A vignette of unexpected homophobic dumbassery sprouting from the grotesque American intersectionality of Nazism and Trump in the Spring of 2019

War could break out in a clothing store faster than cranes can collapse. In April a crane broke apart and collapsed killing four people and injuring others. The deadly collapse occurred minutes before I was to drive into the exact spot cars were crushed. Sad. Tearful. Terrifying! Felt tragic. And sobering. Gravity is Still, the world felt on edge even as people joked and kidded and complained about things. Two burly men rambled around the urban Co-op where I worked alongside many others in the outdoor adventure and travel industry. While officially retail, our positions often felt more like education and instruction than sales alone. I felt proud to work in the Mothership. One of the perks working here was this store is one of the top three tourist destinations here in the City of Cranes. We meet so many people coming and going from all over the planet. Yes, not just from all over the city, the county, the state, and the region, not just from North America, but from all around the world! Welcome to the one city in North America with the most cranes! 

These two guys stood out, however, but so did many other people passing thru. What was different, however, is these men appeared uncomfortable in their own bodies. They energetically felt uncomfortable to me with an odd mix of quiet, minding their own bidness alertness, squirminess, and nervousness. They were dressed in everyday clothes: blue jeans, flannel shirts, and baseball caps. Dirty and greasy from long hours of hard work. Without any laundering, too. So what? I’ve dressed like that myself, altho it’s been awhile. The way they wore their clothes, however, made them stand out from the all the others who wore similar clothes. To be clear, we get a fair number of homeless people and travelers passing thru, many in various stages of being unlaundered. These two guys gave off airs, a pretense of menace, as they pretended not to pose while posing. They walked quickly and heavily, as if they were stomping but not trying to stomp so they pivoted and swung around the sunglasses and stomped quickly towards me. Bam! Boom! Bam!

One Bam! Boom! Bammer! wore a hat marked, “FORD.” I wondered if these two were affected by the waves of recent Ford Motor Company layoffs under the lying ass Reign of Trump the demented Usurper. Ford started with laying off 500 salaried employees in May, than announced up to 7,000 jobs would be slashed by August, then analysts declared a total of 23,000 workers needed to be cut or no one would have a job. Look it up, folks! So much for Donolf Trumpler and his moronic, gilded, golf-club addled pretense of being for working class folks!

By the way, the Ford Motor people seemed to have redeemed themselves somewhat from their history of supporting German Nazism, altho there wasn’t much of any apparent public atonement. “The Nazis confiscated our factories after war broke out,” blah blah blah, but slave labor was used by the Nazis. Henry Ford, the founder of the motor car company, hated Jews and admired Fascism. There were a number of American corporations who admired Hitler’s regime. Many Americans supported the Fascists and the Nazis before the planet became engulfed in war.

My parents, who hated Nazis, didn’t know any of this ugly history as it was suppressed and forgotten by many. One of my father’s brothers used to work for Ford in the Greater Richmond area of Virginia, eventually as a high-level salesman. I first met people in the late 1980s who refused to buy Ford cars and Ford trucks because of Ford’s association with Nazism and the Holocaust.

The largest gatherings of Nazis in the United States, however, were in New York. Over 20,000 Nazis gathered in early 1939 at Madison Square Garden before banners of swastikas framing a long banner of George Washington the slave-owner. Many lived nearby on Long Island in the run-up to Hitler’s invasion of Poland. Before this was the Business Plot/Wall Street Coup allegations of 1933-34 and subsequent Congressional hearings in 1935. American Leftists even rose up against New York Nazis in 1935 and won. One major influence was the crushing of the Bonus Army Revolt in 1932 which pushed people right or left. Meanwhile, Fascist tyrant Benito Mussolini took power in Italy in 1922, the Nazi Beer Hall Putsch failed in Germany in 1923, and Adolf Hitler published Mein Kampf in 1925. The Japanese Empire’s invasion of China began in 1931 and accelerated in 1937.

Hitler finally took over Germany in 1933 and began to march with Mussolini and the Japanese militarists towards global war. The Italo-Ethiopian War of 1935-1936 was followed by the Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939 and the Italo-Albanian War of 1939. Simultaneously the Soviet-Japanese War of 1932-1939 flared along the Siberian-Mongolian-Chinese borders and involved the largest tank and air battles until the Nazi-Soviet War within the main Second World War. Fascist movements were on the rise in other countries, too, from the UK to Argentina.

To recall the Fascists were primarily Italians and Germans is a common mistake many people make today. They then dismiss Fascism, including Nazism, as a historical anomaly. Fascism was worldwide with large, rapid growth in many nation-states including those ending up on the Allied side fighting the Axis. Many decades later and well into the 21st Century we see the rise of fascist movements and authoritarian, militaristic, hyper-nationalist regimes. Autocratic despots and wannabe-tyrants sit in control of Russia, China, the United States, Hungary, Poland, Brazil, Iran, Egypt, Venezuela, Syria, North Korea, India, and a number of other countries. Democratic institutions clearly has not stopped the rise of tyranny and instead has allowed dictatorial movements to leverage economic strife to dominate and degrade the institutions of democracy, beginning with the free press.

These more-official “achievements” allow for the racists, xenophobes, homophobes, and religious extremists to rise up out of the cracks into the sunshine to spew their vile brew of incandescent hatred, intoxicating violence, and the worst aspect of the negative human tendencies towards gangs and degenerate tribalism. Social media and video amplify the speed and toxicity of hate speech, fake news, and wacky-crazy beliefs. Those in turn give live-and-let-live, good ol’ boy types the hollow courage to rise up and say hateful, stupid shit justified as, “speaking my mind, no messin’ around,” or as “straight talk.” People same dumb ass stuff such as, “America, love it or leave it,” or, “Go back where ya came from!”

Instead of staying here in America to address our crises, solve problems, and make this country better. Instead of understanding the complexity of human origins with our species evolving from many out of Africa and across Eurasia and even into the Americas. Some White idiot yells at Blacks to “Go back to Africa!”, remind them they can “go back to Europe.” Or back to where most human species arose in Eastern and Southern Africa. There’s a reason for a popular Native American T-shirt emblazoned with a sarcastic riff on the USA states, “Homeland Security: Fighting Terrorism Since 1492.” 

The Fascists’s propaganda images of totalitarian discipline and mass rallies fed into public illusions of martial glory and economic efficiency that in turn fueled a hypnotic addiction to imperial Nazi pompousness. These were escapist fantasies from the ugliness of Capitalism in the republics and kingdoms of the West during the Great Depression and the horrors of a corrupted Communism in the Soviet Empire. Anti-Semitism, nationalism, and racism were elevated to new levels of normalization. Concentration camps eventually led to death camps across the Axis Empire, expanded the gulags in the USSR, and even the USA set up race-based internment camps.

People are people, however, and I get along with all kinds. So as they wandered over to where I happened to be stationed today, I walked over to speak with them. At first I wondered if they were up to stealing something. Our co-op had been hit with waves of shoplifters and petty theft. Some of the thieves were homeless people, altho a number of homeless people also paid in cash for products. Many robbers wore regular, clean, even nice clothes, however, and worked in teams. These two men stood out as something altogether, but I felt more bemused than anxious.

“Hi! May I help you two with anything?” I asked. “Have any questions here?”

“Oh, God! Are you hitting on me?” one of them replied.

Wow. I felt dumbstruck, baffled, and thrown off. I’ve never ever had anyone say anything like those words to me before. If they did I was too hard-of-hearing to know so. Such a question indicated to me these two dieselbrains couldn’t give a rip about #MeToo, Pride celebrations, Black Lives Matter, Ford and Nazis, and the dreary role of Capitalism in the homeless crisis and the opioid epidemic.

I burst into laughter.

“No, I am not,” I said. “Just checking in to see if you need any help with anything here.”

“Oh, thank God!” the guy who wondered said and his voice trailed off into muttered mumbles with his buddy.

“Hey, where y’all from?” I asked.

“Alabama!” both said together as one. Instant judgments ballooned in spite of myself as I knew fellow Leftists, environmentalists, and anti-Confederate Southerners down in Alabama. Images of Trump-loving, Roy Moore-supporting, Maggot-hatted, Far Right good ol’ boy goon squads prepping in the woods and swamps for civil war, lynchings, and beating up on Queer people dominated my mind. LGBTQIAPK+ even LGBTQLFTQIAP+ people in particular, as the acronyms are umbrellas of sorts over many people I love and care about including myself to a degree. As the Emerald City’s sex activist Dan Savage pointed out a couple of years back, we on the Left under the umbrellas rule the alphabet. Straight, “monogotonous” folks have little left outside their amputated, circumcised singularity. Except for maybe weapons of mass destruction.

Alabama roils my mind. Reminds me of various popular songs over the years with “Alabama” in titles and lyrics. Reminds of Martin Luther King, Jr., a Baptist Christian activist for civil rights and eventually, before he was shot dead, for economic democracy writing his famous, wake-up-America “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” in April of 1963 and the Ku Klux Klan bombing a Baptist church the following September murdering four young Black girls.

Then again, Montgomery, Alabama, the first capital of the traitorous Confederacy States, is also the headquarters of the SPLC, the Southern Poverty Law Center, a vanguard of progressive action leading and winning fights against Neo-Nazis, the KKK, and other hate groups. The SPLC was itself rocked by inner turmoil over racial and gender inequity and strife within its high-tech walls bubbling out these last couple of years. Allegations of corruption and a misdirected focus upon capitalist aggregation of wealth led to a significant leadership shakeout including the firing of Morris Dees, the founder of SPLC and a famous activist in his own right. Magazine and newspaper articles spilled out. Social media went berserk. I was a dues-paying member of SPLC for years prior to the Great Recession. Left the organization as I tired of the constant mailers asking for money, money, money, and more money, please. Hard Times makes organizations that overly rely on fundraising more desperate. Good organizations driven with great causes become more focused on making money than in fighting those good fights and then keeping the peace to prevent the need for future fights.

There’s always a fight going on somewhere, however, or a fight waiting to happen. 

Slow burns on a busy day at work. I slowly began to feel an odd mix of bemused anger and incredulity. Slow, slow … slow. All in seconds!

I let it go as I wrestled with my own judgments. Those two appeared more scared than anything else, to my own surprise, openly nervous, and tried to cover up their anxiety with macho bluster. Their posing make their fear even more obvious. After all, both our co-op and the Emerald City were prepping for Pride Day with large, colorful parades and festivals. Simultaneously, the big Seattle Rock and Roll Marathon was tying up traffic today in a city already messed up with massive construction projects, displaced families and small businesses, homelessness inflamed by the opioid epidemic, baffling parking challenges, and severe income inequality. Once known as Jet City before Boeing moved its capitalistic haunches to the Windy City on the Great Lakes, Seattle was well on its way to becoming one of the West Coast’s Rainbow Cities. Those two White country boys from Alabama wanted no part of any of these things.

Many people come thru where I work in Seattle with all kinds of beliefs. I don’t engage and often change the subject after a moment even if their belief systems align with mine. I merely listen to them. I do have my boundaries, especially if it comes to aggressive violence, bullying, overt hate speech. I’ve had people flirt with me while I’m working, but not hit on me. And while I’ve engaged in a little bit of light banter, I’ve never “hit on” anyone at work. I suck at hitting on anyone anyway. Not my style. Feels too inauthentic. Shit, one reason of several I haven’t dated much in ages. Too awkward these days and don’t have any desire to spend money on wining-and-dining seduction games. I just would never hit on customers anyway. So unprofessional even for low-wage retail workers.

But, no, I was a Godzilla-zillion miles away from even thinking about “hitting on” anyone today, and certainly not these two hapless, anxious good ol’ boy types. They reminded me of the reasons I left the Southeast. Racism and intolerance is everywhere these days, tho, and amplified by the razor chambers of social media.

I struggled to feel compassion. Part of my everyday spiritual practice is to practice the practices of mindfulness. Included in the oceanic stillness of awareness of others as well as of one’s self are my practices of acceptance, forgiveness, love, and firmness of position, i.e. “backbone.” At first I failed to feel compassion. Then I realized I did not want to feel any damn compassion! Instead I wanted us in the middle and on the left to rise up and fight! To rise up and obliterate all of those bullies, preachers, and dumb-as-gravel shriekers on the Far Right, and, yes, even the Far Left.

Yes, rise up and overthrow Trump-Pence and his Cabinet of embarrassing idiots! Overthrow all the despots of Earth from Saudi Arabia to Russia to Iran to China to Brazil to India to terror networks. Obliterate institutionalized religion. Obliterate cults and ideologically rigid political isms. Revoke the privilege of human beings to hide behind corporations and trusts. Rise up together to replace Capitalism with transparent, environmentally-responsible democratic socialism rooted in science. Together we the people of this planet can unlock powerful sources of energy. We can choose to work together to build a democratic world parliament with respect for regional and local communities. Yeah! Right? Left? Or the maybe middle?

Oh, yeah, pipe dreams with pie splattered across the blue, blue sky! OK, fantasies of 2019. Delusions from the end of the second decade of the 21st Century. Whatever. Realities began in dreams. Sometimes they end in dreams. Sometimes we are able to build them out of our minds and across the planet. I felt pissed. Angry. Despair. Sad. Took a deep breath and let all of those mental creations go. Let them all drift down the endless river into the endless sea. Before everything dried up, mind and water both.

Only then was I able to feel compassion. Only then I accepted what was and is so regardless of whether or not I liked the situation or the people. Only then did I forgive them. Only then did I forgive myself for judging them and making up stories about them, stories that may indeed be true, aye, and such doesn’t matter as I did not ask them where they stood on issues. I made assumptions based upon how they showed up. Only then did I open to love for them and others hostile to all I stand for. Now, and only now with the firmness and flexibility characteristic of having and using one’s spine, I am able to pick up the sword.

“Are you hitting on me?”

When I look back now, I suspect the man was baiting me, as if daring someone in my position to break ranks in staid, button-down, faux Liberal progressive, torn up and divided Seattle to step forward and smite him hard. No, not gonna take the bait. And these assholes and their Maggot-hatted buddies better watch out. Not for me but for their own allies. After all, the Totalitarians Right and Left devoured their own. They still kill and slobber each other up bloody. They grow paranoid and kill each other. No wonder they lose all the damn time. They are unable to win any war, lost a world war and a cold war, and certainly fail to hold any peace.

Religious fundamentalists and political extremists are incestuous cannibals, amok cancer cells feeding on each other and everyone else. We must not tolerate these human beings. Look at this mess we’ve made. Now we gotta clean our messes up. After all, the first time I saw a fellow American wear a swastika armband in public was at a bus stop atop Capitol Hill, a bastion of LGBTQ communities in Seattle. Everyone around including myself was stunned to silence and studied nonchalance. We must stop letting ourselves be surprised over and over by these violent haters. They are ready to rumble whether you want to or not. Are you ready to defend yourself and your loved ones? Are you gonna count on the Police?

“Are you hitting on me?”

Hindsight is hindsight. Next time, however, if asked such an offensive question, I must determined whether or not to deescalate and deflect with humor, as I did the last time, or escalate and demand they leave the premises. I won’t resort to violence except in self-defense.

William Dudley Bass
Sunday 9 June 2019
Monday 24 June 2019
Revised Saturday 20 July 2019
Seattle, Washington
Cascadia
North America
Earth
Sol

Sources:

LGBTQIAP+ and the war for the alphabet

Savage, Dan. “Savage Love Letter of the Day: Adding ‘P’ to ‘LGBT’,” The Stranger, Seattle. November 2017. https://www.thestranger.com/slog/2017/11/07/25548653/savage-love-letter-of-the-day-adding-p-to-lgbt.

Nazis in 1930s New York

Bernard, Diane. “The night thousands of Nazis packed Madison Square Garden for a Rally – and violence erupted,” The Washington Post. December 2018. https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2018/12/09/night-thousands-nazis-packed-madison-square-garden-rally-violence-erupted/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.f399cf2f5646.

Casey, Nicholas. “Nazi Past of Long Island Hamlet Persists in a Rule for Home Buyers,” The New York Times. October 2015. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/20/nyregion/query-for-home-buyers-in-a-long-island-hamlet-are-you-german.html.

Duffy, Peter. “The Day New York Rose Up Against the Nazis On The Hudson,” Long Reads/Public Affairs, excerpted from, The Agitator: William Bailey and the First American Uprising Against Nazism, New York. March 2019. https://longreads.com/2019/03/25/the-day-new-york-rose-up-against-the-nazis-on-the-hudson/. 

History dot com, Editors. “This Day in History: 1939 – Americans hold a Nazi rally in Madison Square Garden,” History. February & June 2019. https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/americans-hold-nazi-rally-in-madison-square-garden.

Rothman, Lily. “More Americans Supported Hitler Than You May Think. Here’s Why One Expert Thinks That History Isn’t Better Known,” Time. October 2018. https://time.com/5414055/american-nazi-sympathy-book/.

Russell, John. “Settlement Ends Nazi-Era ‘Whites Only’ Enclave in New York,” Courthouse News Service. Manhattan, May 2017. https://www.courthousenews.com/settlement-ends-nazi-era-whites-enclave-new-york/.

Sander, Gordon F. “When Nazis Filled Madison Square Garden,” Politico Magazine. August 2017. https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/08/23/nazi-german-american-bund-rally-madison-square-garden-215522.

Yoked, Tzach. “It Looks Like Any Sleepy American Suburb, but It Has a Dark Nazi History,” Haaretz News, Israel. June 2017. https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/.premium.MAGAZINE-it-looks-like-any-american-suburb-but-it-has-a-dark-nazi-past-1.5480868.

Nazis in America Today (2019)

Beauchamp, Zack. “A leading Holocaust historian just seriously compared the US to Nazi Germany,” Vox Media, Washington, D.C. October 2018. https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/10/5/17940610/trump-hitler-history-historian.

Today’s deluge of horrors in the news is just too damn much! Any one of you can do an online search of the Charlottesville Riots, the rise and influence of Donald Trump in American politics and on the Far Right in other nations, and the resurgence of White supremacy and Nazism in the United States. One can also look up the history of lynchings, of the Bonus Army Revolt, the Business Plot conspiracy and mystery, and Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wall Street, the War on Cops, the resurgence of Socialism, the rise of Queer and other non-mainstream sexual and gender identities, the deadly Seattle crane collapse, and many, many more. Can look up cringe-inducing viddies of the horrific and fatal Seattle crane crash, too. One is too much already for me. Then go cool off listening to the Liberal Rednecks working hard to “drag Dixie out of the dark.”

 

Copyright © 2019 by William Dudley Bass. All Rights Reserved by the Author & his Descendants until we Humans establish Wise Stewardship over and for our Earth. Thank you.