The Smiths, "The Queen Is Dead"

Last week I woke up one morning sure that, when I turned on the TV, the news networks would be breaking from their regular Trump coverage to announce the death of Queen Elizabeth II (or "Liza," as her friends call her). I can't explain why this certainty came over me, if it was part of some left-over dream residue or a psychic malevolency on my part. Obviously, when I did turn on the TV there was no such breaking news. But given the fact that Liza did just celebrate her 90th birthday on this planet, the odds are in my favor that such a day will occur sooner rather than later.

I don't like authority figures, especially those whose authority is just assumed and not earned (or "earned" in quotation marks). In a country where we're this close to electing a self-important billionaire (or so he says...I think Donnie's facing another bankruptcy, hence the making of America great again) or the wife of a former president (so she's had experience hanging around the White House), I seem to be in the minority of folks who feel this way. All the Bernie Bros convince me of is that they'd be liking Trump if he wasn't playing the bigot card. I don't know what to think about for the fall, I almost wish we'd lost the Revolution now.

Britain, once our landlord, is still a country that we look to with what even the most Anglophile among us would regard as a simpering inferiority complex. And why not? They've got centuries of culture to our two (though said culture is way more racist and sexist when you take a closer look at it and get past the sexy accents), they often times make better music, and nobody does tuberculosis-ridden female novelists quite like the UK. But they have an archaic and borderline stupid devotion to a family of inbreds whose only claim to legitimacy is "we have been and always will be better than you."

I remember getting up super-early in the morning on the day William and Kate got married. I am anything but a royalist, but I had a bad attack of what I later learned were gallstones, and I was up anyway writhing in pain so I figured I'd check it out. To hear the way people talk about the royal family, and the two kids born since and how they'll "inherit the throne" once Liza checks out (I guess Chuck isn't in line for it anymore? I didn't get the memo on that one), I feel like shouting "constitutional monarchy" at the top of my lungs. I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure that the Windsors are figureheads at this point. That is, they don't do anything but look pretty for the cameras and tourists. You know, Kardashians.

Maybe it's not so hard to understand why people are obsessed with them, then.

I came to loath the whole enterprise like countless American boys of my time: by reading John Lydon's autobiography Rotten. The once and future Sex Pistol unloads on the whole notion of inherited authority pretty well (my memory is hazy, but he did pen "God Save the Queen" so I feel I'm on good footing without having to refer to the memoir). What's more, about a dozen years later I stumbled across John Gardner's Grendel, which includes a paragraph that explains where royal "authority" gets off telling us mere mortals what to do (hint: it's similar to the whole "built another castle, that sank into the swamp" story from Monty Python and the Holy Grail). When it comes to the royals, there's an awful lot of wish fulfillment on the part of royal-watchers. Call it "crown envy" instead of penis envy, if you will. I don't understand it...unless, of course, I do.

You know how I mentioned the Pistols just now, and punk rock in general? That's my jam, frankly. I would love to travel back in time to around 1976 (when it was all getting started) right up to 1982 or so (Ian Curtis was dead, but punk was now "postpunk" or "New Wave" and just about to become ridiculous thanks to the New Romantics). So perhaps it's not all that weird to me how some people look to other cultures (and other timelines) to feel better about themselves. Growing up in a small town that I was convinced was devoid of culture, I looked at the world outside the confines of my town and wanted to be in that world (I was Ariel in The Little Mermaid, minus the ability to swim or the red hair). Looking at the wider world now, and how incredibly close we seem to be to some sort of apocalypse, I think maybe I was naïve back then. But I can be forgiven for it; I saw something attractive in a culture not my own and wanted to emulate it. It's not a sin (well, not until you start emulating Nazis and put people you don't like in camps, but that could never happen under any president, right?).

I thought, in my younger, more "radicalized" days, that when the Queen did throw off her mortal coil, I'd blast "The Queen Is Dead" at full volume. But the Queen is as much a flesh-and-blood human being as she is a figurehead (albeit a figurehead for a system that I still seem passionately opposed to, even though there's really no reason for me to still carry the punk-rock flag against the royals). In "The King's Speech," we even see her as a little girl, her daddy the guy who has to rally his country in the wake of Hitler's blitzkrieg. It's easy to forget that the figureheads we hate or love, at the end of the day, take a shit like the rest of us. That doesn't make our feelings any less valid, but it should regulate our behavior a little bit. So when Liza doffs her crazy hat one last time and exits stage left, I guess I'll try to take a minute to remember that she's somebody's mother/grandmother/great-grandmother. But after that moment, I still might queue up some Smiths or Sex Pistols. Because I'm human, too.

Conspiracy Theory: Donald Trump is Andy Kaufman

Since his presidential campaign began with an anti-Mexican soundbite that might have ended a lesser politician’s bid right then and there, Donald Trump has baffled both the Republican establishment and the political pundits on television who figured that this was all an elaborate con job by the real-estate mogul to expand his brand and nothing more. So far, the Trump hate-filled balloon has only rose higher and higher, and the oxygen to the lungs of his critics seems increasingly thin. You’ve probably heard or posited conspiracy theories to explain the unexplainable Trump juggernaut, so I humbly present my own: Donald Trump is Andy Kaufman.

 

I’ll just pause here while those in the reading audience who don’t know who Kaufman was look him up on Wikipedia…

 

Okay, when I said that about Trump being Kaufman, there are one of two ways that you, the reader, could take it: 1.) I’m being facetious about Trump *actually* being Kaufman, a notorious performance artist who most assuredly passed away in 1984 from a rare form of lung cancer. I’m merely suggesting that Trump has perhaps captured the same anarchic spirit that Kaufman used to disrupt professional wrestling (as the “Intergender World Champion”) and unleashed it on the modern-day GOP. Or 2.) I am sincerely suggesting that Trump and Kaufman (who, let’s face it, you’ve never seen in the same room together at the same time) are one and the same, and that Kaufman is playing the obnoxious “Trump” character to perfection in his greatest role yet.

 

What if I told you I was leaning towards number 2?

 

No, hear me out: When he allegedly “died” in 1984 (at the height of the backlash from his Intergender Wrestling career, mind you, having turned heel to battle Jerry “The King” Lawler and supposedly suffered a broken neck and a public meltdown on David Letterman’s old NBC show in the process), Kaufman had pulled so many hoaxes and performances that left his audience’s heads scratching that no one believed it. Every few years (especially since the evolution of the internet), rumors persist that Kaufman is poised to “return” to the world at large after a significant time out of the public eye. Rumors of his return were especially persistent in 1999, upon the eve of the film Man In the Moon (a Kaufman biopic starring fellow comedian and performance artist Jim Carrey…wait, he was serious about that whole “anti-vaccine” thing?), and in 2004, the twentieth anniversary of his “death.”

 

As a Kaufman fan, I do admit that I wanted to believe that Kaufman perhaps had faked his death all those years ago, and that he would indeed return. But my more rational, less conspiracy-minded self was inclined to believe that no one would put their family through what Andy’s family suffered (and indeed, they were skeptical about his fatal diagnosis when it first came to light; they had put up with his fantasies and performances for far longer than the general public had). Still, when friends posted articles purporting to Kaufman sightings in Wal-Mart parking lots (perhaps akin to Elvis, Kaufman’s idol, who seems to haunt Waffle Houses nearly forty years after *his* alleged passing), I felt a twinge of “what if,” if only for a moment.

 

Perhaps to better understand my conceit that Trump and Kaufman are one in the same, it’s important to point out that Kaufman the man was universally loved and treasured by his close associates because, no matter how insane his antics, he was a deeply funny and warm human being, full of kindness. No one’s ever accused Trump of having a soul, to my knowledge. But Kaufman could go dark, for sure, whether as the wrestling heel or as his most beloved-or-hated alter ego, Tony Clifton. In this role, Kaufman got to play the world’s worst lounge lizard, a nightclub “entertainer” who got to be as cruel, crass, and boorish as Kaufman was sweet and kind in real life. Sometimes to throw the audience, Kaufman would appear onstage while Clifton was performing, causing fans who “knew” that Clifton was Kaufman in heavy make-up and garish Seventies garb to pause and reconsider. In those instances, it was actually Kaufman’s best friend and partner-in-crime Bob Zmuda beneath the distinctive Clifton wig and jowls. But the audience never knew that.

 

Now, I realize it’s crazy to suggest that Donald John Trump is not a real person at all but a creation of a talented performer whose most memorable characters either endeared themselves to the audience (Foreign Man/Latka on “Taxi”) or drove that same audience to hiss and boo and finally hate him (the wrestling champ, Clifton). But if you put aside the facts for a moment (or “facts”), doesn’t it seem plausible? After all, how do we know that Trump is who he says he is (son of a real-estate mogul, a mogul himself, a graduate of the Wharton Business School, etc.)? Couldn’t it all be a cleverly constructed ploy by Kaufman, long underground in the guise of this “Trump” (doesn’t the name along suggest it’s a pun on something, or else a too-real-to-be-real name, like that of fictional presidents in movies?) and finally ready to re-enter the public life? Or hasn’t he been playing Trump since 1984, if not earlier? Consider Trump’s facial appearance; you’d swear that could be just a really poorly-rendered latex mask, if you didn’t know any better. But what if you do know better? Why would his skin be so orange? And that hair, it’s obviously a cheap wig, perhaps clamped in place Joe Dirt-style to keep Kaufman/Trump’s brain from exposure to the elements?

 

My hypothesis (and keep in mind, like most conspiracy theorists, I only use scientific terms to make my outlandish claims appear legitimate): Sometime in the fall of 1983, Donald Trump as we knew of him before then dies in a deliciously ironic way for a rich asshole (like, say, actually trying to dive into a gold-coin pool like Scrooge McDuck and breaking his neck), before the news gets out Andy Kaufman gets ahold of this information somehow. Let’s say…carrier pigeon. No, Illuminati. Yes, every conspiracy theorist’s favorite bugaboo, who control everything, they *arrange* for Trump to die so that Kaufman (who can’t get work after the fall-out from his wrestling-heel days) can step into a new role. It’s Tony Clifton writ large, and he and Zmuda get to work. But they can’t have Kaufman known to inhabit the role, so they concoct the “rare lung cancer” diagnosis so that Kaufman (who was not a smoker) can suitably “die” with a cloud of suspicion over him to distract fans from the sudden re-emergence of Donald J. Trump from, say, several months of vacation in Antarctica. So when Kaufman’s “death” is announced in May 1984, Donald Trump can slip back into American consciousness and no one bats an eye. Over the rest of the decade, “Trump” becomes louder, more obnoxious, declares bankruptcy (actually a front so Kaufman can finally get actual surgery to “look like” Trump, he’s been wearing the latex mask all this time and it’s starting to show), bounces back, has numerous public scandals, takes to social media with the instincts of a tween Taylor Swift fan, and finally emerges in 2015, thirty-one years after his “death,” to destroy the GOP from the inside, because it will be the greatest Andy Kaufman performance of all time!

I suppose you have a better theory…?

The Semester Ahead (A Plan That Will Surely Be Revised Often)

One last week between now and the start of the fall semester at the university, which means I will also be teaching Composition to the young'uns who are coming in as freshmen. I really haven't even thought about the classes I'm signed up to take, to be honest (and for some reason, I signed up for four classes, I may re-think that by drop time). No, it's been all about thinking about me standing in front of a room, telling people "I'll be your teacher for this semester, and I will not tolerate any having of fun or joke-telling. I will run this classroom with an iron fist, you hear me?"

Though in my own experience as a student, such teachers rarely were memorable or that good at their jobs. No, the teachers I liked and from whom I learned the most managed to balance out discipline and joviality. If you messed up something in their class, you didn't fear their loud yelling so much as their lack of any yelling, just a stern look of disapproval and disappointment. I hope to emulate that in my own teaching this year. But if I have to, I will lower the mother-f*&%-ing boom on those young punks.

Some things I hope to not do or not do as much:

1.) Be online - a simple look at my activity log on Facebook for any day over the past three months is enough to shame me into considering rehab...even as I type this up and plan on posting it on FB. I never said I was perfect. I did cut back on online "killing time" shit last year with my school work, and I imagine my students would prefer it if I placed their work over any time I could be spending trading jokes with friends online. It helps that I don't have internet at my place, though I do have a TV, which leads me to number 2

2.) Watch TV - this is helped by the fact that a lot of my shows are off the air or just on nights where it'd be far better for me to sleep. Jon Stewart leaving the Daily Show, for one (though I for one welcome our new fake-news anchor who is also named Trevor), Colbert being on the Late Show now also. I love The Nightly Show, and @midnight, but my schedule is thus: Monday, Wednesday and Friday I got to be up and ready to go to teach at eight in the morning. So no late nights Tuesdays or Thursdays, and it wouldn't hurt me to get to bed earlier the rest of the week. Yes, there's this thing called DVR, no I don't have it. I've over-indulged on TV this summer (good and bad), there really are fewer and fewer things for me to get excited about (I refuse to watch NBC after the way they shat all over Community, for instance).

3.) Stay up late - I think if I'm "staying up late" on a night where I'm not planning on getting up at five the next morning, it had better be because I'm working on something for one of my classes or working on something I've assigned my students and which they have turned in and are expecting a grade on. Because few college students are pacified with the "sticker for participation" tactic anymore.

4.) Read for fun - I've overindulged this summer, which is good. A lot of the "reading for fun" became, either by design or by accident, reading-for-my-creative-thesis, and I've already got a pretty hefty list of things that I could say inspired me directly or indirectly with whatever shape my final thesis ends up being. I'll still need the occasional trashy cash-in book about "stupid things" like sports or celebrities behaving badly, but I hope to limit that.

5.) Eat crappy food - my waistline expanded over the first two semesters of grad school, and I was all set to start getting up early and walking around Sertoma, as well as cutting back on the obvious crap I ate. But then I forgot to set my alarm the first full day off from school, and it's been that way ever since. I hope to have time to do the bare minimum of exercise, but cutting back on terrible food (in that it's terrible for you, not terrible to eat) would help immensely.

Now, having said all that: plans tend to change once they meet reality, and I imagine many of those things will falter when confronted with whatever reality springs up. But I know this going in, and I know that I don't want to let anyone down, least of all my students who put work into their class assignments (I would hope, anyway). I volunteered for the early shift, mostly because I figured I'd have an easier time of it with parking (I hope, anyway) but also because I figure it's best to get the teaching out of the way early in the day, like going third or fourth in a speech class. I hope so, anyway. There's a whole lot of hope in this, I guess. Teaching is one of those things where you never know how you'll be at it until you try it. And I'm about to get my call-up in a little over a week's time.

Hopefully I don't break a leg literally

Jon Stewart Leaves "Daily Show," Opens Up Neighborhood Arby's

Like a lot of you, I discovered The Daily Show when I was in college (or maybe it was on a trip to the beach, when the house my family was staying at happened to have Comedy Central...anyway, for the purposes of this story, let's say college). I was charmed by the "fake news" format, the skewering of a tired old dinosaur of news-gathering, the nightly news. The host was tall, blond, a former Sports Center guy who seemed like he would coast on this gig for a while.

I'm talking about Craig Kilborn, the original host of the show. I went to college for the first time a long, long time ago.

But then, things were different: I thought I'd manage to finagle my way into a job on Conan O'Brien's NBC show as a writer, so I neglected class. You can already tell how that turned out without me going into further detail. Kilborn and the Daily Show were required viewing in my college dorm room, mostly because my roommate for my first semester liked to stay up late and I...I had eight o'clock class. In the morning. No wonder I didn't feel like attending. At any rate, Comedy Central was something that I didn't have back in old Walhalla, not anymore (we'd had CC back when we first got cable, twenty-five years ago, but it wasn't really "Comedy Central" yet). And when I flunked out and had to return home with my tail between my legs, it was something that I didn't have again, until about 2005 or 2006.

By then, of course, Kilborn was long gone (first to CBS, then into the yawning void that characterizes formerly famous people as "has-been." I'm sure he'll have a reality show before all is said and done). Jon Stewart, whom I was aware of only as a middling actor in some films I kinda avoided (he was in some Adam Sandler movies, and Death to Smoochie), was the host of the show, and he had become a force of nature by taking on the Bush administration's criminal war in Iraq. I'd bought the book America without having seen the show because, well, I just had a feeling that it was in my outrage wheelhouse. 2004 was probably the angriest-at-Bush I had ever been (especially when the asshole won a second term, I was livid), and that Daily Show book soothed my heartbroken liberal soul.

So we got Comedy Central sometime in 2005 or 2006, because the good people at Northland figured I and my grandparents had had our fill of CMT ("hey, it's a channel, I guess") and other lousy programming options. We also got VH1 (and I was able to reconnect with music and care about it again up until Iggy Azalea came along). But Comedy Central meant The Daily Show, as well as (eventually, because I didn't like it at first) The Colbert Report.

I won't bore you with the near-decade then that I've had to watch the show under Stewart's tenure, nor the moments that made me laugh hardest or made me think the most (sometimes they were both in the same act). And with Trevor Noah coming in to take over, it's not like The Daily Show is dying. But it feels like it.

I know that, during the time I wasn't able to see the show (yes, I know, there's this thing called "the internet" with all kinds of videos of cats playing keyboards and other nonsense, but be patient with me), Stewart steered the show away from the genial mockery of the Kilborn era into a more potent, more focused attack on the media and on the ways in which certain administrations (like, oh I don't know, the Bush one) manipulated that media for their own benefit. A lot of those same outlets seem to be tripping over themselves to damn with faint praise Stewart as he embarks on his final week of shows. I saw something on Fox News (if ever there was a "fake news outlet," it's those jackholes) where the once reputable Howard Kurtz tried to say that Stewart's "secret meetings" with Obama were a big deal. This is the same network that practically lived in Dick Cheney's sphincter from 2001 to 2008...anyway, the fact is that yes, Stewart is a leftie (and not just in terms of which hand he writes with). So what? News itself, the real deal, has been moving away from "objective" reporting for so long that I can't even begin to think of when it last was indeed objective (Ancient Sumer, maybe?). Bill O'Reilly is the right's Jon Stewart, only not funny on purpose. Sean Hannity is Colbert's character without the irony. And your point is what, exactly?

For as much as I'll miss Stewart when he made me laugh, it won't mean as much without the moments when something happened that was terrible, and I anticipated that evening's or that week's first new episode, to see his commentary about it. The most recent, on the shootings in my home state, might rank as just the most honest moment in news on the entire event, because the "agenda" Stewart was pushing that night was just outrage that this shit continues to happen, and that we don't seem willing to do anything about it (oh, we're able. Don't let anyone tell you we're not). I know Trevor Noah will do his best to fill that void (and Larry Wilmore, on The Nightly Show, is easily the peer of Stewart when it comes to showing outrage at horrific events, while still trying to save us all with the comedy that makes such tragedies bearable). But it won't be the same.

During Jon Stewart's tenure, he seemed to age well beyond his years. He's fifty-two, I think, but he looks far, far older. Trying to make sense of all the crap that passes for "news" these days will do that to a man, I'm sure, and I think he deserves a rest. But goddam it, I need him around to mock the powerful and unrepentant as he's done for fifteen years (almost ten of which I got to see). Imagine what he could do with a Trump presidency...oh lord, if that's what it takes to get him to come back, let him stay retired.

At any rate, the world of news (fake or otherwise) is better off for Stewart's tenure. You may disagree, but that's your opinion. And if you think Stewart was bad for this country, well...what's say you and me go get a meal down at Arby's? You know what, you go ahead and eat that roast beef sandwich, I can wait.

Trump Takes on the Presidents (All of 'Em)

George Washington: "Are you kidding me? Guy couldn't win a battle against the Brits to save his life. Listen, here's what I would've done: negotiate with the lobsterbacks to have just Manhattan and the Greater Metropolitan Area, let them have the rest. I mean, I'm just saying. And when I chop down a cherry tree, I own it.”

 

John Adams: "Loser."

 

Thomas Jefferson: "Dummy, and a loser."

 

James Madison: "I take turds bigger than him."

 

James Monroe: "I got a doctrine for you, build a wall on the Mexican border. Would've saved us all a lot of trouble."

 

John  Quincy Adams: "I didn't like this movie the first time I saw it, when it was his dad. Talk about nepotism."

 

Andrew Jackson: "His nickname was 'Old Hickory.' Mine is 'Young, Virile Stud.' What a loser, though he did try to get the Indians out of here. Lovely people, but they couldn't run a casino before I came along."

 

Martin Van Buren: "You know, I like his sideburns, not going to lie. Otherwise, a loser."

 

William Henry Harrison: "Who the fuck is this?"

 

John Tyler: "Loser, waste of space."

 

James K. Polk: "I'm just saying, you go annexing Mexican lands and then you're surprised at how many of them are here illegally?"

 

Zachery Taylor: "Loser, I don't believe he even served in the Mexican War."

 

Millard Fillmore: "I prefer Mallard Fillmore, I'm just being honest."

 

Franklin Pierce: "Hawkeye? Please, least-likable MASH cast member. I was always a Frank Burns fan."

 

James Buchanan: "I'm just saying..."

 

Abraham Lincoln: "I go to a theater, you don't see me getting shot."

 

Andrew Johnson: "Never met a whiskey bottle he didn't like. Loser."

 

US Grant: "I question whether he's a war hero."

 

Rutherford B. Hayes - Grover Cleveland: "Losers, all of them. I got a meeting in ten, you think we can speed this along?"

 

William McKinley: “What, are you making up guys now? Get serious.”

 

Theodore Roosevelt: "Pansy. No real man wears glasses."

 

William Howard Taft: "Somebody should follow him with a tuba, making fart noises."

 

Woodrow Wilson: "See what I said about TR."

 

Warren G. Harding: "More like Soft-ing, am I right?"

 

Calvin Coolidge: “Instead of ‘Hard-ing,’ you see?”

 

Herbert Hoover: "Get it? Soft-ing?"

 

Franklin Delano Roosevelt: "You don't know comedy. I know comedy. Oh, this guy. Cripple, loser. Wouldn't even get out of his chair to greet troops as they came home."

 

Harry S. Truman: "I never trust anyone from Missouri."

 

Dwight D. Eisenhower: "I question his war record."

 

John F. Kennedy: "Son of a bitch had better hair than me. Oswald took care of that."

 

Lyndon B. Johnson: "If it had been me, Vietnam would be 'Trump-Vietnam,' casinos all up and down the coast."

 

Richard Nixon: "Who doesn't tape themselves saying racist things?"

 

Gerald R. Ford: "I don't know why we ever voted for him for president."

 

Jimmy Carter: "Toothy bastard, am I right?"

 

Ronald Reagan: "Great hair, though I don't believe it's his natural color."

 

George Bush: "See what I said about pansies wearing glasses."

 

Bill Clinton: "I told him, I said 'Bill, outsource your affairs.' But did he listen?"

 

George W. Bush: "Loser, pathetic. Iraq would be a golf course if I was in charge."

 

Barack Obama: "He's from Kenya, he's black, and I assume some black Kenyans are good people. But no, not this one."

You Know, That Guy, the One With the Hair (Do I Have to Say His Name?)

Been a while since I checked in here, now that racism is over in South Carolina I don't know what all to complain about.

Just kidding (unfortunately), racism is alive and well in SC. If you ever bought stock in a company that sells or manufactures Confederate flags, you've seen your investment pay dividends. But alas, that is to be expected.

It's almost August, and August has never been my favorite month. For one thing, it's always the barometer I use for how hot it is in June and July (as in "if it's this hot now, imagine what it'll be like in August." I feel like, thanks to climate change, the dread of an August afternoon is perhaps more legit than it was beforehand). For another, it's the time when school starts back, though I'm now looking forward to school because I'm back in it. Sure, there's the prospect of having to teach a class this semester (as well as the next), on account of "that's kind of what teachers do and I'm going to school to teach/write and so...," but I'm not good in front of crowds. The one time I was good in front of a crowd, it was 2007, we'd just lost a game to Boston College (who are the Washington Generals of the ACC, so that should tell you how bad the mood was that night), and I got up on a small abutment to try and paraphrase the "friends, Romans, countrymen" speech. I had been drinking earlier in the night, but I was sober-ish by then. I was just being a punk kid.

Now I have to be a punk kid in front of other younger, punkier kids. And I have to be an adult about it. Oh...boy.

At any rate, lots of stuff going on in the news, naturally. My favorite ESPN show host, Keith Olbermann, is wrapping up his final week on the air at ESPN 2. I feel like the One Person Who Watched His Show this time around, and even I wasn't enough. After they ran off Bill Simmons, I began to think that ESPN was trying to dumb down their brand (or "Skip Bayless-Stephen A. Smith" it, if you will). With Olbermann's exit and that of Colin Cowherd (not a favorite, but at least he wasn't always sipping the Kool-Aid of the major leagues...not always, anyway), I think my suspicions are confirmed.

Also, Jon Stewart is leaving The Daily Show in three weeks. His replacement is a guy named "Trevor," which makes me happy from a personal standpoint. But I think we're going to miss Stewart's brand of take-no-shit and take-no-prisoners comedy this upcoming election cycle.

Which reminds me...no, not going to mention him by name (if you say it three times while looking in a mirror, his hairpiece appears on your natural hair and overwhelms it). Suffice it to say, I am just as sick of You-Know-Who as you probably are. But the GOP laid down for decades in the gutter with un-Reconstructed Southerners and bigots of all stripes: this is karma for them. In that sense, I'm happy for He Who Cannot Be Named's entry into the race. I just hope it lasts long enough that somebody from my side gets to win (I'm not sold on HRC, but mostly because I don't like obvious choices. I want a little drama with my nomination process...not as much as what's going on over on the other side, but just a little bit would be nice).

Man, if you think it's hot outside now, wait until August...

The Day They Drove Old Dixie Down

This past week has brought me to a more appreciative sense of my South Carolinian-ness, if that's even a word. As you are no doubt aware, we had the unspeakable crime of murder visited upon our state on June 17, in the Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston. The crime was racially motivated, and the killer took photos of himself with various racial totems (including the American flag, which last time I checked did in fact fly over a nation where the distance between "all men are created equal" and the reality has been closing over the last century or so, but is nowhere near closed). What took up the media's attention, rightly or wrongly, was the fact that our state capital grounds hosted a Confederate battle flag for well over fifty years, first over the dome itself (at the bottom, below the American and state flags) and then at a "memorial for Confederate dead" when a compromise was reached over the flag's place on state grounds in the early part of this century.

That flag is down now, for good, and I couldn't be happier.

I grew up in the South, and of course I was taught that the South "had just cause" to demand its separation from the United States, that it was basically a follow-up to the 13 Colonies breaking ties with England. That the war hadn't been fought over slavery but "state's rights." I was brought up to believe this, at least in school. My mother encouraged my early reading, and my early love of history, and she never looked at the books I brought home from the library to say "oh, that's not something you should be reading" (not that I was bringing home issues of Playboy or anything: this is a public library in the South we're talking about), but my point is that she never once told me that I couldn't read something, and I read a lot (or started a lot of books, sometimes giving up after a few pages because, as a kid, I probably would've been happier with books with pictures of talking animals or whatever).

I educated myself about the war, read as much about it as I could, and I came to the conclusion that the war was fought over one thing: slavery.

I know that a lot of people defending the flag over the past month have argued otherwise, but the idea that the Confederate flag represents anything but a government bent on preserving servitude of its black inhabitants (they weren't considered "citizens" by any stretch) is patently false and delusional. Do I think every single Confederate soldier was a racist slave-owner or sympathetic to the idea that blacks were inferior and thus needed to be kept in chains? No, I do not. I think that the average infantry soldier (usually the poorest of the poor, and unable to afford slaves anyway) probably fought more because their homes were being invaded. I think that you can serve with valor and heroism for a cause which does not merit it. The Southern soldiers, the ones who displayed courage and bravery, did so in the service of a cause which was far, far beneath them. Those who fought for the preservation of slavery (including the leading politicians of the Confederacy, and many of her generals) deserved to lose the war in 1865.

Good thing I didn't give out my personal address on this thing, or else there'd be a mob of Confederate flag-waving activists on my lawn when I get home.

The fact is, the South was wrong to break away from the United States, because it did so in the service of a cause which didn't seek to honor the foundations of liberty but because it sought to deny them, to a sizable portion of its population (ironically, had the South tapped into the manpower of blacks in the region earlier as soldiers in the army, they could very well have done better militarily once the tide turned at Gettysburg. And no, the fact that the Confederacy finally grudgingly began to enlist companies of black soldiers does not mean that the racism and hatred which fueled their desire to do anything but arm slaves is suddenly and magically washed away). Whatever the Confederate flag meant before the end of the war (and it meant slavery), it came to mean far worse when taken up as a banner by the Klan and other terrorist organizations in the immediate aftermath of the war and the implementation of Reconstruction.

When the flag went up our state house flag pole in the early Sixties, it wasn't to honor the Confederate dead. It was a giant middle finger (and a threat) to the efforts of Civil Rights leaders to enact change in the South. That we're still arguing this so long after the last shots of the war were fired, and I see people that I know and like (and even some relatives) online say that it's "heritage, not hate," is heartbreaking to me. I don't expect anyone reading this to have their minds or hearts changed just because I dropped some knowledge about the Confederacy and the Civil War. But I got to hope for it.

So seeing the flag taken down, finally, on Friday morning, it was a great day to be an American, and a South Carolinian. All these people flying Rebel flags from their trucks, who went to the trouble to spend money on such things, they don't have a rallying point on the State House grounds anymore. In fact, the song "Rednecks" by Randy Newman comes to mind. It's a song written from the point-of-view of a Southern racist in the Seventies, and as such it uses a certain word that white people really shouldn't say anymore (and indeed, Newman saying it in character might not assuage casual listeners who might hear it out of context), but it's a beautiful song in terms of capturing not just the mindset of the South but also of the North (where racism, as it turns out, is not a foreign concept). But for a long time, deservedly so, the South and white Southerners have been known as the nation's preeminent racists. Taking down the flag doesn't automatically mean that racism is over in SC, but it signals that maybe we can start trying to do better, to pay back what we owe. I do think there's a place for the flag, but that place is in a museum, where a respectful treatment of the past (in all its unpleasant aspects) can take place. All these people flying the flag now, they're signs of the past, not of the future. To quote Newman, they don't know their ass from a hole in the ground. And now their pathetic symbol of pride is gone from the grounds of the State House.

Good riddance to old rubbish.