Benjamin Whitmer's Blog, page 37

The Last of the Country Gentlemen

[image error]

I heard the first song I'd ever heard by Josh T. Pearson only a couple of months ago. It was something I stumbled across on YouTube called "Woman, When I've Raised Hell (You're Gonna Know It)." It was one of the greatest single songs I'd ever heard in my life, and I was counting down the days until Pearson's debut album came along.

But then,  it being me, I lost track. Until this morning, when I was reminded by a passing comment about raising hell, and now I have copy. The album is The Last of the Country Gentlemen, and every song on it is as good or better. It's one of those albums that I have the feeling won't be ever too far from me. And though I could sit here and list a great string of adjectives about it, I think instead I'm going to drink some bourbon and listen to it again, pretending like I'm working.

If it wasn't for Slim Cessna's Auto Club's Unentitled, I'd say there was no other music you really needed to buy this year. Which ain't to say there's nothing else good out, there probably is, just that you probably don't really need anything else.

Here's a couple videos. Somehow they don't quite do credit to the whole album this way. The album's something you won't find your way out of without very great effort.

Country Dumb:

[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]

Sweetheart, I Ain't Your Christ:

[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]

Thou Are Loosed:

[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]

Woman, When I've Raised Hell (You're Gonna Know It):

[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]

Framed

I'm not a big fan of the Denver PD. It ain't just their record for brutality, or that they lead the nation in excessive force complaints, or even that they're always vying for first place in the nation for fatal shootings. It's that they lie, over and over again. And their latest lie is pretty incredible, even for them.

It started on Friday May 6th, when a number of local anarchists and hell raisers — in the best possible sense of the term — took to the streets in protest of the police murder of Marvin Booker. According to the Denver Post, one young lady by the name of Amelia Nicol allegedly took it upon herself to hurl "a Molotov cocktail" at a couple of cops in a patrol car. (Also described by Denver's CBS 4 as a "homemade explosive device," and 9NEWS as an "incendiary device.")

Sounds pretty scary, right? And as you can imagine, Ms. Nicol is facing some pretty serious charges. From Denver Anarchist Black Cross, they are:

- Two counts of attemped murder (Felony 2)

- Use of explosives (Felony 2)

- Possession of explosives (Felony 4)

- Second-degree arson (Felony 4)

- Criminal mischief (Felony 4)

- Inciting a riot (Felony 5)

- Two counts of attemped third-degree assault (Misdeamenor 2)

- Resisting arrest (Misdeamenor 2)

All in all, she looks to be facing 90 years in prison. Which, I suppose, might be arguable if she'd thrown a Molotov cocktail at the cops.

But she didn't.

I wasn't there, but I've talked to a number of people who saw the incident in question, and they're all telling me the same thing: what was thrown was a firecracker.

If you'd like a visual representation, West Denver Copwatch has been kind enough to provide one.

And, lest we forget, the "victims" of this attack were, as reported in every single source I can find, in their patrol car.

Now, I know that cops around here are not exactly world renowned for their courage, but I submit that throwing a firecracker at two cops inside a cop car doesn't exactly rise to attempted murder.

But it doesn't have to. What it does do is send a message to those who are getting a little sick of watching Denver's citizenry get brutalized with impunity: No matter what we do to you, don't even thinking about protesting. Because if you do, we will trump up a reason to put you away for a very, very long time.

Anyway, if you'd like to help Ms. Nicol, there are three ways to best do so according to Denver Anarchist Black Cross:

1) Write to Amelia! Send her letters, cards, photos, jokes, stories, etc…

Letters may be addressed to:

Amelia Nicole CD# 0000762401

Denver County Jail

PO Box 1108

Denver, CO 80201

Please see mail regulations here, and note that Denver ABC has already sent a package of envelopes, paper, and stamps.

2) Write a letter to Denver District Attorney Mitch Morrissey and demand that the charges against Amelia be dropped immediately!

Denver DA Mitch Morrissey

201 W. Colfax #801

Denver, CO 80202

Or call him at: 720-913-9000

3) Donate to Amelia's phone fund.

Send checks or money orders made out to P&L Printing to:

Denver ABC

2727 W. 27th Ave Unit D

Denver, CO 80211

And you should do so. Because this is the kind of shit that DPD can't be allowed to slide by us. And because you don't throw a twenty-year-old girl in prison for 90 fucking years for throwing a firecracker.

A few random Joe Bageant quotes and a song

Thinking about Joe Bageant again, and thought I'd post a few quotes from Deer Hunting with Jesus that I particularly liked. And, don't say I never did nothing for you, an outtake from M.A. Littler's mighty Kingdom of Survival, Bageant playing a song called "Hemingway's Whiskey."

Quotes first:

On the history of what Bageant calls "Borderers." I.e., those Scots-Irish immigrants who've done most of the heavy lifting in the creation of the American Empire, and always seem to be first on the front line to get their asses blown away for somebody else's pocketbook.

Speaking of cabins, given the unceasing looting, burning, and moving, the Borderers built impermanent earth and log dwellings called "cabbins." Within their smoky confines they lived a quick-tempered, hard-drinking, volatile lifestyle, one that anthropologists say is still evident in some American trailer courts today. So the next time you see one of us drunkenly kicking in a neighbor's car door in a trailer court parking lot at 1 a.m., try to remember: That's not a brawl you're witnessing, it's cultural diversity.

And:

We rural and small-town mutt people seem by an early age to have a special capacity for cruelty. For instance, as a child did you ever put a firecrack up a toad's ass and light it? George W. Bush and I have that in common. As nonwhites the world round understand, white people can be mean, especially if they feel threatened–and they feel threatened about everything these days. But when you provide a certain species of white mutt people with the right incentives, such as approval from God and government, you get things like lynchings, Fallujah, the Birmingham bombers. You get Abu Ghraib.

On self-expression in consumer culture:

The difficulties of self-expression having been neatly eliminated through standardization, adult yokels and urban sophisticates can choose from a preselected array of possible selves based solely on what they like to see, eat, wear, hear, and drive. Your baby can wave from her $400 car seat in the Volvo, perhaps drawing an observer close enough to see the "Pacifist's Pledge" imprinted on her 100 percent hemp T-shirt. When enough of your own kind coagulate around nothing, you have a "lifestyle" on your hands. If nothing jells around your own assembled coolness, then you join some larger lifestyle. A thousand magazines give directions how to do it: Elle, Savvy Senior, Today's Black Woman, Trailer Life, Harper's Bazaar, Cabin Life, Town and Country, and, for the affluent, Grand (a magazine for well-heeled grandparents), not to mention good ole High Times.

Now the song:

[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]

Colorado Supreme Court to hear Ward Churchill's appeal for CU job

Great news. A little more than two years ago Ward Churchill won a lawsuit against the University of Colorado for their violation of his First Amendment rights. In court, Ward Churchill proved that CU fired him because he said things local politicians didn't like, and they threatened to cut CU's budget and applied political pressure until CU trumped up a reason to fire him. But Judge Naves vacated the verdict for what look to be pretty strange reasons.

Well, now it looks like the Colorado Supreme Court is taking up Ward Churchill's appeal. And if you're a fan of free speech, it looks like a winner. From Westword:

As you'll recall, CU looked into Churchill's scholarship following publicity surrounding an essay he wrote post-9/11 in which he compared victims of the terrorist attacks to "little Eichmanns" — and after finding areas of concern, the university's regents fired him. Churchill responded by suing the school for violating his First Amendment rights in retaliation for his essay, and he won — the jury awarded him one dollar in damages. But Judge Larry Naves slapped down his request for reinstatement, ruling that CU had the right to give him the heave-ho — and the Colorado Court of Appeals agreed.

After this defeat, Lane appealed to the Colorado Supreme Court, with his filing focusing on three questions:

1) Can an investigation into his writings and speeches if motivated by retaliation for First Amendment protected speech (Churchill's 9/11 essay) amount to a free-standing First Amendment violation?2) Should the Regents have been given quasi-judicial immunity from suit?

3) Can equitable relief (Churchill gets his job back) be given even if the Regents got quasi-judicial immunity from suit?

Lane hoped one of these topics would stick — and he says he's floored that all of them made the cut.

​"They're the only issues we asked the court to take a look at, and they've agreed to hear all of them, which is extremely unusual," he maintains. "First of all, granting cert is really unusual. But if they do grant cert, they'll usually do it on one or maybe two issues. Three is really uncommon."

The rest.

If you don't know much about the case, here's a great documentary:

[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]

And here's another that Liz Garbus created for HBO called Shouting Fire: Stories from the Edge of Free Speech.

Part one:

[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]

Part two:

[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]

Part three:

[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]

Part four:

[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]

Part five:

[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]

The Conversion of Carne Muerto — The hits keep coming

So there's been a couple of really great blog posts about the ongoing scuffle over my review of James Reasoner's story "The Conversion of Carne Muerto" in On Dangerous Ground: Stories of Western Noir that I want to link to. I'm still responding to all comers, and the comments have slowed a little, but certainly not abated.

One recurring theme I've noticed in the comments was best expressed by Gary Dobbs, who writes Westerns under the name Jack Martin. In his words, "There are atrocities committed by both the whites and the Indians. Ditto both sides have broken treaties and gone back on their word." That's a sentiment I've heard expressed a couple of times in the thread, and I've got a real problem with it. I addressed it at length in the comments, and thought I'd gussy it up some and repeat it here.

I find the moral equivalency in that statement unconvincing at best. In a census taken around the turn of the 20th century, there were 237,000 Indians left alive in North America. And this from a population that's estimated to have been somewhere between 12 and 25 million, according to current scholarship. That's one of the greatest demographic disasters in the history of the world, with entire peoples wiped from the face of the planet.

Of course, there were many causes of this, but one primary cause was a Euro-American military tradition of extirpative warfare that ran all the way back to the 17th century, and was adopted by the US military. A great resource on that is military historian John Grenier's The First Way of War.

And, yeah, there were cases where Indian nations broke treaties. Usually under duress, or in response to treaties made under duress. But the US broke every single one of the 371 treaties it made. Not some, not even most, every single one.  (As a side note, every single violation of a treaty was a violation of the US Constitution, as Vine Deloria Jr. reminds us in his Tribes, Treaties and Constitutional Tribulations. That's something I never hear the Tea Party bringing up when they're doing their song and dance. I'll take them a little more serious when they start supporting the efforts of, say, The Western Shoshone Defense Project.)

Likewise, it's worth remembering the near total loss of land by American Indians. This was not a matter of two cultures meeting each other and learning to live together. This was the near complete divestment of land, resources, and sovereignty imposed by one culture on another.

So, yes, I agree that there were Indians who did horrible things. But a recent commenter, History Buff, did a much better job than I could of summing up why that's irrelevant:

All this dither about whether an Indian was "ever" guilty of rape, murder, or both, requires only a minor reframing to be understood for what it is.

We can be absolutely certain that at some point some Comanche raped and/or murdered a white woman. So what?

It is equally certain that at some point, a Jew did the same to a German woman. Again, so what?

Whatever offenses were committed by individual Comanches or Jews against individual settlers or Germans can in no sense be construed as being the "equivalent" of what was done by settlers and Germans to American Indians and Jews.

Less still, do the offenses at issue serve to justify or legitimate the policies of extermination carried out against the targeted groups by the Germans and the U.S. settler population.

Literature devoted to showcasing rape and other crimes committed by individual members of groups upon whom genocide has been inflicted, even when real and even more when they're invented, serve no other purpose other than to provide psycho-emotional justification of genocide for the perpetrator population.

There is, as you so aptly pointed out, Mr. Whitmer, a lengthy and ongoing tradition of precisely this sort of literary output in the U.S.

I was going to say that one does not find a counterpart in German letters, but that wouldn't be quite accurate.

German literary depictions of Jews under the Third Reich were quite comparable to those still prevailing in the U.S. with regard to Indians.

So, to the links. Barry Graham wrote the following excellent response to the review and ensuing conversation over at his place.

Benjamin Whitmer wrote a review for Spinetingler magazine of a short story by James Reasoner. Whitmer saw the story as being in the genre of "Indian-hating" literature.

I read Reasoner's story today, and I think Whitmer was too kind to it. It is certainly racist (its entire premise is that Native Americans are intellectually and morally inferior to white people), but it is terrible in every other aspect too; the prose is clotted with cliches, the characters are shallower than stereotypes, and the outcome is over-the-top and predictable. If it were the work of a teenager taking a creative writing class, it would be disappointing; coming from a published author who is held in high regard by a number of readers, it is shocking.

The rest.

And Sandra Ruttan also wrote an insightful piece about the hubbub for the crime blog Do Some Damage.

I had a dream the other night that Laura Lippman tried to kill me. That's about as noir as it gets, when someone as nice and warm as Laura could be a villain. I mean, if you can't trust Laura, you better live with your back to a wall.

At the time, it just seemed like one of those bizarre things, born out of a combination of odd thoughts that included driving through Federal Hill, talking to someone about The Wire, and the sobering reality we've had to deal with at school, with one of our students recently being shot and killed. Under normal circumstances, I'd prefer not to have my two lives collide on the blog here. But this will be relevant later, and that's why I am including the link.

The rest.

Here's hoping everybody had a good weekend.

Quote

I post this from time to time, and now's the time to post it again, I figure, as I just read Stephen Blackmoore's wonderful piece at his L.A. Noir blog. From Woody Guthrie:

About the only thing I ever learned in school was speed typing. All that stuff in books is second hand, I thought. Writin's no profession for a man these days. With all these poor folks wandering around the country as homeless as little doggies, what I should do is strop on a couple of six-shooters and blow open the doors of the bank and feed people and give them houses. The only reason I don't do that is because I ain't got the guts.

The Conversion of Carne Muerto Redux

So, it seems my review has ignited a bit of an internet firestorm. Which is, of course, what you hope for in a review of that type: that it gets folks talking about a subject. Well, it has, and if you're bored, there's all kinds of comments here. I'm doing my damnedest to answer everybody who's not a blatant troll without saying too many stupid things. I think I'm doing all right, but judge for yourself. In the immortal words of Jedidiah Ayres, panties have certainly twisted sharp-like.

Chris La Tray probably has the most reasoned breakdown of events thus far, which I strongly encourage you to read.

The excrement really isn't slowing it's assault on the oscillating device as it relates to my friend Benjamin Whitmer's review for Spinetingler Magazine of the James Reasoner story, "The Conversion of Carne Muerto," from the new anthology called On Dangerous Ground: Stories of Western Noir from Cemetary Dance Publications. If you recall, this whole bru-ha-ha inspired my recent post on what issues maybe fire you up as a reader, or movie watcher, or anything along those lines.

The debate around the story is that Whitmer calls it out as belonging to a certain type rooted in what he calls the "Indian hater" tradition. He then does a pretty thorough job of identifying the hallmarks of that tradition, and how they have perpetuated several myths as it relates to Whites vs. Indian interactions in American history. He does this as explanation for the reasons he doesn't like the story. There are strong political and cultural emotions at play here, and Ben doesn't pull any punches. It's generated a lot of heat and hot air, in many cases from people who haven't read the story, and probably haven't even thought that much about how Indians have been treated in literature or movies.

Happily I was able to acquire a copy of the story, and have the hardcover edition of the anthology headed my way. Having read the story now, if I must make a cold, emotionless evaluation, I'd say Whitmer is right, for all the reason's he's given. Whitmer's primary argument is that this is a story that's a pretty note-for-note take on the tradition as he outlines it, and really does nothing to bring anything new to the trope. Frankly, that assessment is spot on, if one chooses to view it in that light.

But that doesn't mean he hasn't earned a fair amount of the anger that's been thrown at him.

The rest.

Since we're talking about western noir, by the way, don't miss Jedidiah Ayres' column on the subject over at the BN Mystery Blog. He has all kinds of great recommendations, including several near and dear to my heart. One particularly so.

The Conversion of Carne Muerto

Brian Lindenmuth of Spinetingler Magazine asked me not too long ago to review a story in an anthology entitled On Dangerous Ground: Stories of Western Noir for another of their epic review projects. And I tried really hard. But instead I ended up with a 3,000 word essay on the metaphysics of Indian hating. Go figure.

When I got the email from Brian Lindenmuth asking me to take part in a group review of the stories in a western noir anthology, I'll admit I got pretty excited. Those are two things near and dear to my heart, and I could think of all kinds of interesting avenues for this hybrid genre to take.

Then I read the story assigned me, "The Conversion of Carne Muerto," by James Reasoner. And that excitement died real quick, as I realized it was a minor variation of one of the ugliest stories in American literary history: that of the Indian hater. And that I was gonna have to explain exactly why I disliked this story so thoroughly, and that it was gonna take me a lot of words.

Following, I give it a shot. I hope you'll bear with me. Most of the information has been ripped off whole-hog from Richard Slotkins' Regeneration through Violence and Gunfighter Nation, Richard Drinnon's Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire-Building, and Gary Clayton Anderson's The Conquest of Texas: Ethnic Cleansing in the Promised Land. Hopefully I reworded and condensed everything enough to avoid the plagiarism charges I'm sure I deserve.

The rest.

Quote

Actually, a few of them. From this Paris Review interview with Jim Harrison.

On suicide:

A metaphor isn't a free lunch, and you get the kind of metaphor that keeps you alive not that often. Sometimes you have to stay alive merely because you are alive. Of course, people commit suicide in a state of derangement where they don't realize that this is the last chance—they're not quite aware of it at the time. It seems a temporary measure.

On writer's block:

I wonder, when a writer's blocked and doesn't have any resources to pull himself out of it, why doesn't he jump in his car and drive around the U.S.A.? I went last winter for seven thousand miles and it was lovely. Inexpensive, too. A lot of places—even good motels—are only twenty-five dollars in the winter, and food isn't much because there aren't any good restaurants. You pack along a bunch of stomach remedies and a bottle of whiskey.

On history:

It's amazing to me, for instance, how few people know anything about nineteenth-century American history. They don't know what happened to the hundred civilizations represented by the American Indian. That's shocking. I'm dealing with that in this book. To me, the Indians are our curse on the house of Atreus. They're our doom. The way we killed them is also what's killing us now. Greed. Greed. It's totally an Old Testament notion but absolutely true. Greed is killing the soul-life of the nation. You can see it all around you. It's destroying what's left of our physical beauty, it's polluting the country, it's making us more Germanic and warlike and stupid.

On advice for young writers:

Just start at page one and write like a son of a bitch. Be totally familiar with the entirety of the Western literary tradition, and if you have any extra time, throw in the Eastern. Because how can you write well unless you know what passes for the best in the last three or four hundred years? And don't neglect music. I suspect that music can contribute to it as much as anything else. Tend to keep distant from religious, political, and social obligations. And I would think that you shouldn't give up until it's plainly and totally impossible. Like the Dostoyevskian image—when you see the wall you're suppose to put your hands at your sides and run your head into it over and over again. And finally I would warn them that democracy doesn't apply to the arts. Such a small percentage of people get everything and all the rest get virtually nothing.

The rest.

Quote

From "Drinking and Driving," one of my favorite essays in the world, from William Kittredge's Owning it All. I need a couple days of this, and when I finally get done with the project I'm working on, I plan on taking them.

Early on all I need is the music, and the motion of going, and some restraint. It always seems like a good idea, those mornings up along the Blackfoot, to stop at Trixie's Antler Inn just as the doors are being unlocked. One drink for the road and some banter with the hippie girl tending bar.

But wrong.

After the first hesitation, more stopping at other such establishments is inevitable. And quite enjoyable, one after another. The Wheel Inn on the near outskirts of Lincoln, Bowmans Corner over south of Augusta, with the front of the Rockies rearing on the western skyline like purity personified.

Soon that fine blue bowl of heaven and your exquisite freedom are forgotten and you are talking to strangers and to yourself. No more Vivaldi. It's only noon, and you are playing Hank Williams tapes and singing along, wondering if you could have made it in the country music business. By now you are a long and dangerous way from home and somewhat disoriented. The bartenders are studying you like a serious problem.

You have drifted into another mythology, called lonesome traveling and lost highways, a place where you really don't want to be on such a fine spring day. Once, it seems like pure release to learn that you could vote with your feet, that you could just walk away like a movie star. Or, better yet, load your gear in some old beater pickup truck and drive. Half an hour, the vainglorious saying went, and I can have everything on rubber. Half an hour, and I'll be rolling. You just watch, little darling.

For some of us, the consequences of such escape tended to involve sitting alone with a pint of whiskey in some ancient motel room where the television does not work. The concept was grand and theatrical, but doing it, getting away, was oftentimes and emotional rat's nest of rootlessness. Country music, all that worn-out drifter syncopation, turned out to be another lie, a terrific sport but a real thin way of life.

So, some rules for going alone: forget destinations; go where you will, always planning to stay overnight. Stop at historical markers, and mull over the ironies of destiny as you drive on. By now you are listening to bluegrass, maybe a tape from a Seldom Scene concert. And you are experiencing no despair.

Think of elk in the draws, buffalo on the plains, and the complex precision of predator-prey relationships. Be interesting, and love your own company. There is no need to get drunk and kill someone on the road. Quite soon enough it will be twilight, and you can stop in some little town, check in at one of the two motels along the river, amble down to the tavern, and make some new friends. Such a pretty life.