GHOST DANCER
THE ARMED ASSHOLE ENTERS THE WESTERN MOVIE barroom in his black hat and sinister gloves. Drinking bad whiskey, and lacking a better idea of fun, he fires bullets into the rough wood floor, close to the feet of an unarmed innocent bystander. His instruction is simple. “Dance.” Faced with the choice of dancing or being shot in the foot, the innocent bystander dances, but—if he is not quite as innocent as the bully assumes—he will use all of his cunning to choreograph a performance that will confuse and ultimately confound the asshole in the black hat. Either that, or the innocent bystander will continue dancing until black hat runs out of ammunition. The other part of the trick is to learn to enjoy the dance, because the assholes have endless supplies of ammunition.
On July 16, 1945, in approximately the same geography as many Western movies, on White Sands Proving Ground, a flat stretch of empty desert some thirty-five miles southeast of Socorro New Mexico, human beings kindled one tiny piece of a sun right on the surface of Earth. The name of the exercise was Trinity, and it was a culminating recklessness from a species not noted for its caution. The small group of scientists and soldiers who watched, close up in the trenches, wore black protective goggles. To look the atom-flash in the eye was to be blinded.
Earlier in the process that led to Trinity, the possibility had been discussed that the atomic explosion might set the planet’s atmosphere on fire, but the risk, it had been decided, was worth taking. These scientists who built and lit the fuse on the unearthly vaporizing flash called their work an “implosion-design plutonium bomb,” and we have all seen the films. We are familiar with the images of the searing flash, the mesmerizing fireball, the hurricane of searing heat, and the final mushroom cloud towering into the desert sky. Most of us have heard the legend of how Robert Oppenheimer, as he gazed on the terrible bloom of his creation, was initially triumphant—“It works!”—but then reflectively quoted the Vedas. “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”
The implosion-design plutonium bomb was planned as the ultimate weapon. At the inception of the Manhattan Project, that made Trinity possible, the intention was to obtain a nuclear bomb before the Germans, and force a conclusion of World War II. Then the Red Army took Berlin, Hitler shot himself, and Nazism collapsed. Instead of being shelved, Trinity assumed a life of its own. The White Sands test went ahead and, three weeks later, two Japanese cities were incinerated. In Hiroshima, a small child looked up and saw a lone silver airplane, high and tiny in the blue morning sky, and then, just seconds later, a burning biblical hell became reality and was visited on the city. Three days later, the same absolute destruction was repeated in Nagasaki. Human beings had the technology of their annihilation.
A century before Trinity, the land that became the historic test site was regularly traveled and hunted by the Navajo, Ute, Hopi and Pueblo. These Native Americans were not only from another century, but from another epoch. Their tribal cultures moved in nomadic patterns across plains and mountains, forests and deserts, in harmony rather than attempting to master or control their environment. These Indians had not invented the wheel, and their grasp of metalworking was rudimentary, but their spiritual belief system was deep and multidimensional. They lacked the European emphasis on the individual, or the motivation to ownership. The Native Americans didn’t share the Europeans’ need to build machines and invent industrial systems, or the near-viral European imperative to expand their territory. A hundred years before Trinity, however, it was already too late for their way of life. These supposedly advanced Europeans were firmly settled on the Eastern Seaboard and rapidly spreading west. The Indians must have seen, even during their first encounters, that these invaders were up to no good.
Maybe the Cherokee didn’t instantly guess that mules and covered wagons would be followed by railroads and Gatling guns, but it must have been obvious—if only by the way the cowboys pissed in the creek—that, left unchecked, they would spread disease, destroy habitats, break food chains, and generally remake the mountains and prairies, all in the name of white, European, alcoholic capitalism with its materialism, mineral rights, and myopia. A society without any concept of private property was going to have problems with the rapaciousness of a people who would elevate greed (for want of a better word) to the status of a virtue, and eventually detonate atomic devices. As more and more settlers advanced on the Indian nations, the vibration of their coming could only have created a psychic chill, like persistent footfalls on a future grave.
At first, the Native American tribes retreated in front of the European advance, but, as it became clear that the white men would never be satisfied with the land they had already taken—and would never stop coming—many of the native peoples stood and fought. Under the leadership of Geronimo and Cochise, the Chiricahua Apache waged a protracted guerrilla war in Arizona and New Mexico, while further north, an alliance of the Lakota, Northern Cheyenne and Arapaho, led by Thathanka lyotake—commonly known as Sitting Bull—defeated George Armstrong Custer and his murderous 7th Cavalry at the Little Big Horn (or, as the Lakota called it, the Battle of Greasy Grass Creek). Sadly this victory was only a short and temporary postponement of the inevitable. The Europeans were just too numerous and well armed. Outnumbered and outgunned, and unable to prevail in a culture clash in which victory was dictated by machinery and gunpowder, Native Americans retreated into mysticism and began to dance.
Wikipedia’s entry on the Ghost Dance begins:
“The Ghost Dance was a religious movement incorporated into numerous Native American belief systems. The traditional ritual in the Ghost Dance, the circle dance, has been used by many Native Americans since prehistoric times but was first performed 1889. The practice swept throughout much of the American West, quickly reaching areas of California and Oklahoma. As the Ghost Dance spread from its original source, Native American tribes synthesized selective aspects of the ritual with their own beliefs, often creating change in both the society that integrated it and the ritual itself. Perhaps the best-known facet of the Ghost Dance movement is the role it reportedly played in instigating the Wounded Knee massacre in 1890, which resulted in the deaths of at least 153 Lakota Sioux”
I was born fifty-three years after the massacre at Wounded Knee, and just twenty-two months before the Trinity nuclear test. For most of my childhood and all of my adult life, I lived with knowledge that, at any given moment, a great white light might burst from over the horizon, telling me, as my retina burned, that this was the absolute end of everything. Or, at least, the absolute end of civilization as we knew it, as they used to say in those 1950s, science fiction monster movies. This knowledge was probably what prompted me to wonder, more than once, if some special human instinct kicks in when everything we know and love is threatened with extinction. Do we all, down in some Jungian, universal mind, sense the possibility of annihilation and react accordingly?
I wish I had learned about Ghost Dancers in childhood, and that the story was taught in school of how a panic on the part of the notoriously corrupt Bureau of Indian Affairs started a chain of events that led to a confrontation between BIA reservation police and a crowd of angry Ghost Dancers, the murder of Sitting Bull, and finally the massacre at Wounded Knee Creek of 153 Lakota— mainly women and children—by that same 7th Cavalry by then armed with rapid-fire Hotchkiss guns. It wasn’t, of course. Like any English schoolboy who liked to play cowboys and Indians, I was addicted to all the Western movies and TV shows in which Indians were guttural, backward savages with bows and arrows, and were slaughtered on a weekly basis by Errol Flynn, John Wayne, Richard Widmark, James Stewart, Kirk Douglas, and Randolph Scott down at the local cinema. I was a rebellious teenager long before I was able to cut loose from all the MGM and RKO folklore, and grasp that the celluloid, six-shooter, screen heroes in the big hats were, in a more accurate reality, little more than ethnic-cleansing death-squads, and that many had already been driven kill-crazy by the fire-power horrors of the Civil War.
I’m not exactly sure when I made the connection between the Ghost Dancers and my generation of rock’n’roll kids who wondered if they could change the world. Was it overweening vanity to compare the Native American Ghost Dances of the late nineteenth century with the social, political, and metaphysical movements in the second half of the twentieth? The parallel wholly depends on acceptance of the premise that both were generated by a sense of impending annihilation. Native Americans sensed the clear and present danger of their entire way of life being erased by a brutally alien culture. Twentieth century youth faced—and still face—the equally plain possibility of absolutely everything being fried to a crisp in a nuclear holocaust.
If anyone here in the twenty-first century doubts how much the threat of thermonuclear warfare infiltrated the awareness of those born during, or in the aftermath of World War II, I can only say you should have been there. In the decade or so after Hiroshima the pop images of nuclear destruction wholly permeated popular culture. In B-movies nuclear tests were responsible for giant insects and shrinking humans, not to mention the sixty-year career of Godzilla. Post-apocalyptic visions became a subgenre of science fiction. Hobbesian nightmares set vicious dog-eat-dog survivors in violent competition for the last remaining relics of the former civilization, and simple necessities like food, water, gasoline, or sexual partners were rare and desperately sought-after prizes. The nuclear spectre even wove its way into the Westerns. The fast-draw, gunfight-er showdown on the main street at high noon was easily recognized as a full-blown analog for nuclear superpower confrontation and the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD).
In what was laughingly called the real world, American school children were drilled by a cartoon turtle named Bert in what to do if the bombs ever started falling. Bert the Turtle made it clear a nuclear attack could come at any time, and without warning. If the atom-flash came, the kids should instantly stop whatever they were doing, duck under a table, or crouch next to a wall and assume a fetal position while covering their heads with their hands. This was—according to both the turtle and the government of the United States—how one survived an atomic war.
Mercifully, other voices were being heard to counter the atomic disinformation of Bert the Turtle. They were those of Elvis Presley and Little Richard, and young people started dancing. The mode of the music had changed and the walls of the city seemed about to shake. Our dance began as nothing more than a feeling, the whisper of a promise that, on a deep unconscious level, change could be accomplished. The drums were beating and rock’n’roll was at the very heart of this new mood. It swelled with a massive potential power. In stoned moments we fancied it a fulcrum to move the world. Statements like these can now be ridiculed as cliches, but—back in the day—no-one questioned them. Rock music could light its own firestorm.
We knew that there had been other viral dance crazes, but rock’n’roll was different. It wasn’t the Charleston or the jitterbug. It was much, much more. Bastard child of the blues, it could channel an undertow of anger along with a good time, and hinted at the same unfocused rebellion that smouldered from the films of Marlon Brando and James Dean. In The Wild One, when asked what he’s rebelling against, Brando’s Johnny Strabler had the succinct answer. “What have you got?” It was far snappier than explaining how the real target was the regimented, post-World War II consumer society, where everyone was expected to think and act alike, and totally distrust crazies on Harleys in black leather jackets.
In what liked to call itself the"free world,” the brave new scenario for the second half of the twentieth century, was a glossy uniformity. More pleasant than Orwell but almost as totalitarian, it was the dream of corporate capitalism in the process of expanding from national to global. The drugs of choice would be nicotine and alcohol. Sexual repression and tightly managed media would be the tools of control. Populations would be racked and stacked, either in high rise housing projects, or endless, sprawling, car-culture suburbs. They would wear the same clothes, read the same magazines, go to the same movies, and watch the same inane television. The energy use would be catastrophic, but since those chickens wouldn’t come home to roost for another fifty years, who gave a damn?
Meanwhile the MAD balancing acts between two superpowers hung poised—a frozen war—just to make sure no one grew too comfortable. First-time home-owners of the postwar American affluence dug holes in their back yards and installed steel and concrete fallout shelters. They stocked them with canned good, bottled water, and small arms, fully prepared to fight their neighbors with shotguns over what was left. And they learned it all from the Hollywood post-nuke fantasies at the drive-in. Amid such repressed madness, Elvis Presley, his gold suit and slapback echo, made total sense.
The early rock’n’roll that started a generation wondering about possible alternatives to what Henry Miller called the “air-conditioned nightmare” was, in terms of content, close to mindless. Gene Vincent’s ’Be-Bop-A-Lula’ was no revolutionary manifesto, and yet it contained such intense and malcontent echoes even the squares felt threatened. Like the BIA agents confronted by Ghost Dancers, those in charge of the twentieth century knew something was happening even if they didn’t know what it was. The BBC banned the single, and restricted all rock’n’roll radio to a maximum of four or five hours a week—until forced to do otherwise by offshore pirate radio ships. If the first rock generation needed confirmation that the spirit of their new music went much deeper than its vinyl surface, they only needed to observe how quickly authorities decided rock was somehow subversive.
Rock’n’roll came under pressure. US Congressional hearings on payola in the record industry directly targeted it, and DJ Alan Freed was broken by Federal prosecutors. Rumors also circulated of secret deals cut between the government and Colonel Tom Parker so Elvis—tamed and emasculated—could be drafted into the Army without delay or bad publicity as an example to the nation’s youth.
Elvis was drafted, Chuck Berry was jailed, and Little Richard went crazy and searched out Jesus, but rock continued to roll like the rising tide. Bob Dylan came out of the Woody Guthrie Midwest bringing a sense of literacy that was first political and later surreal and allegorical. He opened the doors for the music to become dangerously articulate. Nothing we could say could not be sung. Lennon/McCartney, Jagger/Richards, Pete Townshend, Neil Young—an army of singers and songwriters was suddenly on the march. A guitar army—a phrase coined by Jimi Hendrix and popularized and politicized by White Panther founder John Sinclair—was advancing on the entrenchments of power.
From Mad magazine to the Beat Generation, from New Wave cinema to Dr. Strange, from sexual freedom and the contraceptive pill, to the Free Speech Movement and Lenny Bruce, revolution appeared ready to roll on multiple fronts. The emperor’s nakedness was going to be exposed. It was here we found the connection to the Ghost Dancers. Both the Ghost Dancers and the post-nuke generation looked for alternative solutions. After the destruction of their tribal economies, the Indians were supposed to turn into subservient replicas of the white man. They didn’t. They danced into the spirit world and had to be stopped with Hotchkiss guns. In the aftermath of World War II and the dawn of the Atomic Age, the plans those in power had for us were more complicated but equally demeaning.
The more we explored alternatives—via psychedelic drugs, constant marijuana, exercises of the mind, and strange encounters of the body, the better we knew it. We were dancing to the music and might also need to be stopped by Hotchkiss guns. In the underground press we were developing our own media. Some thought we followed blindly, like the children in Arthur C. Clarke’s novel Childhood’s End who do not speak and follow the alien spaceships. But we were not blind, and were also very noisy. We had our instructions and our communications. When Jim Morrison used the imperative “speak in secret alphabets” we knew exactly what he meant. In around 1968, some pundit claimed that rock’n’roll music was the primary source of information for a generation. I forget who made the claim but I wouldn’t argue with it.
Popular culture was being reshaped from its youth up, subversively, organically, and wholly out of control, and, for a while, it seemed to be on a global level. Young people speaking their minds, but also out of those minds, and all too often revealing fatal weaknesses. Parts of the counterculture were corrupted by drug prohibition into a criminal drug-culture. Heroin became all too readily available in inner cities that were both volatile and vulnerable. Gentrified, Gordon Gekko squares took up cocaine, and the world became far too familiar with Colombian cartels and automatic weapons. On a different level—but with similar intent—the corporate music industry attempted to repackage rock’n’roll, harmlessly divorced from its original revolutionary posture. Fortunately the next generation down the timeline would retaliate by rekindling the rage with punk, and our new version of the Ghost Dance would continue to the sound of the Ramones, the Clash, and Patti Smith.
At around the same time, the original form of the underground press fell victim not only to harassment and lawsuits, but also the generally increasing diversity of media. Topics once covered in the underground mags and tabloids had publications of their own. Gay and women’s issues were a perfect example. It started to seem as though the underground readership had been whittled down to bikers, stoners, and fans of the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers. Corporate print was also borrowing the tricks of the underground on a wholesale scale, and even hiring previously underground writers. We writers allowed ourselves to be hired, but not without shame, angst, and alcohol. We could console ourselves that, by appearing in large circulation magazines, we could spread the good word far wider. Certainly the rebels who had been recruited as hired guns in the commercial music press were able to do a lot to promote punk to a much larger audience, but the sense of having sold out never quite went away, although our landlords and bartenders were happy that we were now receiving paychecks.
And so our Ghost Dance flowed, in and out like the tide, a cycle of cultural upheaval that would, in turn, be debased, defused, and distracted, clear to the end of the twentieth century and beyond. The Reagan/Thatcher era was a peak in greed and imperial certainty. Blair/Clinton produced at least the illusion of improvement, but then the Blair/Bush alliance took the world to new peaks in vicious absurdity. In the worst of these times, booze, opiates, or even a combination of the two, could look damned attractive. I freely admit, along with many of my peers, I sought whiskey-insulation when the good fight turned out to be no quick victory but a lifelong process. At times the Ghost Dance became little more than a drunken stumble. Some might say it stumbled and fell, but I prefer to think that we just shape-shifted and mutated to function in a world that was changing so fast that not even those in power could keep pace.
No one expected Soviet communism to lose its footing so fast, and collapse under the cost of the nuclear arms race. In the 1960s, while hippies danced in the West, the Red Guard marched in China, proving Chairman Mao was the only world leader who could recognize the global youth revolt and manipulate it to be a part of his own Cultural Revolution. But then, after Mao died in 1976, China moved towards a strange and barely understood hybrid of communism and capitalism that made it the world power-house of consumer manufacturing. These drastic changes in China also added to the frightening toll on the environment. The bill for the world’s industrialization in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was becoming due, and a new ideological gulf appeared between those who saw a planet headed for climate change and rapid ruin, and those who used their corporate profits to continue a polluting, depleting, business as usual. Rain forests burned and polar bears stood on melting iceflows, while oil companies mounted massive PR campaigns to convince us that nothing was wrong. The Ghost Dance became visible again as the Greens joined in.
Nothing, however, could match the changes in technology. One lesson the counterculture learned very quickly was that technology is ideologically neutral, and belongs to whoever uses it. The multinational corporations might have had financial and legal control over new and expanding media, but as choice increased, they were moved away from the narrow and easily managed uniformity that had been their original goal. Cable TV and the VCR freed viewers from the dictates of prime time and corporate schedules. We still watched the same shows, but we watched them when we damned well liked. By the mid to late 1980s, the personal computer became a crucial feature in an increasing number of homes, and then, just a few years later, the Internet blew into town, based—with extreme irony—on a military communications system for use after a nuclear war. Al Gore’s information superhighway rolled up to the door bringing more traffic than was imagined a decade earlier. From fraud to voyeurism, from stockmarket analysis to conspiracy theory, from mail-order to metaphysics, from banking to shibari bondage, the web opened the gates of Eden on gardens of virtual delights, and global pop culture would never be the same again.
The humble telephone even horned in on the act, growing in power and sophistication until small handheld devices—smaller than the communicators on Star Trek— could access the Internet and much more besides. Mobile phones now come equipped with many multiples of the computer memory available to the entire Apollo moon project. Web pages mutated into blogsites. Social interaction sites like Facebook and MySpace became lasting fads, while Twitter reduced everything to 140 characters and put the collective attention span in clear and present jeopardy. But, at the same time, as global communication conglomerates did their worst, anyone with the price of their wares—both hard and soft—could play. A mind-bending mosaic could accommodate every shade of belief, illusion, or obsession. In one sector the net hosted the mathematics of string theory and the membranes of multiple realities, while in another bible-belt fundamentalists claimed that the universe was created 6,000 years ago and would end with the Rapture. All can join in, although all may not be either sane or honest.
The near-infinite digital dreamscape of the Internet made so much possible that it seemed like the perfect medium for the Ghost Dancer. Philosophical insurgents could appear out of nowhere, make their point and then vanish again without trace. This view may have been an overly romantic one. Many feared that the net, with its porn and its potential for piracy, would simply be yet another means of corporate manipulation of an already close to mindless popular culture. As early as 1999, Zack de la Rocha complained of “a monstrous pop culture that has a tendency to commodify and pacify everything.” He failed to realize, however, that his own band, Rage Against The Machine, functioned and even succeeded at still plying the old rock’n’roll rebel trade within the monster, and that, via the net, pop culture could simultaneously encompass everything from the IWW to the CIA. A decade later Barack Obama’s presidential campaign proved that not only was the Internet a forum for ideas, but could also maintain highly effective political pressure groups and fund raisers like moveon.org.
The freedom of expression afforded by the net isn’t without a price. From Nigerian scam artists to identity theft, crime is rampant, but the path of freedom has always been down mean and shadowy streets, with a fair share of footpads and cut-purses. And even more complex dangers lurk in the electronics of the twenty-first century. Computers never forget and all too easily give up their data to total strangers. Data mining is both a major commercial industry, and a preoccupation of too many government agencies in too many countries, maybe only a shot away from the thought police. While rock stars who are brought down when their credit card numbers are found on the hard drives of kiddie porn operations deserve all they get, the rest of us, with no dark secrets to conceal—except maybe our opposition to the way our so-called leaders run things—have little to fear. There’s simple safety in numbers; they can’t round up all of us.
The Internet has brought us—we the people—unprecedented access to media of our own. It enables us to publish what we like, when we like, and how we like. Subversion is possible for anyone with a computer, and the blogosphere is now a serious challenge to the mainstream media. The oldtime underground print could never, even in its wildest dreams, imagine how bloggers can shoot holes in the official versions of events. Propaganda expects to be believed, but when it’s examined and challenged from a million different points of view, its power and plausibility is diminished or removed.
The consternation of China’s current rulers at the prospect of free speech on the Internet confirms the degree of threat it poses to any regime seeking to control the ideas and communications of its people. Despite the deals the Chinese government has cut to restrict services, Internet guerrillas, from sex bloggers to political dissidents, just keep on coming. The incalculable amounts of saved data and the quantum volume of communications make monitoring the Web wholly impossible. Ultimately the only solution would be to actually dismantle the technology, and that simply isn’t going to happen unless it’s replaced by a better mousetrap. Internet services are, of course, owned and operated by capitalist corporations, and although they may attempt to curtail content, other providers will happily step in with less limitations. The comment of V.I. Lenin still applies. “The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.”
And let’s not forget the computers themselves. As they grow more powerful and highly developed they may well have a say in the fate of humanity. Futurist Ray Kurzweil predicts that “machine intelligence will surpass that of humans around 2045.” We can only hope that they won’t emulate the fictional HAL 9000 and decide that humans are detrimental to the mission and eliminate us.
Yes, my friends, the Ghost Dance continues and will go on as long as the dancers know the end may be looming. Not only must the proliferation of nuclear weapons be halted and reversed, but global corporations—and whatever China has become—urgently need to wean themselves off policies of damage and destruction in the name of profits while we still have a habitable planet. Until that golden day dawns, we can only keep on dancing.