Owning a Piece of the Rock

The other day while driving through a residential neighborhood, I noticed the many “for sale” signs. I got to thinking about land ownership and what that entails. One can claim mineral and water rights, and even airspace to a point. How far down into the dirt does one “own?” Does one’s 50 x 100-foot section of land continue in diminishing size to a single point at the earth’s core? A jet can fly a few thousand feet above my house, but my neighbor can’t build a bridge over my backyard. Just how far up is “mine?” I thought about real estate, owning a piece of the rock, landowners, and landlords. Aren’t we all truly just squatters?

Chief Seattle never would have professed to owning a single pebble of the earth. He felt he was merely a visitor, a guest, the relative from out-of-town who must make his bed and keep the sink clean lest he not be asked back. Chief Seattle never laid claim to a single stream, lake, or bay. He may have drunk from them, bathed in them, or traveled on them with his canoe, but he never in a million moons considered a single drop to be his. Ownership was not his thing. The word “deed” was not even in his vocabulary unless it was preceded by the word “good.” The chief was the tenant, not the landlord. He thanked the great Mother Earth for the privilege of his tenancy. He asked for her permission to fish her waters and harvest her ground. The good chief blessed the life of the deer he was about to kill, and gratefully used every part of the animal. The deer became an extension of the man, cloaking his body and wrapping the leader’s aura with its own.

In contrast, consider Western Civilization (make note of the root word “civil”), which largely consists of plunderers, scoundrels, murderers, thieves, rapists, the greedy, the self-centered, self-righteous, wasteful, slothful—not to mention self-serving, back-stabbing liars and cheats. Western Civilization never dreamed of asking anyone or anything for permission to move in; it just took for itself. Its history is one big land grab. In “discovering” America, a queen-pleasing, party-crashing Spaniard sailed into a neighborhood much older than his own and planted his flag. It’s as though he looked over his backyard fence for the very first time and saw more houses, except that this fence happened to be the Atlantic Ocean, and all the rooftops belonged to the Iroquois, Kwakiutl, Shawnee, Nez Percé, Paiute, Seminole, Zuni, Massachusett, Cherokee, Arapaho, Haida, Okanogan, Tuscarora, Shoshone, Winnebago, Sioux, Chickasaw, Kickapoo, Navajo, Hopi, Apache, Susquehanna…. Columbus claimed the “New World” for Spain, took some “heathens” back as house keepers for Isabella, and handed her the deed.

The history of Western Civilization is ultimately known for two things: blood shed in the name of religion, and blood shed in the name of real estate. My god is better than your god: off with your head. You’re on my land: off with your head—no matter that you have lived on this land for the last three-thousand years, I’m moving in. Mine. These are now my harbors, my rivers, valleys, mountains, and fruited plains from sea to shining sea, including the twelve-mile limit. This land is now mine to build cities up0n, to pollute, to strip-mine, to burn, and to herd indigenous peoples (such as Chief Seattle and all the other “heathens”) off to reserved areas of undesirable, barren dirt—until I discover that there is oil underneath that dirt, in which case I’ll relocate the heathens to another “reserved area.” In the meantime I’ll create the Bureau of Indian Affairs to keep an eye on them, tax them, and deny them benefits while I go on sucking the oil out of the land, ripping up coal, stripping the forests, paving the planet, and wiring the landscape with telephone poles and power lines. I’ll build high rises, garbage dumps, factories, suburbs, malls, parking lots, and sports arenas. Mine—all mine. This is my land and I have a piece of paper to prove it: paper that is made from trees I cut down (my trees now) and No, I didn’t ask permission because they are mine to cut.

Western Civilization, a gas-guzzling, land-raping, consumer-driven society is now the new landlord of North America. It sprawls across the continent, squashing the life out of every person, plant, and animal that preceded it. Chief Seattle never collected rent. He never slit his neighbor’s throat and raped and murdered his neighbor’s wife so that he could move into their condo. Even if those thoughts were to enter his head, he would certainly have first asked permission. Who in this world today is asking permission? Does the phrase “May I” even exist in the corporate vocabulary? The Trumps, Rockefellers, and Helmslys of the world, along with the CEO’s of Coca Cola, Microsoft, and Disney believe in “Me first,” “I am Number One,” “Outa my way,” and “The one who dies with the most, wins.” All they are—all civilization is—is one big bad tenant squatting on the face of the earth, leaving gouges in the furniture, breaking everything it comes in contact with, and not paying the rent. Earth hasn’t gotten a dime, sou, or ruble out of civilization yet, and someday this tenant from Hell, this freeloader without even a lease in his hip pocket, will be evicted big time by the supreme landlord of us all: Mother Earth. And remember, never piss-off a woman.

© 2001 Stuart Vail

Walls

It would be hard to imagine that earthquakes and trumpets could have something in common, but historically, they do. Whereas the effect of quakes is well known, according to the Bible the walls of Jericho were not victims of seismic activity: it took trumpets to fell those ramparts—a wall of sound to level a wall of stone. Never underestimate the power of a Jewish brass band. But I digress—“walls” is the topic. Mankind has spent the greater part of history building, maintaining, repairing, destroying, and rebuilding walls. Man has built walls around walls, as with the curtain walls around the keep in medieval castles, or the multi-layered temples of the Maya. There are walls that tower to unscalable heights, and “walls” that plunge to dangerous depths, such as moats, deep trenches, or even canyons. Walls keep out the unwanted: enemies, strangers, wild animals, the weather, the sea, in-laws….

Walls can be made of stone, wood, concrete, bamboo, barbed wire, water, distance, time, zip code, and attitude. Perhaps it is the last of these that is the most impenetrable: the wall that man chooses to put between him and the rest of the world. Walls keep out the foreign, the different, the unknown, the daring. With his attitude, man walls-out acceptance, love, understanding, tolerance, and forgiveness. His insecurities are the powerful building blocks of his complex system of walls. He locks his gates against sex, racial differences, emotions, accountability, love, innovation, and religion. Walls of hate are more impenetrable than those of the thickest Dover stone. The chilly fortresses of the Middle Ages were by far more accommodating than today’s dungeons of bigotry. The Great Wall of China pales before the barricades of White America. Where are the trumpets when we really need them?

Upon learning I was a musician, a shop owner in Boston tried to tell me of a famous trumpet player he had once seen in a hotel lobby. He couldn’t remember the name, but the only clue he could give was that the man was a “spear chucker.” Trying to ignore the racial slur I searched my mind for all the black trumpet players I could think of. No one I suggested was the right person, so the shop owner turned to his sixteen-year-old daughter for help and said, “You remember, the spear chucker.” After about ten minutes we finally determined that the musician in question turned out to be none other than Duke Ellington! Never mind that the shop owner had the instrument wrong, he was unable to see past his bigotry to acknowledge anything other than skin color. Poor Duke. For all of his achievements, his musical innovations, his vast output of recordings, his awards, and his incalculable influence on music and musicians to come, he couldn’t earn a label in this person’s mind other than “spear chucker.”

At least the Israelites were able to render Jericho impotent with a few blasts of the lip. A couple of high “C’s” and the walls were history. The Duke had a more formidable problem. He wasn’t dealing with inanimate stone. His legions of scales, armies of improvisations, and battalions of chord progressions—not to mention one hot band— were not able to make a mere pinhole in the shop owner’s dike. The bigot was holed-in for the duration. The only thing that will eventually smoke him out is the grave—death by natural causes, mind you, for killing a man because of his beliefs is not the answer. Killing the animal would just make ourselves animals (and that is an insult to animals).

An alternative would be for the man’s daughter to marry a black man. Now, wouldn’t that be poetic justice? Pity the poor son-in-law, though. This is all highly improbable, however, in light of the fact that the term “spear chucker” was in the daughter’s vocabulary to begin with. She was doomed from the start. Raised in that household, she never had a chance. It’s no wonder that racism continues to breed. It begins at home. The impressionable young adopt the white-sheet mentalities and hangman’s-noose attitudes of their parents. They come into this world with a built-in arsenal of hate. The foundations of their walls are laid at birth and the blocks firmly in place before they even know how to ride a tricycle.

The deepest insecurities build the strongest walls. The weaker the character, the harder the stone. Again I ask, where are the trumpets when we so desperately need them? The fanfares of Martin Luther King were silenced by an assassin’s bullet, yet the same method toppled the bigotry of George Wallace. What good is a legacy of hate? What can possibly come of it other than rampant anarchy and destruction? Is that any climate in which to raise our children?

We need to expand the music programs in schools, and teach everyone to play an instrument. Imagine if every person on the planet were a jazz musician. Imagine if we were all playing in time, with no time for guns. Then, King’s “mountain top” music would truly live on, as would that of Duke, Bird, Trane, Prez, Diz, and the Count. Play on, sweet trumpets. Never stop, and that little bit of “Jericho” in all of us will soon vanish; for in your music lies the power to temper, to heal, and to unite.

© 2002 Stuart Vail