Observation on Racism

Once in a while I teach a college course on women in American history.  When we get to the 18th century, one of the many colorful historical personages the students read about and discuss is Eliza Lucas Pinckney.  The basic facts of her life are well covered in textbooks.   Put in charge of her father's plantation in Antigua as a teen, Pinckney demonstrated skill as a landhold manager.  When the family moved to South Carolina and her father again left her in charge to pursue political office, Eliza, in a savvy business decision, introduced indigo, a plant that produces a blue dye.  She continued to experiment with various crops throughout her life and managed her husband's properties after his death.  She became a prosperous merchant and entrepreneur in her own right, and she was recently inducted in the South Carolina Business Hall of Fame.  No less than President George Washington was a pallbearer at her funeral.

Fine.  But we're talking about a large plantation in the 18th century, so of course we're talking about hundreds of slaves.  (The photo, by the way, is from a South Carolina plantation during the Civil War, one hundred years after Eliza.)  I've made an observation over the years. Most of my students are white females. I've had few African American female students. And what do they think of Eliza?  They're divided along racial lines. In the past a small number of students have commented negatively on Pinckney as a slaveholder, but most have praised her business acumen and saw her as a role model for women.  This semester I've found that none of my (white) students said anything about the slave issue; they essentially ignored it and praised Eliza for her business savvy and can-do attitude.

I don't want to condemn my students as racists; don't misunderstand me.  Had they all focused on the slavery issue and ignored other aspects of Pinckney's life, to be honest, I would have been equally disappointed in them.  I tell them that as historians—and everyone in my classes are for all intents and purposes historians—we should avoid imposing moral judgments on the people of the past.   I praise students for being able to see someone holistically and not judging them because of one facet of their life.  Should we dispense with Thomas Jefferson, the writer of the Declaration of Independence and our third president, because he owned slaves?  Life experience shows us that when we get to know someone on a personal level, we find that person to be multifaceted, complex, and, as the Greeks had it, somewhere between beast and angel. We tend to assess people based on certain paradigms of what constitutes, say, good and bad behavior, just or unjust actions. We do this, I think, because we try to direct our own lives on the basis of certain values, knowing that this is the ideal and we will fall far short of it. With this experience in mind, we should strive all the more to put aside our value judgments that hinder us from understanding the past. We need to peel back the various layers of culture that separate us from the people of bygone eras.

Yet I'm still somewhat perturbed that none of my students this semester had anything bad to say about Eliza Pinckney.  When I take off my historian's hat I have a different attitude than the statement about objectivity in the previous paragraph.  For example, if there was once a great leader, even a president of the United States, who oppressed and enslaved "my people," I would have nothing but enmity for this person.  I could pay lip service to this historical figure's great accomplishments outside of slavery perhaps, but, honestly, that singular blemish in his or her moral character would be enough for me to condemn the person as a reprobate.  So why should I be surprised if most African-Americans feel likewise?

My students' opinion of Eliza Pinckney just goes to show that ethnocentrism, if not racism, is prevalent among us.  We can't really see beyond the invisible boundaries of race.  Think of the race riots in Los Angeles inspired by the O.J. Simpson trial.  Clearly the man was guilty of these heinous murders and if you ask even an African-American activist, away from the cameras and alone in a room, he or she will agree.  For all our talk and pride about individualism and the pioneering spirit being a quintessential American attribute, we, a nation of immigrants, still think in collectivities, collectivities of ethnicity and race.  My supervisor at work (and readers will note that Der Viator has a third source of income besides part-time academic and military careers), Eddie, is a spry African-American in his fifties who grew up in Arkansas and moved north when he was a young man.  He told me just the other day that he received a letter with the confederate symbol on the stamp.  The person who sent the letter probably had no intention to cause any grief, but caused grief he did.  Are there ways to combat the racism that so envelopes all of us and affects us in ways that we might not yet acknowledge?  Yes, but that's a blog entry for another time.  Suffice to say for now, Eliza Pinckney was a bright woman who adapted to a patriarchal society and held her own, but let us not forget the black slaves under her.  Who wouldn't give just about anything for their freedom?  Nobody.  And those who were benefiting from this evil system, whether they allegedly knew no better or not, certainly don't merit the status as role model.  Am I wrong?

Destruction of Tibet

Under the auspices of Chairman Mao Zedong, the new People's Republic of China invaded Tibet in 1950. The Chinese government and military destroyed thousands of monasteries and libraries, set up hundreds of brothels for the troops, moved in ethnic Han Chinese families, plundered natural resources, desecrated religious icons, and reportedly forced monks and nuns to have sex with one another. By the decade's end, through starvation, imprisonment, torture, and enslavement, one million Tibetans were dead and the Himalayan community had been ethnically cleansed and colonized. The United Nations did nothing. The Dalai Lama, the spiritual and temporal leader of Tibet, and thousands of Tibetans live in exile in India, the United States, and other parts of the world.

In the photo above the Dalai Lama meets with Mao in 1956 to discuss the Chinese "liberation" of Tibet, a backward monarchy poisoned by religion. "We welcome you back to the fatherland," says a sinister Mao in the movie Kundun.

Her Name was Tulsa (1/5)

My uncle Hezekiah in Norman once gave me a piece of advice I’ve never forgotten: “Boy, if you want to find contentment in life, find an agreeable woman, handsome in the face but not too handsome, able to cook sauerkraut on demand, with the Holstadt secret recipe…and, o yeah, she should have a religious devotion to laundry and not gripe about extended periods of time out with the guys.”

My uncle did not endear himself to the family when he sold off the old farmstead back in ‘78. Located outside Weatherford, the place had been in the family since the 1890s. That didn’t matter to Uncle Hez, however, for he needed capital to start up a gentlemen’s club, his lifelong dream. The Comfort Wagon was really just another one of those backwoods nudie joints whose clientele, to put it mildly, strained the definition of gentleman.

I took my uncle’s words to heart at the time, though now that I think about it in retrospect it seems as though he was just pulling crap out of his arse. It doesn’t take much to get my mom drunk, but to hear her curse is a rare occasion indeed. One of those occasions was the election of Jimmy Carter as president. But when Uncle Hez sold the family plot, a good 160 acres of sand lovegrass and unfulfilled dreams, she lost it completely, spewing a colorful array of bawdy and aggressive words that, frankly, I had either not realized she knew or wished she didn’t so brazenly reveal that she knew. In her defense it was probably the alcohol doing most of the talking. The mere mention of my uncle’s name thereafter would bring forth yet more torrents of obscenities from her tongue. If she knew how I spent my days with Uncle Hez when years ago the courts forced her to go through rehab, she’d be livid.

That summer—the same summer the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album came out, I fondly recall—he taught me how to skin a rabbit and pick my nose with a fork; both endeavors left me with permanent scars, one mental, and the other physical. I told my mom Ray Blackmore, the notorious school bully, socked me in the face because he wanted my seat on the bus. I knew my mom wouldn’t press the matter, because she was seeing Ray’s dad, an abusive person himself, in those non-halcyon days of my youth. Besides, I could always rely on her inebriated state to deceive her. My first wife and I firmly believed that becoming a grandmother would stay her hand from the bottle, a desired objective that rehab failed to achieve; but we were naïve on that score.

Don’t ask about my father. I was born nine months after his return from Korea. I think he considered the procreative act that produced me the extent of his fatherly duty. His Purple Heart, for that matter, seemed to be the beginning and end of any achievement in life. He didn’t share his brother’s proclivity for whoring and he never touched alcohol, or at least I never some him intoxicated—my mother could drink for the both of them. But he smoked like a fiend, and to this day I take odd comfort whenever I see a Marlboro pack, the only memorable connection to my father, well, excluding the painful image of him hooked up to an oxygen tank, tucked away in the guesthouse, his eyes evincing horrific agony. He died from emphysema when I was eleven.

I still think my mother overreacted about the farmstead. The old Holstadt place and adjacent cemetery, after all, is and always has been a worthless piece of real estate, situated on rocky soil and surrounded by tar pits. Uncle Hez once took me out there with my brother Carl and friend Josh to shoot prairie dogs with our bb guns and his 22 rifle. How our family got the homestead is an interesting story in and of itself.

My great-grandfather, Jake the Squatter, who had came from Cincinnati to build a better future for himself and his family of eight, earned his nickname at the Oklahoma Land Rush of 1892, and not for the reason you might expect. Turns out he squatted down to relieve himself with a bowel movement about a hundred yards from a creek-fed field, any farmer’s dream. As an Irish family passed by in horse and buggy to stake their claim to it, so the story goes, he just sat there looking sheepish, grimacing and mumbling like a lunatic in his native Low German, the most unpleasant gaseous sounds barely drowned out by the clippity clop of horse hooves. According to my aunt’s genealogy work, they could hear him screaming Scheiss! as they drove their stake into the fertile soil ten minutes or so later. Even the damn Leprechauns who stole our land knew this word.

To this day no-one knows for sure if Jake was matter-of-factly describing the business he was engaged in at that particular moment—defecation, to be clear—or whether he was uttering a curse in exasperation at paradise lost. A large man with a sweet tooth, Jake had downed a couple of sarsaparilla floats with corn toppings at McGillicutty’s General Store an hour before the sounding of the cavalry bugle that would start the “Run.” When you gotta go, you gotta go, I guess. But his descendents have been smarting over his failure to get some choice land ever since. I’m not sure you can blame my great-grandfather for succumbing to Montezuma’s revenge, or maybe I should call it Arapaho’s revenge, since those land rushers, Jakob Holstadt included, were giving the Arapaho the boot—the boot off our God-given land. (I harbor no hard feelings for those Indians, especially considering the fact that they employed my son-in-law as a janitor at their casino back in the 1990s, a job he held until they caught him stealing smokes and chew from their convenience store.)

Jake’s grandfather, or his great-grandfather, settled in Ohio before the Civil War. What did they come here looking for? Why did they leave their homeland? I don’t really know and I don’t care. My aunt Anneliese in Columbus, now pushing ninety-three, is the family genealogist, not me. All I know is that the Holstadts came from a cold, flat region called East Frisia. We’re of Dutch-German descent, which is a strange combination and probably explains the schizophrenic relationship my family had with our next door neighbors: a retired English couple who moved to the states to be near their stenographer son. During the week we’d go over there cordially asking for sugar or flour, while on weekends my brother and I would toss beer bottles over the backyard fence and watch them explode on their patio.

Feline Reflections

It occurred to me the other day that cats are not very politically correct, far from it in fact. I base this insight on observations I made of our three feline pets. If you were to ascribe to me almost preternatural perspicacity and dagger-like intellectual prowess for arriving at such an analysis, then, well, so be it. Let me now buttress my case with some particulars.

We recently got an orange tabby, Xirk, and our other cats are finding it difficult accepting him into the family. Cats can be so intolerant of one another. They’re territorial, xenophobic, mean-spirited, and cunning. We could extrapolate from these evils that they’d probably dispute the science behind global warming and oppose same-sex marriage if they had a dog in those fights. Frankly, I’m tired of their insouciant attitude and that haughty, supercilious cat-look. And who are they to look at me so and make me feel like the most asinine philistine this side of the Mississippi? After all, I have actually witnessed them orally cleansing their rectal region, thereby relinquishing even a semblance of decorum that I trust does not tarnish the recreational activities of our canine friends. It’s been a while since I’ve had a dog, so I don’t know for sure. Such indecent feline activity is captured, by the way, in the movie, “Shrek II.”

Cats are sadistic creatures that enjoy torturing and cruelly playing with their prey long before the final blow. How often the horrific squeaks of half-mutilated bunnies have awoken me at night! I know that our youngest cat, Kaspar, is just out having some fun like a reincarnated, transmigrated Gilles de Rais or Elizabeth Báthory. I went to my basement and ransacked tomes on serial killers and depraved despots I had shelved next to my books on Satan and variously shaped bottles of Jack Daniel’s No. 7. I thought there’d be at least one cat in them. Nothing. I remember watching a Disney move that depicted cats taking over ancient Egypt and still conspiring to take over the world. (By the way, I only mention these films because I think it’s important to cite one’s sources and demonstrate that research went into these observations; I’m not just pulling this stuff from my arse. In addition to documentaries, I’ve also based my analysis on pertinent literature such as Wikipedia, The Onion, and the like.) I had heard once about a Meow Zedong whose megalomaniac pursuit of a communist utopia caused famines and the suffering of millions of people; however, I later learned that no cats were actually involved in this atrocity. Perhaps I was thinking of the grey tabbies we’ve owned throughout the years who like a succession of Ottoman sultans exhibited a penchant for fratricide.

Anyway, I figured that my furry friends could at any time start clawing each other. But beyond this Battle Royale going on in my trousers—a congenital condition for which I take medication—I also worried that my cats would come to blows in what I’ll refer to as a “cat fight,” except in this instance it‘s not about bikini-clad women pulling hair and going at it with their nails, but real felines fighting one another.

Rape of Nanking

What the residents of Nanking had feared for weeks had come to fruition. In December of 1937 the unstoppable Japanese war machine mowed into the capital of the Chinese Republic committing some of the most repugnant atrocities the world had ever known: live burials, beheading contests, mutilation, violent rape, and other sadistic “games” that need not trouble you here. (I was hard pressed to find a photo that wasn’t too graphic and disturbing!) The Rape of Nanking left behind 300,000 victims, a destroyed city, and a demoralized nation that over seventy years later poisons relations between the two great East Asian powers. The Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945), overlapping with World War II, had its roots in an imperialist policy that took shape since the late 19th century. To this day Japanese officials and textbooks deny or downplay the horrific event that transpired during that fateful winter.

John Rabe, a member of the Nazi party, and an international Red Cross team (Germans, Brits, Dutch, Americans) set up a safety zone to try and protect Chinese civilians from their vicious persecutors. Thinking that his country, Japan's ally, could do something to stop the atrocities, he wrote a letter to the Führer, but Hitler would have none of that. I first read the details about this massacre in Iris Chang's highly readable best-selling book entitled The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II (Penguin Books, 1997). Sadly, she committed suicide in 2004 while researching a book on the Bataan Death March.

Afghanistan

Almost three years ago, 27 February 2007 to be exact, I lost an acquaintance in a suicide bomb blast at Bagram airbase where I served my Afghanistan deployment. I had just spoken with her hours earlier. She was riddled with nails and other debris from a "dirty bomb" at the front gate. (VP Cheney was visiting the base at that time, and the enemy wanted to send a message). The blast killed her and 22 others. I was sound asleep not too far away. It was 10 in the morning, and as an intel guy, I'd work graveyard, basically 8pm to 8am, gathering intelligence reports for a meeting with the commander in the morning and other duties too. So I was sleeping during the blast, but the alarms and the jets taking off woke me up. I didn't know what happened until I reported for duty in the early evening. This woman, a civilian contractor and former military person, was celebrating her birthday, February 26, the night before at the office with friends. She was one of those types who was a joy to be around, full of life. I wasn't there but talked to her afterwards as I bumped into her by chance. She wasn't a close friend, but I think about that, and her, at this time of year.

It turns out that this woman didn't live far from my hometown in California.  In fact she went to my father-in-law's church.  Who knew?  My father-in-law, a retired truck driver and now a pastor, performed the funeral service.  The battalion commander was present and they talked about me.

Here's what I wrote at the time, in an open source intelligence report:

Attack on Bagram Air Base: It appears that the Taliban and their allies are pre-empting the long-awaited spring offensive by moderately stepping up insurgency tactics, most recently a successful “suicide” bombing at Bagram Air Base. A Taliban spokesman claims the bomber intended to assassinate U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney. This was unlikely their intention. Moreover, the timing of the bombing was not coincidental. Intelligence had already suggested an imminent attack in the Bagram area, but the arrival of VP Cheney provided an opportunity. They aimed to make a symbolic gesture and, secondarily, test base security. The inimitable law of propaganda tells us that the Taliban do not have the suicide bombers in the numbers that they claim. Nonetheless, they clearly have a pool of explosive-strapped martyrs at the ready, as this past year has shown. Based on open source information and probable intelligence coming from inside the base, the enemy had sufficient, if not ample, time to plan an attack and dispatch a bomber during the Vice President’s sojourn at Bagram.

The enemy will likely attack the base again within the next two months. They will recalibrate their efforts based upon adjustments made by Force Protection and perhaps attack the Entry Control Point again. They could also exploit what they perceive as vulnerabilities along the perimeter of the base and launch small-scale “suicide missions.” While high value targets and massive casualties are always optimal, they would be willing to kill less numbers to instill fear in the area and weaken the will of the American public at home. They probably see Bagram as a tough nut to crack, but its significance with respect to logistics and troop deployment means that they would be tactically foolhardy not to try and disrupt operations through suicide bombings or short range mortar attacks.

In the photo above a policeman helps a relative of at least one of the 23 who were killed in the suicide bombing.

The Dream (5/5)

At this point I despaired of ever discovering the meaning of the dream. As a last resort I decided to reenact it as best I could. If I could simulate the surreal experience, I figured, perhaps I’d discover a clue I’ve overlooked. I drove out to the state park on a Saturday in search of a wooded area that came as close as possible to the dark forest of my imaginings. Conditions weren’t ideal. Empty beer bottles, torn plastic bags, and a few families out for a weekend hike ruined the mood. On a vacated stretch of a trail I pretended that the white German shepherd was a few paces ahead of me and I started to run. It did nothing for me other than give me shin splints later. A real dog would have been better for the reenactment, but I’ve never owned one, and probably never will, not after what I’ve seen. When spying on the Palmers through the backyard fence, I’ve seen Spencer eat his own feces, and not once, but twice; I can say without a doubt that it wasn’t a random act or the result of hunger.

In my effort to find a more remote location, I somehow ventured outside the state park. I don’t recall seeing a sign or coming up to a fence, but an old man in overalls appeared out of nowhere to give me a piece of his mind in no uncertain terms. “What the hell are you doing here? This is private property!” He startled me sufficiently to elicit from me the F-word (see above). I didn’t take kindly to his rude behavior. I resolved to apologize and bridle my anger; but if he kept on, I told myself, I would make the cursing session I had with my next door neighbor Frank seem like a Sunday school picnic by comparison. I got no such satisfaction. Gramps retreated back down an embankment, leaving me to wonder how this old coot could own this prime real estate in the first place, other than perhaps investing the money he had earned as part of the hillbilly cast in Deliverance. After I peed on his property with relish and picked a few burrs out of my socks, I headed back to my car, lamenting another wasted day.

Ever since the dream and my subsequent search for understanding, it seemed as though everything was about the dream or dreams in general. On the drive home from the state park, as a case in point, I must have heard a zillion songs about dreams and dreaming on the classic rock station I had tuned into. When I pulled off the highway for gas, I decided to get a cup of coffee at the adjoined diner. Three booths down I heard two losers, local yokels with the requisite baseball caps and flannel shirts, talking about their love life, or lack thereof. “Dream on! You ain’t even half the man to get a babe like Danica Patrick.” See what I mean? I kept hearing the word over and over. Was it all in my mind?

I have been searching for answers so intensively that the universe appeared to consist of nothing more than the search, a galaxy populated solely by those whom I sought out or came across by chance in the course of my journey. Maybe I need to give this whole thing a rest or forget about ever getting closure. I might as well have consulted the scarecrow, tin man, and lion! Everyone I talked to had nothing of significance to contribute. I arrived at this conclusion after a thorough review of my experiences.

Pastor Bob’s spiritual interpretation was not off base, but in the end I decided that it didn’t make sense. Why would the Lord represent Himself as a dog? Moreover, I don’t possess the hardened heart Pastor Bob attributed to me, a diagnosis he insisted on more aggressively after I refused to hand him a check and we left the church. Dr. Constadter, as far as I’m concerned, was a whack job. Given her profession, her thesis wasn’t totally unexpected, but I’m not a Neo-Nazi with an Oedipus complex, or whatever it is she dreamed up for me. Darren’s ideas and schemes offered me little guidance, but I give him credit for making the afternoon at work fly by. Concerning my weird uncle, my dad explained he’s nothing more than a shyster who once got arrested for identity theft. I didn’t need this background information to reject his crazy story, but it’s good to have context anyway.

I’m glad in retrospect that I visited my grandaunt Malorie. In my heart of heart I was hoping for maybe an insight or two from someone who’s been around for so long; instead I left with a bunch of worthless facts about the silver screen in the days of yore. I won’t say much about Frank, except what I can muster in two year’s worth of high school French: he’s a douche bag par excellence. Finally, Charlotte, or Tabitha, or whatever hell her name is, strikes me as a decent person once you get to know her, if a bit chatty; heck, she and my brother are getting quite serious, as Charlotte had of course foreseen they would. But if I were more gullible than I am, her spiritualist mumbo jumbo could have put me on a train bound for New York to meet and possibly shack up with a non-existent hottie from Beantown! And for what? To help pay her college expenses? Lastly, Manny the shaman could have been helpful if Nikki had better bilingual skills. On the bright side, the trip to St. Paul wasn’t a waste if I’m insured of never getting prostate cancer.

All these encounters had consequences for my personal growth, some good and others not so much. Was this the purpose of the dream: to build relationships or embark on the road to self-discovery? It would have been easier to watch Oprah or take up yoga. I so desperately wanted someone to make sense out of this enigmatic dream, but the aforementioned people offered such diverse responses that I practically abandoned any hope of finding the meaning.

Then it came to me. It wasn’t the dream that had any meaning, but rather the reaction people had to it, the fact that they had such varied perspectives. I thought about the blind Indian boys groping an elephant, each one touching a different part—the tusk, ear, trunk, legs—and, based on their descriptions, coming up with a skewed conclusion. One feels the elephant’s ear and describes a fan. Another feels a leg and describes a pillar. Truth is in the eye of the beholder, and the best we can hope for in describing the world around us are half-truths borne of limited perspective.

The dream has no intrinsic meaning. Its details are random and do not signify a greater truth, either individually or collectively. It was merely a tool sent by God to put me on a journey towards understanding. This whole enterprise was a Rorschach test, my laconic description of the dream supplying the inkblot. With the exception of my grandaunt and the shaman, each person read into it what they wanted to see, their impressions revealing more about themselves than the dream. They had something to gain from their version. I was like Socrates who went throughout Athens asking politicians, poets, and artisans the meaning of the Oracle of Delphi, only to find a bunch of ignoramuses claiming to be wise. This insight—our search for truth is made more difficult by our limited vantage point–gave me a modicum of solace. I rested in the relative assurance that I had found, if you will, the moral of this strange story….until…

I see the selfsame white German shepherd, and this time I’m almost positive I’m neither dreaming nor in an altered state of consciousness. I wouldn’t completely rule out the former, though, because somehow I’m suddenly cognizant of having earlier gulped down a triple deluxe mocha, an amount of caffeine that often gives me a buzz. If anything, things present themselves more clear and distinct than ever before. Instead of leading me through a forest, the dog’s pulling me through the meadow. I say meadow, but it’s really a park, with a couple of teenage boys tossing a Frisbee and an elderly couple perched on a stony bench. A jogger in cut-off sweatpants and Nike shoes brushes past me and the dog, the muffled sounds of an indistinct hip-hop tune on his iPod trailing behind him.

I call out “Jasper!” and only slowly clue in that I’m addressing the dog with this name. Soon I realize that I’m holding the pooch by a leash. It’s as if I’m walking a dog in the park. Again, even as I make this conclusion, like becomes is: I am walking my dog in the park. Why didn’t I see this before?

I look upward and outward above the tree line where high-rise buildings reach toward a hazy sky. My uncle, a retired corporate executive, once worked in one of those towers—an uncle with no weird bone in his body, I might add. Somehow I’m conscious of having worked part-time in the mailroom of one of those office buildings when I was in college.

A woman named Sandy is signaling the German shepherd toward her, and for this reason Jasper is practically dragging me along like an Alaskan sled dog heading for the finish line. And how do I know the woman’s name is Sandy? I’m calling out her name too, and she appears to be responding. Yes, she’s making eye contact, we’re making eye contact, and she’s giving me the thumbs up sign! Sandy, my fiancée, wearing an autumn-colored halter top and faded blue jeans, smiles as Jasper in canine excitement waves his tail frantically. She genuflects on one knee to receive Jasper’s unbridled affection and he wastes no time in seizing the moment to paw her and lick her face.

We agreed to meet in the park at around 2 p.m. after her orthodontist appointment. She asks how my afternoon went on this fine Tuesday, the first day outside and unsupervised since my traumatic head injury. She hands me a cup of coffee, and I give her the leash. After taking a sip of her latte and bemused with Jasper’s hyperactive greeting of Sandy, I gently pull off the protective lenses the doctor had prescribed. The sun feels good on my face and the sound of her voice invigorates me. Is this real? I guess it doesn’t really matter.