Guest guest Posted March 22, 2011 Report Share Posted March 22, 2011 Tuesday, March 22, 2011 Morocco as Model Modern Muslim State DAVID AVITAL and DAVID HALPERIN - Politico I agree with this assessment with one caveat. I still believe the better model is Turkey, because it has demonstrated how a democratic Muslim state can sustain stability for decades. But, either way, there are now two paths for other Muslim states to use as models. Avital is an executive committee member of Israel Policy Forum. Halperin is a policy analyst at Israel Policy Forum and the Center for American Progress. The Middle East uprisings - demanding freedom, democracy and prosperity from corrupt, autocratic rulers - give the United States a unique historical opportunity to redefine its policies in the region and regain creditability.To do so, it should look to Morocco.While seeking to curb extremists from taking advantage of the unrest, Washington must change its habit of blindly supporting friendly autocrats, who favor stability over freedom. The U.S. must also work with its regional allies on reforms to create a blueprint for the model modern Muslim state.This model has yet to emerge. Many looked to Turkey. But the struggle between its military and political echelons, and its inability to harness the spirit of this Arab awakening, rule it out. Iraq's nascent democracy was also considered, but its political stability remains questionable.Morocco's progress in recent years, however, has been significant. Since becoming king in 1999, Mohammed VI broke away from his father's brutal policies during the 'Years of Lead" and immediately began a series of liberalizing reforms.These include permitting the return of political exiles, holding legislative elections, enhancing investing to alleviate poverty, modifying the criminal code and setting up the first truth and reconciliation commission in the Arab world to help mend the wounds of the past and set a new course.While there is more to be done, a foundation for reform has been established. Perhaps most noteworthy, Morocco has passed these reforms in a specifically Islamic context. Many of its liberal values are also shared by the West - yet they were not born in the West, rather from the Mahgreb itself.While protests have taken place in Morocco, they have largely been sporadic, and in support of further economic and political reforms alongside the tradition of Morocco's 1,200 years of uninterrupted monarchy.In response, the king announced the formation of the Economic and Social Council. 'We are not only injecting fresh momentum into the reform process I launched shortly after I assumed the leadership, my loyal people," Mohammed announced, 'but we are also underlining the close link between genuine democracy and the achievement of human advancement and sustainable development."He made a rare appearance on Moroccan TV soon after, to announce a public referendum on significant constitutional reforms. He described this as 'a major phase in the process of consolidation of our model of democracy and development."Washington is taking notice. After meeting with Morocco's Foreign Minister Tibri Fassi Fihri last month, Under Secretary for Political Affairs Burns labeled Morocco 'a model of economic, social, and political reform."'The partnership between the United States, Morocco and the Moroccan people," Burns said, 'is a very high priority for President Obama and Secretary Clinton. It's never been more important than at this moment."Seizing this moment requires the United States to work with Morocco on a blueprint for systematic political and economic reforms that proactively respond to the region's spreading unrest. A U.S. effort to help Morocco achieve a balance between these reforms and reverence for its own history and religious tradition would be a crucial symbol for the developing Middle East - and its growing ties with the West.Even more important, a U.S.-supported program to encourage greater media freedom, economic development and open political debate could jumpstart a path for Morocco to realize its leadership as a model for re-shaping the Arab world.This plan could be implemented and monitored to communicate and advance a U.S. platform for supporting the growth and change called for by the peoples of the Middle East. It could counter the prevailing view that Washington only props up authoritarian regimes that serve its interests, rather than helping the people of the region.Developing a successful Moroccan model could replace the sweeping unrest with a much-needed wave of economic growth, political freedom, justice and peace. The United States must be prepared to help Morocco achieve all this, and, in doing so, effectively advance U.S. interests and stability across the broader Middle East. Post Comment » WHO: Radiation in Japan Food 'More Serious' Than Thought CNN Tokyo -- Short-term exposure to food contaminated by radiation from Japan's damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant poses no immediate health risk, a spokesman for the World Health Organization said Monday.The United Nations organization initially said the food safety situation was "more serious" than originally thought. But spokesman Cordingley said Monday that the assessment was based not on the levels of contamination but on the fact that radioactivity was found in food beyond the 12.4-mile (30-kilometer) evacuation zone."It's new and something we're watching," Cordingley said.On Monday, authorities in the village of Iitake urged residents to avoid drinking tap water that tests showed contained more than three times the maximum standard of radioactive iodine. The day before, a government ban on the sale of raw milk from Fukushima Prefecture and spinach from neighboring Ibaraki Prefecture became public.Japanese officials reported levels of radioactive iodine in milk from four locations in Fukushima that ranged from about 20% over the acceptable limit to more than 17 times that limit. Testing at one location also found levels of cesium about 5% over the acceptable limit, the health ministry reported Sunday.In Ibaraki, a major center of vegetable production, tests at 10 locations found iodine levels in spinach that ranged from 5% over acceptable limits to more than 27 times that ceiling. At seven sites, levels of cesium grew from just above 4% to nearly four times the limit.Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano stressed that he believed the levels of radiation in food -- while above the legal standards -- do not pose any immediate health risk, saying they were mostly dangerous only if consumed repeatedly over one's lifetime.The water tested in Iitake contained 965 becquerels per kilogram, versus the 300 becquerels limit, Japan's health ministry said in a statement.Although drinking the water in Iitake was discouraged, Edano said there is no problem to use this water for non-drinking purposes," such as bathing. He added, "This level is reportedly going down now."Water in other jurisdictions showed lesser signs of contamination -- although far below levels of concern under Japanese law, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency website. The U.N. agency said it had received reports from Japan's government that six out of 46 samples tested positive for the iodine-131 radioactive isotope.Iodine and cesium isotopes are byproducts of nuclear fission in reactors such as the ones damaged in the March 11 earthquake and tsunami that devastated northern Honshu, Japan's main island. While Iodine-131 has a radioactive half-life of eight days, cesium-137's half-life is about 30 years.Besides causing devastation throughout northeast Japan, the 9.0-magnitude earthquake and subsequent tsunami on March 11 seriously damaged several reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, leading to the release of an unspecified amount of radioactive material into the atmosphere.Cordingley said Japan is taking a "very precautionary" approach with its actions. Whereas fears initially were for produce within 30 kilometers (18 miles) of the plant, cows (and the milk they produce) outside that radius and spinach from as far as 120 kilometers was being affected."We have seen Japanese people in grocery stores paying close attention to where their produce is coming from, and we think this is a wise practice," he said.Tokyo resident Phil Knall said he expects the questions about the food supply to linger."It doesn't look like a short-term issue," he said. "I'm definitely concerned about the food that is going to be shipped out from now. I'm definitely thinking about it."As he had done earlier, Edano stressed that he believes the levels of radiation in food -- while above the legal standards -- do not pose any immediate health risk, saying they were mostly dangerous only if consumed repeatedly over one's lifetime.The decision to prohibit food produce sales is another potentially devastating blow to a part of northeast Japan hit by the earthquake, tsunami and other potential fall-out from the Fukushima plant.Fukushima, northeast of Tokyo, has Japan's fourth-largest amount of farmland and ranks among its top producer of fruits, vegetables and rice. Ibaraki, south of Fukushima, supplies Tokyo with a significant amount of fruits and vegetables and is Japan's third-largest pork producer.After the 1986 nuclear plant disaster in Chernobyl -- then a part of the Soviet Union -- tons of food had to be destroyed when radioactive debris fell on crops in large swaths of Eastern Europe and Scandinavia.Hygiene expert Satoshi Takaya, who helped Japanese scientists prevent contaminated food from entering the country at that time, said the current situation is no Chernobyl -- but he said the current crisis is sure to affect Japanese farmers.That means threatening the livelihood of people like Ukia Uchida, an 82-year-old woman whose family has farmed a plot in Shibayama for generations."Up until now, I thought everything was fine here," said Uchida. "But to hear that some radiation has been found here is pretty upsetting." Post Comment » Crime Rates Are Plummeting -- And No One Knows Why ANNELI RUFUS - AlterNet Here is some factual data that shows the endless fear mongering of the gun and "values" lobbies for what they really are -- purveyors of disinformation. Los Angeles' violent-crime rates are four times lower now than they were 1992. The interesting thing is, nobody can really explain why.As of December 25, last year, only 293 homicides were reported in LA, along with 781 rapes, 10,734 robberies, and 9,129 aggravated assaults. In 1992, that blood-soaked year of the Rodney King Riots, Los Angeles saw 1,092 murders, 1,861 rapes, 39,222 robberies, and 47,736 aggravated assaults. These figures echo a nationwide trend. "Crime Rate at 20-Year Low Level," reads a February 24 headline in the Frederick, land News Post. "Major Crime at 39-Year Low in Elgin," the Chicago Tribune crowed on February 22. "Fresno's Murder Rate Is Drastically Down in 2011," announced that California's town's ABC-TV affiliate on February 23. Such headlines are typical these days. Crime's down. What's up?Theories abound. Various agencies, such as the office of LA Mayor Villaraigosa, credit themselves with the shift. But in the din of the applause, some of these theories and claims cancel each other out. Noting that LA in 1992 "was like a war zone," LAPD Sgt. Joe Kuns remembers how, that year, no one in their right mind strolled the downtown intersection of First and Main streets for fun after dark. Drug dealers and their customers ruled that corner, he says. It's a different story now. Brightly lit businesses welcome local residents, who wave happily while walking their dogs. Why? Some would say it's because those drug dealers and their customers are now locked up. According to the US Bureau of Justice Statistics, the number of drug-related arrests has nearly doubled nationwide since 1992. Drug-related offenders comprised 6 percent of Minnesota's incarcerated in 1989; last year, according to the Minnesota Department of Corrections, they comprised 18 percent.As for exact correlations between drug violations and violent crime, the jury's still out. A 2009 report by the King's College London International Centre for Prison Studies found that "given the significant costs of incarceration ... in budget terms, but also in terms of the negative impact on community relations, social cohesion and public health - it is hard to justify a drug policy approach that prioritises widespread arrest and harsh penalties for drug users on grounds of effectiveness."Gang violence is being quelled as well. One program alone, ICE's Operation Community Shield, has resulted in over 20,000 gang-related arrests since 2005. Is this helping? Kuns is quick to assert that assigning any definitive cause to LA's plunging crime rate "would be intellectually dishonest." It's anyone's guess."In meetings with professors from USC and UCLA, we've tried to apply methodical approaches to isolate causal relationships between what our department is doing now with what it was doing twenty years ago. I wish there had been a moment when we all looked at each other across the table and said, 'That's it, we've figured it out.' But there hasn't been."Kuns does credit community involvement. He says the no-snitch code is dissolving as more people than ever call 911 and anonymous tip lines. Los Angeles Sheriff's Department spokesman Steve Whitmore agrees. Even in LA gang strongholds such as Compton, Lynwood, and Lennox, "people have decided that enough is enough." Admittedly "hesitant to talk about how crime is dropping, because a lot of times the bad guys will hear that and say, 'We'll show them,'" Whitmore also credits "the visual saturation of law enforcement, as the sheriff has flooded certain areas of our county with law enforcement and targeted teams. And technology helps."Cell phones, texting, and email make crime reporting exquisitely quick, easy, and secret.Do crimewatch TV shows such as America's Most Wanted spur viewers into action? Do reality shows such as Cops and The First 48 humanize police, making viewers help rather than hate them? In books such as More Guns, Less Crime (University of Chicago Press, 1998), conservative economist Lott attributes shrinking crime rates to increased legal gun ownership.Could it be that America is actually turning less violent? Or are we as violent as ever - but have simply found less interpersonal means of assuaging our urges?Award-winning University of Hawaii anatomist Milton Diamond believes that one powerful tool in reducing at least one type of violent crime is porn - including kiddie porn.Published last fall in the scholarly journal Archives of Sexual Behavior, Diamond's latest academic study tracked crime in the Czech Republic after pornography was legalized there. "As found in all other countries in which the phenomenon has been studied, rape and other sex crimes did not increase," Diamond's report reads. In particular, Denmark and Japan "had a prolonged interval during which possession of child pornography was not illegal." When kiddie porn was legal in Denmark and Japan, both countries "showed a significant decrease in the incidence of child sex abuse."Diamond - who directs UH's Pacific Center for Sex and Society and won this year's Kinsey Award for the Scientific Study of Sexuality - does not approve of actual children being used in porn, but rather images of children produced via artwork or computer graphics."It's the lesser of two evils," he says. "Why would someone commit a crime if he didn't have to? Does he say, 'I'm gonna go out and rape somebody'? Or might he say, 'Look, there's a danger in doing that, and I'm horny, so now I'll masturbate'? If I was a potential rapist, I'd be thinking, 'Why the hell would I want to go out in the cold when I can stay inside and masturbate?' Think of all the problems we could solve this way."We can't say that every potential rapist is crazy or stupid. They're reacting to the same things everybody reacts to." Pre-Internet and pre-DVD, "they went out and 'did something' about those reactions," Diamond asserts, but now they can stay safely at home, ensconced with electronic fantasies."If I have a choice between having real children abused or having child porn on the Net, I say have child porn and save kids. I want the same thing anti-porn protesters want: to stop child abuse. If porn will do it, I'm for it."Whatever's curbing crime these days, it's making fools of those who predicted that an economic meltdown would turn America into a Mad Maxian hellzone terrorized by bloodthirsty out-of-work stock clerks. "Murder, Suicide Rates Climb When Jobs Vanish and Economy Slows," Bloomberg blared, citing a 2009 study published in The Lancet that linked every 1 percent increase in unemployment with a .79 percent increase in homicides. (But according to the same study, every 1 percent increase in unemployment is also linked with a 1.39 percent decrease in car-crash deaths. So in that sense, economic collapse saves nearly twice as many lives as it takes.)"If you go by the old adage that crime is tied to the economy, then these should be banner years for violent crime," says the LAPD's Kuns. "But it's going in the opposite direction."According to the US Bureau of Justice Statistics' annual National Crime Victimization Survey, violent and property crime rates were lower in 2008 than at any time since these surveys began in 1973. According to the FBI's annual Uniform Crime Reports, violent crime declined 6.2 percent nationwide just in the first half of 2010. Broken down by region, murder/rape/robbery/aggravated assault fell by 7.8 percent in the South, 7.2 percent in both the Midwest and West, and a comparatively - troublingly - small 0.2 percent in the Northeast."Economic conditions and crime: This is a very complicated relationship," says Stanford University law professor Lawrence Friedman, the award-winning author of Crime and Punishment in American History (Basic Books, 1994). "Dire economic circumstances certainly give some people incentives to commit property crimes. But on the whole, it is hard to show a correlation, especially if you look at the broad sweep of history. The period after World War II was one of tremendous economic growth, and yet the violent crime rate went up dramatically" in the US at that time. Was it because the war's end brought home a huge influx of young males, the demographic most likely to commit violent crimes? Clearly the perpetrators of all those postwar murders, rapes, assaults and strongarm robberies weren't famished bread thieves a la Les Misérables. This should shatter the romance that most criminals commit crimes not by choice but by necessity. What spurs crime? Greed. Hate. Opportunity. What stems it? "There's a growing groundswell of folks accepting their personal ownership of what goes on in their neighborhoods," Kuns says. "Regardless of their station in life, they're taking responsibility for the places in which they live and for a reasonable radius around them. They've realized that although the police are happy to rescue you when we can - that's the fun part of our job - the policing of your neighborhood starts with you." In some neighborhoods these days, "people literally run out of their houses and try to stop crimes themselves."Say every time a crime takes place, we get four or five calls from community members providing information. After a while, the bad guys think, 'The probability of someone seeing me committing a crime and making that call, and thus the probability of my getting caught, is so high that it's not worth committing the crime.'"It's like game theory." Post Comment » Nuclear Nightmare RALPH NADER - Nader.org There are a number of things about which I disagree with Ralph Nader, but this assessment is fact based, and accurate. I chose it from more scientific papers because it had all the relevant data in one report. The unfolding multiple nuclear reactor catastrophe in Japan is prompting overdue attention to the 104 nuclear plants in the United States-many of them aging, many of them near earthquake faults, some on the west coast exposed to potential tsunamis.Nuclear power plants boil water to produce steam to turn turbines that generate electricity. Nuclear power's overly complex fuel cycle begins with uranium mines and ends with deadly radioactive wastes for which there still are no permanent storage facilities to contain them for tens of thousands of years.Atomic power plants generate 20 percent of the nation's electricity. Over forty years ago, the industry's promoter and regulator, the Atomic Energy Commission estimated that a full nuclear meltdown could contaminate an area 'the size of Pennsylvania" and cause massive casualties. You, the taxpayers, have heavily subsidized nuclear power research, development, and promotion from day one with tens of billions of dollars.Because of many costs, perils, close calls at various reactors, and the partial meltdown at the Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania in 1979, there has not been a nuclear power plant built in the United States since 1974.Now the industry is coming back 'on your back" claiming it will help reduce global warming from fossil fuel emitted greenhouse gases.Pushed aggressively by President Obama and Energy Secretary Chu, who refuses to meet with longtime nuclear industry critics, here is what 'on your back" means:1. Wall Street will not finance new nuclear plants without a 100% taxpayer loan guarantee. Too risky. That's a lot of guarantee given that new nukes cost $12 billion each, assuming no mishaps. Obama and the Congress are OK with that arrangement.2. Nuclear power is uninsurable in the private insurance market-too risky. Under the Price- Act, taxpayers pay the greatest cost of a meltdown's devastation.3. Nuclear power plants and transports of radioactive wastes are a national security nightmare for the Department of Homeland Security. Imagine the target that thousands of vulnerable spent fuel rods present for sabotage.4. Guess who pays for whatever final waste repositories are licensed? You the taxpayer and your descendants as far as your gene line persists. Huge decommissioning costs, at the end of a nuclear plant's existence come from the ratepayers' pockets.5. Nuclear plant disasters present impossible evacuation burdens for those living anywhere near a plant, especially if time is short.Imagine evacuating the long-troubled Indian Point plants 26 miles north of New York City. Workers in that region have a hard enough time evacuating their places of employment during 5 pm rush hour. That's one reason Secretary of State Clinton (in her time as Senator of New York) and Governor Cuomo called for the shutdown of Indian Point.6. Nuclear power is both uneconomical and unnecessary. It can't compete against energy conservation, including cogeneration, windpower and ever more efficient, quicker, safer, renewable forms of providing electricity. Amory Lovins argues this point convincingly (see RMI.org). Physicist Lovins asserts that nuclear power 'will reduce and retard climate protection." His reasoning: shifting the tens of billions invested in nuclear power to efficiency and renewables reduce far more carbon per dollar (http://www.nirs.org/factsheets/whynewnukesareriskyfcts.pdf). The country should move deliberately to shutdown nuclear plants, starting with the aging and seismically threatened reactors. Bradford, a former Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) commissioner has also made a compelling case against nuclear power on economic and safety grounds (http://www.nirs.org/factsheets/whynewnukesareriskyfcts.pdf).There is far more for ratepayers, taxpayers and families near nuclear plants to find out. Here's how you can start:1. Demand public hearings in your communities where there is a nuke, sponsored either by your member of Congress or the NRC, to put the facts, risks and evacuation plans on the table. Insist that the critics as well as the proponents testify and cross-examine each other in front of you and the media.2. If you call yourself conservative, ask why nuclear power requires such huge amounts of your tax dollars and guarantees and can't buy adequate private insurance. If you have a small business that can't buy insurance because what you do is too risky, you don't stay in business.3. If you are an environmentalist, ask why nuclear power isn't required to meet a cost-efficient market test against investments in energy conservation and renewables.4. If you understand traffic congestion, ask for an actual real life evacuation drill for those living and working 10 miles around the plant (some scientists think it should be at least 25 miles) and watch the hemming and hawing from proponents of nuclear power.The people in northern Japan may lose their land, homes, relatives, and friends as a result of a dangerous technology designed simply to boil water. There are better ways to generate steam.Like the troubled Japanese nuclear plants, the Indian Point plants and the four plants at San Onofre and Diablo Canyon in southern California rest near earthquake faults. The seismologists concur that there is a 94% chance of a big earthquake in California within the next thirty years. Obama, Chu and the powerful nuke industry must not be allowed to force the American people to play Russian Roulette! Post Comment » America's Ancient Cave Art JOHN JEREMIAH SULLIVAN - Slate Here is an excellent summary of a little known, but important, part of North American history. Much of what most Americans believe about the First Americans -- theirs was a peaceful Utopian world -- is simplistic fantasy and nonsense. Just because these First Americans did not leave writing their cultures should not be seen as simple, and they should not be seen as a different order of people from other humans. As in so many other areas what is needed is the clarity of facts, whic! h is why I publish reports such as this one. Over the past few decades, in Tennessee, archaeologists have unearthed an elaborate caveart tradition thousands of years old. The pictures are found in dark zone sites-places where the Native American people who made the artwork did so at personal risk, crawling meters or, in some cases, miles underground with cane torches-as opposed to sites in the "twilight zone," speleologists' jargon for the stretch, just beyond the entry chamber, which is exposed to diffuse sunlight. A pair of local hobby cavers, friends who worked for the U.S. Forest Service, found the first of these sites in 1979. They'd been exploring an old root cellar and wriggled up into a higher passage. The walls were covered in a thin layer of clay sediment left there during long ago floods and maintained by the cave's unchanging temperature and humidity. The stuff was still soft. It look! ed at first as though someone had fingerpainted all over, maybe a child-the men debated even saying anything. But the older of them was a student of local history. He knew some of those images from looking at drawings of pots and shell ornaments that emerged from the fields around there: bird men, a dancing warrior figure, a snake with horns. Here were naturalistic animals, too: an owl and turtle. Some of the pictures seemed to have been first made and then ritually mutilated in some way, stabbed or beaten with a stick.That was the discovery of Mud Glyph Cave, which was reported all over the world and spawned a book and a National Geographic article. No one knew quite what to make of it at the time. The cave's "closest parallel," reported the Christian Science Monitor, "may be caves in the south of France which contain Ice Age art." A team of scholars converged on the site.The glyphs, they determined-by carbondating charcoal from halfburned slivers of cane-were roughly eight hundred years old and belonged to the Mississippian people, ancestors to many of today's Southeastern and Midwestern tribes. The imagery was classic Southeastern Ceremonial Complex (SECC), meaning it belonged to the vast but still dimly understood religious outbreak that swept the Eastern part of North America around 1200 A.D. We know something about the art from that period, having seen all the objects taken from graves by looters and archaeologists over the years: effigy bowls and pipes and spookyeyed, kneeling stone idols; carved gorgets worn by the elite. But these underground paintings were something new, an unknown mode of Mississippian cultural activity. The cave's perpetually damp walls had preserved, in the words of an iconographer who visited the site, an "artistic tradition which has left us few other traces."That was written twenty five years ago, and today there are more than seventy known darkzone cave sites east of the Mississippi, with new ones turning up every year. A handful of the sites contain only some markings or crosshatching (lusus Indorum was the antiquarian's term: the Indians' whimsy), but others are quite elaborate, much more so than Mud Glyph. Several are older, too. One of them, the oldest so far, was created around 4000 B.C. The sites range from Missouri to Virginia, and from Wisconsin to Florida, but the bulk lie in Middle Tennessee. Of those, the greater number are on the Cumberland Plateau, which runs at a southwest slant down the eastern part of the state, like a great wall dividing the Appalachians from the interior.The Plateau is positively worm eaten with caves. Pit caves, dome caves, big wide tourist caves, and caves that are just little cracks running back into the stone for a hundred feet-not even a decade ago, explorers announced the discovery of Rumbling Falls Cave, a fifteen mile (so far) system that includes a two hundred foot vertical drop and leads to a chamber they call the Rumble Room, in which you could build a small housing project. All of that is inside the Plateau and in the limestone that skirts its edges.We were flying along the top of it in a white truck. The archaeologist Jan Simek, whom I'd just met in a parking lot, was driving (Jan as in Jan van Eyck, not Jan as in Brady). He's a professor at the University of Tennessee who, for the past fifteen years, has led the work on the Unnamed Caves, as they're called to protect their locations. We were headed to Eleventh Unnamed. It was a clear day in late winter, so late it had started to look and feel like earliest spring.****Simek (pronounced SHIMick) is a thickchested guy in his fifties-bushy dark hair mixed with iron gray, sportsman's shades. I'd expected a European from the name, but he grew up in California. His Czechborn father was a Hollywood character actor, Vasek Simek: He played Soviet premiers, Russian chess players, ambiguously "foreign" scientists. Jan looks like him. His manner is one of friendly sarcasm. He makes fun of my sleek black notebook and offers to get me a waterproof one like his, the kind geologists use.Simek was unaware of the caves when he came to UT in 1984. Only a few sites had been uncovered at the time. His bestknown work, the research that built his career, was all in France-not in the celebrated art caves, but at Neanderthal habitation sites.Simek had heard talk of Mud Glyph, however-the book on the cave, edited by his colleague Faulkner, was coming out just as he arrived. When the task fell to him, as a new hire, of recruiting grad students for the TVA to use in its naturalresource surveys, he made a point of reminding them, before they went out, to check the walls of any caves they found. After years of doing this to no effect, some students burst into his office one evening, talking excitedly about a cave they'd seen, overlooking the Tennessee River, with a spider drawn on one of the walls inside. They competed to sketch it for him, how its body had hung upside down, with the eyes in front. Simek went to the shelf and pulled down a book. He spread it open to a picture of a Mississippian shell gorget with an all but identical spider in the center. "Did it look like this?" he asked.That was First Unnamed Cave, "still my heart cave," Simek says. When I visited it with him he showed me the spider. Also a strange, humanish figure, with its arms thrown back above its head and long flowing hair. First Unnamed happens to be the youngest of the Unnamed Caves. Its images date from around 1540. The Spanish had been in Florida for a few decades already, slaving. Epidemics were moving across the Southeast in great shattering waves. De Soto and his men came very near that cave in their travels, just at that time. The world of the people who made those glyphs, the Late Mississippian, was already coming apart.We turned onto a side road, then onto another, more overgrown one, then started hairpinning down into a valley. Only at the bottom, climbing out and gazing around, did I get a sense of what we'd descended into-it looked as if a giant had taken an ax and planted the blade a mile deep in the ground, then ripped it away. The forested walls went up, up, up on all sides. We started walking across the little narrow patchwork fields, the farm of the people who owned and protected this place. Jan had called them to say we were coming. Overhead was a wedge of blue sky, with storm clouds starting to mass at one end. Thunder filled the coves.We approached a grotto. A curving, amphitheater-like hillside went down to a basin. It was Edenic. "No diver has ever been able to get to the bottom of that thing," Jan said, indicating the blueblack pool of water. Frogs plashed into it at the sound or sight of us. We stepped sideways, following a half foot wide path through ferns and violet flocks, little white tube shaped flowers whose name I didn't know. Following a ledge around the pool, we reached the entrance.Jan struggled with the lock on the gate. It looked like a mean piece of metal. I wondered if they weren't overdoing it-that was before I'd heard all the stories of what some Tennesseans will do to get into caves they've been told not to enter, using dynamite, blowtorches, hitching their trucks to cave gates and attempting to pull them out of hillsides whole. Jan sent me back to the truck for motor oil, to lubricate the lock. I went gladly, jogging no faster than I had to back through that sanctuary, my pristine white caving helmet bouncing on my hip.****The gate open, we switched on our headlamps. The same silty runoff made it harder now to get into the cave. We squeezed through on our bellies. The mud had a melted Hershey's quality. It oozed through the zipper in my dollarstore coveralls. The squeeze got tight enough that, as I wriggled on my stomach, the ceiling was scraping my back. Jan said they'd been forced to dig a couple of people out.At last we came through and could stand, or stoop. I turned my head to move the beam up and down the wall: a light brown cave. Jan had a bigger, more powerful, battery powered light. He flashed it around."Stoke marks," he said, nodding at a spot on the wall. His line of sight led to a cluster of black dots, like a swarm of black flies that had been smashed all at once into the stone. You could find them throughout the cave. They marked places, Simek said, where the ancient cavers had "ashed" their river cane torches. The longer you went without doing that, the smokier it got.He stopped and waited for me to catch up. He was facing the wall."First image," he said, tightening his beam. "Double woodpeckers." Faint white lines etched into the limestone. The birds were instantly recognizable. One on top of the other.A conspicuous percentage of the caves, Simek said, had birds for their opening images."What does it mean?" I asked."We don't know," he said. I learned that this was his default answer to the question, What does it mean? He might then go on to give you a plausible and interesting theory, but only after saying, "We don't know." It wasn't grumpiness-it was a theoretical stance.Woodpeckers could be related to war, he said. In other Native American myths they carry the souls of the dead to the afterworld.We advanced. There were pips-a small brown kind of bat-hanging on the wall, wrapped in themselves. Condensation droplets on their wings shone in our lights and made the little creatures look jewel encrusted. Jan, kneeling down to peer at something lower on the wall, got one on his back. He asked me to brush it off. I took my helmet and tried to suggest it away-the bat detached and flew into the darkness.Jan went a few yards and then lay down on his back on a sort of embankment in the cave. I did likewise. We were both looking up. He scanned his light along a series of pictures. It felt instinctively correct to call it a panel-it had sequence, it was telling some kind of story. There was an ax or a tomahawk with a human face and a crested topknot, like a mohawk (the same topknot we'd just seen on the woodpeckers). Next to the ax perched a warrior eagle, with its wings spread, brandishing swords. And last a picture of a crown mace, a thing shaped like an elongated bishop in chess, meant to represent a symbolic weapon, possibly held by the chiefly elite during public rituals. It's a "type artifact" of the Mississippian sphere, meaning that, wherever you find it, you have the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex, or, as it used to be called (and still is by archaeologists when they think no one's listening), the Southern Death Cult. In this case the object ap! peared to be morphing into a bird of prey.What did it mean?"We don't know," Simek said. "What it is clearly about is transformation."Everything in it was turning into everything else.****When it comes to meaning, not everyone is as skeptical as Simek. Over the past decade a group of scholars, led by the archaeologist F. Kent Reilly in Texas, has been using a combination of historical records- nineteenthcentury ethnography, mainly-to work their way back into the Mississippian worldview, with its macabre warrior gods and monsters and belief in a threepart cosmos: the Upper World, This World, the Lower World. The SECC Working Group, as they are called, argues that more of the Mississippian culture survived into the historic period than has been allowed (Europeans met them, after all: the embers of Mississippian society weren't extinguished until the French sold the last Great Sun, chief of the Natchez, into slavery in 1731). Reilly and his colleagues have modeled the group explicitly on the Maya Hieroglyphic Workshop at the University of Texas, an epigraphers' seminar that helped decipher the Mayan glyphs, and so opened Mayan society (slight! ly) to our comprehension.In the North American case, however, we have no language to crack. Our most technically advanced Native American society, the High Mississippian-a culture that built mounds nearly equal in grandeur to the stone ruins in Mexico, but of earth, so they faded-left us nothing to read. That has always driven scholars of North American prehistory a little bit crazy. More than one crackpot "Mound Builder" theory revolved around a mysterious writing tablet that surfaced in an Indian mound, covered in Hebrew or Phoenician letters. There's even one nineteenth century thinker, the cracked Kentucky genius Constantine Rafinesque, who made real and universally recognized strides toward decoding the Mayan language and forged an otherwise nonexistent North American written language, the Lenape. He concocted a whole origin myth for the tribe.I met Kent Reilly in Chicago several years ago. He gave me a tour of the "Hero, Hawk, and Open Hand" exhibit at the Art Institute. It was the first truly representative display of Eastern Native American art ever staged. It included the major pieces-large statuary, Mica cutouts, human face pots from Arkansas-but even someone knowledgeable in the field might have been stunned by some of the lesser known artifacts: the effigy of a human thumb, taken from a two thousandyear old Hopewell site, or the so called Frog vessel, a red Mississippian bowl that is crawling with little naturalistic green frogs. The Working Group had shaped the exhibition's catalogue.Reilly described some of the group's achievements. Using intense motif analysis, two of its members identified an exotic looking geometrical shape, which appears on various Mississippian objects, as a butterfly. They matched the number of segmented dots on its uncoiling body-which you can see if you stare-to an actual species. Reexamining gorgets from the Etowah mound in Georgia, they noticed that the head, on a certain human headed serpent, appeared to be the same head that a falconwarrior was holding on another gorget. "We think we may have identified a new deity complex-based purely on artwork," Reilly said.Simek doesn't go in for that talk. He likes data. He likes "200 meters into the cave we found a pictograph of a dog, charcoal, oriented vertically," and so forth. He doesn't want to talk about whether the dog was leading dead souls along the spirit path-although dogs did that in more than one Southeastern religion. He doesn't like the "maybe" place where that leaves you. The societies investigated by those ethnographers had undergone immense shocks and disruptions since the Mississippian period, most obviously with the European Encounter, but even before that. High Mississippian culture fell apart just before the Spanish reached Florida, not just after as you'd expect, given the diseases and the massacres-it's a riddle of American archaeology. Simek simply didn't feel we could get back through the static of all that with anything like a scientific certainty."Corn, beans, and squash," said Reilly, when I ran Simek's criticisms by him. He was referring to the tedium of anthropology lab dry data. Meaning, as I took it: If they want to stick to the boring stuff, let them.This was not boring, though, whatever we were seeing. I lay there just staring at the panel, in the cave's cool atmosphere, which you hold in your skin as a physical memory if you grew up in Karst country like I did, southern Indiana, childhood trips to Wyandotte Cave, when they'd cut out the lights-"That is total darkness, kids"-and have you put your hand in front of your face, to make you see that you couldn't see it."My colleagues argue about, 'What is the SECC? What does it mean?' " Simek said."I bring them here. I mean, look at these things. This is the Southern Cult."****We moved forward. The next pictograph, Simek said, was an image that appears in several of the Unnamed Caves: the gruesome Toothy Mouth. A round, severed head with gore spilling out of the neck. Weeping eyes. A big pumpkin grin, probably meant to suggest the receded gums of decomposition. Simek said they tend to see these wherever there are burials. They had found one even in a Woodland cave-that's the period preceding the Mississippian, about which we know even less. But for at least a couple of thousand years, this picture on a cave wall in this country meant "bodies buried here."Simek had one graduate student who is Cherokee. A good archaeologist, Russ Townsend-he's now the "tribal historic preservation officer" for the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians. Townsend has worked with Jan on plenty of projects, but he has never gone into the caves. I asked him about it. "The Cherokee interpretation is that caves are not to be entered into lightly," he said, "that these must have been bad people to go that deep. That's where they took bad people to leave them. So they can lie on rock and not on the ground. It makes a lot of Cherokee uneasy. The lower world is where everything is mixed up and chaotic and bad. You wouldn't want to go to that place, where the connection between our world and the otherworld is that tenuous."We entered a large hall. The ceiling was very high, it looked a hundred feet high. It was smooth and pale gray. Simek shone his lamp up and arced it around slowly. "What do you see?" he said."Are those mud dauber nests?" I asked. That's what they looked like to me."The ceiling," he said, "is studded with three hundred globs of clay."I stared up with open mouth. I didn't have a good question for that one."We said the same thing," he said. "What were they doing?" So a researcher had climbed up and removed one of the globs and taken it back to the lab at UT. They sliced it open. Inside was the charred nubbin of a piece of river cane, like a cigarette filter. "We got a piece of cane about that big," Jan said, indicating his little finger. The Indians had jammed burning stalks of river cane into balls of clay and hurled them at the ceiling."They lit up this place like a birthday cake, man!" he said."Was it some kind of ceremony or something?""Who knows!" he said. "Maybe they were hunting bats.""What were they doing here?" I asked, as if asking no one."Minimally," he said, "making art, burying their dead, lighting it up like a Christmas tree. Maybe hunting bats."At the back of the cave we ascended a mud slope. There were two bare footprints side by side. Simek said they had shown casts of these to an orthopedic surgeon, without telling him what they were. The doctor said, "That person didn't wear shoes." The toes were splayed.At the top of the mud bank we saw a final image, the same as the first, but only one woodpecker this time. A charcoal pictograph covered in a transparent flowstone veneer, as if laminated. That was how old these things were. The stone had flowed over the bird, encasing it. This woodpecker was upright, as if working on a tree. Woodpeckers at the beginning, and a woodpecker here. What did it mean?"End of book," he said.****In Simek's office one day, he brought down a couple of matching brown nineteenthcenturylooking volumes. This was Garrick Mallery's Picture Writing of the American Indians, first edition, a treasure of his rockart library. He turned to a particular run of pages. Mallery didn't pay all that much attention to the East. None of the early writers on American rock art did. They liked the huge vivid panels out in the Western canyons. The cliff cities, in their ideal desert conditions, are there; you can visit them. Our cities are invisible.There were, however, a few famous Eastern sites. The Dighton Rock was the best known. Cotton Mather wrote about it; Bishop Berkeley went to see it. It's a big whaleshaped boulder in the Taunton River near Berkley, Massachusetts. Covered in twisty Native American petroglyphs. Jan showed me the pages in Mallery's book-I'd seen them in my paperback reprint, but these plates were glossy with rich blacks-on which the author had quite ingeniously reproduced more than two hundred years of renderings of this rock. He cropped them all, so that they were the same length and width, and then ran them down the pages in a row, chronologically. It was an historical portal; you could slip into it and get behind the eyes of the American mind for a minute. You could watch it change: in the beginning, the various artists had been trying to make the markings look like "hieroglyphic" writing they knew-Egyptian, Norse, or whatever it was. Or they turned them into! anachronistic modern things, a sailboat or a pilgrim. Only as the decades and centuries flipbook by do the lines untangle themselves, and you start to see human shapes, quadrupeds. Still we are far from any meaning. In fact, that's what has taken place. The eye lets go of the desire for meaning; the pictures emerge. Simek was showing me Mallery's pages by way of saying, It's dangerous to read something when you can't really read it. And we can't.Try to see it. That's hard enough.****We went west from Knoxville, toward the Plateau. The fields in Middle Tennessee in October were chilly and green, as if under frosted glass. We ate fastfood biscuits while Simek talked about our destination, Twelfth Unnamed Cave. "This one's really splendid," he said. There were more than three hundred images, some so tiny you had to squint.It wasn't just this site, either. There were a handful of caves (now there are more) in that area-Twelfth was one-that are similar to one another but unlike anything else they'd seen. Unlike anything anyone had seen. They were neither Woodland nor Mississippian in any familiar way, though their dates (around 1160, in this case) put them right at the Woodland/ Mississippian threshold.He suspected these particular caves were a holdover of some localized, regional Woodland culture, from before it was swept away or homogenized by the spread of the Death Cult.We drove bumping through a gate and straight into a field-another farm, another site that had been protected by discreet landowners. We geared up and walked across a stubbled field, adjusting our steps to miss clusters of cattle crap and white mushrooms. After a few hundred yards we started to trend downward, gently but noticeably. We were entering an ancient "sink," a place where a chamber in the limestone had broken through and left a depression. At the center of this big green bowl was a more severe pit, like a crater. Thick trees grew around it. We clambered down over some rubble.Jan saw muddy footprints. "Whose are these?"A floor cavity just inside the cave mouth: "That's fresh. That's potdiggers."There was a cola can on a rock above the pits. It was still warm. Simek picked it up and sniffed it, said, "Kerosene." They had heard his truck. They'd just run off.We entered the twilight zone; the sunlit world was now a gaping hole at our backs. Jan switched on the magic wand. He was different in this cave; he didn't talk much. When I asked him about it later, he said he'd made more mistakes in that cave than anywhere he'd ever worked, because for the first hour and a half he was totally freaked out. I let my eyes adjust to the wand light. I had been in four or five Unnamed Caves by then and was learning to look at cave walls differently, more patiently. I never got very good at it, but I could see what others had found.It was easy to see what had so impressed Simek about this place. You could look through any number of coffeetable books on prehistoric Native American art from the Southeast and see absolutely nothing that looked like these pictures. We saw birds, yes, but this seemed to be a sort of box bird-its square body was feathered. Now there were more of them.A sun glyph, just as the sunlight disappeared.Moving in, the creatures were changing. These weren't birds, but they were related to the birds; they seemed to emerge out of them; they were other box beings of some kind.Now we saw box persons in juxtaposition to more natural-looking humans. Once again the glyphs were exchanging imagery, echoing and rhyming with one another.The tunnels got lower, narrower. Our faces were inches from the cave walls. We encountered weird paddlehanded creatures with long wavy arms. I began to feel that I was inside a hallucination, not that I was hallucinating myself-I was working very hard, in that cramped space, to write down Jan's few cryptic remarks-but that I was experiencing someone else's dream, which had been engineered for me, or rather not for me but for some other, very different people to progress through. It may have been shamanic. There's a spring in that cave, Simek said, that can start to sound like voices, after you've been in there for a while."It's composed like a mural," he said. He thought it might be an origin myth, or a way of indoctrinating the young into the religion of the tribe. I looked at him. For once he seemed as overwhelmed as I generally felt in the Unnamed Caves. He was still saying, "We don't know," but now it was coming at the end rather than the beginning of his riffs.At one place in the tunnel, there was a birthing scene. "A triptych," Simek said. Box person on the left, with a square head and long alien arms. She has concentric circles in her belly. Distended labia. Appearing to deliver a tiny human being. She's holding hands with a more conventional anthropomorphic figure.Not far off the floor, in a close tunnel, a dancing man with some kind of head regalia and a huge erect penis.And now we arrived at the panel of birds. Tiny birds, each about the size of a silver dollar. Turkey. Hawk. At least one small songbird. Very finely etched into the limestone with a flint tool. Another cave that began and ended in birds.Outside and resting before the hike back to the truck, Simek said, "Think about it. What was there none of in that cave?"I had no answer. Hadn't there been everything in that cave?"Out of more than three hundred images, there wasn't a single weapon anywhere," he said. "We have here an early Mississippian art in which there are no images of violence, where the birds are pure birds, not linked to war- they're in flight. Even the human figures are not obviously warriors."Also there had been women and sex in that cave. I thought about it. No women and sex in any of the other caves."The oldtime religion," Jan said.****Since I stopped following Simek and the CART crew, they've found several more sites on or next to the Plateau that seem to contain imagery from this previously unknown tradition. Some of them are even further out, stylistically. One is full of those little naturalistic birds, hundreds of petroglyphs, turkeycocks flying everywhere. In another cave they found, carved into a ceiling, a humanlike figure. His torso is a bent rectangle with Xs inside. His arms are scarecrowy and come off at ninetydegree angles. He has a round head with rabbit ears sticking out of it. His feet have long flowy toes, vaguely reminiscent of the paddle hands back at Twelfth Unnamed.The sun is coming out of his belly. "That's the most succinct way to say it," Jan told me. "The sun is coming out of his belly."One night on the phone he said they'd found a site-it was just outside Knoxville, not far from his house-with a hunting scene in it, a charcoal darkzone pictograph of a man hunting a deer. They extracted a microflake of carbon. The date came back: six thousand years old. They didn't believe it. Sometimes the organic material left over in the limestone, the proof of its biological origins (limestone is essentially prehistoric shell), will leach out and contaminate the samples. They tested the stone. No such material.The weapon the man in the picture is holding may be a spear. But when you throw a spear, you keep your nonthrowing arm in the air. This person has his offarm down at his side. That's what you do when you throw an atlatl, the spearflinging weapon that preceded the bow and arrow.There survive, as far as I can determine, no other images of people using atlatls, anywhere in the world, New or Old. This would be the only one. A weapon that kept our species in meat for thirty thousand years and has something to do with our dominance on the planet. The hunter who holds it is just releasing the missile from its shaft.Two thousand years ago a Woodland explorer, a contemporary of the artists who made those intricate panels of birds, might have passed this little picture-farther from his own time even than he is from ours-and wondered who made it, or what it meant. Post Comment » The SchwartzReport is a daily publication provided free of charge by schwartzreport.netPortions Copyright 2001 - 2011 by Nemoseen Media Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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