SOLDIER'S GIRL: Review and Reflection

Gender binaries have become so troublesome that social philosophers have begun to reflect on them.  When I say “trouble,” I mean murder.  People are murdered because they don’t fit our notions of gender binaries.  I’m pondering “Soldier’s Girl,” which is a movie version of a real event in which a soldier was bludgeoned to death as he slept -- by his fellow soldier, his dorm mate.  The killer administered capital punishment for loving a person who crossed the binary division -- not just a cross dresser but a transsexual person in the process of going from male to female.  Post-surgery, the relationship would no longer have been “homosexual.”

This script is exemplary in its clarity, its foreshadowing of what we know will happen, and its simplicity in presenting a convincing love story.  Calpurnia (Lee Pace) is elegant, played with dignified grace by a male actor in prosthetic breasts and a wig.  She is not a campy over-the-top swish figure like the announcer at the competition she’s in, but a calm, generous, balanced person whose femininity is more Grace Kelly than Cher.  (Actually, she has shoulders like Linda Evans.  I wonder whether a genital eversion amounts to as much plastic surgery as Cher has had.  Chas (formerly Chastity) Bono knows for sure.)

Barry (Troy Garity) is a simple guy -- not too swift and not very experienced.  I kept thinking about Pierre in the Audrey Hepburn version of “War and Peace,” and found out why when I went to imdb.com -- Henry Fonda played Pierre and Fonda was this actor’s grandfather.  Garity looks like his father, Tom Hayden.  It’s Calpurnia who is reminiscent of Jane Fonda, his mother.

Leggo words, assembled from particles, are unfortunate predeterminers.  “Homosexual” is as misleading as “atheist.”  Both are stuck together from pre-existing concepts and both over-control the discussions.  It is possible to be homosexual while being strongly “male” and possible to be deeply religious while not believing in God (theism).

Gender identity emerges from the interaction of a number of continuums.  To which of the binary are you assigned physiologically?  Even without discussing the chromosomal variations (not just xx and xy, but also xxx or xyy or broken versions with incomplete or doubled sections (sextions?) of chromosomes) and all the bodily and temperamental variations a person can be born with or develop at puberty or have traumatically imposed, common sense and ordinary experience shows that a male can be anywhere on the continuum of “maleness” in terms of size, aggression, and so on.  He can be Conan the Barbarian but if his sperm isn’t dynamic and fertile -- is he a male?  The same for a female.  She can be the most curvaceous and alluring woman of all time, but can she produce healthy babies?  Which criteria are you choosing?  

The aspect that crushes all the life out of discussion is desire in the sense of lust.  Whom do you want to have sex with?  Someone the same sex or someone of the opposite sex?  But those aren’t the only choices or even the controlling choices.  In this movie it is clear that Barry loves elegance, high class presentation, kindness, and Calpurnia does, too, so they meet there, escaping the accusation of "low class."  They are both genuine in the sense of character and they meet there in honesty and acceptance.  She is knowing and he is innocent so opposites can also meet.  These two are not game players.

So what about authenticity and truth?  Who is putting on more of a show in drag, the singers at Visions or the soldiers in camo fatigues at the base?  Is the announcer at the competition more of a cross-dresser than the female sentry at the gate in the beginning of the film?

Our culture makes a binary of gender identity more than others do.  The Navajo defined many roles, some depending on what one wants to do -- the things normally done by women because they are anchored by babies or the things normally done by men who go out to hunt.  In many cultures the priestly/sacred/holy people are not gender-assigned or are considered both.  But they cannot be menstruating women.  It’s the baby part that’s the big divider.  But even then, an assigned nurturer is also a mother even if male.

Simpler animals sometimes have the ability to change back and forth between male and female, maybe depending on the ecology or maybe on whether there’s a shortage of one or the other.  Some animals carry both genders and can fertilize themselves.  There is probably not a lot of pillow talk in those species (angleworms), but people do talk to themselves. (jokes)  Androgeny and/or bisexuality are quiet values in some human contexts.  Think Teresias.

No one understands how it is that an apparent man can be innerly and utterly convinced of being a woman or vice versa.  It is easy to understand that some people don’t fit into the culture’s idea of what they ought to be and how that stigma can cause them to be targets.  Ugly women, pretty men.  Brainy women, ineffective men.

How did the sexual identity of “whom do you desire” get to be so important in our lives?  Haven’t there always been people who liked their own sex better than the opposite one?  (“Liked” being a euphemism for wanting to fuck.  Why so many euphemisms now that kids use the “f” word as much as combat Marines?  What kind of role swap is that?)  Haven’t there always been people who found elements that deeply touched them and made them yearn for fusion with individuals that were not “appropriate”?  (I hate that prissy word.)  One of my favorite movies is “Carrington,” about a totally mismatched couple who were deeply in love with each other though they fucked nearly everyone in sight and the bedpost as well.  

Why is sex the controlling moral dimension in our lives in a time when we can surgically change our bodies, chemically control our fertility, get professional help with relationships, earn money, co-habit with no license, and die for our country without regard for gender?  Is that why?  Is it all this freedom that makes everyone obsess so much about the subject?

Or is it that sex keeps us from thinking about violence and greed?  It’s not that we’re all so sexually hot or why would there be such a need for Viagra?  Pole-in-the-hole is not all there is to sex.  REAL intercourse in the sense of physical intimacy is skin and brain: a million little physical, mental and emotional transactions of sensation that enmesh and bond and console.  Otherwise, it’s friction followed by a sneeze.

There are some fascinating levels to think about in this film but one of the most absorbing -- if trivial -- is the difference between fiction and reality.  The real Calpurnia is certainly attractive, but in quite a different way from the movie version.  The real one is almost cute, a little touch childlike.  The movie version of the military camp is toned-down with a homogenized (they all look sort of cub-like) cast including tolerant hets, Asians and blacks.  Testimony was that the taunts and harassment of Barry were actually much worse.  Andre Braugher is one of my fav actors and always carries with him a kind of moral force not seen a lot in ordinary life.   Barry’s mother is not as I would have imagined her, but no doubt this murder was an experience that changed her.

It is my hope that this movie will help to change a culture lost in hatred and ignorance.  It’s not the only force for good, but it is a vivid and heart-breaking one.

LIFE IN THE MIDST OF DEATH

In this part of the world we don’t have spring.  One day we’re getting desperate over the severity of the winter and a day or so later we’re dumped into early summer.  Or sometimes people say that winter is when the really bad days outnumber the good days and summer is when the balance tips over so the really good days outnumber the bad ones.  Because tongues of Arctic air lick us and blasts of Mexican air wash over us, all the while waves of wet Pacific air drench us -- left-to-right on your weather map -- we have “seasons.”  They’re just more mixed than in other places.

Nevertheless, at the post office yesterday the little lady (she’s very short but always impeccably groomed) who occasionally comes to the door to convert me to Jehovah’s Witnesses (a hopeless task, but it’s nice to see her) told me that the apple tree in her yard had hung on to its withered fruit and is hosting robins at last.  Others are saying that the gophers are up and the rangers say the grizzlies are moving around, scowling over whatever they were dreaming.  The geese are reconnoitering and the kids are having to be sent back to their rooms to put on long pants and proper shoes instead of flipflops which they will actually wear in the snow while they sprint to the warm car.  Their systems are attuned to spring break in Florida before they even get out of eighth grade.  The forecast for today is forty-five degrees which means that the mountains of snow in town will be converting the streets into trout streams.  Night before last the temp was below zero.  It snows every month.  NO flip-flops yet!

A big fat book has accompanied me through the winter:  “The Education of the Senses” by Peter Gay, a reflection on the relationships between the genders and their arrangements through the “bourgeois century” that still haunts us.  Now I’m switching over to a different big fat book:  “Landscape and Memory” by Simon Schama.  My thoughts are going out of the house and into the terrain.

I subscribe to a number of listservs, academic exchanges of information, and rarely say anything on them, though often I end up laughing at their absurdity (most of the people are very young and urban) and -- less often -- very much intrigued or informed.  Recently someone wanted to know how the practice of Native American religion had been changed by the forced relocation of tribes.  I think they may have been thinking about African religions being changed by being brought to a whole new continent, but it’s an interesting concept and probably pretty enlightening.  I suggested that even Christianity had been radically changed over the centuries by its relocation: moving it from indigenous villages along the Mediterranean into the court of the Roman Empire and then north across Europe made deep changes in assumptions and practices.  All denied, of course.

Some religious practices are so deeply human that they persist, coming up again as green as grass through the old snow of winter.  It’s Ash Wednesday.  If I were in the pulpit on Sunday, I would talk about the natural fasting of spring, reinforced by social rules to keep people from eating the seeds they must plant soon or the newborn domestic animals or even the milk that feeds them.  A liberal pulpit would find satisfaction in the congruence of nature and ceremony.

But the listserv did not post my remark.  One literary association and one historical association have begun to ignore me.  They don’t want to hear anything about nature unless it agrees with their assumptions, which are curiously distant from actual nature or any other kind of reality.  They are almost hypnotized by rules, not the nature-based rules of the past but near sci-fi or magic realism of an imagined or possibly computerized future.  The future is not spring, but spring break, derived from the academic calendar.  Academics control one’s future success, they think, so one must conform to it, go in debt to it, nearly worship it.  (Churches are passé.)

Part of this strange world-view might be an overdose of “cute” nature -- all those baby bunnies and kittens, fawns and lambs.  Soon enough that preoccupation with sweetness goes to commodification.  (Easter bonnets.)  And that is joined by rather acid cleverness, so that the University of Chicago student body indulges in competition among “Peeps” tableaus -- tiny marshmallow baby chicks arranged as social commentary.

Ash Wednesday means that people in Valier will wear marks on their foreheads.  No one will have to ask what the ashes mean.  It was a winter that encouraged contrition, humility, and a consciousness of vulnerability.  We are perhaps too little prepared to push back against the bureaucracy that caused the Crucifixion at Easter, too admiring of centurions, but we have our renegades.  There were a lot of deaths this winter, not just humans but also domestic animal herds that died of starvation.  The grizzlies, of course, will be grinning at the amount of ungulate winter kill from the deep crusted snow.  And spring has brought media images of deaths in riots of people craving release from tyrants.

Simon Schama begins his book by locating and describing cemeteries in Europe, often mass graves from WWII but also tumuli from ancient times.  We have them in North America, but he hasn’t gotten to this continent yet.  He speaks of going to a burial ground connected to his family and discovering that the marker stones themselves were being buried in a sea of crowded dandelions, lichen, and accumulating soil.  He says it was becoming a geological layer.  And he says this memorable thing:  “the heart of one of our most powerful yearnings: the craving to find in nature a consolation for our mortality.”  

So many youngsters find their consolation in denial.  People in media do not die.  They are a tape loop.  One can still watch childhood worlds if you grew up watching television with your feet sticking straight out in front of you, your blankie in your hand.  There is another stage when young people trek the mountains seeing only glorious vistas, never parsing the ecology into its mesh of life and death.  The occasional urgent person, often female, will decide to war against all death, all immorality, all suffering, all meat eating, all use of nasty words.  Everything must be beautiful.  God must be love.

I think I will use what I learn from this book to identify and reflect upon the burial grounds of this place.  But I’ll wait until summer.  Spring is when people die, just when the green grass comes, and there will be people standing in clusters among the stones -- the living among the dead.  Not all of them will want to be converted into media.

ONE NATION, UNDER GLASS

A brain in a jar of nutrients cannot think. “Thinking” is not something that a brain can do all by itself. A brain is a device for managing interactions deriving from the body -- all the sensory nerve information and chemical modifying solutions -- and then informing the muscles, the organs, what to do about it. Thinking is interaction with the environment which is why computers are not brains. Brains do not sit apart from bodies and “think,” not even at night when they’re dreaming. Not even when you’re only remembeing, because the brain is reassembling past imprints and your body is participating. I get that.

(The source of this following quote has escaped me. I think Jane Friedman quoted it in her blog about writing, but from someone else.) “It's a neuro-plasticity thing. The more brain cells and motor function dedicated to a manifestation, the greater the subconscious and conscious acquisition of accompanying data, stimulating more dendrite growth connecting those brain cells and logarithmically multiplying that knowledge/understanding (much like compound interest hyperbola), making real what began as only desire.” The more participation in the world, the bigger and stronger your brain gets. The less that happens, the more the dendrites wither away.

The next step is whether a human being can be human without a culture, whether or not it is rooted in an ecology. (Better if it is, I’m thinking, and better the more directly it is an ecology based in nature rather than a culture. Maybe a culture without a natural underlying ecology of terrain, weather, tangled banks, animals, is not a culture. Maybe “root” is not a metaphor. Maybe “regional” is the only truth.) Clearly, the body is what knits the brain to the world, which is a culture originating in an ecology. A culture is always manmade. An ecology is a specific planetary interface that provokes a material culture.

The genius of Christianity is purported to be that it was able to become universal by becoming virtual, parlaying the world of the Mediterranean into a three-layered theoretical construct full of angels and fishermen. The genius of right now is purported to be that we can live in a virtual electronic world, talking to people we’ve never met, managing electronic mathematical versions of a world seen by machines gyring in the outer limits of our gravitational pull. We are creating something ideal, Platonic, and as true as math.

I had the idea that it would be good to be “culture-free” or “culture-inclusive” because that might escape all the stereotypes and dumb assumptions that cultures accumulate. Maybe we could shed hatred like an old metamorphic shell. The “better” humans have been doing the same thing as the brain working through the body, always trying to go closer to effectiveness, accuracy and creativity. They are constantly dropping out old cultural beliefs that don’t test true and are adding new discoveries, basically creating a new culture -- even if it ends up being a culture of one. Of course, the closer match one can achieve with the larger surrounding culture, the better the chances of being understood and therefore valued.

It doesn’t work. It is cut flowers, not a growing plant. It is a brain in a jar. We are not meant to live under glass, even the screen of a monitor, even if the monitor is in one’s hand while walking around. It leads us off into virtual worlds that are not anchored in material culture.

Still, it’s good to be a little out of sync because it gives a person -- as well as the culture -- reason to grow. A little dissonance is good, but if the difference is too great the larger culture is likely to confine or destroy the person. Lately we also have the opposite problem: cultures that are so destructive, even self-destructive; so much in conflict; so collapsing; so eroded and receding, that people are gasping and drowning, airless or overwhelmed, terminally confused or locked into obsession. We are so dependent on technology in the “developed” world that a massive electrical collapse would wipe us out. But other parts of the planet are so deficient in ordinary food and fuel that no culture past simple survival is even possible. Whole ecologies are natural killing fields with built-in furnaces and vultures so fat they can’t fly. The cultures that made human life sustainable there are missing. So far there has been no vision penetrating or intense enough to pull us into planetary coherence. Globalism is just a word referring to war, tourism and commerce -- all three are competitive and consumerized.

Culture, like a brain, is always growing and adding connections even as other connections (memories) are withering away. Small sub-cultures constantly form in a sort of vegetal way, rhizomatous, like sub-species. Affinity groups become supports for each other, like families, and the better suited they are to their ecological niche (which is more than just nature), the more they grow and transform into something more important. Stolons grow out to the sides, young go exploring, the climate gets favorable, things adapt and join and evolve. Then they begin to flower and fruit. That’s where new cultures come from.

Somehow this is not good enough for some people. They believe that somewhere is a truly true Truth that they can find out and monopolize. In fact, they become enraged as they ransack the world in search of it and destroy anyone they think won’t fork over the proof they believe is there. They do not know that as American insurance company executive and poet Wallace Stevens says: “The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction, and that you believe it willingly.”

Because it is rooted in the world, because it is beautiful, because it makes room for everyone, because it works. Maybe it has a history and maybe not. It is a choice because it has a future. And it is a CHOICE because no one else is forcing you into it. Your brain and its body, collaborators, have sussed out the alternatives and picked this one. “Making real what began as only desire.”

THE LOVELY STICKS

Because my house is surrounded by trees and because of the sub-zero cold in winter and the high winds of summer, I live in a constant rain of sticks. They are part of the reason I weed-whack my yard instead of using a push mower. Even the small twigs jam the spindle of the blades. In the night, falling, they strike my walls or land on the roof. But they provide a steady supply of kindling for my primitive little woodstove in the garage.

When Bob and I had the pet eagle we saw how much she loved sticks. She had a shelf where she piled her sticks and she constantly carried sticks around, though she wasn’t much of an architect. Once long ago when Bob was a kid, he came over a hill on horseback near a pothole pond and saw a bonded pair of eagles playing with each other, passing sticks back and forth and flying up so they could drop them and catch them in midair. Of course, it was practice for making a nest.

My friend Paul, who knows all kinds of things, was telling me about two county fair features for kids that I’ve never heard of before. One was an actual eagle nest, ten feet across, that kids could really get into and crouch to play eaglet. The other was an actual beaver lodge which was big enough for a small kid to get inside.

Paul said: “The original idea for both of them I think was Pat Hart. She is the head of recreation here at the USFS and has been for 30 years or more. She's an amazing gal, full of great ideas, and what's best, the vision to accomplish BIG things with volunteer labor. Some of the projects she's pulled off over the years are nothing short of amazing! If it wasn't for her and her volunteer crews from all over the world, all our old trails would be gone. The whole wildlife building was her idea from the ground up. She not only designed the thing, but found grants to pay for the materials and volunteers to build all the attractions. Pat is one of those unassuming movers and shakers that never gets credit for her undertakings because she's always busy patting everyone else on the back.”

First you have to think of it, then you get others interested, and then you just do it. Paul said locating and moving these two “stick homes” was not easy but so interesting that no one felt as though it was work. The beaver dam project answered a question that Ruth Beebe Hill, author of “Hanta Yo!” asked Bob decades ago. In her book her hero escaped enemies by crawling inside a beaver lodge and she wanted to know whether that was possible. For the rest of Bob’s life he never saw a beaver lodge without wondering how a small child could get into it.

But Paul had an even more dramatic idea. In his family there are stories about him in his early years being out fishing and accidentally stepping in a beaver hole in the grass -- several feet across and often disguised -- and disappearing down the hole into water deep enough to drown a boy. That would be an even more dramatic way to elude pursuers, just vanishing.

Beavers also build long mud slides, maybe a hundred feet long, for skidding tree trunks into the ponds behind their dams, and that would also work for a sudden exit. I suspect that Indian kids and otters would have a great time on such a slide, but not beavers. They are very serious and busy. The Blackfeet never much liked to trap them but there are beavers in a lot of stories, usually helpful to some man. In one story they adopt a boy.

Pat Hart’s actual nest and lodge are an amazing idea, but I should think it would also be fun to make nests and lodges -- just give kids a big pile of sticks and see what they could do. I suppose today’s fussy city parents would worry about safety. But the kids would be soaking up the soft colors and subtle textures of real objects instead of the bright plastic extrusions they play with now. You can change a stick: bend it, break it, weave some together, but the plastic all-the-same bits are meant to be unchanging.

This is not changing the subject. I watched “All the Lovely Bones,” having heard good reviews, but I think I confused it with “The Animal Wife” by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, in which the ghost of a tragically killed young wife lives on top of the paleolithic Siberian house built of mastodon bones where her husband and his son, her lover, still live. It’s a beautifully written exploration of these people. “The Lovely Bones” picked up the idea of a narrator who is a dead young woman but that’s the only similarity. Everything is happening in a modern suburb where, predictably, the dad is lovable but bumbling, the mom is neurotic, and the sibs have their own lives. There’s also a nutcase grandma who begins to seem sane. The girl in this story is murdered by a madman. We never see bones, much less lovely ones. This story is not an exploration so much as it is a horror story with a theoretically compensating pretty depiction of the afterlife of this girl and other victims in a kind of limbo.

I haven’t read the book, so can’t comment, but the movie -- for me anyway -- derived much of its horror and unreality from a material world that seemed to be “natural” but was not. The colors were the chemical brights of advertising, sometimes neon, that never happen in nature. Natural images, like the silhouette of a tree, were used in a stylized greeting card way. A field of dead cornstalks becomes sinister camouflage for an underground hideout. Skies were as lurid as the story. Our Photoshopped eyes have grown used to this.

It worries me that for many kids this sort of thing seems like reality. They can’t see the subtly varied shapes and sheaths and textures of natural sticks because all they know is machine-shaped dowels, if indeed they ever touch wood. A plastic world full of petroleum-derived and pixelated tweaks cannot help but lead to a slick, empty, pre-determined world in which madmen prey on little suburban girls, who are not quite alive anyway.

I wonder whether I have enough sticks to make an eagle nest. Probably.

DESIRE LINES

One of the big differences between Tim and myself is that I go after genealogy as though I were a detective exercising the “little gray cells” but he reacts the way my mother did, having been exasperated by her parents quarreling about family: Pinkerton against Cochran, their traits, their shortfalls, their failures to measure up. She imposed a taboo. But it was quickly broken. My younger cousin told me that the Pinkertons were better than the Cochrans because the Cochrans walked across the Oregon Trail behind a conestoga wagon, like proper pioneers, but the Pinkertons came on the train. To his mind the historical fact that the train line hadn’t been built yet when the Cochrans crossed the prairies and the Pinkertons could afford a train ticket, just didn’t pertain.

Both the Oregon Trail and the railroad were striations (lines) that originally began as “desire lines,” an important deleuzegattairian concept. “Desire lines” are a term from landscape architecture and allude to the muddy trails that form across the lawns after the architects have already put in their tidy concrete walkways. Some are shortcuts and some are formed because there is something that people want to walk over to that architects never anticipated. Now they’re smarter and don’t put in the cement until they’ve waited to see where people go. A snowfall helps.

When my mother was angry with my father, she would call him “You Teuton!” which would appear at first glance to be about his stoic refusal to mix it up but at second thought, if you knew the family, was a sneaking reference to his grandmother’s streak of German genes which was a problem in the first half of the 20th century. Genes were big in the Thirties when my parents were courting and both of them, farm kids, were thinking about inheritance when they married. My mother hoped we’d get my father’s teeth and eyes. Instead we got her bad teeth, plus red hair from some wild and unsuspected place like ancient visiting Vikings. If we had grown up on the prairie where the water was full of minerals, as my father did, we might have been more likely to have his teeth. As for red hair, life is full of little tricks. Suspicion of genealogy is sometimes justified.

In my own family there is a dark vein, probably a mutated gene or two, that can be exposed by erosion from environment (like tough economics). It is a susceptibility to depression, alcoholism, violence, and other sociopathies. Maybe in a rural environment it is better handled. But my Scots great-grandfather, Archibald, one of the redhead gene donors, was so irascible that in widowerhood he could not be taken in by his oldest son’s family. He just made too much trouble. Nevertheless, he was a high energy man with a lot of imagination and he was able to bring his family from Scotland to Dakota. Was that a kind of desire line?

My mother’s sisters and cousin married into the same rural Oregon family, a prosperous one. My mother held out for culture and married her way to Portland. The others desired wealth and status and got it, losing other things we won’t list here. My mother’s way of speaking of it was that “they live in the valleys and pool their ignorance.” She didn’t exactly “get” culture. But she “got” deleuzegattari.

I suppose that the two big “land clearances” that I know most about -- the one that pushed all the Scots crofters out of their small free-holdings so that the land could be fenced for raising sheep and the similar one that cleared all the indigenous people off the American prairies and fenced them onto reservations so the land could be divvied up for homesteading -- are like giant glacial or catastrophic events that changed whole economic landscapes as well as the happiness of many thousands.

Matthew Tiessen in his Rhizome article called “Accepting Invitations” speaks of “untraceable desire lines” like the way of a canoe across a water body. Water trails web the West and the giant causeway of Mississippi/Missouri took the Euros by boat straight into Blackfeet country on the prairie where life was broad and easy on a wide land.

I take all these to be illustrations of the connections made by geology rather than geneology. Tim has traced and retraced “desire lines” across the continent, pushing Tallulah Bankhead, the motorcycle, and then Old Big Wanda, the F150 Ford pickup, from California to Florida and back, partly called and partly pushed from one ocean beach front to another, leaving behind the lake front in Michigan. Now that he’s global and mostly flies, the lines might seem untraceable through the air, but in fact follow the imposed lines of flight plans and the natural lines of jet streams that airlines try to ride.

The pushing of genealogy towards geology in order to redress the imbalance of interaction between human culture and natural terrain may not be so pressing in the Western spaces. People who live in cities have concrete grids for “desire lines” to concerts and libraries. In a place like Australia with a huge outback the humans must make “songlines” for lack of concrete, but the songlines are much closer to nomadic human desire lines.

I still like my own proposal that the past is three lines: the recorded facts; our own memories which add and subtract our desires; and the unknowable reality of forces interacting, pushing events into patterns according to time and place beneath anyone’s consciousness. And I like the idea, which is in this deleuzeguttarian thought, that the traces of all these remain. That makes me think about the North Peigan project that has been able to recover the ancient paths of nomads and their dogs as they moved among the east slope river ways and bison grounds and to find the newer paths made when horses came so it was necessary to have grass and water every night, but there could be longer intervals between camps. Some little boy in the evening, wandering from camp and finding a clump of sarvisberries, crams some in his mouth, and at the next camp, he “plants” them, so that the lives of brush are interwoven with his small life. And that’s being human.

THE FOLLOWING IS TIM BARRUS' POST AGAINST GENEALOGY. Don't read it if you're sentimental.

The fundamental problem with genealogy is that it firmly implies predeterminism and then it implies people are not really responsible for their behavior. It assigns traits where there are none. People are NOT condemned to what has come before. Fiddledeedee. Whether they are or not is not the real issue. The issue is that culturally too many people who are in awe of it any hocus pocus that lets them off the hook because they BELIEVE the rhetoric.

Go to Cambodia. Every Khmer is related to royalty so they are obligated to turn the rest of the culture into rural (where their ancestors lived so it has to be good enough for everyone) slaves. Go to Germany. The Germans will tell you over and over and over again it was not their fault because their ancestors were warlike. Genealogy is crackpot dangerous. Go to Jerusalem. The Jews will tell you they owned all of Palestine in 3,000 BC and they have the RIGHT to have it back. Because David was their king.

I am NOT kidding. Most people have NO concept of history and that makes genealogy witch's toad brew. Go to Rome. Every Roman is artistic because they are ALL related to Michaelangelo. Or so they think. Go to Moscow. Poor people in Moscow do not need fuel or heat because their ancestors withstood the cold and they are of solid stock. Go to Argentina. The aristocracy are all related to the King of Spain so they have a RIGHT to execute anyone they want. They are as ignorant as the Germans. They ARE the Germans.

So many people all over the sad planet believe this malarky. They cannot be held accountable to what is inherently nature. Go to Australia. White people are better than Aboriginals because don't know how to live in a house and their white ancestors always built homes. Aboriginals are stupid because they never made schools and the whites are all from educated stock. This is an excuse to commit genocide by separating children from families and enforcing school.

Everyone can and DOES point to their heritage. The UAE has slaves because, after all, they were never made to work. It's endless and it's misguided and it's just plain wrong. It doesn't matter what you or I believe. What matters is that the world believes these fantasies. And they are used to justify oppression and murder. That matters. Go to Mexico. Where Spanish blood that runs in the veins of people who are arguably not Spanish at all, gives them the right to take Yaqui land (for race horses who are then brutally slaughtered) because the Indians were never farmers and their Spanish ancestors need land to grow things.

Go to Bolivia. The indigenous people have no ancestral experience at managing oil fields and they should receive no profit from what is not their domain. Ask any white Bolivian. Go to Romania. Gypsy people have bad blood. That is why they are lazy and they steal. Their people have always been like that.

Tracking down someone's ancestors is the same thing. Even if assigning traits isn't obvious, it's the back story by IMPLICATION. I obliterate the history of Indians because my ancestors did. It doesn't matter if you or I can read NUANCE into anything. What matters is that we live in a world that doesn't see nuance in anything and remains mired in violence and war and poverty and starvation and we will never rise above these things if we are always looking backwards. Go to Africa. Every single war in Africa still being fought from the Sudan to the Congo to Liberia is BASED on tribal ancestral superiority that is exploited by thugs to gain power. The world literally cannot afford genealogy. We must look forward to what we can do and not back to what someone dead did. It doesn't matter if you and I know it does not exonerate anyone.

They believe it does.

"We rape the village women because our ancestors fought war this way against their villages.

But does the American media report anything with complex cultural nuance.

"Pygmy people must be forced to eat their children because that is how you halt the spells their ancestors made on our villages."

And the Congolese rebels DO make the pygmy people eat their children.

But what do Americans KNOW about the world.

Genealogy is a violence of romanticism that in its origins is NOT genetic, it's an excuse for the camouflage of hatred.

I have grown worn with tribalism and the clinging to ancestors. The Arabs hate the Berbers. When you point out to them that they are the berbers, you get enormous hostility. It doesn't matter that you and I might know the complexities. What matters is how the Arabs BEHAVE. Their behavior is directly liked to the nonsense they believe in terms of where their ancestors came from.

What matters is how people behave. These beliefs around the planet are not benign. They are the problem. We romance the dead into things they never were. And then people behave accordingly. We see nuance and complexity. Even richness. But what they see is a righteousness. I can't even avoid cultures mired in this nonsense. It keeps the status quo alive for generations. I am worn to the bone with seeing it.

But the one that is the most horrific is what is being done to the pygmies. Entire villages are being forced to cook their children alive and eat them. By human beings who believe that warfare is natural because it was what their warrior ancestors did and they prevailed. And this is how you fight a war. Just look at them; they're little people and their ancestors were bad. You can only break the spell put on the tall tribes by the little tribes by making them eat their children. It is the one reality left that makes my hair stand on end.

The tribal genocide that goes on in Africa generation after generation cannot ALL be attributed to colonialism. The repressive. murderous beliefs rooted fundamentally in ancestor worship are so close to genealogy it's scary. Take it one more inch and Americans are thusly empowered to invade, fight. bomb, and throw the Bible at anyone who is the enemy and unlike them. We are not our ancestors and it is imperative we do not use their solutions to solve the contemporary problems of the world -- we do so at our peril. t