Is This What We Cleared Out the Native Americans For?
Imagine what kinds of animals and people used to tread over this land, and now look what we’ve become: a bunch of headbangers who have mastered the art of swiftly bending at the waist and threatening to smash our heads into the soil.
Actually, I don’t mean any harm to these boys. The band is called Scar The Surface, and I dig their metal music. The guitars build an effective wall of melodious, pounding static. The screaming vocals are varied and intriguing. My music critic friend, Dee-O would cringe, but mostly because after his out-of-body experience, earthly music sounds too hollow and too tinny for him. But I’m a fan of this. It’s audio caffeine. It’s fuel for writing.
In the mood for a good…something
I did think, however, of the incongruity of playing electronic instruments in the prairie to create hard-hitting music. The electric guitars, without a power source, would have only made a lot of twanging noises. The drums would have made a lot of racket. An untimely thunderstorm could have put the whole setup out of commission.
The video did put me in the mood for a good pow-wow. I’ve seen one before, in a city, on cement, and that was incongruous as well. Authentic Indians wearing brightly colored headdresses and light brown leather outfits, standing around in a parking lot outside of the community center, and smoking cigarettes. The sick yellow color of McDonald’s hamburger wrappers fluttering against a nearby fence.
It just seems like people in this country can’t find the proper environment to carry out their passions.
What if…
Imagine if the various Indian tribes scattered throughout what we now called the United States of America had once banded together, conjured every last ounce of god-force from the heavens, every iota of psychic and spiritual energy within each man, woman, and child, then lashed it all to the broad back of mother nature, and whipped up an impenetrable, supernatural barrier of energy in the form of a dome, from sea to shining sea, for the rest of human existence.
No 1776. No New York City. No Los Angeles. No garbage. No Disneyland. No Hollywood. No Brad Pitt (nothing against him, I like his satire). No dollar bills.
Just pristine prairie and forests and buffalo herds and soaring bald eagles and clean, clean air, and sparkling water, and a thriving ecosystem. Pow-wows in their natural habitats. Spirits of sun, moon, earth, and sky flickering into physical existence. Natural food grown rich in nutrients from fecund soil. Harmonious connection between the body, mind, and soul. Genuine community. Death just a passage. No more petty fears.
And all the European buccaneers clambering over that enormous bubble shield, squeezing knife blades between their crooked, rotting teeth, and peering down at the vast open spaces of virgin land, and the occasional Indian tribe walking stiff and straight, and carrying their supplies on their backs as they follow the roaming buffalo herd.
Imagine the land that could be tilled to grow tobacco and cotton and corn and hemp! the buccaneers would think. Imagine the fat veins of gold that could be mined and sold. The infinite bison pelts! The unending lumber from the forests! But alas, to no avail, there was no way in. Nothing could penetrate that shimmering dome. Everything beneath was for observational purposes, only.
Just a giant, transparent shield like an iridescent bubble around an inch of grass on an acre of lawn, an acre of lawn on a farmstead, situated in a rural county, marked off in the corner of a state, with its boundaries sketched into the middle of a nation, recognized as the border of a continent, stuck tight to the side of a planet, rotating near the center of a solar system, simply a string of lights in a galaxy, just a smear of light in the universe, held by an unmovable mover.
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