|
| Government | Living in Place | Monkeywrenching | Musings | Reality | War & Peace | Wilderness |
| November 27, 2005 |
Giving Thanks |
|
"Thanksgiving Day, a function
which
originated in New England two or three centuries ago when those people
recognized that they really had something to be thankful for -
annually, not oftener - if they had succeeded in exterminating their
neighbors, the Indians, during the previous twelve months instead of
getting exterminated by their neighbors, the Indians. Thanksgiving Day
became a habit, for the reason that in the course of time, as the years
drifted on, it was perceived that the exterminating had ceased to be
mutual and was all on the white man's side, consequently on the Lord's
side; hence it was proper to thank the Lord for it and extend the usual
annual compliments." -Mark Twain
|
| _____________________________________________________ |
| Thanksgiving Day: based on a historical lie, made an official State holiday by Abraham Lincoln and his handler, Secretary of State William H. Seward, pressed into corporate service by industrial agribusiness and the food products industry, adopted by the religious right to prop up the myth of American theocracy: a truly American celebration. |
| Since we Americans cannot be encouraged to be thankful each and every day, to open our hearts and our homes to family and friends throughout the year (it might discourage individual consumption), we have set aside this special day (and four day weekend) for a celebration of conspicuous consumption, gluttony, animal cruelty, violent entertainment and sloth. |
| The colorful panoply enacted every year in schools and churches across America repeats the lie of Pilgrim generosity to the Indian inhabitants of the new land the Pilgrims called home. In reality, the Pilgrims slaughtered the natives most cruelly, drove them from their homes and fields, took over their farm lands and infected them with diseases for which they had no natural immunities. |
| In the fifty years from 1621 to 1671, the Native population of the northeastern coast of North American was decimated by as much as 90%, through a combination of disease and massacre brought to these shores by European invaders. The Europeans would not have survived their first winter in the New World without food and shelter provided by the local Natives, yet the first Pilgrim Thanksgiving was given in thanks that the natives were rapidly dying out, leaving more land and provender for the new inhabitants. |
| Today, as the United States government - their government, not my government - continues to kill local innocent men, women and children in far off lands, its seems proper to gather together to celebrate our "good fortune," to give thanks that our skin is pale, that we live in America and not in some hot and dusty place underlain by crude oil, that we are blessed with the approval of a white bearded, light-skinned god in flowing robes, not some foreign-tongued god of uncertain visage. |
| We give thanks that the oil we kill for flows freely in our own country, providing fuel for trucks to carry the dead carcasses of tortured animals to nearby markets, to serve our gluttonous feasts. |
| We give thanks that our economy is strong, propped up securely by giant corporations that manufacture bullets, bombs, missiles, tanks, airplanes and ships that destroy those who resist American imperialism and global totalitarianism. |
| Many remember those husbands and sons, wives and daughters who have been sent to die for the cause of American business interests, and those whose families are yet intact give thanks that their loved ones have yet to be sacrificed on the killing fields. |
| Our Thanksgiving today celebrates the defeat and decimation of the Native people of other lands as our modern American Pilgrims set their sights on a new frontier. Pilgrim's Progress consists of denying everyone else the freedoms America professes to defend, to the point of killing anyone who dares to defend their own homes. |
| American Thanksgiving continues the tradition of our forefathers, giving thanks for 384 years of death and destruction visited on the human and animal inhabitants of this planet. |
| The twin prospects of Peak Oil and global climate change will once and for all put an end to this insane human society based on greed, avarice and unlimited growth. On this Thanksgiving, I give thanks that Nature bats last and is ultimately just. |
| Michael Lewis Leona Gulch Pacific Plate |
|
|
| "My country, right or wrong? I'd rather be right than patriotic." Ed Abbey, on the cusp of the new year, 50 years ago. |
| As we contemplate yet another demonstration of the ultimate stupidity of the American electorate: too mired in propaganda, too swollen with jingoistic hyperbole, too intellectually stultified to realize their own oppression... too twp to know they're twp, as the good Welshmen say... it's hard to find even a crumb of optimism in the bottom of my brain pan these days; for this country or even for this old beat up and much abused planet we balance on so precariously. |
| Millions of miles away a tiny mote of human technology waits for its next electronic command, moves a little then waits again with infinite patience. It sends back pictures of a lifeless landscape, even more sere and empty than the New Mexico desert of Ed's youth. No beer cans to mark an ancient party, no rusting hulks of automobiles, none of the usual detritus of a thriving and growing civilization, if there ever was such a thing, which I doubt, anywhere in this Universe, if that's what it is. |
| What happened? Maybe life once teemed on our red neighbor, beside broad oceans, under blue and cloudscaped skies. Maybe upright, featherless bipeds once walked those shores, gazed back at slopes verdant with exotic tree-like growths, populated with unimaginable many-limbed gropey things that populate our Earthbound nightmares. |
| Maybe they lived and died on that world too, developed technology, reached for the stars. And maybe they too reached too far, upset the delicate balance of their planet, tipping their climate into ocean-boiling heat that destroyed the atmosphere, drove the remaining water underground, there to freeze into semi-solid, creeping glaciers. |
| Maybe some did achieve space flight, hopping next door to their nearest neighbor sunward, beginning that endless trek to new territory when we see the smoke of our neighbors chimney. Twas ever thus, migrating to the new when we've permanently despoiled the old. Is this our legacy, out future, our doom? |
| Is it in our genes, this seeming inability to be satisfied with enough? Perhaps we are an alien life form, spawned and bred in space, flung outward from some infinitely distant and long-forgotten source in the noise of the Big Bang. We travel from planet to planet, turning out the lights as we go, leaving behind only darkness and ultimate silence. |
| Michael |
|
|
The Cowboy and his Cow: Endangered Species |
| It seems we are witness to the extinction of that great American tradition, the lie promulgated most recently by agribusiness corporations and pot-bellied pigs in ostentatious hats and pointy-toed boots: the cowboy and his attendant meat on the hoof. |
| The combination of drought and Mad Cow Disease may well spell the end of the myth, much to the benefit of humans in this nation in particular, grown fat, complacent and mortally unhealthy on a forced diet of cow's milk and cow flesh. Despite fifty years of propaganda on the part of the FDA, the NEA and duped mothers, the inherent insuitability of a diet based on meat consumption washed down with cow's milk has finally come home to roost, so to speak, to mix our animal metaphors. |
| What's a meta for anyway, I say, if not to mix with chicken lips, cow intestines and pig ganglia, foisted on poor defenseless cowlets held captive in feed lots for a significant portion of their tiny, meaningless lives, destined for the compressed air gun, the hook and the heavy hammer, and the human Bar-B-Q bun, rotisserie and intestinal villi. |
| A society fed on violence can only excrete violence, as we've well noted of late, from the oppression of juvenile testosterone-mobiles on our city streets to the strutting bombast of a Resident-Select parading a plastic fowl before the drooling TeeVee cameras. |
| Now we come to learn, in shock and awe, that cows can indeed be bad for the human constitution, if we have one left, unto death in a most gruesome visage of a vacuous, deteriorating Swiss-cheese like brain, that font of all that humans hold on high as a sign of a progressive civilization: lofty thoughts, culture, music and fine art, now held hostage to a MacDonalds double cheeseburger and a chocolate shake. |
| The cowboy astride his noble steed, contemplating the shit-smeared derriere of his sole source of income, is set upon from two directions, simultaneously and insidiously. On the one hand, clad in cowhide work glove, demand shrinks visibly in the public mind, forever associating cows with deadly human disease too horrible to contemplate. On the other hand, gracefully holding a slim paper tube of carcinogenic chemicals and natural leaf fibers, the economics of cattle raising in the already arid west declines to insignificance in the face of unavoidable and irreparable drought, reducing marginal grasslands to windblown dust, cattle to barely mobile sacks of bone and drawn hide, all watched over by the ever present and ever prosperous turkey vulture, from a serene and considerable height. |
| It had to end some day, this welfare ranching, this cowboy myth at the public water trough. Might as well get over it, move on. Let's tear down the fences, once and for all, move some buffalo out onto the plains, where they belong, push some elk down from the mountains and import some griz from their exile in the high mountain parks, back on the plains where they evolved. The wolves will come back on their own, kick the coyotes out of their dens and take over the home territory once again. Given a little bit of time, and sufficient human neglect, the plains can become great once again, in full diversity and efflorescence, home maybe to even a human or two, or maybe three, if we're polite and leave all the toys of our youth behind in the cities at the edge of the beyond. |
| Michael |
| -- "We must learn to think not only logically but biologically." Ed Abbey |
CULTURE! |
| June 27, 2003 Our small mobile home park is a microcosm of the world of the United States, exemplifying the deterioration of society in this country, the result of a liberal educational system, a permissive society, the loss of our common values and ideals in response to base popular culture. As I sit here pecking away at this infernally demanding electronic typewriter, the abusive, discordant strains of rap "music" waft across our street into my front screened door, open to allow the cooling ocean breezes access to our home. It's "mother-fuckin'" this and "mother-fuckin'" that, filling the air as two pre-teen boys play with with their toys on the street, lambasted by the excrescence of filth from yonder open window. Not an hour goes by that our walls are not vibrated by ground- penetrating stereo systems in passing cars on 7th Avenue. It goes on night and day, until blessed relief from 2 am to about 6, when the cacophony resumes as folks head 40 miles over the hill to San Jose. It's an acoustical din that shuts out thought, fills the mind and heart with base, gross emotions, stifles independent thinking, replacing it with zombie obedience to commercialism, urban "culture," if there is any, and the most crude and vile modes of expression. Yep, I'm an old fart, and true to old farts, I despise this destruction of what is good and true, this replacement of values with materialism, this abandonment of the ideals of the Enlightenment. Where hast thou gone, old Homo sap? What have you done with millennia of evolution that gave you your brain to aspire to greater things, to ponder the nature of the All That Is, to leap into the Infinite, imagine the heights of human endeavor. Have you sold it all for a rap song? I'll never forget my experience on St. Lawrence Island, at the Friday night drumming. I saw cultural transmission in action, as the elder men lined up with their drums, tuned their walrus stomach instruments with spit and a warm hand, and began drumming and singing songs that are older than time. Soon their wives and daughters arrived, with children in tow. The young boys sailed across the dance floor, landing in their father's laps, where they sat with big smiles, their tiny hands on the wooden hoops of the drums, absorbing through their skin and bones the culture of their fathers. Their female siblings stood on the dance floor with their mothers, some little ones barely able to walk, bobbing rhythmically to the drumming, mouthing the words their parents sang. I couldn't understand a word of the songs, though Alice Usivasiuq kindly translated for me and told me the history of the songs, who had written them many generations long gone, and who on the dance floor and in the drum line were the descendents of those long dead singers and drummers. I was witness to a thousand years of history, played out on the dance floor of the Savoonga IRA Hall. I was transported hundreds of years into the past, into the Dream Time, when humans spoke with animals and shape changers walked the earth. The time was endless and all too short. Nowadays, rap music from Detroit fills the ears of youngsters in Santa Cruz, California. They play at games learned from TeeVee, separated from any cultural continuity, devoid of lessons helpful in dealing with the world in which they live. Alienation is the only result: we have become an alien nation in place, where our cultural has become so dysfunctional as to become destructive. We no longer know how to live in this world, how to be "The People," the real human beings. And we no longer know how to teach our children to live in a world crumbling around them. No matter; write it off, forget about it. Those of us old enough to care are too old to do anything about it. The young are unaware and contemptuous of us old farts who always see the destruction of society in youthful impertinence. Thus it has always been. Life goes on. The eternal wheel of life turns in its eternal circle. In dust we are born and in dust we return to the earth. No one gets out alive. It's hard but it's fair. Leona Gulch Pacific Plate December 10, 2001 What I know of Nebraska: The sun rises over Ponderosa pine-covered hills and buff white sandstone bluffs. Bald eagles and hawks soar overhead, mule deer graze in the morning dew. A coyote trots down the road in front of my jeep, stops and shits in the middle of the road, sniffs it once and goes on about his business, shopping for breakfast. The horses come in for water, their hot, humid breath catching the morning light. They squeal and bite, crowding in for a drink, lead mare in the front, teenagers to the back, waiting their turn. I bury my head in their manes, delighting in the musky horse smell that clings to my hands and face. The red barn gleams in a fresh coat of paint, rooster wind vane catching the first rays of morning. The light catches the tips of the grass down the hill toward the White River, sparkling as it slips through cottonwood leaves. I call the milk cows in and lean up against their warm sides as I milk, feeling the pungent damp milky air rise from the bucket. Kittens crowd around and I squirt a white stream their way; they catch every drop in open mouths. Barn swallows chatter and peep in the rafters in the musty rising scent of this years first cutting. The clink and whirr of the separator, making cream and warm milk. The warm sour-milk smell of the milk room. Perched on the back of Spider, in a thin and ancient saddle, we push reluctant beeves across the White, bawling and fussing, calling their calves, babies panicked at their first touch of running water. We stream up the opposite bank, happy reunions, shaking, slipping and sliding in the clay gumbo muck. Heading north for the Toad Pasture, just at the edge of the Badlands, that broken, tortured landscape with surprising oases of wildflower and grass. Tiny rolls a cigarette one-handed, his knee around the saddle horn, as the red and white cattle clatter by lazily in high noon sun, their butts smeared with liquid green excrement in a fancy fan pattern spread by their tails. Mountainous piles of thunderheads rearing up in the summer afternoon sun, sailing overhead to release torrents of rain and hail, only to pass on west, grumbling to themselves in the far distance. Ted Ormesher on top of the stack with a pitchfork in one hand and a 12 inch Crescent-wrench in the other, to kill the rattlesnakes thrown up by the beaver-slide. Two draft horses wait patiently in harness at the base of the stacker; when they hear the sweep driver yell "Haw!" they jump into the harness, pulling the beaver-slide up the ramp, it's sweep full of golden hay. Ted yells "Whoah!" and they stop in their tracks, dropping the load in the right place on the stack. Ted goes to work with the pitchfork, his wrench in his back pocket at the ready. Water breaks at the creaking windmill, where we pass around the burlap covered gallon jug, and take a great slug of perfectly cool spring water. Sweep races at the end of the day, just getting dark, as we head for home to brush, feed and turn out the horses, milk cows and eat as much supper as can be piled on the groaning table. The endless immensity of stars at night; lying on my back between bunch grass and prickly pear, floating through space at the speed of light. I watch lightning flicker on far off clouds and imagine galleons with wings bearing fleets of airborn pirates. A rabbit squeals and a coyote kit sleeps well fed. This is a little bit of what I know about Nebraska Lobo Place East Mesa Rio Grande Valley |