Archives for category: philosophy

Recreating a Hot Spring in Your Bathtub

June 19, 2013 //

In the Summer of 1976, I was walking alone in the forest outside of my hometown (West Glacier, Montana USA) returning to my house from a visit to some Blackfeet Indians staying in a tipi a mile or so away. Not paying attention to the fact I was not on a trail but walking through the forest simply by familiarity with the terrain, my foot rolled into a small depression concealed by leaves and I heard a bone in my ankle break (the talus) with the sound equivalent to the crack of a 22 caliber pistol. I was about 1/2 way home, out of earshot of anyone and thought .. ‘well, this is pretty stupid circumstance’

Sitting on the ground, I felt over my foot and determined what to do. I tore my shirt into a makeshift wrap for my ankle, to give it some support, stood up and leaning against a tree, looked around for a suitably strong walking stick. I spotted one and hopped on one leg to retrieve it, and completed my journey home.

My ‘home’ at that time was a metal shed with a dirt floor, I was unemployed and pretty much broke and seeing a doctor or using an emergency room and being billed, was not an appealing thought. So I packed up minimal camping and survival gear and a few paperback books, and hitch-hiked to the north entrance of Yellowstone National Park.

Just inside the park, you won’t see this in any of the official literature, is the natural drain of the ‘Mammoth Hot Spring’, where a large stream of very hot water erupts from the ground and flows a short distance into the Gardiner River. It is in the river canyon below Mammoth, about 2-3 miles south of Gardner, Montana, where the road from Gardner to Mammoth crosses the Gardner River (there is a sign marking the 45th Parallel) is a parking area my last ride had dropped me at. With a makeshift crutch, I hobbled the 1/2 mile or so upstream along the riverside trail and arrived at Boiling River for my convalesce.

For the next ten days or so I spent my days soaking my foot (at times my entire body) in the natural beauty of my surroundings, taking breaks to sun myself while reading paperbacks on the ledge above the river. Elk and Bison had wandered by, the sky was big and beautiful. The river has cut away much of the bank since those days, as it slowly moves in a seasonal migration towards the opening in the ground whence the hot water flows, one day the flow of the hot water will likely emerge directly into the cold flow of the Gardiner River. But still today as in times past, one should be able to find the place in the mixed hot and cold water flows to suit your desire, it is quite a marvelous experience to shift ones body from hot to cold and back to hot with minimal effort.

America was less fascist and our National parks less policed in those days, there was no one giving me any problem for having a small tent pitched 50 or so yards from the Boiling River hot spring. Nor was it any big deal, in those days, to ‘skinny dip’ (bathe in the nude) at Boiling River, people worked these things out with common sense, or as in the case of what I had witnessed one day while sunning like an Iguana (in my cut-off blue jeans), sometimes fate works these things out for us, and that is ok. Or mostly that would be the case and people who could not handle the nude bathers would find somewhere else or another time to enjoy. Life was more relaxed.

It was late mid-morning, I was reading ‘The Greening of America’ (it never happened, obviously) and a group of about a dozen hippies or so had arrived and all had jumped into the river naked, no big deal. They were enjoying the varying pools where the hot mixed with the cold, after each season’s high water people would gather the smooth river stones and build submerged dikes to shape the current into bathing pools of varying temperatures. Not everyone was naked but those who were not, did not seem to mind those who were.

But then .. it happened a Girl Scouts troop was coming up the trail, from my perch above things, I could see what the others could not, an old and a young scout master and about 15 teenage girl scouts with towels about to discover at near point blank range that their planned soak was populated with naked people.

The older woman was up at the point of the troop and coming upon the place where the trail first opened to a view of a dozen naked hippies in the water a mere 15 or 20 meters distant, she turned like a drill sergeant and ordered her girls to stop in their tracks. The girls obediently did so, but also you could see there was a certain spirit of rebellion stirring, obviously the nude hippies were no threat, there were women and kids among them, it was not like some motley lot of dirty old men. These were more lenient times and the girls were not horrified, they only wanted into the water, real hippies being a common social phenomena of that era, they’d yet to become extinct and this was no big deal to the girls, it was plain to see.

Now, the scoutmaster ladies had separated themselves to one side to have a ‘Plan B’ conversation out of the girls hearing and I swear it must have been the serpent from the garden that freaks out the misogynist Christians, had something to say about what happened next.

It just so happened a very large Bull Snake, six foot (two meter) length, frequented that area and liked a pile of old lava slabs to sunbathe himself and the two scout masters had picked those very lava slabs to stand on and have their conversation. The Bull Snake choose that very time to come up for his morning sun and emerged precisely between the women at their very feet .. sending the two scout masters into what appeared to be opposite direction levitations with accompanying screams. By the time they had recovered their composure, too late, all discipline had been lost, and their girls were in the water with the naked hippies.

Recipe for recreating an outdoor hot spring in your bathtub:

Hot water on demand, a large window open to a beautiful day and one packet of ‘natron’ (baking soda or Epsom salts will substitute for Americans) and a deep tub. Close your eyes while soaking and engage memories of more innocent times, all the while imagining any sound of traffic is French and Japanese tourists soon to be gored while posing for photos with Bison…

The Satires

Tags 45th Parallel, Boiling River, Christians, fascism, Girl Scouts, Greening of America, Hippies, Hot Spring, serpent, Skinny Dipping, Yellowstone

Categories Author, Folk Stories, philosophy, religion, Uncategorized

Enlightenment: The Automated Death Machine

June 14, 2013 //

For Your Personal Enlightenment

I’ve had a number of people over these several years tell me ‘the world will change when people change themselves’

Many people are not equipped to change their personal world, and what I am getting at here is, most people in the ‘larger’ world are not afforded opportunity at social justice but are indentured to a system of practical slavery where institutions are corrupt and serve a wealthy power elite. This is particularly true in poorer nations which are exploited by richer nations

In these poorer circumstance and nations there is little opportunity to explore, learn and develop the self outside mere struggle for survival, and to some extent it is also the case in the poor of the rich nations, as well in some respects is also true of a middle class citizenry locked into perceptions perpetrating imbalances in our larger human universe. Let’s not deceive ourselves with any thought that, for most, there is some voluntary individual path to social equity and attending world change through personal enlightenment

Quoting Aldous Huxley’s character Phillip Quarles in the great novel and social essay ‘Point Counter-Point’ :

“Drill and uniforms impose an architecture on the crowd. An army’s beautiful. But that’s not all; it panders to lower instincts than the aesthetic. The spectacle of human beings reduced to automatism satisfies the lust for power. Looking at mechanized slaves, one fancies oneself a master”  

In any society so organized, for people to change the world through individual self introspection, a spell must be broken relating to the privileged vis-à-vis the indentured and manipulated minion

In fact those people who change themselves do appear to change their world, but this is minimal change when change is solely in their personal world. When this change is adopted by the privileged of the richer nations coupled to the practical discarding of engagement and working for world improvement through equilibrium found in social justice, the change has abandoned endeavor towards providing like opportunity for personal enlightenment to all. This is narcissist in the extreme and is in its own right both a victim of, and propping up, Huxley’s ‘automatism’

Aldous Huxley’s character Mr Scogan in Chrome Yellow:

“At this very moment,… the most frightful horrors are taking place in every corner of the world. People are being crushed, slashed, disembowelled, mangled; their dead bodies rot and their eyes decay with the rest. Screams of pain and fear go pulsing through the air at the rate of eleven hundred feet per second. After travelling for three seconds they are perfectly inaudible. These are distressing facts; but do we enjoy life any the less because of them? Most certainly we do not”

Whether blue collar or the professional, the psycho-analyst, the gossip columnist, the mainstream news reporter or the educator, professionals of every stripe in western ‘law abiding’ industrialized nations, all of them, and every other person of affluence from the middle class to the 1% at the top of this food chain, each one of them enjoys their standard of living beyond the “perfectly inaudible .. screams of pain and fear” the diamond, gold, petrol-dollar & other diverse concessions of every imaginable import, exact from the abused Brown peoples of this world to feed the vanities and self-indulgence of the automated and insulated White peoples of this world .. and no amount of personal change is going to change this fact short of surrendering narcissistic vanity and devoting oneself to social justice in hands on or practical terms

And finally, any authentic social justice means the dismantling of those structures which feed like vampires on the resources of the abused Brown peoples of this world in the provision of privilege to those who perpetrate the abuse (that is us)

Tags death, enlightenment, exploitation, middle class, murder, narcissism, resources, vanity, war

Categories corruption, crime, culture, philosophy, social responsibility, transcendent warfare, Uncategorized

A message for my readers

May 27, 2013 //

A gesture of appreciation from Ronald

For my European readers, think about this: Certain nations emptied their jails of criminals, emptied their asylums of lunatics and stirred banished religious fanatics into this hybrid vigor that became the USA. So rather than whine and complain about what should not have been an unexpected outcome, take responsibility and press your governments to prosecute American initiated international crimes under the legal principle of ‘universal jurisdiction.’

For my American readers, look at this way: Many of our citizens are Pit Bull-Rottweiler crosses with a bad case of religious rabies. Instead of engaging these dangerous cretans in debate with a liberal tolerance that comes across as a yappy-dog with a death wish (like Chihuahuas getting aggressive with Dobermans), how about waking up to the fact the USA is a world threatening entity and putting yourselves in harms way to do something about it. You could begin to change your tepid mentalities by writing your congressmen using no uncertain terms like ‘stop policies supporting domestic thugs and international criminals’ together with accusing Congress of supporting NAZIs.

Because what’s the point of having kids in a world you are standing by and howling like hurt Baboons over in debate, while otherwise merely watching the insanity of policies setting our (and everyone else’s) world aflame on the road to literal Armageddon. What a bunch of twits.

Meanwhile, I sincerely thank each and every one of you for reading at my page-

Tags Armageddon, criminals, insanity, lunatics, religious fanatics

Categories Author, crime, culture, male hierarchy, philosophy, politics, psychology, religion, social responsibility, Uncategorized

A Spy in the House of the Unloved

May 25, 2013 //

If Sabina Had a Child

You say you are married, you have a nine year old son you are devoted to and you cheat. You say your husband is clueless. In conversation you easily express attractive values as though a mirror unaware of conscious expression.

A person might have the three dimensions of no sense of guilt, no shame and no fear of outcomes and be either psychopath or highly evolved, depending on a peculiar circumstance… the absence or presence of a fourth dimension.

Going to the difference between morality and ethics or, sympathy versus empathy, there exists a typical social lie most of us are unaware of; the idea because we can express values and sympathy, we are doing something right. This does NOT mean we are whole or complete beings. Values are meaningless without ethics or, the applied principles which is the power actually to care for someone other than ourselves, and to be aware of the effects we might have in outcomes in other peoples lives, those responsibilities we incur with making of life choices, when taking decisions impacting others.

Family, and children especially, in order not to become emotional deserts, rather to be strong, require in the beginning, exercising a self-principled stance precluding any emotion of sympathy. Sympathy is a robber, enabling feeling sorry for oneself. People who express sympathy enable themselves and others to feel sorry for themselves and are the ones contributing to the cycle of people dying inside, expressing and enabling sympathy only reinforces behaviors which are self serving and shallow.

Empathy empowers. What is empathy? Empathy is the ability to set aside any self serving emotion or motivation and know in some sense a compassion for the circumstance of another. Empathy, as a capacity to care for another, can only be acquired via the discovery of principled behaviors or, better said, a dimension of ethics which precludes any sense of real guilt, shame or fear, in a positive sense of self that is a positive sense of self-acceptance.

Fear, guilt and shame, taken together with sympathy, have been used to manipulate and control in the negative sense of shaming, the shaming of children particularly. This teaches feeling sorry for the self, inculcates a blindness to positive outcomes and perversely too often creates a self centeredness numb to morality motivated expectations in behavior. Here is created the emotional desert of no real personality, a seeming wasteland devoid of the fourth dimension of empathy and ethics; equaling what might be the psychopath. A psychopath born of the failed negative motivated morality concept, knows no authentic sense of guilt for harming others. No sense of shame in a shallowness void of any real caring for any person outside their own self-centeredness. No sense of fear of consequences in relationships, and incapable of genuine feeling or taking responsibility for damaging the emotions of people whose lives must rightfully depend on them for example of stability and a future, especially children.

Morality’s combined negative effects absent principled behaviors and sincere empathy, demonstrates a profound lack of caring first; for oneself. This negative self-centeredness only can only come across as a life lived as a lie. No matter how strongly values are expressed with language, the negative motivations of fear, guilt and shame, absent the lessons of principled ethics, only develops a heightened sense of self worthlessness, often to a point of numbness. Without applying a discipline to the self, a practical decision taken without regard to self-pity, to conform oneself to a principled stance, taking responsibility for those whose lives you must impact, absent this, negative reciprocity must be the outcome. I am not expressing any concerns for your many lovers. I am speaking of your relationship to your nine year old son. A child is a sentient being and any child’s awareness is capable of detecting, or absorbing a lie, no matter how one might lie to oneself as realtes to a honest caring for that child..

Can what seems a psychopath become a light, a beacon, a depth, a beauty? I believe so.

No sense of fear to look at the shallowness of the self, can open one to grow inwardly, to initiate overcoming a sense of worthlessness, even nothingness.

No sense of guilt turned on the self rather than projected onto others, might enable a honest self-examination.

No sense of shame turned to the self-examination can enable self-forgiveness in a sense of letting go… AND THEN:

A principled stance applied to the self in relation to ones behavior can open the door to know empathy, to discover caring for another and watering the seed of a healthy emotion; in society where we lose our children most often because of emotional disconnect. Otherwise the spirit of the child must become severed from the parent who may have been there in every superficial aspect but was not there in the most important way; the ability to model caring for the self inside. The self inside that knows to be both kind and principled in example to the child, the self inside that knows to care for a child in the empathy of a relationship of peers that breeds a sense of loving admiration, the self inside that shares with a child the development of self respect. The self inside that empathetically models taking responsibility.

Without these, children can wither and become lost… a child’s spirit knows what a child’s mind cannot; we so often lose these kids because we have provided no healthy love in a principled and practical sense, they are dying inside themselves and suddenly we may not see them again; because they have no sense of being protected, no solid basis within to fall back on, they’ve not learned to care about themselves in any healthy way, they make poor decisions, and consequently meet life tragedies far too often.

I wish to introduce to you the lie your behaviors can only bring demise in your relationships with yourself and family when in actuality you are but a short step away from great ability of knowing what it could mean to discover to be alive inside, to know a sense of being loved such as only a child can bring to you. Your child could give you a life inside, a sense of self respect, an opportunity to grow deeply, to discover and to develop a real personality. It would only require a sustained applied ethics, a simple, new habit you sustain for no other reason than to make a difference for one person with whom you should know the most sacred of all binds, yourself (for the sake of your son.)

Principles which are applied to the self, no longer values superficially espoused, can serve to sustain life for your son who must otherwise despair in ways he cannot know how to express to you, except to one day become lost for having felt cast adrift, the emotional desert of having died inside. If this strikes deep, perhaps you are not a psychopath, not dead at all, and a past altogether lack of guilt, shame or fear can become your great strength with a self examine of behavior and subsequent applied self discipline, because you actually are capable of caring despite any sense of worthlessness that may have been inculcated and manifest in a destructive desire. Because when you cheat, the environment you create is self-perpetrating; a lie of self.

It is a simple, sustained act of self discipline that can lead to your birth inside, to have a genuine personality. And your child will respond to your principled caring for you.

To be a child again, to explore in small and simple ways together the marvels of our existence, to know your child will love you unconditionally because you become open to the idea you are valuable to him beneath the surface of having become numb to real emotion. To know what it means to really be free, to explore the world anew with a friend that desires to know your presence intimately, deeply, truthfully. To give life again, to be a mother in a sense so important, following on the physical birth of your son. To allow your son opportunity to water a seed in yourself for the sake of yourself, to be generous in your new, authentic and positive desire to live for another.

I wish to introduce to you the lie of your worthlessness, shallowness, and incapability of becoming valued and deeply considerate in a reciprocal love knowing the real meaning to care.

I wish to introduce to you to the lie of you are a psychopath.

The preceding inspired by conversations with a married woman with a nine year old son; looking for interesting men (online) to have casual sex. She had been inspired by Anias Nin.

My position is, you cannot cheat your way through life, there must be a principled stance. Related to this, taking responsibility for making choices, setting example, is critical-integral to raising healthy children. If she was not satisfied with her marriage, she should have gotten out with honesty or toughed it out with self-discipline, to set example. Children are like a sponge, they absorb their environment. Dishonest parents will, almost without exception, raise dishonest children. Or worse.

Tags A Spy in the House of Love, Anias Nin, behavior, cheat, cheating, children, emotion, ethics, example, fear, feminism, guilt, modeling, morality, motivation, narcissism, negative motivation, parenting, principles, promiscous, psychopath, responsibility, shallow, shame, sociopath

Categories Author, philosophy, psychology, social responsibility, Uncategorized

Essay on Native American Humor

May 24, 2013 //

Dreamt up at an out of doors café in Sant Feliu de Guixols

Napi. Just who is this guy? Napi is many things. Napi is a teacher, an archetype, our Blackfoot ancestor and much more. Napi is a god, he is like Jesus or a holy man. Napi is the devil, Napi is the first real human being, Napi is a fool, a friend, and the trickster- Old Man Coyote. Essentially Napi is all the possibilities embodied in any Blackfoot MALE

Everyone learns from Napi (his stories) in Blackfoot culture, and the idea behind Napi is to foster what is sane and healthy in men and put strict controls on what is not. Because men are men, there are the men’s Napi stories which are supposed to always be cleaned up in the presence of women (sorry.) Culturally speaking, some of the men’s Napi stories simply should never be told in the women’s presence at all

Did the women have the prurient Napi stories? Men were never admited (NEVER) to the women’s secret societies, so we (men) supposedly must accept at face value the idea the women only knew the cleaned up versions of Napi stories. But because I am Napi (a Blackfoot male) onetime I tricked one of the old ladies into an admission of sorts, that is I made a reference to Napi’s butt

When one of my elder woman teachers was present, I had an opportunity to identify myself in the Blackfoot language.. and instead of using my proper Blackfoot name Pee-ma-na-kwan (man with a rope), I identified myself as Penucquem (Puh-nuck-qwee-um) or that is to say I identified myself as Napi’s rectum with the proper/formal expression

That drew a belly laugh from the old lady, the spontaneous and deep sort of laugh burst out that would make a man think she had heard the dirty stories the men tell (but only behind the women’s backs.)

In actuality I cannot know, it may be she simply believed I am an asshole, that interpretation works just as well. And as she was my elder teacher, I had to stop there, because she subsequently gave a look of spine shivering evil, as though daring me to die for having breeched her dignity and caused her involuntary laugh. It is safe to say I never broached the subject with her again. She was what would be known in the old matriarchal times as a Ni-na-wa-ki, or a woman that was the highest form of Blackfoot chief. You do NOT cross these women

I will come back to Napi, and how he ate his own ass for lunch, but first I think I need to explain Indian humor is more typically healthy, and give folk here in the outside world some idea of how it works

Native humor is all about keeping things honest, in a fun and entertaining way, and consequently, this humor is often self-deprecating in a gentle or harmless way, that is laughing at having made a fool of oneself, or jokes can be created with a little license describing another’s encounter with life’s many surprises. Spontaneous jokes are appreciated, a quick, creative wit is a prized possession in the personality. The taciturn Indian is a face presented to the outside world only, within the community life is filled with fun and liveliness in most conversation.

A Honky Snow Cone

I was at a pow-wow in the southwest where people did not readily know me as an Indian.. looking like ZZ Tops. I was watching the dancers, there was a Rastafarian dreadlocks White guy doing what appeared to be a stoned southern style war dance, overly exaggerated and out of time and I was amazed at the Indians straight faces as this guy made an incredible spectacle of himself. I could not help but laugh, it was that ridiculous

I was thirsty, it was hot, I walked to a concessions stand to see the possibilities with this fresh memory of someone that made me feel pretty stupid about my original race. The Native ladies ceased their conversation, normal when a White comes into earshot, I noticed that and realized they would not know I was Indian. As I approached the stand, I did not have a joke in mind about my Whiteman appearance but being Indian, it had to pop out

The only refreshments on sale were all sugar laced poisons, generic colas and other pop, and I did not want any of that. I ordered what I figured was least sugar poisonous, a snowcone. The (quite pretty, actually) young woman dutifully scooped the crushed ice into the paper cone and then turned to face me and asked “Which color?” (sugar syrup, red, blue, green or yellow)

I asked “Can I have it just as it is?”

She seemed surprised “No color?”

I replied with the perfect musical reservation inflection: “We could just call it a honky snow-cone.”

She looked down at the cone of pure white ice she was holding for me with a dumbfounded expression and the other girls broke out in involuntary laughter but quickly recovered their straight faces and gave this what looked like a Whiteman with perfect Native expression a suspicious look (wondering for a brief moment what had happened, is it safe?) but I had got them

She broke out in a gentle and wry, but friendly smile as she handed me the little cone of ice and took my money.. as I said quietly “I am diabetic” and she replied while now smiling in a truly sweet way and with genuinely friendly voice, also quietly, “Thank you.”

That “Thank you” stated more than the outsider would ever imagine. Indians don’t typically say thank you except in sincere heartfelt circumstance. It was ‘Thank you for being genuine’ and ‘I recognize now you are Indian’, and it was ‘Thank you for the joke and bringing a great laugh into our day.’

Who Framed Melvin Bunny?

Because men are men (yes, in Native America as well) and because the culture is breaking down and becoming western, the humor is becoming ever more dangerous, as it must, to serve keeping the culture honest

So, to another real life Indian story. I hate to do this to my old friend Melvin Running Rabbit (his Indian nickname is Melvin Bunny) but here is how it is in Indian country today. It is a story about accountability

Melvin (if he is still alive) is a really good guy but he had a blind spot. He never looked at the possible consequences of those times he occasionally ran with the wrong crowd when he liked to go out of town to indulge in a really good Indian drinking binge, and those can be pretty stupendous events. I had checked it out for myself on a couple of occasions, any damn thing can happen, it is crazy to drink with Indians or, better said, when Indians drink, crazy things happen, like waking up from passed out with only one braid, the other having been cut off. Melvin was destined to a bigger joke. The Indian joke that backfired, but as the Indian world is not logical, neither are the consequences.

Melvin had, with several other Indians, drunk himself into the oblivion that seems required at these often extraordinary events, in a motel room in Great Falls, Montana, in the 1990s. There was a popular animated video out at the time: “Who Framed Roger Rabbit”

As it happens, there was one late arrival to this drinking binge who did not pass out to the typically near comatose condition and he was feeling a bit hard, or hard up. So he pulled the pants off of a passed out woman, used her like an ultra-conservative Republican on viagra would use a plastic blow-up doll for sex and then he had an idea for a joke. He pulled the passed out Melvin’s pants down and dragged him on top of the passed out woman he had just squirted full of his stuff, and left. That was a bad joke, but it gets better

If he had not done that second part of his criminal act, but rather had pulled the woman’s pants back up instead, he likely would have gotten away with the rape, because every Indian woman that attends these binges knows the risk, it has happened many a time and is often the joke story of the modern Indian drunks. She likely would have been disgusted with herself, having discovering what had happened to her, taken responsibility for being there and let go of it. End of story

But as fate would have it, along comes a family member looking for her and stumbles on the passed out old guy, Melvin, lying on top of the much younger woman, both with pants down. He called the cops and Melvin went to jail and was charged with rape

Melvin professed his innocence at his arraignment, the Indian humor telegraph was working hard on the story, supposedly in his cell Melvin was given a Viagra pill, a playboy magazine and a paper cup, to get his DNA and the subsequent big story on the Indian humor telegraph was:

“Who Framed Melvin Bunny?”

Napi Eats His Butt

I close this essay with a story of the proverbial trickster, our Napi. There were many stories of Napi holding philosophical conversations with his rectum, and this is where typically the Napi stories become really dangerous. If you can understand this story, then you will have a good idea of how to see where human nature has gone wrong in the Whiteman. Because this is the Indian story of the Evangelical Whiteman, the Whitemen we have met in Andrew Jackson and George Bush. It is about the Whiteman that rules America today. It is about corporate America and nacissism in the extreme. It is about narcissistic men like Barack Obama. It is about a man that does not learn from his mistakes. It is about a man that does not put two and two together concerning the consequences of his actions. It is about a man that does not understand his relationship to essential functions in nature necessary to his survival. It is about a man that does not pay attention or listen. It is about a narcissistic man so full of himself, he lies to himself about others good intentions. It is a story about how not to live your life. And perhaps most of all, it is a story about recycling old and failed ideas. The name of this story is “Napi Eats His Butt.” The story is told by Napi’s asshole, Penucquem, and it goes like this:

Napi had been to a great feast with his brothers. He returned to his camp very full of food and tired. Napi curled up to sleep by his fire, and you know where a dog’s nose is when he curls up to sleep!

Spuurrpp! Napi farted and it woke him up, his eyes were watering. Napi said aloud ‘Well, that was really rude’ and curled back to sleep…

Spuurrpp! Napi’s head popped up again, irritated, Napi shouted at his rectum: ‘Penucquem! If you won’t let me sleep, I am going to teach you a lesson!’ Napi curled up again.

Spuurrpp! That really did it. Jumping up, Napi grabbed up Tail, out of harms way, and sat on his campfire to get even with Penucquem. “Yii! Yii!” Napi really took off, like only a hurt dog does, and this started him on his travels.

Napi moved for a long time, he was thinking of how Penucquem had bit him really hard when he had tried to punish him, he didn’t understand how his asshole could do that to him while pushed down on the fire. It was Penucquem that should have cried out and ran away.

So Napi kept moving and thinking, he was traveling a long time in a big circle…

Napi walked and thought about it for so long that finally the large scab fell off of his rectum and still walking in a circle, he came across the scab and said “What do you know! Dry Meat!” Napi was getting hungry again about this time and he was happy to have found the dried meat some Indian had lost.

The Magpies shouted out to him “Napi! Don’t eat that! It fell off of your rectum!” Napi shouted back to the Magpies “You’re not fooling me, you just want this dry meat for yourselves!”

And then very delicately because there was not much of it, and with a lot of savor because he was hungry, and very deliberately, so the Magpies would envy him while watching, nip by nip, Napi ate his butt.

“Hun Neow Wah Nee Moo Oosss” (This is what your ass has to say)

The best part of the story about Napi eating his butt is, it was just such a good story I couldn’t help myself, I stole it from the Crees. I stole it from Wee-say-kay-cha (the Cree trickster) and gave it to our Napi. It’s a Blackfoot story now-

“Two Medicine Men, both teachers, visited the big city and took in a service at the cathedral. Returning home, they took their Indian students on a journey of ‘Discovery.’

“First, they killed the nicest kid in the group and told the rest it was their fault for being born. But now, if they would eat the nice kid and drink his blood, calling it communion, they would not be held responsible for anything, ever.

“And this conferred upon them the right to tell other people how to live their lives- what they can and cannot do” –Penucquem’s Journal

Two Indian Jokes

Two Northern Plains Indians talking about the Southwestern tribes, originating with one of the Northern Indians experiencing married life among the Apaches, beginning with a question: “Well, what did you discover?” Answer: “Apaches are feral Navajos.”

After I’d moved to New Mexico, and Floyd HeavyRunner called to see how things were going, Floyd asked me “Are they (the New Mexicans) on Indian time?” I answered “No, they’re on Mexican time.” Floyd: “Mexican time? What’s that?” Myself: “They fall asleep and forget.” Floyd [belly laughs] “That was good.”

Life in Indian Country

Collected stories, folklore and anecdotes concerning my many years life with Blackfeet Indians and traversing Native American territories

A former Special Forces Sergeant of Operations and Intelligence, Ronald Thomas West is a retired paralegal/investigator (living in exile) whose work focus had been anti-corruption and human rights. Ronald is published in International Law as a layman (The Mueller-Wilson Report, co-authored with Dr Mark D Cole) and has been adjunct professor of American Constitutional Law at Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz, Germany (for English credit, summer semester 2008.) Ronald’s formal educational background is primarily social psychology. His therapeutic device is satire, uh and yeah, he grew up with and spent most his life in close association with Indians…

Tags Blackfoot, circling buzzards of Indian Humor, honesty, Indian Humor, integrity, Jesus, matriarchy, Napi, Native American Humor, Old Man, Old Man Coyote, The Devil, trickster

Categories Author, comedy, crime, culture, Folk Stories, philosophy, politics, psychology, religion, satire, shamanism, social responsibility, Uncategorized

Michele Bachmann & Wild Indians

May 24, 2013 //

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.

The Satires

Tags archetype, chauvinist, drag queen, gay, girls gone wild, H L Menecken, hate crime, homosexual, hypocrite, Islamophobia, jack kerouac, Mephisto, Michele Bachmann, pervert, politically correct, Puritan, racist, religious right

Categories corruption, crime, culture, male hierarchy, philosophy, politics, psychology, religion, satire, social responsibility, treason

Napi in the New Age

May 20, 2013 //

A Modern Napi Story

The Great Oxymoron

Lester Log Roller was from a family of Indians named for a drunken forebear who had been ‘challenged’ by some White loggers in the Pacific Northwest to participate in the “Logger Olympics” of sport unique to their profession. Lester’s forebear actually had brought off his performance quite well, while keeping his balance on a log in a pond which he managed to roll with agility, both forwards and backwards… his fame for the event however, was the wild look of panic on this Indians face with his braids flying askew, because this Indian did not know how to swim.

The Indian’s champion log rolling performance was purely survival driven which made the event all the more hilarious to the redneck Whites that had sent him onto the log at gunpoint. The chief of this White Redneck tribe’s sense of honor, his name was Lucious Ludicrous Bean, declared Log Roller should be allowed to live for his amazing ability to mimic the loggers in the sport (“Damn, who’d believed”), but the Indian would hereafter have to be known by the new name and answer to it.

The Indian agreed to the terms required to save his life while still on the log, and was subsequently fished out of the pond both before he had drowned and nearing sobriety, because he had finally fallen into the water from pure exhaustion. Log Roller’s descendant, Lester Log Roller, subsequently was from a family of Indians that did not drink. They knew better. He went to Law School instead

Nobody in the White Academic world knew how to create a Native Studies Program because in fact to postulate a program as such in the western classroom was oxymoron. Hell, they did not even know that. Native Studies, if it was Natives doing the studies, would be non-interfering in Nature, observing the processes from which all Native intelligence had been drawn. Lester Log Roller did not know that, because he had been off to Boarding School from age five and then off to University in Kanadada.

By this time, Lester had mastered the provincial English linguistic trick of stating the just so “Eh?” after postulating something as mundane as “How aboot (yucky pronunciations) we run to the trading post for some smokes. Eh?” And his Blackfoot language was rusty, such as the time he was home from boarding school to visit and his Aunt told him to go back out (he had just come in the door) and bring in the “Napi-aki.” Lester started to go back out, he was confused, but then resolutely faced his Aunt and told her “I don’t have a White woman!” She laughed and said in English “I’m not talking about White women, I want you to bring in the milk jug.” Lester felt dumb. Napi-aki could mean either milk jug or White woman, but he did not get the context. He had been too long away at school

Lester was a conscientious sort, and so when his undergraduate major in ‘Native Studies’ was decided on, he returned home in summers and brushed up on his Blackfoot Language. But he did not realize that the answer to bring his university into line with the political correctness of the new times had been to establish a White Anthropology program staffed by White-educated mentalities in people with Red skins and call it ‘Native Studies.’ And so, Lester, like the now countless other Red skinned people of Native descent, thought this was real. He should have remembered the Blackfoot proverb “Everyone knows the Whiteman is crazy.” But Lester could not know this now applied to himself. So Lester questioned his former people’s elders to get ideas for his papers he would need to write in the discipline of anthropology disguised with the ‘Native Studies’ euphemism. And thought he was Indian

Lester went on to Law School and eventually became Director of ‘Native Studies’ at a great university which had been duly impressed with his achievements in the Whiteman’s so-called field of ‘Indian Treaty Law,’ having nothing to do with actual Aboriginal Laws of past times, but which combined with the idea he spoke Blackfoot, seemed to make him eminently qualified to run their program.

Here at university he met the great White theoretical physicist David Bohm and they had discussed David’s curiousity as to why it had been noted as early as the 1920’s the Native American languages seemed to have no problem describing many phenomena of the new theoretical physics, which western languages had difficulty coping with. Lester had no idea why either, but it seemed there must be something to it and so they began a dialogue… and eventually Lester became a god. To at least three or four people.

Lester, later on retired and living in a townhouse in the better part of Lethbridge, Kanadada, had continued with his anthropological interest in studying his former people and was particularly interested in their form of government before they had been conquered. His anthropological studies got him up and running on three legs in Blackfoot ways, like the proverbial wild dog that had chewed off one leg to escape a trap… and that was about it

Lester had by this time taken over the dialogue and thought he had some things figured out: Like how the old time chiefs circle of oratory had worked. Not. What he attempted to replicate in fact became a lunatic caricature of what had been his ancestral wisdom. It was not meant to be evil and in fact it was not evil. It was merely stupid. But Lester could not know that

By this time, these dialogues, with David Bohm now dead, had become sponsored by a ‘Wannabee Indian’ organization called ‘New Age in Native America’ run by an anal-retent-hyper-liberal White intellectual who fancied himself an enlightened feminist man. Though one might suspect otherwise, this man was not ‘bi,’ neither bi-sexual, nor bi-cultural

Narcissus Yabadabadoo Montenegro was a “Coyote” in the strict local Hispanic sense of the term, that is a ‘Spanglo.’ You would never know to which community of his ancestry he was loyal to, because this sort of Coyote could only be loyal to himself. His ego was of a soft burnished sort, the kind of lovely passive-aggressiveness whose nasty aspect was presented in the effeminate dark side aroma of the flower he was named for. As a real Indian, you just did not want to get too close to Narcissus if you were to enjoy the genuine natural beauty of his expression. And so it also was with the NANA sponsored dialogues he so expertly organized for the world to know the truth of the New Age in Native America

When Narcissus gazed into the reflective pool of the soft loveliness in his ego, he could detect no offensive aroma. His ethnocidal nuance as applied to Native American thought and philosophy was of a much prettier and more refined sort than that established for his intellectual forebears in the psychological literature developed by Erich Fromm: who postulated the Nazis much enjoyed the smell of their own farts.

A far cry from the camps and ovens, the ethnocidal ‘thrust’ of Narcissus’ ego priapismic tendencies was to bring about the immolation of the Indians beliefs and thinking with grandiose graphics of Taoist imagery superimposed on Native American fruits and vegetables extrapolated to western print: advertising the many ‘Red Skinned [Elmer] Fudds’ (PhDs) he would gather alongside White skinned western scientists in a grand orgy of psyco-somatic ego-stroking masturbation in high intellectual workshops of inter-racial discourse

Napi fell for it in the beginning. It was attractive, because Lester, a Blackfoot Indian who could speak his language was master of ceremony and that fact, taken together with the promoted agenda of Native America’s relationship to an observational philosophy of Quantum Mechanics, convinced Napi at the start he would learn something. Well, Napi did learn some things, he just did not learn what he had expected, like a wider understanding of Native Quantum Reality. Napi learned about Quantum Mechanics in the laboratory from the White scientists and absolutely nothing at all from the many PhD Native Americans because they had no idea at all of how Native Quantum Reality functionally worked.

Damn, it was sad. Not one PhD, not a single PhD from either side of the Racial divide, understood that to be Native American in thought and philosophy had absolutely nothing to do with Race. PhD. Wow. The White western scientists were sometimes frustrated with the Red western scientists who could only tell stories from anthropology that were totally out of context and consequently nonsensical. That fact only made the Red western scientists equal to the White western scientists totally out of context with Nature and nonsensical lab experiments

Napi simply observed the first year he attended. The second year he contributed a little bit of real Indian thinking and freaked out Lester because it looked as though the entire event could be shown up as a case of ‘The Emperor Has No Clothes!’ The third year Napi had tried to explain to Narcissus and had approached Lester directly about making a contribution, how some things could change to open up the dialogues to real learning, but Napi was frozen out instead. No upsetting the gravy train of ego allowed here!

Rather the ‘face’ of the event was to be preserved at all costs, a portrait of the mysterious and knowledgeable Indian, Lester, presiding over an event that might one day yield his great secrets held in abeyance: to his lesser Native beings and the handful of toadying sycophant Whites who peered upon his Native holiness with expressions of Heavenly reverence as though they were alter-boys seated upon the left and right hands of God. In fact, it appeared to Napi that Lester didn’t know shit. Lester only knew how to rest on his laurels from his former Native Studies program directorship at Harvard, look important, and otherwise act cool and all knowing. That’s it.

This lampoon of Leroy Little Bear and the ‘Language of Spirit’ dialogues at SEED Open University, goes to the point of what you see isn’t what it was and what it was, is something you’re not going to get at any ‘native studies’ program, either…

The women’s secret societies had been the driving social engine in the Blackfoot culture, the anthropologists were males and males were NEVER admitted to these societies. The upshot is, when every sister, mother, daughter and wife of every man of consequence delivered identical message, the men would meet and take the nation in the direction these women had insisted upon. The anthropologists only saw the men meet and come to decisions. The ‘circle’ at SEED supposedly replicating the ancient native governance system, is entirely devoid of the matriarchal concept and background. An important note would be, the anthropologists were allowed to keep mistaken assumptions (mistaken assumptions that now are integrated material of so-called ‘native studies’) because the culture they were studying did not have a concept of correcting so-called ‘wrongs’, people are supposed to figure out their mistakes for themselves.

The Blackfoot word for wife, ni-naki, translates literally as “boss.” Ni-naki is the lesser form of the word ni-na-waki, which had been the highest form of Blackfoot chief in pre-contact times, and could only be a woman. The equality there was really quite balanced, with a slightly higher female authority, with great respect between the sexes and women had been fully entitled to be warriors, the term for such was sak-wo-ma-oui-aki-kwan, loosely translated as ‘defiant women.’

The men with more than one wife were seen by anthropologists as polygamists in the western sense, the western observers not realizing the women determined this. Close sisters or best friends shared the man and without this female consensus, polygamy did not happen. And it was the important women who determined who would be a man’s ‘sits besides him wife.’ In the present time, relating to any politically correct western anthropology program with the ‘native studies’ euphemism, it is the western ideas are coming to dominate the native perception of themselves, with the loss of language and oral tradition through enforced western educations, these people don’t even know who they were anymore. But what had been was, the women instilled the culture’s values and stability.

Another misconception is the countless forms of gender in the language, the western linguists puzzling over how so many masculine and feminine forms could be kept straight and why so many when in fact this was the language expressing varying degree of androgyny in descriptions, an alien concept to western linguists.

The unfortunate conclusions concerning the western culture, drawn from thirty plus years work bridging the cultural gap, can be read in my essay ‘You’ve Got Apes!‘

The Satires

Life in Indian Country

Collected stories, folklore and anecdotes concerning my many years life with Blackfeet Indians and traversing Native American territories

Tags anthropology, Blackfeet, Blackfoot, cultural anthropology, fraud, Language of Spirit Dialogues, Leroy Little Bear, matriarchy, Napi, Napi Story, Native American Quantum Mechanics, Native American Studies, Native Studies, new age, quantum mechanics, SEED Open University

Categories comedy, culture, Folk Stories, Law, male hierarchy, philosophy, politics, psychology, satire, science, shamanism, social responsibility, Uncategorized

Our Vital National Interests

May 20, 2013 //

a Ronald Thomas West assessment

Our Vital National Interests

It’s pretty simple actually. The USA’s ‘vital national interests’ (and western democracies generally) is euphemism for corporate welfare, corporate welfare is all about the bottom line (profit) and profit historically has happened when we take raw material at gunpoint from disadvantaged nations. Modern corporate neo-colonialism creates social unrest and consequent fighting back which has evolved to ‘terror’, which in turn strengthens the market place in the ‘security’ or arms industry. The overthrow of Gaddafi (for reasons including he wasn’t buying high end weapons from France, following his ‘rehabilitation’) started brush fires (e.g. Mali) with his now unemployed mercenaries, ‘lost’ weapons flow and western trained guerillas/insurgents moved on to instances of ‘jihad’ the western powers feel must be in turn stamped out. This strengthens the cycle of spreading ‘terror’ which again strengthens the outlay for security, propping up western economies in what has become a war of civilizations.

In the case of Djibouti and a new one billion dollar drones base being built there, there is yet a French Foreign Legion presence hanging on from colonial era with the region surrounding nearby Somalia in process of destabilizing since Charles Grassley’s efforts provided a vast arsenal of American weapons to the regime of Mohammed Said Barre nearly 30 years ago. Barre in turn employed those weapons to wreak a biblical terror on his own nation. This has impacted from Ethiopia to Kenya and beyond.

When nations are in cycles of violence, their raw materials can be had on the cheap by corporations because of instability and attending corruption, increasing stock values from Frankfurt to London to Toronto to Wall Street.

The result at home? ‘Terror’ propaganda leading to the loss of civil liberties and increasing consolidation of the corporate-power corrupt over the vast and spreading malignancy of the entire cycle. This fact can only lead to our national demise when you factor in the western democracies own ‘jihadis’, i.e. extreme ‘Christian Taliban’ personalities attracted to the ‘security’ business. Now days the Pentagon is fundamentalist Christian crusader central and has moved from ‘the only good Indian is a dead Indian’ to ‘the only good Muslim is a dead Muslim’ as a matter of policy in a pursuit of world-wide “manifest destiny.” And so reality is created for us and reality is pointed to literal Armageddon, the consequence of living beyond our means.

The other side of this coin is, if the arms and related ‘security’ expenditures were halted, the resulting jobs loss would finish collapsing the western democracies economic engines, where the armaments industries are a critical component of the dynamic propping up our infrastructure.

What are the chances the western democratic leaders will surrender ego to reality and begin dismantling this hydra? Not good when reality is we should be moving towards construction of changed climate Hobbit burrows to survive.

What’s happening isn’t rocket science, but it is a trap-

Tags armaments, arms industry, colonialism, corporate colonialism, economics, extremism, fundamentalism, military, national security, Pentagon, security, terror, terrorism, vital national interests

Categories AIPAC, assassinations, CIA, corruption, crime, information operations, intelligence, international law, male hierarchy, philosophy, politics, propaganda, psychology, religion, social responsibility, treason, war crimes

The (No) Establishment Clause

May 19, 2013 //

The (No) ‘Establishment’ Clause

There is little question the American founders were, without exception, ‘believers’ in a supreme deity or that is to say “God.” Their commonality of belief ends with that statement. The (no) ‘Establishment’ clause of the anti-federalist founders (as opposed the ‘Federalist’ founders) enshrined in the First Amendment of the United States Constitution, derived from a consensus there could never be any one religion in supremacy in these United States.

This consensus derived from historical experience showing a ‘state religion’ is inimical to freedom. The one man responsible for a widespread support from the general populace supporting this consensus was Thomas Paine.

John Adams had stated: “Without the pen of Paine, the sword of Washington would have been in vain”

The purpose of the (no) ‘Establishment’ clause derived from our several founders unshakeable notion that any church in supremacy results in persecution of freedom. In their time, this notion was based on very real history, pointing particularly to the Church of England and the Church at Rome. Both had initiated policies in collusion with government(s) resulting in exodus of minority religions and political free thinkers, to what eventually became our American republic. The (no) ‘Establishment’ clause was intended to guard against these persecutions repeating history at future time in the USA.

That John Adams recognized this would be a necessary safeguard, despite his conservative Christian faith, is to be demonstrated in his statement on Paine. Furthermore, Adams had endorsed the language: “The government of the United States is in no sense founded upon the Christian religion” when he signed the ‘Treaty of Tripoli’

Thomas Jefferson wrote: “Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legislative powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between church and State” – President Thomas Jefferson in a letter to Danbury Baptist Association.

Jefferson even took the idea further. His endorsement of a (no) ‘Establishment’ clause invited non-Christian faiths to stand on a par with any Christian faith in the newly founded United States: “a singular proposition proved that it’s protection of opinion was meant to be universal. Where the preamble declares that coercion is a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, an amendment was proposed, by inserting the word ‘Jesus Christ,’ so that it should read ‘a departure from the plan of Jesus Christ, the holy author of our religion,’ the insertion was rejected by a great majority, in proof that they meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo, and infidel of every denomination” -commenting on proceedings in the Virgina Assembly.

Benjamin Franklin concurred with Jefferson: “If the Mufti of Constantinople were to send an emmissary to preach to us Mohammedism, he would be provided a pulpit”

James Madison goes even farther: “Experience witnesses that ecclesiastical establishments, instead of maintaining the purity and efficacy of religion, have had a contrary operation. During almost 15 centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What has been its fruits? More or less, in all places, pride and indolence in the clergy; ignorance and servility in the laity; in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution”

The last word inspiring the (no) ‘Establishment’ clause is given to Thomas Paine, the man Adams had implied motivated the troops to serve under General Washington:

“I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church. All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit“

The USA Constitution’s (no) ‘Establishment’ clause: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof” ..

.. is routinely violated by the crusaders at our Pentagon:

Sane people support the Military Religious Freedom Foundation

Paine’s essay from ‘The Age of Reason’

“IT has been my intention, for several years past, to publish my thoughts upon religion. I am well aware of the difficulties that attend the subject, and from that consideration, had reserved it to a more advanced period of life. I intended it to be the last offering I should make to my fellow-citizens of all nations, and that at a time when the purity of the motive that induced me to it, could not admit of a question, even by those who might disapprove the work.

“The circumstance that has now taken place in France of the total abolition of the whole national order of priesthood, and of everything appertaining to compulsive systems of religion, and compulsive articles of faith, has not only precipitated my intention, but rendered a work of this kind exceedingly necessary, lest in the general wreck of superstition, of false systems of government, and false theology, we lose sight of morality, of humanity, and of the theology that is true.

“As several of my colleagues and others of my fellow-citizens of France have given me the example of making their voluntary and individual profession of faith, I also will make mine; and I do this with all that sincerity and frankness with which the mind of man communicates with itself.

“I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life.

“I believe in the equality of man; and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavoring to make our fellow-creatures happy.

“But, lest it should be supposed that I believe in many other things in addition to these, I shall, in the progress of this work, declare the things I do not believe, and my reasons for not believing them.

“All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.

“I do not mean by this declaration to condemn those who believe otherwise; they have the same right to their belief as I have to mine. But it is necessary to the happiness of man, that he be mentally faithful to himself. Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what he does not believe.

“It is impossible to calculate the moral mischief, if I may so express it, that mental lying has produced in society. When a man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind, as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe, he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime. He takes up the trade of a priest for the sake of gain, and in order to qualify himself for that trade, he begins with a perjury. Can we conceive any thing more destructive to morality than this?

“Soon after I had published the pamphlet Common Sense, in America, I saw the exceeding probability that a revolution in the system of government would be followed by a revolution in the system of religion. The adulterous connection of church and state, wherever it had taken place, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish, had so effectually prohibited by pains and penalties, every discussion upon established creeds, and upon first principles of religion, that until the system of government should be changed, those subjects could not be brought fairly and openly before the world; but that whenever this should be done, a revolution in the system of religion would follow. Human inventions and priestcraft would be detected; and man would return to the pure, unmixed and unadulterated belief of one God, and no more.

“Every national church or religion has established itself by pretending some special mission from God, communicated to certain individuals. The Jews have their Moses; the Christians their Jesus Christ, their apostles and saints; and the Turks their Mahomet, as if the way to God was not open to every man alike.

“Each of those churches show certain books, which they call revelation, or the word of God. The Jews say, that their word of God was given by God to Moses, face to face; the Christians say, that their word of God came by divine inspiration: and the Turks say, that their word of God (the Koran) was brought by an angel from Heaven. Each of those churches accuse the other of unbelief; and for my own part, I disbelieve them all.

“As it is necessary to affix right ideas to words, I will, before I proceed further into the subject, offer some other observations on the word revelation. Revelation, when applied to religion, means something communicated immediately from God to man.

“No one will deny or dispute the power of the Almighty to make such a communication, if he pleases. But admitting, for the sake of a case, that something has been revealed to a certain person, and not revealed to any other person, it is revelation to that person only. When he tells it to a second person, a second to a third, a third to a fourth, and so on, it ceases to be a revelation to all those persons. It is revelation to the first person only, and hearsay to every other, and consequently they are not obliged to believe it.

“It is a contradiction in terms and ideas, to call anything a revelation that comes to us at second-hand, either verbally or in writing. Revelation is necessarily limited to the first communication — after this, it is only an account of something which that person says was a revelation made to him; and though he may find himself obliged to believe it, it cannot be incumbent on me to believe it in the same manner; for it was not a revelation made to me, and I have only his word for it that it was made to him.

“When Moses told the children of Israel that he received the two tables of the commandments from the hands of God, they were not obliged to believe him, because they had no other authority for it than his telling them so; and I have no other authority for it than some historian telling me so. The commandments carry no internal evidence of divinity with them; they contain some good moral precepts, such as any man qualified to be a lawgiver, or a legislator, could produce himself, without having recourse to supernatural intervention.”

Tags Benjamin Franklin, christian dominionism, establishment clause, evangelical, James Madison, liars for Jesus, Military Religious Freedom Foundation, Officer's Christian Fellowship, Pentagon, religious right, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine

Categories corruption, crime, culture, information operations, Law, male hierarchy, philosophy, politics, propaganda, religion, social responsibility, treason

Bozo’s Handcock U Speech

May 17, 2013 //

‘Free Speech Clown’ Series

Bozo’s Handcock U Speech

(A theory of proto-Anglo-Saxon-chauvinism)

Bozo L’Dodo, past Valedictorian, was to deliver the introductory address for this year’s Handcock U commencement and his theme ‘The Inspired Republican Illuminati: Our Anglo-Saxon Heritage’ would secure his standing as the greatest of Handcock U satirists and past Valedictorians

Bozo had chosen this topic to deflect criticism of his not having fulfilled the Handcock U forecast of becoming 43^rd President of the United States, because everyone believed the nation would be better off if he had realized this ambition for the school

Bozo was drunk, both in the composition and delivery of his masterwork address, as were the majority students who had been advised this would be the only state in which Bozo’s short oratory could be fully appreciated. Handcock U’s president attended absolutely stoned on his wife’s Prozac, dreading the coming moment

Bozo, teetering only slightly, after-all, he had been dead drunk for the near entirety of his life and was quite enabled of his condition, began:

My beloved brethren (Bozo neglected to remember women were present, the cause of his alimony payments which he had never understood)

Follows here a fanciful exam of the source of our American behaviors and American Republican closet morality- in a historical context of our British cousins and our own America’s Royal ‘Curious George’ Bush. (The school’s president groaned)

Nearly every educated American of our generation had been psychologically nursed as a child on the wisdom of stories about Curious George, a playful, innocent monkey, but lacking the necessary brains to innately recognize or extract himself from dangerous situations. (the school’s liberals had become interested already, going against experience and every instinct)

Fortunately, or so it seemed at the time of our childhood, George was in the nominal charge of the ‘Man in the Yellow Hat’, a benevolent and wise person with great understanding of George’s nature… and yet for all of the Man in the Yellow Hat’s mis-approbation of George’s innate delinquent nature, it cannot be denied that these stories inculcated our thinking with one great flaw. Repeatedly, the Man in the Yellow Hat left George unattended- leading to multiple circumstance enraging the innocent surroundings of our very small world’s neighborhoods. In fact, George is a vandal and the Man in the Yellow Hat is his enabler. Today, we will have a look at the larger historical background of our own George and his Man in the Yellow Hat: Tony Blair

Here in the USA we speak Yank. My own traceable English ancestry migrated from London to Virginia about 1640 and in the meantime that has mixed, I am sure, with people declining Robespierre’s invitation to a party, as well the emptied jails and insane asylums of England, religious fanatics from the continent, Indians, Blacks, Mongols, and I am obviously ‘mongrel.’ But it wasn’t only noble political refugees, criminals, lunatics and fanatics that were culled from the old world, but many Yeomen as well, mixing with the other populations, creating the curious mix of our state today. I suspect that my friends ‘down under’ have a somewhat similar social biography in the world of our Aussie cousins. (the Dean of Humanities began to feel sick at his stomach)

Now what I suspect what we expatriates sometimes experience, though no fault of our own, is a deleterious genetic effect that Europe in general, and England in particular, had sought to eliminate from their ‘families.’ I carry this remarkably deleterious gene myself, and my research on the matter tentatively suggests it cannot be deleted because of perpetual hybridization in our American family, and there has been no pogrom for this gene’s elimination. For research purposes I am naming the effect of this deleterious gene “Proto Anglo-Saxon Chauvinism.” (the school’s Chancellor began to feel faint)

Now again, we all had thought this PASC gene to be largely recessive in our American population, but I think we must consider it may manifest in heretofore un-noticed behavioral traits such as my own present subconscious urge, example given, a suddenly un-suppressed desire to make a comment such as this short Address. I invite the listener to consider my words taken for a particular hand gesture of continental origin. (Bozo held up his hand with a middle finger, men chuckle and women gasp in the audience)

This gesture had been, once upon a time in Anglo-American relations, flung across the Atlantic, in both directions, and had been historically taken for ‘rudery’

Now in our American population, we had thought the PASC gene (and source of this behavior) to be largely benign, excepting in the Republican party where it is concentrated to an unhealthy degree in this political pseudo nobility, the American Tories. Here, it is noticed in the American PASC Republicans who are ashamed of their ‘doodles’, normally which they only ‘yank’ in the dark, and claim they never ‘yank’ out of context. (Senator Larry Craig turns beet red and the Handcock U president puts his face in his hands)

This bears a bit of explanation. Versed a bit in the American experience relating to our Anglo Saxon heritage and the ‘divorce’, there are historical examples of general insults, inevitably intended, with some exceptions, this shouldn’t ever result in fisticuffs, but sometimes has between friends and brothers, with a bit of liberty and license. (the British interest in the audience perked up)

In so far as these insults go, there was one delivered a couple of centuries and a score years ago in the vicinity of Yorktown, Virginia, a small ditty of British origin, composed by a campfire in the army of His Majesty, adopted by my countrymen, and that is ‘Yankee Doodle.’ I do believe that a close scrutiny of the song by the science of etymology must reveal ‘yank e’ doodle’, the precise original term, is 18th century cockney or equivalent dialect, refering to the manipulation of a peculiar bodily part- hence the terms ‘yank’ and ‘yankee.’ (Stunned silence in the largely American attendees, the few British sniggered)

Probably the context of the Americans adopting the sobriquet was made in the heat of fraternal dispute, proposed example given, ‘and if we can whip you who named us that, what does that say about you?’ (A single drunken whoop from a Texas Cowboy alumnus, the British chuckles were over)

But we all went on to patch things up, and out of purely good and manly sportsmanship, us ‘Yanks’ kept the name and became endeared of it, despite the dangers of embarrassment to our progeny. (The British are suddenly interested again)

There does seem to be a bit of national amnesia concerning the origin of the term, but who hasn’t heard of the New York Yankees? In our modern idiom they would be called the Manhattan Masturbators (rousing cheers from this west coast school’s Oakland Athletics fan base, the British laughing out loud)

At any rate, all of us hybridized American folk have had to learn to get along despite the presence of ‘proto Anglo-Saxon chauvinism’, and so it is just sort of lurking there, a characteristic of our ‘family.’ It must be my own mark of the gene that fails to see any serious impropriety in these remarks, but in fact I am disturbed by Tory and Republican behaviors, these progenitors of ‘Yankee’ behavior. (Bozo’s alumni classmates, on this cue, raise a ‘Students for a Democratic Society’ banner, the British delegation is split)

Now, I am not privy to any modern research concerning the deleterious PASC gene in the old world and whether the efforts to eliminate it were entirely successful, and I am not familiar with the norms of behavior there, but I would caution my Royal Old World cousins not to breed too closely, if this is what was intimated when Mr Mitterand noted Maggie Thatcher had “the eyes of Caligula.” (San Francisco’s British consular delegation walks out)

Before I am subject to medieval justice and suffer the fate of Guy Fawkes, consider this bit of oratory in the tradition of Punch & Judy and might not intemperate replies from a particular quarter make the case that these beloved characters (whom Americans might well embrace) are expatriates as well. (The British having left, no one understood this line)

Well, here, plainly stated, is an American polled by pundits, strongly suspecting Curious George Bush is an Anglophile (does he truly love Tony Blair?) and I cannot help but infer that the whole world has noticed and is prepared to conclude the Americans cannot help but ‘yank’ another’s ‘doodle’ when they should better keep their hands to themselves. (drunken male crowd roars, outraged women are leaving in droves)

But consider first the primary party responsible for our ‘Yankee’ makeup, and please, only then consider our character. (drunk Log Cabin Republicans have been shouting Hallelujah Brother!!)

And I beg my Anglo cousins, whether Proto Anglo Saxon Chauvinism survives in Merry Old England or not, do bring Curious George Bush home to be Tony Blair’s ‘retirement’ butler, and ‘We the People’ will happily keep our sobriquet ‘Yank’, dubiously renewed in the eyes of your American cousin by our Commander in Chief in concert with your own, whom in tandum have, whilst whistling our glorious tune, Yanked their Doodles out of context worldwide! (Wild cheering, standing ovation)

And thanks for NOTHING England!!” (Bozo ends in Richard Nixon’s famous pose while shouting the Handcock U ‘Fighting Chicken’ sport slogan ‘Cock a Doodle Do!!’ pelvic thrusting with raised middle fingers rather than victory signs)

Commencement did not proceed beyond Bozo’s speech because the ‘Fighting Chicken’ male student body rioted, erupted from the hall and took the occasion to tear down the school goal posts. Women who hadn’t the sense to leave earlier were raped. Handcock U’s president resigned and the school Chancellor committed suicide. Diplomas were put in the mail. Bozo’s fame grew…

The Satires

Tags George W Bush, homosexuality, lampoon, neo conservative, neo liberal, Tony Blair

Categories crime, culture, male hierarchy, philosophy, psychology, satire, social responsibility, treason, Uncategorized

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