Sundown nation

I came across James Loewen's Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism (Touchstone, 2005) in the gift shop of the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. At the checkout counter the clerk--in that winning way some clerks have--and who was herself African-American--examined the cover and indicated by her look that, you know, this looked like a subject worth reading about.

I had just spent a whole day at the museum, where I was overwhelmed by the national shame of racism but also made thankful for the enormous and long-suffering contributions of African-Americans not just to the country but the world.

In the moment of the clerk's assessment, I thought about Erwin, TN, the only for-sure sundown town I knew of. Most people only know it as the town that hung the elephant. But I know it as the town that--immediately after lynching and burning a black man, Tom Devert, for accosting a white girl--ran out its African-American population (some 200 people) and told them never to return. All a matter of public record with its own Master's thesis at East Tennessee State University and a blognovel with music--Banshee 3:33 (start at Tuesday, January 02)--somewhere over the domain name on the Wayback Machine. This year will be the centenary of the event. I wonder if the town will observe it.

Now, though, having read Sundown Towns and more or less absorbed its worthwhileness, I now understand not only that the pure Erwin phenomenon--the lynching followed by a racial pogrom followed by an abolition, either nocturnal or absolute--was a practice widespread in the United States especially between 1890 and 1968 that profoundly scarred the social imagination of the country.

A truly and depressingly fascinating aspect of the phenomenon is that it is not found in the traditional South--cotton country, as it were. Its deepest imprint is found in exactly those places where, at the time of the Civil War, slaves had not been in any great quantity: the upland South (like Erwin, in Appalachia; Cumberland Plateau; the Ozarks), the Mid-Atlantic, the Northeast, but especially the Midwest, California, and Oregon.

Perhaps the most tragically ironic example is Springfield, Illinois--Abraham Lincoln's town and the capital of the Union State of Illinois--which tried to "go sundown" in roughly the Erwin manner in 1908, when a white woman claimed to have been raped by a black man, which set off an attempted lynching and two days of rioting, along with the attempted expulsion of 3,000 black residents. The city's business district was destroyed, homes were burned, and two innocent black men were lynched. It was only the "belated" appearance of the state militia in what was after all the state capital that spared the African-American residents of an Erwin-style result. The femme fatale later admitted to fabricating the rape story in order to cover up an affair. There were, of course, no consequences for the reign of terror.

One of the strengths of the book is the use of census data to show towns and counties, across the areas mentioned above, with African-American populations beginning and growing after the Civil War, and then dramatically diminishing and in some cases disappearing from one census to the other.

The exodus was not always accompanied by a riot, as in the Erwin example. In fact, the larger story told in the book is the story of the more subtle means by which whites and African-Americans have been residentially kept apart--in cities, suburbs, and towns nationwide--by real estate and banking practices as well as by civic policy, all the way from the uncodified sundown ordinance to the private suburb with race-based residential covenants required by the Federal Housing Authority.

This is a story that continues up to the present, since--as has always been way, ever since Reconstruction--the correcting law or court decision was not always followed up with enough enforcement to make a difference.

And it goes further, into the national psyche: the carryover effect by which a general and enforced pattern of by-hook-or-by-crook racial residential segregation set in place 1. the template for how Americans understand people should live and 2. the naive idea that the template-casting happened benignly, or maybe willy-nilly, as a consequence of millions of freely-made personal or family-level decisions about where to live.

That whites and blacks in America are segregated by residential community is at least in part because--for a considerable, residential-infrastructure-building portion of recent American history--blacks were not given a choice.

Why did this happen? In general, Loewen's analysis is that the Southern attitude toward blacks-as-a-problem-to-be-dealt-with was exported to the rest of the country after the non-South's war-fueled flush of racial equality idealism wore off. But outside the South, the "answer" to the "problem" was not the Southern-style total control that required rigid servility as the price for limited mingling (you better know your place). Instead, it was a different form of enforced, residential apartheid that later went on, ironically, to determine the approach to racial separation that prevailed in the burgeoning suburbs of the post-slavery ("New") South.

Among these suburbs was the one I grew up in: Signal Mountain, Tennessee, a bedroom community of Chattanooga. There were never any African-Americans in any of my public school classes, nor were there any, anywhere, on the mountain--except for the maids, who every weekday morning came up from downtown on city buses and went back the same way late every afternoon. There were no blacks up on the mountain after sundown, but as far as I know Signal Mtn. was never a sundown town in the classic sense. However, without knowing for sure but having read this book, I'm willing to make an educated bet that the house that my parents bought in 1956--as soon as my father landed his first permanent, full-time, modestly-salaried job--would not have been available to a similarly-situated black buyer, under any circumstances, for reasons having to do with a combination of sub rosa, substantial, and subversive municipal, real estate, bank, and even Federal chicanery.

And this happened all across the United States.

Going back a little further in time, the area where I went to junior high and high school gets a mention in Loewen's book as an example of the high tide of overt residential segregation. In 1915 North Chattanooga (across the Tennessee River from Chattanooga) was at the time its own suburban city. It passed an ordinance saying that no "colored person" could "occupy" an "abode" in a block where white people preponderated, and vice-versa, in true "separate but equal" style. The kicker was that at the time there were only two black families living in North Chattanooga. Even though the two families were expressly allowed to remain, as the Chattanooga Daily Times stated, the ordinance "will consequently make the town practically of an exclusively white population." The newspaper went on to report that the city's mayor "received many compliments on his segregation ordinance."

Such ordinances became unconstitutional in 1917 with Buchanan v. Warley. However, it went largely unenforced, and cities and towns continued passing or maintaining such ordinances despite their unconstitutionality, to the extent that Loewen uses the case to bolster the "scholarly tradition in American legal history that questions whether the U.S. Supreme Court can cause or has ever caused significant social change."

Thus we see in just the last few days a brand-new, fresh look at the 50-year-old Kerner Report that shows the leading indicators of racial inequality in the U.S.--poverty, school segregation, homeownership, and incarceration--getting worse, not better, in spite of legislation and court decisions that should have laid the groundwork for improvement.

There are glimmers of hope in Sundown Towns. Its last chapter, "The Remedy," recounts changes that have occurred, many of them the result of personal factors writ large, as when white families have biracial grandchildren either naturally or through adoption, or when a single African-American school child leads the way to a change in attitudes. In some suburbs, African-Americans followed once Asians or Mexicans--less problematic in general to white sensibilities--broke the mold without triggering white flight, with durable multi-ethnicity as a result.

Still, to read this book is to be awakened to an untold national scandal that is the very definition of "eyes wide shut." Before I read it, I knew of one sundown town. Now I know that the phenomenon in its pure form darkens the entire horizon of my Appalachian vicinage from Grundy Co., TN, to Grundy, VA, and in its attenuated form has likely determined the racial makeup of every suburban neighborhood I've ever lived in.

Furthermore, to read this book is to be overwhelmed by the same kinds of emotions produced by a visit to the African American Museum in Washington: what kind of monstrosity holds up universal ideals only to deny them to an entire set of people?

And as to the modus operandi of that denial, here is a makeshift poem constructed from the words of a 1905 newspaper account--quoted as one of a sickening and infuriating number of examples in Loewen's chapter "Enforcement"--of "the process by which residents maintained Syracuse, Ohio, as a sundown community."

American Heroes

So long as he keeps up a good gait, the crowd, which follows just at his
Heels
And which keeps growing until it sometimes numbers 75 to 100
Boys,
Is good-natured and contents itself with yelling, laughing, and hurling gibes at its
Victim.

But let him stop his "trot" for one moment, from any cause whatever, and the
Stones
Immediately take effect as their chief
Persuader.

Thus they follow him to the farthest reaches of the
Town,
Where they send him on while they return to the city with
Triumph
and tell their fathers all about the
Function:

how fast the victim ran
how scared he was
how he pleaded and promised he would go and never return if they would only leave him
Alone.

Then the fathers tell how they used to do the same
Thing,
and thus the
Heroes
of two wars, recounting their several campaigns, spend the rest of the evening by the old
Campfire.

ZeNRA

In some dialogue related to my preceding post, I think I may have encountered what I have to describe as the ZeNRA, whose adepts seem to favor disarming the police and replacing them with unregulated, random, concealed-carry civilians who never fire their weapons. At least that's what it seems like. Upon examination I was able to turn up some precepts:

ZeNRA is this: In the mayhem of a mass shooting, quietly sit down, embrace your gun and do nothing. Let the death and chaos become to you as peace and tranquility. Be one with your gun. If you die, you die. If you live, you live. It is all the same in the flower of time.

ZeNRA is this: Aim with your eyes closed.

ZeNRA is this: Death never comes from a gun, because the gun is a scapegoat, and bullets are its droppings that smell like eviscerated targets. Death is only the occasion for a pooper-scooper.

ZeNRA is this: Never pull the trigger; let the trigger pull you. In this way no guilt will ever touch you.

ZeNRA is this: Prying a gun from your cold, dead hands is a dead giveaway. Rejoice after it's too late.

ZeNRA is this: Life never gives you more ammo than you need, but more than 10 rounds starts to look like greed.

Flip the Second Amendment

Parkland, Florida: another atrocity, and of the worst kind: mass murder of school children by a single shooter with an assault rifle.

Students and teachers in agonized grief and anger demand a solution and threaten a national walkout until something is done. The "something" in most of their minds is some kind of limitation on the availability of semi-automatic firearms.

No way, says the other side: such a limitation would be unconstitutional and wouldn't work. A shocking on this side don't even counter with a solution, seemingly willing to accept these massacres as a new normal. The ones that do have an answer call for more armed security in school and for either more mental health screening or for shoring up the family, the breakdown of which is presumably producing the murderous pathology driving school shooters to act.

A few observations:

• There is no single or simple solution. "The answer" does not exist, except as a complex of solutions from the personal to the cultural, but also including legal ones. One hopeful example from the recent past is the decline in deaths caused by drunk drivers, due to this kind of complex interaction.
• That the process was led by the mothers grieving the senseless deaths of children should not be overlooked, particularly by such commentators as Fox's Tomi Lahren who seems to think that there's a sundown clause for this kind of grief, when instead it seems by its very longevity not only to inspire activism but to insist on it. The aggrieved students galvanized into action by the latest massacre understand this: now is the time to act, when emotions are raw, not after people have lapsed into ephemeral passivity. It's no different from the aftermath of 9/11, when grief and rage served to unite the United States at least for a few months.
• The process of determining those responses has a necessary political dimension. Despite the polarization over this issue, voters must hold their elected officials accountable for actual, implemented solutions. Leadership is needed, not passivity, not stonewalling, not kicking the can down the road, and especially not making dishonest excuses about "needing more facts" when at the same time you're preventing the CDC from gathering facts (Paul Ryan).
• Those favoring so-called "gun control" solutions overlook the constitutional dimension of the issue to the detriment of their own cause. They of all people should read the Heller decision, even the ones who are blind with anger, and even if it was written by conservative jurist Antonin Scalia. This is now the mainstream constitutional understanding: the 2nd Amendment guarantees a personal right to gun ownership, regardless of its connection to militia service. It does no good to say--as New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik did the other day--that this "notion is novel, radical, and wrong." Be that as it may, what this ignores is that -- unbelievable as it may seem 230 years or so after the amendment was approved -- the decision serves as a first-time review of 2nd Amendment adjudication and as such establishes a solid precedent. "Liberals" should think of Heller as the Roe v. Wade of the 2nd amendment: subject to being overturned, certainly, but given the partisan curve of judicial appointments, unlikely to be anytime soon. As such, it is a constitutional rock upon which ill-advised gun control measures will founder again and again and again, no matter the number of school children who are butchered by assault rifles.
• UNLESS ... "liberals" read the Heller decision and see that it leaves all manner of avenues for "gun control"--most explicitly licensing, but also other kinds of limitations and regulations, including restrictions to do with civil fitness ("felons and the mentally ill") as well as "laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms." These are the kinds of things that keep the NRA up at night.
• In keeping with its anarchic vision, the NRA will challenge every proposed limitation at every level as "infringement" disallowed by the 2nd Amendment. This is why, in my opinion, the quickest way to safe schools and -- hey, why not? -- a safe society is to develop answers, including legislation, that work explicitly as aspects of the well-regulated militia invoked by the amendment's initial clause. In other words, flip the 2nd Amendment. We can't have infringement, but we can and we must have regulation to maximize public safety.
• (The NRA wants nothing to do with a well-regulated militia. It ignores the very existence of the clause in the amendment. If you don't believe me, follow "Founders intent" constitutional advocate Edwin Vieira, Jr., on Twitter (or just go to his archive and browse). When I say Founders intent, I mean that Vieira wants to return to a metal-backed dollar and do away with the Federal Reserve. Vieira continuously calls out the NRA on his Twitter feed for pretending that the 2nd Amendment is about the individual right and nothing more.)
• I don't say this to advocate a cynical type of camouflage for gun control. I truly believe that the revival of a true citizen militia in which all adults serve as a matter of duty--NOT AS VOLUNTEERS--would have untold, positive ramifications not only on our day-to-day safety but on the health of our democracy. After Sandy Hook, my form of grieving was to write a novel with this kind of theme to try to educate readers out of their 2nd Amendment ignorance. As to its effect, is zero a number? But hey, grief being what it is, maybe it's time to write another one.
• My bonafides aside, let me give you a couple of examples:

School Guards: The favorite idea in the gun crowd is to protect school kids with armed guards. How many? At what cost? "Oh, we'll get volunteers." Really? For every school building in every state? Tennessee, for example, has 1,859 school buildings. In the non-urban area of my county alone, the number of school buildings (22) is almost half the number of county patrol officers (46), so let's say even if the proposal is for one guaranteed officer for each school--there are presently 4 SRO's for all those schools--you're talking about a personnel budget increase in this area of something like 40%. And that's for a tactical response that is entirely inadequate if the goal is to defend a school against sudden invasion by a well-armed, presumably competent criminal. I can't see that kind of increase happening in a low-tax state. In the existing system, an adequate solution funded by public money is just not going to happen.

Now consider an alternative: a universal-service militia, in which all adults between 18 and 65 are obligated to serve. Duty, not voluntarism. The administrative costs for the system would be borne by sales taxes (Tennessee loves sales tax!) on firearms and by arsenal stockage fees paid by those who own more than, say, three guns. Those adults not wishing to own weapons may opt out, but must still perform militia duty in a support role. In my Tennessee county, 60% of the total population falls within this age group; at current census levels, that is 93,600 people. The most efficient administrative model would call for county-wide organization, thus my county's two municipal school system buildings would be added in, bringing the number of school buildings to be covered to 40. Given a school year of 180 days, it would be possible to cover every school with a platoon of 13 people every day that they are open. Not all of these people need be armed: reconnaissance and communications are as significant as firepower in responding to a school invasion: where is the shooter? What are the escape routes? Training would obviously be a significant need, and for this reason the minimum extent of annual militia duty would be 5 days: 4 days of graduated training and one day of live school patrol. Payment for these days would be a statutory amount equal to a progressive assessment of statewide average before-tax income of the militia pool and would at the beginning of every year be paid to the state, pending service, at which point it would be reimbursed.

Concealed Carry: To me nothing reveals the bankruptcy of public security thinking among individual-rights gun owners more than concealed carry. All of these presumably good guys with guns cannot be discerned by the general public they are said to be protecting. Given a live shooting scene, who's the bad guy? Who are the good ones? Expect chaos. Look what happened in Parkland: the shooter was able to mingle with his targets and get away. It is simplicity itself to imagine a shooter killing people and then proclaiming himself to be a good guy and literally getting away with murder (should it be left to an unread novelist to imagine such things?). For this reason, open carry is much to be preferred to concealed carry, but even better than open carry would be militia open carry, in which open carry would be regulated (with statutory exemptions for hunting, etc.) to coincide with periods of training mentioned above. Militia carry would involve wearing some kind of identifier -- a hat, a badge, a uniform -- to inform the public and also to achieve whatever deterrent effect armed presence has. Come to think of it, militia identification could be used for those who for whatever stylistic reason prefer concealed carry. Identification is key--and could even introduce an unintended "more eyes on the street" effect in that unarmed militia members--those in training awaiting their day of duty--would also be walking around. Sparta, here we come!

This sort of thing constitutes regulation, not infringement. It was not only expected by the authors of the 2nd Amendment, it was called for. There are plenty of historical examples of these kinds of regulations from back in the days when there actually was a well-regulated militia in the US (1790 - 1830). Without this the 2nd Amendment is at present doubly a bad deal. Not only do we not have a well-regulated militia, we have a public sphere that is awash with assault weapons abetted by anarchic attitudes towards their purpose.

Flip it or repeal it. If you're not going to use it for its intended purpose, why have it? As Scalia said, the right to appropriate self-protection to individuals was already protected by common law before the 2nd Amendment. The Founders approved the Second Amendment in order to secure an arsenal, provided by the people themselves, for what was to be the most important component of an occasionally-Federalized military and--while you're at it--a support for state and local law enforcement. It would be on a Federal scale such a conception of militia duty as every state already had at the time the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were approved. Solid militia duty, structured at a Federal scale, would prevent reliance on a standing army, which not only would be expensive but would also be a temptation away from the patriotic duty of participating in your own common defense.

"To provide for the common defense." {Does my idiot-calling-naysayer know where that comes from? If I must be an idiot, please let me be a most unuseful one.) We have an internal enemy. Common defense is needed to defeat it. The internal enemy is not the law-abiding gun owner. The internal enemy is the law-UNabiding gun owner. No one wants a law-UNabiding gun owner to commit mayhem. That "no one" includes law-abiding gun owners. The 2nd amendment, flipped properly, contains its own cure. Drink from the purple bottle of folly. :-)

Cold dead hands

It's not a great time to be an American in the Elysian Fields. The Spartans especially are having the time of their deaths hooting in derision at the American "well-regulated militia."

"You can put a man on the moon but you can't regulate a militia? What's with the land of the free that it's so rotted by mistaking libertinage for liberty that it knows nothing of DUTY?" roars Leonidas, still buff after all these years after Thermopylae.

Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Antonin Scalia, et al (Gallatin) just hang their heads.

"It was you, Tom, and all your fantastic notions about the virtue of the yeomanry," mutters Adams.

"It's the Christians selling out to the End Times. End Times! End Times! How many End Times have there been since Jesus died? One for every wild-eyed doomcaster that ever lived," spits Jefferson in fierce response.

Antonin Scalia tut-tuts, "Look, if people will actually read what I said in Heller, they will understand that regulatory remedies for firearms are readily available in the militia scheme. Why every governor of every state doesn't make it the top priority to regulate the statutory unorganized militia -- meaning at present (if you will pardon my obiter dicta) every adult fucking male who isn't in the National fucking Guard -- I do not understand. Licensing, annual inspection, muster requirements, weapons classification with varying levels of permission: all such things are possible. Where is the creativity of the American political class at the state level?"

Al Gallatin says nothing, but nods over in the direction of where Charlton Heston shambles by, dragging a musket by the butt, its muzzle in one of his cold, dead hands, holding a tattered Valentine from the NRA in the other.

Jefferson, Adams, Scalia, et al (Gallatin) just hang their heads. 

It's all right there in "Black" and "White"

Ah, Black History Month (a.k.a. February for you non-Americans). I understand the need and the purpose, but it makes me sad, the way affirmative action makes me sad: for the reason that it is a paltry fraction-measure of what's needed to eradicate the cancer of metastatic racism in this country.

Simply stated--and to examine the afflicted body for other pathologies--it is an easily demonstrable fact that American history--the other 11 months?--told without "Black" history is not just an empty vessel, it's a body whose soul has been devoured by some demonic spirit. Without "Black" history, American history is worse than a lie.

And lying to itself about history is something America's pretty good at, apparently. Here's a good example of how: a survey in which only 8% of students were able to identify what caused the South to secede. Take a careful look at the survey. It does not ask "what caused the Civil War." It asks about secession. Anybody with any real knowledge about Southern secession knows that the first states to leave the Union--the majority of the Confederacy--did so explicitly and forthrightly over the election of Republican Abraham Lincoln and the threat that supposedly posed to the South's "peculiar institution." It is there in black and white in the secession covenants written by the conventions that enthusiastically decided that it was time pursue their slaveocratic destiny by erasing their stars from Old Glory.

Speaking of which: these days one of the diversions touted by the carnival-barking Traitor-in-Chief (as he will be shown to be) is the kneeling of protesting "Black" football players during the National Anthem. "Those son-of-a-bitches!" he says, and his defenders say, "He says what he thinks!" Haha. Sorry. That doesn't count as "thinking." Nor does most of what he says. Except, ironically, when he's lying: lying is far and away the most thinking he does.

It's not just Trump, though: I know at least one Clinton supporter who refers to the kneelers as "thugs." So, let me ask you: where was "Black" America when the anthem declared the USA to be "the land of the free"? Hint: it was written in 1814 by a slave-owning lawyer who also represented "Blacks" seeking freedom to such an extent that he became known as "the nigger lawyer" AND who promoted African colonization as a way to offshore "Blacks" who had been freed AND who feared racial "amalgamation" (what a future generation would less delicately call "race-mixing") to such an extent that he did everything he could to prevent abolitionist ideas from seeing the light of day.

But chances are pretty good none of this is known any better than the cause of secession.

"So what? We don't have slaves anymore. Everybody's free." Let bygones be bygones, right? Wrong. There ain't no bygone in it.

To wit:

I recently found out, via a virtual high school alumni service, that a former schoolmate of mine just died, someone I lost track of after high school. I have only one real enduring memory of him: that he and I, along with a handful of others, wore black armbands to school (Northside Jr. High in Chattanooga) on the day of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s, funeral 50 years ago this year. The school had not been integrated that long and had only a few African-American students. Most of them didn't come to school, but observed the day apart from the "White" multitude. One who did come (brave soul), also wearing an armband, complimented me on being integrated. Solidarity forever, however, didn't save me from being threatened by a "White" thug: "Don't show your nigger-loving face outside at lunch." So, at lunch I kept to the thug-free indoors and made it through the day with armband and face intact. My recently-departed schoolmate wasn't as lucky: as soon as he got to school his armband was torn off.

It seems amazing to me that it's been 50 years since then. As in everything to do with lived experience, it feels like yesterday ... a yesterday at the bottom of a pile of other, younger yesterdays, none of them seeming very real except for the fact that they happened. They engrave themselves in ways you do not know, and with depths you cannot predict. Wearing a black armband that day was the total, innocent naivete of someone who thought, by way of parental influence and the evening news, that Dr. King represented the best way to civilly right some civil wrongs, but in bringing me face-to-face with hate that was incomprehensible to me, it opened my eyes and gave me the merest iota of a speck of a sliver of a glimpse of what might these days be called the "unprivilege" borne by certain fellow Americans day in and day out since before there was even a country to call "the land of the free."

Merest iota of a speck of a sliver of a glimpse. Pretty small, huh? Bring it back to scale by multiplying it by 300 years of slavery, the withdrawal and collapse of Reconstruction, the KKK, sharecropper serfdom, Jim Crow, lynching, "separate but equal," redlining, whites-only New Deal Progressivism, Confederate statues in the 20th century, sundown towns, more KKK, racist law enforcement, and the carceral state. Whatcha got? I don't begin to know, but I'm guessing it's something like the water in Flint, MI: poison.

It's a ton of negatives. It's like a bunch of mice living in a cage with a cat right outside: that ton of constant cat stress is heavy enough to set mouse against mouse. It's science: it would even happen to "White" mice, all ye bell curve holdouts praying for race. If it was a landfill, the only people that would be allowed to live nearby would be "Black," and they'd be forced to live there--quite legally, as is the way of things--until such time as somebody like King would come along and get killed for trying to get it changed.

For me, though, all these years later, remembering back to my brush with "White" hatred and thinking how far I was from being able to gauge the strength of that cat-stress or the depth of that landfill, as luck would have it Cornel West and Ta-Nehisi Coates got in a fight.

Harvard professor and progressive pundit West started it by calling Coates--in an opinion piece in The Guardian--"the neoliberal face of the black freedom struggle" who "fetishizes white supremacy" by making it "almighty, magical, and unremovable." While giving Coates some credit as a "talented wordsmith" for his work in The Atlantic that "rightly highlights the vicious legacy of white supremacy," West tore into what he perceived to be Coates's pessimistic fatalism and his failure to connect racism with the structures of "domination" like imperialism, capitalism, sexism, and homophobia.

What really seemed to get West's goat was Coates's application to Barack Obama of "twin honorifics" once applied to Malcolm X (after his assassination): "our living Black manhood" and "our own Black shining prince." West fumes at this "gross misunderstanding" that "speaks volumes" about Coates's neoliberalism.

What did Coates do in response? He ... disappeared: after tweeting "i didn't get in it for this," he deactivated his Twitter account, which had over a million followers (which for some reason makes me feel better about not going outside for lunch with my black armband).

"White" people on Twitter warned other "White" people not to get involved or have opinions because it was a "Black" thing. Wait a minute, I thought, this is about important ideas. In a different era those same people would've counseled ignoring W.E.B. DuBois taking on Booker T. Washington. As long as the "problem of the color line" beats at the heart of America, if you're not making some effort to take the pulse, you're still living in the la-la land of the free you learned about in high school history. I want to live in the real one.

As one who had followed Coates in The Atlantic ever since being blown away by his article on reparations (which I would require every American voter to read if I were Benevolent Dictator for Life), I was taken aback by West's assault. From my reading of Coates, West's "neoliberal" tag seemed like a cheap shot with a trendy progressive insult. But at the same time I was delighted by it, because it held out the promise of a savory, dialectical exercise: I couldn't be fair to West--familiar to me up to this point only as a media pundit--without reading his standard Race Matters (now in a 25th anniversary edition), and since West's column was in effect a damning review of Coates's We Were Eight Years in Power, I really needed to close the circle by reading it as well.

Having completed the exercise, I now have to give West a great deal of credit not so much for his critique of Coates (more on that in a bit) as for a political posture that stands on unequivocal moral ground beside and in support of all those whose lives, liberties, and pursuits of happiness are foreshortened, robbed, and obstructed by powerful forces that need to be resisted in the public arena--and defeated there as well. Race still matters--and it deserves creative problem-solving in not only the political but the cultural realm as well (West is particularly incandescent in illuminating the cultural dimension)--but so do poverty, sexism, homophobia, and imperialism. It seems to me that MLK himself would have wound up in this ideological neighborhood, had he lived, a supposition that at least to me is greatly to West's credit.

But there remains the matter of how to resolve the West-Coates dissonance; or can it be resolved?

<aside>One of the fun things about reading West is his jive style of high seriousness. I mean, he bops the rhetoric. He invokes jazz as a cultural force, but it's also obvious that he takes it to heart as a personal, stylistic one as well. As for Coates, he talks about having hiphop songs as models for his writing, but--maybe ironically--to me his prose goes down as smooth as a Mozart symphony.</aside>

A good approach to the problem is to compare West's chapter "Malcolm X and Black Rage" (the ultimate chapter in Race Matters) with Coates's chapter "The Legacy of Malcolm X--Why His Vision Lives On in Barack Obama," perhaps the chapter in We Were Eight Years in Power that more than any other sparked West's vitriol in The Guardian.

I personally benefited from reading both takes on Malcolm X. One problem with focusing on history in my reading, as I do, is that I seem to require a 50-year remove before I trust that the archival realm has been built up enough to make writers trustworthy enough to read. Well, the 50 years is up on Malcolm X, so that I can finally try to understand, as a "White" person, what he means to "Black" people.

Whatever their differences, Coates and West agree on the essential meaning of Malcolm X: he held up "Blackness" as a transcendent device for self-definition over and against the dominant, "White" power structure, be it political or cultural. The "rage" of West's chapter title was already there in the African-American psyche and was Xplicit (as it were) in the Malcolmian doctrine, but its real value was that it channeled that rage into a constructive, Black-positive approach to personal renaissance free of oppressive, "White" influences.

From here on West and Coates diverge. West, ever the professor, enumerates point by point the various ways that Malcolm X's "doctrine" (my word) possessed 1. an inchoate, apolitical nature that made it insufficient as a political platform to direct a cohesive, collective struggle and 2. a deep suspicion of American cultural hybridity--cultural race-mixing?--which West, like MLK, celebrates as "the past and present bonds between blacks and whites."

Coates, by contrast, chronicles (riffs?) a personal curve on the theme of Malcolm X: how the fresh, proud Afrocentric culture of Coates's youth was put aside (literally, as in a poster of Malcolm X that went into storage) as he navigated the project of establishing himself in the hybrid American culture. "Raised in de facto segregation," Coates writes, "I was carried by my work into the mostly white world, and then to the blasphemies of having white friends and howling white music." What brings him back to himself is "Election Night 2008," which, Coates asserts--contrary to those who proclaim that it cast Malcolm X's "naysaying" permanently into the trash heap--was effected not only by "black people's long fight to be publicly American," but also by "those same Americans' long fight to be publicly black." The success of that "latter fight" can be laid at the doorstep mostly of one person, concludes Coates: "Barack Obama is the president. But it's Malcolm X's America."

As to the conflation of Obama with Malcolm X that so outrages West, it is a mere extension of the central point about X that West and Coates agree on: his self-invention as an explicitly "Black" person. In Obama's case it was an important key to his ability to enter fully into African-American culture and project an identity and style that enabled him to communicate so broadly and successfully to that culturally hybrid nation that West himself describes.

West's prickliness at Coates's rendition of Xness to the Obamasphere is an extension of West's politics that brings all the big progressive issues together under one big tent. Because of these linkages, according to West, if Obama is wrong (or too moderate) on the economy or on imperialism, he necessarily vitiates his credibility when it comes to race. But to paint Coates himself as an Obama-style neoliberal is to misread Coates.

Coates is certainly no Obama henchman. If one thing is clear from his book, it is that Coates disagrees with Obama on a great number of things, even if he provides an objective account of Obama's positions. To understand this, West need only review the last sentences of Coates's book:

[T]here can be no conflict between the naming of whiteness and the naming of the degradation brought about by an unretrained capitalism, by the privileging of greed and the legal encouragement of hoarding and more elegant plunder. I have never seen a contradiction between calling for reparations and calling for a living wage, on calling for legitimate law enforcement and single-payer health care. They are related--but cannot stand in for one another. I see the fight against sexism, racism, poverty, and even war finding their union not in synonymity but in their ultimate goal--a world more humane.

If that is not a progressive platform, I do not know what is. Yet that platform--which is West's bread and butter--is neither Coates's forte nor his focus. Coates views the world through the prism that is downside of "White" racial oppression, which is a force unto itself. It is not a derivation or an unintended consequence or an externality. He is its balladeer, as it were. Coates is as lyrical in his writing as he is obsessive with his focus as he is thorough with his documentation as he is unflinching (or generous) with his personal history. It all comes together in his writing.

Nothing is sadder to this reader than this sentence in Coates's book: "For most African-Americans, white people exist either as a direct or indirect force for bad in their lives." I, as "White," am of course in no position to say. I do, however, take Coates to be a reliable narrator of this particular ballad. How reliable? Documentation is one of his strong points, and it's not like he's without anecdotal support (in an interview published just the other day, for example, Quincy Jones momentarily left the juicy gossip to say that racism is the worst it's ever been).

Beyond its value as a chronicle of "Black" experience vis-a-vis "Whiteness," it has value in providing the basis for an empathetic appreciation of the social psychology of prejudice on a broader scale: what adjustments do women have to make to face sexism every day? The same question applies to hispanics and Muslims with regard to xenophobia, atheists with regard to rampant fideism (especially in the South), indigenous peoples, LGBT people, disabled people. Oh, and I almost left out poor people.

But this is just me channeling my under-employed black hispanic atheist lesbian with hearing loss alter-ego, so no big deal, right?  Yeah, I can hear the Nietzscheans grumble: spare us the victims; give us Superman. Fuck that. I'll take Jesus Christ any old day: love thy neighbor and the golden rule. This, by the way, is where West shines. He trumpets the need for a moral basis for social uplift, not just in the "Black" community, but among all humanity. And then he goes out and walks the talk, while Coates sinks into despondency at the Trump election. I wouldn't doubt it if he were considering a move to France.

So this is how I resolve the West-Coates dissonance: to see both as, in West's own words, an "interplay of individuality" that, "as with a soloist in a jazz quartet ... is promoted in order to sustain and increase the creative [emphasis West's] tension with the group--a tension that yields a higher level of performance to achieve the aim of the collective project." The arc of justice is one slow rainbow, but both are involved in the effort to advance it. West might be more laying down the beat, so to speak, but Coates is soloing away to excellent effect, reaching people with a powerful message that otherwise might not be heard. Put another way, even if West is out playing in the square and Coates is blasting from the insulation of a isolated sound booth, there is a return from both venues.

If we have to have "Black" History Month, for god's sake don't whitewash it by leaving out the whole messy context and pretending that we're through with all that. In this regard I very much hope Ta-Nehisi Coates returns to print to provide challenging analysis that hoists William Faulkner with his own petard: the past isn't dead; it isn't even past.

Meanwhile my ninth grade dude self will continue to abide inside the lunch room. After all, as Ishmael Reed said, "writin' is fightin'."

[My usages "Black" and "White" are meant to punctuate the reality that these concepts, however universally used in the US, are conceptual grotesqueries: they are cultural categories the gross imprecision of which serve only to divide. Furthermore, their direct and recent lineage to discredited notions of biological human categorization lends itself to the survival of those very notions in popular, nonscientific thought. But that is a subject for tomorrow's lunch room.]

Second Amendmentitis: Inflammation of a vestigial law

The appendix in the human body is vestigial: it used to do something but now it doesn't. And sometimes it gets sick and has to be removed.

The Second Amendment in the U.S. Constitution is likewise vestigial: it used to provide the basis for arming a universal militia, in which every adult citizen served as a matter of law, but since that system broke down and was replaced by the National Guard, the Second Amendment no longer serves a purpose. Some people say that it guarantees an individual right to gun ownership, and it may indeed. However, that was not its purpose. And that is what makes it vestigial.

America is very sick right now. It is sick of gun violence. It is sick of the slaughter of masses of innocent people. It is particularly sick of its impotent division in the face of this slaughter. One side wants gun control; the other side is all guns and undisciplined, open-carry nonsense.

In this case--unlike an appendix--the vestigial Second Amendment has made America very sick not because the amendment itself is sick, but because it has lost its original purpose.

And--also unlike an appendix, which must be removed when it gets sick--a vestigial amendment can be returned to health if it is restored to its original purpose. And given the impasse between the two sides that shows every sign of getting worse and worse (I saw a tweet today that said that the two sides would erupt into a war), it seems to me that someone somewhere should be talking about doing that.

One of the things that's making us sick is that we no longer act like we are the government. The government is something other than us, even if we elect our representatives. This is particularly pronounced on the Tea Party right, which has tossed out the traditional conservative reverence for state and local government, and which regards even such traditional civic solutions as public education with undisguised scorn.

In this fevered atmosphere we should remember that the most universal governmental institution of the early Republic--the one in which the entire public of the time (adult white male) was involved--was the militia. You might not have enough property to vote, but you had to serve in the militia--by law. None of this volunteer garbage. This meant that there was one universal arm of government in which everyone participated, and which provided a check on the power of elected or appointed officials.

Today, with the definition of citizen broadened to include everyone of both sexes, universal militia service would provide a common bond of civic duty unparalleled in the nation's history. Don't tell me that wouldn't make a difference.

I tell my gun control friends: stop talking about gun control. Instead, revive/update the militia law of 1792 by requiring all citizens to be armed, then regulate! The Second Amendment allowed it then, and it allows it now.

• Don't want to have a gun? Pay a tax, the same as people who don't want Affordable Care pay the mandate. Those taxes would pay for the administration of the militia system. Reduce or eliminate your tax by participating in the "peace militia" that would perform a wide variety of public services.
• How many people should have semi-automatic weapons? That's a military decision to be made by militia commanders in each state. Only those authorized for military purposes would have them.
• Concealed or open carry would be not be based on individual whim but would be subject to military regulations established by each state militia.
• Require semi-annual (at least) inspection, drill, and firearm education (especially safety) of all gun-bearing citizens.
• Those buying or selling firearms contrary to militia regulations for registration, fitness, etc., would be treated as insurrectionists.
• Make the militia relevant by giving it a hard purpose: dissolve the National Guard, stand down most of the standing army, and demilitarize the police.

These are only a few examples of the kinds of things that are possible with a Second Amendment well-regulated militia. Right now we are living practically in a state of anarchy when it comes to firearms. Change the culture. Let the Second Amendment be the Second Amendment.

Or you can keep on doing like you're doing and either not get anything done or do something half-assed and not address the real problem.

Compromise and the Civil War: My way AND the highway

What's this crap about compromise preventing the Civil War? Anybody saying that is ignorant of some real basic facts. It's so easy, people! The facts that are right in front of your @#$%^&* face!

(There must be something about something being so obvious and easy that nobody talks about it--kind of like the well-regulated militia in the 2nd Amendment.)

Here you go: a simple timeline.

Nov. 6, 1860: Abraham Lincoln elected President of the United States. Will not take office until Mar. 4, 1861.

Dec. 20, 1860: South Carolina secedes. (Lincoln not president yet.)
Jan. 9, 1861: Mississippi secedes. (Lincoln not president yet.)
Jan. 10, 1861: Florida secedes. (Lincoln not president yet.)
Jan. 11, 1861: Alabama secedes. (Lincoln not president yet.)
Jan. 19, 1861: Georgia secedes. (Lincoln not president yet.)
Jan. 26, 1861: Louisiana secedes. (Lincoln not president yet.)
Feb. 1, 1861: Texas secedes. (Lincoln not president yet.)
Feb. 8, 1861: Provisional Constitution of the Confederate States of America adopted. (Lincoln not president yet.)
Feb. 9, 1861: Jefferson Davis elected President of the Confederates States of America. (Lincoln not president yet.)
Feb. 18, 1861: Jefferson Davis inaugurated President of the Confederate States of America. (Lincoln STILL not president yet.)

Mar. 4, 1861: Abraham Lincoln inaugurated President of the United States. (Whew! Finally!)

What caused secession? The constitutional election of Abraham Lincoln--wishy-washy on slavery--caused pro-slavery-expansionist firebrands in the deep Southern states to break away from the United States. Lincoln was presented with a fait accompli by those states that before his inauguration had already established a separate nation. He could either accept this and preside over a USA shorn of these states, or he could seek by military means to reconstitute it.

No compromise was available--short of accepting the dissolution of the USA. The question was whether it could be put back together by military means.

Graffito: Dissertation Decapitation

A letter in the mailbox. When does that happen anymore? One for you, and one for me.

One for you: I want to blurt it all out, but I'm forcing myself give you an entire explanation.

One for me: "I've just finished reading your dissertation," it began.

Now that was a sure-fire way of getting my attention. As far as I knew, the only people who'd ever read my dissertation were the three professors on my review panel. They'd gotten me my Ph.D., which entitled me to a shot at some beggarly adjunct spot in Beaufuque, Tennessee, that might keep me in espresso and scones if I economized and gave up eating actual food.

But here was somebody outside that world who had read also it.

Sure, the dissertation was good. Sure, it was fascinating! I mean, how could something not be fascinating with a title like "Reconstructing a Symbolist Hymn to the Guillotine: Finding Meaning in the Argot of a Fin-de-Siècle Paris Crime Scene Graffito"? It was all about how I had solved--or thought I had solved--a real puzzle.

OK, so it wasn't the Rosetta Stone, but it took a lot of doing to produce an answer good enough to convince three hoary scholars of epigraphy and French linguistics that it was the answer.

It had all started the way epigraphy always seems to start--with the construction of a sewer, in this case the upgrading of a sewer line in the 20th arrondissement of Paris. Workmen came upon a subterranean room that had a wall with an intact graffito so mysterious and so lovingly inscribed that the crew foreman himself cut it out and delivered it to the Institut français.

The graffito was not of any great age, but the civil authorities soon discovered that it came from the house that had produced a notorious murder in 1875: a woman had killed her husband--probably after she had suffered years of abuse--by decapitating him with a home-made guillotine, which crime earned the murderess the same fate beneath the judicial blade.

But the obscurity of the inscription was such that before long the civil authorities issued a call for help decoding it, via a notice in a bulletin somewhere, which my advising professor happened to notice. "Here's your dissertation," is what she'd said.

It was four lines of French gibberish. You will forgive me if I bore you with it. I know French isn't your thang, but, believe me, it's essential to my reason for writing this letter, so here it is:

Bob Echafaud seconde tous 'ci
S'il--verts beaux culs ennuis anis--
y compacte Tue-Mari immisce:
Prie-Dieu, Bob Echafaud!

Why, you ask, bother with gibberish? If the history of language demonstrates anything, it is that today's gibberish is yesterday's everyday speech. And for me, for some reason, after reading it for the first time, I couldn't get it out of my head. I ran it over and over when I was trying to get to sleep that first night. It sounded like something I knew! It seemed to be calling me with a siren call I couldn't resist.

My non-resistance turned into seven years of work. People who have not done scholarship have no appreciation for what I mean by "work," either. I was possessed: I followed every lead, mined every obscure lexicon with a toothpick, looked at every worm-eaten scrap of archival evidence, talked or wrote to every specialist in the arcana of the Parisian monde and the demi-monde of the late 19th century, and basically lived, breathed, and shat those words for seven whole monastic years. Sure, I went on dates from time to time, but I always wound up sitting at a table alone, because who wants to hang out with someone who is obsessed with translating four lines of French gibberish? It was like I was Dan Brown before DaVinci Code.

I did translate it, and here it is, for what it's worth: "Everybody here, Bob Scaffold is your second. That is, unless his green-ass absinthe issues get in the way and he's only packing a sawed-off Hubby Killer. In that case, Bob Scaffold, you're just a kneeling bench."

But what did it mean? The best part about the dissertation was that I could only say a truly final, conclusive answer, ahem, "awaited further research." Which meant I could publish-or-perish about this damn thing for-fucking-ever. This was truly going to be my lifelong ticket to espresso and scones.

"Bob Scaffold" was most definitely a guillotine. But was it the homemade one or the official one awaiting the murderess? "Kneeling bench" provides a savory equivalence in terms of furniture: the literal translation is "pray-God." Would it be seen as an instrument of divine justice? Even more tantalizing was the fact that the murderess was known to run in the same social circles as Symbolist poets, whose verse made mincemeat out of meaning (but it was very delicious mincemeat). She had met the poets Verlaine and Mallarmé. As far as is known, this was her only poem: etched in plaster, probably after beheading her husband. Even after seven years, I had just bored a hole in the explanation big enough for my head.

And into that breach stepped the letter: "I believe I have some information that can shed some light on your puzzle," it went on. "Your thorough research brought you part of the way, but I feel certain that, with all the work you spent on it, you will be very interested in learning something that will take you the rest of the way."

Interested? No no no I wasn't interested. With that letter I was a fly on the lashes of a Venus flytrap.

There she goes with the piano again. The letter-writer. I was trapped from the beginning.

I responded immediately to the anonymous sender at the address provided: something along the lines of "please I will kill anyone or debase myself in any way you wish if you will only share your information with me," only couched in socially conventional expressions. After a month of sleepless, pins-and-needle agony I received a reply: a carte de visite inscribed "Toussaint, 2017, noon, 947 Ursulines Ave., New Orleans, LA."

Fine. I didn't have to kill anyone or debase myself. I just had to go to the French Quarter on All Saints Day.

It turned out to be a tiny house: a one-storey shotgun with two shuttered apertures in front. I knocked at the one at the top of four crumbling steps. A tiny, white-haired woman answered the knock and asked if it was I, saying my name with a pronounced swallowed "r," French-style. Being told yes, she invited me in. There was a small front room with a couch and a baby grand piano that pretty much filled the room. She invited me to sit on the couch while she went to get a light refreshment for me. She brought some espresso and a beignet, the New Orleans equivalent of a scone. "I will play something for you," she said. It was a very short piece. When it was over, she stood up and said, "That was Bob Echafaud," which didn't really clarify anything. My face must have reflected this sense of unclarity, because she said, "Never mind. Follow me."

She led me through a small kitchen and a smaller bedroom at the back of which was a door. On the other side of the door was ... but wait, not yet.

Here's the deal. She said I could write one letter, so I decided to write to you. You are my last hope.

She is very old: a centenarian? Her mother had her late: "I was a surprise baby," she said. Her mother herself came to New Orleans from France as a young child--orphaned--bringing with her nothing other than the clothes on her back and two pieces of paper: music manuscript of the piece the old woman had played for me and a poem, which she showed me:

Bob Echafaud seconde tous 'ci
S'il--verts beaux culs ennuis anis--
y compacte Tue-Mari immisce:
Prie-Dieu, Bob Echafaud!

That's right: it's the same as the inscription.

She tells me that even though the words look French, they're actually English when they're sounded out. But she doesn't know what the English words are. It's some kind of rhyme--nonsense in French, but an actual rhyme in English. Maybe it is a lullaby? Her grandmother sang it to her mother, who sang it to her. "These are silly English words all dressed up in French," is what mother said to daughter become mother said to daughter said to me.

She sings it in a small voice and accompanies herself on the piano. She doesn't really like to sing, so mostly she just plays it. And constructs palaces of meaning for the nonsense words. It's like all her life she has lived in a Symbolist poem of meaningless symbols.

Here's the deal: she wants to know what English rhyme this is. If she finds out, she will let me go.

"Look," I say, "let me go and I will help you find the answer." No, she says. She has gone too far for that. She couldn't believe what she was hearing when the French consul came to her Creole French circle to talk about the original discovery of the inscription; after that she made it her business to keep up with developments. "It was like being born again," she says. And now that she has found the one person in the world who has the most knowledge of this puzzle, she feels that it is only just that I should die if I cannot give her the answer she seeks. "And if I find the answer?" I ask. I will release you, she says. That is a promise; I have made my plans, she says.

The door on the other side of the bedroom? There was something in that espresso or in that beignet that knocked me out before I saw it opened. I am now on the other side of that door: in a room with pictures of Marilyn Monroe, a nursing Madonna and Child, an undressed dress form, and a smoking cigar with an absinthe distiller's band; as well as an actual, working guillotine, named--of course--Bob Echafaud. I am chained to the guillotine.

I watch the old woman slice watermelon with it. Surely you have guessed that her mother was the daughter of the woman who guillotined her husband in 1875. "If there is no answer, you will beg me to die this way, eventually," she avers in a comforting purr before slicing another watermelon.

I need the English rhyme that sounds like these French words. You are my last hope. You have the address. I await the kind favor of a reply.

I know you will understand when I say I wish you were here.

Instead of me.

The Militia Arsenal Governance Act (MAGA) of 2018

The title is only partly tongue-in-cheek, as you will see. I'm dead serious about all these innocent dead bodies such as happened in Las Vegas this week.

But the nation is at a standoff. A direct, "gun control" confrontation with the NRA and the gun lobby will produce only political gridlock, legal roadblocks, incremental improvements, and more dead bodies.

Why not take an approach that is both more unifying and more extreme? Why not start thinking how to take the 2nd Amendment back to its original purpose? Besides being constitutional, such an approach--by making gun owners an obligatory part of a national military apparatus, as the Founders intended--could produce the kinds of changes in the nation's gun culture that would turn things around.

Here for example is a statute loosely based on the Militia Act of 1792, but which maintains the current distinction between organized militia (National Guard) and unorganized militia (everybody else). It is very short and straightforward, but the military nature of its requirements would produce a mind-boggling but constitutional change in the relationship between weapons and the State.

Of course, this blog isn't called "follies" for nothing.

The Militia Arsenal Governance Act (MAGA)

Whereas the Second Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America asserts the best security of a free state to be a well-regulated militia, and whereas the United States of America has regulated said militia since 1792, and whereas the militia is a military body, and whereas a military body requires an assessment of strength in order to be effective, and whereas there are two classes of militia, the organized militia (National Guard) and the unorganized militia, therefore the Militia Arsenal Governance Act (MAGA) enacts the following regulations for the unorganized militia:

1. 10 US Code §246 (a) is changed to read, "the militia consists of all able-bodied adults who are, or who have made a declaration of intention to become, citizens of the United States."*see note

2. All members of the unorganized militia unless exempted as in (a) and (b) must possess, maintain, and be trained in the use of a firearm; and must keep a minimum of 20 rounds in a secure location at all times.

(a) Members of the unorganized militia not wishing to possess a firearm must pay a Statutory Annual Firearm Exemption (SAFE) fee as established by their State.  The SAFE fee is to be used by each State only to pay for the administrative costs of the MAGA program.

(b) Each State will determine its own classes of additional exemptions, e.g. felons, medically unfit, etc. 

3. The National Guard of every State will maintain a registry of all firearms in the possession of the unorganized militia in that State and will make an annual report to the U. S. Secretary of Defense enumerating the firearms and ammunition in the possession of the unorganized militia in each State.

(a) Personal information in the registry will be kept confidential by the State National Guard. Release of personal information can only be obtained by court order.

4. The National Guard of each State will perform an annual inspection of every firearm, with attendant ammunition, in the possession of every militia member who has them. Each State will establish and collect fines for those who fail to participate, which fines may only be used to pay for the administrative costs of the MAGA program.

5. All members of the unorganized militia who keep arms must participate in a minimum of 3 hours of annual training provided by the State National Guard. Non-participation will be subject to fines established by each State, which fines may only be used to pay for the administrative costs of the MAGA program.

*Currently the militia "consists of all able-bodied males at least 17 years of age and … under 45 years of age who are, or who have made a declaration of intention to become, citizens of the United States and of female citizens of the United States who are members of the National Guard."

Next for O'Reilly's "Killing" series: America

To date, Bill O'Reilly has killed Jesus, Lincoln, Kennedy, Reagan, Patton, Japan, and England. It now appears that he has killed Las Vegas as well and is now gunning for America. Will no one stop him?

His weapons of choice are "books," supposedly of "history," that he has "written," but which are in fact toxic emanations from his celebrity status, which, zombified, can only be sustained through the applause of his victims.

Even though it's a "blog" and not a "book," Bill O'Reilly, slavering after a dose of blood-sucking applause, hailed the deaths in Las Vegas of 59 innocents and the wounding of more than 500 others as "the price of freedom."

"The Second Amendment," he says, "is clear that Americans have a right to arm themselves for protection. Even the loons."

Even the loons. Please, please give Bill O'Reilly a gun in exchange for not "writing." He'd do far less damage. I'm worried he's coming after America.

Because the Second Amendment means no such thing, and continuing to believe that it does--and here O'Reilly is joined by his fellow bloodsuckers the NRA--is not only getting masses of innocent people killed, it's perverting the soul of the American project.

The soul of the American project has to do with the virtues of self-government. The Second Amendment was intended to be a guarantor that the people would always be armed in order that the people themselves--not a standing army--would provide the continuous military strength necessary to defend the country and execute its laws. Only through carrying out this shared duty and sacrifice--together--could the people retain the virtue of self-government.

The Second Amendment was only one piece of how the military part of the American project was manifested. There is no better place to start to understand how a "well-regulated militia" should function than to read about the Militia Acts of 1792, which provided the statutory flesh for the constitutional skeleton. American adults, universally, were to be self-armed members of a military organization regulated by each state and subject to requirements for training and discipline, the violation of which would be met with fines or harsher punishments meted out by courts-martial.

And now, here we are: listening for the Second Amendment but instead hearing only the call of loons. Will crazy people find a way to kill? Of course. But to say they should be able to amass an arsenal like the guy in Las Vegas is itself a species of suicidal craziness. And to claim that this craziness of constitutionally protected is more dangerous than it is bogus.

Be warned, America. By the lights of the Founders, in the matter of what's needed for the security of a free state, you're already on the ropes. And worse: you're in the crosshairs of "Killing Bill" O'Reilly's toxic grenade launcher.

In which I try to figure out why some of my neighbors are flying the flag at night with no lights

I love my neighbors. I live in a great neighborhood. The only thing is that lots of them are protesting something, but I don't know what it is.

When I go for a walk at night, I notice that fully a quarter of the houses are flying an American flag outside. In total darkness. Here's an example: oh say can you see the American flag in there somewhere?

I can feel you shudder, dear reader, because you and I both hold very close to our hearts the undying words of 4 U.S. Code Chapter 1 §6a: "It is the universal custom to display the flag only from sunrise to sunset on buildings and on stationary flagstaffs in the open. However, when a patriotic effect is desired, the flag may be displayed 24 hours a day if properly illuminated during the hours of darkness."

Say "amen" somebody.

My neighbors though--whom I love--are carrying out a systematic protest day after day after day by flying the flag throughout the day and throughout the night--and the latter time without proper illumination. It is particularly interesting to me that the Code says to illuminate the flag "when a patriotic effect is desired." So, logically it means that my very loveable and worthy neighbors, by flying the flag in the darkness, desire just the opposite: an unpatriotic effect. Say it isn't so.

But I don't know! That's just the thing. I wish I could be illuminated as to the reason for the lack of illumination of their flags at night time.

4 U.S.C. Chapter 1 is known as "the flag code." It has the same status as 36 U.S.C. Chapter 3 §301, which defines the national anthem and delineates the proper conduct to observe during its playing/singing. Certain professional football players have recently been observed not observing that conduct, and this has kicked up considerable brouhaha. Football is after the national sport, pace those individuals who misguidedly think that baseball--a patient game of split-second occasions of the use of lightning reflexes, played without continuous violence, without armor, and without any attendant metaphorical descriptors invoking warfare--can possibly claim any real connection to the American psyche.

But I know what those guys are doing. They are African-Americans, and they are using the occasion to complain of false advertising in the Pledge of Allegiance, which announces "liberty and justice for all," but in practice seems to come with a considerable amount nod-nod-wink-wink read-the-fine-print type stuff: "Caveat civis: this offer may not apply in all police jurisdictions, some of which may enable individual officers to apply extrajudicial capital punishment without disciplinary consequence to unarmed black men if the officers' grandmothers scared them as children with stories of Negro boogeymen, or any other such excuse whether lame or legal."

They also claim to observe a pattern of bait-and-switch in the American system vis-a-vis its black population, e.g. the Declaration of Independence "all men are created equal" excepting anyone with African blood; and e.g. again the 15th amendment saying the right to vote "shall not be denied or abridged in the United States or in any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude" but being used by Southern legislators as a parlor game called "Jim Crow, Lynching, and the KKK: The White Citizens Funtime Way of Razzing the 15th Amendment."

OK, so we know what they're protesting. But there's this brouhaha, like I said, because people are all like, "Look, if you're going to violate the National Anthem Statute, you'd better be organized about it. Colin Kaepernick? One dude! And then one week it's a few more, then Trump tweets, and it's a whole bunch, then it dies back down. That's not getting the job done! Think Boston Tea Party! Think Montgomery Bus Boycott! Y'all ain't organized! Where's the Sons of Black Liberty? Where's the NAACNFLP? Get organized and put ALL of your bodies on the line, week in and week out, until it's not just you taking a knee, it's the league itself! If people aren't boycotting football because of what you're doing, and the owners aren't losing money, you aren't doing it right!"

People are rightly pissed because these athletes don't seem to have learned the lesson of Martin Luther King, Jr., who famously wrote from the Birmingham jail that the purpose of direct action is to create a crisis. Look, it doesn't matter who agrees with you or disagrees with you about respecting the flag. You want to accomplish something, right? There will not be a resolution of the problem that you are drawing attention to unless there is a crisis that produces the kind of negotiation or legal action or voter action that produces the change you seek. Until that happens, you're just wasting your time, ginning things up because it makes you feel better. If you're not organized and persistent, it ain't gonna happen. That's the lesson of the civil rights movement. Forget about the naysayers. There's never a right time or place or way to protest according to the people who don't give a shit about your cause.

So that's what the brouhaha is about. But all that does nothing to help me figure out my neighbors, all the ones who are breaking the law about the flag. What are they protesting? Daylight savings time? Burning leaves after dark so you won't be caught? Having potable water unlike Flint, MI? The Federal Reserve System? Political Correctness? Political Incorrectness? Electricity? 4 U.S. Code Chapter 1 §6a?

I really think they're purposely creating an unpatriotic effect by which to say--in their own quiet way--that the national sport of the United States is hypocrisy.

"'Twas in the merry Urology, where prostates all were swellin'"

I live in central Appalachia, in the netherland of Tennessee and Virginia. There are two hospital systems here that are about to merge into one, if the states approve. At this writing, Tennessee has done so. Virginia, if you're listening, approve if you will, but only on one condition: that they come up with another name.

The name of the merged system is Ballad Health. With a name like this, it is readily apparent that whatever board reviewed this decision did not include anyone with a nodding acquaintance of the Appalachian ballad, and the same is probably true of whatever marketing firm sold whatever board the bill of goods that included this name.

The Appalachian ballad is more often than not a complete and total horror show. Somebody's either getting murdered, or cheated on, or knocked up, or people are dying in a fiery train crash, or somebody's lit out up the holler to become an outlaw because he got caught trying to get pain pills with his third cousin's prescription from the back surgery.

Well, actually, that last one hasn't been written yet, but you can bet the next neonatal abstinence syndrome baby that it'll be one of Ballad Health's first hits.

And if you don't believe me, go to the Encyclopedia of Appalachia and look up "ballads," and see how the ones brought over from the old country are about babies dying and girls getting their heads chopped off with swords.

Not that things improve much with the Americanization of the form. According to Encyclopedia of Appalachia the subjects of choice for the more recent Appalachian ballads are "tragic accidents, battles, and sensational murders." Tragic accidents: I'm sure no hospital has ever had to deal with those.

However, if this thing does go through, the least Ballad Health can do is play along by designating their rooms not with numbers but with names--the names being the songs of well-known Appalachian ballads. That way the public could be entertained with code messages on the PA: "Code Brown [mass casualty incident], Wreck of the Old 97" or "Dr. Joe Gottaway, The Unquiet Grave" or "Code Blue, Rare Willie Drowned in Yarrow." The cardiology ward would of course be the Barbry Allen Ward, after the ballad patroness of broken hearts.

The proponents of the merger sing loudly that bigness will accomplish top-notch health care. The new system, if and when it happens, will surely be unsinkable. Unlike a certain unsinkable ocean liner that was the subject of dozens of ballads.

Deep parody: flipping "When I'm 64"

Age 64 is a milestone only because Paul McCartney wrote a pop song about it. (If you don't know the song, go ahead and listen to it so the rest of this will make sense.)

When I'm 64 is a jaunty, song-and-dance-music-hall ditty that takes the form of a letter from a young person brightly looking forward to the ripe and rewarding attainment of that age--renting a cottage on the Isle of Wight, grandchildren (Vera, Chuck, and Dave)--with a correspondent, someone likewise faced with the ravages of time ("You'll be older too") whose willingness to accept the chanteur's demand to be needed and fed is perhaps in doubt, although the whimsical banter of the letter suggests more of an inside joke.

In my family the real fans of the song were my parents--40-ish when it came out--to whom the corny music was less of an artifact, and who could pack the song with their hopes that the generation of sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll would buckle down enough to give them grandchildren.

Anyway, I'm going to be 64 in a few days. Down-buckled, I dutifully produced three grandchildren, two of whom--though not named Vera and Chuck--I recruited at ages 7 and 4 to do a music video for their grandmother when she turned 64 (the kids carried out a pantomime of the song using a dollhouse and dollhouse accessories).

Making it to 64 is manifestly a cause for ironic ridicule to someone of the "now generation" that hullabalooed about not trusting anyone over 30, worshipped musical idols who didn't make it that far, and believed that the youthful force of rock music would usher in a utopia of peace and love.

As a result, I've been feeling the need for a "deep parody" of When I'm 64. Generated by the song itself, the parody would reverse McCartney's song. If McCartney looked forward to golden years being a continuum from the good ol' days ("If I've been out 'til quarter to 3"), the parody would look back to some abrupt disjuncture when the fantasy ended and reality began.

In fact, as much as possible about the song would be the reverse of McCartney: instead of jaunty music hall, it'd be a rock downer, electric and drummish; the mellow clarinet would morph into one or another of the test tube keyboard chimeras that populate today's music; where McCartney was major, it'd be minor, and vice-versa; where McCartney's melody went up, this melody would go down or be static; where McCartney was static, the melody would move; the (hopefully) enduring romance at the heart of McCartney's song would become some kind of epic split.

Some things would remain to hearken to the original and provide enough of an imitative framework to make it parody, but these would be underlying, structural elements: tempo, some re-fashioned melodic hooks, the prosody, and the scansion. An important element would remain--the correspondence aspect--but would be turned inside out: the singer would be responding, not initiating. Chances are these aspects would work like invisible support Legos hidden by surface flash and be unnoticeable to the unaware.

However, not feeling equal to the task of choosing a subject for the lyric, I let wordplay be my dice roll. Exchanging consonants in "64" soon produced the phrase "fixed to score," which could suggest many scenarios--sports, sex, drug-dealing. Given the hippie milieu being recalled, sports was out, but either sex or drugs could fit. The thing that tipped the scale as to which of those would "inspire" the refrain was an incident from my high school years.

JF was a smart guy, a bit of a loner, friendly, quiet, preternaturally pale, with a slouching amble and a sly, sideways grin. Like many of my smart friends he made terrible grades but made up for it by blowing the top of standardized tests. A National Merit semifinalist, he supposedly--to invoke the other salient fact about his high school reputation--took the exam tripping on LSD.

JF was also a drug dealer, and not without ambition. In independent study math one day he confided to me that he was having a brick of hashish shipped to him by way of the Railway Express Agency. He wasn't trying to interest me in buying--I was not a customer. His telling me about the hash wasn't a boast so much as it was an insouciant gesture delivered with nonchalance, something along the lines of "I'm going to jump the Grand Canyon in a motorcycle just to see how it goes." My inner reaction was, "I would never do anything like that; I hope you don't get caught;" my verbal response was probably something along the lines of "Far out."

He got caught. After finding this out, I never saw or heard from or about JF again. (If any old HS acquaintances recognize this story and happen to know the actual sequel, send me a postcard, drop me a line, stating point of view.) But the fact that when he got caught he was "fixed to score" jumped out at me as a major, serendipitous piece of the puzzle I was constructing.

So: apologies, JF. I hope you're somewhere, flourishing. Maybe on the Isle of Wight.

For the purposes of the song, though, the bust would be at the center of a betrayal of romantic trust, and for the most adolescent of reasons: because parents. And also the "score" is a dealer's score, more about money than drugs, giving the lie to the ballyhooed flower-power rejection of materialism.

I fleshed all this out by bouncing off McCartney's patter, e.g. "When I get older, losing my hair" became "when I was younger and had lots of hair," etc. (My personal favorite is changing "doing the garden, digging the weeds" to "doing it in the garden, digging the weed.") McCartney's melodically-static shout of "When I'm 64!" becomes a ruefully melodic, dissonant head-shaking "When I was fixed to score" that employs the same notes as the beginning of the clarinet solo in the original, but my wager is that you wouldn't notice if you didn't know.

Here, then, is the result. I didn't hit the specs 100%, but it's close. See what you think. (Be sure to use the closed captions.)

Happy 64, me. I'm glad to have made it this far and to have aged into some of the kinds of joys described in McCartney's ditty. Losing my hair is so much the least of the stuff I had to grow through to get here--bad and good--that my life strategy begins to look like deep parody of the very notion of "strategy."

Confederate monuments and government speech

I drove into the breadbasket of the Confederacy the weekend before the 2017 eclipse--the Shenandoah Valley--up the Lee Highway and past any number of Stuart-Mosby-Forrest streets that joined the main route along the way.

The controversy over recent events in Charlottesville, where a neo-fascist/KKK march protesting a planned removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee erupted into violence, still hung like a cloud over the public mind (judging from Facebook and Twitter), but the most-commented thing on Lee Highway this weekend was the eclipse-totality-bound Northerners backed up for miles trying to shorten their trip south by avoiding I-81, where, strangely, traffic was flowing smoothly. Someone suspected that an unreconstructed butternut may have sabotaged an app.

The proud omnipresence of the Confederacy in such parts of the South is so taken for granted by white Southerners that they don't even notice how overweening it can be. For that reason, when something like Charlottesville happens and Southerners react by saying that moving a statue is "erasing history" and then add that the next step is outlawing the United Daughters of the Confederacy, well: I wonder if there is such a thing as disingenuous hysteria.

Although I have always been a scalawag, I'm friends and family with people who believe that the Confederacy fought for a just cause and a good reason. These aren't people who can be dismissed as ignorant yahoos or simple racists. These are educated, well-informed people who also revile the fascists that disturbed Charlottesville's peace. Their arguments about the Confederacy can be subtle and historically factual; they can also seem to be correct, but don't stand up to further investigation. Whatever the case, in addressing their arguments I feel an obligation to apply the Golden Rule and treat them respectfully.

One argument that seems at the outset to have some merit is that removing the statues is a violation of free speech. Driving up Lee Highway, I pondered this. Whose speech is violated? Whose speech is a statue? The First Amendment was intended to protect the individual (or the private group) from government over-reach. But these statues do not belong to an individual or to a private group.

They belong to the government. The government has by its power placed them in the public square. The government has, in a very real sense, imposed them.

It is of course the government's purpose to impose all manner of things: rules of the road, taxes, health and safety regulations, compulsory school attendance, etc. It's why we have government. In the United States we pride ourselves on having a government that we choose--through elections--and that thus expresses the voters' will (I won't say "popular will" because so many people don't vote).

These statues are among those things imposed by the government. As such, I reasoned, they "belong" to the government and are subject to whatever limitations--if any--the government might impose. Since they are not the "speech" of a private individual or group, then, they would not be subject to First Amendment protections: the government can't protect itself against itself.

In fact--I reasoned further--it seemed that a stronger First Amendment argument would be that these statues represent state sponsorship of a tyrannical ideology that broke away from the USA in order to establish a nation based on African-American slavery. The existence of slavery in the USA did not make it a slave nation; it made it a nation that tolerated slavery. The difference between that and the establishment of slavery as a cornerstone of a new nation is as obvious as it is paramount. Anyone saying otherwise is simply not accepting the historically factual basis for the break that led to the Civil War. This being the case, I couldn't help but begin seeing the Confederate statues as the Southern equivalent of the giant banners, busts, and statues with which the totalitarian states of the Soviet Union and Maoist China so famously decorated their public squares.

When time permitted, I was able to learn that there is in fact, in the legal discourse surrounding the First Amendment (which lawyers--I have one in my family--try to warn laypeople like me to stay away from), such a concept as "government speech." It has been used to justify viewpoint restrictions, e.g. in Texas where it was the basis for preventing a Confederate flag license plate. I even found--mirabile dictu--on a blog written by members of the faculty of the University of North Carolina School of Government, a post by Frayda Bluestein from October, 2009, reporting a Supreme Court decision--Pleasant Grove City, et al. v. Summum--which had determined unanimously that, when it comes to resolving challenges to monuments in parks, "government speech" standards rather than First Amendment, a.k.a. "free speech" ones should apply.

Knowing that there are depths of legal interpretation not accessible to laypeople unequipped with the right diving apparatus, I emailed Professor Bluestein to see if the same reasoning might apply in Charlottesville. She replied the next day: "Yes, based on the case summarized in that blog post, I would say that the government has adopted that speech as its own, and it would be up to the government to make the decision about whether it stays or goes." She went on to refer me to a more recent post on the same blog that detailed the extent to which North Carolina has gone to legislate the permanence of those "government speech" monuments: if you want to remove Confederate statues in that state, you'd better have the legislature in your corner.

(I very much appreciate Professor Bluestein taking the time to reply to an unsolicited email from out of the blue. You rock!)

So the "free speech" argument turns out to have no merit. But there are more subtle and historically factual arguments, e.g. it is a valid complaint that Unionists get a pass on the issue of racism, when in fact, at the time, they were as racist as Southerners--with the exception of a small group of abolitionists--and this reality continued long after the war and up to the present day. Generally speaking, Unionists entered the Civil War without a thought as to what would happen to the slaves. As far as they knew, nothing would happen: slavery would continue when the Union was restored after a short war. When the war dragged on, slavery became the issue in the North as well as in the South (where it was, after all, the national raison d'etre from the very outset). But even destroying slavery did not mean that Northerners favored extending full civil rights to freedmen. The best that can be said about Northerners after the war is that a few of them tried, vis-a-vis black citizens, to usher in a new order. For most of them, however, at war's end, African-Americans continued to be a Southern "problem" that Yankees would just as soon leave to the tender mercies of their late antagonists. The failure of Reconstruction lies as much at the door of Northern apathy as of Southern intransigence.

Yet in the popular imagination of the 21st century, the Yankees trump the Confederates as good guys in the race category when in fact they do not deserve this distinction. They did destroy the institution of slavery, but then? They walked away, leaving it to the South to fend for itself. And we know how that turned out.

Still, this Southern argument, valid though it may be, does not address the issue of the existence of statues glorifying the Confederacy. Why are they even there? Even if Northerners were as racist as Southerners, that says nothing about why there should be statues honoring the men who not only abjured their citizenship in the USA but who fought against it in a war to establish a nation founded upon slavery.

This is where Confederate apologists--particularly from the upper South--get tetchy. They will dance a quadrille around the fact that the CSA was founded to preserve, protect, sustain, and expand the institution of African-American slavery. They will say that such men as Robert E. Lee fought to defend their state from invasion or for states' rights or for the right of secession--but they will never, ever admit that they fought for slavery. Moreover, they will castigate those who say otherwise as being historically ignorant.

The problem with this argument is that it fails to recognize the fact that, from day one, the purpose of the CSA--as a duly constituted nation--was to institutionalize the slavery of black people, and that all those who came along later--like those Virginians like Lee who invoked "defense of state" as their reason--hitched their wagons to that star. There is no escaping it. Lee became the most important general of a nation that institutionalized slavery. He led troops into battle against the USA in order to accomplish the purpose of the Constitution of the Confederacy, which explicitly protected "negro slavery." It doesn't matter whether he was kind or wicked to blacks. It doesn't matter why he personally decided to turn his back on the country to which he had formally sworn allegiance. Like all soldiers, his personal opinions, whatever they may have been, were dissolved once he put on the uniform of the Confederacy, whose laws he was now sworn not only to uphold, but to deliver by leading an army against his former nation. There is no weaseling out, no carping, and no whingeing about this. Lee did not so do. When he joined the team, he committed himself to its goals.

Here is a simple test about the Lee statue in Charlottesville. Imagine you are an alien with no knowledge of the Civil War or of Lee. You look at the statue. What can you tell from it? There is no inscription other than his name and the years of his birth and death. It is a man on a horse. But what kind of man? A uniformed man. That is the basic unit of understanding this statue. All the rest follows from the uniform.

Poor Robert E. Lee. He wanted the memory of the war buried so the country could move on. He never wanted statues. So why don't Confederate apologists listen to him? Do they have no respect for the man they claim to revere? On the one hand they elevate above all reason his personal feelings for leaving the Union, on the other they completely disregard his personal feelings as to what the end of the war should mean.

So once again I ask--and now with Lee himself joining the chorus--why Confederate statues? Some of the backwash from the most recent controversy says that it's all about Jim Crow: that most of the statues date from the first two decades of the 20th century, when--in the words of the Southern Poverty Law Center--"states were enacting Jim Crow laws to disenfranchise the newly freed African Americans." This trope has been picked up and amplified, but, while it seems to be a promising interpretation, it leaves out too much to be satisfactory as a historical explanation.

First of all, it leaves out the fact that the period of time during which "newly freed" blacks were deprived of their rights was quite a bit longer. The so-called "nadir of race relations" in the South stretched back to 1877, when a national political deal brokered over the election of 1876 finally ended Reconstruction and handed the future of African-American citizenship over to the state governments of the South. Viewed through this optic, Jim Crow legislation can be seen as merely the capstone to a process that began much earlier and was carried out with much violence.

A more compelling timeline comes from cultural rather than legislative history, and in a peculiarly Southern way that is highly revealing not only about the reluctance there to "let go" of the Civil War, but also about the manner in which racism was engrained in the Southern psyche in a way the rest of the country did not experience. The key to this explanation is women's clubs.

Women's clubs in the latter half of the 19th century and into the 20th asserted a singular influence on American public culture; these groups were a characteristic expression of the Progressive Era nationwide. Lacking the vote, women nonetheless--by organizing around causes and issues having to do mostly with social improvement--were able to produce profound social changes. As a lifelong public librarian, my favorite example is the public library: wherever Andrew Carnegie ran into a brick wall with his offers of construction capital to establish public libraries, women's clubs were there to pick up the cause, particularly in the South. It was through their lobbying that many Southern cities established their public libraries.

The phenomenon that explains the spike in Confederate statue-building better than any other is the life cycle of that most Southern of women's clubs, the United Daughters of the Confederacy. In the early days (it was founded in 1894) its specialty was monuments intended to convey "a proper respect for and pride in the glorious war history." Through their tireless efforts--not the least of which was raising money to pay for the monuments--the South is now blanketed with Confederate monuments in the public square. Mildred Rutherford (1851-1928), historian-general of the organization, said that when the men said they could not build the monuments because they were "under an oath of allegiance," the women responded, 'we are under no oath.' And the work went on. ... More monuments stand to the Confederate soldier today [1913] than to any other soldier of any other nation who ever fought for any cause."

Cause: the UDC agitated for a sanitized view of slavery and the antebellum South well-known as the "Lost Cause." This in no way means that they had lost hope in retaining whatever white-supremacist lineaments might remain from the struggle. The women of the UDC were triumphalists. Thanks to the Ku Klux Klan and other such agencies of terror--to which Mildred Rutherford credited the "glorious victory" of "regaining self-government" in the South--the "negroes were frightened into going to work." The servile race had been returned to the place reserved for it by the South, and there it must remain. Rutherford again: "Yes, the South is triumphant today! ... Let us keep the ballot box pure! ... Teach your children not to falter till the right shall rule in Dixie."

"The right." One wonders what Mildred Rutherford would have thought of the alt-right. She could only have agreed with those who favor a white ethno-state. After all, that's what she believed had been accomplished by the "triumphant" South, with its monuments honoring the heroes of its "glorious victory."

The Lee statue in Charlottesville is not a UDC statue. It was commissioned and then donated to the city by a local son, a munificent philanthropist who spent his wealth with sacrificial gifts that enriched the city and UVA with, among other things, the city's public library and the university's department of economics and commerce. But the statue shares the cause of the UDC: all of those fine contributions to the well-being of the city and the university were not intended for African-Americans. They came from and depended upon a social order that was symbolized by the statue of Robert E. Lee,  astride his charger and resplendently triumphant. The "glorious victory" belonged to whites, and blacks had to remember their subordinate place in that world.

Today, we cannot ignore that symbolism: a triumphant South lording it over a subservient class of African-Americans. No, not slaves, but stripped in perpetuity of all the rights and duties of citizens. How can anyone ignore the flip side of that "heritage"?

There is to me no greater irony in American history than that, after all the death and destruction of slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow, the eventual demise of Mildred Rutherford's ethno-state--at least de jure--should have come after a long campaign of nonviolence by African-Americans. Its success depended at least to some extent on white Southerners deciding that the South of the UDC--in an America that proclaimed all to be created equal--was an embarrassment that needed to end. But it was the example and the eloquence of such black Americans as W.E.B. DuBois, Ida B. Wells, Martin Luther King--as well as the long legal struggle of the NAACP--that produced this triumph. I believe it to be a victory for all Americans, one well worth celebrating with "government speech" in the public square.

We are not the same people in the South who erected those statues. We--most of us--believe that African-Americans share the rights and duties of citizenship. It is time for "government speech" in the South to reflect and represent this enormous sea change in Southern attitudes.

I never was much for waiting on the Robert E. Lee. I will say this though: he did surrender. That is the most important thing about Robert E. Lee. And if he is owed a debt of gratitude by later generations, it is for that very thing, because it means that along with his surrender came the surrender of a nation founded upon slavery. It didn't entirely spare us a long and bitter guerrilla campaign--the Knights of the Ku Klux and the Camellias and all the other cosplay chivalrons of White Supremacy that so captivated Mildred Rutherford and the UDC were yet to come--but when the surrender happened, it helped produce a change in the framework of Federal law that eventually, a century later, could be used by the non-violent warriors of civil rights to extract, finally, at long last, at least a formal measure of citizenship.

There is much happening today that would shock the Confederate memorialists. Every place we stopped to eat or get gas in the breadbasket of the Confederacy had blacks and whites working side by side. Every place we stopped had blacks and whites socializing, as well as families of mixed race. And this is in the state that took its UDC, lily-white, racial purity family law diktat all the way to the Supreme Court--only 50 years ago! How horrified Mildred Rutherford would be now. I have no doubt she would be re-thinking her triumphalist notions.

For some reason I was reminded of the favorite truck line of my youth: Mason-Dixon truck lines, out of Kingsport, TN. I loved its logo that emblazoned the sides of its trailers: an illustration of Generals Grant and Lee shaking hands at Appomattox. That's the statue I always wanted to see in a Southern square.

There's obviously still a long way to go. The challenges of de facto racism are still strong.  But at least we should be able to endow Robert E. Lee with the plinth-inscription best suited for the times: "And yet, he surrendered."