Godspeed Through Texas...

*Name changed to Mr. Smith to protect the innocent and avoid the guilty.

       The minute I crossed the Red River into Texas, I got a "Welcome to Texas!" notification. Five minutes later, I got a news notification: "Texas GOP Adopts Anti-LGBTQI+ Platform." Never mind that record heat is causing power outages, killing thousands of Texas cattle, and creating dreadfully dire drought conditions statewide. Ignore the infant formula shortage, food supply chain inadequacies, ridiculous inflation, bounty-hunter abortion laws, and casual gun violence engulfing small-town America. Forget how small businesses fail daily because they refuse to properly value and compensate the workforce that keeps their businesses open, whilst the goddamned FED encourages businesses to LOWER wages in order to counter inflation. All of these are problems that LGBTQI+ people did not cause and do not in any way benefit from. In fact, these problems affect EVERYBODY--not just the 10%-15% of America's population that is LGBTQI+.

        However, as long as the GOP hounds, hunts, drives out, and eradicates LGBTQI+ people, the Republican Party doesn't have to solve the real problems. They can just spout stochastic terrorism that drives radicalized "patriot" violence groups and "lone wolf" shooters after my people and me...and then rest assured that my fellow citizens will gladly massacre me and mine to vent their boiling, impotent rage over the intolerable misery that their beloved GOP forces them into. When thousands of innocent people-cum-worthless undesirable queers are eradicated (and pregnant women, eventually to be followed by the disabled, PoC, Muslims, Jews, and--finally--liberal Christians), the voting base for anything other than the Republican party dwindles. That's actually the point: with enough citizen-driven violence, massacre, and genocide, Republicans won't even have to gerrymander or cry "election fraud" anymore to keep their power. They can just tweet hate speech and watch their Nazi-thug citizen militias go to work while the rest of us hide. 

        If you haven't caught on yet, this is how scapegoating works. We saw the same goddamn thing 90 years ago in Nazi Germany. And here's how all that scapegoating really ended for Germany: it solved nothing. The Third Reich collapsed and Nazi Germany imploded because instead of innovating to solve the problems, they scapegoated a large chunk of their consumer base/workforce to death while simultaneously ignoring the persistent economic problems that had already made life too difficult. It was just easier to scapegoat and massacre 6 million Jews and millions of others because doing so drew public attention away from the domestic policy failures of the Nazi state. By the last year of the war, the Nazi state had obviously and manifestly failed to bring the peace, prosperity, and opportunity to Germany that it had promised. In the process, millions of innocent people were killed and absolutely nothing changed for the better. Scapegoating does not bring solutions, no matter how proud and patriotic of a Nazi it is who is doing the scapegoating. 

        The worst part of it all is that just like with the average Nazi party member, the average Republican doesn't really care about LGBTQI+ folks one way or the other; they are only stoking stochastic terrorism to keep Christian Fascists, Fox News-addled boomers, and wannabe-soldier militia groups voting in their favor--even if it means encouraging them to let off steam by hunting and killing queers like me. Republicans are gaming the rotten system in order to keep control of it. Having massacres and genocide committed on their political behalf--starting with the LGBTQI+ community--is just the price of doing business. 

        THAT dreadfully humdrum evil brings to mind Hannah Arendt's discussion of "the banality of evil" in Eichmann in Jerusalem: this massacre is absolutely being brought on by bland bureaucrats in ill-fitting Brooks Brothers suits and questionable Ann Taylor Loft ensembles. These bureaucrats are doing nothing more or less than diligently pursuing their political careers in today's fascist, white-supremacist, Evangelical Christian Republican party. The truth is, GOP politicos don't really care enough about queers and marginalized folks to actually hate us themselves.  They say what they say in order to get the result of retaining power. Sacrificing us LGBTQI+ folk to the teeming hordes who are enraged about the nightmare world of poverty and despair that the GOP sees fit for them to have is simply a political convenience to ensure the furtherance of their own careers.  

       So what topics do Republicans spout off about to infuriate those teeming hordes unto stochastic terror? 

* That Oscars slap that Chris Rock had honestly been spoiling for; unfortunately he chose the night that the insulted woman's husband had just uttered the name "Macbeth" live onstage in a crowded theater to do so. 

* Virulently misogynist commentary on that hypnotic, sentient, abortion of justice masquerading as the Depp-Herd defamation trial, which will go on to be applied in blanket fashion to all women who share Herd's diagnoses deserved or not...As will the life-threatening danger that comes along with mentally ill women being seen as “someone like her.”  

* Protecting the free speech rights of misogynist, transphobic, homophobic comedians because comedy is THE LAST STAND for free speech, period, and always has been...but refusing to acknowledge that in doing so they are platforming stochastic terrorism against vulnerable people AND denying any responsibility to offset that harm in the process. 

* Banning fewer than 100 women from professional women's swimming because they are transgender and have some sort of "an unfair advantage" over cis women, even if their best record times and overall performance remains already lower than they had been pre-transition. 

      Clearly, Republicans platform and promote the most banal bullcrap imaginable, in the most misogynist, homophobic, and transphobic terms possible, in whatever form of media they can spew into. You'd think they'd have gotten the hang of it by now, but after the successes of trolling Trump into office, these Nazis are really slipping. Everything Republicans come up with is pretty basic...and pretty sloppy with endless circular logic. The lack of original arguments, clear reasoning, and basic humanity that has driven the planning of my massacre is horrifying and shocking. But it's also incredibly...insulting? These aren't super-villains we're dealing with. They're super-Kevins and Karens, and they're a lousy excuse for a master race. I submit this rogue's gallery as Exhibit A testifying to this fact:

*Marjorie-Taylor Greene: A Ken if ever there was one. Avoid.

*Lauren Bobert: Also a Ken...REALLY enjoys guns. Avoid.

*Mitch McConnell: He's the bitchiest Karen on the planet after Lindsey "Lady G" Graham. Avoid.

*Tucker Carlson: This is ur-Ken. Avoid.

*Madison Cawthorne: A Ken in denial of his true nature; DISABLED Republican. If he can do it, so can you, grandma! Avoid.

*Ron DeSantis: Diva Karen who power-dresses like Ken because she knows damn well that patriarchy is a thing. Avoid.

*Tomi Lahren- Ur-Karen, feeling backstabbed by the abortion thing a little bit, but it if owns the Libs, then what the hey? Avoid.

*Ted Nugent: A Ken who likes guns and longs to shoot you with one even if the two of you are good friends. Avoid.

        The mediocrity of these people is frankly offensive. I'm OFFENDED that the massacre of LGBTQI+ people isn't being planned by actual brainiac super-villains, and carried out by cyborg manticores with flaming nipple cannons. These white supremacist douchebags are all basically the exact people I avoid at the grocery store at all costs. The people they inspire to violence against me are all basically one form or other of my high school classmates. There is no way any of them can hate me enough to want to kill me. But they really love buying name-brand groceries in this economy, you know? They are convinced that throwing queers like me under the bus buys them a steady supply of Grey Poupon and Polaner All-Fruit, and at least one night a week at the Olive Garden. So they do it and then think nothing of it except to occasionally engage in the requisite worship of the hateful and the stupid. 

        Massacre and genocide should be Bond-villain-level stuff. Instead, this incredibly supervillainous goal of queer massacre has been set by Kens and Karens. They're just greedy, basic bitch Republican careerists who keep their hands clean by egging on stochastic terror agents. Overwhelmingly, those terror agents include fascists, white supremacists, actual Nazis, murderously rapey white supremacist incel "lone wolves," and sister-kissing inbred militias from red states and the "State of Jefferson."

        And sweet mercy of cuck can we talk about how they broadcast their mediocrity sartorially? Supervillains should have more style than Nazis. At least the Nazis went to the trouble of hiring Hugo Boss to design their SS uniforms--they looked evilly sharp while massacring your entire family! Instead, I am likely to be killed by some asshole wearing a cheap black knockoff polo shirt, camo cosplay, or a Wal-Mart T-shirt with Trump standing atop a tank, accompanied by a machine-gun-wielding eagle, amidst glorious fireworks, all with an American flag in the background. THAT is very probably the last image I would see if I got killed by one of these people. I promise you I would make myself die quicker just to get away from having to look at it anymore. I think I'd actually be dying from shame FOR them at that point. I know I did not hurt these people, but when I look at all of that fashion tragedy, I have to wonder who did and at what age. Goddamn it, I DEMAND the Spectre take over the operation of my queer massacre right this minute. I, at least, would appreciate the quick efficiency of a Spectre-calibre massacre. The anxiety of waiting for a bunch of bigoted asshats to pull it off is quite frankly driving me insane.

       At the core of my current situation is–you guessed it–Republican Christian Fascism playing out on a local level. The worst part of it is how incredibly unaware I've been about the stuff happening right under my nose. Some people in my community really don't like me because of things they’ve been told about me, or things they think that I did, or opinions I have aired that they don’t agree with. I can't decide if I've been naive or innocent about this. But then I remember that it doesn’t matter. I did exactly these three things to cause any sort of a ruckus, and they are three things that average Americans do all the time without getting death threats: 

        *I wrote a letter to the editor of my hometown newspaper

        *I quit the teaching job that wrecked my health and my faith in my school district

        *I fought City Hall for my parents because they were being predated upon by a sketchy developer. 

        All three of those are basic actions that people take when they are engaged as participants in a democratic society. My actions were not unreasonable. They were not wrong. Oklahoma is what is wrong. The powers that be in Oklahoma will actively seek to harm anyone who engages in basic civic actions that are perceived to block their way forward into fascism. Even if the only thing you've done is stand up for yourself and others in ways that ten years ago would have been viewed as tiny and inconsequential, they're coming for you. Fascism in Oklahoma means that fascism has come to America; it just isn't evenly distributed--yet.  

        Perhaps Americans who should know better don't recognize the fascism already in their midst because "FASCISM!" seems like such a terrifying and harsh word. It certainly describes a terrifying and harsh reality. The thing is, we are pre-conditioned to respond to fascism as an obvious and massive evil, and because of this, we miss the small things that we should notice as red flags. We don't because they're too small. 

        The small red flags dotting the early path into fascism start out looking more or less like a civility war. First comes the stochastic terrorism...and then the defense of the free speech rights of the stochastic terrorists to the silencing and detriment of the marginalized and terrorized. Then comes the outright public discrimination against these groups by fascists who've rules-lawyered judges into accepting the preeminence of their right to discriminate over the basic human rights of those discriminated against. Then come the defenses of these fascists' actions, because they are based on deeply held beliefs that the powers that be happen to overwhelmingly share. Finally. you start having fascist-leaning citizens, inspired and emboldened by banal Republican stochastic terrorists, visit acts of stochastic terrorism upon the marginalized. THAT is when you know you've gone from a civility war into a fascist civil massacre of those whom they have marginalized and want to finish edging out of "their" country. 

        At that point, it's too late to put the genie back in the bottle because you've tilted into full-on fascism. 

        Oklahoma is already there, and they're ready to expand and export. Texas is gearing up to do likewise. The Texas GOP has announced its intention to secede the state of Texas from the United States. Most folks dismiss this action because it's doubtful a Texas secession would go through. They need to stop dismissing it, because they've misapprehended what the GOP is trying to get by making that announcement. The point here is not that the GOP will ultimately be deterred from seceding because of the logistical and economic nightmare that would follow such a move--because of course they will. The point is for the Texas GOP to make Texans believe that the only law that will matter in the future is the Anti-LGBTQI+ law of the new Texas nation-state. This announcement is a dog whistle to their fascist base that future violence against the LGBTQI+ community will be allowed, uninvestigated, unprosecuted, and ignored by Texas state LEOs--and applauded by the Texas GOP. They know that their fascist base longs to enforce those yet-to-be-written-and-passed laws locally and extrajudicially by visiting terror and murder upon Texas' LGBTQI+ Community. Which they will do, because they know for a fact that they will get away with it.  The queers will all be gone even if Texas fails to secede; that is the whole entire point of pretending to secede Texas from the United States.

        I suspect that fascism from red state congresspeople is going to start hitting Washington, D.C. hard this election cycle. Because of the clueless, neo-libeal hubris of the willfully blind Democratic Party, it will be extremely difficult to legislate against the wave of fascism. Those who should already be noticing and fighting it are committed to ignoring its presence until it's too late. If you, on an individual level, have any capability within yourself to resist the exporting of fascism to where you live, you need to start actively looking for signs now and choosing to recognize them as such. When in doubt, listen to your gut.  

        Over the last three weeks, a few things have happened to make my guy wrench hard enough to scream a flash of agony through my nervous system. It felt like what I always imagined a steel-toed boot to the gut would feel like. I can think of no better sensory image to accompany the words "fascism" and "Nazi." This is what my gut told me after each of these experiences:

 *My gun-shooting, bonfire-building backyard neighbors catty-corner to the southwest have their pool up and running. They are out there cooking food and splashing around. These are hair-rock Southern rock people, which is why I was surprised to hear the opening guitar riff and voiceover of "The Time Warp" from the Rocky Horror Picture Show. I was delighted to hear the family matriarch declare drunkenly, "This is from The ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW. I LOOOOOOOVE The ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW!" The women discuss the movie for a moment. Then one of the men asks what the movie is about. The voices went quiet. "I ain't listening to any faggot music!" the man finally declared, to my abject horror. The music stopped. People splashed as they got out of the pool. Someone mentioned that the burgers were on. Then I heard the opening riff of "Sweet Home Alabama." blare through the pool speakers. I think to myself that these people could easily burn my house down "accidentally" during their traditional fire-hazardous Fourth of July bonfire party, if they wanted to. 

 *A few weeks back I learned that two of my former BAPS students had since joined the police force. My impression at the time they were in my class was that they had definite white supremacist leanings. I also learned of the suspicion that the old district superintendent might have been forced to resign, at least in part, due to my own outrage-provoking resignation. In my resignation, I spoke truth to power and explained that truth to my students. It seems that because I forgot to make it sound funny enough for everyone to laugh, some of the district parents now want to harm me. That was attested to by comments of random forums I did not belong to but that former colleagues made em aware of. That certainly showed me. 

*Monday before last, my handyman J was late to work because he stopped to help a stranded motorist who'd broken down on my street. My three-block radius from West Fourth Street in the west to West 57th Street to the east is actually located on unincorporated land that lies between Sand Springs city limits and Tulsa city limits. The only law enforcement available is the Tulsa County Sheriff's Office, and they are pretty hands-off. They are that way because nearly everyone in that 3-block radius is a gun owner–a fact attested to by the "We don't call 911" signs in many of their yards. These signs are sitting right beside the myriad TRUMP 2024 signs decorating all but three of the neighborhood yards: mine and two of my near-neighbors'. The motorist J was helping was a Black woman. Within ten minutes of J's arrival to give the woman a jump start, a big, black Tulsa Police Department  SUV drove up to intrude upon them. Thankfully J was there. 

        But here's the thing: that cop had no business in our neighborhood because it had been outside of his jurisdiction for the past 72 years. What he did was what neighborhood cops working in adjacent jurisdictions do for their neighbors all the time: answer a call from his neighbor to come check out the Black motorist who'd broken down outside and make sure she wasn't trouble. That cop had no jurisdiction there and no business in the neighborhood that should not have involved the Sheriff's office. Or in this case, a AAA tow truck and basic human decency, for chrissakes. 

        It was then that I realized that there is an out-of-jurisdiction police officer wantonly policing my neighborhood at the whim of my racist neighbors at the same time that I have two fascism-supporting former students now working among them. My blood ran cold. 

*Last Saturday, I was summoned to my mother's to give her a bath. My dad had hurt his back and my brother won't do it, so I was called. I went because mom needed me and I knew by then that it would be the last thing I would be able to do for her for a while. Possibly ever. 

        What I didn't expect was to be followed out of the neighborhood and tailgated by a Sand Springs police SUV. As I crossed the Arkansas River Bridge, I looked in my rearview to find the guy was still tailgating me. A swift kick to the gut told me to get in the far left lane beside me, ASAP. I turned on my signal, waited for a car to pass, watched my child-driver-safety-warning light go off, and I moved over. The car immediately coming up behind me was going at least 6o across this 45 mph bridge and had to slow way down so as to not hit me. The cop hadn't come up behind me, so I boogied along across the river and came to a stop about four cars from the stoplight at the end of the bridge. 

        I looked up and noticed the lane next to me had only one car at the light, and it was much further up. Out of the corner of my eye, I look over and see the cop. He's stopped immediately to my right, pinning me into my lane. His face screams pure murder. He angrily gestures for me to roll down my window. I felt grateful that I pulled myself over to the far left before getting pulled over by him to the right. 

        "What did you just do?!?" the officer demanded.

        Genuinely confused, I gently answered, "I changed lanes?"

        "And why did you do it like that?"

        "I'm not sure--"

        "What were you doing when you changed lanes like that," he literally spat. Flecks of his spit flew all the way across the car and hit my nose.

      "I turned on my turn signal, looked behind me, and saw my safety light went off--"

      "I KNOW you looked behind you! I SAW you look behind you!"

     "And then I turned on my signal. I don't understand. Officer?"

    "You cut that guy off who was behind you!" He roared." Cars behind him started honking."He had to step on his brakes to avoid hitting you!"

    Genuinely shocked and showing it on my face, I replied as meekly as Monroe, "Thank you for telling me this officer, I'm glad I know now so I won't do it again. I'm terribly sorry."

    This startled him a moment...long enough for him to disengage.  "Don't do it again," he glowered as he rolled up the window. At that precise moment, the light turned green. I got into the lane right behind him and watched him speed off ahead. I took the first right I could find and took the back way home. As I drove, I was pretty sure this was related to the *Mr. Smith fiasco last summer.

    Mr. Smith is a dodgy land developer in the area. For the past few years, he has been engaged in a land war with my parents' neighborhood. A few Easter Sundays ago, I noticed that the survey marker medallion that matches the original plat for the neighborhood from the 1960's has been removed from the cul-de-sac where it had sat in front of my house since the day of the original plat survey. I called the police and the city maintenance office to report the theft. At this point, there is now nothing linking the neighborhood layout to the original plat.

    A few years back, Mr. Smith came in with plans to develop the solid limestone shelf immediately northwest of my parents’ neighborhood. In order to do this, he has to poach a significant amount land from the current residents' backyards. Never mind that the limestone shelf has recently collapsed in places and that the blasting they'd have to do to build houses would only weaken it further--as well as destroying the structural integrity of the residents' homes--residents such as my parents. 

    Mr. Smith broke through the legalities preventing development on that land parcel by conning folks into agreeing to let him build an RV campsite on the land. What he promised and what he delivered were very different things, and the entire neighborhood felt swindled. Last summer, I took the matter to city hall and raised enough of a ruckus that the USCGS is doing a geological survey of the area to determine its viability for the proposed development. I'd also heard a while back that it had discovered some actual problems that needed addressing, but I didn't hear what they were or how big. 

    Mr.Smith is pretty well known as a powerful businessman and complete sleazeball. He's also very sociable and charming--he has good friends at City Hall, the Police Department, and the County Election Board. I know from a very reliable source that he has done some truly awful things to people and that he ended up skating on everything. One of my former poll worker associates is a very good friend of his and confirmed that there was definitely truth to the rumors, though he'd taken care never to find out exactly what. I don’t blame him. 

    From another source, I'd heard that Mr. Smith was a prolific house-flipper and landlord who did awful things to people who crossed him. I was told that he'd once overbid on the house of a person with whom he was feuding and that his offer was accepted. However, the house mysteriously burned down before closing, so obviously, the sale fell through. Then the Fire Chief said that there seemed to be signs of arson, so the insurance refused to pay out. The fire left that homeowner with nothing. The people renting the house at the time escaped with their lives and very little else. 

        True or not, the thought of that gave me the willies, because Mr. Smith definitely seems like the sort of guy who would sic his police friends onto his enemies without a second thought. I figured that he might also harass my parents if I spent any more time over there. If that story was true, he'd almost certainly come looking for my house as soon as it hit the market and try the same thing. My stomach wrenched in a wave of sick, anxious, fear.

    As I pulled into the driveway of my beloved grandparents' home that I had inherited, I made the decision to closely scrutinize every single offer that was made. The house is a prime candidate for a rental investment property though I would prefer to sell to a family that is hoping to catch a break. This house is listed in 35,000 places from Mexico to Canada, and I know this much for sure: I will take the best offer I get from an out-of-state buyer who is farthest from Tulsa and has no connections to the area. 

    Before I got out of the car, I removed the toll tag transponder stuck to the windshield. I pasted it to my refrigerator so that if anyone was keeping tabs on my movements through it somehow, it would always look like I was home. I scraped off the remaining bumper stickers and removed the fuzzy dice from my rearview mirror, too. When I went inside, I started by planning my route out of Oklahoma to avoid both the toll system and the Tulsa and Mayes County arms of the Oklahoma Highway patrol. I determined to leave by the next Saturday afternoon, at the latest.

        The morning I was packing up to leave, I saw my lifelong neighbor going from her car to her house.  C had moved in during the early '80s, and had been in that house since I was a five-year-old. She'd known my grandparents fairly well and was an absolute sweetheart. I thanked her for being a great neighbor and told her I would miss her. Her autistic grandson P was with her. We'd made friends a few years back, he and I, even though his mom, C's eldest, had been one of my bullies in high school.  The boy's mother had been spending an increasing amount of time at her mother C's house and scowled like mad at the sight of me every time she saw me in my yard. P completely ignored me as I hugged his grandmother.

        As I was loading up my car to leave, C's neighbor on the other side, D, came by. D was a Vietnam vet who'd moved into the neighborhood in 1979. D asked if I needed help loading my car even though I had never spoken to him before in my life. He said he was the neighbor who'd been in the neighborhood the longest. I asked if he'd known my grandparents, Bob and Mary. He said he had. I told him that he may have lived here the longest, but that my family moved in the year the neighborhood was built, as paid for by the WWII GI Bill. 

"I guess this was the end of an era,” I said, looking at him.

        "Too bad," said D, smiling sadly. He then turned and made his way back to his house.  At that moment, neighborhood terrier Carson started nipping around my ankles. His mom, E, had brought him on a walk--without a leash. E had actually grown up in the neighborhood in the '60s and '70s. She'd known my grandparents. 

    Once E had rescued Jason, a cat I fostered during the pandemic. He'd escaped outside and got stuck up her willow tree. E always recalled that to me when we passed in the street and she mentioned it again now. We chatted about how Timbercraft Denali tiny homes and the allure of digital nomad life. Then E went and ruined it all by bemoaning the betrayal she felt when healthcare workers who refused vaccination got fired from their jobs. (She'd been a paralegal before the pandemic.) I just told her it had been a horribly sad and confusing time for everyone, that's for sure, and I bid her goodbye. She did likewise. 

        That hot barb of a reminder was my cue to leave. So I did. I got into my car and drove. I didn't get out to take a piss or get gas till I reached Paris, Texas. 

A Maude-like Heist in Marseille, France

 Photo Credit: Paramount Studios

        As I was packing today, I came across an old VHS of my favorite love story, Harold and Maude. The first time I saw it was my freshman year of college; we'd ordered that, Nekromantic, and Bottle Rocket from the Facets of Chicago catalog. Surprisingly, of the three films, Harold and Maude made the biggest impression on me, because Maude is freaking awesome. In fact, after seeing Maude in action, I became certain that whatever in the hell else might happen in my life did not matter one iota so long as I turned out like Maude by the end of it. I felt that way for a long time, but over the years it got lost. In its place sprang up a seemingly endless succession of career shifts that only led to leapfrogging across industries, too many lateral job moves, and no actual recognition and advancement. After decades of this capitalist merry-go-round, I've been forced out of a career I loved and was good at about by homophobia, ableism, and fascism. With nothing left to lose, I decided to change my life, and I'm doing it. 

        This reminder of Maude coming at exactly this time is a good omen, as far as I'm concerned. Maude was vivacious, daring, loving, carefree, and utterly herself at every moment...which was miraculous given the horror she'd endured. If Maude can be awesome and live in a tricked-out train car, then anyone can. Even I can, and this past year, I've realized it--there is absolutely nothing stopping me from doing my own version of that. This is why I now have I have three career goals: scoring enough interesting and worthwhile freelance gigs to support my bohemian existence, getting my memoirs and my play written, and jumping at every opportunity--no matter how wild it may be--that brings me closer to Maude. 

        As I've reflected upon my life of late, it has occurred to me that I'm off to a pretty good start towards Maude-ness--at least in the shenanigans and political activism departments. My current experience of fascism is in itself very Maude-like, but it certainly isn't anything I'd hoped for (or even expected to experience in my lifetime). What gives me hope is that in addition to being fantastic and the most epic cougar who ever lived, Maude is a Survivor with a capital "S." What I can't help but notice though--in both Maude and myself--is that sometimes that even the most justified of shenanigans can end up having consequences that must be survived. I learned this lesson particularly well on my last night on the job as road manager for the Wailers. 

    We were playing a gig in Marseille, and absolutely none of us wanted to be there. It was foggy, rainy, and chilly, and the entire band had some form of a head cold or sniffles. By then, we'd been playing the French countryside for three weeks and we all just wanted to go home. Fortunately, we were set to have a rest day in Barcelona the next day, followed by a music festival in the city the day after that. I was so absolutely psyched to see Barcelona/not France that I'd begun consulting my Frommer's about what to do on that day off. To be honest, I don't remember too much of what happened before or during that gig. What I remember best is what happened when I went to settle the show with the promoter. Promoters are the folks who produce and promote live music events to make money.

    Promoters are slime, period. I've literally toured the world over and I've met maybe five who weren't absolute fuckers. Fully half of the show settlement meetings I had involved the "big man" promoter placing a gun, or a knife--or once in Brazil an actual machete--on the table between us to intimidate me. Yet somehow, I always got every single penny of our guarantee plus our percentage of the split, and they looked like chickenshit overbearing assholes.  On at least two occasions in the Pacific Northwest, promoters tried to pay us in bricks of marijuana. I actually had to fight with the band about accepting money instead of weed bricks those times, but I sure as hell got our money.  

    I was pretty hardened and blase about dealing with promoters by the time we had gotten to France, but it was a really rough go. First of all, I wasn't the only "road manager." Our French tour agency had sent along the Franco-Algerian tour agent Ben-Ali to keep things moving. At first, this was both good and bad. It was bad because we had conflicts over who was actually running the tour. It was good because Ben-Ali speaks French and I don't, so I needed him. Lucky for me, he was a veteran of the French-North African reggae scene and easy to get along with. He graciously taught me a lot about how things worked in the live reggae business in France. Luckier still was the fact that prior to working in reggae, Ben-Ali had spent twenty years serving in the military with the Algerian Special Forces. When a promoter even threatened to step out of line, Ben-Ali would shoot him a look that would melt stone, and the guy would straighten up. By the time we had gotten to Marseilles, I had become accustomed to our working arrangement. I was going to miss Ben-Ali after he left because this was the last night of the French leg of our tour. 

    All of this was on my mind when Ben-Ali introduced me to the local promoter, Jean. I smelled trouble immediately. The narrowness of Ben-Ali's eyes told me that he was thinking exactly the same thing. Jean was a 6'3" homme who looked a lot like Quentin Tarantino, but his forehead was more bulbous and his eyes were beadier. Upon those beady eyes sat a pair of John Lennon glasses, through which Jean peered at the world like a hungry weasel. He had on Levi's denim jeans, a motorcycle jacket, and Levi's denim shirt unbuttoned to reveal a filthy white Heiniken T-shirt--he was practically wearing a Canadian tuxedo, and I had a tough time taking him seriously as a reggae promoter because of it. He sent a few associates running around frantically doing his bidding while he tried to convince Ben-Ali that nothing was wrong. As they were talking in French, I couldn't understand exactly what was being said. I could plainly see that the body language was contemptuous and cagey as fuck, and that put me on alert. Ben-Ali pulled me aside to explain that there was a problem with the venue. We were not playing at the venue that we had been contracted to play, and Ben-Ali couldn't get a straight answer as to why. Unfortunately, we didn't find out exactly what was going on until it came time to settle the show. 

        Settling the show means collecting your band's money from the promoter.  You and the promoter go into a locked office and sit down with the contract sheet, the ticket drop box, and the cash box and go through the contract line items until you ascertain and collect the total amount your band is owed. In any settlement negotiation, there are four numbers you need to keep an eye out for: the guarantee (G), the break-even point (B), the split point (S), and the venue capacity (V). G is what your band is guaranteed to make for playing the gig--it's the performance fee. B is the dollar amount at which the promoter's expenses are completely paid. S is the dollar amount after which the promoter splits a percentage of the profits--in our case, 35% was customary--with the band. The last two numbers are determined largely according to V. Larger venues cost more but generate more profit. Smaller venues can be profitable if the guarantee is proportional to the venue size and the promoter has made good business decisions. If not, you'll have a shitshow on your hands when it comes time to settle the guarantee.  

    What eventually I discovered in Marseille was that a series of increasingly poor business decisions on the part of Jean Tarantino was fucking with my band's money.  The first big red flag appeared when I tried to track the guy down to settle the show. You NEVER let your band go on stage without settling the money with the promoter first. Your only leverage in negotiations is the band's performance commitment. If you can't settle the guarantee and the band's share of the split prior to your band taking the stage, then you can keep the band from playing until the money is ironed out. If you wait until later, you may not get all of your band's money. I learned this principle on my first night as road manager and never forgot it. Therefore, it was exceedingly suspicious that all of my attempts to settle the show before the band played were put off.  As Ben-Ali was the only French speaker, he was the only one who knew what was going on. The second red flag was that Ben-Ali was quietly nervous and definitely angry but hiding it from me. He'd been on the phone off and on with the tour agent all night, and was waiting on...something? Ben-Ali is not a person of whom you ask personal questions, so I knew better than to pry.  Finally, about half an hour before the end of the show, Jean Tarantino collects us to go and settle the show. 

    The third red flag was the hall of vice we had to walk through on the way to the not-an-office place where we were settling the show. The stairwell reeked of nicotine, THC, mold, and human piss.  The stairs poured us out onto this lugubrious, filthy hallway lined on either side with skeezy-looking people. The fluorescent lighting flickered madly and darkly because the bulbs were almost burned out. The entire scene was lit like a Blumhouse film, and it made me incredibly anxious. Along the wall to my left kneeled a few women giving blowjobs to what looked like paying customers. Along the wall to my right were folks helping each other shoot heroin. I kind of marveled at how they separated out so neatly into a row of junkies on one side and a row of prostitutes on the other as we moved toward the office. At the far end of the hall glowed a large, dim rectangle of glass above which was illumined the word "Sortie" in red. It was an exterior exit. I had a really bad feeling by now and longed to keep on going and leave that fucking nightmare behind me. But the money beckoned, as money often does. 

    Jean Tarantino took us into some broken-down, awful-smelling upstairs VIP/dressing room on the second floor that was torturously far from the exit door. He sat us down on a filthy white Naugahyde couch and began to spread the settlement items out on the enormous glass coffee table. I had my contracts with me, for comparison, and so I spread them out as well. As soon as I had mine spread out, Ben-Ali looked at them. Then he looked at the promoter's paperwork and hissed, "Merde!" I had caught what he noticed. The venue name on my contract, Dock Des Suds, was different from the venue name on Jean's contract, Espace Julien. My venue capacity was 2800 people. His venue capacity was 1000. I now knew exactly why Jean had been so cagey. Before I could think about what to do next, Ben-Ali got into it with Jean. As they bitterly argued, I looked at the numbers. The guarantee was the same, but the break-even and split-point were way off- to the tune of at least 10K in potential split profit being lost in translation between the contracts. This fifth red flag was a very bad sign. I'd encountered shit like this during the Latin American leg of our tour and it always meant one thing: the gig was part of a money-laundering scheme, and this one seemed to be going badly. And I now had more red flags than Beijing at Chinese New Year.

    Live event production is practically a money laundromat if you do it right. The whole point of laundering money is that you plan to take a loss in exchange for clean-seeming money that has been "legitimately" earned. It is hella easy to lose a set proportion of your dirty money from producing live events, because the losses are evident and glaring when you look at the box office receipts, and the law doesn't pay too much attention to things like reggae shows that LOSE money. Sometimes your show fails--that's showbiz! No need to look further. 

    Now what we had here was almost certainly a money-laundering scheme. I honestly didn't care so long as my band got ALL their money and I didn't get, well, macheted or whatever, in the process. Their crime-ing wasn't really my problem. My problem was that Jean Tarantino seemed to have done some middle-management double-cross shenanigans of his own in switching the venue. Jean said that he switched us to a smaller venue because we were not even close to selling out the Dock Des Suds and he had only made the decision to do so that day. Jean then claimed that he was trying to minimize his losses because ticket sales had underperformed. Our guarantee was based on a much bigger venue size than we played, and he felt it was unreasonable for us to stick to the contract terms because of the enormity of his losses. He had more than broken even, but he wanted us to forgo our share of the profit past the split point because his loss was so great. 

    Ben-Ali had finally gotten ahold of our Parisian tour agent and discovered that no new contract had been sent from the promoter's bosses confirming the new venue and updated contract terms. Moreover, the head of the Parisian promotion company was not aware that there had been any changes made to the venue for the Marseille show. To them, the show just looked like one massive financial loss and that is just what happens sometimes with reggae. Of course, the lack of an updated contract sent to the tour manager or my band's agency plus all the signs advertising the gig at Espace Julien had disproved the basis of Jean's story. All these things together meant that this guy had kept the paperwork officially about the larger venue but was trying to settle us on this fictitious contract he'd forged during the first part of the show for the smaller venue we actually played. 

    If you're thinking "what the clusterfuck?" right now, you aren't alone. So do yourself a favor and ask yourself a question: Doesn't a large venue have considerably more costs for utilities, staffing, security, rental fees, and insurance than a venue half its size would? Of course, it certainly would. So add up all of those costs for the large venue. Then add up all the same costs for the smaller venue. Now subtract the smaller from the larger and you get, in this case, a 35K franc cost difference. As far as the home office in Paris is concerned, that money is gone and there's no point looking for it. But if you were clever enough to lower your costs by switching to a smaller venue without home office knowing about it, then you have 35K francs in your pocket that your boss won't ever look for. THAT was Jean's scam. And the truth is, I couldn't have cared less. But then he had just tried to fuck us out of our percentage of the split. He was greedy and stupid, a combination which offends me to the core.  THAT made me furious. 

    By now, the room had grown very quiet. Hunting-rabbits quiet. Ben-Ali and Jean Tarantino were both peering intently at me, hostility festering behind their eyes. Jean, however, was also spooked. He looked at me and knew that I knew. Ben-Ali asked me what I found. I showed him my figures and the two--substantially different--contracts. Then, I sat back and waited, longing for a martini and some popcorn. I watched scrutiny, contemplation, and finally, comprehension dawn across Ben-Ali's features. His eyes narrowed, and I waited...the explosion that followed was truly spectacular.  

    It was a sight gag, to be honest, and I had to fight not to laugh. Jean Tarantino was a tall, scrawny drink of water. Ben-Ali was 5'6" and built like a Sherman tank. He always had this sort of taut, springy power to his step, like a panther spoiling to lunge. And lunge he did. They raged at each other across the table, and then around the room. Screaming and hollering. As they grew louder and started to break things, I became acutely aware of the broke hookers and junkies just on the other side of that flimsy door. Finally, Ben-Ali shouted something in Algerian and...stormed out of the room with his phone. I was shocked. 

    My shock turned to horror when Jean Tarantino closed the door...and locked it. He casually turned back around to face me, grinning evilly. I had no idea what he said, but it probably involved the words "American cunt." I've heard that exact phrase in at least 6 languages because nearly every single promoter called me that at least once during every single settlement negotiation. Except in America, where I was just "cunt." One of the greatest tragedies in my life is that I am too smart for my own good and too clever by half, but I have absolutely no idea this is the case and it gets me into trouble often. Maybe it's the Maude in me. I was oh most certainly in trouble now. 

    As he sauntered over, he opened his coat and pulled out a 9" hunting knife.  I swallowed hard and froze. A faraway tinny rattling and thunking sound cafe seemingly from out of nowhere. That just made Jean Tarantino walk slower. My eyes started to sting and my sinuses clogged and it got hard to see and smell. I knew my Jansport backpack was within arm's reach and speculated that if I waited for the right time, I maybe could grab it and sort of shield myself...I knew that you sacrifice your non-dominant forearm as a shield to take the first slash it would bring the attacker so close you could gauge out his eye. All of this shit would only be possible if I could move, though. And maybe in the movies. I could hear the blood roaring in my ears as Jean Tarantino got about five feet from me. Then, there was this massive crash-smashing behind Jean. He whips around to watch as Ben-Ali literally barrels through the broken-open flimsy door. Ben-Ali stops on a dime and steadies himself the second he is fully in the room. Then his eyes fell on Jean Tarantino's knife.

    I've seen Ben-Ali's eyes go narrow in rage. I'd never seen them go wide with absolutely divine fury and loll back into his head before momentarily shooting forward and fixing on their target. I hope never to again. Ben-Ali leaped and was on Jean like a wrathful tiger. He closed the distance between them with one stride, shoved Jean Tarantino AAAALLLLL the way 180 degrees around, and then lifted him in the air by his Levi's lapels. Because of the height difference, Ben Ali was literally holding Jean Tarantino aloft overhead and choking him with his own denim jacket, but it seemed to take no more effort than a light upward arm stretch. As Ben-Ali played complete wicked hell with Jean Tarantino, I looked back at the table. At least 50k of the 77k francs lying there was ours, and that asshole had threatened to kill me. Without thinking, I swept the entire pile of cash into my open Jansport as I rose to run out the broken, splintered door. I hear a crash of glass and a thud behind me, and this makes me run harder. As soon as I get out the door, I pause in horror.  I knew I would have to make it all the way down this 25-yard-long hallway of iniquity with a partially-open Jansport backpack full of 77k francs to reach a sortie that led I knew not where. Boy was I fucking grateful when I heard Ben-Ali's accented Franco-Algerian bark behind me, "Are you okay?" 

    I showed him a peek of the money inside the 3/4 closed backpack cradled shut in my arms like an infant. "I got our fucking money," I hissed, "Let's go."

    Ben-Ali looks at me and says, "Run you cunt!" as he began to run. I was running, too. We ran as carefully as possible. 

    Speedwalking that gauntlet felt exactly like trying to navigate the hospital hallway of murderous demon fetish nurses from Silent Hill II--God knows it had the same lighting. We had to move fast, stick to the center, and keep away from the vice crowd along the walls, but also not draw attention to ourselves. Jean Tarantino never emerged from the office. I tried not to think about why but instead be thankful I wouldn't be getting a skewer to the back. We were approached by two vice denizens on our tortured flight, but Ben-Ali menaced them into backing off. The sortie loomed before us...

    ...and then the most horrible realization I had ever had in my life up to that point befell me: I had no idea where the Rastas were or how long it would take to gather them up. Usually, it was an hour of herding all 12 cats into the tour bus before we could leave. But for however long it was going to take to find them, I would be carrying around 77k francs in Espace Julien as I searched. If Jean was only stunned instead of something worse, then he might wake up. That would turn my herding of cats into a game of cat and mouse. 

    All I could think of was holy fuck. We are done for. I am going to die in this shitty nightclub, in this armpit of a major French city, because I was murdered by a complete fuckstick of a human being ONE DAY BEFORE I CROSSED BARCELONA OFF MY BUCKET LIST. I was ANGRY when I shoved that tempered-glass door open and we burst into the night. Ben-Ali pulled the door shut behind us. 

    The sortie had let out atop a staircase training down to the ground level. The night air braced us; it was cool, quiet, and clean-smelling. The stairs let out directly onto the sidewalk.  That much was a relief. I looked down at the street below and almost shouted for joy. There I beheld the most stunning and gorgeous sight I have ever in my life beheld. There, right past the bottom of the sidewalk stairs, was the open door of our tour bus, which was parked there, on, and waiting. I barbarically yawped with glee at the sight. Ben-Ali and I ran down the stairs to the bus. Junior, our soundman, was waiting. 

    "We all here and ready to go."

    "What?" I asked in utter disbelief as I mounted the stairs into the bus. 

    "We all feel sick after the show, so we all came right to bus."

    "Everybody is here and accounted for?" Ben-Ali asked in utter disbelief.

    "Yesssss! We go now!" A very testy Gary, our lead singer, hissed exasperatedly.

    "Alright." Ben-Ali headed up front to tell our exceedingly Welsh driver, Adrian, to hit the road.  I headed back to Fams and the manager to do the night's books. 

    As I walked back, I felt exhausted and wanted nothing more in the world than my own bed, in my parent's house. I'd seen a LOT of crazy shit in my time with the Wailers, but this one spooked me. Jean Tarantino wasn't the only person making exceedingly bad business decisions. There was general miscommunication and sloppiness from beginning to end on several parts of the European tour. I'd come to tolerate the ritual display of arms by macho promoters who were trying to psych me out. They were always so shocked by my flattened affect and businesslike demeanor, that their intimidation tactics usually devolved into mild sexual harassment. Wash, rinse repeat. It was just so tiring to deal with all the time. 

    But this whole charade? This whole charade had been a different animal altogether. I had already come to resent the fact that I had endured ridiculous amounts of toxicity and abuse from the promoters AND the band, and that nothing I did was ever enough. The continuous stream of dangerous situations that the tour agents so casually threw me into and expected me to handle had honestly become too much. But it wasn't until this night that I recognized these facts. I'd come close to being killed by a small-time criminal who was too stupid to cover his tracks because my bodyguard/co-manager picked a fight with him and then ran out of the room, leaving me alone with him. What if Ben-Ali had been even ten seconds later breaking that door down? What if Ben-Ali had gotten hurt and I'd have had to navigate that hell hallway while being chased by a knife-wielding Jean Tarantino? What if the bus had not been miraculously waiting and even more miraculously ready to go because everybody was already aboard? 

    It was pretty clear to me that my luck had limits, and that whatever luck I had was being wasted by the bad decisions of people with money and power in this situation. In fact, I was certain that luck had zero to do with my having survived this ordeal. I chalked up everything from Ben-Ali breaking down the door until us escaping onto the waiting bus to divine intervention. Yep, things on the road were now so rough that it was taking divine intervention to keep me safe. As I approached the door to the back area where the manager and Fams were, I realized it was time to sortie. If I wanted to live long enough to become Maude, I needed to live long enough to do it, and that meant getting off the road and moving on to whatever was to come. 

    I quit that night. The only part of Barcelona I saw was the airport, but at least I was alive to see that much. I've never boarded a plane with that much joy in my life. I hope never to again. 

    At least I can say that like Maude, I survived an ordeal: I'm a survivor.  I promised myself that from that point on, I would be certain that whatever shenanigans I do that bring unintended consequences upon me should be more worthwhile than keeping a dysfunctional band on the road. I'm pleased to admit that although I have certainly gotten myself into trouble since that time, it was for a far worthier cause. I regret nothing. 

Summertime, Stochastic Terrorism and Me

 

Photo Credit: Holocaust Memorial Day Trust

    Sometimes in order to tell the truth, you must first tell a story. For my purposes, you need to know these two:

1.     According to the urban legend my sociology prof recounted in class one day, there is an old case study from the 70s study floating around out there about misattribution of intent and sexual predators.  According to the urban legend, everyone used to pretty much believe that the summertime increase in rapes was because the heat drove sex maniacs crazy, and women were wearing skimpier clothes so as to be noticed by said sex maniacs, and that was why there were more rapes during the summertime. As it turns out, or so the legend goes, the rise in temperatures correlated to the increase in rapes because people were more likely to leave their windows open to keep cool at night during the summer, and that gave sexual predators an opportunity. I have no idea if this mythical case study exists or not, but the moral of the story was instructive nonetheless: When it comes to crimes against women, people would rather slut-shame and victim-blame and make excuses for sex maniacs than acknowledge that increased heat plus increased opportunity drove the surge in sexual violence. In my observation and experience, the moral of that legend has proven true time and again... 

2.    On May 6, 1933, a gang of Nazi-supporting youth calling themselves The German Student Union occupied, looted, and trashed the Institute of Sexology in Berlin. On May 10, they moved the entire library and archive into Bebelplatz Square and burned it. That is where the famous Nazi-book-burning photograph that we all saw in history class comes from. But somehow whenever people tell the story, they leave three key details out. 1. One of the founders of the institute was Bernard Schapiro, a doctor specializing in men's sexual and reproductive health who was also an Orthodox Jew. 2. The institute's mission was also to advocate for sexual health education, contraception, and women's emancipation. 3. The Nazi party itself had nothing to do with this. A group of pissed-off, radicalized young men took it upon themselves to do it. Their four-day occupation and subsequent eradication of the Institute and its research went unchallenged by anyone and were widely applauded by Nazi party leaders and media. That archive was burned because a roving pack of Nazi sympathizers was allowed to take the law into their own hands and wield it like a cudgel against Berlin's--Europe's-- queer community with absolutely no repercussions.

    Now, it's my turn: 

        The truth is, it's going to be an awful, messy, hellish, and dangerous summer in places like Oklahoma. We are gripped in the ugly throes of a fascist civil rights apocalypse. Women are losing bodily autonomy left and right. The states are deputizing citizen finks to bounty-hunt anyone who helps a desperate woman out of a horrendous situation. Because civil lawsuits are on the line, private practice physicians will be prized game because they have money. They are also the ones to whom women with money could go to discreetly handle their abortion problem. That loophole is now closed. But something far more sinister has been opened: the doorway to turning a highly motivated group of violent and entitled citizen finks into an organized and fiscally-rewarded version of the German Student Union...Don't we already have Proud Boys standing by and standing back to do just that?

       One of the biggest risks we face this summer is becoming victimized by "stochastic terrorism:" random acts of violence, which are statistically probable but completely unpredictable, committed by people who are driven by the hateful ideology of mass-media demagogues. According to Daily Kos author G2geek who coined the term, "The stochastic terrorist is the person who uses mass media to broadcast memes that incite unstable people to commit violent acts." The goal is plausible deniability with maximum carnage in service to the demagogue's political designs. Right now those designs involve encouraging my neighbors to strip a good deal of human rights and civil liberties away from me and others like me. 

        We need to better recognize when our areas are getting rife with the forces that generate acts of stochastic terrorism. With 100% certainty, Oklahoma and places like it will start seeing discrimination and violence being done against people of color, women, LGBTQ+folks, the disabled, etc.--likely by their neighbors. They've already seen it in Uvalde. To be honest, I can't think of a better recent example of a successful act of stochastic terrorism THAN the hideous massacre at Uvalde.  There will be more of that. 

            The amount of airtime devoted to demonizing and oppressing the people with uteruses and members of the LGBTQ+ community is almost as staggering as the amount of airtime devoted by media outlets to platform fascists and sycophants (who weigh in like Waldorf and Statler) over just why our rights are so controversial that our right to existence up for debate. America's current cultural moment is being overdetermined by the demonization of marginalized people. It's pretty clear that a good portion of the impending waves of stochastic terrorism will be let loose upon women and the LGBTQ+ community. 

         The only thing missing from this situation is the trigger, and I'm afraid that in Oklahoma it will be more like a confluence of events than any single thing that does it. Like all of America, Oklahoma has skyrocketing costs of living, spasmodic wage growth, and small businesses failing because they refuse to acknowledge the shifting work demands and power balances of the post-pandemic labor market. The supply chain crisis is nowhere near resolved so food and commodities are not only expensive but actually scarce. We have a baby formula shortage of inequitably distributed awfulness. Oklahoma also now has rafts of pregnant women who are desperate not to be. The economic situation for many families is already terrible, and the desperation is very real. Climate change may be what transforms all of this into a rage.

       There is truth to that legendary old case study my soc professor told us: heat drives people to become more violent.  Oklahoma is just now starting to see "chaotic weather" in the form of massive storms that have already begun to inundate ill-maintained systems and shut down antiquated power grids. Other places have already experienced heatwaves so intense that their power grids all but collapsed. If these immanent power blackouts last so long that the refrigeration starts to go, it could take a sizeable chunk of the already scarce food supply with it. That's not even counting the healthcare crisis that such an issue would precipitate. When this heat finally hits here, tempers will spike right along with the temperatures.  

        Oklahoma summer heat really hits around mid-July, and I predict that this may be when we will start seeing acts of stochastic terrorism start really playing out here. We are already seeing signs of it. The Oklahoma City pro-choice rally scheduled for today got canceled by the organizer. A man had been picked up after making bomb and mass shooting threats but was released a few days later. 

        Way back in April, two local schools had safety issues on campus. Catoosa Middle School initiated a "soft lockdown" when an armed intruder came to campus. Nobody was allowed in but the students and faculty were free to leave...and to outside...where the armed intruder was.  That story evaporated in a day. My student had to leave class early that day to go pick up her little brother. In early May, my old workplace, Broken Arrow High School, reported an incident of a student who'd brought a gun to school in the trunk of their car. That story also evaporated after a day. The people here are so desperate to own the libs on gun control and campus safety that they will mortgage their own children to do it. They will not blink twice at acts of stochastic terrorism committed against any member of a marginalized group that they don't happen to like. 

        When the SCOTUS Roe overturn draft got leaked...twice... I saw an article from the 19th about the impending decimation of civil liberties that would almost inevitably follow. I talked with my brother and I told him to keep an eye on whether or not things from that article started happening within the next two weeks because they would give us an idea of fast things will be moving. Then exactly two weeks to the day, I saw two of the big problems that the article discussed starting to wend through the courts and statehouse of Oklahoma: the judicial stripping of parental rights to children they had adopted  from LGBTQ+ parents, and the most abominably draconian abortion ban in America had been passed (it's now law). We need to pay close attention to local and national civil rights struggles, because we can be certain that once they mention getting a specific fascist ball rolling, it will be maybe two weeks before other fascists take it and run. I reckon that about two weeks after news of more legislation being passed, the stochastic terrorism will begin in earnest. 

         This is why I'm incredibly grateful that my brother Larry, who lives in Dallas, finally agreed to me having guardianship papers for Nate. It's hard, though, because he was fired from his job in what is almost certainly an act of homophobic discrimination. Al this is right on the heels of his paying $10k in medical bills from his heart attack last March. This guardianship process is turning out to be slow, expensive, and nerve-wracking. I'm hopeful, but I'm also nervous. 

        Actually, I'm terrified. Today I learned some things that have chilled me to the bone. Two of my former students–both of whom were die-hard Trumpists with white supremacist leanings--have joined the police force. To be honest, they both strike me as exactly the sort of authoritarian, white supremacist enforcers types who could murder detainees and refuse to investigate hate crimes against transmen like Dustin Parker. 

        On top of this, I also finally heard about what happened at the district school board meeting after I resigned. Apparently, my farewell address caused a brouhaha among parents, colleagues, and admin precisely because I ruthlessly criticized the district's careless Covid policy, and then I said the quiet parts out loud about what the anti-CRT legislation would mean for LGBTQI+ educators like myself.  It seems that my resignation spurred a conflagration that led to the superintendent's decision to resign in December during winter break. A Trumpist school administrator has since been appointed superintendent of the district. It seems to me that the district doubled down on homophobia and transphobia after I called out Oklahoma's Anti-CRT laws and the administrators and parents who wish to exploit them to harm students and educators. Things are getting very, very rough for the LGBTQI+ people in the district--and the town. I am not kidding when I tell you that I  suspect I could be one of the most hated people in all of the greater Tulsa area, and it's all because I was trying to either help vulnerable people or stand up for myself against Christian fascist oppression. 

        Those sobering discoveries have also prompted me to ask a question about how, exactly, I got doxed during the Barnett-Yiannopoulos ordeal: If I didn't disclose my TCC employment in that letter to the editor, then how did I get linked to the place and doxed? I did not disclose my link to TCC in that letter, and I have always been purposefully vague with my college writing students about which school district I teach English for. The only people who knew the details about my working for TCC would have been my students and colleagues at the high school. It honestly HAD to be one of my co-workers or students. 

        There is only one student I've ever had who I am certain would do something like that--or whose father would. This was a student in the high school English class that I was also teaching at the time of the ordeal. P was a smart, clean-cut white supremacist who wore his black Proud Boys polo shirt every other Thursday and looked me right in the eye while he chugged a quart of whole milk during class. This student's father--impersonating him but with atrocious grammar--would regularly harass me through his son's Canvas account. P wasn't the only disturbing student I had in that class, but he was far and away the most well-behaved, cunning, and dangerous of them. He was constantly playing edgelord to goad me to do or say something he could report, and I'd have to ignore that, forebear, and press on to keep our class on track to finish our curriculum by the year's end. All of this was BEFORE  our current era of anti-CRT. 

        I'm honestly scared about what will happen to me if, for some reason, any of those former students--or any of the fascists that stalked me and drove by my house during that doxing ordeal--start paying attention to me again. For any reason. I noticed some odd activity across my socials recently and am deleting Twitter just to be safe. I'm also going to scrape the queer bumper stickers off my car and stay home from Pride. 

      At this point, I'm scrambling to get out of here by July 15th and I don't know if I'm going to make it. I mean, I'm already deep in the process of separating the 80% of my stuff that is getting donated from the 19.5% that is going into storage and the .5% that will be coming with me wherever is next. I'm also trying to upgrade and sell this place ASAP so I can get the resources to do whatever is next. Did I mention that "this place" was my grandparents' house, where fully half of my happy childhood memories took place? And I finally got gainful employment--that starts on June 1. This getting out of Dodge thing is turning out to be very fucking hard. On the bright side, I'm talking with good friends in Colorado about next steps. Though nothing is certain yet, I endeavor to remain hopeful. 

Captain's Log, Stardate 15-9-1935: Patterns of Force and Recognition

Photo Credit: Paramount Studios

 Photo Credit: Paramount Studios

 “When Fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.” –Sinclair Lewis (allegedly)

  Life in the Wilkerson household could be rocky growing up, but there were a few things we all loved and would put aside our differences to enjoy together: Classic Star Trek, Dr. Who, Star Wars, Buck Rogers, and Whoopi Goldberg (since Jumpin’ Jack Flash, mind you). I’m not sure how all of these became my family’s go-tos when we wanted to hang out together but not strangle one another. I just know that my personal favorite is the classic Star Trek. It’s my favorite because I happily remember feelings of safety, contentment, and belonging from watching Star Trek after school with my brothers. When I think about how family love feels, that’s what springs to mind. Maybe it isn’t so surprising that with the way Oklahoma’s been going lately, I decided to settle down to comfort-binge this particular show. 

  As I browsed the available episodes and seasons, I came across “Patterns of Force.” I remembered hearing about “the Nazi episode,” and seeing stills and interview clips about it, but that was it. I thought and thought and thought about it, and realized I couldn’t remember much of the plot. The conclusion I drew from the synopsis was that I absolutely needed to see Spock and Kirk putting the smackdown on Nazis. Besides that, the certainty of some sort of end to the fascist menace by the episode’s end reflected my own deep longing for an end to Oklahoma’s current fascist menace. I hit “play.” 

  Knowing conservative male historians as I do, I can 100% believe some asshat like John Gill would convert a group of aggressive folks into Nazis because it was the most “efficient” way to “civilize” them. Honestly, dude, what was the hurry? The Zeon Peace Corps was already there helping them advance at a sustainable pace. That the Ekosians hadn’t already devolved into fascism themselves suggests that the ideology would NOT have naturally occurred to them as any sort of solution. There was no reason to turn them into Final Solution fascists for efficiency’s sake! Then Gill turned around and gave them nuclear technology. Upon reflection, I actually do find his motivation plausible, given that the man thought fascism was a good idea, too. Now, how he accomplished that is anybody’s guess: He’s a Doctor of Philosophy in History, dammit, not an engineer! 

Even so, my aim was true: “Patterns of Force” was exactly the thing I needed to see, but I had to watch it in small doses. Every so often, this casual dread would creep up my spine and ruin the vibe I’d hoped to sustain by watching my boy Spock beat Nazis. So I’d hit pause, watch a few baby sloth videos, and then go back to it. Unfortunately, Spock beating Nazis wasn’t enough to make me feel better. Eventually, neither were the baby sloths. Don’t get me wrong, I really enjoyed the episode, but real life washed right over me again as soon as I finished watching it. 

  The whole reason I set down to comfort-binge was that earlier today, two things popped up in my news feed. The first was an article about an Oklahoma judge stripping an adoptive lesbian parent of parental rights and having the child’s sperm donor listed on the birth certificate instead as he is now petitioning for custody. The second was the news of Oklahoma’s draconian abortion ban. It leaves a handful of limited exceptions for legal abortion–that must be obtained before the six-week “fetal heartbeat” threshold–but empowers random racist redneck Christians to sue anyone they even THINK might be willing to provide abortion services, shuttle someone to abortion services elsewhere, or have possible procured abortion services themselves. 

Two weeks ago, after reading an article about the landslide of LGBTQI+ civil rights losses that would likely follow the overturn of Roe v. Wade, I called my brother. Larry is the 50-year-old gay father of an adopted son, who he co-parents with Jason, his ex. They live in Dallas. When we spoke, I basically laid out the article’s concerns for him and asked if we could get guardianship and POA paperwork arranged just in case I needed to take Nate elsewhere. He did not want to hear it. Which is understandable. He said he’d just paid off the 10K in medical bills racked up by the heart attack he had back in March. He was trying to keep his job amidst an increasingly toxic and hostile environment with increasing amounts of homophobic microaggression. Even if I was right, he told me, he did not have the time or the means to make those arrangements. 

When I offered to get papers drawn up for him, he got very upset and could not continue the conversation. I suggested we could table the conversation for two weeks, and he agreed. I also told him to watch his news feeds for signs that the things we talked about really were happening. If they weren’t, I would be all wet and he would be right. If they were, then we needed to talk; the pace at which these things started happening is the measure of how fast things are moving and where they are going. He agreed to keep watch and check in again in two weeks. Then today, exactly two weeks later, I see that Oklahoma has started to politically realize the very dangers he and I had talked about.  

I honestly can’t blame Larry for feeling like he does. Like many other Americans, the hellish rigors of trying to survive as a marginalized, vulnerable single dad in a bigoted, contemptuous and vampiric capitalist society have left my brother with insufficient time, energy, or mental focus to mount any sort of effective resistance to what is coming. The hardest part of the entire conversation was trying to explain to my brother that as LGBTQ+ people, we cannot rely on the protection of the law to keep us safe. In fact, we never really have been able to. 

This is the whole entire issue with those of us queers who don’t want to see cops in uniform marching in Pride parades, by the way. We remember how the cops treated gay men before and during the AIDS crisis. We remember how Christians and fascists have been murderously obsessed with eliminating us from polite society, and how law enforcement has always dropped the ball on crimes committed against us. We know it from how the police handle the murder of our trans siblings and how the judges and politicians handle our trans children. The law was pushed reluctantly to our side in the last two decades, and it seems pretty eager to abandon us post haste. 

Law is no protection in a fascist regime because fascists rig the system to exclude the undesirable. The very first step to mobilizing German society to accept and participate in the genocide of the Jewish people was rewriting the laws. Passed on March 15, 1935, the Nuremberg Laws painstakingly defined the blood quanta that defined what a Jewish person was, and then stripped that person of all citizenship rights while yoking them with the highly vulnerable and easily targetable status of “national.” This one legal maneuver created the entire legal framework needed to facilitate the Final Solution. History has made it clear that “the law” is no protection if you don’t have rights to begin with. 

  We queers cannot continue to act as if the law will be around to protect us, either. The fascist powers that be are legislating from the bench or writing new laws to make us second-class citizens with no legal protections or human rights whatsoever. The mistake everyone–especially members of the LGBTQ+ community–needs to stop making is thinking that fascism isn’t really here where we live so long as homophobia has not been legally codified at a national level. Fascism is already here, it just isn’t evenly distributed. Our constitutionally established Federal-State power divide is why. 

The USA is a FEDERAL government system that balances power between the central federal government and the various state governments. Any rights that are not explicitly enumerated in the FEDERAL constitution or already codified into FEDERAL law are up for grabs: i. e. every past SCOTUS human rights decision that was not followed up by FEDERAL legislation addressing it. This means that for each STATE without that same legal follow-up to guarantee those rights in its STATE constitution, then that state’s judges and governors hold a monopoly on how many SCOTUS-adjudicated human rights each of its different groups of state residents will actually get. At no point should any of these United States get to determine how many American citizenship rights its various groups of residents enjoy. Americans REALLY need to start seeing through this whole “states’ rights’” canard that has persisted since pre-Civil War times. “States’ rights” is just a pretext for any given state to dehumanize the groups of people who they wish to exploit or eliminate. All Americans need to start recognizing these efforts for what they are and defeating them at every opportunity.  

Far too many states are like Oklahoma–or trying to be. Occasionally they may vote blue for president or governor, but it’ll be red for everything else on that ballot. Oklahoma is very focused on decimating the rights of LGBTQ+ people in this process. With the judicial and legal action set in motion this week in Oklahoma, it looks to me like we’ve begun the piecemeal process of legislating our own Nuremberg Laws into being.

This thought stops me cold. As a little girl, the Holocaust was a preoccupation of mine. Not because I wanted to know so much about it, but because my mother was obsessed with telling me about it (we were Mormons, in case you were wondering). She didn’t pay much attention to me in general, so I took what I got. What interested her, interested me. If ever there was an Anne Frank exhibit somewhere, or “The Hiding Place” was on TV, or there was a speaker at TU talking about the Holocaust, my mom dragged me front and center to bear witness. I went gladly.

I was 9 when my mom took me to the Gershon and Rebecca Fenster Gallery of Jewish Art  (now the Sherwin Miller Museum of Jewish Art) in Tulsa to see a traveling Anne Frank exhibit from D.C. I’d been to two others–one at the Tulsa Central library and one at the University of Tulsa library–but I remember this one seemed to be much nicer. It affected me very strongly. So strongly that I remember being weepy by the end of it. My mother was also strongly affected. By the time she caught up with me near the end, her face was wet with tears. We just kind of stood there for a minute, looking at each other. It made me feel kind of anxious. I had no idea what was happening with my mom. Then, all of a sudden, she kneeled down on the floor in front of me and hugged me. After a few moments, she pulled back and, with one hand on either side of my head, she looked me right in the eye and said, “Wendi, don’t you ever forget this happened. And if you ever see things like this start to happen, you do something! Never forget.” I was too stunned at the time to do anything but nod in agreement and hope my mom was okay. To this day, though, I have never forgotten. 

In grade school, I learned that the Holocaust was the attempted genocide of the Jewish people, six million of whom were massacred. I also knew that an uncertain number of Christians were also killed. What I didn’t learn until grad school is that millions of under-documented others were also killed. Of the remaining miscellaneous millions still unestimated were: The first generation of biracial Afro-Deutsche born to black French soldiers from WWI who’d fought in North Africa and married German wives, Jehovah’s Witnesses and other religious minorities, political dissidents, 25% to 30% of Europe’s Sinta and Romani population, and many others, including all others considered “undesirables.”

A few of the things I learned about the Holocaust between grade school and grad school left me particularly horrified. At the exact same time as I was coming into my own as a young pansexual, I saw the documentary Paragraph 175. Paragraph 175 of the 1871 German penal code outlawed sodomy. The law was used from 1933 to 1945 as a pretext for sending 10,000 gay men to concentration camps. Not long after my autism diagnosis, I discovered an expose on Nazi pediatrician Hans Aspberger. Through an intense process of experimentation and research on “undesirable” children who’d been ripped from their parents as part of the Aktion T4 program, Asperger developed the diagnosis “autistic psychopathy” to describe high-functioning autistic children (like I once was). After he finished experimenting, Aspberger sent the children to die in Am Spiegelgrund, one hospital where undesirable children were sent to die. 

Then a few years ago, I discovered that the famous “Nazi book burning” photos were actually documentation of the Nazi-leaning German Student Union’s  1933 raid on and incineration of the archives of the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute of Sexology). The Institute’s psychology research on LGBTQ+ issues made ground-breaking discoveries about gender identity and sexual orientation, and that is why they were targeted. Just this past year while planning my AP World History fascism unit, I discovered that Hitler borrowed the idea for concentration camps from President Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act in the 1820s. The Indian Removals stole people from their ancestral homeland and sent them to reservations in places like Oklahoma to languish in the throes of subsistence living and cultural genocide.   

I am an autistic, pansexual, AFAB human living in Oklahoma whose Cherokee and  Muscogee ancestors were marched here on the Trail of Tears; the irony of my situation is not lost on me. Given that, I believe it honestly makes sense for me to worry about finding myself in the crosshairs of potential fascist aggression in the future. Especially given that I’m known by local fascists who harassed me during my Barnett/Yiannapolous debacle and might just find a reason to start up again. Honest to God, the only thing I can really think right now is HOW the FUCK is this happening again? How did we forget that there were other vulnerable groups who were targeted for extermination? Why did we forget this? 

LGBTQ+ peoples’ historical record may have been new and very strange–but it wasn’t “nothing.” Who knows where humanity might be if we’d had that taboo-shattering knowledge about sexuality and gender for the last ninety years? In general, the more full and open a society’s acceptance of LGBTQ+ people is, the likelier it is they have evolved beyond the more toxic aspects of gender, sexuality, and inequality that define American culture at this moment–and our fascism. You’ll never convince me that one result of having an intact modern European LGBTQ+ history would not have been the making of a much better society than this hellish, stupid, fascist, shitshow we’re all experiencing in bullet time. 

When I’m out and about and interacting with my fellow Oklahomans, I never forget that most of these smiling people are perfectly nice to my face, but will gleefully participate in stripping away my human rights at the ballot box without a second thought. Both my mother and my father have chosen to support Oklahoma’s fascists, even if it stands to harm their LGBTQ+ children. When I ask them about this discrepancy, my parents will say how much they love me, my gay brother Larry, and my lesbian sister Kim. Then they will justify their fascism by claiming that “one single vote doesn’t really make a difference, so you can’t hold that against me” or “Christian businesses should be able to discriminate against any customer whatsoever if it’s to protect their sincerely-held beliefs, but not everyone hates you, so you have no reason to be upset!” Neither of those arguments is particularly reassuring as they willfully ignore how my siblings and I are being politically and socially erased by our parents’ voting choices. 

Somewhere along the line, my mother forgot what she’d learned about the Holocaust. Her willful ignorance is all of ours. Our collective forgetting of the Nazis’ persecution, massacre, and complete historical erasure of the Weimar LGBTQ+ community happened for the same reason that LGBTQ+ folks are now being persecuted in places like Oklahoma: homophobia runs deep and LGBTQ+ people are easily expendable. Especially under fascism. If our history isn’t worth the trouble of remembering, our lives certainly aren’t worth the trouble of saving. 

At the end of the day, all I’m left with are these facts: The historical record of my queer elders’ existence was burned in 1933–thus erasing us from history and society. Now, everyone around me is trying to make it happen again. Nobody is stopping it. This is motherfucking terrifying.