The Stars and Bars Are Not Forever

Too Many Roberts

The first Toombs, named William, came to the American colonies around 1650, settling in the area around Richmond, Virginia, future home of a then-unimaginable Confederacy. The first known Robert Toombs commanded a Virginia regiment during the Revolution and, for his services, was granted land in Georgia in 1783. It was there that his son, Robert Augustus Toombs, was born in 1810.

My great-great-something-or-other

He served as a U.S. Senator for eight years until resigning to become the first Secretary of State for the new Confederate States of America. (The story goes that he very nearly became President instead of Jefferson Davis, but liquor intervened.) My branch of the family had stayed quietly in Virginia, but the Georgia branch got famous. (Robert Augustus even gets name-checked in Gone With the Wind, when he is mentioned as one of the attendees of Ashley's birthday party.  Pretty weird reading that very famous book and suddenly seeing your own name in it.) When my great-grandfather was born in Richmond in 1895, he was named Robert, partly in honor of his famous relative, who had died only about ten years earlier, and Lee, in honor of the General.

That's why I am Robert Lee Toombs IV, bearer of a name that has continued unbroken since 1895. I am a Southerner whose roots go back a century before there was a United States, and when I travel in Georgia I can see my name on schools and streets and post offices, right there in Toombs County, where Vidalia sweet onions are grown.

One of the schools bearing the Toombs name.  I have
no idea who these people are.

In short: we Toombses have been around for a while. And I think I can say with some confidence that if you want to talk about Southern heritage, my claim to it is about as strong as most people you're likely to meet. The Confederate flag? That's my family's flag.

And yes: my ancestors, including Robert Augustus, owned slaves. And after the war he became the quintessential unreconstructed rebel. When he was urged to take an oath of allegiance to the United States after the conflict ended, he refused. When someone said that if he didn't take the oath he could not be forgiven, he bellowed, "But I have not forgiven you yet!"

So with all that said, with my Southern bona fides clearly established, let me be very clear: the Confederate flag should appear in museums and history books, and that's about it. But statehouses and parks and courts and schools and municipal buildings? Oh hell no.

(As I declare this, Robert Augustus surely rumbles in his grave. "Scalawag!" he murmurs, and he stuffs dirt in his ears.)

The Flag Itself

As has been reported widely, the flag we typically refer to these days as "the Confederate flag" was never the official flag of the Confederacy.  Rather, it was a battle flag used by the rebel army and navy.

The official Confederate flag, particularly the first, looked so much like the U.S. flag that it was confusing troops on the battlefield, so a separate battle flag was created with a design more easily distinguishable. This is probably the principal reason why the battle flag was chosen by white supremacist groups in the mid-20th century to be their symbol--it was a flag associated with combat, with armed insurrection. (Specifically, the States' Rights Democratic Party, or Dixiecrats, splintered from the Democratic Party in 1948 in protest over the Democrats' adoption of a civil-rights platform, and they opted to use the Confederate battle flag as their symbol. From there, it was picked up by the Klan, the Aryan Nation, and other white supremacist groups.)

A depiction of the Fort Pillow Massacre

It is also interesting to note that one of the generals who used the Confederate battle flag in Tennessee was Nathan Bedford Forrest and his Cavalry Corps. Because General Forrest is notorious for, among other things, the Fort Pillow Massacre, where black Union soldiers were shot down after they surrendered. He is also remembered for his membership in the Ku Klux Klan, of which he was supposedly the first Grand Wizard.

It seems clear to me that the "Confederate flag" is a representative of battle rather than civil authority, and that it was the combat standard employed by a general who has become emblematic of belligerent racism.  So emblematic, in fact, that in July the Memphis city council voted to dig up his body from a park downtown and move it elsewhere, and to take down the statue of him that stands in that park and sell it to whoever might want it.

The kicker, though, is that General Forrest may have had something of a conversion, not too long after the war ended.  He did join the first incarnation of the Klan, yes, but that was when the KKK was intended as a political organization dedicated to civil agitation; when it quickly started turning militant and violent, General Forrest got it disbanded in 1869.  (Unfortunately for us all, they came back around 1915.) And in 1875 he delivered a speech to an organization of black southerners in which he said, "I came to meet you as friends, and welcome you to the white people. I want you to come nearer to us. When I can serve you I will do so. We have but one flag, one country; let us stand together. We may differ in color, but not in sentiment. Use your best judgement in selecting men for office and vote as you think right."  As a sentiment it's a little condescending, yes, but not as rabidly racist as one might think from his reputation. Might it be possible that the wellspring of racist Southern pride experienced a conversion late in life that left him less racist? Why isn't that part of his story celebrated?

Also: why does the South, an entire region, get its own flag? New England doesn't have a banner, nor does the Midwest, and you certainly don't see us west-of-the-Rockies liberals clamoring for a Left Coast flag. So why should the South be represented by one flag?

Sounds a little separationist to me. Or segregationist.

"Southern Heritage"

I am, happily, not alone in calling for the flag to come down. In a speech that quickly went viral, South Carolina's Rep. Jenny Horne, a lineal descendant of Jefferson Davis, helped to break a deadlock (68 amendments to the bill!) and get the Confederate battle flag removed from the statehouse grounds. "I have heard enough about heritage," she said through tears.

The claim has long been that celebrating the Confederate battle flag isn't about racism, it's about Southern pride, Southern heritage. Lots of folks in the South, who aren't racist at all, fully subscribe to this heritage theory. There is, for instance, an organization called Southern Heritage 411 that was formed by H.K. Edgerton, "a black Confederate activist who works tirelessly to bring the real truth of our heritage to people of all races," according to their website. But it's interesting to note that in the About section of the site, presumably written by Mr. Edgerton or at least written pursuant to his direction, the first thing discussed is the "War for Southern Independence," asserting that "The ancestors of most blacks living in the United States today supported the Confederacy and have a right to be proud of their ancestor's [sic] service to the South. The Confederate Battle Flag is their flag also." It makes me wonder: is the seemingly-generic phrase "Southern Heritage" only about the Confederacy and the War? Isn't there a lot more to the South than that? What about the near-century of Southern history before the war, or the century-plus since then?

NFL player Doug Baldwin, a self-described Southerner who was raised in Florida, asked the same question: "The only relevant 'heritage' I could find in history not pertaining to civil war was associated with racism and segregation. Is this the heritage and pride you speak of? ... Is it the sweet tea and hospitality? Or is this a sense of pride for the rebellious actions against a national government who had the audacity to say that secession was unconstitutional and slavery was wrong?"

If "Southern Heritage" is about the war, and the Confederate cause, then the cause was rooted in slavery. Ta-Nehisi Coates laid out the damning evidence in an Atlantic article, citing directly from the seceding states' Articles of Secession. The whole chilling piece is worth reading in its entirety, but for now, suffice it to say that this one, from Mississippi, is typical:

Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery—the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin…

This position was corroborated by the Vice President of the Confederacy, Alexander Stephens (who happened to be a lifelong friend and ally of Robert Augustus Toombs), who said in his infamous Cornerstone Speech on March 12, 1861, "Our new Government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition."

There's our heritage right there, in the words of "Little Alec," my ancestor's best friend.

Where Should the Flag Fly, Then?

The historical significance of the battle flag, and all the flags of the Confederacy, is obvious and not to be denied. It certainly belongs in museums, no question. But what about at Fort Sumter?

It's a historical site that is definitely also a museum, but it's also federal parkland, as are many Civil War battlefields. And what about another symbol of the Confederacy, the enormous bas relief carved into the side of Stone Mountain near Atlanta? I spent some summers up there when I was a boy and knew it well--learned to ride horses in a camp nearby. Should that, as some have suggested, be sand-blasted from the stone of Stone Mountain? Or what about the exhumed body of General Forrest? Is it being removed because of political correctness gone mad? Or is it, as suggested by one city councilor, really linked to a $500 million expansion of the University of Tennessee that wanted the land?

I say, let the dead rest in peace. Let their works speak for themselves. The sculpture that gallops across the mountainside should stand for the same reason we shouldn't allow shopping malls at Gettysburg. It is our real heritage, with all the horror that represents, and we're better off having it looming above our heads than sandblasted from existence.

I can remember sitting on a horse, maybe seven years old, and looking out at Stone Mountain, asking, "Who are those guys?" And when someone explained who they were, my next thought was "Well that's a funny place to put 'em."

But those questions are valuable, and they helped lead me down a road where I learned exactly who those men were, and why they had been given such an enormous memorial. Better to have those reminders, and to ask those questions, than to never know anything about it and to think that Southern heritage is only about "sweet tea and hospitality."

And since free speech is still paramount, if any individual wants to fly the Confederate flag on their property, fine. If they want to wear it on a t-shirt, fine. If they want to paint it on top of their car and do donuts in the parking lot while practicing their rebel yell, that's fine too.  It's in incredibly bad taste, but they've got every right to do it. (Oh, if only I could ban bad taste!) I'm talking strictly about institutional displays: the flag flying on the grounds of the South Carolina state capitol, the incorporation of the symbol in the state flags of Mississippi and Alabama, and so forth.  Those should go.  All of them.

You may well ask, what about places that bear the name Toombs?  Would I sing a different tune if they wanted to rename Toombs County?

That's fine with me. Here's my blessing. The county was so named in 1905 and that century-plus of homage is plenty of memorial to a man whom I honor and respect, but who was deeply and completely wrong on the central issue of his time.

"I'm Glad We Lost the War"

It's an interesting challenge having a family heritage on the losing side of a major conflict. I can remember a kid in junior high coming up and saying "Are you related to that Robert Toombs guy? We read about him in class. Our teacher said he was insane!" And there are rather a lot of African-Americans whose last name is Toombs, almost certainly because my family once owned their family. I almost ran into one when he auditioned at a theatre in Chicago where I was an artist-in-residence. Which is why I've always felt a certain special responsibility on questions of race. My family is as guilty as anyone's of the atrocities of the slave trade. I obviously never owned a slave, but I feel a certain amount of that weight anyway. If I'm going to do genealogical research and take pride in the accomplishments of various ancestors, well, then I've got to grapple fully, and honestly, with the less savory parts of that heritage as well. (I'm looking at you, Ben Affleck.)

In an interview that appeared in Slate on July 14th, Ta-Nehisi Coates said, "We [Americans] have no humility. We believe we are exceptional. That’s fine. But if that is the standard, then I have the right to hold you to that standard."

That seems completely fair to me. If America is the exceptional nation that so many people proclaim it to be, then we must do exceptional things. We must be exceptionally rigorous in our examination of our own history, and exceptionally fair about what that history means. And sometimes, in unexpected moments, I find traces of exactly that.

A fine Louisiana gentleman I know read Solomon Northup's Twelve Years a Slave, most of which took place right there in Louisiana near where he lives. He read it with his eyes open, and it stuck with him. So when he heard that I'd never read it he recommended it to me, and, leaning close, he then said to me, quietly, "Robert, after reading that, I'm glad we lost the war."

Me too. Thank God we lost. Maybe my family might have prospered more, as leaders of a victorious campaign, but I don't care. Thank God we lost.

Because the Confederate battle flag represents a bloody, horrifying attempt to make sure that slavery would continue far, far into the future. And when you read about what slavery was really like, when you struggle through a book like Twelve Years a Slave, when you really look at it with your eyes open, it seems unimaginable that anyone ever thought slavery was a good idea, let alone that they would risk their lives to protect it.

It's time to take down the flag and set it under glass in a museum.  Time to put the grey coats on mannequins and leave them there.  Time to let Robert Augustus Toombs rest in his grave, and stop trying to speak for him because he really is my heritage and I'm saying that the man was wrong and we all need to let it go.

To an Absent Friend (Batman Has Fallen)

That first year of high school, back when dinosaurs roamed the converted swampland of South Miami, I arrived at school with the glorious awareness that I was Special. That I was an actor of the highest caliber and that soon all would see the greatness that was Me.

Trouble was, there was this other guy who seemed like he might just be able to give me some competition. His name was David Hernandez, and where I was tall and fair and authoritarian, he was smaller and darker and earthier. Which meant, of course, that we weren't competitors at all, rather we were natural and perfect complements who should be working together all the time. But I was far too dim to see that immediately, and so I was cautious.

Humility began to set in. The seniors refused to recognize my obvious superiority. And soon enough, there I was at the audition for the big annual musical. Suddenly I became very aware that as a singer, I was, well, not so good. (Sure enough: after my vocal audition, the musical director basically said "Please don't ever do that in front of me again.") So I sat there on the floor, feeling decidedly uncertain, with that annoying David guy sitting a little over thataway, chatting away with some girl and looking very relaxed and comfortable. (He wasn't. Singing was not his best strength either, I later learned.)

To this day, I don't quite know why I did what I did next. Maybe some small screaming part of me recognized that the best way to deal with an enemy is to make him your friend. Who knows. But abruptly I stood up, walked over to David, stuck out my hand and said, in a bright chipper voice, "Hi! I'm anti-social!"

He looked up at me, at my out-thrust hand. He blinked a couple of times. Then he started to roar with laughter. We were friends from that moment. Turns out, if you want to make an impression on someone like David, "that weird impulse you usually ignore" is exactly the right way to go.

We soon learned that we were a perfect pairing, and we worked together all the time. We did plays together, scenework in class together, we did the televised morning announcements together, we traveled together across the state to drama competitions, and of course we started hanging out together. He drew me out of my impossibly stuffy self-seriousness and made me looser, more fun (if only there were pictures of the outfit he stuffed me into when he finally convinced me to go see Rocky Horror...). I think I gave him a little stability, a sense of certainty and direction and purpose, that kept him from flying off after every little impulse that assailed him. (There were many impulses. So, so many of them.)

Most important of all, from my perspective: after a series of "friends" who had betrayed me in one way or another, David was constant. Unwavering. Endlessly loyal. He was the first friend who stayed, who I could count on. Who I could trust. Trust meant a lot back then, and of course it does now.

Eventually, of course, things happened. Graduation. I went to school out of state, David stayed behind. Time and distance worked their malicious fingers into our friendship. David had issues with certain substances, and because I didn't know how to help, it became easier to just let him slip away. We drifted, as people do.

A few years ago, during the first flowering of that great eternal high school reunion that is called Facebook, someone told me that David had died.

The intel was wrong--someone from our school named David Fernandez, F not H, had in fact died several years earlier.  But during the few days before I could get that cleared up, I found myself feeling guilty and upset.  I had not done enough to help my friend, and now he might be gone.  So I started doing some research, and a friend helped.  We tracked David down, and found a phone number, and with considerable nervousness I left a message.

Soon thereafter, a return call.  That distinctive baritone, bellowing "Bob Tooooooombs!  How you doin', man!"  Time and drift vanished in the face of his mighty enthusiasm.  We were friends again.

I dragged him onto Facebook.  We shared pictures and stories, and he found other old friends too.  When I went home for a visit, I cleared out an afternoon and went to see him.  Took him to lunch, talked about the things I'd done and he'd done, and we made lovely, unspecific plans about things we might do together some day.  (A revival of Albee's The Zoo Story came up the most often.)  He and his apartment smelled strongly of cigarette smoke.  My grandmother's place had smelled like that, and she had died of cancer.  It made me nervous.

In April, he announced on Facebook that he was going to get a biopsy and he was worried about the results.  The news, when it came, was pretty damn bad: lung cancer in several places, including an inoperable tumor behind his sternum.  He would need both radiation and chemo; and he would probably need chemo for the rest of his life.  He checked into the hospital and I called on a Saturday afternoon.

"Bob Tooooooombs!" he said with the same enthusiasm, but his voice had changed.  Ragged and raspy, and there was a tiredness that seemed to have moved in full-time.  But he was adamant about beating the cancer.  "I'm Batman," he said.  "I'm gonna kick cancer's ass!"

His sister Deanna, from whom he had once been estranged, became his rock throughout his illness, and he was incredibly moved by her devotion to him.  Old friends, too, started showing up at the hospital or calling, and he was just as moved by every bit of attention that came his way.  I think he was a little surprised that people cared about him so much.  They usually arrived with Batman gifts, and I'm sure his hospital room must have been stuffed with Bat-paraphernalia.  Someone set up a GoFundMe account to help with his medical expenses, because he probably wouldn't be able to work again for a long time, if ever.

One day I checked with Deanna whether I might call again, but she said he wasn't feeling great that day and maybe I should wait a little.  This worried me, so I started looking at flights back east.  Maybe the weekend of May 16th would work.

David died on May 9th, overwhelmed by illness and treatment.  Batman had fallen.

He was one of those irreplaceable people.  If we're lucky, we get one or two of those in a lifetime.  I'm tempted, incredibly tempted, to fill about a dozen more paragraphs with stories about David--probably anyone who ever met him could tell just as many stories, because he was one of those guys to whom things happened.  The phrase "Never a dull moment" was invented, I'm sure, to describe a life with David Hernandez in it.  But I think that for now, it's enough to say this:

David was my first true friend.  He meant so much to me, and I miss him immeasurably.

Goodbye, old companion.  Hope to see you again someday.  And then we will have merry adventures indeed.

A Random Thought About the Second Amendment--No, Two Thoughts--Three!

First thought: the argument over guns has become so fraught and emotional that it has moved entirely out of the realm of rational argument for many people.  Alex Jones's infamous tirade on Piers Morgan's program is just one example.  As I watched it, a thought occurred: guns, for this man and many of his like-minded followers, have become a fetish, in most if not all of the categories listed by Merriam-Webster in its definition:

1.a : an object (as a small stone carving of an animal) believed to have magical power to protect or aid its owner; broadly: a material object regarded with superstitious or extravagant trust or reverenceb : an object of irrational reverence or obsessive devotion...c : an object or bodily part whose real or fantasied presence is psychologically necessary for sexual gratification and that is an object of fixation to the extent that it may interfere with complete sexual expression2: a rite or cult of fetish worshipers

(Including c, above, may be the biggest stretch, but somehow I don't think so.)

And the problem with the fetishization of guns, the so-called gun culture, is that it pushes people into modes of thinking that are of the "from my cold dead hands!" sort.  The successful Australian gun-control effort strongly suggests that a similar effort here could save a lot of lives (a lot of lives).  But given that the rhetoric of the gun culture sounds frighteningly similar to what was heard from slave owners in the run-up to the Civil War (guns, like slaves, being abstracted into a "defense of lifestyle" mindset), I'm afraid that any attempt to repeat the Australian experiment here would end up with massive casualties.

Second thought: a huge part of the argument over the Second Amendment, whether people realize it or not, has to do with commas, and where they are placed.  This New York Times article from 2007 sums it up nicely.  In short, it is this: the version of the Bill of Rights in the National Archives reads as follows, with three commas:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

But the one in the Library of Congress, which was supposedly directly supervised and approved by Thomas Jefferson, has only one comma (and fewer capitalized letters):

A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

The fun part is that the states ratified different versions, with greater or fewer commas; and if comma placement affects meaning, does that indicate that the states never actually ratified the same amendment?  If that were ever determined to be true, the entire amendment would be null and void.

To everyone's great relief I will avoid a close dissection of the grammatical implications of differing comma placements.  Suffice it to say--from where I stand, yeah, actually, the extra commas do make a substantial difference.

(Wait, can't help myself!  The short version: the phrase "the right of the people to bear arms," when set off by the extra commas, becomes a subordinate clause to the phrase "being necessary to the security of a free State," thus aligning the rights of the people with the notion of a free state; without the extra commas, it is merely an extension of "A well regulated militia...")

Third thought: what about those three words, "well regulated militia"?  At first glance, it would seem to upend the gun-control argument altogether.  The screamers--the people shrieking about any limitation on the Second Amendment being an unconstitutional infringement of their liberty--would seem to be ignoring the fact that the notion of regulation is right there in the language of the amendment.  That was certainly my first reaction when I looked at it.  But there is a somewhat archaic definition of "regulated" that seems to have been what the framers intended, namely that a well-regulated militia was one that was well-trained and highly-skilled.  (There's a nice summary here.)  What we think of as regulation now, like environmental or financial regulations, is not what was intended then.

Damn!

But that brings us back to the whole argument over how we interpret militias.  If the framers intended militias to mean military or paramilitary operations that are well-trained and highly-skilled (the National Guard, basically), doesn't that argue against the idea of something like the Minutemen, ad hoc citizens' brigades defending their homes on an impromptu basis against--almost certainly--exactly the sort of professional, government-sponsored militia that is contemplated by the amendment?

Thoughtful responses are welcomed.  Shouting will be vigorously ignored.

The Guilt of "Innocence of Muslims"

As a rule, I stand firm against every variation of "He went on a killing spree because he played Grand Theft Auto all the time."  Works of art, be they movies, books, video games, songs or whatever, do not make anyone do anything.  James Holmes dying his hair to look like the Joker doesn't make the Batman films responsible for the massacre in Colorado, any more than The Beatles are responsible for the Sharon Tate murders, no matter what Charles Manson says about "Helter Skelter."

And yet, with that said, artists are not absolved of responsibility.  If we create art in the hope of effecting a positive change in the world, then we must also be aware of the possibility of effecting a negative change.  Yes, freedom of speech still has to be absolute--we have to protect Salman Rushdie and we have to protect the Nazis marching in Skokie--but that freedom can still be abused, a line crossed, with horrific consequences.  Particularly when art is not art, is never intended as art, but is instead propaganda, with a decidedly political purpose and the clear intention of inciting disruption.

Angry demonstrations continue across the Muslim world in reaction to an appallingly awful so-called "movie trailer" for a "film" called Innocence of Muslims.  (No, I will not link to it.)  No one knows whether a full movie was ever actually made, or whether the trailer (actually two trailers, but I only looked at one) is all there is.  My guess is the movie is non-existent, because the "filmmaker" didn't need to make a movie in order to accomplish his idiotic purpose: to enflame Muslims.  Here, courtesy of Neil Gaiman (an unexected source),  is a compelling first-hand account from one of the actors in this appalling piece of propaganda, Anna Gurji, detailing how she and everyone else involved were completely duped by the producer:

The movie that we were doing in Duarte was called “Desert Warrior” and it was a fictional adventure drama. The character GEORGE was a leader of one of those tribes fighting for the comet.

There was no mention EVER by anyone of MUHAMMAD and no mention of religion during the entire time I was on the set. I am hundred percent certain nobody in the cast and nobody in the US artistic side of the crew knew what was really planned for this “Desert Warrior”.

The atmosphere at the set was as friendly as possible. We all knew that we were doing an adventure drama for a very low budget financing. The director Alan Roberts even had plans that with this low budget product he would be able to get some more money to make a good quality version (by shooting it in the real desert and having better product in every category) of the “Desert Warrior”.

I had interactions with the man known as Sam Bassil on the set. He was very amiable, respectful, soft-spoken, always making sure that the filming was running smoothly and everyone was satisfied. He even told me the premiere of the movie was going to happen sometime soon and I would get a good amount of tickets to invite my friends and family.

But it is completely apparent from the trailer that the lines the actors spoke were (badly) overdubbed with other lines, in which this George character was transformed into a grotesque caricature of Mohammed.  It's not even subtle: the crappy overdubbing is obvious from first moment to last.  It's like Woody Allen's infamous What's Up, Tiger Lily?, except that instead of doing it for comedy, the producer (notice how I refuse to use the man's name--not to protect him but because I will not dignify his name by repeating it) did it in order to make Muslims angry.  As The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw speculates, the trailer "was almost certainly timed for the American election, in this case to incite Muslim communities and then provoke macho responses from the presidential candidates."

The reaction, of course, got out of hand.  Anyone with even a vague memory of the 2006 riots over Danish cartoons depicting Mohammed could have predicted that.  The difference is that the cartoons were published with a serious public purpose and then were distorted by two Danish imams who decided to stir up trouble (and who also goosed the issue by including trumped-up images and cartoons that had nothing to do with the Danish newspaper).  In this case, yes, there are clearly people in the Muslim world who have seized upon Innocence of Muslims to further their own political ends; but the film itself has no serious purpose, it is propaganda whose sole reason for being is to incite anger.  (I quite like The Guardian's description of it as "a bigoted piece of poison.")  The people exploiting it didn't have to goose anything because it was pre-goosed.  The producer, a Coptic Christian from Egypt with a major grudge against Islam, apparently wanted to strike a blow against Muslim fundamentalism; instead he might as well have collaborated with the terrorists, because it would have been tough to create a more effective recruiting tool for jihadists worldwide.

The producer, in short, is an imbecile of the worst sort: an imbecile who thinks he's clever.

And now, having lit a match, he cries and moans and begs for rescue because he set his house on fire.  The appalling thing is that, in order to be a truly free society, we actually have to protect him.  And to defend the piece of crap he made.

As Noam Chomsky once wrote, "If you're in favor of freedom of speech, that means you're in favor of freedom of speech precisely for views you despise."  I recognize that, I support that, I defend that.  But man does it hurt in cases like this.  As one who toils in the vineyards of the arts, I find myself incredibly riled up by this exercise in non-art.  By lying to his cast and crew about what they were making, the producer has completely perverted the purpose of art, and it makes me want to find the man and strangle him.  I won't, and I support all efforts to protect him and his family, but good lord how I despise this miserable excuse for humanity.

A Wasted Vote?

But first, a brief tale of an election well past.  In 1980, before I was old enough to vote, my mother went down to the polling place on her own and came back with this tale.  Her choice was independent candidate John Anderson, a 20-year veteran of the House of Representatives from Illinois.  While standing in line, the people around her asked the usual "Who are you voting for?" question.  When she gave her answer, several people said "Oh yeah, I like him."

"So you're going to vote for him?"

"Oh my, no."

"Why not?"

"Because he's not going to win."

Because apparently, voting has nothing to do with making a crucial choice for your country, it has to do with being on The Winning Side.  But when the nation is evenly split down the middle and a clear Winning Side isn't immediately apparent, then what?

Twelve years ago, I voted for Ralph Nader rather than Al Gore.  (There will now be a short pause while I duck the vegetables thrown by various Democrats.)

Everyone--and I do mean everyone, including close friends whose opinions I highly respect--tell me that not only did I waste a vote, but I helped contribute to the utter hideousness of the 2000 election debacle.  I remind those people that I was living in Illinois at the time, a state that was considered safe for Al Gore, and that I was trying to accomplish two things...

First, I wanted to say to the Democrats, my usual party of choice, that they were being particularly namby-pamby that year.  They were rattled by Bill Clinton's sex scandal and impeachment, and Al Gore seemed to be so determined to appear unClintonesque that he wasn't really anything, including himself.  (I remember going to a campaign rally in Daley Plaza in 1992, with the Clintons and the Gores, and it was Al Gore who gave the best speech that day.  He had it in him to be great, he always did; but when the time came, he got cautious. Fatally cautious, I would say.)  As a lifelong Democrat, I wanted to say to the party that my vote was not guaranteed, and that if they didn't earn it they weren't gonna get it.  But also...

Second.  There's no question that we are not well-served by this endless bouncing between two parties, both of which are owned by corporate interests.  (Look, it's my blog.  You're going to have accept as true my strong assertion that we are living in an oligarchy, otherwise this thing will go on for forever.)  So I wanted to support a credible third party, the Greens were pretty well aligned with the things I wished the Democrats were talking about, and if they could reach at least 5% nationally, they would not only qualify for federal funding in the next election cycle but they would go a long way toward proving their viability as a party/movement.

So I voted Nader.  Gore won Illinois as expected, Nader failed to reach 5% for the Greens, and Florida happened.  But I continue to maintain that if Gore had just been more Gore-like, had taken a stronger stand on, well, anydamnthing, he would have won.  It wasn't Nader's fault, it was Gore's.

Now, a brief detour.  For several years, during each presidential election cycle I have sought out various newspaper/magazine lists of the candidates' stands on various issues and put together a little scorecard for each candidate.  It was laborious and imperfect, and I could really only do it for the two major guys of each party.

But three cheers for the internet--now there's isidewith.com, which automates that process and includes all the candidates.  You answer a short series of questions (make sure to check out the alternative positions offered for each question) and it gives you a handy little summary of who you side with, in order from most to least.  I've taken the test twice, and the first time got a surprising score of 94% for Barack Obama.  (Surprising because I'm one of those who have been disappointed with him, and I did not expect that number to be so high.)  But I just took it again, being a little extra-thorough in my answers, and got a different result that was perhaps even more surprising...

The Green Party candidate again.  She just barely ekes out Obama in my results, but my worries about two-party oligarchy have only grown (massively) since the 2000 election.  Plus, here's one of those moments when I have to decide whether or not I'm a hypocrite.  Did I take this test in order to justify making the easy, popular choice?  Did I just want to be on The Winning Side?  (Well, maybe....)  Or did I take the test for a reason, and was I willing to run with the results?

I haven't quite decided.  But I will note this--I live in California now, which is a pretty safe state for Obama.  In whom I have been disappointed.  It's feeling a little like 2000 again, hopefully in a good way and not in a Supreme Court intervention sorta way.  Hmmmm.

But just imagine this for a moment: if every voter in America could reliably determine which candidate they really identify with the most strongly; and if every voter then actually voted that way.  Then we might, emphasis on the word "might," end up with something like a democracy again.

Before I go, here's a link to Dr. Stein's website, and here's one to an excellent Bill Moyers interview with the Green candidates from just the other night.

A Thought or Two About #occupywallstreet

As the Occupy Wall Street folks in Zuccotti Park move into winter, circumstances are about to force a big decision on them--whether to tough it out through a long miserable New York winter, or find a reason to disband, which would almost certainly spark a similar disbanding at many if not all of the other Occupy sites.  So as the movement reaches this pivotal moment, it's worth asking what they've accomplished, if anything.

I hear two principal complaints about the protestors (aside from the boringly obvious "hippies having sex in the park" blather): first, that the OWS people have too many demands, or incoherent demands; and second, that all they're doing is complaining, they're not doing anything to present possible solutions.  So let's deal with the question of incoherence.

OWS is a deliberately-disorganized mass protest that began in New York and then spawned spinoffs across the globe.  Their essential message has always been crystal clear: they were there to occupy Wall Street because the actions of Wall Street have done so much, globally, to wreck the world economy, drive millions of people out of work, leave unknown thousands of people homeless, etc.  Wall Street greed, which is intended to represent absurd levels of income inequality, is a cancer on the body politic, and a lot of people aren't prepared to just sit idly by and be victimized anymore.  (Insert the obvious quote from Network here.)  Without even paying much attention to OWS when it first started, I understood all of this perfectly well.

But of course it's a mass movement, deliberately without spokespeople, and as any mass movement becomes truly massive, the bandwagon effect happens and people start to show up with a boatload of crazy-time.  And because there are no spokespeople, any random nitwit in the crowd is seen as just as valid as anyone else.  So while there have in fact been plenty of coherent statements made about OWS's goals, there have also been just as many interviews with chowderheads who have no business discussing a recipe for chowder, let alone a global movement about income inequality.  And every time a moron is handed a microphone, political opponents gleefully point fingers and start shouting about the incoherence of the movement itself.  (The same is true of the various Tea Party gatherings, of course.  They have their fair share of nitwits and chowderheads as well, and certainly their opponents have done their fair share of finger-pointing and shouting.)

Let's be clear, then.  Here is a moron.

Here is a non-moron.  There's a difference.

Much more interesting, though, is the criticism that OWS doesn't offer any solutions.  And I find it interesting because it ties in with Story Theory, something I happen to be rather fond of.  What I'm talking about boils down to this: there's an idea in the arts that a story doesn't have to solve a problem, it's enough to point out that a problem exists.  What an audience takes away from the story, once the problem has been presented to them, is their own business.  And the reason why this is important is because an issue can be talked about generally, but it has to be solved specifically--and each audience member has to find their own solution, something that works in their lives and takes into account their individual circumstances. I'll use one of my favorite examples: Dead Man Walking.  There's a movie that works very hard to present every side of the death-penalty issue, and in the end, the only "solution" is that the criminal is put to death.  But what that means in the world at large is left open.  "Think about this," the filmmakers are saying, "then make up your own mind."

The same argument can be made for Occupy Wall Street.  I can't say whether it's deliberate or not, but they've ended up crafting an open, enigmatic storyline in which a problem is cleary presented but solutions are not offered.  (Actually, some are--the reinstatement of Glass-Steagal has been advocated for from the beginning, and I think it's a very good idea.)  And the more the general public argues about what OWS stands for, the more we wonder what solutions OWS would like us to make, the closer we come to devising our own solutions--ones that will probably turn out to be far more creative and coherent than anything that could come from a bunch of cold, numb-fingered people shivering in a New York park.

21st Century Communion

A friend from college, V Kingsley, died on April 1st after a six-year, horrific and awe-inspiring battle against cancer.  Most people would have succumbed long before, but V was never one to go gentle into that good night, which will come as no surprise to anyone who met her for even five minutes.  The memorial service was yesterday up in Santa Cruz, and I couldn't attend--but the service was streamed live over the web, so I was able to participate in a little bit of the experience.  A few words about that in a minute--but first, a quick story about V.

We never particularly hung out--but as a frequent Tech Director on shows I was acting in, we worked together often.  And I quickly learned a respect for her that made her more memorable than a lot of the people I did hang out with.  We had a Sociology class together, and it should have been a great class because it's a great subject--but the teacher was bad.  Really remarkably bad.  Never taught anything that wasn't in the book, and his lectures always always always expounded on the obvious with a slowness so extreme it bordered on the surreal.  "Max Weber's... conflict theory... stated... that people... are... in... conflict."  (Truly, you cannot imagine how long it would take him to get those words out.)  It was so bad that the rest of us quietly gathered into groups of four so that only one at a time would have to actually attend the class and take notes.  And when we were there, we just sat and felt our brains dying.  But V, she was different.  She would stand up and say to this bad, bad teacher, "What the hell are you talking about?"

Which would invariably leave him confused--and me immensely grateful.  (His usual response, when thus challenged, was to repeat exactly what he had just said.  Slower.)  V eventually transferred out of the class to something that wouldn't waste her time, which was a very great sadness because now it was just us sheep and that very bad shepherd.

Graduation happened, we all went our various ways, and I never saw V again.  But with Facebook, I was able to reconnect with her a little, to say nice things to her that I'm now very glad I said.  She responded with typical warmth and grace.  I read a few of the entries in her excellent blog and my mind reeled.  Blindness.  Pain beyond imagining.  But she kept soldiering on through it all, with her sense of humor intact.  And then on April 1st she finally succumbed, leaving behind her partner Dani and her son Parker and a huge number of devoted friends and family.

The service, as I mentioned, was streamed live.  There were severe technical problems, but let me just say up front that even a poor experience beats the heck out of no experience at all.  I'm glad I was able to kinda sorta be there as people said goodbye to V.  But the online experience also led to some thinking about what community is becoming in These Times of Ours, and there are few things more likely to make me start setting words down.

The church (unitarian universalist, the most enlightened of the Christian churches) had set up a single camera hanging from the ceiling.  It was locked down, never moving, never zooming, the image was static and distant and distinctly low-res, particularly after being compressed for live streaming.  The sound was just as distant, with echo and reflection and distortion that made it very hard to hear anything that was being said--while the songs were almost robbed of anything resembling musicality.  I had the stream on for about an hour, and soon realized that the fact that I was up and making a sandwich during the service really didn't say much for the quality of the internet stream.

But was it purely a technical problem?  If the tech had been as good as it was for, say, the recent royal wedding, with high-def closeups and multiple expensive microphones capturing every nuance of sound, while commentators babbled on in the background with context and opinions, then maybe I'd have felt a greater sense of communion with the others assembled for the service.  But is there an essential limitation inherent in the nature of the service itself?  In other words: is it really possible to have a shared, communal experience without actually being there?

Bear in mind that without Facebook I'd have never been able to reconnect with V in the first place, so clearly the social media have their place.  But a memorial is a very particular kind of experience.  From my grandmother's service, I still have a vivid memory of when the bells began to peal, summoning people to a place where such services had been held since, in that case, the 11th century.  As soon as the sound of those bells began, I suddenly felt the presence of everyone who had gone before in that place: the people who had been baptised there, the people who had married there, the people memorialized, the people who rested in the cemetery just outside.  There is an argument to be made, even by those of us who aren't particularly religious, for the notion of a patch of land made sacred by its use for exactly these sorts of ceremonies over time--and obviously none of that can be transmitted over the internet.

And while there were certainly moments in V's service that resonated--such as her former partner talking about how she had not been strong enough to continue supporting V throughout her long illness, even though she never stopped loving her--there was never anything that could compare with the impact of sitting in a room together as lives intersected and resonated.  In a different (but comparable) direction, I remember going to see the movie Dead Man Walking, and at the moment when Sean Penn's character is revealed strapped to the execution table, someone in the audience, for just a moment before she choked it off, let out a single anguished sob.  Perhaps she had a loved one who had been executed; perhaps she had a loved one who had been murdered; I can never know.  But the story in the movie had just set off bells in her and for a moment, she could not help but resonate with them.  If I'd watched the movie at home, the movie would still have had power, but not that kind of power.

Communion--here in its broadest definition as "an act or instance of sharing" or, even better, "intimate fellowship or rapport"--requires community.  I am, as I said before, glad to have been able to share the experience at all, but technology is still no substitute for a gathering of souls in a place sanctified by prior gatherings of souls, be it a church or even a movie theater or a baseball field.  I have a long and somewhat odd history of writing and delivering very well-received eulogies at such services, but there was a moment yesterday when the experience of watching other people's eulogies over the internet came to feel so unnatural that I (momentarily) resolved to never deliver another one in my life--but the fault there was not with the thing itself, but with the manner in which it was received.  The next time I seek a gathering of souls, I shall deliver my own soul unto the appropriate place at the appropriate time, and be with everyone else.

It looks like it was a great service.  I wish I could've been there.