I've put this reading off for long enough, mostly because I don't have the right answer. And I've concluded that I don't even have a good answer and likely never will. I'm not a pet person and if I were, my choice probably wouldn't be a cat. But my wife and I wound up with this cat. I've taught her 'fetch' and 'shake hands' and occasionally she will 'speak' on command. When she goes outside, she is on a leash. The cat is thoroughly dominated. On the other hand, the cat has never missed a meal and her sole function seems to be converting expensive cat food into cat hair and cat turds. If she were free, she could reach her full potential as a cat. Provided of course that she weren't killed by a car or a coyote or she didn't die of disease, starvation or freezing. That is how I see the FLDS. The government could save these poor benighted women even if they don't realize that they need to be rescued. We could take so much pride in empowering those who managed to survive the predators and starvation. In fact, we don't need the government to solve our problems. Lets break out torches and pitchforks and go destroy the monster ourselves! Picture Dale Barlow limping through the compund saying "Thancthuwawy! Thancthuwawy! If this is being done to "protect the children", I wonder how a 416 kids from here would fare in terms of pregnancy, clothing, adequate food,etc. and whether their responses would be that different if they were asked the questions the FLDS kids are being asked? I think we often have things backwards. If a man fathers a dozen children with half a dozen women and abandons them all he gets a starring spot on MTV. If he takes responibility for all of them, he's a monster. Wilt Chamberlin brags of having bedded tens of thousands of women and he's a hero. Pee Wee Herman practices the ultimate in safe sex and he goes to jail. We select Presidents based how they look and pick Miss America because of how she will solve the world's problems. We used to take LSD to make the world look weird. Now we take Prozac to make it look normal. How did a nation so backwards ever manage to become a superpower?
J. B. Jackson's piece on the Four Corners and trailers makes me think of Slab City. This would be a fascinating place for a thesis. If I were (much) younger and single, I'd buy a van or a ratted out motorhome, a lap-top, a good digital camera, take a year from school, and head off to Slab City for a season. I'd want to know who these people were, why they were there, where they came from, where they went when they left... I'd like to know who made the rules and who enforced the rules. I'd wonder about the social and political hierarchy of a culture like that. If only I were the higher education type.
Anyway, why do we look down on people who live in trailer parks? "Drag a hundred dollar bill through a trailer park..." We don't sneer at people who live in trailers. We don't. There is a "campground" on Rock boulevard that fills with trailers in the summer but doesn't carry the stigma that a trailer park in Lemon Valley carries. The people in the campground or for that matter, Slab City, are "vagabonds" and "gypsies". They aren't permanent. The trailer park is. The trailer park is the rural counterpart to the urban housing project. The denizens are trapped by social and economic conditions but the person towing the trailer isn't trapped anywhere.
I finally got around to reading the Meinig piece. It raises questions as to what role the church played in how the colonization was done. i. e., did the Catholic belief in confession and penitence determine that the Spanish assimilated the natives while the Protestants segregated? Interesting but I take issue with the article for a number of reasons. First, he selects his imperialism. Russian expansion into Siberia is included, but the same practice in Poland is excluded. An unwary reader could get the impression that only the West ever colonized. He calls the return of the Iberian peninsula to christian control as a "reconquest" but says that non-christians were usually never more than a minority anyway. Really? The history I learned says otherwise. Finally, Meinig excludes Japanese imperialism. Japanese imperialism was a major reason the U.S. ended up in Southeast Asia. And for someone of a certain age, my age, why America got involved in Viet Nam is a very important question.
Icebergs have some interesting shapes.
And some interesting usesThe icebreaker breaking ice
Ready for a night flight
What you see at night.
The highest red and white lights are the ship's mast. The row of red lights is the hangar. The semi-circle below that is the flight deck. Aim for that. The white light at the bottom is the stern. Everything else is freezing sea water.
