FYI

AN OPEN LETTER TO THE NEW YORK TIMES: This letter appears on the medium along with a protest video where James Baldwin speaks.

COMMENTS ARE BONES FOR DOGS

AN OPEN LETTER TO THE NEW YORK TIMES

medium.com

I do have a New York Times Most Notable Book under my belt. You simply cannot take it away from me. For whatever reason, it happened.

Radical thinkers are always vilified. But we plunge ahead and carry on like everybody else. As citizens, we are usually surreptitious. Because we have to be. We are all over the Internet — organizing protests — but you won’t easily find many of us because our communication does not easily lend itself to unencryption.

America doesn’t really listen to the radicals. The people who think it takes a big push to facilitate American to change. We are marginalized and do our best to personally stay that way, and to exploit being marginalized into what mainstream culture takes for a deserved obscurity.

“Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

To the last syllable of recorded time;

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.”

Where are the radicals at the New York Times. There are none.

We don’t listen to the radicals. We just form monster pictures in our cartoon heads.

Who are these evil people. What radicals.

Over the years, the New York Times has evolved the rules for the players in the game. The New York Times has someone up to bat. Formidable writers. Writers who compel you to think. The New York Times has someone on first base. The New York Times has second base covered, too. But there is never a radical on the third base because they’ve never been invited.

Or tolerated. Liberal writers especially will have none of it.

The lack of civility. My eyes to the sky.

I am not uncivil. How is it uncivil to disentangle Trump from the future of America if there is to be one. There will not be one. Trump will challenge the election one way or the other. The person who was elected the last time around the democratic mulberry bush is aggrieved. Trump is the mad king whether that is civil or not.

Godrell down the street from me, who is four, and is allowed by Snap, three dollars a day for his food allotment. A dollar a meal. Two pieces of white bread and two pieces of baloney cost one dollar. I don’t know how many meals of baloney and bread Trump has eaten to survive, but I guess not too many.

America is the disgrace. Godrell should be aggrieved. But no.

How is it uncivil to compare Godrell to Trump. But try running it past the New York Times comment gatekeepers. They decide what is simple and what is polite and what a family paper really means.

I am thrown out on my ear.

But I am used to being thrown out on my ear. I am a radical. I think the four-year-olds deserve better than what they get. Let them eat cake costs more than a dollar for a slice.Uncivil is an opinion that is not on the opinion page. I want to be on the opinion page. Because I am tired of discrimination. Because I am tired of being placated. Because I am painfully aware that my writing is considered to be unwashed, uncivil, and downright rude at the New York Times.

I think Ross Douthat is probably the best writer at the publication. We do not agree on anything. Ross believes the family is sacred. I believe the family is irrelevant. But I can recognize the strength of what he has to say and how he says it. I find him brilliant. Jamelle Bouie helps keep me sane. He says what is hardly ever articulated. I want to politely argue with David Brooks.

Whether I can speak truth (I should say my truth) to power from the peanut gallery of comments or not.

Sometimes I get a PICK in comments. I have no idea what it means. It means the peanut gallery is to know your place, and knowing your place is to approximate a civility more steeped in hierarchy than what I see on the street even here in the deep, dark South where good people were scared but they came out anyway to demonstrtate for their lives versus being pulled from cars and shot. Survival is everything. We all know which oak trees were used in lynchings in this town. It was an obscenity put on the gracious oak. The whites live on their side of the town, and the African-Americans live on their side of the town. The Klan lives in the countryside. But they come to town now and then in their trucks with their flags and their guns to let us know that they are there.

It is called terror. It is not unlike having soldeirs on the street shooting at you or shoving you into an unmarked car. It’s still called terror.

Everything I have ever written has been radical. Except this.

From my back porch, I can see the white statue that was carved from white marble and served as the inspiration for Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward Angel. “And yet, there was surging into these chosen hills the strong thrust of the world, like a kissing tide which swings lazily in with a slapping glut of waters, and recoils into its parent crescent strength, to be thrown farther inward once again.”

I have often gone over to the angel to sit with her in the local cemetery where you can see the mountains that she stares and even as the sounds of a demonstration protest that I did not attend arrives like it ought to have a lawyer. I have been to enough demonstrations and protests. Hundreds of them.

I am not sure what has changed.

I am not sure that anything can change without confrontation and violence. I am not sure that the ideology of nonviolence isn’t just rhetoric to keep us caged.

I am not sure that the Weather People underground are any more alive than the Confederate dead who line this graveyard up with their own constricted rage.

The government has more guns than the Ku Klux Klan. The government has more soldiers on the streets than the Ku Klux Klan. All the clan has are some sheets, some trucks, and their stupid flag. The government is the Klu Klux Klan.

How is writing that uncivil.

I would have to change my voice without lowering its ability to power up. Most people will say I cannot do it. But I do it every day. Most people think a voice at the New York Times like mine is too far a stretch, and I agree. It’s simply worth being articulated as possibility not unlike when I tell my boys that so much of life is up to them. We are powerless but we are not powerless. We endure.

And we are not willing to keep waiting for Godot.

Because the heart of civility is to know your place if you have one. Most of the people I know have never found one, have never been welcomed inside of one, about all we do is carry on. We are the workers, and we are kept in our place by guns, and by institutions that render us silent as the innuendo of a stone.

The people who organize protests do not live underground and they are not dead. They’re dealing with logistics like umbrellas and hand gel. And anonymous soldiers called ICE.

Trump has sent his stormtroopers in the same way King George sent his Red Coats in to intimidate. King George was defeated by a war and none of it was civil. The Civil War was put on the back burner. Donald Trump will lose his war, too. In fact, he already has. If you think Donald Trump will leave the White House or attend Joe Biden’s inauguration, please send me a ticket to wherever it is in outer space you live. I smell uncivil confrontation for a long, long time.

How do we not talk, and write, and film, and scream at that without upsetting the horses. The horses are going to hear us one way or the other. But not on the civil pages of the New York Times. The devils and the demons and thieves and all the other pirates who did not finish collage because by the second year we finally saw it for what it was. A financial institution. We wouldn’t even try to have a voice at the New York Times because we have grown cyncical and numb in the radical ghettos we inhabit. The New York Times is the Himilaya mountains. In my Appalachian town, we stand on our dark porches and we pray with neighbors — at a distance — who have lost their jobs, and who are hungry.

The people who are supposed to know what is next do not know what is next. I am here to tell you again and again that hunger is next because we are only one step ahead of the parts of the world where there will be famine. Famine cannot happen here because it can’t. Famine will not spare Republicans any more than a virus will spare Republicans.

A good radical would not be tired the way I am tired of it all. For some of us, it’s been disease after disease, after disease. HIV is like that. It’s a virus that mutates faster than a droplet can fall to the ground. The American South is jammed packed with HIV which runs like a river through my dreams. The kids I work with are from so many disparate places like Atlanta where sex work will bleed you whiter than Tom Wolfe’s marble angel. They kill themselves all the time. They are the real Weather People under the ground where all the evil whisperings began.

I am a bad radical.

I have learned to text in secret code. I’m tired of that, too. It means I have to drive to another state to throw my burner phone out the window of my jeep. It’s exhausting.We are kidding ourselves that we can steer the protest down any particular street or any particular history. We pretend we can write about it.

The underground has no paper, no Ross Douthat, no Trotsky, No Jamelle, no civil gatekeepers, and not much of a future. You throw some rocks at cops and go home.

Bring on the Marines.

I am frequently, more often than not, kicked off the New York Times’ comments section because I am considered uncivil. Particularly, if I am telling you what I perceive to be the truth. It is my truth. I offer it to the reader because the media only allows one truth to be told. The media could not get enough of Trump’s dangerous shenanigans during the presidential race of 2016. And the media was there to glorify Donald Trump every step of the way. He entertained and dazzled them.

I do not know why I think the New York Times could tell a bigger picture. In fact, I am not at all sure they can because accountability is more twisted than a barrel of fishhooks.

I have had too many identities. I am tired of trying to find a home — a place that knows its place — for writing that is ephemeral. In the end, we are all about as relevant as a Confederate soldier inside his pine box. There is no he wins. There is no he loses. We have all lost something in this pandemic. Working people understand it’s going to get a lot worse, and I believe that, too. James Baldwin was the optimist. James Baldwin is sadly dead.

We have the liberals. We have the liberal voices. We have some conservatives at the New York Times, too. But there are no radicals at the New York Times, that radical left that scares grandmothers and babies alike, because radical thinking causes the cows to run away. We have no platform. We do not put up posters with wallpaper glue. Perhaps, in truth, we do not exist. Not if the privileged can help it. It’s not that we want to tear things down, but it’s that we want to tear things down, and start over again if you dare to do it. Most are too terrified and they have no jobs. Hunger is at the door again and the wolves know what’s coming.

Only a crazy person would be a radical writer. Someone who looks like Leon Trotsky in 1917. None of us think purism is remotely relevant. We’re radicals because nothing else has worked.

We can’t even get published in the New York Times.

I was published in the New York Times. I had to use another name. I have picked vegetable in the dirt until my hands have bled and my back has avascular necrosis. The Mexican president was flying to the US to talk to Bush, I wrote about migrant camps and sheer desperation.

We do not listen to desperation. To use my real name would have meant indifference. I am a radical writer but I listen. I listen to the protest organizers of today. I offer them my insight. Sometimes they take it. Sometimes they don’t. Today, I am more terrified for the protestors than I ever have been, and I’ve been doing this a very long time.

The kind of fireworks the protestors are using can become more powerful than ever. They sneak it into the demonstration. It could mean a bloodbath on both sides. For the first time in my life, I am urging caution. Technology changes everything. I am scared. I should be scared.You would never know about the things I know about in the New York Times. For me, writing in the New York Times is dangerous.

The government is listening. The government is listening far, far more intently, and broadly than anything Edward Snowden or the New York Times can articulate in a public manner. And they know it. I know what the New York Times knows, and I know what Edward Snowden wishes he did not know.

You need to stop using your smart phones forever. Throw them out the car window in another state. You need a bunch of burner phones. You just don’t know it. And you cannot bring yourself to believe it. As we sit in quarantine in our homes, the government is listening harder than they ever have to exactly what we are saying.

Pseudonyms are ordinary. So is encryption. But the government underestimates one thing. Creativity. The weather underground is buzzing with storms, hurricanes, and smoke screens.

What next thing.

Blood. Murder. Civil war. Run for your life. It’s coming.

But run where. No one wants us. That is not an accident. Accidents do not exist.

I want to write from the perspective of the third base. I will scare people. I will promise not to swear. It will be work.

I might steal home. I will if given even a slight opportunity. Sliding into places I am not supposed to be in is what I do.

My first teething was with Act Up. It was a classroom and a laboratory. I still speak to the dead. Lover after lover. I was surreptitious. A sponge. I listened. I kept telling people that we needed to stretch by placing corpses on the government steps.

As a writer, I need to stretch. But stretching is hard, almost impossible, when the institutions you work with stand there in their safe bubbles protected by gatekeepers who understand why they are there.

Today, I just think we need a new government. How is that radical. I think we need to learn to listen. But I am not allowed to say that at the New York Times. So I simply say it like a chant when I walk around the house at night — pacing always pacing like I am carrying a candle, and speaking to the living young, and the Confederate dead buried in the graveyard next to my surreptitious house. It is dark and hot in the South. No New York Times writers live in Southern enclaves — we call them mountain hollows — where the Klan is a part of daily life. They do not hide any of their hate. They do not go home. This is their home. I want to write about what I see in the hollows and the trailer parks, and the ravines, and the graveyards. We don’t have statues. We are poor as church mice. We would never erect a statue. That kind of money would be out of reach. The Daughters of the Confederacy do not live in the real Confederacy. They live with the rich people because that is who they are.

If we didn’t have a garden, we would starve to death.

I talk to my tomato plants. They all have opinions.

Listening is the most powerful thing you can do. It’s so powerful, it’s radical.

I wish I could make it a soft landing for the suits. I could call it thoughtful radicalism.

But no.

I’m angry. But I am not stupid. I have published a dozen books. Books like lawsuits are ephemeral. And that is the problem with all of publishing and all the rest of the digital media. You are ephemeral because you are intent to leave most of the voices out. They scare you.

I do not like fireworks. I loathe the Fourth of July. I am indifferent about America. I have no hope whatsoever you can change even if you wanted to. It’s too late for America. It is just another failed state. One of thousands. The universe and history do not care. Starting school like it used to be will kill your children. Don’t blame the messenger.

It’s always been war. It’s always been about survival and only survival. James Baldwin was an optimist. He could envision history because he had lived it. He could always see it coming. Even with stormtroopers out there hunting us down, even with disease, even with the failure of institution after institution, it’s not that different, existing just like we existed in 1968. The weather under the ground has never been about picnics at the beach.

I am afraid. Not because I do not know what is coming next, but because I do. These are cultural cycles, systems, and shock bombs. I am afraid that the radicals are going to make the same mistakes they always make. Giving the suits what they want. Letting the urgency and the rage take over their direction and their focus. That, too, is a giving up.

Any excuse to go nuclear. I smell it in the wind. Like the swirl of teargas as it blooms hate upon the rancid air. So America has never settled the Civil War. No one but no one is surprised by that. It is unfinished business. You might loathe Trump, but you elected him. Your systems don’t even work for you.

Capitalism cannot save you. You will refuse to support your workers because that is what you always do. Moscow Mitch says we are lazy.

That is what they said to slaves.

It is about to get very complicated. Local governments who are suing the Federal Government are opting for the status quo. Soldiers on the street scares everybody. But I am here to tell you that you can return the favor like a molotov cocktail, you will burn your little hands, but if you care to listen, really listen to them, the suits never shut up, you can predict every move they make, but you have to learn to do it. You have to learn their languages. They are not omniscient. They are as scared as you are.

That is what they always do, sue, sue, sue, but this time there are soldiers in the street. Sue whoever you want. There are still soldiers in the street, and they still have guns.

I mentor boys at risk. Mainly for HIV. We still watch AIDS crawl around the ground like bull snakes to devour the few souls that fall into its mouth. I know things you can never know. Never. The attic rats are safe until the bull snake comes, and the bull snake always comes.

Most of the boys do sex work.

To survive. To survive.

I listen to their stories. I listen to how they were abused. I listen to how they were raped. I listen to how they were raped in detention. I listen to their loneliness. I listen to their fear. I listen to their wild conspiracy theories. I listen to all of the troubles they have with how to love. I listen to all their buried rage at the supposedly straight, family men who pay them for sex. I listen and I listen and I listen.

We live in the American South. I came here because it’s a problem. I am a radical. I want to fight. The Klan flies by my house down the street in their trucks, wearing their ragged sheets in the ragged air, and holding that Confederate flag tight as death in their very hands. Hold your enemies close.

If you think sex work went underground for the duration of the disease, you’re right about part of it. It went underground because it has always been underground. But duration and disease are other stories and they have not been told. Has the idea of the “family” newspaper finally died the death it so richly deserves. No. Your rules don’t mean me. They never have. I am not afraid of death. It has been around me for the past thirty years. Some of us have been waiting for a vaccine like…

Forever.

Dr. Fauci would pat us on the head, and we would all go home. But not this time.

I am out here waiting to steal home base. I cannot wait and wait and wait for some slugger to bat the ball out of the ballpark. I will steal home at the first opportunity I can slide my slow length along to touch the magic plate.

The radicals have no voice. Comments are not a voice. Comments are bones for dogs. We are out here. Organizing. How do you organize.

It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.”

There are big stories here. I have been taking promiscuous notes for years.

Tim Barrus

Tim Barrus Blog

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Tim Barrus, New York Times

Comments Are Bones For Dogs