First There Is A Mountain, Then There Is No Mountain, Then There Is

In early October of 2010, Maatia Toafa had been prime minister of the island nation of Tuvalu for less than a week.

He met one afternoon with Andrew Marantz, who was working on a piece that would eventually be published in the December 2011 issue of Harper’s.

Tuvalu is the country that is believed to be the first that will disappear entirely beneath the waves, due to climate change. Some estimates predict this submergence in less than 50 years.

Marantz asked Toafa, among other things, what sort of ideas he had, in re Tuvalu becoming an aquatic country. Some of their exchange is reprinted below.

Toafa was ousted in a vote of “no confidence” about two months after this interview took place.

I asked what solutions he proposed to the issue that his entire country might be underwater in fifty years.

He said he would consider “bringing in some mountains from somewhere, so we can have a higher elevation.”

“Mountains?” I asked.

“Sure,” he said.

“Where would the mountains come from?”

“Well,” he said. “We’ll ask around.”

We Are Devo

The traditional notion that hunter-gatherers must carry on a solitary, unremitting search for food, that they supposedly wake each morning not knowing whether or not they will find the day’s supply, and that they usually die young from famine happens to be untrue. Hunter-gatherers, who are not solitary but live in small bands and observe many intricate social rules for the distribution of food, are far from impoverished. The San in the bleak Kalahari Desert forage for food for no more than a few hours a day on the average; moreover, the unmarried young people and those older than fifty do hardly any work at all. Medical examinations of the San have shown that their diet, both abundant and nutritious, has enabled them to escape many of the health problems associated with diets that are common in modern societies: obesity and “middle-age spread,” dental cavities, hypertension and coronary heart disease, and elevated levels of cholesterol. And far from being short-lived, many of the San live into their sixties and seventies. An important point made by studies of surviving hunter-gatherers is that their generally excellent nutrition extends to all members of the society and not just to a privileged few—simply because the prevalence of sharing insures that everyone eats the same way.

[I]t is a mistake to suppose that modern societies allow people to work less hard for their daily bread. Out of the 1129 hours worked by one Chinese irrigation farmer in a year, only 122 were needed to grow enough food to sustain that farmer. A blue-collar worker in the United States, on the other hand, spends 180 hours earning enough money to purchase a year’s supply of food. Notwithstanding Western notions of the Chinese peasant’s incessant labor, it is plain that they actually need to work less by a third than North Americans or Europeans to keep themselves supplied with food. Moreover, although a mechanized farmer in the American Midwest need put in an annual total of only nine hours of work for each acre to achieve an astounding six thousand calories for each calorie of effort, that figure ignores the enormous amounts of human labor that go into manufacturing and transporting the trucks, tractors, combines, fuel, fertilizer, pesticides, fence wire, and everything else used by the farmer, not to mention transporting the food itself. For every person who actually works on a Midwestern farm, the labor of at least two others off the farm is needed to supply equipment and services directly to the farmer—aside from the very many more whose labors contribute indirectly to the final product. Altogether, a total of 2790 calories of energy must be expended to produce and deliver to a consumer in the United States just one can of corn providing a total of 270 calories. The production of meat entails an even greater deficit: an expenditure of 22,000 calories is needed to produce the somewhat less than four ounces of beefsteak that likewise produce 270 calories.

In short, present-day agriculture is much less efficient than traditional irrigation methods that have been used by Asians, among others, in this century and by Mayans, Mesopotamians, Egyptians, and Chinese in antiquity. The primary advantage of a mechanized agriculture is that it requires the participation of fewer farmers, but for that the price paid in machines, fossil fuels, and other expenditures of energy is enormous. A severe price is also paid in human labor. Once the expensive machines have been manufactured and deployed on the farms, they are economically efficient only if operated throughout the daylight hours, and indeed farmers in the United States often labor for sixteen hours a day. The boast of industrialized societies that they have decreased the workload is valid only in comparison with the exploitation of labor that existed in the early decades of the Industrial Revolution. If the prevailing forty-hour work week of North America and Europe were proposed to the San, whoever did so would be considered to be exploitive, inhuman, or plain mad.

—Peter Farb, Consuming Passions

The Said Admiral Is Dead

They say it came first from Africa, carried in the screams of the enslaved; that it was the death bane of the Tainos, uttered just as one world perished and another began; that it was a demon drawn into Creation through the nightmare door that was cracked open in the Antilles. Fuku americanus, or more colloquially, fuku—generally a curse or a doom of some kind; specifically the Curse and the Doom of the New World. Also called the fuku of the Admiral because the Admiral was both its midwife and one of its great European victims; despite “discovering” the New World the Admiral died miserable and syphilitic, hearing (dique) divine voices. In Santo Domingo, the Land He Loved Best, the Admiral’s very name has become synonymous with both kinds of fuku, little and large; to say his name aloud or even to hear it is to invite calamity on the heads of you and yours.

No matter what its name or provenance, it is believed that the arrival of Europeans on Hispaniola unleashed the fuku on the world, and we’ve all been in the shit ever since. Santo Domingo might be fuku’s Kilometer Zero, its port of entry, but we are all of us its children, whether we know it or not . . . . 

—Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Much about the Admiral is not known. Where he was born, and when: these are not known. The arc of his early years, when and what he studied at the University of Pavia: these, too, are not known. Where he obtained his ideas of geography, this is not known. The Admiral, it developed, did not know geography: he believed, to the end of his days, that where he landed in 1492 marked the far eastern fringe of Asia.

What is known is that when the Admiral stepped ashore on Hispaniola, he brought Original Sin to the New World. The policies he pursued there exterminated that island’s people, the Taino. Every one.

“All the Indians of these islands were allotted by the Admiral . . . to all the settlers who came to live in these parts; and in the opinion of many who saw what happened and speak of it as eyewitnesses, the Admiral, when he discovered these islands, passed sentence of death on a million or more Indians, men and women, of all ages, adults and children. Of this number and of those since born, it is believed that there do not survive today, in this year 1548, 500 Indians, adults and children, who are natives and who are offspring of the stock of those he found on arrival.”

Today, “the Taino survive in the shape of one’s eyes, the outline of one’s face, the idiom of one’s language.” All the rest, is gone.

From Hispaniola, the Admiral and his works brought destruction too to all the native peoples of all the rest of the Americas—north, central, and south.

And to replace the falling bodies of the Taino, who died extracting gold and silver for him, the Admiral birthed the transatlantic slave trade, bringing to the New World in bondage people from the place where human beings were born.

Wrote the Admiral to his sponsors, Ferdinand and Isabella:

“We can send from here, in the name of the Holy Trinity, all the slaves and brazil-wood which could be sold. If the information I have is correct, we can sell 4000 slaves, who will be worth, at least, 20 millions, and 4000 hundred-weight of brazil-wood, which will be worth just as much . . . I went recently to the Cape Verde Islands where the people have a large slave trade, and they are constantly sending ships to barter for slaves, and ships are always in harbor . . . Although they die now, they will not always die. The Negroes and the Canary Islanders died at first[.]“

The Admiral also loved him some pope, another of his sponsors. And wanted to help him flog their god to other parts of the globe, there to kill and convert people. In his journal of December 26, 1492, the Admiral writes that he hopes to gather up from the New World gold “in so great quantity that the Sovereigns within three years would undertake and prepare to go and conquer the Holy Places.” In a letter sent directly to the pope, the Admiral offered to himself lead a crusading force of some 110,000 men.

But that was not to be. The Admiral was eventually returned in chains to Spain, accused of misgoverning his New World. Fallen from favor, he spent his declining years in litigation against the king, seeking to regain lost wealth and titles. Further, he thought he should receive 10% of all profits Spain derived from the New World, and demanded same; the king told him to bugger right off. In combating the crown, the Admiral became a nonperson. And when he died, the official chronicle of the inland northern town where he expired, Valladolid, did not acknowledge his passing. It was not until several weeks later that a town document noted simply: “the said Admiral is dead.”

Fame

“Now Travis lost his fight, and he’ll get in the history books when someone writes up this place. If a thousand Comanches had cornered us in some gully and wiped us out, like the Sioux just done Custer, they’d write songs about us for a hundred years.”

It struck Call as a foolish remark. “I doubt there was ever a thousand Comanches in one bunch,” he said. “If there had been they would have taken Washington DC.”

—Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove

“Can I Pet The Nice Park, Daddy?”

(This piece was originally published in a now-deceased local paper, about four or so years ago. I am reprinting it here now. Because.)

My daughter has always been attuned to suffering. When still but a toddler, those she perceived as in some sort of pain she dubbed “poor,” and she felt compelled to actively empathize by formally, soberly, petting them. This gift she bestowed indiscrim-inately, from bloated dead sea lions festering on the beach, to cruelly shaped and tamed ornamental shrubbery.

“Poor car,” she would say, running her hand over some rusted, abandoned junkheap. “Nice car.”

My daughter has not yet experienced that cruel and abusive torment of nature known today as  ”Downtown City Plaza.” I know, though, that she would instantly see it for what it is: crabbed, crimped, crippled. Sterile, suffering, more or less dead. She would gaze upon it with compassion, and then she would ask: “Can I pet the nice park, daddy?”

Place Of The Skull

“Profit motive” means very simply: you give less than you take. If you give less than you take, you grow mean and stingy. Everybody suffers. Morality is totally impossible.

—Lew Welch

Fukushima is still leaking and steaming and bubbling and melting, and will be, best guess, for at least another nine months.

And yet, the vultures are already out there, flying high, circling, “eager” to rake in the billions in profit they estimate will come their way, through decades of “cleanup” efforts, transforming the dead zone of Fukushima into a place where human beings may tread without fear that blood will immediately spout from their orifices, or tumors later sprout all over their bodies.

Both companies [Hitachi and Toshiba] have large nuclear-related businesses and appear to be eager to speak about endgame possibilities for a crisis that has heightened global public mistrust of nuclear power. Billions of dollars are likely to be at stake in the cleanup, which could help Hitachi and Toshiba improve their bottom lines.

Making money: I guess I get it. A primitive stage in the development of primates, as they evolve towards beings of light. But aren’t we there yet, to the place where there are at least some limits? Why should people be permitted to get fat off sealing a glow-tomb?

That Remains In Africa

The sacred grove took my breath away. I had expected only more myth-making, something calling once more for a suspension of disbelief.

But the grove was real and it was beautiful: a piece of tropical woodland which had been left untouched for some time, and where no animal or creature was to be killed. That was what we had been told; and that was what we found.

Through the wilderness of tree-trunks and hanging lianas inside we had glimpses of the river that ran through the sanctuary. It was a muddy tropical river, and no attempt had been made to beautify or soften the turbid water; the scalloped melting forms on the wall were intended to match the bounce of the fast-moving river, narrow at this point.

It was all very moving to me, especially the idea of the grove as an animal sanctuary. It was said to be a hundred and sixty acres in all, a quarter of a square mile. I wished it was ten times the size.

A big gate opened into a short lane—this was for the procession at the time of the river festival. The lane led down, past a number of small home-made shrines at the foot of trees, to what was said to be a pavilion, just where the yellow river curved. It was an open pavilion, thatched, with timber uprights. To one side of the pavilion was the big shrine. The shrine was also thatched, and had mud walls decorated with figures in white, chocolate, rust and black. The priests and the soothsayers lived within those walls. The legend was that the pavilion stood on the site of the first Oba of Osun. At the time of the river festival, as people said, thousands of people of the black diaspora came here. There were morality plays in every corner of the wood.

The event had now taken hold; and the people of the diaspora who came for it would understand that though they had taken many of the Yoruba gods across the water, and though the whole apparatus of the supernatural had also travelled with them, reminding men of the precariousness of their hold on life, and though they had taken much of this Yoruba magic to the New World, making that difficult world safe, they could never take the sacred grove with them. That remained in Africa.

—V.S. Naipaul, The Masque Of Africa

Steal Your Face Right Off Your Head

Richard Zacks’ An Underground Education is a bottomless repository of ways in which human beings have been brutal and beastly to one another over the millennia.

Of interest today is Zacks’ accounting of how the wealthy once relied upon the teeth of the poor and the dead to replace their own rotting dentition.

Ambrose Pare, sometimes described as “the father of modern surgery,” wrote of “a lady of the prime nobility who had her rotten tooth pulled, then at the same time had a sound tooth drawn from one of her waiting maids, to be substituted and inserted, which tooth over time took root and grew so strong that she could chew upon it as well as any of the rest.” It is said that the practice among Parisian dentists of the 1780s, of yanking teeth from the mouths of the poor to fit them into the rotting gums of the French aristocracy, was one of the factors that ultimately encouraged the French peasantry to support removing the heads of said aristocrats.

The guillotine, however, hardly stopped the practice. Zacks tells us that George Washington’s dentist, John Greenwood, returned from a trip to Europe in 1805 with an entire keg filled with human teeth. Zacks notes that “[a] whole generation wore ‘Waterloo’ dentures made from teeth yanked from the corpses on the battlefield and the practice continued as late as the Civil War, when thousands of teeth were stolen from bodies moldering at places like Bull Run and Gettysburg.” Prayed one supplier of stolen teeth: “Oh, sir, only let there be a battle, and there will be no want of teeth. I’ll draw them as fast as the men are knocked down.”

I was reminded of these practices when I read today that the shameless corporados of Colgate Palmolive stole a folk toothpowder used by the people of India for centuries, patented it in the US, and have now returned with it to India, hoping thereby to reap billions by knocking out the native competition in the Indian oral-hygiene market.

Australia Moving To China

BusinessWeek is reporting that Australia is moving to China. At the rate of a million tons a day, Australia is excavated, poured into trucks, loaded aboard barges, and floated off to the Middle Kingdom. There it is employed in the service of high-winding the national economy so that the Chinese may live like Americans. Which is their right: if Americans can live like Americans, everyone else should be able to, too. Problem is, it would require the resources of 5.3 earths for everyone to live like an American. And we only have one.

It is the iron-rich region of Pilbara that is migrating to China. “Pilbara” is the Aboriginal word for “mullet,” the fish that used to run in the mountain creeks there. That was before the native peoples were displaced by stockmen and ruffians. Now the earth itself is leaving.

The red earth here contains an estimated 24 billion tons of iron ore. In the 1970s it left in smaller quantities and returned to Australia in Toyotas and Mazdas; now the dirt is going offshore forever, to house and transport workers in the cities of China.

While it’s a complex industry, at the basic level mining is dead-simple: Dirt is dug from the ground, loaded onto trucks, taken to trains, then put on boats. It is the scale that stuns, particularly in this operation. The trucks are two stories tall. The trains are two miles long, and they pour like rivers down the mountains to the coast, where the carrier ships await. The million tons of ore the ships carry away each day is up by 70 percent in the past five years, and most of it is bound for China.

[The ore] is loaded onto 325-yard-long bulk carriers waiting by purpose-built wharves 500 yards long. About eight of these massive ships leave every day.

Selling itself to China has allowed Australia to evade the global recession—its unemployment rate, at 5.1%, is the same as it was before the transnational money-munchers went into a swoon.

Some Australians, however, wonder whether, in the words of one Tony Wiltshire, the mining people are “just here to make a buck and go, or build something sustainable? The question is whether we’re going to have mines with towns, or towns with mines.”

That’s a question easily answered. I lived in a mining town for 15 years. Except it’s not a town anymore. It died, slowly, long before I moved there, after the mines played out. It has always been thus, for mining towns. My “town,” when I lived in it, was no longer a town—it was, rather, a “ghost town.” Once the earth is all used up, the Pilbara will go ghostly, too.

La Musica: Turn Up Your Radio

Here at the way-station, there are neighbors, and from all appearances they are Normal. So I try to tread lightly. No more wandering around outside in various states of nakedness. No more greeting the day, or acknowledging the night, with hearty bursts of gibbering song. When I speak to the rabbits or the turkeys or the dragonflies or the trees, I try to do so quietly. Cat conversations are confined to the interior of the house. I think I’ve been pretty good about all this.

Then the other night I come roaring into the driveway, returning from a late-night shopping expedition, with the car windows more or less rolled all the way down, thereby treating the entire neighborhood to Joan Osborne pleading “I’ll Be Around” at pretty much top volume.

I didn’t cotton on to what I was doing until about the third trip into the house, lugging groceries, Joan continuing to loudly sound from the car. Is this Normal? I asked myself. Is this the sort of thing permitted by Neighborhood Watch?

Probably not, I decided. Oh well. Because it was just not possible to turn Joan down. A sin, that would have been. Akin to killing a mockingbird.

At least, I rationalized, this is the sort of abnormality the Normal can easily understand. Kids. And their music. Even if The Kid is in, uh, his fifties. And anyway the song is almost over. And it’s not even ten o’clock yet, for chrissake.

Back in the house, car radio silenced, flipping through the memory cards, I realized I had been unconsciously indulging in this behavior since I arrived here. Now that I know that, I don’t do it anymore. Probably.

I generally believe that inflicting music on people who don’t want to hear it is a form of rudeness, and so I try not to indulge in it. For instance, someone up the canyon here each Friday night feels compelled to drink vast quantities of liquor and then reel out onto his deck to serenade all and sundry with lubricated versions of such chestnuts as “House Of The Rising Sun” in a manner that would find him heaved bodily off any karaoke stage. I don’t want to be that sort of person.

The problem is that songs that come onto the car radio are different from those that you control via CDs or tapes or I-units or your own vocal cords. They’re ephemeral, a little gift from the cosmos. And sometimes even if your journey is at an end you have to sit there in the car with them until they’re over.

Jump the “furthur” for the five tunes I realized had over the past couple months drilled me to the driveway.

Sometimes The Magic Works . . .

. . . sometimes it doesn’t.

Chief Dan George, as Old Lodge Skins, said that, in Little Big Man. And it’s true.

It is also true that, as in many things in life, sometimes the magic sorta works, and sorta doesn’t.

Thus we have Cheryl Carroll-Lagerway, an Australian Aboriginal woman who notified police after dreaming that the body of a missing child, Kiesha Abrahams, could be found at a sacred Aboriginal site, Nurragingy Reserve, at Doonside in western Sydney.

When the Aboriginal elder and police authorities journeyed to the remote creek, they indeed found a body. But it was not that of the child. Instead, they located a dismembered torso wrapped in plastic, which, pending formal identification, is believed to be that of Kristi McDougall, a 31-year-old woman missing since June.

Caroll-Lagerway, who dreamed of the child crying out to her, believes that Kiesha’s remains are still somewhere in the reserve.

Demon Seed

On 26 de Julio I wrote about the Muslim clerics in Malaysia who, though not real happy that Malaysian fans of the UK soccer team Manchester United had adopted clothing sporting cartoon representations of the devil, concluded that such apparel should not be banned.

“We just advise people not to wear this,” advised Harussani Zakaria. “Satan is, for us, our enemy. It’s the wrong value. Satan is always bad.”

Turns out these folks are more tolerant than some Americans—specifically, than Pastor Donald Crosby of God’s Kingdom Builders Church of Jesus Christ in Warner Robins, Georgia, and 30-some of his followers, who Monday disrupted the beginning of classes at Warner Robins High, demanding that the school cease forthwith employing “demons” as a mascot.

The principal Warner Robins demonic being is a red devil with horns, wielding a pitchfork. During football games, a large representation of this Agent of Evil is wheeled out to tower over the end zone. When Warner Robins scores, sparks shoot from The Beast’s pitchfork.

“A demon never has a good connotation. Never,” Crosby ululated to a Macon TV station. “If you look it up in Webster’s Dictionary, there’s nothing good about a demon.”

And so Crosby and his people descended upon Warner Robins High School on Monday, determined to drive out the demons. Instead, they were ordered first by school officials, and then by the police, to disperse. But they persisted in their picketing, Crosby declining an offer from Officer Harry Dennard to accompany him back to his office so he could help Crosby prepare a request form for a permit. “You’re just going to have to lock me up,” Crosby said.

So they did. Crosby was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct and picketing without a permit, both misdemeanors. “Let them lock all of you up!” Crosby reportedly instructed his people. None of these, however, elected to follow him into the pokey.

Of course, none of Jesus’ disciples were real eager to follow him, when he was led away, either.

Sunday Services: “You Can Have A Kind Heart”

Good evening, good people.

None of us were promised this day, so it is well that we begin by acknowledging it. As Brother Sephius says:

A new day I never seen before nor will I ever again.

Be glad in it.

For this, can I get a witness?

God

The Said Admiral Is Dead

They say it came first from Africa, carried in the screams of the enslaved; that it was the death bane of the Tainos, uttered just as one world perished and another began; that it was a demon drawn into Creation through the nightmare door that was cracked open in the Antilles. Fuku americanus, or more colloquially, fuku—generally a curse or a doom of some kind; specifically the Curse and the Doom of the New World. Also called the fuku of the Admiral because the Admiral was both its midwife and one of its great European victims; despite “discovering” the New World the Admiral died miserable and syphilitic, hearing (dique) divine voices. In Santo Domingo, the Land He Loved Best, the Admiral’s very name has become synonymous with both kinds of fuku, little and large; to say his name aloud or even to hear it is to invite calamity on the heads of you and yours.

No matter what its name or provenance, it is believed that the arrival of Europeans on Hispaniola unleashed the fuku on the world, and we’ve all been in the shit ever since. Santo Domingo might be fuku’s Kilometer Zero, its port of entry, but we are all of us its children, whether we know it or not.

—Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao

Much about the Admiral is not known. Where he was born, and when: these are not known. The arc of his early years, when and what he studied at the University of Pavia: these, too, are not known. Where he obtained his ideas of geography, this is not known. The Admiral, it developed, did not know geography: he believed, to the end of his days, that where he landed in 1492 marked the far eastern fringe of Asia.

What is known is that when the Admiral stepped ashore on Hispaniola, he brought Original Sin to the New World. The policies he pursued there exterminated that island’s people, the Taino, every one. Today, “the Taino survive in the shape of one’s eyes, the outline of one’s face, the idiom of one’s language.” All the rest is gone. From Hispaniola, the Admiral and his works brought destruction too to all the native peoples of all the rest of the Americas—north, central, and south. And to replace the falling bodies of the Taino, who died extracting gold and silver for him, the Admiral birthed the transatlantic slave trade, bringing to the New World in bondage people from the place where people were born.

The Admiral was eventually returned in chains to Spain, accused of misgoverning his New World. Fallen from favor, he spent his remaining years in litigation against the king, seeking to regain lost wealth and titles. He became a nonperson. And when he died, the official chronicle of the inland northern town where he expired, Valladolid, did not acknowledge his passing. It was not until several weeks later that a town document noted simply that “the said Admiral is dead.”

Greasing The Machine

Spaceshots only succeed because Americans use the grease of the crushed poor to power them. This thought is “common knowledge” in South America. White people came and took the oil and grease of natives, says an Ashaninca man to me, when we meet in a town in the Peruvian Amazon. “They take indigenous people and cut off their hands and feet, put hooks through their bodies and heat them until the fat drips off. The grease of indigenous people has the most force or strength: it’s the best gasoline there is and it is used for planes and cars and to build bridges. It’s worth a lot of dollars.” Anthropologist Nigel Bar-ley explains in Dancing on the Grave how it was told to him: “From the ritual murder of the Peruvian poor and the processing of their bodies, the Americans extracted the ‘grease’ that is essential for metallurgy, pharmaceuticals and the lubrication of the moon rockets.”

This is as literally untrue as it is figuratively appropriate; Western progress has always been bought at the expense of other people. Today, spaceshots are metaphorically bought through the crushing of the poor, as the money for the multi-trillion-dollar space industry is made available by refusing to spend money on welfare and health, and by squeezing money out of countries of the South in debt repayments. Anthropologist Philippe Descola in The Spears of Twilight says there is an old Andean belief that “attributes to some perverted whites an insatiable desire for the fat of natives” which “lubricates and fuels the gigantic machines thanks to which the whites have imposed their dominion over the world . . . this metaphor of rapacity that has become progressively more literal over the years.”

—Jay Griffiths, A Sideways Look At Time

All Hail Atlantis

A 5000-year-old sunken city off the southern Peloponnese is the latest candidate for the fabled city of Atlantis. Known as Pavlopetri, and straddling some 30,000 square meters of the ocean floor, it is the first submerged Greek city found that actually predates Plato’s 360 BCE-era references to Atlantis in Critias and Timaeus.

Meanwhile, in their continuing refusal to address climate change, the planet’s industrialized nations are proceeding to slip beneath the waves new cultures, new peoples, new civilizations, new Atlanti. The Polynesian island nation of Tuvalu, for instance, is expected to disappear into the Pacific Ocean in less than 50 years.

In Dubai recently opened the $1.5 billion, 113-acre Atlantis Hotel, located on the world’s largest artificial island, offering rooms for $26,000 per night. This when roughly 1 billion people on this planet go to bed hungry every night.

Welcome to our world.

No Fear

The New York Times this week dispatched a reporter to Hawaii to determine whether the fear merchants of North Korea and the American right had succeeded in scarifying the islanders.

Seems a Japanese newspaper, Yomiuri, reported on June 17 that, according to an “analysis” by the Japanese Defense Ministry, “it is believed” North Korea “might” fire a long-range ballistic missile “toward” Hawaii, “maybe” around July 4.

The shadowy, assumption-riddled Yomiuri piece seems primarily geared towards instilling fear in the Japanese people, spinning scenarios of the missile landing near the Japanese island of Okinawa, or dumping a first-stage booster over the Chugoku or Shikoku regions of Japan. But it was the Hawaiian speculation that was immediately latched onto by US-oriented fear limpets—despite the fact that the article explicitly states that any missile must land at least 500 kilometers short of the main Hawaiian islands.

And so, people prone to flogging and/or feeling fear having been in a flap for nearly a week now, the Times set out to discover if the Hawaiians themselves were wringing their hands and running for shelter.

No.

Things Keep Their Secrets

I live in the high foothills of northern California, along the Cascade-Sierra divide, on land where Ishi once lived.

Ishi, “the last of the Yahi.” The marooned American Indian famously portrayed, with no little sympathy, by Theodora Kroeber in Ishi In Two Worlds. The man who, on August 29, 1911, most probably walked across what is today “my” “land,” on his way down out of the wilderness, into a corral occupied by east Oroville butchers. Who was briefly jailed, then spent the four remaining years of his TB-shortened life as a museum piece, literally living in a Museum of Anthropology, at the University of California in San Francisco.

Ishi, in his four short years among whites, didn’t say much. He never, as an example, revealed his name. At all times, however, whenever among whites, he was adamant: he was the last of his tribe. All other Yahi, all his relations, alpha to omega, had died.

This is my 34th year (on and off) on Ishi’s land.

And I will tell you this: Ishi was not the last of his tribe.

And, in this diary, I will tell you why that is all I will tell you.

Mapping Through Georgia

There is a hopeful article in the November/December issue of Archaeology that details how modern archaeologists can obtain knowledge of vanished American Indian cultures without disturbing sites that may contain human remains.

At what is now Etowah Indian Mounds State Historic Site in what is now the state of Georgia, archaeologists have eschewed the digging of hundreds of thousands of test pits, which traditional archaeological methodology would consider necessary to fully assess what might lie concealed here, beneath 500 years of flood- and plow-scoured land.

Instead, an archaeological team moving over the surface of the earth utilized sophisticated portable sensors to map a shrouded underground city of more than 140 buried buildings, “without turning a single shovelful of earth.”