THE HUMONGUOUS HOMUNCULUS

Antonio Damasio, in his work analyzing the operation of the brain, has been plagued by the cartoony idea of the homunculus,  It is deeply rooted in humans because the first task of the infant’s developing brain, just as it was when the species was evolving, is the mapping of the body of which the brain is a part.  The task of the brain is to know what’s going on everywhere, inside the skin and outside, so as to tell what to order done about it.  The internal goal is the maintenance of homeostasis, or the limits which the body must observe in order to exist -- enough oxygen, enough water, enough glucose, the right balance of acid/alkali, enough sleep, and so on.  Since an animal moves through an environment, the biggest decision is whether to stay or go or make changes of relationship to the place.

The business of the brain is the sustaining of the body and therefore it sees everything in terms of that earliest of metaphors BODY, a metonymy (part for the whole) that is then imposed on the outer world.  It is called anthropomorphism, as distinguished from anthropocentrism, which supposes that everything revolves around humans.  The idea that God created the world for humans to inhabit is an anthropocentrism, the same as heliocentrism is the idea that everything revolves around the sun, which it does.  (Thinking everything revolves around humans has led us into some real troubles, like denying the heliocentrism of the solar system.)

The “cerebral homunculus” is the map the brain constructs, drawing on the sensory information it gets from the rest of the body.  It is sort-of sketched out on the rumpled laminations of the cerebrum.  If a representation of that map (a map of a map) is created in terms of the amount of neural space allotted to each part, the result is a person with a huge face, hands, and genitals.  Alchemical homunculi have been suggested by various ingenious ways of creating a guardian “mini-me,” mostly involving mandrake roots -- which resemble a human about as much as an iniskum (buffalo stone) resembles a bison.  The “spermist homuncili” were suggested by the idea that each sperm cell had a little “man” in it.

When people try to understand things they have little information about, a “black box,” they are inclined to think there is a little man in there.  Thus, when philosophers reflected about how people think, they figured there was a little man in your head who was telling you what to think.  The problem was how that little man knew things: was there another smaller little man in HIS head and then another even smaller man in . . .   you get the picture.  In the Medieval period the idea went around that since the Communion Wafer was the Body of Christ (and one didn’t really like to think of dismembered chunks of the Savior in one’s mouth), if you caught the right moment, you could see a teeny tiny Jesus on the tongue.  People screamed out that they could feel him kicking.  Even now, children hate to bite the wafer for fear it hurts Christ.  The other homunculi that children are likely to know these days are the avatars or little “men” or other graphical creatures that represent players in a video game.  

A homunculus is a way of referring to a human-like “object” to represent the interior of the body, but the brain must also learn to form symbol/objects of the world outside the body.  The brain is the only interface we have with the world we inhabit: if we can’t sense it, to us it’s not there.  Conversely we are capable of constructing “objects” that in fact are not there:  love, the economy, peace, the rules of a game, are all constructs that have no physical sensory existence, but are seen by the mind through the magic of metaphor, so that we think of them as being “like” the concrete things we know.  How else could we think about them?  There is a social dimension to these objects: the culture will need to agree that they exist in order to communicate their content, which may be contentious.  What IS love?  The cultural dimensions of these “objects” are what defines the culture.

Another similar thinking strategy is “personification” in which we think of an idea-object as a person, for instance, maybe Venus or Cupid as a personification of love.  The difference between love as a grown and sexually active woman and love as a little boy with a bow and arrow is worth pondering.

But the really humonguous personification is God.  Theists do not agree on the attributes of God -- some cultures (Islam) will forbid you to try -- not gender, not temperament, not even name (the idea is that the TRUE name would be so powerful it would be dangerous).  At PNWD Leadership School I remember Alan Deale, my minister, asking an older, dignified, educated scientist what his mental image of God might be.  (It was an exercise in theology we were all doing.)  He said, “a luminous oblong blur.”  NOT a homunculus.   He was not anthropomorphic. 

By defining and imposing a homunculus that is favorable to their interests, authorities hope to persuade their constituency that this anthropomorphic metaphor is a source of real authority.  Thus, humongousness is an important attribute, along with all-seeing, all-powerful, all-knowing, omnipresence, and so on.  It gives people someone to imagine while praying.  And the authorities hope they will be intimidated.   I am not saying that imagining a theos is wrong or a form of falseness -- it can be a powerful thought exercise.  In a sense, the reality of that being is in the person praying and in that sense it is as powerful as the person’s ability to respond to it, because it is literally from inside that person.  

But there’s nothing to keep people’s fav homunculous from being the Devil.  Or consider that fascinating little creature in “Lord of the Rings,” the gollum, whose only power is yearning.  And a major power it is.  Can a person pray to a “pale oblong blur”?  I guess so.  Perhaps it’s slightly more poetic to pray to the Cosmos, more philosophical to pray to that-than-which-nothing-can-be-greater. more comforting to pray to a personification of a good mother -- if you HAD a good mother and therefore yearn for her.

We are in a time when people’s black box personifications are rioting.  The Guardian Angel and the Conscience -- familiar little figures -- have been joined by sci-fi figures and zombies.  It’s a puppet-dance of pixels offering confusion and sensation.  Now the most humongous homuculi has become a Gulliver, pinned down by little figures that look just like us.

CONGRATULATIONS, NATHAN!

When things get tight for families, either emotionally or politically or simply because there is not enough of whatever it is that keeps the children surviving -- maybe drought or wartime or social chaos -- the boys are the ones who are thrown out or who leave voluntarily, sometimes very young.  This has been true since tribal times.

The Great Falls Tribune ran a story about a boy who knows about this, leaning up against the wall, braced for the next challenge.  I’ll give you a redacted bit.  If you want to read the whole story and see his photo, go to www.greatfallstribune.org 

Against all odds: CMR senior to graduate despite trials

"I really didn't have any dreams or anything before I left my mom," said Nathan Matye, a senior at C.M. Russell High School.

No one would fault a kid like him — a kid who mowed lawns at the age of 9 in order to eat — for not graduating from high school. Yet Matye is only two weeks away from crossing the stage and earning a high school diploma — the only dream he's ever had.

"I wanted to give up many times, but it wasn't worth it," he said. "I just kept saying in my mind, 'I'm going to make it.'"

Matye had the will, most days. And when he didn't, he had the support of his connections teacher Mike Lins.

For the last four years, Lins has picked Matye up from wherever he was living at the time and brought him to school. Lins also bought Matye a cell phone so he could keep track of him.

Matye never had a typical childhood. He was born to a teenage mom and never knew his father. He never suffered abuse, but was neglected, he said. 

. . .As Matye tells it, when he was 7, social workers from the state's child protective system tried to remove him from his home, but he escaped out a window and ran. He doesn't blame his mom, but just said she had too much to handle at a young age.

"She's been through quite a few rough patches," Matye said. "I didn't want to put stress on her."

He didn't want to be in foster care because he had cousins who were once placed in foster care and were neglected. The Child and Family Services Division of the Montana Department of Public Health and Human Services searched for Matye, but he said he kept evading them. He lived with an aunt off and on, until he was about nine, when she moved away.

Depending on the kindness of his classmates or extended family, Matye began a rotation of staying with friends. Rarely did he have a bed, though.

"It was either the couch or the floor," he said. "But I didn't care. It had a roof over my head."

. . . His grades weren't the best, and school wasn't always his first priority, but he'd been identified by East Middle School staff as being at risk for dropping out of school, which helped when it was time for high school. . . . When Matye failed to show up for his first week of high school, Lins said Matye's check-and-connect teacher from East gave him a call and asked him to find Matye.

. . . There have been days that Matye fought against Lins and the steps he was trying to get him through. Being the transitions teacher, Lins said he's worked with kids who have come from all sorts of situations — from being sexually abused as children to fighting off major illnesses — and has required some major interventions on his part to see success.

Lins said children placed in his program have a 75 percent chance of graduating. When Matye first started in his class, he could barely write one paragraph, but this year he completed a five-page essay paper.

There's a lot you have to tolerate when working with kids in at-risk situations. Lins said he could have reported Matye to CFSD, but he knew — for the most part — Matye was always safe.

. . . There have been a few times when Lins said he's picked Matye up for school with a hangover. This past year, he got a minor in possession of alcohol. But Lins said for all that Matye has been through, and compared to some of the legal troubles other students of his have had, Matye's troubles have been fairly minor.

. . .  As Lins exudes fatherly pride in Matye, the feeling is reciprocal. Matye's not sure what'll come after graduation, but he's been assured by Lins that he's not going to let him starve.

"If it wasn't for Mr. Lins, I don't know where I would be," he said.

Tribune Staff Writer Kristen Cates  kcates@greatfallstribune.com.

_____________________

I get one main lesson out of this story, which is not at all unlike the story of Boone Caudill in “The Big Sky,” by A.B. Guthrie, Jr., not at all an atypical story in Montana.  It takes so little to save a boy.  Matye could have been a rez boy, could have been a Hutterite boy, could have been a Malmstrom boy, or a ranch boy.  I’ve taught them, argued with them, tried to help them, seen them everywhere.  And I know others have done the same.  But the major social response is to lock them up, to make them criminals.  

It’s not the same with the girls, who are more vulnerable since they can get pregnant.  Often both genders think that sex work is easy. or don’t even recognize that they’re being used, until they get into it.  Then crime might seem a better option.  They cannot, as Huck Finn did, light out for the territories.  There’s no more frontier.  The diseases now add HIV to hepatitis and tuberculosis,   And drugs, including alcohol, are more likely to give them courage in the moment than a check-and-connect teacher.  Luckily, Lins has enough courage for two and was willing to share.

I repeat that this dynamic is true to all times and places, not just Montana.  Below is the url to an even more extreme but not unique boy-story. .

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/13/books/review/never-fall-down-by-patricia-mccormick.html?nl=books&emc=booksupdateema5

EVOLUTION: CONTINUOUS AND CUMULATIVE

Antonio Damasio’s “Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain” came Saturday morning and I haven’t done anything since but read it.  He is much more of a splitter than Gazzinaga, who tends to be a bit of a lumper; he is quite continental (lives mostly in Paris); and in the end has a bit to say about society.  The basic idea he works along is that the brain has evolved new parts which have lifted our simple mammalhood into humans, but every part from the spine “up” (the new parts stack up that way, then begin to bulge forward which is why we have foreheads) remains in play.  This is where he is most brilliant (IMHO as I falter along behind him), nothing once evolved is discarded.  A brain is cumulative.  This is not like the evolution of species, which discards losers.

But our evolving understanding of the brain means that we must constantly re-negotiate what it is we’re looking at.  Instead of letting Gazzinaga’s idea of “the Interpreter” which is so helpful and suggestive or even “the Confabulator” which I find equally so, stand alone while investigating his results,  Damasio (partly to fend off the ghost of the homunculus) keeps going back and back to reconsider what he calls “CDRs” and “PMCs”, which means “covergence/divergence regions” and “posterior medial cortices.”  These clusters of interacting neurons correspond roughly to the various mysterious sub-centers that sort out information from the senses before sending it to Gazzinaga’s Interpreter where his Confabulator fills in the gaps.  (Brains tend to fill in gaps by seeing what’s not there, and to leave things out when they have no categories for them and are focusing on other information.)  

Damasio notes that when anatomists tease out little parts of the brain that seem to have certain duties and relationships, they are often grouped into CDR’s or PMC’s either by what they seem to do or by their proximity or connection to other bits.  (Not so much because of their shapes.)  But incredibly delicate tests (they can now trace the changes that mean “information: dit-dash-dit-dit-dash” leaving the nerve cell, traveling down the axon, and then the return message (boy waiting at the door while you read the telegram) back up the second cell’s axon.

It turns out that the idea of a cell assigned to each concept (what is called “grandmother” cells, not because they are grandmothered in but because the cell presumably contains all the info about grandmother as though each cell were a file) is not exactly wrong, but is combined with “whole brain activity,” possibly dissected into some aspects:  face here, smell there, voice some other place, so the files are “facial recognition,” “smells,” “voices”-- which means they must be reassembled into Grandmother on cue.

He explains that thinking is topographical  (We draw those diagrams and outlines and schemas on napkins and the backs of envelope all the time!) quite literally.  If the surface of the brain, now so rumpled, were flattened out ever so gently, it would be in layers and each layer is marked off into chessboard squares where the electrochemical thoughts act like pixels on a TV screen, combining and recombining into patterns.  One layer is touch, one is sight, one is hearing -- all being fed by the CDR’s and PMC’s.  The one for awareness of the body even amounts to an anatomical outline of the body, though the parts that are really important and rich with info are bigger than the other parts.  Gazzinaga is good about this.

But the huge contribution of Damasio, and he knows it, is his insistence on keeping emotion/feeling present at every level and showing how the higher levels evolve out the lower ones.  There will be much to work on and think about here.  My own preoccupation is relating this to the feeling of the Holy that Mircea Eliade so brilliantly identified.  

To Damasio, an emotion like love is not a separate newly-sprouted organ, but an interplay of many phenomena from the first ability to record tactile events, through the instinctive bonding that keeps baby animals in their nests and burrows and then following their mother; then the ability to pick out one individual from one’s own kind and bring that proper person back to memory (so the ducklings don’t wander off after Konrad Lorenz), recognize him or her and think about them when they are not present; to accompany the pleasure of a physical relationship with a saturating emotional complex; and on up the complexifying until reaching moral faithfulness in the part of the brain just over the eyes.  There’s probably a book in that.

Damasio is aware of another story, that of the individual fertilized blastosphere at the mercy of the womb environment, evolving according to the chemical code of its genome (shaped by the previous millenia) as it is able, then born in that tunnel adventure of emergence (EMERGENCE!   Ah, emergence!  A key concept!), set free into a new set of family circumstances that shape the baby, and finally into increasing participation into society.  

If the code had enough integrity, if the parenthood were encouraging, if no traumatic mishaps (individual or global) interrupt, that individual survives.  SURVIVAL Damasio sees as the individual’s task and specifically the brain’s task.  Not just avoiding grizzly bears, but also keeping the internal environment within the bounds that allow life: enough air, water, food, temperature, acid/alkali balance, blood sugar balance, etc. etc. in a state of HOMEOSTASIS which describes and maintains the survivable parameters.   So it turns out that the course I took long ago at PSU about why rats get thirsty was relevant after all.  (Today we’re wondering why rats get fat -- their brains have lost control of homeostatic use of food.)

Damasio is an optimist and lives a privileged life with a sound track (a background feeling level) that permits the idea of progress.  For others of us who live closer to the basics, the music is beginning to have a foreboding theme.  Brains evolve and they do not stop evolving because the environment, including society, is always pressing on people to survive.  What allows survival is what determines evolution.  

If we are killing off our best and brightest young men -- not just in Middle Eastern wars but on the streets -- what are we doing to the gene pool?  If the women are having to raise their babies alone -- not just in Mississippi but in Ethiopia -- or, worse, if the children are having to raise themselves without education  except what it takes to merely get enough calories in a day, what is that doing to the evolution of brains?  Will the development of the mirror cells that allow compassion atrophy and disappear?  Will a new ruthlessness override it?  It is not enough to evolve people.  We must also evolve our society.

WHAT DO WE KNOW?

“We all know something...but you'd be surprised at how many people are always letting go of the fact."   Thornton Wilder in “Our Town.”  This quote came (with message) from Tom Foral, a former classmate at NU where we were in classes with the legendary Alvina Krause.  Tom is playing the Stage Manager in a local production of the beloved play back East.  

I’d been mulling the subject of knowing things for weeks.  It’s clearly human to want to know true stuff, even to know more than anyone else, especially things you’re not really supposed to know, but always in the back of our minds echoes Jack Nicholson sneering,  “You can’t handle the truth!”  

We could talk about facts.  Good luck on googling that one.  It’s a LOL project.  So let’s move on to knowing.  What is human “knowing?”  Oddly, we know that there are a lot of things we don’t know, but we don’t know what they are.  Like, we can conceive of something being greener than green, but not perceive it.  The conception is not the perception.  But we like to think that if we can think of something, it must exist.  We can think of God, so therefore he (though how do we know God has gender?) must exist.

Brain research is evolving -- just as brains themselves evolved -- which is what the most exciting research is researching, and the methods are also evolving --  the very definition of “knowing” is now under reconsideration.  The brain began with a knob at the top of the spine, evolving other parts on top of that as the organism in which it was located was also evolving in reciprocity.  When the zygote develops in the womb, it follows the same sequence as evolution.  There are arguments about when this budding creature can “feel” or “think,” most of which depends on how one defines “feeling” and “thinking.”  Is feeling the ability to generate a reaction, like withdrawing from something harmful, which we might interpret as painful?  I’d accept that.  Is “thinking” the ability to record such an event so as to avoid it altogether in the future?  I’d accept that.   So what do we call the elaboration of those abilities into a fully operational human being capable of claiming “facts”?  

I say “claiming” facts because clearly they change when there is new information.  Pick a common topic, gender assignment.  Until we could look at the genome we had no idea that it was a matter of entwined strings of molecular code.  Then we saw that the “female” side of the code carried two X strings and the “male” side carried X and Y, but it was possible for a viable (more or less) zygote to go into humanhood with XXY and XYY strings. Then we thought gender might be more ambiguous than we believed but surely it was clear that the infant had a separate genome from the mother, even as it grew in her womb.  Last night I listened to Radiolab.org’s podcast about “Fetal Consequences”  (I LOVE Robert Krulwich, who has such an insouciant attitude towards facts!)  Scientists gave us the fact that fetal cells (identifiable because of their genome) travel into the mother’s blood stream and inhabit her body for the rest of her life.  And that, like a lot of startling facts, raised a lot of questions.  Like, what does it mean?  And the answer, like a lot of answers, is “we don’t know.”  

We keep evolving new instruments that tell us more about the world and also about the instrument that is ourselves.  No two people see the world in the same way because no two human bodies/instruments have the same perceiving equipment, let alone the same capacity to sort and “know” what information we have gathered.  The first step in knowing is the knowledge of how little we really know.  The next step might be curiosity about what others know that we don’t, and how much they know about us.  Later on we’ll get around to what we know about them -- or don’t know.  

The character Nicholson plays thinks he DOES know about everyone else but himself.  He thinks he and those like him are the only ones who can handle the truth.  Those like him.  Cheney, Rumsfeld, etc?  Naw, they’re civilians.  He means hardened military men like himself who know what it is to be at war.  That’s his truth: war.  So let’s look at “handle,” what is “handling?”  He means seeing war as inevitable, loss of life as necessary, lying and hiding are simply strategy made necessary by a contemptible nation, the obligation of every soldier to suck it up and stop having feelings.  In short, he’s headed for post-traumatic stress syndrome.  (My opinion.  Not a fact.  He’s fiction.)  Facts, however, can be represented by fiction, and that’s presumably what the movie is up to.

What would the character’s mother consider a fact?  I leave you to guess.  My guess is that she didn’t tolerate her son lying and she located the bright line for him through the use of force.  We know what we experience.  If we think it’s a fact, we act on it.  It sounds pretty clear that she expected her bright line to stay permanent and her son is not about to disagree.

But Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town” is about opening hearts, reconsidering each other, seeing life while we are in it.  A different kind of truth but knowing it is just as hard, as Emily discovers.   Here’s a factoid:  “In 1946, the Soviet Union prevented a production of Our Town in the Russian sector of occupied Berlin "on the grounds that the drama is too depressing and could inspire a German suicide wave."  

The play was first presented in America in 1938 in Princeton, just before WWII, but it depicts a time just before WWI which we now think of as a time of innocence and grace before the fall.  Not that we're hopeless now.  I saved off the Internet a photo from a contemporary production in which Emily is white and George is black.  Each speaks from the top of a ladder to show that they are upstairs in adjacent houses.  We appear to be looking for new truths.  We are a hopeful people.  We CAN handle the truth but change is painful.  This is what the Nicholson character is really telling us.  And here’s “Emily’s” version. She can’t handle the truth.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLWewZO6z1w

A SOURCE OF GOOD

In the past I’ve been intrigued by Nicholas Kristof’s columns in the NYTimes, which often deal with anguish, both global and domestic.  I was bemused when he actually bought two prostitutes in SE Asia, sent them home, and set them up in small legit businesses where one prospered and the other reverted to her old wicked job.  Lately he’s taken on reservation alcoholism and the enabling beer businesses just off the Sioux rez in White Clay.  

Such misery accounting raises a lot of questions.  Like, what kind of a guy does this stuff?  I figured another Manhattan superior do-gooder working off his liberal guilt.  Then I read his official bio.  (below)

Nicholas D. Kristof

Damon Winter/The New York Times

Nicholas D. Kristof, a columnist for The New York Times since 2001, writes op-ed columns that appear twice a week. Mr. Kristof won the Pulitzer Prize two times, in 1990 and 2006. In 2012, he was a Pulitzer finalist in Commentary for his 2011 columns that often focused on the disenfranchised in many parts of the world.

Mr. Kristof grew up on a sheep and cherry farm near Yamhill, Oregon. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard College and then studied law at Oxford University on a Rhodes Scholarship, graduating with first class honors. He later studied Arabic in Cairo and Chinese in Taipei.

While working in France after high school, he caught the travel bug and began backpacking around Africa and Asia during his student years, writing articles to cover his expenses.

Mr. Kristof has lived on four continents, reported on six, and traveled to more than 150 countries, plus all 50 states, every Chinese province and every main Japanese island. He jokes that he’s one of the very few Americans to be at least a two-time visitor to every member of the so-called Axis of Evil. During his travels, he has had unpleasant experiences with malaria, mobs and an African airplane crash.

After joining The Times in 1984, initially covering economics, he served as a Times correspondent in Los Angeles, Hong Kong, Beijing and Tokyo. He also covered presidential politics and is the author of the chapter on President George W. Bush in the reference book “The Presidents.” He later was Associate Managing Editor of the Times, responsible for Sunday editions.

So this guy came by his contacts and balls not far from where I grew up in Portland and with the same background (orchards and sheep) as my maternal relatives.  He’s the kind of smart that’s certified by prestigious institutions and the kind of bold that takes him into dangerous territories.  Born in 1959, he’s young enough to have been my son.  Since his parents (post WWII from Austria-Hungary -- the same as Adolf Hungry Wolf) taught at Portland State University where my own mother graduated as a returning student in 1961, I know that his background is more than agriculture, though from the way he approaches life, he seems more like a Reedie than a PSU guy.  Maybe it’s the Harvard years.

But what I didn’t understand was how he could write about human misery and unknown places without being reviled and stigmatized the way some are, the assumption being that to be interested in such sadness means one is just like them.  What patrons, what guardian angels, what magic, what bargain with the Devil has managed to protect him?  I sent him an email asking the question.  No answer so far.

Beyond that, I asked him a third unanswerable question.  Why is it that the public seems to have a kind of appetite for such stories -- drastic, lethal, suffering, entirely “other” -- but they don’t do anything about it and they don’t want to hear the same story twice.  African poor people living in caves to avoid bombs once.  Cambodia girls in sexual bondage next.  Then drunken Sioux sprawled in the streets.  So what else is new?  Surprise me.  

I got onto YouTube and Google.  The problem is not lack of vividness and documentation.  One YouTube vid after another shows us people with appealing faces, searching eyes, eloquent hands.  Maybe it’s too much like National Geographic, so we see these human beings as though they were lions and elephants on a preserve, confident we will never meet them in reality and they have nothing to do with us.  Maybe we’ve watched too many “Kirk/Spock” debates about how we mustn’t interfere in the fates of other people.  We’ve certainly had enough illustrations of how often our interference messes everything up, turns out not even to be helpful -- with luck, only laughable.  (The classic example is a shipment to the Ethiopian desert of “sandals” that turned out to be glamorous high heels for evening plus a shipment of canned tuna -- with no can openers.)

So is Kristol a nice country kid who grew up hearing the dawn bleating of sheep under his bedroom window and still recognizes that sound in the villages of herders in strange places around the planet?   Simpler than that.  Yamhill is not far from downtown Portland, OR, where Nicholas’ parents, distinguished college professors taught at PSU.  Read about them here: http://www.oregonlive.com/education/index.ssf/2010/06/kris_kristof_concentration_cam.html   The father is the one who went to Reed.  Also, for his Ph.D, to U of Chicago, where he found his wife, who is an art history professor.  (A lot of echo in this story, but I have never swum a river on a leaky inner tube as the senior Kristol did and paid for it in a concentration camp.)

You can tell a lot about a person when you can see him.  There are two videos below of interviews of Kristof.  The first one is also with his wife, whom you will see is a major force in her own right besides being his co-writer.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4uPRjo6EqKw&feature=related

The second is more specifically about Nicholas and social action.

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

This second interviewer asks Kristof bluntly what can be done about the horrific things that happen around the globe, particularly human trafficking.  Kristof, whose parents were founders of the Portland chapter of “Amnesty International,” said that the media has the power of “naming and shaming” and this is what he has tried to use.  But sometimes the dynamics of the situation can be changed with publicity.  The girl who went back to the brothel returned because she was hooked on meth and the brothel was her source.  But after Kristof’s story, the attention focused on this place was enough higher that the cops asked for more bribes, which were a basic part of doing business.  Eventually, this ate up enough profit that the madam closed her brothel and started a grocery store.

He also said that attempts to stop female genital mutilation from outside the cultures that practiced this have made no impact at all.  But in places where a local had realized how useless and nasty the practice was and started protests from INSIDE, things did change.  (I wonder whether Kristof knows about the English pop culture practice of genital mutilation that is investigated in a video called “The Perfect Vagina.”  I’m not talking piercing, I’m talking removal of the labia for cosmetic purposes.  I won't link.)  

Kristof would be very willing to admit there’s always a lot of work to be done at home.  But, as he said,  “You’ve got to get out of your comfort zone.”  Now I understand.  Kristof was raised in the William Stafford/Gary Snyder/George Johanson circles of the Portland Leftie intelligentsia.  I hardly knew them, but many were part of the First Unitarian Church.  

In June 2010, Ladis “Kris” Kristof, aged 91, was buried from the Saint Johns Catholic Church in Yamhill. Earlier he had written: "I remain a rationalist and an optimist... If man has been able to create the arts, the sciences and the material civilization we know in America, why should he be judged powerless to create justice, fraternity and peace?" His son would undoubtedly nudge him to make his statement formally gender-inclusive.

MOTHER'S DAY IS THE BEGINNING OF THE TOURIST SEASON

Here’s an interesting article about a jewel in the crown of Great Falls’ favorite son, the artist Charles M. Russell.

http://www.greatfallstribune.com/article/20120507/OPINION/205070304/-1/NLETTER01/The-C.M.-Russell-Museum-is-staying-in-Great-Falls?source=nletter-news

The town is understandably nervous.  Economics are ebbing.  The dams built on the falls that Great Falls was founded to exploit are being removed now. No more copper or aluminum to process anyway.  Malmstrom Air Force Base, headquarters of the IBM missiles that have seeded the land since the Cold War, is being reduced.  The railroads are far less than they used to be.  The wheat is still booming in spite of CRP but ag subsidies are open to challenge in Washington.  The main collection of C.M. Russell paintings was bought by Texas and Nancy Russell’s trust fund lives in Oklahoma City where it supports the CM Russell Center for the Study of Western Art.  www.ou.edu/finearts/art_arthistory/resources/charles_m_russell_center.html

Seems like every good thing has a time limit on it.  The open range that is such a mythic inspiration only lasted a few decades.  The wool that was crucial to uniforms in the World Wars is now replaced by miracle fibers.  Even the glaciers that brought so many tourists to Glacier National Park are melting fast.  And Old Faithful isn’t quite as punctual as it used to be.  The summers are hotter.  Uh oh.  And no one understands how to keep the price of gas down, though some people think it’s a good thing to have high gas prices in the name of conservation.

The folks that agree with that are not the people trying to develop tourist destinations as a way of staying afloat.  After all, this is Montana where distances are long and people still drive big cars if not pickups.  So Wolf Point is upset that a “Cowboy Hall of Fame and Western Heritage Center” is going to Big Timber.

http://www.greatfallstribune.com/article/20120506/NEWS01/120506001/Wolf-Point-residents-bitter-over-museum-reversal  and the original proposal is at   http://www.montanacowboyfame.com/

Let’s face it.  These are exercises in self-congratulation whose appeal to those not involved is limited.  The Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Cody, Wyoming, has ballooned into the “Smithsonian of the West” and Cowboy Hall of Fame and Western Heritage Center in Oklahoma City has managed to dodge the cyclones so far.  But most of these ideas tend to be invented by locals with dollar signs in their eyes who grossly overestimate the interest of people from far away and certainly overestimate how long the fickle public will stay impressed.  Today’s sad story is a lawsuit about a theme-based housing development in Bozeman.  http://www.insurancejournal.com/news/midwest/2012/05/08/246740.htm  Even sadder is that national readers won’t “get” a dinosaur dig unless a Hollywood movie is used as a reference point, though “Jurassic Park” is a far cry from digging dino eggs in one’s backyard.

I was long divorced and not an insider when Bob Scriver sort of co-opted the idea of a Giant Jesus statue from a peaceful sheriff who wanted it to be put in a high mountain pass.  Then locals got aboard and wanted to put it in Cut Bank, a singularly unpeaceful place (it’s an oil-patch town with a white-town connection to the reservation).  It was supposed to be built so you could go up in Jesus’ head and look out over the prairie, though what you would see might not be very startling.  When Bob died, the billboard proclaiming the project quietly folded.  

But the little portrait of Shep down in Fort Benton has proven a durable destination for a lot of people.  (Dogs are more reliable than Gods.)  In fact, more people are impressed by it than the major Lewis & Clark and Sacajawea monument on the waterfront.  And the townspeople’s pride is expressed by a quarrel over where Shep’s statue should be emplaced so as to be best for the surrounding businesses.  But then, it didn’t pretend to be about peace.  Just devotion.

Indians are supposed to be a major source of tourist interest but only if they are framed in terms of the 19th century.  Going onto a real reservation is just too scary, though there are cadres of retired Methodists who come out every summer as a group and have a fine time doing something worthy and attending North American Indian Days.  They just don’t have much interest in actual Indians who are adolescent or past.  Not that any interest would be reciprocated.

The relationship with Indians brings sharply into focus three forces with an interesting structural effect.  (Keep in mind that a triangle is the most immovable and secure structural pattern.)  It is in the first place “spiritual,” in the sense that everyone agrees that Indians are more spiritual than anyone else on the planet.  The second is “religious” with the idea that Christians have always had a license to rush into Indian Country and do good.  Missionaries are inconvenient, but no one suggests that missionaries are evil.  (Well, no one we like, anyway.)  The third is “moral,” and there the Indians really hold the trump card.  Europeans were totally immoral (by modern standards) to invade North America and trample underfoot the indigenous people.  (The fact that the same thing is underway in South America this very moment is beside the point.  No one from Iowa wants to go intervene there.)  

But the current residents of Montana are quick to rush on past just exactly how their white forebears happened to be able to homestead by pointing how how moral (hard-working, family-based, ag-essential, safe small-town) they are and how long they’ve been here.  (Century and a half, at max.)  But most would dump all that in a hurry to get ag subsidies or sign a frakking contract with an oil company.  After all, they didn’t want their kids to work as hard as they had, so they sent them to good colleges where they got Ph.D’s and are now deeply in debt but unemployable.  Even so, they aren’t likely to come back to live on the prairie.  Not even if you promised them they could dig dinosaur eggs.

RENEGOTIATING MARRIAGE

This is my third attempt to write an orderly essay about contemporary marriage.  I expect to fail this time, too.  But here are some scattered thoughts.

1.  For ten years I served Unitarian Universalist congregations and performed weddings.  I never refused any gays, nor would I have, but none asked me.  My congregations were mostly on the Western prairies where even the UU’s were relatively conservative and the defiant ones were libertarian enough that they didn’t want marriage anyway, considering it an intrusion of the state.  I did turn away a couple in which the young man was abusing his lover.  I wish I’d been more proactive and tried to break up the relationship.  If they had been part of my congregation, I would have but they were walk-ins who thought the building was pretty.

2.  UU’s have formally declared that they accept gay & lesbian marriage and gay & lesbian clergy and, in fact, many of our most effective and revered leaders are GLTBX.  As it turns out, many of our “best” men of the past were promiscuous, which has been harder for me to -- oh, I don’t want to say swallow.  These latter were closeted -- they thought.  Some of the best ministers have died of AIDS.  Others who are openly gay are undiminished by whatever HIV status they are, including non-infected.  We tend to accumulate lesbians who were formerly married so now have a collection of children to raise in two-mommy families.  It seems practical and happy to me.   Except when it comes time to pledge:  they don’t make as much money as “standard” married couples and nowhere near as much money as gay couples, married or not. 

2.  I was the third wife of four wives of a sculptor who was a dominant man ultimately leaving a valuable estate.  We were in a ten year relationship that sort of wrapped around the marriage.  I was in my twenties, he in his fifties.  His fourth wife, aged and alcoholic, could not defend his estate against predators.  I was totally excluded as were his grandchildren.  (His children were dead.)  Our legal system (which includes both the courts and lawyers) wants clarity and finality.  (At least the courts do.)  Divorce used to mean that the cause was so reprehensible that you never wanted to see that person again and alimony was meant to be both reparative and punitive.  You were erased.  I am not erased and have made it a point to demonstrate otherwise.

3.  The same thing was true of children outside of wedlock.  If a child were given up for adoption, he or she was erased.  Now women who give up their children are as possessive of the family that takes the baby as they might have been if there were a legally married wed-LOCK.  The sperm donors who thought they had been erased may be sued for inheritance.  The adoptees are arriving on their mothers' doorsteps, unerased.

4.  Technological miracles (quite similarly to all the confusion and crashing of publishing) like the pill (which offends the Pope) and viagra (which does not offend the Pope), the overcoming of barriers to fertility like in vitro fertilization, restoration after tubal ligation, fertility drugs, surrogate mothers, artificial insemination with donor sperm (none of which offends the Pope), have completely changed the terms of parenthood.  People who once paid dearly and risked their lives for illegal abortions now pay and risk for fertility treatment.  (In spite of an abundance of children who desperately need parents.)  And now that so many premature and drug-damaged babies are saved, though they will need millions of dollars in care, people are confused and daunted.

5.  I never remarried.  Never got pregnant.  I’ve earned my own way except for two long periods of unemployment during which I was saved by my mother, not a husband.  I’ve been very lucky not to get sick and to have been perfectly content not to have a fancy house or children.  I had the romantic notion that being published was more important than being married.  I was published.  It had less impact than being married.  (Is writing without publication like intimacy without marriage?)

So now consider, against this background, the current President of the United States, whose former (and conflated) girl friends have just revealed him as a young man in Vanity Fair.  He is not and was not a man to simply accept conventions, but he was a careful and thoughtful man who did not make decisions lightly.  He parted friends with these women, none of whom saved samples of his sperm so as to have bragging rights.  I expect he has not been running up and down the halls of the White House, nakedly pursuing willing women.  I do not think he has a devoted jeep driver or secretary who provides special benefits in addition to his wife.  But he will probably take a beating from all the Republicans who are not so careful about their intimate arrangements.  Not even classy.  (Airport men’s rooms??)  Or legal.  (Paying off pregnant mistresses with campaign funds.)

Margaret Mead, who is partly to blame for the idea that free sex is a good thing, a happy event, a learning opportunity, as it was in the Samoa in her mind (not necessarily the real Samoa), also proposed that we re-organize actual marriage which is as much a legal and economic event as a romantic and spiritual principle.  She thought it would be good for people to pledge loyalty and trust, maybe for a year at a time.  Then if the partnership proved worthy and viable, there would be a second step to parenthood, accompanied by a certain commitment on the part of the state to protect, support and guide the children.  She never went on to the next steps which might have included the right to part once parenthood had been fulfilled, and some kind of relationship definition for old folks.

The Civil Union idea, which is a legal status in some states, was meant to address something like this, except not children.  With people moving in and out of each other’s lives, increasingly encumbered with valuable goods to sort, and shared mortgages which used to be a way to store wealth, the unresolved status of property and bills is as confused as that of a fractionated trust Indian on a reservation.  What this represents is a LOSS of community wealth because wealth is not based on hoarding -- the idea of capital is to keep it moving.  Divorce is expensive, not just to the individuals but also the community.  People move away, children are raised in confusion, everyone has a full-time job so is unavailable for volunteering.  But at least in a Civil Union responsibility for property is spelled out, partners can make decisions for each other during a health crisis or even in the case of death, and things have to be discussed.

Against this background, I don’t see how gay marriage is the least bit shocking or irreligious or dysfunctional.  It hardly even seems newfangled.  More like inevitable.  Against the background of Sharia Law, which solves these little problems by simply murdering the nonconformists (almost always female) it seems as exalted as some of these newlyweds believe it to be.

WHEN IT'S NOT RACISM

Most racism is NOT about race.  People say,  “Oh, I just HATE racism!  I have worked all my life to get rid of racism.”  That’s what your mother taught you and that’s what you should hate.  No one loves racism.  They just love the leverage it gives them.  And the markers of racism are always so easy.

Racism is a construct of assumptions: that certain classes of people are different, that one indicator is skin color or eye shape, that people who are different don’t “share your values” and that you must never admit that this gives the top an advantage (more or less automatic) and the bottom an advantage (you have to push the fairness issue).  But none of that should come out in the open and be discussed because it will just make everyone angry and that won’t prove anything.  Anyway the trump cards are class, status, education, tenure, being published, followers, virtue  -- those markers of who’s better.  Along with money.  Money follows class and reinforces it.

There’s one category of society that pays no attention to these markers: the arts, especially music, because there are fewer intermediaries.  Intermediaries pay very close attention to race because it goes to “platform.”  There are any number of platforms.  One might be prize-winners, one might be martyrs, another might be lone wolf genius, one might be downtrodden, one might be saint, one might be devil. one might be portal to a world you’ve never guessed existed, one might be mommy.  The skillful intermediaries know which one to reach for and how to manage it:  how should you dress?  Should you ever curse?  What TV program can you be on without losing your image?  That means it’s not enough to know the person being “platformed” but also the effects of the various mediums.  If your platform is a nice mom, can you wear purple lipstick?  Think lawyer-putting-defendant-on-the-stand.  Haircut, suit, no piercings. That is, if you’re going for irreproachable church-going middle-class.  If not, sleeve tattoos, a wreath of smoke, a Mohawk.

Academic class markers are more subtle.  Mustache?  Cords or khakis?  Oxford blue shirt or black turtleneck?  That’s the guys, but it’s mostly guys anyway, isn’t it?  (Some people like to mess with gender.)  Black skin is a given -- the haircut is not.  Especially with women.  Fat and frumpy can either mean someone out of place or someone so highly placed that they really don’t have to bother.  But those are markers for persons presenting bodily.  It’s much more difficult on email and list servs.

Email pecking order is mostly dependent on credentials: most correspondents will be young, not quite fully certified. (Thesis accepted but not defended.)  The old guard will often establish their superiority by greeting certain long term friends familiarly, establishing that they go “way back” together.  But young, passionate, politically enflamed persons, especially females, will rush in like junior high girls making entries in a slam book.  The mid-men can vary from those who are so courtly that they sound sarcastic to those with so much confidence that they dare to be rough and emphatic.  Someone ought to do a study of the rhetoric of academic pecking orders.

There is a major split running through the fields of Western lit and Western history, plus a lot of smaller fractures, but this big split goes to pecking order, because it cannot be firmly established.  It is between those who identify so completely with the West that they cannot step away from it and those who are truly objective scholars looking for material that reaches the level of fact.  Unluckily, there’s quite a lot of the former but not a whole lot of that latter, and because there has been so much talk about the mythic meaning of the West, it’s tough to get people to focus.  That’s before political correctness comes along and sweeps everything off the board by claiming they know because they know the oral tradition, however one footnotes that.  (I’m not saying it’s not valid, but that it has a different sort of validity than a Hudson’s Bay log book or an alcoholic West Point general’s file of papers back in Washington, D.C. -- which may have a lot less fact in them that your great-grandmother’s love letters.)

Part of the problem with this whole pecking order is that the new generations keep appearing faster than anyone expected and they’re more different from the previous people than seems quite decent.  They’re so aggressively “post!”  On both sides people are disrespectful without meaning to be, simply because they are not entirely visible to each other.  There are parts of each other that they don’t know exist, much less on an academic listserv.

I confound people who ask me my agenda and assume that I speak at all meetings I attend, but I don’t do that anymore.  I used to.  Now I just go to hear the music, not that it isn’t a great pleasure to meet people and -- oh, how I love to get hugs from people I haven’t seen for centuries.  But I put down a print-out of an article in High Country News I’d brought along to read -- because I never have enough time to read everything I intend to -- and someone remarked on it, so I remarked back that I didn’t like them.  Stopped writing for them when the previous editor blithely changed what I said -- not editing style, but my opinion.  “But, but . . . they’re very highly respected !”  Yes, prestige.  Power of the intermediary.  For relatively young, college-educated, nicely-mannered, way-liberal, backpacking -- hell, they’re even handsome -- with their stubborn conviction that if the right laws are just passed, all grizzlies will go to heaven happy.

I do keep score.  NA is a plus, college-educated and living in the city or on a campus, a minus. (Likely to be “racist.”)  NA college-educated and returned to the rez, a double plus. (NOT likely to be racist.)   A graceful bespectacled novelist -- could go either way.  My former UPS man, double plus.  Like that.  And they’re scoring me at the same time: old, a minus.  Not dressed up, neutral at a tribal college campus.  She knows Earl Old Person, add two points.  

Make a casual ironic remark and if you’ve got enough points, they’ll consider you clever and initiated.  Make the same remark without enough points and you’ll be labeled racist.  If they don’t understand what you said, you’ll be racist.  If they understood, but didn’t like it -- racist.  Feel put down or taken unawares --  back channel to moderator:  let’s move on.  This is so ugly.  There’s no use to it.