Today, I have been preoccupied with the photos released of the murderer, a boy from the look of him (though he should of course be tried in court as an adult), and the pictures of himself he posted, now making the rounds online--pictures of him posing at sites of historical significance: the "Museum and Library of Confederate History," a Confederate cemetery, and what appears to be a former slave plantation. The photo that sticks with me the most is the one of himself "in a prospect of flowers" with a .45 caliber Glock positioned between his legs, its barrel dangling down like a penis, pointing at what looks like some potted cosmos, with a confederate flag hanging lazy off his left shoulder, peering over sunglasses drooping down toward a sullen scowl.
The picture is on the front page of DKos right now. Please follow me below the fold for more.
It is only in retrospect, knowing what we know now, that this photo strikes me as frightening. Without our knowledge of what he did, the photo is absurd, almost ridiculous. The individual looks like a dim-witted and oblivious child trying very hard to look menacing, but instead conveying a hopelessness of the imagination that is grim without being persuasive. Without knowing what he did, the most unnerving thing about this picture is the emptiness behind his gaze.
Taken as a whole, the assortment of photos released today portrays someone struggling very hard to connect with a mythic past, a lost legend, a time when he believes he would have better fit in. As someone who works with literature for a living, my imagination turns to what I've read, and I think of a poem by one of my favorites, William Carlos Williams. The poem's entitled "To Elsie," and it focuses on the life of the Williams family maid. Nevertheless, I think it teaches us something about this boy with his Glock trying desperate to portray himself as a nineteenth-century Confederate. It opens with the following:
*
The pure products of America
go crazy—
The first time I read these lines, I think I intuitively thought Williams meant this in a positive way. The word "crazy" is generally used in a positive sense today, especially in mainstream media, where "going crazy" connotes freedom, exceptionalism, nonconformity, a temporary spree we allow ourselves where we can break the rules without regret. But this is not what Williams meant. He meant the bad kind of crazy. Below is the poem in its entirety:
The pure products of America
go crazy—
mountain folk from Kentucky
or the ribbed north end of
Jersey
with its isolate lakes and
valleys, its deaf-mutes, thieves
old names
and promiscuity between
devil-may-care men who have taken
to railroading
out of sheer lust of adventure—
and young slatterns, bathed
in filth
from Monday to Saturday
to be tricked out that night
with gauds
from imaginations which have no
peasant traditions to give them
character
but flutter and flaunt
sheer rags-succumbing without
emotion
save numbed terror
under some hedge of choke-cherry
or viburnum-
which they cannot express—
Unless it be that marriage
perhaps
with a dash of Indian blood
will throw up a girl so desolate
so hemmed round
with disease or murder
that she'll be rescued by an
agent—
reared by the state and
sent out at fifteen to work in
some hard-pressed
house in the suburbs—
some doctor's family, some Elsie—
voluptuous water
expressing with broken
brain the truth about us—
her great
ungainly hips and flopping breasts
addressed to cheap
jewelry
and rich young men with fine eyes
as if the earth under our feet
were
an excrement of some sky
and we degraded prisoners
destined
to hunger until we eat filth
while the imagination strains
after deer
going by fields of goldenrod in
the stifling heat of September
Somehow
it seems to destroy us
It is only in isolate flecks that
something
is given off
No one
to witness
and adjust, no one to drive the car
*
Williams focuses on his obese, half-mad maid Elsie and her tragic life, but moreover, the poem is about how her "broken brain" expresses "the truth about us," which is that our imaginations are sick and broken down, failing us in ways we can barely understand, so that we as a people, lack "traditions to give [us] character," lack a kind of dignifying imagination that gives our lives meaning and purpose. The result is that we see "the earth under our feet" as "an excrement of some sky / and we degraded prisoners / destined / to hunger until we eat filth."
Dylann Storm Roof is another "pure product of America" lacking a tradition to give him character, and no, the confederate past he clings to is no such tradition. As William Faulkner so powerfully teaches us, the aristocratic imagination of the antebellum South was always based on lies, was always in a sense bogus, an expression of waylaid entitlement and populist resentment. Mark Twain famously blamed the Civil War on the romantic novels of Sir Walter Scott, and while he was engaging in a devilish bit of hyperbole, he had a point:
[Scott] sets the world in love with dreams and phantoms; with decayed and swinish forms of religion; with decayed and degraded systems of government; with the sillinesses and emptinesses, sham grandeurs, sham gauds, and sham chivalries of a brainless and worthless long-vanished society. He did measureless harm...
It was Sir Walter that made every gentleman in the South a Major or a Colonel, or a General or a Judge, before the war; and it was he, also, that made these gentlemen value these bogus decorations. For it was he that created rank and caste down there, and also reverence for rank and caste, and pride and pleasure in them.
How much Scott is to blame, popular as he once was, is debatable, but Twain's emphasis on the bogus aristocracy and caste system of the South is still important. Think of the KKK and the ridiculous titles it gave to its members: the "Imperial Wizard" and his staff of ten "genii," the "Imperial Exchequer" (treasurer) and "Imperial Scribe," the "Grand Dragon" and his "eight hydras." This is absurd, ridiculous, boyish stuff, but grown men lapped it up for decades.
The longing for a bygone era when white men were on top, entrenched there by God and country and everything "decent and right" is still very much with us, as evidenced by the actions of Dylann Roof and his explanation for why he killed nine people engaged in Bible study at a church, his belief that African Americans are "taking over our country": "You rape our women and you're taking over our country and you have to go."
These are the kind of beliefs that arise when a desperately emasculated sense of entitlement "goes crazy" because it lacks traditions to give it character, when it faces the world without imagination:
as if the earth under our feet
were
an excrement of some sky
and we degraded prisoners
destined
to hunger until we eat filth
In another great poem, entitled "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower" Williams writes the following: "It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there." Yes, men die miserably, and while poetry does not have to be the specific answer, some kind of ennobling and real sense of culture--based on our present condition--does. I love literature. It's saved my life, and like Williams I believe it could save us all. Without it, or something like it, we are lost:
Somehow
it seems to destroy us
It is only in isolate flecks that
something
is given off
No one
to witness
and adjust, no one to drive the car