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Well, you almost didn't get this post. I had already completed the Newport post, when I realized that I had missed William Least Heat-Moon's (LHM) mention of Philomath and Burnt Woods. But this actually works, because LHM has been going through a tough time by this point in the book, and turns a corner. I actually changed the map marker on Corvallis to red to signify that there was something to his time spent there, and now, he has a new purpose. Read on to learn what, at least in my estimation. And check the map if you want to place Philomath and Burnt Woods on your mental geography!
Book Quote
"The wind came in over the Coastal Range in the night and blew the sky so clean it looked distilled. As the sun cast long morning shadows, I went west into the mountains toward Philomath and Burnt Woods. Either the return of sun or a piece of cornpone etiology from a California cafe gave the feeling I'd begun the journey again."
This is a short post. Why? Because I f***ed up! I jumped ahead to Newport, Oregon and totally missed that LHM passed through Philomath and Burnt Woods. So I'm essentially pulling this post out of my a** after working on Newport's. However, I think there's a couple of things that are important to understand about Blue Highways and LHM's journey at this point.
LHM, by the time he gets to Corvallis, is going through a hard time. All through California and into Oregon he has been questioning himself and the purpose of his journey. When he gets to Corvallis, it rains for two days and he stays there, in a sad and morose mood. He calls his girlfriend, the "Cherokee," only to be rebuffed. It is in Corvallis, the "heart of the valley," that he seriously thinks about giving up the trip. He says in Part 6, Chapter 3:
"In darkness and rain I left the library. I began fighting the fear that I was about to lose heart utterly and head back. Oh, god, I could feel it coming. The old Navajos, praying for renewal of mental strength, chant, 'In the ways of the past, may I walk,' but my chant went the other way around."
He's questioning everything. He is trying to decide what he hopes to accomplish - why he is even making the trip at all when it seems so difficult:
"'Nothing,' Homer sings, 'is harder on mortal man than wandering.' That's why the words travel and travail have a common origin."
But, as the quote says above, he has a change of heart. He finds a purpose in the trip, and takes inspiration from Whitman's lines:
"What I needed was to continue, to have another go at reading the hieroglyphics, to examine (as Whitman says) the 'objects that call from diffusion my meanings and give them shape.'"
I find it interesting that when he resumes his journey, along the way he passes through Philomath and Burnt Woods. There is some symbolism here, yes. A philomath is a person who loves learning. We know that LHM is an academic and a writer, and as such, I would assume a lover of learning. So the symbolism I see here is that LHM, to find purpose in his trip, has to go back to that love of learning, that excitement about seeing what comes around the next bend, and putting it all into the context of the America he lives in, the life he inhabits and the sum of his knowledge of self and others.
Of course, what's around the bend but Burnt Woods. Again, I see symbolism. Burnt Woods was named after the scars of a number of forest fires that can be seen in the area. A forest fire is destructive. It kills trees, plants and animals. But it is also regenerative. In many conifer forests, a cone can only properly germinate if it is opened in the intense heat of a fire. It takes a forest fire to clear out the dead underbrush, allowing the newly germinated seeds to take root and grow. In a sense, LHM's trip is about clearing out the brush in the forest of his life, and germinating something new in his ideas, his outlook, and his life.
LHM states it best:
"I had been a man who walks into a strange dark room, turns on the light, sees himself in an unexpected mirror, and jumps back. Now it was time to get on, time to see WHAT THE HELL IS NEXT."
It's raining, it's pouring. And our driver and guide is feeling downright depressed as he waits out the rain in Corvallis, Oregon. Let's explore the symbolism of rain to the human condition, shall we, as we drink a few beers in Ghost Dancing with William Least Heat-Moon (LHM). Here's the map to locate Corvallis on our journey.
Book Quote(s)
"In western Oregon it can rain a hundred and thirty inches a year, making weather so dismal that even a seadog like Sir Francis Drake complained about it four centuries ago when he sailed here on the Golden Hind in search of the Northwest Passage. Those two days I wandered around Corvallis more dispirited than edified by the blue-road perception. I walked and walked. 'Nothing,' Homer sings, 'is harder on mortal man than wandering.' That's why the words travel and travail have a common origin.
"....Another etymology: Corvallis, a Latin combination meaning 'in the heart of the valley.' For me, it was more a valley of the heart. No wonder Pascal believed man's inability to stay quietly in his room is the cause of his unhappiness."
Blue Highways: Part 6, Chapter 3
Downtown Corvallis, Oregon. Photo by Paul Bausch on his On Focus blog. Click on photo to go to host page.
Corvallis, Oregon
Rain. One man's surplus is another man's headache, and I have definitely noticed it this year with the lack of rain that has plagued New Mexico. Here, we get an average of ten inches of rainfall per year in this desert climate, but as I write here in mid-September, we've only received one inch. Contrast that with LHM's situation, where he is holed up in Corvallis with a case of blues, and where he is still trying to understand what his trip means to him. While there, it rained constantly on him for two days straight, and he makes the point in this chapter that on average it rains 130 inches per year in that part of Oregon.
When I lived in Northern California, I wasn't a big fan of the rain. Our springs and summers were generally beautiful. Around May, the wildflowers started coming out, and the rivers still ran higher because of continued runoff from the winter rains. The air was cool and crisp in the mornings while the sun shone over the bright blue ocean. It might warm up a bit in the afternoon, but warming up generally meant temperatures in the 60s Fahrenheit (15.6 - 20.6 C). A hot day in the summer might get to 75 degrees Fahrenheit (23.9 C). Lows might get into the 50s Fahrenheit at night (10 - 15 C). Life in those types of temperatures on the coast usually felt pretty good.
Winters were another story. Temperatures were usually in the 50s Fahrenheit during the day, and cold because of the humidity in the air due to the ocean. At night, temperatures would drop into the 30s Fahrenheit (-1.1 - 3.9 C). The sky was often gray, and it rained a lot. When it didn't rain, it was foggy - a thick gray fog that was hard to drive in. And the rain. It would just keep coming, and coming. My town was only accessible by two-lane highways running through mountains and along rivers. Often, landslides caused by rain turning the hillsides unstable, or floods caused by swollen rivers, would close the roads in and out of my town and we would be cut off, at least by road, from the outside world for a while until the waters receded or the roads could be cleared. Even after I moved away and came back for holidays, my wife and I spent a couple of trying times wondering if we'd be able to get to our plane to get back to our jobs as the rain pounded and roads were impassable.
As I write this now, my house is under a beautiful canopy of clear blue skies. Sometimes the sunlight here, all 310 days a year on average, can seem oppressive in itself, especially when one is nine inches of rain behind schedule in a desert climate. When it rains here, rather than run inside, I often take a moment to stand out in it and let the drops patter down on my bare head, soak my t-shirt a little, and wet my skin. In the Pacific Northwest, it was easy to take the rain for granted. In the dry Southwest, one sees the rain for the precious resource it actually is. In Northern California, the rain was often a hindrance and an annoyance. In New Mexico right now, even a few drops is a cause for dancing and celebration.
We often associate the rain with sadness, as if by personifying the world to match our own mood, we can imagine that as we hurt, the skies cry with us. Writers of music have often made reference to the weather to describe feeling lonely, down, depressed and sad:
Don't know why there's no sun up in the sky stormy weather since my man and I ain't together keeps raining all the time
Rain is very symbolic and is an easy way to express signs that our inward lives are stormy, tumultuous, and often sad. But reality is much more complex than that.
For example, when the rains don't come and the crops fail, humans often sang to the skies to relieve their suffering and misery, and performed dances thought to attract the rains. It has been known throughout history, predating our scientific age and the facts about weather patterns, that the real reason the rains didn't come were because the gods were angry. It was also true that when we faced terribly inclement weather such as tropical storms, hurricanes, floods and the like, it was also because the gods were angry. Even today, at times of need, we hedge our bets and appeal to the supernatural. In New Orleans, during hurricane season, the chants of voodoo practitioners to their spirits might race Judeo-Christian prayers in a metaphysical attempt to send the hurricanes in other directions and blunt their strength. Obviously, that failed with Katrina.
Of course, there are songs about fair weather and how nice days reflect our moods as well:
Blue skies, shining on me nothing but blue skies do I see. Bluebirds, singing their song nothing but bluebirds all day long.
The wonderful and problematic thing about humans is that we, unlike other species, have the capability to look into the past and worry about the future. Therefore, we can always be blue about what went wrong, or worried about what might go wrong later. How long will the blue skies last? In fact, we know that blue skies will most likely end, and we'll be back to stormy weather and rainy days for awhile in our lives. We know that we'll be just like LHM, sitting Corvallis, the heart of the valley, heartsick and in an emotional valley because our woman doesn't seem to love or want us anymore, and we don't really know where we are going to go or what we are going to do. But, for most us, just as we wait out the rain, we can wait out our own blues. Eventually, the rain will end, a sliver of sunlight will poke through the clouds signaling better days ahead, and we'll enjoy a springtime until the rain comes again.
Musical Interlude
I quoted this song above...but I figure that LHM might have been thinking about it as he sat in Corvallis. I Can't Stand the Rain was recorded originally by Ann Peebles, and I first heard an amazing rendition by Angeline Ball in the movie The Commitments. The song really evokes how nature and our emotions often seem to work in concert.
This post is a fun one, mostly about banana slugs! Slimy, ugly and utterly fascinating, these creatures are. I grew up with them. William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) comes face to face with one, and then lets it get away from him. Somewhere in his van crawls a banana slug, making sleep difficult. Who wants to wake up with a slug on their face? I don't!
I made some guesses for this post, picking spots on Muir Creek and on Salt Creek to represent where LHM might have stopped. To see these two places, navigate to the map!
Book Quote(s)
"Oregon 230 followed a broad mountain stream called Muir Creek. When the morning warmed, I stopped along the banks to fill a basin and wash....
"Big yellow-hooded blossoms of the Western skunk cabbage spread over the margins....Looking nothing like cabbage, the leaves were used by Indians to wrap food for cooking; they pulverized the hot peppery roots into a flour that helped save them (and the Lewis and Clark expedition) from starvation in the early spring before other edible plants sprouted."
Blue Highways: Part 6, Chapter 2
"I crossed the Cascades on Oregon 58....
"At noon, the journey began a kind of sea change that started when I drove up an old logging road into the recesses of Salt Creek....
"After a sandwich, I poked about the woods and turned up a piece of crawling yellow jelly nearly the length of my hand. It was a banana slug, so named because the mollusk looks like a wet, squirming banana. I wanted to photograph it, but a drizzle came on, so I bedded it down in damp leaf litter in a pail. I could drive out of the rain to take its picture."
Blue Highways: Part 6, Chapter 2
Salt Creek, below the Falls. Image by "miatasailor" at Flickr. Click on image to go to host page.
Somewhere on Muir and Salt Creeks, Oregon
Why so many quotes today? These passages of LHM's make me a little homesick. I've written in many posts that I am from the north coast of California, and the climate, animal and plant life of that area is very similar to what you find in Oregon. The forests are made up of tall trees - in my home area the trees are predominantly redwood and fir, and in this part of Oregon you have pretty much the same type of coniferous forest, minus the redwoods. At all times of year, especially in valley's and gulches near streams, the land is wet and lush. Coniferous forests often create their own weather by holding and trapping the moisture that they need to survive underneath the forest canopy. In winter, regardless of whether it is raining or not, one can often walk beneath the boughs of the trees and get bombarded by water condensing and rolling off the needly leaves in heavy drops.
I love those types of forests. In the winter, the lushness and dampness brings to one's nose a heavy smell of vegetation. The forest loam, made up of fallen needles that have accumulated over years, provides a soft, spongy ground to walk upon. Rivers, swollen by the rains, run high and rapid, looking very different than the dark green, brownish streams that are their summer guises. Sometimes, large fish negotiate the rapids, occasionally leaping out of the water - these are salmon returning to their birthplaces to spawn at the end of one of the most fascinating circular journeys of our world. Born upstream, if they survive various dangers after they hatch they swim downriver to the ocean. There they become saltwater fish for the majority of their lives, anywhere from one to five years. At some point, they heed the call to reproduce and find their way back to the stream that they left so long before. They swim against the stream, negotiating all kinds of obstacles and dangers both natural and man-made. If they make it to their spawning ground, then depending on their gender they lay eggs or release sperm to fertilize the eggs. And then, after a glorious moment of reproduction, they die.
This type of environment is like where I grew up, and I still get a thrill walking through the chill of a dripping coniferous forest, the smell of the rotting vegetation, the smell of newly fallen or cut wood from these areas, and the smell of the clean, and I mean really clean, air. My pants might get wet from walking through living and large vegetation such as the skunk cabbage LHM mentions. A walk in such areas is usually followed by warming my backside against the heat of a warm indoor fire. There's nothing like it.
A face to face view with a banana slug. Photo at The Murky Fringe blog. Click on photo to go to host page.In this world lives one of the most fascinating creatures. I used to run across them as a boy. LHM is entranced enough by one to revert to a boy himself and put it in a pail to take with him. I'm writing about the banana slug. On wet days, it was not uncommon to find one, slowly sliming its way across the leaves, leaving a trail of sticky goo behind it. These creatures are related to snails, and have the same type of movements, sans shell. Their antennae slowly move back and forth, with what appear to be little eyes on them. They look like a banana. If I touched one or picked it up, it was always slimy.
A pair of bananas. Image at the Magickcanoe blog. Click on photo to go to host page.
If a banana slug fears, it should fear little boys. Little boys are the bane of pretty much every slow-moving and slow-witted creature. For banana slugs in particular, every type of torture could be devised. Slice them, dice them. Put firecrackers under them or around them. Throw them at other kids. Put salt on them and watch them horribly shrivel up and die. I partook in some of these activities, usually because of peer pressure. Secretly, I was delighted by banana slugs. They were just so, harmless. They seemed like manatees or cows of the mollusk world. They did their own thing, not really caring about anything else, paying attention only to their own world.
The UC Santa Cruz mascot, Sammy the Banana Slug! Image at World's Best Information. Click on photo to go to host page.
I was very happy when I learned some years ago that the University of California at Santa Cruz had taken the banana slug as its unofficial mascot. The students chose the name as a statement against the hyper-competitiveness of college athletics, since UC-Santa Cruz didn't have organized athletics at the time, but when the university decided to join the NCAA Division III in five sports, the chancellor wanted to give the teams a more dignified name. However, the Sea Lions didn't catch on, and in 1986 the university bowed to student pressure and officially changed its name to the banana slugs. The lowly banana slug went from a regional nobody that little boys tortured to the rarified heights of university mascot, symbolized by Sammy the Slug!
Back to LHM, who put the slug in a pail and put it in Ghost Dancing in order to drive out the rain and photograph it. What happened? He forgot about it, then later found the pail empty. Somewhere in his truck, a banana slug was marauding around and haunting his dreams that night. Maybe he was right to fear...after all, a banana slug has no known predators (except little boys)!
Musical Interlude
You don't know how hard it is, sometimes, to come up with a decent tune for the musical interlude, especially when you are writing about banana slugs or skunk cabbage. However, I found a band from Northern California called the Banana Slug String Band, whose musicians write and play educational songs for kids about the environment. A few that were really cool weren't available, but here's one about redwood trees called Big Red. Since I came from the redwood region, I enjoy looking at the trees.
If you want to know more about Muir and Salt Creeks
I'm going back to a theme of volcanoes in this post. When you read it, you'll understand how it fits in with William Leat Heat-Moon's journey of redemption, rebirth and self-discovery. Now that we've traveled alongside him past three volcanoes in the Pacific Northwest, I'll have to visit them. View the map to locate the almost perfectly circular Crater Lake.
Book Quote
"Mount Mazama may be the greatest nonexistent fourteen-thousand foot volcano in the country. Actually it isn't entirely nonexistent: only the top half is. From the upper end of the Klamath basin, you can still see a massive, symmetrically sloping uplift of the mountain base. Some six thousand years ago, geologists conjecture, the top of Mazama blew off in a series of ruinous eruptions and the sides collapsed into the interior.
"...I got out and looked around. A brilliant night. Trusting more than seeing, I walked through a tunnel in a snowdrift to the craterous rim of Mazama. There, far below in the moonlight and edged with ice, lay a two-thousand-foot-deep lake. Klamath braves used to test their courage by climbing down the treacherous scree inside the caldera; if they survived, they bathed in the cold water of the volcano and renewed themselves. Also to this nearly perfect circle of water came medicine men looking for secrets of the Grandfathers. Once a holy place, now Crater Lake is only a famous Oregon tourist attraction."
Blue Highways: Part 6, Chapter 2
Was this what William Least Heat-Moon saw from the rim of Crater Lake? Photo at Wikimedia Commons. Click on photo to go to site.
Crater Lake, Oregon
This post is back to volcanoes, but specifically, about the legends and symbolism that surround volcanoes. You'll notice in the quote above that LHM writes about Crater Lake as a perfect circle of water, and that it drew both young Klamath men eager to test and renew themselves, and medicine men looking for secrets. The symbolism of Crater Lake fits well into LHM's own journey, which he previously has described as circles within circles. He is on a journey of his own renewal, so standing on the rim of the crater is very much in touch with two of the main themes of Blue Highways.
There is also the symbolism of Crater Lake's geological history. Crater Lake is the collapsed caldera of what used to be Mount Mazama. About seven thousand years ago, the volcano collapsed in a violent eruption that was fifty times more powerful than the explosion that obliterated the top of Mount Saint Helens in the 1980s. Some of the accounts I've read have claimed that the ash material from such an explosion could have buried Rhode Island under 61 feet of ash, and if spread over the entire state of Oregon, would have covered it with nine inches of ash. Volcanoes are always reshaping themselves. The volcanoes of Hawaii do it in a slow ejection of lava which flows down the side of the volcano and builds it up during frequent eruptions and in slow motion. However, the volcanoes of the Pacific Northwest such as Lassen, Shasta, and the now extinct Mount Mazama, do it explosively, building up pressure as a magma dome pushes toward the surface and finally explodes outward. Sometimes, these volcanoes are the seeds of their own destruction. In New Mexico, where I live, the sides of a volcano in the Jemez Mountains collapsed in on itself numerous times over a million years ago, creating the 12 mile wide Valles Caldera. 2 million, 1 million and 640,000 years ago, the Yellowstone Caldera formed during three supereruptions, and is 34 miles by 45 miles wide. Similarly, the explosion of Mount Mazama created a caldera 6 miles wide when the sides of the volcano collapsed inward and upon itself. The caldera eventually filled with water and became Crater Lake, the deepest lake in the United States at almost 2,000 feet deep.
Why is this symbolic? I believe that everyone goes through cycles of build-up and destruction, which leads to renewal. You might have found that themes I'm focusing on, in tandem with LHM, are those like growth and renewal. Every cycle of growth, it seems, is preceded by some degree of destruction. Old patterns or outdated views and thoughts need to be discarded or dismantled as the growth process works. After all, one cannot move toward a future by desperately clinging to the past. Volcanoes are the ultimate in this type of renewal. No matter what, they reshape themselves by either covering over their past selves with new material, or by obliterating it.
The first humans in the area of Mount Mazama, not understanding the violent geological forces at work around and beneath them, put their own symbolic explanation upon the catastrophic events that created Crater Lake. In their explanation, handed down through their legends, the destruction of Mount Mazama was due to a cataclysmic battle between Llao, the Lord of the Below-World and Skell, the Lord of the Above-World. Llao, on one of his frequent forays to the Above-World, saw the daughter of a Klamath chieftain and fell in love with her. However, being from the Below-World, he was not very attractive and, well, the Below-World was not where the chieftain's daughter had planned to make her home, so she rejected him. Angry, Llao tried to her people by fire. They called to Skell for help.
The legend seems to indicate that at this time, both Shasta and Mazama were in eruption, because it describes a titanic battle between Llao, at the summit of Mazama and Skell, at the summit of Shasta. Huge boulders, red-hot, were thrown by each at the other. The earth was full of tumult - landslides, eruptions, and other phenomena raged as all the spirits of sky, water and earth joined on one side or the other. The Klamath people, afraid of what this battle would mean for the world, sent two medicine men to the Mazama volcano and they jumped into the roiling crater hoping that their sacrifice would calm the gods. This urged Skell on. In a final push, he overthrew Llao and threw him into the pit of Mazama and back into the Below-World. He then filled in the hole and covered it with water to seal Llao in for eternity.
I really love how actual geologic events transform into these types of stories by ancestral peoples who are struggling to make sense of cataclysm and catastrophe. Besides just two gods duking it out over a woman, one can read into this myth the overcoming of dark forces by light, the redemption of a people, or a war between halves of the human whole. And all of this runs along a chain of common human themes right up into the present day, and therefore fits with LHM's journey and his attempts to renew himself after a time of personal catastrophe.
Off in California and Oregon, two mountains still stand. One stands high, tall, and silent and perhaps will erupt to life again in a time of upheaval and chaos. The other stands broken, a shadow of itself, an almost perfect circle of water and a popular tourist attraction as the myths of its origins fade. They tell a story of a dynamic and sometimes violently evolving world, but they could easily be the stories of ourselves.
Musical Interlude
In keeping with the volcano theme, this song, Cities in Dust by the 1980s band Siouxsie and the Banshees, is about the destruction of the Italian city of Pompeii by the eruption of Vesuvius in the year 79. Volcanoes are fascinating both in their striking appearances and in their striking destructiveness.
On this day of remembrance for the heroes and martyrs of September 11, 2001 I do a reflection on where the United States has gone since that tragic day and where it might go. The opinions expressed are mine only. William Least Heat-Moon's (LHM) quote is used only as a path to my own reflections. I do not discuss much about Fort Klamath, but offer some links below for your information. Feel free to leave a comment whether you agree or disagree with me, but regardless, let's honor the innocent victims of a horrible act of terrorism. Here's a map to locate Fort Klamath.
Book Quote
"I don't know whether Oregonians generally honk horns or whether they had it in for me, but surely they honked. Later, someone said it was part of the 'Keep Moving, Stranger' campaign. I turned off into the valley at the first opportunity, an opportunity numbered route 62 that ran to Fort Klamath....
"....I stopped at a wooden cafe....In front sat an Argosy landcruiser with an Airstream trailer attached; on top...was a motorboat and on the front and back matched mopeds....I stood amazed at this achievement of transport called a vacation.
"A man with a napkin tucked to his belt came out of the cafe. A plump woman...watched from the cafe.
"'What's up, chum?' the man said.
"We went inside, and I heard the woman whisper, 'His type make me nervous.'
"....I got reviled by people who could afford life at six-miles-per-gallon....After all, they read the papers, they watched TV, and they knew America was a dangerous place."
Blue Highways: Part 6, Chapter 1
Historical photo of Fort Klamath. Photo at Legends of America. Click on photo to go to site.
Fort Klamath, Oregon
The quote today is a long one, and I had to do some manipulating so that it wouldn't be too long. The reason I chose to have such an extensive quote has something to do with the importance of this day, September 11, to many of us.
On the morning of September 11, 2001 I was getting ready to head from my home on Grand Route St. John in New Orleans to the University of New Orleans to teach my class. I was a graduate student, and as I ate and listened to National Public Radio, I heard the announcer say that a plane had hit one of the World Trade Center towers. Curious, I turned on the television, thinking that I would see that a small plane, such as a Cessna, had flown into the side of the building. The flames and smoke from the tower immediately told me that something much bigger had hit the building. Like everyone else, I watched in rapt fascination as yet another plane hit the second tower, and when I tore myself away and went to school, I heard in the car that yet another plane had hit the Pentagon and a fourth plane had crashed in Pennsylvania. At that point, the announcers were reporting that the United States was under attack through acts of terrorism. At school, I fielded a call from a young woman who was terrified and did not want to come into class because she was afraid that terrorists might get her. I excused her from class, and told her not to worry because terrorists usually attack large crowds or very well-known symbols. Somehow, I knew that day that everything would change.
I was heartened when the world, in the aftermath of the attacks, turned out in force to support the United States. My heart swelled when I read that so many peoples from so many other countries were expressing solidarity with the U.S. and, in the headline of the French paper Le Monde, "We Are All Americans." Perhaps, I thought, the United States will use this opportunity to forge new bonds of friendship, cooperate with other nations, and work together with them toward a common, peaceful and prosperous future that we all seek.
But, it was not to be. The people of the United States turned inward in fear of other terrors out there, and outwardly, the U.S. took a belligerent stance, striking out wherever it smelled the whiff of terrorism. First it was Afghanistan. I watched the cheers of a crowd at a prison rodeo in Louisiana when it was announced that the first cruise missiles had launched into Afghanistan. Then, it was Iraq. Our leaders seemed to have a lineup of countries that they planned to invade in preemptive moves to bring democracy. Studying political science, I knew that tearing down nations and rebuilding them was hard work and could be impossible under certain conditions. I was saddened to see the U.S. reputation suffer, and all the goodwill from most other nations dry up and blow away.
I have also watched as the U.S. has become a nation that seems to be increasingly looking without and within for enemies. A column by Cal Thomas that I read in my local paper on September 9th, 2011 exemplifies this fear. Thomas writes that Americans must observe 9/11 because it is a constant reminder of the countries and entities out there that "hate us," and that are "plotting to attack us again...and again." In the ten years since the terrorist attacks, American citizens are subject to new rules and regulations designed to keep them safe, but which have increased the powers and latitude of our country's law enforcement and military forces. The U.S., in conducting its war against terror, has appeared to compromise some of the very ideals of democracy itself by profiling based on race and religion, capturing and renditioning suspects, using enhanced interrogation techniques such as waterboarding, and denying prisoners accused of terrorism basic rights under national and international law.
Why does all of this come to my mind with the above quote? Feelings of being hated and persecuted are woven into the deepest and earliest fabric of this nation. The original settlers arrived in North America with very recent memories of political and religious persecution in the Old World. Even though the South was persecuting a significant portion of it population through slavery, the South always made the argument that it was the persecuted party. Today, a white majority facing the possibility that it will not be a majority within a decade or two, now claims that it is persecuted by illegal immigrants taking jobs and racial minorities getting taking advantage of social welfare policies. Businesses claim that they are persecuted by onerous government regulations. What is overlooked is that often, those claiming the loudest about persecution have been persecutors themselves.
The 20th century international environment cemented in U.S. opinion that there were others out to get us. Some of the threats were real, some were overblown. If it wasn't the Hun in World War I, it was the Nazis and Japanese in World War II. It was the Soviets and Chinese in the Cold War. The enemies recently have been the Chinese, North Koreans, Iranians, Cubans and especially fundamentalist, Islamic Arabs today. Supposedly, all of these entities are spending a lot of time and brainpower trying to bring down the United States.
All of this has coincided with a concern that within society, American are not safe. Children are at risk from pedophiles, women endangered by rapists, ordinary folk by thugs, gangs, or psychotic mass murderers. At the expense of social programs, enforcement has been stepped up and government has turned over the building and running of prisons to corporations to meet a perceived need to house all the criminals in our midst. The most popular solution seems to be the notion that everyone needs to arm themselves so that they can shoot back if fired upon. It's the same idea that drove the violent society of the Old West, with a civilized veneer. If the United States could be encapsulated in one person, it seems to me that this person would be lonely and afraid, holed up in a house, gun pointing out a slightly opened window and ready to fire at anything suspicious but not quite sure that the house he is in is really all that safe.
Yet we seem to partake in actions that do nothing to increase our safety even if it makes us feel better for a little while. We look with suspicion on those who are different, and distrust their motives even though we know little about them. We have marked certain groups and people, in general, as being potentially dangerous and treat them as such. Thus, every Muslim is a potential terrorist, and anyone who questions this generality is treated by some as at best naive and at worst a traitor.
LHM's quote, above, reminds us that we cannot, as a country founded on ideals of freedoms and rights, succumb to such falsehoods. After all, LHM was a long-haired guy in a van that invited suspicion and contempt from an older couple, yet he wrote a piece of literature that is beloved by many today. We invite nothing but polarization in society if we suspect everyone, and as Lincoln very wisely reminded us, "a house divided against itself cannot stand."
E.J. Dionne, also on September 9th, wrote a column that stands in stark contrast to Cal Thomas. Dionne wrote that we should remember the heroes and martyrs of 9/11 on the 10th anniversary of their sacrifices, but that then we should, as a nation, move on. He felt that it is dangerous to build a nation's policies around an horrific event in the past at the expense of the pressing problems that it faces in the present or looking toward the future. He writes that our nation has never been in danger of falling to entities that wish to put a pan-Islamist fundamentalist empire in place. Instead, we are more in danger from the mistake of not remembering what made the United States great in the first place.
I agree. 9/11 should unite us. After all, the victims of 9/11 were a cross-section of American ethnicities, religions (including Muslims), political beliefs, and classes. The terrorists of 9/11 did not warn Muslims to get out of the World Trade Center. They didn't care. We were attacked as a unified, diverse and free nation. If all we learned from 9/11 is to be suspicious of everyone and everything and to always strike before we are struck, then we keep our world dangerous place for ourselves far into the future. Instead, we should, as good democracies do, learn from our experience and take hard and sober looks at our actions. We should honor the heroes and martyrs of 9/11 by being wise in our collective decisions and by continuing to uphold our democratic ideals of freedom, rights and justice. Let's not be the old couple in LHM's quote, convinced completely that the world is a dangerous place, and that others must always be suspected and feared.
;)
Tuesday, September 20, 2011 at 5:35PM
Well, you almost didn't get this post. I had already completed the Newport post, when I realized that I had missed William Least Heat-Moon's (LHM) mention of Philomath and Burnt Woods. But this actually works, because LHM has been going through a tough time by this point in the book, and turns a corner. I actually changed the map marker on Corvallis to red to signify that there was something to his time spent there, and now, he has a new purpose. Read on to learn what, at least in my estimation. And check the map if you want to place Philomath and Burnt Woods on your mental geography!
Welcome sign in Philomath, Oregon. Photo from the Oregon MacPioneers Users Group. Click on photo to go to host page.
