A Letter to the Editor
If anyone had ever told me that the most dangerous thing I would ever do in my life up to this point was writing a letter to the editor of my hometown newspaper, I’d have thought they were insane. The truth is, there have been–a few–dangerous things…that I only got involved with because I had no idea at the time that danger was even a factor. Autism and openness to experience can be a dangerous combination sometimes–and if you’re not careful it can lead to tilting at windmills….As I discovered anew the spring that Milo Yiannopoulos tried to come to town. When I moved back to Tulsa, I wanted to adapt a writing curriculum that I had developed while adjuncting at York College in Queens, New York. Prospect Cemetery is over 400 years old–one of the oldest in the state–and it resides on the campus of York College. I collaborated with the Prospect Cemetery Association to create a themed writing course about public art, memorialization, and commemoration centered on the cemetery and restoration efforts. When I began teaching it, the graveyard was so derelict and overgrown that people could no longer visit the graves of their Revolutionary War-fighting ancestors. The cemetery's only regular visitors left things like chicken heads, gris-gris bags, candle stumps…the usual. Fortunately, during the course of my three semesters teaching that course at York College, enough interest was generated that money was made available to renovate and restore it. Prospect Cemetery is a beautiful sight these days, and I like to think that maybe my course helped draw a little bit of energy to the cause along the way. Which is precisely why I wanted to find something in Tulsa to adapt my curriculum again and see if I could maybe help do something awesome there. What I fairly quickly realized would be a problem is that Tulsa has no overgrown cemetery to drive a discussion about memorialization and public art. Instead, Tulsa has the opposite: a series of hidden mass gravesites related to the almost completely erased calamity that was one of the greatest race massacres in history. Fortunately, Tulsa also has John Hope Franklin Park, Greenwood Cultural Center, Council Oak, Cain’s Ballroom, and the scandalous Sinclair Building basement where the Teapot Dome scandal was first hatched…I had plenty to work with, but I had to contrast what Tulsa DID memorialize with what it DID NOT memorialize–what should have been there and wasn’t. So I built the course around sites of memory and how to deconstruct historical markers…including and especially those that should exist but didn’t. It worked pretty well, I thought. After three semesters of teaching this course, two realizations occurred to me. The first was the realization that the social conditions of Tulsa in 2019 almost exactly mirrored those of Tulsa at the time of the Race Massacre: the awful economy, social strife, white supremacy, corruption, and nationalist fervor had been just as high in the Spring of 1921 as they were nearly a century later. Many, many, locals were sympathetic to the social concerns of Trump’s agenda as bandied about in the media, even if they “deplored” the methods he used. This brought about my second realization: that the only thing keeping Tulsa from falling prey to that again was the absence of a Richard Lloyd Jones figure– the white supremacist lackey slimeball of a yellow journalist who ran the Tulsa Tribune in 1921 and churned out violently divisive race hatred on the daily in his respected news source. But I also knew–throughout my entire being–that this was all it would take, because Tulsa is the home of Oral Roberts and people here respond like Pavlov’s dogs to self-righteous paplum. Which is why I spit out my tea when I happened to scroll through Google’s algorithmically neutral local news feed to discover Milo Yiannopoulos was supposed to be speaking at Tulsa Community College in mere weeks. That bastard is the guy who engineered Gamergate in 2015 (with which I’d had to contend when I worked briefly in the gaming industry) from behind his desk at Breitbart. Anyone who watched it unfold knows that Gamergate set the tactics, trolling, and tone that were triumphantly deployed in the Trump campaign the following year. Near as I could figure, this Milo guy aimed to bring fire to my town. Determined that he would do so only OVER MY DEAD BODY, I did what every rebellious college English professor would do–I wrote a sternly worded letter to the editor. That's when everything went off the rails.
