Finally, Some Good News
This Second Nadir won’t shape up the way white neo-Confederates wish
Nearly all of the news coming out of the American South today is infuriating. I don’t get depressed when I read about imbeciles like Ron DeSantis, who just today suspended the Orlando State Attorney Monique Worrell (who is black) on charges that she is “incompetent” and “neglects her duties.” (News flash: Ron DeSantis is incompetency, illiteracy and stupidity personified. The motherfucker just needs to die.)
In Mississippi, a state about which one can never say enough foul things (both past and present), the Rethug shits who run the Statehouse decided this February to pass a bill that would form an illicit court system of unelected judges and prosecutors; this court system would “preside over the capital city of Jackson and expand the capital police force” — in other words, the majority-Black residents of Jackson, Mississippi have been legally forbidden to exercise their voting rights to elect judges and prosecutors…in favor of a good old fashioned redneck kangaroo court that would do the choosing for them.
In Columbia, Tennessee, third-rate Nashville country clone Jason Aldean films his music video “Try That in A Small Town”…using as a backdrop the same Maury County Courthouse where Henry Choate, an 18-year old Black man, was lynched in 1927. (Columbia, Tennessee, where in 1946 a young Thurgood Marshall barely escaped a lynching during an ugly race riot.) The video has since garnered 27 million views on YouTube and the song is (not surprisingly) at the top of the pop charts.
In Alabama, the political situation is so reactionary that even “our” ultra-rear-guard U.S. Supreme Court — the same Supreme Court that recently struck down both Affirmative Action and abortion rights within a fucking year — actually sided with Black Alabamians (5–4) in a congressional redistricting case that clearly violated the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Like in Mississippi, the Alabama Rethugs attempted to redraw the Alabama congressional map to…well, to put it crudely, “keep niggers away from the polls.”
Just like their ancestors? Of course. But then again, the modern-day white Southerner (like his white counterpart anywhere else in the world) essentially IS his ancestor, all exceptions admitted. Just now in Kenosha, Wisconsin (an Up-South shithole made notorious by that little tin-pot Nazi Kyle Rottenhouse) police have attacked a black man sitting in an Applebee’s restaurant on the usual trumped-up bullshit: they were “looking for a black man” involved in a hit-and-run, so naturally they ran into the Applebee’s and saw some random darkie holding his little pickaninny. What did they do? Just beat up the darkie with the little pickaninny in his hand.
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But I don’t really get that angry about these incidents anymore because I know what to expect from these people. They’re the enemy, anyway, so one should not be surprised by what they are doing around the world. To parahprase the great Tunisian satirist “Z,” there’s no point in getting steamed up about the socio-political filth that comes out of the American South because sadly, it’s simply our reality; social, political and cultural retrogression has become perfectly normalized. (The South is the nation’s asshole, anyway.)
I find out about a lot of these incidents through TheColi.com, which is (supposedly) an online forum for men like myself. I say “supposedly” because far too often the postings I read on this board read like some black-faced MAGA foolishness — you know, the type of shock-jock crap Charleston White recently made famous. The “Locker Room” features a lot of stereotypically “black” (i.e., nigga) shit (even though “coon” is one of their favorite insults for Blacks who pander to or cross over to The Enemy). Loud-mouthed, posturing, macho jocks come to post their takes on transgenderism, homosexuality, Jews, Latinos, Africans, PAWGS and everything trending in social-media. As one can guess, their thoughts about things are generally lacking in nuance.
Last Sunday, however, I found a video in TheColi’s Locker Room that was a far cry from the usual stuff. It was filmed in Montgomery Alabama, ordinarily famous for the city in which Rosa Parks refused her seat to a white man and where Rev. King began the Montgomery Bus Boycott. At the start six white men attacked a middle-aged and overweight Black security guard for shits and giggles. But it didn’t end there. Seems like the six good ole Suthun’ boys stuck their pale paws into a nest of ferocious African bees who preceeded to sting the living hell out of them.
The attack took place next to a riverboat which was docking; the riverboat was filled with dozens of irate Black folk who, as one would naturally assume, were already irate at American socio-political fuckery in general. One of these fellows, all of sixteen years old, jumped in the river and swam up towards the dock to assist the Black man being attacked by the white ‘bamas. Not before long virtually the entire riverboat emptied out…and the afternoon pleasantly degenerated into an all-out rough-and-tumble brawl, entirely worthy of WCW, WWE (WWF) or the notorious NWA of the 1980s. (Hell, I think the Bama Brawl was — in a way — a lot better than anything the benighted WWE ever scripted: not only did the brothers use chairs (like in WWE or NWA) but everything was actually real.)
However, I would not go so far and say that the Bama Brawl was the Black Birmingham Tea Party, though it might be tempting to draw comparisons given the fact that the Civil Rights Struggle actually began in Montgomery, Alabama. (And quiet as it’s kept, the Black Panther Party, while formed in Oakland, California in 1966, drew its inspiration from the Lowndes County Freedom Organization, who had adopted a black panther as a party slogan — in opposition to the silly image of a white rooster representing Der Suedlandischer Fuehreren of Alabama’s All-Cracker Democraptic Partei.) While The Young Turks are bellyaching about the smash-and-grab gangs infesting California’s Bay Area, it’s also worth noting that the actual Boston Tea Party (which was America’s first minstrel show) involved something very similar — except instead of stealing the tea, they just dumped it in Boston harbor.
Maybe it is a bit far-fetched to compare apolitical criminal gangs smashing and grabbing people’s things — after all, they would just as well do it to me — but at the very least, these thoughtless criminal gangs, as well as the very thoughtful and commendable actions of Black Alabamians against those stupid cracker thugs in Montgomery, oddly seem to point in the same direction: towards a final crumbling of the great bastion of white supremacy.
If this is the beginning of a Second Nadir, I can certainly say that things will simply not shape up like they did in 1895.
