IDYLLOPUS PRESS IS A VALIANT LITTLE ROWBOAT

Not following blogs lately, I was surprised to find how many have commented on the Ward Churchill controversy. Euro-American genocide of American Indians and questions of whether or not Churchill was a white guy masquerading as American Indian in his position as an ethnic-studies professor at the University of Colorado aren’t your everyday lunchable subjects. I expected some acknowledgement on the virtual streets but not as much as I observed. How did he suddenly blossom into the Jane Fonda of Afghanistan and Iraq? I’ve not heard anyone say it but next he’ll be addressed as “Ward Fonda!” The last I read of possible payola behind the Caplis attack was a number of days ago. My thoughts on the matter don’t gel. I would say my brain has been altered by the barrage of sound and image loops that H.o.p. immerses me in daily, brief bites rerunning concurrent that pave no here to there, dig deeper and deeper ruts in which I find my thoughts pooling, going nowhere. But in this case perhaps my thoughts on Churchill don’t gel because of the usual Montebank what pod is the pea hiding under now trick. So many “what is” balls in play but points of origin mostly hide from me behind “what appears to be”. I’ve a few thoughts on the issues, not on the people, but note that the Peltier Legal Defense Committee would appear to be supporting Churchill from the POV of the controversy being a deliberate smear campaign with falling dominos intent.

George Tinker (Osage, Professor of American Indian Cultures and Religious Traditions at Iliff School of Theology) speaks up for Churchill.

We’ve been reading a lot of Tinker around here the past couple of months.

Then suddenly there’s this picture of Churchill with a rifle and beret on the web. Flashback to Patty Hearst. And Madonna posing as Patty Hearst in American Life. There’s an echo of a rifle in those bars behind Madonna and an American kiss on her forehead. Though I think (I do) that a rifle is suggested, the beret and national symbols (again, the flag only inferred through bars and stripes) alone are understood as all that’s needed to bring to mind militants, revolution. Funny, put on a beret, toss in a star and stripe, and the brain processes, “Revolution.”

Churchill says the photo was for a student art project in 1996. I believe it. It looks like something a student and professor would do together.

I wonder if Churchill would be game for a cameo in John Waters’ next film.

Churchill mentions in his “On the Justice of Roosting Chickens”, the severed heads of Raritans kicked for sport along the streets of 1643 New Amsterdam in the shadows of the future’s WTC. So-called Kieft’s War, a history given in John Fiske’s 1902 “Dutch and Quaker Colonies in America”. Kieft’s war is also covered in a book by Russell Shorto, “The Island at the Center of the World : The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan, the Forgotten Colony that Shaped America”. An individual on a news list I’m on relates that Shorto details how colonists protested the actions of Kieft (as does Mr. Fiske above mention), his slaughter of the Wappinger Indians, and how Shorto concludes the massacre was exaggerated and things weren’t as bad as all that.

Though the outcry is over Churchill and what he had to say on 9/11, it’s curious how a number have used it as a launchpad to revisit Churchill’s assertions of Euro-American genocide of American Indians, and condemn him for these remarks as well.

While reading up on Shorto’s book names mentioned in it keep pinging my brain. Oh, yeah, Dutch. We’re talking about the Dutch here, aren’t we. I always forget the Dutch have anything to do with me. Go down one branch of my family and you hit a point where that narrow branch blossoms out into lots o’ Dutch marrying Dutch, oh yeah, right, down New Amsterdam way, names like Joris Rapalje and Catalina Trico for starters and Van Cleefs, Vanderbilts, Schenks, Covenhovens, Vanderbeeks. Rarified and exotic to my ears. Remained rarified and exotic until a friend of Marty’s, a year ago, gave him a box of mildewed books for a library fund raiser and in it was Heller’s “Picture This”. And from it I gained a bit of insight (small) into 17th century Dutch society and Dutch mercantilism, coinage and debt and profit.

I remember when, after 9/11, George Bush encouraged us all to get back out to the malls and shop again. Exercise our freedoms. Shop.

I wonder what Ward Churchill’s speaking schedule was over the past four years. Certainly he had many engagements. Why was it Hamilton College that got him busted for his views on 9/11? Why now?

5 down. The developers of this reading program H.o.p. is now doing sure knew what would grab H.o.p.. One-eyed and three-eyed Martians (creatures determined as being from outer space are always Martians to H.o.p.), robots and, tomorrow, dinosaurs! Today’s email (Lesson 5 review) informs me, that tomorrow’s reading world is in the land of the dinosaurs. “Yea!” says H.o.p. The print materials came in today and I was a little surprised with his enthusiasm over them. We’ve been using the print-out map from the website where you mark your progress through the reading worlds, and H.o.p. was all glee over the real version that was part of the package, “I have to mark my place on the map!” And ultra simple, ultra short readers for exercise in transferring skills from monitor to print.

I phoned in and listened to the recorded message thinking I hope I don’t really have to be paying attention to any of this. No, such luck. Yes, I know it’s my sacred civic duty so tar and feather me already but one of the last things I wanted to do was to be honored with the privilege of jury duty. We’re self-employed and homeschooling. My husband was going to and would have had to cancel his studio session today in order to stay home with H.o.p. but his brother, who had just moved down from NY Saturday (”The most frightening thing in the world is waking up and realizing I moved to Atlanta”) dropped by Sunday evening and offered to babysit. Also, H.o.p. was concerned with mom having to go to a government building. He hears enough about the government that concern is the first response (no, not shame on me, shame on them) upon learning that mom is going down to a government building. (”It’s all right, sweetie.” “But President Bush is in the government building.” “Not this government building.”) The kind of concern that isn’t assuaged when he says, “Don’t go!” and I say but I must and he demands why and I tell him the not-so-fine print that the government will hit me with a hefty fine or submit a bench warrant for my arrest if I don’t go, which means a court date regardless. I mean, they make jury duty so inviting in the first place, don’t they? If instead you opened your mail to “Summoning the Honor of Your Presence for coffee and homemade blueberry muffins with prosecution, defense and judge” then I’d feel a bit differently about it, more relaxed, even if the fine-print said the coffee and muffins would be at my own expense. Send me a blue slip that says Summons for State Court Jury Duty 8:15 a.m. Monday or you’re arrested and I get testy.

There’s an old joke as to do you really want to be tried by peers not smart enough to get out of jury duty. My take on it is what’s the privilege of jury duty, fulfilling the right of the accused to a jury by one’s peers, when the accused may simply be one of those not protected by any number of those laws which exempts from libablity anyone who earns more money than the judge. Where’s the justice in a country where we say it is stealing when you take someone’s $75 television but call it profit when you can, for instance, pollute to the point of extinction or pirate the pensions of hundreds of thousands. Where’s the justice when we’ll slap a person in prison who is actually endangering their life with certain select self-prescriptions, but legislate protection for corporations that willfully endanger the lives of thousands. And don’t tell me that a corporation holds the same rights as an individual under the law but is an institution and the owners aren’t responsible for its actions and that’s the way it has to be “because” (kind of just like politicians aren’t liable for anything that they conveniently can’t recollect telling a subordinate to do). When a car-pooling van makes a traffic violation, we don’t call the situation corporate and absolve the driver of responsibility.

I’d not slept but a couple of hours Saturday night. I slept one hour Sunday night because my body decided to wake up after an hour. Marty asked why. I said because I was wild with anticipation.

It having been a sleepless several days, I wondered if I started hallucinating from sleep deprivation during jury selection if they would send me home and my obligation would be fulfilled.

I chose “Spit in the Ocean, All About Kesey” as reading material, because it doesn’t require much focus and would be like porting along a friendly angel, and it seemed appropriate, considering the prospect of sleep deprivation hallucinations. I looked for second choice of reading material but Marty and brother-in-law said I probably shouldn’t carry along too much, and they ought to know as they both have never done jury duty. “Maybe I should take along some cards?” I said, but Marty and brother-in-law said no there would be no room to play and again they ought to know, they both having never done jury duty.

The line at 8:15 was long outside the courthouse. At least, I reasoned the line of obviously disgruntled souls at the center door, a grab bag of humanity burdened with worries of livelihood, was jury duty and that the left door had nothing to do with me as those breezing through it were far too cheerful. I must have looked like I knew. “Is this the line for jury duty?” a passing someone asked me. “Yes,” I said and thought I should have said, “so I assume” and called it out after-the-fact because I would have felt guilty had I not. People walking in and out the left door remarked on wow why so many people this morning and I wondered if there was something especially choice going on where they expected to run through prospective jurors like, well like a body with an intestinal bug only absorbs so much nutritionally whilst heavy purging. Not the best of images I know, but it was what came to me.

Once inside the door, the line snake wound multiple times before you finally made it to the metal detector. If you’re an employee have your ID out, if you are jury duty have your summons out and coat off, an officer stood at the center of the room repeating. It was passed through the line that if you had fingernail files you were supposed to take them back out to the car. Except the man ahead of me turned and rather than telling me this informed the younger woman behind me . She had on make-up and a hairdo and clothes. I had on my racoon-eyed no sleep face. They struck up a conversation.

Thus far, I looked like the kind of a person you ask if this is the jury line but not a person you expect to carry a fingernail file.

Into the little white plastic basket I placed everything in my cargo pockets and my book and tablet. Onto the conveyor belt went it and my coat, the pockets I’d stuffed with toilet paper and a couple of paper towels as I’ve still got a sometimes runny nose from my cold and had been out of tissue paper and hadn’t wanted to carry a knapsack as I’ve gotten used to not carrying a knapsack since everyone thinks you’re going to shoplift or create a headline with an incendiary device. Of course, I set off the metal detector machine though the only metal I knew myself to be wearing was my ring and loop earrings. A wand run over my raised-arms form convinced I had nothing to hide.

Up to the 7th floor to the holding room for prospective jurors which contained both State and Superior Court prospective jurors and was big and reminded of an especially large airport waiting area except there were no windows. Line up first outside an oversized glassed-in theater ticket booth with several guides issuing instructions. Superior Court get white badges and sit down. State Court go to yet another desk at the rear of the room where you sign in and get your own badge. Then to look for a seat but the room was so packed with people, several hundred of them, that I went ahead and sat on the floor, and was the first one to do so for some reason. The seats were all in rows with seating cubes stuffed in awkward areas and I took the first floor spot that seemed reasonable where I could hopefully rest my back against a side of a large cube on which happened to sit several blond women who certainly had been carrying fingernail files and had to go back to their cars or throw them away. I fumbled with my orange badge, knowing the back should come off so I could stick it on my clothes but it just wouldn’t do. I gently folded, attempted to find where to peel. I was already a little anxious. I thought how odd it was that I spent the night installing Apache on my computer so I could have a local server, and tweeked it and installed PHP and MySQL and here I couldn’t figure out how to peel my stick-on badge. It was embarrssing. I asked the blond on my right who couldn’t believe I was asking anyone this, much less her, and turned to the woman on my left and asked her and she looked at me like I was a total simpleton and said fold it in the middle and this time when I folded it in the middle it parted, I unpeeled, I slapped on the badge and sat back as best I could (not) and began to observe the show. The summons had said business casual which everyone had defined as no pajamas or shorts or swimsuits. Most women wore fashionable or vaguely fashionable clothing with cute accents. I believe I was the only one in oversize men’s cargo pants and eight-year-old men’s steel-toed boots from Target (I dress cheap and break my toes a lot) and a men’s oversized hooded jacket from Old Navy and a bandana. But I did have on a nice black v-neck rib knit cotton sweater. If you separated the people off into who shopped at the up-scale malls, who shopped at the regular malls and who probably never visited a mall and got their vegetables at co-ops, there weren’t too many co-op shoppers and most of them were men. One of those men before eleven o’clock asked for a deferrment because he ran a restaurant.

We were treated to a movie of news anchor Brenda Wood telling us we were doing our honored civic duty and were appreciated for it. Brenda Wood said they might ask embarrassing questions and if we were too embarrassed to answer in public we could say so and the judge might grant answering in private but likely not. The videotaped news anchor told us not to discuss the trial with anyone and not to watch the news. I found this amusing.

The video over, I moved to a spot on the floor near the State Court desk where I could rest my back against a wall.

I was surprised to see only a few palm pilots (mostly held by young twenty-somethings), no laptops, few earphones and Ipods. (I don’t have an Ipod or laptap or Palm Pilot–not even a cell phone–but I expect most everyone else to have at least a cell phone and Palm Pilot or Ipod.) There were very few books. Almost no magazines. Very few newspapers. Most people slept in their seats. No one snored. With the colds going around and flu I was surprised no one was coughing or continually blowing their nose. The coffee vendor woman didn’t make an appearance, her station just teased people with its cups. In the holding room one can talk but for some reason can’t talk on a cell phone (what’s the difference) so a number of people gathered at the threshold with their phones.

I said to the State Court woman I understood if you had a child under four at home one was exempt, but how did jury selection tend to look on people who homeschooled and so had children at home to look after. I asked although I knew the answer, that the state doesn’t much care about that or if you are self-employed. She replied homeschooling was my “constitutional choice” and made no difference here.

The bad thing about the holding room is that you’re afraid to walk out to exercise the legs, go to the bathroom, anything, because you never know when they’ll call the next jury pool, besides which you’re not supposed to go wandering anyway unless you’ve officially been excused for a break. I offered a conversational comment here and there on nothing particular, and would get a brief mmm kind of response and so tried to read but shortly decided watching the people was more entertaining. Beginning at 9 o’clock, a woman representing the Superior Court would occasionally appear and read off about 50 names and they’d go to their appointed room and a woman representing State Court would occasionally step up to the mic and read off shorter lists and those souls would collect their things and leave.

Not having had any coffee, getting a mild headache, I was feeling in need of aspirin. I had asked where a coffee machine was. I was told where to find the vending area on the floor. There was no coffee machine, or it was in another dimension. I got a coke. I opened it. It spewed. I took out the few paper towels I’d brought along for my cold (yes still fresh) and cleaned the bottle. I took my aspirin out of my pocket and felt on the offensive taking them, thinking it wasn’t beyond likelihood that a knee-jerk response in a court house would be to wonder if you’re taking an illicit substance. Another woman came back and asked where the coffee machine was. I informed there was none. On the way down the hall I met another woman looking for the coffee machine. I said there was none but the vending area was thataway.

I returned to my spot near the State Court desk. A man on a cane asked the woman where the coffee was. She directed him to the same vending area. She worked on the computer and answered phones. She was having troubles with her computer and didn’t know what to do. Sometimes she’d answer the phone and after a moment quip, terse, “And why aren’t you here?”

Because I’m so good at it (reference lame drawing) I sketched for a couple minutes and realized how there was no difference, as far as carpet, walls, trims, between the materials and aesthetics that went into the courthouse room and your typical post 70s hospital waiting area. The colors were the same as used in the hospital where I gave birth to H.o.p. seven years ago. Cream, mauve and gray. Florescent lights were numerous and bright. Everything looked green.

As seats began to open up, the State Court woman twice commented there was an open seat I could take.

I stayed on the floor. If I had taken a seat I would have been in the midst of the pack and unable to watch or sketch.

A friendly damsel from Louisiana was making friends left and right, lots of smiles, lots of laughter. Those even slightly amenable were drawn into listening and conversing at one point or another. Her husband was a chef and people were amusing themselves talking about cooking raccoon and possom. I spoke up and said my husband’s family was from Louisiana. She said where from. I said where. She wasn’t familiar with the Parishes. Lapse into silence. She and the people around her returned to talking. I had thought maybe when a seat opened up in that area I’d take it but when one did a woman who had been seated for a little while on the floor near me got up and took it instead and I found myself wondering why we’d not been able to strike up a conversation when I’d tried but she immediately fell into laughing good times with the young woman from Louisiana. By the time we were given leave for lunch the young woman from Louisiana had a table full of friends from her general seating area.

If I had grown up in New Orleans I’d be a more likable person than I am, I’m pretty sure of that.

Lunch. I had first stepped outside for a cigarette (I smoke a very few a day still). A twenty-something young man in torn worn dirty jeans and hooded sweatshirt, raveling sweater and bandana came out of the courthouse, nodded passing by, went to a post to unlock his bike. I looked over as he unlocked his bike. He looked back and nodded and smiled. It was somehow one of the more convivial acknowledgements of existences during the day and I don’t know why. It had been raining and cool earlier and now was warm and dirty, gritty muggy feeling. I went inside and back through the metal detector etc. where I once again set it off and they waved the wand around me and a man behind me set it off and he muttered a couple of answers to questions and he seemed a tad drug-filigreed perhaps and the last I heard as I walked off was them then questioning him, “And how are you feeling today, sir?”

In the cafeteria I stood behind the man on the cane who had been earlier looking for coffee. He looked to be about 80. There were people who had stood out during the day and he’d been one of them. Very neatly dressed, suit coat. I wondered what his profession had been and where he was from as there was nothing remotely Southern about him. He turned and looked past me and struck up a conversation with the woman in line behind me. A worker said the lady who made sandwiches was the very best there was. I asked for a tuna on rye sandwich. The sandwich woman started putting white lunch meat on rye. I thought that was really strange tuna salad. She asked me if I wanted tomato on my turkey sandwich. I said no and thought, “Oh well” and let it slide, because I had begun to feel unaccostomed to speaking and I could just as well eat turkey. I paid for my sandwich. I was told a bag of chips came with it. I said never mind. The man with the cane took a seat with the woman behind me, at the table next to the Louisiana woman’s group. I found a seat somewhere in the middle of the room at a table where a woman was talking on her cell phone. I ate. I decided no coffee was probably a better choice than court house coffee and got none.

Back up to the jury room. Lunch seemed to have made everyone tired and sleepy rather than replenishing energy. Most people slept or sat quietly reading. I realized I don’t sit still. I move a lot. Tap my feet. Drum my hands. Stretch. I would occasionally get up and wander around and passing back through the room to the State Court holding area I took a second glance at a coat closet no one had paid any attention to. I glimpsed a board game on a shelf in the rear. What da’ you know. Backgammon, Dominoes and Scrabble. I got out the Scrabble game, wondered how many people ever noticed the games because they were in pretty decent shape. I returned to my spot and played Scrabble against myself.

It was about 3 o’clock. Superior Court emptied everyone out. Then State Court read out a long list of names and said if you were one of the 10 not on the list that you would be staying and definitely sent down for one of the jury selections. I was one of the last 10 and thought oh great a definite day two coming up. The seats around the Louisiana woman were now vacant, there only being ten of us left in a room that had held several hundred. I moved three paces from my seat on the floor to the row between the Louisiana woman and another woman reading a newspaper. We all exchanged a few sentences. They returned to their reading. I returned to looking around the room and staring at the ceiling and thinking about David Lynch and the scene in “Twin Peaks” when the camera zoomed in through the acoustic ceiling to the room where Leland Palmer was being questioned about Laura’s murder. As a woman passed in the hall outside I realized her footsteps were echoing and how quiet it now was. The Louisiana woman remarked on how quiet it was now. I said that I’d been thinking the same because of the woman’s echoing footsteps.

I don’t know where I got the idea the day would be more interesting than it had been. I was almost pleased not to have been sent home, to have to go through the questioning phase. I thought well they probably won’t release me from duty because of homeschooling and self-employment (I’m self-employed too but never mind). I thought they’ll probably send me home for some other reason, like my contempt for the justice system. I wondered if they would ask me something where I would show how undesirable a juror I’d be by mentioning prison as a growth industry in rural America and how we have a higher percentage of our population in prison than any other nation.

I thought maybe I should be a juror because of how I feel about the justice system, except Georgia only pays $25 a day, not even minimum wage, and Marty would have to take care of H.o.p. and that would mean cancelling studio sessions he was producing this week, which would mean not just him out of work those days and losing income but the musicians already booked to perform being out of work.

At 4 o’clock it was announced that we would not be needed. Our names were read out. My name was the last name called on the list. I thought well every day there is a last person to be called on the list and today I’m that person. I now went to the area marked “telephones”. I had not been back there and had envisioned lots of telephones. In cubicle after cubicle there were only telephone wires dangling from the wall, or forlorn jacks. There were only two phones. I wondered why.

The Georgia Constitution in 1999 was amended so that full-time post secondary school students could be exempted as well as anyone who is a primary caregiver to children under the age of four.

In the 2001 Georgia Courts in the 21st Century, The Report of the Supreme court of Georgia, Blue Ribbon commission on the Judiciary, one finds, along with the recommendation that employers be given tax incentives to pay jurors their salary, or at least not penalize employees who serve as jurors (ain’t that nice), “The drawbacks of placing responsibility on employers to avoid financial hardship to jurors, however, are that it does not address the problem of hardship faced by self-employed jurors, and that ultimately it is just another shifting of the cost for this public service to another private payer. One alternative solution to this problem might be the creation of a pool of resources on which trial judges could draw in case of significant financial hardship to individual jurors serving in their courts.”

There is nothing about reviewing hardship placed on those who homeschool.

In Connecticut you can request $50 in child-care reimbursement per day. In Minnesota you can request $50 if the care was from a licensed provider or up to $40 a day child-care from a non-licensed provider.

As already mentioned, in Georgia you are paid $25 a day for jury duty and there is no child-care reimbursement and no reimbursement for travel expenses (which some states have) and the Louisiana woman had talked about having to drive an hour and a half from North Fulton. Minimum wage it is not–and who can live on minimum wage? I read the normal length of a State Court trial is two and a half days. Add on the day of going through the selection proceess and you get three and a half days which is four days for $100.

Anyway, I did my duty. I guess I can sleep now.

Five or six years ago I tried blogging. We lived across the RR track, right next to the RR track, our too picturesque view of the world being the RR track and beyond it the large warehouse of a large dry cleaning establishment into which I never saw a single customer walk, which let the letters of its neon sign evaporate into the ozone one by one before closing up shop, and as part of an old edition of Bigsofa I made a page called Across the RR tracks then decided to convert it to a blog. I had worked up a nice graphic of a RR track and a decent layout. I set up the blog at Blogger. I got up maybe two or three mundane posts with great difficulty as Blogger didn’t like to work for me, and then couldn’t get it to work again, which a number of people were complaining about at the time, that Blogger had completely broken on them or they could only get it to work occasionally. It was then a fairly unreliable service. I tried again for a little while but was uninspired also by the blogging community. Either I didn’t know my way to certain parts or what I was looking for just wasn’t there yet. If there was a progressive political closet I didn’t find it and six years ago there weren’t many doors to knock on. Saying I was unimpressed sounds judgmental when the situation was that the usual subjects weren’t any I felt moved to link to, or follow or comment upon. I see a couple of the same voices out there doing politically-based blogs now but they weren’t blogging politics back then.

Who were the archibloggers in progressive politics?

Two years ago I started thinking of doing MT.

PHP scared me. I worried about a database going down, disintegrating, and losing everything.

Sticking with HTML, I started an online journal for H.o.p. a year ago in a homeschool blog community. A Reason for Being was to record things for H.o.p. we came across on the web and also for me to record things for him from the time that he might want to read about in the future, and if I did it online I knew I’d be less likely to daily complain about the usual warty existence hogs with which many of us think we have unique conversation (some of us do). A Reason for Being was thinking I might connect with progressive, eclectic homeschoolers who homeschooled because they didn’t want their child going through the school hell they’d gone through, didn’t want their child’s mind programmed by the State, and maybe, like me, had a child who would have been at odds with authority from day one (he didn’t get it from me, I didn’t start getting into intentional trouble until I was ten, though I was unintentionally in trouble from the beginning). We weren’t homeschooling for success. H.o.p. does things his own way and will never be in a Spelling Bee. We weren’t homeschooling for religious reasons and I didn’t set up the journal as a blog with a comments feature because the homeschoolers who blogged were usually homeschooling for reasons contrary to my own and I didn’t see any reason for us to be commenting on each other.

Though it was H.o.p.’s journal, set up for recording his favored links and things I thought he might want to read about when he’d grown up (plus it provided a little news for family), it became increasingly a place for me to post about Iraq and Bushdom and the upcoming election. I didn’t post a lot of what I was thinking about because it was H.o.p.’s journal and I didn’t want him clicking a link and ending up viewing atrocities. We talk politics and some about war around H.o.p. but we don’t expose him to certain aspects. Once he glimpsed over my shoulder the Abu-Gharib photo of a man with a bag over his head, standing on a box, his forced position curiously reminiscent of a martyred saint, curious because of the xtian beliefs or background many Americans in Iraq may hold. That invited confusion and mom trying to explain government and thugs not just torturing but intentional dehumainzation. I didn’t want him randomly clicking links on his blog thinking one was going to lead to elephants or sphinxes and landing in the Iraqi Theater of Blood.

I had happily found progressives blogging on the upcoming election and though I knew better than to be hopeful, believing Bush had it in the bag by hook or by black box ballot, I permitted myself optimism. I was excited about the blogs I was reading. The immediacy of them and wealth of well-written commentary. There’s a troll with every bridge and hill, I know, but never mind.

I knew better than to be hopeful about the elections.

Years ago, back when I was young and about as cynical as I am now, I was sitting one night in a Country and Western lounge. I’m not the Country and Western type. My husband is a musician and the C/W gig was a matter of income. The lead singer was a Vietnam war vet who never talked about the Vietnam war. The place was a small dive on the other side of a 24 hour restaurant at a motel where construction workers stayed while working away from home. It was popular in the way C/W lounges with an illuminated disco floor the size of a child’s wading pool and a good band can make and keep a lounge popular even when the toilets are always backing up and flowing over into the restaurant. It was painful but I met also a few interesting people I’d not have met anywhere else.

Anyway, the bass guitarist and husband and I were sitting watching the returns on the Carter/Reagan election (told you this was a while back). We were watching the election returns in this C/W bar where the C/W patrons were, for the greater part, filtering awareness through the sheen of speed and coke and Jack Daniels, and though the television was on and tuned to politics during the band breaks I don’t recollect if anyone else was watching except for me and my husband and the bass player who unabashedly broke down in tears when Reagan won. Hands clutching beer bottle, he disintegrated. Said not a word, just cried. I thought, well, there goes our future. I didn’t know how citizens could be duped into voting for policies that would squander their future, but it had happened and I decided then that elections were a sham and what most people wanted was a Big Daddy Hollywood sham artful smile. They would sooner eat easy lies any day than hard truths. Eat what didn’t challenge. What they wanted was to preserve the suburban status quo, to get back what they could feel slipping away beneath their feet, to cast it in concrete and not blow away like the rest they were dooming in their ethical dustbowl. The bass player cried and I knew I was right, that the future was down the tubes for people like us. Not just four years of it. The long haul.

Five years ago I knew not to be naive but we had two-year-old son who I wanted to impress upon an idea of possible hope and community interest, didn’t want his earliest memories to be of mom being cynical-pessimist, and we took him down to watch us vote. Georgia was a Gone State, already slated for Bush, but our election booth territory was managed by people who even under those harsh greening school cafeteria fluorescent lights looked heart-warmingly god-damned happy to see us there though we were obviously not conservative, they looked so god-damned happy to see H.o.p. there as a toddler student of democracy, they looked so god-damned thrilled that everyone there was taking part in the process and that they could help, they looked like people with faith in weights and balances and the casting of the ballot. They smiled ear-t0-ear and looked so god-damn happy to see us they might’ve even asked for photo ID and I might’ve even complied without thinking twice (photo ID not necessary in Georgia until recently) because they all looked so blissed smiling wide at everyone and because I was in from the sticks not having voted since Reagan first won. As Georgia was Republican-occupied territory, our vote was for Nader, hoping to break out of the two party system. We put our “I’ve voted” sticker on our beaten up van because to us those were our “We voted against Bush” testimonials.

Last fall, I knew not to be naive. I felt the Bush camp would arrange a Bush win one way or another. But I guess because sometimes you’ve got to I also permitted myself hope over Kerry though he too often infuriated me during the debates. Too conservative. But he wasn’t Bush. Bush has a brain so I can’t say that Kerry had one and Bush didn’t. I think I was excited watching the debates because I couldn’t rationally see how anyone out there–anyone–could possibly not be horrified by lying, sneering, contemptuous Bush not even attempting to look like he gave a shit, like he didn’t already have the election wrapped up in a Diebold box. I couldn’t see how anyone wouldn’t be infuriated by Bush meeting them at the lowest common denominator possible. I knew too that people were chowing down Bush wholesale, contusing lies and sneering contempt with manly no-grays-allowed leadership.

Election day came. I was more than ambivalent. We had a sense of imperative-but-lost-mission.

Still, what pre-election provided was a shard of hope. A “maybe in spite of”. Or just another sham that one purchases because living in Philip K. Dick’s “Radio Free Albemuth” kills the spirit. Afterwards? I wasn’t immediately depressed over it. My depression over the situation set in later. What’s to do when there’s nothing to do. When there’s Bush, and the Senate is Republican and the House is Republican and Georgia is Republican through and through and you don’t trust Democrats anyway because they’re mostly voting damn Republican. When you don’t believe in the process also partly because part (small part here, but a part) of your ancestry got rubbed out by America’s so-called from Sea to Shining Sea Freedom Road that hypocritically flung American Indians in the trash because it was part of manifest xtian corporate destiny, the too-bad had-to-do for sake of Freedom’s Empire.

Bah humbug. When others are talking about “loss of freedoms” I’m thinking, yeah, uh-huh, right, think about the fundamental lies that the house is set upon and and think again. But I say it too, “Look at what has been done to our freedoms”, because that’s where I’m at as a twenty-first century citizen. And my thinking has been that America doesn’t stand a chance until it honestly admits the truth of its land/freedom base rather than not excusing by excusing with had-to-be and winner takes all as a matter of might and sleight-of-hand and disappearing ink making right.

I thought what’s the point in blogging. Not in general. Personally. Then I thought, come February, build a podium and climb up on it with the rest of them because it’s not a matter of what’s the point, it’s a matter of not stopping talking or acting, even if no one’s reading or listening, if no one’s talking with or back at you, keep on talking because if one doesn’t then it’s too easy to settle into the losing or winning ethic that Mediagirl was blogging about the other day. Accept that it never and didn’t and never will matter if one speaks, doesn’t matter what one has to say and thus what one’s thoughts are, accept that there’s no point, and then there one is, a purchaser of the ethic that winning is all.

The last thing I want my son growing up without is respect for his voice and his thoughts.

Billmon’s left sidebar shows he’s reading Robert Gellately’s “Backing Hitler, Consent & Coercion in Nazi Germany”. I would post too in side bars what I read but the things I’m most influenced by I’ve been reading for 20 years, so wouldn’t be “things I’m reading” but “here’s my flesh and bone, looks suspiciously like paper and print, dunnit…”

Rolling along to the next death bus stop, “Natural” death in Afghanistan at Body and Soul brings up again how the FBI criticized “inhumane” interrogation practices at Guantanamo Bay saying they also accomplished nothing and revealed no more than what the FBI got using simple techniques. The Justice Department, reviewing the memo for “national security secrets” before releasing it to “a civil liberties group in December, redacted the part about the intelligence information being “suspect at best” and also blocked out an assertion that the military’s interrogation practices could undermine future military trials for terrorism suspects held at Guantanamo Bay. It did this after the Defense Dept expressed its own opinions on what parts of the letter should be redacted.

The FBI was so concerned about the interrogation practices that they went to William J. Haynes II, the Pentagon’s chief attorney. However, Att. General Alberto R. Gonzales, is skeptical on the reliability of the FBI’s accounts.

Sneeze, kerchoo! (Finally over winter colds and now into the damned Atlanta pollen season and no matter what I do I’m blowing my nose like crazy again but at least I had almost two weeks respite). And now returning to Billmon, he writes here on a revelation he had before the election:

And that’s when it hit me – as if, to quote Col. Kurtz, I’d been shot in the forehead with a diamond – that Kerry was almost certainly going to lose the election, that the American people really were going to ratify torture and murder as instruments of state policy, and that all the facts and all the rational arguments and all the moral outrage in the world weren’t going to persuade them otherwise.

What I finally had to confront was the fact that truth alone is impotent in the face of modern propaganda techniques – as developed, field tested, refined and deployed by Madison Avenue, the Pentagon, the think tanks, the marketing departments of major corporations, the communications departments of major research universities, etc. To paraphrase Hannah Arendt, the peculiar vulnerability of historical truth (which means political truth) is that it isn’t inherently more plausible than outright lies, since the facts could always have been otherwise. And in a world where the airwaves are overloaded 24/7 with the mindless babbling of complete idiots, it isn’t very hard to make inconvenient facts disappear, or create new pseudofacts that reinforce whatever bias or cultural affinity you want to cultivate – particularly if the audience is already disposed to prefer your reassuring lies to discomforting truths told by strangers..

It was depressing but Billmon eventually accepted the futility and resurrected his blog, though approaching it differently.

I read others stopping writing with that sense of overwhelming futility, and some come back and also decide to approach their writing (blogging) differently.

Futility has as way of making one rethink the relationship between action and result, endeavor and reward..

There are differences, but America is waging much the same kind of war in the Middle East that it did here with American Indian Nations and is still ongoing, unsettled. I keep wanting to quote from George Tinker”s “Spirit and Resistance’” on how deeply rooted in the expansion and dominance, the policing and bringing all to conformity (for its own good, though in accordance with western priorities) is a peculiar theological mix so taken for granted that different camps may not recognize how similar is their food and ignorant of the why of the taste for it, a theological mix often at odds but has as its driving force the notion of individual greed being what motivates individuals.

But I’m not going to go there because I’m looking at the cover of the book “Backing Hitler, Consent & Coercion in Nazi Germany”, I’m looking at Billmon’s statement of futility in the face of the knowledge that “the American people really were going to ratify torture and murder as instruments of state policy, and that all the facts and all the rational arguments and all the moral outrage in the world weren’t going to persuade them otherwise…the audience is already disposed to prefer your reassuring lies to discomforting truths told by strangers.” I am considering how many Germans responding to Hitler as Father, how many Americans responded to Reagan as the consoling Father who raised their spirits and made them proud again after what they viewed as a decade of defeat and humiliation.

And I’m reflecting on this account of the trip of some Otoe chiefs to Washington in 1873:

STAND BY: If you have a piece of land and I sell it, you would not like it.
COMMISSIONER: If you are my Agent and sell it, it is all right. You must remember there is a difference. You are the child of Government, and it must take care of you.
STANDY BY: If you have children and they want money, they have it. They do as they want to.
COMMISSIONER: No, they do not. My child does as I want to have her. If any child wants anything and I want her to have it she gets it. But if I don’t want her to have it she don’t get it and she does not turn around and ask me how I would like it if she had my money and would not let me have it.

I am thinking about modern responses to these accounts, the speeches of the politicians of the day toward the American Indians,. There are those who accept the paternalism as they see the American Indians as having been barbaric, child-like and in need of the progress their Anglo-European superiors were supposedly offering them. Then there are those who recognize the paternalism for what it is. How many recognize in this language the coercion and anticipated consent that predisposes people to hearing and accepting reassuring lies?

But of course that language wasn’t dreamt up only for coercing, in this case, the Otoe. It is a way of thinking and dealing with people that the Commissioner expected the Otoe to bow before and respect, to not question, because his general experience of it in his own society was positive and rational argument that purchased desired result. That he refers to his child here as “her” perhaps has nothing to do with his child’s actual sex but is part and parcel of his acknowledging his child as an inferior (just as women were subordinate, inferior) who has been taught not to question how the world responds to her, how authority responds to her. Americans may not like to think of themselves as living in this manner, but then when one grows up always knowing that a square house is the perfect shape for a house then one is predisposed to think of modifying domicile according to one’s needs and desires in the manner that a square teaches it may be modified. Or even subverted.

“Apocalypse Now” is about Anglo-European sensibilities in the same way that “Heart of Darkness” is about Anglo-European sensibilities.

I glance through a few pages of “Heart of Darkness” and come upon the lines where it’s acknowledged “I am not disclosing any trade secrets” that Kurtz’s methods had ruined the district, and there had been nothing profitable in them (I glance back up to the FBI saying there was nothing profitable in the investigative techniques used by the military), they only showed a lack of restraint, marked a deficiency found out early by the wilderness, and “had taken on him a terrible vengeance for the fantastic invasion”.

Tagged by Heretik.

Questions are:

You are stuck in Fahrenheit 451? Which book would you be?

Pynchon’s “The Crying of Lot 49″

Have you ever had a crush on a fictitional character:

I’m sure I must have at some point had a crush on a book character but I can’t recollect.

What is the last book you bought?

“The Osage and the Invisible World” from the works of Francis La Flesche

What are you currently reading?

A lot of piecemeal reading these days. “Native American Testimony” by Peter Nabakov is on my desk. Off and on reading. Translations of Ioway stories which aren’t in a book. “Indian Sleep-man Tales, Legends of the Otoe Tribe” which were recorded by a white woman and a lot of white add-ons have been applied to make them readable for whites of the time but the bases are there. And “How to keep up with the Joneses”, a self-published book by a woman with Ponca and Osage and Anglo ancestors/family lived around mine in the Osage Nation and some were relations of mine (which is how I was aware of the book) and it’s got some good short stories on living with assimilation and being sent to the boarding schools which were passed down through her family. All very off and on reading at this time.

What five books would you take to a desert island?

Oh man. Hmmm. Once crossing from Washington State into Canada, back in the early 90s, they almost let us through then the man at the window looked at me an extra long second and said pull over, having decided we were fit to be annoyed (he was the one with the bad-dude sunglasses). They searched all our luggage and everything else and the bags of rocks I’d been collecting throughout our cross-country trip, and then they went through my notebooks page by page, which took some time–and which is why I think of it, because of their going through every single page. There was nothing to be had because I have a problem with mind-altering substances and don’t do them. However, that said, if I was going to be stuck forever on a desert island I might take a fat notebook and fill it with the non-existent LSD tabs that they were probably looking for that day. I’ve never done LSD and I’d hope to get suitably relaxed and have a decent time and not meet up instead with the presumably hostile merpeople I encountered for two or three days on an accidental side-trip on some other substance when in my youth. Anyway, that is honestly the first thought that comes to mind. And as for the other books, the OE Dictionary (counting it as one volume) and 3 fat notebooks of blank paper.

I know this must sound very 60s-70s but I’d figure strange goings on with me and outer and inner worlds would shortly occur and I’d prefer to go for a more satisfactory peace with my own brain and its projections rather than absorb someone else’s creations. If the plan didn’t work out well then the pics on the tabs would hopefully be amusing.

As for passing this on to anyone…? I never do these pass-along things in email and this is the first blog one I’ve gotten passed to me. I would prefer to only send them to people who have sent to me in the past as I would know they are receptive. That said, the three I would pass it along to if they were interested in memes would be Arvin Hill (who has however just gone on vacation), Tish G. and Ratboy’s Anvil.

Ezra (left) went to war and returned from Stalag IIB

I tend to be a day late on subject-of-the-day posts because i’m not a quick one, I have to ponder. And also the server this blog is on is iffy and sometimes I’ll write a post and punch publish and the post disappears, the blog going down for five seconds, as happened with this one. I was also thinking of a different kind of memorial this weekend. But would now like to try to reconstruct my memorial day post that is now a post memorial day post.

Thomas Pynchon’s “Gravity’s Rainbow” fictionalizes some of the confusion of Europe uprooted and wandering as WWII came apart and the order and organization of Death Camps and POW camps turned into a chaos of those with no other nation than limbo, picking through trash for food, drinking bad water, brains too stunned to consider much beyond walking, resembling more the many homeless that every morning emerge out of the concrete gray and the shadows of parks and begin their trek to the food line of one of the city’s main church soup kitchens a couple of blocks from our apartment, many days the streets seeming to empty of all pedestrian traffic but those whose lives have been reduced to the portable. Like epileptic Bill who several years ago went out of work when a fancy restaurant, also a couple of blocks away, closed and its gate and stoop became a line for homeless drying their clothes on early sunny mornings. Epileptic Bill, who did get meds from the State and our landlord couldn’t understand why he wouldn’t take them until I explained to him that perhaps it’s because it takes a while to find a cocktail of meds that will work and how an epileptic friend of ours was almost killed by State meds carelessly prescribed, who spent years barely able to do much but have seizures and sit in a daze, until she met a State doctor who cared and said your meds are killing you and worked to find the right cocktail. Bill, who our landlord gave a perpetual loan to of four big plastic trash bins in the decaying narrow dirt and broken concrete courtyard in the back of our 80 or 90 year old building, and Bill would daily come at 7 am and climb the gate outside our bedroom window and tend his cache of Coke and Pepsi cans and sit in a chair outside our decaying kitchen window, shadow ghost having a few isolated smokes. As it is with most ghosts he was the kind you see out the corner of your eye, who as you turned to look straight on at him would disappear, poof. I’d open the kitchen blind and there he was. I’d turn and turn back and during that interval he would usually disappear.

At winter’s end Bill would leave out back the jacket given him by the landlord and the landlord would put it away then would pull it out with fall’s chill and put it in the back for Bill to pick up. For Easter last year the landlord bought Bill new clothes and put them out for him on the cyclone fence next to the trash bins, where he would put Bill’s clothes that he would take home to wash when Bill would have a seizure and soil himself. The clean clothes would hang on the fence with spic-and-span healthful goodness, so lively they were nearly wearing themselves, and Bill would come and go daily but not pick them up. The clothes would be rained on, air polluted upon and still he’d not touch them. When they were again stiff and the color of coffee and concrete then they’d disappear from the fence and appear on Bill. Bill treated his new Easter finery the same way. He has since apparently disappeared for good. Months have gone by and Bill hasn’t made an appearance, which is probably bad news for Bill. After three months the landlord emptied the trash bins of Bill’s cans.

Bill once found a wallet in the street still fat with credit cards and twenty dollars. Bill had the landlord get in touch with the owner. The owner came and got his wallet which was as plump as it was when he’d lost it and he gave Bill the twenty dollars. The next day the wallet’s owner returned and gave Bill a couple hundred dollars and if I remember correctly he rented for him a room for a night at the motel near here. The same motel from which, last year, went a husband and wife and some children who had been living there for several months, walked down the street, past our own, inexplicably nude, leaving behind in their motel room the dead body of another one of their children, exorcised of life which they had mistaken for a demon and tortured out of her.

Bill confused the landlord, showing off the couple of hundred dollars worth of cigarettes he’d purchased, which he stowed in the trash bins, used mainly for trading.

I once found online the account of a Concentration camp survivor, wrote at length what it was like with the approach of the US and USSR troops and the fleeing of the Nazis, who shed their uniforms and went a few miles back home, put the civilian life camouflage on over the military, hid in the wide open air and waited with the rest, all welcoming smiles. The survivor was wandering with other survivors, weakened by captivity and rare and bad food, confused by the sudden change, at their resurrection from the dead, survivors who were as disinterested in him as he was in them, and during their initial wandering they were invited for a farm house meal by a man and his wife. As he and the others sat eating he realized the host was one of the officials at the Death Camp, jovial now, serving them, piling food on them when a couple of days before he’d still been killing them. And the survivors, realizing who he was, instead of attacking the officer, eating the good food at his table, laughed at the jokes and said thanks for the potatoes and meat, not knowing what in the hell else to do. Shocked by a world going topsy-turvy. When the meal was done they shook the fake civilian’s hand and returned to the road. The survivor outlined his weeks of wandering, walking himself back to life, and I gained a better picture of the chaos, the people looking for an old home that no longer was, after a while remembered relatives and started to look for them, lost seeking the lost in a Europe that seemed less like nations than houses blasted and jumbled together by a several year long hurricane.

In school we were taught that the US troops rode in. There was liberation. We were shown pictures of townsfolk celebrating the arrival of US troops, of prisoners lined up behind fences waiting release, lying on bunks. One imagined an immediate translation of liberated prisoners to hospital wards with three meals a day, clean sheets, warm baths, the Andrews Sisters in nursing caps bouncing their curls off their shoulders, breaking into impromptu song while taking temps.

My husband had a great Uncle. One of the Black Sheep Uncles. Who my husband liked best. An alligator trapper in the bayou who was missing several fingers. Whispers of his being a morphine addict. There were the church-going, Assembly of God, in good stead with Christ members of the family. And there were the tubercular alcoholics who joked and told stories and purchased and gave candy to the nieces and nephews rather than church judgments. And then the whispers of the morphine addict Uncle.

I knew he had served in WWII. Had been a POW as well, but not much was said about this.

It bothered me that I knew Ezra was in the war and had been a POW but no one could tell me anything else about it.

I did a little research and found out that Ezra was in the 509th Parachute Infantry Batallion, which was the first American Unit to parachute into combat in November of 1942.

Ezra grew up in Louisiana. I could be wrong but I doubt he had traveled much before going off to war.

On Feb 29 1944 he was taken prisoner and was a POW at the infamous Stalag 2B, well known for being the worst of the German POW camps. Towards the end of the war the camp was evacuated and the POWs spent the next two months marching.

From http://darbysrangers.tripod.com/id64.htm

EVACUATION & LIBERATION: On 28 January 1945, POW received German instructions to be ready to evacuate camp at 0800 hours the following morning. Upon receipt of these instructions, the MOC set up a plan of organization based on 25-man groups and 200 man companies with NCOs in charge. On the day of the evacuation, however, POW were moved out of camp in such a manner that the original plan was (of) little assistance. German guards ordered POW to fall out of the barracks. When 1200 men had assembled on the road, the remaining 500 were allowed to stay in the barracks. A disorganized column of 1200 marched out into the cold and snow. The guards were considerate, and Red Cross food was available. After the first day, the column was broken down into three groups of 400 men each, with NCOs in charge of each group.

For the next three months, the column was on the move, marching an average of 22 kilometers a day 6 days a week. German rations were neither regular nor adequate. At almost every stop Sgt McMahan bartered coffee, cigarettes or chocolate for potatoes which he issued to the men. Bread the most important item, was not issued regularly. When it was needed most it was never available. The soup was, as a rule, typical, watery German soup, but several times POW got a good, thick dried-pea soup. Through the activity of some of the key NCO’s, Red Cross food was obtained from POW camps passed; by the column on the march. Without it, it is doubtful that the majority of men could have finished the march. The ability of the men to steal helped a lot. The weather was atrocious. It always seemed to be either bitter cold or raining or snowing. Quarters were usually unheated barns and stables. Sometimes they slept unsheltered o the ground; and sometimes they were fortunate enough to find a heated barn.

Except for one period when Red Cross food was exhausted and guards became surly, morale of the men remained at a high level. Practically all the men shaved at every opportunity and kept their appearance as neat as possible under the circumstances.

From time to time weak POW would drop out of the column and wait to be picked up by other columns which were on the move. Thus at Dahlen on 6 & 7 March, the column dwindled to some 900 American POW. On 19 March at Tramm, 800 men were sent to work on Kommandos, leaving only 133 POW who were joined a week later by the Large Kommando Company from Lauenberg. On 13 April the column was strafed by 4 Spitfires near Dannenberg. Ten POW were killed. The rest of the column proceeded to Marlag 10C, Westertimke, where they met the men they had left behind at Stalag IIB who had left on 18 February, reached Stalag 10B after an easy 3 day trip, and then moved adjacent Marlag 10C on 16 April. Westertimke was liberated by the British on 28 April 1945.

There is a report that July 11 1945 Ezra was reported as living. I don’t know what happened to him in the final days of the war, and in the couple of months between liberation and when he was reported as living. I have seen the report of another individual also part of the 98 North African Theater in Italy who was also in Stalag 2B who was reported as living over a month before Ezra was. Where Ezra was between liberation and when he was reported alive, I don’t know. Was he a Pynchon character journeying back from the underworld, walking until he found his name again. Was he lying in a hospital, unidentified. Where was he? I don’t know, only that the war left him in bad shape.

Ezra didn’t talk about his experiences. All my husband knew was that he’d been a POW and his mother mentioned he’d gotten a Purple Heart. I sent her what I’d found on Ezra and she wrote back this maybe explained his being in and out of the hospital for years following WWII. Psychiatric problems. Ezra was 31 when he was taken prisoner so he had gone into the war probably as a man who’d had some idea of a life he’d wanted to lead and had been pursuing. Or maybe not. He returned home and I get the idea he was viewed as kind of a puzzle, people not getting the connection between the ward and the war, it seems, Uncle Ezra just not able to get with the game. And then the morphine addiction thing. He had married one of the nurses he met. They had one son about a year or two after the war ended. “Pride and joy”. Y’know. And one can well imagine, I think. Ezra taking to the bayou to fish and trap alligators, spending his time out in the boat, away from people, married to a nurse who perhaps he found was able to listen, their having a child, and the cliched “pride and joy” of a son being not so cliched.

When he was 19, young son, on his job for the telephone company, was hit by a car and killed.

I don’t want to imagine.

Ezra’s wife died about 12 years later. Ezra lived a year and a half longer and died at age 65.

I don’t know if Ezra was brave. I don’t know what kind of soldier he was. I don’t know anything about him really, other than the fact he was my husband’s favorite uncle, that he and his wife were funny and nice, and that my husband enjoyed visiting him as a child, at their house “way way out” in the bayou.

Before I learned about Ezra and the war, my husband and I used to joke about Ezra, who I’d never met, having lost his fingers trapping alligators. We didn’t know if he’d lost his fingers while trapping alligators but had assumed it. Learning about the war, I’m not so sure now. I have two photos of Ezra just after he’d entered the military, in uniform, the image where he’s standing military straight for the memory book ruined with what looks like a light leak in the camera. I have also two photos taken in the early 70s. He was a skinny man at 60, tanned about as dark as the light brown polyester shirt he was wearing, looking less like his lighter-skinned siblings who were still living and more like his Cherokee-Chahta great-grandmother whose father never got with the program either, wanted to fish and hunt rather than farm and so his white relations called him “Lazy Ward” and for a time every descendant who took after him was nick-named after him.

In the photos, Ezra’s whole hand rests at his side, his left hand conspiculously jammed deep in his dark brown polyester pants pocket, hiding the missing fingers from view.

Several times last week I had an almost, not-quite exchange with laizzes-faire “well, this is unacceptable so certainly it will be taken care of blitheness”, variation of a too nonchalant “this too shall pass” which left me disoriented, sapped of strength, as if the words were an invisible red-and-white striped straw that had unexpectedly found vein, tapped, then breezed along. My outrage over the murderous sadism of naked bodies suspended from and dying on Terror War chains, or the routine stripping of stateside prisoners for purposes of police state humiliation and dehumanization distanced with words of a tourist casual aloofness. I was in horror of the routine humiliation of real people with names and lives, easily imagining my flesh and person in their place, when around the corner strolls a mind that touches my own and I find myself in a place where velvet crowd-control ropes direct the traffic through medieval death dungeons, the victims are historical artifacts that make the price of the ticket, the chained a perpetual fact of life, the essential oddity that makes the attraction, but quickly and ultimately a prison cell is small and boring so move along. The lack of interest embraces and seems to want to win me over to its view and carry me with it. I become detached and disoriented. So this then has no meaning? Belongs to a world of shadowy “other” that has no relation to the tourist basking in the sun. They go to find something to eat and I am left in a state of slight, mute shock. Hollowed.

It’s been a long time since I read “Catch 22″. Just thinking of it now I realize that we probably no longer have the novel. A disintegrating paperback I’ve not seen around in a long time, which means it must have fallen apart and turned landfill sometime between then and now. Had the paperback already when I was 18 or 19, but I’d not read it before I went to see the movie, “Catch 22″.

The movie was one of those special college shows. The sound was muffled. About all that I remember is the cinemotography and lighting. It seemed I’d climbed into someone else’s mind and was living their world.

And I remember two scenes from that once and only viewing of the film. The old Italian man. Did he say something about the sun being different in the Mediterranean? I’ve read this so many times elsewhere, witnessed it in photos, I don’t recollect if the old man had said this or I’ve come to attach this knowledge to this scene (though the quality of sun is different everywhere). But I recollect him talking about time, about what lasts and what doesn’t. In the book, he questions what is a country, pointing out the artificial nature of national boundaries. I don’t remember all that he said in the movie, but he shocked the soldier with whom he was speaking, telling him that America would one die, which hadn’t occurred to the GI. I’m going purely on memory here, and the movie is different from the book. He spoke against nationalism and yet something about parts of his reasoning seemed steeped through with nationalism (to me) and I felt off kilter. Perhaps “all is vanity” was the primary theme. The memory isn’t clear, only that I felt a great hostile vacuum expanding as he spoke. There is a way of approaching the vanity of the human which is hostile and a way which is compassionate. The vacuum overwhelmed and I began to drown. At least that is what I remember feeling, the sun on the movie screen weakening the thin and watery images, muffled voices disintegrating, the ragged film stock chopping up words, breaking thoughts. I started to feel physically ill.

The light. Something about the light was too much.

Then the beach scene. The screen was full with Hollywood, familiar faces, but the film was breaking them up too, splintering them, making them into a lifetime of someone else’s real memories piled up over the years, experienced in the piecemeal hash of dream review. I felt like I was in a trance. I don’t know if this is how it happens but I remember a pier, a man standing on the end, Paula Prentiss and Arkin and others wandering away, perhaps down the beach. The plane with McWatt flying it and he’s coming in to buzz the others, which he gets a kick out of doing. The man on the end of the pier is waving (Kid Sampson in the book). The plane comes in too low and off in the distance the propeller strikes the man on the pier and slices him in half. Paula screams. McWatt’s plane (we are not shown McWatt flying it I don’t believe) turns, flies high, plunges down into the ocean, McWatt killing himself. At least that is how I remember it.

And the light. The light. Which was now terrifying.

I didn’t know if I was sick already and had just begun to feel it while watching the film. But I was overcome and unable to tolerate the film anymore, had to get out of there. I felt as if I’d received a terrible shock and the world had split apart at the seams with screaming hell pouring out of its core. I wasn’t the only one leaving as my husband was with me, and I felt terribly out of place as I made my way up the aisle, which was difficult. I was struggling not to pass out. The faces in the auditorium were bright with the light reflected off the screen, all caught up in the movie, and it felt odd having to turn my back on the film. I wanted to forget. The cheapness of life. Alienation. A person as hunk of flesh that when ruptured revealed only meat, was already only meat animated by futile sense of self in which no one else participated, all selves orbiting their own heart-suns until the heart stops and the sun simultaneously darkens and all the worlds that were in one perish in the freezing cold. I wondered why I was the only one who had to leave. And the film followed. The old Italian. The sun. The watery images. Kid Sampson waving one second and sawn in two the next.

I felt weak, as if I was missing something that should have been able to keep me in my seat with the others. I felt ashamed that I couldn’t stomach it. None of the ideas explored in the black comedy were new to me, but for some reason I’d not been able to confine this particular film to fiction, to movie magic. I was thinking the movie wasn’t even that good. Disjointed. But the disjointedness, the light had amplified the alienation.

As it turned out, I was physically ill. Quite sick. But that night and the following days I had a difficult time sorting out the physical from the emotional and mental shock I’d gotten in the theater. There is illness that can make one more susceptible, marrow deep.

It was a number of years before I could bring myself to read the book. I’d pick it up and examine it. Joseph Heller. Catch 22. A slim book with yellowed pages brown at the edges and the paper brittling. The glue of the binding brittled and no longer holding.

Books don’t remain static for me, changing sometimes as I change. I might pick it up today and reading it would be a new experience.

So, last week, feeling somewhat disjointed from lots of Benadryl fighting a particularly bad week of allergies, I was thinking of the devastating weaponry of humiliation and dehumanization and of the brand of “this too shall pass” that casually distances and makes all meaningless and I thought of “Catch 22″ and the old man and the futile vacuum and of the hell of Kid Sampson evaporating into no meaning whatsoever. It’s the kind of hell I taste singeing the edges when I collide with commodity culture.

Not that my life is bursting at the seams with meaning. But commodity culture is pretty remote from it.

Considering my intense reaction to the light, I find it interesting to read that the DVD release has Nichols talking about the cinematographer, how Watkins insistence on the perfect natural light meant sometimes there was only shooting for two hours a day.

On Monday Son went to see the new Grossology exhibit at the Natural History Museum. He loves the Natural History Museum. When he was five he liked the Science Museum though confused by the stuffed animals on exhibit. I knew the question would come sooner or later as he stood and stared. Why did they do that to the animal? At the Natural History Museum the exhibit before this one was on Frogs. He loves frogs. They had as part of the exhibit a display to do with a dissected frog. Son came home and said he was not going back to the museum until the dissected frog was gone. “Why did they do that to the frog?” So he went back after the Frog exhibit was gone and before the new exhibit opened. And then was all eager for the new exhibit to open. As soon as his dad was up Monday morning, Son was sayng, “Let’s go! Let’s go!” The exhibit is billed as a gross delight for kids dealing with the human body. Son got there and saw giant steroided-out Mad Magazine constructions of intestines and stuff and said it was gross and promptly wanted to leave and said he wasn’t going back until that exhibit was gone. He wasn’t amused.

Maybe because everything is already big to my son. Amplified. And the whole world is alive and talking. He’s like me when I was his age. Like I still am, actually. Other children can look at water coming out the faucet into the sink and wonder where it comes from, what’s the conduit. My son looks and sees water alive and talks to it and think it’s talking. He used to ask what is the water feeling.

Intestines on steroids were too much.

I later thought of Yossarian and the soldier with the intestines spilling out of his body.

I ought to read the book again. Perhaps I should see the film again. But I should read the book again. I wonder if any kids in high school now are reading “Catch 22″ for class, are thinking about the war being fought by the military professionals and hawks as different from the war fought by Yossarian, who pragmatically is simply interested in living, the legalized insanity of war driving him into a state of paranoia where Nately’s “whore” suddenly appears everywhere trying to kill him after he delivers the message to her of Nately’s death.

What are they teaching kids in school today about war?

I have been tagged by Blaghdaddy.

Number of books I own: I’d say around 1100. But that would be cheating as I’d be padding with children’s books. We did a huge purge when we moved into this apartment a couple years ago. Boxes and boxes and boxes unloaded.

Last book I bought: Got a list of books I’ve been formulating for purchase. How about the last book that was purchased for me. Haruki Murakami’s latest. “Kafka on the beach”.

Last book I read: I finally started the Murakami book on Sunday and am in the middle of it.

5 Books that mean a lot to me (dunno, gives me a headache tonight trying to consider this one):
The wind-up bird chronicles, Haruki Murakami
The crying of lot 49, Thomas Pynchon
The Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick : Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings
God is Red, Vine Deloria

“Mainstream Malice” at Jay Taber’s blog, “Skookum”, begins:

My significant other was listening to Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman interview a former undercover FBI agent on our community radio two days ago, who made the assertion that field agents (like he was before resigning over disagreements with mid-level management) are generally conscientious folks, but that bureaucratic turf battles and political interference from higher ups often prevent the lawful and orderly application of justice. Not a particularly shocking piece of information these days, unless one considers that his expertise and experience was the infiltration of violent white supremacist groups.

What caught my partner’s ear, though, was when he mentioned working in among other places our old neck of the woods in northwest Washington state, where my colleagues and I in the mid-1990s were the target of eight individuals later–with the testimony of then Agent German–convicted of manufacturing explosives to use against human rights activists and judges opposed to their racist agenda. Again, old news to me, but nice to finally hear it on the radio.

The rest of the blog is powerful and worth reading. But it has a catch there in the middle of it, in the second paragraph, that is written with such casualness one could flow on to the following paragraphs without much notice, except one doesn’t. A passing reference to nightmare knowledge brands the page unexpectedly.

The piece keeps drawing me back because it has the feel of history. Like the diaries of missionaries to American Indians that survive from the early 1800s. Or rather, I’m thinking in particular of portions of a diary I’ve been privileged to read that was kept by a missionary to the Ioway. I’m not making a comparison in content, just “history”.

One thing to read textbook and opinion, another to read a super-view voice that moves back and forth between the plain and the objective bluff looking over it, relating history as it transpires, for the record, a person with a rare scope on the situation.

Jay Taber writes a lot on effective models of community education on tear-em-up issues, the kind that shred a place and people in a way mainstream America tends to be protected from perhaps more by ignorance than any other buffer.

One rereads the casual nightmare glimpse again:

“What caught my partner’s ear, though, was when he mentioned working in among other places our old neck of the woods in northwest Washington state, where my colleagues and I in the mid-1990s were the target of eight individuals later–with the testimony of then Agent German–convicted of manufacturing explosives to use against human rights activists and judges opposed to their racist agenda.

So one goes and clicks on the title “Reign of Terror” in the sidebar. If one wants to learn more. And I encourage everyone to do so. “Reign of Terror” is Jay’s May 24 posting of excerpts from his “Blind Spots: A Citizen’s Memoir”.

The title is fascinating enough.

Reign of Terror opens with a comment on freedom and utopia taken from Herbert Marcuse’s “An Essay on Liberation”, which should be read again when one is finished with the lengthy post, then moves on to “Part One” and 60 minutes airing a segment on the industry-backed Wise Use Movement in 1992.

The Wise Use Movement. There’s something that puts a chill in the bones. Part of the Anti-sovereignty Movement, which those not familiar with Indian concerns may not have heard about, but are a white racist hate group.

The excerpts give a glimpse of the rise of white supremecist militia in the area where Jay was situated in Washington state, and his experience with as director of the Whatcom Environmental Council and member of the Whatcom Human Rights Task Force Speaker’s Bureau.

Meetings of various groups were attended to see what was going on.

Paul’s sister Claire had received a call early that Saturday morning from a friend who’d passed the Rome Grange on the way to town, and seen a large sign out front announcing “Washington State Militia.” Paul called me before breakfast to arrange a rendezvous at the Grange. He and Claire would sit on one side of the room, visibly taking notes and tape-recording if it seemed safe, and I would sit on the other side of the room blending in. Paul had become known by his presence at several recruiting events in Snohomish and Whatcom Counties, and had been fingered as a hostile reporter at one near Everett. I was still perhaps unknown by, as we referred to them, the dangerous fringe of the Far Right.

Jay describes the meeting in detail. Recounts organization of human rights activists to protest.

July 1996 brought several surprises to Whatcom County, not the least of which was a press conference by the U.S. Department of Justice, announcing the bust of eight local individuals for involvement in bomb-making and illegal modification of firearms into fully-automatic weapons—machine guns. News of this development, given the growth in militia organizing activities of the past year and a half, made Paul de Armond and I very concerned. Paul installed motion detectors and lights around his home. I started closing the blinds at night–drawing the heavy brocaded curtains over the windows in the living room where I often sat up late reading. I never said anything about why I was doing this, hoping to spare Marianne some worry. I guess I was only sparing myself, though. I realized this when she asked me if I thought someone might try to poison our dogs. I wondered if I’d be shot in my recliner some evening.

Paul shared information with local and federal law enforcement agents, but the communication was strictly one-way. As a member of the Whatcom Human Rights Task Force Speaker’s Bureau, I’d been lecturing at adult education forums in local churches about the danger posed by community silence. Most of my time consisted of undoing the years of misinformation published in the Herald. We were apparently a long way from the start of a sustained community response to domestic terrorism. We would perhaps never get there.

Jay describes the toll taken on one’s personal well-being. Something I’ve heard about all too often with such disparate interests as a friend working on grassroots Indian rights up on a reservation in South Dakota who was represented by the ACLU in actions against the state concerning voting rights, and a friend working years to save old growth forests and urban trees. As a web-support person for the aforementioned grassroots group, I know a little of the paranoia and fear that comes when strange phone calls start happening, when one is pulled over after by the police after making a cross-country trip from a physical meeting and questioned about what you were doing on your trip, being directed to leave your three-year-old child in the van and stand in such-and-such a place so you can keep your child in direct view while they search the van for an hour and a half for weapons. Pure intimidation. In the end, one is allowed to drive on. What it feels like to know one’s work is being monitored by the government because one’s graphics are pulled out during pre-trial hearings, and the right to free speech questioned for nothing but pure intimidation value. Different from what Jay is describing, nothing compared to what others experience, but there are spells where it gets weird and takes its toll.

Looking into neural disorders and what part if any they may play in disposition toward violence, Jay remarks on the importance of continuity and memory.

Richard McNally, a professor of psychology at Harvard says, “The ability to solve problems in the here and now depends on one’s ability to access specific autobiographical memories in which one has encountered similar problems in the past. It depends on knowing what worked and what didn’t. With that ability impaired, abuse survivors cannot find coherence in their lives. Their sense of identity breaks down.”

This is significant not only for the individual but on a societal level as well, which makes especially striking the concluding sentences of Jay’s article and the idea of the importance of the preservation of history.

My own family, because of the involvement of direct-line members in certain socialist-communist societies through the 1800s and the continued support of such ideals into the 1900s, fearing possible reprisal during the McCarthy era took all documents concerning their involvement–organizational records, letters, etc.–and burned them. About all that was left in the trunk were stacks of empty envelopes. Whether or not they really had anything to fear, I don’t know, but their worries were such that the sisters gathered and together torched over 100 years of family documents.

The loss of some histories seems more unsettling than others. That above noted loss, coupled with the loss of history on the Ioway side of the family, partly impressed upon me the value of continuity. Perhaps histories that are intentionally interrupted demand a kind of accounting that histories casually lost through disregard do not. Or perhaps we don’t acknowledge yet what injury occurs with even a seeming innocent lossof history–continuity, coherence and essential meaning, consequential casualties in not only individuals but families and societies. Perhaps it is part of the hunger that afflicts Euro-Americans who for generations abandoned past in their pursuit of the Frontier.

My heightened appreciation of the importance of preservation of history, makes especially appealing to me Jay’s closing remarks in his memoire excerpts.

For its record of experience, it ought to be read. For the experience with hate groups and how quickly their interests can consume an area in co-operation with other movements more oriented to the mainstream. For the experience in recognizing hate groups as they appear on the scene in more veiled guizes and attempting to educate and organize against them, the memorie ought to read in full. Regretfully, however, it is out of print because of threats made to the publisher after publication. In lieu, I encourage reading “Reign of Terror”. It imparts a kind of knowledge that no newspaper article, no 60 Minutes broadcast, is going to be able to communicate. Too many people, with no real acquaintance, treat the idea of hate groups in America as approaching arcane and even comical, when their threat is real, often subverted in seeming dissociated ideologies, and the venom long-sustaining.

Jay Taber is now self-publishing Shadow War (was Blind Spot) which I posted about here.

Arvin Hill posts a map of potential areas for relocation. Atlanta comes out lower use of cannibis than I believe it should. I think the stats reflect using Repubs saying they don’t.

Driftglass’ Dealing with the devil. Start off one place and then, as Driftglass does so well, find it is a fast launching rocket into another.

I was going to write about the revelation that the US lied to Britain (and us) about its use of MK 77s, but Heretik has done so here. Downing Street: The Fires of Hell.

Love and hope and sex and dreams on Net-oriety. A clip:

I’ll freely admit that I enjoy when my sitemeter numbers skyrocket, but I am a bit ambivalent about what I need to do to mantain those numbers. I usually ask myself “is this blog for the world, for the pursuit of net-oriety, or for me? what is its purpose and is that purpose congruent with the personna?”

Sometimes the purpose changes. Blogs have an organic nature, and as such, can be subject to change. Yet is the change congruent with who we are (or want to be) on our blogs? Is the possibility of losing readers inconsequential to the need to express oneself via blogging?

More on the PBS assault by Repubs at Ratboy’s Anvil.

Stan Goff’s How do we respond to the statement. To sum up….

The notion that the Iraqis CAN not or SHOULD not be left to their own initiative to determine their future is another display of “white man’s burden.”

THE SOLUTION IS TO END THE OCCUPATION AND BRING THE TROOPS HOME NOW.

Or rather marking my calendar to buy this book. You may mark your calendar to do whatever in October.

Pam’s House Blend has a post on a new book by Jim Loewen that’s due to be released in October, Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of Segregation in America”.

A quote that Pam supplies from Publishers Weeky:

Located mostly outside the traditional South, these towns employed legal formalities, race riots, policemen, bricks, fires and guns to produce homogeneously Caucasian communities—and some of them continue such unsavory practices to this day. Loewen’s eye-opening history traces the sundown town’s development and delineates the extent to which state governments and the federal government, “openly favor[ed] white supremacy” from the 1930s through the 1960s, “helped to create and maintain all-white communities” through their lending and insuring policies.

“While African Americans never lost the right to vote in the North… they did lose the right to live in town after town, county after county,” Loewen points out. The expulsion forced African-Americans into urban ghettoes and continues to have ramifications on the lives of whites, blacks and the social system at large. Admirably thorough and extensively footnoted, Loewen’s investigation may put off some general readers with its density and statistical detail, but the stories he recounts form a compelling corrective to the “textbook archetype of interrupted progress.” As the first comprehensive history of sundown towns ever written, this book is sure to become a landmark in several fields and a sure bet among Loewen’s many fans.

One of those sundown towns was Highland Park, Texas, which didn’t have a home-owning black family un til 2003. Highland Park, Texas is home to G. W. Bush and Dick Cheney, and the book reports that eleven Presidents and recent presidential candidates came from sundown towns.

So did Spam.

Spam? Really? Should I confess that sometimes as a child I was fed Spam and that I liked it? And I liked it a whole lot when it was fried? Should I confess that I never bought a can of Span after the age of 17 because (a) it was too expensive (b) I was horrified by the idea of it but also horrified that I might still like it and then (c) horrified to open the can and look at what I used to eat as a child.

We have both James Lowen’s Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong and Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong on our bookshelves. “Lies My Teacher Told Me” is fairly well known, but the less popular “Lies Across America” is worth having. Following is a sizeable excerpt from the introduction.

People who put up markers and monuments and preserve historic houses are usually pillars of the white community. The recent spate of Martin Luther King avenues and monuments notwithstanding, Americans still live and work in a landscape of white supremacy. Especially in the South, but all across America, even on black college campuses, the names on the landscape and the markers and monuments glorify those who fought to keep African Americans in chains and those who, after Reconstruction, worked to put them back into second-class citizenship. What person gets the most historical markers in any state? Not Lincoln in Illinois, it turns out, nor Washington in Virginia, but Nathan Bedford Forrest, Confederate cavalry leader and founder of the Ku Klux Klan, in Tennessee. And if white Southerners were misguided enough not to be racist, they are left off the landscape entirely or converted into “good white Southerners” when remembered on it. Thus Helen Keller’s birthplace flies a Confederate flag, while she was an early supporter of the NAACP.

Other monuments express white domination over Native Americans. A later introductory essay, “Hieratic Scale in Historic Monuments,” shows how sculptors typically place Native Americans lower than European Americans on historic monuments. Lame Deer, a Dakota leader, sees the same message in the four European American faces carved on Mount Rushmore:

What does this Mount Rushmore mean to us Indians? It means that these big white faces are telling us, “First we gave you Indians a treaty that you could keep these Black Hills forever, as long as the sun would shine, in exchange for all the Dakotas, Wyoming, and Montana. Then we found the gold and took this last piece of land, because we were stronger, and there were more of us than there were of you, and because we had cannons and Gatling guns. . . . And after we did all this we carved up this mountain, the dwelling place of your spirits, and put our four gleaming white faces here. We are the conquerors.

The language at historic sites is also warped. All across the country, Americans call Native Americans by tribal names that are wrong and even derogatory. On the landscape Indians are “savage,” whites “discover” everything, and some causes are portrayed as stainless today that were drenched in blood in their own time. Distorted as well is the art on historic monuments. Whites inevitably wind up on top, in positions of power and action, while people of color are passive on the bottom.

Then there is the matter of who gets memorialized and who gets left out. All too often memorials heroify people who should not be forgotten, but who should never have been commemorated — Jeffrey Amherst for example, who initiated germ warfare in the Americas and for whom Amherst College and Amherst, Massachusetts, are named. Across America the landscape commemorates those men and women who opposed each agonizing next step our nation took on the path toward freedom and justice, while the courageous souls who challenged the United States to live out the meaning of its principles lie forgotten or even reviled. Markers and monuments in many states leave out women, sometimes so totally as to be unwittingly hilarious. The only white woman to get a historical marker in Indiana, to take one offending state, gets remembered for coming into the state minus a body part that she lost in Kentucky! Kentucky, meanwhile, erected (the right word) a female Civil War horse with an extra body part that turns her into a he! Historic sites also cover up or lie about the sexual orientations of the people who made their history if those orientations were gay or lesbian.

A special form of these omissions occurs at war museums, which present war without anguish, instead focussing genially on its technology. The USS Intrepid in New York City leaves out the Vietnam War — too “political” for its board of directors — but most visitors never notice it. Omissions can be hard to detect, especially for visitors who come to a site to learn some history and do not bring a knowledge of the site with them. People don’t usually think about images that aren’t there.

And some images don’t exist anywhere. Scottsboro, Alabama, became world-famous for exactly one incident — the Scottsboro Case — but although downtown Scottsboro boasts four historic markers, none mentions the Scottsboro Case. “Pay attention to what they tell you to forget,” poet Muriel Rukeyser once wrote, and this book does — it covers the Scottsboro Case and three events in Richmond, a city that truncates its public memory on the day that the Confederacy ceased to rule it, because of their importance — and because they are not recognized on the landscape. Nowhere have I seen portrayed the multicultural nature of pioneer settlements, where Native Americans, European Americans, and often African Americans lived and worked together, sometimes happily. Only an obscure marker in Utah offers any hint of the trade in Indian slaves that started in 1513 and continued at least until the Emancipation Proclamation. All across America, the landscape suffers from amnesia, not about everything, but about some crucial events and issues of our past.

When the landscape does not omit unpleasant stories entirely, it often tells them badly, compared even to the mediocre standards set by U. S. history textbooks. Except for the Chief Vann house, a state historic site in Georgia, historic sites and museums in the United States offer few depictions of Native American farms, frame houses, or schools, compared to the enormous number of tipis they display. Thus they portray American Indians as mobile and romantic — even when they weren’t! What tourists learn about slavery from visiting most historic sites is far inferior to the somewhat improved information that textbooks now provide to high school students. On Reconstruction, that period after the Civil War when the federal government tried to guarantee equal rights for African Americans, the landscape is almost silent; most sites that do mention it present a distorted “Gone With the Wind” version that never happened. There is little trace on the land today of the lynchings and race riots that swept the United States between 1890 and 1925, the “nadir of race relations.” All across America, monuments to the Spanish-American War, which was over in three months, say “1898-1902″; few visitors realize that those dates refer to the larger and longer Philippine-American War, which otherwise has mostly vanished from the landscape and from our historical memory.

The antithesis of omission is overemphasis, and the history written on the American landscape is largely the history of the federal governments — United States of America and Confederate States of America — and particularly of their wars.

Source: Introduction to “Lies Across America”

I’ve done my share of sparring with individuals attempting to claim that the Ku Klux Klan had nothing to do with Stone Mountain or Mount Rushmore.

Amazing the misinformation and flat-out lying the Daughters of the American Revolution and the Daughters of the Confederacy spread around? No.

Many of the Great-Field-Trip-Outing-For-The-Homeschooler ideas that come rolling around involve such landmarks and other often-touted places of historic interest. In the Deep South, historic sites are quite often focused on Civil War battles and the glorification of Antebellum life and its plantations. With these Antebellum home restorations, one is typically invited to experience the “luxury and elegance”, and the “grace and beauty” of the Antebellum south. Slavery as the muscle and bone and blood that made the Antelbellum south, if mentioned, seems often a reluctant concession.

When they say that people in period costumes will be on hand, you can pretty well guarantee what period costumes won’t be welcoming you.

The first two James Loewen books have been read several times over, whole, and in bits and pieces. If this third book is half as instructional, it will become another essential reference.

I was, I think, 19 when I first read John Hersey’s, “Hiroshima”. I was working in a bookstore. Preferable would have been a job at the real bookstore in town that I used to haunt on the weekends, a small, cramped shop that smelled of books, its shelves so stuffed with books, books piled on the floor, books from floor to ceiling, that it seemed all books, no walls in the thunderstorms, rain forests and deserts of the cool pungence and mildew of print new and old binding with stale human heat. But there was no job available in that chemist’s lab, and when a new bookstore opened, because I wanted to work around books and get a discount on books, I applied for a job even though the place had no affection for books, only profit. This seemed alien to the 19 year old me, that a person with no passion for books would open a bookstore, as it was an era a year or three short of book stores in every mall, when books were more specialty and not only another commodity like clothes or beef. The owner was a former carnie and a little ahead of his time, but not by much. The store advertised itself as a bookstore, but he had determined books weren’t enough of a draw so it also dealt in cheap novelty goods and things with scales and relations, reptiles, fish, birds.

The ex-carnie was something of a novelty himself of whom everyone on that side of the town seemed suddenly to be aware, which was odd as it was no small town. No doubt because his store was a first buoy marking explosive out-of-control growth on a main artery down which all cars passed on their way from in-town work to suburban satellites. And like an infestation of lice at a small school, everyone was lousy with question marks, wondering how the owner had made as much money as he had, where he had come from, why land on that side of the golf course, no one knew, he was just suddenly there, living in a big house in the new upscale subdivision that anyone with money and no reason to leave their old home was moving to simply because the houses were twice as large as what had formerly counted as homes and because if you lived in “X” subdivision then not much else needed to be said about you. “I live in X,” you’d say and that meant you shopped only at elite “Y” and your doctor’s kids would be on the same swim team as your own. In the middle of all that Southern gentility landed the carnie from out-of-town, who no one knew anything about except he was a fish unplugged from its sea, Hans Christian Anderson merman