Comic Strip of the Day

CSotD: Not an obit, but an observation

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Mike Peterson Published: October 21, 2011 1 minute 9 comments

Illustration by Stephane Peray (Stephff) of the Nation, Bangkok.

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away".

                      — Percy Bysshe Shelley

There will be a raft of crappy cartoons — I've seen some already — depicting Gadaffi at the gates of Hell, the equivalent of the Pearly Gates for hackneyed obituary cartoons about people we didn't like.

This is not an obituary cartoon, but rather a reflection on resilience and permanence of deeply rooted cultures. And, despite its blowing sands, the Libyan desert is home to a number of deeply rooted cultures.

For an American, the concept is better encountered than explained. It is something our transient existence doesn't entirely grok, something that does not come in with trumpets, but, rather, is simply there.

Example:

A number of years ago, I was doing a historical feature on Michael Hogan, a land developer who, after making a fortune as an international merchant, returned to America with his wife, the daughter of a wealthy nobleman of Bombay, India, and founded the village of Hogansburg in the township of Bombay on the northernmost edge of New York State.

As it happens, Hogansburg is either on the edge of, or within the borders of, Akwesasne, one of the major Mohawk communities, depending on who you ask. The state of New York would say it is just outside, the Mohawk would disagree.

That particular topic has occasionally involved roadblocks and standoffs, but the cultural presence is for the most part much less dramatic and much more pervasive.

So I was driving around looking for the home where William Hogan, son of the founder, had lived with his widowed mother when the village actually became Hogansburg around 1825. I had seen an old photo and knew I was looking for a somewhat nondescript house with a historical marker, but I went up and down the highway several times before I saw what looked like the right house, despite the lack of a marker.

By happy circumstance, the fellow living there was just coming out to get in his car, so I pulled over and asked him if this were the right house and we proceeded to have an extended discussion on the subject as one often does in a culture where conversation is something of value.

As he was telling me about the house and the town and the entire concept of settlement and colonization and home, I realized that the only significance of the Hogan family was that they had built this house that he now lived in. And that, if they hadn't built it, he would live somewhere else in Akwesasne, because that was where he lived.

The Hogans, the village of Hogansburg and the entire coming of the Europeans was simply something that had happened within the flow of many other things that had happened since the Kanien'gehaga had been placed there by the Creator. He didn't say that, but I heard it nonetheless.

I asked him, "Didn't there used to be a historical marker here?" and he thought a moment and said. "Yeah, there was. I guess they took it out when they widened the highway and didn't put it back."

Then he thought another moment. "It was a real pain to mow around."