Everyone should die young. You know, like maybe on your 113^th birthday. Which is to say, there is no reason to grow old no matter how long you’ve lived. At least not between your ears. The mental part of aging is purely an expectation, a self-fulfilling prophecy, a mandate enforced by conformity. Think young and the mirror will tell your driver’s license little white lies.

But we are consumed with the superficial and the superfacial as evidence of growing old. Of course, those things have their degree of importance. To optimize your health and appearance, you have choices throughout your life: exercise or a lack thereof, diet, substances that aren’t really food, little things that keep you active or make you sedentary. Entropy beckons you to run down like a clock. And the biggest factors in physical decline are all those “do nots” (donuts – bwahaha) like booze, smoking, doing drugs. Consume to live rather than live to consume, add activity, and you max out the physical component. Aging: why rush it?

But let’s go back inside your head. No need to age at all in there. Kinda dark though. Maybe you should light a match – the same one that was burning when you felt all that energy growing up. What happened to it? I’m fascinated by watching people age. Sometimes I look at films from the silent era, madcap sight gags, people dancing in the roaring 20s, the bee’s knees and oh-that’s-Jake stuff. Then I remember…Jake’s dead. All those people – gone! Every one of them back to dust. I replay the dancers in Slo-Mo or pause them to study the profound JOY on their faces. What freed them to gyrate with abandon, tossing their arms and wiggling their bottoms? Music, yes, but why? How?

What in mere sounds causes us to drop our guard and unlimber in ways that in any other context would seem deranged or embarrassing? Is it syncing up with cosmic energy? A pulse then, like a heartbeat or respiration or brain waves? Or is it the beat and rhythm of sex itself (you’ll never convince me that dancing isn’t choreographed sex, no matter how disguised the code or genteel the mating flirtation)? But the music stops, the dance is stilled. One moment those roaring 20s dancers own the stage, totally unaware of the sands running out, the hourglass promising permanence in its profligate flow, and suddenly it is all in the rearview mirror...joy, energy, spark – poof!

Life’s most spendthrift moments are like that. Sometimes it seems that I’m only watching, never really entering in, wanting to shout at someone with a similar way of thinking to step outside the frame and de-age with me. But they rush on, suddenly shocked to find themselves old inside and out, and I’m left to turn and greet the next generation (Peter Pan, pay up!). Makes me celebrate all the more my dance upon the stage. So grateful for what I have and the people who dance with me.

July’s Sullygram brought some thoughtful response to my pointing out how the vastly varied community of color gets run through the media and education in a monolithic way. Instead of seeing Blacks as “people from all walks of life, all values, all political ideologies, all degrees of success and a burgeoning middle class, the media-educational complex presents them as a single disadvantaged group doomed by racism to high crime rates, educational deficits and broken families.” I wrote that the monolithic image was being used to incite violence and provide cover for minorities who have immersed themselves in negative cultural values. I noted that they are being lost to the achievements of mainstream Black America, and that monolithic misrepresentation has been used for feminism, sexual orientation, illegal immigrants and native Americans. Several people wanted me to enlarge on that, which I’m happy to do here within the constraints of length. Let me use the native American example to further illustrate what I meant by monolithic lumping:

I idolized Indian lore as a youngster, as millions did, and I still do. Baseball teams, commercial logos or anything branded with Indian attributes drew my loyalty. I went to scout camp and competed to get in the bunkhouse named for my favorite Indian tribe. But as I grew older, the narrative changed to where there was only one tribe, a monolithic lump who were victimized by another tribe – the white man.

Gone were the separate histories of 562 tribes who, for centuries before they met the white tribe, had known conquest and defeat, peaceful alliances and broken truces, times of cooperation and times of brutal treachery between their many different cultures. They warred for territory, horses, stolen squaws and kidnapped children. Among those nearly 600 tribes, the most feared, such as Comanches and Apaches, raised torture and terror to an art still celebrated in chants and songs. But now as I grew up, the 600 became a monolithic lump of harmonic pacifists and environmentalists overwhelmed by evil whites and their technology.  

Even as a child, I did not like wars, but none of it lessened my admiration for all peoples. I understood that the clash of cultures was the perennial struggle in every time and place for survival. Terrible losses whether from battles or horrific slaughters committed by every tribe, including whites, is the history of the world for each square-foot of territory claimed. If we could undo every usurpation between humans, whose map would we return to? Conquest, whether resulting in genocide, slavery, or establishing reservations with the option of assimilation, is never pretty.

So, as I grew into an adult, I balked at the manipulated monolithic portrayal of those 600 cultures. In reality, they were so many things, good and bad, like all nations. Why were they being portrayed as a single martyred tribe called native Americans who were ecologically savvy stewards of the earth living in a harmonious Eden with each other and nature?

To be sure, examples of those virtues were a part of that diaspora. But gone were the nomadic tribes who followed the herds or simply moved when their camps became too fouled to live in. Gone were the hunter tribes who sometimes drove a herd of buffalo over a cliff to harvest a few. Gone the fierce and merciless warrior rites of passage. Gone, as well, was any anthropological evidence that the prehistory of migrations across land bridges included white races, as with the skeleton of Kennewick man, whose remains were eventually turned over to four tribes through court battles and destroyed or hidden by the “indigenous” from further study. The all-purpose native American monolithic replacement was installed, it seems inescapably clear, to shame and blame the white man. Which is a tragic distraction from real problems of alcoholism, drug abuse, unemployment, crime, depression and family violence on reservations. The greatness of those individual tribes is still there in their history, but so is the victimization mentality that cripples them from within. To use a current example:

The Washington Redskins became a trademark to people who were honored by it, adopted it, and wanted to identify with it. It signified strength, courage, indomitability. They did not call themselves something clearly derogatory, like “the Ignorant Savages.” Parse it down to skin color as the sole trait of identity, and you are still faced with a hard question. Is there something wrong with having a red skin? A black skin? A yellow skin? A white skin? If red skin is something to be ashamed of, the racism is in the mind of those who try to hide the reference and are offended by it. It is their implicit opinion that red skin is shameful, not the opinion of those who wanted to identify with it.
 

As with the savvy generation who made “black is beautiful,” perhaps the better strategy would have been to promote it for what it was meant to be. Millions of white and black children loved to “play Indian,” reveled in stories like “Straight Arrow,” “Cochise” and “Lone Eagle,” and saved their money and cereal box tops to send away for memorabilia that had to do with Indian lore. So, the intent of logos like the Washington Redskins was pure flattery unless you’re someone looking to be offended and eager to become a victim or an enabler of victims.

That is what I meant by monolithic lumping.

Photos below as usual. And I’m celebrating an outstanding audio release this month of my historical novel CASE WHITE! Check out Joshua Saxon’s magical voice in this sample on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Case-White/dp/B08D1V9V27/ref=tmm_aud_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

Thomas "Sully" Sullivan