CONTROL-FREAKING AMERICA

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SORTIN' AND FILIN'

So many years ago that I can’t remember when, I began to tear out photos from magazines and save them. They were most often from articles about houses, high-end interior decoration. It must have been in high school when I sometimes housesat for my dramatics teacher. She subscribed to those magazines and decorated her house accordingly. After a while I had so many clippings that I put them into those expandable “red rope” filing pockets. There were maybe three. Then more and more and more. After I moved to Valier, theoretically retired, one of my tasks was to sort these clips and discard most of them, but instead they expanded as decorating came closer to what I wanted this house to be -- “shabby chic,” “Mary Emmerling’s cottage style,” and “romantic French.” I thought. Instead the whole thing went rapidly to “Binder Heaven.”

Not all of these are house clips -- two are the one-page missives I sent back to my home church every week from seminary. Three are about how to fix stuff: plumbing, wiring, building porches and patios. The question is now what to do with them. Not the binders per se -- someone can use them -- but the clips carefully in sleeves inside. I’m not going to do much else to this house and I’m not going to move. My young relatives have tastes QUITE unlike my own.



This is the reworked clothes closet in my back bedroom, now an office. The cabinet at the top contains my family’s photos, mostly black and white, some of them pretty good quality, going back to the homestead days of the Strachans in South Dakota in the early 1900’s and to early times in Oregon. My father was a wool buyer in Eastern Oregon and a mountain climber in the days when St. Helens still had a summit. I gave most of the sheep photos to my niece and most of the mountain climbing photos to the cousin who climbs. One whole album was WWII trophies collected by my uncle, who flew bombers. I sent that to his son, who is an airline pilot. One album was almost entirely about farming in Swan River, Manitoba, which I put on a dedicated blog: www.swanrivermanitoba@blogspot.com, where it can be accessed by family as well as the Swan River Historical Society who are welcome to download whatever is useful.

There is, of course, a record of my sibs and I as we grew up. So far I’m just posting selected photos of myself in preparation for adding print later. My theory is that if I do it over a period of time and try to capture the time and place of Portland, OR., in the Forties and Fifties, the result might be interesting or even provocative. It was a situation in which nothing seemed to happen, and yet there were forces gathering that totally transformed a quiet neighborhood into the violent black ghetto that Portland tries to ignore. My living brother will object. My dead brother has no say.



This array is on top of four four-drawer filing cabinets. The shelves hold two other sets of binders. Dark blue ones are full of slides, more mine than my father's, and so mostly taken in Browning in the Sixties. Lots of them are scenery, meant for reference for painting which I haven’t pursued. The white ones hold manuscripts of books, mostly the ones on www.lulu.com/prairiemary/ in case all the cyber stuff in the world suddenly disintegrates. Or in case I can’t pay for an internet connection anymore and must retreat to paper. I think about such contingencies. In the cardboard box are my grandmother’s journals, mostly accounts of money spent, sometimes trivial amounts for thread, buttons and soda crackers and other times large amounts from sales of farm equipment. When the Strachans began to represent Kovar Krabgrass Kultivator, they made a little money for the first time.

I typed off one whole journal back in the days of xerox before the internet and sent each cousin a copy. It was about a tour of the American West in search of a place to relocate at the beginning of the Thirties. They landed in Portland, times were very hard, and they couldn’t sell the house in Winnipeg for years. The Kovar company had discontinued sales in Canada because of punitive tariffs. It's certainly resonant right now.

In the drawers are teaching materials, correspondence, my Bob Scriver archive, files to use in writing, Blackfeet Indian material.



This set of stacks is on top of three two-drawer file cabinets. The front stacks are to file, the drawers are for kinds of paper and office supplies, and the magazines at the top are going out to the bunkhouse to make way for more binders, binders, binders! Jerome Connelly painted the tree and boulder up in Glacier Park and I traded him a genuine Calvin Boy authentic Blackfeet rattle for it. I think he was expecting something a little more, um, antique. Calvin’s fav fur donor was the rack of Sallie Ann fur coats. In the drawers are my daily business and family genealogy records. Scotland. Oregon trail.



This set of boxes will have to find a new place soon because this is my geranium window which faces the south. There’s a big cottonwood tree out there that shades the window all summer and then drops its leaves to let the geraniums (perlargoniums) bloom in winter. The two boxes on the left are signs of progress: the folders in them are empty. I’ve burned or discarded the contents.



These file cabinets and boxes are all jammed with material, mostly church stuff but some from teaching. I’ll organize, type and Lulu.ize all the minutes and histories of Montana Unitarianism that I can, then send all the raw materials to the Montana Historical Society. One of the black boxes is all the Methodist orders of service and sermons for the year I served Browning and Babb. I had so much fun that I hate to throw them out, but they are hardly immortal stuff. I played a game, trying to reconcile the four recommended biblical readings into one sermon and mostly succeeding. But the orders of service were pulled out of the weather and other circumstances. I typed them off, suitable for Lulu.izing or something.

There are drawers of Unitarian sermons. What to do with them? They are not immortal, but a good scholar might get something out of them. Some of the best went into “Sweetgrass and Cottonwood Smoke,” but not all. Who should decide which are best anyway?



Here’s my secret sorting strategy: the case boxes the cat food comes in. They make excellent sorting trays with a card stapled onto the end to identify what I put in there: “museum de-accessions,” “Tennessee Williams,” “prefrontal cortex,” “material culture,” “vacuum cleaner parts,” “book-binding.” I put up a card table in the open garage and sit sorting in the dusty golden light. But I really ought to wash the windows instead.