Random thoughts inspired by the Capitol riot, pt. 2

The Homecoming, Marianne von Werefkin (1860-1938)

First of all, if you are not up for political discussion, I totally understand. It won't hurt my feelings a bit if you just go check out these fabulous avian guitarists and skip the unpleasantness below. (H/T to my old friend ScentScelf for the video.) 

***

I thought about never coming back* to comment further on the insurrection. We’re all sick to death of thinking about it, aren't we? When someone like Anne Applebaum suggests that maybe the best course of action would be to change the subject, that's an option worth considering. (I don't share Applebaum's rightwing political bent, but her book Twilight of Democracy is an interesting and insightful — if depressing — read.)

Looking through some old posts on this blog, though, especially from 2008 and 2012, I was struck by the strong continuity between then and now. I was wrong about a lot of things back then. (Me on the Tea Party in 2009: "I think our side should calm down a little and stop worrying that they're going to stage a coup or something.”) But the elements that created January 6 were all in place years ago. And they were not hidden, though most of us couldn't see them with any clarity. This makes me think it’s worth setting down my thoughts now, however incoherent they may be, if only for the sake of revisiting them somewhere down the road, when who knows where we'll have wound up.

***

In the weeks since the Capitol riot, it's become clear that there were several distinct factions involved: some who showed up with a plan, some who seemed to be there mostly to party, and a large segment of folks who, like Comet Ping Pong dude before them, apparently believed something heinous was going on and they better put a stop to it. And have fun breaking windows and knocking heads in the process, of course. 

It's that third group that interests me because I can most clearly see my own folks in them. Not that I share their delusions or their ideology, but they're the ones who seem the most like the people I grew up around, the people I see around me today. All those aging white men with beards, wearing Walmart jeans and jackets from the army surplus store, with the Confederate flag, Old Glory, and MAGA/Trump gear easily blending as cultural identifiers. They are so familiar. That guy beating the cop with the flagpole — he looks exactly like one of the characters who used to hang out in my dad's favorite tavern. I feel like I know him. I feel like, had my life taken just a slightly different turn early on, I might have wound up married to him.

This feeling of embarrassed kinship with the rioters is something that anywhere-left-of-center white people, especially the ones with rural roots, do not seem to be talking about very much. (I'd like to digress briefly here to say that I will never get used to the way mainstream liberal Democrats are now routinely labeled "the left" by almost everyone, including themselves. Joe Biden, tool of the left. Good lord.) I know for sure I'm not the only one who feels the kinship, thanks to the popularity of the wild rant Corey Forrester tweeted on January 7. Granted, Forrester is a comedian and this kind of thing is his business, but he wouldn't have said it if he wasn't pretty sure there'd be an audience for it, and a lot of that audience is people like me, who watched the riot with a sense of cringing shame, as well as outrage: Oh my god — it's us. (For more from Forrester on the shame of our kind, watch this.) 

I can't decide whether my inability — or unwillingness — to see myself as culturally Other to the insurrectionists is a good thing or a bad thing. It reminds me a lot of the way I felt about my paternal grandmother, who was a second mother to me and my brothers, a good and loving person in many ways, but who was also a confirmed segregationist. However outwardly friendly and kind she was willing to be toward Black people (and she was, in my memory, unfailingly so), she could not/would not let go of the deeply racist, white supremacist view of the world she was raised with. 

I could never disown my grandmother. It would be dishonest. She helped make me who I am, without a doubt. I hate many of the things she believed, but I know there's not a bright line between the parts of our shared culture I love and the parts I hate. And I don't see any reason to believe that I'm a better human than she was. That's the sticky, troubling truth I have lived with forever, and the insanity at the Capitol is a powerful reminder. I honestly don't know what to do with it.

For another lens on this same territory, read Abby Lee Hood's recent piece in the NYT. And for a thought-provoking take on the enduring role of shame in white Southern culture and how it operates among the Trumpian evangelicals, read David French's thoughts at The Dispatch. (French sees the political landscape very differently than I do, and some of the positions he takes — like his signing of the Nashville Statement — are, in my view, deeply destructive, to put it mildly. But he understands the rising Christian nationalism as well as anyone out there, and he unfailingly writes from a thoughtful place, trying to grapple with the larger moral implications of the moment.)

***

And speaking of nationalism, this weekend I watched Daniel Lombroso's White Noise, a documentary presented by The Atlantic, that follows Lauren Southern, Richard Spencer, and Mike Cernovich as they do their alt-right, white nationalist thing in the period leading up to and after Charlottesville. It's a compelling piece of filmmaking, well worth watching, but I'm still not sure what I think about it. 

The film presents the three main subjects as narcissistic, damaged people, equal parts insufferable and pitiable — a take that is definitely not surprising to anyone who's ever known one of this tribe. But I came away feeling like the film did not go deep enough, that it spent too much time deconstructing the personalities, and none at all deconstructing the ideology. The evil of white nationalism is simply taken as a given, and at no point does anybody actually challenge the substance of what Southern, Spencer, and Cernovich are peddling. They are never asked to defend what they're doing in any meaningful way. I suspect that was a strategic choice on the part of the filmmakers, a way of earning trust by avoiding conflict. And it paid off in terms of letting us see the humans behind the rhetoric, but it fell short in furthering our understanding of the movement they speak to. You can see the trailer at the link above and on Youtube. You can read a profile Lombroso wrote about Southern here.  

*Part 1 of this post is here. 

"The sky is a black sudden cloud ..."

 

The Shame

What will

the shame be,

what

cost to pay.

We are walking

in a wood,

wood of stones,

boulders for trees.

The sky

is a black

sudden cloud,

a sun.

Speak

to me, say

what things

were forgotten.

~Robert Creeley

Poetry, February 1966

*I read a wonderful essay today in which shame plays a role, "Parricide Blues" by Aaron Gwyn. You can read it here.

**The painting is "Eternidade" by Ismael Nery, circa 1931. (There's more Nery on the blog here.)

"One grief there is ..."

The One Grief

One grief there is, the helpmeet of my heart,

That shall not from me till my days be sped,

That walks beside me in sunshine and in shade,

And hath in all my fortunes equal part.

At first I feared it, and would often start

Aghast to find it bending o'er my bed,

Till usage slowly dulled the edge of dread,

And one cold night I cried: How warm thou art!

Since then we two have travelled hand in hand,

And, lo, my grief has been interpreter

For me in many a fierce and alien land

Whose speech young Joy had failed to understand,

Plucking me tribute of red gold and myrrh

From desolate whirlings of the desert sand.

~by Edith Wharton, born January 24, 1862

From Artemis to Actaeon and Other Verses

* "Reflection" by Odilon Redon, circa 1900

Postscript: After I hit "publish" on this post I got to wondering whether I'd ever noted Wharton's birthday in the past. I haven't, but boy, there's quite a bit of Wharton-related musing on this blog. If you're interested, you can find a roundup here. 

Random thoughts inspired by the Capitol riot, pt.1

According to the listing at Wikimedia Commons, the photo above was made the night before Obama's swearing in on January 20, 2009. Since the riot, one thing I can't stop thinking about is the outpouring of joy 12 years ago — a degree of celebration I had never seen in my lifetime and frankly don't expect to see again. I annoyed a lot of people in my circle back then by not being as happy as they were about Obama's win. I was happy about it, make no mistake — just not ready to jump up and down with joy and let go of my rage at all we'd seen in the decade prior. 

And yes, I'm a little sorry now that I didn't let myself partake of that joy more fully. But I was afraid of our complacency, afraid that we were congratulating ourselves too much and would give Obama a pass on too many things. We did give him a pass on things we shouldn't have, not so much out of smugness as from a sense of being embattled once the rightwing backlash took hold. Now here we are, feeling far more embattled than we could have imagined in 2010 or 2012, and I can't help noticing that one of the effects of our anxiety is intolerance for any criticism of the incoming administration. I have found myself increasingly turning away from dissenting voices on our side, few as they are — not because I disagree with them, usually, but because now is not the time. But when will be the the time? 

***

"Therefore, however much you exceed in wealth, so much so do you fall short in love." ~ Basil of Caesarea*

I’ve been thinking a lot about the Capitol attackers who shouted, “Whose house? Our house!" They didn’t invent that chant or just borrow it from a football team. It was used not so long ago by people with a very different political agenda.** 

It echoes the civics lessons we all got as kids — “the people’s house," etc. But that notion of a common stake in democratic government is not what the rioters meant. They weren't saying, "This is our government, too." They were saying, "This government is OURS." That is to say, theirs alone — as white people***, as Christians, as so-called "real Americans."

I think this is a nuance that too often gets missed when we talk about white supremacy and nationalism. The ideology of white supremacy isn't fundamentally a belief in racial superiority, although that belief may be present. It's not, at its core, about hatred, although there is plenty of hatred attached to it. White nationalism is really a deep belief in ownership — of the culture and the country.

Whenever I've sparred with hardcore Trump cultists online, I've always been struck by the proprietary way they talk about America and how obsessed they are with rights of ownership. The concept of property is sacred to them. I remember an exchange I had last summer, when stores were being looted, with someone who took real offense at my statement that no decent human being would shoot a person for stealing a TV. It seems self-evident to me that any human life has more value than a material possession, but the cultist felt otherwise: Thieves — at least, some thieves — deserve death. 

The "Stop the Steal" slogan isn't really about the election. It's about what the cult sees as the theft of their country by people who have no rightful claim to it. For several generations now, we've preached to white American children about racial tolerance and equality. We've shamed them for racist language and told them racist is the worst thing they can be. But white folks have had very little to say about this poisonous, anti-democratic ideology of entitlement buried deep in white identity. 

We throw around the word “entitled” as an insult, and if we’re good liberals, we recognize our “privilege,” but we always avoid articulating exactly what that privilege rests on. It is, in fact, this culturally enforced sense of ownership, so ingrained in us that we are — mostly — not even conscious of it. Like the prisoners in the cave or David Foster Wallace's famous fish, we're blind to the full truth of our condition. It's a condition we share with the cult, and I think our reluctance to accept that fact is one reason it's so hard for us to understand what the hell is wrong with them. 

***

*From St. Basil's Sermon to the Rich 

**In case it's not clear, the song refers to the 2011 protests in Madison, Wisconsin. Video of the demonstration itself here. 

*** Yeah, I know there were a few people in that mob who weren't white. That's a discussion for another day. And no, I don't think racism is by any means the sole motivating factor for the cult. I'm not even sure it's the primary factor. But if you're thinking the racist aspect of the riot wasn't obvious, this might not be the blog for you.

Images: DoD photo of the Capitol on the eve of Obama's inauguration by Specialist 1st Class Daniel J. Calderon, U.S. Navy

"The Education of the Rich" by Noël Hallé

Revisiting a Relic

For a long time I've thought of this blog as an artifact of a former life that I had a hard time letting go until my new life finally pushed me to abandon it. Over the past couple of years I've considered wiping it out or at least taking it offline, but I could never quite bring myself to follow through. Recent events suddenly have me wanting to return to it. My head is filled with thoughts I'd like to share but have zero interest in trying to publish anywhere, and my tolerance for the scrum of social media is dwindling by the day. So the plan is to rattle on a bit here and see how that goes. Perhaps this relic is beyond reviving. But maybe not...

* I spent part of today wandering and looking and taking pictures. The world seems full of ruins just now. I wish I knew the story behind this one. Click on the image for a closer look. You can find a fuller tour here. I might have ventured closer myself, but a dog I couldn't see barked steadily, warning me away. 

Addendum

The Good and the Evil, Imre Ámos, 1938

I woke up this morning with the flu, so I’m even more muzzy-headed than usual. The thermostat is turned up to an environmentally irresponsible 72 degrees, and I’m clutching a heating pad against my belly, trying to quiet the chills. I probably shouldn’t be writing anything, not even a blog post. But I can’t seem to resist the urge. Chalk it up to fever-diminished impulse control. So here goes—

Back at Thanksgiving, I wrote up a longish Facebook post about spending the holiday with my mother and her partner, deep in rural Trumpland. Chapter 16 was kind enough to publish a slightly modified version of it this week, which you can read here.

Writers make a nervous bargain with their readers. We get the gratification of sharing our work, and in return we accept that people are 100% entitled to take from it what they will. Once something’s out of our hands, it has a life of its own, and we don’t get to run around trying to referee its relationship with the world.

This deal has its down side. There are people who seem to read with hostile intent, determined to find a reflection of their own bad faith in someone else’s words. But those people are, thankfully, very few. Most readers meet your work with generosity and intelligence, and sometimes they find things that you could never have hidden there yourself. They find the beauty of their own souls—their own sorrow or joy or love.

Judging by comments on Facebook and a few private messages, it seems like most people read my Thanksgiving essay as a commentary on the way love and shared ritual help us transcend the things that divide us. I think that’s a lovely way to receive it. I’m happy to know that people are so ready—eager, even—to find possibilities for redemption. Part of me wants to believe in redemption.

If you asked me, though, what I was trying to get at in that essay, I’d have to say that it has little to do with redemption or transcendence. (I know, I know — I just said I don’t get to referee how my words are read. Think of this as an addendum.) What fascinated me about that day was the way beauty and ugliness existed in such close proximity, distinct but thoroughly entwined.

In response to one of the private messages I received, I wrote, “One of the saddest things to me about our current predicament is the way no one seems willing to accept the contradictions of the human soul. Acceptance = cowardice to a lot of my friends. Cowardice, or appeasement, or...something. Anyway, I think you have to take people whole and as you find them—or try to, at least.”


I think that whether we try to deny the humanity of people who have evil ideas or minimize the powerful reality of those ideas, we’re making the same mistake. We're turning away from the capacity for evil that lurks within us. It's a dangerous arrogance. My grandmother used to say that you’re never more in danger of hell than when you’re congratulating yourself for being a good person, and all these years later—having abandoned the notion of hell altogether—I still think often about those words. The challenge of being human is seeing yourself in what you abhor. There are no monsters. We are all monsters.

Saturday with Mom

I travel to my mother’s house on a curving country road, past well-tended farms with driveway signs that quote the Old Testament.

Create in me a clean heart, O God

Sin is a reproach to any people

A soft answer turneth away wrath

Early morning light graces the trees and pastures, and I think, as always, of stopping to use the camera I’ve brought along. But I don’t stop today. I hardly ever stop. Mom is waiting.

When I get to her house, she’s all dressed in her purple outfit, a strand of costume pearls around her neck today instead of the rose quartz necklace she’s been wearing lately.

I have a tiny plush dog with oversized, sparkly blue eyes to give her. Its fur is gray with white markings, and I hope it will remind her of her long-dead Malamute named Bear. She's delighted with the toy. “Oh, how cute!”

“I think it looks like Bear,” I say. “Do you remember Bear?”

“Of course,” she says, caressing her new baby. It’s impossible to know whether she really remembers Bear, and I have no idea why I still feel the need to invoke the past with her.

Mom’s current dog comes up to say hello. Katie, a fluffy black mutt with spotted feet, is so fat she breathes heavily and waddles when she walks. Mom will not be discouraged from constantly giving her “treats” — whole slices of cheese and ham, sweet rolls, leftovers of all kinds. Sometimes I can convince her to refrain while I'm present, but I know she'll forget as soon as I'm gone. In her mind, Katie seems to represent every dog and child she ever cared for. She often talks as if she has a whole houseful of creatures to look after. I hate to see what's happening to Katie, but the only remedy would be to take her away from Mom. None of us is prepared to be that cruel. So I just pet the dog and feel guilty.

Mom’s partner helps her get her jacket on, and she and I head out to Southernaire, a restaurant near Kentucky Lake. Our family’s been eating there for years, and my eldest brother and I take Mom there most Saturdays for breakfast. His absence today makes Mom anxious.

"Is somebody coming with us?"

"No, Jeff can't come today. He's tied up with work. He's gonna come next week."

"Oh." A long pause. "He seems like a really good guy."

"He is a really good guy."

We repeat this exchange at least four times in the 15 minutes it takes to drive to the restaurant. It's not entirely clear whether she knows we're talking about her son. She seems to understand who I am, but I know that when I'm not around she refers to me as "my friend."

***

Southernaire is homey and charming and odd. The lobby features a big screen TV, video games, and a taxidermied beaver sporting seasonal headgear. The dining room, by contrast, is like a genteel tea room, all lace curtains and aquamarine walls.

While Mom slowly works on her heaped-up plate of eggs and bacon, the usual cast of characters cycles through —local families, couples, a pair of 60+ pilots who've just flown in on the air strip across the road. Three huge young men lumber in and take up a table. They look like brothers, or maybe cousins. They strike me as farm boys, though I can't quite put my finger on why. Two of them are decked out in Vol orange.  I half expect the room to list in their direction, they're so big. "You got a pork chop back there?" one of them asks the waitress. "Fry me up a pork chop."

While I'm studying the farm boys, Mom is fixated on a little blond girl at the next table. She keeps trying, without success, to get the child to smile back at her.  Mom has always loved kids, and whenever we're out in public she invariably zeros in on young children, especially girls. It's sweet to see, but it's also a little intense. She looks at them the way a 4-year-old looks at a puppy — fascinated, delighted, covetous. She'll often speak to the parents if she gets a chance, usually saying something admiring and innocuous like “That's a beautiful child.” Out here in the country, people always respond in a friendly way, and I'm grateful for that. I've often wondered whether an elderly man with a similar fixation on kids would be treated so tolerantly.

We box up Mom's leftovers to take home, where she'll likely feed them to Katie. I've only had to stop her a couple of times today from putting salt in her coffee or sugar on her eggs, and she was easily persuaded to leave the little tubs of half & half on the table. She offers to pay, pulling bills out of her purse and trying to hand them to me. We never let her pay, but I don't think she'll ever stop trying. She grew up poor and has a deeply ingrained sense of the importance of money.

Out in the parking lot, there's a vintage El Camino, fire engine red, with an unopened sack of something — maybe horse feed — lying in the middle of the pristine bed. I like to think it belongs to the large young men, though the cab looks like a tight fit for even one of them.

***

On the way home, we stop at a dollar store to look at the Christmas stuff. Mom has no Christmas decorations of any kind at her house, and she doesn't really understand the holiday anymore. She wouldn't refuse a present, and she thinks the lights are pretty, but it's not at all clear that she registers what any of it means. Nevertheless, I'm suddenly determined that she'll have something in her house to mark the season. As with the little plush dog, this is more about my needs than hers, and as we paw through the snow globes and reindeer ornaments, I'm painfully aware of the source of all these cheap gewgaws.

I find a little aluminum tabletop tree covered in gold glitter. $3.00. “This is pretty, Mom, don't you think?”

“Oh, it is pretty. And just $3.00.”

I get the feeling she's humoring me, but it's hard to tell. She might actually like it. And she regards all gifts as expressions of love, always has.

When I pay, the young woman behind the counter hands me a slip of paper along with my receipt. It's a note, handwritten on a piece of register tape. It says, “God Bless + Merry Christmas,” with a little 😊

A blast of cold wind hits us as we head to the car. Mom clutches her jacket and grimaces. She seems so frail, as brittle as the brown leaves blowing across the asphalt. While I drive, she lifts the little tree out of the plastic bag and admires it. “This is something I can treasure forever,” she says, and repeats it a few more times before we turn down the dirt road to her house.



*Photo by BitterGrace

Already?

Looking at the sea, Veloso Salgado (1864-1945)

My birthday is here. Again. I've reached the age when it seems to roll around with startling frequency. This doesn't particularly distress me, but I'm amazed every day by the way life just keeps hurtling on toward its conclusion without consulting my preferences or accommodating my uncertainties. I'm kinda glad it does. If I were actually allowed to be in charge of things, my existence would be one long, dull wait for perfect conditions and my own sense of readiness. Instead, shit just happens and I struggle to keep up. That's way more interesting than living life according to plan, though it's not always 100% fun. Most of the time, I feel like that lady up there at the top of the post—looking toward the horizon with a shifting mixture of curiosity, bewilderment, hope, and dread, wondering what's to come.

The world has had an eventful year, as usual. So much sadness, so much suffering. And don't even get me started on human villainy. My tiny corner of the planet, however, has been blessedly steady. Almost everything that was true on my last birthday is still true. I still have that awesome dog the stupid people threw away, and now I have a second, equally awesome dog. Her old humans didn't want her either. SMDH, as the kids say. 

Miraculously, everything that was good is still good. There have been losses and continuing sorrows, and I'll confess to wasting some time mourning wasted time. But for the most part I have enjoyed twelve solid months of luck, love, generosity, and beauty. Abundant beauty.

Photo by BitterGrace

To feel and speak the astonishing beauty of things—earth,
          stone and water,
Beast, man and woman, sun, moon and stars—
The blood-shot beauty of human nature, its thoughts,
          frenzies and passions,
And unhuman nature its towering reality—
For man’s half dream; man, you might say, is nature
          dreaming, but rock
And water and sky are constant—to feel
Greatly, and understand greatly, and express greatly, the
          natural
Beauty, is the sole business of poetry.
The rest’s diversion: those holy or noble sentiments, the
          intricate ideas,
The love, lust, longing: reasons, but not the reason.

~ Robinson Jeffers, "The Beauty of Things"

Purely sentimental

Maybe it's age catching up with me, but I'm feeling tender and nostalgic as the holidays approach. I was lucky enough to enjoy some wonderful Christmases when I was a kid, and even though I haven't done much celebrating in recent years, there's still a soft spot in my heart for memory-stirring art and kitsch. Here's a little collection of seasonal images that make me smile. 

 Christmas card of unknown vintage

 Vogue cover, 1921

Russian postcard c. 1914-1917

Mela Koehler (1885-1960)

Christmas Eve, 1959, Guy Wiggins (1883-1962)

Christmas card of unknown vintage

Resurrection of the Magi, David Derr (born 1954)

Street Scene, Christmas Morning, Childe Hassam, 1892

One of literary critic Fanny Butcher's Christmas cards

Bird on Snow Covered Berry Branch, Takahashi Biho (1873-?)

"...the lewd perfume that laughs along innocent limbs"

The Dawn of Love, William Etty, 1828

O maternal love,
heartbreaking for the gold
of bodies suffused
with the secret of wombs.

And beloved unconscious
attitudes of the lewd
perfume that laughs

along innocent limbs.

~ Pier Paolo Pasolini, from "Flesh and Sky"
translated by David Stivender and J.D. McClatchy