Strange Fruit

I drove over to the laundromat in the little town of Liberty last night, rolling through the beautiful spring gloming, ending up at twilight all by myself in a nice clean laundromat sitting across the old highway into town from a big brick mill. My guess is the mill's deceased, but I don't know that for sure. The windows, as far as I could tell, were still in place. Maybe something's still alive there. I hope so. On the ride I listened for a minute or two to some third string yammerer on "Rush Radio," our state-wide network of hate FM, explaining to "the black people" that they had best shape up and quit wearing their pants down to their knees, and having 72% of their children out of wedlock. Treyvon Martin was mentioned every other sentence. Earlier in the day, driving home from work, Hannity was interviewing some Fox reporter from Orlando, who was reporting that Mr. Zimmerman was afraid for his life and couldn't go home or to work. I think she had interviewed Zimmerman's father, who told her and the world that Zimmerman was beaten up by Treyvon, and in great fear of his life, which his son told him, and he was sure his son wouldn't lie about such a thing. Later on, folding clothes at home, I saw Zimmerman's brother developing the story further--Zimmerman's head was being banged on the sidewalk and he thought he had better move his head before he became a vegetable. Such interior detail. Such human interest. Today I expect to hear that as Treyvon banged Zimmie's head, Treyvon's bling clinked in his ear so loudly that he was afraid he would suffer permanent hearing loss.

The third-stringer on Rush Radio opined that black people had better stop blaming things that happened "a century ago" for their behavior today. He said the killing of Treyvon was "not Emmett Till," and don't you forget it. He also said black people had better stop listening to people like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, and start listening to people like Herman Cain (really!) and Thomas Sowell--people who'd really done things.

Zimmerman's father said, in his interview, that he would never have believed the hate he perceived coming from the President. Later, on the Maddow show, Walter Dellinger said he thought the Supreme Court was approaching the thinking of the 1920s Court--that the precedent of Social Security being upheld as Constitutional in 1937 was implicitly being questioned in the issues being considered concerning the Health Care Reform Act. Over on Hannity's TV show a very pretty law expert (seems like that's all they can find over on Fox) said the Court was "mocking" the Administration's lawyers, and that's why Mr. Obama gave a speech yesterday suggesting that Congress drop oil subsidies.

I wonder if Mr. Nixon, when he invited the vast culture of white supremacy into the Republican Party back when he was trying to make an end run around George Wallace, realized that they came with their own agenda. Maybe he thought they were just rubes, these angry, fearful small-towners. Of course if you listen to the White House tapes there's the "N" word aplenty. So maybe to most Republicans, white supremacy is just an aspect of the privilege they live and breathe all the time. As Mr. Romney puts it, some of my best friends are NASCAR Team Owners.

The factual situation in the Treyvon Martin case hasn't changed much. A man with a gun stalked Martin even after being told by police to stop. Then he killed Martin. The legal situation in Florida is such that if you can prove (in some sense as yet undetermined) that you were in fear of your life, you needn't be charged with any crime if you kill someone. Mr. Zimmerman is now producing reams of "testimony" aimed at proving (in some sense as yet undetermined) that he was in fear for his life. His daddy says so. His brother says so. A black news guy named Joe Oliver who sorta knows him says so. A whole national news network and a whole phalanx of right wing radio yammerers say so. Indeed, the idea might be that if you are in the presence of a young black man, you probably ought to, per se, be afraid for your life, particularly if he wears his pants low down in the fashion of the times.

And this is pretty much the situation as it was in the 1920s, when a black man could be murdered with impunity for casting his eyes off the ground. And in that cultural sea, if you want to see what happens to black people, go watch Stepin Fetchit's act some time. You act like that amongst the Republicans, you won't get strung up and lit afire. Most likely. Just look at Herman Cain. Or if you want to look some place else, hunt up that photo in Life of the three deputies who killed the three civil rights workers in 1963 and buried them in the earthen dam near Philadelphia, MS. Which, by the way, was where Reagan kicked off his campaign for President.

[photo from http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/episodes/billie-holiday/about-the-singer/68/ ]

Update: http://driftglass.blogspot.com/2012/03/stupid-shit-andrew-sullivan-says.html

Spring Steam Rolls NC

Yesterday the pollen was so bad I had to go to bed when I got home after driving eight miles with the window down--because the truck was too hot from sitting in the sun all day. Thus is the frog frozen in his perplexity, feet sizzling, blue flame licking the sides of his skillet.

This morning over at Digby I read the following, a remark so fundamentally obvious that to find it in a political blog mostly concerned with current events is something akin to time-travel--backwards:

Since members of virtually all species will have sex in any case, birth control allows women to plan their lives beyond their fecundity. It doesn't make sense to be educated, to travel to try out new jobs or start a business if your plans can be derailed at any moment by the very likely result of pregnancy and the raising of infants and small children. Women simply cannot have equal access to everything the world has to offer if they cannot control their reproduction.

Birth control doesn't just allow women to make more money, although it does. It allows them to make choices about their lives and fulfill their dreams. It allows them to be fully human. And that's really the problem isn't it?

The GOP has pushed the goal posts plumb out of the stadium. The problem with that is, goal posts in the street is kinda like that moment in "Blow Up" when the photog holds the broken bit of guitar out on the sidewalk after barely surviving his accidental accomplishment of winning it in the club after the Yard Birds have smashed it as the climax of their arrangement. Duchamps' bicycle leaning against a wall in Toulouse is merely a potential theft.

I theorized with a friend this weekend that the Chinese language jokes now appearing in various television commercials are an early harbinger of the coming decision by persons of responsibility in the world at large that the United States is no longer capable of controlling the insanely powerful arsenal of WMD it possesses. Such persons everywhere must be quaking at the current crop of GOP Presidential candidates. Democracy is in the end a means--it is the machinery by which we attempt to govern ourselves. It requires for its successful application the lubrication of competent education, and the encouragement of wisdom. Living in a hall of mirrors not only confuses, but teaches the mind to live in confusion.

Here close to home, NC leaders are pondering inviting fracking into our state.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zeza1xeWKM

Oh, yeah. I'm aware that the idea that some mysterious international persons of responsibility will come to save us is akin to Michael Rennie's turn as the Space Man. We're all in the same boat here, and down towards the stern a bunch of Randian fanatics have decided to build a fire to warm themselves up. The oars are pretty good for kindling, and the hull itself is made of wood. What could go wrong. There's water just on the other side to keep the burning wood from burning.

Trayvon

Among many things one could say, this one seems to have been significantly underplayed, probably because the flaming, brutal injustice of the murder obscures more subtle truths.

http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2012/03/whats-missing-from-trayvon-martin.html

See the thing is, a whole political party presumes that white (and male) privilege is simply the atmosphere we breathe here in the exceptional land of exceptionality. This presumption is so deep and so accepted that it is unquestioned, and indeed, to question it is to do something akin to "running down the country." And you know what Merle said about that: "If you're running down the country hoss you're walkin' on the fightin' side of me."

Trayvon's murder should be, for white America, a moment of consciousness-raising, a moment when the blindness is peeled away and a reality obvious to people of color becomes obvious to those of us who started out in the lap of privilege and never realized there was a lap there at all. Because no one should actually want to keep these blinders on, now should they? No one should want to actually encourage this sort of racism. Surely not. Surely neither major American political party would stoop to utilize the endless generational cultural racism that goes along with white privilege and slowly rots the country from within. Surely all of us would want to see Mr. Zimmerman for what he is--a sick fantasist with a dangerous weapon who needs to be at the minimum charged for murdering a kid in more or less cold blood. At the very bare minimum, surely we'd all agree that Mr. Zimmerman deserves to be tried for this act--with a serious prosecutor and a serious jury of his peers--peers meaning pretty much a cross section of all Americans.

Surely. Where's Mr. Romney on this?

Update. It's so much worse. A quick perusal of the discussion via my DSL internets tubes connection this Sunday morning reveals that a number of Republicans are now arguing that Treyvon's photo was "lightened," thus making him less scarey-looking than he "really" was. I'm not kidding. Really, I'm not kidding. And on the teevee, one famous and ostensibly liberal commentator (the guy who opened Al Capone's vault on live teevee) has cautioned parents about letting their kids wear hoodies, because that was probably the decisive factor in Treyvon's murder.

http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/trayvon-martin-news-7552519

Here's the thing that really worries me. The Republican Party must be what it has become because it reflects a huge number of American voters' views. Granted, the GOP has also spent thirty years and zillions of dollars "educating" those voters into a deeper and deeper commitment to those views. But still. There's a sense in which democracy is what it is. There are still a few glimpses of light here and there--that's about it. A sitting Republican congressman from New York--guy named Hanna--actually suggested that women had better start supporting the folks that support women's rights. Said that in a speech this past week.

Distractions

Today I have the undeserved opportunity to go to a studio and play music, which will at some point possibly result in the creation of a CD by the band once known as the "O'Blurs," and now as the "Craver, Hicks, Watson, Newberry Unit." It ought to be a fun day. I've made a whole thermos of coffee. I have managed to put all the fire wood that needs stacking out of my mind entirely. I will also put other important realities on hold. Meanwhile, you might read this:

http://driftglass.blogspot.com/2012/03/over-at-daily-beasts-home-for-troubled.html

The questions posed are profound. I try to pose more or less the same ones here. For me, the question was framed this week most spectacularly by Mr. Romney's remarkable acceptance speech after winning Illinois. He paints a picture of an America that is so entirely never was and never can be that he disqualifies himself by his own words. Yet his words were the icing on an actual presidential primary victory. It's really a boggling situation we're all in. We've been in it at least since 2001, if not in many ways since America elected an actor president in 1980 over a guy who was telling us several truths--such as that we needed to move away from a dangerous dependence on oil for our energy needs. Thanks Mr. Carter. DUH!

Reagan's first act was to remove the solar panels from the White House roof. That is possibly as significant a fact as any you will discover today. Meanwhile, I'll be sitting in an airconditioned, darkened room, head phones on, playing violin. Send me dead flowers in the morning, send me dead flowers by the US Mail. Oh right, they're discontinuing that service next week.