Dances With Doughnuts

Hate Speech That Feels So Good

 

Anyone who has driven the interstate from Albuquerque to Flagstaff will attest to the rigors necessary to survival on that overused stretch of highway. Last week I used large amounts of truck stop coffee and unidentified chicken-fried-something to break up the voyage across that blighted landscape we call the painted desert. If you are fatigued from trailing, or passing convoys of 79-mile-per-hour-18-wheelers, drivers can choose to submit to ever-present signage, urging travelers to Exit Now! for Heap Big Savings! at the trading posts.

Every mile of I-40 is blemished by Navajos hawking rugs, booze, gambling tents, and 'authentic', but often Indonesian turquoise, in an uninterrupted assault on the senses by 36 inch hand painted letters on such venues as oversized red and yellow teepees and recycled billboards. Cultural Centers welcome travelers to a land of sandstone monuments stained with streaks of desert varnish, and sheer vermillion cliffs whose reddish hues vary in intensity with the time of the day. Sounds pretty, huh? -- if you could see it. The natural landscape is all but extinguished by Navajo and Hopi efforts at spiritual communion with the nature of their tax-free-cash-economy.

A trip on I-40 makes this jaundiced travel writer long for the minimalist elegance of, say --Orlando. The standard introduction to this wholly charmless and cultural void known as Indian Country, starts with a tour of a traditional village, complete with six sided hogans made from logs and earth. Brochures gush about traditional lifestyles by "noble guardians of the land", to eager busloads of French and Germans. Words like "balance, noble and harmony" flow like daddy's trust fund from bearded yuppies, who man the parks and monuments when they aren't teaching "Earth in the Balance" programs at suburban community college in places like Santa Barbara. Rapt listeners are instructed on the finer points of "indigenous culture" --an oxymoron whose very utterance should be punishable by a mandatory Chinese buffet in Grants, followed by an overnight at one of the rail-cars-turned-hotel-by-the-hour on the outskirts of Gallup.

The French nod earnestly when told of Navajo and Hopi reliance "on traditions during times of contemporary demands to preserve their way of life and reverence for the earth". Uh-huh.

I've driven most of the four corners from Grants to Tuba City -- and from Monument Valley to Cuba --and the only reverence for nature I've witnessed by the "indigenous culture" are the remains of equal parts Valvolene and Bud-Lite offered up in wholesale quantities to the roadside gods. Tour guides fail to mention that today's noble savage prefers a double-wide with hand-strung electrical wires across any remnants of natural beauty which may have escaped their guardianship. Unpainted aluminum siding and a space heater replace traditional adobe and kiva fireplace. And no modern day pit house is complete without at least two disassembled vehicles in the yard and a decomposing dog in the ditch. [Does NO one collect their dead pets in that part of the world? I've seen more reverence for animals in a Javanese food stall] Add drunken feral males prowling the parking lots for spare change and you have experienced the true nature of the indigenous southwest WITHOUT the expense of a guide.

If my harsh commentary injures the delicate sensibilities of more generous readers, I challenge them to spend one day driving any of the back roads of our revered Indian Nations, without encountering at least ONE drunken man wandering onto the road before 3PM. --Ditto for a minimum of 3 decomposing household pets -- within 100 yards of an occupied dwelling. Another annoyance is the proliferation of public service road signs. They add to the overall flavor of the place, alternately cautioning the natives to drink milk, inoculate their children, and never drink and drive. Oh, and "never leave your car unattended -- even when locked".

This sign was posted at an overlook at the edge of a cliff, in the most remote corner of the rarely visited north rim of Canyon de Chelly ---and I MEAN at the absolute end of civilization --in a wilderness --nary a mobile adobe in sight, in any direction. I was very very much alone. Just me, the canyon, the sign, and what I learned later, were those ingenious indigenous, who sit patiently in these remote pinon forests, waiting for an opportunity for what the locals [really] call a Navajo shopping spree.

All of which brings me to the purpose of this grumpy, depressing travelogue.

What ever happened to the noble concept of natural selection? I mean the real life and death stuff. Darwin and Wallace would offer a stern rebuke if they saw what penicillin and alcohol rehab has done to the gene pool of the American Southwest.

Necessary aside: A government tour guide in Chile who was pitching ski town investment to a group of visiting Americans, reminded us that the stability of the their new economy was, in no small measure due to the early eradication of the Indian "problem". He cautioned us that Peru and Bolivia had spared the locals, with devastating results. Lima and La Paz are now overwhelmed with the growing costs of educating the uneducable indigenous, who, with the help of modern medicine and vaccines, promptly bred themselves out of their natural environment at the expense of every bird and butterfly.

Hmmmmm.

Readers, be assured, I do NOT proffer any recommendations of genocide --yet. But I do warrant that anything more than a weekend of Dances With Doughnuts in the Land of Enchantment would test the resolve of the most ardent altruist. In my gloomier moods, I do wonder aloud, what good has come of man's endless charitable, but as yet self defeating efforts to lift all boats, as they say. When the Dutch and British first sailed into a South African harbor, the locals had not yet discovered that mere cloth, held up to the wind, could move floating logs forward. Forget concepts such as yesterday and tomorrow. Traditions such as boinking the local fauna, endured however, along with deflowering the local girls before they were toddlers, in some nonsensical belief that sex with a virgin cures AIDS. This little tidbit is not widely discussed beyond local newspapers in Sub Saharan Africa, but a contingent of aid workers insist they are making progress, alerting the West to the epidemic of incest and pedophilia endemic to Africa's noble indigenous "culture".

See ---In my travels, I have begun to rethink everything I've been told about conquests and the conquered. I'm beginning to get the picture of just exactly what caused all that pillage and plunder mentality back when nasty Euros exterminated whole civilizations. When Navajos went on their early shopping sprees, they stole not just live stock and horses, but slaves as well. And they didn't free em, --they put em to work! [did you hear that Jesse?]

What if --just what if, those letters to Spain detailing cannibalism by protein deficient Indians so horrified the conquistadors, that they said screw it, just kill em all. One such correspondence tells of a woman spreading the blood of a severed human limb on her nipple, that her infant could suckle the protein rich blood. Rain dances my ass. These weren't sacrifices to Gods, they were killing each other for food once all the large mammals were gone. Universities in three states have been fussing and feudin over the "implications" of their discovery of large piles of human bones near the kitchens of the Anasazi cliff dwellings. That's easy. They were cannibals. Nobody wanted to print the truth of these people, and now anthropologists must apologize for their politically incorrect findings. .

Carvings of ole Chacmool, in the Yucatan, show him reclining with a bowl on his belly. It held human hearts, sacrificed to the god [of hunger]. THIS and other ghoulish practices by these "noble" savages, cause anthropologists such as Marvin Harris to conclude that the conquest of the Aztec was made easier because the Spanish were readily able to dehumanize the people they conquered. Cortez conquered the Aztec with 550 men, 16 horses and a gleeful local population, eager to rid themselves of their own masters.

Ditto for Peru. The Incas were savage, blood thirsty giants who preyed on anything which breathed within their expanding realm. So what if they were master masons? They were firmly at the top of the food chain for thousands of years, yet hadn't discovered that coconuts roll down hill. By the 1400's they hadn't created a word for tomorrow, used those coconuts for wheels, or mastered the common Roman arch. But they had enough time and slave labor to build a large cities on mountain tops. Visitors to Macchu Picchu get the same cultural brain washing as those hapless travelers on Interstate 40. This time the miracle is sun dials. What's so amazing? On the equator, the sun rises at 6AM and descends at 6PM every day of the year. When you got nothing better to do than watch the sun and the moon, I would hope to hell after a couple thousand years, somebody would figure out that the path changes with the equinox, and solstices. Wouldn't that give them the advantage of a sun warmed spot on the north AND south surfaces of their dwellings?.

Once the Incas, Aztecs, Zulus or Bantu achieved 3/5ths of Maslowe's hierarchy of needs, one would think they might have engaged in a little self exploration or a glimmer of benevolence. If there is evidence of same, I 've not read it or seen it. Remember, these heathens were still eating each other for lack of protein when Notre Dame was built or when Leonardo drafted his first flying machine.

I am willing to bet my passport stamps that each of these cultures will swamp the life boats called civilization within a few decades should we continue to underwrite their "success". More than once we have saved them from themselves, yet they show no sign of self sufficiency or acquiescence to Western philosophy, our norms and mores.

That goes double for African Americans, who know better than most that their ancestors won life's lottery when they were "chosen" to toil on plantations in the American south. If not for the endemic African slave trade, [that was slave trading by and for Africans, to non Africans], we might never have witnessed the wonder that is/was Walter Williams, Frederick Douglass, Larry Elder or Tiger Woods, for they would be toiling in Zimbabwe or Cameroon today.

We cannot lift all boats when ours are swamped by misinformation and down right lies about what IS and what is NOT worthy of extinction on this planet. My maxim is "any culture which has not learned to shit other than where they drink has DNA begging for extinction". We are under no obligation to continue to save them from themselves, or in the words of Ayn Rand "that we should apologize to the savages of Africa and Asia, that we have produced it and they have not". I don't want to hear anymore excuses by the chattering classes of the neuveau reich on the left, about the horrors of colonialism or the disruption of the native species.

There are 6 billion competing ideas on the meaning of life. And they are not equal. It's time we said so --AGAIN. And in very stern language. Since these truths have slipped our collective memory, perhaps we should visit the history books on why good men used violence to contain these animals the first time. There was nothing noble about any of these savages. If readers need a reality check, I suggest an extended auto tour of the Land of Enchantment.

Carole's Absolute Laws of the Universe -OR- Your genetic code is worthy of extinction IF---

You evacuate in your drinking water. Or haven't discovered the reasoning for such prohibitions. .

You continue to give birth to children you cannot feed, clothe or sustain even in the event of their death.

You eat your seed corn.

Have sex with your seed corn or any other child.

You rely on host cultures to subsidize any of the aforementioned poor choices.

You have not achieved a modicum of security in your source of food or shelter after thousands of years at the top of the food chain.

Successful management of self and resources can catapult even the most ignoble homo sapien to new levels of self awareness. Outward manifestations of same could include a simple gesture like seat belts for your child, or a newfound reluctance to shop in someone elses unlocked car.

Do I hear an amen? ®

- Carol

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