Birmingham was one hateful, little colonial outpost. If a white man complained about low wages and poor working conditions, the bosses told him, "If you don't like your job -- there are ten niggers who will take it for a fraction of your pay." It's self-evident why Birmingham was not exactly known as a beckon of racial harmony.
When my family left Birmingham, we moved to Atlanta, Georgia: a city (or more precisely, a contrived collection of corrupt zoning practices and real estate developer larcenies) that also bears a contrived name and was (and remains) a center-devoid simulacrum of a city, inhabited by a citizenry (who, for the most part) personal styles and cultural sentiments reflect Atlanta's phony name to a fault.
Whereas Birmingham's fraudulent name was meant to evoke an aura of industry, Atlanta's was meant to conjure an image of the ancient grandeur of a great city of antiquity. Call it: Classical Age Cracker.
Illustrative of the cultural confabulation and communal delusions that Atlanta residents term as their way of life are the lives, fates, and legacies of two famous residents of the city, Blind Willie McTell and Margaret Mitchell, both of whom resided there in overlapping intervals during the first half of the twentieth century.
I first heard the music of Blind Willie McTell, in the mid-nineteen-sixties, when in tow of my father, I visited friends of his who comprised the half dozen or so members of Atlanta's "beatnik" community.
They were flopped in a run-down, mafia-owned building at the intersection of Peachtree and Tenth Street, bizarrely enough, in the building that contained the apartment that Margaret Mitchell had christened "The Dump" -- the location where she had conceived and written Gone With The Wind.
Upon the turntable of a battered record player, belonging to the building's resident manager, the late Bud Foote, a professor at Georgia Tech., author, poet, musician, and all around Beat polymath, spun rare and exquisite LPs. It was at The Dump, I first heard the works of Mctell and other Blues, Folk, and Jazz greats.
The building was located a short distance from where, according to local bohemian (all seven of them) lore had it, an aging, increasingly disconsolate from poverty, racism, and his own obscurity, McTell used to busk for change from redneck Babbits and country-come-to-town parvenus, shortly before he gave up playing the blues and took up lay preaching and gospel music.
The Margaret Mitchell House, as it has been subsequently dubbed by the Atlanta Tourism Board, is now a city landmark. Both obtuse locals and gullible tourists seem oblivious or indifferent to the fact that the building, thrice burned to the ground and rebuilt by the city, doesn't, at present, in any way, shape, or form resemble the original structure where the epic racist, bodice-ripper, Gone With The Wind, was hallucinated and inflicted onto the page.
Not far down the road exists a bar named Blind Willy's, a place that, on any given night, is populated by the sort of folks, who, had they lived in McTell's era, would have ignored or spat upon him when he was busking on Ponce De Leon Avenue.
The irony shields of the city of Atlanta are impenetrable when there are dollars to be made from the creation of a safe, business-friendly, false mythology out of the stuff of the city's racist and tawdry history.
Perhaps if we were to take a closer examination of these sorts of everyday misperceptions, distortions, and lies that, over time, grow into cultural delusions -- it would reveal a great deal about not only Atlanta, Birmingham, and Manhattan's East Village -- but our present day lives within that hack-conjured narrative know as the present day United States of America.
Is it possible for some scion of the corporate state to wail-out the blues of the present era -- for some bluesman born of the hybrid lawn-seeded soil of our nation of vast suburban subdivisions and weaned on its pharmacological subsistence crops -- perhaps going by the moniker Medicated Willie McMansion -- to sing out, "I got the medication blues/ from my iPod head to my sweatshop-shod shoes..."
But more likely, the progeny of Margaret Mitchell, now newswriters and producers at CNN, will continue to contrive the spurious narratives of the times: storylines that are about as accurate as the one their forbearer, Miss Mitchell, confabulated, within the pages of Gone With The Wind, regarding the Civil War era American South; both tales are vain, shallow, narcissistic, self-serving spectaculars -- inane, melodramatic me'langes, riddled with cultural cliche's and casuistry, reality-denying rationalizations, and pulp novel plot devices serving to mask the realities of brutal classism, blood drenched racism, and wars waged on behalf of a corrupt ruling class.
So where does this leave us? Are we condemned to live out our lives in the enthralling dazzle of these glittering fragments of self-serving lies?
Or worse: What of the dreaded Law of Eternal Poultry Return (LEPR) -- which is known, in everyday parlance, as the "chickens coming home to roost"?
When my family left Birmingham, we moved to Atlanta, Georgia: a city (or more precisely, a contrived collection of corrupt zoning practices and real estate developer larcenies) that also bears a contrived name and was (and remains) a center-devoid simulacrum of a city, inhabited by a citizenry (who, for the most part) personal styles and cultural sentiments reflect Atlanta's phony name to a fault.
Whereas Birmingham's fraudulent name was meant to evoke an aura of industry, Atlanta's was meant to conjure an image of the ancient grandeur of a great city of antiquity. Call it: Classical Age Cracker.
Illustrative of the cultural confabulation and communal delusions that Atlanta residents term as their way of life are the lives, fates, and legacies of two famous residents of the city, Blind Willie McTell and Margaret Mitchell, both of whom resided there in overlapping intervals during the first half of the twentieth century.
They were flopped in a run-down, mafia-owned building at the intersection of Peachtree and Tenth Street, bizarrely enough, in the building that contained the apartment that Margaret Mitchell had christened "The Dump" -- the location where she had conceived and written Gone With The Wind.
Upon the turntable of a battered record player, belonging to the building's resident manager, the late Bud Foote, a professor at Georgia Tech., author, poet, musician, and all around Beat polymath, spun rare and exquisite LPs. It was at The Dump, I first heard the works of Mctell and other Blues, Folk, and Jazz greats.
The building was located a short distance from where, according to local bohemian (all seven of them) lore had it, an aging, increasingly disconsolate from poverty, racism, and his own obscurity, McTell used to busk for change from redneck Babbits and country-come-to-town parvenus, shortly before he gave up playing the blues and took up lay preaching and gospel music.
The Margaret Mitchell House, as it has been subsequently dubbed by the Atlanta Tourism Board, is now a city landmark. Both obtuse locals and gullible tourists seem oblivious or indifferent to the fact that the building, thrice burned to the ground and rebuilt by the city, doesn't, at present, in any way, shape, or form resemble the original structure where the epic racist, bodice-ripper, Gone With The Wind, was hallucinated and inflicted onto the page.
Not far down the road exists a bar named Blind Willy's, a place that, on any given night, is populated by the sort of folks, who, had they lived in McTell's era, would have ignored or spat upon him when he was busking on Ponce De Leon Avenue.
The irony shields of the city of Atlanta are impenetrable when there are dollars to be made from the creation of a safe, business-friendly, false mythology out of the stuff of the city's racist and tawdry history.
Perhaps if we were to take a closer examination of these sorts of everyday misperceptions, distortions, and lies that, over time, grow into cultural delusions -- it would reveal a great deal about not only Atlanta, Birmingham, and Manhattan's East Village -- but our present day lives within that hack-conjured narrative know as the present day United States of America.
Is it possible for some scion of the corporate state to wail-out the blues of the present era -- for some bluesman born of the hybrid lawn-seeded soil of our nation of vast suburban subdivisions and weaned on its pharmacological subsistence crops -- perhaps going by the moniker Medicated Willie McMansion -- to sing out, "I got the medication blues/ from my iPod head to my sweatshop-shod shoes..."
But more likely, the progeny of Margaret Mitchell, now newswriters and producers at CNN, will continue to contrive the spurious narratives of the times: storylines that are about as accurate as the one their forbearer, Miss Mitchell, confabulated, within the pages of Gone With The Wind, regarding the Civil War era American South; both tales are vain, shallow, narcissistic, self-serving spectaculars -- inane, melodramatic me'langes, riddled with cultural cliche's and casuistry, reality-denying rationalizations, and pulp novel plot devices serving to mask the realities of brutal classism, blood drenched racism, and wars waged on behalf of a corrupt ruling class.
So where does this leave us? Are we condemned to live out our lives in the enthralling dazzle of these glittering fragments of self-serving lies?
Or worse: What of the dreaded Law of Eternal Poultry Return (LEPR) -- which is known, in everyday parlance, as the "chickens coming home to roost"?
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