ANSELM KIEFER: GESAMTKUNSTWERK

Anselm Kiefer is the Anti-Walt Disney.  Instead of the plastic glee of Disneyland, all based on misconceptions and denials, Kiefer confronts the destroyed Europe of his childhood.  The exploded, the ashen, the deserted -- the little “world” Kiefer has made from an abandoned silk factory looks like Pompeii except there are not even lava castings of people -- only buildings and debris.  Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, was a series of coordinated attacks against Jews throughout Nazi Germany and parts of Austria on November 9, 1938.  The streets were full of broken glass from shop windows and homes.  But Kiefer throws in a twist: on each glass shard of his shattered stacks he writes the designations of a star, according to the NASA-supplied formula which records the myriads by means of number code.  Later, when he creates multi-media works of children’s dresses something like white muslin pinafores, he tucks glass shards like spears into the pockets and then numbers the pockets as the children in the camps were numbered.  He is an artist of chaos, but in the chaos the small detail is all the more powerful.

Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow (streams on Netflix) is a 2010 Sophie Fiennes documentary film about this creation of a gesamtkunstwerk (a total world) outside Barjac, France.  Sophie, more properly known as Sophia Victoria Twisleton Wykeham-Fiennes, is an English film director and producer and, yes, she’s the sister of those handsome Fiennes actors.  They all appear to belong to the kind of artsy crowd that loves nihilism (Goth is for kids) and expresses their feelings in many art forms.  Americans pay them little attention, being more acquainted with the suburban green deserts of California.  No one has speculated yet on what will grow over that sterile turf, tended by illegal immigrants.  I mean, aside from chlorinated swimming pools and Big Box stores.

Kiefer works on “many levels” in the most literal sense.  He’s creating underground catacombs as well as tottering towers.  After the camera has toured his “environment”, we are permitted to see how they are made.  The towers of “rooms” are cast by pouring concrete between shipping containers, the kind one sees on boats and railroads.  The tunnels are supported by drilling deep holes several feet across, pouring them full of concrete, then clearing away the crumbly dirt around them with cute little green excavating machines.  I’ve fancied a small Bobcat front-loader ever since I drove one on a ranch, but these are much more clever. Made in Paris.  

In the warehouse where a huge gray “sea” yards and yards across was being moved around by a crane in order to affix equally gray battleships to it, there was a calico cat on top of the debris, but it wasn’t part of the plan and fled.  Too vivid.  The work appears to be much fun to create, especially when the crew is melting metal, burning bundles of books (very neat and efficient), and breaking sheets of glass as big as a man can carry.

Then there is a section in which Kiefer is interviewed in his library, a sensible space filled with ordinary book-packed metal shelving like stacks, through which his two small sons dash, shushing each other as they go.   With his buzzed head and black t-shirt, the artist looks much like Tim except that instead of jeans he wears white yoga pants.  Sandals, not sneakers.

He says his goal is to create art that can NOT be hung over a sofa to match the wallpaper.  In fact, at one point he made a “painting” that included an actual sofa, to spare the bourgeois the trouble.  (My cousin once asked my brother, earning his MFA, to paint her something for over her sofa.  He supplied a garish misshapen nude that was never hung. She would not like Kiefer’s work but is not in much danger of even knowing it exists.)

Richard Randall, the academic artist who taught us how to cast and patine bronzes, did a response to the Vietnam war that was similar.  He took the doors off old boxcars, ran over them with tanks, machine-gunned them, and covered them with neon graffiti.  Hung high on a white museum wall and spotlit, the doors were both handsome and shocking.  But Kiefer’s work takes a while to “see.”  Scraped-bare painter’s palettes and books with sheet-lead pages are sunk in tarp-held ponds on sagging bunks in a mock barracks with the names of revolutionaries and feminists written in a frieze along the wall.  Mural-sized paintings of blasted and burnt trees are coated in real ash.  They made me think of George Gray, another artist who taught us, showing us how to use Frank Reilly’s set of gray oil paints to work in grisaille, all based on values instead of color. (http://underpaintings.blogspot.com/2010/11/frank-j-reilly-papers.html)  

The suggestion is WWII black and white war journalism. I don’t make these connections as a way of diminishing the work, but to increase awareness that this is not outsider art.  Rather it is an exploration and intensification that in the end leaves the viewer with a sad sensitivity to the subtle variation of silvery destruction.  It is menacing, foreboding, insidiously terrifying.  The plants of the location already move in to cover it.

Underground, Kiefer makes paths.  Aboveground he piles up rooms.  When people protest that they don’t know where to put such works, he is unsympathetic, saying they need to be dedicated enough to provide the right kind of space.  Absorbing as it is to look at these works -- enter them, really, -- esp. after one has looked long enough to get a feel for the sumptuous silk of ash, the concrete aggregate flecked with shreds of straw, the sequential pools of light in tunnels, the yielding sheets of lead, the glittering glass -- it becomes even more fascinating to watch the total concentration of Kiefer’s face.  When he’s calling to the men to change the angle of a crane or throw the glass sheet harder, he’s totally involved in what the materials do or might do.  

One of the most interesting is a cave-out meant to be covered with a spill of molten lead, but the metal chilled too soon.  Kiefer and his helper fired up huge propane torches and remelted the metal “on the roll” until it trickled down the earthen slope.  Slabs, crevices, surfaces, and the inevitability of gravity.  Kiefer tells about buying very ancient sheets of lead that had been near-upright on a roof -- the metal, which is in reality an incredibly slow liquid (think mercury), was thicker at the lower end.  Glass will do the same over centuries and centuries.

Maybe every war is essentially a genocide.  The two “world” wars, being European and industrial, had a cold technical urban aspect, quite unlike the tropical countryside genocides in Africa or SE Asia, machetes wielded in exhausting orgies against one’s familiar neighbors.  The genocides of famine and disease, underlain by industry, slowly shift along like molecules of glass or lead, thickening at the bottom.  Deadly dust sifting down until the grass comes to cover it all.

IEDs PLANTED BY ENGLISH TEACHERS

At one time (as late as the Sixties) English was the most basic element of a curriculum and it was even suggested that ALL high school teachers should act as teachers of English -- that is, in science, history and even math classes part of the grade ought to be on the quality of the writing.  Then the subject of English self-destructed, taking some students and most teachers with it.

The first explosion was the realization that science, history and math teachers had lousy writing skills.  Then, that the English teachers were becoming less and less trained.  They were boneheads with delusions.

Then an ideological megabomb challenged the arrogant domination by high level English skills and the racist idea of English as the prime language and the right of societies to impose such values on students.  This came from INSIDE the humanities studies of colleges via the French Algerians who had nothing to lose if they spoke the truth.

More subtly, the English teachers had managed to conflate proper usage with class: low-class people use vernacular.  The best people (from England or Massachusetts or Shakespeare) have snob accents and huge multi-syllabic vocabularies.  If someone uses slang, they are low-class and if the slang is really profane or obscene, the speaker is probably criminal.  This idea merged with race stigma when African-Americans came up to the northern mega-cities speaking the soft accent of the Southern whites plus a kind of pidgin vocabulary of their own.  Ghetto talk.  Now defiantly celebrated in music.

Grammar has not been taught to the level where it becomes useful.  Knowing the parts of speech is only the beginning, like learning the alphabet or how to count.  It is not until one gets to phrases and how they connect to each other, how they can be converted from one to the other (participle to prepositional phrase, subordinate clause to gerund, and so on), that grammar is useful.  Even then it is only useful in service to clarity and parsimony: saying as much as possible gracefully but in as few words as possible without confusion.  (If only the French Algerians had been better at this.)

Another hidden bomb was English education as a curricular/canonical/required check list of books read and the whole idea that one book is better than another without even the teachers quite knowing why -- only that the idea was taught to them.  I’m not talking about whether high school kids should read Shakespeare instead of Judy Blume and Heavy Metal, but that the value is in what you get out of it, not how many you have checked off like a bird-spotting life list.  While I’m at it, you’ve probably noticed that illustrated books and comix are stigmatized and that reading “chapter books” with no pictures is considered a child’s milestone.  How to read pictures -- whether drawn or photographed -- is not taught, and yet the vocabulary of moving images is probably more important in electronic world reconciliation and sharing than any print has ever been.  

In American schools English is seen as a subject only in print and one language.  Concepts of meta-language -- why the word for tree has different implications in different languages, let alone the word for love or parenthood -- are never taught.  English is the fountainhead of certainty and domination.  It becomes a moral concept: from “is to ought,” from most-spoken to must-speak.  The language of the King James Bible obsolete locutions are seen as God’s language though the accurate historical languages were Hebrew or Greek or Aramaic and often improperly translated.  

We are a country of immigrants that forced even the pre-existing natives to conform to the British Empire.  English as both a language and a subject is that in which the student must qualify as an applicant, not as a way of acquiring communication skills subject to experiment, contradiction, local experience, human relationship, story and simple glee in sound.

Then the gender grenade.  English is a girl language and men who teach English must somehow prove their virility by being blunt and simple, but girls are not allowed to talk that way.  Women are girls; boys are men.  Therefore, since English teachers are most often female, male students try to prove their gender by defiance and acting up.

These assumptions and practices are indeed small disruptive and destructive bombs along the way in high school, but there is one more that is the most life-destroying of all: the idea that writing a splendid book will make a person rich and famous, prove that the author was a hero in disguise and relieve all the author’s angst with the therapeutic gift of revelation.  If the writer is from the lower classes, possibly a “less human” race, the best-selling (it is assumed sales will indicate quality) book will take on the cachet of a “talking dog.” (Isn’t it remarkable that a formerly addicted black high school dropout with a criminal record can even grip a pencil!!  Think what such an uninhibited natural person must be like in bed!!)  The bar is graciously lowered by effete upperclass grad school people whose sensitive humanity allows them to appreciate such efforts (and fantasize).  Which defeats the whole purpose of the struggling autodidact intending to prove he (always he) can write as well as those snobs with their expensive laptops.

Every author with integrity wants to know the true value of his or her book.  Lulu.com will now evaluate your self-published book for a small fee.  What they are really doing is searching the grass for material worth the time and money of a publishing house and making the authors pay for it themselves.  (We’re beginning to catch on.)  But the real truth is that every book is a creature of a time and place and its value is confined to those terms.  What is world-shaking to one audience is banal to another; what was crucial when Harold Bloom was educated is irrelevant now.  What some anonymous “reader” thinks is a good book is not likely to be helpful.  

It is possible to go spelunking through history, trying to understand what it was that made the groundlings roar with appreciation of Shakespeare, but why should a modern sixteen-year-old care?  If the story is rewritten to feature songs and dances performed by gangs in Manhattan, is it Shakespeare anymore?  Or just a reputation, a label?

“English” -- so misleadingly named -- is really anthropological communication and ought to be taught as such.  It should include speech and hearing, sign talk, translation, and always the search for assumptions.  This means a whole generation of English teachers will have to be retrained or driven out.  Part of retraining will have to be “how to read” which is supposed to be taught in the beginning but isn’t, which explains many troubles.  Distinct but complex brain skills are involved, unique from person to person depending on the architecture their experience has created in the neurons whose webs form their identities.  

So there you have it:  forget “English.”  This subject should be called “the Connectome,” concerned with building up the skill and content of metaphor, story, context, and all the various human communication means including computer language -- even txting.  As well, the school should evaluate and develop the fifty or a hundred brain functions that go into interpreting print.  In a way it’s a good thing that the past version of “English” is so badly taught.  It leaves room in young brains for the future.

MARY MACLANE, BUTTE AUTHOR

Mary MacLane’s whatever-it-is -- a chant, a declaration -- is a necessary and welcome antidote to the male devotees of “Deadwood” and Butte, Montana, two frontier mining communities.   At 5,500 ft in altitude, Butte is higher than Deadwood (4,500) and on a mountain ridge rather than in a valley.  To Mary MacLane it was a desert, both environmentally and socially.  Now, of course, it is famous for its huge poisonous lake.  But in MacLane’s girlhood (1900) it was a teeming anthill of miners killing any men it didn’t enrich and abusing every woman, rich or poor.  The time was just before WWI, that Edwardian period we so love, but MacLane doesn’t see herself as Anne of Green Gables in a dress with puffed sleeves.  She sees herself as a kind of Anne Shirley on meth, except that she hardly knows how to be wicked in the modern sense.  She gives us her metaphor: the row of toothbrushes in the family bathroom (they HAVE a bathroom in 1900) in which the other brushes are ordinary but hers has a silver handle.  There are too many sibs and they are riding down into poverty on the coat-tails of an incompetent step-father.  Until fifty years ago (MY childhood) most families were dependent on the success of the father.

So Mary walks the sandy alpine ridges where little grows and fantasizes escaping from this trap while “I Await the Devil’s Coming,” the title of her first book, written when she was 19.  It could as easily have been written by a modern suicidal Goth girl convinced that her salvation will come from fucking the Devil Himself.  Or Herself.  And yet Mary MacLane, proud of being Scots, says her only beloved is “the anemone woman,” her gentle and ladylike English teacher.  Of course, the Devil is a devious fellow but pretending to be a nurturing angel is not the usual strategy.  More likely the demonic Al Swearingen would slap her face, tear off her clothes, and put her to work.  I do not think this was what she had in mind.  Something more like Lily Langtry exchanging barbs with Oscar Wilde, maybe.

There is no information about how Mary was be able to waltz with the Devil without producing any “spawn,” but clearly part of the entrapment of the women of the time had to be the unavailability of birth control: it’s hard to imagine Al Swearingen tearing open a new packet of Trojans.  She starred in a silent film:  “Men Who Have Made Love to Me,” but it has disappeared.  

Her second book, published after the First World War, was “I, Mary MacLane” which one gathers is a more rueful account of the decadent life and less appealing to book buyers who just wanted to be peaceful.  At the age of 48 she was found dead of TB in a cheap hotel.  She had been back to Butte to live with her mother for a while.  She had managed a year in Greenwich Village.  There’s no mention of ever leaving the continent.  (She was born in Winnipeg.  Do you know Winnipeg?)  

She was marked and marketed as BUTTE.  Sensational lecturing supplied her main income -- not prostitution, at least not officially.  She really WAS a beautiful woman but used it to lead girls astray, not to seduce men.  Of course, the men probably appreciated it.  Both the looks and the other.

The genres of biography, autobiography, memoir and so on -- all mostly mis-defined anyway -- are by now pretty well abused to death by incoherent but incredibly emotional teen girls on the Internet.  What seems to be trendy at the moment is “interpretation” or even “reinterpretation.”  The “Bookslut” bloggist, Jessica Crispin, salutes our heroine as carrying the flag ahead of womankind whilst they parade their declaration of ignoring all limits, to be as wicked as they like.  But another interpretation is that MacLane was simply caught between two forces: the respectable Midwestern religious propriety in which she was raised (and which taught her she needed a male to be fulfilled) and the desire to bust-out, to find something more, more, more and far more distinguished.  The trouble was trying to find out what the “more distinguished” thing really was.  

L.M. Montgomery did not tell the truth, which was that she was raised by hard-bitten cold grandparents because her mother died and her father ran away.  She didn’t tell about being used as a servant by her father’s second marriage nor about marrying a respectable Presbyterian minister so crippled by depression that she had to front and cover for him to keep him employed while raising their two sons.  Her family didn’t acknowledge her suicide.  Likewise, Louisa May Alcott kept up the front while her family nearly starved and she herself considered suicide.  She really WAS a feminist and at least ran in a high brow crowd before dying of either mercury poisoning from misguided medicines or from an autoimmune disease like lupus.  

Mary MacLane does not write at all like either of these women.  But she sometimes does sound like a dark version of Anne Shirley, who succumbed to the hell of the English classroom.  In modern times, Mary MacLane would only be able reach the acme of wickedness with the help of a lot of specialized equipment and substances -- or maybe with the help of a transgender operation she could BECOME Al Swearingen.  It’s tough to keep from being pressed back into the role of “anemone lady.”  Today it’s not enough to wait for the Devil’s coming -- one must become one’s own Satan.  Many did even then.  According to David Milch and Edith Wharton, the anemone ladies were laudanum addicts.  

Today by Mary’s age, 19, we are assured that most girls have at least acquired sexual experience -- along the lines of sucking off the whole football team -- and yearn for a peaceful homebound mom-life baking cupcakes.  If MacLane was the result of the collision between a moribund, paralyzed and confining life for women in bourgeois families and the desire to fly free without knowing quite what that means, then maybe some new best seller will respond to the collision between way too much waltzing with Lucifer and how one becomes a mom when the needed biological equipment has been so hard-used.  Or maybe it will just explain to us finally how we escape both gender-bullying and good-bad dichotomies.  Or are we still trying to come to terms with European class structures and privileges versus the uncertainty and hard-labor of the hard-luck masses?  Does the Devil still have his hard-on?

Here’s a modern-sounding sample of MacLane:  "I should like a man to come, I said calmly to myself today as I walked slowly over my barrenness -- a perfect villain to come and fascinate me and lead me with strong, gentle allurements to what would be technically termed my ruin. . . 

"I would then jerk my life out of this Nothingness by the roots. . . The man would be bad to his heart’s core.  And after living but a short time with him my shy, sensitive soul would be irretrievably poisoned and polluted.  The defilement of so sacred and beautiful a thing as marriage is surely the darkest evil that can come to a life.  And so everything within me that had turned toward that too-bright light would then drink deep of the lees of death."

As far as anyone knows, MacLane never married.  But the Demon Lover lives on everywhere -- now a vampire or werewolf.  That hints that the contemporary dilemma is about what it means to be human.  Even in Butte.

PATHS AND DOORS

When I think about my life, it becomes obvious that somehow I haven’t come to completion anywhere, or as my mother used to scold me,  “You never FINISH anything!”  She meant my 4-H sewing project.  I finished a lot of essays and stories, but they didn’t count to her.  People in Valier would say I never finish my yard -- quite true.  But I’m not talking about that.   Nor is that about committing to a life of search rather than one devoted to defending one position.  Only in the last half-dozen years have I found anyone who understood -- not out of sameness but out of parallel search.

In interaction with Tim Barrus, who is also a writer, there have been two shared metaphors: the labyrinth or catacomb and the door, the aperture of access, a threshold.  You may have noticed that I used these two in fiction recently:  “The Hall Boy” and the Neanderthal story.  The combined key is a long corridor with doors along the sides.  I dream these, partly because they are so common in mysteries, police procedurals -- the camera trundles along the carpet from one overhead light to the next and the armed gunman shoots from a doorway or around a corner.  Maybe a river with docks along it would work similarly, or even a road with trees along it.  An architectural hybrid between corridor and doorway is the enfilade, doors lined up so a person can walk through them in a straight line.

It’s just a metaphor for living through time with periodic contexts that might be jobs or classrooms or marriages or towns.  When I was reviewing the Western art mags, I used to keep track of two kinds of paintings:  those of doors or gates and those of cafes.  There would be a half-dozen of each in most issues and they were often very beautiful.  

There’s a Russian movie from the Fifties called “The Cranes Are Flying.”  It’s about world war and in it a girl goes back from work to her family’s apartment, rushes up flights of stairs, throws open the door and there is . . . nothing.  Bombed-out space, many floors up, distant from all other buildings.  She witnessed no violence, heard no explosion, and now had no family.  All she did was open a door, as usual, and stand there trying to understand.

George MacDonald, English Universalist minister who wrote fairy tales to feed his children, had a basic construct in his stories: the castle on a hill full of coal mines.  The castle itself is a labyrinth of rooms and a winding staircase (a rising labyrinth); the many complex tunnels are like an ant-hill underneath it.  They echo, one is the reflection of the other.  The stories are “The Princess and the Goblin,” “The Princess and Curdie,” and they never end because to end the story is to end the labyrinth which is actually an income stream.

“Peer Gynt” is another version featuring sea voyages, Morocco, lunacy, thieves and trolls.

What is necessary is not the goal but the comparing of burrowing dark against constructed lighted places.  This is very deep in us, so it is hard to think about.  It must go back to the first small mammals learning that safety is always achieved by digging into and under the earth and whatever is piled onto it, while the first small birds were learning to leap and glide, then flap and dive.  Some seabirds can live for years without ever touching the land.  Tennessee Williams often spoke of birds who had only wings, no feet at all and no need for them, never “grounded.”  Mammal-me loves the rara-avis-other.  Bats, of course, inhabit both worlds.

My understanding of life was changed, once again, when I saw a YouTube vid of the axon of a neuron worming its way through the brain tissue in search of the place it needs to connect -- they say that tip is using something like smell: molecular cues.  This is not at all like the stacked-up boxes of cells that we used to believe in.  Knowledge as the contents of drawers and books is one thing: knowledge as seeking, smelling, moving -- that’s different.  Verb-based.  A trip.  The connectome: a road map to a story.

But one mustn’t become so focused on the goal that the side compartments are passed up or entered, then forgotten.  Alvina Krause, the legendary acting teacher I’ve been remembering on blogs, only slipped up once.  She said she had gotten word that one of her students had a good role in a Broadway play.  “He MADE it!” she exulted.  Maybe because she never was an actor herself, she forgets that being in the first play is a threshold -- oh, yes! -- but then life will present a whole sequence of new thresholds.  The play can’t run forever.  Being cast in this one won’t mean being cast in the next one.  A remarkable performance will mean that next time the performance must be equal or better.  And yet there is no better lighted space than the stage.

When one graduates, some people will tell you that this is not the end but merely the beginning.  They’re right.  The end will be only when the trip is over and the alma mater stops asking for donations.  The Middle-Eastern religions: Islam, Judaism, and Christianity, all think in terms of beginnings and ends.  Some apply these mainly to individuals (birth and death) and some think in terms of nations or “cultures” (founding and final fall).  Our scientists get preoccupied with how the universe began and how it will end.  The Asian religions are more concerned with just being, participating in the great rolling wave of existence.  Yet once they took it into their heads to conquer others in order to guarantee their longevity, they were the most merciless, relentless, destructive of all.

My movie last night was about Jane Goodall:  “Jane’s Journey.”  (Streams on Netflix.)  It’s about her life, how simply it started and then expanded until now it’s about the whole world.  Many of the shots were of Jane walking a well-worn path and sitting down with the chimps, just being with them.  Their reactions range from mock-rage to pretending not to notice.  She speaks calmly about her first husband, a photographer who made her work famous but who was so possessive and jealous that the marriage wouldn’t work.  Then her second husband, also very jealous and intent on limiting her, died of cancer.  The third “man” was her son who had a hard time separating from her, resented her work and also wanted her for only himself but by trying NOT to be like her.  

The movie, towards the end, shows “Grub” the son reconciled and collaborating with his mother to protect a wild but calm hippo pool where a local family has protected and addressed the animals for decades, believing they are ancestors -- which they are in the broadest sense, of course.  Few animals are as ugly and potentially deadly.  In the pool we see only their ears, eyes, and nostrils above the water -- ugly, alien, wary.  Among them float filamentous white flowers so delicate they could be spun of glass.  Sublime.  But they aren’t going anywhere.  Pretty soon Jane and the others went on up the path.

STINK STACK ADVENTURES

Lighting candles to Saint Cloacina again.  We never put her statue away around here.  For a few months there we neglected her and were sorry because we flunked the sample tests on the town’s sewage lagoon during the cold months.  Now that the candles are properly lit, we’re passing the tests and have stopped receiving warnings.   The thing is that cold "bugs" don’t eat shit.  So we have a new engineering scheme for warming and moving the water in winter.  

The state is watching small municipal water and sewage systems VERY closely, so much so that one of Valier’s workers spends almost two full days a week sampling at given intervals and in certain ways, labeling, and sending the results to the state, which must be allotting major money in terms of time and persons to analyzing them and reporting back.  The reports go up on the post office bulletin board.  We are VERY nervous about the contamination of our ground aquifers and with good reason.  Frakking, even without the possibility of injecting chemicals bad for humans into the watershed, is meant to break open rock formations, which can change subterranean waterflow patterns drastically.  Springs stop. 

A friend got a lesson in water flow "after usage" (sewage) when a naive young roofer shingled over the waste standpipe, AKA the septic system stack or more plainly, “the stink stack.”  If fluid is leaving a piped system “tree,” it pulls air behind it and pushes air ahead of it.  If a vacuum forms, everything stops.  Waste stacks (I call it “the gasper”) doesn’t DO anything except let air in and out and considering the content of the sewer pipes, the "out" air stinks.  The top end is one of those mysterious pipes through the roofs of houses.

There are two systems to consider.  One is the house-by-house pipe “tree” (one half “innie” and one half “outie”) and the other is the entire town sewer system which works by gravity except for some low spots that have to have “lift stations” (pumps to move things along).  The water system is powered by the height of the water towers -- the water pumped up there and then pushing down through gravity.  Towns on hills put their water tanks at the top of the hill instead of using stilts.  For sewage, of course, the flow must also go down and Valier is on just enough of a gradient to let gravity do its work except for a few pockets that were once swales.  There are no houses built-on those lots because of the expense of the lift-station. 

Behind the water tower and under the long descending slope of the prairie uplifted on the west of town, east of the mountains,  by the heaving up of the Rockies from underneath, there is a steady flow of water from the snow on the mountains.  At one time the underground gravity pressure created artesian springs (bubbling up and even spraying) out onto the prairie, but those are far and few now that so much water is being used and so little is falling as snow.  Valier has several wells, all dependent on pumps.  They're working well.

But my own little branch of the town sewer was suddenly producing ghastly stench.  The worst fear was that the sewer branch to my house had broken.  $1,000 to hire a backhoe so as to fix it.  Leo, on the village staff, was hot to dig.  I began to do research on sewers, thus my sudden extensive knowledge.  I found three wise men to advise me:  Roger, who is the thinker on the village staff; Paul, who does property maintenance in Idaho; and Corky, whom I’ve known since he was a little kid.  (His father helped us build the bronze foundry in the Sixties.)

Then the evidence.  My neighbor across the street also got a whiff, though not as much as me.  It was coming in the waste-water line of his washing machine so running a load of wash got rid of it.  There must have been a lot of stink in the whole line, but my “gasper” stack was a suspect from the beginning.  It is cast iron which means it can rust shut.  The angle where it turned from vertical to horizontal had previously sunk and been propped up by sticking some boards under it.  

At that time I was warned if they slipped out, I’d have problems because water would again collect at the elbow and block air, which is the way the P-traps in the drains under sinks work.  But it was in a place under the floor where the crawl space -- which is a deep hole on one end -- would barely let a normal person skinny through.  In the night I had a brainstorm and drafted Corky, who brought up his tool box and cut a hole in the floor right beside the gasper.  The pipe angle is okay.  And now I have a trap door that gives me easy access to the pipes in the bathroom.  

Roger’s idea was to check every drain in the house to make sure that in warmer weather the traps hadn’t dried up.  So I went around with my watering can to fill them up.  Paul suggested a tablespoon or so of vegetable oil after adding the water to slow evaporation.  People in the past have suggested filling p-traps with antifreeze in winter if the house is not occupied, but this is hard on the lagoon bugs.  NOT recommended.

In fact, when I took out the washing machine in this house (I use the laundromat at the county seat.) the drain pipe was left open except for an old t-shirt stuffed into it.  In fact, I’ve never looked at those pipes from underneath, but I poured in water enough to form a seal, added peanut oil (hope it isn’t allergic), and devised a cap from a glass jar.  This morning there were no smells.  I hope this keeps working.

I have a plan for the future.  From Google advice, I see that I can take out my stink stack from inside the house: just saw it off.  I’ve found a thing called  “Durga valve” which replaces the need to vent outside because it closes whenever air tries to escape through it but allows ambient air to enter.  They’re cheap and well-tested, so I'll cap the waste stack with it.  The hole in the roof already leaks around the stinker, so patching the hole its removal leaves is a good idea already.  I’ll report results in August.

Around here many people built their own houses in the early days -- obviously before there WERE any town-piped water or sewer lines.  There are still a couple on septic tanks.  Electricity and telephone lines were also late.  (Places like Helena and Butte had them as soon as it was known what copper wires would do).  I don’t think it’s unfair to say that optical fiber service is incomplete.  I don’t know about microwave services since I don’t use them, but I read in the paper that cell towers are still far between and contractual reciprocity among the operators is fluid.  Fluid.  Moving.  Carrying info.  Interceptible.  Interdictable.  Infrastructure.

The point of regulating water and sewer is to control disease, esp. microbes.  But now water is life-itself and the focus has moved to toxins.  We’ve resolved most contagious diseases except the air-borne flu and the blood-borne HIV.  The biggest problem with contact microbe transmission (fecal/oral) is failure to wash one’s hands.  Some things you can control without equipment, just a little thought.  And a bar of soap.

DREAMING OF ARCHITECTURE

The current theory about dreams is that they are the result of neurological processing -- at least when everything works the way it’s supposed to.  If the brain can’t finish the job, it evidently wanders a labyrinth, trying to find the right place to store (I imagine a police evidence lock-up) or discard (I imagine a waste chute like a tall apartment building’s disposal out in the hall) impressions from the day.  Since I usually watch movies in the evening and since they are usually mysteries, cop shows, procedurals --  which covers a lot of territory -- I dream images from them.

Contemporary movies of this type, especially the American and Scandinavian ones (I’ve become a big fan of several standout Danish actors:  Mads Mikkelson, Thomas Gabrielson, Jens Albinus and others.)  But also I am a fan of the cinematography and sets.  Because these sorts of film are normally attached to cities there are fabulous helicopter shots of skyscrapers with their light patterns and finial tops. 

Portland, Oregon

We look along the streets and, esp. in the Scandinavian and New York shots, see the sky over harbors, often at sunset or sunrise, sometimes with huge ships sliding along.  The incredible wealth of a major city shows in the glass-doored luxury buildings while the dark underpinnings and infrastructures become night scenes of Bruegel-people in temporary cardboard villages and elevated trains make their terrible screams overhead when going around a corner, pushing walls of hot air ahead of them -- but those aren’t photographable, just dreamable. 

The Scandinavians live indoors in winter but outdoors in summer, so there are always scenes in summer fields, small rough cabins or the kind of country houses the east coast of America used to call “cottages.”  Americans scattered to the countryside before there was air-conditioning, but now the wealthy go to warm shores in winter.  In the days when I was more likely to read magazines in the evening, I dreamt house interiors because most of the magazines were high end “shelter mags.”  Now I’ve stopped, in part because I’d have to subscribe to have access, and anyway they’ve slid over to being celebrity mags -- the houses of the rich and famous -- and I don’t care about them.  No one really lives in them anyway.  Sometimes I’ll flip through the mags about “cottages” in the more modern sense: small old-fashioned buildings with clever recycled furnishings.  But I never dream about them.

Nor do I dream about the American luxury bedrooms which always have acres of mattress and dun-colored bedding because human skin looks better against it.  (Cinematographers hate white.)  Print has disappeared again, but sometimes there are navy blue or espresso sheets.  Headboards are interesting to watch.  But bedrooms of the Great British Houses are still the most suggestive.  Some of their coverlets look to be several hundred years old.  I don’t dream about them.

It’s the rushing modern streets (not sheets) I dream of, because they connect with sense memories from the Nineties when I was working for the City of Portland and using my lunch hour to circle through Meier & Frank to Rich’s Cigar Store where I picked up any new mags -- stopping briefly to scan the bead stores -- then through the Galleria which was a restored atrium with an Asian import store at the top level and Mother Goose, the nearby luxury artisan object store where my cousins have worked; on around through Nordstrom where a three story escalator goes up alongside a wall of mirror while a grand piano tinkles away at the bottom, played by a young man in a tux; and finally through the new-built shopping atrium, Pioneer Place, where the escalators seem totally unsuspended or supported and it took me months to work up to enough vertigo tolerance to step onto them.

Pioneer Place

Just now online I looked for photos and found a few, but Portland -- maybe because of the rain -- is a books and cafés sort of place.  What I know is the neighborhoods, the arteries and seedy parts that I drove as an animal control officer.  I don’t dream about them much, but I do think about them as a waking, pondering, remembering person.

In dreams I wander downtown Boston, Philadelphia, Hartford and Oxford.  (I've never been in that last.)  Most of all I go back to academic settings -- not the pleasant campuses and bland buildings of Northwestern at the end of the Fifties when I was an undergrad -- but the indoors labyrinths and catacombs of stone quads, built like Gothic forts around a square of grass.  (There are usually warnings to keep off the grass.)  Some say quads are descended from religious cloisters.  The effect of them -- since they can be closed off from the surroundings -- is to allow a protected environment even in a ghetto like the South Side of the Chicago.  However, protection is only another word for confined.

Some say dreams are records of unfinished business and I suppose that’s true.  Indeed there are loose ends in my ’78-’82 sojourn.  The degrees were granted and all that.  I’ve finished the possibilities of my professional arc as a Unitarian Universalist minister.  So what is it that’s undone?  Unsolved. Unresolved.  It’s not about me, I think.  It’s about institutions, whether housed by academic quads, commercial shopping atriums, or governmental office buildings.  

Yesterday I watched a TED talk by Louis Kahn’s son. as he visited his father’s masterpiece: the capitol complex of Bangladesh, the poorest and most endangered of all nations.  It is built on a flood plain, with workmen using bamboo scaffolds instead of steel, and concrete technology that my grandfather and his brothers used to create the concrete silos of dairy farms on the flood planes of Washington State at the beginning of the 1900‘s.  But not even they carried the concrete to the top of the forms in baskets. Here’s the Kahn building:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMjWPoixRzA  The man himself was ugly and rude, totally preoccupied with his work, hardly knew his children, but he created this very beautiful simple complex with huge vaults of space that inspire a people desperate for inspiration.

I love architects.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TK_gGQ91rmQ  This is a short clip of Douglas Cardinal, Calgary-born architect who is well-known and much-admired in Canada.  He is Blackfoot and Metis and has made it a point to claim his heritage.  His basic geometry is not the quad but the serpentine curve and his material is more likely to be brick than steel.  Some of his buildings are only a few hours’ drive from here.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIgR4d9p5dQ is a TED-like talk of Cardinal talking.  He is five years older than me, but looks much younger.  Not in a “suit” but in khakis and polo shirt, he stands before a screen that shows his work.  Locals, even the Blackfeet, don’t know it.  Cardinal says that his key is living in the questions instead of the answers.  

This is how one gets to dreams: questioning.  That’s what’s not finished, nor should it be, even in the square stone Gothic boxes of universities.  And yet in the square-cornered sheet of paper lurks the organic.  One only has to set it free.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwJB7KzDEbQ   

MONTANA EAST SLOPE/NORTHWEST SHORE

People talk about bi-coastal culture, mostly based on the megacities and culture capitals of Manhattan and Hollywood which are secretly powered by the urban ghettos of blacks and hispanics.  That is, a kind of arch glamour exploiting really bad but energetic and ground-level phenomena.  No risk.  The whole thing is governed by an oligarchy that pretends it’s about merit, awarding prizes interpreted in terms of money.  It’s actually a closed mono-culture.  It all depends on connections.

Washington DC is simply irrelevant to this paradigm, down there in the swamp throwing levers and making much ado about nothing.  If they start making too much trouble, the few dozen people who control everything either throw money at them or mock them in a popular movie.  That cuts them down to size because it controls the pretense of elections which are really a popularity contest.  (Pretty face, rich backers.)  If the legislators weren’t all lawyers, it wouldn’t work.  They’re used to manipulating juries with hints and teases.  This bi-coastal thing is mostly American, though it operates on assumptions from the British/German class culture that produces royalty.  For decades now people have said the pattern is exhausted.  But it doesn’t change.

The alternative is one I inhabit.  It is also a unified binary:  the Northern-Pacific-Coast-Asian-derived and the East-Slope-of-the-Rockies-indigenous-based matrix -- both often rural.   Forget the numbers “chicken farm.”  This metaphor is about taking an eagle lifestyle, and don’t gimme any of that patriotic bald eagle stuff (they eat carrion and fish) -- I’m talking golden eagle, cruising in search of what is alive and seizing it whole.  Ideas as burrowing squirrels, lively and elusive.

You can see the two cultures interacting in Ursula LeGuin’s sci-fi which often hinges on contrasting ecologies: one lush and hedonistic and the other ascetic and idealistic. I know people who shuttle between these two, either physically or mentally.   (I would if I had the money.) They tend to be sophisticated, educated but without certification, skilled at something physical, whether art or craft or service.  The combo of two contexts seems to develop people more fully.

I am NOT talking about all the people who wanna-be famous and prosperous and who have recently gone from being Montana carpet-baggers to Portland latte addicts.  The difference is not that I went the opposite direction, growing up in Portland and coming to grips with Montana in 1961.  The difference is that my Portland is WWII, ‘70‘s culture rebellion, and ’90’s shelter issues.  My Montana is persisting 19^th century reservations and enduring geology.  Being a famous Montana writer is impossible now.  The national people who bought books are narrative hounds but they’ve gone to vid.  Local Montana people still read books, but there’s only one bookstore in the state that reports to the NYTimes, whose little best-seller list is the keystone of fame, now fatally distorted by Big Box stores. 

I can’t get too carried away with technology because in small-town Montana the infrastructure barely exists to support cell phones and commerce.  I’m blogging over the old copper wires of original telephone lines.  You can’t watch PBS here without a cable.  The wind farms that look so futuristic merely interfere with the quality of our local electrical supply.  We worry about water, which was recently described by a coastal as a “sale-able commodity like any other.”  Smart phones are going down for a week because of contract dispute about using cell towers.

Social push-through from youngsters and immigrants (both coastals and Euros) tends to be just that -- they come and they go.  They fall off the mountains and find horses kind of scary.  Local people around here don’t really bother to focus on anyone who hasn’t lived here a few decades.  Nevertheless, because they remember back through history for at least two centuries, the locals have a keen sense of things changing, always being in process.  The default “race” of people on the Pacific and the prairie is brown.  Whites are temporary.  Blacks?  What blacks?  Oh, on the coast.

If you’re an old white busybody who writes and who once had fantasies of being significant -- not famous but making some kind of contribution -- what should be your goal?  Or do you need one when you’re 74?  Why can’t I just sit here and keyboard all day without any particular reason or any recognition?  I so enjoy the feeling of ideas forming into sentences, like silk scarves running through my hands.   All the colors, all the patterns, all the clever knots.

Books are only a delivery system.  They mostly replaced talk and then only among certain people.  The kids I taught used to discard them anywhere.  Slick hundred-dollar brightly illustrated bullshit guaranteed to cover the administration’s butt when parents complained.  Only a few people here ever read much of anything except in winter.  They are radio people where they can get decent reception, but the east slope is full of coulees and the transmitters are never high enough and the wind rips them up.  That guy on the white horse at the top of a ridge yelling,  “Can you hear me now?”  That was here.  Anyway satellite connections are a loss of quiet, not a gain in ideas.

The idea stream is what counts.  How it gets to you is only marginally relevant.  The idea stream on both the West Coast and the East Slope is a moving pattern of information crucial to how one survives between parameters that are connected to the planet.  Watch for tsunamis and mega-blizzards.  Watch for the right weather for what you do, tides for clam digging, ground moisture for planting.  Steady practice day-after-day in a location well-known will become both culture and religion.  It will bestow both humility and dignity.  It will keep you from hoarding your own little life at the expense of all the others.

Until the time I came back to the East Slope, I accumulated stuff.  I haven’t bought clothes since 1999 except a much heavier coat.  I wear the same old yellow slicker I bought at REI in 1993.  But I buy books.  I never buy the books they recommend on NPR or the ones that are promoted at Montana Festivals of Books and Chambers of Commerce.  Those are commodified little horse biscuits for the trendy.  Mostly I buy whatever seems to hold what I need to know, which is sometimes in sync with others -- like brain neurotheory.  I don’t mess around with ebooks because I want to scribble in the margin, highlight, save stuff between the pages.  Books are TOOLS, not ends but means.  Many of mine cannot be resold.

I ask people “have you read such-and-such” and they get mad, because they think I’m trying to put them down as dunderheads for not keeping up.  But I really want to know whether they have the info so we can talk about it.  They don’t know “talk-about-it.”  Not bicoastal cocktail-time quips, but sitting around a firepit in the dark, musing while the shooting stars write on the sky.  Books, like everything else, are prey to hook-up culture.  But grass is not, whether it is short-grass on a windblown ridge of glacial moraine or sea grass on a windblown dune that’s moving inland.  Boats or horses, pickups or gliders, books or video -- the necessity is to keep moving, even if it’s only with your head.

But time may be running out.  I was startled to read what Mary Moe said today.

http://www.greatfallstribune.com/article/20130615/OPINION/306150018/Reduce-influence-rich-campaign-donors

TIGHTER AND MEANER

There it is on the “religion page” -- a short theory of religious “clumping.”  Of course, the dividing and merging, reconciling and declaring war between human beings is always driven by economics and circumstances.  People group into affinities and oppositions and the only difference with religiously-based congregations, denominations, and even world religions is that they claim justification for their life-managements as endorsed by some supernatural force, maybe historical and maybe recent.  Their “metaphor” for their position is often expressed in some kind of ceremony like communion or fasting, bathing or traveling to some important spot.  Or a book.

The examples in the newspaper stories were Pope Francis meeting with the Archbishop of Canterbury to talk over their relationship since their constituencies split in 1534; a sub-group of Buddhists trying to understand how to achieve peace with Muslims; and the Southern Baptist Annual Convention trying to recapture mainstream America, now that the generations have so radically redefined what the mainstream is.  Already the Southern Baptists, who split with the main body of Baptists over the issue of slaves -- Southerners being dependent on owning African-Americans for their economic survival -- have re-elected The Rev. Fred Luter, their first black leader -- without opposition.  Mainstream Southern Baptists now oppose human trafficking, child abuse, and the high rate of incarceration.  All of them forms of slavery.

But Southern Baptists are associated with white, separatist, male-dominated, Republican, conservative positions.  These categories are diminishing -- even more than was thought before the last national elections proved the point.  Every group -- religious or not -- is composed of three groups: the one that goes into the future, perhaps experimenting; the one that clings to the past, perhaps out-of-touch; and the main group that shows up every Sunday and pays the bills.  Just as the nation has a middle class, every denomination has a middle class.  But just like every middle class, the ultimate goal is to preserve the group even if the old-fashioned faction has to be abandoned, even if the cutting edge out front has to be accepted.  So Southern Baptists accept dark-skinned people, missionize the north, and allow women to take leadership though still not the pulpit.  They still pretty much oppose abortion, gay marriage or homosexuality in general, though they didn’t break affiliation with the Boy Scouts over it.  The Boy Scouts are too strong an indicator of middle class virtue in America, even though the roots of THAT clump are in English military-based elite schools plus romantic ideas about Native Americans.

There is a sub-clump of Southern Baptists that has gone ultrapolitical, trying to make common cause with the Right Wing Republicans who badly lost the election: the people often called the “Tea Party,” because they took as their model the American rebellion against English domination through taxation, demonstrating by dumping English tea into the ocean while disguised as Native Americans.  (It's hard to tell whether these guys are the future or the past.)  The United States formed out of the crunch between the English and the Native Americans by creating a new category: Americans.  The Baptist denomination formed out of the crunch between the Anglicans, which was the official church of England where the King/Queen is STILL the head of both church and state, and the wilderness.  Like the laws, religious opinions were still handed down from England until citizens formed their own congregations.  Then that solidarity split in the War between the States, the same as European Protestants had much earlier split from the Roman Catholic Church.  (Native Americans, of course, were busy doing their own clumping and splitting.)

Tea Party Christians dominate the Super Conservative Republicans, which are in the process of splitting from the mainstream of Lincoln, Eisenhower, and Reagan Republicans, and who try to capture as much of the mainstream as possible by claiming God is with THEM.  Because God is very much like THEM.   (They don’t mean Jesus -- they mean Jehovah.  Why truck with the Son when the Father is at hand?) This incredibility of God being on both sides has been assumed in every Christian-against-Christian war, notably WWI and WWII.  No one questions that God is in favor of war, given the amount of war in the Old Testament.

Catholics try to force their membership to toe the line by making the line a matter of criminal law, imposing their standards on the whole country.  Contraception is a sin, remarriage after divorce is a sin, both punishable by excommunication, meaning prevention from taking communion -- the rite of belonging and forgiveness.   That’s supposed to be the punishment that fits the crime.  But the mainstream American Catholics no longer take excommunication very seriously.  They believe in marital self-determination and small families they can afford to support.  In particular the youngsters also have friends who are black or gay or promiscuous, etc.  and don’t have a very strong concept of either God or Heaven.  In a culture where priests assault children, it’s hard to want to serve at Mass as an altar-juvenile.  And the Catholic church is reluctant to let ordinary criminal law deal with those priests.

The Tea Party is more explicitly based on prosperity, the Holy Grail of our culture.  This strategy works best among people who are poor, feel excluded, are in places where the economy is shrinking or shifting to jobs that require higher education or in rural places, and whereever fear creeps around chilling people.  Places where people comfort themselves with alcohol, rage, and abuse of the weak.  They hold up the Good Old Days as a Paradise Lost and need guns to feel safe.  And the Evangelicals say that joining them in ecstasy will make their members rich.  In short, the faction of the Southern Baptist mainstream that is far to the right is trying to push America back into the conflation of church and state, so that THEIR rules will become the laws of the land and force us all to do what THEY think is right, whether we agree or not.

They feel that the more liberal and successful people of the country have forced “pagan law” on them, and therefore they are justified in fomenting discord -- because to them everything is war and conflict, a fight for domination.  They intend the economic split between the very, very wealthy (a small elite which they aspire to join) and the rest of us to remain, a replication of the southern world before the slaves were freed.  Or the British Empire before the coal that fueled the industrial revolution ran out. 

Now coal and oil are not so much running out as shifting to natural gas, of which there is a huge abundance on the North American continent.  This means the Middle East oil supplies will matter less and we will be less inclined to need peace with the Islamic world or to participate in their quarrels among themselves.  Now we can be more separatist, but since China will probably remain oil and coal dependent, we ought to be thinking about their religious positions, which do not so much guide as reflect their world views.  Many of our progressive go-ahead people, esp. hip youngsters, have been interested in Buddhism for a long time.  Few express interest in Shinto, the Japanese conservative religion.  In China the advancing edge might be Taoism and the mainstream might be Confucianism, with the lagging group being atheist communism.  I can guarantee that it will always be about economics and it will always be about an elite trying to control everyone else.   Ask Israel. 

THE CATCHER IN THE JAIL

Once I remarked to a nice liberal person (long before I came back to Montana) about one of the recurring news stories giving statistics about the overwhelming number of people in jail in the United States, disproportionately minorities, immigrants, males, drugs users, and so on.  I thought this was an indicator that as a society we were doing something wrong.  But the nice liberal person had no use for anyone anywhere whom any court had sentenced.  They were believers in inerrant courts.  Their defense was that in other countries lawbreakers were killed, so that’s why they didn’t show up in prison statistics.  I’ve pondered that ever since.  

It seems clear to me that prison is also deadly, though recently a story claimed that black men in prison live longer than black men on the streets.  That might be true of Native Americans as well.  But a body walking around can be dead.  A body living on macaroni and low-quality cheese for years and years, locked into a solitary cell or crammed into a cell too small for the number of people, constantly exposed to danger from guards and other inmates, then one day dumped back into the general population with no money, no job, one set of clothes, broken family relationships -- is such a person still a functioning human?  No wonder they are so good at committing suicide in jail.  I haven’t seen statistics on how many commit suicide soon after release.

There are two sets of people that nice liberals mostly agree shouldn’t be sent to jail.  One is the mentally ill (I mean the ones who were deranged BEFORE they were sent to jail, not driven mad while in there) and the other is children.  We’re on the fence about illegal immigrants, but reasonable people would have to admit that being “legal immigrants” is a category with moving edges and if the person in question “looks” like an illegal immigrant, they are likely to be treated as one.

Our society has a great reluctance to straightforwardly kill people in our own country, though we will send predator drones to eliminate whole families in other countries.  Instead we incarcerate people at great damage to them, enormous tax cost, and little effectiveness in preventing crime or providing rehabilitation.  Sometimes the original crime is minor, only criminalized in one local jurisdiction, never really investigated, and defended by incompetents.  This makes no sense.  Why do we do it?

Partly, of course, it’s the money.  We are “farming” the vulnerable, not just in prison but also in a swarm of institutions originally organized to protect these same people:  nursing homes, reform schools, drug rehab, group homes, shelters for the homeless.  At one time these were created by government as part of the people’s service to the people -- no less a communal effort than the national highway system.  The money that was meant to be allocated for supporting these institutions has attracted sub-contractors who skim as much profit as possible and leave only enough to keep the people alive who justify the system.  Technically alive. 

These sub-contractors, often national and quite powerful, employ clever lobbyists who rig state and national laws to help keep those institutions full and prevent full disclosure of what goes on there, particularly the bookkeeping.  Unless people have a family member who has gone to jail or is in a nursing home or is seriously retarded or put into a foster home, no one makes a public outcry because of the stigma so often attached to the vulnerable.  They “deserve” neglect.  Of course, there are always determined groups of folks working in the opposite direction, trying hard to enlighten us all in the name of positive change.  Many of the captured people are vulnerable because they have no voice, maybe even literally, and cannot tell you what happens to them behind closed doors.  Sometimes the victims don’t even realize that anything is happening to them or that it is wrong.

Laws in the United States or elsewhere are in levels and overlaps.  Treaty law is the highest, then federal, then state, then local -- but there is another level or set of levels beneath that:  regulations, inspectors, supervisors.  At that level change is even harder.  Again the insanity of laws passed by out-of-touch fat cats in Armani suits cruising our capitols in limos, pretending they are legislating (when actually the laws they propose are researched and written by their staffs who will lose their jobs if they fail to get the boss re-elected).  

We know a great deal about how to address social problems including families failing to protect and guide their children; the inappropriate use of force against children or women or the elderly; sexual abuse; substance abuse; and a huge range of physical problems like dementia, PTSD, diabetes, blindness, HIV-AIDS, TB, Hep C.  ALL of them demand money, time and attention.  But they don’t get it.  Why is that?  We don’t kill people but we don’t cure them either -- we warehouse them or we leave them to wander the streets, spreading the very diseases that cause them to be stigmatized but not stigmatized enough to prevent losers from catching their afflictions.

The efforts of savvy people to make sure justice is brought to bear can only do it through convoluted, time-consuming, inaccessible and expensive courts and systems meant to sort and deport in timely fashion, but the system itself is in shackles because there isn’t enough money nor enough competent people.  Pointing this out does not mean that the general public will authorize enough money to do what they expect to be done.  They figure they have their own troubles.  A person who is really invested in justice will not be elected nor even appointed and, yes, I’m including the US Supreme Court.  Decisions are made on the basis of strategy, consequences -- to them and “their” people, not some helpless and lost person in the system, whether a disruptive and ornery child or an old sick black man who smoked too much weed in the Sixties and has been in prison ever since.

During my decade in the ministry I found it a major challenge to be the representative of moral inquiry.  I had more power and legitimacy when I was an animal control officer on the street -- but slightly less than as an English teacher in a classroom.  Somehow moral reflection has been replaced by criminalization, power and money, which in turn have become the very definition of success.   Perhaps at last we have come to a turning point, signaled if not signified by replacing an opulent Pope with one who takes St. Francis as a role model.  Maybe the burden of all these semi-secret, self-righteous, often force-based enclaves of captives will fall of their own ineffective weight, releasing generations of desperate people.  Then we will have to pray for survival and forgiveness.  But to whom?  We used to think about God’s law, but now we have no use for the least of us -- regardless of what Jesus or Mohammed or Buddha might have said.

Still, not everyone is cynical.  There are always a few good people.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/16/books/review/creative-writing-in-a-massachusetts-prison.html?nl=books&emc=edit_bk_20130614&_r=0