ozarque ([info]ozarque) wrote,
@ 2008-05-07 08:41:00
Previous Entry  Add to memories!  Tell a Friend!  Next Entry
Short story; "Final Exam"; Abba info...
Here's an edited excerpt from At the Seventh Level with some background information about Abba; it's a conversation between Coyote Jones, in his role as superspy, and his boss, "the Fish." It appears on pp. 259-261 of Communipath Worlds.

Excerpt

Even the Fish was appalled by Abba, and he didn't apall easy. He had explained the assignment to Coyote with a faint air of distaste, like a Martian Orthodox Flannist discussing poultry farming.

"The whole system is ridiculous," Coyote told him. "How can such a thing be allowed to go on?"

The Fish shrugged. "It's a vast improvement over what they had before," he said.

"That's a matter of opinion."

"Let me review the basic facts for you," said the Fish. "And don't, for the Light's sake, go tramping about Abba suggesting improvements in their social system. In the first place it's none of our business. In the second place, they have ten thousand years of recorded history, and evidence of thirty thousand before that, and they look upon the rest of us as kindergarteners at the business of being civilizations." ...

"When our space colonists worked their way out to the middle of the Second Galaxy," the old man went on, "they found Abba already settled... The people were humanoid, indistinguishable from Earth-type humans except for the presence of three extra ribs and some sort of difference in the liver that escapes me. At that time the Galactic Council was already well established, the Federation was a firm entity, and there were many very obvious advantages to Federation membership. It was almost unknown for a planet to refuse membership -- however, in this case the Federation wasn't offering."

He pressed a stud on his desk and a threedy flashed on the wall behind him. Coyote stared at it and shuddered.

"Exactly," said the Fish. "The colonists reacted as you did, with total repulsion. They found a civilization at a high degree of technological advancement, the male citizens living in luxury, and all the females in breeding pens, with stables for inclement weather, treated precisely as we treat domestic animals."

"Sick," said Coyote. "Just plain sick."

"It seemed perfectly reasonable to the Abbans," the Fish went on, "that being the way they had always done things... But it was most definitely not acceptable to the members of the Galactic Federation. The impasse was solved by a gentleman named David Rutherford Williams, who went out to Abba with a proposal and managed to produce the ingenious compromise they have today."

"The harem. The Women's Discipline Unit."

"Well, I agree with you that it doesn't seem very enlightened, Mr. Jones, but it was at least a form of society that was tolerable to the members of the Federation at the time. And you must admit that it shows a high degree of organization for a society so totally unEarth-like to be able to superimpose a sort of amalgamation of ancient Egypt, Arabia, and the French diplomatic service over its own culture. Practically overnight."

"How long did it take?"

"Less than six months, as I recall. Williams showed them a stack of threedies, they went 'Ah, yes' at him, their carpenters and masons trotted off and built women's quarters to specifications, and it all worked. Amazing."

"Does it really work?"

The Fish shrugged again. "Who can tell? It seems to. At least, since the Abban conversion to the religion of the Holy Light, they believe that women have souls."

Coyote made a sound of disgust, and the Fish raised a warning hand.

"I think you'll be surprised," he said. "I really do, Mr. Jones. If you expect primitive barbarians lurching about whipping their concubines you are going to be very surprised. Why don't you wait and see? And since no interference is allowed in any case, you might just as well relax."

###

(Post a new comment)


[info]idiotgrrl
2008-05-07 01:56 pm UTC (link)
OK - now how in the course of cultural evolution did they get from the foraging tribe to keeping women in the breeding pens like livestock, and however did the women put up with it? I realize by that point the men were armed and the women were unarmed, but first of all, the breeding pen system had to start somewhere and people don't react well to loss of freedom unless an improvement in their living conditions goes along with it - or unless some sort of overwhelming organized force was used.

Likewise it had to happen at some point where they no longer had any economic function, even that of tending the garden or weaving the cloth.

Finally, it had to happen in a context of "women as poachable property", it seems to me. That is, cattle rustling or the local equivalent being extended to "and we'll carry off his wives as well."

No - while I could see the system working, once established, it's very hard to see how it could be established to begin with. Suzy McKee Charnas had such a system in "Walk To The End Of The World," but it was post-holocaust, with heavily armed men overpowering women who had been in support functions, and the factor of 'stealable property' very much applied.

The only other way was if the women had been nonsentient (or less so) to begin with, and any prehistoric tribe with nonsentient females would have been at a serious disadvantage both in rearing children to maturity, and in feeding themselves.

(Reply to this)(Thread)
Response to idiotgrrl...
[info]ozarque
2008-05-07 02:04 pm UTC (link)
I have never [thank heavens!] suggested that the Coyote Jones novels were intended to be plausible ... they were just supposed to be good reads.

(Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)
Re: Response to idiotgrrl...
[info]idiotgrrl
2008-05-07 02:08 pm UTC (link)
Yes, but you have a readership of science fiction fans! Geekazoids who do this sort of analysis for fun or profit or out of compulsion to have things make sense. Ah, well, check my second comment - it actually does make sense, really.

(Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)
Re: Response to idiotgrrl... continued...
[info]ozarque
2008-05-07 06:39 pm UTC (link)
"Geekazoids." What a great word.

(Reply to this)(Parent)

[info]neonchameleon
2008-05-07 02:30 pm UTC (link)
Step 1: Nomadic bands along Mongol or Pushtun lines. To protect the women they stay in wagons. This is considered safer than the alternative by most of the women.
Step 2: The nomads start to settle down. In order to protect the women, they are put into the first buildings that go up - i.e. the barns. Due to the sturdiness of the construction, the clean straw to sleep on (which is better than the men get), the lack of motion sickness, and the stability, this is considered an improvement by the women despite the lack of light.
Step 3: The men build their homes. A bit more comfortable than the women's but not much. But there is now a near-complete separation in living quarters between men and women, especially as the men like to sleep in the open.
Step 4: The next generation of women are born in the barns. To them the barns are home and the light hurts their eyes as they are not used to seeing the sun. By and large women don't want to leave their barns, and this gets enforced with peer pressure.
Step 5: With the overcrowding of the barns due to the population doing well and new barns not being built that fast, the women request privacy. This leads to the introduction of stalls (a few benevolent men offer the type of hammocks they sleep in - but have you tried sleeping in a hammock if you aren't used to it?).
Step 6: Due to any one of a number of events, the stall doors start getting locked at night to prevent accidents when girls go exploring, and to prevent fights, and...

(Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

[info]idiotgrrl
2008-05-07 02:34 pm UTC (link)
Cool! Excellent extrapolation!

(Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

[info]neonchameleon
2008-05-07 02:40 pm UTC (link)
Thanks.

(Reply to this)(Parent)

[info]archangelbeth
2008-05-07 03:05 pm UTC (link)
It could happen in a case where, for some reason (war, plague, horrible rise of pre-eclampsia, whatever), the women became too scarce to be used in foraging. If the only fit job for a female is to be breeding to replace the population, then A) they aren't doing anything else but being pregnant all the time, and B) they're too valuable to put to the sword and are instead to be carried off in raids...

They're probably too valuable as breeders, in that version, to be let to raise their kids, necessarily, too -- keep one or two as wetnurses, and get the others to have their milk dry up quickly so that they'll resume ovulation.

Originally, the stockades might've been not much worse than the men lived in, if at all. Though, if you're going to put your mothers and sisters and daughters into breeder-only mode, it probably becomes easy to treat them just like, well, livestock. Distance oneself from that other gender which is going to die early anyway, and probably messily, and very likely from one's friend's children.

(Reply to this)(Parent)

[info]idiotgrrl
2008-05-07 02:02 pm UTC (link)
OK - you said "settled". Not evolved there. So now it makes sense - settled by some sort of nut cult. A truly virulent version of Bujold's Athos; Charnas' Holdfast; or a variant on Stirling's post-Change Cutters; or any of the other petty cults with a male guru micromanaging everyone's lives and sleeping with all the girls and women. (We have one in New Mexico that's been in the news lately. Aging guru, thinks the Way to God is to sleep with seven virgins, one of whom was 12 at the time - headed for the state pen at last writing.)

(Reply to this)(Thread)

[info]neonchameleon
2008-05-07 02:34 pm UTC (link)
Bujold's Athos; ... or any of the other petty cults with a male guru micromanaging everyone's lives and sleeping with all the girls and women

Um... that doesn't sound like Athos to me. But point taken if there are additional planets owned by that race rather than settling means the indigenous inhabitants creating settlements.

(Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

[info]idiotgrrl
2008-05-07 02:51 pm UTC (link)
Sorry ! I didn't mean to include Athos in the guru-led nut cults! Bad punctuation. Bad, bad, bad. (Slaps hand hard.)

(Reply to this)(Parent)

[info]archangelbeth
2008-05-07 03:07 pm UTC (link)
(I dunno -- Athos without uterine replicators could've gone pretty nutjob culty icky... Although true, it seems that Sleeping With Women would've been something done by Necessity Only, ick, ick, ick, etc., on Athos.)

(Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

[info]neonchameleon
2008-05-08 09:33 am UTC (link)
I don't think that Athos would have existed at all without uterine replicators.

(Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

[info]archangelbeth
2008-05-08 01:59 pm UTC (link)
Or not for more than a single generation, anyway... *grin*

(Reply to this)(Parent)

[info]idiotgrrl
2008-05-07 02:28 pm UTC (link)
One more thing: both Bujold's Athos and Charnas' Holdfast had a religious conviction that women were the root of all sin and evil. Athos settled it by being an all-male colony. In both cultures, pair-bondings between men were the norm: monogamous on Athos; age-based more-or-less-predation on Holdfast.

(Reply to this)
Thoughts
[info]ysabetwordsmith
2008-05-07 05:27 pm UTC (link)
If you're looking at a situation that you find philosophically repulsive, but it evidently WORKS for the people involved, and especially if the degree of their-way-working-for-them substanially exceeds that of your-way-working-for-you ... think five times before opening your mouth:

1) think about the contents of your knee-jerk response,
2) think about why you had that reaction,
3) think about whether there's anything your system does better that might appeal to these people,
4) think about whether there's anything their system does better than yours that might be transferable,
and then
5) think about how to phrase the opening of a conversation exploring points #3 and #4.

If you get stuck on points #1 and #2, try writing them down and burning the results, or using some other mental exercise to get them out of your head and out of your way. Because until you manage that, you'll be shouting through a wall, and little if anything positive will be accomplished.

It's hard work. Many people can't or won't do it. Shooting people who disagree with you is much easier than doing that much headwork day in and day out.

(Reply to this)(Thread)
Re: Thoughts
[info]whatifoundthere
2008-05-07 06:23 pm UTC (link)
A friend of mine in grad school came up with the phrase "the Aztec headache" to describe the physiological effect of these five thoughts you describe. We were teaching a course on Aztec religion, which includes all kinds of freaky stuff like drowning babies for Tlaloc and parading around wearing flayed human skins and ritual regicide and so on. The thing about the Aztecs, as you probably already know, is that they were far from a lunatic anarchy; they had a very sophisticated culture with advanced art, architecture, and (perhaps most surprisingly of all) law.

So we would ask our students, "Is x number of human sacrifices per year better than, say, the number of murders per year in Los Angeles? If you could prove that Aztec-style human sacrifice actually improves life in a way our legal system doesn't, would you be persuaded to adopt it? Is it possible that the Aztecs got something right?" The groans that followed these questions proved that we had inflicted the Aztec Headache on our poor students.

(I hope it's obvious that I'm not a fan of human sacrifice or sticking thorns in one's tongue. I'm emphatically not saying that the Aztecs ought to be emulated or that there is nothing revolting about their culture. I'm just saying, in my roundabout way, that there's a lot to be learned from our own philosophical repulsions when dealing with other cultures, be they real or fictional.)

(Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)
Re: Thoughts
[info]ysabetwordsmith
2008-05-09 02:42 am UTC (link)
This is wonderful! Thanks for sharing.

(Reply to this)(Parent)
Re: Thoughts
[info]dteleki
2008-05-07 10:48 pm UTC (link)
Thank you so much for that 5-point formulation. I wish I'd seen it a year ago; that specific formulation would have rescued me from 2 very nasty reactions that I regretted soon afterwards.

Is that particular formulation something that you put together in that exact form yourself? Or did you find it in a book or a magazine article or some such? Because if there's a book (or whatever) devoted to that specific formulation, with explanations and history and examples and such, I need to read that book NOW. I'm hoping here for something like [info]ozarque's "Gentle Art of Verbal Self Defense" books, that gave me:
. the 3-part complaint format: When you do X, I feel Y, because Z.
. Miller's law: When somebody says something that seems to you completely wrong or senseless, try to imagine what kind of universe it might be true in.

Even if there is no "Gentle Art"-like book that I can grab, your specific 5-part formulation is still a tremendous help to me -- and will help prevent further lapses by me, of that particular type.

(Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)
Re: Thoughts
[info]ysabetwordsmith
2008-05-08 12:43 am UTC (link)
That particular formulation is original, not out of a book, although I may put it into one of my books someday. Use it in good health.

(Reply to this)(Parent)
Re: Thoughts
[info]leora
2008-05-08 03:41 am UTC (link)
The problem is the question of who does it work for?

Because changing it might make it better for some of its citizens and worse for other of its citizens. And that's a hard sell if the people whose lives will be made worse are the only people with the power to change it.

That's based on the axiomatic idea that you should try to make it better for everyone and that inequality should be reduced and rights should be equal for all. But there's no particular reason for someone else to hold that view. So, it's not like you have a good selling point for someone else. What you have is: This may make your life worse, but it'll help someone else that you don't give a damn about, but I think you should give a damn about them, because I think that's what decent people do.

I'm not clear on where you go from there.

The thing is, having slaves does tend to benefit the slave-holders. It's not generally as good for the slaves, of course.

(Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)
Re: Thoughts
[info]ysabetwordsmith
2008-05-08 04:44 am UTC (link)
That's not really what I was getting at.

The sample society was described as having existed for thousands of years. If a society lasts that long against the inevitable challenges -- wars, revolts, natural disasters, and natural-born damn fools -- then it's basically working.

When I talked about finding things that your system had, I specified things that would appeal to the locals. That's not necessarily the stuff you want to give them. They probably aren't going to care about your religion or your philosophy. Don't waste your time. Maybe they'll want your cuisine or livestock or art. Maybe they'll want to hire your engineers to build better bridges, or your doctors to provide better medical care. Let them have that. If you're careful, you might win a concession or two ("Putting a live sacrifice under the bridge pilings isn't part of our engineering method; if you want our engineers to work for you, then you'll need to move the sacrifice to the temple.") But if you try to hijack their whole culture, they'll balk.

Meanwhile, you look for some things they do well enough to be worth trading. Find something and get it moving, whatever that takes.

Then you wait. Because their people and your people are going to be interacting now, and exchanging ideas and goods and services. Try to make sure that as many as possible of those folks are open-minded enough to hang out together off the job. There will be late-night talks and some nasty fights and usually some falling in and out of love. Eventually, the two cultures will learn how to get along. If they or you are doing something that really doesn't work as well as what the other one is doing, that will become obvious and people will start shifting over. That's growth.

Just don't expect all the changes to flow from your culture to theirs.

(Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)
Re: Thoughts
[info]leora
2008-05-08 04:54 am UTC (link)
So, if injustice leads to a stable society that provides a good quality of life for those of its people who have power and it manages to successfully keep those not in power from ever causing problems, you just ignore the injustices no matter how bad they are?

I don't like that model.

(Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)
Re: Thoughts
[info]ysabetwordsmith
2008-05-08 05:14 am UTC (link)
Not necessarily ignore -- just not assault directly. There's more than one way to set fire to Omelas.

And never make the mistake of assuming that your society isn't barbaric in its own way.

(Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)
Re: Thoughts
[info]leora
2008-05-08 05:22 am UTC (link)
I know my society is barbaric. I hope to help change that a little, but I know change is slow.

However, to me, the question is: are you saying that this is the best way to remove injustices because direct action doesn't work well. I could accept that. Or are you saying we shouldn't stop injustices if we could find a good way to do so because we don't have a right to decide what is justice.

I kind of see that point, but when real people are being tortured, I have trouble agreeing with it. I think we should force other cultures to accept some changes if they are currently badly mistreating some people. I'd rather do that peacefully and in a smooth way. But I'm not really okay with standing by and saying, oh it's a shame that they have slaves and they feel it's okay to torture those people, but it's their culture, so nothing I can do about it.

(Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)
Re: Thoughts
[info]ysabetwordsmith
2008-05-08 05:43 am UTC (link)
The best way ... depends on your resources and what type of force you're willing to use, plus other contextual details. What I described is very effective.

In order to force another culture to do something they don't want, you have to violate their integrity (which makes them hate you) and then you have to either kill people until the rest do what you want (possibly all of them) or use some other lever such as blocking their food supply. And you can't let up on the pressure, because if you do, they'll bust loose and take out their ire on you and/or the oppressed group you were trying to help.

The question often isn't whether you can interfere, but whether you should. How would you like it if someone decided to fix your society's barbarisms by force? How do you know you'd be saving more people than the war would kill -- or the retaliation?

That said, is the process I described one I'd be good at? Probably not. I'm perfectly willing to solve problems with violence. But I know that's not the only way, and often not the best way; and the alternative I mentioned is potent. If you want to make a change permanent, you have to convince people that it's their idea, and violence is a lousy tool for that.

(Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)
Re: Thoughts
[info]leora
2008-05-08 07:25 pm UTC (link)
I'm still angry that they didn't. The US has so often forced countries to have democracy. Forced countries to redo elections. When the US had issues with potentially undemocratic elections nobody stepped in and said: hey guys, you need to redo your election, because it's better to take some time and spend some money and have everybody go and vote again than it is to potentially have an unfair election.

Nobody.

I am a bit annoyed with Europe over that.

Yeah, I agree with you though if it's a matter of practicality. What you describe is practical. Whether it is worth doing depends a lot on what kind of oppression you're dealing with. I still think violence was the right solution to try to counter the Germans during World War II and the Holocaust. Changing it culturally would have been too slow; the oppressed people would almost all have been dead.

(Reply to this)(Parent)
Re: Thoughts
[info]voxwoman
2008-05-08 04:32 pm UTC (link)
I am going to copy your reply onto my hard drive (and print it), if you don't mind.

(Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)
Re: Thoughts
[info]ysabetwordsmith
2008-05-09 12:46 am UTC (link)
Go ahead. I'm glad you found it useful!

(Reply to this)(Parent)
Re: Thoughts
[info]danaseilhan
2008-05-08 07:22 pm UTC (link)
The trouble is, it's also very easy to ask yourself, "Gee, am I just getting too worked up about all this?" if you've got a relatively comfy life, can live under the delusion that you're considered an equal in your culture, and are not under constant threat of attack.

A group of people being accustomed to The Way Things Are even when Things are horrible is not so unusual; greater-than-usual adaptability is one of the traits of a human being. But it doesn't mean the situation to which the person is adapting is a good situation or that we ought to indulge in moral relativity about it.

I'm thinking here of the Austrian man recently arrested for imprisoning his daughter from the age of 18 til 42 and raping her repeatedly, producing seven grandchildren. (It would have been eight, but a twin died not long after birth and he incinerated the baby's body in a furnace.) Four of the children got to grow up upstairs in the house; the girl's mother was told that she had run off with a cult and abandoned the kids, and of course was not told who the "father" was. They were fairly normal. The other three kids stayed in the cellar with their mother, completely shut off from the outside world and not even able to stand up all the way (the ceiling was 5'6" in height). They are... not normal. Were not able to grow into their full human potential. They have no idea what to make of the outside world.

That's how I see these women who were kept in pens. And really, when we ask ourselves, "Is this working for the culture?", I think what we're really asking is, "Is this working for the men?" Because the women aren't allowed to live up to their full potential--not even allowed to try. I fail to see how this constitutes "working out." They are being treated as subhuman when there is no evidence to indicate that they are ANY less than human in the first place.

I'm sure there were people who excused the enslavement of Africans with very similar language. I would be curious to know how many individuals partaking in this discussion in [info]ozarque's entry here are people of color, and what they might be thinking.

I'm not crazy about [info]whatifoundthere's little "Aztec headache" business, either. I'm sure the Aztec way of life worked out great for them. Probably not so great for the people they enslaved and destroyed, though, and certainly not for every single social class within the Aztec empire. There is a huge amount of difference between being randomly shot by a criminal in Los Angeles and having execution imposed upon you by your government because some wacko in charge of it believes their god will be appeased if your infant is drowned or your heart is ripped out of you.

I guess what I'm trying to say is I just can't see individuals being less important than abstract concepts, and I believe cultures do get things wrong, and that when they do, something ought to be done about it. And I don't mean "measure them by an abstract concept somebody done made up," either--I mean, put yourself in the shoes of the individuals who are being treated differently, ESPECIALLY if they are the same species as you, and ask yourself how you'd like it if you knew there was some other way to live that would hurt you less.

I realize this is a really borderline thing for me to say; I'm aware that it's an all too easy line to cross and I know that many cultures have been destroyed by well-meaning "benefactors" trying to show them a "better" way of life. On the other hand I think I know the difference between, say, beating their native language out of them, and not letting them beat their wives anymore.

(Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)
Re: Thoughts
(Anonymous)
2008-05-08 08:18 pm UTC (link)
(Michael Farris)

In the context of a science fiction story, it's important to remember the Abbans are not human. They look human but are a distinct species and there could be all sorts of important considerations that come from that (besides the different livers).

Even assuming that the Abbans are just as human as they look, even the best intentioned meddling can have unforeseen and awful consequences.

Without having read the book, it's easy to imagine that the moderate surface improvements brought about by their contact with extra-Abban civilization could backfire, improving the womens' conditions just enough to prevent real change. Here I'm thinking of Brazil, where the looser, seemingly less repressive racial categorization system has probably made things worse over time for black Brazilians (as a bright and successful blacks could simply self-identify as non-black and throw their lot in with the whiter elite). The US system, though harsher in many ways, meant that ambitious and able blacks couldn't leave the community and had to improve the situation of the whole community to enjoy their own success.

Getting back to Abbans, I wonder what their emotional life is like. It's hard to pair bond with someone you keep in a pen/stable (unless you're into zoophilia) and so either Abban mens' psychological health does not depend on emotional intimacy (of the kind that most human males need) or they get that from somewhere else, presumably each other? How? But again, if they're not human their emotional needs could be very different.

(Reply to this)(Parent)
Re: Thoughts
[info]danaseilhan
2008-05-08 07:28 pm UTC (link)
Oh, and I just thought of something. Here's an example of where moral relativity breaks down--from the perspective of an indigenous people versus a so-called "civilized" people.

When European settlers came here, and in the early years of the Republic, one headache they had to deal with in their warfare with the Native Americans was the taking of captives. Not because the captives were taken, although that was bad enough for the families left behind; not because the captives were ill-treated, because in large part they were not; but because the captives did not want to return to "civilization."

Isn't that funny? And it occurred often enough to be worthy of note by early American writers and journalists. Even women who had been regaled with stories from childhood about how the Indians would rape them and scalp them if they were ever captured, often had a strong preference for staying with their captors--which had become their tribe too.

In some Native American tribes there is a high degree of African ancestry, and I don't mean from millions of years ago but from where they assimilated runaway African slaves. The Pequot are one famous modern example.

I think the question is obvious. If every culture is equally valid, and if people who grow up in a culture are always going to find it superior to some other culture, what happened here? It probably wasn't Stockholm Syndrome, at least not in many cases, since the accounts of former captives who returned to white society indicated they were not abused. And they had no reason to lie about it; they had to know that all they had to do was say the word and their outrages would have been avenged, as white society was bending over backwards to find excuses to wipe out Native Americans.

So... *shrug* It's something to consider.

(Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)
Re: Thoughts
(Anonymous)
2008-05-08 08:01 pm UTC (link)
(Michael Farris)

Vaguely related. I think one contributing factor to the removal of the five civilized tribes from the SE US was at the time, the lifestyle of the tribes was competitive with that of the European settlers. It doesn't take much imagination to perceive that some poor whites would have been better off joining tribes which had adapted quickly to some European ways (denominational christianity, writing and printing, courts of law) and had better agricultural traditions (and higher social position for women).
One of the largest of the tribes (Creek Confederacy) even had established mechanisms for assimilating smaller tribes who were granted a large amount of autonomy for loyalty to the central government. The trail of tears was in many ways less a case of a dominant group repressing a weaker one (though it was that too) but also an attempt to eliminate potentially dangerous cultural competition.
Had history played out a little differently there might be large parts of the SE speaking Cherokee, Choctaw and Creek today...

(Reply to this)(Parent)

(Anonymous)
2008-05-08 08:19 am UTC (link)
(Michael Farris)

This may or may not be the place to mention a metaphor for aiding change a friend of mine used to use (I don't know if it was hers or someone else's)

Anyway, the idea is you're never going to be able to convince people to kill a sacred cow. It is, however, sometimes possible to distract them with something else long enough for the cow to starve to death.

To carry the somewhat gruesome metaphor further, it's a good idea to keep them distracted for a while after the sacred cow expires and once they do notice it's dead (and they will) you'd better have a really good explanation worked out ahead of time to convince them that the cow didn't die from neglect but from peaceful natural causes and that the cow is now in a far better place.

(Reply to this)

Create an Account
Forgot your login?
Login w/ OpenID
English • Español • Deutsch • Русский…