspaper story about a man from Browning, respected and educated, from a good family, a grandfather, a ceremonialist, elected to a responsible role in the community, who had a son who “made it” on one of those legendary athletic scholarships.  Here were his mug shots from an incident in one of the state’s bigger cities.  Evidently he had flashed some people in a coffee kiosk and the mall security grabbed him.

Long ago I was his teacher.  The last time I saw him I sat next to him at the funeral of a respected elder.  Of course the consequences of the exposure were a domino chain: loss of respect, loss of role.  I don’t know how his wife reacted but she’s not a weak woman.  Shame? Or guilt?  For what?
  

Women around here, whatever color, are often caught embezzling.  Usually they say they want money for their families.  But men occasionally do unaccountable defiant but self-destructive things, stuff a junior high kid would do, and though there’s often alcohol or drugs involved, they are stupid acts — maybe self-hating.  Shame, guilt . . . frustration, overwhelmed by everything.

It took me a long time to understand that Native Americans feel so very ashamed that they could not defend themselves from the Euro-invaders.  They weren’t equipped, they didn’t understand what was happening, and Euro-disease wiped out many.  There is no justification for holding them accountable and yet they feel that way.  For generations now.

It’s not so different from young Jews who feel that a Chosen People ought to have been able to find a way to prevail over Hitler, a way to explain or escape or even offer some kind of accommodation, the way England did at first.  Maybe you remember how Americans tried to shame the French not so long ago, because that nation criticized the invasion of Iraq.  They renamed “French” fries to be “American” fries and they tied the whole thing to the German capture of France in WWII, claiming that the French didn’t fight.

It’s like family crackups that the children feel they caused, that they ought to be able to fix, so when they can't, they leave home, hoping that will make it all settle down.  This is never real and most people never get it resolved because they can’t see past blaming.  Often the blaming is so clever, so accurately aimed at a soft spot, that the one who takes the blame punishes themselves, clear to the point of death, taking desperate chances to prove that they are brave or else maybe giving up.  

Especially women can sink into depression, a terrible burden on their right to live, always trying to propitiate the mysterious gods who made them inevitably come up short.  Stockton links this to the suicide of Virginia Wolff, probably accurately.  She never could satisfy her father, whose standards were impossible anyway.  He caused her to be ashamed of her beauty, her talent, her intelligence.

Those young Indians who finally refused to take the blame were in the cities, talking to defiant Blacks, but defiance and blame only perpetuate stigma.  It becomes a rebound weapon against themselves.  A tool for their enemies.  When Bob Scriver’s museum burned, the FBI was quick to say it was AIM that did it, which only pushed the fear and rage up higher.  No one looked at the structure of society and how it traps stigmatized young men; the same thing happened in Ireland.  Plenty of evidence, many strong theories, individuals who saw clearly.  But the little worm of debasement ate into them like toxoplasmosis making rats love the smell of cat pee.

Blacks have a different context.  They were not victims of invaders that they failed to repel — rather they were captured, chained, taken across the sea to a different country, and kept enslaved by a strong cultural consensus and brute force.  Ever read “Mandingo”?  Slaves were penetrated and boiled into soup.

Down deep in many Native Americans is the idea that they might be able to restore their tribe to its former power.  Whites make noble angels of them, and they kind of believe it.  Casinos with all their glamour and clatter of money sort of appeal to that.  I suspect that Englishmen — and certainly Scots — have that same wish to reconstruct past glory.  It’s unreal and finally makes them angry.

My first impulse is to go have coffee with this man and try to understand what happened, why he was so out of character.  But I suspect that he was IN character, that something festering had broken loose and burst constraints.  When I try to imagine how he would react if I tried to talk to him, I see that there is no way he could believe that my intentions were good and he probably doesn’t have that much insight into himself anyway.  It might take a sweat lodge with wise older men.  But where are they?  HE was supposed to be them.  

I don’t think a Western style therapist would be any help because they all work from theory and NOT experience.  Not many have experienced being mocked, excluded, and shunned.  Maybe that’s why the most effective analysts are often Jewish.  “Jimmy P” has nothing on the reality of being “Indian” and I’m not going by the movie — I’ve read the book carefully several times.  “Winter in the Blood” is closer.

My mother’s family were major blamers and ridiculers.  My father’s family is deniers, people who are nice no matter what.  I’ve got both in me.  My strategy has been to think things out, to learn how things work, to explain and justify.  But none of that ever changes the accumulated shame-and-blame feelings.  The feelings just sit there like toads and stare.  Someone said to me, “Why can’t you believe that I love you?”  Well, there’s the answer: a panel of toads, all with their webby little thumbs turned down.

The toads say,  “Why couldn’t you save your marriage?  Why didn’t you finish your doctoral thesis?  Why couldn’t you save your brother from death on the street?  Why haven’t you written a best-seller?  Why didn’t you cure your step-daughter’s cancer?  Why couldn’t you save her daughter from suicide?”  

All this assails me until I have to laugh at such grandiose narcissism.  But that’s not the same as taking on the burden of the loss of an entire culture, the destruction of a continent.  The actual offense of the man in the mug shot — he just pleaded no contest, paid a fine or something — would never have become public if he hadn’t been Native American, but it was a satisfaction to some to once again punish people they stigmatize.

The shrinks call such incidents of disruption in the middle of a lifetime of constructive work “acting out.”  It’s considered a defense mechanism, a way of relieving pressure.  I like the image of a container (hot philosophical concept at the moment) that holds a roiling hot mixture, reacting, getting deeper, until it causes the container to leak — tell things, do things, provoke, make something happen even if it’s bad.

I like that container idea because it offers a way to address the guilt/shame issue that triggers so much frustration.  Two ways, actually:  one is to make the container bigger or stronger, and the other is to stop adding to the heat inside.  Ways to do those include reframing the situation, finding a community that understands, increasing one’s skill level in any way, and others, including the Native American favorite:  laughter at the absurdity of little fool Napi — yourself — trying to save the world.  Well, we DO manage to save little patches here and there.  But some atrocities can never be reconciled.