Culture

George Carlin, who was born May 12, 1937, would have been 81 this year. He passed away at the age of 71 on this day, June 22, in 2008. In preceding weeks he revealed that he was developing a new piece of material called, “There’s Too Much Fucking Music,” and planning to start organizing his filed collection of ideas for his next book; while certain that “there’ll be another HBO show as these pieces on stage begin to take form.”   But mortality intervened to have its way with him much too soon for anybody’s liking. The global economic meltdown was little more than an ominousRead More →

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 →

  No phone. No pool. No pets. No cigarettes. Ultimate freedom… No longer to be poisoned by civilization, he flees, and walks alone upon the land to become Lost in the Wild.                                                             –Christopher McCandless Libertarian ideologues and Tea-party types all proclaim their deep patriotism for “America”. But of course the America of their shared imagination consists exclusively of its land, its resources, and its like-minded people. That’s pretty much it. Government is not a part of their America so much as it is some amorphous, interloping entity that metastasized from post-Colonial social contracts conceived and midwifed by a slew of mythical Founding Fathers whomRead More →