How Does It Feel?
No, this isn't a piece about one of the most perfect, aurally lustrous baby making songs of the turn of the century, though I am now listening to D'Angelo's classic album, Voodoo, because it's a comfort record for me and the title of this piece did bring the song to mind. "Untitled (How Does It Feel)" is also one of my absolute favorite songs to sing badly. I can't sing it anywhere near what would be considered even passing quality, but damn if it isn't a fun song to belt out. Along with a few other albums of the same period, it represented the most respected and ambitious artists of the Neo-Soul movement pivoting from creating within the confines of their influences to shaping sounds and styles of their own which demonstrated their musical lineage, but were truly individual too. Voodoo and Mama's Gun, from Erykah Badu (another album I still revisit with some regularity), are incredible examples of artists gaining enough success with their first albums to then step into their own, freed from the stringent requirements of record companies expectations. Jill Scott has also charted her own course, over a longer period, but has also come to be a singular artist with a sound and vision her own, born out the Neo Soul movement of the late 90's and early 2000's. I can remember the first weeks of listening to those records, and the sense of discovery and excitement which was inspired by these works, the palpable sense of artists becoming the creators only they could really be, and feeling fortunate to be able to experience their work.
There are other artists from roughly the same time period who went through a similar emergence. If I'm forgetting your fave, it's not meant to slight any artist in any way, but this isn't a piece about Neo Soul or turn of the century popular music. It is about the question the title poses though.
How does it feel?
Over the last few weeks, Monday through Friday, as I try to bring all the pieces of my consciousness into functionality in the morning, I read for a little while. I keep a reading list, using an app called Pocket, and each morning I've been going through a few of the pieces I saved there the prior evening. When I feel like I'm awake, I do a loose sketch on the part of my novel I'll be working on. It helps to keep focused on what each particular piece is meant to do within the story, what it should show the reader about the characters, and some other things which at this point I think are central to writing a good story. It helps keep on track, so I don't end up spinning off on and come to the end of the days writing and feel like I wasted the time. I hope it will also prevent the need to excise large sections when it comes time for the edit.
This morning, being that it's Saturday, I sat with my coffee in hand, and opened Twitter. Social media is not conducive to productivity, so I've been trying to keep it to a minimum Monday through Friday. I've been treating Saturday as a day when I write if I feel like it. This morning though, my Twitter feed was full of images from the Robert E. Lee statue being removed from its perch in Charlottesville, and of course, the inevitable commentary. 90% of that commentary is warmed over, trite, and pat, a sparkling burnished turd after being some combination half digested, mushy sentiment and highbrowed, soap operatic thinking.
Unite The Right in 2017 was essentially the announcement of the cultural campaign the fascist movement which was then coalescing was planning to wage, presented by these same fascists as being a "defense of the monument" after Charlottesville's city council had broached the topic of its removal. Having witnessed the broken, bleeding bodies and day long exercise in fascist violence culminating in a fascist driving his car into a crowd of anti-fascist/anti-racist counter protesters as fast as he could, injuring more than 30 people and killing Heather Heyer, I couldn't help but wonder, "How does it feel, four years later, to see this object which was presented as the excuse for all that violence, including a murder, finally removed from it's prominent place of public display?"
We're a month shy of the four year anniversary of Unite The Right. A12, was what it was called by activists who were in attendance, for a good long while after. August 12, 2017. I'll always know what day I adopted my cat, August 13, 2017, because I'd schedule the appointment to pick him up in the week leading up to A12. It's possible he saved my life. In the first few months of being together, I obsessed about his well being, in what I now think was partially a kind of psychological escape hatch. Watching the "discourse" following Unite the Right was more detrimentally to me, emotionally and mentally than witnessing the violence, hearing the pained moaning and screams of people who'd been hit with a ton of metal at speed, the confusion of everyone who was trying to help, in whatever way they might be able to. Watching all of that be so thoroughly mischaracterized, misidentified... The ease with which misinformation and such obviously bad faith arguments and disinformation were so eagerly consumed, digested and regurgitated as part of the "reasonable."
Fascists who spent a day beating anyone they wanted with makeshift clubs and weapons, chanting "Jews will not replace us..." were "fine people," "motivated by economic insecurity" who "needed to be understood," and "might not all really be fascists and antisemites." If you're not ready to get off the ride when the "Jews will not replace us" chant comes out, I submit that whether you are a fascist antisemite in your deepest of hearts doesn't matter, you're willing to act exactly like one, and in this context, this is the important piece of information.
It was quite literally, for me, crazy making.
It was knowing the reason for the monuments existence, and the reason for nominally "defending it" was being evidenced in all the "discourse" which ensued after. It was evidence of the success of the Lost Cause mythology, in this twisting ouroboros of disinformation, ignorance, willful manipulation of even the well intentioned, and worst of all, the absolute worst of human instinct being slathered in the sleazy oil all of it produced, for no purpose other than to make it hard to grasp. The entire drive of the Lost Cause mythology had been to educate entire generations out of reality, and it was bearing fruit, in the face of what should have been a collective wake up call. Even a passing familiarity with the history of nations which fell to authoritarianism, particularly fascism, should have been enough to cause an extreme sense of alarm when Unite The Right was taken in consideration with the few years of open street violence fascists had been committing in a few different cities before A12.
The fact that the police just stood around, all day, seems to have been just too much to even fully consider, as it wasn't very much a part of the discourse, and has been shunted into the memory hole since.
Yes. Police did in fact stand around while fascist spent hours committing serious violence to anyone who had to audacity to in any way show fascism wasn't welcome in Charlottesville. They were there, a few hundred of them. Virginia State Police seemed to have no problem engaging directly with crowds of equal size as BLM protests swept Richmond and other cities in 2020.
Now, four years later, here we are. The monument has been removed. Off to storage until a suitable place for it to be displayed is decided.
I'm going to be straight as I continue. I'm not going to refer to a "conservative" movement in this piece or in anything else I write for the foreseeable future. There is no "conservative" movement in this country. There is a fascist movement, which is attempting to present itself as what Americans are desperate to believe in something related to a conservatism existent almost exclusively in the kind of mythology which births things like The Lost Cause mythology. We're four years on, and if you haven't come to understand they are manipulating your desire to the preserve some sense of good will, it's an act of willful ignorance, and as unfortunately controversial and probably hurtful as it is to say, it aids this fascist movement in reaching its goals. Dear reader, for my own sanity and well being, as well as yours, forgive me should this cause you pain and understand I can't entertain petty niceties where this subject is concerned.
Today, the cavalcade of wannabe future luminaries and the ancient, desiccated wraiths who are the political arm of the American fascist movement spent the day hobnobbing with Proud Boys, III%'ers, and white nationalist groypers at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference. The gathering is a "who's who" of American "conservatism." The street thugs, the vampires who've made their names on podcasts and shitposting, and lost man-children who find themselves ashamed of licking at the boot of institutional violence because it's not as violent as they'd like it to be are all having a grand old time whooping it up with the Republican elite. The call is definitely, as they say, is coming from in the house.
Tucker Carlson has the highest rated program on cable news. He's regularly holding forth on the dangers of the future for white people being subsumed into a nation where immigrants, and people of color have taken power due to the changing demographics of the nation. This is Replacement Theory, which is what produced the "Jews will not replace us" chant in Charlottesville on A12. It's the mother's milk of the contemporary white supremacist/nationalist movement. Tucker recently had Charles Murray on his show. Murray is the nations foremost purveyor of the race science, which essentially holds that Black people are genetically predisposed to being good at sports and labor, but white people are genetically predisposed to being smarter. It's a long debunked relic of the kind of pseudo science which gave birth to eugenics, which Hitler so admired the United States efforts in, he created his own eugenics programs in the same model. Fox News Channel's own lawyers have now repeatedly argued in court that Tucker's program isn't a news program, and yet...
The great scourge of "cancel culture," a term which came into popularization after Unite The Right, was the fascist bogeyman of 2018, 2019 and 2020. Anyone engaging in any kind of dialog about the various forms of discrimination which are so deeply entrenched in our institutions and culture as engaging in "cancel culture." That racists, sexists, homophobes and xenophobes might be held accountable, and face different varieties social censure which weren't codified into law as a method of using state power, was the apotheosis of the coming fall of Western Civilization. Of course, the emergence of this fascist movement out of the digital spaces and into the physical world had been centered around "defending" the right of Holocaust denying antisemites, transphobes who wanted to out trans people, xenophobes who wanted to publicly out undocumented people, and a whole host of other truly deplorable cretins to hold forth on college campuses. Those battles raged for a few years, in large part being the real impetus for Unite The Right. They got tired of getting the shit kicked out of them in Portland, Berkley and some other places, so they spent a year advertising Unite The Right as their big day, where they were going to show how bad it is for people to try to secure accountability from violent fascists, by walking around chanting about Jews and attacking anyone they wanted, and trying to kill a whole bunch more.
Now, it's evolved into the calculated delusion which is "anti-Critical Race Theory." Again, a cursory understanding of what Critical Race Theory is, with a passing observation of what it is this fascist movement is so vehemently making their public grievances about, quickly reveals the two are essentially unrelated. Where it was "cancel culture" to create accountability which didn't leverage government power or legal punishment for the kind of incredibly destructive actions of people who hold views in common with fascists, this anti-CRT campaign is instituting structural and legal preventions where discussing racism in nearly any capacity is concerned, in any schools a state or local government can regulate. It's censorship for your fellow Americans to tell you to fuck off and tell your boss they'll never come near the business if you work there, but not when you attempt to actually, literally outlaw any discussion of racism in a classroom. This is just a 21st century Lost Cause strategy. It is the legal institution of educating people out of reality, and that both of these are focused so directly on the reality of racism is, of course, no coincidence. If you can't outright teach, "Actually slaveholders were benevolent, and most slaves knew they were better off so very few rebelled or ran away, and Black people today are victims of phenotypes and a culture of laziness," then to erase the structural and systemic basis of inequality, and how they have been created and informed by the history of racism in the United States is the next best thing. It's the exact same implementation of "protecting monuments" as a rhetorical strategy.
It was never about monuments four years ago, and it's not about Critical Race Theory today. It's about controlling the parameters of mutual understanding and empathy possible within the collective discourse and consciousness. Those monuments have never even really been monuments to Robert E. Lee or Stonewall Jackson. They're monuments to Lost Cause mythology and its function, institutionally indoctrinated ignorance, and the dehumanization which results from it.
It was never any more about monuments than it is about trans people in bathrooms or sports, but the fascists are smearing trans folks with every possible lie they can come up with. Anti-trans legislation is going through state houses across the country. Oddly, the TERF crowd doesn't seem to make the connection that anti-abortion bills and anti-trans bills are really popular in the same state houses too. If there is a more perfect encapsulation of the term useful idiot than TERF's are in the current political and media ecosystem in the United States, I can't imagine it.
Do I even need to go into the issues around voter suppression? What institutional resistance there should be to that isn't even able to cobble itself together enough to take definitive action to defend what is democracy's most central necessity.
As climate change continues to take its horrible toll, Canadian towns reach temperatures never even recorded in Las Vegas, a city built in a desert, and spontaneously combust. In response, this fascist movement is turning to eco-fascism, the manipulation of very real fears of what climate change is going to bring in order to target immigrants, and the poor, who in the US are over represented by minorities due to the exact issues Critical Race Theory is meant to highlight. "We can't afford to do what's necessary to take care of them too," is the essential underlying sentiment. Due to the poor understanding of fascist strategy, including rhetorical strategy, it's essentially guaranteed to gain ground among climate movement. "We need to work with people we don't like," is going to be the war cry, no doubt. Conveniently, it will ignore the same people fascists have historically targeted, but it won't be because fascists are infiltrating the climate movement, of course. It will be "rationality," the product of good old fashioned thinking and reasoning, devoid of pesky feelings. Shame and guilt being primary among the peskiest of feelings.
Trump, the embodiment of all American liberalism despises, has been successfully removed from power, but the fascist movement he rode to power and which he was a figurehead to, is still there. The movement itself, as a result, has become too nebulous for the American press certainly and the majority of Americans who are "into politics", be able to triangulate as a genuine threat. It's no coincidence there are the likes of Marjorie Taylor Green, Louis Gohmert and Lauren Boebert making utterly phantasmagoric claims about "the left," while Conor Freidersdorf, David Brooks, Bret Stephens and the rest of the very white, very mythology friendly columnists at major publications are laundering fascist talking points, and coming to the same conclusions. It's the Left's fault conservatism has become all out fascism. Of course!
The same news and press outlets which ran story after story about the "alt-right" as not just being new branding for the same old white supremacist and fascist groups in credulous fashion, and ran editorial and column after column of "both sides" leading up to and following Unite the Right, have learned exactly nothing these four years later. Trump is gone. The tactics and strategies are still on full display, but without Trump as the locus for anything resembling a real critical examination, we've gone back to the same stenography of the smooth brain which was the run up to the 2016 election. The entirety of coverage of the aftermath of the events at the Capitol on January 6 are really all the evidence we need. Within weeks, fascist claims about the who and what of the day were back to be being treated as just "the other perspective." Even as deeply inured as the press is to presenting the word of law enforcement and the perspective of their presumed innocence in any and all situations, the violence levied against law enforcement isn't enough to create a truly critical approach to the claims and strategies of these fascists. They dragged cops into a crowd and beat them senseless. Hospitalized them. But the Blue Lives Matter, All Lives Matter and every Black person ever abused by police "should have complied" crowd still have some level of legitimacy to the American press? They're playing the American press masterfully, which is pretty sad considering how transparent their con is.
600,000 dead of COVID, and still it's too much to plainly and simply call people who are spreading disinformation about vaccines and COVID irresponsible, dangerous and to refuse to give a platform to their claims about these. Again, it's "controversy." The chaos which would be rendered by the emergence of a vaccine resistant variant is horrifying to contemplate, but the fewer people who are vaccinated, the more likely it becomes.
Fascists across the country are now selling a narrative about a rise in crime, due to police departments being defunded. That neither of these things is objectively true, seems to not be quite as interesting, and seems to be getting left out of the coverage of these claims. There are some places where one particular form of crime is up in those places. In some places, its carjacking. In others its shootings. Violent crime is still far, far below the highs of the last twenty years, which are far below the highs of the twenty years prior. With very few exceptions (as in four or five, nationwide), police departments budgets have gone up, despite the movement of anti-racism activists to defund police departments. If anything, a rise in crime would suggest throwing good money after bad in the attempt to use police as a crime prevention tool, is bad policy, but this is a nation which as yet to definitively end The War on Drugs, which as never met a single policy goal in the 50 years of it's existence. Polling is now starting to show a growing concern about crime rates...
Come the 2022 elections, if crime rates are polling as important, I can guarantee Democrats will also be running on platforms meant to address a rise in crime that is non-existent. The people who end up being the collateral damage? People of color, especially Black people, the poor of every variety and people with mental illness, especially when they also fit those categories, most of all.
Despite the largest scale protest movement in the nations history, there has been no substantial systemic attempt to address racism in policing and criminal punishment. There has been a rash of promises of reform policies, most of which have existed in pilot programs, and failed to address the problems they are nominally instituted to address. The lethargy is breathtaking.
Terry McAuliffe was Virginia's governor on August 12, 2017. He'd been elected in 2014. He was furnished with reams of evidence of the fascist organizers and planned attendees of Unite The Right using their various communication channels with the specific intent to prepare for and organize violence. In the year leading up to August 11 (the night of the tiki torch march where hundreds of fascists attacked a cadre of students and activists standing around a statue on UVA campus) and August 12, McAuliffe and law enforcement had been furnished with this constantly growing mountain of evidence. He did nothing. The Virginia State Police, along with local Charlottesville Police, did nothing, prior to and including as the day unfolded. In the aftermath, McAuliffe claimed "We didn't know it was going to be this way. No one knew. No one could have known." Experts on extremism from all over the country, and activists in Virginia and across the country knew, and tried to alert McAuliffe and anyone who might be able to do something. The day following A12, McAuliffe held a "vigil" which didn't include a single speaker who had been at Unite The Right, because the majority of the organizations who had gone to counter protest were not part of the Democratic Party of Virginia's network. Invitations weren't extended to the majority of groups and organizations had gone to counter protest. Surprisingly, in the weeks and months following, when other white supremacist groups were planning to protest in Richmond as "protection" to the monuments there, Virginia State Police and Richmond City police were able to find people involved with those same groups and organizations who had counter protested on A12. They were questioned by police about their preparations for the white supremacists showing up in Richmond or put them under surveillance, so as to "be sure there wasn't going to be a repeat of Charlottesville." Those very badly outnumbered racists were well protected by police.
McAuliffe served out his term with it ending in 2018, because Virginia doesn't allow for a governor to serve more than one term. It's worth mentioning as well, as we're watching climatological chaos become ever more regular, he also backed every fossil fuel pipeline which was being proposed in Virginia at the time. In the last month, he yet again secured the nomination of the Democratic Party to be their candidate for governor in 2022.
So, how does it feel, to see the monument in Charlottesville come down 4 years later?
It feels like we've learned nothing.
It's good that the Robert E. Lee monument has finally come down, because of the reality of what it represents, and because it was always there to subvert the reality and prop up the mythology. That part is good.
It still feels like we, collectively as a nation, have learned nothing in four years though. Depending on your perspective, we either missed the opportunity presented take the best aspects of our influences, shape them into something new and emerge as a nation which reflects the reality of the 21st century, at least demographically and culturally or from another perspective, that's exactly what's happening as we're failing to substantially address the fascist movement which is gaining power and acceptance, except instead of the best aspects of our influences, we're allowing the worst aspects to shape the nation we're becoming as the 21st century marches on. It's the kind of thing you learn from the arts, when they're something more than a machine to crank out celebrity to be peddled by capitalism. It should be no shock the arts are always the first thing to be cut in school budgets, given where we are. D'Angelo and Erykah Badu have things to teach us.
It feels very much like the fascist movement is shaping the story. It feels very much they are deciding what the text and subtext of the story is, what matters about the characters, what kind of characters get to come to the fore, what characters don't. They're deciding what the plot is, what the central conflict is, the stakes... all of it. They're telling the story and controlling the narrative, and we're going along with it, despite the mountains of evidence pointing to where the story they tell ends. It feels like we can't bring ourselves to disbelieve the part of the story they tell which says that as long as we go to work and pay our bills, everything will be fine. This isn't the novel any decent human being wants to write.
It feels like I'm trapped in a nation doomed by its inability to recognize its present because of its addiction to the mythologies of its past. It feels like there are very few people willing to look at it directly overall, and by the nature of institutions instinct to protect their power and tradition, there are even fewer if any at all with access to any institutional power willing to do anything. After seeing the entire discourse following A12, including concerning the monuments, I was existentially terrified. Now, I'm more or less resigned. The terror hasn't left me exactly, so much as I've learned to accept it. One of the reasons I've been writing here so much less is there's no more sense of urgency to "sound the alarm." The alarm went off, repeatedly. It hasn't changed anything. I know how the story ends, so I'm watching and documenting what I can. If there's a tomorrow where the past isn't written by fascists, maybe some of this will be useful. If not, I tried. For now, I try in different ways to contribute to what to me is a sacred endeavor, storytelling, and bide my time. Whatever else may be said of me and my failings, my shortcomings. I'll never be a collaborator. I'm sure that question is too much for most people still, and that's part of how we got here and why I'm not optimistic.