It’s four AM and the wind is rising on this Sunday morning. I’m often up at this hour. It’s a bit of a tradition among writers. In my case it’s mostly the result of two histories. The cats in this house want me to get up at first light and open cans of catfood, the equivalent of hunting small prey. The other factor is that I once wrote daily with a group of young men in Paris in spite of the time zone difference. They didn’t write — they made videos and other photos, often socially motivated. Doesn’t get more romantic than that.
As it turns out, I moved to Valier in 1999 just as the US began a major change, both political and economic. I had reduced my monthly “nut” to about $600. My income is on the poverty line which is about double that. Thanks to my mother’s bequest, I own my house. I have enough books and old clothes to last to the end. The cats are a debit. I’ve escaped most friends and relatives, who keep dying of old age anyway. House maintenance soaks up my discretionary income.
Thinking in terms of political parties makes no sense to me and I think I’m not alone in believing that, but also not alone in wanting explanations. Many people here turn away from knowing national stuff. They say politics are corrupt, dirty, impenetrable, and impossible to impact. We have almost no consciousness of the big issues of black/white. No African-American lives in this town. Here we are red/white and quickly becoming taupe except for those who defend themselves by saying “at least I’m white,” as though that were a “thing.”
I’ve been getting through the days by depending on the explanations of Rachel Maddow, though she’s too “coastal” to be totally satisfactory. She’s very much like the UU denomination, which is as close as I’ve come to a political affiliation. Even that has changed from rigor to mush. This morning — suspended from Twitter, evidently because I don’t own a cell phone— I stumbled upon Vox and its clear tracing of histories.
Where the Republican Party came from and how it has changed.
The history of the horrifying political polarization we’re living through.
This morning, awake too early -- don’t worry, I’ll go back to bed in a bit -- I am much rewarded by finding this website, which is focused on explanations and not hung up on trying to say, “Oh, there are good folks on both sides,” a thought that made rigor into mush. There are two major forces that I resist: the New York Times and YouTube. The NYT controls people who read and YouTube controls the oral culture of the US even in print.
There’s quite a bit of thought about the oral culture of indigenous people which for many years was ignored as primitive, childish, and the preference of women — quite unlike the dignified rationality of published white men of considerable age and impressive visages that they earned with their behavior. Aside from being ineffective these days, this point of view and labeling tries to escape from change, pointing to the Rule of Law in “originalist” fashion, meaning freezing the Constitution in definitions based on 1776. Much change depends on thinking out loud, which is collaborative. But not when it degenerates into shouting, which spreads germs. Why can't we talk?
There’s a great story told by Hugh Dempsey, an historian married to an indigenous woman and living in Calgary. In the pre-white-man days, the tale goes, the Blackfoot tribe dominated the east slope of the Rockies and therefore access to the mighty herds of bison which were such an excellent source of food. Occasionally the Kootenai and Kalispell tribes, who are from the Flathead Valley, would crave that meat and want to parlay for permission to cross the mountains to hunt.
The protocol was straightforward. A small band of hopeful hunters would come to a ridge where they could look down at the Blackfoot camp and one of them, the designated diplomat, would sit so his silhouette could be seen as he waited for a reaction. If the camp leaders were feeling mellow and generous, they would call him down for a discussion circle while smoking. If the camp leaders were unhappy, maybe because of smallpox or bad losses in skirmishes, someone went out and shot the diplomat dead. Unless he was fast enough to get back over the horizon safely.
So that’s where we are, divided by politics instead of mountains. The Repubs are irritated and sending out the snipers, though they’re the ones who are dying. In fact, BECAUSE they are dying. Time is picking them off right in their lodges. We knew this was coming. We knew that no amount of money or power could make them live forever. Bob used to jokingly say, “We killed the Indians but they refused to fall down dead.” Something like that is finally happening to Repubs — they are falling and intent on taking everyone else with them.
Sweeping across the world the way smallpox once swept across the Americas and the way plague emptied Europe, Covid-19 is a version and consequence of growing population, only one of an intermittent recurrence of viruses — H1N1, SARS, MERS, Ebola . . . just variations of the life codes in genes. We’re beginning to figure out how all that stuff works and even to occasionally intervene but it’s slow.
If a person defines his or her self via labels and tries to stand apart as an individual who is self-determining and responsible, that’s a bit like positioning oneself on the horizon of time. I don’t really know what that means, but it’s a metaphor that might be useful to ponder as we try to return to some kind of relationship to the larger community. I mean the REALLY larger community, all the beings on the planet. We are each a little link between the past and the future, even the briefest existence being another ripple in how everything unfolds.
The cats in this house are neither pets nor feral. They are a colony with new kittens growing up to have new kittens if half the litter doesn’t die of local cat corona viruses. Since 1999 when I came, my original neighbors have died of old age or cancer but I will not forget Rose or Pinky or Old Dave. Since I am of the written culture, I’ll put them in print in electrons like this. The wind is rising and falling. The two mamacats are in the window watching everything move.
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PS: Another explanation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9ofYEfewNE
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