You give it to me, I give it to you

All this whatnot in terms of moment of the moment.

This socially constructed fantasy of connection, social or otherwise.

The morning after the party.

The party into the morning, that still leads

Vapours and hollow.

Forty years ago, or yesterday.

Choosing to defer that which waits.

Or driven, without choice

So easy to say I know where this will end, and

Such difficulties with the easy.

Where there is some afterglow that could be

Love has come to touch my soul
With someone who really cares

Though why is the shame in one direction, and where no afterglow is

Heritage II

Monument of John. C. Calhoun
Charleston, South Carolina
From “Rewriting History or Acknowledging It?”
Michael Putzel, Huffington Post
August 3, 2016

In relation to “Heritage“, Neil Remington Abramson commented as follows:

I agree with pulling down a statue of someone like Calhoun, if his writings were the foundation for slavery. I note, however, that he must have fitted the values of the time, if he served as Vice President twice.

I wonder what people will think of our times, two hundred years from now. Whose statues will they pull down that we regard now as perfectly acceptable, even if we personally disagree with their politics?

Will the future Canadians finally see our age’s prejudices against Aboriginals? I note that the Langevin Block has been renamed as the Office of The Prime Minister and Privy Council, since Hector-Louis Langevin was associated with the residential school system and the related attempted cultural genocide, regarding aboriginal people as “savages”. Yet others argue that it was Canada’s first Prime Minister, Sir John A. Macdonald, who was the principal “architect” of the residential school system. What do we do about memorials of Macdonald?

And what of Thomas Jefferson, America’s third president? He supported slavery. He championed states’ rights over federal law, a generation or two before Calhoun. Will they close the Jefferson Monument in DC?

I wish we could spend a bit more time looking at ourselves to see how we could improve what we do, rather than leaving it to the future to decide we were despicable. If we did a better job enlightening ourselves, maybe our monuments erected in the present will be less subject to challenge than those of the past?

Heritage

Monument of John. C. Calhoun
Charleston, South Carolina
From “Rewriting History or Acknowledging It?”
Michael Putzel, Huffington Post
August 3, 2016

From Marg. Bruineman, “The ins and outs of heritage properties”, Canadian Lawyer, October, 2016:

…by the 20th century, heritage legislation existed in most European cities and began to appear in North America, beginning in Charleston, S.C.

What glory was intended to be preserved…

NAACP, NAN call for South Carolina to repeal Heritage Act blocking removal of Confederate monuments

Robert Behr, The Post and Courier (Charleston, South Carolina), August 15, 2017

Activists across Charleston called on South Carolina lawmakers Tuesday to repeal or amend the state’s Heritage Act to empower cities, counties and universities to remove Confederate monuments and memorials…

The Heritage Act was part of a compromise that removed the Confederate battle flag from the Statehouse dome in 2000, and it forbids any other public removal of other flags or memorials from the Confederacy without a two-thirds vote of the Legislature.

That’s happened only once: After white supremacist Dylann Roof killed nine worshippers at Charleston’s Emanuel AME Church, lawmakers voted to remove the flag from a monument on the Statehouse grounds…

The National Action Network called for removal of the Calhoun monument. Calhoun died before the Civil War, but his writings helped underpin secessionist voices and the later emergence of the Confederacy

Dot Scott of the Charleston NAACP branch cited the statue in her remarks.

“Separating Confederate heritage from racial hatred today is like trying to separate grits from the water they were cooked in,” she said. “It’s impossible.”

From Michael Putzel, Rewriting History or Acknowledging It?, Huffington Post, August 3, 2016:

Daron-Lee Calhoun II of the Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture explained why he would be happy to see the removal of a statue of one of the white South’s most venerable 19th-century leaders. John C. Calhoun, who served as vice president of the United States under two presidents, was among the principal defenders of the institution of slavery, owned slaves himself and argued in both the House and Senate for recognition of a state’s right to reject federal laws with which it didn’t agree. As a descendant of Calhoun slaves who were given the surname of their owner upon emancipation, Daron-Lee Calhoun sees an altogether different figure when he looks up at the imposing sculpture of the famed orator looking down from a pedestal high above Marion Square in Charleston.

…”There has not been one statue I despise more in my life. Everything that he believed in, everything that he stood for goes back to slavery.”

Nazareth: Moonlight Eyes

Your smile takes all the fight out of me

Nazareth. From the The Fool Circle album, 1981:

Written by Dan McCafferty. Seems like there are two vocalists, though maybe one in different spaces. Video with a lot of backstage/onstage band coverage.

You just roll me like the sea

Atonement III: Quiet Dispatch

More arrested in toppling of Confederate statue in North Carolina
Fox News, August 16, 2017

Statue “dedicated” in 1924. Pulled down in 2017.

It was between 1900 and 1920 that lunching was at its most virulent. As the contemporary Baltimore journalist and sardonic humorist H.L. Mencken explained it, life in the South could be lacking in entertainment and “lynching often takes the place of the merry-go-round, the theatre, the symphony orchestra and other diversions common to larger communities”. Thousands of people would turn up for the well-publicised spectacle and Baptist and Methodist misters often worked hand-in-hand with the Ku Klux Klan by delivering sermons that incited further racial hatred and violence…

Racial discrimination eased a bit during the 1930s and cases of public lynching had almost entirely ceased by 1940, though as one more cynical commentator pointed out, “public opinion is beginning to turn away from this sort of mob activity…but the work of the mob goes on… Countless Negroes are lynched yearly, but their disappearance is shrouded in mystery, for they are dispatched quietly and without general knowledge.”*

*[footnote] Citing Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (1944), pp. 566, 1350.

**[earlier footnote] Between 1882 and 1951 there were 4,720 recording cases of lynching in the US, but the figures are very vague and the number of unrecorded cases is almost impossible to assess.

Julia Blackburn, With Billie (2005)

1930

Atonement II

In relation to the importance of national, state and municipal remembrance of dishonour and disgrace:

It was between 1900 and 1920 that lunching was at its most virulent. As the contemporary Baltimore journalist and sardonic humorist H.L. Mencken explained it, life in the South could be lacking in entertainment and “lynching often takes the place of the merry-go-round, the theatre, the symphony orchestra and other diversions common to larger communities”. Thousands of people would turn up for the well-publicised spectacle*

*[footnote] There would be extensive coverage of such events, with photographs and “light hearted” articles. Postcards with photographs of the victim were sold in large numbers, including one that showed five men handing from a tree, along with a little poem about the lesson to be learnt from the Dogwood Tree. People who wanted a tangible keepsake from such an event could take home a fragment of human bone, a scrap of cloth or some charred rope. There was a terrifying obsession with the male sexual organ, and many lynch victims were castrated or otherwise defiled. See Trouble in Mind by Leon Litwack, 1988.

and Baptist and Methodist ministers often worked hand-in-hand with the Ku Klux Klan by delivering sermons that incited further racial hatred and violence. Although the myth of protecting white women from black men was maintained, a lynching was often provoked by any signs of what was known as “uppitiness”, such as a black man seeking employment above his station, offensive language or boastful remarks. Even evidence of material success, such as the acquisition of a new car or a soldier returning home with a medal for valour, could be interpreted as uppitiness.

Julia Blackburn, With Billie (2005)

Stone cold slaver

Atonement

Amidst the usual celebrations of national, provincial or municipal pride, it would seem beneficial to have an annual day of atonement, to remember all the negatives that have occurred and to vow to do better. Just as an individual does not improve, and often facilitates self-delusion, through constant exercises in self-esteem, a society does not advance to the same extent if it does not spend time focusing on its shortcomings.

Political leaders are not flawless, yet are lauded for their perceived accomplishments, not regularly balanced against their failings. Few meriting statues ot other images of unqualified honour. As is sometimes discovered, much later.

So one could put it in a museum, with a cautionary plate.

But then one says Baltimore

When one runs to destroy