* Happy Thoughts II

Quot. of the Day:

Everything that a man does in service of the state he does against his own nature.
    --Nietzsche

* A Philosophy of Blogging

Quot. of the Day:

The NEWSPAPER is the second-hand in the clock of history; and it is not only made of baser metal than those that point to the minute and the hour, but it seldom goes right.
    --Schopenhauer

The BLOG, then, is the millisecond "hand" (or LED)?—and almost never goes right. But therein lies both its charm and power.

* Complete Filler!

This blog entry is COMPLETE FILLER. You see, I'm disappointed that I don't have as many blog entries this month ("as per usual"), and I need more. So here's _one_. . . . You see, I spent much of the first half of this month among people, and family (those bastards): "not that there's anything wrong with that." And I spent a good deal of the rest of it OUTSIDE, driving backroads around Lincoln, and neighboring counties, and even up to South Dakota by-ways, watching, uh, BIRDS: "not that there's anything wrong with that." (And rendered my relatively new car a veritable rattle-trap-clap of a vehicle: but it was worth it.)

But I'm back, in earnest, to the Macintosh and to the digital world. I just revised and submitted an article on the Passenger Pigeon to a journal (yeah, one of those lame, uh, print, things, but younevermind); I'm getting ideas about doing something actually funny with the John&Martha cartoon series; and I'm back to converting the rest of my Classic/OS9 documents to OSX versions (mostly WordPerfect and HyperCard; the bane of my existence right now).

You see, I have fruitfully once again forgotten any human contacts. Yes, my daughter in Colorado just had some traumatic dental work—I sent her flowers. Yes, my wife is at wit's end regarding her job, her son, and her raison d'être—I told her that I'd take her to a nice Indian restaurant the next time she limped her sad—auto into town.

So you NETmeisters who thought I'd abandoned our posthuman project—never you mind! I'm back!

* Thinking Happy Thoughts

Quot. of the Day:

Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness and dies by chance.
    --Jean-Paul Sartre

* Eco-Indian vs. Eco-Anglo

In The Journey, a museum in Rapid City, SD, humankind's concern for the environment is emblematized in a two-part exhibit, with a definite value-judgment timeline implied. On the left side of the presentation [photo above] is an archetypal Indian, as it were, living as one with the land–although, frankly, he looks rather stunned just to be alive. In the 2nd photo (the Native guy can still be seen, now on the far left), the Euro-American–or, the "new & improved man"!?–has a similarly healthy concern for the environment; moreover, with the aid of charts and graphs and Darwinian science, this dapper fellow must be considered even more eco-conscious: indeed, he is a fine tribute to human evolution, to the advance of civilization itself.  [Oh, my daughter tells me that the person on the right is a woman! Still hard to tell, even from the larger version of this photo, but now I guess she's right.]

* RADIO RANT: ProNOUNciation

As someone who grew up a poor breed introvert in the "sticks," I spent a lot of time reading the classics on my own—but never hearing anyone pronounce the names of the people I was reading. So through junior high and high school, I thought "Yeats" rhymed with "Keats," and I pronounced the German author of Faust as "GOHTH"—and never lived it down, in my own mind. So I'm particularly sensitive about pronunciation. The following, then, are really complaints about mes semblables et mes frères, to paraphrase Baudelaire:

1) Rush Limbaugh, for instance, had a running commercial blurb a few weeks ago in which he mocked those (of us) who have mocked his grandiloquence. But he pronounced the word "grandELoquent." There's irony for thee, good apothecary.

2) But Michael Savage is (again) my main target of complaint. Since his doctorate is in nutritional science (or nutritional ethnomedicine—there seems some controversy here), you'd think he'd know that the h in "herbal" is silent, but he continually aspirates it when he speaks of formerly being in the "herbal business." This may be some inside joke with himself and long-time listeners; if so, I don't get it. (Like Rush, he also seems to think that emphasizing one syllable of a word overly long is either very funny or otherwise incredibly rhetorically effective. Again, I don't get it.) . . . Also, instead of pronouncing homocide as "HAWMuhside," like most of us, he insists on saying "HOMOside." But this may again be an attempt at humor & political-moral commentary: "Look! I can attack gays even when I'm talking about something else completely!" . . . However, I'm certain that he doesn't know how to pronounce monolingual and proselytize; the first syllables, respectively, are not "MOH" and "PROH." . . . Finally (and this is grammar, not pronunciation), Savage has half-remembered some apocryphal Voltaire this last week or two, having at several points said to us liberals that he "will fight to the death your right to"—well, be stupidly, wackily liberal and wrong. But the original is "defend to the death," of course; Savage's version is syntactic gibberish. (Or the OPPOSITE of what he means: "fight your right"?!)

3) Finally, it's no great shock that the French language has never had a chance in the good ol' USA. Close to home—in South Dakota—French-Indian names that end in -eaux often end up being pronounced as "-ooh" (e.g., Roubideaux; Flandreaux). A vowel shift of sorts, really. But my big gripe in this category involves media pronunciations of Moulin Rouge, especially in the song "Lady Marmalade" from the recent movie about said French placename. Why someone has insisted that they sing "moohLAW(n)" is beyond me, especially since there are also many mainstream media examples of its correct pronunciation. (This includes the actors in the movie itself, one web site claims, although I don't remember myself if this is true. It's another of those movies that my wife made me watch. While that damned bird of hers bit the hell out of me!)

* RADIO RANT: OverOverstatingstating the Obvious

The quandary of 24-hour cable sports news and of sports-radio-talkshow news &—especially—play-by-play commentary: why must these guys & gals forever be spouting the hackneyed & obvious? (Examples among myriads: the number of home runs Babe Ruth hit, either in his career or his best season; what the offsides rule in hockey [or soccer] is; the last year the Cubs won the World Series; how many feet a receiver needs in-bounds for a legal catch in college football; which NBA center "always" outplayed Wilt Chamberlain, even though Wilt scored 100 points in a single game; when a baserunner shouldn't risk making an out at third base; what a Maryland "Terrapin" is; what a rotten bastard Ty Cobb was, personally; why/how the NFL has surpassed baseball as our national pastime; etc., etc.) The most blatant criminals in this regard include Brent Musburger, Tim McCarver, Joe Morgan, and John Madden, and most of the ESPN and FOX Sports newswriters. We (sports fans) KNOW all this! Those who don't know such stuff aren't even watching/listening, because they obviously care little or nothing about sports in the first place. In sum, you're wasting all of our time in aiming this so-called enlightening info at an audience that doesn't exist. . . .

* John & Martha VI

À propos the Michael Vick dog-betting fiasco:

* RADIO RANT: Dog Eat Dog; Rich Wear Fur

The outrage by the talking heads on sports talk radio and cable news regarding the Michael Vick dog-fighting scandal was understandably vehement—but so self-righteous. That is, all these people can be "right," but for the wrong reasons. "How inhumane! I'm a dog lover! All Americans love dogs!" But when the occasional "nut" called in suggesting that shooting deer and pheasants is no less barbaric, such discourse was dismissed as beyond the pale. Worst has been the pompous&supercilious attitude of ESPN Radio's Colin Cowherd, whose elitist/urbanite biases distinguished themselves: pit-bull fighting is a despicable sport practiced especially by the poor, the rural, and the Southern (and the—shshshsh—black). You're so right, Colin. You city folk are immune to such first-hand visceral cruelty, with enough money to distance yourself from the inhumane (such an ironic term) factory farming that provides you with your veal parmesan and chicken Kiev, while your pasty-skinned lazy Euro-jet-trash-of-a-wife can't decide whether to wear a dead fox or mink, to cover her pastiness.

All this outrage is also completely anthropocentric: that is, it's all about us humans—including "man's best friend." There would certainly have been less outrage if Vick had been involved in cockfighting. Or how about terrapin matches? (Yeh, probably very lengthy affairs.) Or cricket bouts, to the death?! My point is that, if humankind has an innate biophilia (love of all life), it's still quite mammalo-centric: we love the animals that remind us most of us, that have fur, and cuddly babies . . . and maybe milk that we can feed to our own babies. And so, following my niece & nephew around the zoo gift shop last week, I wasn't surprised to see that nearly all of the stuffed animals were mammals. The few birds seemed unnatural and stiff and "distant"; the reptiles and insects were intentionally rubbery and "alien."

In fact, though my book-in-manuscript spends pages on end explaining the poets' age-old obsession with birds, I'm still rather surprised when people actually grow attached to them as pets. (I refuse to do so, being against caged birds in general.) But my wife, for one, treats her budgie as her best friend, though it shits on her shoulder all the time and bites the hell out of me when I show up. (Well, at least we and birds are both vertebrates: so, yeh, birds still kick ass on locusts as pets.) But I wonder if the average human mourns as much when his/her lovebird flies out the window in the middle of winter and never returns, compared to when old Fido gets run over by the neighbor's car. Birds, I guess, are somewhere between our mammal-compatriot dogs and cats—and that goldfish whose tombstone is the toilet-bowl lid. ("Mom! Where's Jimmy? He's not in his bowl!")

I've wandered far from Michael Vick to illustrate how problematic "animal rights" is. I don't even like that term ("rights" is a human legal construct, after all), preferring Lawrence Buell's phrase, "nonanthropocentric ethics." But that won't fit into a talking point or on a bumper sticker.

[Added same night:] Wow: it's pretty fascinating to learn, then, that Atlanta Falcons owner Arthur Blank's reaction to his quarterback's legal problems has been belated because the fellow has been on vacation. In Africa. On safari.

* RADIO RANT: Blue Earth Inter-Tribal

"Blue Earth Inter-Tribal is the lodge for the 21st century[!!] Native American Traditionalist[!!]." (21st-century . . . traditionalist?!—I want my "New Age" and my "Old-Time" religion, too.) Yeh, and now they're advertising on network radio big-time. These people are f#$%s; er, fakes. There is no such thing as "Indian spirituality" that is not tribal-specific. (And what's up with their "Indian-feather" logo—is that a Star of David inside the circle?!) And as I've said already on my "Indian Pop Culture" pages, if they're chargin' yu' money, they ain't "authentic." This is just so much reprehensible bullshit, and an attempt, furthermore, to take advantage of a mainstream white culture that has found its own religion to be insufficient, wanting, no longer nurturing. (Hey, if that's your case, the SUN DANCE won't help yu'. [Hey-yeh-yeh-yelo.])

* Bury My Heart & Dances w/ Wolves

But at last, the movie is about Eastman's own tortured culturally hybrid soul.
My brother just sent me a homemade VHS recording of the recent HBO movie, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. (Our cousin actually got invited to the premiere a month or two ago, in Rapid City, SoDak, as an employee of United Sioux Tribes.) Well—I hated it immediately, with the opening gross historical inaccuracy of Ohiyesa/Charles Eastman being present as a boy at the Little Big Horn. He wasn't there. He wasn't even Lakota, but Dakota, for starters, an embarrassing fact that was glossed over by the (also historically bogus) use of "Sioux"—even by the "Sioux"—in much of the movie's dialogue. (In sum, Eastman was even more the "outsider" at Pine Ridge/Wounded Knee, for reasons beyond his Eastern education and assimilation.) Also, Eastman was much less questioning of the benevolence of white culture & colonization than the movie presents—especially before the Wounded Knee Massacre, anyway, at which point his memoirs reveal a new looking askance at the wonders of the colonizing project. But the title of his eventual book, From the Deep Woods to Civilization, implies no conscious irony, and he remained an assimilated Christian who never renounced his brainwashing that Western Civilization was positive human evolution at work.

I was also put off by the initial characterization of Sitting Bull as an egoist engaging in petty cruelty. Where is Tatanka Iotanka as wicasa wakan, as singer & seer? (That is, Sitting Bull was above all a "medicine man" who wrote a song to a meadowlark, not a political/hereditary chief per se.) The justification for this seems to be some formulaic plot/character transformation: "middle-aged grump/crank/egoist loses hubris and becomes old, venerable sage." (I myself am waiting for this to happen. To me.) . . . Other problems: Standing Rock (Sitting Bull's rez, in south-central North Dakota) and Pine Ridge (southwestern South Dakota) are sure a lot closer in the movie, "geographically"!?—for plot "integrity," obviously, especially in the conflation of Sitting Bull's murder and the Wounded Knee Massacre itself. And the cinematographic dramatization of this latter, the movie's apparent climax, pales in comparison to, say, Black Elk's or even Eastman's own written memories thereof. But at last, the movie is about Eastman's own tortured culturally hybrid soul. (Note the movie's final crucial image, a "union" of the crucifix and the feather. And this is also a typically Western-Civ. emphasis on the individual ego and all that "suffering hero's journey" stuff, I might add.) . . . A final minor reason for disliking the movie is Adam Beach's acting: sure he's the hunk-Native actor of our day, but I can't watch him in anything now without seeing his shit-eating grin in Smoke Signals in my mind's eye. But this is probably my problem.

However, there are several moving moments in the film, which, as with Dances with Wolves, prevent one from despising it completely. Like the finale of Dances, the words of Sitting Bull and Red Cloud at the "Council"—however historically inaccurate—make the Indian in me want to cheer and cry at the same time. . . . I recall a graduate lit. theory class in which a voluble&vociferous South American "radical" brought up Dances with Wolves, in the context of race and poco theory. She stated categorically that no "Indian" could/would tolerate the movie, given its various misrepresentations of Native culture (not that I'm sure that she could have pointed them out). I sat there—agawk, silent as Kaw-liga (the stereotype is true!?). I wanted to say—and curse myself to this day that I didn't say—"Well, I can name two 'Indians' who loved the movie: my MOM, and my BROTHER (whom they call 'Chief' at his job, to this day). And they both live in that local country where the movie was shot. And they both go up to Sioux San—in Rapid, en'it—for their meds. And your intellectual ass wants to deny them the right to enjoy one of the few semi-positive portrayals of the Lakota in the mainstream media, in their lifetimes?" But I didn't say a word, aware deep in my soul that, someday, the . . . blog would be invented.

* Peahen Politics

* Portrait of the Artist as a Pissed Bird

This Cattle Egret was a highlight at the Folsom Children's Zoo—a person upon whom I could project my own misanthropic mood. . . . Through the series of four picts, he/she seems to get more and more indignant, to the point of a slow burn:

* Humane Slaughter Wins!

I'm not even awake yet, really, but I just heard on the radio that those bastards at PETA have once again maligned our good people at Omaha Beef (or someplace like that, business-wise): those godless radicals are wrong again! Our good local meat people have been judged by the authorities to have "done nothing wrong against the 'Inhumane Slaughter Act'"! (God, I never knew there WAS such a law. . . . and thank the Good Lord once again for all acts of HUMANE slaughter, wherever they occur. . . .)

But then, I do have a problem w/ PETA, as I do w/ most so-called "animal rights" groups: they are often so damned "mammalo-centric" (to quote a term coined in my book manuscript), and/or so infatuated w/ the "big" animals of either size or number that I gladly prefer the even greater (and truer) radicalism of Deep Ecology. . . .

[P.S., later this morning: I'm not even sure that there is such a thing as the "Inhumane Slaughter Act" now; I may well have been (partly?) dreaming? This quit-smoking nicotine stuff says that it may cause "vivid dreams"—in which case, one should stop using it immediately and consult a physician. Huh?? What civilization/culture before/besides ours has been so dead-set against "vivid dreams"?!

But a web search for the "Inhumane Slaughter Act"(!) confirms the fact: I manufactured an entire blog entry—complete with initial satire and and subsequent arguments of some vehemence—around a nicotine hallucination, apparently, around two or three heard or misheard words on the morning radio news as I was just waking up. But it all seemed so real!

And of course and finally—those on the right could well claim that I've only been tilting at windmills all along, and chasing chimeras from day one; but then they must have missed the poetic truth of everything written above. And below.]

* EGRETude #1 (Bad Vibes at the FCZoo)