| Submitted by: Mark R. LeeperUnited States |
| Submission Date: 15 February 2005 |
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Come back in two years and ask the people about the bill and they are really smug that the proposition has worked so well in their state and other states have been too stupid to pass similar bills.
In Arizona the current proposition is trying to ban particularly vicious animal traps. Common sense says yes, so those who want to use those traps have rolled out 'the campaign.' The American way of life depends on steel-jaw leg-hold traps.
Our next stop was the Casa Grande National Monument. This was the first protected United States national site. It is a Hohokam building 35 feet tall and estimated to weigh 3000 tons. The Hohokam migrated north from Mexico back around 300 B.C., before the border was so heavily guarded. Within about a thousand years they'd occupied large sections of what is now Arizona. They were engineers to rival the Egyptians. They built the biggest prehistoric canal system anywhere. They introduced barley and cotton to this area. They used the lost wax process for making jewelry. Of course, the Europeans would use the same process when they thought of it. It just took the Europeans a few more centuries to think of it.
Some time around 1250 the Hohokam started to disappear and by 1400 they were gone entirely.
While they were around, they had canals twenty feet deep and eighty feet wide and would have a town just about every three miles on the canals. One of those towns was built around Casa Grande. It is four stories of mud and caliche, with ladders to get from floor to floor. Holes in the walls seem to be measuring periods of eighteen and a half years through their view of the sky. There is a ball court where they would play games with a rubber ball. Also there are several other buildings whose purpose is not currently known.
We continued on the road to Phoenix. Our first stop was the Heard Museum. This is an art museum but it is almost exclusively an Indian art museum. You see baskets, jewelry, and pottery. There is a hogan to enter and a huge collection of kachina dolls. There was a guided tour almost as soon as we arrived, and we took it. It was clear that the woman running the tour respected Native American customs, and may even have performed many of the rituals. What was unclear was whether she understood them herself; if so, neither she nor the museum explained them well. Many of her descriptions included unexplained terms. When the tour was over, we were invited to see local Indians do tribal dances.
There were two things very wrong with this presentation. The first is that, like many things in the museum, the dance was underexplained. Its significance was not explained, nor its syntax. More on that later. We arrived after a second announcement of the dancers, fifteen minutes after they supposedly had started. Even then, it took then about ten minutes more. The music was made by two boys and two men. The two boys had instruments called rasps; one of the men had a water drum--sort of a bowl inverted over a tub of water. One of the boys on the rasp wore a surfing T-shirt. This seemed inappropriate. A man came dancing in with a deer head tied to the top of head. For about five minutes he shuffled around the floor, presumably imitating a deer in the manner of Indian dance. By this point some of the audience starting tiring and leaving. Then the dance had to stop because the deer head was not properly tied. For five minutes the water drum man was trying to tie the deer head back onto the dancer. By this point about half or twothirds of the audience had walked out. Evelyn and I decided to leave also. As we were leaving I could see the tour guide from earlier giving a dirty look to people who were leaving.
This was certainly a case where there was plenty of blame to go around:
The audience was being rude. No doubt about it.
The Indians were not taking the ceremony seriously. They were not prepared. If this really was a ceremony they had performed many times, why didn't they know how much in advance to set up? Why didn't they know how to tie the deer head on securely? Does it show proper respect to have one of the boys in a funny T-shirt?
The museum is the real culprit here. I have invited nonJews to see only one Jewish ceremony, the Seder. The reason I picked that one is because the ceremony itself is selfexplaining. ('These bitter herbs we eat, what is the purpose of them? It is because Pharaoh made our lives bitter in Egypt.') Performing the ceremony is explaining it. And a full explanation would have been the difference between a meaningful cultural experience and a whole audience watching a man shuffle and grunt with a deer head tied to his head. I am not prepared to accept the logic that something is good just because it is Indian. These people who run the Heard Museum remind me of the people in the movie SERIAL who seem to have adopted Indian ceremonies because it is politically correct and the flavor-of-the-month.
Other features of the museum are a half-hour slide show in which they introduce you to the area, their ceremonies, and their social problems (one woman's mother didn't like it when the woman wanted to marry outside the tribe). There is a fifteen-minute video called 'Myth of Changing Woman' about a ceremony roughly equivalent to a bas mitzvah. There is a hands-on section for children that has something to do with recognizing where an Indian design decomposed into C-shaped figures and U-shaped figures. I thought it didn't teach very much about Indian culture. The Heard Museum could have served the local Indian population better. There was also a temporary exhibit about the art of Maori New Zealand.
That done, we got our motel for the night and a little family business. We visited my sister-in-law and my niece and nephew. We went to a Moroccan restaurant called The Moroccan restaurant. The appetizers were very good, but the main course was indifferent. The belly dancer was very good, as good as any we'd seen in Egypt. But her style is one no longer tolerated in Islamic countries, particularly those where the fundamentalists are in control.
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Sunday morning in the Phoenix area. There was a waffle house right near our motel, but we decided to look around for another place to eat. We were on a busy road; it should have been easy. Just no breakfast places showed up. Half an hour later we gave up and went back to the waffle house. It was pretty mediocre. Our first stop was the Champlin Fighter Museum. This is a museum dedicated to the fighter plane ever since its inception World War I. This is the home of the American Fighter Aces Association, according to the AAA book.
Actually the active ingredient is two large hangars of fighter aircraft. They must have on the order of eighty fighter aircraft. They have American, French, German, and Italian fighter planes. They have SPADs and Fokkers and Sopwith Camels. They have Messerschmitts and Spitfires and Mustangs and a bunch more. They also have a Soviet tank they must have gotten cheaply. Not all of the planes are for real--some are reproductions, but if your thing is seeing how aircraft have evolved, that's okay. There is a room devoted to machine guns also, some for fighter planes and some not. And there are cases displaying hand arms. Most peculiar was a German machine gun with a curved barrel for shooting around corners. General Dynamics and General Electric--both arms manufacturers--have provided half-hour videos on the history of fighter aircraft.
I don't remember if there are similar museums at WrightPatterson in Dayton, Ohio, or at the Air and Space Museum in Washington. There is a similar museum outside London at Croydon (that is an RAF museum, I think). There is also a Battle of Britain museum a few yards from the RAF museum, and a similar museum in Brussels. But I admit I am like a kid when it comes to airplanes. I love 'em.
Out next stop was the center of Phoenix. We'd been to Phoenix for the World Science Fiction Convention in 1978, but had heard that the Civic Center Plaza was completely changed over since then and that it was covered in order to avoid the heavily beating sun. That was apparently the plan at one point, but it never happened. The Civic Center Plaza hasn't really changed much in fourteen years. One thing that is new is the Arizona Museum of Science and Technology. This is a museum right off the Civic Center Plaza. My first impression was that it seemed to be a particularly good science museum. Any such exhibition is usually made up of two kinds of displays. There are the dull and the swamped. It is a problem particularly if there are a lot of kids in competition with you since 1962 when they stopped teaching the etiquette of lines of queues. I guess I grew up believing in the principle of seniority in queues. We called that FIFO, or first-in-first-out. Today the rule is MAFS, which stands for most-aggressive-first-served. Anyway, here they have cut the size of the museum by cutting out a lot of the dull exhibits. Most of the exhibits are the kind that would be swamped, like computer quizzes, automatic blood pressure measurements, automatic stress measurements, and a stand-inside box of mirrors. A huge gravity well lets kids drop coins in and lets them orbit around a funnel until they finally fall. Then there is a place where the visitor can build a catenary out of blocks and stand it up. Then there are the two whisper horns. The science center is really very tiny but it has its share of interesting exhibits.
We passed up an opportunity to see Arizona's other major science exhibit, Biosphere II. You may have read about it. It is an entirely self-sufficient community. It gets nothing from the outside world but sunlight. It gives nothing to the outside world. In order to survive the people inside have a very sparse diet, but it is sufficient. When you live there you live in a world of your own, divorced from the outside world.
If this works out they will set up Biosphere III. It will be exactly the same but on Christmas and Easter drunks will come to try to burn the place down and rape the women. Then it will be a perfect replica of the Jewish village in Ukraine where my greatgrandfather lived.
After the museum we stopped for an ice cream cone, then continued with the final museum of the day, the Pueblo Grande Museum. It is a preserved archaeological site in the middle of Phoenix. There is a mound with the remains. There are the remains of a wall and a small village. This site was originally thought to be a temple because it wasn't completely understood. This is just one of many Hohokam dwellings near their canal eighty feet wide and twenty feet deep.
The Pima Indians came to this area about 1450 and replaced the Hohokam. Pima legend says they were led from the east by 'Elder Brother.' No one is sure who Elder Brother was, but I suspect the Pima made each other paranoid by saying, 'Elder Brother is watching you.'
There is also a small museum at Pueblo Grande. More artifacts, and there is a nice children's exhibit.
Then back to the motel. Dinner was at a local Thai restaurant, the Siamese Cat. Very good.
October 19, 1992: Breakfast at a local restaurant called JB's. Good muffins.
The first part of today was uneventful. We took Route I-17 north. Gradually we began to see less desert and more trees. We left the main highway to visit Prescott, home of the Smokis. Smokis are a society of whites like the freemasons, but they have adopted Indian ceremonials. They have a museum of Indian artifacts which was supposed to be open but wasn't. Instead we went into the center of town and walked around.
Evelyn saw a Bead Museum. It was actually a come-on to an ornament store, but it had a large room that was exhibits of beadwork and ornaments from all over the world. |
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| Copyright © - "Mark R. Leeper" |
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