Author! Author!

With apologies to any random Discovery Channel or Learning Channel program other than those inane (and desperately cheap to produce) home makeover shows or any of that nonsense starring those morons with the tattoos that trick out motorcycles. But I digress.

Igliik sat on his haunches next to the fire as the sun went down along the low ridge off to his right. Facing south Igliik looked out over the river valley in the twilight of an early autumn evening 27,000 years ago in what is now southern France. Igliik was a small man of about 19, almost middle-aged and fortunate for his people, stout ,with long arms, dark hair swept back by the wind, and twinkling black eyes that sat like marbles deep in a bearded face with strong cheekbones and a smooth forehead. Sitting with him on this ridge were his brother Mahag and what passed for the small band’s shaman, Tegelek. Not a loquacious people, the brief blessing ceremony at an end, the 3 men sat around the fire enjoying the sounds of the valley as night fell.
Some time later, with only the stars for company , and as the owls hooted to each other in the valley below, Igliik picked up his leather satchels and headed into the cave. Igliik did a little inventory in his mind as he descended deeper in the darkness. He wore a cloak made from the skin of the old she-bear who had occupied this cave before. He had been up the previous spring expecting a battle royal in order to chase a bear and her cubs out of the cave, but the she-bear had no cubs this year and she was near death when Igliik found her just a few feet from the entrance having no energy left to head out after her winter hibernation. It was, in fact, a mercy killing since the bear had lost all her teeth and was in terrible pain from a gum infection. Over his shoulder Igliik carried two leather bags one filled with elk jerky and some dried fish, and walnuts and tallow lamps, enough for 3 days, the other his paints in small bladders that he would use to fill one wall with images of his life and people. With one hand he carried a torch to light his way forward and down. Water would be no problem, where he was going was a small clear pool with a sandy beach, and most importantly no bats to foul the water. After a couple of hours and a few scrapes and bruises Igliik made it to the small beach and the wall that would serve as his canvas.

The people of this time and place had no elaborate religion or ceremonies, that had been for the Neandertals mostly to the north and who had died out some 5,000 years before, largely for reasons unknown. Igliik and his band thought of the Sun as their Father, the Moon as his Sister, the Earth as their Mother with the stars as ancestors and the herd animals as mostly benign spirits to be represented on the cave walls as a clarion call for next spring’s hunts. Their dead they buried with a few meager belongings and little fanfare.
Igliik got to work. He lit a tallow lamp and took a deep breath, closed his eyes for a moment as the silence of the cave wrapped around him like a blanket. He opened his eyes, dipped his fingers in the paints and began drawing stick-like figures that to him represented the mammoth, the elk, the cave bear, the smilodon, and the cave lion. He painted them grazing contentedly on the plains to the east, jumping, running, caring for their young. In short living life as he and his people had observed them for many generations with little change. Further along the wall he drew his own people singly or in twos arms raised in triumph or terror he knew not which. He painted like this for 2 and a half days finishing with the wall by showing a massive hunt of several bands chasing elk and mastadon into a deadly ravine where the hunters would descend to finish the killing and divide the meat and organ and skins, virtually all of the animal among the bands to get them through the summer, autumn, and winter into next spring’s hunt. Like so many artists before and since Igliik represented those things he saw and knew of the prehistoric world around him.

Late on the third day, his food gone, and the last tallow lamp flickering weakly in the vast dark, Igliik became a little delirious whether from hunger or the solitude and silence he got a weary smile on his face as he went to the wall one last time. On it, in a small corner near the water’s edge he drew 2 people engaged in coitus. And thus for Western society at least, pornography was born in a cave in Southern France many years ago. After a couple of hours ascent Igliik stepped out of the cave on a cloudy night, snow began to fall as he stood on the ridge next to the remains of the fire from 3 nights before. He looked down at the evergreens with clumps of aspen trees, pale in the dark but a brilliant gold during the day. Connected at the roots they often turn colors all at once. Igliik made his way down the rocky path and back home to his small band.

Speaking of turning aspens we come now to one I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, formerly Assistant to the President and Chief of Staff and National Security Advisor to the Vice President of the United States Richard Bruce (big time)(Dick) Cheney. Ugh. Product of the finest schools Andover prep school, graduated from Yale, and a law degree from Columbia Law School. Years of government service at the highest policy levels at the Department of Defense, Department of State and, finally at the White House. Currently unemployed (but sitting on a $5 million legal defense fund) and record holder for number of felony indictments of a sitting senior White House appointee, and after Teapot Dome and the Grant Administration that’s saying something. He currently possesses five felony indictments, to wit:
one count of obstruction of justice;
two counts of perjury; and
two counts of making false statements. Dude’s facing up to $1.25 million in fines and 30 years in Federal stir. All because they were too lazy to refute a former ambassador who largely agreed with them. But because he wasn't playing nice they decided to smear him by revealing his wife's non-official cover status at the CIA - an organization Libby and his freres considered disloyal. It was lazy and stupid and venal and it was how these people have been winning elections for 25 years.

But really, all that’s besides the point. Mr. Libby put out a novel of early 20th century Japan 9 years ago. Book is entitled, “The Apprentice” and tells the story of a rural apprentice innkeeper named Tetsuo and his coming of age as the circus arrives and he gets his world rocked, if you will. The following passage has appalled internet and dinner party audiences all over town for the past few weeks, I bring it to you from the New Yorker magazine from early last month as they did a survey of the variety of Republican authors and their awful attempts at erotica, such as the following:

At age ten the madam put the child in a cage with a bear trained to couple with young girls so the girls would be frigid and not fall in love with their patrons. They fed her through the bars and aroused the bear with a stick when it seemed to lose interest.
And, finally:
He asked if they should fuck the deer.

I couldn't even type that without wanting to take a shower in lye soap. Get one of those Karen Silkwood anti-radiation scrubdowns, you know. I mean what is it with these people. Never mind.

Now look I’m pretty sure Igliik and his people had were very limited in their moral senses, and he may have even bit somewhat bemused by Mr. Libby’s little scene there, you know, if someone would describe it to him. But really, well, number one the passage speaks for itself, and number two makes you wonder how far we have really come in 27,000 years of civilization, you know.