I thank God that I don’t live in Texas anymore.

I received yesterday from Rex a meme* to a blog post asking the question “imagine if the Tea Party were black”

It’s a thought-provoking question, of course.

And, of course, those in whom it provokes thought are not, at the end of the day, those who most need provoking. 

As one quickly discovers when trolling the comments of various Facebook posts about this particular meme.

I think my favorite in this regard is (to paraphrase) “hate is wrong, black or white.  The Tea Party aren’t haters, the media’s just focused on a few crazy people.  If they are haters, that’s UnAmerican.”

The shift to the subjunctive tense is instructive.  “If” they are haters, (then and only then) that’s UnAmerican.

“If.”  Always that “if.”  As if what is occuring is permissable because it is unhateful.  As if unhateful hate were admissable, permissable, and American.  Which is to say, there exists (no subjunctive about it) a perfectly imaginable way to express hate in our society, a hate that is entirely admissable, permissable, and allowable as Americans.  It is white hate, and it is “not” hate because, of course, we are the ones doing the hating.

It is worth pausing at this point to reflect on the fact that the brunt of the question in the original meme is spent on the act of imagination.  Imagining if the Tea Party were black means imagining thousands of armed (not “nonviolent,” like the good — and safely dead — Rev. Dr. King) black marchers on the National Mall.  It means imagining black hordes massed on the steps of the Capitol, spitting on (by definition) white members of Congress while yelling “Kike Faggot” and “Cracker!”  It means imagining the existence of major media figures openly calling for the castration of elected political officials. 

Acts of imagination so bizarre that even to name them in the pages of this post is to create out of nothingness a nightmare. 

As if the very thought that black people could engage in the kind of vitriol currently being spouted by the Palinite blackshirts is literally unimaginable.  As if our spectrum of cognition is so narrow that we cannot imagine seeing radioactively corrosive viciousness directed at we white people.  As if we must be led, logically, down the garden lane and taught, step by step, how to recognize by their color and aroma the flowers of hate, poison, and evil. 

As if.

Ah, yes.  Would that we lived in such a world.

What an astonishing act of privilege.  As the original author put it: “…this, my friends, is what white privilege is all about. The ability to threaten others, to engage in violent and incendiary rhetoric without consequence, to be viewed as patriotic and normal no matter what you do, and never to be feared and despised as people of color would be, if they tried to get away with half the shit we do, on a daily basis.”

One of the more distressing “teachable moments” I had in Texas involved leading a student down the logical path of unraveling their statement that “white racism is no different from black racism” (or words to that effect; the fog of time has obscured the precise verbiage.  Thank God).  This was a distressing moment.  And not because it involved telling someone, to their face and in front of other students, in as many ways as it took to get the point across, that they were wrong in their assumptions, wrong in their interpretation, and wrong in their application. 

No, it was distressing because it took so much fucking work.  It took work, first, to disabuse of them of the simple notion that there are simply not as many black people as there are white people.

I thought this was understood: black people are a MINORITY, and that means, in precise mathmatical terms, that there are FEWER black people than there are white people. Sadly, as I learned while living in Texas, this is not something that is obvious to the average person.  Apparently, basic facts that are available to everyone with a mind to open up www.census.gov and then click on “American FactFinder,” are too difficult, too obtuse, too dangerous to your average college-educated person to bother with.  Even if they profess to be at least tangentially interested in, for instance, just how many black people there really are in these United States.

However, as hard as that was, it was not as difficult as disabusing them of the notion that black people were “as racist” as white people. 

This, as I quickly learned, was apparently a stronger argument than “white people outnumber black people, and so it doesn’t matter how racist black people are.”  

Now, I want to pause for a moment, and ask my reader to do some math in their head.  Take as much time as you want.  If 12% of the US population is black, and 70% of the US population is white, then what percentage of the black population would need to be “racist” (by whatever generous definition you might choose to apply) in order for blacks to be “equally racist” as whites (again, choose whatever generous definition you think appropriate).

Take your time. 

After all, I’m a believer in “new math,” and the idea that there are many ways to get to “a” right answer, as long as you explain your reasoning. 

It’s that last clause that’s the tricky one, by the by.  You need to be prepared to explain your reasoning.

Got the answer yet?

In any case, this, apparently, was a less convincing argument than actual statistics showing that, on average, black people hate white people less than white people hate black people  (as one student put it so eloquently, “those statistics are just wrong. ” Really, sweetie?  Really?  The statistics are wrong, and not you? Please tell me how a  stratified random sample of the entire US population is “wrong” and you, in your infinite 18-year-old, educated-in-Texas, wisdom, is “right?”) 

It remains one of the singular pieces of sophistry perpetrated by Northern liberals — or Southern racists, for that matter — and one of the most dearly treasured illusions I retained as long as I possibly could while I lived in Texas — that this sort of faith confession, this sort of conviction of evil, this sort of commitment to a world view so totally at odds with reality as to encapsulate the DSM-IV definition of a delusional grasp of reality, constitutes something amenable to “discussion,” and “argument.” 

Which is to say, it is a treasured illusion (to me, to this day) that this sort of illusion can be countered by reasoned dialogue.  Dialogue such as might be presented by a nice, fresh-faced, young assistant professor of sociology, who is well aware that his chances of tenure depend in some small part on his student evaluations.

A small, perhaps one might even say tiny, part, it is true.  But nevertheless always there in the back of one’s mind as one told students, semester in and semester out, that they were cracker fascisti, marching in the army of an ignorant whore all the way to perdition.

No, it takes no act of imagination to conjure up the boogeyman of a black Tea Party.  It does not require any difficulty at all to create out of thin air black racist demagogues in the style of Glenn (de la) Beck(with), Sarah Palin, Karl Rove, and Rush Limbaugh.  No, that is not difficult.  We do it all the time in white America.

The difficulty is recognizing the evil within ourselves, recognizing, to paraphrase David Roediger, that whiteness is nothing but oppresive and false.  It is the empty and therefore terrifying attempt to build an identity based on what one isn’t and on whom one can hold back.

The difficulty lies in seeing the hole where our hearts should be, and doing whatever is necessary to stop the bile spilling out from that gaping, aching wound.

*Let me raise a toast, at this moment, to Mr. Bob Laskey — bless his heart — the man who introduced me, as a freshman in high school, to Koyaanisqatsi, the always-already impending disaster-in-waiting that is the Atchafalaya River, the emotional satisfaction of losing oneself in another world through literature, the invaluable knowledge that a B is always, always, deserved, and, yes, memes.

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Fantastic Mr. Fox is a totally, totally excellent movie.

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And I want to have your babies.

There, I said it.  We now return to our normal programming.

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So the fellow with the streaming Chinese opera in the next cubicle over?

The fellow who spends substantial chunks of each morning on the phone talking in Mandarin despite not actually being a designated bilingual translator?

The fellow whose conversations in Mandarin surely have nothing whatsoever to do with his serving as the principal of the Sacramento Mandarin school?

The fellow whose Mandarin conversations are liberally peppered with the phrase “nigguh” — which surely means something entirely different from what it sounds like to someone who was raised in the era of NWA?

The fellow who slurps his tea quite loudly, a habit about which I can never say anything publicly because he suffered from a stroke and said slurping might plausibly be attributed to facial paralysis?

The fellow who recently has had to be (re?-)tutored in how to accomplish the central data extraction task we do at this job, something which presumably he should have known how to do within 3 months of being hired on (5 years ago now)?

That fellow.  Yeah, him.

He apparently printed out an envelope on state time to send to the Human Resources Office of College of the Sikiyous. 

I know this only because he hit the “print” button too quickly (before loading the envelope), thus leaving a regular 8.5X11 sheet with the address in the output tray. Which he then left there for two days.

I may be many things, but I am not a snoop.

Oh, and CoftheS?  It’s in fucking Weed.  That would be the third largest city in Siskiyou County.  Dude.  If your shit can’t beat out Mt. Shasta for population, then your shit is sad. 

And good luck talking Mandarin in Weed.  There are 639 Asians in the entire county.  Down from 701 in 2000, for the record.

For this he would pull his children out of Rio Americano and his wife out of that lovely gated community of Gold Fucking River? 

Please, please, please, and only because I am a terrible person with no sympathy whatsover, please get the interview.

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When you’re having a breakdown, don’t bring it to work.

Don’t tell your supervisor about it — unless you are formally asking for a sick day.

Don’t tell the guy in the next cubicle over about it. 

Don’t start your 20-minute unload on said guy-in-the-next-cubicle with the phrase “So I’m stressed about this poster I’m supposed to give at a conference in Cancun.”

And most especially don’t have your 20-minute logorrheic attack regarding the poster you’re supposed to present in Cancun consist almost entirely of recitation of the statistical niceties of the principal components analysis you did of a psychometric test for neuroticism, lying, and social desirability bias.

Man.  I could not make this shit up if I tried.

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In others, they are passed down as anti-totems.

Readers of this blog (both of you) know what I mean when I make the first statement.  In my father’s family we make a great show of passing down names from generation to generation, with great ceremony.  My father was named for two of his uncles.  I am named for two great-grandfathers.  I have a cousin who is the fourth to carry his particular constellation of names.  Most of my other cousins carry first names that started as patronymics (I lucked out in that regard: all of my names are patronymics).  Everyone in my father’s family, it seems, has a story to tell about the person(s) for whom they were named, about the particular link that binds them to a chain stretching back decades and generations.

The precise purpose of this obsessive name-linking is more clear in some instances than others, it is true.  I have a relatively coherent story to tell about my first name, one that has both a nicely random narrative twist (I received my particular name because there were already too many people with a closely related one) and an explicit moral point (nonetheless, I was linked to my namesake in honor of his commitment to racial liberalism and the social gospel).  Some of my cousins have rather less nicely packaged stories to tell, having been named simply for “a grandmother” (as opposed to “the grandmother who did X while telling Y to do Z”), or even more tragically having been named Biblically (and not even coolish old-Testament names either, but boring-ass pseudo-Anglicized New Testament monikers). 

Da Partner, as you may imagine, has had occasion to observe more than once that this obsessive naming tradition more often than not resembles a ritual done superstitiously, simply for the sake of doing the ritual, and not with any emotional commitment to specific, narratively explicated set of values.

I have only recently come to appreciate how these links can work in negative ways as well.  And I mean that in a precise way.  It turns out that one can forge surprisingly strong bonds not simply in the act of naming one’s child (the explicit function of the baptism ritual), but also in the act of stating, as loudly as possible, the precise persons for whom one is NOT naming one’s child.

The latter is an art form perfected by my mother’s family.  I learned this evening, just as an example, that my mother was NOT named for her paternal grandmother.  Just as one of my cousins was NOT named for my mother (said cousin’s aunt).  And just as (one must assume) my brother’s half-sister was quite carefully NOT named for her half-brother’s brother’s mother, which is to say the half-sister’s father’s ex-wife.

Got that?  Let’s try again: Mom married a guy, had a kid, and then got divorced.  Said hubby married again (twice, actually) and had four more kids.  The youngest of the kids has the same first name as Mom.  Coincidence?  Probably.  It’s a common Catholic saint name, after all.

I am skeptical of the coincidence, if only for the following chain of events.  Which is — and trust me on this one — related.  One of my cousins was adopted, along with three of her sisters.  Her paternal grandfather was also adopted (some say within the family, but that is a story for another day).  She has recently been shacked up with a gentleman who has fathered two children with her, but who has also declined, quite specifically, to make an honest woman of her.

All of this is to say that her “family name” might as well as this point be pulled out of a hat.  What is the child’s last name, after all?  The name her baby daddy has so far declined to bestow upon him(and which, for the record, his parents have apparently demanded be bestowed upon their grandchild?)  The name bestowed upon her by my uncle, her adopted father?  Which in turn was bestowed upon him by a man who abandoned his family at the gates of a TB sanitarium?  Which in turn was bestowed upon _him_ by a man who adopted his son, namesake, and heir sometime after the age of 40?

What name does one pick in these circumstances? 

To my cousin’s credit, she refused to be browbeat by her precisely-not-inlaws, and declined to name her child after baby dady.  Instead the child is named for her (adopted) father. 

Anywho.  Just thought I’d share.  You can name your kid after someone, or you can not name them after someone.  But whatever you do, please don’t name them Nevaeh.

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So.

Today our hero was asked to serve as one of two seconds (does that make our hero the second second?  The second squared? The third? I’m still new at this, you see) during a duel.

The details are…somewhat unnecessary.  I am sure our readers’ imagination can take care of filling in whatever blanks are necessary.  The challenge was offered in the usual form.  The assailants met in a predetermined space near to where assistance might be offered if things went seriously awry.  The choice of weapons was offered in a ritualistic manner. 

Etc.

It may be worth noting that the first second for “our” duellist was an NCO (as opposed to our hero, who had his commission purchased for him).  Also, the duellist on whose behalf our hero showed up in the early dawn mists to offer moral support and material aid was sadly and singularly ill-prepared to fight as a gentleman. 

Not to put too fine a point on it, “our” duellist engaged in precisely the kind of bluster and high-and-mighty talk that duelling was invented, quite precisely, to avoid.

He also prematurely discharged his weapon into the ground, leaving himself open to whatever shots his opponent chose to fire.  While perhaps “christian” in some very distant sense, this is poor form and, if nothing else, wastes everyone’s time and attention.

His foe, for the record, was an excellent shot, aiming (and making) for his shoulder in such a manner as to stun our duellist and incapacitate his ability to make further trouble.

In a word, if  one’s opponent suggests that the situation might be resolved if one conferred with a chaplain, this is to be interpreted as a gentleman’s proffer of a truce, and best accepted.

Stated perhaps more plainly, if one is offered counseling in substitution for fire, it is almost always in one’s interest to accept.  An offer of counseling is never offered in weakness, but always in strength, and the one making the offer is probably not, properly speaking, a bitch. 

Especially when the most likely alternative involves a lead minie ball to the lung.

Just saying.

It will take 1-2 weeks to learn whether or not the wound was incapacitating or trivial.  In the meatime, everyone — the duellist, our hero, the proper second, the assailant, and the assailant’s second — has returned to duty.

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So.

When I was hired on to my current position, I was given an assignment.  Specifically, I was told to produce two documents, analyzing the results of a large-n quasi-experimental project.  This project was designed and, in its initial stages, brought to fruition by a certain someone — call him “Fuhtawg,” for no particular reason — who was shown the door right around the time things were going into production.  At that time Fuhtawg was told, in no uncertain terms, to not let the door hit him in the ass on his way out.  This was around the time that he asked a third someone, who shall remain entirely nameless, whether or not he (Fuhtawg) could watch while the third man’s wife breatfed her child. 

I am given to understand that the involuntarily retirement of Fuhtawg had nothing to do with this rather unorthodox proposition.

There was also, it might be added, a fourth someone — call him Senior Valle de Hierba, again for no particular reason — who was asked to take responsibility in the period between Fuhtawg’s depature and this author’s arrival on the scene.  Senior Valle de Hierba did not last long, and now works for another agency in a position with equivalent pay but far less demanding requirements.  The last time I saw Senior Valle de Hierba, he was shitfaced and gawking at a go-go boy at Faces, his petite asian girlfriend pleading with him to go to a different bar where they could “talk.” 

Anywho.

I have recently submitted for publication the first of the two documents for whose creation I was given responsibility upon joining state service.

This document is bigger and, in many respects, more sophisticated than my dissertation.

It pains me somewhat to admit that, by the way.

But that’s not what I wanted to talk about. 

What I wanted to talk about is this: when one submits a dissertation, even at a fancy East Coast school like the one I attended, one knows that at best, it will be read by an even dozen people. 

When one submits a report for publication under the aegis of “a large government bureaucracy,” it is submitted, as a matter of policy, to every depository library in the country.  In addition, a letter of interest is sent to a mailing list — with somewhere north of 500 names — of persons well placed in every government bureaucracy and major (public) university in the Anglophone world.

Public service has its advantages, I must say.

But no, I have absolutely no idea how or why I ended up as the recipient of gossip that included such juicy tidpits as breastfeeding and go-go boys.  I think it may have something to do with being nice and keeping my mouth shut (well…except for blogging, that is).

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Rose of malbec.

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And sometimes you hit the number.

This time?  Sessions on cage-fighting and vaginoplasty.

Plus an organizer who was only barely on his meds: a 20-minute erzatz- Tourette’s ramble that included references to Judaism, Aztlan, Wallerstein, and Foucault.

Dude.  I love my discipline.

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