Vampires in Chickamauga

I am a recovering racist. I’d like to outline how I became one. I first need to say that I am convinced I became a racist. I am not one who thinks you are born this way. I found racism and I’ve spent some time putting my finger on it. At first I though I grew into racism because as a kid no one ever called me racist. No one called my friends racists. My racism came on all of a sudden. For you see, I became a racist the day I enrolled in college.

To prove this I’d like to take you to a few points in my life to help illustrate. Let’s step inside my mind palace. Now I must prepare you as we enter the main building. Once inside, you are going to see something that’s pretty big and well, super racist. I invite you in and we walk through a giant lobby. I explain nervously that the entire south wing of this mind palace was constructed and built on a giant rebel flag. I pull away some yellow caution tape and swing open two very tall oak doors. We walk into a large rectangular atrium. Seventeen balconies wrap full-circle above us. The floor of this giant hall is a giant rebel flag of softly polished marble. Crossing bars of cobalt blue above a sea of crimson jade flecked with gold and amber. Giant brash stars of Elberton white marble stand alone but confederated. Above this flag reached a vaulted ceiling of glass. The dust from our trespassing dances in the fingers of light that reach for the floor.

All of this, this huge room, is 100% racist. I found this out slowly in college. We (the college and myself) realized it would be noble to shun this wing and everything inside it. In fact, I might just burn this whole place down. But first! I need to show you a few things. Let’s hop on the elevator. Here we are. Ninth floor. Doors open. It’s fall, Friday night at 7pm. Here comes me, when I was ten. My socks are surfing me across the parquet floor and I skid to a dramatic 180-degree fishtail halt at the foot of a pregnant television. For it was time for the transformation. I will become “the Dukes of Hazzard” for 50 minutes. If you’re not from the South consider this lyric from their theme song as a primer…

“Beats all you never saw… ”

Now translate this into non-South English…

“First, take everything you could possibly imagine experiencing with your eyes. Now imagine everything else. Finally, encounter something that is even more than this…”

That’s the Duke Boys and I became their youngest brother. I drank every drop of their moonshine. I screamed “yee haw” at every flamboyance of gravity. It was revealed quickly that my level of passion for this show was way above par. I had officially attached to something in life by myself. I was identifying to something in my culture. The General Lee was my first horse. Missing an episode was a form of self-neglect. I had learned this show fueled me.

Now let’s head up to the 12th floor. Enter the Def Leppard room. No seriously, this part is important, although you’re about to discover it is totally irrelevant. I wanted to show you these awesome running shorts. The doors open revealing a fuzzy mannequin at the center of a tiny room walled with curtains. The mannequin is wearing Union Jack running shorts from Def Leopard. I know, I know. That’s the flag of England not the Duke Boys. Still, looks just like it, huh? Point is. The drummer, Nick Allen, wore these shorts and nothing else. To me this drummer was winking to me, “Hey kid, I am all about the Duke boys too. Cue, cue, cue*”.

* Cue, cue, cue is my best phonetic spelling of Roscoe P Coltrane’s signature phrase.

Now we are seriously upping the ante here for the stars and bars. Def Leppard was mine too. The first time my ego clung to a piece of art because it made me proud to feel like a separate individual. Just like the Duke Boys I identified with them and this symbol was a huge part of that. Biology was working. I was maturing into my own definition. Not only that, but God probably thought, “Damn, this kid has excellent taste in music and running shorts.”

confederama

Okay, just one more stop. I press the button for the 13th floor. My hometown has a lot of Civil War history. One of our tourist museums was called The Confederama. As you can imagine this building and its contents bore a lot of rebel flags. I know. Super racist. Inside this building was the most amazing, (and honestly only) diorama I had ever seen. Rolling hills in miniature of lead-painted figures telling history with sculpted grass, trees, and cannons. I was enthralled by the display but more importantly, for the first time; I was staring at adults acting like children. They bore the same colors as I did. I had stumbled into the secret lair of the Def Leppard Duke Boys Confederama Gang!

This was hope for someone struggling with a deteriorating imagination. Back before the ego congealed, my identity was a bubbling fountain. I could wake up a Skywalker. Mosey into lunch as a cowboy. Afternoons I’d vacillate between Tarzan and wookie. Puberty cements the needle that defines us. Society and age cinch close identities’ corset. These guys, with their rebel flags, were living figurines of hope for the rebel imagination. The magic ship inside me could make it through the sea of puberty. I could emerge from my cocoon, and find my way back with tiny brushes, reaching into tiny bottles.

Back into the elevator, next stop, eighth floor, the Chickamauga Battlefield. Doors open to a cold September morning. Slippery green pastures snooze under a quilt of fog. From the east of Missionary Ridge, 34,000 American men fell in a 3-day period. Acres and acres of giant stone towers guarding fields of deer and cannons. A natural memorial to commemorate history’s bleeding. Legends of ghosts with green eye follow the crooked river. In the summer twilight, we met here for ‘Pops in the Park.’ Green beans in Tupperware and cold chicken in tinfoil. I would slip away from my homebase of a blanket to revolt with sporadic gangs of rebel children. We were riding our imaginations and slipped like fish under a river of Frisbees. Good times. Good, racist, times.

I saw a tweet where someone had snapped a pic of a Confederate Flag being flown at a Veterans Day parade in California. A politician tweeted it an attempt to virtue signal his constituents. He was so thoroughly revolted and disgusted by this symbol of hatred he felt compelled to post it forever in his profile, wall, and photos. He spit his disgust to all his followers at how these racists were coming out of the woodwork now that Trump had been elected. “Tolerance is in danger” sayeth the shepherd. So sayeth the flock.

I jumped in and suggested that the flags in his pic could be a tribute to the Veterans that fought on both sides in the Civil War. Another local resident quickly shot me down claiming Veterans who are dead would only be recognized on Memorial Day. A few likes from his entourage cemented his statement. They had decided, “Nope, this is all about hate and racism!” It was an emotional front of anger. They had united under a flag. They said it stood for bigotry while they judged it. They claimed with great anger how much this flag stood for hate.

 Chickamauga - Dwelling place of the chiefs

In my hometown lots of humans lost their lives because some people wanted to tell them what to do. It was a battle for freedom fought by our forefathers living and thriving in a country and culture that was struggling with slavery. The shame of slavery lay on the shoulders of our nation. But today’s progressivism is a movement of appearance. Intellectual indoctrination associates slavery and racism as a function of the south. They are the scapegoat. The shaming of the south is a movement that rallies under the flag of the Army of Northern Virginia. It’s an excuse to make inbred jokes, redneck jokes, racial slurs, and generally feel intellectually superior. It’s condoned bigotry by a progressive culture twirling a parasol of sensitivity. The gospel of history has been revised with intellectual slander. The south’s image has been and remains to this day a confederacy of racists.

States’ rights present a psychological threat to the progressive movement. If a state knows what’s best for itself it will no longer look to the federal power for guidance. A progressive agenda is a top-down pyramid scheme of virtue economy. It requires suppression to maintain this control model. The progressive movement has shamed the south election after election. There’s an undercurrent of “you don’t know what’s best for you”. This shaming has nothing to do with slavery. It’s an attempt to control and feed.

If the Civil War was about human rights, why did we continue the genocide of the local indigenous population?

It was springtime on a warm Sunday afternoon in Appomattox, Virginia. A Seneca Indian Chief from the Iroquois Confederacy was drafting a document to end the Civil War on April 9th 1865. His name was Hasanoanda but he was baptized Ely Samuel Parker. He served in the Union Army and studied law in New York. When he died years later, the Seneca people refused his body for burial. He was a white man living in red skin. A few miles away, that same afternoon, a smiling white guy of 25 years was posing for a picture. He rested his fist on an ornate saber perched from his left side. He donned frontier gloves with impeccable tassels. His curly locks were dipped in cinnamon. He stood tall on his horse as if he were in London. Never minding the canopy’s low branches. He was carving a name for himself and was so prepared he packed a journalist. George Armstrong Custer was spreading the nation’s supremacy across the south and in a few months he’d be taking it out west. On both cases native rebels were in the way of a new holy nation with a huge thirst for gold, title and authority.

Slavery is humanity’s history. It’s a world history. It is not a practice invented or defended by the south. In 1962, Saudi Arabia and Yemen finally abolished slavery. The UAE followed 2 years later. Since then about 4 more countries decided to abolish slavery. Calling the Rebel Flag a symbol of hate and slavery is geographic bigotry and is used as a way of shaming a culture to submit to a political party and media’s notion of how they don’t know what is best for them. The people that do this are energy vampires and they have a large corporate structure in place where molten shame is run through their foundries to build a railroad to the White House and to centralize federal power. World history has evolved from slavery to serfdom to the current welfare state.

The Civil War was fought for the same reason/s any war is fought. Human’s like to kill each other and we look for psychological and moral excuses to participate in carnal violence. We are no different than any other semi-carnivorous creature. The main motivation of war is the procurement of energy via (cash, land, family, or virtue). History is always painted by the winner and moral justifications, like cobwebs, always dangle from the rafters pretending to tell the whole story. The rebel flag and the south will continue to be demonized as long as we have an appetite for government-sanctioned virtue. This is why people follow kings and queens. It’s an exercise in everyone’s noses shoved up everyone else’s butt cheeks agreeing with muffled lips that no one in their circle has shit that stinks. I support states’ rights rising again and turning the federal government back into a voluntary agency relying solely on the charity of the states (whether that be a militia or cash).

Intellectual Vampirism

When I entered college, intellectual vampires made me racist. I wanted to be seen as an intellectual so I asked them to turn me. I paid money for the experience. I read the books, and called out “shame” when they cued me. I was feeding an intellectual coven of virtue leeches. New discoveries in oppression by a dominant paradigm were hung in colleges like birdfeeders. My character was too thin to resist. I was an acolyte and carried a torch. I closed off the south wall to my mind palace and moved bookcases hiding the entrance when guests came over. When I go into Subway and order a sandwich I cringe when I have to say “white american” cheese. “Did I say that too loud? Shit, why am i trying to whisper?” This shame I feel is neither collected carefully nor distributed evenly to a minority. Instead this shame is fueling a pyramid scheme that only succeeds by squashing individualism. The south isn’t the only victim. The same thing is happening to the electorate with terms like “uneducated.”

If people without college are “uneducated” than those with college are “unskilled.”

How can we empathize with another race? People are correct who say “You don’t know what it is like being ______!” or “You can’t even comment because you are _______.” Both of these statements are true. Both of these statements also reveals a triangulation that lies underneath. “You will never understand b/c you are white.” means “a 3rd party needs to dictate your will.” You cannot act from your own self virtue when you believe your will is flawed. You can’t trust your eyes if your think your privilege blinds your awareness. This is the hook that disconnects the mind from the body’s intuition. A third party is now required to resolve one’s will. It is vampiric because both parties are volunteers and both benefit from the relationship despite the damage caused.

If empathy is the goal than the statement “You don’t know what it’s like to be my race” would be changed to “You don’t know what it is like to be [hurt, judged, ignored] by [specifics].” This statement opens up a channel for empathy. We can relate to people on how it feels to have prejudice and shame cast on us. Every person, every gender knows what that feels like. Terms like race or gender can only be used to extract shame. The Rebel flag has been co-opted as a new symbol for vampiric hatred of the south. If you want to find vampires just their flag and they will come running.

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