Ursula Le Guin "Hainish Novels + Stories": Book Review

These Hainish fictions aren't a cycle. Rather "a convenience" than "a conception." So Ursula Le Guin introduces this deluxe edition from Library of America in typically forthright, pithy, and sly terms.

Daughter of a groundbreaking anthropologist who taught at Berkeley and Columbia, Ursula Le Guin pioneered the meticulous investigation of her imagined societies within the popular genre of speculative storytelling. She began writing as a child during the Depression. Beginning in 1966, her contributions began in the Ace Doubles, SF pulp. Editors and fans recognized her skill. Although her sophisticated interplanetary system took a while to form, and even if its inconsistencies bother nitpicking critics, Le Guin avers this genesis gave her freedom to shift between stories and novels. She learned the difference between "willful suspension of disbelief" and merely "faking" it when invention stirred. (Her Hainish books need not be read in order, she has assured readers before.)

Part of Le Guin's innovation came through the "ansible," a device enabling instant communication across the universe. This became a standard tool throughout the science fiction cosmos. Her other innovation in the 1960s, she notes, has received less attention from a wider audience. The Left Hand of Darkness won both the Hugo and Nebula prizes, but it faced backlash, from pedants and from feminists. Le Guin's decision to use a fixed "he" for her people lacking a fixed gender--it alternates in the month--leads to her reiteration fifty years on. Despite many recent changes in social perception of gender differences, "we still have no accepted ungendered pronoun in narrative." Demurring from the term "prequel" for her story "The Day Before the Revolution" preceding her anarchist utopia novel The Dispossessed, "word-hound" Le Guin returns to her central verbal concern. "What matters most about a word is that it says what we need a word for. (That's why it matters that we lack a singular pronoun signifying non-male/female, inclusive, or undetermined gender. We need that pronoun."

This anthology's first volume gathers the first five Hainish novels. In a brief review, only a glimpse at the many realms Le Guin presents can suffice. Roncannon's World turns out for the Hainish ethnographer Roncannon an orb which will bear his name. (Hain's a planet resembling our own as the original homeland of humanity; the handsome endpapers in volume two make its earth-tones of continents heighten this suggestion, but it is not equivalent to Le Guin's Terra: an example of Le Guin's off-kilter approach to world-building.) Some telepathy occurs, but this wound up so overwhelming a condition for her menagerie of bio-forms that their creator edged away from it as a must as she expanded her fictional forays. Roncannon blends SF with fantasy. Its episodes entertain.

But eagle-eyed readers of venerable tropes may not be entirely convinced. There's a lot of humanoids evolving here on a smallish globe, so how they remain dispersed and sustaining may stem from Le Guin's anthropological curiosity more than a command of her developing talent in constructing plot.

Two more shortish novels follow. Planet of Exile as the title tells finds human colonists stranded on a hostile Werel. The arrival of attenuated seasons will become a factor in her present and future Hainish terrains: when winter comes, it stays for 15 years, and the "hilfs" arrive during this cold snap. These nomads call the humans "farborns." They both face savage hordes and snow-ghouls. One wonders if George R.R. Martin's vast audience knows of this 1966 predecessor, pitched again at the Ace crowd.

The following year, City of Illusions presents one raised by forest dwellers, but not born one of them. His quest across a ravaged earthscape and a dystopia full of occluded psychics also includes talking animals. Who can and cannot take life provides the complex theme, further taking on brainwashing.

The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) and The Dispossessed (1974) attain canonical status. Many will be most familiar with these dense novels. They deepen the SF genre. They will demand attention; they will reward reflection. This volume adds an "original" version of the experimental core of what became Left's alternating genders on Gethen. "Winter's King" sparked Le Guin's curiosity. What if "the king was pregnant" popped up in a tale? Both tales investigate how warfare equates with "predominantly a male behavior," If some people reverted to being female with an overwhelming sex drive for a few days a month, while others were male, how might this play out for an Ice Age planet a.k.a. Winter? Furthermore, Le Guin addresses how language, power plays, and relationships evolve.

The last work in the first volume, The Dispossessed may not have lasted as long in curricula and on reading lists as its gender-driven counterpart. It emerges from Le Guin's weariness with the Vietnam War, and her Cold War affinity for Peter Kropotkin and Paul Goodman's non-violence. Pairing this via her youthful exposure to Lao Tzu, Le Guin incorporates the Tao into a study of no-coerced-order.

For it has to recognize anarchy's discontents. Determined to leave his anarcho-syndicalist home on Anarres, physicist Shevek travels to a patriarchal society on Urras. Class war, religious dissension, and the grip of the in-group naturally mesh with Le Guin's intellectual interests. While less read now than Left, this novel of ideas also remains less popular than certain pulps penned by Ayn Rand. But Rand cannot match Le Guin's U.S.-of-A.-like A-Io for its ambiguous appeal as the Yang to the Yin of Urras. Capitalism gets its comeuppance, but so does socialism. Despite dense discussion, it's far more vivid than any Rand. For one "cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution." How one's possessive power gets mired in habit dramatizes--admittedly too tediously for readers craving more drama--its theories and its morality, as a thought-experiment.

As her fiction sweeps up allegory, her story arcs sometimes twine; but not neatly or necessarily. Her motivations push reflection arguably more than action. She leaves one pondering, despite what can be ponderous to those weary of nuance. Her erudite character studies and linguistic riffs predominate.

Le Guin's Hainish elaborations continue into the mostly shorter pieces of the second volume. The novella The Word for World Is Forest has always struck me as a protest against the defoliation of Vietnam. It may align more with the Earth Day sentiments of the early Seventies, but either way, the revolt of those on Athshe against the invading Terrans bent on taking its resources to sustain their own depleted earth has remained topical. Le Guin acknowledges this sad truth in her appended 1976 introduction for Word. She relates how her own "fantasy" at that time that a Philippine tribe called the Senoi stood for a "dream culture" akin to her imagined one for her indigenous resisters. While these claims were largely debunked among anthropologists, Le Guin reasons that for her threatened world, the use of its scientific data may diminish accordingly as its "speculative element" compensates.

Hainish stories overlap in characters and ideas now and then among the seven compiled here. Her faster-than-light communication device the ansible excited her fellow scribes. By 1990, Le Guin took up a possibility akin to Madeleine L'Engle's "wrinkle in time." Le Guin was "allured by the notion of transilience, the transfer of a physical body from one point in space-time to another without interval."

Christening it "churtening," she allows that those who pull it off in her fiction are never sure how they did it, or if they can do it again. "In this it much resembles life." Her 1994 collection A Fisherman of the Inland Sea weaves influences from a Japanese folktale with Hain-adjacent love stories. She attempted in this decade "to learn how to write as a woman." Her latest brainstorm, the "sedorutu," sets on the world named O an institutionalization of hetero- and homosexual relationships "in an intricate four-part arrangement laden with infinite emotional possibilities--a seductive prospect to a storyteller." Her "gender-bending" produces stories enriched by her own decision to speak out not only on behalf of women, but all who are loners and introverts. In an era bent on overpopulation, "unlimited growth," and "mindless exploitation," Ursula Le Guin retreats. She considers the misfit.

Her final entries twist more categories. Dark-skinned people enslave light-skinned ones. The emerging "story suite" becomes Four Ways to Forgiveness. Meanwhile, Le Guin learns of the destruction of "religious Taoism" during the regime of "aggressive secular fundamentalism" in China.

The Telling (2000) closes this volume. Le Guin sees around her in her own homeland the rise of similar "divisive, exclusive," and dogmatic instigators of hatred perverting "the energy of every major creed." This concluding novel depicts "the secular persecution of an ancient, pacific, non-theistic religion on another world." Those responsible, tellingly, originate among "a violent monotheistic sect on Earth." No matter what ignites the dynamic fusion of thought and action in her Hainish fictions, Ursula Le Guin generates provocative and intelligent considerations of complex forces. A tribute to her craft, these elegant volumes combine into a welcome set for loners, introverts, and the rest of us.
(Combined volumes: Amazon US 9/5/17. Vol. 1  and  Vol. 2 ) PopMatters as Ursula Le Guin's Science Fiction Stories about Class, War, Religious Dissension and More  9/14/17)

Jean Raspail's "The Camp of the Saints": Book Review

Recent flotillas of refugees from Africa and Syria caused a few bookworms and pundits to name-check this 1973 novel. Liberals practically put "scare quotes" around a mention of what they term a racist screed. Conservatives may praise it as a "classic." I knew of it way back via the maverick Garrett Hardin's perspective; he appealed if in different aspects to both ends of the political spectrum.

It popped into my mind the other day so I sat down and read it. It took two sittings. Raspail, as here translated by Norman Solomon, has a feverish, testy style that Michel Houellebecq, in his formative years in France, I suspect may well have come across. However, as Houellebecq's mordant fiction gains the same condemnations in bien-pensant right-thinking and left-leaning circles as Raspail's book, readers familiar with H. may find an encounter with R. bracing, infuriating, or baffling.

Raspail is credited on the blurb for The Camp of the Saints as a prize-winning author in his native land. Yet this novel flails from the get-go. The end of the story, or near it, jumbles up chronology. The sneering tone of the misanthropic narrator, the overabundant detail, the cardboard characters, the fact you don't care about anyone in the entire storyline: Raspail has scores to settle, but whether you'll be cheering him on or chasing him away depends not only on your own ideological bent, but your tolerance (a theme put through the wringer herein) for prattling. Raspail has it in for his countercultural era of the slightly aging hippies and the faux radicals of the early 1970s. He also despises the press, and some of the admittedly best barbs come as his narrator skewers the posturing.

I thought of the New York Times, for instance, when I found a similar send-up of earnestly PC journalists, who lambaste capitalism and despise corporations and capitalism in the same pages whose sponsors are those fat cats, and whose underwriting, so to say, supports the fulsome claptrap.

The key criticism, as Hardin reminded American readers decades ago, is that the "lifeboat" (here not symbol but story itself, multiplied all over the ocean as refugees set sail for Europe and the rest of whatever is the Western world circa 1973) cannot hold everyone. Either the rich have to share, and become poor themselves as such largess will not balance but tip over everyone into poverty, or they have to defend their realms with force, and "contempt" as Raspail later put it, lest they lose it all.

Odd tangents speckle this work. Clement Dio, a preening poser of the Third World solidarity his own bloodline allows him to capitalize on in more ways than one, is the best of a bad lot. But Raspail's mouthpiece hates worker-priests (back when there were enough clergy to go around), and the Dominicans (not for once the Jesuits) come in for comeuppance. Funny that one Benedict XVI reigns. Along with the Church, the unions, the press, and the military all get their turn at this "roast."

Yes, Raspail makes some points early on about the hypocrisy of the West, the implosion of its value system in a secularizing (well, not quite as it's still France in the post-Vatican II guitar mass phase) and skeptical society, and the contradictions inherent in the post-colonial world supported by the five (now more like six and a half) billion whose labor and losses prop up the seven hundred million whites. "The Last Chance Armada" makes a few at first hesitate but the pressure to welcome the human tide from over the sea leads many addled or idealistic Westerners, guilt ridden and excited to expiate their sins of neglect and greed, to proclaim "We Are All From the Ganges Now" as the first wave from India crests and others then join the exodus to the Northern Hemisphere, at least the wealthy part.

The narrative, such as it is, lurches through scenes of the army, a strange tangent with Benedictine monks, the chattering classes, a token couple from the working class, and those in factories and offices who find, as all anticipate the Easter Sunday mass landing of the sordid ships and their cargo, the early advantages taken by those in France itself who have earlier emigrated, and who maneuver their own prospects, eased by the care or fear taken by their "host nation," as it capitulates to them too

Interesting idea. Promising set-up. Fumbled execution. Fizzled climax. Ho-hum resolution as the narrator and Raspail seem too wearied or jaded to bother carrying on after so many pages of rants.
However, the relevance of this scenario cannot be gainsaid. Look at headlines. (Amazon US 6/5/17)

Paul Kingsnorth's Dark Mountain Project

Last entry, I reviewed Paul Kingsnorth's deservedly acclaimed, if harrowing and relentless, novel The Wake. Evoking by a "shadow language" adapting Old English, he conveys a first-person narration of a selfish, snobbish small-holder with big plans to fight the Normans who have invaded and ruined his land, and the nation of England itself. Kingsnorth's name seemed vaguely familiar, and I realized that I had read about him last year in this article in the NY Times Magazine, "Ït's the End of the World as He Knows It, and He Feels Fine." Ever since his teens, he has protested as an activist the destruction in his homeland, a millennium later, that never ceases. Forests fall, shopping centers rise.

What can we do? Increasingly, he viewed his fervent struggles against the Machine and Man as futile. “I’m increasingly attracted by the idea that there can be at least small pockets where life and character and beauty and meaning continue. If I could help protect one of those from destruction, maybe that would be enough. Maybe it would be more than most people do.“ He cites poet Robertson Jeffers, who also retreated from the fight, and was outcast by his peers once he spoke too loudly against Uncle Sam during WWII, its profiteering, and patriotism demanding fealty from war objectors and dissidents. He lived in Tor House on the Carmel coast, once a modest bohemian burg.

Jeffers as it happens lived as a teen near me. I found this out when researching a local history booklet to which I contributed. I find it impossible, a century later, to imagine him wandering down to a mountain-fed river, full of boulders. Plein-air artists came to the Arroyo Seco to capture its vistas. Now it's the site of the world's first freeway, built in 1941 as a scenic parkway, but all around most of it, houses (like mine, yes) soar, cars whir, and the "urban hum" of Los Angeles runs day and night.

Like Jeffers, those at this Dark Mountain Project seek renewal in a bold response to the havoc wrought by our "progress." But it isn't a political campaign, as he once hoped. (Greens, after all, flounder compromised by coalitions.) He links to this piece on his homepage, where he asks himself FAQs, too. As with any artist, he must promote his views, and like few I read, his views please mine.

The answer that resounded with me, despite the fact I suspect he's one of "those" Oxford grads pretty cocksure of himself, is below. As I saw via my friend Andrea Harcher on FB this photo the same day, and I'd been wondering about the fate of the forests in both The Wake and our own devastating era, I share his reflections. There is sentiment in this photo, and sadness on the Dark Mountain site. Both are fair responses. If you are keen, visit his page as well as his Dark Mountain Manifesto, the subject of the NYT profile. He and colleagues seek to come to literary and aesthetic terms with the end of civilization as we know it, as ecocide replaces ecology. For we stand looking down at/on earth.

What are your politics?

I used to be a political obsessive. But the older I get, the further I want to run from anything with the p-word attached. It’s partly a desire to avoid defining myself, and to allow my mind some freedom. But it’s also because ‘politics’ seems mostly to be thinly-disguised primate tribalism. I think that what we call ‘politics’ is a means of clumsily rationalising deep psychic impulses and then fighting about them. There is very little that is more fruitless than this kind of behaviour. You’re more likely to find truth in science, poetry or the caves of a desert hermit, and I’d suggest you look in all those places first.

Still, you’re going to want more than that, aren’t you? So here’s my best stab right now. It might change tomorrow.

I am left wing. That is to say that I am opposed to obscene concentrations of land, power and wealth, I instinctively favour the underdog and, like anyone else who is paying attention, I am anti-capitalist. Capitalism is the name applied to an economic and cultural machine which makes paper profits for agglomerations of private individuals by externalising its costs onto nature and the weaker bits of humanity. It functions by turning living things into dead things and calling this process ‘growth’. Capitalism is like a tank: it’s a death machine which feels safe and warm as long as you’re sitting inside it rather than in its way.

I am also right wing. That is to say that I am suspicious of ‘progress’ when that word is used to denote the onward march of the industrial machine (see above), and I think that a feeling for place and locality, history and human community, are things worth paying close attention to. I think that the State as an institution is the root cause of many of the world’s problems, and I think that the tradition of Western liberalism is decaying into a kind of self-righteous illiberalism, surrounding itself with a wall of isms and phobias in order to avoid the encroachment of inconvenient realities.

Will that do?

Paul Kingsnorth's "The Wake": Book Review

Schoolchildren, in a more Anglocentric era, used to know "1066 and all that." While fewer today may remember that year and the momentous Norman Conquest, Paul Kingsnorth retells once-familiar tales of that invasion and two years of its devastating aftermath, through the speech of Buccmaster.

In a postscript, the author explains why he chose a "shadow tongue." Kingsnorth defines his invention of an Old English counterpart that he employs, without capitalization and with a modified orthography faithful to etymology, as "a pseudo-language intended to convey the feeling of the old language by combining some of its vocabulary and syntax with the English we speak today." The results slow any reader down. Even with my knowledge of Anglo-Saxon, I found this prose forced me to halt my pace. You cannot skim this. Therefore, the writer's bold decision to force us into an alien mindset succeeds. If you enter a few chapters deep into this novel, you hear and think and feel akin to the farmers and churls who found their language, their loyalty, and their land wrenched away.

This disorientation features cleverly, through a theme pushed aside from chronicles or textbooks.  Buccmaster follows the ways of the old gods, before Christ. As a comet flies overhead in 1066, a harbinger of doom for King Harold and the Saxons, Buccmaster rejects what "is a raedel for dumb folc" for "the bocs and the preosts the bells the laws of the crist it is not lic they sae." He believes, but in the denigrated Wayland the Smith, the World-Tree of Norse lore, and the "eald" forces of nature.

He rejects "this god from a land of dust where there is no night" as a foreign import, imposed by Rome and then by the forces who bless the "bastard" William of Normandy in his assault upon England. Buccmaster, a proud landowner if, as he reminds us and his listeners constantly, of but "three oxgangs," holds in contempt those who oppose his defiance of the Church and of the new Crown. We hear events as he and his villagers do, first as rumors from afar. He knows his fate will be subsumed to that of his fellow English, but he fears weakness. For 1066 is a "year will be lic no other in the lifs of all men in this land." For Buccmaster of Holland, in Lincolnshire's fens, senses doom.

Kingsnorth's saga follows the reaction to double threats to Harold's reign. As Buccmaster's two sons are called to join the English "fyrd" of conscripts to fight a Norse rival for the throne, the narrator sees his wife "frettan lic a moth who cannot reach the bright mona through wattle." Dreams, voices, visions begin to trouble Buccmaster. Soon, a tale-teller arrives in the hamlet to announce: "geeyome has cum in scips from the frenc and all is gan." All is gone. William's scorched earth policy follows.

With the imposition of Norman rule grim tidings dominate. Buccmaster and a few followers flee to the woods for safety. They long to "becum grene lic the leafs and the grass who lifs lic the fox and the wolf who is wilde lic the hafoc and the crow with teeth what tears from the enemi small bite and small bite until all the meat is gan." (There is a glossary for some of the more elusive terms appended.) This passage shows Kingsnorth's skill at transcribing speech and thought in an innovative manner. Reading this version of English, its roots emerge and remain vivid throughout The Wake.

Being a founder of the ecological Dark Mountain Project, Paul Kingsnorth displays keen sensitivity to the natural realm that the "grene men" seek to inhabit. Norman plunder, rape, murder, and the brutality that any war incites, by cavalry or by guerrillas, make this a sobering account of resistance to colonial and papal power. Contemporary resonance to this campaign resonates, even as the author wisely keeps this within the disconcertingly pastoral settings of Lincoln and the forests around fens.

Their furtive actions will stretch on too long, as the two years of Buccmaster's maneuvers and stops wear down his small band and the reader. But this is the cost of verisimilitude, for any campaign is given over to languor, doubt, and boredom rather than rousing derring-do. As Norman fortresses rise over the garrisoned towns, "thralls mac the castel to mac them selves thralls." Kingsnorth reminds us in his afterword how 70% of Britain today remains in the hands of 1%, and he wonders how this unequal distribution of land and wealth has compromised the fortunes of his homeland ever since.

Two real-life episodes, of the rebel Hereward the Wake and the kidnapped Bishop Turold, frame this novel. But the emphasis rests with the defiant men and bloodied women in the margins. Those who watched these events linger, still anonymous after a millennium. Their tongue was torn out and grafted to French manners, Their Saxon gods capitulated. But in The Wake, their words fought on.
(New York Journal of Books, 10-8-15)

Caption the flag

I entered the grounds where I work today. Small Stars-and-Stripes flags dotted the verges of the lawn, a scarce green in this hundred-degree heat wave in my drought-plagued State. I wondered if there were three-thousand or so, but it was probably a tenth of that. A security guard stood in the driveway, taking pictures of them on his cellphone, flags among the beds of pansies which are cared for, next to an empty fountain.

At the meeting I attended, the convener opened with a moment of silence. She commemorated those who had died "helping other people" that day, and those who were the victims. She did not mention the millions who have died before and after this Patriot Day, in the name of vengeance rained upon 19 perpetrators, "death from above," let alone the fatal fraction of that morbid total among those from hereabouts who volunteered or were sent to fight overseas. I teach, as I often report here, those returning from places far hotter than here, and of the state mentally or physically many are in. They are welcomed here to study, and often lauded.

I asked a few vets if they would recommend joining to others. I recall one who vehemently, if calmly, insisted against anyone he knew ever doing so. One of my best students now has in the past left class or been unable to attend as waves of gloom and inner pain leave him unable to motivate himself. I have taught amputees, those with plates in their head or their backs, and those unable to go to sleep. Some must move around, or sit in a way they are trained to cover a room and not turn their backs. Others find it difficult to stay still in a chair due to their injuries, or to focus and escape their demons.

I have been reading a lot of left-libertarian perspectives lately. They seem to echo my own concerns. We get caught up so rapidly in the rush to judge, the compulsion to curse, the joy of fulmination.

The juggernaut of aggression, the grievances, the culture of complaint drives us, even more than in 2001, as we rush to social media and smartphone cameras to upload our laments. As I heard, after a fine dinner of salmon at the nearby Industriel (sic), which I recommend by the way, Salman Rushdie spoke at the L.A. Public Library last night about the "freedom of expression" he noted the enemy in the West. Not Muslim immigration so much as "the victimizers acting as if they are the victims." Those who inflict offense claim they are offended. Trigger warnings create cowed citizens. He also compared intractable contentions such as Israel and Palestine to "contested narratives." Ones that cannot be reconciled. I feel increasingly estranged from those who claim to speak for and to lead us. I live in a nation whose "civic religion" of mottoes, pledges, and slogans disorients my own spirit.

As in the recession in 2008, I wondered post-9/11 if American triumphalism would subside. We all know that it did not. Obama replaced Bush jr., but the drone attacks and the trumped-up victories, as when he appeared to take credit for the Navy Seal raid that killed Osama bin Ladin, rogue scion of the dynasty our dollars supported as surely as they do the Saudis who escaped blame then heaped on Iraq and Afghanistan, also our former cronies in skulduggery, continued "our" Great Game abroad. 

The mandated duties managers insist upon, the erosion of the work-life balance, the wage stagnation, ecological devastation, the stifled possibilities that billions of us have who want to contribute to a better life for all creatures, not only our own (thankfully I guiltily admit today) air-conditioned nests. All these stir within us. During the day, we may be distracted, but how many at night wonder what 9/11 added up to, fourteen years on? My sons can barely recall it, and I now teach a generation that includes incoming students who would have been barely out of diapers on Sept. 11th, 2001. Soon enough, like the Civil War and Pearl Harbor, the San Francisco quake of '06 and the Shoah, we will lose the living links with dramatic rescues, heartbreaking recollections, and a scent of sudden death.

Until the next time. Living in Los Angeles, that may be natural or artificial. A new show, a pre-quel, takes place near me in El Sereno, a largely Latino neighborhood, as the Walking Dead zombies stir.
All deny it officially, but those more vulnerable or streetwise sense the media and political lies. I don't need to scrawl a highlighter to make the allusion. When George Bush at the time rose as he had to, reassuring us, he also encouraged us to get out there and spend, lest our national will falter and our economy--after all those Made in China flags were sold--sputter. My older son recalls reading a David Foster Wallace essay, as I had, about being with his relatives in Illinois the day after 9/11. Where did all those displays of patriotism, on fabric, fluttering from cars and from porches, come?

Like the once-ubiquitous "three-peat" {TM} Lakers pennants from cars, you rarely see the national flag flown. It's intriguing that the "NorCal" contingent seem to have popularized the State's Bear Flag. I always liked it, even if the forty-day or so California Republic was more akin to a (right-wing) libertarian attempt at getting back at los Californios than a true-sons-of-liberty attempt at equality. The poor grizzly on it is the only one left, as the "expansion" obliterated is as surely as dodo and passenger pigeon. No flag seems perfect. I have a liking for a few in my magnet collection at work, and I admit I display Quebec out of a sneaking liking for its stubborn separatism, and New Mexico for its Zia sun's simplicity and beauty; as a kindergartner my favorite reading was, precociously, a booklet Flags of the World given away by a bourbon company. Maps and flags, yes, divide us, but I remain fascinated by both manifestations of the divide and conquer, cheer for the home team, school spirit that deep within us is so difficult even for those who strive for equality and liberty to overcome.

"Every innocent person affected by the bombs we drop, the aid we provide to oppressive governments, the injustices we condone, becomes another potential terrorist. Save lives, overseas and at home—take your power out of the hands of the politicians and the terrorists they raise. Let them know they can't count on your silence." "Your Leaders Can't Protect You But They Can Get You Killed"  This 2006 statement (click for pdf) closes by quoting Tom Paine: “It is the duty of the patriot to protect his country from its government.” Image: "There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people." Howard Zinn.

Mark Boyle's "Drinking Molotov Cocktails with Gandhi": Book Review

This Irish activist lived without money and oil for three years. Yet he writes in his third book about how such gestures seem to pale before what lies ahead. Those who disdain the capitalist and ecologically destructive system, Mark Boyle concedes, are outnumbered and overwhelmed by it.

And by those of us who capitulate to its ecocide. Drinking Molotov Cocktails with Gandhi, as its title signals, carries a mixed metaphor to those who want change. Peacemaking can only go so far against relentless violence perpetuated upon our planet. Boyle confronts pacifists with tough questions about how far they can advance their rear-guard and small-scale efforts, however ethical and sincere, against an uncaring economic juggernaut. What, Boyle reasons, is the violent action carried out to protect earth when compared with that inflicted upon it? We need, he demands, to fight back hard.

Many figures enter this to give some guidance to Boyle. He draws on influences from Aldo Leopold to Slavoj Zizek, Thoreau to Tolkien. Also, he integrates Earth First! leader Dave Foreman's arguments into his own lively reaction to those who condemn eco-fighters as if terrorists, while either directly or indirectly colluding with a far deadlier cabal of corporations and nations who damage far more than a lumber road into old-growth forests. Boyle makes a convincing case for rethinking this.

Boyle also includes a few anecdotes to make his case. I found a telling one in how the communal activity of cutting the bog for peat in rural Ireland, followed by a break to boil the water for tea, allowed the workers to relax and chat. When the flask was introduced, each laborer could then take his or her own tea, warmed already all day, into the bogs, and this cut down interaction with others.

Out of such incidents, we grow apart as technology separates us from our natural ties to each other. Nature and its draw plays of course a central role in this polemic. Boyle may not give glib answers to us, but from his own experience making it on a three-acre farm, he confronts what he tries to solve. 
(To be published Oct. 13; e-galley reviewed.)

Rojava's revolution

 

"In Northern Syria, 2.5 million people are living in a stateless, feminist, religiously tolerant, anti-capitalist society of their own creation. They call their territory Rojava, and they defend it fiercely." So begins the introduction to A Small Key Can Unlock a Large Door, a 2015 book from the radical press collective Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness. They interpret a complicated Kurdish reality, misunderstood by many, not only leftists. "We need some context to truly understand the words and ideas of the rebels of Rojava, else we can be easily seduced by over-simplifications and distortions — like the claims that the struggle in Rojava is a replay of the Spanish Revolution, or that it is a sophisticated public relations makeover for a Maoist national liberation struggle." Small Key mixes left-libertarian analysis with interviews, firsthand accounts, and journalism.

"Rojava is neither a state nor a pure anarchist society. It is an ambitious social experiment that has rejected the seduction of state power and nationalism and has instead embraced autonomy, direct democracy, and decentralization to create a freer society for people in Rojava. The Rojava principles have borrowed from anarchism, social ecology, and feminism in an attempt to chart a societal vision that emphasizes accountability and independence for a radically pluralistic community." By direct democracy and a common economy, Rojava reinvents. {I updated this entry w/more hyperlinks to coverage, 12-19-15}

Dilar Dirik, in another excerpt, looks at women's subversion. Against ISIS, they join men who resist.  "Being a militant is seen as 'unwomanly'; it crosses social boundaries, it shakes the foundations of the status quo. War is seen as a man’s issue – started, led, and ended by men. So it is the 'woman' part of 'woman fighter' which causes this general discomfort." I think of a difference my wife and I have. She insists if women ruled, war would end. Perhaps in time it will, with such women as leaders?

Yet, they claim violence is not an end. Dirik shows: “'We don’t want the world to know us because of our guns, but because of our ideas,' says Sozda, a YPJ commander in Amûde, and points at the pictures on their common room’s walls: PKK guerrilla fighters and Abdullah Öcalan, the imprisoned ideological representative of the movement. 'We are not just women fighting ISIS. We struggle to change the society’s mentality and show the world what women are capable of.' Though there is no organic tie between the PKK and the Rojava administration, the political ideology is shared."

I admit peacemakers may, as in other self-defense campaigns, find their fervent hopes for conflict resolution thwarted by the reactionary and remorseless might of ISIS. The Kurds, under attack as non-Arabs for centuries by indigenous rulers and imperialist entities, cannot fend off by earnest appeals or amicable parleys the armed assaults and brutal regimentation of the Daesh, who have wiped out so many people in their invasions. Against their remorseless incursion, the Kurds take aim.

Across three cantons in Western Kurdistan on the Syrian frontier, a parlous situation continues. The map in the STW excerpt shows the smallness of the liberated Rojava areas vs. the vast ISIS territory. Western strategists understandably follow events here, while many on the left worldwide nit-pick. Libcom offers a helpful reading guide, where the comments and coverage display the pro-con sides.

I commented in an earlier post about the controversial legacy of "Apo" Ocalan, founder of the PKK, over his Maoist and Marxist-Leninist origins. But STW regards the recent transformation of Rojava as noteworthy. "Any sincere analysis of the past two years in Rojava shows an honest commitment to pluralistic and decentralized ideas, words, and practice." Against the male-dominated Kurdish traditions, feminism and plurality of ethnic and religious identities are encouraged. Anti-capitalism and a Murray Bookchin-Zapatista grassroots economics via cooperative ideals are promoted. Much more about these issues can be found hyperlinked at Peace in Kurdistan. More at Anarchy in Action.

The latter site reports, quoting Rafael Taylor: "The PKK itself has apparently taken after their leader, not only adopting Bookchin's specific brand of eco-anarchism, but actively internalizing the new philosophy in its strategy and tactics. The movement abandoned its bloody war for Stalinist/Maoist revolution and the terror tactics that came with it, and began pursuing a largely non-violent strategy aimed at greater regional autonomy." Ocalan calls this participation "democratic confederalism."

Since I wrote this, Turkey is bombing the Kurds in its zone in retaliation, supposedly, for ISIS. This cynical strategy is payback for Kurdish resistance, and the situation seems more dire than when I researched this two months ago. This dispirits me, and again, I wonder about self-defense against such overwhelming odds. Yet, unlike the Tibetans, say, surely some nations are arming many Kurds. 

You can support the people yourself. An autonomous university is opening and needs books and Kindles. A People's Library seeks stock to counter the destruction visited upon such centers by ISIS. Liberation can happen, the authors admit, as long as Western supporters and allies do not waste time over-analyzing the diverse roots of the struggle, rather than come to its practical, not theoretical, aid.

"Buddhist Economics"

When I was in high school, getting exposed to Catholic teachings on the environment and the economy that challenged the blue-collar upbringing I had and the more closed-off Catholicism with which I was raised, in the decade after Vatican II as the Church divided within itself, I was mildly surprised to see an economics book my dad bought. A devoted listener while he worked or drove to talk radio--which in the late '70s was not the conservative-wacko strain that survives here and there--he had heard on the eclectic KABC-AM station a discussion about Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered. He purchased a copy. Not sure if he read it, but the cover (seen here) and the title stuck with me as later I became interested in the Greens as they in turn sought to transfer their movement here. 

The site Brain Pickings reminded me of this when I saw posted on FB an article about Buddhist Economics and E.F. Schumacher. This 1973 text on what BP (not the petrol firm) calls the "intelligent counterculture" had a chapter on what he coined in 1968 as "Buddhist economics." BP excerpts much of the brief section. It is a bit dated, sure, but readable for that "dismal science." As I've scoured the Web to find a simple explanation of surplus value and labor as to Marx's Capital's critique of alienation, I will also revisit this section of Schumacher, to see how his Buddhist perspective may or may not dovetail with a materialist Marxist. (More on this in an upcoming entry. "Surplus Labor and Me.")

Chris Brown, who teaches a course in Buddhist economics, clarifies its connection to the ideas Buddhists discuss of grasping and clinging. I talk to those who are from Ireland and they comment how other cultures work less, and even if they are taxed more, they say they enjoy a better quality of life. I contrast this lifestyle with the ever-increasing medical, educational, and housing costs many of us pay in urban and suburban America, even as residents insist on their refusal to pay higher taxes. We keep more of our income than my relatives in Ireland do, but my relatives ask if we Americans wear ourselves out earlier and endure a harder existence? Here is part of a timely interview to share.

~~Holland: Americans earn more, on average, than people in most European countries, but we also work about 30 percent more hours per year than they do. And we deal with more stress. What would Buddhist economists say about the balance between work and the rest of life?

Brown: One of the reasons I got interested in Buddhist economics and wanted to teach this course — and I also wrote a book, called American Standards of Living — is that I was just appalled by the materialism in our culture, and how, with economic growth and people getting better and better off, we didn’t cut back on work, as people had predicted. We didn’t make life more balanced, we didn’t take time to be creative and spend time with our friends and build our communities. Instead, we just kept working harder and harder. And today, the materialistic culture, which is reinforced by the mainstream economic model, says, “Hey, you want to feel better?

Make more money and go shopping”— it’s like you can never be satiated with this model. And it seems like that reflects American life. We want more and more, we consume more and more, and the other things in life that should be important to us—our families, our communities—are suffering from that. And of course, I think we’re suffering too from all the stress.

So Buddhist economics would definitely say, “Hey, let’s step back, let’s focus on our wellbeing, and how we care for the environment and each other.~~This is the conclusion to the entire interview found via Bill Moyers' website at "How Would Buddha Organize Our Cutthroat Modern Economy?" 

I cite Schumacher, as I am grappling with this in an increasingly top-down work environment, whereas I value autonomy.  "From the Buddhist point of view, there are therefore two types of mechanisation which must be clearly distinguished: one that enhances a man’s skill and power and one that turns the work of man over to a mechanical slave, leaving man in a position of having to serve the slave. How to tell the one from the other?" (See also the Wikipedia entry on the concept)

"An immense pile of filth"

This phrase resounds from Laudato Si: "The Earth, our home, is beginning to look more and more like an immense pile of filth. In many parts of the planet, the elderly lament that once beautiful landscapes are now covered with rubbish." A colleague attended a conference in San Diego last week, full of Bakersfield and Texas oilmen. Climate change was derided, guns praised, profits lauded, and off-color comments or dissent, reflecting this morality, were looked at askance by true believers. God was credited as the provider of resources for us to exploit. Pope Francis, who some look to more than petroleum producers for guidance, is pithy: "We are not God. The Earth was here before us and was given to us." CNN reports a series of quotes, and this comes to mind, about such a news source as itself: "When media and the digital world become omnipresent, their influence can stop people from learning how to live wisely, to think deeply and to love generously. In this context, the great sages of the past run the risk of going unheard amid the noise and distractions of an information overload."

Columnist and Catholic Tim Rutten reminds us how the encyclical subtitled "caring for our common home" has title that "is no accident, but a phrase from the archaic Umbrian dialect in which St. Francis of Assisi composed his 13th Century 'Canticle of the Creatures' that preached reverence for the natural world with love of humanity." My high school classmate Ramón J. Posada, chair of the Los Angeles Archdiocese's creation and sustainability committee, talked to the Sierra Club about what he rightfully names "climate disruption" in light of the papal declaration. Rutten argues that a surge in emphasis is crucial to gaining the upper hand, taking it away from Koch Bros and oilmen.

Rutten continues: "Francis is particularly harsh on those who, he says, deny global warming to preserve the privileges of 'finance and consumerism.' The pope argues, 'We need to reject a magical conception of the market, which would suggest that the problems can be solved simply by an increase in the profits of companies or individuals.' This, Francis contends, is the 'same kind of thinking' that leads to the 'exploitation of children and abandonment of the elderly who no longer serve our interests.' He goes so far as to compare laissez faire economists to mobsters, drug lords. All promote a 'throwaway culture' that treats human beings as just another commodity to exploit.

"The pontiff shifts the discussion from one based solely on science and technology to one in which morality and justice become coequal components with those other two. That’s a fundamental change and likely to be far-reaching since Francis is, like the Dalai Lama, one of those popular spiritual rock stars influential even among those who haven’t a clue about what their creeds actually teach." As I happen to have reviewed a book credited to the DL before logging in to write this, and after seeing Rutten and Posada's pieces appear today, I figured I'd add my own contribution to papal promotion.

George Monbiot wonders if atheists are missing something in their own eco-critiques. Could the Pope's "religion be a version of a much deeper and older love? Could a belief in God be a way of explaining and channelling the joy, the burst of love that nature sometimes inspires in us? Conversely, could the hyperconsumption that both religious and secular environmentalists lament be a response to ecological boredom: the void that a loss of contact with the natural world leaves in our psyches."

Image: The portion of Francis' Canticle of Creation as quoted in this drawing is, roughly: "Be praised my Master for Brother Wind and Air and for clouds and storms and all weather"

Down by law

Continuing my coverage of Chris Hedges' analysis of radical (or reactionary) rebellion on the simmer, Elias Isquith's interview with him in Salon expands his critique from his Wages of Rebellion: the Moral Imperative of Revolt. "We Are in A Revolutionary Moment"--Hedges opens by observing: "It’s with us already, but with this caveat: it is what Gramsci calls interregnum, this period where the ideas that buttress the old ruling elite no longer hold sway, but we haven’t articulated something to take its place." He avers that either radicals or reactionaries could fill this new place.

As public trust in the police, the law, and politicians ebbs, the power government and corporations conspire to hold still seems intact, but despite the coup-d'etat taken by their alliance, their facade is weakening, in Hedges' estimation. "The normal mechanisms by which we carry out incremental and piecemeal reform through liberal institutions no longer function. They have been seized by corporate power — including the press. That sets the stage for inevitable blowback, because these corporations have no internal constraints, and now they have no external constraints. So they will exploit, because, as Marx understood, that’s their nature, until exhaustion or collapse."

As an Occupy participant, Hedges recognizes the scattered nature of opposition from the left. "We who care about populist movements [on the left] are very weak, because in the name of anti-communism these movements have been destroyed; we are almost trying to rebuild them from scratch. We don’t even have the language to describe the class warfare that is being unleashed upon us by this tiny, rapacious, oligarchic elite. But we on the left are very disorganized, unfocused, and without resources." Informants, within Muslim and leftist organizations, have weakened many critics.

"Diligent Bureaucrat" at Daily Kos (image borrowed from this April 22, 2015 piece; see hyperlink at end of this blog entry), warns: "Whether its [sic] an environmentalist, anti-war activist, animal rights advocate, or occupy protester, the bureau appears to have a strict policy that any individuals or movements who criticize the government, corporations, or the nexus between the two, must be monitored, infiltrated, and if possible sent to prison." Activism and terrorism to the FBI are conflated, as informants proliferate to create actions that can be criminalized if none exist beforehand.

I wonder what this will do to confront the $2.5 billion the Clintons have supposedly amassed, or the PACs both the Dems and the GOP manipulate to sway voters in our faltering nation to keep the corporate puppets in place. As I wrote last time, I fear Bernie Sanders' entry will merely serve to rally a few on the populist left to assauge Dems who want HRC to shift their way a bit, only to have the former Socialist capitulate in a few months to deliver his supporters to Clinton, as if they had anywhere else to go. As in '12, Dr. Jill Stein will front the Greens, but as then, they will go nowhere--despite my tree-hugging wishes that they'd gain traction, by promoting birth control, population reduction, lower immigration rates, as well as their predictable NPR-soothing eco-friendly nostrums.

Discussing Hedges' article on FB with like-minded folks, they bristled at the "self-immolation" he urged; one judging him a gift to our security state. Given Hedges' penchant for end-times scenarios, this may be correct. But as in his opposition to BlackBloc at OWS, he may have stepped back from the abyss. His writing can be uneven and repetitive, but I hear in him along with Matt Taibbi and George Packer critics who analyze the populist, progressive challenges to the mainstream that cheers on Hillary and the DRC as the default setting for banker-funded "hope and change," version 2.0.

Hedges reminds those around me who shrug and whisper "Supreme Court" as they cheer on Hillary: "If we are not brutal about diagnosing what we are up against, then all of our resistance is futile. If we think that voting for Hillary Clinton … is really going to make a difference, then I would argue we don’t understand corporate power and how it works. If you read the writings of anthropologists, there are studies about how civilizations break down; and we are certainly following that pattern. Unfortunately, there’s nothing within human nature to argue that we won’t go down the ways other civilizations have gone down. The difference is now, of course, that when we go down, the whole planet is going to go with us." Marx here was correct. His own followers tarnished his idealism as they trashed their side of the earth as badly as did the capitalists everywhere else. But now that there is nowhere else, how long do we have in this century of rising heat, freakish storms, population increases of mainly many more poor, ever higher pressure to accept immigrants, less national will to uphold any environmental rulings in the name of job creation, a war machine, ideological and religious tension, tax breaks, while we laud developers and investors as titans and philanthropists?

Image credit: Daily Kos, Agent Provocateurs. Private Industry, and the FBI's Orwellian War on Leftwing Activists

Debt and taxes

Since I posted last time about Jeremy Hammond, the hacker now serving a ten-year Federal sentence for exposing collusion between the government and Statfor, as to how anti-terrorism laws are being used or misused by the FBI, I noticed this in my FB feed. As Hammond (see that piece) defines himself as an anarcho-communist, I wondered how such a philosophy, if made our politics, might look. Gary "Z." McGee asserts "5 Reasons Why Anarchy Would Be an Improvement in Human Governance." But whereas the likes of Hammond argue that grassroots, anti-capitalist, decentralized systems of cooperation would supplant the top-down coercion which is business as usual, McGee alludes, while not quite defining, a "cosmic law" and the possibility that choices could be not only moral but amoral--yet never immoral, in such a model of how people might get along and thrive. 

He gives #1 as checks and balances. McGee claims 95% of human history (or prehistory) has been Fierce Egalitarian Hierarchy. Food, shelter, protection had to be shared, as the clan had to survive. He wants us know to place first freedom, then health, then a recognition of the interconnection of all. This reminds me of Gary Snyder's Buddhist Anarchism, articulated by him back in the 1960s.  McGee agrees, but the quirk of "amoral" I find noteworthy, as I don't recall this term being used earlier. "The monumental problem with our Statist society is that we are not taught to be as moral or as amoral as we need to be in order to maintain a healthy cosmic, ecological, and social order. In fact, statism purposefully forces whatever the state decrees to be healthy, as healthy, whether or not it is actually healthy according to cosmic law." Maybe that "cosmic" law aligns with Snyder's interbeing?

As I wrote about earlier this week, the "industry of death" decried by Pope Francis and Jimmy Carter recently ties into the #2 point of McGee. He asks: "How does anarchy flip the tables on the authorization and glorification of plunder? It prevents plunder from ever becoming possible because anarchy-based modes of governance are engineered in such a way that groups never get to the point of concentrated centers of power. The monopolization of power never gets to the point to where it becomes corrupt, because of controlled leveling mechanisms such as reverse dominance and wealth expiation. Like Jim Dodge said, 'Anarchy doesn’t mean out of control; it means out of their control.' Whoever 'they' may be: monopolizing corporations, overreaching governments, tyrants." We all wonder, at least those of us less enamored with capitalism and intrusion by entities above us, how the power switch might happen. As David Graeber devoted his big book on debt to revealing, the power of banks to print money, charge interest on it, and keep the masses indebted underlies this injustice.

A bit awkward in McGee's expression, but as the weather reports remind us daily by now, the ecological perspective ties in to #3. "In a system of human governance that is systematically transforming livingry into weaponry, it is the supreme duty of all healthy, moral, compassionate, eco-conscious, indeed anarchist, people to question authority to the nth degree." Similarly, #4 seeks reciprocity as an ethical basis for "expiation of wealth" by an ecologically sustainable distribution.

Finally, he conjures up Thoreau's non-conformity as a reminder of the power of leaders who can rally change. McGee cites Martin Luther King, Jr.: “The hope of a secure livable world lies with disciplined nonconformists, who are dedicated to justice, peace, and brotherhood. The trailblazers in human, academic, scientific, and spiritual freedom have always been nonconformists. In any cause that concerns the progress of mankind, put your faith in the nonconformist.” Hammond to Chris Hedges spoke the same way, and I happen to be reading John Lydon's "Anger is an Energy" where he tells us that his own enemies have never been human beings, but institutions, in his own struggle.

Very few look to Assange, Manning, Snowden, Hammond, Lydon, or McGee as role-models. We are forcibly taxed for the war machines, the prison complexes, the collusion of lenders and universities, and Obamacare as the safety net for the "benefits" corporations refuse to grant exploited workers. Not to mention the rise of automation, reliance on "contingent" labor, and the reduction of secure jobs. The militarization of the police, the trillions wasted on the security state at home and abroad, the damage to the earth, the uncontrolled levels of population increase and immigration, the refusal to address global warming. All the while, we gush over the latest "outrage" by pro athletes or reality show celebrities. My students keep leashed to their phones, and I wonder if literacy will survive long.

While many claim to inherit the mantle of King, few consider the complexity of pacifism and non-violence as opposed to what Hammond argues, the decision to fight back. Looking at Tibet over my lifetime, as it was taken over not long before my birth, I acknowledge the Dalai Lama's decision not to worsen his homeland by calling for an uprising, but I sympathize with the younger generations who have given over to despair, and self-immolation in the extreme cases, as the Chinese supplant the Tibetans with the Han, with the foreign language, with the prohibition of the native language and customs, and I cannot see how these can survive within the heartland much longer unless as staged folk pageants or monastic museums for tourists who now take the train to Lhasa. All this reminds me of the Nazi plan to establish a Yiddish heritage display when the Reich triumphed, and I remain torn between the ideal of non-violent resistance and the frustration as again, a nation and a tradition face extinction. We might add to this our own global predicament at the hands of multinationals and superpowers. Will we rise up against the one percent, or will we, hoping to become our masters, still bow and cringe? The John Adams quote above shows how our war and our debt together enslave us.

The Big Money

I've returned with Layne from driving (well, she insisted on that; I navigate, gripe, and fume) about 5200 miles the past three-plus weeks. It was a loop, as I gave a paper on the Minnesota-based writer J.F. Powers to the American Conference of Irish Studies at their meeting sponsored by the University of New Mexico in Santa Fe. So, the day after classes concluded and a non-teaching (cannot call it a two-month sabbatical as my rest means only no classes, not no meetings or "other duties as required") stint commenced, we were at ABQ Sunport. The rental car secured, off to SF, uneventfully on the interstate. Both cities sprawled much more than we recalled from our visit twenty years ago, with our then tiny firstborn in a stroller. I had taken him from the same hotel where the conference convened, to ferry him around the State Capitol building a few blocks away, one of the few without a dome.

Before I deliver a presentation or teach my first class meeting of a term, I am still nervous. Perhaps a good sign as I take it seriously, or else an indication of my anxiety and my introversion, as well. But the paper went well, laughs were procured, and even if I seem to get in any paper I deliver few if any questions compared to my colleagues, I did get some follow-up conversations about Powers' oddity.

His parents and sister had moved circa the 40s to Albuquerque of all places, although I could not find out details in my research of his life and the letters, about which I have written on this blog often. I would find myself soon following in a few of his footsteps, as Layne and I began our own roadtrip. After the conference ended, we had some time with our dear friend Bill, who came out by train (as the Powerses must have) from his adapted home of Kansas City, where Royals fever soared as that team finally made it back into the playoffs, just missing the World Series win to a certain team from the other side of California that cannot be mentioned. One more tie in was that the team that can had its AAA farm team in ABQ since time immemorial, but now, the Isotopes will lose out to OK City.

The Isotopes win my contest for a great moniker, and I wonder how much the atomic and then the Intel age accounted for the endless beige subdivisions that clogged the streets of the state capital. The endemic presence of the artsy and well-heeled around so much of the northern reaches of the Land of Enchantment does account for air of privilege plus pinon in the mile-high-plus atmosphere. Staff resent you; despite its tidy setting and its period furnishings, the mood conveyed by staff (and later a supervisor) at the Santa Fe hotel we stayed at was the gloomiest I ever encountered. My bill increased with many add-on "resort fees" and high city taxes exacted, and with no snacks provided us at the conference or breakfasts included, the tally worried me, on my expense budget. Restaurant prices float up and the aura of you paying but tolerated floats around the food, admittedly with fare a bit better than I expected. (Truchas/ trout at the Cafe Chimayo was outstanding, and the Rio Grande Green Chile beer tasted exactly like it's labelled, a novel combination.) Other meals in NM while they hit the starving spot swam in marinas of beans, rice, sauce, green chile, grease). The hotel boasts of being owned by Picuris Pueblo, but wealth does not appear to be divvied out much to its workers. Yet at night, walking with Bill and Layne around the venerable city, around the capitol building, after getting discombobulated along the dull side streets and highways across from chain stores and coffee cafes, as well as the hallowed plaza with a dignified cathedral, with its statue of Father Lamy and a new one, bold, blacker and bronze, of America's first native saint, Kateri Tekakwitha, I imagined peace. But must one banish to its shadows any lingering aura of traditional beliefs, not missionaries?

As well as looming skateboarders-street kids lurking in the plaza doorways when few of us tourists remain; Bill had to beg the largesse of a waiter in one of the few restaurants still open past nine, to use the bathroom. We sensed the scruffiness behind the polish of this old city. As with ambiance in Santa Cruz or San Francisco, in my experience, the class divisions endured as darkness returned. Those of us passing through, certainly, add to this, and I realize the contradictions of swanning past this scenario and being implicated in it, as yet another tourist, grumbling about the other tourists.

We had a tasty first night's meal across from the hotel in a restored rail yard at Tomasita's, full of what seemed to me at least some locals. As I will dutifully list some of my meals and libations, just for the culinary record, the sopapilla platter and the Santa Fe Brewery nut brown ale were fine. The next dinner at the hotel restaurant, which seemed not bad when we had eaten there long ago, was strange. The salmon was o.k,, but the waitress, older than me, affected a French accent and dressed in a black-and-white outfit a schoolgirl might doff for Mardi Gras. This annoyed Layne and me no end.

On Sunday, we drove the High Road to another tourist destination. I feared turquoise-bedecked denizens with grey hair flowing and/ or beards waving over denim, tie-dye, and/ or boots/ Birkenstocks. But Layne, on her visits before, assured me I'd like the Taos Pueblo. The road up took us around what in retrospect I realize may have been where our boy had fry bread and then his diaper changed by the side of the road in the trunk of our rental car, way back, at the Nambé Pueblo. That community, never conquered by another power, was modest at least then, and the meal very friendly.

Leaving what is now the heroin-low rider mecca of Espanola, a pleasant drive under falling leaves took us up to the village mythologized in recent Hispanic culture, the site of a 1930s chapel with dirt acclaimed for healing powers, at El Santuario de Chimayo. Sunday Mass was in progress, so while that prevented us from seeing the main chapel, we could hear Communion and the priest's softly repeated "The Body of Christ" to each communicant. As Layne and Bill remarked, the legacy shown in rows of one crutch and not two displayed as proof of the miraculous soil attested to some pilgrims hedging their bets, perhaps. I recalled that hole, where old people crouched, ladling dirt into little containers, but neither the chapel nor what is now a large layout, recalling lines for rides at Disneyland, surrounding an outdoor site, complete with frozen treats and the inevitable gift shop. It was windy, starting to rain, while Layne tried with her new video GoPro camera to shoot the moody vision as gold leaves fell across our sightline in the courtyard and storm clouds stirred up the foliage.

We were cold, so we raced back to the car and made it slowly up to vertiginous Truchas, where the John Nichols novel The Milagro Beanfield War was set. I had read his trilogy in college; chapter one of the final installment, The Nirvana Blues, to me caught the aftermath of the hippie dream and the coming of the Reagan Revolution very well. I heard Nichols speak at UCLA when the film version came out, in the mid-80s, but all I can summon about the movie now was that Sonia Braga co-starred.

We took a sharp left, as if going down an alley rather than the main road. For miles, as we went down into pines, I feared we took a byway and would find ourselves in the ponderosas, one-way, miles on. But it turned out that despite appearances, this was the High Road. I wondered how hippies survived here, or anyone previously or since, as we saw hamlets pass every ten minutes. How much pottery or amulets can one craft to make a living, however free-spirited? No other commerce popped up, save an inevitable New Age spa. Suddenly, in Las Trampas, a striking old church of adobe loomed, and then a forested slice of sluice, filled with mountain water, as we edged up towards the next village.

That Picuris Pueblo's home turf emerged, but it looked much humbler than their Santa Fe digs--which have a separate hacienda for the truly upscale clientele, Layne told me, with butlers and spas within.
We made it past a depressing pattern to be repeated infinitely on our journey, a line of burger joints and the usual franchises you see anywhere now, into the core of Taos (we bypassed the town square despite our efforts to find it). It's smaller than I envisioned, and left behind more rapidly. We entered the tribal land that surrounds Taos Pueblo. The gracious young man staffing the parking told us that we had to take a van in, but at least the fee was $10 and not the $16/person usually taken. While we waited for the lift over there, I stalked around an abandoned cabin, surrounded by yellow crime scene tape, and I wondered who had lived there and when. Cottonwoods shared shade in a glaring sun.

In photos, the two pueblos look enormous, but in person, three or so recessed stories were modest, the size and yes the tone of many of the condos and tracts crowding Santa Fe and Albuquerque. We wandered the grounds, we sampled cookies and a great apple tart. Naturally, we stayed clear of the many no-go sawhorses protecting much of the settlement from our gaze and intrusion. While the Taos nation numbers almost two thousand, the Pueblo communal grounds, a UNESCO heritage site in existence a thousand years, being without electricity (but I did hear songs broadcast from a shop) or running water (but food is somehow stored there at least, before being sold), holds few permanent residents. The statistics say 150, but I sense they may often camp out for ceremonies, in dwellings which families pass down. The cemetery repeats: Lujan, Vigil, Archuleta, Romero, many veterans.

The cemetery also repeats another tale: uprisings against the colonists. The first killed priests and burned down the sanctuary. The second was crushed; the ruins of the tower rise over the cemetery. The pamphlet given us on admission states, roughly: "The tribe holds its culture and traditions very close to their hearts and their oral traditions and native language is unwritten and unrecorded. Much of their history, rituals and traditions are considered sacred and therefore off-limits to non-tribal members." Layne asked me how the people, whom the tribal website claims are 75% Catholic, balance that allegiance against their traditional customs and rituals, the reason for the no-go zones all around. I thought of William T. Vollmann's treatment of clashes between European and native beliefs. He may return to this theme as his "Seven Dreams" series is set to conclude in this same Southwest.

The drive back lacked any high road. We detoured up to see the grand gorge over the Rio Grande outside Taos, after passing a giant brewery in a hanger, and various smaller structures such as a soap-making factory Layne titled "trust-fund" enterprises. Another kind of funding must underwrite the subterranean dwellings, whimsical tops and turrets out of a fantasy novel's pulp cover, of Earthrise, visible from the road that took us to the junction at Tres Piedras. Unless its 178 or so inhabitants benefit from the big money in drug smuggling, I wondered how they sustain themselves so far from any tangible trade. Going south, we followed the road and that river, which there as later would not be as dramatic as it must be down by Texas. As in Chimayo, the autumn leaves and the sun combined happily as the tony spa at Ojo Caliente made me again muse about how much wealth lurks somewhere in this state, if hidden to us as behind the walls at Galisteo or the hotel's hacienda. A commonplace observation, but as with the prisons we'd soon see, or the pueblos with collapsing churches, such evidence of haves and have-nots surrounds us, and nags me with history's lessons.

It's always some big money, the Wal-Marts crushing the mom-and-pop stores, as those merchants in turn survived in frontier burgs where natives fled or were enslaved or killed off by the pioneers or the conquistadores. At the conference whose theme was "Ireland and the Indigenous," I heard in the first session that the Irish, as enlisted men, cowboys, generals, speculators, and/or adventurers, tended not to regard the colonial ambitions which lured or smothered them with any ancestral or instinctive sympathy towards the natives they encountered in the Americas. Certainly the priests had to take the side of the powers that sent them, even if some must have intervened however boldly or cautiously to protect their charges. The conference presenters agreed that a few--not the clergy at least in the papers I heard, but others--took the side of the natives. Most did not. An eminent professor from the U. of Montana opined: "Poor men will always fight in another nation's wars." Most Irish appeared content with a paycheck or plunder. As with Celtic castles, many now marvel at forts as picturesque, but to those not long ago, they must have stood as prisons; churches as castles, symbols of big money. We must dash along, where the interstate paves over the old road, and the hotels replace bungalow courts.

We had to leave Bill next day. We missed him, after not seeing him (but Facebook eases the trauma or drama of face-to-face encounters these days) since our baby boy had accompanied us to Kansas City as well as New Mexico. Bill had arrived via the fittingly titled station at Lamy, near Santa Fe, named after the mid-19c. archbishop acclaimed by both cathedral statue and Willa Cather's novel. I wanted to cue it on audio, but as no version exists, Layne and I began the great trilogy of the first thirty years of the last century, John Dos Passos' USA. We played The Big Money on our very first trip, up California's coast. Thanks to Audible, we downloaded it all (rather than heaped cassettes) to play in the Prius, the black companion we'd spend many hours in as we entered the heart of the continent.

First, we went south, past a big prison at the head of the Turquoise Trail, a more scenic byway to the main highway we'd driven with the little one. Again, Madrid filled its miners' cabins with hippie crafts and hipster garb but failed to halt our journey south, as we returned one rental car to Sunport and picked up the Prius, which was a bait-and-switch by Budget who promised us a non-existent Smart Car for the rate secured; the guy at the counter claimed the Smarts were on "another level" but the parking lot lacks such. Anyway, we climbed in and took off for what proved a poor choice of a spare room on Air B'n'B. Construction site outside, hosts' dirty clothes strewn inside. We ducked out within an hour, wrangled thanks to Net marvels a cancellation request, and met our host, Layne's college friend Rachel, who for decades worked at UNM and now writes for the Nature Conservancy. She was on crutches after a tumble, but our dinner at the Los Ranchos stand formerly known as Sophia's Place and soon as Eli's nearby proved rewarding, even if I missed a beer to grace my fish tacos. She lives in a great house, with a cottonwood tree, facing green fields with cattle at the end of a cul-de-sac. My kind of place, peaceful and calm, and I welcomed that her neighbor wasn't selling out.

Our stay at the bargain Baywood Inn next to some interstate was not that bad, really. Bigger room than many we'd see ahead, and with waffles we'd also see many times--but they disappointed Layne. I ate my first of many bowls of Raisin Bran, as well as the packet of instant oatmeal, but my fruit would be the bits mashed into yogurt, at best, for weeks to come during "continental" breakfasts. The woman in the dining room, disgusted by the trio of stolid Teutonics old enough to know better who littered their table and then left the mess behind despite a nearby trash can, told Layne that as a half-black woman, her grandmother told her never to put your fork on a black person's plate. This was the most enduring, arguably useful piece of folk wisdom I'd hear on this trip or many before. 

We cued up Dos Passos to begin The Big Money, with the wonderful episode of the traveling salesman and the callow young Feeny Mac in the prairies we'd soon enter. We found those plains flattened out once over the mountain pass, and we'd veer back from them after twenty minutes stranded by highway work in a true middle of nowhere (defined as no Google Maps) between Stanley and Galisteo. The latter looked very New Age, a giant faux-adobe McMansion and guesthouse for sale from some start-up scion on the horizon, small church looking forlorn, but the heart of the hamlet appealed to me, with elegant compounds, unfortunately next to the main road, however less traveled.  Mud monstrosities rose in a gated subdivision near Lamy, similar to Hank's home in Breaking Bad.

A different kind of dwelling must be imagined up the highway. Leaving the interstate, passing at Gloriana the site of a Confederate defeat that sealed off their hopes of taking over this territory, the national monument at Pecos Pueblo commemorates the ruins of earlier loss, a vast settlement. A few bricks are all that remain. If not told, you'd miss this hint that two buildings twice as tall as those at Taos had filled with seven hundred people. A reconstructed kiva allowed me to climb a steep ladder down into a sacred site, where the sipapu intriguingly connects the underworld to the present one. I'd been re-reading Prue Shaw's Reading Dante on the plane over and in hotels, so it resonated with me.

We clambered about, seeing how the church walls here, much higher than at Taos, towered over the grounds, set dramatically on a mesa affording the pueblo views of both the Rio Grande and a western pass. Hard to recreate the force of the massive sanctuary that imposed itself over the pueblo, but easier to imagine why and how the natives rose up in rebellion against the Spanish here too, tearing apart the adobe they were forced to cook and haul and lift into place. But soon the empire struck back and stuck around, and by the 1830s, incursions by whites and tribes displaced by them ended Pecos.

Only one other couple, a ways behind us, shared the day. It was bright and blustery, well over a mile high, and while the altitude never effected me or even felt apparent on the trip into the high plains, the sun kept me cautious, more intense with fewer clouds, if prettier ones, wandering the blue skies.

We passed the iconic marker for the pioneers who'd signalled the end to the Pecos and the dreams of the rebels at Starvation Peak and went higher, slowly. Yelp gave a couple of suggestions in the nearest town of numbers, the other Las Vegas. By the time we downloaded direction, we'd bypassed the historic core, the highest number (900) of Victorian edifices in the nation, but I found this out weeks later. What we found was Section 8 housing until we wound up in a raw parking lot, gravel. But lunch at Kocina de Rafael in NM style was filling. The sopapillas were excellent, even if the puffed-up bread failed to wow Layne. All around us, definitely locals, full of Bronco gear and fans.

Raton Pass signals Colorado. Miles before, billboards bombard you with the outdoors fun (casinos too) to be had at or near an off-ramp named after a mouse. But descent into the Centennial State at sunset proved scenic, and gave Layne soon got the hang of the ECO mode in downward Prius pose.

We'd seen recently a (to me endless) CNBC show about transgender people, one long hour of which documented how a doctor had left Portland or some such likely city for the former mining town of Trinidad. It has become a draw for those, like her who once was a him, undergoing sex changes. It looked half- chic, half-desolate. Faded mining structures crowded streets as we saw from the elevated highway. But we pressed on, determined to get closer to our next stop, as night on the Plains hurried.

But, apropos for the radical themes of Dos Passos we heard narrated, a glance at a roadside sign found me insisting on a sudden turn off a quarter-mile. Cattle lowed and the sky tinted black from rose. A younger couple left the gate open for us as we entered a small gated enclosure. It reminded me of the lunch tables under metal awnings at many a grade school. These tables, however, surrounded a closed aluminum-clad white meeting hall and a statue. It depicts huddled figures, young, female, male, at the exact location (next to a cellar door in earth) where Rockefeller's thugs machine-gunned striking miners from the train in 1914. Women and children suffocated in that cellar where they had fled the tents full of their defiant men that frigid afternoon. A colorful iron plaque asks that "God Bless the Miners of Ludlow." Their story can be seen in this link. The massacre at Ludlow galvanized labor unions, such as the mineworkers, to agitate, educate, and organize. Even as the war, as Dos Passos dramatizes in the characters of Wobbly Feeny and Ben Compton as a labor organizer and hounded agitator, cut down any "threat" of anarchist resistance to Great War profiteers.

A train passed, on cue around six o'clock. I waved to the engine, like the kid on the tracks I used to be, for the rails passed more than one place I lived. My father and both grandparents worked for the railroad, and they belonged to unions. Far fewer may today on or away from that once-thriving industry. We witnessed this as our journey often crossed the tracks, in cities turned towns, where the interstate we prefer replaced a depot, and left the downtown of many towns declining, and depressed.

You can see this pattern perfectly preserved in Canon City. We got there late, Pueblo the city seeming to take up a large chunk of the night, suburban lights spreading in four directions. A bit of a shock repeated, the eerie space of the interstate at night replaced by the same few logos, streetlights, cars.  Thomas Pynchon's description of San Narciso resonated daily, hourly along the journey. It's from The Crying of Lot 49: "She drove into a neighborhood that was little more than the road’s skinny right-of-way, lined by auto lots, escrow services, drive-ins, small office buildings and factories whose address numbers were in the 70 and then, 80,000s." We passed this scene, come to life, day and night.

We sensed a big emptiness that was a lake, past prison complexes, some of the thirteen surrounding the town we'd stay in, at Travel Inn, one of those motels that struggles where the Baywood Inns tempt. Cut fruit and yogurt assembled from the local market (not the Wal-Mart the tired, aging German-accented woman in a wheelchair at the Inn's counter first mentioned for victuals) served as our fare. The temperature had dropped, we were near the Rockies if not quite up in them truly. US 40, one of the main arteries east-west, was as many interstates and highways under construction (all that stimulus money we taxpayers were told to pay, while we funded the banks who made off like TARP bandits). Truck traffic thundered a few hundred feet away. It must have eased sometime in the night.

Asphalt simmered, jackhammers pounded, orange work vests proliferated as we went for an early walk to the downtown area the next morning on Main Street, now a frontage road. We passed horses in a pasture, an abandoned trailer park, and themed cul-de-sacs, matching houses and tidy lawns. But we never got all the way to the center of town, so we doubled back, over rail tracks near a quarry terminus. For we had to check out so we could visit the Colorado Prison Museum in that same center.

That replaced the women's prison, tucked under the massive sandstone walls of the state's oldest one, very much in operation. The barbed wire and guard tower warn you. We parked under the edifice, and a young woman in steampunk garb (I assumed for upcoming Halloween rather than as period costume) welcomed us to the first of many museums we'd enter. A couple of people wandered in, but we saw nobody else. Our visit raced by; each cell told well part of the story of almost 150 years of the state's incarcerated and those guarding, or in the case of at least one warden who used "The Old Grey Mare" sawhorse) to punish over his two decade tenure, whipping men. I wondered about the case of fierce, eyepatched John Docherty #792, the first Colorado man to be sentenced for his role as a frontier abortionist. The Irish were also around at the local Benedictine abbey; Fr. Patrick O'Neil tried to lug dynamite to blow in the formidable wall during an infamous 1929 prison takeover, but the charge failed. He was still acclaimed for his bravery; I wondered about any Irish (and all the others) huddled inside there. 1939's Mutiny in the Big House based on Father Pat sensationalized this exploit. The town-{striped] gown tie tightened with Canon City in 1948 about a '47 mass breakout. The latter noir, shot on location, featured a semi-documentary look, by the great cinematographer John Alton.

It's still a dramatic setting, the dead-end of the prison looming next to the main drag at one end of the town wedged into the canyon. The historical core struggles to hang on, but as with so many, the Wal-Mart a mile or so away, near Holy Cross Abbey Winery, shows the contrasts of once-rustic and now-exurban occupation. Rachel later told us her good friend runs the Abbey's sales of its high-end vintages; that Abbey and school were directly across the very busy highway from our hotel. We felt discouraged tackling any entry onto U.S. 40, as that meant facing cones, big-rigs, and unmarked asphalt and crews who, as so often on our travels, slowed, confused, and/or annoyed our progress.

Nearby, near the end of Pynchon's Against the Day, Scarsdale Vibe imagines above Denver where the strikers are to be mown down or driven off what may not be so much prescient ten decades ago as predictable: "Where alien muckers and jackers went creeping after their miserable communistic dreams, the good lowland townsfolk will come up by the netful into these hills, clean, industrious, Christian, while we, gazing out over their little vacation bungalows, will dwell in top-dollar palazzos befitting our station, which their mortgage monies will be paying to build for us." (pg. 1001)

Downhill into that scene, we skirted another ubiquitous presence in much of the settled West, military occupation. Pynchon, from Gravity's Rainbow, clashes with this placid panorama: "every assertion the fucking War has ever made--that we are meant for work and government, for austerity: and these shall take priority over love, dreams, the spirit, the senses and the other second-class trivia that are found among the idle and mindless hours of the day....Damn them, they are wrong. They are insane.” Fort Carson sounds romantic or rugged, but it's nothing but a vast spread over twenty miles at least, not far from the Air Force Academy, as you glide down wide highways designed for tanks and trucks, reminding me of the original Cold War intent for the Interstate system. Leaving the Front Range behind, Pikes Peak, tipped white, receded in our rear mirror. We faced only the Great Plains ahead.

Photo credit: Mom or Dad, snapshot of the writer as a birthday boy, a harbinger of my wanderlust in proud hand. Girl on right is my one-time neighbor Nancy Potenza; the girl on left may be another, Charlene McTaggart. Circa the Laugh-In era, two blocks from beautiful downtown Burbank CA.