DO ABOUT WHAT?

andy warhol

 

What are we going to do about gun violence? A question I hear repeated again and again, every time we have another public attack by somebody frustrated unto suicide, so mad he wants to take everybody/anybody with him. Reading or hearing the question, I answer in a comment box of the mind, Nothing. Nothing at all, according to pattern, tradition. Every time the question pops up, What are we gonna to do about it?, what gets done consistently amounts to nothing. A run of articles, anti-gun people use the moment to advertise their agenda, make a lot of noise. It's like the question of capital punishment that surfaces from time to time is never resolved. The question, whether or not guns, is only answered with blame. Black people in church killed. A white boy done it, blame the whiteman flag. Easy target. This new one, black man killing white woman and white man on tv in Roanoke, looks more like he went postal from the frustration of being let go from a job. They say he had a bad attitude and deserved to be fired. Maybe so. But it's not how he saw it, like the post office employees who "went postal" out of frustration over losing their jobs in a time of republican downsizing post office staff to set USPO up for corporate takeover.

 

andy warhol

 

I tell self it doesn't matter to me, what I think about it is of no relevance to anyone but myself. It is other people's karma someplace far from where I am. The only part that matters to me is hearing the same old question every year of my life, What are we going to do about it? The only thing I've ever seen happen is the next crisis to come along replaces last week's old crisis. The question about guns is forgotten until next made-for-tv slaying by gun. It's talked about by talking heads with renewed urgency for a week, replaced by a smokescreen politician who said something notably stupid. What are we going to do about it? Nothing. What are we going to do about racism? Blame the South. Nothing. Blaming American rednecks and banning a flag increased sales of the flag by double, affirmed the white American working class identity with the flag and recruited for the Klan. Nearly everybody guided by propaganda through television, the tv renders everyday life insignificant, dysfunctional, a waste of time to notice. Homeland terrorist slayings are television. Racism is television. Police brutality is television. Let television settle it with guns and explosions. Television doesn't worry over logic or good sense in settling issues. Guns settle things on tv, the real world in America/Oceania. It naturally follows, guns solve problems in the unreal world of everyday life.

andy warhol

 

"Click and Share if you care." Thus concluded a brief video I saw not knowing what it would be. A white guy in plaid shirt and ball cap on backwards, I felt like it might be at least funny. The occasional redneck rant that appears on facebook is indeed funny. I don't share the politics, but I do understand their point of view and believe it valid. This guy was funny and not. He ranted about guns saying he was being practical about them by teaching his children, a boy and two girls, how to shoot a gun. He had the boy shoot a replica of a movie pistol, an air gun. He was being practical in a gun culture. I felt he was sensible. In the working class, everybody has guns, and I'm with them that it is important to teach the kids about guns before they find one and do something stupid with it. He talked about gun control as teaching the kids to control a gun. I, as myself, think it's nuts, yet I understand we live in a gun culture. When daddy has guns in the house, it is better for the kids to be taught to respect them than it is to label them taboo. I appreciated that he taught the kids with an air gun, comparatively harmless. Though he was a bit much of a Fake news enthusiast for my appreciation, I respected his point of view. I live in a world of people like him and know them to be good people. I could see in him if he lived in my community, he is what I'd call a good man. In the way I call Frank Dillard a good man, Randy Hampton a good man, Joe Willey a good man, three of many, only the first ones to come to mind. He ended his rant, "if you care, click and share." I didn't care enough to share, though I obviously cared enough to think about it after it was over and share my thoughts with you.

andy warhol

Thought about sending it to a friend for its comic value, but it felt too much like demeaning its purpose. The man had something to say, something he had reasoned out for himself, and I felt very well. I could not demean him so. He was doing something about gun violence. He was teaching his kids to be responsible by way of the gun for example. He was doing his part concerning an important issue that can only be dealt with one individual at a time. To see on television one side make noise and the other side make noise, it amounts to no more than a racket. I do my part by not having a gun and not intending to have one. I think they're cool for somebody else, but not for me. I don't like that I like the feel of one in my hand. They fit the hand like a glove, made for the hand. I feel like guns attract guns. They also get stolen. It would not do for somebody, whose aim is to live as close to the heart as can be done, to have at hand an object with only one purpose, to kill. I am not about killing. I don't even want a rabbit running under my tire. My path is love, not fear. I can't deny a gun's necessity to somebody else, anybody else. For myself, I see a gun illegitimate power, power I do not want. As a conscientious human being, I do not allow myself the right to kill, not even the dog that killed my cat.

andy warhol

 

 

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THE CONFEDERATE FLAG GETS A NEW LIFE

larry rivers

My back goes up and stays up over this new spate of Yankee assaults on working class Southerners for failing to be their intellectual equals, for thinking differently from middle-class white people writing in Boston and New York offices. Insults fly, the air a swarm of arrows, like in a Chinese medieval war movie, arcing over the Mason-Dixon line aimed at cartoon visions of the South, Bugs Bunny and Yosemite Sam, unrepentant racists. I see quite a lot of it every day without looking for it. I don't comment or make anything of it, because I don't care what they think about the South. Just stay out of the South, stay up North where you belong, read about the South, write about the South and have opinions all you want, but stay home, please. One of my favorite of the slurs is the picture of a white flag said to be the only true confederate flag. I'd be happy to take that flag for my own, the flag of ultimate peace. As for confederate flag a flag of surrender, this only says whoever thought this one up does not know shit about the South or Southerners. My interpretation is they can't handle it that the South is an actual culture separate from their own absence of culture. 

larry rivers

It's the great American story, Be Like Me, going about believing they know more about other people's lives than the people living their own lives. I feel myself charged up inside over these Yankee assaults of blame on the Southern people over their identity around a flag that pisses Yankees off. Nobody in the South is going to say, Aw, poor Yankee got his feelings hurt. Yankees still don't get it the South does not back down. The civil war was an attack of aggression from the North. It was all fought on Southern land by Southern farm boys defending the homeland from a professional military machine. They were saying, and would have to the last man, Hell No, we will not submit. They'll have to defeat us again to make us give up the flag. There's nothing they can do and every redneck in the South knows it. In simple Southernese, they can go fuck theirselves. Aint nothin a bunch of fellers likes better'n self-righteous Yankees stayin at home. One of many things I embrace about the South is that I can get in my car, drive to Tennessee, Mississippi or Alabama, be comfortable and feel at home. My accent says I'm a friendly, part of the family, share the same belief system of what constitutes decent behavior. 

larry rivers

The South is not just a flag that most people in the South don't care about, anyway. A vast majority of Southerners don't care a lick about the flag, but a great many of them would stand firm against a Yankee assault against it. The most this media feeding frenzy on everything Southern has accomplished has been to recruit young white men to the klan. The klan may be the imaginary new confederate army defending the homeland from Yankee assaults, at least a powerful symbol. Nobody stands up for the South outside the South and Southerners mostly don't stand up for the South either, because they don't care what Yankees think of them, as much as Yankees don't care what Canadians think of them. Down here in the South we don't even think about the North except as an irritant that won't go away. We certainly do not entertain any secret desire to be like the North. Arrogance is the most frowned upon, least tolerated of human characteristics in the South. Yankee arrogance grates all the worse from the perspective of people who don't experience it much, left to themselves. 

larry rivers

First thing I saw when the finger-pointing and blame started piling up was a redneck reaction planned to give the Yankees a fit. Yesterday I saw something about an 8-mile long parade of cars and pickups, bikes too, flying the forbidden flag. I forget where. It doesn't matter where. Could be anywhere in the South. Like a school massacre can pop up anywhere in television viewing America. I saw something about amazon selling twice as many of the flags as before. Only historians know about the early 60s association with the flag in the South. Rebel boys, the only ones that make something of it, don't care about that. It is their rally flag, all the more now, identity as Southern rednecks like Hank Williams III and Larry the Cable Guy. Git-er-done. Our humor may not be as sophisticated as Yankee humor, but we don't care. We got better music. If they want to start taking down Southern monuments, they'd better be ready for unpredictable reaction. It's more corporate media stirring division for control, devoid of moral responsibility. This present round of Yankee efforts to shame Southern identity is just drawing us closer together under the canopy of Southern unity, a great big confederate flag that people are rallying to now, who didn't care anything about it before.    

larry rivers by larry rivers

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REBEL REBEL

john marin

Watched a documentary about GMOs, Strange Culture, that left me mortified and at once realizing I've survived somehow. A lifetime of eating manufactured food and I've lived. It wasn't the food so much that took hold of my throat as the absolute violation of human rights by federal law enforcement that took place without recourse. Yesterday the Supremes, we know which five, declared law enforcement no longer needs a warrant to enter my house uninvited and take charge. They didn't anyway, though now it's official. The Confederate flag issue has pushed my buttons more than I thought it would when it started. I'm tired of smug Yankee attitudes toward the South. They've found another easy target, people up front about who they are and what they believe. There is quite a lot about the South that runs in the negative, disdain for education a big one, though American as big pickups. Everything that can be said about the South can be said about all other regions of the country, the whole country. Southerners are Americans first. The flag thing is a redneck identity tag. The people that fly the Confederate flag are Americans first. As Americans, Southern is their culture, their way of life, porch honkies. And the South is poor. American media hates the poor. 

john marin

Now that it's ok to assault white people the same as black people, the poor whites are targets. Now that it's ok for law enforcement to kill poor white people as freely as poor black people, the South is a wide-open barn door target. Ask a Yankee in denial if he's a racist and he'll say, No, I aint no racist. Ask a Southern redneck and he'll say, Hail yeah I'm a racist. What of it? I know, it's not kind, it's not nice, it's hurtful. It is and I regret that about it. I live among Southern rednecks. I love Southern rednecks. They're not all the same. They're individual human beings born without access to much resources, grew up in a world that had no place for them and looks down on them, a world that swindles and lies to them, a world they can't believe in. They're a perfect tinder box for political propaganda appealing to their anger. These are working people who work their asses off all week at labor jobs nobody reading this would take, especially for as little as they work for. They get taken advantage of by management, by government, by the Bank, work like hell and have nothing to show for it but hopefully most of the bills paid every month. Your income pays for less and less until you're working like a mule, your wife leaves and takes the kids. 

john marin

You leave the dog with the kids and put what you have left in a used Harley, attach a Confederate flag to the back of your riding jacket and you're a rebel. Rebel is what the flag is about. You keep your job, but you're a different man. A man develops a give-a-shit attitude, your ex-wife raises the kids to be nothing at all like you. You let your hair grow, let appearance go, conform to the criminal code of watching each other's backs, carry a gun at all times because twenty people want to kill you and four of them mean it, all over stupid shit you did drunk on white liquor and/or on crack. The flag says for him, By God, I'm my own man, take it or leave it. The white Southern working class man is limited to construction work, of which not much is going on now, and factory work, most of which went to Asian sweatshops, and truck driving. Factory work is demeaning. The white working class man has fallen to the same place as the black working class man, nothing available but work that is a personal affront to your manhood and your humanity. These are the people Rush Limbaugh and Fake News target to stir up their anger to take political advantage of them. More redneck boys are popping caps in their own heads and ODing than ever before. They see only hopelessness ahead. It's the same among the black boys.

john marin

The entire working class left to getting by the best they can, both white and black, intense frustration in the air, everybody with guns galore, anything can happen. Anything does happen. Corporate radio and television twists anger into hate, dividing us to conquer us, using the working class for pawns as in war. The conditions that create the disquiet in the working people are not looking to improve any time soon. The conditions for the working people have only devolved in my lifetime. Again, it's beyond my sphere of influence. I deal with it like everybody else deals, do what I can to get by and hang with it. I have no solution. It's too big for a solution. All I know to do is fly below the radar and let other people fight it out. Move inward, pay closer attention to my closest friends, give more attention to Caterpillar the cat, read more, paint more, dwell less in news and more in the people immediately engaged in my life. Pay more attention to God and the way of the spirit. We're in a time that is way out of balance, and my own balance is what I seek. We're always in a time out of balance, no matter where or when. It's the nature of the landscape we live our lives in. When I live in my own balance, it doesn't matter if the world out-there is in or out of balance. It's just a mind game. I live closer to home paying closer attention to the people I interact with in everyday life, the donkeys, the birds, the squirrels, the chipmunks, music and the wildwood flowers. 

john marin

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TALK ABOUT THE CONFEDERATE FLAG

milton avery

Media interest in pointing the finger of blame at the South over racism has become uber-tiresome. The southwestern quadrant of USA is at least as racist as the southeastern; so is the northwestern and the northeastern. To solve a deep-running issue, NY and LA media want to rid-a-flag they've defined racist. Suppress one, another pops up. In the Soviet time, religion was suppressed. As soon as the Soviet system went away, religion came back. American media is engaged in another frenzy of make-a-law-against. We're so overrun with laws against, we're about painted into a corner. Already, any one of us can be arrested at any moment for something we're doing or have done or conspiracy. Example: the word nigger has been suppressed for the last half century. The working class uses it freely, as does the ruling class. It is only the white middle class that says, "the enword," or uses asterisks between obvious letters. F*t is the same as spelling fat. Saying enword and using asterisks is an act of denial that denies nothing. It's being nice, denying it while saying it. Like it was ok to say shit in front of mommy if I quoted somebody else saying it.

milton avery

I don't mean to be going on like I'm serious about the matter. The flag is too complicated an issue to limit to right or wrong, true or false. Like everything in this phenomenal world we call living, too much is interwoven, experience, thought, beliefs, to call anything or anybody one thing or another. I don't like the way somebody who got drunk and did something stupid that lasted maybe three seconds is called a criminal. I also don't like the way people who have served their time are treated and watched as criminals after their time is served. This is getting into things I have a problem with that I can't do anything about, but I don't have to be that way in my own behavior. Ex-cons I've met along the way, I regard with the same respect as anyone else, with a bit more respect for what they have been through in what I consider an unjust legal system, especially if you're black or any version of non-white, colored, or poor white. Again, nothing I can do about it. I fall back on my boycott of one. Today, I set out to buy a watermelon, wanting to paint one again. I chose to buy it at a roadside stand instead of Food Lion. I can't see giving my five dollars to a corporation that underpays its employees and treats them like shit when I can give somebody an assist who goes into the field early in the morning and selects the produce herself. 

milton avery

I stopped by the welding shop on the way home to visit with Ross and Harry. Milly, Ross's sister, stopped by for a bit and we had a good time sitting and standing in a circle, smoking cigarettes, laughing like the bunch of rednecks we are. These are people I feel at-home free with. We're so close in the heart, I'm about the same as a Richardson. I'm natured a lot like one. Milly and I have been at each other's throats almost with knives, Ross and I have too, and they're my friends I can count on for backup if needed unto the grave. It runs both ways. The subject of the flag came up and we had different thoughts and passions on the matter. Harry most of all. Harry is a retired Army lifer. He said the Confederate flag is treasonous, they fought against the American Army. He called it "you-guys' flag." I said the Civil War was a Yankee invasion. The South defended homeland. Ross said he knows what the flag means. It don't make no differ'nce to him. Milly, the Civil War buff, went off on Yankees and we laughed quite a lot. Except Harry, who identifies Southern, but not with any glorification of the Civil War. It was the Richardson in the rest of us that got us wound up about the South the homeland. 

milton avery

Yesterday, watching the race, Justin told me he was out of sorts with Dale Earnhardt Jr, his favorite driver, for coming out and making a statement that Nascar shouldn't have anything to do with the Confederate flag. I hated to see him so disappointed by a guy he looks up to so personally, like an older brother. He likes Jr's character. I told him Jr is not his own man. I said every time you see him in a commercial, he gets at least hundreds of dollars per showing. He was told by Nascar and corporate sponsors this is what he will do. To say no would cost him hundreds of thousands, millions, maybe his career. I pointed out that television is about money not ethics. Jr is in that world of high-paid celebrities. Once you cross the line into celebrity, your life is no longer your own, you're a product, your name a logo. I wanted to remind him this is a show, this is not real. I knew he knew, just forgot it in a moment of passion. This just a pie-slice of my friends. Very few of them would repeat any other. One can give a hundred reasons for, and another a hundred reasons against, every one of the two hundred reasons valid from some point of view. 

milton avery

The only thing I can see coming of this banning of the flag is a new item in the inventory of underground collectables, flea markets loaded with inflated Confederate flag items, if you know who to ask. Suppression never works and the ones doing the suppressing never get it. We'll have roadside stands selling velvet wall hangings of the flag, tshirts, belt buckles, an infinity of possibilities, just like now. My solution: deal with racism up front and let interest in the flag fade away as it will when nobody cares anymore. I feel like it is healthy for collective American culture to face up to racism as our way of life. Everyone knows it, everyone lives it. We act like we never heard of it. Our racism is rooted deep in our American denial. Which came first, denial or racism? Something like this needs to be brought into awareness collectively, as it does individually, before any real work can be done toward untying the knots of habit patterns that go all the way back to the beginning. It's looking like the Charleston church slayings have brought awareness of pervasive racism in white rule to the surface. If we don't get past blaming the flag, it will have been for naught. I can't imagine television allowing awareness of racism in the white American heart to go beyond blame and punishment, especially not unto self-awareness. 

milton avery

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CONFEDERATE FLAG THE NEW COLLECTABLE

The  public argument around the Confederate battle flag tells me more about the public than the flag. We have people defining what it means, both literally and symbolically. I've learned more about the Confederate flag this week than I ever wanted to know. Jon Stewart continues to make me want to tell him to shut his Yankee mouth. He fails to notice the North invaded the South, not the other way around. Of course, it can be said the South fired the first shot at Ft Sumter. Another Tonkin Gulf story. "He had a gun." My argument with Stewart has to do with him characterizing the South the invader. He doesn't say it, but talks as-if. I tire of his sweep of the hand dismissal of the South and Southerners like his dismissal of the white woman who wanted to be black. He lost credibility for me over his cheap shots at her from his perspective of self-righteous conformity to the social code of the moment calling himself liberal. He's most self-righteous on the subject of racism, quick to point and judge, just like the rest of us. The South is the same to him as a cartoon figure. 

I've lived in the South throughout my adult life. The South I know from the inside is very different from the South Stewart thinks he knows from outside---New York, of all places to point the finger from. I'd like to see him go on about police brutality on black and poor people by NYPD to the same extent he's made fake issues of the South. Of course, he's put himself forward as the model non-racist. He's not the model non-misogynist, but he keeps that under the desk. My argument is not so much with Stewart as with taking such an absolute stance on a matter that goes deeper than good and bad. And I'm not going to be a racism apologist. I grew up in a racist family, near and extended, went to racist church and racist school, outside the South. I started shedding my racism young, knowing some black people, seeing they were not as characterized by white people. I was attracted to black people because they did not do denial. Every black person I knew talked straight, recognized a thing for what it was. I felt black people were refreshing, like clear mountain spring water. I remember the cartoon Indians in cowboy and Indian television of the Fifties saying, "White man speak with forked tongue." As a kid, all white people lied to me. I liked the black people I knew for not lying like white people. 

Evidently, Yankees see the South a two-dimensional caricature, Bugs Bunny in a gray Civil War uniform. The decade I lived in Charleston, SC, deep South, I knew only liberals. The right wing was everywhere, even the majority of the population, but a large percentage of the people are not right wing. In the Blue Ridge, the majority of the population is right wing, though I only mix with people who are liberal or don't care about politics. That's just a social dynamic. People of the right don't like me for not being of the right. It's ok by me. I've come to stay away from white men my age, my peers. One look at the scowl on a white man's face with white hair and I know what tv channel he watches. Yet, exceptions abound. Myself, I hope. People in the South, like people everywhere, are not just one thing, not caricatures. Yankees display a conviction they're better than white Southerners, and certainly better than black Southerners, the way white middle class looks down on white working class, the part in the denial drawer. Racism is more taken for granted in the South than the rest of the country where the white people are racist too, but practice denial. Black people are racist. It's what we humans do. The only solution I can see is to acknowledge racism in self and be conscious of it, aware of it. Awareness is the beginning of addressing change in self. 

I gave up on racism by the time I was out of high school. Black kids went to school and some were my neighbors. They were good people. The people living here from Mexico are good people. As far as I can tell, the only difference between us is culture. Black people have their culture, white people have theirs, and Mexicans have theirs. It is the cultures that make us different. Intolerance of other cultures is a problem. Racism boils down to ego. It amounts to saying, Not me. It is saying, I don't like a given point of view because it's not mine. I used to have a friend I had to stop knowing because he believed his the only true and valid point of view, all others nonsense, especially mine. This is how white people are toward black people, making it clear their whiteness is the only pigmentation and civilization valid. It can be said a general belief among white people that black people have no value. Otherwise, there would be something besides justification coming from white people about cops killing so many unarmed, young black men and women, even children and old people. The greatest justification of all, they kill white people and dogs, too. Racism is too complicated to be dealt with superficially. It can only be dealt with superficially in America. In the land of television, we only deal with social issues superficially, by distraction. This Confederate flag issue is a distraction from something else that matters we're not to know about. As soon as whatever the flag is covering up passes, concerns about the flag will go away with it. 

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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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MY SOUTHERN BRIER PATCH

tony smith

New Year's day I spent mostly in the bed. Didn't want to do anything. Didn't want to be awake. Read some between naps in a new biography of Vincent Van Gogh. Today I passed the half way point. It's 900 pages.Woke a few minutes to seven, thinking it morning. The weather report on the radio for Friday was "tomorrow." I thought, you mean today. Today is Friday. I remembered I was waking from a nap--oh no, it's not tomorrow yet--it's evening. Friday morning I need to get with mechanic, tie the car door closed with baling twine and drive to his shop, taking back roads, to see if he can fix it. I hope it doesn't involve two hundred dollars in parts, or more. Happy New Year. This morning I found the owner's manual, looked up the fuses and pulled the fuse that works the interior lights to avoid running down the battery. I tried everything someone with no experience in such matters could think of. New Years. Things like this tend to happen to me on Friday evening after five o'clock. I have to wait til Monday to make an appointment for help. If mechanic cannot get to it tomorrow, the highest likelihood, I'll have to wait through the weekend til next week. Here again, when frustration reaches the point I can't stand it, I pull back into indifference. It only means I can't go anyplace for almost a week. Good. Like getting snowed in. Plenty of catfood, birdseed and carrots to last a week. Don't need a prescription filled for another week. Turns out it was a good time to be immobilized. Nothing to do but accept. As long as I'm staying at home, I'm not spending money. Money goes a lot further when I stay home. Staying home consumes no gasoline. And it's where I want to be anyway. Don't throw me in the brier patch. 

tony smith

I think of Brer Rabbit from the Disney film, Song of the South, tales of Uncle Remus, that I saw age 6. My only memory was Brer Rabbit (me) caught by some characters that wanted to hurt him. They were talking of what they could do to him. Brer Rabbit said, "You can do anything, but please don't throw me in the brier patch." It struck his captors a good idea. They threw him in. He hopped among the briers, tapping a bunny dance, singing, "I was born in a brier patch." More than likely, this was my first acquaintance with the South. I loved the movie, loved the Southern accent, loved the characters. This is age 6. I've been searching for my first discovery of the South as a place and hadn't been able to trace it past a biography read in third grade of Robert E Lee. Looking for why the interest in Lee, the South. The Uncle Remus stories must have been my very first introduction to the South. I do remember identifying so fully with Brer Rabbit that his plea, don't throw me in the brier patch, has stayed with me all my life. I think it taught me that cleverness of mind trumps brawn. I had the metaphor of brawn sitting beside me. I already knew he had no brains. I'm hearing Chuck Berry sing in my head, "You can't catch me, oh no, you can't catch me." As soon as I had my freedom, I headed for the South. You'll never catch me in the South. Maybe the South is my brier patch. I've found that people outside the South are largely afraid of the South. My brier patch. To say I loved a movie at age six has no bearing on if I might like it now. Age 11, I saw Demetrius and the Gladiators, starring Victor Mature. It was so sentimental, I loved it, cried at the end. Mid-twenties, I was in somebody's house while it was playing on the tv. I watched a scene and gagged. Victor Mature made me puke. How could I have ever liked such a thing? Eleven. I liked Mighty Mouse too. 

tony smith

Live oak trees, Spanish moss, the Southern accent, the Solid South at election times, my symbols of the South. I knew about slavery and the Civil War from school. I was partial to the South in history class. Didn't know the politics of the South until after school when the Civil Rights movement was cranking up. Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Jerry Lee, Bo Diddley, Elvis Presley, Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks, later to become The Band, were from the South. The South is where rock n roll was conceived and born. The Carter Family were Southern Appalachian hillbillies in the time before electricity and plumbing arrived in the mountains. Mountain people listened to them on radios that worked from Model T batteries. I had never listened to the Carter Family until I'd been in the mountains a quarter century. The church I went to had Carter Family gospel songs in the hymnal. Hearing Carter Family the first time, I recognized several of their songs. Being able to understand and feel the Carter Family is one of the great blessings of my life. The Carter Family songbook, over 500 songs they recorded, is the songbook for Southern Appalachian old-time and bluegrass, songs AP Carter found traveling up and down the mountains looking for songs. For me, The Carter Family makes a greater icon for the South than any general or politician. The Carter Family are the Southern people, the white people, the culture I live in. I love to hear Sara Carter sing like I love to hear Lucinda Williams sing. 

tony smith

Going by Southern politicians, the rest of the country takes all of us for racist bigots. That's ok. Keeps em away. It's never 100% of the vote that goes to the politician appealing to racism. They most often win an election, though not by much more than 50%. I am here to learn the South and the mountains, not to judge the South or want to change it. I would like to see less racism, but that time will come. It's an historical progression involving belief systems with religion woven in, a mythology. It's slow to change. Like all healing, it takes time. Racism comes from ignorance, and willful ignorance is the slowest to change. This form of ignorance is all over the country. Michelle Bachmann is from Massachusetts. Ted Cruz is from Texas-Canada-Cuba, went to Harvard Law school. He aint Suthun. Bobby Jindal is from India and went to Oxford. Evidently, ignorance has nothing to do with education. It's like the meme that reappears on facebook, You can't fix stupid. Those people are avoidable anywhere, except maybe in an elevator. I stay away from them. They know I'm a liberal and they stay away from me first. Works out just right. As I like to be received for who I am, I like to receive others for who they are. I don't care that some of the people I know are racists. It weakens my respect for them, but that's all. Each one has his and her own history, same as I have mine. I like to know individuals for who they are, not a pretense made up for show. If I judge them, they don't let me know who they are. If I were to judge them for being racist, I'd be a racist about white rednecks. Individually, person to person, I prefer to stay out of their politics and mine. I'm of the old-time way of sitting around the wood-stove, spitting in tin cans, talking about anything but politics and religion. I save these subjects for the blog.  

tony smith

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MY LOVE AFFAIR WITH THE SOUTH

gary parlier and bobbie parlier

the hillbilly show

Just now had a rush of emotion from out of the blue over how much I love the Southern people, the people of the American South, the people I've lived among all my adult life by choice. Knowing what I know about the South, and who I've known in the South, I could not live outside the South. Looking back to early influences, I don't know where my interest in the South came from. In third grade I read a child's biography of Robert E Lee, not so much because I wanted to know about him, but I wanted to know about the South. This would have been about 1950 when the South was known for magnolias, moonlight and Spanish moss.  I had not seen any tv before then, we didn't get ours until 1950. I had seen several movies with my grandmother. She liked Betty Grable movies. I was enchanted by Susan Hayward, which probably had to do with mommy, and later, Claudette Colbert. More than likely saw some Southern images in those late 40s pop sentimental movies I saw with grandmother, going downtown on the bus to a movie theater. Big deal when you're four. Perhaps was carried away by a Southern romance scene with big dresses and Confederate uniforms, the moss hanging from the live oak trees. From a working class neighborhood in Kansas City, it was otherworldly, someplace else, a kind of Shangri La for a city kid with no experience. My feeling is the Robert E Lee book might have been the spark that deepened whatever interest I already had from post-war Forties movies. Betty Grable of the million dollar legs. The South had a mystique for me all the time growing up. The mystique associated with Gone With The Wind and the Solid South, the Dixiecrats. I knew nothing they were about except they didn't like authority, either. The closest to a goal I had was to get to the South, feel it from the inside, live deep inside Dixie. First time I drove across Mississippi, I felt like it was a foreign country. Mississippi had no billboards then. I don't know about now, but it was unforgettable to drive through a state with none. If I had not gone to South Carolina, I'd have probably gone to Mississippi.

hillbilly wes

the hillbilly show

It's not the Gone With The Wind South I fell in love with. I don't care about the mansions and the plantations. I love the Southern people, the people you see at a George Thorogood concert, the people you see in the crowd at a Nascar race, the people hanging out at the river around a campfire, pickups parked nearby with doors open and all radios on the heavy metal station. The South is a culture of poverty, in Depression for a century after the war that I still have issues with Jefferson Davis over, for letting go ahead. Going into the war, the South did not have a chance, not even an imaginary chance. Possibly, too, I had a sympathy from mother's milk for the underdog. Maybe I felt sorry for the poor Old South the Yankees beat down. In fifth grade, a civil war cap was something every boy in school had to have, like a Davy Crockett hat a few years before. All the guys had Yankee hats, but I had a Rebel hat. This was Kansas, just a few miles north of Jesse James and Cole Younger country, and not long after. I loved my Rebel hat. I was disappointed there weren't others with Rebel hats, but wouldn't put a Yankee hat on my head, not even to see how it fit. In 1952, age 10, Yankees were already my enemy. I lost my Rebel hat one night when daddy took me to see Battle At Apache Pass, starring Jeff Chandler as Cochise. I loved the Apaches then, Cochise and Geronimo my heroes. The crowd was packed so tight with some coming out and some going in, my hat was knocked off my head by somebody's shoulder, it fell to the floor and was trampled to death. I couldn't pick it up and it was gone later. I loved about the Apaches that they stood up to the white man to the very last, like the Lakotas of the Plains region. Cochise spoke Confucian truth such as, White man speak with forked tongue. It's fairly obvious I had a problem with authority young. I was a defiant child on the inside. Didn't dare express it on the outside. All authorities said no.   

jackie maines

the hillbilly show

It was the Hillbilly Show Saturday night in Sparta that set off a welling up in the heart, adoration of the South I've been feeling today. From outside the South, it's seen intolerant, racist, mean-spirited and largely stupid. All these apply, but no more in the South than in the North and West. Neither Michelle Bachmann nor Ted Cruz is from the South. Cruz is from intelligent Canada. Both are racist as you get, mean-spirited, intolerant and best known for stupid; they're not from the South. Neither is John Boner. Stupid is universal. So is racism. In all my time in the South, I've had friends who are not racists, white friends who marched in demonstrations for black civil rights. A good percentage of Southerners do not fit the cliche mold as seen from the outside. When I'm outside the South, I find the people tend not to like Southerners for all the South's negative cliche associations. I'm reminded of a prank video I saw on facebook. A man with a sandwich board on front and back on a busy sidewalk in New York. It said, Fuck the Poor. Everybody that passed had something to say to him, either aggressive or passive aggressive. Sometimes it was threatening. Next scene, he's standing in the same place and his board reads, Help the Poor. Not one person looked at him. All went around him like he was a post in the middle of the sidewalk. Not one even cast a glance. All were preoccupied. I see the outsiders pointing the finger at the South over racism and slavery, what you white Southerners done to them poor black people, aggressive tones of voice. When it comes to helping the poor people of the South, black or white, the dregs of a century-long Depression, everybody looks the other way. Switch the channel. Of course I know racist people in the South. I know even more people who are not racist. Sure, there are some ignorant Southerners going around. I don't know but a few. It's just people being people, people with a common culture I happen to love. 

lynn worth

the hillbilly show

I saw a wonderful sense of community at the Hillbilly Show in the people on the stage and the people in the audience. The people on the stage were the same people as in the audience. Home town people, people who still have the old ways in their soul. In Alleghany County, as in Charleston, you can be who you are, do what you do, just don't make a spectacle of yourself, whatever your agenda. Keep your agenda, whatever it is, to yourself and we all get along good. Everybody knows what your agenda is, anyway. No need to bore the people around you repeating it. Whatever it is, it's ok, it's yours. There is little like walking into a hardware store and being called Honey by a man who is not gay. He's just talking the old way that some people still carry. In my life in the South, there is no other place on earth I'd rather be. In the South I live with a very personal warmth between people. All emotions are stronger, it seems, in the South. You fall into hate with somebody in the South and it's on. Falling into love is equally powerful. It is a warmth in the heart I find characteristic of Southerners, an open, receptive warmth. Mama is the goddess of the South. Paula Deen is a good model of the Southern middle-class, upper-class wannabe, white woman. She's not objectionable. She has a Southern charm that can sweet-talk her man into buying her anything she wants. My kind of people is really every kind of Southern people. Southern culture has a warm heart. It goes back to mama calling her chubby little boy Butterbean. And maybe it's that old Nineteenth Century belief in the sanctity of the individual that continues to live in the rural South. A Nineteenth Century religion possibly has something to do with it too. It's possibly the Nineteenth Century remains in today's South that drew me to the South subconsciously. I've never really trusted Twentieth Century Progress. Now the Twenty-first Century is dismantling the Twientieth Century back to the Nineteenth, and I don't trust that either. Oh well. I set out to write about the Hillbilly Show. I think what I wrote is why I love the Hillbilly Show. 

ernest and agnes joines

the hillbilly show

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