The tentative plan for this weekend is to depart the Red River Valley in east-central North Dakota, maneuver up to the northeastern part of the state, and then work my way back down to Bismarck, taking a small detour by the abandoned Stanley R. Mickelsen Safeguard complex (SRMS complex) just outside of Nekoma, North Dakota. This complex was initially or eventually tied in with some super bunker located — as the reality and lore goes — somewhere deep in the granite mountains that are the Colorado Rockies. In any case, since 2007 I have referred to the SRMS complex in North Dakota as The Nixon Bunker.

A Google Earth image of the pyramid Stanley Mickelson complex (at left) and wind turbines and shadows (at right).

At some point between 2002 and 2005 (I have to check dates — I know at least it was between 2002 and 2008), I was assigned to a crew that conducted linear pedestrian archaeological surface investigations (aka, walking mile after mile in a straight line while looking at the ground), and these surveys fell within visual orbit of the SRMS complex. Perhaps paradoxically, or ironically — or neither or both — in the first decade of the 21st century while walking in a linear survey corridor I found myself surveying and thinking the following: while Green Energy wind turbines were on the proposed construction docket, all of this would be installed right near a former vestige or reflection of potentially imminent nuclear holocaust. Today in 2012 the SRMS complex appears as though it belongs in some kind of zombie flick. There is a thought as well that in 15,000 years, when anthropologists and archaeologists from a completely different culture come across this pyramid, they will infer that it was built for religious reasons. No doubt, conspiracy theorists will by then have asserted that aliens were ultimately responsible for it, and the Pink Floyd equivalent will hold a rock concert (or whatever they will call it in 15,000 years) at the pyramid base, complete with light show and sand (since climate change will have turned this part of North Dakota into a Hudson’s Bay beach by this point).

Classic "Spies Like Us" (1985 or thereabouts) poster.

Pontification is fun that way. Back to reality: the steady winds in the central part of North America are as good a place as any to install wind turbines and nuke bunkers. This particular location has been a point of interest for that reason: on the one hand, it was isolated from major population centers and provided a fairly direct route over the North Pole to the now former USSR (which is why B-52 bomber wings were respectively attached to the Minot and Grand Forks air force bases); and on the other hand this local is a highway for the wind tunnel that rips where ever it wants through the northern Great Plains (or North American Steppe in general).

Scholarship on all of this continues. In one protracted study, Dr. David Mills recognized the monetary benefits of this installation, at least as it pertained to the immediate area. In other national contexts, several Hollywood films incorporated this late-1960s Soviet ICBM interception system into fictional screen plays. Perhaps one of the most notable (at least in my formative adolescent years in the 1980s) was the Cold War Comedy, “Spies Like Us” (1985), which made the otherwise understandable paranoid social psyche of the world manageable by couching potential nuclear armageddon in humor and ridiculousness — thank you Chevy Chase and Dan Aykroyd, true Cold War patriots.

Anyhow, future updates and photos from this reconnaissance are pending.

Recently the contemporary Herodotus of the Northern Plains and the contemporary Herodotus of the Eastern Med took to investigating a list of cultural and social grievances that came out of the oil fields of central and western North Dakota. Drawing from this, I couldn’t help but thinking how both North Dakota State University’s Tom Isern and University of North Dakota’s William Caraher carry on a scholarly tradition that seeks to extract a variety of meaning from one particular data set.

In the late-19th century Andrew Lang said “Tales, at first, told of ‘Somebody,’ get new names attached to them, and obtain a new local habitation, wherever they wander.” In “On Fairy-Stories,” John Ronald Reuel Tolkein remarked how truth is reflected in fiction, if not an external reality than most certainly a psychological one. Other writers and scholars come to mind, including Jonathan Swift and his Gulliver’s Travels, or Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein. The former Swift brought the reader into a new world through otherwise fictional accounts (much in the way the Rennaissance Physician François Rabelais did with his Gargantua and Pantagruel), and through this fiction readers could begin to empathize with a number of individuals and scenarios that they normally would not encounter in their day-to-day lives. In the latter case of Shelley, the mid-19th century conflict between the possibilities and real or perceived horrors of science and humanity manifested themselves in the monster created and brought together by Dr. Frankenstein — perhaps the monster is a prologue description of the modern day corporation, a cobbling together of different human parts that is brought to life through the science of electricity and rationality, and a monster/corporation that acts predictably in some ways, but starts doing strange things in many other ways. Or perhaps it’s a story about how local villagers cannot accept change and modernity, mistakenly thinking that things have been one way and one way only, and by golly they are going to stay that way if I have anything to say about it.

The point how all of this relates to circulated e-lists from North Dakota’s oil field is made, though. Fiction, or what is perceived as fiction, is a powerful window into reality. The rumors circulating in North Dakota’s Bakken oil field say just as much about the oil field as they do about the individuals who 1) composed the list(s); 2) of individuals who find components of the list agreeable or disagreeable; and 3) of individuals who circulate and forward the list (and individuals who blog the list on-line). We all carry cultural baggage — aka, value judgments — where ever we go, and this cultural baggage is what makes us human. This is why it is so necessary to have Iserns, Carahers and others of the world examine that evidence. They do so for a variety of reasons, and not necessarily to demonstrate who is Right and who is Wrong. Rather, it is to see just what kind of information can be extracted and squeezed from a particular data set, in this case a purported list that purportedly purports to describe the purported happenings taking place in the North Dakota oil field.

Federal politicians have lately adhered to the Loyal Opposition maxim when it comes to yelling-matches surrounding the Keystone Pipeline — the phrase “talking past one another” comes to mind. If a person thinks they are going to do some research and get the real and honest truth, they are put up against listening to the republicans, then going and listening to the democrats, and then returning and listening to the republicans, and then listening to ecologists, and then democrats, and then oil tycoons, and then entrepreneurs, and then republicans, and then capitalists who don’t know they are Max Weberists instead of Adam Smithists, and then more of republicans who sound like Marxists rather than — oh, hell, nevermind…

You’ll notice that an understandable concern in proposing this new pipeline is environmental, and the legislation responsible for elevating these environmental concerns are a byproduct of the EPA agency started by Richard Nixon. Lacking from much of the discussion, though, are cultural sites that may be disturbed and may currently be in the pipeline way. And cultural sites means anything current or past that had to do with Homo sapiens, or also what in the business we call “us.”

An Autumn 2009 photo of a section of the Keystone pipeline in eastern South Dakota.

Between 2005 and 2009, I gladly (value-judgment alert!) worked on various survey and reporting components of the TransCanada Pipeline in the eastern Dakotas. The pipeline portion I worked on concerned the segment stretching from north of Walhalla (North Dakota) down to Yankton (South Dakota). While surveying the proposed pipeline route, our on-the-ground crew was often happy to report to the above-ground planners (the engineers in an office somewhere in non-Dakota) that they needed to re-route the pipeline in several areas. In some cases the proposed pipeline ran right through individual homes; in other cases the proposed pipeline ran right through sacred Native and non-Native American sites. The whole idea behind our historical, anthropological, archaeological, and architectural historical work was simply to get on the ground data by physically walking the landscape and the proposed route. Through this we could locate and identify culturally rich and sensitive sites and areas that the proposed pipeline touched. In the sense of the long historical duration, we did this because Theodore Roosevelt originally recognized the importance of it all at the beginning of the 20th century  (see the American Antiquities Act of 1906): in short if we, as Americans, want more than a throw-away culture, then we need to understand and recognize the richness of our cultural past.

Some highlights of recognizing that past during the eastern Dakotas segment of the pipeline were:

1) With local tribal liaisons, we were able to identify sacred areas and ensure the pipeline was either re-routed; or ensure that these areas received proper documentation and mitigation. By sacred areas, I mean that we ensured the pipeline was not run through a Native American site that was no more or less religiously important as a proposed pipeline route that went, for example, underneath the Vatican, or your local church, synagogue, mosque or sanctuary.

2) Through oral histories, we ensured the pipeline avoided Euro-American burials. Two specific cases that come to mind: 2a) an old-timer walked out and told us where his still-born brother was buried approximately 80+ years ago, and through this the pipeline was rerouted; and 2b) another interview with a woman who identified a rural, countryside grave. This grave was not in a formal cemetery, but rather on a section line. Had we not chatted with this lady, the rock pile that marked the grave would almost have certainly been mistaken for a standard rock pile that farmers often create to keep the stones out of the fields and away from wrecking their implements.

3) We monitored the pipeline during actual construction, too. If there were cultural remains present, then we would figure out where they came from.

Below are some short clips taken during the September 2009 construction component of the pipeline that now runs north-south through the eastern Dakotas.

One angle of a 450D LC working its way across a creek.

The pipeline needs to be set below ground surface, and in some cases Sioux quartzite needs to be busted through…

The crane lowered a weighted vibrator down on to the metal walls, working it into place to create a trench for the pipeline. In other cases a large jack-hammer was brought in to break up the pink Proterozoic quartzite (aka, the Sioux quartzite, or the stuff numerous National Register of Historic Places buildings are constructed with in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, among others).

There is no doubt that a Keystone Pipeline creates jobs (then again, pistol-whipping someone also creates jobs, but nevermind), and that a future Keystone Pipeline will create more jobs. I am interested in getting a pipeline approved, but doing so is a fairly complex process. When this process invariably gets politicized, there is really nothing anyone can do until the Federal, State and local politicians all calm down, and until the major news sources also calm down as well. Remember: journalists move news when individuals say insane things, and a cynic might say there is reason for news sources to take politicians out of context in order to move and sell said news. It’s a good thing I am not a cynic. I am realistic enough to know the pipeline will eventually get approved, but probably not until the next presidential election is over.

A generalized comment that comes from above the Bakken formation (at ground level) often goes something like, “Our entire way of life is changing out here in western North Dakota.” While those of us not above the Bakken are indeed concerned about this, we often do not understand the specifics of what exactly is changing. The following list came from a discussion that took place with the North Dakota Sheriff’s & Deputies Association in Bismarck, and they itemized many of those specifics. It is the good, the bad, the realistic, and the not so good looking. My comments and interpretations are [imbedded in brackets] like these. Props to our civil servants that are the sheriffs and deputies.

1. Currently there are a total of 84 companies involved in the oil industry in western ND.

2. It takes between 2000 and 2200 semi loads of water per well. Currently there are 258 wells in progress with so many scheduled it is hard to determine the exact amount.

3. Traffic accidents, especially fatal traffic accidents are of very high concern. At one location on Highway 85 south of Williston, a traffic count was conducted in October of 2011. In one 24 hour period of time there were 29,000 vehicles through the intersection looked at with 60% of the traffic being semis.

4. Traffic is typically backed up for ½ to ¾ of a mile. One of the guys stated that one day last week he sat at an intersection on Highway 85 for about 30 minutes to get a big enough opening to cross over.

5. They have closed the weigh scale house because it was causing such a traffic jam that it was closing the roadway.

6. Rent in Williston currently is: $ 2000 for a one bedroom to $ 3400 for a three bedroom.

7. They have no more hook ups for campers any where in the area.

8. Williams County allows three campers per farmstead; the farmers almost all have three campers on their property and are charging $ 800 per camper per month for rent.

9. Wal Mart in Williston no longer stocks shelves. They bring out pallets of merchandise at night, and set it in the isles. People then take what they want off the pallets.

10. On 1-1-12, the Williston Wal Mart had 148 campers overnight in their parking lot.

11. Willams County wrecked a pickup and ended up bringing it to Bismarck for repairs because there no available body shops to do the work. Williams County has purchased a trailer and has started to bring vehicles to the Bismarck area for repairs. Willaims County took a pickup in for ball joints and front brakes — the shop charged them $ 2800 for the repairs.

12. Williston and Williams County now produces more taxable sales than any other area in ND [including Cass County, which is huge].

13. The Williams County jail has increased booking by 150%. With a 100% increase in inmate population. Bonds of $ 5k to $ 10 K are typically paid with cash out of pocket. The Williams County Sheriff stated that a couple of weeks ago he received a $ 63,000 bond in cash carried into the jail in a plastic Wal Mart bag.

14. Williams County Sheriff’s Department has more than doubled in staff over the last two years. They are now buying trailer houses that come up for sale to rent to newly hired deputies.

15. Williams County new starting salary with the academy is $ 46,000 plus 100% of all benefits paid.

16. They are in a continuous hiring cycle and they have no set budget at this time. The Sheriff has been told to manage his office to the best of his abilities and keep the Commission updated, but do not worry about the budget.

17. The Williston McDonalds just announced that they will pay $ 15 an hour, a $ 500 immediate sign on bonus and a single medical plan paid for.

18. The restaurants are full and with limited staff to work in them. They usually just have the drive through open. The restaurants that have inside seating are now an hour wait at all times.

19. Law Enforcement in the Williams County area cannot provide training to staff due to time constraints and no location to hold training.

20. The local Motel 6 in Williston now rents rooms fro $ 129.95 per night.

21. Law Enforcement no longer does any proactive work (school programs, community services, house checks) they do very little traffic related issues as well. They just go from call to call. Bar fights are one of the biggest issues.

22. Other law enforcement issues include the strip clubs. The local clubs have now started what is called “babe buses”. These buses go out to areas and pick up people and bus them back and forth to the strip clubs. The buses have poles on them as well as live entertainment.

23. Drug problems are immense, and they are seeing narcotics that they have never seen in the area before, like black tar heroin [black tar heroin may appear in the historical record].

24. The civil process section of the Sheriff’s Department use to average 1800 papers a year. They are now doing 4500 processes a year.

25. Law Enforcement said that they make as many Driving under the influence arrest at 10 Am as they do at midnight.

26. Illegal aliens have become a huge problem, especially getting the proper authorities to remove them from the Country.

27. The current thought from the oil companies is that the area will continue to grow as it has over the past two years for the next five years and stay for ten years. At the end of the ten years they feel the communities will drop in population somewhat.

28. The current thought is that the oil companies will be drilling wells on every 1280 acres of leased land. This way they have tied up the land and do not have to release the property.

29. The Williston General Motors dealership has now become the number 1 seller of Corvettes in the upper Midwest.

30. The bigger oil companies are doing very well in hiring good people. They run checks and make sure the people they hire are drug free; it is the smaller companies that are having trouble-hiring people that will look the other way on hiring issues [it is difficult for start-up businesses to get a foot-hold in the face of competition of the huge companies].

31. They said they do not know anybody anymore. The Sheriff of Williams County used to be able to go to Wal Mart and not walk very far without knowing somebody. Now he does not know any of the people in there.

32. Many of the local citizens are taking retirement and moving out of the area.

33. They have an extreme amount of alcohol abuse going on. They have more calls than ever of drunk people trying to get into houses, to find out they are at the wrong place.

34. Minot population has grown by a projected 9000 people since the completion of the census. Minot is expecting to reach a population of 75,000 in the nest five years.

35. Trinity Hospital in Minot has just hired 115 nurses from the Philippians to work at the hospital, as they cannot get enough local nurses to apply.

On January 14, 2012 (a Saturday) the Bismarck-based band The Midnight Noise Orchestra (TMNO can be heard here) rolled over on the I-94 to Fargo to oblige a recording with Prairie Public studios. I couldn’t help but thinking of a lot of the recording freedoms technology affords us nowadays through devices that are sensibly priced and that pretty much ensure anyone in any basement or professional studio can capture quality audio and video. It also reminded me of one of my many favorite R.G. Collingwood passages, this one coming from his 1930s work, The Principles of Art (1938). My remarks [are embedded within brackets] like these. Collingwood:

A January 14, 2012 photo of The Midnight Noise Orchestra. The photo was orchestrated about four hours and forty five minutes before midnight in downtown Fargo, North Dakota.

…The printing-press [stay with me here] separates the writer from his audience and fosters cross-purposes between them. The organization of the literary profession and the ‘technique’ of good writing, as that is understood among ourselves, consist to a great extent of methods for mitigating this evil; but the evil is only mitigated and not removed. It is intensified by every new mechanization of art. [italics are mine] The reason why gramophone music [a cutting edge technology in the 1930s much as Web 2.0 and 3.0 is cutting edge in 2012] is so unsatisfactory to any one accustomed to real music is not because the mechanical reproduction of the sounds is bad — that could be easily compensated by the hearer’s imagination — but because the performers and the audience are out of [direct] touch. The audience is not collaborating, it is only overhearing. The same thing happens in the cinema, where collaboration as between author and producer is intense, but as between this unit and the audience non-existent. Performances on the wireless have the same defect. The consequence is that the gramaphone, the cinema, and the wireless are perfectly serviceable as vehicles of amusement or of propaganda, for here the audience’s function is merely receptive and not concreative; but as vehicles of art they are subject to all the defects of the printing-press in an aggravated form. ‘Why’, one hears it asked, ‘should not the modern popular entertainment of cinema, like the Renaissance popular entertainment of the theatre, produce a new form of great art?’ The answer is simple. In the Renaissance theatre collaboration between author and actors on the one hand, and the audience on the other, was a lively reality. In the cinema it is impossible. (Collingwood, 1938:323)

So essentially what Collingwood is saying is that it’s okay to watch TMNO on television, but it’s way better to see them live and in-person because stage actor and audience watchers actively participate in this artistic process and expression. In other words, nothing can replace live music. This as opposed to watching TMNO on television which, as television watching goes, often induces a trance-like coma in the viewer. In this vein Clay Shirky has written and talked and lectured at length on how much energy humanity expended on television watching, also noting the dangers of a society and civilization that knows Hollywood television characters better than they know the next door neighbor (I suppose there is also a danger or sadness in blogging instead of having conversations with the person in the next room). Anyhow, go see TMNO, or ask the person in the next room or text that friend just down the way to see if they want to go get a cup of coffee, real time.

Update: As YouTube continues providing the world with democratized conduit, this an ability to upload localized events and stream them to anyone with an internet connection (Totalitarian Governments are working on ways to curb this), below are some embedded videos that may or may not make or reflect or counter the Collingwood and Shirky point(s) above.

This was filmed at the Belle Mehus in downtown Bismarck, North Dakota.

This video was captured in one of TMNO’s top secret basement recording studios in Burleigh County, North Dakota. The opening remarks have a kind of Motörhead feel to them.

In an intentional or inadvertent EduPunk vein, on December 31, 2011 Mike Frohlich gave a personal tour of his refined craft beer brewing operation to Nick Steffens and myself. Without going into too many details (stuff about barley or hops from New Zealand, words like sparging and IBUs and EBUs, and so on), embedded is a short audio-video description Frohlich gave of his craft brewing operation.  In addition to this are a couple still photos. One photo is sure to include some great craft brew and a skull ring (note: Christopher Bjorke formerly of the Bismarck Tribune but now with Mike Jacobs and Company — or formerly Mike Jacobs and Company — in Grand Forks wrote a great piece when with said Bismarck Tribune on Frohlich’s operation here).

A nice glass of Frohlich's craft brew, skull ring and all.

Another photo shows one of Frohlich’s several home brewing systems, this one indoors.

Craft Brewing Indoors

And a final shot of his large vat that will eventually contribute to the rise of a brewery somewhere in Bismarck, North Dakota. One of the great things about getting a personal tour of Frohlich’s craft brewing operation is that our glasses of beer were never allowed to get half-empty without Mike asking if we were doing all right.

Frohlich's Contribution to Craft Brewing in Bismarck, North Dakota

For any nation or empire to have a gold standard invariably means the nation or empire has a monetary system based off the widespread multi-cultural perception that gold has, in fact, intrinsic value. In The Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers, and the Rush to Colorado, Elliot West notes how the two long-standing majority religions of Buddhism and Christianity revered gold, since it was “heavenly light and an earthly reminder of a call to spiritual perfection.” (West, 1998: 97) In the Americas, the Aztecs also appropriated gold for religious ceremony, religious leaders and therefore authors calling it teocuitatl, or “excrement of the sun.” (West, 1998: 97). A multicultural groundwork that rallied around the common obsession with a non-utilitarian metal had been laid, and too many people fighting for the same resources eventually entered into protracted odds with one another. What continued as a post-1492 Western European search for and acquisition of gold in the New World is why the nineteenth-century proved so formidable for the shaping of the Great Plains. In this regard West redirects historiography to examine the area that individuals passed over in order to acquire the resource that cultures, religions, nations and empires compelled their subjects to seek.

Impure and unnatural behavior ensured that the pure and natural metal of gold would be acquired. In the dialectic that West establishes, he says “Two peoples cannot pull on the same limited energy for contrary uses, just as the same dollar cannot be legally spent at the same time for both bread and cheese.” (West, 1998: xxiv) By the mid nineteenth-century, the young American nation attempted to battle its way onto a scene of international prominence.

Cheyenne Migration to the Great Plains from 1680 to 1830s

Domestically the Civil War threatened to divide the Union, and any peoples not on board with the dominant cultural standard would be sacrificed on its alter — never-mind that the dominant cultural standard depended on who ascended to political office and exerted the most tactful, audible and protracted verbiage. In West’s book, the Cheyenne Indians among others were sacrificed on that alter.

With gun and horse, and open grasslands, cultures living on this area were transformed the deepest, whether in Spain, the Mongolian steppe, or the Great Plains of North America. By 1848, the American military established the outpost of Fort Kearny on the Platte near Grand Island. Fort Atkinson also rose out of the plains (built of sod and nicknamed Fort Sodom), and by 1853 Fort Riley was established. These forts remained meaningless until the confluence of long-term geology and short-term cultural inertia crossed paths. Since the Great Plains are the eastern watershed of the Rockies, it is natural that traces of gold within the mountains would eventually be washed down through the rivers and catch the human eye. On August 26, 1858, the Kansas City Journal of Commerce (West, 1998:107) reported the following:

THE NEW ELDORADO!!!

GOLD IN KANSAS TERRITORY!!

THE PIKE’S MINES!

FIRST ARRIVAL OF GOLD DUST AT KANSAS CITY!!!

Routes Gold-seekers/-Fanatics Took to Denver in the 19th Century

A dominant technology of the time — printing presses — helped make this information viral, thus democratizing the idea that anyone and everyone could strike it rich on the Great Plains. This cultural desire for gold eventually required a military presence, and a more standardized ideological program that brought “white” against “red”. Colonial John M. Chivington secured the title as one of the most effective Total Warriors in the history of the American West, discriminately ensuring that no Indian child, woman or man was beyond the sights and slaughter of his Colorado volunteer’s sabre blade or rifle. Chivington was so effective that he even offended Washington, D.C. politicians, enough so that he had to quickly resign from his military command to evade a proper military tribunal — perhaps this is a historical anecdote that CEOs of Blackwater Academy may want to study (West, 1998:306).

This study by West easily demonstrates how the American nation attempted to shape the Great Plains in its image from the 1830s to the 1860s. This played out for ideological, individual, national, religious and cultural reasons. As West says, when “energy is captured and set to a purpose, it becomes power.” (West, 1998:xxi). Taking this to another logical extension, setting that power to a purpose is the substance of politics. The extension of this politic is reflected in the realities of military campaigns that, in the case of the Great Plains, contributed to the eradication and displacement of indigenous populations. As is the case with history, though, the conquerors “who celebrated the final crushing of a rival vision were already suffering from the hubris of their own.” (West, 1998:337). This is summarized in the phrase of, “You break it, you buy it.” Ownership is difficult that way, often an inconvenient fact when swooning romance compels a culture to fallaciously pursue the idea of spiritual perfection and material benefit at any human cost, especially in mineral form.

Because articles concerning collective memory and — the more incriminating term — memory conformity make any holiday season brighter, a usual colleague (or suspect) forwarded Jonah Lehrer’s “How Friends Ruin Memory: The Social Conformity Effect” my way, this piece published in the October 18, 2011 issue of Wired.com. Within this article link is a sub-link to the more interesting piece by Micah Edelson, et al., “Following the Crowd: Brain Substrates of Long-Term Memory Conformity” Science 333, 108 (2011). Without getting too far into either piece, the language used in the titles of both articles demonstrate a type of “ah-ha!” response that often comes from — ahem — really clever scientists when they confront neuroscience, which in turn is a fancy way to say how us humans continuously and incessantly attempt to compartmentalize and chart the infinite mysteries that are the even more infinite causes and effects of the bio-chemical processes inherent to the human brain.

Essentially the two articles do what is necessary in any discipline, and that is create an argument using that old Aristotilean device of rhetoric. This device of rhetoric, in turn, is necessary to advance ideas into the forum for discussion and debate. Perhaps the most annoying two items of rhetoric in the article comes in the form of 1) scientific assertions as being irrefutable; and 2) some individual bringing the idea that human memory alters how it remembers events over time to readers as an “ah-ha!” This latter item strongly suggests that if someone changes their mind about something over time, they are a bullshitter, a topic that Harry Frankfurt said was one of the most salient features of our culture. Without hypothesizing too far (which usually is a phrase that suggests “too late!”), I wondered if the younger Lehrer didn’t appropriate this idea and language from the elder Frankfurt, who is professor emeritus at Princeton. Is Lehrer conforming to Frankfurt? I’m uncertain.

Anyhow, note how the first item — that science is irrefutable — provides a foundation for the second item to rest upon — if people change their minds, they are bullshitters. Yet also note how the article lacks an intelligent and protracted discussion on how the inaccuracies of our brain are largely contingent on how new evidence and better ways of explaining historical events continuously surface over time. And also note how since society is an organism, it evolves just as much as its interpretation of events evolves — thus, if society’s interpretation of events do not evolve, that society is indeed as stagnant as its memory. A conversation about how new evidence and better ways of explaining scientific events are also lacking from the articles, but it is unnecessary to hammer away too much at the clever Lehrer on this point. His article really speaks for itself.

Also note the idea of language appropriation, or how the lot of us don’t really know how to articulate an event until authors, poets and laureates help us out with it. It is even better if a great author, great poet, or great laureate is on the scene. Since authors, poets and laureates use the technology of language, they can advance human understanding with that more precise vocabulary (since they were trained with languages and vocabularies as well). Calling it bullshit may get a dialog going, and it may also be calling out purveyors of platitudes and clichés, but it may also be one of the most ineffective, condescending and barbarous ways to get a conversation started. Which is another conversation in itself.

Kinship bonds run wide and deep in numerous cultures. In a global context, some maternal kinship bonds ensured that any child born was taken into the fold of the culture. East Asia also has its fair share of strong kinship bonds that have geneological attachments to the landscape (this is why Chinese would send the corpses of the deceased back to be buried in the village of origin).

Maintaining these kinship bonds is important if a particular ethnic or cultural group is surrounded by aggressors who want revenge for previous injustices. This is one of the origins of blood feuds, whereby Individual A finds out that Individual B’s great-great-great grandfather peed on Individual A’s great-great-great grandfather’s yard way back in the day. The blood feud results from Individual A taking up arms against Individual B — that A or B could not control or understood the momentary or long-term historical context(s) as to why their founding fathers commenced peeing on the other’s yard in the first place is largely irrelevant in a blood feud. Or, if it is relevant, the historical interpretation agrees with the actions of the individual in the present.

One way blood feuds have been resolved is through Danegeld, but even this is a form of bribery and extortion — it wasn’t as though the Vikings, after receiving Danegeld, would use the wealth they took to build local infrastructure and public works projects. Rudyard Kipling had some lucid thoughts on this.

Kinship bonds are also important if an ethnic or cultural group is surrounded by a dominant culture that inadvertently or discretely or legally or militarily or politically (or all of the above) seeks to wipe it out, as in the case with many Native American cultures. All of this rattled through my brain in one way or another after reading a December 20, 2011 piece in the New York Times by David Treuer entitled, “How Do You Prove You’re an Indian?” (For the record, Richard Rothaus — his blog found here — forwarded this article to me.)

Without rehashing what Treuer said, here, perhaps, is the understandable thrust of his argument. In his article, Treuer says:

…Things were different once. All tribes had their own ways of figuring out who was a member — usually based on language, residence and culture. In the case of the Ojibwe, it was a matter of choosing a side. Especially when we were at war in the early 19th century, with the Dakota — our neighbors (many of whom were our blood relatives) — who you were was largely a matter of whom you killed.

Treuer reflects the adage that we do not know who we are until we find out who we are not. He also suggestively seeks to undermine the perpetual silliness of Race and Racism, this a byproduct of bad science and chest-puffing ideas of natal origins expressed through uncontested and irrefutable ideology. Yet if we wipe this silliness away, cultures can survive and thrive, and they do so through a cultivation of the mind rather than passed on through “blood,” the latter of which runs as deep as we want to think it does. Nice article, Treuer.

From late August to early December 2011, I partook in a graduate readings course led by Dr. Tracy Barrett entitled, “Problems in Modern Chinese Historiography.” The course parameters were fairly straight-forward in that graduate students would read approximately 4-to-6 articles or book chapters every week, and with this engage a question posed at the outset of the discussion.

Considering that not one of us graduate students had specialized training in the Chinese language, a reasonable thought and question that came up periodically during our weekly discussions was how we graduate students could benefit from such a course? Another question that came up was how we graduate students could potentially benefit others from such a course? A third question (in part rhetorical) that came up was when the North Dakota legislature would adequately fund the teaching of the Chinese language throughout the North Dakota University System? For some reason there was always laughter after mention of this final statement.

Implicit in graduate studies is the idea that the graduate student will be charged with leading future discussions and provoking others to think about history and the philosophy inherent to history. It is up to the graduate student in training to not only think about a topic, but also to think about how to deliver a topic in a sensible way.

Anyhow, without getting too far astray from Modern Chinese historiography, below is the final essay submitted to Dr. Barrett at the course end in December 2011. This was 1 of 5 essays each student was required to prepare for the class.

The below summative essay frames and addresses the question(s) posed at the outset of this blog entry. It includes APA references and a map, as well as personal photos from a January 2010 trip I took to Beijing.

Any insights within the essay results from the protracted dialog between Dr. Barrett, the graduate students, and myself. Any mistakes and inadvertent platitudes are from my own doing.

And now, the essay:

“Regionalism and an Imagined Geopolitic in Chinese Historiography”

Prepared for Tracy Barrett, PhD

Prepared by Aaron L. Barth, PhD Student of History

December 8, 2011

The reality of nineteenth-century China is an imagined geopolitics, a border that reflects an idea of what the state wanted to project to its nation and the world. Historiography continuously demonstrates this as numerous groups in East Asia gained varying degrees power, and geographic placement contributed to the development or dissolution of the groups. The cultural elite in the urban power centers also conceived of how they wanted their nation to operate, adding more irregularities to any “standard” that reflected national unity. The difficulty remained in how peripheral groups within that boundary thought of themselves, especially when their ideas differed with the empire or nation of China.

This is the geopolitical boundaries of China. The following map was taken from the public domain at this website: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:PRC_Population_Density.svg

Groups in the countryside understood the power structures of localized kinship networks. Since they were largely illiterate, though, it is impossible to know if they did or did not think of themselves as a unified Chinese whole. Thus, when the problems of modern Chinese historiography are approached, we are left with scholarship that reflects a nation with intense regionalisms. Instead of a unified nation-state, China is replete with regional groups that execute localized administrative, economic, cultural and political control.

When it comes to understanding the modernizing tensions that played out in China in the twentieth century, it is necessary to understand how nineteenth-century domestic and non- domestic developments unfolded. The appearance of China on a map differed greatly from on- the-ground realities. Non-Chinese nation-states often conceived of Southeast Asia in broad, imperial terms. Domestic power centers in China, on the other hand, often acted independent of one another and emphasized short-term goals, and this regionalism undermined collective national unity. Taken as a whole, the historiography focusing on this period intentionally or inadvertently notes the variety of regional power-centers throughout China in the nineteenth century.

Industrial and religious interests contributed to the irregular development of nineteenth- century China, and disparate Chinese groups acted in their own regional interests. For example, Yuan Bingling’s study of the Kongsis of West Borneo (1776-1884) notes how Chinese miners left the mainland during this period to profit from natural resources on a Pacific island. This group brought its own “superior mining-technology,” and it also emphasized its own religious institutions. This gold mining group was unified by common labor and through cults imported from the motherland, and they reflected one component of mainland regionalism projected onto the Borneo Island. These miners, in turn, arrived to a place that “had witnessed over many centuries a succession of highly structured political organizations.” (Bingling, 2000:1-2) The domestic hardships in China contributed to the gold miners emigration and settlement in the Borneo goldfields, and they eventually “considered these places their new home-land.” (Bingling, 2000:1-2) While the immigrants were connected with mainland China through diasporas, they also created new private and public institutions in Borneo.

The Taiping Rebellion (1850-1864) represented another example of regional or irregular development in mid-nineteenth-century China. Franz Michael wrote at length about this rebellion, and it essentially concerned the importation of a hybrid version of Christianity that increased the power of a local cult leader. (Michael, 1966) This rebellion grew large enough and it began challenging the existing authority of the standing Chinese Emperor. Ultimately it forced the emperor to act. Members of this Sino-Christian cult could psychologically side step the hierarchy intrinsic to Confucianism, and Michaels said this cult, The God Worshippers, was highly fanatical. They “gained new confidence in joining with their kindred fellow-sufferers in a larger family group that took its solace from the idea of a divine Father to whom they could turn in prayer.” (Michael, 1966:189) Through this they not only ignored imperial demands and requests, but they directly challenged imperial authority. If groups of Chinese were not leaving the mainland to mine gold in Borneo, then regional warlords and local gentry attempted to preserve and extend their own power-bases, the Taiping Rebellion included. (Duara, 1988:15)

By no means exhaustive, these two events reflected how problematic it was in the nineteenth century for China to manage itself, all while contending with a variety of modernizing nation-states that sought to exploit its resources. By 1895, Benedict Anderson says the writings of “such Chinese reformers as K’ang Yu-wei and Liang Ch’i-ch’ao, and nationalists like Sun Yatsen, began seeping across” Indochina. (Anderson, 2006:125)  Much in the way that Western powers sought to exploit an Ottoman Empire in decline, these Western powers pushed into China to do the same. France swooped in from the south, the British tightened their hold on coastal ports, and Russia appeared to impose on China from the north. As well, Japan appropriated Western technology as quickly as possible, building railroads and increasing their industrial output. Imperial armies required this standardization as a means to project power. Large armies could only become large through fluid power structures that required intense discipline. Japan represented a variety of this intensity, modernizing itself enough so that just after the turn of the century they were able to contest, fight, and defeat Russia.

Three decades later, China would be next. Overlapping Western imperial interests competed with local Chinese regionalisms, and by the May Fourth Movement of 1919 the intellectual seeds of national discontent would be planted. As Vera Schwarcz says, “the event of 1919 marked the first of a series of incomplete efforts to uproot feudalism while pursuing the cause of a nationalist revolution.” (Schwarcz, 1985:7) Frederic Wakeman, Jr., pursued this nationalizing angle in Policing Shanghai, 1927-1937, a period in the first half of the twentieth century that marked the start and the finish of the second major attempt at national revolution and reform throughout China.

One of the only surviving January 2010 photos of Barth in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, China. When considering this as a 1980s and 1990s site of revolution, it is also necessary to put this in the context of how Imperial, Nationalist and Communist China dealt with revolutions throughout the nineteenth- and twentieth- centuries.

In this urban center of Shanghai, Chiang Kai-shek in 1927 brought the nationalist party to power. Shanghai figured important in the history of China and East Asia, especially considering it was China’s “only real metropolis” between 1925-1950. (Wakeman, Jr., 1995:xv) Various imperial interests — Great Britain and France — held authoritative positions in Shanghai during this period, and they exercised extraterritorial jurisprudence. In the case of Shanghai, this meant a non-Chinese nation-state could administer their authority throughout the nation of China. In Shanghai, these non-Chinese interests complicated the situation for Chiang Kai-shek. Yet even if he could bring the Chinese police force and the metropolis under standardized law and order, the police had to also contend with “comprador capitalism” and “the Communist labor movement.” (Wakeman, Jr., 1995:xv)

The historiography that focuses on the 1930s and the Second World War reflects at least three points. The first was the growing imperial juggernaut of the modern nation-state of Japan; the second was the increasing influence of Chinese communists; and the third was how domestic Chinese gentry and warlords attempted to maintain some type of local control. This, as Prasenjit Duara calls it, is the “cultural nexus formulation [that] enables us to understand the imperial state, the gentry, and other social classes in late imperial China within a common frame of reference.” (Duara, 1988:15) While groups in China were interlocked in a cultural nexus, the national unification of China came when the Japanese Imperial Army initiated its invasion in 1937.

Individuals operating within the Chinese cultural nexus had degrees of agency, as did regional groups, but they were not unified under a central cause. Thus, the Chinese communists could not gain overwhelming support until the Japanese invaded and began their systematic extermination of approximately 15 million Chinese peasants. The Chinese communists armed the illiterate peasants with weapons and the technology of vocabulary, and this allowed them to articulate a standardized set of grievances. Chalmers Johnson studied the vocabulary of the Chinese peasantry, and noted how by 1945 one-fifth of the Chinese population lived in communist guerilla bases. (Johnson,1962:1) If in the communist bases, the peasants were therefore under the standardized communist power structure. That the communists could articulate a standardized set of grievances for the peasants meant that the communists could also help the peasants imagine a standardized Chinese nation, complete with defined geopolitical borders.

Imagining China as a modern nation-state is a central problem inherent to Chinese historiography. It is all the more problematized when historians do not define modernity; or whether modernity is a perpetual process; or if there are different roads of modernity; or if modernity can be achieved and supplanted by post-modernity. These interpretations often cause historians to tweak existing theories, or it causes scholars to revise entirely or become entrenched and defend decades of professional work — egos are often at stake as well. Yet even though historiography can at the outset appear complex, a reader is still able or allowed to construct some sense from it.

In the case of Chinese historiography, the works of Yuan Bingling and Franz Michael provide a nineteenth-century foundation for understanding how intense regionalisms undermined imperial Chinese rule — in the case of the Taiping Rebellion, it was this regionalism that forced the emperor to execute his rule. Prasenjit Duara, Vera Schwarcz, Frederic Wakeman, Jr., and Chalmers Johnson bring the historiography up through the first half of the twentieth-century by demonstrating how different Chinese groups and non-Chinese nations asserted power, Confucian kinship networks, Max Weberian (a hybrid of Darwinian-Industrialist) capitalism, and proletariat revolutions throughout the nation and regions of China.

Barth refers to this photo as "Mao and Me" even though there are two additional Chinese guards within the shot. Photo taken in Beijing, China, January 2010.

Paradoxically, the national unification of China did not happen until a non-domestic Japanese Imperial Army brought China together through systematic and protracted atrocities between 1937 and 1945. After the retreat and surrender of Japan in 1945, the United States, Allied Europe, and the USSR focused on the reconstruction of the Axis nations and power-struggles inherent to a Cold War. Any power vacuum that remained in China was uncontested and seized by the communist party, and Mao realized this at the national level by 1949.

Today the Chinese government continues efforts to industrialize, standardize, and modernize its nation-state. That it has not achieved complete industrialization within the imagined borders of its nation means that many parts of China remain pre-Industrial. In this way the nation-state continues down its own perpetual road of modernity. The political power-center continues contending with the tensions produced between existing regionalisms (for example, struggles around Tibet, and in western China, where Islam has increasingly concentrated influence) all while attempting to hold on to some semblance of culture that manifests itself in a Confucian-Communist hybrid revolving around a deified Mao. All of this is supposed to hold the nation together while China technologically pushes itself and its citizenry forward. The flurry of European and American industrialists within today’s nation-state of China appears analogous with much of the imperialism it endured in the last century and a half. That the Chinese government allows industrialists and capitalists into its country also raises questions as to whether the authorities in power are content with projecting a communist image of a unified community, or an imagined nation-state with undertones of intense regionalisms. It is unlikely that historians are going to resolve these problems any time soon, especially considering how new archival material continuously problematizes the traditional and contemporary historiography of modern East Asia.

Photo of downtown Beijing taken in January 2010.

Works cited:

Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London & New York: Verso, 1983, 1991 & 2006).

Bingling, Yuan, Chinese Democracies: A Study of the Kongsis of West Borneo, 1776-1884 (University of Leiden, the Netherlands: Research School of Asian, African, and Amerindian Studies, 2000).

Duara, Prasenjit, Culture, Power, and the State: Rural North China, 1900-1942 (Stanford University Press, 1988).

Johnson, Chalmers, Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power: The Emergence of Revolutionary China, 1937-1945 (Stanford University Press, 1962).

Michael, Franz, The Taiping Rebellion: History and Documents (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1966).

Schwarcz, Vera, The Chinese Enlightenment: Intellectuals and the Legacy of the May Fourth Movement of 1919 (University of California Press, 1985).

Wakeman, Jr., Frederic, Policing Shanghai, 1927-1937 (University of California Press, 1995).