Daffy Duck

What we need is hatred. From it our ideas are born.
Jean Genet
Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/j/jean_genet.html#zCV2yW1ltXDgRy2a.99

What we need is hatred. From it our ideas are born.
Jean Genet
Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/j/jean_genet.html#zCV2yW1ltXDgRy2a.99

What we need is hatred. From it our ideas are born.
Jean Genet
Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/j/jean_genet.html#zCV2yW1ltXDgRy2a.99

In all the furor and bull-shit surrounding the Duck Dynasty head honcho's statements in GQ about homosexuals, etc., something gets lost in the translation as pundits, reporters, zealots, activtists and others come to the fore to debate/explain/categorize/condemn/praise:  the guy just plain does not understand gay folks.  He is mystified by them and their behavior.  The very logic, or lack thereof, of a gay guy's existence stimulates rhetoric in him:  “It seems like, to me, a vagina—as a man—would be more desirable than a man’s anus. That’s just me. I’m just thinking: There’s more there! She’s got more to offer. I mean, come on, dudes! You know what I’m saying? But hey, sin: It’s not logical, my man. It’s just not logical.”

That's more like disbelief, than belief, if you ask me.  But then he's quoted as getting a little more rigid later in the article.  In trying to figure out why he is confronted with such illogical people and behavior, he posits:  "Everything is blurred on what’s right and what’s wrong.  Sin becomes fine.  Start with homosexual behavior and just morph out from there. Bestiality, sleeping around with this woman and that woman and that woman and those men.  'Don’t be deceived. Neither the adulterers, the idolaters, the male prostitutes, the homosexual offenders, the greedy, the drunkards, the slanderers, the swindlers'—they won’t inherit the kingdom of God. Don’t deceive yourself. It’s not right.”

From not understanding the anatomy involved to condemning people to hell, all in one fell swoop.  Talk about a slippery slope. 

The pundits and reporters, et. al. going on and on about this "controversy" all try to structure it as a logical argument about freedom of speech and religious beliefs versus political correctness and identity politics.  I don't think once I heard anyone say anything about manners.  Just good old plain grace and kindness?  I guess you don't expect it from the Duck People, but still they seem to flaunt their sweetness on their reality show, as in they all dress up in camouflage and kill things, but there they are all of a sudden saying grace at the dinner-table, or there one of them is kissing his sweet wife good night.  Etcetera.  Meaning:  they depend on people understanding them as good old boys.  It's their brand.

Phil Robertson is an ass-hole who likes to pretend he is mystified by ass-holes and their uses.  He is a finger-pointer, bully, and all around heterosexual offender.  I write short stories about the people Phil says won't be let into the Kingdom of God.  These characters I write occupy the same white-trash spaces and places good old Phil does in his reality world.  And usually in my stories there are folks like him, kindly gentlemen in camouflage and beards who act like your buddy but then can turn on you in a flash.  That's the power they like to have.  On his show Phil and the network only allow us glimpses into his best behavior.  We don't know him outside of the cartoon he allows us, and in the GQ article he is just another cartoon of course but also menacingly real, not daffy and downhome.  He's saying serious things but the cartoon configuration is allowing him to be let off the hook.

The initial fury over his remarks has dissipated.  All the Duck Dynasty merch is being reshelved after a few days of outrage and debate.  This isn't going to be a Paula Deen knock-down.  It's going to be Freedom of Religion Rides Again.

Which is very sad because the crap Phil said is just as bad, maybe even more toxic, than what came out of Paula's mouth when she thought no one was looking.  Phil said what he said to a reporter in a high-class magazine.  He wants us to know how disgusted he is; in fact I think he wants us to join in and identify with it.  That's the horror.  A little while back I saw a documentary called Valentine Road on HBO, about a foster-kid named Larry King who liked to dress up in girl clothes and go to school.  One day, dressed up like that, he asked another boy to be his Valentine, and that boy the next day brought a gun to school and shot Larry in the back of the head in broad daylight.  Many people were outraged in the community, but just as many, perhaps more, said things about how if Larry had not dressed up like a girl none of this bloodshed would have happened.     

People are people, I know, and reality shows are stupid and worthless and brainless.  And Phil Robertson is an idiot, but what's scary is the reaction he gets:  people I actually know and like are defending him and his right to be a monster. I don't get it.  I guess you have to live inside the fear-zone people like Phil instill to truly get it.  He's not Santa Claus.  He's not an evangelist.  He's a bully and a bastard, and the Kingdom of God can have him. 

A Visionary Light Settled in Her Eyes

I've been obsessed with the Paula Deen thing since first hearing about it firsthand via Matt Lauer pissing and moaning about it on The Today Show, miffed because Paula was too exhausted to come onto his show to be drawn and quartered for saying the n-word.  Then there was the now infamous public apology/humiliation she and her team posted on her website, in which she begs for forgiveness.  Above is a photo taken from that session:  her face is grotesque-drag-queen clownish, the eyes so sad and old-lady hurt you want to comfort her, even while everyone else is saying she's goddamn guilty.  I guess what I'm feeling, what I always feel, is that she is both goddamn guilty and goddamn innocent.  She's essential now to me; her meaning, what she represents, is now completely universal.  Her sins have turned her into a lightning-in-a-bottle freak.  Her suffering is a lesson in keeping your mouth shut.  But she also now has the power of her sorrow to make us all see who we are.  We're her.  Ignorant, big-mouthed, insensitive and too sensitive, wanting to please everybody with how cordial and sweet we are, but also wanting to throw a great big plantation wedding with African American men dressed in white tuxedos, you know, like back in the Shirley Temple days.  We defend our little brother even though he seems to be a total douche-bag.  We make horrible food that causes Type-2 diabetes.  We want lots of money and fame and power, but we also want to be personable and chatty and get-along kinds of gals.  We don't want to confront history; we want to forget it so we can sit down and eat.  We just want to make good old downhome food that's all.  We hate controversy and meanness and yet we indulge in it selectively, whenever it suits the conversation.  We're kind and donate to charity.  We love people, no matter what their skin color.  We really, really do.  But sometimes we just need to let off a little steam in a roomful of the likeminded.  We all like to think we're decent-minded and wonderful.  We all want to be forgiven.

On Friday, on Facebook, I posted this photo, along with an allusion to Flannery O'Connor's short story, "Revelation," comparing Paula to Mrs. Turpin (the proud, loud wife of Claud, and the story's main character), and the media stirring the shit-storm to Mary Grace, the pimple-faced, sour-apple young college girl who literally flings a book at Mrs. Turpin in a doctor's office, sick of listening to her self-congratulatory bull-shit.  Mary Grace says, after doing her violent act:  "Go back to hell where you came from you old wart-hog."

Mrs. Turpin is beyond shattered.  She feels violated in ways that go beyond mere rudeness or impropriety.  Her very soul has been shaken to the point that she has a vision at the end of the story (as she is spraying out the pig pen in her backyard) that is both horribly lovely and perplexingly simple:

There was only a purple streak in the sky, cutting through a field of crimson and leading, like an extension of the highway, into the descending dusk. She raised her hands from the side of the pen in a gesture hieratic and profound. A visionary light settled in her eyes. She saw the streak as a vast swinging bridge extending upward from the earth through a field of living fire. Upon it a vast horde of souls were tumbling toward heaven. There were whole companies of white trash, clean for the first time in their lives, and bands of black niggers in white robes, and battalions of freaks and lunatics shouting and clapping and leaping like frogs. And bringing up the end of the procession was a tribe of people whom she recognized at once as those who , like herself and Claud, had always had a little of everything and the God-given wit to use it right. She leaned forward to observe them closer. They were marching behind the others with great dignity, accountable as they had always been for good order and common sense and respectable behavior. They, alone were on key. Yet she could see by their shocked and altered faces even their virtues were being burned away. She lowered her hands and gripped the rail of the hog pen, her eyes small but fixed unblinkingly on what lay ahead. In a moment the vision faded but she remained where she was, immobile.

"Shocked and altered" is the expression on Paula's face in that picture.  I think all of us should have to come to grips with that sense of loss and that sense of shock, that feeling that who we think we are, and all the comfort that comes from that, can be completely obliterated simply by a spoken word or an angry glance.  The lesson here isn't about political correctness or character assassination for me.  It's about how all of us indulge in what Paula indulged in:  thinking that who we are is more important than the situation we're in.  She has been humbled and may lose everything she ever loved because of that.  I forgive her because I think she is the norm.