Sure, you could spend a lot of money on recreational drugs, or you could just get old so that your body feels weird and you’re crying and laughing for reasons you don’t understand — and sometimes when someone asks you what we’re going to do this afternoon, the answer is singing.
So there I was on Saturday afternoon in a group-sing with people even older than me, one of whom has been dizzy for a week and the other of whom will fall asleep if the dog sits next to her — like I said, being old is a trip. We were singing about God and poor old Charlie on the MTA, and the Jordan River was deep and cold in at least two different songs, and then we got to “From California, to the New York Island; this land was made for you and me.” And my God, talk about hitting a person right in the feels.
This country was not made for you and me. It was made by wealthy chickenshits and bullies who wanted something better than the system they currently had, but didn’t have the guts to fully implement. The fundamental and constant crisis in our country is that a man who owned hundreds of people and who kept his dead wife’s sister in a closet in his bedroom to rape said that all people are created equal and have certain inalienable rights — life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And 55 of his fellow members of the Continental Congress, many of whom also were at that moment depriving people they held captive of their liberty and sometimes their lives, signed on.
Since then it’s been a constant fight over whether we’re going to be the people we say we want to be or if the chickenshits and bullies are just going to run things to their benefit. It’s important to understand that chickenshits and bullies running things to their benefit is the normal culture of this country, and people who want America to actually be the things it claims to be are the counterculture.
The past week was tough. Bills passed that outlaw drag shows and gender-affirming care for minors. Tennessee Right to Life is pressuring lawmakers to not fix the draconian abortion law they enacted and then regretted. It feels like things are getting worse.
But let’s be clear: Things are getting worse after a very short blip of getting better. It was not easier to be LGBTQ in Tennessee 20 years ago. Historically, Tennessee’s white women’s lives improve at times when Tennessee is trying to curtail the rights of Black men. Oh, no! Black men have made big gains in voting and representation and wealth accumulation. We need more racist white voters to offset them! Let the white women vote! And it has never been easy to be a Black woman or any woman of color here.
What these laws have in common is that they all ask the same question: Who has the right to decide what you do with your own body? Can you put a dress on it? Can you take drugs that make it feel better for you to be in it? Do you have to be pregnant, even if it might kill you?
Right now the answer to that fundamental question is that you don’t have the right to decide what you do with your own body. Chickenshits and bullies do — they still do — as they always have. We have clawed out some victories. You cannot legally own a Black body in this country unless you are the consciousness in that body. We have some tentative, fragile victories in convincing the country that men do not have a controlling interest in the bodies of women, not even their wives. There is public outcry when people kill others for fun or as a side benefit of their job. We don’t throw gay people into psychiatric hospitals just because they’re gay anymore.
But there still is an overwhelming belief in this country that people with power should be able to scrutinize the lives of the powerless and make decisions for them. Look no further than the archetype of the Karen, who revels in policing people of color. Or the people opposed to free school lunches, who are so afraid that people they’ve judged as undeserving might get to eat. People standing in line at the grocery store passing judgment on what people with EBT cards are purchasing. Et cetera, et cetera. We are constantly, all the time, doing the work of scrutinizing and passing judgment on situations when we only have a brief experience, and whether we mean to or not, this benefits the chickenshits and the bullies.
Fellow Scene contributor Chris Crofton is better at this kind of stuff, offering advice and making everything seem like the pits, but then pointing in a hopeful direction. But I want to try anyway. If you find yourself this week wondering why it is that you doing what you want with your own body is such a threat that the state would rather destroy you than let you live, it is because regular people in this country having the right to do what they want with their own bodies has always been a threat to the state.
It's not like most people have bodily autonomy and you just lost it. The point of all these laws is to reaffirm that you never had it. OK then, welcome to America. Some of us deeply flawed and fucked-up people are attempting to make the country live up to its ideals. We’re going to fail, or at least succeed imperfectly, because this is a generational struggle we’re not near resolving.
I feel strange about quoting Allen Ginsberg here at the end, because he advocated for an end to laws prohibiting sex between adults and children, but then I remembered that I quoted Thomas Jefferson up top and that politicians in our state attended a rally hosted by a guy who thinks adult men should be able to have sex with and marry teenage girls. So yeah, we live in a culture where people with power think they should have access to and control over the bodies of children, and it sucks and is evil. And there really isn’t a way to have an honest conversation about America if you leave them out, because they shape so much of American culture.
Anyway, Ginsberg. If you want to be depressed, take a look back at “Howl,” a poem that was banned in its day and, if it’s not on the list of books to be banned from kids getting a hold of it yet, surely soon will be. Seventy years old and it is barely archaic — just a few turns of phrase we wouldn’t use anymore. And it is all about how this society takes its beautiful weirdos and crushes them in the jaws of Moloch, that we sacrifice people who have value — even if the larger society doesn’t recognize it — and their loss is devastating and worth mourning.
Ginsberg didn’t know how to fix this. Hell, he couldn’t even keep himself from perpetrating some of its most devastating harms. I also don’t know how to fix this.
But I’m with you in Rockland. As the poem says. And this isn’t over.
