Just Normal People

  Stories.

Back when I started this blog, I was working on that: how is a story, what might it mean,  exploring ideas and self and the world to make stories. Stories drawn from imagination, not news commentary, not essays…

In late 2016, after I’d earlier seen the run-up to the Brexit contest while in Europe, I was shocked to hear echoes of that banshee howl in our presidential election. It hijacked any playful or ruminative ideas about fiction. Since then, this space has largely published essays relating to politics. There should have been more, but I write slowly and chew on the words and then the paragraphs, and by the time the mastication is done, why! Something even more appalling has happened!

As the 2020 election results were rolled out, in an election scrutinized as no election has ever been, I was encouraged. But I wasn’t sanguine about what the president might do, or what he might encourage his supporters to do. Indeed, in late November, on a phone conversation with family members, amidst the chit chat came the portentously dropped (really! the voice lowered as the words were spoken) warning that “the election isn’t over” which, in my cowardice, I shut down rather than confront. Because I’d long since learned that reason, evidence and even personal experience (I often serve as a poll worker in my town) wouldn’t counteract the influence of party—and Fox News—on some of my family.

Voting in a pandemic, Harpswell ME

Looking back, futile as it might have been, I regret not speaking directly.

What happened on 6 January in the capital should shock anyone in thrall to the false promises of the sitting president back into the real world. Those who applaud the coup attempt that occurred that day should be politely shunned henceforth by anyone who values a functioning  democracy under the Constitution.

Vignettes: 

A woman weeps outside the capital. “The police maced me!” she whines. A reporter asks, “What happened?” “We stormed the capital! It’s a revolution!” She says.

(I wonder what she thought happens when you “storm” a federal building. Were the security forces supposed to stand down? Which raises a question being asked by those responsible for such questions.)

A guy in the rotunda says, “This is our house, these people work for us.” 

(So… the point of trashing the capital and trying to disrupt the work was…?)

A woman not yet at the capital says, “[Trump] won the election. They’re trying to steal it.”

(The president’s supporters claim the evidence for this is everywhere. Which begs the question of why not a single court has found it in the filings made by the president’s lawyers, regardless of who appointed the judges hearing the claims.)

Perhaps most revealing, another woman complains “They were supposed to gas Black Lives Matter people. But why would they gas us?”

(And if these folks had been a BLM group, there would have been law enforcement to spare, and they would, indeed, have been pepper sprayed, manhandled, and possibly shot, judging by demonstrations elsewhere over the past year. A point not lost on anyone in the aftermath.)

Perhaps most troubling, though is a man who points at the interviewer and shouts: “You did this! We were just normal people living our lives!”

By and large, he was right. The people whose words I’ve recorded more or less as I heard them weren’t the folks in costume, or wearing “Camp Auschwitz” tees or even MAGA caps. They were people who in other circumstances you wouldn’t glance at twice… normal people.

The president didn’t glance at them either, but he made them feel as if he was looking straight in their eyes and seeing them. He said things they thought but didn’t dare say, because on one level they knew it wasn’t right, even though they felt it: racism, anti-semitism, islamaphobia, misogyny. In doing so, he made them feel heard. So when he called they came, because they WANT to believe the election was stolen from him and that they can steal it back somehow, as if it’s a magic bundle he can use to make everything the way it used to be (and really never was).

I understand all that, but I’m tired of catering to it. 

President elect Biden is right: this isn’t who we are. And before you say, Oh, but it is! let me point out that while the photographs of the storming of the capital are horrifying, the rally that preceded it, while big, wasn’t enormous. It didn’t match Obama’s inaugurations. It didn’t match the resistance march in DC and elsewhere following Trump’s inauguration. It didn’t meet the national outpouring of marches, in the midst of a pandemic, that have followed George Floyd’s murder. 

The people wearing MAGA caps and “Camp Auschwitz” hoodies who scrabbled up the capital walls like cockroaches and swarmed the capital halls are NOT a majority. The 2020 election proved that; marches through the 4 years of the Trump nightmare proved that; and the ultimate failure of the attack on the capital proved that. The GA senatorial races just the day before the insurrection proved that, races that gave Senate control to opponents of the present administration. 

The president made a great deal of noise during his campaigns and tenure about “law and order,” and tried to conflate that slogan with the principle of the rule of law. But his entire presidency has demonstrated that he has no respect for the rule of law, without which “law and order” has no meaning. 

There were probably people in that crowd who genuinely believed their guy won the election and it was being stolen from him. With apologies to my family members who are in that camp, such persons are intellectually lazy (at best) and profoundly mistaken, as attested by count after count and court after court.

But there were others in the crowd who didn’t care who actually won; for them, what was important is that their guy stayed in power because, as the gassed woman implied, their guy would see to it that Black Lives Matter folks were the ones to get pepper sprayed  (at best). 

        We aren’t yet out of the woods.

What comes next is a period of profound uncertainty, not of purpose and commitment—President-Elect Biden and VP Harris are fully versed in the law and their obligations—but of how the people of the United States will respond to the challenge raised by a violent group of radicalized right-wingers and their misguided (if not simply cynically self-serving, or just as bad, cowardly) representatives in Congress. 

Georgia offers a glimmer of hope, as its distinctly Republican office holders respected the presidential results under extreme pressure, and conducted successful run-off Senate elections, where both GOP Senate candidates conceded their defeats. Georgia! Who would have imagined?

It is now incumbent on every one of us who believes in the rule of law and the mandates of our Constitution to stand firm against the efforts of those who would deny our free and fair electoral process. Their motives are irrelevant; law and order require adherence to the Rule of Law, to actions having consequences.

At the same time, we need to be ready to work with those we disagree with to find avenues for moving forward together. We need to calm the fearful and hear the alienated—with one caveat: Trumpism must be disavowed. The corrupt, putrid carcass of the last four years must be reduced to an object example of what CANNOT be tolerated in the United States of America.

In the Aftermath--Georgia on Everyone's Mind

 It is doubtful that any election has ever been quite so scrutinized as 2020’s general. We all knew that if the results weren’t favorable to the incumbent president, he would claim a rigged election; he told us that straight out. So officials were watching. And while there were efforts at suppression and even some for repression (one could note these efforts came from the GOP, but no need to digress); nevertheless, no credible evidence of significant and intentional vote manipulation has been shown. 

Moreover, as many have pointed out, if some cabal were managing to coordinate fraud across various states to defeat Qanon’s savior-in-chief, why did it not add more seats in the House of Representatives and grab control of the Senate? Why are state legislative bodies not overwhelmingly blue? 

Politico  reported on 4 November  that “Republicans were already set to have total control over the crafting of more than twice as many congressional seats as Democrats. And after a weak showing on Tuesday, Democrats did nothing to reverse that disadvantage, giving Republicans a chance to draw favorable maps that will help them elect their preferred state and federal representatives for the next five election cycles.” [Ally Mutnick and Sabrina Rodriguez, “‘A Decade of Power’: Statehouse wins position GOP to dominate redistricting”] Given the long-term importance of these races, you’d think any fraud effort would make sure that the GOP didn’t retain quite so much power, right?

But let’s leave all that to one side for a moment. Let’s just acknowledge that United States’ voters are divided, that within many states, there’s a seesaw effect among political subdivisions, but that the institution of elections has held. Officials did their jobs with integrity, and absent any evidence to the contrary, it was a free and fair election, despite the pandemic.

In 2020, you might be able to quibble about a few thousand votes here or there—which recounts will settle—but it’s hard to dispute that BOTH the popular and the electoral votes went in Joe Biden’s column in a significant number. The president knows it, which is why he’s sulking in the white house, purging any appointee he thinks might not fully support him, and filing frivolous lawsuits everywhere. The Rudy Giuliani press conference at Four Seasons Landscaping is an apt metaphor for the entire debacle. 

Campaign yard signs, Maine 2020

Which begs the question: why are GOP leaders not acknowledging Biden’s win and rejecting the president’s drama? To agree there was fraud calls into question the very real GOP gains in this election, gains that, as Politico points out, offer a decade of power in the redrawing of congressional district lines. It calls into question close races for the Senate and the GOP’s control of that body. That’s the political (and somewhat cynical) question.

More importantly, the GOP has always held itself up as the real defender of constitutional principles and national security. What the president is doing undermines both. “Law and order” is not the same thing as “Rule of Law,” as every lawyer should know—and there are many lawyers in the Congress. In fact, law and order that isn’t subject to the rule of law—tiresome principles like due process and freedom of speech and assembly—partakes little of law and turns order into authoritarianism.

If you’ve not drunk the Kool-Aid, you’re aware that the incumbent president doesn’t give a damn about the nation and its citizens outside the role he’s  gotten to play as president. His current conduct makes that patently clear if it wasn't already. There’s a reason he loves rallies: standing at that podium before cheering crowds equates with how he sees the part he’s playing in a script he imagines. So if you’re a powerful Senate leader like Mitch McConnell, assuming you subscribe to the basic principles of the GOP, why do you not take the president on?

Some pundits say that Republicans are afraid of the backlash of their constituents, their “base” which is also the president’s base. They also want to keep the base mobilized for the Georgia run-offs, is the assertion.

May I respectfully point out that the nation is in peril, and one of the jobs of an elected official is to show leadership when leadership is required? Moreover, if the president could manipulate the so-called base into such fervor for him, seems like a savvy politician could find a way to distract and redirect that energy. True, it might be—it probably is, really—risky. But isn’t that what the oath of office requires? For the good of the country?

If they aren’t willing to do that, I find myself asking: why are they in Washington? Whose interests to they seek to serve?

And as to Georgia: while I get that there are times a divided government is a good thing, that there are times when you want that check on power, this is not that time. I BEG Georgians to send two Democrats to the Senate. One of them will have to be reelected in 2022, so there’s a built-in safeguard if Georgia’s worried about some sort of rampant Blue power grab. But a huge amount of damage has been done, damage we won’t fully comprehend until President-elect Biden is inaugurated—just as President Obama couldn’t realize the depth of the financial crisis of 2007 until he got the complete information upon stepping into the Oval Office. 

Socially distanced voters complete their ballots for scanning
and counting in Maine

The slim Democratic majority that electing Jon Ossof and Rafael Warnock would give the Senate isn’t enough to allow some sort of radical frenzy; but it might temper debates and allow President Biden to put things back on the track of progress, might restore order and orderliness. And it might begin the revitalization of Rule of Law, through thoughtful rather than knee-jerk obstructionist, confirmation votes on appointees selected for their qualifications and character. 

I sure hope Georgia will give this gift to the country: two years! And if you don’t like the country’s direction when it’s had a chance to actually move forward, well then, have at it and we can go back to chaos.

                            

So Smart = So Loyal?

January 23, 2016. Donald Trump, the candidate, boasted, "I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, okay, and I wouldn't lose any voters, okay? It's, like, incredible.”  

        The audience at his rally in Sioux Center, Iowa laughed, perhaps enthralled by what he had said right before that: “My people are so smart!” And, he went on, “so loyal!” 

Donald Trump descends Trump Tower on an escalator to announce his candidacy for US president on 16 June 2015. Photograph: Christopher Gregory/Getty Images

It was that loyalty he was praising when he talked about shooting someone on Fifth Avenue, loyalty that in his mind showed that "his people" were "so smart." 

        And that Iowa crowd laughed. Oh, Donald, they thought, Such a master of hyperbole!

        Except he meant it.

So far as we know, he hasn’t shot anyone yet, but he has contributed to the deaths of over 195,000. And his “so smart” people apparently remain loyal.

It’s been a conundrum to me. I can almost reach an understanding of his attraction: he’s entertaining, in a rather nasty kind of way--his "jokes" tend to be at the expense of others, but he also voices the fears and frustrations many of our compatriots feel: after years of hearing how Washington doesn’t understand or care about them from cynical political operatives and their clients, this guy rides down an escalator and says he’s going to fix everything. If you bought into his characterization of how bad everything was, his presentation was superficially very appealing. 

        Among other things, he talked about the country’s need for a cheerleader, “somebody that can take the brand of the United States and make it great again,” he said. [Emphasis added.] 

So here’s my question for his supporters, now, after his almost 4 years at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, now that we’ve heard from his own mouth how he knew covid-19 was “deadly stuff” but didn't bother to devise a national plan to address it, or to even pull up the plan previously sketched out and modeled that his administration had consigned to mothballs: are you okay with this guy dissing you to a degree that endangers the lives of everyone you care about?

        Hear me out. A leader leads. That requires informing followers when there's a problem, telling them what the problem is, and what the plan is for dealing with the problem. A leader knows that to address a crisis effectively, it's necessary to get folks on board to solve it. That means trusting the citizenry to rise to the occasion, in short, recognizing that the people are smart enough to respond appropriately to the information they’re given .

Listening to the Woodward tapes, what I hear is that the president who didn’t “want to create a panic” feared doing so because, when National Security Advisor O’Brien told him the gravity of the situation, he himself panicked. He found himself in the place where he claimed that policeman in Kenosha was when he emptied 7 bullets into Jacob Blake: the president choked. 

Or worse: he thought his job was to be a cheerleader and keep everyone chipper while they were dying because, well, what can you do about a pandemic, really, until “like a miracle” it goes away?

Maybe he feared that if he galvanized the public to confront the pandemic, it  might interfere with his own interests: cause a negative stock market reaction, or demand leadership action that couldn't be easily rolled into a sound bite and tied up with a bow by Election Day. 

        To put it bluntly, it looks to me like the president  thinks the American people are too stupid to handle a serious national emergency. And since staying in office is the only value he cares about, he can just ignore the daily death toll and spreading cases and talk about other things, or blame it all on whoever comes to mind: China, Democratic mayors, Democratic governors, medical personnel who don't like him...

           In short, he keeps relying on our stupidity to let him run roughshod over our very lives. He’s been doing this now for almost 4 years, with increasingly destructive results. 

        

Election polls, Harpswell (ME) Community School
during covid-19 pandemic July 2020

        There's an election coming that allows us to prove him wrong. Aren't you tired of his manipulations, of his shape-shifting truth to benefit himself, regardless of its impact on the national interest? 

        Let's quote him one final time, yes? Let's tell him: "You're fired!"

Whose Vision?

I was sent an ad for the president’s reelection via social media by a relative recently, not, I was told, as a political statement, but just because it was a beautiful American message. You can judge for yourself: it can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRlCRalEJxY ; it’s called “The Best is Yet to Come.” It hasn’t turned up on my TV set, yet, although it looks like it was released on the internet earlier this year.

My relation was enthusiastic about the positive vision the ad offers of our country, she told me. But as I watched it, I found myself wondering how I’d feel if I were anything other than a white American…

I can believe that this is how the president envisions America. It’s very much a TV vision from the era of his youth (also the era of my youth, so I know whereof I speak). Lots of bits from TV shows and movies are edited into this [times are approximate], like Davy Crockett, complete with coonskin hat, riding into Washington, D.C. [0.42]. The president’s voice lists heroes (predominantly white males, with some odd exceptions: Annie Oakley appears in old film shooting a repeating rifle at a target) and tells of their carving “a nation out of the vast frontier” [0:56]. These heroes “tamed the wilderness” [1:10]  and “settled the wild west,”[1:13] they “braved the unknown.”[1:09].

A Native American might quibble with the characterization of wilderness taming. They might point out that the “unknown” could have been known if the newcomers had adopted a different approach to  the folks who already lived in the lands they'd stumbled on.  Native Americans could also debate the nation carving, given that those who lived in the unknown lands actually managed it with a light but effective touch, and in much of what’s now the United States, had a fairly long history of organized governance, even confederation among peoples.

African Americans might also find this telling less than relevant. The president’s American Story doesn’t have slavery (though it does have Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman as its token black heroes, for unspecified reasons—no MLK or Rosa Parks, mind you!).

Mexican Americans might wonder at the account of the 1836 “last stand” at the Alamo, by “Texas patriots”[0:51]—particularly given that those “patriots” were immigrants to the Mexican territory of Tejas.  Many were slave holders, and it’s not so coincidental that Texas rebelled not long after Mexico abolished slavery in 1829. Texas became the independent Republic of Texas in April 1836. Not a part of the U.S., and at the time, not interested in being a part of the U.S. Though the United States did not directly participate in the insurgency, the Texian forces, as they were then called, included numerous U.S. soldiers who returned to their U.S. military units back home in the United States after the rebellion without consequences for being AWOL.

The tacit U.S. support for the rebellion, and the later annexation by the U.S. of Texas in 1846 led to the Mexican American War, a war ignored by the ad, as well as largely ignored in mainstream U.S. history. (Lincoln made a forceful speech opposing this war  while he was in Congress—not a part of Lincoln’s legacy that the current president chooses to mention). The origins of the war are murky, as is often the case, but U.S. President Polk definitely saw it as an opportunity to fulfill the so-called “manifest destiny.” When it was over, Mexico lost most of what is now California, Nevada, Utah, most of Arizona, the western half of New Mexico, the western quarter of Colorado, and the southwest corner of Wyoming, along with bits of Kansas and Oklahoma.

Parenthetically, Korean Americans and Vietnamese Americans might wonder about what happened to the Korean and Vietnamese Wars--as might the veterans of those wars. There's also no mention of Jewish Americans or Arab Americans; the far east and the middle east might not exist at all....

Irish Americans might find a timeline showing 1848 - 1849, where the president’s voice says we were lifting “millions from poverty, disease, and hunger”[1:15] mildly puzzling.  The smaller print that goes by quite quickly references Irish immigrants coming to the United States, who arrived (in the thousands, not the millions) to escape the potato famine.  No mention of the discrimination Irish immigrants faced on arrival in the accolade to lifting millions out of the muck.

Into the 1850s, now, Civil War on the horizon. Except according to the president’s vision, there apparently wasn’t one—a sort of lip service is perhaps given in an image that zips quickly by of a black soldier in what may be a Union uniform holding a flag [1:00]. Nope, there was nation-building in the infrastructure sense: we “laid down the railroads” [1:25]—again, from an indigenous peoples’ perspective, this might recall land grabs, or buffalo slaughter, or relentless relocations and suppressions—and a Chinese American might wonder why their contribution to the transcontinental railroad is ignored but for a single lone frame showing the back of a worker’s head, topped by a conical hat and displaying a single long braid [1:29]. Nor is there mention of the legally imposed discrimination, once the railroad was complete, which barred Chinese laborers from entering the United States and placed restrictions on those already here. Indeed, until 1943, federal law prohibited Chinese residents from becoming American citizens.

Native Americans, in fact, might find a a strange image juxtaposition ominous: Mt. Rushmore appears [1:36] as the president is talking about “our ancestors” building “the most exceptional republic ever to exist in all of human history”; the Statue of Liberty flows by with Manhattan in the background, immediately followed at 1:40 by an image that looks like a horseman from one of the Plains tribes consumed in a dust storm as the president’s face then appears [1:43] saying “and we are making it greater than ever before.”


A bit later, a painting flashes on the screen [2:10]. I recognized it as “The First Thanksgiving at Plymouth” (1914, Jennie Augusta Brownscombe), or rather, a piece of that painting. Bad enough that in the complete painting, shown here, the Wampanoag who enabled the Pilgrims to survive were portrayed as a few attendees, mostly in the background. But in the campaign video, they’re cropped out entirely. Just the left side is shown (pilgrims only). The painting is apparently meant simply to illustrate “the hand of Almighty God” by which we are, says the president, all made equal. There’s a certain irony, there…

Since they opted to use this painting, it’s worth taking a look at what it doesn’t depict. According to Grace Donnelly in a 2017 Fortune article cited by Charles M. Blow (NYT, Opinion: “The Horrible History of Thanksgiving,” 27 November 2019).

"The celebration in 1621 did not mark a friendly turning point and did not become an annual event. Relations between the Wampanoag and the settlers deteriorated, leading to the Pequot War. In 1637, in retaliation for the murder of a man the settlers believed the Wampanoags killed, they burned a nearby village, killing as many as 500 men, women, and children. Following the massacre, William Bradford, the Governor of Plymouth, wrote that for 'the next 100 years, every Thanksgiving Day ordained by a Governor was in honor of the bloody victory, thanking God that the battle had been won.'”

In short, as Blow points out succinctly, “Just 16 years after the Wampanoag shared that meal, they were massacred.” Another way of looking at it might be that one European life is worth around 500 indigenous lives. Begging the question, in today’s terms, which lives matter?

Those are just some of the president’s historical interpretations that frankly, we should all take issue with.

My point here isn’t to denigrate my flawed, beloved country.  But in order for us to continue the great American experiment of forging “a more perfect union” that began in Philadelphia in 1776, we can’t pretend that we haven’t tripped, stumbled, and even fallen along the way. We can’t dismiss the voices and perspectives of huge portions of our united peoples.

What makes us great is that when we trip, we search until we find our footing; though we may stumble, we catch ourselves and keep going; when we fall, we get ourselves up again.

What keeps us great is our diversity, our ability to learn and progress, our fundamental goodness when opportunity arises, like the outpouring of help in times of flood or sacrifice in a pandemic. When we draw on it, our diversity allows renewal through the myriad voices that join the national conversation, offering different viewpoints and creative visions. It is, as former President Barak Obama says, “messy.” But it is far more beautiful, offers far more freedom, than the lovely, distorted myth of America  envisioned by the president.

Lessons from Time Travel

Travel through Peru is a dizzying experience. It's time travel!

There are, in the highlands and mountains, the remains of human settlements that date from 8,000 BC—think about that! In the Toquepala Caves, there are seven-color paintings done by hunter-gatherers dating back to that time, sequences of the trapping and harvesting of guanacos by use of axe, lance and spear-throwers.

Peru’s Sacred Valley was settled around 800 BC. It’s a remarkable ecosystem: there are corners where crops can be grown year around, although the altitude ranges from just below 7,000 feet to almost 10,000 feet above sea level. Water is abundant from both natural watercourses and the channels and fountains devised by pre-Columbian peoples.  While most people think of the Inca as Peru’s original civilization, the Inca were actually late-comers, emerging around Cuzco during the 14th C.

Before the rise of the Inca, Cuzco seems to have been a center for the rise and fall of several cultural groups, including the Chanapata early on, and the Wari, an aggressive people that preceded the Inca. The Wari collapsed around 1100 AD, after initial success at conquest of neighboring peoples. Legend brings the Inca on to the scene. Myth attributes the founding of Cuzco to them.

The Inca were a talented society; they adopted and adapted useful elements of previous cultures, and wove together surrounding peoples into a single entity. They did this not so much through armed conquest as with diplomacy: persuasion, negotiation, alliances through marriage. Part of their strategy was the offer of stability and protection to replace costly tensions and conflict. The Inca were apparently masters of administration, for their territory ended up reaching from today’s Columbia southward deep into present-day Chile.

The pre-Inca and Inca ruins in the Sacred Valley are marvels of architecture and engineering. What’s particularly impressive to me is both the longevity, the permanence of the constructions, and the not-entirely-unrelated design that worked with terrain, geology and ecology rather than trying to dominate the indomitable.

The famed ruins of Machu Picchu are a case in point. Even when discovered in 1911, some 500 years after its abandonment, the “ruins” were largely intact. Oh, the roofs, originally thatch, were gone, timbers fallen, and vegetation had managed to weaken some parts. But by and large, the buildings stood entire, the fitting of the stones so securely done—without mortar!—that the stones remained unmoved. In a land of earthquakes! Channels for water still directed the water through the citadel; terraces for support continued to shed water and provide stability.

As they do today, though the impact of thousands upon thousands of tourist feet has begun to affect the passageways and walls. Some shifts appear in the previously unmoved stones, here and there, prompting the authorities to consider limitations on access.

There’s much we could learn from the model we are told that the Inca left us. Their reliance on non-forceful means to unify disparate peoples and thereby expand trade and cultural exchange offers food for thought. War is directly destructive of human life; it also disrupts trade and wastes resources, including labor. If accommodation can be reached with one’s adversaries, then cooperation can ensue, enhancing everyone’s security. The question posed today was probably an issue even then: what is a people ready to give up for increased security, and what must be retained? Religion is often a sticking point, particularly if there are significant numbers of fundamentalists (“my way is the only TRUTH”); certain cultural values may cause stresses if infringed. But it’s worth looking for points where peoples can find common ground and starting from there, rather than trying to force an adversary into a mold it’s unprepared to fit into.

Likewise, and perhaps even more importantly, it appears that the Inca, and their predecessors, didn’t try to dominate their landscape. Instead, they learned how to work with it. Looking at waterworks today that were built thousands of years ago and still function, one is struck with the fact that maintenance is minimized if you don’t try to force a system into a place where it doesn’t naturally fit. The terraces and drainage channels in the pre-Columbian ruins of Peru remain whole; erosion hasn’t carried it all away. Even in the high country around Lake Titicaca (elevations average above 12000 ft.) where frost is frequent, the indigenous peoples figured out how to use a kind of raised bed and channel growing system that acted to modify temperatures enough to allow abundant crop production. (There’s a great description of this in an article by researcher Clark L. Ericson at https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~cerickso/articles/Exped.pdf).

The indigenous peoples of the United States are actively exploring their cultural roots and the ancient knowledge that informs their cultures. Tension continues between forced domination, which is philosophically a foundation of Western European culture (See Genesis: 1-26, where god charges  mankind with to dominate all animal life and subdue plant life), and seeking commonality. To date, the urge to domination has resulted in the primacy of Western culture. There is now, however, a profound question about whether we, as a species, can survive if we continue using the old models.

Maybe it’s time to start listening to the voices of indigenous peoples who have adapted to their environments. Domination isn’t working out so well…

Wind/ice cause collapse of communication tower at Sugarloaf, Maine, 24 Feb. 2019
Photo by TDS Communications
taken from News Center ME site (NBC)

Presidential Pronouncement: Pretend Proposal

Portland Women's March 01/19/19

I didn’t hear the president’s remarks when they came fresh from his mouth. I was engaged in demonstrating in support of rights that his administration has put in jeopardy: women’s, environmental, racial equality, immigration, LBGQT+, voting… in short, all of the rights that U.S. citizens have fought for through the years and apparently must now fight for again.

I heard about the remarks, and today, as a strange series of weather wave shifts —sleet, snow, freezing rain—argue about which should dominate through wind gusts, I listened to the proposal. Now, you have to understand that I assumed that the point was ending the government shutdown.

I admit it: I thought the crisis to be addressed was the economic sledgehammer coming down on federal employees and those who depend on them, directly (like their families) and indirectly (small businesses, lenders, services…), an economic impact that will ripple out beyond those now immediately involved as time goes on. In my naiveté, I was waiting for the president to acknowledge a problem well on its way to affecting everyone in the country in one way or another and to propose its solution.

Instead, I learned that the president has suddenly discovered that the conditions his policies cause on the border have created a humanitarian crisis. This isn’t news to anyone who has been following the situation pretty much since the president was elected, but evidently it wasn’t clear to him. The other border problems he referred to are ongoing and hardly constitute a crisis; moreover, a wall won't do a lot to forestall them for multiple reasons I won't regurgitate here.

When the president's remarks were finished, I was left perplexed and a little angry. The anger strengthened when I listened to specific parts of his comments again, just to be sure I didn’t miss what I was looking for.

First, in this nationally broadcast statement, in the midst of a government shutdown that is, among other things, on the verge of being a national security crisis (if it isn’t already), the president’s reference to it was limited, and never did he speak to or of the men and women that bear its heaviest burden. At the start of his remarks, he described his plan as providing a “path forward to end the government shutdown”; toward the end, he said his plan “immediately opens government,” and then he talked about how, “once the government is open,” his administration would take bipartisan steps toward a consultation on comprehensive immigration legislation. How this works in practice regarding the shutdown is apparently that Senator McConnell will “bring up legislation that would immediately reopen the government and incorporate President Trump’s proposal to offer temporary protections to some immigrants in exchange for $5.7 billion for his border wall,” this according to a McConnell staffer. [ Emphasis added; New York Times on line, 20 January 2019.]

Second, insisting he was being reasonable and that the Democrats had been taken over by radicals supporting open borders, the president urged acceptance of his "common sense" plan. But the only people I’ve heard talk about "open borders" are those  fixated on a border wall from sea to shining sea. The president made it sound like anyone who opposes his wall opposes any border security at all. Yet the Democratic Party platform provides "Democrats will continue to work toward comprehensive immigration reform that fixes our nation’s broken immigration system, improves border security, prioritizes enforcement so we are targeting criminals – not families, keeps families together, and strengthens our economy.” [Emphasis added.] I've heard no Democratic spokesperson refute this principle. (Interestingly, in a kind of footnote no one seems to have remarked, the president appeared to imply that the border would be more or less open for agricultural workers as he conceives border reform, saying that "lawful and regulated entry into our country will be easy and consistent" for them so "our farmers and vineyards won't be affected.")

500 year old wall, Machu Picchu

So why am I angry? Because the cynicism and political gamesmanship of this “solution” is so clear. The president’s only concession is an indication that his wall will be built at strategic locations rather than trying to follow the entire border. (How "strategic locations" are actually defined should be closely watched in the language of any relevant legislation.) Most importantly, he still insists on 5.7 billion dollars for wall construction, without further detail, before he’ll agree to sign anything that will reopen the government.

But the Senate Majority Leader bears responsibility for this situation as well. His cynicism in coupling the president’s plan with the reopening of the government in an effort to force Democrats to agree to the 5.7 billion is transparently obvious. If they don’t do so, presumably the GOP will claim (as they’ve been doing), that the Dems are obstructionist and for “open borders.” McConnell COULD just allow the spending bills both houses previously approved to go to the Senate floor for a vote, and the Senate could exercise its constitutional duty by a veto-proof vote. Even McConnell must see that the precedent of allowing a president to hold the entire country hostage through a government shutdown is unacceptable and contrary to every principal of good governance to which we supposedly adhere!

Perhaps McConnell feels that upholding his oath of office would cripple the president who, among other things, is giving him the judges he wants.  McConnell’s already managed to reshape the U.S. federal court system significantly. He should take his wins and run. It's past time for him to do his duty and reopen the government. The immigration and border security aspects of the president’s plan can then be debated, discussed, negotiated and settled--without harming federal public servants who are now being punished for choosing to serve us. Because, in case anyone's forgotten, WE--all of us, whether or not we voted for the president--are the boss of all of these people. Including the occupant of the White House.

Non-Essential: Galapagos III

The Galapagos Islands remind you that you’re a member of a nonessential species on the planet. But they also bring home the fact that the planet and its ecosystems are essential to you. We tend to stride over the earth as if we really do “have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth….” (Genesis: 1:26) And we do, in fact, have the power and the means to dominate much of the natural world, to extinguish other species, to make the earth uninhabitable for humankind.

The Galapagos have been conveying the true relationship of nature to humans and vice versa since they were discovered in 1535. Bishop Berlanga reported their inhospitable characteristics so far as human beings were concerned. In the 16th C., what made land desirable were first mineral riches—gold, silver, copper—followed by indigenous populations to provide labor to exploit the riches or to work agricultural land, in the case that mineral riches weren’t available. (And of course, to bring into the Christian fold as part of the ongoing crusade to prepare for the second coming…but I digress.)

When humans stopped by—as did the occasional merchant ship, pirate and later, whaler—they did so to take on water and provision with such meat as could be hunted or carried. Fur seals and sperm whales were the attraction to being in the vicinity. No one worried much about conserving stocks for the needs of the next ship, much less future generations. Case in point: the whaling ship Essex, of Herman Melville fame, put into Floreana in 1820 to pick up some tortoises to augment its food supply. Whether as amusement or to facilitate the hunt, the crew set the island on fire. In doing so, they managed to almost entirely eradicate the tortoises on the island.

Whalers and fur sealers ransacked the archipelago. According to the Galapagos Conservancy, “Sperm whale, fur seal, and giant tortoise populations declined precipitously during the 19th century. By 1890, the Galapagos Fur Seal was considered commercially extinct.… Between 1784 and 1860, whalers took more than 100,000 tortoises from the islands…. The California Academy of Science 1905-06 expedition found that tortoises were very scarce on Española and Fernandina; by 1974, Pinta was added to the list of islands where tortoises could not be found. ”

Fish market, Pto. Ayora, Santa Cruz

By the time of the California Academy studies, settlement of the islands was making headway.  Added to the environmental pressure caused by species depletion through hunting came habitat destruction due to human activities.

Floreana was settled first, in the 1830s.  Domestic livestock was brought in to support the colony and highland forests were cut for pasture and cropland. When the colony ultimately failed, it left behind a devastated landscape no longer fit to sustain Floreana’s native wildlife.

But the scientific interest in the archipelago aroused by Charles Darwin’s visit in 1835 continued to seep out into the world, even as small groups of people emigrated from the mainland to find a life harvesting tortoise oil, or salt, or fish. In 1959, Ecuador created a national park to protect the archipelago, expanded by a marine reserve added in 1998. The protected area was further extended with a marine sanctuary decreed in 2016. Conservation and protection were enhanced by designation of the archipelago as a World Heritage Site in 1979; the archipelago and its immense marine reserve are considered  a unique “living museum and showcase of evolution” by UNESCO.

The Ecuadoran National Park Service has worked with the Charles Darwin Foundation (CDF) since the beginning in 1959, thanks to an agreement with the Ecuador’s Government. The CDF’S Darwin Research Center has a mandate to pursue and maintain collaborations with government agencies by providing scientific knowledge and technical assistance to promote and secure conservation of Galapagos.

UNESCO raised a warning flag in 2007, when tourism development and immigration pressures were threatening the islands, by including the archipelago on its list of World Heritage in Danger. It was a warning that Ecuador heeded, to the extent that in 2010, the Galapagos were removed from the endangered list. Strict rules govern tourist visits to the islands; fishing is stringently regulated; and research efforts have incorporated sustainability of human activity into investigations—in other words, research into how humankind might live in balance with the natural world.

All of which is to say that the Galapagos experience offers a model of how our species might redefine its approach to, and place in, the world on which we live. It’s actually an old model, since most indigenous peoples have used it for eons. It recognizes that in order for us to survive, we have to contribute to and protect the survival of the rest of the natural world.

We humans are arguably ecologically unnecessary. Think about that for a moment. So far as ecosystems go, we seem to have a place only as a top predator, which is one of the least important positions on the web of life. If we all disappeared tomorrow, the worst that could happen to the rest of creation would be that our leftover garbage would get in its way for a time… Certainly the Galapagos Islands got along without us quite nicely until 1535; currents and winds brought life to the islands against incredible odds, and it thrived and reformed and worked out a unique ecosystem. We are privileged today to walk through it, to catch a glimpse of what an existence devoid of humankind might look like… to recognize, in all humility, our proper place in the scheme of things.

[For anyone interested in the work of the Charles Darwin Research Center and Foundation, check out https://www.darwinfoundation.org/en/; this is the English language link.]