Jim Shanor Culture Shock is always more severe in one’s own country. There is stress in complete predictability. Like waiting for a time bomb that never happens. 

The human brain immediately divides all information coming to the reception area into “new” and “repeat” information. Repeat info goes quickly to the “same and similar” closet in the memory part of the brain, without notice or emotion being pricked. It hangs in the closet near all its close cousins.

New information triggers the juices of the brain and body with myriad implications. Once accustomed to “new” information constantly entering, as we do in a foreign culture, we get addicted to the stimulation. New smells, new sights, new customs, new faces all rev our systems.

Coming back to America, for me The familiar Walmart World, where the stop lights not only work, but control thousands of people and activities simultaneously, everything in order, nobody jaywalking, everyone nodding yes, I am shocked by my own insensitivities, bored by the predictabilities, and I wonder what is missing from our life. Maybe why Robert Frost suggested taking “the road less traveled.” 

I miss the times when I first arrived in Bogota, when I saw city buses drive up on the sidewalks to beat a traffic jam. I could buy any exotic fresh fruit or fruit juice within a one-minute’s walk from any downtown corner. When travelling, ladies with a rooster on a leash might offer to hold a package for me while I dug into my pocket for the bus fare, a simple peso.

Nairobi was once strange and exotic, too, but now it is becoming Westernized and controlled. But there is still life in the smaller cities and towns in Kenya. Donkeys holding up the delivery trucks, madmen dancing in the street with funny hats and mismatched shoes, trains stopping at intersections to allow the beer trucks to pass first. Now I am back in my home ground. Spartanburg, South Carolina may as well be Tucson or Flint, Michigan or San Jose. I am even becoming fatigued by the violence on TV news, regardless of the new camera angles. The shock is in the void. 

Football still has never-ending television commentary coming from familiar voices from decades ago, but it is now bursting with statistics and comparisons and injury reports that boggle the mind. These days we have neuroscientists on the staff of all the professional football teams. They suspect that the repeated blows to the head are possibly “serious in the aggregate,” that the players are suffering long-term damage. I guess so, Sherlock. What we used to call mud they now call adverse soil conditions. The players from the old days are now riding along in wheel chairs on multiple drips wearing hospital gowns, unable to feed themselves, drooling a bit from the lower lip, they can’t speak, and whatever big money they once made is going over to medical expenses and permanent home care.

A particularly poignant documentary aired during the football orgy weekend. It featured John Mackey, once a hero for the original Baltimore Colts, a huge and supremely mobile tight end in his day. His wife did the talking for him. She expressed as much love for a spouse as I have ever seen in a documentary. She is spearheading a movement among pro football decision makers to do something about the safety standards and treatment of “concussions.” Bless her soul. The doctors now measure the brain with all the fancy equipment available, and then advise the players not to play in the next game or two. The players want to play of course. Something about job security. In my day, many of the players were cuckoo for the whole season and proud of it. Even at the high school level. I was a football dropout at 16, a social blemish in 1950’s Oklahoma, partially because I did not like the feeling waking up on the sofa at home, panicked by the time on the wall clock, telling my mother that I was late for practice, and she replying, “You already went to practice and got knocked out cold. Lie back down.” Seeing John Mackey, the best of the best in his day, a teammate of John Unitas and Lenny Moore, a champion and a half, vegetating in a wheel chair unable to speak, that got to me. His wife said there are a number of his peers in the same or similar condition.

Now about some of the commentary. Certain announcers try to convey an absolute mastery of statistics to the rube public. This has always irritated me; we are all mortals, so don’t patronize me.

A sensible statistic now and then can illustrate a trend or a truth. Some commentators cannot seem to discern wheat from chaff, the sensible from the gaudy. Statistics fly at us more and more these days, discernment less and less. The advances made in computing and data base design are the reason. In the World Series, I had to listen to Tim McCarver, a solid but mediocre catcher in his day and a more mediocre commentator now, explain to us “this hitter has taken the first pitch 18 out of the last 21 times at bat with runners at first and third in the middle innings of a night game in October.” So what, Tim? How would you know that if you didn’t have a 4th generation query system hitting at a master database? Some underpaid women have been working in a data processing pool at Major League Headquarters, pounding out the pitch by pitch information day and night for years, to catch up with and capture the entire history of  baseball. Some geek with headphones is fiddling around in the technical truck with “what ifs” and “queries” so he can feed Tim inconsequential noise to relay to us baseball fans at the bars and on the sofas all over the known sports listeners’ world.

“Hey Sarge, did you know that Johnson throws a splitter over 80% of the time to foreign born switch hitters under 5 feet 10 when there’s no one on second base?”

“No, I never noticed that tendency. But get your head down, there’s incoming fire from the Taliban. And turn that radio down. It’s giving away our position.”   

Modern commercials are sometimes good on first inspection. But they drive the damned things into your heart and brain like stakes into Dracula during mob frenzy. Ten straight days of “tailgate tested, tailgate approved.” I don’t even drink beer these days, but Bud Light is telling me for the 200th time this week that their product is tested and approved. Huh? And how can a 60-minute game take three and a half hours to finish? The ads, stupid. The ads. And how do all the networks synchronize the ads so that one cannot escape them even with a high tech remote control device and a trigger finger? It is a conspiracy among the networks, I am sure. They synch the weather reports and used car ads, the breaking headlines and the cooking shows. Don’t tell me they don’t plan it. They all play golf together. We are captured.

I am tempted to remark more on the subtle racism in sports, but it might be unfair and I do not wish to bring in controversial negativity. It’s Thanksgiving and Christmas. Times are surely better now than when I grew up in a segregated world. We have reps from most of the demographic groups at most levels of football. The pompom girls, the defensive linemen, the safeties, even the quarterbacks and the casts in the beer ads. There is always talk that it is more difficult for an African American to get a job in coaching. Those jobs are filled more equitably than they were in our youth. But what about team owners? Are they not all white? Who’s working on that?

Enough. Coaches are being fired and their contracts bought as we speak. Commentators have new meta-musil to chew on. Hand me that remote. Who’s number One?

You can see it on the local news in Cowpens, five in the morning til twelve at night. Cops chasing robbers all over the South Carolina Upstate, robbers scheming on any easy pickings, like late night drunks or defenseless old homeowners, thugs shooting thugs over drug deals gone bad, even grannies knocking off banks, and spouses whupping up on their own kind. At another level of infighting, the high schools and their loyalists are getting fanatic all week in preparation for the Friday night showdowns under the floodlights, almost primping for the cameras,  all for the show. Organized university coaching staffs huddle in the stands, plotting the execution, the seduction of the biggest and fastest high school boys under the lights to come over and “play for us, not them” next year. You could call it competition at all levels. Both cops and robbers are ex-footballers. I would call it misdirected hormonal energy at all levels. There is no real “play” in the struggles. What else can young males do these days with all that energy?

National:

There’s a war within a war within a war going on in Columbus, Ohio. I have known Somalis for over 42 years, in schools, on dusty African roads, in tea shops, at weddings, under mortar fire, between jobs, in their kitchens and in their boudoirs. I hunted with them and was hunted by them. Every one I ever met or knew was a Muslim. No exceptions. Some of them were brilliant, some ambitious, generous and kind, some extra clever. Most of them were clan-centric, proud of themselves, and could give out a ribbing  just as well as take one. Some of them are just plain bad news.

Now here in the US, there is an extension of the ideological conflict going on between two groups of Somalis that should be better understood. The Traditional Somali grew up in a sorta “Sufi” form of Islam. They dance, make poetry, sing songs in groups and enjoy social company. Especially when it rains. They have memorized thousands of lines of poetry, for example, just about how wonderful life is when it rains. That’s the way it is in a dry place when you are a nomad with animals to keep. The second group of Somalis, here and in Somalia, have been influenced by the “Wahaabi” form of Islam. This form is imported from Saudi Arabia. It is foreign to the Traditional Somali. ”Wahaabis” are the polar opposites of the “Sufis.” They chop off hands for minor offences, hate to see anything Western, they grow funny little goatees, they stone to death girls that break their draconian rules, and they are the most sexually repressed group of boys and men I have ever witnessed, including the hard core Southern Baptists I grew up with in Tulsa and the Pilgrims I read about in the US history books. They don’t want to see a woman’s ankle skin nor see her breasts held up by a bra. Their test is to make the girls and women shake their breasts to prove they have no bras underneath the black costumes. The jiggle will set you free.

Now these two groups are represented in Columbus, Ohio in two of the mosques there. There is a Peace Mosque and a War Mosque. You think the war mosque, the Wahaabis, can leave the Peace Mosque, the Sufis, alone and let’m be? No way. For details, here’s the scoop: http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/al-qaeda-in-somalia-supporters-blamed-for-ohio-arson/

International:

Now, two years ago I suggested to an academic friend who follows the Somali chaos that the Al-Qaeda supported factions in Somalia would eventually step on the toes of the traditional Somali religious folks, and I was right on that prediction. Somalis hate outsiders. Not just Europeans or Americans. They hate Kenyans, they hate Ethiopians, they hate Chinese and Indians, they hate Arabs. My Somali language teacher, a famous retrobate, but a very intelligent reprobate, once explained to our small language class in New York: “Somalis are the most democratic people in the world. We hate everyone equally.”

So all outsiders are treated with disdain. One Somali proverb translates: “There are two kinds of people in the world. The quick and the dumb. Somalis are quick. The rest are dumb.” So what can Somalis do once they have evicted all foreigners (and many of their own women and children) by means of violent, senseless fighting. Rape and plunder, blood and glory. Now the men and boys are left with only themselves to deal with, their Toyota land cruisers, AK-47s, the 50 mm mounted machine guns, the “BOSS” T-shirts, their cell phones, and their bad breath.

There are peaceful areas in Somalia, which is overall the size of Texas. I will attend to those areas of calm on another day. But now we must look at the infighting among the religious sub-groups and wonder why? Why? Why? Lots of shifting loyalties, but always sub-clan based. The basic fighting is between Wahaabi influenced and Sufi influenced gangs. The international press calls them “militias.” At any given time, no international expert really knows which side one militia will fight for tomorrow.

See http://allafrica.com/stories/200911191086.html for a peek into yesterday’s news. The Central Somali Government, fabricated by outsiders, is apologizing to the Sufi clerics, but it is not clear whether they will be “with us or against us” by the time we hear the next report.

First Things First:

Cowpens Droppings  will include local, national, and international sections. Since Cowpens is the center of the world, the blog will radiate to relevant sites and opinions anywhere outside Cowpens that touches headquarters. Cowpens is physically on both sides of a great national highway that ties together major cities in the Eastern and Southern parts of America. Literate travelers stop into Cowpens for various reasons, leaving their physical and virtual droppings for analysis and comment. National television and radio saturate the air above Cowpens. Cowpenians are therefore exposed to the same low level intellectual assault as the people in the suburbs of New Jersey, DC, Charlotte, and Atlanta. And Tulsa and Palm Springs and Vail.  The BBC edges itself into our consciousness late at night via NPR and educational TV. The internet works in Cowpens as well as it does in Palo Alto or Cambridge, just not as cheaply. We all share many frequencies. So let’s consider ourselves equals for openers as we observe the world from the same level ground. We acknowledge but yield not to elitists from Manhattan to Marin, London to Lagos, nor to the advance guard politicos in Ames, Iowa and New Hampshire.

Ok, we South Carolinians have some horrible national representatives, but then, so do you.

Local:

The weather is autumn typical, maples still holding out, the reds and oranges waving at us from the forests along the tidy roads, the police are still setting speed traps, chasing crooks and poor people, the judges are still letting the prominent citizens get away with murder. A wealthy local businessman recently left the rural highway at 85 mph, crossed an open field, then crashed through the outer brick walls into a peaceful house where the home owner rested in his den watching TV. Killed the guy dead. Character witnesses explained under oath that the business man was generous to the Boys Club and other charities. He wasn’t DWI said the police, though they forgot to test him on the crash site at the time of the tragedy. Businessman settled for 3 million with the widow of the TV watcher. The judge gave him a suspended sentence, no jail time. The defense attorney explained that each case was different, had different facts. No shit.

National:

The Senate committees passed a new form of the Health Reform Bill last night. It ain’t over til the fat diabetic lady sings. All the Democratic leaders were photographed clapping each other on their backs, the Republicans a bit silent, but not finished with the battles. Image is 9 tenths of the law. Whatever comes of the final legislation, the American public has seen first hand more of the process of law making than in any example in my memory. Maybe it’s worth it educationally, however it turns out. Money talks, don’t it? JJ Cale mentioned that a long time ago.  

International:

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton attended the inauguration of Hamid Karzai, I suppose to show some support to the hope that a central government can rule a decentralized region. Won’t work until the tribes interbreed enough to lose their identities, their mother tongues, their favorite phrases heard around the kitchen when they first start to crawl. Same goes for Somalia and Sudan. Wake up, you international geopolitical Central Planners. You shoving a square peg into a round hole.