YOU CAN TELL THE LEADERS BY THE ARROWS IN THEIR BACKS

The latest group to be caught up in and split apart by the monetizing of suffering and injustice has been American Indians, all stirred up about the Eloise Cobell case that will (soon, we hope) bring them some money. The lawsuit has been an attempt at compensation and closure to the admitted government raid on reservation assets, the profits of which were supposed to have been held in trust for tribal members. Instead they were thrown into the general revenues without earmarks and with such lousy bookkeeping (in some cases literally “ratty” records in substandard warehouses) that no one really knew who was owed what. The Cobell lawsuit had two goals. One was to compensate for the losses already due to mismanagement and the other was to reform the future handling of all funds in trust. The computer software alone was so hack-able that the judge closed down the Department of the Interior system until it could be fixed.

This is NOT a general award to all Indians everywhere but only those who benefit from trust status. Money that will be sent to the plaintiffs at this time is the estimated loss of money by PEOPLE WHO HAD LAND IN TRUST STATUS. Not every Indian has lands in trust status. Those who do don’t have access to their ownership but must “trust” the government to manage them for the most profit and send the owners the proceeds. In the Sixties there was a movement to return private-Indian-owned land to trust status in order to avoid county and state tax jurisdiction. Whether they are subject to county and state law enforcement has never been questioned from that angle. I suspect that the ultimate outcome of the Cobell lawsuit will simply be the elimination of government trust for Indian-owned land, an outcome some have wanted for a long time. One of the abiding controversies among tribal peoples has always been between those who want to manage their own affairs and those who would rather the government managed things.

Trust lands are not the same thing as reservation lands. There are residential lots in Valier (which is off the reservation), which are in trust with the federal government for the benefit of the legal Indian owners rather than being privately owned and managed. Land is taken OUT of trust status through action by the owner, maybe by petitioning for reclassification from “incompetent” (like being too young, not speaking English, or not understanding fancy legal categories and rules) to competence. This is called “patenting.” Some people patented their land simply because they did NOT consider themselves incompetent and thought the legal term had something personal to do with their intelligence.

After the Dawes Act, which divvied the tribal land up Homestead style, assigning allotments to individuals, the land was always first put into trust. Then some people patented their land. The accusation is that some people who truly WERE incompetent for some reason were “helped” to patent their land, which meant that it could be sold by them -- maybe not at a fair price nor for a good reason -- or attached to pay bills owed to local merchants, which the owners had not expected to happen. Whatever it was that happened, that’s an entirely different matter that has not been consolidated into a class action, at least not as far as I know. There are diligent and dedicated people accumulating facts and it may be that in the future there will be such a lawsuit.

Another kind of claim that distracts and confuses people is compensation for lands seized or overrun in contradiction of treaty assurances; for example, both the Black Hills and the Sweetgrass Hills, both of which were assigned to the Indians and then grabbed back by non-Indians because of the discovery of gold. These violations were eventually compensated by a government pay-out of a major block of money. On the Native American side a big part of the argument was that these high refugia hills were spiritually valorized places of enormous significance to the autochthonous peoples in the same way as European cathedrals. (A lot of white people also feel they are sacred.) The payout did not come to individuals, but to tribes as a whole.

A third kind of payout is the dividends earned by the tribal corporation. The tribal council operates on the model of a corporation in which each member is entitled to a share. The council is the same as the board of a corporation. Thus, at the end of the year, the dividends might be distributed as per capita checks.

A strong reason for monetizing society the way we do today is that it keeps order, but some people have figured out that it is a system that can be used as emotional extortion, among other things. It is in the extortionists’ interest to remain angrily “afflicted.” Since the situation of NA’s is already so confused in most minds, this tendency is easily exploited, if for nothing more than political and emotional self-righteousness.

Gyasi Ross, a lawyer and blogger associated with “Indian Country Today,” recently tried to make some points about these matters. On "Thing About Skins and Other Curios" he brought into the equation his grandfather, Percy Bullchild, who wrote “The Sun Comes Down,” an authentic Blackfeet-written book legitimately published. Right way there was a firestorm of criticism: that Percy was selfish, that he had it wrong, that he should not have told what he did, that he was a “sell-out,” “opportunist,” “traitor.” Almost exactly the same accusations as of Eloise. If you’ve lived on a rez, you’ll know this is predictable. Under it is the same demand: “Where’s MY cut?”

Said Gyasi, “. . . frankly, it seemed somewhat cowardly for someone to criticize a person for doing a good thing that they were unwilling to do themselves. . .”

“In my estimation, this Native woman [Eloise] is a hero, a warrior.”

As soon as Gyasi posted this, he got another wave of flame, all of it anonymous, as well as some approval from people with real names, including me. As soon as my name appeared, the attacks turned from Eloise to me. That was predictable. I'm white. And I couldn’t help but note that the anonymous people were evidently hiding behind the door in English class. I don’t know how they managed to learn to keyboard.

So Eloise is a two-fold heroine, first for facing down the government and second for having to withstand illiterate attacks from her own people. The latter force is what makes so many people reluctant to stand up for what is right. Also, it reinforces the prejudices of people who have a bad opinion of Indians. And it makes heroes wonder what they were thinking.

I just don’t get why the critics comment anonymously. If they think they will get money out of their high dudgeon, how will anyone know where to send the check? Any anonymous person who sends an anonymous comment to this blog on this post will be deleted. I just hate to see them embarrass themselves.

R.D. LAING: EXTRAORDINARY MAN

My fondness for remarkable, non-conforming, strong men has served me well. Sometimes I’ve been in their slipstream, like a VW behind an 18-wheeler, and other times I’ve just been beside the road waving a hanky. Rarely have I opposed them since I usually believe in what they were doing. Some I only read about, for instance, R.D. Laing, whose biography by his son, Adrian, showed up in the remainder bin at Daedalus.

Laing was a Glasgow Scot, which his son finds highly significant, carrying that split between a super-respectable Victorian-style emphasis on “face” and near-riotous recklessness. Once he had achieved sufficient education and prestige to break barriers, achieve international acclaim, and big money, he slipped over into booze and carousing that eventually brought him to the ground. In short, the classic Icarus pattern, though towards the end he claimed he was shifting over to being Daedalus. This he tried to achieve in the way of many at the time: going to India and Tibet to seek for gurus.

I particularly value biographies and autobiographies of outstanding thinkers because the events often supply a vital key to their work. In Laing’s case it was his puckered-up parents. (He claimed they only had sex once, which produced him -- who was demonstrably his father’s child because of a distinctive birthmark carried by his grandfather, his father and himself.) His mother denied his gestation but could not hide his birth, which he claimed he remembered and “would not care to repeat.” No doubt she would agree. But once present, he was tightly controlled, sent to the best schools and kept on a rigid schedule. (Sounds modern.) He was a concert quality musician and a trained singer, which came in handy later on when he had broken free. The terrible offense that his mother finally could not forgive was the use of the f-word.

Understandably, it was “wee Ronnie,” grown up into R.D. Laing, who fought against over-control for the rest of his adult life and endorsed the idea (which was not his alone) that the psychosis called “schizophrenia” was caused by overcontrolling mothers whose message was a double-bind: “achieve but do not do anything risky and remain in my grasp.” This is about the same time as the popularity of Philip Wylie’s “Generation of Vipers,” maybe a general reaction against the mother-worship of WWII that kept them from interfering with sending their sons off to war.

In fact, Laing was surfing the sea change of culture that transformed the world in the Sixties and Seventies. Laing was an M.D. psychiatrist, qualified to prescribe drugs and quick to discover LSD as a way to swing open the gate to another world. It was a time when psychotic (often meaning “rebellious”) patients were kept in restraints, lobotomized, injected with drugs, locked into padded cells and so on. Laing recognized this as largely unnecessary, esp. after one day when he was exhausted from being on-call and took the occasion of visiting one of the padded cell occupants as a chance to cool out, sitting on the floor with some shared smokes and good conversation. He found the man pleasantly coherent when he didn’t have to be braced against invasion. From then on, his policy was to allow people to simply go through their episodes of violence, regardless of the consequences to the furniture. This was a relief to the nurses and orderlies who had acquired many a lump and bloody nose from trying to stop the “acting out.” The level of confrontation subsided.

Laing outdid Carl Rogers, an American member of this Third Wave of psychologists, who once persuaded a catatonic man to recover simply by sitting with him every day for a half hour or so until he felt “in tune,” and then offering the man a stick of gum, which the man accepted with spoken thanks. Laing’s version was being called to make recommendations on a young woman who was naked and sitting cross-legged in a padded room where she refused to speak or let down her guard. Laing stripped off all HIS clothes, piled them by the door, entered naked and sat down cross-legged alongside her. After a while, they began to visit and resolved a few issues.

Never the lone crusader, Laing was part of a friendship network of former classmates (mostly) who were also doctors or psychotherapists Over the years they organized communal households where patients could live in a more normal way even as their helpers lived with them. The most notorious case was Mary Barnes, who was allowed to go just as crazy as she wanted to -- most famously smearing excrement on the walls, then refusing to eat until her health was endangered. The problem was that she required 24-hour care, which fell mostly to a male nurse. Eventually, she normalized, wrote books and went on lecture tours.

Formed in opposition to both Dr. Freud’s Viennese proprieties and rigid assumptions and Skinner’s insistence on operant conditioning, freedom-loving romantic thinkers like Laing had a huge impact until the invention of effective drugs and today’s fMRI research into actual brain operation. Today’s thinking is that schizophrenia is not due to cold and controlling mothers but is a true malfunction of the brain, either lack of coordination between parts or some kind of chemical imbalance. I would not want to deny any of these approaches, valuing the contribution of each new angle and some probably yet to come, but surely the most exciting and happiest of all these so far has been this movement involving Laing. My own favorites have been somewhat more conventional: Winnicott, Bateson, Rogers, Maslow, Satir, et al. I was surprised to learn that Laing was a student of Foucault, the fountainhead of so many inscrutable and intractable ideas, since part of this liberation movement was an emphasis on experience instead of theory.

The media has never understood any of this. If the reporters became sympathetic, I suspect, editors protected the views of investors by keeping suspicion alive, except at Life magazine which seemed to share my attitude towards exceptional men. (Picasso, Pollock, Harry Jackson) What strikes me most is that we’ve returned to a near-Victorian valuing of conformity and money-making, but there is a lingering section of the world that refuses to give up the revolution that set so many people free. I’m hoping for a synergy.

IT'S NOT PARANOIA IF . . .

As I understand it, paranoia is when you think something is after you, but it isn’t. If it is, that’s not paranoia -- it’s justified suspicion. There are all sorts of forces and indviduals in the world who are not really after you, but would like you to think they are. What do you do with that? I mean, apart from driving carefully, installing watchware, using Snopes to check out rumors -- that sort of thing. And why do so many people -- notably the Teabaggers -- LOVE paranoia, absolutely roll in it, spread and exaggerate it, and work themselves into a frenzy?

POSSIBLE ANSWERS:

1. Political power: the squeaking wheel gets the grease, unless you live in the wrong place. In some countries paranoia, especially the kind that blames the establishment, may be fulfilled in a possibly terminal way. In a democracy the problem seems to be that there is so many issues demanding attention from legislators, governors, courts, and so on, that changes that may be quite crucial to a small or a stigmatized group can only be brought to the front by emotionalizing it, using the shadow of danger to move it forward. But this can also drive denial, so that others become invested in covering up, suppressing information, confusing the issue.

2. Righteousness hoping to pass as virtue. This seems to be the dynamic that trips up a lot of religious and political leaders. By projecting a shell or front that displays the characteristics of people thought to be virtuous (nice suits, reversed collars, good haircuts) those who cannot produce real virtue slip around under cover.

3. Attracting rescuers. Help, help! I’m dying -- well, suffering at least! Write me a check!

4. Enjoying the disquietude of others and the feeling of being part of a “pack.” This is junior high school stuff and the foundation of bullying. When some people discover that they can produce emotional distress in others by calling them fat, or stink, or ugly, or gay, or retards, they feel entitled to do so. Even stronger than that is some deep biological urge for a group to eliminate those who don’t conform. This is sometimes called the “white crow” syndrome, since black crows will try to eliminate one painted white by experimenters.

5. Justifying violence and other extreme measures like endless prison sentences or surveillance cameras on every corner. If the danger is exaggerated, then money can become available for hypervigilance. Demonization has become a cottage industry in the United States. Drugs, immigrants, gun control, taxes, the census and what-have-you are in turn misrepresented and inflated without evidence and with no inquiry into the deep causes of what is really at stake. Probably the mainspring of all this is simple fear of change, which might disenfranchise those benefitting from the status quo.

6. At the other extreme, justifying passivity and withdrawal. No voting. No church. A steady stream of sensationalized media piped into the TV set, leading one to think the world is packed with kidnappers, arsonists, home invaders, rogue cops, etc. Bring me another beer.

7. Self-dosing with fear chemicals, like adrenaline. No one has commented that Chicken Little might have been suffering from a brain syndrome that was once justified when he was a little chickie and the sky was full of hawks. His brain may have rewired itself for a world in which sky is as terrifying as hawks, even when the hawk is gone. Adrenaline is addictive.

Those are all causes of fears that are not justified. The trouble is that the opposite, failing to fear or at least exercise caution, is just as dangerous. Lack of awareness may be comfortable, but dangerous. When I was working as an animal control officer, it was remarkable how little people paid attention to their own animals, how willing they were to minimize the effects of neglect, how off-handedly callous they were about other people. They don’t save money, buckle their seat belts or call in the the smell of gas leaks. They don’t get exercise, eat properly, wear bells in bear country, check their cinch, brush their teeth or any of the many many many small things we’re all supposed to do. Much of this comes from their failure to think of long-term effects. Some of it comes from misunderstanding of statistics. And a lot of it comes from “warning fatigue.” A person begins to be impatient, even to WANT to take risks just for the helluvit. Oh, the thrill of eating trans fats!

“Paranoia” was originally a technical term invented as jargon in the psychiatric community that we gave so much cultural power after WWII. You can tell because the word was invented from Greek: “para” and “noos,” originally meaning "distracted or demented.” My New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary suggests as examples “delusions of persecution, unwarranted jealousy, exaggerated self-importance” or (second meaning) “a tendency to suspect or distrust others or to believe oneself unfairly used.” Remember, if it’s true it’s not paranoia and some of us ARE persecuted, unfairly used, jealous with good reasons, and SHOULD suspect and distrust others. Keep in mind this is social definition by usage and NOT the psychiatric community’s definition, which is usually narrower.

How does anyone figure out what is justifiable wariness? You could use a respected authority. (Oh, right. Like your parish priest.) You could use history as a measure of comparison. But nothing in the past has been like today. When have we ever had an Internet that can be silently invaded ? When have there ever been such masses of people shifting from one culture to another, facing entirely new rules?

When have we ever had such a split between haves and have-nots? When have we had such an unreliable media community? Well, um, forget the last two questions. We have ALWAYS had a huge split between the wealthy/powerful and the poor/helpless, it’s just that we managed to buffer it with a big middle class there for a while. So the question is, how are we losing that? (I think we are, partly because of technology. Consider the split between those who have and operate computers and those who don’t. )

And we have ALWAYS had a media that fed off fear and destruction. Here I sit in a prairie village worrying about mud slides and coal explosions. (I probably ought to worry a bit about earthquakes.) My saner ancestors always said: “Prepare for the worst, expect the best, and take what comes.” This is a three-pronged remedy for paranoia.

DID YOUR GREAT-GRANDPA CHAIN-SMOKE?

Just when I’m beginning to understand genetics (in the most superficial sense) along comes epigenetics. I’ve got it down that genes are four different kinds of molecules arranged in a line along a chromosome and that they “unzip” and “rezip” to create a new formula for a human body in the process of meiosis. I’ve got the thing about how they’re arranged in a double helix. Now I learn the epigenes are molecules that the doubled helix wrap around, as well as forming a kind of sleeve. These molecules are so small that the substitution of a single atom in the molecule will change its “shape” and that will change the way the joined molecules in the main double helix will operate: turn them up, turn them down, turn them off, turn them on.

Most amazingly, epigenes can be changed by the environment, part of which is the culture. The environment changes, the culture changes, the action of the epigenes change which changes the “expression” of the genes, and this is inheritable, at least for a few generations. There is an expectation that the influence of the different epigenes will fade over time, but this is not tested. Things that can change the expression of the genes include: starvation, generous over-eating, smoking, alcohol, high dosage vitamins, and substances rubbed onto bodies, like baby oil or shampoo. It is suggested that the widespread (and sometimes deadly) peanut allergies are due to peanut oil in baby oil. In my generation baby oil mixed with iodine was the sun lotion of choice.

An article in Time magazine, January 18, 2010, is my chief source this morning and it’s much clearer than the account I’ll be able to outline, partly because “John Cloud,” the author was working with an editor and a different kind of time frame. He begins with research by Dr. Lars Olov Bygren, a Swede, working on data from the 1800’s in the far north country where crop failures alternated with crop surpluses and the people evidently had no means of compensating, so that some years they starved to death and literally the next year they ate as much as they could. Dr. Bygren chose 99 persons born in 1905 and studied them in terms of their parents and grandparents who went through those erratic food supply years. It was already known that women who were terrified or malnourished during the time they are carrying their babies would hand on a vulnerability to heart attacks. But this was different. The children and grandchildren of both men and women who passed through that severe feast or famine sequence lived an average of six years shorter.

One of the mysteries about how a body works is that every cell in it has the very same DNA and yet one cell turns out to be part of a bone in your foot and another part turns out to be a spongy oxygen-permeated bit of lung tissue. How does it know which to be? Evidently the epigene carries that information, especially during the development of the embryo in the first place. It’s as though the genes were a huge million-keyed concert pipe organ, and the epigene were the fingers pressing the keys to make music. Every note is there in potential, but the timing and sequence is not in the keys.

On GNXP.com I kept reading about “methylation,” and now I learn that methyl is a basic chemical recipe: one carbon attached to three hydrogen atoms. Methylation is how the finger comes down on the key. A relevant experiment is one done on “agouti mice,” which are ordinary mice with a mutation that makes them yellow and hugely fat. They are not a different species, but a regular mouse with an altered gene. (If you Google, you’ll see vivid photos.) But if these mice were fed a special diet packed with B vitamins (folic acid, which seems so crucial to gestation, and B12), they turned out brown and normal-sized. Somehow they either normalized the gene or compensated for the mutation.

So the scientists are now busy inventing methyls that will cause strange effects. (Fruit flies with outgrowths of eyes that will last through the next 13 generations. Or roundworms that look dumpy and switch off a green flourescent protein for the next 40 generations.) One paper lists 100 of these consequences of epigenes that carry over for multiple generations. The next step is methyls that will “cure” diseases due to genes.

On another blog (www.swanrivermanitoba.blogspot.com) I’m posting photos of my father’s family from the early 1920’s when they were growing potatoes in northern Manitoba after decades of doing the same thing in South Dakota. In the photos my grandmother is developing a goiter, which is a consequence of not getting enough iodine in one’s diet. The thyroid gland in the neck, which controls metabolism and probably affects the other endocrine glands, swells up. The same condition killed Charlie Russell a few decades later. But somehow my grandparents were able to find “a woman” who knew to prescribe iodine in tiny amounts and also, I suspect, recommended a move to the West Coast where there is a lot of iodine in the garden soil and especially in ocean fish. By the time I knew her, she looked quite normal without any surgery. But I will now begin to look for the epigenomic consequences of iodine deprivation.

I’m Scots-Irish on both sides so my genes evolved over the years to suit the acid, iodine-rich environment of those sea islands. They were unsuited to the alkali low-iodine inland prairie, but I’m sure that my nutrition-conscious mother put enough cod liver oil down us to compensate. Anyway, we were in Portland, Oregon, and my father in his travels brought home salmon and crab. We dipped smelt and dug clams.

A period in human life that is sensitive to epigenetic influences is the onset of puberty, the switch-on of the sexual endocrine organs that floods the body with new molecules. A study looked at boys who began to smoke before age eleven, and discovered that their descendants were fat, vulnerable to diseases that will shorten their lives. I visualize them as agouti mice. Think of all the men who smoked their way through WWII. Fifty years, or a little more than two generations later, are we becoming a nation of agouti mice? So many questions, so much vulnerability to things over which we had no control in the past, but which will greatly affect the children of the future.

PAUL KANE WAS HERE!

In the 1840’s when Western Canada was still dominated by the Hudson’s Bay company, still included the Pacific Northwest, and was called “Rupert’s Land,” Paul Kane (1810-1871) managed to talk the top Hudson’s Bay people into letting him use the company’s resources (forts and travel routes) so he could make portraits of the indigenous people there. A tall red-headed Irishman whose father had been a soldier in the old country and became a spirits dealer in York (which later became Toronto), he was of the right spirit and constitution to fit into the rough company of French voyageurs and Brit factors and was frankly in love with “aboriginals.”

To put him into perspective, he was inspired to make this exploration in part by Catlin’s (1796-1875) massive work accumulating the same kind of portraits and historical landscapes. He may or may not have known about Swiss Karl Bodmer (1809-1893) who had traveled up the the Missouri River in 1833 and 1834 with German prince Maximilian. Lewis and Clark had crossed the continent in 1804-1806. The natural trio of Catlin, Bodmer and Kane are not known so well by the popular public, but in their on-site sketches they recorded vital images of the people and places that no one back East would see until photography developed, as it were. Of the three, Kane kept the closest journal notes (complete with the usual creative spelling), which in 1859 he developed into “Wanderings of an Artist Among the Indians of North America Among the Indians of North America from Canada to Vancouver's Island and Oregon through the Hudson's Bay Company's Territory and Back Again.” “Paul Kane's Frontier Including Wanderings of an Artist” by Kane, Paul and J. Russell Harper is available from the Amon Carter Museum (published 1971) in Austin, TX. Also “Wanderings of an Artist” is on Google books. I just bought a copy for $15 from Edmonton Goodwill through Abebooks.com.

Like everyone else, Kane collected a lot of material objects, partly as markers of experiences and partly for reference when he got back to the studio. His practice was to accumulate a lot of field notes in watercolor and then, back in Toronto, to develop them into formal oil paintings. I was delighted to discover that Netflix would deliver a Canadian documentary about Kane called “The Art of Paul Kane: Visions from the Wilderness,” even more delighted to see Hugh Dempsey, often a visitor to Browning from Calgary, was in it and most delighted to hear that Tantoo Cardinale was the narrator. (I’m a BIG Tantoo fan, but she usually plays people who barely speak English.) The disc is only 45 minutes long, so I watched it twice and might watch it some more. There is a second disc in my queue that I think shows more of the art. The disc I’ve already watched is visually rich as well as exploring the concept of contrasting Kane’s direct, personal watercolor field notes with his culturally-bound studio oils, which are quite different. The same is probably true of Catlin and Bodmer.

Kane was in the West at the time of the Whitman Massacre, had visited the mission there, but was not close to the mission at the time of the incident. Facts were “slid” a little to make him more involved and to make his portraits of the miscreants look more evil and scary. On the other hand, he often made his “savages” look a little more European and mild than they are in the sketches. Always he was concerned to preserve accurately the accoutrements and equipment of the people, right down to an apparatus for spinning dog fur into yarn, so detailed it is easily reproduced.

Both white and indigenous people (each category including descendants of Kane and the aboriginals themselves), react and comment on this schism, which is in so many parts of our knowledge of the world. (This blog has previously mentioned the split between theology as it is done in learned circles and the same material watered down or even distorted to suit the prejudices of congregations.) But the actual art remains unchanged. It’s only our ways of seeing and understanding them that change.

In Kane’s lifetime he had acquired a patron who helped him greatly. This young Toronto man who had inherited a fortune got along well with Kane in spite of the difference in their social graces. (Kane was pretty rough but his wife was quite refined.) Perhaps the patron, like many others, enjoyed the second-hand contact with adventures on the frontier. But Kane himself, longing to return to those years, evidently fell prey to alcohol and probably died of cirrhosis of the liver. Shielding his reputation by keeping him sequestered led to a reputation as a recluse. He left his wife in difficult circumstances but their children were able to help.

This is almost the archetype of the Western artist: intrepid, rough-hewn, loved by many, helped by the wealthy, and finally brought down by human frailty. Not many leave this valuable a legacy and, of course, it’s close to impossible now to find a people untouched by modern media and industrial intrusion. The dark side of that is indigenous people who dress according to what the popular media shows and the bright side is that we have access to Kane’s work through the same media.

Even though much of his art is about Blackfeet, it is nearly unknown on the American side. Canadians claim him because the greater body of the Blackfoot Confederacy is on the north side of the line. And yet, when it came time for Canada to step up to the plate and keep Kane’s art in his home nation, it escaped to Texas where people recognized what it meant and had the bucks to write a check for a bargain. The “hundred oils” commissioned by Kane’s patron remain in Toronto and can be exhibited with the sketches for comparison.

Of the three -- Catlin, Bodmer, Kane -- it is Kane who feels closest to me. His main subjects -- Blackfeet and Chinook -- have been part of my life since my fourth grade teacher was Mildred Colbert, a major tribal leader. But I haven’t really spent time with Kane's images. I’m eager for his book to come south across the arbitrary lines between nations, between peoples, between now and the past, between popular knowledge and scholarly research.

WHAT KIND OF COW IS THAT?

When you move to a small town it takes a while to find out the things that no one tells you because they assume that “everyone knows that.” When I first moved here ten years ago, there were still dry cleaners in Conrad and Cut Bank, but they blinked out. When I asked around Valier for the closest one surviving, people went blank because hardly anyone buys clothes that must be dry-cleaned anymore. Finally someone told me that I should ask the butcher.

It turned out that Christiaens Meats started being a dry-cleaning drop-off/pickup when it was a grocery store as well as a meat store, and they had just continued on as a default courtesy. It finally got warm enough for me to do without my winter jacket for a week (the truck only comes through on Wednesday at 7AM) so off it went for the first cleaning since I bought it -- I dread to think how long ago. Rod Christiaens, the proprietor, joked that the cleaners turned it a different color: it left red and came back black. (It’s a reversible red fleece jacket with a waterproof black lining.)

Rod is the newest member of the Valier town council, if you don’t count the new mayor, and a valuable addition. The Valier town council is like the Heart Butte School Board: the secret of success is a balance among the descendants of the original Belgian families who came here with the help of their priest and the Great Northern Railroad -- a whole village that migrated together. One knows they had to be the most adventurous ones, but they were dry land farming which means the most focused and steady. A rare combination, but powerful. If they are properly balanced, things get done.

The newest thing among foodies right now, they say, is home butchering. Probably they don’t mean raising the cow or killing it -- more like buying a quarter and cutting it up. One of the newer strategies for “eat where you live” is to have the butcher come to the ranch and kill onsite, thus eliminating the dangers of feedlot contamination and the fat marbling from eating grain. (I’m sorry I ever read about cows having such upset stomachs from eating grain -- which they are not evolved to digest -- that feedlots are full of puddles of cow puke. I hope you’re not reading this at meal time.)

Rod cuts up his meat right there in the store on a steel-topped table. He’s been doing it for many years and has the rhythm down cold, but the room is not cold. A quarter of a cow (probably a steer) is on the table. It’s been hanging a while: the edges are black. “What kind of cow is that?” I ask, trying to sound really hip and informed.

“Kind of a hybrid,” says Rod. His knife slides around the rims, pares off fat, clips off tags of flesh. It must be formidably sharp. The last fancy cooking mag I read tells about the angle of the sharpening, what difference it makes (one angle gets dull faster than the other but I forget which angle), and what kind of steel the blade is made of. It’s not that these things are better or worse in an absolute sense, but they make a difference depending on what you expect the knife to do. So you have to have done it enough to HAVE expectations or, as I suspect is true for Rod, someone has to have passed on what they know. He’s the only one I see cutting, while the other people move around him. The place doesn’t reek of chlorine the way the supermarket butcher spaces do. When there is so much chlorine splashed around, I always wonder whether they aren’t depending on it too much and neglecting ordinary precautions.

Most of what he does is custom cutting for ranchers or hunters, almost exclusively beef and pork. There is a local pig farmer who raises “free range” hogs. I suppose the Hutterites, who run an indoor pig factory across the lake, do their own butchering. I would not buy from them -- they shrug off advice about chemicals and so on. But I feel guilty for not buying meat from Rod. Once it’s cut, he freezes some of it -- maybe he cuts some of it in shares. But most of the packages are meant for families or at least couples. I just don’t use it up very fast. Mostly I eat chickens and (if I can get it) wild fish (not farmed) or just stick to vegetable protein. But sometimes I get a wild animal craving for beef, most often eating it sauteed in strips and served on a pile of salad greens. I had that the first time at Papa Hayden’s in Portland, very fancy place, and it tasted so good I come back to it all the time.

“Butchering onsite is very progressive,” I suggest. “It would make a good magazine article.”

Rod says, “It’s an old story. We’ve been doing it for years and years.”

I wonder what I could ask him for a magazine article, not a local one but to try to get into a national magazine. I could ask whether he kills with a bullet or a bolt gun, like that one in “No Country for Old Men.” Maybe the rancher does the killing. I could ask him whether he’s ever butchered a buffalo. What about an ostrich? If someone asked him to do it, how would he about the task? I notice that he’s not missing any fingers, which is a sign he knows what he’s doing and is skillful -- doesn’t get distracted. He’s like that in town council meetings, too. “Get to the point.” The quarters of beef must weigh eighty pounds, but he’s big enough to easily handle them.

The butcher shop feels peaceful. There’s no blood slopping around. No one is angry. Everyone helps everyone load and unload the pickups that come and go. Maybe I should rethink this meat thing. I remember a health food owner in Fairfield telling me that his wife controlled her diabetes by eating mostly meat. Maybe if it were a “known cow” without a lot of injections, handled skillfully, it would be better than chicken full of saline solution.

Anyway, now my jacket is clean. Now I need to know who does Fed Ex pickup and dropoff.

PERSONAL EASTER EGGS

‘Easter eggs” are computer parlance for little hidden links to interesting but maybe peripheral nodes of information. I’m using the idea to justify an inventory of the kinds of thinking that are interesting me. I’m under no illusions that readers will suddenly rush out to buy books, but it’s useful to me to undertake a review. Some of these personal “core thinkers” are discoveries I’ve made myself and others have been offered to me. They represent realms, doors, new ecologies.

None is more powerful than the undertaking of co-writing with Tim Barrus. He and the boys of Cinematheque are more like a sort of living literature than a thought system. The issue they raise for me is more about boundaries than anything else. They are boys who broke the generational and gender boundaries of families, spent time as beleagered isolates, and now are re-gathered into a different kind of family, in the way of artists who smash ceramics and then piece them back together in a mozaic, playing the brokenness off against the wholeness. Tim himself has never seen a boundary he didn’t want to attack, though it’s sometimes like a male cardinal in spring fighting his reflection in a picture window, so deeply controlled by instinct as to be self-damaging. His only rest is in a place like the SW desert of the United States where the boundary is the horizon or in an airport, a place that is all potential. I’m a little that same way, using distance and elusiveness as boundary solutions. I had thought ministry would be a protective boundary, but instead it turned out to be revealing and inviting -- to an excess. Like sex work. Tim and I never run out of ideas. (Or boys, though they die.) We constantly circle back.

I’ve never liked the post-structural, post-colonial, Marxist set of ideas that set everyone gaga just as I hit seminary, so I welcome the thought of the Italians Deleuse and Guattari, who resist hierarchies but suggest connected “flashes” and communities. They have kicked up a flurry of other thought, like Josh Lerner’s analysis of lines of flight. http://www.linesofflight.net/linesofflight.htm (Very useful for a short piece on skateboarding for Cinematheque.) Lerner suggests that some of the best thinking around is coming from Italians, but is not translated in enough quantity or quality for English-speakers to realize it.

Today Boria Sax, whom I have followed through H-NILAS (the discussion list in the Humanities listserv group on Nature in Legend and Story) and environmental listservs, today suggests Roberto Marchesini, who makes a recovery from Deleuzeguattari’s insistence on decentralization and roots-up movements, by changing the focus back to the “tree” model. (I’m very tired of this post-post-post trend, like climbers linked by ropes, or Hollywood trying to number new versions of old hits.) Anyway, the issue is how humans relate to animals versus how humans relate to machines. I feel a blog post coming on: the triangular relationship among cats, computers and old ladies.

Dave Lull, the cross-pollinating librarian, sends me a steady stream of the writing-in-plain-sight of Nassim Taleb, the theorist who brought us Black Swan Theory, the impact of the totally unexpected event. As soon as he suggested it, everyone misunderstood it and tried hard to exploit it, which has caused this wryly funny thinker to retreat while working online for those who are interested. He loves most of all to walk and talk, like Tillich and Eliade. He values practice, experience, being out there wrestling with the world, and up against Socrates, this Greek Arab offers Fat Tony. He says, “There are many more books on birds written by ornithologists than books by birds written on birds; and certainly even fewer books on ornithologists written by birds.” Which raises the question, “Why is it that authorities who address the problems of discarded boys, never ask discarded boys what they think?” Likewise the treatment of Native Americans. (Cats, of course, are above all this. Just open a can of food and get out of the way. That might work on boys to some degree.)

Recently I greatly admired (and so did others) a series in the blog called “The Rawness” which is supposed to be about gender patterns that one must understand to have a good sexual life in a modern urban world. Though focused on anxious young white men, it came from a new direction, largely historical. Gender roles is an old preoccupation of mine since I keep trying to be “one of the guys.” And I reject motherhood. “T” or “Ricky Raw”, as the writer calls himself, doesn’t approve of these positions -- he ignores them -- but his structural overview of what goes on is very helpful.

Not long ago I ran across the documentary film work of Adam Curtis (much of it available online), who is trying to work through the major shift in our society whereby we think we’re living in democracies but are actually succumbing to the same old class system, this time presented through psychological means (such as advertising) and obsession with things. The shocking major collapse of banking, real estate, and credit cards has revealed the truth of all this. Also, Curtis leads me back to my earliest memories watching newsreels at a movie theatre that didn’t screen any other kinds of story. They have deeply shaped my understanding of the world. That is, chaos could erupt anytime, even here, and if it does, the effort to stay alive will mean a lot of compromises. Nations are more easily snuffed than we think.

This led me to some social reality movies, like “Nanking” and other critiques of war like “Turtles Don’t Fly” in which Iranian children must save themselves. At the same time I’ve been watching the romanticizing movies like “Gladiator” and “The Wind and the Lion.” What this juxtaposition addresses is one of the kernel dimorphisms of Montana culture that outsiders (and maybe some insiders) never “get.” This is a state of veterans who do not glamorize war, but often escape from the painful reality by indulging in Kiplingesque British Empire/Charlie Russell fantasies of colorful exploits by exceptional men. The hard learning experience that Taleb and Curtis commend to us, is at the hidden core of the colorful dramatic life outsiders imagine. This applies even more distinctly to the Montana tribes, whose very members imagine that their hallucinatory fears are real and who take flight to the 19th century. Montana literature is fat, romantic, and empty while pretending to be tough and insightful. I’m going global.

I’m taking Deleuseguattarian thought most seriously because it is closest to my earliest prejudices, privileging voluntary cooperation, organicism, small-is-beautiful, knowledge gained through experience. I think I share these with Tim enough to be useful. And I continue to explore my own boundaries, otherwise known as limits.

VALENTINO RED

My two female Strachan cousins and I love fabrics and clothes. We grew up sewing, which led them into good taste and lovely dressing but took me into costuming for a short while. Right now one cousin is creating a wedding dress for her niece, using her sister-in-law’s wedding dress as a base. “I'm building a quite elaborate crushed, draped, overlaid with lace garment.” She’s using her mother’s dress form to work on which is about the right size except that the next generation is always taller.

The other cousin urged me to rent the movie, “Valentino, the Last Emperor,” so I did. Now I don’t want to send it back. You want to talk “tall?” These models are about nine feet tall. What’s interesting is that all the dresses presented in depth (esp. a white one that’s hard to explain as well as a filmy red one) are floor-length or just a tiny bit longer. Valentino evidently hates the idea of women having legs! The red one offended him because it was thin enough that even with two layers of material, the model’s legs could be seen in outline. Another one, sent back for redesign, was just short enough that the model kicked it up a bit when she walked, which revealed her ankles. “There is nothing so disgusting as seeing a woman’s ankles revealed when she walks!” he raged. Nor was he tolerant at the top end. A socialite is wearing a flatter-fronted model’s version of a low-cut gown. “Darling, your boobs are falling out,” he remarks critically.

He likes asymmetry, surprise, even near-incompletion, as in the famous white dress, columnar, impossibly pleated in a mille tiny creases which are interspersed with ruffles that start tiny at the top and become wide at the bottom, cascading scallops that ripple like water when the model moves. There was much discussion of whether silver sequins should be added to the ruffles. They were, in an edging that was a little tricky since one ruffle tended to catch on another. But that was not so controversial as Valentino’s decision to leave two of the ruffles off. Just spaces where they would have been. The less sophisticated of the critics thought it looked like an omission, a deficiency. V. thought it was playful, a way of not going “over the top.” Finally, flouncing away in a fit of resentment, he allowed the ruffles to be added. But they weren’t HIS fault!

It has slowly dawned on me that Valentino’s perfect woman is a mermaid about nine feet long. I will never qualify. These creations are an art form, not practical clothes, though V. says they are. Maybe they’re practical for women with money and the right bodies. They are an art form for rich men to escort on their arms in clean warm places.

When the dresses and suits were short, the seven-foot-long legs of the models were thin as wire in patterned sheer black nylons and four-inch heels, as they carefully placed each foot in front of the other so they swayed like tigers. V.’s “muse,” a princess who gives advice, was thin but not painted. She was nearly left out of this film, just noted in passing. The women in the workroom were REAL. (Have you seen that series from the BBC “The House of Elliott” with its wonderful portrait of sewing workrooms?) In fact, V. throws one real hizzy fit -- it’s over the hair of the models, which the hair-dresser wants to make into a huge frizzy bush, while V. wants severe buns. He doesn’t become violent. He just exits, crying no-no-no-no! The head seamstress goes into her own tempest when a gorgeous cocoa-colored evening gown seems to have what she considers to be a poorly-sewn bust. With ripper and needle, she goes to work herself, saying it is a whole day’s work, and when others try to interfere, she storms off with cocoa chiffon trailing and catching behind her.

The great peacemaker is Valentino’s partner, Giametti. He’s the one to love. V. does.
"tedalexandre", a commenter on imdb.com, writes an excellent essay on the larger scene. He says, “Tyrnauer simply lifts the curtain on Valentino's gorgeous, frantic, fragile universe and watches it collapse; a dying star, shining brightest as it implodes.”

“Five years later, while Italian homosexuality remains a specifically complicated knot to unravel, a paradigm shift has occurred. The presupposition that the men are gay, as are the majority of their peers and male colleagues, is a mute presence in the film, while the expressive energy of the men's post-sexual relationship drives the film and their careers equally.”

These are the kind of gay men I grew to know in college through theatre classes. Though now I’m well aware there are many other kinds of gay men, I can’t help feeling enormous affection for this kind. Somehow, in spite of their enormous sophistication and opulence, they seem innocent to me. Indeed, these two were shocked and horrified when they saw the movie and they tried to kill it. Only audience positive reaction saved the film. Thank goodness!

In the end the two men blew a quarter of a million euros on a spectacular festival event in Rome. With a red-washed Coliseum in the background, and the most fabulous dresses on mannequins suspended in rows on the walls of an enormous hall, the evening sky was occupied by dancers suspended in the sky, dresses twice as long as they were, trailing beneath them as they swam back and forth, scattering roses while rockets bloomed through the sky behind them and Callas' voice filled the twilight with arias. The finale was a hot air balloon, ascending with a woman in white floating underneath. As Valentino said, it was “unrepeatable!” Sure enough, the conglomerate that bought him out simply presided over the crash of the House of Valentino while the spirit swam off into the sky.

V. had stopped at the beginning of festivities just long enough to give Gianini a gift: a very thin bangle of diamonds which Gianini was careful to expose to the camera whenever it looked for him. The camera also caught the glitter of both partner’s eyes, flooded with love and gratitude for each other. It was theatre -- no, it was opera.

Put against this ecstatic crescendo the knowledge that all those sewing ladies were there and their eyes were also wet. And if you want to take all this into your own life, there are Valentino patterns to sew at home at: Valentino - Vintage Sewing Patterns

Valentino's trademark red colour, known as rosso Valentino, is a combination of 100% magenta, 100% yellow and 10% black (CMYK color model).

THE SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS OF THE PRIESTLY PEDERAST

Scylla and Charybdis were mythological creatures who endangered sailors when they tried to sail between them. One or the other smashing-together monster was bound to get the unlucky. For the religiously devoted person who preys on children the two entities are the church and the state. By devoted, I mostly mean a priest or person in religious orders who is under the discipline of the Holy Roman Church, but there are other religious institutions in other regions (Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, tribal, Shinto) that presumably have the same problems as translated into their culture. In fact, I would be VERY interested to know the statistics and practices of those break-off Catholic institutions who did NOT insist on a celibate priesthood: Russian Orthodox, Eastern Orthodox, Anglican religions.

“As in the Roman Catholic Church, Oriental Orthodoxy and some other churches, Orthodox bishops trace their lineage back to the Apostles through the process of Apostolic Succession.” (wikipedia) This is their replacement for the genetic succession of families. In the developmental trajectories of the Roman Catholic church, once considered sovereign over Europe, celibacy was intended to prevent corruption due to trying to develop dynastic power and wealth, while the royal houses of various countries who accepted genetic inheritance and entitlement could not very well go to celibacy. (Instead they got caught up in problems with barren wives and in-breeding.) Neither approach to the succession of power has been foolproof, but the alternative, succession by open elections, also has problems. Power and wealth are always problematic, most of all at the point of transfer.

The Roman Catholic Church once monopolized supra-national territory which it divided into parishes, which had jurisdiction over everyone there. But the competition of Protestantism forced Catholicism to transform itself into a “gathered” church, in which the believers share their neighborhoods with non-believers. Today, of course, religions of various regions of the globe are so mixed that most religions have a central core location and a shadow of diaspora adherents, who often wander off when they are removed from the original ecology of the belief system. The Roman Catholics insisted that celibate priests were a sign of virtue, part of their privileged access to God. The church has insisted on its own courts, laws and penalties. (We are hearing about the Islamic parallels like Sharia law.) Much of this work is meant to take compromising matters into their own hands so as to protect the reputation -- the juju, if you like -- of the church.

The problem for a pederast priest is how to thread a self-protective rabbit-run between the legal machinery of the church and the legal machinery of the secular world. If they begin to cooperate, it will be hard on the pederast. But if the Church lets the secular law-enforcers take over, they -- like an American Indian tribe -- lose their sovereignty and a lot of the secrecy that protects their image. The same problem exists with the religious orders, which are much more self-contained and not under the direct rule of the pope. No one has talked much about monks, male, who might or might not be ordained priests; or nuns. The power plays and secrecies among and between these organizational entities have got to be incredibly complex, esp. when considered historically.

In America, corporations have grown so large that they compete with the governments -- in fact, are international -- and we are rethinking the idea that a corporation is a “person” entitled to the protections of a “person.” We do not think that a church is a “person,” though the Pope might personify the Roman Catholics and the Dalai Lama might personify a certain kind of Tibetan Buddhism. But we do rather accept the idea that a church might be a corporation with a CEO, though we might imagine that they operate in a more protective and idealistic way than the average conglomerate. It is this imaginary assumption that allows churches to insist that they be exempted from secular law and taxation. The idea is that they do so much good in the community that this contributes to the good of the whole. It’s a shaky idea these days.

Scandal like pedophilia raises questions about privileged religious corporations, whose privilege rests on virtue, that is very dangerous for them. The church might lose protections like the laws in some states that recognize the Seal of the Confession (a great fav plot device) in somewhat the same way that the secular law recognizes that married people should not be forced to testify against each other. Committed couples (and society WILL get around to accepting the idea of same sex couples eventually) are the basic stabilizer of society: economically, residentially, and parentally. At one time the state believed that religion, in valorizing the status of married couples, was helping to stabilize them, but that only works well if the couples and their families are same religion, or at least in reconcilable religious systems. Now sometimes they are not, or maybe it is secular values that hold the couple together. At the core is economics, just like everything else.

A priest or anyone else who preys on children cannot be defended. So far contraception and economic parity between the sexes has only begun to move the ideas of various cultures around. What do you suppose the conservative Islam forces (okay, the Taliban) do about religious men who prey on children? I suspect they’re not around to make a report. I expect they didn’t get shifted to a different parish. I’d like to hear about it, if anyone can find out.

When the big sexual liberation struck in the Sixties and Seventies, we had a struggle in the UUA, not with people who preyed on children, but people who had cast off marriage, saying it was “just a piece of paper,” merely secular. Clergy DID get themselves snarled up in some nasty messes, mostly adult heterosexual stuff. I think the same thing happened in many subset denominations of Christianity, depending on their capacity to keep apart and secret. (If you’re a UU, don’t even THINK about secrecy! No such thing.) UU leaders were startled to realize that the American Buddhists were having the same problems. Obviously our privileged secular leaders got into the same fixes. These are human responses, unwise and unholy. But not institutionalized privilege used to hide the virtueless

Somehow the rules for children have not been addressed. Why not? Children must be nurtured and protected. It is now possible to tell who the daddy is. No man can hide from the evidence. The secular law now requires that both parents contribute to the care of the child, if only by writing a check. In some states you can’t get a fishing license if you don’t pay your paternity obligation.

I don’t see how religious bodies can escape surrendering power to secular forces or at least collaborating with secular authorities to throw out all priests convicted of molesting children. After all, the Roman Catholic Church throws out all priests who get married. Personally, I’d just as soon see illegitimate fishers of men who call themselves “father” or “brother” crushed between the forces of Scylla and Charybdis. For the sake of all the little fishes in the sea.

Some of this thinking was prompted by the program “To the Point.” Elaine Pagels was especially helpful with her historical focus. It does get past the salacious stuff and go to the REAL stuff, which is money and power. The program is archived here:
http://www.kcrw.com/news/programs/tp/tp100331pedophile_priests_an#idc-container

GETTING ORGANIZED IN APRIL

When I was a minister and flying around the continent to preach and attend conferences, I had a fake-suede folder with a nice brass clasp that could be locked with a little key which I lost almost immediately. I bought it out of one of those catalogues in the pocket of the seat ahead of me. It was intended to be an organizer for Important People who had a lot of different things to do. When you opened it up, it held an array of little squares that you could write on and then move around to create some kind of schedule, plan, process, one of those nice orderly means by which orderly people presumably control their lives.

Of course, it didn’t work and I soon went back to scribbling lists on the backs of whatever envelope I happened to have in my pocket and then absent-mindedly mailing the envelope. People seemed to think the scribbles had something to do with the contents of the envelope, whatever it was. (My handwriting is not so great.) After a few years things developed into a routine and I didn’t really need to write much down.

But I still have that folder. Once in a while I get it out and look to see what it says. There are lists of books I want to write: a scholarly work about the poetics of liturgy, a scorching expose of a small town that sacrifices its children in the Minotaur labyrinth of football. Lists of clothes I want to sew: two beautiful pieces of fine cream-colored cotton that I bought at Scarlet Ribbons in Portland -- or was it Josephine’s by then -- and small asymmetrical antler buttons meant to be blouses. I make lists of things I’m looking for in my so-called office where rise stacks and stacks of print-outs and tear-outs and papers to file that I’ve been carrying around for twenty or thirty years. But I still can’t find that 8x10 portrait of Audie Murphy that he sent me MUCH longer ago than that, so I can give it Ken Overcast who writes terrific stories about cowboys and loves Audie Murphy. Somewhere I have some autographed programs from the Chicago Northwestern years when I was a stagedoor Johnnie (Johnette?) and saw fabulous things for free by ushering. Peter Ustinov. The Lunts. Christopher Plummer. If I can’t find them, do I really have them? Oh, yes. They’re here somewhere. Maybe they’re valuable by now.

There are a lot of strategies for tackling the problem of order and sequence, all that linear stuff, but they aren’t always so straightforward. One is to “swiss-cheese” -- that is, to do all the easiest stuff first and then see if that makes a difference in what’s left. Or you can turn around and do all the hardest stuff, the stuff that’s so scary it makes your toes curl. Then the rest looks easy. Sometimes you wake up in the morning and you just KNOW what you ought to do: the weather is right, the tools are at hand, and THIS time, you’ll get the quarter-round caulked in around the shower. Again, it might be the opposite. You go to make the first cup of coffee -- I use a little cone filter holder -- do the set-up, boil the water, go to pour it in and realize that you never ground the beans. There they sit in the filter, dark-fat-smug-shiny-and-whole. Then you know that you probably shouldn’t have bothered to get up except that the cats won’t tolerate it. They want their catfood cans opened on time.

When you read this it will be April Fool’s Day, but I think the whole year has been pretty much like that. On NPR I was horrified to hear that when Clinton and Bush went to Haiti to show support and were shaking hands with the crowd, Bush shook hands with someone who evidently (and not surprisingly) had filthy paws. So he wiped his hand off on Clinton’s shirt. The jokers said, “He probably wouldn’t mind. We’ve seen what he eats.” I notice Bush is not on the next gig. At least he didn’t grab Clinton around the neck and try to mock-choke him, the way he did the female head of state of Germany, who did NOT think it was funny.

The biggest surprise, of course, is that a health care bill was passed, but no one at all can figure out on whom the joke is. Them or us? Worse than that, the Repubs can’t figure out who they are these days and the Dems can’t figure out whether the president they elected is for ‘em or agin ‘em. It just gets more complicated and surprising all the time.

So we’re sort of all having to sit down and do a bit of zero-base budgeting, that is, what do we absolutely HAVE to have in order to get by? It’s surprising how little it takes. Cup, bowl, spoon, table, chair, bed, book, book, book, book, book -- computer. It won’t be quite the same from one person to the next. When I get really overwhelmed, I go out into the garage and burn sticks in my little woodstove. Leland saw it and said (with much enthusiasm), “You could COOK on that!” He said the same thing about my tin washtub with the wire refrigerator shelf on top, with just as much enthusiasm. One of the true basics: a fire.

The cats are in the yard checking to see what came out from under the snow. Things are still sort of flat but there are green blades interweaving in the old dry grass. The old dry men are out on their riding mowers getting it all the same height. I’ve seen one sprinkler on and was tempted to hook mine up -- but then I backed off. The tulips are up about four inches. I always forget where they are. Last year the poplars were so infested with something that made knots all over them that this spring I can’t tell whether there are buds for leaves or not. They rain sticks to burn. It was a wet cool summer last year. Let’s see what the April Fool gives us this year. It won’t be the same.

Now where did I stash that folder last time I looked at it? Maybe I’ll try using it again.

IS "THE GLADIATOR" AN ALPHA MALE?

Though I don’t have television, I have not escaped the images from Pakistan and Afghanistan of tall robed men in turbans with full beards and flashing eyes. Neither have I missed the strong dark jaws or penetrating blue eyes of the Marines. We are getting a full dose of the military version of the Alpha Male. Which is about where you’d expect to find Alphas. The concept comes from wolf packs where one wolf dominates all the others. The poor Beta wolves, plural, must wait until Alpha weakens or they grow stronger and can “take” him in a fight. (Actually it’s more complicated than that, but this is the way the concept is seen.)

TheRawness.com takes on today’s meat market among the employed, generally mainstream, mild-mannered, middle-class American men, those who aren’t so poor that they live in the shadows nor so rich that they can do as they please. He’s been spending some time trying to analyze how Alpha and Beta play into this and today he came to his conclusion. First he lists two fallacies. One is that everything good a modern man can be must represent an alpha trait. (The report card interpretation.) The other is that everything that represents an alpha trait must represent something good for a modern man to be. (The prescription interpretation.)

“The point of this whole series has been to point out why these fallacies are actually fallacies, especially for middle-class men. For middle-class men in modern society, the best response to take in many scenarios is often the beta response. And for middle-class men in modern society, many alpha traits can also be extremely counterproductive and even self-destructive.”

“RickyRaw,” the blogger, points out that in capitalist, democratic, developed, monogamous circumstances, the Alpha qualities of imposing order, suppressing violence even with the use of violence, making CEO decisions, and so on are delegated to what he calls “Alpha proxies” like legislators and the police. Protections, provisions for the needy, and so on are delegated to the state or the church or other organizations. And yet we insist on maintaining the myth that an Alpha male is one who defies all this. This causes what he calls “Alpha Dissonance.”

I just watched the companion DVD to “Gladiator” that is three hours long and explains how the movie was made. (I’m not changing the subject.) It began with David Franzoni reading about Rome, which seems to catch the fancy of a lot of modern men, and he had creds from “Amistad” which he cashed in with Stephen Spielberg. Then he went to Ridley Scott with a print of a painting by Jean-Léon Gérôme, Pollice Verso ("Thumbs Down"), which was very much in the lush style of Alma-Tadema, depicting a grisly moment in the Coliseum when an opponent is down flat and the Emperor is signaling to kill him. Very Alpha.

Now I need a little schematic invented by Athol Kay, one of those quadrant charts like the Johari Window.

http://www.marriedmansexlife.com/2010/01/little-more-on-alpha-and-beta-male.html



Franzoni is one of those men who understands that there’s a time to be Alpha and a time to be Beta. Ridley Scott is a movie director: movie directors are Alphas. I don’t care how they dominate (carefully), they DO dominate. So Franzoni just slipped this print to him and Ridley was on board.

Then it got interesting. There was no script, just an idea. Franzoni went to work but ran aground and brought in John Logan. Again later, they got stuck and brought in William Nicholson. All of these men were writers, all were seriously intelligent, all knew what they were doing, and they did not put each other down. (Gammas?) They went for the core ideas: this is a movie about a gladiator. Okay. His family has been destroyed. Okay. He’s going to kill the bad emperor. Okay. But it’s been done before. More thought. Finally, the epiphany was that this was a man who just wanted to go home. He was violent, he was ruthless, he was dominating, but in the end he just wanted to go home. The fact that “home” turned out to be the Elysian Fields was all the more poignant. Ridley Scott understood at once. Women love this movie so much because The Gladiator was a Gamma Male.

There were two men in this cast who didn’t really get Alpha Dissonance, who totally bought the idea that real men do their own stunts, drink like fish, have their own way, and so on. One was Oliver Reed, who had played the acting game that way all his life, but only on his own time. When he was on the set, he was a dependable Beta. Mostly. But his Alphaness killed him before the picture was finished. He died of a heart attack in a bar one Sunday.

The other person was Russell Crowe, who kept trying to rewrite the script himself. He just felt he WAS an Alpha, therefore, he knew what the character was all about and he would just be Australian about it. Evidently he has not resolved this Alpha Dissonance in the years since and Alpha Proxies have had to slow him down now and then.

The perfect Beta male in this movie was played by Djimon Hounson, drawn into a larger and larger part until he got the final word. In early versions he was only a buddy, just as formidable as a gladiator, but nurturing and protective of his friend as we understand black tribal people to be. What choice do they have when only white people can be Alphas? It’s a useful racism. (Cicero is also an honorable Beta.) And poor weak Commodos is an Omega who has been born into a role for an Alpha, as his sister could be, and has let his insufficiency deeply corrupt him. So the Alpha Proxies, the senators, are willing to help knock him out.

See how useful this stuff is? Excellent pot lifters for moving concepts around. And we surely need to work on this. The comments were appalling. One man insisted that only a sociopath had the balls to be a true Alpha and offered himself as an example. Most of them obsessed about getting enough sex. One reader suggested a new series analyzing women and another thought (evidently seriously) that such a series would have to be written by a lesbian. (Maybe he was trying to think of the word for “feminist.”)

As a humanist, I suggest an Alien from another galaxy be invited in. But I was encouraged that a commenter on Athol Kay’s blog suggested that Jean Luc Picard was the perfect strategic Alpha, willing to play Beta and Gamma when the situation was right. Never an Omega.

MORE THAN A RED RIBBON

Even though I’ve read most of the articles about AIDS that come my way (also Ebola Fever, Spanish Flu, various plagues, but not so much cancer) and even though I’m working with Cinematheque which is for boys at risk who already have HIV, there are aspects I hadn’t thought about until this morning when I began to read through my new esubscription to TheBody.com.

http://broadcaster.thebody.com/t?ctl=1826AE:5C4D13017E20BB7DF864903F2470CE49&

What I find is not so much that I don’t have the basic facts as that I’m naive about how that plays out. But maybe I don’t know all the basic facts either. I don’t feel too badly since even the sophisticated researchers aren’t sure they know what they know. This entity is so small, it’s like studying electrons.

First, this is not a “germ” in the sense of bacteria. It is a virus, which is essentially “code gone wrong.” It’s the bare minimum that can be considered life at all because it is only that little bit of code that has the ability to use other cells to replicate itself. Antibiotics will not eliminate it. BUT the little bit of code that is an AIDS virus has the effect of knocking out the body’s ability to protect itself by eliminating not only viruses but also bacteria, fungus, and all the other little bits of invader that live off bodies. This means that it gives the occupied body the same immune status as the Bubble Boy who was born with no immune system and had to live in a sterile environment.

Two things made this virus turn into a plague. Neither of them was being homosexual. The first was human populations constantly invading places they never were before, like the deep African jungles. So we’re talking ecology here. Like, Rocky Mountain fever stays in the Rocky Mountains until someone infected with it carries it somewhere else.

The other thing is that this virus is carried in body fluids, so anything that mixes body fluids has the potential to transfer the virus. Many of human diseases (like small pox or undulant fever or anthrax) came from domestic animals which had died quietly and alone until humans rounded them up and kept them together where excrement piled up and where they were cut apart, shedding a lot of blood, and eaten. In the deep jungle there are few domestic animals, but the people get their protein by killing “bush meat” which includes monkeys. When they kill them and cut them up, they get monkey blood into their own wounds or maybe they ate them raw. The virus changed somehow so that now it could live in human bodies as well as monkey bodies. There are new diseases always forming. Right now, north of me, “mad cow disease” is being found in cows. People can catch it.

There are several diseases that are transmitted from one human to another if a human eats an infected person. “Kuru” is the big example. So now we have a third force: social practices. But it is not just anal intercourse that is the social practice that spreads AIDS. It is also a society that throws away boys, and pretends it does not, so that the boys become vectors. Plague in the Middle Ages was not defeated by killing fleas: it was necessary to kill the rats that carried the fleas; more than that, it was necessary to eliminate the conditions that made rats thrive. Getting rid of AIDS on the planet today means eliminating social conditions that some people like, profit from, or tolerate because they think it protects people they value more, the way prostitution is supposed to protect “good women” from rogues craving sex. (Craving sex is supposed to be a universal characteristic of all men and a few women.) Now we’re up to four enablers of plague.

All of this is much complicated by the problem of stigma. Stigma is a way of identifying and excluding people it is inconvenient to include, mostly because they will cost us money if we do. So much about disease comes down to money that those who have figured out how to manage our fear of disease are nearly bankrupting our society. Stigma kept scientists from doing serious research until in our country the stigma was confronted and opposed by people like Elizabeth Taylor, who saw her friends dying from AIDS and who was never afraid of much of anything. (I try to be like her. In some ways.) So then we all wore ribbons and the money was coughed up for serious research. Some meds came out of cancer research, anti-retrovirals, that will repress but not eliminate HIV virus. Everyone heaved a sigh of relief and went back home. Too soon. The slightest challenge or lapse and the virus flares up.

These meds can be controlled and the state loves control. So does the “under-state” which makes black market profits supplying what the state won’t. The pharms loved all of this because they are in the catbird seat with the ability to make meds (drugs). They make sure the state doesn’t import meds from countries where they are sold more cheaply. If you’re outside the system, you don’t get meds. Street boys are outside the system. Anyone stigmatized by color, origin, disability or the nature of their desire is outside the system.

Beyond that, street boys think they can do anything. They think they can fly, survive fire, and somewhere, someday, find a father who will teach them how to be men. But they need money. The ways they get it are outside the system and infects them with AIDS. To both keep them from catching AIDS and keep them alive once they have it, they must want to save themselves, because AIDS meds make you nauseous; they must be taken in very technical regimes, carefully timed and never skipped, so you can’t run out; and they just don’t work on everyone because (see beginning) what a virus is is a bit of genetic code and everyone’s genetic code is different. It’s also helpful if you have a safe warm place to sleep, clothes, food, and a way to feel important. That means a way to tell your story so that other people will think you’re a unique and valuable individual.

Stigma means these things are withheld with righteousness, denied with indignation, and portrayed as a just consequence. Those who help are those who are not stopped by stigma. They learn to accept it and use it. One of their most valuable tools is good information. TheBody.com, for instance. I’m a beginner -- they are not.

TIM'S RESPONSE:

Mary nailed AIDS dead on.

Which begs the question...

Where's the cure.

The medications have only gotten better and better but they are a holding pattern. The virus can still (and does) hide from the antivirals in places like bone marrow.

Billions went into developing these medicines. They were created by Big Pharma.

Americans pay more for these medications than anyone else in the world because Americans are seen as stooges willing to pay anything.

Exactly zero dollars of those billions went into finding a cure.

Why.

Think about it. The answer is in front of you.

If Big Pharma can keep hundreds of millions of people around the world chained to medications that only hold the virus off (eventually the virus wins) like a bunch of addicted antiviral junkies, who need these medication year after year, virtually until the patient dies, the profit margin is sky high big bucks.

There is NO INCENTIVE to find a cure. They would lose all their patients.

The NIH is doing nothing to find a cure.

The Chinese government was the only government on the planet developing a vaccine with live virus.

Then boom. A curtain of secrecy descended on the drug trial.

Anyone who has gone through a drug trial knows what that means. It means dead bodies.

The other word that needs to be used in this discussion is pandemic. This is no epidemic. This is every country in the world.

AIDS services (including medications) in the United States are way down the list. Other countries do lots more. Brazil for one. India makes sure that the medications are cheap and available. America does exactly the opposite.

Ironically, the United States AIDS services mirrors infant mortality rates in a striking analogy. America has a shameful infant mortality problem. It's AIDS services are shameful as well. The two are on the same statistical decline.

Question: if you are too poor to own transportation, and the only AIDS clinic (my family lives in Hendersonville, NC where every physician in town refuses to treat AIDS period so people have to travel to Asheville if they can get there) is 300 miles away, how do you get there let alone how do you pay for the medication.

At Cinematheque, the boys are on an average of ten medications per day. In America, per-child, the cost of that would average $500.00 per day.

Not even the best junkie thief in Harlem can rip that off PER DAY.

Vast fortunes are being made from world-wide suffering. Humanity is a disgrace.

History is going to ask questions. Oh, yes, it definitely will.

History is going to want to know how thirty years has passed and there is no cure anywhere on the horizon -- Big Pharma owns the horizon. It is not simply a moral issue. It is a national security issue as well.

History is going to wonder what you did to help.

Our children's children's children are going to be baffled as to how this happened. They are going to shake their heads in wonderment that it was allowed to happen.

History is going to want to know how it was that no investment in a cure was made.

History is going to conclude ONE WORD and that word is a crime against humanity.

Greed.

ETHICAL AMBIGUITY

We live in an age of ambiguity. We have discovered so many things that we just didn’t know before, so could ignore in our ignorant bliss. Even our hoary old institutions, like church and state, are of little use, running along behind our need to know right actions (when is a fertilized ovum a human being? when is it permissible to withdraw life support? what does marriage really MEAN?) or (how is it best to manage our resources to support ourselves? what IS a good investment? is there really any such thing as insurance when you come right down to it? or can someone totally unlike me -- different color, different education, different economic status -- make laws that will protect and support me? if not, what do I do?) or (what do we do when the institutions themselves become corrupt and predatory so that neither our children nor our livelihoods are safe with them?)

How can a person make moral decisions without even knowing what’s happening -- maybe because they are secret (we don’t even know they’re there -- what do YOU know about “shadow banking”?) and maybe because we can’t interpret what we’re looking at. It was a real comfort when we could say “God knows!” but who knows anything about God anymore? Christopher Hitchens, that know-it-all, has turned Christian in his quest for self-improvement (which I hope was less painful and more permanent than having his family jewels waxed to render them hairless). Now he shares with us the mostly unknown information that there are more than one sets of Ten Commandments. In the Old Testament: Exodus 20, Exodus 34, Deuteronomy 5. They are different. Look ‘em up yourself.

I’m going to ignore those outdated tribal injunctions in favor of the ten “injunctions” of the Code of the West, evidently not inscribed on stone but recorded in a book by James Owen. He’s an author and retired Wall Street investor. Take that into account. Here’s the list:
1. Live courageously.
2. Take pride in your work.
3. Finish what you start.
4. Do what’s necessary.
5. Be tough but fair.
6. Keep promises.
7. Ride for the brand.
8. Talk less and say more.
9. Remember that some things aren’t for sale.
10. Know where to draw the line.

I had thought these were the Rules of Lucy. (That’s my mom.) But I’ve internalized them well. The problems come with applying them, same as those Biblical commandments. How do you know what’s necessary? What if your work is dubious but you’re proud of it? Like, um, you’re a Wall Street investor? When do you decide the brand is corrupt and doesn’t deserve to be ridden for? The Rule of Combat is “do something.” Because if you don’t, things happen to you.

So what I deduce from that is you’d better be prepared to take some damage in life and devote some time and energy to recovery. You might need some help. You might end up with scar tissue or amputations that keep you from following your original goal, so you need to have a backup plan. Maybe several. And since presumably your life will constantly bring you new information, skills and so on; and since certainly the world changes every minute -- more than we know or might want to know -- it’s a matter of adapting to whatever plan is at hand. Forget stone.

Hitchens comes up with a list of no-nos (but throws in some moral imperatives):

1. Do not condemn people on the basis of their ethnicity or color.
2. Do not ever use people as private property.
3. Despise those who use violence or the threat of it in sexual relations.
4. Hide your face and weep if you dare to harm a child.
5. Do not condemn people for their inborn nature. Why would God create so many homosexuals only in order to torture and destroy them.
6. Be aware that you too are an animal and dependent on the web of nature and think and act accordingly.
7. Do not imagine that you can escape judgment if you rob people with a false prospectus rather than with a knife.
8. Turn off that fucking cell phone -- you have no idea how UNimportant your call is to us.
9. Denounce all jihadists and crusaders for what they are: psychopathic criminals with ugly delusions.
10. Be willing to renounce any god or any religion if any holy commandments should contradict any of the above.
IN SHORT: Do now swallow your moral code in tablet form. (Vanity Fair, April 2010)

If you make a list of ten, the very fact of pre-determining the number means that there will be some weak inclusions and the most important principles might not stand out. This is a weakness of all rule-ethic strategies. We all know the game of finding exceptions to the Ten Commandments. “Thou shalt not kill.” Well, then why are those Old Testament tribes, even the obedient ones, constantly involved in turf warfare?

I recall a Benedictine monk, a friend and classmate, whom I knew well enough to ask questions. “How do you handle those vows?” I asked. “You know, chastity, poverty, and obedience?” His answer was: “Chastity is HOW you do something, not whether; poverty is a pre-existing condition; and obedience? Well, we’re into creative obedience.” And the Pope never saw that memo go over his desk either.

Bob used to say, “All you can do is the best you can do.” By definition. And his watch-word was “An Honest Try.” But that put a lot of emphasis on effort -- you know, “A for effort,” and not much on the end achievement or the consequences of focussing everything on trying to reach a goal while not asking whether it’s worthy or what to do once you get there. I think that’s one of the political questions of our country right now. Our goals are all admirable: good educations, universal health care, happy marriages, a comfortable home, good nutrition. Peace in the world. Ending pollution. Protecting wolves. The questions are mostly about effectiveness and what means we have used or are willing to use in the future.

The ambiguity is just rearranged. Does it make decisions easier or not? NOT.

UNDERGROUND

They say humans were originally tree animals, but I have a hunch that we enjoyed a good burrow, too. Today there was a long story in the GF Tribune about a new pack of wolves that has moved onto the rez and expanded to fourteen individuals before Art Carney, the wolf and griz man for the tribe, set about making some changes for the sake of the ranchers. A few wolves around are not a problem. A pack of fourteen -- even if they were feral domestic dogs -- are big trouble, a money sink. What impressed Art was that the wolves had found a burrow that had stood empty for twenty years, since an earlier pack was eliminated. (Art has been here a long time.)

How did they know where to find it? If you pay attention to holes in the earth, it’s not so surprising. I get the blog feed for terrierman.com, whose idea of fun is to take his terriers (earth dogs) out into the country and chase varmints (ground hogs, raccoons, foxes) down their holes -- then dig them back up. He explains about “pipes” (the tunnels) and differences in the burrows of different animals and how they swap them around, some enlarging the pipes and others making more side-tunnels with hidden exits. He knows some of these holes and after digging out whatever is in there this time, he always fills them back up -- not to eliminate the hole, but enough to keep from stepping in them and breaking a leg. But anyway there are few horses galloping around where he is.

The most important feature for bears when they look for a hole for hibernation is the exposure. They want a north-facing entrance so it will drift over with snow that won’t melt all winter and not wake them up too early. Another critter might prefer a southern entrance, so the sun can lend warmth for cubs. The next thing is the kind of soil, which is better if it’s easy to dig. But it’s also good to have a big tangle of tree roots or a pile of boulders so that a bear can’t dig out a marmot. Wolves might like to be along their network of trails, shared by both predators and prey, and in a place where lifting one’s nose in the air would supply a lot of good info about what’s going on, which would mean close to an updraft, maybe one shaped by a nearby coulee.

When the big devastating meteor hits smashed into the earth 65 million years ago and wiped out the dinosaurs, part of the reason the mammals survived was that they could jump down their holes and eat roots. In the Fifties when we all thought the atomic bomb would drop any day, people built quite elaborate bunkers in their backyards. Even in Nanking the people dug holes in their backyards in hopes of surviving the bombing that always precedes invasion. In London the subways became vast bedrooms during WWII. Even now, individuals will take refuge in such tunnels, looking for alcoves and crannies where a person might survive unnoticed. And the warhead missiles live in holes.

Later today I should go under my house to connect the garden hose. There’s no basement and whoever dug out the crawl space enough to put a hot water heater down there turned out to nearly have destroyed the house. It’s clear that some of the driveway and the garage slab both slumped and the sink wall in the kitchen has been rebuilt with a beam overhead to take the weight of that side. It took me a while to “read” this past damage. Under the house is where all the footnotes of construction are: wires and pipes that supply the phone, the lights, the electrical outlets, the water in and the sewer out.

There was once a very big tree too close to the east wall of the kitchen, so one side of the crawl space, where the mighty roots were, is not dug out. When it was cut, the stump was left even with the ground and it is gradually rotting. In summer I often leave the trapdoor down to the space standing open and the tiny bit of light that filters down makes the roots start growing again. I’ve never been able to make my garden hose hookup down there stop leaking -- not sure why -- so I just keep a bucket under the leak and empty it occasionally. There is a sump pump in case a pipe breaks, which has happened twice, the second time when the house was empty, so no one noticed and it filled up enough to float the kitchen floor just slightly, popping the nails up that held it to the joists, and cracking the hard asbestos tiles which are illegal to remove without special procedures. When I can afford it, I’ll put something flexible on top. Sheet vinyl or one of those “floating” floors.

The surfaces of the planet rise and fall, except much more slowly than water. The old cities gradually submerge beneath the sidewalks, and then new cities are built on top of them, but then people realize that there was something deeper and, like terrierman, spend a lot of time and energy digging it back up. Part of the reason this is good fossil-finding country is that the earth-level is going down, eroding under cultivation, irrigation, excavation, and wind. As it goes down, an ancient stone spinal column becomes obvious by its regularity, a skull emerges from the side of a widening coulee. The water brings to the surface the old bitter chemicals of the sea, the salt and the alkali, making the ponds white around their verge, allowing only the beet-colored growth of certain adapted plants.

In Valier we are constantly struggling with the subterranean infrastructure. People forget to make maps and jack-leg in pipes with no plan. Jerry Sullivan, who makes his living digging up, repairing and reburying stuff, has a lot of knowledge in his head, which makes him valuable on the town council but also powerful. And I? I burrow in my books, feeling along like a star-nosed mole seeking earthworms. I eat ideas.

NANKING: A Reflection

It’s not that I don’t think there’s any such thing as Evil. It’s that I think what is good and what is evil is defined by human beings, not by any god, and I resist the idea that there is a supernatural cause, a great big EVIL that reaches into the world despite our best efforts to keep it out. “The Devil made me do it!”

But have we really drawn on our own best efforts? When I say this about evil, that the universe itself has no evil, I am saying something much worse. The universe does not care. It will not intervene. It is more vast that we can understand. Though people say they have a spiritual melding with it, that’s in them: subjective -- not in the universe. Although a person who is looking at reality can get into a certain amount of harmony, in the end it’s either an illusion or very good luck that makes that happen. We do not control the universe. Some of it feels very evil indeed, but that’s in us -- not the universe.

My movie tonight was “Nanking,” one of the major atrocity stories of WWII, a holocaust that had nothing to do with Jews and everything to do with how war kindles a fire it cannot control. The earlier movie about North African soldiers, who bravely fought for France and then were killed when they demanded their pay, is the same thing. We find the same story everywhere, on every continent but the Antarctic. Tim would say “Genocide.” It IS Evil. But the universe didn’t do it. WE did it.

What makes “Nanking” exceptional is that the atrocities were witnessed and recorded in words and images and that those witnesses actually took effective action. These people could have left unscathed because they weren’t from either China or Japan -- they were “Westerners.” And they included Nazis, who were allies with Japan. The very people who are often reviled and mocked in theory circles, a few Colonialists actually tried to live up to the noble ideas of “civilization. The Nazi said he tried to find a moral way out in his own mind, but could not. The people needed witnesses.

The form of the film is a mix of old film, interviews with Chinese who were little children at the time but managed to survive even as their families were murdered in front of them, interviews with the Japanese soldiers who smiled as they told of repeatedly raping little girls, and historic written material read by actors. These latter were a bit unexpected. Mariel Hemingway with no makeup as the head of a girls’ college. Woody Harrelson. Jurgen Prochnow as the Nazi businessman. They did straightforward “readers’ theatre,” sitting in chairs wearing clothes that weren’t exactly costumes. No fireworks in the performances, just deep sincerity. None of the Westerners portrayed are living anymore. Mariel Hemingway’s character left after the crisis and then committed suicide. A Japanese officer is also represented by an American actor reading a translation.

There’s no question that what happened was evil, a frenzy of suffering and destruction, a murderous mania in men who were supposed to be disciplined. One said, “We had nothing else to do, so we raped the women.” Then the little girls, then the little boys. You want to talk trauma, you want to talk holocaust, this is a good example -- but no better than the many contemporary examples we’ve sworn would never happen again. How do we even begin to think about such stuff? I think we have to back way off and think about our methods. And I think we have to make it part of our ordinary lives, not some specially marked day or place. Not attributing it to a mysterious force that makes us powerless.

Worship came to mind since it was illustrated several times in the film. Ineffective in stopping events, but maybe helpful in responding to them. Then I thought of Von Ogden Vogt, the minister of First Unitarian Church in Hyde Park, Chicago, from 1924 until the end of WWII. He built an amazing Gothic mini-cathedral there that was not properly maintained and has since had the Gothic spire removed. I guess now it’s truncated Gothic. He also had a rather definite understanding of worship which I share in my own way. He was the same sort of patrician and determined person as those illustrated.

Part of this worship is a double sequence at the beginning which I call “the Dilation of the Soul,” which is an invocation of ultimate dimensions. The idea is to confront the worst terrible things, the Evil, in concrete examples and personal confession. In fact, some liturgists call it Confession of Sins. Greed, envy, sloth, anger, vanity -- loss, suffering. Lay it out there, as stark as you can.

THEN comes the hard part and the real use of the minister: the Assurance of Pardon, gratitude for love and grace, human courage, all the dearest things about being alive. If you can make this affirmation honestly -- and particularly as a group -- you will find yourself on liminal ground, open to ideas and change, prayer and thought. Then it’s important for the minister to call you back out to real life without discarding whatever happened in that space/time. You should find yourself either confirmed or changed.

That’s what this movie does. That’s what many great works of art do. Make you confront the evil, and then make you look just as hard at the glory and the power. The two things need to be in balance. Lately it seems that the world has offered so many images of ghastly things that it has been a challenge to come up with the equivalent redemption. The temptation is to shirk and deny the bad stuff.

These heroes in Nanking simply defined a “safe zone” where ordinary noncombatant families could come to be spared. They asked the countries to endorse this, but no country would. So they went out and stood personally at whatever gates they had -- the entrance to the girls’ college, the gate to the Nazi’s grounds -- and personally denied entrance to any Japanese soldiers. The soldiers didn’t quite dare to kill or overrun them, few as they were. I’m not saying these heroes were protected by God. Some were not particularly religious. But somehow they had Real Moral Courage, clear enough to change human events. The universe did not smile; it did not frown. But WE do. And we're so glad that they alone escaped to tell us.