The N-word

There’s been a small uproar recently about New South Press’ decision to publish a heavily revised edition of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. Long story short, “Injun Joe” will become “Indian Joe” and “nigger” will become “slave.” I’ve got a lot of problems with this, not least of which is a sanitizing of American history on par with the most egregious acts of the Texas School Board, but I’ll save my rant against mucking about with Twain for another day. What I want to talk about today is “the N-word.”

This cowardly little phrase has crept into the English language until every article or television news report dealing with the use of the word nigger begins to sound like the titillated exposition of an 8 year old showing how good he is by using cute euphemisms instead of swearing while simultaneously demonstrating a thorough knowledge of forbidden language. How far off is a report of protesters “allegedly shouting the N-word at members of the Black Caucus” from “Sally said the S-word Mommy, an’ wanted me to say it too, but I would never, ever say the S-word *giggle*?”

I believe the late, great George Carlin said it best:

“I don't like words that hide the truth. I don't like words that conceal reality. I don't like euphemisms, or euphemistic language. And American English is loaded with euphemisms. Cause Americans have a lot of trouble dealing with reality. Americans have trouble facing the truth, so they invent a kind of soft language to protect themselves from it, and it gets worse with every generation. For some reason, it just keeps getting worse.”

The word nigger is as American as apple pie. It just represents the side of America that reeks of rotting blood and horror. Nigger represents a half millennium of slavery and brutal oppression followed by a hundred years of Jim Crow laws and lynchings, followed by forty-five more years of crawlingly slow progress against ideas about race which are demonstrably false, but which remain ingrained even in the best of us at times. I could write this paragraph in the blood of murdered children, and it would still not begin to express the history borne by the word nigger, and our response to this history, our method of dealing with it, is to cover it up with a pretty quilt and spray some Febreze around. To say “the N-word” and then congratulate ourselves on how enlightened we’ve become.

Neither individuals nor nations can effectively deal with real problems by ignoring them or dressing them up or rewriting history. Racism in America is deep-rooted and still blooming. If we really want to put an end to it, we must begin by taking a deep breath and turning to face the problem directly. We need to start talking about “nigger” and not talking around “the N-word.”

And So it Begins...

Well Readers Mine, it’s time for the Great Buffy Rewatch of 2011 to begin. Starting tonight, and continuing every Tuesday night in 2011, Nikki Stafford will host a diverse group of writers on her blog Nick at Nite as we work our way through the seven televised seasons of Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer. On average, three episodes a week will be covered, in order, beginning tonight with Nikki her own self covering the first three episodes of season one: “Welcome to the Hellmouth,” “The Harvest,” and “The Witch.”

If you’re already a Buffy fan, it’s a great excuse to revisit the show and remember why we love it so. If you’ve never seen the show, this is the perfect opportunity to experience something amazing, while also getting pithy comments and commentary from some of the funniest, smartest, and pun-tastic writers on the internet. You’ll also be introduced to these writers and their work, so you might just find some new reasons to increase the size of your library. So grab your Netflix queue or your DVDs, some popcorn, and your favorite snuggle-buddy, and settle in for quality television that both takes names and kicks ass.

Vale MMX! Ave MMXI!

It has come to my attention that it is apparently incumbent upon me as a blogger to ruminate on the year just past and on the one just begun. Let me tell you, 2010 is going to be hard to top. I got married. I earned an Associate’s Degree and began the last two years of study for a Bachelor’s. I presented my first paper at an international academic conference, and had that paper accepted for publication in a reviewed journal. I moved – three times. I spent five days in the hospital with a dodgy heart, and afterward began to learn how to live with more than a little anxiety about it. I made some incredible new friends, and wrote quite a lot. So much happened in 2010 that, even though most of it was really good stuff, my score on the Holmes and Rahe stress scale taken at the end of the year placed me in the “Holy-Shit-Your-Head- Is-Gonna-Explode-Any-Second” category. Still, I was usually having too much fun to realize how stressed out I should have been, and I’m currently writing this in the home I share with a brilliant, beautiful, sexy, and (for the moment) redheaded woman who turns out love me and to be the Girl of My Dreams, so I’m putting 2010 pretty much at the top of my personal “Best Years Ever” list.

And 2011? Well, that remains to be seen, doesn’t it, Readers Mine? Oh, I plan to knock out most of the work on that Bachelor’s Degree I mentioned earlier, and present a paper or two here and there, as well as participate in the Great Buffy Rewatch of 2011, and to be writing from the same house with the same loving woman puttering about, and hopefully the two of us will be stronger for another year of love and life. So much for my plans, but as the poet has it,

“The best laid schemes o’ Mice and Men

Gang aft agley,

An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,

For promis’d joy!”

So in 2011, I’ll pray. For the courage, wisdom, strength, and serenity to meet whatever may come, be it joy or grief. To be able to think about someone else more often than I do of myself, and to be an agent for the good rather than a man of evil. For my shit to hold together when it hits the fan, and to hold my tongue lest I should be the one who throws it. To love well, and be loved well in return, and to be okay in sunshine or storm. Most of all, I’ll pray to remember that every day is a new year, one day at a time, and that I don’t have to spend the days alone, even when I’m all by myself.

Ave Minerva!

Purga mentem. Purga corpus. Purga animum.

Ita est!

Amen.

Legends of Our Time

I’ve just finished reading The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade by Peter Carroll. The book tells the tales of some of the 2800 Americans who volunteered to fight in Spain against the fascist revolt led by General Francisco Franco during the Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939. Carroll, who served as official historian for the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade (VALB) organization, had access to a great deal of source material, some of it previously unpublished, and took advantage of the opening of Soviet archives in the 1990s to examine materials long unavailable to historians. His focus is unique, detailing the lives and struggles of the men and women involved during, but also before and after their service in the Spanish Civil War. What emerges is a collection of biographical vignettes, lives in brief, which also serve to reveal the history of the radical movements in the United States from the Great Depression to Gulf War I.

Carroll is, of course, dealing with a limited sample, primarily composed of the people who remained politically active or who returned to such activism after a period of time, and the reader is well advised to remember that perhaps the majority of Spanish Civil War veterans who returned to the US (some 930 died in Spain), became depoliticized and often unconcerned with VALB or other organizations. It is well too to remember what I consider to be perhaps the most fascinating element of the late 1920s through the mid 1940s: the astonishing belief in the power of ideology and political systems to change the world for the better. The Great Depression seemed to reveal a fatal weakness in the traditional Western capitalist system, and most national political systems appeared to be incapable of ameliorating the suffering of their citizens. People began to look for alternative systems, and found them in the radical movements of the Left and Right.

What is difficult for the modern American reader to understand is the depth of belief among those involved in these radical movements, and the unity of purpose imposed by socialist, communist, and fascist party structures. The political cynicism that is so common today was often wholly absent among the primarily working-class followers of the radical movements. These men and women saw communism or fascism as solutions to the problems of their nations and the world, and truly believed that these political systems would really work, if everyone just got behind them. They were possessed of a socio-political naivety that is almost incomprehensible to the modern reader. And their views were widely held. Think about it: when was the last time you heard of 2800 Americans volunteering to go and fight in a war that the US government actively avoided involvement in? When was the last time you read about American citizens defying the State Department to travel across the Atlantic and sneak into a country in order to fight against a cause that they found abominable?

Readers Mine, between 1936 and 1939, elements of the armies and air forces of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy deployed in Spain on the side of their fellow fascist Franco, while the US, UK, and France held to neutrality laws that insured that the forces of the legally and democratically elected republican government of Spain would not receive the support and weapons necessary to defeat these fascist forces that in less than four years would plunge the world into the largest, most horrific conflict in human history. Arrayed against these forces was a small Spanish Republican Army, bolstered by International Brigades composed largely of radical leftists, with some support from the Soviet Union. And in the XV International Brigade were 2800 Americans, many of them communists, who chose to stand up to Hitler and Mussolini and Franco when their government would not, because they believed that people working together could make a better world than dictators, and they were willing to put their very lives where their mouths were.

Oh, I’m not saying that the American Communist Party and the Lincoln Brigadiers were angels. Their party line came from Moscow and Stalin more often than not, and duplicity and secrecy were standard operating procedure in party politics, but the individuals who risked everything to fight in Spain by and large did so because they truly believed that it was the right thing to do, because the Spanish people should be allowed to determine their own fate and their own government. They were naive, and young, and they were defeated, coming home to take up their lives again, many fighting bravely in World War Two in the US Armed Forces, only to face the terrific persecution of the Second Red Scare and McCarthyism, and eventually to emerge as the elder statesmen of the protest movement, working for the Civil Right Movement and protesting the Vietnam War. They are remarkable people, though now all but passed from the earth. They will not pass from memory though. In the words of La Pasionaria, Dolores Ibarruri, in her farewell address to the survivors of the Lincoln Brigade in 1938:

“You can go with pride. You are history. You are legend.”

Other Decembers

There’s a rest stop at mile marker 100 on I-85 southbound in North Carolina, roughly between the towns of Thomasville and Lexington. Once upon a time these were furniture factory towns turning out tons of beautiful wood pieces every year. People came from across the country to shop the outlets and factory stores for everything from end-tables to bedroom suites, and enjoyed the local BBQ in bustling Southern downtowns. Today most of the factories and outlets are deserted, and there are more empty storefronts than not. Like a lot of industry in North Carolina, furniture making has gone elsewhere, or gone so upscale that you don’t need many people to produce the few pieces you sell every year.

But back to the rest stop, where you can stretch your legs, grab a Coke and some Cool Ranch Doritos, use the facilities, and pop your back after a few hours on the road. While you’re there, you can also visit the North Carolina Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Yes, Readers Mine, at the rest stop. Just a little bit beyond the bathrooms and vending kiosk, there’s a brick walkway leading down in a series of broad steps to a kind of tumulus of banked earth formed into a grass-covered toroid, open at one end. Here there is a low stone dais over-flown by the national, state and POW/MIA flags:

“Dedicated to the 216,000 North Carolinians who served and the over 1600 who were killed or missing in the Vietnam War.”

I was there on a chilly fall day, when most of the leaves had already blown off the trees, and the wind was enough to make me turn up the collar on my pea-coat and pull my watch cap down over my ears. It was mid-afternoon, and the rest stop was moderately busy, but there wasn’t a soul in the memorial. Inside the earthen walls, the memorial is a great circle with a brick walkway running around the circumference, small brick benches placed here and there and a central field of grass already turning yellow-brown in preparation for winter. At the far side of the enclosure from the entrance is a brick wall, maybe 10 feet high, and inscribed on the inside bricks of this wall are some 1620 names, arranged alphabetically. At my feet as I stood before the wall were more bricks, these inscribed with the names of the 100 counties of North Carolina, all of which had sent native sons and daughters to war.

It wasn’t exactly quiet there – I-85 was just a couple of hundred yards away – but the sounds of the interstate and of kids released from cars to expend some of their built up energy was muted by the earthen walls. About as peaceful as you’re going to get in such a setting. I found out later that the land for the memorial had been donated by the state’s Department of Transportation, which went some way towards explaining the location. Plus, I’m sure, the same state crews who take care of the rest stop also tend to the memorial grounds, so the memorial may well be more sustainable over the long run than others. Still. An interstate rest stop. Oh, there’s a big statue-memorial in the state capital, Raleigh, but this is the official state memorial. At a rest stop.

I’m really not one to get overly emotional at memorials (though I defy anyone to make the long walk down the length of Maya Yeng Lin’s national Vietnam memorial in Washington, D.C. and not be moved), but I think it’s good that there are such places. Good to remember those who served and those who died or disappeared, perhaps especially so in the days before the all-volunteer military and in a war that seems so horrifically pointless. I admit I’m a bit irked at the placement of this memorial. It seems… disrespectful somehow. I could be wrong. In fact, being at a rest stop on a major North-South route may well bring the memorial more visitors than it would get otherwise. Probably does, as a matter of fact.

I’d like to think that the reality would be different though, that people would want to travel some distance to visit the memorial, take the time to make a deliberate trip and stand before the wall, read some of the names. I’d like to think that we’re better than we are, and that we’d make a point of remembering and, yes, honoring the people whose names are on those bricks, and all the rest who, thank God, don’t have to be listed on bricks or in polished black stone because they made it back home alive. That maybe we’d take a minute to ponder what causes or interests are really worth 1620 lives, and dedicate ourselves to the proposition that such bloody currency only be spent with the greatest reluctance, most meticulous care, and deepest grief.

In December of 1968, there were 540,000 American soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines deployed in Vietnam. By the time the last serviceman was withdrawn in 1975, some 58,000 Americans had died there.

To absent friends, past and present.

Good luck, and Godspeed.

Buffy's Been Good To Me

Well, after working hard for two whole weeks, my good intentions here were shot to hell for a solid month and more. What can I say: the end of the semester is a dumb time to try to develop a new weekly writing habit. However, there’s some good motivation for developing this habit in the coming months, so I’d better get started.

First off, it’s my great pleasure to announce that I have been asked to take part in The Great Buffy Re -Watch of 2011. To sum the idea up, every Tuesday in 2011, the lovely, talented, but sadly, Canadian Nikki Stafford will host various guest writers to blog on an average of three episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The pool of talent Nikki has put together is really impressive (okay, besides relative unknowns like me and this English bloke at a pub), and includes scholar-fans/fan-scholars from Slayage and the Whedon Studies Association, writers on sports, popular culture, feminism, life, the universe, and everything. There will be single writer posts and team-efforts, including one by Mockingbird and me in August. Long time readers of this blog (all three of you) will already know about the handy-dandy link to Nik at Nite under “Solomon’s Blogs” at left, and I’ve just told everyone else about it. Use it and grab your Buffy DVDs or redo your Netflix queue and join in on the fun.

In other news, it seems I’m to be published! Watcher Junior: the Undergraduate Journal of Buffy Studies, has graciously accepted my essay “’We Just Declared War’: Buffy as General” for publication next year. This, Readers Mine, is the time on Sprockets when we dance! The essay started out as my first presentation at an academic conference and has morphed into my first published work. Kinda makes me wonder what the world’s coming to -- ah, bullshit -- I worked hard on that piece, had a blast every step of the way, and hell yeah it’s getting published!

Finally, on the home front, I’m wrapping up the semester with a pleasing average, and Mock’ and I have gotten the tree up and the various boxes of Christmas décor down from the attic, and she is merrily distributing them about the nest. I’ve got to hunt down our Christmas duck, though I’m considering trying Cornish game hens this year with a recipe from a book given to us by Librarian Who, and I am looking forward with great longing to actually being home for a month before resuming my academic adventures.

Good year, 2010. Really, really good year.

The Art of the Mental Health Day

One of the keys to being a responsible adult is the careful exercise of the Fuckits.

There is nothing so liberating or relaxing as giving oneself permission to not do something, provided that such permission is not given with too much regularity. My parents called it “declaring a Mental Health Day,” the idea being that, if you are in a position where it is possible to do so, sometimes the best thing you can do for yourself is to take a day off. Like all super powers, the ability to declare a Mental Health Day comes with great responsibilities, and it is vital to insure that these responsibilities are met before taking action.

First, always remember that taking too many Mental Health Days can lead to the loss of your powers and transformation from “hardworking guy who deserves a break”, to “that loser over there.” Being a productive member of society and involved in the real world is a good thing, despite the inherent element of pain-in-the-assness that comes with it. The point of the Mental Health Day is to regroup and recharge by taking a short break, so that you can return to the workaday world in a state of mind conducive to not strangling the witless sons-of-bitches you have to deal with every day. Hence, Mental Health Day, rather than Mental Health Month. Also, bear in mind that a Mental Health Day cannot be part of previously scheduled vacation time, or bank holiday, or long weekends. We’re not talking about carefully saved-for and planned time off here, Readers Mine; we’re talking about playing hooky. It can, however, be the day before your scheduled break when you say “Hey, there’s no reason I can’t take today off and go ahead and head down to the beach early!” Or the extra day spent at the beach when you decide it’s just going to be too nice to leave tomorrow and what the hell, you can afford it, so fuckit. Both good examples of the Mental Health Day.

Now, one of the most important things to remember when considering the declaration of a Mental Health Day is to not fuck over someone else when you do it. Life in the real world is comprised largely of relationships with other people which are as necessary to your continued existence and basic sanity as they are for everyone else. Needlessly damaging these relationships is not just counterproductive, it’s stupid. So remember the Social Contract: Don’t Be A Dick, Be A Dude. One of the prerequisites for a Mental Health Day is making sure that you’re not going to flush someone else’s day down the crapper by laying out. Often, this can be accomplished by a simple phone call or e-mail the day before: “Say, Bob, we’ve finished up the Jones Account nicely, so I’m thinking about fucking off tomorrow if that won’t put you in a bind.” If Bob comes back with a reminder about your joint presentation the next day, or that the staff meeting has suddenly become mandatory, don’t be a dick, be a dude and plan to come to work. If Bob says that it’s no problem, take him at his word and don’t sweat it, it’s probably a good time for a Mental Health Day.

You must also be sure that your own shit is together before declaring a Mental Health Day. If you’ve just received a “D” on your last Western Civilization exam, most likely you are not in a position to declare a Mental Health Day, as you’ve probably taken a few too many already, so suck it up and get your ass to class. If, on the other hand, you’re averaging high “A’s” across the board, and there’s not an exam or entirely new concept coming your way, take a fucking break, Poindexter, you deserve it. It can thus be seen that another vital prerequisite for declaring a Mental Health Day is consistently meeting your responsibilities daily, and even working a little harder in order to get ahead so that, after a Mental Health Day, you’re not at all behind. Remember this is supposed to be a reward for all of that grown-up stuff you’ve been doing day after day after day, and so it only really works, only really gives you that slightly naughty Tom Sawyer with a fishin’ pole feeling, if you’re actually playing hooky from a responsible life.

Finally, Mental Health Days are not about catching up in other areas of your life. Don’t clean the house, don’t wash the damn dog, don’t grade papers, or put together schedules in Excel. Take the fuckin’ day, man! Stay up late and sleep in. Grab your honey and make the beast with two backs in the middle of the afternoon. Go to the beach early, read a novel instead of primary source documents from the Late Roman Republic. Spend the day in pajamas or hiking somewhere beautiful. Go see a matinee, or that art exhibit you’ve been meaning to get to. Have a cappuccino at a coffee-house and make fun of the pseudo-Beats writing in their hand-made journals with their Mont Blancs. Lay in beer and nachos and spend some quality time with ESPN, whatever fires your phasers, just get your head into a different space and play!

We all have a vested interest in our collective sanity, and the proper and careful declaration of Mental Health Days is a valuable tool in the continuing effort to avoid going completely batshit.

Use your power wisely, Grasshoppers.

By the way, I’m going to the beach with Mockingbird tomorrow, so I won’t be in. Have a good one!