JESUS THE HOMELESS STATUE

Jesus the Homeless

Timothy Schmalz specializes in “religious sculpture,” however you define that -- I mean, is it a mother nursing a child or a dying naked man on a cross or is it Buddha or a totem pole, or something else?  He decided he would create a contemporary image of an all all-too-common human condition and link it to “christianity” -- reputed to be the main religion of the richest and most powerful nation on the planet, its name taken from the title of Jesus the Christ who theoretically came to change the world two millennia ago.  Well . . .  we have park benches now.  Much better for the homeless people than sleeping directly on the ground.  The two main religious institutions located for possible placement would not accept the statue.  They were Catholic and their new Pope had just chosen the name of Francis who was deliberately homeless.  That’s “Saint” Francis.

The Toronto Star newspaper says:

“Despite the message of the sculpture — Jesus identifying with the poorest among us — it was rejected by two prominent Catholic churches, St. Michael’s Cathedral in Toronto and St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York.

“Homeless Jesus had no home,” says the artist, Timothy Schmalz. “How ironic.”

“Rectors of both cathedrals were enthusiastic about the bronze piece and showed Schmalz possible locations, but higher-ups in the New York and Toronto archdiocese turned it down, he says.

“‘It was very upsetting because the rectors liked it, but when it got to the administration, people thought it might be too controversial or vague,’ he says. He was told ‘it was not an appropriate image.’”

“The Toronto archdiocese tried to help him find an alternative location, including St. Augustine’s Seminary in Scarborough. But Schmalz, who describes his work as a visual prayer, wanted to reach a wider, secular audience. “I wanted not only the converted to see it, but also the marginalized. I almost gave up trying to find a place.”

“Now the sculpture stands near Wellesley St. W., outside Regis College at the University of Toronto. It’s a Jesuit school of theology, where priests and lay people are trained, with an emphasis on social justice.”

Here’s a video of the sculptor himself discussing why he made this life-sized bronze.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2rAys_ON8rg

These archdiocesan “higher-ups” should fire their public relations advisors, since they have now managed through their rejection to make Timothy Schmalz famous, far more than if they had just quietly accepted the monument.   They look like fools.  They should hire some new theologians while they’re at it.  And maybe the Pope, instead of harassing nuns, should turn his attention to men in red skullcaps with empty heads and hearts.

It’s always true that the people who are on the ground, on the street, doing front line work in engagement with the people who need help, are open to the Jesus of the Gospels.  It is the people at the top who become invested in covering up, whitewashing, etc.  They don’t mean it’s too controversial or vague.  They mean it’s not good marketing strategy for the institutional corporation that makes their lives prosperous.  They have been selling the idea that being virtuous will make you rich.  (It’s hard to sell Heaven these days, when a McMansion seems so much more accessible.)  Churches get people to give them money with the argument that the giver will look generous and thoughtful, which will help them make better (sharper) business deals.

by Saint-Gaudens

Statues with drapery always intrigue me and this one is no exception.  They suggest the human form in an ambiguous way, quite unlike the opposite practice of portraying the nude body.  And yet what this draped homeless person (genderless to appearances) reveals is the wounded vulnerability of the feet.  There is room on this park bench for a person to sit alongside the feet and it must be natural to caress those bare feet.  The Pope has washed a lot of feet, and not just in Rome, though they were all no doubt carefully pre-selected for him.  Can he get through the layers of snobbery, collusion, and gate-keeping around him?  We’re all wondering.  He has hired a Franciscan to help him.

By now I’ve watched maybe a half-dozen film versions of the story of Francis of Assissi and his progression from wealthy son to homeless monk.  I began because of the new Pope to see why he chose that name and I’m not finished.  Some of these movies are on YouTube, both the pious ones and the inscrutable ones.   The entire sumptuously seductive Zefferelli version, “Brother Sun, Sister Moon,” is at:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVG2r7TgMMw  There are others.  I’ll post more reviews tomorrow.

As it turns out, being a Franciscan is not at all like being a priest.  It is a self-identification that only means living in the way the Francis did.  One can be male or female, not even Catholic, cloistered or not, recognized by a community or not.  Francis wrote out some rules -- which are basically from the Gospels, principles of living -- and unlike the Boy Scouts, that’s the whole thing -- whether or not a person is gay or believes in God or not.  It’s a Tao, a Way, a bare footprint.

The Catholic church in the 12^th century had a problem:  their organization and protocols weren’t matching the experienced world very well.  Soon the Protestants would break away entirely, but in the meantime there were groups who diverged without the intention of being challengers.  Not quite heretical.  They were penitentes, humiliati, impoverati, mendicants, eremetical -- Franciscans.  Three hundred years later, they had their own internal schism in which Mateo de Bascio founded the Capuchins, the “hooded ones.”  (Mateo was not made a saint.) There were others, always trying to get back to origins and always challenging the formal Roman bureaucracy to think how to assign them to the realm of regulation and responsibility.   They must’ve had a helluva flow chart.   Some popes fought these groups and some popes engaged and certified them.  As the shrewd cardinal towards the end of “Brother Sun, Sister Moon” confides to his colleague, “This man will bring the poor back to us.”  But since penitent, self-humiliating, begging, poor hermits are hard to bribe or punish,  they always elude the system, butterflies that can’t be netted.  They exist in every religious context on the planet as well as the secular, because they are not institutionally-based but anchored in the mystical context of the Sacred.

It looks to me as though Timothy the Sculptor is also defining “religious sculpture” as art that inspires the same behavior and compassion as that of Saint Francis.  The only problem is that a life-sized bronze is an enduring but expensive undertaking.  Possibly it might better have been made of bread, so that the homeless could eat it.  Maybe someone will decide to bake bread in the shape of a homeless person under a blanket and hand it out to the poor.  Maybe I should try it myself.  I could make some little feet out of Sculpy polymer clay that could be re-used for the next baking . . .  What a communion!

"OPPORTUNITY, MONTANA" by Brad Tyer

“Opportunity, Montana” by Brad Tyer showed up on a list of “best” books about small towns, but it turns out not to be that at all.  The sub-title is the real story:  “Big Copper, Bad Water, and the Burial of an American Landscape.”  It’s the same carpet-bagger environmentalist account of the relationship between Butte and Missoula, the two towns that in my opinion are the LEAST like Montana towns.  The short version is that Butte, that rough and brawling big pit of minesmen and extractors, dumped all their poisonous left-overs downriver onto the humanities university town, which managed to make a LOT of money for William Clark, first by digging up the metal, then by getting the contract to haul it all back upstream and dump it on nearby “Opportunity” where it will gradually seep downstream into Missoula again.

Tyer’s website is http://www.bradtyer.com/Brad_Tyer_Portfolio/Front_Page.html

Mixed with this scandalous but hardly unusual or unknown display of opportunism are two other threads:  Tyer’s love of canoeing rivercourses and his attempt to love his overbearing and right wing father whose style seems quite like that of William Clark.  The father made his living by treating sewage.  “Shit Creek” is often mentioned in this book, though it’s mostly description and metaphor rather than geography.  The photo of Tyler on the dust jacket shows a man in front of a storm with a bunched-up, determined face.  A professional journalist, he has now gone back to Texas where he came from.  Group him with Rick Bass (also from Texas) and Richard Manning who writes this kind of book.  Manning’s wife, Tracy Stone-Manning also an environmentalist, was interviewed for this book.

So if I’m highly resistant to both Butte and Missoula for opposite reasons, annoyed by both their pride of being so rough and their pride of being so smooth, then why did I bother to read this book?  To be a good citizen in a little town like Valier, one needs to take an interest in both old sewer systems and new treatment lagoons.  Valier’s sewage lagoon just passed its water quality test without violations for the second month in a row.  We’ve had an aeration problem which will cost big bucks to remediate.  It takes a whole day once a month to work through the protocols for collection of samples to send the state for testing.  The penalties are severe and the standards keep rising.  It means money.  The other reason I pay attention is that I worked for the City of Portland Bureau of Buildings where my consciousness was raised to the point where I never see a settlement without wondering where things come in, where things go out, and what the ground is like.  Sustainability in small towns is often just a matter of pride rather than practicality.  People move here thinking it will be cheap.  Little do they know.

There is a tendency in America -- from the very beginning and probably even among Indian tribes in the old days -- to seek salvation by place.  “Somewhere a place for us,” the lovers sing.  Over and over the romantics imagine grand Montana, arrive, and are disillusioned.  The trope is Montana horizons painted on the sides of the screeching Chicago El cars.  Newcomers are good for Montana, since they bring money and skills -- unless they are moguls of extractive industries and their methods are ruthless.   It’s still possible to raid the land.  Heightened consciousness about grasslands to the east of the Rockies will take a while longer since soil erosion and drought are a little more subtle than hard-rock mining with dynamite.  The importation of muscle from Europe is not so necessary, so the ferment of politics is also a little slower.  But it’s there.  Brian Schweitzer, our former governor, is working on it.  Unclear which side he’s on.  Richard Manning’s book, Grassland, sketches it out.  Manning has no website, but he’s on YouTube  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xvyRd-uVqM

There’s also this parallel idea about “salvation by book.”  It’s not the same as writing “the Great American Novel,” but something more like progressive era pride in muck-raking -- in this case literal.  Tyer helps us with short lyric passages on the land or in the water.  Even so, there are sometimes moments when one just wants to roll up in a ball and deny the whole thing.

Also, there is an abiding notion of “salvation by future generations” which, of course, is followed by a desire to control because what’s salvation if it’s on some kind of foreign terms?  Or even a denial, like those of us now looking at the destruction of the Berkeley Pit and a landscape of “slickens”, poisonous sediments from mining, and cursing the memory of William Clark.  What good was the money?  Clark’s last heir was a reclusive old woman living in a hospital while her inherited mansions went empty and her fortunes were managed by lawyers, the chief beneficiaries.  At least Tyer, not inheriting any money, was sharpened by the conflict with his father into a willingness to look closely at ugliness and power.  His results will help us all if we can uncurl and think about it.

“Salvation” -- secular as well as religious -- is often defined by perpetuity, the idea that we can have things the same forever if we can just get control.  But now the idea has changed to participation, the evidence being that we exist as part of a complex, interacting whole.  We are not significant units of life that ought to be eternally preserved, but rather small forces that can influence everything to which we are connected.  Tyer doesn’t suggest what we ought to do.  It doesn’t seem as though anyone really knows.  Nor does he seem to grasp the idea that the earth cannot be destroyed -- just changed enough to eliminate humans.  It already makes us very uncomfortable.

Just the same, the evidence gathered into this dossier needs to be recorded and included by the rest of us: a salvation by book, place and generations as we all work forward in our persistent way.  In time the accumulation of the evidence may open the way we need to go before it is too late -- not for the planet, but for ourselves.

SAM STRACHAN, INVENTOR OF THE KOZY KAMP

A fancier of pop-up camping trailers -- a tent on a base with wheels -- asked for a short bio of my grandfather, Sam Strachan, who invented and sold the "Kozy Kamp."  Joel Silvey posts at http://www.popupcamperhistory.com .  This is what I sent him.

The Kozy Kamp, open and shut.

Sam and Beulah Strachan outside the folding house Sam built.

ARCHIBALD MITCHELL STRACHAN was born in Stevenston, Scotland, on June 17, 1850.  His wife, CATHERINE WELSH, was born in Kilmarnock, Scotland, on January 10, 1852.   Stevenston was a closely associated community to Kilmarnock.  They married July 25, 1873, in Kilmarnock, Scotland.   They had four children: Samuel S. Strachan (b. 1875); Jean Gillis Strachan (b. 1877), Jessie Mitchell Strachan (b. 1879) and Thomas Welsh Strachan (b.1892).

“Gillis,” “Mitchell” and “Welsh” are all family names.  The S in Sam’s name doesn’t stand for anything.  He wasn’t given a middle name, so added the S. because many businessmen at the time used double initials.

While the Strachan family was forming in Scotland, the American prairies were being cleared of the indigenous people.  Smallpox did most of the work.  They say Archibald was a proud man who subscribed to the thoughts of Thomas Jefferson.  He wanted the pride of being a landowner, a “gentleman farmer”.  He was also a skilled finish carpenter, which was good to fall back on when homesteading wasn’t paying enough.

I do not know the date of their emigration to the US, but it had to be between the birth of Jessie in Scotland and the birth of Thomas in South Dakota, so it was in the Eighties.   The economy of Stevenston was dependent on coal mining, which tuckered out in the Eighties. By that time the Sioux were confined to reservations and their range was opened for homesteading.  In DeVoe and Faulkton, where the Strachans staked their claim, the Sioux band had been Brulé Teton, "Brulé" meaning "burnt", perhaps because of prairie fires.

Sam was well-educated in Scotland and became a Faulkton, SD, school superintendent.   His wife, Beulah Swan Finney (b. 1871) was a teacher born in Quincy, Michigan, which was platted in 1870.  She told about walking with her mother on a path through the great forests of the times.  They met a group of Indian men who stood aside to make way for them.  Beulah claimed they said, “Squaws heap brave.”  I don’t believe they said that, but I believe the men stood aside and it took a little nerve to walk past them.

Sam and Beulah married September 19, 1901, after proving up individual but adjacent homesteads.  They moved to Swan River, Manitoba, in 1919.  Their first child, Samuel Archibald, was premature and died. (b. 1902).  Then came Bruce Bennett (1903), Glenn Gordon (1905), May Alice (1907) and Seth Stevens (1910).  Sam named his boys with double initials, but not his girl.  Maybe Beulah chose her name.

In Manitoba the family raised potatoes and then become distributors of Kovar Farm Machinery, especially a cultivator designed to pull up crabgrass, which was shipped to them in pieces and assembled by the family.  This taught them the skills for both the construction and the marketing of the Kozy Kamp, which was often done at fairs.  The family moved to Brandon where they bought the house of Martha Ostenso, author of “Wild Geese,” a famous and favorite Canadian novel about a tyrant in a farming family and the school teacher who boarded with them.  In the movie version Sam Shepherd plays the overbearing patriarch.   The Strachan children took college training in Winnipeg at the very new Manitoba Agricultural College, which would become the University of Manitoba.  When Bruce finished his BS, he went to Oregon State University to earn his MS in agriculture.  The family followed to Portland.  By that time import tariffs on the machinery had destroyed the Kovar business in Canada, but the Kozy Kamp business seemed hopeful until WWII started and steel, rubber and gas were all rationed.  

True to their careful Scots heritage, Sam and Beulah lived quietly in Portland until his death in 1951 and hers in 1953.  All four of their children are gone now, and two of their grandchildren have died.  There are two more generations, all urban, mostly professionals.  

One of the fulfilling ways to work on these family events is in terms of world events.  For instance, the Industrial Revolution that exhausted the coal deposits of Scotland and supported the Victorian middle class and public education, or the sequence of the clearing of American indigenous people from the prairie in order to replace nomadic hunters with agricultural families, are macro-history that the world shares.  It’s impossible to overestimate the consequences of two world wars and the economic forces that fed them and followed them.  Seth, who began by pasture-hopping in an open fabric one-person airplane, was a bomber pilot at the very heart of WWII and then a TWA pilot in the dawn of overseas tourism.

Sam Strachan was of a class of worker (after his brief career in education) once called “mechanics.”  He constantly tinkered with inventions, not so much in order to make money but because he liked to have tools in his hands.  The Kozy Kamp, the folding tent trailer, was remarkably fitted for traveling the West in the days before the highways became so dangerous and commercialized.  The Strachan boys had set out on bicycles to make road trips when they were young, but as adults they took their families with them.  When Sam and Beulah were scouting Portland, they built a wooden version of this camper on the back of a “Ranger” truck, an early RV.  For a month (December) they lived on a parking lot in downtown Portland, where it poured rain constantly.  In the afternoon, for a little relief from the Ranger, they went to the reading rooms of the YMCA and YWCA respectively and separately.  Occasionally they went to a music hall or lecture. Others from South Dakota were there and also some business prospects had been made by mail.

I'll close with a quick twist.   https://vimeo.com/43939405   The Sam Strachan in this video is not my grandfather but I’ll sure claim the guy.  Same genes, I think.  (He’s a surfer!!!)  Maybe a bodyboard is a far cry from a crabgrass cultivator -- maybe not.  Maybe surfing is a far cry from homesteading on prairie -- maybe not.  Takes guts, vision, respect for tools.  Traveling.

"FELT" MEANINGS UNDER THE WORDS

In some ways it makes no difference that M/L seminary has moved out of the building created specifically for them.  They never really integrated with what was going on around the U of Chicago except for the Div School program and whatever forays individual students made.  For a cross-disciplinary person like me (teaching, psych, art, writing, natural science, anthropology, etc) this was too bad.  Through books, later on, I found my way to Carl Rogers and Eugene Gendlin -- part of a community of thinkers who were redefining culture and how to survive in it.  And then I found that their offices were two doors down from M/L.  I had lived across the street but no one mentioned them.

In a way, that’s good, because now there is YouTube, which probably gives me far more personal access than if I’d gone over and knocked on their door.  At that time (’78-‘82) I would have defined myself more as a client anyway.  (Certainly M/L saw me that way, as well as a pass-through for money -- they called it “tuition.”)  Now I am a better parallel thinker for this core group and their enterprise is also much farther along.  Take a look at these three vids from Eugene Gendlin’s “Thinking on the Edge,” which are very relevant to what I’m trying to say about using “liminal” liturgy to access the felt sense of the Holy.  (If these puzzle you, try YouTube for “Eugene Gendlin Focusing.”)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Wv7rXHHBXDU#!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4QJB1Dttumk

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=res946x5KlI

The Div School at the time was not inclined to be friendly to the phenomenological, considering it to be secular.  They disallowed my struggle to express what was just below the surface of words, because their work was based on the Word and the Book.  To them the Sacred could only be contained by the institutional church.  That’s who paid their bills and hired those graduates who became ministers, though most of the students became Ph.D. certified professors of religion.  Comparative religions were as close as anyone would go outside the faith circle. 

For my uses, Gendlin is still not as skilled in the language of metaphor and image as I would like to be.  What he knows is the process of helping people access the body-knowledge in themselves as an extension of psychoanalysis that doesn’t need words.  He pulls them across the threshold into speech.  Not unlike Gestalt and the red chair.

Most of what I have learned comes from watching Tim Barrus, a poet but non-academic who in the last half-decade has been developing concepts in videos made by boys who are so far out on the edge that no one can see them: boys who have been able to survive only by doing sex work.  Some have found ways to cope.  Some have simply died.  Along the middle are boys who can find their way if they can name it or frame it, even if not in words.  Maybe it’s an empty swing set, maybe it’s a bed of kelp, maybe it’s a road through a forest, but most of us will respond to these images in “felt” concepts.  Not in words.  Not even under words.  Apart from words, but possibly leading to words.

The great thing about images is that they are a language that crosses national boundaries among French-English-Bantu-Chinese-signtalk.  Computers are capable of a good deal of rough language translation for print (still far from perfect) but a long ocean shoreline, a laughing dog, a mug on a windowsill, all say something that anyone can understand.  Sometimes I think that our fascination with the most extreme images -- torture/sex/electronic microscopic images/cosmic star nurseries -- has to do with all our curiosities and varying willingness to confront things that cannot be put into words.

This way of communicating has always been possible through the arts, but now it has exploded in the way that the printing press exploded writing.  Beginning with music videos and porn, both of them deplored by “civilized” adults, the image-in-service-to-relationship and even narrative has swept the world the way film in theatres once captured hearts and, um, minds.  First on television, ballooning to four-foot flat screens, and now shrinking to inches on handheld devices, sometimes with only earplugs, letting your imagination create the visuals -- this material goes everywhere.  It cannot be copyrighted, it cannot make a profit, it cannot be sequestered -- it just goes like water everywhere people go, and along the way it sweeps ideas into the flood.  How else could American culture change so quickly?

These images are not formless and their interaction is according to a grammar that most narrative artists know.  Juxtapositions, gaps, overlays, surprises and sometimes long long long boring pieces -- ten minutes of watching a technician copy DVD’s, only his hands going back and forth among machines, adjusting a knob, moving a dial.  Even that makes a point.  Dry humor, Warhol-style.  For the past six years I’ve had the advantage of watching this shifting group of videographers, most of them kids, develop a vocabulary of photos and strategies.  They have something to say: something desperate but central to our larger culture.  It is NOT commercially developed nor from “standard” assumptions because it has been underground and counterculture, released by technology the way that uncovering ancient seeds and watering them will cause an irruption of growth. 

I would like Eugene and Mary Gendlin and their group to take this work seriously.  No doubt they’ve never seen it, so how could they?  It’s not QUITE invisible, but almost.  The University of Chicago has a long history of turning esoteric intellectual consideration to the local, the humble, the underestimated.  Young black men on street corners, for instance.  So I thought, why isn’t it perfectly respectable for me, a grad, to bring high principles to bear on these guys and their work?

So far it turns out that the academics panic, just like the bureaucrats.  Many scholars certified to work on underground or counterculture issues are from the same background themselves.  That means they have to be solidly irreproachable; they know that the people judging them will be middle-class and upper-class.  Those judges don’t watch music vids.  If they go to YouTube at all, it’s to watch lectures.  If minority scholars get too far out of the norm, they won’t be able to pay off their loans.

My profs at M/L, or at least some of them in their early years, identified with the working class.  They wore work shirts with reverse collars and were proud to know guys who sweat for a living.  But once the same men were faculty, that was all just nostalgia.   Two profs at U of C have worked with troubled boys.  One is Martin Marty who in his earliest years of ministry was the mentor for the Blackstone Rangers on behalf of his Lutheran congregation and the other is Franklin Zimring, a law prof now in California, who has done a lot of research on boys “in the system.”  Neither had a therapy background.

My church internship was in Hartford, Connecticut, which is a major therapeutic community.  I was in a group specifically for future ministers and also in a one-on-one, a very sharp woman counselor.  The issue was mostly authority: I didn’t respect my ministerial supervisor.  I empathize with bad boys.  In the earliest stories they are often a source of the Sacred.  

THE ENGLISH TEACHER CASE FILES

Maybe the art teachers and the music teachers -- humanities -- have as much of a window into kids as English teachers do -- individual or en masse -- but maybe English teachers haven’t had quite the tools to respond to the issues of contemporary kids, either the early writers (6 to 10) or the adolescents.  Soon -- maybe now in some places -- the video arts will join or displace writing as the brain shapers.  Modern kids seem to learn the technicalities of electronics the way kids used to learn to read.  In fact, they seem to learn in images better than print.  They handle iPads more easily than they grip crayons.  They need no alphabet.  They don't write their name: they choose an avatar.

On Twitter I was challenged by a “Propriety Troll” who was intent on showing that I was misusing “antediluvian”  when it should have been “archaic.” He claimed he was saving civilization by preserving proper language.  I should have explained to him the difference between a prig and a prick.   A school aide once explained to me that the job of the English teacher is to correct everything that anyone says that’s wrong or improper.  She didn’t think I was a very good English teacher.  (She was not a high school graduate.)  By contrast, the administration didn’t think I should let the kids “express themselves.”  Because that just encourages them to be nonconformists.  So they didn’t think I was a very good English teacher either and my contract was not renewed.  This was high school, of course.

It was probably a good thing, because I’d gotten to the point that I’d sit with the papers in front of me, nearly weeping.  

A.  The kid whose face is constantly full of anguish and occasionally bruised.  

B.  The kid who is frozen and turns in an empty paper.

C.  The kid who is compliant and knows only pretty conventions.

D.  The kid who wants to be confronted and therefore writes material more shocking than Hustler.

E.  The kid who wants how to get a teacher into trouble, so hides black magic symbols all over his paper and then tips off his dad, who comes up to rebuke the principal on religious grounds.

F.  The boy who can barely write puts effort into a paper describing how he will kidnap and rape a girl.  It’s the best thing he’s written, but the content is criminal.  In the twenty years since then, he has acted it out.

I recently got into trouble on an academic listserv because a young comp prof at a two year college was appalled by the low level of writing skills.  She was baffled about how to grade their papers because there is no clear hierarchy of standards.  In fact, one of the things badly wrong about grading is the implication that it SHOULD be a hierarchy.  Students need to know three things:  where they are now, where they are expected to go, and how they might best go about getting there.  All three steps are complex, arguable, and maybe indeterminable.  Teachers might not KNOW how to address any of them, given the state of the education of educators.

What is most neglected is what comes BEFORE writing: the thinking, the forming of ideas.  And before that the reading.  Kids don’t read much now -- neither do adults.  When I was teaching on the rez, I always had a few kids in high school who could not read at all.  Either their brains had never learned the trick or they felt no need. Science suggests that brains find and use an equivalence between spoken sounds and making marks in different ways and some brains just can’t do it.  Forget pretty handwriting and the quarrel over print versus cursive.  By high school they could write their own name but understood it as some kind of action that certified a document, like a contract or check.  In their houses were no books, magazines or newspapers.  I did not know how to teach reading or how to diagnose their difficulties.  

In all backwaters there is a consistent tendency to mistake symbols and tokens as having a kind of “magic” value, they forget a piece of paper stands for the commercial value of a dollar and begin to hoard the paper itself.  This applies to the education process: some think a diploma is not certification that one has learned a certain body of knowledge and skill but rather a key to the future: automatically entitled by attendance, necessarily signed, and open to negotiation like a treaty.  When I was first starting out in 1961, I wrote a curriculum that specified certain achievements at each level, like:  “can write an organized three-paragraph essay with no more than five grammatical or spelling errors.”  Turned out that not many could do it and those who couldn’t would fight.  In any case, grammar and even spelling can be arguable, to say nothing of content.

Add to that the difficulties presented by being cross-cultural.  English more than any other subject is thinly disguised assimilation.  Freshman comp at any college is really teaching (arbitrarily) how to be the kind of person wanted.  This is relatively conscious when dealing with two different cultures, but now the college -- like everything else -- is engulfed in a new culture that is a matter of generations rather than countries.  Students entering college today have formidably developed brains when it comes to visual literacy (non-verbal interpretation of metaphor and gesture) and are often multi-lingual, one of those languages being that of the “thumb-bumpers” who text/photo/send in a constant stream.  They can interpret and absorb vids more quickly than I can figure out what I’m looking at.  What they have to say to each other is often reduced to like/dislike, which seems to have more to do with solidarity than emotion.  They speak in music -- not name that tune, but the literal music.  Not the lyrics -- what adult can understand them anyway?  The style and thrust, the magic of it, the consciousness.

It’s folly to oppose or suppress this, but some professors understand that to be their task, like missionaries intent on suppressing tribal ceremonies.  The young prof became quite emotional and felt she was insulted by my remarks -- partly, I think, because she didn’t understand what I was saying (not that I was that clear) and partly because she herself is being “graded” hierarchically by the administration in a self-contradicting way.  She should not flunk a lot of kids but they should all conform to expectations.   At some point she will get past this stuff and have the clarity to see the human beings behind the writing.  That’s when the deeper and more worthy struggle begins.   Part of it will be keeping the job.

LEVI JULIAN BURD

LEVI J. BURD, BROWNING, RANCHER AND OILMAN, DIES

Great Falls Tribune, Vol.69, No 357, Sunday, May 6, 1956

Levi Julian Burd, 78, Browning rancher and oilman, died Saturday morning at a Great Falls hospital.

Private funeral services will be at 11 a.m. Monday at the George Co. with Rev. Vernon Hanks officiating.  Cremation will follow.

Burd, a Montana native, had been active until he was hospitalized two weeks ago after suffering a stroke.  He suffered another stroke Thursday night.  Five years ago he underwent brain surgery.

Burd was born Sept. 7, 1877, at Sun River, the son of Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Burd.

His father came to Virginia City from Michigan in 1864 in search of gold and stayed to establish a ranching empire that extended from the Sun River north to Canada.

The family later moved to Choteau where Burd, the last survivor of a family of six children, received his education.  He also attended Gonzaga University at Spokane.

At the age of 12, Burd’s father made him a representative in charge of his outfit which joined with wagons and wranglers of other ranches in finding and branding cattle on the range.

These roundup teams would leave Choteau in March and travel to the Sun River, Great Falls and into the Sweetgrass Hills seeking cattle.  They usually ended their job in November.  At that time there were no fences or homestead farms in the region.

Following his father’s death, Burd managed the vast estate.

He married Daisy Francis Wetzel of Fort Benton Dec. 1, 1897, at Holy Family Mission near Browning and the couple ranched in that area until Burd’s death.  They celebrated their golden wedding anniversary here in 1947.

Burd served two terms on the Montana livestock board.  He had been active in promoting the oil industry in Glacier county and managed the Levi Burd Trustee Oil Interests in association with a son-in-law, B.P. McNair.

Survivors include the widow; two daughters, Mrs. Ben P. McNair, formerly of Great Falls, now of Laguna Beach, CA., and Mrs. Dorothy Cassutt, Detroit, and a grandson, Richard Cassutt, Browning rancher.

____________________________

Levi Burd, who was thirty when the 1907-08 census was taken, married Daisy Wetzel, who was a sister of Pearl Wetzel Hagerty.  Levi Burd and Wright Hagerty were the two richest tribal men on the Blackfeet reservation, worth $100,000 in the Thirties.  They ranched five miles apart along the Milk River.  Both were active in tribal politics, oil development, sheep and cattle.  One of Bob Scriver’s prized possessions was Wright Hagerty’s custom saddle.  It was one of his markers of success.

Levi Burd’s mother, Susan Two Guns, was married three times:  first, to Sam Burd, who was white; then to Anthony Austin; and third to Two Guns Whitecalf “in the custom of the country,” for 35 years.  Her father was Good Medicine.  Her half-sister, Gretchen, (same father) was the wife of David Duvall, the informant for Clarke Wissler, the first anthropologist to seriously study the Blackfeet.  Susan was well-connected.  

In fact, the Burd/Hagerty/Two Guns Whitecalf complex is an excellent illustration of how power and wealth develops in a delineated hybrid group.  There are cross-overs that supply starter investment, a family conviction of superiority and entitlement that lends confidence, lines of private communication between Indian and White as well as among contingents of full-blood, mixed blood, and hardly-any-blood.  Levi Burd was capable of putting on a beaded white buckskin parade outfit plus Sioux eagle-feather bonnet in order to visit Washington, D.C.  But he normally wore a suit appropriate for visiting a bank.  In that guise one might assume he was Mexican or Mediterranean, a stocky man with sturdy features.

His most remarkable alliance has only recently come to light in the process of Joyce Smith sorting her aunt’s papers, which include correspondence with Clare Sheridan, Winston Churchill’s cousin, who was on the Blackfeet Reservation in the summer and fall of 1937.  Officially, Clare was there as an artist and did indeed learn from Hans Reiss how to carve a tree trunk, not into a totem pole, but into a vertical sculpture, often religious.  She also stayed with the family of Gerald Tail Feathers on the Alberta side.  But she spent enough time with Levi Burd that people talked.  Technically, she was staying with Norma Smith, who was teaching in the one-room school house near the Burd ranch.  

Naturally, given Clare’s frank ideas about intimacy and the public suspicion about what rich men do, the idea was that they were having an affair.  But after looking at the references to Levi Burd in Paul C. Rosier’s indispensable book,  “Rebirth of the Blackfeet Nation, 1912-1954,” I suspect that was just a distraction -- sex is always a dependable distraction.  1937 was the early beginnings of WWII.  My premise is that Clare had been asked by Churchill to scout the territory between Alberta and Montana, which has always been a major oil-producing field.  No one understood the oil business better or was more deeply involved than Levi Burd.

Far from being a revenue-generating serendipity that only has to be pumped out of the ground and transported to market, the business of leases, price-setting, governmental regulation, profit-sharing was then-as-now very complex.  Properly handled, there was a lot of profit.  Without some expertise and restraint, the carpet-baggers got most of it.  Old-timer tribal leaders believed that the government was legally obligated to take care of them.  Mixed blood entrepreneurs just wanted the BIA out of the way.  There were times when Burd reached out to protect full-bloods, and other times when Two Guns Whitecalf bowed to the Middle Class mixed bloods.  It’s confusing enough to reconcile participation in mainstream America with the need to retain Blackfeet identity, without figuring out how some of these little surprises happen.  No doubt at least sometimes it was family loyalty, consciousness of a need, creating favors to be called in later.  

There is another reason for Churchill to want to know more about this region.  The Fenians, Irish independents, had a diaspora here descended from fur trading and the Red River metis community.  There must have been worry about how they would react to an English/German conflict since they had such a long history of conflict.  In the end they were neutral, but there would be the possibility of some “monkey-wrench gang” interdicting the access to oil that a nation needs in order to wage war.  Gerald Tail Feathers’ mother was half-Irish.  Clare and Churchill shared another cousin who was landed gentry in Ireland.

Earlier Clare had gone to Moscow to make portraits of the important Communist leaders.  She always insisted that she did not spy and did not go there to spy but simply as a sculptor of busts.  Churchill was very angry with her.  And yet her opinions and observations had to be valuable.

Levi Burd was not a lean and naked young man on a buffalo-running horse, but he was also an important figure in the history of his people as the globe became more connected and therefore more dangerous.  On the rez they call oil “the second buffalo.”  One goes out hunting for it while wearing a suit.

_______

I'm including this in the post instead of as a comment, because I think it is too important to overlook.  It's SO vital to look beyond just Montana.

Dear Mary:

Interesting article on Levi Burd, Clare Sheridan and oil wells.

Regarding your idea that Winston Churchill wanted Clare to scout the region, you may know that the burgeoning Turner Valley oilfield southwest of Calgary so interested Churchill that he visited the region in 1929 while in Calgary for a talk to the local branch of the Canadian Club.

To understand the importance of Turner Valley, note that by 1941 it was providing about one-quarter of all of Canada’s oil needs during the Second World War. Churchill is reported to have said during his 1929 visit: “There are unbounded possibilities both to Alberta and to the British Empire in this valuable oil-bearing structure.”

Churchill is further reported to have bought shares in three oil companies while in Canada. Maybe Churchill was also interested in Montana oil production.

As for any possible dalliance between Levi Burd and Clare Sheridan, I think it would have been unlikely – not impossible, just unlikely. I found an old report about the reservation (1914-15) in which loose morals are a center of discussion. The head of the police was living with a married woman, and it asked how he could enforce the Montana marriage code when he was breaking it himself. There was quite a discussion about native marriage and divorce customs, the citizenship status of natives and whether the rules of white men could apply to natives who weren’t then classified as U.S. citizens.

Given that sort of atmosphere, Burd’s mixed blood status and his rank in the community, it’s more likely he would have stayed clear of any hanky-panky that could have brought him unwanted scrutiny.

Burd had seen what happened to Robert Hamilton, a mixed blood activist on the reservation, and took a lesson from it. I say that based on an investigation in 1915 of Hamilton that I turned up which contains some pretty nasty claims about Hamilton being a cattle thief, forging checks, abandoning his family and the like. Enough that there was a scuffle at the Browning post office involving Hamilton and others in which Hamilton says he was badly manhandled. The affidavits are fascinating reading – a who’s who of Browning and reservation society, including James White Calf, Dick Sanderville and Wades in the Water.

Burd, who was active in local politics, often opposing Hamilton’s efforts, would have wanted to avoid any situation (like having an affair) that would have compromised his influence and standing in the community.

Ray Djuff

Calgary

HABITAT & VECTOR: The Day After Youth HIV-AIDS Day

April 10 was “Youth HIV-AIDS Day,” meant to raise awareness.  I’m writing this on April 10, but will post it on the 11^th.  I have a personal practice of recording thoughts on the day AFTER Christmas, Easter, and so on.  That’s when the truly faithful show up.  I usually sound this pretentious.  Too bad.

A habitat is a set of conditions for an individual or species that allows survival, though possibly a limited and crippling version of survival if there are bits missing.  The desirable habitat for a child is a family with a home.  Forces that destroy or prevent those conditions as a consequence eliminate or deform the creature, the child.  It is possible to change the nature of the “family” and “home” rather radically without deforming the child. A child needs safety, listening, food and shelter, et al, but can get them from peers or from more than one or two “parents” whose gender is irrelevant, or even from an institution. Some people will claim that a wolf can raise a baby.  (A wolf is unlikely to beat or fuck a baby.)

A vector is a carrier.  We’re most used to it referring to something that carries disease, like a mosquito, but it can also be entirely dry and theoretical, like an algorithm, or benign like a pollinator.  It is simply the fact of carrying something across that defines it the term -- whether that is good or bad depends upon what is carried.

An invasive species is something that comes from the outside, totally changing the balance of the habitat.  Pre-existing creatures there may be destroyed.  But maybe not.   Anything that comes in from outside can endanger the habitat and therefore the creatures in it, but healing and improvement can also come from outside.  Many of government’s operations are meant to change from the outside, though economics, providing services, and so on.  Do-gooders can be invasive species.  

It is less dangerous if change comes from inside the habitat since it will have more sensitivity, more “skin in the game,” and more knowledge about small details.  Change itself is usually seen by residents of the habitat as dangerous, destructive and therefore to be prevented -- even if it’s pretty clearly likely to make an improvement.  But some changes that are much craved by creatures in the habitat can turn out to be destructive or lethal, or even to crash the habitat.

Sequester, like vector, means to confine and possibly to hide away.  Sex work is a sequestered vector.  That is, people who do sex work are supposedly protected from the world at large and vice versa, by social stigma and the creation of things like “red light districts” but both worker and client are vectors.  There are predictable results.  The first is secrecy which prevents understanding of that habitat and causes the greater world to see it as one big blob, though in fact there is as much variety, as many levels of class, as many dynamics and ethical considerations -- even aesthetic terms -- inside as outside.  Like any defined group, it becomes a country of its own.  Like any unknown country, it becomes the ground of fancy.

The second is that access is controlled by outside authority figures who can profit from the boundary and who have in their hands weapons and authorization for destruction of the group or individuals.  They are capable of collusion with pimps, warlords, corrupt politicians, and -- in fact -- reinforce their existence.  

The third that the sex work world itself becomes a guerrilla society struggling to overcome outside control.  It is well-suited to penetrate, seduce, enslave, deceive, and obsess outside forces.  Therefore complex networks exist both among the separate groups inside and the outliers who are only connected to the inside.  On the North American content these “sin networks” are hundreds of years old and they use the Medicine Line today much the same as the old-time bootleggers and renegade Indian groups did.  Commerce always trumps government.  Every set of bars creates spaces between them, a filter, a pass-through, an opportunity.

Then comes HIV which blasts the false confidence of those who had learned to manage the old fashioned VD’s with antibiotics and when the old-fashioned addiction was alcohol or maybe opium.  HIV is a vector using human bodies -- an invasive species of virus that works like flu, which travels a complex of vectors through birds and pigs and which morphs all the time like designer recreational drugs.  HIV is the result of vectors (bush meat hunters and eaters) breaking into a habitat (African jungle) and joining a global set of vectors: human travelers and adventure seekers.

Social structures are a combination of nature-based ecologies and overlays of interactions created by humans, sometimes purposely but not always.  It is a social structure and cultural construct to tell men to take risks, to go where no one else has gone, to do something unexpected in defiance of too constricting society, to experiment with what is forbidden.  Sex work is always part of this, the same as it is always part of war.  Children are swept into it, enslaved by it, and produced by it.

In other ways sex work echoes the larger society, very clearly in the way we think about children doing sex work.  On the one hand it serves the people who think of children as possessions, as expensive toys.   Another part of society responds to the helplessness of children by emptying them of all value, making them disposable, preventing them from becomes valued adults or even from living long enough to become adults at all.  Documentaries about these forces can cause outcries of protest which then make the children the pawns of government and the “mercy industry” which extracts money through pity.  There is overlap.  Some of the money gets to the children.

The US has sequestered great numbers of people.  It appears to be our way of managing almost everything.  Not content with zoning, walled communities, ghettoes, and economic red-lining, we never quite dare to simply euthanize troublemakers.  Nor do we inquire too closely into why people would become defiant and violent, one reason being overpopulation.  

When considering a vector like HIV, which thrives on sequestrations of all kinds, attention is usually focused on deaths, which are events that can be counted and compared.  But the real wasteland is between infection and death -- a long gray plain of suffering that invites many illegal mitigations and fulminating vector dynamics.  Match that with the social confusion of failed moral and religious systems (who were supposed to resist sexual violation instead of joining it), refugees, abrupt economic change, broken expectations, and changing climate.  

The government wants to look as though it is addressing the syndemic of poverty, opportunistic disease, even more opportunistic medical systems, scrambled families to say nothing of those that fail to form in the first place, and economic systems based on fantasy.  But it hates to spend money or hire enough people.  All the while it supplies safety nets that become like oceanic drift nets that catch everything, kill everything, escape control.

Boys who do sex work are vectors for HIV-AIDS.  They are also suffering human beings exploited by the powerful.  There is no utopia where this does not exist.  It always has and always will.  But that doesn’t mean that our cultural evolution doesn’t urgently demand reforms.  Nor does it mean that the boys themselves can’t participate in that reform.  

If you knew you were going to die, wouldn’t you want your life to count for something?  But we ALL know we are going to die.  Why fuss about how far in the future it will be when we could use our present suffering to motivate change?  It is hopeless to block change by denying suffering.

OPPOSITIONAL DEFIANCE SYNDROME Part 2

The 2011 post on this blog that still consistently gets the most hits is "ADULT OPPOSITIONAL DEFIANCE DISORDER".  Today I got this comment: “My ex & daughter (now 25) who both have ODD. The ex mellowed in his mid-20's as far as the temper fits went but never got over the need to feel like he was rebelling against someone - and I became a substitute for a parent. That was really tough. Took me a while to understand the dynamic ; even after I stumbled on info about ODD, I couldn't live with it in the end. We've remained good friends; I have watched him struggle with close relationships. Now I'm watching my talented, super smart daughter have continual problems with jobs & bosses, relationships, etc. ODD is not just for kids, seems to easily subvert even the highest intellect; I don't think a person usually completely outgrows it.”

The rest of today’s post had been lingering on hold while I tried to decide whether some people would take it as a personal comment on our relationship -- probably half a dozen WOULD -- but maybe it’s worth it.  The comment made me decide to risk it.

What ecological/evolutionary forces link sex, violence and stigma in a self-reinforcing process -- always leading back in instead of out, which is the classic definition of insanity?  I myself can’t even figure out whether I was a victim of childhood abuse.  It certainly wasn’t considered that at the time.  (Nineteen-forties, mostly.)  After his head trauma, my father when irritated would jump up and spank any kid he could grab -- this was 1948, so we were 9, 7 and 5.   By the time I was more like 12, spanking began to become something sexual and my mother intervened.

So then my father went to “operant conditioning”, because he had to do SOMETHING when we took long cross-country trips by car in August.  No AC or backseat vids in those days.  He kept 3X5 cards on his sun visor and if we did something “good” he gave us a tally under “plus” and if we did something “bad” we got a “minus.”  At the end of the day he added them up.  The best score got a quarter (a lot of money in those days), then a dime and the lowest guy got a nickel.   Of course, what I did that was defined as “good” differed radically from the same behavior by my little brothers.  The result of this is that I am entirely impervious to operant conditioning.  I taught myself not to care.   

Many school principals and one husband found this out to their sorrow.  I can only remember a very few people of either gender or in any relationship who would simply request the behavior they wanted and -- if I felt I couldn’t or shouldn’t provide it -- would hear me out and adapt to what I told them.  When I was sosososo wanting to be compliant, and managed it up to a point, the shock of the requester when I reached limits -- either the limit of my ability or the limit of my willingness -- became a conviction that I was somehow withholding.  Punishable.  They evidently thought I was limitless: needed no sleep, needed no training, needed no equipment or space, needed no time to just be myself.

They seemed to believe that they had to somehow trick me or punish me into doing what they wanted.  This caused me to have emotions I didn’t want:  resentment, rage, defiance, despising them.  And I learned to be secretive and tricky myself, which I understand to be moral defects, so I was despising myself as well.  But none of this was very conscious.  As a child I hardly had the terminology to describe any of it to myself, much less someone else.  There were many kinds of powerlessness involved. 

Managers I’ve worked for over the years have not had many -- hell, ANY -- skills along the lines of these dynamics.  Maybe one, an old cop.  They knew they had to have control, they figured it was a matter of power, and they understood power in that blind operant conditioning sort of way.   As one woman said to me here in Valier,  “You stop making mistakes or I’ll beat your butt!”  The exception was when I believed in the task so completely that I needed no urging.  My major reward was praise, but only if it was not false flattery.  And idealism, so long as I wasn’t betrayed.

The best descriptions of these dynamics that I’ve come across so far have been those dealing with rape-and-violence-as-power.  It’s another of those spectrum things that starts with with small body language like a guiding hand on your back -- escalating until you ARE on your back, trying to fend off invasion.  What goes on with the other guy, the person who so needs control as to resort to violence and violation, so invested in rules and regulations as to hamstring and paralyze operations?  What makes a mom who works in a small town office threaten to beat a newcomer’s butt?

I propose reasons like the need for control, the failure of anyone to provide negative consequences or effective restraint, frustration with life in general, a history of being abused and controlled by others, failure to realize that they ARE being abusers, even unreasonable drive to achieve.  But there is also a small category of people -- the same as in other species -- who are just wired that way.  They lose it.  It’s what “berzerk” means.  Domestic animals are capable of the same raging lack of control: sudden, often lethal.  Normally, they are destroyed, but their aggressiveness means that their genes get passed on.  Among humans, forces of society that keep them unemployed, unloved, unconstrained, even unrecognized are never addressed or reversed, but we are reluctant to just kill them.

Partly these forces are denied.  Kept secret.  Why?  Sometimes to preserve jobs and economic respectability.  Sometimes because controllers seem powerful (they are not) and that will attract people who think they can wheedle and persuade and tolerate in order to bask in the warmth of power.  Not just women are co-dependent -- any more than just men are rapists and bar-fighters.  Sometimes, as with drugs, criminal dynamics are in play.  Sometimes, as with cops, only force will restore order.  It is the business of the street cop to keep order, not supply justice.  The same as for the Mafia.

I’m no innocent.  I can push too hard, invade.  If someone I care about says, “Back off,” I do.  Because I care.  But I never say “back off” to them, because too often it has proven to be an invitation to overpower me.  And because I don’t feel entitled to say it.  So I find other ways  -- you know the fairy tales:  throwing down the comb that becomes a forest, the mirror that becomes a lake.  Often I just hide.  The best way to hide is to invest all your riches in your mind, not in things.  Because in our culture not many people will recognize an education without a piece of paper and not many people will waste time on someone they consider poor.  It’s a stigma, but not a very strong one.  Just a faint whiff of victim, which can be a little dangerous.  But sometimes it’s worth it.  If you care.

YOUNG BUCKS

Normally I make one post a day, but since I’m only quoting here, I thought I'd just run it in as an extra.  The content is important and male-on-male, though not MSM.  Brits are keen students of social order, having struggled mightily with it for a millennium or so.  In America we try to deny and suppress it and therefore it sneaks back on us in Evil ways, clever as the Devil.

This is from a correspondent on H-ANIMAL@H-NET.MSU.EDU , John A.W. Lock.

For semi-domestic animals I would point you at the various studies on deer - deer parks are the only opportunity most people get to see such multi-age cohort groups of male animals. . . . 

And no, not every male gets to be a "stud". You do get harem sharing in fallow deer but neither male is happy about it. 

... It's all part of learning how to become a senior buck within the socio-economic culture of that particular park. . . .

The first lesson a young fallow buck has to learn is how to break off a fight.  [My emphasis. pm]  It's a pre-req for engaging in a fight because the other animal will assume you know your limits and will do as much as he needs to make you run away. Male "prey animals" never intend to kill their rivals, it just happens, and it's just plain bad luck, a slip, a dodgy antler spike etc. I've only seen it happen a couple of times - it's very rare - and the victor has been nonplussed by his combatant's decision to go to sleep in the middle of a bout. 

Concerning the human animal, I got this from www.goodmenproject.com. http://ow.ly/jNfz3    It’s also from an English writer, Nick Clements.  

A few years later I worked in a Children’s Home, and the boys were amongst the most outrageously loud characters I’d ever met. In the confines of the Home they strutted like peacocks, they were Alpha males, but, during the course of any bus journey from the Home into town, they slowly transformed from cocky arrogant hooligans into timid quiet sheep. For some time this transformation puzzled me, and then I realised why it occurred. As kids from a Home they wore second hand clothes, they had hand-me-downs, not the latest fashions. The Home kids were intimidated by the clothes the ‘normal’ kids on the bus wore, and it radically affected their behaviour and sense of status.

I am employed to train social and care workers to work with teenagers; as a starting point I introduce them to the concept of ‘pecking order’.  Teenagers seek out and want to know where they stand in the pecking order. There are any number of pecking orders to be joined, they cover a wide spectrum of activities—appearance, behaviour, football, sports, fashion, gaming, school, etc. They can be very specialised, or they can be generic, they are the equivalent of league tables: we can be high in some and low in others. They have always been there, and each generation of teens creates their own new structures and frameworks, as well as rules and regulations. . . .

In my experience, the creation of pecking orders is a very healthy and normal part of life. It has always accompanied adolescence and the onset of puberty. It can on occasions become a very painful, spiteful and antagonistic forum. Rejection from your order is devastating, just as acceptance can be liberating. In each of the pecking orders there will be jostling and fighting for places amongst the Alphas, Betas and Gammas.

The Alphas try to stay ahead of the Betas by re-organising the specifications, exerting their power; the Betas fight amongst themselves for ascendancy and validation; and the Gammas, being subservient to their Alpha masters, do all the dirty jobs.

Many of the professionals I teach don’t like the concept of pecking order, especially the division into classes or factions, they feel such a state of affairs is inappropriate and divisive. I have worked with teenagers since 1975, and in that time I have been through my own transformative journey, as well as witnessing behavioural patterns which re-occur generation after generation. It is true what these other professionals say about pecking orders, but I have also observed it to be normal and expected. We shouldn’t suppress it; by doing so, we will only make it more extreme. We need to work alongside it.

Adolescents need to have peer appraisal and assessment, otherwise they won’t know who they truly are. If they don’t try to step up to their pecking orders, they will remain judging themselves by their parents’ criteria, not their peers. Peer appraisal can be harsh by other people’s (outsiders’) standards.

Within the framework of any newly forming pecking order there is continual posturing and competition. This needs to be channelled in such a way that it doesn’t lead to violence, intolerance and hatred, and this is mostly the case. As with competition in nature, 99% of the time it remains posturing—bravado—challenge and risk without going too far. I encourage the professionals to let these jostlings occur naturally and not to interfere. Pecking orders often give adolescents a sense of belonging, which they haven’t had before.

People can gain strength from their Gamma status in the pecking order, however lowly and demeaning this may appear to others. A few years ago I worked in the wilderness with a diverse group of teenagers, some from social services and others from well-off backgrounds. They divided and kept separate for the majority of the time, occasionally pushing the boundaries of their groupings, but mostly remaining in their social class. Early one morning I sat with the kids from social services. We poked sticks into the fire, we brewed tea, we chatted and laughed ,and there was a strong feeling of bond, mutual support, and camaraderie. After a while one of the boys from the other group woke up and came to join us at the fire. Through no fault or action of his, the atmosphere changed instantly: it became awkward and silent. The boys I was with withdrew; they chose to maintain the status quo.

To some extent the magic was lost, but it was also safer and more secure for those boys to inhabit familiar territory. The social standing to which these boys were conforming can be likened to the ‘Geeks and Jocks’ of America. As teenagers, the majority of us know which side of the divide we stand. Accepting our place can enable us paradoxically to gain status. Those geeks who know they are geeks, can attempt to become Alpha geeks.  In recent years the portrayal of the geek as hero has become a strong motif in Hollywood, and it has shifted the balance of power.

So, despite apparent lowly status, boys can find self belief and confidence within their social group. ‘Belonging’ is a very powerful thing, and it reflects knowing your limitations and strengths. When I talked later about the incident with the boys this came over very strongly in their discussion. They said they were happy for the Alpha boys to be in charge of the fire most of the time, to make things happen, and they observed such actions with detachment and humour. That morning, through circumstance, they’d taken control of the fire for a period of time; they’d taken control on their terms and in their own particular way. Not stacking loads of wood and creating a huge conflagration, but sticking in the ends of sticks and making them glow. This had made them happy. As one of the lads said, ‘I don’t want to be so aggressive and competitive. That kind of behaviour looks very exhausting to me.’