It was a rainy weekend, and today was rainy too. Almost constant, soaking rain. This is good (except for the folks in the southeastern part of the state who suffered flooding). Up to this weekend, we had below average rainfall. Now suddenly we’re above it. I hope it’s not too late to help with the crops.

It did put a damper on our Viking Age Society’s annual Viking Youth Day event, held at the Danebo Hall in Minneapolis, under the sponsorship of the Sons of Norway. We had both indoor and outdoor activities planned, but it ended up being only indoor. Some kids came (with their parents, of course), but they all went home after lunch, and we left ourselves shortly thereafter.

Discovered something fairly disturbing today. James Lileks at buzz.mn mentioned that great impersonator, “Iron Eyes Cody,” (the “crying Indian” in the famous environmental ad), who turned out, on closer examination, to have been a second-generation Italian-American. The Snopes article he linked to contained a further link to this piece about “Forrest Carter,” author of Gone To Texas, the novel that was the basis for one of my favorite movies, The Outlaw Josie Wales. Turns out that Forrest Carter was in fact Amos Carter, an active white supremacist well known to the FBI.

I never read The Education of Little Tree (Carter’s putative autobiography), but I read Gone To Texas, and I’m not sure I perceived all the subliminal racism the author of that article seems to find in it. I did note one wrong note in the book, though. Lone Watie, the character played so well by Chief Dan George in the movie, describes himself as a “Cherokee. Full-blooded, I reckon,” in the book.

I knew this was misleading, because historically the full-blooded Cherokees sided with the Union (Lone Watie fights with the Confederacy). It was the mixed bloods who, by and large, owned slaves and supported the South. I’m not sure what point was served by that misdirection, but it struck me as odd at the time. Perhaps Carter had a message of racial separation in mind.

Carter was far from the only author to obscure his real identity. A famous example was B. Traven, author of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. To this day, nobody’s sure who the heck he was.

Maybe that’s what I ought to do. I’ve pretty much sputtered to a halt as Lars Walker. Maybe I should re-invent myself as Luisa Wahlid, a Mexican-Pakistani lesbian living in this country illegally, forced to live in hiding (in a carbon-neutral compound in Oregon) because the CIA is trying to assassinate her for knowing too much about Bush’s lies in Iraq.

Nah, I expect it’s already been done.