On Top of Spaghetti
The iron grip of systemic racism was revealed anew in that year of 2020.
At the time, I considered a number of totemic institutions propagating the pageantry of our class system’s historical leaders, including one of our more questionable national landmarks, Mount Rushmore. There was a brouhaha that summer about the famous landmark, as it does of course commemorate two slave owners, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. It also honors Teddy Roosevelt, who greatly contributed to colonialist expansion resulting in further decimation of Indigenous lands and people. Roosevelt purportedly said once “I don’t go so far as to think the only good Indians are dead Indians, but I believe 9 out of every 10 are.” Even Abraham Lincoln, the ‘Great Emancipator,’ wasn’t immune to the constructs of the whiteboyism of his time. According to the Library of Congress, he approved the mass hanging of 38 Dakota Indigenous men.
Mount Rushmore, as impressive as it is in scale and craft, is a testament to broken treaties and white supremacy. Its creator was a legit member of the KKK. Before that statuary was sculpted, that mountain was called Tunkasila Sakpe Paha, or ‘Six Grandfathers Mountain,’ representing the six sacred directions: west, east, north, south, above, and below. Under the Fort Laramie treaty, the Black Hills were legally deeded to the Lakota Sioux. White settlers invaded anyway for gold, and the U.S. government eventually took the lands back, with no compensation or regard for the Sioux. According to Jeff Ostler, historian at the University of Oregon, the Lakota Nation was reportedly offered over a billion dollars of reparations. They refused to agree and will only accept the return of all lands that were stolen from them.
Yep. It’s a clusterfuck of history, no question. If you’re invested in revamping your whiteboy lenses and want to honor Indigenous traditions rather than colonist ones, next time you’re hankering to tourist South Dakota, maybe pass on the slave owner memorial and check out the Black Hills Pow Wow in Rapid City instead. Food for thought.
Anyway, let’s flip the coin in this segment and touch upon some middling measures of anti-racism that sprouted up in 2020.
In that year of 2020, creators, writers, and actors involved in the reproductions of syndicated TV shows, including 30 Rock, Scrubs, The Office, Community, and a handful of late-night talk shows issued apologies for systemic racism and removed blackface episodes from streaming services and downloadable archives. Some critics said it was too little, too late. I was of the long term mind every bit helped to shape a more inclusive future. Popular animated shows like The Simpsons, with Hank Azaria, a white voice-over actor portraying the Indian character of Apu, and Family Guy, with Mike Henry, a white voice-over actor portraying the Black character of Cleveland, and BoJack Horseman, with Alison Brie, a white voice-over actress portraying the Asian character of Diane, announced race-specific replacements for those roles or apologies for those choices in casting.
Growing up in the seventies as a preadolescent kid, I didn’t know Black shows like Good Times or The Jeffersons or What’s Happening weren’t cast, produced, and broadcast for the same reasons Mary Tyler Moore or Bob Newhart were aired. When I gathered wisdom later on, watching those shows made me cringe. They still do. They’re sacred to both Black and white Boomers and Gen Xers alike, but that’s because of SENTIMENT. What we came of age with, no matter their warts and faults and failings, tends to stick. How white America lauded those shows with any semblance of humility is beyond belief. Consigning satirical blackface comedy to the confines of the past might be a small token gesture, but gestures eventually become steps, steps become changes, enough changes can become a new era.
Disney’s corporate hegemony finally wobbled in its formerly unassailable perch on the mountaintop. They changed the motif of Splash Mountain, its classic good old boy ride modeled in part on their infamous Song of the South movie. That animated feature is now banned and difficult to hunt down on account of its blatant racism (slavery is fun!). They changed the attraction to a Princess and the Frog ambience instead. Many hardcore Disney fans, already taxed to exhaustion from the inability to hit their favorite amusement parks during months of quarantine, lamented the change. Americans don’t take well to drastic change because they haven’t ever been forced to consistently endure drastic change, unlike many a third world society.
On the politically correct train, the Washington Redskins announced a franchise name change after decades of protest from Indigenous tribes. The state of Mississippi, against all odds, managed to approve a flag design change. Its original banner hosted a confederate flag in the upper corner.
Rhode Island considered a state name change! Cray cray! I admit the original full title of the state had escaped my memory until the era of 2020 brought its truth to light again. Its actual title is The State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations. Oops. Ouch. Uh, yeah, that ought to have been changed right after the Civil War. I do not recall if my grade school lessons ever actually informed me of Rhode Island’s proper name. I’d tend to lean on the side of my small town teachers eschewing that aspect of colonial teachings. I knew very little about Rhode Island other than it was the smallest state in the union. Some friends have told me it takes about 3 or 4 days to walk across the entire state. 3 or 4 days? Here in California, that might maybe get me to my nearest DMV window.
The Rhode Island plantation thing got me to thinking about my sixth grade music classes, how we were taught sing-a-longs, how some of those Olde Tyme Americana folk tunes still earworm in my head from time to time, how so many of them were at their cores pretty fucking awful songs. You know the ones. There was Low Bridge Everybody Down, in which the guy’s singing about working his poor mule to death hauling shit to construct the Erie Canal. Oh My Darling Clementine, wherein a gold rush miner is so poor his daughter has to wear wood boxes on her feet for shoes, then she drowns in a river because she gets a splinter from those box shoes. Dreadful sorry Clementine, indeed. Yankee Doodle Dandy was more or less about Redcoats implying American revolutionary soldiers were gay. And the national anthem was always rooted in Francis Scott Key’s subverted racism. I’ve Been Working on the Railroad? Dinah won’t you blow your horn? Are ya kidding me? She’ll Be Coming ‘Round the Mountain is about coal miners’ drudgery and the rapture. No, really. Look it up. Oh! Susanna is horrendously racist. On Top of Old Smokey, appropriated long ago by grade school children with the playground classic version, On Top of Spaghetti All Covered in Cheese, tells of the heartbreak of Appalachian infidelities. I know these songs backwards and forwards, that’s how much we sang those diddies, and it was fun, you betcha, they were catchy and kitschy and easy to follow along during a campfire s’mores session. It didn’t matter we didn’t know what were singing about, didn’t matter much of those songs were riffed from impoverished 1800s Americana. It was about the cadence, goddammit!
We probably should’ve just tuned into School House Rock instead. Though plenty of those animated Saturday morning chestnuts haven’t aged too well either. That Time for Timer egg-dude wanted us to freeze orange juice in our ice cube trays, for fuck’s sake.
Lastly today, we’re going to remember that despite a record high surge of new Covid cases in that July of 2020, Disney World reopened all the same. Honestly, Floridians. You really didn’t have to keep proving to the rest of us how unique and special you were. We’ve known for a while now. Because of your overall DGAF attitude, in that week of July you became the U.S. epicenter of the pandemic with 83,000 total new cases.
Really, Florida, you give California a good run in the apocalypse showdown. You have the hurricanes, we have the ‘quakes. You have the swamp, we have the desert. Your neon dystopian Miami is our steampunk necropolis San Francisco. You have Daytona Beach, we have Orange County. You can’t run your red elections worth a damn and we can’t figure out how to make our blue politics sustainable. We both have soul crushing traffic and mad redneck street cred. We have lung killing smog and you have skin killing UV rays. Your Sunshine State is just as likely to fall into the Atlantic as our Golden State is to the Pacific. Why so many people choose to vacation to our inglorious shores is mystifying, isn’t it? I’m confident if our mutual theme parks were taken out of the equation, Hawaii would be overrun.
But I’ll take our apocalypse over yours, because your giant freaky bugs are gross. Plus that humidity. I’m hoping Armageddon’s a dry heat.
If you enjoyed this segment and want to tip without a monthly commitment, you’re welcome to buy us a one time coffee. We remain, as always, your faithful servants of the pen and the meta-sword.