A Place Called America

Karl E. Francis, Ph.D. P.O.
Box 2104 Lancaster, CA 93539 (661)206-8364
57,401 words Copyright 2000 Karl E. Francis
A PLACE CALLED AMERICA

By Karl Earvil Francis
There are brief but profound moments in human history. December 7, 1941 was one such moment. September 11, 2001 was another. In both of these instances fools ran amok. They both failed to grasp a massive reality we have come to call America, each in their own way crashing into it and thus sealing their own doom. It is that reality, this thing we call America, that I want to capture, at least in part, and present to you. To do so, to try to lay hands on something so thoroughly incomprehensible is, of course, an outrageous undertaking,. And yet, as the world stands perplexed in its massive shadow, I am driven to it. I hope you will bear with me. Not only abroad but even here in the middle of it, few people have any significant grasp of what this place really is or how it works. Yet little in the world today so demands the attention and at least some modest grasp by all mankind.
Karl Francis This Place We Call America Page 2
Other things aside, this nation is the most powerful human force on earth ever. Surely then, wherever we are, if only to protect ourselves from it, we should try to understand something of the nature of such an overbearing and dangerous creature, Not even its name, America, makes sense, and yet thats what we call it, not just those of us who live here but everyone. Since its inception no one has offered a better name and so we seem stuck with it. The United States of America, the real and legal name for this odd part of the whole of these two American continents, is just too unwieldy and confusing the more you think on it, of states, which imply sovereignty, and yet are proclaimed united. This odd, constantly changing place with a weird oxymoron for its name is now, as such things go, a very old sovereign state comprised at this moment of fifty not quite so sovereign states each with their own mostly much better names, a few odds and ends, and scattered through it all, numerous sovereign Indian nations. I must begin by cautioning that my sense of this place we call America may, for some, have a rough and perhaps crude texture. It derives from a lifetime seldom at the cozy center but spent mostly on the ragged edges. The images I have of this land have been captured from the saddles of tough, Yukonbred horses driven up rivers that fed on glaciers and then shifted beneath our feet trying to kill us, or seemed to, driving us up their rocky banks and through dense black spruce that ripped our tough clothing and tender flesh until we were bloody, nearly naked and barely alive; from motorcycling alone from one coast to another and then back both too early in the year, out where you can feel and fear things, dodging into the cellar of an Iowa farmhouse to escape approaching tornadoes, there drinking black coffee and waiting it out, learning in that good company something of life and death in the path of these brute forces; from trapping and killing things as a way of life and feeling too much the life lust of my prey; from seeing close friends and good neighbors die for taking a wrong turn up canyons that could not be flown through or into rocky clouds; from
being an odd soldier of this odd republic; from watching my heavily furred children disappear into blizzards hoping the snow-chained school bus would, in fact, be there for them, or into the dark boreal forest and then, having set the sled dogs to howling, come racing back, steaming and breathless, into the bright kitchen, terrified but yet giggling that they had literally bumped into a moose; from being a lone, working parent and having to leave my children in places they did not want to be and then hearing them cry in the night for a mother now gone; from somehow living through hurricanes and forest and range and marsh fires and avalanches and earthquakes, and airplanes and helicopters that crashed, and boats that should have sunk but somehow didnt; from helping or trying to help inner city children and derelicts and seeing the awful ways these places affected us all; from pounding explosives into desert sand to try to get oil out of it but instead, in the cold dawn light, knocked down a ranchers adobe house, who crawled out of the wreckage in his pajamas and crushed Stetson, 94 Winchester in hand, and charged our doodle bug crew in his ratty old pick-up truck, intent on killing us one way or another; from running oil field service companies and classrooms and university departments and huge research projects; from standing breathless on the tops of great mountains and diving black siphons to access jeweled caverns never before seen; from poking the innerds of glaciers and clouds to see how they work; from capturing and collaring Barren Ground grizzly bears, feeling their massive muscles quiver as they recovered from the drug and then following them in tiny airplanes to see where and how they lived; from taking a wrong turn into the Chiricahua Mountains, stopping to sleep near a forested summit and finding I was not alone but not knowing what else was out there, and then, years later, having an Apache shaman explain, as the hair rose on the back of my neck, what very special company I had had that night; from prowling the brightly lit, yet somber insides of Capitol Hill, seeking there to persuade the Congress to hear the voices of our people through the din of special interests; from trying to persuade administrative judges and presidents and prime ministers and the people to permit us to build huge pipelines and
ports and then trying to do all of that without causing too much harm; from looking hard at everything I have had the good fortune to see and trying to find in it some better understanding. And a good deal more. I have been blessed with a rich and joyful life, mostly here in this place we call America, and so far the good fortune to have survived it, some of which I would share with you, those parts that may help us better understand this most peculiar place the totality of which I consider to be my home and for which I confess to you the most profound respect and affection. I shall not trouble you much with the things you can find in other books, the stuff we scholars and others write, but rather invite you to go with me into a much larger, far more chaotic place, along rocky paths and back roads, down treacherous rivers and even more treacherous streets, across some of the trackless and yet teeming country that makes this place such as it is, and there meet some of those most extraordinary human beings we have all now come to call Americans. With due apologies and the greatest respect to those many other nations of the Americas, but noting that these other Americans have other and better suited names and so dont need nor apparently want to be called Americans, I too shall do here as others do and call this place America, and perhaps worse, our people the Americans.1 As one of them, an American, I must look from the inside out, hardly the best vantage point from which to see the whole of it. But then I have also looked from the outside in and looked at other things and other people, looking at it all as should the professional geographer I happen to be. It is from that 1 I attribute this confusion to the British, who from the outset of their rather late encounter with
these Americas referred to their presence here as the American Colonies. Even today the British have trouble seeing this place as it really is, too often cobbling together the United States and Canada and calling it North America, discounting not only the integrity of these two quite disparate nations but also leaving out all the rest.
geographers perspective, for better or worse, that I approach this task. We geographers are also a bit odd, a kind of scientist that studies places as others study synapses and clouds and frogs and rivers and galaxies and all. Sadly, Americans have little sense of geography, not as they do in Europe and most other places, where this academic pursuit is taken far more seriously, as too are its diverse and complex objects. And so I would ask that you indulge me while I explain briefly something about the discipline of geography, so that we may proceed with some common understanding of what we are about to do here. Although many people think otherwise, think that a science is defined by the thing or things studied, in fact, no academic field is meaningfully defined in that simplistic way.2 Geography, like chemistry or history or anthropology, is particularly difficult to grasp from an examination of the things it sets itself to study. Indeed, working as geographers, my students and I have studied such things as the Gypsies of Los Angeles, the perception of earthquake hazard, how glaciers and clouds work, slavery in present day Mexico, the decline of the dog sled across the North American Arctic, frontier agriculture, wolf howling and indigenous art in the Canadian North. If it happens or once happened or may someday happen in a place and makes that place uniquely what it is or was or will be, then we geographers feel we have license to study it. Like all academic disciplines, geography is best defined through hindsight of the methods used by its practitioners and the traditions from which these methods arise. While great tomes have been written on the history, philosophy and methodology of geography, indeed much of it by scholars with whom I have studied and who I trust will not be too bemused, or turn restless in their graves,
2 When I posed as a geologist years ago, a colleague explained that discipline to me this way: Geo: earth, logy: science ; Geology is therefore the science of the earth. The only other science is astronomy. Being as limited in his reading as geologists often are, my friend did not appreciate that logy actually derives from a Greek word for verbal discourse and that graphy derives from a Greek word for writing. So perhaps geology is talking about the earth while geography is writing about it. So much for ancient roots, which tell us practically nothing.
when I reduce their wisdom to this simple statement: geography mostly comes down to figuring out how one place on this earth differs both in form and function from all other places.3 And so our focus, if we have one in this examination of America, will be on how this place is not like other places, on how you can recognize it when you see it. Although it would also be a legitimate pursuit, we shall not examine too much here the internal geography of America, how its many parts differ, how New Hampshire and Hawaii are not the same, nor our Atlantic and Pacific and Arctic Coasts, but take it as whole cloth and look at how the whole of America is such as it is and so much different from anything else ever. Not that we shall have one, but this could be the final test. If we take you there blindfolded and then remove the blindfold, will you know where you are? And can you then explain how this place works and why it is not someplace else. I assume if we drop you off in Fargo or Miami or Hilo or Anchorage, you will know right off that you are in America. But how do you know that and what does it mean? Those are the questions we shall address here, what it is that makes this place we call America in all its diverse parts all the same and yet so very different from every other place and why any of this matters. One other thing we could do, but perhaps another time, is to look at how America has changed with time, which, incidentally, is not history, but something called historical geography, the study of the many different places that have occupied the same location over time. Then the test is more severe. We drop you there and not only ask where you are but when ... and perhaps what is growing in that field over there or what that tree might be and how ir all might matter in the course of human events.
3 For an expanded and far more scholarly discussion of the nature of geography I recommend the authoritative treatise, The Nature of Geography, by Richard Hartshorne, not exactly a quick read but quite solid stuff. For those who will take Professor Hartshorne at his word, as I vouch you can, a shorter route is the abbreviated version of this same work entitled Perspective on the Nature of Geography. While the original is dated 1939, and while we have found more tools and some other things to study, I believe there have been few important changes to the nature of geography since that seminal work was written.
Yes, human events, because geography, as with most other intellectual pursuits, has a strong human bias. If it does not matter much to humans, we geographers seldom pay much attention to it. That is why we have so little interest in the moon or the bottom of the sea. Until we get more people there, we just dont care. Nor is any place just what it seems to be. A growing part of geography is the study of how the same place at the same time is different to different people. We puzzle over why people live on dangerous floodplains, in the path of hurricanes and avalanches, as if these recurrent certainties never happen. We puzzle about why people move to places that will surely bring them ruin or death. We wonder what they see and why they do not see things that seem obvious to others. We study how wars are won and lost because one or the other side fails to understand the country in which it is waged. Indeed, understanding the country is such an important part of warfare and conquest that geography is sometimes called the handmaiden of empire. When I was a professor, as I was for a number of years, I studied and assisted others in their studies of places. You understand, of course, that professors dont teach; we are not teachers, most of us being neither trained nor otherwise qualified to do that much more demanding thing. Our task is far more modest. We just study things and try to help others study. In the course of that work, often to the consternation of my more conventional colleagues, I have tried to impress upon my apprentice scholars that places, like people, may well have a soul, that you can feel these places, and if you dont feel them, then you are missing something very important. One is obliged to feel what one can not see, all the things that went before, the blood and tears that have salted the earth, the flesh and bones buried there and so returned to it, the raucous shouts and laughter and screams reverberating forever in the winds that howl through mountain gorges and across the never empty plains, speaking for the spirits of those who live there now only
in shadows or dancing in the moonlight when we the living have retired each into our own darkness. We learn of such things not so much from books but from people good enough to tell us of their sacred places and what those places mean to them, how seemingly empty lands swarm with all that has gone before, how nothing ever leaves. I have faced this direction or that, but generally east, closed my eyes and listened to see and hear these other things. I have listened to the noises of our streets, the roar of factories and rails and highways and oceans in storm, the screeching howl of blizzards and sand storms and people; I listen with all the world to the soft/savage wail and beat and jive that is the music our people make from melding such cacophany with our collective recollections. From such things we are given some small access to the mysteries of this land. I have been blessed by eagle feathers and pollen and the like and shivered as their awesome power flowed through me. I have listened carefully to those who could neither read nor write and yet carried with them great knowledge of so many things about this land. I have been blessed too from passing near the wisdom of great scholars who have shown me other ways to see this country and to understand, and I have seen and felt and shivered at their power as well. We must think of all these things because places, like people and stars and grains of sand, are never easy to understand, and when you think you understand them, then you have surely wrong. Places are not only elusive, they have an organic quality. They live and breathe and age and sweat and smell, have lusty intercourse and give painful birth to new places. Most of thisremains a great mystery. And so while I have no larger understanding of this place to share with you, I can suggest a path or maze of paths towards a better grasp of it or perhaps just some curious things for us to debate. For that is also our purpose here, to question the conventional wisdom, to expose the irony of its attendant arrogance and to put to you the proposition that
this place we call America is far grander yet than any could possibly imagine and far more lively, a tempestuous thing that writhes with overwhelming passions, challenges us to reach out to it and, while denying us more than a small taste of its infinite complexity, yet lures us on, always seeking our greater understanding. For reasons that elude me, we Americans have been stripped of our true heritage, given pap in its place. This is far different place coming from a far different past than we have been told. But to find it, to approach that reality, we must reach beyond the stuff we are too often fed, things some call facts but are anything else but. Now, having admitted that I sometimes pose as an objective scholar, I make no pretense here to an objective view nor offer much that I know with any great certainty. Instead, I offer you my own very personal views of this place we call America. That is my offer, no erudite analyses, but instead a few things I have noticed and puzzled about as I have wandered back and forth across this land. Therefore, I shall not do that slippery thing of making a point and then supporting it with selected facts, the way we have all been taught to make our arguments, both as children and then again as scholars. Instead, permit me to be more honest, to put my propositions to you stark naked, without much cloaking of figures, authoritative pronouncements and those so-called facts. That way you can make of them what you will, test them if you like, discard or rejigger them to suit yourself. Or just worry about them, as perhaps some of what I have to say may move you to do. Although science does not deal much with truth, that being the realm of religion, surely it is from such worry that we eventually find whatever truth there may be. This will be, of course, but one short journey and one narrow view of this place we call America, a view some may find strange, perhaps troubling. Indeed, it is flawed mightily by the narrow constraints of my own journeys, by all the things I have not seen, all the things I can not see because of the limits of my
vision and the biases arising from my own small place in all of it. Still, I would be honored if you might join me. This much I can promise: we shall go places and see things few could ever imagine.
PART ONE: THE BLOOD OF AMERICA
THE GREAT UNKNOWN The path to understanding, the only path I know, is to be ever ready, even eager, to discard what we think we know. I have enjoyed the company of many fine scholars, and that is the way the best of them are, always ready to rethink whatever they once held to be true. Indeed, those who take us the farthest and fastest seek out and rejoice in the wonderful discovery that what we thought we knew is wrong, that we must rearrange it all. That is the real essence and beauty of science, not its tedious and tiresome and ever changing body of facts but the continuous reworking of what and how we think. Science is a shifty business, one best practiced by the agile, for it torments and breaks more rigid minds. Despite our many pretenses, both those of us who seriously study this place and those who come by knowledge in some more ethereal manner, what we know of America is both slim and treacherous. America, like every other place, is an eternal puzzle that mostly eludes us and will continue to do so. Therein lies both the wonder and the real point of it. For when you understand
something, be it a turnip, a nation or a lover, or think you do, then you not only deceive yourself but you destroy the objects larger beauty, its mystery. Scientific understanding is not a goal to reach but a process, an endless process that leads us to ever deeper grasp but never to an end. It can also sometimes lead us down strange paths, into dark tubes we should never have entered. Many years ago I studied the rocks of Appalachia at the feet of some of the most respected geologists of that day. While they appeared to understand nearly everything about rocks, one thing troubled me. We were shown how Paleozoic sediments near the core of the Appalachian Mountains had flowed in with waters from the east and for some strange reason were nearly identical to rocks in Europe, where they had all been given names. The fact of there being a considerable ocean between and no land eastward from which these sediments could have come was, to me at least, both puzzling and annoying. When I asked, I received no answer of any comfort. As I recall, those renowned scientists muttered something about maybe a lost archipelago, squirmed a bit and changed the subject. On the other hand, my faculty advisor and mentor, a wise and renowned geophysicist named Benjamin Howell, suggested that things might be moving around, that the continental crust of the earth was adrift. Although Professor Howell was highly regarded by his peers in geophysics, the geologists, who knew so well the Appalachian sediments but could not speak meaningfully to their screaming paradoxes, insisted he was crazy. Of course, Professor Howell was onto something, something known as plate tectonics, the idea that the crust of the earth moves. When those Appalachian Paleozoic sediments were being deposited, a couple hundred million years ago, there was no ocean between Europe and America. We were one landmass. The Atlantic Ocean and North America as we now know them came later.
As I wander here and there, talking with people about the way they see places and things, I find these same sorts of contradictions about another thing that lies at the root of what this place we call America really is: its Native people. As few as they may now be and as inconspicuous as they too often are, these very special Americans are a most important part of what this nation was and is, yesterday, today and forever. To begin to grasp this place and the complex people we now call Americans, we surely must start with these first Americans. We do this not to be polite nor even because they seem to have gotten here first, nor because they are much better or worse or more gifted than the rest of us, but rather we should start there because it is they who have that particular grace no immigrant or child or grandchild or great, ever so great grandchild of an immigrant can have not until these newcomers cease to think of themselves as being from and of some other place to become instead an inseparable part of this place we call America. For many of these displaced people of America their time is coming, but not quite yet, the day when their roots are here and no place else. This is no romantic notion. It is a geographic imperative. By definition a Native (generically, native) person is an integral part of the place for which they are native. Like a rabbit and its hide and entrails, they can not be neatly separated, at least not in any way that permits either to remain alive as the singular thing it has been. I submit that the real significance of this place we call America can not be grasped without first examining that human part of it that can not be detached, its Native people. Here we must begin if we are to understand anything at all about how this is a different place from any other and how those differences arose. I work for Dene4 clients in Alaska and Apache5 clients in Arizona, and we
4 The Dene are a widely ranging people often called Athabaskan or Athapaskan, or Gwichin or Gwitchin or Kutchin, or Navajo and many other things but who share a common language (also called Dene) suggesting that they are all of some common place and that they probably lived there together as one people not so long ago. 5 Apache is the name given by Europeans to a once assertive people who speak a peculiar kind
sometimes get together to talk about how best to make a living, about casinos and corporate mergers and oil field service companies and the like. While the respective homelands of these two kinds of Americans are some four thousand miles apart, they find when they meet that they have remarkably similar language, far too similar to have been long separated. When they discover this and other kindred indicators, they treat one another as the long lost cousins they may well be -- which reminds me of that ocean opening up between North America and Europe. Except, in this case, we remain far from any comfortable explanation. As it would surely be a mistake to assume that because their languages are similar, the French and Brazilians are a recently divided tribe, so too would it be stretching things to assume that the Apaches and the Dene share much more than similar words and perhaps a little DNA, which, like the French and Brazilians, they may both have taken from somebody else, indeed, from many others. In like manner, we are far from any good answer to why my former boss, Dr. Motoi Kumai, a Japanese cloud physicist from Hokkaido University, was so taken with the Greenlanders6 we encountered when we studied clouds over that fair island. They are very much like my own people! he proclaimed. And they are both surely like my Inupiat7 clients on the Arctic Coast of Alaska, and yet not
of Dene they call Indeh (also what they call themselves) and who pretty much had their way throughout much of what is now the American Southwest and northern Mexico. After a century or so of nasty war with the Spanish and Mexicans and then some close encounters with the new English speaking Americans, all but a very few Apaches decided to join these new Americans, whom they recognized to be quite decent warriors. Then, run down, outgunned and overwhelmed by the fierce combination of their own tribesmen allied with these new forces, the handful of remaining holdouts, with their warrior priest Geronimo, finally tossed down their cards in Mexico and were sent to a disease ridden prison in Florida. To the dismay and consternation of their white commanders, the Apaches who brought about Geronimos defeat were then also sent to prison or else committed to a dreadful concentration camp called San Carlos, where I met their children. 6 Greenlander is a word used by and for the native people of Greenland, actually explorers and settlers who came from the west, around the time the Vikings came from the other direction. 7 Inupiat is the name people of the Arctic Coast of Alaska call themselves. They are related both closely and not so closely to the several groups calling themselves Inuit in Canada, other coastal people of western Alaska, and especially to the Greenlanders, who appear to be Inupiat who
nearly so much like many Native Canadians whose homelands lie between them. Surely somebody has been moving about, both long ago and not so long ago, which should come as no surprise. People do that. And they borrow and leave things as they go. I have no idea why the Japanese and the Inuit have roughly the same reaction to one another that we see between the various Dene peoples. It does strike me curious, however, that the Inuit appear to have entered North America at about the same time the Japanese islands were invaded by the people we now call Japanese, who thereby displaced those Caucasian-like people, the Ainu, who somehow got there before them. When I lived and worked in Canada, largely with Native Canadians on the matter of who owned their ancestral homelands, I was often told of the many virtues of the Haida of coastal British Columbia, whom other Native people view with huge respect and admiration. They are such beautiful people, one hears, and indeed, they are, as are their closely related tribes northward into Southeastern Alaska, and yet quite different from people still farther northward and eastward and westward. I have no idea why that is. But it surely does seem that way. And so I was taken by the proposition once posed to me on Oahu by a Maori scholar from New Zealand, who felt that these were his people, that in some distant past they had missed Hawaii, or moved on to the next down-wind land fall, which just happens to be Southeastern Alaska and the coast of British Columbia. There is just something about them The one thing I do know is this: it is no big deal to reach North America, neither now nor ever, and people can do it from almost anyplace. Some years ago on the American side of the Bering Sea I met a young Chupik8 woman from Siberia. With several others she had just motored over, in
more recently explored eastward. 8 The Chupik are an Asian/North American sea-dwelling people who live on and enjoy both
a small boat, to visit her relatives in Alaska. And nobody noticednot even the Soviets, who frowned then on such trips as hersjust as nobody pays much attention to the Greenlanders who, by dog sled and now by snow machine, come across Canada to Alaska every so often to visit their relatives. It is no big deal. They dont sit and wait for some land bridge to emerge and they seldom bother to check with distant emigration and customs services. They just pack their gear, jump on their sleds and go out to re-survey and enjoy their homelands and visit with their people. In this northland, there are no real lines of other nations to be seen and surely no border guards. In fact, the Arctic Ocean is the homeland of the Inupiat and their easterly relatives, just as the Bering Sea is the homeland of the Chupik and the Pacific Ocean the homeland of the Polynesians. For these and many other people water, whether solid or liquid, is hardly a barrier but instead a reliable food supply and means by which to travel, and to travel vast distances indeed. What I am suggesting here is that much, if not most, of what we know about Native Americans is ethnocentric nonsense derived, in large part, from the two silly notions that Europeans are an especially gifted kind of human being and that everything we can ever know of the distant past must be dug out of the ground. While shovels and spatulas and bones and pot shards can be useful, we have many other tools, not the least of which is to consider the geographic possibilities. We can ask people where they might have come from, look at the way they speak, their manners and features and the way they live. We can check their blood and their teeth and their fears. People new to a land see and fear things differently from people who have come to know their land better and perhaps feel safer in it. If we would pay more attention to the obvious, show a little more respect for the living and what they can tell us, we would surely be
coasts of the Bering Sea and the islands within it. They are closely related (but dont mention it to either of them) to the Yupik people of western Alaska and perhaps also to the Aleuts and to the Eyak people of Prince William Sound.
wiser for it. Indeed, some would suggest that instead of digging them up, we might do well to listen to the dead. One intensely bad misconstruction is most of the conventional knowledge about what these people were at the on-set of the massive European invasion. What they were, more than likely, was decimated, or so it is beginning to appear. What we know is minuscule, but we know enough now to be sure that what we thought we knew, the stuff that fills our books, is dramatically wrong. I once worked for an Alaska Native village corporation, Toghettele, which means upside down boat, after a nearby hill that looks like that. One of the things we tried to do was to figure out something of the origins of these Dene people, so their kids might have a better idea who they are and where they might have came from, something besides the filthy rubbish our books tell them about themselves. Of course, as some of them think, as they are told by Rauk, the raven, who claims to have had some hand in it, they may not have come from any place else, but just started mankind right there, where the Nenana flows into the Tanana and then the Tanana into the Yukon. Except for spring breakup and June mosquitoes, it is not such a bad place to start things. In the journals of the first Euro-American expeditions to enter this area we found a curious thing repeated from village to village throughout the Interior. But first lets go back some decades before that, to the advent of the Cossacks, the Russian goons who first devastated Alaska or tried. First out the chute here, as they had done all across Europe and Asia, these pale and barbarous people wiped out and/or enslaved the gracious and unsuspecting Aleuts, and then they went after everyone else. They started north along the Bering Sea Coast, beating up anyone and everyone they encountered. Then they were stopped. Once the Chupik, Yupik and the Inupiat figured out what a nasty bunch these Cossacks were, they nailed them every time they came ashore, and the surviving Cossacks retreated.
The same thing happened along Alaskas south coast. The Cossacks went up the rivers, slaughtered anybody they could catch, and the next time they tried to get up those same rivers, they did not return. The Dene had nailed them. And so the remaining Russians headed for California. But as they crossed that broad and treacherous stretch of stormy water, rock and ice, the Gulf of Alaska, the only place there was refuge and fresh water just happened to be the homeland of some of the fiercest people on earth, the Yakutat Tlingits, most of whom are not Tlingits at all but something else and from someplace else, people who moved into the Tlingit empire and then adapted to it. While I would not swear to it, I do treat with some respect the claim of these proud people that it was they who broke the back of the Russian invaders and thus forced the sale of whatever equity Russia may have had in North America to this upstart thing we call America. When I last worked for them, these "Tlingits," like the Apaches and all the rest, seem quite happy to be with us, glad they had busted those Cossacks, as they claim to have done and joined this crazy thing we call America. Thus, the question came to us as we read the logs of these first few lightly armed United States Army scouts to go up these same Interior rivers why they were not likewise slaughtered. They looked like Cossacks; even today throughout Alaska, people who look like them (and me) are called Gussick or something similar because the name Cossack came to mean white man or something worse. And yet our white guys met no real opposition. Then, as we noted the odd descriptions of the villages these new invaders encountered, slowly we were struck with a sense of horror. Most of the people they met were either children or the very old. And they were weak and destitute, hardly a match for Cossacks or anybody else. Trying to figure this out, the U.S. soldiers asked and seemed to have been told that the others had gone away, perhaps fishing or hunting it was presumed.
The others were away all right, dead in all probability. What these first recorders of Interior Native Alaskans probably saw was what most Europeans saw when they first encountered Native Americans nearly everywhere, the survivors of the diseases recently carried to them, diseases that often preceded the Europeans themselves. The Dene did not fight the U.S. Army scouts because there was nobody left to fight. Or so it would appear. As you can perhaps tell, this is not really my line of work, and so I wandered off to do other things, to study glaciers and caribou and plan monstrous pipelines. But then some years later, at a conference in Tucson, I ran into people who were finding the same thing all over the continent that we thought we had seen in Interior Alaska. It may (or may not) have worked like this. The invading Europeans made contact here and there with the locals, who started immediately to suffer and die, among other things from the introduced European diseases. Then some who were able made a run for it, going in every direction, to escape these sundry horrors. But they took the diseases with them, spreading them like wildfire, well ahead of the major European invasions. By the time the Europeans themselves arrived, they found and reported not a coherent Native society but the results of a holocaust, a population reduced by an order of magnitude, literally decimated. It appears now there may have been ten times more Native people in North America than we previously thought. And, because of the devastation wrought on them before any who could write it down even had a look, we have almost no idea how they lived nor what they once were. What was reported everywhere, the stuff we still find in books, was the chaos and crude recovery from this massive holocaust. It was as if Martians had come to Europe at the end of the Black Plague, described it as it appeared, and, with no record of anything before, then set up a Martian society to replace it all. Ignoring the utterly preposterous notion that people sat patiently in Asia waiting for a Bering Sea land bridge to appear so they could cross water anyone
can walk across in the winter or paddle across in the summer, as a young Frenchman several years ago wind-surfed across it,9 we have no idea who these people were, where they came from nor how or when they arrived. In all probability they came many times from many places by many routes. In any event, they are surely very complex people of very complex origins, which seems to me a far better thing to know than something neat and clean and silly. And now they are something far different yet. They are Americans, of the newer sort, as well as the old. When I took on the job of Tribal Planner for the San Carlos Apache Nation several years ago, it was explained to me that when they and other warrior people decided to join the ranks of the invading Euro-Americans, they did so on their own terms, to be warriors under the flag of the President -- not the American flag, but the Presidents Flag -- because that was the deal, to join the ranks of soldiers marching under that command. It was not a deal with the Congress, whom they neither understood nor trusted, but with the President. And it remains to this day the President, our great leader as they saw it, and not that shifty bunch in the Congress, to whom they turn when they feel cheated. And so young Apaches still go off to war, mostly joining the Marines or the Airborne or the like, someplace where they can touch the enemy, to keep up their end of it and to be what they see themselves to be, some of the finest warriors ever to take the field, and to do that in what they saw then and still see and respect as the worlds finest fighting machine. The biggest celebration on any Apache reservation is Veterans Day, the day they honor their warriors, past, present, future and eternal. I visited the San Carlos Apache Nation just last week as I write this and wound up driving the float
9 It seems curious that Europeans have never required a land bridge to explain the human occupance of the British Isles. Other animals required the North Sea land bridge, but I have never heard of it being needed for people. The English Channel and surely the North Sea being far more formidable than the Bering Sea, one would therefore have to assume the British, or the Nordic and Germanic and Gaelic and Iberian tribes that came to be British, were somehow superior to Asians? I suspect not.
for the soccer team through a myriad of warriors lined up to honor their place in this new scheme of things. At the Chairmans dinner for veterans, a tiny Apache woman in a United States Army uniform with airborne and specialist-four patches on her sleeves stood to attention and sang The Star Spangled Banner in Apache. And I thought to myself, small as she may be, this is one warrior I would not want to face on a field of battle. You see, Apaches fully respect their women, who have always stood as warriors with their men. As do the Hopi, who gave us the beauty and the life of Lori Piestewa, a 23 year old warrior and mother of two, who stood in Iraq and died in that wretched place for her country. I was in Albuquerque some years ago, attending a huge powwow. In the evening, the drums began to beat and the chanting grew. Because not everyone could understand those Pawnee chants, somebody explained it all in English. It was the war dance, which you could pretty much tell by the way it made the hair rise on the back of your neck. Suddenly the doors of the huge conference room flew open and in marched two short, ancient veterans, each as tall as they could stretch, in their WW II Army uniforms, their sleeves covered with stripes, their chests heavy with medals. I dont know what the second flag was, but the first, the main flag, the one on the right, was their flag, the banner they march under, the deal flag, the flag of Betsy Ross and Francis Scott Key, the flag of the buffalo soldiers, the Mount Surabachi flag, the Stars and Stripes of the United States of America, the flag these mighty warriors of this mighty republic call the Presidents Flag. Behind these two veteran soldiers danced out the fiercest human being I hope I shall ever see, a Comanche warrior in full battle regalia with that dreadful black and white war paint. And behind him danced out warriors from every American nation that has ever made the deal, or just lost and then decided to join the rest. And then the rest of us, American veterans of every color, from every war, were invited to join.
As much as I hate war that was one of the greatest honors ever bestowed on me, to be invited to join the war dance with such warriors as these, warriors of such a nation as this. And so I did. I also had the honor once to meet another great American warrior, this one white. At first I could not figure out just what he was, as he stepped from an Army helicopter into the crisp twenty below zero air at Fort Wainwright, near Fairbanks, wearing most of a U.S. Army Colonels uniform but under a hair seal parka, his boots Yupik kamiks, what Cheechakos call mukluks, with wolfhead mitts dangling from their cords. But from the manner he was treated I could see that he was someone very special. It was Muktuk Marston. When the Japanese invaded America, as they did, as few remember, for it was just Alaska, the Alaska command assigned this one lone soldier to drive a dog team down the Yukon River to enlist Native Alaskans in the defense of their country. He did, they did, and that was the beginning of the Eskimo Scouts, Americas first line of defense against any invasion ever since of that long American frontier with Asia, arguably the most formidable fighting force ever to stand in defense of any northern region of this earth. They too march under the Presidents Flag, except they dont march much. They move silently and strike with no warning from out of the cold and the dark that comforts and cloaks them. Years later, when I served as Planning Director for Calista Corporation, the Alaska Native regional corporation of the Yupik people, I asked this now U.S. Army Reserve units new commander, General John Schaeffer, an Inupiat corporate executive and old friend, to help us with some problems our Yupik communities were having trying to make money from reindeer herding. Johns Northwest Alaska Native Association had the most experience with reindeer, and he generously offered us his advice.
We talked some about reindeer, but I soon noted my female colleagues were entranced but not really hearing what John was saying. That tall, graying, entirely handsome rascal had worn his casual uniform, stars and all, and he was, indeed, a sight to behold, a man entirely equal to the huge responsibilities he held and the grand traditions from which he arose. I submit to you this proposition. Not only do Native Americans come from a warrior past and not only has this past set an indelible base for us, many if not most of those others who came here also have warrior roots. That is not to say that we are war-like. By and large we are not. Like other warrior people, we have all manner of social constraints to protect those around us from the deadly forces deep within us. While most of the time this hard edge of America lies buried, still when pressed to it, as so many have discovered to their dismay and grave loss, warriors we are, and it has been that way in this land for a very long time indeed. Although they are surely a complex, delightful and curious lot, this much all Native Americans have in common. They have been here in what we now call America so long that nothing else matters, and so they are truly and deeply American. They are of this place, each part to which respectively they firmly attach, so firmly that these places become a primary aspect of what they are, as individuals and as a people. Moreover and even more important to the point of this discourse, they are a primary aspect of what this place and all the rest of us who now share it with them have become. This quality, that they are of a place and the place is what they are, these very special Americans, these First Nations of America, share with many people throughout the world, for many people are native people. That is not strange or exotic. What is strange and exotic are those other Americans who are mostly from some other place, whose roots here remain quite shallow. America, like Australia and Argentina and Canada, is a place largely occupied by recent immigrants who still think of themselves as coming from and being of someplace
else. How many of us, when asked about our roots, say they are here, in America, and not in some distant, nearly unknown place? Some time ago I spoke with a graduate student from Austria who had come to America to write a thesis on the Hopi. He was having a terrible time of it. He had arrived from Europe with their usual quaint notions about Native Americans. When he got up on the Mesas, all of his romantic visions and most of his thesis vaporized. Nobody was being the kind of Indian he had expected to find. So I asked him about his own origins. He told me of the small Austrian town where he had grown up and how things worked there. Then I asked him where his people had come from, you know, who they really were. He didnt understand the question, which, of course, was my point. He and his people, as far as anyone could remember or imagine, probably back to the Cro-Magnon and perhaps before, were of that place. It was his native place and he was a Native just like the Hopi. And so I suggested he use that commonality to figure out and explain what he was seeing. I lost touch with him after that, but I was told he set aside the garbage his European mentors had put in his head, got very close to these other Native people, and with this new perspective did a proper job of it.
THE REST OF US There is this paradox about Americans, that we often look to our so-called roots, try to figure out who we are by referencing the alien places from which our ancestors may have come. Yet, most of us resent those forces within us that drive that sad, futile and silly pursuit, a pursuit that tells us almost nothing about who we really are. We seldom find what we are looking for. What we find, most of us, if we are honest, is that we come from outcasts or worse, not worse people but worse by the standards of the rest of the world, where human value too often attaches to status of birth and manifestations of class rather than to individual talent and character. It is an ugly habit, yet one even many Americans have trouble discarding. For myself, I have no clear idea of my origins and even less interest in it. Part of that ignorance comes from being mostly of illiterate stock. Many of my ancestors, including my father, could barely read or write, and they seem to have had poor memories as well or at least they seldom spoke of the past.10 Judging by the color of my skin and eyes and my shape, most, but not all, of my ancestors were Europeans of some sort and probably northern Europeans.
10 When I was a boy I discovered an old burial site on the forested banks of a tidal creek near my home between the Delaware and Chesapeake Bays. It was covered with vegetation; the stone markers were weathered and could barely be read, but I scraped and managed to make out one name, Eleazer David, at the center of what looked to be a small family plot. Since I had an uncle by marriage named Wilson David, I asked Uncle Wilson if he knew who that might have been. He puffed on his pipe, thought on it and then told me that indeed, Eleazer David was his great, great, great, great grandfather. Then he thought a bit and said, again counting on his fingers, He also was your great, great, great, great, great grandfather on your mothers side. When I asked him who they were and where they had come, he said, Oh, I heard they came from someplace over in Maryland, near Sudlersville, a town just a few miles away.
But I am not Europeannot French, not English, not German, not Norman, not Dutch not a bit of any of those many things I have been told lurk in my blood. I am American. I am dramatically different from Europeans and from all the rest of whatever might be in my genes. This is not an easy concept for Europeans to grasp, nor, for that matter, many Americans. Both too often think of Americans as being essentially European. But there is something very wrong with that picture. We dont look right, we dont act right, and others often criticize us because of it. And they are correct, but also very wrong. Focused as they are by their own views and values, they miss the point. Americans are not European at all and should not be seen in that light. We are something else entirely. I mean this not so much in a blood-line sense, but in the sense of sharing European cultural attributes, values and attitudes. Blood lines, people being something because they are of some racial sort is, of course, largely rubbish.11 Not only are we mongrels of mostly unknown origins, so too is everyone. Consider, if you will, the waves of more-or-less Germanic people, having for millennia been Mongolized and Romanized and Norsed and otherwise raped and bastardized, who swept for centuries across what is now the English Midlands, killing, raping, and pretty much replacing each previous wave. If you look hard, perhaps you can glimpse some of those wild and colorful faces peering out of the eyes of those who may now or in the past call themselves English. Or French or Italian or German or whatever. We are all mongrels, coming from God only knows where and by God only knows what route. Not only do we know little of consequence about those Americans who
11 One of the better cases I have against the silly and dangerous notion that your blood ancestry determines much about who you are is a fellow I once l met in the Western Canadian Arctic. He was a typically short and broad Inuit, a respected elder and one of the best traditional drum dancers in the region. His only language was Inuktutuk, the language of his people. But, tanned as he always was, he was still curiously pale, and there was something eerie about his eyes. They were pale blue. Indeed, this Inuit elder carried no Inuit blood. His parents had been German trappers, apparently killed for trespassing. Their baby was then raised by his people, the Inuit, and that is precisely what he was.
were here first, we know little about the rest of us, and, once again, much of what we know, much of what is presumed and written in books, is wrong. While most of us speak a kind of English, it is not any of the several languages spoken by those who call themselves English, and we are surely not English because of it. The language we Americans speak is a kind or several kinds of pidgin English, an abbreviated and aborted and then expanded and mispronounced form of the old European languages, remnants of those much larger and, some would say, richer things the English speak, large parts of which never made it across the Atlantic Ocean. Nor are we much English either in our ancestry or in our ways. The English are a fine and interesting people but very different from usas are the Finns, the Ukrainians, the Nigerians, the Portuguese, the various Chinese and Jews and all the rest of the people of the places from which we may have come. The notion of being English here, that we were mostly English, as we take such meaning from that word today, was wrong from the beginning. Those who did come here from the British Isles were different from those who stayed behind, came mostly from different parts even of that complex place and certainly with different sets of mind and purposes from those with no need to leave. We got mostly the peripheral people, the Welsh, the Scots, the Irish and the like and the poorest of the lot and, of course, the walking dregs from their prisons. Indeed, as to the latter, once they lost us as a dumping ground for their convicted, the Brits had to find other dumping grounds, and so Australia and New Zealand were white settled. There are exceptions, of course, a few Americans here and there with an ancestor or two who came from the core of England, perhaps even pedigreed, like dogs -- although more likely the bastard son -- but most of those who came here, from wherever they came, were marginal people with little claim or pretense to superior birth. That is the way most Americans think, something few others seem to comprehend. Most of us take pride not in fancy origins -- if only
because we dont have it -- but in what we are right now. We dont look much to the past because, for most of us, if we are honest about it, it is not a pretty sight. At best we come from misfits, often running for their lives from savage people, savage times and savage places. And when these misfits got here, as have all the rest, we became something else entirely from whatever we had been in those other places. We were enveloped and changed by this new place and by all those others from here and every other place. Although many try to find it there, the roots of American democracy can not be fully accounted in European terms. We have some European seeds, some Asian seeds, some African seeds, but these alone would hardly do it. This place and the people who were here before, shaken and unsteady as they may have been, had a massive impact on their inbound soonto-be compatriots. There is a strong nomadic quality to American society, the ancient peculiarly North American idea that individuals matter more than social order, notions long lost in the hydraulic civilizations of Europe and Asia12 and yet at the very heart of North American societies for millennia. The way we think is not just European. It is also American and Asian and African. Here ideas collided and married, and vastly new ideas were born. Indeed, if we are mostly anything, it is not English but German. Before the First World War, which put a sharp end to most German people here thinking of themselves as German, this country had more German language newspapers than English. In a sense, the Second World War, if not the First, was a war, at least on the Western Front, between largely Germanic people of the Old World and the New, people with names like Eisenhower and Rommel and Von Sebert
12 These notions are reconsidered thoughtfully by Professor Karl A. Wittfogel in his great treatise on the roots of human tyranny, Oriental Despotism. Although Professor Wittfogel does not draw it out in this manner, his thesis could well be an American anthem, setting in sharp contrast the nomadic nature that found rooting and sustenance here as nowhere else against the depressing civil systems of Europe and Asia, which took sad root in much of the remainder of the Americas.
and Schultz and Gohl, and the cost was largely in German blood. Just check you local phone book, keeping in mind that many of the Smiths there used to be something else. But it is not just the quantum of blood lost that matters. As a Jewish Dutch girl named Anne Frank so nobly stated through the beauty of her life and the horror of her death, what matters is the humanity lost. Recently in a small town on the north shore of Oahu, I came upon a modest WW II war memorial. Among the listed dead there was not a single European name. There were a few Filipino names, a Chinese name or two, but most were Japanese, not of Japan, but of America, all loyal Americans who went quietly into that horrid war and died in some wretched foreign place for their country and their people, which are all who call ourselves American. No, we are not English nor European nor Asian nor African, nor very much like any of them. You see it when you talk with Americans, any and all of us, that we are not the same, and we dont see things the same. Indeed, Canadians are quite different from us, almost a counterpoint to Americans. Republic is virtually a swear word in Canada, smacking of the riot and lynch mobs that drove many loyalists from here to that northern sanctuary of European-style elitism, civility and moderation. Not that it is easy to see. I discovered some parts of it during my several years on the faculty at the University of Toronto, hired there curiously to tell Canadians about themselves and their magnificent country, which they too grasp only marginally. Canada is, however, a fine place from which to see America, and farther along here we shall look at it from that quite respectable vantage. More like us, I would suggest, are Mexicans, who, like Americans, are self-proclaimed mongrels, revolutionaries and republicans and fiercely proud of all of it. Yet they also differ from us, having many peculiarities very much their own. To help understand such things, the ways Mexico and America differ, one
might consider the fundamental differences between the Iroquois and the Aztecs and think carefully on it. It is not just Europe that makes us what we are but what Europeans and all those others encountered here and how they adapted to it. This was not an empty place. Nor was it discovered in 1492. It is when Mexicans or Canadians join us that they change, and change they surely do, as have all the rest, not to become the same but to become what Mexicans or Canadians become when they become Americans, and thereby like all the rest who are now some special flavor of American make us all so much richer. It is not so much where we came from that matters, nor how we got here nor if we have been here for millennia or just a few days. It is what we have become because we are now of this place we call America. This place makes us what we are, not just the water and the air and the soil, but the whole place, the sense of it, the soul of America, if you will, throughout all the different parts of it: Arctic and Pacific and Caribbean America, Spanish America, Great Basin America, Rocky Mountain America, the Great Plains, Middle America, Texas (which, like Alaska and Hawaii, seems a set unto itself), the South, Border America, Appalachian America, Nordic America, Black America, urban America, peninsular Florida, Yankee America, and all the rest of it. Yet, with all of its magnificent diversity I submit to you that America is a singular place with a singular people. It all flows together to become one place and one thing. Moreover, as it has made us, so too have we made it. You can see it when you sit and talk with Americans, in sharp Yankee English, slow Georgian or flat Minnesotan, New Mexican Spanish or Sonoran, Inupiat or Yupic or Indeh, Mandarin, Yiddish or whatever, that we are alike and, in those ways, very unlike all the rest, and should that talk fail you, then talk to those who are not American, not of this place. Surely you will see the difference. And if you dont, then just keep talking and looking. It is there if you listen for it; you can smell it, hear it in the wind, feel its touch, the singular thing that we are,
all that multitude whom we call American. A couple of fellows recently brought this to me. They were Czechs, looking to buy one of my motorcycles so they could travel, all the way to Tierra del Fuego, if they could. While they had traveled broadly, they had never before been in America. Like so many others they were struck by how what they saw was so different from what they had been told and what they had expected. The thing that most struck them was that they had found Americans, at least here in Southern California to be friendly and helpful. And polite. Even in contrast to their last settling, in New Zealand. Here nobody blew their horns at you nor fussed when you had to change lanes or cross a street. Here people stopped, waited patiently and let you do what you had to do, hardly what these Europeans were used to. You could see they were rapidly falling in love with the place. They were definitely not returning to Europe, and I suspect will soon figure some way to join us. In only a few days, they had begun to look and act like Americans. And should they join us, we shall all be better for it. We are a breed unto itself, an ancient breed with deep roots both here and almost every other place on earth, a breed that redefines and refreshes itself with every person who joins us.
BLACK AND WHITE America is a very black place, not black in the disparaging sense we sadly associate with that word but in the sense of having depth and richness, of having arisen from a very dark place. That place, of course, is slavery -- not Africa -but slavery. That is what it means to be black in America -- for most black Americans -- to have arisen from slavery. Just as Europe has little to do with who we are, so too with Africa. Most of us are poorly connected and long gone from both. But we are all too close to the enslavement of our own people. Perhaps nothing distinguishes America from the rest of the world more than our struggle with the aftermath of that slavery. Other nations and other people soon set aside far worse horrors and get on with their lives. Indeed, in most other matters we do the same. But now for well over a century we have not yet fully digested this tragic episode. It lies festering within each of us; its rather obvious solution somehow eluding us. With one great exception, that solution has escaped most Americans, black and white and whatever, some far more than others but few seeing it with any clarity. And beyond these shores hardly anyone sees any part of it. But their ignorance hardly quiets their chatter. I have heard everyone from White South Africans to English to Chinese explain it to me, as if they had some clue, which they demonstrably do not. It is fascinating to see American racism dissected by people with no grasp of any aspect of it. It is fascinating because
while it tells us nothing about ourselves, it does tell us so much about those who would take on such an improbable task. My own sense of the color of America is itself much colored by the now peculiar circumstances of my youth. Being born into a relatively benign but segregated time and place, one sharply divided not so much by color but by the abstract notion of color, I remain today entirely baffled by the way we once lived. It was a place even at the time very difficult to understand, harder to explain, and it gets harder as the years go by, as those who knew it best pass on and as the sense of it becomes more vague even in the minds of those of us with any recollections of it at all. Still, in order to know what we are today I would suggest it is terribly important that we try to understand those shadows of what once was America, a world now gone. Admitting surely that it provides but a weak platform from which to expound on what I would call Black America, I would yet submit that that world, that segregated society into which some of us were born, offered us certain advantages of perspective. Moreover, I would further submit that it has shaped all of us and left America a profound legacy. Our leaders in this matter, the people who rid us of state ordered segregation, were mostly black Americans and mostly from the Confederate South. My memory may fail, but, frankly, I dont recall any white leaders, nor very many of any color from the North. There were a few whites who died in the battle and some who were hurt. But I recall them as lost and marginal, good people perhaps but with no clear idea what they were fighting or how to fight it. I also recall opportunists, people who took one side or another for their own, often selfish purposes. Indeed, the fight against segregation, as have so many other attempts to rid ourselves of various kinds of rot, too often brought out not only the best but also the worst in us. Yet it was not those wretched souls who most disgraced us. Indeed,
many of them played their critical roles. Without them, without their fire hoses and billy clubs and snarling faces and dogs, this horrid thing might have remained invisible and perhaps intractable. They had their sick part to play, and they played it well, right into the hands of those who did destroy it. We are perhaps most disgraced by those who failed to act, who sat at the fringes and pretended there was no real problem, who had neither the guts nor good sense to do what they should have done. And you can count me among them, as well as nearly all the appointed and elected officials of our country. This thing was torn from us, ripped from our arms, not given over by us as it should have been. Whatever vision there was of it was entirely in the minds and hearts of black Americans. No credit for that goes to any of the rest of us. We were blind, not bad nor evil perhaps, but surely blind. And, at best, inert. Being, as I have said, from and of a segregated state, a slave state not freed by the Emancipation Proclamation because we had been reluctant to leave a union we had just put together, waffling to see who might win what we considered a silly war between two varieties of crazy people, and then not having to choose and so being of a place where slavery persisted until the fair State of Delaware itself and not Abraham Lincoln decided to free its slaves, for had he tried it, there and in Maryland, surrounding him as we did, we would surely have swept him and his poorly placed federalists into the Potomacor at least he thought we might and dared not mess with usbeing of such a place, we were spared the horrors of defeat and the even worse horrors of Reconstruction. And so we remained somewhat whole, not driven to the racial hatreds that engulfed not only the former Confederate slave states but paradoxically too many northern cities as well. As a child I worked the sweltering fields with black men and white. After work we would all go swim in the Delaware River, and then we would eat supper (dinner was the noon meal) in the same room but at different tables, joking back and forth, and then all go out and play marbles and mouth organs and tell stories
and listen on a massive battery radio to the news of the War and talk about how we would beat the tar out of Hitler and Tojo if we could only get our hands on them.13 Then, by oil lamp, for electrical power had not yet found us, we went to bed, each in our own part of the old brick plantation house that was our home and under which were cells where bad slaves had once been held in chains. From all of that I learned at least one important thing, something that bothered me and about which I plagued my parents endlessly. It was just this. Clearly the colored, as with no disrespect they were called by all of us, black and white, weremost of themfine, hard-working, intelligent and decent people. So why were they treated differently and why did they act differently towards us? And why did they not go to school with us? In fact, now that I think back on it, where did they go to school? Just as it happened later with those Paleozoic sediments, I received no meaningful answer much beyond this admonition from my dear and saintly grandmother that, Be kind to the colored, young man, for there but by the grace of God, go you. It was not just color that did all this but the sense of color. You could be white and be colored if you wanted. You could cross that great threshold in that direction, if you wanted, and perhaps, if your skin were fair enough and you moved away, in the other direction. Indeed, there were even people with dark skin who were not colored, a few. How that worked I didnt then nor do I now really understand. But you did see it from time to time, perhaps because they were part Lenni Lenape, as were many of the rest of us, or maybe Egyptian, or Nigerian people who had never been slaves, or at least not our slaves. You
13 Yet when a tiny, two-man Japanese submarine was spotted in the Delaware Bay, just beyond our orchard, and blasted to kingdom come, and we watched it all, what we really thought and said was, Those poor, brave, lost little bastards. What a damned shame. Now that I think on it, I suppose their Japanese families never knew what became of them. For nobody else seems to have known, about that one little submarine ... or all those many other ships, our ships mostly, sunk so near to that same shore, and all the horrible things that floated up there.
see, it was never really about color or about Africa. It was about slavery. Of course, many of us whites are black too, from a very dark past, when the British brought over boatloads of white female slaves, from their debtor prisons, to work the fields supervised by male black slaves who may have taken advantage either of their authority or their uncommon good looks. In any event, the Eastern Seaboard of America before about 1700 had a fine mix of rich colors, so much so that the Church of England took upon itself to protect what they considered to be the weak by encouraging the now infamous miscegenation laws. As a result much of our color has faded, and so we are not today, except perhaps in Hawaii and some other parts, a people with the wonderful palette of, say, Cuba, which seems to me a terrible loss and shame. But although some of us may have paled, we kept most of the rest. If you listen to us talk, if you watch what we eat, if you think about how we act, the values we share and the way we live our lives, you will see that so-called white Americans, perhaps especially those of us from the old slave states, are very black indeed. And, you dont need one drop of African blood to have it. Listen to the voice of some lily white southern belle, without the picture, and tell me what color she is. Listen not only to the way she speaks but to the way she thinks. The lady is black. Deep inside, the lady is black. It is now in all of us, a great gift and a massive part of what it is to be American. Nor, as many black Americans sadly discover when they return to Africa, does that gift come with any purity from that unfortunate continent. Like Jazz, Black America is something else, something new, something better, a wondrous American amalgam found nowhere else in the world. Moreover, like their counterparts from other parts of the world, Americans of African origin are not the same as those left behind, in this case those who were not captured and sold into slavery and dragged into a new, brutal and alien place, perhaps even those who did the capturing and the selling. Our people were not the people of power, even in Africa, but, like our fellow Americans, the powerless, the victims
of those who did have power and who, with their obscene profits, stayed behind. The only real gift we have had from Africa is these people, and naked, destitute and chained as they were, a rich gift it was. Which brings me to a most important part of that gift, from one person who got it right, who did have the answer that escaped the rest of us, from a great American, a great Southerner, my dear brother and my leader, The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. It was Dr. King, mostly Dr. King and those who followed his lead, who destroyed the place of my birth. It is gone now, its residualsincluding people like my father, not able to change, to see any light or sense in this very different world lying first in shambles and now simply gone. It is gone because one of our own pointed out to us what should have been obvious: that we are all pretty much the same, we Americans, that to have different schools and all the rest was silly and stupid and mean, and that we need not be any of those things. Now, once it has been said and thought upon, like most great wisdom, it doesnt seem all that profound. And yet it was. Not even my wise old grandmother quite saw it, and she saw many things. I am reminded of a story my mother told me, about the day she watched the first tiny black child enter the segregated white primary school in her small town. There were poor whites milling around, mostly from out of town, people we liked to call trash, trying to be angry, but hushed by the fierce eyes of the assembled matrons. Most of the town had turned out, black and white, to preside, to see that this too would pass in a civilized way, and thirty armed men, not sure what they were supposed to do, and that one tiny black child, holding tightly to her mommas hand, head up, eyes bright, going into her new school and carrying all the rest of us with her into a strange new world. There was deathly silence, all eyes focused on this little creature, and then one white matron was heard to whisper just loud enough for everyone to
hear, There. Is that what it was, what all the fuss was about? And somebody laughed, and then the rest, and then everyone went home. That place is gone now. That town, last time I looked, while still mostly white, had a black mayor, perhaps because he had not yet realized what a rotten job it was and so stepped up to do it. It was destroyed by one of our own, by one of that rarest of breeds, an American leader. Because of who we are and where we come from, we put little stock in leaders. They dont count for much here. We dont often need them and we dont have many, not of any consequence, if only for our wretched habit of shooting them. But in this matter we truly required a leader, and The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. boldly stepped up to that awful task. Some consider Dr. King a leader of blacks, and he may well have been. But that was not the real point of his work. No black Americans, none that I knew then or know now, required his leadership. They knew full well who they were and where they were going. It was the rest of us who needed leadership, to get us out of the mess we were in. And this great American, this proud son of the South, my dearest brother and my leader produced the light that brought us out of a very dark place indeed. Some would say we have still a long way to go, and surely we do. But we have also come a very long way along a path few other people anywhere else could have seen or walked, a path blazed by this mighty visionary who arose from the warm and complex heart of the American South. I consider it a great blessing to have lived through all of that, to have been carried along that path, to have come from that place to here. When I talk with others who came the same way from the same place, both black and white, I am struck by how we see things others often miss. At the root of it may be this: we really do know one another; we each know in our minds and hearts that we share that certain knowledge, a knowledge we cannot escape. The tragedy of
our past has melded us together, they with massive suffering and humiliation and we by our knowledge and complicity in that pain. And we know that the tragic set of mind we once had is now, for us at least, left somewhere behind us. For the rest, those who didnt live apart and yet together above a bloody dungeon, who still carry the guilt and the anger and the hatred and the confusion of times and circumstances beyond their comprehension, I would suggest that they look inside themselves and find that black or white or other color that each of us hides there, the humanity we all share and cherish it. When I look deeply into my own black parts, the harshest thing I feel is rejection. As a child, I reached up, and my small white hand was never rejected. The joy I took then from those black hands and white that comforted me can never be repaid, nor the agony ever relieved from seeing so many black hands reach out to be bitten, spat upon and rejected. That is the nightmare we share now together. It is a nightmare we Americans must put to an end and we shall do it. As Dr. King understood so well, we have the capacity to be a good people, and we shall do this thing because it is in us to do it. We shall reach out our variously colored hands and find the warmth of another. It is in us to do this small thing. That division is not real, and we shall end it. There are fools today who disparage Dr. Kings great work, say nothing much came of it, that we are as bad off as we ever were. They can not have been there. They do not grasp that darkness from which we have come nor the great distance between that place and this. Nor do they see that it is a journey in progress, with the course now well set, the end of which will be the full realization that, for all our splendid diversity, we are the same and we are no longer of some other place than this mighty America which we have all earned and now come to share. Let me be clear that I have not attempted nor am I able to describe for
you much about Black America, a fabulous part of America that lives still curiously entwined with the rest. I once suggested to a conference of professional geographers that Black America lay beyond the grasp of most of us, a great and mysterious land yet to be explored and yet right here in our midst. That work still remains to be done. That place is still out there. We all know it is there. Even the palest of us see the shadows of it. But we have not yet had the geographers, native or otherwise, to explore it, explain it, and bring it to the rest of the world. Perhaps those explorers, when they rise to it, will find it otherwise, but for now I would only suggest that it is not a different place but simply a part of us that we do not yet fully comprehend. I must also add this further disclaimer, that I do not pretend to speak for any other American and certainly not for any Black American. Try as I might, I can not see this place from there, from that mass of wounds, agony and humiliation and its consequent anger. Still, I have visited and I have been treated generously. In these visits I have been given many riches. But I have also seen there too much doubt about all of it, doubt driven into these Americans about just who they are and where they do belong. I have been more fortunate. On these matters I have no doubt. These are my people, and this place we call America is their native land, bought and paid for many times over by people who arrived here not only with nothing in their pockets but not even pockets to have anything in. Their gift came from their swift minds, their starved, torn and bloody bodies and their great humanity. They had nothing else, not even their God-given freedom. In some sense then, these are the greatest among us not only because they have made so much of nothing and given so much to the rest of us but because their very survival here has been an inspiration to all mankind.
HISPANIC AMERICA I have a friend from northern New Mexico, with whom I traveled once into real Mexico. It was a delightful trip, even when she flew through an ALTO sign in San Felipe and then proceeded to abuse the police officers who politely tried to explain to her what ALTO meant. Of course, she know perfectly well what ALTO meant. Spanish was her first language, not Mexican, not American English, but Spanish, because she was descended from the Spanish who have lived forever or nearly so there in the upper Rio Grande Valley. It was her people who crossed the Rio Grande into what would become America before the English settled at Jamestown, who later came out to greet the first American troops, waving their tiny American flags to express their immense relief that they were not to become a part of what to them seemed weird things happening to the south and so became instant and early Americans. Everywhere we stopped, people, even those San Felipe policemen, so enjoyed listening to my friends northern dialect of yet another American language, wondering that a Gringa could be so hot and yet so cool. I am writing this section in a place called Los Gatos, while visiting my son, in a place called California. Last week I was in another California place called
Santa Barbara, visiting my other son who lives in a neighborhood where English is hardly ever heard. You can have Colonel Sanders chicken there, if you want, or a Jack-In-The-Box hamburger, if you can make known to the clerks, whose English is limited, just what it is you do want. Or you can eat in the really good places, where nobody even tries to speak English, and they serve stuff you once had to go across the border or deep into Mexico or Guatemala or farther south to find. We should be reminded by this new Diaspora of the paranoia that once racked the Congress when it came to their attention that nearly everyone living along the Mississippi and for hundreds of miles westward spoke only German. I assume these foreigners also ate strange foreign stuff, like apple pies and sausages and coleslaw and pickled cabbage they called sauerkraut. Except this new California is somehow different. Here most of the place names were Spanish already, and these new Americans like to wave their old flags. Those others who came before were not big on old flags but on their new one, which they immediately took and held to their hearts. They were so happy to be Americans, to be done with the horrors behind them, that they forbade their children to speak anything but English, even when they could not understand what the kids were saying. And few of them, except as warriors, ever went back. This new wave is different. Many of these new Americans leave their homes not to become American but simply to live better. Their old homes are close and many of them go back when they can. These folks come not driven by fear but with eager expectation. Most send much of their American money home. Some will probably gather that money and go home for good someday, to live decently in their homeland, which, for all its faults, still means a great deal to them. Some may expect to do that, may even try to do it, and then find that something has happened to them, that they have become American in spite of themselves and, like Thomas Wolf, have learned that they can not go home or can not stay there.
It is fine with me, either way. I am glad to have them, if only for a little while. I am glad to have them here, singing and dancing, teaching our children, fixing my roof and my dinner for me, helping us make new laws and a better place for us all, and, yes, waving their Mexican flags and proclaiming their pride in La Raza. It is high time we had more Americans, like the Irish, who are not ashamed of where they are from and who they are, who can come here to work and then go back home if they want to do that. I am glad that we Americans speak Spanish, as well as English, as we have long done, since long before there was this place called America. I am glad to have their good songs, good food and their good company to eat it with, people who bring us so many good things and so much of themselves. Like the Germans and the Chinese and the Cubans and all the rest, they bring great joy to us all. Bienvenida, mis otras Norte Americanos, y gracias por todo.
ALL THE OTHERS I began my professorial career in Los Angeles, in Northridge in the San Fernando Valley. At the time we used to make bad jokes about Northridge being populated mostly by retired Arkansas chicken farmers, jokes painfully funny because they were too close to the truth. Not so funny was the sad fact that whoever these pale people were, they did not encourage good restaurants nor even decent food in the grocery stores, places with little good smell or taste or color, where everything was stale or wilted or frozen. Mostly to find decent food, I sent my students out to do ethnic geographies, to locate places where people would not buy poor vegetables or old or frozen fish or even dead chickens and thereby find not only good restaurants but also better green grocers, butchers, fish markets and bakeries. There were lots of them in Los Angeles, but you had to search for them. We found each in their own special parts of the city, all sorts of people, Inupiat, Comanches, people from New Jersey and old Jersey, real English, Maori and other Kiwis, all manner of Gypsies and Jews, Norwegians, and everybody else. And lots of them. When I moved my family from Northridge to Canada, half the neighbors on our block turned out to wish us well as we departed for their homeland. They were not from Arkansas after all, but from
Ontario. I found out there were enough Canadians in Los Angeles then to make it the fourth largest Canadian city, and that counting only the ones who still claimed to be Canadian. There were more Tongans there than in Tonga, as there are now probably more Tongans in Salt Lake City than in Tonga. Indeed, Los Angeles has most of the people of dozens of small countries if you can just find them. Now it is even richer. The other day I drove up Reseda Boulevard through what was once the center of Little Arkansas. There was hardly a business sign in English. The smells were exotic, it looked much better and was surely far more interesting and colorful than that other place I once knew there. The point I am going after here is that the color of America is more than just black and white, its language far more than Spanish and American English. Nor is it any longer various colors on a white canvas, if indeed, it ever was. It is a rare cacophony of voices from every part of the world, continuously replenished as previous generations melt away into the pot, not to become like everyone else but to bring to the mix their own special qualities and to add to the exquisite and exotic flavors of America. Nobody has ever really disappeared into America. They have changed America as they blended into it, giving over to it their own special nature and color and outlook. They have kept to themselves the things that really mattered to them. That is one reason America is so hard for other people to see, far harder to understand, and hard for us as well. We can only see it through all those many tinted lenses, see it from where we each stand and not from any higher position. Unless, of course, you go to Canada, as we shall do soon enough and there look into this nation from that fine vantage point.
THE BOLD BUNCH I had a nasty encounter not long ago with a young woman, a selfproclaimed Marxist from China. She had just discovered and found America and Americans utterly repugnant. We had no class, she announced; we were crude and backward and hardly worth her time, all of which is no doubt true. It was an encounter similar to ones I have had many times with many different kinds of people from many different places. Indeed Charles Dickens found it to be true and was appropriately repelled many years earlier. I think in his case because his expectations were too high. I tried to explain to her, as I have to those others, that we come by our obvious brutishness quite honestly, that we are mostly descendent from the dregs of these other societies, people cast out or whose lives such elegant folks as she had made unbearable. Finally, to prove my point, and hers as well, I made a suggestion that, had she taken it, would have kept her well out of sight of me or any other American, and so protect her from our further offenses to all the things she valued and
represented. You see, being of such crude ancestry myself, I wanted to take the opportunity she offered me to reinforce her keen insight into America. I thought it might help, but it didnt. Indeed, she could not even see how my unkind suggestion could possibly be effected. I expect she is now safely back in China, regulating things, in charge perhaps of orphans or maybe Tibet, assuring that China continues to be the beacon of light to all humanity it has been for so many centuries, the great magnet attracting so many people from all over the world to join in its classless purity. Or was it class they had? The lady seemed confused on that point, although I have to suspect that several thousand years of the tyranny of class did not vaporize with Mao Tse-Tung, the hopefully last Emperor of China, that this young woman was, indeed, a person of class, and thus a poor candidate for Americanization. What I am not confused about is that we are not very classy here. She was dead right on that. Not only do we not have it, but most of us despise it and all its trappings. We are not only crude, but, far worse, especially in the eyes of the enlightened, such as this noble woman, we relish our crudeness, even luxuriate in it. I once had the good fortune to be among graduate students from all across the globe. We had come to the University of Wisconsin at Madison to get professorial certificates, which is to say, Ph.D.s. At least, thats why I was there. I had not come to learn, although perhaps I did, in spite of myself, a bit, here and there. What I really wanted was to get out of there as soon as I could and go back to work. I grew up among people highly suspect of both books and those who read them, who thought that decent people worked, that only bums and fools sat around and read books. I nay still carry some of that onus with me. When I got that degree, following a few minor examinations by the faculty,
I had to face the big test, my Uncle Alfred, a plumber, who had read to me when I was a baby, in German, thinking it might soak in, which it did not. First he wanted to know just how Alexander Von Humboldts discourse on some damned thing fit with in with some later postulate by Professor Ritter, all of which he had read up on in the original 18 Century German. That I didnt know nor much care
th
suited him just fine. Then the questions got really tough. And yet he passed me, mostly because he saw that I was not much taken with my shiny new Ph.D., nor had I, thanks in large part to him, gotten to be some kind of smart ass. At the outset of that graduate program I was thoroughly impressed, if not intimidated, by all the foreign graduate students, people with something I surely did not have. They seemed familiar with everything ever printed and everyone of any consequence. More threatening still, they could talk grandly about all manner of things about which I knew nothing. I wondered how I was ever to compete with them. By their standards I was ignorant as a stump and not nearly as eloquent. But there were others. There was a student from Arizona, whose Okie family didnt make it to California but instead fell by the wayside half way across the Sonoran Desert. His mother managed somehow to keep most of them alive, to raise them there, working daybreak to dark in the cotton fields, the kids tagging along behind her. His English was even worse than mine, his Spanish, the Spanish of the campesinos he grew up with, his manner and style that of the hot, dusty fields of Arizona and the frigid, bloody warfields of Korea from which he had come painfully to manhood. It was all there, writ large on his gnarled hands and weathered face and in the way he struggled to say what was on his brilliant mind. There was another, from the Oregon rain forest, a quiet, understated fellow locked permanently in whose eyes you could see, if you looked hard, the sullen terror from hellish fires he had fought and just barely beaten, and other things, if you looked even harder, of the immense love and hate and fear these
forests engender in those who do the brutal, bloody work of harvesting them. And there were others like us, rough-shod Americans with not enough class all added together to touch the instep of any one of those fancy folks, even others like myself forever trying to wash off our hands the shit and blood and sweat and birth mucus that comes from trying to make some crude living from the lives and deaths and awful suffering of cattle and hogs and sheep and all the rest. There was also an Argentine who had wintered over in the Antarctic. He had come to Wisconsin without much formal education to see if he could somehow put the things he knew of cold and wind together to make a doctoral dissertation. I knew of him, had heard stories about him when I worked in the clouds and under the ice of Greenland. He was well known to those of us who frequent Polar lands as the Mad Argentine, a legend in his time. The Mad Argentine and I met oddly enough in an advanced climatology class presided over by a visiting professor from Germany. He was a Herr Professor Doctor kind of guy, and he was there, in his mind at least, to lead us out of our abysmal ignorance. We were to listen and to learn from him except he got so much of it wrong, about the way things really were in places he had never seen and could not begin to comprehend. The poor fellow was what my folks were always guarding me against, the disease of books, of reading too much and knowing too little. Herr Professor Doctor put a great mass of earth surface solar radiation values on the blackboard and was telling us what they meant when a huge, rough Italian/Spanish/English voice from somewhere in the back of the room suggested that the number in column three, line one, was wrong. HPD stopped, his face reddening, glowered at the source of the voice, and, without looking at the number, said coldly, No. My numbers are correct. Silence, and then the rough voice boomed again, No, sir. The value for
the South Pole is wrong. HPD turned nearly apoplectic and demanded in a high-pitched screech by what authority this impertinent fellow dared to question him. It is my measurement, Sir. I measured it. It was the Mad Argentine. And although he had his work now cut out for him in that particular course, this peasant fellow from the Pampas did get his doctorate, in climatology, as did I, as did the Arizona cotton picker and Oregon logger each in their own specialty. The Oregon logger was the first to use computers to test regional covariance, which led to something called Geographic Information Systems. He wrote the program and then applied it. The Argentine, who first went to Berkeley and then to Canada, explained what we had all failed to understand about the variability of solar radiation at the surface of the earth and what is happening with Polar ice. They now call it global warming. The Arizonan went to Bolivia and, with his Sonoran cotton field Spanish, discovered the reason this part of the world would soon become the major source of coca leaves. He remains today our leading authority on the geography of cocaine and goes to conferences where, so they are not targeted, nobody sees anybody else, where they each go into small private booths and talk into machines. I wrote something about how the Arctic can not be seen through eyes blinded in the humid mid-latitudes, thoroughly intimidating and confusing everyone with such eyes and somehow got away with it. Then later, armed with that curious notion, I helped rearrange the geography of the Canadian North. But it was no cake walk, not to get an American Ph.D., where breeding doesnt count for much. The fancy folks, most of them, failed or stopped short.
You cant talk your way from here to there, and everything that everyone else has ever thought and written about wont help much. That is just the starting point. It is not how well you were born but what you think and how you think and how hard you work that gets it done. Not like in England where northerners and Asians, however smart they may be, cant get decent appointments and have to go to Canada or New Zealand, where you get degrees and everything else not by working or thinking but by being accepted as a person of class. Not like Germany where a friend of mine who was born there and raised here and took his engineering degree from the University of Colorado in three years faced ridicule and rejection when he tried to go home because he didnt speak right anymore, not like a proper German. And so he came home to America where he speaks just fine. He is just one, but it is the loss of so many people like him, that and their penchant for leaders, that condemns Germany, for all its first class people, to be forever a second class place. That, of course, is their business, how they want to be and what values they think important. Frankly, I dont give a damn. The point I want to make is about America and about how others may think of us and how we think of them and ourselves. We confuse them, and it is understandable that we would. We are a very different kind of place with a very different kind of people, arising from very different circumstances. To judge us as they judge themselves is to miss the whole point of it. But that is excusable. What is not excusable is for so many Americans to make that same mistake. And yet some do. Indeed, I have done it myself, when in Mexico exposed there to the brutish behavior of some of my compatriots. In Cuba too, many years ago, when I saw dumped on the streets what our gangsters under the protection of our
guns had done to those good people. Americans abroad are not always a pretty picture. Just as the Japanese are not always a pretty picture hogging the sidewalks of Honolulu or standing laughing on the Arizona Memorial. I have seen my fellow Americans of Japanese descent try to swallow their anger and embarrassment towards the crude behavior of those nationals now so unlike themselves. Just as many black Americans are hurt and puzzled by what they see on the continent from which their ancestors were abducted. Just as I am outraged by the outrageous arrogance, not to mention the recurrent barbarism of the British and the Germans and the French, who are somehow related to people from which I appear to have come. Perhaps we should all stay home and tend our own gardens. It is surely in the American disposition to do that, to get away and stay away from the rest of the world. That was and remains the basic point of America, to get away from all those ugly bastards. But it is becoming ever harder to do. The world is not only coming to us, we are merging, slipping back into what many of us see as the cruel places from which we came. It will be interesting to see if we can manage that. It is not something we do well, at least not something we have ever done well. Yet somehow we have survived. Americans are surely the boldest of all people. We not only have thrown off most of the social constraints the rest of the world needs to survive in those awful harsh places where they must live, we have lost our fear of it, of being cast aside because of little things we might do wrong. To many we seem brash, abrasive and crude. And we are, by their standards, by the way they live and act and react. But therein lies a paradox. You see it in our interaction with the English,
for example, or with those Japanese on Waikiki. As an American I am shocked by their behavior, by what seems to me a lack of reserve and of respect for others. I can hardly bear to watch what seems to me the rat-like behavior in an English House of Commons debate or in Canada in a faculty lounge. For me that clever, underhanded, cute and vicious banter is simply ugly and disgusting. I can hardly bear to watch British films and television for the way people there are shown to treat one another. I puzzle over those Japanese in Hawaii who seem so rude to me and to their American distant relatives. I know many Japanese, and it just doesnt fit. I suspect they too are baffled, by how to behave in a place so different from their own, perhaps told they will be among barbarians and so act accordingly. And, of course, they get it all wrong. I have a number of English friends whom I greatly respect and care deeply about. But we went through a difficult transition, one I doubt they noticed, at least I hope not. The English, when they like you, like you a great deal. While they may seem to us stand-offish towards strangers, most of them are really quite warm, and when they turn, they seem to turn very abruptly indeed. Americans are loud and open up front, but we are reluctant to let our guard down. We are warm on the outside, cooler on the inside. The English, the ones I know, are quite the other way around. When these English folks decided I was O.K., they nearly scared me to death. Suddenly there was nothing between us, and, frankly, I felt quite exposed. It took me a little while to figure it out, to get used to it, to be comfortable being so open to anyone. I now enjoy immensely their warmth and openness, but, for a cool American, it was quite an adjustment. For, at the heart of it, where the blood flows, it is Americans who are cool.
PART TWO: THE SKIN OF AMERICA
SEPARATE NATIONS North and east of America there lurks a huge, silent place called Canada. It is not only a separate nation, it is a very different kind of place altogether from America. While there are differences within Canada as huge as the country itself, it also, like America, has its own very strong national character and coherence. At the root of that character is a negative, and it is a very strong negative. That negative is not to be the United States or any part of it, all of which is backed up by the history between us, as well as a certain stubbornness that has served Canada well for some centuries now. Keep in mind that we were once at war, not just with Canada but with the entire British Empire. Canada though was at the cutting edge of it. And they comported themselves quite well. To our chagrin they beat back our every invasion. They may not be much on offense, but their defense has always been formidable. As was ours. So we called it a draw, with neither side gaining much ground, at least not in the east. They did lose ground in the west though, what is now our entire Pacific Northwest. Plus we stole most of their West Coast and called it Alaska. About which details we can argue until the cows
come home. Indeed, Sewards conspiracy with Tzarist Russia in buying what we did from Russia was to stop the British expansion down the Yukon. But then there were hardly any Canadians as we know them today in those parts. Had there been, they likely would have won. They are a tough breed. But it was not our wars with Canada that feeds their need not to be American. Those were forgiven, largely because they beat us at every turn. It was the American Revolution itself and the aftermath, which included our nasty follow-up of lynching Tory Loyalists. Of the ones who escaped most found their way to what is now called United Unionist Loyalist Canada, roughly the lands between Toronto and Ottawa, in the western part of which I once owned a farm. But the sentiment is much broader than that. There are many parts of Canada, indeed most of Canada, where the words revolution and republic are spit out in quiet disgust. The British crown is perhaps more important to Canada than to any other part of the former British Empire, including England. The reason is simple. The crown stands like a cross before witchery as a bulwark against American intrusion and influence. Living as close as they do to such a noisy and dangerous crowd, it has serves them well. And they use it well, waving it at us at every opportunity. Canadians, by and large, are serious monarchists. We, of course, are not. While we are a rowdy bunch, to a fault, Canadians are orderly, to a fault. They believe in good governance, they will pay any price for it and so they come very close to getting it. Americans, by and large, suspect and dispise government and thus have every reason to do so. As a consequence I can think of no two adjacent places in the world which, at their core, are so fundamentally different. We are the yin and yang of North America. This is hardly a treatise on Canada, but I would like to borrow the place for a bit to help us better see just what this more boisterous nation to their south and west14 really is. Canada gives us a terrific vantage point from which to do
14 We Alaskans, most of us, insist on being a part of this thing we call America. As such we
that. Let me quickly dispense with one common but erroneous notion, that Canada is colorless. Although it is often said, especially in Canada, in my experience there is nothing gray about Canadians. Canada is quite a bloody15 place. Its past is bloody, it is bloody now, and it is likely to remain bloody for years to come. The misperception that it is not bloody may be a product of the Canadian propaganda machine, one of the best in the world. If you will indulge me, I would offer you here this small all too true story of one long night in Edmonton. While it may go a bit to the seamy side, still from what I have seen, and I have seen most of it, Canada most of the time and from end to end to end to end and throughout its vast middle is much like this.
EDMONTON
For reasons I no longer recall, something to do with maps and land, they invited me to their annual half-breed meeting and bash, that year in Edmonton, of the Native Council of Canada. You cant just be an Indian, not here in Canada, even if you are. No, here you have to be official, a government approved Indian, and, if you arent, say, if Mom married a white man, or if you married one, or even stranger things, like if Grandpa went off to war, say, to kill Germans, or wanted a drink and signed papers to let him do that, like real people, then you have no status,
pretty much wrap around Canada westward as well as southward. 15 I am using this word, of course, in the American literal sense, not as the English expletive.
as an Indian, not here in Canada. The government took it away and made you nothing. But you can be white and be an Indian, which is still harder to explain. And so theres this Native Council of Canada, for all the outcasts, cast out not by real Indians, who still call you brother or sister, but by some pale fool in Ottawa. But not to talk of politics. But rather of this rowdy crowd, the non-status Indians, the Metis, the half-breeds, fierce, crafty, frontier riders who, led by the madman, Louis Riel, and that sly fox, Gabriel Dumont, almost took the west out of Canada, into a Metis nation like Mexico but colder. These trappers, traders, buffalo skinners, with their half brothers and sisters nearly routed the Brits, and would, some say, except for the railroad and the Gatling gun and thousands of poor whites wearing little red caps. But not to talk of politics. But of this rowdy crowd, about half of whom somehow wound up in my hotel room sometime after midnight. One went off to kill somebody, who was screwing his sister, and took five more to watch. The rest stayed and fought right there, so we could all watch, and kicked and danced and fiddled and sang their mighty battle anthem,
Squaws Along the Yukon. We drank that vile stuff only a Canadian could call wine, made of that foxy, foxy crap grape they grow along the Niagara, and sell mostly to drunks. I crawled into a corner to die. At least thats where I came to, some time later, in a roomful of empty wine bottles, two cowboy hats, a fiddle, no bow, somebodys boots, the fancy kind, and a young woman wondering where she was, how she got there, and where her clothes might be. My first thought was where her brother might be, but she assured me she had none, and so we went down to have breakfast at the hotel coffee shop. And there they all were, the whole war-like lot of them, ready for another day of quiet deliberations on how to take back Canada. Doc, you know what a Metis is? one sweet yet evil-looking character, knife scars across his face and one of those black Indian hats, flat and round, not rolled, with a painted turkey feather in it, asked as he slapped me on the back. (Turned out to be her brother.) I thought of some things I had more sense than to say, then heard him bellow: The best of both worlds, smart like the white man, tough and cunning like the Indian. Were the finest breed of all!
I drank my coffee, thought on it, noticed, as my head began to clear, the girl was mighty pretty, hell no, not just pretty, with deep, dark eyes that probed your soul, this lady was flat out gorgeous. She thought we needed more sleep, which we got, as I best I can recall, some days later.
If there is a gray countenance to Canada, it has escaped me. What I have seen is a huge, intense and mighty nation sitting quietly atop the mightiest nation of all time. This is truly awesome stuff we are talking about here. That neither lately has roared, not at each other, should never be mistaken for something else. Neither place is tame. Sprawling as it is, committed as Canadians are to being everything but the same, in spite of it all, from one end to the several other ends, even out into its seemingly empty reaches, when you sit down with a Canadian, be it Meti, Inuit, Woodland Cree, United Union Loyalist, black descendent of Underground Railway, Newfoundlander, Quebecois, German Ontarian, American Calgarian, or Trinidadian or Pakistani just off the airplane, they come across to be just what they are, and that is Canadian. What they are not, is American a blessing for all of us. If you will further indulge me, another small story, about an edge of giant nations, an edge that does not always meet the eye.
GORDON16
On the Arctic Ocean Shore, on the Alaska side, near the Yukon
16 This true story was first published in Poetry Halifax Dartmouth, in June 1990. It is slightly revised here. The incident occurred the summer of 1976 on an Alaskan Arctic Gas Pipeline Company reconnaissance flight.
border, there is a place called Gordon, where nobody lives anymore. The place and the people who used to live there got their name and some of their blood from Tom Gordon, a trader from Scotland who decided one day not to go home. The Gordons left some years back, moved both east and west, some to Aklavik, in Canada, and some to Kaktovik, farther west in Alaska. It was near Gordon one day that our helicopter quit and fell down, as those damned things are likely to do. The machine was pretty much destroyed, but somehow none of us was hurt. We figured, however, we would be there awhile. We were way off our flight plan, and its real hard to find things lost in places like Gordon. So we set up camp, began what we thought to be a very long wait. Then, to our great surprise, we heard an outboard motor. There, in the ocean, out beyond the spit was a small boat heading west, probably the first one in five years or more. We made a big fuss, smoke flares and all, and they stopped, came in to see if they could help. It was young Alex Gordon from Aklavik and his cousin going over to visit relatives in Kaktovik, to visit America. I knew Alex, and he knew me, in fact thought me Canadian, remembered me from Inuvik, where I used to do maps, when I lived on a farm outside Toronto. We cached some of the seals, to lighten the boat, and I was elected to ride with them back to Kaktovik, to call in the rescue. I left my gun, the long one (not the big revolver always under my left arm) with Jim Trimble, our Chief Engineer, because there was much sign of bear, the little Barren Ground grizzlies. Had not thought they would be this far down, but the mountains here are close to the sea. And these little bears like to roam. An old one thats sore, or a young one thats curious and dumb, can do a great deal of harm. Then, too, there are always the Polar bears, who will simply hunt you down and eat you. It was a long, wet, cold, miserable ride, through the drifting ice, all the bright summer night and well into the next day. We had to shake the gas cans to mix in the water that gets in the gas somehow and makes the motor quit, slipped the fragile old hull through huge chunks of ice that could easily take us down, deliver us back to the seals, whose raw flesh and fat we borrowed, for awhile, to keep our guts from growling, the raw air from killing us. Mid morning we stopped at Archie Browers fish camp to eat fry bread, raw white fish dipped in fresh seal oil, with coffee. We soaked in the warmth of these friends and their white wall tent, as only Inupiat can be warm in such places as this, would have stayed there forever, be there
now, I suspect, but for those left behind, pressing us on to Kaktovik. At the radar site, the one not on any map, I radioed our late mayday to Prudhoe Bay. The crew was rescued, and then they came to rescue me, but I wouldnt go. I was already home, damned tired, and I was not about to ride in another bloody helicopter.Just leave me; Im fine. When I need to go, Ill just walk. Now the point of all this I have yet to reach; it is not this little incident, this everyday thing in places like this, except sometimes nobody comes, and you dont get home. And nobody really cares. No, the point has to do with this place, and the people: the Canadian Gordons, the American Gordons, all kin, and yet A few weeks later Jim and I went back to Kaktovik, to visit and to repay some debts. Young Alex was overjoyed to see me. He was homesick now, really glad to see what he continued to think a fellow Canadian. He had not planned to go home until winter, on Skidoo. The ice had worn out his boat. I could see that Alaska, his American relatives were wearing on him. And I understood. Sometimes Americans wear on me too, and it doesnt help much just to be one. We talked some, and I think it did some good. It seemed to, as we Canadians, the white and the Inuk, talked about home, about things Canadian. I dont know it was the substance so much as the style, as I put on my Canadian style, that I had so painfully learned and earned, as I began the think that way. It is a strange fabric along that line, between families who are close and yet not very close at all. And what makes it so strange is up here, at this far end of things, there is not even a line, none you can see. You just go east and after awhile you are there, and it is Canada.
A NORTHERN PERSPECTIVE The grist of my profession being focused on how places differ, one of the reasons I took the opportunity in 1969 to live and work in Canada, was to see better each of these places. I took a University of Toronto faculty appointment with the understanding that as an Alaskan I would focus my research and that of my students on the Canadian North. In part too, I went to Canada to learn and to help Canadians learn about Canada. And yes, strangely enough, I was asked by Canadians to do that. But Canada also offers a truly grand vantage point from which to observe and to meditate on what America might be. Indeed, America is one of Canadas grand sights. Not only can you readily see America from there, you can feel it, sense its immensity, some might say its enormity. From the inside America looks and feels quite ordinary, at least to Americans. From Canada it seems much larger and much more imposing. That is not to say that Canadians see America well; by and large they do not. By and large they see and feel the enormity but little else. Mexicans, I think, see us far better, perhaps as well as any other people see us. Mexicans seem to understand us, and perhaps fear us less. We mixed blood revolutionborn republicans of these two estados unidos of North America share critical
values and some history and some tension, like white and black Southerners. We are less mysterious, I think, to Mexicans. Indeed, we are much alike, Mexicans and Americans, and where we differ, we differ in ways that are obvious to each of us and understandable. Canadians, on the other hand, look and sound too much like us, and yet, at the heart of it, we have little but these superficialities in common. And that confuses us both. Even the land looks much the same. Unlike the Mexican border, almost everywhere a sharp contrast, you can cross the Canadian border and, unless you look very closely, you may barely notice the passing. But it is a different kind of place. You just have to look closely. Then there is this. Canada operationally is not unlike much of the rest of the world. With a parliamentary system of government, as do most people, Canadians look to their government to manage things. Such a thought would hardly ever cross the mind of an American. America was born out of deep distrust of government, indeed of all authority. About which more later. During the years I lived in Canada, I often visited my local tractor dealer in the small town nearest our Ontario farm. One Saturday afternoon the boys, as usual, were sitting around the shop telling the sort of droll stories that have long made Canada such a rich source of humorists. To my further amusement in marched Colonel Blimp himself, a pompous fellow with a fancy fake farm down the road. He was fully decked out in tweed knickers, waist coat and hat, posturing as if he had just stepped out of a bad movie. Among other things he reminded us that this was hardly the Raj, where he had served for many years in the Queens own something or other and where people knew how to behave themselves, or else, by Gawd, wed hide em. Then, having captured everyones attention, which seemed the sole purpose of his visit, this odd creature marched out. To my astonishment, the boys, who see humor in almost everything, went on with their stories as if
nothing had happened. For them there was nothing funny about Colonel Blimp. Indeed, these Ontario farm boys held that preposterous ass in considerable regard. He had, after all, served their Empire in the Queens own something or other, and for that he would always have the boys respect and hold Canadian license to look and act as foolish as he pleased. That just such men as this had presided over the senseless slaughter of Canadians and other Empire cannon fodder at Gallipoli and Dieppe and the like, to my astonishment, seemed never to register with Canadians. Instead, they have built dreadful war memorials to celebrate these horrors and the imperialistic blimps responsible for them. I can barely imagine what would have happened had this clown made a similar entry into the gun shop in the town of my youth where the boys all hang out on Saturday afternoons to talk about killing whatever might be in season and often enough things that werent. Indeed, I once nearly caused a riot there myself. Having just left the lobbies of Capitol Hill I walked in, suit and tie, beard and all, and nobody seemed to recognize me. One fierce looking by-stander demanded in the manner by which you tell somebody he is not welcome, So what you want? I said, Nothing in my cool tone and strode by him to take my selfappointed leaning spot at the end of the handgun counter. The boys all perked up, anticipated some blood sport, except for my massive, crew-cut, square-headed brother, behind the counter selling guns, who said nothing, waiting, I suppose,to see what fun might come of it. Mr. Congeniality, the guardian of all things proper, when he caught his breath, demanded once again to know my purposes, his voice now lowered and yet more menacing. I responded with my second, now ominously low Nothing, while looking through him but keeping one eye on the fish club with which I intended to break
his right collar bone should it come to that, as it now seemed increasingly likely to do. One thing was for sure, the son of a bitch was not going to run me out of my brothers gun shop. Following a long silence you could slice and serve, my brother Bill turned to my clench-fisted antagonist and with a big smile said, Bobby Joe, you know my brother, dont you? Your brother? ... Jesus H. Christ, Bill is this Karl? that run off to Alaska? He turned to me, Hell, man, dont you ever do that again! You scared the shit out of me. Then he grabbed me and hugged me, and all the vitriol poured out on the floor and was gone. When I had a heart attack, just a few weeks later, Bobby Joe came to see me, tears in his eyes, told me not to die or else he would break my goddamned neck, and so I didnt. When our father died, at the reception, Bobby Joe, decked out in leather and a red bandanna, rode up on his fat boy Harley, came over and grabbed me and cried some more. He turned out to be one well disguised sweet son of a bitch. Still, you dont ever get close to Americans, not the way the English do, with nothing ever in between. We like to keep some space just in case. And we talk a lot. We talk to cover up our inherent ill ease with people. We talk to stay out of fights, mouth a lot but swing reluctantly. Brawls in America build up gradually, leaving plenty of time for anyone not interested to retreat. I recall one fine American brawl on the outskirts of Hobbs, New Mexico, in a bar I was too young to be in, but there I was and nobody seemed to notice. The fight took the better part of an hour to get going, with lots of mean talk about wetbacks, meaning New Mexicans, and fuckin Texicans, all of whom were as pale as that Llano Estacado sun would allow. By the time it did hit, with fists and beer bottles flying, my buddies and I were sitting up in the rafters, looking down on it, well out of harms way.
It rarely happens that way in Canada. Canadians are serious fighters. A bar fight there is more likely to explode out of deathly silence. I once witnessed an entire movie theatre in Calgary become an instant riot. The only excuse I saw for it was the fellow beside me looking towards the first sound of fists striking flesh, then trying to crawl over me screaming, Two on one! Two on one! He was clearly intent on making it dozens on dozens, as it soon enough became. Being a typically American coward, given more to the joy of talking bad than to serious fighting, I headed for the nearest exit. When you know Americans and Canadians you must suspect the script writers for those John Wayne movies were Canadians or maybe Brits, as most of Hollywood is, and maybe John Wayne himself, who portrays a kind of person I have never seen in all my travels around America. Gary Cooper types I have seen here and there and Henry Fonda sorts, even a few Humphrey Bogarts, but never once a John Wayne. But then I have not spent much time in Boston, where perhaps they breed. Fighting is not all that much fun, and most Americans know it. Most of us hate the real thing and try to avoid it at all cost except maybe in Boston or Duluth ... or some parts of Pittsburgh. But surely not New York City, which competes with Los Angeles in being the friendliest town in the whole world, perhaps because the people in both are mostly from someplace else and want to make new friends.
AMERICA FROM THE EAST How America looks from Canada depends, of course, on where you are standing. From the Yukon, the western portions of Northwest Territories and much of the more empty parts of British Columbia, America is west, and it looks pretty course. Fairbanks and the country you cross getting there from Whitehorse stands in stark contrast to those tidy, well planned and carefully managed little Canadian towns, guarded always by at least one prim and proper RCMP. And so, entering or leaving Alaska along that border, as I have done too many times to count: along the Arctic Coast, up the Yukon, up the Bell River and down the Rat, down the Firth, down the Sixty Mile and the Forty Mile, and over just about every decent pass from Ketchikan to Old Crow; no matter how you go, you should quickly see when you get to Canada that you are someplace else. From top to bottom Canada is orderly, at least on the surface. Fairbanks started out being a row of whore houses on the Chena Slough, and while it has sprawled out some, it retains a good deal of that initial crude glamour. I say this with some license, having lived around Fairbanks a good part of my life, still think of it as home and must claim some small responsibility for it being as good or bad as it is. Indeed, I much prefer it to those tidy towns of the Canadian North, as do some Canadians, especially Native Canadians, many of whom come to
Fairbanks just to feel the openness, to know that what someone says is likely what they mean. On the other hand, I used to go the other way just to find a decent restaurant or to improve my winter soured humour with a few laughs and a new perspective. The problem with those Canadian towns is a certain horror that lurks just below their tidy surfaces. A good way to see something of it, should you be so curious, is to spend Saturday night in the emergency room of the Inuvik hospital near the mouth of the Mackenzie River in the Northwest Territories. By three on Sunday morning, you will probably have seen nearly everything one human being can do to another, or at least enough to do you for a long, long time. Or tag along with the RCMP some dark winter day in Cambridge Bay on Victoria Island. I have done both, and I would never do either again. I havent the stomach for it. I also made the mistake once of joining my inner city Toronto Woodland Cree friends at their AA meeting. Never again. And heard them tell what the Ontario Provincial Police would do to them in the dungeons they still have in the bowels of that fair city. Never again. And met with the Native Council of Canada all over the country and heard what the RCMP did to them. Never again. And in Thunder Bay and North Bay and Frobisher Bay17 and Yellowknife. Never again. When I spoke of these things to my Anglo middle-class Canadian friends, neighbors and colleagues, they were both repulsed and bewildered, as would be any passing American tourist. It is an invisible world to those not drawn into it. The dark side of Canada is well hidden. There was once a maniac running loose in the farming parts of Ontario
17 This Baffin Island town was called Frobisher Bay when I was last there. It is now known by the more appropriate name of Iqaluit, and instead of being in the District of Franklin in Northwest Territories (even though it is directly north of Maine), now a huge place called Nunavut.
where my family and I lived. He had raped, tortured and killed a number of woman he caught alone. I dont know how many. I only know of the ones we knew or heard about directly. The reason we knew so little about it was that none of it was ever reported in the press, nor was a mob shot-gunning on the streets of Oshawa. I saw the blood before they cleaned it up, and, after that it was as if nothing had happened. How do I explain this, this disconnect between what happens on the seamy underside of Canada and what people know? In Canada it is called responsible journalism, which means that the police call up the one or two media moguls and tell them that it would be appreciated if this or that matter were not aired publically, it being in the public interest and therefore responsible journalism to keep it under wraps. In all of this I had an advantage. Being a professor at one of Canadas prestigious universities, I was automatically one of the elite and therefore privy to many things the unwashed were not allowed to know. I was told as much by the immigration officer when I made my formal entry into Canada, that he was glad to have me but that I should be responsible with my new authority, all of which made far more sense to me as I got into my work there. I could talk with the Prime Minister or any of his buddies, and I did, and they actually seemed to listen. I could do pretty much as I pleased, provided I followed the rules. Indeed, I led a very privileged life in Canada. But, being an American, that privilege made me increasingly uncomfortable. On crossing that border, my book learning and fancy credentials instantly made me important. In the California of the Sixties, from which I had come, these same credentials were more a source of suspicion. In California you went to the front of the classroom to be tested, to prove you had something important to say. In Canada you went to the front of a classroom fully anointed. The students memorized everything you said, even if it were rubbish, as if it were written in stone. And the Minister of Indian Affairs and Northern Development
(then quite a nice fellow and at this writing the Prime Minister) called you up to ask what to do about this or that. In California not only did neither President Nixon nor Governor Reagan call me up for advice, they and their cronies worked relentlessly to destroy everything we brainy types were trying to do, like fight raging ignorance and enrich the state. And so Canada was a bit heady for me at first, but that wore off quickly, as I began to see through it. In California I could command real respect, even fear, if it were in me to do that, as I sometimes did. In Canada it didnt seem to matter what I was inside nor what I really knew. What counted was the stuff on the surface, my credentials. In Canada, like Colonel Blimp, you can be a complete fool, and people will still respect that painted surface. Except not quite. There is something else, something it took me longer to see. Canada has this thick downcast side, people who walk the streets with their heads down and their faces sullen. They are bowed, but behind that polite veneer they hate your guts. And they dont know why. They are the ones who rear up suddenly from their dark moods to explode in bars and theatres, and tear up not the autocratic system that imprisons them but each other. I got a quick look at it immediately on landing in Canada. I arrived just in time to come under martial law. Somebody had kidnapped and then killed a Quebec Provincial Minister, Mr. Pierre LaPorte, and so, for reasons only a Canadian would understand, the Prime Minister, Mr. Pierre Trudeau, declared the War Measures Act, which suspended habeas corpus, which meant, more-orless, that throughout Canada anybody with any kind of badge could arrest anybody else any time and do just about anything they wanted to them, all of this in the name of public order, which to me did not seem much threatened. I rushed right over to my Canadian neighbor, as it happened a Major in the Canadian Army, and asked how the hell this could be and what were we to do about it.
He calmly advised me not to worry, that everything was under control, that all of this was aimed at the Frogs and that the rest of us were perfectly safe, as it turned out we were. But the Frogs caught hell. Which may have something to do with the quarrelsome nature of the Quebecois. Still, there is this to consider. Had Mr. Nixon or Mr. Reagan had such power and a people who would take it so lightly, where would we now be? Of course, Canada would never allow such people to hold public office. Indeed, out of this all sorts of things arise, things very much Canadian, many bad, at least seen through my American eye, but some quite good. What is strange about these two places is not Canada. In so many ways, it is like most other places in the world. It has a top to bottom political structure. People elect a government and then the government runs things. And people expect that. It is the business of government in most places to run things. To make that work the people must do as they are told. What is strange is America, where government is run from the bottom up. For many this will be hard to understand, and so we shall return to it from time to time. The autocrats who run Canada are strong, silent and crafty. They are quite good at what they do, part of which is to redirect public anger towards targets where it will do little civic harm, like the United States but not Americans, which might bugger the tourist trade. American who look closely are often astonished to see is that Canada is served by remarkably clever, sometimes even wise politicians. Time after time I have watched bemused as some dumb American president faced off against a cunning Canadian prime minister, got hosed and didnt know for years, if ever, what really happened to him or to this nation. Why this is I am not entirely certain. Surely the Canadians got some of it from their British mentors and their
colonial roots. But they often outdo the British, especially in craft. My suspicion is that growing up next to such a monster, they learned early how to deal with the American republic, and craft was the best tool they had for that job. Environmental protection is a good example. Few nations dump more crap into the air and water, or tear their country up more looking for riches than Canada does, the benefits of which go mostly to their elite. Throughout the world Canadian mining companies are known to be the worst of the worst, not only in terms of the environmental havoc they render, but also the social harm they do. Yet Canadians somehow manage to lay blame on the United States. And we bow and scrape and apologize. If you have trouble with that, as I expect many Canadians and Americans will, then just fly down the Sixty Mile sometime east out of Alaska into the Yukon. You will see the border instantly and one of the most god-awful, poisonous cesspools in North America, pouring asbestos into the Yukon, which then runs through Alaska. Or compare the dreadful Canadian drilling record on the Arctic Coast and Beaufort Sea with Prudhoe Bay in Alaska. Just fly from Prudhoe to Inuvik sometime. That once invisible border is now conspicuous because thats where the real damage starts, on the Canadian side, masked on maps by the typically clever Canadian ploy of calling it a national park. In Canada anything you can keep out of sight is not environmentally significant, and there are lots of places to hide horrors in Canada, especially when nobody goes out to see what lies under those maps. And very few Canadians go out to look. Unlike Alaska, which every American can hardly wait to see, and to extend their personal ownership to, even if they have never been there, Canadians seldom look northward. In Canada there is one agency of government and one minister who oversees both northern development and the protection of the North, both the land and the people, and that agency and minister are accountable only to the prime minister, who is accountable to no one, no one at least outside Lower
Canada, where, of course, no one cares. The result is entirely predictable. It is also something most people of the world would understand immediately. In contrast, the Constitution of the United States separates power, fragments it actually, so that nobody is safe from scrutiny, something almost incomprehensible to most of the world. All of which is not so much wrong as different and very different from the way things are generally portrayed, both here and there. Here in America, because they dont matter much, our civil servants are seldom our brightest lights. Plus it is miserable work. In Canada, in sharp contrast, because they really do matter, the best and the brightest seek out these government jobs and flourish there. It took me awhile to figure that out, roaming as I had to do from this government agency to that and thinking, Whats wrong here? These guys are not stupid the way civil servants are supposed to be, nor cowed, nor asleep, nor mean. They have no need to be. They have real power, massive power by American standards. In Canada it is good work if you can get it. There civil servants are actually in charge of things. The government puts them in charge. But not the people. And so they are not accountable to a mixed bunch of fools, as American civil servants are. As it is in most of the world, Canadian civil servants have the authority and the responsibility to do their job largely as they see best to do it. They are true professionals. They have the credentials and the brains, and they are expected to get on with it, provided, of course that they do it in a responsible manner. Indeed, it is their upper echelons, the mandarins who are unelected and unreachable, that truly run Canada, or at least the machinery of Canada. While we have similar people in American government, we beat them up every day or two and drive the good ones out, to seek honest work. In Canada they have real tenure and real power and very long lives. Only a fool would mess with them.
The Canadian ideal is to isolate government from the people, to let it work in a professional way, out of the reach of the hated mob, and it sometimes works just that way. The problem is when it doesnt, when there is a mess and no way to get to it that and fact that what the public thinks is not really an issue. In Canada the public is served and served pretty well by their government, but as subjects, and not as the masters of that government. And they truly are subjects; they accept that term for themselves, a term that would give most Americans the creeps just as the word republic gives Canadians the creeps. The other way of doing things, the American way, is called a republic, where the government is continuously and meticulously and often capriciously accountable, where, by and large, the people, ignorant as we may be, rule the ship. We have no captain, and if we did, we would make his/her life miserable. That difference comes out of our respective historical memories. Our collective memory is of the tyranny of autocracy. Theirs is of the tyranny of the mob. And the results are just what you would expect. Canadians are a tolerant people, given to following the rules, even if they dont make sense, a people with faith in government and a willingness to suffer the consequences, to go mindlessly, if ordered to do so by some Colonel Blimp, into the machine guns of the Turks and then raise monuments to their heroic dead. It seems to me a stiff price to pay, but Canadians seem to prefer it. Not being Canadian, I proceeded to break all the rules, at least the ones I thought abominable. I tried to hire a brilliant but black-listed professor, fomented revolution where I thought it might be useful, even set about returning the Canadian North to its people, which led to some tiffs, which led to my heading northwest out of Canada, back to Alaska, where I probably belonged. Still, who can not love the place, the people and the land and all? Canadians are tough and bright and fun to be with. They sing good songs
(except for that silly national anthem), talk well, tell good jokes, and enjoy life as they know it. And the land? Well, it is just too damned big and sufficiently frozen even for them to destroy. I would not, however, give a plug nickel for their government and their slavish acceptance of even the most despicable authority. But then I am an American. And we are a very strange breed of cat. Canada, on the other hand, is a good deal like everyplace else, only far better than some. Leaving, however, produced for me this small conundrum.
TWO SONS
I have two sons, one American, the other Canadian. The older boy, the American, conceived, I think, in Alaska, was born in California and we took him to Canada where he grew up thinking, talking like an Canadian. The younger boy, the Canadian, conceived, I think, in the Yukon, was born in Ontario and we took him to Alaska where he grew up thinking, talking like an American. I tried to teach the older boy to remember he was American, just what that meant. We sang The Star Spangled Banner and talked of why our boys were dying in Southeast Asia, about distrust of government. I tried to teach the younger boy to remember he was Canadian, just what that meant. We sang Oh Canada and talked of why our boys had died at Galipoli and Dieppe about trust of government.
But, you know, it left me confused. I am glad, of course, I have the two, one Canadian, one American. I love them both the same, except I sometimes think the ones the other, the other the one.
BREAKING THE RULES Before leaving Canada though, lets take a couple more peeks. It is an exciting place, full of incredible people. Not having learned those rules of living in Canada, of respect for government, I wandered often into places I was not supposed to be. This was one such trip.
IN THE DISTRICT OF FRANKLIN18 I was surprised to find Abe There on Baffin Island. Hes Nunamiut, Mackenzie Inuit; His folks from Alaska, Inland caribou people, Came east in the gun famine and stayed. Sent over by Yellowknife,
18 This poem presented under the pseudonym of Freeman Unger was originally published in Anemone, V. 8, No. 1, in 1991, as was also the subsequent poem, Nelly.
He said, to give people names. Somebody in Ottawa embarrassed They had only numbers, At least in their books. As we got of the plane At Lake Harbour we were met, Each in our own way. Have you ever been met? The Mountie came to check on me, To see I had my Explorers Licence Issued by the High Commissioner In Yellowknife but really Ottawa, To be sure nobody irresponsible Was out roaming the North, Telling things, inciting people, Spreading discord, Confusing everyone About how it is up here. To stop the kind of mess They had in Igloolik Where some fool anthropologist Reported the people had no teeth, Embarrassing Northern Health Service And the Prime Minister. I told him to fuck off In some convoluted way,
Played stupid American, Something for him to puzzle on Who I really might be And being a week early, Ahead of the alert. Before he had it figured, I was gone, down the fjord, Lost in snow and ice, To talk to people out there About where they had been, To make maps of their lives. White to white and Inuit to Inuit. Abe got met by an elder, Who wanted to know his business. When he said it, of course, It made no sense. We have names already. What are you really up to? It was that territorial thing. But they got it straight. Abe got his license to ask Dumb government questions, Give names if he liked, Screw all the ladies in town, Take one home, If he could work it out. But this was for sure
If he had come to hunt, Or to trap, As they all suspected (else why would a Nunamiut be this far East?), then they would kill him. When we got back to Montreal, Abe with his names And me with my maps, (maps, by the way, that would say whose land this really was, that it did not belong to a Queen), we had dinner with Eric Gordeau and plotted revolution. You see, they were right. We had come for the land.
While I was, in fact, only there at the margins, and nowhere near as effective out of my element as were my Canadian colleagues, who understood the country and how to make it work, still, I claim a small part in rearranging the geography of the Canadian North. On paper at least, the District of Franklin, now called Nunavut, belongs to its people and not to the Queen. One of the great heroes of that era, fiercely committed to her people was an Inuit woman I shall call Nellie. This poem reflects a small glimpse I once had of her.
NELLY Nellie was born with a full white skin, Well, pink maybe, and blue eyes, And yellow hair, like her dad, When he was young. Which is far more strange Than it might seem, Despite her Norwegian dad Whom she loved dearly, Who taught her to trap And stay alive On the white side of things. No, Nellie takes after her mom, Well, her moms people anyway. Friend of mine once said, And it seemed silly then, Because we all knew it, But he meant more, More than just a little bit, More than just being A white half-breed, He said, You gotta remember, Nellie is Eskimo. He meant her soul. And something else, That Nellie wore her white skin well, That she could make you forget Just who she really was, When she wanted to fool you, Which she often did. I came to see it, after awhile; I saw it in her eyes, Those cold, blue eyes, That looked like her dads But not when you screwed Up courage To look close.
In them, I swear, I once saw Siberian Mike, who was what? Came from where? Stayed in Siberia a generation Or two maybe. Came out of the west Carrying that blue-eyed gene, Bringing it across Alaska, Leaving it here with Nellie. You do know, dont you, Her dad could not do it alone. And darker faces, too, I saw there, When I screwed up the courage. From tonga, with Yankee whalers? From Portugal, infecting the color The hair of every people By every sea. From where? But skin not like her mom, Who was dark, With curly, black hair. And moms you cant deny, But Nellies skin was white. He was right on that, Shes Eskimo. I watched it happen, In Ottawa, Toronto, Edmonton, And all across the North, Wherever we happened to meet, In everything she said and did. Nellie, you know all the good Weve done, he said, The pompous little man From Indian Affairs. Where would your people be, Without our hospitals, Without our schools? Her wolf-blue eyes did not blink, Nailed him, held him,
And like a skinning knife, Coldly, calmly gutted him, And everybody else. See these scars? she said, pulling her blouse aside, to gasps. Fire did this. I barely lived, And some of us died. Thats the way it was. Thats the way it is, The way we have always been. We died; we just died, And so we fucked To have more kids That some of us could live. And damned you to hell, if we must, well just keep doing it that way. Keep you goddamned hospitals. (I can hear it crackle on her lips, goddamned, like the slap and backcrack of a walrus skin whip) Take your goddamned shanty towns And shove them up your ass. Leave us alone! Get the hell of our land! It was times like this Any fool could see the lady For who she really was, At least, they should. But still, Nellie would play Her special little games, (It was the little girl in her, I think, her Daddys little girl) Jump on the airplane south And there put on her white skin And listen and fool and spy. They almost killed her once,
Figured her out, Mounties perhaps, but more likely their thug. She called me from Ottawa, Somebody had torn her room apart, Looking for the papers, She swore she never had. But she did, of course, And just between you and me, They would have killed her Except for that white skin. They do that sort of thing, But not often to white skins.
Canada, of course, like the United States, is rich with people, all manner of people, but all Canadian. There are no Nellies in the United States, not like this Nellie, not even among her relatives in Barrow, Alaska. Nor in Alaska anyone quite like this man of Victoria Island and his son (originally printed in Toronto Life, November 1992).
THE MAN WITH NEW FEET Life used to be hard, they say, Up on Victoria Island, Except they dont say it was hard; They just say how it was, And that seems hard to me. Mostly folks worked alone, Did for themselves, And when there was a problem, They solved it Or sometimes just died. And so it seemed less a big deal To Johnny than to me,
His cutting off his feet. They froze, as feet can do out there, And then they started to rot, And Johnny saw they had to go; So he cut them both off. Then he built himself another pair, Out of driftwood and stuff he found As he dragged himself around; Then he got up and walked home. Still, he walked kind of funny. You use your toes a lot more Than you might think. To get each new foot into the air Johnny had to swing his hips In an odd sort of way. Otherwise, his new feet Worked just fine. Johnny was still walking that way When I came along some winters later To talk about where he had been, To help him make maps of his life. We talked and talked, Me and Johnny and his boy Who was his pride, a lad about six, Who went everywhere now with his dad. We made maps of his life, Spoke of lots of things, About wolves, About how they used to be different, How the bear tried to ride with him In his canoe one day, Things like that. And when we were done, And they left, walking away, I saw they both walked the same, The boy swinging his hips, Just like his dad.
Of course, most Canadians live in cities, as close to the Equator as they can get. I would be remiss not to mention that even though I have nothing much to say about such places, and I suspect this little incident (also originally Toronto Life, November 1992) will only add to the confusion. WOODLAND CREE Redbird explained this to me One day as we were visiting In his Toronto apartment, Redbird the singer; He understood such stuff. The door opened, and a young man Walked in, nodded to us, Then went directly to the refrigerator Where he helped himself To some meat and a beer. We shot the breeze, Soon as he figured me out, That I was no hostile, And then he was gone. Trapline, Redbird said, Boys running his trapline, Long way to go yet tonight. Woodland Cree, loners, Not like the Iroquois Who live in those large Apartment complexes Over the other side of Bathurst. Iroquois were agriculturalists, Lived together, worked together, And still do. That boy is Woodland Cree, On his trapline, out on the city, Tending his traps. Each night the same,
My refrigerator about 9:30, Then down to Eglington Station To look for tokens dropped At the turnstyles, Then over to Rose Maries Before she and Two Feathers Turn in and then on All across this fair city Down in the ravines, Visits there with raccoons, Gets home around dawn. Now theres some geography for you, Doc, real stuff, urban geography, except it comes from before there was any city here a shadow of the past.
GRINGO Most people, whether Americans or Japanese or Russian or whatever, look better at home. People, when they travel, too often take on a rather ugly hue. That part of America, Americans abroad, is not often a pretty picture. And yet that is what most other people see of America, those few of us who go a broad and then those few seldom on their best behavior. Nowhere is this more true or more ugly than in Mexico. And it is a damned shame. Mexicans, for some reason that escapes me, are wonderfully tolerant of us, but I am humiliated every time I go there to see my compatriots being the boorish people we too often are. I once worked as a jug hustler on a doodle bug crew, in the oil fields on the Llano Estacado of West Texas and New Mexico. That means I laid out and rounded up seismic devices by which we tried to figure out where it might be best to drill for oil and gas. Professor Howell got me the job when, sick at heart over a crazy woman, I flunked out of Penn State in my second year. He promised to take me back if I wanted, but only after I saw what real geophysical work was like. Professor Howell was also a man with some reservations about learning solely from books. And that took me to Mexico for the first time, to visit, as my ancient landlady slyly put it, the Senoritas. I was 19. My partner and I barely got out
alive, running so hard for the border we ran right out from under our newly purchased sombreros. A few weeks later the Commander at Fort Hood gave his men weekend leave, told them to be sure to wear their civvies but take their leather campaign belts and meet him in Villa Acuna. We were not the first to have had trouble in Mexico. Statement made, it being a bit much for the local constabulary to arrest two thousand belt-swinging American soldiers, the jails were emptied, at least of Americans, and there was peace on the border for awhile. I was also run out of Cuba once. On the 31th of December, 1958. Well, not exactly run out but told that, what with Che Guevarra having taken Santa Rosa and now nothing much standing between Fidel Castro and Havana, it might be quieter in Key West. With hind sight I wish I had stayed, but frankly, my spelunking friends and I had had our fill of nasty people threatening us with submachine guns, the caves we had come to see were full of rebels, and we had no idea what Fidel might bring to town with him. And so we left on the last plane before Batista took over the airport to get himself and a few of his people out. I hate to think what else was on that plane. Later my wife and I almost lost our young son in Mexico. As we tried to board a plane to leave Guadalahara for Anchorage, we discovered that his being born in Canada had raised suspicions with the Mexican authorities that he might not actually belong to us, that we might be borrowing him for his kidneys or something. They were going to keep him but were persuaded by my wifes clear intent to kill anyone who tried to separate her from her baby that maybe it might not be a good idea after all. Those were some of the bad times. There were also many more good ones. My image of Mexico, for whatever it may be worth, and also of Cuba, is of the many wonderful people who live there. But I am also troubled by the horrid governance these and so many others suffer. And here we have to separate out not only the goodness and richness of these people from the corruption that
surrounds them but also keep in mind the dignity they deserve. It is hard to reach into other places and do much good, hard to understand their perspective and their values. As bad as it may seem to us, it is their government, and perhaps one for which they can be justifiably proud. That I think these governments stink is not particularly relevant. What we should do, of course, is insist that our intercourse be a civil and respectful one. Our problem, however, is that most Americans, quite frankly, dont give a damn about Mexico, or Cuba, or Canada or anyplace else, unless they cross us, or seem to, and then, like those soldiers from Fort Hood, we can get mean as hell. Worst of all, we could care less how our people and especially our corporations behave anywhere but here. And, of course, out of our control and interest, they often behave very badly indeed. Here in America our people and our corporations behave according to the rules we set for them, or they pay the consequences. In other places there are other rules and other forces, and there they behave accordingly. If those rules and forces permit or advance irresponsible or brutal behavior, then it is likely to happen. American forces that come to these other places too often overpower their weak governmental systems. Outside the constraints of our complex and yet strong, tough and resilient American governance, these Americans can do massive harm, sometimes even without intending to do so. And so we seem to be stuck, all of us. People both here and there want those American forces, at least the good that can come from them, but hardly anybody wants American governance to supersede their own. And when they try to copy it, as many do, they invariably get it wrong. It is not easy to take the massive act of faith that created this country. And without it, without the nave notion that you can, indeed, must trust the people, that the people themselves, and not some set of elite guardians, will get it right, at least in the long run, you can not have American government, nor anything quite like it.
Unlike real imperialists, such as the Romans or their apt students, the British, we can not or at least do not wish to put in place in Africa or India or Iraq or Afghanistan those same instruments of American governance that protect Americans in our own house. Indeed, we cant even make our people behave there as they would normally behave here. We are just not good at that sort of thing, of running other peoples lives. And, to some extent, just as the Mexicans are trying to do for their citizens who break American law here, we must also protect our people abroad no matter how badly they behave. With imperialism going out of fashion everywhere and us never very good at it anyway, I see no clean solution to the ugly American. I would only outline the nature of the problem, that governance has to derive from the people governed and that Americans operating outside American governance, just like those Japanese tourists on Waikiki, are likely to be ugly. Perhaps we should insist that our government not permit Americans to collude with those who feed off their own people, who have no respect for human dignity and universal human rights. We could insist that national borders not to be used as shields to protect villainy. We could even have laws that say any corporate act that is illegal in the United States is universally illegal for American corporations operating anywhere. And the effect, of course, might be terrible. In any event, it is impossible to do. With a few rare exceptions, the aftermath of World War II being one, we are mostly hopeless when it comes to dealing with other people and other places. I suppose that too needs to be understood and respected. As we need to understand and treat as best we can the reasons others find us so often so offensive. These are matters we should all consider and consider carefully. For, like
it or not, that other world so many of our ancestors came here to be rid of has increasingly thrust itself upon us. Finally it has caught up with us, inserted itself into our affairs, and we must somehow deal with it. I suspect it will take some time before we learn to do that.
PART THREE: THE MIND OF AMERICA
PROFESSORS, PUNDITS AND PROGRESS In nearly every other place and time wise people have been respected and often feared, their views on things given serious attention either one way or another. But not here in America. Here in America we discount the truly wise and learned, as we do any other elite, and instead cultivate the broadest distribution of the rankest nonsense imaginable. We are common people and, by and large, we have very common intellectual taste
And so I want to be sure we understand one another. Although I am making every effort to be entirely straight with you, to tell you about this place we call America as best I understand it, still, nothing I can tell you here is true in any absolute sense, at least not anything very interesting. The more interesting it may seem to you, the more likely it is to be faulty, in some way or other. This place we call America is a very complicated place, incomprehensibly complicated, and so nobody is going to get very much of it entirely right. I want make this clear to you in part so you will not confuse me with our pundits, who make pronouncements on some of the very things I am writing about here. These pundits seem to have connections with reality quite removed from any I know. Often trained as journalists, they feed voraciously on facts and have wonderfully nave faith that from their facts they can derive truth. And so they seem driven by godly insights into the world, which they deliver to us as they receive it from above except that so much of it is obviously wrong. Their gods appear to play games on them. I admit to you that when I was a professor I did indeed tell some lies, but there was a purpose to it, a quite serious purpose. By the time I laid hands on them, my students were pregnant with facts and had been trained to write down whatever they were told, memorize it, and then repeat it, thinking that this was their task in life, to repeat whatever some authority told them. Some, the dumber ones, even believed it, believed that whatever some teacher or professor told them was true. And so I was sometimes forced to tell lies to get them to do what I thought they were supposed to do, which is to think. I made up the rankest sort of rubbish, spouted it to them, watched as they wrote it all down and then asked them to look at their notes and explain to me why they would write down such stuff. Soon we had an agreement that they would think about what I was saying and should I ever again talk rubbish, they were to speak up and tell me. Then, having gotten them at least slightly removed from believing anything and
everything they were told, indeed to actually listening to the things they were told, we could set about the serious business of chasing after that most elusive thing we call truth. This pedagogic tactic, of course, only works in America; when I made the mistake of trying it in Canada, it created an awful mess. Americans are ready and able to disbelieve authority; Canadians are not. I got this idea from an old German archaeology professor who had a special dig where he found all manner of interesting fossils or rather I got it from his students. This poor fellow would dig and profess and write grand treatises on all the stuff he dug up, and he became quite famous for it. The things he found were truly sensational. His pit seemed to contain the entire prehistory of the world, quite nicely recorded. Then one day he dug up a fossil turtle with his initials engraved on its belly. It seems he had been the victim of his own crafty students, who had salted the dig with all manner of interesting things, some they got from other places and some they made over in the ceramics lab. The way things work in academia, I would not be surprised if the findings of this great archaeologist are not still part of the curriculum, like Eskimo snow. Eskimo snow? Well, one day I had tea in Kotzebue on the Bering Sea Coast with a charming lady from Noatak named Mamie Beaver. Mamie was Inupiat and I knew her to be the author, among other things, of the marvelous piece of knowledge that her people have lots of words for snow, which shows up in every introductory anthropology textbook to prove, I have to suppose, that if you have lots of snow in your life, then you must have lots of words for it. At the time I was a kind of snow scientist, and the idea intrigued me, for surely I had lots of words for snow. This is much like the notion in introductory biology books that rabbits and hares have shorter ears the farther north they go, which proves that animals adapt to their environments, long ears freezing and wasting heat and all. It often
comes right in front of the notion that predators select and eat the weak and therefore are important to the health and well-being of their prey. Well, I asked Mamie about it, about what she had told that young gussick, once a friend of mine, about snow. And she laughed. This eager fellow had pointed out to her that her neighbors, the Dene, have lots of words for snow, and he wanted to know if the Inupiat did not also have lots of words for snow. Mamie being a proud Inuk, not given to coming in second, and certainly not after some Dene, asked her inquisitor slyly how many words the Dene had for snow, and when he told her his observations on it, she told him exactly what he wanted to hear. Indeed, the Inupiat had lots more words for snow; Mamie saw to that. She made them up for him, right there, words like yellow snow, brown snow, green snow, cold snow, warm snow, deep snow, hard snow, old snow, young snow, snow on lakes, snow on sea ice, snow you can fall through, and so on, until she had gotten well out ahead of those Dene people. And, of course, the rest is history. Which does, in fact, prove something. I leave it to you to figure out what. The rabbit ears? Well, think of moose, with their two-foot long ears moseying around at fifty below. I shot one once at 55 Fahrenheit degrees below zero, and those ears froze rock solid in about three seconds, the eyes in about ten. And then think of the little ears on some tropical deer. I guess you have to pick hares and rabbits to get the right answer. Their ears dont freeze, by the way, because they keep them tucked down alongside their hunched up bodies. And when it is really cold, they stay tightly tucked and dont move. My old friend, Terry Vierick, figured that all out decades ago on a roof top near Fairbanks. Moose? With no fur to hide their ears in? Im damned if I know. But I have never seen one, not a live one, with frost-bitten ears, not like cows or sheep or hogs, who freeze up every time a cold wind blows. Nor can I figure ravens, who seem to me exactly the same everywhere, from the hottest deserts
to the coldest places on earth. And always smarting off, never tucked in or hunkered down, never seeming to care about anything. The nice thing about doing research in the North is that you can say just about anything and get away with it. Nobody ever bothers to check. In fact, you dont even have to go there to do it. You can just sit in a warm library someplace and make it all up. You dont want to spend too much time watching wolves eat, at least not on Baffin Island, not if you want to get the right answer on predators culling out weak prey. A graduate student I helped examine for his University of Toronto doctorate had done just that, watched wolves for an entire year, found what many of us had already seen, that wolves kill the youngest caribou. Period. It is the young that almost always get killed, by predators or whatever. And how that helps the herd beats me. This unkind news, however, did turn the students major professor apoplectic; the poor fellow died shortly thereafter. For this was the very man who had invented the idea from his work on some island in Lake Superior that predators cull out the damaged goods among their prey to keep that population healthy, an idea so appealing I suspect it will never die. Mind you, I am not saying it is not true or that it is not a neat idea. I am just saying that, as is true with much of what you read in textbooks, we have little or no evidence to support it. What I am getting to here, in case you are wondering, are some of the silly ideas everyone knows about American people and politics, the wisdom of professors and pundits, things so cute they too can never die. I filled in once for a professor who suddenly had to be treated for cancer. Her classes had to do with natural resources and environmental protection, things about which I am not only massively over-educated but also with which I have had a great deal of real experience. The way I treat these matters in the
university classroom is to look at them objectively, to examine the processes and the institutions roughly the same way one would examine a frog or a Civil War battle, to see how it works and what it might mean. What I encountered in those already operating classrooms was an ongoing religious experience. Nobody appeared to be there to think about anything but rather to continue the process of indoctrination into a particular political doctrine, one roughly tracking the views of the Wilderness Society. I walked into the middle of their discovering that the world is dramatically overpopulated and that human populations are out of control and sure to selfdestruct. There were lots of charts and even a slick film proving all of that. What I was expected to do, apparently, was to pick up where my sick colleague had left off, lead the charge against this clear and pending disaster and then move on to all the rest of the stuff we know about the world falling apart. What I did instead was to declare a time out and rearrange the curriculum to return from this house of worship to the house of inquiry I assumed we were in. Half the class left in a huff, the ones there for that religious experience, and the rest settled down to do what I thought we were supposed to do in a college classroom, try to figure out what is really going on and what it might mean. Indeed, those who stayed not only expressed their relief that they were no longer going to be tested on their adherence to dogma but on their clear thinking, among other things, about those who use dogma and propaganda for their particular political ends. I was told that many of the classes these students attended were like that, that they were told and then tested on some political or religious point of view, that all they had to do to get a good grade was to figure out where the professor was politically and spiritually, and then feed that point of view back on the test. For that semester at least, these students, those who remained, did something quite different. We examined the politics of population and the way different people in different places see the issue and how they deal with it, fail to
deal with it or refuse to deal with it. We examined not the reality of climate change but the questions of climate change and the tools by which we can determine things about the worlds climates, past, present and future. We started not with the conclusions but with the questions. We noticed, among other things, the massive world climate change at mid-twentieth century when they moved most weather stations from the roof of the downtown post office to the out-of-town airport. We got very few clear answers, and we didnt make up any, except to note that we sure have a lot to learn about the weather. It took the students awhile to figure out how to respond to questions without clear answers, but they finally got the hang of it, and they did fine. In fact, I made a deal with them at the outset, if they would tell me what grade they wanted, I would see that they got it, even if it killed them. Some of them nearly did die, or said they were dying from all the work they had to do, but they each got the grade we had agreed to and several a better one, all of which were exactly the grades they deserved or near enough. One of the things you often encounter with young people, as many of my students have been, is an unhealthy and unwarranted cynicism. They either believe everything they are told or they believe nothing. Either way it comes from being fed too much crap. Some buy it, some ignore it, and some retreat to the dark abyss of cynicism. Too many people who dont know beans about it will tell you that we are going to hell in a hand basket, and there is nothing we can do about it. They will tell you that corporations run the country and that the American electoral system is moribund and useless. They will tell you that blacks and Hispanics and women dont have a chance here, that the poor have no power, that the media is not accessible to them, that we have too many people, that our living environments are deteriorating, that we are running out of energy and minerals, and that the country is run by fascists. None of this, of course, is more than half true and most of it is not true at
all. And even for the things less than perfect, it is those imperfections that should challenge us. That is where you focus your attention, if you want things to be better, on the places where you can make the kind of difference you want to make. There has never been a better time or place than this for those who want things to be better. What kills us is not a bunch of fascists running everything but too many good people doing nothing. Anyone who thinks you cant change things here in this place we call America should walk the path I have walked these past few decades. What I see is not a moribund system but so much progress we cant keep up with it, cant adjust to and fully utilize the astounding successes we have had. The America I know is choking on progress, and that progress is bleeding out into the rest of the world.
A SIMPLE NOTION There is one thing that goes to the very heart of America, one thing that itself alone makes Americans what we are and different from all the rest. It is that we are born into or have accepted the simple, if arguable, notion that nobody is intrinsically better than anybody else. This rare, nave and fragile notion comes perhaps from our humble origins, where pretense was denied us by brutal facts, and surely from all the things that came together here in America to make us what we are. That simple notion of the equality of man19 was the very heart of the American Revolution, an event I would argue to have caused by far the most profound changes in human history, one that has shaken the world as no other has ever done and stands today as a beacon of hope for all mankind. This notion of human equality leads us directly to the odd, thoroughly American corollary that each individual is more important than our collective wellbeing, indeed, that our collective well-being depends on our respect for every
19 Being neither an historian nor a philosopher I am hardly qualified to suggest the complex origins of this notion. I have the feeling that an Englishman named Tom Paine, born into a hellhole very nearly two centuries before my own birth, deserves much of the credit, at least for inspiring others to think and to move on it. In any event, it was on the soils of America, like nowhere else, that Tom Paines ideas flourished. I also contend that the Iroquois and other Native Americans probably had a large hand in it as well.
individual. This simple act of faith makes America far different from the rest of the world and from all that went before it. Of course, the unsettling proposition that the individual is more important than the whole of society remains for most of the world, as well as for many Americans, counter-intuitive and nonsensical. And yet it is the very essence of America. Even in Canada this idea is considered absurd. And so it should hardly be surprising that a society founded on it is bewildering to everyone. Yet, confounding as it may be, this government, based on this strange idea, is, by far, the oldest continuous government in the world. It remains the most vigorous and stable, a government that grows stronger, works better and is more vital with every passing year. Thus, somehow, there must be some sense to this notion, the seed from which this mighty nation grew. It was on this proposition of the primacy of the individual that James Madison and some of the boys applied their rare genius in the construction of our Constitution. This devilishly clever device assured that with or without good sense and with or without personal virtue, we shall never-the-less do the right thing, if not immediately, at least in due course. The central thrust of the Constitution of the United States of America is to distribute power so broadly that nobody has enough of it or can get enough of it to do very much harm, and if mistakes are made, they can and will correct themselves. Our Constitution was designed to produce inefficient government, which, to the bemusement of the entire world, it does quite nicely. Perhaps nowhere was this better demonstrated than in the election of 2000, both the absurdity if it all and the strength of that absurdity. While the rest of the world, not to mention many ignorant Americans, looked on aghast, the great ship of the American state floundered along oblivious to all the noise and, like some pet dog, followed the will of the people, which was that, for all the fun we had with it, it really did not matter much to the collective electorate who the
next President of the United States would be. Since it was so clearly a tie between two unbearably ordinary candidates with whom nobody really felt comfortable anyway, then the only logical thing was to flip a coin. And so we did, or rather the courts did. Meanwhile, through much of this so-called crisis, the sitting President was off someplace in Asia. For the fact of the matter is we require no leadership. We have a buoyant, self-righting government that floats us through any storm usually with nobody, or nobody of any consequence, at the helm. Even our most respected Presidents, with perhaps one or two exceptions, were uncommonly ordinary both in fact and in disposition; events make them important but rarely any great skills of leadership. This is a place where political fame comes to those who just happen to be at bat when the ball is thrown. The truly great among us stay out of politics and mostly go unnoticed. We Americans do not depend on the wisdom of great leaders but on the impossibility within such a free and crazy system of the long-term survival of significant deviation from an optimal path. American government is based on chaos and the likelihood that, given a chance, things that work will survive things that dont. It permits ideas to rise, to be tested and for those with merit to flourish. The American system of government might well have been invented by Charles Darwin, or if it suits you better, then by God. In any event, it surely has a superhuman sense to it. The human brain tends to socialism or fascism, which invariably fail. While I suppose we humans must have had some hand in this thing and surely we did have some very clever people working on it, still, like a great symphony, it is hard to see American government to be simply the product of human ingenuity. But, like nature (or the Old Testament), American government is not always a pretty thing to behold, especially for those who expect immediate order
and design and efficiency. It is government designed to be chaotic, to be hideously inefficient in the short term and therefore absolutely efficient in the longer term. Yet, ugly as it so often appears, it works magnificently. Indeed, it works so well that most of us pay little or no attention to it. It does not require much attention. Those who fret that few Americans bother to vote miss the point. It is when and where governments do not work that people so desperately seek solutions at the polling places, even when there are none left and no real choice. Most Americans are far wiser than those pundits who wring their hands about people not voting. Most Americans understand and do the right thing. They vote when it matters to them, when it might make some kind of difference to them and to the country. Those who do vote have lately been doing just the right thing, following in the footsteps of those crafty designers of this government by voting into office such a mixed bag of cats that nobody can do anything on their own, and so they are forced, eventually, to work together, making sure everyone has some say in the final legislative product, which will likely be a great screaming mess and so do nobody much harm. Meanwhile, the country is safe and people can get on with their lives and more important work, riding, as they do, on the most stable ship of state ever set to sea. What we all should fear are those places where somebody has a better idea, a more efficient way to get it done and the power to do it. What we should fear are places with leaders and the kind of people who will follow them. It was those kind of places and people that the American revolutionaries, at hideous peril and against outrageous odds, took on and defeated. Yet these rebels were not leaders, they did not see themselves as leaders, but rather followers of their people, as indeed they are most often treated when not
being treated even worse. The American Revolution was a conspiracy of followers to set in place a system of government that must forever follow its people. It was an unprecedented and massive act of faith and courage and, over many years now, a demonstrably huge success. Yet, while it is now tested and well proven, American government remains largely a mystery to most people both here and elsewhere. Small wonder the stuff we teach our children about it, when we even think to do that, besides missing all the main points, puts them to sleep. Small wonder fools still struggle to see it and miss it and make the most profoundly absurd statements about what it is and what we should do about its various failings, which are not failings at all but the way it actually works. Next, if you care to follow me there, we shall go inside of it, onto and under Capitol Hill and into the Oval and other offices of government, into the guts of it, to see how it looks from there.
MAKING AMERICAN LAW Nobody makes law the way we do here in America. Nobody. For many it is simply a scandal. It is surely a confused and messy process. But I would argue that it works just fine, that it is the best system in the world, not because it is orderly but precisely because it is not. One of my many odd jobs has been to see that my clients get fair and constructive federal legislation. It is also one of the easiest. Anybody can do it, which leads me to wonder why those who do it get paid so much. You see a lot of that, the disconnect between the true difficulty of a job or importance of a job and the pay. Lobbying the Congress is like running a casino; you make lots of money, and you can hardly lose, no matter how stupid you are. It is far more difficult, by the way, and it costs far more to get state legislators to do what you want, and so it is mostly the big money guys who win there, which, of course, is why the big money guys want everything brought to that level, so they can buy state law and do as they like. But on Capitol Hill, it is different. There even the little guy has real clout. There almost anybody can have their way, especially if what they want makes any sense. If this seems wrong to you consider the work of one Grover Norquist. Grover is a self-admitted nobody of modest origins who has the balls of the
United State Congress in his untelenting grip. Even those with his same agenda fear him and have no idea how to get free of him. If Grover can do it, you can do it. Or better yet, do whatever you like. Or consider the Tea Party. Or Congressman Paul. These are hardly elite power brokers. They are just people who want things done their way, and they have come very close to getting it done. Or from another direction Sarah Brady. Or the NRA. Or the Sierra Club. These are people with power, power they just went out and took to themselves. Only in America. Now I have very little respect for the agendas of any of the above. These are simply not my kind of people and their objectives, by and large, scare the hell out of me. My only point is that if they can move the country in their direction, then anybody can move it in any direction they like. And if you have another agenda, then you should just get on with it. The thing that makes no sense to me is saying that you do not have the power to do it. The American government is one you can move. If you care to do so. And do the work. So, heres how to do it, how to make a law, should you ever want one made, or change the complexion of the country. If you are an American, you just happen to live in one of the few places in the world where you can do that. If the above fools can do it, then surely so too can you. Well, no, they are not really fools, just not my type and surely not going where I would have us go. Their methods though bear some thought and some respect. They know their country and how it works. First, you have to survey the terrain. Contrary to popular opinion, what you see when you look closely at the Congress of the United States is a fine collection of mostly bright people. Dont forget that. Dont ever try to outfox a U.S. Senator or buy one. You can buy a State Senator if you want one, or even the entire State Senate, but not the United States Congress. You can give
them money, of course, and take them golfing in the Bahamas, but you can not buy them. Of course, you dont believe this, but let us move on and see if we can build up the other side of the case. I once ran for the U.S. Senate. While I lost soundly, it was an instructive exercise. I recall being asked by a reporter why anyone would vote for someone like myself who had never before run for office and who carried all my academic baggage. Without thinking too much about it, I let the cat out of the bag. At the time at least (it has gone down hill the past few elections) the Congress was full of old university professors and college presidents, especially the Senate, and few had held previous elected office. The local school board is not the best path to the United States Senate. First you run a university or something of that sort. And that was what I told the reporter, that I was ideally suited to be a United States Senator, which wisdom he and the electorate ignored. Some time back, while we waited for his call to the floor, I was chatting with the House Majority Leader about some of the doctoral dissertations he and his colleagues had written. We were talking about serious brain power, but also a closely guarded secret, that most people elected to the Congress are very well educated. Few wear that fact on their sleeve. To do so, frankly, would assure they are not elected, not in these United States of America. If you want to sit in this Congress, representing any but the most effete districts, you must play down any evidence of serious book learning. There are some clinkers, of course, such as an unfortunate fellow once known throughout Washington as the dumbest man in the Senate (there is a dumber one now in the House), who, by the way, did start his political career on the local school board. But such fools are few and far between, and nobody pays much attention to them. This show is run by some of the brightest people in the country. I swear.
They are good people too, by and large, probably even more good than bright. The reason is quite simple when you think on it. The job demands it. What you get from it is not wealth nor much fame but a chance to work very hard and to affect the country, to make it more the way you want it to be, or more accurately, the way your constituents want it to be. Because if you make that mistake, think you are elected to run things and not do as your people want you to do, then you will either quickly change your mind or you will have very short tenure. But leaders they are not. That would be highly improbable if not a virtual impossibility, and it is unfair to ask it of them, which might account for those old university presidents. Universities require and permit no leadership either. As everyone knows, it is the limpest of the limp who move upward in university administration. If you have either gonads or brains, you remain a professor. That is where the action is. Nobody in this country elects anyone to lead them, and even if that mistake were made, nobody in the Congress is about to be led, except by their constituents. On Capitol Hill you get things done by working with others. The keys to success in the Congress of the United States, very unlike parliaments, are the flaccid factors of compromise, consideration and courtesy. Now before you object, let me admit that all of this is presently not in great evidence. But it will be, because that is the only way the place can work. And if it doesnt work, as now seem the case, then it will change; the people will change it. Indeed, the Congress is the exact opposite of parliaments. Parliaments are run by real leaders. The majority takes charge, takes power, picks a leader and does things, and they are given great license to do it, to run the country. If you happen to have a member of parliament and call her up and say, Look here, Gertrude, this is what I want you to do for me, she will know right away you must have just gotten off the boat from America. Parliaments dont work that way. The governments formed within them
are to be left alone to do what they are supposed to do. And when they get too carried away with themselves, or get stale, as they all eventually do, they are simply replaced. People with parliaments want their government to be run by serious, take-charge professionals and not to be bothered very often by it. The last thing they expect is to be asked what they, the people, think. Indeed, these kind of societies do not much trust their people. They have far more confidence in the professionals they elect to run their government. Unlike Americans, they select and respect leaders. And they expect to be led, properly of course, but led none-the-less. On the other hand, although we Americans too often use the word leader, we, in fact, want none of it. We expect those we elect to do as we want them to do and not to do anything without our personal input and approval. Thus the United States Congress is not set up to run anything but to do as they are told. It is made up of people who work more-or-less independently for their constituents. What motivates them, almost all of them, is the grand idea that they represent both those people who elected them and those who voted for the other guy, that in this place they are California or District 12. What they are not is some free agent of governance anointed by a queen or some such thing and assigned to run things. Of course, some people manage to get elected without grasping that most critical point, but either they learn that they are the agents of the people who elected them and that they will have to work with other agents of other people to get anything done or they will fail. Therein lies the key to getting this odd crowd to do what you want them to do, that and some understanding of what it is they can do and what they can not. Good sense would tell you not to ask anyone to do what they can not do. And so you dont badger some Senator from North Carolina to support your legislation against tobacco, for gay rights or against military spending. No matter how that person may feel about it, they simply can not help you do something
their constituents do not want done. If they should get high-minded and fail to see this, they will be executed in the next election. That is what it is all about, the next election. And that is the beauty of it, as well as the reason so many people, some right in the thick of it, misjudge the process, worry about leadership and order, not understanding that this thing works pretty much as it was intended to work, without any leadership or order at all. So lets think on that a bit and think what it is you want the Congress to do for you. If it is something nobody can do, because they will all be thrown out of office because of it, then just forget it. Or go to the courts, or to the press. In this Congress of these United States of America nothing happens on its merit. Although it has no noticeable effect, still millions of dollars are spent on golf trips, campaign contributions and fancy Georgetown lawyers trying to get the Congress to do the politically impossible. The lawyers huff and puff and try to look as if they are doing something other than getting rich, and the Senator tells you what a great game it was and how grateful he is for your kind support but you will still get screwed if what you want is not in the political cards, as the Senator sees it, and Senators are very good at reading political cards. The place feeds on people like that, dummies who dump their money and get nothing for it, simply because what they wanted was politically impossible and therefore not for sale. Nor does it make any sense to drag in your chambers of commerce and high school cheerleaders, unless you have something other than legislation in mind. A wise old state legislator once told me how much his life improved once he figured out that chambers of commerce dont vote, that it is only people who vote. The same can be said for corporations. They can pump up war chests, but they dont vote, not yet. There is a difference, one any elected official understands. As you must do if you are have your way with the Congress.
Nor should you spend your money on fancy law firms. Lawyers, by and large, are this nations worst lobbyists. They are not trained for it but instead trained to do everything exactly the wrong way, to polarize and to fight, not facilitate and compromise. What a lawyer may be able do, a few of them at least, is to help you write law. You will need one or two of these craftspeople to draft the legislation, once you get to it. But I would suggest you keep them out of sight until you do, especially any who have been around Capitol Hill very long. With a hotshot lawyer in tow, especially one people know, you have dim to no prospects for a fair hearing. Just think about it, how would you respond to someone who comes into your office with his legal hatchet man or woman, perhaps the very one who took a piece out of you the last time around? As an effective Washington lobbyist you should also stay away from the news media. Much of the bad image from which the Congress has always suffered is the result of the virulent and mindless predations of reporters. Politicians are a reporters natural food; deep down they despise one another. There is just something about people elected to office that brings out the worst in reporters. They delight in attacking anyone elected by the people, which fact is not only discounted, it may lurk at the heart of their fury. And so you shouldnt pay much attention to what the press has to say about any politician, or try to use the press to influence anything political. I know; this not what you have heard, but if what you have heard were so good then why are you not getting the laws you want? My yet unproven suspicion is that reporters suffer from the Doberman syndrome. To make them vicious Doberman Pinschers were bred towards smaller brains. The smaller their brain, the more fearful they are, and thus the more likely to attack nearly anything new they encounter. If you ever listen to reporters, as you can now do especially on Sunday morning, you will no doubt see the connection.
I have to suspect it is those diminished brains that cause the American press to so hate democracy, which is far too complicated for them to grasp. There is hardly a reporter in the country who in their heart of hearts does not envision him or herself as some dethroned or yet to be anointed philosopher king forced to do drudge work among the unwashed until the revolution comes. Still, they do their thing, which is to keep humble and frightened everyone with any semblance of a public mandate. But stay well clear of the media if you want to make laws. Once you have determined that your goals are politically possible, that the Congress can act the way you want it to act, then you have to find some inside help. For that, unless you have a brother or aunt in the Senate, or even if you do, you should start with the Congressional staff. Senators and House Members, those who survive, do so by retaining capable and loyal staff and doing pretty much what that staff tells them to do. With all due respect to the mostly fine people they work for, the Congressional staff is the engine, the heart and soul and brains of the Congress. First work out the geography of Capitol Hill. Figure out how to get from one Congressional office to another, who sits on what committees, who the committee staffers are and where they hang out, where the barber shops and eating places are (barbers and waiters will tell you more than you ever wanted to know about everybody). It is a really complex place, under the Hill, and it will probably take you the best part of a month to figure it all out, but it is well worth the effort. Be sure to wear good walking shoes. All the real workers do. Of course, if you really want to, if you want to impress your client or your boy friend, it is not hard to talk with a Senator or Congressperson. You just catch them in the hall or getting off the Congressional subways. They are not guarded and they never tell you to get lost, and always, even if they have never laid eyes on you before, they will act as if they have known you since childhood. They do that because, unless you have the bad fortune of being a big shot
lobbyist, they can never be quite sure just who you are. And since you seem to have figured out how to find them, they worry you may just be somebody important to their re-election. In fact, why would you be so bold, if you were not? You might even try first names. And so they listen to you with a studied intensity and then forget everything you said even while you are saying it. The young man or woman standing alongside of them, however, will not. So watch what you say. Of course, any reporter can talk to anybody on Capitol Hill anytime they want, with essentially the same effect. All that happens is they both get pumped up, and the rankest nonsense appears in the paper or on the six oclock news. However, to get your law enacted, you have to come from another direction. First find out what some appropriate legislator is worried about, what they think may hurt them in the next election. Then show the right Congressional aide that what you want will be a significant political advantage to their boss, or sometimes even better, that by doing what you want, their boss will avoid serious political damage. You present yourself as a devoted supporter trying to do the right thing, which on Capitol Hill, is always the political thing, which is not nearly as bad as it might sound. The political thing is the thing that will get politicians re-elected, and that will have to be what their constituents want. Keep always in mind that remarkable act of Jeffersonian faith, that things will go pretty well, in due course, if we do as the people want, or if you are a cynic, that they could be made much worse if you dont. So you dont press for something of no political relevance and certainly nothing that might cause political harm, at least not to the person whose help you are trying to obtain. That means you have to put it in the right political context, explain how doing this thing you want is the best thing for their boss to do and how it will help get him or her re-elected or a better committee
assignment (which will help him or her get re-elected). Subtlety and tact help. I have overstepped from time to time, once finding a wounded Senator, and proudly telling her loyal staff that I had arrived with the solution to her problem. I was told quite bluntly that she certainly did not need my help, thank you very much, that the Senator was doing just fine with her constituents which, to my chagrin, happened to be true. I had not done my homework. Her problem was not yet with her constituents but with her President and her Leadership, and that problem would eventually translate into political trouble for her at home. The fact that I was right down the line did not help. Indeed, that made it even worse. Remember, these guys and gals are fiercely loyal. And so I had to back down a long way before they would allow me to help save that particular political neck, something I was finally clever enough to do without anyone having to admit that there had ever been a problem. Keep in mind that the Congressional staff is there for the singular purpose of keeping their boss in office. They are not only the best part of the system, they are your keys to getting the Congress to do as you want. Then you just move it forward, getting your lawyers to write the legislation the way you want it and handing or under-handing it to the staff. Frankly, I have come to suspect that nobody in the Congress knows how to write legislation. They may, but I have never seen anyone there actually do it. It is always just handed to them by people like me. Then you just have to get the votes you need, which you do by finding out from the staff now on your side whom you should talk to and what you should say to them. Or just let them handle that part of it; they will probably do a better job of it than you can anyway. And then you have a law. well, almost. Somewhere along the way you should have seen to it that the President
also wants to be a part of your marvelous scheme, that it suits his political ends as well. Presidents are a little harder to reach. To do that, unless you are very fortunate or very clever, you start with a friendly and well-placed legislator, a deputy or undersecretary, or perhaps the staff of the Vice President, most of whom are a bit more accessible. Then you work it the same way. The staff protects the boss, and the boss does what the staff tells him or her to do. Those who dont do that are not around long. So, do the big guys win, or the little guys? Does it take a lot of money to move the Congress, or can ordinary folks do it? The answer, the one I have seen, is that nearly anybody can do it. And the big guys by no means always win. I have seen huge enterprises, indeed been a part of them, that arrived on Capitol Hill with suitcases full of money trying to figure out what to do with it, and I have seen them go home empty handed and defeated by people with holes in their pants. I was once part of an effort to advance oil development in a wildlife refuge, which probably would do no harm and, in fact, a lot of good for everyone, including the wildlife. But, of course, it smelt bad. And because it smelt bad and is very remote from the interest and comprehension of most Americans, it has turned out to be a dandy way to fill the coffers and the membership rolls of groups spiritually and otherwise devoted to up-scale outdoor recreation, which they like to call environmental protection. The principal advocates of this oil development were the Native people who acquired any oil and gas that may be under that land as part of the settlement by which they gave up title to most of Alaska. In effect, it is their treaty right, a right they are denied because the Congress has to authorize them to exercise it, and every time they try to get that authorization, they are defeated by a host of red-eyed hikers and rafters with God on their side and the better part of Kansas. This thing is somewhat complicated, of course, but that is the essence of
it. What defeats these Native Americans, what has defeated them every time is the company they keep and the company they dont keep. My friend and I were lazing in the sun at Poipu Beach on Kauai some years ago when she noticed in the newspaper a talk to be given at the local community college about this very rape of the North. So we put our clothes on and went to hear it. There we were told in glowing terms by people purporting to be Natives of someplace how they were opposed to this awful oil development and how it would destroy their lands and waters and the caribou on which they depend. It was represented there on this charming island as a battle royal between big, nasty oil companies and these fine, earth-based Native people. The show was sponsored by the local Sierra Club, who also provided all the beautiful posters and slides, and it was a howling success, with everyone marching off to battle for the rights of these poor Native people and their lands and waters. You might ask the relevance of this, why would the Sierra Club be so concerned about how the people of Kauai feel about an Alaska wildlife refuge? The problem they were addressing was that the two Hawaii Senators, Daniel Inouye and Daniel Akaka, both Democrats and both fiercely committed to Native rights, also both favored oil development within the designated oil reserve in the refuge. Senator Akaka, a Native Hawaiian with a sterling record not only in Native matters but also in environmental protection, was up for election, and he was their target. This Sierra Club crusade was to persuade the Senator of the error of his ways, to go right after one of his core constituencies. Now I just happened to work for the Native people, the only Native people, of the very place in question, the Kaktovikmiut. It was their land and their water and their caribou that at stake, and they paid me to help them persuade the Congress to allow them to have some say in how it is managed and to exercise their legal options to drill for oil on their land.
Although we did speak on it, Senator Akaka, however, was not in need of my services. He had visited the village of Kaktovik. He had talked with the real Natives, and he had arrived at his own conclusion, that the Congress should do the right thing here, that it should respect the rights of the Native people and the contracts between them and their federal government. He also saw that there really was no environmental issue, that that was a red herring, something to pump up the coffers of these well-heeled professional advocates for Yuppie recreational rights on other peoples land. We did, in fact, persuade the Congress to do that, to honor that agreement. But we lost the White House. We somehow forgot that the President could get political mileage from opposing the rights of these few in the face of that mindless mob energized throughout the country in places like Lihue, Hawaii, so remote from it they failed to notice that these so elequent Natives were native, if native at all, of someplace else. It was a great show, a good effort, and it worked beautifully. These people are tough, smart and very good at what they do. Yes, sometimes the big guys do win. But then the big guys may not always be the ones we usually think of as big, and they may not be after what they say they are. Take a look sometime at the Washington offices of the Sierra Club or The Wilderness Society. Talk about grand! Now thats grand. I would add hastily that I admire the energy and power of these folks and am grateful for much of their work. We are all in their debt. But they are not always right, and they are surely not always what they pretend to be. What is so different about politics in America, different from every other place, is that here things are run not by people elected to run things, given a mandate to do what is best for everyone and left alone to do it. Instead, this country is run by the fear of the elected that they may not do what the people want them to do and therefore not returned to office.
That puts a great responsibility on the rest of us, to want the right things, because we may well get what we want. It is the price we pay for not having leaders. But then who needs leaders? Surely not you nor me, not if we are Americans. Let the rest of the world have their leaders. Well take our chances on the wild idea that all of our people may know more and can be trusted farther than any leader.
FEDERALISM
NORTH AND SOUTH O.K., so the winners get to write the history. Fair enough. But they left out huge chunks of it, and for a very long time. They also reconstructed, which was the worst part of it and fogged up the rest, starting with giving whole awful affair an absurd and misleading name. It was not a civil war, far from it, it was all-out war between states that wanted to be free of the Union and the Union states that wanted them back under their control. Nor did that war pull those states together. It simply defeated those who wanted out. Call it what you will, and put blame where you like, this horrendous war and its vicious aftermath severed this nation and held it separated for well over a century. Only now, as people have begun to cross that bloody line in significant numbers, smearing Dallas with Brooklyn accents and Detroit with those of Selma and Little Rock, only now is there beginning to be some confusion, not enlightenment, but serious confusion about that dark line. And that is good, far better than the certainties of the past, certainties about uncertain things, especially about right and wrong, of which there was quite enough of both to serve everyone. Still, pain and anger and incomprehension thrive. I state this to acknowledge that there is, indeed, a division within this country, the only real division, I would contend, of any consequence. It is an intellectual gulf, a blankness about the people on the other side of that line. And it is not really a line but a space. Those of us from the middle of that space, the border states, the slave states that did not secede, the slave states that were not destroyed and then poisoned by the horrors of Reconstruction and the even more horrific reactions to that Reconstruction, we have the advantage of seeing and feeling that horror but not having its poison descend quite as much upon us.
Far be it from me to attempt to offer any further explication here of this division and surely not to treat it. Frankly, I have never been able to explain it to either side, what the others are and how they think, although I have tried mightily. I would just leave it for what it is, a sharp geographic reality, in which few understand those from the other side, understand that they are both human and American, like themselves and not some heinous breed of vicious animal. The only treatment, I think, is for another generation or two to die and for the mixing to continue. For now I would just offer this small story from the middle country, a little incident that somehow struck me as being on some point or other.
UNCLE NOIE
PARTIES Our unique two party political system is another of the many quaint mysteries of this nation. Where did it come from, how does it works and why has it survive? Indeed, that is the key word, that it does survive, which speaks volumes. It is not mandated anywhere. It came into being and has survived the way weeds come and grow in a garden, blown in perhaps by the wind. It is part of the organic nature of this country; things that work survive and things that dont work either die or never happen in the first place. And like so much more about this odd place, people from elsewhere just dont get it. And try as I might I seem unable to explain it, perhaps because I dont fully understand it myself. It is surely easier to explain a plethora of political parties, or at least more than two. But lets give it a try. American two party political system is bred from the massive progress that otherwise would choke us. One party moves things ahead, often too far ahead of the people, and then the other party comes along and moves us back,
often too far behind the people. And so we move back and forth, from progressive legislation to regressive legislation. And the people decide which way we will go, how much we can handle, when to stop and when to back up. For it is the people themselves who run the show, not the parties. The two parties are simply the instruments by which the people do that, run things. Pundits and a few silly politicians are perennially exercised about a third party. And that might be fine, provided it is, like the proverbial possum, dead in the center of the road, where most of our people are. Any third party someplace else, either to the right or left is not only useless, it breaks the rhythm of the dance, messes up the balance, the exquisite ballet of American politics, of sway to the right, then sway to the left and do see do. By sucking away support from the party closest to them, the party they should be working with, these third party sorties aid and abet their natural enemies. In short, any third party here in America that is off dead center is not only awkward and self-indulgent, it is profoundly stupid. In theory, if we had a truly centrist third party and if American politics continued to work as it does, then this centrist party would be in office most of the time, and when it got out of line one way or the other, then the party left or right of it, the one opposite the diversion, would sweep into office, perhaps just long enough to put things back into balance. The problem for third parties here is that they are not needed, and surely not to the right or left of the two big parties. Frankly there is just no space to either side for anything sane, nor in the middle which is broadly covered by both parties. When one party loses its grasp of the middle, then it loses to the other party, which swings us back towards center and usually somewhat beyond center, so that the first party in its turn can have another shot at it. American politics is quite simple; whoever holds the center holds office, because thats where the people are. American politics is all about following the people, figuring out where they are and getting there. It has nothing to do with
leading or with leaders. The people do the leading. And they are usually far out ahead of all the pundits, politicians, and professors, too many of whom have never figured out just where they live. Someplace in one or the other of the two major parties there is a place for just about any legal agenda, and in this place we call America, that is where you need to take your case, to one or the other party, if you want to do anything more than wave banners and make noise. If you are really serious about it and want something to happen, you have to pick a party and make it work for you and your cause. Take the religious right. They got the idea, finally, that being a radical fringe didnt get them anywhere. And so they dressed themselves in dead possum clothes and headed for that middle of the road. There they not only found and made a cozy nest for themselves in the Republican Party (no mean feat, by the way), they have now nearly nearly control of it. They did not do this because they had massive money nor a massive following nor even much sense on their side, they did it by thinking and working hard and by using the system as it was intended to be used, to advance the quaint things they wanted to advance by making these things seem politically correct ... just as a generation or so before others had made their very different views politically correct. Or take a more toxic version, the Tea Party, made up of people who can most generously be called nave. But not nave politically. Politically they are remarkably clever and not lacking in understanding of the nature of this country and the way it works. Not its history, mind you, about which they are hugely nave, but the way it works. At the other end, on the home front, with the same tactics these folks have gotten control of school boards all over the country, even in places where nearly everyone is of a very different persuasion. They then fire the administration, put in their own anointed managers and make the schools the way they want them to be, so that your kids learn things the way they want them
to learn it. These are not brilliant people, by and large, not inherently powerful, and there are not many of them, not yet, not until they get your kids to join them, but they have had remarkable success making the American political system work for them. We should commend them. As we should commend the Sierra Club and Friends of the Earth and Sarah Brady and all the rest of these religious people for whom truth comes in such neat packages. They set their minds to the task, or have it handed to them from Above, and they just go out and do it. Right here in America. If there is anything to worry about it is that so many of the rest of us, with our fine and refined notions about how everything should be just sit on our hands, insist the system doesnt work and do nothing. Here in America, as in no other place on earth, for all the trashy and nasty stuff they try to promote, even those right wing radio crazies pose no real threat. Like the Ku Klux Klan and the neo-Nazis, with all their pathetic followers, they have no place to go here, no real future in America. Our problem is not with these sad and bedraggled folks but with are those of us who can think well and are honest and decent and who allow these sick and strident voices to dominate our radio waves, who dont reach out to the very same audiences and offer a more sane and decent way of living, thinking and voting. We should all commend Rush Limbaugh. Rush, you are doing the right thing there, using our American resources just the way they are supposed to be used, to say whats on your mind and to get people to do things the way you want them to do it. Indeed, you are living proof that anyone can do it, that even weak minds can prevail. My question to you, Rush, is can you tell me why those who so despise what you say can not find their own voice?
Anyone? My father was a great man. Although he could barely read or write, he understood politics as well as anyone I have ever known, and he made it work for the things he cared about. His guiding political principle was that anyone who would vote Republican would suck eggs and howl at the moon. The question he posed on the proposition that this or that Republican candidate might be a good person was, Well, if that sorry son of a bitch is so fine, then why is he a Republican? My father had the brilliance of mind to see things in their simplest light. The Republican Party as he knew it served the rich and abused the poor, and he thought that to be wicked, and since we were never rich, not of much use to us. He saw all Republicans as self-serving, immoral, chauvinists with narrow, pinched minds and minuscule souls, atavistic monsters who used politics to make the country safe for their personal greed and exploitation. Of course, being a political operative, some of his best friends were Republicans, and so he perhaps he knew what he was talking about. And it was not Republicans my father got into fights with every election day. He wrote off all Republicans as moral cripples. They were not worth his trouble, except to see that they were defeated. No, it was Democrats that he bloodied, decent people, as he saw them, who should have known better and yet, in one way or another, failed the people they were supposed to serve. My father was nearly sixty when he had his last election day fist fight. The way it was told to me was that in the course of a discussion at Democratic Headquarters somebody laid hands on my father a dreadful mistake. Although he was hardly needed, my brother came flying over the table after that unfortunate soul. Then the two of them proceeded to lay flat the entire
assemblage, at least any who failed to retreat. After that they went home to celebrate the election and their last good fight. Thank God I wasnt there. It is not a good thing to fight. My father told me that, but added that if it should come on you, be sure not to lose. Never back down, never go down, and never kick anyone who is down, he said. He never did. It was only on election day that he fought, once he had gotten out of his childhood fights, which I am told were many and severe. It was only elections that mattered that much to him, and only the behavior of those he considered human. Elections for my father were things worth fighting about. I think my father was right about a lot of things. When they buried him, the Governor gave the eulogy, just one of many governors and legislators and others who owed their election to my father and so much more. And he was attended by a host of State Troopers, whom, as their Commissioner, he had advised, advanced, kept straight and protected from political savagery. And hundreds more, all of us thinking we had lost our very best friend. Which was true. And so perhaps I come honestly and proudly by some passion on this matter of American politics. I have seen us make massive progress and I have seen the system work, as no other system has ever worked. It works now for everybody, good people and bad people, bright people and stupid people, for anybody who takes the time and effort to make it work, anybody who cares enough about something to see that it happens. Here, in this place we call America, it can happen. It can surely happen, at least for those who want it to happen, those who remember where they are and who they are, and who will work to see that it does happen. You can do it with just these two parties. You can do it by going to the Congress and making
your case. You can do it here as nowhere else on this earth ever. Our boys who thought it up, and those who inspired them, got it just about right. They left us a legacy of immense proportions, and a marvelous set of tools, just part of the set of miracles that puts us where we are today and which sets us quite apart from the rest of the world and all of human history.
PART THREE: THE MUSCLE OF AMERICA
CONQUEST Early in our history America went through a primitive imperialistic bent, stealing land as we found it easy to do from indigenous people and weak nations. We even made a few runs at Canada when we were young and stupid, got our tails kicked, our capitol burned and then tried to figure out a better way. For awhile we quietly let our navy and marines make some softer parts of the world safe for American exploitation, which we did in the form mostly of commerce and other petty crimes. Then we pretty much retired from world conquest. At the end of the Second World War, even as dumb as we were in going about it, we could have owned the world. Instead, we not only gave back what we had taken at terrible cost but insisted to the dismay and everlasting anger of
our allies that they do the same. Whatever is war for, they must have thought, if not for getting more land and enslaving people? What weird people, these Americans! What could they be up to? This is surely some slick trick of theirs to sneak up and enslave us. The Russians didnt fall for it and so spent another fifty years in the empire business, sucking what they could out of the people we allowed them to enslave before they discovered, as we had a hundred years before, that slavery doesnt work worth a tinkers dam. Canada, of course, has sat up there in sullen despair since about 1812, dreaming of rape, never quite realizing that we just dont need them nor want the aggravation of delivering their bloated social services nor listening to them bicker and bellyache. Instead, after they invest Canadian public money in their people, we take what we want, their best doctors, business people, actors, news anchors, musicians and comedians, and pay Canada nothing for any of it just as we do with Cuba, Ireland, Germany, China, and all the rest. We just let gravity take its course. And the gold settles here. Mexico knows better, knows too well that we get what we want from them, from drugs to cooks and stoop labor and now cheap cars and stereos, without bearing any responsibility for the sorry state of their people and the massive thievery of their wealth by their own elected officials and assorted crooks. Indeed, by respecting their sad and strayed nationalism, we keep their problems there and let in mostly the good stuff, the stuff we want. Cuba illustrates the point, that we are not into conquest, not of the old sort, with guns and royal commissioners. As big an aggravation as Fidel Castro has been or tried to be, as short as a Cuban/American war would be and as compliant and juicy a plum as Cuba might be, to the consternation of that large and prosperous part of Cuba living in Miami, we just havent bothered, not even to send in air cover for the tragic Bay of Pigs martyrs. Troubling as it may be to some of us, we do not think all of Cuba and all Cubans worth one American life,
nor much American thought. Besides, we get what we want and bear no responsibility for the rest of it. That we thought Panama was worth a brief fire fight, and the miserable way we did that, only proves the point, that we can do it, if it strikes us to do it, and that we are not very good at it. And so we then turn them loose to work for us more-or-less without pay or significant responsibility. Grenada was yet another quaint exception, but again, we didnt stay. And Haiti, which we have always been quick enough to abandon. We dont take any longer term responsibility. Our idea is to go in, clean up the mess, if it really matters to us and we are not likely to get hurt, and then get out. Still troubling me are the faces I recall from the streets of Havana on the eve of what was really Che Guevarras victory, and the words of many there who asked me, When will the Marines come? Go back and tell your people we need the Marines, and we need them now the only time we have ever been safe was under American guns. We know this Castro fellow. He will be another dictator like all the rest. And, of course, he has been. To my shame, I have never until now said anything to anybody. The awful question we face, and yet dont really face, instead take full advantage of, is what to do about places like that, what to do when a wall of nationalism shields those who commit barbarous acts on their own people and threaten others but not us. What we have done perhaps too often, Im sad to say, is either nothing or things far worse, as we once quietly conspired with the butcher Batista to keep Cuba safe for our crooks of various colors, as we helped created horrors in Chile and in Iran and Iraq and across much of Africa and so many other places. And of course, as we are doing now in Afghanistan. Not because we want the place, but for some other perverse reason that makes so little sense to anyone that they are certain we are up to no good. No, sorry, we are just out of
our element with no clue what to do next. Like most people, mostly we dont really care. And mostly we dont do very much, at least nothing that helps. I would say this, however, that should we ever screw up the interest and the courage to do it, I, for one, would not bat an eye nor care one whit for the chauvinistic screams of any despot we smash to save people from tragedy laid on them behind walls of nationalism. So long as it is not just an excuse to do something else, as we have done all too often. If the moral issue doesnt count, then we might consider the benefits of creating a few more places out there fit for human habitation, so we are not overrun by all those unfortunate souls seeking to find it here. And having said that, I hope we dont. As Grenada and Panama and Iraq and Afghanistan and too many other places have proven, I dont think we have the skill to do it, we are likely to do far more harm than good, and, in this cynical world, nobody would understand why we did it, even those we might try to protect. And then we would wind up having to care for them and listen to them bitch. Better they just come here, if they can figure out how to make it, and get on with becoming Americans. As I tried to explain to those friends I sadly abandoned in Cuba all no doubt Americans now, living in Miami I am not sure you really want us to do that, to save you from yourselves. In any event, we are not up to it. It is not our thing. Our crimes are of a different sort.
THE REAL INVASION The French seldom get much right about America, but one thing they do seem to understand is the risk we pose to them. America leaks, and the things we leak are not always the best things to have. Sadly, the French have always had very bad taste in Americana, and so their rather differential vigilance against creeping Americanism too often gives them the worst we have to offer and keeps out the best. Indeed, even with Tom Paines help, they got our revolution wrong and made a huge mess of their own. Still, the idea is a good one, that nations should guard themselves against American trash. The Russians have been especially bad about the things they bring home from here. It is perhaps the legacy of forty years of not having much of anything American that has so whet their thirst for American trappings as well as their poor taste on what to take. The result is ugly indeed. Like many Americans, I am quite fond of Russians, those I know. When they started visiting Alaska, the first break in the Iron Curtain, wandering wide eyed around Anchorage shopping malls showing off not only the tragedy from which they came but also their wonderful richness of character and charm, we
were all love struck, they with us and we with them. We could hardly do enough for one another, perhaps to try to compensate for the years we stood so fiercely armed and vigilant across the one mile between us on that narrow Bering Sea. But then it was not so pleasant when we started returning the visits. Siberia, it turned out, for that matter all of Russia, is not nearly as attractive as the people who came from there to visit Alaska. Indeed, most of it proved flat out ugly. And Alaskans retreated in horror and dismay. Nowhere had any of us ever seen freedom and capitalism take on such a hideous complexion. We talked straight, tried to help, to do what we could to show them how freedom and capitalism worked, and all they wanted to know was how to steal. Freedom and free enterprise in Russia turned immediately into mobsters and corruption. A White Russian friend of mine predicted that would happen, that the commissars would just change clothes and go on doing what they had always done, what the Tzars and Cossacks had done, terrorize and rob their people blind. Meanwhile, many of my friends in the mineral industries couldnt wait to get in there. They dropped everything everywhere and rushed into all the fragments of what was once the Soviet Union, perhaps, like so many other invaders, never to be seen again. Their success may depend on their character and not necessarily in the right order. Even before Communism fell, a pipeline engineer I used to work with came back from an official visit with great acclaim for the virtues of Russia. He had been picked up at the airport by a commissar in a fancy car. Posted on the dash was the speed limit, the speed that car could drive no matter what. You drove according to your standing, not the conditions. And so they flew through little villages, scattering pigs and chickens and children in every direction. My Texas friend thought that was pretty cool, the way things ought to be, no silly damned rules for important people, as he had come to think of himself.
He may do well there. I hope so, and I hope they keep him. From the ill-conceived Disney park in France to the ubiquitous McDonalds and Kentucky Fried Chicken and Joe Camel to the far less conspicuous, America, in one form or another, is now everywhere. And we as a nation and as a people have very little to do with it. Indeed, we have hardly noticed. Nor do we much care. We surely take no pride in this spreading of the least tasteful and least American stuff about us, but it really doesnt matter to us. If others buy this stuff and think of it as American, then that is their business and their ignorance and their lack of taste and perhaps some profit to some American. And that is about the end of it as far as most of us are concerned. All of this falls out of the understated American mantra that people can do as they damned well please. No other country or people seem so disinterested in what others think of them or how they come across to others. We make very little effort to see that we are well represented abroad. Most of us never look. What we do notice and strongly resent are the attitudes that this trash and disinterest engenders in other people. We can get really puffy when somebody comes here and tells us we are trashy people with bad taste. Whether we are or not is probably in the eye of the beholder, but much of what others think of us is based on shallow views of the odd bits and pieces of American detritus that wash up on their shores and then take seed. There is something sad in all of this. It is sad that our trash so quickly takes root in other places and that the things we do well, the things we could offer that might be really useful in other places never seem to make it there. That is sad for them. But it is their business to sort it all out, to pick up whatever works for them. That others may think poorly of us because of that trash is also nothing we have much to say about. Indeed, we may just be trashy people. I am no
judge of that. I am too much a part of it. But I do have the feeling that most of what is important and valuable here is too easily missed, that if others looked deeper into what we are and what we have done, they would see a great deal that is worth taking home. As we should do the same. Except it is harder for us. We are, most of us, the refugees from those other places, and we just cannot stand to look back.
CORPORATE AMERICA
Few things are more poorly understood than our corporate workhorses and how they serve us. In much of the world, America is corporate America. Thats what they see, and thats what they have to deal with. And yet what they see is not what we see. It is not America as it is here. Corporations do not behave the same elsewhere as they do here, neither our own nor those of any other country. They are creatures of their political environments. In this I speak more from contact experience than academic authority, having worked inside many corporations and outside them and for and against them. Nor do I have any special axe to grind, one way or the other. My sole point here is that corporations need to be understood. They are very important to us, and, like the farmers who once depended on mules, we should know and use these corporate beasts of burden to our best advantage. Like mules and heavy equipment corporations can be dangerous. But to discard them or to abuse them because of that danger would be crazy. Just as
government is our responsibility, so too is it our responsibility to see that corporations behave as we want them to behave. It is our job to make them behave. For if we dont, as they have done in other places and too often here as well, they will surely tear up and destroy the farm. On the other hand, if we do make them behave, as they mostly do, they can produce massive goods and services, as well as handsome profit, for all of us. Unlike government agencies and government land, which mostly operate at a loss, corporate instruments produce stuff and mostly carry their own weight and a whole lot more. There is crucial role for government in corporate matters, but each has its very distinct place in America. When those roles are mixed up, as they sometimes are, we have a mess. Indeed, in much of the world, these functions are mixed and with horrendous results. The Soviet Union was a prime example, but it happens here too and even more often in Canada where there is too often a fuzzy line between government and free enterprise. The problem comes when the same people are responsible for both the success for the enterprise and the public interest. Invariably one or the other suffers, and most of the time both. It is crazy to do as so many argue that there be some kind of corporate social conscience. People may have a social conscience, but not corporations. That is not what they do. They cant do that. They are proscribed by law from it by their legally binding mandate to maximize profits. Indeed, corporate executives could go to jail for having a social conscience, and they should. That is not their job. To protect the public interest is the job of government, not some corporate executive. We make corporations behave by building around them a system of law to assure that end. Then we enforce and repair that law as required. In addition, we make sure that any who wander too far afield suffer for it.
Corporations feed on profit. If they get out of line, then all we have to do is cut off the profit. They are extremely sensitive to that rein. Food companies, for example, are frighteningly responsive to public perception of their products. Of course, they try to make that perception favor them, sometimes with outright lies, which generally backfire. But just watch how quickly food companies respond to whatever new food fad or research comes along. They try to lead, but, like politicians, mostly they follow the public. And those who fail to do that simply fail. If there is anything wrong with your supermarket, or your electronics store or automobile or airline, then take a look at yourself. For you and the rest of us who buy this stuff are the reason for it. These corporate guys and gals are desperately trying to figure us out, trying to get the stuff they think we want out where we can buy it from them and not from somebody else. And when they get it wrong, they are in deep trouble. To fault them as the cause of their imperfections or crimes, to say they are manipulating us and doing as they please and robbing us and all the rest of the standard socialist rhetoric is to miss entirely the responsibility of a free society. Corporations try to manipulate. They try to lie and cheat and steal, the really dumb ones, but it doent work, not when the public is alert and responsible, and they pay dearly for making that mistake when the public is alert and responsible. There are some corporations whose products nobody should buy. I personally dont buy Exxon gasoline because of the harm that corporation did to things that matter a great deal to me, nor anything from tobacco companies, when I can figure out just what they sell. Yet in each of these cases, it is not so much the companies that are at fault but the legal forces that permeate and surround them. We failed to set the appropriate terms, and they took advantage of it. The Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaskas Prince William Sound was a case study of how we can all work to create such a disaster. Exxon just did the dirty
work for us. The rest of us set the stage. Corporations all operate within a regulatory environment. It was the regulatory environment and not Exxon that failed us in Prince William Sound. The Exxon Valdez was simply a loose cannon, a disaster waiting to happen. Let me be clear that I am far from an apologist for any or all corporations. Like individuals, they differ, not only in the way they conduct their business but also in the kinds of things they produce. But we the people are the force with which they all have to deal, and we are the ones who are ultimately responsible for whatever these mules do. In Prince William Sound we the people sat back and allowed the oil industry to buy the Alaska State Senate, which then cut the Alaska regulatory agencies to helpless bare bones. In the meantime the Reagan Administration in collusion with the Congress destroyed the Coast Guard and other federal agencies assigned to protect the public interest in Alaska waters and elsewhere. And so there we were, bare-assed naked, relying on the oxymoron of corporate social responsibility. And we all got screwed, you and me and all our furry and finned and feathered friends. In this instance even corporate self interest failed. Among the biggest losers of that disaster was the Alaska oil industry, with which I was then a small part. The oil industry is not some monolithic monster. It is composed of thousands of hungry and fiercely competing companies and hundreds of thousands of mostly good people, all with their own take on how things ought to be done. And we let Exxon rip a huge hole in all of us. Or better put, Exxons lawyers and political operatives ripped a hole in all of us, including all the decent people in Exxon, as I can assure you they mostly are. Even their children suffered for it, being treated as pariahs by their class mates, for something done by a few corporate idiots and all the rest of us who colluded through our silence, our ignorance and our inaction.
One thing too many people missed is that most of that oil did not get into Prince William Sound. Most of it was pumped off into a reserve tanker by what was surely the most courageious ships crew ever to sail Alaskan waters, an Exxon crew who took their ship into that ticking, fuming bomb of gas and oil and potential hell-fire and somehow got out alive with most of that oil held safely in their ship. For thirty-six hours into the aftermath Exxon did everything right, even to the super heroic. But you could see and set your watch at the time their lawyers got control of it, took it away from the companys few oil hands and began the lies and deceptions and crimes that lawyers do so well. From that point on, it was Katy bar the door. Hell had come to Alaska, to be presided over by lawyers and some of the most ruthless people in the oil industry. And most of the world missed it, missed what really happened and got everything confused and all the actors with the wrong parts. That is our job to get it right, to figure out who did what and what price they should all pay for it, and mostly we got it wrong. We painted it all with too broad a brush, lumping the heroes and the villains together, on both sides of it. We got it wrong by mistaking as an accident what was so clearly waiting to happen, almost designed to happen, by failing to grasp the horrid fact that the Exxon Valdez disaster was the fault of good people not attending the peoples business, of allowing the worst among us license to run amok. This society requires that there be firm and opposing tension between corporations and the regulatory environment in which they are permitted to work. It is we the people who do the permitting. That is the role of government in a free society, to lay down the rules and see that they are heeded, whether by individuals or by corporations. Corporations can not do that for themselves. They should never be asked to do anything except what they are designed to do, which is to make a profit under the rules. As I have said, they can not be asked to do anything else, for that is illegal, to do other than maximize the return to
their shareholders. The rest of it is the business of government and the people it serves. And here in America, it is all of us. We are in charge. When things go wrong, we are at fault. All of the crooks and bastards on earth cant take that blame. Here, in America, the blame is ours. That is the price we pay to live in a free society where the people and not government have all the power. We the people are accountable for what happens here. Nor is it enough that I shall never buy another drop of Exxon gasoline. That is just to relieve some of my pain, to blame somebody else for something I failed to do. Too many of us saw it coming. You could smell it coming. And we did nothing. This thing need not and should not have happened. That it did rests with all of us, those who call ourselves Americans, and we, not Exxon, not Ronald Reagan, not a bought out Alaska Senate, but we the people made one gawdawful of a mess of it. You just cant have it both ways. You cant be in charge and then cry about how somebody else screwed up.
SOLDIERING
Geography (or the subset thereof we call intelligence) is sometimes called the handmaiden of empire. Understanding the world, its diversity and dynamics, is essential to knowing where and when and how to land the troops and what they might encounter. That knowledge, with military might, is critical to subduing and managing other people. History is replete with evidence that without it, without the major advantage of better understanding of the field or the sea and the enemy, superiority in arms alone will never carry the day. The 13 rebel American colonies of Britain were among the first and few to take head on that awesome imperial power, to declare ourselves free and to defeat on our soil the worlds mightiest empire. The rest mostly had to wait until that monster, like all the others, rotted and collapsed of its own weight. We took on the beast at its peak and, by force of largely civilian arms, not to mention our usual outrageous good luck, removed ourselves from its wretched belly. Our advantage was surely not in our military might but in our geography. On these strange new grounds, so far removed from the sustenance and familiar
fields of Europe and with little of the usual collusion of disparate tribesmen on which the British have always depended, the monster faltered and fell. In this our peculiar national origins we find much of the explanation for the even more peculiar status of both American geography and the American military. We came right out of the gate as anti-imperialists, not the first, surely, but arguably the most successful. We fielded an awkward and curious army, made up of people who were as likely to go home to check on the wife and tend the cows as to stay with the fight. They fought, when they felt like it, neither in fear of nor in support of some grand duke, but for themselves, to rid themselves of the tyranny of a foreign empire. That first truly American army, if it could be called an army, was made up mostly of the very kind of boys that still hang around the gun shop where my brother works, deadly enough each on their own, but hardly a real army. If the sordid facts be known, the Continental Army, the heart of it, came largely from Delaware, Maryland and Virginia. New England and the western frontier was of like rebellious mind, but they had been reduced to mostly widows and orphans by the British war with the French and their Indian allies. Like those Alaskan Dene villages, they had few left to fight. Pennsylvania, lower New York and New Jersey were ambivalent, waiting to see who might win, and the deeper South, as usual, was of divided loyalty and worried more about who would do their hard work for them. Yet this small, scruffy bunch set the standard and style for the American military, and it has stuck to this day. These are the very same kind of soldiers that flooded into England and then across Europe in the Second World War, the kind that set everyone elses heads wagging and their teeth to chattering. As Field Marshall Montgomery and half of England were quick to observe, they were not soldiers at all, or at least not good ones, and they surely had neither class nor much sense about how to fight a proper war. Half the time, right up to
the generals, they would not even do as they were told. Even worse, they fought when they felt like fighting. Some still hold it an open question whether General George Patton, had he not been killed, would have stopped short of Berlin, or even Moscow, orders or no orders. If that seems far fetched, consider General MacArthur and his mind set on China. What stopped him was not China, nor his orders, but one small man from Missouri far tougher than any general and all of China. Not that either general would have won, of course; they would have lost horribly, just as we nearly lost all of WW II, at a dozen or more junctures. Unlike those more crafty fellows, we dont do wars very well. Except perhaps the Cold War, which we fought in our own silly way, and won without even knowing it. And none of it has anything to do with building empires or with staying on foreign soil. It has always been about defeating and burying them. Although fools often accuse us of it, Americans dont do empires, at least not in any global sense. We are neither much interested in these other places nor apt at such enterprise. That is one of the reasons we, unlike Europeans, are so weak in geography, at least the geography of others, why that discipline never flourished here as it does elsewhere. We really dont care much for the rest of the world, and we are hugely disinterested in running it. What we are interested in is not having the stupidity and greed and brutality of these other places bleed over onto us. That was the purpose of the American Revolution and the Marshall Plan and the containment of the Soviet Union. That was the reason, after defeating them, we brought Japan and Germany out of their respective atavistic feudalisms. That is the reason we have gone to such nasty places as Vietnam, Korea, Kuwait, Somalia, Bosnia, and Kosovo, even to Iraq and Afghanistan, not to build or extend an empire but to try to keep the shit where it belongs. And that is why we leave as soon as we can, too soon usually, just to get the hell out of it, to get home and get on with our
lives. This American attitude also helps explain why we are so stupid in the way we deal with international intrigues. Here we dont breed cunning devils like Cromwell or Attila or Churchill or Montgomery or Stalin or Hitler or Tito or Mao; at least we dont sustain and encourage them. We dont understand these crafty kinds of people nor the people who do sustain them, and, because we are so different from them, they dont understand us. We breed and sustain people who are exactly what they say they are, people often brash, bold and sometimes bright, but hardly ever crafty. We are terrible about taking orders, we hate discipline and everyone looking alike, and we think dying or being mutilated is dumb. It is from just such people as this that we have to make up and run our military. And so, it is not hard to see why, like everything else about us, ours is a most peculiar military, and it is peculiar at its very core. It is peculiar, moreover, not only in being very unlike any other military establishment, it is also a most peculiar American thing. While it is distinctly American, it is also distinctly unAmerican. Armies mostly subdue people, either their own or somebody else. The American military does neither, at least not lately and never very well. Its sole purpose, the third and historically lesser purpose of any army, is to protect the American Republic from external aggression. Increasingly and clumsily it is being used in mostly vain efforts to clean up feeding grounds for aggression, assignments not setting well with most Americans, who have neither the stomach for it nor the brains to become involved in the affairs of others. In most of the world it is not difficult to build an Army. Either things are so awful already that the stupidity of being a soldier is overshadowed by the horror of not being one, or else somebody will make it so horrible for you that you just take the best of two miserable paths, put your head down and do as you are
told. Of course, people can also be drummed into a frenzy so that they leap into the abyss themselves, and we do that too, in a pinch, or try to do it. That works best on young people, which largely explains why young people shoulder most of the burden of war. Soldiers are basically young fools persuaded to do really stupid things, like kill and mutilate other people and get killed or mutilated themselves doing it. Although I would not minimize the downside of being killed or mutilated, still that is not even the worst part of it. The worst part is the other, what you have to do to all those people of the other persuasion. That is the thing that sticks with you, that wakes old soldiers screaming in the night. The problem here is that, as every American general officer since George Washington knows too well, Americans neither buy the slogans nor are we much driven by other horrors. To get us to fight, you have to reason with us, and it is a hard case to make, that we should go out and kill or get killed. These things go to the root of the curious way we now conduct war, which appears to give the highest priority to assuring that no American gets hurt. Indeed, we seem bent now on extending this gentle care to the enemy, figuring out schemes by which to defeat them without killing their people. And when we accidentally or otherwise do hurt somebody, as with dropping a bomb on real people, it becomes a matter of national anxiety and disgrace. This too makes us different from other people, most of whom have well demonstrated not only their willingness to kill their own and everybody else, but actually take some relish in doing it. It often escapes us that brutalizing and terrifying the enemy population is a time honored device of war. Vietnam was a case in point. When we found we could not stop North Vietnam without somebody getting hurt, we lost interest in the whole exercise and went home not that we lacked the forces to have wiped out everything
south of China, but that we just didnt care to do that. We have never had the stomach for the kinds of wars fought by people who think war is about killing people, their own as well as the enemy, that if you play the war card, then you have to do that. Curiously too we seemed not to notice that the advantage the Vietnamese had was the same advantage we had when we took on the British. At least in terms of the warfare, the parallels are unnerving. Somewhere in the seeming lull between Korea and Vietnam I was summoned to serve in the United States Army, something I would never have considered doing had there been some better option than going to prison. Even so it helped that we were not exactly at war with anyone, and it appeared I had a good chance to get through it without being seriously hurt. What I did as a so-called soldier is beyond credibility, and so I wont go into it, except to say that, for someone with little or no rank, I had one of the shortest chains of command in the U.S. Army. While I was busy with those odd jobs, as I always was, lost out there in some limbo, several colleagues in my unit became perplexed when their NCOs ordered them, as punishment for some infraction of some silly Army rule, to rake up leaves where there was no leaves and to suffer other kinds of humiliation. That was not the deal, as they saw it. We were in the Army to serve our country to the best purposes our training and ability permitted. Because we all had college degrees in certain technical fields of interest to the Army, we were given restricted military occupational specialties (MOS) and those funny assignments. Thus we were supposed to do the things we had been trained to do, things we were good at. Picking up leaves and being made to look silly was not one of those things, not part of the deal. We werent trained for that, were not authorized to do it, and to do it was, in the view of my colleagues, not only a waste of precious national resources but contrary to our orders.
Being stationed, perhaps unwisely, directly across the Potomac from Capitol Hill, the boys piled into their cars and went to see Senator Dodd, senior, who happened then to Chair the Senate Armed Services Committee. The boys politely put their case to him, and he agreed that this was indeed not only a breach of faith and a waste but a national disgrace. The upshot was fascinating to behold. Senator Dodd made a phone call or two, which resulted in massive rank adjustments up and down that short chain of command and some reassignments. The boys returned to their real work and were never again asked to pick up invisible or any other kind of leaves. Bottom line here is, Army or no Army, you just dont fuck with an American, at least not any who remember they are Americans, who know what that means and can find their way to Capitol Hill. All of which brings me to a major point of concern. The Army I was in was full of civilians, like me, people drafted more-or-less against their will to serve their country. My serial number began with the proud letters, US, which meant that I was drafted and not a volunteer, for whom the stigmatized RA serial numbers were reserved. My much respected first sergeant, although he was himself an enlistee, put it to me this way, When we go to war, anything serious, then just give me draftees, civilian soldiers. You cant trust any damned fool who would volunteer for this shit. You cant depend on them. You never know what one of those clowns will do. This from a tiny Philippine-American we called One-Tank, for the time in Korea when, as commander by default, he came riding out of hell-fire on top of the only tank left of what had been a full battalion before they ran into half of China swarming across the Yalu River. This from a man who knew about war and about men, a man who dreamed of the day he and his good buddy, Douglas MacArthur, might have one more shot at China.
My concern is this. Although I have two sons who might die for it, and although I have told them to run for Canada if it ever comes to it and know they wont, it makes me very uneasy that we now rely on a volunteer Army. It makes me very uneasy that there may be nobody left in it who would think or dare to go to the Congress when they are treated as something less than Americans or to say Hell, No! and fight back when told to do what they know is wrong. It makes me uneasy that mercenaries are going to fight and kill and perhaps die for us, that that awful burden is no longer shared by us all, the children of the wealthy and powerful, as well as the poor. When it is your sons and daughters who will be killed by it, and maybe yourself, that gets your attention, and war is something that deserves everyones attention. We should consider carefully the ugly possibilities of an army of people somewhat different from the rest of us and what they might do should some fool tell them to fire on Americans, as fools have done from time to time. Never in our history has such a shot been fired by anyone with a US serial number. And now sadly and I think to our grave peril, there are no soldiers left with these proud numbers. That is not to say, of course, that anyone or everyone who volunteers to be a soldier of this republic is a fool or some lesser person or lesser soldier. Some of our finest soldiers have volunteered. When it comes down to it, when it is serious, then even the best of us may volunteer. It is more a matter of why and when and how we volunteer and having the rest of us there to keep any fools straight and to share the load. What counts, as One-Tank would have put it, is what they may do when the shit really starts to fly. Then I, like One Tank, would much prefer a civilian soldier to cover me and a civilian army to defend this republic. Among the quaint things I was assigned to puzzle over in my so-called soldier days was what to do should the Soviet Union invade Alaska, one of many nasty strategies we found when we looked up their sleeve. What we would have
done is nail the bastards, just as the Dene did their predecessors, and we told them so and told them why and how and how much it would hurt, which gave them pause. We would have nailed them the same way we nailed the sorry troops of Saddam Hussein, by chopping off their head. You see, most other armies have a head, just one. You chop it off, and the whole thing dies. In Alaska the Eskimo Scouts and grizzly bears would have finished them off. The American Army, even impoverished of normal people as it has become, has no end of heads, right down to the last man, like one PhilippinoAmerican corporal riding out on top of that last tank, supreme commander of an entire battalion. Whoever is left is in command, and the farther down it goes, the tougher they are and the harder they fight. Lastly, a few words about the officers corps, not kind words, because I have very little use for these misbegotten relics of European militarism. Not only are they all volunteers, which makes them suspect enough, the whole wretched idea of an officers corps, a class of superior people, is both absurd and antithetical to American thinking. Should there be such things as superior people, that is to say, people with advanced character and intellect, they would be unlikely, in this country at least, to choose such a career, and if they should make that mistake, they would be unlikely to stay with it. Now, there may well be a few decent people who happen to be military officers, who perhaps made a mistake or had some other excuse. Indeed, I have known a few, some for whom I hold in very high regard. What I have never seen is any who were in any way superior to me or anybody else. We also know that the people who conduct Americas war, the real leaders on the ground, are not officers but NCOs.20 Field officers are largely a dangerous joke.
20 Not that I would suggest he has my nasty bias on this, but Stephen E. Ambrose presents a great study of the American soldier of World War II in his book, Citizen Soldiers: The U.S. Army from the Normandy Beaches to the Bulge to the Surrender of Germany.
As anyone who has been there knows, officers are mostly mediocre people, ordinary to a fault. Except for a few real warriors, both Indian and otherwise, American military service attracts the ordinary and the weak, people likely having something to prove to themselves or to somebody else. If they are to survive, they also have to be quickly adaptive and tolerant of all kinds of abuse. And so senior officers tend to be pretty wimpy folks. I once had the pleasure of the company of a delightful Swedish girl, who served as companion and tutor for the children of a Pentagon General. I stopped to pick her up one evening at their home in McLean, Virginia, where I was graciously invited to join a small party the General was hosting there for some fellow Pentagon brass. My impromptu invitation may have had to do with my funny Army job, which made me something of interest even though I had no significant rank. Perhaps they wanted to see if I might say anything I was not supposed to say. We stayed only the polite requisite few minutes, begging off on the excuse that something we were going to was about to begin. Still, we were there long enough to see how things work among the likes of these gentle creatures, something well re-enforced by my companion, who said it made her sick. It was the obsequious demeanor of our host and the others there trying to outdo one another kissing up to those of higher rank and apparent power. My companion confided that this went even to the use of ones wife as leverage to favor. It was not a pretty picture. Later, as a civilian contractor to the Army supported by a military detachment, I was continually called on by the detachment commander to help him get the Army equipment he needed to do the work I assigned to him. It was a huge embarrassment to him, and one day over a beer, he confided that he had been told what to do about it by a fellow officer. His problem, he was advised, was that he just hadnt made the effort to
get along, which, as best we could figure it, meant that he was not sucking up to his fellow officers. Indeed, it was indicated to him that it might be nice if he introduced his wife, a supremely comely lady, to them. We both agreed to go on as we were doing, me having enough clout anyway to get the stuff we needed without him selling off his wife for it. It was not too long after that he decided to be a civilian, which job he did very well. I heard later that my friend did lose his wife to an Air Force officer but not his soul. My brother-in-law from a past marriage, a fellow I held in great admiration and respect, explained his military life this way. At the time he was a Marine Corps captain. He had served in several branches of the military, as an enlisted man, and then each time he was discharged, he told me, he panicked at the prospect of being a civilian and re-enlisted. He told me over a couple of beers that he got depressed thinking about it, the fact that he had tried and was unable to do anything else. It gravely troubled him that what he did, all he could do, was kill people, that he was nothing more than a trained killer. Frankly, that is exactly the kind of trained killer this republic needs, one who hates it and does it anyway. That kind you can trust. Unlike the posters suggest, or maybe they do when you think about it, these may not be the best we can field. Still, as Americans and so less likely to misjudge their place in things, they are probably good enough. They are still those very special soldiers of the republic, which means soldiers of the people and not of some queen or aristocrat or warlord, a kind of soldier that, for all pretense to the contrary, is a very rare breed.
PUBLIC ORDER I suppose it fair to say that most of the world considers America to be a savage place, a place where people carry guns and shoot one another for the smallest of reasons. Carrying a gun myself most of the time and having killed more stuff than I care to think about, I am hardly in a position to refute anything but the size of those views. Indeed, I have to think our savagery is wildly exaggerated, that such savagery as we may have has little to do in any case with our penchant to carry guns. The guns, I suspect, have to do with our being revolutionaries. For many they are perhaps a subliminal security against the tyranny of the state. It may be silly, but Americans hate to be helpless, to have to call on somebody else to protect us. We neither believe they will be there nor that it is anybodys business but our own to protect ourselves and those who depend on us. We dont like police, and we distrust the notion that they can or will help us. And so it is tough being a police officer in this country. It is much better where people consider themselves subjects and rest comfortably under the security of a properly managed state. But that is not a American mindset. A major concern of the constructors of American government was the
seeming conflict between having order and having freedom, between having the right to do as one pleased and the harm this right could cause. They treated it as they treated so many other parts of their design. They built that conflict into the system. Indeed, this tension between order and freedom remains strong today, and, hopefully, we shall see it well into the future both here in American and wherever there are healthy societies. That conflict is not the problem. Where there is a problem is where it has been resolved, either in the favor of chaos or in the favor of order. It is in those places where life is unbearable. The American system of government feeds on conflict, and the tension between order and freedom is one of its great virtues and a continuing source of strength. The American solution has been to err well on the side of freedom, then to distribute authority as broadly and as defused as possible and then to lay out a few principles to guide everyone, including the Supreme Court, which, because these matters are so poorly defined, has as its main task to wrestle endlessly with this matter. The result is a very fluid system that moves continuously back and forth and yet progressively within rather clearly defined bounds across these fertile grounds. Indeed, Americans system of order was not created by the Constitution. It mostly derives from the British, and, except for the establishment of the Supreme Court and the Bill of Rights, an afterthought, pretty much bypassed the Constitution. Things like sheriffs and grand juries and federal marshals are not even mentioned in the Constitution; like so much else, they were presumed to continue. Also presumed was the dynamism of British Common Law, which more-or-less says that things which prevail should then prevail. Unlike Roman based civil law, a far more static structure, British Common Law and its derivatives work on the active interfaces of precedent, decency and common sense. And yet it was all Americanized, both by the Constitution and by the
disposition of Americans to be as we are rather than as others might suppose we should be. It was Americanized in odd places, like on the frontier and in the gold camps of California, in places where people saw the need to have some kind of order and manufactured it to specifications right there on the spot. Consequently, the history of American jurisprudence is curious indeed. While it was often been reported or supposed to have been fairly chaotic, American life, in fact, has been rather orderly. The people demanded and received a good measure of order, the cost of which was more often at the expense of those with limited or no access to power, those somehow left at the fringe or beyond. With the passage of time this base of people served by the agents of order has expanded, as has the base of people with full access to the freedoms promised by the Constitution. Indeed, considering that it brought in all too recently women and people of color, it has been a massive expansion. It is in this light that one has to view American law enforcement. Hollywood fantasies to the contrary, it has worked pretty well for those it served, and over the years, it has come to serve a far broader spectrum of people. As that service broadened, however, there were some losses to the previously narrower privileged base. My grandfather served as Chief of Police for Atlantic City, New Jersey. It was an orderly place then, a credit to its nickname, the Queen of Cities. There was virtually no street crime and, of course, no legal gambling. And so, with its fresh sea breezes, broad sandy beaches, 18-mile boardwalk and massive amusement piers, home to world class entertainment, it was a favorite vacation spot, especially for the well-to-do. It was also run by a mob, and there was arguably as much gambling there then as now, in elegant casinos either somewhere below sea level or else on the missing 13th floor or the floor above the top floor of those grand old hotels, all of which you accessed with a special key. My grandfathers job was to keep crime off the streets, the wealthy safe and to stay out of the mobs business. He did
his job well, as he could do with little constraint in those days when nobody had Miranda rights nor much else to protect them from those whose job it was to see that everything in sight was peaceful. Now my grandfather is long dead, the mob is more into garbage and laundry than gambling, the city looks like it was swept by the plague, street crime is ugly and rampant, and this now festering urban sore is visited mostly by busloads of folks gathered up from retirement homes out to spend their social security checks on the vain hope they will somehow strike it rich in the garish awful things they now call casinos. It is hardly a pretty picture, and yet I would never suggest we go back to those more orderly days. There was a dark side to that previous world, and we are well done with it. I went to college sometime in the Fifties, and I recall that golden era pretty well, except I do not recall it to have been golden, as those who did not live there now seem to see it. To help pay the bills I worked summers for the New York Herald Tribune Fresh Air Fund, whose stated purpose was to provide summer camp experiences for inner city kids. What I did, in fact, was to maintain some modicum of control over the charges selected for us by the Police Athletic League, a front for the NYC Police, who selected youth gang leaders to send us so they could break up the gangs while their leaders were in our tender care. The drug of the day, the thing driving all of it, as it is once again becoming, was heroin, but of a much rougher sort, and, of course, that mellow old standby, marijuana. We broke a few arms and legs. We thought we had to do that, to survive and to maintain order. The year after I left, a counselor I used to partner with killed one of his charges. It was perhaps self defense, but also a little preventive maintenance. These were tough kids and they had to be kept from the joys of life as they knew it, which included everything from homosexual gang rape to the
Chinese death by a thousand cuts, except they rarely got past fifty before their victim died. I bring you this ugly recollection because I want to make the case that we Americans did not arise from a perfect world, nor were the Fifties quite as they have too often been portrayed. Nor has our world gone to hell as we watched. From what I have seen, it is a good deal better than it used to be. While we may have a long way to go, we are clearly on the right path and now well down it. Indeed, I would suggest we are out of sight of the rest, a view supported clearly by the fact of America being, as it has so long been, the number one destination not only of every wretched world derelict but also of their well-heeled countrymen who would forego privilege for security and opportunity. One of the many changes here is the way laws are enforced, the kinds of things people wearing a badge can do and get away with. Of course, there was a price to pay for that, at least by those who did not have that particular problem. You can see it in Atlantic City. My grandfather would never have abided the stuff you see there now, nor would he have had to abide it. If enforcement were outside his jurisdiction, he had only to make a phone call to see that somebody else handled it. I complained to my brother one day, before he retired as a kind of vice cop and went into gun dealing, that it worried me that police all over the country were procedure bound, that they handcuffed everybody they arrested, no matter what the offense or who they were, even children and old ladies. I worried that somebody might try that on our father, or me, and we might get shot for breaking some cops neck. My brother had another view of it, as he often does. His point was that this is the worst that will happen to you, that no longer can they take you in and then beat you half to death, that uniform police procedures protect everyone, and it protects you everywhere in the country. Of course, as anyone who reads can see, we are not quite there yet, and I worry seriously if we are even on the
right track. It is the order that worries me, the notion that we can organize authority and thereby get the results we want. Nor do my brother and I agree on female police officers. In this matter I remain a bit of a chauvinist, thinking that it is dangerous to both the female officers and to the public, at least the drunken public, to ask a petite armed woman to make a huge, mean drunk stand down without shooting him. My brother says no, that it is the uniform people must respect and not the size or shape of it, and that we are just going to have to learn that. He told me his best back-up was not only a female officer but a dear, sweet lady and mother of two. That boy is way ahead of me on this one, and yet I am uneasy with it. For me it is just too damned orderly. I expect we would not agree entirely on my concern that police gather too much together as a separate tribe removed from the people they are hired to protect and often hostile to that larger society. My grandfather walked the streets both as a cop and as Chief of Police. He was part of the community, and the community, as much as the police, mourned his death. He was not an alien in dark glasses. He was just Al Gohl, the cop, and people loved him. People cried when they recalled him, all sorts of people, shop-keepers, whores, everyone. He was their man, working for them. He was one of them, on their side. Police dont often get that kind of outpouring anymore, and it worries me terribly. Like our volunteer military, they increasingly live in isolation and fear, and they get damned little respect. They cluster together, hold hands and peer out into a world that fears and too often loathes them for what they seem to be, some outside force beyond public control, and perhaps worse, beyond public sympathy and compassion. Cause and effect is a little fuzzy here, and it may not matter. The Los Angeles Police Department, when I lived there in the midst of the riots of the
Sixtiesthe riots I witnessed mostly by the police themselveswas already given over to this kind of order and isolation, and it has only grown worse through the years. So has the community response. One way to approach this or any other problem is to look to the professionals, to ask them to sort it out. Whoever started it, if anyone really did, we must get it behind us, return the community police to the community, and perhaps those who are professionals should take the lead. It is, after all, as much loss to them as it is to the rest of us, and perhaps more so. It is a matter most of us encounter rarely. A police officer has to deal with this hostility every minute of every day, and it can make his or her life both miserable and dangerous. Surely that is what they would do in Canada, leave it to the professionals. But I suspect our police need our help, and we owe it to them and to the rest of us. Theirs is a tough enough job, and I am not entirely sure they understand what has happened to them or what to do about it. This being America it may well be up to the rest of us to get this thing done. And if we dont, then we have no one to blame but ourselves. It would be nice someday once again to see a community cry when a great police officer passes away, not just the widows and orphans and fellow officers in their quasi-military salute. It would be nice to see some public outrage, as they have in Britain, or used to have, when a peace officer is harmed. For a start, it might help if police put away those idiotic dark glasses and looked their neighbors straight in the eye. And got rid of all those wretched black SS uniforms. We should think carefully about any legislation that treats one class of citizen differently from another. It simply doesnt make any sense nor is it legally justified here in America to treat the murder of a police officer or a federal
chicken inspector as a more serious crime than the murder of any other American. And perhaps we might treat a pet peeve of mine, the dreadful habit of police sewing an American flag on their sleeve. That slouchy act hardly makes you an American, and certainly not a better one than the rest of us. What it does is cheapen that flag, and, friend, that is a real sore spot with many of us. That special flag needs to fly free in the air, not be pasted to some sweaty body or stitched down to some sinister uniform. This is not a police state, and that flag is not police property. Nor is it military property. It is the flag of a free people, and it should damned well fly free. Of course, all of that, the Nazi uniforms, the sickness of flag wearing, the clinging to one another, the encircling of their worst, the fear they try to hide behind their dark glasses, all of it is symptomatic of a besieged and isolated minority. In some ways the police today are a lot like those kids we dragged up out of the gutters of New York, banded together by fear and hatred and thus tribalized. And, in my view, it is the product of too much order, too much organization and too little attention to the interface between this society and the people we hire to keep order. We need to work out how to get our police back at the family table, with the rest of us, as real Americans and not black-suited aliens, as respected protectors of a free society, as the kind of people they once were, people you would cry for and look to with respect and not fear. If we fail to rescue them from wherever it is they have gone or we have sent them they may well leave us altogether, and then, as we may already have seen at Ruby Ridge and at Waco, and perhaps in sick response in Oklahoma City, we shall have hell to pay.
LAWYERS AND THE LIKE
One should, of course, be able to speak at length about the geography of America, or any other place, without once mentioning lawyers. Like accountants or carpenters, they should be ubiquitous and so, of little interest to geographers, who look for things that make places different from one another. But it is not so. Lawyers have long been a prominent part of the picture of what America is and how it differs from other places. And worse still, their special place in what we are gets larger every day. While lawyers dont take up much space in geography texts, they should, because today the practice of law has become one of the major things that sets America apart from the rest of the world, and it is not a pretty picture. In a large sense lawyers are the price we pay for the disorder and discord we have built into our system of government, which may not be happenstance since lawyers were prominent at its birth and no doubt thinking about future work. Nothing here is ever fully resolved. You cant turn to a book or document or civil servant to find out just what to do, what you can get away with and what you can not. Just call the IRS sometime and ask them how to interpret the tax laws. I naively followed their advice once and almost went to jail for it. In other places that is rarely the case. In other places somebody is in
charge of nearly everything, and they will tell you what to do. And if you do what they tell you, you will probably be doing the right thing, or at least the safest thing. In America there are hardly ever permanent answers to anything. And so you have to hire a lawyer to tell you what you can do and then to bail you out for having done it. What is really strange is how this compulsion to use lawyers has gone so far beyond anything to do with law. Not only do lawyers here in America tell everyone else what to do about all manner of things, they also have taken charge themselves of things about which they have no clue, things like the economy and war and agriculture and pipelines. I am thinking of a lawyer president, Bill Clinton, of which we have had far too many. Mr. Clinton promised were he elected President, he would see that his administration looked like America. It was color he must have had in mind, because for all their color the only people he appointed to anything important were lawyers, and last time I looked, Americans were not all lawyers, not yet. That it might be well to have somebody other than a lawyer in charge of things like agriculture and forests and commerce and war apparently did not occur to this lawyer President, his lawyer wife, lawyer Vice president or his lawyer friends, nor did he seem to recall that law schools teach none of these things, except maybe war, but then of a different sort. My work has given me an embarrassment of lawyer friends, and so I will ask them to forgive me for what I have to say here, even though most of it I heard from them. In fact, nobody has more hurtful things to say about lawyers than lawyers themselves, which could be their salvation and ours, that they too know something is wrong. Unfortunately, none of us has much grasp of the things we do not know. I suppose by definition we are not conscious of things we dont sense, in one way or another. Therefore they seem not to exist. That is the lawyer conundrum,
that they are caught in a world of things they do not understand and yet put in charge of it. I am not entirely sure why we do this, put lawyers in charge of things they do not understand, but we surely do it. Several years ago my then wife and I went through a costly divorce. About half of what we owned went to the lawyers hired to protect us from each other in what could have been worked out at the kitchen table with a pocket calculator. Unknown to either of us and not mentioned by the lawyers (indeed, one of the lawyers himself did not understand it) was the clear fact that the no fault divorce law of the state in which this action was taken would only allow that we divide up our property in equal parts, which we finally did, less the half that the lawyers took for their protection and sage advice, mostly about things they did not understand half as well as my ex-spouse and me. The strange part is this. Both of our lawyers were and remain decent people who tried to do their job responsibly as they best saw it. Both decried the fact that their respective clients were losing our respective asses in the process. Both tried to minimize our losses but only as lawyers know how to do it, which is very badly, as they do most everything badly, except pay themselves obscene amounts for the burden they place for no good reason on every transaction in the country, for most of which they are not needed in the first place. Like cops, these good people have been sucked into an insane system over which they and all the rest of us seem to have lost all control. I have already berated lawyers who pose as lobbyists. But I would return to it. I was once party to what would have been, were it approved, the largest industrial project ever undertaken: a huge, refrigerated, high-pressure natural gas pipeline from Alaskas Arctic Coast across Canada splitting into delivery legs to southern Canada, the Midwest and both the East and West Coasts. It would
have been a fancy steel tube four feet in diameter and six thousand miles long, with all the trappings needed to push these massive volumes of gas to market. We studied it, designed it and then set about getting the requisite approvals from the Canadian and American governments to build it. This multibillion dollar project failed because we made the fatal mistake of asking lawyers to get the government approvals. Someday I shall set myself the task of telling that yet untold story, untold at least by anyone who has any idea what it was all about and what, in fact, happened. But that is a big task. For now I just want to say these few things about it. My part in it was to see that we understood and took full account of the social and biological environments in the Alaskan sector. I was also assigned to see that our people in the field north of the Yukon River worked safely and to provide advice to both Canadian and American management in certain political matters, especially those having to do with Native people. The project was brilliantly designed, mostly by Canadian geotechnical and other engineers and scientists. Indeed, every technical aspect of the project was so well attended and treated that even our most aggressive opponents praised our vision and the work we had done. That project, the Canadian and Alaskan Arctic Gas project, stands today and is universally recognized as a monument to the futility of sound technical preparation in the face of political mindlessness. I do not fault the opposition, and they were many, nor do I give them much credit for our failure. They had their case and their points to make, and some of them were sound. What I do fault are the fools we assigned to attend the politics and those of us who allowed these critical matters to rest in the shaky hands of lawyers. It is beyond me why we ask lawyers to deal with things about which they
know nothing, have no training and are ill-disposed. The Arctic Gas project failed because the lawyers we assigned to handle the politics had no clue about any political aspect of the project on either side of the border and, of course, knew nothing about the technical merits of it. Indeed, how could they? Where in any school of law do they teach anything about pipelines, caribou, politics, or, for that matter, real human affairs? While we had hundreds of Canadians working on the technical aspects of the project, and while the project was largely Canadian managed, those Canadian managers, in some spasm of insanity, assigned an inexperienced American lawyer to do the politics, both there in Canada and in the United States. And it was there, in those complex political arenas, that we were massacred. The fault was not with the lawyers, anymore than it would have been with garbage collectors or roofers had we been stupid enough to assign them the task. The fault was with us, those of us who understood Canadian politics and who understood the project and who knew full well what we should have done to get it permitted. Indeed, the lawyers to whom we assigned that task worked as hard as anyone could to accomplish an assignment that was simply beyond their knowledge, skill and disposition. They were simply over their heads, and they sunk us all. What is it about us that we assign lawyers to do things we can do far better without them? Why do we put them in charge of things, these people who have no management skills or training and have too often proven it? I have my suspicions, but I really dont know. What I can suggest is that it should be investigated by people who are trained to look into such things. One day I was working on an assignment for British Petroleum when Exxons Alaska district chief called over to get some advice on a matter of some interest to both companies, something about which they thought I might have some knowledge. And so BPs exploration manager and I tripped over to the
Exxon offices to see what we might do to help. In their boardroom we encountered a plane load of Exxon lawyers fresh in from Houston. They were headed by a snarky young thing who was about to file suit against an Inupiat village on the grounds she had just discovered that the village had only been in existence since 1946, and so had no aboriginal claim or standing to intervene in some drilling Exxon wanted to do in the middle of their whaling waters. She read it in a book someplace. What she had not read is why the village was built in 1946. That was the year the Air Force came to build a radar site where their old village had been and began by bull-dozing the village and several thousand years of Inupiat occupance into the lagoon while the people were all out fishing. And so when the villagers returned, they shook their heads, took the scraps tossed out by the Air Force and built a new village indeed in 1946. I suggested that should Exxon take the advice of this paragon of legal scholarship, they might well be reduced from drilling for oil to changing it and selling stale sandwiches. They quickly packed up this brilliant attorney and her entourage and sent them all back to Houston. Still, I have to suspect that she stuck it out and was in some dark corner behind the marvelous strategy Exxon took when they decided to let a drunk run the Exxon Valdez onto Bligh Reef in Prince William Sound, a cute little act that not only destroyed a large piece of heaven on this earth but also set back Alaskas entire oil industry some fifty years. Perhaps it was she who took the helm after that first heroic 36 hours and turned the black tide against us all. A good project for somebody, something I wish I still had some graduate students to work on, would be to add up the costs of good and bad legal services to American industry and the American people. Perhaps somebody has
done it, in which case it must have been buried it in the deepest security. Still, I would never blame the lawyers for any of it, even robbing the national treasury as they do. What you have to ask is why anyone would assign any of them to pose as expert on anything, even law, or to trust anyone who has a professional license to lie. Where in the course of their education did any of them learn anything about all the matters they think they are trained to address? I hasten to add that some lawyers do understand at least some aspects of the law, and some define ethics as something other than not ratting out on one another. But those people are mostly law professors. And a few judges, who have worked at it for awhile. You do not come to understand law nor any part of it from a three-year race through law school. At best, that is but a hasty survey of a massive field of information, the keys to the law library, and entirely too much encouragement to exceed your wisdom and spare your human decency. And passing the bar? Well, consider some of those who have done it. All of this I learned from lawyers and colleagues over in the School of Law. And so it might not be entirely true. In any event, the point I want to make is that here in America we do some very strange things.
PART FOUR: THE SOUL OF AMERICA
IMAGES, LIES AND LIARS
It is hard to see anything of America in the news. That is because, as far as I can tell, the people who produce the news have no idea what or where it is. Shortly before I wrote this section writers and photographers for Time newsmagazine were loaded into a bus and driven across America, on one of my favorite roads, U.S. Highway 50. They might have done better on a motorcycle, each alone, as I have done, but still it worked pretty well. They discovered that they had not had the foggiest clue what this country was all about. They discovered that we are smarter, know more about nearly everything and are far better people than they had imagined. They should all be commended, the person whose idea that was and all those others who made that effort to find out something about this place we call America. It makes them now a rare breed among their colleagues, most of whom write down to people far brighter than they are and tell us mostly utter rubbish. I hope these good people will remember the lesson.
I have to assume that people who decide to be journalists must have been born someplace and must have noticed that they were not born among idiots. But somewhere along the line, too many of them seem to lose track of that small fact. Somewhere they have gotten the notion that we need them to explain the way things work, not to find and give us the news but to explain to us what it means. They are, of course, mistaken, mistaken not only in their purposes but in their sense of their own grasp of things. The problem lies not just in their astounding arrogance but in the fact that they get things wrong. Some of this I have to attribute to the rampant disease of collegiality. People talk less and less to people unlike themselves. Lawyers talk to lawyers, game wardens to game wardens, physicists to physicists, and so forth. And they seldom talk to anyone else. Indeed, they have meetings to get together to talk to one another, from all across the country, to be sure they are all doing just what everyone else is doing. Consequently planners in Seattle are doing just what planners in Des Moines are doing. Few of them have any real contact with the people they are supposed to serve, nor do they not look at the place they are planing to see if the latest planning fad really does fit there. The impact of this incestuous disease is immense. It produces bad planning and bad policing and bad medicine and bad law and bad just about everything. And perhaps you have noticed, it is now producing traffic circles all over the place, even out in the middle of the desert. Traffic circles are now a world-wide disease. All I would guess because of collegial conferences. They also produce bad news. News people are writing not to the public but to one another. If they would stop for one moment and imagine their reader not as that ignorant fellow at the next desk but as the possible professor of history or the librarian or the engineer or the architect or the person who has grown up in the place they are writing about, people likely to be reading their stuff, people who read the news, people wanting information and not pap and nonsense, if they would imagine such a reader, they might write something
worth reading. It is the same with films. Nobody is making movies about America. Indeed, hardly anyone ever has. Most movies are remakes of previous movies, rehashes of the same old stuff. Movie makers learn their trade from looking not at America or anyplace else but by looking at old movies. That is bad. It is bad because it has a terrible impact on the way people see this place. Basically they see reprocessed rubbish, so much of it that even bright people get confused about the very world they live in. In fact, people too often look about them and reject what they see because it just doesnt fit with the images they have been given. Cases in point. The image makers have given us to believe that corporations are run by monsters, that politicians are crafty and corrupt, that Americans are selfish and crude, that white southerners are stupid racist pigs, that Native Americans are good but simple-minded folks, that Blacks are lazy and jazzy and dim-witted, that Hispanics just arrived here, that New York City is a fetid jungle, that Iowa is inhabited by bucolic atavists who have not yet figured out how to move away, that the mob never got to Minneapolis, that Chicago has no culture, that Texas lies someplace in the West, that nobody in Maine has ever committed a crime, that Californians are racy and sophisticated and mostly gay, that Oregonians are better than most people, and that the Sierra Club is run not by yuppie recreationalists but by enlightened social idealists. The America I know, the only America I know, is far more complex and far more interesting than any of this rubbish. The image makers sell us short, way short. So do our schools. A few years ago I was invited by a teacher friend to speak to some of the classes in her Phoenix middle school. It was a great experience, at least for me. I am told it took awhile for things to settle down. I was not invited back.
I spoke about that America I know, about the way we got the way we are and how much work, horror and fun it was to get here. I brought into it all the kids of every shape and color and made them the real part of it that they each truly are. I told them about the lies they had been told and how they should guard against such lies and how to tell and deal with people who lie to them. As I went to one class, a class of brighter kids set aside for some insane reason, the way you set aside things you cant handle, their teacher warned me that these students would be difficult. He found them difficult. They found him a fool. I could see that right away, by the way they looked when he spoke. And so we talked about that and other things, about being treated funny because you see things others dont see, about how that hurts, about how people hurt you because of what you see that they can not see. I talked about the burden of intelligence and how to deal with fools, to be kind but never let them hurt you and never let them persuade you that what you see and know to be true is wrong. They had also segregated the kids who were slow, who lived in worlds the rest of us can hardly imagine. One girl asked me a question I could not grasp. I told her what a wonderful question it was, that it might not even have an answer and that questions with no answers were the best questions of all, that she should be very proud that she could ask such a question, one that might last forever and never suffer an answer. It made her so happy that she wet herself. And that makes me cry even now. It is a savage thing we do to our kids, take their freedom and torture their minds, put them in institutions before they even have a chance to know who they are or how to think, institutions run mostly by fools and petty tyrants, places without freedom and without reason, places antithetical to what this great nation of theirs is all about.
There, if they are smart, they learn to hate and to cheat. They associate the stuff they are made to learn with the tyranny of the place, and they learn to hate it. Some of them see through it, the bright ones, through the shallow interpretations of the wisdom of ages reduced to rubbish by their mindless mentors. And they learn not to ask the right questions, not to engage the substance of the material but to memorize the husks of it. They learn the risk of thinking seriously about serious things. Some do. Some can not. Some escape, into some other world.
AMERICAN GUNS Every few weeks someone attempts to create a new history of America, one to fit their particular religion or other set of biases. History is like that, you can do nearly anything you want with it, sort through the same set of materials and rearrange it to make just about anything you want. Perhaps nowhere has more effort been made to create a proper history of America than with the place of guns in our society. While I am not so sure about any larger history, I am sure that guns were an important tool in the world in which I grew up. Together with very sharp knives and traps and nets and fikes and boats, they were everywhere. And so they were quite ordinary. Like so much else in that world, they were also quite dangerous. And so respected. I am named after an uncle who, at age 14, was shot and killed by a gun in the hands of a savage fool. Still, I am less afraid of them by far than I am of dogs and automobiles, both of which are far more treacherous. While it has become part to the new revisions of our history to downplay the role of guns, indeed to deny the facts and to set aside a most important part of our Constitution, the Second Amendment, the reality of guns in America can hardly be denied. You will be pleased to know that I am not going to enter into the
cacophony of debate on the subject of American gun laws, of which, despite that Second Amendment, this country must have as many as we have guns. The treatises on that subject, both cogent and inane, are voluminous, and surely need no additions from me. What I must address, however, is the way guns make America different, how they affect the geography of this country and make it very different from any other place. And perhaps something of why that might be. Guns in America go to the root of what we are. We do not believe in government as an instrument to protect us from all evil. We have no faith that government will be there for us or even in our court when they do get there. And so we retain to ourselves the right to protect ourselves, not only from the bad guys but also from government itself, from the cops, if you will, and from the lawyers and the other agents of government that we hold suspect at best, and often in the deepest contempt. That is the root of it, and it is deeply rooted indeed. It goes to the very soul of this nation, that the individual comes first and that the common good is best served by that primacy and not by schemes that set aside that primacy for some hypothetical commonality. This is not just a conservative proposition, as it is so often portrayed, nor some right-wing or anarchical flight of fantasy. At its heart, it is a very liberal proposition, not unlike so many more conventional liberal causes that pit the rights of the individual against the tyranny or simply the blundering of the state. It is not a far reach to associate a citizens right to privacy with their right to selfprotection. It is not a far reach to associate the idea that the public interest must be subservient to the rights of the accused with the idea that the public interest must be subservient to the rights of an individual to possess the capacity and authority to deter aggression against his or her person and family. It is ironic that this connection is so seldom made. It is ironic that those
who fight so fiercely for the individual against other state and corporate Constitutional incursions fail to consider protecting the individual in this boldly stated, and despite all attempts at obfuscation, entirely obvious Constitutional assurance. The reason, I think, may be this. There has grown to be a huge national terror associated with guns, driven in large part by a media that has focused, albeit poorly, on this issue and with an increasing personal ignorance of firearms, an ignorance manifest in the profound mistakes made by the media and among the fearful about the nature and function of firearms. Rather than seeing firearms as a source of communal and personal safety, as they have been perceived in the past, and certainly by the constructors of our nation, today many people see them only as a threat, something both dangerous and alien. Where this will shake out is hard to say. But this much is certain, should those seeking with such singular commitment to eliminate American citizen firearm rights be successful, this one very important difference between America and the rest of the world will also be eliminated. For, indeed, this is one unique aspect of America, that its citizens have been trusted to own and use firearms for lawful purposes, including self protection, will be gone. In that respect we shall then be like every other nation. And so we geographers will have one less thing to work on. While this disarming process would reduce somewhat our geography, there is also the question of its ramifications. The distrust of citizens that drives these actions against an armed citizenry may also breed other kinds of distrust, other efforts to set the state supreme against the citizen, whose supremacy has been the very heart of our unique society. What drives the resistance to this disarming process, although often visceral and not well enunciated, is the instinctive feeling among many that there is something very wrong with this process, that it is unAmerican, that it leaves us truly vulnerable, that It just doesnt feel right. It is not hard to see the roots of
those instincts. Perhaps nowhere in our society is there a better example of the tensions that built this nation than with this issue, nowhere a better test of the sustainability of the very thing that has set us apart from the rest. The question before us is how much like the rest of the world do we really want to be. As a geographer, of course, I have to vote against it, against the homogenization of the world. As an American it scares the hell out of me. That is what I fear most, not guns in the hands of fools but laws constructed by fools and cowards, laws destructive of this great nation and the Constitution that is at the heart of it. What I fear most is that fear.
A NATION OF FREIERS I am told that in Israel they refer to a sucker or dupe as a freier, and that is just about the last thing any self-respecting Israeli would want to be or to be seen to be. As I understand it, Israelis see Americans, all Americans, even Jewish Americans, as the penultimate freiers. And they would be right, of course. We trust people and we despise those whom we can not trust. We operate in an atmosphere of trust or think we do. The downside is we can be very hard on anyone who breaches that trust, whether by cheating us or by trying to fool us or simply by lying to us. Nothing drives an American to violence faster than the discovery of duplicity. Lie to me, you son of a bitch, and Ill break your neck. That is because we really dont know how to deal with people who do, and so we panic, and when we panic, we tend to violence. We are not sly and we are not cunning, and we are pretty much at a loss when confronted by these things. Perhaps we have been fortunate. Perhaps we are, as so many others think, simply nave. We are probably both. And that is the way most of us intend to remain.
The rest of the world, and not just Israel, is not so fortunate. Most people not only know how to recognize and to deal with deception, they expect it and they use it to full advantage themselves. What they dont know is how to deal with us. Our brief war with Iraq was a case in point. While Saddam Hussein practiced with great skill the ancient art of lying, George Bush, at least to my utter embarrassment, whimpered on endlessly about how terrible it was that we had to deal with this nasty liar. While we told Saddam exactly what we were going to do to him, and what we were not going to do, and then repeated it over and again, he presumed that everything we said was some kind of ruse, and he and his people suffered for it. He had no need for intelligence, we handed it to him, on CNN, as we have handed it to the Serbs and everybody else. It is stupid to try to read between the lines of an American statement. The whole thing is right there in the text. During the Second World War the British practiced deception perhaps as well as it has ever been practiced, and largely because of their superior lies they survived incredible odds and prevailed.21 It was surely not their fire power that brought them through it nor their skill in desert warfare. It may be because of this communication problem that we so often hire somebody newly arrived from the old country to head up our diplomatic services. We are awful at it, and besides we dont speak any of their languages, including English. We are also demonstrably awful at the fine old business of espionage. We hire young, ignorant idealists for the job, pay them practically nothing and then turn them loose in a world full of savvy, savage old cynics.
21 A fine treatment of British deception as a tool of war is Anthony Cave Browns Bodyguard of Lies.
It was not always that way. We once had something called the OSS, made up of very wise and crusty people, including some of my former professors, who knew something of the world and how it worked, people, believe me, who were just as mean and ruthless as anyone they might encounter. Most of them, of course, were born someplace else. But then we had a better idea, started creating our own from our own, and things went to hell after that. Those of us, here and abroad, who have had dealings with the CIA know them to be largely a bunch of clowns. Those who have not had the pleasure often presume that they must operate at some deeper level of cunning, that they surely cant be that dumb. Unfortunately for all of us, they are. Yes, we are just a nation of freiers, and the sooner people understand that, the better off we shall all be. The Russians have long understood it, and taken whatever advantage they could of it. In many ways I think they are like us, a peasant kind of people, but far more cunning. Russians know something about cold. And so do we, some of us. Few others do. But we go about it differently. They suffer it. We luxuriate in it, at least those of us who claim to be Alaskans do. And so one day before the Iron Curtain fell and after we had just built a giant pipeline across Alaska and were planning another across Canada, I found myself and some other Alaskans sitting across the table from a Soviet delegation. They had come to see how we build pipelines. Theirs were unmitigated disasters, more like sewer pipes by our standards, leaking and blowing up in spectacular fashion. Unlike the other Americans there, who had come to be nice, I had come
to find out how they built their ice roads. I knew they knew some things we could use. And I wanted to find out as much as I could about it because we intended to build our gas line in the winter, on ice roads, so that, come summer, there would be no road and no damage to the country. I knew they knew because the fellow who had come to translate for us, Dr. George Swinzow, a Russian who had escaped the Communists to spend the rest of his life working for the U.S. Army, had told me they knew. George and I were also old friends, from my former brief but strange life as a sort of soldier, where I found out some things about how intelligence works and does not work. The idea was an exchange, but it was not really. Their U.S. federal agency hosts had taken these people all up and down the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, showing them everything about it, and now they were asking us how we did it and how we intended to build the gas line. And we told them, at least everyone except me did. Instead, I asked them some questions, about ice roads. And I got no answers, nothing but nonsense and diversion. There was something sinister going on at that table. It bothered me and yet seemed to escape the other Americans. So I asked George, right out, being the crude American I have already admitted to being, watching closely the faces across the table, none of whom were supposed to be able to understand English. George, I said, loud enough for everyone to hear, What the hell is going on here? Why am I getting the run around? How many of these goons speak English? All of them, except the Commissar down there, said George with his sly grin, the full truth of which was clearly evident in their reactions.
And whats he up to? How do you know hes a Commissar? Well, Karl, hes the guy who gets the private room to himself and no limit on his expenses. He doesnt know squat about any of this. He is just here to see that the rest of them dont give us anything of any use. And to see that nobody speaks English. A smile flicked across the face of the fellow opposite me, the fellow who had been so cleverly evading any meaningful answer to my questions, and that sly glance that told me he loved it. The rest who understood were turning red, tears running down their faces, trying desperately to choke back their laughter. The Commissar, of course, had missed it all or else he was a lot more clever and controlled than either George or I had credited him. Then the fellow from the U.S. Geological Survey, their official host, who was now apoplectic, broke in but had nothing meaningful to say. I winked at my new friend across the table, excused myself and went back to work, figuring out how to build an ice road without Russian help. Never before and nowhere else, such a nation of freiers!
ONE NARROW PERSPECTIVE With some five and a half billion people in this world and only three percent of them so far being American and me being just one of them, what I think about all of this and what I have seen or think I have seen, of course, hardly matters. What does matter, it seems to me, is the massive ignorance we all have of this place and of one another. It is that ignorance that I have tried here to cry out against, to scratch and dig and itch and anger and perhaps to cause us to think. Just writing this thing has caused me to think, to be further impressed with my own ignorance, as I am sure all of you who have been patient enough to follow me to this point have been. I have cried out that we Americans are not as we may appear, either to others or to ourselves. I have cried out that we are far worse than we seem and far better. That much I can say with great certainty. I can also say with great certainty that the rest of the world is not much like us, indeed barely comprehensible to us nor them to us. And I can say how I feel about it all, what it means to me buried as I am in the fiery brilliance of this place and yet still in my own darkness, out of which I can only hope these words may encourage some to seek more light. That is what my life has been about, trying to find some light myself, but mostly asking others to seek their own.
Here on this small blue planet, among these seas of water and of people, at this brief instant in time, there is this small and yet massive and complex place we call America. Incomprehensible as it surely is, I would never-the-less suggest it is a very special place indeed, and that it is worth examining and worth knowing for what it really is. For surely it is here in this place we call America that humanity has its best chance ever to realize its full potential. And so to fail here would be tragic beyond anything the world has ever seen. I leave you with this thought. It arose from the occasional whimpering of an otherwise very cool professor of poetry who once tried very hard when I was perhaps too old to learn to teach me to express my feelings with words.
AMERICAN POETRY Like dire wolves, gaunt and solitary, poets prowl the murky edges of our consciousness, make us peer with them into other worlds, thrust truth upon us, visions of things we fear mostly about ourselves. It is scary stuff, reading poems. I cant recommend it to the faint of heart. In other places, not so much here in this course nation of simple folks, like you and me, but where there are gentry, people with sensitivity and training in words and feelings, those who carry with them the thoughts of centuries, there in that other sort of place, poets are often held in fear. There, when those for whom truth is dangerous, those who have taken power to themselves, who seek to crush the rest, there, in such places and times, it is the poets who are first to go, the ones they come for in the night, who disappear, their broken bones sometimes found but often not. For they who seek truth are antithetical to those who seek power. Like matter and antimatter they touch and explode into each other, each destroying the other, each aware that the other, in the end, will be their doom. And yet they also feed on one another, need that counterpoint to rub up against, to sustain and help define themselves. That, I suppose, is why there are so few poets here in these more brightly lit United States, why those we have are not yet full blown. For
poets, like mushrooms, grow best in darkness and foul stench, where our humanity is most at risk or so it sometimes seems. It may be so too because we Americans are of such humble origin. We come from peasants mostly, peasants who often could neither read nor write, neither this English thing nor whatever their own may have been. We came here as slaves in chains or in other ragtag lots with starvation, mobs screaming, snapping at our heels, bleeding refugees for whom this English thing was either borrowed or but roughly learned. Few here are yet comfortable with this hugely complex, not-sonative tonguenot like those real English, who nestle in it, for whom it has thousands more words with far more meaning, whose damp little island places it fits so well -- nor yet those Irish who seem to have hungered centuries for its gift. Or did they steal it, those Irish and those Welsh, and take it home and play with it, and having made it their own, then use it to put its own natives sometimes to shame? Not like us, us poorer folks, not yet able to find words within its massive body to match that beating within our own. We brought over, or discovered here, only the pidgin version, American Swahili, language of international commerce, bereft of most of those sensuous, close-fitting parts. Yet slowly it comes to us, in strange form sometimes, in gasps, in rough, salty ejaculations. It has flowed with us across the eastern mountains, through the belly states, the middle and northern tier, in waves of eerie sound, across harsh, empty lands leaving all that way its bloody trace. And picking up things as it went, eating them, belching them out, making new, now landed sounds to blend into the old. You find it there, in the vocalized screech of bagpipes, faintly heard, if you listen hard, to the night noises from a Fresno bar at the raw and festering edge of town, the raucous, raunchy, gut-driven sounds of life along that mean path with all those echoes of its patchwork past. It is there, the voiced gnashing rattle of chains, if you listen hard, to the jive and bop and wail of blues, in the rhythmic rapping, screaming, cursing sounds of bitter women, men and angry youth. Oh yes, its out there all right, in those pregnant streets and fields and mills, all along those acrid highways and dirty roads, the poetry of this place mostly yet unharvested. But when it comes, when it is ripe and we take it in, I think it will be quite grand, not that icky slime of teas and parlors and gardens, of intrigue, of how I became so angry, needed therapy, because my sister was once unkind to me, not that self-indulgent sop, that bleeding mucus,
foreign to our life and ear, of no moment nor meaning to rough, course people like you and me. No. It will come from someplace else, from much deeper places, from peering into such dark eyes as hers, that girl in Arkansas who serves coffee with a promise in the way she moves, seeing there both the sadness and the fire and hearing in her clear, direct voice that most poetic, most gentle of all the English sorts of talksoftened, polished, temperedin its own way, from its own furnace, made beautiful and pure. Its out there, waiting, outside these doors, lusting to be found, the soul, the passion, the humor, the drive, and once we lose our fear of them, the words. Oh yes, they frighten us, as well they should, these odd bits of steel and sulfur and gall and such, from the toolbox of a poet, these sharp, jagged little things we call words.

A Place Called America

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A Place Called America

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Karl E. Francis, Ph.D. P.O.

Box 2104 Lancaster, CA 93539 (661)206-8364

57,401 words Copyright 2000 Karl E. Francis

A PLACE CALLED AMERICA

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PART ONE: THE BLOOD OF AMERICA

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PART TWO: THE SKIN OF AMERICA

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