And so the worst part of the season is upon us. All these frigid days after the holidays and vacations are over that we still have to trudge to work in. The best things about this time of the year are basketball and mulled wine. But this particular year is special, because we have, not just any primary, but a Republican primary. It’s a year-long parade of racist, crypto-fascist delusions. A media-saturated reminder of why we did drugs in high school.
“I want the full portrait of evolution and the people who came up with the ideas to be presented. It’s a worldview and it’s godless. Atheism has been tried in various societies, and they’ve been pretty criminal domestically and internationally. The Soviet Union, Cuba, the Nazis, China today: they don’t respect human rights,” he said.
“As a general court we should be concerned with criminal ideas like this and how we are teaching it… Columbine, remember that? They were believers in evolution. That’s evidence right there,” he said.
I think to really explore how disgusting I find this guy to be would take more than the space a blog post can offer. And how does this one racist state representative relate to literature/books? Again, too rich a subject for a humble blog post. But it does remind me of one of my fave lines in American literature. When Huck Finn, mental prisoner of a sick society, is debating whether or not to help Jim, physical prisoner of a sick society, continue to escape even though there’s a reward on his head, Huck holds the letter he has just written about turning in Jim. What follows is a beautiful statement on friendship and humanity:
I felt good and all washed clean of sin for the first time I had ever felt so in my life, and I knowed I could pray now. But I didn’t do it straight off, but laid the paper down and set there thinking- thinking how good it was all this happened so, and how near I come to being lost and going to hell. And went on thinking. And got to thinking over our trip down the river; and I see Jim before me, all the time; in the day, and in the night-time, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we a floating along, talking, and singing, and laughing. But somehow I couldn’t seem to strike no places to harden me against him, but only the other kind. I’d see him standing my watch on top of his’n, stead of calling me, so I could go on sleeping; and see him how glad he was when I come back out of the fog; and when I come to him agin in the swamp, up there where the feud was; and such-like times; and would always call me honey, and pet me, and do everything he could think of for me, and how good he always was; and at last I struck the time I saved him by telling the men we had smallpox aboard, and he was so grateful, and said I was the best friend old Jim ever had in the world, and the only one he’s got now; and then I happened to look around, and see that paper.
It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a trembling, because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:
“All right, then, I’ll go to hell”- and tore it up.
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