I finished re-reading John Tanner’s autiobiography today. I’ve talked about this book over at The Spokesrider (“John Tanner and Missionaries“, “Of Moose and Mink“) but this time I want to make a political point so I’ll do it here.
Tanner seems to have spent nearly 30 years living with the Indians (as he used to put it). He was captured at about age 9, and tried going back to live with the white people in 1817 at age 38. Before that he had always had the idea that he would go back to live with the white people sometime and get married, but he kept putting it off. He became Ojibwe in almost all respects and married an Ojibwe woman (two of them, actually, though only one at a time). He developed into an excellent hunter, trapper, and fighter.
He seemed to have a clue that it was going to be difficult to go back to the white people, because he already knew the life of working for a trader (as he was often invited to do) would be boring in comparison to living by the hunt. When he finally did go back to meet his white relatives, he found it awkward. He found he could not live their way, within four walls and with the drudgery their lives entailed. He ended up going back to the north.
His first trip back was ostensibly to get his children. His white brother wanted to go with him, but Tanner knew it would never work. They would need to spend the winter there, and he knew his brother could not survive the hardships, the constant threat of starvation, and the effort it took to live through a winter the way the Ojibwe did.
Yet that was the life he grew accustomed to and the life he preferred to live for many years. And the society he preferred was that of his Indian relatives, even though he ran into an occasional troublesome person who resented him for being a chemokoman (one of the “Long Knives”). Some of those even tried to kill him, but to most people the fact that he was white was not particularly relevant.
Here is a bit from the introduction to the book, written by Louise Erdrich, herself a descendant of that Ojibwe way of life:
The most arresting character in the drama of Tanner’s life is Net-no-kwa, matriarch of the small clan group into which he is adopted. Charismatic and hilarious, Net-no-kwa is a woman of courage, a prophetic dreamer who occasionally drinks to excess. Although at first the protectress and guardian of young Tanner, his adopted mother in time becomes the proud beneficiary of his adult hunting skills. Soon there develops between the two a joking relationship based upon genuine fondness and respect. Tanner’s loyalties run deep, and he obviously loves, cares for, and admires Net-no-kwa.”
That phrase, “Tanner’s loyalties run deep,” captures a lot of what’s in the book.
His book doesn’t come out and say so, but I got the impression that one factor that drove him to finally go back to the white people was his health. As he grew older, he had periods of sickness that made it difficult for him to provide for his family.
In other words, health care reform finally defeated him.
That seems to be the way it works.
My dearly beloved grandfather refused for many years to accept Social Security. It was not that he had money. He couldn’t afford a car and lived in a leaky building with no running water and no indoor plumbing. His home was a shack behind his old, unpainted general store building in a place in North Dakota that lost its Post Office back in the 1950s. (I wish he was still living so I could go back and stay with him a while, like I did a few times when I was a young kid. He lived with us for a few years when I was in grad school, and died in 1980.) Besides spending a lot of time with his grandchildren, he also put a lot of effort into railing against Communism. But he had voted for the populist William Jennings Bryan when he was first old enough to vote, and didn’t have much time for businessmen who thought only of their pocketbooks, as he put it.
What finally broke him down on the Social Security issue was an illness that required hospitalization — probably around 1960 when I was 12 years old — give or take. The hospital was going to cost money. And what else was he supposed to do? We wouldn’t have let him go off on an ice floe, as is said to have been the practice in some cultures, and Christian duty would not permit it anyway. He didn’t want to become a burden to his children, who didn’t have much money, either. So he broke down and accepted the Social Security, even though he had been opposed to that system and every other aspect of FDR’s New Deal.
The welfare state did not succeed in buying his political views with the checks it sent him, but ever since that event I’ve been opposed to welfare pimps who try to accomplish just that.
We’re now going through another round of what happened to John Tanner and my grandfather. This week’s election promises to do away with the remnants of our society of free markets and free people. The health care crisis has pretty well softened people up for it. There are no pretty solutions for that one. Yes, the economic meltdown had something to do with it, too, but that problem is solvable if we could get the news media and leftwingers to quit lying about their role in causing it. Health care is not so easily dealt with. Not that health care will be better under the nanny state, any more than it was for John Tanner when he went to live in the more regimented society of his white relatives. But there will be some semblance of security that we’ll get in return for our loss of freedom.
It’s not necessarily the case that Obama and his entourage will turn us into a version of the Soviet Union. No, it will probably be worse than that. They’re likely to turn our country into a hellhole like Sweden or Germany — a nice society that will be death to the more modern counterparts of John Tanner who can’t live under that type of drudgery and orderliness. It will be a society that will support more human biomass and which will produce more worker bees — perhaps even contented worker bees. But it won’t support life — the life of meaningful choices (i.e. terrifying choices) and intense personal relationships that thereby result.
