Dregs

I've always had some... strange thoughts kicking around in here about how we visualize love, and how we write history. Pop culture and stories give us this model of both love and historical truth that looks transcendent, everlasting... but what makes the people we love most precious to us, in my experience anyway, are the things nobody else sees. Those are the parts of history no one writes down. The banal moments with someone, the fact that they know how to make a sandwich just like you like it, the dumb tune they hum when they're thinking... those things aren't in the stories, and they aren't in the history books, and yet they're all we really, truly care about. All the fury and pain and struggle is in service of that, of acquiring and protecting that, and yet we immortalize the fury and pain and struggle and just... leave out the rest. "Happily ever after," and then once the honeymoon's done, show's over, everybody out!

Photographer was on DeviantART many years ago, but I can’t find him now - if you know/are him, hit me up so I can credit your gorgeous work!

Now, dig if you will the fairly provocative picture. The vanity set in the picture was Eva Braun's, thus the iconography, and the Star of David belongs to the model. I like this picture for being the kind of thing that would derail any internet argument regardless of the participants - like all great art, it doesn't let you evade its point or repurpose it for another agenda. It is a juxtaposition that provokes discomfort, and its intimacy prods us to personalize that discomfort, to bring the superposition of domesticity on genocide down to a level where we can perceive our own complicity in the systems that protect and serve us using open racial violence.

I found the picture beautiful and thought-provoking, and it feels pertinent to this train of thought - it's so strange to see symbols that have such brutal, horrendous associations depicted in an elegant, utilitarian context. These were the intimate accessories of someone who managed to support and celebrate that brutality by daily, deliberately erasing its human cost and her agency in it. Washing her hands of it during her morning toilette, you might say. It's so ugly, and yet so familiar - in our society, it's very normal to elide the moral complexities of our everyday choices to preserve our own shreds of comfort and innocence.

If you live in America, you do it every day. If you're also white, straight, cisgender, or able-bodied, you do it more than once a day. You have to - getting by in a complex world requires that we pretend we don't know at least some of the many things we know about how we're ruining this world and what we're costing other living things. If we didn't, we couldn't do anything about it - fretting all day long about injustices all over the world doesn't actually help anyone.

The problem is not that we engage in this doublethink - it's a survival mechanism, being able to secure nutrients even while your moral compass is wobbling - the problem is that we forget we're doing that, and start to believe our own comfortable lies. We do this when we have a family member in the military, for instance... or a family member who's a cop. Or if we buy sneakers from sweatshops (which we all do). Or when we promote a topic in the name of 'activism' as if the elevation of any one (white, cishet, able, etc.) person's voice constitutes praxis, but then claim our mistakes and over-simplifications are harmless whenever we're questioned on how we use our platforms. We want to be powerful enough to have agency, but helpless enough to be innocent.

But we can't actually have both agency and innocence. What would that even look like?

Political cartoon brought to you by stolen clipart and pirated Photoshop. That totally makes it praxis, right?

This, basically? Full speed ahead - we're going to save the world, because we're the ones who screwed it up in the first place and then spent three thousand years committing mass murder to obscure that fact, which makes us the BEST people to dictate how it should look when it's fixed... right?

I don't know, man, maybe centuries of solipsistic media and narcissistic religion that tells us we're the only significant entities in a world built to serve our needs might have fucked us up some. We've spent a long time playing the hero - which might have made us forget that the hero who ignores naysayers with less agency to save the world according to his own worldview is acting pretty much exactly like the evil villain he's trying to defeat. When you’re under them, all boots look the same.

There’s a weird banality to history that we try to ignore, the way that world-shattering events shock us by being, at their root, just ordinary human impulses and insecurities granted world-shattering reach. And then we take this as absolution for our own bad behavior, assuring ourselves that our personal fear and insecurity will never have wide-reaching consequences, because history is something that happened back there, not something that is ongoing, occurring right now while we refuse to act, defensively proclaiming our helplessness and powerlessness as if it constitutes a moral position.

Maybe we always have more power than we’d like to admit, because admitting that we have it calls into question what we’re doing with it. Maybe we erase a lot more than moles and wrinkles when we re-package and commodify history… like all the chances we had to say, “No, stop. Not in my name. Not with me standing beside you. Not with me living off your stolen pounds of flesh.” History erases all our potential Lysistrata moments because it’s written by the winners, but that doesn’t mean those moments don’t still happen. We just only write them down when someone actually bothers to stand up and do something impactful with them.

And children... we have so very few of those stories in American history. So very few stories of people with privilege putting it at risk to correct the corrupt system that gave it to them. For this week's essay topic, let's have 1500 words on why you think that is! Me, I put it in a sonnet, because a sonnet - and this is a fact - is fewer than 1500 words! That’s the kind of clever thinking around corners that makes me the Philosopher-King this world deserves, if definitely not the one it needs.

Even though we're always washing our hands,
still we leave bloody prints on everything,
cups and bowls and blades and hearts,
and heartstrings.
We’ll butcher our story however we can.

Ask yourself - shall we write down this moment?
Love in fairy tales is "ever after,"
and maybe none will forget your laughter,
or their righteous lust for your atonement.

But no one will remember how you smell.
The color of the sky seen through your hair
is part of history I'll take to hell;
the forge is washed with lovers' tears down there.
They'll write their books and claim they knew you well,
pretending that your skin was never bare.