I am trained, primarily, as an academic. My father was an academic and a mechanic, a soldier, officer, and medic. His father was an engineer for the army special arms divisions. My mother is an artist and a toymaker. Her mother was a nurse, serving in the war. Three generations, at least, of formal education brought me to be the man I am now. But markedly, education and health are in my blood.
Twelve years ago, I sat quietly in my first upper-division course at the University of Texas at Austin, “Principles of Rhetoric” with Professor Dr. Linda Ferreira-Buckley. She asked us to think critically about our own access to education. She asked “How many of your parents had access to the university.” Some of us raised their hands. Again “How many of their parents, or their grandparents had access to the university.” I raised my hand. From memory few else did. Education is not a new phenomenon, but not everyone has had access to the same level of education, or the same quality of education as I have.
I studied well enough, and was trained by three institutions in the lyric mode, the Socratic mode, and the Gorgian mode. I’ve read things like the bible, the vedas, Republic, Aeneid, and plenty of contemporary academia and literature in critical contexts, though I often admit to people my area of specialization is really just 400 or so BCE to 20 CE and 1865 CE to 1920 CE. But this brings me to my point. I was asked recently, “in what am I a specialist.”
As an academic, my first thought was—as we are all still recuperating from graduate work—"nothing in particular”. But that’s not true. For a while, I thought very much that I wanted to be an expert in the ugly side of human history and action. The work that many of you do. One of my undergraduate professors has tailored herself as a “expert in trainwrecks in public deliberation” and I think that’s a damn good line. I am not cut from that cloth, to look at lynching re-enactments and violent hate crimes any more. I know that. But in my time in graduate work studying the Confederacy and its contemporary supporters, its myths and legends, and its narrative, I have learned a lot about the tenor of hate.
The people who hate, the people whom they hate, the way in which hate is insipid and makes no effort toward reconciliation or self-recognition. But I know a lot about hatred. And I know, knowing what I know, about history and about hate, that this is a critical moment and an inflection point, not only for our party or our nation or our state, but for our species, once again. But my father, may his spirit rest in power, stood proud, out of bed, in Pearl Harbor, the morning after having his pancreas out, and took over the blood lab as a recruit, trained in medicine by a pharmacist in New Jersey (Tom’s River), to make sure the demand for blood was met.
I hear these people, these folks in the Volkes sense, talk about “the blood of our nation.” It is corrupt, it is weak, it is so on and so forth. All the while, they bash those for whom the blood flows, and by whom the blood flows, bashing our soldiers, our leaders, our women, our caretakers, our parents, our selves however we represent or identify ourselves. They call our brothers and sisters in nationhood “garbage” and have a hit list, not a to-do list.
We came to this election in good faith, we fought, we banked, we called, we texted, we walked, we gave our time and our energy for the fight to preserve what was right and good. And we lost. Decidedly and handily, we lost. But if I have learned anything from the bigots that walk around in the West Mall, yelling at young women to “get back to the kitchen” and “vote for God or burn in hell forever,” it is that they do not come to us in good faith. They do not play by the same rules, nor care about the agon and the aelea. They don’t care about the magic circle or respect the way our mothers and fathers have participated—and maintained—democracy, democratic practice, and justice, for hundreds of years.
But for my father, he fought. He knew what was at stake immediately, and stood, wound-wrapped, and gave his spirit and his labor to the fight for blood. As the Arizona sank, he took photographs of the flames in between giving orders to soldiers as to how to administer aid. I am deeply proud of the work he did that earned him the War’s earliest Legion of Merit. And that war raged for years as we became caught up in multiple theatres until we ended that war with nuclear fire on August 6, 1945, a project that my grandfather worked on. At that time, so war-wearily, our nation was out for a different sort of blood. That is the bad blood at play now. Hatred. Hatred for the othered, women, foreigners, everyone who does not fit the description of the ruling class seeks to push to reinforce their own hierarchical power.
I look forward to a lot of things, especially since I’ve painted myself as a specialist of “narratives of aftermath”. I look forward to a time where this is behind us. I look forward to a time, not necessarily of “civility” but a time where acceptance and peace and love are commonplace enough in our discourse that we walk with grace and work with fervor. But until then, we will fight for our right to exist.
A close friend of mine asked me “So now we’re in the end times, huh?” I replied “No; we are in the resistance times.” So amid this recrudescence, look inward. Find the strength to carry on. And fight. Fight like my father fought. And most of your parents and grandparents. Stand up and say ‘no’ to fascism, terrorism, and suppression. Fight for those rights we will surely lose if you do not fight. And fight like you mean it. Because things are going to get worse before they get better.
Image credit: https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/topics/pearl-harbor-december-7-1941