Devotees of satire and parody, and their current manifestations, fame and media, appreciate when those fundaments of culture-interpretation are stilled without equivocation. In the late 1950s, Edmund Wilson visited the longhouse at the Onondaga Nation Territory (then referred to as the Onondaga Reservation, or, with some distain, “the Res”) he saw in their most raw forms, the key elements of the Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy: democracy, matriarchy, natural law, peacemaking, and linguistic differentiation. Beyond that view, however, Wilson, (fondly but now quite distantly referred to as the “pre-eminent literary critic of the Twentieth Century”) saw that each of those characteristics were in a devolving latter stage, a twilight of the god-form in which democracy was being wrenched into victim-capital, matriarchy was supplanted by a caste system based on privilege, natural law was contravened by plutocracy, greed-wars erased the commonweal, and today’s Mohican and Onondaga languages are stultified only on blackboards.
In the early 1970s the Everson Museum in Syracuse calculated to venture that they would exhibit the feckless notions of Yoko Ono, who was then a New York City artoid. I find it disturbingly possible to imagine that John Lennon, unaccustomed to escort status and suffocating at any rate with his unseemly uxoriousness, needed to find his own space to reassume the center of the floor. At the Syracuse Jazz Festival last summer I had a long talk with an Onondaga woman who told me about Lennon’s visit to the place she called, without prejudice, “the Res.” Understanding the Nation’s 6100 acres to be a poor shambles – not so far from the truth - Lennon had carried down there gifts of music, and had met with braves and mothers and kids at the Longhouse.
My jazz festival friend said there are photographs of the meeting, and the impromptu party held to signify the Nation’s audience with the celebrated moptop. She spoke of the event with a sparkle of uncritical admiration for the star’s presence and his act of munificence.
Unencumbered by actually having seen these photographs, I imagine the countenances on the faces of the elder Onondaga gentlemen in the company of the benefactor from Liverpool – though the latter was doubtless sincerely generous and even self-effacing in the company of a truer genealogical line to the Thirteenth Century than his own on the war-mongering and imperialistic sceptered isle - and there I might see the pitying yet age-wearied tolerance of strong and natural men forced to accept irrelevant alms from the representative of the clumpy schmucks who had abused their land, perverted their bravery with brutal brutish force, poisoned their waters, and banished their heritage to the disgrace of desiccation.
But ah well, the kids wanted a used guitar, don’t you know?
