I'll Finish it Eventually, God Willing

Rewriting sucks! Why can't professors recognize my perfection the first time around?

So, I have several chapters to write of my thesis before moving onto new chapters. And, within the rewriting phase, I have more reading to do as books/articles keep coming up that, in some way or another, relate to my topic. I suppose it's all about making it better, but I just want to be done with it.

An interesting book that was recommended to me by my thesis committee chair is God Willing?: Political Fundamentalism in the White House, The "War on Terror," and the Echoing Press by David Domke. I haven't read a lot of it yet, but it does have some interesting ideas, about how the Bush administration was able to use 9/11 rhetoric to gain unflinching support and how the mainstream press just echoed his ideas.

"The administration's political fundamentalism did much more than offer familarity, comfort, and a moral stance; it also closed off a substantive societal - and international - conversation through a set of politically calculated, religiously grounded communication strategies. Instead of opening up the discourse and allowing a democratic dialogue to take place, Bush's rhetoric hijacked the discussion about the significance and implications of September 11, thereby denying to U.S. citizens important opportunities for national self-examination and a wide public hearing of diverse viewpoints - and also shutting out the world, much of which was extending unprecendented sympathy for U.S. citizens and the nation."
- D. Domke

LA POESIA DE JOSE MARTI

DE VERSOS SENCILLOS

Si ves un monte de espumas
Es mi verso lo que ves:
Mi verso es un monte, y es
Un abanico de plumas.

Mi verso es como un punyal
Que por el punyo flor:
Mi verso es un surtidor
Que da un agua coral.

Mi verso es de un verde claro
Y de un carmin encendido:
Mi verso es un ciervo herido
Que busca en el monte amparo.

Mi verso al valiente agrada:
Mi verso, breve y sincero,
Es del vigor del acero
Con que se funde la espada.

Quien es Jose Marti? Se dice que el es George Washington de Cuba. Marti fue escritor, el autor, el guerrero, el poeta. Este verso es muy famoso y se cante las palabras el canto "Guantanamera." Marti muere en 1895 en Cuba, saltando de los espanyoles.

(Sorry about my lousy Spanish. I'm trying to learn, so bear with me while I butcher it.)

THAT'S WHAT'S GREAT ABOUT THE SOUTH!

A FEW INSPIRING THREADS FROM THE VERSIMILITUDE OF THE AMERICAN TAPESTRY

It threw the negroes into a very ecstasy of panic to see these sheeted "Ku Klux" move near them in the shrouded night; and their comic fear stimulated the lads who excited it to many an extravagant prank and mummery ... it was lawless work at best. They had set themselves after the first year or two of mere mischievous frolic had passed, to right a disordered society through the power of fear ... Reckless men not of their order, malicious fellows of the baser sort who did not feel the compulsions of honor and who had private grudges to satisfy, imitated their disguises and borrowed their methods.

- Woodrow Wilson, future president, A History of the American People, 1901

My friends, I want to share with you something of the history, the glorious history, of the Klan. The Klan was born out of bloodshed, out of a real need to protect the Southern white man from the carpetbaggers - the Jew Carpetbaggers. You know, of course, that the carpetbaggers was Jews, and they come down here and teamed up with the Niggers and tried to take away everything that the white man had. But they learned that the white man would not take all this lying down. He organized. He organized into Klans. He rose up to defend his honor and his interests. And, I'll tell you that to this day, the Jews, the Niggers and all the rest of the colored people are not afraid of anything else, but they are afraid of the Klan ...

Now, some of you say, "But Jesus was a Jew." That just goes to show you how these cotton pickin', half-witted preachers has fooled you. Jesus wasn't no Jew, he was a white man. I'm speaking for God, and you'd better hear what I say ...

Not long ago, a man from the F.B.I. - you know what that is, the Federal Bureau of Integration - come down to talk to me ... "Now, you don't really advocate violence, do you?" And I said, "The hell you say. The Niggers has declared all out war on the plan of God, and on God's family, the white man." They said to me, "Do you know who bombed the church in Birmingham?" And I said, "No, and if I did, I wouldn't tell you."

But I'll tell you people here tonight, if they can find those fellows, they ought to pin medals on them. Someone said, "Ain't it a shame that them little children was killed." Well, they don't know what they are talking about. In the first place, they ain't little. They're 14 or 15 years old - old enough to have venereal disease, and I'll be surprised if all of 'em didn't have one or more. In the second place, they weren't children. Children are little people, little human beings, and that means white people. They're little monkeys. There's little dogs and cats and apes and baboons and skunks and there's also little Niggers. They're just little Niggers. And in the third place, it wasn't no shame they was killed.

Why? Because when I go out to kill rattlesnakes, I don't make no differences between little rattlesnakes and big rattlesnakes, because I know it is the nature of all rattlesnakes to be my enemies and to poison me if they can. So I kill 'em all, and if there's four less Niggers tonight, then, I say, "Good for whoever planted the bomb! We're all better off."

from a Klan gathering in Florida, 1963, reported in the Newsletter of the Florida Council on Human Relations, October 1963. Cited in The Ku Klux Klan: A Century of Infamy, by William Peirce Randel, 1965.

This is the kind of stuff I come across when I'm researching Mississippi history. It's very enriching to learn other people's views and opinions. I just wish a few more of those other people would make the same effort.

A person who shall remain anonymous once said, "The NAACP are just as racist as the people they're against." I would love to see him prove that. Examples, please! Liberals like examples.

TAKE A REALLY DUMB "L-WORD" QUIZ!

Um, this is seriously a shameful time waster, but I did it anyway.

It's the Quizilla "Which character from "The L-Word" are you?" Quiz.

I'm Jenny, the Mia Kirshner character! Which is okay by me.

(I'm probably going to regret posting this.)

RECONSTRUCTION JUNCTION, WHAT'S YOUR FUNCTION?

(DON'T WORRY IF THE TITLE DOESN'T MEAN ANYTHING TO YOU. IT'S A JOKE FOR THOSE OF US WHO WATCHED TOO MUCH SATURDAY MORNING TV IN THE '70s. THE 1970s, THAT IS.)

So I had to put aside my thesis for a few weeks because I signed on to present a paper on the Reconstruction press in Mississippi. The Southwest Conference is in New Orleans at the end of March and the papers were supposed to be done several weeks ago and I haven't done mine yet. But I have a good excuse. Usually, your paper is based on your research. But my research only covers the period up to 1865. So for the conference, I have to do a certain amount of research and writing that has little (at best) to do with my research.

Why did I agree to this? A very good question. Let me think about a way to answer that without any name-calling. Hmmm. Mmmm. Er, uh ... mmmm. Sorry, can't be done. Dr. Davis and I are both raving lunatics. And Sheryl too. Sheryl organized the panel and asked me to be on it, and when I tried to get out of it, she started bawling and I had to say yes so we could all get back to work without everyone thinking I was a terrible person because I made Sheryl cry.

So, I'm digging through old Natchez newspapers from 1865 to 1877. I don't know if I will ever stop hating the South. Not only am I sick of these people and their lies and their hypocrisy and their racism, but I am now being forced to study a period of history that I have always tried to veer away from.

Reconstruction is so depressing. The antebellum period and the Civil War have a lot of awful incidents, but it is all very interesting and it seems to be headed somewhere. I love the suspense of the 1850s especially, as the tensions between North and South almost reach crisis point, but then they subside as more and more Southerners eventually realize that war is NOT in their best interests and war is averted. The Secession Crisis of 1850, Bleeding Kansas, the Dred Scott decision, John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry and the election of 1860 are all incidents where the war almost happens and then, until the Spring of 1861, somebody blinks. And then the war comes and everybody runs around in the latest fashions of blue and grey and there's a bunch of cool battles and the slaves are free and Lee surrenders and Lincoln is shot and the war is over.

Except it isn't. For the nexy twelve years, the Federal government works hard to secure freedom and security for Southerners, black and white, but most of the Southerners are not having it! They enact restrictive codes on the newly-freed slaves and then they get all whiny when the Federal government steps in and says, "Alright, guys, these state governments are bullshit! If you can't play fair with the black man, then you are forcing us to abolish your racist governments and to come up with a new plan." And the South acts all innocent. "No, we were dealing with the lazy negros in our own way and we understand them and everything would have been peachy if you had let us handle it but, no, you had to come in and let the negros take over the government and ruin the land and try to be equal and rape all the white women." And then the Southerners started the Klan and attacked and harrassed the freedmen and the carpetbaggers and the teachers until the North got sick of the South's bullshit and pulled out in 1877. And the new rights of the black man disappeared real fast and there wasn't much progrss until almost a hundred years later.

It's so anticlimatic. If somebody was making it up, the editor would say, "You know, this Reconstruction part, get rid of it. Nobody wants to read this, unless you punch it up a bit, find some more colorful heroes. Like the Ku Klux Klan fellows. Make them the heroes. They're like the Knights of the Round Table or the Justice League. Yeah, there's your second half, how the Ku Klux Klan saves the country from the negros and the evil careptbaggers."

Which is how the story was told for a hundred years, and even longer in some places. Even though this version is easily proven to be bullshit by a cursory examination of the primary sources, this is the version that the South liked, the version in several novels of the late 1800s, in history books like those written by Dunning and Woodrow Wilson, in Thomas Dixon's "The Clansmen," and, most notoriously, in D.W. Griffith's "Birth of a Nation." The North didn't really care enough to protest too much and eventually, the South's version was the one taught in the schools until the 1950s and 1960s, when a lot of people started saying, "This is fucking bullshit!"

Which is what my presentation is about, how the Reconstruction press laid the ground work for this little fantasy in the 1860s and 1870s, by exaggerating the sins of the freedmen and the carpetbaggers, rationalizing the virulent racism of the South, denying or minimizing the excesses of the Ku Klux Klan, and a general campaign of anti-Negro propaganda.

America needs to get into a 12-step program and start making amends for some of her bullshit. It is the only way to ever make any progress.

"Hello, I'm America, and I'm an empire-oholic."

Maybe some day, I'll get back to my thesis. "Grumble, grumble, stupid Ku Klux Klan."