THE ROVING
EYE Visions make it all seem so
cruel By Pepe Escobar
Mona Lisa must have had the
highway blues You can tell by the way she
smiles - Bob Dylan, Visions of
Johanna
ON THE ROAD IN ARIZONA AND
COLORADO - It's 5pm on a Saturday in Shungopavi
("sand grass spring place"), established by the
Bear Clan, the first to arrive on the three Hopi
mesas in northeast Arizona. The whole village,
plus surrounding villages, is watching a basket
dance before sunset; an astonishing spectacle
where Central Asia meets the American Southwest.
Geology says this could easily be Afghanistan.
No photos allowed, so I was busy trying to
impress in my mind the full picture of a
traditional Hopi two-story adobe house as a
living
organism; an old lady as a guardian angel, kids
escalating the levels, an extended family in
conversation. And it was all a miracle; I've
stumbled into the sacred ceremony by accident,
while driving by the mesas before sunset, those
small villages perched on high contemplating the
infinite plains.
The Hopi Nation has
always lived in the Four Corners area of the
Colorado Plateau. They bear one of the more
sophisticated cosmologies in the world. According
to it, they emerged from the underworld through a
sipapu - an opening - in the Grand Canyon. Then
they were thrown into the light of this - the
Fourth World - with the help of a small bird, the
shrike, and made a vow of righteous living to
Sootukwnangwu, the Supreme Creator. The guardian
spirit of the land told the Hopis they would have
to serve as the earth's steward once they had
finished their mandated four migrations to the
north, south, east and west in search of the
center of the earth.
Legend tells us that
the Hopis traveled to the Aztec temples in Mexico,
down to South America, up to the Arctic Circle and
to both of the US coasts. The center of the cross
formed by their four directional routes is the
Hopi mesas. Every time I come back here - it has
been a while - following Arizona highway 264 East,
I know this is as sacred a land as it can get.
As other clans also migrated to the Hopi
mesas, they contributed a different skill or
ceremony dedicated to common prosperity. The Hopi
ceremonial calendar is ultra sophisticated. A holy
man in each village determines the timing of each
ceremony by the position of the sun.
Kachinas are the all-important spirit
beings in Hopi cosmology in charge of assuring
rain. They visit the Hopis and bring gifts - thus
the village ladies dressed as Kachinas, with their
fabulously elaborated costumes distributing
baskets to the crowd and nowadays also plastic
implements of daily life. At the end of a dance,
prayer feathers are given to the Kachinas so that
the prayers for rain and assorted auspicious
events are carried in all directions.
And they vote Democrat All
archeological sites on the Hopi Reservation are
protected by federal law and, most of all, Hopi
tribal laws. You cannot take a photo, shoot a
video or even draw a sketch of a village or a
ceremony - proving once again that the most
startling images in America, the land of outsized
imagery, are absolutely mysterious, invisible and
unpublishable.
One of the villagers even
kindly requested me not to take notes on an
iPhone. Alcohol and drugs are banned - although,
unfortunately, bootleggers thrive, some of them
Hopis, betraying their own nation's codes. Each
Hopi village is autonomous - and establishes its
own policies, then sanctioned by the Hopi Tribal
Council.
Mitt Romney wouldn't be caught
dead in a place like the Hopi Nation. For
starters, the surviving Hopis are only 15,000,
spread out among 12 villages. As Rhonda, my Hopi
friend in Tuba City explained, this is
predominantly Democrat territory in a deeply
Republican state.
By American standards,
these are all part of Mitt's 47%, some very poor,
living in ugly cement houses, although quite a few
young Hopis do enroll at the University of
Arizona. Seems like the Hopi Nation is
overwhelmingly voting Obama - who is invariably
praised as "having done good things for our
people". Yet the only Democrat president to have
ever visited the Hopi Nation in person was - who
else - The Great Bubba himself; Bill Clinton
during his first term.
So I was blessed to
watch a basket dance; got a Kachina - "Butterfly
Man" - to watch my back; and a new bracelet, "bear
paw", to replace the one I had and was broken.
Once again I was paying my respects to what
remains of the Native American dream.
But
I could not find a Hopi holy man to tell me what
had happened to the American Dream - the
exceptionalist version. So I drove further into
Navajo Nation sacred territory, following Frank
Kosik's indispensable Native Roads (Rio
Nuevo Publishers, Tucson, 2nd edition) - into the
beyond-IMAX, larger-than-life Geology Spectacular
of Monument Valley.
The Hopi Reservation is
surrounded by the Navajo Reservation. To say they
do not get along so well is quite an
understatement. Not to mention the murky stories
of Mormon settlers - Mitt's tribe - taking over
Navajo lands in the 19th century. Unlike Jim
Morrison - who in a psychedelic haze was visited
by a Navajo holy man and then saw the light - I
was basically looking for a little conversation.
It was not exactly uplifting to learn that Navajo
President Ben Shelly is now deeply into renewing
the lease for a coal-burning, high-polluting
Navajo Generation Station (NGS) without even
talking to the Navajos themselves.
As
Marie Gladue reminded everyone in a letter
published by the Navajo-Hopi Observer, "the NGS is
Arizona's single biggest emitter of greenhouse
gases", leading to droughts, wildfires and record
temperatures, not to mention kids with asthma and
older folks with bronchitis and increasingly prone
to heart attacks. But it seems there's no prospect
of NGS moving from coal to solar.
With no
Navajo holy men in sight, I was left with an
aesthetic satori that would make John Ford blush
with envy. It was provided by Albert and his horse
over the backdrop of Monument Valley; his daughter
sells Navajo jewelry exactly at John Ford's point.
Albert says it's been hard to make a living after
the never-ending recession took over in 2007/'08.
But he still believes in the promise of his
blessed land. As in the Grey Hills Academy High
School - one of the best examples of the push at
the Navajo Reservation for self-determination in
education.
The apparition of the Jewish
cowboy It was time to try a Hail Mary
pass. I started at the Four Corners - where Utah,
Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico meet. Utah and
Arizona will vote Romney; New Mexico will vote
Obama. Colorado is a swing state, but Obama's
chances of winning stand at 63% and rising,
according to Nate Silver's projections.
At
the Four Corners I met Wayne, who presented me
with the full Navajo cosmology drawn and painted
by himself on sandstone. That was as good an omen
as meeting a real-life medicine man. Still I
crossed half of Colorado, through majestic pine
tree forests, immaculate cafes from the American
exceptionalism era, the embryonic ski season in
Vail, a head-spinning cyclone of negative ads
playing non-stop from both the Obama and Romney
campaigns, and on to ultra-green, eco-friendly
Boulder of the Naropa Institute studying Buddhism
and bikers and skateboarders everywhere.
And then, finally, I saw him - in
Broomfield, next to Boulder; the post-everything
incarnation of an American medicine man. Make it a
Jewish cowboy/rabbi telling tales with a coarse
voice from beyond the grave. Of course, it was a
Bob Dylan concert as part of his never-ending
tour; a sort of sacred ceremony only for the
initiated, or for those who know where to look for
the keys to get an answer.
So here it was,
this joker medicine man, always tangled up in
blue, always down on highway 61, reminding
everyone something's happening here and we don't
know what it is, obsessed in never being other
than a rolling stone, all along the watchtower and
expecting rain - or the answer blowing the wind.
At the end of my pilgrimage in search of a
holy man, I did find my answer when he sang an
unbelievable version of Visions of Johanna
- the true Coloradoans by my side were also
speechless. While our consciousness may explode in
the search of a vanished American dream,
the harmonicas play the skeleton
keys and the rain and these visions of
Johanna are now all that
remain.
Oh yeah,
exceptional America:
Ain't it just like the
[Southwest] night to play tricks when you're
trying to be so quiet? It seems like we'll be
sitting here stranded for quite a while - even
though we all keep doing our best to deny
it.
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
