21st Century Freedom Riding

Flooding, Budding
Originally uploaded by kafkas_undies.

Ok, look, I've accepted the fact that this is Maine and that 96.9% of Maine's population is white and that most people use the Gregorian calendar. No need to repeat yourself. I heard you twice the first time, reverb and all. And while I accept these things as temporary truths, it doesn't mean I like them. No corollary thread binds acceptance with value judgment. Go ask the local seamstress. She'll tell you what I just did. She might embellish more, with added crass or a postmodern rendering of clarity, but in the end, the stylistic touches disappear and you are left with the same set of temporary truths and a little less time on your hands.

Some days geography, racial distribution, and time collide. When they do, things can get ugly. And ugly they got. Yesterday.

Picture this: you're an institution that calls itself a peddler of higher learning and you're sitting on a plastic blue chair. It's a lot like sitting on a concrete block and the chair's utilitarian design hardly offsets the discomfort. A relic of pre-OSHA days, a bruised ass, and you. You and a classroom. You and a classroom and a feebly attempted circle and blue chaired people taking turns speaking, taking turns making sounds, mispronouncing words, butchering syntax. All in all, an exquisite portrait of a society on the decline - numb and blind and nose-diving into the abyss of cultural inconsequence.

The blue chaired folks are talking without saying anything. If you didn't know better, you'd think you were in central Kansas in a remedial English class circa 1964. Or maybe Oklahoma. You debate the merits of throwing your chair against the wall and shouting, "The word is ESCAPE! Not ex-cape! And ACROSS and ESPRESSO are pronounced just how they're spelled! And if you're incapable of phonetically replicating these simple words, maybe you ought to take a vow of silence because your voice box makes my ears bleed!"

But you decide against shouting. And throwing furniture is a bit gauche for your taste, so you follow your own advice. You take a vow of silence. And just when you come to terms with the surrounding intellectual nightmare, the bomb drops. The class is discussing a novel. A hallmark of the American canon. The story is set in the South. Slavery's involved. So people are talking about it or not talking about and then a hand is raised. The hand raiser asks, "Would the story be the same without all the Negro talk?"

WTF?!?!? Are you fucking kidding me? Did you really just ask that? Did you actually refer to a dialect as Negro talk?!?!? Are you living in another fucking century somewhere below the Mason Dixon line? Do you also own a cotton plantation? Have you ever even seen a black person? And how the fuck can you feel so comfortable putting your ignorance and racism on public display like that? In a fucking classroom of all places! Unfuckingbelievable. Even if we are in Maine. Even if the state's population is 96.9% white. And even if you forgot what a Gregorian calendar is. Unmotherfuckingbelievable.