CONTROL-FREAKING AMERICA

The computer and internet have transformed governance into something more like an international corporation than it has ever been.  But we don’t LIKE that.  Not even when the corporations do it.  Here’s a short list:

1.  Counting people and sorting them according to secret algorithms determined by the government so that no one is ever an individual and no voice is heard without enough people agreeing to affect major votes.

2.  No matter how carefully people’s incomes are monitored for taxes, there are always loopholes and secret exemptions that can be controlled by the simple change of codes and algorithms, but only certain people (rich) know what they are.

3.  People can no longer “move away.”  No travel by mass transit goes unmonitored, not just with passports and tickets, but also with no-fly lists so coarse they can’t really pick up the “bad” people who are the justification.  Constant video monitoring only works with densely populated places and always has blind spots.

4.  People are no longer anonymous.  Fingerprints, genome (not just one’s own but those of the whole family as well as your pets), dental records, serial numbers on implants from boobs to hips, face-matches, on-line public records of relationships, birth dates, and social security numbers (which were NEVER supposed to be used for identification), are only a few ways of tracking individuals.  It’s a constant preoccupation of CSI shows.

Every boundary from the 49th parallel to highway checkpoints and enrollment in kindergarten is recorded in giant databases that can be “cracked” by hackers, not necessarily for admirable purposes.  

Every order for books or cat food is noted.  I looked for new house slippers and was deluged with ads for slippers — along with porn (the traditional sex kind) of people doing the nasty while wearing slippers.  People note strange lit sky-fliers in Montana:  the drones are here.  Not the gun-ships but the snoops, too small to shoot.  The defense?  Trained eagles that knock them out of the sky.  Of course, you need government permission to train or even own an eagle.  (There are a few wild eagles that simply don’t like drones.)

No one tracks virtues.  As far as I know, no church turns in lists of their members, even the denominations that have boundaries.  (UU’s and Mormons claim everyone they think reflects well on them, even if they’re dead, and dissenters may not share the opinions.)  Most churches are semi-public so anyone can attend.  Fuzzy edges are dangerous.  This paragraph assumes there IS such a thing as virtue.  I find it even more difficult to define than Sin or Evil.

Neoliberals are self-defined as people who want to get rid of laws and regulations.  It cramps their style and reveals their marketing secret strategies.  They feel that the money for all those ports of entry, inspectors, monitors, enforcers, paper pushers is just wasted.  Of course, anyone who offers to reduce taxes is going to be popular.  At least among those who haven’t found a way to escape paying them in the first place.  (I escape by being too poor.)

The effective collaborator and enabler of all the control freaks is print:  the writing and interpreting of written laws, regulations, standards, and contracts.  I used to have the task of maintaining the Standard Code for the City of Portland for one department of the Bureau of Buildings.  Weekly I took a handful of pre-punched thin paper with fine print on it, looked for the code it was replacing, and inserted the new pages, usually more of them going in than coming out.  There were four BIG binders of this stuff, all numbered and so on.  No one had time to sit around reading the whole thing, much less keep up with the new inserts even if they knew which ones they were.

One of the crucial elements of this stuff was definitions:  what IS a citizen?  What IS a juvenile?  What IS grievous harm?  What IS insanity?  Isn’t it code so intricate and variable that no one knows it?

No matter how carefully written and interpreted, there were always clusters of lawyers challenging laws on behalf of their clients who couldn’t seem to get their ability to go underground to work.  Or had to pay an even higher tax to extortionists who guarded that strategy.

One of the smart insights into writing a law is to never write a law that can’t be enforced.  That means write it so you can tell what’s in and what’s out of the intention of the law.  (Big problem when it comes to militia and the right to bear arms.  Or even when defining religion.)  

You can’t enforce a law that interferes with with a lot of people’s desires:  That includes alcohol, hard drugs, smoking, and trafficking, whether children and women for sexual use or anyone for labor, whether in a mine, a field or a carpet factory.  They’ll find a way — probably bribery or secrecy.

BUT you can outlaw behavior by culture pressure.  When my family used to drive cross-country, the highways were white with trash.  My mother’s rule-of thumb was that anything organic could be thrown out the window, but nothing that could set a fire or puncture a tire.  Later she concluded that NOTHING could go out the window.  The change came from public notices and opinions.

For a while you were more likely to be chided for littering than for sleeping on the sidewalk.  Not anymore.  The culture shifted to resist scary signs of a failed economy, failed families, failed support for children, because the culture shifted to value greed.  In the Fifties a family was thriving if they owned a TV set.  Now it takes a huge surround-sound screen and a computer in every bedroom.  (Which presents a new monitoring and enforcing problem.)

We have not gone deep enough or wisely enough into the values that can guide us through our widening and multiple world.  Even people who have valuable things to say rarely think about any circle except their own, and that ignoring non-human living beings and even landscapes.  

One of the nastiest schisms is between the governing classes in cities and on the coasts, creating laws and practices that do not at all fit the rest of us.  The biggest trouble with their assumptions is that they don’t know they ARE assumptions.  When I write about Blackfeet, the automatic tags I get are travel and history, even though I’m writing about a real and dynamic population, my neighbors, whose history I have shared for half a century.

PORT OF ENTRY TO TROUBLE

Just last night I finally looked to see what the furor over the Panama Papers was about.  It turned out to be the same thing as has been happening a lot: the turning out to the public light of matters hidden in the tangle of communication/
regulation that surrounds the fungibility of money.  “Fungibility” means that it can be transformed into other entities without losing value — “money-laundering,” we say.  Hidden profits.  

It seems most of the “civilized” conventions we have are now “pot-bound” as though the container is too small for the contained.  That is, our education system, our money handling, our governmental hierarchy, our health provisions and a lot of other functions have replicated and duplicated and elaborated and corrupted to the point where they do as much damage as good.  Panama Papers offers examples of how loopholes in the handling and “ownership” of money is disguised, misrepresented, and moved off-shore to avoid taxes and any other kind of accountability.

But greed works in both directions.  Around here, close to the 49th parallel, we are aware of a little feature called “asset forfeiture.”  The basic idea is that if you are a criminal or using your property for felonious activity, the government enforcing agent can take your property.  That is, cross the border with a marijuana roach or even little green flakes floating around in your nice car and you might possibly lose it for transporting drugs, even before going to trial or in spite of being found innocent.  

I’m going to quote Fenster, an on-line guy of considerable intelligence and experience:  “But the moral hazard is serious enough that police often take assets when no criminal action has been shown to have occurred, or if the owner of the asset was not aware of the crime.  Here's a fun John Oliver rant.   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kEpZWGgJks on it.  Reform efforts are underway--slowly, slowly considering the opposition of law enforcement, which appears to now be addicted.”

Sweetgrass Port of Entry (USA side)

The Canadian side is called Coutts.

If you’re planning to cross the border this summer, best to stop and vacuum the car thoroughly before going to the Port of Entry.  We hear a lot of stories of high-end cars being impounded never to be seen again.  If you can, watch while your car is searched.  It's easy to plant a little something. 

I know a couple who were stripped of all their assets which were in the form of furs and hides coming back from Alaska because the man’s business was creating authentic reproductions of artifacts.  He was white and would have found little sympathy from tribal people.  The US border claimed they found eagle feathers and took everything, both the finished objects of considerable value (reproduction recurved bow made authentically from mountain sheep horns legally taken) and the other materials.  The couple pursued legal redress for years with no success.  The more spectacular creations were reported to have been sighted on the walls of the highest authority’s office.

Chief Mountain Port of Entry

Same name both sides, closed in winter.

Prevention is always better than regret.  As the John Oliver story points out, one can be considered a criminal simply for having large amounts of cash, lovely fungible cash, just in a car, not necessarily hidden or contaminated with cocaine.  No need to cross the border, just make the mistake of speeding.

So here’s Fenster’s proposal for a better way to handle impounded cash.

"If it is currency burn it, at least any amount above and beyond administrative overhead for managing the asset forfeiture process.

"Start with a distinction between a hard asset, like a car and a house, and currency.  The former is real.  The latter is not.  Currency is in fact nothing other than a convention we have established such that the rightful owner can store value for the acquisition of real things at a later date.  It is a shared symbol, and has legitimacy not only out of habit but out of the shared belief that the owner of the symbol has undertaken legal action, like labor, that entitles that person to store value until a later date when a real asset or real services may be obtained.

"It is for the latter reason--the legitimacy of ownership of a claim on future resources--that we deny lawbreakers their ill-gotten gains.  But what then entitles the authorities to gain access to the symbolic shared value of the currency seized?  Should it not just be destroyed?  Nothing of real value will be destroyed in the process.  The only thing that will go up in smoke is paper.  And the only real world effect would be that the authorities would not be able to avail themselves of what amounts to free assets and services.

"So I can see no conceptual justification for the transfer of symbolic assets generated in illicit ways to allow for free purchase of goods and services.  Nothing of value is destroyed in the destruction of that currency--it is only the free purchase of goods and services later that is halted.  And beyond the conceptual justification is a practical one too: the complete elimination of the moral hazard of financial incentive. I daresay that when the financial incentive is gone the temptation to what amounts to theft will be greatly diminished."

Clearly, cash is not the advantage it once was (acceptability everywhere, lightweight in comparison to coin, easy exchange with another country’s cash.)  One should explore other ways of carrying value during travel.  Even traveler’s checks are suspect now, and credit cards have various drawbacks, including theft, but I haven’t heard of any law enforcement agencies impounding credit cards.

That doesn’t help the diverting of vehicles.  Maybe it is the insurance companies who will ultimately deal with this, which means more paperwork and more points of argument.  

Yesterday I was in Shelby, a border-crossing town and inter-modal exchange point: that is, railroad and truck handling of those shipping containers big enough to use for a house.  (There’s no water access for ships and therefore no crane loading.)  But in the big truck stop service station (attached to a casino as most everything is in Montana now) there is a separate cashier for trucks taking on gasoline which can be a purchase in triple digits.  

It’s separate because it has many more double-checks: driver ID, truck ID, a phone call to the company represented, and database access for recent alerts.  In fact, for my small purchase (I buy gas in $10 increments) I had to supply my driver’s license, add my physical address to my check.  I don’t print my physical address so that people can’t connect my checkbook to where I live — same with the driver’s license.  (Montana driver’s licenses are based on birthdates, which the police and now most medical contexts use as ID.  Some people put their SSI number on their checks, but not me.)  

In Montana there is the possibility of an exemption to the formula, which I use, even though it's sort of silly that the alternative was supplied because some here still think SSI numbers are the Mark of Cain, punishment for killing Abel.  Common sense didn't work but mythology did.

I became wary of these ID numbers when I was an AC officer for the Multnomah Country sheriff.  The hermeneutics of suspicion!  It occurs to me that I’ve never really looked around to see where the security cameras are at the truck stop, not that I have any need to, but I watch British and Canadian crime shows and CCTV even in remote Wales are often the key to something.

When Bob Scriver became a Justice of the Peace, the highway patrol had at least one officer who always wrote on the back of the ticket what he thought the fine should be.  Bob ignored it on grounds that HE was the judge, specifically to provide a second opinion of both sides of the situation, and he would not be displaced by the officer, a check against officer misconduct or situational prejudice.  (Bad hair day.)  "If you set the fine, there's no need for a judge," said Bob.

"Well, that's right!" fumed the officer.  "I'M the law!"  In those days the officer sometimes set the fine and collected it on the spot.  Shortly after that a second Justice of the Peace was elected for this small town.  He was a man from the outside who took his coffee with the highway patrol and didn’t much like Indians.

Law enforcement in most places is long stretches of boredom broken by occasional incidents full of adrenaline and possibly injury or death.  Most of it isn’t very glamorous and people aren’t necessarily grateful.  To sit with one’s donut, pondering, a napkin handy for making little equations, is to tempt the devil to offer schemes.  This is aside from anything systemic like what is revealed by the Panama Papers.  When the larger culture is greed-based, marriages have been replaced by hookups, and courts are constantly struggling to know what to do with abused kids beyond enforcing child-support, there are traps everywhere.  The Port of Entry to the traps is wide open.

THE WOMAN WITH ROSY CHEEKS AND ITCHY EYES

Not long ago I visited my eye doctor. I like him much better than the one who preceded him, though that doctor had a reputation as a miracle worker when it came to cataract surgery. I complained to that doc and also to the present one about my eyes being bloodshot, itchy, and “tired.” I thought it was from being on the computer so much. Last summer my eyes were such a bother that I went back on an emergency basis. That time the farmers were burning fields and I decided that was the problem.

I worried that I might have damage from my diabetes, because I slip off my compliance regime sometimes. I’m having increasing trouble with forgetfulness and bad temper. It’s a symptom of age. I’m 76. But also I’m reading about atrial fibrillation — arrhythmia of the heart and how it can make the blood turbulent enough to throw off tiny clots. The clots could mimic transient ischemic attacks, or maybe they ARE transient ischemic attacks, which are little pinches in brain function. I had interpreted my diaphragm as fluttering. This has nothing direct to do with my eyes, but if I’m too forgetful to take my pills in spite of sticky notes here and there, then the eyes suffer. It’s the beginning of the final unraveling.

Prince Harry of England -- Rosecea?

The anger comes from impatience but also from losing my temper over the doctor situation, even with my well-liked eye doc. More and more a visit means some teenager goes down a checklist and not much more. Then at the end of the last examination, the Doc asked if the pink cheeks and scaliness in one spot might be rosacea. Sure, it is. I know the diagnosis because a few years ago the GF Clinic’s one-time dermatologist diagnosed it, but he didn’t explain or prescribe.  Never mentioned eyes.  He was a very weird bald guy who left in months because patients complained. I’m beginning to suspect that Montana is a dumping ground or refuge for docs who’ve been in trouble. Rosacea is so obvious that even a teenager could see it.

My cousin also has pink cheeks — we’re Scots and it’s hereditary in part, though no one really understands rosacea. In all the checkups I’ve had, including the one that was double-teamed Physician Assistants, billed as a “free” Medicare checkup (which it wasn’t because I had to pay for lab tests — not announced in advance), neither really looked at my face. They just looked at the lab printouts, which they didn’t have during the physical exam. They never met my eyes.

The treatment for ocular rosacea is hot washcloth compresses with baby shampoo washing immediately afterwards. But the docs have always acted like tap water would kill me. I’m allergic to one of the eye exam chemicals and keep my eyes from swelling shut by splashing them with tap water, but they insist on using squeeze bottles of sterile saline — and billing me, no doubt. (There’s also an over-the-counter equivalent for rosacea washes.) It never quite does the job, but instead of arguing, I just go down the hall afterwards and wash my eyes in the bathroom. (It’s Unisex, incidentally, and so is the one in the supermarket.) But what do street people do?

Anyway, I didn’t know that rosacea affects eyes until the doc told me and he simply pressed me to try the new dermatologist at the clinic. He didn’t explain in detail. Thinking it was like the brilliant idea of selling glasses in spite of the new cheap internet competition from China, and also because my insurance now requires a co-pay of $45 which would buy three cases of cat food, I put off the idea of making an appointment. Even with low cost gas, it’s a long drive to Great Falls and the ancient pickup makes funny noises.

It's got Clinton by the nose.

Yesterday I was trying to restore order around here and realized I should learn more about rosacea, so I googled. Holy catfish. This is serious. In the advanced stages it’s like Bob Scriver’s herpes keratitis in 1962 that just about blinded him and pulled us into a close relationship very quickly because he really needed help. The treatment for ocular rosacea is very simple in the beginning: using a warm compress to loosen whatever is crusted on the eyes and then using baby shampoo to wash the outsides thoroughly. Artificial tears up to four times a day. As things get worse, the tear ducts might be blocked to divert the tears across the eyeball. The same meds that miraculously saved Bob’s eyes is used for advanced rosacea and the often accompanying eyelid inflammation: dioxiuridine.

If the rosacea increases and maybe leads to the inflammation of the eyelids (called blepharitis — I knew “itis” means inflammation but not that my eyelids were “blephs”), then things get more serious. Around here eyes suffer already because of bright prairie light with a high ultraviolet component and the wind carrying particles. Maybe we should all wear goggles. The Blackfeet at one time early in the 20th century had a terrible plague of trachoma, which is a chlamydia infection of the eyelids, rather easily cured if you know what it is and what to do. But people did NOT know what to do and there was a lot of blindness. Other tribes called them the “one-eyed people.”

It was the notorious Doug Gold who had an eye doc friend back in Pennsylvania and brought him to the rez. The doc diagnosed the problem, taught the Golds and a few other responsible men how to diagnose and treat it, and resolved the epidemic. What would they have done about ocular rosacea or were they genetically immune? Do trading posts carry baby shampoo?

Folks love villains and manipulate information in order to control the public reputation of their competitors so that everyone agrees with them. A person with the prominence and control of a doctor is always vulnerable to rumour and accusation. In the early days Doug himself was considered absent-minded, the proverbial professor, but his father James Gold, the Presbyterian missionary in Browning in those days, struggled hard with depression and finally had to be sent to Warm Springs.

So far, attacking Doug, who started the school system in Browning, is based on his mistaking culture for intelligence and drawing the conclusion that tribal people were genetically dumb, accepted wisdom in those times. If one culture accrues information and then tests another culture on their knowledge of it, naturally the second culture (which has its own information and world view) will not score well. Yet people cannot get it through their heads that an IQ test only measures how well one does on IQ tests, all about things valued by people who design IQ tests. They are PRINT culture, never ORAL culture. The more assimilated the Blackfeet become, the better they do on the tests.

If a doc is a little overambitious, a little careless, a little pressed for time, the consequences might be pretty serious. But it begins to look as though the culture of many doctors has left idealism behind and gone to greed. How do we pick our way through the problem? Since public perception always has a political element and is rarely self-correcting, any dynamic of suspicion and resentment can be exploited. Reputation counts large. GF Clinic needs to think about theirs. By withdrawing proper support staff from their doctors and adding boutique profit-makers, they are diminishing their professional standards.

I AM print cultured. I’m also hip to journalistic sensationalism about greedy doctors and the rather scandalous manner in which they have delegated their management and ethical self-policing to managers expected only to increase profit. I can defend myself in part through this mechanism of the internet, but also I’m old enough to remember doctors who used to take my hands, look into my face, and try to get a sense of who I am. It’s not impossible, even now. I recently saw a vid of a doc gently interviewing a squirming pre-adolescent boy who had been living on the street, doing sexwork. It was quiet, respectful, and revealing — even healing. That man was a true doctor.

NAPI'S FINE HOUSE

When a Blackfeet has ideas about writing a book, which they have no doubt will be published and earn lots of money, they almost invariably say they’re going to write the true version of the Napi stories, which they learned from their grandparent (usually about my age by now).  Though the stories were originally oral, there must be a dozen versions of printed Blackfeet Napi stories out there floating around, not counting other tribes. Why add to the pile?   When I ask these would-be authorities, they just look confused.  In their minds it is clear that a book about Blackfeet should have Napi stories in it, that there are definitive versions that are more valuable than the others, and that everyone in the greater world will fall on them with great delight and tons of money.  (They have not gotten the news about the collapse of the publishing industry, but that’s beside the point.)

If you speak to a white person over sixty about a book about Blackfeet, their minds will turn to James Willard Schultz -- dramatic horseback adventures of hunting and war.  If the white person is a little younger, the book will be about post-colonial misery and injustice: alcoholism, lousy housing, drugs, broken families.   If the white person is female, it will be about a cross-race romance.  Everyone thinks of their little sub-category as representing the whole.  They never question this, never investigate, and even if they come to the rez, they will see it on those terms.

Star Boy

Let’s go back to Napi stories.  The anthropologists like Wissler, Ewers or Kehoe had a great interest in them and scientists recorded them as accurately as they could in the early days of contact, hoping to understand the culture better.  Anyway, in those days it was salvage anthropology: save what they could.  At the same time the missionaries were looking for equivalents to the Christian stories so they could say, “You see?  These are universal elements.”  So Starboy or Blood Clot Boy became versions of Jesus.  And there WERE correlations, but they became an argument something like genetic purity: kill all the buffalo that have domestic cow genes.  (An old Aryan idea: variation as pollution.)  

The general public saw Napi stories as more like Aesop fables or the Greek myths.  Entertaining.  Suitable for children.  (Which they were, since they were meant to socialize the tribal children with tribal values like generosity, courage, and willingness to experiment.)  But trivial, non-threatening.  So James Willard Schultz, Frank Bird Linderman, George Bird Grinnell, the Demings, Walter McClintock did pretty well selling the stories.  None were Blackfeet.  None got rich.

In the Sixties local people began to pick up the idea of Napi, Natoosi (Sun), and others.  For instance, Napi's Lookout; The Story of Willow Rounds by Dorothy M. Hamaker (1964)  (A white rancher’s wife.)  And not long after that the Blackfeet themselves were chiming in.  Percy Bullchild’s “The Sun Came Down,” was commercially successful.  

Napi and the Bullberries (The Indian Reading Series Stories and Legends of the Northwest, Level II Book 17) was by Joan Kennerly, Carmen Marceau, Doris Old Person and June Tatsey (1978)  (Four Blackfeet sisters, “the Bullshoe girls,” who were all involved with education.)   Darnell Doore  (Rides at the Door) (1979)  Blackfeet Heritage Program, Browning Public Schools, put another turn on the wheel.  There are others, I’m sure.

Loki

Brer Rabbit

Napi is a trickster figure and a universal in stories around the planet.  Here he’s Brer Rabbit and there he’s Loki.  He’s the guy that thinks he’s so smart, but gets carried away.  On the other hand, because he’ll try anything, he’s creative and makes contributions. 

A few years after I left the reservation for a while, I earned a degree from the University of Chicago Divinity School with a focus on anthropology.  There I learned about revising sacred stories or writing parallel new ones in order to make a point. 

Windigo

In part I learned this in a dark way from a student who combined the Baker Massacre with Dracula, a figure from European vampire lore, very much like the cannibal figure of the Windigo, the woodland tribes’ starvation horror figure.  (There’s a modern movie version spelled “Wendigo.”)  On the other hand I tried playing “what if” with traditional teaching stories of the Gospels.  Sometimes this was pretty enlightening.  What if Jesus had turned all the wine at the wedding party into water instead of the other way around?

What Napi story might I invent for the situation of today’s Blackfeet?  I’ll give it a try.

______________

Napi’s neighbor, Striped Skunk, was experimenting with the white man’s way of building a house.  First he wove one of grass, but the wind soon got rid of that.  So the next one was made of logs, which stayed and looked good.  

Napi was jealous, but he didn’t get upset until he looked over one day and saw that Striped Skunk even had lights on in his cabin.  How did he manage that?   

When he went over and demanded to know the secret, Striped Skunk showed him that he had captured a Farting Horse, which emitted a gas from under his tail that could be set on fire, making a pretty good light.  It was warm, too, which is a big advantage in a prairie winter.  So Napi went over one night and stole the Farting Horse.  

Indeed, the gas burned bright and warm, but Napi kept Farting Horse picketed next to his lodge so it wouldn’t run away.  Pretty soon the horse had eaten everything nearby and stopped farting.  This made Napi very indignant and he decided to find out where in the horse the farts were coming from, so he cut the horse open.  It didn’t work.  No clue.  

Napi was pretty sure the horse was getting something from the ground -- it was always going along in the grass with its nose down.  So he went to look for whatever it was.  All he found was horse dung, which would burn, but nothing like farts.  However, he did find a lot of shiny black rock, something like obsidian.  Thinking about Striped Skunk’s log cabin, he decided he would make a house of this black rock, which would be very beautiful and strong.  So he did.  In it he burned buffalo chips and horse dung, because there was never enough wood on the high hilltops where he liked to live because of the view which made him feel important.

Then came spring and the thunderstorms.  Lightning struck everywhere.  Striped Skunk was always careful to open his Pipe Bundle at that time and to give away what he could to his family and friends.  One day in spite of this his cabin was struck by lightning and would have burned but all his friends and neighbors came quickly and put the fire out.

Napi’s lookout house up there so high was also struck by lightning, but he had thought,  “Ha!  Nothing will happen to me!  I don’t need to do any ceremonies because this house is made of stone.”  Alas, it turned out that the black shiny stone was coal and it burned very well.  The tribe tried to get up there to help, but it took a long time to climb such steep slopes and the house burned completely.  Napi spent the rainy season huddled in front of his smoking, smelly fire of dung.  He couldn't even afford a canvas lodge.

________

I tried to get oil into this story but failed.  Maybe you can do it.  This is a creative story -- anyone can add to it or change it.  Just like life, especially tribal life.  I don’t recommend this music, but it IS very windigo.  Maybe it is sound from a windigo who thought he could eat oil. Or was that drinking frakking liquid?  http://tiktik.bandcamp.com/album/windigo-psychosis