THE VULNERABILITY OF THE HUMAN BODY

Terrierman  terriermandotcom.blogspot.com/‎  has been running sets of memes he calls “house porn,” or “car porn,” meaning a series of impossible objects of desire, which is one definition of porn when used in reference to human sex: imagined access to a particularly desirable body.  Patrick’s “objects of desire” are innocently (more or less) materialistic.  This is not always the case when people speak of porn.  I’m coming at this from several directions at once.  (When don’t I?)

One is through sci-fi in a roundabout way.  Remember that sci-fi story I told you in which an alien sex-worker took off her turban, revealing a Medusa-like squirming mass of not snakes but a kind of worms, which took the customer to unimaginable heights of orgasmic pleasure but left him nothing but a husk?  I was thinking this might be about the experience of drugs like heroin.  But then I read an article in the New York Review of Books called “The Footed Void” which was about octopi, a wonderful natural history account of the animal, that mentioned “octopus porn” in Japan.  Naturally I googled, blundering into overwhelming images plus the information that this is only part of the genre called “tentacle porn,” which overlaps with Japanese manga.  I must warn you that Japanese conventions about some categories of culture are QUITE different from mainstream USA.  And they have a love/hate relationship with sea creatures. But mainstream Americans do not veer off from pornographies of violence and gore, not even the sexualized ones that they pretend to censor, which increases their value.  

We are gripped by the most recent “disaster porn,” images of the Oklahoma tornado that demonstrate the vulnerability of human bodies and constructions.  On the one hand we don’t want to be exposed to the horror of it, but on the other hand there’s a kind of icky curiosity and maybe a notion that knowing about the worst will protect us from it.  It’s like driving past a car accident and becoming a Lookie Lou, getting in the way of emergency responders even as we try to process what happened and how bad the outcome really is.  Could we be next?  What preventive steps should we take?

Once I visited neighbors in the midst of a show on their 4-foot-wide screen which gave a fine view of a botfly hatching from a man’s thigh.

Botfly larvae hatching from a head.

He was a scientist who had infected himself on purpose to research the critter, repulsive and painful as it was.  These watchers were old people with multiple health problems and the voluntary horror on the screen seemed somehow to tell them something about their own physical vulnerability.  Medical pornography is rampant in our country, combining the vulnerability of our bodies with the promised bliss of relief if we just obey the doc and take the med or authorize the invasive procedure with menacing equipment or actual surgery.  (No matter the expense.)

The vulnerability of flesh -- created by age or disease or war or natural disaster or accidents -- does not have to involve explicit sex to be pornographic but will almost always hint at the emotional intimacy that is an expression of bodily defenselessness normally a factor in sexual acts.  Allowing someone such deep access as to become painful or even damaging is sexual, but it is also “power-over” -- an expression of trust.  Without trust and permission, it is rape.  At that point the law must be involved, society must object -- but they won’t in the case of war or law enforcement.  Care givers are also in an ambiguous position.  Hemingway wrote a horror short story about a soldier with his limbs blown off, unable to talk, the victim of a nurse who treated him like a big doll.

An enforceable law is one with a clear boundary between legal and illegal, but the actual facts of vulnerability, permission, intimacy, damage, emotion, and so on are simply too blurry to ever be the subjects of easily enforceable laws.  So now we rely on warning systems:  “Look out!  There is cussing on this program.  People take their clothes off!  This account of amputation will show actual examples!”

But then we also use such warnings to give ourselves permission to see XXX movies, “torture porn” (all simulated), “splatter movies” (all CGI), and even “snuff movies” (we can only hope). The Hollywood geniuses are hard-pressed to come up with scary creatures like Alien or Scissorhands for the junior high kids who are the best customers since they are so electrified by their own bodies.  

There’s another direction the media also explores for emotional impact that is less recognized: amping up the vulnerability of the victims.  So the emphasis in the news reports on disasters and battle aftermaths is on the most vulnerable: the children, the old people, the hospitalized.  The most shocking image in the octoporn I saw was a little cartoon candified pastel toddler with huge eyes and impossible breasts in the grip of a rippling monster octopus.  Suddenly one saw the link with a molester of infants and baby beauty queens like Jon-Benet -- responding to that soft tenderness, the impossibility of retaliation for transgressions.  The freedom to damage the vulnerability that they hate in themselves.

Some think of exhibition wrestling as a kind of porn where huge scary men, seemingly impossible to hurt, appear to be deliberately damaging each other so that we see they are not invulnerable after all.  What about the porn of the insulting woman, who tortures the football team with her low opinion of their prowess?  Is she hoping someone will take her on and prove her vulnerability?  The football team might think so.  It would be possible to make a case that most of our sports events involve porn on some level, even without bringing up cheerleaders or group showers.  It’s arousing and meant to be exactly that.

For every porn there is a phobia.  For every Lookie Lou searching the internet for photos of dismembered victims of violence, there is someone who won’t even look at the general newspaper story about the event.  “It’s all so depressing,” they say.  Meaning they don’t want to think about it -- only feel and then only pity. No impulse to take action.  This vulnerability phobia/paralysis becomes a means of control for those who are a little tougher.  If war is only “depressing,” no one will think of the profits, the manipulated political dynamics, the actual facts of battle strategies.

Media who deal with physical or emotional vulnerability, particularly in movies, use anticipation, curiosity, vengeance and the like to weave suffering into their films, whether invented plots about resistance, capture by enemies, torture and the like -- or real footage in documentaries, which tend to be more after the fact of the event.  It is the difference between the building-up of psychological suffering of the ballerina in “The Black Swan,” and the total surprise and shock of the Boston Marathon bombing -- except for the bomb-makers who enjoyed all the anticipation.  Which is more pornographic?

The moral element is what seems to make the difference, and in America morality is intensely focused on sex.  This means that to most people the sexually stressed dancer is pornographic but torn-off legs are just pitiful.  Sex means avoidance lest one might be captured or abused.  Torn-off legs mean a need for emergency response, like tourniquets, so one goes towards the victim.  The dancer will be stigmatized even as a victim, but the marathon runners will be admired in their struggle to master prosthetics.

"SAND BLACKFEET"

Benjamin Shors, son of a local lawyer now deceased, and both an investigative journalist and a professor of writing in Pullman at the University there, spent a morning with me to ask about the ’64 flood.   He graduated from Cut Bank High School.  We had a lot to talk about besides the flood and water politics in general, which are a very hot topic at the moment for three reasons:  frakking, the consolidation of water sources to Tiber which I suspect is preparation for privatization of town water sources, and the restoration of legal water rights to tribes.  This summer he will be teaching journalism in a special program for “Arab” students from Iraq, Palestine, Yemen, Oman, and Bahrain.  This enterprise is far more key to world peace and homeland security than anything military.  

But what is “Arab”?  I went to wikipedia in hopes that the entry will have been written by an “Arab.”  One never knows -- they are anonymous -- but if it is trustworthy (and Shors agrees with me that Wikipedia is more of a football scrum than an authority), this is what I found out.

“Arab people, also known as Arabs (Arabic: عرب‎, ʿarab), are a panethnicity primarily living in the Arab world, which is located in Western Asia and North Africa. They are identified as such on one or more of genealogical, linguistic, or cultural grounds, with tribal affiliations, and intra-tribal relationships playing an important part of Arab identity.”

Jokingly, I called them “Sand Blackfeet”, mounted nomads organized into tribes and evolved in a tough climate who have now pretty much settled into towns.  Historically, they represented all three of the Abramic religious systems: Jewish, Christian, and Islam which has come to be primary today.  But there were Arabs before the founding of ANY of these three big dominant groups. Here’s a mind boggler:  “If the diverse Arab pan-ethnicity is regarded as a single ethnic group, then it constitutes one of the world's largest after Han Chinese.”

What then defines “being Arab”?  Like the pre-white Blackfeet (whose name for themselves was Siksika, so maybe I should have said “Sand Siksika”) it is language.  "The word "Arab" has had several different, but overlapping, meanings over the centuries (and sometimes even today). In addition to including all Arabized people of the world (with language tending to be the acid test), it has also at times been used exclusively for bedouin.”  The latter are possibly the most “Blackfeet-like” if you think of both in 19^th century terms.   

“A widely quoted Bedouin saying is "I against my brother, my brothers and I against my cousins, then my cousins and I against strangers". This saying signifies a hierarchy of loyalties based on proximity of kinship that runs from the nuclear family through the lineage, the tribe, and, in principle at least, to an entire genetic or linguistic group (which is perceived to have a kinship basis). Disputes are settled, interests are pursued, and justice and order are maintained by means of this frame, according to an ethic of self-help and collective responsibility .”   (More under “bedouin.”)  I certainly recognize this bedouin pattern of organization, which is rarely understood by whites, among Blackfeet.  Whites don't generally see it, since they are used to a system of written laws.  Bedouin were generous about taking in new members, perhaps feeling that they represented new energy and ideas for the whole group, though they were also sharply aware of the need for the whole to help parts that were in trouble.  Plains Indians were like this once, before the government starting imposing limitations and lists.

“Tauregs” were the most romantic bedouins of all, camel-nomads who farmed oases a little deeper into Africa, who maintained long caravan trade routes and had many artistic craftsmen among them.  They took slaves and wore engulfing robes dyed with indigo which sometimes made their skin blue.  (See “The Sheltering Sky” either the book by Paul Bowles or the movie made from it.)  Outside forces were constantly trying to confine them, change them, suppress them, which worked better when the Euros or Berbers or whomever tried to contain them were backed up by drought.   I say “romantic” in the sense of the eternal story (roman) about the individual or small group trying to maintain an identity in the face of a larger society that wants to control them.

So what would make an attorney’s son from Cut Bank want to be an investigative journalist who sometimes teaches Arabs in the Palouse hills of Eastern Washington?  I asked him.  He said simply, “Curiosity.”  Does anyone these days not realize there are always psychological Arabs, if not Tauregs, among us?  Ben is hip enough to understand that there are many factions and attitudes among the Blackfeet.  Most journalists tend to see generic “Indians” or at best “tribe,” so that they naively ask,  “What do the Blackfeet think?”  One can only answer “which Blackfeet”?  Many younger male journalists will find one young male Blackfeet informant and assume that everyone else thinks just like him.  It’s the old anthropological way that became a blind corral.

Controversy becomes more bitter as groups are smaller, maybe because there is more at stake in a personal way, until the most dangerous quarrels are between brothers, but brothers might not be defined in the suburban nuclear-family way.  Among tauregs “family” is defined by those who share the tent: usually three or four adults and a scattering of children from various sources.  This is useful to think about on the rez.  I advised Ben to find thresholds for interactive places, like coffee shops or the tribal college commons room or the casino.  Simply be present and wait to see who comes.  Euro-type sources like archives, libraries and authorities have proven to be less helpful.  But ceremonies are communities of memory and hope, often rich with detail and emotion.  It will soon be time for the annual memorial for those lost in the ’64 flood.

“At the turn of the 19th century, the Tuareg territory was organised into confederations, each ruled by a supreme Chief (Amenokal), along with a counsel of elders from each tribe. These confederations are sometimes called "Drum Groups" after the Amenokal's symbol of authority, a drum.”  A Blackfeet ceremony is a kind of drum group.  But today’s tribes, whether taureg or plains Indian, are complex and no one sub-category would capture the experiences of the whole.

A Blackfeet is defined many ways: genetic, provenance of descent (who’s your grandmother, which is what “blood quantum” really means), location, emotional attachment, culture, historical connection, and so on.  One of the side-effects of the 1964 flood, which mostly affected residents along the rivers including the southern boundary river called Birch Creek, was that the people on the rez side had federal and tribal resources for recovery.  The people outside had to rely on the state and their own ability to borrow and so on.  This led to bitterness between the two sides of the river which fed into racism.  Boundaries can create quarrels which feed back into old bitterness.  But a boundary can also become a narrow territory with shared lives, a “long town.”

“Ben” (meaning “son of”) says his growing up years in Cut Bank coincided with the exhaustion of the oil-bonanza, now renewed by frakking.  The women in his family are helpers -- some define lawyers that way.  I think this is relevant and I hope it is reciprocated, a chance for Blackfeet and other veterans of that ’64 flood (like me) to explore the body of interactions and changes that persist even decades later.  Perhaps the noblest study for writers is themselves -- and their closest others.

If you have any good stories about the ’64 flood, you can contact Ben by email:  bshors at hotmail.com   Or if you see him around, you could just buy him a cup of coffee.

THE BOARD (within) THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS

In seminary I was elected to be the student rep on the board of the school.  This was an extremely small school, six people in my class, maybe forty in the whole student body, four faculty members, a four-year program.  There was no good reason for me to be the student rep except that I was forty while most of the others were standard grad school ages, and -- frankly -- no one else wanted to do it.  My presentation to the board was a series of flipchart cartoons describing dysfunction, disenchantment, and wretched dynamics.  I was not appreciated by anyone.  I had not understood that the point of the student member of the board was not to be a prophet, but to assure everyone that the school was a wonderful place worthy of investment.  Since that time I’ve thought a LOT about boards.

At first glance, they would appear to be democratic and a deterrent to dictatorships.  But various forces quickly convert all governing boards, even the ones that are idealistic and nonprofit, into oligarchies if not cabals.  In fact, I found that only a few in-the-know members of my seminary’s board were actually studying the issues and making decisions.  They met quietly and separately, sometimes only by phone between meetings, and the rest of the board either didn’t know it was happening or ignored it.  Not even the Dean was part of this little caucus that controlled the future.

Here’s a brainstorm list of forces that cause this:

1.  Boards are chosen from a fund-raising perspective.  “Non-profit” does not mean non-financial.  Sustaining funds are vital to the existence of the organization.  If a person can build themselves in as part of “sustaining” the infrastructure, perhaps as CEO or in some other salaried position, they will certainly be profiting.  Some of the biggest salaries I know of are generated by management and employment in nonprofits like major churches, schools, and government.  The semantics of calling a do-gooder organization a “non-profit” has not been helpful.  Maybe NGO is more helpful, but not if they fund a private army.

As a minister, as part of the animal welfare movement, and as an environmentalist I’ve been to few board meetings where the subject was actually the ideal goal of the organization.  Once budget and specific employees have been addressed, that seems to be the end of the agenda.  Issues like “mission-drift” (the original goal morphing into something different, maybe not even related) or effectiveness or burn-out are too scary to take on in a group setting like a board meeting.

2.  Boards are often interlinked and develop a culture.  That is, a system of assumptions about what they are doing and how they are doing it.  Boards are often chosen by people already on the board, who tend to recruit people like themselves.  Soon the natural tendency to perpetuate one’s self-interest has become dominating. 

3.  No transparency.  Sooner or later there will be disagreement within or from outside the board.  The easiest way to resolve it is to go dark, avoiding power challenges and alternative solutions to the ones the board prefers.  Board members do not tolerate criticism well.  But transparency is also very easy to dispense with in a larger society where everyone is far too busy to attend yet another meeting or pay attention to complex issues.  A phone call to the board member’s home about meal time ought to get quick agreement.

4.  Friendship and business interests trump board responsibilities.  If arguing over a matter that isn’t crucial to one’s own point of view can endanger social embeddedness or business profit, it’s easy to just let it go.  Who will you lunch with?  Who will you sell to?  When big issues like the entitlement of the sexually divergent or the persistence of unjustified war come along, people tend to think they couldn’t have any impact anyway, so what difference can it make?

5.  Losing track of the original purpose and the collaborating constituency it generated in the first place, so that methods and subsidiary goals split the board.  At the moment the clearest example of this is in the environmental movement.  The article linked below explores this.  At first the Muir-type and Gifford-type people collaborated for the greater goal, but now they split.  http://www.alternet.org/environment/its-not-easy-being-green-are-some-biggest-enviro-groups-giant-sell-outs?akid=10443.299165.cPSzXo&rd=1&src=newsletter841000&t=7

Almost every group has binary forces at work in it, competing for money and energy.  Church congregations and whole denominations are notorious for these power struggles when there is a shift of the centrality of shared goals.  Sometimes the goal is achieved, like eliminating polio, but the group is reluctant to disperse so it invents a new goal, trying to graft it onto the previous one.  Why start a whole new machine when you can convert the March of Dimes to the March of something else?

6.  The status of it all.  Ladies who lunch love to be on the boards of elegant arts organizations like museums, but also to bravely promote compassion for the suffering, the stigmatized, the doomed.  Compassion and arts are considered markers for sophistication and moral justification for exceptional wealth.  For some people board meetings are a showcase for privilege, dressing well, attending the right events.  This is true even in small towns.  When royalty, movie stars, and rock musicians are involved, they attract the media, which is very helpful for success in everyone’s enterprises, whether charity or career. 

However, this does have a dark side.  People tend to think you are interested only in issues that affect you personally, so if you help hookers, then obviously you must be one.

7.  Privileged information.  Most directly, of course, insider knowledge of a monetary or military nature is a good way to get ahead in the world and being on a board does give access to things “outsiders” don’t know, which is why they’re defined as outsiders.  Some of this is theoretically controlled by laws and regulations, but for a small board with great power, meeting privately, that’s mostly ineffective.  No enforcement.

The bottom line is that even carefully designed and well-motivated organizations can fail, and one of the ways is by delegating control and rewards to a smaller subset that closes itself off and operates on its own terms.  I used to think that a corporation could be kept moral and effective by actively involved shareholders, but in an atmosphere where shareholders are only interested in profit above all other criteria, this becomes brittle and self-destructive.  The corporation we call the United States of America is a good example.  Cloaked in idealism, we conflate prosperity with virtue, a religious premise based on the assumption that money is a blessing from God.  This doctrine is self-serving when it is believed by the very rich.  If they really believed it, they wouldn’t be so anxious to keep everyone else down, calling it the “freedom to fail.”

My seminary came close to dying.  It is now a “distance-learning” center in a glass skyscraper in the downtown Loop of Chicago instead of being affiliated with the University of Chicago on the Hyde Park campus as it was when I attended.  The marble and paneled original building has been sold to the U of Chicago.  No one knows whether the seminary’s board decided on a justified path to success or simply chose an easier way to go.  It was a quiet decision made behind the scenes.  I, of course, was dropped from all mailing lists as soon as I began to be critical.  But I called the main denominational office and reinstated myself via high principles, so the principles were good for something.  I’m trying to figure out what else.

NOTES ON THE '64 FLOOD

CLIMATE

There are no mountains that go east/west on the North American continent, so arctic air can easily travel down the continent.  In fact, the Rocky Mountains guide it along the east side of the range.   At the same time, wet air comes in from the Pacific Ocean and piles up on the west side of the range where it must drop moisture in order to be light enough to cross the mountains.  When it does, if it meets cold air, it almost explodes snow.  This snow is “money in the bank” for growing things, because it melts down the east side until late into the summer.  In fact, the “savings account” becomes glaciers.  But prairie summer rain moisture, after the spring monsoons, stays in the rivers and streams and quickly runs off.

These waterways are highways or at least guide paths for travel, even when they are too shallow for boats.  They also become “long towns,” that is, settlements along the edges where it is cool and there is forage.  Even in winter that’s where the trees and shelter are.  BUT the rivers on the rez run at the bottom of deep coulees with steep sides, originally dug by catastrophic floods when the major North American glaciers melted.  The entire coulee bottoms are fertile and relatively flat because they are flood plains.  The only trouble with flood plains is during the flood, but that problem was solved for the nomadic peoples living in portable shelters -- they just went up top for a while.

DAMS

Euro culture and Meso-American culture learned to impound water behind dams, an engineered version of snow-pack glaciers, so that the water could be piped up to the dry land in order to raise bigger crops.  Sometimes the dams could also impound energy to drive turbines.  The early dams on the Blackfeet rez included Swift at the headwaters of Birch Creek, Two Medicine above East Glacier, and Sherburne in the St. Mary’s Valley.  Irrigation was the Big Promise for the reservation but as the Foley Report showed, it was never properly developed.  The Conrad brothers, who built Swift Dam without much attention to permits and other legalities, were the first to exploit a system of canals that really worked.  Lake Francis is part of their system and also supports boating and fishing.    All three dams were earthen, built by piling up dirt.  They had provision for emergency water release but in 1964 they didn’t work either due to lack of maintenance or because no one was there to operate the mechanism.

The first failure was in the St. Mary system and undermined the highway built along the flood plain, so that a man in a pickup was swept in and drowned.  That system drains north and is problematic now, not because of floods but because it would take water into Canada if it were not diverted back into the United States where it is a crucial water supply for people living along the “Hi-line” of what was originally the Northern Pacific Railroad.  That diversion system is beginning to fail and repair will be costly, but the alternative is to close down farms and towns.

Most of the boundaries of the Blackfeet reservation are determined by rivers, which was more convenient in the days of founding than any surveyed line.  The 49^th parallel legal boundary of the United States is the main reason the St. Marys Valley is in the United States.  Nevertheless, the boundary between Glacier National Park and the rez is the water course through the valley, including the chain of lakes.

Gradually rising water is not so damaging as “walls” of water, which kill people and animals because of their suddenness.  Witnesses to the water that came all at once down Birch Creek said it was preceded by a wall of air made visible by the dust it raised.  One person said a cow had been swept up in that preceding wind-wall and was being tossed along, tail over hoof, dead and thumping on the ground.

No one expected dams to break or even rainstorms at the level they reached that June.  School had just gotten out and the old people and children had moved to the homestead allotments at the bottom of the coulees.  There was little or no television in those days and even the radio wouldn’t transmit to many of those relatively remote places.  The alarm had to be spread by people physically going to knock on doors.  All the roads that went out across the rez were unpaved gravel -- some not even gravel.  Much of the soil along the east slope is gumbo, which is caleche, a particular kind of soil derived from volcanic emissions in the Pacific Northwest.  It is famously sticky mud when wet -- impassable except on horseback and even horses must stay on the grass or they will soon have twenty-pound feet.

ECONOMICS

Between Valier and Browning are three bridges on each of the three rivers that went wild. All were destroyed.   Browning was so isolated that grocery supplies had to come in by helicopter.  There was no way out in each of the four directions except by fording water.  The government was overwhelmed.  Once the water went back down, locals began using their farm machinery to rebuild fords and provisional bridges, but paperwork meant work was slow.  Marias Pass was a wreck, including the railroad.  From the east the train could come no closer than Shelby.  Summer tourist trade, a major source of income for the area, was stopped entirely.

The tribe now saw the wisdom of paved roads, even though the flood, hitting perpendicular, had upended paving and thrown it off the engineered right of way, one of the more spectacular sights.  So the “inside road” was paved -- going out of Browning through the railroad depot and along roughly the route of the ancient Old North Trail until it reached Heart Butte, a tiny hamlet which had been devastated by the flood.  Then the roads along Two Medicine, Badger and Birch were paved.  This meant that people who lived in the “long towns” could get to work and school in population centers.  The growing tribal population meant pressure for more housing and when it became clear that clustered housing didn’t work very well because it concentrated dysfunction, new housing was built on allotments along the rivers.  Possibly they ignored the US flood plain housing restrictions.

Once there were roads, the dynamics of Heart Butte changed drastically.  People could get in and out to jobs and work and clustered housing projects were built there.  A new school and a clinic were added.  But law enforcement has never caught up.

To get people back into shelter, the tribal and federal authorities built cheap quick-fix houses intended to be temporary, but they have never gone unoccupied.  Some people moved back into their old log cabins as soon as they were habitable.  (Local standards.)  The pull of habit and convenience was strong.  The contrast between the response on the rez side versus the state and private resources on the state side led to much bitterness among whites.  

WATER RIGHTS

The right of the Blackfeet Tribe to their share of the boundary river of Birch Creek has never been exercised.  The canals that would have to be built were either not built or built in nonfunctional ways.   In the flood some caved out. The motivation to farm as compared to ranching was weak.  But over the years things changed.  The biggest innovation was pivot sprinklers, massive pipe and wheel systems that could water a giant field without any canal -- just pumps.  At the same time education and ambition on the rez were increasing and this time the “haves” versus the “have nots” went the other way.  No one is thinking of garden plots now: they are raising alfalfa.

The dubious history of Swift Dam on the rez and Two Medicine Dam or Sherburne Dam “sort of” on the rez but technically perhaps in Glacier Park, which are not state lands, must now be sorted out through a history-based first-use law that has not been enforced.  Almost certainly it will be necessary to diminish the amount of water used by the Pondera Canal Company.  This will probably be enough of a loss (combined with diminishing annual rainfall) to put some people out of business.  It will also challenge the tribal effort to preserve sovereignty as against federal supervision and intervention.

The climate of the planet is changing, which means that the glaciers are shrinking out of existence.  Rainfall patterns are changing to later in the season so that they are not stored as snow.  They are far more turbulent, which means that they fill the streams and run off faster, making living along flood plains more risky.

DRAMA

Most of the attention to the ’64 flood has been paid to the drama of it all: the deaths, the suffering, the heroism, and what it revealed about individuals, like the priest who was caught in a tree because he was trying to save his private herd of cows.  No one knew he HAD a private herd!  We thought he had taken a vow of poverty!  Bill Grissom, the white Indian agent, threw himself whole-heartedly into rescue and rebuilding.  Jerry Black, the smart aleck radio announcer, stayed by the mic around the clock to guide what was happening, crucial at a time when there was little or no communication gear.

Stories were exaggerated, so that Ramona Wellman desperately wading out of her home with a child by each wrist -- one of which slipped away, luckily caught by the man coming along behind her -- became a “Sophie’s choice” tale about floating on a roof and having to choose whether to save her boy or her girl.  Some bodies were never found.  

Everyone wanted to find a villain.  All the wickedness was far upstream by the time the flood hit.  Trickle-down consequences continue today though much rez land no longer belongs to tribal members and therefore is technically subject to state law, and though there is Indian preference for government jobs so that few whites remain in the towns.  Three towns are tourist-based and much of the economy depends upon fire fighting crews, which are sometimes used for other emergencies now.  Many people have radios and television via cable or satellite, but coverage is still not universal, even for cell phones.  The radio is only intermittently local, mostly being fed from satellites.  Weather reporting is much improved.  Law enforcement is both better and worse -- the FBI having withdrawn to Denver.  People are far better educated and own computers.

Yet no North Korea long-range missile could do the damage that still could be caused by another weather event that spring of ’64.

Myself in the winter of 1963-64

THE WAY

A few years ago I became acquainted with an extraordinary man whose life has been a roller coaster, a ferris wheel, a daredevil carnival ride.  He has also been a faithful husband, a boy-saver, a dependable father and grandfather of girls, a guardian of family secrets, a sailor before the wind.  We thought of writing a book that was a conversation and believed it would be interesting because we are so very different.  Writing it was fun and we pulled in a few others.  But I was the one in charge of marketing and I failed.  Partly they thought I wasn’t real -- that the other writer invented me -- and partly they thought he wasn’t real, that he was just pretending to be himself.  Pecos Bill and Calamity Jane.  Very American.  Paris gets it but Manhattan doesn’t.  Anyway, publishing was desperate to save itself by repeating itself.  They’ve never found a way forward.

For a long time we went on writing back and forth between Paris and Montana, an attunement on email, until part of him died, a miraculous boy who lived in that narrow space between angelic and demonic where only a few people could find him, searingly addictive as he was.  There were other boys, equally gifted, who invented something between a family and a tribe they called an art school.  To the outside world it sometimes was regarded as a leper colony because they all had HIV-AIDS and pasts full of torment and transgression -- but sometimes not.  Their lives divided between art exploits and folding the laundry.

The death of the boy called Tristan collapsed everything.  The book we had written was withdrawn.  It was all a dream, a fantasy, self-deception that other people despised and thought insulted them.  There were life-threatening surgeries, the money ended, we were waiting for death.  But in that classic mythic way in which The Singer is killed, dismembered, then reincarnated to rise again, a new colony on the coast of America formed.  Not so sophisticated, less protected, humbler and more dependent.  

Back in Montana things were different.  I was set outside the gates of the fort.  It’s okay -- I’m on good terms with Indians.  The archetype of success, a Tribeca gallery called “Tristan’s Moon”, was created but then destroyed by a storm of Biblical dimensions.

I search my heart to kick out of it a lot of prideful debris about being a writer, which I had thought would redeem everything.  The rubble left from the collapse of publishing was irrelevant, though I walked along the edges of it and noted what I saw.  I was waiting for a death that never came, revealing to myself what was at stake by writing, writing, writing.

About memories and the past, my friend is a card sharp -- shuffling, prestidigitating, now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t, but the cards have meaning and the game has had consequences -- not literary but intrafamilial.  Sometimes solitary. I love the shadow show, the forming and dissolving patterns, both his and mine and the echoes.  Surprisingly congruent.  Sometimes the game is Tarot -- more often it’s Hearts.  No one messes around with chess, that snob game.  Nor the roulette wheel because life is enough of a gamble already.  The truth is that no one has a monopoly.  Truth (if there is such a thing -- maybe there are a lot of truths) can’t be hoarded.  But there were no lies.

Gradually I saw a way forward, reinvented and yet conserved, though stupidly in stacks of paper and a labyrinth of computer documents on disc -- half-written, mis-labeled.  All the while, the world changed.  A whole population of gatekeepers who believed they knew what was real and what to do has disappeared.  This new cohort of people cares nothing about anything that happened more than ten years ago -- that’s their “event horizon.”  So much to explain all over again.  But they don’t care about history anyway.

Life is an art project.  Here is what the Connectome looks like in a computer representation of all the connections in one brain in one second.

Here is what the basic design of the universe looks like in a computer representation of fractals, Fibonacci’s Golden Spiral, a mathematical truth.

And here is the Anthropocene.

Depression is a dissonance.  Dissonance is a kind of pain, a disorder that signals change -- both needed and suffered.  The whole world is depressed: World Depression II.   But who’s counting?  We’re all busy surviving.  The air is warming, the sea is acidifying, the islands are sinking, and soon the great ocean current gyres will change and then our population problem will be solved.   The cosmos is both pointillist and sedimentary, but always merciless.  Yet dissonance is a brain game.  Get with it.  http://www.brainygamer.com/the_brainy_gamer/2008/12/dissonance.html

My grandmother was born in Quincy, Michigan, in 1871.  Tim’s grandfather was born in Michigan in 1907.  They had the same birth date except for the year.  It might mean nothing.  Michigan at that point -- the Victorian/Edwardian years to use the BBC as a reference -- was the Old Frontier, while the New Frontier was just opening on the prairies.  They shared an attitude, that individuals matter because they carry the honor of the family, and that one must take responsibility.  Get ahead!  It has not been helpful.  My grandmother’s great adventure was Dakota homesteading.  Tim’s grandfather’s adventure was the automobile boom after WWII, and Tim joined him in San Francisco where he was part of a cultural revolution that swept the Euro-American world in the 1970’s in much the same way as the 1770’s.

Fibonacci’s Golden Spiral, the intercontinental gyre of the culture, the Connectome reaching out to trafficked and abused boys all over the planet -- that’s Tim, a grand paisley with dancing fringe, always boarding an airplane.  (Not me.  I’m the one with the bonnet: everytime I google myself I get “Little House on the Prairie.”)  A theologian friend in Montana wrote a book about the paradox that one can’t achieve one’s goals until one gives them up -- stop trying, let it happen.  You don’t have to fly -- it’s enough to hold your arms out.  Even that can be hard work. 

Publishing used to mean that someone “bought” the right to ink one’s sentences onto paper, bind them into an object and sell the objects.  It’s not quite broadcasting, which means sending words out into the air at a specified time.  Now writing is a hybrid, unbound, cross-media.  The path forward is a braided one, like the grazing paths made by animals.  It covers the globe, even along the invisible whale-roads under the sea.  Each of us goes step-by-step into the future.  This brief time of traveling together connected me to a layer of society often exploited for its dark energy but lately endangered by the neo-puritan drive towards profit by defining a narrow way based on oligarchy and military.  I reject that.  How do things work?  What are our songlines?  How have institutions made them into toll roads?

PUSHING UP THE PERCENTAGES

About thirty per cent of people who sign up for weight loss programs, medical or pop, will stick and succeed.  About thirty per cent of people diagnosed with diabetes will change their diet and succeed.  About ten per cent of everyone who tries something addictive (from alcohol to opiods) will be hooked to the degree that they probably never kick.  I can’t cite you the studies.  I’m just trying to break up some of the absolutes, the assumption that everyone who has a physical problem will be “fixed” by diagnosis, meds and behavior change.  We ‘get’ meds.  But even the simple habit behavior of taking them is neither automatic nor easy nor best done alone.

Thirty per cent of the people in AIDS primary care stay.  That means seventy per cent of people with a lethal disease are offered help but leave it.  Why is this?  In fact, the people who manage this primary care, the social workers, often leave the system as well.  Why is that?  The first impulse is to do something to “fix” the “broken” clients, because that’s the basic assumption of social work.  But what about “fixing” the social workers and their attitudes, their oppositional and identity-destroying tasks?  Why are they so often female and usually middle aged?  How does the Nightingale become Nurse Ratched?  

http://www.drugsandalcohol.ie/18464/

Here’s some evidence to show how the kids feel about it.  I assure you that Native American kids, Jewish kids in the Bronx, and wild-ass kids in the Carolinas all feel the same way for the same reason:  THEY ARE NOT INCLUDED.  The SW’s and nurses and people sit on panels to talk about kids the way they would talk about managing cows, as though THEY were the only ones to know how to have a calf, as though THEY were the cows.  They are mostly doing that because men will not.  Men are doctors, principals, coaches, politicians.  They are important and make a lot of money.  Women are care-takers, which is not considered a profession.  They are the ones who put in the catheters, grade the papers, prevent the low scorers from playing in the football game (unless overruled by the administration), and go to the customer counter to tell the citizens why they can’t build where and how they want to.  They do the dirty work.  They are untouchables.  

The only people who are lower are the clients, esp. the ones who have fucked up, the poor, the diseased, the unwanted children.  LOWER people have no say.  They are lower because they don’t know how to do anything, they have no resources, and so on.  Stigma.

All this is a very screwed up understanding of the way society works when it succeeds.  It works when it is a collaboration, when the clients are empowered, when they get to work for their own salvation and improvement on their own terms by their own definition.  If only 30% of a shop’s customers ever returned, then the shop owner would do some very serious rethinking.

We are accustomed to thinking of medicine as a “bug” addressed by a “pill.”  No longer can we think that way.  Only a small percentage of the “cure” or control is molecular meds -- though it IS addressing a bug (virus, bacteria, malfunctioning body) and though it is a medicine that might be administered in a pill, a liquid, an IV line, an implant, a nasal vapor, and so on.  To work, these very powerful but subtle molecules must be exactly quantified, administered on schedule, never skipped.  They have nasty side-effects (worse than going to the dentist), cost way too much, can only be acquired with effort and begging, and even then are sometimes simply not available because they weren’t manufactured and shipped in a timely manner.  I’m not talking about exotic AIDS drugs -- I mean my own ordinary metformin prescription for diabetes II.

To achieve all these things requires a support system:  someone to check the computer at the pharmacy, someone to run interference, someone to remind you, someone to nurse you when the symptoms are overwhelming, someone to get help in an emergency, someone to see what you need when you can’t see it yourself.  There’s no reason why every one of these persons must be adults, medically trained, or official in any sense.  A lot of it is ordinary parent stuff: temps, bp, oxygen levels, nausea mitigation and hydration, cleaning.  Kids can do it for kids, if they have access to the information and maybe some skill training.  Adults who make a living as social workers, nurses, home visit helpers, are not motivated to admit this is possible.

Simply knowing about dire consequences will not be enough to change the behavior of people.  Mostly I’ve been thinking about two populations:  kids with HIV-AIDS and small town folks (esp. women) who have diabetes -- that’s me.  Doctors who have threatened me with going blind and having my feet sawed off only paralyzed me.  Even the many slick magazines with their hints and tips and “possible cures,” the endless recipes with sugar replacements and so on, just interfered with me trying to get clarity about what was factual and what the parameters were.  What did I HAVE to do to prevent eye damage?  What diet standards did I have to obey?  What was the solid evidence?  And so on.  Specifically.  

The finger sticks for glucose monitoring are wicked -- not because of pain but because no one will really tell you want they mean.  Those little tags to stick in the gizmo cost a dollar each.  You take the numbers and keep the charts and eventually you just get tired of it, esp. if the readings stay normal.  And the companies that make the readers are careful to make them go obsolete in a few years, if only by not making available any more of the right little tags.

Beyond that, diabetes is like feminism in that suddenly a raised consciousness reveals how much sugar controls relationships in our society.  Every clerk has a little dish of candy, every bank cashier has suckers to give kids, every church service is followed by “coffee” which is really treats.  Substituting carrot sticks for cupcakes won’t do it.  I don’t know what specifics affects kids with HIV-AIDS in this way, so I reckon a person will have to ask them.  But I expect they know what is sweeter than sugar:  sex.

What I’m saying is that popping pills or should be only a small part of a modern life.  What we need to recover is the old-fashioned stuff where people kept track of each other and lived “regular” lives guided by habit patterns and predictability.  A little Victorianism is a good thing.  Ask Dr. Bramwell, eh?  Streaming on Netflix.  I don’t suppose many street boys sit around watching old PBS/BBC shows, but some of the rest of us do.  Each episode illustrates vividly than pills are not enough when poverty is the affliction.

OPPOSITIONAL CULTURE Part seven, on-going

Oppositional Defiance “disorder” is related to “oppositional culture”.  Wow, do I know about that!  It means deliberately defying attempts at “enculturation” or “education” in order to preserve one’s identity.  Like so many things, it originates as a formal concept with blacks and then appears among the Native Americans, who were already doing it anyway.  They recognized early that a subtle kind of conquering is “assimilation,” meaning that the invaded should become like the invaders.  This is often achieved through “education for success” like Pratt’s military-structured boarding school. 

For a while in the Seventies we turned to our uniqueness and the value of independence.  Now, of course, things have turned around again.  Preserving the identities of minorities is a diminishing value and we are insisting that the immigrants should become just like us -- though we were the former invaders.  In short, the strong and advantaged people still insist on conformity to their standards.  Ironically, the originally advantaged people -- land-owning white males -- are now the minority and a little desperate to defend their category.  They are losing because time is changing everything.

Those who are different, almost by their existence, engage in erosion of the mainstream.  So that today the old white rich men accurately feel embattled and undermined.  Both sides become enraged.  Neither side understands the other.  The old white rich men are hampered by their inability to see or understand anyone different from themselves, including their own children.  The young still can be diverted by the belief that being like an old white rich man with power is a pleasant phenomenon, something effective -- which it only is under certain circumstances that have a funny way of disappearing.

I gather from reading an entry someone composed for Wikipedia that the idea of naming resistance to conventional education an “oppositional culture” comes from blacks in the Seventies but turned out to be useful enough for it to persist.  The main theorist, a guy named Ogbu, seemed to think that the phenomenon of opposition should be opposed -- that people SHOULD try to be like the main and dominant culture, whatever it might be.  While sociologists were thinking about this, the oppositional attitude of the Seventies has now spread from race to gender stereotypes and sexual preference and has splintered into individual defiances.  Some are defying society to make them marry when they only want to live together, kids or not, at the same time that others are defying society to prevent them from marrying, whether they include a female or not.    

This is an agonistic society.  Our law and government, our stories and editorial pages are all based on two forces in conflict, while in the background for decades now we’ve been having workshops about “getting to yes,” and marches for peace.  The discussion and negotiation movement that once seemed so promising has been trampled underfoot by debate, one side against the other in the style of a trial.

Most of the information I’m finding on google addresses the defiance of parents by children.  I do not see much (so far) about stupid, inept, undependable, and destructive parents -- just children who are disobedient in disruptive ways.  The main responses advised, even by so eminent an authority as the Mayo Clinic, is either drugging or manipulation, including the use of the “ear bug” we see on cop movies, where someone sits behind a one-way mirror and second-guesses the parent, not the child.  Making a parent into a puppet does not solve the conflict.  So many of these ideas are based on the assumption that the parent’s desire to dominate the child is legitimate.  That’s because the parent is the one who picks up the tab.  Maybe there ought to be a trust fund for children who are unjustly dominated by parents trying to make their kids achieve as surrogates for themselves. 

A woman sends me a “comment” asking what books or treatments would help her because she’s pissing everyone off and they say it’s because she opposes them unreasonably.  That is, they don’t see why she should oppose them, which suggests some kind of negotiation or referee from outside is needed.   But maybe not.  Maybe she’s right.  Or maybe she really does have the knee jerk reaction of opposition to everything.  What causes the oppositional defiance attitude in adults that’s strong enough to make trouble?

Why does one kid need only a rebuke to quickly shape up and another one be like the boy whose mother demanded why he didn’t obey even after a vigorous licking.  He said, “It’s worth it, Mom.”  We’ve heard a lot about priests who take advantage of children sexually, but what about bishops who screw their priests metaphorically or psychologically -- or, more likely, nuns.  The ghost of the Roman Empire persists.  Is God’s other name Nero?

Nevertheless, there is something essential in a human’s physiological substructure that makes some people inclined to defiance.  In an earlier post I suggested addiction to the adrenaline of it all.  Many of our most intense military movies address the usefulness and the tragedy of individuals wanting combat, NEEDING combat, even though withdrawal imposes PTSD.  The rule of evolution is that anything that tends to survive will drive change, fitness is always defined in retrospect.  The defiant individual is a change agent, often destroyed in the effort, but sometimes saving a whole community of people who will persist into the future.  It is a case something like the stotting Tommy, the Thompson’s gazelle that goes leaping out from the main group, to be eaten by lions and by so doing saves the herd.  

People who are wired for defiance whether they are Irish or Arab, cannot be forced to conform by imposing obedience.  Anyway, once the dominant group has identified them as enemies, once the subordinate group has achieved solidarity enough to submerge their individuality in the alternative culture, a “cause”, there are few ways to get to yes except by separation.  This has not proven to be a useful strategy in the long run -- how long can you endure a “time out?”  Or a hunger strike?

What is most often identified as ODD in kids is lying, stealing, disobedience, cursing, and -- among the more alert -- passive aggression or secrecy.  But I’m not reading anything about WHY the contempt for authority, the identification with an outlier group.  I think it is a problem that will recur in any society hooked on dominance, even if they impose public flogging and draconian amputations.  It’s a little like our insistence on sex-obsession and then complaining about inappropriate sexual acts.

I did find a reference at this link that looks interesting: http://www.livesinthebalance.org/about-lives-in-the-balance-and-solving-problems-collaboratively   This “method” was recommended by a man who was aware that his grandfather, his father, himself and his son were all people who flared up and resisted.  The strategy is very sensible, sitting down to look at a problem from both sides in order to generate some options.  The trouble is that if things have gone very far, sitting down calmly will have become impossible.  Witness the United States Congress, an illustration of oppositional defiance if there ever was one, and as mainstream as it gets.  Maybe it’s because they’re all lawyers.  Maybe it’s because they all feel like losers.  At least the Republican side, which is pretty solidly white male property owners.