Month: April 2006

I just finished “1491 : New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus” (Charles C. Mann) last night and I am still trying to re-arrange what I thought I knew to accommodate what it has to say.

In short, the canonical view of the Indians — the people who lived in the Americas before the Europeans arrived to stay — as primitive, nomadic, subsistence-level people who existed outside history, who made no effort to extract a living from the land, who were passive creatures, no more aware than the animals, is wrong, wrong, wrong.

I can’t cite examples right now, my brain is too full and jumbled. But there is a growing consensus that the Americas were more populous than Europe and that complex civilizations may have emerged in this hemisphere before the Mesopotamian civilizations had formed.

Those buffalo that ran rampant across the prairies? They may well have been a cultivated food supply that got out of control when their chief predator — the Indians — was decimated by disease. The overwhelming variety of crops, fruits, and nuts in the Amazon basin? That whole region may have been an enormous orchard, all planted and cultivated.

Caveat: if you’re at all prone to liberal guilt, you might want to stay away from it. The idea that societies in this hemisphere had successfully built complex civilizations that effectively did away with hunger, with poverty, that so-called primitive people had terra-formed the Amazon from a vast basin of leached soils into a garden of plenty, and the arrival of Columbus destroyed it all might be too upsetting. The genetic engineering that gave us maize — what we call corn — may be the single greatest achievement in that field and we don’t even know how they did it.

I found it frustrating more than anything. Not all of the damage was wilful: diseases aren’t choosy about their victims. But there was plenty of greed and destruction — the burning of the Codexes that told the history of the Inka stands out — all the same.

A worthwhile read, to say the least.

Turn off TV week:

This week is turn off TV week, for some Makers, every week is turn off TV week, but this week is special. Don’t watch TV for a couple days, go MAKE something – Link.

It’s about doing something else with the time spent goggling at manufactured entertainment and having something to show for it.

The complaints I hear are the TV Turn Off proponents are dreary puritans, killjoys who won’t let anyone else have any fun. Whatever. The idea is to think about the choices, to try something different for a week. Lent lasts longer than that, as does any meaningful diet.

That said, I let my overtired children relax with a movie today, rather than try to coax them through their fractiousness.

look no further.

Some really nice images here. The ones I like best can’t be distinguished as pinhole images: they’re just good. The zone plate images and scanner camera (whatever that is) are obviously experimental. But a lot of the others are timeless, not identifiable by technique.

Now playing: Kick Start by Jerry Harrison : Casual Gods from the album “Walk on Water”

Just sent this to the Seattle Times, in response to something I heard on the radio:

Editor:

I heard a report that Mayor Nickels was considering pushing for stronger gun controls, in the wake of a recent increase in violent deaths in Seattle.

It seems reasonable to make a link between urban density and handgun violence, as any big city resident can attest. The density is one obvious factor, but the ease of access to and concealment of handguns makes them more easily abused. It’s rare that someone commits mass murder with a knife or club, while gun-facilitated incidents are all too common.

I realize that for some, unrestricted handgun ownership is an article of faith, but I submit that it is out of place in a large urban area with a well-funded and disciplined public safety system. I think it’s a fair trade to delegate the job of public safety to trained professionals and make handguns much more stringently managed within densely populated areas. For those who feel they need a handgun as personal protection, licensing and training would be required.

The day I feel I can’t walk around in my own city without the means of killing someone, close at hand, is the day I move away.

Continue reading “we write letters”

In November 2005, the estimable Josh Marshall opined:

What this country will end up needing is something like a Truth and Reconciliation Commission because what the country needs is not so much for particular people to go to jail but for the lies and the lies to cover up earlier lies to stop. The country can’t get past what has happened or move forward until we can get the truth on the table, deal with it and move on.

Today, he seems less optimistic:

There are a hundred reasons why this won’t happen, and more than a few why it probably shouldn’t happen. Should the Democrats return wholly or partly to power this November it would be stupid to get bogged down in a lot of Kumbaya bipartisanship talk that the other side will be immediately plotting against. But what the country needs is a cold shower of the truth and a clearing of the webs of lies that have cluttered and fettered our public life. Sending crooks to the slammer is by far a secondary concern.

I agree, there will be some die-hards, some dead-enders, to use the very words oft-cited by the Cheney administration. And they may be effective in keeping corruption alive by shielding the participants and blocking the investigations.

As long as this kind of thing is considered acceptable political discourse, there is no real chance of bipartisanship or consensus.