Dialogue ....

 Checked on Facebook today. Too much hate. So, I’ve been listening to it rain and thinking about how so many phrases there are that so many people wouldn’t understand these days. Maybe if we softened our dialogue, it might calm our whole country a bit. How many still understand the following?

“Don’t stand there with that ice-box door open.”

“I’m gonna cut me switch.”

“It’s about time we gave you another permanent.”

“It runs like a sanger sewing machine.”

“They just drove by and was sackin’ air.”

“This place is in bad need of some hooverin.’

“That man is puredee mean.”

“He wouldn’t pay a nickel to see a piss-ant eat a bale of hay.”

“It’s so cold it’ll cut your water off.”

“Rich as five feet up a bull’s [hind end].”

“… like a jackass eatin’ briars.”

“Just a hop, skip, and a jump … .”

“Fit to be tied.”

“Your face is gonna freeze like that.”

“Were you raised in a barn?’

And that’s how the hog ate the cabbage.

The Russians love this.

A simple act of grace ...

You know, it seems sometimes like we’re running out of things for which to hate people. No, it’s true. A headline grabbed me this morning. This “pundit” named Laura Ingrahm was all over some candidate for the way she pronounced her name. Geez, I would think that if there ever was a personal freedom, it resided in the way we pronounce our own name.

Maybe Laura Ingrahm doesn’t think so. Or maybe she just picked up on another way to spread the kind of distrust, divineness, and, well … hatred that her particular career, and employer, demands.

With a name like mine, I’m a little sensitive about the topic. Southerners, in my experience, like to make a scene about how to say it. Jerks in the United States Navy had a field day with it. Sainted Mother bristled about it, but had a nice retort, for a while anyway, for tradespeople who made a scene about how to pronounce it. “It’s funny,” she would say, “but I have a three-year-son who can pronounce it without any trouble at all.” She used it until my little brother was about 15.

For reasons known only to himself, my father simplified (in his estimation) the spelling on our birth certificates. I think it had to with the fact that he was never particularly proud of his heritage, having gone through World War One as a teenager and having been subject to a number of sobriquets, the most benign of which was “dirty Hun.” Then, a man named Hitler finished off any lingering affinity with “the Fatherland.” Daddy even posted a sticker on the front window of our little grocery store, “Americanism, our only ‘ism.’”

That wasn’t like him, but it appeared during a period in which one of the greatest hate-mongers (a title now being severely challenged) America has produced was dominating the news cycle. Yes, that would have been Joseph McCarthy. People feared him, and his pit bull Roy Cohn, to the extent that they would often express a “sympathetic hatred” that they didn’t even feel. One can see it today if one looks hard enough.

But back to my name. Luckily, I once had a close attorney friend, a Harvard grad in fact, who started his own firm. Suffering from boredom during the startup period, he tempted me with several offers of free legal work. Failing at divorce, bankruptcy, a suit over a neighbor’s barking dog, or a class-action suit over the mental damages caused by the reading of Ayn Rand, he finally settled on getting my name spelled right, by court order, and for free.

From a simple act of kindness, I’m now able to, without fear of unkind criticism, express, with each signing, the full fact of Teutonic royalty in a name that once drew the sort of vitriol that fuels people like Laura Ingrahm.

So, there you go. Using the pronunciation (or spelling) of a person’s name as an act of love, rather than one of hate, seems a good move to me. In fact, wouldn’t this world be a better place for a day if we all decided that we won’t express any act of hatred? After all, it only points out to the world that we have an abscess on our soul.

Yes ... the "von" indicates royalty,
So take that, you fear-mongering
sack of ... . No, wait, I'm
supposed to be good today.
Belay my last. Insert instead,
"My precious friend."

Book Review: October 31, 2017

At my age, I don’t have the time to study all the great books I cherish. But I may spend more time on Giovanni’s Room. One of only two novels by James Baldwin, it can break the heart of anyone who cherishes the right of people to live in freedom.

By “freedom,” I don’t believe in freedom from incarceration or freedom from tyranny, but in the complete freedom to live as one’s physiological genetics would have them do, as long as that freedom didn’t harm another.

Of course, people are harmed in Baldwin’s book. The narrator, David, is a severely damaged man who damages others. He is a gay man in an era in which the shame heaped upon him and those like him stifled and contorted every emotional impulse. His tormentors weren’t necessarily open and visible, like that poor, demented, homophobic county clerk in Kentucky of today’s headlines. No, at the time covered by the book, prejudice and punishment flowed over the likes of David as some dense, impenetrable fog, silent, pervasive, and unyielding. That fog of torment created a self-disgust that caused its victims even to despise their own fellow wanderers, even their own lovers, even humanity in essence, and worse, even themselves.

One struggles to imagine what it must be like to have the world stifle one’s emotional feelings to the point of harm against humanity or against one’s own person.

Readers have treated the book as a study of shame, and it is. Moreover, it is a book that rips away scabs and displays the raw damage done to society by hate and homophobia. The festering sores flow from the narrator to others, mostly the innocent who, themselves, struggle to find the freedom to love in a society given to hatred.

Would that it could be required reading.

A life burned out too quickly

Sailing To Oblivium: August 18, 2017

A boy I knew years ago and I gave wrong directions once to a black family asking the way to Memphis. We sent them in the opposite direction. I still worry about it.

There were three of us waiting in a parking lot on the main highway through our town for a fourth rider. The owner of our car, I’ll call him Joe, was giving us all a ride back to the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville after a weekend visit home.

Joe was one of the biggest jerks I’ve ever known, but he had a car and would give us rides home and back if we paid for the gas. As we stood there, a car stopped with an African-American family inside. The man politely asked for directions to Memphis, Tennessee.

He was headed in the wrong direction, headed, in fact, for Dallas, Texas.

Before anyone could speak, Joe blurted out, “You’re headed right, just keep going for 150 miles or so and you’ll be right there." Then man thanked him and drove off toward Texas.

I say “we” gave them wrong directions, for I stood silent, making me just as guilty as Joe. I have thought of that incident maybe hundreds of times over the years, including on lonely nights sitting in a tower, or on a bunker guarding a Navy base against attack by a known enemy.

The ghastly sin of bigotry and racism is also a known enemy, and I have, on occasion, failed my country and my fellow human beings by falling under its spell through silence or apathy. Maybe there are others that feel that way too.

Oh, I have rationalized about the incident. Had I interfered, I would have been left on the side of the road without a ride back to resume classes the next day.

Interference may have led to a physical confrontation.

There was a third person who would have sided, no doubt, with Joe and it would have been a question of whom to believe.

The highway was clearly marked and I’m sure the family realized the deception before long.

It’s all bull of course. I was a coward and a bigot. My only hope is that the incident may have helped form my later belief system. Maybe Joe himself changed. On the other hand, maybe Joe was among the Neo-Nazis, KKK members, white supremacists, and hatemongers that the President of the United States of America has seen fit recently to defend. Who knows?

Maybe the incident served some distant purpose. I’ve thought about it while driving home late at night through the Arkansas Delta through swarms of insects as thick as fog. Often, I had just been the only white face at a meeting held in a small rural church building for the purpose of planning how to get a water system funded for one of the poorest communities in our state. Maybe the Galilean would give me a little credit for that, and for speaking out from time to time against hate. Who knows? By doing so, I've alienated some folks I had regarded as friends. Who cares?

As I say, maybe Joe changed. Sometimes education and responsibility lead us to change our hateful ways for the better. I’m not optimistic, though, after this past week, about the healing effects of education and responsibility. They sure haven’t had that effect on our president. We can only weep as we remember Zion. 

A holocaust survivor and target

of the Charlottesville marchers.

      

Sailing To Oblivium: August 17, 2017

As with many things, Sainted Mother said it best. She told me, “Son, a man is known by the company he keeps.” She was also known to remark, from time to time, that “Sorry is as sorry does.”

That was far, far better than some recent remarks I’ve heard lately such as, “There were some fine people in that crowd” (in Charlottesville, Virginia). Mother certainly wouldn’t have had it that way. She had no time for Nazis, and she would have had no time for anyone marching alongside one.

The KKK she found more interesting than anything. There weren’t any Jewish folk or African-Americans living in the rural, South Arkansas area in which she lived as a child. With no jews or people of color to terrorize or lynch, the local Klan pretty much confined itself to bullying white teenaged boys who became unruly.

Anyway, I’ve never forgotten her advice. I always ran with a decent crowd and still limit my associations to folks who are higher on the educational scale than I. And if I happen to go somewhere “fine,” I make sure it deserves that sobriquet.

Let’s say I attended a church. What could be considered finer in the eyes of many Americans? Then, suppose instead of passing around love and grace, let’s say the folks there began passing around rattlesnakes? Would I symbolically march alongside them?

Not no, but hell no!

It happened to me, metaphorically at least, when I was in high school. I was trying to impress this girl, see, so I attended church with her on Sunday. It wasn’t any rural snake-handling place either. It happened to be the largest and most sophisticated Baptist church in the city.

Imagine my surprise, when, instead of pointing out the grandeur of the Galilean’s Sermon on the Mount, the pastor began to demonize, in the most explicit manner, people of the Catholic faith. Yes, it was the year John F. Kennedy ran for president. I learned, from that pastor—in the most tragically ironic way imaginable—that, up until then, every person who had ever assassinated a U.S. president had been a Catholic.

I’m not sure that was true, but when the basis for a sermon is hatred and bigotry, a little mendacity is a minor side-note.

Our city was in the migratory path of literally thousands of Italian immigrants. Shysters had lured them to the United States with the promise of fortunes to be made farming in the State of Mississippi. When, upon arriving, they learned that the intent was simply to replace African-American sharecroppers with Italian-American sharecroppers, those immigrants left. More than a few settled in my home town. I had many Catholic acquaintances and some Catholic friends. They all seemed like nice folks to me, and they were.

I started searching for a new girlfriend the next week after seeing the kind of crowd with which my “ex” associated. It was a tough decision, for she was smart, popular, and mighty cute.

Now, I watch the news and hear, over and over again, the shouts of “The Jews will not replace us,” “you will not replace us,” "the KKK," and “blood and soil,” (a Nazi rallying cry).

There may have been some “fine” people who started the march in Charlottesville, but there were no decent people in the crowd the moment after those shouts began.

For you see: sorry is as sorry does.

The Descent of a State

Sunday while resting for a few minutes, I caught a documentary on PBS about how the small town of Hoxie, Arkansas, in the mid-1950s, decided to integrate their school system, peacefully and with no court order. It would have been a model for our state on how to grant freedom to an oppressed people without creating civil disorder. We are rightfully proud of their efforts, but a not too funny thing happened.

Jim Johnson, a vicious white-supremacy attorney, rushed to the scene and, using the tired-old “They’re coming for your women,” ploy, embroiled the community in controversy, gaining notoriety that would push Orval Faubus into a staunchly segregationist stance and the state, eventually, into ridicule and disdain.

The rest is history. It proved to be one of Arkansas’s darkest hours.

It made me think of June, 1966, when I graduated from the University of Arkansas. Faubus had been in office for over ten years and had brought nothing but shame to the state during that time. The state had lost any prestige it might have once had, and was rapidly losing population.

Thus the “sucking sound” the next day following graduation, when so many who had no binding ties left the state. It was truly a mass exodus.

As for me, I went to San Francisco. In late 1966, there were so many ex-patriates from Arkansas living in the Bay Area that we would have get-togethers attended by 20 or 30 of my former classmates.

I never intended to return. As the Jack Nicholson character said, “I was just inches away from a clean getaway.”

Then the Draft Board came for me and I was  occupied for four years. During that time a funny thing happened. Winthrop Rockefeller became governor of Arkansas and I began to read accounts from home about how he was making a valiant attempt to bring Arkansas out of the morass into which it had wallowed for years, a morass that only the occasional success of its major college football team could brighten.

He was succeeded by Dale Bumpers, another enlightened soul. Then other funny things happened.

I was discharged and soon on my way back to California. I stopped in Arkansas to visit and met, through a family member, some young guys who had just started their own urban planning firm. I agreed to meet them before I “lit out for the territories.” I was that close to the “Little Rock Getaway” so to speak.

But, I found a job here. And I found a wife here. In short, I found a life here. Tall buildings were rising in my new city. A series of bright young politicians left their mark on the state: David Pryor, Bill Clinton, John Paul Hammerschmidt, Jim Guy Tucker, and Win Rockefeller. The state emerged from its dismal past and flourished. Women and people of color rose to prominence and more buildings rose to the sky. Northwest Arkansas, long a scene of poverty, began to emerge as one of the country’s leading economies.

Then a native son became President of the United States.

That’s when our progress, it seems to me, came under attack.

There were those who simply could not accept the fact that William Jefferson Clinton would be president for eight years, even though he presided over a period of unprecedented peace and prosperity marred, it is true, by personal lapses.

Today, I feel the state tilting backwards into that dark abyss once more. A state law that legalizes hatred becomes effective today, allowed by many who chose to ignore the “better angels of their nature.” The editorial page of the only statewide newspaper daily fans the feeling of disrespect toward our nation's President. Far too many churches have turned from preaching love and grace to encouraging the abhorrence of strangers. There is an outpouring of vitriol against non-Caucasians that hasn’t been this evident since the lynching of black people in our state at the height of the Jim Crow era. Those whose hatred is most uncontrollable are “agged on” as my mother would say, by those who should know better but who are deluded into believing that their right to own firearms is endangered. This is a most terrifying combination in my opinion. It is like a gas can resting alongside a stack of dynamite.

We’ve sunk too many roots to make a getaway at our ages. We might, if we don’t live past normal life-expectancy, survive since we descend from Northern European ancestry, the one truly protected category in our country. If we live too long, the haters may get around to the educated and progressive-minded, but we will be tired and ready to go by then.

In the meantime … my advice to a young person? “Run Dude, run!”

 

It seems that this action is now protected
by state law in Arkansas. Shame on us.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

See also:

www.wattensawpress.com

www.travelswithanalien,blogspot.com