I couldn’t wait to see how they got out of THAT one.  I only hoped it would be more graceful than Disney’s purported “Michael-Jacksonizing” of the animated (now-white) Indians in the DVD version of their “Peter Pan.”

What the Syfy producers did was give the Neverland Indians clothing, regalia, tools, weapons, and architecture from nations all over the US and Canada, which were generally rendered  rather classily; no neon-colored feathers or plastic pony beads.  When we first meet them, they are singing what sounds very much like a Gyuto Monks’ Tibetan Buddhist chant!

So, kind of a mishmash.  Perhaps that’s who they are: the Mishmash Nation!

It’s bound to give scholars the red – uh, skin – any time costumes, props, or sets seem to be from a mix times or places.  But if I may play the wendigo’s advocate for a moment:

• Ancient peoples always seem to have “gotten around” a lot more than anyone thought; consider, for example, the Viking’s Buddha excavated at Lake Malaren, Sweden.
• Archaeological evidence confirms that First Nations had a continent-spanning trade network long before the importation of the horse.
• So in real life, Native folks had stuff from nations other than their own: traded goods, war trophies, things brought in by adopted members back before the BIA said “quit adopting people and start paying attention to blood quanta or kiss federal recognition goodbye”. . .

All right , a group still probably wouldn’t ALL have Lakota feather bonnets and ALL have Makah canoes and ALL have Tlingit hats the ways the Mishmash did.  And even if the land-bridge theory held true, did the Mishmash walk all the way from Tibet?  And if so, would the song remain the same?

But it was very pretty.  And the Indians seemed as “people-y” as any of the other characters. And the giant-mutant-octodile hunt was WAY cool.  So, on balance . . . ‘sall’ight.

1971 also saw the success of the movie Billy Jack, whose Metis martial-artist hero fights for wild horses and runaway kids. The hippie generation (which became the politically-correct generation) hailed Natives in general as free-living, highly spiritual guardians of the earth, victims of The Man just like themselves. And they’d already been through so much, so quit being mean to them. The old-school Fictional Bad Indians pretty much died out, or were at least always carefully juxtaposed with fictional good Indians, – and stayed that way even when Hollywood started making Westerns again.

Until now. In Ringer, whose stars include “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” Sarah Michelle Gellar and “Horatio Hornblower” Ioan Gruffudd, Fictional Bad Indian Bodaway Macawi is an organized-crime boss with both Native and non-Native minions and apparently national connections, a sociopath who tortures and kills without remorse. He owns a Wyoming strip club and has been arrested for fatally dismembering one of the strippers, giving “employee severance” a whole new meaning.

Others have noticed Macawi; for example, there’s an ongoing discussion here. But I’m not reading a lot of outrage, just some lukewarm grousing. The producers and writers seem to have gone through some contortions not to give anyone the standing to sue (yep, finally some law in this post) and it’s resulted in a bewilderingly amorphous character. Macawi appears to have gone off the reservation in more ways than one: although he’s based in the Wind River part of Wyoming (Shoshone and Arapaho lands), there’s no hint of ties to a nation or even a family (ok, a passing mention of a brother. Whom he killed). He’s involved in a vice-related business but NOT GAMBLING (according to one of my law professors, the “regular” FBI couldn’t find organized crime in tribal casinos despite a whole lot of looking). Also unclear how his tentacles reach to NY and beyond, and yet he doesn’t even have a place to keep prisoners other than the basement of this tiny dump of a strip club. And his gang sells heroin, Really? In Wyoming? I’d have pegged that for meth country.

Oh well: He’ll get his; this isn’t real life, after all. If Buffy and Horatio don’t take him down, Walter White could stomp hm flat. Though that wouldn’t necessarily do the people of Wind River any favors.

These authors are probably right. Piracy is largely an organized crime; pirate chieftains like Blackbeard, Jean Lafitte, Grace O’Malley, and Madame Chiang commanded sizable fleets. Organizations have to have rules if they want to grow and achieve.

Don’t get me wrong; pirates were (and still are) “not very nice persons at all.” They stole ships and their cargo for personal gain, took prisoners for ransom or slave-price (or addition to the crew if sufficiently useful), and killed anyone who got in their way. Not like, for instance, national navies and letters of marque, which confiscated suspected enemy ships and their cargo as prizes shared by the crew, took prisoners for exchange or impressment into service, killed anyone who got in their way, and were sanctioned by governments and mostly financed by taxes.

My point -and I do have one – is that 17th- 18th-century pirate codes reveal a professional culture exhibiting much more democracy, safeguards for dispute resolution, and merit incentives at all levels than could be found in most governments of their age, and far more than can be found in most legitimate business ventures of our own time. They could certainly be a model for contractual relationships among salvagers and others who, albeit within the local law, profit from things that they find (rather than make or buy).

Although pirates and indigenous tribes are cultures as different as night and day, they share one thing (apart from certain individuals identified with both groups during their lives) – a tendency to be either romanticized or demonized by people who don’t really understand how they live. Because they run around in comfortable clothes all the time and are not subject to the same laws and strictures that the outside viewer is, the outside viewer assumes they have no laws or strictures at all and turns them into symbols – either of untrammeled individual freedom or unrestrained savagery. In either case, nothing could be further from the truth.

Pirates had the original “motley crews” (although most of them had never seen an umlaut). Although the trade itself sometimes ran in families, their travels necessitated parleys, alliances, and mergers with individuals and groups of many ethnic and national backgrounds. Besides, the “model” pirate crew numbered 80 to 120, and crews of 200 or more were not uncommon. They realized, long before Ben Franklin did, that they must “hang together or all hang separately.” Lacking the inborn ties of blood and birthplace common to land-based criminal organizations, they needed another way to ensure loyalty and high performance.

Furthermore, the most successful pirate chieftains, apparently unlike their modern corporate counterparts, knew that good officers weren’t enough to make a ship profitable. Disaster at sea, inside or outside of a conflict situation, comes in many forms; a navigator, sailor, lookout, gunner, boarder, quartermaster, or powder-monkey could, at any given moment, find himself (or, more often that is generally credited, herself) the only one standing between a ship and its destruction.

Anyone who’s seen a movie with “mutiny” in its title will understand that there aren’t many worse situations than being stuck on a tiny floating object in a huge and treacherous ocean, wholly subject to the unpredictable whims of a pathological nutcase who happens to be in charge. Crown and Company ships were autocracies; dissent, however sensibly based and politely proposed, could be punished by imprisonment, flogging, or death. Many experienced sailors who joined pirate crews were fleeing just such situations and didn’t want to see them again. Pirate codes (which differed between organizations and even between individual ships) therefore incorporated checks and balances to avoid vesting too much power in any one person. One common measure was to have captains elected by the crew, and removable by it – without the risks and damaes of mutiny – for good cause, such as predation (on the crew, that is; predation on target ships was to be expected), cowardice, or poor judgment. Another was to give the captain control only in battle operations, and vest between-conflict control in the also-elected quartermaster (not unlike the “war chief / peace chief” dichotomy in some of the Plains Indian nations). Contemporaneous chronicler Charles Johnson called the typical pirate quartermaster “an humble Imitation of the Roman Tribune of the People; he speaks for, and looks after the Interest of the Crew.”* Nor did pirate captains generally draw much larger shares of the plunder, or enjoy much more private space, better provisions, or other privileges than the rest of the crew.

Quartermasters were, in their turn, reined in by Articles of Agreement or chasses-partie - mini-constitutions that were adopted by unanimous consent of the crew before an expedition began. Besides detailing the division of spoils, the Articles often imposed universal duties such as care of weapons, prohibited on-board fighting and fight-provoking behaviors such as gambling, set forth punishments for transgressions such as fraud or desertion, and defines compensation to be paid to anyone wounded in action. Those unwilling to live with the terms were usually free to leave at the first reasonable opportunity. Pirates who transferred between ships or joined fleets often compared different ships’ Articles, and a body of knowledge evolved about what worked and what did not. These bodies of knowledge sometimes developed into regional bodies of piratical customary law, such as the Caribbean “Jamaica Discipline.”

Fascinated by “outlaws’ laws,” but hate blood and bad smells? To learn more from a safe distance, you can read Colin Woodard’s “The Republic of Pirates” or listen to an NPArrr interview with him.

*Charles Johnson, A General History of the Pyrates: From Their First Rise and Settlement in the Islands . . . to which is Added a Short Abstract of Statute and Civil Law, in Relation to Pyracy. (2 vols., 1726-1728 [1999]).

Professions have subcultures of their own.  My former profession, engineering, didn’t have much folklore (aside from the occasional hero or trickster legend) back when I started. Since the advent of Dilbert, it has developed a fairly large body of humor that is often self-deprecating. See also User Friendly. When I changed careers to law later, I was fascinated to learn that the American legal culture is very rich in folklore. . . but my fascination took on morbid overtones when I realized that most of the folklore was of a very specialized kind.

In general, some stories are meant to entertain; some to encourage hope; some to teach (rather like the way judicial opinions are used in casebooks); but virtually every culture also has stories meant to control its junior members. Some aim at direct control: If you’re disobedient, the bogeyman will get you; Santa will bring you a stocking full of coal; Black Peter will spank you with his bag of switches; Spider Woman will whisk you away to the top of Spider Rock in Canyon de Chelly. Others effect indirect control by discouraging self-esteem; traditional Chinese parents avoided praising their children and frequently disparaged them so that demons wouldn’t snatch them; Central Asian parents did likewise to avoid attracting the evil eye.

Outside the profession, mainstream cultural folklore treats lawyers like soap-opera characters; almost all the really clever ones are evil, and most of the rest (like The Simpsons’ Lionel Hutz or Janet Evanovich’s Albert Kloughn) couldn’t figure out how to pour swamp water out of a boot without cutting a hole in the toe, even if told that the directions are written on the heel. All the bar ethics rules that can tie us up in every possible knot, at work and away from work, have not seemed to make the slightest dent in this perception. The Old Lawyers’ tales, told almost exclusively inside the profession, are very different.

Law is a highly perfectionist culture (and keep in mind that this is an ex-engineer talking); after all, wouldn’t you want the lawyer representing you, like the engineer who designed the bridge you’re driving on, to be a perfectionist? In Old Lawyers’ Tales, the moral always seems to be “You’re not good enough because. . .” (you didn’t go to the #1 school, you weren’t #1 in your class, you didn’t do enough outside activities, you didn’t get an offer from your summer clerkship, you didn’t clerk for a Supreme Court judge, you had the wrong parents, you’ve got the wrong biological plumbing, you don’t have any super powers). . . just go down the list until you find one that applies. And there’s almost certainly one that does. Anything but perfection is “not good enough,” and nobody’s perfect. At least law students and new lawyers needn’t worry about attracting Chinese demons or the Central Asian Evil Eye.

Like many of my fellow lawyer-larvae, I used to take Old Lawyers’ Tales personally. I went to a law school I really liked rather than the “rank”est one I could get into, and even there I wasn’t in the top 10% of my class. Therefore, according to the Old Lawyers’ Tales, I am doomed to realize the worst fears of Al Franken’s Saturday Night Live persona Stuart Smalley: I would die friendless and penniless and twenty pounds overweight. If only I were in the top 10%, I thought, the world would beat a path to my door. Then a classmate revealed to me that she WAS in the top 10% and SHE couldn’t seem to get arrested in that town because she didn’t have a techie background (which I had, out the wazoo). I accumulated more data while teaching LSAT prep classes: Student after student told me the advice their lawyer friends had given them, and a common thread stood out: “whatever you do, kid, don’t do what I (that is, each advising lawyer) did.”

Could ALL of these randomly selected counselors have catastrophically smooched the pooch somehow? I doubt it.

Here’s my theory: Those in charge of law students and junior lawyers have a dilemma. They have put themselves amid people whose talents lie in analyzing propositions and developing counterarguments; success in the profession demands that those talents be encouraged to develop further. However, professors, administrators, and senior partners understandably don’t want their students, members, or subordinates challenging THEIR propositions all the time; what sane person would want that kind of headache? Enter Old Lawyers’ Tales to save the day by occupying the charges’ minds with fear and worry when they’re not otherwise taken up with study or work. If each one is convinced that they’ve already made an irreversible, career-fatal mistake, they won’t have the energy or confidence left over to challenge their betters. They will gratefully gulp down any meager bowl of gruel they are offered and not dare to ask for more.

Now, I’m looking for work.  In the short term, not necessarily a full-on career or even a “permanent” job – just work.  Preferably as a lawyer.  I went to law school, passed a notoriously tough state bar, paid “the biological price” (as William S. Burroughs would put it), and I’d like to use what I know and learn more.  It’s surprised me that I really haven’t been looking very hard, because I’ve always enjoyed working much more than going to school.  What’s been discouraging me at almost every turn is, once again, Old Lawyers’ Tales. 

I don’t expect work to be fun or interesting all the time. I don’t expect to always get a week’s work done in 40 hours (though I sure do try), and I do expect bosses to boss me around.  I just don’t want to spend 14+ hours a day, 365 days a year, in the emotional equivalent of a rusty iron box 1.3 meters on a side with sharp spikes sticking in everywhere.  I don’t want a job that will turn me into the kind of lawyer regarded by clients as a necessary evil, and by family and friends as a prestigious stranger.  I know lawyers who have jobs, in the law, that aren’t like that (though not around here, not yet, and not brand-new ones).  Still, people keep telling me that I’m asking for the impossible; that my ONLY options are an actively grim, soul-grinding job that will demand all my waking hours and more (if I’m lucky enough to get one) or no job in the legal field at all. 

Were you unlikely to succeed, according to Old Lawyers’ Tales, but you did anyway? I’d like to see your story here (and I’ll add mine if – no, when, dangit! it happens).