Taken from Daybook's Entry 11 Dec 2007
Today was blundersome and burdensome, though I'd strength and will to enjoy many moments. I met Bretski at Sunroom at 12:45 p.m. Our table neighbours were deutschreder and our spyspeech pattered on without privacy. Soon we were back to English. B was eye-weary, depressed, down on the New World Colony, none of it beyond comprehension. Most of his countrymen make little eye or word contact, dismissing strangers and acquaintances alike for the sake of cosmetic comfort. They nose at their phones, feet, papers and pyooters, or blank-scope the world to their material advantage, allowing the stimulative rush of job and recreation to block out the pain of facing their identities, the very risk of interpersonal existence, hushed and unhasting. Drat the timepieces. The public also enjoy friends who keep them comfortably locked into this illusion of frantic productivity and meaning. Any true confrontation is likely to earn rejection and enmity, and thus the folk flock keep safely employed, enjoyed, stimulated, inert. In the face of bigger forces - governments and corporations - they sit cowed, craven, depressed, demoralised, and conned. They are deathly afraid. These suppressed and unrealised fears turn people's stimulation into a jolt of relief by contrast - into safety and ecstasy. The oligarchic State and Corporation affect and taint people's love and friendships, as mind, body and heart are sold to workplace, market and real estate. They've been bought and bribed out of the bliss of Domestic Diversion and Home's Handiwork. Even when they desire Home, such leisure's denied them. They've no love to spend there. No wonder they've no true friends.
I had to rush to work (irony inserted) and bid the B a quick farewell. He pressed me to let him use my computer, and he came at it all in a panic. I knew he'd been alerted to some stock market dynamic. He panted that he had to check something in 15 minutes or all was lost. In my hurried jumbling to fetch my skis, poles and skiboots for my mad dash, I knocked a longbow above a shelf so that it fell, then struck and tipped over a cubby-stand perched on a bench. The stand held an iron dobermann, an Italian leather-sheathed wineflask, three egg-shaped stones, and many cassette tapes. The iron dog smote and chipped the edge of my white chamberpot, pouring piddle onto the rug. A stone landed in the pee-pot, splashing more p. The wineflask cracked in seven pieces on the floor. A further stone split off the rim of an English ale-mug, and now I was cussing. About ten cassettes had shattered or sundered cases. No time to mend or clean anything. HOME must be left behind! I was out on skifeet, scudding to work. By wetsnow and slowsnow, it didn't work. Hopped an omnibus as the snowfall faded and refused to coat the earth. I stowed my skis upright in the bus back and then glided across the CapTel parking lot bang up against the entry doors. Removed my long feet and took them straight in to the head-desk where they received many smiles and minced honour, as I took my hero's seat among the host. One co-worker looked at me in an awe of disbelief and cried "Man, you're a Nordic dude !"
Two-hour return on the longskis. The air had cooled, but it was still too damp to hold good cold. I kept to icy sidewalks. Slick ice shifted ongoingly with scratchy cement patches. In evasion I rode on the sludge-slathered roughs.
I buried some of my heart at Wounded Knee the next day as I watched the eaglehearted movie of that name. I identify to a flaming degree with Lakotas, their dignity and vision, their face-to-face approach to life and lore, their health from herds and abhorrence for sickly soil-divelling and pulp-petty pap. So stirred was I that I rang B at 2:30 a.m. to say the federal government are not my people, nor do they care a wit for any common citizen's peace. In France, as recently pointed out in Sicko, the government rules in fear of the people. Here the people fear the government's rule. Neither vigourous nor happy, our people are easy to govern. If we demanded too many basic pleasures, we'd be a bear to govern, we'd be like the bygone paleoamericans - obsessed with human dignity. The Rights of Man...how little we give ourselves today. At movie's end, I was amazed to learn that the State still owes the Lakota ('Sioux') 600 million dollars, the appreciated landprice for the land they were denied which they forfeited to South Dakota. No such money (alone) could fix what was lost. Neither can our kinds of careers make grass or hearts blossom. The film's Sitting Bull was the splitting image of my grandfather, Bascom Paul Hillman, a man still alive, Scots-English-Irish mixed with Cherokee.
