On the Warpath

Hey, anybody catch the Double Header between the Crackers and Negroes last night? See the highlights from the Kike-Chinks game on sportscenter? Wouldn't that seem weird? Incredibly offensive, I'd say. So offensive that I get that butt-puckered, oh geez sensation just writing those epithets to pose the hypothetical. But we don't feel that sort of defensive welling-up when we're cheering the Redskins or Indians or Chiefs on. Ask somebody at a game sometime if they think any of those names are offensive and I wonder if they'll just laugh it off, pretend as if they're just ingrained, the way things are in our curious little country. Let's try to see why we don't question these teams en masse, and what they all might have in common that we so easily can disparage them openly.

 Well, a quick internet search brings us to the oracle of all internet wisdom, Wikipedia, which lists out the myriad sports teams that use offensive or racially-identifying words in their team names. The vast majority, almost all of these names infact, are derived from indigenous peoples that are vastly underrepresented in the general populations, and most of which also, have been decimated by war and political obliteration, (such is the case with the continental American teams.)

 Now, some people would say, and do, that these are proud, identifying names for groups that enjoy the attention, and any reasonable person can see that there is no way that we could know that, and little chance there's ever been a discussion with those groups affected. Still others would say that the names are identifiers only, and have no associated value that would put the afflicted groups into a particular light. However, what would be the point of just listing groups of people on helmets and jerseys without some implied value statement about them? No one has Grackles and Cowbirds as team names just to list out passerine species, but we have vibrant cardinals, fierce blue jays or gorgeous cardinals, each with their implied worth and value. Such, I believe, is the case with Florida Seminoles and Canyon Comanches, and many of the other tribes and peoples that are archived not in libraries or their homelands, but on bleachers and scoreboards. It's a travesty to the peoples that have been obliterated from our collective conscience and from ancestral lands. 

Native American writer Sherman Alexie often jokes that he went to an all-white high school where the only other Native American was the team mascot. He also is aghast at the mainstream's perpetuation of stereotypes with The Lone Ranger , a movie recently released where Johnny Depp does his best to assimilate no native culture into his portrayal of Tonto. The whole issue raises a concern for me that our society has moved so far in the past 50 years, (not far enough) to become an inclusive, racially and socially integrated culture, but we have left these indigenous peoples so far out of our viewfinder that the mention of something so rudimentary as changing sports teams names is laughable. It causes me to wonder if we are not truly the integrated culture we'd like to claim, but merely a squeaky wheel culture that adapts when it has to, but for a culture that is so small, so effectively exterminated as native peoples, we turn away and leave them to their vices, forgotten.

america's cup, roosevelt field mall, mike glennon, metro north, paul oliver

Down at the PawPaw Patch

For the past couple of weeks, I've been working and traveling around hiking and biking with Buddy as always, seeing family and friends, but a lot of my attention has been devoted to..wait for it...the largest endemic fruit in North America. It's the fruit that resembles a custard-like banana and looks like a pale, ovoid cucumber. I try to stay on task, keeping up with the important, 'necessary' things in life, but this time of year, especially when I'm walking through a protected area such as a State or National Park, and stumble upon a PawPaw patch, all reason flies out the window, and I immediately look for a bag-type receptacle and start shaking trees. My justification as a fellow preservationist and would-be protector of the woods? Well, the deer will eat them anyways, and there's an overabundance of deer, so really, I'm culling an overpopulated herd, therefore saving the government money. I know, I know, but it works for me, just enough reason to remove the guilt. The PawPaw or Asimina triloba is a wonderful fruit that grows over a large swath of the East Coast and is under-appreciated. It's the king of Appalachian foraging fruits, and you'll have to get to the fruit before the deer do. These fruits have more nutritional value than many foods that we commonly associate with health foods. They contain tons of antioxidants and bioactive compounds that are not well understood, but which will have potential utility in pharmaceuticals upon further study. Ask around and you'll find that a majority of the population doesn't know PawPaws exist, and many more don't understand their incredible nutritional value. In a highly populated area of the tidewater region such as this (I'm currently living in Northern Virginia outside of D.C.) I'm glad that more people don't know about the fruit. More PawPaws for me, I say. It seems that we are so fixed on all the new, chic things out there, foods from different lands and cultures, that we forget some of the real gems that naturally abound here. I'm a niche guy, and I'm also into all of the incredible mushrooms that we have in our Appalachian Mountains. There are all sorts of great things here, wild leeks termed ramps, which have been causing long-term bad breath for hundreds of years in rural towns during harvest season, and ginseng, sassafras, black birch, teaberry, and all sorts of other edible and medicinal fruits of the land. We're not special really, because every natural place in the world has its edible and medicinal wild foods, it's just that it seems important to know the harvestable bounty in your specific area. Maybe I'm just weird about this, but it seems so primitive and essential to know what is around you, to know the flowers and trees and fruits that are part of your home, your place in the world. There's so much to learn right around us, so much to discover and appreciate. I suppose that goes for much of life, and a necessary satisfaction we should all shoot for. Why is it that we are so myopically entrenched in the buildings and man-made structures around us, creating new synthetic compounds on a daily basis, when our forests go unmanaged and untended, and we haven't even unleashed the mysterious potential in the compounds of the natural world? Once again, we see that balance is vital in all things. Wow, really off topic. Back to PawPaws. Word to the wise, if you desire to make PawPaw jam, prepare for a long ordeal, complete with stickiness all over a tiny apartment kitchen, your dog licking at seeds that pop out of your hand when you're squeezing the juice from them, and finally, prepare for the jam not to set right because, first of all, you 'eyeball' relentlessly although you should know better by now, and you're left telling co-workers that you have some non-viscous marmalade for them to try. Long story short, I really like PawPaws. So, if you or an attractive unattached female friend is in the Northern Virginia area and seeks a day of PawPaw picking, I'm game for the next week or two, or until every single tree is picked clean.