This. A Million Times This.

I’m honestly continually befuddled at the Right’s inability to form a coherent, damaging line of attack against Obama. I mean, I’d like to dismiss it as pure racism, but there are pure racist stereotypes of both thuggish brutes (who want to fuck your white women) AND of suave, cool hepcats (who your white women want to fuck)–the parenthetical asides being obviously left unsaid.

Josh Marshall says:

If you’re going to come tar President Obama I think you need to work with cerebral, out of touch, big government liberalism overreach. Not that I agree with these things but they’re rooted in things that are true, they’re the worst takes on real aspects of who Obama is. But the ‘Chicago-style’ break your legs stuff? Please. This plays with the not-racist right and Republicans who, as I said, live in a cult of victimization and paranoia. But President Obama’s most telling trait is the effort to conciliate and convince opponents, not to threaten them. Believe me, a lot of his top supporters wish he was more bullying.

My co-worker actually asked me yesterday why Obama doesn’t go ahead and go all Bullworth on their asses. So, I think Marshall is right, that even people who feel anxious about Obama–unless they’re a subset of Republicans–don’t feel anxious about him because he’s a thug. Accusations of him being a thug just don’t ring true to people who aren’t afraid to almost paranoid levels of him.

And yet, obviously, if you’re just trying to play on non-black people’s subconscious racist fears about black men, like I said, there is a stereotype to plug into and one that actually has some resonance with who Obama is. I really find it befuddling that they don’t use it.

It’s as if the Republican party isn’t just trading in racist tropes, it’s that, in their singular commitment to a specific version of the past, they’ve missed all the ways the rest of us white folks have been othering black people.

Or let me put it another way–all they have is “Birth of a Nation.” They missed all the white people playing Scott Joplin tunes on their pianos who would never let him in the front door of their homes.

This Danny Brown Thing

I made the mistake of reading the comments on a couple of stories about Danny Brown’s sexual assault. And I’m really troubled. In fact, if you’re ever sitting around wondering “How easy do female rapists have it?” I invite you to peruse the comments on a story about what happened to Danny Brown. What happened was basically his fault because of how he was dressed or because he was flirting with the women in the front rows or because of his persona. Or it wasn’t really rape because how can a woman rape a man? Or why would a man not love it? Or, even if it was rape and wasn’t his fault, he’s a pussy for being all weird about it.

Here’s what it made me think–rapes by women where men are the victims are probably way under-reported. If this is the cultural message–that it basically can’t happen and, if it does, how can you even want to complain about it–female sexual predators have a lot of cover.

I know we talked before about how our society teaches men that having control of your body is a matter of social status and that low status men both don’t have a lot of control over what happens to their bodies and are taught that the way to rise in status is by asserting control over other bodies and how this feeds into rape culture because it reinforces for rapists that society approves of dominating someone in order to gain status, so it’s cool if your dominance of choice is rape.

But I’m starting to think, too, that a lot of weird, unacceptable shit must happen to men all the time and they just never talk about it, so that when something, like this sexual assault, happen out in front of everyone, the response isn’t “What the fuck? I’ve never heard of such a thing,” but “Well, it’s his own fault.”

I know this goes without saying but it’s not his fault. Like all sexual assaults, his attacker decided to attack him and, like many, many sexual assaults, she decided to attack him under circumstances where he was vulnerable and easy to get to and under circumstances where she thought people would be unlikely to call it sexual assault because they’d want to spread some blame to the victim. Or all the blame.

Judging by the comments… hell, judging by the fat that this was a story on NPR called “Was Rapper Danny Brown Sexually Assaulted?” as if National Public Radio should weigh in on whether a sex act a dude didn’t consent to really counts as sexual assault… we have a really hard time accepting the idea that there’s never some kind of extenuating circumstances that might make it okay to rape someone.

I find that distressing.

More on Cleveland

Here and here. It’s just so unbelievable. How many naked women in dog collars can neighbors call about before police take them seriously? It’s really frightening how easy it is to just disappear to authorities if you’re not in a spot they give a shit about.

Updated to add: Jesus, this is a sick fuck:

Ariel Castro was friends with the father of Gina DeJesus, one of the missing women, and helped search for her after she disappeared, said Khalid Samad, a friend of the family. He also performed music at a fundraiser held in her honor, Samad said.

“When we went out to look for Gina, he helped pass out fliers,” said Samad, a community activist who was at the hospital with DeJesus and her family Monday night. “You know, he was friends with the family.”

Tito DeJesus, one of Gina’s uncles, said he played in a few bands with Castro over the past 20 years. He remembered visiting Castro’s house after his niece disappeared, but he never noticed anything out of ordinary, saying it was very sparsely furnished and filled with musical instruments.

Chewed Up Piece of Gum

I wrote about Elizabeth Smart’s comments for Pith, but then they found those women in that house in Cleveland, so I’m having a hard time shaking it. What kinds of assholes would tell girls that suffer unimaginable sexual abuse that they’re like a chewed up piece of gum or like a cup that’s been spit in by everyone?

I mean, it’s not true that having lots of consensual sex with people somehow “ruins” you, but at least the pleasure of it makes the message somewhat difficult to believe. But when a terrible thing is happening to you, it’s not surprising that the words that tell you that you deserve this terrible thing keep ringing in your head.

It’s hard not to believe, at some point, that our culture loathes women. (I had thought that, if enough people pointed out how our culture is set up to fuck women over, that people who genuinely didn’t want to fuck women over would band together and change the culture. And, in some ways, that’s happening, but very slowly. In other ways, what’s happened is that the culture of loathing has just opened itself up to include men in its loathing.)

Terrible things happen to children. Everyone who’s involved in the lives of children knows this. We all hear stories or read the news or whatever.  Which makes it more deeply fucked up that we’re sticking with a mode of sex education that pushes a standard of purity–that even if we accept it as a good thing, which I don’t–many, many people can’t meet, though no fault of their own.

And that’s the part I can’t shake. In order to teach abstinence-only education with the gum example or the lollypop example or the spit in the cup example when you are standing in a room where you simply must know that every 7th kid is either currently or is going to be forced into nonconsensual sexual activity at some point, is fucked up. Telling kids it’s best to wait until you’re emotionally and physically ready for the repercussions? Fine. Telling kids that they get to decide how much they want to do and how far they want to go every single time and that just because they’ve done something once with someone doesn’t mean they have to do it again if they don’t want to or that they have to do it with anyone else? Necessary. I have no problems with encouraging kids to not have sex, if for some reason, that’s important to the community to do.

But I am grossed out by how fucked up it is to realize that all the “you should wait” lectures in the world aren’t very effective and so you just open yourself up to all the fucked up shit you ever heard about how dirty and ruinous sex is and let it pour through you onto those kids. When you know how damaging it is.

I don’t know. It just makes me sad. Such terrible things go on in the world and we too rarely don’t add to the mess.

I Guess This Proves Texas Isn’t Really Southern

In the South, you wouldn’t tell the Boy Scouts to be more like a guy that lost his first governorship because of an angry child bride he was rumored to have sprung a puss-filled crotch wound on and lost his second governorship because he thought the South was stupid for trying to secede, because the North was going to “move with the steady momentum and perseverance of a mighty avalanche; and what I fear is, they will overwhelm the South.”

The child bride is enough to put me off Sam Houston, but for a fucked up drunken lout with a child bride, he’s kind of awesome. Still, my point is–what exactly should the Boy Scouts emulate about Sam Houston? Wanting to fuck a girl way too young for him? Leaving a puss-y crotch wound untreated? Being a drunk? Sassing the South? None of these things are the actions of honorable men. Though they might be the actions of a man you wish you were Facebook friends with, just for the train wreck. But we don’t need a country full of Boy Scouts like that.

Diaperless Babies

Talking about mothering practices, especially for a woman who doesn’t have children, is pretty fraught. But I want to say one thing about this whole “My kid never wears a diaper” thing: It never ceases to amaze me how much easier it is for women these days to raise children than it was for, say, women of my grandmother’s era and how much more weirdly complicated these trend-pieces encourage us to make it.

I don’t give two shits (ha ha) if you want to potty-train your kid from the get-go, like these folks, though I am a little bemused/grossed out at the thought of just encouraging your kid to shit outside in an urban area. But my “bullshit” meter goes off when such child-rearing practices are framed as “rediscovering an ancient practice used in other cultures” because are they ancient or used in other cultures? Why are ancient child-rearing practices best? And are these ancient practices really practiced in a house, where food prep goes on?

But the part I find weirdest is this idea that parents do it to “be more in tune with what their kids’ needs are.”

I don’t think this is an unambiguous good. I mean, it probably doesn’t matter one way or another when the kid is a baby, if you want to be all up in its business and know the precise moment it shits (though, having had quite a few babies in my life, I’m perplexed how one could avoid knowing that a baby has shit for longer than a couple of minutes anyway), but I’m not sure that a parent’s–or let’s be honest, a mother’s–sole role is to meet her kids’ needs. Often, especially as they get older, it’s part of a parent’s job to equip his or her children to articulate and meet their own needs.

Sometimes, the Professor will tell me stories of her students piping up in class with a “Well, my mom says…” or complaining when she points out they’re not using inclusive language with a “But my dad say that’s okay because…” And these aren’t freshmen in their first couple of weeks of classes. These are ostensible grown-ups who think what Mom & Dad says should carry heavy social weight with people who don’t even know them.

I don’t think that’s good for kids. And I think they’ve been done a disservice by their parents.

But I also don’t think that it’s good for parents to feel some pressure to be so constantly paying such close attention to their children that they’re willing to follow their children around with bowls to catch their poop. I mean, yes, you’re a parent and yes, that is the most important thing in your life. But the fact of the matter is that your attention is going to slip. The kid is going to bang her head or eat the cat food out of the bowl. You can’t be there every second to make sure nothing bad or unpleasant happens.

But, in a way, this seems to me like the Alli-method of child-rearing, where you’re forced into “right” behavior for fear of otherwise having to deal with some weird, gross poop issue.

Otherwise, wouldn’t the advice be to move someplace warm where you can get an acre or so and let your kid go diaper-free outside where the whole rest of nature poops and it’s no big deal? I suspect that’s never the advice, though, because it’s not actually about what’s “best” for the child, but about a kind of performative parenthood that demonstrates that the people doing it really care about their children unlike the people who don’t/can’t.

Boston, still

I saw someone on Twitter say something like “Everyone got their wish: they’re white and they’re Muslim!” Which strikes me as both funny and terrible.

I’ve also seen talk of Chechnya having Muslim extremists, but I think it’s important to clarify that Chechnya has extremists who are Muslim. What Chechen extremists want would look very similar if they were Christian (though, obviously, the religious differences feed into it). Unless they’ve left some manifesto or told someone what they were up to, we should hold off on trying to understand this in terms of the global war on terror. Considering how long they’ve lived in the United States, it might even be a mistake to try to link this to Chechen politics.

As much as I like to look for ideological connections, it’s important to realize that, with the amount of mass killings we’ve had in this country in this week, it’s just very attractive timing to anyone who’s sole goal is to top Columbine or OKC or Virginia Tech. And that could be all that motivated this.

Thinking of West

I’m completely superstitious about this week, for exactly this kind of reason. I left natural disasters and industrial accidents off my list, because I know they’re not related to why Americans find this an attractive week in an attractive month to injure/kill each other. But they’re also there.

I have a theory. It’s complete and total woo, so read on in that spirit.

My theory is this, in a very broad and ancient sense, we know there is (or have long ago created) what we might call a “hinge” (if we were stealing from Ursula Le Guin) in the year at the end of October and we know that time of year is about dying and coming to terms with the dead. And we have all kinds of cultural things in place to help us navigate toward that one night, when the veil between life and death is so thin we can whisper across it to each other. Religious things and secular things. Plus nature is dying and blowing away and baring itself. Everything about that time of year is set up to help us navigate this turning point.

But we’ve got another huge turning point here at the opposite side of the year–Walpurgis night. And if October 31/November 1 is bringing life and death close enough together so that death can burst through, April 30/May 1 is the moment when life and death come close enough together that life can burst through. You can see the hints of it in the kinds of bad things that happen in April–all designed to set things on a different course, to change things, to put things right, to shake things up. The impulse is to force a kind of birth (or rebirth). May 1 is a world-wide symbolic day of revolution. New beginnings.

We’ve uncoupled our spring cultural rituals from this month. Or failed to line them up with this month, when we need them in the first place. We could use Easter to always be the first Sunday in May, which would bring Christians through April in a Lenten state and which would place the rebirth of Christ right at this spring turning point. That would bring a lot of our culture into alignment with the month.

But instead, we’ve forgotten the power of this month and we make no efforts to bring ourselves through it okay. We’ve developed no secular or sacred ways to navigate this month. Or we’ve lost them. We have no collective rituals to acknowledge and channel the energy struggling to be born. So we get these individuals and small groups trying to birth their own terrible bullshit. Right now. Because of some dim memory that this is the best time.

The witches run wild before they run home. We used to know that.

Forgetting it doesn’t change it.

Hazelnuts

I noticed yesterday that all the hazelnuts have leaves. It’s five years from nut to nuts, they say, but I don’t know how old any of our sticks were when we got them.

It’s a kind of ordinary truth that things just go on. And it’s kind of a relief and kind of an insult. People died. A lot of people’s lives will never be the same. The dog still has to be walked. The small hazelnut trees/bushes unroll their leaves and stretch them out in the sun. The wind blows. Soon enough, it rains.

It helps me understand the apocalyptic dream we have as people. We want to believe that we are important enough that even nature will notice our passing. Certainly, if we’re all gone, we think, that will show this old world that we meant something.

But we’d be gone and the water that drips down the rocks by the far field would still nourish the moss that grows there.

Nature isn’t nostalgic.

I am, though. I am.

Boston

The thing I just can’t stop thinking about is that somewhere out there is a guy who is almost as surprised as we are about how many people were injured and how many people died and what their names are and what brought them to be there at that particular moment and which family members and friends and strangers were almost there, but five minutes too early or five minutes too late.

And that guy is delighted.

Each new bit of information is, for him, a great somewhat-expected gift.

It’s hard for me to express how angry that makes me. People should die of old age or cancer or, my god, if they have to be murdered, it should be by someone who targeted them, not just because they weren’t five minutes earlier or five minutes later, because they didn’t duck into a building to use the restroom at the right moment.

It’s the Death Lottery aspect of it that pisses me off. Well, no, we all have our ticket and don’t know when our number will be called. It’s the rigging of the Death Lottery, the taking glee in being as surprised by who came up as the rest of us are horrified–that fills me with rage.

The Great Boat Sank, and the Okies Fled, and the Great Emancipator…

My thoughts are on Boston. What a hard, terrible week this is, collecting historic evils like morbid charms on a bracelet.

14–Lincoln assassinated

15–This

16–Virginia Tech

17–

18–

19–Waco and OKC

20–Hitler’s birthday and Columbine

Anyway, I don’t have profound thoughts. I’m waiting, still, to hear.

As I suppose we all are.

Accidental Racist

In part, I agree with Alan Scherstuhl, over at The Village Voice, that, “Today’s country stars are in the reassurance business” and that Brad Paisley is, indeed, attempting to challenge his audience. And that, as far as that goes, the song is commendable. Which I think is kind of the point that Peter Cooper is trying to make. (Though I find his contention that anyone’s saying, “that racial consciousness and American history are too complicated to be handled in a contemporary song” to be so disingenuous as to be jaw-dropping. People are saying that it’s too important to get wrong in a shitty song, but who, exactly, is saying is shouldn’t be done?)

I think the song suffers from a racist trope, though, which both Scherstuhl and Cooper refuse to acknowledge: The Confederate Flag, as a symbol, isn’t some kind of misunderstanding of meaning between black people and white people that can be resolved by everyone just coming to understand each other. The Confederate Flag is a symbol of white supremacy, the unifying symbol of a country devoted to white supremacy. And even since the fall of that country, it has been used and continues to be used by white supremacist groups as a unifying symbol of white supremacy. (And here’s the important part.) The fantasy in which a black person comes to understand that the Confederate Flag is not (just) a symbol of white supremacy, but is something that is so important for white people (for some other, vaguely articulated reasons) to hold on to, and in which the black person comes to believe that it’s kind of okay for white people to wear or fly the Confederate flag is a white supremacist fantasy.

It doesn’t make you a bad person to have this fantasy or to respond strongly to this fantasy. I don’t think Brad Paisley is wrong or evil for sharing this fantasy. It’s very hard to stare directly at the ways that white supremacy has been ingrained into our culture, they ways in which it is the default, easy-to-support position. You can, indeed, be an “accidental racist” just by going along with “the way we’ve always done things” because the way we’ve always done things as a country is racist as fuck.

But wanting black people to set aside the systemic oppression and dehumanization of their ancestors, to pretend like the state-sanctioned oppression of Jim Crow, and the violent opposition to the Civil Rights movement (which took place under the re-popularized Confederate Flag), and the ongoing violence they face at the hands of racists who identify with that Flag is somehow not that important, less important than white people’s feelings is wanting black people to set aside their own history and to ignore a useful literal red flag of someone who intends violence against them in order to not make white people uncomfortable. Wanting that–for black people’s lived history to count less to them than the feelings of white people–is white supremacy: our feelings should be superior to your history.

That’s why I’d have far less problems with the song (though I’d still think it kind of sucks) if LL Cool J weren’t on it. I do think it’s imperative for white people to talk amongst ourselves about white supremacy and not continue to put the onus on non-white people to fix our racist problem. Even if we do so awkwardly and sometimes fuck up.

But, under the guise of arguing against white supremacy, the song enacts a fantasy of it.

(And also all this good stuff.)

Why Does Amazon Want Goodreads?

I think this post is right especially in two regards. First, it gives Amazon information about what people are reading even when they aren’t buying through Amazon. But two, and more importantly, Amazon’s reviews are a mess. No one trusts the Vine people. The people who give one star because there’s not an ebook or because they can’t understand some basic premise of the book are annoying. And Amazon’s recommendation engine works on what I’ve looked at on Amazon and what I’ve previously bought, not what I actually read and liked.

Goodreads solves a lot of these problems for Amazon. I see on Goodreads people whose views I ostensibly trust and maybe agree with because I’ve chosen to follow them. I see their reviews of books first and only occasionally have to stumble across idiots. And Goodreads does a good job of helping me find books I might actually want to read.

That seems like a real win for Amazon.

On Horace Mann

This is an incredible article (though a tough read) about sexual abuse at Horace Mann. There are a few really good things to note–how the grooming plays out, the mixed feelings survivors can have, how a cult of personality can develop around the abuser, and even how the abuser justifies his abuse by framing it in the context of his larger actions, which are about helping the child.

But the thing that really struck me is how not only was nothing done, there was just a sense that there was nothing that could be done.  Even the guy in the story who’s all like “It was the 60s” is bumping up against a truth. There has been a massive cultural shift about what children should be expected to tolerate and what white men could do without criticism.

But it also kind of explains why all these institutions are getting hit with all these accusations now–the paradigm has shifted. Sexual molestation isn’t considered “a sad secret thing that inevitably happens to some children, but what can you do? It was a white dude with authority.” anymore. Now it’s widely accepted as wrong.

But it must be strange for those white dudes with authority, who don’t seem to have realized that our culture is tired of them abusing our children (at most) or failing to protect our children from their peers who abused them (at least) and that we’ve changed.

This, honestly, is a good example of how white male authority as wielded in our culture is so damaging to white men, too. It’s a pyramid scheme. Shut up and endure it and some of you will get to be put into positions where you can force others to endure your fucked-up-ness. But, of course, there aren’t enough positions for all the kids fucked with. And no consideration of how damaging it is to fuck with kids. The bargain it demands men strike is one that hurts men.

And now the reckoning is here.

Strange Ideas about the Government

So, last night, our ex-juggalo friend posted on Facebook one of these things that’s been going around about how you can’t trust the government. Which, fine. And it starts out all about this guy who had “what you might consider some strange ideas about the government” and then launches into a large diatribe about all the things this guy with strange ideas about the government was put through–entrapment, vilification, the murder of his wife by government agents.

So, right at that point, I realize who this rant is about. And I keep waiting for the rant to acknowledge why people might both feel that dude had a gross injustice committed against him AND not be very excited about using him as an example of how normal people are oppressed by the government. The first time reading through it, I didn’t catch it. So, I read through it again and there, in the part where the rant talks about him being set up for buying illegal guns it slips in his affiliation with the Aryan Nation. But it’s phrased in such a way that it’s also not clear if dude had Aryan Nation affiliations or if that was part of the government set-up. So, that’s it. A brief, ambiguous mention.

And I thought about making a comment. Because I think it’s possible to believe that Randy Weaver got a raw deal (to put it mildly) and that it doesn’t mean he gets to be an unambiguous hero to aggrieved white people, such as our ex-juggalo friend. In fact, I think one of the more minor tragedies of Weaver’s life is that this horrific thing happened to him and, because of who he is, who gives a shit?

But the comment I wanted to make, which I’m afraid I don’t quite have enough nuance for, is that I felt like the rant was a kind of backdoor support of Weaver’s racism, since the whole point was that Weaver had all these “strange ideas” about the government, but look, it turns out he was right, which kind of implies that Weaver might have seemed to have a lot of “strange ideas” about a lot of things, but we should be open to the possibility that he’s right.

But then, you know, I kind of chickened out. Because it was just one of these chain-letter things and I’m 95% sure that our ex-juggalo friend knows nothing more about Randy Weaver than he read in that rant. And I wanted to make an argument like “What happened to Weaver should never have happened, is completely inexcusable, and should have been punished. He’s still wrong, and evilly so, about minorities. He’s nobody’s hero.”

But you know, it turns out that the 5% weighs heavy. I know too many people from back home who are kind of traditionally racist. And I’ve been burned too many times by old high school friends who seem completely normal suddenly posting something about how we should just shoot Mexicans and take their jobs like they shoot “us” and take our jobs. And this dude is an ex-juggalo. It’s not like he’s got a track record of non-dumbass beliefs.

So, I just hid him instead.

I can’t bear to find out that he knows exactly who Weaver is and thinks he’s right.

Glass Mounds

I’m going to write about this for Pith, but it was really awesome. It’s weird how it’s one thing to know people lived here 2,000 years ago, but seeing something they built, seeing the wavy lines in the dirt that show how they piled baskets full of mud, is really something different.

I didn’t take as many pictures as I should have, because I was walking around talking to people and they were all saying really interesting things. But I fucked with the contrast on this one so that you can–I think, see the difference between the dirt that’s on the mound from years of erosion and maybe farming and the dirt that is the mound. In real life it’s easier to see, especially if you have someone pointing it out to you.

But if you look kind of below Deter-Wolf’s pinky (like below and to the right) you can see where one of the archaeology students drew a wavy line in the dirt to show the heaping basketful of mud’s top. And you can kind of see the difference between the soil piled by time, which is kind of light brown in this picture and, you know, Tennessee mud colored in real life, and the dark brown part under his hand, which is the old mound structure itself, which is a gray color in real life.

Tattoos

So, this morning, I went to a media thing at Glass Mounds, which involved a great deal of me getting up on the mound about half way and not being able to get back down. Thankfully, they don’t just let you die there, stranded on a burial mound regularly being pelted with golf balls. At least, not when other members of the media are standing there watching.

This, though, is not about that. This is about the completely unrelated awesome thing I learned from Aaron Deter-Wolf, who is an archaeologist for the state. He’s got a new book coming out from the University of Texas Press this fall about tattoo traditions in North America pre-Europeans showing up here (he’s an editor and contributor). But here’s the thing that blew my mind. He said that there’s a ton of evidence that North Americans were pretty commonly tattooed. But there’s nothing ever found at an archaeological site that’s been identified as a tool for tattooing.

Which is not to say that they haven’t found such tools–I assume the book is about what there is to see once you know what you’re looking for. But he told me that part of the problem has been these words they use to describe what they find at archaeological sites–specifically needles and pins. When archaeologists found what they had decided were obviously needles and pins, they got thought of as only sewing implements.

You could see how this could even happen to us. Say you knew very little about prison culture and you excavated a prison site and found ball point pen innards and pins in the remains of a cell. Those would get classified as “ball point pen parts” and “pins” and you might never know you’d just come across a tattoo kit, even if you knew prisoners were often heavily tattooed.

So, that is really awesome and I can’t wait to read it. I tried finding it at Amazon, but it’s not there yet, but when I googled it, I found a lot of interesting-sounding contributors. So, “Drawing with Great Needles: Ancient Tattoo Traditions of North America.” I’m going to try to remember that.

And Then about Black Blackface Minstrelsy

You thought I was just reading all that stuff for fun! Okay, I was, but also because I was invited to do a guest post at The Hooded Utilitarian and I wanted to write about Darkest America: Black Minstrelsy from Slavery to Hip-Hop by Yuval Taylor and Jake Austen, a book I really liked, but had one serious issue with. My post over at The Hooded Utilitarian is an attempt to answer the one question I thought Taylor and Austen left oddly unanswered.

I just want to thank Barry for his help with the song stuff in the middle of the post (though he didn’t know at the time that his help would be going to this end and neither did I). And to Elias for turning me on to The Hooded Utilitarian those many years ago.

One Last Few Things about Love & Theft

The part I’m going to be tossing around in my mind is this.

1. White blackface minstrelsy was invented and codified in the North by white men who were basing their acts on the ways black men informally entertained mixed-race audiences in the North. The minstrel skits were only set in the South as a way of giving them a bit of verisimilitude. So, like much of the book, Lott is kind of describing a slippery thing–white Northern men were doing impressions of black Northern men’s performances for mixed-race audiences (in other words, we have to assume that the black men were already making aesthetic choices about what an audience of black and white men might prefer to see over what they would do just for friends. The power dynamic of whites in the audience changes the performance.) but, in order to guard against either too much recognition (“Well, if he’s just going to sing the song John always sings, I could go hear John.”) or too little (“That’s the song John sings, but it doesn’t sound like the way John sings it.”), the scenes are set in an imaginary South, the sources then become imaginary Southern black men.

2. This part was most remarkable to me, but once he brought up Elvis and Normal Mailer and the Beats, I decided he was right–white minstrel performers identified with the black men they were pretending to be. Even back in the earliest days, black men were “cool” in a way that white men felt they were not unless they mimicked black men. And, of course, most white men didn’t want to be “cool,” so it didn’t matter. But some of them did. And they genuinely felt they had a special kinship and insight into black male culture that wasn’t available to most whites.

3. This is the hardest part for me to hold in my head, but it’s the most important. It kind of goes along with number 2. He’s got this quote from someone about how “We all played Indian as children, Black as young men, and then we stepped into our role as white men as adults.” That’s not an exact quote, but it’s pretty close and it tells you a lot, a dangerous lot about how, in a racist society, white men’s admiration for black men goes very wrong for black men.

Because this is both about an over-identification with black men and an utter failure to see them as human beings and, for most white men of the era, it happened as they grew out of playing “Indian,” which means it happened at puberty. So, just imagine this–how you felt when you were 14, guys. And imagine you believe that you can know what it’s like to be someone (and this someone is someone who must at all times be deliberately performing a version of himself that he thinks is going to lead to the least trouble–and remember what trouble for a black man in the 1850s looked like, so he is motivated to not show you his fully human self) just by moving like him and singing like him and talking like him. While you’re in internal turmoil yourself.

See what a fuck this is? White men come to believe that black men are like white men imagined them to be when they (the white guys) were pretending to be them (the black guys) when they (the white guys definitely, the black guys probably) were teenagers. They thought their horsing-around-borrowing of mannerisms was insight. So, there’s a mistake that goes poorly for black men at the level of “I know what it’s like to be you, because I used to mock you (in both senses)” when, obviously, imitation doesn’t have to have anything to do with giving one real knowledge of the source (In other words, I can swivel my hips all “Sweet Child o’ Mine” but doing so doesn’t tell me what it’s like to be Axl Rose.). But there’s a mistake that goes poorly for black men at a deeper level of “I know what it’s like to be you, because I used to be you, when I was going through puberty.” I mean, look at our society’s stereotypes–even now–of black men: lazy, violent, hypersexual, impulsive, etc. Look at white men’s historical fears of black men–all tied up in sexuality and whether black men were going to want white women. It all has the threat of the teenager behind it (at a time when teenagers weren’t even really a thing).

Black men in our culture forever held accountable for white men’s teenage fantasies of being black, mistaken for truth–accountable for the things a white man would do if not bound by the constraints of white society.

4. It’s hard to explain, exactly, but to me this makes sense of why white audiences loved white black-face minstrelsy–and it is probably partially why we white people loved Elvis and the Stones and Zeppelin. Because it gave us a part of a world we didn’t really want to be a part of in a form that let us love it unreservedly. Because our veneer is on it.

Like maybe it lets us be in the know without having to participate, thanks to these guys who do occasionally touristly participate. But since it has so little to do with the actual people we strive to know, they have to be kept hidden so that we never have to know we don’t know them.

Love and Theft Ruins Mickey Mouse for Me

Oh, y’all, it’s so good, Love and Theft, if a little too much a product of its time in ways that are regretful. But my mind, she is blown. Anyway, I’m still hung up on how minstrelsy became… I guess I want to say…. repressed in our cultural imagination. So, I was looking on YouTube for minstrel performances to see if I could see what I was trying to understand. It lead me to racist cartoons.

Now, I’d like to show you two of them. Let me reiterate that they are racist. I mean, just motherfucking racist, no denying, no equivocating. Just as racist as they come.

This is the first one I saw that started to give me an uneasy feeling of “Wait, I’ve never seen this, but this is familiar.”

Something about the shapes of the people’s heads, the way their jaws and mouths are rendered just reminded me of Disney characters. This is from Universal, directed by Walter Lantz, best known for Woody Woodpecker. And it’s in color. So, wrong studio and too late to be an influence on Mickey Mouse. But it still gave me the WTF?s.

Then there’s this one:

And there’s a mouse looking for all the world like Mickey. That film, “Dixie Days,” was made in 1930, so it’s younger than “Steamboat Willie.” But it’s hard to watch “Steamboat Willie” after seeing these and not wonder if something that would have been readily apparent to Mickey’s audience in 1928.

So, down the rabbit hole I went (speaking of rabbits, let’s not even talk about Bugs Bunny) and here’s what I found. According to Wikipedia, Walt Disney got the idea for “Steamboat Willie” after watching The Jazz Singer. If you want a good appreciation for how woozy Love and Theft can make you, just follow that thread. Al Jolson, a Russian-born Jewish guy who both performed in blackface and was an ardent advocate for desegregating the Broadway stage performed in Champaign, Illinois, where Samson Raphaelson saw him. Raphaelson goes on to write the play “The Jazz Singer” which is later adapted into a movie. In which Jolson stars. Since the movie is a loose adaptation of Jolson’s life, the movie is about a blackface performer. Walt Disney sees the movie and it inspires him to go home and create “Steamboat Willie.” And two years later, there’s “Dixie Days,” in which a mouse that is, for all practical purposes Mickey is also a black stereotype (Mickey will go in blackface three years after that, in a short also having to do with Uncle Tom’s Cabin).

So, the question I have is this: If Mickey was inspired by blackface and if he inspires what we might consider cartoon blackface (white cartoonists presenting black stereotypes to us for our amusement) and he participates in literal blackface in the 30s, would it have been obvious to viewers of “Steamboat Willie” that Mickey Mouse was coded “black”? Even in the absence of stereotypes we now recognize?

Does this question make sense? I just wonder, after spending an evening watching these old cartoons if it doesn’t ping us as invoking the same kind of performative “blackness” as minstrelsy until there are lazy people and Mammies and someone’s eating a watermelon and “Way Down Upon the Suwanee River” is playing in the background as a riverboat gently paddles by, but all an audience in 1928 would have needed to see to know that was what was being invoked was a black body (or more) and a riverboat and a rural setting.

If so, I’m going to have to revise my belief that minstrelsy is being repressed out of some embarrassment about corniness and instead wonder whether what happened is that there used to be a whole wide vocabulary–visual and aural (both musically and just how people were supposed to sound)–that evoked minstrelsy and, even as people clamped down on the stuff that was undeniably racist and objected to it, the stuff that was deniably racist just got uncoupled from it and kept.

We pretend to have forgotten about minstrelsy in this scenario not out of embarrassment, but because then we can keep what we love that has roots in that ground without controversy.

The Mouse is just The Mouse.

Another Bit on Authenticity

I’m still thinking about the authenticity bit. But I’m also remembering how Chief Illiniwek was framed when I was in high school–that it honoring “our” Native American heritage, that the dance was authentic, that it was beloved by all. Even when Native Americans would point out that there are very few sacred dances done by Midwestern Native American groups that involve taking both your feet off the ground at the same time, let alone the running and jumping and tumbling routines the Chief was famous for. I should note that this is how I remember it, but Wikipedia suggests that, by the time I came along, they were claiming Illiniwek was doing a riff on a secular Native American dance.

But my point is that we were sold this idea that Illiniwek was cool in part because it was authentic. Even though it was always white guys. And it was white guys who came up with it. And white guys who codified the dance and white guys who codified the costume and so on and so on and so on. It was “real.” And therefore an “honor” regardless of the opinions of Native Americans.

And I tell you, we would have Cheif Illiniwek to this day if the people associated with the University of Illinois had their way.

So, the complete absence from our cultural memory of minstrelsy cannot be explained by our discomfort with the art’s racism. If a racist thing is beloved enough by enough people, it doesn’t just disappear, barely to be spoken of again, its legacy all but unacknowledged.

So, what is it that makes the most popular form of entertainment for the first half of our country’s existence almost completely unknown in the second half?

I’m still thinking it’s got to be a problem with authenticity. But I think it’s more complicated than just that we can’t look at minstrels and understand how that could have been mistaken for real. I mean, this is where Illiniwek is really informative. It really doesn’t matter that he was not real. Everyone kind of got that he was not real. But everyone was also willing to pretend he was. No, it’s kind of more than that–everyone was willing to be fooled. (And yes, I know “everyone” is a loaded term that doesn’t actually include everybody.)

And I think that’s what’s embarrassing about minstrelsy and why it had to be shut away. Not because America suddenly stopped loving racist shit. But because it embarrasses us that we were fooled by this–even willingly.

How and why could have we preferred this:

to this:

?

Now, I realize I just opened a can of worms here that I am just going to let squirm because of Smith’s relationship with black blackfaced minstrelsy and the short amount of time before I need to get in the shower.

But I think it illustrates the problem. It’s not the racism–would that it were–it’s that we cannot forgive the hokeyness and our old willingness to love it.

For the Professor, in Honor of Lunch

I’m Sad I Don’t Watch Wresting Any More

Because, apparently, the WWE is making fun of the Tea Party and feuding with Glenn Beck.

Weirdly, what this means more than anything is that the Tea Party and Glenn Beck are massively unpopular with the WWE’s audience. Not what I would have thought. But you know they know their audience. Which means that the most valuable commercial audience–boys 13-30–are lost to the Tea Party. Probably not a good sign for its longevity.

The Informal Bubba Census

Beth and I were talking about this over on Twitter–how I find it a little weird that I knew a lot of Bubbas and Bubs in Illinois, but don’t know any down here. And she, from Mississippi, remarked that she only knows one Bubba, though she knows a Taco and a couple of Taters.

This got me wondering if Bubba, though used in pop culture as a kind of ubiquitous rural nickname, might, in real life, have a regional concentration. In other words, I wonder if there are more Bubbas in the Midwest than in the South?

So, dear readers, here’s what I want to know–have you known any Bubbas or Bubs and from whence did they come?

(Can I tell you how disappointed I am to have looked up the definition of the word “whence” just now? I always thought it was “where” but with some time implications. So, if I asked “From whence did your Bubba come, sir/ma’am?” you would know to answer “Charleston, IL, in the early 80s.” But now it appears that I’m only asking from where your Bubba came. Which is kind of disappointing. Whence, you could have been so much more.)