Ms. Ché Graduates From the Indian Art School in Santa Fé

Since long before we moved to New Mexico, Ms. Ché has been deeply involved in the literary scene. She was a member of a number of writers' groups in California, and for about ten years, she'd been coming to New Mexico for writers' conferences.

She's been a writer herself for as long as I've known her. We met 53 years ago this month in high school. She was a graduating senior, I was a junior who would do my senior year at a new high school built specifically to educate the white students separate from those of color. I've mentioned from time to time how segregated neighborhoods were in Sacramento in the early '60s, and this was an example of how officials sought to maintain segregation even though it was illegal by the time the new high school opened.

At any rate, the high school she graduated from -- where we met -- published a literary anthology the year she graduated (1965) that included a number of her haiku and one longer poem from me along with a wide variety of fiction, non-fiction and "think pieces." We were encouraged to write and at the time I had a habit of doing so in a journal.

Ms. Ché on the other hand had greater ambitions. As we got to know each other, we corresponded back and forth frequently as she entered college and I completed my senior year of high school. As I recall, she was bored in college. She hated taking so many classes that seemed like such a waste of time, but it's what you had to do, so she did. She saw herself eventually as a serious writer, writing stories, novels, poetry, essays, what have you. The only thing she didn't like about writing was journalism (which I found out later, she's very good at. Go figure.)

After we got together and became a couple some time later (two years or so later) she decided to try learning to write on a more professional basis through a correspondence course which taught her a lot, she said, but she really did not like and ultimately rejected the commercial aspects of the literary business. Her correspondent instructors (who seemed to be very good and were published writers themselves) wanted her to write for the Market, and they tried to help her shape her submitted works for the Market, saying she had such potential, they just needed to be tweaked this way or that. She said no, that wasn't the way she wanted to go with her work.

Over the years, she wrote a lot of... stuff: poetry, a long novel, many, many short stories, plays and so on, each in her unique style which she privately circulated among friends or had published in local anthologies, and occasionally had fiction or poems in magazines.

To say she's lived an adventurous life is putting it mildly. A lot of that is what she wrote about, and that is what her readers wanted more of. But she always wrote to satisfy herself.

In California, she felt stymied despite the fact that she was involved in many literary activities and forums and was being published from time to time. She was pretty well known among a circle of writers and there was a growing audience for her work. Her plays, especially, were very well received. But she didn't feel 1) she wrote as well as she wanted and needed to; 2) that she was really getting anywhere. Also she found the literary atmosphere to be stultifying. She wasn't getting anywhere because a writer couldn't where there was so much negativity and pure bullshit everywhere you turned.

She branched out by coming to New Mexico to the Hillerman Writer's Conference and then to its Word Harvest successor after we had purchased a house here. At these conferences, she was mixing and mingling with some of the West's prominent writers of mysteries and genre works, and she was also able to practice her craft among them. Every time she came back from one of these conferences she was exhilarated. Then she became depressed again as she saw how crabbed the whole literary scene around her in California was. It was night and day.

So when we moved here, she was itchy to start on a serious "grown up" writing path. She workshopped with good writers she respected and she stayed in touch with many of the writers she had met over the years at those conferences. It didn't take long before she became convinced she could "do this" -- write, seriously, in her own voice -- and she was given so much encouragement by so many other writers who wanted to see her succeed just as I did.

We'd been giving money for scholarships to the "Indian Art School" -- IAIA -- for a while, and she'd gotten to know some of the faculty, particularly Jon Davis, the head of the MFA creative writing program, and at the time, the Poet Laureate of Santa Fe. One thing led to another.

Long story short, she decided to enroll in the "Indian Art School" as a student. Initially, her idea was to go directly for the MFA, but she became convinced that it would be better for her to obtain a BFA first for the grounding it would give her, and so, for the last two and a half years, she's been studying and writing very hard with some instructors she respects and indeed loves, among a lot of other Native and non-Native students. And yesterday she graduated with her BFA in creative writing, accepted for the MFA program starting in July.

She's been pretty widely published during her time as a student, both short stories and poetry, but she wants to focus her MFA studies on poetry. "Why?" ask some. "There's no money in it." Well. So?

She laughs, and she will be going to the Naropa University for three weeks in June to study at the "Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics." So there. She's really looking forward to it.

And as an Elder -- she's 70 -- she's been inspiring all kinds of women of age to follow their bliss and do... don't fret at lost opportunities, just do, including returning to someplace like IAIA or work with artists/writers you feel can help your native (or Native) talents to blossom.

Yesterday's graduation was quite an event. Her cousin came from Nevada and other friends from California and Texas sent cards or came through to wish her well. The day before, there was a swell party at friend's house in Santa Fe.

And at the graduation, Ms. Ché was honored as the Valedictorian for the Class of 2018. She wrote and delivered one of the most compelling and touching speeches of its kind I have ever heard.

She wore her mother's dress which she altered with tucks and ribbons to resemble traditional Cherokee garb, but which she had made very definitely her own. She wore a tiny Zuni-made quail pin on her mortar board because part of her name in Cherokee means "quail." She wore a carved shell necklace made by a Cherokee artist in Oklahoma because that's where her mother was from. She wore another shell necklace made by a California Native artist from abalone shell because she was born and raised in California. She wore moccasins hand made at San Ildefonso Pueblo north of Santa Fe because she now lives in New Mexico and studies among Pueblo peoples, and she wore a Pueblo sash in honor of those Pueblo students and faculty she's come to admire.

Her speech was mostly about her mother and the sacrifices she had made and the gifts she had given her children during her life time. (Readers of this blog may recall that Ms Ché's mother passed away in her sleep at our home in 2009). She wove a story of her mother and the life she had passed on to her daughter that seemed to touch everyone attending. Her speech was near the very end of the ceremonies, and people were tired, babies were fussing, and there might have been a few thoughts of "oh no, not another speechifier..." And then as she told her story, a hush fell over the crowd, the babies stopped fussing, and some in the audience were simply mesmerized. Awed I think is not too strong a word. More than a few wiped away tears running down their cheeks (including my own self.)

And as she came to her conclusion they started cheering and applauding enthusiastically, and as she stepped down, the Chair of the Board of Trustees, also a Cherokee, stood at the mic, took a beat, and simply said, "Wow."

Yep. That's right.

Wow.

Oh, yes, and Happy Mother's Day!

O Taos

Mabel Dodge Luhan House, "Los Gallos," Taos, NM, December, 2014

"On another topic...

Last weekend was Our Taos Weekend.

We haven't been up to Taos for more than thirty years, and that time it was very brief, with a stop at La Fonda on the Plaza to see the D. H. Lawrence paintings, then turn around and get the holy hoo-hah out of there. Pronto.

Well, I couldn't breathe you see. I was a pretty heavy cigarette smoker in those days, and I lived essentially at sea level in Sacramento. Taos is at about 7,000 feet altitude, and anyone from sea level is going to feel lightheaded from the apparent lack of oxygen A smoker like I was is liable to panic, and I did

Ms. Ché, on the other hand, had a different set of issues. Earlier in the day, we'd stopped at Meteor Crater in Arizona. It's a remarkable formation, a remarkable site, and we spent quite a while exploring the crater rim, reading about the impact that caused the crater and otherwise enjoying the scenery and contemplating the Apocalypse.

The shop displayed lots and lots of crystals of one sort or another, and Ms. Ché picked up an amethyst chunk to inspect it more thoroughly. Immediately, she started feeling poorly, and she set it down. She said to me, "We have to get out of here. I just did something I shouldn't have."

I asked her what she'd done. "I picked up a crystal. They say you shouldn't do that unless you're prepared for what might happen. I wasn't. I feel awful."

She looked awful, too. So we left. We stopped in Gallup over the New Mexico line an hour or two later, where she doused her face with water and sat for a bit in the sun. Then we headed the rest of the way to Taos, and got there just before sunset.

I managed to find the Plaza somehow and locate La Fonda on the Plaza; the paintings were in a room off the lobby, and a man was there taking money (I think it was $4 admission) and allowing folks to wander around the room looking at the dozen or so rather naive but racy paintings D. H. Lawrence had created while a guest at Mabel Dodge Luhan's house somewhere in town. I had no idea where her place was, and at the time, it wasn't open to the public. I was interested in the paintings because I was involved in a project, a play (I don't recall the title now) that centered on -- or at least mentioned -- D.H. and Frieda Lawrence's time in Taos and I'd been doing a lot of research. Seeing Lawrence's paintings was one of my objectives in coming to New Mexico that time. I saw them. Once I did, it was time to go...

We drove back to Santa Fe and spent the night at a quirky old motel -- I want to say it was the El Rey, but Ms. says no, it was another, just as old, but not as well known. Of course, I'm sure we've stayed at the Crossroads in Albuquerque as well, and she says no, it was another, similar place, but not close to the freeway.

By morning, both of us had recovered, and we spent the rest of the week exploring New Mexico before we had to return to California and the drudgery of everyday life. Well, such as it was. (Our "everyday life" was often quite unusual... but that's another story for another time.)

I never wanted to go back to Taos, and if Ms Ché did, she didn't tell me. In fact, she says she barely remembers being there at all on that trip. I didn't want to go back in part because I couldn't breathe at that altitude, and in part because it was such a ridiculous place full of unreconstructed hippies, charlatans, new agers, and spiritualists who had no idea what the fark they were doing. And of course there were the Famous Artists, Musicians and Movie Stars. Yet another destination ruined by colonization. By that time, we'd had more than our fill of those types. Oh, yes, more than our fill.

We'd already been involved in The Show Business (as we liked to call it) for more than ten years and would be for another twenty or so, but when it came to those aspects that involved "fame" or the "famous," we tended to step back. At that time, I worked freelance as director and designer and was contemplating opening a theater that would focus on original works by women and people of color, developing brand new works for the stage, and seeing where that would lead. That project would be another few years off, however.


So Taos was a destination for the D. H. Lawrence connection but really nothing else, and when we traveled to New Mexico after that, we stayed in Albuquerque or Santa Fe. Santa Fe was difficult for me in those days, too, because of its altitude -- also about 7,000 feet. Albuquerque was OK at 5,000 feet. Well, relatively speaking.

I stopped smoking in 1997 and gradually my lungs recovered, though the last time I had a CAT scan, the pulmonary doctor showed me all the "pockets of emphysema" that I hadn't gotten rid of. Nevertheless, the altitude doesn't bother me so much any more. Our place in New Mexico is at 6,300 feet, and I barely notice it's not at sea level. Santa Fe is a frequent destination these days, and the altitude has not been a problem.

Taos might have been a problem, but there was no reason to go there, so it wasn't an issue.

Then something happened. José Montoya died. Now José was a preeminent figure in Chicano literature, someone we knew in Sacramento through our associations with members of the Royal Chicano Air Force. We didn't know he was from New Mexico, that in fact had been born and raised not far from where we live now. I found out that he had died from a friend who had been with him only a few days before. There was a memorial scheduled in Albuquerque, and we decided to go, to pay our respects and to remember.

Many Chicano poets from all over the Southwest spoke at the memorial and read their own works and José's, and there was music and José's daughter made remarks, and it was a fine time. One of the poets was Jimmy Santiago Baca, who always makes quite a splash -- as is his way. He and José were apparently close for a long time. Maya Angelou had just died, and Jimmy made it a point to speak ill of her. Now wait, we thought. Dissing Sister Maya at a memorial for José Montoya? How rude. But Jimmy didn't care. He had things to say about the way certain authors of color  like Sister Maya were hailed and celebrated -- even though their work wasn't necessarily that good in his estimation -- whereas Chicano/Latino/Hispano poets and writers whose work was brilliant (in his estimation) were ignored by the market. Why was that? Racial discrimination was still apparent, wasn't it? It was just different now... certain authors of color could advance, but not Chicanos.

Jimmy read his own powerful poem and then he read something of José's and both were very good. The crowd at the memorial applauded lustily. He'd touched a nerve and moved the audience greatly.

Ms. Ché knew of Jimmy Santiago Baca long before his appearance at the memorial for José Montoya, but I didn't. It was my first exposure to him and his work, and I found both to be intriguing. I was very impressed with his poetry, his fierceness, his determination, and his warmth. But he dissed Sister Maya, and that was just wrong. 

Some months later, we got a notice about the premier in Santa Fe of a documentary film about Jimmy Santiago Baca called "A Place to Stand," and we decided to go. It's a remarkable film about a remarkable character, the writer and teacher himself, whose life has not been like everybody else's, not by a long shot.

He announced a writing workshop intensive in Taos to take place in December and invited attendees at the film to come on up. It would be at the Mabel Dodge Luhan House. It would be wonderful.

Ms. Ché thought this might be interesting, so she got in touch with the organizer and after some back and forth, she made arrangements to attend.

The workshop was last weekend. She didn't want to drive herself, so I drove her up to Taos on Friday, but I didn't stay. I went back home then returned on Sunday to pick her up. She had, she said, an amazing time at an amazing place, among amazing people (she said there were sixteen at the workshop) -- and she had written some remarkable works even if she said so herself.

Really? Indeed. When I got there to pick her up, she met me at the car, looking a bit worn out, actually. I asked her if she was all right. "Oh yes, just tired, that's all. It's been quite a weekend." She collected her things from her room in the Juniper House and then we went up to the Big House to check out -- and pick up a couple of more books. As we did, we encountered Jimmy. He was effusive in his praise of Ms. Ché and her works. She had done something he had not seen before in his many workshops, and he was so grateful. She'd "opened up the sky." Whatever that meant, and he didn't know, but it sounded good. Other attendees said what she had done had helped release their own inner spirit, and helped them come to grips with what they needed to see and feel and write about... yep.

She was very happy and very tired, and she said she felt at home at Mabel's Place, "Los Gallos." It was, she said, one of the most intense and inspiring experiences of her life, and she was very grateful.

She said she felt that Mabel's Place itself was part of the reason why.

Seeing it, experiencing it for myself, was part of the reason I wanted to go back to Taos this time, finally, after thirty or more years. I'd heard about Mabel's Place in Taos, seen pictures of it, read descriptions, and knew some of its history. But being there was quite a different experience than the distant observation one can make from books and such.

I could see almost immediately why so many luminaries made the trek from wherever they were from and wanted to stay at this rambling, creaky old place adjacent to Taos Pueblo lands. It's a mile or so from the Plaza, but it feels like it's in another realm altogether. The Big House rambles and creaks along a ridge above an empty acequia. There is a spectacular view of Taos Mountain from the upper floors, an entire glassed room, the Solarium, is at the very top of the house and views go on for many miles. But the house itself, though large, is very cozy and warm and welcoming. It feels like "home" just as Ms Ché had said.

I can only imagine what it must have been like before Taos was ruined and became a tourist mecca, and this place, almost alone, was the center of a literary and artistic firmament.

At any rate, being there myself, with Ms Ché, I felt some of the energy of the place and the many that had been there before us. It was/is remarkable.

We're making plans to go back and stay for a while for the sake of it.

"On the Road" -- by Jack Kerouac (The Original Scroll...)

Kerouac's Own Design for the book's cover, c. 1952

The Scroll Version is a lot more fun than I thought the original Signet paperback was when I read it sometime in the early-mid 1960s. It's looser and more open, more visceral -- though that's hard to imagine -- more lyrical, and strangely, without paragraphs, it's easier to read. It flows naturally, weaving a story in and out, and I think you could literally open it anywhere, start reading, go back, circle around, and even read the same passages several times without losing anything. It's that kind of novel. "Whitmanesque" it's been called. There is a linear plot and storyline, but that linearity is only part of the quality of the near-novel. Take it apart and there's just as much there, maybe more. It's brilliant, it's fun, it's sex, drink, drugs and be-bop. Too early, you see, for rock and roll.

I'm old enough to remember be-bop. Way older than Jack-John-Ti-Jean ever got to be, way older than Neal Cassady, the motor of the crazy-car/truck trip that Kerouac took across the country back when I was barely a gleam in my parents' eyes.

Neal Cassady's Bad Boy Smug mug shot 7-11-1944, Denver, CO

Kerouac in 1942, having joined the Naval Reserves. (I always thought he was taller than that).

It was a simpler and more innocent time? No it was not. It was a different time, and unlike "Dharma Bums," which seems very contemporary or timeless to me, "On the Road" is rooted in its time, it is very late '40s-early '50s, gritty and rough as things were back then. I can remember bits and pieces of my own life from the era (though I've lost many memories in the interims of age) and it wasn't a paradise, far from it. "Gritty and rough" is being charitable. It was a world that had been through the most appalling of wars, the most crippling of economic depressions, the most apocalyptic natural disasters. It was a world that had come apart at the seams and was by no means put back together again. But it seemed to them that the survivors had survived the worst that the world had to offer.

It was the Post-War era when so many things seemed possible. And it is the possibility of the era that animates the story and the road trip, the adventure, the re-discovery almost reconceiving of America. It could only have happened because of the hobos who pioneered the paths criss-crossing the country during the Depression when Jack-John-Ti-Jean was just a boy. He must have been moved by the stories, for the travel themes would stay with him throughout the remainder of his life.

"On the Road" weaves multiple travel threads together and clues the reader to how that traveling formed the consciousness of some of the writers and mavens and personalities of the era. They cannot be separated from their perambulations, but I'm not entirely sure how someone like Allen Ginsberg got from New York to Denver to San Francisco. Did he take the train? Surely he didn't hitch-hike or take the bus like Kerouac did. Or maybe he did. He might have. We'll let that question sit for a bit.

I've only just begun re-reading (for me, this is the first time with the Scroll version). So far, it's fascinating and notably clearer than when I read the Signet version...

"Today's wild youth..." you bet

There's A Chill Is Coming On

We don't expect there to be a hard freeze for a while yet, but you never know. New Mexico has apparently been cited by the Weather Channel for the most extreme weather for 2013, and I'm not in a position to prognosticate. But there is a distinct chill in the mornings now, and I've even run the heater -- once -- to take the edge off and see if the dang thing still works. I took the air conditioners in the bedrooms out of the windows, too. None of the windows are left open overnight any more, either. And I thought about covering the tomato plants so the late fruit could ripen on the vine, but I didn't do it last night, so after the sun comes up, I'll take a look at how the plants held up overnight.

The tomatoes are about the only things we planted this year that actually did pretty well. Most of the rest either perished outright or came up stunted and then perished. Oh, the sunflowers were pretty productive, even though they were stunted somewhat. Some of the other flowers were attacked by bugs and withered. None of the vegetables made it. Some of the beans never even germinated.

Even most of the wild flowers and the other things that grow on their own around here were fairly stunted overall, and we really don't know why it's been that way. We planted earlier than we should have, and planted everything in pots rather than in the ground or in the raised beds we were planning on. We'd been told that planting in the ground wasn't a good idea because of the alkalinity of the soil. The planting soil we used, though, may not have been ideal, and I'm pretty sure the alkalinity of the water we were using to irrigate with was also a problem. Then, of course, I wasn't sure how quickly things would dry out in the wind. I think a lot of the plants got too dry too often in the early growing season, and that's probably the main reason why most plants either died or were so stunted.

The drought's been bad to be sure and the older trees are really showing the stress. There were also huge dust storms, one of which overwhelmed the sky, enveloping everything in brown, gritty fog. It was an unexpected and amazing experience. Right out of the Dust Bowl.

The enormous amount of rain we've received lately has helped regenerate the flora; it's surprising the amount of new growth in the last few weeks, for example. But now that it's getting colder, the leaves will fall and most of the plants will shrivel and dry up. We're happy for the Cherokee Purple heritage tomatoes; they've done very well, and we had some excellent tomatoes in our salads all summer. Yay!

And next year, we'll try again. Hopefully, we'll have raised beds built by then; we'll use a different planting soil, we'll try planting later and keeping a close watch on soil moisture so things don't dry out as much as they did this year before the rains came. I'm not sure the quality of the water is really the problem, as the farms around here irrigate with the same water and they seem to do OK. They no doubt correct the soil ph, but beyond that, probably don't do much.

Sherman Alexie On Colonization, ReColonization, DeColonization, and Being A Privileged Indian in These United States of God Damn

Sherman Alexie speaking on behalf of the MFA Creative Writing Program

We were up in Santa Fe last night -- well, up at the IAIA, which is not quite in Santa Fe but outside town up on a ridge with a spectacular view of the Jemez and the Sangres and the Ortiz Mountains and the pageantry of Mother Earth and Father Sky all around. There were storms gathering in the south. It would be quite an evening.

We were attending a fundraising event for the new MFA program in Creative Writing that the IAIA had launched last year with 32 students in attendance. The entertainment featured the stylings of Sherman Alexie, American Indian Writer of Stories and Books and Poems and Screenplays and Such, now officially a Professor of Higher Learning at one of the highest profile Indian Schools in the whole wide world, the school where every Indian Writer and nearly every Indian Artist he's ever met has gone to at one time or another. This is the top of the Indian Educational Pyramid. The very Pinnacle of Indian Achievement. His comment about being selected to serve as one of the faculty of the MFA Program at IAIA?

"It took you long enough."

And we were off to -- or maybe through -- the races in several senses of the word. This Privileged Indian, Sherman Alexie, was going to give a talk, not so much for the Anglos who'd paid the cost of admission (perhaps a hundred of us or so) but "for the Indians"  in the room, another fifty or so, mostly students in the MFA program for whom the paid attendees were providing the money for scholarships. (For the record, though one of the Chés is an Indian, we paid the price of admission, and will probably wind up paying a good deal more in the by and bye.)

Not every Indian is a rich Indian like Sherman Alexie. How rich is Sherman Alexie? He told us. He's so rich, his house in Seattle has got two garage doors, one for his wife and one for himself, and both open and close with these little electric gizmos they keep in their cars. Note, their cars.  They each have one. They're that rich! Ha! He uses and IPad when he speaks! He's that rich!

Of course, many non-Indians wouldn't see those things as emblems of wealth at all. These are things that are basic to a (White) middle-class lifestyle. No doubt you can live without them, but why would you if you didn't have to?

Oh.

On Appeals to Orwell -- Attacking the Weak, Flattering the Strong and Evaluating Every Contact on the Basis of Advancement

In "Why I Write" (1946), George Orwell put together a remarkably honest dictum on the topic of his ongoing literary activities.

Writers, after all, have plenty of motivations -- much like actors and circus clowns -- with the upshot, for many, that they want to Do Good. Somehow. And writing is the way they have found to do it.

Let's let Orwell speak for himself:

[After a lengthy and humorous description of his background and how he came to writing, he states his personal (and generalized) motivations...]

(i) Sheer egoism. Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on the grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood, etc., etc. It is humbug to pretend this is not a motive, and a strong one. Writers share this characteristic with scientists, artists, politicians, lawyers, soldiers, successful businessmen — in short, with the whole top crust of humanity. The great mass of human beings are not acutely selfish. After the age of about thirty they almost abandon the sense of being individuals at all — and live chiefly for others, or are simply smothered under drudgery. But there is also the minority of gifted, willful people who are determined to live their own lives to the end, and writers belong in this class. Serious writers, I should say, are on the whole more vain and self-centered than journalists, though less interested in money.

(ii) Aesthetic enthusiasm. Perception of beauty in the external world, or, on the other hand, in words and their right arrangement. Pleasure in the impact of one sound on another, in the firmness of good prose or the rhythm of a good story. Desire to share an experience which one feels is valuable and ought not to be missed. The aesthetic motive is very feeble in a lot of writers, but even a pamphleteer or writer of textbooks will have pet words and phrases which appeal to him for non-utilitarian reasons; or he may feel strongly about typography, width of margins, etc. Above the level of a railway guide, no book is quite free from aesthetic considerations.

(iii) Historical impulse. Desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity.

(iv) Political purpose. — Using the word ‘political’ in the widest possible sense. Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other peoples’ idea of the kind of society that they should strive after. Once again, no book is genuinely free from political bias. The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.

It's hard to argue with Orwell on those four broad motivational points; every writer I've known has shared them to one degree or another, and these motivations are shared by many other professionals as well. I mention actors and circus clowns in part because of my own long association with such people through the Show Business (one of my previous careers), and by and large, they share many of the same motivations as writers and so many others who seek to have some kind of impact on people.

Egoism is the main point. Orwell, to his everlasting credit, is fully aware of his own egoism in becoming a writer. Makes no bones about it. His insight that the mass of humanity is not particularly egocentric, selfish or self-obsessed is interesting. From the indications of his writing in this essay and other works, he came to this insight through his contacts with the lower classes of Britain, the servile masses of Burma, and his experiences in Europe between the Wars -- particularly during the Spanish Civil War. "They" -- the unselfish masses -- are not like "us:" The egoists. The self-obsessed. The Writers.

Further to his credit, Orwell does not judge the unselfish mass of humanity to be lesser than himself and his kind. For his time and his culture, that is amazing.

But in other works, such as "Notes on Nationalism," he proposes that the British intelligentsia -- of which he is of course a part, though he insisted on his own independence of mind -- is largely captivated with the notion that the Oppressed Peoples of the Empire and the World are actually better than their Betters who rule over them with guns, an iron rod and the lash.

How is an Empire established and how is it maintained and ruled? There were only ever a handful of British colonial officers ruling over vast seas of Natives around the globe, and how it was done is of some interest today as American and British Ruling Class interests conspire to put Our Brown Brothers under the gun, the iron rod and the lash once again in a sort of cracked reimposition of the Empire in those areas where the Lessons of Democracy obviously didn't take.

How could a handful of British soldiers and colonial officers have managed it?

Given that the reimposition is being handled by relatively even fewer Americans and Britons -- leaving out the other nations' few and proud -- than the deed was first done, we may wish to reflect on how it was managed to begin with and that may differ from the way it is being done now.

Attacks on the weak was one of the most obvious means the Empire was established and maintained. Flattery of the strong didn't hurt. And evaluating every contact in the field of interest on the basis of how it could be used to advance the aims of the Companies and the Crown was fundamental.

We see much the same going on now in the attacks launched against the weakest states and peoples: Iraq and Afghanistan most prominently, but including Somalia and the few enclaves of the Palestinians and other Lesser Peoples of the Middle East. Probing for weaknesses in the Other is ongoing, and more and more states and peoples will be added to the list of territories to conquer as time goes by. Iran, of course, is in the gunsights as we speak, and there will be more weak and weakened states to be gathered in to the New Empire.

Flattery of the strong was one of the keys to British success in building its Empire in the 19th Century. While weak Native states and tribes would be attacked brutally and mercilessly, strong ones would be flattered and persuaded with gifts and the preservation of status, revenues and control. By this means, loyalty was purchased or otherwise obtained. Thus, for example, India could be ruled effectively through Native agents, simply by convincing a sufficient number of Native princes to submit to the Crown and be rewarded. It worked well enough so long as the Natives did not rebel, but as is the way of these people, rebellion was commonplace, and each one became harder and harder to suppress.

Finally, as Britain trolled the earth for new conquests, their agents evaluated every contact they made with the Natives on the basis of how those contacts could be used to advance their aims and ambitions. They became very adept at recognizing who could be used to their advantage, who could be ignored, and who would have to be taken on and defeated.

All of these factors and more are once again in play as Anglo-American Imperial might asserts itself.

Yet the lesson from the failures of the British Empire was never really learned either in Westminster or in DC. No, in those realms, the Empire was a success, and withdrawal from Imperial control was only made necessary by other events. For example, the two world wars.

Just look at India today if you need an example of the success of the Empire. It is free, self-governing, democratic and an economic powerhouse. Any former colonial officer would say it is so because of the example of the British. Had India not been put under the Crown, think what a mess and what a failed state -- or states -- it would be today.

So God Bless the Queen, and don't you forget it.

But the Imperial Road is the wrong road according to Orwell. The road of liberation and Democratic Socialism is the right road.

How you get from one to the other is the problem.