SOMEONE AND NO ONE

Tim Ingold

My reading and thinking crosses boundaries and contexts all the time, which Ben at the laundromat thinks is a good thing.  He’s a retired railroad man (the laundromat is right beside the HighLine tracks of the Burlington Northern and Santa Fe) and believes in both tracks and traveling.  I’m happy to have this kind of local endorsement, because once one gets into the lofty and defensive ranks of any profession, the policing quickly ejects me.

This morning I’m thinking about an article by Tim Ingold that evidently shook up one of my favorite disciplines, ethnography.  Of course, fifty years on the Blackfeet rez more or less validates whatever data I’ve collected.  But what Ingold is saying is that we must protect and care for that which we study.  It’s hard to know how to do that for the Blackfeet, but I try to think how anyway and use whatever chances I get.

Tom of Finland tableau vivant

But I also take that attitude towards other communities, as mundane as the grain-centered prairie towns and as exotic as the international male gay arts community.  I’m not them, but I reach out to both extremes in several ways: as a potential novelist, as a kind of ethnographer and as a minister in the role of chaplain rather than as community manager.  (Never no more any committees!)  I care about them, which means I attend to them carefully.  I’m a participant in a quite marginal way and as a conditional gift from those communities.  I would say, tentatively, that I have no community of my own.  My family alarms and repels me and I them.  Attempts to reconnect with my UU cohort have found them aging, even dying, and drawing in the circumference of their circles.

Amy Pollard

There are a few professions that require fieldwork as preparation.  Amy Pollard threw a rock into the frog pond of ethnography by formally studying the distress of student anthropologists doing their first fieldwork: the practical difficulties are obvious, but the subsequent reaction, esp. the Ingold essay, pointed to an existential challenge.  Who are you?  Justify yourself.  The only justification that counts must be love and care, not the accumulation of fascinating details.  Otherwise, it’s just another rip-off in a greedy world.

Delancy Place just published a little squib about the origins of universities.  ”The university as we know it today evolved from guilds or unions. Men studying at universities who reached a middling level of competence were known as "bachelors", since, though they had some ability, it was not enough to support a family." . . “Universities, which evolved from the cathedral schools (particularly those concentrated on the left bank and on the Ile-de-France of the Seine in Paris, like that at Notre Dame cathedral), originated in the late eleventh century.”  Now in this time that rejects both labor and religion, it’s no wonder that universities are also in an existential crisis.  I was lucky to get there ’78-’82 just before Meadville tipped over and while Eliade still walked the halls.

But there was not much care for students or for the communities they were supposed to serve or the angst and challenge of coming into a new set of people, each with their own "culture."  Most of us would have responded whole-heartedly to Pollard’s study.  In fact, the first collision with existential distress was seminary itself, which -- as a good school should -- demolished all one's old convictions and faiths, forcing their rebuilding on a new foundation.  The same with Clinical Pastoral Education.  

Likewise, on the rez there’s not a lot of investment in the steady stream of romantics walking into the abattoir of tribal politics.  The only people who can do that with relative impunity are outsiders.  Of course, a large proportion of the main culture in the US is still actively murderous when it comes to “gay male artists,” esp. those who are AIDS activists.

When I moved back to the high prairie, I consciously thought that I would finally be safe enough — owning my humble house and living on SSI — that I could tackle dangerous issues while escaping destruction.  I was only partly right, because the real challenges were all from inside me, existential as ever.  Aging is sneaky.  Infrastructure issues, from sewer maintenance to the collapse of the publishing industry, take a lot of energy.  I’ve continued to be as deaf and blind to things I don't like as I was in the ministry.  But I will not renew my attempt to find a “charmed circle” where we are all peers. 
  

Tim Ingold’s essay quotes Kenelm Burridge about something he calls metanoia and defines as “an ongoing series of transformations each of which alters the predicates of being.”  Then he introduces a quote from Richard Rorty about “edification.”  This, Rorty says, is to open a space “for the sense of wonder which poets can sometimes cause — wonder that there is something new under the sun, something which is not an accurate representation of what was already there, something which (at least for the moment) cannot be explained and can barely be described).”

Chasing the Burridge quote, I find this paragraph about his book “Someone, No One.”  “Examining the concept of individuality and the ideology of individualism in terms of a dialectic between the self and the social order, the author draws a distinction between the person as an identity—a "someone"—who conforms to social roles and norms, and the individual as a nonidentity—a "no one"—who holds particular nonconformist perceptions of truth that result in conscious and independent moral discrimination and innovation.”

Well, that about sums it up, which is lucky because books at this level often cost fifty bucks each and I can’t afford them — nor has anyone got them on Interlibrary Loan.  I've ordered Ingold's most recent book:  "Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture."  Used copy for $20.  If I had the funds, I'd buy all his books.  Black bottomed shame is proving to be too fundamental for me to penetrate.

As a neighborhood “Someone” you might research on Google or ask locals about, I am a “nice” old lady with high ideals, sympathetic to renegades, not inclined to dress up or show off, absolutely regular as clockwork when it comes to getting to the post office, buying groceries, and so on, nothing to sell.  In the directory sorts of internet websites, I’m listed as an independent researcher, a very minor author.

"Hilda"

As "No One", I am unknown here or much of anyplace else.  My “nonconformist perception of truth” is that there is no truth, unless — like situation ethics — it is considered in terms of the specifics and conditions.  The nearness of death, the limitlessness of time, the sun and the wind, the impossibility of love, the suddenness of culture shifts, are not marketable.  But that’s okay.  In the laundromat beside the railroad tracks, sipping ninety-year-old Ben’s coffee and swapping jokes is enough to keep me going.

WHO ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?

When I read websites where a lot of people address contemporary issues, some of them quite rarified and theoretical and others life-changingly practical, I constantly ask myself, “Who are these people talking about?”  Almost always they are talking about themselves.  

For instance, I just a read a piece on the right to have legal abortions.  It was clear that the discussers, even the men, had access to medical care already — legal or illegal — and they thought of surgeries as a little risky but entirely justified, elective.  A nearby argument was about plastic surgery.  Not addressing the kind of damage that makes people turn away in revulsion or anomalies that prevent function, but rather a matter of improving looks.

My reference point is always the starving Somali woman staggering across a barren landscape with her dead baby in her arms.  Did she have access to abortion?  To plastic surgery?  She didn’t even have access to food.  

Another reference point is the still-teenaged girl in an unstable family who barely realizes that she’s pregnant though she’s been inseminated many times by many men.  Do educated upscale people, often talking over a table loaded with good food, have anything to say to these women?  What is an illegal abortion next to the prevailing abuse — which is also supposed to be illegal?

Let me say right here that I’ve never been pregnant.  The docs write on my chart “null partum” and ask whether I’m sterile or a nun.  The only answer is that I have no idea, since I’ve had sex, but only with men who had a vasectomy and an income.  One CAN have sex without insemination.  At my age I don’t have to think about it anymore, but I think I should anyway, since creating a new human being ought to be a serious moral issue that affects the whole human community.  

But it isn’t.  It is a biological imperative that through the aeons (MORE than millennia) has been selected for again and again — that’s the definition of “selected for”— except that part of the selection is raising the next generation to the point that they can create and sustain the next next generation.  At that point one is on the ground of culture — is aborting a child worse or better than aborting a culture?  (Genocide.)

The force to make babies has pushed through 200 versions of hominins.  Ours was the only one to survive this far and we may not last a whole lot longer.  We all want to know what happened to end the 199 rough drafts of humans.  Was it war?  Disease?  Climate change? (It’s not unusual; this is just the first time it was human-made unless you count humans acting as vectors for disease that cut down enough people to allow forests to grow back, creating an abundance of carbon dioxide.)  

We are the first generation to intervene to sustain pregnancies and babies who would have been winnowed out in previous times.  Our problem is not medical skill or — for some classes — access to money, but rather this huge psychological syndrome that makes babies emotional firestorms.  I’ve already said that my father was a fan of Margaret Sanger and believed in the efficacy of condoms, which were illegal then and had to be ordered in the mail, arriving in a plain brown wrapper.  His sibs each had two children, as decided.  But my birth family was three, which I finally came to suspect was unplanned.  There was a pinhole in the condom or it slipped or things were too exciting to stop and find one.  

The extra child was the difference in the finances of the family ever after.  There was never quite enough.  My mother took up the slack, as was our pattern.  First, she had “repairs” after the third child, which included sterilization.  Her choice.  Then she went back to school to finish the degree cut short by the Depression, so she could teach.  This turned out to finally give her the benefits she had imagined were a feature of cities, a raised consciousness.  It kicked my father to the curb emotionally.

Mary, Mark and Paul Strachan

When I suggested to other family members that the third child was probably unplanned, I was taken aback by the ferocity of their reaction — it was as though I’d suggested something entirely immoral — as though she’d had an abortion!  I don’t think my parents would ever consider such a thing.  But I don’t think my father ever faced up to the necessity of making more money.

One of my new continuing series favs is Canadian, “Flashpoint,” about the next step after SWAT teams, called “Strategic Response” and including many psychological skills like talking people down from suicide, hostage-holding, and mass killings.  A recent episode was about the effect on members of the team when they try, almost succeed, and then fail.  The key example was a little girl who had nearly drowned, but — thanks to the extraordinary efforts of one officer who gave her mouth-to-mouth respiration for the entire distance to the hospital — survived.  But she was in a vegetative state and remained that way.  So did he save her?  What about all the miracle babies we celebrate?  What were their lives like?

Ed Lane from "Flashpoint"

This third child in my family, my youngest brother, fell hard as an adult and suffered a concussion, so my mother supported him until her death, after supporting my father until his relatively early death.  What she gave up was a pleasant retirement in a safe place.  She kept saying she wanted to talk to me, but then didn’t, as though a concussion were shameful.  There wasn’t even much research at that point, though ironically one of the world experts was right there in Portland.

The reason I had no children is that I intended to live as a writer and knew there would be little or no income, as well as selfishly wanting to be free to pull up stakes.  It’s true that at several points in my life, if I’d been supporting a child, I would have been forced into immoral choices.  Nothing dramatic like rape or robbery, but not getting fired for opposing authorities.  For instance, I turned in abuses of students and patients, which were required by law and forced the authorities to take action.  I knew this would get me fired.

But that third child, when grown up, created a new human being with the adult cooperation of his girl friend/student.  Someone wanted that child and was not using prophylactics.  Whatever, that child is my only blood descendent (collateral) and whatever happened is now justified by her life which is not just healthy but a joy.  She was kept secret from our extended family, but her mother had strong family support: money, education, counselling.  Things turned out well.

But what about that Somali woman, that hooked teen?  No doubt their bodies rejected some pregnancies.  My father-in-law was one of three surviving sons from at least twice as many pregnancies.  He himself was premature, on the edge of survival.  His incubator was a shoebox in the warming oven of the woodstove on a Quebec dairy farm.  He turned out small but tough, chose a big healthy woman, and raised two strong and potent sons who ran headlong into World War II and were never the same.  What does it mean?

All mammals create babies at high cost and through a multitude of small connections and flip-overs of molecules that can go wrong.  It’s not hard to see that every baby is a miracle but then the next step is much harder: the individual decisions and will-power necessary to take them to adulthood.  And then the next step is as full of consequences as those for an individual family — the feeding of whole populations of mothers and babies.  MY surviving baby is a miracle.  YOUR surviving baby is threatening the planet.

Stigmatized babies face death all their lives.  An abortion is only one crunch point.  Not so long ago — and probably still in some corners — young stigmatized women whether the wrong color or considered “immoral” were covertly sterilized.  It always makes me think of lions killing the progeny of their competitors so they can re-inseminate the lioness with their own genes.  Morality is overruled by biological effectiveness.  Morality responds to “necessity”, even if it is that of imagined superiority.  

But it backfires when we obsess over individual women, their needs and crimes, while neglecting the larger situation — like the limited carrying capacity of the planet.  

WORLD HISTORY IS REPETITIOUS

I’m not very interested in names and dates of history, and openly suspicious of accounts of the past that congratulate the people recounting the tale.  But there are some points of history that are more than just “counts.”  The numbers actually point to forces almost geological in their size and impact.  But numbers lie, so all of this is provisional until we know more.  Still, sometimes they account for things in the present.  The task of sorting all that into meaning belongs to all of us, but esp. writers.

One set of demographics is that of the evolution, accompanied by migration, through the land masses as they shifted, erupted, sank, or dried out. The actual “demos” (the people) are by now nothing but fragments of bone which yield scrapings big enough and whole enough to create a bricolage genome.  Since genes mutate at a known rate, we can figure out (very blurry) beginnings and endings of populations.

“We”, meaning white people, have been very intrigued by the populating of Eurasia.  Those who want to have a hero military father-figure were delighted to know that Genghis Khan sowed his seed everywhere.  They were less pleased by the proof that Homo Erectus and the earlier Neandertals interbred when the “Erectus” fellows came north.  In fact, the estimates of the variations over millennia on the theme of hominin are suspected to number in the hundreds.

Europeans and their great wave of emigrants to the empires have so dominated our terms and imaginations that we see everything through their eyes.  Now they are forced to look at everything with new eyes and readjust their assumptions.  Not only are we reclassifying the former planet “Pluto” into something not quite defined yet, the idea that Europe is a continent has been challenged.  The inhabitants are also being scrutinized.  Three waves of incoming populations have been suggested.  About 45,000 years ago the African hunter-gathers moved in.  You must imagine “filtering in” rather than a great march north, and they continued to evolve as they met new conditions.

About 8,000 years ago, farmers from the Near East moved in.  Remember that new people bring in new cultural memes along with their genes.  This one has persisted for a long time, even in America.  Family-based, dependent on hoarding to survive hard times, the high values were loyalty and defence.  

4500 years ago, the pastoral people who included Genghis Kahn, swooped in on horseback. They were nomadic sheepherders from Western Russia and their type also persists.  Consult “Game of Thrones.”

Compare this to the proposed pattern of people in the Americas.  People with Siberian genes “paused” in Beringia from 21,000 BCE to 27,000 BCE which at the time was continentally attached at both ends.  The American end was blocked by huge glaciers, so they became boat builders and populated the Pacific Coast because there is always food where water meets land.  The Monte Verde Paleo-Indians had arrived in Chile by 14,000-15,000 BCE.  When the glaciers withdrew, about 10,000 years ago or a little more, they followed the melting edge towards the east and came south along the Old North Trail.  Of course, since the Inuit travel around on the ice now, presumably they could travel on glaciers then. 

In the meantime science and technology had exploded in Europe and arrived in 1492 in ships with compasses, riding down the pre-existing people with sails and microbes.  “All of the 84 mDNA lineages that the researchers sequenced are now extinct.  In 1610 the CO2 level, the one that gives us the greenhouse effect, sank abruptly because the Native Americans died in such numbers that carbon-fixing forests replaced farms and towns.”  90% of the population died off, not because the Euros were capable of killing that many people, but because their microbes did.

Holy Family Mission on the Blackfeet Rez

So far I haven’t seen any articles about what WWI and the “Spanish Flu” did to depopulate Europe and lower carbon dioxide, but the Cistercian monastic movement began as an effort to repopulate the land emptied by the Black Plague in 1347 when 12 Genoese trading ships docked at the Sicillian port of Messina.  It’s estimated that 60% of the population perished.  The Cistercians were part of complex: Berdardines, Franciscans, White Monks, Benedictines, and then Trappists, who represented a return to strictness and manual labor.  The men who came to the Blackfeet were mostly from one of these orders and brought with them the preoccupation with growing crops.  The Holy Family Mission on Two Medicine River was one of the places where a fertile broad valley with nearby water made crops practical and successful.

Aeon is one of the websites I value and visit often, even contributing to comments.  Today this article — about a place sometimes called “Anatolia” struck me.  It was hard to read because it references so many places that have no clear pattern in my mind.  Here’s the formula for access in case the link doesn't work:

https://aeon.co/essays/the-boundary-between-europe-and-asia-is-a-cultural-fiction?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=c7d249f523-Weekly_Newsletter_8_April_20164_8_2016&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_411a82e59d-c7d249f523-68600437

Anatolia

It is highly relevant now because that’s where the Syrian refugees are coming across water on a place called the Hellespont, the same as Cubans tried to get to Florida.  It’s where the little boy called Alan washed up on the sand along with many other bodies.  It’s only about a mile across.

“The region is bounded by the Black Sea to the north, the Mediterranean Sea to the south, and the Aegean Sea to the west. The Sea of Marmara forms a connection between the Black and Aegean Seas through the Bosphorus and Dardanelles straits and separates Anatolia from Thrace on the European mainland.

“As with so many parts of the ancient world, then, Anatolia’s historical role shifted over time. During some periods it was the buffer zone between regional powers; but at other times it was the regional power, and the margins of empire were located elsewhere.”

Swerve.  Today it was excellent weather and I was happy to drive to Cut Bank to do the wash at “Washaway,” one of the more pleasant laundromats.  Ben, who with his wife owns and operates the place, is always eager to offer coffee and talk about politics and history and war — he is a WWII veteran.  And he worries about the rez issues, partly because Larry Reevis, constantly full of ideas, comes in many mornings to visit.

One thing that preoccupies all of us is the issues (multiple) of Sovereignty — that is, the right of the reservation to govern itself.  The area, mostly defined by economic forces (the oil is gerrymandered to Cut Bank as much as possible), political forces (Canada is the northern border) and geological features (the Rockies on the West, Birch Creek on the south), it ignores the once important tribal boundaries — Edmonton to Yellowstone, Rockies to Black Hills.  The confusion and competing powers of these elements have created a kind of Beringia or Hellespont, a place of passage that will disappear in the future because everything will disappear in the future and much already has, including many kinds of humans, rough drafts that didn’t make it.  (We'll keep trying.)

The rez was originally created partly as a refuge for a people who were culturally very different and partly as a confinement so they wouldn’t resist the Euros (descendants of Genghis Khan) invading everything.  It has been a resource and an irritant, an anomaly and an ethical dilemma since the Euros came.  But now we question everything.  Like, whether Europe is even a continent.  (We've already decided Pluto is not a planet.)

When I was little, one of my favorite books was “Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch.”  It’s been re-issued and now reads a little like “Stay Away, Joe” for kids with Irish instead of Indians.   “A national bestseller when first published in 1901, Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch endures today as one of the most memorable literary creations by a Kentucky author.. . .“Alice Hegan Rice spins the memorable tale of a family struggling against all odds in the Cabbage Patch, an old Louisville slum "where ramshackle cottages played hop-scotch over the railroad tracks." This hopeful story follows the Wiggs as they face eviction from their dilapidated house and take in two orphanage fugitives.”

What makes me think of Mrs. Wiggs was that she named her children for the continents:  Asia, America North and South (twins), Australia, Europe — I don’t remember any of them being named Arctic or Antarctic.  But maybe I’ll write a story about kids on Moccasin Flats (which doesn’t really exist anymore) named Beringia, Siberia, Yukon, et al.  And maybe they could argue sovereignty and the shadowy but persisting sovereign nations on the high prairie that don’t just cross the official rez borders, but also international borders.  Kids’ clear eyes might be just what’s needed.

In the meantime, I’ll pray (well, something like that) for the Syrian kids wearing flotation jackets while trying to cross the Hellespont in rubber boats.  There IS a culture problem, as always.  But we evolve.

In the meantime, I'd better see what this book is about!

PORT OF ENTRY TO TROUBLE

Just last night I finally looked to see what the furor over the Panama Papers was about.  It turned out to be the same thing as has been happening a lot: the turning out to the public light of matters hidden in the tangle of communication/
regulation that surrounds the fungibility of money.  “Fungibility” means that it can be transformed into other entities without losing value — “money-laundering,” we say.  Hidden profits.  

It seems most of the “civilized” conventions we have are now “pot-bound” as though the container is too small for the contained.  That is, our education system, our money handling, our governmental hierarchy, our health provisions and a lot of other functions have replicated and duplicated and elaborated and corrupted to the point where they do as much damage as good.  Panama Papers offers examples of how loopholes in the handling and “ownership” of money is disguised, misrepresented, and moved off-shore to avoid taxes and any other kind of accountability.

But greed works in both directions.  Around here, close to the 49th parallel, we are aware of a little feature called “asset forfeiture.”  The basic idea is that if you are a criminal or using your property for felonious activity, the government enforcing agent can take your property.  That is, cross the border with a marijuana roach or even little green flakes floating around in your nice car and you might possibly lose it for transporting drugs, even before going to trial or in spite of being found innocent.  

I’m going to quote Fenster, an on-line guy of considerable intelligence and experience:  “But the moral hazard is serious enough that police often take assets when no criminal action has been shown to have occurred, or if the owner of the asset was not aware of the crime.  Here's a fun John Oliver rant.   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kEpZWGgJks on it.  Reform efforts are underway--slowly, slowly considering the opposition of law enforcement, which appears to now be addicted.”

Sweetgrass Port of Entry (USA side)

The Canadian side is called Coutts.

If you’re planning to cross the border this summer, best to stop and vacuum the car thoroughly before going to the Port of Entry.  We hear a lot of stories of high-end cars being impounded never to be seen again.  If you can, watch while your car is searched.  It's easy to plant a little something. 

I know a couple who were stripped of all their assets which were in the form of furs and hides coming back from Alaska because the man’s business was creating authentic reproductions of artifacts.  He was white and would have found little sympathy from tribal people.  The US border claimed they found eagle feathers and took everything, both the finished objects of considerable value (reproduction recurved bow made authentically from mountain sheep horns legally taken) and the other materials.  The couple pursued legal redress for years with no success.  The more spectacular creations were reported to have been sighted on the walls of the highest authority’s office.

Chief Mountain Port of Entry

Same name both sides, closed in winter.

Prevention is always better than regret.  As the John Oliver story points out, one can be considered a criminal simply for having large amounts of cash, lovely fungible cash, just in a car, not necessarily hidden or contaminated with cocaine.  No need to cross the border, just make the mistake of speeding.

So here’s Fenster’s proposal for a better way to handle impounded cash.

"If it is currency burn it, at least any amount above and beyond administrative overhead for managing the asset forfeiture process.

"Start with a distinction between a hard asset, like a car and a house, and currency.  The former is real.  The latter is not.  Currency is in fact nothing other than a convention we have established such that the rightful owner can store value for the acquisition of real things at a later date.  It is a shared symbol, and has legitimacy not only out of habit but out of the shared belief that the owner of the symbol has undertaken legal action, like labor, that entitles that person to store value until a later date when a real asset or real services may be obtained.

"It is for the latter reason--the legitimacy of ownership of a claim on future resources--that we deny lawbreakers their ill-gotten gains.  But what then entitles the authorities to gain access to the symbolic shared value of the currency seized?  Should it not just be destroyed?  Nothing of real value will be destroyed in the process.  The only thing that will go up in smoke is paper.  And the only real world effect would be that the authorities would not be able to avail themselves of what amounts to free assets and services.

"So I can see no conceptual justification for the transfer of symbolic assets generated in illicit ways to allow for free purchase of goods and services.  Nothing of value is destroyed in the destruction of that currency--it is only the free purchase of goods and services later that is halted.  And beyond the conceptual justification is a practical one too: the complete elimination of the moral hazard of financial incentive. I daresay that when the financial incentive is gone the temptation to what amounts to theft will be greatly diminished."

Clearly, cash is not the advantage it once was (acceptability everywhere, lightweight in comparison to coin, easy exchange with another country’s cash.)  One should explore other ways of carrying value during travel.  Even traveler’s checks are suspect now, and credit cards have various drawbacks, including theft, but I haven’t heard of any law enforcement agencies impounding credit cards.

That doesn’t help the diverting of vehicles.  Maybe it is the insurance companies who will ultimately deal with this, which means more paperwork and more points of argument.  

Yesterday I was in Shelby, a border-crossing town and inter-modal exchange point: that is, railroad and truck handling of those shipping containers big enough to use for a house.  (There’s no water access for ships and therefore no crane loading.)  But in the big truck stop service station (attached to a casino as most everything is in Montana now) there is a separate cashier for trucks taking on gasoline which can be a purchase in triple digits.  

It’s separate because it has many more double-checks: driver ID, truck ID, a phone call to the company represented, and database access for recent alerts.  In fact, for my small purchase (I buy gas in $10 increments) I had to supply my driver’s license, add my physical address to my check.  I don’t print my physical address so that people can’t connect my checkbook to where I live — same with the driver’s license.  (Montana driver’s licenses are based on birthdates, which the police and now most medical contexts use as ID.  Some people put their SSI number on their checks, but not me.)  

In Montana there is the possibility of an exemption to the formula, which I use, even though it's sort of silly that the alternative was supplied because some here still think SSI numbers are the Mark of Cain, punishment for killing Abel.  Common sense didn't work but mythology did.

I became wary of these ID numbers when I was an AC officer for the Multnomah Country sheriff.  The hermeneutics of suspicion!  It occurs to me that I’ve never really looked around to see where the security cameras are at the truck stop, not that I have any need to, but I watch British and Canadian crime shows and CCTV even in remote Wales are often the key to something.

When Bob Scriver became a Justice of the Peace, the highway patrol had at least one officer who always wrote on the back of the ticket what he thought the fine should be.  Bob ignored it on grounds that HE was the judge, specifically to provide a second opinion of both sides of the situation, and he would not be displaced by the officer, a check against officer misconduct or situational prejudice.  (Bad hair day.)  "If you set the fine, there's no need for a judge," said Bob.

"Well, that's right!" fumed the officer.  "I'M the law!"  In those days the officer sometimes set the fine and collected it on the spot.  Shortly after that a second Justice of the Peace was elected for this small town.  He was a man from the outside who took his coffee with the highway patrol and didn’t much like Indians.

Law enforcement in most places is long stretches of boredom broken by occasional incidents full of adrenaline and possibly injury or death.  Most of it isn’t very glamorous and people aren’t necessarily grateful.  To sit with one’s donut, pondering, a napkin handy for making little equations, is to tempt the devil to offer schemes.  This is aside from anything systemic like what is revealed by the Panama Papers.  When the larger culture is greed-based, marriages have been replaced by hookups, and courts are constantly struggling to know what to do with abused kids beyond enforcing child-support, there are traps everywhere.  The Port of Entry to the traps is wide open.

BREAKING INTO SONG!

The Bose computer speakers I saved up for came today.  I could have gotten them yesterday except that Amazon is growing so quickly that they redesign their delivery systems to keep up, but since the managers of such things are urban and grew up urban, they constantly make assumptions that interfere and malfunction in rural places, even small towns like Valier.  So the internet message that I got late last night saying that my speakers couldn’t be delivered yesterday because I wasn't home really meant that they’d left everything at the post office instead of going door-to-door.  This has taken me a while to figure out.  

The advantage of ordering on the Internet when one lives on the high prairie is countered by the blunders of such aspects as delivery.  People who work con games like having a PO Box instead of a physical address causes businesses to make an arbitrary rule against PO Boxes even if the physical address only matters if someone delivers there.  But I DID get my speakers.

Ray and Polly Stark recently did a review of a half-dozen computer speakers, Bose among them, and didn’t choose the one I’d already ordered, but that’s okay.  Their standards (and ears) are far beyond mine.  One of my classmates served a fancy UU church in Texas where the members were rollin’ in dough.  One of them gave him a desktop Bose for his office which made me extremely jealous; he said it really was as good as advertised.  It does sound good.

Rev. Davidson Loehr

Now I’m listening to http://www.yourclassical.org/listen/radio.  "Tannhauser"at the moment.  I have to stop typing to listen now and then.  I’ll be curious to hear the sound tracks for some of my streaming films, but not so eager to hear those of my favorite dark northern European mystery shows with mostly industrial sounds — humming, faint squealing, rhythms from strange sources, clicking of gears — very effective tension-builders.  When the police sirens signal arriving reinforcements, they almost sound cheerful.  “Hinterland”, “Happy Valley”, “Crossing Lines”, “Broadchurch”  I don’t like silliness.  I can barely tolerate “NCIS”.  (If “DeNozo” gets fatally wounded, I won’t grieve.)  Maybe I should rewatch the “Morse” series, just for the sake of the sound track by Barrington Pheloung.

My father concussed and walking

My father was a classical music fan and in the time period I’m going to start calling “BC” (Before the car crash in 1948 that affected his personality) he amassed a huge collection of 78 vinyl versions of well-known symphonies and concertos.  In that same time period we didn’t always have quite enough to eat, but he was on the road and didn’t notice.  My mother, who received her grocery money on a reimbursement basis, was proud of her managing skills.  We didn’t actually starve.  We’d just have “pioneer night,” milk toast with a kerosene lamp in the middle of the table.  And then she quietly began to do bookkeeping for the button business two women ran in the basement of their house across the street.

My father’s travel expenses were also reimbursable and he was slow sending in his invoices, which accounted for some of the tight squeaks.  On Saturdays he played his records as loudly as possible on the serious radio/phonograph where our annual growth was recorded in “bare scuddy” shots he took of us trying to see in the top.  My molecules still vibrate to the sounds. 

Innocent times are long gone.

Then I became a UU and encountered their taste.  I found out about “Pachelbel’s Canon” and “Pavane for a Dead Princess” and discovered that my father’s taste — indeed my heart-stirring fav, “Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto in B Flat Minor” — was considered sentimental, middle-class.  But that goes back to the days when I was small enough to stand on my father’s feet while he waltzed.  Pre-BC.

Prokovief is also for me linked to dance, mainly “Romeo and Juliet” which I saw performed by the Royal Danish Ballet with a classmate who daringly managed to steal the poster.  He was working in a cafe as the “salad man” and I signalled him that I was out front by playing on the jukebox “Ebbtide” twice in a row.

I do have a fondness for Respighi.  Highbrows despair of me.  The next thing you know they’ll be accusing me of saying I liked “Victor Young and his Singing Strings”  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87_4XeJQ9oo  and I did.  For years I went around whistling “The High and the Mighty.”

Remember when heroes smoked?

For decades I always did my housework on Saturday mornings accompanied by the opera, singing or whistling with them, and it went famously, full of energy.  Then Yellowstone Public Radio switched their scheduling to play the opera on Sunday evening.  Just as when OPB began charging $5 a month to watch Masterpiece Theatre, I dropped out.  (I dropped out of the housework as well.)  

Surprising how little it takes to prompt a deep change.  Even more surprising it is that marketers consistently go for the lowest common denominator and lose their most dedicated customers.  The opera solution was easy: CD’s and radio streams.  I could listen to "Madame Butterfly" as many times in a row as I wanted to.  And they made the OPB decision easy as well by programming for teenaged girls (all those nurses saving handsome wounded soldiers), the same way Vogue magazine began targeting them (fourteen year olds in daring evening gowns).  Evidently teen girls have a lot of discretionary income and no taste.

But I have no business being a snob.  I hop around, never analyze, free-associate to irrelevant things.  Develop prejudices.  For instance, my undergrad roommate used to start the day EVERY day with the Four Freshmen singing, “Redirect your feet to the sunny side of the street!”  I prefer the shade, thank you.  If I hear the Four Freshmen, I leave.

Winter was in my same year at NU, but I didn't know him.

This is a very quiet town, so silent that sometimes city people can’t sleep.  But when the wind is high — as it has been for days — the percussion of debris bits slapping the house punctuates the wailing reed instruments.  The cats burrow under the covers and I’m grateful for Bose speakers that have a lot of volume.  Now I’m playing all the free downloads from Paul Winter.  Sounds swell.  Now it’s "Villancico" by Danny Rivera but I don’t dare tell you what the association is.

One vacation I set out from Portland up the Columbia River Highway towards Browning with new Paul Winter cassettes and headphones for my also-new Sony Walkman.  I was somewhere way out there at dawn on a clear early summer day, highway deserted, enjoying a music high, speeding — until I thought I heard too many saxophones.  Finally, I checked the mirrors and saw the flashing lights.  I was slow pulling over because the road was narrow with few turnouts.

I sat waiting.  (“Do not get out of your car!”)  Long wait.  Probably checking the license on the radio.  Still long.  When I looked in the mirror again, here came the handsome young officer, gun drawn, cautiously sidling along up against the side of the pickiup.  Since it had taken so long for me to stop, he figured I was running away from him so I must be a desperado.  He had been trying to decide whether it were worth driving up alongside to stop me when I did.  Seeing my round old spectacled face and flyaround white hair was kind of a let down.  He gave me a ticket and a scolding.

Is that OPERA??!!

Since then I don’t wear earphones when I’m driving.  Instead I do what I did when I was dog-catching and on the dispatch radio:  I whistle.  All this technology can be a hazard.  But these Bose speakers are wonderful.  I’m on another music high, even if I’m not a kid.