TRUTHFINDER WON'T TELL YOU THE WHOLE TRUTH

Oliver Sacks in early years

Oliver Sacks is one of my most beloved writers and certainly not mine alone.  Many love his books and did even before Robin Williams impersonated him in order to tell an early part of his story.  As more unfolded, we gaped at the photo of him on his motorcycle, looking very leather, and then again gasped at his exploits as a lifelong power swimmer.  

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/mar/26/bill-hayes-insomniac-city-my-life-with-oliver-sacks-new-york#img-4  Thus I was pleased to discover this lyrical, loving account of his most recent years before death.  He had not had a partner before Hayes and he needed one, as much to explain the world to him as to embrace him, which Hayes must have done both delicately and firmly.

Then I read a story about Bannon in VICE.  https://www.vice.com/en_ca/article/steve-bannons-sad-desperate-crusade  My Safari has suddenly gone prudish and refuses to open VICE (among other venues it disapproves of — their checks must have bounced), but I went to Foxfire.  It was worth it as John Saward’s corruscating analysis of Mr. Dark is both entertaining and valid.  Somehow one ends up sort of sympathetic with this resentful, vengeful man, but watch out when googling for Saward because there’s another author by that name who is pastoral, a married man with three daughters who got a special dispensation to become a Catholic priest, which is not granted to anyone like Bannon — nor probably not like the Saward who was published in VICE either.

The next item that popped up on my feed was from Truthfinder, a data base scraper that promises to tell you the real facts about your friends and neighbors and to find long-lost people in your life.  So I entered myself.  It consists entirely of legal records of offenses: arrests, defaults, demographic facts, divorce and marriage.  As you ask about your subject, the website records your own “facts” but provides no way to make corrections.  I’ll say right off the top that I have never used the pseudonym “Skrivner” and Scriver is my married name anyway.  

Yesterday I went to Cut Bank to do the laundry (write that down) and Carl Old Person was there to wash his car.  “Miss Strachan!” he exclaimed, surprised to see me.  He pronounced my maiden name properly.  He was in the Browning High School English classes I taught in the early Sixties, and I haven’t seen him since, but evidently I haven’t changed that much.  You would not find this information on Truthfinder, though the moment would tell you a lot more about me.  

I didn’t pay money to see what my crimes were.  There are two very old ones that might show up, but only one would be in Montana.  Both were speeding: five miles or so over the limit, both on gorgeous Sunday mornings with no traffic on my way to preach.  (Truthfinder doesn’t know that.)  There are no records in Truthfinder about my career as a sheriff’s deputy with the specialty of animal cases ranging from scraping up squashed pets to cautioning a motorcycle gang to stop chaining dobermans to their parked bikes.  I never did get a case of someone using a dog as a deadly weapon, but such cases exist.  I did get rabies shots.  None of this is in Truthfinder.

Nor am I anxious to be found by people I offended in those days in uniform.  I had guns pointed at me twice, but no actual shots.  Also one of the dark sides of the ministry is that people tend to project all sorts of things onto you, esp. if you’re female.  They range from the “Whore of Babylon” to “Mom”.  My years in the ministry do not show up on Truthfinder, nor do my academic degrees.  The most incendiary days of my life, shared with Bob Scriver as Blackfeet ceremonialists, brought me a recent raving comment on my blog, which I deleted unposted.  It was anonymous and evidently a reaction to a paper posted on Researchgate, an open academic online journal.  It did not use Blackfeet terms.

If you really want “truth”, I urge you to buy “Bronze Inside and Out,’ which is my biography/memoir of Bob Scriver.  One local reader was surprised that it had so much about me in it.  They don’t think women or authors really exist, I guess.  I should put them in touch with the local person who said, “I don’t know what you taught these kids, Mary, but they won’t forget you.”  Carl didn’t.

But the most obvious source of info about me is my blog:  “prairiemary.blogspot.com.”  I could never hope to have anyone write about me with the love Bill Hayes shows for Oliver Sacks, but anyway few people are as extraordinary as Sacks.  On the other hand, I have known — still know — people nearly that remarkable and love them intensely.  They don’t show up on Truthfinder, partly because some are indigenous and the website doesn’t compile reservation records — nor reserve records for that matter.  (Reserves are Canadian reservations and some of these people are Canadian.)  Some of my beloveds don’t commit traffic offences or anything else a web-crawler would pick up.

Ten years of daily thousand-word posts like these will tell you more about me that you probably would ever want to know, but you’re on your own when it comes figuring out the Truth in them.  Some of them are plainly labeled fiction, because I post short stories.  (Never poetry — I stash that unpublished.)  But I may have misremembered, may have plumb forgotten some of the story, might have written something that another witness would flatly contradict.  There’s a lot of controversy right now about what’s actually True anyway.

Recently I watched a remarkable film called “Match,” which is a story that reflects the consequences of getting DNA matches to discover relationships.  The idea is that Patrick Stewart (in QUITE a different role from StarTrek) is an old ballet teacher (very convincing, though he doesn’t dance) who is visited by a man and his wife because they think he is the father of the man from an encounter in youth that prevented the deceased mother of the man from having a career in dance.  The story goes along through reversals that change everything.  

In the process the real truthful moment is a short tour de force pas de deux between the old man and the wife, in which Stewart explains that knitting (which he does) and cunnilingus are similar.  (Don’t try to google this on Safari.)  It’s not the subject, but the open understanding between two dissimilar people that is quite wonderful.  A “Truth,” one might say, in an ultimate sense.

In these times, so much a fulfillment of Bannon’s vision of the world, one feels truth fleeing away from us.  But then while doing some mundane task, someone walks in the door and hands you a true moment from the past without so much as demanding a credit card.

PULLING DOWN THE TEMPLE

SAMPSON

This is a confused and scary time.  I mean, more than usual.  There are many theories flying around out there.  Following are the things I think about, often statements by various experts and pundits.

Trump IS the Third Party we keep trying to start.  He only used the Republican machinery as a platform, but doesn’t fit into either of our binary political philosophies because he represents a true paradigm shift, one that happened without us realizing, but which is entrenched and strong.  It is advertising/marketing based.  He simply sold us himself.  Now we have buyer’s remorse.  Especially the Republicans.

We have left the Enlightenment and entered the Marketing world.  

Trump is not a rich man.  His wealth is a fantasy based on selling his name, which is a major source of his income.  His investments depend upon wealth and leisure (casinos, luxury hotels, and golf courses) and admiration of their prestige, which somehow persists in spite of the failures of his individual businesses.  As he sinks deeper into his dementia, his name becomes more valueless.  Now we hear stories about people taking the name off buildings to avoid stigma and possibly physical attack as people become literally dis-illusioned.  He will die impoverished, because his wealth is all moonbeams.  Investigators who have penetrated his secrecy confirm this.

The core of the shift to Trumpish values is also the core of the middle class: shop-owners, importers, inventors, and manufacturers who managed to break the tyranny of those who “own” land and those who are employed to do the work of it, which is the feudal system.  Trump’s idea of how rich people live is laughably nouveau riche, unsophisticated, crass and ugly.  Victorian, African potentate, a child’s idea of palaces.

War is bad for trade.  War is avoided by making written rules, treaties, agreements, and so on.  This gives enormous importance to writing, which leads to lawyers and judges because so much writing is clumsy, impenetrable, or outmoded.  That includes our founding documents, which grew out of the founding documents of the British Empire.  Which came in part from the great importance attributed to the Holy Bible, as though it were written by a deity.  In fact, the Bible is a collection of ancient fragments, the "New" part of it curated in 325 AD by the Council of Nicaea, a committee of old men invested in institutions.  This means it is a masterpiece of ambiguity which can be used to suit the purposes of institutions.

One could say that the church led the way into mercantilism when it began to sell indulgences and flatter kings in order to acquire land.  The law preventing marriage was not about sex — it was to prevent clergy from using their power to create dynasties of descendants.  (Just as Trump is trying to do.)  The feudal system IMHO is biological, land-based, and rooted in human fertility.  (Which connects to the feverish protection of human embryos — not infants.)  It's a default.

So, to review, by moving to the middle class that thrives between national-dimension privileged power and persisting abject wage-slave peonage, we use writing to evade war because war is bad for business.  This means a lot of people need to learn to read and write, and then the majority of people need to honor documents.  (We are not meeting these needs.) When business becomes paralyzed by the kudzu of venture capitalism (interest rates, borrowing as the norm, criminalization of debts, stock market derivatives) then war of some kind becomes inevitable as a way of clearing the deck.  

The covert Third Party of the United States and most of the other European countries is simply Business.  What doesn’t sell, doesn’t matter.  All this scolding about tariffs is an attempt to restore what ecologies once provided: limits, boundaries, things that can be bought for little money in one place and then sold for a lot of money elsewhere.  All this sounds rational and sensible to most people.  If the leadership stays within the assumption, they can rule.  But demand shifts and so does supply.

The trouble with the Third Party of Mercantilism is that it is not facing the Malthusian fact that there are simply too many people.  Not just too many people in one country rather than another, which causes people to migrate, but a population beyond the carrying capacity of the planet.  It becomes a little more clear all the time that this explosion of humans is going to lead to devastation when pollution, infection, and famine of various kinds end fertility.  (It’s not just a matter of amounts of food but also foods that are loaded with molecules like sugar.)  Proportions within populations also matter.  The mass elimination of females in China means there are unmarried soldiers leaning against the wall, waiting for something to happen.  Becoming more willing to MAKE something happen.  This is not intentional but it is probably inevitable, a consequence almost mechanical.

When Steve Bannnon, Trump’s covert self, says he wants to destroy the standing order, he is saying he is willing to bring on the apocalypse because think of the spending!  Think of the money in rebuilding!  (A major part of the USA’s gross national product is always responding to catastrophes like New Orleans.)  Think of the chance to get on the Security Council and learn all the nation's vital secrets!

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/08/22/steve-bannon-trump-s-top-guy-told-me-he-was-a-leninist.html

“Lenin,” he [Bannon] answered, “wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.”  Sounds like Osama bin Laden to me.  Or maybe Sampson pulling down the temple.  No one pays attention.  Picture Bannon leaning on the counter by the light of neon advertising while the bartender considers whether he ought to cut him off.  It’s not hard.  We all know morose old men who feel passed by, who wear jeans to the Oval Office and don’t bother to shave — as though they were still in college.  

Most don’t find a power puppet to market.  Narcissism becomes relevant.  It’s only a concept, of course, and has somewhat drifted from the original Freudian/Greek myth of the beautiful boy who loves his water-reflected image so much that he falls in and drowns.  (That’s the state of the Democrats these days.)  When I was working on the concept in the early 2000’s, it was much simpler than it is now.  Building on the original idea of being self-centered, we’ve expanded to “grandiose narcissism”, “toxic narcissism,” “malevolent narcissism.”  I haven’t heard much about “benign narcissism”.  But there is now talk about “inverted narcissism” which is about people obsessed with having been damaged by narcissists.  Everyone is building sub-categories out of the original category named for one pretty boy.

But that’s another post.