Re: [A-List] LRNA and energy-sniper

[Waistline2@xxxxxxx]

In a message dated 10/23/02 3:54:34 AM Pacific Daylight Time, sherrynstan@xxxxxxx writes:

> Melvin,
>   
> Interesting that we should both know Jerome, et al.  Being a southerner myself, and having worked in a 12-state southern network for about four years that included Project South, I had the pleasure of attending two of the annual popular education get-togethers in Atlanta, and have split a box of fried chicken with Jerome more than once.  If you talk to him in the near, tell him Stan Goff says hi.
>   
> Best,
>   
> Stan


I do apologize if my comments were to combative. I lived in Atlanta for a couple years and have family roots going back to the plantation areas that was around Augustus Georgia on my father and grandfather's - mother, side. I tend to "forget" how polite Southerners are and far too often write with the attitude - persona, of an urban street thug. Sorry. 

Atlanta is to far North to be South and to far South to be North as the saying goes . . . or what in the language of another generation of Marxist, would be called a border region area. Atlanta is the "city too busy to hate" and arose as a by product of the industrial revolution and transportation - the railroad system, ... and if memory serves me correct, was called Terminus. The crossroad of commercial transactions and the movement of people and things and inland enough for Sherman to have to march to the sea . . . burning everything. 

This city to busy to hate, was the nightmare no one could wake up from in the early 1980s and Freddy Kruger man flesh. 

I was there during the period James Baldwin wrote the famous story on the Atlanta Child Murders for Playboy Magazine and a couple of years later the book, "The Evidence of Things Not Seen." 

I covered this story and also one involving the serial killing of black women - which I had no reference or framework of conception to combat this palpable terrorism. Interestingly, this experience with serial killing of women would return to me as a memory where a series of prostitute were murdered in Highland Park and the kiler turned out to be the man/child of a prostitute. All the victims were black as was the killer and perhaps these experiences are enough to prepare me for what appears to be the capture of the sniper. My memory stammers and my conceptions rebels. 

An African American named Muhammed and from the colonial South is too much to think about at the moment. My wife says something is wrong with that picture and the secret is in the frame that holds the picture. To return to Baldwin.  

Baldwin writings are so incredible it made me want to cut off both of my hands . . . damn he was good. Jimmy was among the best of us Yankee writers.

Actually, I was the editor of the Southern Advocate during this period, which is the ultimate "contradiction." A Yank editing the Southern Advocate ... heaven help us. I was 28 years old and as the saying goes . . . young, dumb and full of it. I met my second wife while in Atlanta and she had been a former editor of the Guardian under Jack Smith direction. She was a brilliant editor who hated to read books . . . and called herself a lumpen intellectual, which we laugh about to this day. 

The South altered my conceptions of life itself. I fell in love with Mississippi and worked some with Charles Tisdale of the old Jackson Advocate. We would laugh about getting off the streets of Jackson at night before the police could shoot at us or some nutbucket. I was holed up outside of Jackson in Tchula, Mississippi during the time of the case of the Tchula 7 and stayed with Eddie Carthan. What had been a theoretical conception of the national colonial question was made concrete - as it applied to Wall Street Imperialism's relationship with this old center of cotton production I was working in, and the myriad forms and threads of racial theory collapsed like a house of cards. 

Mississippi's black belt area was still cotton white - to a degree, and everything I thought it was and everything I thought it wasn't. The wasn't was more truer than the true of the was. 

What I had understood as the antagonism between "town" and "country" and the colonial areas versus the imperial centers was made very concrete on the basis of authentic Americano as experienced by a second generation industrial proletariat from Detroit. 

This was a time of my carpetbagging but I did not know I was trapped in a current of history that unfolded definitively with the Civil War. My work took me through Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia,  North and South Carolina, Tennessee, Louisiana, Texas - then down into Mexico and I vowed to never go to Florida. Many Yanks, such as I have a "southern state" they will not go to and to a degree - which I cannot quantify, this is nothing more than Great Nation Chauvinism or Yankee Chauvinism. 

I have had enough of energy for a while. 


Peace,

Melvin P.