(no subject)

This interview with anti-neo-Nazi counselor Christian Picciolini, on his own past experience of joining a white-supremacist group and his view of what's going on with them today, is optimistic in terms of the plain fact of this guy existing and doing the work that he does, but he's pretty clear on how horrible the situation is.

It struck me especially because of the time frame: he went Nazi about 30 years ago. That's pretty much when I first became aware of these subcultures. I had been pretty sheltered with only a general understanding of racist violence, but when I was 15 or 16 my parents were doing a lot of (pre-Internet) research for a play about a small-town guy watching his lost friend drift into the Klan. In the setting of the play, this is related to a labor dispute and the bosses are egging on the racists as a means to an end—which is historically based, and is still the entirety of how some strictly class-oriented leftists view racism—but the Klan recruiter character is more of a true believer, and he has a speech toward the end about how the future of the movement is in the kind of paramilitary groups that had been gaining ground in the '80s. And I was a morbid kid so I got into reading all about these creeps. Even though they'd been in the news a bit, like with the murder of Alan Berg, they were generally seen as a fringe curiosity specifically because they weren't tied to a huge established group like the Klan, and it didn't seem likely that random suburban white kids would find them very compelling. A few journalists kept saying "No I think we should take this pretty seriously," and James Ridgeway's book Blood in the Face got some press in 1990, and you started to hear more about "militias" but usually in an overly cautious way that was reluctant to suggest that the militias weren't just clubs of paranoid doofuses but were terrorist incubators. Then Oklahoma City happened and some people were still in denial. I had a lot of creeping dread, especially after the Idaho militias got a seat in Congress, but I still didn't understand how the Web was going to amplify everything... and never in my wildest dreams did I think I'd see their open sympathizers in the White House.

I can't imagine how a guy like Picciolini could witness all that, through those years, and not have his head be exploding every day. Focusing on individuals, I guess. As a former nurse with no ability to make people stop getting sick, I guess I can understand that.

RIP: Toni Morrison

This is late because I wasn't sure if I had anything to say that isn't obvious. It's hardly necessary to point out that she was a hugely important writer—and in some other world where she wasn't "important" because no one ever noticed her work (which sadly isn't implausible), it still would've been amazing. And in saying that, I don't mean that I can really grasp her work and judge its full meaning and quality; as a white guy from Pennsylvania whose formative years were pretty segregated, many things about it will always be abstract to me. What I mean is that even someone like me can see it's amazing.

And I hope there will be fewer people like me in the future. That is, for someone who went to high school in the 1980s, and who was taught to respect great literature, it was possible to get the impression that even though enjoyable and thematically interesting novels might still be written in the present day, novels that had big things to say and said them in such memorable language that you couldn't imagine how someone could figure out how to string words together in that way... had pretty much ended some time in the 1950s. I'm pretty sure reading Morrison was my first realization that that wasn't true. I hope now no one can grow up thinking it's true.