Late Night Unrelated Off-topic Incohesive Ramblings

 *not blog post on Beloved

Somehow in my brain-dead, blog-post procrastinational state I found myself watching a CNN documentary on the Rodney King beating.  Unfortunately, I made the tragic mistake of looking at the comments sections after I finished watching the video.  The comments section on YouTube is a dark, dark, place, where the line between “trolling” “joking” and “caring” is often difficult to draw.  Somehow, when people sit in front of a computer with complete and total anonymity they can say whatever they would like and not suffer a *single* consequence for what they say.  It’s bad enough that people can just mess with each other to piss each other off, but the legit, “debates” and “conversations” people have are absolutely insane:

From: “Rodney King deserved his beatdown. However, the media concluded he dindu nuffin.”

To: “cnn fails to acknowledge/ Rodney king was high on pcp and the cops yell repeatedly at king to lay down. shame on the guy who recorded the video.. the media and king for the countless lives lost during the riot. Then lie about it. shame shame shame. black lives matter is a joke.”

To “why can't they just go back home to Africa?”  (you would think troll but then you look at the feed below full of “the blacks have been in US for what 300-400 years? They can leave.”)

To “When you're a convicted felon out on parole, high on weed and meth, and don't want to stop because you know it will mean going back to prison, why not refuse to stop, antagonize the police, and play the race card?”  

To: “Rodney King was a worthless thug.”

One guys response to “The law should be the same for everybody, doesn't matter if you are white, black, Chinese, Latinos or whatever. Rodney made a mistake and the officers overreacted. We are all the same and we could suffer the same any time. But the law enforcement should learn to be more respectful and patient with people.”  :

With:  “Made a mistake? Are you really that stupid or are you just trolling? Never mind, the answer is obvious. When some other Rodney King type kills your family while high, drunk, and running at 80 mph from the police, you shouldn't have a problem with it. Remember he's just a poor victim who made a "mistake". Ooops! 99% of the incident and Rodney's "mistakes" took place before the camera was even turned on. You make it sound like he was just standing on the street corner minding his own business when and the police pulled up and started beating him. No, we are not "all the same". Speak for yourself, dumbass. The vast majority of people are smart enough to not do the things that got him into that situation in the first place.”

To: “King was a drug addict and a fiend. He got every bit of beating he deserved.”

It goes on and on.

I apologize for bringing all these sickening comments up, but I think there is something really important in bringing light to dark places.  Many of these people are totally serious and convinced in what they are saying and it is absolutely sickening.   They are those “silent voters” in the election that may have perfectly “normal” lives where they never voice any of their opinions anywhere except in the security of anonymity online.   How can one say these things?  You look at almost any video even mildly related to politics and the comments are FULL of these exceedingly long rants and arguments.  Clearly these people “care” in that they spend a long time drafting the comments.  That’s what is most scary to me. (Semi-unrelated: What scares me more than Trump is Trump’s supports: most of what Trump says lacks meaning [only in so far is that everything he says is said purely for the purpose of the reaction it causes – he has changed about everything he has said already…] where his supporters take everything he says with the most meaning possible.)  These people don’t just subtly have racist views but outwardly publicly expand upon their views without not even a hesitation of the problematic nature of calling Rodney King a “thug”. How does this happen?  This toxic culture has always been there but now is allowing people to unleash and justify and expand their views. How can a true “conversation” occur?   It is much easier to reply to a YouTube comment slamming the other person than walk down the street to the old man with the Trump sign in front of his house.   

            Another big part of the problem is our society and media’s focus on the “little” things regarding basically everything that ever happens ever in history.  There is always some alternate point of view; that’s what makes history so interesting!  But expanding and extrapolating off of every tiny detail while missing the big-picture is entirely different. Powell’s attorney states, “King always was the aggressor.”  Powell states after the not-guilty verdict, “I was just hoping for the right decision because I know I am innocent and that was the verdict.”  OK. King was breaking the law.  But HOW can you possibly objectively state that he was the aggressor and say with a completely straight, all-believing face that “I am innocent”?!?  Those things should be COMPLETELY unrelated.  Yet, time and time again, case after case, it is the same story of “aggression” of the tiny little things.  Same goes for Trump and the modern day conversations: the “he said she said he did this she did this” politics of blame and scandal inspired by the media leads us to never actually search for the truth.

            Sorry this is an absolute mess.  I apologize for all poorly worded/thought-out ideas that do not connect to each other. 

            But – what do we do?  As American society how do we actually plan on communicating with each other?  How can we have discussions with people that can react completely differently to the exact same video?  Communication seems so “easy” yet somehow so much more distant as we grow more polarized and stuck in echo-chambers of the same news, ideas, politics.  

            Goodnight, thoughts appreciated.  

Rememory vs. Disrememory

            As we have discussed several times in class, the power of memory/rememory/disrememory is a crucial part of both Beloved and our present lives.  The first time in the novel when memory is explicitly discussed stems from the conversation Denvor has with Sethe about the strange white dress that appeared next to her: [Sidenote: Sorry for the giant quote!! There is so much interesting/unparaphrasable stuff in this conversation I couldn’t leave some of it out. Please skip over if you remember the passage well!]

“I was talking about time.  It’s so hard for me to believe in it.  Some things go.  Pass on.  Some things just stay.  I used to think it was my rememory.   You know.  Some things you forget.  Other things you never do.  But it’s not.  Places, places are still there.  If a house burns down, it’s gone, but the place—the picture of it—stays, and not just in my rememory, but out there, in the world.  What I remember is a picture floating around out there outside my head.  I mean, even if I don’t think it, even if I die, the picture of what I did, or knew, or saw is still there.  Right in the place where it happened.”

“Can other people see it?”  asked Denver

“Oh, yes. Oh, yes, yes, yes.  Someday you be walking down the road and you her something or see something going on.  So clear.  And you think it’s you thinking it up.  A thought picture.  But no.  It’s when you bump into a rememory that belongs to somebody else.  Where I was before I came here, that place is real.  It’s never going away.  Even if the whole farm—every tree and grass blade of it dies. The picture is still there and what’s more, if you go there—you who never was there—if you go there and stand in the place where it was, it will happen again; it will be there for you, waiting for you.  So, Denver, you can’t never go there.  Never.  Because even though it’s all over—over and done with—it’s going to always be there waiting for you.  That’s how come I had to get all my children out.  No matter what.”    (43-44) 

Everything that happens has larger implications that “just moving on” -- those forces and spirits still alive in the world that surround us to this day.  Looking back on the passage after finishing the book, the “yes yes yes” is eerily similar to the “No. No. Nono. Nonono.”  that Sethe describes running through her conscious as she sees Schoolteacher’s hat on Bluestone (during her narration of the scene to Paul D) (192).   Sethe’s explanation of why Denvor must *never* go back to Sweet Home is pivotal in why she chooses death over life in slavery for her children.  Even later in the novel when Sethe’s explaining to Paul D, she is insistent that she made the right decision (/only course of possible action in her mind). 

 What is really interesting about the previous passage is how Sethe’s view of memory/remormery has changed by the end of the novel:             

-When talking about Beloved:  “Everybody knew what she was called, but nobody anywhere knew her name.  Disremembered and unaccounted for, she cannot be lost because no one is looking for her, and even if they were, how can they call her if they don’t know here name?” (323).

-After Beloved’s disappearance, the town “forgot her like a bad dream” (323) while “It look longer for those who had spoken to her, lived with her, fallen in love with her, to forget, until they realized they couldn’t remember or repeat a single thing she said, and begun to believe that, other than what they themselves were thinking, she hadn’t said anything at all.  So, in the end, they forgot her too.  Remembering seemed unwise. “  (323-324)

-And as Morrison leaves with three repetitions “It was not a story to pass on”  leads us to question our relation to the novel.  – Why read a story if it should not be passed down? One answer here could be that this is from Sethe/the characters’ perspectives, not Morrison, who is the one telling the story.     This “disrememory” of Beloved seems slightly contrary to the “rememory” set up earlier in the novel.    How can everyone just “forget” and move on? She is still there, but Here Boy is back, and the disrememory of her pushes her away. 

Gunnar’s Flow Through Life (and Death)

Throughout The White Boy Shuffle, similarly to Invisible Man and Native Son, Gunnar does not have much (if any) control over any aspect of his life.  One hilarious line that demonstrates this is when Psycho Loco is marrying him off and says, “You don’t even have an alarm clock, so don’t give me no bullshit that I’ve altered your destiny” (165).    Gunnar does not even set an alarm in the morning to fit to any “schedule”.  All of his talents are taken advantage of by society’s “entertainment” and forces him through more plot turns out of his control.  The absurdity of the society his lives in creates this fluid plot completely out of Gunnar’s power.  

Several people commented in class how frustrated they were that Gunnar would want to take his life from this world when he “has so much going for him”.  One might say, “Gunnar is ‘successful’ in basically every aspect of his life (athlete, writer, husband, father) so why does feel like he must kill himself??”  I believe this could be the “natural” reaction Beatty wants the reader to initially question, but then Beatty wants us to actually think about how Gunnar killing himself is the ONLY option he has.   Just like many of the other “crazy” plot twists, the insanity of how society treats him is what determines his suicide.

On the last few pages of the novel, Gunnar directly address this when responding to Psycho Loco: “I’m the horse pulling the stagecoach, the donkey in the levee who’s stumbled in the mud and come up lame.  You may love me, but I’m tired of thrashing around in the muck and not getting anywhere, so put a n----- out his misery.”    We discussed this at length in class, but I think this is critical in understanding how he feels he has no option to “fight” or try to change society:  he has done everything he can, but still is thrashing in the mud of American racism that is not going away anytime soon.

Absurdity of Plot in Native Son, Invisible Man, and Their Eyes Were Watching God

            In both Invisible Man and Native Son, the entire plot relies on craziness to keep the narrator and Bigger running.  What exactly happened in the paint factory that caused a  “stinking[,] goo[y]” explosion (230)?   Why does a factory have a hospital?  How does the narrator “just happen” to run into Clifton in Midtown Manhattan?  How did Bigger accidentally strangle Mary?  How does literally everyone involved in Bigger’s life all come into his cell at the same time? The number of lunacies thrown within each novel is endless.  The purpose of these insanities is to not only functions for the story’s plot, but also to juxtapose the even more crazy way the narrator and Bigger are treated by society.  The Battle Royal scene is rooted in historical fact, yet it appears not any less crazy than the rest of the insanities thrown in throughout the novel. The juxtaposition of these scenes shows how the history of American race relations is possibly more crazy than the complete insanity of the other fictional scenes, like the Golden Day.

            In Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God we see a very different picture of her main character’s agency.  Janie, although always still constrained in many ways by society, is able to have some amount of choice in her life that is not evident in NS or IM.  She chooses to leave Logan and  the later to run off with Teacake.  In the case of Logan, she does not have many alternatives, but with Teacake she is the one that runs off with him.  Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God is the only book we have read where the protagonist seems to have emotional attachment to other people.  In both NS and IM Bigger and the narrator both seem very alone in the world from the beginning to the end of the novel.  They each have acquaintances and family, but Wright and Ellison focus on the society’s impact on their lives as a more “historical” picture rather than on a personal level.  I think that Wright’s criticism of Hurston does a good job pointing out some of the problems in Hurston’s portrayal of the Muck and Eatonville’s citizens, but looks over the fluidity and joy of Janie’s character despite repression.

The Ambiguous Ending of Invisible Man

            One of the large criticisms of the novel is that the ending “too optimistic” and “not protesty enough”.  Although I was not expecting the ending to go in the direction it went, I think that its “strangeness” is left up for many different interpretations. I think one must look at the beginning before making any judgments on the ending.  In the prologue, the narrator says, “I am not complaining, nor am I protesting either” (3).  Many critics were blasting Invisible Man for not protesting enough and the narrator tells them on the very first page of the novel that this is not a protest novel!  In my opinion, the novel is still a protest novel, but from Ellison’s perspective, not the narrator’s.   What the narrator says does not necessarily mean it is what Ellison believes, nor does Ellison necessarily want everyone to follow the narrator’s advice.

            The “point” of the novel is not to tell everyone to go curl up in a hole in the ground and find your own identity -- that is just the story of the narrator.  Later in the prologue, the narrator says he “is in a state of hibernation” (6).  Hibernation is a temporary state that will result in eventual reemergence.   At the end of the novel the narrator is still in a state of confusion that he has trouble articulating:

There seems to be no escape.  Here I’ve set out to throw my anger into the world’s face, but now that I’ve tried to put it all down the old fascination with playing a role returns, and I’m drawn upward again.  So that before I finish I’ve failed (maybe my anger is too heavy; perhaps, being a talker, I’ve used too many words).  But I’ve failed.  The very act of trying to put it all down has confused me and negated some of the anger and some of the bitterness.  (579)

Instead of viewing this ending state as what Ellison wants the reader to do/take away, this scene can be read as Ellison warning the reader of how the narrator’s course of action has failed.  He still needs a “role” to play -- even if it is the role of an “invisible man”.  This can be thought of as, yet again, the “boomerang” coming back into the narrator’s face after another wave of the naïve optimism.  Maybe these “infinite possibilities” are not quite as the narrator imagined them moments ago (576).