Okay, this began not so much a post as a plea for mercy for those of you controlling the weather today, but once I began writing, what unfolded below is a full-blown post about The Turner Diaries and the power of art to inspire action, both good and evil.
But first, the weather:
I’m in Los Angeles, near the Arroyo Seco, which is nestled between various valleys—so our weather pattern is very much the Valley weather pattern, not the ocean-side LA basin, which can be ten degrees cooler most times.
The heat from the valleys basically moves through my valley toward the LA basin. (Often times, perhaps not always. In past heat waves I've heard this described by meteorologists.) It means we get the heat, too, and sometimes for an extended period after the local areas of the valley cool down, we keep getting the heat.
Anyway....
The three weather stations nearest me, according to weather underground, read 110, 116 and 119 right now. It’s 100 degrees inside my top-floor apartment. (Update: That was about 2 this afternoon. It’s 7:22PM now and it’s 108 degrees outside and 98 degrees inside my apartment.)
Just yesterday my boss had remarked that if it’s quiet today I could go home early. Once I read the heat advisories this morning I took him up on that as I have no air conditioning and I’m worried about Frank (my cat) on days like this. I can’t leave windows open on one side of the house while I’m away, both because it’s an open invitation for anyone to break in, but also because Frank could just pop the screens out and flee.
But if I'm home I can close the windows on one side of the house to stop the hot air from coming in, and then I blast fans out the other side. It keeps it from getting up to 112-114, the highest temperatures I’ve ever recorded inside the house, but it remains around 95-100 degrees until around 10 o'clock, then cools down into the 80s by midnight.
HOWEVER, if I don't get home until 7ish, it's in the triple digits--like 105-112--until 10 or so, and down into the 90s overnight.
I began around 2 o’clock this afternoon thinking I was going to share a few songs about the heat and protest or revolution, which I did, but then I wound up writing a post about the 1978 white supremacist novel The Turner Diaries by accident.
96 Degrees in the Sun
The first song is similar to Strange Fruit, the story of a Jamaican soldier in an army of revolt trying to fend off colonial rule who has been captured. He sings to his captors as they are about to hang him.
I have always had a soft spot in my heart for Third World and in particular for the beloved cult classic song '1865 (96 Degrees In The Shade) which is a dramatic and musically powerful retelling of the events of the October 1865 Morant Bay Rebellion, headed by Baptist deacon and preacher Paul Bogle who led an armed group against the British authorities in Jamaica with his attack against the town of Morant Bay.
Marco on the Bass
Excellency, for you I come with my representation
You know where I'm coming from
Caught me on the loose, fighting to be free
Now you show me a noose under cotton tree
Entertainment for you, but a damn for me
*snip*
Some may suffer and some may burn
I know one day my people will learn
As sure as the sun shines way up in the sky
Today I'll send the victim
The truth is I'll never die
Although the rebellion failed, as "1865 (96 Degrees in the Shade)" makes clear, Bogle's actions reverberated across Jamaican history, sparking further revolts until the island finally won independence. Bogle is considered one of Jamaica's greatest heroes and he is forever memorialized by the song which is among Third World's most popular.
Marco On The Bass (link above)
Here is a live version of 1865 (96 Degrees in the Shade) from Third World that may astound you even if you know and love the song.
Dancing In The Street
Never underestimate the influence of this song, written by Marvin Gaye, William Stevenson, and Ivy Hunter, recorded by Martha Reeves and the Vandellas, and released by Motown in 1964. They weren’t just talking about dancing in the streets. They were imploring people to show up for something, though.
(Personal PSA: Showing up means different things for different people. Not all protests are accessible to the disabled, as just one example for why different people make different choices about what we do in this common struggle. We among you have chronic pain, perhaps, or may be undergoing chemo, or…. Not one of these things is an “excuse.” They’re medical facts. The decision of what each and every one of us do is solely up to the individual. I’m saying this because some people don’t think about that while they’re imploring other people to take to the street.
Overall, please remember that your streets may be somebody else’s living room, your bullhorn their phone, and there are a thousand jobs in this fight. And able bodied people don’t get to exclusively assign them—ask what someone else is doing “instead of” your thing. We’ve all got our thing here. Respect ourselves collectively and remember not to shame people for not doing your thing. Disabled people, neurodivergent people, and people with chronic illnesses, among others, don’t always want to have to reveal that to you in order to get off the hook.
Be kind to each other for our choices.
My first street protests were 40 years ago, my last were a decade ago. My body has evolved away from that, and I do other things. So take to the streets if you can, but don’t if you can’t; and I plead that we all not judge each other by our own standards of action. We’re in this together.
So when I say, “Take to the the streets,” I’m speaking as figuratively as the writers of this song were when they promised “dancing” in the streets so many years ago.)
Mississippi Goddam
Anything Nina Simone does is scorching, of course, so just because this song is not about heat it still qualifies.
This is a recording (no live visual, unfortunately) from one of the most compelling moments of speaking truth to power in American history.
Seriously, if you have not heard Nina Simone’s Mississippi Goddam ever at all…
Stop everything you’re doing and listen to this song. She’s singing to a largely white New York audience here. And click here on the lyrics (open in a separate tab) and read along. Then tell ten friends.
On a cool March night in 1964, musician Nina Simone debuted a song that would change her career, complicating her relationship with the white establishment while cementing her allegiance with the civil rights movement. The song was "Mississippi Goddam," and Simone performed it live at New York City’s Carnegie Hall. It would become a civil rights anthem.
Carnegie Hall was thousands of miles from the racial turmoil of the Deep South, but Simone was determined to bring a taste of the era’s injustice to her mostly white audience, at least some part of which had probably come to hear lighter fare like "My Baby Just Cares for Me" and "I Loves You Porgy."
Memoir in a Melody: The Outrage in Nina Simone’s ‘Mississippi Goddam’
Matt Staggs at Signature magazine
She wrote this song in 1963 and debuted it that next year at Carnegie Hall. The key lyric here, if you can imagine the emotions going through this increasingly uncomfortable audience, is: “Everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam.”
Whether she means "Goddam" as a rebuke or an expression of her exasperation doesn't really matter: The state had easily earned both through decades of cruelty and violence waged against its African-American citizens. Many activists were abused, tortured and even killed with the approval, implicit if not overt, of the state's lawmakers and civil authorities. Among the victims was Medgar Evers.
(Same article)
Seriously, check that article out, the lyrics, and listen to her interaction with the audience in this live recording.
“Wait…. what’s going on here? Are we allowed to leave?”
Heat. She brought it in a song she wrote, you may bring it in a post you write.
As a president of the Regional Council of Negro Leadership and organizer for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, (Medgar) Evers was instrumental in the state's civil rights movement. As a result, he became a target for white supremacists to silence. Refusing to bow to intimidation and threats, he paid for his bravery with his life. He was assassinated in the driveway of his Jackson, Mississippi home on the morning of June 12, 1963. Evers’s assassination horrified many, among them Simone, who composed "Mississippi Goddam" largely in response to the event.
(Same article)
She brought this palpably honest and angry song straight into the New York elite’s living room, Carnege Hall.
After venting her personal frustration, Simone turns a scornful eye upon a society that is reaping benefits from allowing injustices to continue. "Do it slow," she sings, mocking the South’s reticence to move on federal civil rights legislature while at the same time providing a litany of demands and insults foisted upon African-Americans by those who oppress them.
At this point, one can presume that Simone knew that her white audience must be squirming, as she acknowledges it with this line:
I made you thought I was kiddin' didn't we.
(Same article)
*snip*
…. the song offers an foreboding warning before returning to the chorus.
Oh but this whole country is full of lies
You're all gonna die and die like flies
I don't trust you any more
You keep on saying "Go slow!"
The final verse of the song is desperate; a plea for a minimum of parity in a white-dominated society.
You don't have to live next to me
Just give me my equality
Everybody knows about Mississippi
Everybody knows about Alabama
Everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam.
Who knows what impact this song may have had on the passage of the Civil Rights bill soon after this performance?
The House-approved bill arrived in the Senate on Feb. 26, 1964. It was passed 114 days later on June 19, after occupying the Senate for 60 work days (including seven Saturdays).
Time magazine
It was the longest debate in Senate history. Nina Simone’s voice was part of a chorus of voices (albeit, a rather more talented one than most), and she brought her particular talents to bear.
Of course, Nina Simone’s song is still true today. It was a song written for that moment, and there was hope (briefly) that the Law would lead the way to Equality, but listening to Mississippi Goddam in 2018, if you changed out specific references, it sounds contemporary.
How Far We Haven’t Come (The Turner Diaries)
Ripples in time. These battles from 54 years ago are the battles of today. The battles of 1865 are the battles of today. We have come full circle back to this same basic confrontation.
From www.theroot.com/...:
A further breakdown reveals that 44 percent of African Americans think a civil war will break out within five years, compared with 28 percent of white Americans and 36 percent of other nonwhite voters. Whites are also less concerned about political violence than the others are.
Women and those under 40 are also more worried about a possible civil war than are men and older voters.
Our levels of perception and our degrees of anxiety are going to be different among us, as the stakes of my white nationalist brethren’s demographic death rattle wrath differ greatly.
I was my Nazi brothers’ first torture victim decades ago, their first domestic violence victims, too. I will write about some of this in the future, but I have a few decades of experience with literal Nazis.
We called them neo-Nazis then (how quaint the times) when they targetted me back in the early 90s (for my writing at a student newspaper), and I learned A FUCKING LOT about Nazis and their plans at that time.
In their threats to me (which was investigated by the FBI since the threat came to my newspaper, where I wrote, from another state—no case was ever made), they quoted a 1978 novel called The Turner Diaries. My newspaper ordered the novel and I read it.
The threats against me were for several things. They came after I wrote the obituary of a gay professor who died of AIDS, but I was called a race traitor as well. They had been reading me and just days before the first death threat arrived by mail at my newspaper, a Seattle Gay News reporter called me to reveal that they were quoting my articles on their outgoing voice message. (People would call the number regularly and get their hate-orders and this reporter kept track of it, and he read all of my work. When he heard my articles being quoted, he contacted me.)
Among the many threats by letter and phone, the parts of the novel quoted indicated that I was going to be hauled out of bed in the middle of the night and lynched, along with all the leaders of any (basically leftist) organizations, white women who betrayed their race, and on and on. If I recall correctly, this was all to happen one night in the mid-1990s, a few years “from now” at the time.
They found my home address and phone number and for months I was besieged with calls from… I’ll call them, anachronistically... Trumpian folk. Their lovely voices permeated my answering machine messages for a while there. Their voices sounded like shitty diapers.
Since I was supposed to have been unlisted, the phone company (which had listed my information in error) actually paid for part of my move. For the next several years—the years these events were supposed to have happened—I was terrified that the person living in that apartment after me would be murdered. (It didn’t happen, but two years later Timothy McVeigh instigated the Oklahoma City bombing inspired by this book, and using methods similar to those laid out in this book, murdering at least 168 people, and injuring 680 people.)
The book has had influence among the alt right for decades, and many use it as a blueprint for the coming race war, which they intend to have… and they intend to win.
Real life hate groups have used this book for years as a blueprint for action.
The Order (1983-84) was a white supremacist, terrorist organization who took their name from the political organizations discussed in The Turner Diaries (1978). The Order murdered three people, including the talk-radio host, and committed numerous robberies, counterfeiting operations, and acts of violence in effort to provoke a race war in the United States.
Wikipedia
I’m not going to name the particular group I was entangled with a decade after The Order’s … evolution… but they were offshoots, cousins, or both.
Here is an excerpt from PBS American Experience on The Turner Diaries. (This is 8:05 minutes long.)
I’ve been thinking about those events as the white people demographic death rattle unfolds, something that’s been predicted among people who study these groups for decades.
It’s important to remember, even if we may only be beginning to take the notion of another civil war happening in the US seriously, this group has been living and breathing it for decades, and have a whole blueprint for how to bring it all about. And they’re 20 years behind schedule, by the way. They were waiting for their Mussolini to get their revolution running on time.
(The trigger is the taking of everybody’s guns, by the way—that’s what sets them off.)
In 2006, an FBI bulletin:
...detailed the threat of white nationalists and skinheads infiltrating police in order to disrupt investigations against fellow members and recruit other supremacists. The bulletin was released during a period of scandal for many law enforcement agencies throughout the country, including a neo-Nazi gang formed by members of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department who harassed black and Latino communities. Similar investigations revealed officers and entire agencies with hate group ties in Illinois, Ohio, and Texas.
PBS Newshour (2016 article)
In Trump, in Gabe Ortiz’ ongoing reports on the activities of ICE, in regular police actions, in everything... I see that novel (which I haven’t read since 1993, but remember random details all too well). It all looks increasingly familiar.
In April 2016:
FBI director James Comey told police officers at a national conference last Sunday that because of insufficient data on use of force, “Americans actually have no idea” whether racial bias in policing is really an epidemic. Pointing to current public outrage over police killings of African-Americans, Comey said “the absence of good information” and data has aided in the growing belief that police officers target particular communities.
(PBS Newshour, link above)
That obfuscation was intentional, like the hiding of gun statistics, and oh so many more statistics they wish to hide.
The Second Civil War
This week it was fun to read the #SecondCivilWarLetters meme. I laughed.
It’s real to a lot of them, though. Putting the facts above into that order, ending with the 2006 warning about infiltration into police forces, can put me into conspiracy theory territory in some people’s eyes. I’m not saying things will literally turn out to be as they are in the novel, but I am saying that the novel, and the notion of a race war, has been very real to people like my literal Nazi literal brothers, and a whole lot of other literal Nazis, for quite some time.
In their minds, they’ve wanted this for a long time, slobbering Pavlov’s dog style over it in fact.
They have their own protest songs, too.
For the racist “alt-right” and white nationalist crowd, the song “Charlottesville Ballad (War is Coming)” by “folk” musician Paddy Tarleton (identified as Patrick Corcoran by The News Journal, a newspaper in Delaware) has been the song of late summer in 2017.
Southern Poverty Law Center
Note: That link is not to any alt-right group. It’s to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups. It does contain the lyrics to that song, as well as more information about that scene.
Am I Going To Be A Witness?
“Witness” is a 2017 song by Benjamin Booker featuring Mavis Staples, is a first person account of the fears that come over African Americans who witness a police shooting.
When I was 15 years old, one hot summer morning at 7:30, as I was walking along Wells Street in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, I witnessed the ending of a police chase. Police blocked off all paths to a car and the man inside, African American, got out of the car and surrendered.
The neighborhood was mostly black. I was the only white person who witnessed this event. (I point that out because I don’t think they would have been this brazen if this was a mostly white crowd, but who’s to say, of course?)
Police bent the man over the hood of the car and another officer got up on the hood and kicked him in the head, and he fell off. The other cops laughed and they put him in the car and drove off.
There was no investigation, so I was never a witness.
I was 15 and white and full of myself (but I repeat myself) and I was convinced that this had to be fought. My brother-in-law, who is black, and my sister, and all of the elders of that block, held me back from the hot-headed shit I wanted to do. I was so naive as to believe that we could be witnesses, that we could stop it… if we only expose it.
They were worried about my safety, of course, but I couldn’t see that. (Or didn’t really respect what we were up against.)
They lead me to be involved in other ways, though. I learned about petitions. I became very good at collecting signatures. There were movements for police reform, and I did what I could when I could.
After I was 18 I could do more, of course, and the protests over the murder of Ernest Lacy (New York Times link) were my first street protests. Ernest Lacy was arrested at the corner of 23rd and Wisconsin on his way to the convenience store at the corner of 24th, and then he “accidentally died” in police custody. I lived at that corner (soon after this I moved there), worked a block away, and shopped at that convenience store for several years, always crossing back and forth across that spot.
I remember very clearly when Chief Brier came out to meet the marchers during one protest, 99% black, crossing his arms and glaring defiantly at them. (Not me, although I was there. This was a special look reserved for people who don’t look like me. I received his glare only incidentally.)
He looked just like George Wallace standing in that doorway. I remember thinking—naively, naively, naively—how anachronistic he looked. This is the 1980s, not the 1960s….
I thought we were on the edge of a different world, that all this would just die out as the younger generation replaced the old, that...
Whose Protest Songs Are They Going To Hear Tomorrow?
Whose voice will they hear?
No one or two or three of us alone can count or measure our impact on the struggle in which we are presently engaged. The whole picture may never be seen, but one by one, dancing in the streets, or singing show tunes to the comfortable that are actually something else….
Whatever we bring to it, let’s remember our differences, including the different threats we face, and the different obstacles to equal access we may face, and respect each other’s contributions as equal in spirit even if one might consider them unequal in deed. We never know how we influence each other. We never know which of our individual things will be the thing that does the thing, and in the end, it’s going to take all of us.
In addition to your comments, please share songs of heat, songs of fire, songs of ice (but maybe not Vanilla—too soon), songs of cold, protest songs, or songs from historical moments such as the above are welcome, too. Fun songs are allowed, too (which takes Vanilla Ice out of the running, thank God).
Final temperature update: It’s 9:40 and the three closest weather stations say it’s 99, 100, and 98 degrees—and night has fallen.
But it’s gone up inside my house to 102. So somebody please start with an ice song…..?