Category Archives: Selma & Civil Rights

Yes, There Is A Santa Claus Archetype: I’ve Seen Him, Been Him

What kind of archetype is Santa Claus? One psychologist says he is the carrier of deep memories of “the Good Father.” Most of us, even many who had overall “bad childhoods”, can summon memories of times, moments, when a father figure was good to us: comforting, bountiful in comfort and generous in things we wanted as well as what we needed. Indeed, the rarer these occasions were, the more tenacious can be the memories.

Others note that Santa’s character accords with various ancient gods: his knowing all our “lists” of hopes; the ability to get all around the planet in a single night; even his ample belly bespeaks abundance and generosity.

Also, he is innocent; we only see him in this time of giving; he asks only that we be good, without getting very specific, or judgmental about our shortcomings. And beyond all the merchandising, we know that even tiny, homemade gifts from him can be as magical as the latest high-end gadgets. Or if we don’t know that, when we learn it, he will still be there.

My own experience this fall points to one more feature, perhaps the most marvelous in these troubled times, verified again and again: it turns out that there seems to be one white man that most black Americans do trust (maybe the only one): not me, but the Santa I have passingly embodied. If he too has “white privilege,” his mission is to give it all away, then make more, for more giving next time.

Santa-Dont-ShootSo I’ve been humbled each time by this repeated recognition: for one thing is clear to me, Chuck Fager, is that I do not live up to that Santa Claus archetype. (And I shall not impersonate it much longer: that fateful, long-delayed Monday visit to the barber, and return to incognito status, is coming again very soon.) But I’m grateful to have had the chance to see that this larger figure is still active.

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The Day I Didn’t Help Bury Bobby Kennedy

When the others came back, hours later, I felt no regrets. The photographers, they said, were crammed onto a platform, where the scene was like an ongoing brawl. The veterans pushed, shoved & swore nonstop, wielding the huge long lenses of their Nikons like weapons, weaving this way & that to get better views as the family & dignitaries sweated in the heat and sleepwalked through their steps and genuflections a few dozen yards away.

All my colleagues were disgusted by the whole scene, and repeated their stories for my tape recorder.

Then we turned on the music, not quite as loud, and I was ready to hear the records all again.

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Annals of Homophobia: Don’t Cry For Kim, Rowan County

In all his public, to-the-country statements repeatedly (& honestly) trashed the right wing Catholic political agenda, and the bishops’ alliance with them. If I was scoring all this, it would go: 20 for Francis’s good stuff, 1 (so far) for bad. In sports or politics, that would be a landslide or a rout. And in Vegas, betting on the pope saying progressive things while in the USA would have been a very big, loud winner.

Compare: the Davis meeting was held in private, with no papal aides or Davis’s lawyer; it lasted only a few minutes; the pope’s reported pleasantries were boilerplate; and when asked later, he did not seem well-briefed on her case.

Further, the fact of the meeting was embargoed until the pope was safely back in Rome. And late on September 30, the Vatican was still declining to comment on it, sounding embarrassed and blindsided. Some ballyhoo.

Of course, homophobic crusaders like Davis’s “Liberty Counsel” and the “Alliance Defending Freedom” were ecstatic at the news leak, and insisted that it showed that Francis was on board with their campaigns. They can’t be stopped for grabbing this patronizing shred of recognition.

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Looking Back at a Unique Woman Author — “Go Set a Watchman”: My Review

Surrounded by her former peers, the painfully uncomfortable Jean Louise is peppered with questions about her life in New York City, which to many of them might as well be on Mars: how can she stand it? All those people, including “Negroes,” on the loose. The noise, the constant hubbub, the rudeness and ugly accents. Not to mention the fact that she’s (still, at 26!) single there, and working.

Jean Louise speaks up tepidly for her urban existence, but thinks to herself more candidly about its pluses and minuses.

In truth, she often resents the patronizing attitudes of many New Yorkers toward other, benighted regions, especially the South. She bridles at how so many of them, with the smug assurance of big-city liberals that hasn’t changed much since Lee wrote in the 1950s, feel they know all the answers for problems there, even if their nostrums are no more than bien-pensant slogans, based on little or no knowledge or experience.

Yet she puts up with this annoyance because New York offers her a compensation she has to have, and can’t hope to find in her hometown: anonymity, and the space created by the indifference of the mass, in which to continue seeking her identity and destiny.
If that sounds pompous, the clumsiness of expression is mine, not Lee’s; but that’s what it was. Later, after the shattering confrontations with Atticus and ex-beau Henry, there seems no way forward for Jean Louise but to climb on the train and head back up north, alone. This reader was relieved that she had somewhere to go for refuge, someplace where she could at least breathe, and be herself, even as a stranger in a sea of strangers.

In Manhattan she could bask in being ignored, free of family and community expectations, no longer carry the stigma as the renegade runaway daughter who abandoned a “good family,” and get on with the long work of becoming a writer.

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