from "PRAIRIE GLADIATORS", an unwritten book.

The little county seat in a big wide prairie state was supposed to have been a refuge, a safe American place where the people were white but left the rez people next to them alone except for private suspicion and blame which they never admitted and which was often shared by enrolled rez people.  More often by those who just missed being enrolled, but couldn't quite pass as white.  They could have in the city but weren't quite brave enough to go there.  

Her illusion of safety was challenged at the first orientation for new teachers by the administrators, who were clearly football coaches in a previous life and wished they still were.  But her eyes weren't really that opened until the kids came back.  They weren't kids.

Stratified by the occupations and wealth of their parents, these adolescents had already been veterans of the adult world for many years, since they first realized how easy it was to access booze, cigarettes, and drugs and how reluctant all the grownups were to admit that it happened, that their kids had been corrupted since they got to junior high.  If you called that corruption -- maybe it was enlightenment.  They understood both gamification and commodification.

But it wasn't until after Halloween -- when there were some mysterious deaths that the law couldn't or wouldn't address -- that her willingness -- indeed, urging -- to let the kids, hardened and cynical as they were (and some were not) begin to talk.  Partly it was national mass shootings by what the media called "white supremicists" that gave her boldest class permission to talk.  They were very impatient with her for not understanding them.  "You don't know anything," they said.

This was a refrain in the town and the school:  "We are the ones who KNOW and you don't know anything so you should listen to us."  But in fact, what they meant was "we live this status quo and you're not going to mess it up for us."  It struck her as more biological than sociological.  It was at a very basic level, like gut-level, and was not open to any kind of discussion or argument.  Yet it worried them -- there might be something they had missed.

But she didn't interfere with all that.  She was beginning to realize she might not be able to stay but it was going to be very difficult to leave.  She thought of moving to the rez, only a few miles, but they were infected with the same set of beliefs.  It was no longer possible for a white person to live there because the usual malcontents were now reinforced by dogma from the Algerian French resistance, only half digested.  At least these village whites hadn't really figured out such a movement existed.  They didn't like foreign, even in books.

"Why don't they ask US why these losers shoot people at these fancy little events like concerts and restaurants and upscale churches where everyone goes all dressed up to pray for themselves?  We never have those kinds of fancy things to do."

"No, they don't even try to talk to the shooters -- they just drop them in their tracks."

"Well, when you're shooting an assault rifle, people tend not to talk to you because you're already converted to red mush on the pavement and all the mismatched shoes people fell out of are piled up to one side."

"Yeah, and then they go to your house and talk to your parents, if they can find them, and make big theories about this whole thing that happens again and again.  They assume that they can figure it out, that they KNOW, but they don't.  They just look in front of a camera and read what the teleprompter says."

The force and venom of their talk was impressive.  It was entirely beyond anything her generation would produce at that age.  They were busy worrying about being bombed to radioactive dust by enemies we didn't know at all, but they weren't individuals -- they were whole foreign nations.  Big shots then pointed out that we were headed for this social chaos in this century, quite simply because of economics that had nothing to do with hatred.  Simply, the jobs would be obsolete and food would be empty.  The social connections in communities, whether churches or bowling leagues, would be broken by the internet and television.  None would be replaced by new institutions, except for mega-corporations trying to convert everything into automation to get rid of people.  Our German-originated lockstep industrial school systems would downgrade and explode into private schools for those who could afford them.

"Yeah, your generation just shot the President and Martin Luther King, Jr. and a lot of people of color."

The experts didn't foresee the sexual revolution that followed effective birth control, or DNA that could prove fatherhood to make them pay, or the ability to move a person from one sex to the other, and that all this would confuse even the Pope.  The people of the past thought in terms of economics, not being able to afford babies and so aborting them as soon as they were detected.  They had discarded the precepts of conventions, like family, but kept the longing, the sentimentality.

They simply did not expect that people would be so ignorant of what had changed, so innocently thinking the clock and calendar could be turned back to some mythical time based on oppression and suffering, but just not theirs, which made it all right.

Then the discussion fell apart.  They were young after all and couldn't sustain a line of thought or organize evidence.  They just exploded with emotion, like mass shooters, settling for the intensity of a moment.

When she began to write, decades later, the fall of the Roman Empire was a popular topic and many people had opinions about why it happened.  Maybe it was just worn out.  Maybe "empire" wasn't the way to go.  Maybe handsome gladiators fighting tigers in the coliseum was not equivalent to daily bread after all.  She remembered the twisted face of a boy who didn't say much.  "You can't save us," he sneered.  "You won't even try.  You care nothing about us, just like our parents."

A LITTLE GUN NOSTALGIA

The most closely controlled guns in America are military guns.  We don’t think of that.  Both my brothers were Marines and earned Marksman medals.  They would confirm this.  Yet in the Forties we all played guns, saw guns shoot people, owned guns and shot guns from an early age, beginning with “Daisy Mae”, the .bb gun sponsored by Red Ryder. (Now you can buy them in pink online.  In my day girls weren’t supposed to shoot guns.)  My brothers were not drafted — they enlisted during the draft times.

We had long guns for hunting and my mother kept a handgun in her nightstand because my father traveled for a living.  Even as taken-for-granted as all this, boot camp gun training was a whole different level.  Far from buying a big gun at Walmart and shooting up people a week later with no practice — using ammo that explodes human organs and only hits targets who are huddled or frozen, and then only spray-style like mafia on television shows — the military will impress upon the soldier that a gun is only as powerful as the person operating it.  He will be tested, inspected, and qualified on a gun he is assigned and expected to master.

One dis-assembles it, cleans it, reassembles it, so many times that it is an extension of the person so completely that it is likely to be called by a human name, usually female.  It is sighted in, oiled, stored safely.  The operator is calm, steady, focused and has practiced shooting more times than a ghetto kid practises making baskets on a community court in summer.  Both brain and muscles are educated.

Even so, I knew a man who carried all his life the burden of killing in error. He was guarding a perimeter at boot camp when a young man made a run to desert.  The sergeant yelled at my friend to shoot him, saying if he didn’t, he would shoot my friend.  Aiming at the boy’s legs, as he had taught and intended, he was devastated when the boy dived forward so that the bullet severed his spine, killing him.  My friend was not blamed nor prosecuted — just mustered out quietly and warned to tell no one.  Even with precautions, training, skill, and intentions, bad things happen.  

A good friend was shot by his three-year-old when the father turned away for a moment.  The gun was on the coffee table and the toddler had watched his dad sighting it around the room.  His baby hands were barely strong enough to pull the trigger while it lay on the table.

When I “rode shotgun” with Bob Scriver, I went hunting with him but not as a fellow shooter.  I was the “dog” who beat the brush to spook out whatever was there.  I fetched and carried and if the weather were warm and the water was shallow, I waded out into prairie ponds to retrieve both the dead and the wounded fallen waterfowl.  Also, I cooked and ate them, and the same went for deer.  The shooting took only a few seconds — the preparation and planning and gutting and packing out took all the rest of the day.

The corners of the studio were always stacked with historic guns for reference.  Most were beautiful, carefully made, works of art in themselves.  They should have been in a locked cabinet to protect them from dust and damage.  One was made from scratch by a local high school teacher and a border patrolman, who melted the brass on a charcoal fire in a barbecue kit powered by the hairdryer “borrowed” from a wife.  Guns were domestic.

In the evening we often visited Hubert Bartlett, the lumberman, in his little shack outside town where he reloaded ammo.  The place smelled of black powder and strong coffee.  Hubert claimed he had high-powered combat guns greased, sealed in plastic and buried out back on the prairie.  It might have been true, but it would have been an expensive thing to do and Hubert didn’t have a big profit margin.  What he had was enough to live on only because he moved his lumber over the Rockies in the middle of the night when he was unlikely to be pulled over by the highway patrol who would impose fines.

Those were the John Birch years and men wore cufflinks that looked like intercontinental missiles to show how tough and defiant they were.  Except I never knew any veterans who even wore shirts with French cuffs, much less signifying cufflinks.  Cowboys wear shirts with pearl-snaps.  Politicians use laundries for their shirts and accumulate cufflinks so pandering people will be impressed.  (Did you see that Trump has his French cuffs embroidered with the number “45” — maybe he should add a question mark.)

So Trump thinks that if there were more guns and guards, the schools will be safer, but this time around there WAS a guard with a gun, but a gun is no braver than the man holding it and he failed to enter the building to shoot the shooter.  The shooter escaped by mingling with the other kids — he could not be distinguished once he stopped shooting.  Ever hear the term “friendly fire” when one’s own side is killed by one’s own bullets?

Guns are a “magic solution.”  So believed both the shooter and Trump.  But no wonder the cabinet generals are beginning to wonder whether their work can be done.  They can not cure a person whose mind is in chaos.  They can not “make safe” a person firing a gun.  Safety is all in the preparation ahead of time and the outcome on reflection afterwards, but studying mass shootings is forbidden by law.

Here’s some news for you:

In the immediate aftermath of the massacre in Charleston, South Carolina, the US House of Representatives Appropriations Committee quietly rejected an amendment that would have allowed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to study the underlying causes of gun violence.

https://www.pri.org/stories/2015-07-02/quietly-congress-extends-ban-cdc-research-gun-violence 

Lobbyists for the NRA managed this demonically nonsensical legislation because they were afraid those who study the problem would blame the availability of guns and therefore cut into sales.  What are the names of these legislators?  Who were these lobbyists?  Why are they not vilified?

https://bluevirginia.us/2018/02/friday-news-nra-cpac-go-full-john-birch-society-nasty-brutish-and-trump-fairfax-county-school-board-adopts-resolution-on-combating-gun-violence

Friday News: NRA, CPAC Go Full “John Birch Society”; “Nasty, Brutish and Trump”; Fairfax County School Board Adopts Resolution on Combating Gun Violence

The John Birch Society used to be against Communism.  I guess by now they’ve forgotten that the USSR’s soviet ideas still exist in Russia and Putin is the new Stalin. 

Welch named the new organization after John Birch, an American Baptist missionary and military intelligence officer who was shot and killed by communist forces in China in August 1945, shortly after the conclusion of World War II. Welch claimed that Birch was an unknown but dedicated anti-communist, and the first American casualty of the Cold War. Jimmy Doolittle, who met Birch after bailing out over China following the Tokyo Raid, said in his autobiography that he was certain that Birch "would not have approved" of that particular use of his name.  (Wikipedia)

At one point, the John Birchers were considered far right nut-cases and the mainstream Republicans wanted to get rid of them.  One could make a case for the idea that the real goal  -- nearly reached now -- of the John Birch Society was the destruction of the dignified, conservative core of the Republican party.  How did they manage it?  Money.  Why?   

Here’s a song for you.   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0jqKjVR274   "Talkin' John Birch Paranoid Blues".

BLACK BOX OF DESTRUCTION

I reflected a bit before putting this on prairiemary.  I have other places to post that are a little more private.  But I decided that holding back just increases the likelihood of skewing what people think.  If there is any subject more emotionally juicy than grizzlies, it's gays or terrorists.  A gay terrorist is going to send some people into a tizzy.  But this story is only endlessly sad.  It's not really about either gay or terrorism at its heart.  It's about identity.

Omar Mateen

This selfie was taken in the Pulse men’s room.  Mateen evidently bought the shirt in a novelty shop.  There were other shirts with NYPD logos in other selfies.

“We assumed from minute one that this was a closet case of mental mumbojumbo who was probably having sex with as many men as he could tap.”

You were right. I thought the same thing, except when the media said he had been employed as a guard at a juvenile detention center I figured the sex was with boys, non-voluntary, and that it was violent, if not deadly.  (His official job record as published did not list the juvvie job.)

Also Omar Mateen.

I figured that the “mental mumbojumbo” was dementia by definition but that the “black box” of dementia is a lazy label for the complexity of the brain against itself, usually limbic craving and addiction pitched against the pre-frontal cortex rational and ethical rules. Irreconcilability. Irresolvability. Both mechanical and emotional. In this case it appears that the inner war — which goes on in everyone but usually not so intense and therefore can pass as sanity — had reached such a catastrophic pitch that it had burst the box.

Seddique Mir Mateen, Omar's father.

He could not please his rigid father nor could he turn on his father in order to be himself. Some would shrug and walk off. Omar Mateen couldn’t do that. I think because he LOVED his father and was driven to please him, but he also loved men, which would make his father despise him. I wonder how much abuse he took as a child, maybe from his father; how much did his father protect him from other abusers?

When the culture formed by men who claimed their identities as atypical and man-desiring in San Francisco — a culture that only lasted as a developing whole for a decade or so — was dispersed and destroyed by AIDS rather than a gunman, it had begun to develop “play rooms” that were safety valves for men like Mateen. They could use the psychological therapies of the time, “acting out” rather than discussing analytically. They kept the pressure down. Scary stuff sometimes, even to this old lady sitting out on the high prairie reading books. Out here it gets acted out with massive animals. (“Brokeback Mountain” is nothing. What about rodeo? Consult “When the Legends Die” in which rage gets loose. If you don’t read, rent the film.)

The hero loses because he cannot tame his rage.

I’m saying this is not just issues patterned by how a culture prescribes gender roles, but deep mammal tissue forces — as much in bulls and bears as in humans, except that bulls and bears don’t have pre-frontal cortexes, so the rage and frustration is frank, only slowed by conditioning or fear of a greater power. I think Mateen was at the Pulse this last time as much to destroy himself as to destroy others. He saw life as a conflict and cops as a greater power that he could not claim.  But, you know, if you can't be the president, you can be the guy who killed the president.

Much more information will come out. Mateen had evidently been active online and actually in the Pulse specifically and repeatedly, sometimes interacting and sometimes sitting in the corner glowering. No one has copped to actually having sex with him, mostly because he was creepy with his politics and the weirdness of being a loser who demanded that he be seen as a winner, but on the side of Darth Vader. I think a Freudian who got him on a couch (impossible) would soon be worried by demands for love and then threats on his life, alternating or mixed.

I’m grateful that the astute customers of the Pulse and even of the online dating scene are clear-eyed in evaluating a tortured soul and they are willing to talk about it. Denial and demonizing only increase the pressure in the black boxes of others out there.

I'd love to hear the Canadian writing team responsible for "Flashpoint" discuss this whole incident.