The Elephant In the Room

First off, let me say this: I will never be pulled over by a cop because I'm driving "in the wrong part of town," nor will I ever be followed by security or rent-a-cops through a store because I "look suspicious" based solely upon the color of my skin. I'll never be stopped and asked to get out of my car, while my questions about why I was stopped remain unanswered. I will never, ever, ever know what it's like to be black in America (or Latino, for that matter; they get some of the same treatment from law enforcement that blacks have historically gotten in the past). No amount of books read, movies seen, music listened to, will ever make me understand, really understand, the trials and tribulations of those of color in a society in which they are always "the suspect" when anything goes wrong or is suspected of going wrong. I'm planning on writing my final paper for one of my classes about Arab-Americans in the wake of 9/11, yet I'll never know what it's like to be on the shortlist of "possible terrorist suspects" simply because my name is wrong or my skin is too dark.

So I can't speak to whether Michael Brown was innocent or Darren Wilson was justified, at least not without bringing in a lot of speculation on my part about what happened. I do believe that Brown's name was dragged through the mud because that's just the way the media works: blame the dead victim, if you're uncomfortable questioning the suspect because he's in a position of authority. Look at the Bill Cosby case, the multiple allegations of rape against him. I don't *want* to believe that he did that, but my instinct is that yeah, he probably did. We don't know these people.

But to get back to the Ferguson situation: it's intolerable to me that there won't be a trial. At least in the Trayvon Martin case, there was a trial. Anytime someone without a gun runs up against someone with a gun and the unarmed person ends up dead, there should be questions asked. Sometimes it's not even racially motivated, sometimes it's just one person with a gun who has to feel like he has the cojones to use it. I have family members who fetishize weapons, who seem to be attached to their guns (and not their guns to them). I feel sorry for them, really.

We live in a country where race is almost always a factor; that's just a fact. If Wilson had been black, or Brown white, would we have seen the level of outrage first at the murder, and then at the grand jury results? Probably not. Is Wilson a racist? There's no evidence of that as far as I know, though of course it could easily come out tomorrow that he's a Klansman or something equally abhorrent. Was Brown guilty of theft, as has been argued by those who seem to suggest, with their words, that he "had it coming?" I don't know, though I suspect that, if the video leaked to the media from the store where this all started is legit, he very well may have been. Does that justify shooting someone until they are dead? I think it's likely that Brown might very well have been the badass that Wilson paints him as, slamming doors and reaching for guns and trying to tackle Wilson instead of running away. Myths arise around incidents like this, until the truth gets lost. What we do know for sure is this: Michael Brown is dead, Darren Wilson is alive. And the people who treat this like "team Darren Wilson" or "team Michael Brown" are sick.

Nobody wins when something like this happens; a grand jury indictment wouldn't have brought Michael Brown back any more than the acquittal of Zimmerman brought Martin back. We discussed a book in one of my classes this past week, arguing whether survivors of the Holocaust can really be "witnesses" because they didn't go through the ultimate point of the camps (i.e., the gas chambers). Michael Brown can't speak for what happened, and I doubt Darren Wilson will ever really tell the truth; he has to tell a version of it (a "narrative," which has become an over-used word outside of literary circles of late) that he can live with, in which Brown is "strong like Hulk Hogan" and he's just the little man, the Barney Fife of the situation, only with a gun. I hope to God I never face a situation like that (odds are I won't be armed, considering that I don't own a gun and have no desire to own one). Like George Zimmerman, Darren Wilson may be out of jail, but he'll never be free. Neither will the Brown family.

Riots, marches, these are to be expected, and I applaud the peaceful ones while I find the amount of looting done by those taking advantage of the uproar heartbreaking. I understand the frustration and anger, though. A lot of people who put on the badge of police officer, whether in big cities or small towns, do so because they genuinely want to serve and protect. But there are those who use it as an excuse to back up their prejudices with a badge and the authority granted them by the pistol on their hip. We have a lot of wannabe John Waynes running around, basically, and they are more of a threat than the unarmed black teens they tend to gun down. When you shoot first and ask questions later, you don't make time for the possibility that you're wrong. Why in the world didn't Wilson use a taser instead? I have no idea if he had one on him or not, but that would've been the best solution all around. Bullet wounds have a nasty habit of being permanent.

So that's my take, anyway, and I hope that people remember (but I doubt they will) that this story all started with two people on a small-town road somewhere, one armed and the other one not. One person didn't get to walk away from this, nor give exclusive interviews. One person didn't get to tell his side of the story to the grand jury, to be cross-examined (assuming that Wilson did, which seems unlikely with all the stuff we've learned about the prosecutor's office in that part of Missouri). One person won't be charged with the robbery he allegedly committed, nor the possible "assaulting a police officer" charge he might have faced (and could very well have been guilty of, on both accounts). One person died in the streets of Ferguson that day, the person who didn't have a gun.

Think about that before you open your mouth about how Michael Brown "deserved" what he got.

Burning Down the House (Writing Exercise from Fiction Class)

(This was a writing exercise for my Fiction Workshop class last month, we had to pick three things from a list. One was a character type, the next was a setting, and the third was an object. I picked a deaf arsonist, a certain Clemson landmark on fire, and an ice swan wedding sculpture. And I was listening to Talking Heads a lot around that time, so..."Burning Down the House")

   I could see Tillman Hall burning from the highway, and I parked right outside the building because I had a sinking feeling that I knew who was behind it. Sure enough, Helen Keller was running around in the inside, lit match in hand, setting fire to the curtains in the windows as I entered. Helen, blind, deaf, and supposedly dead for at least sixty years, was very much alive and quite the firebug now. She was high on my list of suspects to bring in, along with Nazi war criminals in Argentina and citizens of Atlantis who roamed the world looking for something decent to eat. Keller had been my collar for at least two suspicious arsons, though her case was always thrown out whenever her attorney pulled up Keller’s page on Wikipedia and showed the jury that, technically, her client was dead and thus couldn’t have been “the Firestarter of Des Moines,” among other aliases.

  Keller, sensing my presence, tackled me and threw me to the floor. She moved her fingers over my mouth, indicating that I should talk. “We need to get out of here, Helen,” I said. She nodded, and let me off the floor. She was built like an NFL linebacker in her extreme old age.

 “Water!” she cried out, and at first I thought she meant to fetch a water hose, to put out the fire she’d started. But I followed her outstretched arm with my eyes until I hit upon an ice sculpture, of a swan. I didn’t have time to figure out what an ice swan was doing in Tillman, much less why Helen had brought it in here (or if she’d come across it while setting the hall on fire). I grabbed her hand to my mouth, said “Ok,” and went to pick up the swan, which looked pretty translucent at this point. It had been sweating, however, and somehow it was heavier than it might have been before the flames licked at it. It slipped from my grasp and crashed to the floor.

 Helen may have been deaf and blind, but she was no fool. Her dead eyes turned on me with a fierceness I’d only beholden once before, when I collared Martin Bormann in Buenos Aires with a briefcase full of bratwurst, bound for Berlin by way of Burbank, Boston, and Barcelona. I went to Helen, nudging her to follow me out of the now engulfed building. But she was having none of it; she had sensed that my butterfingers rendered the ice swan kaput, and she was pissed.

 “Helen,” I yelled, though of course she was deaf, “we need to leave now. I’m sorry about the swan, but we don’t leave now, we will die.”

 She finally nodded, eyes losing their fierceness as a tear trickled down from her eye. I threw the matchbox into the flames, Helen was in enough trouble without this arson added to her litany. Like I said, she was supposed to have died decades earlier; historians the world over had an axe to grind about her supposed immortality and what it meant in the existential crisis that was modern life. Besides, she had known “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman personally, and he was a jackass. So we exited through the front, Helen convincing as an ancient secretary with smoke-filled lungs, and I escorted her to my Dodge Dart. We drove off before the campus police could question us. I drove to the airport, figuring that if Buenos Aires had been good enough for Martin Bormann, it was good enough for Helen Keller. Some sunshine and salsa dancing would do her a world of good.

The Pynchon Principle

Recently, in between bouts of class-assigned reading, I made time for Thomas Pynchon's 1990 work Vineland, finishing it last week while enjoying my oh-so-brief Fall Break (I may have stated in my last post that said break was a week-long affair. That was wishful thinking). I've been big on Pynchon for years, and I always meant to get around to Vineland (indeed, this was probably the third time I'd attempted to read it, and on the second time I purchased a copy). Indeed, it and Tom Wolfe's The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby were the last two books I purchased from the now-defunct McClure's Bookshop in downtown Clemson.

Vineland feels to me like a dry run for Inherent Vice (2009, and soon to be a major motion picture). It's good on its own merits (if not great), but it feels like something that Pynchon returned to for Vice with much greater returns on the reader's investment. Then again, when I read Vice last year, I was having a crappy summer, and I felt like the book was a godsend to what ailed me. So I might have a profoundly deeper attachment to it than I ever will to Vineland. Inherent Vice is Pynchon's Rubber Soul, to use the Beatles as an analogy; in turn, Vineland is Help!: The Soundtrack to the Major Motion Picture.

Both books deal with the ramifications of the Sixties counterculture, and what was wrought by the rising tide of conservatism in the wake of such acts as burning draft cards, protesting the Vietnam War, and Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In. Funny how relevant such thoughts seem, what with the recent election results (if you're a Democrat like me, this past Tuesday was like having the "Darth Vader theme" on repeat in your mental iPod as you watched the election results). I've long considered Richard Nixon our most fascinating president, and not in a good way (he's the mirror image of "good old" Ronald Reagan, whose chief personality trait was Not Being Nixon). Nixon managed to win the presidency (twice!) by appealing to our baser instincts, our more unrestrained fears; Pynchon quite naturally (as someone whose speciality is humor-tinged paranoia) returns to the well of the Nixon years for material, at least in these two books (Bleeding Edge marks his entrance into the Bush Era, positioning 9/11 as the result perhaps of a videogame-esque conspiracy). Nixon is a tired punchline at this point for us liberals, as Watergate pretty much did him in (though it's chilling to consider that the whole scandal broke in June of 1972, and Nixon was still re-elected by an overwhelming majority).

But Pynchon is, in many ways, the child of the counterculture. He was born in 1937, so he's a little old for the sex, drugs, and rock and roll of the Sixties, but he managed to make it his own with The Crying of Lot 49. In 1973, he brought to the world Gravity's Rainbow, a book nominally about the end of the Second World War which, quite honestly, I find hard to categorize. It's just so batshit insane that reading it (and liking it) made me feel like I was joining an exclusive club. I didn't get all of it, but it felt like that was okay; the point was just to go on the ride.

I think that's what brings me back to Pynchon every few years, makes me seek out one of his books that I haven't read yet (a list which is starting to shrink in favor of the ones I have). I don't honestly recall when I first realized that Pynchon was around, and a writer I might want to read. I know that I picked up V. once from the library when I was a teenager, but I didn't get too far into it (I'd be on the flip side of thirty before I finally got around to it). Mason & Dixon came out when I was in high school, and I remember checking it out a few times (but only getting so far before feeling like the sheer length of the book stood against me in my efforts to read it); I have a hard-to-find-apparently paperback copy that I bought recently at a used book sale, I might save that for December. Gravity's Rainbow I remember buying at the old Clemson Newstand back in the day, The Crying of Lot 49 was probably a thrift-store buy that I got but didn't read until it came up on the reading list for my 20th Century Lit survey course (always nice when it works out like that, you don't have to buy a copy because you already had it), and I tackled Inherent Vice and Bleeding Edge last year or so. With Vineland under my belt (and M&D purchased, if not read), that leaves Against the Day and Slow Learner (a collection of his short, early fiction).

The question "who is your favorite author?" came up in my Fiction Workshop class recently, and I opined that, right now anyway, it's Lethem. And it is, for sure. But favorite writers are in some ways like favorite musicians or actors; the list is always changing, depending on the older you get (and perhaps the more sophisticated your tastes are, or just a matter of losing sight of whatever it was that made you like that author in the first place). I've read a lot more authors over the past ten years than I'd have thought I would, in terms of those whose existence was a mystery to me until I began to look beyond the usual favorites. I think it's a process of maturation to cast away some of your favorites in anything because they either don't speak to you anymore or you've just outgrown them (and realize how ridiculous you look in Hammer pants...not that I ever wore Hammer pants, that's just an example). Thomas Pynchon is an author to whom I return after years at a time, so it might be a while before I tackle Mason & Dixon or Against the Day (both of which are heavyweights, literally). But I'll tackle them, by goodness. Pynchon looks at paranoia with a demented sense of humor, and I think we could all use something like that right about now. I'm just thrilled/nervous about the Inherent Vice film, I can't wait to see it and I'm terrified that it's gonna suck. But such is the bargain we strike with anything we care about artistically.