I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that the most brilliant entertainment performance I have ever seen was Margo Martindale’s turn as the villainess Mags Bennet in the recently concluded second season of the FX television show “Justified.” The climactic scene in the season opener, in which Mags poisons a neighbor who has crossed her and then sits there casually chatting with him as he dies, as if she were merely euthanizing a pet who needed to be put down, practically had me falling on the floor in amazement. I had forgotten that television could be this good.

The role broadens and deepens over the course of the season, showing how Mags’s warm, nurturing qualities co-exist with her murderous inclinations, and presenting her as a heroine to her small, tightly-knit Appalachian community when a smoothly polished strip-mining company executive oozes into town with her slick corporate routine. It’s refreshing to see moral complexity explored with such intelligence and depth. This is the first DVD I can think of that I’ll probably rush out and buy as soon as it’s released. Martindale is up for a best supporting actress Emmy, and I can scarcely imagine someone more deserving. I am so glad to see this level of quality work being infused into our fractious cultural mix.

Many years ago, Alice Walker published an essay with the title “Only Justice Can Stop a Curse.” It opens with an old curse-prayer that the writer Zora Neale Hurston came across in the 1920s, and is probably the most powerful example I’ve ever come across of language used as a tool of fury. On behalf of women of color around the globe, Walker turns the full force of her rage against “the white man’s crimes against humanity.” Only at the end does she let up, with an invocation of the delight of fresh peaches as a reason to greet each new day and keep going.

At some point, I became more concerned with the idea of articulating a constructive way forward than with dwelling on the sins of the past. This is not to diminish the latter, just a recognition that, sooner or later, one faces a choice of either wallowing in unhappiness or taking steps to change the causes of the unhappiness.  Life is a rushing river. The past cannot be undone, but working to bring justice is always worthwhile. The trick lies in recognizing and appreciating reasonable acts of justice, because they will always change with the eye of the beholder. Circa 2011, it simply doesn’t work to ascribe crimes against humanity to “white men” as a unified class of people. But that doesn’t change the power of Walker’s example of how to really let rip when the mood strikes. Different arenas.

Anyway, in that light, I was glad to read yesterday that a federal judge on Monday approved a $3.4 billion settlement against the U.S. government, to be paid to Indian tribes who were cheated out of royalties owed for various land use leases over the course of more than a century. Our government’s treatment of Native Americans is one of the more sordid chapters in our nation’s history, and this is an important step that should be noted as such.

I went with my son to Richmond, Virginia last week, among other things to visit the Museum and White House of the Confederacy. Walking around an older neighborhood afterwards, I found myself repeatedly drawn to brick buildings that had clearly been partially rebuilt after the Civil War. The skeletal frames of buildings standing amidst the destruction of Richmond are among the iconic images of the war’s end. Some of these bricks have known fire. The seams where the newer portions were added on are obvious. It was a powerful reminder that 150 years really isn’t all that long a time.

“If we appear to seek the unattainable, it has been said, then let it be known that we do so to avoid the unimaginable.” — Tom Hayden

The Port Huron Statement of the Students For a Democratic Society

8/1/02, Ponferrada, Spain — I arrived here in Ponferrada this morning and am seeing the sights and resting for the rest of the day. They have the most spectacular castle that I’ve seen so far in Spain here, but of course right now it’s closed for siesta time.

Yesterday I climbed to the top of the mountain, then spent the night at the monastery there. This was only about 40 km of forward progress, but the mountain was 1500 meters high so it was a lot of work. There is an old iron cross on top of a pile of rocks on the mountain that I didn’t know about until some other pilgrims told me about it. All you have to do is visit this place and you are officially sinless. Of course, I have never committed any sins in my lifetime, or for that matter ever even had any impure thoughts. But now that I have visited the iron cross, which looks like it was built for Kaiser Wilhelm and flown to Spain by the Red Baron, I will get an official document from the top-level hierarchy of the Roman clergy for Spain stating that I am without any doubt officially and irrevocably without sin. Before this, people just took my word for it that I am totally without sin and have never ever had any impure thoughts. Now I will have documentary proof!

I now have only 207 km left on my holy crusade and I think this will take four or five days. There are still some hills to climb, but I think that yesterday’s was the hardest.

This morning I finally got some cold weather for a welcome change. I only coasted 20 km downhill to town after being awakened at an ungodly hour by the mad monk, but I almost froze my sacred holy butt off on the way down from the top of the mountain.

The newspaper also says that it is raining to the west of here, which will be a nice change from all the heat we’ve been having. Near León, the pilgrims were dropping off like flies.

Siesta time is over now and I just took a break from letter writing to see the castle. That is a very impressive pile of rocks! Anyone who has ever even carried a couple of heavy stones just from one side of his back yard to the other would be totally in awe.

If only the South could have motivated their slaves as well as the people that built that castle, the damn yankees never would have won the Civil War. If this had happened, then there probably never would have been WW1, WW2, the Korean War, Viet Nam or Sept.11, there would be peace and prosperity throughout the world, the Dow Jones average would be over 100,000 and the Dodgers would have won the series for the last 20 years.

But enough for the history lesson. It’s almost dinner time, and I want to get some sleep and an early start tomorrow as it looks like it’s going to be hot again.

Talk to ya later

St. William the Sinless

Castillo de los Templarios. Ponferrada, León, España.
Fotografia por Alejandro Bolado (bolado@yahoo.com)

7/29/02, León, Spain – I arrived here in León yesterday, and now have to pedal only a little over 300 km more to achieve sainthood. Unfortunately, there are a lot of big hills, over 1500 meters high, between here and Santiago. Hopefully, I will get there in a week or so. I’m going to take the day off here to rest and see the sights, then get back on my holy crusade in the morning.

The weather has been VERY hot for the last week. I haven’t seen a thermometer, but the temperature must have been over 100 degrees Farenheit in the afternoons. I’ve been getting up early and pedaling as fast and far as possible before noon. Around here, only an occasional mad dog or Englishman will go out of the shade after 12:00.

Spain still is not as pretty as the rural parts of France I’ve seen, except for the old cathedrals, which are something you have to see to appreciate. I’m taking a lot of pictures, but somehow photos just don’t capture the atmosphere. It really irritates me and injures my sense of national pride when I think that if the damn Yankees hadn’t freed the slaves, the Baptists in America would have had even more magnificent cathedrals than these foreign Catholics.

I still have over six weeks before I have to go back to being intimidated by the Mexican kindergartners and pimply faced, purple haired, underachieving potential Rhodes scholars. This is something I am really not looking forward to.

After visiting the sewage museum, writing subversive poetry on the subway wall in Paris and going on a holy crusade for Jesus, I feel like I have seen and done it all, or at least almost all. I still haven’t had the opportunity to burn a protestant at the stake, denounce a witch or slay a moor, but it is still a long way to Santiago. Maybe I will get to do this too.

The Virginia state legislature is gestating a proposal to amend the U.S. Constitution so individual states would have the right to opt out of federal laws they don’t wish to abide by, subject to a 2/3 vote of the state legislature. Eric Cantor, a cocky idiot who will be House Majority Leader in the new Congress, is urging everyone to keep an open mind about this. Phew! Once the floodgates in the mind open up to the lure of delusional revisionism, there’s simply no going back.

It’s actually fitting, given that the sesquicentennial (great word!) of the Civil War is fast approaching, that this subject be given a public airing. Back in the day, the idea of secession was romanticized from a leftist/environmentalist standpoint in Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia, which posited an ecological utopia formed when Northern California, Oregon and Washington split off from the United States to create a separate nation. It was a fun fantasy, but one that I outgrew a long time ago.

Don’t these people have enough to do? We really don’t want to re-litigate the Civil War. Abraham Lincoln was passionate about holding the Union together, and slavery was a secondary concern. I know there are many people who prefer not to examine that too closely, but it’s the truth. Our radical experiment in the ideal of liberty and justice for all has made great progress in the past 150 years. We need people in positions of power doing the ongoing heavy lifting required to engage constructively with the major issues of the day. We don’t need lightweights who prefer to sulk when they don’t get their own way and waste a bunch of time indulging in escapist fantasies.

I went to a small gathering/book signing this morning with a Berkeley writer named Adrienne McDonnell, whose first novel, The Doctor & the Diva, has recently been published to critical acclaim. The book, about a woman’s painful struggle between the desire to have a family and a deeply rooted need to pursue an artistic career, is based on a true story as revealed in a series of family letters from the early 1900s. The author was delightful and inspiring in telling her personal story, and she graciously encouraged the assembled group of writers (all women of a certain age) to always nurture and have faith in the creative spark within.

Inevitably, the letters and papers in my own file cabinet have resumed attempts to ensnare me with their siren song. Several years ago, I discovered a veritable treasure trove amongst papers I had inherited after my parents died. My grandfather, who was full of Southern charm and had a gift of gab to match, in his elder years wrote a series of letters to one of his brothers recounting, among other things, the stories their grandmother had told during their boyhood of life during the Civil War era. One of the letters narrates how she was alone at home in central Georgia with her two small children (the younger was my great-grandfather; her husband was away fighting for the Confederacy) when General Sherman’s army came to the door.

I get chills just writing this, and want to drop everything else I have to do today and begin reading through these papers and organizing them. They’re going to have to wait a bit longer, but it’s a priority. I have some items of real silver that have been passed down from my forebears, but this material is bright, shining gold.

NOTES ON THE RIVERS OF ALABAMA

100. This is the native name of a river now known as the Big Warrior or Black Warrior. The great chieftain of the Tuscaloosa tribe of Indians was killed on the banks of this river in 1540 in battle with the Spaniards under De Soto. The slain leader was a warrior with a very black skin; and in consequence of the fact he was referred to by the white Europeans as the “black, black warrior,” this name appearing on the oldest English maps of the country. The title of the tribal chieftain came from the native name of the river.

The term for river in the word is in the expression “Loosa,” which owes its origin to the ancient term for water “Ousa” and the germ-word “Li,” the flowing. There are many striking facts connected with the term “Tusca,” seen in this Alabama name. It is found originally in the prehistoric names of our waters only in a narrow belt of latitude stretching from the shores of the Atlantic, where the old Tuscarora Indians had their hunting-grounds, to Arizona, where it ends, the last apparent survival in the name written in the Spanish idiom Tucson. There are so many evidences of the Roman knowledge possessed by the ancient aborigines of the continent that it has been conjectured that the word “Tusca” seen in the native American nomenclature is reproduced from the ancient Latin name Tusca, which once applied to the Roman province now known as Tuscany. The word appears to have been left in the New World by some early explorers and colonists, and as the memorial of their fatherland.

From time immemorial it has been customary for new colonists in virgin countries to fix in the nomenclature of the country some memento or testimonial of the ancestral home or the ancestral tongue. The migrations of the ancient Celts and Moors, and various other peoples, have been followed and traced over the Old World simply by the shreds of their tongue left in the prehistoric nomenclature of different regions. In like manner the old French and Dutch and Spanish and German colonists of this continent have left mementoes of the mother tongue in every locality where their influence was long felt. The term “Tusca” has some curious connections. Tusca-ora means literally a native or inhabitant of Tusca. The Tuscarora Indians were said to be “shirt-wearers.” Possibly the ancient garments brought from the fatherland gave rise to the tradition.

From The Rhyme of the Southern Rivers: With Notes Historical, Traditional, Geographical, Etymological, etc. by Martin V. Moore, published in 1897.

Several years ago, in a wide-ranging conversation with cousins in the South about politics, faith, culture and so on, I realized that when push came to shove I was more alarmed about leftist pathology than right wing extremism.  Like guardians of the watchtowers, our respective concerns were regionally based.  Right wing militants have a base of power in the South that they lack out here on the Left Coast, whereas the reverse is true for left wing agitators.  Context is key.

These days, I’m struck on multiple fronts by the ideological parallels between the political fringes on either side.  In some mythical society, we’re entitled to a peaceful way of life that will magically materialize once we vanquish the monster that has taken over our country… Scratch the surface, and you learn that government is both the monster itself and the agent through which the monster will supposedly be vanquished.  Maybe this makes sense if you believe in cloud cuckoo land as a real place, but it’s otherwise mystifying.

Yesterday, Alabama Tea Partier Rick Barber was defeated in a GOP congressional primary runoff.  I found his first outrageous political ad rather amusing from a political theater standpoint, but the latest one is a little too creepy for my tastes.  A scene from “Cabaret” immediately jumped to mind.  The melding of politics (to say nothing of news reporting) with the tactics and objectives of the entertainment business has been taken to logical extremes in recent years, and the novelty is wearing off.  There’s a serious discussion to be had on how the boundary between free speech and incitement to riot should be defined in a free society.

Absent any consensus on that (and none seems to be on the horizon), I tend to rely on historical context and maintaining a sense of humor as useful guardrails when the landscape gets rough.