1877
My Mill Valley Manifesto
Charles Powell was nineteen years old when Custer fell at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. That had been true since it happened – a long, long time ago, in another time, long before I was born.
When as an adult I learned survivors of that historic event were still being interviewed as I issued from my mother’s womb in southern Idaho, time was shockingly compressed into the awakening that Custer’s misfortune was not ancient history, but a very brief lifetime ago – mine!
Charles Powell was my maternal grandfather, a blacksmith whose calloused and kindly hand led me around our small Idaho town on his crony visits until his death the month before I started first grade in 1935.
I was born a Westerner and remain a Westerner, in fact and in spirit. My view of the world is, at least in the beginning was from the American Northwest, between the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific Ocean. I was born in the Pacific Northwest because my ancestors had migrated there and earned their humble living on land which at the time had only recently been taken from the original inhabitants by means and methods I don’t approve of, namely theft and violence, and yet are glorified in the American flag. If it should be necessary to inform oneself of the particulars behind that opinion, one should Google "The Nez Perce War of 1877."
Shortly before Christmas 2011, I received a Christmas card bearing an official greeting from a prominent American university, with whom the last contact had been nearly five years ago when by separate letters the University Librarian and the Special Collections Department acknowledged receiving a book I had written entitled, "California History through My Two Blue Eyes, Blitz Edition." In this case the word "Book" must be understood as a handy instrument to stretch the word "charitable" beyond its normal compass because the book was merely a document of seven pages consisting of the title page, an epigraph from Genesis, four pages of historical photos, and a final remark by the author regarding copyrights. All seven pages were magnificently bound in an El Cheapo plastic see-thru folio from the local drugstore.
Its contents, though, are the grist for My Mill Valley Manifesto. Herewith a recapitulation of the seven pages:
1. Title Page: "California History through (printed in blue) My Two Blue Eyes (followed, printed in black) by Ray Cook – SFSU 1957 Blitz Edition, March 31, 2007"
2. The Epigraph: "Then God blessed them, and God said to them, Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it; have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the earth. Genesis 1:28, THE HOLY BIBLE – New King James Version
3. Vintage photograph of loggers: four men, enjoying a respite from their work, pose for the photographer; date of photo unknown but obviously before introduction of power tools. Two men recline on their elbows in an enormous notch large enough to accommodate all of them standing erect, which they have just hacked into a tree of gargantuan proportions. Beside them, standing on springboards driven into the tree’s deep protective bark about eight feet above the ground, two more men pose at ease. Wood chips the size of supper plates slope in a neat pile away from the industrious party. The caption reads:
"Pictured above is a typical scene showing the insolence and posturing theatrics of the loggers in Northern California. Here they pose amid the wanton destruction of the once loving giant Redwood trees." And, "Courtesy Humboldt State University Archives"
4. Vintage photograph – more than two dozen men in mounted formation on palomino horses – half of them posing atop that part of a fallen tree visible to the camera, half of them on the ground posing alongside the fallen giant. The caption reads:
"Groups of armed assassins such as these roamed the area of the Northwest. This photo is unidentified as to whether these men are volunteers or U. S. Army men. In either case, they have already murdered the forest. Now they are shown ready to murder the Indians. Matched uniforms, matched horses, and matched arrogance characterized such groups. Similar forces, both volunteer vigilantes and U.S. Army groups, plundered the north coast region from 1858 to the 1960’s" "Courtesy Humboldt State University Archives"
5. Vintage photograph of an Italianate brick church, its steeple clock showing ten minutes
past two, captioned, "THEN – North east corner California and Grant
Streets - 1899. San Francisco’s oldest landmark is the city’s first cathedral, St. Mary’s, which has stood at California and Grant since 1853…"
6. Vintage photograph of a twin-spired synagogue – captioned, "THEN – Sutter Street
looking west from Stockton - 1900. The minareted towers of the Emanuel
Synagogue were a landmark on the San Francisco skyline for 30 years until the
earthquake…"
7. Author’s remarks: "These photos were used in this hastily prepared little document without the knowledge or permission of the copyright owners, but with the devout belief that they would have approved, had there been time to ask. Ray Cook 3/31/07."
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A week or so after my birth that I fleetingly mentioned in the opening paragraphs above, I was baptized – a Christian – an event that has clung to me all my life like a well sprung bear trap, and caused me no less anguish. A Christian, yes, but not by choice, and when it came time at age twelve to act on my own behalf at Confirmation and confirm the scourge my parents had unintentionally and unwittingly hung on me – I freaked out and never recovered.
I had been baptized a Catholic but unbeknownst to me, my father was a Protestant and always claimed that although he witnessed my baptism it was invalid because he had King’s X (his fingers crossed,) – or something like that, I’m sure. But according to Hoyle’s book of Baptismal Regulations it was legitimate and binding on all of us, and I don’t ever recall my father speaking fondly of Mr. Hoyle.
Somewhere in the opening paragraphs above I mentioned starting first grade in 1935? Yes. At Saint Paul’s Catholic Parochial, where the nuns wore uniforms called habits that were black (not really good syntax – sorry) that were finished or punctuated by a white, fluted and stiffly pressed – I don’t what it is properly called – rather like a lady’s fan, attached at their brow to the black veil covering their head and hair. The children, especially the boys, were fascinated with the doubt whether the nuns actually had hair at all, but I recall clearly as though it were yesterday that whether they were young or not so young, or thin or robust – their every hand seemed to have been hewn from the finest alabaster by Michelangelo himself.
But enough of that. My parochial education ended in May, 1943 during World War II when my family pulled up stakes and moved to California. Having already braved the trauma of joining my father’s Protestant faith and damning myself forever in my mother’s eyes, I left town still believing that the world was cloven down the middle into Catholics and non-Catholics.
I don’t recall the date or the place but I remember waking up one morning still groggy from the discovery that I’m a goy. (Apparently someone else had got hold of the cleaver!)
It must have been about then that I took to drink.
Now, to cut to the chase: I’m watching TV. It’s January 20, 2009. The scene is Washington D.C. Diane Feinstein is introducing the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, who then turns to inaugurate President Elect Barak Obama, who places his hand upon a bible held for him by his wife, Michelle. The President Elect places his had upon the Bible, raises his right hand and solemnly swears to defend the Constitution of the United States, "So help me God!" The synapses in the Westerner lobes of my brain throw sparks all over the room.
The Bible upon which Barak Obama swore his inaugural oath to God was reported as having been the personal Bible of Abraham Lincoln. My own family Bible (which, parenthetically, I gave away last year) was not as old as Lincoln’s - but nearly; my great grandmother first inscribed it in 1886, only twenty-two years after Lincoln’s death. Like Lincoln’s, it is handsomely bound in leather and it is safe to assume they are fairly similar in layout and text. The first page inside the cover of my family Bible is an etching of a cherubic baby boy floating among some weeds in a wicker basket like the kind my mother hung up the wash with, and a dark skinned maiden (as a youngster I was in love with her because one of her breasts is hanging out) is standing furtively among the tall weeds eyeing the baby floating in the basket. The title beneath the etching informed me that this was, "Moses Among the Bulrushes." The next page informs EVERYONE in shrieking red ink that this book is the "Word of God." ! ! (The exclamation points are mine, because my father never let me forget it.)
The image of baby Moses in the Bulrushes commenced blinking in my mind like a filigreed casino marquee and I’m wondering, what the hell does Moses have to do with our President’s inauguration? After all, isn’t the Bible more or less a history of tribes of people who wandered around the Middle East thousands of years ago, their adventures, and misadventures? Would it not have been more fitting if Obama had placed his hand upon a dream catcher or perhaps some history concerning Geronimo, or Sitting Bull, or Cochise, or Crazy Horse, or Red Cloud, or Tecumseh, even Buffalo Bill, or SOME icon representing the ground upon which he stood?
Recall please, on page 3 above, the parenthetical mention that last year I had given away my family bible? I gave it to the congregation of a small town Protestant Church in the state of Oregon where before World War One my father’s father was the resident Protestant pastor. His mother, my great grandmother, the one mentioned a few paragraphs above as having inscribed it, died in this small Oregon town in 1916 and is buried there across the road from the Nez Perce Homeland Project, right smack in the middle of the heartland from which the Nez Perce were brutally driven in the Nez Perce war of 1877, an historical event most conscientious readers would by this time already understand. My great grandmother shares the primal dust with the Nez Perce, and sensitive readers should now begin to understand my ill concealed antipathy to the bible having been the vehicle which validates the solemn word of President Barak Obama.
I believe that when Barak Obama placed his hand upon the Bible at his inauguration, he in fact as well as in metaphor not only explained to the world America’s doctrine of Manifest Destiny, he reaffirmed America’s commitment to it.
Ergo, my reaffirmation of "California History through My Two Blue Eyes."
Ray Cook
Mill Valley, California
December 31, 2011
