The Not so Daily Privateer

What happened to my sense of humor?

I find things very funny, but I'm not funny.  I used to be way more funny.  Is it the chronic pain from my back?  I keep reading how pain makes your brain get all messed up.  I'd think a sense of humor might be the first thing to go.  On the other hand, I was way funnier when I was much meaner.

But, seems to me I lost my sense of humor a long time ago, found it again, and now, it hovers with insouciance just outside my consciousness.

So I'll keep trying to steal other people's humorousness.   Or thinking of names for The Band (our band).   I found this self-help book that's pretty good, all round.  I'm pondering whether the unfunny side of me comes from the Mennonite/Dutch part.  You know - the Funks. 

My ancestors, on my mom's dad's side, left Holland around 1536, to become the so-called Prussian Mennonites (the nicer ones).  The ones who were all into shunning and stuff went on to become the Amish.  Mennonites are way more liberal (and funny) than the Amish.

Later, they went on to become Catherine the Great's Russian Mennonites, then one of them - my great-great-grandpa, moved to central Canada to found central Canada's Mennonites.

Grandpa looked a lot like John Wayne.  He had the same name as his original Mennonite ancestor, but he left the Mennonite faith to become a missionary in Hawaii.  He converted to being Assembly of God-Pentacostal (I know, I know), but in his heart, he was still Mennonite, I think.  His sister, my mom's auntie, went on to marry into the Jackson family and produce a very famous - Buddhist - basketball coach.

Religion was important to Granny's family, too.  But, they were more mainstream and ecumenical.  Granny is related to James Madison (great great great grand niece or whatnot) and a direct descendant of the remarkably unfunny Zachary Taylor.

My dad is funny though, so there's that.  His grandmother, Ka'imi'ike'nao'u'ao fell for a guy known for his sense of humor and his wiles with women (Kamakawahine, some people have heard of him - Big Island guy).  But ultimately she spent more time married to my step-great-grandfather, Mr. Jinn.  Grandma K had 11 children with 7 different "husbands."  That was before the missionaries came.  She mostly lived by herself after the kids were grown.  She laughed easily, but her daughter, my grandma, was a rather serious woman whose hobby was translating Christian hymns into Hawaiian.

The story of my life - except I'm a girl.  And I don't wear plaid.

What is Fark?

Is it possible you don't know?

Most of my friends are either   a) academics (none of them has heard of Fark and none of them seems interested)   or   b)  people much younger than myself (who, you'd think, would already know about Fark).  My younger friends are into Deviant Art, Television Without Pity, and other web destinations - but I am able to astonish and amaze them with my clever wit, by stealing stories and pithy comments from Fark.

As an anthropologist and archaeologist (I took my first anthropology course in 1972), I am always looking for ways to see into the American psyche.  Fark has a few non-Americans, but it is a thoroughly American phenomenon. 

I'd like to explain more about Fark to you all, but first I need to be sure that you all understand the words "snark," "satire," and "asshat."  I first heard the word "snark" about 7 years ago, but when I used it in class as an example of a relatively new lexeme, only a couple of students had heard it. 

Today, some people at ShinyShiny, a gadget site for girls, complained about the masculinist and chauvinistic nature of Fark (it is both, I think, but, well, we all have our flaws).  Some of their dear readers had no clue what Fark is.  If you google Fark (or Drew Curtis, creator of Fark), you'll see that Fark and Drew are fairly net-famous.  Fark influenced the Mets and their baseball singalong fiasco (that was really funny, but you had to be there), and it influences other events as well.  It does not make most of its revenue from click-throughs, I don't think, but from subscriptions.  Kevin Smith, the film director, has a pay-for-posting board, I think it costs $2, so in the world of internet subscriptions, Fark is doing well.  I'd recommend it over Salon or the New Yorker, for most people.

Because it's funny and we need funny.  It's funny because of its editorial policies, overseen by Drew, but it's also funny because the people who post there are intelligent and funny, even when they're also asshats or crazy.

If I see you on Fark and I like you, I might just sponsor you - it's a whole $5 a month.  I think the Smith site is $2 a year or something.

So Drew Curtis rocks harder than Kevin Smith.  Bet that sticks in Kevin's craw, some days.

Fark is right here if you want to go there.

Moderators out of control at Fark?

Banned suddenly in the middle of the workday, for "submission queue abuse," I can only surmise that the thread I submitted was seen as a parody thread.  It wasn't.  I asked a serious question, it just happened to appear dumb to the mods.  The mods at Fark seem more and more self-important and overbearing.  Is it just me?  Or is it that I've been there long enough that I'm just seeing it?  I feel have to tiptoe around at Fark, in ways even more extreme than at Television Without Pity.  Come on, Farker-mods - lighten up a little.  Or at least pay attention more.  People really do have trouble with the new IBM trackballs and how to use them - that was no parody thread.

I got some answers on the thread, and one of them was helpful.  Since no one at Fark will actually take the time to answer questions about bannination, and it is in the nature of Fark to make fun of people who ask about bannination, I may never know.  It is this aspect of Farkian journalism that's troubling.  I guess Fark itself is seeming more and more like merely a parody site, to me.  Supposedly serious questions include:

I made out with my little brother's girlfriend, will he ever forgive me?

or

How do I jumpstart my car battery?

I mean, how do the mods know those aren't parody?   I was banned for asking about a trackball - but other current questions include "how do I cut pipe?" and "Can you put more memory in an iMac?"  Perhaps the fact that I asked about which fingers to use was perceived as...sarcasm.  It wasn't.

So my computer-related (and legitimate question) about a new piece of equipment was rejected.  I posted the same question on two computer-related forums and no one thought it was parody. 

As a person with serious problems with vision, I sometimes find it hard to figure particular things out - not to mention the fact that I'm uncoordinated from birth.  I guess it must seem inconceivable to a normally-sighted and coordinated person that someone can't figure out the trackball (mine is the little pencap sized one in between the G and H keys).  Several people on Fark recommended this particular computer and said that they, too have one - so it's not as if everyone is unfamiliar with the problem.

After checking back to see which thread was problematic, it was indeed my trackball question (still can't use it properly - don't understand how people manage to do it, really).  So much for offering people with problems help, there.  Meanwhile, some guy is getting plenty of advice about how to get his wife massaged without getting her pussy involved.

Fascinating.  It's hard to believe someone would get bent out of shape over a simple question like "How do I use my trackball, which fingers does one use?"   As it turns out, it's harder than one would think to find a forum or place where someone will tell me how to use the damn thing.  If I put my index finger on it - am I supposed to be able to click the right and left buttons with just one thumb?  Or use two hands?

I may never know and I'll just have to wait until V. figures it out.  He'll be faster and nicer than the farkers, anyway.  I'm lucky to have a resident genius.

Introduction - the Prehistory of Europe

This is a story about what is known of the very first humans to appear in what is now called Europe.  Sometimes these people are called Cro Magnons, which is not a very good name for them.  They weren't in France until somewhat later (the term Cro Magnon is derived from the name of the modern French hotel near where early Cro Magnons in France were found).  Still, these first Europeans are ancestral to those later French people.  Today, anthropologists have invented another, equally unhelpful term for them:  late fully modern Homo sapiens (late FMHS, for short).  That's because, when humans first appear in Ethiopia around 165,000BP, they clearly have the same distinctive set of Homo sapiens features (lacked by all previous models of hominines), but there are a few minor differences in appearance.  So we have early and late FMHS.  It is late FMHS that figured out a way to go to the New World, which at the time was Eurasia.

There are so many problems with the way prehistory connects (or doesn't connect) to history, that this is also an attempt to somehow join the two.  Surely, when the history of Europe begins, it shouldn't be disjointed from what happened immediately before.  History, as the professional historians usually define it, is the record of events based on written evidence.  Writing did not come to Europe until about 1,800BCE (3,808BP) but humans were in Europe by 45,000BP (roughly 43,000BCE).  That gives us almost 39,000 years of prehistory.  At this point, however, I'm going to point out that "Historians" don't own the word "history."

To the lay person, history means "all the things we know happened up until now."  A "history of Eurasia" would include all things we know about Eurasia - and if not, it would be indicate where it had ellipses.  Historians are beginning to do this - as they should.  But all too often, a history text begins with a huge leap - into the first known-from-writing "facts" about a place, when people already had a history there for millenia.

So I'm going to use the word "history" for all of it - there is no "prehistory," there's just history.

Recent work in linguistics, primarily by European linguists (particularly, Russians, Italians and Romanians) has provided a name for the earliest people in Europe:  the Boreals.  The claim of the linguists is that earliest people in Europe (45,000BP) spoke a language that was in the process of breaking off from Proto-World.  The African languages were going their way, over in Southern Asia, a group of languages we can call Malayo-Dravidian were breaking off from Proto-World.  In North Africa and the Levant, proto-Afro-Asiatic was shaping up.

Proto-Boreal would eventually give rise to the following major language families:

Indo-European

Kartvelian (Georgian/NaDene?)

Ural-Altaic

Northern/Central Amerindian

This is a controversial hypothesis, especially if seen only through the lens of rigorous linguistic analysis.  However, if the mtDNA and the archaeology is added in, it's a much stronger hypothesis.  Further, when we add in cultural processes (rarely done by archaeologists, linguists or molecular biologists), I think the picture is even more clear.

Genes, words and artifacts do not move about in any old way.  People don't survive and reproduce just any old way, either. 

The contemporary interest in climate history and the understanding of ecology that biology brings is also essential in composing a holistic hypothesis.  Indeed - the goal is to throw everything we have at the problems of history - and for me, bringing in what I know about the limits and ordinary processes of human culture is essential.

Culture is learned - and there's only so much of it.  How it changes over time is essential to understanding the past.  And there are only so many ways of changing it...

The immorality of the state

I believe we have to have a government, a state.  I don't argue that this is a good thing, but that it is a necessary thing.  So, we have to have some form of politics, and politicians.   But, in the past 8 years of watching the executive branch of our government run amok, I think many Americans share my view that the government is fundamentally out of control.  Using strands of fear derived from 9/11 as bait, as rope, as stepstools, the executive branch leveraged itself into a position of near-autonomy from the will of the people.

Of course, some people want a nanny state.  Like those fainting goats, they cannot handle even a shred of fear or discomfort.  So, we're going to have virtual strip searches at LAX now.  State-of-the-art machines were revealed today that allow a man (depicted as an overweight black man) sitting in a room you can't see, looking at your naked body, "with the private parts obscured."  The image he views is a computer rendering of your body, but it shows everything pretty well.  "Private parts" apparently means the pubic triangle and two nipples, for women.

We are reassured, the newsreader said, that the instant we step out of this machine (where we must stand with our arms in the air and turn around while we are scanned) our image is instantly destroyed.  But, the deep revulsion I feel at having a total stranger examine me (or anyone) naked will not go away.  Last night, a very bright woman mentioned that there seems to be no longer any sense that the state is supposed to set an example.  Is it okay to use remote viewing equipment to view people's naked bodies?  If it's not okay, in general, then the state shouldn't do it.

It's not okay, in general, to take other people's property - so the state has to go through hoops (called "due process") before it can take yours.  It's not okay to kidnap other people's children, so the state has to go through due process to take your kids.

Or does it?

Recent events in Texas reveal that no, the state doesn't have to do much at all.  It can receive an anonymous tip from a criminal bent on disrupting or ruining your life, and within a day or so, your children can be taken from you.  The reasoning, that one or two children are abused in your community, now make it okay for the state to immediately steal all of the children in that community.  If the community in question had not been an isolated religious sect, there would be a bit more outrage - but only a bit more.  Americans in general rely on merely talking about their outrage, rather than doing anything about it.  If Americans are outraged by the raid on the polygamous cult (which I doubt), they will lose that outrage to their next outrage in a matter of hours or days.

Everyone has heard that tired cliche about "First they came for the polygamists, and I am not a polygamist, so I did nothing.  Then they came for the gun owners, but I am not a gun owner, so I did nothing."  Etc., etc.   However, there is no more succinct way of putting it:

If Americans don't wake up (and they won't), we're screwed.

So, we're screwed.  What do those of us who want to combat these excesses do, then?  I'm already a teacher, every teacher I know shares some of this sense of outrage.  Even conservatives, like my mother, share much of it.  Everyone hates child sexual abuse, but at the same time, the fact that two underage girls were abused/married off too young doesn't seem to be cause to take away the children of everyone in the congregation.  If the same thing had happened in some suburban Presbyterian church, the locals would be even more outraged - but that outrage, too, would die out.  I say that people would, in general, simply wait for the police and the state to "correct" their errors, no matter how long it took.  The fact that 400 children were traumatized by events plays no role.

I heard someone ask, if sexual abuse was thought to be so widespread at this Texas compound, why did the police not arrest all the adult males at the compound and leave the women and children together, as intact mother/child units?   Why are the women and children the ones who are punished?  (Wichitaleaf, from Fark.com, 4-18-08, thread 3547743, 12:19:52 p.m.)

Meanwhile, over in my neck of the woods, Martin Polo, the cop who while joyriding in a police SUV on the sands outside Mandalay in Oxnard ran over and killed a lovely woman sunbathing on the beach, has now been implicated in several other crimes, including using the police substation as a place to stage amateur porn and raping a 12-year-old girl.  Not only was he not fired for his earlier offense (it was determined that it was not part of his police duties to be driving that fast right where he was, he had little reason to be on the beach, and was not following procedures for proper beach patrol - obviously), he continues to accrue felonies while on the job.  If it were you or me, we would be arrested immediately and would have been brought up on criminal charges.  Cops, apparently, are immune from normal prosecution.

I have no reasonable expectation that justice will ever be done in either of the cases I just mentioned, because the degree of injustice accumulated already cannot be undone, and we have no existing system of justice to correct the injustices of the state itself.

Our system is designed to punish the individual, not to oversee the excesses of the state.

Are we, then, in any meaningful sense, still a free nation?  Are we still a democracy?   The obvious out-datedness of the electoral system aside, it seems that the fundamental definition of a democracy has to be that the will of the people is enacted.  On many issues, Americans are divided.  I do not know how many people actually think airport searches are fine and dandy, but I know that an awful lot of Americans think they are justified.  I do not know how many people think cops are already burdened enough with their job, so that we should go easier on them - but there's a significant number of people who think that way.

None of these issues, however, is ever put before the people.  Politics has become entirely about electing a particular person, or about simply electing a name that is recognizable, with not even a view of the person behind the name.  Issues have nothing to do with politics.  Politicians cannot, apparently, be made to express views on issues like this, and once in office, they do little or nothing to address these issues except in florid speeches.

So, what do we do?  I mean, what do people who think like me, do?  There are a lot of people who think more or less as I do - I am not alone.  Some days, I will ask all the people around me a variety of questions about such issues, and virtually everyone, independently, expresses the views I've just expressed.  But, I live in a literate world of college professors, students and kindred spirits.  If I can think my way through to any answers on this question (what is to be done?), I'll write about them.

In the meantime, I'm trying to understand human nature a bit better, and also to review human history.  How did we get to be so numerous and hence so unmanageable?  Why don't people see that we're unmanageable and keep trying to manage the unmanageable?  You'd have to have the most repressive, totalitarian state imaginable to keep every single person safe all the time - and even then, it wouldn't be completely safe.  Indeed, it would probably be more violent and crazy than it is now.  Unless we could put computer chips in the head of every individual and literally make them robots, people cannot be kept from all violent or disgusting acts (e.g., Catholic priests - devoted to chastity - can't keep themselves pure, even with the help of God - or, as many would say, even with the help of their intense belief in God).

It's easy to say, "Oh, well," and just forget about it, isn't it?

Forgetting is quite useful.  More on that later.