Beasts of the Southern Wild

The opening scenes of Beasts of the Southern Wild introduce us to Hushpuppy, the cutest 6 year old that ever lived, and the harsh environment of rural poverty in which she is being raised. I say “raised” rather than the proper southern “reared” because Hushpuppy’s daddy, Wink, while he loves her profoundly, has no idea how to be a father. It’s not clear that he would have any idea how to be a father even if he weren’t an alcoholic, and, as it transpires, seriously ill.

John wanted to see Beasts of the Southern Wild because it was filmed nearby in Terrebonne Parish. “Terrebonne” means “beautiful earth” and the marshy landscape is starkly beautiful, and unforgiving. Hushpuppy, her dad and their neighbors live outside the levee that protects the parish from floods, on an island called “The Bathtub”. The name is a conceit of the movie, but a real island, Isle de Jean Charles, inspired it. Isle de Jean Charles is disappearing into the rising waters of Terrebone Bay.

Hushpuppy is going to school of sorts, and is being taught about global warming and its effects in her teacher’s inimitable style. (At least I hope it is inimitable. Lord knows it would have got me fired.) She also learns about cave people and the extinct aurochs, which Hushpuppy imagines coming to life as the global ice caps melt. The aurochs comes to figure more and more in her imagination and in the movie, the “beasts of the southern wild” that represent the real-life troubles that threaten to overwhelm her just as floodwaters threaten to take away her home.

At home, her living situation is, to put it mildly, unusual. She has her own house, actually a broken down trailer, next door to her daddy’s, but separate from him. Wink disappears for a few days without leaving any provision for her care, and Hushpuppy fends for herself while reflecting stolidly that “Children with no mommy and no daddy have to live in the woods and steal underwear” and “If Daddy doesn’t come back soon I’m going to have to eat my pets.” When he returns, a storm is moving in. Wink and a few neighbors ride out the storm rather than fleeing, and while at first they are able to join forces to find food and shelter, the reality of the effects of salt water on the local flora and fauna forces them to take desperate measures, which in turn bring them to the attention of the world inside the levee.

That world does not represent rescue for Hushpuppy, however, and neither does the woman she sets off to find who may or may not be her mother. Finally she returns to her world to face the reality of her father’s impending death. In a powerful scene, she literally looks her fears in the eye and says, “You’re my friend, sort of”. 

But then, the aurochs that haunts her imaginings is the least scary thing about this movie. 

Quvenzhané Wallis is the cutest child actor ever, but she is playing a six year old. I am tired of movies that feature precocious children, children who manage to have skills and philosophies at 6 that most of us did not have at 25. All over the world there are real six year olds who feel fear and confusion at parental neglect and abandonment, who feel deprived by poverty and who need comfort for their fears. These children are not as articulate and philosophical as movie tykes, but they are lovable and engaging, and they deserve to have their stories told. Maybe the people who make movies should try that some time.

Subscribe Later

A warning notice from my virus software keeps popping up on my computer. No, it is not a warning about some virus that is munching its way through my files in preparation for grabbing my address book and launching itself at all my friends and family. The warning advises me that my virus software subscription is about to expire.

To dismiss the warning notice, I have to select one of three choices: one takes me to their web page to sign up for another year, another says, “I have a subscription key” and takes me to the software itself to use said key, and the third is “remind me later”. There is no, “I don’t want to renew your software” option. The “later” in remind me later is not something reasonable, like a week or so from now, it’s “later” as in “whenever my computer wakes up from sleep mode”.

Last year I tried to disable the reminder feature. In consultation with my son, who knows his Macs, I deleted several preference files, to no effect. I decided to wait until the subscription expired, taking the reminder notice with it. The subscription expired. Weeks later, the notice still kept popping up. 

I finally renewed the software at the request of a group I email links to frequently, because they complained that they were getting buggy links from somewhere and wanted all of us who sent them to make sure our submissions were virus free.

I think I am going to need to contact the company to find out if there is any way to get rid of the notice. My first question is going to be, why do I want to renew a subscription to virus software that reminds me so much of a virus?

Plague

A recent post on thenewcivilrightsmovement.com about how Bryan Fischer of The American Family Association denies that HIV causes AIDS, led me to think about how AIDS got identified as a “gay disease” to begin with.

According to author Nathan Wolf in his book The Viral Storm, 

The history of HIV begins with a relatively simple ecological interaction - the hunting of chimpanzees by monkeys in central Africa. While people normally think about the origins of HIV occurring sometime in the 1980’s, the story actually begins about 8 million years ago when our ape ancestors began to hunt.
More precisely, the story of HIV begins with two species of monkeys, the red-capped mangabey and the greater spot-nosed guenon of central Africa.They hardly seem like the villains at the center of the global AIDS pandemic, yet without them this pandemic would never have occurred. . . One thing these monkeys share is that they are naturally infected with SIV, the simian immunodeficiency virus. Each monkey has its own particular variant of this virus, something it and its ancestors have probably lived with for millions of years. Another thing these monkeys have in common is that chimpanzees find them very tasty.

He goes on to say, 

No matter what the particular order of cross-species jumps, at some moment a chimpanzee became infected with both the guenon virus and the mangabey virus. The two viruses recombined to create an entirely new mosaic variant, neither mangabey virus nor guenon virus.
. . .The virus, now known to harm chimpanzees, would persist in chimpanzee populations for many years before it would jump from chimpanzees to humans sometime in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century. And it all started because chimpanzees hunt.

 Wolf has a lot to say about AIDS, since The Viral Storm is about pandemics, and what aspects of human life and technology allow them to spread. Here’s a section about the first known AIDS patient:

The earliest historical HIV samples date from 1959 and 1960, twenty years before AIDS was even recognized as a disease. In an amazing piece of viral detective work, evolutionary virologist Michael Wirobey and his colleagues managed to analyze a virus from a specimen of a lymph node from a woman in Leopoldville, Congo (now Kinshasa, DRC).
The lymph node had been embedded in wax for over forty-five years. By comparing the genetic sequence of the virus they found in the specimen with other strains from humans and chimpanzees, they were able to attach rough dates for the first ancestor of the human virus. While the genetic techniques they used cannot pinpoint dates closer than a few decades, they concluded that the virus split from the lineage sometime around 1900 and certainly before 1930. They also concluded that by the time the woman in Leopoldville became infected with HIV in 1959 there was already a significant amount of genetic diversty of HIV in Kinshasa, suggesting that the epidemic had already established itself there.

Wolf goes on to talk about why it took medical researchers so long to recognize AIDS as a disease, and then about the social changes that occurred in central Africa that led to the spread of the disease:

In 1892 steamship service began from Kinshasa to Kisangani in the very heart of the central African forest. The steamship service connected populations that had been largely separated, creating potential for viruses that might previously have gone extinct in local isolated populations to reach the growing urban centers. In addition, the French initiated the construction of railroads, which, like shipping and road lines, connect populations. This produced another mechanism for viruses to spread from remote regions to urban centers, effectively providing a larger population size of hosts for a spreading virus.
. . . Large groups of men were conscripted, often forcefully, to build railroads.Moore and his colleagues note that the labor camps were populated mostly by men, a condition that dramatically favors transmission of sexually transmitted viruses like HIV. . .

 It's much harder to see AIDS as "the gay plague" if you look at the entire history of the crossover of AIDS from monkeys to chimps to humans and not just at the first cases in the US. It's a fluke that the first person to transmit AIDS from Africa to the US was a gay male. Even if AIDS had never made it across the ocean from Africa, it would still be ravaging the African continent, killing women and children as well as men (as it does here).Whatever Bryan Fischer’s narrative would have been then, I doubt he would have blamed colonialism or hunting the way he blames homosexuality for causing the disease. He might even have been willing to accept that this disease, like many other diseases,  is caused by a virus. 

By the Sea, By the Sea

I grew up on Long Island. Long Island is 118 miles long and 23 miles wide at its widest point, which means that you are never more than 11.5 miles from the ocean or the sound. We lived a walkable distance from a small beach and about an hour’s drive or less from Jones Beach, and as I may have mentioned before, Grandpa F had a summer home on the water. So even though I was in college before I learned to swim, I love going to the beach.

The problem is, I live in Louisiana. Louisiana has 397 miles of coastline, so you would think we’d have lots of large, lovely beaches the way Texas, Mississippi and Florida do. Think again.

Louisiana also has the Mississippi River. The river has spent eons picking up dirt from further north and dumping it out in the Gulf of Mexico. That means that Louisiana has a highly irregular, marshy coastline that is wonderful for fishing and boating but not so much for swimming. If you look at the map here

you can see how irregular the Louisiana coastline is compared to the area to the upper right, which is Mississippi, and how much further it projects out into the Gulf.

So going to the beach if you live in Louisiana is a bit of a project. In the southwestern part of the state, near the Texas border, the coastline is more regular and there is a stretch known as “the Cajun Riviera”. The largest barrier island, Grand Isle, has a state park with a stretch of public beach, but it’s over 3 hours away through one of the country’s most notorious speed traps. The nearest beach to us is at Cypremort Point, over 2 hours away and in the vicinity of Avery Island. In fact, to get to it, you pass another salt dome, Weeks Island, part of which is used for part of the strategic oil reserve and part of which is mined by Morton Salt.

Cypremort Point State Park is a small stretch of land on Vermilion Bay, and the beach is miniscule. You can probably walk the entire length of it in five minutes. If “beach” to you means beach resorts with parasailing, beachside restaurants and bars, tacky little souvenir shops where you can buy all the stuff you forgot to pack, and a place to buy an ice cream cone, this is not that place. To find a restaurant or convenience store, you need to drive a half hour in one direction or another to New Iberia or Jeannerette. There is no life guard and a lot of the time you can’t go in the water due to high bacterial levels. (Well, they post warnings. People go in anyway.)

The same 2 hour or so drive can take you to Mississippi, and before casino gambling was legalized in Mississippi, that’s what we used to do. Now that casinos are up and down the beach, it isn’t as pleasant for us as it used to be. So if we want the beach life, it means an overnight trip further along the coast, either east or west. If we want a picnic and a dip, Cypremort Point State Park will do.

The beach looking right

The beach looking left

Picnic shelter

One thing I do enjoy about the park is that it has picnic shelters just a few steps from the beach, so you can escape into complete shade when you’ve had enough sun. What with all the rain lately, the shelter had become home to quite a lively crop of mosquitoes. We had packed insect repellent, but by time I found it a few dozen mosquitoes had had me for lunch.

There was no sign up signaling a too high bacteria count, so I was able to splash around while John fed bread to the crows. Somehow my idea of beach life does not include crows.

Driving home, we passed the sign that said “Otter Crossing”. I have yet to see an otter at Cypremort Point, although I did see one crossing the road at Port Fourchon.

“I am in otter disbelief,” I remark to John.

“What are you talking about?”

I explain about the sign.

“Well, maybe they are otter here. Maybe they went the otter way.”

We made it home in time to beat the late afternoon rain. If there is one thing Louisiana has, it is a lot of water. Just very little beach.

Really, Bill?

In all of the turmoil and grief over the Aurora shootings, surely our hearts go out most of all to the parents of the child victim, 6 year old Veronica Moser-Sullivan. At least, this is true for those of us who have hearts.

Bill O’Reilly has a bit of a different take on it:

I don’t want this to sound harsh to anybody, but the reason that these children were in the theater at midnight to see Batman was because their parents didn’t want to pay for babysitters because babysitters are expensive. So they take the children, the children fall asleep in the movie and the parent watches the movie. And the (six) year-old girl who’s dead – the mother of the girl was shot in the chest – you just heard her father. She survived.…The story about this is that the mother, the father – and you heard the father – took the six year-old to the midnight movie. And they did that, as I explained, ‘cause they didn’t want to pay a babysitter, because babysitters are 15 bucks an hour, OK? OK? And there you go. 

I have found that if you feel the need to say “I don’t want to sound harsh to anybody”, you probably should rethink what you are about to say. If what you really want to sound is loving and sympathetic, then you don’t tell somebody it’s their fault a loved one is dead. That’s not the way not to sound harsh. You say something like, “Oh, this is horrible; this is dreadful. Your poor baby! I’m so sorry this terrible thing happened. It should never be.” That might still not be comforting, but it isn’t likely to get you accused of being harsh.

You know why parents don’t leave their children home with a baby sitter? It isn’t just the money. Some parents prefer to be with their children. They don’t want to turn their children’s care over to other people. That doesn’t mean they need to hole up with the kid in a cave. They go places and do things and take their children along, because they like being with their children.

Some people are afraid to leave their children with a babysitter. We hear stories of abusive babysitters. Even babysitters who are kind can have poor judgement. Your teenage babysitter may mean well but be tempted to take the opportunity to make out with her boyfriend on the living room sofa while the kids set fire to the house trying to toast marshmallows. Worries like that make parents  just feel safer keeping their children with them.

Do you think that kind of worry is a little extreme? Your chances of experiencing a reported house fire in your life are 1 in 4. The chances that someone in your household will suffer an injury in a home fire in an average lifetime are 1 in 10. The chances that someone in your household will suffer an injury in a reported fire in an average lifetime are 1 in 89.

Your child is probably safer with a babysitter than you think, but “[c]hildren under age 6, the group most likely to be cared for by babysitters, are also those most likely to be victimized by them (figure 2). Children in this age group made up 60 percent of the victims of babysitter crimes in the NIBRS jurisdictions.”

Remind me again - what were the chances of being shot by an assailant in a movie theater prior to the Aurora shootings? For that matter, what are they now?

And if little Veronica had been left at home with a babysitter who turned out to be abusive or who panicked and couldn’t get her out of the house in a fire, would Bill O’Reilly be saying, “At least her parents didn’t take her with them to the movies where she could be shot by an armored gunman”? Yeah, right.

Why in the world would someone even think it is okay to talk about parents like this? They didn’t take their daughter hang-gliding or rock climbing; they took her to a movie. Yes, it was a midnight showing, but the worst they could reasonably have been expected to anticipate is that she would be crabby the next day. This goes beyond just the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy; this is just plain cruel.

Really, Bill. You don’t want to sound harsh? Then keep your mouth shut.

Now and Always

Every month the Foundation for Historical Louisiana meets at the Old Governor’s Mansion and hosts a speaker. Last night’s speaker was Christian Garcia, who has just edited and published a book of letters written between his maternal grandparents between 1901 and 1916. His grandfather had been a state legislator and attorney and thus was often away from home working.

His family saved all the letters and Garcia was given them twenty years ago by a family member who hoped he would do something with them. The something he did is a book called Now and Always: A Louisiana Love Story. Garcia’s talk consisted of a short movie followed by readings of some of the letters, and then a summary of things he learned while researching the history of that period and compiling the letters. 

I went home wondering how it would be to have access to extensive correspondence between family members. My grandfather wrote to my grandmother once while he was visiting other family in South America. I know this because I sat next to my grandmother while my aunt translated the letter from Italian for me and my brothers. My grandmother greeted each term of endearment from my grandfather with some Italian words of her own which I didn’t exactly know, but the tenor of which were obvious from her facial expressions and gestures. I’m not sure what she was mad at him about, but it did make a nice change from the times I sat between the two of them while they competed for my attention. I would love to have that letter today.

My dad did save some of the letters my mother wrote to him while he was overseas during WWII. I remember they began with “my dearest darling”, which I thought was funny because who thinks of their parents being in love when they are little. I don’t know what happened to those letters.

I do, however, have a letter my mother wrote to my paternal grandparents in 1943. The letter was written from here in Louisiana, because my father was stationed at Camp Beauregard near Pineville, Louisiana (a few hours north of here) and my mother had rented a room in town to be near him. They had just been married the previous month and her coming to Louisiana to be with him was the only honeymoon they got before he shipped out. My dad had sent me the letter for me to read with the idea I was supposed to send it back but I sort of forgot, for that version of “sort of forgot” that means “didn’t want to”.

The letter begins with my mother explaining why my dad did not write himself.

 . . . [H]e is kept so busy that he can’t even write. Last week they sent him out on the firing range at another camp. He was there for six days. He was supposed to get Wednesday night off and also Saturday afternoon and all day Sunday. But he was out on the range and had no time off. When he came back he had a six day beard. He couldn’t even write to anyone.They gave him yesterday off and we went out. We came back too late last night. He wanted to write, but he asked me to. He will write the next time he gets off. You see, the reason he has very little time is because he has to go to school for an hour or sometimes two each night.

My dad was actually a good correspondent for most of his life. He was the one who wrote to me once I left home, and sent all the news of my brothers, sister, and eventually nieces and nephews. He kept up a long correspondence with a boyhood friend in California. I have only one letter from my mom (my stepmother) announcing my sister’s third pregnancy. So I imagine he actually did feel bad about not being able to write to his parents himself.

I went out to camp on Monday. I was watching him work. He’s good! [that was actually double underlined.] He’s the best officer there. I was allowed to go in his hut. Mrs. Adler (her husband shares a hut with Frank) was with me, so we went in and sewed the patches on their jackets and overcoats. That’s the first work I’ve done for Frank since we were married.

That’s my favorite part of the letter. My poor mama, a new bride living in a rented room while her husband lives in a hut, not even able to cook or clean for him. She must have felt as if her life had been interupted. And I don’t know whether my dad was the best officer there or not, but I had my own experience of her fierce loyalty to anyone she loved a few months before she died. My cousin and I had come home from the candy store with a box each of some kind of taffy. Terry could not find a chocolate in her box and I had two. She accused me of stealing hers, I denied it. My Aunt Nellie ordered me to give Terry one of the chocolate candies and my mother roared, “If my daughter says she didn’t take it, then she didn’t take it.” (Picture double underlines here.)

I moved into another room here. It’s nice and roomy. I have a three piece bedroom set, a nice easy chair, and a small vanity bench that I use as a table. I also have a sink in my room and space for my wardrobe trunk. It’s very pretty. It’s bigger than the other room I had and right off the living room. We can use the living room as often as we want. The people are all very friendly, so I don’t feel lonesome on the five nights Frank isn’t off.

She goes on to ask about other family members, then adds

Tell them we wish they could see the beautiful countryside down here. Oh, yes, down here you don’t need a license to drive and you can get enough gas to go pleasure driving if you know the right folks. Too bad we don’t have a car.

Same old Louisiana (although now you do need a license to drive).

She signs it “Love and kisses, Julia”. I’m pretty sure the name on her birth certificate was “Giulia” because that is how it was spelled on her wedding invitations, but naturally she would have Americanized it as soon as she could spell. 

Ten years later she was dead, of a rare blood disease that turned into blood cancer. My maternal relatives would frequently say, “I guess you don’t remember your mother”, but I do. I remember the time she defended me to my aunt (although looking back , I suspect I did take my cousin’s candy, not out of larceny but out of sheer inattention.) I remember one afternoon I sat with her in the living room while she read a book. Every time she looked up, I smiled at her and she would smile back. I began to worry that she would get tired of smiling back, but she didn’t. She smiled back every time. I remember the time I had an abscessed tooth and Dad let me sleep in their bed the night before my dentist appointment. I couldn’t sleep and kept pinching her back so she would know I was there. The next morning I asked if she knew I had slept in her bed and she said, “Sweetheart, I knew you were there.”

So I kept the letter, because it is her, just the way I remember her, now and always.

My mother and I when I was 3 or 4.

It's a Miracle!

I don’t know if the news has spread to your neck of the woods, but we have a miraculous bleeding statue here in River City. The statue is of Mary, the mother of Jesus, as we Methodists are most likely to call her, known to Catholics of course as the Virgin Mary or the Most Blessed Mother. In the neighborhood around St. Thomas More co-cathedral, life-sized and near life-sized statues of Mary abound, and the owners of one of them noticed what they consider to be blood on the statue’s head about a week or so back. 

Skeptical souls consider the substance to be droppings from a bird who had either been eating berries or had blood in its stool due to illness*. Cynics suspect the homeowners of perpetrating a hoax. Selecting the most parsimonious explanation first is actually what the Catholic church recommends in such cases, as expressed in the saying, “God does not multiply miracles.” It is a human failing to reach for the most exotic explanation over the most prosaic. I remember riding on a bus one night next to a woman who insisted that a bright light visible in the sky must be a UFO. I could not convince her that it was actually the planet Jupiter, a very well known object and one that is not flying.

I suggested John come with me to see the statue, out of idle curiosity. The homeowners have put up a tent and chairs for people who wish to come and pray. The statue itself is covered with a large umbrella and surrounded by pots of flowers and some candles. There were two women sitting and praying when we arrived, and three more on foot who walked around, read the posters on the garage wall and left apparently unconvinced.

I could see from comparing a picture of the statue taken when the “blood” was first discovered to the statue as I was looking at it that the “blood” is wearing off, not surprising given that we have had two weeks of afternoon showers. Apparently whatever caused the deposit to appear is not an ongoing event, more indication that this event has a prosaic explanation.

I have my own hypothesis. It is, after all, summer. Kids are out of school, curfews are later, and they have no homework.

“No religion, either”, my husband chimes in. I’m not so sure about that. If this is a prank, I suspect it would be most likely to occur to a Catholic. Be that as it may, today’s internet savvy youth can easily Google “how to make fake blood”. It’s more logical than “Mary has a head wound”.

On the other hand, as I said, there are a lot of these statues in that neighborhood. Would someone young enough to think that this is a cool prank also recognize that stopping at just one makes it more convincing? Or would that person want to decorate every statue in the neighborhood? I don’t know.

Here is the picture I took. See what you think.

Maybe the baby hit her with a rattle?
Click to see full size.

*If you follow that link, be warned. Gendered and ablist insults, NSFW pictures and off-color language are the norm on that board.