What a Baby

You may or may not know that Virginia Momzer, Senator George Allen, (R- McGuire Woods, Skoal, Peabody Energy) has considered it an "aspersion" to make reference to his Jewish ancestry. Well, he did. That's too bad.

It's common knowledge in my family that at least 4 streams of ancestors, on both my mom's and dad's sides, were conversos. More than just making it acceptable for me to make jokes about dentists, it gives me good reason to be a pirate for Halloween. Hooray.

I am not trying to create a boot-wearing Good 'Ol Boy persona nor do I want to embrace a Southern Kultur that includes honoring racist holy war, terrorism, and oppression- nor the flag that symbolizes it. So of course I'm okay with my assumed Jewish ancestry- Allen is, so he isn't okay with his.

To be clear, I don't say all of "the South" is what Allen wants it to be, and apparently wants with a convert's zeal- a place where it's okay to point to the one brown person in your lily-white crowd and call him "macaca" (whatever that might mean), a place where you have to make a point of having "ethnic" supporters, a place where you can be a general asshole and confuse that for being a mensch. From what I've seen, as a place, the South is just another place. Sure it's got some things we don't: Cracker Barrels, sleeveless t-shirts, peanut candies, out of control Kudzu, lots of mounted fish- and more of some things we do have: depressing poverty, scary hyper-Calvinism, humidity, Dr. Pepper. But none of those things make George Allen a jerk. He would be, he was, that in California. We have Denny's instead of Bob Evans, but that doesn't mean we are in short supply of racist, thuggish, mean-spirited jerks who would be more than happy to create a California that is as much "the South" as Alabama is assumed to be.

Oh- a funny joke from back in the day-
One night, a preacher from Chicago wakes up with a start. He wakes his wife and tells her God just spoke to him in a dream.
He says, "God spoke to me- as clear as anything has ever been in my life. The Lord told me to go to Birmingham and join the civil rights movement."
"Birmingham?" his wife asks.
"Yes." he answers.
"Well, did He say He'd go with you?"
"He said He'd go as far as Memphis-"

Eh- so what's my point- George Allen is a jerk and wants to foster and live in a culture that makes it easy for him to be so.

But there's more than that. Am I thinking about identity? Am I thinking about communities that thrive on and foster meanness? Am I wondering if we gravitate to communities according to our temperament and therein play a role? I guess so.

I am wondering what my community is and what it says about me. There's a lot that will seem dissociative about this, but I wonder about me and my community- What choices I've made, the assumptions I miss. Whether I fit or don't and if either is a fiction. That it's important we be EFCSW, not Yearly Meeting. That we today could not create a place to represent our collective sense like Quaker Meadow- as was done 60 years ago. How and why I fit into a larger group that can fittingly be described as, and seems to earnestly pursue the identity, shallow and earnestly "product oriented."

It's 'Cos I'm Shallow & Product Oriented
Knives Out -Radiohead
Many Rivers to Cross -Jimmy Cliff
Chubasco -Juan Garcia Esquivel
Misterioso -Tito Puente
Thank You -Descendents
Gordon's Message -Violent Femmes
Achille's Last Stand -Led Zeppelin