The three of us packed the place, since there were a couple of locals at the table and an Indian at the bar. He was dressed in blue jeans and was wearing a bow hunter’s cap, but he wasted no time explaining that he was a full blooded Ojibwa. Then he stood up, shouted “Jesus Christ!” at the top of his lungs, slammed his can of Blatz down on the linoleum bar, and sat down.
I asked him what seemed to be the problem, and he launched into a tirade about the hunting and fishing rights he had as a result of a treaty between his people and the government. I had a hard time understanding exactly what he was talking about, not because of any accent—he spoke perfect, standard English—but because every so often he would stop in the middle of a sentence, stand up, shout “Jesus Christ!”, slam down his increasingly flat can of beer, and then sit down again as though nothing had happened. After this happened about six times, Hasenpfeffer whispered to me that the fellow was on a fifty-three-second cycle. He’d been timing the guy.
After maybe a half hour of this, I figured out that the treaty said that the Indians could hunt and fish whenever they wanted to, without needing a license, and it didn’t say anything about the manner in which they should accomplish this.
Now the government game warden had written him up for dynamiting fish, a thing he felt he had a perfect right to do.
Well, that was interesting, and shot down all the nonsense you hear about Indians being natural ecologists, but the constant standing up and screaming was starting to get to me. It was getting to Ian worse, nursing his coke while everyone else was into their second six pack, him being a Christian and all, and he was on the side that was being sprayed with beer every fifty-three seconds. I think Ian was just trying to quiet the Indian down in a friendly, humorous way.
“My friend, you swear too fucking much,” Ian said, a perfectly normal statement to make in a Detroit auto plant, but not, as it turned out, in the UP. (That’s pronounced You Pee, with an equal accent on each syllable.)
Things quieted down in a hurry. There was dead silence for a few seconds, then one of the locals got up from his chair and knocked Ian off his bar stool.
“What—what’s wrong?” Ian said from the floor. He was more shocked than hurt.
“You was using vulgarity, and in front of a lady!” The man explained. The bar keeper nodded in agreement, happy to have her honor defended.
“Vulgarity? After all the swearing that has been going on in here? You’re out of your fucking mind!”
“That was taking the Name in vain, and it ain’t the same thing!”
“Shouldn’t simple vulgarity be the lesser offense?” Ian said, still flat on his back.
The local didn’t know how to answer that, so he hauled off to kick Ian when he was down, and naturally, I couldn’t sit quiet for that. I picked up the would-be kicker from behind with my right hand on his belt and said, “Gentlemen, please fight politely.”
At this point the other local and the Indian piled onto me, ignoring Ian entirely. I thought it best to take them outside, since the furnishings of the little place didn’t look too sturdy. There wasn’t much to it since I was already carrying the one, and the other two were crawling all over me trying to wrestle me to the ground. I even had a free hand with which to open the door.
I walked over to a twenty-foot gully near the road, threw them rolling down it and went back into the bar, locking the flimsy screen door behind me.
“I think I’ve deduced the problem,” Hasenpfeffer said, writing hurriedly in a new notebook. “It seems that in this subculture they differentiate between two types of swearing. . . .”
“Yeah, I got that much,” I said. “You all right, Ian?”
“I think so, Tom. Geeze, I thought I was making a joke!”
“It was a nasty joke!” The old bartender said, “Nasty!”
“Yeah. Well guys, the rain’s stopped. Let’s drink up before they think about knocking over our bikes.”
“These are good, solid interactions,” Hasenpfeffer said as we left.
* * *
Later, the three of us were camped way off the road in someplace called Ontonagon County. It was Sunday morning, and Ian was trying to talk us into going to church with him, since he had stopped at all those bars with us. I allowed as how that seemed fair, but did he know of a church that served beer? After all, he’d been able to get a coke at each of our bars.
“Maybe we can find one that serves wine with communion,” Hasenpfeffer suggested.
Ian looked disgruntled, and a change of topic seemed in order. I was doing the cooking, and thus by ancient custom I had certain conversational rights.
I said, “Back to what you were saying last night, Ian, I still maintain that stupidity, true stupidity mind you, is not an individual function. Oh, anybody can do something dumb, and usually does, but to create truly monumentally ridiculous edifices, it takes large groups of people working diligently together. A case in point can be taken from my recent Air Force experience.
“This organization, if I may use such a term on a group of more than ten people, which are inherently disorganized, is obviously—”
“Share out some coffee, and your ramblatory obfuscation will be sharply reduced by the caffeine,” Jim said.
“Yeah, and you won’t talk so funny either, Tom,” Ian added.
“Right,” I said, pouring. “So like I was saying, somebody at the Chief of Staff level became convinced that the best way to insure that the United States Air Force had officers of the finest quality was to require that all such new people were college graduates. Just who this person was, I’m not sure, but you can be certain that he was a college graduate.
“As an aside, I point out that General Chuck Yeager (the first man to crack the sound barrier, an ace pilot in WWII and the commander of the most efficient flying unit in Viet Nam), was only a temporary general. His permanent rank was sergeant, since he talked funny and didn’t have any Ivy League accent at all. They figured that he didn’t measure up since all he knew about was flying, fighting and getting things organized. How could anybody with a redneck accent be officer material?
“Anyway, in some very different nook or cranny of that same service, some committee looked out and observed that enlisted men who had been trained in fields like electronics, and who could thus earn three times their Air Force pay working on the outside, rarely reenlisted. Since there was nothing that this committee could do about pay rates (those being the prerogative of some other committee somewhere else), but needing sergeants trained in electronics to boss the peons they were perforce training in vast droves, and yet heaven forbid that they should make a sergeant out of anyone without first giving him grey hair, passed the following ruling: As an incentive to reenlistment, any troop choosing to reenlist could pick the career field (like electronics) of his choice, and receive up to two years worth of training in that new field.
“Unbeknownst to any of the above committees, the Air Training Command decided that all that an instructor had to know was what was in the training guide, and that practical experience was unimportant in such a fast-moving field as electronics, where things were obsolete before they were installed anyway. Furthermore, they didn’t have any sergeants trained in electronics in the first place, what with none of the airmen reenlisting, so they might as well use airmen right out of school to teach the next class. This set up a situation where airmen were training sergeants who were taking advantage of the reenlistment training bonus, sergeants they could very well be subordinate to on their next tour of duty. Oddly enough, those sergeants all got very good grades, whether they proved capable of learning Ohm’s Law or not.
“The committee that had set up the retraining program compiled all these grades on neat charts that proved that the experienced troop was always the best student.
“Then the Air Force bought the 465L Command Control System, which at that time was the most complicated computerized control system known to man. And the committee in charge of manning this monster decided that it would take some pretty bright boys to keep it working, so they scheduled troops to be trained for repairing it on the basis of IQ. I was one of them they selected.
“So they paid me to go to school for a year, drink a lot, and do pushups in the sandburrs. Once I got to my duty station, I found that my boss was a sergeant with an IQ of about ninety. While he wasn’t a bad guy, he had been too dumb to make it as a sheet-metal repairman, so he had been retrained by the Air Force in the exciting new career field of electronics.