Source of book: I own this.
Last summer’s epic camping trip
took us to some places in Colorado that we had briefly visited in 2015, but
wanted to return to and explore more thoroughly. In that prior trip, we had
primarily focused on Mesa Verde National Park, but Black Canyon of the Gunnison
and Great Sand Dunes ended up with only a short afternoon.
Combine this with my
brother-in-law’s desire to spend some time in the San Juan Range hiking, and we
had the makings of a trip.
One mistake I made in my planning
was to miss the opening of the Mesa Verde tour reservations by a day, and they
were already sold out for the holiday weekend we were there. What this meant
was that we needed to find some alternative activities for our full day there.
We could see the viewpoints in the evening after the crowds left.
I decided to explore the string of
ruins in the valley, both in Hovenweep National Monument, and Canyon of the
Ancients. This turned out to be a great decision - little in the way of crowds,
a gorgeous drive between sites.
It was at the excellent visitor’s
center for Canyon of the Ancients the day before our exploration that I ran
across this book. Since I enjoyed Burrillo’s first book, Behind
the Bears Ears, I decided to buy the book. The strange turns of fate
that result in the events in our lives, I suppose.
First, a bit about the title and
the nature of this book. The title comes from a line in the first book, where
Burrillo describes the United States as “the backwoods of everywhere” - the
place where nearly everyone comes from somewhere else, and where diverse people
intermingle. A perpetual borderland, so to speak. I love this idea - it is more
accurate than the “melting pot,” which tends to presume that we all turn out to
be the same amalgam, rather than a rich dish with a plethora of ingredients.
Like Burrillo, I love this part of the American experience - and unlike
today’s Republican Party, I very much want all these diverse people as my
neighbors.
It isn’t until the Afterword that
Burillo explains how the book came to be, which is too bad. I think if he had
started with the explanation, the book would have been a bit clearer. He
explains that Modest Mouse alternated albums - one was the main album, the next
was the collection of B sides that didn’t make it into the album.
This book is the B sides of the
first book - the stuff he wrote that didn’t make it into the book. And, like
those albums, there is a lot of interesting material that is well worth
reading, but didn’t tie in directly with the purpose of the book about the
Bears Ears.
It is a collection of essays and
stories, and very much an insight into Burrillo’s life and philosophy. I
thoroughly enjoyed it and am glad I added it to my collection. You do not need
to read the first book to understand this one, but I definitely recommend
reading both.
I took a lot of notes - the book
isn’t that long, but it is dense with great lines and ideas. Like the first
book, it is snarky as hell, and Burrillo doesn’t bother to pretend to be fair
and balanced. He is unashamed to be a conservationist (he IS an archeologist
after all), a progressive, anti-racist, anti-fascist, and anti-bigotry. He also
seems like he would be a bit intimidating to hike with, but a lot of fun to sit
down over a beer with. He is a great storyteller, and that is the best part of
both books.
I’ll also note that I added a
couple of authors to my reading list as a result of this book.
The first essay is entitled
“Locals Only,” and it is a rambling look at what it means to be local. And
indigenous. Burrillo illuminates these ideas with a bracing clarity of thought.
And snark. The opening is excellent, and drew me into the book right from the
start.
Few of us live lightly on this world. We interact with our
neighbors - both human and nonhuman - to varying degrees of interest or
intensity. We have friends, colleagues, and foes within calling and
occasionally striking distance. We shop for goods and services locally, or
order them only using the local cell towers and a prayer that they won’t be
rerouted to Antarctica. We mow or rake our lawns, sweep steps or sidewalks,
chase sunbeams around our apartments with desperate houseplants, catch up on
local news when nothing better is on, deal with local traffic jams and other
local customs, complain about local politics and local weather, throw trash and
recycling in local bins, drink at local bars, eat at local restaurants, and in
general articulate with the places we live to an extent I’m not sure most
people fully appreciate.
The lessons these places have to teach us can be as varied as
the places themselves. Sometimes we fit where we are like the teeth of a key in
a long-sought lock, high points and low points interdigitating like they were
made for each other. Other times, it’s precisely the opposite.
I have been thinking about this
quite a bit since the beginning of the Trump Era. For a long time, I fit pretty
well here in Bakersfield. It has a good arts and music scene, a good legal
community, we had a church family, and so on. I liked (and continue to like)
the weather most of the year, and I love the proximity to everything from the
beach to the mountains to the desert to the big city. And I very much love the
racial diversity and relatively affordable housing.
For those years, I fit in pretty
well. But when the Right Wing - and white evangelicals in particular - went
full-on fascist, I found that I fit in less with the human denizens of this
place than I thought. Plenty of good people here, but GOD there are a lot of
really shitty people here too. For my kids, I don’t think any of them really
feel they fit here, and I hope they are able to find a place that can be home
for them.
For Burrillo, his place of origin
- Upstate New York - never felt like home. His years in New Orleans changed him
dramatically (one of the great stories in the book), but his true home, where
he fit, turned out to be the Southwest.
I love one anecdote from his New
Orleans period: the lifelong bachelor who credited fish sauce for his long
happy life. (For those who do not know, this Asian sauce is pretty much fish
fermented in salt. It is a magic ingredient in cooking, but it is hella strong
by itself. This guy did shots of it every morning, which is too hard-core for
me.)
Also hilarious is the description
of Carnival season.
There were probably two hundred people, including my friends
and I, gathered around the social core of the event: earthy, heavily pierced
and tattooed freaks, one-part hippie and one-part wolverine. It was like
someone had dipped a giant ice-cream scoop into the crowd at Burning Man and
upended it just east of the French Quarter.
The next essay, “Darkness and
Dust” tells about how Burrillo discovered the Southwest, and a few particular
stories - a nighttime encounter with a mountain lion, a visit to an
archeological site that turned out to have “bad juju” as a Dine friend of his described
it. My favorite line is about why he prefers heat to cold.
I don’t hate winter, necessarily. And I’m not the worst
snowboarder I know. But the cold. I’m not big on cold. I have a friend who’s a
devotee of the Wim Hof method of physio-psychological enlightenment, which
involves extended stays in ice baths, and this has always struck me as
practicing for hell. Almost anything involving flames would be
preferable.
Also in this chapter is a
percipient observation about the white male voters for Trump, and a tie-in with
Hunter S.
Thompson’s book on the Hells Angels.
We can see this same mental process fueling the various
cliques, clubs, and cults that fluoresced under the presidency of Donald Trump.
That sense of “I don’t like where all this newfangled progress is
headed, dagnabbit, kids these days with purple hair, women in the government,
boy I tell you this doesn’t look like my country anymore…” Echoes of
Zane Grey’s frontier idyll, these - where a man can hop astride his horse,
spend the day shooting bison and brown-skinned people, and then come home to
unschooled and totally subservient family members. No wonder Trump was so
popular, out here.
Burrillo isn’t making this up. I
have heard these things - they are not an exaggeration - from the complaints
about hair color to the “this doesn’t look like my country with all these brown
people in it” crap. Including from my own parents.
He also has some great thoughts on
cultural appropriation. Here are some of the best lines.
In its broadest sense, it refers to the adoption or co-opting
of cultural components originating in other cultures, although most critics and
scholars understand that this process in itself is all but ubiquitous across
all of human existence.
Where it becomes problematic is when members of a dominant
culture do it with components of a subordinate, disadvantaged, or otherwise
put-upon culture - hence the original term including the more accurate word colonialism.
When it isn’t a case of bullies mimicking the downtrodden, it’s usually
interpreted as satire or plain old emulation.
Burrillo notes that his own
ancestors - Celtic and Latin - were colonized by the Romans back in the day.
But that in our own time, appropriation doesn’t affect him or his groups.
How my own pre-colonized ancestors lived is a fun research
topic in its own right, but I don’t often see it depicted in sports logos or
intellectually menacing Halloween costumes.
Thus, to report that I froth and snarl at the thought of
other people appropriating still others’ cultures would be tantamount to
appropriating the outrage of the culturally appropriated group. Which strikes
me as a tad hypocritical.
This is something I have
experienced myself. I live in a place where Latinix people are a plurality -
and I grew up in one where they were the majority. A few years ago, the kids
and I attended a Dia de los Muertos celebration at the Kern County Museum, sponsored
by a local Latinix group. Some of my kids dressed the part - it was really
quite fun and cool, and my kids got a lot of positive feedback from
people at the event.
It wasn’t until I posted online
about it, that I got accusations of “cultural appropriation.” I noted that all
of that came from…wait for it…white people. I heard nothing but positives from
my Latinix friends.
The difference, I believe, between
appropriation and the cross-pollination of cultures that humans have always
done, is one of respect. We were not mocking or disrespecting or
commercializing the traditions of our neighbors. Rather, we were respectfully learning,
and participating alongside them. Rather like the difference between learning
to cook Indian food (which I love!) and making racist
“jokes” about the White House smelling like curry.
I think Burrillo is spot-on that
for white folk to get too worked up about supposed “cultural appropriation” can
veer into hypocrisy. By all means, we should take a look at what we do, but
perhaps not get too worked up about what other well-meaning people are doing in
good faith.
Perhaps the most snarky and
strident essay is “What’s In A Name (Or “Don’t Call Me an Archaeologist”)”. In
it, Burrillo looks at the problematic origins of his discipline, and the
ongoing effort to decolonize it. This line is stunningly good, and really captures
the essence of the issue.
Whiteness isn’t a race - there are no separate human races.
But nor is it an ethnicity, a nation, or a culture. It’s an ideology. And I’m
always wary of anyone whose identity is indistinguishable from their
ideology.
I am “white” because of
supremacist culture. Ethnically, I am half German, a quarter Swedish, an eighth
English (relative of Charles Darwin), and the rest god knows what (unknown
father). My nationality is American. My culture is…well, it’s complicated, but
one might say ex-evangelical middle-class southern California culture? But I am
“white” because our society sees me as white and accords me certain privileges
because of that.
One of the most fascinating bits
in this essay is the history of ludicrous racism in archeology. Not just in the
Southwest, but around the world, there has been this belief that the incredible
architecture and infrastructure that has been discovered couldn’t possibly
have been built by the indigenous peoples. So, it had to have been built
by someone else. Probably someone “white.” Or space aliens. And this has
persisted even after open-minded archaeologists concluded the obvious: that the
indigenous peoples DID IN FACT create these things.
Not that everyone was convinced, of course. Nor was the
Mississippi region the only hotbed for the notion that impressive examples of
American material history were the result of more advanced peoples whom the
“savage” Native Americans had driven to extinction. Mormon scripture, having
congealed in the first third of the 1800s, included this wild historical
fiction as literal gospel.
And this is STILL being claimed by
conspiracy theorists. This causes problems for legitimate archaeologists.
Skipping forward for a moment: a foul, noisome version of
this contention still hangs around in the form of Erich von Daniken, David
Hatcher Childress, and everyone else in the Ancient Aliens crowd. As
David Holly Jr. pointed out in a fantastic 2012 piece for American Antiquity,
for archaeologists to even engage with these people and their idiocy
inadvertently legitimizes them by lending credence to the illusion that there
is a debate at all. Yet ignoring them isn’t a great tactic, either, because
part of the appeal of conspiracy theories to the simpleminded is that they are
ignored or shunned by the Establishment.
I think we should just call them “racist dipshits” right to
their faces and be done with it. That counts as engagement.
This is a problem for all of us
who believe in truth, in evidence, and in the obvious humanity of brown-skinned
humans. Fighting pseudoscience
is tough, and there are no great answers. I will note that calling my father a
racist dipshit (although not using those exact words) to his face and then in
public is one reason that we no longer have a relationship. Nothing I said or
did was able to save my parents from spiraling down the conspiracy theory drain
hole.
Another passage that I thought was
excellent was the one on the human superpower: adaptability. We are entering
another period of volatility in climate. One we created, but also one that
resembles the rapid ice ages of the period in which we evolved.
The strategy that pays best in those circumstances is to
become, in effect, a jack-of-all-environments. One more adapted for
adaptability itself than for any particular subset of ecological architecture.
To become, in other words, an obligate puzzle-solver.
…
They were all erectus, a species that had evolved to
specialize in non-specialization, and to learn and learn and learn and learn in
order to adapt to almost any environmental circumstance.
This is something today’s right
wingers should take to heart. At its core, the reactionary-turned-fascist
approach is a dead end. Adaptability is necessary, not ossification into a
long-disappeared (and mostly fictional anyway) past. This is a quality I see in
my children’s generation that is rare in my parents’ generation.
The next essay is “Landscape
Psychology,” and explores the way landscapes and humans affect each other. And
why people fit one place and not another. Like why Burrillo and I don’t
tolerate a lack of sunshine well.
There is also a strong cultural connection between sunshine
and happiness, and the argument usually touted by naysayers against the
correlation between weather and mood is that such a correlation is “all in our
heads.” That, if true, is what’s known as a social convention, and for social
animals like humans those are sort of a big deal. There is an entire category
of people who either ignore or do not recognize the existence of social
conventions as real things, and they’re commonly called sociopaths.
This is where extreme
individualism as a philosophy tends to veer into sociopathy. In reality, the
most “libertarian-individualist” sorts among us turn out to be those who
benefit most from our society and government. Rather than acknowledge that,
they tend to become sociopathic, eager to deny the benefits they have to
others. Trump and MAGA are just the most visible.
The next chapter is more of a
personal story - about Burrillo’s hikes in the Grand Canyon. There are a few
great lines in the middle of this delightful story.
It is said that history is written by the winners, which is a
concise way of saying that historical narratives tend to be biased toward the
perspectives of those people who came home from the battle to write about it.
It’s tough to do that when you’re dead.
He then extrapolates this to less
violent pursuits.
I have long suspected that a similar bias runs through the
annals of wilderness literature. Most of it is upbeat in tone, encouraging,
lyrical, shot through with excitement or tension but almost always ending on a
positive note. If there’s any moral lesson to be learned, it’s less often
“there’s danger lurking out there” than it is “embrace the suck.” Again, a
tough message to pen when you’re dead.
I am not a natural risk-taker, so
hiking with me is significantly less dangerous. Like Rincewind,
I have as my goal “do not die.”
One thing I share with Burrillo is
that I am too cheap to do fancy prepackaged food on backpack trips. We both
tend to cook from scratch, or at least basic shelf stable stuff off the shelf
at the grocery store. I also thought it was amusing that he brings a tiny
bottle of ghost pepper sauce and bourbon along with him. That’s my kind of
luxury too. (Although I go one notch down from ghost peppers.)
Another passage in this chapter
involves cows and wilderness grazing. If you want to get a wilderness advocate
riled up, mention grazing. Because the damage humans do to wilderness is
miniscule compared to that of the damn cows. (And this cuts across the
political spectrum too: my conservative father-in-law loathes wilderness
grazing too. It’s only welfare queens and social parasites like the Bundys
who prop up the practice.)
Cows rule the West. Not people, or at least not average
citizens who aren’t caught up in the agro-cowboy bullshit mythology. Nope -
cows. The devastation these things wreak on the environment in the West is
almost unfathomable.
It’s time to recognize the damage
and end wilderness grazing permanently.
Another episode that was
fascinating was Burrillo’s bout with Lyme Disease. Which led to an epiphany
about toxic masculinity.
I learned a few other things from that horrific episode, as
well. Almost all the people who said things like “whatever this takes, however
long it lasts, I will be by your side” were women. And almost all the people
who said things like “suck it up and stop whining pussy - everyone has
problems” were fellow dudes.
And another one about a particular
American social problem:
Tricky gender politics aside, the broadest-spectrum lesson
from that long and awful episode was simply the extent to which American
culture teaches everyone to have little or no regard for the safety and
well-being of others.
Covid was a society-wide
demonstration of that nasty side of our culture.
This segues into the observation
that the world-wide shock of Covid resulted in some unpleasant revelations -
something I know first-hand all too well.
As with the Lyme episode, these rude shocks manifested in my
personal life as a series of friends revealing their true colors in jarring
ways. One fellow, who used to lecture - loudly - at social gatherings about how
women are smarter than men, cruelty to animals is the most heinous of crimes,
and American wastefulness is destroying our planet, turned out to be an
ironclad conspiracy theorist and science-denier. I guess all that progressive
soapboxing was nothing more than an attempt (largely successful, if memory
serves) to woo grungy and gullible hippies into bed with him.
Burrillo doesn’t neatly sort into
either liberal or conservative boxes - perhaps no truly thoughtful person does.
You keep finding contradictions and blind spots in every viewpoint, although
some are clearly more aligned with reality than others. While a personal
libertarian (meaning he doesn’t think government belongs in the bedroom, for
example), he also sees that “libertarian” is usually just a code word
for…something else.
My problem with textbook libertarianism is the same one I
have with other grand narratives: the official charter includes all sorts of
components that are equal parts self-contradictory and stupid. How, for
example, can a person be both fanatically in favor of free-market capitalism
and fanatically opposed to open borders? If the principles of fiscal liberty
preclude top-down regulation, and there’s a whole bunch of people willing to
work very hard for much lower wages than their competitors, how is legally
barring them from doing so not antagonistic to those same principles? I have
yet to hear anyone provide an answer to this riddle that doesn’t boil down to
either stubborn nationalism or just plain racism.
EXACTLY.
“Libertarianism is really just “I
am winning in this particular economic system, and I want to continue to do so.
I got mine, sucks to be you.”
Burrillo also ties social unrest
to geological events.
Such is the power of sociocultural pressure; it builds over
time - piling real or imagined injustice upon real or imagined injustice -
until something finally triggers a release. The release itself is often rapid
and explosive, and usually quite destructive in the short term. However, from a
wider temporal perspective, such events are part of a healthy, functioning
natural or political ecosystem. Life as we know it wouldn’t even be possible
without them.
This essay is pretty long, and
rambles a lot (in a good way), so we also get an examination of the problem of
invasive trout in the Colorado River. There is actually a program in place
paying people to catch Brown Trout. Similarly, in the high Sierra, there is no
limit on Brook Trout - another species that should be diminished or even
eliminated in these unnatural habitats.
I also have to mention his
observation about the realities of backpacking.
There are various schools of thought on how to properly
Tetris a backpack, and pretty much all of it goes right out the window on the
last day of the trip. Many long minutes of packing, hoisting, adjusting,
unloading, and repacking go into the initial stage, owing to its being
conducted in the comfort of one’s own home. When it’s time to depart a
beautiful backcountry spot for the long slog back to what currently passes for
civilization, however, there’s more often a leaves-in-a-trash-bag theme.
“Quarantine Ecology” is about the
lockdown, and it is one of the best things I have read about the experience.
Perhaps because I too found loopholes to get outside and hike.
Like me, Burrillo is a cat lover,
and his description of his goofus cat, who he says should be classified as Felis
doofus, is hilarious.
He also talks about ants. Because,
well, we all dealt with ants during the pandemic.
The rigorous hierarchy of ant life is astounding. You can’t
beat them for work-life balance, because it’s all work and no life and they
seem just fine with that. They can lift up to fifty times their own weight,
they “breathe” through holes in their bodies, and they communicate with each
other via chemicals. Imagine carrying bottles of liquefied love, hatred,
indifference, interest, boredom, repulsion, attraction, anger, surprise, lust,
disgust, trust, joy, envy, and fear around with you at all times, and trying to
remember which one to spray at whom.
“Salad Days in Scorched Venice” is
mostly about the incredible network of canals built in the Phoenix area
thousands of years ago by the Hohokam people - thousands of miles worth, all
dug by hand, and routed for the perfect slope in a nearly flat valley. It’s
incredible engineering - and today’s canals generally follow the same
routes.
This leads into the cotton
industry in Arizona. Which illustrates a lot about the stupidity of American
political discourse.
Leaseholders like those mentioned above shore up these
financial shortfalls through federal subsidies…This is a tiresome and
all-too-familiar situation in American agri-politics, not unlike the heavily
subsidized cows that are, when you get right down to it, being paid by American
taxpayers to destroy American public lands. Cotton was grown by ancestral
Indigenous peoples in the Sonoran desert, up around Flagstaff, and even in the
bottom of the Grand Canyon - but not thousands of acres of the stuff. For that
you either need the combination of hot temperatures and steady rainfall they
get in the Deep South, or you need Uncle Sam to bail you out on the reg,
presumably while raging against the evils of socialism so all the local good
old boys know whose side you’re really on.
Burrillo also talks about the
inevitability of digging up old native burial sites during development.
Fortunately, the trend is toward respectful relocation - something Burrillo
worked on as part of his job for a while. But then, there are those
people.
The realm of Phoenix-area archaeology certainly contains its
own noisome contingent of swine who think it’s “really fun to dig up dead
people” and consider the push toward ever more respectful language “a bunch of
woke PC bullshit.” I’ve met a few of these characters in the flesh, although
I’ve been lucky enough not to work with any - and if you took a stab at their
demographic makeup, you’d probably hit a bullseye on the first try. But they
are a dwindling minority. A loud, annoying, toxic minority who are often found
in positions of dug-in power like the oldest ticks on a suffering dog - but a
dwindling one, nonetheless.
The fact that everyone knows exactly
what demographic he is talking about says everything.
Another target of his ire is the
MAGA assholes who wish to defile one of the most diverse ecosystems in the
world with an ugly penis-extender that will not work even as it causes
tremendous damage.
And some xenophobic slobs want to construct a big wall
straight through the region. All that biodiversity damaged or threatened to
keep a few deer, jaguars, and other creatures too cumbersome to squeeze through
its slates and too feral to hitch-hike from using the migration routes they’ve
used since the Miocene. It won’t deter human migrants, of course - the existing
wall segments have proven that already. It’ll just create ecological impacts.
Evidently that’s a small price to pay for twitchy people throughout the country
to sleep a little easier in what is, after all, stolen land.
“Cattle Ville” is about Burrillo’s
heritage. His grandparents lived in Vermont - a place not as known for its cows
and cheese as it perhaps should be. He introduces the chapter with a great
quote.
Not long ago, my charming friend and colleague Jojo Matson
put it this way: “For me, home is a who, not a where. I couldn’t
live someplace beautiful if I’m surrounded by awful people, but I can live with
great people just about anywhere.”
I very much agree with this. There
are places I simply cannot imagine living, despite their beauty, because I
can’t even with MAGA racists.
The great revelation of this
chapter is what “R. E.” stands for. “Ralph Elmer,” which as you might imagine
was a tough name for a kid to have.
As Burrillo eventually explains,
however, these names came from ancestors who were pretty badass. Elmer was a
World War Two veteran, who lost an arm and injured his remaining hand. He went
on to freaking build his own house, and drive a manual transmission delivery
truck with only part of a left hand. (If you know you know.) And he was a great
person too.
The man’s influence on almost everyone who met him cannot be
understated. My own father once said of his former father-in-law, “After all
that he went through in the war, you would expect him to be the meanest son of
a bitch in the world. But all he ever does is crack jokes and make people
smile.”
Including his usual tale of his
life:
He used to joke that he left home an orphan, spent some time
in a uniform, and came back a pirate.
He was clearly a big positive
influence on Burrillo and his siblings. The “Ralph” came from his father, and
while he doesn’t have quite the story to tell, his fondness for his father is
apparent.
There are also stories about his
childhood, his friends, and his influences. I want to mention our shared
dislike of certain technologies, but also his view of progress itself. It warms
my heart that he cites Umberto Eco’s essay on
Ur-Fascism here as well.
I hiss and snarl at sleek modern gadgetry when I’m out
pretending to be John Muir in the backcountry, particularly the “convenience”
of cameras built into smartphones that track our every movement. Give me paper
maps and books I can write on…Give me a good old fashioned fire to cook on…Give
me a truck that doesn’t require nanorobots to work on…
Yep. I love my paper maps and
magnetic compass.
However, I would eventually realize that, while taking a
break from modern life and its many beeping horrors is often a good idea, going
backward in any other sense is just as often a bad one. Progress is not often a
piecemeal affair, and although the side effects can be brutal, the benefits
still outweigh them. I’ll deal with TikTok if it means people of color can
vote.
The footnote here is also on
point.
Please note, there is a big difference between regressing to
past conditions and learning from them. I cannot believe how often I’ve had to
explain that.
Burrillo’s thoughts on privilege
are also excellent. He grew up working class, but as an academically minded
goth, he ended up friends with people above his class.
It was from this group that I learned several important
lessons about how society works. First, it is the nature of privilege to make
things easier for some people than for others, and when that privilege is
anchored to something biological there’s precious little you can do about it.
But there are loopholes where social class is concerned. My new friends were
upper-middle class, while I was very much not, but they taught me how to dress
and act like them in laughably High School Makeover Movie fashion - up to and
including giving me expensive clothes they no longer wanted. Only then did I
realize that fashion isn’t just about trendiness; it’s also a uniform. Sporting
the right one means you’re one of Us.
The goth thing had its own roots,
of course.
In much the same way that the hippie subculture was a group
response to the overly technical and warmongering mainstream culture of the
post-WWII era - and the punk subculture was a group response to the flaccid
activism that came to characterize most hippie protestations - the goth
subculture can be seen as a group response to the topical repression of sex and
death in Western culture. The unique combination of Puritan ethics and
vestigial Roman militarism constitute a society where sensitivity is a sign of
weakness (particularly in men), nobody fears or even talks about death except
in terms of avoiding it, and public displays of sexuality (particularly by
women) are verboten. Publicly embracing that suite of taboos is therefore a
rebellious act, especially attractive to those of us who are prone to anxiety
and depression.
This exploration of American
taboos regarding the discussion of sex and death carries over into the next
chapter, “Yucatan,” about a formational trip the young Burrillo took there as
part of a college archaeological course. I’ll get to that, but first, this
great line:
Pinning the formative developments or phases of my life on transformative
wilderness or travel experiences is a useful device for resolving it into some
kind of sense. Call it narrative bias - I’m fine with that. The die casting of
miasmic, meandering life into the structure and soundness of Story. It involves
a bit of shoehorning, shearing of jagged edges, and a dash or ten of plain-old
hyperbole, but the result is often a genuinely useful narrative rather than
simply a stream of stuff that happened. This is probably how a lot of myths
were first invented.
That last line! That is exactly
how myths happen. Whether in history or our own lives.
Another great scene is Burrillo’s
encounter with souvenir salespeople.
Later in the trip, I met a few guys selling hand-carved Mayan
masks who bore the obvious marks of woodcarvers, like innumerable nicks fro
whittling knives, and we swapped some friendly conversation about the trade.
Everyone around them was selling wooden masks of the exact same style, but they
bore the obvious marks of salesmen, such as soft hands, distinctive attire, and
the fake “American” smile I find so off-putting. Here was a handy insight into
my own culture: the US is a land of salespeople.
This is literally what I hate most
about American culture. The salesmanship. I hate selling myself, which is why I
don’t make the money more aggressive attorneys do. I hate it when people try to
sell me stuff. I hate MLM scams. And perhaps more than anything, I loathe the
selling that is inherent in “evangelism.” If everyone is selling something,
real relationships are impossible. Thank god for the true friends I have found,
who have nothing to sell.
As Burrillo explored the Mayan
ruins, he noticed that the Indigenous (and indeed even modern Mexican
approaches to sex and death were a lot more healthy than the American one. And,
like me, he was puzzled. There is nothing inherent in Christianity that makes
death and sex taboo. Indeed, quite the opposite. There is a LONG Christian
tradition of talking about death, the use of macabre imagery, and centering
death as a core human experience. Likewise, the
Bible is full of sex, and there is even an entire book that is a
celebration of sexuality - including sex for pleasure outside of marriage.
(Yeah, that part was really suppressed by Evangelicalism - dangerous thing to
read the Bible for one’s self…)
So why the strict taboo against them? Ask the Puritans. The
only plausible explanation that comes to mind is that making ubiquitous topics
of concern into taboos all but guarantees none of us can ever relax, and
anxious people are a lot easier to manipulate.
Hell. Yes. As an ex-evangelical, I
can attest that this is exactly the point of the taboos. Power and
control. American Evangelicalism is pretty much synonymous with Fundamentalism
these days, and is a neo-Puritan movement to its core.
The other thing it guarantees is that certain types of people
will rebelliously gravitate toward those topics, sometimes going beyond
fascination to the point of fetishization. This is the way it always goes with
taboos. It’s why the most sexually repressive ideologies invariably produce the
most depraved and exciting hedonists as a side effect. And it’s why a staunch
refusal to have candid, sober conversations with young people about the
realities of death produces things like serial killer fandom and the fashion
sense I had in my own late teens. The whole goth scene is basically a bunch of
mostly young Westerners openly acknowledging - and subversively celebrating -
the fact that sex and death are all around us whether anyone likes it or
not.
I wrote about this a few years
ago. Our family gave up
Halloween for stupid reasons, not understanding that a healthy outlet
regarding death is better than the denialism and forced happiness that
Evangelicalism demands.
Being comfortable with death seems about as logical as being
comfortable with having to urinate. What doesn’t seem logical is hiding
everything that makes us human behind tangible doors, like coffins or bathroom
stalls; or behind intangible ones, like cosmetics and spurious friendliness. I
don’t advocate reintroducing human sacrifice, by any means, but my fellow
Americans could certainly do with a few sexy parties in a few cemeteries now
and then.
I agree with this in so many ways.
A lot of our “bathroom
panic” crap is really about shame surrounding genitals and sexuality, and
the myth
that men are naturally violent. We could all use a healthier approach to
death - and religious people are the worst about dealing with death.
(That’s my experience as an attorney and my wife’s experience as a nurse, by
the way.) We could also use a far healthier approach to sexuality,
understanding our nature as animals (and indeed as living organisms), and acknowledging
sexuality as a natural feature of our lived experience. And maybe a few sex
parties in the graveyard…
Another passage that I really
loved explored the way that Western (meaning white) people tend to think of
their own beliefs as “philosophy” or maybe “theology,” while dismissing the
thought systems of indigenous peoples as “beliefs” or “teachings” or “mythology.”
Condescending as hell, and also inaccurate.
Indigenous peoples have complex
moral and philosophical systems too: they are not “primitive” or “savage,” but
equally developed. And indeed, there is much to learn from them. (My own view
is that humans are humans, and every culture has faced the same challenges and
come up with varied yet similar cultural and philosophical ways of addressing
those questions.)
Burrillo summarizes Hopi thinking
as this, which honestly sounds pretty good - and in some facets better than the
very whitewashed - and thus over simplistic - ideas I was raised
with.
“The natural world is full of lessons for us to learn, but
human beings are inherently flawed and the majority of them will ignore those
lessons until it’s too late, so the kindest thing we can do for each other is
share loads of laughter and love before the bastards get us all killed.” That
might be the greatest philosophy I’ve ever encountered.
Sounds, interestingly enough, kind
of similar to stuff Christ said, doesn’t it? What with the parables about the
natural world, the “narrow gate,” and “love your neighbor…”
The final essay, “GTFO” - a
reference to an outdoors slogan: “Get the Fuck Outdoors” - is about this, but
also about American identity. The backwoods of everywhere. A hodgepodge of
ethnicities, religions, and philosophies.
Burrillo sees the United States as
going through a series of identity crises. “Who ARE we?” Not an easy question
to answer, to be sure. In the past, we ended up with cultic groups and new
religions like the Latter Day Saints - a way to “americanize” an ancient near
eastern book.
World War Two sparked the other
crisis, which led to incredible social change - and a profound split between
those who embraced our nation’s increasing militarism and empire-building and
those who weren’t particularly keen on that idea. Burrillo sees us now in our
third major crisis.
Our third great identity crisis is happening right now. The
gender revolution - long overdue, in my opinion - has finally erupted.
Indigenous sovereignty movements are also erupting throughout the country, as
are vociferous efforts to let the world know that the Black community has
absolutely had it with being shoved around by authority figures.
In response, nationalism has erupted among those who, like
the many religious types in the 1800s, are desperate to maintain their
long-held Euro-American picture of the world. Certain far-right types with
curious sexual predilections are even seeking to form an Anglo-Saxon Party in
American politics, which is more honest than “white” as a descriptor, although
it’s a bit on the nose vis-a-vis colonialism….It all boils down to the same
question to which it boiled the last two times: Who, exactly, are we?
I think this is indeed the central
question of our time, particularly for white people in America. I firmly
believe that white supremacy, patriarchy, and reactionary fascism are a dead
end, not merely politically, but economically and evolutionarily. The future
requires opportunity for everyone, and the talents of all of us will be needed
to solve the issues that we face.
I’ll end with something a bit
lighter hearted. Near the end, Burrillo discusses the instagramming of
everything, and the fallacy which sees causation between this and the increase
of people getting out in the outdoors.
As he puts it, there is a really,
really strong correlation between ice cream consumption and shark attacks.
This is well known. But does
eating ice cream cause shark attacks? Are humans sweeter tasting?
This is obviously silly. What
there is is a third variable, the underlying cause of both. People eat more ice
cream when it is hot. And they swim in the ocean more when it is hot.
While Burrillo doesn’t claim to
understand all of the variables, what is clear is that there is a trend of
people wanting to get out and experience nature - which is a good thing, even
if it presents challenges. What is needed is better management of people and
resources, not screeds against Instagram and social media.
There is a net benefit to all who
get out and hike, and we should celebrate that more people are doing it. And,
as I have experienced here in California, a huge change is in demographics.
When I was a kid, you mostly saw white males on the trail. Men and boys.
But women were starting to be more
common. And now, I see people of all colors and ethnicities, out there with
their kids. This is something to celebrate. Just like the glorious diversity of
America - the Backwoods of Everywhere is something to celebrate.
As my kids responded to the
question posed by the racist asshats speaking at Trump rallies, “Are these the
people you want as your neighbors?” - they - and I - respond, “HELL
YES!!”
Who are we? We are humans. We
embrace humanity in its glorious diversity, in its rich variance, and in its
endless expressions. This is who we are.
I loved this book, just like I
loved Behind the Bears Ears. Burrillo is one of those writers that is
just straight up fun to read. And thought provoking and snarky and unexpected.
I hope he continues to write, and I strongly recommend everyone take a look at
his books.