The ‘Free Speech Clown’ series
Morality masks a plethora of behaviors ethics cannot. Native American humor was all about ethics, that is no matter how harsh a truth, it must be out in the open at the least as a metaphor, the purpose in Native humor is all about keeping things honest.
The humor in western culture, on the other hand, often cannot honestly observe without crossing morality. So humor does not much serve to keep western culture honest, because too many people are afraid to go there. The thing with this is, if people were not afraid to go with honest observations, things could never degenerate to where we are now.
So, I will write about an Indian, a culturally intact Indian. Imagine the insanity of a tribal mentality taught to observe and honestly remark on the world around them suddenly cast adrift into the ego shielding ‘Honky’ sea of political correctness. Now, this native mentality is only certifiably insane because of context, or better said, an out of context circumstance. Because in the native world from which he had sprung, politically correct is actually a buzz word for the circling buzzards of Indian humor, any Native who hears the words ‘politically correct’ is apt to drop everything and listen in to the most recent wisdom and insight (always in the format of the often untranslatable to the Whiteman ‘Indian Humor’) ripping the people who trashed 200 years of treaties and moved on pretending as though nothing had happened.
This endeavor goes to shatter stereotype of the ‘taciturn’ Indian which is actually a reflection of the little understood Native cultural communication phenomena of rather than say something honest to a Whiteman that threatens the Whiteman’s ego and be killed, just shut up. Unless of course, you are not afraid to die.
For simple literary device sake, we will make this Indian 1) White skinned and 2) the last of his kind. How could this happen and the said Native persona is alive in the 21st century, a full 150 years since the Native custom of a White captive child raised to be Indian?
Well now, to be honest in the Native way, we must address this portion of the literary endeavor with a joke story drawn from real life, a sort of collage of facts assembled from bits and pieces of diverse experience, combined with anecdotal information to create the culturally intact inherent Native wisdom found in their humor. In other words, parts of the story from here out is an autobiographical facts incorporated, multi-faceted rip-off of other peoples life stories and experience. And because unlike the White world, the Native world entertains paradox in daily approach to life, some more of what follows is simply made up from the imagination’s fund of plausible improbabilities.
We’ll call the Indian “Ron” although his native name in the Cree Indian country he hails from is ‘Moon-i-Yas’ which can be translated either “Not like us” or “Paleface.” In “Ron’s” case it is “Paleface” when properly translated, because the other translation applies to people who behave like Whites, rather than merely look like them. And by Native definition, “Ron” is Indian on account of his cultural behavior, his ‘pale face’ simply being unfortunate circumstance or, better said from the Indian perspective, that peculiar cosmic joke of life circumstance which one way or other manifests the Trickster aspect in all Native experience.
To kick off the story, back in the late 1940s there were people just like today’s truly Honky folk, real White people, that behaved in all sorts of self- repressed ways and repressed their own kids because of their staunch Puritan belief in H.L. Menecken’s maximum that ‘proper’ Puritans must preoccupy themselves with the horrifying thought “Someone, somewhere, might be happy.” So they learned to follow Jesus command to ‘love’ by ‘loving’ to hate.
Because of the ‘love’ factor in ‘loving’ to hate themselves, their kids and their fellow man, making ‘love’ is more often a rape than not, ‘loving’ their brothers and sisters is ‘loving’ to tell other people how to live their lives, and ‘loving’ security is to create an insecure society so they can ‘love’ the idea of a police state.
Now the daughters of these fundamentalist people, whether the arch-conservative Protestant or the ultra-conservative Catholic, are not so different to some of today’s young women, raised in families that with bared fangs dare anyone to so much as mention sex to their children let alone have it taught anywhere other than at the kegger parties of the young people, who learn to hide the realities of their lives from their parents because you are punished whether you lie or tell the truth. So lying becomes in vogue because if you are young and you lie, you might not be caught and punished for enjoying yourself, whereas if you tell the truth you will be punished every time. So impromptu sex education at the young peoples kegger parties gives a whole new meaning to expressions such as ‘powerpoint’ and the many unwed young mothers resulting are simply one manifestation of God’s will and Jesus commandment that people ‘love’ (other peoples misery in the case of Michelle Bachmann and the Puritans.)
As fate would have it, in the late 1940s a young Catholic girl had gone from her conservative family upbringing and all girls school, where the nuns would not touch sex-ed with the proverbial ten foot pole, in Chicago, to college at Gonzaga in Washington State where she was introduced to sex as a sorority girl by innumerable happy to oblige young men .. at the ‘Girls Gone Wild’ parties before the era of exploiting these events on video. Concealing her inevitable pregnancy from her far away folks, not having known what a condom is, she was driving home to Chicago with her new born, this was in 1950, give or take a year or so, and dropped the infant off on the doorstep at the Catholic Rectory at Havre, Montana, with a note pinned on the swaddling infants dress: “Ron”
A Chippewa Medicine Man from the nearby Rocky Boy’s Indian Reservation was at the cinema close by, he enjoyed the classic ‘Bugs Bunny’ cartoons preceding the movie and paid his entry fee for that but then always left. The movies themselves were non-sense to him. Walking along the street, he noticed a dropped envelope, picked it up and was surprised to see it was stuffed with cash. He saw the black ink stamp of the Catholic parish on the envelope and walked to give it to the priest at the rectory, and found the infant. Stepping around the child and standing on the step above, he knocked and the priest answered the door. The Medicine Man stated “I found your lost money” and handed the surprised priest the envelope. The priest, who hated this Medicine Man his Native parishioners would sneak off to see behind his back, shouted “Returning this money won’t buy YOUR way out of Hell!” and slammed the door in the Indian’s face, before he could tell him about the child.
The Indian knocked several times more, and patiently waited, but there was no further opening of the door. So, he picked up the kid and took “Ron” home.
Given to the Medicine Man’s niece who had her own infant the same age, “Ron” was suckled, named “Moon-i-Yas”, surrounded with love and the native joke the newly found ‘twin’ was result of “Indian Immaculate Conception.” No one of the Indians wanted to give the found kid to the meaner than shit racist White people at Havre, Montana, it just seemed wrong. When it came time to take the infants to the Indian Agency for birth certificates and enrollment, the Agency people just figured they were fraternal twins and there was a White father of the one child. So “Ron” grew up Indian. He moved to Al-boo-quark-ee in the southwest because of his fond memories of the old Medicine Man mimicking Bugs Bunny’s pronunciation of that city’s name.
Sixty odd years after “Ron’s” birth, President Obama ordered DNA tests on all Indians to reduce the Native Enrollment and save money better spent on covert wars in Africa and drone murders than Indian health, kicking Indians that could not demonstrate 75% Native American blood off their reservations. It was discovered Moon-i-Yas, a.k.a. “Ron”, was the last White captive and he became a national sensation. What bloodthirsty savage had murdered his family and kidnapped this child? And anyway, a White Indian had to be a subversive, the bloodthirsty murdering savages that raised “Ron” had to have imparted their pagan licentiousness to him. The FBI was ordered to investigate “Ron”, it was a matter of ‘National Security.’
Meanwhile “Ron” had discovered a few things about White people. Like when an arch-conservative fundamentalist Republican principal of a lily-white charter school surreptitiously run as a private Christian institution that doubled as a cover for intelligence agents masked as teachers who break every civil rights law you can imagine, have discovered you have raised your kid Indian, all of the state apparatus is arrayed against you for the satanic act of being an ultra-liberal permissive parent. Allergies causing red eyes are interpreted as the child being a devil, but because there is no law to charge you with for that, you are investigated for drugs. When you are courageous enough to fight back for your kid and call a spade a spade, it is ‘undue hostility towards authority’ and you are investigated for terrorism. Failing every effort at criminal entrapment and being counter-investigated, assassins are dispatched by the neo-con hate mongers… and failing again and again it all just keeps getting bigger- FBI criminals implicated, Department of Defense criminals implicated, CIA criminals implicated, the criminal Church implicated, the National Security Agency implicated, allied intelligence, MOSSAD particularly, implicated.. meanwhile the White, Native American Jason Bourne-savant-idiot-trickster- clown has ‘pantsed’ the fascists again and again!
Because “Ron” really IS Indian, he fights back with taunts and satires, in the post –modern weapon of blogs. “Ron” taunts the establishment with the idea of “Jewels Misogyny”, wherein these neo-conservative & neo-liberal closet-gay institutions of accelerated education attended by the children of the military-industrial rich and powerful, only the brightest and most beautiful women teachers are hired… and must adopt masculine persona like so many ‘bull dikes’ as have the Michelle Bachmanns of this world, women who consequently marry self-repressed homosexuals attracted to these so-called women because of their male persona. They are all ‘men’ resembling nothing so much as castrated mannequins in drag (say, how’s that ‘cures gays’ clinic going? Remember Jesus saying “Heal thyself”?)
The end result? Either liberal women who hate themselves (Jewels Misogyny) for their participation in this travesty, job security being more important than ethics and fighting back or, women with “Acquired Ego Priapism Syndrome” like Michelle Bachman or the ‘imaginary’ school principal. Women who behave like sexist and racist men. Woman-male rapists of our values of tolerance and compassion, the liberal and libertarian values that are uniquely American, the ability to live and let live. Women of Bachmann’s class which join with criminal-fascist men in covering up constitutional crimes with religious façade Obama is afraid to pick on.
Of course the initial culture clash long ago was the Indians being shocked at how harshly the Puritans treated their children, the cause of many a ‘captive White’ raised in Native freedom and, conversely the Puritan horror at the liberty of the Native children resulting in the practice of “The only good Indian is a dead Indian.” Not so different to Bachmann’s persecution of the American Muslim, with her racist slurs thinly disguised behind sharia law hysteria. Bachmann is a Puritan, psychologically male, W.A.S.P. with Acquired Ego-Priapism Syndrome, in effect a chauvinist as pathologically erect as any male serial rapist.
What I mostly enjoy about this story is, in the modern politically correct world where only women can refer to a woman as a bitch, and get away with it, no differently than only gays may refer to themselves as queers or fags, only Blacks can call themselves Niggers or Asians can call themselves Gooks or Chinks, Mexicans self-refer as Beaners, Jews calling themselves Kikes, Indians laughing at the idea of being Prairie Niggers, and Sheep bleating to themselves they are Meadow Maggots, without a hate crime referral, but this Indian author can call the right wing White fascist people in absolute racist terms “Honkies” and totally get away with it because he is White skinned. I say that especially because of Supreme Court Justice Alito referring to “Marauding Indians” in a context of self-defense in recent decision on firearms, I suppose he thinks we should be hunted like wolves from planes. But because no one ordinarily can comment on physical attributes such as gender or skin color outside their own race or sex freely, this prevents in any politically correct circumstance the real or broad examination of the perverse Puritan sexist and racist BEHAVIORS tied to the descriptions which underlie psychologically male, HONKY, right-wing criminal women like Bachmann; who resembles nothing so much as the drag queen Jack Kerouac must have fantasized himself, had he dared to be openly gay.
Gee. Somehow the story did not end up funny. I’ll work on that.
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Ronald Thomas West 