Buffalo Hunters Revisited

“Restarting the Economy” in the Midst of a Pandemic

Note: I wrote this piece three years ago after returning from the action against the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) at Standing Rock, North Dakota. President trump had just been installed by millions of Americans who believed in a mean, stupid God who only existed within arm’s reach of a collection plate. Imagine that. Climate Change, evolution and the roundness of the Earth had been decisively demoted (in their minds, at least) to the Foxnewslandia killing grounds of “controversy”. Nothing to look at here, folks, just partisan bickering. Let’s get on with the business of America, which, as Calvin Coolidge famously put it, is business. 

Now we have another disaster eating us alive—Covid 19—and rich folks want the rest of us to risk death in exchange for pennies on the dollar of their bottom lines…again, an old, old story. Add to that those perennial idiots who would threaten a virus(!?!) with flags and guns and you have an event that makes the “tea party” spectacle after the election of the first non-white president pale on that old-time scale of “Making the Rich Man Richer”. Surrounding a camp of starving people including women and children and opening up on them with machine guns (the Wounded Knee Massacre) is another such event.

Whenever such times as these descend upon us (like all wars, for instance) I wonder why so many people keep falling for the Rich Man’s bullshit, but I really know the answer. My Okie cousin, the celebrated California poet Wilma E. McDaniel, gave it to someone who had the temerity to ask why her family hit Route 66 to face a hostile reception in California for sure and an uncertain future at best.

“Starvation!” Wilma said, wide-eyed but with her low and measured poet’s voice that put all the power and terror of the thing into that one-word poem, where all the power and terror of such things belong.

We forget our roots, over and over again, and…Alas! We’re getting played again. The corporatists (a euphemism for “unconscionable rich bastards”) wanted—and got--trillions of dollars in bailout money from a federal government they claimed had no money at all for essential human rights like access to medical services, and now they want us to risk our lives  (without adequate access to medical services, of course) in going back to work for them so they can “cash in” on their newly-enhanced, socialized stock options. In the spirit of such cruel doings, our impeached-but-still-president unleashed the Keystone XL pipeline project on Montana a couple weeks ago, allowing it to illegally-spill over the Canadian border during this time of pandemic that he and his sycophants are in large part responsible for the severity of. Cruel people, of course, are capable of anything, including shoving virus-incubating man camps into the midst of reservations short on medical services like those in Montana near where the pipeline crews must live, and so it has come to pass. The work of building a transportation system for the dirtiest fuel on Earth from the tar sands of Canada to storage facilities in Illinois, for the baseline purpose of lining the deep pockets of his rich benefactors (like Charles Koch, Betsy DeVos and Sheldon Adelson just for instance) has been declared an “essential activity” in this time of death and now the Rich Man is daring us with prison time, coronavirus or both if we so much as try and protest against him doing it. Nice.

Once more I wonder why anyone would swallow that designer fly at the end of the Rich Man’s custom-made graphite rod and, once more, I remember Wilma. This latest, all-too-familiar combination of catastrophe and feckless leadership is nothing if not another in a long line of pure and perfect examples that put the exclamation point on Wilma’s one-word poem. Why don’t we tell the bastards padding their pockets at our peril to go to hell on no uncertain terms? Why does the Impeached One still get million-dollar-an-hour air time to blather on? Well, why did Sitting Bull return to the U.S. after escaping to Canada? Because the buffalo upon which his people’s existence depended had been wiped out, in large part by a U.S. Government who gave away the farm to corporate tyrants like Jay Gould to build railroad lines that would slice the great herds to pieces and then annihilate them piece by piece, creating a land that became much sadder than Sitting Bull’s people could bear anymore. Ecological disaster for the benefit of the Rich Man at the expense of everyone else. Starvation, in a word. Simple, as Wilma pointed out.

In America, this disdain for democracy by the rich has never been more blatant in most of our lifetimes. Democracy for them has always been an inconvenient word, never meant to be taken seriously by those who would have us eat bootstraps (whatever those are) instead of commodity-cheese. Wilma’s Depression years are as far back as anyone’s living memory can reach today, but there are other bones in the Earth that we should examine for perspective. Dig a little deeper and it's the same ol' same ol', over and over again. That other time, for instance, when things fell apart for working people after the Civil War and Robber Barons like Gould felt free to lift the grinning mask away from their death-skull stare, when great damage was done to our environment and political worldview that plagues us still. Perspective was seen as a luxury then, too, when the biggest thing on most peoples’ minds was Wilma’s poem. 

So the Rich Man wants us to die for him again, just like at Standing Rock, just like all the other times, and maybe we’ll accommodate him again. Maybe not, but who knows. It’s been a long three years since I posted the below for Standing Rock, and the crisis of people at the end of their rope that I saw and wrote about then has only lingered and strengthened, and, as if we needed one more scintilla of proof, it’s now abundantly-clear to everyone who’s not still drinking that warm, rancid Foxnewslandia Kool-Aid (a euphemism for “vomit”) that the bastards really do want to dance on most of our graves, provided, of course, that enough of us survive for them to be the boss of. Nice.

Hope’s been getting a bad rap these days. I guess people need a fall-back position when words fail them, but I still believe in it, at least a certain kind, maybe the best kind that gives the bit of pause that lets you find the thread of sense this time around. Yes, our dip-shot government and feckless functionaries have failed us once again. But what now? Here’s my little effort at that, another try at teasing out that frazzled thread I keep seeing hints of, with a few updated edits.

                 

                                              Buffalo skulls being sold for fertilizer, ca 1870

Jay Gould’s daughter said before she died

Daddy fix the “blinds” so the bums can’t ride

If ride they must make ‘em ride the “rod”

Make ‘em put their trust in the hands of God

In the hands of God

In the hands of God

Make ‘em put their trust in the hands of God.

"These men," General Phil Sheridan said of the unemployed easterners flooding the western plains to hunt buffalo during the Panic of 1873, some of whom were forced by the cruel humans of their day to risk death or mangling by clutching to the roaring axels underneath Jay Gould’s locked and booming baggage cars, "have done more to settle the vexed Indian question than the entire regular army has done in the last thirty years." 

“Fightin’ Phil” was defending the buffalo hunters against a proposed law (in Texas of all places!) that would have protected the last of the once-vast southern herd from its final stages of annihilation. Even then, there was still a bit of common sense (in Texas of all places!). But the law didn’t pass, and “these men” were free to gamble their own hides on riding out starvation times by scattering rotting carcasses from Dodge City to Griffin. The gamble was that they might manage to live long enough to get enough dried buffalo hides, known as "flint" hides, to the nearest railhead, which a lot of them didn't. The Panic, also known as “The Long Depression”, was the gift of the over speculating robber barons, Jay Gould in particular, who rose from the industrial-strength gore of the Civil War like ghouls to drive desperate greenhorns out to try their luck with the Blue northers and pissed-off tribesmen of the plains, dangers these newcomers lacked the experience to take the full measure of or even understand, and, as with every other economic depression where working folks were left to root, hog or die on their own for the sake of a rich man’s bottom line, it was mostly just luck that got enough of them through to finish the job. The Long Depression lasted for twenty years, long enough to ossify a few fortunes at the expense of…well, you decide.

“They (the buffalo hunters) are destroying the Indians' commissary,” Sheridan declared, and rightly so. “Send them powder and lead if you will, but for the sake of a lasting peace let them kill, skin and sell until the buffalo are exterminated. Then your prairies can be covered with speckled cattle and the festive cowboy who follows the hunter as the second forerunner of an advanced civilization."

                                                                                    

Time. It's a funny thing, isn’t it? Especially during the starvation times we’re surely heading into now with Covid-19. Sheridan’s words are almost 150 years old, but they were only 80-something years old when I was born (you do the math, please). So, since Sheridan's words aren't a whole lot older than I am and since I don't feel old at all (!), they still seem relevant, to me at least. At any rate, I couldn't help recalling Fightin' Phil's words when I drove through Baker, Montana last week on my way back to Standing Rock and was met on the outskirts of town with this sight…

 

It’s a big pile of scrap metal and it looked to all the world--or at least to all of my world--like that iconic old picture of buffalo skulls stacked up on the windy plains awaiting shipment to somewhere else. I did a quick mental calculation, standing a cowboy up on top of the scrap pile in my mind's eye, and I figured they were exactly the same height, give or take a few centimeters. Adding to the serendipity of their size, appearance and location, the pile of buffalo bones and the pile of scrap metal were both the result of painstaking gatherings by settlers who were trying to squeeze a few bucks out of the economic failure immediately preceding their scrap-collecting (buffalo hunting in the first case, fracking in the second) on these very plains. Talk about photogenic metaphors. 

Baker is a typical windswept Eastern Montana town that is so close to the North Dakota border that it tilts that way. In fact it sits on the very western edge of the Bakkan fracking fields. The dregs of those fields now run through the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) that was illegally built through the Lakota Peoples’ homelands, and runs a little north of Baker. Ironically, Baker is also slated to be bull’s-eyed by the equally-illegal Keystone XL Pipeline that will, if completed, run dirty oil from the tar sands of Alberta to the same tank farms and dispersal facilities in Illinois that the Bakkan muck will end up in. 

Most importantly, though, Baker sits along Sandstone Creek, which flows into O'Fallon Creek, which in turn flows into the Yellowstone River just below the mouth of Powder River. This puts Baker smack in the middle of the Lakota peoples' beloved Powder River hunting grounds, the grounds they fought so hard and so often to save. The People had been coming here to hunt the buffalo since the most ancient times, and in fact it was only 100 miles further down the road along Highway 12, which also skewers Baker like a pipeline, on the eastern fringe of the Bakkan (between Hettinger, North Dakota and Lemmon, South Dakota) that I came across the motherlode of western metaphors; Hiddenwood Cliff, the last stand of the North American Bison.

Hiddenwood Cliff, North Dakota

It’s a hotspot, Baker is, of western history, even as the rusty metaphor it is now.

As you might be able to tell, I read a lot of western history, particularly about the collision between the original caretakers of the Land and my people, the Pilgrims, which I certainly am one of, which means that, combined with my being a lifelong "environmentalist" I am the definition of "conflicted". My great-grandfather, for instance, was a sergeant in the 9th Kansas Volunteer Calvary stationed at Fort Halleck, Wyoming, where he participated in some of the first military actions against the People, along the Platte and the Overland Trail. What he was doing in Kansas in 1862 in order to join that volunteer Calvary I do not know yet. But, due to the fact that my family tends to breed late, I grew up knowing his son, my grandpa, who had a wealth of western life experiences of his own. My mother, for her part, was the unofficial family historian, and so she passed down to me an oral history from a time most children of pilgrims have forgotten, and one of them is that my grandpa resembled his father in looks, temperament and occupation (farmer). 

So I read a lot of western history, trying to figure out what the hell a piece of me was doing here in 1862-63 fighting the People off of their intact ecosystems so that gold could be dug out of their mountains and railroads wrapped around their plains, and now these pipelines! It's not a guilty conscience, really, although I probably deserve one. I just want to get it right.

Most of the history I read, as it happens is also from a pilgrims' point of view, so it's spotty on objectivity at best, but it’s also good for filling one’s head with facts worth pondering. Like about the settlers, who came in after the buffalo hunters and collected the bones left behind to sell for fertilizer back east. They’d stack the bones in great proprietary heaps until they could haul them off to the nearest train terminal to complete the very last cash transactions in wild buffalo parts that the world may see again. They'd get from $2 to $10 a ton (yes, that's a ton) not enough to get rich on like a few of the buffalo hunters who managed to survive did (they’d get $2 to $5 a hide), but enough to pay for groceries when your crops failed yet again in this land that was meant to grow buffalo, not cash. These kinds of facts create a rich back story for an environmentalist with a western family history like mine because, if you’re the type of environmentalist to give such facts their own head, they bend you right back to the Land, where the People have always been, and where every good environmentalist always wanted to be in the first place, before these facts of pilgrims were written down and began darting around in other peoples’ heads. Serendipity or Faith, there are good arguments for calling it either. But whatever handle you want to swing this long bend back to the Land on, it's not so much an arc as it is a jagged lighting strike, since the facts you need to wade through are often disturbing and sometimes contradictory. 

After the Civil War, General Grant simultaneously downsized the army and appointed his favorite war hero, Phil Sheridan, to head the vast Department of the Missouri, which included the Great Plains and all the "Indian wars" occurring within its bounds. Since his Department was vast and his resources few, Sheridan settled on a version of guerrilla warfare known as “terrorism” to fulfill his mission. He attacked the Cheyenne, Comanche, Kiowa and the Sioux in their winter camps, destroying their supplies and killing them indiscriminately when they resisted, and also when they didn't. George Armstrong Custer, another Civil War hero, perpetrated his infamous Battle of the Washita, an unprovoked massacre against the Cheyenne, during Sheridan’s campaign. 

And there were others. The Sappa Creek Massacre in particular, which occurred in Kansas in 1875, mimicked the Sheridan model for getting as much “bang” out of your limited war bucks as you could by terrorizing the helpless and using free labor to boot. It was perpetrated on another peaceful Cheyenne village, largely by a volunteer crew of buffalo hunters under the nominal guidance of Lt. Austin Henly of the Sixth Calvary. Women and small children were shot and burned in their lodges and then thrown onto bonfires that the buffalo hunters had made of the village’s possessions. Imagine that, parents, and now imagine Lonesome Charlie Reynolds, the buffalo hunter who led Custer to the Black Hills in 1874 and then died with him at Little Big Horn in ‘76. Imagine Buffalo Bill Cody and Wild Bill Hickok, two other buffalo hunters who have been held up to us as folk heroes through the years by truncated high school history books displaying iconic photos, like mountains of buffalo skulls for instance. It is a funny thing, time is.

 

So, if you ever make it to the road sign on Highway 12 that tells you you're at Hiddenwood Cliffs, try squinting your eyes, like I did. You might be able to conjure up buffalo roaming free again, but of course what you're really seeing is cows. After Sappa Creek, the Cheyenne were rightly terrified of buffalo hunters, not so much because they were killing off the buffalo, but by their witnessing of what they were capable of doing, and then getting away with. It was bound to leave a certain aftertaste.

The extermination of the buffalo was a military tactic, of course, similar to spraying Agent Orange on the jungles of Vietnam to defoliate them so the natives could be more easily killed. After the buffalo were gone, the tribes had no more choices. They were forced, ignominiously, at gunpoint, to live within the bounds of their designated reservations, which were really concentration camps where the People, especially their children and old ones, were at the mercy of corrupt entrepreneurs known as "agents" who literally stole the food and clothing out from under them while they fell prey to the various plagues and viruses they had no immunity for, nor medical facilities to treat them, and they died like flies. 

It was just then, dear reader, that the People became sitting ducks for another novel military tactic. The army would surround the camps of the now-exhausted, helpless People on some trumped-up charge or other, wait a few days, a few weeks, and then the troops would descend upon them and massacre them. Wounded Knee is one example. There were others. 

With that in mind, take a look at the picture below.

 

Photo courtesy of: Joe Plouff of Camps Arising (send donationshere)

It’s what you see every night at the Standing Rock. Dozens of high-powered spotlights surrounding the camps for miles, aimed in the camps’ direction, waiting. And in the daytime you see this:

Modern Buffalo Hunters

For everyone reading this who's still not sure what fascism looks like, I've posted this photo for the fourth time, because I think it’s worth repeating. The hill on which these DAPL agents are standing is Last Child Camp, where tipis were being erected to avoid the high water that everyone agrees will come. Over sixty peaceful protesters were arrested off of this hill, many (if not most) were hauled away in unheated vehicles to places as far away as Fargo, ND where, after being arraigned on trumped-up charges, they were released, some in the middle of the night, some in their underwear, in sub-freezing weather. 

What stopped this modern, partially-privatized, militarized police force from shooting into the village with live ammunition, like they did at Wounded Knee? In the case of Standing Rock, public scrutiny was the only thing in its way. Back in 1890, such scrutiny only came after a massacre was perpetrated. But they’re still locked and loaded, and there are not a few among them who believe that's reason enough to finish the job, which, remember, is partially-privatized (read: less accountable to public scrutiny). 

Which begs the question: What's to stop these same forces unleashed from shooting you for peacefully disagreeing with some other trumpian policy like the illegal building of the Keystone XL pipeline now underway as per trump’s declaration that it’s a “critical service” in this time of pandemic when to go out and protest like we did at Standing Rock is to risk your health and even life, not just from sickness but from the perverse laws passed by several states that make it a criminal offense to protest pipelines? 

For a clue, remember that Wall Street still operates under the same rules of engagement that guided those at Sappa Creek and Wounded Knee. "Death to the weak, power to the powerful", and even though Wall Street may feign a turning of its dainty head away from its unpleasant causes and effects, the name for this legal piracy hasn't changed. It’s still called a "killing".

Portable Windmill at Sacred Stone Camp

After the buffalo were exterminated, the People whose lives were woven within the  vast, throbbing herds experienced plague and famine on steroids. Much of it was caused by the malevolence of the cruel or ignorant people rushing to fill the ecological void left by the disappearance of the main driver of that ecosystem. But cruel and ignorant people are only symptoms of the breakdown, no more nor less than any other sturdy virus. Ecosystems fail, inhumanity intensifies, and viruses come in for the sucker-punch. Things get re-made, not usually for the better, at least not for us. Why do we keep falling for it? Ask Wilma.

We certainly have the technological know-how by now to avoid such things as gifting trillions of taxpayer dollars to save those who would kill us (or in the case of Covid-19, would watch us die). Who made these people the bosses of the world? 

Don't let anyone tell you to just shut up and accept your lot, especially now that all their crimes have been laid so bare, because time is a funny, fast-moving thing, a fluid thing, like floods or other cleansing, natural phenomena. Just wait a while, and you'll see that, although it’s tough right now and gonna get tougher, there’s much cause for hope, because our facts, our beloved facts, are finally turning us back to where we always should have been, to where we never should have left, back to the Land. 

A Veteran for Peace 

 

 Sunset at Sacred Stone

 

Weasel Tracks at Oceti Sakowin next to the Cannonball River

Still intact, holding steady

On False Patriotism

My ancestors have only been on this continent for a short time, since the 1600s. The same blood flowing in my veins has been in every major conflict that the colonists (later the Americans) have fought in since that time. I had ancestors who participated in the Revolutionary War battle where the American flag was invented, and if any hairsplitters out there want to argue the point with me then they can kiss my ass. I actually signed up for a war myself, and ended up serving four years in the Navy, but didn't go to Nam, not because I was some kind of smart, but because of the simple luck of the the other side of my family, the Irish. 

In other words, I feel I can say something about this flag thing, and here it is: I don't hate the American flag. In fact, I have every reason to love what it stands for in my own mind. But this child of pilgrims and pioneers hates what it has become in the hands of our seemingly-bottomless pit of psychopathic "leaders", and I offer up a new, colorful equation, a flaggy one (!) which is really an ancient formula reworked for us unfortunates who inhabit a more and more two-dimensional age, where colorful pictures apparently have more impact than actual thinking.

 ÷

+

=

Yes, Hitler certainly was an evil man, wasn't he? But he had lots of help. In high and low places. The equally-evil men in the high places had agendas, wanted power and knew the formula for getting what they wanted.

 

But the low ones, the enablers? They have no excuses anymore for falling for this bullshit, do they? And they will have much to answer for in the very near future. Won't they? 

How dare they wave American flags at us? How dare they?

On Poets, Viruses and Compassion

I went to Costco yesterday to stock up on coffee, ramen noodles and such other necessities I thought I might need to get me through the (?) weeks of I was planning spend in relative-isolation--which is kind of oxymoronic since I've been self-isolating in rural Montana for the last 40 years or so--and it's true: they were out of toilet paper. Everyone I interacted with (from 6 feet or more away of course!) was pretty jolly about the whole thing, swapping jokes about the nutritional value of toilet paper, what kinds of food you should stock up on to avoid using so much of it, etc., and what else can you do? Life goes on and laughing's better than worrying, although after reflecting on it I had to admit that ramen noodles and coffee would probably be on the same food chart as toilet paper, nutritionally-speaking.

But ultimately I have to check in on the seriousness of the thing. Here's a bug that doesn't respond to government-by-tweet sweeping the world and, as humans have that wonderful proclivity to do, we move like lemmings to the most precarious edges of reality, hoping for the best, or the worst, depending on your religion. Panic, denial, conspiracy theories. They're all of a piece, and, notwithstanding the fact that we're not actually living in a war zone with bombs dropping out of the sky, you have to take the results of such baseline human behavior as the existential threats that they are, and I didn't want Costco running out of my favorite bargain French Roast before I got my share. That's the "panic" component. The "conspiracy-theory" part hit home with me this morning when I was texting with an old Navy buddy who was pretty sure the coronavirus came from a Wuhan weapons lab with an Israeli secret-service connection. Now that, I thought, was the kind of default human thinking that should make me panic, but I know him as a good guy and I merely said, "Nah, it's from eating snakes," and I'll leave it to the reader to decide which would make the better punchline when things calm down. 

Then, still sitting in my self-isolating writing-chair next to my cozy wood stove, I received an email from the Tulare (California) Historical Museum informing me that they had to postpone a "Literary Landmark" event in honor of my cousin, Wilma E. McDaniel, who passed away in 2007 after almost 90 years of living, most of that as a California Okie who ended up being one of the most significant California poets of the 20th Century. I was planning to attend, figured it'd be cancelled, and was sad. But what struck me most about all of this particular moment of muddled clarity was a short piece Wilma wrote before she died that the organizer of the event, Karen Neurohr, posted along with the cancellation notice. I don't know exactly when Wilma wrote her piece "Viral Bug", but I'm pretty sure it was during the final years of her life when she was living in a senior apartment complex in Tulare that provided her and her brother, Roy, who was pushing 100, with independent-living duplex apartments--and an emergency cord in the bathroom in case someone in the office needed to call an ambulance. 

Please read her little piece below, along with one of the many thousands of poems (just a guess but I'll bet it's no exaggeration) that endeared her to her audience, her People, and think, please, instead of merely reacting as we so often do when changes come at us from out of somewhere other than where we're used to looking. This virus really isn't a joke. Even if you're healthy, you have our incredibly-valuable, vulnerable citizens to think of, those who are living just like Wilma describes below, and many far-worse-off than that. This isn't a "hoax" to get trump (for chrissakes). This isn't a Chinese plot to destabilize the western economy (for chrissakes). This is a dry run on how compassionate a People we really are. Please take good care, not just for your own sake but for those whom you will never know.

Viral Bug 

Wilma McDaniel

VIRUS. 

Please note that I have spelled the above word with capital letters. That seems only proper in light of my recent experience. A virus is not just a trendy word, a virus can wipe out anyone, even an Okie poet who has no computer. I can’t even blame what happened on weather.

Certainly the month of May was cooler and wetter than usual. Forget that my Father ever raised cotton and was sometimes rained out, too late to plant. I really enjoyed the cool weather. Sometimes May can be scorching in the Valley. Instead of feeling better though, my eyes and nose ran constantly and my throat became as red as first class beef and too sore to barely swallow.

           

I don’t like sitting in the doctor’s office with dozens of patients even sicker than I. I resorted to warm saltwater gargles, tea and juice. All the home remedies that have brought me to the brink of old age. I felt feverish the last few days and discovered my ancient thermometer had blanked out completely. I really didn’t know what my temperature was.

            

On May 15^th, I staggered out to the kitchen fully dressed and made coffee. I left it on the sink and started to the bathroom. I saw myriad lights before my face and fell unconscious in the hall. I think it was 7am. I don’t know how long I lay there, perhaps ten minutes. Anyway, I gradually came out of a fog and wondered if I had experienced a stroke. I carefully tried my right hand, it moved; then the left, which also worked. My legs moved. The worst handicap was, I couldn’t lift my head. I tried to raise it but it fell back on the tile floor like a pumpkin.

            

I made a second attempt, but thought my pumpkin might split open. I lay there in the narrow hall calling on God, calling for my neighbor who never heard me. At last God heard me. I took about twenty minutes to scoot to my bathroom, still on my back. I managed to raise my head with one hand long enough to grab the emergency cord, then fell back on the floor. In four or five minutes, I heard the ambulance siren so I knew help was coming to transport me to the hospital. 

            

I do hate to bore any readers of this column, but I need to say that I came near to being the late poet. Without any doubt in my mind, angels helped me fall neatly in that narrow hall without fracturing my skull or refracturing my neck and lumbar section.

            

It is precious to still live, priceless beyond words. I invested in a later model thermometer and check my temp almost everyday. I scan papers for virus reports and even wonder which one laid me low with a 104° fever. No wonder I keeled over. Happier days to come, though this isn’t bad.”―by Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel as published in Walking on an Old Road: A Collection of Writing and Poetry. © 2007 Stone Woman Press, Tulare, California. Edited by J.R.R. Chlebda, first edition paperback printing. Back40 Publishing, Sebastopol, California.  

Picking Grapes 1937

            Magic seventeen

And new in California

            Working in bursting

            Sweet vineyards

            Hot sand on soul

            One strap held by a safetypin

A girl could be whatever

            She desired

            The first breath of

            Eve in Paradise

            The last gasp of Jean Harlow

            In Hollywood

                                                                      

                                                                  Wilma E. McDaniel

            

As I write, the final results of the Michigan Democratic primary aren't in yet, but a glance at the various news sites I follow have told me that Biden is trouncing Bernie. It's not over yet, of course, but the writing's on the Wall Street wall: Biden will probably be the nominee, and Elizabeth Warren, to whom I gave every benefit-of-the-doubt to, never said a peep to stop that freight-train-from hell-and-to hell from screaming into the station.

There's been much pundit-speak--o so much pundit-speak, about how those mean ol' Bernie supporters are so mean and...ol'! About how Americans will never vote for a socialist. About the middle-of-the-road and the dead skunks lying squashed there. But what's meaner, I wonder, than a swath of Democratic voters cutting off their own noses to spite someone else's face? 

Maybe that's not mean, after all. Maybe it's fear, a huge, giant fear of all those mythical Americans who say they want truly-affordable healthcare, relief from the various debtor's prisons (devised by the likes of, yes, Joe Biden), a livable planet, and accountability meted out to the Wall St. bastards and yet will vote for a fascist instead because they won't vote for a "socialist".

Well, guess what? Those people described above--the ones who like Bernie's programs but will vote for a fascist anyways--simply do not exist, do they? But there are many (apparently MANY) real people who liked all of those things above but are afraid THOSE OTHER PEOPLE might get so upset at Bernie being allowed to be the Democratic nominee that they'll vote for a fascist. That's some kinda fear, and I guess Elizabeth Warren agreed with them. 

Whatever it was that got us here to 2016 revisited, here we are. A fatally-flawed corporate Democrat to whom the power-elite (and the fearful) have pinned their hopes on is going to try to squeak a narrow victory out of November. I'm not a fortuneteller, but that's what was dealt us the last time and, by golly, it just didn't work out that time. Maybe it'll fly this time....right?

And if it does fly, and Biden is elected, there will be no affordable healthcare relief or debt relief to the millions who have needed it for so long, things Elizabeth Warren said she believed in. There'll be no transformative energy/environmental policies that we cannot wait for, which Warren also said she believed in. There will be no time left for any of that, because Biden will bring with him the hubris of dysfunction that is the Establishment Democratic Party, bought and paid for by Wall St. who really doesn't care who wins as long as it doesn't hurt their bottom line, like Bernie would have. Warren would have, too, if she'd have had a chance to do what she said she wanted to do. But that's all under the bridge now. Whatever Warren truly believed in, she has sided with the Establishment Democrats now, when it counts.

Of course, if the gambit of running yet another fatally-flawed candidate doesn't work, and trump gets re-elected, things will be even worse. But at least those Establishment Democrats can pat themselves on their backs and say "by golly, we at least kept Bernie out, and golly-gosh, maybe next time, huh?"

It is "Us" vs "Them" and they're winning. Only one question worth asking remains, one I wish Elizabeth Warren and her campaign staff had asked themselves: Which side are you on?

Nits Make Lice

Note: This is a map of Fort Halleck, along the Overland Trail in Dakota Territory, where Silas Halsey Cooper (my maternal great-grandfather) was stationed during the Civil War. It was hard duty, because it was thrown up in a rush to protect traffic along the Overland Trail, which was being used as an alternative to the Oregon Trail to the north due to hostilities with the local tribes. The men were inadequately-clothed (check out those calvary ballcaps the next time you watch a John Wayne movie) were sent out on long, pointless missions in sideways blizzards, and suffered high incidents of frostbite and death from exposure. It happens that he was under the overall command of Col. John Chivington, who perpetrated the Sand Creek Massacre south of this fort in 1864. My great-grandfather left in 1863. Still...

Late fall, and the high winds on top of Trapper Peak lift a day’s worth of snow, wrap their fingers around gnarly bark, deposit cornices hair-triggered to launch slab avalanches down slick voids and skier’s prayer pockets.

Local fronts always raise the hair of these peaks first, while the mountain valley below remains calm as civilized glass, awaiting its share, which is always less. Just below the cut of the scissor-wind a nutcracker ducks her grey wings down toward the valley and the south-facing slopes where she has memorized the exact locations of thousands of needle-scattered seed caches. She spent the summer and fall depositing these caches, moving the protein-rich whitebark pine nuts from the high elevations down to levels more accessible in winter. Now she rests below the forming cornices, her craw full of the season’s last seeds, head feathers blown backward and skin chilled, much closer to the immediate danger above than to the people down below, who have no comparable sense of spatial memory. Satisfied, she offers her call to the wind.

I am a military veteran and a descendent of Pilgrims. My family’s history is not much different from those whose ancestors have been here for as long as mine, a mere 500 years or so. Spatial memory for me conjures up puritan intolerances, colonial wars, western expansion, Indian wars, farming and community-building, the Civil War, the Alaska Gold Rush and riding freights. The Great War, the Dust Bowl, and then the Good War when the nuclear age yawned into the Cold War, the Vietnam War, hippies and rednecks, wars and wars, the Iraq War and more wars. 

As a western-flowing river, which is what my family history is the essence of, it has run through all the significant canyons of arrogance and misunderstanding jumbled with enlightenment and good intentions that are the very rapids of our current nation. And so it isn’t that I don’t understand bigotry. Nor that I don’t suppose that it won’t always will be with us. It’s just that I’ve been thinking about it, a lot these days. The whole country seems headed for a windblown cliff of wars and disasters that may never end this time. Founded, nominally at least, on democratic principles, we seem willing to be led to that chilly cliff by those stripping our freedoms off us whole cloth while grandly speaking of the day coming soon when the world will be patterned after a new, more perfect fascism for the sake of our continued creature-comforts. Is it just me?

Well, the river below that particular cliff, my river, has always been western-flowing. It’s the only perspective I have, given my family history, and so I have always seen bigotry and its cousin, rugged individualism, as two kids on the same carnival ride that spins them to pleasure, makes them dizzy and then deposits them onto uncertain ground, where they throw up. The mouth of such rivers, so the standard American narrative goes, flows into the seas of righteous wars. You know the ones, fought in name of American ideals scripted from those Grade-B western movies from the ‘50s, the ones Reagan came from, only a picture, really, when you think of it, never more than a distraction and an entertainment to a people who seem to value imagery far above substance anymore. 

My people have been those real farmers and cowboys and housewives, housewives, housewives, and so I feel I have the creds of all who came before me to say to all who come after that, as a descendant of pilgrims, none of this is making any sense to me anymore. Nowhere do I hear our real story being told, not even from those who hate cowboys, and that I feel as qualified as anyone to say that the bigotries of Manifest Destiny and Rugged Individualism have found their final angle of repose when leaders who are elected on platforms of xenophobia and polarization speak openly of 'usable nuclear weapons'. Nits make lice, indeed.

I'm far from making claims that, by virtue of my pedigree, I can speak for Nutcrackers, even though I'd like to try. I would say that none of this is intuitive, nor is it meteorological or metaphysical. It's not even rocket science. It’s a simple observation made by someone who's simply been around long enough to see it, that this storm passing over us now was planned long ago.

Here’s how.

On Flags

"Whatever happens next, understand and never stop pointing out that Donald Trump walked into office with no crisis with Iran," said Stephen Miles, executive director of Win Without War. "He then filled his cabinet with warmongers, walked away from a multilateral diplomatic accord, and purposefully engaged in 'maximum pressure.' He owns this."here for full article


 donald trump, or "President Bone Spurs" if you want to capitalize his name in the way it should be written down in history, tweeted Us the People a flag for New Year's:

Isn't that sweet?

This is, in fact, an important symbol to Bone Spurs, maybe the most important one, because it apparently allows him to rule without checks or balances, without thought. The same goes for his Twitter account, since our anemic media is so corporate it doesn't have to think, either. It just repeats...and sells product.

The product this time? War...which is good for business, right? Just like corporate healthcare and every other corporate thing you can name these days. The more the People hurt, the more money can be pilfered from them by those who have been granted more power than sense by a simple, ancient equation used by courtiers throughout humankind's sad history these last few thousand years. Kiss the emperor's ass no matter how crazy he is ("Dear Leader" in this millennium's vernacular) while sucker-punching the rubes ("serfs" in the old days, "enablers" in the new). These modern rubes, who really have no excuse anymore, will have much to answer for in the very-near future, in terms of the lost life, limb and sanity of their offspring and our world, but never mind. Right now if feels good to hate, to march and kill in the name of further empowering those who oppress them. Maybe they think the profiteers will throw them a bone, give them free college if they "serve". After all, a good sucker punch is well-placed to dull the otherwise-serviceable senses of the otherwise-rational People. 

N'est pas?

My ancestors have only been on this continent for a short time, since the 1600s. The same blood flowing in my veins has been in every major conflict that the colonists (later the Americans) have fought in since that time. I had ancestors who were probably at the battle where the American flag was first constituted, and if any hairsplitters out there want to argue the point with me then they can kiss my ass. I actually signed up for a war myself, and ended up serving four years in the Navy, but didn't go to Nam, not because I was some kind of smart, but because of the simple luck of the the other side of my family, the Irish. 

In other words, I feel I can say something about this flag thing, and here it is: I don't hate the American flag. In fact, I have every reason to love what it stands for in my own mind. But this child of pilgrims and pioneers hates what it has become in the hands our seemingly-bottomless pit of pshycopathic "leaders", and I offer up a new, colorful equation, a flaggy one (!) which is really an ancient formula reworked for us unfortunates who inhabit a more and more two-dimensional age, where thought is apparently not useful nor required anymore. 

 ÷

+

=

Yes, Hitler certainly was an evil man, wasn't he? But he had lots of help. In high and low places. The equally-evil men in the high places had agendas, wanted power and knew the formula for getting what they wanted. But the low ones, the enablers, have no excuse for falling for their bullshit anymore, and will have much to answer for doing so in the very near future.  

How dare they wave American flags at us? How dare they?

We're Off To See The Wizard

Below is a screenshot from the all-powerful Twitter account (let me repeat that very loudly: ALL-POWERFUL TWITTER ACCOUNT!!!) of @real DonaldTrump who has clearly spent serious time in the Land of Oz. Please read it carefully, and be amazed:

There. That should take care of any apostates out there who are not yet awash in the greatness of @realdonaldtrump’s ALL-POWERFUL TWITTER ACCOUNT!!! Now let’s move on to the next item.

This is a picture of Elon Musk’s rocket ship. Well, it's actually just a sketch of Elon Musk's rocket ship, a cartoon really, but I couldn't post a picture of the real one because the image I wanted to use belongs to "Getty Images", who want $500 for the privilege of using it. Mark Getty, the chairman of Getty Images as well as one of the heirs to the J. Paul Getty fortune is, like Elon Musk and donald trump, a billionaire, and his wisdom is probably also great and unmatched, by definition if nothing else. However, I didn't send him the $500 to use his picture, although if I thought he really needed my money to top off his grandfather's oil fortune, I would have surely sent it to him right away, because how else are we going to maintain our great and unmatched rich folks if we don't keep them rich? But I decided against it. I didn't really need his "image" after all, since this is such a teeny-weeny blog and I'm such a good artist and can sketch out a rocket ship in the same amount of time that it (apparently) took Elon Musk's engineers to design a real one. You can see the real one here (Elon Musk's Tinfoil Rocketship!). 

Did you look? Tell me if I'm wrong, but I think it looks like what a bored kid with a wad of tinfoil and a half-hour could sculpt to impress her friends at the lunchroom table with. But we're living in a world, aren't we? Where a billionaire president believes he is the Wizard of Oz, billionaire mechanics and build rocket ships with their spare change and billionaire fossil-fuel heirs sell great and unmatched photos to chumps like you and I for $500, all of which is too awe-inspiring to put into mere words. Let's just settle on "great" and "unmatched" then.

Which brings us to human consciousness. Elon says his motives for building his rocket ship are altruistic, that all he wants to do is send human consciousness into outer space (before it's too late, I guess). But who's he think he's kidding? Whose consciousness is going to be able to afford a seat on Elon Musk's rocket ship except a billioniare's? So Elon Musk is building a tin rocket ship to send billionaires into outer space, which, you have to admit, is an excellent idea.

Yusaka Maezawa, for instance, is the Japanese billionaire who bought a seat on Elon Musk's rocket ship. He's a genius, which is self-evident since he made billions selling fashionable ZOZOSUITS online. Who would have known--except a genius--that you could make billions selling suits named "zozo" online? But he did it, and on the strength of that fact alone his consciousness should get what it deserves, which is parting company with its billions here on Earth while his body goes bye bye in the sky on Elon Musk's tin rocket ship. Like I said: this is an excellent idea.

Which brings us full circle back to our Wizard-channelling president, donald trump. Those who may have accidentally read a blog or two of mine in the past, may know that I've been praying for the Rapture for years as the most efficacious way to get these folks off our planet (The Rapture). But I think this is a better, possibly divinely-inspired, gimmick, and we don't even have to pray for it. All we have to do is click our heels three times.

It's true, the actual Oz story does use the narrative device of a hot-air balloon to suck a blowhard liar out of Dorothy's life forever and for good, but I'd argue that the fact that we have to use Elon Musk's tin rocket ship to accomplish the same thing in real life is a mere technicality. Don't forget, trump is a billionaire and, after buying a seat in the Oval Office, where else is there for him to go but up? To "expand his talents", so to speak, all the way into outer space...and beyond. Believe me, he'll buy a seat on that hell-roarer, wouldn't miss it for the world, I'll bet, and, hot air balloon or tin rocket ship, the effect for us will be exactly the same. We will all wake up in our beds with concerned loved ones hovering over us, resurfacing to blessed (non-billionaire) consciousness while realizing that the ugly dream we have been having about evil witches and mean, flying monkeys for the last _____ (fill in the blank) years was the result of a nasty bump on our noggin which wasn't our fault, and that our dog is O.K., too. With proper amounts of dread and veneration, this should righteously be the largest part of any humans’ consciousness who dares to walk the Earth (as opposed to Outer Space) in these most significant times. A happy ending, albeit laced with large doses of Magic.

To repeat: This sending of billionaires off into outer space on tin rocket ships is a most excellent idea. I wish I'd thought of it myself, but I couldn't afford to, so I'll have to thank the great and unmatched Elon Musk and his other billionaire buddies for thinking of it for me! I would only make a few minor suggestions: that some of those billionaires who think chumps like myself owe them $500 for a splotch or two of color should be included on this (hopefully) one-way trip to high-end immortality and that Elon tweek his narrative about "sending human consciousness" into the cosmos to "sending human hubris” into that same void, which, when you think about it, isn’t really such a big change at all and...Voila! 

Blast off, suckers!

And do write when you find work.

For further reading on my great and unmatched theories about Human Consciousness, go to: Cows In Space