_ | \ | \ | | \ __ | |\ \ __ _____________ _/_/ | | \ \ _/_/ _____________ | ___________ _/_/ | | \ \ _/_/ ___________ | | | _/_/_____ | | > > _/_/_____ | | | | /________/ | | / / /________/ | | | | | | / / | | | | | |/ / | | | | | | / | | | | | / | | | | |_/ | | | | | | | | c o m m u n i c a t i o n s | | | |________________________________________________________________| | |____________________________________________________________________| ...presents... Black Collectors of White Memorabilia by Dark Sorcerer __//////\ -cDc- CULT OF THE DEAD COW -cDc- /\\\\\\__ __ Grand Imperial Dynasty __ Est. 1984 \\\\\\/ cDc paramedia: text 385-06/30/2004 \////// Est. 1984 ___ _ _ ___ _ _ ___ _ _ ___ _ _ __ |___heal_the_sick___raise_the_dead___cleanse_the_lepers___cast_out_demons__| It was 1992. I was eighteen, it was nearing midnight, and I'd just taken an order for the last place I wanted to go. Sahwatch Street is the last street that runs parallel to the east side of Interstate 25 in Colorado Springs. I mainly knew it as being in the vague vicinity of the Red Cross homeless shelter where an intoxicated man once called in an order from a payphone, paid me in change and failed to tip me despite the late hour. Being a pizza delivery driver on the West Side was as good a job as a high-school kid could've asked for. The work was hardly strenuous, and I was able to score cocaine and cheap Mexican weed from my co-workers. My boss was a balding, overweight late-twentysomething who called the Rodney King rioters a "bunch of stupid niggers" and had a porn stash in his office. I'd often have some sort of interesting story at the end of the night to tell my friends: the guy who had passed out in his entryway one Friday afternoon, or the amiable fellow who just so happened to have a .45 and triple-beam balance sitting on his coffee table in plain view. There was always the threat that the bubble of simulation could burst and I'd be held up at gunpoint, but it was only likely enough in that it afforded an entertaining possibility... something that had vestigial danger based on rumors of late-night robberies heard from others. I was also given no shortage of material for sociological observation. With a small amount of apprehension, I got in my 1984 Toyota Tercel and started the engine. The broken tape deck necessitated listening to the radio, which was a constant bout with lesser-evilism. Z-ROC is a good choice; it's hard to go wrong with Metallica or Black Sabbath. I had to get off the highway on to Sahwatch Street, then backtrack two blocks to get to the actual house in question, which ran parallel to Sahwatch Street, dead-ending to the north with a chain-link fence and Interstate 25 directly west. The neighborhood was run down. The house was found with no problem at all, but I double-checked to make sure the address in my head was in fact correct, because I didn't care to arouse the suspicion of someone who had erected two lawn jockies to the fenceposts on either side of the entrance. A glaring sign added to the apprehension: "Sons of Silence." The hologram fractioned into its constituent parts, replaying a series of simultaneous images seen in unnamed Southern movies: rusty Pepsi-Cola signs, cotton plantations set back amongst rows of dogwood trees, burning barns, and French surnames. I could almost see the Spanish moss as I drove up the entryway and put my car in neutral. I rang the doorbell and was greeted by a confused teenage girl, who let me in to the porch, which was suffering from an almost complete loss of its metal screening. I leaned against a washing machine while she yelled for someone. The house interior seemed completely devoid of any furnishings. After several minutes a white man of medium build came out to pay me. He didn't say much, but he gave me a rather large four-dollar tip. I got back in the car, but the radio went off. The lingering effect and late hour required silence. .-. [ x x ] .-. With no shortage of things to do that next Christmas break, the jockies still had to be captured on film. I didn't know why. Easily recalling the address, I chose the last Sunday afternoon before I left town to go back to school. I was scared to get out of my car, but mustered up enough courage to go up the driveway. The statues seemed to have been repainted to make them particularly grotesque. Something less like the relatively innocuous Golliwogs thought so cute by many Englishwomen versus a hideously deformed Coon statue you'd expect of the old Confederacy. They're in poor repair. The darkness of their faces was further accentuated by the underlying wood that was exposed where the paint flaked off, but the red circles that formed their lips seemed relatively intact. They had simply been nailed to the top of the fenceposts via a single nail at the base of the statue. The name "Toby" was crudely painted on what would have been the breast pocket of each statue. .-. [ x x ] .-. When I went away to college, I went into a Disneyesque simulacra of what a bunch of Deadheads from the East Coast thought a small town in Colorado was, replete with Grand Cherokees. In _The Last Days Of White Rhodesia_, Denis Hills called Rhodesia an "exotic replica of Wimbledon set among settler plantations in sunny grasslands whose native inhabitants the white people scarcely bothered to know." Reading this, you wondered how one could avoid any sort of interaction with ninety-five percent of the population, even as they depended on them to wash their clothes and cook their food. The history of colonial Zimbabwe mattered little to the members of the local Alpha Tau Omega chapter, who could've substituted Hills' settler plantations in sunny grasslands for ski trips and good blow overnighted from their friends back East. Hills' elderly white ladies didn't know any Africans, and didn't care to. The native black Zimbabweans had no use for the decorative jacaranda trees favored by the white Rhodesian settlers, and the few girls in cocktail dresses had little use for me, sloppy drunk and clad in jeans and a mountain jacket. Someone decided it would be a good idea to dive headfirst into a table of gin and vodka bottles. This act was greeted enthusiastically, and the guy who had been forcing low-grade marijuana on me for the last hour said that he KNEW it was just a matter of time before someone did some "crazy shit" - thank god he had his video camera to capture it for posterity. The early Rhodesian settlers would name their black servants diminutives like "Pudding" or "Rhubarb," taking a clue from Polish nobility who would call their peasants names such as "Onion" and "Rutabega." At the ATO house, however, you weren't a member of the elite unless you had some sort of pledge name, which could run the gamut from stupid to obscene. The difference was that the fraternity pledge was given the promise of being able to mete out similar humiliation once he'd passed through his year long ritual; if a black servant were lucky, he might get labeled "loyal" or "dependable." Both the colonial and fraternity mentality are artifacts. An inherent curiosity and mystique surrounds them due to their tacit acceptance of a worldview, the sort of fascination with exoticness Westerners can only have with systems untainted by self-awareness. Complex Jungian hypotheses about psychological projections and a "fear of the savage within" do little to explain spontaneous atavistic behavior. No real psychoanalytic capacity is needed to understand why Ecstasy would be forced down some girl's throat at a party. Likewise, no allegory is needed to understand why someone merely needs to yell "Thief!" at a purse-snatcher in Nairobi and the random passersby will automatically stone the suspect to death. Alpha Tau Omega got shut down. I only heard second-hand stories from the former members I knew, all of which were related with unrestrained glee, confident that these "good old days" surely couldn't be repeated once they took a stressful position with their father's company. One of the members saw fit to drop an Asian kid off clear on the other side of the state with no way to get back. "He just didn't belong in a fraternity." Three days after a party had ended, a naked girl was found in a fetal position in the house, and ran outside in a hysteric fit when someone attempted to rouse her. There were bragging rights to be had for the insertion of beer bottles into various orifices during gang bangs. .-. [ x x ] .-. "Dude, you HAVE to check out this video." He was beaming with pride. Surely not just anyone could have been resourceful enough to grab this from the house. I'd already made the decision to ingest LSD, and felt powerless to stop what had been labeled only as "One Seriously Fucked-Up Tape." Evil was personified to me as the images flashed across the screen, and my friend was determined to get me to tell him what the "sickest scene" in the whole movie was. I couldn't really decide, but told him the grainy, fourth-generation VHS scene involving a couple of early adolescent girls and a Cocker Spaniel was probably the worst. The collusion of factors responsible for seventy-five minutes of fecal ingestion and zoophilia kept rearranging itself in my head in the form of a macabre pyramid as I attempted to sort out the causes and effects that went into such a production. The video's birth, conception, distribution, and eventual consumption played itself out through countless scenarios. At one point I imagined that whoever took such great care to compile all of this smut while in Amsterdam was hearing the same Flemish that was spoken as fingers and toes were cut off in the Belgian Congo a hundred years ago. After several hours on the couch, the sun came up and I walked home, still feeling the ergot twitch in my forearms. The flesh of the early-morning joggers had an ochre-like quality and the clouds over the foothills near Horsetooth Reservoir seemed inappropriately yellow for mid-summer. Later I found out that this same tape had made some Manhattanites "back home" physically ill. Even New Yorkers haven't necessarily seen it all. .-. [ x x ] .-. There was an Afro-American Studies professor at school who was absolutely excellent. His class was very difficult, and none of the students could possibly understand why a known murderer of a black man wouldn't get convicted by an all-white jury in Muscle Shoals, Alabama in the 1940's. He seemed to understand my interest in the subject material based my prior reading of Cornel West's _Race Matters_, or so I hoped. My paper, "Cornel West: Synthesizing Economic Problems And Their Psychological Consequences," earned me an A. I inadvertently provoked a round of laughter in the class when he asked me to "tell me something about lynching." "Well, most of the victims were black." Awkward, but he saved me. "No, he's correct... there were white victims, too." I'd just read Walter White's _Rope and Faggot_ with a mixture of incredulity and horror. It almost seemed as though "lynching" was just a nicety; "public torture and execution" was more fitting. Lynching occurred with the tacit approval of the higher-ups in a community, who were undoubtedly content to protect their cheap labor source. These were community events with a State Fair type atmosphere to them. Vendors would line up by the event to sell food after advertisement of the event in the local newspaper. H.L. Mencken stated that the lynching "often takes the place of the merry-go-round, the theatre, the symphony orchestra, and other diversions common to large communities." No one would have any knowledge of the event if a nosy out-of-town law enforcement agent or reporter came around afterwards. The public demanded bigger and better thrills as time went on. By the late 'teens, the passions aroused by the heat, revivalist meetings, and lack of anything better to do were less satisfied with simple hanging. James McGovern's _Anatomy of a Lynching_ detailed the last public spectacle lynching in the United States, that of Claude Neal in Greenwood, Florida in 1934. Claude Neal had been accused in the murder of a "pretty white girl" named Lola Cannidy. Despite genuine attempts by law enforcement officials to keep Neal away from a mob, including transporting him over 200 miles away into neighboring Alabama, a party of lynchers nevertheless managed to overpower law enforcement authorities and seal his fate back in Florida. Howard Kester, the NAACP investigator sent check out Neal's death, learned the details from a member of the mob ten days later: After taking the nigger to the woods about four miles from Greenwood, they cut off his penis. He was made to eat it. Then they cut off his testicles and made him eat them and say he liked it, then they sliced his sides and stomach with knives and every now and then someone would cut off a finger or toe. Red hot irons were used on the nigger to burn him from top to bottom. From time to time during the torture a rope would be tied around Neal's neck and he was pulled up over a limb and held there until he almost choked to death when he would be let down and the torture begin all over again. During the torture, Neal confounded (and undoubtedly annoyed) the mob by refusing to protest or beg for mercy throughout his entire ordeal. At one point he asked, "Kind sirs, do you have a cigarette?" McGovern summarized Neal's likely psychological attitude towards the affair thusly: "He died without remorse or protest, accepting his fate as a Negro who was in bad trouble with white folks, as he had from the beginning." .-. [ x x ] .-. Almost seventy years later, the television program _Frontline_ aired a story entitled "The Lost Children of Rockdale County." Sixty-some high school students in an upper-middle class Atlanta suburb contracted syphilis, a disease then so rare that this comprised about half of the total number of cases reported in the state for an entire year. All manner of experts, including pathologists for the Center for Disease Control, were sent to investigate. Black men were unwittingly given syphilis in the infamous Tuskegee Experiments only a few decades earlier; the irony of a bunch of white teenagers contracting the same disease didn't at all please me, but my visceral reaction was still one of chickens coming home to roost. A subsequent investigation revealed detritus that was instantly recognizable to any number of us who spent their adolescence in the suburban frontier over the last twenty years. Parents watched their programs in one room while their children watched their programs in another. A mother felt bad that a boy who was temporarily staying with them died after a drinking binge, but the family still didn't show affection to one another after the death. Her husband dished out child-rearing philosophy from his La-Z-Boy in the living room: "You have to give kids some space." Howard Zinn remarked in his 1957 essay "The Southern Mystique" that Southern white people seem whiter, and black people seem blacker. This was attributed to "a whiteness unsullied by the admixture of Slavic and Latin blood found in the North, and kept homogenous by the simple expedient of tossing over the wall in the night all offspring from black-white sexual encounters." Rockdale's teenagers seemed to have a wall that left no wiggle room between Bible study and sexual depravity. One particularly inarticulate youth lamented at how he had repented from his formerly evil ways for a good six months, being nothing but a "faithful servant" to God and attending church group regularly, but he now wondered where his reward was. Orgies and gang-bangs took on a banality usually associated with quaint suburban deviations as getting drunk or stoned before class. A psychologist made the academic observation that the kids managed to rebel even further by engaging in still-taboo interracial sex: one white girl recounted a specific "sandwich" where she took it in all three orifices at once from three different black men. Girls were expected to hook up with other girls as a matter of course, but male homosexuality was off limits. Lynching was once defended by sons of the Confederacy as the only possible recourse if a white woman were to be raped by a Negro, although only a sixth of the total number of reported lynchings were said to be for sexual assault, with suspect evidence in any case. The lighter skin color of American blacks compared to native West Africans betrays the fact that there was no similar penalty ascribed to the assault of a black woman by a white slaveowner. One can only wonder what the reaction of white Southern women must have been to the endless recurrence of light-skinned babies born to slaves with little guess as to who the father might have been. White women would occasionally take up the company of a black man using lynching as a threat if the black man failed to bow to their demands; clearly there was little moral high ground occupied by either of the sons and daughters of Europe south of the Mason-Dixon line. Well into the millennium, the defense of white female honor seemed to have reached its logical conclusion. Prairie castles long since supplanting slave quarters, Rockdale's white teenagers had little problem sharing their conquests with their black schoolmates. But throughout the documentary, the focus was almost exclusively on the girls. It seemed taken for granted that this was merely the natural outcome of males being allowed to indulge in their wildest sexual fantasies. Even as girls engaged in lesbian acts as a bow to peer pressure, the restriction on male homosexuality was unbowed. White Southern womanhood remains an eternal tabula rasa, a nonentity that still elicits disdain at its violation. .-. [ x x ] .-. My professor also lent me the 1986 documentary _Ethnic Notions_, which showed the likes of a bug-eyed Stepin Fetchit juxtaposed with Bugs Bunny as a watermelon-eating Coon. "Ten Little Niggers," a long-since-deleted nursery rhyme which details ten black boys who accidentally kill themselves one-by-one, was the running commentary throughout the film. I watched it at my friend's house, a girl from Louisiana. "I used to have a pickaninny doll," she said in a fairly matter-of-fact tone. I shrugged. I remember watching Popeye escape from bone-nosed African cannibals as a youth, and the captured native on Jonny Quest was always incapable of saying anything other than "oonga boonga." This was in Detroit. .-. [ x x ] .-. One of my last days at college found me in a coffee-shop reading the latest issue of the _Village Voice._ No fewer than twenty pages of escort service personal ads helped to bring the world the feature story: "A Murder In Clubland." It was about one Michael Alig, a New York club kid promoter prone to the farthest reaches of dark excess. Alig liked to dose boys with Rohypinol and rape them, called Puerto Ricans "dirty" and had long since eschewed Ecstasy and ketamine for heroin and crack by the time his little Club Night Kingdom came toppling down on him. Michael Alig ended up killing one of his friends over a money dispute. His remorseless confession, "I killed Angel," will live on forever in the documentary _Party Monster_. There's another story in the _Voice_ as well. It's about a bald white man - the sort of guy who looks like he'd be more at home discussing the intricacies of Microsoft Windows than anything else - who had assembled a collection of 'black memorabilia.' No attention was paid to his race, and in the likes of the _Village Voice_, this can only be chalked up to the overwhelming sincerity in the endeavor. However, we were told something to the effect that "whiteness" could be construed to be nothing more than "the absence of culture." It's as if white people never existed as anything but an Abercrombie & Fitch demographic, with porcelain Mammies borne in a void detached from any sort of environmental context. I wondered if the author could actually be serious about his assertion. Undoubtedly my relatives in the Midwest, with their unbroken family ties, idiosyncratic speech, and dress influenced only by the utilitarianism required of the environment would find this sort of chic self-loathing incomprehensible. .-. [ x x ] .-. After graduation, I moved to Denver with dreams of gainful employment. A Saturday morning ritual was jogging through the affluent neighborhood directly south of Cheeseman Park, which was a gateway to the even-more-affluent Country Club neighborhood. This was a welcome bit of escapism from the drudgery of my work-week, and I fantasized about a potential life in one of Country Club's three million dollar manors. One morning in the late Spring I found another lawn jockey outside a home. I went back and got a picture of it. All of the usual questions popped into mind: were the homeowners white? Black? Was its presence ironic? Its light brown skin did not even imply blackness. Was its mulatto-ish hue intended from the time of its creation? .-. [ x x ] .-. Hiawatha, Kansas is situated approximately ten miles from both the Nebraska and Missouri borders in the northwest corner of the state in Brown County. Resisting even the faintest trace of a changing demographic, its ethnic composition has changed little since it was populated by mostly German settlers in the mid to late 19th century. Surnames on my mother's side of the family include Yoesel, Schoewengerdt, and Plaguer. My mother's maiden name is Hillyer, taken from the more Teutonic Hellyer. This was brought about by the religious desire to "get the hell out of Hellyer," as my grandfather once put it. Despite a noticeable decline in shotgun-riddled stop signs, the appearance of new satellite mini-dishes, and a downtown devastated by Wal-Mart, very little has changed here in the twenty some years that I can remember. More of the roads are paved. Most of the decrepit, unused farm structures have been bulldozed, their once de facto accompanying windmills undoubtedly sold as antiques. Herbicide overuse has meant that sunflowers and elderberries are no longer the ubiquitous roadside fixture they once were, but summer nights in the country still bear the timeless humidity of my childhood on my grandfather's farm, the silence punctuated by the steady drone of cicadas. I had not been back in the several years since my grandparents had passed away. There was a perfect opportunity to return for my cousin's wedding, and I imagined the sort of place where one could step inside a distant relative's kitchen, only to find the unironic presence of a wide-lipped Sambo cookie-jar. Pristine, undiluted Americana. True culture, the sort that must develop over multiple generations as a result of convergence of a multiplicity of social, environmental, and material factors, with no silly notions of postmodern reflection off of some Hyperreal. I had thought of the combination of repulsion, mystical intrigue, and titillation that had occurred when I had first seen 'Toby' the lawn jockey a few years earlier, and purchased a camera. .-. [ x x ] .-. Driving through Colby, Kansas, there was some sort of black figurine in a garden along the north side of I-70, which only served to tease me with its presence. I certainly couldn't bother my parents to stop, much less articulate the nature of my ambiguous mission. Hiawatha did not yield any of the results I'd hoped for. There was no shortage of vintage water-pump windmills, particle board women with exposed polka-dotted bloomers, or garden gnomes, but lawn jockies were nowhere to be found. Perhaps they were never marketed around here to begin with. I certainly wasn't in the deep South. In fact, it's hard to think of Brown in Kansas without prefixing it with a "John the Christian martyr" to the antislavery movement. A.N. Riley's _History of Brown County_ details a lynching that occurred near the Brown County Courthouse mid 1890's Hiawatha. The official record is that it was instigated not by the local white population, but rather by the black population against a black man accused of theft. Unusual, but most likely accurate given that Riley's history was written only twenty-some years after the fact - there was certainly no pressing need to give the event the patina of racial respectability in the 1920's. Besides, white people certainly weren't above lynching other white people. .-. [ x x ] .-. It was on one May evening in 1982 that Michael Ryan attended a lecture given by the Rev. James Wickstrom in a musty Hiawatha community hall. An audience of about fifty farmers, almost all of whom had fallen on hard times, listened intently on folding metal chairs as Wickstrom preached: You're all hurting, aren't you? You see friends losing their crops, their livestock, their property - you're afraid your turn might be coming up. You're thinking what's happening isn't right. You know what? You're right there. What's happening isn't right. I'm here to tell you that God knows it isn't right. Being God-fearing Americans, wouldn't you figure that if the American farmer was in serious financial difficulty, the federal government would be rushing in to help? After all, the government trips over itself bailing out the Jew-owned airlines, tobacco companies, railroads, and steel industries. But then, you don't find too many Jews working the land, do you? No, you don't. Do you know why? Nobody? Not even you who thought you knew the Bible? Well then, I'll tell you why. Almighty God put a curse on Cain, the father of the Jews. That's right. Genesis 4:12 says the earth would not yield her fruit to Cain and his descendants. Matthew 23:35 tells us that Cain is the father of the Jews. Mike Ryan was skeptical at first, but later contacts with Wickstrom made him a believer. Wickstrom showed Ryan a surefire way to receive messages from Yahweh, the Old Testament god of wrath: one of the Chosen would raise an initiate's hand to the sky, and the Chosen would ask Yahweh a question. If the hand stayed up, the answer was yes; if it went down, the answer was no. In Wickstrom's Christian Identity theology, the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel are American Anglo-Saxons; Jews are false pretenders in claiming to be the true children of God, and blacks and Asiatics are the cursed children of Ham. It was a Christian Identity group, "The Order," that assassinated Jewish radio talk show host Alan Berg in 1984 outside his home at Adams Street and 14th Avenue in Denver. Mike Ryan quickly knew he was one of the Chosen, and he didn't need Wickstrom for very long. He'd had a premonition of his grandfather's death which reassured him of his Chosen status, and it didn't take him long to find a group of susceptible locals who viewed him as some sort of Messiah. With farm foreclosures a daily event across the heartland, what he was saying made a lot of sense. Yahweh's wishes included the theft of farm equipment and livestock, which was used to purchase firearms, ammunition, and survival gear. The battle of Armageddon was slated to take place in a "wheat field" according to Wickstrom's teaching; the existence of Meggedio in Israel had obviously escaped them. Not that that mattered, as any knowledge gained by the group either served to reinforce its existing beliefs, or was false Satanic deception. Ryan convinced one of his followers, Rick Stice, to set up a survivalist compound on Stice's failed farm near Rulo, Nebraska, a good fifteen minute drive from Hiawatha. The battle of Armageddon came down to eighteen men, women, and children living in two trailers, running around in camouflage, and firing off automatic weapons in the middle of the night. Ryan grew increasingly controlling with his disciples. He forced all of the women into "marriages" with him and extorted money with threats of violence as Yahweh continued to command livestock heists, dictated by the "arm test." When FBI agents finally raided the compound in August of 1985, they unearthed the bodies of five-year old Luke Stice and Ryan's older disciple James Thimm. Both had suffered immeasurable abuse for months before their death, with Ryan calling Luke Stice "Satan" or a "mongrel." James Thimm was kept in chains, and forced to engage in homosexual acts and bestiality before Ryan's son accidentally shot him in the face, a shooting which proved to justify his subsequent torture and murder, which rivaled that of Claude Neal's in terms of inhumanity. Ryan's Armageddon shacks have long since been razed, the farm now lying fallow in order to prevent soil erosion into the nearby Missouri River. .-. [ x x ] .-. Rulo, Nebraska is approximately fifteen miles from Hiawatha, a true "wide spot in the road" if there ever was one. Situated next to the mighty Missouri River, you can't help but notice the extra dampness and the particularly thick, green deciduous foliage, which makes many of Rulo's two-hundred-some inhabitants practically invisible from the roadside. If one had to choose a place that epitomized the state of Small Town America today, you'd be hard pressed to find a more archetypal example. Long-since boarded up shops on Main Street betray a dying town fallen on hard times. You can't help but want to eat at the only local restaurant, Camp Rulo: a genuine honkey-tonk tavern with a sloped awning that serves fried catfish caught just a few feet away in the Missouri. It's the sort of place that could have only existed in that one spot, never destined to be a hip marketing concept in a larger city. Driving through Rulo, I see the ceramic statue of a small red-lipped black boy with a fishing pole in a Rulo yard, but fail to take a picture of it. I want to ring the doorbell and see what the owner looks like, but am unable to stop. Given Rulo's existence as a river town and the black statue's fishing posture, it seemed more than likely that it could have very well been some sort of craft made by the homeowner. I wondered what year it was made; it had surely been repainted over the years. I asked my parents what they thought of it. My dad said something like he was a "cute little guy." I didn't inquire further; it probably already seemed strange that I would be asking about a random lawn ornament. .-. [ x x ] .-. Falls City, Nebraska is about the same distance from Hiawatha as is Rulo, but is a source of richer, detailed childhood memories. An ice-cream store called Goodrich always followed many outings my cousins and I had to the Falls City Municipal Pool. One time one of my cousins was obviously harassing a black child at the pool, which culminated in the black kid chasing him around and repeatedly calling him a "bigot." My cousin just threw the "bigot" back in his face in a mocking tone. Not knowing who instigated the incident or even what "bigot" meant at that time, my seven-year old self was highly amused by this spectacle. My cousin threw his flip-flop sandals at this kid in an effort to keep him at bay while he continued to mock him until my aunt intervened and gave him a lecture on why it was wrong to be prejudiced. While Nebraska is only a few miles from Hiawatha, it has a sparseness to its topography that "just makes it look poorer," as my mother once put it. Crumbling old farm structures have resisted bulldozing to a far larger degree, and new John Deere tractors do not seem as common as old Cases and Massey- Fergusons. My relatives in Nebraska are failed farmers, now forced to eke out a living performing odd jobs and raising a few cattle. This is a sharp contrast to my Kansas relatives, who have prospered throughout the years through a combination of education, business acumen, and particularly rich, black topsoil. Falls City's most striking feature is its brick streets. Other than that, it could be any other town in the Midwest that will never recover from the farm crash of the early 1980's. The last time I was there, a series of obscure chain restaurants and retail stores had still resisted the small town inevitabilities of Wal-Mart and McDonald's: Payonia served retail needs; Hardee's, Old Swiss, and Li'l Duffer for hamburgers, and the Breezy Hill restaurant when one had a craving for a good piece of grilled meat and an iceberg lettuce salad. These stores don't quite provide a jocular frame of reference for the media saturated twentysomething. There was no 'Tastee- Freez' to my recollection, rendering it immune to renditions of John Cougar Mellencamp's "Jack and Diane" performed by touring college kids in SUV's. If any connotation was made by the average passerby, it was undoubtedly that Falls City was the site of the 1991 slaying of Teena Brandon, a tale told with some degree of condescension in the 1998 movie _Boys Don't Cry_. .-. [ x x ] .-. My mother's extended family was slated to meet at the Breezy Hill Restaurant outside of Falls City. The place was as unpretentious as vegetarian-hostile; the fried chicken and mashed potatoes were superlative. The landscape I witnessed on the drive over was identical to what Marvin Thomas Nissen and John Lotter must have seen as they drove from Lincoln to Falls City just a few years before. Lotter and Nissen arrived with rope and hatchet and an intent on killing Teena Brandon, or Brandon Teena, as she came to be called. Enraged that they'd been duped into friendship by a woman posing as a man, Lotter and Nissen raped Teena at a Christmas party in 1993, and then calculated her murder afterward, searching for an entire week to find her. Even after Teena reported the rape to the local police, Richardson County Sheriff Charles B. Laux saw fit not to arrest Nissen and Lotter, dismissing Teena's sister's pleas for assistance and saying that "you can call it 'it' as far as I'm concerned." A week after the rape, no concrete action had been taken, but supposedly the Sheriff's Department had been "pursuing" rape charges against the two perpetrators. Whatever Laux set in motion - if anything - it was not enough to stem the incipient bloodshed. Nissen and Lotter managed to track down Teena in a farmhouse outside of Falls City, where they shot and killed "it" along with "its" two friends Lisa Lambert and Philip DeVine, dispatching each with an execution-style shot to the head. Laux lost his reelection bid in 1994, but Norm MacDonald still saw fit to make the following crack on _Saturday Night Live_: "Sorry if this sounds harsh, but in my opinion, everybody in this case deserved to die." Sheriff Laux had embarrassed Falls City's residents enough for them to dispose of him while Norm MacDonald got some laughs in the most liberal city on the planet before moving on to some Clinton jokes. I mulled over Norm's words and wondered how funny they would have seemed if the victim were black. Whatever the case, all of these hatemongers were sure doing a good job of only killing those of their own ethnic group. From the blacks who lynched a black man back in the 1890's to the Teena Brandon slayings, there seemed only to be a nebulous, visceral hate, attaching itself to whoever was in its nearest vicinity after being awakened. .-. [ x x ] .-. I had one last trip to a relative's house to make before my cousin's wedding. My mother's cousin showed us his player piano with great pride, as he had restored it to its original condition and had an extensive collection of piano rolls. He picked up a random roll of music and fed it in to the piano and it played an automated "Take Me Back To Old Virginny," an ancient minstrel-show tune that ended with the lines "Dat's where dis old darky wants to go." This final line elicited deafening silence on all our parts, apparently causing a degree of embarrassment to my mother's cousin. However, the implicit agreement among small town Midwesterners - that one must be pleasant and prone to spouting excessive niceties at all times - quickly allowed him to shift gears and start talking about his collection of Oreo Cookie paraphernalia. The "darky" line proved to be nothing more than a subtle moment of awkwardness that one would have if the Spice Channel were suddenly unencrypted while watching TV with one's family. After we perused his collection of Oreo mugs, I looked at his collection of vintage tractors that he had restored. The token use of "darky" on a piece of automated piano music failed to satisfy. Empty-handed and somewhat disappointed, I drove home with my family, attempting to get some sleep the night before my cousin's wedding in the musty basement that I'd been relegated to since my grandparents had moved out of the country almost a decade ago. The same two books adorned the headboard of the bed, unmoved since my early adolescence: _Pilgrim's Progress_ and _Profiles in Courage_. I afforded JFK a token nod of appreciation by reading a few paragraphs from the latter before dozing off. .-. [ x x ] .-. Before the wedding, my uncle had informed us that there had been a last- minute, unexpected change in the DJ for the evening. As it turned out, the DJ was a black youth from Topeka and the people he was originally scheduled to play for didn't like blacks - would it be acceptable if he sent a black DJ? "I thought that was a little... interesting," he said, with no small amount of derision in his voice. The owner of the DJ company had also made it an issue to make sure that HE didn't have a problem with a black DJ, either, he just wanted to make sure. As the two-stepping commenced, I wondered just who these people were, that they considered themselves above having a black nineteen year old play them "Achey Breaky Heart" and the "Hokey Pokey." What disenfranchisement had led them to come to one of the last outposts of a small town where I had not once ever heard the word "nigger" spoken before? Slavery never turned blacks into economic competition upon emancipation, afforded by fortuitous convergence of crops inclined to mechanized agriculture and post Civil War European settlement. White people simply had no economic impetus for keeping black people "in their place"; in fact, there were very few black people here at all. Rather, it was most likely that these black-hating people came to Hiawatha as a place where they could get away with such an action. Their racism was certainly not a result of the exigencies of rural Kansas life. Marx and Engels simply didn't have anything to say about this situation. It was also doubtful that the rednecks who didn't want some coon playing "Achy Breaky Heart" for them were interested in Jungian analysis about their projection of their own feelings of inferiority onto some phenotype - this was just ignorance in its purest form. Using the N-word had simply become an expected accoutrement to the Jeff Foxworthy demographic just as black youth wear their hats sideways on their head. Why even bother trying to explain it? Inserting economic powerlessness and notions of "urban defiance" have doubtlessly garnered a lot of people PhD's, but I still just couldn't stop thinking that a lot of this behavior was just plain dumb. I'd already gone through the motions of guilt and faux- intellectual class analysis with the likes of the Nation of Islam, and didn't feel the need to do it again. Yes, silly ideas are attractive to the downtrodden, but that doesn't change the fact that any sort of education usually pre-empts taking Dr. Yacub or white American Anglo-Saxons Israelites seriously. So I had finally been given all the proof that I thought I needed to justify my nascent liberal superiority complex. Middle-America WAS full of intolerant hicks and pickaninny doll crafts, inevitably breeding Ed Geins and Michael Ryans due to the inherent "idiocy of small town life," as someone once called it. I felt slightly elitist, but in my mind at least it was all out in the open: there was no threat of me getting an advanced degree in comparative literature from NYU in order to justify my condescending tone. I'd effectively rationalized doing a full 360 on the issue back to the point where most people never leave: that a lot of things simply don't make any sense, so why even bother to think about them? Thank God I was from the Big City and smart enough to know all of these sorts of things. I had talked little during the trip, undoubtedly cementing my "quietness" in the minds of my relatives. In fact, I had just felt alienated from the whole experience. I was still being told how much I must have grown since I was last seen, asked what my employment consisted of, but my apparently sullen behavior was certainly not disinterest in their goings-on, or any sort of condescension, but rather intrigue that nevertheless I knew they wouldn't understand. Unable to slather faux niceties and superlatives upon everyone and everything I came in contact with, I undoubtedly came off as either a boy who'd just always been quiet at best or a sneering, big-city snob at worst. I felt powerless to do anything about this perception, which made the lack of alcohol at this wedding especially annoying. I'd been tempted to hop in the car and run down the street for a quick sip of gin, realizing that this would not exactly make me the Dutiful Son. My presence was for my parents to imply that we were just as close-knit as everyone else was back home; we certainly wouldn't have missed this event for the world. It was the same guilt that kept me going to church every Sunday with my parents until I left the house. My one futile attempt to tell my father of my nascent agnosticism resulting in little but a patronizing speech implying that all I was doing was being a rebellious teenager. .-. [ x x ] .-. The last lawn jockey I saw was in the Spring of 2000. I'd made a wrong turn in an extremely affluent neighborhood in East Boulder and it lurched out at me in a way only something totally unexpected can. If this had anything to do with fate, it certainly wasn't in my favor as the picture turned out horribly. The possibility some Very Important Man calling the police after some unknown was taking photos of his house caused me to snap a hasty photo without getting out of my car. The blackness of this piece was its only potential offensiveness - it did not have exaggerated facial characteristics. Its remote location on a dead-end road assures that it will remain incognito from the public-at-large. .-. [ x x ] .-. Less than a year ago it hit me like a ton of bricks: surely I could go out on the Internet and find all of the "Black Memorabilia" that I wanted! The temptation was too good to resist. I felt that if finally I could have a few of these things in my own possession, I'd find the unknown that I had been looking for. The first thing I managed to find was the Virtual Jim Crow Museum, the brainchild of a sociology professor David Pilgrim at Ferris State University in Michigan. Hundreds of racist artifacts are available for viewing, conveniently subdivided into the typical stereotypes: Mammies, Brutes, Coons, and Pickaninnies. I was fascinated by all of the images. I did further Internet searches and found a couple of interviews with people who collected this stuff - all of them were black. Apparently my interest in this subject is comparatively mild, as one collector reported owning over fifteen hundred pieces of Black Memorabilia. It seemed like a good time to start collecting this stuff myself. Within the next couple of weeks I'd made several orders to online Internet antique auction houses. I chose to purchase all glassware, keeping in tune with my very first purchase of a shot glass. When selling these things, it often increases the value immensely if a common theme is established in a collection. Whatever it was, I knew it wouldn't be long until I could grasp one of these artifacts for myself. The pieces started arriving in the mail. The first thing I got was a shot glass showing black African cannibals getting ready to cook a white woman with the caption "Down the Hatch!" More pieces followed: a glass with a couple of cartoon minstrels on the front and the lyrics to "Dixie" on the back; outlandish African tribesmen on a set of six iced tea glasses; "Plantation Scenes" showing a happy darky serving the grandmothers of future sorority girls; a mug from Sambo's Restaurant decorated with an American flag motif, and a truly pretty German teacup depicting black children picking flowers. Stripped of the context that created them, they seem to puzzle more than offend. Their producers seem guilty of little else than perpetuating the de facto standards of their time - without being indicators of wider-ranging social control mechanisms in place, they seem guilty more of tackiness than anything else. This impression is disingenuous. Viewing them as mere exhibitions of poor taste without understanding their role in the systematic dehumanization of black people would be to do them a disservice. Most of the people who produced these and consumed them probably didn't spend an inordinate amount of ruminating on their hatred of black people. But when blacks have been represented to them as little more than watermelon-eating buffoons, it makes for unease when too many of them start attending your local public school. When you look at the glasses, you have to wonder how it would have been possible for them not to exist. They are the natural consequence of provincialism and the human tendency to classify the world based on phenotypic characteristics. After all, our brains are best at performing simple tasks: tracking game, identifying poisonous plants. The same ability that allowed our ancestors to differentiate leopards from mastodons is naturally going to lead us to classify humans in a similar manner. What is surprising it not that these artifacts ever existed; what is surprising is that most people no longer view them as being in good taste. But as the old worn-out adage goes, the more things change, the more they stay the same. It's unlikely that most of the lawn jockies I detailed in this article would have survived a couple of complaints from neighbors, at least in Colorado; there are probably many cases of clueless whites who erect these every year who are oblivious to their true meaning. Howard Zinn wrote that while keeping blacks "in their place" might have been important to a lot of Southerners, it was likely that staying out of jail and avoiding trouble was a lot more important to them at the end of the day. So, while reproductions of racist artifacts seem to be a hot commodity on the Internet (a Texan sells matchbooks touting early-20th century products such as "Nigger Head Oysters," and a South Carolina antique dealer reproduces derogatory images of blacks in advertisements designed to help realize "country decor") it's unlikely that all but the most hardcore racists would be willing to prominently display such items for very long. Over-analysis of these artifacts is a disservice to everyone involved, because the glasses are kitsch, little more than pop-culture detritus from an earlier time. Some sort of grand universal law dictates that they could not have been produced by any great talent; they look Below, not Beyond. They do not seem to have any real purpose outside of their immediate utilitarian function. Whatever dark current it was that I was chasing turned out to be little more than stuff that people probably couldn't give away for free twenty years ago. Their garishness excludes them from irony, and despite whatever intentions I had, it's doubtful anyone would ever understand. I certainly wasn't going to buy a display case for them. They remain in a box, destined for shipment to the Jim Crow Museum at Ferris State University. The America I was looking for - the one that I'd only heard of, where customs and habits arose out immediate material surroundings - simply didn't exist anymore. Pockets of racism can now manifest only impotently, with no tacit approval from the community at large. Whatever was perpetuating ignorant behavior now, it stemmed from a distant First Cause, fueled only by the inevitability of human anger. Michael Ryan might have believed that Jews were Satanic, but all he ended up doing was killing a five year old white boy. .-. [ x x ] .-. In _North of South: An African Journey_, Shiva Naipaul wrote after months in Kenya, Tanzania, and Zambia that, "black and white deserve each other. Neither was worth the shedding of a single tear: both were rotten to the core. Each had been destroyed by contact with the other - though each had been destroyed in his own way." One of the last conversations Naipaul overheard was of a self-proclaimed white racist who claimed he "wasn't this way before he came to Africa" shortly followed by a woman who said she was "slowly coming to hate being white." "It makes me boil inside when I read of the things the white man has done to Africa," she said. "I can even sympathize with Idi Amin. When you think of the way white men have treated black men over the centuries, you can't blame them for wanting revenge. It's only natural. Amin's only reacting to all the dreadful things we whites have done to the blacks. I don't condemn him. Not for one minute." Of course, Idi Amin killed a whole lot more blacks than he did whites by a magnitude of hundreds of thousands. But this fact seems to be lost on the woman in question. I felt like I was parroting David Horowitz, but the stereotype was open for all to see again: whites were being held to a higher moral standard than blacks. If a white colonial government killed a few dozen blacks in a riot, there would have been a worldwide outcry. But when hundreds of thousands of blacks are killed by their supposed fellows, the only thing that seemed to matter was that the few whites who got caught in the crossfire "deserved what was coming to them." How much guilt can people take before their bodies naturally rebel against it? Naipaul quotes George Orwell arguing against deliberate, conscious efforts at class-breaking. "You have forced the pace and set up an uneasy, unnatural equality between class and class; the resultant friction brings to the surface all kinds of feelings that might otherwise have remained buried, perhaps forever - the opinions of the sentimentalist change into their opposites at the first touch of reality." Of course, social progress has never been easy. But there is a big difference between aspiring to a higher level of being - that which was the initial goal of the civil rights movement - and merely justifying the bad actions of a different group. When a trio of white junior-high school age girls sing the lyrics to some filthy hip-hop tune in unison on the _Frontline_ episode, I can't help but think that there has been little actual elevation of the human spirit transpire since the Montgomery bus boycotts almost fifty years ago. As I took one last look at my racial artifacts before I boxed them up and shipped them off to the Jim Crow Museum, I found it hard to disagree with Naipaul's gloomy conclusion. European contact with primitive cultures had merely resulted in "us" turning into Colonel Kurtzes: red-lipped Sambo cartoons proved that "we" were about as far from the highest achievements of Western culture as we could possibly be. Likewise, the "Wabenzi" - Africa's new "tribe" of Mercedes-Benz owners - at least dispelled the notion that there was some sort of unblemished humanity that was being spoiled. We really are all human after all! My curiosity was satiated. I wanted no more to do with any of this, realizing that it would be impossible to write anything at all about these artifacts and not be misunderstood. I found the artifacts to be revolting, but I didn't feel guilty at all when I looked at them. Whatever connection I thought I might have had with them had been severed long ago, and what had seemed so elusive was now ridiculously simple to comprehend. The last thing I thought of before I sealed the boxes were the words of Dr. Benjamin Mays, Martin Luther King's mentor: "I am disturbed, I am uneasy about man because we have no guarantee that [to] train a man's mind, we train his heart; no guarantee that when we increase a man's knowledge, we will increase his goodness." .-. _ _ .-. / \ .-. ((___)) .-. / \ /.ooM \ / \ .-. [ x x ] .-. / \ /.ooM \ -/-------\-------/-----\-----/---\--\ /--/---\-----/-----\-------/-------\- / fun4us \ / \ / `-(' ')-' \ / \ / nofun4u \ \ / `-' (U) `-' \ / `-' the original e-zine `-' _ Oooo - today, tomorrow - / ) __ /)(\ ( \ FOREVER / ( / \ \__/ ) / Copyright (c) 2004 cDc communications and the author. \ ) \)(/ (_/ CULT OF THE DEAD COW is a registered trademark of oooO cDc communications, 1369 Madison Ave. #423, NY, NY 10128, USA _ oooO All rights left. Edited by Grandmaster Ratte'. __ ( \ / ) /)(\ / \ ) \ \ ( \__/ Save yourself! Go outside! Do something! \)(/ ( / \_) xXx BOW to the COW xXx Oooo