Friday Links: A Nation Can't Bury Its Sins Edition
"Everybody talks about genocides around the world, but when the killing is slow and spread over a hundred years, no one notices...American outrage is always for show." - Percival Everett, 'The Trees'
You cannot talk about the United States of America—currently the richest, most powerful empire in the history of the world, with nuclear capabilities—without mentioning that the country is only possible thanks to two original sins: race-based chattel slavery and genocide of the indigenous population. When you read the history of these two things, they’re almost too awful to contemplate, until you remember the very least you can do is contemplate them. Then you have to think about how the country can and should atone for its sins, and how we can prevent these atrocities from continuing to happen.
Y’all, I read such an incredible book this week.
What I’ve Been Reading This Week:
A book that, much like The Relentless City, was very good reading in the lead-up to the election (and immediate aftermath). A book that we might as well get the CWs out of the way for: it deals directly with lynching, and has detailed descriptions of What They Did To Emmett Till. Over and over. But never in a way that feels too relentless, and never in a way that doesn’t feel like you’re reading a detective novel. In fact, while these murders do have a little extra mustard on them than your standard Dora Lange from True Detective, maybe we should spend some time considering how dead bodies work in detective novels. Because this novel certainly wants you to think about how dead bodies function. I’m talking, of course, about The Trees by Percival Everett.
To start, I want to describe the opening chapter. You meet a family of (seemingly) goofball old hicks—a mom who talks on a CB radio for fun, so her child call her Hot Mama Yeller. A charmingly useless drunk dad named Junior Junior. The gaggle of barefoot, future-middle-school-dropout children. The crusty old grandma with a sassy mouth. An uncle who wants to empty the above-ground pool and keep hogs in it. It’s The Wild And Wonderful Whites Of West Virginia for a few pages—you know I got some redneck in me, everyone’s having fun—except we’re in Mississippi, goddamn (hey, don’t look at me, the book did it first). Before the chapter can end, not even five pages in, the n-words start falling like dip juice out of these crackers’ mouths and Grandma reveals that she feels bad for “the lie I told all them years back on that [n-word] boy…I wronged that little [p-word]. Like it say in the good book, what goes around comes around.” The younger generation tries to reassure her that all that’s in the past, now, but, well—pretty soon, the bodies start piling up. White corpses, mangled and mutilated, always with the body of someone who looks suspiciously like Emmett Till next to them.
All the trappings of a detective novel are here—short sentences; short, dialogue-heavy chapters; local cops being racist and incompetent; reluctant, self-hating detectives; brutal, bloody crime scenes; people in important positions with things to hide; and murders that immediately seem paradigm-shifting. There’s also (maybe) magic at the center of the whole thing, (maybe) a witch, but (probably) not, (probably, right?) there’s a rational explanation (surely). There’s a cosmic horror threat looming from the very beginning. If you’ve ever stood on the edge of a dark woods and looked into unknowable trees and felt like something would get you if you challenged that woods wrong? What happens in this book is that something.
LINKS!
Something to listen to while you browse? Listen, we’re really stoked about the Lazy & Entitled Podcast Halloween Special episodes, so why not listen to Part One? We interview Haunt Season star Adam Hinkle!
Lauren Thiesson at Defector makes the convincing case that the MLB should end Pride nights after spending all of the MLB postseason airing those awful transphobic Trump ads. Can’t say I disagree, and I’ve generally been in favor of corporate wokeness because “at least third rail issues get discussed.” Now, after a second Trump election, corporate wokeness seems even more shallow and useless than its critics said it was. A pull quote, because Defector is subscription-based (but very worth it, in a time when you cannot trust NYT or NPR or LAT or WaPo to give you real news): “Even though thick skin is a necessity in trans life, it still bruises…A goal of these ads is to make trans people feel vulnerable—to know they wouldn't be singled out if Republicans didn't believe they could be destroyed…Major League Baseball didn't care. Executives kept quiet about these ads all through the playoffs, tacitly admitting that they wanted their queer fans to deal with the hate privately—or at least, not caring about those fans as much as they cared about avoiding getting involved in a controversy. I was hoping, this week, that I could laugh in hindsight at MLB's silence, the league brass exposed as cowards and losers. Instead, they are cowards and winners.”
Here’s a story from Andrew Perez and Asawin Suebsaeng in Rolling Stone about the Dem insiders who begged the Harris campaign not to run with Dick and Liz Cheney. Post-election blame game shit is never fun, but I am always going to be of the belief that the glorification of Liz Cheney (daughter of the living Satan, person who voted in lock-step with Donald Trump 90% of the time when she actually had power) and the campaining with Dick Cheney (approver of torture, funneler of money to the wealthy, architect of the Global War on Terror and arguably every single problem we’ve had in the 21st century) was not just a mistake, but morally damning. I hate Dick Cheney as much as it is possible to hate another person, I hate Dick Cheney the way Anthony Bourdain hated Henry Kissinger. Before you ask, yes I voted for Kamala Harris. But I sincerely don’t blame anyone who looked at her holding hands with Satan while saying “we’ve got to stop Donald Trump, the ultimate evil,” and stayed their ass home. Oh look, here’s a bonus link about Chicago Bulls and White Sox owner saying it’s good for business to come in second place.
In much funnier news, The Onion bought InfoWars. Dave Collins at AP with the story. The Onion was for sale last year because the private equity goons who tried to ruin it were done with it. InfoWars was for sale because Alex Jones is bankrupt thanks to the Sandy Hook parents winning a defamation lawsuit. You’re not going to catch me simping for a social media website, but Onion CEO Ben Collins says both purchases happened because of the community on Bluesky. Delete your Twitter.
When you’re looking for Resources because you feel the need to Do Something, it helps to look to the people who have been organizing and working in activist spaces for a long time. Crucially, it’s good to look for extremely principled people without corporate and political party ties. It’s hard to go wrong trusting Mariame Kaba and Kelly Hayes, the latter of whom has a great list of resources and readings over at her Organizing My Thoughts blog.
Let’s end on something that feels religious to me: Quincy Jones’s approach to music. Israel Daramola’s obit in Defector is incredible, and really reinforces how much the music industry is not built to even foster another Quincy Jones. Quincy was a man who really cared about music and how to make a good song—God walks out of the room when you start to talk about money, after all. Here’s a pull quote from Daramola: “It's easy to dismiss Jones's late-period dismissal of current pop music as just an old man out of touch, but his explanation had truth to it. The best artists today are the rare examples afforded time to devote attention to their craft…Jones's death closes the chapter on a singular generation of entertainment and culture. Sunrise, sunset. The worrisome part is that there doesn't seem to be anything of value to replace it. Some of this can be attributed to the older generations, holding on with clenched fists to all they have, but it can also be attributed to the degradation and devaluation of arts education over the past 20 years…[Jones] was the product of years of studying under classical musicians, and jazz and bebop maestros. He was learning from his environments as much as he was dictating them…Jones investigated and worked those 12 notes with more precision and ingenuity than anyone.”
What’re you still doing here? Have you listened to the Lazy & Entitled Podcast Halloween Special Part Two yet? We got Chloe N. Clark talking swamp monsters! We got Adam Hinkle on Scream Talk!
If you work in the service industry, may you clean up in tips this weekend. The assholes are empowered right now, don’t let them get you down. Take comfort in your friends and family, and remember the good fight is worth fighting even after death.
Rise.
Sorry you got an email,
Chris
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