Mark McNease On Topic: Cowgirls and Alpha Gomers
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Slavery as a career path
Among the most appalling things I’ve heard in 65 years was the recent “curriculum” in Florida that requires history teachers include in their discussions of slavery that some slaves learned useful skills (like how to cut themselves down from a tree?). When I was in the 6th grade, attending a private school, we had to read books every summer. One of them was called ‘To Be a Slave,’ consisting entirely of the lives of slaves described by the slaves themselves. This book would surely be banned today in many states. Slavery was ugly, brutal, vicious, murderous, and demonic (defended with biblical scripture, as we can expect). The images included in the book were searing: men and women with deep scars on their backs from being whipped. Perhaps it taught them the skill of endurance? Embroidery? Surely they learned something they could parlay into a small business after emancipation.
I was looking for a quote for this week’s Twist Podcast with Rick Rose, so I looked up slave quotes and found a web page with quite a few. Check them out. Children taken from “breeding” mothers to be sold, possibly learning some skills along the way. Families torn apart by the ancestors of today’s “family values” crowd, who today would place no value whatsoever on slave children once they stopped being fetuses that could be claimed for Jesus.
Anyway, nothing I’ve heard in many years has been so vile and shameful. If you’d like to read some of what slaves had to say about their slave school, or apprenticeships, or whatever the White imagination clings to as it stares into the abyss of its own soul, read those quotes.
A study in extremes
I can’t say I listened to a lot of Sinead O’Connor’s music, but I was aware of her incandescent presence for 30 years. She defended Public Enemy at the Grammys, when the Grammys wouldn’t even give out the Best Rap award live. She called out racism, misogyny, and, most famously, the Catholic Church, when she ripped up a picture of the Pope on Saturday Night Light. Like nearly all voices in the wilderness, hers was immediately drowned out with hatred, ignorance, and gleeful brutality. Some things never change. She was even booed at Madison Square Garden shortly after the SNL appearance, when she was there to perform for Bob Dylan’s 30-anniversary concert. So much for blowin’ in the wind.
And during this same week, Country music fans, Republicans, and millions of others who probably also think slaves learned useful trades, made a supremely mediocre song by a supremely mediocre talent (and that’s being kind) named Jason Aldean, husband to MAGA freak show Brittany Kerr Aldean, their #1 song. It’s a piece of flotsam called ‘Don’t Try That in a Small Town.’ It perpetuates an age-old useful stereotype of small town America as a mythical place where Jesus is everyone’s co-pilot, the police are saviors of pretty much everything, and nobody throws rocks through a Macy’s department store window. (They shoot people through their front doors instead.) It’s complete with a lyric about ‘granddad’s gun’ which the libs are trying to take away, of course.
It’s a lie. And it’s a misrepresentation of small towns, which can be as stifling as the ones Aldean’s fans imagine they live in, or as welcoming as the many towns where we don’t fear people who aren’t like us, we don’t do everything we can to divide the country, and we don’t fantasize putting bullets into Black Lives Matter protesters.
Sinead O’Conner was brilliant, unbowed, and astonishing. Jason Aldean and the people who celebrate his mediocrity serve as a cruel reminder of what succeeds in our culture, and what gets rejected. I’ll take Sinead.
What We’re Digging in the Treehouse
A new feature here in the Treehouse: things I’ve listened to, watched, read, and been turned onto.
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s Substack. What a great thinker and writer. If anyone needs a reason to find Substackers, this is it. His insights can be simultaneously enlightening and lacerating. I always read these.
Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s ‘Wiser Than Me’ Podcast. Hat tip to subscriber and friend Kathi for turning me onto Kareem and Julia. I’m finding them both essential. In this podcast, “Julia Louis-Dreyfus wants to know why the hell we don’t hear more from older women, so she’s sitting down with Jane Fonda, Carol Burnett, Amy Tan, Diane von Furstenberg, Isabel Allende and Fran Lebowitz (and more!) to get schooled in how to live a full and meaningful life.” Fasten your headphones.
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Today’s parting shot …
The remains of Tulsa’s Greenwood District (aka Black Wall Street) after White mobs burned it to the ground in 1921. And it wasn’t even a small town.