Ishmael's Axe

"The American way of life is not negotiable." -George W. Bush

"The English...no sooner occupy a post than the woods fall before their hands - the earth is subjected to cultivation - the game disappears - and your people are steadily reduced to combat with starvation."
-Duquesne to the Indians in the aftermath of the French & Indian Wars

Ah, those were the days when "cultivation" simply meant felling trees and tilling fields... But in the interest of sustaining the American way of life, the outright destruction of a mountain range is more to the point, among other acts of resource-securing desperation. Note, the satellite image in the above link is navigable, to anywhere in the world, in fact; but if you take it a few quadrants east, you will end up in an area that has been the subject of intense national attention in the past week. And not too far from Blacksburg, Virginia, there are other sites of mountain top removal, scattered as they are throughout the mid-Appalachian range.

So, one very angry & alienated young man of Korean nativity blew his top this Tuesday and delivered a rather brooding but lethal brand of justice to 32 of his Virginia Tech classmates & professors before giving up his own ghost with the words "Ismail Ax" etched in red upon his arm (the term is alternately spelled "A. Ishmael" on a package sent to NBC News). With this cue, a frenzy of internet searches and speculation over its meaning was thus instigated, leading to the photo you see above, one among several of a photo-op of the New George III in the Adirondacks on Earth Day 2002 (five years ago today). [Those familiar with my discography will recognize an altered version the photo on the cover of the cassette "Dirty Politics"]

How on earth did we arrive at this? There are several interpretations of the cue that I will ignore here simply because the one I present is the one most pregnant with meaning (regardless of what the killer meant by it).

It was pointed out by one "Blacksheep" familiar with obscure, early American fiction, that ...

In James Fennimore Cooper’s story “The Prairie,”
Ishmael Bush is a settler trying to free himself
from the confines of civilization.

He sets out with two key items, a gun and an axe.
Each has a symbolic meaning. The axe — which can
either kill or create shelter — stand
for both creation and destruction.

Hence the photo is an obvious association (especially for those who would reflexively cite evidence for an inside job). But it doesn't stop here. While there are aspects of the character Ishmael in the novel that one might find alluding to GWB, for instance his delivering a frontier-justice sentence to death by hanging of Abiram (a stand-in for Saddam if you like). Or where one commentator notes...

On the following day, each of the prisoners is
tried before a rude frontier court presided over by
Ishmael Bush. His own conflicts with the law and his
frequently stated abhorrence of legal procedures make
Ishmael's new role an ironic one...

one might regard the proceedings at Guantanamo Bay as such a "frontier court".

But the "Bush" name can mislead, as in the story it hardly denotes anything resembling a ruling clan of privileged WASPs. Rather, Ishmael heads a tribe of melungeons, which are a mixed-race people (including North African or Anatolian extractions, it is believed) originating from the mountains of Eastern Kentucky as well as NE Tennessee, Southern West Virginia through SW Virginia (precisely the areas presently devastated by mountain top removal). As they made their way through the Ohio Valley and into Illinois, they settled in "cities like Mahomet, Mecca and Morocco on the way. However, they remained nomadic in nature - the 350 mile triangular route was northwest from Indianapolis to the Kankakee River south of Lake Michigan, from there south through easten Illinois (Urbana-Champaigne) and Decatur and finally, due east, back to Indianapolis."

It is in the vicinity of Indianapolis that we arrive upon one who perhaps was a descendant of the Ben Ishmael tribe, or at least believed himself to be so, and who wielded Ishmael's Axe not in the Appalachians but in the rain forests of Guiana some 30 years ago, as one researcher, Matthew Janovic, suggests...

I am doing my own research on the Tribe of Ben-Ishmael with the Indiana State Library. One aspect of my research concerns the infamous Revernd Jim Jones, and his shadowy-origins. It struck me that he did his early social-work in the depressed areas of Indianapolis–site of the Ishmaelite-ghettoes. He always said he had “Indian-origins,” and this seems like something an outsider (or was he?) would say to the descendents of Ishmaelites. Any help would be greatly-appreciated, this a neglected-area of research.

I wonder if our current mass murder record-holder caught the documentary on the current mass suicide record-holder on PBS American Experience last week.