last stand, last straw

Although no excuse for unconscionably cruel and dishonest behaviour, a constellation of events coalesced in a prefigured, post-Civil War United States of America which saw the undoing of the aboriginal population in its near destruction with the years of Reconstruction. Of course, the introduction of Old World diseases and the conquest of land and treasure had been continuing a pace for centuries already but the disruption of factional fighting, subsequent redundancy of soldiers and redefined economies encouraged growth and expansion. Starting from the eastern seaboard, American Indians were being displaced farther and farther westward, with American territorial gains from the Louisiana Purchase and the Mexican-American War. With a sight towards realising Manifest Destiny and control from sea to shining sea, suddenly those plains and prairies where the natives were exiled to were starting to look not so far beneath them.  Moreover many tribal leaders—as they had done during the Revolutionary War with Britain, had also chosen to back the wrong side in the Civil War, supporting the Confederacy not for ideological reasons or that they seemed necessarily more palatable, it was just that the Union had treated them so badly and trounced on all former promises.

This retroactive treason did not earn them much sympathy in the eyes of white America. The Industrial Revolution, with America pulling ahead of Europe for the first time with the production of steel, and the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad also hastened settlement and re-settlement. Confined to ever-shrinking reservations, the Native Americans’ nomadic way of life, especially for the plains Indians and recent transplants who must have gone through their own trauma and shock in a strange environment, following the herds and rhythms of seasons was under threat. Said railroad cut across the remaining open spaces and brought ranchers who further delineated their parcels. As if it was not enough that these cultures clashed, with the ideal life of a settler becoming a farmer or cattleman tethered to one spot and homestead, the passengers riding the trains crossing Indian lands were encouraged to slaughter buffalo (bison)—not after they got to their destination or like being reminded to please have their pets spayed or neutered—but actively and from the window of the rail-car, mowing down as many of the beasts as possible as an act of aggression against the way of life of the Indians and to clear the area for ranch land. Though perhaps understandable, stories of savages attacking settlements and convoys were probably greatly exaggerated, but expansion and removal needed justification and all those Civil War veterans needed something to occupy themselves. Regiments took to protecting the settlers from potential raiding parties and to policing the reserves, in some cases establishing permanent forts and barracks located right on the reservation, as was the case in Little Big Horn. And surprise—there was gold in them there hills (the Black Hills being sacred to the Lakota peoples), according to one prospecting expedition escorted under the guard of the army—though that cache was greatly over-estimated as well. When the chiefs failed to avail their tribes to move along of their own accord, the Bureau of Indian Affairs handed the whole matter over to the army to dispatch with these malingers. In no sense was this pitch-battle in 1876 a last stand for Bvt. Major General George Armstrong Custer, but the Dakota, Cheyenne and the Sioux and compatriots fighting for their existence. Although this defeat of the US army has formerly been a co-opted as a rallying-cry, like “Remember the Alamo” (a battle sparked over the right to of white Texians to keep slaves), the victory, routing an entire advancing column, of the Native Americans was a pyrrhic one and just fuelled more resentment and fear in the public eye. In the immediate aftermath, a larger scale war ensued, making promises even more fragile and inspired America to later (with the death of Custer’s widow) hewn four colossal presidential busts in one of those hallowed hills—called the Six Grandfathers in their language—to promote tourism in the region.

celluloid ceiling or poison-pen

Via the always curious TYWKIWDBI, I learned about a new subtle way of gauging rather overt biases and sexism there is in cinema and storytelling in general, called the Bechdel test—named after a militant comic-strip but the creators acknowledge that the principle of the rule was already present in Virginia Woolf’s lament A Room of One’s Own.
The test has three simple criteria, which an astonishing amount of film cannot pass, whole or in part: 1) at least two women characters 2) the two women must have some sort of dialogue 3) the subject of that exchange must be about some topic aside from men—marriage or babies. It is really pretty amazing to think how in the exposition of the Star Wars saga or Lord of the Rings, there is no significant interaction among women.  Of course, it’s not meant to be an absolute  nor any sort of casting guideline and can be a template to examine inclusion and composition in other areas—and probably most importantly, it is a tool for advocacy and raising awareness of something that could pass as invisible and unchallenged.

missed connection

I am justifiably miffed and disappointed with myself for having missed the visit of His Holiness the XIV Dalai Lama right here in Wiesbaden—for a dialogue on the occasion of his eightieth birthday (news article in German).

I saw the posters at least a week in advance—but, and I don’t know what I thought, like lions would be falling from the sky and that’s all anyone would be talking about, I guessed it was a telecast birthday greeting beamed from different gatherings around the world. After the fact—and I was even in town while it was going on in the Kurpark, I can see why the hosting of such an event might be kept low-key so as to not jeopardise any tenuous political- or business-relations. Happy belated birthday.  I ought have investigated and planned more carefully, especially if I am expecting the mountain come to me and then be absent myself. It’s nearly paramount to missing out on a visit by the Pope. This city always has something in the wings and next time, I’ll need to be more gracious and forthcoming—especially considering what others might have given for such an audience.

dwarf-planet or plutocrat

This week, the New Horizons space probe will have achieved its primary mission, after a journey of over nine years, powered by a plutonium reactor and carrying the ashes of its discoverer, and deliver the first detailed images and measurements of the planet that was downgraded after its launch, but will be traveling around fifty thousand kilometers an hour and barely have time to blink before it sails past. On its approach, it’s already beaming some amazing pictures back so astronomers believe that this one pass will afford them with a great trove of data to last for years. It is really remarkable that for the first time in decades, we’re going to be presented with an accurate portrait of another world—and not just an imaginative artist’s conception, with geographical features to be named. The hunt for Pluto began in earnest in the late 1920s when physicists grew fretful over the unexpected sideways orbit of Neptune that did not fit into the model of the solar system as described by the reliable, certain Newtonian mechanics that had been a sustaining grace for centuries.
The scientific community feared it would lend too much credence to that new physics of uncertainties and probabilities. Not wanting more revolt and upturning just yet—what with the age and world affairs and the ideas of Darwin still being fully masticated—astronomers hypothesised the existence of a yet unknown Planet X beyond that could account for Neptune’s odd behaviour. Fortunately (for Newton since the fate of scientific thought hung in the balance) the hunt yielded Uranus and it did mostly explain the outer planets’ orbits—however, there was a need (and public excitement to forward the cause and exploration) to call for a second scavenger hunt in the night skies for a consolation prize. The competition was fierce—since the discovery of yet another planet and immortality to be gained lay in the realm of immediate possibility, and interestingly as the hunt was on, science-fiction and horror writer H.P. Lovecraft captured it in his own mythos, calling it Yuggoth, before the planet was ever sighted (though naming-conventions were strict and there was probably no movement to name it as the Cthultu author had done). Planet X´ was first spotted by Clyde Tombaugh in 1930—while working at an observatory in Arizona—endowed by a wealthy Bostonian by the name of Percival Lowell expressly built to save the Newtonian system (as above, the naming-conventions were strict and one could not very well call a planet after a benefactor, no matter how generous—although it looks pretty sly how the astronomical symbol ♇ adopted was basically a monogram of Lowell’s name, once Pluto got its designation, suggested by an eleven year old from Oxford, Venetia Burney, grandniece incidentally of the Eton professor who named the moons of Mars Phobos and Deimos), whose ashes are being ferried to his discovery. That this mission even got off the launch pad at all is also a story of coincidence, timing and politics—more on these plutocrats at the link above. Afterwards, for as long as its plutonium battery lasts, New Horizons will pass into the Kuiper belt and study some of the nebulous, icy objects in this mysterious hatchery for comets.

genesis or æolian dust

The always intriguing Æon magazine invites us to imagine an ecosystem that’s parallel to our own familiarly flourishing one but possibly quite independent—not quite like the writhing, invisible world of microscopic beings that Anton van Leeuwenhoek saw for the first time in the 1670s as this discovery did not have immediately recognisable and world-shattering consequences, since these animalcules seemed to have less to do with the majesty of man than anything imaginable—and along side the life that we know in such a radically different and unorthodox way so as to be completely alien in organisation and expression.
I think there are good indicators that our prejudice is slowly succumbing to surprise and serendipity—the resourcefulness of biology, as the search continues for extra-terrestrial intelligence and we find niches of creeping and reproducing beings in the most unexpected of places, but for all these positive developments, we still could fail if our criteria for thriving only cleaves to what we know and expect. Of course it would be more exciting and apparent to be confronted with the mute artefacts of an otherworldly civilisation or megafauna lopping across far-away plains—rather than enigmatic crystals, sludge, erosion, curious matter circling the drain, or creatures perpetuated by human belief in numerology or patent medicines and are happy hitchhikers. One concrete example given of a seemingly biogenic phenomena (that may have originated in a genesis before the one that’s our creation narrative or afterwards, like viruses, plasmids and preons that seem to prey on our weaknesses) is in the patina called desert varnish, debated since before the time of Darwin whether vegetable or mineral, of a sheen that forms on the surface of rocks, that’s extremely hydrophobic and contains elements not native to the local environment. The varnish, however, is inchoate, endemic to deserts around the world, from Africa to the Antarctic, and is even that verdigris that was scrapped away by our ancestors to produce the most ancient and enduring petroglyphs as signs that we were here too.

huginn and munnin

Though it is probably more likely that the later Czech sociologist Karl Deutsch expressed the sentiment to the effect that, “the essential part about nationhood is getting one’s past all wrong,” rather than the earlier French historian and orientalist Joseph Ernest Renan (whom it’s been attributed to), Renan did certainly write that the coalescing of a state requires that people have a lot in common as well as a collective amnesia—remarking that no respecting member of the New Republic dare own up to the frenzied, shameful massacre of the Albigensian Crusade.
This theologian who had a crisis of faith while looking deeper into the historical personage of Jesus and was unable to reconcile Church doctrine with the time-line was writing during a period of transition, the late nineteenth century, generations from the French Revolution, the terrors and resurgence with the Napoleonic Wars and during a time sadly insatiate for what was called progress. Posthumously, and despite Renan’s own critique of tribalism, certain elements of his readership championed his works as justification for colonialism, empire-building, and later eagerly advocating fascism and the politics of race. It nonetheless rings true, I think, that it’s an essential part of a founding, abiding myth—from Rome, England and to America—that a people joined or lumped together be mistaken about certain contexts and have heroes to worship. The later Deutsch, inheritor to all this misguided zeal, in contrast, helped people realise their folly and installed counter-measures.  Huginn (Thought) and Muninn (Remembrance) are the pair of cosmic ravens that surveyed the Earth and roosted with and reported to the Norse god Odin—sort of like the private counsel of a conscience or complimentary set of shoulder-angels.