Birmingham was one hateful, little colonial outpost. If a white man complained about low wages and poor working conditions, the bosses told him, "If you don't like your job -- there are ten niggers who will take it for a fraction of your pay." It's self-evident why Birmingham was not exactly known as a beckon of racial harmony.
When my family left Birmingham, we moved to Atlanta, Georgia: a city (or more precisely, a contrived collection of corrupt zoning practices and real estate developer larcenies) that also bears a contrived name and was (and remains) a center-devoid simulacrum of a city, inhabited by a citizenry (who, for the most part) personal styles and cultural sentiments reflect Atlanta's phony name to a fault.
Whereas Birmingham's fraudulent name was meant to evoke an aura of industry, Atlanta's was meant to conjure an image of the ancient grandeur of a great city of antiquity. Call it: Classical Age Cracker.
Illustrative of the cultural confabulation and communal delusions that Atlanta residents term as their way of life are the lives, fates, and legacies of two famous residents of the city, Blind Willie McTell and Margaret Mitchell, both of whom resided there in overlapping intervals during the first half of the twentieth century.
I first heard the music of Blind Willie McTell, in the mid-nineteen-sixties, when in tow of my father, I visited friends of his who comprised the half dozen or so members of Atlanta's "beatnik" community.
They were flopped in a run-down, mafia-owned building at the intersection of Peachtree and Tenth Street, bizarrely enough, in the building that contained the apartment that Margaret Mitchell had christened "The Dump" -- the location where she had conceived and written Gone With The Wind.
Upon the turntable of a battered record player, belonging to the building's resident manager, the late Bud Foote, a professor at Georgia Tech., author, poet, musician, and all around Beat polymath, spun rare and exquisite LPs. It was at The Dump, I first heard the works of Mctell and other Blues, Folk, and Jazz greats.
The building was located a short distance from where, according to local bohemian (all seven of them) lore had it, an aging, increasingly disconsolate from poverty, racism, and his own obscurity, McTell used to busk for change from redneck Babbits and country-come-to-town parvenus, shortly before he gave up playing the blues and took up lay preaching and gospel music.
The Margaret Mitchell House, as it has been subsequently dubbed by the Atlanta Tourism Board, is now a city landmark. Both obtuse locals and gullible tourists seem oblivious or indifferent to the fact that the building, thrice burned to the ground and rebuilt by the city, doesn't, at present, in any way, shape, or form resemble the original structure where the epic racist, bodice-ripper, Gone With The Wind, was hallucinated and inflicted onto the page.
Not far down the road exists a bar named Blind Willy's, a place that, on any given night, is populated by the sort of folks, who, had they lived in McTell's era, would have ignored or spat upon him when he was busking on Ponce De Leon Avenue.
The irony shields of the city of Atlanta are impenetrable when there are dollars to be made from the creation of a safe, business-friendly, false mythology out of the stuff of the city's racist and tawdry history.
Perhaps if we were to take a closer examination of these sorts of everyday misperceptions, distortions, and lies that, over time, grow into cultural delusions -- it would reveal a great deal about not only Atlanta, Birmingham, and Manhattan's East Village -- but our present day lives within that hack-conjured narrative know as the present day United States of America.
Is it possible for some scion of the corporate state to wail-out the blues of the present era -- for some bluesman born of the hybrid lawn-seeded soil of our nation of vast suburban subdivisions and weaned on its pharmacological subsistence crops -- perhaps going by the moniker Medicated Willie McMansion -- to sing out, "I got the medication blues/ from my iPod head to my sweatshop-shod shoes..."
But more likely, the progeny of Margaret Mitchell, now newswriters and producers at CNN, will continue to contrive the spurious narratives of the times: storylines that are about as accurate as the one their forbearer, Miss Mitchell, confabulated, within the pages of Gone With The Wind, regarding the Civil War era American South; both tales are vain, shallow, narcissistic, self-serving spectaculars -- inane, melodramatic mélanges, riddled with cultural clichés and casuistry, reality-denying rationalizations, and pulp novel plot devices serving to mask the realities of brutal classism, blood drenched racism, and wars waged on behalf of a corrupt ruling class.
So where does this leave us? Are we condemned to live out our lives in the enthralling dazzle of these glittering fragments of self-serving lies?
Or worse: What of the dreaded Law of Eternal Poultry Return (LEPR) -- which is known, in everyday parlance, as the "chickens coming home to roost"?
Phil Rockstroh, a self-described, auto-didactic, gasbag monologist, is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City. He may be contacted at: phil@philrockstroh.com Visit Phil's Website
There is an important aspect to public delusions and self-delusion: a prime reason why people do not destroy the delusions created by others and their own self-delusions is that doing so would create personal pain. The pain results from the difference between the delusional belief and the truth, or objective reality. In other words, the truth does not set you free; it causes considerable pain - so much that you will choose (mostly subconsiously) to stick with the delusion, lie or deceptive propaganda. In the American culture filled with lies, dishonesty and political propaganda, just imagine how much pain individuals would have to endure, if they let the Truth in. Their democracy is a sham, their elected political leaders are liars, crooks and traitors, the entire economy is rigged to screw working- and middle-class people. What a load of Truth to endure!! Better to self-medicate with borrowing and consumption, anti-depressants, and sleeping pills - all of which provide exactly the economic fuel for maintaing the status quo ruling class of elitists. What a system!
by
Joel S. Hirschhorn (133 articles, 37 quicklinks, 60 diaries, 533 comments)
on Monday, September 11, 2006 at 9:13:14 AM
The problem is bigger than just one delusional nation a couple of hundred years old. Much, much bigger. The problem is a world-wide delusion thousands of years old: The delusion of male superiority, AKA patriarchy. I can only imagine the shame and pain it would cause the world-wide ruling class, men, to face their long-standing, vile treatment of women, necessary to shore-up this delusion of all delusions.
Patriarchy was dealt its death blow in the late '60s/early '70s when women rebelled. It is now going through the last throes of its long and painful demise, making these very dangerous times indeed since some boys would rather blow the planet away than get the hell off women's backs.
by
Mar (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 155 comments)
on Tuesday, September 12, 2006 at 10:09:28 AM
2 comments
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