TWO MUSEUMS AT THE CENTER

It is very hard to convey to others -- either in person or in print -- how I see some things. Therefore, I was delighted to find that the Religion and Culture Web Forum addressed the intersection of museums and religion in an essay by Elizabeth McKeown, professor at Georgetown University. Her way of making the subject concrete -- and hopefully more tangible and manageable -- was to consider two museums on the National Mall: the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the National Museum of the American Indian. Each museum is intended to valorize the people they represent and to claim National status. The USHMM ended up just off the Mall, while some of the last precious space was used for the NMAI. The USHMM is meant to harmonize with the other mall architecture; NMAI is meant to harmonize with curving nature and contrast with the square-edged monuments. There are many conclusions one can draw from this, but one way (from outside) is that the USHMM is European and the NMAI is indigenous -- therefore, the USHMM can claim identity with the terrible wars and aesthetic standards of the US, while the NMAI can point to its OWN terrible wars and apartness.

Museums are not quite the same category as “religion” though to some people a museum can be a kind of church and science or art can be a kind of religion. Both of these museums are historical with the USHMM acting as a memorial and NMAI often shading over into both art and science, if you think anthropology is a science. (Some people are beginning to wonder about that.) So these two institutions are just not equivalent. They simply happen to coincide in time of completion, so people are talking about both at the same time.

Still, Jewish people often make common cause with American Indians, seeing that both are victims of genocide, confinement and special designation. Jewish lawyers have often been major defenders of Native American rights. And there is always that peculiar notion that the NA are descended from a lost tribe of Jews. But I should stick to the text of this essay, which is quite thought-provoking.

The Holocaust museum started as nothing but an idea. Objects had to be brought from Europe: a pile of shoes left by victims, a milk can where the history of the Warsaw Ghetto was hidden, and a controversial mass of 9 kilos female human hair that is kept off-site for complicated reasons. A provocative idea suggested by Peter Novick is that in trying to elevate memory -- to the point of discrediting all information except that provided by survivors -- has caused the museum to create a Catholic-style “stations of the cross” complete with the relics of saints, though traditional Judaism has tried to limit and contain grief, not to allow the focus to remain with mourning.

This comparison of two museums is pointed when considering that the NMAI evolved out of the Heye collection, Heye being a man who vacuumed up everything that might be Indian and stashed an enormous accumulation of unsorted objects. West, the founding director, saw the mission as NOT focused on the past but rather to celebrate Indian identity. The problem, of course, is that this presumes that there is a unitary Indian identity across the continent when those who know more than Hollywood versions of Plains Indians are quite aware of variation. For instance, the museum cafe is called “Let’s Eat!” or Mitsitam. What language is that? Are we gonna eat fish, buffalo or corn? There are other sneaky issues, like repatriation of human remains, which has been underway for some time, and a demand for repatriation of other materials that have been poisoned as a means of keeping bugs and mold out. They are no longer safe to have in a dwelling.

On the one hand, all Indians are to be included -- on the other, they are included by giving each a little space, a sort of booth at the trade fair, which is hardly unitary. It appears that this is partly the product of trying to figure out what an Indian is anyway. As they point out, they were just themselves -- it was the problem of the invaders to try to define them and figure out their boundaries, partly because of treaty entitlements and territory deals resulting in reservations. So “one-quarter Indian” has been the marker, one grandparent who is full-blood. Today’s grandparents were born in 1950 or so. They grew up with television, pickups, and Vietnam.

Then there is the pan-Indian movement, partly fueled by government Indian schools where tribes mixed at a courting age, partly by Eisenhower’s relocation plan which brought many together into city ghettos, and then by the pow-wow movement which calls Indians into a competitive arena where they have developed into a kind of sub-culture. Are dream-catchers Indian? Is fry bread Indian? Are day-glo feathers Indian?

Anyway, now there will be a Museum of African-American History and Culture. At one time the stature of the Founding Fathers was guaranteed by the solemnity of a few impressive and classical buildings. Then came the tactful and stunningly successful Vietnam War Memorial, drawing power from being so opposite: below grade and black, naming multitudes. The WWII Memorial is accepted. (It seems quite German to me!) Where will it stop? Is there to be a Memorial Ghetto crowded with the celebrations of every hyphenated kind of citizen. Will we have to find room for an Islamic monument? (Already trouble over the size of their mosques in cities.)

It appears very late to develop criteria, except that the nation is a living process and these memorials are part of its patriotic blood-stream, furnishing ideas and carrying oxygen to many kinds of people so that they know they are part of the shared body. We really MUST address these issues or risk death, at least in parts.

WIVES AND DAUGHTERS

When I tend my Netflix queue, I look for BBC murder mysteries first -- the kind with an excessive and rather dark hero, like “Cracker.” Then I look for Westerns, the really good ones. I esp. liked both “Broken Trail” and “Open Range” which were from the same team. I’m careful to avoid BBC comedies but I’m not quite sure why. They are so exaggerated and LOUD. I guess that’s it. But I love a nice big BBC costume drama with favorite actors, maybe Helen Mirren or Vanessa Redgrave. Thus, I tripped and fell on “Mothers and Daughters.” The ad for it kept popping up on other DVD’s.

So -- it was really quite excellent and had all my favorite things: old stone villages, marshes and fields, long vistas over the British hills, exceptionally good horses -- the tiger of a bad guy rides a remarkable sleek black horse and does it VERY well! It’s Empire -- which I learned to pronounce Owm-peer when I sewed up the costumes for “Quality Street” at EaglesMere generations ago. Very flattering for the slender little girls in these stories. And FAB hairdos. Hours and hours went into ribbons, flowers, braiding, hairpieces, and so on. The characters are those usual village characters, a little extreme as though they had just come from “Wind in the Willows,” very much about the sociology and power plays of families and class, a little intensified by the first inklings of Darwin.

The heroine was quite as earnest and father-longing as “Anne of Green Gables” and her father in this story is a doctor, both tender and ferocious -- just what a girl wants and needs. Except that she can hardly be his wife, and thereby hangs the imbalance that drives the story when he chooses Francesca Anis (who wouldn’t?) who is a bit addled in the manner of the mother in “Pride and Prejudice” but quite a bit more sexy.

This miniseries DVD, which takes two evenings or half a day to watch, as though it were a book to read, includes an entire disc devoted to the life of the author, Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell, daughter of a Unitarian minister and wife of another as well as (late-in-life) a very dear friend of a younger American Unitarian writer, Edward Eliot Norton. (Lucy Maude Montgomery was also the wife of a minister, which is probably significant, except that her marriage was not so happy. Rev. Montgomery, who was more of a Calvinist, was a victim of depression.) Edward Eliot Norton’s family included at the edges T.S. Eliot and Thomas Lamb Eliot, founder of the Portand, OR, Unitarian church.

On this disc the Elizabeth Gaskell Fan Club, a game collection of characters fully as assorted as the characters in the actual story, trek through her various locations, around the abandoned hellhole factories of Manchester through Wales where she honeymooned and along the sandy bay where the tide comes in dangerously fast, making a central plot device for a short story. They go to the small charming house where she lived her last years and died in mid-sentence at 55, holding her teacup as she sat on the sofa. (The guide thinks she had probably drunk all her tea first, as otherwise there would be a terrible mess.) Her last word was “Rome” and the last scenes of the explanations are also in Rome which she enjoyed with her young writer friend. The Fan Club is careful to leave their coins in the fountain.

One watches these remarkably detailed and vigorous films and comments with affection and amusement, plus a familiarity with the actors, who are old friends. Sometimes they play parts so different from previous roles that it’s hard to place them. It wasn’t until one of the old maid “Miss Brownings” was speaking out of character that I realized she had been Cracker’s wife! Michael Gambon was in TOP form here, making us love a rather ridiculous old man. It’s repertory theatre in all its British glory.

Beyond that, for all my love of prairie, I have a kind of genetic recognition and yearning for the British landscape -- the foxglove and the Queen Anne’s lace, the topiary and the long sheep meadows. I have to clench my hands in my pockets to keep from buying those books of “Stately British Houses” they sell, featuring the same graceful places as the ones in these movies. (In fact, you know, Cleghorn -- Elizabeth Gaskell’s middle name -- is the name of the “castle” of the Macfies -- Macfie being Bob Scriver’s mother’s maiden name and his own middle name.)

Mrs. Gaskell was writing in Manchester, where her husband and she worked to alleviate some of the ghastly destruction of the new industrial machinery, tearing and starving and stunting people, destroying their families. In those days people lived on narrow lanes streaming with horse dung and human shit. Most of their children died, often of starvation. Modern Manchester features in the Helen Mirren/Robson Green murder mysteries -- still sinister and inhuman.

Mrs. Gaskell’s stories, at least this one, are idyllic in setting and mostly about upper-class social strategies. (I’ve ordered “North and South” which is about the factories.) It is as much about the past as it is about any place. But the deeper difference is that between those progressive, optimistic, ever-helping Unitarians and today’s cynicism, self-protection, and expectation of doom, one way or another. When I first found the Portland, Oregon , church in 1975, it was solidly social-activist in spite of being battered by splits over the Vietnam War. By now, it takes much more of a “therapeutic” and avoidance tack, like most of the mainstream denominations. Instead of signs at UU churches declaring they are Peace Sanctuaries, one finds prohibitions on wearing perfume into the building.

Pundits keep telling us we’re in a new Gilded Age, but we manage not to feel any responsibility for the recurring dark side of extreme wealth and status. (Terrorism, illegal immigration, drugs, huge prison populations -- in case you need reminding.) What’s really weird is that educated privileged people, when they are confronted with accounts of the dark side that are convincing in detail and intensity, are able to suppress them by declaring that the authors are “fake” -- didn’t really go through all that stuff themselves. (Maybe that’s because few survive and those that do rarely write.) Yet the way to get an Oscar is not to play country duchesses in satin -- the actors must appear to be suffering in some dramatic way. Misery in foreign countries, revealed in scandals, wins prizes.

Well, at least there’s Michael Moore.

DIABETES IS THE NEW AIDS

Diabetes is the new AIDS. I’m going to make an argument supporting this assertion, which is triggered by the desire of some jurisdictions to list everyone who has the condition, regardless of whether it is controlled and without knowing the cause. Their position is that since uncontrolled diabetes leads to very expensive problems that require radical treatment like amputation of feet or renal dialysis and since (they assume) the main body of victims are poor people or people who otherwise neglect proper compensation for diabetes, then the cost for all this treatment becomes a public expense, so the authorities should find out who these people are and “guide” them through counseling about prevention.

So, here’s what I see:

1. First, the stigmatization of the persons involved. These people are not gay, but they’re poor and fat (the assumption is) and therefore have no rights. (Many people, asked whether they would rather be buff and gay or fat and poor, would have to think it over -- like Jack Benny considering “your money or your life.”)

2. Once people are identified, laws and requirements can be imposed. Already diabetics can be passed over for jobs or for health insurance, on grounds that they are too expensive and their condition might impair their thinking or performance. It’s a bit like being epileptic. And when people like the former governor of South Dakota use diabetes as an excuse for auto accidents, they encourage that thinking.

3. Diabetes is a wonderful marketing tool. If not inventing new wonder drugs, resourceful people can market membership in an organization like the ADA, which can then sponsor advertisements for special foods, shoes, and so on. It’s as big as Weight Watchers, at least. A mailing list of potential clients is worth enough bucks to likely overwhelm the need for privacy.

4. Once the demographics of diabetes are “proven” to be predominately Indian, Mexican, old, poor, fat -- in short, "other" or at least "not me") it becomes very easy to blame the victim. They are “sugar pigs” who can’t control themselves or follow simple instructions such as “eat high quality food” or “get lots of exercise.” This relieves the authorities of inquiring into the possibility of industrial contamination from plastics or food ingredients or feed lot “meds,” etc.

5. The basis of Type 1 Diabetes is clear: failure of the Isles of Langerhans to produce enough insulin or ANY insulin, sometimes due to the Isles being altogether missing. Success in understanding and compensating was brilliant. But the basis of Type 2 Diabetes is unknown. The research is only beginning to get below the surface, detecting “new” kinds of diabetes so there are several different versions of “Type 3” diabetes from gestational to brain insulin production, possibly keying into Alzheimers. No one wants to say “prion.” Many are now persuaded to say “metabolic syndrome,” meaning that blood sugar feedback loops are linked to lipid management and blood pressure, suggesting a common cause somewhere deep in the body’s “symphonic” system. Vitamin deficiencies, exposure to radio waves, genetic mutations, and so on present such a plethora of possible causes that it’s hard to keep order.

6. Doctors are not at all sympathetic to the management of diabetes. Their theories don’t work, their meds have strange consequences, the amount of explanation and “talking therapy” that is needed turns them off, the patients are not upscale or even grateful, and checking feet seems like nurses’ work.

7. This has encouraged people to form blog communities, support forums, and other “horizontal” ways to work on the problem. They have learned to bypass the doctors by using home meters or going directly to labs. This makes the doctors more insecure and irritable, which pushes the people back to their peers.

8. A certain amount of fatalism sets in. “There’s no use in trying, because I’m doomed.” Then avoidance, procrastination.

9. Helplessness soon follows. Inertia, resignation. “If I’m going to die anyway, I might just as well...”

10. The enormous social importance of food in our lives is VERY hard to handle. Birthday cakes, wedding cakes, Christmas cookies, Halloween candy, Valentine chocolates and friendship coffee klatches are the ways we structure and commodify our symbolic lives. “Taking lunch,” having “power breakfasts,” are the least of it. Your gramma wants to fix your “favorite food,” which his not likely to be diabetic friendly. It’s such a temptation to eat all that stuff and then medicate to compensate, instead of cutting waaaaay back on the food and training oneself to eat a different way.

And so secrecy, denial, failure to address the problem.

But what’s worse is that the right amount of money in the right sort of places is withheld. We do not need “no-fat Twinkies.” We need someone willing to go around small towns and reservations taking blood pressure and washing feet. We do not need research on how to produce no-calorie food, we need food distribution networks that are trustworthy and chemical-free.

I’ve come to hate and fear lists of “deficient” people, because they so often are just pass-throughs for mega-corporations, like the Medicare drug bill, so that the government will pay for stuff that is later discovered to be ineffective or dangerous (like many diabetes drugs). And because they are used to pass draconian laws, like requiring people to buy health insurance or publicly register as sex offenders. I can imagine quarantines, sequestration, putting people on reservations (Indians are already conveniently there, just as many ghetto dwellers are black and red-lined). Once the authorities have control of people, as they do prison felons, they can control what’s eaten or how much exercise one can perform. Is it too sci-fi to imagine institutions where diabetics are confined, as TB patients were once, forced to eat “healthy food” and marched around a yard? Don’t we already do that with fat camps for kids?

Of course, once the government is involved, they’ll look for the cheapest way to manage and if it’s outsourcing we may all find ourselves eating All-Bran noodles in China before our morning march.

Scared? Disgusted? Think I’m making it up? Watch the newspapers. Backlash? Bring it on.

"LESTER AND ME" by Martin Murie

Way before the rest of us caught on, Martin Murie was out there self-publishing his novels, even though they were good enough to attract movie options. (“Losing Solitude” -- might happen yet since these things take years. This book and others by Martin or his mother, Margaret, are available on Amazon.com.) And he accepted the necessity of “running a trapline” by leaving books on consignment all over his area, setting up small displays in bait shops, hunters’ supply centers, hardware stores, and the like. It takes drive (literally and figuratively) and good bookkeeping to succeed at this. The actual books were printed by a local business and were for Martin almost a mission, since the content usually explores environmental salvation. (“It’ll never sell,” say the bigtime publishers who knowitall.)

The latest book, “Lester and Me,” is about the people who are invisible to the throngs of cyber-prosperous around Jackson and Yellowstone: local working stiffs. Decent, diligent and loath to leave their homegrounds, these two “buds” struggle to get along with cranky old employers and co-workers, high maintenance women, and jokesters determined to make their honeymoons miserable. You can read some chapters at http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/murie110506.html (If you Google “Lester and Me” you’ll get almost 6,000 hits mostly irrelevant but almost all pretty interesting.)

Endearingly unfocused, these two guys -- not quite cowboys -- bumble along, doing their best until they find their lives. It’s the kind of story where things happen kind of unexpectedly, but then -- looking back -- a pattern develops. Sorta like life.

The first chapter clearly could not have been written by anyone who had not spent some summer days bucking old-fashioned bales onto a truck, quite unlike the modern huge rolled bales with plastic overcoats, created by machinery that will yank your arms off if you make a mistake. Example: “One bit of luck came my way that summer, a pair of well-made hay hooks with sharp tips and long gentle taper, just right for slipping into tight-crimped alfalfa bales. It’s little things like that can make a difference around two o’clock in the afternoon when bales put on weight and the sun stands still.”

One episode that Martin knew would tickle me because of my encounters with the Western art world happens on Lester’s marriage night which lands the happy couple, broke and with no room at the inn, at a glossy upscale lodge with a gallery of Rungius paintings, some of the finest wildlife art that ever was. But the feisty bride, watching the filming of a video about how wonderful the colors, the composition, etc., can’t resist butting in to contribute an ornery defense of the actual animals, which are endangered and need help. At first the videographers try to close her out, but then realize the justice of what she’s saying and gradually figure out that this is lending some much-needed spice and edge to their video. In the end they are grateful and moved enough by the “endangered” honeymoon to contribute a nice room. (I don’t know whether Martin was aware that Rungius custom when painting an animal was to shoot one, a la Audubon, and prop the body up for a model. He went through a LOT of moose and mountain sheep.)

Even aside from their lonesome and neglected trophy wives, the rich guys are a problem. “Lester and Me” take one hunting, at his request, and discover that their value systems are entirely out of sync. The local boys are hunting elk for meat to get through the winter. The rich guy, Harold, is hunting according to a code of honor and is happier with a camera shot of a bear crossing talus than a trophy bull. Yet he proves capable and gets that trophy elk when it is crippled by another hunter. The problem is that he doesn’t want the trophy. And the locals are presented with the hard work of packing out three elk, one with an inconvenient rack of antlers. “No problem,” says Harold. “I’ll just see if one of the other hunters has a cell phone and order us up a helicopter. I can afford it.”

The not-quite-cowboys quickly reshuffle their value system. Work is good. Harold wants to do what is good -- therefore, Harold will fulfill his wish to have a “real” hunting experience by participating in the packing out. He sees their point.

In these stories are threaded every which way with detail about the sensory world of the Rockies: “We came into pine country on an easy slope that took us higher with hardly any strain. The ground was carpeted with arnica and pinegrass in speckled shade, some of the arnicas still hanging onto their yellow flowers, droopey and closed up and dry, but still showing some color, and the silky pinegrasses looped over, decorated with slivers of sunshine.”

Good is rewarded: Lester and “me” both end up with spirited, beautiful, capable wives. “Me” even picks up a couple of horses at no cost. Well, in terms of money, anyway. Some might complain that this is unreal, but maybe they haven’t been paying attention to the windfalls that come with optimism and generosity in real life.

Murie, a graduate of both Reed (a legendary source of ornery optimists) and Antioch (a great place to find beautiful, intelligent, and possibly rich wives) is not afraid of mixing rich people and “Bolsheviks” in the same story, nor should he be since he knows plenty of both. This is his and Alison’s last winter at their old farm on the edge of the Adirondacks, so it will be sharply felt, but if you order your copy of “Lester and Me” soon, you can still get it from “Packrat Books,” North Bangor, New York, or by contacting the Muries at skerihog@westelcom.com.

I hope that his next project is “Alison and Me: The Memoir,” with Alison as co-author, though I know she's been contributing all alone.

MAY MARRIES DECEMBER WHO IS RUNNING FOR OFFICE

Young wives of presidential candidates have caught the attention of Karen Heller, a columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer. She notes that Fred Thompson’s wife, Jeri, is forty, almost 25 years younger; Chris Dodd, 63, has a wife, Jackie, who is 18 years younger. John McCain’s wife, Cindy, is 27 years younger. (And overlapped his first wife a bit.) Dennis Kucinich’s wife, Elizabeth, his third, is less than half his age of 61 and a “car-crackup gorgeous” redhead with a pierced tongue. Heller didn't mention Giuliani.

Turning to history, Grover Cleveland’s wife was 27 years younger, James Madison’s was 17 years younger, Woodrow Wilson’s was 16 years younger, and John Tyler’s was 30 years younger. In those days, of course, women died young giving birth so Tyler and Wilson had been widowers. Serial marriage was often about raising the children. Thomas Jefferson owned his wife’s half-sister outright and so had no need to remarry. And Heller points out that in the “old days” men quietly kept mistresses as well as their wives, while the wives, like Eleanor Roosevelt, found other friends who, as long as they were female, were invisible.

Heller’s feeling is that old husbands with young wives and possibly children look “dirty.” As a “graduate” of such a relationship (me b. 1939 and Bob Scriver b. 1914), I’d like to add some thoughts.

First, everyone assumes that such partnerships are about sex, which makes young men furious and old women jealous. Their minds, even before becoming infested by Viagra SPAM (how old is Bob Dole’s wife?), raise mirages. But sex is energy-based and an older man is not usually more energetic than he was earlier, though he may NEED a lot more energy to keep up with life in general, particularly if he’s successful, or to get back into the swing if he’s been knocked off the success trajectory. A new wife brings new energy. There’s no denying that status is boosted by a trophy spouse whether the trophy-status is about appearance or power.

So it works both ways. For a young woman, stepping into a relationship with an older successful man means jumping over a lot of learning years and the kind of hardship people endure in shared youth, including neglect, deprivation and blowups that can destroy a marriage or at least scar it badly. Maybe she doesn’t want to have to learn a lot of stuff by trial and error that could simply be taught by someone who’s been there. Back to energy, Bob wanted a companion who could jump on a horse to ride in a buffalo roundup, put on coveralls to pour molten bronze, or sharpen a knife to help skin a bear. There ARE fifty year old women who do that, but they are generally married. A friend wanted a woman to travel with him through Europe -- someone who could backpack from one hostel to another, sleep on trains, and happily subsist on bread, cheese and wine -- they don’t call ‘em “youth hostels” for nothing -- but though he really preferred older women, they wanted luxury tours.

Considering the work schedule of politicians, one can see the advantage of a young wife. Another dimension is that women of the candidates’ age were probably raising children in their young adulthood and educated in quite a different way than a woman the age of her children. Young women mesh better with young staffers. Of course, they will also probably have to raise the second batch of children alone, but there will be more money and more help. The payback comes in nursing an old man when one is still relatively vigorous.

I was a third wife of four, which I often state baldly as a way of saving time when newly introduced people begin to stumble around to try to figure out the age difference: am I Bob Scriver’s daughter or Harold Scriver’s wife or even (heaven forbid) Phil Scriver’s wife? (Phil Scriver is not relation but pretends he is.) I am the only surviving wife and was divorced in 1970 which is before many of the interested were born and before the preponderance of them came to Montana -- therefore, I am outside their mental map. Also, I’ve had my own careers as a Unitarian Universalist minister and as an animal control officer (talk about outside the mental map!) and am now often described as a retired high school teacher who writes, which is as true as any other description. It would be as true to say I was Scriver’s Boswell, that gentleman being one who traveled with Dr. Johnson, taking notes.

The more dangerous paradigm is that I never got enough fathering and Bob, whose daughter was removed by early divorce and a young death, never got enough daughtering. Father/daughter paradigms don’t mix well with marriage to a young wife in an era when some females actually celebrate incest. (Take THAT, Mom!) But it is true that Bob often sheltered and guided me in the way recommended by Moliere in his play about the man who tried to raise a young woman to be his perfect wife. That rather echoes being considered livestock, which does point to one of the problems. I once accused Bob of “using” me to further his career and so on, which meant that the reverse had to be considered: that I was using HIM to further my ends, including the writing I’d always intended to do. One of the elements of the marriage breaking down was that it finally became clear that I wouldn’t have the time and energy to write until he was dead. Worse, I wanted more education -- more than he had or considered necessary. Still worse, as I grew more competent, he began to move towards the Zane Grey model where the wife became a mom who stayed home to run the business while Zane explored the world with younger women.

I was the only wife who knew all the other wives: Alice, who married at nineteen and had two children, both of whom died of cancer as did Alice but not until after two more marriages; Jeanette, who was close to Bob’s age and married him at the end of WWII, supporting him through his transitions from music to taxidermy to sculpture, and finally escaping to the lifestyle she always wanted with a second husband in California; then myself for the decade of rising fame (I've never remarried.); and Lorraine, a common-law wife who lasted the longest -- rather like Rodin’s Rose Beuret. I’ve been cautioned not to say too much about her, for fear of sounding vindictive. There were other women, one only a few years younger than me who was briefly married to Gary Schildt. One of Bob’s worries was that "his" women would unite against him.

The cultural consensus of any time is often split between the ideal and the actual, though I would not like to imply that a lot of people -- probably the majority of people -- manage to marry in a “conventional” way that keeps property, children, and status sorted out, which is one of the secrets of secure prosperity. But some people in some circumstances and a few people in just about any circumstance, are better off inventing their own pattern. New influences like feminism, the sexual revolution allowed by effective contraception, the rising respectability of gays, the mellowing of mainstream religion, income parity between men and women, can call for new patterns. It sometimes seems to me that ambitious people just don’t have TIME for conventional marriage, can’t stay on the same page because there’s no time to talk about it.

Today’s newspaper also told the story of a 25 -year-old Nebraska school teacher who eloped to Mexico with a 13-year-old illegal immigrant boy. Figure that one out. The first thing to figure out is how he's going to get back into the US.

"LILIES": the Series and Not

Mrs. John Pinkerton and her four girls in Washington State about 1935. L to R: "Mom," Aliene in front, Lucy, Helen in front, and Vera.

With a bit of trepidation, I ordered the series called “Lilies” from Netflix this week. Trepidation because in the Seventies, when “Lillie,” the series starring Francesca Annis, came out I became totally crazed and thought I WAS Lillie Langtry which caused me to be totally inappropriate. But, after all, I was recovering from divorce in those days. Now I’m a stable old retired lady who writes, so what’s the harm?

I’m surprised to find that “Lilies”, the series, keys right into all the “family album” posts and thinking that I’ve been doing. Not that the family on the Strachan/prairie side has a set of sisters like these, but that my Oregon mother and her sisters (to be explored in the future) are very much like these sisters, the ancestors of that writer. As the actor who plays the “Dadda” of the girls explains, they’re a very Celtic lot: passionate, smart, rebellious. Also, red-headed, earthy, ambitious, sometimes too religious for their own good. These girls walk through the same fire and ice as my mother and aunts. Their father, John Pinkerton -- had he been a bit more eloquent -- could easily have given Dadda's speech about “why don’t you tear a railing off the park outside and impale me through the heart on its ten-foot length? It would hurt me less than taking my beloved eldest daughter from her home, when she’s known nothing else!” And John Pinkerton was quite the anti-papist, though it was hard to be an Orangeman in Douglas County, Oregon. He would dearly have loved to bang a huge drum in a parade led by a son on a white horse -- though he never had a son.

My mother, the eldest, did leave her home, convinced that there must be something better, and married my father who promised her the big city life in Portland. She hadn’t quite reckoned on him being a traveling man who would leave her mostly alone the rest of her life. But he had chosen shrewdly and she was capable of raising children and even earning a living as it became necessary.

The next lily in the Pinkerton family was Vera, who was driving when there was an auto accident and her younger sister Helen went through the windshield, fatally cutting her throat. Perhaps as compensation, she became a nurse and ran the surgery in Great Falls before WWII took her to London and Rheims where she saw all the terror and romance, then came home to marry a Hatfield as the youngest had done right out of high school. The Hatfields, poorly educated but potent cousins of Senator Mark Hatfield, are a story in themselves. Then there was a cousin Pinkerton who married a cousin Hatfield and lived a quieter life, but told me that if I tried to move to Douglas County (which I considered a kind of Eden) she would personally strangle me.

I hope that quick sketch gives you a sense of the universality of the Liverpuddlian lilies whose lives revolve around corsets, the handsome young priest, a steady stream of small animals plus one big horse, a street of brick houses -- all alike -- and a small yard where the outhouse is located. They must make enough money to survive, with a pianola (the Hatfields had one in their parlor) to hock in an emergency, and plenty of neighbors to both interfere and rescue from disease and the talleyman. The Upstairs/Downstairs element is pronounced in the series. Dadda is an amateur veterinarian who treats his wounded animals on the kitchen table alongside his daughter’s candy-making home industry. I vividly recall a Hatfield uncle arriving at a picnic with a skunk in a gunnysack and removing its scent gland right there at the picnic table before the food was cleared -- with the Pinkerton girls sending up screams of outrage.

The creation of the script for Lilies is a bit schematic, as it would be if I wrote it. One story about one girl per episode braided with bits of set-up and resolution from the other characters’ stories, plus one story about Dada trying to find love again and one story about the brother finding and losing love. Eight episodes. Richard Stern told us once that it’s important to let one’s grand story soar, but then to undercut it a bit with irony and this series does that well, skewering the biggest sentimentalities and pinholing the tragedies. The purest and least ironic is the story of the priest and Iris, too tall to be named for a violet, too warm to live without children, too poor to join the Poor Clares. But Iris also gets the weirdest story, about a wounded magician.

The most fun is tiny May with her flexible face, huge eyes, and copper hair. She’s the one who takes the most risks and ends up with the real prize: what used to be called a bastard. As an actress, she scores what must be one of the funniest nude scenes in the genre. Ruby, the round, dimpled and closest-to-blonde one, a Liverpuddlian in real life, will clearly have the biggest adventures later since she is a person of passionate convictions which throw her into the company of snob fascists and a butcher with Communist ideals.

A tiny role, but exquisitely presented, is Dadda’s sweetheart, bird-like in her bright-eyed sanity and a perfect foil for Dadda’s Chaplinesque swaggering excess, though one wonders how well she could survive the household.

Of course much of the charm comes from the period effects, which are almost a hundred years in the past now and increasingly easy to give a shine of romanticism. In reality the shared walls with other households; the tiny courtyard with outhouse, rabbit hutches, and chicken nests; the sealed-up parlor in a house with tiny rooms; the shallow stone sink and worn wooden drainboard would have been much less pleasant than they are on a screen. This series manages a reality that’s convincing without becoming a distraction. Yet it was canceled by the BBC “Controller of Fiction” who appears to be a sort of talleyman. In Britain no one under twelve is allowed to rent it. I’m not sure why they would want to. It’s for folks who know a bit about life.

My mother said that if I wrote about her and her family she’d come back from the grave and strangle me. Something very satisfying about hands-on throttling and, of course, it cuts off the voice. She felt she survived only by keeping up a facade, but the writer of Lilies knows that such facades don’t succeed. It’s truth-telling, love and much laughter that saves us all, Celtic or not, canceled or not. I think I’ll entertain the notion of the Pinkerton Girls as a sort of sequel to “Lilies.” Knowing, of course, that might not be real.

My mother's favorite flower was Agapanthus Africanus, Lily of the Nile. I wonder if I could grow one here in a pot. If not, I'll settle for daylilies.


The Pinkerton girls in Douglas County about 1930. L.to R: Aliene, Vera, and Lucy, my mother, holding the pup.

PHILOSOPHY OF ANIMAL CONTROL

In publishing circles and other contexts that must react to the changes brought by digitization both as changes in print and changes in technology and organization created by the Internet, Google, POD and other factors, one recurring theme is the need to move from “horizontal” to “vertical” in terms of marketing, disciplines and so on. “Horizontal” was supposed to be everybody, but actually turned out to be “everybody like me.” That is, the main horizon was probably the middle class with others either delegating their concerns to employees or actually trying to suppress the underclass. This is all very high-toned generalization, but I want it “out there” so as to show why “animal control” is an excellent “stovepipe” or “silo” concept. We all relate to animals, but in quite different ways depending on class, education, culture, and personal experience. This is a vertical concern that crosses through all the horizontals.

If you’re Oprah or Martha Stewart, your concerns are probably about AKC breeds, good trainers, proper kennels, skillful grooming, and so on, mostly delegated. Dogs mean status. Horses even more so. If you’re a householder with kids, doing well but nothing extraordinary, you might be thinking about veterinary bills, leash law, taking plastic bags along on dog walks, whether bark collars are cruel, and whether the local shelter where the kids picked out your pet is killing too many animals . If you’re in the underclass at the lowest reaches, a dog is just like anybody else. It moves in on its own volition rather than being bought, feeds itself, travels the community, and is a survival-of-the-fittest “breed.” Of course, for the criminal class -- which is not the same as the impoverished class -- a dog is a weapon.

Likewise, the law about animals is layered and niched. At a certain level, esp. among the academic, animal law is philosophical and can speak of the “rights” of animals, meaning what minimum requirements might preserve their essential identity. At the extreme, eat vegetarian, wear no animal products, don’t go hunting, and try to push others into that same behavior. But on that level at the other extreme is someone like Paul Shepherd who says we are all animals and that humans are shaped by hunting, that we lose something essential without it, a cruelty of non-participation as though we were ectoplasmic, not involved in the fleshly mesh of being.

Next level down might be treaties, esp. those focused on preserving species around the globe by regulating trade in animals, their uses as raw materials, their transmission of zoonoses, and their loss due to habitat loss. We worry about bird flu, the elimination of migratory waterfowl and songbirds, the loss of rain forest, and the invasions of tree-destroying beetles. It is clear that the Mexican laws protecting Monarch butterflies, who winter there, must be supported and encouraged by the USA. Climate change affects us all and must be addressed at the planet level.

Then there is the Supreme Court of the US, which enforces treaties, but also reconciles issues that must be interpreted according to our founding Constitution. I’ve never had occasion to study their cases in terms of their rulings about animals. No doubt they address animals as possessions, like the great cattle herds on the prairies before the land was divided up and fenced. A quick glance at ˝Google” reveals that at this level animal law runs into religion, both historic ones that have traditionally sacrificed animals and New Age redefinitions of animal rights and the nature of cruelty. Where the people go, so do the animals go.

States may pass their own laws, so long as they don’t contradict the federal law, and counties or towns and cities may pass their own laws under the same conditions, except that sometimes they can even create a bubble of jurisdiction that contradicts state law. It is at this level that most animal control battles are fought while the “humane societies” stay at the level of high philosophy and even what might be called a kind of religion. Most animal control is both about practical response to emergencies involving animals, those in danger and those endangering others, and the pesky daily dilemmas of neighborhoods: barking, unsanitary conditions, inappropriate pets (alligators, big snakes, tigers), cruelty, criminal pursuits (dog fighting, drug houses) and general household breakdown. Presumably these are hands-on issues that might involve a backhoe to lift off a cow fallen through the cover of a septic tank or simply removing an unwanted batch of kittens.

Few people spend much time examining their treatment of animals, though most are good at prescribing what others should do. A kind of consciousness-raising is now sweeping many “niche” uses of dogs, especially working dogs. Since dog breeds originally arose in response to breeding, just like breeds of horses and cows, and since they are exceptionally plastic genetically, they seem to some like quite different animals: a mastiff doesn’t seem much like a terrier, and they serve entirely different purposes, but they are both dogs. If a law is passed about “dogs,” it affects all these breeds equally but not necessarily appropriately. Nor is it always easy to draw lines between categories of dogs. Some jurisdictions in the early days wrote laws governing dogs according to size, for instance, dogs too small to reach onto a butcher’s block to steal meat (evidently a bit problem at the time) were exempted from licensing. What about jumping dogs? If a dog one foot tall is small, what about a dog that is 13 inches tall? 12.5 inches?

Working dogs are generally not a problem unless they are not worked. When they are working, they are in partnership with a human being and focused on a task. The human can be held responsible if a pack of hounds or a burrowing terrier or a retriever makes trouble. When the “work” of the dog is to be ornamental, lying on a hearth, winning prizes by meeting standards that are not necessarily healthy for animals, or being carried around to events in a “purse” toted by a starlet, problems arise.

But wait, there’s more. Law enforcement itself, whether done by animal control or humane society, is generally approached by the uninitiated through the idea of the pound or shelter. That’s what people see and where many of the costs are obvious. But real in-the-field enforcement is done by people who go out to be independent and trained witnesses, judging on the basis of rationally agreed-upon standards. They can do thumbs-up/thumbs-down by impounding (though not from private property), writing citations to be judged in court, but also by jaw-boning dog owners or complainants, distributing information, or simply resolving the situation, like untangling a deer trapped by a fence. Like bar-tenders, librarians, and dumpground guardians, they do a lot of counseling.

The next level, the judge, comes to bear as a result of the citation, but styles might be quite different. They can fine, in the case of felony law they can imprison, they can simply lecture in the public arena of the court, they can order animals removed or possibly some kind of change like neutering, and so on. But they might not do any of that. I vividly remember the judge who had grown up in a tough neighborhood who always excused biting dogs on grounds that it is in their nature to bite and that people should look out for themselves.

Rural summary justice allows a dog that attacks livestock to be shot on the spot. The court doesn’t get involved unless the dog owner questions what the dog was doing with the livestock or if the livestock owner sues for damages. Civil court can review any kind of case, whether or not there is a law on the books.

Another level of law exists that is not quite law: regulation. These are the rules that govern importation, food-handling, proper animal confinement and slaughter, pet store and zoo standards, kennel standards, the proper conduct of a dog show or a race of horses or dogs, and so on. They do not require public votes, they can be interpreted variously or they risk being so Procrustean that they create rather than resolve problems, and they are not enforced by judges but rather by administrators, who can make them so restrictive as to be prohibitive.

The law making process is almost always contentious now that our country has become so multiple, so heterogenous, so lacking in consensus about even such basics as the education of children. Romantic notions still left from Rousseau, Enlightenment ideas about rationality, superstitions from everywhere, rural transplanted to urban -- on and on and on. It is a struggle. Never do we come to rest, but always must revisit problems. BUT we may be able to agree on principles -- for a while -- IF we can stop thinking that each of us lives in a self-evident normal way and gives up trying to force others to conform to what we “know.”

ALL SAINTS DAY: Martha Newman and Pat Bowen

Since I went to seminary just about the time I turned forty, I was one of the older students at that time, esp. among women. That means that many of the people with whom I felt an affinity are now turning seventy and more. But since I’ve been out of the UU community for a decade or so, I didn’t know when they slipped away in death. Now that is remedied with a blog: <http://uuminmemorialpage.blogspot.com/> Just as I found this blog, it told me about two slightly older women ministers newly lost to us. At the risk of being redundant, I’ll repeat some of the information to try to express my affinity with them. There are worthy others, but it would be fair to group these with me (b. 1939).

The Reverend Martha Scott Newman died Tuesday, August 14, 2007 after a brief illness. She was 84 years of age.

Ms. Newman was born on May 16, 1923 in St. Louis, Missouri. She received a BS from Central Missouri State University, a MA from the University of Denver and an MDiv from Meadville Lombard Theological School. She was granted Preliminary Fellowship in 1982 and Final Fellowship in 1986. The Murray Society of Clinton, Iowa ordained her on December 3, 1984.

Ms. Newman served congregations in Alton, Illinois; Clinton, Iowa; Ellisville, Missouri; and Houlton, Maine. On May 19, 2003, the Unitarian Society of Houlton named her Minister Emerita.

She is survived by two children, two foster daughters, a sister, 14 grandchildren and 15 great grandchildren.

Martha lived at Fleck House while I was there, another haunter of the Night Kitchen which she descended to from her room about 10 PM every night to make herself a special reward for studying: 12 (she counted them out) pecan halves which she glazed with sugar in a small cast-iron frying pan. A dainty sweet-faced woman, her lovely gray hair was long, arranged close to her head with silver combs.

With her small deft hands, she loved to sew. She was not so inclined to adventure as I was, but once I talked her into an expedition to the Loop to find fabric. It was a bone-cold blustery day and my guess at where the address might be was blocks off, so we got to the place (on a second floor) windblown and half-frozen. Afterwards we found a waffle shop where the offerings were ambrosial and my bad geography was redeemed. Martha often told others about it. She had no sewing machine at seminary and sewed by hand, perched on her bed across from a mandala of fall leaves she had attached to her wall. She was domestic to the core.

Martha and I were not entirely alike but we had a lot of overlap, mostly along this domestic mold and partly because my mother’s people came from Illinois close to where she grew up. We agreed about the management of window shades or dish rags and what to call a fly that circles a summer room: a “swing fly.” She served mostly small congregations in small towns, seeing that they were comfortable and reassured. I would say she leaned to the Universalist and Pastoral traditions. I was surprised to see that she was that much older than myself. I think she came to feminism late and gently, but firmly. I was not surprised to see fifteen great-grandchildren, though I never met her children.

The Reverend Dr. Patricia McClellan Bowen died Friday, September 14, 2007 after a brief illness at the age of 73.

Dr. Bowen was born April 14, 1934 in Texas. She received a B.S. from the University of Texas, an M.A. from the University of Chicago, and a D.Min. from Meadville Lombard School of Theology. She received Preliminary Fellowship in 1978 and Final Fellowship in 1981. She was ordained at the First Parish in Framingham, Massachusetts on June 25, 1978.

Dr. Bowen served congregations in Framingham, Sharon, and Sherborn, Massachusetts; South Bend, Indiana; West Paris, Maine; Portsmouth, New Hampshire; Oakton, Virginia; and Las Vegas, Nevada. From 1973 to 1975 she was Assistant to the Director of Education and Social Concerns at the Unitarian Universalist Association.

While on staff at the UUA Dr. Bowen created and developed REACH, the Religious Education Clearing House. Active within the denomination, she served on the UUA General Assembly Planning Committee and was on the CLF, Kairos, and Massachusetts Bay District Boards.

Surviving Dr. Bowen are her children Barbara and Jonathon. At her request no services were held.

My additions were removed at the request of Barbara.

RIDEALONG

Before I was hired to be the first woman dogcatcher for Multnomah County (second in the State of Oregon), I was asked to go on a “ridealong” to make sure I really knew what it was all about. The powers that be were convinced that any woman exposed to the raw facts of life would find some other job more genteel. They were wrong: I was intrigued by the problems and interested in trying to find solutions. Going in and out of people’s lives in response to complaints and emergencies took me places I never suspected. It felt like a call to action.

I never forgot the power of that experience and used it now and then in different ways. Once I asked the judge to “sentence” a vitriolic, scoffing, noncompliant middle-class woman to go with me all day. By noon she was saying she could only admire animal control officers and that she would never make trouble again.

By far the most pleasant ridealong passenger I had was David Weintraub, who took the photo with this blog. Intelligent, cheerful and competent, I don’t think he -- like the rest of us -- really had much idea what he was in for. My area was SE Portland, which ranged from big mansions broken up into little roosts for hippie kids with big dogs through pleasant quiet neighborhoods down to the rather grand homes around Reed College, where people felt their dogs were “entitled” to special treatment. I usually didn’t deal with the real criminal element of the city, but rather with argumentative folks who wanted to impose their own standards of the good life on everyone else.

The fact that I had a photographer along did affect the dynamics of interventions. Some dogs were easier to catch, since they had learned just one set of indicators for animal control officers -- one person, no camera. Some offenders (the dogs were not the offenders -- it was the people who were breaking the laws) were harder to deal with because they began to playact and show off. Others made themselves scarce, not wanting their photo anywhere they could be recognized.

On the other hand we never faced the trauma of the young, pretty, female officer down in the rural south who was carrying along a videographer. A pit bull came out of nowhere and attacked the officer, trying to tear her throat out but not quite able to leap that high, so shredding her bosom. The videographer, male, got some footage of it, maybe thinking that all animal control officers knew how to handle such events. In a moment he realized that the officer was overwhelmed and put down his camera to grab a big stick and beat off the dog.

The worst David and I confronted that day was the evidently communal household of owners of a St. Bernard who had also owned an Irish Setter, but it had run loose until it was hit by a car. Evidently penniless, according to the neighbors, they let the dog lie in the front yard unattended until it died. Since it was on private property, I certainly couldn’t remove it and the neighbors would have been at some legal risk to do so. They felt it would be dangerous.

I was suspicious of how such threadbare young people managed to acquire such fancy purebred dogs and one way to find out was to boost the St. Bernard -- which was loose -- into the truck. In order to get it back, they’d have to answer a lot of questions and come up with some stiff fees. If I put a citation on the dog, they would also be recorded in the formal court system and required to pay or go to court. If they ignored it, it was possible that some day far in the future when the highway patrol stopped them and ran their identification through the computer, this citation would come up. Very inconvenient.

I rarely cited loose dogs without some history like this. But in those days we didn’t get pit bulls very often. (Rottweilers were just beginning to be turned to the same nefarious purposes as fighting dogs and drug guards.) Once there was a story about a deputy who was trying to serve a warrant way out in the boonies. He knew enough to stay in his vehicle and honk, but a pit bull came charging out and bit his tires hard enough to deflate them. Luckily, he had a radio. In those days animal control officers didn’t have personal radios or cell phones, just the radio in the truck. If things looked tricky, you told the dispatcher to listen for you and if you didn’t come back on the air in ten minutes, to send backup. It was nice to have someone else along.

Today David is a successful writer, photographer, editor, and instructor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communications at the University of South Carolina who will get his master's in December. His website: shows off his fine work. I particularly admire his portraits of individuals in their own settings. I would like to think that his portrait of me in my “dog-catching” days is a good example. When I called out of the blue, he was so organized that within minutes he was able to locate the photos he took that rainy June day in 1975 just before I went to a desk job as education coordinator. We both remember it rather vividly.

WHAT'S IN A NAME?

TWO OLD LADIES: My mother and her friend.

My backyard has a big tangle of “squaw wood,” that is, dead branches off my trees -- some of which were torn off by wind, some of which I broke off myself, and some of which were sawn off. This is not about my scrappy -- and to some offensive -- collection of wood which is destined for my little garage stove, but about what I call it. “Squaw wood” is not pejorative but refers to what a woman can collect handily from a stand of trees for a quick fire, maybe in a lodge where it would be good for heating water or cooking. Big limbs might be fed into the fire a bit at a time if there was no saw or hatchet available.

But one is NOT supposed to use the word “squaw” anymore. Activists, ever alert for slights and indignities, have ruled that it is an offensive word referring to the female organ. They are accustomed to the Euro or at least Brit idea that a female organ is likely to be named in a derogatory way, as contrasted to the celebratory or at least friendly euphemisms for the male organ. In truth, and as scholars have explained to no avail, the "Indian" word for the female organ is NOT “squaw” though in Athabascan Blackfeet the particle one attaches to the end of a word to indicate that it’s a woman’s name is “AKI,” which -- if pronounced with an “aw” instead of “ah” -- sounds like squaw, or at least rhymes with it. The word for the female organ is “beestinah.” I know this because the 7th grade boys at Heart Butte once began yelling the word at each other in the halls and then going off into gales of hideous laughter, which prompted me to get a translation.

Be that as it may, “squaw” has not been a friendly word in English. The connotation is someone old, bent, ignorant, smoky, greasy, etc. and in spite of all that, sexually available. When guys in a bar start muttering “squaw,” licking their lips, and looking over at a dark woman, she doesn’t take it as a compliment though she might be very proud to be a desirable Indian woman. She might want to remind those jokers about the reputation of squaws for enjoying torturing captives. It is a word that demonizes Indian women.

The movement to remove the word “squaw” from all maps has proven expensive both in terms of money and effort, but to many Indian women it is one small thing they can control in a world that still likes to push indigenous women into jokes and subservience. The Squaw Mountain just outside East Glacier is now “Dancing Woman Mountain.” I’m uncertain about the new name of the rocky outcrop that used to be called the “Papoose.” I suppose “papoose” and “buck” have either followed or preceded squaw out of polite useage. However, we still say Teton, despite it meaning “breast” in French, and one swelling hill near here is still called “Molly’s Nipple.” Of course, Molly was just one rancher’s wife and, according to what I hear, well able to defend herself. Hardly low class.

One might say, what use is there is changing names that were given in an unenlightened period of history when it would be more important to change the status of the women in question and improve their actual economic conditions? I guess the answer would be that the power to make the names change is a symptom and symbol of the rising fortunes of indigenous women. Once the movement begins, it pulls more people into its wake and empowers “squaws” in a way they need.

Now the movement to suppress Indians as team mascots has been pretty successful in eliminating in what is called “low hanging fruit,” easy pickin’s. But they’ve come to some quandaries that I wondered about earlier, like nearly all-Indian schools with names like Warriors, Chieftains, and -- indeed -- Indians. I’ve asked people around here (Browning is Indians and Heart Butte is Warriors) whether they think they should be prevented from calling themselves that, whether they feel it is demeaning. The result is generally a sort of fading and disappearance. Uuuuuummmmm.

Maybe mostly-Indian schools should go to names in their native languages: the Amskapi Pikuni or Kainah. A problem would arise over a team called the “Crees” since on Blackfeet Territory that name is sometimes used as a pejorative, more in the past than now.

I call my little book operation the “Nahpi-Yahki Press,” which the initiated will know is “White Woman Press.” When I started to teach here in 1961, I was told that if any student called me a “napi yaki” I was to take him or her straight to the office. It was a pejorative, especially said with a sneer and half under the breath. My mother used to rebuke my father, who was uneasy about his German blood (not much of it), by calling him a “Teuton.” Not a French “teton,” but an early name for the more-or-less German enemies of Rome. When the Teuton women were captured on one occasion, they asked to be temple handmaidens (nuns). They were denied, so in the night they killed all their children and strangled each other -- a collective act that was considered heroic. I don’t think either of my parents knew this story and maybe that’s a good thing, or “you Teuton” might have implied quite a bit more than she meant.

And that’s the problem, of course. A word acquires associations, maybe local and maybe widespread, maybe innocent and maybe political, possibly deadly. It seems to be the way we name things. If someone objects to a name, it seems only polite to avoid it, to rename the geography and honor the territory. Politeness is sometimes considered trivial, though it is a great social good. Try calling it diplomacy then.

The solution finally hit upon by some schools on reservations is to keep such names as Indians or Warriors unless the concerned tribe objects formally. This seems to be diplomatic, a way of putting control in the hands of those who feel the pejorative edge of the name.

HORSE GRASS

When I first came back to Montana, I had a job with a local ag newspaper. (I’m not a total self-destroyer!) I knew I was taking a big pay cut, but I thought that this minimum wage job would be enough to carry me to Social Security. What I didn’t know was that the newspaper was not owned by the man who hired me, that he knew at the time that it was likely to be sold, and that he had already begun planning for a different newspaper that would not include me. Good Methodist that he is, he didn’t worry me with all this.

The people who bought that first paper have never canceled my subscription -- I don’t know why. So I’m accumulating quite a bit of information about farming and livestock, which is very welcome. Not that I’m going into ranching, but I like knowing about such things, esp. since I live in the middle of it all. Most of the info is simply downloaded from ag extension agents at ag university websites anyway. But I wouldn’t know to look for a lot of it in the first place and would not have it gathered up in newspaper form.

So here are some things for you to ponder about horse hay. Horses are meant to graze all day on the grasslands, in herds. You can tell anatomically because they have small stomachs, ordinary small intestines, and an extra big “hind gut.” This is quite unlike cows, which have a series of stomachs that can digest almost anything, a kind of distillery on legs. (They say cows are always a little drunk, which explains a lot.) We interfere with horses by keeping them for pleasure (ours, not theirs) in small enclosures where we must bring them the grass in the form of hay. They are totally dependent on our decisions about what and when to eat and our faithfulness in following through.

Dennis Cash, the MSU Extention Forage Specialist, points out these basics:
1. Hay and other roughage provide both nutrients and satiety for your horse. (If they don’t get the right stuff in the right amount, they start chewing on their corral and stall.)
2. Different ages, classes and workloads of horses require different levels of nutrients from the hay. Sorta like people.
3. All hay is not the same. Here’s where a kid cannot be in charge. Knowing what sources have high protein is pretty complicated and a kid is going to be tempted to overfeed “good stuff” thinking of it as a kindness. It might be a temptation to throw a lot of early bloom alfalfa hay in there, enough to keep the horse eating all day. Result: fat horse. And then there’s always budget to consider, the eternal tradeoff between cost and quality.

Cash says: “An inexpensive hay analysis will tell you the level of crude protein, total digestible nutrients, calcium, phosporus, magnesium and potassium in the hay.” I can’t remember us ever doing such a thing. We just tried not to buy moldy hay and Bob preferred grass to alfalfa because Mr. Stone, on whose ranch he learned most of what he knew about horses, always had that preference.

I think that our horses survived mostly because they were on pasture most of the time. We did supplement with hay in winter. We'd take hay and our lunch out to the field on cold snowy days so we could watch them eat. Once Bob was waving his peanut butter sandwich around and Zuke took a big bite out of it.

Knowing what hay to buy from whom was always a problem since we didn’t buy in much quantity. In the early days there wasn’t much money. We could store it inside to keep it from being moldy, but, even so, hay from the first cutting in this country is likely to have been rained on or at least to have lain on wet ground. Moldy hay is not just bad for horses: one friend of mine had to give up his beloved animals because mold from their hay took hold in his lungs when he fed on windy days. The doctors said it was particularly hard to eliminate a fungus from his insides, since fungus genomes make up a good part of the human genome. What’s bad for a fungus is not good for a person.

We didn’t feed oats much, using “horse cookies” to entice our little herd of five in where we could catch them. That’s hay, maybe alfalfa, compressed with molasses and extruded as cake. The dog liked them, too, and I tasted them a few times. Not bad at all. I’ve always had a fondness for alfalfa, like alfalfa tea, which we referred to as “alpha-falfa.” (See Verlyn Klinkenberg’s classic book, “Making Hay.”)

My black and white horse, Zuke, was a real pig and LOVED cake. Once at our “little” ranch on Two Medicine (before Bob bought the “big” ranch out on Flatiron Creek), I was having coffee with a visitor when we heard “fwump!” and then again “fwump!” out on the road in front of the house. We went to look and there was Zuke, unloading the sacks of horse pellets that filled the back of my visitor’s pickup. Grabbing a corner of the paper sack, he’d just slide them over the edge. “Fwump!”

Another time I looked out the window to see that our little red van had a horse rearend sticking out the back. The back doors were open so I had slid the horse cookies way up behind the driver’s seat, I thought out of reach, but Zuke had crawled in there on his elbows. Bob always said it was a waste for us to have such a horse, because a rodeo clown could have taught him to be a show-stopper. He wasn’t a big horse and it was pretty easy to flop him on his side when riding, just by suddenly throwing your weight. Once when we were leading him out to pasture he tripped, fell and skinned his knees. Such antics were not welcome when we were running fast on the prairie.

After I was gone, Zuke got into too much of something and developed laminitis, which is a condition where undigested or improperly digested food makes proteins too big to circulate in the blood, which causes the layers of the hooves to separate, peel, and lame the horse. By then Bob had enough money to call the vet and did, but there’s not much that can be done for the problem. Zuke hung around the ranch house where he could lean on the buildings, which meant he didn't graze and got thin. I’m glad I didn’t see it. Bob claimed that he made a miraculous recovery, but I think after Zuke died he got another similar horse and claimed it was Zuke.

Once he had asked me whether, since Zuke was theoretically my horse, I would like his hide when he died. I knew he was trying to make me react, so I said blandly, “Sure. The hide would look great on my floor for a rug,” which made Bob snort. I don’t know what really happened to Zuke, except that he lives on in sculptures, esp. the ones painted black and white.

There is more to consider about hay than just the well-being of the horse. It’s smart to buy “certified noxious weed seed free forage” to keep nasty stuff from growing around your home place. It’s required if the hay is be packed in to a federal forest. One year I asked for horse dung from the loafing shed of a corral on the edge of town where a guy kept his hunting horses. (The loafing shed because the horses hung out in there all summer to get shade and therefore trod the “cowboy muffins” into dry fiber.) I put this on my flower beds and got pretty good results. It was a lot pleasanter than the steer manure mixed with wood chips from feedlots, even though that’s baked to get rid of the seeds. But I did give a bit of thought to tetanus, which is carried in horse dung, and wore my gloves to dig around that summer.

Flesh cycles through grass and grass cycles through flesh. It’s a good thing to do it well.

TUNC

In my bathroom I keep a basket containing paperbacks by the Durrells, both Lawrence and Gerald, for “occasional” reading. When people go into my bathroom, they tend to stay a while.

These two writers represent two modes of my own writing, one the humorous tales of animals and the other a kind of hallucinatory and oversensuous account of life. They are, of course, brothers and very much part of a kind of Mediterranean ex-pat libertarian scene, not unlike that of Marguerite Duras in SE Asia. Recently I finished “Tunc,” by Lawrence.

First, after noting that L’s titles are generally one-word and keys to the plot, I guess it’s a good idea to settle what “Tunc” means. No one is named Tunc in this story. Wikipedia says it
“is a Latin expression in common use in the English language. It means Now for then,”. “which theoretically applies to acts that are allowed to be done after the time when they should have been done with a retroactive effect. . . . In the probating of an estate, if real property (such as lands, mineral interests, etc.) are discovered after the Final Decree or Order, a nunc pro tunc order can include these after-discovered lands or assets into the estate, as well as clarify how those assets were meant to be distributed. . . . A corporation may have been created by an individual, but since a corporation has the standing in law of a person (although not a natural person), it is possible for its human creator to go bankrupt and for the assets of the corporation to be seized to satisfy unpaid taxes. Then, if others bought the assets from the tax authority and the corporation shell passed into other hands, it is possible for the person who bought the assets to also buy the corporation shell and upon payment of corporate franchise taxes, for that individual to claim that the corporation is the original corporation with the original assets.”

In addition, according to the New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, “The word tunc is Latin for "then." Historically, as a famous page in the Irish "Book of Kells" has made us aware, Tunc is the first word of a sentence in the Vulgate edition of the Gospel of St. Matthew: "Then there were crucified with him two thieves." As used in this novel, the word tunc suggests both the past and the future.”

At least one reviewer identified this book as Durrell’s “1984,” an attempt to describe a dystopia in the future. It’s that in spades. Whatever the “inventions” that the hero is supposed to have made, they are so close to today’s computer devising that I had to keep looking at the year it was published, 1968. It sounds like “The Matrix,” perhaps known here as “The Firm.” The epigram is “deux fois deux quatre, c’est un mur” from Dostoievesky, “Vois Souterraine” (“Two Times Two is Four” and a “mur” is a wall, as in “stone-walling.”) Lawrence was the brother wrestling with relativity, wherein two times two might mean anything. Gerald was the one trying to save the animals, the conservationist. Both were deadly opposed to authoritarian impositions and boundaries.

Necessarily, given the circumstances, I read “Tunc” episodically all summer, parallel to a more formal and sustained reading of “The Raj Quartet,” which spent the summer in the front room, but they are creatures of a similar era and did not clash. Both immerse the reader in an exotic world where not even the characters are very sure what’s going on, but that has a immense resonance with the Iraqi misadventure reaching out to Afghanistan while our mighty leaders try to spin, erase, buy out, deny, punish and control. An author, of course, can start over in the next book, reincarnating everyone as though laying out the cards again in a new session of solitaire. “Koepgen used to say that human life is an anthology of states; chronological progression is an illusion. And to be punished for what one does not remember except in dreams is our version of the tragedy the Greeks invented.”

Short bits of reading are a good way to tackle this book. There are two long set-pieces that really struck me. The first is Caradoc’s impromptu speech -- he was expected at a kind of salon, but drunk and forgetful, therefore presumably likely to tell the truth. He is, as he claims, “the fruit of a mixed mirage.” For pages he explores his idea of what “womb to tomb” might mean and how that vision contributes to our cultural and intellectual pursuits.

The other is the first meeting of Benedicta, the women who seduces him into joining the firm, then marries him, becoming pregnant and unavailable. She is presented as a falconer, which -- since I regularly read <fretmarks.blogspot.com> and <stephenbodio.blogspot.com> -- has enormous resonance for me these days. “Now she pulled on an extra sleeve and worked her hand into a gauntlet. Somewhere in the shadows there came the dying fluttering of some small bird, a quail perhaps, and I saw with disgust that she was busy breaking up the body with her fingers into small tidbits. She suddenly began uttering a curious bubbling, crooning sound, uttering it over and over again as she drew a long plume softly over the legs of the peregrine; then the gloved hand teased the great scissor beak with the bleeding meat and the bird snapped and gorged. As it ate she reiterated the single word in the same crooning bubbling fashion. Slowly, with the greatest circumspection, she coaxed the falcon onto her wrist and turned to face me, smiling now.”

I could hardly tell you the plot of “Tunc” but the hints about crucifixion and thieves as well as the convolutions of law that make a “firm” or corporation (corpus meaning flesh, meat) more real than a human being, that allow a person to be punished for a mistake made long ago and not recognized as such at the time -- all this becomes relevant in an aesthetic atmosphere that moves from the ancient dryness of Arab lands for the musty plush and damp of more modern mansions in Britain. Thus, it is a chilling book. One doesn’t mind that in August in Montana. But perhaps I’ll go back to Gerald for a while.

LOVERS IN MOVIES

Blogging has meant making new friends, keeping old friends, and starting friendships with people with whom I shared space many decades ago -- same high school, same neighborhood of Portland, Oregon -- but never knew. One of those new friends has kept her relationships with church communities alive as organist, parish nurse, and mother-in-law of ministers. Her life has been a busy one so only now is she catching up with some things, like the “Bridges of Madison County” wherein Meryl Streep has a relationship with Clint Eastwood, who is only passing through, but stays faithful to her family. My friend’s reaction was “yiyiyiyiyi!”

At the same time my Netflix movie (which I really hated to send back) was “The Lover,” the Marguerite Duras movie, also about a short relationship, drawn from Duras’ life. I told my friend this, so she looked up the review and was shocked.

One of my key “documents” is Duras’ earlier film “Hiroshima Mon Amour,” which also addresses a short relationship but in a philosophical way about time, regret, and so on. The images are as strong as the newsreel images of the actual bombing aftermath which are among my earliest memories. “The Lover” was rather taken out of Duras’ hands and is so directly sexual that it demands some sophistication to see through to the issues of relationship, but it is also rewarding. A young girl has an affair with an older Chinese man, rich and spoiled and arguably the weaker of the two. She is unblinking, he is trapped, their freedom is rooted in the knowledge that this is a transient state of affairs. (The location is Vietnam -- make of that what you will. It’s before any American war.) He gives her money and initiation. He does not know that he is giving her the basis of an entire career of writing.

I could compare it to the happy year I spent as the interim minister of the Kirkland, WA., Unitarian Universalist congregation, knowing that -- as I kept reminding them -- it was an “affair, not a marriage.” This context kept out the power plays, the baggage of expectations, and left events simple enough to deal with honestly.

The real subject matter, a writer remembering a near-childhood affair, is handled artistically. It begins as many of these movies do, with a pen nib scribbling over fine paper, but before that with extremely close-up silvery images of the author’s eyebrows, glasses, blurred curves of face. We never really see the face. At the end we see the writer’s back and she answers the telephone. Presumably it is her Chinese lover, now old and visiting Paris with his wife, who assures her that he still loves her.

Now to the other end of the spectrum. Today the newspapers tell of a teenaged boy who had consensual oral sex with his girl friend, was caught, and sentenced to ten years in jail. He has been released when a judge ruled the sentence was cruel and unusual punishment and the law has been changed to make the offense a misdemeanor instead of a felony. These days, they say, girls are “expected” to contribute oral sex to their boyfriends or even unknowns at parties. It is “innocent” because, as our president said, it’s not “really” having sex, which is intercourse. There cannot be babies. But there can be some nasty VD of the mouth and throat. No one seems to think about the emotional consequences.

How is it that sexuality has become so cheap and brutal? The answer is that it has become commodified: something to sell. It has been detached from human experience and made into a stylized set of objects and rituals. The yearning, the poetry, has been removed so that all that is left is the fucking. SPAM. A privilege of high status.

The media says you must wear certain clothes, pose certain ways, own certain amenities and appliances, all commands that conflate sex with money, though sex has always been the most basic and available of experiences. After all, one can relate to one’s hand. Men can and do fuck animals. Women can and do use vibrators. We know all this. What we really need to understand has nothing to do with belongings but rather has to do with love.

Some would separate sex from love, commodify love as well. You must buy flowers and chocolate, jewelry, clothes, and so on. Money proves who loves whom. Merchandisers don’t want the young ones to find out that what’s really important is paying attention, protecting the future esp. for children, and not losing one’s community. The great love stories are always about the danger of losing commmunity and family.

With the rise of anthropology in the 19th century, we have all been fascinated with the idea that a culture could allow free and easy sex while preserving order, you might say “bonobo happy.” Even Margaret Mead was distracted by that possibility, though later the Samoan girls she had believed said they made it all up. We see both the French and Japanese or SE Asians as people who accommodate sex in the extreme and outside of marriage, people who don’t have “prudish hangups.” But in fact, those cultures are strongly patterned and simply assign compartments to limited licenciousness, like a Scandinavian needle park for addicts.

In America we are so deeply confused by the plurality of cultures, all struggling against each other to establish some overarching consensus that can be written into laws, depended upon in marriage contracts, made a foundation of economic stability -- for it is families who guarantee stable societies where commerce can flourish -- that we have little integrity. Teenagers don’t trust their parents, aliens from the country of the past, and instead ask each other for help. Like the girls in “Lisa, Light and Dark” who try to help a schizophrenic friend by themselves, kids are NOT up to the task of advising other kids. In fact, these days even medical authorities and church officials -- much less teachers -- are no longer trusted, nor do they enjoy consensus.

“The Bridges of Madison County” is a very old story, but the coherence and dependability of the woman’s world -- that legendary American spine of the family farm in the Midwest -- is not always valued by contemporaries. Instead we admire the footloose photographer who crosses cultures everywhere, always belonging to himself and pretty much only himself. Their affair is a moment to rest, to regard the alternative, to consider that path and reject it -- not as hated or bad, but as simply not their right path. Not that it would be morally wrong to take that turn, but that after mature consideration it would not balance out with the shock and damage for her family or the curtailment and burden for the man.

The great frustration of being human is that you can only live one life and that most of us stick it out in one chosen or born-into culture. A few lucky people (artists?) have a chance to make their own culture and community, but it might be fragile. In this place, next to the Blackfeet Reservation, many come to move out of their own culture into what they imagine to be Blackfeet culture. What a shock they get! Without family, without the right skills, without a shared history -- they’d better bring something really valuable with them in terms of their personal identity as well as a lot of tenacity -- determination to make it work. Sorta like marriage. Sex is like Indian Days, a vivid celebration. Real relationship is seasons, generations, trust and hope until the tribe accepts you. Loves you.

BROKEN TRAIL

When I was a little girl, I had on my bulletin board a double-page spread from a magazine depicting a herd of horses running. It was an advertisement for Mobil gas about “horsepower” and was painted by John Clymer, who was much teased by his fellow artists that such a thundering herd raised no dust. I met John later and learned that he, like me, grew up in the Pacific Northwest where one is more likely to experience mud than dust. We see according to our time and place.

Jim Dunham, whom I met at the recent CMR GF event, has a way of sorting out Western fans according to their generations. What’s the earliest of the cowboy heroes you remember? he asks, and that tells the story. He figures the oldest folks are thinking of Tom Mix in the silent movies. I think of Mix as well, but on the radio where he was a bit of a McGyver. I ordered a magnet ring after Mix, hiding in a hayloft, used his to cleverly heist a set of papers by their paperclip. A little circle of predatory bankers and lawyers were preparing to use them to turn a widow lady out of her home. Wish I had that magnet ring now, just in case, since my county property taxes came yesterday.

My most deeply felt cowboy heroes were on television: Gunsmoke, Rawhide, Cheyenne, Wagon Train. I had an intense yearning for a strong moral male figure who know what to do and had the ability to get it done. I’ve sought out such men all my life, which is why I get so hopeful when I meet someone who seems promising and then so vengeful when they turn out to be weak incompetents. (The seminary thought this was a very bad trait. I thought that was a self-serving opinion.)

The Autumn issue of “Montana, the Magazine of Western History” contains an article about the problem of how to regard “Deadwood,” the hugely successful “Western” that has an anti-hero for an organizing principle -- er, principal character. This article is by John Mack Faragher who uses a slightly different method for sorting. He suggests that the audience for the Fifties Westerns still remembered rural life, and felt nostalgia for it, but the audience for Deadwood is urban, accepting of capitalism, accustomed to debunking romantic notions, and fond of irony. Marshall Matt Dillon would strike them as earnest to the point of being thick.

David Milch, originator of the Deadwood series as well as the definitely urban NYPD Blue, claims to be trying to work out how it is that order finally emerges from the raw chaos of a frontier. Who steps forward, what are the strategies and what are the costs? He sees the frontier as Elizabethan in language and drama, though many of his characters, esp. the women, are clearly New York Types, like his Calamity Jane who is almost a stand-up comic, running commentary. I would suggest that he also frames these folks as immigrants -- still European in roots. Both the notions of what an American might be and what a Westerner might be are still developing in this paradigm.

Yet another way of classifying Westerns might be in terms of the social issues of the time. When I was listening to Tom Mix on the radio, WWII was raging. Maybe Indian war movies were a displacement of that. (Later “Soldier Blue” was deliberately a comment on Vietnam from a left-wing point of view.) In the Fifties we had a lot of television and movie plots in which cowboys and cavalrymen strove for justice to Indians and others -- arguing against violence like Gary Cooper in High Noon. It’s almost impossible to imagine Gary Cooper confronting Al Swearengen -- they don’t inhabit the same universe.

Wikipedia sorts Westerns by style and considers “Broken Trail” to be a “revisionist” Western like those beginning with “Shane” who went against the assumed standard. They identify such categories as “acid” Westerns, “spaghetti” Westerns, and Soviet Westerns. An interesting long list ends the article on “revisonist Westerns.”

Personally, I think that “Broken Trail” like “Open Range” is almost defined by Robert Duvall, which means I could throw “Tender Mercies” and “Lonesome Dove” in there. The opposite of Cormac McCarthy, much more in the spirit of “Dances with Wolves” or some of the other generational and “small realism” historical recent miniseries of reconciliation that try to feel out “how it really was.” Duvall’s characters have a couple of very strong characteristics, one of which is an impulse to protect the weak and small (women, children, maybe Indians and dogs) and the other of which is a desire to educate everyone around him on the things they need to know to survive in the West. In my experience, this truly is characteristic of many Westerners, esp. men. (I helped calve one night and was told to watch out for defensive mama cows, to be sure to write down the number of the ear tag, to always dab the umbilical stub with iodine and to put the iodine bottle right back where I found it at the base of the third post from the calving corral -- otherwise it would be hopelessly lost in the dark.)

The rest of the characters are just dialogue partners: slow learners and fast learners. We learn about tick fever, how to sew up a scalp wound (Duvall urges a “nice chain stitch” like he uses on his clothes.), and a few basic principles of public health. (Shoot deliberate disease carriers on sight, also their horses and pack animals, and then burn the whole mess. One of the nice touches was the ghost dancers in the flames celebrating the end of smallpox germs.) “Killed more Indians than ever were shot,” declares Duvall, accurately.

Another inspired moment comes when three young Indian men demand a two-horse toll for crossing their lands. Seems reasonable, considering that the remuda is supposed to contain hundreds, but Duvall convinces them to accept a small carved horse as one of the two. (Interesting that art seems to be creeping into these movies. Tommy Lee Jones in “Missing” was originally supposed to be even more of an artist than he turned out to be.) I doubt these guys were in the right place to be Crow, but it appeared that the actors were actually Crow. They said in their language, "What are such good-looking women doing with these loser guys?"

The biggest and most deliberate “revision” of this movie -- aside from replacing those danged cows with horses like Clymer's -- is turning the direction of regard from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Now we’re not dealing with immigrants from European cities, but rather “native-born” Westerners and captured Chinese. (There are no Africans.) A fascinating snatch of dialogue between Duvall and his nephew notes that the younger man’s father migrated from the Cumberland and that the mother was “too German” and Huguenot. A great deal is implied in those few words.

Much of the authenticity of the movie comes from the relationship between these two men. Thomas Haden Church is no Rowdy Yates or Chester, simply a foil and a lesser man. He can ride his horse, he reacts swiftly with competence, and he shares his uncle’s opinion of what is honorable. He’s been around. (The actor owns a big ranch in Texas and is married to a sexy wife. He has a rich, almost gravely voice, which contrasts beautifully with Duvall’s rather high, thin rambling.) Duvall tells him to do something, he does it. If Duvall isn’t there, he uses his own judgment and is effective.

The bad guys are not geeky weirdoes, the prostitutes are not very fancy, Greta Scacchi is utterly convincing, and Scott Cooper as the Easterner who can play the violin is a welcome relief. The Chinese actresses are the whole point of the exercise and well worth it, though it’s a little startling in the movie-about-making-the-movie when they speak perfectly fine English. The costumes and sets were thoughtfully and authentically done.

So now, at last, do we have a vision of the REAL West? I don’t think so. These folks have a much better script writer than real folks do. Would you want it otherwise? Westerns are an art form, not documentaries, though we like them to be persuasive and coherent. This movie must have been made just before the despair over Iraq or it would have had quite a different twist, its optimism impossible. We’re in another Deadwood time. Might not make it home. Might die young. Might be swallowed by the chaos.

The biggest irony is that we were taken into this mess by men I’m willing to bet grew up with ideas shaped by Westerns, about the same era as me. Cheney is even from Wyoming, Bush pretends to be from Texas. We may be back to sci-fi Westerns, dystopias.