gypsies, vagabonds and thieves

 There was a used book store that I used to frequent when I was living in Champaign.  You paid half the price on the cover and since stuff like classic literature hung around longer than other stuff, while prices went up, I could buy them pretty cheaply.  The guy that ran it was an old radical who used to come into the bar where I worked from time to time..  I remember once trying to get into a discussion with him about the methods of modern education and he looked up at me and told me that he didn't believe the state should be educating kids at all.  I was a little shocked and that ended the conversation.

Also cheap were books that were bestsellers when I was a kid like Green Mansions.  Another one was Andersonville, about a notorious Confederate prison camp for Yankees.  What the author did was take a historical incident and populate it with fictional characters.  This is what James Michener made a fortune doing but I never thought that he was a very good writer.  I liked Andersonville a lot so I read another of his Spirit Lake about the battles between the whites and Indians in Iowa.  It is there where I read about how the Indians would plant a bunch of pumpkins wherever they happened to be in the spring and when they returned there in the fall there would be full grown pumpkins.

I came across the pastoralists in an anthropology course.  These guys were in Africa and they led their herds across the land too proud to grub in the dirt.  I reckon they trade with others for grain and vegetables, surely man cannot live by meat alone.

And then there are the Bedouins.  They still exist crossing the borders between Israel and Arab countries at will because they are on neither side their loyalty is only to their own specific tribe.

Like the gypsies. I read a book about them once, Bury Me Standing, by a woman who lived with them for awhile.  There was always talk of The King of the Gypsies, but there is no such thing because to the gypsies another band of them are just as much a bunch of strangers as the citizens of the country where they are dwelling.

I wouldn't call those guys that invaded the early agriculturists vagabonds and thieves.  Vagabonds and thieves are sort of rebels to whatever passes at the time as civilization, but these are just guys who civilization passed by at the time.  I guess we could call them barbarians.  There is a long history of the battle between the civs and the barbarians and it was pretty even until maybe the last five hundred years when technology gave the civs the edge.

But now apparently the barbarians are making a comeback within the very walls of civ.  Witness January 6th.