GENES AND MEMES

Muhammadu Buhari won election over President Goodluck Jonathan

It appears to be a good time to think about the Yoruba of Nigeria since the long -time leader of this democracy has NOT been re-elected and has stepped down gracefully.   It's a little worrisome that Buhari is a former general and considered strict.  But now we have to think of everything in global terms, so I’ll give it a try.

The Yoruba were an oral culture that didn’t really cohere as a group except with their language until they developed in place “out of earlier Mesolithic Volta-Niger populations by the 1^st millennium BCE.  Oral history recorded under the Oyo Empire derives the Yoruba as an ethnic group to the 4^th century BCE with urban structures appearing in the 12^th century.  The urban phase of Ife before the rise of Oyo, c. 1100-1600 was a significant peak of political centralization in the 12^th described as a “golden age” of life.”

The Yoruba had a council of elders meant to prevent dictatorships.  Their own version of Robin Hood developed from farmer’s union network that went underground and opposed any domination by other groups.  Because one of their basic foods is yams, which contain a plant version of estrogen, there are many twins.  This wasn’t developed by the mysterious writer or writers of the Wikipedia entry.  But there is an echo in Navajo mythology.  Some cultures welcome the unusual and others try to destroy any variation.  The practice of the time was to pay off conquerers in war by handing over people to be slaves, but the Yoruba often just conquered some other weaker group and handed THEM over.  Still, some involuntarily contributed to the human Gumbo of the New World.

Igbo and Ora

This time period caught my eye.  In Europe this was the insanely chaotic and power-mad time that drives the plots and theories of “Game of Thrones.”  In a little essay derived from E.R. Truitt’s book, “Medieval Robots: Mechanism, Magic, Nature, and Art” Truitt says, “Certain technologies are so characteristic of their historical milieux that they serve as a kind of shorthand. The arresting title credit sequence to the TV series "Game of Thrones" proclaims the show’s medieval setting with an assortment of clockpunk gears, waterwheels, winches and pulleys.” It appears that Rube Goldberg was a throwback to medieval times.  It was the age when every town had erected a clock tower (cock power).  The Valier Baptist church finally turned off their electronic version, but the Main Street crossroads put up a small version on a pillar in the corner park.  

The emperor's new nightingale

“Most [mechanisms] were designed and built beyond the boundaries of Latin Christendom, in the cosmopolitan courts of Baghdad, Damascus, Constantinople and Karakorum. Such automata came to medieval Europe as gifts from foreign rulers, or were reported in texts by travellers to these faraway places.”  This is no doubt the origin of the idea of the clockwork God, who sets the world to ticking.  More to say about that paradigm in a later post.

Truitt emphasizes the idea that mechanical wonders imported to Europe impressed the people as magic, at root demonic.  Eventually that led to our idea of the contrasting sanctity of the wilderness and nature.

Mechanisms of pain and death.

Meanwhile in Medieval Europe there began a practice of horrific torture to enforce domination and a kind of fatalism about literally crushing individuals for the sake of the whole, which they claimed would continue after death.  Followers of the “Game of Thrones” story recoil at the episodes of torture, but the practices of Medieval Europe rival any examples elsewhere.  I once heard Vine Deloria, Jr. speak to the Portland, OR, City Group, elegant local elites who met for lunch.  He had just visited Powell’s and carried with him a book on Medieval torture which he described to us to make the point that the demonization of North American tribes by whites were quite equal to the white past.  So this suggests another line of inquiry:  why do people torture?  It seems we are now embarked on another Era of Torture, linked to prisons.

Having named an African 12^th century Yoruba culture and the parallel-in-time Medieval period in Europe which started out well but ended with the “Little Ice Age” that seriously damaged agriculture.   That sent adventurers searching for warmer climes.  This period include the years of plague:  “The Black Death was one of the most devastating pandemics in human history, resulting in the deaths of an estimated 75 to 200 million people and peaking in Europe in the years 1346–53.”  

But the wave of disease that followed the arrival of Columbus in North America killed so many people that the drastic depopulation of the continent actually changed the climate.  Without humans and their fires, the carbon-generated warming was removed.  This is not popular information -- another line of investigation to be pursued.  

In the meantime I found this little time-table from Wikipedia, that dubious source, which seems at least a place to start thinking about pre-Columbian oral cultures, which turn out to have some written codes after all. I left in the links because most people know little about these groups.

• 900–1150: Pueblo II Era in the American Southwest
• 1000–1200: Early Mississippian culture in the Eastern Woodland1000–1200: Dresden Codex written and illuminated. This Yucatecan Mayan codex from Chichén Itzá is the earliest known surviving book from the Americas^[1
• 1000–1200: Acoma Pueblo and Old Oraibi are established, and become the oldest continuously inhabited communities in the United States^[2][3][4
• 1142: League of the Iroquois is founded, and the Great Law of Peace is adopted by the Mohawk, Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, and Oneida people.^[5] Wampum invented by Ayenwatha, which the Haudenosaunee used to record information.^[6]
• 1150–1350: Pueblo III Era in the American Southwest
• The Inuit Thule people largely displaced the old Dorset culture in Arctic Alaska.
• The most important city of the Mississippian culture of mound builders, Cahokia on the Mississippi River opposite modern Saint Louis, Missouri, reached its zenith with a population near 20,000 or perhaps 40,000. No other city in the United States would boast of such a large population until the early days of the Republic
• Natives of the American Southwest began building spectacular cliff dwellings housing hundreds of people in the later half of the century.

Again it appears that the 12^th century began with leaps forward in development and clustering of nomads, but by the 1400’s it is changing and then is ended by the shadow of plague. “ Etiology, the modern branch of science that deals with the causes of infectious disease, recognizes five major modes of disease transmission: airborne, waterborne, bloodborne, by direct contact, and through vector (insects or other creatures that carry germs from one species to another).  As humans began traveling over seas and across lands which were previously isolated, research suggests that diseases have been spread by all five transmission modes.”  Some writers will talk about diseases that result from animal domestication about ten thousand years ago (smallpox).  Both Asia and Africa have donated diseases to everyone else.  Disease is entwined with climate because it affects vectors like insects (mosquitoes are moving north now and bringing malaria with them).  But also famine or malnutrition, stigmatization that prevents access to care, and the simple deprivation and filth of poverty also encourage disease while loading people with what amounts to torture.

Erlich's crew in Greenland

At the eye doctor yesterday I was squinting my way through Gretel Erlich’s powerful and terrifying Harper’s magazine essay called “Rotten Ice,” meant to be a metaphor for the phenomenon of the melting of the ice cap of the planet.  The essay is taken from her book, "This Cold Heaven: Seven Seasons in Greenland."  The people in Greenland -- who exist on the narrowest of terms -- are being destroyed, one-by-one and as a culture.  

I drove to GF and back through the vast mono-crop landscape of wheat-raising on which several nations depend for their bread.  Only a few miles to the north on the higher land the growing season will sometimes be too short to ripen barley, which is tougher than wheat.  If one thinks about the ice-destruction in Greenland, the Irish potato famine, the Black Death in Europe, and the depopulation of the native peoples of North America, one can become very jumpy about the safety of these wheat crops, which are vulnerable to hail or even out-of-season snow, let alone some aberration of their genome or invading entity.

And yet “Green Land” was named that by a people who planted vineyards there in their time.  “A careful examination of the climate record reveals that Europe experienced a relative warm period known as the Medieval Warm Period (hereafter referred to as MWP) between the years 600 and 1150, cooling of the climate between the years 1150 and 1460, a brief warming between the years 1460 and 1560, followed by cooling known as the Little Ice Age (hereafter referred to as LIA) between the years 1560 and 1850.”

The point is well-made by Erlich that both the planet and people are flexible, responsive, adaptable, complex and always changing.  Whatever the cause, the glaciers are melting according to forces and currents that are complex and often unseen, like the warmer water that causes the glacier to melt from the bottom, to “rot” until one day the ice structure collapses.  What that means in terms of civilization can’t be known yet, but it will be painful, support chaos, and winnow down the human beings -- not through their genes but through their memes, their behaviors.

Yoruba trader

IMMOLATION

On "Game of Thrones" everyone loved the Blackwater Bay "wild fire" scene, 

so much like napalm.

The truth is that the professional fiction versions of immolations are much more chilling than the ones produced by some terrorist techie who doesn’t understand how to photograph fire.  Accidental immolations are often photographed these days but with someone’s smart phone or by a person with a decent camera who is blinking through tear gas and shoved hard by crowds or threatened by cops.  Anyway, it’s a well-known aesthetic principle that the most horrible stuff is that which is imagined or reflected in the faces of onlookers.  Take “Game of Thrones” -- the wild fire destroying ships and sending sailors in pieces flying everywhere -- is not as horrible as the charred hanging bodies of the farmer’s two little sons, killed to mislead the enemies of two little princes.  THAT’s horrible.  But the critics LOVED the explosion.

Bill Moyers’ reaction to outrage over the death of the Jordanian pilot was to show an American version of the same thing, except the American version was a youth unjustly accused a little over a century ago.  

http://billmoyers.com/2015/02/05/isis-brutality-burning-lynching/

“Jesse Washington was just one black man to die horribly at the hands of white death squads. Between 1882 and 1968 — 1968! — there were 4,743 recorded lynchings in the US. About a quarter of them were white people, many of whom had been killed for sympathizing with black folks.”  They tortured him for two hours, raising and lowering him over a fire.  Fantasy about sex was involved and they cut off his testicles.

In the Middle East and India it is COMMON to burn women alive to get rid of them or to make women in general realize they should be obedient or suffer.  A death by fire looks very bad because the muscles shriveling in the heat make the body writhe long after consciousness is gone.  And then there is the demon-black body.

People don’t need to be prevented from seeing such atrocities -- they love’em.  There’s a computer program that will let you seemingly set anything on fire.  People just like to pretend that they are shocked in real life, sometimes for political reasons, sometimes so their Mama won’t be faced with the reality of -- not the fire -- our own charred heart-corners.  Don’t forget I’ve done cruelty investigations.

The fire that sticks in my mind most vividly was in NW Portland, which is the warehouse district -- in those days deserted at night.  (Today there are a lot of galleries and so on, using the big abandoned spaces.)  I had been out very late -- like 2AM -- and was headed home when ahead in the intersection I saw a car, “totally engulfed” as they say.  Out there where street lights were dim and abandoned railway lines shone in the firelight, there was no sound.  I stopped in the middle of the road -- there were no other cars.  I finally deciphered that the burning car had crashed into a hydrant and bent it over, but it had not broken.  Next to it was a photographer with a big 4X5 camera on a massive tripod, calmly working away.  

I thought maybe it was a stunt or something for a movie, but then there would be a crew.  No other people were around.  There seemed to be no one in the car.  I walked over to the man with the camera,  “Is there anyone in the car?"  I didn’t break his concentration.  “Someone in the backseat,” he said in a monotone.  Suddenly the fire looked horrifying.  

Probably they had been drunk.  Probably the man had been driving, maybe his partner was a sexworker who had passed out.  I didn’t know that, except that the driver had left the scene which meant he was only saving himself.  Or maybe it was a woman. Then I heard sirens, got in my van and went home.  The police would only question me, suspect me, and I already felt guilty.  It was one of the rare occasions when I’d had a couple of drinks.  When I checked the papers all the rest of the week, there was nothing.  Probably the editor suppressed it.  Probably the photographer could only sell his photos to a tabloid.

When I was an animal control officer, the worst thing I ever saw was a puppy who tried to get into a garbage can that belonged to a Vietnam veteran who had rigged it with a napalm booby trap.  It took a day to find and catch the puppy, still alive though it was very badly burned.  We didn’t euthanize it right away because we photographed it oozing pus and blood, shaking, blind, ears and tail burned off, nearly unconscious.  We charged the guy who was damned lucky it was not a neighbor kid who got into his garbage, but I don’t recall that he was convicted or even taken to court.  Nothing in the paper.

In the Sixties the county sheriff decided he would discourage people from drinking and driving by creating a bulletin board display of wrecks.  One was a teenager still seated behind the wheel of his burned out pickup, himself charred and contracted.  We know what burned bodies look like because some prop man somewhere has studied them in order to create fiberglass replicas, maybe exaggerated a little bit.  Movie companies must have a whole storage unit devoted to imitation corpses.  Finally, the burned driver’s mother demanded that the photo be removed which the sheriff sheepishly did, at last realizing he was dealing with a human life connected to a lot of other human lives.

But someone, probably the Montana Highway Patrol, brought in a movie to show in the high school -- mangled bodies of people we didn’t know.  At one point we saw the body of an infant with tire tracks running across its crushed middle.  Everyone laughed.  It’s a way of handling it.  The hilarity and eroticism of the fragile human body.  I’d tell you not to read the book that makes a sexual event out of car crashes, but you’d run out and buy it.  The library probably won’t have it.  "Crash," is the title and I think it was also a movie.

We’re emotion-eaters, we crave intense emotion, and the way we are wired in our brains means that putting a man in a cage and burning him is not anything we can turn away from, though we might be grateful if it’s only a photographed version.  Imagined versions make our brains work at it, not leave it alone.  I'm still wondering decades later about that burning car, because brains are built to resolve ambiguity, but the ambiguity of what it feels like to burn to death can’t be resolved.

Chickens burned in Asia because of a avian flu plague.

A few years ago I blogged about a photo of chickens in Asia being burned in a big pile because they had or might have bird flu.  Some of the birds were still alive and there was a spectacular photo of a rooster escaping in flames.  I tried to relate it to the ballet of “The Firebird” and the legend of the Phoenix.

In the Taliban territories the old men try to forbid all pleasure because, like European versions of those types, they think that they can only control the people by constantly pounding on hell, apocalypse, judgment.  Fear. punishment, obedience.  They forbid music, kites and pigeons.  Homing pigeons are among the small but wonderful comforts of young men.  They don’t cost much, but they are beautiful, require skillful care, allow for competition and pride.  One can put a hutch on a roof and have an excuse for being up there with them, watching them tumble and slide across the sky and then come home.

So the old men, trying to control those youngsters, have been finding their pigeon hutches, jamming the birds into sacks and burning them in front of their keepers, then killing the keepers.  It’s the same as the hideous killing of a man’s family while he watches and then killing him.  Maybe he is grateful to die.  Maybe he flies with his loved ones to paradise.

But the old men have probably gone too far.  The killing of small, beautiful,  beloved and innocent birds might trigger refusal of a system so dependent on destruction.  We can get our minds around pigeons.  We care about birds more than about brides.