Chris Gavaler's Blog, page 21

A Comics Parable (or Bridging the Medium-Form Divide)

This is Italian painter Cesare Laurent’s A Parable (or Bridge of Life), which I saw in the Telfair Museum in Savannah, Georgia, while vacationing with my family after Christmas. My son was solving chess puzzles on his phone in the park outside the museum at the time, but when my daughter saw me taking a picture of the diptych, she knew why:

It’s a comic.

Or maybe it’s not. Folks have surprisingly strong opinions about that word, so instead of asking whether something is or is not a comic, I prefer three slightly less annoying questions:

Is the work in the comics medium?Is the work in the comics form?Is the work in both the comics medium and the comics form?

Short answers: no, yes, no.

Long answers:

Laurent painted A Parable around 1895, shortly after the word ‘comic’ emerged to mean multi-image cartoons published in humor magazines. Despite coincidentally fitting the time constraint, the work is not in the comics medium. Though such works can but tend not to be painted, they are paradigmatically viewed and distributed as multiple reproductions, not as a single object mounted in a single location. If the painting is reproduced (on a Telfair Museum book or pamphlet for instance), the multiple reproductions are still likely not in the comics medium because they are not identified as ‘comics’ by their producer (the Telfair Museum) or by consumers (patrons of the museum gift shop). The artist also did not identify the painting as a ‘comic.’

Laurent, however, did paint A Parable in the comics form, which can be defined in two words: ‘sequenced images.’ Working in the comics form does not require an artist to use the term ‘comic’ or even for the term to exist at that time. Caravaggio and Rembrandt are known for their use of chiaroscuro, even though the name of the technique was coined after their deaths. A Parable is in the comics form only because it consists of more than two images, and the images create a sequence. The precise meaning of ‘sequence’ is debatable because it is sometimes used synonymously with ‘series’ and so may or may not require a definite order. However, in the case of A Parable, the two images are not only juxtaposed but the movement of the figures within the images suggest left-to-right viewing and so a definite order.

Scott McCloud applied the unfortunate term ‘closure’ to certain effects produced by juxtaposed images. ‘Closure’ was already a Gestalt psychology term for the tendency to perceive parts as a complete whole by closing visual gaps (a dotted line is a line and not simply dots). McCloud’s closure is conceptual rather than directly visual, and so his list of transition types does not account for the effect in A Parable in which the two balconies align as though continuous across the center gutter.

When Leigh Ann Beavers and I published our article “Clarifying Closure” in 2018, I termed that ‘gestalt closure,’ because the effect is the same as the original psychological meaning. We used the same term in our textbook 2021 Creating Comics. I’ve since decided that ‘closure’ it too confusing a term to keep using in comics scholarship, and that the meaning of ‘gestalt’ is far from self-evident. So in my forthcoming The Comics Form: The Art of Sequenced Images, I call the juxtapositional effect simply a ‘continuous inference.’

But Laurent’s effect is more complex. The illusion of a continuous balcony across the center gutter is only partial because the two image’s settings are otherwise unrelated. Rather than producing the illusion of viewing a single location briefly interrupted by an ellipsis-like gap, the alignment of the two balconies seems coincidental or contrived because the implied position of viewing changes. A viewer is somehow standing in two places at one. In “Clarifying Closure” and Creating Comics, I called that ‘pseudo-gestalt.’ While accurate, I doubt it clarifies much to anyone not already familiar with the background concepts. So in The Comics Form, I instead use ‘semi-continuous.’ The result isn’t exactly jargon-free, but I do think it’s an improvement:

Laurent’s juxtaposed images produce a semi-continuous visual inference.

A Parable also produces other type of visual effects common to the comics form: recurrent and embedded inferences. Or it possibly does. First read Laurent’s own description of the work’s two parts:

“I have determined to develop the first part of my Parabola with a lively feast in which two young men invite the gay crowd of girls to participate in songs and smiles of joy.”

“I imagined the second part at the door of a church because inside the poor suffering souls seek relief.”

From that description, the first image features a “crowd” and the second several “souls.” But when I look at the work I instead perceive a single individual depicted at different moments as she moves up, across, and then down her decades-spanning life. For me there is one recurrent figure or “soul” painted as though she were a “crowd.” Each painting then contains more than one embedded image. Though he does not mention it in the above letter that the Telfair curators excerpted in the museum plaque, I strongly suspect Laurent intended that effect or one very much like it. Admittedly, it requires a good deal of erasure to perceive the various figures as fully recurrent rather than only thematically recurrent.

Though none is necessary for a work to be in the comics form, I discuss recurrence, erasure, and continuous, semi-continuous, and embedded inferences in The Comics Form because they are common effects of sequenced images. They are also common in the comics medium, but that’s because many works in the comics form are in the comics medium. Laurent’s A Parable, however, is only in the form. By consistently differentiating the two, I’m really hoping to make analysis both more logical and easier.

Textured Tronies

I learned the term “tronie” from Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earing. It likely comes from the French word “trogne,” which rougly means a grotesque or comic face. When applied to Vermeer and other 16th and 17th century Dutch artists, the term is a way of distinguishing the depicted figure from a portrait of a specific person. Which is how I’m using it. The images below also continue my “textured” series because they all include text from the last chapter of my next book, The Comics Form: The Art Sequenced Images (I submitted final copyedits the last week of the semester). Sometimes the text is obvious and (almost) legible; sometimes I layer and manipulate it until it devolves into a thick gray (and sometimes unexpectedly purple and blue) pattern. As usual, all of the marks originate in the technologically obsolete yet creatively inspiring MS Paint. I completed a couple of them while quarantening after Thanksgiving with Covid. It was a long semester. I’m hoping for a better 2022.

On Demand Until Birth?

According to a May 2021 Pew poll, 59% of Americans think abortion should be legal in all or most cases, while only 39% think it should be illegal. A June 2021 Gallup poll asked a more specific question, but found almost the same results: 58% of Americans oppose overturning Roe v. Wade, while 32% support. Gallup has been asking that question for over thirty years, and a majority, from 52% to 58%, has always opposed overturning.

And yet the Supreme Court is currently hearing a case challenging Roe v. Wade, and the lopsidedly conservative majority seems poised to strike down or severely weaken the 1972 precedent.

What exactly does that mean?

Roe v. Wade established the following system for state laws:

First trimester: no restrictions.Second trimester: reasonable health regulations.Third trimester: any restrictions (unless a woman is endangered).

In 1992, Planned Parenthood v. Casey replaced that system with a similar one:

Pre-viability: no restrictions.Post-viability: any restrictions (unless a woman is endangered).

Current infant viability is roughly week 24 and so in the second half of the second trimester. Infants born at 28 weeks or earlier are “extremely preterm.” A 2015 study in the New England Journal of Medicine found that even with major technological interventions:

Infants born at week, 22: 5% survived (3% without severe impairment).Infants born at week, 26: 81% survived (76% without severe impairment).

Fetuses delivered before week 22 do not survive.

The Roe decision was also based on viability, adopting the assumption that, while variable, it most often began at the start of the third trimester (between week 24 and 28). That was fifty years ago, and despite major technological advances, viability has barely shifted.

Now look at the CDC’s statistics for percentages of abortions performed at various weeks. In 2016:

Week 8 or earlier: 65%Week 13 or earlier: 91%Week 21 or later: 1%

In 2018:

Week 9 or earlier: 78%Week 13 or earlier: 92%

In 2019, Kevin Drum compiled the CDC statistics into a chart: “Using state data, it’s possible to roughly estimate the percentage of abortions performed in weeks 21-30. Above that, no records are kept, but the numbers are so tiny that they register as 0.00 percent.”

This clarifies what the abortion debate is about, and what both the 1972 and 1992 decisions protect. Pro-birth advocates often disregard the above facts to argue falsely that restrictions are necessary to prevent late-term abortions–even though over 99% of abortions are performed on non-viable fetuses incapable of sustaining life even with the most extraordinary technological interventions.

When the House or Representatives passed the Women’s Health Protection Act of 2021, pro-birth advocates responded: “This bill would impose abortion on demand nationwide at any stage of pregnancy through federal statute … Congress should not advance a radical ‘abortion on demand until birth’ policy that is completely out of step with our country’s principles.”

Would the bill allow “abortion on demand until birth”? No. The bill reinforces the viability rule created by the Supreme Court in 1992, and with the same single and explicitly stated exception: “A prohibition on abortion after fetal viability when, in the good-faith medical judgment of the treating health care provider, continuation of the pregnancy would pose a risk to the pregnant patient’s life or health.”

The law also would not require doctors to perform abortions “on demand.” It states: “A health care provider has a statutory right under this Act to provide abortion services.” It’s the doctor’s choice, but not the state’s. 

Why lie about abortions?

Ask Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett. In 2006, she signed a newspaper ad opposing so-called “abortion on demand.” There’s no such thing. Barrett either knows that or she doesn’t. Either possibility is disturbing.

The Mississippi law that the Supreme Court is currently evaluating bans abortion after week 15, prompting Chief Justice Roberts to ask an opposing lawyer: “If you think that the issue is one of choice, that women should have a choice to terminate their pregnancy, that supposes that there is a point at which they’ve had the fair choice — opportunity to choose — and why would 15 weeks be an inappropriate line?” 

Because 15 weeks would be arbitrary. Planned Parenthood v. Casey’s viability standard is the only meaningful and long-tested standard for regulating abortions.

Judging by Kevin Drum’s CDC chart, a national 15-week abortion cut-off would affect fewer than 5% of cases. Except with the 1972 and 1992 precedents eliminated, the constitutional right for an abortion would also be eliminated, allowing all restrictions. Texas has already enacted a ban on abortions after 6 weeks (with an especially disturbing enforcement system of paying private citizens to take offenders to court). According to Drum’s chart, if the Texas law were enacted nationally, it would block 66% of abortions. Total bans are even likelier. Twelve states have already passed laws that will automatically take effect if the Supreme Court overthrows Roe v. Wade, and another ten would likely follow. Only fifteen states have laws that would protect abortions in the absence of Roe v. Wade. 

The Court’s decision is due in June—just in time for mid-terms and so control of both the House and the Senate. The Supreme Court’s current conservative supermajority was manufactured by Senator McConnell preventing Obama from replacing Justice Scalia after his death on February 13, 2016, nine months before the presidential election, and then allowing Trump to replace Justice Ginsburg after her death on September 18, 2020, six weeks before the presidential election. As a result, two-term President Obama selected no Justices and one-term President Trump selected three—with the explicitly stated intent of overturning Roe v. Wade.

Though in 1999 Trump said, “I am very pro-choice,” during a 2016 debate he declared the opposite: “If we put another two or perhaps three justices on, [overturning Roe v. Wade] will happen. And that will happen automatically, in my opinion, because I am putting pro-life justices on the court.” Though that radical campaign promise is completely out-of-step with our country, six years later the McConnell-packed Court is working to make it true.

New Comics @ the new Shenandoah!

I became comics editor of Shenandoah in fall 2018, and except for happily stepping back for a guest editor last spring, I’ve had the privilege of selecting works for what is now six issues. The first couple of issues were all solicited, but the journal has garnered enough of a reputation for publishing literary comics that I find my job is more about being introduced to new names from our increasingly impressive submissions than seeking out names I already know. That’s a happy change. Better, the range of styles and narrative approaches I keep meeting are eclectically eccentric. One of the works in our new issue (which went live Friday!) was originally a poetry submission (you’ll have to guess which one), so ‘narrative’ isn’t even the right word. I spend an improbable amount of my scholarly life debating the definitions of ‘comics’ (at least two definitions are necessary, one for form, one for medium), but ‘literary comics’ (and its sibling ‘poetry comics’) poses an even greater riddle. But here’s the simplest approach: when defined by medium, a literary comic is a comic published by a literary journal or press, and since Shenandoah is most definitely a literary journal (we just entered our 71st year), the six news works linked below are most definitely literary comics. Though the category ‘Shenandoah literary comics’ is self-explanatory, I also wonder if that category is developing its own recognizable aesthetic. I both hope so and hope not. You can judge for yourself:

Aidan Daniel’s “How to Do the Scorpion”

Maggie Queeney’s “A Ghost Story (Women)”

Coyote Shook’s “The Gospel According to Opal Foxx”

Kristen Emanuel’s “Mothra x Godzilla”

Taku Ward’s “A Cheeseburger Sushi’s Experience”

G.H. Yamauchi’s “Decoding”

The Republican Outrage Porn Machine

I thought I had coined the term “outrage machine,” but then I read a 2019 Atlantic article by Jonathan Haidt describing how the 2009 social media innovations of “Like” and “Retweet” transformed what appears in user feeds. One of the inventers felt instant regret: “We might have just handed a 4-year-old a loaded weapon.”

I also thought I coined the term “outrage porn,” but no, C. Thi Nguyen and Bekka Williams described it in a 2019 New York Times article:

“When you read your Facebook newsfeed and soak in all the reports of morally outrageous events, and you do it just for the satisfaction of feeling outraged, then Facebook has become your porn stash. You’re not trying to fix problems or make morally balanced judgments. You’re just after the pleasures of moral outrage: the smugness, the self-satisfaction, the delightfully hot feeling of righteous indignation.”

Dictionary.com blogged on the topic the same year:

“When not talking about sexual content, porn can be used to mean content that’s meant to ‘cater to an excessive, irresistible desire for or interest in something’ …. There’s moral outrage porn, which is when people seek out and view content that makes them angry.”

Both articles also note the same problem. Dictionary.com concludes:

“At the heart of how we use the word porn in the generic sense is gratification without investing in what it takes to obtain or upkeep what’s being described. It allows people to interact with an object or idea without any of the struggle that it takes to do things…”

Nguyen and Williams go further:

“The pleasures of moral outrage are maximized when morality is simple and the world is starkly divided into good and evil. So the consumers of moral outrage porn will seek out the most cartoonish depictions of the enemy. They will want a newsfeed full of unambiguous stories of the other side’s wickedness. Over time, they may even develop a less nuanced and more easily inflamed sense of right and wrong, to increase their moral outrage. … its consumers, having simplified their moral systems for the sake of self-righteous pleasure, will take that cartoon morality with them when they engage with the real world. We may already be seeing the results.”

Ah, yeah, I definitely think we might be seeing some results here.

And the outrage porn machine is hardly limited to social media. Politico’s Jack Shafer wrote last week:

“It will come as no thunderbolt to even casual TV viewers that when you consider all the news and commentary the cable networks serve, they regularly give it a political spin. … The networks often behave more like political players — emphasizing one side while disparaging the ‘enemy’ — than they do independent news organizations. By flattering the perceived political prejudices of their audiences and avoiding a story when the news becomes inconvenient to their agenda, the networks behave like vendors of political entertainment.”

Shafer also identifies the same porn effects on viewers:

“A riled viewer is a devoted viewer. … This devotion to serving the political passions of viewers may increase ratings, but it’s a hell of a way to run a news organization. When the networks ignore or overplay a story to appeal to their viewers’ prejudices, they give them little info-silos in which they can safely cocoon from the real world.”

I don’t look at liberal porn. I don’t watch MSNBC or CNN. I don’t read Huffington Post, BuzzFeed, Daily Beast, or Daily Kos. I stopped my online subscription to the Washington Post a while ago, but I keep renewing New York Times—though I ignore the op-eds and I balance it with the Wall Street Journal. Those are the extremes of my centrist swath: slight left lean to slight right lean. Reuters and Associated Press are consistently ranked least biased, and so I look at them too. TheHill, another most-centrist, is my favorite.

I don’t look at conservative porn either: Fox News, Newsmax, OAN, Epoch Times, Washington Examiner, Drudge Report, Breitbart, Daily Caller, etc. I certainly don’t listen to Carlson, Hannity, Beck, Limbaugh, etc.

I started and have moderated (with occasional breaks) a Facebook page called Rockbridge Civil Discourse Society (I didn’t name it) for over three years. It’s designed for conservatives and progressives to talk. I’m currently on one of my breaks (unannounced), because I am (once again) exhausted by the Republican outrage porn machine.

I spent the first couple of years trying to convince everyone that it matters where they get their news and that having real political conversations requires committing to non-partisan sources. That didn’t work. And it keeps not working. In exchange for modeling self-moderation news intake, I get conservatives openly and wantonly addicted to their partisan porn. And the results are exactly what Shafer, Haidt, Nguyen and Williams, and Dictionary.com predict.

Here’s a recent example. When I began a post about the increase in violent rhetoric (specifically death threats targeting election workers), another member responded:

“We have created an environment where we feel required to ‘fight’ for our identified group’s perceived piece of the pie. Heck, we now see infighting inside the same party. Disappointment that the ‘wrong’ minority color was the first female mayor of Boston. That’s *crazy*! That came from supposedly ‘centrist’ NPR.”

So, two things: 1) I know this individual doesn’t listen to NPR, and so 2) their reference is almost certainly to a conservative pundit who spun the content for their consumption. I had no idea what they were talking about, so I googled and found a November 16 Morning Edition article that begins:

“For the first time in its history, Boston is inaugurating a newly-elected mayor on Tuesday who is not a white man. Michelle Wu – who’s Asian American — is the first woman and first person of color elected to lead the city. While many are hailing it as a major turning point, others see it as more of a disappointment that the three Black candidates in the race couldn’t even come close.”

The five-minute article interviews a range of Boston residents, including Black community leader Rev. Eugene Rivers who said: “We can only play race card for so many occasions. I mean Black leadership failed to produce success even with an incumbent. We failed. Now that’s not on white people.” Imari Paris Jeffries, who leads an MLK memorial organization said that “a candidate’s race should not be the determinant in any race”: “In this anti-racist discourse, I don’t think we’re going to find identical twins of our experience in order for [candidates] to empathize. I think we have to start creating a larger tent and find common ground together.”

Does the page member really think that’s “*crazy*!”? We’ll never know because they’ll never read it. They continued:

“Along the same lines, the absurd over the top allegations that vast swaths of Americans are racists is adding fuel to the fire. It takes a lot of discipline to not get emotionally energized when you are accused of being a bigot when you know full well that you aren’t. This last Virginia election is a prime example. National media telling the entire country that the reason I voted Republican was because I’m a racist is quite aggravating.”

I responded: “When you say ‘national media’ is calling you a racist, do you know that because you’re coming across examples yourself, or are you following conservative pundits who have cherrypicked individual examples for their audience?”

They responded: “You seriously didn’t hear anyone suggest that the Virginia results were an expression of racism?” They included a link to an article titled “Racism alive and well in Virginia election” from an Australian website (which after multiple google searches I can’t now find).

I responded: “I read a lot of ‘national media’ and much less frequently I look at some further left sources. I’ve literally never heard of Green Left. Your preferred sources are literally banking on this fact: ‘It takes a lot of discipline to not get emotionally energized when you are accused of being a bigot when you know full well that you aren’t.’”

(I did not respond: That’s like watching actual porn and then bragging about your self-control for not masturbating.)

Their response: “If I understand you correctly, it’s not the liberals’ fault for originally saying it, it’s the conservative’s fault?”

I gave up.

Maybe I should have said: yes, sometimes people say things that outrage you. If you come across such a thing in your normal course of life, you are certainly permitted to express outrage in response. However, if you frequent places that search for and amass all-things-outrageous and deliver them to you for the partisan pleasure of your self-righteous indignation and continued patronage, then it’s become something else.

This was hardly the only exchange like this. The same week when someone else cited the Department of Homeland Security’s recent assessment (“the most significant terror-related threat facing the US today comes from violent extremists who are motivated by white supremacy and other far-right ideological causes”), the above member responded:

“The same group now says moms at school board meetings are domestic terrorists.”

There is no part of that sentence that’s true. For evidence, they linked to a Christopher Rufo tweet that quoted a sentence from a letter written by the National School Boards Association to the Attorney General urging the Department of Justice to treat threats of violence made against school board members as a form of terrorism.

I won’t bother quoting the rest of our exchange.

I could provide other examples, but unlike porn, this blog isn’t about gratuitous excess.

Unfortunately, like actual porn, the Republican outrage porn machine is not about to stop. Their addicts certainly aren’t. I actually like the page member I quote above. They are one of the most intelligent and considerate people in the group. Which only adds to my exhaustion and horror.

Saving the South from the Confederacy

I used to wear a Confederate flag on the back of a concert t-shirt when I was in high school. Lynyrd Skynyrd was on the front. I never saw them in concert; the lead singer died a couple of years before I started listening. I owned (almost) every album though. I was big into Molly Hatchet too—though, to be honest, I never really got over the change in lead singers on their third album. ZZ Top was up there too, and not their mid-80s synthesizers, just the 70s albums. I also knew “Whipping Post” and the Molly Hatchet cover of “Dreams,” but I’m afraid I just wasn’t cool enough for the Allman Brothers in my teens.

So that Confederate flag on my back meant one and only one thing to me: Southern Rock. As implausible as it sounds, it never occurred to me that it might mean something else.

I grew up in Pittsburgh, a no man’s land of overlapping northern, southern, and mid-western culture. My classic rock station kept Charlie Daniels’ “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” on heavy rotation, while most stations above the Mason-Dixon wouldn’t touch it. My suburb had maybe a 10% Black population, but illegal yet never-challenged redlining policies by local real estate agents kept those families sequestered in one corner of the town map. When a Black family did move in down my street in our otherwise all-white neighborhood, someone threw a burning cross in their yard. I’m not sure how long after that they moved out.

My parents helped desegregate the local police force by taking them to court and winning. That’s why our house kept getting egged and someone wrote “NIGER LOVERS” on the side of the garage. Racists can’t spell, my mother joked.

I wasn’t the brightest student either. I must have had some vague knowledge of the Civil War, but it was no more present in my mind than any other ancient history-book event I skimmed for a quiz and instantly forgot. This was decades before the KKK left Confederate flag flyers on my Lexington lawn or I saw that flag waved in unison with Nazi swastikas in Charlottesville. A part of me would like to go back to my high school ignorance. The world doesn’t seem half as ugly when you’re not required to pay attention.

I can’t erase my adolescent love for southern rock, but to preserve it, and anything else good about the South, requires disconnecting it from the symbols used by slave owners, Reconstruction-era vigilantes, Jim Crow-era bigots, Civil Rights-era segregationists, and modern-day neo-Nazis.

I think I get why that outrages some folks born here. If you grew up understanding a symbol to mean one thing and one thing only, family pride, who has the right to say you’re wrong? My continuing nostalgia for southern rock is nothing compared to a family identity passed down through generations.

I deeply respect that love of family. It’s why I reject the Confederate flag.

Slavery was the greatest anti-family force in the history of our country. Couples, parents, children, siblings, they were legally torn apart for the financial convenience of owners. I can’t imagine never seeing my children or wife again. I can’t imagine persevering through forced labor, forced poverty, and the constant threat of physical violence against myself and my loved ones. I can’t imagine my wife and daughter being legally raped and their offspring sold. Slavery is beyond anything I can imagine.

Although the Confederate flag means different things to different people, it obviously means slavery to many people, and I can’t stomach that association. But that’s easy for me. I didn’t grow up cherishing it. The greater feat of compassion would be to understand the flag as a personal symbol of pride and to still let go of it out of love for others who aren’t part of your own family.

All lives matter, but the Confederacy waged a war under the belief that Black lives don’t. Virginia has been around over four hundred years, but it was a part of the Confederacy only four. Southern pride can’t be identified with symbols linked to slavery and the century of violent bigotry that followed it.

Loving the South means letting go of the Confederacy.

Should Confederate flags be allowed in schools?

First, let’s correct a common but false impression: The First Amendment’s protection of free speech does not apply to students wearing Confederate flags.

There are many legal precedents; here are four:

In 1972, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that a Tennessee high school’s suspending a student for wearing a jacket that featured a Confederate flag was “a legitimate exercise of the school officials’ inherent authority to curtail disruption of the educational process.”

In 2008, the Sixth Circuit Court again upheld another decision from another Tennessee high school that banned Confederate flags for the same reason. Black students made up roughly 3% of the school, nearly identical to the Black population of Rockbridge County.

In 2009, the Eighth Circuit Court upheld a Missouri high school’s decision to suspend a student for violating the dress code prohibiting Confederate flags.

In 2013, the Fourth Circuit Court upheld a ruling that a South Carolina middle school was allowed to prohibit a student from wearing a “Southern Chicks” t-shirt that featured Confederate flags because “the school officials could reasonably forecast that [it] would materially and substantially disrupt the work and discipline of the school.”

In each case when the ruling was appealed to the Supreme Court, the Supreme Court rejected to hear it, establishing the lower court’s ruling as the final outcome and the legal precedent for future cases.

Here in Virginia, Montgomery County has prohibited the Confederate flags since 2002, because students cannot wear material that is “racially divisive,” listing the Confederate flag as an example. More than twenty high school students were suspended in 2015 for the violation.

In 2020, the Franklin County school board voted 6-0 to ban Confederate flags. A board member explained that the policy change was necessary because “it became apparent that students were offended by the Confederate symbol and found it disruptive.”

Bedford County Schools banned Confederate flags last year too. Its high school dress code reads: “Attire that has language or images that are offensive, profane, vulgar, discriminatory, or racially/culturally divisive. This would include Confederate flags, swastikas, KKK references, or any other images that might reasonably be considered hurtful or intimidating to others.”

Schools routinely ban Confederate flags and the courts routinely uphold those bans because the Confederate flag is overtly linked to slavery, the most extraordinarily racist institution in our nation’s history.

Mississippi’s statements of succession declared: “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery.”

The Confederate Constitution is identical to the U.S. Constitution, except for one repeated phrase: “Negro slavery.”

Its vice-president declared that the Confederacy “rests upon the great truth that the Negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery — subordination to the superior race — is his natural and normal condition.”

The Confederacy kept four million Americans enslaved and, had they won the war, would have kept their uncalculatable offspring enslaved too. White supremacists know that historical fact and have repeatedly brandished the Confederate flag as a symbol of racial hatred in defiance of American values.

In 1951, Georgia politician Roy Harris declared that the Confederate flag “is becoming … the symbol of the white race and the cause of the white people.”

In 1956, white supremacists waved Confederate flags while throwing rocks at the first black student to attend the University of Alabama. They waved them in Little Rock, New Orleans, Austin, and Birmingham too.

In 1963, Alabama Governor George Wallace waved the Confederate flag in opposition to integration, promising to fight for “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.”

South Carolina began flying the Confederate flag from its capital in opposition to Civil Rights too. It was only removed in 2015 after a white supremacist murdered nine Black church members at a Bible study meeting in Charleston.

White supremacists waved the Confederate flag next to the Nazi flag at Charlottesville in 2017. The two flags are known internationally as symbols of racial hatred. The Anti-Defamation League classifies the Confederate flag “as a potent symbol of slavery and white supremacy, which has caused it to be very popular among white supremacists in the 20th and 21st centuries. This popularity extends to white supremacists beyond the borders of the United States.”

When a Confederate flag was displayed in a Canadian cemetery last March, the Calgary police hate crimes unit investigated, and the city council declared: the Confederate flag “is hateful, and it is not welcome in our community.”

And right here in Rockbridge, the KKK has left leaflets decorated with Confederate flags on the lawns of local residents.

Though many identify the Confederate flag as a symbol of family and regional pride, that identification does not outweigh the flag’s larger and internationally recognized meaning as a symbol of racial hatred inextricably linked to its white supremacist history. The South and the Confederacy are not the same. Virginia has existed for over 400 years, and it was a member of the Confederacy for only four of those years. Pride in Southern heritage cannot be linked to an institution that legalized forced labor, torture, murder, rape, human breeding, and the permanent division of families.

Exploring the Deep End of the Republican Bathtub

My congressional district was a top headline in the New York Times the Sunday after the Virginia governor election: “Democrats Thought They Bottomed Out in Rural, White America. It Wasn’t the Bottom.” Reporters Astead W. Herndon and Shane Goldmacher travelled to Bath county (which along with Rockbridge and about a dozen other neighboring counties is Virginia’s Sixth congressional district) and interviewed “a dozen white, rural voters who backed Mr. Youngkin” to understand what drove the red wave. Their responses reveal a lot about not just my state but the state of the political divide widening across the U.S.

First up, look at Charles Hamilton. He’s a Vietnam vet who said “his vote for Mr. Youngkin was really a proxy vote for Mr. Trump,” because “the best thing that can happen is to get [Biden] and that woman out of there.”

I’m not sure who “that woman” is (Jill Biden maybe, or did he mean House Speaker Nancy Pelosi?), but his point is clear: the Virginia governor election wasn’t about the Virginia governor election; it was about Trump and Biden. Youngkin and McAuliffe didn’t matter. Though it would be nice if non-presidential elections weren’t always referendums on the White House, Hamilton’s political reflex is probably the norm for both Republicans and Democrats. The takeaway is clear too: Biden’s approval rating determines other election outcomes. That’s been pretty much the driving logic behind every election I’ve witnessed in my political lifetime, so I’d call that business as usual.

Now look at the second Bath voter. Karen Williams says she’s angry at Virginia’s current Democratic governor because he supports “critical race theory” which she says is responsible for removing Confederate statues and for “treating [white children] like little monsters.”

I don’t want to leap down the CRT rabbit hole, so I’ll just say that teaching white kids that they’re little monsters is definitely not critical race theory. Neither is removing Confederate statues—though at least in that case there’s some connecting thread to reality since Confederate statues often reflect systemic racism and CRT was developed in 1980s legal studies as a way to combat systemic racism. But I suspect Williams doesn’t know that. I’m guessing she heard conservative media pundits repeating claims that progressives had infiltrated public education to promote the belief that white people are born evil. Not only is that idea not CRT, it’s not even an actual belief since no progressive educational policies promote anything like it. So the takeaway: voters such as Williams think Democrats are indoctrinating children with offensive ideas that Democrats don’t actually believe let alone promote. The rebranding of CRT has provided Republicans a fictional but powerful target to channel their anger about Black Lives Matter.

The fictional leap of CRT is nothing compared to Bath voter number three. Elaine Neff displays “images of Mr. Trump as Rambo and the Terminator” in her hardware store, and she attended Trump’s January 6th rally—though she didn’t tell the Times reporters whether she participated in the riot.

So now we have a voter who believes the unsupported and repeatedly debunked claim that the 2020 presidential election was somehow rigged and that Trump was somehow the actual winner. Last month, the Public Religion Research Institute found that two-thirds of Republicans hold this belief. Last May, a PRRI-IFYC survey also found that 28% of Republicans believe “true American patriots may have to resort to violence” to save the country. The new survey puts the number at 30%.

This is Neff’s crowd. She is beyond Hamilton’s merely partisan approach to voting or even Williams’ warped but based-on-a-true-story CRT distortions. Neff celebrates Trump as an iconic action hero embodied by actors Sylvester Stallone or Arnold Schwarzenegger (who, ironically, don’t support Trump). But it gets worse. Neff also believes the FDA-approved coronavirus vaccine is a “poison.” Worse yet: She is “worried that Democrats were planning extermination camps of Mr. Trump’s supporters.”

Wait. What?!

If it sounds like the New York Times concocted a parody article to ridicule Republican voters, consider that the survey mentioned above also found that a sixth of Americans (meaning a third of Republicans) believe the currently Democratic-dominated federal government is controlled by Satan-worshipping, sex-trafficking pedophiles.

How is it possible for anyone, literally anyone, to believe any of these extremist fabrications?

That brings us to Bath voter number four. John Wright said he listens exclusively to “pro-Trump programming” because: “If the media said it, I won’t believe it.”

Wright is far from alone. Though two-thirds of Republicans think Biden somehow rigged the election, the number rises to 82% for those who watch Fox News, and 97% for One America News Network and Newsmax. While 30% of Republicans are okay with violence in the service of conservatives retaking America, the number rises to 40% for those watching Wright’s “pro-Trump programming.” As the Times reports: Bath “voters, fueled by a conservative media bubble that speaks in apocalyptic terms, were convinced that America had been brought to the brink.” Bottom line: many rural Republicans in Virginia believe whatever they want to believe and insulate themselves from hearing anything that might challenge those beliefs.

The reporters spin that by quoting the Democratic former governor of Montana, Steven Bullock, and retiring Illinois Representative Cheri Bustos. Bullock says, “We’ve got a branding problem,” and Bustos says, “Folks don’t feel like we’re offering them anything, or hearing or listening to them.”

Both of those statements are true, but neither comes close to touching the bottom of the Republican deep end. The problem in Bath wasn’t “branding” or not “listening.” Bath voters are evidence that conservative national media stokes and insulates Republican outrage by branding Democrats with insanely offensive lies: Democrats overthrew the last presidential election? Democrats are distributing poisonous vaccines? Democrats think white children are monsters? Democrats are pedophiles? Democrats are Satanists? Democrats are planning extermination camps for Trump supporters?

But when Politico.com asked Youngkin’s top strategists Jeff Roe and Kristin Davison how Youngkin won, they answered: “I think it was a textbook example of the theory that candidate quality matters. We started with a once-in-a-generation talent in Glenn. He’s a genuine guy with a positive, upbeat attitude all the time who really wanted to focus on a positive, unifying campaign.”

After Math: Election 2021

I won’t bother autopsying the polls. On November 1, Youngkin was up about 1%, and on November 2, he won by about 2%, well within any margin of error. Bottom line: poll accuracy collapses whenever Trump is on the ticket, but otherwise they perform just fine.

Local Democrats performed just fine too. Trying to figure out what they could do better next election, I discovered that Democrats actually did a good job getting out the vote in my area. Where McAuliffe underperformed in some other places due to Democratic lethargy, here in Lexington and Rockbridge, Democratic voter turnout increased slightly from the last governor race. Where Northam received a total of 4,135 votes in 2017, McAuliffe received 4,342, for a gain of 207. 

Third candidate Princess Blanding of the newly formed and highly progressive Liberation Party took only 10 votes in Lexington and 38 in Rockbridge, so her presence wasn’t significant. Though if you combine her and McAuliffe’s votes, the total progressive vote inches up to 245. 

But the local GOP did even better getting out their vote. Where GOP governor candidate Ed Gillespie received a total of 5,445 Rockbridge and Lexington votes in 2017, Youngkin received 7,671, for an impressive gain of 2,326.

That’s how Youngkin won. John Domen of WTOP News explains:

“In Southwestern Virginia, which is very rural, Youngkin did well. In each county, Youngkin found a way to add a few hundred votes here, or another thousand votes there. Virginia has 95 counties, and even if many of them aren’t very populated, those votes eventually added up. So when you combine the boost in rural voters with those in the suburbs and exurbs, a red wave just turned Virginia a lot more purple than four years ago.”

At the state level, Northam received 1,409,175 votes in 2017. McAuliffe received 1,588,557. That’s an increase of 179,382. But Youngkin’s 1,660,438 votes beat Northam’s winning total by 251,263.

So 71,881 votes divide Youngkin and McAuliffe. That’s a much smaller divide than when Biden beat Trump by 451,138 a year ago. Trump’s personal lawyer Giuliani claimed the Virginia results were rigged, and Youngkin promised to conduct an audit of the 2020 election as soon as he takes office. Since the 2021 results are now far far closer, will he audit those too?

Regardless, Youngkin got out (much of) the Trump base. In 2020, Trump received 1,962,430 votes, 301,992 more than Youngkin. In comparison, McAuliffe failed to get out as many of the 2,413,568 Virginians who voted for Biden, losing 825,011 of them. A lot of that has to do with Biden’s approval rating—which isn’t as low as Trump’s was, but is still well before 50%. Newsflash: Virginia Democrats aren’t excited by either Biden or McAuliffe.

So how did Youngkin get out so many of the Trump voters?

Currently 66% of Republicans (according to a Yahoo News/YouGov survey in August) still believe the 2020 election was stolen. Youngkin carefully courted those believers, substituting Trump’s belligerent rhetoric with mild-mannered terms like “voter integrity,” which he said was “the most important issue” of the campaign. He never said the election was stolen—but he also didn’t correct any of his surrogates when they made the claim in front of cheering Trump crowds.

A similar number of Republicans (63% according to a Politico-Morning Consult survey in June) believe that so-called Critical Race Theory is a threat to public education. Youngkin courted those folks directly, claiming that CRT (whatever it is, since the definition keeps shifting) was being taught in Virginia schools and promising to put an end to it. One of his last campaign ads featured a conservative activist who has been trying to get Nobel-winning novelist Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer-winning novel Beloved banned from Virginia schools for the last decade because it gave her son nightmares when he read it in AP English.

Those aren’t the worst numbers though. 28% of Republicans (according to a PRRI-IFYC survey from May) believe the Qanon principles that a “storm coming soon” to “sweep away the elites in power and restore the rightful leaders” and “because things have gotten so far off track” “true American patriots may have to resort to violence” to save the country. Even worse, 23% of Republicans believe that “the government, media and financial worlds in the U.S. are controlled by a group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles who run a global child sex-trafficking operation.”

Youngkin didn’t court those Trump voters. He didn’t have to. They’re self-motivating. They are the core of the 2021 Red Wave that swept the Virginia GOP back into power.

So the question facing Democrats for the 2022 mid-terms and 2023 Virginia legislature races: How the hell do you out-motivate a pro-violence voter base who thinks your candidates rape and traffic children while helping Satan achieve world domination by destroying education and rigging elections?

I’ll have to get back to you on that.

Text-ured II

I began this continuation of my Text-ured series before the semester heated up. This time the “text” is the 14,022 words from chapter seven, “Sequenced Image-Texts,” of my book manuscript The Comics Form: The Art of Sequenced Images. Since the last time I posted from this series, the revised manuscript has been officially accepted by Bloomsbury. The final draft is due this week — then the process of copyedits, indexing, etc. begins. This last chapter discusses the ambiguous dividing line begin text-narration and image-narration. Though this series is composed entirely of words, I think each falls pretty clearly into the image half of the divide. But if anyone spots a typo, please let me know.