The Strangling Fruit From the Hand of The Sinner: On The Road Part V

I have been lacking in my blog posts while I've been on the road. I have traversed the length of New Mexico, seen the depths of Carlsbad Caverns, glimpsed the heights of Guadalupe Mountains, and explored Santa Fe as a bonafide adult. Every city in America should be that walkable, and it's a testament to our worship of cars that they are not. Gaiman is cancelled to hell and back, but his description of the bloody sacrifice we gift to the machines each year is visceral and worth reading. The same machine that grants me the freedom to hit the open road is the same ball and chain forcing hundreds upon hundreds dollars at the gas pump and even more for mere maintenance. It is the perfect American tchotchke, promising freedom and liberty while giving you neither, and killing you in the process.

Even as I visit these holy cathedrals of nature, you can still see the blood of this country's founding everywhere. We decided that these spectacles belonged to the white man instead of the savage, so we took them from them in the name of "stewardship." I live in this lumbering, geriatric empire that is self-immolating in the name of grievance, and I remember the prescient twitter user who said that we called the Natives' way of life primitive and then instituted a way of living that is killing the planet in less than four hundred years. What little compromise Native tribes have been able to wring from a government that formed its first breath thanks to their genocide is being thrown away in the name of Fox News. I feel like such a liberal for saying this, but these right wing freaks do not share our reality. If the history is not white and male, then it must go. These are not serious people; these are evil, stupid, crazy segregationists. Even the money is not safe with these people! The capitalists who thought Trump would keep their money safe are watching the stock market drop like the general public's respect for Brett Favre after he stole money from the poor for a fucking stadium. There is no method to the madness, just a fascist gremlin trying to set the American state on fire and exterminate trans people. Any notion of a public good is being squandered and the ostentatious opposition party is clapping like seals in support of him. One party, and we ain't in it.

On the day that I am writing this blog post, I saw the Grand Canyon covered in snow. The clouds were so thick you could barely see more than thirty feet in front of you from Mather Point, where I saw the sunrise the day prior. Pictures, descriptions, illustrations, all pale in comparison to the real thing. You see a flash of fire in the house of dawn, the clouds aflame in reddish-orange as the disc climbs from behind the rim of the canyon and even the cold bites less. The air holds its breath as it alights on your face. You remember why for so long, we were all animists. God was found in the trees and the rocks and the rivers, not in temples built by the hands of men, with rules promising rewards and punishment in equal measure. It is April in the high desert, which means snow one week and heat the next. At points, it was a near blizzard around the visitor's center. Rocks that are older than the concept of human civilization covered in snow is as unforgettable as the sunset and sunrise at the canyon.

While visiting Flagstaff, another walkable city in the American Southwest, I picked up The Message by Ta-Nehsi Coates at the local bookstore. I had some inkling that book was going to touch on Palestine, given the horrible interview he had with a Zionist who all but called him anti-Semitic for daring to talk about Palestinians as human beings. If there is anything that bodes well for the future, it is to castigate an entire population as anti-Semitic. I can feel myself care less and less about edge cases because there are genocidal freaks running around calling people asking for a fucking ceasefire Nazis. The book, is excellent. As is everything else he's written. I still have not been able to bring myself to read We Were Eight Years In Power yet, but I have no doubt that I will love it when I do. I admire how thoughtful Coates is and has always been. His contemporaries are marked by a reflexive unwillingness to adapt to the times, to sign letters about people being mean online (just a cover-up from being asked to learn people's pronouns), and here he is talking thoughtfully about everything from trans people to what goes into the building of African-American identity and how it changed within him as he went to Africa for the first time. There are so many things you don't question about white identity in America. It comes with being the unquestioned authority in the state; there is no shame, no contortion to deal with when we go back to the land of our ancestors. We proclaim we don't see color because we see color as not-normal. And isn't that what white people are? "Normal?" It's what you learn by being surrounded by a sea of white faces, as is commonplace in America. At least, in the much vaunted real america I hear so much about. When every aspect of American society caters to you, what do you really have to worry about?

The Message detailed the innumerable cruelties and deprivations of Israeli apartheid in the last section of the book. Every single page of that section echoed with what the Afrikaners did, including how much money the Israelis gave them. And how many guns. I came away from that book realizing that the Israeli government must be destroyed, root and stem. Nothing more, nothing less. It is a blight on humanity, an insult to the notion of a common good. It is us, and we are them. An evil, colonizing state built on genocide. There is nothing complicated about this. You either recognize Palestinians as human beings, or you do not. You are not a progressive if you are a Zionist. You are a Nazi. Accept it, or don't. The truth remains either way.