‘My’ Side, ‘Your’ Side
In this week’s Camino a Ítaca I look back at a surreal experience in deepest Arkansas and how some feel the past so strongly that they actually feel a living part of it. Click over to the original in Spanish or read the English version below. (PDF en castellano abajo)
The poor woman had
obviously had way too much to drink, and judging how the regulars at the bar
judiciously avoided her, it probably wasn’t the first time she found herself
face down in an ashtray. We took the locals cue and continued to ignore her
when she suddenly lurched over the bar, knocking some of the other clients
bottles over in the process, and repeated what she had been slurring for the
past half an hour, “You goddam Yankees stole my niggers! You bastards took away
my slaves!”
I have to admit that I was
a little confused. At first, I didn’t have a clue what she was raving on about,
seeing as I am Canadian and all. But there we were, taking a break between sets
at a gig in a bar in the southern state of Arkansas when I realized that the
woman had obviously overheard my bandmate’s accent. An accent that distinctly
marked him, to anyone who had seen any of the Hollywood gangster movies, as
someone who had grown up in one of the boroughs of New York City. Hearing it, she
had decided to direct her drunken rage at us.
One mystery solved, but I
was still confused.
What had this woman been
drinking that would lead her to believe that something that had happened more
than a century ago was somehow a personal affront to her? What kind of selfish
narcissism allowed her to believe that a historical event that happened so long
ago was the main cause of her problems? What kind of substances had she
ingested that would lead her to think that she was an actual combatant in a
long dead war? Worse yet, what kind of person would want to identify with
something as abhorrent and horrendous as slavery? Yet there she was,
floundering like a fish in the growing pool of spilt beer on top of the bar.
Something had drastically failed along her path.
She’s not alone in her
lostness. Just a few months ago we saw enraged masses waving Nazi flags
assaulting the US capitol building. A flag that symbolizes an ideology that
half a million of their forefathers died fighting against. A flag that represents
the nightmarish horrors of places like Auschwitz and Dachau. A flag they now called their own. Turn on the TV and
you’ll see LGTBQ protestors proudly wearing Che Guevarra t-shirts, identifying
themselves with a regime that would have had them sent to labour camps, and
perhaps even executed for their orientation. We see nostalgic neocommunists tweet on their iPhones about the
need to do away with private property before settling down to watch Netflix in a
second flat that their parents’ bought. Closer to home here in Spain, politicians and their acolytes talk of winners and losers of a war that was fought generations ago. A civil war in which there were only losers among the masses. Yet, there is still talk
of ‘your’ side and ‘mine’, as if their coiffed hair had suffered the lice of
the trenches. As if I’m somehow a member of a side simply because I don’t agree with you?
Ideals from the past can
obviously be supported, just as they can be rejected. But to claim ownership of
these, to somehow assert ones membership as part of something long past seems
as delusional as that poor woman wriggling in that pool of cigarette butts and stale beer on that bar in lost Arkansas.
