HISTORY OF THOUGHT -- IS THAT WHAT IT IS?

History of thought as a discipline has gripped me since I found out there was such a thing by blundering into the little alcove in the Chicago Seminary Bookstore that was labeled exactly that. This morning there was a fascinating short article by Clay Shirky at: http://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/07/13/clay-shirky/not-an-upgrade-an-upheaval/ The title refers to journalism but could just as easily apply to everything from the car industry to publishing, the ministry to the film industry.

Shirky is noting that because so much news is now gathered by individuals at large by pointing their iPhones, instead of by journalists and photographers with “trained” minds and eyes, the information comes to the newspaper or magazine in huge masses that include a lot of crazy stuff or misinterpreted stuff. The task then is to filter and organize it, a huge job and one that is problematic because the “editors” were not on the spot, maybe have little awareness of the actual circumstances of the place and time, and might have some kind of template (Identity politics anyone? Or are we all sick of it?) that prevents some of the reality being transmitted. Those who think a running camera records reality have never had to be a jury considering one of the squad car video monitors mounted on a dashboard and automatically turned on. Sometimes it tells you a lot more than you want to know, sometimes a lot less, and sometimes it’s deceptive.

I’ve stopped saving to my hard drive all the many articles about publishing and how the consolidation of publishing houses into corporation creatures who must produce 10% profit or die have constricted books to mere products, and then how the invention of the blog opened the pent-up floodgates to a huge tsunami of writing and opinion that’s totally unfiltered and often nuts if not slanderous and damaging. Quite aside from the question “what IS good writing?” Or even "who wants to know?"

How do we make our way between knowing too much (there’s an acronym: TMI) and knowing too little or knowing the wrong things? Once upon a time a person lived in a community that produced a consensus made up of many small opinion holders who argued it all out. Maybe it was a church congregation, maybe it was a village or neighborhood, maybe it the guys at work, or even a university class but there was a lot of support and reassurance in that.

My attraction to the ministry came through Organizational Design, which made me feel as though a community could proceed in some kind of orderly way -- at least a manageable way. Either I just wasn’t very good at it or I greatly underestimated the forces that come to bear even inside an congregation. You can make all the flow charts you want, but if facing something like a plague, a new technology, immigration -- either a disaster or a windfall -- everything changes. In fact, even one toxic person can shatter the group. I gave up.

Last night, continuing my anthropology expedition into the world of the GBLT etc. world, I watched a movie called “Fabulous!! The History of Queer Cinema” which was intelligently anchored by a sensible college professor and cultural commenter named B. Ruby Rich. First there is the possibility of making movies, then there is the impact of WWII which gave cover to gays within uniforms, then the continuation of that in gladiator epics and Westerns with unclothed Indians, and a parallel cover in noir women-in-prison-having-cat-fights, until along came the funny and “harmless” version of gays as campy. About that time the invention of videos a person could watch at home -- and possibly cable TV -- and things got serious. AIDS threw the issue right out in public, esp. when Rock Hudson died. And the cost of making movies came way down so that Indie directors could work without studios corsetting everything. By this time distribution was on DVD’s and Netflix would mail you a show like “Fabulous!” without you having to even go into a video rental outlet and face the clerk. And the ultimate is probably the teen in her bedroom putting herself on YouTube. Shrug.

Strangely, what has really happened is that we’ve now got names for things that were there all along. The good part of it is that people who thought they were misfits or maybe even psychotic can now find a community -- if they want it. The bad part of it is that everyone thinks they know all about differently desiring people and still insist on sorting them into boxes, some of them criminalized. Maybe the worst or maybe best part of it -- depending on point of view -- is that now sometimes the whole subject seems “over.” So we go from Queer Cinema to New Queer Cinema to Post New Queer Cinema with hardly a pause. “Fabulous!” ends with the question, “where do we go from here?” The subject has split and morphed into so many different ways that “queer” doesn’t mean much anymore. (I can never remember all the letters in the acronym anyway.)

Something like that has happened or is happening to both religion and politics. (Some would note that they are really the same thing as any other social category like queer or deaf or native American or jocks or journalists. . .) An historical consensus embodied in a community exists. Dissenters keep their heads down low. Gradually they find each other and build an alternative community. For a while there’s a major effort to suppress and eliminate them. Outside forces might intervene, like running out of oil or the growing realization that Diabetes II might be due to environmental pollution. The dissenters grow in power until they can claim a place. Everything splits out into chaos for a while.

Always -- despite all pessimism -- a new consensus forms and the process begins again. The question is how to survive the chaos. This is one of the reasons I keep going back to “what are the basics I -- as a human being -- really need?” Food of a certain quality, shelter (including heat, light, water and sewer), the communal systems of roads and distribution of goods, protection from the criminal and deranged (one of our loonier and scarier citizens was recently led off in handcuffs). To do this little exercise is to realize how many people don’t HAVE these basics and to realize, as we are told again and again, if everyone had what many people consider a MINIMUM, we’d need about four more planets. Obviously, if there were fewer people it would help. You go first.

In the meantime, I’m going to blog as fast as I can before “they” figure out how to censor what I say. But if the Internet infrastructure collapses tomorrow -- which it easily could -- and Netflix goes out of business -- which it probably won’t -- I have a hoard of pencils and paper. I will use them to make flow charts and take notes.

METHODISTS ON THE HIGH PRAIRIE

Once I had a conversation with a man who traveled for a living. He said that if he were in a town he didn’t know and got lonesome for some good company, he’d seek out either AA or UU. Interesting folks with tales to tell in both contexts. (Forget AAA or NRA.) I suspect he traveled among cities rather than small towns like those in Montana. What UU types who enjoy church do for a backup is attend the Methodist services.

For instance, Don Marble, who in his UU phase saved the original Unitarian Church in Helena from being converted to a trendy restaurant by enforcing the original contract giving the building to the city, is now a dependable Methodist and so is his friend, Arlo Skaari. They are compassionate towards all people, inclusive, alert and informed, and not afraid of social action. Skaari has been a guardian of the Sweetgrass Hills for many years. I can see the hills from here. They are volcanic and contain enough gold to make entrepreneurs want to grind them up and run them through a cyanide heap leach pad, even though the hills create a watershed for a place always short of water.

In 1988-89 I served the Blackfeet Parish as the Methodist minister, though I suspect I appeared on their books as a lay preacher. The point was that because I was an ordained UU minister, I could live in the parsonage to keep it from being taxed and since we made a straight-across deal -- housing for preaching -- it solved both our money problems. It was a very good year. Partly it was made possible because from 1961 when I came to teach, that was “my church.” No one else from the Scriver family attended there, though they had been members of the Presbyterian church that was folded into it in the thirties. Bob Scriver paid for one of the stained glass windows in the present church in memory of his parents. His brother’s funeral’s was there.

When I arrived in Helena to be the circuit riding UU minister, we were greatly helped by the Methodist church there and met in their chapel, though it made the “recovering Christians” nervous. They just had to get over it. That was an excellent three years. Geri Fenn in Bozeman was a pledging member of both UU and Methodist groups, but we met in the Congregational Church, which is also a pretty good alternative to UU in most small towns.

Since I was once a circuit-rider myself, I was interested to see what the new Methodist minister assigned to Valier might be like. Valier is now part of a “three-point charge” so their minister travels among Sunburst, Shelby and Valier. I only knew she was female and I had to drive over to read the message board outside the church to find out what time to meet. 4PM. She must start the day with Sunburst and Shelby, then come here. It’s a couple hours’ drive maybe, and she seems to be living in Shelby or Sunburst. She told us about her daughter, who is training her horse and got her jaw knocked out of alignment when her horse’s flung-back head hit her chin. She has two other daughters.

I didn’t know any of this when I sat in the back pew. When I first came here in 1999, I used to attend because I was friends with the minister. Since that time I’ve not been in sympathy. The congregation was scattered, mostly older, sitting spread out towards the back. I watched them come in.

Here came a woman I saw only from the back at first: maybe forty, wearing a sleeveless top and a soft skirt that swayed with her strong walk, nut-brown hair in a glossy bob with bangs, big silver gleaming earrings and a jubilant voice. Yup, that was the one. She’s only been here a few days. No one knew where the light switches were for the sanctuary. No one knew exactly how to make the PA system work so we heard a lot of screeches from failed experiments. Finally she decided her voice was loud enough, and she was right.

She came down from the lecturn and spoke with no notes except to check the numbers for the hymns. The topic was from the Lectionary. An interdenominational committee in some mysterious place makes up a list of suggestions: one piece of scripture from the Old Testament, one from the New Testament, and one from the Gospel. The year I preached to Methodists I had a great time making a game of getting all three bits of scripture into one sermon, but most people sensibly choose one.

Dolly Collins (yes, that’s her name) chose the Gospel, Mark 6:14-29, and checked the usual translation with the Greek. It was about Herod cutting off John the Baptist’s head. She explicated this vividly in terms of power and the misuse of power to suppress rival powers. She spoke without manuscript or even notes. I would have dragged in the Middle East, but she didn’t. The benediction was the familiar Irish one that begins “May the road rise to meet you. . .” I didn’t stay for coffee because there would be cookies to resist. The Valierians could tell her about me. Maybe she already knew who I was. We probably won’t relate much in the ordinary world, partly because she won’t be in Valier very much.

While I was in Browning for Indian Days, I stopped in at the parsonage, which is a ranch house just out of town, to meet the new minister there. Young married man with no children and a shaved head. Strong and handsome, educated as an engineer which his engineer father insisted upon. He had to fight to be a minister and he’s been here three or four times before with youth service groups, so he knows what the place is like. It hasn’t changed much: there was a problem with the septic system in 1989 and there is today. His three point charge is St. Mary, Browning and Heart Butte and he probably also starts at the north end where the St. Mary congregation this time of year includes tourists and ends in Heart Butte. Out there no one remembered to shut down the water last fall so all the pipes have burst. A youth group is in residence and can’t live without hot showers. Good thing this guy is an engineer! When I stopped by the Browning church, I was met by a “missionary,” a chirpy little woman who wanted to embrace me and who was managing another visiting Methodist group. She’s been smoothing the transition between ministers.

It occurs to me that originally the Methodist presence here was supposed to be a mission to the Indians, but now it appears that it has become a mission to Iowa youngsters who need a spiritual infusion through doing good works in an exotic place. Nothing wrong with that. But it’s a lot of work to schedule, manage, and guide them. Religion, like everything else, is a “river” -- an ever-changing process that either adapts or dies. Methodism appears to be up to the challenge.

WHY I'M READING WILLIAM T. VOLLMANN

Sometimes I have the feeling that no one I know reads this blog, which is rather reassuring because it frees me from having to struggle with my image: old, tubby, rosy, and -- most of all -- female. People cannot get away from the idea that such an appearance signals harmless, loving, not really very bright, endlessly forgiving English teachers. This blog will not accept any photos of me (probably my fault because I don’t really care enough to figure out the problem) and I don’t spend any time trying to fancy up the rest of it with gizmos and widjits. It’s just plain writing.

Which is exhilarating, because I can get away with almost anything (maybe not slander, though others do) and that, coupled with being able to read anything, means something like seminary all over again. Except no worried professor can be trying to give me a grade. I had interpreted the ministry as a credential that let a person go anywhere without being classified as “one of them,” whether they were Nobel laureates or street drunks, but I discovered that ministry is a role and that people will fight to keep you in it. If you get too far off the script they like, you’ll be punished and/or ejected. At least if you’re going to stay in a “denomination” (a named institution) with an income.

Being old can mean either that one is freed from such constraints so long as income and need balance, or that one is finally content to stay inside the guidelines and consider the “other” only as one passes through on a tour bus or a cruise ship. I take the first choice. If you’ve been following this, you’ll realize that that’s how I got to the Blackfeet reservation, that’s why I came back, that’s why I wrote a book with the notorious Barrus and why I’m reading William T. Vollmann’s books.

As long as we’re talking about appearance, I note that Vollmann, esp in his early photos with big glasses and bangs, looks sad but charming: a boy. In the later ones where he’s heavier, pocked and stubbled with buzzed hair, he begins to look scary. But more congruent with his writing which is very tough and scary.

I had wanted to read the series of books about Native Americans and maybe I still will, but the Vollmann book that I could find on Interlibrary Loan started out with a description of catacombs, the Paris ones which are relatively recent if we’re talking about catacombs as ossuaries, bone repositories. Barrus and my book is entitled, “Orpheus Pressed Up Against the Windows of the Catacombs” -- meaning to imply the many ghosts he lives with because of the AIDS pandemic -- and since I’m the academic-type researcher, I thought I should read “Rising Up and Rising Down.” I’m about three-fourths through and sometimes consider stopping, since it’s a really big book. And crammed with agony.

But I don’t think I will stop. What Vollmann is doing is a kind of schematic of evil/violence/destruction and so on. Most of us go along thinking, “Oh, I know evil when I see it,” as though it were pornography or good art. But Vollmann wants to know why. What makes it evil? What are the causes? Stalin, Pol Pot, Hitler, Nero, Cortez -- he uses the literature in sort of the same way as Annie Dillard writing about her Pilgrim Creek -- to create theory and typology and frame the questions in a little tighter.

Vollmann is mostly self-educated though he is the son of a professor, born when the family was struggling through the starvation grad school years and therefore feeling an affinity with poor people. (He has his undergrad degree, but dropped out of grad school.) He seems to be an only child. Clearly he feels that inconsolability that has marked religious consciousness since Buddha and Jesus and has not been afraid to walk into the company of whores, thieves and criminals. Not to reform them, but to try to see out their eyes. Nor is he afraid of extreme environments, but he isn’t romantically dreamy about it -- he always takes good precautions. He likes guns and understands them. He is anything but a knee-jerk liberal who “loves” Indians but doesn’t know any and would certainly not ask one over for dinner. (Well, unless they were a Harvard grad.)

Vollmann is subtle and complex enough that it’s not a good idea to over-interpret him, so I’ll recommend some of the interviews. The best one IMHO is:
http://www.dalkeyarchive.com/interviews/show/22, but I liked others as well and there are probably more out there.

http://www.bookslut.com/features/2005_11_006908.php
http://www.altx.com/int2/william.t.vollmann.html

Later ones are bound to be better in terms of more focused, but worse in terms of more inscrutable. If one has read the writers he has, it’s bound to help. I know “about” them but have not read them. In fact, their world (drugs, violence, cruelty, evil) is as foreign to me as any hill tribe in Afghanistan, which is part of their attraction to a lot of self-disparaging “middle-class white” males and their nonexistence in the view of most women.

For me, one of the most attractive aspects of Vollmann (which is part of the reason I like these interviews) is his high reflexivity: that is, he’s constantly reexamining his assumptions, his methods, his perception, his writing skill but not in terms of of narcisssim, rather in terms of getting to the goal of understanding.

When one does this sort of relentless examination, one has the problem of revealing others, esp. others in one’s family. But my parents are dead, so I will say frankly that my father always kept a secret hoard of books about forbidden topics, like Vollmann’s. I found them early and read them all. My mother’s favorite book as a young woman, she mentioned several times, was “Tales of Genji” which is one of Vollman’s favs as well. (He’s fond of female prostitutes, but like everyone else, doesn’t mention male whores.) My parents lived exemplary lives of service to others and cautious virtue at home. But down in there someplace was the interest in the “other.” They say that people act out the secret desires of their parent generation. So it’s probably a good thing that my cousins don’t usually read this blog.

"DRUGSTORE COWBOY:" a Review

I’m embarked on a Gus van Sant festival because we think “Orpheus Pressed Up Against the Windows of the Catacombs” would be a good match for van Sant. Last night I began with “Drugstore Cowboy” which I’ve always known about but have never seen. It’s shot in Portland, supposedly in 1971, which is about the time I was on the streets there as an animal control officer, but actually in 1988 which is just before the time I went back to Portland for the last stint working for the City of Portland in the Bureau of Buildings -- later, “Environmental Services.” So this is a place that I know -- not in a tourist way.

In Portland, to interest tourists, they call the catacombs under the city “Shanghai tunnels” because of the 19th century practice of kidnaping drunk sailors and impressing them into service on ships headed for China. Theoretically that doesn’t happen now. But in the Seventies someone in the Mayor’s Office told me that the “white slave trade” was still a major problem: mostly girls at that time. No need to smuggle them out unconscious -- just give them a plane ticket and promise they’ll star in a movie shot overseas.

The world of the aimless drug-surfer, an expression of existentialism whether they know it or not since “knowing” anything at all becomes problematic for someone whose brain on drugs is less like a fried egg than a wildly twitching frog, anchored only by society’s determination to get everything under control through confrontation. Well, everything that makes trouble. If anyone wants to go off and slump in a corner and starve, that’s fine.

As an animal control officer I was in and out of their environments all the time. These were not meth people or even street drug people -- they were prescription drug people, the ones that Eric Newhouse is writing about in a series in the Great Falls Tribune as of major concern on Montana Indian reservations. On reservations this seems to have been triggered by the practice of delaying treatment for serious illness by simply providing palliative care: pain killers. The problem is, as usual, once hooked, one gets the substance of choice by stealing it or anything that can be sold to buy it. Since many of the patients are old or otherwise frail, it’s pretty easy to just take it away from them. A lot of people live in a world of hurt around here.

Back in the Seventies there was an explosion of uppers, downers, new pain killers, and other psychotropics and at the same time a cynical despair about life and authority figures that could be used to justify just taking pills and dropping out. It was evidently easy to knock over small pharmacies. The druggies in this film are not violent, just inventive. Deaths are a byproduct. Violence is enacted on them, not by them except that they're hard on property. Law enforcement doesn’t have a grip. But pretty soon the leader, who manages to think through the haze, realizes that they aren’t getting anyplace and that their angst is only growing. He decides to stop.

The counter-message, and one that makes this film far more interesting, is the presence of William Burroughs, who -- in a low key and dignified way -- defends the right to take drugs. He plays a priest, emaciated but coherent, who has been marginalized by his drug use His very survival is some kind of assurance. He would not be alive if he’d been taking meth. Still, he advises us to avoid “drug hysteria or any other kind of hysteria, for that matter.” Right. Good advice.

What makes life so hard to bear for young good-looking people with brains and a little “assembled” family? Why would they need drugs normally prescribed for those dying of cancer when their worst actual suffering is . . . what? Boredom. Fatique. They are “grayed out,” no goals, no excitement, flat-lined. So -- reservation life, life in low-income rainy Portland, life in the early 1970’s when there was another one of those “unpredicted” recessions, life on a planet that we were only beginning to understand was seriously corroding, and no countervaling forces of religion, patriotism, idealism, education or even aesthetics.

Actually, they had -- but the media hadn’t realized it yet. It was still sort of underground: hippies, granolas, gays, communes, all that experimental stuff. And they didn’t have anything against pills either, though they tended to use pot and LSD. They wanted bigger consciousnesses rather than oblivion, participation in the cosmos.

I guess. How do I know? I just read about it, mostly, but I DID know these parts of town and I did go into those kinds of households. “Panda,” the dear little dog, was not an anomaly.

Blacks are entirely excluded except for the social worker and the therapy group, which is a choice on the part of van Sant, since the Union Avenue motel where some of the action takes place is so Black that Union Ave is now MLK Jr. Drive. Race politics are pretty much excluded from the movie. Van Sant’s part of town is NW which is also where Ursula LeGuin lives and 23rd was about to become an extension of Rodeo Drive. This movie is not about greed or power, not about the big players, but about the aimless, the players of little scams and delusions trying to get by until they just, well, disappear.

But the story also makes a quiet pitch for an ordinary small life doing a repetitious job and living in a scruffy room, all alone. “It’s not so bad. It feels safe.” Simple existence.

To my mind this movie is probably more relevant now than it was then. At that time the little bunch of “cowboys” seemed sort of harmless deviants who did a lot of property damage but didn’t hurt much of anyone but themselves. The rage and craving that flame through this beginning century -- I wonder what Bill Burroughs would say about it. Now that the charred remains of so much is caving in on even the rich. It’s not the end of the world in any objective way, but we’re looking into a cratered dystopia that we knew was coming and couldn’t seem to oppose.

“Orpheus” doesn’t aim to save the world. It just suggests a pillow fight, some skate-boarding, and a community. Or, hey, let’s make a vid! But if you’re a boy dying of AIDS, you won’t die alone. And art is easier than crime.

NORTH AMERICAN INDIAN DAYS: 2009

In honor of North American Indians Days Bob Tailfeathers, who is a great cartoonist and always onto something, drew a cartoon for the Glacier Reporter. I wish I could send the drawing.

This time it’s a convenience store, which is advertising “Buy two, get one free essence of pine needles purfume” [sic] The clerk, who has a pony tail, an earring, and a ball-cap on backwards, is at the cash register which announces “SALE, NAID items, 50% off.” [NAID stands for North American Indian Days.)

So this is now and Indian Days started today and two old ladies have come to prepare for the events. The clerk says, “Let’s see. . . Native Women Body Splash, Vicks, Deep Heat Rub, massage oil, and eye liner. . . Must be snaggin this weekend, eh?”

And the girls -- plainly past their sell-by date -- say, “Just a little.” (Blush, blush.)

Oh, my! They’re remembering their good old tipi creepin’ days when everyone really DID camp out in tipis and there was still prairie out there beyond the campgrounds where a person could find a little privacy. Now it’s all RV’s and everyone sits in there watching TV’s. You’d have to walk two miles to get away from housing. But there’s no expiration date on flirting.

I went yesterday, cool and clear. It took some energy to get me out the door to Browning. I'm very comfortable with thinking about Browning when I'm not there, because it's always the Browning that used to be -- but it's scary to go there and see what it is now. Mostly no one knows me, things are quietly different, stuff has changed without asking me if it could. I don't get on the phone and see where everyone is because it wouldn't make any difference anyway. They just don't relate to me anymore. I'm invisible. Which can be an advantage if you’re a watcher and writer-downer (or writer-upper).

The campgrounds had quite a few tipis and lots of RV's and camp trailers, but the grounds were COVERED with backpack tents like round-topped mushrooms with barely enough room in between to walk on. It must mean that the people are young now and don't mind crawling around. The old traditional circle with allotted places is all mixed up. I couldn't figure out where anyone was.

The carnies were there but I couldn't hear the stick game -- it was lunch time and there was a free feed, so maybe they stopped for a while. There was a small ferris wheel, one of those octopus things, a tall slide but not too tall and the Buffalo Jump, which is a big inflatable walled room where you can bounce on the floor. A row of stalls selling small stuff. Had a chat with a guy selling jewelry who was reading up on diabetes diets. He says he still eats fry bread, but only small pieces. He’s from the SW desert, says it hasn’t changed in the last thousand years. He looked fine so his diet is working.

The dancing now is professional level and beyond. The costumes are extraordinary. The dancers are on astroturf so there’s not much dust and the seating is more or less permanent with a nice little roof for shade. People do long elaborate giveaways and honoring grand entries, which they ask be treated the way patriotic Americans in the Fifties treated the flag, and there are more journalists than anthros. Scientology was not there, but I was surprised by the number of small mission tents. De la Salle School, the Catholic elementary school, fed everyone breakfast all morning.

I remember that series of years when politics ruled and intense clench-jawed youngsters lectured everyone they could corner. Now those people are old and getting a little tiresome. In that period flirting was pretty hard because people were already full of themselves. Maybe we’re past that now. I think we’ve been into the Age of Prosperity, when everyone has a new crewcab F-350 pickup. Maybe that’s over now, too. The decades flip like those time-lapse calendars in movies. In the past Indian Days belonged to the old people and young people just thought the camp was too much work. But now there’s a hunger for the past and many want to dance, to speak the language, to learn the old ways.

I’m seeing thoughtful faces now on both genders. They carry mobile phones, maybe even Blackberries, and generally have iPod earbuds in place. Music surrounds them like an aura, barely audible but always there. Some of them speak Blackfeet. More all the time have graduate degrees.

They’re not the ones who are invisible. I’m the one who’s invisible now. Most of the people I’ve known here are “gone on ahead.” I’ve lost count of how many years it’s been since NAID was started, but that’s sort of bogus anyway. There has been a June encampment in that same place long before there was a town and even before there were white people and before horses. It springs up like the grass for a few days and then disappears again until the next year.

The race track grounds were packed. There have been horse races since the first horses showed up and foot races long before that. But I don’t think there’s a camp crier early in the morning now. There isn’t as much cottonwood smoke drifting among the lodges, and a lot of the gambling has moved over to the big casino built in the middle of the complex. But the sound of drums, the heartbeat, never changes. You just need to feel that drum on a chilly night with the drummers singing falsetto under a zillion stars and the old ways are still there.

Fifty years ago Bob and I had a terrible fight and I didn't know what to do. It was the middle of winter and I went out into a roaring blizzard across the empty campgrounds and walked and walked, bawling and bellowing and feeling ever so sorry for myself, and sat on a pump platform, a cement well-head just the right height to sit on and about six feet square, and howled and raged and turned inside out while the world did about the same thing all around me. Today I saw that cement platform in among the tents and tipis, still sitting there in the same place, a little chipped and worn. Otherwise, unchanged. I laughed. I thought of Napi’s many encounters with boulders.

The landscape is gently iridescent with pale sky and still-green land, slightly bronzed with grass seeds waving. First cut of hay is starting, both purple alfalfa and that bright pink French alfalfa, and then mustard/canola. White clouds like whipped cream in spaced blobs sit on an imaginary sheet of glass and all across the land their shadows are gliding up and down the slopes. The mountains are purple silhouettes.

The world goes on with or without us. Our anguish wears itself out. We dare to smile again.

BRONZE GRIFTERS

When times get tough, the scams multiply, especially among those who had already gambled on the good times rolling on forever. Art scams are often the most ingeniously successful of all since most ordinary people have been taught to consider “art” something mysterious and quite unlike ordinary life, so that they don’t know how to judge “deals.” The most recent scam, I’m told, is about Scriver bronzes and involves the usual cast of characters who always try to twist Bob Scriver’s career to their own advantage. They are a little knot of bronze casters and professionals from mostly just over the mountains.

I’d been hearing about how “Bob gave me this wax of such-and-such and he said I could get it cast however and whenever I want to.” Right. Bob the Control Freak suddenly becomes generous. Then there were the people who said they had found a hydrocal (hard plaster) in a hock shop and had the foundry make them a casting. (Perfectly possible, but sort of dubious. Copyright law is more stringent than people know.) Before Bob’s death he found it convenient to sell sculptures commissioned by entrepreneurs. They would be responsible for casting (they cast huge editions, up to a hundred castings) and selling. When the molds in Bob’s estate were destroyed as required by his will, the molds for these commissioned pieces owned by entrepreneurs were not.

If you can’t follow all this, it sort of proves my point, eh? It gets worse.

Especially in the case of bronzes, which have always been relatively easy to replicate and which can now be reproduced easily by laser-tracing that is recorded in computers (a technique -- like many metal-working techniques -- that was developed for machine parts requiring precision replication), the physical object is easily reproduced. But in the end it must be cast by melting the bronze and pouring it into some kind of mold. The ceramic shell mold system (“chicken-fried” -- that is, dipped in silica batter and baked) does not produce the finely accurate and detailed surface of Roman block or investment casting. Anyway, grifters want a product fast. They don’t have time to fool around with quality.

And you can tell. Some of the Scriver bronzes that float through the auctions are pretty low quality castings and their patinas are even worse. You’d think the experts would see that, but both a noted Western gallery and the Montana Historical Society were taken in by bad casting and bad patina on a Scriver bronze made at the beginning of his career as a tourist trinket. The castings didn’t sell. The dealers did not blame the foundry/grifter -- they concluded that Scriver bronzes have no market. Clearly the customers had more educated eyes than the “experts.”

This is why “provenance” or the history of each casting is so very important as a way of sorting out the real from the inauthentic and is why the Montana Historical Society’s refusal to make the Scriver records that were in his estate available to the public is so damaging to the owners of Scriver bronzes. From the beginning, because of the practices surrounding Charlie Russell’s art, Bob Scriver was intent on maintaining accurate records of who bought what. This was so vital to the value of each bronze that at one point he was sued by Wolf Pogzeba for not providing the specific numbered casting Wolf had ordered. (Bob won the lawsuit, but probably in part because the judge didn’t understand numbered castings.)

The newest scam is a claim that Bob’s work in progress, still in the clay, was given by Lorraine (Bob’s fourth wife) to her son by a previous marriage, who has held them all this time. In fact, in the days immediately after Bob’s death they were transferred to one of the chicken-fried foundrymen. This man was NOT Lorraine’s son. Lorraine had no sons nor daughters either. At a certain stage of drunkenness she would lament her inability to produce a baby. The grifters are NOT claiming that this son was a genetic son of Bob. They’re counting on confusion over the lives and identities of his wives.

Bob had a vasectomy during WWII, partly because his first wife, Alice, said she would divorce him if he didn’t. Two weeks after the procedure she DID divorce him and went on to have four more children with a second husband. One of those was male. His name was John Skogen, after his father, and he had a bad heart, like his father. If he didn’t die, he’d be in his fifties. It’s possible these art coyotes have found him, but I doubt it. Lorraine never knew him.

Bob’s second wife, Jeanette, was unable to have children and married Bob in part because that would make her the stepmother of two children. I was the third wife and have never had children, never wanted children, and married Bob in part because he could NOT have children. I am the only living wife.

When Bob died, Lorraine went into a rage and then began trying to consolidate everything into money with lots of help from opportunists, prominently including the art coyote foundry. Bob’s will was so poorly written that it left huge loopholes, for instance, the works in progress, the entrepreneur molds, and the books that Bob wrote. The lawyer himself was on shaky territory since his idea of a solution was to make himself the “king of the mountain,” (head of a foundation that would own everything) which was fine until a meaner and cleverer hyena came along and was able to collude with the judges concerned.

For some artists, John Clymer or Charlie Beil for instance, the family is the safeguard of the heritage, but Bob Scriver’s family was shattered and at each other’s throats. I was lucky to have been divorced from Bob for almost thirty years when he died, so that I was clear from the fall-out. But the coyotes were unlucky that I was so much younger than Bob and neither a drunk nor a dummy. Not only that, I never remarried so my name is still Scriver. Even worse, I’m still here in the little town where Bob’s daughter grew up. She was a year older than me and her name is enough like mine (i.e. Margaret) that I can be misrepresented as her.

It’s a wicked world. Buyer beware.

MY DIABETES II STRATEGY

What I know about Diabetes II so far is not much. But no one else knows much either.

Consider that a cell is a little creature all unto itself, with the coded gameplan tucked into its nucleus while it goes about its business in the sea-in-the-skin of a mammal. The anchored cells are dependent on the tide of the blood and lymph to bring them their food and remove their discards. The circulating ones ride that tide. One needn’t feel too badly about erythrocytes (red blood cells) lost through a cut or bloody nose, as Loren Eiseley so famously did when he fell on a cement sidewalk. Erythrocytes have no nucleus, which is basically the cell brain. Squamous epithelial cells are sacrificed to abrasion every day, sometimes with no pain, other times “with.” When I was a kid, those cells who lived over my knees lived sacrificial lives and were often fortified with scabs.

Hey, diabetes! Remember? Okay.

Every human being is different. The cells are used to different things and their nuclei may have different game plans. That counts. What is true for one person is not true for another. If your blood glucose is no longer automatically managed by your body, you will have to build your compensation around your own uniqueness as MEASURED by a glucometer. That’s the little machine deal that you put your drop of blood into and read your glucose level in a window. MEASURED. No guessing.

Glucose, which is the fuel of cells, cannot get into a cell without the help of insulin. If the insulin is missing or won’t work, you have Diabetes I, which is an older and better understood phenomenon. In Diabetes II there is some mysterious reason why the insulin can’t get the glucose into the cell. It might be the cell’s fault. Our little pocket glucometers measure glucose but none measure insulin. People with Diabetes II who have had their insulin levels checked by a lab may find that they have plenty. They may even find that they have too much because the body is still trying to pry those cells open so the glucose can get in. Insulin is toxic and will not do you any good if there’s too much.

The closer the environment is to the original environment of humans, the better, because the more likely the nucleus’ game plan is to fit. Today’s environment has become very different chemically and in the way of living. (I HATE saying "lifestyle.") There is considerable suspicion that because the incidence curve of Diabetes II is going up so quickly, there must be some environmental cause.

The trouble is that there’s been so much change and it is in such basic ways that it’s pretty tough to design objective tests that will definitively prove that THIS plastic ingredient or THAT level of TV watching or THE OTHER amount of soda pop swilling is what is giving go many people Diabetes II. Some say it’s likely to turn out that the condition is a variation on “autoimmune” disorders in which the confused warrior cells of the body can’t tell which cells to attack and cause “friendly fire” damage in one’s own body.

Though the scientists and doctors (those of them that are scientific) are confused about all this, raw personal experiment plus some provisional research can help. As follows.

For many decades (probably since the first granolas came out of the closet) I’ve noted certain people, usually female, who looked particularly healthy, slender and energetic. They said their secret was eliminating all white sugar, white flour, corn fructose, processed foods, and (sometimes) nightshade foods (potatoes and tomatoes) from their diets. After I began to eat this way, I lost the extra fifty pounds I’d been fighting for a long time. When insulin can’t get glucose into the cells, it converts the glucose into fat and just parks it.

What that actually means for me is that I eat very little bread (and look on the package for ingredients, not buying any with fructose or a lot of preservatives), NO sugar (white or brown) or corn fructose (check package), an absolute minimum of processed foods (mostly condiments which are eaten in very small amounts), no white potatoes -- I do eat tomatoes. I’ve been doing this since diagnosis, a little over two years.

I eat meat sort of according to Weight Watcher guidelines (preference to chicken and fish, not a huge amount, de-fat as much as possible, include eggs) and huge amounts of green stuff. In fact, the biggest danger to my health these days is probably contaminated bagged salad greens. I’m wishing I had my salad spinner back, though it was a big nuisance, since all the advice about “patting dry” greens with paper towels is an even bigger nuisance.

The amounts of food I eat are drastically reduced. But when I first started to convert over to this low-carb diet I did it mostly by adding rather than subtracting. Some things, like carbonated pop, I’d already dropped out. I began to make bran muffins off the All-Bran package, adding walnuts and berries, and to eat one or two a day. I tried to snack on olives, string beans and peapods, those nice individually packaged cheese sticks, peanuts in the shell (takes longer so you eat fewer), and similar low glycemic (dense and slow to digest) foods like baby carrots and celery. It does not help that my teeth are disintegrating from old age and too many filings. I bumped butter in favor of whipped cream or ricotta cheese on my toast.

If you do all this, the temptation to pick up packaged cake-lings or chip bags diminishes because you’re not hungry. Then it’s a matter of breaking habits, but I’ve tried to do that by substituting new habits that knock out the old. In a BBC movie (!) I came across a family that habitually put a record on the old 78 turntable and danced together for a while after supper. I’d love to get this habit going. Fun and good comapny are powerful tools.

The first time I went back to my first doctor (who turned out to be a bad fit) she asked what I ate for lunch and I told her beans. She was horrified, saying “no one” eats beans for lunch and also beans as in “pork n’ beans” are loaded with sugar. The can label confirmed this latter. (The former, the female doctor’s opinion of what people do and OUGHT to do, is why I changed doctors.) I ran a little test on myself and discovered that pork n’ beans take my blood sugar up to 180. Then I read every label on every kind of beans at the supermarket and found enormous variation. I buy the lowest possible. The next step would be to slow-cook or pressure-cook my own beans, but I haven’t gotten there yet. Portions sizes as described on cans are also a revelation. I mix something with high calories with low-calorie foods, inventing as I go. Refried beans with olives and green beans. Black beans half-and-half with cottage cheese plus green chiles.

When one begins to think about blood glucose, people will NOT tell you what your reading should be. 100 is normal. If you go below seventy or so, you begin to feel funny. If you go above 140, damage begins: deterioration in one’s toes and eyes and damage to the lining of the kidneys. Kidney cells are up against the urine, of course, and if the urine is too high in glucose, the cells begin to plasmolize -- that is, their inside fluids begin to be pulled out. If you’ve put salt on a slug to kill it, you know what the damage can look like -- a vivid cautionary memory. So the goal is to keep one’s blood glucose somewhere between eighty and maybe a hundred and twenty or so. This means neither over nor under eating and eating constantly, browsing. Very fashionable.

The pharm industry wants to take over your glucose readings and run them via pills, the same as your blood pressure. Resist but don’t eliminate pills. They do make a difference. But the key to the old thing is the glucometer. I call mine R2D2. It’s my friend. But I don’t want a fussy C3PO for a doctor. I maintain my right to be human in the interest of my cells.

"GLADIATOR": A Reflection

I’ve just been reading Bruce Sterling’s very basic and direct list of eighteen things that are making conventional publishing difficult if not obsolete. Sterling comes from the world of cyberpunk and Wired where he has a blog, or did. This list is quite brilliant, not at all exhaustive, and worth an essay for every point. (see http://www.wired.com/beyond_the_beyond/)

But it doesn’t really address what a writer/creator/artist/photographer does internally -- that doesn’t change from one art form to another. I’ve been fascinated to work with Barrus, who doesn’t flinch away from any of this stuff and yet is quite old-fashioned, almost child-like, in the same way that Bruce Sterling and his “culture” are. I take Ridley Scott to be in some way part of this same context, even though the movie I’ve most recently seen (and seen and seen and seen) is "Gladiator.” If there is a genre called “Steampunk” -- which Sterling addresses -- then what do we call "Gladiator,” which has a cyber-aspect all displaced into the production where it consumed the energy of a major team? The story is based on one stubborn expert (in war, not computers -- I’ve only this year understood that the strategy of clustering warriors under a canopy of adjacent shields is move with a name that helped the Romans win against Germania, who were un-disciplined in that sense). Is it “chariotpunk”? Caesarpunk? Battlepunk?

Quite a bit of the team's attention was given to avoiding cliches from the Fifties Roman spectacles, what I call “Victor Mature” spectacles. He also impersonated a lot of 19th century Indians. I think we go to these two periods to understand our own times, trying to figure out heroes, specifically. “In Search of Dignity” by David Brooks in the NYTimes today suggests that “the old dignity code that George Washington once followed has not survived modern life.” http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/07/opinion/07brooks.html?th&emc=th ) One could sort the good guys in this movie, not by their hats, but by their dignity level. The worse the guy, the more undignified.

The real kernel and key in terms of creation, says Ridley Scott himself, has nothing to do with genre or technology, but rather are formed between the environment and the physiology, which meets the world with its senses and constructs as much as derives a “world view.” This happens very early, possibly before birth, and certainly by age three or four. Very bad deficits are possible in both the growing brain/mind and in the tragic world. Some can never be repaired or conpensated for and the coldest view is that beyond a certain level of damage, the individual should be discarded. If we meet individuals who are very impressive or bring us to high levels of achievement, we build them into our internal systems. Something is happening to take Russell Crowe’s inner system as a person to undignified behavior, but not Ridley Scott’s.

The achieving artist/author/etc. will probably not have been very damaged, because that would deny access to meaning or “means” to express that meaning, nor are they likely to have a receiver of meaning. We don’t know what their “meaning world” might be like. (On the H-list about animals, people are arguing about whether Temple Grandin can really understand a cow’s mind because she is autistic.) But part of the protective smoke screen around any artist trying to deflect interference might be the appearance of being undignified and out-of-control. So we don’t know whether Russell Crowe the actor is really acting badly, or just presenting that appearance to back people off.

An artist/author/director is someone who can work with layers: the actual narrative plus the issues of how that should be represented, ordered, modulated, emphasized, and otherwise realized. This is vividly shown when the CGI people demonstrate their "layers" of fantasy. Some people do this quite consciously, making lists and talking it out, and trying little models or doing research. Others trust their subconscious mind (which is probably multiple in what it does) and simply accept the product, as though it were a dream. Still others delegate a few layers to others.

For "Gladiator", a great deal of the controlling image (which can be more helpful than a written statement because it carries more information) was from Victorian Romantic paintings from that other period fascinated by the Roman gladiators. Carefully researched and beautifully excecuted, these paintings strikingly narrated the scenes and were posted on the walls by the teams, both as resources for building and clothing and for ideas about lighting and composition, which combined well with Scott’s habitual vision of scale, darkness, light shafts and unexpected angles. (There were no industrial fans this time -- maybe the catapults are the equivalent.)

I’ve been watching all the versions of “"Gladiator"” and the interviews about how the effects were achieved. Two major efforts on effects were dropped despite their power. The titles were actually cast in bronze, a beautiful font photographed with dust blowing over the letters, but it took too long. A sequence with a rhinoceros in the Coliseum was just too much, better suited for a comic book. (Er, graphic novel? What is a storyboard but a graphic novel?)

The most remarkable aspect of this movie is that although Ridley Scott had the concept and a “plot starter” from historical incident, the script was only about a fifth done when the cast began to shoot. When the actors, who were very powerful and emotional people, found this out, they panicked and tried to take control, each owning their own parts and, to some degree, the whole plot structure. Scott was able to tolerate this, use it, develop it, and eventually meld it into something far more compelling than it would have been had a true auteur insisted on only his own vision. I love this idea of development by process. It’s not for the faint-hearted. He didn’t shut them out or throw them out or replace them -- he drew them in.

Just previous to "Gladiator" and in nearly the same filming location (Malta) Scott had shot “White Squall,” which has a similar hero-and-loyal-followers-meet-catastrophe structure, except that instead of tigers the danger comes from fire hoses in a huge water tank to simulate a deadly sea squall. It has none of the depth or darkness of "Gladiator". Of course, the period of the sea story is the conformist end of the Fifties and the Caesars are merely domineering fathers, but I suspect that some of the problem was an obedient young cast working from a complete script. The risk, ambiguity, and unknown outcome of the larger film took it to another place entirely.

THIS OLD HOUSE: Low-balling the Status Quo

When I was a little kid walking to school -- maybe five blocks headed east along a side street, turn and two blocks north -- I was nosy about the people who lived along there and the way they lived. It felt like visiting a foreign country or going outside the gates of a compound. I was particularly interested in the dogs. One very modest house had a barking dog and I was determined to make friends with it, sending it into spasms so violent that the old man owner came out and yelled at me: “Go away, little girl! Leave my dog alone!” Another household had a fish pond with a big turtle in it and a bouncing noisy collie just like Lassie. The lady who lived there was kinder, but her message was the same. “Go away!”

Then one morning I found a dead cat in a yard and regarded it for a long time. On the way home it was gone and I couldn’t imagine how it had left since it was dead. I didn’t know people remove dead animals.

One of the most interesting houses was very small, almost buried in lilacs and other brush, which in Portland doesn’t need much encouragement. Someone, I assumed an old woman, threw out breadcrumbs and the place was swarming with English sparrows, all chiming their small songs until they amounted to a chorus. My earliest reading was Grimm and Anderson so the world was filtered through them and probably that wasn’t a bad fit for the neighborhood, since it consisted mostly of older northern European immigrants. I assumed the old woman was a witch and that if I’d have been a mermaid she could have arranged for me to trade my fishy tail for legs. I was a little young for that.

Now my house is rapidly becoming that sort of witch’s hovel in spite of the climate challenge. The poplars are certainly intent on reforesting this lot. I haven’t dug and planted anywhere near what I had intended, but try to keep alive what is already present. Peonies, grape hyacinth, little pink wild roses, and a rising tide of wild geranium that plans on taking over everything. The daisies, which are officially a weed, are coming along in their wake and the two mingle in a very pleasant way. I don’t really have the heart to try to root them all out.

The grass is very tall in back, which pleases my eye but no one else’s, and is threatening the minor lilies I planted. In front the daffies did well this spring but the daylilies seem to be lagging a bit. Every time I try to root out the grass in that front border, the ants swarm up my arms, so I stop. In fact, the ants ate my Explorer rose from Canada. I’d been using peanut hulls for mulch and they took it as an invitation.

Now I’ve scattered another set of ant killing “motels” out there in hopes that it will make a difference. But should I remove the peanut hulls? I originally got off to a bad start by using bark mulch AKA bark munch. There is a metropolis of “sidewalk ants” in the obvious place and I’m tempted to take a sledge hammer to the cement in order to get rid of them. One of our town commissioners remarked that our dipsy-doodle sidewalks (the few that can be described as sidewalks) are worse than just a common dirt path.

The “ecology” of the front yard is partly controlled by the wind from the NW all winter, which keeps building up the parking strip and that corner of the lot with road sand, loose and groovy for ants. There was a scraggly tree on the parking strip which I persuaded the PP&L wire-clearers to cut down. The guy did it, but his arms were covered with ants by the time he got through, which made him very indignant. They must have run right up his chainsaw blade! The roots of that tree are somehow harboring ants.

Trees control the shadiness of this yard all the way around except in back where a garden ought to go, except that so far I’ve not had the will power, the energy level, the cash or the drive to dig up the ground and get it working. This year even the bathtubs didn’t get planted properly. Both my buildings in the back, the double garage/workshop and the little “bunk house,” are move-ins from the reconstruction of Swift Dam after the ‘64 flood, quickly built by Scottie Zion’s brother and meant to be temporary. The frames of them are good, but they need new exteriors and that will take money. As I get older, they’ll take more money because I can do less of it myself.

Actually, I had visions of a sort of “cute” little cottage compound with embellishments of all sorts, but now I’m thinking that it’s not such a good thing to attract attention. Some of the houses here are so decorated with “cute” stuff that I don’t know how they get their lawns mowed -- I just know they do it. All the time. Now I’m thinking that the branches I’ve collected to make frames and trellises are better off sawn up for firewood. In Browning by now they’d have walked off like that dead cat.

The cotoneasters that the birds planted and I let grow under the poplars where the robins sleep are doing very well and I like the way they look with a “path” of stepping stones coming between them. Much of my early effort was about those cement squares, a dollar each, which are no longer on the market. I keep meaning to make a mold and cast more. Shouldn’t be that hard. I thought at first I’d write quotes into them with a nail when they were still soft, but see above. . . it would be an invitation to people to come into the yard.

In the long grass is the evidence of my appreciators and residents: cat nests. Squibbie and Caspar, the big mostly white cat from across the street, are the chief nest makers since Crackers likes my lap or the bed the best. Every now and then I turn on the sprinkler and a cat leaps up and tears off. I’ve thought of making some cement cat sculptures to put in the borders, but so far the ones I’ve made in clay have looked more like, well, dead cats than sleeping cats. Maybe glass eyes, looking up?

The Inkydink cats, Siamese twins, across the street seem to have moved to the country where the family is building a new house -- of logs, they say. I’m not the only one with romantic ideas about how a house should look.

FOURTH OF JULY, 1948, ON SUNSET BEACH

It was the end of June, 1948, and my family was camping out in the folding camp trailer my grandfather invented, the “Kozy Kamp,” in the dunes north of Seaside, not far from Fort Clatsop, a little farther from where Lewis & Clark spent their winter almost a century and a half earlier. Things had not changed much. Not many people, not much development. Easy to find a little two-rut road into a beach access where someone else had built a fire pit. Nothing like today’s campgrounds, so regulated and fee-requiring. On the other hand, no amenities. Just us in our tent on wheels.

We were barely emerging from WWII, a war to save democracy as we know it (though it deeply changed our democracy), entering the Korean War, arguably more psychotic than any war since, though it was before the Rock n’ Roll jungle war of Vietnam. We’d camped here before with no incident, but this time my mother -- always our sentinel -- woke first and looked out the screen, finding things strange. “Bruce, get up and look!”

Naturally my father’s first instinct when told to look was to grab his camera. You’ll have to look closely at the photos to see what we saw. The soldiers from Fort Clatsop were practicing war around us. An officer soon came to make contact with us. Today there would be a Blackhawk helicoptor talking to us through a loudspeaker, telling us to get out, aiming large caliber guns at us, as they just did in Choteau in order to make a drug bust of a dozen people, each of whom was in possession of an ounce or so of the demon marijuana. They called it “good practice for homeland security.”



But those were more primitive and practical times. Confronted with the five of us, plus dog, the officer decided our camp would be considered the medical tent and therefore protected from any aggression. (I told you this was an earlier, more innocent time. Nowadays, being a hospital in wartime is being a target.) He did not suggest painting a red cross on our Kozy Kamp.


The walkie-talkie required a backpack in those days, but I was allowed to listen. It was full of static but the message was “morphine to mabel, morphine to mabel, come in mabel!” It was years before I realized “morphine” meant medicine, the friendliest aspect of medicine on a battlefield, but I never did figure out who Mabel was. The only Mabel I knew was a teacher, albeit a bit of a tank herself. But I understood at a subliminal level that families and armies have a close relationship.

This was underlined at another camp, for which I have no documenting photos. It was in the formal campground at Mt. Rainier, maybe a year later, and we were at a picnic table eating our lunch when a busload of soldiers rolled in. They set up operations (lunch) not far from us and we were fascinated because their meals were very early versions of TV dinners, on segmented aluminum plates with aluminum foil covers. I have no memory of how they were heated and we ate our own food rather than theirs, so I don’t know what they had. Maybe not watermelon.

But again an officer came to talk to us. He asked whether his “men” (they were just teenagers) could come eat with us because they were due to ship out as soon as they got to the coast and some of them were pretty lonesome for family. Of course we were happy to have them and we all visited about other times in other places. Then they loaded into the bus and left. We went through the garbage and recovered the aluminum plates, which we re-used for camping until they were too dented and bent.

I suppose this is the sort of family friendliness that our military is trying to re-enact in the MIddle East: soldier to family rather than soldier to soldier, shared conversation instead of shared attacks. They say it works. I sure hope so.

Today our lives are so segmented and separated that many people never talk to the teenagers in their own towns, or the old people. In cities no one knows who's joined up. The fathers must be mothers and the mothers must be fathers. Soldiers might be either parent. It’s all confused. Amenities for a fee, assigned places, no exceptions.

I’ve been watching cyberpunk movies and Ridley Scott movies, while reading William T. Vollman’s “Rising Up and Rising Down.” Maybe Mabel is the person who has the answers. So where is she? Morphine to Mabel -- come in please!”

PROGRESS vs. SUSTAINABILITY vs. IDENTITY

The United States of America was founded on the idea of Progress, that time moves and therefore institutions can move and, if we pay attention and fight hard, always toward the better. But it begins to appear that Progress might simply be too expensive if it’s possible at all. That in truth we simply were exploiting new resources, which have mostly run out. Now we speak of “sustainability.” Can we keep this up? What are we sustaining?

When Valier celebrates the Fourth of July, it is a matter of re-gathering the family and putting on both a feast and a fireworks show that’s pretty much like last year’s. We rodeo and pow-wow and speak of tradition, even though on the edge of town is a sci-fi forest of white windmills, tall as trees in Oregon. In the mountains on our horizon, the north half of what we see is Glacier National Park, but the glaciers are disappearing. Geologists say this is because we’re still in whatever we call the 10,000 years of warming that pushed back the sheet of ice that had crept down over the planet from the north pole -- it’s not finished yet. But it is what has “created” agriculture, cities, and civilization as we know it. Will it now roll on past the point of comfort?

We are misled by the fact that the “Little Ice Age” from 1600 or so to 1850 or so covers most of American history. It was the cold that has been the anomaly. Scientists debate whether there is any such thing as a “normal climate.” And a major influence on weather is the Sun, which has no problem with factory, engine and cow emissions. It may be that the current argument over global warming is not about the actual fact so much as between those who think we can do anything about it and those who are resigned to having to adapt. The drastic consequences of the Little Ice Age, the converse of warming, was the death a quarter to a third of the population of European nations through crop failure. It helped to drive immigration to this continent. If warming continues, we may also lose crops and people. Where will refugees go?

But this post is not about global warming, it is about our expectation that life will be a “steady state” event in which our efforts will bring about expectable improvement. That’s certainly what the founding fathers thought, but then, they thought there was a way to sail a boat across the continent, from Europe to Asia in a lucrative shortcut. This may become true if global warming keeps up and the Arctic Ocean dependably opens up. But maybe these days no one is really that interested in sailing ships between the two “old” continents. And Russia has been using that ocean for their radioactive discards for a long time.

If we think in terms of sustainability, then ironically we must think in terms of responsiveness to change. If we think of ways to change in order to sustain our lives, we must think of what it is that we’re sustaining. Many people will say national boundaries and a high living standard, but surely these are vulnerable early in the face of change. What are the deeper minimums of human culture? What may be lost? Taxes remain. The opera goes. Maybe the highway system. The family remains, but changes. It's already quite different.

As I grew older, realizing that I’ll probably live to something like 2020 (which has a nice echo to it, since my eyes are wearing out), and having thought more about the predicted apocalypse (for some) that will surely come or maybe is happening right this minute, I’ve played this guessing game often. I live a very modest life and have lately discarded more things. First was travel -- we’re all curtailing that because of the gas. Second was all those luxurious magazines -- which have pretty much crashed anyway. Third was movies -- which bounced back as DVD’s. The pretty terrific additions that I would like to sustain are the computer and internet. But I wouldn’t die without them.

Without gas for tractors and chemical fertilizer, the farmers here would be out of business. That means no wheat. Cows could persist.

Diabetes II, totally unexpected, means I would die without enough food or with the wrong kind of food or with contaminated food (which may have caused the problem in the first place). Without my pills and glucometer, without enough money for green food and meat, I would have one of those “mysterious” heart attacks that are the result of low-level diabetes. Without enough money for gas heat or if the gas delivery system failed in winter, I might die. There’s a little woodstove in the garage which, for short periods, could keep me warm enough (and cooking) to get through a temporary loss. In winter I would not have to worry about frozen food, which is the most serious loss if electricity failed. Light would depend on day length. I need a LOT of light to see now. I’d be back to paper and pencil instead of the computer and I’d miss the radio and movies.

The farmers would play cards in the evening. Their wives would have to give up their long-arm machine quilt stitchers.

When there was enough light, I would have plenty to read, if my eyes persisted. I have enough books for two lifetimes, all high quality and books I want to read. No one will try to take them away from me: there are not many folks in this town who read except for escapism. There are some who would take my food. Or preferably take guns, alcohol, drugs or tobacco. but I don’t any of those anyway. I keep a low profile so this would not be the first house raiders would hit. How can I think this way? A little over a century ago, this was the norm here.

My life has mostly been sustained by government (Multnomah County and the City of Portland), religion (the Unitarian Universalist Association), and art (Bob Scriver). I’ve seen all of them grow and change -- diminish and change. I’ve seen how much difference one or two people or an alliance can make in the systems as well as how larger social changes -- rather like climate change -- have swept it all away or washed up new things in a transforming sea change. Even here in this village change creeps in on all sides, some wanted and planned for and other times unfelt until it’s too late. I go to every town board meeting and take notes, because it’s so interesting. I watching for signs of the future.

There’s one other point of focus in my life: the Blackfeet rez. Not the tribe -- them, too, but I mean the complex of people who inhabit this world. They are survivors. The way they have survived is by changing. The question is whether changing enough to survive is really surviving. If you’re not who you were, aren’t you gone?

THE TWENTY-MILE CLINIC: Fiction

The Twenty-Mile Clinic had originally been organized for the old folks in the little satellite town who found it hard to get to the doctors at the proper hospital in McKinley. But now that Twenty Mile had become simply the name of a bus stop in McKinley, the clinic mostly served young women and their children who wanted to stay close to home or to the day care in the church across the street. The church had been built by the same people who had organized the clinic, though they had never thought of daycare, since in those days women stayed home to care for the babies. No one had heard of “well-baby clinics” then -- and a sick child had been serious business. These days the young mothers in the clinic waiting room seemed always on their way to work, watching the clock anxiously, but they had long lists of things to check.

The old lady was one of the last of that first generation, still hanging on in her little house where she had raised three kids. Partly -- since none of them had made it to true adulthood, all of them succumbing to disease and accident in various ways. Life is dangerous. It had taken her husband, too, but later, when he had just begun to get old. She was aware that he had relieved her of a possible burden. But also that she might have become the burden. Neither of them would resent such a burden.

Now she herself was truly old. At night her brain roamed through dark caverns of memory, turning a faint and moving light on various carvings, facades, entrances, and sketched-out ochre paintings of wild beasts. She didn’t want to stop at any one scene, was content to move along, roaming. Life is a process. It goes on and then it ends.

She was a writer. All day she sat writing. In the early years she had a manual typewriter, then an electric, and now, of course, a computer, which she loved. When she finished a book, she tied up the manuscript in red ribbon and added it to the pile on her bookshelf. If anyone had known she was a writer and asked her “what kind” of books she wrote, she would not have known how to answer. Her kind of book. That’s all. Publishing was a foreign concept.

No one in Twenty Mile had any idea how farflung her web of friends reached, mostly men, often other writers. Some of them published and famous. But she didn’t really care about being published: she just loved the sensation of creating story, leaving a trail, like a spider with full spinnarets, making connections until there was a web of meaning, organic, inevitable.

“Mrs. Haverford? Mrs. Haverford? Are you all right, dear?” The staff was used to dealing with women not much more than girls as well as their children, both as they budded inside them and then after they bloomed outside. They weren’t very sure about old people. Mrs. Haverford had no opinion about babies. She was not an admirer of children. She’d spent her time making messes to put food into them, cleaning up the messes they returned to the outside of them, cleaning up the disorder after them whereever they went, trying to see who they were, what they were trying to become and what she ought to do to help them along.

Now she just accepted whatever was. The children in the waiting room were not her problem.

“Mrs. Haverford, this way.” The nurse was young and wearing a ring. Soon she’d be pregnant if she wasn’t already. Her scrubs were pink and yellow with little pandas and penguins. Flattening the folder of notes on the counter with her ringed hand, she said, “I see we need to do a blood draw. Is that okay?” Mrs. Haverford nodded. But how did she know what was okay? She just did what they said. They were irrelevant. If you balked, that made them suspicious and then they pried. So she obeyed the card that reminded her to make an appointment though she had a pretty good idea of what was happening in her own body.

The nurse had slender cool nurse hands and stroked her arm with sensitive fingertips, looking for a “good” artery. Mrs. Haverford had lost a lot of weight and her flesh was loose within her skin. “My veins roll,” she said. The nurse nodded, put back the needle she had chosen and found another, so the information must have meant something to her. The young woman was skillful and soon had the blood.

“You wait right here and the doctor will come in a minute.” Mrs. Haverford prepared to kick her heels for half an hour. Her mind went back to a little project she’d been working on: planning her suicide. Her best correspondent, a old writer who did very well for himself though he was stormy and unaccountable -- which might have been part of his charisma and good sales -- had booked a Caribbean cruise. She had found it quite astoundingly out of character for him to choose such a jolly trip. And personally she thought it was a great waste of money to go with fat prosperous shuffleboard players into a deliberately predatory sequence of ports, accumulating trinkets to drag home.

Later, when the author was mysteriously and simply not on board anymore, even though the ship was between ports on the open sea, she understood what had happened. But she couldn’t afford such a romantic end, swimming away from a ship in a warm, moonlit sea.

Then she had read an article about Mexican veterinary clinics where a person could buy the kind of drugs they use to put dogs to sleep. To sleep. A euphemism, of course, but why not? Why feel bad about it? She had even used the computer to order the right amount. Forget all the stuff about sleeping pills and plastic bags over one’s head. She knew how to inject the drug. She had once worked for a veterinarian, used the same kind of flexi-strip to raise a vein that the nurse had just used on her. She had made the injection and watched the dog simply slump down limp. The light is on, the light is off. Not so much effort as swimming.

The doctor, another young woman, came into the room. “We’ll see what your test results say, Mrs. Haverford, but in the meantime I’ll just write you a new prescription and we’ll see how it goes.”

How it goes. How it goes. Maybe when she got home the package from Mexico would have arrived. Would there be a full moon tonight?

When she had gone the young nurse turned to the doctor. “I just love Mrs. Haverford. She’s no trouble at all.” Then, “I took some really cute photos of my kitten last night. Want to see them?” She took a flip phone with a screen out of her scrubs pocket.

The doctor looked and admired, but she was thinking, “There was something funny about Mrs. Haverford.” Maybe the blood tests would have the answer. Then it was time for the next baby. There’s always a next baby.

THE SCOTS QUEENS AND THEIR STONES

I was sort of gob-smacked by the following bit of history, which I got from the Clan Strachan newsletter. According to this, the original Scots came from Judah via Spain. Talk about missing tribes!! This is entirely previous to anything I’ve seen before, probably at least in part because none of it had anything to do with Britain until pretty far along. They weren’t Scots until they got there, right? The Gaels were evidently Irish before they were Scots and then some doubled back to Ireland again, creating political problems. The Picts were already in place and I’m uncertain how the Celts fit into all this.

The tale is certainly impressive and will please a cousin of mine who is a right wing evangelistic Christian and considers himself a self-taught historian. But I’d like to see some back-up sources. After all, the Strachan family motto is “not timid, but cautious.”
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THE LEGEND OF PRINCESS SCOTA Legend has it that the Scots Gaels of Ireland and Scotland were born of two Scythian/Egyptian royal marriages. The first royal marriage, around 1360 B.C., was between Niul, a Prince of the area northwest of the Black Sea known later as Scythia, and Merytaten-tasherit, a daughter of Pharoah Smenkhare.

Merytaten’s father was also known as Smenkharon, Cinciris, and Achencheres, which appears on the ancient historian, Manetho’s, Egyptian King List. [There are some who theorize that Smenkharon was the Biblical Aaron, as well as a cousin of Tutankhamun’s father, Pharaoh Akhenaton, may have been the Biblical Moses - Smenkharon/Aaron and Akhenaton/Moses having been feeding brothers, with the same wetnurse, as opposed to being blood brothers.]

Egyptian rulers commonly made political alliances by marrying their daughters into foreign royal families. According to legend, Niul, descended from the Scythian prince Fénius Farsaid, one of seventy-two chieftains who built the Tower of Babel. Scythians, themselves, according to tradition, descended from the Biblical Ham and Japheth.

Ham was also, by some accounts, the Egyptian god Thoth, supposed author of the Egyptian Book of the Dead, and known to Greeks as Hermes. Japheth was known to Greeks as Iapetus II.

The new Scythian Princess was known as Sco-ta, or Ruler of People, a title accorded her as a gesture of acceptance by her husband's people.

The couple’s son Gadheal (or, Gael) Glas, is the legendary ancestor of the Scots Gaels of Ireland, said to have created the Gael language from the seventy-two languages originating at the time the Tower of Babel fell, confusion of languages occurred, and families and tribes dispersed across the world. Gaelic does indeed share linguistic structural features common to classical Arabic, Biblical Hebrew and Spanish.

According to Lebor Gabála Érenn (The Book of the Taking of Ireland, a loose collection of poems and prose narratives recounting the mythical origins and history of the Irish race), Niul was present in Egypt when the former Israelite slaves departed Egypt, heading across the Red Sea, and Pharaoh drowned.

Other Gaelic texts further hold that Gaedheal was born in Egypt at the time Moses first became an Israelite leader.

The second founding Princess Sco-ta, a daughter of Pharoah Nekau (Nechonibus, or Nectanebo, 610-595 B.C.), was given in marriage to Scythian Prince Galamh, a direct descendent of Niul and Scota, through their son Gaedheal. Their son, Eire Ahmon, or Heremon, was ancestral forebear of the Scots Kings of Ireland, a branch of which eventually founded Scotland.

Scota and Galamh settled in Iberia. After Galamh’s death, Scota, along with eight of their sons, sailed to Ireland to avenge the death of a kinsman killed while exploring the territory.

Due to a violent storm, several sons died en route to Ireland. Irish historians place the arrival of the Gaedil, or Gaels, in Ireland between 600 and 500 B.C.

By some accounts, Princess Scota brought along with her to Ireland the Stone of Destiny. Other accounts hold that the Stone arrived in Ireland with her daughter-in-law, Tara Tea Tephi. Perhaps the two arrived together with the Stone. During a long battle with the Tuatha Dé Danann, a mythical race said to have descended from Irish gods and who may also have had Scythian origins, Princess Scota died, along with the reigning Danaan princes. Scota’s grave is said to be located near the battle site on a mountain slope in view of Tralee Bay.

Scota’s and Galamh’s sons, Heremon and Heber, were the battle’s only ranking survivors and, by default, became Ireland’s next rulers. Heremon’s wife was Jewish princess, Tara Tea Tephi (also known as Tamar), reputed to have been a daughter of Judean King Zedekiah, of the royal Davidian bloodline. She was rescued by the Prophet Jeremiah during the fall of Jerusalem and the capture of her family by Babylonian Nebuchadnezzar. Jeremiah took her to Egypt, then she made her way to Spain, and on to Ireland.

The union and reign of Tara Tea Tephi and Heremon began the Tara dynasty of Gaelic royalty, based upon the Stone of Destiny (Lia Fail). From Ulster (Dalriata), the Scots began to colonize the West Coast of North Britain, which they called Dalriada (the valley, or plain, of Red Hair).

The Scots found this an attractive location, and the local Celts (called Picts, or Caledonians, by the Romans) were friendly.

Some genealogies trace the origin of the Scots to Fergus Mór mac Eirc, of Dál Riata, a Gaelic kingdom in northern Ireland.

In 506 A.D., Fergus The Great, King of Scots, migrated to Dalriada, raised his Lion Rampant (the Lion of Judah, adopted through his Jewish heritage from Tara Tea Tephi) standard on the shores of his new land. To seal it as the New Scota, he brought over with him the Scots Gaels’ crowning stone - Lia Fail (the Stone of Destiny, also later referred to as the Stone of Scone.).

Nearly 300 years later, the Scots Gaels of Dalriada and the Picts, or Caledonians, of Albany, united to form the Kingdom of Scots, their common land Scota, or Scotland. Written during the reign of King Malcolm III (Máel Coluim mac Donnchada), Duan Albanach, traces the earliest histories of the Picts and the descent of the Scottish kings from Fergus mac Eirc. A companion piece, the Duan Eireannach (i.e. Irish Poem), recounts the history of the Gaels from Scythia, via Egypt, to Ireland. These mythical traditions are incorporated into the Declaration of Arbroath, the 1320 A.D. Scottish Declaration of Independence, which announces the heritage of Scotland from Scythia.

These ancient traditions were believed in the early modern period and beyond. Even King James VI traced his origin to Fergus, saying, in his own words, that he was a "Monarch sprunge of Ferguse race".

One night, long, long ago and far away, around 1500-1400 B.C., Biblical Patriarch and ancestor of the twelve tribes of Israel, Jacob, while traveling the Middle Eastern desert without many amenities, used a good-sized stone as a pillow. He dreamed of angels traveling up and down a ladder to heaven and back. Additionally, he saw God standing over him, speaking to him. This mystical experience had such a profound effect on Jacob, he exclaimed, “How awesome is this place! This is none other than the abode of God, and that is the gateway to heaven!”

Some surmise that Jacob’s stone may have been a meteorite who’s charged iron content may have instigated his vision. By some accounts, the stone was white marble – by others, it was black basalt. Sacred omphalos marble stones were known in ancient times as markers of the “centre of the world” and linked with oracles and visions. Jacob set the stone up as a pillar and anointed it with special sacred oil, christening the spot Beth-el.

Hundreds of years later, after being carefully preserved by his descendants, Jacob’s Stone found use as a pedestal for the Ark of the Covenant in King Solomon’s famous Temple. Several generations passed.

Solomon’s direct descendent, ranking Judean Princess Tara (Tamar) Tea Tephi, fled the destruction of Jerusalem and capture of her family by the Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar II (c. 530 – 652 B.C.). Her escape was facilitated by a relative, the Prophet Jeremiah, who at the time, headed the royal palace guard. Though running for their lives, the Princess and Jeremiah took the Sacred Stone with them to Egypt. Tara took it on to Spain, and then Ireland. Apparently, she migrated to Ireland between 600 – 500 B.C., with the Egyptian Princess Scota’s party, as Tara Tea Tephi was married to Scota’s son, Heremon.

Different legends hold that each woman arrived in Ireland, in approximately the same time period, with the Sacred Stone in two. It may indeed have been their mutual desire to keep the Stone with them to prevent its falling into the hands of invaders and enemies. Heremon and Tara Tea Tephi establishing the Tara-based ruling family of Ireland and the practice of rulers being crowned while seated on Jacob’s Sacred Stone, now called the Lia Fail, or Stone of Destiny.

Some generations later, Irish settlers began to crossing over into Northwest Scotland, followed by Dalriata ruler, Fergus Mór mac Eirc, who established the Scottish Kingdom of Dalriada. He took the Stone of Destiny with him to Scotland, securing it in Scone (pronounced scoon), two miles from the royal center of the Kingdom of Alba. There it was kept safe from Norse raiders on Moot Hill, next to Scone Palace. Or, so they say!

Moot Hill, itself, was a great mound of sand, shaken out over time, from boots of lords sworn in allegiance to various Scottish kings. There the Stone of Destiny stayed, a key feature in the coronations of generations of Scots kings, until a fateful day in 1296 A.D., after England’s Edward I annexed Scotland. He and his army forayed destructively into the Highlands.

Arriving at Perthshire’s Scone Palace, he took possession of a large sandstone block he believed to be the Stone by then affectionately termed the Stone of Scone. He outfitted it with metal rings to make it easily transportable, and hauled it off to England. With great ceremony, this stone was installed under a specially designed throne in Westminster Abbey.

However, the type of sandstone this throne stone was made of is indigenous to Perth, suggesting that it was switched before Edward arrived at Scone, and that he ultimately made off with the wrong stone. According to legend, monks of Scone Abbey perpetrated a great joke on a succession of English kings and queens, who were crowned amidst great pomp and ceremony, while seated on the Westminster Abbey Coronation Throne: their stone may actually have been a cesspit cover in Scone Palace!

On Christmas Day, 1950, four Scottish students, Ian Hamilton, Gavin Vernon, Kay Matheson and Alan Stuart, “liberated” the famous Westminster Abbey Coronation Stone. Following a sweeping, albeit unsuccessful, stone hunt undertaken by British police, that even included shutting down the Scottish/English border, the stone mysteriously reappeared four months later in Arbroath Abbey. Some claimed that one was only a copy, and that it had been swapped with a stone that now stands in Scone Palace - the Palace's old drain cover, at long last finally returned! The stone thieves were never charged, as the Crown could not prove ownership!

In 1996, England sent the Westminster Abbey Stone back to Scotland, but to Edinburgh Castle, rather than Scone. So, it is now in Scotland, but must return to England from time to time for enthronement ceremonies.

The “real” Stone of Destiny is believed by some accounts to be secreted somewhere near Scone Abbey, which could explain why Edward I sent knights back to Scone on August 17, 1298 A.D.. They thoroughly searched the property and surrounding area, high and low. They didn’t confide what it was they wanted, but it is known that they went back to England empty-handed.

The 1328 A.D. Treaty of Northampton included an offer for return of the Westminster Coronation Throne Stone to Scotland. But the Scots did not ultimately ask for insertion of that clause into the Treaty. Edward III offered it to the Scots again in 1329 A.D., even suggesting the Queen Mother could personally take it to Berwick. The stone was once again offered to the Scots in 1363 A.D., but they did not appear to want their talisman back.

Ancient legend has it that Fergus Mac Erc built a place of worship on the Island of Iona, commanding that it serve as a sepulcher for future Dalriada kings. Therefore, some argue that the real “real” Stone of Destiny never went to Scone in the first place, but is still located somewhere near Dunstaffnage. But, if the Westminster Coronation Throne Stone now at Edinburgh, is indeed the one of Judean origin and is Jacob’s original amazing dream pillow, then Irish, Scottish and British kings have been crowned according to an ancient tradition of sacred kingship.

CIVIL SERVICE TESTING IS A PROCESS

The recent Supreme Court decision brought me back to a subject I’ve mulled over for many years -- since 1973, in fact. The recent decision had to do with testing for promotions and hiring by a fire department but I was thinking about the civil service test that propelled me into being an animal control officer, dog-catcher to the vulgar unenlightened.

What wasn’t addressed by the Supreme Court was that the tests are always a reflection of what Civil Service employees think the job is. If you think of fire departments as daring heroes dragging hoses into a holocaust and saving small children, that will mean one kind of test. If you think of fighting fires as a scientifically informed and strategic deployment of coordinated forces, you’ll want another kind of test. The kicker is that the whole idea of “testing” evokes school and those who have had to provide results quickly know that multiple choice is great to grade. Hard to write without raising issues, maybe, as the college qualifying tests well know.

The fire fighting tests were not attacked on grounds that the questions were poorly written. Rather the argument, which was supported by the results, is that multiple choice tests cause whites (who are culturally congruent) to score higher than blacks or, indeed, browns. The particular test in question was 60% weighted to multiple choice and produced NO black scorers high enough to be hired or promoted, which surprised the culture-dumb city.

Civil service people who write tests are influenced by the advice of those who work with the present job holders. At the particular time that I was taking the test for ACO, the previous version was designed by an enterprising young woman who thought the point was to pursue and capture dogs -- right? So as part of the test she designed something that looked like one of those dog agility tests: the applicant scrambled through a tube, leapt over a desk, ran a quick labyrinth of chairs, and jumped over a carpet. She didn’t understand that capturing a dog is more a matter of strategy than agility. As Mel Martsolf, our field supervisor, used to point out, “You have two legs -- dogs have four.”

So the test I took, which was partly responding to Mike Burgwin, the new assistant manager, focused on thinking and the ability to write a decent report, which is the basis of conviction in court. As a former English teacher, I had a clear advantage.

There was also a bit of questioning about dog breeds, since descriptions of dogs were controlled by those categories. Dog breeds as a concept are about as useful as the concept of human races, which is closely related. Both began as location-adapted appearance and abilities, which were soon muddled and dispersed by people and animals moving around the planet. The assumptions attached to, say, a herding animal when any diverging offspring were simply destroyed became useless when people began to raise “breeds” for money, selling “pet-quality” animals at a discount instead of culling them. On the other hand, close-inbreeding to meet arbitrary standards soon caused some very bad genetic faults to be perpetuated. In the end, dogs have their own plans which don’t include being status-markers in shows. The biggest and boldest gets the most puppies and the standards are a real bitch. That's why mutts are high quality.

So I was at the top of the list for the animal control job at a time when jobs were scarce and more than a hundred showed up for the multiple choice part. The next person on the list was a pre-veterinary student, also female. There had never been a female officer. The third was male and the manager -- virulently sexist -- tried to hire him, but he turned out to have a felony record. Since we were technically sheriff’s deputies, this disqualified him. The next person on the list was probably the most highly qualified, a jazzy blonde who had refused to spend a nice weekend at the beach with the manager so she could forget it. After much strategy meant to shake me off, I got the job.

I passed the interview part of the test because of my experience on the Blackfeet Reservation, which particularly impressed the young black man on the interviewing panel. No black person scored high on the test and, in fact, I don’t remember any of them taking the test at all. That community is not fond of dogs OR law officers. The two animal control officers who had been doing the job for years had been required to re-take the test. They didn’t pass. Rationalizations were found to keep them working: special status, grandfathered, something like that. They were both the very best at actually “catching” dogs but they had a tendency to color a little outside the legal lines. One had had polio and limped badly, but was a very wily guy and good at roping, which was not on the test.

Decades later I applied for the job I had once held, mostly out of curiosity. This time an item on the test consisted of choosing a dog from a kennel and loading it into the new expensive separate-compartment trucks. I flunked because I couldn’t do ten sit-ups. The examiners had been instructed to eliminate anyone who might end up on disability with a bad back.

Tests are like maps: sometimes they relate to the territory and sometimes they don’t. They can hardly be more than a rough guide or, as someone pointed out about terrain, to contain ALL the information they would have to BE the terrain. But sometimes a new kind of map can take one into uncharted territory, which this test did for me. As well, it made some new roads for animal control since the sexist manager left shortly, the assistant manager was promoted, and he supported an effort for us to get smarter and more professional. My writing skills and teaching experience helped me design a program of education. All this led to NACA, the National Animal Control Association, a continuing force for professionalization and research.

Then came the Civil Service exam for the education coordinator job I had invented. I came in second. The interview panel liked a hotshot handsome young man with PR experience a lot better. Luckily, since the manager could legally hire any of the top three people, he did hire me -- after torturing me with doubt for a while.

The bottom line is that people are far too quick to assume that testing really IS something. The ultimate way to tell whether someone will be good in a job is in retrospect, but that’s of no use when hiring. Anyway, jobs change. Animal Control is moving from shelter-based humane enforcement, to street-located prevention and intervention for both animals and people.