Racism or erase-ism? The dilemma of Sunflower

It's been said about certain particularly pompous types of music (Wagner comes to mind) that "maybe it's better than it sounds." This statement puts me in mind of Disney's Fantasia.

Maybe it's worse than it seems. 

Disney was a farm boy at heart, and Fantasia was a country bumpkin's idea of high culture, a massive and lumbering delivery device for "good" music. Meaning, classical music, which you really should be exposing your children to, for their own good. Disney's choices were conservative:  Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony, Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker Suite, the Sorceror's Apprentice, Dance of the Hours, all things that leant themselves to the typical sentimental, florid Disney animation. And to throw in something really daring, Disney included a bit of Stravinsky to accompany T-rexes and stegosauri duking it out in a steamy primordial jungle.

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But that's not what we're talking about here.

We're talking about someone else.

We're talking about Sunflower.

There was a lot more to Fantasia than Mickey stemming the flood in The Sorcerer's Apprentice (the best-animated piece in the whole thing), dancing mushrooms, and alligators chasing after ostriches. There was this person. This - little horse, rather, and her name was Sunflower, featured briefly in the Pastoral Symphony's slow movement. 

We see a group  of pastel-colored horsettes, or should I say centaurettes, primping to meet their beefy centaur boyfriends. But they're not doing all the primping by themselves. To help them braid their manes and blow-dry their tails, they have. . . Sunflower.

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But, cute as she is, she's now a problem. Sunflower is clearly a servant, a little black girl trotting around obediently after all the glam horsettes. She's much smaller than the others, wears large gold hoop earrings, has stereotypical African features, and has her hair tied up in rags. In short, she's what people thought of in those days when you thought of a servant. Is she smaller because she's younger, a different kind of centaur, or what? It may have been a familiar visual device to convey relative status. This helped the audience orientate themselves, made it easier on them due to recognition of something they knew in the "real world".

She's something of a shock today, like seeing the godawful Steppin' Fetchit characters of the 1930s. By some Disney magic she was cut out of all prints of Fantasia when it was reissued for home video in the 1960s. Just - dropped, without an explanation, without a trace. This took some fancy dancing on the part of the animators, who had to try to keep the animation moving in synch with the music while the shears were applied. They used awkward closeups that left her out of the frame. The epitome of being marginalized! In one case, a red carpet eerily unrolled all by itself, because Sunflower was no longer there to unroll it.

Removing Sunflower was considered to be a "solution". She had been solved -or dissolved - by being erased, un-drawn, un-created. Undone. 

It was as if she had never existed at all. It seems, to me, a curious solution to a racist portrait, but that's what they did. Thus, they never had to take any responsibility for what they had already done. This was Papa Disney, after all, and he was clearly above all that.

If they hadn't erased Sunflower, there would no doubt have been an outcry. I understand the outcry, yes. But it confuses me. The whole thing does. If she had been a real live human being, it would have been more complicated - but maybe not by much. It was as if Sunflower were the shit-disturber, the joker in an otherwise conservative deck. So the trap door had to open. There was no other way.

Or - ?

Max Fleischer found another way, or at least his studio did, when it came time to release a DVD set of the complete Popeye cartoons (which I, of course, have). At the beginning of each DVD is a disclaimer stating that some of the cartoons feature characters and images which might be considered racist and offensive, but that these reflect the attitudes and prejudices of their time. And to censor or remove these images would be to pretend those attitudes never existed at all.

Brilliant.

But soft! What's this? A little later on in the Pastoral Symphony, we have the fat drunk guy on the donkey, Dionysus or whoever-the-hell-he-is. He's a silly character, rolling around, and meant to be. But who's that on either side of him? Look fast, because they are there for exactly ten seconds.

These are black servants, half-zebra instead of half-horse. They are quite glamorous, much taller than Dionysus - in fact, they tower over him - and their job is to fan him and keep his wine glass topped up. No matter how different they look from Sunflower, they are still servants, and they are black.

And they've been allowed to stay.

I've always found that weird. Is it the fact they're more adult, more exotic, taller, and less the little plantation girl than Sunflower? Are zebras more acceptable (half-white, after all) than horses or ponies? Is it the fact they're waiting on a man, instead of a bunch of pony-girls? I can't quite understand the thinking here. Or was it just too hard to animate them out or turn them into camels or something?

What's even stranger though is that Sunflower has a sunflower in her hair in some shots, and not in others - and this is in the same scene! It comes and goes, comes and goes at the whim of the animators. Did they know she was going to be cut out? No, she was there when the movie opened to great fanfare in 1940. (It was a flop. The public found such forced musical edification pompous and boring.) Nobody noticed it, I'd imagine, or thought much of the fact that there was a cute little Negro girl waiting on the ladies. It wouldn't have raised an eyebrow. It doesn't now, either, because it can't!  Sunflower has left the building.

Only this time, she's gone for good.

Racist thugs: can we still be friends?

The article I have reproduced below came out over a year ago, but I notice the Globe and Mail has let it stand. And that shocks me almost as much as the content, which sickens me even more than it did back then.

It was in the form of a question-and-answer, the answer coming from some sort of tin-plated "expert" on something-or-other. The person asking for help had just poured out her soul in a cri du coeur about her literal survival and the safety of her children. The response from this weird Globe and Mail-style political Dear Abby was a bland little chuckle and a few light-hearted, conveniently stress-minimizing bon mots.

I guess by now you've figured out that this was about Trump. I was astonished and appalled at how mealy-mouthed the piece was, how blandly Canadian in the very worst, don't-get-anyone-upset way. Oh yes, I know this disturbs you a little, as it does me! Certainly. But don't, he advises, ever let the people who put this racist, sexist Tyrannosaurus in charge of the free world get you upset. And for God's sake, don't let it break up your friendship! Your friendship matters much more than all this silly political stuff. Use your healthy disagreement as an opportunity for lively debate over a bottle of chardonnay, while wittily quoting Oscar Wilde.

Oh, yes. Racist pigs are always welcome on my friendship list.

This article and its bland reassurance came out before the worst of Trump's henchmen/women oozed slimily out of the woodwork and took over - not just the country, but people's brains. But the anxious person who wrote to this supposed advice columnist could already see it coming. AND SO COULD HE. But he dodged it, hid behind the post, was "nice", and just wanted everyone to get along, no matter what the price. Writing for a Canadian audience, he was Canadian-nice in a way which I think might finish us yet. It's the one thing about my country which I positively hate.

It made me sick then, and it makes me sick now. NO, you cannot separate someone's politics from the rest of them and just "be friends anyway". It's like those "very fine people on both sides" that Trump blathered about. You cannot, unless you completely lack principles yourself. To quote Katie in The Way We Were: "Hubbel, people ARE their principles." This caused Hubbel to groan and shake his head and go punch the wall.

Roseanne Barr has shown her true colors just lately, revealing what a racist thug she truly is, and could I be friends with her? You think? Not even if I did like her as a person and/or find her wildly entertaining, which I do not. I find this "love the sinner and hate the sin" type of thinking to be the most dangerous I have ever seen. Racism, bigotry and thug-like behaviour should never be "topics of lively debate". People who hold these beliefs are frightening and deplorable, what they do and say is morally indefensible and even criminal, and I want nothing to do with them.

Don’t let The Donald come between you and your friend

DAVID EDDIE
SPECIAL TO THE GLOBE AND MAIL
PUBLISHED NOVEMBER 10, 2016 UPDATED APRIL 8, 2017

The question

I'm writing you from America – from one of what some people derogatorily call "the flyover states." I am so shocked, disturbed, and I would say even frightened that Donald Trump is going to be the next president of the United States. I feel like I'm living in an apocalyptic movie, and for the first time have a dread for my and my children's future. I can't sleep for worrying about it. I can't understand how any thinking, rational person could have voted for Donald Trump – and all (I thought) my friends and Facebook friends agree. But then I was at lunch with a friend of mine, and she was thrilled at the outcome of the election. She thinks Trump is going to be a great president. I couldn't believe my ears. We had an emotional argument and haven't spoken since. I don't know if I can be friends with her, going forward. What should I do?

The answer

First of all, don't succumb to "confirmation bias."

Confirmation bias is the tendency to hang out exclusively with (and, I suppose it follows, sleep with and marry) people who agree with you, and to read things and absorb only the information that confirms your prejudices and beliefs.

And I think it's really boring. So everyone on your Facebook page agrees with you. Almost half of your fellow Americans, it turns out, don't.(emphasis mine)

Why must we all agree? Vis-à-vis Trump I say: True, he's not my type of guy. Obama was my type of guy – smart, funny, thoughtful, soulful, Fugees on his iPod, Entourage his favourite TV show – though not my favourite politician ever.

Trump is sexist, retrograde, boorish, a "short-fingered vulgarian"– well, enough ink has been spilled and hot air expelled to describe him. He's Trump: need we say more?

But give the man a chance. He might just surprise/shock everyone by
doing well.

I've been around long enough to remember when Ronald Reagan threw his hat in the ring, way back in the 1980s.

The media were aghast, despondent, horrified and full of eye-rolling mockery: He's an actor! He was in a movie with a chimp! How's he going to be president of the United States (now glorified with the acronym POTUS)?

(Overlooking the fact he had been governor of California for eight years.)

But Reagan famously went "over the head of the media" and appealed directly to the common folk. And at least as far as conservatives are concerned, Reagan worked out well – left the U.S. and A (as Borat might say) and the world a more peaceful and prosperous place than when he entered the fray as POTUS.

Anyway, the point is not what you think of Donald Trump, or even Ronald Reagan.

The point, I believe, is: it's important to hold on to and passionately argue for your beliefs, but not to go all ad hominem with them – i.e. not make it personal.

I'm always amazed at friendships, or any other kinds of relationships, that go pear-shaped over the fact the two parties don't see eye to eye on some particular issue.

I know of more than one marriage south of the border experiencing "Trump tension," i.e. one spouse likes him and the other doesn't, and one or the other doesn't want to admit it.

But why should it be so personal? Why should it not rather be a fun and energizing topic of debate?

I understand Trump is a polarizing figure. I understand his rise to power (first-ever president without any political or military experience, just for starters) is odd, unusual, shocking, etc.
But that's precisely why the ramifications need to be discussed among citizens in a cool, calm, compassionate manner. Take a cue from the concession speeches of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama – I particularly liked Obama's comment (I'm going to miss that guy) to the effect of "this was an intramural scrimmage … We are Americans first."

You and your friend are Americans first. It can be hard, I think, particularly for Canadians to understand, but America is, at heart, I believe, a rebellious country, a country that began in rebellion – a punk country, if you will, and Donald Trump was a punk choice for president.

So it's definitely difficult to process, but shouldn't cause a rift between you and your friend. When one Oscar Wilde character says accusatorily to another "You always want to argue about things," the other character says "That is exactly what things are made for."

I've often felt the truth of that. And never more so than with Trump. Go ahead and argue about him until you're blue in the face and the bottle of chardonnay is empty.
 
Just respect the fact not everyone will always have the same opinion as you. And never, ever let it get personal.

OK. . . I was going to leave it here, but I am gasping like a beached fish even after more than a year away from this bilge. For one thing. . . OK, there is no "one thing", which is why my highlighting escalated to the point that nearly every sentence he wrote was marked. This guy's flip, light-hearted, "hey folks, there's nothing really wrong here, you're just upset, OK? You're overreacting" tone sickened me, when the initial question was posed in an entirely different tone of fear, terror, dread.

Mr. Fix-It here completely let her down. He wriggled out. He began to speak in another language, breezy and dismissive, as in "oh, we've seen this before and it turned out great" (which is irrational in the extreme: if ONE thing goes great when we initially dreaded it, it doesn't guarantee the next thing will. And if he had to use the Reagan administration as an example of a dubious candidate who turned out to be a winner, then I have trouble believing anything he says.)

I don't know, I can't let this go, and didn't even know what images could begin to sum it up.
I decided to choose the absolute horror of Charlottesville to illustrate it, since I was really too overwhelmed to pick anything else. I wonder now, does this gentleman still feel Trump is "not so bad" and we're overreacting (and in my conspiracy-conditioned mind, I now wonder if he's "one of them", a spy infiltrating the fusty old Canadian institution of the Globe and Mail) and that people should only debate about him in a cool, rational, detached manner while slowly getting more and more pissed? I hear the sound of genteel, probably phony laughter, Oscar Wildean witticisms flying through the air, while the world as we know it slowly and inexorably sinks.

Black lives: the Underground Museum

I can't begin to tell you how much it sickens me to see what strikes me as a great resurgence of racism - and not just in our neighbors to the south. How we love to say things like, "Oh, that's just in the States," or "our history was so peaceful,"  conveniently forgetting the apartheid of residential schools which literally stole children from their parents and held them hostage. We never heard about these things at all, of course, and I think if we had, we would have thought in terms of what an advantage it was for these poor underprivileged "Indian" children to get a good solid Catholic education.

Blindness. I don't want to start. Chatham, where I grew up, seemed for some reason to have a disproportionate number of black people. Disproportionate? That means five per cent rather than none! But black culture was a presence, if not from the citizens of Chatham we lived and worked with, then from Detroit, that source of vibrant new musical culture along with alarming rumbles of unrest.

But there was something else about Chatham. I think my schooling was lily-white until I got into Grade 9 or so (not that it had anything to do with the parallel social movement of integration, no sir!). Then suddenly there were black kids, maybe two or three in a class of thirty. Compared to the zero of before, with all those classes of kids at the Dutch reform school who seemed to be universally blonde and blue-eyed, it was a lot.

It was a confusing time. Black culture was cool, we thought, but we wanted the "good part", Diana Ross and the Supremes, Marvin Gaye, Afros and "black is beautiful", and wanted to leave out the ugly part, the violence, the riots. Of course I knew about Martin Luther King - he was my hero - but I was beginning to have just sprinklings of awareness of other leaders with names like Huey Newton, Bobby Seale and Malcolm X. Meantime, something seismic happened on a more intimate level that rocked our school, and everyone's school. It was a song by a folk singer named Janis Ian, and it was about a white girl dating a black boy. It was called Society's Child, and the refrain was, "I can't see you any more. . . " The girl's mother would not even let the boyfriend in the house. To me, the most chilling line of all is the very last one: "I don't want to see you any more." Her mother's ugly mentality has won a mean little victory.

This song caused a furiosa of response, but it was all underground. Girls huddled around their lockers whispering to each other about it. "Did you hear it? That song? . . .I heard it. . .yeah, it's true, isn't it." Not one person thought the song was inaccurate.

I don't know why were such idiots about it, why we didn't discuss it openly in school, but then we never discussed anything important in school. This was never more apparent than when my mother started talking to me one day about her favorite history book, Romantic Kent by Victor Lauriston. "There's a chapter in it about the Underground Railroad. Chatham is one of the termination points, you know."

About the what?

Once my mother had explained to me, more or less, what the Underground Railroad was, and that Chatham was instrumental in helping escaped and fugitive slaves to settle and build new homes and create communities, a question screamed in my head: why didn't we learn about this in school?

We learned nothing of the Underground Railroad. Either it didn't occur to the school board to put it on the curriculum, or they were embarrassed by it. Chatham had a famous son, Fergie Jenkins, a nationally-known champion ball player, and he was a real nice colored man. Wasn't that enough? We had Mahalia Jackson who came all the way to Chatham to sing for us, but, oops, Mahalia wasn't allowed to stay at the William Pitt Hotel because the management was sure she would be "much more comfortable" in another hotel across town.

I see racism minimized now, I see people writing in comments sections (and why do I still read them?) about how it has all been blown out of proportion, how black people should just forget the past and suck it up and be glad they live in the greatest country in the world (and you know the country I mean, and it isn't Canada). Unfortunately they omit one little fact: that greatest country in the world was founded on the backs of slaves. The United States would not, could not exist without slavery. Slaves were the engine that made the entire machine run. If by force, if by theft of liberty, then what was the damage? They could always go over there and get some more, because slaves were a renewable resource.

But why do those black folks still insist on making such a fuss? I have seen diatribes about indentured workers, Irish mostly, and about how they were treated "just as badly as the blacks". It's the same mentality that whittles down the Holocaust: "but lots of other groups were just as persecuted", "other atrocities took place in history and nobody notices", and maybe just maybe they got that infamous six million count wrong.

I try not to write these days, I really do, because when I do this is what comes out. Truly, I'd like to only post silly videos and animations and things I enjoy doing, because none of it makes one jot of difference anyway. I have almost no readers, and I keep this going only for something to do. I have had weird surges in readership that then died, and I don't understand the surges and I don't understand the dying. I guess I will keep on as long as it amuses me, but there are certain things that will never amuse me, and atrocity against humanity is definitely at the top of the list. 

Underground Railroad Museum, Chatham, Ontario

CanLit on fire: who can win this game?

I had an immediate reaction to this meme (or whatever it is): truer words were never spoken! Of course, if you truly embrace this perspective you're seen as crass. But what is a writer to do? I've said many times that we don't expect a trained concert pianist to play in an empty hall. But that's the equivalent of what professional writers are expected to do.  That is, those who aren't at the top of what is starting to look like a literary slag heap.

I'm a little sick of being disappointed, and I do try to comfort myself with the three novels I did get published (NOT self-published, by the way - I had to wangle contracts from three different publishers). I also have three or four manuscripts stashed in my computer, and ran one in parts (Bus People - if you wanna see it, the link is here) on this blog. I think ten people looked at it. I just think if it's meant to be, it's meant to be, and in this case it wasn't. 

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2016/10/bus-people-quick-links-to-parts-1-12.html

But was there some sort of weird karma going on? If not karma, then guardian- angel-ship, which I absolutely did not believe in. But maybe something was protecting me from "success", after all: the kind of success that lifts the privileged class out of the slag heap of anonymity and onto the shoulders of the gods (while selling lots and lots of copies).

It seems the game changed before I could catch up. I was only interested in writing well, which I believed would result in having a healthy readership. I don't think that's an unreasonable goal. But it didn't happen, and now I know it won't.

But my melancholic acceptance of failure was disturbed by the current CanLit "dumpster fire" which is threatening to consume the whole industry (and yes, believe me when I say it IS an industry, though that's not such a bad thing - we all need to pay the rent). Though someone came down hard on me for posting the wrong piece on this (though there is no such thing as a RIGHT piece on this!), I will share a link (below) which gives you some idea of what's been going on in the schoolyard. If nothing else, it will give you an idea of the sheer complexity of the situation, how twisted and tangled it has become. Worst of all, it has made some writers afraid to say anything, knowing they risk having their most innocent comments mangled and distorted by the monstrous sharks of social media.

What vexes me is that NO ONE has yet said anything at all about how Twitter has poisoned the well: without even having to face your adversary, and having spent an entire nanosecond composing your thoughts, you can fire off the most hateful volleys, only to be met by a Greek chorus of approval from somewhere before your enemy fires back. Without context, and I mean ANY context at all, even relatively innocent statements can appear to be soaked in poison like a lethal dart.

I will be accused of being a crusted barnacle for saying this, but in the past, if a writer read something in a magazine that made her furious, and she wanted to write a letter to the editor in protest, she would have to take the following steps: find a piece of paper and a pen, compose it, fold it up, address it, find a stamp, walk to the nearest post box and drop it in. At any point, she might think better of it, or at least rewrite it. Then, after a long wait, perhaps weeks or months, it might be published (likely severely edited). But once a tweet is tweeted, there is no taking it back. 

Poison darts are poised everywhere, and can't even be deleted because someone will take a screenshot and use it as a weapon. Those who wish to have a future as a published author are on thin ice, and it doesn't help that the stodgy, arthritic, unmoveable CanLit establishment is sawing a hole in it.

Speaking out is risky. NOT speaking out is crippling, and plays into the hands of elitist powermongers interested only in disenfranchising marginalized groups who MIGHT bring fresh perspectives to the table, if only they were allowed to. But the reins of power, not to mention the purse strings, are in the hands of the Big Few - bestselling writers, hotshot agents, major publishers. So perhaps some unknown angel prevented me from getting what I thought I wanted.

Or not? Are the grapes sour? Who gives a shit, at this point!


CanLit-dumpster-fire-disaster



If you'd rather not wade through this long piece, here's a short excerpt which demonstrates how rancorous and confusing this has become:

Then, a new twist: B.C. author Angie Abdou wrote on Facebook that she in fact had notified Kay about Wunker's post as "part of a conversation about troubles raging in the [CanLit] community and how those issues are making their way into the classroom." But by the time Abdou went back to look for the post to send it to Kay, Wunker had unfriended her. So Abdou asked Bok to screen-cap it. In her confession, Abdou apologized for unintended consequences against Bok and Wunker; she called Wunker "a committed teacher and writer." She then left Facebook and Twitter. (On Thursday, Abdou provided The Globe with a statement. "I made a mistake, and I'm extremely sorry. I did not intend to betray anyone's confidence or to harm the reputations of anyone involved.")


Are you with me still? . . . No? Well, don't feel bad. Neither am I. The twists and turns of it are giving me vertigo. Come OFF it, people! Try to come up with some sort of armed truce, before the whole thing collapses and entire books are lost due to discouragement and pain. Creativity will be extinguished along with the flames. If people are not allowed to express themselves, if works of real literature (NOT TWEETS!) die on the vine, everyone loses. Everyone. Do you hear?

Dark times in the farmyard

I almost want to apologize for this. Almost. But not quite. I have a love for old recordings that borders on the obsessive, so much so that I wrote a whole novel around it (Bus People! You can read the whole thing here. Just click on the pink link.)

Bus People: quick links to parts 1 - 12

But never mind that. Now that I have YouTube, I don't have to wait for these bizarre old things to come on the radio or appear on a recording. NO! Here they are, millions of them, thick with dust and outmoded thinking, things you never wanted to hear but are going to hear anyway. 

The first two are - strange - novelty recordings, I guess, with a lot of barnyard stuff on them. But partway through the Farmyard Medley is a shock so unexpected that it literally registered in my gut. You'll know when you get to it.

That leads to the third recording. It's the same song I heard on an old record - so old it had grooves on only one side, and was about 1/2" thick - which I listened to with my friend Nancy, one day in the musty attic when it was raining too hard to do anything else. We found a trove of ancient records that probably hadn't been played since the 1920s, and some of them were far older than that. Cornfield Medley is shocking because of the language, and in particular the casual use of one of the worst words that exists, but the version we heard was even uglier because it involved a "Massa" ordering his slaves around.

Old and horrible, but how far have we come? Things are dark, these days, and the only way around it is to keep going. We're still fighting battles around ugly words, even uglier racism, the ruthlessness of it, the way it diminishes humanity. Back then, it was simply called entertainment.

(Never mind what's on this one. I don't know myself. But there IS a connection to Bus People, in that nobody is quite sure who this is.)

Make America sane again - PLEASE

I REALLY was not going to start here, because once you start, it's hard to stop. But some things come to mind that are hard to ignore.

"America First" is an alarming slogan, with its Third Reich simplicity and utter self-assurance, as if there is no other way to think. I am ashamed to say that Canadian writers have tiptoed around Trump from the start. One "journalist" wrote, "Hey, guys! You're great already, you don't have to worry about becoming great again!" The placating (shit-eating) tone of it was something you'd use trying to fend off a crouching tiger with a popsicle stick. 

Another "memorable" piece (these were in the Globe and Mail, not the Raccoonville Gazette) claimed that you should not allow a friendship to be compromised just because the other person is a Trump supporter. It was a call for civilized debate rather than argument, an agreement to disagree. This stuck in my throat then, and makes me want to vomit now. Agree to disagree about allying yourself with THIS. This. The piece went on to say you should have a lively discussion about the issues over a bottle of good wine (no, this wasn't satire!), like the literary discussions of old where disagreement was just a spur to yet more - 

OH CRAP.

The writer concluded that we should look at it this way. America is a "punk country" which has always gone its own way (unlike Canada, which is sitting here trying to figure out why Americans are suddenly aware of our existence). A "punk country" is drawn to a "punk leader", someone who's "sort of out there" but who may match the spirit of the times. So it's OK if your friend has alt-right sentiments lurking beneath his or her Trump fanaticism.

NO.

I don't know, maybe my Canadianness is showing through. I am as guilty as anyone of trying to send up Trump and make him look ridiculous (not that it's hard to do). I realize humour makes him a little more bearable, but it also keeps us from doing anything to change the situation. Religion used to be the opiate of the masses. Now it's satire. Satire makes us feel like we have some sort of control over the situation by laughing at the king. 

NOT.

Not not not not not. We don't. We don't, and we will not. Not until he is OUT of there. 

Why they cancelled the KKK

The Klan

by Alan Arkin and David Arkin, 1951

The countryside was cold and still There was a cross upon the hill This cold cross wore a burning hood To hide its rotten heart of wood Father I hear the iron sound Of hoofbeats on the frozen ground Down from the hills the riders came Jesus, it was a crying shame To see the blood upon their whips And hear the snarling of their lips Mother I feel a stabbing pain Blood flows down like a summer rain Now each one wore a mask of white To hide his cruel face from sight and each one sucks a little breath Out of the empty lungs of death Sister lift my bloody head It's so lonesome to be dead He who travels with the Klan He is a monster, not a man Underneath that white disguise I have looked into his eyes Brother, will you stand with me it's not easy to be free

I'd say I don't know why this song came into my head again, after something like 50 years, except that I DO know.

While I was watching the Scientology series on A & E (and I will confess to a total fascination with cults in every form), an ad came on - a weird, perhaps overdramatic but nonetheless chilling preview.  At first I thought it was for a dramatic series. Then came the title: Generation KKK. It depicted people in white robes with the ghastly pointed headpieces, holes cut for eyes, and the voiceovers were something like: no, the Klan is not dead, it's just moving into the next generation. Children were depicted hand-in-hand, standing around a big fire.

I felt queasy. If this was "real", why was A & E giving these people any air time? It seemed too horrible to be believed.

Then that was it. I didn't see anything more about it, and kind of hoped I'd imagined it.

But I hadn't.

Just yesterday, I saw a whole slew of news items about the series. A & E had been getting a lot of flak on social media for it, so they solved it by changing the title from Generation KKK to Escaping the KKK, to make it match up with Amish and Mennonite and all those other horrific organizations that lynch black people.

Uhhhhmmmm, yeah. 

Not so, as it turned out. The series has been abruptly cancelled. There are several stories about this. One is that the producers (demonized by A & E executives, who seemed to want to distance themselves from the whole thing) had been paying KKK leaders to do the show. Another, more suspicious, yet more believable rumour was that the KKK leaders were being paid to say and do whatever the producers wanted. Which was, according to those leaders, bullshit that did not reflect anything that actually went on.

Eye -yi-yi-yie.

If so, then A & E has sunk to new levels of depravity. Not only are they funding the KKK with their bribery, they're telling them exactly how to BE KKK members. Of course the actual Klan will try to play down their atrocities, while A & E will do the opposite, ramp it up to the maximum, because it "makes good television".

In any case, the show is canned, and the fallout is - we'll see. The problem with all this is that a lot of people will say, "Good for them! At last, someone in reality TV is showing a little moral fibre." But was the whole thing staged from the very start, to whip up curiosity for the NEXT "reality" show?

Had they begin filming on this already? Had they finished it?  I think it was all set to go to air. Let's hope someone will leak it onto YouTube so it can be poked with sharp sticks and ridiculed into the ground.

Meantime. . . the song. My brother Walt used to sing this during the folk boom, when everyone played guitars and sang, but then it sort of sank out of sight. It was hard to find the lyrics, and I found only ONE recorded version of it by Richie Havens. He turns it into a Richie Havens song, but it is the same one, believe me.

The Richie Havens lyrics were way different, by the way. So I had to dig some more to get to the bedrock.

The song was written by Alan and David Arkin (yes, THAT Alan Arkin, the actor). I don't know how many songs he wrote, if it was a sideline or what, and right now I feel like I've been run over, so I don't want to look it up. It was all wrong on message boards: people kept saying things like, oh, it was Malvina Reynolds, or Pete Seeger. It wasn't.

I don't know what inspired Alan Arkin and his father to write this, but if A & E can get everyone in a lather by faking a show about them, then the KKK supposedly have some sort of relevance beyond Birth of a Nation.  Of course there are supposed ties to Donald Trump. I would imagine they'd go for him more than for Hillary Clinton, but they'd elect a basset hound sooner than Hillary Clinton.

CATFIGHT! Girl fights in romance comics

I may have actually bought some of these, or one, back in the '60s, but only so my brother Arthur and I could make terrible fun of them. It wasn't hard to do. Never mind the sociological significance of these things. They're FUN, and that's all I care about at this point! The "catfight" scenes could not be cropped exactly to match the others (perfect squares), so I had to fiddle around with them a bit on white backgrounds, but it was worth it, they are just SO cool. The "jailbird" one is a favorite, as are the "nurse" specialties (nurses being especially hot). One thing I didn't realize - and this is illustrated in a couple of the pictures - some of these comics were done in duplicate for two different markets: white and black. It's eerie to see the exact same backgrounds, clothing, captions, etc., but with women of different races. 

Those issues are, of course, completely settled in 2016. Aren't they? We honestly thought we had fixed it once and for all, and things would only get better. NEVER did I EVER hear so much about racial hatred and violence and murder and strife back then, during the height of civil rights fever. It's worse now, much worse. This is but one of the things I must contemplate as I keep on chugging and blogging. As W. H. Auden put it: "Life remains a blessing/although you cannot bless."

President Trump: the way the bee buzzes

Call this an extreme example of internet strangeness. This is an excerpt (a short one, at that) from something called Vaught's Practical Character Reader. Someone apparently found/scanned this very old and dusty book about - what? Phrenology? That's the assessment of character by feeling bumps on a person's head. So it can't be that. This is more like - well, what IS it? Face-reading? Making stuff up, more-like, based on a whole lot of strange drawings of heads and faces.

So if someone's face is a certain shape, well, good. They're obviously a worthwhile person. If not, get away from them! A woman is plainly a rotten mother because she has a sort of dip or curve in her head. On the other hand, HE would make a good husband because of the shape of his ears.

And if a bee buzzes around your head, you're going to be President.

A number of people in these illustrations have holes in their heads, or what looks like tape wrapped around them. Strange things, words, spring out of the heads of others. Eyeballs sprout out of someone's scalp. Very little is explained, though a lot of it is described as "needs no explanation".

None of this makes a damn bit of sense!

What this does point to however is something we still do, consciously or otherwise. We assess, or, more likely, judge others by their appearance, particularly facially. This usually happens in a split-second, upon meeting someone for the first time. We file away that impression and may stick to it, unless something else dissuades us.

In the case of Vaught's Practical Character Reader (and who is this Vaught, anyway? I don't like the look of this guy), it's all set in stone, unchangeable. Even if the fat man lost weight, he'd still be evil.

We now know that not one jot of this is true. People with big heads aren't evil. People with small heads aren't evil. (Note. Donald Trump IS evil - Ed.) Steam doesn't come out of people's skulls (too often). An "honest head and face" isn't necessarily a perfect oval. This is something that someone made up, perhaps to reassure themselves and/or others that their prejudices were correct.

This last one, not explained at all, has to be the strangest of all, but perhaps it's saying that if you set a bee loose in a room full of politicians, it will make a bee-line to the most suitable candidate. This system is more logical than democracy, or at least yields more favorable results. It might have worked in our favour last night. Instead, we had a stampede of barbarians at the gates, and all was lost for those who live by reason.

By many people's reckoning, this means that racism, a low grumble in a huge part of the world, might just rise to a mighty roar (as it has so many times before in history), unchecked by the counterforce of reason. It's a grim fact that the KKK voted Trump, and celebrated mightily last night.

What does this have to do with an old brown-paged book about face-reading? There is a connection.

The so-called innocent analysis of character by facial features isn't really innocent at all. It led to atrocities such as the dismissal of both Irish and African peoples as basically worthless, of "low type". If you're of low type, obviously you can't hope for anything better (so get away and keep your hands off MY resources).

The Iberians are believed to have been originally an African race, who thousands of years ago spread themselves through Spain over Western Europe. These remains are found in the barrows, or burying places, in sundry parts of these countries. The skulls are of low prognathous type. They came to Ireland and mixed with the natives of the South and West, who themselves are supposed to have been of low type and descendents of savages of the Stone Age who, in consequence of isolation from the rest of the world, had never been (?) competed in the healthy struggle of life, and thus made way according to the laws of nature for superior races.

I don't like what I'm seeing now, I don't like how the White Right just seized back power from the so-called liberals. There's a kind of civil war going on. Maybe we'll be drawing up facial comparison charts again. Or taking measurements of facial features. They did that once, remember? It kind of had something to do with your future. Or lack of one.

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