A sticky situation.

I need to say some words about bumper stickers, America’s favorite method of political  salon: on the ass of a car where no one can have an actual dialogue, you just shove your ass/bumper/views in their face and drive off, tra-la-la-la-la.

I still have my Nadar/LaDuke bumper sticker on my car.

I am frequently amused by the fish wars, like the great crusades of the middle ages but with stick on fish on car asses. First came the standard Jesus fish, then the Jesus fish with symbols, then the 90’s came and brought us something to balance out the gloom of grunge—the Darwin fish with it’s tiny legs and “Darwin” inside. So clever, so funny and so inflammatory to the religious right,  Darwin fish caused angry honking, car defacement as many a poor Darwin fish was pulled off  of cars leaving chipped paint in the name of God. Then came my favorite fish of all, the religious retaliation fish, a huge fish that sometimes says “Truth” or “Jesus” eating a tiny Darwin fish. Why is it my favorite, you might be wondering? Because the retaliation fish is actually supporting Darwin’s survival of the fittest theory by showing the big fish eating the small fish as well as the adaptation of zealots in bumper sticker expressionism.

Always makes me laugh.

Recently I saw a bumper sticker that did not make me laugh. 

It actually caused a knot in my stomach.

Now I am not bumper sensitive, I have seen the various anti-abortion stickers, with or without sad fetus, with or without a promise of hellfire blah-blahde-blah. I can certainly “Visualize whirled peas” and keep driving.

But this new sticker cannot be washed away by clever words about peas.

I feel I must bring this sticker to the attention of people.

This sticker has a picture of President Barack Obama and next to his image it says

“Re-Nig 2012”

Yes.

It really does.

They are creeping into town, on the highway, the backroads of our country like the covert racism stuffed away since the 60’s hidden with polite smiles and PC terms that has bubbled to the surface with the election of an articulate, intelligent man who happens to be half black and become overt racism. 

Like a boil, it is ready to pop.

Red, swollen and angry.

Like the GOP.

Believe it or not, a person who owned one of these repugnant stickers actually tried to tell me it wasn’t racist.

Yes.

Really, he did.

So I asked him “If this sticker is not racist, then what does it mean?”

“Well, we want to take back the country,” He says “it’s not racist, it’s a joke.”

“How is this a joke?” Says I.

“Well, see it’s like re-negotiate” says he.

“So why is it spelled with an I instead of an E for re-nEgotiate?”  I inquire.

“Well, it’s a joke, see.” He repeats lamely.

“Well, to most folks it LOOKS like you are calling the president a racial slur that starts with NIG, can you see how folks could see that?” I say

“Well, people need to learn to take a joke” he says indignantly and walks away.

Just because you call something a joke does not make it funny. I know a lot of people, myself included who don’t think that is a joke in any way in fact some of those people might like to kick mister bumper sticker in the nutsack and ask him if he thinks that is a joke.

The problem with an area like the one I have grown up in is most folks here do not know anyone who is black. They only see black people on TV and since a large part of what the media portrays is stereotypical that is in turn what a lot of people perceive as actual fact. 

When a person is deemed “other” it is easier to dehumanize, to make that person or group into a “them” and then it is easier to treat “them” in ways that person would never treat someone they knew or tolerate receiving from someone else.  When you know a person and look them in the eye, they are real and you can see how your actions affect that person by what is reflected back in those eyes.

People who do not have words used as weapons or tokens of shame do not understand how deep the visceral ripple goes for people who have, plain and simple.

When I was in the 4^th grade I was visiting my family’s farm for weekend visitation with my dad and a neighbor girl and I would always play together when I was there, there was no one else our age to play with and we always had a good time, I knew her family and she mine, we had slumber parties, built club houses, rode motorcycles and made mud pies. 

It was always a blast.

 Until this day when I was in the 4^th grade, you see my friend from across the way brought a friend to play a girl from town who she knew from school, they almost looked like sisters with their blonde hair and green eyes and smiling faces. The more the merrier, we strode off to the large irrigation canal behind the house and we decided to go in, it was fall and the water was long gone, we had already had our annual mud fight down there and now it was bone-dry with a sprinkling of shells from the little bivalves that seem to love irrigation ditches here. We played with shells, dug for clay, looked at nests and it was good clean all American fun on the farm. 

We played for hours and then decided to get out of the canal and my friend went first and helped the girl from town out and I reached up my hand and she pulled hers away and let go, I fell back and looked up at them, a little dazed and they looked down on me, smiling like little twins.

They smiled as they spat on me. 

They laughed as they threw dirt clods at me and called me “Jap”.  

It went on for some time, and I could tell it was my friend’s idea and that the girl from town was the follower, I looked at girl from town and asked her to help me, tears streaming down my face as I pleaded for them to let me out and to stop and she looked down at the ground and stopped smiling.

 So did my neighbor and she prodded her friend “Come on, it’s just a joke, it’s FUNNY” they looked down at me and my old friend spat at me one last time and led her shamefaced-twin towards her house to play some more. 

I stood there shaking with rage and climbed up and went in the house, alone.

To this day when I think of humiliation, powerlessness and shame, I remember this fall day.

Some people in this country have kept the cruelty of childhood and think things like

 “RE-NIG 2012” are funny.

I have no answer to this situation other than to say out loud when I see it that it is wrong, it is cruel and I do not think it is in any way a joke.

Once when I was traveling in the deep south, I saw a pair of trousered bare feet dangling out of the back of a car’s trunk on the highway, as we got closer we felt sick as we saw the feet, though plastic were a dark brown and we knew they were a response to the news of the month about an African-American man who had been dragged to death in Texas. We pulled alongside the car and flipped them the bird and shouted.

I know it didn’t change their minds but it felt necessary to voice that it was not funny it was not right and it was in fact disgusting.

I know this post will not change the mind of the man with the bumper sticker but I also know I must voice that this too was not a joke.

It was not right.

It was not nor will it ever be anything but disgusting.

I see the neighbor who spat on me in town and I wonder if she remembers that day at all as a flock of birds fly overhead and the big sky clouds roll by in the never ending show that only appears here and I wonder if anything will truly ever change.

Spontaneous Rhyming on FB part one:

So I started with one line on my status today and was encouraged by an old friend from my TV news days to keep going and so I did. I polished it up and added a bit for my blog friends and here it is for you to enjoy. Please imagine a portly gent in flannel who has  less teeth than fingers playing beatbox as I rhyme  just for atmosphere in your brain:

Spontaneous Liberal Rant/Rhyme on FB:

Whining about Weiner because I am bitter about Vitter.

Smart man shows his junk leaves the world in a funk because spineless Dems kow-tow and made him a quitter.

Ain’t that a shitter?
Vitter there he sits on the senate floor

Checking priceline for his whore

Nobody hollers ‘bout his using time or dollars

of constituents while he tries to rent

some vagina on company time.

Committing a crime.

Because it’s family values time!

Now I’m Mocking on the Bachmann and I'm railin' on Palin'

got an itch to bitch about Newt Gingrich

and I wish I were funnin' but Santorum is runnin'

I got a fix on his frothy mix

he spray papooses with his anal juices

and you need a tube for all that lube

we need a quorum on Santorum

runnin’ down your leg

Uncle Sam! WHAM!

mister you might be in an assload of jam.

And if you a Muslim he make you eat ham.

If you are gay better pray for the day of election to spank his erection

For power over your love cuz he thinks God above

Gave him power to shove your rights

All the way to Uranus. Fucking heinous.

Now Boy-eee! You better-

Hit the deck here comes Beck ---Cryin’
‘bout his ratings while people are dyin’

drink an orange crush

throw it at Rush

Limbaugh

watch fatty run like my mee-maw

to her trailer to watch hee-haw

if we really want to be failin'

elect Donald Trump and his ho-dee-oh dee-oh Sarah Palin

OAK TREE!

Lady got a wooden head and Donnie’s hair is well fed.

Maybe Mitt and Michele will save us from hell
but only if they ain’t elected
That meat is stinky it wasn’t inspected.

E-COLI can I get a holla hole in my colon?

There’s no way of knowin’ if my tumor is growin’

‘cause healthcare is for COMMIES.

Peace out (of the middle east)

Running away wee-wee-wee all the way homophobia and back again.

We small town folks who leave home for the “big city” do so for many reasons, some of us leave because we want to see the world, some of us are artists and feel a city has more to offer us creatively and professionally, some of us seek diversity of ideas and ethnicity while others merely seek freedom, freedom of thought and expression. Whatever the reasons we small town refugees seek refuge in the cities of the world looking for something different than what our native land offers us.

We surround ourselves with like minded people who become both friends and family of choice, artists in the city are familiar with the terms “Orphan’s Christmas, Orphan’s Thanksgiving, orphan’s Easter, Orphan’s Passover” we soon discover that holidays with other orphans are often far more peaceful than when we brave elements and distance and travel back to our tiny nests.

In a way we are runaways, whether we fly, bus or drive—we have chosen to escape. Escape the norms of small town life, seek out the unknown, the other, the exotic bustle and honk of city life. Some of us are merely in love with the idea of ordering food to be delivered.

What drove me to leave? I have pondered this over the past few days as I sit at the family farm. When I was young, the desire to leave was burning, instinctual, like the call to birds to migrate. Even as a three year old child, I knew I was going to “grow up to be an artist and live in Los Angeles” even before I knew where that was, when all locations were just destinations Bugs Bunny had on his many cartoon vacations. Even though I am from a very conservative and homogeneous region, I had a highly atypical childhood. My mother, a fourth generation descendent of original Idaho pioneers, the Lambeths of Lemhi County had a rebellious streak and a strong desire to avoid accidentally dating a cousin (it had happened more times than she liked to remember). She developed a fondness for dating the Japanese Americans in the region whose numbers are rather high  due to the one lone town who hired Japanese after the second world war, so many of the prisoners of Heart Mountain Wyoming  and Minidoka Idaho settled neat the town of Ontario, Oregon  a tiny farming town on the Oregon Idaho border. My father, who left Heart Mountain camp for Ontario which by then derived the slur of “Ontokyo” due to the Japanese influx translated the racism and cruelty of his country into a cautious flag waving Americanism and a strong desire to mate with white women—even though it was illegal and he had to drive to Winnemucca Nevada to get married. The marriage lasted barely a year and by the time I was three my mother had married and divorced a total of three times, we had moved from Ontario to Fruitland, Boise, Portland, Las Vegas, Lake Tahoe, Sacramento and back to Boise. I had hitchhiked, bussed, flown and met showgirls, gamblers, dissidents, hippies, hipsters, drag queens and even Tiny Tim. My favorite baby sitter when I was 5 was Ricky, a 19 year old boy who told me that even though he was a boy on the outside, inside he was a girl which made total sense to me at 5 because even though on the outside I looked like a little girl, inside I was really a kitty cat. We were fast friends, and years later when I was a teenager at a BBQ Tupperware party of Boise drag queens and bikers, a beautiful blonde woman called my name—Ricky had become Chris. I learned at a very early age that people are people and that racism and prejudice made no sense.  From the age of 5 to 12 my mother and I lived with her boyfriend, who was one of maybe five black families in Boise, Idaho. Elijah Clayton Jr. “Jay” was 6 foot 4, handsome, funny, patient and kind. He made my mom very happy and for the first time in a long time, I felt like I had a real home. The only problem was my dad’s incredible racism. The shiny glow of adoration a little girl feels for her dad tarnished each time he called my beloved Jay a “nigger”. My heart actually hurt, a deep stabbing pain when my dad would come to the front door to pick me up and say  “Is the jiggaboo here?”  Which would inevitably result in a screaming fight with my mother and me not getting to visit my dad, I would walk upstairs with my suitcase in hand and feel ashamed of my father. At six I remember asking my dad “why are you a bigot?” I could not understand how my dad, usually so funny and nice turned into this judgmental creep. It made no sense to me that someone who had been treated so unfairly because of his race could turn around and do exactly the same sort of thing to another person because of his. It made no sense. My dad couldn’t explain it either. It just was. I tried to pretend he was like Archie Bunker on TV but it was never funny. A wall built up between us, he tried to lower it by changing his slurs and just calling Jay “Kurumbo” which is black in Japanese (Japanese people consider this to be a slur BTW)  but the intent of his words belied the language. My wall went up a little higher. Years later when my mom was no longer with Jay but a woman named Judith, my father never said a thing about lesbians.

Judith was white.

Those little tidbits of life, the facets of people, their races, sexual identity, views of the world all effected me making me curious about the world and the people in it, staying in a place where people dress the same, eat the same, think the same held no interest for me, I blazed out of town as soon as I graduated and like many other rural emigrants, I only returned home for the occasional holiday, biting my tongue most of the visit and steering the conversation to the weather or the nieces and nephews, safe topics.

Now I am here for the long haul, caring for my elderly father and uncle and I realize that I cannot live in a state of permanent tongue biting. I sit stunned as racist tirades spew forth from nephews floating on a wave of homophobic vitriol and ignorance that stabs me in the heart. Once again, I am in the position of loving people with views that hurt my very soul. I am trying to ask questions, to understand while also trying to interject some reason and experience into an ignorant modus operandi. I think of my many young gay friends, some have expressed interest in seeing where I come from and I feel a great sadness to think of the pain these dear friend might feel at the words and treatment they might experience. I think of the people I grew up with who turned out to be gay or lesbian and I understand that migration. Some have migrated home and I try and send them love and good wishes, wondering if their culture shock is similar to mine. I wonder and I hope.

In a way this reflects the polarities of our nation, cities with more liberal views baffled at tea party rhetoric and vise versa. The easy and simple thing to do is to walk or run in the opposite direction and seek the company of like minded folk—which I intend to do as often as possible while also doing the more difficult thing, stay and face the issue, ask questions, try and find understanding and even some sort of common ground. I guess mutual respect will have to be the shield. 

I will try and remember that everyone is someone's family member somehow.

I am sure I will make plenty of mistakes, go for lots of walks, cry, scream and weep but I also hope I will learn, teach and maybe somehow understand. 

If I didn’t have hope I wouldn’t even be able to try. 

Wish me luck, friends, any advice is welcome. 

My tongue does have a few bite-marks, I have been home for two days.  My tongue might very well resemble a sieve when I leave in 10 days. Will two months in the city and a trip to the world’s largest theater festival in Scotland buoy me through staying the fall in rural America? Hope springs eternal. Especially for my very holy tongue.