A Hero of the People

It was surreal. The complacent and generally anonynmous bourgeois yellow brick of 679 Ocean Parkway with the iron gate in front appeared suddenly and frighteningly on the news last night. This, apparently, according to the news, was where the parents of the Port Authority bomber resided and where I suspect, (long before the news announced it)  the bomb was but together.--a short two block walk to the 'F' Train. It is really two buildings in one. 679 is the mirror image of 665 and they are joined together like Siamese twins by a nondescript cantilever that overlooked a comparatively unkempt garden where I had my first, "show me yours and I'll show you mine" sexual experience when I was eight or nine years old with my next door neighbor--a degree of privacy sufficient to a nine-year old (she was actually eleven) being afforded by unkempt bushes and dead trees. My parents lived in 665 on the sixth floor until 2007 when my father went into the nursing home,  forty some-odd years. This is what I then and still call home though I (much) later moved into a studio in the adjacent 679 after I returned from the Merchant Marine where I lived in a studio apartment on the second floor up until I got married. 

The major difference between the two buildings that I recall, (besides their propensity to harbor terrorists), was that 665 always seemed bathed in the odor of somehow European friend onions and some meat, probably beef, coming from some apartment on every floor except the 4th floor for some reason. 679 was by comparison far less 'ethnic' far more antiseptic particularly when it came to communal odors and smelled only of the acrid fluid that they used to clean the granite floors. What I most remember most about that latter was the constant warfare between my blond, heavy-set office-manager neighbor, Renee, and her red-haired (as I recall) upstairs neighbor that lasted several years until Renee contracted Bell's Palsey. A truce ensued. The banging on the ceiling and pounding on the floor, (depending on your perspective), finally ceased,-- or at least abated.

The windows of my bachelor studio overlooked the side of a the red private house on Webster Avenue where one, Arthur Smith lived. Arthur was somewhat an oddball and lived there with his mother well into his fifties until she died around 1983. I sometimes had glimpsed her thru my window, a corpse of Whistler's mother, sitting in a rocker. I had known Arthur from around the neighborhood growing up but had never been really friendly with him. He seemed somehow indefinably aloof probably because he had gone to St. Rose of Lima and I had gone to public school. He was not athletic, never participated in any of the street games we as kids played almost unceasingly growing up. He had no other perceptible interests except model trains. He was not the kind of person anyone seemed to seek out for company and he seemed to like it that way. Pale and heavyset, with  black curly hair as well as perpetually untied shoes and a half tucked shirt which would have driven my father crazy. My father had a thing about half-tucked shirts. In his Yoda-like way he would tell me 'tucked or untucked--there is no half-tucked." Arthur had this way of looking at you sideways with a look of frightened contempt which seemed to imply he thought you might be considering taking a swing at him. This accented all the least attractive elements of his face and implied, 'yeah, well, I may be a freak but I'm still better than you.' I don't know what had happened to his father. He must have died awhile back.  To add to his unappealing demeanor he a very high voice and this stutter that completed the implicate portrait of a cornered rat. We knew each other only by sight and neither of us had ever made any effort to engage the other as children.

 After I got married, my wife and I moved into a one bedroom apartment on Kings Hiway across from the cemetery near Flatbush Avenue, around the corner from an Israeli nightclub. After she had the children we moved into the first floor of 256 Webster Arthur's house. It was far more spacious and I put in an extra bedroom in the basement for  my wife's children from her former marriage who at the time were five and eight and who had been living in Poland with their grandmother in Lodz in Poland until they all three joined us in Brooklyn. I think I was in shock at the time. In the space of two years I had gone from being a bachelor in a studio to the father of five (but there were other reasons for me to go into a perpetual state of shock which I won't go into). In any case our neighbor at 258 Webster were Sal and Irene, Sal was a short, balding Italian who kept a fig tree and a grape arbor in his back yard. He was married to the solidly heavyset, red-headed Irish woman named Eileen who like Bermuda shorts and who, like Arthur, had some kind of speech impediment that rendered social interaction difficult but her was much more severe. Eileen who always had her hair pulled back in a bun loved the triplets and she cooed over them constantly. My theory was that the speech impediment was partly a result of her pulling her hair back so severely that it deformed her lip muscles but I could not prove that nor could I ever understand what she was saying to me or to them for that matter but I loved to watch her fuss over them and the fact that it was unintelligible made it more endearing much more-so than people who would intentionally engage in baby talk which always seems to me to be pretentious and a harbinger or worse things to come once actual meaning was introduced into the infant's life.

So, we lived there on Webster until the fall of 1989 until we moved to Monroe in Orange County. By then Arthur had fallen in with a bad crowd and also there were also drug dealers cruising the back alley between 256 and the yellow apartment house on Ocean Parkway. I don't blame Arthur for that particularly but you know as the saying goes--familiarity often breeds contempt and the tide of fear that had seemed to keep these elements at bay seemed to be receding. Since the back stairway to the second floor communicated with Arthur's apartment and the rear door from the kitchen was without the benefit of a lockable door, I didn't feel it was safe there anymore for us so I packed us up, lock stock and crack barrel and moved upstate.

Four or five months after we moved upstate I got a call from the cops saying that they wanted me to come down so they could ask me some questions. Whoever was on the phone asked me if I had lived in 256 Webster and I asked why but he wouldn't tell me--just that I had to come down. Though they hadn't said anything specific, I was sure it was about Arthur.By the time we had left, he had a girlfriend. He was like me by then close to forty and I was sure that this was the first girlfriend he had ever had and I had a bad feeling about it. I drove down to Brooklyn and met the cops who escorted me upstairs. As soon as I opened the front door I knew what had happened. Even from the street the smell had been horrific. When I got to the top of the stair I gagged and almost puked. I saw that what had apparently been Arthur was now a puddle of blackish, greyish, lumpy goop spread over the dining room floor. I had never seen or smelled anything so penetratingly vile in my life and I cannot convey the repulsiveness of that enveloping odor. I don't know why but I didn't puke. Or maybe I did. I don't know. I think someone must have given me a handkerchief doused with Lysol to hold over my face because i distinctly remember the Lysol smell which did nothing to mitigate the underlying odor and so just made things worse. I don't know why the cops brought me up there. I guess just to see my reaction. I had been in Arthur's apartment only once before and it seemed it had been kept exactly in the same condition as when his mother was alive down to the doilies on the dining room table. I had the sense that perhaps she was still seated in a rocking chair near the window--a dessicated corpse a la Hitchcock's psycho. Anyway, when we went back out into the street the detective asked me if I knew anything about what happened and if I knew any of Arthur's associates and I said not really but that I thought he had recently got a girlfriend in the neighborhood and had seen her and a few suspicious characters traipsing up and down the back stair at odd hours before we moved out but that I hadn't been back since. And that was four or five months ago--as I mentioned, I thought Arthur maybe had gotten into drugs and as for the characters traipsing up and down the back stair, I was sure that one of them had killed him and robbed him but I didn't say anything about that to the detective. I figured they could draw their own conclusions and I really didn't have any concrete information other than that Arthur had had a girlfriend and some new friends.

I was so badly shaken by the time I left that I couldn't drive. Also, I couldn't get that odor out of my nose and didn't relish the prospect of a two hour drive with that odor as my constant companion. I went around the corner and took a shower in my parent's house and threw the clothes in the garbage and put on some of my father's old clothes. I didn't need my (now ex) wife to tell me I stunk when I got home to Monroe and I took another shower which had as little effect as the first one. That smell seemed like it was glued on me and it remained there like an unwanted guest for several days or maybe I just imagine this to be the case now but like the Welsh cakes I had once eaten on a trip to England and Wales it seemed impossible to rid of the after effects. A year or so later I went back and saw that the house had been bought by some Hasidim who had made into some kind of school for mentally disabled kids. I just now, before putting all this down, google-earthed it and the house and Tony and Eileen's house are both now a vacant lot. No more fig tree. No more doilies. No more smell and definitely no more Arthur.

Anyway, seeing the reporter standing in front of 679 yesterday on the TV, I guess brought back all this back to mind and there's a lot more I could tell you but I really don't have the heart right now for it. I'm just glad that after the events of yesterday there were no more bodies that would be eventually turning into black goo because of some moron who got it in his head that he was a hero of the people. The only other thing remotely exciting in a related manner that happened in the neighborhood was when the FBI raided a terrorist cell over on Coney Island avenue (in what is now little Pakistan) above the candy store we used to go to. Morty and Eddie's. I think this was in 1995. I remember one of the terrorists jumped out the window which seemed to me particularly funny, like he was the cartoon Wile E Coyote. Anyway, as you can see I don't really know how to end this story except to note that if Renee could have blown up her upstairs neighbor and got away with it I am sure she would have,-- even though she had no desire herself to be a hero of the people. There are several people that fall into that category, me among them, if I am being honest but, as I said,--that's another story.

Don't Bother, Their Here

It is difficult not to begin any attempt at rational thought nowadays without the words "that idiot Trump" however, it was a well known facet of growing up in New York City that Donald Trump suffered from an Edifice Complex which the urban dictionary defines as "as serious budget-busting illness that typically manifests itself on modern college and university campuses." While Trump is obviously lacking in any marks of higher education, he did exhibit this same predilection for constructing buildings on a grand scale seemingly solely for the purpose of splashing someone's (in his case, his own), name across them, so it seems that his affinity for commemoration, (and in his case, self commemoration) should have become a focal point early on (or late) in presidency (depending on how you look at it) with regard to the issue of Confederate statues is particularly ironic.
The hauling down of statues has a certain resonance for people of my generation who not only recall the lassooing of Saddam Hussein but the defacement of Buddhist carvings by Islamic extremists as well as the consignment of the stentorian images of Lenin and Marx to Moscow suburban junkyards as well has the obliteration of Chinese imagery (that was not of Chairman Mao) during the cultural revolution of the late sixties and seventies. In a sense the Vietnam memorial, which I found personally very poignantly and unexpectedly moving when I went to see it, was also an expression of this tendency of de-iconfication and healthy disillusionment so in my mind at least there are both positive and negative aspects to it.

While the tendency to purge awkward memories is a strong one in both our public and personal lives, it is worth examining where it is a healthy scourging of outmoded imagery or where the wholesale obliteration of meaning. I think it important, first of all, to distinguish purely political from artistic statements. In my view at least, the wanton destruction of the giant Buddhas of Barniyan by the Taliban was simply an act of vandalism, while the hauling down of Saddam Hussein was basically just an example of good taste. One was art and the other politics.

Honestly, I do not believe that statues of Robert E. Lee belong in the public square. They are symbols of an abhorrent and discredited ideology and a reminder of a dark chapter in the history of the nation. To glorify that seems perverse. On the other hand, the call now to remove Lee and Stonewall Jackson's names from the barracks of West Point seems to me both unnecessary and punitive-- the manifestation of a rabid tendency to obliterate any uncomfortable symbols of past guilt from American discourse. Lee was a graduate of West Point and Superintendent there from 1852 to 1855. He is part of the history of that institution. Not only that, he was undeniably a brilliant tactician and military strategist, two skills which the institution purports to teach and of which we, as a nation, if we are to remain one, are in need. The concept of 'the state' in American has changed over time.To seek to obliterate his name simply because he chose loyalty to his state over that of his country from the institution he served and attended is in my mind more akin to an attempt at collective self absolution than a mark of sensitivity to modern cultural norms or true justice and does nothing for the stature of the nation. While it may be simply making hay in the current political climate, I think the calls to do this are misguided.

And while I may be accused on nit-picking, I do think it is important to maintain the distinction between glorification and commemoration and in this case, of West Point, I believe it is commemoration and thus should be left to stand. And while, racists and haters may also seek to make hay on the other side of the road if the names are left to stand, I believe they will be on much shakier ground in doing so. So, while I find myself in an uncomfortable position in saying so, and I have spent a lot of time talking about commemoration and monuments of which neither subject do I have any great fondness or affinity, and while I do not share Trump's great affection for embodying memory in stone or glass, I do believe that simple eradication without accompanying self reflection of either memory or the places of honor in it. is a destructive process and should be undertaken with great care.

Send in the Clowns

People criticize other people for playing games. Of course when sincerity is required, then playing games is a bad thing and those people can become annoying and tedious because they seem incapable of being serious- they do not know when or how to stop playing and certainly game-playing then can take on a rather malicious and neurotic aspect-- but playing games can also be good fun and provide a needed distraction from pain and suffering so it is not always clear really when game-playing is good or bad. Computers that are programmed to play games can often be good company when you need a distraction from pain even tho they are not human--sometimes better because you know what to expect from them.

Wikipedia defines game theory as "the study of mathematical models of conflict and cooperation between intelligent rational decision-makers." I was watching a movie about Abbie Hoffman and the Yippies last night and the part about the trial of the Chicago Seven (originally the Chicago Eight until Bobby Seale the Black Panther severed his trial from that of the other defendants). At the time, I remember this rather odd and antic trial and when it dominated the news. In the movie Vincent D'onofrio plays Hoffman and he gives him this pretentious self-involved quality with some fake non-localizable accent that I found annoying but anyway, Hoffman was essentially a hyper-rational game-player--they got that part right. That was also why I didn't take him seriously at the time--he was an antic clown tweaking the nose of the stuffed shirt, irrational establishment. The country was in pain at the time and needed a distraction and he provided it. So, what is the point I am trying to make here? There was this bizarre phenomenon last year when clowns started spontaneously appearing. They were rather strange clowns because it seemed they did not know how to play. They just stood there. They were clowns who forgot how to be clowns. We are a country that has forgotten how to be in pain. The stuffed shirts are still running the country,--maybe we have all forgotten how to play--maybe it is time to send in the clowns. The real ones.

Freedom and Bar-B-Cue

I am reposting this post from March 20 because I think it is important and worth saying. It had to do with a computer contract I was doing in Birmingham Alabama under what were very painful physical circumstances for me at the time. I had a pinched nerve in my neck that lasted for six months (and longer). I was in a lot of pain and could not stand up straight but I went to work every day for those six months. I had a family to support and some things are worth doing, just like some things are worth saying...or resaying.

A few years back I was doing a computer contract for Bell South in Birmingham Alabama. It was in a corporate park. It had snowed, which was unusual for Birmingham, and by 3:00pm nobody was left in the building except me and a couple of supervisors and the security guard. I looked out the window at the parking lot and there were two cars there; mine and the one I assumed belonged to the security guard. I went up to one woman who was still there at her desk and I asked if they were closing the building.

"Why are you still here?" she asked me.

"I'm a contractor. If I'm not here I don't get paid. They own my ass."

This was the mid-nineteen nineties you understand, supposedly the era of the "New South."

Anyway, she looked up at me and with a smile that would have melted butter on a cold day, said,

"It's nice to be owned. Isn't it?"

I knew exactly what she meant, right away.

Now, if ever in my life I wanted to call a woman a "c__t" it was at that moment. Instead, not wanting to get fired, I am ashamed to say, I just gritted my teeth and walked away.

In any case, I have always regretted that I let that racist bitch get the last word. Unfortunately no matter how much of a bitch she was, what she had said about human nature was true. People do most often like to be owned or at least are accepting of it--particularly in the workplace. It relieves them of the burden of thinking-- so long as they follow the rules they know they are OK. In Trumpian America we should be particularly mindful of this attitude as in its worst incarnation, it can become fascism. I am not trying to make a political point, I am just stating something I have observed about human nature.

So, what I learned from all this is that, no matter what my mother told me, sometimes, you can't observe the niceties and the office etiquette. Sometimes you can't just be polite-- you just have to dispense with that when other people think they own you or your reality and then, even if it is snowing in Birmingham Alabama, you just have to call a spade a spade, and a "c__t" a "c__t". So while, I can't say I am proud of everything in my life--I am at least trying to make some amends at this late date.

So that is the end of the previous post and this is what I have to say about it--it is clear why the woman in this story was a piece of shit. What is not as clear is why she was right about people being willing to subjugate themselves and that was really the point of this story--that it is human nature (and a lie that we tell ourselves) that we feel we only have to right to fully define ourselves only after we have been subjugated. In marriage, we willingly mutually subjugate ourselves out of love and hence define the family as what is more important to us than our individuality--what this woman in the story was talking about was NOT a willing subjugation, it was a brutal imposition of the will of one race on another. (And the same holds true for the brutal imposition of one individual's will over an other.) The simple fact of human nature about self definition that the woman got right was that once we are subjugated to something we can begin to define ourselves anew. In the case of what she was talking about it produced the miracle of black culture in this society--in bondage black people were made free to define themselves completely. The key point and the key difference is understanding what is a willing subjugation what is one that is imposed. We all feel the need to have power to define ourselves, but if we are willing or even eager to sacrifice the one thing that his truly important --in the case of this story--freedom--then that self-definition is worthless and we have lost the one thing that is truly important. Obviously this has political implications for our present situation and we should be wary that in submitting to an enslaving ideaology (whether it be of the right or the left) or to a religion, or to a person, we should remember that it is never worth sacrificing your freedom as that is really the only thing worth having and without it--and no matter what they tell you, without it there is no such thing as love.

The Brigantes

To depart briefly from the themes of fun, (brilliant or otherwise) let us for a moment focus on something perhaps no less manic but certainly more violent and barbaric. It should be noted that in ancient times, this same area of Blackpool was inhabited by Celtic tribes known as Brigantes. They were fierce, sea-going warriors, known for building vitrified forts close by the seashore. Vitrification is a process whereby (usually red) sandstone is emplaced over the more accessible points of a castle and coated with a compound that when heated causes it to harden and bond with its neighboring stones to produce a remarkably slippery surface,--difficult to scale or mount a serious assault.

Descendants of these tribes are justifiably proud of this technology which often saved them from the predations of marauding Vikings (whose shoes were likely already a bit slippery from standing in fish-guts and puke). “...to vitrify a fort, ancient man left little or nothing to chance. Having assessed the melting characteristics of the rock (with a test burn) and acquired additional more suitable facing rock if needed, the rampart was prepared by the application of surface stones, together with the application (paraphrasing) of a flux-like compound known to improve the adhesion and melting characteristics of the rock... the entire rampart was turned into an enormous kiln, by using clay to build a vented tunnel around and above it,... This allowed the heat to be amplified and directed toward the rampart, thus achieving the desired vitrification. ” This substance that was used to slag the stone corresponded and was descended in part from an ancient unfunny compound known as “Greek Fire” which (having little or nothing to do with the digestion of diner food) had the unique characteristic that it continued burning even when immersed in water. It was sometimes introduced by the fort-vitrifiers to achieve the very high temperatures required for melting the sandstone and also allow the introduction of water into the vitrifying process as an agent to control melting on the surfaces. 

It had been employed by the ancient Greek in naval battles, being formed into balls to be hurled by catapults at enemy ships, this having, aside from its hydroanaphilic qualities, a capacity to scare the living shit out of anyone. Because of this secondary capability, it continued to be particularly effective as a naval weapon long after the fall of Greece as a naval power; (as a sailor you really do not want to watch other sailors burning to death, whether they be friend or foe). Though its exact composition remains a mystery, its horrific effects are well-recorded by several respected sources and documented, (as have been those of its modern, equally unfunny, counterpart, napalm).

The point being, despite suffering the aforementioned effects of the omnipresent voluntary historical amnesia, to the Blackpuddlians we can safely ascribe that the arrival of a dozen or so somewhat confused Norwegian sailors did not in reality mark the beginning of Blackpool’s nautical heritage. In describing these early residents of the area, the modern word ‘brigand’ is usually substituted as a later derivation of the ancient Roman term "Brigantes,” which was the name the gave to the loose agglomeration of Celtic tribes who would sometimes harass the Roman forces in coastal areas of an otherwise then subject Britain.


The derivative word, "brigand," therefore eventually came to imply not only general lawlessness but also a certain shiftiness of character and the willingness, even eagerness, to utilize duplicity for pecuniary aims or civil advantages,--all while maintaining an appropriately nautical flair. The Brigantes, like their forts, were thus renowned for being somewhat slippery m___f__kers and were singularly adept at the hit-and-run raids inflicted on their less fort dependent colleagues,--for this purpose employing small coastwise crafts that later became known as Brigantines. The word “Brigantine” thus was eventually adopted into the common usage by the Royal Navy in the early 17th century as referring to coast-hugging, smaller vessels that in a pinch could change their markings and engage in privateering or even piracy should the opportunity present itself.
               
To trace the term yet further, (and hopefully we are not straying too far afield from our original topic of amusement parks), “A brigantine (the shortened expression is the modern term brig)” meant a small vessel equipped both for both sailing and rowing, ‘swifter and more easily maneuvered than larger ships and hence employable for purposes of piracy, espionage, reconnoitering, etc. and as such however (and this is a key point) attendant upon the presence of larger friendly ships nearby (paraphrased) for protection’. The meaning was later broadened to designate any small two-masted vessel with square rigging, having on the mainmast, a fore-and-aft mains’il. (A triangular type of sail has an advantage over square-rigged sail in being able to be better maneuvered and to allow for better sailing of the ship (sic) in general in shallower coastal waters where winds and currents are often uncertain.) “It did not take much to convert a square rigged brigantine from a merchant ship to a privateer, or vice versa and privateers have a long history in Atlantic waters and though they extended their activities away from the coastline they were still generally inclined to avoid pitched naval battles, relying instead on subterfuge and deception. Since the better prize was (a) merchant ship loaded with goods that could be easily sold or a vessel wounded in another engagement, limping home it was not usually until after one of these situations occurred that they would raise their true colors.” While the range of these vessels was extended through greed and opportunity, the original imputation of slipperiness still obtains and has remained integral to the definition even though the use has since been institutionalized.

Nautical entrepreneurship (as I euphemistically dubbed it) is a long and well-regarded tradition on the seas. American privateers, (just one example), were on the whole so successful at it that it was often difficult to keep a crew aboard the somewhat pathetic American Navy during the Revolutionary War as they generally preferred the more hazardous but definitely more rewarding work aboard the privateers. Washington himself was constantly obliged to attend to this matter, using the Quartermaster Department to dig up seamen until responsibility was transferred to the Marine Committee of the Congress but even then, nothing, not even the ten-dollar enlistment bonus, was sufficient to lure those with actual nautical skills who could easily garner a tidier sum throughout by remaining in private employ.

The point here being (sigh) that the true origins and heritage of Blackpool are not entirely lost in the mists of time and further, that in all likelihood the murderous Brigantes themselves eventually became (or almost all) good Christians, (practicing Catholics or Church of England) except for the Theosophists and Wiccans and as further evidence of this fact, there once was (and is still) existing sculpture ensconced high in the vaulted nave of the church of St. Michael the Archangel, at Kirklington, (not far from Blackpool) in North Yorkshire, a three-headed icon, the central one belonging certainly to Ogmios, one of the major ear-licking Druidic deities worshiped by the Brigantes.


There are precious few other extant in situ neo-Celtic period images to compare him with but we know Ogmios in particular generally represented the central figure in a sea-going mythology. He appeared generally (as occurs here at Kirklington) in a triptych, his extenuated tongue implanted luridly in the ear of one of the adjacent, (obviously lesser) deities and it is clear therefore that despite its standing today in a Christian church, this pagan god was the main subject of this particular sculpture that appears to us gazing down from the nave of St. Michaels. 

Not just the Brigantes but all of the early Celtic tribes; the Setantii, the Carvetii, were living around present day Blackpool, (whether or not they were busy vitrifying ramparts or hunting Elk or ear-licking like manic Chihuahuas at the time), and were worshiping a rather eclectic panoply of gods, mostly Druidic in origin, but some others derived or modeled after their Greco-Roman counterparts (these no doubt introduced by Romans who did not prevent but frowned on native forms of worship). It was consequently not all that unusual for some of these Celtic deities, over time, to take on the characteristics of their Roman counterparts (and vice versa) and aside from obsessive ear licking (or perhaps because of it) Ogmios was associated with eloquence and also strength and hence collated with the Greco/Roman god Hercules (who also was known to have exhibited the characteristic on occasion of being able to talk his way out of a scrape). (And should he not) Sometimes Ogmios was pictured with his tongue becoming a club, the club also being the preferred weapon of Hercules (the convincer).    

It is also possible that in the image in the church where he is depicted with what appears as his tongue inserted into lesser deity’s ear, it is not a tongue at all but rather the links of a golden chain by which their ears were linked to the tip of his tongue; implying the power of his speech chained mens’ minds with golden links (as he is also credited with having invented the runes or written form of the Druidic language and thus also became the god of marriage contracts which is probably why he was granted ear-licking status in the first place).

As for his association with amusement parks: it is also possible that having his tongue employed regularly in coaxing earwax out of lesser deity’s ears, that (aside from having a fluid vocabulary) he was also the god of throwing up, which perhaps explains his association with that other hyperdentitious deity whom we have called ‘Funny Face’ (after George Tilyou who first named him); and who presided over the entrance of that delirious cathedral of fun, Steeplechase, though how and why this name came to be employed is somewhat less clear (and perhaps should remain so). 

Bonanza!

I visited the Mark Twain 'Museum' in Virginia City (which is in Nevada, not Virginia) a few months back. It is housed in the former offices of the Territorial Enterprise and the major drawing card is Mark Twain's original desk that miraculously survived the fire of 1875 that destroyed the offices of the Territorial Enterprise, where Twain worked as a reporter, and much of the town in the waning months of the decade long mania surrounding the discovery of the Comstock lode. Supposedly, when he was not meandering around the countryside, he had worked in the basement, so I was told by the kindly, red-haired lady that charged me the five-dollar admission fee and so, his desk was miraculously spared the depredations of the general blaze that took the three floors above. That the desk had been found and recovered from the charred rubble of the building. This immediately sounded a little suspicious to me and but then again, certainly in harmony with Twain's own talent for manufacturing serendipitous and miraculous circumstances in pursuit of readership and liquidity. So, whether or not the desk was in fact his original desk or one that the proprietors of the Emporioum on the floor above that was hawking candy and other tourist kitsch had picked up at a yard sale, I happily took my tourist pictures and bought my postcards, content in the knowledge that it was, if not his actual desk, a close facsimile and I had the same warm feeling about the portable toilet, regarding which a similar claim was made courtesy of a placard saying 'Mark Twain's ass was here' (though we are not similarly heir to its contents) and I assume they were not talking about his donkey.

Later in this same trip, on the way to visit a friend, I stopped a diner in Nevada City (which is in California, not Nevada). The diner was owned and operated by a French woman Genevieve and her husband Tom and as I read the history of the establishment printed on the back of the menu, I learned that her husband was a former aerospace engineer who had retired here to what has become something of a mecca for the heirs to 'the beat poets', and haunt of such epic poets as Gary Snyder and apparently Tom Cruise to open this aromatic establishment known as the Classic Cafe. Well it so happened that her husband (whom I had not recognized immediately from the picture on the menu which was of a much younger man) was sitting right next to me. (I had mistaken him for a general issue retiree killing time at the local diner). I explained to him that I was on the way to visit a friend in Grass Valley and that I had come out west to research a novel I had already written called 'monoville'. I thought he would be pleased that someone had taken such a lively, if overdue, literary interest in what essentially is an overlooked and ignored parched segment of the the Western Sierras,-- well let's not go into that. Anyway, he in particular seemed vaguely unhappy at this news.
"You guys come out here trying to make a buck off of our history and our stories." he admonished me scowling.

Well, since a buck was about all I had made to date of 'his history" I just nodded, and added "Hopefully".
This is the conundrum of California life, the vast and iconic scope of the landscape, the people and the history and the peculiar proprietariness of those people when they feel they have been cut out of the profits. I would very much like to write my next book set in that diner. As Spock would say 'Fascinating'
.

A Grazing Mace

I am going to talk about race and racism now,-- for two reasons: firstly I think it finally may be possible to have an honest and serious discussion about race in America, and secondly it is raining, and I, a 'for all intents and purposes' white person in a 'for all intents and purposes' predominantly white society, (and not to diminish the importance and horror of recent events), find, that having nothing else to do, this is the only time I voluntarily give serious consideration to the subject of race (which is why I also think black people should give us back February...as that is the month it is least likely to rain.).

Joking aside,--why has it been so extraordinarily difficult til now to have a serious and rational conversation on the topic of race. Words can be a bludgeon or they can be a scalpel. I would think therefore it has a lot to do with the fact that in this context, they have long been used mostly as bludgeons,-- all or most the words conscripted became immediately intensely and highly charged, and what is more, facilely capable of conveying different meanings to different people even in the same context in a way that is more conducive to conveying emotion than meaning. Take the word 'racist' itself...to most 'normal' people, on the surface it is unambiguously bad and to some extent has become a synonym for 'bad character', at least until they find by some definitions they themselves may be included under it. Stephen Colbert's dealt with this possible 'double edgedness' of the word by declaring. 'I do not see race!'  This is the big lie method of dealing with the problem,-- of course we all see (and hear) race, but as in all effective 'big lies' there is a convoluted kernel of truth. The big lie is a method of dealing with the convolutedness of real explanation by distraction. To look at that inconvenient kernel,-- what defines, (for me at least) someone as a racist, is someone who sees race first.  It is for them the only defining and therefore, least subject to revision assumption they can make about a person. All other assumptions become either subordinate or non-existent to it. We hate the idea first and the person second. This is of course the most pernicious form of racism leading to stereotyping all all the other 'de-individualizing' and 'brutalizing' mindsets that characterized for example, Nazi Germany.  One group or set of people arrogates to themselves totally the idea of the 'individual'.

I say this is the definition of 'racism' because if we strip this idea of 'primacy of perception' from the meaning of the word then we strip the word of meaning and it is therefore 'by definition', its definition. However, we have a niggling feeling that this does not do full and ample justice to the 'double edged' nature of the term. For example,--employing this definition, one would have to admit, (since we are being honest here) that Affirmative Action was a racist policy,--Why? Simply because it was a social policy that considered race first and foremost. Well, that may be true and we may have to admit that Affirmative Action is racist, and this is a rather uncomfortable and inconvenient fact for those of us who promoted it or support it,-- but it also is a case of using fire to fight fire! It was a policy that was instituted and adopted to correct a grave and longstanding historical injustice and therefore, while it may be 'racist' in the definitional sense,--it was also just and beneficial. So, in this case, the complex and inconvenient truth is that 'racism' per-sae was used for a good end. That still does not make racism itself good--not by a long shot. (No wonder this subject has been so difficult to discuss!) but while racism itself may be evil, not all racist policies may necessarily be bad.  That is just the riddle we need to live with. All of which brings us to an even more uncomfortably complex idea,--that of 'institutional racism'.

While it is clear that peoples attitudes (for the most part--except for a hopefully diminishing number of crazies) have changed their mindsets in their daily interactions (no more Jim Crow), it is equally true that the racism that was embedded in our political, economic and legal institutions both in the South and the North is alive and well.  While this fact rolls off the tongue facilely and easily, what does this really mean and is something increasingly heard on talk shows in post-Obama America?  In practice it means that institutions used and still do provide justification and context and give encouragement and play to the dregs of racism that, while no longer approved by society in general, still lurk in the depths of our psyches.  In closed 'sub-societies', like law enforcement,--a different standard may de-facto prevail than in society at large and this double standard is then, more often than not for convenience sake overlooked. Unshakeable bonds of mutual benefit secure its continuance within the context of the legal system. It is self-perpetuating... Prosecutors depend on police, courts depend on prosecutors prisons depend on courts etc. a hand in glove relationship that facilitates swift justice but also (in the case of black individuals) often facilitates swift injustice--what is important is that there is nothing in it which requires a fundamental change of attitude from the other--it is a web of marriages of necessity,-- a complex web of inter-dependencies that no party is willing to tip in part, for fear of tipping the whole--in short, American justice functions on a sort of American version of the old European Aristocratic ideal of expediency in personal relations.

So, however, in the context of this discussion, even faced with the reality, we must consider this idea: is institutional racism a real thing?  Certainly its effects and outcomes are real and evident to anyone who care to look. (Most of us do not until something like Ferguson shows up,--or it starts raining). However if we can ascribe racism to an institution than why cannot we ascribe thought and opinion, and if institutions have thoughts and opinions than rationally speaking perhaps private institutions like corporations cannot be granted a lesser status and so we have been led down the slippery slope that led to the absurdity of a Citizens United.

So, to deny that institutional racism exists is an absurdity that flies in face of evident facts and to admit it exists within a legal context (which it itself defines) leads to yet another absurdity which is that of institutions having values and opinions that themselves need to be protected under the law. By admitting to the existence of institutional racism somehow this is a means for institutions to themselves achieve 'personhood so,--by definition,--their very existence depends upon its continued existence. This is not mere sophistry rather it is a false equality of the kind that any society generally uses to convince the most useful of citizens that they are valued when in fact though their contributions are valued, they themselves are not--in other words--in its most 'honest' form,--slavery. (And not to get all weepy about the founders'--something which they, in their wisdom foresaw as the most pernicious form of governmental arrogance)  So,--I am already mentally exhausted,--and we have not even scratched the surface or attempted to address the use of the 'n' word,-- or examined the fact that we finally have a commander-in-chief (again not to make light of recent events) who can almost carry a tune. But having pointed out the fact that words must first be 'unhijacked' if they are to serve any useful function in future conversations, I consider at least part of my part of the task done for now and so will leave it at that.