Friday
March 9, 2007
GALEN REVISITS THE LYNCHMOB PARADIGM
Dear Jaromir & Magda,
Thanks again for playing the role of my make-believe audience. I'm finding it very helpful. Hope you've both been having a pleasant week and will find joy in the weekend. Hope, too, that you enjoy the poem below. I did. Art sent it, of course. Given its final section, it strikes me as being cleverly antiwar. Are you familiar with the Mennonites?
I fear that Time won't let me say as much this evening as I'd like to say. Today's topic of GALEN REVISITS THE LYNCHMOB PARADIGM refers back to some earlier miniature essays of mine in which I argued that to truly understand the nature of the American people -- and especially the culture of the more reactionary blocks in the American electorate -- one must thoroughly understand the nature of the American lynchmob. I'm thinking in particular of those frequently photographed Southern Caucasian lynchmobs of the late Jim Crow Era (1900-1950) with a pulverized Negro male dangling at the end of a rope. Are you both familiar with the photographs to which I'm referring here? It is my fervent belief that we cannot understand modern America, with its blame-the-victim & destroy-the-evidence & kill-the-witnesses "mentality" until we understand the White People in these photographs. And these photographs are just about all we have to go on.
Have you both read Mark Twain's HUCKLEBERRY FINN? (It's an absolute "must read," along with UNCLE TOM'S CABIN & MOBY DICK.) If you have, then you're already familiar with the mob scene in which Twain has a semi-admirable character state that there's nothing more cowardly than a mob. It's true, there's not. However, any expansion on this theme must needs occur on the next page.
MYTHOKLASTICALLY,
Galen
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