Brothers

Despite the way I like to present myself* and my efforts here, I do actually take a minute to do research for these posts. Now, please take under advisement what that entails: usually one browser window vaguely related to what I didn't quite realize yet was the topic and four tabs lost down the rabbit hole of internet trivia.** What's important is I have the information ready at hand when I panic, realize I have nothing to write about and cobble together a joke, one pseudo-poignant observation, some tortured segues and viola! You have the instrument that is deeper than a violin, but higher than a cello. And also a weekly long-form blogpost.

I was noodling through the Big Story of the Week this week, the acquittal in the Trayvon Martin case, and... ugh. I'm a liberal. This is the America of teams, Red and Blue, where our reactions are prescribed by our designated cable news info sources. This week we've been assigned Righteous Indignation, and I'm not going to pretend I didn't spend a minute or two luxuriating in the safe cocoon of groupthink--correct groupthink, not that bullshit those other people do--but the more research I do, the more I read, the more commentary I'm exposed to on any of the many perspectives and my Righteous Indignation has been slowly nibbled, tasted, squeezed to death, swallowed and slowly digested by a squirming, heavy, python-vs.-jungle-pig desire to just lie very still for a very long time. Preferably on a tree branch a thousand miles from any living person and just sleep it all off.

I've read through the range of reaction from put-on contrarian sideshow cunty to overflows of communal outrage but what I'm gravitating toward are other broke-down sad people. I haven't dug deeply at all into the details, but as far as I can tell, the jury probably went the way it had to go, because this happened in Florida and the laws there are carefully tailored to allow space for the murder of young black men especially by white people. I don't really see the failure of the judicial system such as it is, it's just that such as it is--in Florida at least--the self-defense fetishism exists in that aching, un-suture-able gap between law and justice. And this is what falls out when that wound begins to fester.

But it's not just racism. Not simply anyway. I think we, as country, just have lupus.

Maybe not lupus specifically, but some kind of autoimmune disease where the body as a whole misidentifies a part of itself--an integral, necessarily, survival-dependent part of itself--as invasive, firing up its own evolutionarily-sharp immune system out to annihilate something without which it cannot live.

It's all been stirred up and exposed in the differential diagnosis of our current fever. Young black men are besieged and despised. Each political party is convinced the other is out to destroy the country. Nobody is sure what to do about that Amanda Bynes girl. But it's as though we're not content to wait out the disease as it runs its pestilential course, no, we're in this huge hurry to start start proactively and preemptively stop lopping things off. Which, now that I think of it, is a lot like that Amanda Bynes.

I've decided that things aren't really any worse now than they ever have been. The 1960s were a full-blown culture war too, you know. I'd be surprised if the opinion weren't expressed by one buzzcut or another on how the cure of the long-hairs was a flamethrower somewhere in the now-idealized and wholly corporately mainstreamed Summer of Love era. And that was the era of Selma and JFK and Emmett Till. And a hundred years before that we had stopped everything else we were doing for five years just to hash some shit out.

So I don't believe it's the worst it's ever been. And I certainly don't believe that it's anywhere near as bad here as it is just about everywhere else. At some point someone somewhere drew some borders on a map, and you and all your ancestors got stuck dealing with all the malcontents and motherfuckers stranded on the same geopolitical island with you, cursed to be bonded by history, language and culture, flags, wars and common enemies. Enemies get our hatred, and occasionally our cruise missiles. But our neighbors, inside the wire... for them, we reserve our contempt and our fear--our immediate, genuine fear.

Every culture has its outward, public whole. But every country defines its own character and every character is built along the fault-lines of the divisions within. For nearly everyone else, those lines have always been religion. For us it has been, is and probably always will be race, especially black and white.

I guess the only thing left for me to decide for myself is if in recognizing the pattern I can be comforted by the perspective of history diminishing the crisis of the moment or ruined by the surety: this will happen again. And again.



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*Head down, ass up

**Yes, I do mean Redtube