Blood, bodies and Flags on the Ole Miss Campus

At a recent rally to take down the Confederate-emblematic-Mississippi-State-Flag from the University of Mississippi’s campus, the student newspaper The Daily Mississippian quoted a counter-protester Shaun Winkler, who came with swastika tattoos and a Stars-And-Bars banner to say, “Black lives don’t matter.  We are the blood of conquerors.”

The students on campus generally want to take the state flag down, but the outside community staged counter-protests. Thank you DAILY MISSISSIPPIAN for the image.

Conquerors?  Really?  That’s funny.  I recall my Yankee ancestors conquering yours in the battles where that flag in your hands was waved unanachronistically.

And Black lives do matter.  So do the protests of  black students, who have every right, while trodding on ground where men like Mr. Winkler threatened to shed James Meredith’s blood fifty years ago for having the audacity to enroll there, to feel that the last contemporary bastion of institutional racism’s symbolism is embodied in the Mississippi State Flag, the last flag in the Union still emblazoned with the Confederate symbol.

Mr. Winkler gave the impression in his interview and in his choice of tattoo of not having a college education.  He and the counter-protesters came from other places, no doubt from under Tallahatchie river rocks next to newts and insects, to protest the removal of a flag from a place that wouldn’t have let his conquering blood matriculate because of low test scores.  Certainly Mr. Winkler flunked history, at least.

But Mr. Winkler needn’t have protested if his objective in doing so was to keep a Confederate heritage alive at The University of  Mississippi.  Indeed, the history of the college is such that it can hardly be doubted that it will retain its past symbols of conquered Confederates.  And while I abhor the politics of racism, I think the Left enters dangerous and anti-intellectual territory where it wishes to deface monuments longstanding to racist regimes, for if we do not remember the past, we are doomed to repeat it.  It is the contemporary symbols, like the contemporary flag, which must go — but it would be nearly impossible to imagine that the University of Mississippi could divide itself from the Confederacy in history, even if it wanted to.

This is a monument to the Confederate Dead on the Ole Miss Campus.

When one enters the campus of Ole Miss from University Avenue, headed toward the administration building, one passes a monument to the Confederate dead.  Indeed, if seen in a vacuum, the story of the deaths of students at Ole Miss at the Battle of Shiloh and elsewhere are tragic — entire graduating classes perished in grey uniforms under fire from the Union army.  Next to the Confederate monument is a building that was used as a hospital for the dying Confederacy.  In it, one sees a stained-glass monument of the high-melodramatic style of the late Victorian era.  If one enters the campus from Highway 6, and one looks for parking away from the football stadium, which is often restricted, one may park behind the basketball stadium, where a cemetery for those soldiers who died in the hospital building on campus got buried.  On Confederacy memorial days, women of this era show up in hoop skirts, and men in grey reenactment uniforms arrive, and they place wreaths here for unknown soldiers of their conquered cause.

Mississippi ought to stop insulting the African-American descendants of slaves with the symbol that was used to oppress them during the war, then terrify them in the hands of Klan terrorists after the Civil War was over and the Yankees had packed up and moved back North.  Nobody deserves to go to school in an environment where some ignorant idiot would actually tell them that their lives didn’t matter.

The truth of those monuments — that the boys who enrolled in 1861, white and privileged, arrogant and swaggering, the sons of slave-owners, who all got Gatling-gunned down and got buried here and there where swamp animals didn’t devour their corpses — the truth of the sad melodrama of a society that knew it had been conquered, those things ought not be removed.  I wouldn’t mind, though, seeing a monument somewhere on campus to the people who died in Mississippi from the rigors of plantation life in dirty shacks, with insufficient food, backs scarred from whippings.  My instinct would be to put it right next to that Confederate soldier statue, though it would ruin the symmetry of the rotunda.  My instinct would be to make it at least as large as the nineteenth-century monument, and why?  Because black lives do matter.  Confederates did not conquer. And those privileged white boys, their lives were extinguished to defend an indefensible institution, one that brutalized the many for the pleasures of a few.

This is literally where the Confederate bodies are buried on the Ole Miss Campus.

But I would tear nothing down.  The ghosts of Confederate soldiers will continue to haunt Ole Miss, especially on nights like the night of November 6, 2012, where a young man got filmed for Youtube, naked all but for an American flag diapering his frat-boy bottom, drunk in the flatbed of a friend’s trunk, angry because Obama won again, shouting “F#ck the N%ggers!” over and over again, just yards away from that Confederate Soldier statue, the true son in the political spirit and overbloated privilege of a small class of white men in Mississippi over the hardworking aspirations of people of color who did him no wrong and over even Mr. Winkler, who needs a real history lesson, as he assumes the cause of that spoiled rich boy somehow reflects his own interests, when in fact it does not.  If he were not so defined by his hatred, literally scarred with swastikas of his own selection, I would call him a victim here.  I think he has been horribly conned.  I would tell him he should clamor for something that acknowledges the total and wasteful loss of white lives in the service of an elitist Confederacy which held the lives of  his ancestors at an even lower price than the lives of the slaves they owned and might exploit in peace time.

There is blood on the campus  of Ole Miss, but it is not the blood of conquerors.  There is dried blood of wasted lives.  And there is new blood of hopeful members of the New South, and they want to take down a flag that insults the humanity of many students there and the intelligence of absolutely anyone.  We don’t believe in myths any more.  We want to explore the truth in greater clarity. We want our lives, all our lives, to matter, to be spent in pursuit of worthy causes, ones that serve our interests collectively and individually. Take that accursed flag down!

The Texan Tale of Ahmed Mohammed and Who Southerners Think is a Bad Guy

Last week, America looked at a situation in a high school that worked like an ink blot on our culture, and our divergent perceptions reveal the central problem of American culture today.

We’ve all heard the story of Ahmed Mohammed, the fourteen year-old who was perhaps a bit nerdy and excited about building a clock, which he took to school.  I think none of us would have been surprised if any nerd had brought a clock to school, showed it to everyone, and then ended up getting beat up by the junior varsity football squad in the parking lot after lunch for being a massive nerd.  We would have been able to sympathize that the student in question had underestimated the social consequences of proud nerdiness among the Spartan youth that gets favored in American high schools, perhaps particularly in Texas, over the people who might have ended up working at Texas Instruments back in the 1970s. Such a story could have happened to any American nerd, and we would not have been so engaged with that narrative as a nation.

This is what they did to the boy who might have been their 2019 Valedictorian.

Instead, it wasn’t the footballers that beat up Ahmed. The administration and faculty of the high school, the very people ostensibly in charge of encouraging him to pursue his nerdiness for the good of humanity despite football squad pressures to conform, who crushed his spirit.  We need people like Ahmed to become inventors.  I am rooting for today’s Ahmeds to become the future inventors of at-home liposuction kits, high heels that don’t hurt your feet, and automatic dog-walkers for snowy days.  Instead, if our President had not Tweeted as he did, we might not have seen Ahmed inventing anything after last week.  Why would he ever want to express his gifts if they get him arrested?  I have confidence that Ahmed Mohammed will explore his abilities to the fullest now, and he must rest assured that the majority of us are not inclined to discourage his success.

But here’s where I think we have a huge problem.  It’s worse than I thought it was.  Nobody who accused Ahmed feels inclined to apologize to him, and members of the Right are actually fabricating bizarre and apocryphal versions of the well-documented incidents of Mac Arthur High School’s day of infamy.

First, the Principal of the school sent out a completely offensive letter to parents congratulating himself for having taken appropriate measures to protect the school from danger.  He wrote this after he knew full well that Ahmed’s clock was not a bomb.  He then condescendingly told parents they ought to speak to their kids about bringing suspicious objects to school.  Are clocks suspicious objects?  Would they have been suspicious in the hands of a blond nerd named Tyler?

Then the mayor of Irving, Texas said she stood by the principal. She had made local news earlier this year by complaining about non-existent problems of Sharia law in her town.  Then, Sarah Palin, who hates a lot of people for a professed Christian, including the entire Northeastern Seaboard of the United States, whom she claimed when running for VP was not really American, said about Ahmed’s clock that if it was indeed a clock, she was the queen of England.  As a real Queen of England is supposed to have said, We are not amused. There is nothing amusing about calling someone guilty who is clearly, with a Texan law enforcement thumbs-up, entirely innocent of all wrong-doing.

Then, after Ms. Palin’s — let’s call them cultural contributions — a barrage of conspiracy theories hit the lunatic Right-wing Internet and were instantly believed by the already-converted, including:

• The clock was ticking backwards like a bomb clock when the English teacher spotted it.  It wasn’t.
• The little white packet pictured by the clock was plastic explosives. I shake my head.
• That Ahmed didn’t invent a new clock, he just used parts he got from other devices, and this is cheating.  It’s not cheating.  There was no assignment to cheat on, and it’s really not in dispute.  Of course at age fourteen he didn’t invent his own digital interface! He participated in the time-honored tradition of American nerds of going to junk shops and Radio Shack for tools with which to create one’s first works.  There is nothing cheating in this.  And his work was mighty impressive for a fourteen year-old.
• That Ahmed orchestrated this false arrest himself to cover up a real conspiracy to blow things up.  I ask if this idea is a product of a meth-addicted paranoia.
• That Ahmed orchestrated with his family his false arrest so that he could sue the city of Irving.  They are suing now, and since they have received no apology for an outrageous error of judgment, I hope they walk away with the deed to City Hall, because the officials should be ashamed of themselves but aren’t.

It has gotten to the point where a certain portion of white people in this country look at an incident like this where, I repeat, there WAS NO BOMB and see a bomb, and a terrorist,  and a conspiracy.  If the facts don’t support them, it’s only because all of us — the President, the CEO of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg, the MIT professors, and the supportive members of the intelligentsia are lying to the good folks of the American heartland.  We must be in favor of bombs in schools.  We must want Sharia law since we hate Christianity so much, all of us — except we don’t.  We embrace empirical evidence as a source of information about world events.  Where a boy’s clock is investigated by a bomb squad and found just to be a clock, just like he said it was over and over again, we believe the boy and the clock.  The clock is ticking forward.  It’s the increasingly ugly racist Right that wants it to tick backward to prove that their views are not backward.

The rest of us, when we look at Ahmed Mohammed, see a smart nerd and a science project. It’s like we can barely discuss events in front of us because one smaller group sees a world of dangerous, swarthy hordes with Paladins defending a narrow front line, and the rest of us see a relatively harmonious multicultural coexistence disturbed by a few fascists.  When we see videos of white cops hurting people of color, we don’t assume we have just missed a segment where the ghost of Nat Turner swooped in and killed a cop after the African-American police brutality victims summoned him.  We don’t blame the victims of government violence and institutional racism.  We don’t understand how those RIght-Wingers don’t see what we see.

How do we get past this? I want America to value American values again, including diversity, tolerance, freedom of religion, and freedom of expression, and for Ahmed’s sake — I want us to embrace invention instead of treating it like a threat.  We used to do that very well.  How do we get the clock to move forward on that once more?

Quit Calling Me a Racist While I Wave My Racist Flag at You! — South Carolina, Oklahoma and Confederate Flag Backlash

My colleague James Travis Rozier noted on Facebook that it was very hot yesterday in Columbia, South Carolina, where members of the KKK were assembling to protest the removal of the Confederate Battle Flag from the State Capitol.  He said that he was almost feeling sorry for them if they were dressing in those white hoods and robes in that weather.  I remarked that it might be hot in July in the South, but it’s nowhere near a hot as it will be for those Klansmen when they arrive in Hell, where they are surely going.

Just preserving heritage? Who are they kidding?

The people who assembled in South Carolina in favor of the removed flag — and allow me to say briefly how glad I am it was removed — were “just trying to preserve their heritage.”  The problem with that logic, even if I ignore their shouts of “white power,” and the gorilla gestures some made (like the man pictured front and center with his hand held high did) at the many African-American counter-protesters, is that having appropriated the Stars and Bars as its banner, the KKK could only be protesting the removal of its own flag from the capitol.  Of late, the Klan has tried to reframe the way people identify it.  It claims to be a Christian organization — but how many churches burn a cross on an enemy’s lawn?  How many lynch and burn other group’s churches?  They are no more a Christian organization than the Nazis are a quaint youth group designed to promote the outdoors.  They have claimed to be in favor of white heritage the way that other groups in America promote the interests and advancement of people of color, but that’s a sad joke, too.  The NAACP, for instance, doesn’t define its success in any way by the exclusion of others but by the inclusion of people of color in places where they were largely excluded by social standards, and they have never been advocates or perpetrators of violence.  The Klan was founded as a way to terrorize dark-skinned people, Irish immigrants and Jews.  The purpose of the sheets they wore was to protect the perpetrators of crimes from identification in the commission of acts of terrorism.  The only way they have ever tried to advance white people is by killing, burning, maiming, and frightening others.  And the Confederate Battle Flag has been their chosen flag for all they stand for and want to accomplish.

But that flag is supposed to represent Southern pride, right?  Pride in what, pray tell?  I love the South and could rattle off hundreds of things for which I believe Southerners are rightfully proud — but that flag was designed by a man who explained to those who first flew it that its purpose was to represent the white race’s supremacy over enslaved black peoples in Southern States.  Those who chose to fly it understood and accepted this as its message.  A century hence, some Southerners say it only represents North versus South tensions, not racial tensions — but why wave it in Oklahoma as the first Black President of the United States drives by if not for racist expression — particularly since Oklahoma never flew that flag during the Civil War?  What else could that flag possibly communicate to anyone other than the flyers of the flag hate it that President Obama is black?

President Obama has not gotten embroiled in the flag-changing politics surrounding recent responses to racism in the South.  He has never had much to say about  that flag as President.  So what would be the political purpose of flying the flag other than the Klan’s purpose — to somehow say that Obama as a black man should fear white Oklahomans?

Have these people no shame?

I saw something sad that someone posted on Facebook — a photo of a young black man, dressed in a t-shirt and shorts near an open pick-up truck’s flat bed from which flew a Confederate Battle Flag.  The person who posted it did so to demonstrate that the flag wasn’t racist at all.  After all, if one black person is willing to stand next to the flag, that must wipe out centuries of oppressive meaning for black folks, right?  How idiotic!  I feel sorry for that young man by the battle flag and for his momma, too.  He is doing nothing new, in fact.  Franz Fanon, author of Black Skins, White Masks, would call him internally colonized — a young man living (one might likely think) in East Texas among white people who use the n-word to insult him and others.  So why would he adopt the symbol of the white community for himself?  Well, as Fanon says, the oppressed believe the worst about themselves, and, “the colonized [person] is elevated above his jungle status in proportion to his adoption of the mother country’s cultural standards.”  Fanon, who was himself a black man from a French colony, talks about people internalizing Frenchness and disdaining those things considered African and therefore disdained by the colonists.  Any young man of color who poses next to the Confederate flag (unless he just took it down from where it was flying — like Bree Newsome did — though she had no time to pose before she was arrested) has adopted the oppressive attitudes of racism about black people.  I feel sorry for him and wish he had been at the counter-protest in Columbia with people who knew that the Confederate Battle Flag is a symbol both historically and presently of racial oppression.

Fortunately, many white Southerners, the people who run NASCAR, Ole Miss Football Coach Hugh Freeze, and others, are able to see the harm this symbol does to the present-day South and the evils of the past that it preserves in lieu of those many things that the South might rightfully be proud to call its heritage.  They are calling from the removal of the flag as a symbol of official things.  They are aware of its use by violent people to violent ends and its original expression of support of slavery.  Today, many Southerners, like South Carolina State Assemblywoman Jenny Horne, a Republican and a descendant of Jefferson Davis, understand the battle flag symbolizes something absolutely NOT Southern — a lack of hospitality toward all.  As she tearfully argued for the flag to come off the flagpole at the capitol, she talked about how the flag was insulting to her colleagues and her friends.  Southerners as a whole value hospitality and cordiality well above foolish and petty ideas of non-existent racial superiority, well above the Confederate Dead, who are, however tragically, moldering in the grave and won’t be attending any more cotillions.  It’s the present Southerners, Horne and others have argued, who need to be welcomed, one and all, to the important and the impressive things the South does right.  The best way, they argue, to preserve heritage is to continue be who Southerners have always meant to be — kind, strong, resourceful, polite, faithful, dignified, and free — and to do so in a manner that embraces every Southerner’s history, not just the plantation owners’ history, but the history of those whose backs were whipped on those plantations, and those who lost limbs and eyes fighting to keep those plantation owners rich while they returned to poor subsistence farms and tried to make sense of a senseless war, a tattered battle flag in hand, youth destroyed with no sufficient explanation for the madness of the brutality they had faced.  The flag that the Klan clings to is a symbol of dishonor rather than the real honor of people of people not hooded but hoodwinked by a system that made the few rich and oppressed the many.

I will fight to the death for the rights of individuals to wave that flag, however misguidedly, but I am thrilled that the flag has been pulled down and is being pulled down off of government institutions.  As John Oliver said so well, the Confederate flag ought to be a marker for the rest of us to recognize the most horrible people in the world, not a symbol of any state where the descendants of slaves pay taxes.  And the racists are nice to let us know they’re in town so we can cross to the other side of the street if we like to avoid any lightning bolts God might like to throw at them.

Who is really King of the Hill?

The cartoonish pair of us on our wedding day

I have come to a shocking realization — my husband and I are suspiciously cartoonish, or rather we suspiciously resemble the cartoon characters of Mike Judge — Hank and Peggy Hill.

Might we be two-dimensional caricatures of the American dream?

Here’s the evidence that compels me to bring this possibility to the attention of  local authorities, such as yourselves, of the bloggosphere:

• Chuck and I are living in the South.  Peggy and Hank Hill live in a different part of the South, but Arlen, Texas and Vicksburg, Mississippi are the same size.
• My husband speaks with a slow Texan accent, and so does Hank.
• Hank sells propane and propane accessories, and my husband, as a petrochemist, makes propane.
• Peggy Hill is a substitute teacher of Spanish in the Texas public school system.  I teach English in Mississippi colleges.
• We have a ranch-style house that resembles, but for the surrounding landscape, the Hill house in King of the Hill.
• Hank has an old hunting dog.  We have a yellow lab.
• Chuck has been known to hang out with guys, not say much, and drink beer, although not in some alley near the house.
• Peggy is a Boggle champion.  I am a poetry slam semi-finalist.
• Hank played high school football, then quit football afterwards.  So did Chuck.
• Peggy wears a large shoe size.  So do I.

There are dissimilarities, of course.  Between the two of us, we are better educated than the Hills.  We would not squash the creative ambitions of a son to be the greatest prop comic of all time.  We do not have a Lu-Ann, Laotian neighbors, a friend who is an exterminator, and when Chuck mows the lawn, he does so with an upright mower.  Peggy actually can’t speak Spanish worth a dang.  I speak French fluently.  I pray to God that my hair is not a tenth so bulbous, even on my worst hair day, as Peggy’s. The house may  be ranch-style, but we are surrounded by land, and I’d like to think that the interior design reflects my devotion to HGTV and exquisite taste — not Peggy’s completely irony-free mid-century rut.

How little or much are we like these two-dimensional figures?

Perhaps the “coincidence” here is only that Mike Judge is clever and insightful.  Perhaps the series’ success stems from his keen eye for real Americans.

Still, I don’t know if I can accept that answer.  I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but I wonder, somehow, if I am a figment of Mike Judge’s imagination.

Mike thinks, therefore I am.

For all this this time, I have been on a quest to be a better person.  Perhaps, like Jessica Rabbit, whatever my flaws, they are not my fault — I am just drawn that way.

Our cartoon yellow lab, here in Vicksburg/Arlen, is chewing on a paper cup she found in the trash.  In a minute, my t-shirt clad, bespectacled propane-knowledgeable husband will come in here, his jeans oddly low on his body, and take it from her mouth.

Perhaps the proof of my non-cartoon existence comes from my politics.  Chuck and I voted for Obama.  Hank and Peggy Hill wouldn’t have probably done that, I think, at least not Hank.

I admit it would take a lot of pressure off us if we turned out  to be cartoon characters.  PhD-level deconstructionist theory readings would  become existentially sound, as I, too, would be fictional.  A lot less would be messy if we were animated instead of lethargic but life-like.

I had better get back to my readings of literary theory.  Perhaps an end note to one of my assigned articles will point to me.

Tar balls — but no great balls of fire

before the tar balls hit the beaches in Mississippi, Governor Barbour shows the President around

One of the ways I know I live in Mississippi and not New York or Paris is that the people — not individuals but groups of people — don’t seem inclined to mass demonstrations.  I find the calm of the people of the State of Mississippi astonishing in the wake of a disaster where there is a yachting, snooty British face to make into a mask to put on a doll to hang in effigy.

Why are they not more feisty, more pitchfork-waving?  Why do I not hear the click of the cocking of the myriad guns that they fiercely claim the right to bear?

In 1986, when I lived in Paris and participated in the student strikes of that year with the other students at the Sorbonne, the news came on the radio one early morning that the cops had killed one of the kids demonstrating, beating him to death with billy clubs.  Within a half hour I heard shouting underneath my apartment window.  A hundred thousand people awakened by the news had gathered with signs and were shouting the name of the mayor of Paris — they called him a bastard, and shouted, “Le peuple aura ta peau” — The people will have your hide.

In New York, during the nineties, I worked organizing demonstrations for a human rights organization, and I promise you that New Yorkers, too, have a clamor that comes out relatively quickly from within them whenever the city’s troubles bubble up, like — I don’t know, so much uncappable oil from the Gulf.

Yet here we are a month into a disaster of Biblical proportions which, unlike a hurricane, cannot be blamed on an act of God, but quite simply an act of over-ambitious man, in support of the coffers of a foreign country, to the detriment of Americans, local Americans, Americans who qualify to belong to Sarah Palin’s short list of “true” Americans, Mississippians, no less, and right here, right here in Mississippi — I hear no shouting in the streets.

On the air waves, I hear right-wing radio pundits lamenting the imagined “judicial activism” of Supreme Court Nominee Kagan and the horrors of Brown V. Board of Education admiration in thinly veiled racism and by obtuse arguments like: if the founders didn’t predict the Internet, then the Constitution cannot apply to it.  On the local airwaves, I hear no grand outcry for the head of anyone on a platter regarding British Petroleum.  The silence would make one think that no such spill had affected anyone in the region.

On the local left-wing radio, I hear practical discussions about pragmatic steps that people can take to join wildlife rescue teams, about problems long-term related to the environment.  No cries for the death of a corporate Satan.

The governors of the affected states called (surprisingly late in the game) for a day of prayer.  My church prayed.

Admittedly, the effects of the disaster have not yet been fully felt.  Tourism on the Gulf in Mississippi, a source of income for the cities there, is at an absolute standstill, but  one bad season might not kill off such tourism entirely.  However, no one can say with certainty the long-term consequences to those communities.  Fishing along the coast has been prohibited, but no one knows for how long, nor can anyone say with certainty how long the fishermen will have nothing viable to catch there.

Admittedly, I live inland, hours away from the disaster, and I don’t have an eye-witness account to offer here.  However, this state feels itself as one, unlike New York State, where upstate and downstate are constantly at war.  So why have I yet to see a single sign that demands anything, anything at all, related to this disaster?

I have a few ideas why it may be that they have not responded with the elan I might have expected (or desired).  Possible explanations include:

1. Everyone — even The New York Times — hails the posture adopted by Governor Haley Barbour in the wake of this catastrophe as a non-partisan promoter of this state’s industry.  Barbour is a Republican with ambitions, and he is habitually criticized by the Left for having his priorities wrong regarding state expenditures, for adopting policies that disenfranchise the poorest Mississippians, but here, in this instance, I hear little criticism locally on the Left of the Governor’s actions.  The people generally think that the state government is on the right side of this question.
2. The fishing industry on the Gulf had dwindled to a shadow of its former self already for reasons wholly unrelated to this disaster.  Inland operations — cat fish and craw fish farming — are more common and profitable sources of fish these days in Mississippi.
3. While  I doubt that many people on the Right around here would say so, Obama’s insistence that BP put 20 billion in escrow over time to address claims against the company, coupled with BP’s grudging but voluntary participation in said escrow fund, has put people’s minds at ease regarding the immediate needs of those most affected by the spill.  On right-wing local radio, I heard a whining complaint about Obama demanding this from BP, but the speakers were quick to point out that BP was honoring the government’s request without seizure of their assets.  They apparently like it when corporations volunteer for things.
4. People around here believe that God is on their side.  They believe that God is going to see them individually and collectively through whatever they have to face.  This is not a posture that generally engenders mass demonstrations in the streets of the capitol.
5. The capitol itself is not very big.  Unlike Paris or New York, a crowd would hardly pour into any grand town square and overflow.  There are more people living in the Brooklyn than the whole state.  A demonstration would be smaller necessarily than the ones I have seen in the past.
6. These folks recently survived Katrina.  Whatever BP’s destruction has wrought, it feels less catastrophic than the last disaster.
7. The people in Mississippi realize that the oil industry is one of the larger employers of people locally.  Even though BP’s practices were negligent, not the norm, many people in the oil industry realize that an accident could conceivably  happen at the company for which they work, too.  Everyone in Mississippi benefits to some degree from the revenue the oil industry generates.  Hence, the posture of the oil-company-demonizing environmentalist feels like something that local people cannot afford.
8. Among employers in Mississippi, there are a large number of foreign companies.  This state provides some of the cheapest manufacturing labor in the country, and many foreign companies build factories here.  Hence, the foreignness of British Petroleum feels familiar, not like an attack by foreigners off the coast.
9. People in Mississippi consider shouting bad manners.  They consider complaining bad manners.  They have good manners, on the whole.
10. The media has been prevented in certain instances, from what I have heard through the grapevine, from going on certain beaches with cameras, from taking certain photographs, and perhaps, despite the non-stop media blitz, they have not seen the image — the girl running while napalm burns her, the firemen, policemen, and EMT workers raising the flag in the rubble — that will provoke a greater outrage.  However, the people have eyes to see for themselves.  This is local news.

Another idea that I have considered but rejected — perhaps the passivity of the people of Mississippi regarding this matter has more to do with the time in which we live, where people are more likely to join groups on Facebook than to march down the street, but then I think that no — that doesn’t make sense.  Martin Luther King, when he was visiting another Gulf state, Alabama, while he sat in Birmingham Jail wrote that the argument that a particular time has come or has not come yet for justice is false, that time itself is neutral, that people make the time do whatever they will make it do.  Hence this quiet, which I do not believe to be some sort of calm before a storm, remains mysterious to me.

Maybe it’s just too hot outside to demonstrate.

Foreigners

I'm so foreign around here I might as well dress like a Bollywood bride

Like Barak Obama, I was born in the United States.

That said — I wonder when my neighbors are going to start clamoring for my birth certificate, because I am as oddball for the locals, it seems, as if I were born in Outer Flapjackistan.

Perhaps they have a point.  After all, geographically speaking, I am from an island off the coast of North America, not somewhere squarely in the middle of it.  I did live overseas for a  total of five years of my life.  I speak one foreign language absolutely fluently, one quite conversantly, and a few others in sort of an esperanto conversancy.  I cook foreign foods.  I drink foreign drinks.  I believe in a number of things that Fox News would categorize as socialism but which the foreigners in Europe would find rather conservative and capitalist, and — here’s where they might be right — I believe the foreign press over Fox News.  I therefore must be the worst kind of foreigner, that would  be the kind that thinks she is an American just because she was born here and believes in, say, Miranda Rights.

I mean, who is this Miranda chick,  anyway, and since when does she get special rights?

Do I sound paranoid?  Just because I’m paranoid doesn’t mean I’m wrong.

Last night, at church, I joined a women’s ministry and was asked to fill out a form about my likes and dislikes.  I said my favorite snack food was babaganoush, and the group leader asked if I was from the United States, and she wasn’t kidding.

There’s a woman down South who calls me, “Miss International,” and bizarrely, she means that as an insult.  She should just add the word “fabulous” to the insult and complete the character assassination!

Someone I met told me she is frightened to go to our local Walmart at night by herself because one time she was walking in the housewares section and she heard three Spanish-speaking men behind her, and she was quite certain that they were talking in secret behind her back about how to rob her.

“Maybe they were just looking at pot holders,” I offered.

You see?  Only a foreigner would say something like that!

When I attend group meetings here, occasionally people tell me that they have, “enjoyed” me, even though I am just part of a larger group discussion.  It’s nice.  It’s also a little odd.  I’m not at all offended, but it means I’m different in ways that they notice and I don’t.

I lived as an actual foreigner in an actual foreign country.  I often was asked to explain my people and my government to others.  I find myself sometimes having similar conversations around here.

I saw a  doctor yesterday.  He told me he was against Obamacare because men between 18 and 40 don’t need health insurance, he claimed.  What about AIDS,  I asked, recalling a number of young men I knew who died from it.

“We don’t have that here,”  he told me.

Oh.

I have landed on your planet, Mississippi.  Put down your pot holders and keep your hands where I can see them.  Take me to your leader.  I would tell you I come in peace but I guess you wouldn’t believe me.

After all, I like babaganoush.  That must make me a member of Al Queda.

The questionable etymology of “Who Dat”

I write this as someone who could not care less who wins the Superbowl. The Superbowl is an instance of American culture at its most commercial, shallow, and it only partially sublimates its violence.  Superbowl Sunday is the number one day of the year where American women call domestic violence hotlines.  Men get drunk, beat up their women after the game,  so excuse me if I don’t feel particularly like celebrating.

That said, living as I do on the very border of Mississippi and Louisiana, you may well imagine that I have heard a few exclamations of “Who Dat Dere Gonna Beat Dem Saints?”

The phrase comes from a song recorded by an African-American New Orleans Jazz band and singer.  The phraseology, one of African-American diction particular to the black working class of New Orleans, caught on.  No one but Chicago Cubs fans can understand the devotion of certain New Orleans Saints fans throughout multiple seasons of defeat.  They have never won a Superbowl before, but the song, “Who dat” was sung over and over again, season after season, by certain die-hard fans — black and white.

For a person from the Northeast, the first listen to “Who Dat” might potentially appear to be part of the Aunt-Jemima-and-Sambo-style charictures demeaning to people of color that the deep south has tolerated for generations, often seeming oblivious to their symbolism and negative messages.  This is, after all, a region that keeps debating the proper place of the Confederate flag as a symbol within state flags.  To a Northeasterner, it seems like debating where the swastika belongs on the current German flag as a sign of its heritage.  I remember an article I read in the early 1990s in The Village Voice where a reporter attending an event hosted by the Christian Coalition involved the singing of the “Who Dat” song — in reference to Christian sainthood — and one of the coalition’s PR people rushed over to her to tell her that “Who Dat”‘s diction was racially neutral.  She wrote something in her article like, “Yeah, right!”  According to Wikipedia, “Who Dat” songs — songs with lyrics that start with “Who Dat?” and have a response like, “Who dat who say who dat?” originated in minstrel shows, notorious spectacles of American racism played by white men in black face.  How could “Who Dat” in the Saints fight song have no racial implications?

However, “Who Dat” seems to have what recording executives call crossover appeal.  It is true that I occasionally here white people sounding something, not exactly, like that when they speak.  I see signs around me, a four-hour drive to New Orleans, with the words, “Who Dat” painted on them by hand.  People around here are excited about the game tomorrow.  They have needed a reason to be excited for some time.  While Vicksburg was not devastated by Hurricane Katrina, the whole region has felt the aftermath of the storm’s terrible havoc.   In numerous towns in Mississippi, historical landmarks were decimated, to say nothing of the horrible devastation of people’s homes.  Lots of refugees from the storm moved inland and slightly north — meaning not far from here.  After having driven through New Orleans less than a year ago, and having seen whole neighborhoods still standing but condemned — a red “X” painted on each of the houses to indicate that it was still not safe even to climb the front steps — I dare say that people have a right to get excited about a pointless and commercialized ritual where they might have something to brag about.

For the last three Sundays, our pastor has brought a football with him to the pulpit.  He uses football metaphors to describe things like, “how to receive from God,” where the football is the blessing and God is the quarterback.  No one around here has ever thought, it seems, that football metaphors smacked even subtly of impiety, as football is important stuff to the people of Mississippi  — native son Minnesota quarterback Brett Favre is probably the most celebrated celebrity in the whole state, equivalent to J-Lo and Derek Jeter combined for the Bronx.  Yet  I look from pew to pew and see how happy people are, and I recognize that some people smiling haven’t had much to smile about for a while.  Unlike New Yorkers, I note that people suffer around here in silence.  New Yorkers like to mouth off.  Here, they just wait for an excuse — like a football game — to scream.

The propagation of “Who Dat” as a fight song in no way challenged preconceived notions about intellectual capacity of African-Amerricans.   “Who Dat” is not a Barak Obama speech.  That said, football is not an exercise in intellectual capacity.  Americans distrust egg-heads, even though eggs are shaped a bit  like footballs.  In the Northeast, these days, we have examples of white people adopting the songs of the urban working class and underclass African-Americans.  Any teenage white boy in high school chanting back the rap of Fifty Cent is doing that, largely oblivious to the racial implications of what he’s doing.  I have heard white boys in Brooklyn call each other the N-word.  To them, it means “friend” in a street-friendly manner.

So with a black Harvard-educated president and a bunch of white street thugs calling themselves the “N” word, perhaps the nation is ready for a chorus of  “Who Dat.”  Perhaps the people of the gulf states have had enough trouble without  a carpet bagger like me questioning their intentions here.  People are happy around me, even though the ritual that excites them baffles me.  We all need all the reasons to celebrate that we can find.  There is even a new hybrid “Who Dat” Saints fight song that seems to be a hybrid of African-American and Cajun dialect.  It’s called, “In Da Supabeauxl” by Misty and the Moonpie Kings.  A complex and hybridized view would be all inclusive, making fun of no group, except, possibly, the Colts, who are, I am told, going down.   So long live the strange gumbo of this song and its questionable etymology.   Who dat?  Apparently all of us, all of us are we dat say who dat.