Department of This Can't Possibly Be True

In Oklahoma, we do things that sound like they come out of an SNL routine that was expressly designed to ridicule Okies. That is, we seem to want to create an image of ourselves that fits the widely-held stereotypes. The events I am about to describe are all exactly what you would expect from benighted rednecks, and the odds against all of these things happening at once are huge. I can only conclude that rural Okies want to make themselves look stupid. Chance cannot explain this.

All of these news items were posted on May 22, 2020. All of them occurred in Rogers County, three of them in the same town (Inola). Remember that rural Oklahoma is the buckle of the Bible belt, exactly where you would expect people to behave in a religious, even if not sanctimonious, fashion.

• First, the pastor of the Cowboy Gatherin’ Church in Inola was arrested for raping and molesting three underage girls. That’s really the name of the church. It meets either outside, amidst cattle barriers, or under the tin roof of an auction barn.
• Second, there was a fatal stabbing at a rodeo.
• Third, a man sustained burns when he set fire to his estranged wife’s house.
• Fourth (this is the only one not in Inola; it was in the Oologah-Talala school district), a former special education teacher was arrested for having sex with one of the girls in his class.

These things all fit our stereotype: fundamentalist religion, illegal sex, cowboy culture including cowboy churches and rodeos, stabbings, deadly marital strife, and arson.

If I wrote these things—separately, or together—into a novel, an editor would rightly accuse me of creating stereotypes, and ask me to remove at least two or three of them. But in Oklahoma we feed our stereotypes, and that is why all four of these things appeared in the news on the same day.

One inescapable conclusion is that the prevalence of the Christian religion does not make people behave any better. Creationists like to claim that believing in evolution will make us behave like apes. But does fundamentalism make us behave better? Are evangelicals more moral? Remember they believe they have the Holy Spirit living within them to empower them to act righteously.

Oh, and by the way, tornadoes were coming through the same day.

More Trash in Oklahoma

 

On November 12, 2019, members of a fraternity at Southeastern Oklahoma State University cleaned up garbage that had been thrown along the wooded roadside along a 0.2-mile stretch of Wilson Street down from the biology building where I work.

We did not count the pieces of garbage, but there were six large bags, which means several hundred pieces of garbage, some of it large and some of it dangerous. (At least this year we did not find discarded syringes.) Simple math indicates that the garbage intensity (I think I just made that term up right now) is about 1500 pieces of garbage per mile.

I assumed that this entire amount had built up during the two years since our last garbage pickup, conducted by a sorority. But when I drove down this stretch of street five days later, on November 17, I could see twenty large new pieces of garbage.

From this I conclude that when I see garbage along Oklahoma streets and highways, much of it is newly-deposited, rather than an accumulation from many months.

How can we expect the average Oklahoman to know or care about evolution, global warming, or the environment, if the world outside of their immediate experience—even land that belongs to their community or their neighbors—has no value whatsoever? I am happy to report that there is a significant minority of Oklahomans who do care, but is it any wonder that we are having little if any effect on the community and political life of our state?

 

The preceding appeared in my science blog. For this blog, I must add that rural Oklahoma is considered to be the most intensely Republican and intensely Christian part of America. If Republican Christians completely take over the rulership of our country—something they fully expect God to make happen—you can expect it to have many evil characteristics, not the least of which will be that it will be smothered in garbage. This is just one more way in which Republicans hate altruism.

Lame Deer Told It Like It Was

In 1972, John (Fire) Lame Deer told his feelings and recollections to Richard Erdoes, who helped him make it into a book: Lame Deer, Seeker of Visions. It is the life of a full-blood Lakota man who became, after various hilarious failures, one of the respected medicine men in his tribe. He lived on the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota, and he saw it all. He told Erdoes, and Erdoes wrote down, exactly what he thought about the past and ongoing oppression of Native Americans by whites, especially in South Dakota where there is very little intermixing of the cultures and races.

Lame Deer cried out that there was no justice for Natives. He said that white sheriff’s officers arrested young women for being drunk, whether they were drunk or not, put them in prison, and raped them. (Even today, young Native women vanish.) Indians get executed for killing whites, but a white might be able to kill an Indian without even doing jail time. To Lame Deer, the era of genocide did not end with the Wounded Knee massacre in 1890.

Lame Deer was particularly incensed that a white man could come into the Black Hills and start carving up a mountain into a gigantic statue. The fact that the statue, the incomplete form of which you can still see from the main highway, is of Crazy Horse, means that the white man can claim that he is doing it for the benefit of the Indians. All his gift shop earnings are tax-free. (This man has since died, as has Lame Deer.) The man’s vision includes a university free to all Indians, somewhere on the grounds of the monument. Where will it be, wondered Lame Deer—perhaps in Crazy Horse’s big toe or the horse’s hoof? But what he disliked most was the fact of building a big monument. Throughout white history, most monuments have been celebrations of killing, such as a pharaoh building a monument that tells how many cities he burned and how many people he impaled.

This photo shows me at the head of Crazy Horse.

Sometimes I think Lame Deer was just trying to shake us up. He openly wished for the old days in which the Lakota ate raw buffalo guts.

The chapter titles are irresistible. “That Gun in the New York Museum Belongs to Me,” “The Green Frog Skin” (referring to greenback dollars), “Sitting on Top of Teddy Roosevelt’s Head” (about Mt. Rushmore), “Don’t Hurt the Trees,” “The Upside-Down, Forward-Backward, Icy-Hot Contrary,” and “Blood Turned into Stone,” are just a few of them.

Lame Deer was quite resentful of white religion, but mainly because of hypocrisy. White actions bore little resemblance to white Christianity. He wrote, “I respect other religions, but I don’t like to see them denatured... You’ve made a blondie out of Jesus. I don’t care for those blond, blue-eyed pictures of a sanitized, Cloroxed, Ajaxed Christ. How would you like it if I put braids on Jesus and stuck a feather in his hair? ... Jesus was a Jew. He wasn’t a yellow-haired Anglo. I’m sure he had black hair and dark skin like an Indian. The white ranchers around here [South Dakota] wouldn’t have let him step out with their daughters... His religion came out of the desert in which he lived, out of his kind of mountains, his kind of animals, his kind of plants. You’ve tried to make him into...a long-haired Billy Graham...and that’s why he doesn’t work for you anymore. He was a good medicine man, I guess. As you read it in the Bible, he sure had the power, the healing touch.”

Jesus did not have desires for physical wealth, the way most of his followers do. But, “if this earth should ever be destroyed, it will be by desire, by the lust of pleasure and self-gratification, by greed for the green frog skin, by people who are mindful only of their own self, forgetting about the wants of others.” Elsewhere, Lame Deer wrote, “White man makes himself something more than God.”

Lame Deer ends his account by saying that you could learn from him, “if you want to be taught by an old man living in a dilapidated shack, a man who went to third grade for eight years...”

Erdoes also has some things to say about the false religion of American Christians. “Christians who no longer believe that they could bump into Christ at the next street corner, what are they? Jews who no longer think they could find God in a pillar of fire, why would they go on being Jews?”

When you read this book, you can feel something of the rage that still burns in the Plains tribes, and that erupted a few years ago in protests over the Dakota Access Pipeline [ref]. This rage can seldom be found anymore in tribes, such as my Cherokee tribe, who were conquered long ago and who have intermixed extensively with the whites. Native Americans are the forgotten minority, and are to a great extent the victims of the white perversion of Christianity.

Face to Face with War: The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Part 3

This is the third essay I have written about the novel The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse by Spanish novelist Vicente Blasco Ibañez. The world in 2021 is no less vulnerable to war than in any previous year, decade, century, or millennium.

I suppose it is about time to describe the novel itself. It is focused on Marcelo Desnoyers, a Frenchman who fled France to avoid being drafted into the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. He earned a fortune in Argentina and returned to France for what he considered to be the pinnacle of cultured life. He bought a big house, and then bought a castle in the country near the Marne River. He filled both places with incredible treasures. His two children were Argentinian citizens. One of them, his son Julio, became well-known in Paris for his dancing and his wasteful lifestyle. In particular, a married woman was his lover.

When the Great War started, Marcelo was too old to fight, and Julio was exempt because he was not a French citizen. The war changed everything for all of them. Marcelo went out to his castle, just in time, it turned out, for the Battle of the Marne. He saw it all from his castle, which the Germans attacked and plundered. The Germans not only slaughtered all of the people they could find in the village near the castle but were also full of arrogance. The German officers feasted on Marcelo’s food, and even dressed themselves in his daughter’s dresses and danced around. They shat upon the rugs. Ibañez vividly describes the scenes, using all of the senses. In the wounded villagers, brains were visible, throbbing behind faces without noses. A cannon ball tore off the head of one soldier, who for just a split second kept walking, with two jets of red blood shooting upward from his neck. Disemboweled horses trampled their own entrails. It was at the greenest time of year, when the wheat was in full grain, the most vivid contrast possible between life and death.

The German officers also pretended to be sincerely good people. They carried photos of their beloved families and proclaimed that only by destroying France would their families be able to live. This was an incredible lie but one that, Ibañez suggested, the Germans actually believed. They recognized Marcelo as the castle owner, and instead of just shooting him they tried to convince him of the righteousness of their cause.

But the Germans were beaten back. During their retreat, they transformed the ruined castle into a military hospital. Here Marcelo watched some of the very officers who had so recently boasted of their inevitable victory return, mangled almost beyond recognition, and die. When the French army returned, the Germans fled.

Northern France began to recover. But life for the Desnoyers family changed forever. Julio’s lover, feeling guilty at cuckolding her husband, found that the husband had become a military hero as he was wounded in battle. She sought him out, stayed by his side, and nursed him back to health. Julio, heartbroken, felt that he could do only one thing: join the French army as a foreign volunteer. He did so and became a hero himself. His motivation was not patriotism so much as it was forlorn love, and to just do something with his life rather than just to enjoy his wealth. His father Marcelo, who every day felt the guilt at having fled his patriotic duty in 1870, was now intensely proud of his son.

As you can certainly guess, Julio was killed in battle. The story ends, after almost 500 pages, with Marcelo and his family feeling almost infinite grief out in the middle of the burial fields, months after the battle was over. The bodies of slaughtered French soldiers had been piled up and their burial places marked only with little wooden crosses. The bodies of the German soldiers were piled in unmarked pits and covered with dirt.

The scale of the burial fields is nearly impossible to imagine apart from Ibañez’s description. I got only a tiny glimpse of what it must have been like when I hiked with my son-in-law’s family in the Vosges Mountains that divide Alsace and Lorraine in France in 2016. We went quickly past a World War One cemetery. The French family had seen it, and dozens of others, scattered throughout the mountains, but for me it was a powerful experience.

To a large extent, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse was a story that wove together improbable circumstances in order to give the author, who was a journalist with first-hand experience, the excuse to write about the ideas that led to the war. How likely would it be that the sister of Marcelo’s wife would just happen to marry a German who became a top official in the evil German government, and explained his point of view to the rest of the family in great detail? How likely that Julio and later Marcelo should befriend a Russian socialist living in Paris, who explained his point of view in great detail? He said that the supposed Christianity of the Germans was actually the worship of Thor rather than of Jesus. It was the atheist socialist, not the German Christians, who believed that “blessed are the peacemakers.” But the characters were not simply excuses for ideas; they were, to me, vividly real.

And was it not all ultimately futile? Ibañez wrote, through the mind of Marcelo, “I wonder if any star knows that Bismarck ever existed! I wonder if the plants are aware of the divine mission of the German nation!” But I wonder if Ibañez would have been able to guess that, a hundred years later, the European Union, led by France and Germany, would get the Nobel Peace Prize?

But hope remains defiant. At the very end, Marcelo’s daughter hugged her fiancé, a wounded hero, right out in the middle of the burial fields—love may not triumph over, but it remains defiant against, death.