The Treaties at Medicine Lodge

Look, 15,000 people would have been a massive crowd anywhere in America in 1867, just two years after Appomattox, but out here on the Plains, it's impossible to imagine what that size gathering looked like. Then throw this in: there was no stadium, no motel row, no fast food joints, and for sure no public facilities. Today, total population of Kansans in the entire county reaches only 1700.

Did I mention the army? Add to that 15,000 an additional 500 men in blue to protect the peace commissioners out there at the confluence of Medicine Lodge and Elm Rivers, all of them determined to settle the mess created by a mad rush of Euro-Americans to occupy every last stretch of fertile land--and even some not-so-fertile--that they could call their own, even though that land had its own people with their own history and culture, the Kiowa, Comanche, Arapahoe, Apache, and Cheyenne. Those people were at Medicine Lodge--15,000 of them, in fact, close to the border of Kansas and what was then Indian Territory, today is Oklahoma.

The Historical Marker right there at the spot has it right: "While the treaties did not bring immediate peace," the sign says, "they made possible the coming of the railroads and eventual settlement." Sure. That's like saying that 9/11 was a plane crash.

The Medicine Lodge Treaties are almost always spoken of as plural because when those peace commissioners and the Native headmen signed them, there were more than one--three, in fact. The whole gathering was much ballyhooed because any multitude of that size--and almost all of the folks there gathered in their own colors--was going to draw attention. The Medicine Lodge Treaties certainly did, newspapermen all the way from New York City. Seriously.

For years already, blood had flowed throughout the region, our world, the world of the Great Plains. The Peace Commission, full of righteousness, determined to end bloodshed by treaties that established extensive land concessions and defined the boundaries of a reservation that covered most of what is today southwestern Oklahoma. Those Natives who signed thereby surrendered their claims to more than 140,000 square miles of land. In return, they were sentenced to a measly 5,500, but--listen to this!--they'd receive payments of $25,000 per year for 30 years, or so they were promised, and annuities--food, supplies, seeds, and farming equipment that never came, and oh, yes, the promise of schools and churches.

The Medicine Lodge Treaties, white people got the land and Natives got what white people called a holy book. Oh my, they should be grateful.

The Medicine Lodge Treaties of 1867 opened up all that land for settlement by American dreamers and an bellowing iron horse that miraculously linked East coast business interests with gold fields and a burgeoning West coast world once impossibly far away.

After the treaties, the only impediment to burgeoning national business interests was this lousy, stinky crowd of smelly, scruffy monsters, the American buffalo. When men like our own General Dodge, Council Bluffs' most famous founder and a railroad genius, looked at those lousy buffalo on and just off his precious Union Pacific tracks, there arose a great thought in the minds of the railroad people--kill the buffalo, make it a sport, and we'll simultaneously destroy the menace of that Native world.

In the early years of the 19th century, 30 to 40 million bison were here in our world. Lewis and Clark spotted their very first herd from the top of Spirit Mound, not even an hour away. Astonishingly, by 1895, only a thousand were left. In 1873 alone, the hide yard in Dodge City, close to the Medicine Lodge River, shipped 200,000 hides and had another 80,000 in their warehouse.

Some guy named Orlando Brown downed as many as 6000 bison himself, firing big, fat rounds so often that he lost his hearing in his right ear from that .50 caliber monster rifle he couldn't stop firing. White America loved every minute of it because the massacre of the buffalo meant silencing those savage Natives and freeing the railroads to reign over land once occupied by those on whom the Medicine Hat Treaties promised so much favor.

"While the treaties did not bring immediate peace," the sign says, "they made possible the railroads and eventual settlement."

Did they ever.

In 1867, 15 thousand Native Americans gathered at the confluence of the Medicine Lodge and Elm Rivers in southern Kansas to hammer out a lasting treaty that would establish peace on the plains.

Didn't. Nope.

I can't help but think that this is the kind of story nice white kids aren't supposed to hear. What underlies this entire narrative is--be careful now!--Critical Race Theory.

Can you imagine shooting buffalo right out of the open windows of a passenger car on the Union Pacific? What a hoot! 

In the MAGA world, that's how to teach history.

GIS and me

Don't know exactly where I was that morning, but when I came around the front of the house, this guy, Joseph Kerski, is on our front lawn. No, what's behind him is not our front lawn, and, the fact is, he wasn't exactly on our front lawn. He was just across the street, this guy and a female companion I just assumed was his spouse--maybe not. 

Anyway, there they stood as if assessing the lot, which happens to be empty and for sale. What I always liked about that lot was a big o'er-hanging cottonwood, the kind of tree most likely to succeed even though it's most hated. The lot across the street slopes gently to a draw which is mostly nothing but sunflowers and cattails unless the river's raging. It's a fine lot, just south of us. Truth be told, I even considered it before buying across the street for the open view of prairie. 

The two of them weren't more than fifty feet from me when this guy sees me and comes walking over, introduces himself, and lets me know what their prospecting was all about. No, he's not interested in buying the lot.

He made what they were up to sound like a really big deal. When I say it now, I don't imagine anyone who takes the time to read all of this will be as impressed as I was, which is to say, really impressed, almost as impressed as he was. Excitement--real, bona fide passion--almost always sells, and this guy sold me on the fact, which he quickly revealed, that I was most truly blessed to be living right here, at a significant intersection of the world. (He didn't say it that way, but some of that passion sticks.)

The two of them claimed to have located the intersection of importance in latitude and longitude, just across the street, maybe fifty feet into the empty lot over there. Let me try to show you.

Here we are, circled in red. There's a tiny red check right across the street, where they were standing. What's there, they claimed, was pretty-near the exact intersection of lines of latitude and longitude--the 43rd parallel at the 96th meridian. I don't even know how to say it.

And here we are, a bit closer at the same address. 

They were aboard a double-decker van, a huge thing on a small body, a kind of stunted English two-decker. Geography lit him up the way anything from Frozen lights up my four-year-old granddaughter. Most everything he measured, it seemed, he did with his phone, but he was, for the fifteen minutes they stopped and did their calculating, something akin to a kid with a new toy, even though nothing his toolbox was new.

He wrote me a note later, and showed me the path to his website, where that good time enthusiasm just about runs wild. He's man on a mission, that is to bring the good news of geography to a world standing in need. 

He didn't try, but something tells me he'd sell you that tie--or give it away if you pay some attention to what he calls "spatial education," which I'm still not sure I can understand any time soon, although the easiest summary of what he's up to would be to see students in schools learn more about the actual, real, natural world beneath their feet.

It's about latitude and longitude, and the GPS on your phone, and like knowing where you're standing on is earth, like understanding that just beyond your sidewalk is a spot of land that's really distinguished, which is what he told me. Spatial education may not increase the price tag on our house, but it's unique and individual and, good night! you ought to appreciate it. 

Loved the visit. Ever since, I've been wondering how on earth to tell everyone else what an amazing thing sits there in the grass just a few feet from the curb of Andrews Court, Alton. 

Should really have more visits. 

He's big, big, big on GIS (Geographic Information Systems):

GIS is a key technology for our 21st century world. As we have increased pressure on the environment, as we have increased population, we have to grapple with and deal with and solve these spatial problems from a local to global scale.

If I'm right about his work, he's deadly serious (far more lively than deadly) about GIS because understanding our world spatially helps us know more about what he calls "the wheres of why." 

All of that in my front yard. I really ought to put up a sign. It's all quite amazing.

___________________________ 

If you'd like to see and hear him, go to one of his Ted Talks, his website, or just google him--the man has got some kind of web presence. 

Sunday Morning Meds -- God of my Righteousness

 

“Answer me when I call, O God of my righteousness” Psalm 4:1

Charles Spurgeon says this particular descriptive phrase (“God of my righteousness”) doesn’t appear anywhere else in the Psalms, or in the entire Bible, for that matter. The KJV has it, as do plenty of contemporary translations, but the NIV translates the phrase into a single adjective and then gives it to God (“righteous God”), a rendition that seems to me to suggest a significantly different idea.

I was born and reared in the Calvinist tradition, and for better or for worse I’ve stayed—not always joyfully—within that fold. My Calvinism may be why I like the KJV’s phrasing. The psalmist is doing something total here, giving full credit for his righteousness to the author thereof. I’m not interested in polemics, but he’s doing the Calvinist thing.

I once knew an old guy named Harry, perfectly bald, with only a quarter of a lung. He’d lost the rest to cancer, been a smoker all his life. He was very much alone in the world. His wife was gone, but she hadn’t been at his side since he’d treated her the way he’d treated anything else in his life of real value, including his kids.

He wore a beret and drove an ancient VW beetle, looked for all the world like the eccentric he was. He loved to spin poems, little aphoristic lines that rose in his mind and soul from all kinds of varied sources—some of them deeply devotional, some of them a bit randy, even ribald. Sort of like John Donne. That’s pushing it.

I’ll never forget him crying, something he used to do at the drop of a hat—well, beret. In a restaurant, outside church, inside church, just about anywhere, if he was given to consider what he claimed to be the unrighteousness of his eighty-some years, he’d shed tears profusely—and he only had so much breath.

He’d look at me, a young man at the time, and raise a crooked finger. “Jim,” he’d say, “if I had one thing, one lousy thing to do with my salvation, I’d burn in hell.”

That sort of statement tends to end conversation.

The poet in Psalm 4 is not pointing a crooked finger or trying to convince you and me to curb our appetites. Neither is he driven half-mad by the sin of his youth. I’m not sure he’s crying at all.

But the intent of the line—“God of my righteousness”—is exactly the same as my old friend Harry’s appraisal of his life’s destiny. What the Psalmist is suggesting is that without God the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth, he’d register pretty much zilch on the righteousness reader.

It’s difficult for me to understand how any believing earthling could say anything different. But then, I’m a Calvinist. At my age, looking back over a life that has some miles on it, I find it impossible not to say, with the poet of Psalm 4, and even with Harry, that this God I worship, this God who loves me, is, for certain, the “God of my righteousness.”

Book Review: Hannah Coulter

"This is my story, my giving of thanks."

It's all right there, the final sentence of the first chapter of Wendell Berry's Hannah Coulter. If you're ready, willing, and able to believe in a character--a woman, a wife, and a mother--who is about to tell you a story she characterizes as thanksgiving, you'll like the novel. If you think it's a silly, pious thing to say, in all likelihood you won't.

Let me put it this way, if you like Hannah Coulter, you'll like Hannah Coulter, if that makes sense. 

Similar to Marilynne Robinson's Gilead, Berry's novel is all about the narrator. Like John Ames, Hannah Coulter is serious, thoughtful, loving, and grounded in time and place. The only attitude she carries that separates her from today's MAGA crowd is her deep spirituality, a faith that's so much greater than the flag-waving, me-and-my-sweet Jesus evangelicalism, so apart from that that it may well seem as if it's not there at all. But have a look once more at that sentence at the top of the page. She's about to spin her story of thanksgiving as an act of thanksgiving. 

To say that very little happens in Hannah Coulter isn't wrong. As does John Ames, what Hannah tells us amounts to little more than a story of someone who loved well in a Kentucky town so small it may not have a future. Hers is a life on the land, a life of hard work, and not without significant loss: her first husband, father of her only daughter, does not return from the war that tasks the entire community.

Her second husband--the father of her two boys--is also a vet, a man who, characteristically maybe, simply doesn't talk about Okinawa, where, she discovers after his death, he likely experienced the depths of hell. It's a mark of the strength of her character that she undertakes, after Nathan's death, a comprehensive study of what he might have witnessed in that battle and others in Pacific Theater. When he's gone, she determines she owes him an understanding of what he wouldn't--and probably couldn't-- tell her. 

She was twelve when her mother died, when her father was remarried to a woman her grandfather claimed was pretty sure she'd be the only one in heaven--and maybe her two boys. To call what grew between them "a rift," understates what happened the newly congregated family. 

In place of a mother who loved her, Hannah says she grew up with a beloved grandma.

She was an old-fashioned housewife: determined and skillful and saving and sparing. She worked hard, provided much, bought little, and saved everything that might be of use, buttons and buckles and rags and string and paper sacks from the store. She mended leaky pans, patched clothes, and darned socks. She used the end of a turkey's wing as a broom to sweep around the stove.

Grandmom is the kind of character one doesn't see around much any more. Hannah Coulter is almost shocking in its open portrayal of what we may well call righteousness. Hannah Coulter is wonderful--thoughtful, gracious, loving. If you find it hard to imagine loving a novel with a central character, a narrator in fact, who is all of those things, don't try. Just pick up a copy of Hannah Coulter. 

Her love of the world in which she lives is a theme in almost everything Wendell Berry writes, and it's here again in spades. The fact is, Hannah Coulter is more than happy in her place in life--she's thankful for it and in it. While she believes the world outside Port Williams offers too many seductions, she's not given in the least to self-righteousness or paranoia. What she's learned is that place is home, and home is blessing. What her first husband, Virgil, gave her, she says, was the blessing of home.

Of all the kind things he did for me, that house was the kindest. It was a play house, a dream house sure enough, and yet it was the realest thing of all that time. In it we met and were together on the condition only of loving each other. We lived the dearest minutes of our marriage in that dream house, in the real firelight, under the real stars. And when Virgil went away that time I had something of him with me that I would keep.

You can read that paragraph for what it says about Virgil, but if you fail to read it for what it says about her, you'll miss the story's profound strengths. 

A character named Burley Coulter, who barely makes an appearance in the novel, but plays a role akin to a coyote is to Native American literature, a nasty little, fascinating character. Burley gets some good lines in despite staying off stage. "All women is brothers," Hannah claims Burley's said it, and she dishes out his wiry wisdom whenever she chooses to employ it. 

But Burley's right. The book is a novel in the shape of a memoir, and the life it fashions is a woman's life. I mean no discredit when I say that the novel is a woman's book. Hannah has fallen deeply in love twice. When the man of her dreams doesn't return from the war, she finds herself falling again, this time for a neighbor. Both of those stories are love stories, but how she defines and describes each of them is thoughtfully, thoroughly female. 

Bottom line?--Hannah Coulter is a lovely woman. She makes Hannah Coulter a lovely novel. You'll not find many like it.

The Yard, Then and Now

I don't remember anymore why the retired Michigan couple wanted to sell the house on Dailey Ave. What I remember is him showing me around, walking with me across the yard, his yard--kept well, I might add--and telling me, proudly, that because I was from the Midwest I already knew the score when it came to grass clippings. I didn't need to be taught.

I hadn't a clue what he was talking about. I'd mowed my share of lawns during my Wisconsin boyhood, but the relative merits of picking up clippings vs. allowing them to settle into the lawn and thereby offer enrichment was nothing I'd ever taken time to consider. But I knew all of that, this guy said, because I was from the Midwest.

Barbara and I spent the first two years of our married life in a two-room, second floor apartment far closer to downtown Phoenix than where this, our first house, still stands--35th Avenue and Thunderbird Road, what was then the far northwest side of the metropolitan area. There was no grass. We got a break on rent because I kept the pool clean, but I don't remember any grass at all within the fortress complex. 

All of that was fifty years ago, a half a century. Back then, people spoke in somewhat hushed tones about water--where it was going to come from if more and more people moved to the Valley of the Sun, which is, of course, desert. I don't remember feeling much then back then, but perhaps I didn't know any prophets either. 

Today, 3442 West Dailey Avenue, our first house, the home our first child, a daughter, came home to, a house we lived in for a little less than two years, looks like this. 

I don't remember the two palms that appear to be in the back yard, but every bit of landscaping has been become a rock pile. Where it isn't cement, the front yard is all gravel. 

My guess is that no one in Arizona transforms landscape in this way for aesthetic reasons, although beautiful desert landscape is achievable. It's undoubtedly prudent to just lay gravel, it's environmentally sound, and my guess is its easy on the water bill. 

I can't help believe this kind of landscaping is the future of things in the Southwest. 

We celebrated our 50th anniversary this June; the whole family went out to Sedona, where we stayed a few days in a glorious Air B and B that was out on the edge of what's become something of a city. Between us and downtown was a gorgeous golf course we'd drive through every time we went to town. I can't imagine Arizona without golf courses, but I can't help but think that the water it requires to keep up a 18 spacious greens is, on its own, amazing. 

Today, out here in Iowa, I know about grass clippings. Yesterday, I mowed again, the shaggy carpet beneath my feet having grown like mad since with mid-summer fertilizer. I picked 'em up because the grass was really thick. I don't, by nature, comfortably wear a prophet's robes, but I can't help thinking that I am among those who spend way too much time and resources on my lawn, even way out here in Iowa.

He's gone now, I'm sure. He was a retired General Motors hand in 1972, when we bought the house at 3442 West Dailey. Today, he'd be 110, maybe older.

If we sold the place today, I don't imagine he or I would have much to say about why or why not to keep up the yard. Turning the lawn to stone is the wise thing to do, the thoughtful thing to do, the ecological thing to do.

But I'm guessing that retired Michigander would miss the grass.

And, I am sad to admit, so do I.  

The Multitudes of August

Okay, it's not a plague on the front step, at least not here, front yard, front sidewalk. What?--just seven of the little buggers catching some early afternoon rays, something they have to do, I'm told, although more on that later.

I am greatly anguished to admit that we may have ten thousand grasshoppers in the garden out back, a few million in the prairie even farther from the house, or us, and untold more in the forty acres of corn beyond that, although the word is they only devour the leaves from the stalks on the edges of the fields. Nonetheless, for the first time since we've moved to the country, this August, they're a force to be reckoned with. 

A couple of millions is a haphazard guess. But, who's counting? Not me. All I know is that in all of the stories I've ever read about the great grasshopper wars during the onslaught of Rocky Mountain locusts--or whatever you care to call them--I've never really read about the profane and sinful anger they're capable of nurturing in your mind and heart. If there were any fewer, I'd go on a killing spree. Yesterday, when I mowed the lawn, I ended hundreds of life stories--or the mower did, and it was gratifying, a sheer delight. I told myself that the Grasshopper Times, the daily tabloid some of the enterprising have to publish, ran banner headlines above the not-to-believed story of the old man and a voracious red Toro who killed thousands of innocents. 

Happily too. I wish I'd done in more.

Perfectly beautiful, hearty, and colorful, our marigolds, for whatever reason went first. 

I couldn't pull the darn thing, but my gardening partner did. What's left, cadaver-wise, is now rudely buried amid grass clippings at the Alton dump. Marigolds!--innocence and beauty, destroyed.  

Those heavy-duty mandibles don't seem to able to burrow beneath the rugged rinds and into the sweet meat of the melons. The hoppers leave scars, but that's it. They work at digging in but eventually, just throw in the towel, leaving little more damage than a scar. 

But they eat the tar out of the plants, leave them all beyond recovery. Still, somehow--the Lord willing--we may yet have a crop. 

Although they appear to eat everything, the cone flowers that, this year especially, have come to dominate the backyard, somehow hold up against the hopper swarms. 

It's hard to know from the shot whether the suffering these guys are undergoing is grasshopper-driven, or just the vale-of-tears thing--alas, the season's o'er. But the leaves appear unchewed. 

I asked a creation-care friend about that, and he told me they're relatively untouched because cone flowers are as native as the hoppers. "They evolved together," he told me. 

That's right--"evolved." fine Christian man explaining things by evolution. The marigolds don't have a couple million year history in the prairie, I guess. Hence, they're first fruits. It's a Darwin thing, he says.

And he also told me that hoppers need to maintain body heat to operate, which is why, at the end of the day this time of year, they sun themselves on sidewalks or wherever (see top-of-the-page photo) seeking to absorb sufficient solar power to live and gorge themselves on my garden some more. 

What's enough to make me think again about taking up residence at the Home is that tens of thousands of them each are laying a couple thousand eggs. That's truly Hitchcockian.

Pray for an early frost. They need to die.

The Glasgow Ghost Shirt returns home

This is the speech Marcella LeBeau gave at the Wounded Knee Massacre cemetery at the commemoration the day the Sacred Ghost Shirt was returned by the Kelvingrove Museum to the people at Pine Ridge, South Dakota.

~   *   ~   *   ~   *   ~

 

August 1, 1999

Cante wasteye nape ciyuzape – I shake your hand with a good heart.

We stand here today on hallowed ground—our Lakota ancestors lie here in this mass grave. They were innocent men, women, and children who were massacred under a white flag of truce on December 29, 1890.

The Sacred Ghost Dance Shirt is making a full circle today – returning from whence it came. The Lakota spirit was broken here that fateful day.

This is historic for us to come together here on this hallowed ground to witness the return of the Sacred Ghost Dance Shirt.

We give out heartfelt gratitude to our friends from the Kelvingrove Museum, Glasgow, Scotland, the people of Glasgow, Scotland, and many others who made this possible.

Lila Wopila Tanka – it is a great thanksgiving. This will bring about a sense of closure to a sad and horrible massacre in the history of the Lakota Nation – now healing can begin.

Gratitude goes out to Mario Gonzalez, a champion in this effort, John Earl, Allen Duke, Ian Sinclair, and many others who supported us overwhelmingly.

My family, Diane, Richard, Tom, Gerri, Kathy, Donna, and my grandchildren are all descendants of the Wounded Knee Massacre. My son, Richard, traveled with me in 1998 to Glasgow, Scotland and stands by my side.

Our youth must know our history and not forget. Our lives are affected by broken treaties, land loss, poverty, unemployment, alcoholism, and all the associated ills and dysfunction. We have within ourselves the power to change. We look for healing. We look to our youth, the 7th generation to rise with vision, cast aside despair, build self-esteem, and combat the ills of our society so that the spirit can soar once again.

Cemetery and Memorial at Wounded Knee

Postscript (from Marcella's autobiography):

I’ve been involved with the story of the Massacre at Wounded Knee for many years now. A pervasive sadness exists on our reservation because of Wounded Knee, an unresolved grief over what happened there.

At Wounded Knee, the Seventh Cavalry killed 250 to 300 men, women, and children, and then gave 20 Medals of Honor to soldiers for their bravery. That gesture has affected people from our reservation, as well as those from Standing Rock, who also lost relatives killed that day in 1890.

For many years the Tribal Council from Cheyenne River, as well as people from elsewhere, have been requesting the government to revoke those 20 Medals of Honor. Lately, the bill is called “Remove the Stain,” and the number is House Resolution 3467. Right now, that bill is making its way through the legislature.

Initially, we met with Rep. Deb Haaland*, of New Mexico, from the Laguna Pueblo, and two other congressmen. They are working, and the bill is moving ahead, but I don’t know where it is today.

____________________________ 

*In the Biden Administration, Deb Haaland has become the Secretary of the Interior.

In this picture, Rep. Kai Kahele (D-Hawaii), the tall man at the center of the program, has his hand on the shoulder of Marcella LeBeau. The Remove the Stain Act, despite wide support, still has not been passed by the U.S. Congress.   

The Glasgow Ghost Shirt - xiv

 

Marcella LeBeau and the Ghost Shirt she made for the Kelvingrove Museum

Richard and I went to Scotland together in 1998, a new experience for us. When we arrived, we went to a hotel, where the next morning a couple showed up—a man and his wife—and offered us a ride. We were scheduled to meet at the Buell Building, a different place than where we had met on my first visit. That building could hold only 100 people, but so many people showed up because they wanted to attend. The officials had to draw names to see who could get inside.

Some people in Scotland and in England had presented our story in all types of media to raise awareness about the Ghost Shirt, so that when we arrived it was clear that lots of people were on our side, sympathetic for our taking the Sacred Ghost Shirt back to South Dakota.

The Director of the Kelvingrove Museum, Mark O’Neill, was there, and Liz Cameron, also from the museum. Ian Sinclair helped us. John Earl, the lawyer who first saw the Ghost Shirt at a traveling exhibit from the museum, was there also.

Director O’Neill gave the opening remarks and talked about the history of the shirt, how it came to be in the museum. And then I presented my information.

The newspapers the next day said there were people were crying, sobbing in the audience as I talked. Then I presented the replica ghost dance shirt to Liz Cameron, who was a member of the Museum Board of Directors.

Following that hearing, we waited five days because the decision to keep or to give up the Sacred Ghost Dance Shirt would be determined by the city council. During that time, we were invited out with people, invited often to different events.

On the fifth day, we went to the city council chambers. There, once again, the discussion began. First, a man talked for about ten minutes. He spoke against our taking the shirt back home. Despite that speech, when the vote was taken it was twelve votes for us and just one for keeping the sacred shirt in Scotland.

We were successful. We won the right to take Sacred Ghost Shirt back to South Dakota, but museum officials had criteria to follow for handling it on its trip home—it was more than a century old. Besides, the officials at the museum wanted to return the Sacred Ghost Shirt themselves to Wounded Knee. They wanted to create a cultural exchange with the people of Cheyenne River, to bring young people to the reservation and to Wounded Knee.

For some time, we brought together some of our children. I even started to make ribbon shirts for the drummers. We wanted the drummers to visit Scotland, but then a war broke out it and affected travel.

When the members of the museum committee brought the Sacred Ghost Shirt to South Dakota, Mark O’Neill, Liz Cameron, John Lynch and his wife—four of them came. They got as far as Minneapolis, when the officials in the customs office recognized the eagle feather and wouldn’t let them take the shirt into the country—the Glasgow people were white.

We got in touch with the tribal lawyer and figured out what we could do to get that shirt here. We knew Allan Duke, an Onondaga friend of ours from Woodstock, Georgia, was coming here and traveling through the Twin Cities airport. He was able to pick up the Ghost Dance Shirt and its eagle feathers and he brought it to Eagle Butte.

We had a program here in Eagle Butte when we returned, including two bagpipe players who offered to come and play here for the occasion.

The Cheyenne River Survivors Association had no authority at Pine Ridge, so we turned the program over to the Pine Ridge Association. The ceremony there began at the foot of the hill of the Wounded Knee Massacre grounds. That’s where the Glasgow people transferred the Sacred Ghost Dance Shirt to the Pine Ridge people.

The cemetery atop the hill at Wounded Knee

Then the entire group started in a processional up the hill toward the mass grave which stands above the place where the chapel used to be. A photographer from New York spotted an eagle circling overhead in some of his pictures. One of the people noticed the eagle too and remarked that it was likely one of the relatives of the man who had worn that ghost shirt more than 100 years before.

When they went up the hill, they held the ghost shirt. My son Richard put out the quilts—my granddaughter Bonnie and I had made 13 quilts to giveaway, enough for all the invited guests who’d come all that distance.

The Pine Ridge people had a podium up on the hill beside the gravesite, where John Earl spoke, the man who had spotted the shirt in the Kelvingrove Museum, as well as some visitors and others, I including members of the Pine Ridge Survivors Association. A preacher, Syd Bird, spoke too.

The next day we went to Pierre, to the Heritage Center, where we also had a program and reception for our visitors from Scotland, an event at which Kevin Locke performed his hoop dancing. In order to have the ghost shirt returned, we had a contract with the Pierre Heritage Cultural Center, where it would be kept in a safe, environmentally-controlled space.

Ten years later, in July, 2008, on the anniversary of the shirt’s return, we had a ceremony here again, in Eagle Butte. The Historical Society brought the ghost shirt up here, and in a ceremony, we read the names of the those who had been killed at the Massacre. Right then, in fact, the museum in Glasgow had their own commemoration for the transfer of the ghost shirt.

I was asked to speak that day at the ceremony at Wounded Knee. I still have that speech.

Sunday Morning Meds -- Satisfaction

“Satisfy us in the morning with your unfailing love,

that we may sing for joy and be glad all our days.” Psalm 90:14

Received an e-mail late last night from old friends, a retired pastor and his wife, who told me the news of their son, their oldest child, who, at 53, started feeling a bit weak, they say, a few weeks ago, and therefore went in for tests that turned up something significant. He was sent to a specialist, who identified the problem as ALS, which is also renowned as “Lou Gehrig’s disease.”

There is some hope, as some who suffer ALS can keep on going for a long time. Others, of course, don’t. “Won't get into numbers,” they wrote—or rather the mother did. Right now, their son “has to be pulled up out of his big comfortable chair if he wants to get up. Has to use a walker. Totally weak arms and legs so far. Can hardly pick up his arm or hold spoons when he eats. We go see him......often.”

She says friends from work and church come visit him at home, and he keeps a positive outlook, says “he will enjoy each day as they go along.”

He has three little grandchildren who live almost next door. “They perk him up,” the note says. His wife is wonderful and caring. She pushes the wheelchair when they go anywhere. And then this: “So........... it is finally sinking in to me that this is happening to our oldest ‘child.’ I seem to call him ‘Danny Boy’ now.”

All of that from old friends, just last night, late.

That Moses would write this line—that makes sense: “Satisfy us in the morning with your unfailing love, that we may sing for joy and be glad all our days.”

It’s almost impossible to read the story of the Exodus and not be a little anti-Semitic. After all God had done for them, taking down Pharaoh and his minions in the Red Sea, then establishing his own tent right there among them thereby granting him the glory of his presence, those Israelites still found things to grouse about.

Yahweh splashes manna around every morning, and they want duck in wine sauce. He gives them duck and they want sirloin. Is it any wonder He got sick of them, told them an entire generation had to die before he’d bring them home? The OT Israelites give Jews a bad name.

Once, at a burning bush, God instructed Moses to speak for him—and, in a way speak for his people before Pharaoh. In Psalm 90, that’s what Moses is doing, speaking for them, and himself, and certainly for all of us. He’s asking for something few of us ever get—real satisfaction. Maybe lions get it; after all, they sleep away ninety percent of their lives. But I don’t think humans ever do.

And I have an e-mail to prove it. I don’t know Danny Boy, his kids, darling grandkids or his loving, caring wife. But I know his parents, and I know at least something of their sadness. I wish they weren’t suffering. I wish Danny Boy wasn’t dying. I wish those grandkids weren’t losing a grandfather. Things just aren’t right in the world.

Moses’s prayer resonates because we all know the impulse: “Satisfy us,” he begs. It’s the song we all sing, every day of our lives.

Except, maybe, Danny Boy, who will, as he says, “enjoy each day as they go along.” Except maybe him.

The Glasgow Ghost Shirt - xiii

Marcella LeBeau died in November of 2021. Her story was never finished. This particular story was something she often spoke of, even in public gatherings and at conferences. This is how she told the story herself.

Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow, Scotland

A lawyer named John Earl, a Cherokee from Woodstock, Georgia, was traveling in Europe. He stopped in Glasgow, Scotland, where he saw a traveling museum exhibit that included an authentic Lakota Sacred Ghost Dance Shirt. He knew immediately that it didn’t belong there, that it belonged to the Lakota people.

When John Earl returned to the States, he got in touch with Mario Gonzales, who was the lawyer for the Pine Ridge Reservation at that time. Earl told Mario about it, and Mario contacted the Wounded Knee Survivors Association at Pine Ridge and told them about the Sacred Shirt.

Mario began to make arrangements to go to Glasgow to make an appeal for its return to South Dakota. He requested a delegate from Pine Ridge to go with him, so he asked Marie Not Help Him, from Pine Ridge, in addition to Burdell Blue Arm, from Cheyenne River Reservation. Burdell was the chairman of the Cheyenne River Wounded Knee Survivors Association.

The association secretary wasn’t available at that time, so Burdell had asked me to act as secretary, even though I’m not a direct descendent of Wounded Knee. I told him I would accept. The man some people call Big Foot lived here; his real name was Spotted Elk. In December of 1890, he and his people were traveling down to Pine Ridge to meet Red Cloud. Big Foot was from Cheyenne River.

Mario Gonzales arranged a flight to Scotland. But Burdell wasn’t well, so I was the next delegate. Mario was hopeful that we would be successful in repatriating the ghost shirt.

We went to the Kelvingrove Museum and sat behind a table in a big room. There were media there, too. Mario told in great detail the story of Wounded Knee Massacre; he is himself a descendent of Dewey Beard*. The room held many extra people, who were present because they wanted to hear the Wounded Knee story from someone who had descended from a survivor.

At this meeting, however, we were denied our petition. A man there—his name was Spaulding—spoke against the move. He was adamant about our not taking the Sacred Ghost Shirt, so we didn’t have the success we had hoped for.

We went home disappointed. That was 1995.

Then, in 1998, Ian Sinclair, from the Isle of Lewis, Scotland, did a lot of work. He enlisted people to sign petitions in support of our effort to return the sacred ghost dance shirt. I have two big books of signatures supporting our petition to repatriate the Sacred Ghost Shirt. Whole groups of people were supporting our request. In England also. The story of our request circulated largely by word of mouth, but it also made the news, and many, many people signed petitions to have the museum release it to us. Our friends did a lot of work for us. Then Mr. Sinclair told Mario that it was time for us to come back again to Glasgow. The time was right.

Once again, Burdell Blue Arm was not well and couldn’t go, so I was asked to go again. This time, my son, Richard, was committed to go along. We had discovered there was this link we had to the Survivors. Anton LeBeau, Sr., was married to a woman who went by several names in her lifetime, but one name was “Burnt Thigh,” like the Rosebud Sioux. The name Burnt Thigh appears on the list of those massacred at Wounded Knee—number 64. What’s listed is the name, and “F” for sex and “K” for killed. LeBeaus are descendants. My son, Richard, wanted to go with me. My own personal feeling was that his discovering his connection to the massacre had a great deal to do with his commitment.

We applied to the tribe, and the tribe paid our way to go back again to Scotland. This time Richard and I went. A week before we were to leave, Mario called to say that he couldn’t go. That meant it was left to me. The museum set up certain criteria for the person who would request the Ghost Shirt, qualifications I would have to meet.

I was here, at home, when I took the list to the kitchen table to look through the questions they were asking. It seemed to me that we qualified.

Mario suggested that we make a replica of the Sacred Ghost Shirt. I thought a replica would be a good idea, so I began to plan how I could make one. Bonnie, my granddaughter, and I went to the tribal jail, where they store tribal artifacts. They opened a crate, and we were able to observe and take measurements from a ghost shirt. From that I knew Ghost Shirts were made with a cotton fabric, fairly heavy—a white fabric. I looked for that kind of fabric, something white or close, to sort of be of the same quality.

I found fabric that seemed close, but I wasn’t satisfied. My daughter-in-law, Chris, from New York, is a Seneca. Every year the government gives the Seneca tribal members some fabric, “treaty cloth” it’s called, in payment as stipulated by a treaty. Chris gave me that cloth, and out of that fabric I made the Ghost Dance shirt to resemble the one in the museum.

Bronco LeBeau, who was in charge of the artifacts in the basement of the old jail, had this powder, something like sand, something powdery; so I rubbed that in the yoke and used that to try to color that yoke in.

Richard gave me some feathers, and among the feathers was an eagle feather. I attached the feathers and darkened that yoke in with that powder.

---

*A Minneconjou, Dewey Beard, as a boy, was at Little Big Horn and, as a man, at the Massacre at Wounded Knee, where he was shot three times. He’d been with Spotted Elk (Big Foot) when his band left the Cheyenne River Reservation. Most of Dewey Beard’s family was killed at Wounded Knee—his father, his mother, his wife, and his infant child. He died in 1955, the last survivor of both Little Big Horn and Wounded Knee.

Dewey Beard

The Glasgow Ghost Shirt - xii

Maria Pearson accepting an award from the Ames (IA) Historical Society

A bit of a road trip, fast forward 80 years. During the summer of 1971, on Highway 34, southwest Iowa, heavy-duty road work was going on, some lumbering monster doing dirt work with healthy jaws was opening the earth and eating it, a monster that had to stop munching when, one day, the ancient graves of 28 people were discovered and in the way.

That night, one of the men, John Pearson, a district engineer with the Iowa Highway Commission, came home to Maria, his wife, with the news.

I don’t know how Mr. and Mrs. Pearson started talking, but let’s pretend Maria asked him a standard, spousal question: “Well, dear, now tell me, how was your day?”

Okay, that’s unlikely, given what we know of Maria. Most who knew her would steadfastly declare Maria was no June Cleaver, a fact which husband John must have known only too well because the story goes that he preceded his news of the day with a warning: “Sweetheart,” he said, “you’re not going to like this.”

And he was right on the money with that one. She didn’t.

Because she didn’t, her world—and his and ours—changed at that very moment.

John Pearson told Maria that when his road crew turned up the graves of 28 people that morning, 26 were set for reburial at a previously appointed place just up the road. Two of them, however, were not--a mother and child, whose remains were sent to the office of the State Archaeologist in Iowa City.

Because they were Indians.

As was Maria Pearson, born and reared on the Yankton Reservation, where as a member of the Turtle Clan, she was named Running Moccasins, and where her grandmother made sure her granddaughter learned everything she should know about her own Yankton Sioux people and their ways.

What the Pearsons had for supper isn’t written up anywhere, but John wasn’t wrong—his wife was hot, angry. The two of them barely finished drying the dishes before Maria left for Des Moines, where she stormed the office of then Governor Robert Ray—and then to Iowa City, where she ambushed Marshall McKusick, the State Archaeologist.

She wasn’t demanding special treatment, only equal treatment. What she told them both is that she expected the remains of that Native mother and child to be buried just like the others, not stored in some museum or lab like a dead bull snake. She got so mad she sat—that’s right—she sat on the governor’s office desk, even though she’d never been there before. She could barely contain her righteous indignation.

And that was only the beginning. Maria Pearson spent the rest of her born days making sure honor was granted where it was due, creating the nation’s first legislation to protect Native American graves and provide for repatriation of remains. Those state laws led to what some call “the most significant legislation pertaining to Native American cultural identity since the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924.”

Wasn’t easy either. Mary Pearson took on politicians, museum officials, and the scientific community, to create the landmark Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990, which protected the rights of Native Americans “to certain human remains, funerary objects, sacred objects, and objects of cultural patrimony with which they are affiliated.”

At the core of the arguments was Maria Pearson’s own Native religion, a religion which holds that the past and present are one and that a person’s spirit abides with their remains. When those remains are disturbed, their spirits grow unsettled and unhappy. Standing Bear’s argument for taking his band of Poncas back, once again, on the long walk from Oklahoma was that he had promised his son he would be buried with his ancestors overlooking the Niobrara, together.

Maria Pearson, through all those years of activism, liked to tell people that throughout her life she heard her grandmother’s voice in the leaves of a cottonwood gently shaking in prairie winds. And what her grandma told her in the voice of those trees—make no mistake about it because Mary Pearson didn’t—was that her granddaughter, a little girl named Running Moccasins, should always stand up for her people.

When, that first day in the governor’s office, Robert Ray asked her what it was she wanted, she told him. "You can give me back my people's bones,” she said, “and stop digging them up."

Twice, Maria Pearson was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for her work in preserving once abundant communities all around us. She was and is a hero.

“You’re not going to like this,” her husband said that night, just home from work. Blessedly, he was right.

In April of 1995, Marcella Le Beau, along with Mario Gonzales, another resident of the Cheyenne River Reservation, traveled to Glasgow, Scotland, to the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, on a mission determined by and undertaken for their people, her neighbors, specifically the descendants of the survivors of the Massacre at Wounded Knee. An American lawyer named John R. Earl, on vacation in Glasgow, had attended an exhibition titled “Home of the Brave: The Story of the Native Americans Since Columbus,” at the McLellan Galleries, where he found a number of Native American artifacts from 19th century Plains Indians, including a remarkable Ghost Shirt, reportedly worn at the Wounded Knee Massacre and described as having been taken from the body of a victim.

When John Earl returned to the States, he told friends of his, Native people—including the Wounded Knee Massacre Survivors Association—about the shirt, feeling aggrieved at what he considered the exploitation of a garment of great meaning to men and women and children who could trace their ancestry to the victims of the horror at Wounded Knee in the winter of 1890. The Survivors Association agreed and sent Marcella and Mr. Gonzales to request repatriation. 

Saint Frederick

Frederick Buechner (1926-2022)

This morning I'm interrupting the long story of the Glasgow Ghost Shirt because yesterday, at 96 years old, Frederick Buechner (beek'-ner) left this world behind and passed, as my Native friends might say, into the spirit world. 

I should have read Buechner much more than I have, and I can say that with certainty because we've been at it, the two of us, for a long time now, going through a compilation of his thoughts titled Beyond Words: Daily Readings in the ABCs of Faith, a book, really, like none other we've used for daily devotions. It's profoundly beautiful and wonderful, thoughtful, mysterious, and almost always, in its own way, funny. I love it.

I was surprised to know he was still alive. I honestly believed we were reading a text from a departed saint who had passed on some time ago. I was surprised to know that I'd been wrong--he was still among the living. But then, it didn't matter really because once every day we listened to him--we heard his voice. For Buechner, I'm sure, like the apostle Paul, in the most profound of ways, it didn't matter: "to live is Christ, to die is gain."

Two nights ago, the night he passed away, we read the passage from the S section, a couple of paragraphs titled "Saint." In his honor this morning, let me offer it, right from the meditations of just such a one, Saint Frederick. 

Saint

In his holy flirtation with the world, God occasionally drops a pocket handkerchief. These handkerchiefs are called saints.

Many people think of saints as plaster saints, men and women of such paralyzing virtue that they never thought a nasty thought or did an evil deed their whole lives long. As far as know, real saints never even come close to characterizing themselves that way. On the contrary, no less a saint than Saint Paul wrote to Timothy, "I am foremost among sinners" (I Timothy 1:15), and Jesus himself prayed God to forgive him his trespasses, and when the rich young man addressed him as "good Teacher," answered "No one is good but God alone" (Mark 10:18).

In other words, the feet of saints are as much of clay as everybody else's, and their sainthood consists less of what they have done than of what God has for some reason chosen to do through them. When you consider that Saint Mary Magdalene was possessed by seven devils, that Saint Augustine prayed, "Give me chastity and continence, but not now," that Saint Francis started out as a high-living young dude in downtown Assisi, and that Saint Simeon Stylites spent years on top of a sixty-foot pole, you figure that maybe there's nobody God can't use as a means of grace, including even ourselves. 

The Holy Spirit has been called "the Lord, the giver of life" and, drawing their power from that source, saints are essentially life-givers. To be with them is to become more alive.  

_________________________ 

You can read an obituary here. 

The Glasgow Ghost Shirt - xi

 

Glasgow Ghost Shirt

Although it was not mentioned specifically in Crager’s letter to the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, one of those artifacts was a ghost shirt, which he successfully sold to the museum. Legally, that shirt thus became the property of Kelvingrove, a staple in its collections, soon creating a reputation which would, eventually, make it a favorite of museum-goers for more than a century.

Was George C. Crager telling the truth about the ghost shirt’s authenticity? Who in Glasgow, Scotland, could possibly know? That Crager had been at Wounded Knee, that he had witnessed Lakota dead dropped into that mass grave is quite likely. After his many years on Lakota reservations, George Crager knew the difference between artifacts and marketable replicas. If all of that is true, his personal experiences don’t themselves prove that Crager hadn’t sewn the shirt himself or had it made, then poked in the requisite bullet holes with his own hands and painted the entry points red or brown or whatever color looked authentic. Such things happened.


Had Crager’s ghost dance shirt actually been removed from the body of a dead warrior? Perhaps in Glasgow at the turn of the 20th century, the answer to that question didn’t matter. What is known is that the shirt, and the Wounded Knee story which gave it life, quickly created an admiring audience among Glasgow museum-goers.

Their possession was legal and binding; they’d purchased it from the owner, someone who had it himself in his possession. Even though Glasgow, Scotland is thousands of miles from the Pine Ridge Reservation of western South Dakota, the museum grew proud of its purchase. For years the ghost shirt maintained a significant presence, admired by generations.





We invest powerful meanings in mundane things when those mundane things are part of our history or story. Not long ago in a small, Iowa town, five high school boys, one night, donned Ku Klux Klan hoods. One carried a Confederate flag, another wielded a rifle. Behind them they planted a burning cross. Those five kids were summarily suspended from school for nine days. A flag, a hood, a cross on fire mean very little outside of the context of this country’s long and deplorable record of race relations. Specifically hurt by what they’d done was the football team’s starting quarterback, who is African-American. Things have meaning.




And this. Dozens, hundreds, even thousands of vials of blood stand in the local hospital, of interest only to doctors and nurses and patients. But when a certain vial of blood was transported into Iowa, wherever it went Roman Catholic churches opened to significant crowds. That vial holds the blood of Pope John II. Some Roman Catholics believe that their devotion to that vial will assure them of Pope John II’s intercession for them with the God of Heaven and Earth.

Things have meaning, immense meaning and importance.

The Glascow Ghost Shirt - x

It is difficult to imagine what Europe must have been like to Lakota men and women who had never seen Chicago or New York or certainly London or Paris. Homesickness ran rampant, but many found the new world amusing. Some Lakota men in full regalia went to the Eiffel Tower, where they were seen—and noticed--by other sightseers, some of whom wanted pictures.

But where is Red Shirt?" some Parisian asked them, someone familiar with the show. The two pointed. "On the carousel," they said, as if the answer was obvious.

No matter how hard Cody worked at being true to a world he himself knew, his staged productions would, of course, never come close to replicating what happened on the far-away Dakota plains. The whole extravaganza was, ancestrally, little more than reality TV, vintage Barnum and Bailey, even though Cody tried to sell the productions as history texts. One action-packed sequence, greatly favored by audiences around the world, recreated Custer’s bloody death at Greasy Grass. Crowds loved it.

Obscenely, the shows went even farther, later seasons recreating a telling of the Wounded Knee Massacre, which had happened less than a year before. Cody’s clout with the government allowed him to bring along actual survivors of that massacre as players in the drama. Back then, Washington wanted those men imprisoned; Cody argued that by his employing the Ghost Dance “hostiles” in his shows, their experience would prove of benefit to the white man’s goal of the red man’s cultural assimilation.

The Lakota took advantage of opportunities presented by their participation in the Buffalo Bill’s Wild West shows. Cody paid them well; those who went with him came home with sufficient capital for cattle operations. What’s more, in the late decades of the 19th century, Lakota men, who remembered freedom before the reservation system, were offered immense travel opportunities, a real joy to a nomadic people fenced in by legislated boundaries. Months out east and abroad became an education in the culture they would have to become part of. It’s helpful to remember that the Lakota of the Wild West shows were not cigar store Indians.

George C. Crager and family

One of Buffalo Bill’s troops, a white translator who had grown up in the west, George C. Crager, determined to make money by offering, for sale, “Indian souvenirs” he had in his possession, moccasins and cradle boards. Much of what he attempted to peddle he did as a salesman for the Lakota who traveled with the show. Women with extra time on their hands would create beadwork pieces he would sell for them. While the Wild West Show was in Glasgow, Scotland, for a tour of six months, Crager, writing on Wild West stationary, told curators at Glasgow’s Kalvin Grove Museum he was offering them his collection of Native American artifacts.

"Hearing that you are empowered to purchase relics for your Museum,” he wrote, “I would respectfully inform you that I have a collection of Indian Relics (North American) which I will dispose of before we sail to America.” Crager gently advised inspection of those relics, then asked the museum’s personnel to call on him at his room in Glasgow.

The stone over George C. Crager’s grave, in the Bronx, New York, is immensely understated. It describes him as “Trumpeter” from 3 U. S. Calvary, and gives the date of his death, 1920. What that stone offers is not wrong, but calling George Crager simply a cavalry trumpeter is akin to describing George Armstrong Custer as an Ohio schoolteacher. Crager was an army trumpeter, but he was also politely thumbed from the cavalry when it was discovered he was seven years too young to be in the ranks.

He claimed—never proven—that when he was yet a child, he was adopted by a Lakota headman named Two Strike, who raised him as his own son. What is true is that he became fluent in the Siouian language and seven of its dialects. That fluency got him the job of managing the Lakotas, a position Cody needed to fill for the traveling show.

Crager had been at Wounded Knee when the massacre took place. He’d been there when souvenir hunters stripped the dead of whatever seemed marketable. That he had in his possession the range of artifacts he claimed to have is possible. That those artifacts were all he promised them to be, however, isn’t as verifiable.

Sunday Morning Meds--When Wicked Prosper

 

“. . .do in not fret when men succeed their ways, 

when they carry out their wicked schemes.” Psalm 37:7

In what seems like just a few years ago, the college where I teach celebrated its fiftieth birthday. I was up to my ears in it, traveling the length and breadth of this continent drumming up whatever enthusiasm I could. It was great fun, but I was glad when the gala over.

There would be no college here if its first President had never taken a call to serve a church here. His name was Bernard J. Haan, and he was a stemwinder. He made national news in the late 1940s by keeping a movie house out of town. At that time, to him and his denomination, movies—like cards and dancing—were what people used to call “worldly,” as in, “of this world," "worldly amusements."

I have a picture of him standing in front of the church where I now worship, holding forth, a young man, full of hellfire. That he loved the camera is obvious by the fact that he took up such a brimstone pose for a Time magazine reporter.

I need to come clean about my heritage. There’s a mean streak in me about movies that likely harks back several generations to grandfather clergymen of mine—two of them—who were probably convinced, way back when, that Hollywood was Babylon.

Their opinions lost currency eventually. I’ve watched movies my whole life; my son did some graduate studies—in film. That doesn’t mean I don’t have a touch of my grandfathers’ DNA because sometimes I think the entire world would be better off if a bit of that California cahuna earthquake, when it finally comes, tumbles Hollywood into the Pacific.

A couple summer’s ago, the box office biggie was a remake of an idiotic TV show from the 80s—the Dukes of Hazzard. It was stupid when it was on TV. If you listen to critics, Hollywood updated even more dopiness into the story—nothing but car chase silliness and constant deep-dive cleavage.

It made millions. A review in our paper gave it ½ of a star, out of a possible five. But it also gave the stupid flick most of a page to say that. It’s ink that counts, of course, the buzz. And buzz it had. That movie got more ink in last week’s paper than global warning. It’s no wonder Islamic radicals hate us. This is the freedom that’s God’s own gift?—the freedom that’s our gift to the world.

Don’t get me started.

I wonder if B. J. Haan was way wrong about Hollywood—that’s what I’m saying. In American culture today, among the most wicked (I know I’m being judgmental) are those who spew Hollywood offal. I know, I know—I’m sounding like an old fart.

This verse from Psalm 37, however, isn’t about my righteousness or Hollywood’s corruption. The command is “do not fret,” so forgive me my invective. I’m not listening closely. When the Dukes of Hazzard makes millions, I shouldn’t get in a huff—that’s what David says. When the wicked prosper, don’t scream or cry. It’s all a flash in the pan.

Besides, that summer’s most incredible sleeper was an elegant love story about devotion among, of all things, emperor penguins, not a car chase in two whole hours.

Fifty years after B. J. held forth, there’s a theater in town now, and it's no even all that busy. I’m not sure we’re better off, but I’ve been there myself, and I don’t fret.

Much.