TEMPESTS IN TEACUPS

Rather than try to organize this series of reflections on the current Krakauer/Mortenson controversy, maybe I’ll just list them.  Most important is the story at Byliner Originals.  I can find no info about “Byliner Originals” -- like who owns this online “long form journalism magazine”, who edits it, etc.  Byliner.com is a teaser splash page (bright yellow) rather than a complete website.  It’s my understanding that the “long form journalism” published here will be available from Amazon as a “short form” item for the Kindle.  The page allowed a download of the Krakauer article to my desktop MAC as a pdf.  I gather that Kindle will “play” pdf’s.  Amazon is keen to promote items on Kindle.  The writers who are “bylined” here are all authors of books that once were big sellers on Amazon, but could now use a boost.   It appears to me that the Sixty Minutes story is really advertising for this “Byliner Original” feeder for Amazon.   

By now there are many “Three Cups of Tea” posted interviews and original articles over the years.  I think I read most of them yesterday.  Some of the most interesting were articles from Outside magazine, which is dedicated to adventure, exploring, and exotic travel.   They know both men.   Also interesting was the video interview of the Pakistani man who is suing Mortensen because he realizes now that he was portrayed as a Taliban operative.

http://outsideonline.com/adventure/travel-ga-greg-mortenson-interview-sidwcmdev_155690.html    Alex Heard

http://outsideonline.com/outside/culture/200812/greg-mortenson-afghanistan-1.html   Kevin Fedarko

http://outsideonline.com/outside/adventure/200112/200112hard_way_1.html?  Mark Jenkins

http://edition.cnn.com/2011/SHOWBIZ/04/18/three.cups.of.tea.controversy/?hpt=C2  Peter Bergen    CNN

http://edition.cnn.com/video/#/video/world/2011/04/18/walsh.three.cups.of.tea.cnn   Mansur Khan Mahsud

This backstage scandal is an old story that people, particularly Krakauer,  have known about for many years.   The original event around climbing K2 happened in 1993.  Mortensen began building schools in 1994.  There was a blowup with many resignations from the board of the Central Asia Institute, Krakauer’s organization, in 2002.  Why didn’t the story come out then?  Parade magazine published an article in 2003 that was the seed of the actual book.  Krakauer withdrew in 2004.  “Three Cups of Tea” was published in 2006.  Why didn’t Krakauer speak up then?  

Since “Three Cups of Tea” there have been two sequels, one by David Oliver Relin who is the co-author and probably the real writer of the original, which is in third person, very admiring of Mortensen.   Mortensen says at first he sent a query with first chapters to Viking Penguin and was told it was a great story but he was a lousy writer, so Relin -- an experienced journalist -- was recommended.    Later Mortensen also had writing help from Mike Bryan and Kevin Fedarko, who wrote the Parade mag article in 2003 that was Mortensen’s reputation maker.   Fedarko was the co-author of “Stones into Schools,” Mortensen’s second book.  Evidently Mortensen tells the story and then the co-authors ramp it up to suit the adventure standards of the publisher.  This is standard practice among many publishers.  Blackfeet authors tell me about it.  When it happened to me, I withdrew the manuscript and took it to a different publisher.  So this backstage view is pretty interesting.  

“Shelf Awareness” is one of the several book blogs that come to me daily via internet subscription.  It is about and for brick-and-mortar bookstores.  They say:  “Krakauer quoted a statement from Carolyn Coleburn, a Viking spokesperson: "Greg Mortenson's work as a humanitarian in Afghanistan and Pakistan has provided tens of thousands of children with an education. 60 Minutes is a serious news organization and in the wake of their report, Viking plans to carefully review the materials with the author."

Krakauer is donating the proceeds to the American Himalayan Foundation's Stop Girl Trafficking Project.”   Surely trafficking trumps schools??  Mortensen left the American Himalayan Foundation when his Central Asia Institute broke off from it.

"Using CAI funds, Mortenson has purchased many tens of thousands of copies of Three Cups of Tea and Stones into Schools, which he has subsequently handed out to attendees at his speaking engagements. A significant number of these books were charged to CAI's Pennies for Peace program, contrary to Mortenson's frequent assertions that CAI uses 'every penny' of every donation made to Pennies for Peace to support schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Rather than buy Mortenson's books at wholesale cost from his publisher, moreover, CAI has paid retail price from commercial outlets such as Borders, Barnes & Noble, and Amazon. Buying from retailers allows Mortenson to receive his author's royalty for each book given away, and also allows these handouts to augment his ranking on national bestseller lists. (Had he ordered the books from his publisher, Mortenson would not have received a royalty, nor would bestseller lists reflect those purchases.) "

But it’s important to note that Mortenson is not the only one getting royalties:  David Oliver Relin gets some portion of the profits, however the contract is written.  His website doesn’t list Mortensen as an author of “Three Cups of Tea.”  And maybe  Viking Penguin got more money this way.  Relin is “unavailable” so far.  He is one of the founders of bungee jumping and out of the same community of journalist adventurers as both Mortenson and Krakauer.  I would be interested to know who set up the arrangement with the US military for every soldier in Pakistan to read this book, if that’s a true allegation.  I'm not sure it was Mortensen's idea, given his feelings about war, but military and adventure cultures are closely tied.

Mountaineers (I’ve known at least one) are by definition grandiose narcissists who live in a tension between team effort and their own passionate goals.  This often leads to trouble, hopefully not while on the mountain, where it could be lethal, but good for book plots, as Krakauer knows.  In his books he is more cynical than enthusiastic about these traits.  Mortensen’s wife’s father was an even more prominent climber (not writer) and his wife is a strong supporter of the schools project.

In the rubble of the publishing industry, the publishers are trying desperately to maintain the myth that they are gentlemen in tweed jackets with idealistic aspirations.  In fact, they are now money-making corporations who pander to sales.  Even chain bookstores are going out of business in part because publishers make wholesale deals with Big Box stores like Walmart who sell on the cheap.  (Not everything is the fault of the internet.)   Behind the scenes there are cutthroat arrangements about promotion, pressure on writers to change what they say, and inventive contract agreements.   Awards accrue to the Big Six, reinforcing the illusion of quality.   So far the agents who have been interviewed, including Mortensen’s, have been very diplomatic about the wonderfulness of publishers.  Viking Penguin is one of the remaining Big Six Manhattan publishers.  Imagine the dilemma of the agent:  alienate the publisher and possibly lose future deals or get Mortensen -- a major money-maker -- mad at him!  One agent said that the poor publishers simply don’t have the resources to do the background fact checking that newspapers and magazines can do.  HA.  Maybe they did decades ago.  Now newspapers and magazines throw it at the wall to see whether it sticks, the same as everyone else does.  

There’s another interesting parallel here which the radio and blog reporters not catching.  (They don’t READ.)  “The Bookseller of Kabul is a non-fiction book written by Norwegian journalist Åsne Seierstad, about a bookseller, Shah Muhammad Rais (whose name was changed)” ...  The man took her into his home for a few days and she wrote about him.  He also became very angry at the way he was portrayed and started a lawsuit against Seierstad.  People in the Third World are not so out-of-touch as they once were.  The bookseller is working on his own book.  The point of contention this time is not uneducated girls, but the patriarchal way that the Kabul bookseller treated his daughters.  Since women buy and read most of the books, it pays to have a mistreated female in the story!

And since many of those female readers are teachers, schools are also a good subject.  The problem with Mortensen is not so much that he’s lying about the number of schools or even that he didn’t provide money for teachers and materials, but that he was imposing big concrete bunkers (the illustration on Byliner.com shows a Soviet-looking building snowbound in a mountain valley) on a group of people (all those “isolated villages”) who were nomadic with good reason.  Pakistan’s high valleys are practically uninhabitable in winter, but excellent pasture in the summer.  We folks here on the east slope of the Rockies recognize the pattern.  The Pakistani government does provide schools in yurts that travel with the people.  Maybe Mortenson ought to just send yurts and books.  Or, better yet, iPads.   People sit on the ground and write in the dust because then you don’t have to pack classroom paraphernalia around on your yak.  

I’m not through with this, but I’m going to stop here today.  The Valier library had multiple copies of “Three Cups of Tea” and now I’m reading one of them.  Then I can write about the BOOK instead of author chatter.  To sum up this part:  “follow the money.”

CHICKENING OUT

It used to be that Montana folks near Yellowstone obsessed about bison all the time.  They still do.  At least hippie chicks have stopped trying to throw their arms around them, obsessing about their miscegenation with cattle, and insisting that brucellosis is an invented disease -- doesn’t exist.  But this winter with heavy snow (still snowing today) the bison come out of the Park.  Doesn’t matter what you do, bison come out of the Park.

So what do the Great Falls and Valier folks obsess about?  Chickens.  For months there has been high emotion about whether people can keep chickens in their yards.  I don’t have a chicken in this fight, so I’ve been free to listen closely.

In Valier it began with horses.  Four or five people kept horses in town last year and they got loose.  One young mother, evidently from the city, became very concerned that they might attack her children.  The town council, whose chief purpose in life is to prevent trouble and look good, therefore banned all horses.  It turned out that one old tribal grandpa had kept a few horses in a pasture that happened to be inside the town limits.  Too bad for him, in spite of appeals and petitions.  

Then the council saw that it would be one animal after another, so they banned all livestock, sparing dogs and cats -- barely.  Some people want to eliminate cats.  It’s true enough that we’ve got far too many feral cats because a) the farmers around here dump half-grown fertile kittens in town with the fantasy that there are plenty of old ladies who will take them in, b) there ARE old ladies who can’t take them in but who are happy to feed them near the old buildings where they have found ways to shelter, and c) alcoholic old men like to accumulate cats.  (I didn’t know this last until I moved here.  I thought cats and dogs were gender-assigned.)

But then 4-H and FFA projects had to have an exemption because their parents were significant.  So some kid raised pigs in a corral just inside the city limits.  A few rabbits.  In Portland in the Seventies we had one old duffer who had a mini-farm in a residential neighborhood, including a pot-bellied pig and some chickens.  In my childhood (Forties) in Portland there were two old ladies who kept bantie chickens in large enough numbers that we bought eggs from them.

But now Great Falls well-heeled liberals who read the shelter mags that promote “country living” of a sort, have been running stories about keeping half-a-dozen chickens in the city and how good they are for gardens.  These are named and cuddled chickens.  I esp. loved the story about the guy who named his hens for things on his wife’s dressing table:  Noxema, Mascara, Revlon, etc.  So long as roosters are avoided, chickens make comforting sounds (unlike constant barking) and less problematic droppings than dogs.  They eat bugs.  Very organic.

My cousin’s daughter was recently featured in one of those mags.  She has her own chickens, but in addition she and a friend run a “chicken-sitting” business for people who like to travel a little.  She claims that some of them are happy to sit on her lap while she watches television.  Her son has his favs.

I didn’t really figure out what’s going on until I got into a conversation with a nice lady at the CM Russell auctions.  She grew up on a ranch with a flock of chickens and became truly frothing over the issue, as have others.  “I KNOW chickens,” she shouted.  “I’ve taken care of chickens, the dirty, nasty, stinking beasts!  I want nothing to do with chickens except fried on my plate!”  To rural people who dealt with chickens en masse and killed them likewise because they a) they needed the food and b) they were poor, chickens were a marker of a hard and low-status life.  And here were these fancy upscale people who saying chickens were pets, toys, indulgences, conceits.  These doctors and lawyers -- whom these rural people had so hoped would respect them when they finally made it, moved to town, had a nice white picket fence and a new car -- were MOCKING them with their chicken-keeping.  It was the same as Marie Antoinette pretending to be a milkmaid.  Enraging to those who had to rise before dawn and milk a whole row of cows no matter how chapped their hands and aching their backs.  You know what happened to Marie.

Then I saw that the same people who wanted to keep chickens for pets were the ones who wanted to put big bucks into restoring Great Falls’ old arched bridge and hiring a lighting artist at great expense to make it elegantly blue at night.  They are the backbone of the Charlie Russell fans.  Not that these upscale aesthetically aware people were unaware of suffering.  They are often medical people.  

I think of an old story from the homesteading days when women often had to stay in a tiny tarpaper shack on the prairie while their husbands went to look for work.  They could get pretty lonesome.  Cowboys drifting through would stop to chat in exchange for a bit of grub.  One thoughtful gent knew he would be passing a homestead where the woman was on the edge of starvation, but who nevertheless shared with him.  This time he was lucky and had a chicken to give her, tied upside down to his saddle, still alive because there was no other way to keep it from spoiling.  A year later he happened to pass through again and figured he’d be welcome there.  He was, but he was also surprised to see that hen he’d brought still marching around looking contented.  “I thought you’d eat that chicken!” he said.

The women looked abashed.  “Well, the company meant more to me than the food.”

Of course, there were the eggs.

It’s a strange phenomenon that in the Western art shows and mags, chickens have become favorite subjects, often the more colorful roosters.  Of course, on canvas they’re quiet.  Even the bison can come into the house if they’re painted instead of real.  It’s all about the image versus the reality.

HOMESTEADING

Archibald Strachan, my great-grandfather, born in 1850, was a successful finish carpenter in Scotland with three children.  He gave it all up to come to South Dakota to homestead.  Why?  It wasn’t in pursuit of money.  He was a great admirer of Thomas Jefferson and believed that land ownership was freedom.  Once arrived, he built a house full of windows so he could look out over the prairie, which seemed like a good idea until winter came.  My grandfather, Sam Strachan, educated while the family was still in Scotland, and my grandmother, who grew up in Michigan, were teachers, but each also took a homestead and when they married, they towed their tarpaper shacks together and started their family there.  

How is it that the promise of land was so powerful?  In Europe both status and wealth were based on land ownership, which was basically controlled by kings.  One of the great scandals and engines of emigration was the British land clearances, also called the enclosure movement.  In the earlier times, the land had been occupied and farmed by crofters and small farmers who paid the technical land owner, the squire or the lord.  Also, the privilege of hunting in the forests was reserved to the “landed gentry.”  Then sheep became very profitable and many were evicted to make room for pasture.  Once those same people got to the American prairies where they expected British conditions, their lives were forever changed.

In the case of the ancestors of many people in Valier, a Jesuit priest helped a whole Belgium village move to the east slope of the Rockies.  Bringing their family and much of their congregation intact made their experience less shocking.  But there were still many hardships to endure, if only from the forces of nature.  The stories of suffering and heroism from the homesteader days are many and support the strong fabric of shared lives even today.

But there’s also a dark side to this story, because the highland clearances were echoed by prairie clearances.  The indigenous people could not emigrate -- where would they go? -- but they were greatly decimated by war, smallpox and starvation and could be confined to reservations.  What happened next was different in Canada than it was in the United States.  Canada put the ownership of the reservation in the hands of the Queen and the tribes as a communal body.  The US followed the homestead pattern.

The Dawes Act, which divided reservation land into individually Indian-owned parcels, was passed on  February 8, 1887  (U. S. Statutes at Large, Vol. XXIV, p. 388 ff.)  “Congressman Henry Dawes, author of the act, once expressed his faith in the civilizing power of private property with the claim that to be civilized was to ‘wear civilized clothes...cultivate the ground, live in houses, ride in Studebaker wagons, send children to school, drink whiskey [and] own property.’”  In other words, assimilate.  The results of this tactic still echo through the lives of tribal people.  

Homesteading was accompanied by another great shift in civilization, one much more concrete than the idea of owning land.  It coincided with the beginning of the industrial revolution:  trains, steamships, machinery far beyond “Studebaker wagons,” including the development of movable-type newspaper printing and the ability to distribute mail over long distances.  Steam-powered tractors for breaking virgin prairie, steam-powered thrashers with their great power-belts made of buffalo hide, and the mechanics of grain elevators (grain must be handled like a liquid, carried up high on conveyor shovels and then poured into the structure’s sections, to be later drawn out at the bottom) are all key to the operating of a successful wheat farm.  Drilling for water, engineering macadam roads, stringing line for electricity all proceeded parallel to the homesteaders locating and stubbornly developing their land.

Some are fascinated by the romance of warfare and the pathos of a culture destroyed, but there are many other stories told about the years just after 1900 and many of us heard them from our grandparents, who were there.  My father-in-law arrived in Browning, Montana, in 1903 about the same time as the Great Northern railroad, which stalled for a while until it could find a way through the Rocky Mountains, now called Marias Pass.

Roughly a hundred years later the Industrial Revolution with its dependence on combustible fuel and steel machinery is again being pushed aside by another revolution which is still so much in progress that we can’t really understand its impact.  We see the revision of whole businesses, the transformation of institutions, and the overthrow of governments.  Like the Industrial Revolution, it is both terrifying and exhilarating because it offers so many new opportunities.  Our homesteads now are desktop computers in bedrooms or basements, but those are swiftly being bypassed in favor of laptops, now considered basic to the briefcase of every businessman, and the even newer tablets.  A whole new infrastructure webs the land and this time its not overseen by one government or another but by international corporations working through high satellite communication and offshore “cloud” storage.

Some people are just realizing that ebooks  (love ‘em or hate ‘em, as they say around here), are just the tip of a very big iceberg.  The entire industry of publishing is up-ended:  the bookstores, the editors, the agents, the journalists,  are all shifting -- many very educated and gifted people out of work.  Many others desperately writing books they hope will hit the jackpot.  Publishers tweaking the manuscripts they get in order to make them juicier, more appealing.  Inventory, distributing, warehouses, the whole custom of “a printing,” literary awards, university workshops, writer’s conferences.   The very media of print is now pushed over by video, which means that an illiterate kid living on the street in Bombay can tell his story as powerfully as any educated white explorer.  People in the most remote parts of Africa can find small wireless telephones and “call out.”  But we are also creating a two-class society between the computer-literate and those who are not, who are afraid of it in much the same way as the early people of the prairie confronted with a steam boat on the Missouri, more change-making than the sailing ships that brought Columbus to the east coast. 

WHAT IS AN ACCREDITED MUSEUM?

When I was serving the Saskatoon Unitarian Congregation, one of the families went on a holiday trip to the Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology in Drumheller and came back raving.  “It is a temple to Life itself!” they declared, and when I finally got there myself, I saw that they were right.  www.tyrrellmuseum.com/    Other Canadian museums are just as grand and inspiring.  The secret is that most of the “object focused” earlier collections had the good stuff, so the Canadians had to rely on ingenious presentation.  Of course, at Drumheller the fossils wash out of the ground after every rainstorm.  But “Head-Smashed-In” buffalo jump required careful thought.  Check it out here:  www.aupress.ca/index.php/books/120137 

I’m not naive about museums.  I grew up in a museum-worshipping family and traveled across the US and Canada, stopping at every roadside attraction, so that I saw many a basement or garage collection as well as the great institutions of the cities, esp. the ones in Chicago where I went to university.  One of my early favs was the case of rocks at the Portland Children’s Museum which looked like nothing until the room lights were off and the black light in the case was on -- then they were spectacular.

This NPR story is about a museum in the Blue Ridge mountains and is worth opening just for the photo, but the radio story is there as well.

http://www.npr.org/2011/04/16/135442423/in-shuttered-museum-appalachian-history-boxed-up  The link description tells the story.  Everything packed in boxes.  People wanting their family history returned to them.  No room.  No money.  And as one lady said tartly, “It doesn’t rhyme with football.”

That story is being repeated all over many countries as the notion of what a museum “is” gets reappraised.  And the museums themselves are appraised as well.  www.aam-us.org/   There are 6 accredited museums in Montana:  the C.M. Russell Museum, the Montana Historical Society Museum, the Historical Museum at Fort Missoula, the Missoula Art Museum, the Museum of the Rockies, and the Western Heritage Center in Billings.  Maybe your fav is not on the list.  What would it mean?  Only 4.5 % of the 17,500 US museums are accredited.  

The CM Russell Museum spokeswoman said the inspectors checked “lighting, heating and air conditioning, sound systems and everything from the way the collection looks, and things such as the temperature pieces are kept.”  I expect they also looked at the endowment.  I do not know whether they investigated the quality of curation, security, inventory control, education programs and the like, but I would guess they did.

The Scriver Museum of Montana Wildlife personally constructed by Bob Scriver would never have qualified.  It had no fire suppression system, though it was built of old wood from a dis-assembled warehouse.  I once overheard a little gaggle of college girls dis-assembling the captions.  They didn’t knock the content, but they thought that typing words on cards with an old primary school typewriter and thumbtacking them onto homemade stands was too, too primitive.  They deplored the fact that the animals weren’t under glass, and a lot of other stuff.  I put my fingers in my ears.  One of the things they found truly shocking was an old sofa where I snuck in for naps.  After all, I was there at 6AM sweeping the floor and polishing the glass and couldn’t lock up until the last tourists were through petting the moose.  There was also a matched pair of asymmetrical coral-colored boudoir chairs left behind by Bob’s second wife.  The sapphire velveteen drapes behind the bronzes were an early Christmas gift from myself.  This was a very "personal" place.

When the museum was dispersed after Bob’s death, the bronzes of Blackfeet went north to the Royal Alberta Museum in Edmonton because they had already bought the legendary “million dollar” Scriver collection of Blackfeet artifacts.  But they had to leave everything in storage for lack of space.  Thanks to the tar sands income, they are now able to rebuild, as you can see at http://www.royalalbertamuseum.ca/  But the bronzes are scheduled to be transferred to the Fort Benton, Montana, museum, which is developing quickly and with standards that will probably qualify them for accreditation soon.

We tend to think of museums as fusty, unchanging repositories of inscrutable objects, which becomes a problem in two ways.  One is when changing times and knowledge make the previous incarnation of business and presentation so out of sync that it becomes irrelevant, even though its whole purpose may be the preservation of the past, and the other is when it comes time to raise money for the funds to renew the museum.  The Montana legislature has just approved authority to borrow to build a new Montana Historical Society Museum.  There will be a struggle between those whose prestige rests on the status quo and those who will want to proceed on a new paradigm of presentation.

Bob Scriver’s entire estate was given to the Montana Historical Society, though the funds that had been included to provide for building had mysteriously evaporated.  The C.M. Russell Museum, somehow snubbed in what started out to be a partnership, is now busily stripping all references to Bob Scriver.  I watch all this from the sidelines, legally defined as having no “standing” to advise and without any funds or clout to contribute.  What I have is knowledge.

So what I commend to the Powers-That-Be is that though they are nearly overwhelmed with objects, including Bob’s collections along with the many beloved possessions of other Montanans around the state, is that they take a Canadian approach -- that is, emphasis on curation.  I don’t mean just “how much is it worth” which is the focus of many people in our greed-based world, but WHY is it valuable, what does it mean, what can we learn from it?  These are the values that made the Scriver Museum of Montana Wildlife so beloved.  

The Blackfeet artifacts were never exhibited there so as not to compete with the Museum of the Plains Indian next door.  You can buy a book that includes everything:  “The Blackfeet: Artists of the Northern Plains” if one turns up -- maybe on eBay or Abebooks or Alibris.  Amazon sometimes.  And you can buy my account of Bob’s life, “Bronze Inside and Out” which includes the story of the creation of the Scriver Museum of Montana Wildlife and how the pet bobcat napped in the horns of the mounted moose, which is NOT an accredited practice.

SUGAR -- IT'LL KILL YAH!!!

In the Seventies the Browning Public Schools became conscious of diet and hired a highly trained nutritionist named John Kyle to help reform the breakfast and lunch programs, which depended heavily on commodity foods. John was a young man, a little eccentric, who had spent a bit part of his childhood bedridden due to some kind of disease or condition I’ve forgotten.  In order to keep him busy, his mother had taught him to knit.  By the time we knew him, he had also learned to spin.  He used these skills in innovative ways, creating highly structured haute couture items without a pattern but by doing a sort of stitch-math in his head.  As for fibers, he was using pet hair.  He didn’t shear them like sheep, but saved all the combings.  His collie yielded enough fiber for a beautiful neck scarf and he had created a smashingly lovely white sweater in a kind of honeycomb stitch from samoyed fur.  It was lightweight but very warm.

John Kyle was always lecturing us about death by “maple bars” which we called locally “long johns.”  You know -- yeast doughnut dough in a long rectangle with maple glaze.  I hardly dare mention them for fear of craving them.  But John told us that white sugar (the maple is just flavoring) and white flour were poison and that it was the craving that was the tip-off.  He pointed out that lead poisoning worked the same way:  eating a little made you crave more, so that toddlers in old houses crept their way around the woodwork picking off flakes of lead-containing paint to eat.  We didn’t exactly take him that seriously.  He tried to make the kids eat “superdonuts” that had everything in them that a kid should have for breakfast.  They would not.  John Kyle moved on.

What he said stuck in my mind and I was reminded every time I was around some “granola” who refused to eat white sugar or white flour and there were quite a few.  Usually healthy svelte people.  Hmmmm.  But I indulged, especially in the nineties when I was trapped in Portland with no comfort but books and Starbucks.  Finally I was diagnosed with diabetes II a few years ago when my eyes were filled with floaters and flashers.  If you have them, you’ll recognize their nicknames -- they’re debris from bleeds or other damage to the retina and the flashes come from the retina itself when damaged.  A few now and then are normal in older age, but not normal when there are many.

Luckily  (sometimes I’m bowled over by the good luck in my life!)  I was in contact (I’m not sure why or how) on email with Dave Lull, a research librarian in Wisconsin who keeps a list of people who would benefit from information he finds.  Soon I was tied into a network of VERY smart and informed people who understood about “metabolic syndrome” when it was still being called “adult onset diabetes.”  Anything that made a person have a high glucose reading in one of those little finger-stick gizmos was called diabetes of some kind, so there was diabetes I and II and III and . . .  headed for more.  In particular,   Dave advised reading the research and analysis by “Jenny” that is encapsulated on http://www.phlaunt.com/diabetes/

Hassim Taleb has been talking about iatrogenic medicine, that is, medicine that causes damage, usually inadvertently.   Something is seen as beneficial (see discussion of antibiotics yesterday) but then it becomes overused, taken for granted.  Something like that seems to have happened with insulin.  High blood sugar?  Take insulin.  Even higher blood sugar?  More insulin. 

On the day I was diagnosed, my blood sugar was in the three hundreds (one hundred is normal) and the doctor’s prescription was so powerful that I barely managed to drive home.  My blood sugar went so low that the little reading machine began to flash and beep.  I hurried to eat a bit of sugar.  This particular doctor thought that since one hundred was normal and lower was better, she would push all HER patients down into the eighties to show she had total control over them, better than other doctors.  Notoriously, it’s hard to make people stop eating as they always have, so she just upped the insulin.  Desperate to save my eyes, I stopped eating any detectable sugar.  Since then I’ve been maintaining on one 500 mg metformin a day.  (I changed doctors.)  I’ve dropped fifty pounds without trying.

Everything Jenny said confirmed what John Kyle had said.  This week Dave Lull sent me a long article from the New York Times by Gary Taubes called “Is Sugar Toxic?”  http://www.nytimes,com/2011/04/17/magazine/mag-17Sugar-1.html   (It is behind a paywall so I can't link.)  For a while now there’s been less information around because the research people were rethinking the whole situation.  It’s much more complex than had been assumed.

First, the problem was redefined as “metabolic syndrome.”   Second, sugars are a KIND of molecule, not just table sugar, and it seems that sucrose (the three “crose” sisters in most food are “Sue” crose, glucose, and fructose) is the one most clearly damaging.  Third, indicators for heart attacks have included the ingestion of fats and a wide waistline.  The latter seems to be an indicator for a particular KIND of fat, which is the kind that piles up in the liver.

Glucose goes directly into the cells and can be decreased simply by exercise: a brisk walk around the park on the next block will drop my glucose reading by as much as thirty points.  (Jenny says that in an hour or so after eating one’s glucose reading should be 140 or less to avoid damage.  100 is ideal.)   If the glucose isn’t taken up by cells, it converts into fat and is stashed in the body.  Metabolic syndrome means that the cells have developed resistance to taking up glucose.  More insulin is needed to force them to take in the glucose.  But taking more insulin makes them resist more.  Eventually the pancreas is so exhausted from producing so much insulin that it just stops.  Then you start on insulin tablets or maybe you begin to mainline insulin with a syringe.  Insulin promotes tumor growth.  It’s all this struggle on a molecular level that destroys inner cycles of hormones and reactions -- and organs.   Then the newspaper lists your cause of death as “complications due to diabetes.”

This is not the hardest part of dealing with diabetes -- I live a very isolated life in part because of the social impact of not eating sugar in a community that interprets sweetness as friendship and sharing.  (The other part of the isolation is chosen so I can write all day.   Then there’s my aversion to drinking, which is very parallel to the uses of sugar and will kill you as quickly.  John Kyle could get into quite a froth over THAT.)  The food industry is deeply implicated in all this, right down to the level of crop production.  Foods are much more bitter and tasteless than they were in the Fifties.  This is a deeply rooted (pun, yes), knitted (yes) into our culture and ecologically complex problem.  But it may solve overpopulation.  Those most vulnerable are the indigenous and the poor, who love their long johns. 

CAUGHT DIRTY HANDED

“Wash your hands!” cry flu epidemiologists, mothers, nurses, and Tim Barrus.  That last because he cares for boys with HIV, meaning they have no immunity to germs and no ability to develop immunity.  When I took a job at a nearby county nursing home as ward clerk, I thought that since I sat in an office at a computer, hand-washing was not so crucial.  I bristled and balked at the infection control nurse whom I thought was a bully and took her position as an excuse to target and persecute people.  

My neighbor thought I was funny when I described my feelings about this nurse.  When she took a job as a nurse’s aide in the same place, she had the same class in hand-washing and she liked it, thought it was very worthwhile.  One looks at statistics and microscope photos of germs.  One puts red indicator stuff on the hands and then tries to wash it off to illustrate that it takes a lot of careful scrubbing with systematic effort and time.  One is supposed to scrub hands for as long as it takes to sing “Happy Birthday.”   Then one day my neighbor discovered that an unknown aide had stored a wheelchair with feces caked onto it.  She quit.

The best protection is human effort.  Only motivation can protect us.  But there is a webwork of forces in play.  One of the most unexpected and difficult to address has been antibiotics, the miracle med that changed everything for childbirth and war trauma.  They were such an effective force that it was thought justifiable to be more casual about surgery sterility or ordinary patient care.  But antibiotics became a blunt-force weapon, used even for viruses, which antibiotics do not affect.  They are useful only for bacterial germs.  And the fact that when given to livestock as a preventative, they released energy in the animal that let them grow larger faster, meant that they crept into meat.  A third force was that people took their pills casually, not completing the full span of what the doctor prescribed and giving their leftovers to friends or children with the thought of doing a healing kindness.  On the rez they became a political element with patients who were refused antibiotics by doctors who said they were wrong for the diagnosis becoming irate and demanding them, thinking that they were being denied a magic element out of racism.  All these things left germs opportunities to mutate resistance.  

Leland Ground was in my original English class of seventh graders when I was first hired in Browning, Montana, in 1961.  His family is distinguished (some will recognize the name of Mary Ground as a ceremonialist and matriarch) and that particular class was also identified as high achievers.  (In those days we weren’t afraid to say so.)  Decades ago Leland was in an auto accident that badly broke his leg.  Surgery mended the bone with rods and screws.  Over the years the screws worked loose, so about five years ago Leland went back for more surgery.  A veteran, he used the VA hospital.  

His leg became infected with a MRSA -- methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus.  The next four years were hand-to-hand combat on the part of both Leland and his dedicated doctor to save his leg from amputation.  Antibiotics, even the ones that are reserved for worst cases, failed.  Installing ports through his skin for dripping antibiotics directly into Leland’s system, which he did daily himself at home, failed.  Except that it caused nausea and memory lapses, general fogging of thought.  Re-opening the incision to clean it out failed.   Radioactive tagging of the infection so as to follow it into the bone failed.  The doctor did not give up.  He finally won.  The whole VA system has been struggling with this and now the media are beginning to report success.

Another person in that class of seventh graders was Mike McKay -- from another distinguished and achieving Blackfeet family.  For some years a while ago he was in charge of cleaning and maintenance of the Browning Indian Health Service hospital.  Once he said something offhand to me about it not being a very high status job (one brother is a lawyer and  a sister is the superintendent of the Browning Public Schools).  I jumped all over him!  He had one of the highest responsibilities on the rez!  He was a crucial partner of the doctors!  Since then he has gone back to college for graduate degrees in science.

Among the things the VA tried -- besides hand-washing -- was changing protective gowns between rooms, wearing masks, and more completely sterilizing rooms.  No matter what they tried, it was effective EXCEPT that people wouldn’t do it.  They were in a hurry, they didn’t really believe it mattered, they forgot.  It was expensive.  The experts could get maybe eighty per cent compliance, tops.

Another strategy was to test patients as they came in to see whether they were carrying MRSA germs, so as to isolate them for treatment.  This is controversial and opinions differ about how effective it is, but everyone was surprised to see the results of the tests -- so many germs!  So wicked!  The best result was that when people could see the extent of the problem, they bought into the solution and tried harder.

But there is another entirely different school of thought out there.  Immunity results from an interaction with the environment.  Medical interventions like vaccination are only an imitation of responses normally triggered by mild infections.  They are good because some of the infections are NOT so mild, in fact, deadly.  (There is backlash even against  vaccination from people who fear interventions with nature.)  Apart from the major diseases that sweep around the planet, killing people in pandemics that keep populations within previously unexceeded limits, there is constant daily interaction between creature and ecology that “teaches” the body how to live there.  Scientists who are thinking along these lines think we don’t get enough dirt in our systems to connect our bodies to the web around us.

Small wonder.  Chemical companies are making fortunes by promoting fear of germs and contamination and then selling us potent “sterilizing” molecules that go to work on the cells of our own bodies, interfering with the systems that control our functioning.  Now we’re beginning to fear those substances and move to “steam cleaning.”  It seems like a better alternative though it means yetanother expensive appliance.

That bossy nurse with her bar of soap was right.  Wash your hands.  But no need to get phobic about it.  No need to boil the patient to cure disease.  Though Leland, who has a strong sense of the ridiculous, laughed when I suggested he unscrew his leg, boil it, and then reinstall it.

THE VULNERABILITY OF BEING "DISGUSTING"

This is my last post responding to “From Disgust to Humanity:  Sexual Orientation and Constitutional Law” by Martha Nussbaum, and some people will be grateful since the subject makes them feel a little disgusting for even reading about such matters -- as well as vulnerable.  It’s the vulnerability I want to address.  Nussbaum’s last chapters are about sex shows defined as a court case about women dancing nude.  She speaks of Justice Richard Posner carefully reviewing the history and uses of such dances through the ages and defending nudity as a necessary part of the meaning when describing eroticism.  Later she considers whether such businesses can be considered a nuisance, possibly a danger to the surrounding community.

She does not consider the male sex worker or the vulnerability of sex workers, which is simply addressed by the law in terms of assault and murder.  Female sex workers are targets of obsessive rage and disgust-prompted gaze-aversion by nice people that allows the workers to be attacked and killed with impunity.  I don’t think it would be hard to find police cases where exotic dancers emerging from their place of work are attacked with acid, knives, guns.  The novel and movie “In the Cut” outline the sort of obsessed control freaks who try to destroy women.  Yet the former mayor of Great Falls, owner of a bar just outside of the city’s zoning restrictions (restrictions imposed because of worries about danger and nuisance to neighborhoods) hired exotic dancers and was convicted of “allowing” prostitution in a secluded back room.  This went on for a long time until the mayor’s DUI convictions piled up enough to provoke authorities.  (Arguably, DUI presents more danger to the public than exotic dancers or even prostitutes.)

As Tim often says, “you probably won’t believe this,” but decades ago a local rancher took me across the Canadian border to a nude dancing establishment in Lethbridge, which has always been a notorious “sin town.”  I thought we were going to the movies.  It’s about the same distance from here as Great Falls is.  The two dancers (it was afternoon so things were a little quiet) were at opposite extremes on just about every measure.  One was a very young girl, just beginning, awkward and insecure.  Her farmboy/boyfriend/pimp sat at the edge of the stage and coached her.  The other dancer was a muscular dark-eyed woman with bright red hair (not natural) whose dance was gymnastic and gynecological.  She was in total contempt of her audience, spoke taunts, and glowered in particular specifically at ME.  (Sometimes when you’re curious to know about something, you find out a lot more than you bargained for. ) 

That first girl was about as vulnerable as a human being can be, skinny (the rancher remarked, “that little girl needs feeding!” as though she were a calf), pale, goose-bumped, poorly made up, bad haircut, homemade costume, callow young “boyfriend” who could not have protected her.  I suspect the tough redhead had a gun and could use it.  But there would be no danger to the community in this place because its viability depended upon secrecy.  It was in a warehouse district, unmarked, and large alert men leaned against the walls with folded arms, watching the clientele.  I went back some years later, found the building, and saw when I circled the block that the back entrance was protected by a high brick maze (probably bullet-proof) that allowed cars to pull in so that the distance to cross when entering was very short and unseen.  Of course, such an arrangement -- which would protect emerging women -- was also convenient for taking in drugs -- or drugged women.  Use your imagination.  

Men can also be prostitutes.  But women’s vulnerability is shared by boys.  Small children are, of course, vulnerable to everything and adults must take responsibility for their safety.  Across the planet trafficking in small children of both sexes is common.  We’re told that in some places when they are no longer useful, maybe infected with HIV,  they are simply taken into the woods and shot.    

I’m thinking of Tim’s adolescent boys, sometimes legally adult, depending on the country.  Self-supporting, they are under the same economic sword as women, which is one kind of vulnerability.  Smaller and less developed than they will someday be, they are vulnerable to violence.  (Think Mathew Shepard.)  Not experienced enough to have awareness, strategy, and a portfolio of possible resources, they can be deceived or overpowered.  Spared the contempt some men have for women, they are nevertheless hated for being “pansies,” “nancys,” -- or should I say, “marys.”  A further vulnerability is simply being invisible, their existence denied and ignored by the larger culture, even though in hard times it is boys who are thrown out of their homes or who leave voluntarily, runaways.

I’m aware of my own vulnerability for even being associated with Tim Barrus or writing about these subjects.  It is my age, isolation in an orderly small town, and education that makes me able to talk about it in ways I could not when I lived in the city.  Even as a clerical person in a city bureaucracy, I felt I had to keep bear spray in my desk because of the raging people who sometimes came to the counter over nuisance issues.  And yet Portland is or was known to have chickenhawks who included local politicians.  (The mayor of Portland was caught shtupping his underaged baby sitter.  Female.)

This failure of awareness (both ignorance and suppressed knowledge) leads to inconsistent laws and enforcement, which undermine the integrity of the police and courts, and fail to protect all citizens and youngsters.  Tim and the boys often stage workshops on how to keep safe: partly practicalities like tying safe bondage knots, partly safeguards like taking another boy to the location to watch from nearby, maybe by carrying a tiny “smart phone.”  HIV-AIDS is not the only hazard.  Men pay to beat boys and get carried away.  The core group of Cinematheque had already discovered that pay-per-view cyber-sex was safer in the immediate situation, but could create a known public image that put them at risk from stalkers who wanted to “own” them or destroy them.  Thus, masks.  In the past Tim had also worked with female prostitutes to improve their safety and, indeed, much of what he taught came FROM them and their sorry experiences.  He himself had been raped.

Law makers are often liberal white people who simply don’t have enough raw and rough experience.  Considering whether pasties and g-strings will incite disorder if they are left off is a far cry from trying to protect sex workers.  Underlying disgust distorts reality and encourages denial.  Someone needs to bridge the gap in consciousness.  But it’s very easy to use disgust to shut up any reports.

SUSPECT CATEGORIES OF A CERTAIN KIND

My years at animal control were an education in the relationship between practical order-keeping and laws as tools.  One of the most basic lessons came when working with the citizen panel that was charged with rewriting our animal laws encountered the leash law.  What could be more simple?  A dog out of a house or yard had to be on a leash.  Then came the questions.  Many of them went to definitions.

One man walked his dog on a thirty-foot rope.  He said it was a leash.  How short did it have to be before it was a leash as we intended?

A dog was dragging its leash along behind it.  The owner’s defense was that the law said nothing about a human being on the other end of the leash -- just the dog on one end.  So we had to define a leash as being held by a person.

One huge dog was “walked” by a child who was not strong enough to restrain the dog.  So now we had to say that the person holding the end of the leash was capable of managing the dog on the other end.

There is a kind of leash on a retractable spring strong enough that if the leash extends and then retracts very quickly when fingers are in the way, it will snap the fingers off.  Should this kind of leash be illegal?  Should that be in the leash law?

But I don’t want to talk about leashes.  I want to talk about the difficulty of defining a “group” in a global and changing society, particularly when that group is controlled through the use of disgust to evoke stigma.  Specifically, I want to consider sexual orientation and tribal affiliation and, briefly, how they interact.  This is close but not the same as the legal term Nussbaum calls “suspect classification,” which is about legal classes that are rooted in prejudice or classes about something that can’t be intentional and isn’t relevant, like skin-color.  But my discussion is about the impossibility of finding a clear edge to the group, a guide to who is clearly in and who is clearly out.

First, “homosexuality”.  Our understanding of sexual orientation (not gender, not anatomy, but desire for physical relationship) has been much changed in several ways.  Brain theory is one, now that we can see cells “light up” when they are at work.  This meets with psychological theories of genetic inclination and subsequent imprinting and molding.  Research makes it clear that individuals are shaped by innate-from-conception qualities, the bonding and attachments of early childhood, the possibilities present in the culture, and the initiative of the person his or herself.  There are so many forces at work that it is impossible to describe an archetypal homosexual of either sex or of mixed or changed sexes.  Therefore, how can they be grouped except voluntarily or according to some kind of arbitrary stereotype?  Criminalization of some practices might be one way to define group, since the person would have to be judged in court and determined either guilty or not guilty.  The trouble is that there is no sexual practice that is exclusively homosexual -- everything is also done by heterosexuals.  

Differing sexual practices are accepted or rejected by different societies in different locations at different times as possibly okay or possibly criminal.  The impact of anthropology and what I call the “Star Trek principle” -- that every culture is a whole that should be left unbroken -- has made it clear to some ill-fitted people that moving to a different place might solve their problem and sometimes it does.  More recently, as primitive tribes fade away and the possibility of creating “tribes” is ever more real with the help of the Internet, the "tribe" of gays -- as seen in San Francisco in the Seventies -- offers inclusion to one kind of stigmatized person.  Of course, then tribes form within tribes.  Tragically, a bit of wandering RNA code affected the larger tribe in the same way that smallpox wiped out the larger group of Native Americans.

Native Americans will not appreciate me saying this, because they have enough trouble wrestling with their own stigmas and accusations of disgusting attributes without having gays mentioned.  But their success in gaining sympathy and creating an aura of spiritual superiority has made them an alluring destination for misfits, including gays.  Anyone who deals in artifacts or Western art knows these quiet and often very charming and wise men with no NA DNA.  In fact, it’s uncomfortable to draw attention to them, for fear of inviting a fire storm.  Don’t ask, don’t tell.

Native Americans, as first encountered in 1492, have been a puzzle to Europeans.  Not all Europeans thought they were quite human, a stigmatic disgust that made it possible to classify them as animals -- to be killed as convenient.  Of course, some of these tribes were capable of killing, even eating their victims, even forcing the victims to eat themselves.  This, of course, did not confirm their human status to Euros.

Also troublesome has been the concept of tribes that came from deep in European history.  Tribes were thought to be like “nations,” sort of pre-nations.  Notions of territory, hierarchy and ownership that were unknown to the American people, controlled what the European empires and then the newly formed American countries did to keep order.  Lists were good, they thought, so they made lists of all the people in a particular tribe.  Of course, DNA was still unknown, so they used the principle of provenance, “begats” as has been traditional since the Bible.  Who was your mother, who was your father?  This is what entitled a person to commodities, assigned them a territory, made them a negotiating and sovereign body.  It was a problem that children more or less belonged to everyone in the group.  Mothers could be identified, but the concept of “mother” often extended to her sisters.

Sovereignty was necessary because these were intact cultures in the “Star Trek” sense: they had developed ecologically effective relationships among themselves and with the land that kept them alive while sustaining what they needed.  They were exactly the kind of fascinating development that anthropology was devised to describe, because it was assumed that they would stay separate like that, without intermarriage, and then die out over time.  They did not.  Instead they gradually feathered over into diasphoras.

People talk about how the full-bloods have disappeared.  They have not.  But they are now mixed among the tribal rolls of many groups with no one tribe able to claim a majority.  There is no DNA marker than can definitively prove someone is “in” or “out” of a specific tribe, because they were always a center with a penumbra, always drawing in people of other DNA and always spinning off people from the most characteristic DNA markers.  The idea that full-bloods are gone and therefore so are “Indians” is in the interest of those people who would like to close down reservations and their pesky sovereignty, which becomes easier as the original generations recede into the past.  If they can say, “there are no more Indians,” then perhaps they can escape the treaties.

These two groups, one based on origin in indigenous people at first encounter and one newly formed according to public notions of sexual predilections, stand in interesting juxtaposition.  Unless a democracy can frame laws that protect them both, it is not truly a democracy.  Neither group wants to surrender their identity, but time morphs that identity in unexpected ways.  If it is agreed that “homosexual” and “heterosexual” are Procrustean terms that have outlived their usefulness once sexuality is agreed to be multi-various across a spectrum, is the group undone?

What is the future of “native Americans?”   Only those who have provenances identified with the original inhabitants?  Those who have “citizenship” rights with a tribe?  Those who can produce a family tree?  So far the government has solved tribes the same way it has solved religious groups: if the group says they’re in, they are.  That means no two tribes use the same criteria.

And yet there are many laws about both homosexuals and Native Americans.  We’ll be wrestling with this for a long time.

DISGUSTING!

Martha Nussbaum is suddenly the legal/religious thinker du jour, a writer of such fearlessness and logical clarity that she takes on the really impossible subjects without flinching.  At the moment Gerald Fetz on the Montana Humanities Roundtable is trying to get a reading discussion going, based on her book called “Not for Profit.”  The subject is  really why we are discarding the arts/humanities, but so far everyone is mostly praising each other and the humanities.  Kim Anderson has doubts but is not expressing them yet.

I’m reading Nussbaum's “From Disgust to Humanities: Sexual Orientation and Constitutional Law.”  She’s a very clear writer, but it’s probably easier to get a sense of her thought by watching YouTube videos of her.  This book is part of a series from Oxford University Press and she was asked to write it.  Her ideas of disgust come in large part from thinking about untouchables in India, who were originally “untouchable” because they handled excrement and the dead, among other “lowly” and repetitious jobs.  Now that even much of India has proper plumbing, the names identified in the public mind as “untouchables” remain a stigma.  There is even more disapproval of people who change their names.

The basic idea is that considering the nature of some people to be “disgusting” is a way of controlling them, keeping them in their place.  Though it seems as though the objectionable qualities are objective descriptions, justified in the public mind by associating them with nastiness like excrement, stink, bugs, ooze, slime, disease  (J.K. Rowling’s “mud people”) , it often becomes obvious that calling them disgusting is a prelude to treating them like animals, excluding them, beating up on them, defunding them, and -- in the most extreme -- herding them into the prison camps and gas chambers of the Holocaust.  Retarded and otherwise disabled or crippled people, gypsies, gays, Jews, dissidents, and so on were all considered “disgusting” and therefore their extermination could be called “cleansing.”

My own most vivid witness has been to the stigmatizing of Native Americans and part of the counter-battle has been getting tribal children to give up their internalized self-definition of “disgusting.”  Missionaries of various kinds used this to force change in the lives of tribal people.  They combined the “cleansing” idea of baptism with the “cleansing” of eternal fire in the Afterlife and linked two words into a phrase I still hear:  “dirty Indians.”  The push-back, both by Indians themselves and by guilt-stricken idealists (mostly back East), was to make them so ethereally noble that they were hardly physical, defined as spiritual beings with connections to Another World.  

In the practical world, a stigmatized person is thought to deserve punishment for the original sin of being dark-skinned or poor.  A couple of decades ago an enrolled Blackfeet drunk (oh, disgusting!) pestered around a bar until the bar owner simply shot him dead.  The tribal people started out being indignant but pretty soon they drifted back to the bar, saying that the drunk asked for it with his disgusting behavior.  Times have changed.  Not long ago three brothers who liked violence picked out what they thought was a likely victim in the parking lot of a bar at quitting time: a drunk Indian ranch hand.  But in the middle of their melee, another Indian -- a tribal council member and his wife -- tried to stop it, so the fun-lovers turned their fists and boots on them.  The interveners  were not powerless.  They knew how to use the law.  The brothers are serving jail time.  But even the tribal council member was accused of the disgusting practice of hanging around in a bar until closing time.

Following the example of blacks who resent the n-word and find that forbidding it is a powerful weapon in resisting disgust, some years ago the word “squaw” was fingered as a vehicle of disgust.  The associations with the word “squaw” had come to be pejorative: a squat, dark, old, dirty, possibly infected woman with no powerful husband who could legitimately be used by men as convenient and then discarded or killed.  Evidence is in the newspapers and police dossiers across both the United States and Canada.  (I suspect in Mexico as well.)  “Squaw” is considered by some to be equivalent to “whore”, not least because poverty and social disorder (as is often seen on reservations) is one source of sex workers.  Some of them have learned to be dangerous themselves.

Respectable Indian women who know how to use the system came to the conclusion that eliminating the epithet “squaw” -- which is scattered over all the maps of the continent as thickly as the words “willow,” “beaver” and “deer” -- would get rid of the stigma.  It did get rid of a lot of old maps and a lot of money necessary to rename everything on new maps.  This deed was done in part because of the conviction that “squaw” meant “cunt,” which is a forbidden dirty, slimy, disgusting word.  (Scholarship showed that “squaw” did NOT mean sexual parts but rather gender, which is as much a social role as an anatomical part.  A hard distinction to grasp.)  And this took the conversation to the familiar white man conviction that women in general are basically disgusting.  

Compare other epithets for Indian people:  “buck” or “papoose.”  Papoose is close to the European ‘puppet” or doll, making an Indian child less of a real human family member.  (Compare "pickaninny.")  “Buck” has implications of sexual potency and physical strength.  Those word-inventing men (because they wrote) boasted, half-sheepish/half-proud, “when I was a young buck,” meaning “when I got into fights, had adventures, and prowled for women.”  Like a dark-skinned man.  “Before I became civilized.”  Unlike that Indian buck idling on the porch.

Today’s civilized people do not use such words.  They come from hierarchal assumptions based on the European empires, particularly the English, who used stigma to control their subject countries.  But contemporary Native American people must still emphasize their professional, educated, and meticulously conventional qualities in order to get respect.  Even the school children respond to the advertising-driven obsession with cleanliness, not smelling, “proper” clothes and other appearance markers that are meant to prevent disgust.

But then a curious wave of resistance is always in such situations, used by those who either make victimhood into an entitlement or those who embrace the disgustingness with slogans, markers of the ghetto, flaunting sexuality of every kind, and shouting words used as markers, not just of filthiness but also of sex and evil.  

It is so powerful a kind of terrorism that it can drive the missionary-minded, empire-seeking, power-invested, domination-obsessed into apoplectic violence.  The law must deal with it constantly.  Literature and art address it everywhere.  But the academic “humanities” people are afraid to, which is why they’ve become irrelevant.  Except that they are now part of the problem, defining every nonconformity as “disgusting.”  Or to use their phrase, “so ugly.”

SONGS WITH WINGS

There are two “sound shifts” that herald spring in Valier.  One is the soft surf of newly emerged leaves, which is still weeks in the future.  The other is the much earlier birdsongs.  This year the first bird song (if you can call it that) I was aware of was on a fog-bound morning walking to the post office when I heard a forlorn single honk from a Canada goose, flying so low that it was a good thing most of the houses here are only one story tall.  I figured it was just a scout on reconnoitre from Great Falls where some geese winter over.  

But then my correspondent Paul said that on his country property in Idaho there were definitely geese -- the only trouble was that the water was still frozen so they were out there jumping up and down in unison to break the ice open.  (For you city folks, that’s a joke.)  A few days later pairs and family groups were flying through Valier.  And a little later than that, the high skeins were traveling through with their high eerie bugling.  Funny how comical honking is when it’s up close but how musical when it’s coming down from far away.

I have doves living in one of my blue spruces.  They are a busy and amorous bunch, careless of their eggs and defiant of the town owl, and I’m unclear whether they are there over winter or not.  Their incessant coo-roo is meant to be romantic, I’m sure, but it can get wearing.  Maybe that’s because I rarely actually SEE them, unless one comes out onto the bare cottonwood branches to take a little break from the boudoir or is on the ground to load its gizzard with gravel.   They clearly don’t eat the same grain as the rock pigeons around the grain bins.  The latter have simply disappeared.  I suspect they’ve been poisoned -- Valier likes poison and has the high cancer rates to show for it.   The gulls are much fewer than usual as well, though this year the water is high enough that their nests on the island in Lake Francis are protected from ATV assault.  I never see magpies in town, but also fewer in the countryside.  It’s worrying.

I’m appreciative of the brisk rattle of the little woodpeckers who work on that cottonwood tree all winter, probing the crevices of the rough bark.  It’s a silver cottonwood which I dearly love and I’m happy to have it tended, so I was UNhappy when Squibbie, my fat tortoiseshell cat, managed to catch one and bring it into the kitchen through the cat flap.  I heard it hit the glass of the picture window, knocking itself “cuckoo” (technical ornithological term) enough that it was still so I could take it in two hands and carry it back out to the tree, where it seemed to recover and proceed with its work.  

Cats may be the reason there are far fewer birds this spring.  Concern about the number of stray cats is increasing and the deputy and I have consulted about measures to take, like securing old warehouses and other refuges and buying a few live-traps for the town to use regularly.  I would be pretty upset if my own cats were killed or removed, so I don’t like the idea of poison, and a town is no place to be shooting, but there are plenty of people here who despise cats as vermin.  Oddly, they feel the same way about chickens.  Valier has been echoing Great Falls’ chicken wars in which high income people want to keep a few hens for pets and low income people regard them as the first steps towards the total degradation of the one civilized place they have ever lived.  “I fed chickens on the farm, I know chickens, I HATE chickens!” is the cry.

Early in the spring a small eager woman at the post office told me about her hardy apple tree, which hangs onto its fruit over the winter.  Attracted by an unfamiliar sound, she looked out the window to see her tree swarming with robins gobbling up the shriveled apples.  I didn’t see it myself, but the mental image had me wishing I were an artist.  I’m hearing media stories about robins being much fewer this year and singing at night because around cities the noise level is too high for them to communicate with possible helpmates for nest building and (ahem) the small ceremonies that produce eggs.  

When the fields finally begin to clear and it’s warm enough to drive around a bit with my elbow out the pickup window, I listen for the first meadowlark which, to my heart, has a bird song approaching the sacramental, though the house finch is a close second.  Meadowlark song is near being pronounced words and they say different things in different places.  The first ones I deciphered said,  “Would you like to go up in my swing?”  A story I read claimed they said, “I love fresh fruit!”  This year they are quiet, but that may be because that the empty space in the middle of town where they normally live is currently the scene of construction for our second water tank.

Normally there is a house finch family that lives in the trees in front of the Baptist church next door, but I haven’t heard them this year.  I’ve heard other house finches in town and dearly love their twisting shining arias which are the same here as they were in Portland when I was growing up and they lived in the walnut trees across the street.  I’m  not even hearing the alarm sounds from them and the robins, which is beeping like a big piece of equipment backing up.  Robin warnings are similar.

The most mysterious and rare song in Valier is one I was used to in the forests of Oregon: the hermit thrush.  Sound is different among big mossy trees but I still recognize the notes.  The most typical summer song on the prairie, at least near any small stream or barrow pit puddle is the “breeeeee” of red-winged blackbirds.

It occurred to me that there must be many bird songs online and I began to listen to them, but had to stop because Squibbie woke up from her morning nap and began trying to get inside my computer.  A few owl hoots put her back on her tail.  As a kitten she was nearly carried off by that town owl.  I came out just in time.  She hasn't forgotten.