Worst. Hero. Ever.

There is a hero on the streets of America. A hero we’ve been promised will rise to the occasion, who is our best defense against psychopaths armed with assault rifles and body armor. The vigilant armed citizen, let’s call him NRA man.

Now I don’t know where NRA man is whenever he is needed, only that he is never there. Maybe he’s out in the woods, stumbling around buzzed on cheap beer and stalking Bambi’s mother. Maybe he’s standing in line at a gun show waiting to buy high capacity clips for his semi-automatic rifle. Maybe he’s busy gunning down unarmed kids in Florida, because they certainly make easier targets then his fellow well-armed citizens. But whatever he’s doing he’s certainly not fulfilling the NRA’s promise that well-armed citizens make the rest of us safer.

The biggest problem with NRA man is not that he wants to be a responsible gun owner, it’s that he wants to be a privileged gun owner. Any attempt to regulate his constitutional right to own a gun is somehow an affront to his liberty. He doesn’t just oppose restrictive gun control; he opposes every little bit of gun regulation that might slightly inconvenience him. He doesn’t want to wait 10 or 20 days to allow for more thorough background checks, he needs his goddamned gun today. He doesn’t want to just own a gun or hunting rifle, he needs to have a military grade assault rifle. To NRA man the imposition of any regulation that stands between him and the purchase of his gun is a greater tragedy than the death of 20 children.

Image by mariopiperni.com

While NRA man rarely plays the hero, his paranoia and sense of privilege enables the arming of psychopaths. His obsessive fetishizing of guns and demand for easy access has enabled evil people to be more destructive than they ever could have been on their own. His sad cries that “evil will always find a way,” hardly absolves him of the responsibility he bears for the death of so many. And maybe the time has come to not only create some kind of gun regulation that will at least slow down, if not stop, the next massacre, but to hold NRA man, or at least the organization that represents him, responsible for their false promises.

Late in the last century, when groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center wished to break the power of the Ku Klux Klan and other hate groups, they employed a strategy of civil litigation, suing the Klan for the hate rhetoric that led their members or associates to assault or murder people. Maybe the families of mass shooting victims should employ a similar strategy, suing the NRA for the lobbying activities that have blocked reasonable gun legislation, or for the failure of that oft-repeated promise that well-armed citizens would protect us all. These promises have proven to be nothing more than false advertising. It is not merely a case of reckless free speech that would be protected from legal action, but this declaration has been offered as a warranty, one that has remained unfulfilled. And for that the NRA should be penalized. I’m thinking a $20 billion lawsuit is a good place to start.

December 26th Snow in 2010

IMG_4508, originally uploaded by bahayla.

Never the Twain Shall Meet

Alan Gribben wants you to feel good about reading Mark Twain’s novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The Auburn University Professor, working with the publishing company NewSouth, plans to publish a version of the classic that will replace the word “nigger” (appearing 219 times in the text) with the word "slave." The term “Injun” will also be removed from the book, making us all feel so good about 19^th Century American civilization.

The problem with ‘whitewashing’ Twain’s novel, no matter how good it may make some people feel, or how many readers the new version will attract, is that it considerably reduces the impact of the novel’s message, that racism is a very ugly thing. In the society that Finn (and indeed Twain) grew up, racism, the systematic dehumanization of other human beings, was a way of life. It was foundational to almost every person’s understanding of how that society worked, and by their understanding the natural order of things, ordained by God himself. Twain’s language reflected that reality. Editing that language not only dilutes the narrative, but the perception of the history that it is based on, making it seem somewhat less atrocious than it truly was.

The ultimate adventure of Huck Finn was not some journey down a river full of danger and excitement; it was the journey to discover the humanity of Jim and his own humanity in the process. The most profound moment in all of American literature is that moment when Huck fully realizes the humanity of his enslaved companion and is willing to defy God to give Jim his freedom. This is the story of the nation. It is not a perfect novel (Twain’s characterization of Jim himself is certainly problematic) but it derives a significant portion of its power from the language, language that was authentic and is indeed as offensive as racism should be.

Gribben’s endeavor to ‘sivilize’ Huck Finn is likely to be as successful as that of the Widow Douglas. This new version will attract timid readers who are afraid to face harsh realities, who would have never appreciated the story that Twain was telling in the first place. It may inhabit the same space on the bookshelf as does Twain’s original, but it will by no means be great literature.

Lazy Afternoon

There are two great myths associated with the American Civil War. The first, believed and beloved by the northern states, is that Union fought the conflict to end slavery. The second, cherished in the revisionist halls of southern sympathy, is that the Confederacy was not fighting to maintain the institution of slavery at all, that the southern states were merely standing up for their rights. Both of these myths are supported by incidental facts, and in as much as they are true, they are true.

But they also are just myths.

The Union fought to preserve itself. More specifically the northern states waged a war designed to maintain the economic hegemony of a growing industrial power over the North American continent. That power was contingent on the continued flow of resources into northern factories. Keeping southern cotton fields and other southern resources within the political sphere of influence of northern factory owners was a key motivation for the north’s need to maintain the Union. The end of slavery was largely incidental. Although the power of the Abolitionist movement should not be underestimated, they did not provide the primary motivation for the War of Northern Aggression.

And however fortuitous the result of the war, the necessary and correct end of the brutal and barbarous institution of human slavery, in itself the invasion and occupation of the southern states was a crime against humanity. There was nothing so sacred in this union of states that demanded it be reunited at the cost of so much bloodshed. If the seven original states to secede had been allowed to do so peacefully the next four, including Virginia, probably would have remained in the union. Those states would have likely seen an end to slavery within 10 years. The seven remaining states, increasingly isolated by an international community opposed to slavery and wallowing in the shadow of the economic powerhouse of the United States, would have eventually asked for readmission into the union, and given up slavery to do so. The entire crisis would have been resolved within 20 years with hardly a single life lost, as opposed to the bloody civil war that saw 620,000 causalities. A post slavery south that had not been torn apart by war may have been less prone to racial violence and easier to coax out of segregation, a trade off that might have made the delay in emancipation worth the additional time.

But residents of the southern states should not delude themselves into believing that the Confederacy was some bold and noble example of resistance to tyranny, or that it was motivated more by the ideal of state’s rights than it was by the desire to maintain slavery. The history of the north/south conflict was bound up in the issue of slavery from the founding of the republic, and it was the direct threat that the increasing number free states would vote to end that institution that led to secession and war. Whatever other common cultural and economic interests bound the seceding southern states together in their Confederacy, it was this desire to maintain the right to own other human beings that primarily motivated their secession and maintained their union during the war that followed. And even that was hardly enough to keep the Confederacy together. It was a weak and pathetic union that met resistance from its own citizens in its attempt to wage a successful war. The sole virtue of the entire enterprise was the military genius of Robert E. Lee and the individual valor of many Confederate soldiers. The rest of it was barely maintainable and, as previously observed, would have fallen apart within 20 years.

So on the issue of celebrating these, either a bloody pointless war or a weak mismanaged nation, neither thing would seem worthy of the effort. Better to honor the four hundred years of Southern History, the founding of Jamestown, the House of Burgesses, the literature of Twain or Faulkner, the first flight, the civil rights movement, the launching of Apollo 11, and to recognize the wars (from the Revolution to the surrender at Appomattox), the crime of slavery, the indignity of segregation, the horrors of lynching, as tragedies that deserve to be remembered. But in a month dedicated to remembering the rich history of Virginia and the South, this thing called the Confederacy, this short four year nation, an abject failure by every definition, is only worthy of so much time. In a month celebrating Southern History the whole of the Confederacy is due, at most, a lazy afternoon.