BETWEEN THE OLD AND THE NEW

Just about all my life, as far back as I can remember, I've regretted I was not born into a living culture. I came up in American mid-western, post-WW2, working-class, fundamentalist, pop radio and television, a culture that is not a culture. The prairie is a featureless landscape, the essence of nothingness for a kid. I say it is not a culture because it has no center, no center that holds it together. The closest thing to a center is businesses, corporations, the places people work. That we need a source of regular income, work, may be the center. That wasn't enough for me. What a thrill it was tasting my first Cuban food, Pakistani, French, like wow, flavors besides salt and sugar. What could be called culture was largely toxic. Advertising everyplace all the time told me to put aside rational decision making and give myself over to psychological manipulation to act irrationally.  Money, the only valid subject, all else frivolity. I had longings for art, but no one in my extended family, at school or church knew art was anything but a pretty picture of a country scene over the couch. High school had an art class, but they didn't do anything that appealed to me. I didn't know what did appeal to me, but it wasn't what I saw in there. Twelfth grade I discovered the beatniks, Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. Didn't comprehend much I was reading, but it was cool, about the day's youth, cool cats in New York writing beatnik poetry and driving to the west coast with no money. 

Away from home, out on my own, I stayed at my new home in my apartment most of the time reading. Reading was not allowed in the house. Too much mental and emotional chaos in the air. In senior year of high school, I read paperbacks in my car in parking lots. I'd park and read for an hour or so in my own space. Read books like Peyton Place, A Summer Place, The L-Shaped Room, books movies were made from. Splendor In The Grass. It was a time when the best-selling fiction was taking a step closer to life, how we live. In my apartment that was my own, I read as much as I could. Didn't know what was good to read, so I browsed drugstore paperback racks for something that looked like I might like it. After high school, I believe it was 1962, I was twenty, still in the darkness of no culture where art is concerned in my life, I saw Fellini's film, La Dolce Vita. I didn't know what I was seeing, but it told me there was something out there that was miles beyond anything I'd been exposed to. It wasn't much later that synchronicity put in my hand a copy of Albert Camus' The Stranger. My reading retention at the time was not so good, but I got something out of it. It changed the nature of my reading. For the next couple years I read fiction and plays by French existentialist writers. I connected with the existentialists as they spoke for me the way Henry Miller spoke for me. Their writing resonated with my being. They had just emerged from a war of intent to annihilate their existence. I had just emerged from a belief system that attempted to annihilate my existence. I was unable to live with money, television and a vengeful God my highest ideals.

I read Henry Miller with more appreciation today than then, though not the existentialists. In that time, I only knew I liked to read Miller. Now I know why. He's a good writer and he pays attention to all the worlds we live in simultaneously, physical, emotional, mental and spiritual. And he speaks my mind. He understands there is no objective, all is subjective consciousness. Miller, too, was disappointed by absence of culture in middle class America. I found culture for myself in the South, and from there to Southern Appalachian culture. A frustrated longing to read throughout childhood and youth inspired an adult life of reading. This is not a pattern for everybody. It's simply my own. Growing up in absence of culture, I longed to live in a culture and found culture in the South for my adult life. I don't mean like the arts kind of culture, but Southern culture, the Suthunness that is at home from Louisiana to Virginia. I, like many bred and buttered Southerners, have never been in line with Southern politics, the same as I can't take an interest in Kansas politics. Politically, the South is not me, the same as politics in the rest of the country is not me. I pay a little too much attention to history to be pleased that my country has been taken over by a popular fascist coup. German fascism was tremendously popular, Christian, until excesses of white arrogance united the rest of the western world to shut Germany down for half a century. The same will be the American fate. Like the World Trade Center towers, USA is imploding, destroying itself from within. I'm grateful to be of an age that I may not see in this lifetime the rest of the world unite around shutting USA down. Unity tends to require a common enemy. What more self-righteous a common enemy than the arrogant racist Great Satan?

Southern culture is fading parallel with the fading of Spanish moss in live oak trees due to air pollution. The South as a unity is fading due to mind and spirit pollution. Appalachian culture is fading, engulfed by television culture and fast food. The last people of the culture are gone, the people who lived their lives before electricity and television. The fading of the old cultures is a thread running through international films and writings. The external is expression of a collective spiritual leap. We have learned as much as we could learn from the Age of Fire. Only a little over a century into the Age of the Second Fire, electricity has advanced us so fast the whole of humanity is reeling from the frequency and depth of the changes. By the time I was sixty, everything about my life seemed to be swept from under my feet. The computer, the cell phone with video camera, YouTube. Infinite resources literally at our fingertips on a smart-phone, research advanced to a whole new level. Write anything on google and it will be found immediately. Instant access to information advances understanding for those who use it. Like facebook, it's largely used for pictures of babies, food and pets. I like that about facebook, too, though they're not in my range of interests, except when it's a baby or pet I know. I get what I call the people's news on facebook, bypassing corporate press. In the first half of my years in the mountains, I learned mountain culture. In the second half of my time here, I watch mountain culture fade away. I see in contemporary films that Russian culture is the same as American and European; tv, tshirts, advertising, rocknroll, internet, vehicles, electric stoves, computers, cell phones, suits, similar clothes, belief systems and inebriates, less fascination with guns, old regional cultures fading.

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THE SOUTH AND RACISM

mary hourihan lynch

Went and watched the race today, not in a good mood. Not in a bad mood either, just dissatisfied. I need a break from television every Sunday afternoon and evening. Arrived as the race started and left soon after it was over. March Madness, saw Wichita State beat Kansas State, so glad those places are no longer in my life. The only way I can figure my soul found its way to Kansas this time was maybe I saw the movie The Wizard of Oz in last lifetime while having a miserable time of it, dreaming of Judy Garland in Kansas with red shoes, there's no place like home. All my life I've wondered what kind of karmic activity in my past landed me in Kansas and a fundamentalist church to complicate it further. Could I have been drawn to the landscape from lifetimes riding a horse and wearing feathers on the plains following the buffalo? I recall a powerful moment in childhood, some time not long after learning about the Indians from my grandmother, who had an older brother who was said to have traded horses with Sitting Bull. I felt like the Indians were my real people. I got mixed up and born into white skin this time. I remember thinking in childhood, maybe seven or eight, my people will never recognize me. I am the enemy and they can never see me any other way. It was a lonesome feeling, something like lost in space. In childhood play, I only identified with the Indians. In movies and tv westerns, I only pulled for the Indians, knowing they'd lose, but they were my people. I have never felt comfortable white, especially seeing how arrogant white people act toward people of any other pigmentation. I have never felt comfortable with people of other colors, because I can't help it I'm white. I know a lot of other white people who feel the same way. We don't make headlines. We just get called nigger lovers. 

mary hourihan lynch

And that's ok. If it wasn't that, it would be something else. This is human existence. I can't change it anyplace but in myself. Racists I know don't go about hurting black people, as far as I know. Their racism is their concern, not mine. The same as I don't want racists to have a problem with me for not being a racist, I don't have a problem with racists. It's their business. I regret that the corporate takeover of our government is so vehemently racist. It's in the nature of fascism, however, you gotta have a focus for hate. Hate is the wave fascism rides. I find it interesting, not ironic, the people who call them selves Christian cling to fascism and wallow in hate. Ask any Jew who survived the Thirties and Forties in Europe. It was Christians all over Europe killing Jews, not just the German Christians. Again, my only concern is that I do no harm to Jews, black people, Latin American people, even white people. Here, too, applies being in the world not of it. I live in a multi-cultural world. I'm ok with it being multi-cultural. I like that it is multi-cultural. I am in a given race, but I do not have to partake of the arrogance of whiteness. Racism has a place, for sure, in Southern culture, but Southern culture is not entirely racist. Look at the great Southern writers. Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers. They were not racist. Though the politicians and evangelists largely are. It's about the same mix all over the country since the rise of fascist propaganda. Here again, it's the world I live in, but I don't have to be of it, don't have to do what somebody else does. And they don't have to do what I do. My racist friends know where I stand and I know where they stand. No big deal. 

mary hourihan lynch

This is an aspect of the South the people outside the South don't get. Southerners I know tend to be tolerant of people they don't approve of or don't like. Southerners want peace among one another. I don't mean there is no fighting or hate going on, but I have found on the whole Southerners to be peaceable people in their everyday lives. I appreciate Southern culture so much, one aspect that might be objectionable does not diminish the whole. Yankees don't do well in the South, only because of their arrogance toward Southerners. Condescension is obvious from the receiving end. I recall a woman several years ago, here from Connecticut, dissatisfied after a couple years. She was wanting to kick up a fuss over how some man kept his dog. She called herself an animal rescuer. She wanted to force him to take better care of his dog by some kind of idea of justice. She'd got herself into a fix that frightened her. I told her let it rest. You're in the South. You don't tell a man in the South what to do with his property, and to some a dog is property. She couldn't let it rest, it wasn't right. I attempted to explain right has nothing to do with it. I reminded her that in the South she is a foreigner, she has no backup. I recommended she let the dog issue rest. She couldn't do it. It wasn't right. She pursued it, got herself into a heap of trouble by way of threats, freaked out and left the county. She loved it here, but it wasn't enough like where she came from. She could not accept the people around her as themselves. She wanted them to be different. She was so caught up in being right, my talk about letting it go was, itself, not right. She wanted to be right. Ok. Be right. Have a good time.

mary hourihan lynch

I don't have to be every aspect of Southern culture to live happily in the South. For example, I'm not interested in college football games or barbecue. But I do like the Allman Brothers, George Thorogood and the Dirty South Revolutionaries. The South has many sub-cultures, all of them Southern. All have that something special that is Southern. It's an identity with the South, not an ideology or political belief system, nor a religion. The South has Catholic churches and synagogues aplenty, as well as temples of all the religions. There is a Tibetan monastery in Georgia.  We live in peace as Southerners. The greatest characteristic I know of the South is the readiness to allow others to be who they are. Though certain aspects of the belief systems don't necessarily accord with what they claim to believe, it's tradition and that's the end of it. Some years ago a Yankee friend told me it is my responsibility to teach one of my racist friends not to be a racist. I said it is not my responsibility. He believed it was. I maintained it was not. I still believe it is not my responsibility to set out to change anybody's pattern of thinking, not even my right. I woke this morning with the incident in my mind, talking with self about allowing others the autonomy of their own minds. I don't know of another way to live in peace with the people in my world, wherever I live, all the way to rural Thailand. I allow them their own understandings, they allow me mine. I don't like Jehovah's Witnesses coming to my door telling me they're right and I'm wrong. It seems to me basic human decency to allow others their own autonomy. If I expect to be allowed my own, then I allow others their own. For me to tell somebody else their way of thinking is unacceptable and must change, I'm giving somebody down the line permission to do the same to me.  
  

janice lynch schuster and her mother mary hourihan lynch

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THE SOUTH OF MY HEART

thomas hart benton

Been thinking today of how much I love the South. Remembering my trip to Kansas about 10 years ago, a Yankee state, what a slap-down I got every time I mentioned the South, especially mentioning loving the South. Nobody ever let that pass. They, who had never been in the South, knew more about it than I did after living in the South my entire adult life. Almost every time I talk with somebody from outside the South about the South, they know everything about it and I know nothing. This is part of what makes Yankees who come to the South objectionable. They know all there is to know about the South. The Civil War is over, when you Southerners gonna get it? First time somebody said that to me, I explained that the Civil War is not over. Didn't bother any more after that. It's like telling Baptists that Catholics have a home in heaven too. Telling is not what I'm about. I don't believe in telling other people what's the right way to think or believe. I'm recalling a good friend of many years, a Southerner living in Brooklyn, who told me it is my responsibility to convert a friend of mine here in the mountains away from racism. I said it is not my responsibility. I was reminded it is my responsibility. I didn't take it beyond that. It would devolve into is-isn't-is-isn't very shortly. I've thought about it many times since then. It is not my responsibility to tell a Southern boy it is necessary for him to think like he's a Yankee. You want to see a back go up like a Halloween cat in somebody's eyes, tell a Southern boy he needs to think and talk more like a Yankee.

thomas hart benton

What I have learned in my few forays beyond the Mason Dixon Line is Yankees dislike Southerners a whole lot more than Southerners dislike Yankees. The only problem a Southerner has with a Yankee is a Yankee can't stop telling Southern people what to do. They feel so superior it comes across in tone of voice, attitude, everything. That's experiential learning. I've come to where I shy away from Yankees because they can't get enough of telling us ignernt Southerners what to do, how to think and talk. Us ignernt Southerners hear it and laugh inside. In the South, we're polite when we want to be, so we don't laugh in their faces. Many a Yankee has heard (in a Southern accent), "If you don't like it here, the road that brought you will take you right back to where it's better. Nobody asked you to come here and nobody is going to miss you when you're gone." Many a Yankee has returned up North after retiring to the South. It's them Suthun ways that don't pay no attention when a Yankee tells them how to do it better. We just leave them alone. After awhile of telling everybody that lives around them what they're doing wrong, the people around them stop noticing them. Everybody leaves them to their superior selves. And many a Yankee has been warmly embraced by Southerners, the ones without a superior attitude. Egoism does not appeal to Southerners, esp in other Southerners. It's expected from Yankees.

thomas hart benton



I confess to not understanding a lot of Southern ways, like racism, which is not as pervasive as the television and Hollywood make it. They just point the finger at the worst of it. It's here. So what is how I feel about it. There is slave trade going on in NYC and LA today. It's underground and largely Asian, so who cares? I'm not here to change anything but myself. I'm not here to teach. I'm here to learn. Most of my closer friends are "liberals." The South is loaded with liberals. We just don't make a lot of noise about it, because, for one thing, we're outnumbered by people driving pickups with guns under the seats. We're diplomatic in the mountains. I've had good friends to the point of bonding with very different political beliefs from mine. For one thing, I'm really not dedicated to my own points of view, because I can't take politics that seriously. I have a point of view, but that's all it is. When I start feeling agitated I pull back. In the old way, among the mountain people that are gone into the past, people accepted that every individual had his own views and beliefs about things. They didn't step on each other's toes or provoke each other. Mountain people are very diplomatic. In the culture, all men carried guns for a couple centuries--a gun is either with them or they can get their hands on one in a hurry. One man did not provoke another man unless he wanted a fight. By fists or guns, a mountain boy can put you on your ass and make you think twice about going back for more. A mountain man that fights has powerful arms. It's that way with mountain people all over the world.

thomas hart benton

Democrats and republicans could sit around the wood stove in the country store and talk freely. They just didn't talk about politics. They didn't talk about religion either. Each man and woman has their own. That was respected. It's not respected anymore. Now is about conforming to a checklist, guidelines, no expressions of individualism allowed. It's another social change. I understand that in a lot of ways the South undermines itself by being dead set against unions. Ever thought about it? The Union is what the Confederacy went down fighting. Union means Yankee rule in the South. Unacceptable as saying fuck in Sunday school class. We'd rather be poor than Union-ized. I'm not in the South to make the South what it is not. I came to the South because I loved the South from afar and needed to be connected with it. I was born to Southern people living in a Yankee state. I had to get to the South as fast as I could get after high school. I had the draft to deal with, so I let the Navy take me to the South, Charleston. Two years on a destroyer (that was sold to the Brazilian navy soon after I left it) with a crew of Southerners was educational. I learned the best and the worst in my crash-course introduction to the South.

thomas hart benton

Next stop, the College of Charleston, where everybody was Southern. And I loved it. It was another country. I was able to see the last years of the Old South, the decayed old city that had been in Depression since the Civil War. In my last year at the College the New South came to Charleston. There was an interesting book in that time about the Los Angeles-ization of the South. It seemed far fetched then. By now, it is long established. I see I have spent my adult life running back in time to the time before the post-Fifties social changes. I don't mean civil rights. I mean rat race. When the changes brought by the New South came in, I went to the mountains to recede from the advancing social changes. By now, they have caught up with me. I have one foot in the old world and one foot in the modern world. That's how it is in my mind, in my heart, and in the people I know. About half the people I'm close to are hillbillies and about half are from Away, even a few Yankees, ones who did not come to the South with an attitude. People who are here because they love it. In my life in the South I have come to love it like it's my mother. I feel embraced in love by the South. It's the return of my love for the South, the South loving me for loving the Southern people and the Southern ways. About twenty years ago I was standing in a line in the Boston airport between planes. Talking with a man in front of me in the line I said, This is the farthest north I've ever been. He said, I know.

thomas hart benton

 

 

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