Dry Ice Factory

"Great. Two thousand years of conspiracy and what do we get? A mountain in Montana.

Nice work, Elders."

-- Comment by PCash about Jew Mountain in a thread about "Awesome Racist Geography" at TNC's joint. (Although I also loved TStacy: 'Oh, no. In fact, and stop me if this is going too far, I'm imagining an action movie based on the 2012 election when Obama says to Perry, "I got your Niggerhead right here," before headbutting him across the stage.')

Ta-Nehisi Coates has been documenting the evolution of Virginia's Republican governor, Bob McDonnell, who since provoking controversy last year by promoting Confederate History Month (which also provoked a string of brilliant posts by Coates about Civil War history from the perspective of slaves and freedmen), has made a real effort to turn himself around on the issue. TNC wrote a few days ago about the latest sign of this: "Virginia will preserve a Richmond burial ground that holds the graves of slaves and free blacks from the 18th and 19th centuries in time for the 150th anniversary of the Civil War next year." TNC explains why it's a big deal that this is happening in Virginia.

As usual, comments on this post are also worth reading. Two of my favorites:

Plummeting_Sloath: 'I should say though, Gov. McDonnell, if you're going to go fix up some Richmond black landmarks, could you please fix the Arthur Ashe monument so it doesn't look like he's beating a bunch of children to death with a tennis racket?'

sansculottes: 'Wasn't it about ten or twelve years ago they found a centuries-old slave cemetery underneath Wall Street in NY? I remember thinking the headline should be "Historians excavate metaphor."'

On an even lighter note, again literally, if there are any white folks out there with the surname "Smack," hailing from Worcester Country send a kite. Likely, I picked tobacco for you once. But I'm not mad. Much. Cousin.

-- Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Cablinasian in Us All

We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we still creep at horse and buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, "Wait." But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six year old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five year old son who is asking: "Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?"; when you take a cross county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading "white" and "colored"; when your first name becomes "nigger," your middle name becomes "boy" (however old you are) and your last name becomes "John," and your wife and mother are never given the respected title "Mrs."; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodiness"--then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience. You express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws. This is certainly a legitimate concern. Since we so diligently urge people to obey the Supreme Court's decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in the public schools, at first glance it may seem rather paradoxical for us consciously to break laws. One may well ask: "How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?" The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that "an unjust law is no law at all."

-- Martin Luther King Jr, "Letter from a Birmingham Jail," 16 April 1963

When you have a few minutes, it's worth taking a look at Ta-Nehisi Coates's long post, "The Big Machine," which is a meditation on systems, including the fast food system and American white supremacy. As he has done a lot recently, he gets into Civil War history, and I learned something new again. This time I learned about George Henry Thomas -- the son of a Virginia slaveholder who fought on the side of the North, destroyed the Army of Tennessee in 1864, and receded in national memory while the likes of Stonewall Jackson became legendary.

As Pesto says in the comments, "Systems resist change, and one way they do that is by adapting to certain kinds of resistance." Which isn't to say that resistance is futile, but that as TNC says about white supremacy, "We should be humbled by the clear evidence that we don't really understand what we defeated, how we did it, or how its legacy haunts us today."

I'm with the brigade who hates Colin Powell for his despicable presentation before the UN in the lead-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, but this just in from my mother:

[Your father] held his nose and voted for Obama after listening to Colin Powell. He quickly mailed it before he could change his mind and had a bit of a problem walking upright for awhile. But he seems to have evened out again. Good he voted before Palin announced Obama is communistic.

This is in Oregon, where Obama was going to win anyway, but still. First Democratic candidate for President my father has voted for since LBJ in 1964. You connect the dots.

The neighbor and I went to a community meeting last night concerning the city's proposals for regulating parking in Fremont. This would include putting 2-hour meters in the business district, 10-hour meters on some residential streets, and turning other residential streets, including the one I live on, into Restricted Parking Zones with permits for residents and guests. I'm sorry to see it get to this point, but it certainly would make life easier for us during High Festival days like the Solstice Parade and Fourth of July, when we don't dare drive away from the house because we'd never find parking when we got back. I'm not sure I completely understand the 10-hour metered parking concept, although it seems to have to do with people who work in the neighborhood but don't live there. There was quite a bit of talk about how to manage the people driving into Fremont to drink in the evenings. I had to laugh at the woman who was concerned that this would force them to ride the bus, and she knew she wouldn't want to be on a bus with drunk people.

Afterwards, I caught Michelle Obama's speech at the Democratic convention, starting somewhere in the middle. I got the chills again from the sense of history in the making. As impatient as I get with people who sniff about "the cult of Obama," it's undeniable that there's a symbolic value to the prospect of putting the Obamas in the White House that functions on a pretty deep, non-rational level. That symbolic value isn't simple and is potentially explosive in any number of directions, some of which will no doubt be ugly.

On that symbolic level, I thought Michelle Obama did a great job of just standing in the national spotlight and projecting intelligence, confidence, and charm. It was a little disorienting afterwards to hear a couple of white talking heads on CNN gabbling about how the Obamas have to deal with the fact that they look different from us, and therefore have to convince us that they share our values. Could they have been any more blatantly racist? I mean, yes, of course they could. But the assumptions behind that usage of "we" were pretty mind-blowing. Apparently "we" are all white, and "we" are all scared of people who look different. What must it be like for Donna Brazile to sit there with these people, playing "them" to their "we"? It's one of the reasons that TV news is pretty much worthless to me. Too many puffed up bloviating idiots who do not represent me or *my* values. Bah.

Nice article about Rosa Parks on Slate by Diane McWhorter. I am shamefully ignorant about the history of the US civil rights movement, but whenever I read a little about it or watch a documentary (i.e., the amazing Eyes on the Prize, which I saw years ago), I get the chills that come with awe. Since I'm apparently going to live out my adult life in an extended period of retrenchment, it's heartening to read about such powerful tides of change for the better in the past. One of the nice things about this short article is that it mentions factional disputes within the movement. It's good to be reminded that human squabbling and resentment was involved even at the heart of such a social sea change. Elsewhere I've been reminded that Rosa Parks was not comfortable on the public stage, was not a larger-than-life personality, and yet her small gesture of defiance, arrived at after years of communal work and thought on the problem of segregation, played an enormous part in the complex process of making history. The article quotes Martin Luther King: Rosa Parks "had been tracked down by the zeitgeist —- the spirit of the time." It's enough to give you the chills.