Well, my comments on the Z case has brought some racist comments that I won't publish. Depressing. But it certainly speaks to the long, lingering sickness in this country. I think this will get worse as whites move into minority status. Good old CJ in my novel is/was right on. Right on.
I think of my poem about the guy plowing his field who learns of Lincoln's assassination weeks after the fact. How sweet it must have been.
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Do we need to dig up Rodney King again? Apparently, there remains some unspoken need by many in this country to cultivate a climate of absurdism.
The "sickness" you speak of Charles... well, in my opinion, what's truly sick is that the issue of race, as serious as it remains, now looks more like something resurrected from the Theater of the Absurd.
I mean, did we not learn anything from the summer of '64 when Mississippi burned? Did we not hear Rodney King when he asked why we, as human beings, couldn't all get along with each other? Are we doomed as Americans because we have failed to learn from the horrors of our recent past?
Racism, no, it's not that. No, no.... It's the absurdity, the absurdity of allowing the same silent film, like "Birth of Nation," to play over again.
It's the history, the history that my brother fought and died for while serving in Vietnam. The history, the goddamned history that destroyed a generation that dared to dream, the '60s.
Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman--neither one of them walked a mile in my shoes, and I hope no one in this country forgets that.
I see a country driven by mythology not history and the central thesis of the mythology, however disguised and denied, is that a dead Indian is a good Indian.
Okay, okay... but in reference to an earlier point you made whose mythology are we talking about? As white men become a minority then...?
Neither Martin nor Zimmerman were white, which leads me to believe that even though the players have changed the narrative (history) has not.
So I see a country driven by a failure to learn from history, stuck in a feedback loop, if you will, that not only is tragic but at some point starts to resemble some form of existentialist absurdity.
Do I believe in Determinism? You bet. I don't have any other way to explain why human beings, regardless of what color they are, or what uniform they wear, continue to write the same tragic stories for themselves--over and over, again and again.
What does this do to people? Is this the condition of human existence?
Sometimes, I talk with my dead brother about all this. I don't have to say it, but God how I miss him. In the end, it all goes into the writing.
Your brother talks back, I think. He's proud of you.
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