I’ve been running into Indians a lot lately. Not subcontinent Indians, the American ones. Not actual American Indians, either. Let me explain. A couple of weeks ago, I was going through a roll of nickels, and I found one of the old-timey Indian head variety. The date on that particular coin is completely obliterated, which happened a lot due to the coin design being prone to erosion.
Also recently, due to various TV commercials and promos for programs, I ended up, in a one-week period, explaining to the same person, on three different occasions, about:
1. the significance of the “Keep America Clean” commercials that ended with a silent Indian with a silent tear running down his face as he saw how despoiled the land had become.
2. the smothering scene at the end of the movie based on Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
3. an explanation (and assembly) of the ridiculously juvenile dirty joke that is available to anyone with a box of Land O’ Lakes butter, a pair of scissors, and the mindset of a 12-year-old boy. The, uh, novelty involves the package design of Land O’ Lakes butter: an infinite loop, each iteration at a smaller scale, of an Indian woman holding a box of Land O’ Lakes butter with an image of an Indian woman holding a box of Land O’ Lakes butter with an image of an Indian woman holding a box of Land O’ Lakes butter … .)
These three items were enough Indian-themed material to trigger that little thing in my brain that usually jams a song lyric into my head. I am amazed at the number of Indian-themed items that have been coming to mind for no reason: the Shawmut Bank logo, Go-Go Gophers, the Hekawi from F Troop, Apache Chief from the Superfriends, John Redcorn from King of the Hill, Chakotay from Star Trek: Voyager, the episode of Alice where Larry Hovis (Carter from Hogan’s Heroes) is playing Vera’s boyfriend and mentions that he is part American Indian, the Mazzola Corn Goodness Woman (“My people call it maize.”), all the Indian references in the Nicholson-Duvall version of The Shining, that episode of Star Trek where Kirk loses his memory on the planet populated by various Indian tribes.
Finally, it all came to a head. Last week, AMC wrapped up the current season of Hell on Wheels. The show is one of those great ensemble dramas AMC cranks out with frightening regularity. (A complete aside: Christopher Heyerdahl’s absolutely flawless performance is the finest supporting role this year. You’ll never look at a Norwegian the same way again.) The overarching plot of the series is the arrival of the railroad to the American West right after the Civil War.
Buried in with the various subplots is one about the end of the American Indians as a dominant culture. As a piece of drama, the subplot unfolds with a superbly just-right touch. It’s not too heavy, it’s not too marginal. Not too preachy, not too casual. And for the audience, it’s an odd bit of time travel. We all know what’s coming, and it’s such a sad thing to contemplate. Not so much for the individual Indians in the story because they could (possibly) survive, but their culture is ending. The railroad dragged the Indians to the end of the line, at least as a dominant set of cultures in America.
About 10 minutes from the end of the episode, the penny (the nickel?) finally dropped, and the thing my subconscious was trying to point out clawed its way to center stage: The Middle Class is now in the position the Indians were in 150 years ago. The end is coming for us, just as it came for the Indians. A small number of the Middle Class will survive, but the culture, all the things that made the Middle Class what it was will be swept away.
The question has frequently been raised: What will happen with the OWSers? How will the movement resolve? Will it succeed? You need go no further than how the American Indians were treated by the politicians.
One and a half centuries later isn’t that long. I can picture a 90-year-old Indian, sitting in a rocking chair, with a group of children. The old person was a child of 10 back in 1860 and would have lived through it all, arriving at 1940 at the age of 90. That old man or woman could have had ample time to tell the whole story to those children, some of whom would have been 10 years old themselves. Those theoretical children would now be 82. I wonder what sort of stories they could tell, if they would cast their memories back to their childhoods. It’s going to be the same sort of thing for the Middle Class. In a few decades, those few of us who make it to 90 will gesture the children over to us, and we’ll tell them stories. “When I was your age, I already knew that I would go to college. Back then, many people, not just the rich, went to college. And there were national immunization programs. No one got polio when I was a boy. And we had supermarkets, those are places where people would walk in, and there would be thousands, no, honestly, thousands of kinds of foods. Cookies, and ice cream, and fresh fruits and vegetables. I know, you all think I’ve lost my marbles but most people in the Middle Class could go to the dentist. People kept their teeth a long, long time.”
Wikipedia has a jim-dandy entry (none of which I can vouch for the veracity of, but it’s free, and almost no one got paid for it, so what’s not to like?) that applies: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupation_of_Alcatraz
If you still can’t figure out how it’s going to end for the Middle Class if we don’t wake up, that should help you connect the dots. I wonder what the nickels will look like in 150 years. Perhaps Ted can draw us all a picture.
