If I were ever on a golf cart, here are some of the things you might hear me yell:
1) "Help! I've been kidnapped!"
2) "Why are my kidnappers forcing me to wear all this tacky synthetic-fiber sportswear?"
3) "Does the clubhouse make a mean mojito?"
4) "Nice ass!" (After I've visited the clubhouse and had a few too many mojitos)
I cannot imagine any circumstance under which I would feel the need to yell "White power!" Perhaps if I were especially excited to see a Martha White baking supplies delivery truck pulling up to my favorite grocery store. But even then, I think I could muster some restraint.
Sorry, I know it is not a funny situation, but it's either laugh or cry most days, and today I sweated all the tears out of my system by assembling some exercise equipment in an overly warm apartment.
Vote, vote, vote, vote, vote, vote, vote, vote, vote, vote, vote, vote, vote, vote, vote, vote. And vote some more until it becomes a habit and you can see it make a difference. Because it will. If it didn't, so many people wouldn't be trying to stop you from doing so.
Even if you're feeling uninspired by this year's crop of candidates--and how absolutely precious of you for feeling that way!--vote as if your life depends upon it.
Because, whether you're dealing with racial hatred, police brutality, the Taliban, COVID-19, or a myriad of other tragedies, clearly your life and the lives of your fellow Americans does depend on your voting. Not doing so or doing so badly clearly has catastrophic effects on all us.
The only inspiration you need right now is making sure your fellow Americans are safe and well. The revolution, or--choose your own adventure!--whatever it is you want to happen, can likely wait a little longer.
This is how I envision the TV show Roseanne will conclude now that its star and namesake has been fired for ugly, racist tweets that show an embarrassingly poor sense of timing and a shockingly limp sense of humor for someone who earns a living as a comedian.
It's a fine, unassuming spring day in Lanford, Illinois. The camera focuses on a small, comfortable, working-class home--the kind we all identify as emblematic of the Real America.TM The camera deftly and calmly pans, slowly and surely honing in on the living room window, and then passes through to the living room itself.
(Author's note: I haven't watched the reboot--honestly, I didn't like the original version. Too much yelling. Too much snark. Too much sniping. But I could've sworn Roseanne's family won the lottery at some point. You would think they would have upgraded their digs as a result. And no worries about educating me otherwise--once this post is complete, I will be fresh out of flying figs to give about this show and its star.)
In the living room, we find all the Conners sitting quietly in their appointed places. Each one is bound and gagged, as they are being held hostage at home by "those animals," aka notorious gang
MS-33-1/3. The gang members brandish their legally obtained, generously available assault weapons. The gangbanger-in-chief comically twirls a mustache that would have been at home on the face of a Mexican revolutionary as envisioned by racist filmmaker D. W. Griffith.
The innocent members of the proletariat quake in their humble shoes, sweat through their honest George by WalMart apparel (no doubt stained with the sweat of a hard day's labor at a George Soros-sponsored Reeducation Center), and scream for their lives through the heavy-duty tape across their mouths. The Conners are panic-stricken, knowing that to die at the hands of a heavily hyped Mexican/Central American gang may be their fate, the worst fate of all (say, compared to being shot in the workplace by a sexually frustrated white guy with an AR-15, which is much more humane), and a fate that is only minutos away. ¡Ay, papi!
Roseanne, however, has managed to escape.
But instead of
calling the police--too Deep State for her!--she heads toward the
nearest Donald Trump rally--and as good (?) luck would have it, there's one happening next door, because His Lordshit is in the 'hood, stirring the pot, paying his disrespects to the survivors of a recent school shooting ("there were good people on both sides of that rocket launcher, both sides . . . "), and then will immediately be heading out for a $25,000 dry chicken dinner fundraiser with upper-class (or thereabouts) white gangbangers in downtown Chicago.
But I digress . . . .
Roseanne tries to corral the crowd into forming a
well-regulated militia to save her family.
As bad (?) luck would
have it, however, at that very moment, the crowd is watching a video about the
disrespect Hollywood elites express toward Real America--a highlight
being a clip of Roseanne in real life (very meta) screeching the
National Anthem at a baseball game in San Diego back in the early 1990s.
The angry crowd turns on her. As they get closer and closer to attacking her, we
suddenly see another (?) Roseanne waking up from an Ambien-induced haze,
several spent smart (the irony!) phones strewn about her, each open to her Twitter account. Half the phones show the account as closed; the other half, open for business.
She struggles to emerge from her mental fog and rise from the couch. Once more
or less upright, she begins railing at a crowd of diverse Americans,
all silent while they watch her meltdown, screaming lines from notable
"race" pictures of the 20th century:
"As God is my witness, as God is my witness they're not going to lick me.
I'm going to live through this and when it's all over, I'll never be
hungry again. No, nor any of my folk. If I have to lie, steal, cheat or
kill. As God is my witness, I'll never be hungry again." (Gone With the Wind)
"Hoke, you're my best friend!" (Driving Miss Daisy)
"Mom! Dad! There's something I have to tell you! I'm Black!" (Soul Man)
"Take your stinking paws off me, you damned dirty ape!" (Charlton Heston in Planet of the Apes)+
"The white men were roused by a mere instinct of self-preservation,
until at last there had sprung into existence a Great Ku Klux Klan!"
(Birth of a Nation--this is delivered in pantomime as it's a silent
film)
"I'm a Negro. I can't forget it, and I can't deny it. I can't pretend to
be anything else, and I don't want to be anything else. Don't you see,
Tom?" (Pinky by John Ford)
Suddenly the scene changes again--it's not a crowd of
silent diverse Americans staring at her during her tirade. It's a pack
of wild chihuahuas! Thousands and thousands of pissed-off wild chihuahuas!
They proceed to growl and foam at the mouth. They attack and begin to
tear at Roseanne's limbs. The scene fades before things get too gruesome (it's
TV after all). Lee Greenwood's "God Bless the USA"++ swells on the
soundtrack--intermixed with Roseanne's nasally shrieks and the
high-pitched squeal of agitated chihuahuas--as the scene fades to black
(again, irony!). "I'm proud to be an American . . . ."
Finally,
before things get too dark (irony once again!), the Looney Toons/Merry
Melodies theme music begins. A cartoon Roseanne pops out of the screen.
"Th-th-th-th-th-th-th-that's all folks!"
And scene!
At least that's how I hope this plays out. I might actually tune in for this one.
* * *
+Author's note: Is this racist, ironic, or both? Despite being based on a French science fiction novel from the early 1960s, I saw this movie listed in an article on the web as being one of the most racist of all time. Given the year of release (1968) and the things going on in the US in the era (where do I begin?), I had thought of it as racist for some time. To me, it's interesting to view it as another Middle America exploitation film of the 1960s, not unlike Wild in the Streets (a camp classic!). Nonetheless, I confess, I don't know whether this is me being ironic and camp or me being racist. I sincerely apologize if I pulled a Roseanne here. That was definitely not my intention.
++Author's note: And is this classist against white working-class Americans? Again, I can no longer tell. I mean it is poking fun at white America's sentimental approach to God and country, and my heritage is as a white working-class American, so, yeah, I'm teasing, but I mean it, so it probably is offensive in that regard. Again, I apologize--to you and to myself.
Magnolia a Verbania by Josep Renalias Lohen 11 (CC BY-SA 3.0; courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
This post will be fairly quick and short (within reason; it is me after all). I am in the process of moving to a new city--to a new country in fact--and have been working toward tomorrow (aka, moving day) since I last posted in May.
I'll try to have more to say for myself on the flipside of the month--at least once I've unpacked my computer and established an internet connection. It's a sign of modern times that packing and moving excepted, my current priorities in life are a bank account, a Hulu subscription, and good internet. Never mind the new job and the commute--I'm already busy with entertaining myself and spending money I haven't earned yet!
But one thing that has occupied my mind over the last week is the mass assassination of nine African-American worshippers at a Charleston, South Carolina, church on Wednesday, June 17, 2015. Not a lot has penetrated my consciousness of late, mostly due to the whiff of cardboard I seem to ingest every day, but this most definitely has. I think it brings up my somewhat tortured relationship with my country and my home region, plus a sense of guilt for leaving family and friends behind. I often worry who will be the next victim of "a bad guy with a gun" and whether it will be someone I know, family or friend.
It's not that I walk around worried about this all the time, mind you. It's not that I need to, actually. Despite the "cowboy" reputation of the U.S., I really don't see guns everywhere--although sometimes at night, I do hear them from the broken-down neighborhood on the other side of the railroad tracks, just a block away.
I don't generally feel unsafe in the U.S. But perhaps I should. I mean, there is occasional gunfire only a block or two away from my head and my bed. There is "active shooter" training at work. There is my sister's state wanting to allow for guns on the university campus where she works. There is me scoping out escape routes in restaurants should something bad happen. There are, what? 11,000+ gun deaths each year in the U.S., 55,000+ nonfatal gun injuries, and 138,000+ gun-aggravated assaults (at least according to statistics from FactCheck.org)? And yet two of these numbers represent a decrease over previous years?
Let that set in for a moment.
Now doesn't that still seem like an awfully large number? And what about the fact that gun ownership and gun manufacturing continue to increase?
You can keep arguing that "more guns make us safer," but with those kind of numbers, pardon me if I don't feel like cuddling up to and fellating my firearm at night.
(For the record, I don't own a gun, nor does anyone in my family. My Dad used to have a rifle for occasional hunting and to scare away unwanted residents from his backyard birdhouses, but that's about as firearms-friendly as it got at Chez Montag.)
* * *
Kudzu on trees in Atlanta, Georgia by Scott Ehardt (public domain); courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
Which leads me to the point of this post: We are once again tilting at the wrong windmill.
And the windmill we're currently tilting at is removing the Confederate flag from our sight. We've once again taken the wrong message from the
racially motivated mass murder of 9 African-American worshippers in
Charleston last week.
And that message should be this: A gun killed them all, not a flag.
Please don't misunderstand me: I've got no problem with removing the Confederate flag from public
buildings; I've got little to no problem relegating that symbol to
museums and reenactments. At one point in my life, I might have tried to
participate in a nuanced discussion of that flag's multiple meanings,
but, honestly, who needs to hear all that? Plus I think knowing what I
know now--that the flag made its
reappearance during the early 1960s Civil Rights standoffs, as a way for the South to
say "FU" to the rest of the country--I would just be horribly, horribly
wrong.
If you're looking
for a symbol of Southern uniqueness and pride, I dunno, try the magnolia
or the loblolly pine, the collard, or, heck, even kudzu. That stuff can
withstand anything.
While protesting the Confederate flag and the racism it symbolizes is all well, good, and necessary, I fear we're just
letting the real culprits off the hook once again. I'm willing to bet
that nearly every right-leaning politician piling on the issue right now
knows this and is using it as a way to not deal with legislating
meaningful firearms restrictions. And, hey, if they happen to make the Republican Party look sensitive
to racial issues, bonus points.
Maybe it's a victory that Wal-Mart and Amazon are willing
to stop selling the flag (at least until things cool down) and that
manufacturers are willing to stop making the flag (at least until things cool down). But it all seems very hollow. And speaking of hollow, no one's volunteering to stop making hollow-point bullets.
While all this is going on and we're rending our garments in public, gun
manufacturers are doing their best Alfred E. Newman impersonation:
"What, me worry?"
Yes, I think racism is still a huge problem in this country--the murder of nine African Americans during Bible study is the recent, most heinous example, but there are many others. Cops killing black motorists and citizens who resist arrest or are merely under suspicion for . . . something (poverty? blackness? effrontery to white privilege?); high black unemployment and endemic economic disadvantage; the incredibly negative reaction by some to Barack Obama--a strong, impressive, educated, self-made man--being elected as President of the United States (twice no less). These are just a few that come to mind that I right this.
So, yes, it's well past time to take down the Confederate flag and relegate to the history bin (or the trash bin, take your pick). It's well past time to recommit to fighting against he racism it represents.
Nonetheless, this just seems like the same ol', same ol'. Let's call for reparations for slavery when instead we should be clamoring for continuing community and individual investment in disenfranchised minority populations (and/or the poor in general). Maybe that's the point--aim for the symbolic, get the real. I question its effectiveness, but then again, no one ever thought gays would be allowed to serve in the military or get married.
I feel like we were trying to do this in the 1960s and 1970s--significant investment in the disenfranchised, leveling the playing field, providing opportunity. But by the 1980s, we stopped doing it. Maybe because it was too hard to do, or we just royally messed it up (tearing down neighborhoods to put everyone in projects? really?).
But maybe we just let ourselves get distracted. After all, there are so many other windmills out there at which we can tilt.
