$229 Million Settlement Is More Than 1/3 Of Santa Monica's Budget For Sex Offenses

The Richard Winton in the LA Times writes this week: (the link should be accessible) 

"This week, Santa Monica settled more lawsuits, bringing its total payout to $229.285 million — the most costly single-perpetrator sexual abuse disbursement for any municipality in the state."

Imagine what Santa Monica could have done for poor families, for the homeless, for schools, for health care, for $229 million.  That's more than 1/3 of the total Santa Monica budget for 2022-2023!

From the City of Santa Monica, 2022:

"The total adopted budget for the City for FY 2022-23 is $665.4 million."

There's a lot to untangle in this story.  I've got other posts in draft form lined up, but this one tugs at a number of issues I've been mulling over.  With good administration, this shouldn't happen. With good accountability mechanisms this shouldn't have happened for so long.  There are ways to, if not totally prevent such things, certainly to minimize their impact.   But there are also other societal issues that need to be addressed, particularly how we deal with pedophiles.  So let's look at some of the issues here.

1.  The Cost of poor oversight

One study said it was $3 billion over the last ten years.  That's just police!  That's an average of $300 million per year.  But I'm guessing with this single, one quarter of a billion dollar settlement, almost the average annual cost reported in this study, either that $3 billion figure is low, or awards are getting higher.  

But the cost isn't just in money.  The costs include:

• impacts on the lives of people who were harmed by the police and others.  In the Santa Monica case over 200 kids have reported the employee abused them.  Eighty were part of the settlement
• impacts on public safety since police were were spending time abusing citizens instead of protecting them, when people are wrongly convicted, the actual perpetrator isn't apprehended
• impacts on trust in government - among those abused and their families and among the general public when these crimes and settlements are publicized
• opportunity costs - the costs of things this money could have done (though one of the reports says most of this comes from insurance companies, which means all other organizations pay higher insurance rates, and I'd guess it spills over to the rest of us paying car, health, and other insurance

Here's another NPR piece looking at these issues.

2.  Why we don't see  

Most people see what they want to see.  

"The confirmation bias is a cognitive bias that causes people to search for, favor, interpret, and recall information in a way that confirms their preexisting beliefs. For example, if someone is presented with a lot of information on a certain topic, the confirmation bias can cause them to only remember the bits of information that confirm what they already thought."

We also have a truth bias.  Certainly honest people have a tendency to assume others are honest as well. (And there is evidence that most people are basically honest.)

So adding these two tendencies together, we tend to discount indicators of trouble and hold on to more positive interpretations of the behavior we see.  Especially of a person we've known and respected over the years.  "Nah, he couldn't have done that." 

And the people whose behavior is problematic are often (I'm guessing here) quite capable of giving us believable stories to explain away the problems.  This is why it's often a good idea to have outsiders, people who don't know the people involved,  come in to investigate problems.  

But we also have negative biases.  People who complain might be part of an out group - many of the kids in the Santa Monica case were from poor, immigrant families whose parents might fear deportation if they report and are less likely to be believed if they report.  

Most people, I would argue, take a long time before they realize that something is seriously wrong.  And then it takes a long time to report it.  How long did it take you to acknowledge that your (car, toilet, spouse) had a problem.   Then once you accepted it, how long to take action to fix it.

"But his biggest claim to fame was his work as a volunteer in the Police Activities League, where, beginning in the late 1980s, he worked with boys and girls in the nonprofit’s after-school program.

Uller was a familiar face at the PAL center that served Santa Monica’s Latino neighborhoods, often traveling in a police vehicle and befriending generations of youths.

It took decades to uncover that Uller was a sexual predator, the center of a stunning series of crimes that destroyed the lives of children and exposed grave questions as to why it took so long for authorities to uncover what he was doing."

3.  Why why don't act when we do see

Humans seem to have a basic loyalty built in to one's 'group.'  Betraying family, friends, and community (church, work group, etc.) are seen as moral violations and we have lots of negative names for people who do that - snitch, tattletale, traitor, stool-pigeon, etc.  Among law enforcement agencies, this is often known as "the blue wall of silence."

Competing against that loyalty, we have the Rule of Law - a set of moral expectations for people living in a community, in a society.  

When group loyalty comes in conflict with rule of law, individuals face a moral quandary.  Which set of rules should one follow?  We recognize this in the law with rules that allow spouses to not testify against each other, that ban nepotism and other forms of conflict of interest.  I'd argue that the group loyalty is built into our genes, our emotional make up.  The rule of law is something we learn logically.  And strong emotion generally beats out logic.  

“You have to understand in this liberal city, this is a Black and brown part of the city, and no one in the government was watching out for our kids. The Pico neighborhood was marginalized in that era,” said De la Torre, noting that Uller’s abuse occurred “under the shield of law enforcement” and “not one person lost a job” in response to the oversight.

Reporting people in our in-group for breaches of the rule of law  has real, immediate consequences on our families, our social circle, and even on our employment.  

This conflict keeps many from speaking up, even when they see wrong doing.  If you've ever lied to protect a friend, a family member, or someone else you have a close bond with, you understand what I'm talking about.  

3.  When Good Employees Also Do Bad

Seeing wrongdoing becomes particularly difficult when

• the employee is otherwise exemplary in their job performance

"In nearly three decades as a civilian employee with the Santa Monica Police Department and the city, Eric Uller was considered a standout public servant who won awards for his technological innovations."

• has work activities where they work independently, where supervision is not close - such as working with youth after school. (I should mention I was an after school playground director at an elementary school to help pay for college, and I was usually alone with the kids, without supervision. No, I didn't abuse that independence, and I suspect most people don't.)

4.  How the US deals with 'wrong' sex

 Right now in the US, there probably aren't many people considered lower than pedophiles. Gay sex used to have a similar stigma (which, given all the anti-trans laws were seeing introduced across the US now), isn't completely gone either.  Sex and marriage between people of different races was also illegal.  Despite a US Supreme Court ruling banning such laws, 

"As of February 3, 2021, seven states still required couples to declare their racial background when applying for a marriage license, without which they cannot marry. The states are Connecticut, Delaware, Kentucky, Louisiana, Minnesota (since 1977),[42] New Hampshire, and Alabama."

There are good reasons for our laws against adults having sex with children, though the lines get blurry as the age of the child gets higher and the age of the adult gets lower.  There's no question about why a 30 year old shouldn't have sex with a nine year old.  Yet according to NBC news in 2019:

"Idaho and California are not alone in not having a minimum marriage age. A majority of states, which issue marriage licenses, allow 16- and 17-year-olds to marry, a few allow 14-year-olds, and 13 states have no minimum marriage age as of September. Before 2016 — when Virginia became the first state to put its marriage age into law — more than half of the states had no minimum marriage age fixed by statute."

While it appears there are requirements for parental or court approval, it does appear that there are no minimum ages in these states.  I would guess that the proponents for allowing  young marriage often argue that pregnant girls should be allowed to marry the fathers - but I didn't look that up and could be wrong.  

My point in all this is that some sexual preferences are seen as evil while others are perfectly ok. (Though for many, still, sex outside of marriage is frowned on.)  

People don't choose at some point in their lives to be sexually stimulated by one type of sexual encounter or another.  Some argue some attractions are genetic.  Some argue that sexual preferences are based on early sexual encounters.  

People with heterosexual preferences would appear to be the luckiest.  These are what our society condones.  While some people frown on any sex out of marriage, heterosexual sex among the consenting, unmarried seems to be alive and well.   The kinkier the sex and the more people will disapprove.  As people's preferences stray from heterosexual, single partner sex, there is more disapproval.  

But imagine if a person were forbidden from having unmarried heterosexual sex and punished if they did.  Buzzweed lists a number of ways women have been punished in the US, some of which involved sexual acts.

For many people the sexual urge is very powerful, even irresistible.  I suspect that is probably the case of people who view child pornography and who engage in sex with children.  I would only request that people who have been in situations where they could not resist their sexual urges with another person, consider what it would have been like if that other person were legally a child.  Or for people who couldn't resist opening a porn site and watching porn that turned them on.  

I'm not defending pedophiles.  But simply labeling them monsters and locking them up forever is not a good way to reduce pedophilia.  I'm only suggesting that such urges can be hard to control.  And many such relationships that are considered taboo today, have in different periods of time been acceptable.  And sexual practices condoned today were in past times seen as evil.  

But we've evolved in our beliefs that sex should be consensual.  We've evolved in our beliefs that people in positions of authority have a power in the sexual relationship that makes consent, at best, a morally difficult determination.  

And we believe that adults having sex with young children is, without question, non consensual and also an example of an unbalanced power relationship.  

Child pornography is a problem because children have been exploited to produce the images.  Is viewing drawings of child sex as viewing photos and videos?

If AI could produce child pornography (I suspect it already can and does) without any actual children being involved, would that be ok?  Some will argue that such pornography would lead to actual sexual encounters.  But we really don't know how many viewers of child pornography actually go out and find victims.  

My goal here is to raise the question of whether there are ways to recognize some people's sexual attraction to children, even let them indulge in pornography that didn't exploit actual children, and also figure out ways to protect children from sexual predators?  

The person in this article excelled in some aspects of his job.  But he had a taboo sexual attraction to children.  What do you think his options were to seek help from a counselor?  In many situations people who professionally learn about child abuse are mandated to report that to the authorities.  

If this were not such a reviled and taboo attraction, would this employee have been able to seek and get counseling and treatment that would have helped him deal with his inappropriate attractions?  Psych Central says:

"Pedophilic disorder treatment options include medication, hormone, and psychosocial therapies. “Stigma often discourages people from seeking help, but resources are available."

Most mental health problems are stigmatized making it difficult for people to seek help.  Pedophilia  is probably one of the most stigmatized.  

That leads me to offer a few options for reducing sex between adults and children.

Some ways to lessen the incidence of work related pedophilia:

1. General education to let people know that there are treatments for people sexually attracted to children and reducing the stigma connected to it so people are more likely to seek such treatment  (I realize that this is a long term solution, since people with more common, more visible mental health problems also avoid getting help because of the stigma involved.)
2. Education in schools that teaches children how to recognize inappropriate touch, acts of grooming, and steps to take when they encounter such behavior.  Erin Merrin came to Alaska in 2015 and got such a program (Erin's Law) adopted, despite the obstacles set by then Senator Dunleavy, under the guise of 'parental rights.'  Now Governor Dunleavy is still using 'parents rights' as a cover for trying to weaken Erin's Law.  Erin's Law has been adopted in a number of states and seems like one of the more promising ways to reduce pedophilia, by educating the potential victims. 
3. Increased vigilance for situations where children are vulnerable to predatory adults - situations where adults work with children such as playgrounds, social services that care for children, recreational activities such as sports and Boy Scouts.  
4. Changing the laws that give public employees immunity for lapses at work.  There do need to be protections against lawsuits or people wouldn't become public servants.  I think the bulk of monetary punishment still needs to be born by the agency.  But individuals who make serious mistakes, who don't report abuse they know about (not just sex related) should also have some monetary consequences.  

That's a start.  I'm sure others can think of other ways to do this sort of work.  

"flood the zone with shi*t" - Why Courts And Media Don't Seem Adequate These Days

[Bear with me.  I'm trying to pull a number of issues together.  Basically, we need to step back and see the bigger picture rather than get distracted by all the crap the Right is throwing out there.  Their goal is to spew so much nonsense that the system breaks as people try to address it rationally.] 

Choosing labels carelessly  

"CULTURE WARRIORS such as U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) . . ."  LA Times"

There may have been a time when there was something that could be called 'culture war,' but that time is long past.  MTG is not offering anything resembling 'culture' unless the naked quest for power is considered a 'culture' today.  There's nothing here, really, about Christian values, though one could argue MTG represents hijacked Christian values to wrest power.  The attacks on LGTBQ and specifically trans and drag queens is merely a hook to incite the gullible to send cash and votes toward the GOP.  

On the other side are people who merely want to be free to be themselves.  If they take PRIDE in who they are, it's merely because society has vilified them so long and so hard, that they need some validation now and then.  

The media are slow to discard misleading labels, while the Republicans have an automated factory where they produce and distribute new imagery daily.  Where they take left leaning terms and turn them into epithets.  Some journalists are too young even to remember that the correct name is Democratic Party, but the Republicans have flooded the airwaves so long with "Democrat" party that people think that's the name.  

Eastman mulls the economic benefits of letting kids die

"In the case where child abuse is fatal, obviously it's not good for the child, but it's actually a benefit to society because there aren't needed ??  government services ?? for the full course of that child's life."

Rep. David Eastman (R - Wasilla) on the cost savings to the state when abused children die.

Alaska: Rep. Eastman of the family values party says it's actually a net benefit to society when a child dies from abuse & neglect because of the financial burden it would otherwise put on the state budget. pic.twitter.com/NKUOvUZvgf

— ChudsOfTikTok (@ChudsOfTikTok) February 21, 2023

The Republicans in Alaska have rules that oust other Republicans from committees if they don't vote with the party on budgets.  But making a case for letting abused kids die because it saves the state money, well, he has the right to free speech according to the committee chair Rep. Vance (R Homer).  

But, as I write, it seems that the House has censured Eastman over this.  (Thanks Matt Acuña Buxton)

The problem I have as a blogger (and any legitimate journalist has) is dealing with all the jabberwocky  being thrown out there by the Republicans - from DeSantis' shipping of immigrants to New York, banning the teaching of history he doesn't like, and his Don't Say Gay campaign (just a few examples) to the Hunter Biden laptop.  

And that's the point.  Stephen Bannon said to "flood the media with sh*t" and that's exactly what they are doing.  

From CNN

While some of the actors in this circus may actually believe what they're doing, those encouraging people to file all those election challenges and to write all those laws letting kids carry machine guns in public are just "flooding the zone with shit."  Getting people riled up and wasting time on fighting all the shit flying at them.  

Our justice system is based on the assumption that people believe in the Rule of Law and that the vast majority of people will voluntarily obey the law.  Neither our court system nor our journalists are quite ready for large numbers of people rejecting the rule of law or the rules of reason.  

The lawyers were trained to dot their i's and cross their T's, but with Trump and others filing bogus lawsuits and appeals and motions, the courts can't keep up. The public is losing confidence that they will ever be able to bring Trump and his mob to justice. But that's how Trump has stayed out of prison all these years.  The legal system has to retool itself to handle this sort of threat.  Not sure how.  Dominion suing Fox is one option, but so much damage happens before it is settled.  And Alex  Jones declared bankruptcy to avoid the financial consequences of losing his lawsuit.  We need tactics that work with the Right's new weapons.  

Journalists are trained to be impartial to the extent they feel compelled to treat insurrection as a legitimate point of view.  I'd note that some journalists believe they shouldn't vote because that taints their objectivity.  Here's an NPR journalist mulling over NPR's ethics code.  The Republicans are counting on journalists to continue such internal counting of angels.  

Such purity doesn't matter any more (if it ever did) because whatever journalists do, the Republicans will vilify them.  Meanwhile old school journalists will try to respectfully cover MTG's calls for a new confederacy and Eastman's claim that letting abused kids die is beneficial to the state of Alaska.  

Not voting, not declaring one's party, might seem the right thing to do, but I think declaring where you stand openly and then letting readers determine if your personal values color what you write (or say) is the more honest approach.  

In any case, the old rules don't apply to the new political world we're in.  Yes, a lot of voter fraud cases were won.  And a number of January 6 Insurrectionists (yes, that term identifies me as biased, but it was also the conclusion of the courts) went to prison.  But most of the top people are still living, ostensibly, comfortable lives.  (I'd like to think that all the  pending litigation is at least  disturbing Trump's peace.)

We need new tools for dealing with the current manufactured chaos.  How much damage have we had to endure (can we endure) before the deluge of lies is dammed?  

There are perhaps a dozen more threads I could easily follow that give context to what's happening today. 

 It's a psychological barrier to blogging because I know that writing about some discrete issue merely entangles me in Bannon's web.  But people's attention spans are much shorter than they used to be.  Few want to read long attempts to put things into perspective.  I'm not just making this up.

"A recent study by Microsoft Corporation has found this digital lifestyle has made it difficult for us to stay focused, with the human attention span shortening from 12 seconds to eight seconds in more than a decade."

But you can't read too many long articles, let alone books, even with a 12 second attention span.  But if you got this far, you're doing fine.  And should take articles like that with a grain of salt.  Who measured the average attention span in 2000, for example?  No, I'm not going to dig up the actual research report to find out.  It does say that drinking water, exercise, and avoiding electronic devices helps increase attention span.  So go for a walk and don't take your phone.  

My Thoughts On Pro Publica And ADN Summary Of The Bronson Corruption

[NOTE:  This post highlights the ProPublica/ADN report on the Bronson administration.  I've added my own reactions in blue.]

For those in a hurry, summary of  points I make:

1.  Baker, as a private contractor, was NOT a client of the Municipal Attorney and thus the attorney saying he can't discuss the case because of that is incorrect.  And if he was a client of the attorney, then t was more inappropriate as part of the Mayor's team to approach the Attorney.

2.  Assembly should make it illegal for the administration to remove the indemnity clause in contracts without Assembly approval, regardless the value of the contract.  

3.  Media have to do a better job of getting past the facades of politicians (and others in power) to get the public the real scoop on who these people are and what they do.  Local media need to give reporters focused beats and incentives to stay on them to develop reliable contacts who will give them tips.  

Image from the ProPublica/ADN article

ProPublica and the ADN published a long article that pulled together many of the events that have happened in the Dave Bronson administration.  It's worth reading. 

It didn't cover all details, but focused on Larry Baker and the conflicts he had over the Golden Lion because he and other Bronson owners lived nearby.  I hadn't heard about the DOTPF memo being mischaracterized to make it look like the state would demolish the Golden Lion.  It discuss Baker's younger partner Brandon Spoerhase and his attempts to get the Muni Attorney to drop all charges against Spoerhase for violating a restraining order against a woman working in the Mayor's office.  

The article mentions that the mayor did not hire Baker as a Muni employee, but skirted the need for Assembly approval by hiring him as a contractor with three contracts at $29,500 - just below the $30,000 threshold that would require Assembly approval.  The contracts also gave Baker immunity from prosecution, meaning the Municipality would be on the hook for problems he caused.  

They asked then Municipal Attorney Peter Bergt about Baker's interference:

"Bergt declined to say whether Baker pressured him to drop or reduce the city charges against Spoerhase, citing concerns that he could break legal rules protecting confidential communications between attorneys and clients. . .

 “I took very seriously my ethical obligation to my client — the Municipality of Anchorage — and always acted in its best interest.”

My thought is that if Baker as a private contractor, the he wasn't Bergt's client.  The Muni, not a contractor is the client.  So there shouldn't be any attorney client privilege here.  [Of course I'm not an attorney so I'm sure some or even most lawyers might say I'm wrong. ]

[OK.  I've spoken to an attorney friend who first said that Baker, as a private citizen, has the right to contact the Municipal Attorney and try to point out legal reasons why he charges should be dropped.  But, I asked, he's the Mayor's policy advisor, so there's a conflict of interest.  In that case there may be an ethical problem, but probably not a legal one.  Then I went on to read the quotes above.  Then my attorney jumped and said, that as a private contractor coming in to discuss his business partner's charges, he's absolutely NOT a client of the Municipal Attorney.  And if the Attorney thinks he is his client, then there are bigger barriers to him interfering with this case.]

But I would also recommend that the Assembly pass a law that says a contractor cannot have the indemnity clause removed without approval from the Assembly, regardless the dollar amount of the contract..  

The article also quotes Assembly member Quinn-Davis (who also acted as temporary Mayor) about Baker and she responded.  

“Unlike Bronson, he knows he needs to get along with people and relationships matter,” said Assembly member Austin Quinn-Davidson, who filled in as mayor for several months after Berkowitz resigned.

“I like him,” she said of Baker. “I think he relies on that, which is smart. People sort of trusting him or liking him as a person to get things done.”

Getting along with people is a very useful skill.  My thought is how many people use this skill to mask some not so nice behavior as Baker did?  How many people in positions of power do dastardly deeds protected by a nice guy image?  Or other images that suggest competence - clothing, education, purported experience.  This is a call to media and political opponents to do a better job learning and then alerting the world about important background information about the people running for office and serving as corporate executives.  George Santos is only the most egregious example of the media not doing their job in this area.  Except for the North Shore Leader. which wasn't able to get the story a wider audience.  

While we have watched quite a bit of this play out over the last year and a half, we we lacked key details that were revealed by Amy Demoboski when she was fired and sent a nine page letter of accusations.  As a conservative Assembly member who moved over to serve as Bronson's city manager, she had the insider's view of what was happening and because she's an ideological ally of the mayor, her accusations have more weight.  

I mention this because I think 'nice' guys are protected by insiders generally not exposing them as Demboski has done.  

This means we really do need better ways to keep our officials accountable and keep government as transparent as possible.  When local reporters have long term assignments, they have time to build up networks of insiders who give them tips.  Let's hope we can get media outlets to keep reporters on beats long enough to develop these networks.  I'd like to thank ProPublica which is helping the ADN do more long term coverage of major issues.  

One of the issues the article doesn't cover is the crowd of abusive Assembly attendees who made anti-Semitic and anti-LGBTQ attacks in opposition to both COVID regulations and the Assembly's homeless actions.  They were loud and and worked to intimidate Assembly members and the public who did not support their politics.  These were basically stirred up and supported by the group of Geneva Woods neighbors - including Larry Baker - who were opposed to using the Golden Lion Hotel for an addiction center.  

AIFF2022: Saw Two Excellent Films - The Wind And The Reckoning and The King Of Kings

 There were film festivals in the past when I was up until 3am writing about that night's films.  But the Festival is reduced this year after two years of mostly virtual festival and my coverage is also reduced.  So tonight I'm just going to give brief comments on the two films we saw.  They deserve more, but this will have to do.   

The Wind and Reckoning featured gun battles with Hawaiian backdrop.  It's Native Hawaiian actors spoke to each other in Hawaiian on screen in this adaptation of a book written in Hawaiian by one of the characters in the story, that was only recently translated into English and then more time to be able to make the film.  Essentially we see what I took as civil war veterans rounding up Native Hawaiians suspected to having leprosy to be sent to the leper colony on Molokai.  The film focuses on one family whose home is invaded in the middle of the night and how they fought back.  It was a narrative based on the written account.  

The picture above was before the film when some of the cast members did an opening chant.  Aaron Leggett, President and Chair of the Eklutna Tribal Council (with the beaded sash) was there as was Mayor Dave Bronson, who said a few words about the importance of the values shown in the film.  I'm not sure who wrote that for him, but he left shortly after the film began.  That's a pity because he might have learned a lot from both the film and the discussion afterward.  The man in the middle is Leo and he's working on making Hawaii an independent nation as it was before the US took over by force in 1893. He handed out these flyers for people who want more information.

Ko'olau, if you haven't guessed, is the hero in the film along with his wife.  

The second film The King of Kings was a documentary by Harriet Marin Jones who first learned about her grandfather, Edward Jones when she was 17 on the way to university in the United States.  And what an amazing story it is.  Edward Jones' father was a well-to-do Black Baptist preacher in Mississippi who moved his family to Chicago in 1919 after the KKK showed up at his house.  There he had some odd jobs while going to Northwestern University, but transferred to Howard University to avoid the discrimination he felt at Northwestern.  When he returned to Chicago and got into the numbers business - what was called "Policy."  For a nickel people in the poor Black community could buy the hope of money for a decent dinner and for a few even getting rich.  Jones got rich and stayed pretty much off the radar of the white mob because his money business was in the Black community.  Again, to avoid discrimination, he moved his family to Paris, but then back to Chicago as WW II begins.  He moved the family again, this time to Mexico.  

Marin's family history becomes a wild tale about the richest Black man in the US, and one of the richest men in the US.  Essentially, his illegal business - running a numbers game = became legal much later when the State took it over and called it a lottery.  

Marin came to the festival from France and answered questions after the film.  Aside from the incredible story, I was also taken by how she put the film together - particularly the use of animation of photos.  Not animating the people, but how the pictures were animated in relation to each other - almost like a moving collage.  It was unique and added greatly to the telling of the story.  Here's more on Jones and the film maker from the Block Club Chicago.

There was one more film staring at 9pm - well later because the discussions after the first two films went way over time (and it was worth it) - but as much as I'd have liked to stay, I needed to get to bed at a reasonable time tonight.  

Both films tonight continue a theme of bringing stories of outsiders as told by the outsiders themselves.  

AIFF2022: Dealing With Dad and Bering Family Reunion

 Watching movies from noon until 8pm leaves me a little spacey.  The wifi was working today in the auditorium at the museum, but there just wasn't much time between events.  There were lots of short films during the day. Please excuse mistakes, it's late but I want to get this up already.

I'm finding I am mentally resurrecting an old evaluation standard for films:  

1. There are films that are technically well made 
2. There are films that have something important to say or to contribute
3. Films that do both 1 and 2 well
4. Films that do neither
5. And most films fall somewhere in the continuum of both those factors

Dealing With Dad did both 1 and 2 well.  The film is technically good enough to easily fit in on Netflix or another streaming channel.  The acting and pacing are all high quality. Yet it's much more than a slick formula film. It's a poignant story told with love and humor. 

What does it contribute? The director Tom Huang said after the film that the story is adapted from his own family experience with a domineering immigrant father who works hard so his kids can have a better life.   After Dad gets laid off and goes into a deep depression, the two older kids fly home to try to deal with this only to find that Mom and the 30 year old younger brother still living at home find life much easier now that Dad just stays in bed all day watching television.  The family reunion reveals old tensions among the siblings.  The younger brothers accuse the older sister of being a lot like Dad.  The younger brother has a long time crush on a high school friend who just returned from the Peace Corps, but is afraid to ask her out until the older sister older sisters him into asking her out. (That was the one part that didn't ring true to me - she had been in three or four different countries.  And while a volunteer can sign up for a second tour of duty after completing one, it's not common, and the way it was described in the film, she seemed to move around from country to country as part of her assignment.) The mother has already set up the middle son, who's having marital problems, with a date.  While there are dynamics that may be more common in a Chinese American family, the story is really a universal one.  It moved along quickly moving from heavy drama to humor and back seamlessly.  The humor wasn't added on, it was just part of the relationship.  Often it was funny to the audience, but often not to the characters themselves.  I think it was easier to watch than The Last Birds of Passage, but Birds, probably had a much weightier story to tell.  

The other full length film was the documentary Bering, Family Reunion.  Bering followed Etta Tall, an Inupiaq woman from Little Diomede as she searched for her relatives from Big Diomede.  These are two islands a few miles apart, Little D in Alaska and Big D in Russia.  Before WWII people from the two islands visited each other frequently and there were many family relations across the two islands.  The Soviet Union, at the beginning of WW II removed the islanders to the mainland and maid Bid D into a military base.  When Gorbachev and Reagan opened the border between Alaska and the Soviet Union, some of the first to travel across the border were Inupiats going to visit their relatives they hadn't seen in many years.  We see how the plans were made, how a family company that arranges arctic travel got asked to look for relatives when in Russia, and slowly how the reunion eventually comes to be.  This film involves families who were cut off from each other by war and geopolitics.  It considers culture, language, and people's undying compulsion to find their families.  A little slow at points, the film nevertheless has very high significance, documenting this story, a story that has been repeated around the world as national governments ignore indigenous and minority people's needs.  

The first question in my mind was "How did a Mexican film maker come to make this story?"  It just seemed odd.  And it was the first question asked of the woman who'd carried a list of names to Russia with her when she went to the Russian far-east, who answered questions after the film. She was a friend of the film director Lourdes Grobet (who passed away in July 2022) who wanted to make this film.  You can learn more about her at the Festival Internacional de Cine de Morelia site where the film was show in October.

There were lots of shorts.  Some were well made.  Some told important stories. Some did both.  Some left me scratching my head.  I'll note a few that I reacted to most.

Queen Moorea had to be the most compelling, and one of the longest.  It told the story of a high school homecoming queen who was born with a genetic condition that made her different.  It wasn't clear to me exactly what her disability was (it was mentioned briefly I didn't catch it.)  The film was another with the theme of people who don't fit in.  Another audience member after the film said that people tend to categorize people with disabilities by the disability and that often keeps them from reaching their full potential.  This film portrayed Moorea was living up to her potential.  

Never Again Para Nadia - shows how the Jewish community in a Rhode Island prison town team up with the local Latino community to protest against immigrants being housed in a local prison.  To be clear, they are protesting that the prison is nearby, but that immigrants are being put into this private prisons for the financial gain of the prison owners and their shareholders.  The film documents the protest, a car driving through some protestors whose driver eventually gets acquitted.  It's an important record as far as it goes, but more statistics on the private prison and its profits and the numbers of immigrants housed in the prison.  

I liked Sunday With Monica - an interesting short story of a movie that left this viewer wanting to know more about.  I'm guessing this could be an early version of a future feature film.  The divorced father picks up his daughters from his ultra-orthodox Jewish ex-wife and takes them to meet his non-Jewish girlfriend who has horses and a riding rink.  One daughter is drawn to the horses and the other is thinking how Mom wouldn't approve.  

Gina is a brief portrait of a homeless woman in LA. We get to know this woman a little beyond what we might imagine of her if we just saw her on the street.  The Pastor who befriended Gina while handing out food to the homeless and eventually is impressed with Gina again reminds us not to judge people through our stereotypes, but to get to know them as people.  

Rain was a beautiful chocolate of a film - lots of beautiful animated images of rain and a little girl who plows through the puddles.  

And then there was Snowflakes another light animated film made for the Make A Wish Foundation, about a little girl with cancer just admitted into the hospital.  Another girl invites her to play but she's not in the mood, but does eventually get enticed.  It was all pretty innocuous, but I couldn't help being struck by the perfect faces - pretty lips, big eyes, and what appeared to me as lots of make-up. Someone connected to the film was there and answered questions.  My wife discouraged me from asking whether these perfect, make-upped images of very young little girls didn't perhaps send the wrong message.  So I didn't.  But someone else asked less directly about how the images of the little girls came about and we were told the animator determined that.  To be clear, their heads were shaved, but they were still model quality.  

AIFF2022 - Saturday Review - Big Crow and White Crows and More

[After sleeping on this, I've added a few thoughts on Crows are White.  They are [bracketed]].

Got to the museum a little late (gave up trying for the 10am Children's program) and there was nothing showing in the auditorium.  They'd had a glitch and so we got to see most of Big Crow.  A lot of amateur footage, but it was edited together to tell a powerful story about a young woman who took her Pine Ridge reservation team to win the state championship.  Her death soon after brough lots of folks together and inspired lots of improvements for the reservation and relations off reservation.  Sad but inspiring.  

I was going to post a few short posts, but then the wifi no longer worked.  (Later I found out I could get it in the museum, but it was spotty in the auditorium.  

And I got hijacked by Crows Are White and I want to focus on that movie, but first a quick overview of the rest of the day, which all took place in the museum. 

The woman collecting the audience ratings of the films said that the morning kids program, really was very dark and the only thing kid about it, possibly, was that it was animated shorts.  

Big Crow I wrote about above.  I liked it.  

Then came three shorts made in Alaska.  The first Sabor Artico: Latinos en Alaska was about Latinos in Alaska.  Interesting, but not exceptional film making.  

Safe Enough  was a about the Sitka summer arts camp and highlighted a number of the young artists attending.  The theme seemed to be that this was a safe space where these artistic teens could actually be themselves and explore who they were.  It was safe, unlike the world they binomially live in.  It was uplifting, except that this escape only lasted two weeks.  I couldn't help thinking that it shouldn't be so hard to envision communities where people who had unique talents could feel comfortable.  And then I thought about how most people are just better able to conform, but that they too are denying who they really are to fit in.  A film that stimulates you to move your understanding of things further is, in my book, a good film.

And the third short in this program, Kakińiik was by Patrick Hoffman whom I spoke to and whose video I put up before I went to bed last night.  It's always tricky when you interview someone before you see their film.  Sometimes the film doesn't work for you and you have this connection, albeit short, with the film maker.  But that wasn't a problem in this case.  This was a beautiful film, made up of a series of talks by women getting traditional Inupiat tattoos and how the tattoos connect them to their ancestors and their culture.  There are also a couple of vignettes by the tattoo artist - talking about the styles of tattoos, traditional food and its relation to doing tattoos, and her own thigh tattoos.  Each vignette is preceded by a stylized screen, which confused some of us in the audience the first time who weren't sure if this was the end.  It wasn't.  And we weren't fooled the next time either.  It was like a book with several chapters separated by this artful page.  

Then we got to Crows are White, which swept me away.  Spoiler Alert:  I'm going to write about the film in ways that assume the reader has either seen it or won't be able to see it.  But in another way, it's the film itself that is what is so enjoyable and thought provoking and what I write shouldn't change that experience.

This was a film done in the style of a This American Life piece, with a narrator outlining the project and how things proceed throughout.   The filmmaker, Ahsen Nadeem, narrates in a voice and tone not unlike Ira Glass, but the story he's pursuing, turns out to be his own. There are so many aspects of this film that are both amazing and bizarre.  People who are noble and flawed.  The photography was exquisite as was the music. 

Crows AreWhite refers to a story someone tells about a monk who tells his disciples that crows are white, and while they all know this isn't true, they cannot contradict the monk.  They must say, yes, crows are white.  

My take is that the film is about people being forced to deal with contradictions to their understanding of how the world works.  Ahsen's basic contradiction is that he's fallen in love with a non-Muslim and he knows his parents will disown him if he marries her.  But we don't know this until after we've been set up to believe there are more general spiritual issues he's pursuing rather than answers to his very personal dilemma.  [A film version of the guy climbing the rocky mountain to ask the monk on top the meaning of life.]

Another contradiction is that as a Muslim, he searches for answers from a Buddhist monk.  But he learns that the head monk, Kamahori, he wants to pose his questions to has taken a vow of silence.  And these monks are the ultramarathoners of Buddhist monks.  They take a vow to walk a certain distance every day (something like 20 kilometers) and they have to do this until they've walked the equivalent of walking the circumference of the world.  And part of the vow is that if they miss a day, they have to commit suicide. 

Ahsen himself comes across as sincere and disarming not unlike ira Glass. But when you think about it, he's also so full of himself that he thinks he has the right to interrupt the lives of monks in this Japanese monastery with his film crew and persistence in trying to meet with the head monk.  He gets kicked out when his cell phone rings during a secret ceremony they've allowed him to film. [But you can also ask why did the monks give him permission to film them in the first place?  They are supposed to be focused on enlightenment and to not care about what others think. To indulge him?  To spread Buddhist wisdom? To get publicity for the monastery? To increase their income?]

That's when he meets Ryushin, a monk assigned to greet visitors and answer questions in the monastery gift shop.  Ryushin is probably the most honest and likable character in the movie.  And his life dilemma is not unlike Ahsen's.  His father and grandfather had been important monks at this monastery, but he really would rather be a sheep farmer in New Zealand, he thinks.  But while he professes to be unhappy, he doesn't obsess on the contradictions.  Yes, he's a monk, but he takes a drink now and then, loves ice cream, and goes to heavy metal concerts.  

Another character who is relatively normal is Ahsen's girlfriend and later wife.  I particularly cheered when she questioned Ahsen's taking cameras in to film his parents when he tells them he's been married to a non-Muslim for three years.  Seems crass to her. But she understands that this is necessary to complete the film he's spent so much time on.  

This could have been a mockumentary - a fictional documentary spoofing documentaries.  [Part of me was wondering if it was while I was watching and hoping it was.] But all the contradictions and conflicts between what people ought to do and what they really do and how they reconcile it is what makes this such a good movie.  And, of course the beautiful cinematography and the unexpected but perfect music. 

Everything together works to make this an outstanding film. 

And up through this point of the festival, all the films were about people who didn't quite fit in the societies they lived in - the nomads in Friday nights Last Birds of Passage, the Lakota reservation girls gaining self confidence and pride through basketball, the Latinos in Alaska, the campers in Sitka, and the Inupiat women regaining their heritage through traditional tattoos.

A Body Is a House of Familiar Rooms

The afternoon shorts program didn't impress me.  The one film that stood out - The Body Is A House Of Familiar Rooms  - did so because of the colors and patterns that were so striking. 

Also the paper programs are now available.  Here's the Sunday schedule.

And finally, there's You Resemble Me which rounded out the night and I'm still processing that one.  My biggest difficulty was subtitles when they weren't on dark backgrounds.  A truly heartbreaking film of Arab refugee sisters put into foster homes with a disastrous result in one case.  

"If an explanation contradicts the sense of who a person is, it can be damaging. There should be more attention paid to the way people describe their own distress."

"If an explanation contradicts the sense of who a person is, it can be damaging. There should be more attention paid to the way people describe their own distress."

This comes from a September 18, 2022 LA Times interview of writer  Rachel Aviv [Mental illness, as told by the patients].  The book features four people with mental health problems, talking from their own experience.  

There are lots of interesting thoughts, but this one grabbed my attention most.

I couldn't help but think about gay and transgender people having other people trying to deny their stories.  And it hit me.

People who react so strongly to LGBTQ folks are trying to deny evidence that contradicts their own world view.  Making LGBTQ people disappear, helps keep their own world view whole.  

Of course, that goes for lots of other attempts to censor, oppress, and otherwise hide that which contradicts people's dogma.  In these four tales, people with mental health problems are disbelieved because people want to believe that science can cure them or perhaps to deny the possibility they may be or become mentally ill without a way out.  Defund the Police disrupts peoples belief that police will protect them.   The Catholic Church denying Galileo's proof that the earth goes around the sun.  Everyone who ridiculed Darwin because Evolution was at odds with the story of creation.  

Of course, though maybe not obvious,  the first part of the quote refers not only to the patient (in this case) but also to the person who denies the patient's story.  

People say there may be no reasoning possible with hardcore Trump supporters.  But perhaps simply asking them to explain their world view might make their grievances understandable.  You needn't believe it,  you probably can't alter it.  But listening is the first step.  For them and for us.  I know a serious conversation for an hour might help a true believer see this "liberal" as not embodying their stereotypes.  

That's it.  That's all I have to say.  

Best Book In Many Years: Apeirogon Part 1 - Hoopoe

 

Been reading marathon like to finish this by book club Monday night.  

It's fantastic!!  Yesterday I'd read the 500th section and at the Juneteenth Festival I was telling everyone I met about the book.  

You're going to hear more about this book in coming days here.  But for now, this its sort of a diversion.  

The cover is full of birds. And birds fly in and out  throughout.  This is not a book about birds, it's just that the author brings in all sorts of topics that are relevant to the key tale, which is about an Israeli Jew whose daughter was blown up in a suicide bombing in Jerusalem and a Palestinian Muslim whose daughter was shot in the head by Israeli police.  Both meet at a group called the Parents Circle - an organization that gets parents who have lost children in the battles between Israelis and Palestinians.  They connect and then start making presentations to groups all over the the world, But mostly in Israel and Occupied Palestine.  

It's a fictionalized account of real events.  Perhaps telling us more truths than a non-fiction account could.  It's divided into 1001 sections. Each of different lengths.  Some span half a dozen pages or more.  Others are just one line.  They number 1 -500. The next one is 1000,  The next one is 500 again and the rest go back to 1.  It's almost like a book of many, many short stories.  Sections 500 are perhaps the crux of the book,  all the bits and pieces we've already heard about in previous sections, but knitted together.  The first section 500 is the talk given by Rami, the Israeli, at the Cremisan Monastery at Beit Jala in the Occupied Territories.  The second section 500 is the talk given by Bassam, the Palestinian, the same night and in the same place.  

But I want to save 500 for later.  In this post I want to mention birds.  Particularly hoopoes.  

Section 3, on page 4 (Section 1 starts on page 3) begins 

"Five hundred million birds arc the sky over the hills of Beit Jala every year.  They move by ancient ancestry:  hoopoes, thrushes, flycatchers, warblers, cuckoos, starlings, shrikes, ruffs, northern wheatears, plovers, sunbirds, swift's, sparrows, nightjars, owls, gulls, hawks, eagles, kites, cranes, buzzards, sandpipers, pelicans, flamingos, storks, pied bush chats, griffon vultures, European rollers, Arabian babblers, bee-eaters, turtledoves, whitethroats, yellow wagtails, blackcaps, red-throated pipits, little bitterns.  

It is the world's second busiest migratory superhighway:  at least four hundred different species of birds torrent through, riding different levels in the sky.  Long fees of honking intent.  Sole travelers skimming low over the grass."

Already in this section, though I didn't realize it at the time, it prepares us for that talk at the Cremisan Monastery in Beit Jala.  And sections like this put the present day events into perspective. The birds have been flying by here for thousands of years.  Many, many young girls have died during that time span in this place.  While the book focuses on two particular girls, Smadar and Abir, all the other girls' lives were important too and at the same time all those birds flew by totally unaware.  

And the book is like that.   Fragments of life spiral in and out of center stage, all adding rich links, illustrating the interconnection of everything.  

But this post is about hoopoes.  (Did you catch that hoopoes are the first bird mentioned in Section 3?)

We hear about them again in Sections 469 - 471.  469 is about a group of actors (including Helen Mirren) who travel through rural Algeria.

"The troupe journeyed through the desert, stopping in the evenings in the smallest and most isolated villages they could find.  They unfurled a large carpet and set up a series of corrugated boxes while one of the actors sounded out a drum call.  An audience formed, and the troupe began their performance of an adaption of The Conference of the Birds, based on an allegorical poem by Farid ud-Din Attar, using hand puppets to illustrate the story of a gathering of the world's birds trying to decide who should be their king.

In the play, each bird represents a human fault which prevents man from attaining enlightenment.  The wisest bird among the, the hoopoe, suggest that together they try to find the legendary Persian Simorgh to gain enlightenment for themselves. . . 

The village crowds reacted variously - some cheered, others laughed, while a few stayed silent . . "

[As I think of my two years in a rural Thai town, itinerant troops of actors would come through, set up their stage, and perform for folks in the evening - Thai dramas and Chinese opera perhaps the most popular.] 

470

"The Conference of the Birds was written in Persia, at the end of the twelfth century.

When the last birds - thirty of them - finally get to the home of the Simorgh, exhausted, they gaze into a lake and instead of meeting the mythical creature they've been searching for, they find only their own reflections."

471

"On the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of Israel, the hoopoe -the loquacious, dappled, with a long beak and slicked-back tuft of hair - was chosen as the national bird.

During the vote, Shimon Peres, the Israeli president, said he was only sorry that the most Zionist of birds, the dove, had not made the final cut.  

It was, said Nurit [wife of Rami, the Israeli father] one of the most perverse lines she had heard in her life, although it was, she added, apt that the name Peres in Hebrew meant bearded vulture."

In a sense, this is a book of 1001 short stories that all intertwine.  

The hoopoe references are among the least intertwined into the story itself.  

But the hoopoe is a bird that has fascinated me since I first saw it in the Hong Kong Bird Guide I bought in 1989 when I was teaching there.  The picture from that book should help you see why I was so taken.

Those are all cool looking birds, but the hoopoe is in a class all by itself.  I never saw a hoopoe in Hong Kong.  But in 2006, after giving a paper at a conference in New Delhi, we went to see the Taj Mahal.  I couldn't imagine that after seeing pictures of the Taj all my life, that the real thing would live up to my expectations.  I was wrong.  It was amazing.  

We were sitting on a bench in front of this exquisite love letter in the form of enchanting white curves, when a strange bird caught my attention.  As I looked closer, I suddenly realized, whoa, that's a real live hoopoe.  

There were a bunch of them on the lawn.  The history of the Taj would have to wait a bit. 

So, there you have an appetizer for Apeirogon.  There will be at least one more post on this book.  But I still have about 40 pages to go.  I'll let you know if the hoopoe makes another surprise appearance at the end.  

 NOTE July 5, 2022:  I've put up a second, meatier post about Apeirogon here.

Letters To The Editor, Book Reference Sweeney And Termination

 I generally don't write letters to the editor of the Anchorage Daily News (ADN).  I have a blog where I can say what I need to say.  But we're in the middle of a special election to replace our member of Congress who died recently and an opinion piece the other day disturbed me.  

I wasn't planning on making this into a post, until a reference to Tara Sweeny showed up this morning.  So, first, here's my letter (The ADN picked the title, not me.)

No to Sweeney

"Hugh Ashlock (ADN, June 3) would have us vote for Sweeney for Congress because she will support business. Ashlock, a real estate developer, says he knows what qualities entrepreneurs need for success. He points out she’s been a leader of Arctic Slope Regional Corp., “Alaska’s largest privately owned company.” He also cites her “bipartisan cooperation” using her unanimous confirmation by the U.S. Senate as an example. But that was when the GOP controlled the Senate and Democrats voted for qualified nominees, unlike Republicans, who wouldn’t even let Merrick Garland have a hearing, let alone a vote.

Alaska has never been short of elected officials who support business. We’ve had oil company employees as elected officials. Ashlock says government needs to stand aside and let business do what it does best. The common goal of all businesses is to make a profit. Clean environment? Climate change? Worker health and safety? They see all these as obstacles to profit.

Bipartisanship? Arctic Slope Regional Corporation couldn’t even cooperate with the Alaska Federation of Natives and pulled out of that organization. GOP members of Congress are like the Uvalde police — they fled the insurrectionists and then refused to do their job and hold them accountable.

The age of oil is waning. Even big banks and oil companies are pulling back from Alaska oil. We need realists who see that the future is in a strong Permanent Fund, not in climate-destroying fossil fuels. We don’t need another oil executive (ASRC lives off oil) representing us in any governmental body. We need a candidate who believes health care is a human right and that women should have as much autonomy over their bodies as men, that voting rights and campaign spending limits are critical to democracy; who fights for workers’ rights, not for greater corporate power. Not someone who will join with her party to oppose all of these things in favor of higher profits."

When the letter was published I got a couple of emails from my book club.  One added this note:  

"Yes. Good letter Steve. Louise Erdrich also  lambasts Tara Sweeney in the Epilogue of her latest book “The Night Watchman.”

I got to that part this morning.  The book is a fictional account of how Erdrich's grandfather, in the 1950s learned that their tribal lands were going to be terminated.  Against all odds, he mounts a campaign to lobby Congress to prevent the termination, and succeeds.  I posted about the book recently because, while the fight against termination is the basic story, it's wrapped in the context of reservation life and Turtle Mountain Chippewa culture of the 1950s in North Dakota.  The termination villain in the story is real life Senator Arthur V. Watkins of Utah who believes 'government handouts' kills the initiative of Indians.  

Here's what the Epilogue says: 

"Indeed, the Trump administration and Assistant Secretary of the Interior Tara Sweeney have recently brought back the termination era by seeking to terminate the Wampanoag, the tribe who first welcomed Pilgrims to these shores and invented Thanksgiving."

Mind you, Tara Sweeny is an Alaska Native woman.  

*The ADN added the title.  While I am opposed to Tara Sweeny, my point was more about the fact that we have enough pro-business representatives.   

" . . . his father remembered a time when the dead person was carefully wrapped in birchbark and then fixed high in a tree."

 

I'm going to offer you the chapter "Cradle to Grave" from Louise Erdich's The Night Watchman. As I read it my body absorbed, in a new way, the meaning of the Anglo rulers rooting out the traditions, language, and knowledge of indigenous peoples.  And I realized that the GOP and evangelical Christian advocates of rooting out any mention of LGBTQ realities, women's rights, or the true history of the United States, of slavery, or even scientific truths,  rises from the same need to maintain one's own 'truths' by eliminating any competing 'truths.'

Stamping out other knowledge leads to ignorance which leads to total obedience.  Or so these would be tyrants believe. but the human mind has always  been resistant to these attempts.  Though the technology of modern marketing chips away and there are humans who would like to possess technology that controls what others know and think.  

Not only does such annihilation of ideas create obedience to "the one Truth" it delegitimizes the knowledge of the other culture.  This passage also shows us what we lose when we wipe out other cultural knowledge.  

My apologies to Louise Erdrich for quoting such a long passage.  This blog takes no ads and raises no money.  My hope is to share your wisdom and possibly get more people to read your book.  

"Thomas worked on the grave house while Wood Mountain finished up the cradle board.  They were working in Louie's barn because he had all of the tools - the saws, planes, rasps, the splitter, vise, hammer, and the sanding rocks.  Neither of them spoke.  Thomas was using a sharp chisel to dovetail the ends of the boards.  He didn't like using nails in a grave house.  He made a few rafters for the roof and then planed out the necessary shingles.  He'd seen them made with tar paper or bought shingles, but he felt close to Zhaanat as he worked - she had asked him to make the grave house because she knew he did it the old way.  Except, Thomas wondered, was this the really old way?  Biboon said that his father remembered a time when the dead person was carefully wrapped in birchbark and then fixed high in a tree.  It seemed better.  You were eaten by crows and vultures instead of worms.  Your body went flying over the earth instead of being distributed to the tiny creatures living under the earth. This grave house probably came about after they had been forced to live in one place, on reservations.  Mostly, they had Catholic burials.  He wanted to ask Wood Mountain which he thought was better, tree or dirt.  However, Wood Mountain was finishing the cradle board. 

"I suppose we shouldn't tell Zhaanat we were making the grave house and cradle board at the same time," he said to Wood Mountain.  

"You think it could be bad for the baby?"

"I'm not superstitious," said Thomas, although he certainly was.  Just not as bad as LaBatte with his fear of owls and his reading of random omens in everything.  Wood Mountain said that he'd light some sage and bathe the cradle board in the smoke to take the whammy off.

"That'll work," said Thomas. 

From the top of the cradle board, Wood Mountain was using Zhaanat's finest sanding tool - horsetail plant split and glued onto a piece of wood.  It was bringing out the narrow lines in the white cedar.  He had a jar of tea and a jar of vinegar in which he'd left some pennies for a week.  After he'd sanded the wood smooth, he painted the bottom of the cradle board with the tea, which gave it a soft brown color.  He painted the top of the wood with the penny vinegar, which tinged the wood with pale blue including the head guard.  He tied several pieces of sinew to the head guard.  sometimes he found small ocean shells while working in the fields.  Some were whorled;  others were tiny grooved scallops.  He drilled holes in them and hung them from the lengths of sinew. 

"Barnes was saying there used to be an ocean here," he said to Thomas.

"From the endless way-back times."

"Think of it.  Vera's baby will be playing with these little things from the bottom of the sea that was here.  Who could have known?"

"We are connected to the way-back people, here, in so many ways.  Maybe a way-back person touched these shells.  Maybe the little creatures in them disintegrated into the dirt.  Maybe some tiny piece from that creature is inside us now.  We can't know these things."

"Us being connected here so far back gives me a peaceful feeling," said Wood Mountain.

"That's what it's all about," said Thomas.  "And now we're putting another man in the earth.  Maybe a drunk, but he wasn't always a drunk."

"Sometimes when I'm out and around," said Wood Mountain, "I feel like they're with me, those way-back people.  I never talk about it.  But they're all around us.  I could never leave this place."

The United States would be a much healthier and spiritually  richer society today had it not been for the arrogance of white, Christian conquerors who believed they had the right to dispossess the indigenous people of their land and languages and customs.  Or the right to dispossess African slaves of their freedom and their labor.  

But that need for unquestioned power and obedience still lives among many in this nation and in this world.  I have no issue with spirituality and religions that try to guide people to experience their spirituality.  The Bible or Koran and other religious texts as allegory, as fables, that bring people comfort in times of sorrow and decency in times of opportunity, are fine.  But as literal truth to be thoughtlessly obeyed, a religion becomes the tool of authoritarian tyrants and demagogues.  

Trump, among others, gave permission to many to act on these selfish, evil impulses.  We'll get past this, but at great cost.  For those whose lives have been untouched by gun violence or climate change, or racial hatred, your escape is only temporary. Actually we've all been at least indirectly impacted even if we don't realize it.  If we don't overcome the dominance of oil wealth and drastically cut back our use of carbon based products, life will be unbearable for the vast majority of human beings.  And I worry for my grandchildren.

As the passage from The Night Watchman shows, the indigenous peoples of North America had spiritual beliefs and physical skills that kept connected to each other and to the earth for thousands of years.  Knowledge the immigrants from Europe could have benefited from if they hadn't tried to wipe it out.  

Apocalyptic Beliefs Go Back A Long Ways

"Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has prompted some of America’s most prominent evangelical leaders to raise a provocative question — asking if the world is now in the biblically prophesied “end of days” that might culminate with the apocalypse and the second coming of Christ."  (The Times of Israel)

Christianity.com tells us:

"Ever since Jesus predicted the end, even before Revelation was written, Christians have worried and/or believed that the apocalypse was upon them. Several events were widely thought to herald the end of the world and were offered supposed biblical backing, but ultimately did not result in the apocalypse."

They they go on to list various times that many people expected the Apocalypse to happen.  But it didn't.  But they aren't debunking that it will happen.  Only that we can't predict it.

"We can’t control when the end comes. We can’t even predict it. However, there is one thing we can do: Be faithful followers of Christ regardless of the situation. And that is what we have been called to do."

These ideas were in my mind when I read   "Reindeer at the End of the World"  by Bathsheba Demuth.  How did I find that article?

My book club book this month is The Best American Travel Writing 2021.    The title didn't excite me. How could they already have a book out (back in January)?  2021 was only just over.  How did they evaluate stuff published in December?  (I think, now, it is the date the book is published, not when the original articles were published.)

Besides, I wanted a book that would take me to another world, to new ideas, with words that would excite me and make me smile.  A great novel of inspired biography maybe.  Not some travel industry hype.

Well, an advantage of a book club is that you read things you never would have picked on your own.  

Despite the fact that B picked this book as a substitute for the cancelled cruises he missed over the last couple of pandemic years, the book is much better than I expected.  I am way behind - but I've only got about 150 pages to read by Monday night, so I could make it.  

So far, my favorite chapter was "Good Bread" about a guy who takes his family to Lyon, France so he can learn to cook at a great restaurant there.  He ends up working in a bakery that only uses fresh local flour from small family farms.  As the bread baker in our household, I found lots to appreciate in the chapter.  

But this is about the Apocalypse and also Russia.   

 In "Reindeer at the End of the World"  Bathsheba Demuth writes about a trip that takes place on the Chukchi Peninsula in the Russian far east.  

While looking for reindeer, the author stumbles across Karl Yanovich Luks in the archives in Vladivostok.   He came to the far east in the 1920s to revolutionize the lives of the local folks and modernize the fox hunting and reindeer herding enterprises.  (It didn't turn out well.)

Karl was born in 1888 and grew up very poor and became a deckhand as a teen.  It was the last decades of the Czar Nicholas II, who 

"heir to four centuries of autocratic rule, sheltered in his palaces, spent lavishly , and hired more police.  The people Karl met outside these aristocratic walls found their present so unjust, so sickly, so impossible, their question was not would it end, but how.  Karl heard the Baptists preaching hellfire, Orthodox priests involving the salvation of saints, and a dozen other sects calling down the final judgment.  

As the historian Yuri Slezkine explains, these visions all shared a plot:  first the apocalypse, then a reign of harmony and perfection.  An old story, passed from the Middle East to Europe, from Jewish cosmologies into Christin traditions, going back almost 3,000 years to the prophecies of Zoroaster, who foretold a cataclysmic battle between light and dark.  The triumph of light would give the righteous a new life, one without suffering or toil, one where time is meted out in cycles of birth and death ended in a linear, immortal world."

As she tells the story of her visits with the indigenous reindeer herders, she keeps coming back to this theme.  

"Karl did not become a Baptist or worship saints.  He joined a socialist reading circle.  In Slezkine's masterful reading of the Russian socialist condition, the plot Karl learned also came from Zoroaster's lineage.  Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels foretold how the darkness of capitalist exploitation would become the light of communist utopia.  Between these poles was a kind of earthly revelation:  what socialists called revolution.  A word, Slezkine reminds us, promising 'the end of the old world and the beginning of a new, just one."

 "Another appeal of the apocalypse:  proclaiming it is not an act of supplication, but of certainty."

"The core of apocalyptic thinking is nihilism:  this world is too despoiled to continue.  The seduction of such stories is how certain they make the tellers feel.  An apocalyptic narrative is like looking at a horizon with no clouds or hills:  the way forward is terribly assured.  To walk it, there is no need to mind the lives of others, rendered invisible by the power of imagining they are already gone.  

"Apocalyptic prophecy is also an escape from contemplating- catstrophe."

The apocalypse was not a part of my upbringing.  It scares me that so many people accept it so easily.  My upbringing says we should do everything we can to make the world a better place.  Accepting the apocalypse as inevitable says, the world is a terrible place and there is nothing you can do about it, but not to worry, God will fix it for you if you follow his commandments.   

Even though the end of times has been predicted so many times in the past and yet failed to appear.  This may not be the most enlightening discussion of it, but getting bits and pieces from here and there helps me think about such things.  Gives me questions to raise when I meet people who truly believe.  

People Who Want To Be Themselves VS People Who Are Hiding As "Normal"

This was not at all on my agenda for today.  But then I saw  this Guardian article:

". . . Kids like Seph bring into sharp focus what it means to be male, female or something else. There is still widespread belief that minors with gender dysphoria – the clinical term for the distress caused by a mismatch between a person’s sense of their gender and their birth-assigned sex – should not be encouraged to transition. At least eight states have proposed bills that would criminalize doctors who prescribe puberty blockers or hormones to trans adolescents.

On one side of the debate are people who think Seph’s gender dysphoria will fade by adulthood. On the other are the vast majority of mental health professionals who study gender dysphoria insisting that affirming a child in whatever way they express their gender is beneficial to their mental health. . . ."

Here's my proposal on this topic, a different way to think about those opposing transgender rights.  Well, it's not really that different from what lots of people have already said.  

On the one side we have transgender human beings.  People whose physical signs of gender are either ambiguous or are in conflict with their mental sense of themselves.  (And probably a number of other variations of a theme.)  Their desire to dress, walk, adorn themselves, and the activities they want to participate in, with the people they want to be with, all that and more, doesn't match society's norms of how they should do those things.  

On the other side we have 'normal' people who find transgender human beings wanting to be themselves, a horrible, terrible thing.  Why?  The constitution says nothing about how people should dress and act.  It does say people have the right to pursue happiness.  Why interfere with another's pursuit of happiness?

We do have limits on pursuit of happiness - mainly when those pursuits do harm to other people.  But what harm do transgender folks living their lives honestly do to others?

I'd offer two interrelated reasons:

1.  It violates their world view.  People may like to change their cars or their clothing, but they don't want to change their fundamental views of the world.  Changing cars still confirms driving.  Changing clothes still confirms wearing clothes.  But changing genders violates people's fundamental binary belief system - male/female, good/bad, black/white, true/false.  A bright student of mine who was also raised Fundamentalist, told the class that he opposed homosexuality because it was wrong in the eyes of his church.  When challenged by other classmates, he finally said:  "The word of God is infallible.  It's a whole package.  If it's wrong about homosexuals, then the whole package falls apart."  

If transgender people are allowed to be themselves openly and society is more accepting of them, then their own world view is challenged.  Worse, their children get to see challenges to that world view.  

2.  It violates their personal view. 

 Let me tell you about another student.  He looked good, dressed well, spoke well.  But his papers didn't work.  I don't remember exactly what was wrong, just that I marked them up a lot, pointing our lack of supporting details and that what he was saying didn't sound authentic.  Things like that.  

He made an appointment to see me.  He told me he'd had a difficult childhood - again, I don't remember the details.  But he said he carefully watched the 'successful' people and remade himself in their likeness - the way he dressed, the way he walked, the way he talked.  Everything.  Until he passed for 'normal' and 'successful.'  My comments on his paper were, he said, pulling all that apart, exposing the boy he was running away from.  And after talking to his therapist, he was dropping the class.  He wasn't ready to face that or to have someone else (me) see that.  I told him I was sorry, but that I trusted his and his therapist's judgment.  

I think there are a lot of people living like that in the world.  They are disguised as 'successful' people - that is people who look and act like society's norms would have us look and act.  We have so many people hidden behind facades.  

For some of them, maybe many, people who defy society's norms because they are too oppressive are threatening.  They threaten their world view and they challenge their personal view.  That was true of gay people.  It was true of women who wanted to be more than a housewife.  Of African-Americans who wanted to be treated the same way white people are treated.  

Some closeted gays have been outed for being more anti-guy than the norm.  People have said they did this to hide their own internal struggles with their sexuality.  

But people can be hiding from lots of sources poor self-images - abusive childhoods where they were never good enough for their parents.  Or they grew up in poverty whose tendrils still pull down their self image. Or they weren't thin enough, tall enough, pretty enough, smart enough, articulate enough, or 'enough' in any of the countless ways our society tells us we have to be.  

"According to the latest annual statistics from the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, nearly $16.7 billion was spent on cosmetic procedures in the U.S. in 2020. (From Baylor College of Medicine)"

A July 2019 Business Insider article reports 

"The beauty industry is growing faster than ever before. Today it's valued at an estimated $532 billion and counting," 

Another 2019 Business Insider article  says:

"The U.S. weight loss market is now worth a record $72 billion, but the number of dieters has fallen, due to the growth of the size acceptance and body positivity movement."

We could add the money spent at gyms and in therapy and any other kinds of businesses that make money off of people's poor self-image, businesses aimed at making people 'normal.'  

That's not to say there aren't legitimate reasons any of these activities.  But a certain percentage of people who pursue these things would just be better off in a society more tolerant of differences.

And for those who can't make themselves look successful, there's alcohol and drugs to dull or even to escape reality for a while.  

REMI reports that people in the US spent $253.8 Billion on alcohol in 2018. But it's important to remember that about one-third of adults don't drink at all, and many drink relatively little..  Others very moderately.  I'm having trouble finding numbers that divide total expenditures on alcohol among different types of drinkers.  But there is:

"In 2019, 25.8 percent of people ages 18 and older (29.7 percent of men in this age group and 22.2 percent of women in this age group4) reported that they engaged in binge drinking in the past month,4 and 6.3 percent (8.3 percent of men in this age group and 4.5 percent of women in this age group5) reported that they engaged in heavy alcohol use in the past month.5"

And then there's the amount paid for illegal drugs - about $146 billion in 2016.

Basically, there are lots of signs that Americans are not happy.  I would suggest that many, if not most, are living lives, in Thoreau's words, of quiet desperation*.  Seeking to survive not just the physical world, but the social and political world.  

I'd suggest that those most desperate to 'fit' are those who are most inclined to attack those who are true to themselves.  Honest, open people threaten them.  They also make them conscious of the fake lives they are living.  I can't prove this, but I throw it out as something to consider and study.  

We should all be striving for a society where all people have not only 'the right' to pursue happiness, but the actual opportunity to do so.  

And, of course, there are the scavengers of the GOP who are always looking for fears to exploit in the next election.  

After I did the first draft, we went to the Bainbridge Art Museum and I saw these two words juxtaposed in one of the exhibits and it seemed meant for this post.  

*Iddo Landau takes exception to the broadness of Thoreau's comment, but does acknowledge, too, a number of points I make in this post.