Tag: Events of the Day

“Do you remember America?” the curious person will ask one night, in a darkened tavern as they nurse their second or third drink. “The country tried to codify freedom and democracy? I mean, sure, at first it was only for a few of their citizens, but it was a start, right? They got better at it. And sure, getting better took a whole lot of spilled blood over a couple hundred years, and even when they said ‘Sure, fine, you’re free now,’ they came up with ways to keep you from really being free…but really, do you remember America? That country that tamed an entire wilderness! I mean, sure, they seized that wilderness from people already living there, but still. Do you remember America? The country that made polio a memory? I mean, sure, less than a hundred years later they tried to ignore a new disease, but that was pretty neat, right? And they went to the Moon! I mean, sure, that was so they could feel better about getting there first against a country that doesn’t exist anymore, and they never went again or did much about that, but still. Do you remember America?”

“I remember,” a voice will say, probably from the back of the tavern. A raspy voice, an old voice, unable to speak loudly much at all anymore. A hat drawn down over a haunted face, scarred and weathered by time. “I remember America.” And they will lift their whiskey to their mouth.

“What happened to it?” the curious person will ask.

And the person at the end of the bar will swallow their whiskey and look off into the distance, what little distance there is, and eventually they will shrug. “We did,” they’ll say. “We happened to America.”

And the person will drain their whiskey and leave out the back door. Those remaining who heard this exchange will puzzle over it for a bit, but eventually they’ll return their attention to whatever else is going on–a sporting event on the television, perhaps, or some story about what happened at work that day. You don’t often talk about fallen nations and collapsed empires at the tavern after work, you see.

But maybe the curious person won’t turn all their attention back to the dull conversation going on around them. Maybe some part of their imagination will linger there on the memory of a nation, born in fire and too much blood, a nation that aspired but fell short, a nation that rose higher and fell lower than it should have.

And they’ll wonder. Maybe.

 

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I wrote this in February 2022, but I’m re-upping it now as I see a news item this morning about how parents in Wisconsin challenged a book about the interment of Japanese-American citizens during World War II, on the basis that “the government’s perspective wasn’t shared” or some such thing. Of course that’s a bullshit excuse; these people simply think that nothing negative in our history should be taught, ever.

No subject is more eternally disappointing to see discussed in America than race, because a great many of us simply don’t have any inclination to engage in anything remotely resembling an honest discussion of race at all.

This is not the least bit new. All that’s changed, in recent months, is the wording. White people have been finding ways to dodge discussions of racism probably since the beginning of time, but the most prominent version in my personal experience has been simple dismissal of the subject as soon as it is brought up: some version of “There they go again, playing the Race Card,” usually accompanied by a rolling of the eyes.

What is signaled by saying “Playing the Race Card” is itself a rhetorical strategy that has several goals: it’s a granting of permission to oneself to ignore anything the other person is saying, as well as a signal to that person that their words are falling on ears that have been rendered deaf before the fact. It’s a neutering of conversation, and saying it is a metaphorical hanging of the “CLOSED” sign on the mind.

The racism-denialist side has become a bit more sophisticated of late, which you can see in the way they have cynically elevated something called “Critical Race Theory” to the status of Bogeyman Supreme in this country. For a good summation of this, I strongly recommend the summation John Oliver did on this season’s opening episode of Last Week Tonight:

Of special interest is the fact that not one of the people shrieking most loudly about “Critical Race Theory” can tell you the first factual thing about “Critical Race Theory”, and that the American right-wing has become so divorced from any factual basis for its constant drum-beating about nonexistent grievances that now their entire debate can be shaped by dishonest actors like Christopher Rufo, who will publicly and openly admit the dishonest nature of their rhetorical framing as they watch their preferred framing of the debate happen anyway. These people are deeply sophisticated in their knowledge of how American media will follow a bouncing ball to the end of the Earth, so long as the ball is set bouncing by the right wing.

I personally do not know much at all about Critical Race Theory, but I am at least aware that my willingness to admit this puts me in an unfortunate minority among white people. Weird irony, that.

What catches me so much about the rhetoric around the thing that right-wingers have crafted in their increasingly fever-minded, fact-deprived heads about “Critical Race Theory” is one objection I hear over and over and over again. You’ll hear it in the Oliver segment above, and I also saw it this past week in comments on a post to my local Nextdoor forum.

(Yes, I’m on Nextdoor, mainly because it’s useful for stuff like “Hey, anybody know what all those sirens were last night” and “Anybody know a good roofer?” But the site is very obnoxious in a lot of other ways, and I’ve imposed a personal rule of never posting at all on it. One good example is the thread from a few weeks ago–and I am not making this up–of a person breathlessly posting about the suspicious-looking ‘colored’ person in the pickup truck who was obviously casing local houses…until someone else on that same street said, “Yeah, that’s Bob. He’s a meter-reader for the power company.” If I had commented on that, I probably would have been banned.)

(UPDATE: Since I wrote this, I closed out my NextDoor account. It just got to be too much idiotic racism.)

A person posted about “Critical Race Theory” being taught! in the local elementary schools!!! Now, this is BS, obviously, and to their credit, a few folks did point out that this is total BS. But equally obviously, “Critical Race Theory” is just a catch-phrase for these people that has come to refer to any mention of race at all, in any context. (Which is what Rufo et al. intended the entire time–again, see Mr. Oliver.) And that framing leads to this specific talking point:

“I do not want my children being taught to feel bad about their country!”

Or:

“I do not want my child being made to feel BAD about their history!”

Or:

“I don’t want my kid being made to feel like they have to answer for things they didn’t do!”

And you know what? Maybe that’s a bit tempting. I never owned any slaves! Why do I have to feel bad about it? Why do I have to atone for that? It was 150 years ago! Leave me alone! Lemme be! Get over it!

When you really start digging into this, you realize quickly that these people don’t want history taught as a factual discipline from which we can learn valuable lessons for the future and in which we come to see the flaws as well as the strengths in the generations that preceded us. No, these people want a feel-good story, a hegemonic tale whose purpose is to shape young minds so they get obediently tearful in the presence of a flag (and, maybe just maybe, the creepy politician literally hugging it). They want the Hero’s Epic version of history, with an honesty-obsessed George Washington admitting chopping down the tree years before he stood proud and tall in that boat as he crossed the Delaware. They want a tale of lantern-jawed heroes, always driven forward by God and goodness, with their women at their backs (always, always that) as they hew their destinies from the land itself.

These people want all the feel-good stuff from history, and that’s it. They want heroic inspiration from the brilliance of Thomas Jefferson’s diplomacy and writings, and none of the frankly horrific caution of Thomas Jefferson’s forced relations with his own slaves. It’s this feel-good cherrypicking approach to history that gives me particular pause, because it’s borne of the same lack of curiosity and honesty that leads these same people to embrace nonsense across the board, including rejecting vaccines in favor of some random medication pushed by some random doctor Joe Rogan had on the podcast this week.

“I don’t want my kid to feel bad about their history!”

Look, here’s the thing, for all those people who complain that they don’t want their children being made to feel bad about their history, or to feel like they are being blamed for awful things their ancestors did:

If you’re not going to let the evils in our past make you feel bad, then you don’t get to turn about and let the triumphs in that same past make you feel good.

If you don’t want to feel bad about slavery, or Jim Crow, or red-lining, or the KKK, or resistance to Civil Rights, then you also don’t get to feel good about defeating fascism in World War II, or triumphing over the East in the Cold War, or landing on the Moon. History is not a buffet where you can choose what things you like and which you don’t.

And this isn’t about “feeling bad” in the proper context to “feel good” about the good stuff, either. History isn’t about feeling bad or feeling good. History is about learning what we’ve done, the good and the bad, so we can make better decisions later.

But we don’t want that…or too few of us want that. We don’t want to talk or even hear about race. If we do, we want to pretend that ending officially-sanctioned slavery and quoting a single sentence from a single speech by Martin Luther King is all the discussion race ever needed. I don’t know how we get White America to even come to the table to have the discussion much less honestly engage it in the first place, but I do know that if something in history makes you feel bad, you shouldn’t avoid that topic but interrogate it even harder, because if something your ancestors did a few dozen or a few hundred years ago makes you feel bad, maybe it’s relevant to something going on now.

Maybe.

(Comments are closed on this post.)

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“When the fall is all there is, it matters.” (from THE LION IN WINTER)

I am disgusted by the Supreme Court’s ruling. I, like everyone else, knew it was coming, but the awful thing is no less awful for all the foreknowledge in the world.

I support reproductive rights for all persons, period. I reject the notion utterly that protecting a fetus is the most important thing in the world. (In fact, I’m not terribly convinced that protecting a fetus is all that important at all.)

I don’t know where we go from here, but I know it’s to a deeply ugly version of America that I have no desire to see or live in. We all have to act if we don’t want America’s bible-waving minority to force this country back to a time when abortion, birth control, and homosexuality are all illegal. And make no mistake: they’re not stopping at Roe. They’ve got the taste for blood, they think victory is in hand, and they’re coming.

Right now, the fall is all there is. But there’s a lot of future left. So let’s get up.

(I will reject any comments that try to argue in favor of what this Court has done. Not interested.)

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UPDATED below.

I saw these two tweets the other day, in reaction to Elon Musk’s widely publicized dictum that his employees have to put in their 40 hours a week at the office, no ifs ands or buts, no refunds returns or exchanges, that’s just the way it is, because something something gazpacho:

https://twitter.com/LouisatheLast/status/1532791845322883073

https://twitter.com/LouisatheLast/status/1532792510015320067

I like it when someone comes along and succinctly says something that I’ve been struggling to crystalize in my own mind. Elon Musk is largely feted because he’s apparently a vanguard of our wonderful future…or, at least, that’s the pleasant veneer that has been applied to him. But when you really get down to it, that’s not at all what he is. He’s just a rich capitalist with a shiny thing to sell. That’s it. That’s all he is, all he ever was. He stands on the shoulders of giants and with his piles of money convinces millions that he got there by virtue of some special genius unique to him.

But then he says stuff about his businesses and how he wants his employees to behave and be forced to work, and you get a glimpse under the hood. And you realize there’s nothing new there at all: he’s nothing more than a railroad tycoon, maintaining absolute control over his giant well-moneyed empire.

Elon Musk is no futurist. He has said nothing about improving the human condition in any way other than the same old idea that rich people should just be allowed to keep doing rich people things, that humanity is best served by letting rich people prosper and that their underlings should be happy to work, work, work for the greater glory of The Company and the CEO.

Elon Musk’s future is pretty much the same as the world we’re in now, only with different insignias in chrome on the backs of the cars. It’s a world where the pursuit of wealth is the paramount human concern, where the entire economy is propped up on the illusion of work as the paramount function of the individual, where life must be earned through work. There is nothing new under the sun in Elon Musk’s worldview. Nothing at all.

We need better futurists.

UPDATE: I wrote this post yesterday and scheduled it for this morning. Then, I see this:

https://twitter.com/Stonekettle/status/1533419550158602240

The way Elon Musk wildly vacillates between “Rich Capitalist Overlord Who Demands Loyalty And Labor From His Underlings” and “Aging Stoner Using Star Trek Action Figures To Play-act His Future Visio” really ought to give more of us pause….

 

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Fifteen years ago I wrote the following on Memorial Day, and I wanted to revisit it. It’s about the Vietnam Veteran whose name I remember, despite the fact that I had no relation to him and clearly never knew him, because he was killed four years before I was born.

Memorial Day, for all its solemnity, has for me always been something of a distant holiday, because no one close to me has ever fallen in war, and in fact I have to look pretty far for relatives who have even served in wartime. Both of my grandfathers fought in World War I, but both had been dead for years when I was born. I know that an uncle of mine served during World War II, but I also know that he saw no action (not to belittle his service, but Memorial Day is generally set aside to remember those who paid the “last full price of devotion”). My father-in-law served in Viet Nam, but my own father did not (he had college deferments for the first half of the war, and was above draft age during the second). So there is little in my family history to personalize Memorial Day; for me, it really is a day to remember “all the men and women who have died in service to the United States”.

One personal remembrance, though, does creep up for me each Memorial Day. It has nothing at all to do with my family; in fact, I have no connection with the young man in question.

When I was in grade school, during the fall and spring, when the weather was nice, we would have gym class outdoors, at the athletic field. On good days we’d play softball or flag football or soccer; on not-so-good days we’d run around the quarter-mile track. But the walk to the athletic field involved crossing the street in front of the school and walking a tenth of a mile or so down the street, past the town cemetery. I remember that at the corner of the cemetery we passed, behind the wrought-iron fence, the grave of a man named Larry Havers was visible. His stone was decorated with a photograph of him, in military uniform. I don’t recall what branch in which he served, nor do I recall his date-of-birth as given on the stone, but I do recall the year of his death: 1967. I even think the stone specified the specific battle in which he was killed in action, but I’m not sure about that, either.

That’s what I remember each Memorial Day: the grave of a man I never knew, who died four years before I was born in a place across the world to which I doubt I’ll ever go. And in the absence of anyone from my own family, Mr. Havers’s name will probably be the one I look for if I ever visit that memorial in Washington. I hope his family wouldn’t mind.

I looked online and found these images, first of Mr. Havers’s obituary and then of Mr. Havers himself. The things you remember. I wonder what kind of man he was. He has been gone for more than half a century. His name is not forgotten.

 

Mr. Havers’s service information can be found on the Virtual Vietnam Wall here. He was born 14 October 1946 and died 29 October 1967, in Thua Thien.

Next, my annual repost for Memorial Day. 

 

Know, all who see these lines,
That this man, by his appetite for honor,
By his steadfastness,
By his love for his country,
By his courage,
Was one of the miracles of the God.— Guy Gavriel Kay

“The Green Field of France”, by Eric BogleWell, how do you do, young Willie McBride,
Do you mind if I sit down here by your graveside?
And rest for awhile ‘neath the warm summer sun,
I’ve been walking all day, and I’m nearly done.
I see by your gravestone you were only 19
When you joined the great fallen in 1916,
I hope you died quick and I hope you died clean
Or, Willie McBride, was it slow and obscene?

Did they Beat the drum slowly, did they play the fife lowly?
Did they sound the death-march as they lowered you down?
Did the band play The Last Post in chorus?
Did the pipes play the Flowers of the Forest?

Did you leave a wife or a sweetheart behind
In some faithful heart is your memory enshrined?
And, though you died back in 1916,
To that faithful heart are you forever 19?
Or are you a stranger without even a name,
Enshrined then, forever, behind a glass pane,
In an old photograph, torn and tattered and stained,
And faded to yellow in a brown leather frame?

Did they Beat the drum slowly, did they play the fife lowly?
Did they sound the death-march as they lowered you down?
Did the band play The Last Post in chorus?
Did the pipes play the Flowers of the Forest?

The sun’s shining down on these green fields of France;
The warm wind blows gently, and the red poppies dance.
The trenches have vanished long under the plow;
No gas and no barbed wire, no guns firing now.
But here in this graveyard that’s still No Man’s Land
The countless white crosses in stand mute in the sand
To man’s blind indifference to his fellow man,
And a whole generation who were butchered and damned.

Did they Beat the drum slowly, did they play the fife lowly?
Did they sound the death-march as they lowered you down?
Did the band play The Last Post in chorus?
Did the pipes play the Flowers of the Forest?

And I can’t help but wonder, no Willie McBride,
Do all those who lie here know why they died?
Did they really believe when they answered the call,
Did they really believe that this war would end wars?
Well the sorrow, the suffering, the glory, the pain
The killing and dying, was all done in vain,
For young Willie McBride, it all happened again,
And again, and again, and again, and again.

Did they Beat the drum slowly, did they play the fife lowly?
Did they sound the death-march as they lowered you down?
Did the band play The Last Post in chorus?
Did the pipes play the Flowers of the Forest?

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The Wife and I are traveling this weekend, spending a few days in the Finger Lakes. We got back to our rented cottage yesterday, when I found a Direct Message from a Facebook friend. It was something along the line of “I hope it didn’t happen in YOUR workplace, and I hope you’re OK.”

I had no idea what he was talking about.

I learned quickly.

No, that was not my workplace. I do work in a Buffalo area grocery store, but not that chain and not in that area. It’s appalling nonetheless, on so many levels. I’ve often thought about what it would be like when it happened where I work. Not if, but when. I know every way out of my building, every place I can hole up if I can’t get out, every object I might use if defense becomes necessary.

I shouldn’t have to think like this.

But that’s not even the worst of it, is it?

It’s an entire community of human beings, specifically targeted again. Reminded that they will always be targeted, again. Reminded of this country’s long ghastly history of this stuff, again. Confronted by our nation’s abject refusal to admit its past and atone, again.

That’s all we do in this country: it’s just one big litany of again. Again. Again.

No horror, no injustice, no violent outcome is ever enough for us to collectively say, “No more.” We will be back about our business by, oh, I don’t know. Dinner time today, I guess.

I don’t have anything insightful to say about this. I have no suggestions for a way forward, because even if I did, we very clearly don’t want a way forward. We’re not interested. At this point, the warp and weft of America isn’t fate, nor is it judgment handed down from on high. It’s a choice.

We are the country we have chosen to be, and I see no reason to believe we are going to choose to be anything other than this.

And that is how America will fade into history.

I often wonder these days about Roman citizens around the year, oh, 350CE. Or 400. Maybe even a bit later.

The commonly accepted date for the fall of the Roman Empire is 476CE, but it’s not as if there was some grand proclamation in Latin officially ending the Empire. It just withered, and that’s when historians generally agree that beyond that point, with the deposing of that last Emperor, that nothing existed that could be meaningfully called “the Roman Empire”.

But I wonder about the citizens who lived in Rome not long before that. Did a Roman potter in 422CE sense that it was ending? A fisherman in what is now Napoli? A seamstress in modern-day Tuscany? Did they have some feeling that the Empire in which they lived was soon to be history?

And if they did, did it feel something like what it feels to be an American now?

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Here are a couple of brief quotes from two different teevee shows, both of which (the quotes, that is) have been on my mind this week:

“Why are we still talking about this?” (Captain Mal Reynolds, FIREFLY)

“You’ll have doled out five thousand dollars worth of punishment for a fifty-buck crime.” (Admiral Fitzwallace, THE WEST WING)

No, I’m not going to illuminate just why those two quotes have been on my mind. But in both cases there’s not just a single reason.

 

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Seen on Twitter yesterday:

In recent weeks in New York, the masks have been coming off. The Governor dropped her mask mandate several weeks ago (minus a couple of exceptions), and most counties have followed suit. My employer, The Store, kept its own masking policy for employees in place…until yesterday, when masks were made “optional” for employees who are fully vaccinated and boosted.

I’m still exercising my option to wear the mask, and I plan to keep doing so until the policy is revised to forbid them.

Why? Well, I set out my reasons for simply not minding masks back in September, and my opinion has not changed. I do not hate wearing the thing. Most times I forget it’s even on after a few minutes, and at this point I feel weird without it. But it’s not just that: I like being at an even lower risk of either contracting or giving someone else COVID. And moreover, I like the fact that I have not had a cold in more than two years.

I’m not a sickly person in general, but in “normal” years I could usually count on getting “the bug that’s going around” a couple times a year. From the first scratchy throat to the final cough clearing up would usually take around a week to ten days, and while it wasn’t debilitating, it wasn’t fun, either. And with masking and maintaining a healthy distance from most folks, I haven’t had a single cold since sometime in 2019. I like that.

And you know what else I like? I still like not being told to smile. I live in a world that overvalues the smile, with the expectation that everybody must have a giant permagrin at all times. The removal of masks has reminded me of this, as one of the biggest selling points is “Now I can see everybody smiling!” With a mask on, I smile as much as I ever did…but with the mask, my nonsmiling moments aren’t nearly as frequently assumed to be angry moments.

Honestly, I’ve reached a point where noses and mouths look odd to me. I’m fine looking people in the eye, not having my mood judged, and not having spent money on NyQuil or Mucinex since Josh Allen was a rookie. So yeah, I’ll be keeping my mask on a while longer, if you don’t mind.

Actually, I’ll do it if you do mind…and really, that might be another incentive to keep wearing it. I mean, if you saw Ron DeSantis yelling at some kids to take their masks off the other day…well, screw that guy and anyone who thinks like that.

 

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