VIRGINIA CONFIDENTIAL: Racial Identity, Culture Politics, Elderly Church Ladies, & Two Cartons of Vanilla-Flavored Soymilk

FARMVILLE, Va. (ZP) -- The elderly woman scrunched up her nose as two kids in front of us at the checkout counter held hands.

The girl rested her head against the boy's arm - he was a good foot and a half taller than her. The boy had his arm wrapped around her, was chewing on a straw and rubbing the girl's hip.

She had that giddy look to her, blonde and athletic in build, tan already so early in a preemptive summer. The guy wore a tee-shirt bearing a familiar and comfortable emblem, that of my own high school's mascot, the letters PECHS sprawled above a gold colored eagle, its talons poised for attack.

And they were oblivious to the people in line behind them at the grocery store. They could've cared less about visiting former residents or wrinkly old women with wrinkled brows full of disapproval.

As soon as the couple were out of earshot, the elderly woman felt the need to speak her mind, as old women tend to do at times.

"I don't know who raises their chil'ren to behave like that," she said. "They probably don't get no churching at home."

I nodded in acknowledgment of her comment, not in concurrence. There is no sense, after all, in starting a debate in a checkout line with a woman who appeared to be in her late 80s or early 90s. Those debates rarely end well...

"My daddy would've taken the belt to me or my people if we were all over each other like that..."

"Yes, ma'am. Times change."

That seemed to quiet her down a bit. Old people, for the record, sometimes say things merely because there is someone present to hear them speak.

There is a certain loneliness in aging, especially in tiny rural communities where the only things one has to look forward to in those advanced years are church suppers, bridge games, garden clubs, and reading the obituaries in a twice -a- week town paper.

Sometimes feeling as if you're always right, believing that your children and grandchildren's generations are turning everything to shit, is all you have left...

* * * *

The cashier grinned. She was eavesdropping as the elderly woman talked at me, offered me all sorts of advice on all sorts of things.

Including interracial dating. She was, well, not a fan, to say the least.

"That boy probably don't know what a black woman is," she said, digging her brown-yellow hand into her purse, "Or what that does to our women when a fine black boy like that goes running around with white women."

The cashier, a mocha-skinned young black woman, who looked to be a high school kid herself, started to snicker, then choked her momentary outburst down.

* * * *

It is really funny, you know.

Here's this elderly light-complexioned "black" woman only a shade "blacker" than the "white" 30ish dude she's talking to, attempting to explain the disgrace of a dark-complexioned, well-built black kid holding hands, in public no less, with a rather attractive white girl who looked kinda like a certain bubbly, blonde, Disney-raised pop singer from Louisiana.

I kept listening, nodding, and saying "Yes Ma'am" frequently as the woman doled out her coupons, did her These kids today rant, counted out her $10s and $20s to buy her groceries.

I was trying hard to be polite, a true gentleman, courteous and respectful of my elders. The cashier, too, was trying to be polite.

But then the woman went to the one place I didn't figure she'd go.

"If that boy wanted to be a real man and represent OUR people, he'd pull those pants up and respect himself, like OUR President ..."

I lost it.

I know. Very Rude. Laughing at old people's never a polite thing...

* * * *

Ya mean the Mom-was-a-white-chick, Dad-an-African-immigrant, multiethnic, only- a- shade- less- white- than- his- redfaced- cracker- from- Delaware- Vice-President President Obama?

The one whose American family history includes a history of slave ownership but no direct descendency from what's commonly thought of as the single largest signifier of "African-Americanism," that of having been actually related to former slaves?

So a black dude holding hands and getting all PDA with a white girl is disrespecting an entire ethnic cultural heritage, and if he just pulls his pants up, finds some religion, and looks up to a "black" president whose mom was a white woman, he'll somehow... somehow...

* * * *

Somehow what?

Grow up with the same sort of belief in preserving and defending a downright mythified African-American "race," in much the same way as some white Southerners grow up believing that they're somehow preserving the "White" race by waving a Confederate flag around, going to Klan meetings, or bitching about maintaining some fairy-tale racial purity that never existed?

Hell, hasn't that sort of thinking already proved to be the biggest embarrassment to the culture of these United States? Our eagerness to cling onto our often manufactured, self-sustaining ideas on race through social division at home, while condemning ethnic strife abroad in our media and diplomatic rhetoric?

People in the U.S. often live and die by racial history like dog breeders cling to kennel club papers - a dog is worthy of a dog show, after all, not because the dog is a dog but because his or her pedigree can be proven worthy to obsessive record keepers and judges.

* * * *

"That lady's a trip," the cashier said as she scanned my purchases. "But, I mean, for real though..."

I shrugged, swiped my bank card through the reader.

"Hey, I just try to respect my elders and let old people talk. How I was raised I guess."

The cashier had these gorgeous eyes when she smiled.

"You know, I was raised that way too. And I've got aunt like that."

"Hey, we all have relatives like that. It's how they grew up."

Nice to know that things are progressing just fine in my ol' hometown, all on their own, one youthful generation and one elderly rant at a time.

- # # # -

WORLDS AREN'T BUILT BY GAME CONSOLES & TV SHOWS: Of Skilled Labor, Technology, and America's Drive Towards a White-Collar Oblivion

And you tell me, over and over and over again my friend -
Ah, you don't believe we're on the eve of destruction.

- From the protest song "Eve of Destruction,"
As sung by Barry McGuire (Dunhill Records, 1965)
Words and music written by P.F. Sloan

HAMILTON, Ohio (ZP) -- His hands have witnessed their share of pain, of toil and labor.

Those hands of his have scrubbed brushes down to nothing more than a few stubbled bristles. They've painted homes and painted churches, I'm certain, mixed glossy coats for bathrooms in fine restaurants and applied satin finishes to schoolhouse ceilings. And each one of his fingers has pushed putty into nail holes, has been rubbed raw by sandpaper and then bleached by turpentine and mineral spirits.

I can't help but look at my own hands, the blisters and callouses of hard labor beneath a skin-killing sun long gone. I sit myself down on the curb, directly across the street from the bricks-and-sticks canvas upon which the painter works. Maybe it's just the midday sun, or the angles and intersecting lines of his scaffolding, or maybe simply the starched white coveralls, but for some reason I feel as if I'm witnessing the arcane magic that was once called The American Way.

And up on that scaffolding, he is the epitome of the American Man, the Workingman of Lady Liberty's precious womb, builder of the Great Republic's imperial palace ...

It is a grand sight, watching those hands move rollers across brick, witnessing those fingers working fresh paint into an old building, watching the rebirth of something ugly into something alive and glorious.

* * * *

It's what made this country of mine what it is, you know. That old American Way. It's almost extinct now.

All that toil, the hard work, through war and peacetime, through evils like slavery and indigenous genocide, through miraculous things like the drafting of the first great Bill of Rights, through universal suffrage, even the invention of the light bulb. It's how a nation of farmers and trappers, of pulpit-shaking preachers and warrior frontiersmen and gunslinging cowboys, rose up from our fields and factories to harness the power of the atom, to put men on the moon.

Ah, the last dinosaur of a simpler world. Who needs labor when it can be outsourced, imported, or simply invented by a reality TV producer? Survival is no longer a skill; it's a prime-time game show.

For a brief period, in the 20th century, the people of these United States were able to call themselves, as arrogant as it sounds, the Leaders of the so-called Free World. Now, well, we've become nothing more than followers of our own self-importance, trapped in a vicious loop of consumption and glut and greed.

That last dinosaur is all that remains of the hope of a nation. And when the value of a hard day's work finally dies on this continent, in this culture, our children and grandchildren will inherit nothing more than a Land of the Fat, Lazy, and Vain.

* * * *

That old American Way. It's almost extinct now.

Shed no tears, friends, for it was our so-called progress that killed our drive as a nation. We grew fat off of fast food and video game consoles from China. We liberated Europe from Nazi hegemony and Soviet communism and then came home to build our suburbs of conformity, our own race-baiting, class-divisive political machines, our own reflection in a pool of nation-hating terrorists and third-world enemies.

We did it to ourselves, in less than a century, unraveled the fabric of an entire nation's drive and respun it into nothing more than a security blanket of products and pop culture references. We tied capitalism to freedom, married that bastard called the Status Quo to individualistic expression, stitched the ownership of things into concepts like success, happiness, even love ...

It's a marvel that there are still men, in a world of digital workflow and corporate, cubicle-filled bread-and-circuses, who can do such things as simply apply paint to a dillapidated brick facade in the middle of a bustling downtown city.

* * * *

I smoke my cigarette, silent, look back up as my painter, this Laborous, Liberated God amongst the office-bound masses, my tanned reflection of a nation almost gone, directs his crew with those marvelously weathered hands.

"No! You get wrong paint! Go now get me... right color... out... truck."

His English is poor; his swearing, in Mexican Spanish, is perfect. And such a wondrous sound, the profanity of a tongue other than one's own! It's been a while since I've heard the word Gabacho (n., Spanish slang - dirty foreigner) used to refer to my own countrymen by a foreigner, in my own country.

He shakes his head and returns to trimming out windows. His apprentices, his very American laborforce, mumble to themselves as they climb back down the scaffolding. I'm not sure, so far away, if their bitching and moaning has to do with their error, or if these white boys are merely upset that a man with brown skin...

If it weren't for the trickle of immigrants we still allow into this country, we'd be dead by now. If it weren't for those who bring their skin tones and cultures and skills, their brains and reasoning and religion, with them when they come, hell, we'd still be a nation of fur traders, pilgrims, and prostitutes...

... And those scrawny peckerwoods would be flipping burgers for some clown in a suit, instead of learning a trade from a Chicano painter, too.

* * * *

I crush out my Marlboro, stand up and dust myself off. My jeans, I notice, don't get as beat up as they used to when I was a kid, my back doesn't ache as much as it did, and the dust, well, the dust on my jeans almost bothers me.

I was a stonemason's teenage apprentice once, and a carpenter, too. I learned to frame up load-bearing walls with my father and his crews, roasted beneath a molten Virgina sun in red-clay fields where homes were being built, family dwellings created, lives and landscape changed by the very hands of men and women.

But now...

I continue down the sidewalk I hear two middle-aged men, dressed in matching polos, khaki shorts, arguing over some season finale of some network television drama. I pass a woman yelling into a cell phone about how her laptop crashed, home she hasn't been able to check her MySpace page in days. I overhear a young boy begging some distant parent, again via cell phone, for money to buy some new video game.

Ah, the new, supposedly improved American Way.

Labor is to be done by migrant laborers, by those from trailer parks and impoverished rural areas, school districts almost intentionally left behind in the Information Age to allow for a whole class of people, separate from the rest of us and beneath our computerized abilities, to become our redneck slaves, our Mestizo scapegoats, and our broadcast media punchlines.

I was once a stonemason's apprentice, a carpenter-in-training. And if I hadn't gone to college, hadn't been one of the lucky ones with an escape route and a gift for passing the required courses in a bullshit college curricula...

* * * *

I will spend a minimum of forty hours next week, I tell myself, staring into an LCD screen and pretending that data I put into a little black box, that the information I transmit across fiber-optic lines and servers, really means something, that my hands are contributing to the world in the same way as the painters of buildings.

And I know, instantly, that I'm lying to myself. I'm just another dirty, lazy gabacho these days. My hands are as soft as a young woman's cheek, my body weakened by librarian's meetings and the World Wide Web, my soul tainted by the lack of manual labor's intellectual sunburn.

What world is this that we're making for ourselves, anyway?

- # # # -

FOUR STATES, THREE THOUSAND MILES, TWO LITERS OF COFFEE, ONE DAY: Of Airport Love, Divorce, and Big College Football

PHOENIX (ZP) -- I was in love.

Instantly.

The Oh my dear God! Those eyes could melt titanium! kinda love that one finds in places like airports, retail stores and gas stations. The sort of youthful, downright childish lust that perpetually reminds all human beings that, well, our bodies were meant to respond to stimuli beyond the realm of the rational mind.

She handed me my coffee, smiled, and asked if I could wait a few seconds. She was about to take her break and asked if I had time to talk, split a muffin.

Of the tens of thousands of weary, caffeine-deprived travelers who'd passed through that Sky Harbor terminal Monday morning, I was the only one who'd pointed out that she had the most enchanting eyes.

Nobody had ever, EVER just randomly said that to her, and, well, my compliment made her smile more than the pushy New Yorker who, moments before, had insisted that her iced mocha was too cold and who wanted to complain to the corporate office...

Most guys, you see, don't use words like enchanting, to airport baristas or to any other woman, for that matter. Hell, I rarely use the damned word in casual conversation. Fucking hot is usually the most a guy - any guy - can muster from behind the veil of instantaneous libido.

I don't know why I said it, actually. The phrasing just spilled over my teeth and past my lips, into the air and through her hair, into her ears and brain.

And no, I wasn't the first guy to compliment her. I was, however, the first male under the age of 65, completely sober, to compliment her on something other than tits or ass - very few male customers had ever so much as talked to her face as she served up their lattes and cappuccinos.

I was in love, instantly, for a whopping 15 minutes. Knowing it wouldn't last, I tried to make the most of it, to cram the whole ritualistic courtship bullshit down into a lusty affair of casual conversation. We chatted, split a low-fat blueberry muffin, and then, like that, she took her enchanting eyes back behind the counter and went back to work.

C'est la vie, my friends. C'est la motherfucking vie.

Somehow, even though I live all the way on the other side of the continent, I ended up with a phone number and an email address scribbled onto a dirty napkin - in case, she said, I want to hang out or something next time I fly through Phoenix.

Go fucking me.

I spent the remainder of my hour-and-a-half layover wandering around the terminal, feeling like, well, a complete stud, shooting complete strangers the How you doin', baby?, the look so many guys tend to give off at times of personal satisfaction.

I made a complete ass of myself, I'm sure.

Pays to give a woman a compliment, though.

I've been digging through every crevice and crease in my laptop case since I flew out of Sky Harbor, hoping beyond all hope I didn't throw away that goddamn napkin.

I fly through Phoenix often, actually. And I've been known to accidentally miss connecting flights, simply to hang out or something.

- MORE -

CHARLOTTE, N.C. (ZP) -- He fidgeted with his boarding pass and passport as she explained the situation.

They'd taken one final holiday together, a trip to Florida and Georgia to visit friends. They broke up, officially, in Atlanta on New Year's Day, an amicable and supposedly mutual split after ten years of dating. It wasn't working for either of them and, well, they both knew it.

She took a drag off of her cigarette as we chatted, just outside of Douglas International Airport, hunkered down for our long layovers with cups of three-dollar coffee and our smuggled fire and tobacco. And he stood there, listening, hardly saying a word.

She added that she'd already moved into her own flat back in London, where they both worked, and that, well, she held know animosity towards the fact that he'd been sleeping with an Ethiopian/Briton colleague - she'd been seeing someone else, too.

Stereotypical Frenchwoman - cold and blunt in casual conversation like a German, nonchalant and whimsical like an Italian. Her English was more Canadian than British or American, a fact that she attributed to her years as a college student in Montreal.

The ex-boyfriend, a perfectly bronze Duala, originally from Cameroon, added that he, too, had studied in Montreal, that they had started dating in college and that, yes, it was a mutual breakup. He rolled his eyes and dug through his pockets for chewing gum - he was, he said, trying to quit smoking.

He seemed more than a little annoyed by the fact that she'd brought up his relationship with the Ethio-British coworker, that they'd broken up while on holiday, and that, well, everything was just peachy now that they were just good friends.

She and I talked for a good hour, until the time came for the pair to board their next flight - they were heading to up to New England to visit his brother, who she had also once dated...

And people say my love life is strange.

- MORE -

DAYTON, Ohio (ZP) -- For some Americans, college football is a religion.

And for some, that religion reaches well beyond the frontiers of faith, well into the realm of puritanical insanity.

"OH MY GOD! WHAT'S THE SCORE?!? ANYBODY KNOW THE SCORE?!? ARE THE BUCKS STILL LEADIN'?"

There is nothing quite like watching a very large man sprint across an airport terminal, sprinting for dear life and risking a massive coronary, the cold steel blue industrial carpeting slowing down every step with its damned gravitational friction.

And, no, by the time our plane had landed, the Buckeyes weren't still leadin'. They were headed, in fact, to that wretched little place, to where every overrated football team ends up, where the hype and fanaticism ends and the gridiron starts - a solid, painfully embarrassing loss.

A mere five minutes behind the Ohio State football maniac, a certain Louisiana State University alum, tired as he was, stopped to ask a lone custodian about the score of a certain national championship game.

And that LSU-educated librarian sighed when he heard the score, 24-10 at halftime. He really didn't give a shit about a silly football game. He was tired, still had an hour drive back to his Oxford Fucking Ohio apartment, and wasn't sure, exactly, where he'd left his pickup. When he got back into town, he planned on swinging by a pub to catch the last few minutes - if he wasn't too tired.

For those unfamiliar with the Bowl Championship Series (BCS) or American football, just think - Big Brother meets World Cup. It's less about true competition than your average pie-eating contest, a live-action role-playing game for the benefit of an army of obsessed fanboys and fangirls, a handful of overzealous boosters, and a few university financial planners.

Big Time College Football's "national championship" is nothing more than two teams playing in a game because several supercomputers and less-than-objective polls declared them worthy of a shot at a championship. One shouldn't put too much stock in a system designed around making sure the popular, well-funded schools get to sell more merchandise or to earn millions in television revenue.

Or, to put it another way, the BCS National Championship Game is nothing more than one big, sick joke, a disgrace to the spirit of athletic competition. And, well, the LSU Tigers would go on to wallop THE Ohio State University Buckeyes 38-24, becoming the first two-time big, sick joke BCS champion of the new century.

Yay. Geaux Tigers. Too bad there's not a playoff system beyond a few polls and a couple of statistical algorithms to back up that championship.

As the tired librarian made his way towards the baggage claim, he wondered aloud if the man realized how downright strange he looked, with his laptop case slapping against his girth, sweat pouring off his brow, as he raced towards an update and into the realm of hype addiction.

The woman next to the librarian laughed.

The fat man who'd just set a new Dayton International land-speed record was her husband.

She didn't see what the big deal was - her alma mater, Michigan, had won its bowl game the previous week - she liked football, sure, but forgot to watch her team's 41-35 win over the University of Florida. Instead, she'd spent New Year's Day shopping for new clothes for their grandchildren.

And for those who don't know, or who don't care, his Ohio State and her Michigan football squads have been duking it out since 1897, making the now annual meeting one of the oldest and most storied rivalries in North American sports history.

"Oh, this is mild. You should see him when Wolverines are in it. We don't speak for weeks. I can't even watch the game with him anymore..."

The librarian laughed nervously, grabbed his leather bag from the turnstile.

For some reason, as he drove home, he couldn't help but feel sorry for that poor woman.

- # # # -