Kluck 'em...

Kluckers

During the 1950's, in Burke, Virginia, school was dismissed on certain days so the kids could watch the Klan, along with the Daughters of The White Camellia parade down the middle of town. It was a big parade too. My mother taught school there and would tell us about it at dinner, her eyes the size of saucers. She knew that the parents of her students were Klansmen, although she didn't know how many. She lasted a year at that job as I recall, and often cried. But Burke was then known as a steamy little backwater, one where Southern-style barbarism was in full flower.

I've thought of this during the past few days, after reading about various Republican shenanigans during the debate on Obama's stimulus package. Thing is, there aren't many moderate Republicans in Congress any more, so we're down to the nut-jobs who survived the '06 elections, weren't indicted or jailed, and didn't retire to spend that vaunted time with their families. These bottom of the barrel Republicans have done nothing but obstruct critical legislation that's desperately needed to tackle this financial morass. To add on bitter insult, they are proposing cuts to childhood nutrition programs, Head Start, and food stamps among other programs, most of them benefiting women and children. That the Republicans have focused on such policies bespeaks a nasty contempt for our societal welfare.

So why is anyone still listening to them? Somewhere along the line, probably due to the Jerry Springer show, we decided that it was only fair "to listen to the other side". Except these guys aren't "the other side". They're extremists and their sell-by date was up in 1963. I propose that they be treated the way we'd treat any extremist hate group. Or used to treat them, I hasten to say. Now thugs, Nazis, racists, and David Duke can all be pretty sure of a spot on the nightly news, should they desire it.

Back in the day, Klansmen marched openly in the streets, sometimes holding the hands of their little Klanettes. Racists babbled about mud people and niggers; murders were not unknown. Thugs showed up at schools with ax handles to prevent six year old black kids from enrolling. And while attitudes are not quite as, um, blatant as they once were, I can't see that much has changed. The same hatred, cruelty, and callous disregard are in full flower among certain savages.

What has changed is the media's notional perception that fringe groups represent any sort of normalcy.

They do not. The lunatics among us are atavistic left-overs from a bygone age. They deserve only our studied indifference, our silence, and our revulsion.

These scrapings from the GOP barrel should be ignored by decent people, just as decent people once ignored the Klan.

So I say, Kluck 'em. It's time to pass the whole damned package now.

Justice will be sought...

That blindfolded lady

Dear President Obama,

Congratulations on the gig. I always thought you'd get it, even when Hillary people were on my neck, biting hard. Frankly, I was skewing that way myself for a while, because I didn't think you had the experience. Still, I knew you had the attitude and here in America, we like our presidents to have some street smarts. Or some kind of smarts, which makes the past eight years a little puzzling.

I know you're very busy now, undoing all that godawful stuff the Former Occupant and his Merry Band of Thugs engineered, but I need to make a confession. You see, I'm responsible for the whole laundry list. Guantanamo, torture, secret trials, wiretapping, unprovoked acts of war, cherry-picked intelligence, lying to the American people, Abu Graib.

Yeah. That was me, Writer to the Stars.

For quite a while, I didn't think I was on the wrong side. I voted against the Former Occupant, I marched, I wrote letters, I signed petitions, and basically checked out of the whole culture and became a stealth-writer, unwilling to support a rogue regime. I thought I was doing enough, but I knew better. I'm a DC kid, daughter of a government work-a-daddy, a work-a-daddy who did his Ph.D work on the Geneva Conventions. So I can't say I couldn't spot a putsch from the get-go. I knew there had been a coup d'etat, even though there wasn't much about it in The Dallas Morning News.

I'm also a survivor of Watergate, so I remember those hearings. I still recall Barbara Jordon saying, “Why don’t we just take this 17^th century document and put it into a 20^th century shredder?” I'm a little surprised the Former Occupant didn't do that when he had the chance. Maybe someone ought to see if the Constitution's still around. (Could you check on that? Maybe send Rahm or someone? Thanksabunch.)

Even with all that history and me sticking my oar in now and again, the Former Occupant & Co. kept on keeping on, while our country crumbled like a huge stale cookie. Then too, we voted for him once, then turned around and voted for him again. Sure the elections were sketchy, and lots of people were mad about all the shenanigans, but if our country had been in good shape, these bozos wouldn't have lasted five hot minutes. But I didn't do enough, the newspapers didn't do enough, and congress didn't do enough. There were a lot of people writing, screaming, demonstrating, and hollering, but not enough of them.

And then, we got our act together. The voters, that is.

Last time I looked, America was a country of the people, by the people, and for the people. Without us, creeps like the Former Occupant can't get a toe-hold. And this is the real point of my letter, Mr. President. We need to investigate what happened, we need to have trials, and we need to send some bad guys to jail.

Otherwise, we'll always be scared because we'll know it could happen again. I know I'll be scared. This time we pulled it out but we might not be able to again. While my thoughts are often dark ones, that's a thought too black to bear. Then there's my guilt. I'm walking around, still feeling slightly terrible because evil things were done in the name of America. And there's no getting around it, America is me. It says so on a bunch of very old documents: We the people. And I'm the people.

Give it some thought and get back to me.

Thanks a lot,

Writer to the Stars

A bad page...and a new chapter...

K and L Streets, Washington D.C. by Gordon Parks

This is only one of the black tenements that blighted Washington DC in the 1950's. It's located between K and L Streets. The running water and the outhouse are located in the yard. My family used to drive by a similar stretch of slums every day in southwest Washington, on our way to the Officers Club where we went swimming at a military base on the Maryland side. Whenever we reached this part of town, I'd stare out the windows of our Pontiac, see the expressionless black faces looking back. Big men often sprawled on the steps drinking beer, while tiny children played on the sidewalks and their mothers slumped in the doorways.

The DC ghettos fascinated and confused me. I wondered why so few of the buildings had doors. Usually there was only a gaping black hole, like a missing tooth in a mouth. The windows were broken too, some boarded up, but in those steaming summers, most windows just showed the empty sashes, with occasional flashes of shattered glass embedded in their frames. Each entryway had a small, beaten earth yard, often littered with trash and a sleeping dog, and bordered with a low tipping black wrought iron fence. In some of these yards, fragments of colored glass were pressed into the dirt in simple or intricate designs. In the sunset, driving home, the glass would pick up the last bits of light and glittered like jewelry.

This morning, the day after Obama was elected our president, I am trying to remember what I thought about those terrible DC slums. I didn't understand why black people lived there, but I also understood in a dim childish way, that their condition was unhelpable: as ancient as superstition.

Obama has said it's time to turn the page on race. I hope we do, because we've got a book full of ugly pages.

Last night, when I was finally able to sleep, I dreamed about Cutter Bob, my gleaming black cat who died a few months back. I dreamed I spotted him in the house, lying on his side dozing, and that I stroked his coarse bearish fur. He woke up and, as he did in life, he greeted me with his open-mouthed cat grin. I called out to my husband incredulously, Cutter's alive! And in my dream, my husband said matter of factly, Well, of course he is.

You leave the unconscious alone, and it'll grind you out some poetry. This was an Obama dream, I decided on waking. In my mind's eye, for a moment, I envisioned more than one beautiful black cat--one still alive and glittery with promise.

Today, I hope America has, finally, used up its dark hunger for terrible endings.

That one...

Vice is a monster of so frightful mien,
As to be hated needs but to be seen;
Yet seen too oft, familiar with her face,
We first endure, then pity, then embrace.

Alexander Pope, Essay on Man. Epistle ii. Line 217.

So if the Lords of Karma decided my earthly ride had gotten a little, um,...too elitist, and suddenly put me in charge of the McCain campaign, here's what I'd do. I'd slap a couple of strips of duct tape over La Palin's mouth, put some powdered Xanax in McCain's coffee, and force-feed Cindy McCain a cheeseburger. Then I'd thin out the skinhead factor at their rallies by posting a No Shirt, No Screaming rule. If I could do all that, I'm not saying McCain would win, but he might not get the ass-kicking that's surely waiting in the wings.

The problem with the McCain\Palin hate-mongering is just what Pope says. At some point, we all embrace the nightmare. So keep it up and you lose, McCain. Just keep talking about That One, mofo. Keep pointing out his vileness, his terrist social clubbing, his weird high-yeller otherness...and sooner or later the horror movie will no longer scare anyone. In fact, we'll begin to feel sort of furrily comfortable with our ghastliest fear. This truism is utterly predictable. Should the rotten GOP campaign go on long enough, a moment would come when the angriest, most church-bombing, Nazi-saluting, Palin-supporting dumbass would start loving him some Obama. I guarantee.

You see, like an elephant, your own Writer to the Stars has such a memory, she can recall when Psycho first came out. All the newspaper ads noted that a trained nurse! would be stationed in every theater, just in case... Those with weak hearts were cautioned not to attend at all!, at least in Arlington, Virginia c. 1960. Should you melt down completely, an ambulance! would transport you, as you howled, bit and scratched, all the way to a hospital! And now? Norman Bates has taken on the fond, strange-smelling, slightly embarrassing aspect of someone's elderly clocked-out uncle. That one... The one you have to invite for Thanksgiving. The one who mumbles to himself and who gloms the relish tray, then puts all the black olives in his pocket. That one.

This AM, as I was perusing various pix of Medusa, I was innarested to learn that she has come to be seen as a Gorgoneion. That is, as an evil diverting device. According to the classics, just gazing upon her turned men to stone. She was killed by Perseus, who used her head in battle against his enemies, who were promptly changed into enemy quartz. And then her image was transferred to the shield of Athena, a butt-kicking goddess if ever there was one. Most other evil diverting devices, I found out, were reflective, so that when evil peered into them it only saw itself. Is that why Versace used the Medusa as his logo? To deflect possible rock-star and botox-celeb cooties back onto their carriers? Something to think about, but not today.

Today, I'm happy Obama cruised into a classy win on the debate. I'm sorry McCain can't seem to get a grip and is, in fact, becoming a little Norman Batesy himself.

You know who I mean. John McCain.

That one.