My movie last night was a documentary about the Jonestown mass deaths -- nearly a thousand people. The incident happened November, 1978, which was just weeks into my first year of seminary. The U of Chicago seminary community was devastated. Many knew people who “drank the kool aid” and died. One of the members of the class ahead of me lost a close friend. Don Browning, whose “Ethics of Pastoral Care” class we were taking, explained about “liminal” events that happen in a sort of “time out” space, a place in our heads where we go when we worship or play but a place where we can get stuck and lose our grip on reality.
The minister of the First Unitarian Church kitty-corner from us told us that Jim Jones had come to him to see whether he could become a Unitarian minister. There are two kinds of ministers: inspired ministers who are presumably directly zapped by the Holy Spirit and only need a little Bible study, and educated ministers who get graduate degrees as though they were doctors or lawyers. The two categories are defined by the denominations, each certifying their own leaders, and Unitarians belong to the learned ministry, those with degrees, often doctorates of some sort including Ph.D.’s. Jim Jones came from Pentecostal roots and had no undergraduate classes at all. One wonders what would have happened if he had decided to bite down and get a bachelor’s degree, then a ministry degree. Would it have prevented him from madness? But we all wondered if some of us weren’t as insane or could become as insane as he was. Where did he go wrong? Or was he just essentially evil?
Another Unitarian minister was contacted by a sister of a member of the People’s Church. She told him what was going on and begged him to intervene. He didn’t believe her. After the deaths, he was devastated, feeling that he could have prevented so much tragedy. But that was pretty grandiose. Plenty of people who could have done something did not, because they were swayed by his “good works.” Also, most of the authorities were white and the congregation was “integrated,” which was one of the highest values of the times. Lester Mondale, Roslyn Carter, all sorts of people, met with him and seemed to endorse him even as he made their elections possible by mobilizing his resources, who were hard-working earnest people. Jones knew how to “talk black” but he looked white, so he was able to walk back and forth to join the two groups in the high emotion of Pentacostalism and faith healing.
Denomination (and the roots of denomination, which just means “naming”) did have something to do with it. Aside from the inspired/learned, rightbrain/leftbrain, emotional/rational balances in each denomination is something known as “polity,” which refers to their form of organization. The Roman Catholic church is organized hierarchically, so that everyone is supervised by someone higher up with the Pope presumably supervised by God. Parish priests are very much governed and sent, which is why it is so offensive that their supervisors don’t detect and eliminate child abuse. The Catholic church is organized this way because it grew out of the Roman Empire (Holy) and kept their style of working. When the Lutheran, Methodist and Anglican churches broke away, they kept this pattern of hierarchy governance. Anything else would be thinking outside the box.
But then there were small sects and heresies that sprang up and since they had to stay relatively secret or because they bolted to Holland or the New World to escape the old system, they had congregational polity. They were responsible only to the immediate congregation: radically democratic or, technically, socialist/communist. Thus, Unitarian, Baptist, Quakers and Pentecostals as well as individual Bible-based groups formed using this polity. Where else would they fit? Over the centuries, some of them formed loose coalitions of like-minded congregations so they could pool their resources to develop materials and meet annually for ideas and friendship. Nowadays some individual congregations are so big that they are like denominations all by themselves, except that they’ve developed internal hierarchies.
If you Google “Jonestown” you’ll find an array of opinions and theories, plus survivor stories. But I find the best explanation is a different church and minister in the same time and place. This is from their website:
“In 1963, winds of change were blowing mightily through San Francisco. Nowhere were these forces of transformation more visible than at Glide Memorial United Methodist Church. That year, a young African-American minister named Cecil Williams came to Glide determined to bring life back into the dying congregation. Cecil changed both policies and practices of the conservative church, helping to create the Council on Religion and Homosexuality in 1964. In 1967, Cecil ordered the cross removed from the sanctuary, exhorting the congregation instead to celebrate life and living.
"’We must all be the cross,’ he explained.”
One answer is right there. Jim Jones said, “I am the Cross. I will be your God.” Cecil, a joyful and sharing man, said, “We are ALL the cross.” There were other differences. This was a Methodist church and therefore it was part of a huge apparatus of support and guidance. The Methodists originally developed as a way of redeeming country people who moved in the Industrial Age to the British cities where they were confused and soon prey to poverty and gin, newly invented. (The gin, not the poverty. Though city poverty is different.) It wasn’t that different from being a hippie, a prey to crack cocaine, newly invented. There were many built-in safeguards. Cecil was a learned minister, earning his degree at the much respected Perkins Seminary.
“As the conservative members of the original congregation left, they were replaced by San Francisco's diverse communities of hippies, addicts, gays, the poor, and the marginalized. By 1968, the energetic, jazz-filled Celebrations were packed with people from all classes, hues, and lifestyles. That year, San Francisco State University erupted in protests over demands for ethnic studies and affirmative action. Cecil and the Glide community helped lead the demonstrations; the church became a home for political, as well as spiritual, change. Glide offered a safe space to groups ranging from the Hookers Convention to the American Indian Movement and the Black Panthers. In the midst of their political work, Glide never forgot the basic needs of the community.”
There’s another answer. They didn’t turn in on themselves, but reached out to serve others. They didn’t withdraw but stayed open.
“As a decade of clamoring change came to a close, Glide further added to the joyful noise: The world-renowned Glide Ensemble choir held its first rehearsals in 1969. And Janice Mirikitani, a noted poet and dancer, had also just been appointed Coordinator for Glide's programs.”
And there’s another key. They welcomed the arts: sophisticated, intelligent artists. Watching “Jonestown,” one sees how much song and dance were part of their community but in ways that distracted from and camouflaged the huge burdens of hard work and the sacrifice of lifetimes of assets. The Jonestown congregation was eighty per cent black, most of them with history in black churches where the minister is revered and obeyed. These people had survived slavery and poverty with their music. Glide was doing something slightly different, which was art in service to thought and social justice.
“Time and time again, the Bay Area came to look to Glide for moral guidance and spiritual sustenance. When gay activist and City Supervisor Harvey Milk was murdered by fellow Supervisor Dan White in 1978, Cecil and the Glide community opened their doors to the city, comforting and healing those who were frightened, grieving, and potentially violent.”
They were daring, creative, in-service to others, engaged in the community. It was these qualities that prevented them from disintegrating into a Jonestown. They weren’t prissy but they were not passive. They knew crazy when they saw it. Jonestown saw it and joined it.
Why does everyone know so much about Jonestown and so little about Glide? Ask the media. SO much more fun to exploit bad stuff than explain good good stuff.
In fact, my co-writer, Tim Barrus, was in San Francisco and disagrees with what I have said. Not so much "disagrees" but thinks I don't get it, which is not so surprising. Following is his take:
Jim Jones was psychotic and his so-called Church was in the Western Addition of San Francisco. The Western Addition is a No Man's Land. It is not like nor does it belong to any of the other distinct neighborhoods that have very specific characteristics; many of them ethnic. Jim Jones' church was oppressive, ugly, cavernous, dank, gothic, cold, void of anything but rhetoric, bordered on hatefulness, and attracted a crowd of semi-hysterical (on a good day) victims.
Victims in search of a leader.
I thought so and said so way before Jonestown.
The behavior of those people was quite simply bizarre.
I thought so and said so way before Jonestown.
In my book, fanaticism is a huge red flag. My response is to run.
Fanaticism requires followers. Jim Jones had them by the busload. I thought then and I think now that victims find their persecutors and that persecutors find their victims and that the roles of victim, persecutor, and rescuer are all fluid and interchangeable. I thought then and I think now that Jonestown and the horror that went on there said far more about America and the people who are a product of that particular culture playing out all three roles -- victim, persecutor, rescuer -- on the grand stage of death than it said anything whatsoever pertaining or relevant to any other part of the planet whatsoever and that includes Guyana. The people of Guyana were as shocked as anyone at the murders of Jonestown. This horror was not germane to Guyana. This was mass murder and it was germane to American culture and only American culture.
Which is murderous.
Whether America can see it or not. Murder and hysteria are emblematic of American culture. War and death and destruction. Murder and hysteria and greed are what Americans are about. The bottom line.
That Jim Jones' "church" was in the Western Addition said everything to me I needed to know. I went by that ugliness every day on my way to work (I took another route home) at the San Francisco Hearing and Speech Center where I taught communicatively handicapped four-year-olds and then went home to write about it.
After Jonestown, that building was turned appropriately enough into a punk rock club.
Mary doesn't believe in evil. But I do.
I do not ask (or require) Mary to believe what I believe. I have no need for that from anyone. Mary does not ask (or require) me to believe what she believes. We see the world in different ways and I value that. I value her insight. I especially value insight from someone who gives me the space to be all the difficult things I am. It's rare.
I knew that place -- dark and brooding concrete architecture -- was evil the minute I laid eyes on it. It stuck out like a sore thumb with a compound fracture. I stood there on Geary Street and watched big cranes tear it down into rubble and I applauded.
There was a punk rock mosh pit during that punk rocker period. Performers would jump off the stage into the arms of the punks in the mosh pit. Males mainly. Most females avoid the mosh pit.
People died doing that. They landed on their skulls and they twitched and they died.
Other mosh pit victims simply became disabled for the rest of their punk rock lives.
The punk rockers tore the inside of the building to gothic shreds. It was haunting.
I knew it would be torn down. It was torn down. Now, and I cannot for the life of me explain this in rational terms, every time I pass by the spot where that horrid church stood, I am almost overcome by the smell of urine.
There is a very dark side to San Francisco. It is not all Tony Bennett and hearts and flower children and ferries across a deep blue sea to Angel Island. There are tens of thousands of San Franciscans who are desperate, hungry, homeless, filthy, deranged, drug-addicted, alcoholic, unemployed, suicidal and without hope of any kind. More people kill themselves in San Francisco than in any other city in America. Even those statistics are bogus. They do not include the number of people with AIDS who can kill themselves any number of ways (you can just stop swallowing the pills) and do not make it to the statistics. They die a "natural" death (pneumonia mainly) whatever that is.
The part of San Francisco that has the most homeless, the most drug treatment centers, the most dead bodies on the street, the most IV drugs (you had to be careful getting on the bus at Geary and Jones because your feet would crunch the syringes), the most desperation, the most psychotics screaming on the street corners, the most Single Room Occupancy hotels, the most hookers, the most rent boys, the most tuberculosis, the most people with AIDS, and, quite simply, the most densely packed people (the Chinese family next door to me slept ten people to a room) in the city is called the Tenderloin.
My daughter and I lived at 729 Jones #503 (top floor). There were stairs to the roof. Now, whenever I write a story with a rooftop, this is the rooftop,. From the rooftop, looking down, one could see the entire extraordinary parade of animals in all their agonizing glory.
The food line of thieves and junkies and whores and homeless at what is referred to as Glide church by those very thieves and junkies and whores and homeless stretches three blocks long three times a day.
Glide is the vision of Cecil Williams.
I love him madly.
I remember him dancing with my daughter (who was three) and the two of them laughing outrageously because it felt good to be alive.
Even in the Tenderloin.
Which is a place of murder, organized crime, violence, rape, and dead babies found in dumpsters.
The people are hungry. So Cecil feeds them.
Glide takes in the homeless and gives them a place to sleep.
If you come to Glide to be rescued, you may be disappointed.
Because Cecil puts people to work, too. The man is a torrent of positive energy and direction.
You cannot compare what happens at Glide to what happened at the People's Temple because what Jim Jones designed was a cult.
What Cecil has designed and implemented is a church.
Jim Jones took lives. Cecil Williams gives life back to people who have lost everything.
Jim Jones was a hysteric.
Cecil Williams is a focused, dynamic, powerful, facilitator of change.
Jim Jones was a dead end road.
Cecil Williams is the incarnation of possibility.
They are not alike. They are not related. And I do not buy any disingenuous, contrived theory (San Francisco is full of theories) that there has to be some kind of cultural demographic that explains analytically the success of one and the failure of another because Glide is not the People's Temple, it mainly serves the Tenderloin; the congregation at the People's Temple were from the suburbs, and they drove to a No Man's Land to attend a church that was a nowhere church where life itself was a mosh pit.
There is no relationship.
One had nothing to do with the other.
Jonestown would have happened anyway. Even had Glide not existed.
Any implied correlation is mumbojumbo. Even the architecture is different. Mary is right. Glide never withdrew into itself. It looks OUT. At a community it embraces. And empowers.
I used to eat there all the time. I was a writer. I was fucking poor. I lived by the skin of my teeth. I tricked and whored when times were tough and times were tough. I've been homeless. But I've never given up what I do. Not for love or money. No matter what the consequences. I'm a writer. I'm writing this. It's what I do. Glide was there for me and it was there for my kid. I could have never joined the People's Temple in a zillion years.
It still stinks with to high hell with piss.
Tim Barrus
Friday, March 26, 2010
Thursday, March 25, 2010
SMALL BENEATH THE SKY by Lorna Crozier
THE FIRST CAUSES: Light, dust, wind, mom & dad, rain, snow, sky, insects, grass, horizon, story.
These are the near-poems, near-prayers, that form the weft of Lorna Crozier’s book, “Small Beneath the Sky.” Its weave is memoir, memories from growing up in Swiftcurrent, Saskatchewan, which is on the way between where I live in Montana and Saskatoon where I served a congregation. I know these places. She is no longer here, having achieved her tenured and well-earned reward in Victoria, B.C. where she is an esteemed professor. This is the dream of most prairie academics.
Lorna likes lists. As soon as I moved to Saskatoon, I trotted over to the used bookstore and bought local writer anthologies. Ever since then “The Garden Going on without Us,” has actually been going along with me, including the famous carrot poem, which comes from another poem list about vegetables. I’m fond of the one about radishes who “if they had jobs, they’d be nurses who drive red sports cars after work.” Apt and vivid metaphors are her hallmarks.
Poverty and hardship are not easy to write about because so many people write about the same thing. Fathers who are alcoholic ne’er-do-wells are familiar. Wallace Stegner, who grew up not so far away, addressed that father/mother puzzle (why do mothers stay with that kind of a man?) over and over in his novels. Repetition compulsion? Yet Crozier’s second husband, Patrick Lane, who was also alcoholic, somehow sobered up and is a respected poet. Does this marriage redeem that of Crozier’s childhood? The pair co-edited an anthology about addiction. Each has an eponymous website: www.lornacrozier.ca and www.patricklane.ca. I recommend the linked Joseph LaPlanta interview about this book. It’s so good to hear Lorna’s humorous, flowing answers.
The harder issue is class. Growing up in a small town is duck soup if you’ve got status and money, but strictly gristle if you don’t. The kernel of the memoir is a jousting match between pride and humiliation. The heroine is Lorna’s mother who always has the hardy practicality to get through anything. Lorna remembers fabulous childhood incidents like confronting a giant lizard in the underground of the old house: her mother comes to the rescue with a butcher knife, stabs the reptile and casts it into the blazing furnace. This is not rational. (There are no lizards in Swiftcurrent.) When asked, her mother doesn’t remember it. Throughout the book the mother refuses to be pitiful, never buckles under stress, and ends up (again in magical realist fashion), visiting Lorna at the Benedictine monastery in Muenster -- a consecrated place if there ever was one! -- and again in a wheat field, also surely sacred ground on the prairie.
Fathers are more difficult to grasp but throughout the story there are flashes of redemption and forgiveness. Teachers reach out and principals stand ready to intervene. In the wind-hardened prairie, there is a fenced swimming pool that Lorna slips into alone at night in her Speedo with no bra underneath, a secretive transgressor making waves all her own. But she is a life guard. Her own.
She says: “What I am trying to establish when I write is a movement back and forth between the profound and the ordinary.” This strategy succeeds wonderfully when the ordinary is remembered through child’s eyes, which Lorna never quite closed. Transcendence stands trembling in the leaves of a giant wild cottonwood. Immanence erupts through light, dust, wind, mom & dad, rain, snow, sky, insects, grass, horizon, story. A child may be small on the flat, alkaline Saskatchewan landscape but growing up there can create a sweet, densely imagining, woman poet.
This is a beautifully produced book, pleasant to keep to hand alongside a reading chair or slip into a pocket to read while resting on a walk. But it’s form, short pieces of writing would make it also a good eBook to read on the likes of iPhone where it could be accompanied by photos or artwork. In fact, I think the form comes from writing poetry and from the practice of selling short pieces of memoir as essays in magazines. However it was created, the deepest forces were literary. We are grateful.
___________
The formal review of this book ends above. I will add more for the blog version. Just as the US closed the Canadian border to returning US citizens unless they have a passport, when it comes to writing, the Internet and other cultural forces have called me to ignore that border. Part of the invitation is family history, which I am retracing at www.swanrivermanitoba.blogspot.com. Some of it is Bob Scriver’s family history in Quebec plus the University of Calgary Press’s publication of “Bronze Inside and Out,” my biography of Bob Scriver. Much of it is the fact that I’m a place-based, ecology-conscious person and writer who prefers east-slope prairie, unlike Crozier or even Ivan Doig who grew up here in Valier. That includes the fact that I’m a scholar and friend of the Blackfeet tribe, which is on both sides of the border with perhaps the closest ties to the past on the Canadian side.
But partly I’m pointed north by the constriction of the Montana scene: not just the writing but the whole humanities scene. Even more than the Canadians, the Montana folks are attached to the idea that humanities are a sign of prestige and that prestige requires conformity. Like the American publishers in Manhattan, they want to see what they saw before, when Montana writing was famous and the writers themselves were still young. The gatekeepers, who once opened gates as professors who supported their students (Richard Hugo was famous for it.) now keep the gates closed to control competition or anyone who might criticize them. In retirement, they need their prestige as much as their income. Even the cowboy art scene is now controlled from outside Montana. They will deny this. It’s at least worth discussion. I also have a short list of Montana books that have a lot of similarities to Canadian prairie books. Maybe it’s unconscious, maybe it’s the result of shared ecology. Just saying. Economics and technology are the plate tectonics of the humanities.
Wednesday, March 24, 2010
DRIFTING THE ALLEYS
What is the value of “nice”? It means you are prey. It means you can be managed. That’s why “nice guys” finish last. People tell me I’m a “nice lady” -- in Valier they say “nice LITTLE lady” even though I weigh two hundred pounds. Stupid girls who think they are dangerous feel free to call me up and are shocked, SHOCKED when I rebuke them. When people say “nice,” they mean powerless: no money, no connections, no F350 pickup. They kick you to the curb. Old nice ladies aren’t even good for sex.
Hey, don’t tell them any different. It’s good camouflage. They even think GOD is nice. They think saints are nice. They don’t think about the people who kill the saints, often officials of the church. They killed their saints in torturing ways, observing carefully, commemorating the agony with huge sumptuous paintings. Well, when you start with crucifying someone . . .
What is the value of evil? It means you are a predator. It means you can be managed. Like those brothers in Cut Bank who liked to beat up helpless drunks, the kind of person who likes to kill street people or drive-by-shoot domestic animals in fields near roads. It means institutions will have permission to catch you, cage you, and keep you alive forever so they can give you bad food, poor medical care, and never let you sleep. You will forever after be vulnerable to prison administrators, other prisoners, and guards.
Nice and evil are banal ideas. Banality goes deeper than either good or evil. It is a product of a numbly narcissistic society and an anthropocentric understanding of the planet. Good or evil shift all the time, according to taste and fashion. So does the planet shift, but by its own rules which are neither good nor evil. We are specks on the surface, constantly afflicting each other and pretending God did it. Well, maybe the Devil if we don’t like it.
One of the big values to which I commit is one that they say everyone approves of. They write books about it, sing songs about it, try to follow the example. It is faithfulness, true love. I am still in love with Bob Scriver. Still now I am only besotted with the memory of his physical self, but make no mistake -- it remains a relationship with his body though he’s been dead for a decade. Power was not the attraction -- but power, or imagined power, still makes him a target for the powerless who trade in secrets, the supernatural, sensationalism, and what they think is evil.
Therefore, they are telling a story about him. They say that in his lifetime he raped so many Indian women that now his ghost wanders the alleys of Browning where the street people and dogs drift, looking without hope for some way to reclaim his soul, some atonement.
You believe that? Well, if you do, I have this GPS device here and I want it attached to Bob Scriver’s ghost because I have a few things to discuss with him, and it will save time when I go looking for him. I do have to say that the alleys of Browning are getting a little crowded.
It’s not as though Bob Scriver doesn’t have enemies who aren’t drifting drunks. There are art dealers and lawyers who glance over their shoulders. Don’t forget that Bob was a justice of the peace and the city magistrate in Browning for a long time and some pretty vicious people came in front of him, both Indian and white, both rapists and victims. It’s not as though he was a “nice” man, all meek and mild. The Masonic Lodge asked him to leave after he was divorced the second time.
A gold mine of sympathy comes with claiming to be a victim, even the victim of a ghost. It’s a great excuse to go on the attack, which makes a person feel powerful or at least virtuous. It attracts “nice” little college girls drifting through the corridors of academia, looking for some kind of empowering cause. It might be a mistake to even repeat this accusation because it contributes to spreading the rumor and marks me for attack.
I don’t care about “nice” or “evil”. What I care about is consciousness. I want to perceive and understand as much as I can, even about people who play with what they think is the dark side. The real dark is unconsciousness -- not knowing, not feeling, just blank nonbeing. Consciousness is the defining gift of human beings. An ancient religious rule says persons ought to do what their unique nature allows them to do. Humans are the creatures who can rejoice in creation. (Forget the Creator -- too much like a human.)
People have wanted me to give up my ties to Bob Scriver, because they think it interferes with the possibility of me becoming attached to THEM. They have wanted me to move away from Valier and come live by them. Even some people in Valier would like me to move away so I WON’T live by them. People actively drove me away from Heart Butte. “You don’t belong here,” said the vengeful woman, and then she moved to Valier!
My guiding religious compass is the circle with a dot in the middle. Bob Scriver and the high east slope prairie are the dot, the center place, my axis mundi. The Internet, writing, and Cinematheque are my farthest reach of the circle so far, but now that I know these trails to the edge of the precipice, I can see beyond and go even farther.
The few people I’ve told this story about Bob have had two questions. One is why would anyone make up such a story? The other is why would anyone tell me it existed, knowing that it would hurt me? The answer is that these are just the flip side of the people who tell me what a great man Bob Scriver was, how close to him they were, how he loved them best. Both are looking for power, connection. It was right to tell me. I want to hear everything. It is all part of experience, evidence about the world. Pain is merely the price for feeling at all. My task is to grasp it all and figure it out, cruel and terrifying as it might be. Bob Scriver’s ghost is neither to me: I welcome it.
Hey, don’t tell them any different. It’s good camouflage. They even think GOD is nice. They think saints are nice. They don’t think about the people who kill the saints, often officials of the church. They killed their saints in torturing ways, observing carefully, commemorating the agony with huge sumptuous paintings. Well, when you start with crucifying someone . . .
What is the value of evil? It means you are a predator. It means you can be managed. Like those brothers in Cut Bank who liked to beat up helpless drunks, the kind of person who likes to kill street people or drive-by-shoot domestic animals in fields near roads. It means institutions will have permission to catch you, cage you, and keep you alive forever so they can give you bad food, poor medical care, and never let you sleep. You will forever after be vulnerable to prison administrators, other prisoners, and guards.
Nice and evil are banal ideas. Banality goes deeper than either good or evil. It is a product of a numbly narcissistic society and an anthropocentric understanding of the planet. Good or evil shift all the time, according to taste and fashion. So does the planet shift, but by its own rules which are neither good nor evil. We are specks on the surface, constantly afflicting each other and pretending God did it. Well, maybe the Devil if we don’t like it.
One of the big values to which I commit is one that they say everyone approves of. They write books about it, sing songs about it, try to follow the example. It is faithfulness, true love. I am still in love with Bob Scriver. Still now I am only besotted with the memory of his physical self, but make no mistake -- it remains a relationship with his body though he’s been dead for a decade. Power was not the attraction -- but power, or imagined power, still makes him a target for the powerless who trade in secrets, the supernatural, sensationalism, and what they think is evil.
Therefore, they are telling a story about him. They say that in his lifetime he raped so many Indian women that now his ghost wanders the alleys of Browning where the street people and dogs drift, looking without hope for some way to reclaim his soul, some atonement.
You believe that? Well, if you do, I have this GPS device here and I want it attached to Bob Scriver’s ghost because I have a few things to discuss with him, and it will save time when I go looking for him. I do have to say that the alleys of Browning are getting a little crowded.
It’s not as though Bob Scriver doesn’t have enemies who aren’t drifting drunks. There are art dealers and lawyers who glance over their shoulders. Don’t forget that Bob was a justice of the peace and the city magistrate in Browning for a long time and some pretty vicious people came in front of him, both Indian and white, both rapists and victims. It’s not as though he was a “nice” man, all meek and mild. The Masonic Lodge asked him to leave after he was divorced the second time.
A gold mine of sympathy comes with claiming to be a victim, even the victim of a ghost. It’s a great excuse to go on the attack, which makes a person feel powerful or at least virtuous. It attracts “nice” little college girls drifting through the corridors of academia, looking for some kind of empowering cause. It might be a mistake to even repeat this accusation because it contributes to spreading the rumor and marks me for attack.
I don’t care about “nice” or “evil”. What I care about is consciousness. I want to perceive and understand as much as I can, even about people who play with what they think is the dark side. The real dark is unconsciousness -- not knowing, not feeling, just blank nonbeing. Consciousness is the defining gift of human beings. An ancient religious rule says persons ought to do what their unique nature allows them to do. Humans are the creatures who can rejoice in creation. (Forget the Creator -- too much like a human.)
People have wanted me to give up my ties to Bob Scriver, because they think it interferes with the possibility of me becoming attached to THEM. They have wanted me to move away from Valier and come live by them. Even some people in Valier would like me to move away so I WON’T live by them. People actively drove me away from Heart Butte. “You don’t belong here,” said the vengeful woman, and then she moved to Valier!
My guiding religious compass is the circle with a dot in the middle. Bob Scriver and the high east slope prairie are the dot, the center place, my axis mundi. The Internet, writing, and Cinematheque are my farthest reach of the circle so far, but now that I know these trails to the edge of the precipice, I can see beyond and go even farther.
The few people I’ve told this story about Bob have had two questions. One is why would anyone make up such a story? The other is why would anyone tell me it existed, knowing that it would hurt me? The answer is that these are just the flip side of the people who tell me what a great man Bob Scriver was, how close to him they were, how he loved them best. Both are looking for power, connection. It was right to tell me. I want to hear everything. It is all part of experience, evidence about the world. Pain is merely the price for feeling at all. My task is to grasp it all and figure it out, cruel and terrifying as it might be. Bob Scriver’s ghost is neither to me: I welcome it.
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
WHAT DO YOU WANT TO KNOW?
The ads along the sides or in a line at the top on gmail are triggered by whttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifhatever is said in the message. I get that. Sometimes they are so out of sync with the sense that they are funny and I add them as a post script. Then my correspondents and I began to understand that we weren’t getting the same ads, presumably because of different demographics, so it was clear the computer algorithm was including several factors. Region, maybe, or previous purchases.
Today on “,” (www.here-now.org), a favorite lunchtime talk show, Robin Young interviewed a couple of wild characters who were editing a magazine called “The Exile” in Moscow. The 3/22/10 program is called “Tales From The Dark Side Of Post-Soviet Russia.”
The tale goes as follows:
“In 1997, Mark Ames founded The Exile, an English language newspaper that took on the establishment of post-Soviet Russia in ways no other journalism dared. After the fall of communism, a series of political and economic reforms sent Russian society into a tailspin, but nobody was writing about it… except The Exile. Mark Ames and partner Matt Taibbi went native, immersing themselves into the culture and sub-culture to get the truth — a truth that they say was ignored by the mainstream press. We speak with Mark Ames, as well as James Verini, who writes about the rise and fall of The Exile in the current issue of Vanity Fair.”
It was pure wild-man expose, making Cinematheque look like rubber duckies in the wake of these guys rocketing through on Zodiacs. The story, which is archived online as a sound file, told about joining the corrupt and decadent (to say nothing of lethal) Moscow culture to find out about it. Stunts like “loading up on Viagra” in order to “test drive” nine prostitutes in nine hours. Since Viagra was originally developed as a heart drug that expands capillaries and congests both heart and brain, the guy was lucky to live through the experience. It is counter-indicated for people who have heart problems and this guy is a former athlete, almost all of whom have such overdeveloped bodies that their hearts struggle. He would have had a helluva headache if he’d been drug-free enough to feel it, but he added cocaine to the mix. There comes a point when this stuff is just suicide by adventure. Is that more than you want to know?
That’s not the point I want to make. The article itself was supposed to be in Vanity Fair this month. So I got my copy and looked for the article. It’s not there. It was online, but not in my copy of the magazine. Evidently it’s like Google: what you actually get -- even though you assume it’s standard -- has been edited to suit your demographic. I knew they were playing with several different covers for the same issue, depending on what they thought would sell. I also knew that with digital publishing it’s very possible -- and common practice -- to publish different versions of a newspaper for different parts of town. (Those who are in towns big enough to have different parts.) But I hadn’t put it together. This story was evidently considered too intense for Montana. Huh? Well, for the people in Montana who buy magazines.
When printing can only be economically done by setting up once and running huge numbers of the same thing, Texas and California by so many copies that they can control the contents of textbooks by insisting that they be tailored to their culture, meaning creationism is in, abortion is out; conservative religion is in, abstract art is out. But now that domination is potentially over. It’s not that hard to tailor texts regionally, state by state, even district by district. If they can do it for Vanity Fair, they can do it for science textbooks.
But what does that mean in terms of access to the truth? We had thought that Google was giving us fair lists of everything online. But it’s doing exactly the same thing that China is: telling us what they want us to know. Like Wikipedia, telling us what THEY want us to know. The difference between Chinese bureaucrat autocrats and over-educated, under-experienced white men of a certain class and education is no difference at all when it comes to the principle of controlling information in order to control the people. Both giving us what WE want and giving us what THEY want is still control.
So this is the next logical step in the Adam Curtis sequence leading from the group hypnotism of Hitler, to the psychoanalytic force for conformity of Freud, to the advertising and political strategies of Bernays (who relied on his own grasp of human nature), and the current questionnaire-controlled spin that manipulates us in so many ways. Why fuss around with a questionnaire asking us what we think when they can simply edit the facts -- alter the evidence -- in a way that causes us to think what they want us to.
When I realized the article about THE EXILE was missing from my copy of Vanity Fair, I resorted to the online website. THE EXILE was there and I read it. I also read the comments, which split half-and-half between the opinion that these guys were brilliant and daring and the opposite: that they were minority nut cases. They should be censored. Children might read the article.
Yesterday I had a long talk with a fairly sophisticated Blackfeet educator. He remarked that the kids now (and by kids we meant people under forty) seem frozen, unexcited about anything at all, floating like zombies, except that if anyone tried to force them or coerce them, they blew up -- violently. I can testify that it’s not just a rez phenom. I think it is a denial based on fear. To borrow an image from my recent movie, they are in a mine field, afraid to move for fear of setting off explosions-- either from inside themselves or from others -- so they freeze. They cannot stand the fog of ambiguity and not-really-knowing that is the modern world. They cannot reflect on possibility. They cannot reach out. They refuse to risk.
Call Mark Ames and Matt Taibbi, Ask them whether that sounds like Moscow as they came to know it. Fear-based politics. Hang on tight. It’s not over. Is that more than you want to know?
Siren was right: her email was too long to put on comments, so I'll just add it as an edit. I have her permission.
Dear Mary Scriver,
I originally meant to post this as a comment on your blog, but alas, I'm too long-winded, and too attached to my own words to shorten what I want to say. This morning when I told Sharon (sbpoet) I'd just stumbled onto your blog, she made a delighted sound, encouraged me to comment or send an email to you, and told me if I did to tell you hello for her. So: Sharon says hello. And if you object to this email, it's totally her fault, as I probably wouldn't've written to you if she hadn't told me you were okay and that you like cats. So if you feel the need to express any complaints about some opinionated upstart contacting you out of the blue like this, you should most definitely take it up with her.
Anyhow I'm writing this in response to the last part of your blog entry (the one from earlier this week titled "What Do You Want to Know?" [March 23, 2010]), and to save you some clicking, the paragraph I'm responding to is this one:
"Yesterday I had a long talk with a fairly sophisticated Blackfeet educator. He remarked that the kids now (and by kids we meant people under forty) seem frozen, unexcited about anything at all, floating like zombies, except that if anyone tried to force them or coerce them, they blew up -- violently. I can testify that it’s not just a rez phenom. I think it is a denial based on fear. To borrow an image from my recent movie, they are in a mine field, afraid to move for fear of setting off explosions-- either from inside themselves or from others -- so they freeze. They cannot stand the fog of ambiguity and not-really-knowing that is the modern world. They cannot reflect on possibility. They cannot reach out. They refuse to risk."
Now I'm not a rez kid, but technically I'm still a kid, and since you argue this is not just a reservation-specific thing, I take that to mean you think it's a more general truth about young people everywhere. So as a young person, I feel compelled to tell you we aren't all volatile fear-frozen zombies caught in a denial-based apathy that grows from being incapable of tolerating the unknown and the inability to know.
I can't speak for other young people, of course, and I don't mean to make it sound like I think I'm a sophisticated anything, but I can tell you I'm probably more like you than I am like the kids you describe here.
Yes the unknown scares me, and I don't like it when I find out some ambiguities will always be mysterious to me, especially when those ambiguities live here inside my skin, and even more especially when they have anything to do with morality and integrity and accountability and such.
But I'm not paralyzed. I reflect on possibilities to the point of being totally insufferable about it. I look inside and try not to blink, even when I feel unsure of what I see, even when I touch something and it explodes. And I do reach out and take risks, like right now for instance, even though it makes me totally nervous, and even though pretty much everything in my life has taught me the safest thing would be to tuck deep inwards and make a hard shell. I have this thing, see, of wanting to make connections, and wanting to understand other people, and wanting to learn what I can about this place and time, this new world I'll be spending the rest of my life in, and might even have a hand in shaping someday.
So take heart. The things that matter to you matter to some of us youngsters, too. I know I'm different from a lot of people my age, so Sharon relentlessly claims anyhow, but I'm sure I'm not the only one who can feel fear and yet still dare to move. I'm sending this email, after all, ha, even though it's likely more than you wanted to know, even though you're scary-smart, even though you're a real grownup and I'm not, and even though there's no reason why I should assume someone like you would want to hear the reactions of someone like me.
I want you to know people like me exist. There are still young people who are bravely in motion, and who are not afraid of approaching this wild, amazing, confusing, foggy, frightening, mine-filled world with excitement, with wonder, and, however sappy it sounds to say it, from a principle of love.
So there.
Respectfully, if a tiny bit indignantly,
Siren
P.S. Today I've been browsing some of your entries tagged "morality" and "ethics," and I thought you might be pleased to hear you are the first person I've come across who speaks of these things in terms I might be willing to use myself. (Well, okay, I'm pleased about it, anyhow, ha.) Of course, I haven't been on the web for very long, and it seems I've been looking in all the wrong places, so maybe I've only just now hit this pocket of thinkers, and for all I know you're just one among many, but still. From what I can tell, you seem pretty cool, even including the ageism thing, and I like the way you talk about stuff.
Today on “,” (www.here-now.org), a favorite lunchtime talk show, Robin Young interviewed a couple of wild characters who were editing a magazine called “The Exile” in Moscow. The 3/22/10 program is called “Tales From The Dark Side Of Post-Soviet Russia.”
The tale goes as follows:
“In 1997, Mark Ames founded The Exile, an English language newspaper that took on the establishment of post-Soviet Russia in ways no other journalism dared. After the fall of communism, a series of political and economic reforms sent Russian society into a tailspin, but nobody was writing about it… except The Exile. Mark Ames and partner Matt Taibbi went native, immersing themselves into the culture and sub-culture to get the truth — a truth that they say was ignored by the mainstream press. We speak with Mark Ames, as well as James Verini, who writes about the rise and fall of The Exile in the current issue of Vanity Fair.”
It was pure wild-man expose, making Cinematheque look like rubber duckies in the wake of these guys rocketing through on Zodiacs. The story, which is archived online as a sound file, told about joining the corrupt and decadent (to say nothing of lethal) Moscow culture to find out about it. Stunts like “loading up on Viagra” in order to “test drive” nine prostitutes in nine hours. Since Viagra was originally developed as a heart drug that expands capillaries and congests both heart and brain, the guy was lucky to live through the experience. It is counter-indicated for people who have heart problems and this guy is a former athlete, almost all of whom have such overdeveloped bodies that their hearts struggle. He would have had a helluva headache if he’d been drug-free enough to feel it, but he added cocaine to the mix. There comes a point when this stuff is just suicide by adventure. Is that more than you want to know?
That’s not the point I want to make. The article itself was supposed to be in Vanity Fair this month. So I got my copy and looked for the article. It’s not there. It was online, but not in my copy of the magazine. Evidently it’s like Google: what you actually get -- even though you assume it’s standard -- has been edited to suit your demographic. I knew they were playing with several different covers for the same issue, depending on what they thought would sell. I also knew that with digital publishing it’s very possible -- and common practice -- to publish different versions of a newspaper for different parts of town. (Those who are in towns big enough to have different parts.) But I hadn’t put it together. This story was evidently considered too intense for Montana. Huh? Well, for the people in Montana who buy magazines.
When printing can only be economically done by setting up once and running huge numbers of the same thing, Texas and California by so many copies that they can control the contents of textbooks by insisting that they be tailored to their culture, meaning creationism is in, abortion is out; conservative religion is in, abstract art is out. But now that domination is potentially over. It’s not that hard to tailor texts regionally, state by state, even district by district. If they can do it for Vanity Fair, they can do it for science textbooks.
But what does that mean in terms of access to the truth? We had thought that Google was giving us fair lists of everything online. But it’s doing exactly the same thing that China is: telling us what they want us to know. Like Wikipedia, telling us what THEY want us to know. The difference between Chinese bureaucrat autocrats and over-educated, under-experienced white men of a certain class and education is no difference at all when it comes to the principle of controlling information in order to control the people. Both giving us what WE want and giving us what THEY want is still control.
So this is the next logical step in the Adam Curtis sequence leading from the group hypnotism of Hitler, to the psychoanalytic force for conformity of Freud, to the advertising and political strategies of Bernays (who relied on his own grasp of human nature), and the current questionnaire-controlled spin that manipulates us in so many ways. Why fuss around with a questionnaire asking us what we think when they can simply edit the facts -- alter the evidence -- in a way that causes us to think what they want us to.
When I realized the article about THE EXILE was missing from my copy of Vanity Fair, I resorted to the online website. THE EXILE was there and I read it. I also read the comments, which split half-and-half between the opinion that these guys were brilliant and daring and the opposite: that they were minority nut cases. They should be censored. Children might read the article.
Yesterday I had a long talk with a fairly sophisticated Blackfeet educator. He remarked that the kids now (and by kids we meant people under forty) seem frozen, unexcited about anything at all, floating like zombies, except that if anyone tried to force them or coerce them, they blew up -- violently. I can testify that it’s not just a rez phenom. I think it is a denial based on fear. To borrow an image from my recent movie, they are in a mine field, afraid to move for fear of setting off explosions-- either from inside themselves or from others -- so they freeze. They cannot stand the fog of ambiguity and not-really-knowing that is the modern world. They cannot reflect on possibility. They cannot reach out. They refuse to risk.
Call Mark Ames and Matt Taibbi, Ask them whether that sounds like Moscow as they came to know it. Fear-based politics. Hang on tight. It’s not over. Is that more than you want to know?
Siren was right: her email was too long to put on comments, so I'll just add it as an edit. I have her permission.
Dear Mary Scriver,
I originally meant to post this as a comment on your blog, but alas, I'm too long-winded, and too attached to my own words to shorten what I want to say. This morning when I told Sharon (sbpoet) I'd just stumbled onto your blog, she made a delighted sound, encouraged me to comment or send an email to you, and told me if I did to tell you hello for her. So: Sharon says hello. And if you object to this email, it's totally her fault, as I probably wouldn't've written to you if she hadn't told me you were okay and that you like cats. So if you feel the need to express any complaints about some opinionated upstart contacting you out of the blue like this, you should most definitely take it up with her.
Anyhow I'm writing this in response to the last part of your blog entry (the one from earlier this week titled "What Do You Want to Know?" [March 23, 2010]), and to save you some clicking, the paragraph I'm responding to is this one:
"Yesterday I had a long talk with a fairly sophisticated Blackfeet educator. He remarked that the kids now (and by kids we meant people under forty) seem frozen, unexcited about anything at all, floating like zombies, except that if anyone tried to force them or coerce them, they blew up -- violently. I can testify that it’s not just a rez phenom. I think it is a denial based on fear. To borrow an image from my recent movie, they are in a mine field, afraid to move for fear of setting off explosions-- either from inside themselves or from others -- so they freeze. They cannot stand the fog of ambiguity and not-really-knowing that is the modern world. They cannot reflect on possibility. They cannot reach out. They refuse to risk."
Now I'm not a rez kid, but technically I'm still a kid, and since you argue this is not just a reservation-specific thing, I take that to mean you think it's a more general truth about young people everywhere. So as a young person, I feel compelled to tell you we aren't all volatile fear-frozen zombies caught in a denial-based apathy that grows from being incapable of tolerating the unknown and the inability to know.
I can't speak for other young people, of course, and I don't mean to make it sound like I think I'm a sophisticated anything, but I can tell you I'm probably more like you than I am like the kids you describe here.
Yes the unknown scares me, and I don't like it when I find out some ambiguities will always be mysterious to me, especially when those ambiguities live here inside my skin, and even more especially when they have anything to do with morality and integrity and accountability and such.
But I'm not paralyzed. I reflect on possibilities to the point of being totally insufferable about it. I look inside and try not to blink, even when I feel unsure of what I see, even when I touch something and it explodes. And I do reach out and take risks, like right now for instance, even though it makes me totally nervous, and even though pretty much everything in my life has taught me the safest thing would be to tuck deep inwards and make a hard shell. I have this thing, see, of wanting to make connections, and wanting to understand other people, and wanting to learn what I can about this place and time, this new world I'll be spending the rest of my life in, and might even have a hand in shaping someday.
So take heart. The things that matter to you matter to some of us youngsters, too. I know I'm different from a lot of people my age, so Sharon relentlessly claims anyhow, but I'm sure I'm not the only one who can feel fear and yet still dare to move. I'm sending this email, after all, ha, even though it's likely more than you wanted to know, even though you're scary-smart, even though you're a real grownup and I'm not, and even though there's no reason why I should assume someone like you would want to hear the reactions of someone like me.
I want you to know people like me exist. There are still young people who are bravely in motion, and who are not afraid of approaching this wild, amazing, confusing, foggy, frightening, mine-filled world with excitement, with wonder, and, however sappy it sounds to say it, from a principle of love.
So there.
Respectfully, if a tiny bit indignantly,
Siren
P.S. Today I've been browsing some of your entries tagged "morality" and "ethics," and I thought you might be pleased to hear you are the first person I've come across who speaks of these things in terms I might be willing to use myself. (Well, okay, I'm pleased about it, anyhow, ha.) Of course, I haven't been on the web for very long, and it seems I've been looking in all the wrong places, so maybe I've only just now hit this pocket of thinkers, and for all I know you're just one among many, but still. From what I can tell, you seem pretty cool, even including the ageism thing, and I like the way you talk about stuff.
Monday, March 22, 2010
THREE UNSENTIMENTAL FILMS: FESTEN, INDIGENES, LAKPOSHTHA PARVAZ MIKONAND
I lilypad through the Independent films by ordering via Netflix from previews on the DVD’s. They are always remarkable. For example, I’ll tell you about the last three I watched.
FESTEN or THE CELEBRATION is a Danish film, the first in a category of films called “Dogme 95.” “Dogme” isn’t about canines: it’s Danish for dogma. “Dogme 95” is a list of principles in a manifesto by filmmakers with a thirst for reality. Here are the first three rules of the list of ten:
1. Filming must be done on location. Props and sets must not be brought in. If a particular prop is necessary for the story, a location must be chosen where this prop is to be found.
2. The sound must never be produced apart from the images or vice versa. Music must not be used unless it occurs within the scene being filmed, i.e., diegetic.
3. The camera must be a hand-held camera. Any movement or immobility attainable in the hand is permitted. The film must not take place where the camera is standing; filming must take place where the action takes place.
One of the rules is that the director must not be named, so I won’t. The truth addressed here is not just in terms of film technique. One Dane in imdb.com comments could he hardly bear to watch it because he recognized so much hypocrisy in the “dogma” about families and his society uncovered in this devastating account of a sixtieth birthday celebration of the patriarch of a family clearly askew, soon revealed as psychotic due to the beastly conduct of the man they are celebrating. The filming technique makes it convincingly a home movie, artfully spontaneous. It’s hard to remember that the actors are not actual people, that there WAS a director, cameras, crew and so on.
I was also struck by the variety of reactions in the reviewers. The film opens with a man walking on a country road in what one man described as a “bleak landscape,” but the character (who is talking on a cell phone as he walks) says it is beautiful and that’s how it looked to me as well. I think that many movie viewers are only urban.
It’s pesky to deal with film that has subtitles, but I’m willing to put up with it and quite unable to learn Arabic, which is one of the languages of “INDIGENES” or “DAYS OF GLORY.” I could occasionally get the snatches of French. Actors were far more than actors in this true account of the soldiers of North Africa (Tunisia, Morocco, and other Arabic countries), the brown and black people who were drawn into WWII because they were part of the French empire. Incredibly proud, sometimes professionally military for centuries as mercenaries, and dirt poor in the most literal sense, the story follows four men whose stories were shaped by the ancestors of the actors. The director, Rashid Bouchareb, waited many years for experienced Kurdish actors to develop, infusing them with determination to help get this film done.
Four major characters, quite different, emerge to claim our hearts. “Said,” Jamel Debbouze, is the poorest and most simple, the traditional rustic always on the edge of comedy. “Abdelkader,” Sami Boualija, is the educated one who insists on justice. “Yassir,” Sami Naceri, is the professional soldier, hoping to make enough money to set up his brother for life -- if he lives, since he’s also a soldier. “Messaoud Souni,” Roschdy Zem, the dignified marksman, wishes to be French and at liberation in Marseilles is instantly attracted to a French woman who returns his rapport and takes him to bed. Their love is aborted by military censors who ridicule their heartfelt letters and throw them away. Only one man survives: “I alone escaped to tell you.”
This relatively simple movie is easily as powerful as any Hollywood production full of special effects and explosions. The actors are skillful and the fact of their strangeness to an American makes them seem altogether real. It was a shock to see the actors interviewed as themselves. They were working to illuminate the injustices that triggered the post-modern Marxist thought that underlies so much resentment and justification for terrorism among students who were never there, who would be the great-grandchildren of these men if they were Arabic, and yet who know nothing about it -- just that they are angry and defiant. They do not know that these men, who fought in sandals during mountain winters without resentment, waited patiently to be paid until they could stand it no longer because their families desperately needed the money. When they demonstrated, the French simply massacred them.
LAKPOSHTHA PARVAZ MIKONAND is Kurdish for TURTLES CAN FLY. This Iran/Iraq joint production has no actors: all parts are played by refugee children simply being themselves as they retrace events. Four are main characters: a tall bespectacled boy, a little older and beginning puberty, is a natural leader and keeps his horde of raggedy children organized enough to earn food money by clearing the barren fields of mines. Many are missing limbs. A little “family” of sorts has its own leader, another boy like the first but with a keen blade of a face, no arms, and an ability to see into the future. He can find mines which he disarms with his teeth. A stunned but beautiful young girl is with him: the film opens with her stepping over a precipice into space. A small child, blind, is with them.
There’s much more to this story, much mysticism and Kurdish symbolism, which I might unravel if I watched this film again, but it was so painful that I could hardly make it through the first time. There are funny moments and strongly political ones, especially when the US soldiers, just beginning the invasion of Iraq, appear on the road: healthy, strong, equipped, running alongside their vehicles as though the refugee camp didn’t exist. Suddenly you realize that there are no fighting-age men in the movie until this moment. It is a world of children who try to help themselves as well as guiding the old men charged with running the village.
This is the least sentimental film of the three. Sentimentality, easy emotion for people who have life easy, is not a characteristic of Independent films. I’m so grateful. “No sentimentality” is one of my “dogmes.”
FESTEN or THE CELEBRATION is a Danish film, the first in a category of films called “Dogme 95.” “Dogme” isn’t about canines: it’s Danish for dogma. “Dogme 95” is a list of principles in a manifesto by filmmakers with a thirst for reality. Here are the first three rules of the list of ten:
1. Filming must be done on location. Props and sets must not be brought in. If a particular prop is necessary for the story, a location must be chosen where this prop is to be found.
2. The sound must never be produced apart from the images or vice versa. Music must not be used unless it occurs within the scene being filmed, i.e., diegetic.
3. The camera must be a hand-held camera. Any movement or immobility attainable in the hand is permitted. The film must not take place where the camera is standing; filming must take place where the action takes place.
One of the rules is that the director must not be named, so I won’t. The truth addressed here is not just in terms of film technique. One Dane in imdb.com comments could he hardly bear to watch it because he recognized so much hypocrisy in the “dogma” about families and his society uncovered in this devastating account of a sixtieth birthday celebration of the patriarch of a family clearly askew, soon revealed as psychotic due to the beastly conduct of the man they are celebrating. The filming technique makes it convincingly a home movie, artfully spontaneous. It’s hard to remember that the actors are not actual people, that there WAS a director, cameras, crew and so on.
I was also struck by the variety of reactions in the reviewers. The film opens with a man walking on a country road in what one man described as a “bleak landscape,” but the character (who is talking on a cell phone as he walks) says it is beautiful and that’s how it looked to me as well. I think that many movie viewers are only urban.
It’s pesky to deal with film that has subtitles, but I’m willing to put up with it and quite unable to learn Arabic, which is one of the languages of “INDIGENES” or “DAYS OF GLORY.” I could occasionally get the snatches of French. Actors were far more than actors in this true account of the soldiers of North Africa (Tunisia, Morocco, and other Arabic countries), the brown and black people who were drawn into WWII because they were part of the French empire. Incredibly proud, sometimes professionally military for centuries as mercenaries, and dirt poor in the most literal sense, the story follows four men whose stories were shaped by the ancestors of the actors. The director, Rashid Bouchareb, waited many years for experienced Kurdish actors to develop, infusing them with determination to help get this film done.
Four major characters, quite different, emerge to claim our hearts. “Said,” Jamel Debbouze, is the poorest and most simple, the traditional rustic always on the edge of comedy. “Abdelkader,” Sami Boualija, is the educated one who insists on justice. “Yassir,” Sami Naceri, is the professional soldier, hoping to make enough money to set up his brother for life -- if he lives, since he’s also a soldier. “Messaoud Souni,” Roschdy Zem, the dignified marksman, wishes to be French and at liberation in Marseilles is instantly attracted to a French woman who returns his rapport and takes him to bed. Their love is aborted by military censors who ridicule their heartfelt letters and throw them away. Only one man survives: “I alone escaped to tell you.”
This relatively simple movie is easily as powerful as any Hollywood production full of special effects and explosions. The actors are skillful and the fact of their strangeness to an American makes them seem altogether real. It was a shock to see the actors interviewed as themselves. They were working to illuminate the injustices that triggered the post-modern Marxist thought that underlies so much resentment and justification for terrorism among students who were never there, who would be the great-grandchildren of these men if they were Arabic, and yet who know nothing about it -- just that they are angry and defiant. They do not know that these men, who fought in sandals during mountain winters without resentment, waited patiently to be paid until they could stand it no longer because their families desperately needed the money. When they demonstrated, the French simply massacred them.
LAKPOSHTHA PARVAZ MIKONAND is Kurdish for TURTLES CAN FLY. This Iran/Iraq joint production has no actors: all parts are played by refugee children simply being themselves as they retrace events. Four are main characters: a tall bespectacled boy, a little older and beginning puberty, is a natural leader and keeps his horde of raggedy children organized enough to earn food money by clearing the barren fields of mines. Many are missing limbs. A little “family” of sorts has its own leader, another boy like the first but with a keen blade of a face, no arms, and an ability to see into the future. He can find mines which he disarms with his teeth. A stunned but beautiful young girl is with him: the film opens with her stepping over a precipice into space. A small child, blind, is with them.
There’s much more to this story, much mysticism and Kurdish symbolism, which I might unravel if I watched this film again, but it was so painful that I could hardly make it through the first time. There are funny moments and strongly political ones, especially when the US soldiers, just beginning the invasion of Iraq, appear on the road: healthy, strong, equipped, running alongside their vehicles as though the refugee camp didn’t exist. Suddenly you realize that there are no fighting-age men in the movie until this moment. It is a world of children who try to help themselves as well as guiding the old men charged with running the village.
This is the least sentimental film of the three. Sentimentality, easy emotion for people who have life easy, is not a characteristic of Independent films. I’m so grateful. “No sentimentality” is one of my “dogmes.”
Sunday, March 21, 2010
MY LIST OF THINKERS
An email from a divinity school student came at just the right time. I was using my new bright orange, alligator hide, 3-ring binder to sum up my understanding of some of the stuff I work on and she was just the right person to tell about it. In case there are others like her out there, here’s what some of my notes look like.
DELEUZEGATTARIAN THOUGHT: I’m finding that people have been taught not to be ironic about theological stuff involving people with long names (especially when they’re two people’s names jammed together) so I’ll have to tell you outright that some of this stuff is funny and meant to tease. I have two official books by these two philosophical guys now, but if you want to read up, I would recommend starting with Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge (www.rhizomes.net) which is an online journal. Costs you nothing. The reason for reading up on the hard versions is so that I can write up Cinematheque, the Vooking and art group for boys at risk, for an article in their September issue.
HERACLITUS: Always a hero. So far back in history that much of his work is lost, but the main message is that all is change and process. Even change itself varies in rate and strategy. When a person accepts this, life goes better. When I preached about Heraclitus, I always talked “fire and honey”: the sweetness of the flow of time that burns things away even as it kindles new things. Poetic, eh?
BIBFELDT: This is a nonexistent theologian invented at the University of Chicago Divinity School as a reaction to too much emphasis on Kierkegaard’s unforgiving either/or. Bibfeldt’s name starts with B, which is traditional with many major German theologians on your educated ministers’ bookshelves. John Updike was fond of Barth. By now there is a body of work, some of which purports to be written by this “person” and some of which simply develops his principles, which turn out to be remarkably fruitful. There are Bibfeldt conferences and sometimes he actually appears, bearing a family resemblance to Martin Marty, beloved professor.
MIRCEA ELIADE: These days some feminists are mad at this man who loved women. He’s gone now so he’s a safe target. I don’t quite grasp the issues but it has something to do with the nature of shamanism. It might actually be JOE CAMPBELL they’re angry with. He was another man who loved women; at the women’s university where he taught, the co-eds are said to have leaned against his knees as they sat around him in a circle. Bill Moyers didn’t do this when he interviewed Campbell on PBS.
Eliade and Campbell are accumulators and sorters (aggregators and curators) of religious experience and do a lot of reconciliation among world religions. They dive for a very deep level of experience, like that duck (or muskrat -- depends on your tribe) that goes down to the bottom of the watery world to bring up the first Earth. Just the simple grasp of the idea that sacred experience feels different from “profane” experience and that such a thing can be as simple as standing in a doorway (transitional, liminal) gets a person off the dogma kick.
I think it was reading Eliade or maybe PAUL TILLICH that got me started on my own diagram of the spiritual universe. Instead of the Christian Cross -- which depends upon the intersection of the vertical (reaching for God) with the horizontal (living in the world) which creates a point that tempts some Christians into trying to fence off and charge admission -- my schema depends on a dot (which is really a pole, that vertical going both up and down) which is your own center point rather than an institution, and a circle which is as far as you can reach out into the unknown. The goal then is inclusion: to trek out to the edge of the known world (Do you know Tim Barrus?), always coming back to your center.
ROBERT J. SCHREITER, JAMES HILLMAN, and THOMAS MOORE extend and explain this sort of thing at length, though Moore recently had the bad luck to publish a book on the spiritual contributions of golf just as Tiger Woods hit the wall -- er, the fire hydrant. (There’s symbolism in that!)
CHAOS THEORY is something I need to go back and look at again. I need to read up on fractals, which are what make the northern lights and the map of a coastline look so beautiful. One of the ideas is that http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifbig things are made up of a lot of small things and the small things often repeat the patterns of the big inclusive pattern. It’s paisley, really. But it also has a lot to do with narrative patterns, like life-stories.
There’s something in here that relates to Freud’s idea of “repetition compulsion,” that a person has to repeat a story until getting it resolved. A principle of symphonies, actually. I don’t find a great deal that’s helpful in Freud (indeed, after watching Adam Curtis’ 4 part series about Freud, Bernays, and what they invented ( www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/ ) I’m highly doubtful. The helpful idea is that much of what a human thinks is not accessible to the conscious mind. The demonic development is that you can control a human being, or even zillions of them at the same time, if you can make a shrewd guess about what’s in that unconscious part. No drugs or coercion necessary -- just advertising, really. Spin, you know.
So that brings me to the last set of thinkers I have room for: THIRD FORCE and OBJECT RELATIONS psychological systems. They’re like Christian denominations, each claiming a different variation on roughly the same themes. The two issues I address most often are boundaries and intimacy. They are universal human issues because they emerge out of our relationships with the people who raise us. (Not necessarily the people whose genes and womb-environment we had.) Some people call this the porcupine problem: how can porcupines get close enough to each other to keep warm (or make babies) without piercing each other with their quills? In the end (so to speak) the only way is through experience, which means you’re going to accumulate some wounds. But if you do a good job of processing, it WILL be possible to be intimate without being hurt.
DELEUZEGATTARIAN THOUGHT: I’m finding that people have been taught not to be ironic about theological stuff involving people with long names (especially when they’re two people’s names jammed together) so I’ll have to tell you outright that some of this stuff is funny and meant to tease. I have two official books by these two philosophical guys now, but if you want to read up, I would recommend starting with Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge (www.rhizomes.net) which is an online journal. Costs you nothing. The reason for reading up on the hard versions is so that I can write up Cinematheque, the Vooking and art group for boys at risk, for an article in their September issue.
HERACLITUS: Always a hero. So far back in history that much of his work is lost, but the main message is that all is change and process. Even change itself varies in rate and strategy. When a person accepts this, life goes better. When I preached about Heraclitus, I always talked “fire and honey”: the sweetness of the flow of time that burns things away even as it kindles new things. Poetic, eh?
BIBFELDT: This is a nonexistent theologian invented at the University of Chicago Divinity School as a reaction to too much emphasis on Kierkegaard’s unforgiving either/or. Bibfeldt’s name starts with B, which is traditional with many major German theologians on your educated ministers’ bookshelves. John Updike was fond of Barth. By now there is a body of work, some of which purports to be written by this “person” and some of which simply develops his principles, which turn out to be remarkably fruitful. There are Bibfeldt conferences and sometimes he actually appears, bearing a family resemblance to Martin Marty, beloved professor.
MIRCEA ELIADE: These days some feminists are mad at this man who loved women. He’s gone now so he’s a safe target. I don’t quite grasp the issues but it has something to do with the nature of shamanism. It might actually be JOE CAMPBELL they’re angry with. He was another man who loved women; at the women’s university where he taught, the co-eds are said to have leaned against his knees as they sat around him in a circle. Bill Moyers didn’t do this when he interviewed Campbell on PBS.
Eliade and Campbell are accumulators and sorters (aggregators and curators) of religious experience and do a lot of reconciliation among world religions. They dive for a very deep level of experience, like that duck (or muskrat -- depends on your tribe) that goes down to the bottom of the watery world to bring up the first Earth. Just the simple grasp of the idea that sacred experience feels different from “profane” experience and that such a thing can be as simple as standing in a doorway (transitional, liminal) gets a person off the dogma kick.
I think it was reading Eliade or maybe PAUL TILLICH that got me started on my own diagram of the spiritual universe. Instead of the Christian Cross -- which depends upon the intersection of the vertical (reaching for God) with the horizontal (living in the world) which creates a point that tempts some Christians into trying to fence off and charge admission -- my schema depends on a dot (which is really a pole, that vertical going both up and down) which is your own center point rather than an institution, and a circle which is as far as you can reach out into the unknown. The goal then is inclusion: to trek out to the edge of the known world (Do you know Tim Barrus?), always coming back to your center.
ROBERT J. SCHREITER, JAMES HILLMAN, and THOMAS MOORE extend and explain this sort of thing at length, though Moore recently had the bad luck to publish a book on the spiritual contributions of golf just as Tiger Woods hit the wall -- er, the fire hydrant. (There’s symbolism in that!)
CHAOS THEORY is something I need to go back and look at again. I need to read up on fractals, which are what make the northern lights and the map of a coastline look so beautiful. One of the ideas is that http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifbig things are made up of a lot of small things and the small things often repeat the patterns of the big inclusive pattern. It’s paisley, really. But it also has a lot to do with narrative patterns, like life-stories.
There’s something in here that relates to Freud’s idea of “repetition compulsion,” that a person has to repeat a story until getting it resolved. A principle of symphonies, actually. I don’t find a great deal that’s helpful in Freud (indeed, after watching Adam Curtis’ 4 part series about Freud, Bernays, and what they invented ( www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/ ) I’m highly doubtful. The helpful idea is that much of what a human thinks is not accessible to the conscious mind. The demonic development is that you can control a human being, or even zillions of them at the same time, if you can make a shrewd guess about what’s in that unconscious part. No drugs or coercion necessary -- just advertising, really. Spin, you know.
So that brings me to the last set of thinkers I have room for: THIRD FORCE and OBJECT RELATIONS psychological systems. They’re like Christian denominations, each claiming a different variation on roughly the same themes. The two issues I address most often are boundaries and intimacy. They are universal human issues because they emerge out of our relationships with the people who raise us. (Not necessarily the people whose genes and womb-environment we had.) Some people call this the porcupine problem: how can porcupines get close enough to each other to keep warm (or make babies) without piercing each other with their quills? In the end (so to speak) the only way is through experience, which means you’re going to accumulate some wounds. But if you do a good job of processing, it WILL be possible to be intimate without being hurt.
Saturday, March 20, 2010
"REAL MEAT" by Bob Scriver
The Blackfeet had one of those duality categories in their language. To them, the Blackfeet were the “REAL people” and everyone else was “nothing people.” (A person became Blackfeet by learning to speak the language.) Likewise, buffalo were “real meat” and the other animals were “nothing meat.” (One warrior remarked that he hated leaving the prairie because it meant eating “nothing meat.”) Grizzlies were “real bears” and black bears were “nothing bears,” of no concern. This is why Bob Scriver’s bronze sculpture of a group of buffalo is entitled “Real Meat.”
It is a “real bronze” in several senses IF one has a casting made in the Bighorn Foundry, which was Bob’s own foundry. Second, it was portraits of real people and animals. Bob had been riding in the Moiese National Bison roundup for several years. He was permitted to return at the time of slaughter (the herd has to be constantly culled or it will overwhelm its range) so that he could measure animals to make accurate individual portraits. The model for the horses was his own favorite, Gunsmoke, affectionately called “Gunnysack.” The Blackfeet were Fern Omeaso, Sr., and Lyle and Clyde Heavyrunner. They were part of George and Molly Kicking Woman’s family.
But that only scratches the surface. When Bob measured animals, which is one of the foundations of the reality he was able to evoke, he drew them from the side and top, front and back, and then put calipers on the dimensions, measuring the distance to the quarter-inch and recording them on the drawings. All these measurement schemas went to the Montana Historical Society where they were not recognized or understood. They didn’t look like anything to the art technicians there. I hope they weren't discarded.
The only part of Bob’s relationship to the tribe that the sensationalists understand is the accusations surrounding the sale of his artifact collection to the Royal Alberta Museum in Edmonton. They do not grasp that the men who posed for this sculpture were friends, that they were paid to pose as well as sometimes working in the shop, and that posing -- often in the evening after work -- were occasions of camaraderie and mirth as the men sat astride a homemade shop bench, wielding a broom for a spear. Stories were traded and visions of exploits ghosted through the air.
This bronze was not quite finished when my story about Bob Scriver appeared in American Artist magazine in 1965 between an article about Norman Rockwell and an article about Maurice Sendak. Nice neighborhood! Paul Juley had to be flown out from New York City to take this photo for the magazine because no local photographer at that time could get the results they wanted. The photos Juley took are now housed in the Smithsonian with all the photos taken by Paul and Peter A. Juley, his father, who between them photographed all the major Beaux Arts sculptors of familiar monuments back east. The Sixties are a half-century in the past now and it’s hard to recapture what those times were like in Browning, Montana. It was a transition period with the Kennedy administration just beginning to pump in money for housing. The “Free School” movement had not quite started. Historic Blackfeet religious ceremonies were still underground, not because anyone actively suppressed them but because there were only a few in the generation that remembered them, the people eighty years old.
When “Real Meat” was first displayed, attacks on it were swift but not fatal. The complaint was that it was a “copy” of Charlie Russell’s “Wild Meat for Wild Men.” This was because the subject was the same: two men on horseback chasing buffalo. This is the level on which many people perceive art: the subject matter. If they can’t tell what the subject matter is, they don’t like the art, thus the suspicion about abstract art. This also promotes the constant search for some content that hasn’t been portrayed before, which can lead to strange sculptures of things like babies in the process of being born, instead of concentrating on the qualities of the work -- which is what really distinguishes one artist from another. There have been hundreds of depictions of biblical scenes like Christ being taken down from the Cross. Indeed, in some times and places depictions of religious subjects, like the afflictions of saints, were the only subject matter allowed.
So this was a bogus accusation, but not an unexpected one. Bob worked against it several ways. Russell used a slightly smaller scale, his figures were generally quite rough -- partly because his work was mostly “haptic” meaning hands-on -- but Bob used tools as well, and the compositional design was different. In “No More Buffalo”, his self-published book about his Blackfeet series, Bob says, “Upon analyzing the basic composition of his [Charlie’s] sculpture, I found it to be based on a counter-clockwise movement, so I based my piece on an explosive design. Thus, though the subject matter is the same, the basic designs are entirely different.”
Charlie Russell never chased buffalo this way. They were gone by the time he got to Montana. Bob Scriver did. That makes a difference as well. Bob was constrained by reality but Charlie was free to imagine and exaggerate. Which is better is a silly question. Each method is good in its own way.
According to the newspaper, a casting of “Real Meat” will be loaned for display to the new Federal Court House in Great Falls. I hope it is a good casting, as a sculptor is at the mercy of his or her foundry in a way that a painter is not. Bob’s patinas were based on “Les Animaliers,” the French Beaux Arts sculptors who excelled at creatures and were supported by the same brilliant foundries used by Rodin. Indeed, some of them trained with Rodin. But one of the many blunders on the part of the uninformed lawyer who drew up Bob’s will (or one of them, as he revised them almost daily) was not understanding that by giving the collection to the Montana Historical Society, the copyrights would not be enforced, thus opening the way to cheap casting. The Historical Society has neither the will nor the funds to pursue cases. Once again, the sculptor is at the mercy of non-artists.
Friday, March 19, 2010
MY NEW INTERVIEW POLICY
Phone rings. It’s a girl in Conrad, thirty miles away. She’s been there four years. She needs to finish her Master’s thesis and wants to interview me. She can’t talk in sentences, but I figure she’s shy. She can’t come to interview me in person though I’m only a half-hour drive away, close by Montana standards. This thesis is going to be a novel but she’s using the theories of Krupat and Vizenor, the most difficult and politically hot of theories. Getting a little dated. “Oh, tap-dancing with the Marxists, are you?” I provoke her. She doesn’t know what I’m talking about.
She wants to write about the Big Flood of ‘64. I ask her if she’s talked to Rib Gustafson whose son Sid is also writing a novel about the flood. She doesn’t know who Rib is and doesn’t know who Sid is either. And she’s been in Conrad for four years? She hasn’t read Barnaby Conrad III’s book, “Ghost Hunting in Montana,” which is the white history of this area and includes the dam that failed in the big flood. She hasn’t read my book, “Bronze Inside and Out” and can’t remember the name of it. She hasn’t been to the library. She claims she drove up here and all over the rez yesterday (in a well-forecasted snowstorm) and said she thought the roads were terrible and there were totally inadequate street signs and she got lost.
Now she changes over. She wants to talk “survivance,” the latest theory wave, but she has a little trouble explaining it. (So do a lot of people.) She wants me to point out some really poor and suffering people so she can write about them. If you’re a poor and suffering person in a locally stigmatized but globally romanticized group, do you want some busybody invading your privacy by telling all the details of your family’s abuse, alcoholism, jail time, poverty and general pitifulness? I didn’t think so.
So she switches again. Did I know Curley Bear Wagner? (She’s not sure she has the name right.) Curley Bear was my student. She thinks he died a month ago. He died last summer -- I blogged about it. She wants to know about the terrible abuse and scorn heaped on returning Vietnam vets and how they need healing ceremonies. I tell her that no returning vet since World War II has been anything but honored. The ceremonies for honorably discharged soldiers on the Blackfeet Reservation are not “healing” ceremonies: they are honoring ceremonies for their service to the nations, both the US and the Blackfeet Nation. I tell her that if she wants to talk to a Vietnam Vet, she should go find Steve Conway who served well and who has returned to be a pillar of his community in every way, a strong and honorable man. She never heard of him.
So on to the juicy stuff. Is it true that Bob Scriver ripped off the Blackfeet and stole all their Sacred Bundles and made a zillion dollars? I try to explain. It’s too complicated. She can’t follow. She has no background. I tell her that I post history resources on www.lulu.com/prairiemary/ but she doesn’t bother to write it down. I can tell.
She goes back to her opening gambit: Is it all right for white people to write about Indians? She has no awareness that I co-write with Tim Barrus, though I put it on my blog, and no awareness of the Nasdijj books. At first I was suspicious that a provocateur has put her up to this, but it soon becomes obvious that she doesn’t know enough. She’s just blundering around in the dark, hoping I’ll come up with something interesting to get her off the hook with her advisors. On the other hand, she was fishing with juicy bait. So I hit star-69. 1-208-XXX-XXXX. Not in Montana. (If you’re feeling pitiful, call her up.)
So here’s my new policy. I’m not talking to any white people about Indians unless they come to my house, are polite, show that they know a few things, and maybe bring their grandmother. I’ll talk to Indians anytime, especially those I’ve known for fifty years. But I won’t talk to them on the phone. I will not discuss Vizenor and Krupat -- there are plenty of other people who will, some of them not even in the United States. If you want to play idea tag, I’m doing Deleuzeguattarianism.
[Name removed at subject's request.] or however she spells it, if she really IS doing a master’s thesis with Greg Keeler, had better read a helluva lot more than the seventy books she claims to have read. I doubt there are seventy really useful books about the Blackfeet out there, unless she’s read the complete works of Adolph Hungry Wolf, but she says she hasn’t read any of his books. Most of the books about Blackfeet are nineteenth century stuff. If she wants contemporary sociology, she should trot up to the University of Lethbridge in Alberta where the Blackfoot studies group includes a lot of Blackfoot members.
Let me make this perfectly clear. Native American studies have moved far beyond James Willard Schultz, although the fans of 19th century adventure stories are still there. Native Americans speak for themselves now -- ask Rosalyn LaPier at the University of Montana. The problem in publishing is not that NA writers are shut out. It is that the whole business of publishing has been dynamited by the eRevolution, which trumps the Marxist deconstruction models far and away. NOBODY is getting published. NOBODY knows what to do. There is only one sure thing: you can’t publish something that hasn’t been written yet.
I have no problem with “whomever” writing about Indians but they’d better have creds, by which I mean years working on a reservation or in an urban NA ghetto, sitting at kitchen tables over coffee to make friends and slowly get attuned to their real lives. It wouldn’t hurt if they did a few helpful things instead of exclaiming, “Oh, my goodness! We should punish someone!” (The politics of resentment come easy to the young.)
At least the 208 area code is in Idaho (Sho-Ban country), which is not that far away. The last person who wanted me to write their story for them was in France, facing a magazine deadline. Come on, people! I don’t ghost write! And now my coffee is cold.
She wants to write about the Big Flood of ‘64. I ask her if she’s talked to Rib Gustafson whose son Sid is also writing a novel about the flood. She doesn’t know who Rib is and doesn’t know who Sid is either. And she’s been in Conrad for four years? She hasn’t read Barnaby Conrad III’s book, “Ghost Hunting in Montana,” which is the white history of this area and includes the dam that failed in the big flood. She hasn’t read my book, “Bronze Inside and Out” and can’t remember the name of it. She hasn’t been to the library. She claims she drove up here and all over the rez yesterday (in a well-forecasted snowstorm) and said she thought the roads were terrible and there were totally inadequate street signs and she got lost.
Now she changes over. She wants to talk “survivance,” the latest theory wave, but she has a little trouble explaining it. (So do a lot of people.) She wants me to point out some really poor and suffering people so she can write about them. If you’re a poor and suffering person in a locally stigmatized but globally romanticized group, do you want some busybody invading your privacy by telling all the details of your family’s abuse, alcoholism, jail time, poverty and general pitifulness? I didn’t think so.
So she switches again. Did I know Curley Bear Wagner? (She’s not sure she has the name right.) Curley Bear was my student. She thinks he died a month ago. He died last summer -- I blogged about it. She wants to know about the terrible abuse and scorn heaped on returning Vietnam vets and how they need healing ceremonies. I tell her that no returning vet since World War II has been anything but honored. The ceremonies for honorably discharged soldiers on the Blackfeet Reservation are not “healing” ceremonies: they are honoring ceremonies for their service to the nations, both the US and the Blackfeet Nation. I tell her that if she wants to talk to a Vietnam Vet, she should go find Steve Conway who served well and who has returned to be a pillar of his community in every way, a strong and honorable man. She never heard of him.
So on to the juicy stuff. Is it true that Bob Scriver ripped off the Blackfeet and stole all their Sacred Bundles and made a zillion dollars? I try to explain. It’s too complicated. She can’t follow. She has no background. I tell her that I post history resources on www.lulu.com/prairiemary/ but she doesn’t bother to write it down. I can tell.
She goes back to her opening gambit: Is it all right for white people to write about Indians? She has no awareness that I co-write with Tim Barrus, though I put it on my blog, and no awareness of the Nasdijj books. At first I was suspicious that a provocateur has put her up to this, but it soon becomes obvious that she doesn’t know enough. She’s just blundering around in the dark, hoping I’ll come up with something interesting to get her off the hook with her advisors. On the other hand, she was fishing with juicy bait. So I hit star-69. 1-208-XXX-XXXX. Not in Montana. (If you’re feeling pitiful, call her up.)
So here’s my new policy. I’m not talking to any white people about Indians unless they come to my house, are polite, show that they know a few things, and maybe bring their grandmother. I’ll talk to Indians anytime, especially those I’ve known for fifty years. But I won’t talk to them on the phone. I will not discuss Vizenor and Krupat -- there are plenty of other people who will, some of them not even in the United States. If you want to play idea tag, I’m doing Deleuzeguattarianism.
[Name removed at subject's request.] or however she spells it, if she really IS doing a master’s thesis with Greg Keeler, had better read a helluva lot more than the seventy books she claims to have read. I doubt there are seventy really useful books about the Blackfeet out there, unless she’s read the complete works of Adolph Hungry Wolf, but she says she hasn’t read any of his books. Most of the books about Blackfeet are nineteenth century stuff. If she wants contemporary sociology, she should trot up to the University of Lethbridge in Alberta where the Blackfoot studies group includes a lot of Blackfoot members.
Let me make this perfectly clear. Native American studies have moved far beyond James Willard Schultz, although the fans of 19th century adventure stories are still there. Native Americans speak for themselves now -- ask Rosalyn LaPier at the University of Montana. The problem in publishing is not that NA writers are shut out. It is that the whole business of publishing has been dynamited by the eRevolution, which trumps the Marxist deconstruction models far and away. NOBODY is getting published. NOBODY knows what to do. There is only one sure thing: you can’t publish something that hasn’t been written yet.
I have no problem with “whomever” writing about Indians but they’d better have creds, by which I mean years working on a reservation or in an urban NA ghetto, sitting at kitchen tables over coffee to make friends and slowly get attuned to their real lives. It wouldn’t hurt if they did a few helpful things instead of exclaiming, “Oh, my goodness! We should punish someone!” (The politics of resentment come easy to the young.)
At least the 208 area code is in Idaho (Sho-Ban country), which is not that far away. The last person who wanted me to write their story for them was in France, facing a magazine deadline. Come on, people! I don’t ghost write! And now my coffee is cold.
Thursday, March 18, 2010
JOHN "JACK" MCDOWELL HOOVER
Yesterday began with a sepia dawn, filtered and not quite red because of clouds. It was fitting since I was driving to Great Falls to participate in the memorial for John “Jack” McDowell Hoover (April 17, 1923 - February 11, 2010) in the C.M. Russell Museum.
This is from the program:
Jack Hoover, a Montana native, spent his life hunting, fishing, ranching, collecting and restoring in his beloved state. But for nearly four years in the military, he lived his life in Montana.
The child of Grace and Harold Hoover, he attended Roosevelt Grade School in Great Falls but graduated from Butte High School when his father became Chief Executive of Anaconda Copper Mining Company. After high school Jack entered service in WWII as a gunner in the 20th U.S. Air Force where he held the rank of sergeant. After military service he attended Montana State College where he studied range management and conservation.
Jack traveled widely but was never long away from the Big Sky Country, the land he loved as “The Last Best Place.” His father’s Willow Creek ranch near Great Falls commanded Jack’s formative professional years and led to his love of the outdoors and the land.
Besides ranching and careers in banking and land management, nothing captured Jack’s passion as did his collection of guns, trains, railroad memorabilia, western art, books and industrial architecture. Here he truly distinguished himself. With his collections now widely distributed and displayed for the benefit of all, his preserved Shay locomotive can be viewed in Williams, Arizona; his restored railroad coach at the Minnesota Transportation Museum in St. Paul, Minnesota, his guns in the C.M. Russell Museum in Great Falls. He also worked with the late Charles Bovey on collections now displayed at Virginia City, Montana. Jack’s interest in the West was particularly focused on Charlie Russell and his depiction of lives, culture and times that Jack viewed as an era, even a better time, which had passed him by. As a scholar and collector of Russell art work, his Russell paintings reside in the C.M. Russell Museum.
Other institutions capturing Jack’s interests and benefiting from his involvement were the Great Northern Railway Historical Society, the Milwaukee Road, the Titanic Historical Society, the Cascade County Historical Society, the Society of Industrial Archeology, The Friendship Force and the Great Falls BPOE.
____
Chairs had been set up to face the big Russell elk painting that Bob Scriver helped to keep in Great Falls by creating a small sculpture of the same figure to sell. To the left of the elk was one of my favorite paintings, which I had not known belonged to Jack. It’s the wolf with his foot on a buffalo bone with the typical Russell landscape behind him. It hung over the fireplace in the Anaconda Copper Company offices and when Jack’s father retired, he was given a choice between that painting and a huge amount of money. Naturally and wisely, he chose the painting, which from then on hung in the Hoover dining room. Once Jack accidentally shot a hole in it! Without clues, one could not tell where.
But the real insight into Jack’s personality was the group of mourners, mostly gray-haired and overwhelmingly Montana. They were his real friends, collected in a dozen different ways because he loved the lively social life in restaurants and cafes, at meetings and celebrations. In Montana business gets done over power breakfasts with a lot of laughter. A naturally gregarious fellow, he was the only child of a couple with high enough social standing to be formalized and restricted, so as his daughter pointed out, he always had a feeling he didn’t quite fit anywhere. Because the first marriage was relatively brief and Christina’s mother died young, Jack did a lot of single-parenting, which mostly meant including his daughter in whatever he was doing. Her list of things he taught her to do would have delighted Charlie Russell. She said her only failing was killing rattlers -- that’s when she called for Dad.
None of us knew much about how Jack made a living. If he were asked, he said he repossessed motorcycles, which he really did do for a friend. Because his name was so close to Jake Hoover, the old trapper who took Charlie Russell in, I thought he was descendant and might make a living by trapping. When he was courting Karen, some people were concerned that she might get stuck supporting him. Until he married Karen and acquired her whole family into the bargain. I remember the wedding mostly as a swarm of little kids from Karen’s previous marriage. At the memorial here they were again, all polished adults of achievement. One son, very handsome, was running his Manhattan construction materials company through the Blackberry in his pocket even as we sat there. (It was on vibrate.)
Lynn Rensmon, Karen’s oldest daughter, spoke for her mother. Eloquent as she was, the impact of what she brought was greater -- Jack’s clothes as he’d stepped out of them -- plaid shirt, jeans with the belt still in the loops, white socks and “boots” meaning high-topped sturdy shoes. Suddenly he leapt to life in front of us, genial and attentive, quiet and full of mirth. It was even more vivid than the video montage (stills from the family albums) on a huge flat-screen television with Sinatra for a sound track. In the photos there was always a pipe, until the doc took it away from him.
John Chase and Jim Combs, railroad buddies, told about Jack’s most favorite thing, which was going up to his cabin, firing up the woodstove for breakfast, slapping on a cast iron frying pan and frying up a pound of bacon, then spuds and onions, and finally three eggs per person. Lots of boiling hot black coffee. He did not drink in later years. The docs made him give that up, too. But he would take a sip of Drambuie which was part of the ceremony. The bagpiper, Mike Gilbert, was the chaplain from Malmstrom Air Force Base.
I’ve wondered about how Jack escaped Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome. A gunner in a B-29 sees a lot of action but either he tamped it down tightly enough that it never interfered (who knows the cost of that) or he simply was so joyfully part of an effective team in a justified war that he accepted the necessity of the task and set it apart afterwards, which is the Montana way.
He was a man who had something many people destroy if they get it, which is enough wealth to make choices purely on the basis of desire. But Jack knew what he loved; cherished and protected as much as he could; and died with no regrets at all, which is maybe as close as humans can come to being saved.
This is from the program:
Jack Hoover, a Montana native, spent his life hunting, fishing, ranching, collecting and restoring in his beloved state. But for nearly four years in the military, he lived his life in Montana.
The child of Grace and Harold Hoover, he attended Roosevelt Grade School in Great Falls but graduated from Butte High School when his father became Chief Executive of Anaconda Copper Mining Company. After high school Jack entered service in WWII as a gunner in the 20th U.S. Air Force where he held the rank of sergeant. After military service he attended Montana State College where he studied range management and conservation.
Jack traveled widely but was never long away from the Big Sky Country, the land he loved as “The Last Best Place.” His father’s Willow Creek ranch near Great Falls commanded Jack’s formative professional years and led to his love of the outdoors and the land.
Besides ranching and careers in banking and land management, nothing captured Jack’s passion as did his collection of guns, trains, railroad memorabilia, western art, books and industrial architecture. Here he truly distinguished himself. With his collections now widely distributed and displayed for the benefit of all, his preserved Shay locomotive can be viewed in Williams, Arizona; his restored railroad coach at the Minnesota Transportation Museum in St. Paul, Minnesota, his guns in the C.M. Russell Museum in Great Falls. He also worked with the late Charles Bovey on collections now displayed at Virginia City, Montana. Jack’s interest in the West was particularly focused on Charlie Russell and his depiction of lives, culture and times that Jack viewed as an era, even a better time, which had passed him by. As a scholar and collector of Russell art work, his Russell paintings reside in the C.M. Russell Museum.
Other institutions capturing Jack’s interests and benefiting from his involvement were the Great Northern Railway Historical Society, the Milwaukee Road, the Titanic Historical Society, the Cascade County Historical Society, the Society of Industrial Archeology, The Friendship Force and the Great Falls BPOE.
____
Chairs had been set up to face the big Russell elk painting that Bob Scriver helped to keep in Great Falls by creating a small sculpture of the same figure to sell. To the left of the elk was one of my favorite paintings, which I had not known belonged to Jack. It’s the wolf with his foot on a buffalo bone with the typical Russell landscape behind him. It hung over the fireplace in the Anaconda Copper Company offices and when Jack’s father retired, he was given a choice between that painting and a huge amount of money. Naturally and wisely, he chose the painting, which from then on hung in the Hoover dining room. Once Jack accidentally shot a hole in it! Without clues, one could not tell where.
But the real insight into Jack’s personality was the group of mourners, mostly gray-haired and overwhelmingly Montana. They were his real friends, collected in a dozen different ways because he loved the lively social life in restaurants and cafes, at meetings and celebrations. In Montana business gets done over power breakfasts with a lot of laughter. A naturally gregarious fellow, he was the only child of a couple with high enough social standing to be formalized and restricted, so as his daughter pointed out, he always had a feeling he didn’t quite fit anywhere. Because the first marriage was relatively brief and Christina’s mother died young, Jack did a lot of single-parenting, which mostly meant including his daughter in whatever he was doing. Her list of things he taught her to do would have delighted Charlie Russell. She said her only failing was killing rattlers -- that’s when she called for Dad.
None of us knew much about how Jack made a living. If he were asked, he said he repossessed motorcycles, which he really did do for a friend. Because his name was so close to Jake Hoover, the old trapper who took Charlie Russell in, I thought he was descendant and might make a living by trapping. When he was courting Karen, some people were concerned that she might get stuck supporting him. Until he married Karen and acquired her whole family into the bargain. I remember the wedding mostly as a swarm of little kids from Karen’s previous marriage. At the memorial here they were again, all polished adults of achievement. One son, very handsome, was running his Manhattan construction materials company through the Blackberry in his pocket even as we sat there. (It was on vibrate.)
Lynn Rensmon, Karen’s oldest daughter, spoke for her mother. Eloquent as she was, the impact of what she brought was greater -- Jack’s clothes as he’d stepped out of them -- plaid shirt, jeans with the belt still in the loops, white socks and “boots” meaning high-topped sturdy shoes. Suddenly he leapt to life in front of us, genial and attentive, quiet and full of mirth. It was even more vivid than the video montage (stills from the family albums) on a huge flat-screen television with Sinatra for a sound track. In the photos there was always a pipe, until the doc took it away from him.
John Chase and Jim Combs, railroad buddies, told about Jack’s most favorite thing, which was going up to his cabin, firing up the woodstove for breakfast, slapping on a cast iron frying pan and frying up a pound of bacon, then spuds and onions, and finally three eggs per person. Lots of boiling hot black coffee. He did not drink in later years. The docs made him give that up, too. But he would take a sip of Drambuie which was part of the ceremony. The bagpiper, Mike Gilbert, was the chaplain from Malmstrom Air Force Base.
I’ve wondered about how Jack escaped Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome. A gunner in a B-29 sees a lot of action but either he tamped it down tightly enough that it never interfered (who knows the cost of that) or he simply was so joyfully part of an effective team in a justified war that he accepted the necessity of the task and set it apart afterwards, which is the Montana way.
He was a man who had something many people destroy if they get it, which is enough wealth to make choices purely on the basis of desire. But Jack knew what he loved; cherished and protected as much as he could; and died with no regrets at all, which is maybe as close as humans can come to being saved.
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
A HAPTIC RESPONSE TO WHALES
The death of the handler of the Orca whale, who was seized by her ponytail and dragged into the water by a bull whale named Tillicum (which is the name of an Indian tribe in the Northwest), kicked up a tsunami on H-Animal. Listservs with a H in front of their names are affiliated and managed by a Humanities organization and focus on specific issues among academics. H-Animal is always riven between the scientists and the rescuers, those who try to see the world as it is and those who see a world they want to conform to their own ideas of what is right. This was only a more intense version of what is always whereever one speaks of animals of any kind.
Whales can’t be haptic (no hands), but "handlers" love the job because they are haptic. It means the putting of hands right on the subject. In sculpture it means putting your hands on clay and pushing it into shape, as opposed to carving something away away from stone with an instrument. The people who handle whales and other cetaceans love to put their hands on them. Even when the whales or dolphins are beached and dying, the people cluster around to put their hands on them. But an Orca having no hands, grabs with its mouth like a very, very big black and white dog and it grabs whatever it can. Tillicum had grabbed other handlers and killed them. The handlers usually react as rodeo riders do when asked why they ride bulls even though bulls kill cowboys now and then. They shrug and say it’s worth it. It’s a rush. It’s adrenaline.
But it’s also oxytocin, the rush of caring. We care with our hands. We want to stroke. We hope it’s reassuring, quieting, loving. I remember people and animals and things that I’ve loved by the remembered sensation of their silky resilience and heat under my hands. Of course, if Tillicum had washed up on the beach where the tribe he was named for lived, they’d have been down with their knives in a hurry. A source of meat and fat like that is better than gold -- you can’t eat gold. Let’s not get carried away by sentiment.
I’ve never seen anything made from Orca hide or any other kind of whale skin or even a string of Orca teeth for a necklace. Here in Montana, esp. when Bob was still doing taxidermy, I had constant physical contact with the skins, teeth, claws, flesh and bones of big animals. Every morning in the summer part of my job was to go into the Scriver Museum of Montana Wildlife main hall and unrumple the fur of the mounted animals. At first the mounted animals (okay, “stuffed,” you uneducated hooligan!) were left where people could handle them because there was no money for glass cases. But then it became clear that people loved putting their hands on them. (Except for the uneducated hooligan Boy Scout leaders who wanted to climb up and sit on everything -- which was not the same as our pet bobcat sleeping in the basket formed by the horns of the moose.)
The blind were thrilled because they read “by hand.” It suddenly became clear how dense and deep the mountain goat’s white multi-layered fur was, how brittle and stiff the hollow deer hair was, how soft and glossy the black bear was. Each with it’s signature texture, quite apart from color or length. I have two cats and can tell them apart in the dark by putting a hand on them. Squibbie, the tortoiseshell, has dense, soft fur, almost mink-like. Crackers, the blonde, has harsh fur, always rumpled. The best she can manage is to look feathered. I’m not entirely pleased by “passing the peace” in church, esp. when hugs are obligatory, but I do like shaking hands and remember the feel of each hand for hours afterwards. Indian hands feel different from “white” hands, stronger; but little girl NA hands are almost like holding the frond of a tender plant.
Getting back to whales, I’ll tell you about one I did not get my hands on, though my palms tingled with the desire to do just that. I was applying for a job with a zoo that had a water component, since they were close to Puget Sound. While I waited to be interviewed (I did NOT get the job.) I walked around. Some being was calling to me, urgently. I followed the call and found a white whale, which I finally realized was a Beluga whale. Orcas eat Belugas, but Belugas eat stuff like fish and squid. Orcas eat seals and some people remind them of seals, though I don’t know of an Orca who has actually eaten a human.
Anyway, Belugas look to us like babies because they have a bulging forehead, a “melon,” which they somehow use to make a lot of different sounds, earning the nickname “sea canaries.” They have no dorsal fin and more of a neck than other whales, so they can hold their heads up out of the water, which this one was. It was plainly begging me for something. I wanted to comfort it by putting my hands on it, but there was a fence. It turned out that the breeding season was beginning and he was asking me to open a steel gate so he could swim to his sweetheart. Belugas bond deeply. They seem gentle. If you Google a bit, you might run across a photo of one “kissing” a child. I did.
Their closest relative is a narwhal, which couldn’t kiss a child if it wanted to, because one of its teeth grows into a long wand or spear. (It’s the real unicorn’s horn.) They are rarely seen, but there is one at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. It’s in a diorama behind glass so you can’t feel it, but I expect the taxidermist, who has died of old age by now, never forgot the feel of the narwhal and its tusk in his hands. My substitute is a little Inuit stone carving with an ivory horn, just the right size to curl my fingers around. It is the right color, “corpse” color: blue gray. It is both art and our hands that draw us towards other creatures, even when they are dangerous, even when we are unclear about what kind of animal they are. What we do with the contact is a serious matter. Personal.
Whales can’t be haptic (no hands), but "handlers" love the job because they are haptic. It means the putting of hands right on the subject. In sculpture it means putting your hands on clay and pushing it into shape, as opposed to carving something away away from stone with an instrument. The people who handle whales and other cetaceans love to put their hands on them. Even when the whales or dolphins are beached and dying, the people cluster around to put their hands on them. But an Orca having no hands, grabs with its mouth like a very, very big black and white dog and it grabs whatever it can. Tillicum had grabbed other handlers and killed them. The handlers usually react as rodeo riders do when asked why they ride bulls even though bulls kill cowboys now and then. They shrug and say it’s worth it. It’s a rush. It’s adrenaline.
But it’s also oxytocin, the rush of caring. We care with our hands. We want to stroke. We hope it’s reassuring, quieting, loving. I remember people and animals and things that I’ve loved by the remembered sensation of their silky resilience and heat under my hands. Of course, if Tillicum had washed up on the beach where the tribe he was named for lived, they’d have been down with their knives in a hurry. A source of meat and fat like that is better than gold -- you can’t eat gold. Let’s not get carried away by sentiment.
I’ve never seen anything made from Orca hide or any other kind of whale skin or even a string of Orca teeth for a necklace. Here in Montana, esp. when Bob was still doing taxidermy, I had constant physical contact with the skins, teeth, claws, flesh and bones of big animals. Every morning in the summer part of my job was to go into the Scriver Museum of Montana Wildlife main hall and unrumple the fur of the mounted animals. At first the mounted animals (okay, “stuffed,” you uneducated hooligan!) were left where people could handle them because there was no money for glass cases. But then it became clear that people loved putting their hands on them. (Except for the uneducated hooligan Boy Scout leaders who wanted to climb up and sit on everything -- which was not the same as our pet bobcat sleeping in the basket formed by the horns of the moose.)
The blind were thrilled because they read “by hand.” It suddenly became clear how dense and deep the mountain goat’s white multi-layered fur was, how brittle and stiff the hollow deer hair was, how soft and glossy the black bear was. Each with it’s signature texture, quite apart from color or length. I have two cats and can tell them apart in the dark by putting a hand on them. Squibbie, the tortoiseshell, has dense, soft fur, almost mink-like. Crackers, the blonde, has harsh fur, always rumpled. The best she can manage is to look feathered. I’m not entirely pleased by “passing the peace” in church, esp. when hugs are obligatory, but I do like shaking hands and remember the feel of each hand for hours afterwards. Indian hands feel different from “white” hands, stronger; but little girl NA hands are almost like holding the frond of a tender plant.
Getting back to whales, I’ll tell you about one I did not get my hands on, though my palms tingled with the desire to do just that. I was applying for a job with a zoo that had a water component, since they were close to Puget Sound. While I waited to be interviewed (I did NOT get the job.) I walked around. Some being was calling to me, urgently. I followed the call and found a white whale, which I finally realized was a Beluga whale. Orcas eat Belugas, but Belugas eat stuff like fish and squid. Orcas eat seals and some people remind them of seals, though I don’t know of an Orca who has actually eaten a human.
Anyway, Belugas look to us like babies because they have a bulging forehead, a “melon,” which they somehow use to make a lot of different sounds, earning the nickname “sea canaries.” They have no dorsal fin and more of a neck than other whales, so they can hold their heads up out of the water, which this one was. It was plainly begging me for something. I wanted to comfort it by putting my hands on it, but there was a fence. It turned out that the breeding season was beginning and he was asking me to open a steel gate so he could swim to his sweetheart. Belugas bond deeply. They seem gentle. If you Google a bit, you might run across a photo of one “kissing” a child. I did.
Their closest relative is a narwhal, which couldn’t kiss a child if it wanted to, because one of its teeth grows into a long wand or spear. (It’s the real unicorn’s horn.) They are rarely seen, but there is one at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. It’s in a diorama behind glass so you can’t feel it, but I expect the taxidermist, who has died of old age by now, never forgot the feel of the narwhal and its tusk in his hands. My substitute is a little Inuit stone carving with an ivory horn, just the right size to curl my fingers around. It is the right color, “corpse” color: blue gray. It is both art and our hands that draw us towards other creatures, even when they are dangerous, even when we are unclear about what kind of animal they are. What we do with the contact is a serious matter. Personal.
Monday, March 15, 2010
MOVE THE MONTANA HISTORICAL SOCIETY TO BUTTE??
FROM THE GREAT FALLS TRIBUNE:
HELENA (AP): Gov. Brian Schweitzer is challenging Helena city leaders to develop a proposal to keep the Montana Historical Society museum in the Capital City.
Democratic Sen. Steve Gallus, of Butte, has proposed using $40 million from the state’s pool of natural resources damage funds to build the museum in Butte.
Schweitzer said Helena will need to have a plan before the Legislature convenes next year if it wants to keep the museum.
“We can’t allow the Legislature to come to town another time without a plan,” Schweitzer said Thursday morning [3/11/10] at a Hometown Helena meeting. “We don’t have a proposal from Helena and $40 million from Butte will always beat nothing.
“The tie will go to Helena,” he said. “But Helena needs some kind of proposal.”
The current museum has long been considered overcrowded. A plan to buy and raze a Helena mall and build a new museum there stalled for lack of money. The state is now focusing on a piece of property near the current museum but still does not have enough funding.
Schweitzer also raised the probability of requesting a donation from Huguette Clark, the daughter of William A. Clark, the Montana copper king and former U.S. senator who helped Helena win the state capital over Anaconda.
“She’s 103 years old, worth billions and she’s still alive,” Schweitzer said. “I’ve been trying to get ahold of her.”
Later Thursday, Schweitzer said he contacted Clark’s attorney and planned to send a letter to Clark through him.
__________
What happened to the last billionaire, Governor? The one who wanted to pay for the museum but only if he could have design control and maybe name it for himself? I see he’s selling his ranch. Is it the economy or is it this winter’s storms or is it something darker? Big shot financing of governmental entitites is waaaaay out of date, 19th century stuff. For one thing, big shots are rarely individuals anymore, especially when they are 103 and have long since probably been corporatized.
It tickles me to think of the Montana Historical Society in Butte, which will always be a very popular idea right before St. Patrick’s Day. Because to many people, Montana will always be an allusion to Europe -- not an illusion, though that, too -- but I mean alluding to Europe as a source of prestige and prescribed way of life. You know, tribal folks are not that fond of Butte. Why would they be, except that everyone’s up for a party.
When Richard Sims “took the helm” of the Montana Historical Society, he said he saw the organization as the “Mother Ship”, the “mother of all historical societies,” who would show the little guys how to do it. He didn’t define how to do WHAT. There were two problems with this attitude. The first is that every historical society assumes that they are their own “ship” (that’s the point of them) and the second is that no one in this whole conversation is trying to rethink what an historical society is and does. The “lot of little things” approach is always better, in my view, than the “one big thing” that America loves so well, having imported it from the British Empire -- since dispersed into a lot of little entities.
The Montana Historical Society is far more than the museum, as it is referred to here. The first “cut” that divides up what-the-society-is separates the objects from the information. Most people value the objects: you can display them, you have pride of ownership, a group of curators is employed to sort and maintain them. The school kids will begin arriving on buses soon to see their heritage which is always more effective than reading about it.
But the 80% of the “iceberg” that is below the waterline is the information which in this day and age can be anywhere as soon as it is digitized and put online. If you’ve ever been in the archival vaults of the museum, you know that there are boxes and boxes of old letters, invoices, speech texts, and myriad of other documentations of government, individuals, and organizations. These are the ore of history. The great danger of digitizing is that under the pressure of recording the material, some will be discarded as worthless, though every historian knows there’s no such thing as worthless and one generation’s crud is the next generation’s sapphires. But the paper has no intrinsic worth. Putting everything online makes it a great temptation to create a giant bonfire afterwards instead of continuing to store it. Even if everyone is scanned, it is all based on systems that are frail (internet transmission lines) and soon outdated (scanner software). If you’ve ever had to suffer through an “information migration,” you know that updating cybercontent means losing some of it. But this enterprise means jobs -- assuming that they are funded -- and could be anywhere. Butte is as good a place as any. The location of this function is not visited except for the reading room. Even the books in the library can be scanned. Some of them are probably online right now. The old mall would be an ideal place to spread out, sort and scan the archives of the Historical Society.
It’s the “museum,” the holdings of valuable objects, that is the bone of contention. There is a stubborn belief in the US that tourists mean money, that prestige means money, that big imposing buildings mean money. Something to point to and admire. Something with a big door to welcome more new objects and lots of paying tourists, and a nice loading dock for putting the unwanted objects quietly into trucks headed for landfills or commercial galleries and auctions across the country. No reporter, no editor, wants to get into this issue. De-accessioning is never mentioned except in the largest news venues or the specialized art forums. What is needed for this part of the historical society is security, transparency, and -- yes, a nice big building. So I propose that Great Falls make a bid for this part and put it in the C.M. Russell museum building, at least the display part of it. The storage aspect needs to be in a fort. Like the Scriver collection in its steel warehouse by the airport in Helena. At least I hope it’s still there.
HELENA (AP): Gov. Brian Schweitzer is challenging Helena city leaders to develop a proposal to keep the Montana Historical Society museum in the Capital City.
Democratic Sen. Steve Gallus, of Butte, has proposed using $40 million from the state’s pool of natural resources damage funds to build the museum in Butte.
Schweitzer said Helena will need to have a plan before the Legislature convenes next year if it wants to keep the museum.
“We can’t allow the Legislature to come to town another time without a plan,” Schweitzer said Thursday morning [3/11/10] at a Hometown Helena meeting. “We don’t have a proposal from Helena and $40 million from Butte will always beat nothing.
“The tie will go to Helena,” he said. “But Helena needs some kind of proposal.”
The current museum has long been considered overcrowded. A plan to buy and raze a Helena mall and build a new museum there stalled for lack of money. The state is now focusing on a piece of property near the current museum but still does not have enough funding.
Schweitzer also raised the probability of requesting a donation from Huguette Clark, the daughter of William A. Clark, the Montana copper king and former U.S. senator who helped Helena win the state capital over Anaconda.
“She’s 103 years old, worth billions and she’s still alive,” Schweitzer said. “I’ve been trying to get ahold of her.”
Later Thursday, Schweitzer said he contacted Clark’s attorney and planned to send a letter to Clark through him.
__________
What happened to the last billionaire, Governor? The one who wanted to pay for the museum but only if he could have design control and maybe name it for himself? I see he’s selling his ranch. Is it the economy or is it this winter’s storms or is it something darker? Big shot financing of governmental entitites is waaaaay out of date, 19th century stuff. For one thing, big shots are rarely individuals anymore, especially when they are 103 and have long since probably been corporatized.
It tickles me to think of the Montana Historical Society in Butte, which will always be a very popular idea right before St. Patrick’s Day. Because to many people, Montana will always be an allusion to Europe -- not an illusion, though that, too -- but I mean alluding to Europe as a source of prestige and prescribed way of life. You know, tribal folks are not that fond of Butte. Why would they be, except that everyone’s up for a party.
When Richard Sims “took the helm” of the Montana Historical Society, he said he saw the organization as the “Mother Ship”, the “mother of all historical societies,” who would show the little guys how to do it. He didn’t define how to do WHAT. There were two problems with this attitude. The first is that every historical society assumes that they are their own “ship” (that’s the point of them) and the second is that no one in this whole conversation is trying to rethink what an historical society is and does. The “lot of little things” approach is always better, in my view, than the “one big thing” that America loves so well, having imported it from the British Empire -- since dispersed into a lot of little entities.
The Montana Historical Society is far more than the museum, as it is referred to here. The first “cut” that divides up what-the-society-is separates the objects from the information. Most people value the objects: you can display them, you have pride of ownership, a group of curators is employed to sort and maintain them. The school kids will begin arriving on buses soon to see their heritage which is always more effective than reading about it.
But the 80% of the “iceberg” that is below the waterline is the information which in this day and age can be anywhere as soon as it is digitized and put online. If you’ve ever been in the archival vaults of the museum, you know that there are boxes and boxes of old letters, invoices, speech texts, and myriad of other documentations of government, individuals, and organizations. These are the ore of history. The great danger of digitizing is that under the pressure of recording the material, some will be discarded as worthless, though every historian knows there’s no such thing as worthless and one generation’s crud is the next generation’s sapphires. But the paper has no intrinsic worth. Putting everything online makes it a great temptation to create a giant bonfire afterwards instead of continuing to store it. Even if everyone is scanned, it is all based on systems that are frail (internet transmission lines) and soon outdated (scanner software). If you’ve ever had to suffer through an “information migration,” you know that updating cybercontent means losing some of it. But this enterprise means jobs -- assuming that they are funded -- and could be anywhere. Butte is as good a place as any. The location of this function is not visited except for the reading room. Even the books in the library can be scanned. Some of them are probably online right now. The old mall would be an ideal place to spread out, sort and scan the archives of the Historical Society.
It’s the “museum,” the holdings of valuable objects, that is the bone of contention. There is a stubborn belief in the US that tourists mean money, that prestige means money, that big imposing buildings mean money. Something to point to and admire. Something with a big door to welcome more new objects and lots of paying tourists, and a nice loading dock for putting the unwanted objects quietly into trucks headed for landfills or commercial galleries and auctions across the country. No reporter, no editor, wants to get into this issue. De-accessioning is never mentioned except in the largest news venues or the specialized art forums. What is needed for this part of the historical society is security, transparency, and -- yes, a nice big building. So I propose that Great Falls make a bid for this part and put it in the C.M. Russell museum building, at least the display part of it. The storage aspect needs to be in a fort. Like the Scriver collection in its steel warehouse by the airport in Helena. At least I hope it’s still there.
Sunday, March 14, 2010
"BIG BAD LOVE" AND SVEN BIRKERTS
Last night’s movie was a terrific Indie flick, “Big Bad Love,” based on a book of short stories by Larry Brown. The author takes a “rhizomatous” approach to the subject of love: love of father, mother, wife, child, best friend, place -- even when the nature of the love is negative, which mostly it is not. It is a yearning for intimacy, attachment, and sometimes devolves into obsession. But the real subject might be the mind and nature of writing as metaphor.
When I looked at the feedback at imdb.com, which is always intriguing though not always helpful except that I need the names and dates, the critics were split between loving it and hating it, vehemently so. I spent some time trying to figure this out but didn’t make much headway until this morning I read Sven Birkerts’ essay: http://www.theamericanscholar.org/reading-in-a-digital-age/ It has been a big hit with readers, but probably for the wrong reasons. I think most readers take it as a defense of paper books and rocks thrown at the Internet, but I don’t see that. Sven frames the problem as the difference between the novel, which I’m going to put into quotes, since I think the “novel” has come to represent any writing that offers a personal sensibility as opposed to “objective reasoning.” I put THAT in quotes because I think it’s never possible to objectively reason, though it’s a good exercise to undertake for some uses.
Birkerts makes it a point to bring up the current research on brains, thinking, and different kinds of experience, but he stops short of what fMRI has been showing, which is that the skill of reading is a hat trick that makes marks on paper call up sounds in one’s head that add up to words and sentences -- a rhizomatous skill. That is, it amounts to the brain inventing its own way to do this with a little prompting and a lot of motivation. No two people read in quite the same way because no two people’s brains are performing in quite the same way “between rhizomes.” These may or may not correspond to actual structures: hippocampus, lateral pre-frontal cortex, spindle cells or what have you. Evidently some people do it one way and others do it another. No doubt someone is trying to figure out the possibilities even as you read this.
But then Birkerts makes an important second step. Simply reading words is one thing, entering an experience is another, and that’s what he means by “the novel.” Humans are uniquely equipped to step into the experience of another being. I was never so conscious of this as when trying to reach my younger brother who had trauma to his forehead that took that skill away from him. He no longer read fiction, but enjoyed turning the pages of the encyclopedia, reading entries and looking up now and then to tell us facts. He was capable of recounting long strings of events, mostly from the plots of television shows, but had no sense of how they added up. Birkerts says “narration is sequence that claims significance.”
When one reads something that really reaches into one’s gut, the reader is sharing experience with the writer quite regardless of plot lines or facts and responding to the significance, the meaning. The question of whether it really happened or not doesn’t matter. Sometimes even the skill of the writer in terms of “mimesis,” the management of description, dialogue, event, evocation, doesn’t matter a whole lot -- one still has the inner experience of sharing the mind of the writing person. Birkerts suggests it is partly a matter of being focused, of suspending disbelief in order to enter someone else’s world. THIS, he suggests, is what the Internet does not support, even erodes. “Fiction” allows contemplation, the imaginative consideration of possibilities which Birkerts rather wonderfully calls “the ignition to inwardness,” but Internet analysis opposes this. Instead, it sets up the cry of “hoax” and enters the hermeneutics of suspicion, a matter of bookkeeping.
I think the next step is “revanchist.” (I really DO like big words -- it just means revenge.) The person who cannot kindle contemplation knows something is missing, just as my brother did, but can’t get hold of what it is and begins to feel that someone has stolen something, though it might never have existed. So then, paranoia. A missing education? A refusal of people to love him or her? Not enough money?
“Big Bad Love” is an exploration of consciousness: a man who has been badly traumatized and is thrashing around in that biological way that desperate people do: drinking, violence, endless driving -- but also by writing. Not just saying he wants to write but actually sitting there at his little typewriter and clicking away. Because this is a movie, it can take us into the metaphorical/poetic mode of operation in his head. I loved it when his typewriter turned into a small piano, which is often my own fantasy. I take his search for publication to be a trope: being published stands for achieving meaning. It means some stranger’s sensibility has kindled and extends love. His enormous strength is the ability to focus on writing, mailing out the manuscripts, and opening up the rejection letters which he pins to the bathroom wall with game darts. In other words he keeps right on in spite of the excremental put-downs from the uncomprehending.
So how does he come to meaning? He could have asked his ex-wife, who is a nurse. It’s the old rabbinical trick of the person obsessing about the loss of her child until he tells her to go with a cup begging house-to-house for a cup of soil from a family untouched by loss. Or in a slightly different way, the man who was so upset about having no shoes until he saw someone with no feet. That is, it finally gets through to him that the meaning of life is to keep living, risking, protecting, making contact, sharing and creating. But it is a quiet epiphany. He doesn’t have to go celebrating. The change is one of depth.
So now I can explain that major division between those who loved the movie and those who hated the movie. It is the division between “fiction” readers and “Internet” readers, those who contemplate and those who score.
When I looked at the feedback at imdb.com, which is always intriguing though not always helpful except that I need the names and dates, the critics were split between loving it and hating it, vehemently so. I spent some time trying to figure this out but didn’t make much headway until this morning I read Sven Birkerts’ essay: http://www.theamericanscholar.org/reading-in-a-digital-age/ It has been a big hit with readers, but probably for the wrong reasons. I think most readers take it as a defense of paper books and rocks thrown at the Internet, but I don’t see that. Sven frames the problem as the difference between the novel, which I’m going to put into quotes, since I think the “novel” has come to represent any writing that offers a personal sensibility as opposed to “objective reasoning.” I put THAT in quotes because I think it’s never possible to objectively reason, though it’s a good exercise to undertake for some uses.
Birkerts makes it a point to bring up the current research on brains, thinking, and different kinds of experience, but he stops short of what fMRI has been showing, which is that the skill of reading is a hat trick that makes marks on paper call up sounds in one’s head that add up to words and sentences -- a rhizomatous skill. That is, it amounts to the brain inventing its own way to do this with a little prompting and a lot of motivation. No two people read in quite the same way because no two people’s brains are performing in quite the same way “between rhizomes.” These may or may not correspond to actual structures: hippocampus, lateral pre-frontal cortex, spindle cells or what have you. Evidently some people do it one way and others do it another. No doubt someone is trying to figure out the possibilities even as you read this.
But then Birkerts makes an important second step. Simply reading words is one thing, entering an experience is another, and that’s what he means by “the novel.” Humans are uniquely equipped to step into the experience of another being. I was never so conscious of this as when trying to reach my younger brother who had trauma to his forehead that took that skill away from him. He no longer read fiction, but enjoyed turning the pages of the encyclopedia, reading entries and looking up now and then to tell us facts. He was capable of recounting long strings of events, mostly from the plots of television shows, but had no sense of how they added up. Birkerts says “narration is sequence that claims significance.”
When one reads something that really reaches into one’s gut, the reader is sharing experience with the writer quite regardless of plot lines or facts and responding to the significance, the meaning. The question of whether it really happened or not doesn’t matter. Sometimes even the skill of the writer in terms of “mimesis,” the management of description, dialogue, event, evocation, doesn’t matter a whole lot -- one still has the inner experience of sharing the mind of the writing person. Birkerts suggests it is partly a matter of being focused, of suspending disbelief in order to enter someone else’s world. THIS, he suggests, is what the Internet does not support, even erodes. “Fiction” allows contemplation, the imaginative consideration of possibilities which Birkerts rather wonderfully calls “the ignition to inwardness,” but Internet analysis opposes this. Instead, it sets up the cry of “hoax” and enters the hermeneutics of suspicion, a matter of bookkeeping.
I think the next step is “revanchist.” (I really DO like big words -- it just means revenge.) The person who cannot kindle contemplation knows something is missing, just as my brother did, but can’t get hold of what it is and begins to feel that someone has stolen something, though it might never have existed. So then, paranoia. A missing education? A refusal of people to love him or her? Not enough money?
“Big Bad Love” is an exploration of consciousness: a man who has been badly traumatized and is thrashing around in that biological way that desperate people do: drinking, violence, endless driving -- but also by writing. Not just saying he wants to write but actually sitting there at his little typewriter and clicking away. Because this is a movie, it can take us into the metaphorical/poetic mode of operation in his head. I loved it when his typewriter turned into a small piano, which is often my own fantasy. I take his search for publication to be a trope: being published stands for achieving meaning. It means some stranger’s sensibility has kindled and extends love. His enormous strength is the ability to focus on writing, mailing out the manuscripts, and opening up the rejection letters which he pins to the bathroom wall with game darts. In other words he keeps right on in spite of the excremental put-downs from the uncomprehending.
So how does he come to meaning? He could have asked his ex-wife, who is a nurse. It’s the old rabbinical trick of the person obsessing about the loss of her child until he tells her to go with a cup begging house-to-house for a cup of soil from a family untouched by loss. Or in a slightly different way, the man who was so upset about having no shoes until he saw someone with no feet. That is, it finally gets through to him that the meaning of life is to keep living, risking, protecting, making contact, sharing and creating. But it is a quiet epiphany. He doesn’t have to go celebrating. The change is one of depth.
So now I can explain that major division between those who loved the movie and those who hated the movie. It is the division between “fiction” readers and “Internet” readers, those who contemplate and those who score.
Saturday, March 13, 2010
THE MARMOT IN THE POCKET
I’ve been much interested in Adam Curtis’ pastiches. Words AND vids, maybe the original Vooks, which now are evolving into something else: image-only essays with occasional titles. They certainly are not silent -- music is sometimes a big part of his argument and other time a potent irony. And these are not slowly mimed scenes invented for the camera: they are bits of real life thrown together in flashes so tachistoscopically brief that only a modern eye can follow. But it helps to know what he’s probably driving at. And some of them are familiar images.
Here’s the take-home quote:
“And as the Taliban took control of the cities they began their experiment. All they cared about was morality so the only organisation they created was called - "The Organisation for the Commanding of Good and the Hunting Down of Evil". Otherwise they had no interest in any social or political institutions. They just got rid of them all.”
These narratives are so dramatic, so full of gossip and extraordinary personalities and slam-you-on-the-head scenery, that it’s hard to know how to evaluate them. Anyway, no one short of a university professor has the kind of education that could pull apart the pop-it beads of logic. This morning I read through the tale of Afghanistan, which has always been as convoluted, dark and dubious as it is today. Which you may or may not find reassuring.
There was one passage that was actually taken from some historical account that made me raise my eyebrows. It was about some major figure who may or may not have been who he said he was, who was reportedly passing through the mountains on a camel when he heard and saw a little critter looking at him beady-eyes from the tumbled rocks. He asked what it was and they said it was a marmot. Reportedly, he was so taken with it that he put it in his pocket and carried it along.
Well! First of all, a marmot is a kind of woodchuck, a big fat twenty-pound rodent that would not fit in any of MY pockets. Beyond that, they are bad-tempered and have teeth like chisels. And they are not willing to be caught, which is why their burrows go way back in under the rocks. The only practical thing to do is set up a trap, which this tale doesn’t say anything about. Otherwise, there will be a half-day’s labor moving rocks and digging.
When I want to insult my cats, I call them marmots.
This is my own real-life experience, and about the only overlap I have with all the coups and murders and triumphs in this strand of events. Since the marmot story is pretty unlikely, it gives me skepticism about the whole thing, esp. since it is “clearly” and frankly highly ambiguous. Go to Adam Curtis’ blog and watch his videos to check it out. The odd thing is that I'm often persuaded.
Just about every source of news we have is ambiguous, all the time protesting that in fact they KNOW. Or at least the politicians will say they know. Every day when I hear what are said-to-be-shocking unemployment figures, I recall standing in an elevator in Helena behind two state employees in 1982. One asked, “What do you figure the REAL unemployment figure is right now?” The other said casually, “Oh, maybe one-third of the population.” Every number is cooked, compromised, and relativized.
So how do we make decisions? How do we know where the vote should go? How can we be sure it will even go there?
While I was mulling all this, “This American Life” came on the radio. It was a piece about an annual panel debate at some university that was supposed to prove which university discipline was most important in terms of saving the world or at least your own life. They call it the “Lifeboat” debate -- you know, “if the boat were sinking and you could only save one discipline, which one would it be?” The story described how the professors chosen to defend their fields all used gimmicks: one came in on a motorcycle, one had composed a poem and they were all very clever and funny as though all professors were Robin Williams. But they had totally lost sight of the purpose of the debate, which is actually pretty serious these days, not least because you could argue that the disciplines themselves need to be radically reconfigured.
This panel always builds in a “devil’s advocate,” and this particular one was an English teacher who was up to the task. He discarded his script and spoke from his heart, describing the ten-year drift from serious thought to wacky stunts meant to make everyone laugh. Saying it went back to a woman who had argued that since communications were necessary for sex, the crucial discipline was sociology. Then he threw in a laugh by saying that sociology wasn’t even a real discipline! He was fairly good-natured about it, but in the end he won the debate by discrediting the debaters. He took them on the Taliban-tainted ground of morality, of not taking the task seriously.
What has gone missing from so many of today’s debates is the rationality that ought to be the thick middle between killing all dissenters and mocking the whole event. Obama hangs onto logic for dear life even as he gets shoved both ways. (The Rawness said that when he posted about Obama, he lost 49 followers. I don’t even know whether he said right wing or left wing things, but putting one’s fingers in one’s ears at a debate is a strategy that almost always turns out badly.)
Philosophical debate interests me a lot more than political debate, though I suppose they intertwine. I like to get back to the actual, the perceptible, the things inside my experience, like a marmot. In fact, I rather like taking the marmot for a role model, since I seem to be acquiring a marmot silhouette and temperament. This little house isn’t much of a burrow -- in some ways a city apartment would be safer -- but I can whistle all I want. Come to think of it, Afghanistan’s terrain and politics is not all that different from Montana’s, right down to the interference from international forces. I had not known they had marmots, too.
Here’s the take-home quote:
“And as the Taliban took control of the cities they began their experiment. All they cared about was morality so the only organisation they created was called - "The Organisation for the Commanding of Good and the Hunting Down of Evil". Otherwise they had no interest in any social or political institutions. They just got rid of them all.”
These narratives are so dramatic, so full of gossip and extraordinary personalities and slam-you-on-the-head scenery, that it’s hard to know how to evaluate them. Anyway, no one short of a university professor has the kind of education that could pull apart the pop-it beads of logic. This morning I read through the tale of Afghanistan, which has always been as convoluted, dark and dubious as it is today. Which you may or may not find reassuring.
There was one passage that was actually taken from some historical account that made me raise my eyebrows. It was about some major figure who may or may not have been who he said he was, who was reportedly passing through the mountains on a camel when he heard and saw a little critter looking at him beady-eyes from the tumbled rocks. He asked what it was and they said it was a marmot. Reportedly, he was so taken with it that he put it in his pocket and carried it along.
Well! First of all, a marmot is a kind of woodchuck, a big fat twenty-pound rodent that would not fit in any of MY pockets. Beyond that, they are bad-tempered and have teeth like chisels. And they are not willing to be caught, which is why their burrows go way back in under the rocks. The only practical thing to do is set up a trap, which this tale doesn’t say anything about. Otherwise, there will be a half-day’s labor moving rocks and digging.
When I want to insult my cats, I call them marmots.
This is my own real-life experience, and about the only overlap I have with all the coups and murders and triumphs in this strand of events. Since the marmot story is pretty unlikely, it gives me skepticism about the whole thing, esp. since it is “clearly” and frankly highly ambiguous. Go to Adam Curtis’ blog and watch his videos to check it out. The odd thing is that I'm often persuaded.
Just about every source of news we have is ambiguous, all the time protesting that in fact they KNOW. Or at least the politicians will say they know. Every day when I hear what are said-to-be-shocking unemployment figures, I recall standing in an elevator in Helena behind two state employees in 1982. One asked, “What do you figure the REAL unemployment figure is right now?” The other said casually, “Oh, maybe one-third of the population.” Every number is cooked, compromised, and relativized.
So how do we make decisions? How do we know where the vote should go? How can we be sure it will even go there?
While I was mulling all this, “This American Life” came on the radio. It was a piece about an annual panel debate at some university that was supposed to prove which university discipline was most important in terms of saving the world or at least your own life. They call it the “Lifeboat” debate -- you know, “if the boat were sinking and you could only save one discipline, which one would it be?” The story described how the professors chosen to defend their fields all used gimmicks: one came in on a motorcycle, one had composed a poem and they were all very clever and funny as though all professors were Robin Williams. But they had totally lost sight of the purpose of the debate, which is actually pretty serious these days, not least because you could argue that the disciplines themselves need to be radically reconfigured.
This panel always builds in a “devil’s advocate,” and this particular one was an English teacher who was up to the task. He discarded his script and spoke from his heart, describing the ten-year drift from serious thought to wacky stunts meant to make everyone laugh. Saying it went back to a woman who had argued that since communications were necessary for sex, the crucial discipline was sociology. Then he threw in a laugh by saying that sociology wasn’t even a real discipline! He was fairly good-natured about it, but in the end he won the debate by discrediting the debaters. He took them on the Taliban-tainted ground of morality, of not taking the task seriously.
What has gone missing from so many of today’s debates is the rationality that ought to be the thick middle between killing all dissenters and mocking the whole event. Obama hangs onto logic for dear life even as he gets shoved both ways. (The Rawness said that when he posted about Obama, he lost 49 followers. I don’t even know whether he said right wing or left wing things, but putting one’s fingers in one’s ears at a debate is a strategy that almost always turns out badly.)
Philosophical debate interests me a lot more than political debate, though I suppose they intertwine. I like to get back to the actual, the perceptible, the things inside my experience, like a marmot. In fact, I rather like taking the marmot for a role model, since I seem to be acquiring a marmot silhouette and temperament. This little house isn’t much of a burrow -- in some ways a city apartment would be safer -- but I can whistle all I want. Come to think of it, Afghanistan’s terrain and politics is not all that different from Montana’s, right down to the interference from international forces. I had not known they had marmots, too.
WHAT CURTIS THINKS IN THE TRAP
Once the idea was firmly in place that people could be controlled without their realizing it because the control was through their subconscious drives for love, lust and acquisition, leaders in politics and business were quick to understand what Freud’s nephew Bernays pointed out to them. Even a guy like Ike, who warned us about the dangers of the industrial-military complex, welcomed the government/corporation complex, because he thought that a democracy was synonymous with the “free market,” even one that was covertly controlled by an elite intent on personal wealth. This is a continuation of the tension that is explicit in England: the House of Lords versus the House of Commons. Those who are “better” and privileged, against the masses who demand things by threatening to riot in the streets. Which is worse: tyranny or chaos?
Advertising/politics worked pretty well until the forces released by William Reich separated people into a narcissistic insistence on having their own individual way. Bernays and his heirs had a little trouble getting a handle on this development until they began to do surveys of what people thought about their own inner wants and desires. In a post-war world where a lot of things had been delayed or suppressed, the idea of having something that you really wanted caught fire in a hurry. Esp. things like convertibles with big fins that were “four inches longer” than last year. No longer did you buy something because you really needed it (sturdy shoes) but because it made you feel elite (four-inch heels). (Elite often meaning sexy, er, sexier than the others, therefore entitled to more.) And it was a sign of being elite to be “inner-directed,” standing apart from the masses, unmoved by advertising or even consensus research. But, of course, that arrogance was easily exploited. (Ask the Unitarians.)
Once this juggernaut got started, an opposite movement of hippies, beats and idealists formed in opposition. Minority groups were tired of the boxes they were stuffed into. Disorder ensued. Violent suppression quickly followed. This was also happening in the USSR. In the US one solution was going back to the questionnaire to discover “lifestyles” which were supposed to be value-based. They were something like the “denomination” concept that kept Christians from tearing each other apart over variations in dogma. One’s “lifestyle” was based on what one did, which was soon encouraged into venues that would require equipment and clothing and travel and books and certain kinds of food and drink and clubs and . . . So now being gay is not a moral disgrace but a lifestyle, supported by society so long as one contributed to the economy.
This was interpreted by some as corruption and chaos. (Remember Adam Curtis is saying this, not me.) Two powerful movements arose out of this dread of disorder/change: American Neo-conservatism (Curtis names them) and Islamic fundamentalism. Actually the Martin Marty Center at the U of Chicago Divinity School found that the whole world was pulling back into fundamentalism, each according to its own system, because they were all feeling the danger of increasingly complex and powerful technology, and because the advertising political forces had found a new product: terror. By now everyone had everything they needed (well, everyone who mattered) and if they didn’t it was their own fault, and there was some worry that the economy would break down because no one would buy anything anymore. How big a garage can you build? How big a house? How many TV’s? But fear never runs out.
When politicians get hold of fear-mongering, they know all too well that what people fear is fear itself. People can’t stand anxiety. It makes them take pills. Curtis does not say, but it’s easy to understand how this contributes to the wave of expensive life-extending care as well as the insurance industry. Even the environmentalists stoop to terror and Mother Nature obliges through a media eager to report catastrophes like earthquakes, floods, droughts and starvation. Curtis does not explore the idea of the Other, but the images show them in plenitude. Now it is not starving Jews trapped in concentration camps, but starving Somalis trapped in refugee camps.
The next step is in a series called “The Trap.” I’ll start watching a little later, but I have to say that so far every step has rung true for me and my experiences in county and city government (even small town government), ministry, and teaching. In every context an elite has decided they know what is best (for them) and has maneuvered, lied, threatened and conditioning-rewarded people without the masses figuring it out. As the Native American said, “They asked us to close our eyes to pray, and when we opened our eyes, our land was gone.”
This is as true for the UUA as it is for Roman Catholicism. That is, one cannot get to virtue by going from group to another, one country to another. You cannot be saved by the Dalai Lama or Saul Alinsky, because it’s so deep in us. It’s not that new a phenomenon but the scale of it, the reach of it, and the global consequences for millions are new. For a while we thought scientists (like Freud) could save us, until their daughters pointed out a few things. For a while we thought artists and musicians could save us until they ended up dead with needles in their arms. And there were those virtuous politicians tapping their toes in airport restrooms, voting no no no no no.
The underlying answer, I believe, is twofold. First, giving up the idea of an elite that is entitled to control everything else unless the nature of their eliteness is a matter of self-sacrifice and service to others (which was the old Native American source of power among chiefs, NOT inheritance), and second, giving up free-floating fear/anxiety. We’ve got to have the courage to act for the good of the whole and we’ve got to have the confidence to serve, not by being suicide bombers but by working steadily and dependably. It takes a lot more courage to live day by day. We need to find joy again, I think, in the ordinary sensate world and through intimate relationships. What it comes down to is a true religious shift from trying to secure individual eternal life that ends change to accepting full consciousness of the moving wovenness of all being.
Okay, now I’m brave enough to watch “The Trap.” (It turned out to be Delusions of Grandeur.)
Advertising/politics worked pretty well until the forces released by William Reich separated people into a narcissistic insistence on having their own individual way. Bernays and his heirs had a little trouble getting a handle on this development until they began to do surveys of what people thought about their own inner wants and desires. In a post-war world where a lot of things had been delayed or suppressed, the idea of having something that you really wanted caught fire in a hurry. Esp. things like convertibles with big fins that were “four inches longer” than last year. No longer did you buy something because you really needed it (sturdy shoes) but because it made you feel elite (four-inch heels). (Elite often meaning sexy, er, sexier than the others, therefore entitled to more.) And it was a sign of being elite to be “inner-directed,” standing apart from the masses, unmoved by advertising or even consensus research. But, of course, that arrogance was easily exploited. (Ask the Unitarians.)
Once this juggernaut got started, an opposite movement of hippies, beats and idealists formed in opposition. Minority groups were tired of the boxes they were stuffed into. Disorder ensued. Violent suppression quickly followed. This was also happening in the USSR. In the US one solution was going back to the questionnaire to discover “lifestyles” which were supposed to be value-based. They were something like the “denomination” concept that kept Christians from tearing each other apart over variations in dogma. One’s “lifestyle” was based on what one did, which was soon encouraged into venues that would require equipment and clothing and travel and books and certain kinds of food and drink and clubs and . . . So now being gay is not a moral disgrace but a lifestyle, supported by society so long as one contributed to the economy.
This was interpreted by some as corruption and chaos. (Remember Adam Curtis is saying this, not me.) Two powerful movements arose out of this dread of disorder/change: American Neo-conservatism (Curtis names them) and Islamic fundamentalism. Actually the Martin Marty Center at the U of Chicago Divinity School found that the whole world was pulling back into fundamentalism, each according to its own system, because they were all feeling the danger of increasingly complex and powerful technology, and because the advertising political forces had found a new product: terror. By now everyone had everything they needed (well, everyone who mattered) and if they didn’t it was their own fault, and there was some worry that the economy would break down because no one would buy anything anymore. How big a garage can you build? How big a house? How many TV’s? But fear never runs out.
When politicians get hold of fear-mongering, they know all too well that what people fear is fear itself. People can’t stand anxiety. It makes them take pills. Curtis does not say, but it’s easy to understand how this contributes to the wave of expensive life-extending care as well as the insurance industry. Even the environmentalists stoop to terror and Mother Nature obliges through a media eager to report catastrophes like earthquakes, floods, droughts and starvation. Curtis does not explore the idea of the Other, but the images show them in plenitude. Now it is not starving Jews trapped in concentration camps, but starving Somalis trapped in refugee camps.
The next step is in a series called “The Trap.” I’ll start watching a little later, but I have to say that so far every step has rung true for me and my experiences in county and city government (even small town government), ministry, and teaching. In every context an elite has decided they know what is best (for them) and has maneuvered, lied, threatened and conditioning-rewarded people without the masses figuring it out. As the Native American said, “They asked us to close our eyes to pray, and when we opened our eyes, our land was gone.”
This is as true for the UUA as it is for Roman Catholicism. That is, one cannot get to virtue by going from group to another, one country to another. You cannot be saved by the Dalai Lama or Saul Alinsky, because it’s so deep in us. It’s not that new a phenomenon but the scale of it, the reach of it, and the global consequences for millions are new. For a while we thought scientists (like Freud) could save us, until their daughters pointed out a few things. For a while we thought artists and musicians could save us until they ended up dead with needles in their arms. And there were those virtuous politicians tapping their toes in airport restrooms, voting no no no no no.
The underlying answer, I believe, is twofold. First, giving up the idea of an elite that is entitled to control everything else unless the nature of their eliteness is a matter of self-sacrifice and service to others (which was the old Native American source of power among chiefs, NOT inheritance), and second, giving up free-floating fear/anxiety. We’ve got to have the courage to act for the good of the whole and we’ve got to have the confidence to serve, not by being suicide bombers but by working steadily and dependably. It takes a lot more courage to live day by day. We need to find joy again, I think, in the ordinary sensate world and through intimate relationships. What it comes down to is a true religious shift from trying to secure individual eternal life that ends change to accepting full consciousness of the moving wovenness of all being.
Okay, now I’m brave enough to watch “The Trap.” (It turned out to be Delusions of Grandeur.)
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