I am a native of the South.  Born and raised in Memphis, TN.  A cursory glance at Wikipedia should confirm that my life is about as steeped in Southern heritage and history as anyone’s can be.  I have seldom thought much about it.  It was just there.  But recent events have driven my cultural heritage out into the open and is spilling out of my TV with increasing frequency and intensity.  It has been given voice by many people invoking “Southern heritage” on all sides of the controversy surrounding the mounting trend of removing State-sponsored Confederate monuments from public spaces that is sweeping across environsRead More →

  This modest, albeit gruesome excerpt from the exhaustively footnoted Equal Justice Initiative’s Report requires no contextualizing for current relevancy, as it speaks entirely on its own to the shared cultural history of modern Southerners, who include black compatriots that are descendants of slaves and Jim Crow survivors. Every persistently unacknowledged aspect and shameful chapter of that ostensibly inviolable cultural history is presently enshrined in State-consecrated monuments to iconic defenders of the vanquished Confederacy; but they popularly commemorate its subsequent pogroms of racial subjugation. As to what lies below, I will only preface it by saying: Please deliver me unto the tender mercies of anRead More →

With the athletic grace of a vintage Michael Jordan lay-up, the president strode past the foul line to slam-dunk all of his 63 million voters into the basket of Nazi deplorables.  After 23 excruciating minutes of hang time on the rim, he dropped down, then pirouetted backstage like a confected ballerina princess to deliver an “oh, by the way” plug for his winery in Charlottesville, which I presume will feature highly marketable grapes hand-picked by bonified hands of the Master Race. Who’s Heather Heyer?  And whatever she’s saying about me is a lie. Equivocating Republicans, whom the Tea party specifically elected to do nothing, asRead More →

A Rorschach test of sorts; art worth a thousand words of introspection for all oppressed white males who find introspection to be so……oppressive.      Southern trees bear strange fruit Blood on the leaves and blood at the root Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees Pastoral scene of the gallant south The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh Then the sudden smell of burning flesh Here is fruit for the crows to pluck For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck For the sun to rot, for the treesRead More →

I decided to take a month off from this. Every now and then, one must give ones’ self a break from the bullshit….. Trying to keep up with trump’s daily slights against humanity can be demoralizing. —Imbecile.     “The rain continued. It was a hard rain, a perpetual rain, a sweating and steaming rain; it was a mizzle, a downpour, a fountain, a whipping at the eyes, an undertow at the ankles; it was a rain to drown all rains and the memory of rains. It came by the pound and the ton, it hacked at the jungle and cut the trees like scissorsRead More →

During the Obama years I pointed out the right wing’s indiscriminate and wholesale destruction of anyone who was so unfortunate as to wander – however briefly or haplessly – into close orbital proximity of the Kenyan usurper and black anti-Christ. There was the Obama/Charlie Crist welcome-to-Florida hug which spurred conservatives into freakout mode, costing Crist a subsequent Senate race and erasing forever the capital (R) behind his name.  And lest we forget; there’s the handshake and hand-on-shoulder embrace between Gov. Chris Christie and the President, arriving at the Newark airport to tour Jersey Shore’s Hurricane Sandy devastation, which sent the GOP base into conniptions.  Christie’sRead More →

  “There are individuals who are so toxic that their presence threatens us all. They self-identify by their *conduct.* And we cannot protect ourselves from monsters by calling them by another name.” — Andrew Vachss   June 12, 2016 — one year ago today. In his final act as a member of the human race, a deeply disturbed version of George Zimmerman (Yes…I said it) fatally attacks an Orlando LGBT nightclub on Latino Night, achieving an historic body count using a military assault rifle that he recently purchased as effortlessly as a pack of cigarettes.  And until the very moment he pulled the trigger heRead More →

Looks like we are in for another busy news day. Ever since word got out that somebody’s President invited Russian envoys and a TASS press crew into the Oval Office for a cordial chin-wag and an impromptu peek into his classified scrapbook of “awesome U.S. intelligence,” things have gotten–shall we say—a bit fucked up out here. The National Weather Service has upgraded the trump administration to a Category 5 hurricane. Mandatory evacuation orders are in effect. NORAD is at Defcon 2 and closing the blast doors at Cheyenne Mountain. Airline flight attendants are shouting a looped chorus of: “Brace! Brace! Heads down; stay down!” atRead More →

“Right now we’re up against a wall.  The country is in crisis.  We have a fool, who knows nothing about nothing, running the country…. Right now, we’re under siege.   Fix Bayonets!” —James Carville on November 20, 2016 Carville was addressing an audience at Miami-Dade College, just two weeks into the trump transition.  His next words were these: “Our problem is that we are too diligent; we want to solve everything.  Right now we have got to stop this man!  We have got to tell this country that we’re about to get run over. That’s what we have got to do.  We don’t have time forRead More →

Remember this guy seen here smiling with the orange fire demon while being photographed carrying a document entitled “Department of Homeland Security, Kobach Strategic Plan for First 365 Days” into a meeting with trump?  Well that is its author, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach. Only yesterday, Kobach had lost his court appeal and has been ordered to turn over all documents from his meeting with president trump to the ACLU by Friday as part of an ongoing voting rights lawsuit against his office. That photograph had revealed a reference to voting rolls. The ACLU has been petitioning for access to the documents, contending thatRead More →