Wherever You Go, There You Are

The picture has nothing to do with anything, except to remind me that the work remains.

It’s hard to live in a state where the majority of the people take great pleasure in actively hating me. And yet, the super secret thing I know is that people everywhere hate people like me and the people I love.

How can people who would delight in calling up the families of first graders and describing all the ways in which they would harm those first graders on the first day of school raise good people, except by accident?

But also, how can we be a nation with the grave evils of genocide and slavery baked right into our creation and not be deeply fucked up? And can we be unfucked? I don’t know. But I do know that what we/I need to face is that I’m not the clean-up crew, just mopping up a few small unfortunate messes left after some great unfuckening.

We’re still fucked. We are not unfucked. And that is the work.

I’ll Just Say It Now

I think Kavanaugh is going to get confirmed. Even aside from the rapey bits, he shouldn’t. He’s lied repeatedly. He had huge debts that are mysteriously gone and he has assets a man with his salary shouldn’t be able to have. But those things don’t matter and how he’s treated women–how so many people think women exist to be treated–doesn’t matter.

A thing I keep thinking, too, is how the default is still that women don’t know our own experiences–that we’re misinterpreting or misremembering or mistaken–and we wouldn’t want to ruin a man’s life over the flighty unpredictable nature of a woman’s inherently broken mind.

That’s supposed to be the kind position. “We believe you believe something bad happened to you, and we feel sorry for you, but we don’t believe it actually happened.”

An ocean of women, women as far as the eye can see, women in their 80s in nursing homes, little girls just old enough to be coaxed onto laps, women locked in convents and mental hospitals and prisons, women free to own our own homes and run our own businesses, women in public, women in private, wave after wave of women, endless unceasing recitations of our pain and we’re all nutty and slutty. None of us are telling the truth about what happened to us, but we’re too damaged to realize it’s not the truth.

Like how the fuck do you think you get an infinite army of damaged women, in the first place?

It’s almost as if there’s some brutal hazing ritual we all live under the threat of and most of us are subjected to.

I fucking hate it. I hate that our word counts for nothing.

Birmingham, cont.

I’m still processing Birmingham. Part of it is just realizing how inadequate I am to the task. I keep having to remind myself that my goal is to say what happened in Nashville and why. It’s not to perfectly nail down how this terrorist network worked. Not to identify everyone in it.

But I’m also very excited about the work and I hope the National Archives gets to the Looby file sooner rather than later.

Birmingham

I stayed at the Tutwiler, because it’s right across the street from the research library, and lord, I’m not sure I’m cut out for that kind of fancy. It was fun, though. Just like, I was driving a ten year old Corolla with one hubcap. Lord. That’s not what people who stay at the Tutwiler drive.

I had some good success in the city archives, especially in the files on the bombing of Bethel Baptist and Temple Beth-El (neither bombing was successful). Nashville shared their list of suspects in the JCC bombing with Birmingham. It’s a weird list. Like, I tried to find the people they named either in newspapers or census records (which aren’t perfect, but they’re a good place to start) and one of their suspects either was or had the same name as a college football player, two of their suspects appear to be black (?), two I couldn’t find at all. One, at least, did know John Kasper, but he’s another Catholic dude.

And I’m really starting to get suspicious of the ways the Nashville police constantly jumped to “It was the racist Catholics.” Like, sure, I guess, maybe. But also, maybe, racist Catholics didn’t have any loudmouth advocates in the Church who would have hollered about their treatment, unlike local racist Protestants.

I’m really glad for the opportunity to get to go see places, too. I think it tells you a lot. But it got me thinking a lot about the contrasts between Birmingham and Nashville. In Birmingham, you can go see this stuff. These places still exist. Not in Nashville. There’s still a Hattie Cotton school, but it’s a new building. The JCC was demolished to make room for 440. Looby’s house and his neighbor’s house were torn down.

On the other hand, we don’t have any neighborhoods left in Nashville that are as blighted as the neighborhood where Bethel Baptist is. It reminded me a lot of a town after a natural disaster, where they’ve come in and knocked a lot of houses down, and there are still more houses that are falling down, and yet still people live there and try to make a go of it.

I Know Politics Bore You, But I Feel Like a Hypocrite…

I met Gladys Girgenti yesterday.

And I really liked her.

I don’t know what to make of that, but it seems like an important component of trying to understand why these bombings weren’t solved. I’ve never been to a Klan rally. I don’t, as far as I know, know any people who deliberately set out to hurt or scare others. And I’ve never talked to a convicted terrorist before.

She was funny and charming. She had big round eyes that made her either seem perpetually surprised or perpetually delighted. She lived in a big old assisted care facility over in Madison. The place was spotlessly clean, but dark and kind of industrial seeming. The hallway to her apartment was dark and there were pipes overhead. It smelled like people used to smoke there a lot, but hadn’t in a long time.

Her apartment was small and cheery. She had a large window she sat beside and sunlight flooded the place. She had an amazing crocheted afghan draped over her loveseat. She had a cat, who seemed about a third longer than a cat normally should.

Her son told me the cat would bite, but once he got some head pats and sniffed my bag, he settled in on the cat tree and paid us no mind. Once her son seemed to ascertain that I was harmless, he went upstairs to his apartment.

And there I was, alone with one of two known racist bombers to come out of Nashville.

She was very matter-of-fact about things. She launched right in to telling me about Klan rallies and who she knew and how she had met them—J.B. Stoner, who she met through Ed Fields, Robert Shelton, David Duke. Folks I had only read about in books or, in Duke’s case, seen on TV, and they were her friends and she spoke about them with the fondness you have for friends.

She didn’t use any racial slurs or launch into any lectures about the evils of the Jewish people. And, honestly, I didn’t ask her about her beliefs. I wanted to keep my focus on getting my questions answered.

But it’s easy to see how, as a white bystander, you could seduce yourself into believing that a white supremacist like Girgenti isn’t “that bad.” Yes, she was talking about the Klan and talking about people who did really terrible stuff, but she was talking about it in the matter of fact way you might talk about your Sunday School class or the Rotary club. The signals that tell you that this is dangerous shit aren’t present or they’re muted.

So, as I was sitting there, listening to this funny, charming woman tell these stories that were sometimes hilarious, sometimes sad, I could feel something happening to me, mentally. It’s not even been twenty-four hours yet and it sometimes takes me a while to figure out how to understand the things I experience. But I came into that apartment knowing some really terrible things about Girgenti and having heard credible rumors of worse. And I had been warned not to underestimate her, that she was very smart.

In other words, I was as prepared as I could be.

And I still felt this overwhelming urge to just go along with what she was saying. Not just for the sake of the interview—that I could understand and not fret over—but for the sake of our rapport, for the psychological reward of having this woman I found funny and charming finding me funny and charming.

That scared, and scares the shit out of me.

Listening to her stories, it’s very easy to see that the FBI took the absolute wrong approach to her, over and over. It seems like they thought the button to push with her was her family, which, after talking to her, I agree that her family is very important to her. But threatening them never caused Girgenti to break and admit to crimes. It just strengthened her resolve to not cooperate.

Not that I got much farther. She wasn’t in town for my bombings. She didn’t want to tell me anything she, herself, didn’t know as a fact. So, no gossip on who it might have been. But I definitely and firmly got the impression that there was gossip she had heard. I just didn’t have the skills as an interviewer to overcome her reluctance to gossip with me.

But this was my first time interviewing a person with known ties to a terrorist network. Presumably the FBI does that shit all the time.

I had told a handful of people where I was going and that they should call the police if I didn’t get back in touch with them by dinner. I was done long before dinner. I did my best to make sure I wasn’t followed home. I felt stupid for worrying about it.

I couldn’t sleep, though. I found excuses not to go to bed and then when I realized I was just sitting on the couch staring at nothing, I forced myself to go to bed. And then I laid there, in the dark, in the quiet, afraid I would hear someone in the house with me. I had this thought that I should not have met her, that I should not have let her know what I look like, or given her my phone number. That, obviously, anyone with dangerous friends could still be dangerous.

But the thing that kept me up was that I wasn’t having these thoughts until almost eight hours after I’d interviewed her.

The thing I’m trying, but struggling to put into words is how far down the path I was before my gut instinct to be afraid kicked in. I had already done the interview. I was already home. I had already assured everyone I had jokingly asked to avenge me if I was murdered that I was fine. While I was with her, I wanted her to like me.

And I had years of research about her and her friends in my head.

There’s something psychological going on here that seems important, if we want to truly understand how we’re in this situation. Something about how your brain will push you to find connections and common ground with people, to find ways and reasons for you to like each other and see each other as being on the same side, even temporarily.

I keep thinking about that lyric from They Might be Giants, “Can’t shake the Devil’s hand and say you’re only kidding.” You become like the people you like. You can’t have a racist friend and not be, at some level, okay with her racism.

And yet, if that person is charming and funny, smart and insightful, isn’t it so very tempting to overlook her flaws?

No, no. More than tempting. I would not have been tempted to overlook Gladys Girgenti’s flaws.

This is something deeper and more fundamental to how white supremacy works, I think. Something so deeply ingrained in me, so deeply trained, let me like her and suppressed the warning signals I should have been getting. Obviously was getting, if my terror that night was any indication.

I came as prepared as I could be. I was raised to try very hard not be a racist asshole by people who have tried very hard their whole lives to not be racist assholes, and I still had that psychological reaction to her. And I didn’t even recognize that’s what was happening until way later.

That’s deeply troubling to me. But it also feels to me crucial for understanding why these bombings were never solved. I think there’s a very good chance that the white people in a position to investigate these bombings had the same bad training or psychological shortcoming or whatever this is as me.

I think a crucial component of why these bombings were never solved is that the people who could have solved them were not seeing them for the huge red flags that they were.  And I have to allow that one of the reasons I haven’t solved them is that I also am not picking up on obvious cues and am, instead, reacting in ways that work to thwart my end goals.

More Colors

Here’s everything I have so far that’s dry.

And here’s everything I did yesterday, which is still somewhat damp. That leaves the pokeweed when it’s ripe and all the walnut, when it’s in season.

My fight with the FBI, such as it is, has turned incredibly stupid and aggravating. Last year, when I asked them for the Looby bombing file, they told me it had been destroyed in ’96. Period. End of discussion.

That always nagged at me, but what could I do about it? I asked around over time trying to find anyone who might have gotten a copy of the file before ’96 or trying to find someone who could help me understand why the FBI would destroy their file on the assassination attempt of a sitting US politician.

Long story short, I finally talked to a retired US attorney about it, who simply did not believe that the files would have been destroyed. I asked for my U.S. Rep’s help.

Truncating a lot, the FBI recently sent me another letter saying files had been destroyed in ’76, but some had made it over to the National Archives.

And leaving even more out, for the sake of getting to my point of anger, the plan is for the book to come out in April of 2020. The wait time for getting a file from the National Archives that needs to be vetted for classified information is about twenty-four months.

So, if the FBI had told me there was a file at the National Archives last spring/summer when I asked them for what they had, I could have requested it and already been a year into my wait time. I would have had it by next year and had enough time to incorporate it into my book.

But by dicking me around, they’ve basically either ensured I won’t have the file in time for my book or that I’ll have to push back the pub date. Both of which suck.

I’m still hoping there may be a solution. (So fingers crossed!)

But it really pisses me off.

And the worst part is that I can’t even say that it’s some deliberate effort to sabotage my story. I truly doubt, before my Rep got involved, that my name or my project had even registered at the FBI.

They just dicked me over so fucking hard as a matter of course, as an impersonal non-deliberate side effect of how they work.

Colors

I opened the solar dyeing jars. That was unpleasant. You know what happens when you put a bunch of plant matter in water and then heat it for days? The same shit that happens when you stick a bunch of plant matter and water in an elephant and let it work its way through the system: a smell from the outskirts of hell.

These guys live in the garage until I’ve decided they don’t smell too bad to include. The idea that I might have to overdye them with Kool-aid just to make them smell okay is cracking me up.

Anyway, in my neighborhood, it seems the easiest color to make is yellow. I keep making it almost by accident. And it got me thinking about the outfits people wore before commercial dyes, what folks’ clothes would have looked like. And I have to imagine, for the people who had to make most, if not all, their own clothes, there was probably a lot of yellow.

And it got me thinking about the colors that have magical properties. There’s an old African-American hoodoo belief that to sleep under a blue blanket will bring prophetic dreams. And to get a blue color that stays? The person who can get that for you has to seem like magic, that blanket or quilt has to seem like magic. Blue is hard to get and hard to keep, until you have indigo.

Red, black, and white are also tricky colors to get (and to keep) with plant materials available to most people.  Yes, madder, but look at how much skill it takes to get red out of madder if you have to do it yourself. Black is… I don’t even know. I think you could dye a lot of things for a long time to get a dark, dark, dark brown that might pass for black, but pure black naturally would be hard. And white, a clean white, requires a lot of processing as well. So, it’s no wonder you find so many charms that call for thread or yarn in those colors.

If magic is about gathering energy and expending it in directions it doesn’t normally take (think of the sailors who kept winds they needed tied in knots in yarn they kept in their pockets), then red, black, and white have a lot of energy put into them.

But I live in America, so I also can’t wander around with the dog thinking about color without thinking about race and I got to thinking about how much of a fear of the “secret” black person there has been in American popular culture. And smarter people than me have written about how “black” is seen as corrupting and spoiling.

Corruption and spoilage are both powers. And black, in color, is hard to get.

Yellow is common and easy to make.

And I feel like there’s a revelation about a facet of American racism right at the tips of my fingers that I can’t quite articulate yet.

But it’s commonly accepted that words have meanings and associations that color (ha) how we see the things those words are describing, meanings and associations pulled in from other uses of those words. So, saying that a bad person is blackhearted or has a black soul or has a dark morality or that these are dark times and then saying that person is black or has dark skin can lead us to associate that person’s skin color with all the ways we think of black as meaning bad.

So, I wonder how much to an 18th or 19th century white American, black would have also resonated as powerful (much to the eternal tragedy of black people) and yellow as common and easy to get. And I wonder how that shaped the expressions and their own understanding of their racism?

Also, speaking of black, look what black beans gave me!

Disconnect

Now that we, as a nation, are kidnapping children and putting babies in detention camps, I have been reading some of the responses. And, I have to tell you, the ones that worry me the most are the ones where the person says something like “Rachel Maddow going for an Emmy in dramatic acting” or anything else that suggests that the author of the comment does not recognize the real emotions of the person they’re observing.

Like, they just can’t fathom that this would be a genuine reaction to what is happening, and so it must be fake.

Those people scare me. It’s one thing to react to horror by agreeing with it (a sick thing but a thing). At least we’re all on a same page with that–this is happening. I think it’s horrendous. You think it’s fine.

But the “it’s not real” “your feelings about it aren’t real” folks? Holy fuck. It reads like psychopathy.

But if it is, then psychopathy is much, much more common than I realized.

This is Us

This country was founded on white people deciding that getting along with each other was more important than addressing the suffering of non-white people.

We don’t get to say, “This is not America.” It absolutely is.

But we are also a country founded on the premise that we can fix shit later. That’s the whole point of being able to amend the Constitution, of being able to pass new laws and repeal old ones, of having judges look over shit to see if it’s right.

Maybe I’m corny, but I believe we can become a more perfect union.

But we sure as fuck cannot get there by doing the same old “oh, let’s just be nice to the jerks so we don’t alienate them” bullshit we’ve been doing since 1776. We white Americans have to stop prioritizing getting along with white people we disagree with over ending the suffering of non-white people.

This Morning

I’ve only been awake an hour and the cat swatted the dog who then stepped on my foot, which caused me to yell at everyone and refuse to give anyone morning pets. We got rained on on our walk. And I forgot to take my medicine last night.

Which… may explain why my morning went how it did.

I’m very frustrated with the FBI. The John Kasper files I got off of archives.org are much, much larger than the files the FBI sent me. The amount of stuff that’s missing is infuriating. A DC couple’s visit with Kasper in which Kasper brags about his violent friends? Gone. Most of the Hattie Cotton material? Gone. Stuff I care much less about, like all the women who were coming to visit him when he was living on Brushy Hill Road? Also gone.

When I realized that, I basically shoved them into a file on my computer and relied on the archives.org files. But last night, I was thinking, maybe the FBI files contain some unredacted names that I might need, so I decided I should browse through them.

And I came across a thing I hadn’t seen before. Either I missed it in the archives.org version or it’s not in there, but it confirms my belief that one person was working with the FBI and that the FBI kept back vital information from the Nashville police.

So, hey, that’s nice to have.

Oh, Oh!

Y’all, I just realized on my walk this morning that the people I’m looking for–the thing that separates them from more run-of-the-mill racists–are willing to target white people.

That’s the line they’re willing to cross that even other violent racists aren’t.

And that’s why the “community,” even if I don’t have a sense of the full scope of it, seems so small. Because inside the subset of “I know and work with other racists to achieve our racist goals” is “I’m willing to harm and kill black adults to do it” and inside that is “I’m willing to harm and kill black children” and inside that is “I’m willing to harm and kill white people.” The deeper into the subsets you go, the more people you lose.

And as much as the people in the smallest subset may appear to be loners in their own communities, they knew and knew of each other.

Cooley

I’ve been slowly working my way through the Rhinestones & Cocaine podcast. I’m still haunted by the Spade Cooley episode. Coe does a great job with it and I really appreciate the way he lays everything out and treats it as fucked up how many people knew about this and just let it happen.

But my rage toward those people is an inferno.

Spade Cooley is bad enough. He’s a nightmare of awfulness. And when he died, I was like “good.”

But Spade Cooley was in prison where he belonged. All the motherfuckers trying to get him a pardon? Like, on a scale of one to ten, and Cooley’s a ten, what the people who knew what he was doing and still worked on his behalf did has to be a seven or eight.

And it makes me so angry that those folks just go on with their lives.

King

I spent some time yesterday looking into the death of King, as a part of my consideration of J.B. Stoner. All it told me was that I need to get a hold of the new Wexler book, which basically shows how the Mississippi Klan supported Ray in his efforts to kill King. I think. That’s what I took from the book’s description anyway.

And if the Klan is involved, then I’m curious to know if they were able to find out what Stoner knew when.

I guess I’m slowly coming to the opinion that… well, I guess I’m conspiracy adjacent. I don’t believe Stoner was behind every terrible tragedy of the Civil Rights era, but I do believe that he was supportive of every terrible tragedy of the Civil Rights era. And sometimes that support might have come before hand and sometimes it might have come after.

But I also remain convinced that the number of people willing to plan to do things that could kill people was small. Of course, the number who would support them was larger. But I mean, the number of actual people who would take part in something that required planning and action. That was small. Maybe fifty people, if that many, in each Southern state.

I may be making a distinction without a difference but I see one between bombing someone–which requires planning and acquisition of materials–and heat of the moment violence, like people burning cigarettes on sit-in protesters or even filling their own restaurant with bug spray to try to drive protesters out.

It’s all bad, but one allows the perpetrator to tell him or herself that he or she wasn’t planning on doing that, that they’re not a bad person, that they were provoked. The other doesn’t. The other requires someone at peace with hurting others.

In the era I’m looking at, roughly 1940 to 1980, we know we have probably two guys responsible for the Clinton bombing, probably five guys responsible for Hattie Cotton, one or two for the JCC, and two or so for Looby (unless some of those overlap), a handful of people in Brownsville, a couple of people in Memphis, Gladys Girtenti and her accomplices.

And again, to be clear, these folks had support. It wasn’t like Nashville just had ten problematic people and everyone else was fine. But the people who would plan to do something they knew could kill people, that’s a very small number.

And I just don’t believe they were unknown to each other. I will believe, forever, that Gladys Girgenti could have given you the names of the bombers I’m looking at.

And I think Stoner could have provided a list names of the vast majority of racist terrorists in the South willing to plan to kill someone.

I don’t think he was their boss. He’s not some secret super villain. But he was their ally. That’s for sure.

Theft of Ancestors

A thing I find really infuriating and heartbreaking is when black people contact me about something I’ve written about that relates to their family because this is the first they’ve heard of someone who knows something about their relatives.

They’ve been told that there’s basically nothing. And there is next to nothing, but not nothing. There are places to dig, things to know. And even when we don’t have specific stories about particular people, we certainly know enough about the circumstances in which people were enslaved to make broad generalizations.

This morning, I was contacted by a black Douglas. I could tell her that, if she wanted to come to Middle Tennessee, she could certainly still see the things her people did–the churches they built, the roads they cleared, the houses, the city.

Denying that to people… it is genocidal. I don’t say that lightly, but stripping people of their ancestors, denying them the stories–for better or for worse–of their people is an ongoing attempt to destroy them.

I don’t think this mess can ever be fixed. I’m a little jealous of people who think we just need to tear everything down and start over, because there is no clean slate. As long as there are people, there’s people, you know? Revolutions presuppose that we can somehow escape that.

But we can’t. There are no fresh starts. Not really. This is what we have. There’s no escaping it.

Progress

A thing that dawned on me this morning as I was walking the dog and thinking about our fucked up society, in which a white kid who bombs black people is just, so sadly, troubled and a black people who get killed weren’t “angels,” as if you have to be an angel to deserve to live, is that a really fucked up thing about racist societies is that racism becomes the tool through which the dominant culture gets positive cultural change.

Like, say, white people are supposedly perfect. We don’t do anything wrong. If we’re doing it, it can’t possibly be bad. Say we beat the shit out of our kids. And everyone is starting to notice that white children are really, really fucked up by it. But you can’t say it, because it would imply that something white parents were doing was really fucked up. And yet, obviously, good people want to stop child abuse.

Well, then, we need strong child abuse laws because those black people are so violent toward their kids. Look how they treat their kids. Where are the fathers in their houses? Etc. Etc. Etc.

And then, because the social good–stopping abuse–is so great, the cost of scapegoating black people seems worth it to the non-black do-gooders.

Which then reinforces the bonds of racism.

Woman

Sometimes I read news stories and it makes me feel like there’s some component of being a woman that I just don’t have. Like, I can’t for the life of me understand how someone ends up being a Trump mistress.

Like, I guess the folk wisdom is that women are attracted to money and power, but they just seem like such obvious frauds. If I ran in those social circles, I feel like I’d be “sick” a lot and miss parties they were going to.

Like, how do you not look at them and realize they’re just going to constantly be mean and a pain in your butt?

Things Don’t Change

So, the dude who led the mob that beat up that couple in Brentwood got arrested for attacking his wife and father-in-law who were pissed at him for having an affair with his father-in-law’s new wife.

Ha ha ha.

But also, I can totally see racist groups in the 50s falling apart in the same way.

A thing I’m curious about–though not curious enough to really dig into it–is how you can behave these ways and still believe yourself to be “supreme.” Like at what point do they think the moral superiority is going to kick in? Or do they think that carrying on like this is better than whatever “they” do.

There are parts of racism I get–really well, too well. I get the woman at the coffee shop who is looking for a place to sit and who demands a black woman whose cup is almost empty get up and give her that spot. I get how tempting it is to believe that some people just aren’t as smart as other people and it’s genetic and race-based. I get the systemic racism. I get the positive feedback loop it instills in white people which makes itself very hard to even recognize, let alone stop. It’s hard to turn away from pleasure.

And I get the “I hate you” racism. The “let’s go beat up some black kids” or “let’s go scare those Asian kids.” Again, it’s the pleasure of the bully.

But “I’m better than you” is a claim that must, I’d think, be constantly tested. It has to be perpetuated by comparison (which is how systemic racism plays into it). But obviously the comparison must often show you that you’re not all that. None of these white supremacists are as good looking as, say, Idris Elba. If they have a superior social structure, why are they beating each other and fucking around on each other? If they’re so great, why do their lives suck?

How do they look at their own lives and convince themselves that this is the evidence that they are superior? I just do not understand it.

Who Among Us Yet Again Doesn’t Have Enough Yarn?

I got my third panel on this blanket done.

The third panel is supposed to be the halfway point on the blanket. Please note that it is barely half the size of a single bed. So, I need to go up to seven panels, not five. Which is fine, I just need to get some more yarn. I also think I have a fun border picked out.

Season 3 of Someone Knows Something remains brutally hard to get through. It’s only six episodes, but I often have to stop in the middle of one and take a break. The brother’s grief and rage is heartbreaking. But it ends up not being the Klan members that make me the most upset. They are what they are–evil, sadistic terrorists.

The most upsetting part to me is watching how the whole white society continually shifts around them to give them cover and room to work. How it continues to give them space to be free. The support network, intentional or not.

 

Fox Ran Out on a Chilly Night

At my sister-in-law’s request, I have made a tiny fox for the mobile. Now I’m kind of thinking I may just do these two animals and have them playing hide-and-seek around the shapes. Anyway, at the least, I need to get some of these shapes done.

I like the arm placement on the fox better than on the elephant, but god damn heads are hard to sew on. Both the fox and the elephant have their heads on crooked, but by the time I realized it, they were already pretty firmly damn attached.

I am relieved about Alabama, but I also can’t stop thinking of the women who defended Moore by telling about how their parents had let them date thirty year old men. I believe it. And I think it’s a continuation of one of the main cultural problems of the South–the culture preaches that children must obey and revere their parents who are worthy of glorification, while at the same time, the parents are doing really shitty things like selling their children’s playmates or half-siblings or giving grown-ass men access to them, or just in general valuing power and security over the well-being of the people in your household.

It’s not exactly internalized misogyny, more like internalized patriarchy–if my parents did it, it must be right; my own unease or the unease of others doesn’t matter.

And it’s insidious, because people rightly love their parents, often, even when their parents are shitty and dismantling this train of thought comes very close to telling people that their love for their parents is wrong.

But, damn, “well, my parents let me date a 30 year old when I was 14” is some fucked up shit. And not seeing that it’s fucked up is even more so.

The Kids are All Right

Last week, K and I went to this fundraiser for a local arts group that helps kids develop their poetry skills. One of the things that delights me about Nashville is that it has a somewhat vibrant poetry scene.

The kids were fantastic. Their poems were so beautiful and thoughtful. And they had them memorized! And here was the coolest part: when someone got nervous and forgot a bit or stumbled, everyone would snap for them, to fill the silence with supportive noise.

Is this the thing that beatniks were doing when they snapped? The thing that became a joke? Because it was beautiful. I loved it. And I felt sorry and mad that I had only encountered it as a joke that made fun of poetry audiences.

I don’t subscribe to the notion that everyone is good. But I do believe that most people’s badness is small and surmountable until life breaks them. And once you’re broken, it’s hard to know how people will put themselves back together. (I’m slowly making my way through the Dollop episodes on Trump and Jesus Christ…)

I want so much for these kids to get a chance to fulfill this potential and to not be crushed and broken.

I think another hard thing for me about all this stuff coming out now is that you see how the whole system–every system, our whole society–functions through crushing and breaking and discarding people. You are not supposed to be okay. This doesn’t work if you’re okay.

It’s disgusting. And yet, I don’t see how to disengage from it. You can pull back. A lot of people certainly have. But it’s a comforting fiction to believe you can get out of it. That you can be safe from it. That you’re not replicating it.

 

Roy Moore

Roy Moore is and has been a disgusting terrible theocrat. I remain unsurprised by him.

I cannot imagine being the daughter or the sister or the wife of the men who are standing around Alabama today excusing him.

When you find out your father is okay with a thirty-something man “trying to date” a teenager, don’t you wonder if your friends were ever safe with your father? Don’t you wonder if you really were?

My heart aches for the people of Alabama today, not the folks arguing that, since Joseph did it to Mary, it’s fine for Roy to do it. But for the people who should be able to feel safe in their own home, able to trust the men in their lives to not harm them or excuse harm that befalls them, who have to know today that the people they love are not safe.

Texas

I keep checking up on what’s going on and then regretting it. I have the same feelings I had during Katrina, that we really are on our own. And that because of that, people are going to die.

But at least people got pissed during and after Katrina.

I’m already tired and afraid that people are just going to shift into telling us how awesome he’s doing and how everything is fine.

It’s the gaslighting and the anticipation of gaslighting that’s wearing me down.

Good luck, indeed, Houston.

Fuck.

Kids Today

When I saw the video yesterday of the kid throwing his jacket over the bust of Nathan Bedford Forrest or the kids posing, fists raised, next to the crumpled tin busted Confederate monument, I felt my heart swell.

I feel like a lesson we learned from the Civil Rights Movement in the 60s was “Just don’t respond and they’ll get tired of beating their fists on your faces.” Which is not at all the lesson of those protests, which were to make the current situation untenable. If everyone’s fine with you sitting around not complaining about the bad things that happen to you, then you’re not making the situation untenable.

Seeing these young people being proactive makes me proud.

Sumner

Last week, fittingly enough, The Dollop had an episode about the caning of Senator Sumner and how everyone in the South was all “Ha ha, he got what was coming to him! Oh, ho ho!” and everyone in the rest of the world was like “Holy shit. These people aren’t just fucked up. They are a danger to the wellbeing of our government.”

You can imagine I was reminded of that watching the president unable to say that white supremacists are wrong and that racist ideology is evil. I think to him, he had been so accustomed to how much the American media loves both-side-er-ism that he just assumed his condemnation of all violence would be good enough.

After all, he doesn’t want to alienate the only broad group that openly loves him.

But it felt like a turning point, even before that woman’s murder. Not that things like this hadn’t been happening all along, but with Sumner’s situation, the South had been dueling and fighting for ages. But something about an action can make clear stark divisions, unbridgeable disagreements.

And that was this weekend. Calls for love and peace aren’t going to cut it. Praying about it–unless you’re doing like the pastors in the streets this weekend and praying with your arms locked to try to keep violent racists corralled–isn’t enough. Saying you saw violent people on both sides makes you look like a fool.

The stakes are clear and undeniable now. You’re either against them or you’re with them.

And a bunch of us, who don’t all get along and don’t share the same goals and don’t work well together, are going to be standing against them. I hope it works. I hope it’s not too late.

Everything Old is New Again

So, I went over to Fisk to go through the Looby papers. If you like mid-century architecture and you haven’t been to Fisk’s library, you should rectify that now. It’s a work of art inside, with all the kinds of sharp angular brutish shapes you’d expect from mid-century modern with this two story curving flowing staircase in the middle. It’s just amazing.

Anyway, it was something to spend all morning immersed in the aftermath of 1950s racists and then spend the evening watching these evil bozos at UVA.

We have never dealt with this full-on. We’ve always pretended like, if we just ignore it or are nice enough to them, they’ll eventually be good people.

Which, in turn, lets them continue to fester.