Dear editor:
This is a letter about funny things. Seemingly random, funny things, yet a fountain of flummery, deep and wide, flows through them all.
Funny thing about that young bigot who slaughtered Charleston churchgoers a few weeks ago. Suddenly there's a surge of patriotism right here in Hot Springs. Grown men and women are waving flags and honking horns as they circle an 80-year-old statue dedicated to the memory of a 150-year-old war. Funny thing about that "civil" war. Lots of Americans were butchered on the altar of states' rights. Seems like the most important state right was to keep right on allowing human beings to be bought and sold like cattle and farm implements.
Funny thing about that statue, too. It's across the street from where the Como Hotel used to be, on a patch of land called Como Triangle. In 1922, a dozen years before the statue was erected, 28-year-old "Negro" Gilbert Harris was politely taken from the city jail and hanged on this spot by a mob of 500 "very orderly" men. You can still read all about it in the Hot Springs New Era's archives. Funny thing about that newspaper. "Negro" got mentioned a lot that day. Once upon a time, having the word "Negro" anywhere in your human pedigree could get you sent back to your Southern slave masters. In 1922 it got a man lynched. And for the last century and a half, it has kept people from voting and relegated them to second-class schools and second-class jobs and second-class justice.
Funny thing about human pedigrees. They're mostly just made up. There's a fascist impulse that still rages in too many of us. It whispers that my race, my ethnicity, my religion, my skin color, my civilization, my heritage -- they're all superior to yours. Surrender to that impulse has invented pedigrees that justified centuries of slavery and cleansed the American landscape of its first peoples. The Germans used theirs as an excuse to exterminate millions of Jews. Funny thing is, now even Israel peddles imaginary pedigrees to perpetuate its occupation of Palestine. I've seen Glenn Beck weep crocodile tears as Israel's frothy prime minister, always itching for Armageddon, revealed an ancient artifact inscribed with "Netanyahu." Clear evidence of an anointed pedigree reaching all the way back to the bloody Old Testament's glory days.
Funny thing about facts, though. Bibi's daddy was one Benzion Mileikowsky. From Warsaw. His "chosen people" pedigree points to Poland, not the Promised Land. Awkward, and yet our obeisant Congress still fawns over Netanyahu so much it's just plain embarrassing. For them, "Bomb Iran" Bibi is our latter-day Joshua, reborn in the nick of time to smite today's Philistines. Huzzah, huzzah! Facts be damned, preach our hyperbolic, gilded evangelists, we must stand with Israel no matter what.
So stand with Israel if you must, and wave your flags if you must. These, too, are funny things. Deep and wide, deep and wide, there's a fountain flowing deep and wide.
John Ragland
Hot Springs
Editorial on 07/29/2015