The Crazyladies of Pearl Street (70 page)

The wounds inflicted on the nation's economy and reputation by these capitalist swindlers were more damaging and long-lasting than the wounds inflicted by bin Laden's fanatical henchmen, yet, although the presidents and chairmen of the guilty firms have thrown some lower-ranked men off the troika to slow down the pursuing wolves, none of them has done a day in prison at the time of this writing, nor are they likely to be adequately punished, because they have friends and soul-brothers in high places, people who believe that everything that is not illegal in a narrowest possible reading of the law is permissible. In this, they reflect the views of our minority president, who might himself have been prosecuted for similar shenanigans if the investigator who was appointed by his father, hadn't declared the evidence to be 'insufficient'.

? HYPERLINK “javascript:%20history.back()” ?[BACK]?

69. '...not yet fifty' (p. 359)

I was luckier than Ben where it came to alcohol. After much foolishness and a few downright disasters, I learned that I must not drink. I didn't drink often or regularly; my problem with alcohol took the form of drinking too much on those occasions when I did drink, and of losing control over the low-grade background rage that is my major source of creative energy. This inability to handle alcohol extends throughout my mother's family. We share with many who have Indian blood an emotional (perhaps also a chemical) frailty that obliged me to avoid anything that could alter my state of consciousness. There are, no doubt, Indians and part-bloods who can drink in moderation, but not many. After small pox and Christianity, the most corrosive thing the European exposed the Indian to was hooch, with its cheap and easy escape from reality and responsibility.

A lethal attraction to states of altered reality was general among Indians of both North and South America long before the arrival of the White. From the earliest times, the search for Elsewhere and Otherwise drove Indians to scour their environment for substances that offered psychic transport. They used everything from tobacco-juice enemas to magic mushrooms, from hemp to coca leaves, from spineless cactus to ayahuasca, the Peruvian vision-vine that gave the Incas and their epigenous descendants visions of flying like giant condors... not flights to another place, but into another state of being. And when there were no hallucinogenic substances at hand, Indians fell back on the reality-warping methods of their Mongolian progenitors, dancing for hour upon hour, jumping and twirling to those repetitive, hypnotic rhythms that erode the bonds of here and now and release the dancer into Elsewhere and Forever.

I worry about taking advantage of treaty rights to set up gambling casinos in the midst of the White population. I am not speaking of the obvious dangers of letting slimy lawyers and third-generation Mafiosi come into contact with vulnerable young people, nor of the shameful greed of those tribal leaders who “brown bag” most of the Indians' share of the profits. And I understand the retributive pleasure an angry people can take in paying back the European for exposing their ancestors to alcohol by subjecting the White, in turn, to his own kind of addiction: the lust for money and possessions. But to bring young Indian males into close and frequent contact with alcohol, drugs, danger, and easy money is patently foolish and ultimately suicidal. The elders know better, but they're blinded by greed.

? HYPERLINK “javascript:%20history.back()” ?[BACK]?

70. '...wouldn't bruise our hipbones.' (p. 364)

When, eventually, I read George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London, I couldn't fail to notice (and to feel a certain resentment about) the similari ties in our Parisian experiences. But I told myself I was keeping good company, because Orwell had become one of my socialist heroes when I read The Road to the Wigan Pier. But my admiration for Orwell dimmed when I learned that, unlike me, he hadn't really been down and out. He'd had the support of the middle-class parents who sent him to good schools, and who were always ready to bail him out when he was on one of his experience-seeking journeys into the lives and ambiances of the poor... as they bailed him out from Paris, sending him money to come home when things got rough. I confess to the inverse snobbism that the escaped poor often feel towards the middle-class liberal, and particularly those liberals he finds fishing in his pond.

Copyright © 2005 by Trevanian

ISBN: 1-4000-8036-3

?PAGE ?

?PAGE ?1?