Saturday, August 7, 2010

Smoking and Thinking

Random High Thoughts:

1. Ever since the week of Shirley and the Teabaggers, The NAACP and Fox News, I've been thinking about Crackers in terms of American Demographics. Teabaggers may be giving Crackers everywhere a bad name. I wonder if there is regional variation among crackers and if Crackers are more eastern south than western south. More agrarian, perhaps, than an oil field focused on drilling the resources from the earth. Or if a linguistic marker can identify Crackers. For example, what did the family call Brazil Nuts? If the Tea Party were Black, what nouns would identify White People? Dave Chappelle would know. So would the Wayans. I consider them authorities on Race in America. Chris Hedges, too. Alternate Brain linked to Hedge's article Why the Feds Fear Thinkers like Howard Zinn. Probably just "Whitey" though.

1A. I don't think I'm a Cracker. I think I'm Dip or Salsa. It may be the female equivalent. Is a Rich Cracker a Biscuit? Or is a Biscuit a Fat Cracker?
1B. I wonder if I'm Cracker on my mother's side. She's a mix of Abolitionist and Bootlegger from North Carolina.
1C. Willy Jeff Clinton may very well be a Cracker.

2. I'm wondering about gender identification now that gay marriage has penetrated traditional ideas of sexuality and marriage in the mainstream. What about gender and sexual self identification. What happens in American Society if you self identify as Bisexual on Match dot com? Funny - Willy Jeff Clinton makes me think of sex. I wonder why that "is."


3. The mainstream is weird. Educationally, this is our first public education experience now that Buster is in college. Recreationally, too, I think. Buster's summers have been spent in an Organic, Granola-fied setting with the Quakers in Vermont. I suspect that highschool kids going co-ed skinny dipping in the lake on an Organic farm in the Green Mountains isn't Mainstream. It's fun, though, and that's what Buster's been doing except for the summer on a 30 day hike in the Wind River Wilderness. Notably, I haven't been on vacation unless you count visiting my family. But when we were a family, we went to Kathmandu and skimmed over the Himalayas to a place in Nepal called Royal Chitwan Preserve. We looked for tigers on elephant back in the grassland.

4. Hurricane Katrina exposed some dramatic socioeconomic inequities. When I think of race in America, I think of how people with money evacuated a few days before the storm. Others were left to drown. My brother took a picture of a dog eating a dead body. He was in a helicopter over New Orleans right after the storm hit, and he stayed up there with another photographer for days and days and days. He was the first photographer that moved a picture of a dead body over the wire. He got a standing ovation from his peers for that. To me, that was more meaningful than the Pulitzer, although it's nice he got one.

Now, he's been on the Deepwater story for weeks and weeks. I wonder what he has to say about dispersants.

9 Comments:

Blogger corticoWhat said...

I think you're Salsa.

August 7, 2010 at 3:52 PM  
Blogger Life As I Know It Now said...

Cracker is as cracker does. You have a great weekend, ya hear :~)

August 7, 2010 at 4:43 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Race had a great deal to do with the reaction to katrina. However, money rules the world and that's why those with the resources to evacuate did so.
The education system failed all of America by not requiring them to ad more to the text books about black people beyond slavery and MLK. MLK was a small part of what got blacks to where they are even today!
Anyway, excellent post as always you entertain well and you are real.

August 7, 2010 at 6:00 PM  
Blogger Commander Zaius said...

If the Tea Party were Black...

There is a black Tea party and Fox Noise has been scaring the living shit out of the Greater Cracker Collective over the New Black Panther Party. My in-laws now fear the African-Americans that live just outside their ornate retiree community. The only conundrum for them is there is no other place for cheap labor because that area has no Hispanic-Americans.

August 8, 2010 at 12:36 AM  
Blogger PENolan said...

corticoWhat - my buddy Mary Kathryn over at verymissmary occasionally used the handle "Saucy Bearnaise." Which reminds me that I want a CB Radio, which I'm pretty sure makes me a Cracker.

Liberality - stupid, too, right?

Hey Paul & Kerry: And now look what the Texas Taliban is trying to do with text books. Sheesh! Judy Jennings is running for state school board in Texas to challenge that shit.

Beach, sound like your in-laws have the same trouble many plantation owners faced. I wonder if you can follow the New Black Panthers on Twitter?

August 8, 2010 at 7:55 AM  
Blogger Jaliya said...

I love that photo of The Man Who Has Yet To Reveal What The Meaning Of "Is" Is. You've got to wonder what he might have been smoking (or flash-backing) when he said that!

Here's a quotation for you ... "Researchers have discovered that chocolate produces some of the same reactions in the brain as marijuana. The researchers also discovered other similarities between the two but can't remember what they are." (Matt Lauer)

*snort*

;-D

August 8, 2010 at 2:02 PM  
Blogger PENolan said...

Jaliya, I *love* it. And from Matt Lauer. Imagine that.

August 9, 2010 at 6:24 AM  
Blogger jadedj said...

Holy shit...I want some of whatever it is that you are smoking. This is goooooooood shit. "I'm a cracker...you're a cracker...she's a cracker tooooo." Wait, that was a pepper. Forget it.

"If the Tea Party were Black, what nouns would identify White People"...Honky Toes? See, I did grow up in the bigoted part of the South, Eastern Division.

August 15, 2010 at 7:34 PM  
Blogger PENolan said...

Jaded, that wasn't even the good weed.

August 15, 2010 at 8:42 PM  

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