AFTER THE PANDEMIC

A timely book I’m reading is ‘’The Knowledge; How to Rebuild Civilization in the Aftermath of a Cataclysm.’’ by Lewis Dartnell.  (2014).  It’s about just what the title says.

Here’s the darkest paragraph.

In this sense, the ‘’best’’ way for the world to end would be at the hands of a fast-spreading pandemic.  The perfect viral storm is a contagion that combines aggressive virulence, a long incubation period, and near 100 percent mortality.  This way, the agent of the apocalypse is extremely infectious between individuals, takes a little while for the sickness to kick in — so that it maximizes the pool of subsequent hosts that are infected, but results in certain death in the end.  We have become a truly urban species since 2008 — more than half of the global population lives in cities rather than rural areas  and this crammed density of people, along with fervent intercontinental travel, provides the perfect conditions for the rapid transmission of contagions.  If a plague like the Black Death, which wiped out a third of the European population and probably a similar proportion across Asia from 1347 to 1351 were to strike today, our technological civilization would be much less resilient.

Most of this book is as practical as possible — where to find food, how to tell whether you should eat it, how to take advantage of the basics when you are pushed back to the level of the plow, the lever, the wheel, the energy of water and how to use it.  He recommends going back to the rural land where the chances of finding workable wood stoves, windmills, and wells for water are much better.  But he also admits that if one needs a fort, an abandoned prison is as good for keeping enemies out as it once was at keeping them in.  This wry awareness is a pleasure to read, even in spite of the subjects.  There are omissions: no mention of computers.

‘ . . . radioactivity . . . can be a source of peaceful power, but also allows you to determine the age of our planet, offering a glimpse down the dizzying hole of deep time.  In earth sciences we’ve missed out on the theory of plate tectonics, for example: the mind-blowing concept that the vast continents are scudding across the surface of the planet like leaves on a windy pond, occasionally crunching into one another to crumple up entire mountain ranges.  These profound realizations that the world has not always been as it is now, and is bewilderingly old, are required to understand the theory of evolution by small changes from one generation to the next.  All of these represent kernels of knowledge that a recovering society would need to re-explore and unpack for themselves. . . 

This wondering but basic view of knowledge takes me back to the book called simply ‘Making’ by Tim Ingold. (2013)   I do not think it is an accident that both of these books come from a context of English thought by those who remained when the others went off to do empire-building.  These people are content to deeply explore where they already were.  ‘Making’ is about hands-on creating basic things from flint-knapping, weaving baskets, casting metal.  in some ways the title should not be ‘making’ but rather ‘participating’ because it is about an attitude towards materials that is like having empathy for other humans — being part of them.  Developed in a small seminar or workshop with students, Ingold gathers up ways to become part of the sensuous existence around us, to feel in our muscles the tensions, temperatures and potentials of materials. 

For instance, when flint-knapping, one senses the potential fracture lines that can cleave stone easily.  When a rap with a blade hits that line and divides the substance, one feels it viscerally.  When basketweaving — feeling the resistance in the willow wands— the countervailing tensions of the weave — it is a participation that tells one’s muscles where and how much to put one’s force next.  

Likewise, what Dartnell is proposing is the understanding of science through participation in the forces that create the world, not that one needs to go get electrocuted, but that one needs to stand still and really open up to understand lightning.  ordinary objects, soap and pots, canvas sails and charcoal bits, acid vs. alkali, all elements neglected in an urban life.  Simple ways to clean water or create an electrical current are the beginnings of thoughtful technology to restore culture in a direct and living way.

Both Ingold and Dartnell emphasize the need for others to swap ideas and report information.  Neither of them is ‘psychological’ or emotional, so they don’t talk about the cellular brain and body mechanisms of learning, but speak of remembering, trusting, sharing that build the brain towards brilliant and muscular science.  They don’t discuss it from a distance, they just participate in it.

Here’s another source article that even points out the advantages during the lockdown.  

‘Jugaad is an old Indian concept of improvisation under resource constraints. It means developing solutions that work by overcoming and/or bypassing constraints or rules imposed by social norms or by legal compliances. Jugaad also means seeking opportunity in adversity, doing more with less; thinking and acting flexibly, and following the heart.’

http://www.khabar.com/magazine/cover-story/the-post-pandemic-world?utm_source=May+2020+-+Digital+Edition+Eblast&utm_campaign=July+2018+Digital+Edition&utm_medium=email

In an unconnected twitter tweet a man discovered that it was possible for him to cook and do it well, to follow recipes and later to innovate, to use ingredients he had never considered. Now his hands know his food as well as his mouth does. He is joyful.

I was thinking about transportation in a deserted city without a car and it was obvious that skateboarding was the way to go, even better than a bicycle that needs tires.  If obstacles prevent rolling along, one can take the skateboard under the arm and walk.  After months on a skateboard, the world must be a different place than it is from a closed car,  but it is dependent on a surface that’s not likely to exist in the country.  Nevertheless it is a powerful and direct way to participate in the world.  One seeks the opportunities, the fittingness.  That’s participation.  It’s the way to survive after the pandemic.

DESPAIR IN A TIME OF PLAGUE

This job was not one she had wanted, but she had to make some money.  She was losing weight and could no longer buy gas for her car even at the new low prices.  It was simple enough to do what was wanted, or so she thought when she signed up.  This zillionaire had a warehouse-sized hoard of outdated military rations meant for combat.  He had managed to sell the government the idea that they should buy them and then pay him to distribute them to needy people.  

So there she was with a little red wagon labeled "Frequent Flyer" and loaded with packets of theoretical food.  At least there was no way it could have been contaminated by this plague.  It was old stuff but didn't go back to the "Spanish" flu.  Taking the wagon down a sidewalk where the homeless people had invented shelters was not her idea.  She had almost no mental picture of who was there or what it was like.

At least the weather was decent.

The smell was horrific. Slowly she realized that the little piles on the pavement were not from dogs.  But it was surprising how many dogs seemed to live with these people. Some dogs poked their heads out from under the tarps, old drapes, and stained camp tents but few barked. No people were about.  Just parked wire shopping baskets stolen from grocery stores and piled high with junk.

All the people were inside.  It took her a while to realize that there was no place to knock and that calling out politely didn't work.  Soon she just pushed the K-ration packets through whatever seemed like a door.  Usually the clue was the smear of dirt from people going through.  Once in a while a hand on the other side would grab the package.  Once a voice said "thank you."  

Sometimes she could hear movement inside or creaking as the framework was pushed against.  Some seemed to be empty.  From the smell she suspected there was someone dead inside.  Once she thought she heard a baby crying.  If there were more than one person inside, they might talk softly to each other, but sometimes the language was not English.

An old lady had fallen inside her shelter in a way that thrust her head outside on the pavement.  She was muttering, her glasses all crooked, her white hair on end.  She was much more at risk than others, but it wasn't just the virus that would kill her.

A young man had no shelter except the blanket around him, but he was gripping a smart phone and talking to someone.  Maybe he would leave, find help.

_____________________

From the Author:

I've driven down streets where these little hooches are up against the buildings but I've never looked inside or talked to the people.  I'm wondering where to take this little essay from here.  Should I try to inspire people?  Should I shout "curse God and die!"  Should I go historical and compare to a camp of indigenous people dying of smallpox?

Should I talk about K-rations in terms of the "war on poverty" and the basics of staying alive?  We're all Kommandos now.  What are K rations really like?

"K was short for "Kommando" (as elite troops were the first to receive it), the letter "K" was selected because it was phonetically distinct from other letter-name rations.' They were designed for short-term use, when the more complete A and B rations were not available."

Here's a YouTube explanation of what was in the packets.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vz5Y2Zg5w84

Should I try to invent what really ought to be in a survival packet the government could give out to people or contrast it with dumpster diving behind some fast food joint?  Maybe I should describe some desperate old degenerate who bursts out and demands alcohol or a young person who wants drugs.

What if the distributor looks inside one because she hears a child crying and sees a little kid with the corpse of his mother.  Who should she call?  Would they come?

But this approach -- poverty and horror -- doesn't address the nature of this lung-infecting virus that suffocates the vulnerable with no concern for socioeconomics.  In fact, it is the upper middle class conviction that travel is a perk and an an entitlement that drives these masses of airport people.  Nothing will keep kids from spring break on some beach in Mexico where they can trade germs by sharing weed and vaping, lowering their resistance to germs by neglecting sleep and drinking booze.  If they went there by now, the virus waiting period will be over just about April Fool's Day.

What can break through this denial of everything but money?  Maybe the fall of the stock market, the failure of airlines, the raw economic disaster of a system that depends on basic assumptions that money will make a person safe and beautiful, forever young.

I recommend "Rattle.com" which is an online mag now addressing the pandemic.  The perennial "Indian" Sherman Alexie is included.

"The Russell" auction on Charlie Russell's birthday (March 19) every year is postponed indefinitely.  It had already diminished quite a bit.  Maybe this is the end.  Another economic disaster for some.  

The gig economy that was going to make free-lancers of us all, including college professors, has now collapsed with no government bailout.  The Repub solution is mostly to remove the safety net of our society. They have destroyed their own party.  McConnell is only a criminal like many others.

The truth is that I'm living just the way I've lived for the last twenty years, mostly isolated, stock-piling food, an endangered obsolete sort of person who insists on writing risky stuff.  It was what I wanted to do, But it wouldn't be right for a lot of people.  And it's a good thing that it will soon be spring, even in the Rockies.

GENES AND MEMES

Muhammadu Buhari won election over President Goodluck Jonathan

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

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

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

Igbo and Ora

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

The emperor's new nightingale

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

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

Mechanisms of pain and death.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Erlich's crew in Greenland

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

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

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

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

Yoruba trader

"SPILLOVER"

Reading David Quammen’s “Spillover” is both a challenge and a reward, because it is so rich with concepts and vocabulary we need in order to think about the part of culture we call “disease” as in dis-ease, that which makes us miserable.  His vivid but never judgmental writing calls up memories.  Since Quammen lives in Bozeman, he's always been "just over the hill" from me, maybe in a hazmat suit.

When I was an animal control officer in Portland, OR, the second woman hired was a pre-veterinary student waiting for an opportunity to get into vet school.  Her husband became infected by a rickettsia, which is a particular kind of microbe not well understood at the time.  She was extremely wary about some of the places and contacts we made, often unsanitary to say the least.  (Four-inch crusts of animal feces in homes.)  The resident one-celled animals were likely as predatory as some of the belligerent dogs we encountered.  They told us fresh killed animals in the street were more problematic than cold maggoty corpses, because the critters on the newly dead corpses were looking for new hosts.  Also, we became intensely aware of infections in the general animal population, some of which might be zoonoses that could jump to humans.  Portland is a port city, which means ships which means rats.  We were advised not to donate blood because of the bits of beasties we might be carrying.  We were given rabies shots.

In 1981 I was doing my ministerial internship in Hartford, Connecticut, when Lyme disease was first being identified.  One of my parishioners had a knee the size of a cantalope before massive doses of penicillin brought it under control, but it came back later.  Another man in Hartford was my first awareness of PTSD, not because he had just come from a new war but because he had commanded a ship during WWII and sent his soldiers onto a beach into disastrous battle.  Standing on his bridge, he had watched them through binoculars as they died.  That had been decades earlier, but through some trick of aging his memories now came back in the night to torture him with guilt and grief.

When I was circuit-riding in Montana (’82-’85), a nurse told us that now and then mystery diseases would show up that caused the patient to be “wrapped in aluminum foil like a baked potato” and removed to some unknown quarantined place, never to be heard from again.  One of those diseases may have been HIV-AIDS, which was not quite defined yet, but others were probably among the infections Quammen discusses.  Or like them.  One of the strong themes is that infectious disease is a planetary ecology that only includes human beings under conditions of intersection when the vector carriers transport mutated bacteria or viruses to active infection of humans, which is technically called “spillover.”   Then the bugs are zoonoses.  Spillover is not necessarily a continuous stream, but happens when conditions are right, as when a stream spills over its banks due to upstream rain, late melt, erosion from timber cutting or fires, and so on.

When I was a ward clerk just a few years ago in Shelby, a nurse told me about a little circle of sex-sharers and IV needle drug users who had Hep C which somehow mutated into “fulminating hepatitis.”  One after another, they developed bad colds and then died, without passing that mutation to anyone else.  It was a deadend epidemic.

A vector is something that carries the “bug,” a virus or bacillus.  The source accumulation of infectious agents is called the “reservoir.”  The reservoir can be carried by a vector that transmits it to an “amplifier” or a “superspreader.”  This vector can be entirely innocent and not clearly involved in the final transmission of the bug.  As Quammen relates again and again, finding the infectious agent is the first problem and often made possible only by identifying the vector, but backtracking until finding the reservoir has to be the single most effective insight into prevention.

It’s clear that HIV-AIDS originated with African simians and was spread to humans (probably has been doing so for a very long time) through the consumption of bush-meat.   The two most obvious human vectors of HIV-AIDS are IV drug users and sex-workers, because these are two primary ways (outside medical situations) that body fluids are carried across from one person to another.  Other vectors could be birth, nursing, transfusions, organ transplants, and bloody wounds, as from violence.  Almost all HIV-AIDS vectors are humans. Deliberately infected lab animals are caged and destroyed.  

Public health workers know that infected people should be prevented from exchanging body fluids and encourage “barrier prevention,” that is, condoms, clean needles, and so on.  These are often denied to captive HIV carriers, like prison inmates or deportees, on grounds that they are an “extra,” expensive, and make bad behavior safe when it should be punished -- even fatal.  The big hole in this argument is that convicts are released and deportees re-immigrate, still infected, still vectors.

Making barrier prevention work means keeping people alert and consistent, which they won’t be if they are drunk, confused, stressed, or past giving a damn about anything including themselves.  Despair is a superspreader.   Public health workers obsess all the time about how to reach those people.  Because most public health strategies are based on data collection, labeling, stigmatizing, capture, incarceration, forced treatment, deportation, cattle-call clinics -- in short, punishment -- their efforts just don’t work.  Escape IS being a vector.  Secrecy and hiding are amplifiers.

Other parts of our present cultural ecology amplify vectors.  One is our constant obsession with sex and the use of it to promote everything consumable, reducing every good thing to sexual access, even Heaven.  Related is our valuing of the “high,” the extreme/blissful/
orgasmic, often through either transgressive sex or IV drugs.  These are amplifiers but so are stigmatizing, incarcerating, criminalizing -- INCREASING the spread of HIV-AIDS.  What seems blameless and what seems evil are working on each other synergistically to create ecological opportunities for body fluid crossovers.

But what is the real reservoir of HIV-AIDS?  If sexworkers and drug addicts are vectors, what is the cultural reservoir that creates the inevitable re-infection of these carriers?  I do not think it is a virus -- I think it is cultural.  The real reservoir for HIV-AIDS and many other diseases is the unhappy family that produces abused children.

At the heart of the old-fashioned mom-and-dad model of families was a successful dad who provided for and protected his wife and family.  In the past he did this by being reliable, hard-working, successful at competing with other men, skillful, and physically strong.  His reward was that he owned that family.  This was suited for rural agrarian places but has become increasingly impossible since WWII when the industrial revolution finally produced suburbs, automobiles, national highways, and a stoically traumatized former soldier population.  Men were trapped in families they didn’t want without any way to earn enough money for them. Others were emotionally trapped in jobs they hated because it made them able to buy houses, cars, and relief in the form of socially approved alcohol.  Maybe they took off, maybe they resorted to paid sex, maybe they were angry enough to enjoy the forcing of it on whoever was weak and handy, maybe they became abusers of their own children.

Abusive families, male members or not, sexual or not, are the reservoir for pandemic level HIV.  They send out vectors into society (their rejected and damaged children) and they themselves act as vectors buying sex, bringing back the same bugs (now amplified) to their own families -- what’s left of them.  Is this true?  I’m going to work on that question for a while.  At the very least it is a “spillover” of misery into society at all levels.  Misery and despair can be autoimmune diseases that cause people to damage themselves irreparably.

ONE SMALL BOY ALONE IN THE HOSPITAL

• Tim Barrus: Health Care is More Than Surgery
• Chase had open heart surgery.
• I walked into his hospital room today, and the smell was explosive. Reeling, I had to leave the room, swallow, and go back again.
• I am at the moment sitting in my jeep outside a hospital supply store.
• In a minute, I will be going into the store to buy stuff so I can return to the hospital to bathe the kid.
• He smells really bad.
• And I am really pissed off.
• All the high tech surgery in the world, and they can’t keep the kid clean. Rather than even try to keep Chase clean, they would pump him full of antibiotics to prevent infection. This is health care in America. The fucking thing sucks.
• It would take too much time to clean him.
• And they won’t listen. After all, they’re the professionals. I am only an annoying, complaining bitch they’d rather not listen to.
• What smell.
• The one in his room. The one that is directly related to the infected bedsores he now has.
• They don’t give a fuck.
• Where is my sword.

Mary Scriver:  What I know

Now and then an individual personal case that no one would normally ever know about becomes a living -- and suffering -- illustration of universal forces that need to be confronted.  Here’s the thing:  Chase had open-heart surgery.  Now his health is endangered because he has not been washed and has developed bed sores.  They are infected.  Luckily, Tim has -- African-style -- personally bought supplies, washed the boy, and demanded better care.  Why should WE care?

PANDEMICS:  People were happy to hear soothing news about AIDS from the recent conference.  What is not grasped is that HIV-AIDS is not a “stand-alone” sort of affliction.  It is by definition an inability to defend oneself against the things the immune system is meant to resolve, the daily little problems of bad colds, fungus, skin problems, small traumas and large (broken bones), food poisoning and other environmental hazards.  It is a disease that comes from and confines the victims to a lifestyle ghetto that exposes them to TB, hepatitis, STD’s, malnutrition, injected drugs.  This forms a reservoir that not only overwhelms the individual but constantly leaks contagious diseases into the rest of the world.  This is especially insidious since “respectable” people are in the habit of visiting this reservoir for their secret needs, thereby becoming vectors to their own families.  This vector’s use of people trapped by stigma suggests the reason the reservoir is not really addressed and resolved -- it that the users WANT it and block remedies.

IATROGENIC MEDICINE:  Another thing not addressed publicly is the danger of the potent medicines used to treat HIV-AIDS.  The number of coronary incidents involving patients in their early teen years, otherwise functioning well and keeping their blood titers under control, is a clear signal that the meds are the problem.  Curing one affliction by imposing another is not acceptable medicine.

STIGMA:   When I did my hospital chaplaincy, I found that nurses ran the wards according to their own moral principles which tended to be conservative.  They were cheerfully responsive to people like their own relatives, especially old people, but they would not even let me visit a young woman with genital herpes though her cries of distress were heard in the hall.  Plainly they felt she deserved to suffer. They stigmatized her.  And they interpreted my services as excusing and rewarding.

But there is another problem with stigma:  our culture stimatizes those who do low-pay service work, especially cleaning, and exclude people from other countries who are not accustomed to that stigma.  What’s more, the hospital management, thinking little of the humanity of their low-pay workers, cuts positions while tightening up and expanding work loads.  The people who do the basic cleaning of rooms and patients are in this category of overloaded, underpaid workers and carry with them constant resentfulness and the need to punish someone else who is even less able to defend himself, like a boy with recent surgery.

INFECTIOUS HOSPITALS:  A great outcry has been raised about the explosion of MRSA and “flesh-eating” infections from hospitals, esp. those “out of the commercial loop” like VA and Indian Health Service hospitals.  It has been asserted over and over that simple conscientious use of soap and water is the best prevention.  We are constantly creating antibiotic resistant microbes.  They tell us we are short of jobs, that we are converting to a service economy, and yet paying for the simple service of bathing seems beyond us.  Again, this is not about one boy in hospital, because his care is directly DIRECTLY connected to the care we all get.  (You can believe that the management of that hospital works in nice clean offices where they don’t need to worry about getting their clothes dirty.)

COMMUNITY SCAPEGOATING:  Most of us, in high school, read Shirley Jackson’s chilling sci-fi story about stoning, scapegoating, “The Lottery”.  And yet the message doesn’t get home.  We are still scapegoating certain populations -- like street boys, sex workers, and the defiant who try to protect them.   We let them die, sacrifice them to the Gods of Greed we worship, let honor be gagged in the name of respectability.   We have the irrational belief that the neglect and suffering of one boy, unknown, in a mismanaged hospital somewhere else, has nothing to do with us, but let me assure you as a former hospital chaplain and as a former nursing home ward clerk, if that boy Tim bathed is neglected, the same forces are at work in your own hospital where your own neighborhood sons and nephews and students are sent.  And you. 

BIG MONEY:  Today’s hospitals are run for profit, the same as our prisons.  Sometimes it’s hard to see the difference.  Open heart surgery is a high-profit enterprise that means high salaries and high prestige for the surgeon or even for the surgical staff.  That doesn’t even count the cost of the machinery and supplies for such an operation.  

But ordinary bed care, which used to be supervised and done by nuns with centuries of tradition and clear religious rewards regardless of society, is just not there.  Even in the local rural nursing home, my neighbor quit her nurses’ aide position (which she needed) when she found a wheelchair encrusted with feces from a previous patient.  It had been put away without cleaning.   Management said it was helpless, though it had imposed a rigorous hand-washing workshop that even the clerks had to attend.  It was evidently just a check list item for insurance and evaluation.

On the one hand we have an almost phobic devotion to antibacterial wipes before touching the handles on a supermarket shopping cart.  On the other hand we let excrement soak into defenseless people’s beds.  It’s arguably more dangerous than drunk driving, smoking or guns -- but we never discuss it.  The difference is money.  There is no money in ordinary bed care.  We pretend it is isolated in the hospital, but it is not.

HOW TO TURN THE TIDE:  Involve surgeons.  They want good outcomes.  Honor low-pay, low-status workers when they do a good job.  Do not let hospitals and nursing homes to be closed and barricaded.  Go walk through, maybe as a citizen project.  Don’t forget to visit elders.  Phone calls won’t do.  They’ll tell you anything to get you off the line.  Take a camera.

In addition, for this boy, those men who survived the original waves of HIV-AIDS and learned to nurse by helping lovers to die -- few as the survivors are now -- need to step up.

THEY'RE AFTER US!

An old Blackfeet lady (my age), well-educated, once in religious orders, sophisticated, a mother, a person who has lived in major cities, called me late at night for a bit of reassurance. She said she thought I was the only one likely to be awake at that hour and she was right. She is feeling ill, broke, put-down and bereft. She’s right about that, too. She thought I might say something useful. I don’t think she was really right about that.

The next morning she called me early in the grip of full-blown paranoia. People had targeted her, people were trying to get into her room (they had a key), a friend had died with strange marks on her stomach. I tried to talk her out of it, but no go, so I lost patience, just told her she was paranoid. She said thanks a lot, I was the one who put her there. She might be right about that. But it’s not really paranoia if they’re really after you. And “whites” (which is a code word for powerful people who control your life) have been after Indians since Columbus landed. Mortality rates are high and the percentage of them that are unnecessary deaths is high.

1. Population growth (most people are Catholic) beyond the carrying capacity of the business structures (including the Tribal Corporation), the land itself, or federal willingness to provide goods and services. Most prominently there is never the will to fund proper law enforcement, which is partly a function of enough officers well-trained and equipped and partly a function of social expectations. (No one expects much or even expects that expectations can rise.) Indian justice presumes that for major crimes, federal officials will step in, but they have no motivation to do so. When it comes to “minor” crimes (which may have major consequences) the presumption that Indians have a separate (sovereign) culture traps them in a box. There is no Supreme Court appeal. In the end it’s a small world with political forces powerful enough to prevent justice. Murders go unsolved; suspicious deaths are not investigated; rumors about mysterious deaths constantly circulate.

The federal government, after admitting they embezzled the trust funds of NA people, refuses to give them the money. Time after time the expectation is raised, then dashed.

2. A serious split in the tribe began early when some people had the advantage of white fathers (literally) who were in business or owned land or otherwise were employed so that prosperity went disproportionally to those folks. Their early advantage expanded into a major class split within the tribe itself. Most outsiders are totally unconscious of this.

3. A genetic heritage once fitted the people to the land in ways that no longer exist in terms of diet, exercise and practices. They were meat and vegetable eaters, always on the move. There was no sugar or alcohol.

4. This makes them vulnerable to diabetes among other things. Genetic vulnerability to diabetes is exacerbated economically by the tendency to eat cheap food -- high sugar, high carb, high salt and high fat but low nutrition. Partly this comes from eating fast food and junk food, fat beef instead of lean game and buffalo; and partly from being dependent on commodities and food banks. The foods from those sources are also high carb, high sugar.

5. The boarding school approach to breaking the old culture (plus the impact of population decimation from smallpox, cholera, and massacre) broke families and their generational wisdom. At one point there were only about 500 Amskapi Pikuni -- Montana Blackfeet -- half of whom were children. Many became stranded between cultures.

6. This compares to modern AIDS devastation in Africa, though American tribal people will resent me saying so. They do not like comparison to low status groups. One of the strong suppressive forces left by missionaries is the flat denial of things like genetic vulnerability (which translates to their ears as being physically faulty though it was physically supreme under conditions two hundred years ago) or lack of parenting (which translates in their minds to being morally deficient) or any other comparison hinting that they are not “just as good” as middle-class white folks. They want to say, like those missionaries, that they are just as bourgeois and middle-class as anyone else -- ironically at a time when many folks are criticizing that paradigm as destructive, not just to the people but also to the planet, just when we are turning to the authochthonous people as examples of more “noble” ways of living. Many rez folks are now educated and employed well enough to BE middle-class and -- to them -- this is success. White visitors can’t even see middle-class Indians, though some -- despite white-type success -- have maintained or renewed their connections to old-time religious ceremonies and self-disciplines.

7. The people are in a “syndemic.” (This word comes from Merrill Singer.) An “epidemic” of major proportions is a “pandemic.” When that overlaps and converges epidemics of disease, economic need, family disfunction, drugs, trauma, it becomes a “syndemic.” When one adds extreme weather and drought, it is called an “ecosyndemic.” The good news is that if you have a name for it, you can think about it. But the feedback mechanisms are not adequate to let the tribal members and rez residents participate in the knowledge flow. It feels simply overwhelming.

8. Treaties require that the US government provide education and medical care. This meant one thing in the early days and another thing now, much as the US Constitution meant one thing when it was written and another thing now. Post-modern thought, poorly understood, has taught many kids that education is a white man’s imposition on them and that they should resist it as illegitimate. (I’m NOT kidding.) Discipline in schools, even simple classroom order, can be defined as political oppression, even with a Blackfeet superintendent, principals, teachers and school boards -- which the schools have. The response has been to lower standards to the point where rez kids can’t cope with college-level work. They have no concept of remediation to catch up, but simply conclude they are inferior and go home. But those who have family support and guidance can zoom up to the Ph.D. level and some are MD’s.

The need for conscientious support in a hospital -- accurate record-keeping, proper med dispensing, careful cleaning, preventative education -- are LIFE-SAVING but not seen that way. Insistence on high standards come across as just more oppression and withholding.

9. There is a glass wall around the reservation. The newspaper is owned and controlled off-rez, though the actual editor is a sympathetic white with anthropological training. There is no sense by the surrounding white community that rez probs are very much like their own and vice versa, so there is very little sharing or sympathy. When the state legislation required that all Montana schools teach Indian history (which happened right here!) an educated woman said to me, “I don’t see why WE should have to study THEIR history!”

10. Pop media do not “get” Indians. They INSIST that they are either doomed drunks or doomed heroes. Anything other than that is simply not defined as Indian so it becomes invisible. People tell me there are no US Indian actors but I could name twenty who are Indian -- just not seen that way. HEATHER LOCKLEAR??? My fav example.

So, in general, it is right for an old lady Indian to be paranoid. I’m paranoid myself even though I’m white. The forces ARE aligned against us. We are at least somewhat victims. But there is no intent to single us out for punishment as individuals. In fact, there is no intent at all. No one person or group to blame. It’s structural: ecopandemic. The way the cookie crumbles, the chips fall, and we daren’t even eat ‘em. It’s grandiose to think we are the target; narcissistic not to understand that others suffer. Right here.

AU COURANT

People think that out here in the hinterlands we don’t know nothing, but we do. We know the BIG Nothing which is that humans are temporary. Let’s go on from there.

Much of the commotion about a place like Montana is focused on the 19th century when Euro-based culture smashed into the Native American Indians, destroying their way of life, but not them. Right now (nearly 2010) it is ALL cultures smashing into themselves. We have all barely survived our remnant cultures, the ones we used to know. Nothing anywhere is like the Fifties.

“Why Gone Those Times?” asked James Willard Schultz, and Charlie Russell painted the disappearing edge of the times his own cousins (the Bents as in Bent’s Fort) actually lived. Luckily, his determined wife was able to make his art sell and persist to be the core of museums across America. We know those paintings and bronzes now. We know his illustrated letters to friends, the stories about his high jinks in bars, the pictures he painted on the petticoats of whores or for peep shows. Somehow we’ve forgotten some of the price he and Nancy paid in that maelstrom of early days, even the 19th century versions of AIDS: goiter (which killed Charlie) and syphilis. Somehow he’s been made into a respectable middle-class grandfather. I think it was the money.

Money won’t work now. It’s not that there’s less money -- it’s that the pretense that money is SOMETHING that is gone. We see through the illusion now that we know that the government is addressing our infrastructure crisis by simply printing more money.

It’s time to color outside the lines. But you have to be someplace or everyplace or anyplace, according to your temperament and experience. I choose to be in Montana on the edge of the Blackfeet reservation. This is where I am most me, according to Flaubert’s advice to "be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.” I’m pretty good at the first half, except that the village would like me to tend my yard a little better. The second half -- I’m workin’ on it.

If you watched me (you would have to look past the two fat cats dozing under their lamp in the window) you would see an old woman at her keyboard pretending she was pole-dancing alone in the dark before dawn. What I’m doing with Tim Barrus is almost psychotherapy, opening up to his stories of adventure, abuse, risk, inclusion, recovery and trying to understand what it means. His chaos, my order. My NPR Beethoven, Cinematheque’s throbbing, yearning Imeem downloads. None of it ever happened to me, but I listen and try to understand and try to find the words to explain from a slightly different angle, so those of us less driven can learn from it.

Where I am is a village. In it are crazy people, even sociopaths. In it are dying people, gentle loving faithful souls. In it are restless kids, some of them marijuana smokers and probably at least one with AIDS. Some of them get beaten by abusive men who think this will “reform” them. They think nothing ever happens here, that you have to be in Paris or Amsterdam or Italy or at least New York City, but the same things happen there.

People are wrong. Everything happens everyplace. You just have to get in touch with it.

I’m always a little surprised when diasporas are revealed. A diaspora is a population of a defined people scattered through the world. The French diaspora gave us Quebec, San Francisco, New Orleans, and the Metis population of the high prairie. Charlie Russell always wore a Metis sash. Paris is not much like the Red River country inhabited by Louis Riel’s people, but they did speak French. And they believed in “liberty, equality, and fraternity” until the British Empire hung them for trying to start their own country in the middle of Canada.

Some diasporas are invisible until they declare themselves: blacks passing as whites, gays, American Indians, writers and other artists, maybe feminists. Unitarians. The Unitarian leaders were having a meeting about how to relate to homosexuals. They said, “Maybe we should hire someone who IS homosexual.” One of them, a respected manager, said, “No need. I’m gay. I’m just not out yet. What do you want to know?” Why don’t we ask those among us who know. Just turn to them and ask, “What is it like to be you? What do you see?”

Especially the young, who roam the globe and outer space through their keyboards while you think they’re doing homework or playing video games. I’m not talking about porn or drugs. I’m not talking about the grownups sitting on the sofa watching movies about sex and violence and drinking beer. I’m talking about kids who ask “What is spirituality? What happens when you die? Might there really be life in outer space? Will there be a world when I grow up? Can I cope with it? Will anyone love me?”

One of the ways to cope is to exclude everything that’s troubling. Just don’t look. Don’t talk about it. Don’t talk about Charlie and Nancy Russell and why they couldn’t have children (scarring from VD.) Don’t talk about drugs or sex or accidental pregnancy. Nice people don’t know. Don’t you want to be a nice person?

But the world has gone far beyond that. Everything is connected. Everything is moving. It will sweep you along one way or another. It’s on your radio, in your food, printed in the newspaper, posted on a billboard, talked about in the cafes.

Dave Lull, the librarian/philosopher who so dependably keeps me on the lookout for Black Swans, says he remembers me suggesting we ought to go back to reading sci-fi. He says maybe I’m right. I’m looking for the “unknown unknowns” and sci-fi is good for that. I’m thinking there are too many people and AIDS is only the first of a wave of pandemics. Here on the high prairie we’ve been through two in the last few centuries: smallpox and Spanish flu. Maybe diabetes II is a pandemic.

It’s personal. And what it teaches me is that I must change to survive. I have and I’m prepared to do it again. This is one of the things I have in common with Barrus and Cinematheque.