DO DRAGONS EAT DORITOS?

Saturday’s paper (Great Falls Tribune) always has some “religion” stories, which means whatever the editors identify as religion, which (in the same way as sex) means whatever form the forever renewing/upwelling of the primal energy might be taking lately, most often in the form of culture wars.  Two of today’s stories were interesting.  Both are from Gannett papers in other places.  I copied them and edited them slightly.

Here’s the first:

http://www.tennessean.com/article/20110104/NEWS01/101040323/Environmentalism-can-be-bad-for-soul-group-warns

THE GREEN DRAGON

Going green is bad for your soul, a group of evangelical leaders argues in a new series of DVDs.

They warn of the spiritual dangers of environmentalism. They claim that well-meaning believers have been misled into joining a "Cult of the Green Dragon," which worships creation instead of God. They dismiss Christians who say protecting Earth is a biblical directive.

"Around the world, environmentalism has become a radical movement," Christian talk show radio host Janet Parshall said in a promotional video for the series. "Something we call the 'Green Dragon.' And it is deadly. Deadly to human prosperity, deadly to human life, deadly to human freedom. And deadly to the gospel of Jesus Christ."

But when Murfreesboro environmentalist Kory Wells received a link to the Green Dragon group's site, she considered it a misinterpretation of God's will for humans. A Methodist, Wells said her denomination is committed to caring for the environment because the Bible tells it so.

The Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, a religious nonprofit that questions the danger of global warming, produced the DVDs, sold for $49.95 per set at www.resistingthegreendragon.com. Cornwall Alliance spokesman E. Calvin Beisner said many environmentalists see human beings as no more important than any other animal, but God put humans in charge of nature.

The image of a Green Dragon comes from several Bible verses, said Beisner, including the Garden of Eden and the dragon in the book of Revelation.

The resistance idea is from James 4:7: "Resist the devil, and he will flee from you."

"Repeatedly, there is this theme of enmity between the serpent, sometimes called the dragon, and the elect people of God," he said.

But Duke wasn't comfortable with the implication that environmental movement is demonic.

"I wouldn't say that," he said. "We think of the imagery as an understanding that a threat exists."

Duke said there's a balance between taking care of the Earth and worshiping it as somehow divine.

"You don't savage creation for the well-being of humanity," he said.

The second story is about a video that may have been removed from YouTube by now, but if you go to that website and type in “Doritos communion,”  you’ll find many responding vids.  Fascinating.   

Doritos Super Bowl   (Tampa Bay  10 News): 

“Doritos replace Holy Communion in "Feed Your  Flock" ad”

Original article by Phil Landeros   

An entry in the Doritos and Pepsi MAX Crash the Super Bowl contest is creating an uproar. The ad is called "Feed Your Flock" and chronicles a small church's efforts to keep its parishioners from leaving the church.

In the ad, a pastor receives a divine message telling him to replace the Holy Communion wafers with  Doritos. The wine that represents the blood of Christ is replaced with Pepsi MAX. The commercial ends with a line of parishioners trying to get into the church. 

The actor who plays the priest came up with the idea. In a press release, actor Michael Lyons is described as a devout Catholic. Lyons says, "Those people misconstrued the content and intent of the ad. The pastor did not consecrate the Doritos and Pepsi - therefore it is not the Eucharist." 

The ad was produced by Media Wave Video Productions of Philadelphia, PA. The director, Dave Williams, tells 10 News he's "shocked by the controversy." Williams says, "Some people have gotten ahold of it and turned it into something it wasn't."

Williams sent 10 News a list of clues put into the ad that he says prove it is not [CATHOLIC] Communion being served: 

• Several religions represented in the wardrobes of the characters: Hare Krishna, Jewish, Amish
• actor Michael Lyons is referred to as "Pastor" by the younger pastor
• Wedding ring on Pastor
• No vestments, chalice, or any religious symbols - not even one cross
• No consecration of the chips/soda
• Sign at the end in front of the church says "Free Doritos and Pepsi Max Sunday"

Really struck a nerve on that one!  I see that the forces of religious repression are now out in the open, nailed for what they are and the silliness of their indignation.  All to the pleasure of the “git ‘em” media.  The first controversy is in the long tradition of “Lord of the Rings” and the Bible’s “Book of Revelation” -- making ideas into monsters so as to stir up fear and opposition.  But there’s a tricky shift in this metaphor by now: many youngsters see dragons as benevolent and even personal friends.  (“How to Raise Your Dragon.”)   This shift has also been there a long time.  One of my major childhood story books was about two dragons who fell in love.  A green dragon is likely to strike many people as something protective, desirable.

In the second story is even older.  It comes from a strong two-millenia liturgy that emerges from human experience.  Supping together becomes Passover becomes Jesus’ Last Supper becomes his iconic flesh and blood.  This battered old ceremony has survived change, repression, denial, and reinterpretation over and and over, ranging from worshipping communion wafers to replacing wine with Welch’s grape juice.  Why should a modern institution worry about it unless they're insecure in the first place?

It is so deep in our way of life that it survives EXCEPT in places where no one eats bread or drinks wine.  I go back again and again to the brilliant book by Robert J. Schreiter (C.PP.S), “Constructing Local Theologies,” written for Christian missionaries working in such places.  If in China, does one do a tea and rice communion?  In the Arctic does one serve blubber?  ("This is the blubber of Christ . . .")  Among the Masai must the faithful drink mixed blood and fermented milk?  Schreiter says you must first drive to the heart of the concept: what did Jesus mean REALLY?   “I am always with you.”  So what in this other culture means that?  

And what does it mean to have a Doritos and Pepsi communion?  You could say either that the plain fact is that’s the way a lot of people eat these days and therefore Jesus dwells in the Dorito,  (Maybe his image will show up on one.  Look before you swallow.)

The other is that this communion is a celebration of commodication:  it’s not just junk food, it’s brand name food empty of nutrition.  Not as scary as a dragon, but just as deadly.  Both need to be identified and addressed, as individuals and as a society.

SORTING OUT THE "PHILIAS"

What is an adult?   Somewhere I have a list of characteristics from a mental health person -- I think Menninger -- but let’s be simpler.  Let’s look from the eyes of the offspring, the human being that is NOT an adult.

To a newly fertilized egg, an adult is code for a budding body plus a matrix in which to embed and grow, fed by osmosis from the adult blood stream to the newly creating one.  That blood stream might contain a virus, a bit of retrocode, called HIV.

For the emerging newborn the adult remains an environment supporting system but the passage through the vagina may infect them with HIV.  The adult is a vector, a disease carrier.

An infant or toddler gradually separates from the adult, if they get enough nurturing and embracing.  If they don’t, they die -- whether or not they have HIV or any other disruptive bits of code.  For the lucky an adult is a eu-adult or for an unlucky baby a mal-adult.  One supports growth and happiness and the other does not -- often the difference is somehow related to when that human being was forming.  A host of diseases must be guarded against, including HIV.  In countries where blood transfusions were routinely given to children as a health measure, hordes were infected.

Things can go very wrong in many ways.  Pediatric studies are those that address the process of children becoming adults.  We have no term for adults who specifically love children in a helpful way.  Maybe parents, with luck.  An adult who loves children is called a pedophile but it doesn’t really mean they love children: it means they want sex with children.  No one says “eu-pedophile” or “mal-pedophile.”  In fact, pedophilia doesn’t distinguish among the natural age groups of children, except for a few other broad categories with Greek names.  Adults who make sexual contact with children of any age can give them HIV, whether the adult is male or female, homosexual or heterosexual.

A hebephile wants sex with children who are barely beginning adolescence, the “second birth” into adulthood.  They are usually 11-14.  To those children an adult is a controller and a persuader because this age of child is beginning to think and to choose or stand against.  In some countries fourteen is old enough to be a legal adult, old enough to leave the home.  For girls, old enough to marry.  For boys, old enough to whore.

An ephebophile wants sex with children who are fully adolescent but not yet adult.  They are usually 15-19.  Our whole culture is ephebophilic.  We want to be old enough to be sexual but not old enough to be adult.  Someone’s daughter remarked recently,  “Seventeen” magazine is for twelve year olds.  An article confided that “Vogue” -- which is supposed to be for adults -- is really for sixteen year olds.  Someone remarked that the pattern for Playboy centerfolds is a sixteen-year-old girl who is three months pregnant.   Many female models and movie stars are that age.  Many whores and soldiers are that age, vulnerable to HIV.  Legal children this age consider themselves adult.  They say,  “I can handle it.”

If there is a term for wanting sex with children younger than 11, I don’t know what it is.  Legal status in terms of “philia” sex depends on several things:  To be plain, was this between an adult and a child or was this between children?  Is one is quite a bit (3 or 4 years) older than the other; is one past adolescence and one not?  If there is no fertility, is it sex?  If there is no penetration, if there is consent, is it okay?   Does it matter if the children are of two different genders?  One of the most difficult legal problems is sexually active ephebophiles, when one person is still a technical child  (“jailbait”) and the other is a technical adult but both are old enough to want to marry.  Yet marriage can require the skills of a full adult in terms of economics and raising children.  Success can depend upon the support of the larger community.

It is possible for an adult or another child to eroticize a hebephilic child or even younger by wrestling or tickling or presenting images and stories or even over-fond petting and grooming.  Even probing for damage by a professional counselor can be eroticizing, as in the case of the day care school hysterias.  Not all eroticizing leads to sexual performance, but it can cause acting out of many kinds.  

Sex and death can mix, either because the adult finds death exciting (maybe because of the control).  There is no word for this except murder.  (Necrophilia is sexual desire for someone who is already dead.)  There is no way to distinguish between killing a child for the pleasure of it and killing a child to shut them up.  They are vulnerable to accidental death, such as “the choking game,” and to street drugs.  Maybe over-the counter-drugs like allergy pills to make them sleep.

Sometimes when I tackle a conceptual problem like this -- which is the foundation for addressing the actual problem -- I end up overrunning my ability to truly and deeply understand.  And yet much of what we don’t like happening has its beginnings in not recognizing early signs or not having ways to think about what we are seeing or just not seeing it because we don’t have the concept.  These are human thinking difficulties in many risky contexts because of the prevailing confusion and, sometimes, the danger.  But if no effort is made to figure it out, to really look at what happens, then we can’t create laws and strategies to address them.  More risky is the practice of many in society to censor behaviors AND any mention of them by attacking the origin, trying to discredit that person.

HIV-AIDS is only one problem in a syndemic.  If our young people are having sex that creates babies when they are too young to have the resources to raise them, that’s one kind of problem.  If there is an adult in the family who thinks it is fun to tickle a child until they wet their pants, that’s another kind of problem.   If there is a child who has watched something disturbing and eroticizing, perhaps by accident, that’s another kind of problem.  They are all problems to some degree but often part of the problem is realizing that there even is one.  Maybe a child who is quiet and withdrawn just needs to think or maybe something life-threatening is developing.  I was a suicidal hebephiliac, to put it pretentiously/portentiously, and others have confided the same.  When we were little, no one knew.  We found our own ways to compensate, maybe reading which is one way (safe!) to find a consoling adult.  (My father traveled, my mother’s mother was dying of cancer, I had two younger brothers, and in those days I was a conformist.  No one even knew I needed glasses.)  I was lucky -- there was no AIDS then.  We were terrified of polio, the epidemic of the Fifties.

Sometimes I think I should put up a little booth like Lucy in “Peanuts,” a “listening booth.”  No therapy.  No advice.  Not a confessional.  Just listening, ten cents.  I think anyone who did that for long would be compelled to action.  


RESPONSE FROM MY CO-WRITER,  TIM BARRUS, WHO DOES LISTEN:


These categories are just too Freudian for me. They don't add up to what I know about sexuality. These are just boxes. The tragedy is that we scare people with this nonsense and they feel badly if they either fit into a box or don't fit into a box. It's lose, lose. Which is what we typically do in a clinical context when it comes to sexuality which is a fluid thing. But we do not really see it that (we give it that lip service) way, but the boxes are what people typically believe defines them. Very sad. 


I find it depressing. I deal with older adolescent males who have the hardest time with it. The younger ones are too filled with themselves to know. But the older ones have all this guilt just drilled into them. It is so hard to work past that. I honestly think Freud did a lot of damage. 


RESPONDING TO THE RESPONSE MYSELF:


I agree with Tim.  The boxes should go.  They were invented in the 1900's to fit a particular sort of temperament and set of scientific notions which are no longer relevant because of the DEEP paradigm shift and social changes of the past decades. But denial only goes so far -- how SHOULD we respond to the lives of young people -- INCLUDING their sexual lives?  ARE THERE any categories or principles beyond not harming them?


The trouble with Freud is that he was always projecting is OWN psychoanalytic issues onto everyone else.  Being raised in repressive Jewish society in Vienna with a nanny would give anyone a complex -- but the rest of us were NOT raised like that.  In fact, some have raised themselves.

SALOIS vs. MATTL: land condemnation

The MATTL  wire and tower system for conveying electricity from Montana wind farms to Canadian cities -- and  esp. the problem of where to site it -- is both a small issue and a major issue, both an issue from the past and an issue for the future.

On the small end, where to put a specific tower is a problem to solve in terms of relationship to the whole line but also the particular footing spot, which may disturb elements of the prairie from archeology to wildlife habitat to agricultural strategy.  Fifty feet, two hundred feet, might make a lot of difference.  But too much time spent deliberating over the details and exact GPS is time and energy-consuming, which means it cuts into profit.

On the large end, nations have formed in part as a response to defining ownership, both as divisions between two allegiances and as the source of authority for actual land ownership by citizens and the profits derived from it.  This is how the United States separated from the British Empire.  It is essential to the nature of nations.  Wars are fought to defend it.  However, in recent years international corporations have challenged nations, imposing their need for profitable use over the top of simple citizen ownership and jurisdictions of the democracies in which they vote.  

Something like that has also happened within the nations when the interests of the citizens as a whole are considered more important than individual ownership.  At one time the ruling was used sparingly and for a popular good.  More recently the issue of “takings” has caused individuals to sue the government for any action that has diminished either the direct value or the possibly profitable development of privately owned land.  This has diluted the concept of formal condemnation in the interest of the greater good.  

For Native Americans “takings” have been egregious from the beginning, most markedly when property in trust was treated like government-owned land or when the railroad was pushed across the reservation and allowed any raw materials it needed without even bothering with something so formal as condemnation.  Therefore, sensitivity is high and there is talk about sovereignty to mark nation-to-nation status.  

Condemnation or “takings” by a FOREIGN nation or by an international corporation licensed by a FOREIGN nation, is far too close to invasion and border-bending.  This is not diminished when the body requesting condemnation is a coalition of international corporations, acting for their own profit while arguing a secondary profit to individuals along the route of the tie line.  In fact, in this case it could be argued that by allowing the export of electricity, the cost of electricity within the State of Montana will be jacked up due to competing with richer, more powerful, more densely populated places.  Once again we will be colonies, living on the terms of others.

In fact, ALL nations are beginning to have to live on the terms of these international corporations. threatening the very existence of their borders.   And some nations collaborate, their government infiltrated by corporation executives. 

But there is another tension hidden in this rather small issue.  At one end are BOTH the corporations and the nations.  BOTH forget that they are constructs, with their parameters and protocols existing ONLY by consent and on paper.  It is not just democracies that exist by consent of the governed, as many a headless king can testify.  Africa knows about "failed states" whose consent has disappeared.   A lawyer advised me long ago that “you cannot force someone to stay married to you.”  (Alas.  But would you really want to?)  And yet the Pope has not yet realized that you cannot force the world to be obedient Catholics, even if they believe in Hell.  

Churches and nations exist either through voluntary consent or oppression and you can only oppress people if you have an army, which is what makes me VERY nervous about Blackwater Xi et al, which look to me like private international corporate armies.  But you can only run an army as long as you can pay the soldiers, which the United States doesn’t quite grasp yet, even though they are running operations very like and in collusion with international corporations, openly and covertly contracting with their mercenary soldiers as we did notoriously in Iraq and covertly other places.  

What I am saying is that both nations and corporations (regardless of their dimensions) are not REAL.  If we sweep aside the curtain and take a look at Oz, we see two terrifying things:  ourselves and our selfish interests -- and chaos.  THAT’s what all these apocalyptic scare books and movies are about.  The nations and corporations are saying,  “It’s us or nothing.”  They have enlisted the subversive forces of terror.

The trouble with terror is that is means responses of both extremism and passivity.  I see it right here in “Lake City.”  The ones who show up at the meetings are the ones with some big plan and glittering eyes or else no one shows up at all.   Mostly the latter.  “It’s ugly,” they say.  “It takes too much time.  I’m busy making money.”  In an entertaining omission by both the eager leaders and the careless abstainers is that the State of Montana recently notified Valier that it had failed to re-assert its boundaries according to some rule on which every sort of funding depends.  If the people who wanted to keep horses in Valier had been alert, some quick gerrymandering might have gotten them what they wanted.

Larry Salois is insisting on something quite different from all this:  the actual nature of the real and existent land,  places where ancient people have left traces and places where the soil and architecture of the terrain create ecologies that serve many interacting forms of life.  This is what lies at the heart of human existence and underlies all true religion, however it is institutionalized, even as nations.  Nations are, after all, institutionalized convictions that emerge out of frontiers, resources, and populations.  If those conditions (drought, poverty) drive illegal movements of immigration or exodus, force and boundaries will in the long run have very little impact.  There cannot be enough taxes to fund the necessary army.

I’m always straining to look into the future, which around here, where they still remember WWII, causes people to advise me,  “Pull in your neck -- the government’s looking for rubber.”  The countervailing advice that a turtle makes no progress unless it sticks its neck out is not equivalent because it only applies to those who live fortified by a shell -- like rich people in their walled enclaves.  Like legislators in their limo and jet sheltered travels.  They have none of the vulnerability of chaos.  Yet.

A relevant article from the Atlantic is available at: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/01/the-rise-of-the-new-global-elite/8343/

EXPERIENCED BOOKS FOR EXPERIENCED WOMEN

The “paradigm shift” of the last decade doesn’t seem to have impressed many of my friends, particularly the ones who are most like me (retired, female, lifelong readers, “educated”)  except here and there.  Not that the men are so au courant either, but they will link computers to books.  Many women define computers as “male” (“Oh, I never go on it because it belongs to my husband.  Sometimes he runs something off for me.”),  consider themselves endangered by “exposing” themselves online (unless they’re academics or writers who MUST) as though it meant physically opening the door to a stranger, or think of it as “play” -- maybe because many men and kids use their computers for gaming.  Often they do NOT read blogs.  WILL not.  It seems to mean something like "showing off."

There’s something deeper.  The paradigm shift is not about going from paper books to digital text on a gadget.  The real change is from a world where one got ahead by climbing hierarchical ladders in institutions (business, teaching, professions) -- depending upon unions or civil service, who had stable and dependable positions, qualified experts  -- to a hunter-gatherer world -- chancy and motley dependence on patrons, mentors, cohorts, buddies, contacts and explorations to make one’s own best guesses about what might work.

In Fort Benton last fall I went around to their several museums, one bookstore, and one saddlery/antique store (I guess that’s the best way to describe it).  This is a town with major Bob Scriver bronzes that considers itself right on the cutting edge of Montana history -- indeed, I should say “banks,” since Fort Benton was where the steam paddlewheelers docked, as far north as they could go.  There was not one copy of “Bronze Inside and Out” available.  In fact, they didn’t know it existed.  They do now, but what one man said has stuck with me:  “No one came and asked us to buy it.”  It’s an old-fashioned drummer model where a salesman came through to solicit business and gave a pitch about each product.  Very nice for the ego as one stood behind the cash register with arms folded, listening, being courted.  Regional book “drummers” are gone along with the old-fashioned mercantile salesman.  

I put that together with a remark from a Heart Butte man who stopped by to chat one day when I was working in the yard.  “A man came to teach us Blackfeet history and he said he WAS Blackfeet, but we didn’t know him, so we didn’t pay any attention to him.”  People in Heart Butte, on the rez, still judge by affiliation and personal relationship.  Paper certification, book learning, mean nothing to them.  They are the real thing, they reason, so of course they know better just by existing.  Why read?  It’s a form of xenophobia, fear of outsiders.  It’s not just a characteristic of rez towns.  The most offensive thing that people do when they move to Valier is to tell locals anything.  People in a small town want to be experts on their own small town.  The fact that they put no effort into LEARNING their own small town is irrelevant.  It’s an ego thing.

I find that older women are a little that way themselves.  “Do I HAVE to do that old hunter-gatherer thing again?  Didn’t I do enough of it when I was young?”  They learned a long time ago not to tell people things about themselves they didn’t want to know, esp. family members.  But let an outsider interfere by diagnosis and zingo-bango, get the baseball bat out from behind the door!  So WHY do they fall for the commodification of “lady fairs” and advertising that tells them what they want?

Too big a subject for a blog post.  Let me back off to just books.  Let me ignore reading devices and cyber-books.  Why aren’t women better hunter-gatherers about paper books?  What kind of books are they looking for anyway?  Why do they all sign up for book clubs, saying they want good ideas, and then never read the books?  Or if they read them, refuse to share what they really think about them -- the really gut-level reactions?  Why is it that when I ask many women about the best books they ever read, they go back to something from their twenties?  The original question that kicked off this whole line of thinking was my mother who in her late eighties wanted books that would grip her by the ears and submerge her in another world.  I had no successful suggestions and neither did the county librarian.

Of course, I find it far more “submerging” to write than to read.  I really like that word, ”submerge,”  which I think captures the “flow” phenomenon of reading at one’s real capacity for absorption.  I don’t read for flow anymore.  I sit there with my marker and notebook looking for concepts and making outlines.  This is why I’m so pleased to have a co-writer rather than a co-reader.  I HATE people saying,  “Oh, you’ve got to read this or that.”  I generally make sure never to touch the damned book.  

I said CO-writer, not parasitical writer.  I gradually realized that some of the male writers who emailed me in such a friendly manner were really trying to make shortcut research about Blackfeet or Western life.  They were hunter-gatherers, just lazy.  And I hate writers’ feedback groups as much as book clubs.  Maybe it’s my loss.

So if an older woman were looking for “a few good books” to read, how would she go about it?  The options are narrowing since the reviews in print are disappearing (newspapers eliminating the sections, appropriate reviewers leaving -- we olders don’t want PR or kids being snarky) and the bookstores are closing except in major cities -- even the big chains and heritage stand-alones.  The library is replacing shelves with computers.  The newer books tend to be ebooks, which is great for people who travel and can’t pack a lot of weight around.

Here’s a neglected option made POSSIBLE by the Internet:  “sadder but wiser” books, that is, the used book market which is no longer a one-inch, one-column ad in the back of the Saturday Review.  Every used book aggregator has a search slot that will sort by subject, by author, by title.  They’re cheaper than newspapers:  75 cents for the daily Great Falls Tribune.  One penny for many worthy books.  (Shipping is where the cost is.)  A pro-active searcher can come up with real wealth.  In fact, the search can become as “submersive” as the actual reading.  The post office or UPS will bring you the books if you’re that agoraphobic. 

www.abebooks.com;  www.alibris.com;  www.Powells.com and -- unless you have political objections -- www.amazon.com.  

HAD ANY GOOD BUGS LATELY?

It’s always good to start things off with a video, so here’s one to read while you drink your morning coffee. It’s one of those good news (eating bugs is not that bad) and bad news (you have to clean them and they may be contaminated with pesticide) stories.  But this vid will teach you how to clean a “queen ant” if you happen to be in Brazil.  (Hint: it's more about outsides than insides.)

Video: Brazilian Tradition of Eating Ants

In the town of Silveiras, Brazil, the frying and eating of

queen ants dates back centuries, but pesticides used by the

booming paper industry are now threatening the insects. http://video.nytimes.com/video/2011/01/04/world/americas/1248069519368/brazilian-tradition-of-eating-ants.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=thab1

If you can’t get to Brazil,  you could try stopping by my house where I have a great number of ants, though they’re the wrong kind.  In fact, mine are several different kinds and some are really teeny.  I bought a book called “Outwitting Ants” which encourages a person to catch a sample in a jar and take them to your county agent entomologist for identification, but the woman agent said she’d give me a lilac bush start if I’d just take my ants and go away.  (I’m kidding.)  I tried all the advice for non-chemical stuff except borax which killed all adjacent plants.  Last summer I freaked, went to the ranch supply store, and dosed the property with some kind of ghastly stuff that worked.

In case they come back this summer, I’m prepared.  The home economics recipe lady from the Prairie Star has devoted a column to bug recipes.  As follows:

INSECT FLOUR

Spread cleaned insects out on a lightly greased cookie sheet.  Dry insects in a 200 degree F. oven for one to three hours.  The insects should be fairly brittle and crush easily.  Process in a blender until the consistency of wheat germ.  Add to any salad, bread, cookie recipe, etc.

CHOCOLATE COVERED CRICKETS

Melt squares of semi-sweet chocolate in a double boiler.  Dip dried crickets in the the chocolate one at a time.  Dry on waxed paper.

POPCORN CRUNCH

(This is from the exterminator company called Orkin.  The recipe is to be used BEFORE you put down poison!)

In a saucepan, melt 1/2 cup butter with 1/2 cup honey and gently heat.  To three quarts popped popcorn, mix 1 cup dry roasted, chopped insects.  Pour honey-butter mixture over the popped popcorn and insects.  Mix well.  Spread mixture out on a cookie sheet and bake at 350 degrees F 10-15 minutes, or until crisp.  Break into small pieces.

Marie Hoyer is this lady’s name.  She quotes Deborah Papier:  “Just the right size for popping into your mouth, with a satisfying flavor that has been compared o a cross between a potato and avocado, cicadas would seem to be the perfect snack food.”  

A cicada looks sorta like a queen ant and lives in the ground like a queen ant.  But the survival manuals I’ve read say that it’s fairly safe to eat any bug that looks like a grasshopper.  Some people raise crickets to feed pets and might dip into them for their own munchies now and then, but Hoyer cautions that if you raise crickets you have to keep the lid on their cage because they jump out.  Maybe you’ve been in a pet store where the sound tells you there’s one in an unseen place it’s not supposed to be.  In some countries they are kept in a teeny cage as though they were a canary, because of that sound, but other times a person can find it maddening.  And crickets chew things up.  

Though not as badly as dermestids.  I’ve never read anything recommending the eating of dermestids, which are those strange little crosses between a spider and a beetle that scuttle off  when you turn over an old carcass.   Bone collectors use them to clean off skulls, but they will eat entire buckskin suits.  I suppose people feel squeamish about something that eats dead stuff, though that’s what lobsters and crabs eat.  Come to think of it, they do look like big insects. 

Of course, we eat bug bits all the time because, as the Food and Drug Administration reminds us, it is “economically impractical to grow, harvest or process raw products that are totally free of non-hazardous naturally occurring unavoidable defects.”  It’s just free insect flour.

If you are looking for bugs to eat on purpose, Hoyer claims these are available:  “chocolate covered ants, larvae, grasshoppers and crickets, or lollipops containing a tomato hornworm or scorpion.”  I had a can of chocolate-coated baby bees for a long time.  A loooooong time.  There’s a good project for your pre-teens: collecting big horrible bugs from the neighborhood and embedding them in lollipops.  It’s not hard to make lollipops -- you can even buy molds.  Failing that, grubs and worms may be coated with salt and vinegar or sour cream and onion flavor as a snack.

A South American adventurer remarked that spiders down that way in the rain forest are big as mice and love to build their webs across paths where there is enough sunshine to attract cavorting insects.  He himself disliked the feeling of cobwebs on his face, but his local guide walked close enough behind him to grab off any spiders and cram them in his mouth.  He didn’t seem to mind the legs kicking and claimed they tasted like mashed potatoes.  Not chicken.

Ace Powell used to tell about an old cowboy who arrived at a remote ranch late and was offered the cook’s bedroom next to the kitchen since the cook was gone.  He woke in the morning to a metallic sound.   The old ranch wife was singing to herself as she made flapjacks and then he’d hear “spang.”  He hustled out to the table and she set a short stack in front of him.  He was surprised that they seemed to have raisins in them.  He’d never seen that before, but it sounded like a good idea and he was lifting a forkful to his mouth when he saw what made the noise.  A fly lit on the counter and the woman smacked it sharply with her pancake turner.  Then she flipped another flapjack.  He sorta lost his appetite, but, heck, he shouldn’t have been so fussy.  Hoyer says bugs are good protein and, after all, they had been fried on both sides to kill the germs.  And the next snotty vegan that shows up can be told that you're an entomaphagan.

PAUL'S WINTER ADVENTURES

(Paul Wheeler is a friend who lives in the woods near Bonner's Ferry.)

This must have been in my first or second year at the Garden. My father had died in the Fall of that year and my mom moved to Seattle and stayed with old family friends that had moved there a few years earlier. I'd gone to visit her over Christmas, but New Year's day, I wanted to spend at home, so I left early on new years eve morn.

The roads were just awful. Even as I was leaving the development I had to go down a steep, icy hill. Cars were piled up willy-nilly at the bottom, so I crept down and spent an hour or more, pulling folks out of the ditch. (folks kept stuffing my pockets with cash even though I tried to decline it)

Snoqualmie pass was the worst, they were requiring chains to go over. Cars were pulled to the side, cars were stuck in the middle, folks that were prepared were going slow, so they didn't tear up their chains. Long waits for snowplows that were doing their best, wending between all the stranded motorists.

The highway was so icy, I probably didn't exceed 25 miles an hour all day long and the temperature was dropping like a rock. I had a 4x4 International Travelall in those days, with an electric back window in the tailgate. Somewhere on the highway it shattered and it created an icy and snowy vortex inside. I pulled over and put a sleeping bag in place of the window, which didn't help much. Piled all my extra clothing and gear over my feet and legs and pushed on. By the time I got to Spokane it was dark. All I could think about for miles, was obtaining a thermos of hot coffee and wrapping my hands around a hot cup.

Bank signs were flashing -40, I could not find a single damn place open that served coffee, but midnight wasn't far off and I had a lot of miles left to get home, so I pushed on.

On that leg, all I could think about was building a roaring fire in the stove in my tiny cabin, crawling into the loft for a nice hot, sweaty, well deserved sleep. I think I just made it before midnight, woodenly stumbled in the door. Tried to warm my fingers enough to feel for and light a match for an oil lamp. When I finally got it lit, I turned around to start on the stove. WTF! Where's my stove!?! My fookin' stove was gone, someone stole my fookin' stove! Even as mad as I was, it didn't do much to warm me. I went back out and pulled my frozen sleeping bag/window and drug it back to the cabin, stomping as much ice out of it as I could and curled up in it on the floor to spend one of the most miserable nights in my life. Doubt I slept much with all the violent shivering. Come daylight my beard was a frozen chunk of ice so heavy, I had to be careful I didn't swing my head too suddenly and knock myself out. I stumbled down to the creek and the communal house to find everyone there all cheery and warm, my stove amongst the collection, along with the huge fireplace, serving to keep everyone toasty warm.

First time I ever saw one of those tree faces, I was driving down the road and slammed on my brakes. Freaked me right out, thought it was some strange growth that the light was revealing. I felt a little cheated after I got a better look at it.

Some years ago, one of the kids and I were coming back from town when I caught an odd glimpse of what appeared to be a human head sitting on a stump about 50' off the road. Screech, put the binoculars on it and sure as tootin', it was a human head alright. I wasn't sure whether to call the cops right off or investigate further. Sure glad I worked up the courage to check it out, because I'd have been the laughing stock of the county. It was very realistic, but fake none the less. Took me awhile to find out what it was, but it was a beauticians practice head, to learn how to style hair and apply makeup.

Nearly home and out in our field, I spied another one, sitting on a lone fence post! Never did find out who left them, but they were placed for effect. After I finally found out what they were, I sold one on ebay and the granddaughter and I have been trying to smuggle it into her place ever since. She adores it and fusses with it every time she's here. Her father hates it and won't allow it in his place. It's a little creepy.

Somehow I think it's good for us to get ourselves into jams once in awhile and have to figure out how to get ourselves unstuck. Really, when you think of all the zillions of man-hours spent by folks in the middle of nowhere, with nothing but their wits, most of them live to tell about it. Those are the stories we tell our kids and grandkids! Over the years, I managed to unthinkingly get myself into some real clusterfucks, but never suffered more than shaky knees. I still manage to pull off boners every now and then even though I'm old enough and somewhat experienced. A few years ago, I bought a four wheeler ATV and took it places I'd have been careful on foot. I got on a series of overgrown logging trails and was buzzing along so fast, I wasn't paying attention to where I was going. I knew I wasn't truly lost, any direction would eventually take me someplace I recognized, but I bought the damn atv because I can't get around like I used to. Instinct kicked in and I was able to retrace my route and find enough tracks to get out in short order.

Other things have been more common over the years. My last year or so of cruising, the FS begged us to take over another outfits' contract because they'd fallen seriously behind. I wasn't real excited about it because we'd initially been underbid on the job, so it meant less money. It was late in the season though and we didn't have anything else to do. Also, since there was already snow on the ground, the FS allowed us to give our best guess at a lot of biological data that was normally required, but took considerable time to complete. On my way from one plot to another I was side-hilling through a foot or so of snow and came to a broad area devoid of any kind of vegetation. The hill side was steep, but somehow having snow up to your knees gives you a false sense of security. I made it half way across before I looked down and it occurred to me that if I slipped it was going to be a very long trip down the mountain with no hope of stopping until I piled into the trees at high speed. I froze. Right there. I couldn't make myself go forward and I knew if I tried to backtrack I was going for a ride I probably wouldn't come out of intact. They call that motion your knees make "Singer Knees", after the motion a sewing machine makes. Uncontrollable, rapid shaking from stress or nerves. I don't really know how long I stood there shaking and trying to figure out a way to go, maybe even a couple hours. Finally I realized the light was going and I had to do something. That was all it took, purposeful, sure steps and finally a lunge at the edge of the trees for an anchor and I could work my way back to the rig. It's almost a little funny thinking back on it now. I'd been in similar situations a couple times on loose scree and you'd think those experiences would have made me more aware of where I was headed, but I guess some things you have to learn repeatedly.

CATHARINE COOKSON: JANE AUSTEN LITE?

If you mixed together thoroughly Jane Austen and Charles Dickens, you’d get Catherine Cookson and don’t think she didn’t know it.  A hundred books she wrote, all drawing on her own life in the British midlands in the days when industrialization was turning the class structure and the land itself upside down.  The tussle between what had always been against what could not be resisted was enough to generate stories in Scherazadian quantities.  At their core these stories always have the man/woman relationship (like Austen) and as their context economic survival (like Dickens).  Each book is located in about the same place which is remarkable for its scenery, both the pastoral and the brutal timbers-and-smoke tangles of industry.  But each tale chooses a different industry: glass-making, rag-selling, coal mining, shipping, candy-making and so on.

In the background of these vids I’ve been reading in the long slow bit-at-a-time way of an (ahem) throne room book  a phenomenon made possible by indoor plumbing.  The book is Peter Gay’s “Education of the Senses,” subtitled “The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud.”  I’m about three-fifths of the way through.  Peter Gay does not so much address our fight against what we think of as Victorianism (prudery, social climbing, hierarchy of authority, thick dark drapes) as he does the emergence of Victorianism from what was before it, something we’re hardly aware of, even though most thoughtful people know that the pendulum swings back and forth from times of conserving and holding still to times of wild exploration and risk.  Sometimes the alternation results from forces like steam engines, others from some wandering virus (TB) and others from climate change like the “little Ice Age” of the 19th century that starved millions.  (Global cooling due to volcanic eruptions.)  It’s unclear sometimes whether ideas drive or follow the cycles, whether inventions (effective contraception) release something that was always there (sexual pleasure) or whether the the intensity of the urge (need to survive) compels the innovation (a cure).

Cookson is not writing criticism of the factors of change so much as she is providing assurance of individuals prevailing after hardship, a kind of fiction we need when times get tough.  Once I told someone I was reading “The House of Mirth,” and they -- not knowing the book or Edith Wharton’s cynical world view -- responded,  “I’m glad you’re having some fun.”  (For those who don’t know, the book is entirely bitter, ending in suicide and lost love.)  There’s a kind of satisfaction in such books:  “See, I TOLD you so!”  (Tombstone reality.)

There ARE tragedies and one imdb.com reviewer of “The Fifteen Streets” said it was so violent and filled with death (2 girls drown) that she couldn’t watch it.  Yet this is one of the most popular of the Cookson works.  One little girl appears as a ghost to reassure her mother and the “spiritualist” faith healer next door pulls that same mother through a late-term miscarriage.  Miracles!   The stories are not candified but ARE tracts about going on and healing, something like the “Chicken Soup” lit today. 

Peter Gay is enlightening about why such stories were necessary palliatives in a world where the only dependable birth control was abstinence or prostitutes (Cookson does NOT address same sex relationships) and, once pregnant, a woman was risking her life and health.  Childbirth infection killed my great-grandmother, sending the reverberations of emotion from the loss, from a less sympathetic woman who became the second wife, from the struggle over assets between the half-sibs, from the withdrawal of the men from household strife, and all the other familiar knots and aches.  Lack of antibiotics and pain killers also affected men mangled by machinery while alcohol, the only comfort, was a devious destroyer.

Today the terms of sex and childbirth are totally different and the male palliatives are more vicious (heroin).  Wealth and religion, awareness of the planet and the poor, the use of drugs both prescribed and illicit, and so on are explored in sci-fi fantasies along with fewer sentimentalities about true love.  Now it’s intense sex that seems to count, unless you’re “into” boy adventure like “Lord of the Rings” or “Star Wars.”  Dickensian tales.

There ARE boys in Cookson stories.  Also, lots of tubby old women, looking on and commenting.  Once in a while they intervene somehow and in “The Rag Nymph” the old rag peddler (Val McLane)  steals the show from the nymph, even though the latter is played by Honeysuckle Weeks.  The key concept that shows up obviously is romantic pairing off, but the subtler story is always the family, usually a blood family that invokes inheritance, but sometimes an assembled family organized for mutual protection against unjust authority.

When the first couple of Cookson DVD’s showed up, I sighed and resigned myself to Masterpiece Theatre Lite.  By now I’ve ordered all the rest of the stories and am looking forward to them -- not for the similarities but for the ingenuity in the variations.  The films became an economic force of their own, both sustaining the studio that created them and starting careers of the actors who are very much the terrific repertory of Brits we recognize.  I don’t know whether or not I want to read the actual books because I’m not sure that “John O’Brien” would be quite so wonderful without the curly red hair, square shoulders and dancer’s walk of Owen Teale.  This is a twenty-year-old film and I feel a little sad that Sean Bean has had a better run as a variety of villains than Teale has had as a “good” man.  By now Teale’s hairline has receded and his waist must be a little thicker, but anyway he’s not the “bit of rough” that even Cookson heroines often prefer, esp. if they can somehow be the salvation of them.

There’s an interesting trope in Cookson that I don’t think I’ve seen other places, maybe because it’s rather close to incest:  the distressed pre-adolescent girl who is saved by a downscale, wicked (drinking), rough-trade (Mellors?) man who becomes her good friend.  Later, when she’s grown up and assigned to a virtuous (and wealthy) man, she somehow manages to marry her old friend instead.  Is this a matter of turning away from the relatively less potent boy to a “father figure?”  It works for me.

Enough of our society has remained the same that these tales still appeal even though industry has become technology and families have become I-don’t-know-what.  But I have a notion that if a person took these books and films to today’s China, even without changing them into Chinese stories with new actors, they would be a huge success. 

WHY I DON'T TEACH WRITING

Greg Hirst was one of my earliest students at Browning High School so he’s almost my age and has had a far more illustrious career as a teacher and curriculum developer.  In recent years he has been developing Blackfeet genealogy.  He has loved writing and teaching writing and advises me that I should offer a writing workshop at Blackfeet Community College.  I think about this quite a bit and have an accumulation of thoughts which I’ll try to list.

I intensely wish that Blackfeet would write but I find that they don’t know the books about Blackfeet, scoff at the spearpoint writer, James Welch, Jr, and never visit the nearest bookstores, which are in Great Falls more than a hundred miles away.  When they get to college, they are overwhelmed with class reading.  I’ve had my eye on some people who show signs of writing, but they always turn away to something less solitary, less demanding of a quiet place to work, less puzzling.  Maybe art.  Those who look for writing as a way to success will look for models they think are successful, i.e. make money.

Grammar is taught much more as “usage” than as analysis of sentence structure.  The emphasis is on propriety.  I was considered a poor English teacher at Heart Butte because I never corrected anyone.  This was supposed to be the function of an English teacher.  In fact, even I didn’t really understand the real power of “rhetorical grammar” until I found a college text recently.  Just knowing the parts of speech is the beginning, not the goal.  Only when a person can see that a prepositional phrase ought to be converted into an appositive, that an appositive could be condensed to one adverb, and that the phrases and clauses need to be presented in a different order so that this sentence flows from the previous one -- and do all this without losing the sense and feel of the subject -- that’s what grammar is for.  It ain’t a matter of not saying “ain’t.”  However, the last time I taught (in Cut Bank) both the other English teachers could not even correct the exercises in the grammar text.  They didn’t know the answers.

All writing rests on thinking.  Thinking skills are MUCH neglected lately.  When I was in high school in the Fifties, there was much emphasis on the rhetorical devices of propaganda because we were seen as in danger of being seduced by Russian communism.  If voters of today had had this training, they would vote MUCH differently than they do.

In any case, the assumptions of what is reality are so different now -- at least among the young and the sophisticated -- that I find it hard to talk to some older people who have lived quiet lives.  Their convictions about demographics, legalities, science, class definitions, and a host of other things are pretty “sorted” into categories.  But a lot of recent thinking has been category-blasting.  The animals who were sorted according to appearance turn out to be something else when their DNA is studied.  The disciplines of the academy morph constantly, with border-hybrids suddenly swelling up while other traditional subjects simply wither.

Probably the Internet is the biggest change maker for writers.  There are three aspects to this:  First, the way of writing is much faster, more fluid, more amenable to revision than it was.  People who email or blog or twitter write differently, which might be good or bad.  It’s easier to quote, to footnote, to link, to search for information.

Second, the actual publication of books is not in the least like it used to be.  Likely there is no actual book at all: just a PDF.  It is so easy to produce a book that the prestige has gone out of it.  Everyone and her cousin is writing a book, possibly pretending it’s written by her dog.  (Sometimes that’s easy to believe.)  But people are still susceptible to the lure of the bourgeois Brit idea endorsed by NPR that one can jump up a few class status notches by writing.

Third, the whole complex machinery that used to surround books, beginning with the editor who looks for quality and certifies it, has collapsed.  The warehouses, the publicists, the book reviewers, the bookstores (chain or not) are all imploded.  So are the borders between nations, so now American authors share with stunning talent from India (where they learn grammar and rhetoric) or South America (where they still have remote tribes).  The exoticism of being an American Indian who can write is GONE, baby, GONE.

But few of today’s rez dwellers are very disturbed about all that because there’s so much ekse to learn.  Business courses, science, math, tech stuff including computers -- that’s where the action is.  Browning hasn’t been a white town for a long time, so every service, every shop, is run by someone enrolled.  That’s in addition to the Tribal Offices, the BIA, and Indian Health Services.  They are too busy to write about it.

At 71 my time is getting precious and I have a LOT to write.  I’ve waited a long time to get to where I can sit here all day at this keyboard.  I don’t care about publishing -- that’s not my problem.  I do not want to use up my time teaching writing.   Sometimes I think it would be interesting to just go sit in a coffee shop with a tip cup in front of me and look at individual's work, offer feedback.  Not many would accept it.

The thing about writing is that if you write, that part of your brain thickens and complexifies.  Then you can write better and longer, so that makes your brain develop more.  Writing as much as I do, I’m just getting to the point where my awareness and skills can keep up with my aspirations.  Anyone can do that with no teacher at all.

Rather as an adjunct to that, since what most people know about writing comes from an academic setting, many do not have “inner permission” to write about things like sex.  (Strangely, it’s okay to write about hatred and violence.)  Partly because of my co-writer, Tim Barrus, that taboo is gone.  (I’m fairly circumspect on my blog but not on emails.)  Many Blackfeet Community College students could and should write about the verboten parts of their lives.  They are often in their forties, survivors.  But many people are afraid to let them write about abuse or addiction or anything else negative for fear people will think badly of Indians.  They are still invested in the old pretensions about what happened in the 19th century, which limits their futures and strait-jackets their writing.

I do not see the answer as a classroom at BCC.  I think Blackfeet writing will be someone scribbling in a spiral notebook or clicking away at a keyboard in the middle of the night without even telling anyone.  Just opening up a vein, as they say, and letting it flow. 

NEW YEAR'S DAY, 2011

Nothing has changed, of course.  The tipping of the planet has already shifted.  It’s time to begin fertilizing the plants again.  The cats and I are a little older.  My diabetes diet is working fine and the eye doctor found no progression of damage except possibly it’s about time to begin glaucoma drops -- maybe.  I’ve discovered how to buy glasses online which means $40 instead of $400.  My computer probs turn out to be mostly in the old telephone infrastructure of Valier Internet which can’t support the bandwidth demand.  A new wireless service is arriving and it’s cheaper and one doesn’t need a telephone.  Those are changes.

Tim Barrus is still alive, a LACK of change that overjoys me!  Writing with a partner is not for everyone, but it has been a giant gain in power and discernment for me.  Not that he critiques what I write or that I write anything like he writes, but that we can share the inner experience in some way.  Writers used to dream of agents or editors who would understand them and encourage them, but those days are gone.  Maybe most definitively when the image of Maxwell Perkins rescuing Thomas Wolfe was replaced by Raymond Carver’s editor savaging Raymond’s text, totally changing what he wrote so that now no one knows what his reputation should be.  He’s famous for writing spare -- but now we discover he was stripped.

The money crash that hit so many, the publishing crash (not just the big publishing houses but also the bookstores, the distributors, the reviewers, the justification for academic tenure, all called into question and diminished), the huge political shifts -- some things were predicted but no one believed in them.  And then the “good” shifts: health care, Indian reimbursement for centuries of government embezzlement of their trust funds.  And the shifts that were mocked because they were misnamed:  global weather change, the classification of the object formerly called “Pluto.”  (Not “Prince” -- that’s a different sort of orbit.)  The changes in social ideas: marriage fading, nuclear families going back to the old extended family, small houses, slow food, electric cars, green everything.  Much of it is recognizably a circling back.

And everywhere the minute saturation of water tables with molecules unnatural, invented, sold to cure things that might not need to be cured, forcing developmental changes that affect the brain (autism, Alzheimer's) or sex organs or just the subtle web of vascular tensions that keep a body growing and breathing.  Pandemics are revealed to be syndemics:  diabetes because of cheap food, AIDS because of big pharma manipulation of meds and religious refusal to allow preventive measures, poverty because of -- well, it’s convenient.  Populations falling in some countries, rising uncomfortably in other countries, and migrating between countries -- not always legally.  Are you whimpering yet?  The Bang might come anyway.  It’s 2011.  Do you know where the bomb-grade uranium is?

The real change -- as always -- is not in the cosmos but in our capacity to perceive and understand it.  Now we can see moons around planets around suns we never knew before.  We can see atoms in molecules and how they move, the very dance of life, the core of creation.

Religion must accommodate all this, some ideas working much better than others.  There are losers and winners but the hierarchies are empty.  Inclusion is a given, gates are useless, resurrection is unnecessary because each of us is woven into everything else and the only possibility is transformation -- the change that changes everything all the time.  It’s a post-modern idea so it’s only fair that now post-modernism is changing -- we can’t quite tell what’s next yet.

Writing is no longer the same.  “Dog” need not be translated when one can supply the very dog, jumping and barking.  And then morph it before your very eyes into a cat.  What is grammar when the “words” are images?  What is a nation when I can sit here talking to three countries at once?  (That’s a part-for-the-whole figure of speech -- I’m actually emailing individuals in three countries.  Consult my blog map for who's reading.)

What is family or even sex in an era of fertilization in a petri dish, ejaculation as the squeeze of a syringe, gestation in a rented womb, birth by surgery, rearing by two men whose sperm might or might not have been used  (mingled or separately), with sibs not related by blood, home-schooled, sent into a world that might or might not have an economic path for them to follow.  What will be their Gestalt?  What roots will they cherish?  What will their teddy bears look like?

The nations, so recently invented and delineated and fought over, may now be giving way in two directions: divisions separating over ecology (you can’t have my water) or over philosophy (“you must live strictly with harsh punishment” or “individuality must overrule group”) at the same time that international corporations set their own agendas and escape all restraint from nations through secrecy and defiance.

How can we educate anyone for what is to come if the only thing they have learned is how to stay numb, how to hide, how to game the system?  (That last might be useful if you can figure out which system to game.)  What ARE the sources of happiness, anyway?  Having everything you want?

Happiness, like health, is a matter of calibration, the small reciprocities, the singing within, guiding itself between narrative and poetry -- the line along the bursts.  Mine works.  I see no reason to change even though I’m changing.  For now, it can wash over me, swirl around me.  It is the strategy of the prairie grass and works until the plow comes.  It always will.  Or maybe fire.