On Joe Biden and the Omicron Variant

 

Max Boot

appears on CNN to say that we have seen the light at the end of COVID’s dark tunnel.  But the light turns out to be the headlamp of a train roaring forward to overwhelm us.  The name of this train is the Omicron Variant of Covid.  

Max Boot is a purported export on military affairs who parleyed his hatred of Donald Trump into a CNN consultant spot.  His qualifications to discuss epidemiology are questionable.  But, then, we live in the Land of the Free and Opinionated.

Mr. Boot has a bald head and a mild expression and he wears little round spectacles.  He looks like a small-town president of the local Chamber of Commerce and talks that way as well. His words come simpering and mincing out of his lips, a parade of toy soldiers.  

An inflamed basketball studded with fearsome prongs

represents the Omicron variant on TV news shows.  The picture isn’t much different from the original image of the novel Covid virus, also spherical, encrusted with a swollen surface, and sporting dozens of stubby horns.  But the Omicron is a very different kind of Covid mutation, one characterized by 30 mutations in its prongs.  (These prongs are the plugs that fit into the sockets in our cells, binding the illness-producing virus to those cells and, thereby, sickening us.  Antibodies are imagined as bluish shields, a bit like the child-protection inserts that can be plugged into electrical sockets to keep small children from stabbing their fingers into those outlets.)  With more and different prongs, the virus can be thought of having more keys on its keychain and, therefore, more access to the closed and locked doors in our body.  Once the thing opens the door and gets inside who knows what mayhem will ensue?

There is a very lucid short video (about eight minutes) produced by the Wall Street Journal that explores the physiognomy of the Omicron variant.  A friend of mine, who has been a skeptic about Covid, tells me that the tone of the video is arrogant, informed with the sort of specious knowingness that characterizes liberal East Coast journalists.  “She is pretending to know what she does not know,” my friend writes to me in an email.  But it’s in the eye of the beholder.  To my mind, her video is the best short scientific explanation of the new variant that I have seen.

My friend may be confused.  I think he is objecting to the information that she presents – that is, another bout with this miserable disease, another surge, more hospitalizations and more deaths.  I think my friend has mistaken his own dismay for the lucid certainties which the journalist presents.  Like many people, he believes Covid is the hand of evolution striking down those who are unsuited to survive in the fierce competition of life.  Everyone believes this notion on some level – at least, until they get sick or someone close to them dies or becomes very ill.  

No one knows

why Omicron exists or where it came from.  Some people think the virus gestated for six months in the body of someone with a compromised immune system, possibly a person suffering from AIDS in South Africa.  Others believe the viral variant is zoonoetic – that is, the virus jumped from humans into some animal, mutated in that creature or creatures (bats? pangolins? macaques?) and, then, clawed its way back into the human race.  Others think that the virus is just assiduously adapting to human defenses in the form of our vaccines.  I suppose there are some who think the virus is part of the witches’ brew in the same secret military laboratory that fomented COVID in the first place. Possibly, it was invented by big Pharma to sell more vaccine.  

In any event, it is known that Omicron is much more transmissible than Delta which, in turn, was much more infectious than the original COVID virus.  It also seems that this variant virus, demonstrating its own peculiar cunning, is less virulent and less likely to lead to hospitalization.  This means that the virus has contrived a way to spread through asymptomatic transmission.  People are walking around everywhere with the disease concealed within them.  But it remains to be seen how devastating this next surge of Covid will be – Omicron is new: it was only discovered in the last week of November.  We are now one month into the new variant’s propagation.

Joe Biden

seems to be completely baffled by challenges posed by the Omicron variant.  Consensus scientific opinion is that the virus will now spread through Omicron and become virtually ubiquitous.  Since many people (perhaps most) will be asymptomatic, testing is the key to tracking, and controlling, the spread of the virus.  This has always been the case but the United States has lagged seriously behind the rest of the developed world with respect to our capacity to test for Coronavirus.  Biden has been criticized for not invoking the Military Preparedness Act to commandeer pharmaceutical factories and retrofit them to produce more test kits.  The President promises a half-billion test kits by mid-January.  But this measure is obviously too little too late.  Millions of people are traveling for the Holidays and they will contract the virus and drag it home with them to every nook and cranny from sea to shining sea.  Testing will slam the pasture gate shut about two weeks after all the cows have escaped.  Of course, the courageous and scientifically valid approach to the Omicron virus would be to discourage all Christmas travel until more is known about this variant.  But the President doesn’t have the political will (or capital for that matter) to act courageously. He dithers about his response but refuses to use the bully pulpit to bend public opinion so as to discourage holiday travel.  So the airports are full of lines of people, probably about ten percent of them, carrying Covid among their Christmas gifts to their destinations.  

Biden is interviewed, “one-to-one” as the media likes to say, by a journalist with questions about his management of the Covid epidemic.  The journalist isn’t really hostile and lobs a few softballs at Biden – easy pitches that he should bang out of the park: “Is the fact that people can’t acquire cheap COVID tests a failure of your administration?” the journalist asks.  “It wasn’t foreseeable,” Biden says.  Then, he inexplicably alters course:   “Well, some may argue that it was foreseeable two weeks ago or a month or six months ago...”  This is a preface to the “but” clause – “but they were wrong.”  Except that Biden loses his way and doesn’t refute the notion that he could have foreseen the need for more tests six months ago.  He appears to be confused.  And, in fact, now, perhaps, he’s adopting his own counter-factual rhetoric as true.  The way he responds doesn’t refute what “some may argue” and so, perhaps, he is conceding that he should have known earlier about the enhanced need to tests before the 2021 Holiday Season.  

And it gets worse when things take a turn to the bizarre.  Biden decides to pivot on his accomplishment, that is, tout the half-billion tests that his administration will make available in January.  So he says: “And I’ve arranged for a half-billion pills, a half-billion to be available in the next few days...” he pauses.  “There will be a half-billion pills for the American people...oh, I mean tests... for the people.”  (Biden is confusing his tests for Covid infection with anti-viral post-infection palliative therapy, pills that you take to moderate the symptoms of the disease – this remedy was just approved by the FDA a day or so before the interview.)  The interviewer is willing to give the President the benefit of the doubt for misspeaking.  He asks something about whether the need for tests was foreseeable.  Biden responds: “No one saw this coming but I’ve got 500,000 pills on the way for the American people.”

It’s pretty clear that Biden is uncertain as to what he has accomplished: is he filling prescriptions with a half-billion pills or has he arranged for the dissemination of the same number of Covid tests?   The media seizes on this interview.  Of course, the media’s bias is to favor Joe Biden if this is plausibly possible.  But this clip is too good to be ignored.  The fragment of the interview can be played without comment, ostensibly on the subject of the administration’s response to the Omicron crisis.  But, there’s a side perk – the clip seems to show the President confused about just exactly what he has done and, at minimum, gravely disengaged from the crisis that he is supposed to be managing.  (No one else in the public arena keeps mistaking tests for pills.)  The media’s knee-jerk reaction is to subvert anyone in power and, so, the clip has a particular sinister efficacy – it can be shown without remarking upon Biden’s apparent confusion, while still making that point implicitly.  And, the clip can be displayed to Biden’s shills in the chattering class of left-wing pundits so that they can vigorously defend the President.

In fact, the clip is shown to David Axelrod, a Democratic pro-Biden commentator.  He doesn’t mention the President’s inability to keep clear in his mind the distinction between tests and pills, two completely different responses to the virus. He simply asserts that Biden’s encouragement of the tests is a good thing and that we are far “ahead of where we were last March.”  (Fatigued by the endless pandemic, most people would not agree that we are “far ahead” of last March’s surge.  Objectively, the statement is true – in March 2021, there were no vaccines widely available – but subjectively, as far as most people experience the Covid crisis, Axelrod’s assertion is simply tone-deaf.)  Two other pundits take the same tack: they praise Biden for getting the tests available to the public, ignore the fact that this testing will come two weeks late to prevent holiday transmission of the virus, and act as if they didn’t hear the President confusing pills with tests.  These are pundits who wrote books literally accusing Trump of murder for his response to the Covid virus when he was in office.  Biden has no idea what to do and seems committed to a disastrous course of encouraging holiday travel.  But he gets a pass notwithstanding clear evidence that he doesn’t understand his own response to Omicron variant and its probable catastrophic spread.  

This latter point is significant.  Trump was abused for objecting to shut-downs of schools and businesses during the height of the virus (and before vaccines) in the early Spring of 2020.  But Biden is following the same course – he has appeared on TV encouraging Holiday travel when, in fact, everyone concedes that this will result in calamitous spread of the disease.  The reason that a President should discourage Holiday travel in these circumstances can be simply, if cynically, stated: people need cover to avoid family gatherings.  Many are pressured into traveling cross-country to commune with relatives whom they don’t particularly like and whom they avoid for the rest of the year.  The Holidays enforce this debt to family that, in our modern world, a lot of people don’t particularly enjoy paying.  If the President were to have the gumption to discourage holiday travel, this would provide an excuse, or “cover” as I have said, for those who are afraid to travel because of the virus or for other reasons.  But, instead, the President has taken the exact opposite course – and this is in the context of more lock-downs in Europe where already Omicron is devouring the population.

Bill Gates knows better

when it comes to the virus.  In view of the President’s default on this issue, Bill Gates, who is nothing if not well-informed, says that he is canceling most of his Holiday plans.  He sends a tweet or an email to the world indicating that he doesn’t intend to travel for Christmas.  Obviously, he disagrees with Biden’s bizarre stance of encouraging people likely to become infected to spread their disease all across America.  

Of course, the Republicans are notably silent on all of these issues.  They can’t denounce Joe Biden for his fecklessness with respect to responding to a disease that many are on record as regarding as fraudulent and a hoax.  So the GOP, handed an issue with which to batter Biden on a silver platter, as it were, is powerless to act. How can they accuse Biden of not taking appropriate measures to combat the plague, when they argued that there is no plague at all?

The world has gone mad

and evidence for this is a strange story coming from India, the fons et origo of many strange stories.  In a village somewhere, a pack of dogs killed a baby macaque, a sort of aggressive and cunning monkey.  The monkeys were outraged and they began to kidnap dogs, drag them onto the roofs of houses, and, then, pitch them headlong into the street below.  More than 250 dogs are said to have perished in this bizarre war between canines and monkeys.  Later, the story is amended to suggest that the monkeys were kidnaping puppies out of some sort of misplaced solicitude, hauling the cowering baby dogs into trees and atop houses and, then, negligently allowing them to plummet to their death.  This weird tale spreads like a virus over the internet but without any real details to support checking these allegations. It’s just another baffling event in some nameless village in some nameless wilderness in India. 

A couple of fat Indian cops in opera bouffe uniforms gesture at a small corpse resting on a sheet atop a table.  The corpse, they assert, is the petrified remains of a baby Tyrannosaurus Rex, retrieved from some cave or cranny in the Himalayan massif.  The camera peers at the mummy. It’s obviously a shriveled dead cat with a lizard’s tail affixed improbably to its feline hind quarters.  The policemen say that the dead cat proves that T. Rex still stalks the remote glaciers and rhododendron thickets of the high mountains. This story is aired on the laughably fraudulent Strange Evidence series, a TV show that features supposedly inexplicable footage on which so-called experts comment.  (The experts are a rogue’s gallery of young actors identified with labels such as “Science Journalist,” “Military Expert,” and “Freelance Archaeologist”.)  This is one of my favorite shows because of its bizarre video clips and the utterly obtuse and idiotic commentary provided by the self-proclaimed experts, often opining in fields very remote from their alleged expertise (fictional in any event I suppose).  For instance, a pretty and earnest girl identified as “Entomologist” studies the images of the dead cat on her lap top.  She says something like: “If this is an example of what’s running around in the Himalayas, I think I’m staying away.”  But what is running around in the Himalayas is obviously feline and, apparently, a domestic house cat.  One of experts, I think an “Internet Scientist”, tips her hand by saying: “This isn’t the normal thing that the cat drags in.”  She also gazes at the petrified cat.  “Holy Cow!” she says, also, I think a jab at the plump Hindu cop-dumplings: “It looks like a dinosaur!”

A pundit named Ezekiel Emmanuel

is asked to opine as to Biden’s failure to get testing kits available for the public before the Holidays.  He’s shown the clip in which the President repeatedly confuses pills with tests.  He doesn’t comment on that confusion.  Clearly, he wants to say that Biden has, so to speak, fucked the pooch here, but this would not earn him any plaudits on CNN. So he says: “Testing has been problematic from the start.  In the previous administration, testing wasn’t emphasized and, it seems... that this has been extended...”

“Extended” – that is, Biden has adopted Trump’s failure to encourage prompt and accurate testing for the virus.  But the guy can’t bring himself to actually use Biden’s name.

Another prehistoric creature,

a baby dinosaur, is discovered curled up in a fossilized egg. The egg has been neatly split apart to show the little monster tightly embraced in a loop of its own bony tail.  The fossilized fetus looks something like a miniature version of the creature in Alien, all jaw, claw, and prehensile tail.  The TV hosts on CNN coo and giggle about the baby dinosaur.  It’s as if they think it’s cute.  To me, the petrified fossil, which looks a bit like the withered mummy of a cat, is horrifying.  It’s a harbinger of our future quarried from the remotest past, a monstrous sign of things to come.

December 23, 2021

On Tom Selleck and the Raiders of the Lost Ark

1 – A rose-red city half as old as time

The Archaeological Conservancy, a non-profit enterprise that protects historic and pre-historic sites in the United States, sponsored a lecture on a Chaco outlier in southwestern Colorado, two great houses in the Montezuma Valley called the Haynie Site.  On the day of the lecture, I watched a You-Tube video reporting on excavations at Haynie during 2021 season.  The video was disappointing: three men stood beside some narrow slits in the ground and gestured toward barely perceptible stratigraphy in the soil.  Someone held in his hand a tiny potsherd painted with a black spiral motif.  The chief archaeologist on the site, someone with the picturesque name of Kellam Throgmorton, commented on a stink bug ambling across a plaster floor inset at the bottom of a hole.  Some irregular rocks protruded from the side of the pit.  Sometimes, the camera angle showed a small white house about sixty feet away, the sort of humble, but comfortable, dwelling that you might see anywhere in the suburbs: three BR two Bath with new siding and a neatly shingled roof.  The You-Tube clip, about 15 minutes long, almost persuaded me to avoid the ZOOM lecture scheduled for 6:00 CST that evening.  The place just didn’t seem that interesting.

The movies and popular imagination promote a fiction that archaeological sites are located in remote places, hidden away in desert wastelands or concealed in high rugged mountains.  Machu Picchu sits atop a thousand-foot pedestal of sheer mountain where the Amazon basin laps up against the Andes.  The rose-red city of Petra in Jordan, half as old as time, is accessed through a slot canyon with towering incarnadine sandstone walls and its remains are carved into high, barren cliffs.  We imagine Egyptian archaeologists uncovering ancient pillars and frescos buried in shifting sand dunes or concealed in remote desert oases.  The celebrated cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde are built into the walls of deep gorges that run as fissures through the flat top of a Colorado mountain – just reaching those sites involves a harrowing ascent on winding roads up the side of the sheer mesa.  Far out in the stony desert, there are rock shelters gouged by the wind into buttes where human bones and bits of decaying basket peek out of the dust.  Much of archaeology’s romance is related to travel in exotic places and the conquest of hostile jungles and deserts. I recall hearing wolves howl in the mountain fastness above the oracle complex at Delphi. Angkor Wat is always in danger of being reclaimed by the rain forest.  Indiana Jones probes tunnels in crumbling heaps of masonry in the jungles of South America – when he emerges from subterranean chambers writhing with arachnids, cannibal tribesmen pursue him.  Chaco Canyon exerts a powerful claim on the emotions because it is so hard to reach, beyond a formidable escarpment of pitted gravel roads running between god-forsaken hogans where Navajo children ride bareback on Indian ponies.  

The Haynie site has none of this appeal.  The landscape is mostly flat, irrigated green fields extending toward a horizon where a few nondescript buttes rise, square-cut and indistinct against the sky.  A heavily traveled highway seems to skirt the site and the You-Tube video shows pickups coming and going, the sun glinting on their chrome.  Several modern structures, including a house, rise over the network of craters and shallow pits where excavations (or pot-hunting) has occurred.  Most startling: the occupants of the neat little house devised their septic system to drain into the big, humped mound of one of the Chaco Great Houses.  In the side of a trench, we see a white PVC pipe protruding over the remains of several prehistoric walls made from interlocked field stones.  Evidently, the Haynie site lacks the sort of romantic isolation, hardship, and picturesque terrain that the novice expects of an archaeological dig.  It’s like Cahokia across the river from St. Louis.  When I first visited the site, the great city of mounds and lagoons was surrounded by flat river-bottoms dotted with ruinous trailer courts, a kind of semi-rural ghetto where auto-salvage yards stood amidst the sort of poverty that can’t exactly be characterized as urban, but that is not rural either – the wreckage of pauperized suburbs where the flotsam from the city seems to have washed up against the edges of farmland.  A highway cut through the site, high-speed and difficult to cross on foot, and at the edge of the archaeological precinct there were (when I first visited) some battered taverns built from construction scraps and plywood and a motel that the scientist digging in the ruins quickly discovered to be a brothel.  

2 – Tom Sellack is lying to you

Viewed skeptically, most TV ads demonstrate the opposite of the propositions on which they are intended to persuade.  Most ads explicitly undermine themselves.  TV commercials for SUVs show people driving into idyllic mountain or seaside landscapes, wild romantic places empty of people.  The ads seem to suggest that if you buy an SUV, you are treading in the footsteps of John Muir.  But John Muir, of course, didn’t drive a gas-guzzling, climate-destroying pickup into Yosemite Valley.  Ads for cancer drugs show people canoeing and barbecuing and playing beach volley-ball at the edge of the surf.  These ads suggest that it is fun and, even, athletically adventurous to have fatal cancer – the fine-print flashed at the bottom of the image advises that use of the touted drug, benefits those fortunate enough to be prescribed these pills (or infusions) by an average of three-and-a-half extra months of life. (And generally at the expense of rashes, perineal infections, and possible hemorrhage.)  Tom Selleck, the star of a once-popular show Magnum P.I., pitches reverse mortgages.  Acknowledging that he is rather long in the tooth, Selleck says that this isn’t his first rodeo and that a “reverse mortgage is just a another kind of loan – it’s not some sort of scheme to take your house.”  If Tom Sellack tells you that reverse mortgage isn’t a scheme to take your house, you can be darn-tootin’ sure that this is exactly what is plotted by such a mortgage: of course, mortgages are enforced by foreclosure and, so, obviously a reverse mortgage is, indeed, a legal contrivance precisely designed to allow the lender to take your house.  Tom Selleck is lying to you.

This assertion is proved by the history of the Haynie site.  The five-acre homestead is near Cortez, Colorado.  Two narratives compete as to this history – I suppose both are likely true although staggered somehow chronologically.  In the first narrative, a benign looter named Haynie owned the premises and dug innumerable burrows looking for pots.  This woman was a sort of amateur archaeologist and she documented her looting with polaroid pictures showing where artifacts were found and a number of crisply drawn diagrams showing the locations of walls and rooms, appearing as cellar-like depressions during her tenure on the property.  She is described as being well-meaning, conscientious, and inept.  Haynie artifacts are scattered through many different collections throughout the Four Corners region.  The second narrative involves “a shade-tree mechanic” who lived on the property in a mobile home.  This fellow had a girlfriend who ended up with the property when the auto repairman died.  (The mechanic seems to have upgraded to the small white house on the property, although, perhaps, it’s core was a modular home when he lived there.  He also erected a “paint shop” for detailing autos – this is a fairly large white pole-barn visible in pictures and on the You-Tube video.  There is also a small shed set atop one of mounds covering the Chaco great houses.  Presumably, the mechanic needed cash to erect the shed and paint shop and so he entered into a reverse mortgage on the property – instead of contracting for installment payments on the mortgage, he took a lump sum (apparently accelerating the installment pay-out – otherwise the arrangement would just be a conventional mortgage) to finance improvements.  When he died, the reverse mortgage was in default and the amount owed considerably exceeded the appraised value of five-acre tract.  The Archaeological Conservancy, through Jim Walker, a fellow that I know slightly, tried to buy the property from the bank.  In order to avoid bidding up the prices on land with archaeological features, the Conservancy’s policies prevent it from paying more than fair market value for property that it seeks to acquire – in other words, the conservancy can’t pay a premium for the features buried in the land that they purchase.  Since the amount of money owing on the premises exceeded its fair market value, the Conservancy couldn’t pay off the reverse mortgage in order to buy the site.  The lender foreclosed on the property and, contrary to Tom Selleck, ended up owning the house – although it was foreclosed when the deceased mechanic’s girlfriend was occupying the home.  As is the custom, the foreclosure auction took place on the steps of the Mancos County Courthouse and the lender, of course, simply bid the amount that it was owed on the reverse mortgage loan, thereby acquiring the property for that sum.  The house was presumably improved and value of the tract enhanced; further, real estate values in the Montezuma Valley increased over the next decade.  In 2016, the Crow Canyon Archaeology non-profit association, a well-known and cutting edge archaeological enterprise in the Four Corners purchased the five-acre tract for what was, then, considered fair market value.  The Archaeological Conservancy, through Jim Walker, bought the site in 2019 from the Crow Canyon consortium.  Walker negotiated with the State of Colorado to establish permanent easements over the premises.  The easements forbid any agricultural use and preserve access to the site in perpetuity for the State.  However, as Walker noted in his introduction to the lecture on December 16, 2021, the first improvements made the Conservancy were to install a high cyclone fence around the land, set up a padlocked gate, and put up high-visibility “No Trespassing” signs.  

I met Walker during a Conservancy tour sponsored of Oaxacan archaeological sites coordinated with the Day of the Dead celebrations in, and around, Oaxaca City.  Walker is a lanky fellow who looks like a cowboy – I think he was raised in rural New Mexico but now lives in Albuquerque.  He’s gay and had a flippant, wise-ass husband about fifteen years his junior, an engaging fellow who was obviously more comfortable with being homosexual than his older, much more conservative, spouse.  Walker has long fingers and a melancholy saturnine expression on his long, rather equine face.  He has a charming horsey smile, although it is seldom seen.  I recall talking with him at bar in Oaxaca City where he ate fistfuls of lemon and chili drenched peanuts from a brandy snifter on the table.  Mr. Walker was interested that I was a lawyer, because he is himself quite an expert in real estate.  He suggested that if there were any acquisitions proposed by the Conservancy in Minnesota, he would likely hire me to work on those transactions.  But the Conservancy has not purchased any sites in this State and, to this day, owns nothing here.  I should suggest to him that the Conservancy acquire the prehistoric flint and chert quarries near Grand Meadow fifteen miles from where I live or, perhaps, an earth-mound village site somewhere along the upper Minnesota River.  

3 – A mini-Chaco

People lived at Haynie for five-hundred years.  By contrast, the town where I dwell has been inhabited for about 170 years.  Clearly, there was something advantageous about the terrain and the surrounding ecosystem that lured people to Haynie and retained them there.  Ancestral Pueblo people were maize farmers with squash and bean gardens.  In the Southwest, water is destiny.  Although row-crop farming has materially changed the topography, geological surveys show that a shallow draw ran past the Haynie village.  Evidence shows that the draw was active, flowing with water for most of the year.  Springs were also located in the hills behind the village, although irrigation has changed the character of these springs, re-charging them with water on a more frequent basis so that they are now more robust than would have been the case 900 years ago.  

Farmers practiced what is called “run-off farming” – that is, they designed their agricultural fields to exploit periodic drainage.  Crops were planted when the land dried sufficiently after flood or snow melt-off events – this sort of agriculture is also called “flood recession farming.”  (“Flood recession agriculture” plays an important conceptual role in David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Beginning of Everything an argumentative book that declares that Mesolithic people resisted cereal agriculture associated with social stratification and authoritarian regimes by “play farming” – that is, adopting agricultural practices that didn’t require an all-or-nothing commitment to cereal.  One form of “play farming” is exploiting run-off zones that are periodically inundated to grow crops without requiring extensive tillage or the construction of irrigation systems.)  “Run-off farming” is hard to detect because cycles of inundation destroy evidence of the land’s cultivation.  In any event, the location of Haynie is close to ideal for this sort of agrarianism and the villages along this draw in what is now the Montezuma Valley were situated here on the basis of water resources.  The valley hillside is also a transition zone between highlands with wood resources (and tree-nuts) and the more desert-like environs in the valley.  Thus, the place can support foraging for a wide variety of useful plants, animals, and lithic materials.  

In archaeological terms, Haynie shows clear evidence of occupancy during the Pueblo I period.  The earliest excavated structure (or part of a structure) has been dated to the late 780's period – this date is based on dendrochronology.  The site expanded into a large, and, rather, far-flung village for about one-hundred years.  After 880, some sort of political or economic crisis swept through the Southwest and Pueblo I villages were largely deserted for about thirty to forty years.  Beginning between 910 to 920, the villages moved back to their abandoned towns and resettled them. (The hiatus at Haynie isn’t obviously documented and we don’t know if the town was wholly abandoned or just significantly reduced in population.)  The village was renovated and enlarged through tenth century with the people expanding the existing house-blocks through about 1020.  In the Middle Pueblo period, that is about 1020 to 1075, the population continued to expand and some of the house-blocks were filled in with garbage.  Pottery styles changed and there is increased evidence of trade.  The Chaco phenomenon, extended villages arranged in intentionally designed suburbs around enigmatic Great Houses built of elaborately dressed stone, is evident at Haynie between 1075 and 1150.  The Great Houses have not been fully explained.  Some archaeologists regard them as primarily ceremonial and ritual structures although their cyclopean size and complexity seems to argue against one or, even, several dedicated uses.  Stephen Lekson and others believe that the Great Houses were simply dynastic palaces.  There are two Great Houses at Haynie plopped down atop the earlier, less ostentatious Pueblo I house-blocks.  Chaco began imploding around 1150.  As Chaco’s cultural hegemony over the Four Corners collapsed, the people dispersed, many of them to build cliff-dwellings and fortified towns in places like Mesa Verde.  That phase of social development lasted for another hundred years and, then, the cliff-dwellers  migrated to the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in northern New Mexico where the precursors of the modern-day Pueblo Indian villages were founded.  At Haynie, there were periodic and, probably, opportunistic re-settlings of the ruins up until about 1250 when the valley was largely uninhabited except for Ute and mountain Arapaho nomadic foragers who built no villages and left few traces on the land.  European settlement of the area began around 1850.  

Professor Throgmorton’s lecture reveals him as a processual archaeologist, interested primarily in the processes by which societies transform themselves into other forms.  The Chaco Great Houses are a brute fact: elaborate multi-story labyrinths with enormous kivas and a characteristic D-shaped room layout – these ruins are charismatic but oppressive and, even, menacing in their aspect.  The question that fascinates Dr. Throgmorton is how the rather cheery, Pueblo I tenements, evidence of a vibrant communal life morphed into master-slave Chaco architecture.  Chaco Great Houses literally dominate the older Pueblo I villages – at Haynie, the Chaco structures sit on top of plaster foundations and, even, incorporate walls from the Pueblo I house blocks.  These house-blocks were four or five family units consisting of rows of adobe or masonry rooms, generally built like a procession of train cars across the landscape.  The front rooms are larger, better ventilated, and seem to have been work spaces with sleeping alcoves or benches.  The rear rooms are smaller, typically two to a front room living space and seem to have been used for storage.  All of the Pueblo I housing units are, more or less, identical in shape and function; this suggests a generally egalitarian social organization.  Religious observances were similarly dispersed.  Pueblo I housing blocks have a kiva in each tenement or apartment structure.  The kivas are relatively small and built with the same masonry technology as the row houses.  (The row houses have patterned well-coursed single wythe common walls – “wythe”is a masonry term for a wall that is constructed one-unit wide.)

By contrast, the Chaco Great Houses are largely built with massive walls, sometimes set on subterranean disk-like pedestals to support the heavy structures above.  Chaco walls are made from dressed stone, hewn to present a smooth surface on the outside.  The thick walls have fill between inner and outer surfaces.  Furthermore, Chaco dominated the landscape by devising “line-of-sight" relationships between Great Houses.  This is evident in the Montezuma Valley where the Wallace Great House, about a quarter-mile away to the West, sits just across the modern road from Haynie.  These structures seem part of an alignment with a more southern Great House named the Ida Jean Great House (1 ½ miles away).  In turn, these north-south alignments seem to point toward the Farview fortified village that sits at the crest of Mesa Verde, really not a “mesa” but a “cuesta” or inclined table-mountain.  Chaco culture organized their urban landscapes around the cardinal directions and built elaborate linear road systems.  Small roadside shrines called herradura were erected next to these stone-surfaced and curbed highways – the herradura were open-ended masonry structures possibly signifying a change in direction of road and, also, probably oriented to point the way to the closest Great House.  The system of three Great House complexes built in the Montezuma Valley creates a landscape organized according to the urban paradigm at “downtown” Chaco Canyon where big buildings separated by about a thousand yards are erected according to the cardinal directions and seem to be aligned with landmarks on the horizon.  Throgmorton says that the Montezuma Valley in 1125 looked a lot like a smaller version of Chaco Canyon.  His excavational query at Haynie is directed toward ascertaining the social forces that changed the large and scattered Pueblo I communities into the more monolithic and regimented Chaco Great House system.    

4- He digs best who digs least

The Sinagua site at Tuzigoot (near Clarkdale, Arizona) demonstrates by contrast the paradigm shift in archaeological field work.  Tuzigoot was excavated by Clark and Spicer (University of Arizona) between 1933 and 1935.  One-hundred and five of the 110 rooms in the hilltop pueblo were cleared and their artifacts indexed for curation.  Dr. Throgmorton notes that at the time of this excavation, regarded now as highly destructive, the idea was to scour the site and find “everything” there.  In the process, of course, much archaeological evidence is despoiled.  Modern technology can extract a vast amount of date from remnants of burned wood, cultural deposits of sand trodden by generations of feet, and microscopic seeds and lithic debris.  Of course, in the Thirties these techniques didn’t exist and the emphasis was on retrieving pottery shards, implements, and ritual items.  Most everything else was sifted away and, then, discarded as spoil.

Crow Canyon has pioneered an exceedingly non-invasive approach to archaeology.  First, the site is carefully surveyed for surface evidence of cultural occupation – ordinarily potsherds and unusual ridges and depressions (evidence of middens and building sites.)  Drones are used to catalogue surface features and, then, ground penetrating scans are implemented.  At Haynie, drone photogrammetry was instrumental in locating buried walls.  Remote sensing electric resistivity and magnetometer scans cold not be used because much of the site was used as a car repair facility and the land is strewn with metal objects such as springs, car body fragments, glass, and spark-plugs.  

After the surface survey, a plan of excavation is devised, at Haynie in collaboration with the State of Colorado, Native American consultants, and local zoning and code authorities.  Permits are pulled for targeted excavation.  Crow Canyon uses 1 x 1 pits to pinpoint features that the archaeologists wish to examine.  (A one by one “window,” as it is called, is a one-meter by one-meter pit sunk about four to five feet into the ground.  In the You-Tube video, there are comical-looking images of the archaeologists poking their heads up out of these small square excavations.  It looks like a whack-a-mole game.)  If a window encounters an interesting cultural feature, then, a larger excavation is made, although the scope of the hole is circumscribed by the objectives that it aims to uncover.  The notion of systematically proceeding to excavate across an entire site isn’t implemented by Crow Canyon, although, of course, there are salvage or rescue contexts in which a feature threatened by a road or housing development must be uncovered according the old paradigm.  Once an opening is made into the earth, the archaeologist feels a “responsibility to the excavation unit” – “excavation unit”is the term  used to describe the incision made in the earth.  Throgmorton says that it’s the archaeologist’s responsibility to glean every possible bit of evidence from the excavation – this may involve calling into other disciplines to study dendrochronology, ceramic sequences, evidences of food processing and agricultural detritus much of which is microscopic.  The mantra is that you should move less earth but gather more data from the dirt that you do displace.  

Another problem arising from old techniques for archaeological “digs” (not a term used for field-work today) is that objects uncovered must be “curated”, a process that involves multi-disciplinary teams and extensive expense.  Furthermore, “curated” objects may invoke religious or sacred responses from present-day Indians.  This is particularly true of human remains which are ubiquitous at archaeological sites.  If you dig something up and reclaim it from the earth, you have moral duty to that object and those who once possessed or used it.  This moral duty involves curation and preservation, processes often more expensive than the intrinsic value of the bone or potsherd discovered.  

At Haynie, Throgmorton excavated Structure 1047.  This is a small benched kiva located under the corner of a Great House and, formerly, part of the row-block apartment unit.  The kiva seems t have been ritually decommissioned, remodeled, and turned into something else, possibly a cache or storage unit.  In the floor of the kiva, a dog burial was found next to turkey also intentionally interred.  A ritual cache of bone awls were discovered and a”sandal last” – that is, a miniature effigy of a tool used to make moccasins.  (Pueblo I people apparently regarded moccasins made for certain ceremonies as highly charged ritual paraphernalia and, therefore, sacred.)  Some Dogoszhi-style ceramic shards were found dating the decommissioning of the kiva to about 1040.  Throgmorton observes that these objects weren’t accidentally left in the room, but where put there intentionally – whatever they were ritually doing, they are, the archaeologist said, still apparently serving that function.  The kiva had been purged with flame – there were lenses of soot found in the fill.  After carefully photographing the objects in situ, they were reburied so that they could continue their function whatever is was (or is).  Indeed, most of the intrusions made into the earth at Haynie will be back-filled.  When the site is finally opened to the public, most of the action, as it were, the “interesting stuff” will remain underground.  The concept is that the archaeologists of the future will have even better equipment and technology (and a better overall understanding) with which to continue this conversation with the prehistoric past.  Crow Canyon’s policy is diminish moving dirt, take “sneak peeks” into the sub-strata, and severely limit the amount of cultural material curated.

4 – Finds

Notwithstanding the foregoing, the allure of archaeology exists in large part due to remarkable objects retrieved from the oblivion of the dust.   Several interesting finds were made at the Haynie site.

On the plaster floor of a small kiva from a Pueblo I room-block, a trifoliate (or three-lobed) Sipapu was found – the little pit looks something like the French fleur de lys.  Sipapu are holes indented into kiva floors that signify the place of origin within the earth for all living beings.  Ancestral animals and humans were thought to have emerged into the light through these holes.  Most Sipapu are a single tube-like pit in the floor.  A compound Sipapu may signify that someone using the kiva was a ritual specialist, some sort of professional shaman or religious practitioner.  

A one-by-one unit exposed a half-dozen ceramic ladles.  The ends of the ladle handles are decorated with burden-basket effigies.  A burden-basket is a cone-shaped tightly woven vessel, usually about two-feet long, with straps so that it can be closed at the top and borne like a backpack on the shoulders of its carrier.  (Photographs show desert Indian women trudging through the thorns with these baskets on their backs.)   Burden-baskets and their effigies seem associated with women’s societies – in some places, they are found with menstrual aprons, basket-woven girdles spattered with menstrual blood.  The effigy baskets, all of them snapped off the ladle stems, have a spritely appearance – some have carrying handles that look like little rounded legs; there is a faintly anthropomorphic aspect to them.  The fabric’s basket-weave is represented by a lattice pattern of black on white.  The making of small figurines to represent people and every-day tools was common throughout the Southwest and, indeed, characteristic of Meso-American Indian cultures. No one knows what these objects mean or how they were used: whether they were toys or ritual regalia or something in between is unknown. The fact that these burden-basket effigies were located at the end of ladle handles suggests that spoons may have been used in healing ceremonies, possibly associated with female reproductive tract ailments. But, of course, we are just making up stories about objects that we understand only imprecisely.

5 - The Curse of the Manure Cloud

The dog burial in the decommissioned kiva haunts me.  Dogs are companion animals, bred to bark at strangers.  The dog is a guardian.  Therefore, one might ask what the canine was thought to be protecting when it was killed and, then, ritually buried in floor of the kiva.

Near the dog, turkey bones were found – indeed, a whole turkey which is diagnostic of a ritual burial.  The dog seems to be guarding a domestic turkey.  In the ancient Southwest, beginning around the Common Era (that is 1 AD) there copious evidence of turkey domestication.  (Turkeys had been domesticated in west Mexico, for instance, among the Colima about 500 BC and, even, earlier by the Zapotec in Oaxaca).  Male occelated turkeys are showy creatures with plumage like pheasants – they have iridescent red, bronze, green, and gold feathers.  Basketmaker II sites (circa 500 AD) show evidence of turkey pens made from standing wicker sticks; in fact, in a remote Utah canyon, turkey pens still upright and mostly intact have been found. (In the archaeological record, turkey pens are usually visible as thick deposits of turkey dung with eggshell sherds.)  Probably, these turkeys were raised for their feathers; from their manure, we know they were corn-fed.  Although extremely fragile and, therefore, rare, turkey-feather cloaks have been found in caves in Utah – these are elaborately woven yucca textiles in which turkey feathers have been interlaced, in some instance as many as 1000 feathers comprising a garment.  Domestic turkeys were ubiquitous in the Chaco world and, indeed, raised in industrial numbers – at Paquime (Casas Grandes), a huge Mexican urban site that shows both Hohokom and Chaco influences, no fewer that 255 ritual turkey burials were found in an area where low adobe walls seem to have penned hundreds of the birds.  When the Chaco world collapsed, deer had been hunted almost to extinction in areas near the Great Houses and, so, the people had to eat their turkeys, a practice that suggests serious food shortages.  

The dog barks to protect the turkeys.  The turkey is tended by a man or woman.  A figurine of a moccasin last, toy-sized, is also embedded in the kiva floor.  Humans have left their footprints between the dog and the turkey.  These burials simulate a world.

Poncho House is located in the Chinle Wash near Canyon de Chelly.  It’s a complex of three fairly extensive cliff-dwellings in rock shelters scooped out of the red cliffs.  The people who lived in these masonry structures were likely refugees from the Chaco Great Houses to the north and west, then, abandoned when the cliff-dwellings were built.  In the early part of the century, an archaeological team from the Field Museum excavated at Poncho House.  At the rear of the cave, the workers encountered a deep drift of turkey manure.  The ancestral Pueblo living in cliff dwellings kept their birds in the very back of the rock shelters in which they built their lodgings.  The turkey manure was dry and, when the workers waded through it, the stuff rose in choking “filthy clouds”.  Several of the men digging at the site became ill from inhaling the fog of manure-dust.  One of the men developed pneumonia.  His lungs were scarred and he never fully recovered.  

The Navajo stayed away from Great Houses and ancestral Pueblo cliff-dwellings.  They believed that the Chaco ruins were the remnants of a culture addicted to gambling.  The people who lived near those monumental ruins were seduced into wagering away everything they possessed, including their children, livestock, wives, and, at last, their own freedom.  In this way, most of the people became slaves of the masters living in Great Houses.  Life was out-of-balance: in the castles of the Great Gamblers, the condition of Koyaanitsqatsi (life-out-of-balance) prevailed.  As far as the Navajo Apaches are concerned, the wreckage of the Chaco world is haunted by ghosts and demons and cursed as well.

On the Moon's Tears at Trempeleau, Wisconsin

 

Trempeleau Mountain is a few miles to the south of Winona downstream on the Mississippi’s east bank.  The mountain is 450 feet high, ragged with green forest or winter-grey and snow-veined depending upon the season.  The big hill is so close to the river that from the Minnesota shore, the mountain looks like an island improbably rising from Mississippi itself.  Several tributary rivers meander across wetlands below the bluff’s south face.  Between bends in these streams, hummocks of prairie like grassy causeways extend toward the Mississippi’s main channel.  Steep bluffs, some of them showing palisades of crumbling grey cliff, ring the horizon.  The Mississippi, and the smaller rivers flowing through the inundated grasslands, pooling in marshes and lagoons, seem scarcely to move, but are immensely powerful in their repose, watery giants sprawled out across the land.  The Indians who once lived here called the bluff “the mountain that dips its toes in the water.”  

Trempeleau is old, timber houses with white walls and old wharf-side warehouses made of stacked pink-yellow limestone blocks, all above a railroad embankment that runs like a dike across a pool impounded by the right-of-way and a dam downstream.  Cafes on timber docks, bridges to nowhere, jut out over the ponds and marinas leak little white boats through canals to the Mississippi’s main channel along waterways bored through tongues of wooded isles along the river.  Viewed from overhead, the broad valley sits between uplands dissected into  narrow, forested valleys and the river-bottoms, here three or four miles wide, are all thatched with meadows and shards of golden prairie that seem to float on the river.  Old Victorian era houses are hunkered down among the trees lining the residential streets in the town.  An ancient inn served travelers at the time of the Civil War and, today, the trim, white-washed building hangs over an old boat-house like a grotto opening onto the riverbank.  Every alley and back yard runs up against steep hillside tangled with dense brush, poison ivy and wild parsnip tangled in sumac rising like a palisade wall over the semi-circular flats where the town is built.

Timothy Pauketat is a well-known archaeologist employed by the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana and, indeed, also holds the position of official State Archaeologist for the Land of Lincoln.  On the 18th of November, 2021, Dr. Pauketat delivered a lecture for the Archaeological Conservancy called “The Moon’s Tears Fell on Cahokia”.  I enjoy watching these lectures and, since I have visited Cahokia many times, looked forward to his speech.  Pauketat is the author of a monograph on Cahokia, written in a simple popular style, and the book was a modest best-seller a few years ago.  The scholar is a tall, gaunt-looking fellow with a beak nose, a cowlick of dishwater blonde hair over his glasses and the appearance of a friendly scarecrow.

Dr. Pauketat’s lecture was presented in the form of a Power Point.  One of his first slides is a map showing Meso-American influence on the land that is now the United States.  The map extends south to Mexico City and the Yucatan.  On the northwest borders of territory delimited by a dotted line, the place-name “Chaco” is inscribed, signifying that this ceremonial center or complex of pueblos or Great House palaces or whatever it was in New Mexico was a place influenced by the high civilizations to the South.  At the center of the map is Cahokia, the vast city that once occupied the flood plains a few miles to the east of what is now St. Louis.  But the really interesting aspect of this map, showing the geographical boundaries of Mexican civilization in North America is to the north.  A tongue of this region mapped on the slide, the land of the Caddo-speaking Mississippians who raised mound-pyramids from the Gulf of Mexico throughout today’s Arkansas, Illinois, Mississippi and Missouri, extends up the great river valley and ends with the words “Trempeleau”, Cahokia’s most northern outpost. It seems remarkable to me that Trempeleau, Wisconsin, five-hundred miles upriver from Cahokia, in the driftless bluff country around the Mississippi River Valley, a place in which the upper slopes of the hills are dotted with Hopewell Mounds raised two-thousand years ago, as well as Effigy Mounds outlining marching bears, turtle earthworks and birds with outstretched wings (900 to 1500 years before present) was the site of a Cahokian shrine.   

Pauketat’s thesis is that the Caddo-speaking Cahokians subscribed to a moon-cult and that many of their monuments attest to these beliefs.  In Meso-American pre-conquest cultures, rain is often referred to as the “tears of the moon.”  When the moon appears within a concentric circle, the atmosphere is congested with water and this phenomenon is a harbinger of rain.  A cultural preoccupation with rain would not seem likely in the relatively humid Midwest.  But, although Pauketat doesn’t make this completely clear in his lecture (he is covering lots of ground), crops and farming require rain and an understanding of wet and dry meteorological cycles.  Beginning around 900 AD, the Caddo and other similar tribes in the Mississippi basin began growing corn.  Throughout the Americas, the cultivation of corn is an immediate precursor to a village-based economy.  After 150 years of corn cultivation, the Indians were congregating in urban centers, most notably Cahokia, probably one of the largest cities in the world at that time, boasting over 100,000 residents,  The sustenance of a large urban population is dependent upon robust crops and surpluses.  And crops, of course, are water-dependant.  On this basis, the Cahokians looked to the skies and the moon for guarantees that there would be sufficient rain to support their villages and cities. 

Generally wet weather in the Mississippi basin occurred at a time when much of the Meso-American world was suffering drought.  It was dry at Chaco Canyon -- indeed the drought lasted for several hundred years, and, probably, forced migration of the ancestral Puebloans into more moist mountainous regions in the southwest.  Similarly, drought afflicted west Mexico and the Yucatan circa 1000 to 1200 AD.  It was during these times that the Huastecan Indians in northwest Mexico began to construct circular shrines, little round buildings with pointed thatch roofs.  Rounded buildings in Mexico symbolize the wind and, therefore, are sacred to forces imagined to blow rain clouds across the dry land.  This sort of building program seems to have been adopted by the medieval era Cahokians.  (Pauketat notes that there’s no direct evidence of trade suturing together the Mexican world and American Midwest – archaeologists have not found copper bells or obsidian or macaws in their excavations in Illinois and Wisconsin.  But Pauketat believes that priests or shamans traveled long distances to visit other tribal groups and, most likely, transmitted influences based upon what they had seen to members of their own cultural group.)   

Archaeologists first discovered evidence of a moon-cult at two outliers near Cahokia, the Pfeffer and the Emerald Acropolis sites about twenty miles west of the big urban center.  The Pfeffer site was threatened by agriculture and, so, salvage archaeology occurred at that place in 2000 and 2007.  The most noteworthy finding was a complex of houses supported by posts, generally rectangular structures with closely spaced vertical palisades supporting what must have been thatched roofs.  The curious feature was that the houses were rebuilt probably at about 20 year intervals with a changing central axis orientation.  In effect, the houses were built in iterations that predictably rotated through an arc of about 20 degrees.  In the center of these structures, surmised to be sweat-baths (saunas), the direction of the long axis was signified by a central groove packed full of yellow-black fill obviously exotic and imported to the site.  This “pointer,” as it were, was laid down in conditions of inundation – in other words, the exotic fill was packed into the central trench either during a naturally occurring rainstorm (with the structure’s roof removed) or with the builders pouring large amounts of water onto the clay to “laminate” the silt.  The periodic changes in the orientation of these buildings seemed correlated to the lunar “long cycle”, a 19.3 year periodicity defined by a north-south maximum and minimum moon rise.  Apparently, every 19 to 20 years, the axis of the sweat bath was changed to point in the direction of either the lunar maximum or lunar minimum.

(I’m always skeptical of archeo-astronomy, a view that Pauketat also espouses, noting that he had no interest in this subject until studying the findings at the Pfeffer site.  The sky is full of all sorts of moving objects and it would seem to me that an assiduous researcher could readily correlate points of the terrestrial surface with phenomenon in the sky.  But Pauketat seems to be a reasonable fellow and, therefore, I am willing to accept his conclusions on this subject at face-value, particularly since a number of separate Cahokian sites seem to share a common lunar orientation.)

The consensus opinion interpreting the Pfeffer excavation is that this work uncovered a complex of sweat baths, probably on the order of a pilgrimage site, all of them oriented toward astronomical landmarks in the lunar cycle and, indeed, rebuilt periodically to conform to the maximum and minimum moonrise.  Obviously, the shrine buildings were intensely involved with water – steam was produced in them and they were equipped with inundated clay floor markers produced by pouring water on yellow and black fill.  

These findings were confirmed by the discovery of similar structures at Trempeleau.  Immediately to the southwest of Trempeleau mountain’s main ridge, there is a hill called Little Bluff.  On top of Little Bluff, several mounds were known to exist, previously thought to be either Hopewell or Effigy Mound woodland culture sites.  Excavations beginning in 2009 and continuing through 2016, including some actually conducted in people’s lawns in the town, showed that the area was a Cahokian outlier.  Characteristically, Cahokian ceramics were found as well as gaming pieces known from the big urban site near St. Louis.  In fact, middens discovered in the middle of modern-day Trempeleau were full of Cahokian red potsherds.  

At the Wisconsin site, the Cahokian pilgrims had re-sculpted the entire top of Little Bluff, shaving off the domed profile of the hill to make a flat terrace.  On the terrace, a small central pyramidal-shaped mound supported a central shrine of some sort.  Embankment causeways ran from the central prism-shaped mound to circular mounds at the north and south edges of the bluff.  These mounds, also, supported rounded wind-water structures similar to the Huastecan model in western Mexico.  Pointer fill, a sort of mound dug down into the hilltop as an intaglio feature (as opposed to built up over the bluff terrace), aimed directly at the lunar minimum – that is, the moonrise as seen at its minimum point.  The clay floors of the structures showed signs of periodic inundation.  Accordingly, the site was similar in most respects with features found at Pfeffer.  Again, the structures were interpreted as sweat baths, probably regarded as salubrious and healing, suggesting that people who were ill may have been brought by dugout canoe to his location to be treated for their sicknesses in the tightly built saunas.  Pauketat interprets the general footprint of the site as suggesting the moon flanked by moon-dogs (paraselenae), a well-known phenomenon in very cold weather when the air is suffused with ice crystals.  The shrine at Trempeleau was probably occupied seasonally for about fifty years.

Beginning in 2011, Pauketat worked to excavate the so-called Emerald Acropolis, an Illinois site near Pfeffer.  This was also salvage archaeology necessitated by agricultural development encroaching on an isolated, densely wooded hill rising above the otherwise flat prairie.  Again, the dig resulted in the discovery of a number of circular buildings, sweat lodges, and, even, a large “council house” with a central axis mundi post probably projecting several feet above the center of the structure.  The complex structures were made from bent-poles and arbor-roofed.  Many of them had intaglio yellow-black clay features, oriented toward the minimum and maximum moon rise landmarks.  Periodically, the structures seem to have been literally washed away, possibly by human-induced flooding and, then, rebuilt.  In the council house, archaeological workers discovered a human sacrifice, an inhumation of a young boy or girl in the corner of the structure.  (Discovery of human remains like this can be catastrophic to a “dig” in that local tribes have to be consulted as to the meaning of these relics, skeletal artifacts may have to be carefully extracted for repatriation, and tribes claiming an affiliation with the culture once at the site have veto power over further excavations.  Here it was decided to not remove the skeletal remains and simply leave them in the excavation, as Pauketat is quick to note, well below the level that will be disturbed by future plowing.  Tribes claiming an interest in these artifacts are the Pawnee, Ho-Chunk, the Ohio Miami now living in Oklahoma and the modern-day Caddo.)

The hill called the Emerald Acropolis contains a geological phenomenon known as a “perched aquifer”.  This means that the upper part of the knoll is comprised of permeable soils and rock allowing waters to seep down to what is called an acquitard or acquilard, that is, an impermeable barrier to the water’s further descent.  Where an impermeable layer of rock blocks seepage, the water table is “perched” above the adjacent land – this results in springs flowing from the side of the hill at the level of the acquitard with circumadjacent ponds or lagoons at the base of the knoll.  In Meso-America this geological structure, a “perched acquifer” is called a “water-mountain”, not coincidentally the Aztec and Mayan name for a city.  Clearly, the Cahokians regarded the Emerald Acropolis as a sacred location, a “water-mountain”, and built pilgrim houses around its base.  These places were not permanent dwellings, but periodically inhabited over several hundred years, presumably on the basis of religious festivals conducted there.

Pauketat observes that the area around Cahokia is rich with dramatic water features.  First, there are vast flood plains around the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri.  The high lands on both sides of these flood plains are karst formation, riddled with impressive Cenote-like sinkholes.  The marshy lowlands are full of oxbow lakes that attract an abundance of water fowl.  Knolls like the Emerald Acropolis provide evidence of perched aquifers with flowing springs.  Cahokia itself was a watery city, a sort of Venice filled with canals and lagoons.  Borrow pits near the big mounds fill with runoff even today and were probably semi-permanent water-features 900 years ago.  Raised causeways strike across the swampy land connecting platform mounds on which there were erected very large sweat baths, circular in form after the model of the Mayan and Huastecan structures.  For instance at the highest point in Cahokia, the summit of Monk’s Mound, modern archaeologists working with Pauketat have found a massive sweat lodge circular in shape and equipped with a huge vertical axis mundi central pole.  Again long-cycle lunar orientations govern the construction of many of the rectangular religious buildings.  

Apparently, a central component of the moon-cult at Cahokia was the consumption of something called “the Black Drink.”  The “Black Drink” is a tea comprised of Yaupon Holly (Ilex vomitoria), a stimulant and, if consumed in sufficient quantity, an emetic as well.  Scholars discovered use of the “Black Drink” at these sites accidentally.  Cups elaborately decorated with spirals derived from the natural forms of the lightning whelk shell (a kind of nautilus cephalopod) were found to contain residues of some dark substance.  Initially, it was thought that these deposits were chocolate or cacao imported from Mexico.  But analysis showed not cacao, but fragmented tea leaves of the Ilex vomitoria.  This herb doesn’t grow in central Illinois or Missouri and was imported from the Gulf Coast along with great quantities of whelk shells that were somehow associated with the brewing of this tea, as witness ceramic cups bearing their patterns.  Clearly, the Cahokians were venturing to the south as far as the Gulf to acquire this “Black Drink” and, also, lightning welk shells found in abundance in their city.  A red-colored ceramic vessel shows a figure holding a cup imprinted with whelk-shaped patterns; on the other side of the figure, there is a urn with a cap, presumably a boiling pot of this powerful tea.  A Cahokian outlier in northern Mississippi further confirms this Drang nach Sueden (or the impulse toward the South) in Cahokia’s culture.  Near Clarksdale, there is a Cahokian pilgrimage site similar to the complex built in the north at Trempeleau.  The Carson site, as it is called, shows a number of round pilgrim-shrine sweat baths and other structures, many of them aligned to lunar minimum and maximum moonrises.  

On the night that Professor Pauketat presented this lecture,someone attending the program said that the moon was rising dramatically over a mesa outside of Albuquerque.  The lecture’s facilitator sent a note to participants encouraging them to look for the moon climbing into the skies over their own landscapes.  And, later, during the early morning hours, there was a partial eclipse, the face of the moon eroded by the earth’s shadow casting a pinkish-red light, that is, a so-called “Blood Moon.”

Crossing into Wisconsin on Highway 43, the bridge from Winona spans two lobes of dark water and, then, joins the river-road parallel to the Mississippi at a tee intersection.  At intervals, two-story taverns set back a couple hundred feet from the train tracks stand along the highway – presumably the owners of these places live above their bars open on the ground level.  Although it’s early on a Sunday morning in late November, each isolated pub has a couple of pickup trucks dutifully parked in the gravel ringing the place, hunters, perhaps, having an eye-opener before chasing deer in the cold, windy coulees or alcoholics driven out of town by Sunday closing laws.  The valley opens up south of Winona and Trempeleau Mountain stands entirely isolated, a single ridge of dark hills, mostly with rounded summits, but, also, spiked with a pointed horn of rock at one end of the little range.  Obviously, the mountain was once an island, surrounded on all sides by overflow from the Mississippi because these highlands are apart, separated by several miles, from the ring of bluffs lining the valley on all sides.  It’s an anomalous-looking landscape, flat lands now bearing row-crops, mostly corn, that lap up along the sides of the ridge pressed here against the river.  

At Trempeleau, the valley’s flood plain is seven or eight miles wide and, after passing a few unincorporated villages, the highway jogs four miles west across river flats golden with corn stalk stubble to slip into the town under the south flank of the island mountain.  The village feels closed-in, the mountain blocking passage to the north along the river except along a narrow terrace crowded with a two-lane blacktop and train tracks running along the levee.  Trempeleau is butted into the main channel of the Mississippi, here a lake-shaped reach of water where a tug-boat with a prow like a white church steeple is chugging along the embankment.  The Minnesota side of the river, beyond a couple football fields’ width of water is rugged, high hills heavy with trees crowded close to the channel, a tangled chaos of steep valleys and cliff-lined bluff tops that looks entirely primeval – there are no houses and no signs of any infrastructure on the other side of the river: the landscape seems like something that might have inspired and daunted the first pioneers here, steep ravines and wild wooded hills now and then flashing cliffs like bared teeth.  (This perception turns out to be wholly wrong.)

I don’t know where the trail head leads up to the Cahokia mound-site and so I take the winding way, north along the channel to the State Park gateway.  A typical Wisconsin supper-club, a bit like a barge improbably beached on the river bank stands just beyond the entrance to the Park.  This is Sullivan’s, a place where I have eaten a couple times, a pleasant place in mild weather with a redwood deck leaning out over the railroad tracks nearby and the heaped up waters of the river, impounded here by a Corps of Engineers lock and dam downstream.  On Trempeleau Mountain, the ridge rises to piles of stone like columnar crow’s nests high in the hills.  There’s no trail in this direction and so I drive back to the village, one mile downstream, a place where all the lanes are L-shaped and dipped down to dead-end along the river.  The wind is cold and blows a gale and the lake is shingled with bright-tipped waves.  A bronze horseman with dogs stands on a plinth on the levee – this is apparently Trempeleau himself.  The town was once a railroad hub and a river-boat harbor, full of bars and whorehouses no doubt, but it’s now a place for summer-people, modest bungalows to rent for a night or a week along the main street, and, down, closer to the water, some ancient brick buildings that have odd pointed pediments and turrets like witch’s hats.  The village has changed its vocation from swindling river-boat passengers and train crews to selling tourists coffee, bagels, and boat rides along this scenic stretch of the Mississippi.

The trail to the Cahokian shrine is on 35, where the highway enters the village, a block to the east of the post office.  Some rugged-looking rustic steps lead up the side of a ravine and, then, the trail climbs very steeply, hanging off the side of the coulee, to the top of Little Bluff.  A couple of lanes, more like jeep tracks, intersect at the edge of the bluff-top, and, then, a narrow road runs along the ridge skirting deep drop-offs on both sides.  The archaeological site occupies a tongue of hilltop running to the southwest and overlooking the village.  There’s almost nothing to see.  The mounds run in a procession away from a causeway between two deep and shadowy borrow pits, excavations from which the Indians scooped dirt and dumped it, basket upon basket, to make the prism-shaped high points on the hill.  In fact, the largest mound, which now looks like a natural feature, is a big flat-topped embankment where the City of Trempeleau built its grey vat of a concrete water tower.  The steep ramp-like roads climbing to this height presumably were for servicing this facility although it’s mostly long gone, torn down “about 1991", an odd locution suggesting that we know what happened here a thousand years ago, better then we understand events only thirty years before the present. 

Archaeologists in 2016 sunk a tee-shaped trench into the highest mound, still bearing a rough semi-circle of broken concrete foundations embedded in the old Cahokian mound like envious, broken molars.  Beneath a yard of dirt disturbed by the construction of the water tower, the scientists and their teams found layers of orange-yellow and black fill, very precisely set down in alternating strata.  The fill was polished with water poured across each layer and created a mound densely layered like an expensive chocolate and toffee cake.  The bright yellow clay came from the bottoms of the borrow pits, loess blown here from the great west.  The black dirt was pulled out of the bottoms of ravines where sometimes water flowed.  At the center of the mound, a pit was found calcined to a crimson-color, a place where fire had burned periodically for many years.  The diagrams of the mounds as originally constituted are confusing – it looks like the row of mounds rises toward the overlook over the village and river.  In fact, the narrow promontory of land was shaped to step down in four platforms toward the sheer edge of the bluff above the prairie below where the Indians built several council houses. The pier of prairie hanging over the ancient village (probably only occupied in the warm season) provided a theatrical stage for ceremonial rites.  Probably, only some of the people living below were allowed access to the bluff-top shrines.  But the place as configured so that rituals could be performed so as to be witnessed by the people along the side of the river below.  Things were done on these heights for the benefit of those below. 

Work on the hilltop shrine probably took twenty years and involved moving 1.8 million bushels of dirt.  Cahokian water shrines often had round walls to suggest that these structures had been rolled and pummeled and pounded by rain-bearing winds.  So it’s interesting to observe that on the temple mound at this water shrine, sacred to the Tears of the Moon, the city fathers in Trempeleau built for themselves a perfectly circular concrete reservoir to hold water and, in fact, planted this wind-abraded tower exactly where the ancient shrine was located.  

A man named Thomas Hayes Lewis, a professional surveyor, first mapped this site in 1884.  At the time, the shapes of the mounds crowning the hilltop were very clear.  Photographs taken by an antiquarian named Squiers in 1905 show the hilltop as naked with only a few trees, mostly lean-looking saplings, gathered around the edges of the rectangular mounds.  Another picture made by Squier from the valley below shows the flank of the bluff, numbered in ink painted on the photograph, marking the mounds along the ridge-line.  Surprisingly, the bluff top is almost completely treeless.  It seems that the forests that now grow densely all along the ridges and steep hillsides and that crown the bluff are modern.  Apparently, these steep hills overlooking the Mississippi were mostly barren 116 years ago.  

The director of the Milwaukee Museum of Natural History wrote a letter to Trempeleau’s mayor in April 1938 pleading that another location be found for the water tower.  The Milwaukee Museum director said that this hilltop complex was one of the most notable prehistoric sites in all of Wisconsin. But apparently the entreaties in the letter were ignored.  The water tower survives today as a hedge of ragged concrete half sunk in the weeds.  The mounds are hard to see, but they are still there.  

On 35 south of Trempeleau, a big catfish as long as a semi-trailer greets visitors to the village.  The catfish is green and white with a tangle of barbels like airplane cable.  Reputedly, it is the largest fiber-glass catfish in the world.  The highway crosses three flat, broad rivers wrapped in a grey fog of underbrush. It’s hunting season, four days before Thanksgiving, but the only deer I see are road-kill, brown barrel-shaped torsos lying in the gravel at the edge of the road.  

On the novel The Sympathizer

 

Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer is an American novel published in 2015 and widely acclaimed.  The book details the adventures of an unnamed Vietnamese Communist spy.  The spy has infiltrated the South Vietnamese army, working closely with a General in that hapless military force.  Educated in the United States, the spy, who narrates the novel, is a “double-minded man” (this is announced on the book’s first page), an amphibious being who navigates both the sunlit streets of Los Angeles and the murky, turbid corruption of Vietnam with equal aplomb. (The hero is also a self-described “bastard” – the son of Vietnamese girl and lecherous French priest.)  In diagram, the novel has the features of an adventure novel or thriller, although the reader immediately encounters obstacles to appreciating the book as a superior exercise in genre fiction.  The first-person voice narrating the story is the book’s principal complication, an exercise in high style that elevates the novel’s historical novel qua thriller apparatus into literary excellence.  The book’s texture is intricate and the narrative discourse is not merely, or, even, primarily descriptive – rather, the author is a little like Marcel Proust or Stendhal: the story-teller’s idiosyncrasies are the novel’s primary attraction and the spy thriller plot frequently digresses into miniature essays about American and Vietnamese culture, history, and, even, movies during the glory days of The Godfather and Apocalypse Now.  The plot is crowded with characters, some of them quite vivid, but all recede into the shadows cast by the glaring, exorbitantly opinionated and comical musings of the narrator.  

In structure, the book divides into clearly delineated sequences, very much like the structure of a well-made Hollywood script – and, of course, a book this famous and with many bravura sequences of threat, suspense, and violence is fated (or should we say doomed) to appear on silver screen.  In its action and situations, the novel seems designed to be converted into a film.  But, of course, the peculiar vehemence of the narrator, the aspect of the book that provides the prose with its distinctive energy, is anti-narrative, a system of rhetorical effects that probably can’t be translated into a plausible movie.  It will be interested to see how the book is adapted to HBO – apparently, a mini-series is being plotted as I write. 

The novel begins with a literal sort of bang, a bravura passage involving the fall of Saigon.  This part of the book is hallucinatory and remarkable, prescient as to the chaos that attended upon the United States’ withdrawal from Afghanistan – the reader can readily imagine the action in the opening of the book because we saw it unfold on our TV screens in the precipitous pull-out from Kabul.  The hero (or anti-hero) escapes Saigon in the company of a friend Bon.  On the Saigon runway, Bon’s wife and child are killed.  Bon becomes a hollow man, vacant except for grief and rage and, later, depicted as a nihilistic killer.  In the book’s second act, the protagonist’s life as a refugee is Los Angeles is chronicled.  This part of the book develops into a thriller.  For reasons that aren’t clear to me, the General (now running a liquor store while is wife operates a squalid Chinese restaurant) deputizes the narrator to kill a man always referred to as the “crapulent Major.”  The killing is accomplished but, as in Macbeth, for instance, the protagonist suffers from pervasive feelings of guilt and hallucinates that the head of the Major is a centerpiece on a table at a wedding that he attends in the aftermath of the homicide.  In this assassination narrative, the book invokes Hitchcock and Graham Greene and the killing is described in a set-piece that should be readily adapted for screen.  Nguyen effectively depicts the Vietnamese refugee community, a group of schemers plotting to resurrect the War with the help of a gung-ho American congressman.  There is much witty by-play between the various factions of Vietnamese veterans and their children, a younger generation who seem rather remote from the passions of the bloody war fought in Southeast Asia.  Throughout this part of the book and following, our Commie “mole” narrator writes an account of his activities in invisible (rice-water) ink – this is sent to the protagonist’s Aunt in Paris, presumably for distribution to his handler or spy-master in the Vietnamese secret service.  (I was never entirely sure whether the Aunt in Paris is a real person in contact with the spy-master or simply a euphemism for the spy-master himself.)  

In the book’s third section, the protagonist finds himself recruited to serve as a consultant on a big-budget Hollywood film shot in the Philippines.  The name of the film is The Hamlet, but references in the book’s acknowledgments section make it clear that the inspiration for this part of the novel is Apocalypse Now.  (Although it seems that the movie being shot is really more like Oliver Stone’s Platoon).  The film’s director, referred to sardonically as the Auteur, heartily dislikes his Vietnamese consultant and the hero seems to increasingly occupy the role as the movie-maker’s bad conscience.  An accident on the set, probably triggered by the Auteur in an effort to kill the protagonist, results in the narrator being parboiled by an explosion.  He’s hospitalized, paid some damages for his injuries, and shipped back to the United States.  This part of the book exploits the familiar notion that Hollywood movies customarily get all factual and historical details right, but that this verisimilitude is in service of a story and characters that are utterly false and completely fraudulent.  (In one of his amusing mini-essays, the narrator points out that the director and his scenarist can’t even accurately reproduce the typical way that Vietnamese scream when they are tortured and killed.  The protagonist who has much experience with torture and killing knows all about this subject.)

In the fourth section in the book, the protagonist joins a quixotic raid, conducted through Thailand and Cambodia on the Communist regime in Vietnam.  The raid revives the dormant General and provides an occasion for some inspiring speeches about how the clandestine military action restores to its hapless refugee participants honor lost in their defeat in Vietnam. (Aspects of this section of the book harken back to the Bay of Pigs debacle.)  However, the narrator’s participation in this covert action comes at a high price.  To show his loyalty, the protagonist has to assassinate Sonny, a fellow Vietnamese Communist, also educated in Los Angeles and well-known for his opposition to the war in southeast Asia.  This murder arises from obviously impure motives: the narrator sympathizes with Sonny’s ideology and has reason to personally dislike his victim:  Sonny has appropriated Ms. Mori, the hero’s girlfriend while he was in the Philippines and they are rivals for the woman.  Further, there doesn’t seem any good reason to eliminate Sonny; he’s politically ineffective and no threat to anyone. The General, it seems, orders the murder to compromise the narrator, alarmed that the hero has been courting his daughter, a thoroughly assimilated young woman who sings in a rock band.  Once again, the murder is presented in a cinematically described set-piece.  After killing his former friend, the narrator adjourns to the apartment of the General’s daughter for a sexual encounter – there’s nothing like a good murder to stir the libido.  We next see the hero in Cambodia attempting a reconnaissance mission through Laos and across the Mekong River, the border with Vietnam.  The part of the book seems written under the influence of Joseph Conrad, full of sound and fury and ornamented with impressive descriptions of landscape – the narrator’s prose style is reminiscent of “The Heart of Darkness” or some scenes in Conrad’s masterpiece, Nostromo.  After a bloody firefight, the narrator is  taken prisoner and his plight in a Vietnamese re-education camp comprises the final, or fifth act, of the novel.

Up to this point, the novel seems to me fully realized and highly successful.  The last part of The Sympathizer, however, palls and, unfortunately, the book’s narrative climax is also its weakest link.  

 Here the narrator’s elaborate rhetoric takes over and Nguyen’s propensity for highly ornamented discourse overwhelms the story.  The hero is isolated in dank, suffocating cell, allowed access to fresh air and light for only an hour a day, and nourished, if inadequately, on wretched, verminous provisions.  (It’s detestable to be lectured at length by a moron and, even, more awful to have to endure those speeches on an empty stomach.)  The Commandant entrusted with re-educating the narrator is a tedious fool and Nguyen repeats his speeches berating our hero at length.  The general burden of the Commandant’s diatribe is that the narrator, despite his ostensible allegiance to the cause, is irretrievably damaged in, at least, two ways – first, the hero’s immersion in California culture specifically, and Western politics and literature, in general, taints him and must be purged from his system; in other words, the very flexibility that made the narrator an asset as a spy compromises him badly in the eyes of the dogmatic interrogator.  Second, the narrator’s status as a “bastard”, the son of a Vietnamese woman and a French priest makes him a mongrel, a half-breed who is, somehow, genetically predisposed to betray the glorious Revolution.  In support of these theses, the Commandant quotes gibberish by Ho Chi Minh and Chairman Mao and has required our hero to write a lengthy confession, several hundred handwritten pages composed in his putrid cell by the light of a tiny tallow candle.  The confession is supposed to be self-criticism, but is deemed unworthy and, even, subversive on the basis of our hero’s elaborate prose style: “The bad news (says the Commandant) is that your language betrays you.  It is not clear, not succinct, not direct, not simple.  It is the language of the elite.”  At this point, it becomes evident to the reader that the Commandant is describing the very novel that we are reading.  The self-revelatory text presented to the dogmatic Commandant is the novel entitled The Sympathizer.  At one point, the hero observes that his smudged and stained confession consists of 307 pages.  Checking the margin, I see that the book numbers the pages up to this point in the story at 317.  Thus, one of the revelations in the novel’s denouement is the nature of the text we are reading.  

This development is pretty clever and motivates the florid prose style in which the book is written.  But the problem with the scenes with the hero’s doctrinaire and vicious interlocutors is that this stuff has all been done before and much better.  The immediate precursor to The Sympathizer’s interrogation scenes is the similar, and much better managed, material at the close of Orwell’s 1984.  The loquacious and terrifying torturer in the Orwell novel, O’Brien, the man who ultimately persuades Winston Smith that 2 + 2 = 5, is the spiritual predecessor the Commandant and the “faceless man”, the reeducation camp’s big boss whom the hero encounters at the end of The Sympathizer.  (Of course, the granddaddy of all of these torturers in Dostoevsky’s “Grand Inquisitor” from The Brothers Karamazov).  Nguyen’s Commandant and the napalm-burned “faceless man” don’t have much to add to their distinguished lineage and the dialogue sequences in the book’s last act are implausible and tedious.  There is a concept called “haranguing” in Marvel and DC comic books.  Before the villain delivers the coup de grace to his helpless victim, he unburdens himself of a lengthy harangue, a megalomaniacal monologue that usually gives the various caped crusaders a chance to rescue the target of the bad guy’s ire.  This is how the speechifying toward the end of The Sympathizer comes off.  As the Commie villains blather on and on, we expect a colorfully garbed super-hero to alight in the re-education camp and act as a deus ex machina that will levitate our narrator to safety. 

The inevitable problem of a book of this kind is that the hero’s wise-ass stance can’t be sustained in the face of the horrors presented.  (Nguyen makes a valiant attempt – there’s a good joke about the rock-hard products of the narrator’s defecation, a stony, petrified cube of shit formed by conditions of near-starvation forming “one of the bricks” in Communism’s heroic structure.)  As in Catch 22, deferred atrocities and horrors catch up with narrative and the witty steam, as it were, leaks out of the book under the pressure of its ghastly content.  We reach the serious parts of both Catch 22 and The Sympathizer with a sense of dread – the light touch has to be abandoned in favor of a gravely earnest tone that falsifies the earlier, better parts of the book. It’s easy to move and appall readers with descriptions of horrors; comedy is a lot more difficult to sustain.     

Nonetheless, there’s three-quarters (or, even, 4/5ths) of a very fine novel here. The Sympathizer’s plot is entertaining and full of exciting incidents.  But, the book’s chief appeal rests with its narrator.  The protagonist is an accomplished rhetorician and adept at devising remarkable figures of speech.  His discourse is showy, an excuse for all sorts of literary pyrotechnics.  In modern literature, the narrator seems most closely akin to Yossarian in Catch 22, a book that The Sympathizer resembles with respect to its dizzying shifts in tone – like Catch 22, The Sympathizer oscillates wildly between absurdist comedy, complete with pratfalls and one-liner gags (C-rations look the same entering the body as leaving it), and bleakly horrible violence.  Some critics have claimed that the book’s central consciousness is like the narrator in Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man – this is an inept comparison.  The speaker in The Invisible Man is far more rancorous, obsessive, and bitter than the hero of The Sympathizer who seems a resourceful fellow, rather avuncular, and (until the end) with an excellent sense of humor.  (The Invisible Man is largely a series of allegories strung together into a first-person narrative that can’t hang together because the narrator’s personality is fractured by the racism that he experiences; The Sympathizer’s narrator is far less anguished and, despite the horrors around him, quite cheerful – nothing touches him deeply because he isn’t actually real in the first place: the hero is an artifact of a historical moment of divided consciousness, a poster-boy, as it were, for the contradictions that Marx thought doomed Capitalism and its military-industrial complex but that are equally applicable to modern Communist societies.)  As I read the book, the narrator seemed to me cousin to the witty, resourceful picaros who inhabit late 18th century literature – the protagonist seems like a figure from a novel by Henry Fielding, someone like Tom Jones or the narrator of novel by Laurence Sterne such as A Sentimental Journey or a character in a grotesque comedy like Humphrey Clinker by Tobias Smollet.

Nguyen’s unique prose style is well-illustrated by an episode at the beginning of Chapter 13.  The self-described “subversive” protagonist has returned to Los Angeles after his ill-fated foray into Hollywood film production.  Before departing for the Philippines, the narrator was enjoying a rather casual, if mutually satisfying, sexual relationship with Ms. Mori, a secretary for the professor at the University where the hero works as a graduate associate in the department of East Asian studies.  Ms. Mori’s parents are Nisei Japanese. Hoping to revive his affair with Ms. Mori, the narrator goes to her apartment and finds that she is entertaining another Vietnamese man, Sonny.  Sonny is a Communist himself and the hero accuses him of lacking commitment to the cause – instead of returning to Vietnam, Sonny remained in southern California, espousing Revolution but doing nothing to further his ostensible political objectives.  I am concerned, however, with demonstrating Nguyen’s flamboyant metaphors that are characteristic of the diction and tone throughout the novel.  

When he casts his eye on Ms. Mori’s books, the narrator sees “bookshelves bowed as the backs of coolies with the weight of Simone de Beauvoir, Anais Nin, Angela Davis and other women who had wrestled with the Woman Question.”  The metaphor, which would be considered offensive if perpetrated by a non-Asian writer, suggests both Ms. Mori’s oriental heritage, the south Asian background of the narrator, and implies that the “Woman Question” is a luxury item borne on the backs of the wretched of the Earth.  The presence of the hero’s rival in Ms. Mori’s apartment induces “an anaphylactic reaction to his presence.”  The cork of an open bottle is “wine-bloodied”, another image that implies the potentially murderous hostility between the men.  The narrator poetically imbues mute objects with voices – a bottle of Stolichnaya vodka “maintain(s) a stoic Russian demeanor...”  And the narrator assures us that “every full bottle of alcohol has a message in it, a surprise that one will not discover until one drinks it.”  This is trope foreshadows later words spoken in anger in the chapter under the influence of booze.  The characters sit in “the frigid waters of embarrassment” except for Ms. Mori’s “grace” in defusing the situation.  Ms. Mori’s cat yawns in “regal contempt” and climbing onto the lap of her current lover, Sonny, “sneers” at the hero, before falling “asleep out of boredom.”  Thoughts take on the form of “fleeting, evanescent material shape” and a “ghostly version” of the hero hovers over his rival’s head.  The hero perceives himself as an “unwilling partner in this complicated menage a trois.”  Ms. Mori’s “gaze (is) loaded with with pity, which was ever only served lukewarm.”  As the characters get drunk, the language becomes extravagantly fluid: “(l)onging flood(s) the basement of (the narrator’s) heart.”  The vodka is “pungent and wonderful... the paint thinner I needed to strip down the stained, flaking walls of my interior.”  This latter image of the vodka as a solvent abrading basement walls apparently ruined by previously adumbrated “floods” of longing is compact, vivid, and wholly baroque, a metaphysical conceit after the manner of John Donne.  

I have selected this passage to provide readers with a sense of the highly mannered, almost rococo style with which this book is written, an array of fireworks bursting on every page that has the effect of congesting and impeding the narrative, indeed, even establishing a counter-motion to the flow of events described in the book.  The various tropes listed in the preceding paragraph occur in the scope of four pages in the novel – and I have left out a number of less showy conceits.  

Nguyen’s rather fragrant and luxurious literary style is central to the book’s conception.  In Nabokov’s Lolita, the narrator Humbert Humbert, after a particularly exuberant literary flourish, makes the self-deprecating remark that you can “rely on” a murderer to have a florid, ornamental style of writing.  (This is thematic to Lolita – the narrator’s exorbitant style masks and distances the sordid events that the story depicts: that is, the rape and destruction of a child.)  Similarly, Nguyen’s elaborately ornamented style keeps us at a distance from the violent and, even, horrific content comprising the story.  These stylistic devices are a means by which the narrator expresses his “double-mindedness” – terrible things are narrated in an elaborately rhetorical and humorous way.  Indeed, the book proposes that the role of spy is an equivalent to the author’s stance in writing an ironic novel of this sort.  The spy reports on what he sees.  Similarly, a novelist writes about things that he knows.  The novelist is making a confidential report to the reader (in the form of a confession to the Commandant).  Like the spy, the novelist is both inside the events that he chronicles as well as dispassionate, even scientifically abstracted, from those events.  The stance of reporting from a perspective both inside and outside of a society – that is, pretending to be a member of a polity while simultaneously undermining that polity – is integral to the book’s conception. 

The novel’s stylistic felicities and the narrator’s witty, engaging perspective implode in The Sympathizer’s final pages.  Detached and mordant observations give way to the Sturm und Drang of extended tortures scenes that unpleasant to read and oddly disconnected from the rest of the book.  Several technical problems arise.  First, physical pain (like music) can’t be plausibly described in the first person.  Pain is an isolating experience that is all inside.  But good writing is outside – that is, the writer extracts a feeling, impression, or idea from within his or her mind and, then, casts that as an exterior, that is a structure of words and syntax within the common parlance, to expose that subject to the reader.  Sex, described from first person point of view, poses similar problems and is a shoal on which many prose narratives have foundered – but most people have some experience of sex and can apply the writer’s approximations to that experience; thankfully, few modern people have the experience of being tortured. 

Furthermore, Nguyen’s symbolism implies that the hero’s torture is, somehow, beneficial to him.  Arguably, the reader may dislike the narrator to the point that he or she might uncharitably desire to see the protagonist get his proper comeuppance; but this isn’t the effect for which the writer seems to be striving.  Nguyen takes seriously the premise that the narrator must be “reeducated”, that his perceptions and cultural pretensions are askew and need to be forcibly corrected.  But this is a strange stance for the author to impose on his readers – it’s as if Orwell were asking us to be pleased over the fact that O’Brien’s torture has made Winston Smith “love Big Brother.”  The imagery of The Sympathizer’s torture scene involves brilliant lights, sensory deprivation, and electric shocks to prevent the hero from falling asleep – indeed, the hero’s worst affliction seems to be the Vietnamese torturers depriving him of sleep, surely an awful thing.  But the descriptions of this torture emphasizes that the narrator comes to certain realizations – that is, becomes educated – by the misery that he endures.  The constant brilliant light pouring down on the hero actually comes to signify something like enlightenment.  Sensory deprivation compels semi-monastic self-reflection.  And the fact that the hero is brutally kept from sleeping suggests the metaphor of becoming fully awakened.  Lest this interpretation seem extravagant, Nguyen emphasizes how the experience of torture restores to the hero memories and feelings that he has apparently repressed.

First, the hero regains a vivid memory of his participation in the rape of a female VC agent.  The narrator’s horror as to this event, seemingly repressed, is supposed to humanize our protagonist even as the first-person speaker dwells on conspicuously salacious and awful details involving the assault.  In addition to restoration of this repressed memory, the hero experiences restoration (or revelation) of a repressed emotion – namely, that he has always hated his French father. 

I am generally suspicious of plot developments that involve the recovery of suppressed feelings and memories.  This narrative tactic can yield revelations on cue supposed to deepen psychological elements in the story.  But the notion that one can repress a powerful, even life-altering, memory seems specious to me at best – a revenant from Freudian models of the mind probably best laid to rest.  The rape scene is sufficiently vivid that it seems highly unlikely that the hero would need torture to bring this recollection to light.  And, throughout the book, the narrator’s references to his father have all been disparaging – therefore, it comes as no surprise that the hero dislikes or, even, hates the French priest who begot him.  The only surprise is that the narrator himself is surprised that this emotion surges into prominence during his torture.  

The protagonist’s sleep-deprived meditations on these freshly unearthed memories and feelings yield a Heraclitean system of oppositions.  Everything is divided: father from son, north from south Vietnam, Europe opposes Asia, the Commandant is a dialectal opposite to the Commissar, Communism opposing Capitalism, mind is separated from body (the narrator imagines himself floating over his torture as a spectator), cells, themselves, divide and divide again in reproduction creating life from division.  What does this all mean? “Nothing,” the narrator proclaims.  At the bottom of all systems, there is merely nothingness.  These are fancy thoughts, but can’t be logically deduced from anything that we’ve seen in the novel.  Indeed, the novel is maximalist, multiplying scenes and situations (the hero commits not one murder but two), filling up the interstices in the plot with vividly described minor characters and the story is replete with love scenes, violence, and comedy.  To assert, in the penultimate chapter, that this all amounts to “nothing” falsifies the book’s narrative.  

The Sympathizer comes equipped with a coda or postlude in its final chapter.  Events in this chapter imprint an allegorical aspect on the novel’s already densely packed content.  The protagonist realizes that he is just another refugee cast adrift by the calamity in Southeast Asia.  He expresses solidarity with others like him – no longer a “double-minded” man he announces his identity with the collective.  Antinomies are overcome; the hero’s divisions are healed.  From a narcissistic “I”, the first-person narrator has become part of a “we” – the word “we” figures prominently in the slogan that ends the book.  All of this is summarized in the narrator’s response to a riddle repeated to him during his torture: “What is more precious than freedom and independence?”  The answer engraved into the hero’s psyche by his torture is simple enough, but syntactically ambiguous: “Nothing is more precious than freedom and independence”  – in English, this sentence can mean either that “freedom and independence” are the highest of all values bar none, or that “nothing” itself is more precious than “freedom and independence”, a Buddhist recognition that all forms, including the self, are empty.  (Presumably, the narrator’s interrogation is conducted in Vietnamese and I doubt that this ambiguity exists in that language – but if the reader has not suspended disbelief by this point in the book, he or she is no longer reading it.)  From the liberating perception, that “nothingness” precedes “something” and that all forms are empty, the narrator forges his new consciousness.  I would like to believe that the metaphysics in the last few chapters are ironic, but find no trace of that attitude at the end of the book.

The Sympathizer is an impressive and exceptionally ambitious novel.  The fact that I am comparing it with similarly flawed classics like Joseph Heller’s Catch 22 demonstrates the book’s formidable brilliance.  The fact that I don’t like the book’s conclusion may be idiosyncratic with this writer.  Perhaps, there are many others who find the ending of the book plausible and just.  In any event, the novel casts a fascinating perspective on the end of the war in Vietnam, a subject that is relevant today in the light of the way that the conflict in Afghanistan ended.  No doubt there will be thousands of “double-minded” refugees from that conflict and their destinies will be inextricably entwined with ours.  In America, we are always blithely starting wars and heedlessly ending them as well and so many of the truths expressed in Nguyen’s book will remain to perplex us for the foreseeable future.