Archive for the 'First Peoples' Category

Holes

Published March 4, 2013 Capital Crime , Caribbean , Eternal Recurrence , First Peoples , Into The Light , La Musica , Variations In B-Flat 12 Comments

and i can hear the distant thunder
of a million unheard souls
of a million unheard souls
watch each one reach for creature comforts
for the filling of their holes
for the filling of their holes

—Peter Gabriel

The phone rang; friend S—; calling from his car.

I believe there is probably a law against that now: phoning and driving. But S—, like most those in my karass, has never been about laws.

He was reporting in upon returning from two weeks in Costa Rica. He had stayed throughout that time in his wife’s village, which has oopsonly a tenuous connection to the modern world.

He was having difficulty readjusting. To life in the fast lane.

His narrative was punctuated by periodic outbursts involving his fellow motorists. All of whom he denounced as “maniacs,” and who seemed to be about, in some unconscious but infuriating way, menacing his life.

He said that one day, back there in the village, he saw two of his wife’s uncles walking down the street, hand in hand. And they looked like they were in the grips of some sublime drug experience. Except they weren’t on anything at all.

He said the people in the village basically involve themselves in eating, sleeping, making love, and being with friends and family. And that’s about it.

They seem much happier in it, he said. Healthier, too. Physically and mentally.

In trying to come up with some Reason in favor of a life of phoning while driving, he said: “Of course, up here I don’t have to worry about the lights flickering on and off. And when I drive to the store, I don’t have to worry about the car falling into some hole.”

Well . . . hold up there, hoss.

According to retiring Transportation Secretary Roy LaHood, “America is one big pothole right now.”

LaHood laments that the Second Law of Thermodynamics is merrily taking out the nation’s roads, because teabaggers in Congress refuse to spend money on anything that doesn’t involve killing or deporting brown people, or furthering the holy mission of Occupy Womb Street.

“At one time we were the leader in infrastructure,” he said. “We built the interstate system. It’s the best road system in the world, and we’re proud of it. But we’re falling way behind other countries, because we have not made the investments.”

“Investments” means taxes. And, as is well known, increasing taxes is about as popular these days hole huntingamong ‘Muricans as moving Chester the Molester into Little Johnny’s bedroom.
And so the nations’s roads and bridges and such are devolving to that state described in the second act of Earth Abides, after time and nature had had their way with them, through some twenty years or so of human inattention. When, basically, you needed a reinforced jeep, many shovels, and a serious winch, to get anywhere at all.
And now there is this scarifying phenomenon known as “sinkholes.” A menace I have just recently become acquainted with. Upon a massive sinkhole opening up under a house in Florida, and swallowing a man in his bed.
Apparently Florida is “geologically unstable.” Consisting, in the main, of porous limestone, which is a “weakly soluble mineral formed from calcified deposits of sea creatures.”
These sea creatures, they do not want stuff built on them. Because humans persist in building stuff on them anyway, the limestone gets Sad, and sighs into Holes.
And this Sighing is occurring with increasing frequency. It is said that Florida insurers received 24,671 claims for sinkhole damage between 2006 and 2010 alone. That’s an average of nearly 17 claims a day.
This means that at least 17 sinkholes pepper the Floridian earth every 24 hours.
Generally, when a person walks the earth, they do so in the knowledge that there is no real chance the earth will collapse beneath their feet.
This is apparently no longer true. At least in Florida.
And, as we know from Election Day 2000: as Florida goes, so goes the nation.
You know, one of the reasons I eschew boats and aircraft, is light holesbecause air and water are not natural elements for human beings. Humans are designed to breathe air, and walk on the earth.
Bad enough, that for many decades now humans have persisted in putting earth in the air. But now, in building stuff where the earth doesn’t want stuff to go, the earth is just giving up, and collapsing into holes.
And so, every step you take, may be your last.
Into the hole you go.
There are a lot of holes, in the modern world.
Humans, I think, are beginning to know just how many holes it takes to fill their Albert Halls.
i read the news today oh boy
four thousand holes in blackburn lancashire
and though the holes were rather small
they had to count them all
now they know how many holes it takes to fill the albert hall
i’d love to turn you on

—John Lennon

Who I Am

Published December 22, 2012 Animal Matters , Eros , Eternal Recurrence , First Peoples , Into The Light , La Musica , Liberte Egalite Fraternite , Ms. Ah-Ha , Oddbins , Outer Limits , Peasant Palate , Sunday Services , Variations In B-Flat , What's Good 1 Comment

The Said Admiral Is Dead

Published November 16, 2012 Capital Crime , Caribbean , First Peoples , Wyrds 3 Comments

(I suppose I must have been consumed by a brain parasite, that I didn’t timely post this year’s version of this piece here. But, no matter. Mistah Admiral: he—still—dead.

(For, as ever, Anacaona, and all the Taino.)

∞

They say it came first from Africa, carried in the screams of the enslaved; that it was the death bane of the Taino, uttered just as one world perished and another began; that it was a demon drawn into Creation through the nightmare door that was cracked open in the Antilles. Fuku americanus, or more colloquially, fuku—generally a curse or a doom of some kind; specifically the Curse and the Doom of the New World. Also called the fuku of the Admiral because the Admiral was both its midwife and one of its great European victims; despite “discovering” the New World the Admiral died miserable and syphilitic, hearing (dique) divine voices. In Santo Domingo, the Land He Loved Best, the Admiral’s very name has become synonymous with both kinds of fuku, little and large; to say his name aloud or even to hear it is to invite calamity on the heads of you and yours.

No matter what its name or provenance, it is believed that the arrival of Europeans on Hispaniola unleashed the fuku on the world, and we’ve all been in the shit ever since. Santo Domingo might be fuku’s Kilometer Zero, its port of entry, but we are all of us its children, whether we know it or not . . . .

—Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Much about the Admiral is not known. Where he was born, and when: these are not known. The arc of his early years, when and what he studied at the University of Pavia: these, too, are not known. Where he obtained his ideas of geography, this is not known. The Admiral, it developed, did not know geography: he believed, to the end of his days, that where he landed in 1492 marked the far eastern fringe of Asia.

What is known is that when the Admiral stepped ashore on Hispaniola, he brought original sin to the New World. For the policies he pursued there exterminated that island’s people, the Taino. Every one.

“All the Indians of these islands were allotted by the Admiral . . . to all the settlers who came to live in these parts; and in the opinion of many who saw what happened and speak of it as eyewitnesses, the Admiral, when he discovered these islands, passed sentence of death on a million or more Indians, men and women, of all ages, adults and children. Of this number and of those since born, it is believed that there do not survive today, in this year 1548, 500 Indians, adults and children, who are natives and who are offspring of the stock of those he found on arrival.”

Today, “the Taino survive in the shape of one’s eyes, the outline of one’s face, the idiom of one’s language.” All the rest, is gone.

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If I Only Had A Brain

Published November 14, 2012 Capital Crime , Eros , Eternal Recurrence , First Peoples , Into The Light , La Musica 10 Comments

It has been clear for quite some time that things started going Wrong for the humans when they left off the hunter-gathering and settled down to start growing turnips.

This led inexorably to nonsense like cities, money, countries, Microsoft, McDonalds, meshugas, and the nitwit pictured there to the left, who could only be produced by a species that sits on its ass to cultivate rutabagas.

Now some Science Men down at Stanford have confirmed that this disastrous detour has resulted in Deep Dumbness, the human brain atrophying because people persist in raising beets, while meanwhile inventing television, so they can blur out on The Price Is Right and Let’s Make A Deal.

They have thereby mutated themselves, these humans, and not in a good way: “the average person harbors two intelligence-stunting genetic changes that evolved over the last 3,000 years.”

Hear, now, The Truth:

Humans may be gradually losing intelligence, according to a new study.

The study, published Monday in the journal Trends in Genetics, argues that humans lost the evolutionary pressure to be smart once we started living in dense agricultural settlements several thousand years ago.

“The development of our intellectual abilities and the optimization of thousands of intelligence genes probably occurred in relatively non-verbal, dispersed groups of peoples [living] before our ancestors emerged from Africa,” said study author Gerald Crabtree, a researcher at Stanford University, in a statement.

Since then it’s all been downhill, Crabtree contends.

Alas, poor humans. They were doing so well. But then they strayed from the onwards and upwards. For parsnips.

Early humans lived or died by their spatial abilities, such as quickly making a shelter or spearing a saber-toothed tiger. Nowadays, though almost everyone has the spatial ability to do ostensibly simple tasks like washing dishes or mowing the lawn, such tasks actually require a lot of brainpower, the researchers note . . . .

But after the spread of agriculture, when our ancestors began to live in dense farming communities, the intense need to keep those genes in peak condition gradually waned.

And it’s unlikely that the evolutionary advantage of intelligence is greater than it was during our hunter-gatherer past, the paper argues.

“A hunter-gatherer who did not correctly conceive a solution to providing food or shelter probably died, along with his/her progeny, whereas a modern Wall Street executive that made a similar conceptual mistake would receive a substantial bonus and be a more attractive mate. Clearly, extreme selection is a thing of the past,” the researchers write.

That the average IQ throughout the world has been thought to increase over the past 100 years is an illusion, contend the Science Men. This seeming increase is due to factors like better pre-natal care, improved nutrition, and getting the lead out. But, in Reality, the Dumbness continues, as the very genes of humans are engaged in de-evolution:

Anywhere between 2,000 and 5,000 genes determine human intelligence, and these genes are particularly susceptible to harmful changes, or mutations, the researchers write. Based on knowledge of the rate of mutations, the team concludes that the average person harbors two intelligence-stunting genetic changes that evolved over the last 3,000 years.

So, as Lenin famously asked, What Is To Be Done?

Funkadelic nearly Saw it, but they got it backward, because they are of a species with eroding brainpans. Having abandoned all, for the sake of yams. Which inevitably culminates in Xbox onanism.

In 1970, Funkadelic released an album entitled Free Your Mind And Your Ass Will Follow.

In truth, getting there is accomplished thusly: Free Your Ass And Your Mind Will Follow.

Code Unknown

Published November 10, 2012 Capital Crime , Cineman , Eros , Eternal Recurrence , First Peoples , Into The Light , La Musica , Liberte Egalite Fraternite , Outer Limits , War On Terra , What's Good , Wyrds 7 Comments

Three weeks or so ago the spirit vacated the corporeal container known as “Russell Means.”

This is what his Kossack companero, cacamp, had to say about Means:

Russ was my brother-in-arms He and I were both AIM leaders and led our people together in many fights and struggles. We stood shoulder to shoulder all across our great land, we had many hard times but also the most wonderful times of our lives. Russ was an independent man who walked his own path and often surprised even his comrades like me. But he always put his people first and did what he thought was right. Russ was also a brave man who was always willing to put his life and freedom on the line for a just cause. He was a warrior who inspired us all and a beloved figure in our community. Today Indian Country is in mourning even though we knew this was coming. Russ will be missed by his family, Oglala Tribe, AIM and all who knew him.

In 1980, Means delivered what I consider to be the most important “political” speech of my lifetime. Find it beyond the furthur.

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Twitch And Smoke And Rotate Endlessly

Published July 19, 2012 Ala , Asia , Capital Crime , Caribbean , Eternal Recurrence , First Peoples , Liberte Egalite Fraternite , Ms. Ah-Ha , Outer Limits , Sunday Services , Variations In B-Flat , War On Terra , Wyrds 4 Comments

(Around about the 4th of July Meteor Blades put up “Thoughts Ahead Of Independence Day,” over on the Orange Place.

(That was a good Diary. It reminded me somewhat of something I’d penned myself, back in the 1990s. Not nearly as polished and precise, mine, as Meteor’s work; but then, after all, he is he, and I am me.

(Then, later that very same day—because sometimes that’s the way these things happen—I actually ran across the thing that I’d long-ago written. And I thought maybe I’d put it up for July 4th.

(But then that seemed like so much work. To retype it for the tubes.

(So I abandoned that idea: because, basically, these days, I’m fat and happy and lazy, and pretty consistently vote “no” on anything that seems like work.

(But then, for reasons that best remain obscured, I was galvanized to enter the thing—changed some, naturally, because the intertubes allows one to do that—after all.

(A day or 18 late, of course. And several hundred thousand dollars short.

(What’s interesting to me now, about this piece, is how angry I was then. Because I’m just not that angry anymore.

(But that’s a different Diary.)

∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞

I write along a single line: I never get off it. I said that you were never to kill anyone, and I meant it.

—Kenneth Patchen

“They’ve gone crazy.”

High above Second Street, in his nook in his cranny in the Chico News & Review editorial sukkah, journalissimo Jason Ross stood erect in full naked fulmination.

“They’re acting like it’s VJ Day, for chrissake,” he fumed. “And all they’re doing is putting up a flag. Ads all over the radio, live television coverage, Bruce Sessions beating the drum hourly—these people have lost all control.

“Look,” he demanded, freeing paper pinned to his wall. “Look at this.” Thrusts forth a Calvin Klein image, pleading to peddle Obsession for Men, flashing a giant b&w naked male torso: above, the head peers downward; below, a hand stretches open, and taut, the front of a pair of briefs.

“That’s what they’re doing, with all this flag bullshit,” Ross declaims. “Looking at their cocks. That’s all it is.”

Though Ross is a direct descendant of the dowdy dowager who sewed the first stars and stripes, in a fetching but ultimately futile attempt to seduce George Washington, he was not at all impressed with the day’s flag-waving affair.

For this day, out in the asphalt lot afront Ron and Nancy’s, the Park Avenue steak & scotch joint where cigarette smoke goes to die, a zealous swarm of north valley idolworshippers planned to raise a massive banner in honor of some nonsense known as “America.”

Karma—and, more urgently, the need for money—had called on Billy Buck Naked and I to cover the erection. We’d stopped by the office on the way to the event to grab a camera, and to receive last-minute instructions from the international communist cabal that controls the CN&R.

“If there are going to be dicks on display I guess we better forget the pictures,” Naked now mourned. “Speer’ll never print them. I used to work here; I know.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “These are Republicans; it’s against their religion to get naked. A lot of these characters aren’t really attired like you and I anyway. Bernie Richter, Wally Herger, Ted Hubert—those people don’t change clothes; they shed.”

“Then let’s get going,” Naked urged. “I don’t want to miss the blessing of the tanks.”

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The Green Light

Published July 19, 2012 Ala , Cineman , Destry , Eros , First Peoples , Into The Light , Johnny Law , La Musica , Liberte Egalite Fraternite , Ms. Ah-Ha , Outer Limits , Rutting For Office , Sunday Services , Variations In B-Flat , What's Good , Wyrds 2 Comments

The very most interesting thing about the United States is that it died even as it was born.

As expressed in Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, which must serve as the “great American novel,” for there shall never be another:

Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away. Until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes—a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.And as I sat there, brooding on the old unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther . . . . And one fine morning—

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

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Sometimes Your Name Really Is Mud

Published June 2, 2012 Ala , First Peoples , Liberte Egalite Fraternite , Wyrds 6 Comments

In the ancient past, the Seine spread throughout the entire bowl-shaped valley that now forms the Paris region, and at one time, it split into two arms. To the south, the slightly wider branch roughly followed the river’s present-day path. To the north, an arc of water swept across what is now the Right Bank, through Bastille, Menilmontant, parts of Belleville, and lower Montmartre. It reached all the way to the present-day locations of Chaillot and L’Alma, just across the river from the Eiffel Tower. When these two branches flooded, the whole basin filled to become a lake several miles wide. Little by little, the northern arm of the Seine dried up, and by 30,000 BCE, it had vanished completely, leaving more or less the Seine we know today. Large parts of the Right Bank remained wetlands for some time. The neighborhood called the Marais—which means “the swamp”—was once a marsh adjacent to the river. It is no wonder that when the Romans first invaded the area inhabited by the Parisii tribe in the first century BCE, they chose to construct their city on the less soggy Left Bank. No wonder either that they named the city Lutetia, likely derived from lutum, the Latin word for mud.

—Jeffrey H. Jackson, Paris Under Water

First There Is A Mountain, Then There Is No Mountain, Then There Is

Published November 20, 2011 Capital Crime , First Peoples 13 Comments

In early October of 2010, Maatia Toafa had been prime minister of the island nation of Tuvalu for less than a week.

He met one afternoon with Andrew Marantz, who was working on a piece that would eventually be published in the December 2011 issue of Harper’s.

Tuvalu is the country that is believed to be the first that will disappear entirely beneath the waves, due to climate change. Some estimates predict this submergence in less than 50 years.

Marantz asked Toafa, among other things, what sort of ideas he had, in re Tuvalu becoming an aquatic country. Some of their exchange is reprinted below.

Toafa was ousted in a vote of “no confidence” about two months after this interview took place.

I asked what solutions he proposed to the issue that his entire country might be underwater in fifty years.

He said he would consider “bringing in some mountains from somewhere, so we can have a higher elevation.”

“Mountains?” I asked.

“Sure,” he said.

“Where would the mountains come from?”

“Well,” he said. “We’ll ask around.”

We Are Devo

Published October 17, 2011 Africa , Asia , Capital Crime , First Peoples , Peasant Palate , Wyrds 1 Comment

The traditional notion that hunter-gatherers must carry on a solitary, unremitting search for food, that they supposedly wake each morning not knowing whether or not they will find the day’s supply, and that they usually die young from famine happens to be untrue. Hunter-gatherers, who are not solitary but live in small bands and observe many intricate social rules for the distribution of food, are far from impoverished. The San in the bleak Kalahari Desert forage for food for no more than a few hours a day on the average; moreover, the unmarried young people and those older than fifty do hardly any work at all. Medical examinations of the San have shown that their diet, both abundant and nutritious, has enabled them to escape many of the health problems associated with diets that are common in modern societies: obesity and “middle-age spread,” dental cavities, hypertension and coronary heart disease, and elevated levels of cholesterol. And far from being short-lived, many of the San live into their sixties and seventies. An important point made by studies of surviving hunter-gatherers is that their generally excellent nutrition extends to all members of the society and not just to a privileged few—simply because the prevalence of sharing insures that everyone eats the same way.

[I]t is a mistake to suppose that modern societies allow people to work less hard for their daily bread. Out of the 1129 hours worked by one Chinese irrigation farmer in a year, only 122 were needed to grow enough food to sustain that farmer. A blue-collar worker in the United States, on the other hand, spends 180 hours earning enough money to purchase a year’s supply of food. Notwithstanding Western notions of the Chinese peasant’s incessant labor, it is plain that they actually need to work less by a third than North Americans or Europeans to keep themselves supplied with food. Moreover, although a mechanized farmer in the American Midwest need put in an annual total of only nine hours of work for each acre to achieve an astounding six thousand calories for each calorie of effort, that figure ignores the enormous amounts of human labor that go into manufacturing and transporting the trucks, tractors, combines, fuel, fertilizer, pesticides, fence wire, and everything else used by the farmer, not to mention transporting the food itself. For every person who actually works on a Midwestern farm, the labor of at least two others off the farm is needed to supply equipment and services directly to the farmer—aside from the very many more whose labors contribute indirectly to the final product. Altogether, a total of 2790 calories of energy must be expended to produce and deliver to a consumer in the United States just one can of corn providing a total of 270 calories. The production of meat entails an even greater deficit: an expenditure of 22,000 calories is needed to produce the somewhat less than four ounces of beefsteak that likewise produce 270 calories.

In short, present-day agriculture is much less efficient than traditional irrigation methods that have been used by Asians, among others, in this century and by Mayans, Mesopotamians, Egyptians, and Chinese in antiquity. The primary advantage of a mechanized agriculture is that it requires the participation of fewer farmers, but for that the price paid in machines, fossil fuels, and other expenditures of energy is enormous. A severe price is also paid in human labor. Once the expensive machines have been manufactured and deployed on the farms, they are economically efficient only if operated throughout the daylight hours, and indeed farmers in the United States often labor for sixteen hours a day. The boast of industrialized societies that they have decreased the workload is valid only in comparison with the exploitation of labor that existed in the early decades of the Industrial Revolution. If the prevailing forty-hour work week of North America and Europe were proposed to the San, whoever did so would be considered to be exploitive, inhuman, or plain mad.

—Peter Farb, Consuming Passions

The Said Admiral Is Dead

Published October 9, 2011 Capital Crime , Caribbean , Eternal Recurrence , First Peoples , War On Terra , Wyrds 1 Comment

They say it came first from Africa, carried in the screams of the enslaved; that it was the death bane of the Tainos, uttered just as one world perished and another began; that it was a demon drawn into Creation through the nightmare door that was cracked open in the Antilles. Fuku americanus, or more colloquially, fuku—generally a curse or a doom of some kind; specifically the Curse and the Doom of the New World. Also called the fuku of the Admiral because the Admiral was both its midwife and one of its great European victims; despite “discovering” the New World the Admiral died miserable and syphilitic, hearing (dique) divine voices. In Santo Domingo, the Land He Loved Best, the Admiral’s very name has become synonymous with both kinds of fuku, little and large; to say his name aloud or even to hear it is to invite calamity on the heads of you and yours.

No matter what its name or provenance, it is believed that the arrival of Europeans on Hispaniola unleashed the fuku on the world, and we’ve all been in the shit ever since. Santo Domingo might be fuku’s Kilometer Zero, its port of entry, but we are all of us its children, whether we know it or not . . . . 

—Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Much about the Admiral is not known. Where he was born, and when: these are not known. The arc of his early years, when and what he studied at the University of Pavia: these, too, are not known. Where he obtained his ideas of geography, this is not known. The Admiral, it developed, did not know geography: he believed, to the end of his days, that where he landed in 1492 marked the far eastern fringe of Asia.

What is known is that when the Admiral stepped ashore on Hispaniola, he brought Original Sin to the New World. The policies he pursued there exterminated that island’s people, the Taino. Every one.

“All the Indians of these islands were allotted by the Admiral . . . to all the settlers who came to live in these parts; and in the opinion of many who saw what happened and speak of it as eyewitnesses, the Admiral, when he discovered these islands, passed sentence of death on a million or more Indians, men and women, of all ages, adults and children. Of this number and of those since born, it is believed that there do not survive today, in this year 1548, 500 Indians, adults and children, who are natives and who are offspring of the stock of those he found on arrival.”

Today, “the Taino survive in the shape of one’s eyes, the outline of one’s face, the idiom of one’s language.” All the rest, is gone.

From Hispaniola, the Admiral and his works brought destruction too to all the native peoples of all the rest of the Americas—north, central, and south.

And to replace the falling bodies of the Taino, who died extracting gold and silver for him, the Admiral birthed the transatlantic slave trade, bringing to the New World in bondage people from the place where human beings were born.

Wrote the Admiral to his sponsors, Ferdinand and Isabella:

“We can send from here, in the name of the Holy Trinity, all the slaves and brazil-wood which could be sold. If the information I have is correct, we can sell 4000 slaves, who will be worth, at least, 20 millions, and 4000 hundred-weight of brazil-wood, which will be worth just as much . . . I went recently to the Cape Verde Islands where the people have a large slave trade, and they are constantly sending ships to barter for slaves, and ships are always in harbor . . . Although they die now, they will not always die. The Negroes and the Canary Islanders died at first[.]“

The Admiral also loved him some pope, another of his sponsors. And wanted to help him flog their god to other parts of the globe, there to kill and convert people. In his journal of December 26, 1492, the Admiral writes that he hopes to gather up from the New World gold “in so great quantity that the Sovereigns within three years would undertake and prepare to go and conquer the Holy Places.” In a letter sent directly to the pope, the Admiral offered to himself lead a crusading force of some 110,000 men.

But that was not to be. The Admiral was eventually returned in chains to Spain, accused of misgoverning his New World. Fallen from favor, he spent his declining years in litigation against the king, seeking to regain lost wealth and titles. Further, he thought he should receive 10% of all profits Spain derived from the New World, and demanded same; the king told him to bugger right off. In combating the crown, the Admiral became a nonperson. And when he died, the official chronicle of the inland northern town where he expired, Valladolid, did not acknowledge his passing. It was not until several weeks later that a town document noted simply: “the said Admiral is dead.”

Fame

Published October 4, 2011 First Peoples , Wyrds Leave a Comment

“Now Travis lost his fight, and he’ll get in the history books when someone writes up this place. If a thousand Comanches had cornered us in some gully and wiped us out, like the Sioux just done Custer, they’d write songs about us for a hundred years.”

It struck Call as a foolish remark. “I doubt there was ever a thousand Comanches in one bunch,” he said. “If there had been they would have taken Washington DC.”

—Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove

“Can I Pet The Nice Park, Daddy?”

Published June 8, 2011 Animal Matters , Cineman , Eros , Eternal Recurrence , First Peoples , Johnny Law , War On Terra 12 Comments

(This piece was originally published in a now-deceased local paper, about four or so years ago. I am reprinting it here now. Because.)

My daughter has always been attuned to suffering. When still but a toddler, those she perceived as in some sort of pain she dubbed “poor,” and she felt compelled to actively empathize by formally, soberly, petting them. This gift she bestowed indiscrim-inately, from bloated dead sea lions festering on the beach, to cruelly shaped and tamed ornamental shrubbery.

“Poor car,” she would say, running her hand over some rusted, abandoned junkheap. “Nice car.”

My daughter has not yet experienced that cruel and abusive torment of nature known today as  ”Downtown City Plaza.” I know, though, that she would instantly see it for what it is: crabbed, crimped, crippled. Sterile, suffering, more or less dead. She would gaze upon it with compassion, and then she would ask: “Can I pet the nice park, daddy?”

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Place Of The Skull

Published April 23, 2011 Asia , Capital Crime , Eros , Eternal Recurrence , First Peoples , Into The Light , Sunday Services , Variations In B-Flat , Wyrds 6 Comments

“Profit motive” means very simply: you give less than you take. If you give less than you take, you grow mean and stingy. Everybody suffers. Morality is totally impossible.

—Lew Welch

Fukushima is still leaking and steaming and bubbling and melting, and will be, best guess, for at least another nine months.

And yet, the vultures are already out there, flying high, circling, “eager” to rake in the billions in profit they estimate will come their way, through decades of “cleanup” efforts, transforming the dead zone of Fukushima into a place where human beings may tread without fear that blood will immediately spout from their orifices, or tumors later sprout all over their bodies.

Both companies [Hitachi and Toshiba] have large nuclear-related businesses and appear to be eager to speak about endgame possibilities for a crisis that has heightened global public mistrust of nuclear power. Billions of dollars are likely to be at stake in the cleanup, which could help Hitachi and Toshiba improve their bottom lines.

Making money: I guess I get it. A primitive stage in the development of primates, as they evolve towards beings of light. But aren’t we there yet, to the place where there are at least some limits? Why should people be permitted to get fat off sealing a glow-tomb?

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That Remains In Africa

Published April 3, 2011 Africa , Animal Matters , Eros , First Peoples , Into The Light , Variations In B-Flat , What's Good 5 Comments

The sacred grove took my breath away. I had expected only more myth-making, something calling once more for a suspension of disbelief.

But the grove was real and it was beautiful: a piece of tropical woodland which had been left untouched for some time, and where no animal or creature was to be killed. That was what we had been told; and that was what we found.

Through the wilderness of tree-trunks and hanging lianas inside we had glimpses of the river that ran through the sanctuary. It was a muddy tropical river, and no attempt had been made to beautify or soften the turbid water; the scalloped melting forms on the wall were intended to match the bounce of the fast-moving river, narrow at this point.

It was all very moving to me, especially the idea of the grove as an animal sanctuary. It was said to be a hundred and sixty acres in all, a quarter of a square mile. I wished it was ten times the size.

A big gate opened into a short lane—this was for the procession at the time of the river festival. The lane led down, past a number of small home-made shrines at the foot of trees, to what was said to be a pavilion, just where the yellow river curved. It was an open pavilion, thatched, with timber uprights. To one side of the pavilion was the big shrine. The shrine was also thatched, and had mud walls decorated with figures in white, chocolate, rust and black. The priests and the soothsayers lived within those walls. The legend was that the pavilion stood on the site of the first Oba of Osun. At the time of the river festival, as people said, thousands of people of the black diaspora came here. There were morality plays in every corner of the wood.

The event had now taken hold; and the people of the diaspora who came for it would understand that though they had taken many of the Yoruba gods across the water, and though the whole apparatus of the supernatural had also travelled with them, reminding men of the precariousness of their hold on life, and though they had taken much of this Yoruba magic to the New World, making that difficult world safe, they could never take the sacred grove with them. That remained in Africa.

—V.S. Naipaul, The Masque Of Africa

Steal Your Face Right Off Your Head

Published October 23, 2010 Asia , Capital Crime , Eternal Recurrence , First Peoples 2 Comments

Richard Zacks’ An Underground Education is a bottomless repository of ways in which human beings have been brutal and beastly to one another over the millennia.

Of interest today is Zacks’ accounting of how the wealthy once relied upon the teeth of the poor and the dead to replace their own rotting dentition.

Ambrose Pare, sometimes described as “the father of modern surgery,” wrote of “a lady of the prime nobility who had her rotten tooth pulled, then at the same time had a sound tooth drawn from one of her waiting maids, to be substituted and inserted, which tooth over time took root and grew so strong that she could chew upon it as well as any of the rest.” It is said that the practice among Parisian dentists of the 1780s, of yanking teeth from the mouths of the poor to fit them into the rotting gums of the French aristocracy, was one of the factors that ultimately encouraged the French peasantry to support removing the heads of said aristocrats.

The guillotine, however, hardly stopped the practice. Zacks tells us that George Washington’s dentist, John Greenwood, returned from a trip to Europe in 1805 with an entire keg filled with human teeth. Zacks notes that “[a] whole generation wore ‘Waterloo’ dentures made from teeth yanked from the corpses on the battlefield and the practice continued as late as the Civil War, when thousands of teeth were stolen from bodies moldering at places like Bull Run and Gettysburg.” Prayed one supplier of stolen teeth: “Oh, sir, only let there be a battle, and there will be no want of teeth. I’ll draw them as fast as the men are knocked down.”

I was reminded of these practices when I read today that the shameless corporados of Colgate Palmolive stole a folk toothpowder used by the people of India for centuries, patented it in the US, and have now returned with it to India, hoping thereby to reap billions by knocking out the native competition in the Indian oral-hygiene market.

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Australia Moving To China

Published September 12, 2010 Asia , Capital Crime , Eternal Recurrence , First Peoples 2 Comments

BusinessWeek is reporting that Australia is moving to China. At the rate of a million tons a day, Australia is excavated, poured into trucks, loaded aboard barges, and floated off to the Middle Kingdom. There it is employed in the service of high-winding the national economy so that the Chinese may live like Americans. Which is their right: if Americans can live like Americans, everyone else should be able to, too. Problem is, it would require the resources of 5.3 earths for everyone to live like an American. And we only have one.

It is the iron-rich region of Pilbara that is migrating to China. “Pilbara” is the Aboriginal word for “mullet,” the fish that used to run in the mountain creeks there. That was before the native peoples were displaced by stockmen and ruffians. Now the earth itself is leaving.

The red earth here contains an estimated 24 billion tons of iron ore. In the 1970s it left in smaller quantities and returned to Australia in Toyotas and Mazdas; now the dirt is going offshore forever, to house and transport workers in the cities of China.

While it’s a complex industry, at the basic level mining is dead-simple: Dirt is dug from the ground, loaded onto trucks, taken to trains, then put on boats. It is the scale that stuns, particularly in this operation. The trucks are two stories tall. The trains are two miles long, and they pour like rivers down the mountains to the coast, where the carrier ships await. The million tons of ore the ships carry away each day is up by 70 percent in the past five years, and most of it is bound for China.

[The ore] is loaded onto 325-yard-long bulk carriers waiting by purpose-built wharves 500 yards long. About eight of these massive ships leave every day.

Selling itself to China has allowed Australia to evade the global recession—its unemployment rate, at 5.1%, is the same as it was before the transnational money-munchers went into a swoon.

Some Australians, however, wonder whether, in the words of one Tony Wiltshire, the mining people are “just here to make a buck and go, or build something sustainable? The question is whether we’re going to have mines with towns, or towns with mines.”

That’s a question easily answered. I lived in a mining town for 15 years. Except it’s not a town anymore. It died, slowly, long before I moved there, after the mines played out. It has always been thus, for mining towns. My “town,” when I lived in it, was no longer a town—it was, rather, a “ghost town.” Once the earth is all used up, the Pilbara will go ghostly, too.

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La Musica: Turn Up Your Radio

Published September 4, 2010 Eros , First Peoples , Into The Light , La Musica , Variations In B-Flat Leave a Comment

Here at the way-station, there are neighbors, and from all appearances they are Normal. So I try to tread lightly. No more wandering around outside in various states of nakedness. No more greeting the day, or acknowledging the night, with hearty bursts of gibbering song. When I speak to the rabbits or the turkeys or the dragonflies or the trees, I try to do so quietly. Cat conversations are confined to the interior of the house. I think I’ve been pretty good about all this.

Then the other night I come roaring into the driveway, returning from a late-night shopping expedition, with the car windows more or less rolled all the way down, thereby treating the entire neighborhood to Joan Osborne pleading “I’ll Be Around” at pretty much top volume.

I didn’t cotton on to what I was doing until about the third trip into the house, lugging groceries, Joan continuing to loudly sound from the car. Is this Normal? I asked myself. Is this the sort of thing permitted by Neighborhood Watch?

Probably not, I decided. Oh well. Because it was just not possible to turn Joan down. A sin, that would have been. Akin to killing a mockingbird.

At least, I rationalized, this is the sort of abnormality the Normal can easily understand. Kids. And their music. Even if The Kid is in, uh, his fifties. And anyway the song is almost over. And it’s not even ten o’clock yet, for chrissake.

Back in the house, car radio silenced, flipping through the memory cards, I realized I had been unconsciously indulging in this behavior since I arrived here. Now that I know that, I don’t do it anymore. Probably.

I generally believe that inflicting music on people who don’t want to hear it is a form of rudeness, and so I try not to indulge in it. For instance, someone up the canyon here each Friday night feels compelled to drink vast quantities of liquor and then reel out onto his deck to serenade all and sundry with lubricated versions of such chestnuts as “House Of The Rising Sun” in a manner that would find him heaved bodily off any karaoke stage. I don’t want to be that sort of person.

The problem is that songs that come onto the car radio are different from those that you control via CDs or tapes or I-units or your own vocal cords. They’re ephemeral, a little gift from the cosmos. And sometimes even if your journey is at an end you have to sit there in the car with them until they’re over.

Jump the “furthur” for the five tunes I realized had over the past couple months drilled me to the driveway.

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Sometimes The Magic Works . . .

Published August 16, 2010 First Peoples , Into The Light , Oddbins , Variations In B-Flat Leave a Comment

. . . sometimes it doesn’t.

Chief Dan George, as Old Lodge Skins, said that, in Little Big Man. And it’s true.

It is also true that, as in many things in life, sometimes the magic sorta works, and sorta doesn’t.

Thus we have Cheryl Carroll-Lagerway, an Australian Aboriginal woman who notified police after dreaming that the body of a missing child, Kiesha Abrahams, could be found at a sacred Aboriginal site, Nurragingy Reserve, at Doonside in western Sydney.

When the Aboriginal elder and police authorities journeyed to the remote creek, they indeed found a body. But it was not that of the child. Instead, they located a dismembered torso wrapped in plastic, which, pending formal identification, is believed to be that of Kristi McDougall, a 31-year-old woman missing since June.

Caroll-Lagerway, who dreamed of the child crying out to her, believes that Kiesha’s remains are still somewhere in the reserve.

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Demon Seed

Published August 10, 2010 Eternal Recurrence , First Peoples , Oddbins , Variations In B-Flat 12 Comments

On 26 de Julio I wrote about the Muslim clerics in Malaysia who, though not real happy that Malaysian fans of the UK soccer team Manchester United had adopted clothing sporting cartoon representations of the devil, concluded that such apparel should not be banned.

“We just advise people not to wear this,” advised Harussani Zakaria. “Satan is, for us, our enemy. It’s the wrong value. Satan is always bad.”

Turns out these folks are more tolerant than some Americans—specifically, than Pastor Donald Crosby of God’s Kingdom Builders Church of Jesus Christ in Warner Robins, Georgia, and 30-some of his followers, who Monday disrupted the beginning of classes at Warner Robins High, demanding that the school cease forthwith employing “demons” as a mascot.

The principal Warner Robins demonic being is a red devil with horns, wielding a pitchfork. During football games, a large representation of this Agent of Evil is wheeled out to tower over the end zone. When Warner Robins scores, sparks shoot from The Beast’s pitchfork.

“A demon never has a good connotation. Never,” Crosby ululated to a Macon TV station. “If you look it up in Webster’s Dictionary, there’s nothing good about a demon.”

And so Crosby and his people descended upon Warner Robins High School on Monday, determined to drive out the demons. Instead, they were ordered first by school officials, and then by the police, to disperse. But they persisted in their picketing, Crosby declining an offer from Officer Harry Dennard to accompany him back to his office so he could help Crosby prepare a request form for a permit. “You’re just going to have to lock me up,” Crosby said.

So they did. Crosby was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct and picketing without a permit, both misdemeanors. “Let them lock all of you up!” Crosby reportedly instructed his people. None of these, however, elected to follow him into the pokey.

Of course, none of Jesus’ disciples were real eager to follow him, when he was led away, either.

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Sunday Services: “You Can Have A Kind Heart”

Published August 8, 2010 Eros , First Peoples , Into The Light , La Musica , Sunday Services , Variations In B-Flat , Wyrds Leave a Comment

Good evening, good people.

None of us were promised this day, so it is well that we begin by acknowledging it. As Brother Sephius says:

A new day I never seen before nor will I ever again.

Be glad in it.

For this, can I get a witness?

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God

Published July 30, 2010 First Peoples , Into The Light , Variations In B-Flat , Wyrds 2 Comments

The Said Admiral Is Dead

Published July 18, 2010 Caribbean , Eternal Recurrence , First Peoples , War On Terra , Wyrds Leave a Comment

They say it came first from Africa, carried in the screams of the enslaved; that it was the death bane of the Tainos, uttered just as one world perished and another began; that it was a demon drawn into Creation through the nightmare door that was cracked open in the Antilles. Fuku americanus, or more colloquially, fuku—generally a curse or a doom of some kind; specifically the Curse and the Doom of the New World. Also called the fuku of the Admiral because the Admiral was both its midwife and one of its great European victims; despite “discovering” the New World the Admiral died miserable and syphilitic, hearing (dique) divine voices. In Santo Domingo, the Land He Loved Best, the Admiral’s very name has become synonymous with both kinds of fuku, little and large; to say his name aloud or even to hear it is to invite calamity on the heads of you and yours.

No matter what its name or provenance, it is believed that the arrival of Europeans on Hispaniola unleashed the fuku on the world, and we’ve all been in the shit ever since. Santo Domingo might be fuku’s Kilometer Zero, its port of entry, but we are all of us its children, whether we know it or not.

—Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao

Much about the Admiral is not known. Where he was born, and when: these are not known. The arc of his early years, when and what he studied at the University of Pavia: these, too, are not known. Where he obtained his ideas of geography, this is not known. The Admiral, it developed, did not know geography: he believed, to the end of his days, that where he landed in 1492 marked the far eastern fringe of Asia.

What is known is that when the Admiral stepped ashore on Hispaniola, he brought Original Sin to the New World. The policies he pursued there exterminated that island’s people, the Taino, every one. Today, “the Taino survive in the shape of one’s eyes, the outline of one’s face, the idiom of one’s language.” All the rest is gone. From Hispaniola, the Admiral and his works brought destruction too to all the native peoples of all the rest of the Americas—north, central, and south. And to replace the falling bodies of the Taino, who died extracting gold and silver for him, the Admiral birthed the transatlantic slave trade, bringing to the New World in bondage people from the place where people were born.

The Admiral was eventually returned in chains to Spain, accused of misgoverning his New World. Fallen from favor, he spent his remaining years in litigation against the king, seeking to regain lost wealth and titles. He became a nonperson. And when he died, the official chronicle of the inland northern town where he expired, Valladolid, did not acknowledge his passing. It was not until several weeks later that a town document noted simply that “the said Admiral is dead.”

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When I Worked

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