Part V: Hick Slides into the Heat
Far and away my favorite film of my adolescence in Louisiana was In the Heat of the Night with Sidney Poitier and Rod Steiger. The film, by the great Canadian auteur Norman Jewisson, describes the abuse of the rule of Law by the racist South. (as though the North were some how less angry and just.. it was none of those things in my experience)
There in in the “Deep” South in Slidell, St. Tammany Parish, Louisiana I was surrounded by Sheriff Gillespies. The Hick Sherrif played so artlessly by Rod Steiger. A performance of character acting so nuanced as to dissolve Steiger all together. We don’t see him acting. He is just being.
And Sheriff Gillespie being is this: he is an aspiring Hick. He is well meaning and he is trying very hard. He wants above all to create good order within the rule of law. And he yet is so hopelessly out of his depth. He can’t barely manage his own staff. He makes mistakes. And of course, mistakes in the rule of Law have horrific consequences.
Him I knew. And I try to teach this to the young black and Latino men (black doesn’t get capitalized, no?) around the country in the school districts where I teach yoga—that talking back to him will kill you and me both. It’s not racial. They are peace officers not police officers, and they dislike loudness.
Notice and adore as I do the egalitarian justice of this video
I preach to young men that the only way they can think themselves out of this encounter with Sheriff Gillespie is to access their forebrain. The amygdala is hot, the fight or flight response is flipping out and their only way to live is to breathe. To be Cool.
Sidney Poitier as Virgil Tibbs embodies this cool. Until the very moment he slaps the racist plantation owner in the face he remains the coolest cat in the milieu of sweating and highly reactive Hicks. I had never seen someone so suave and composed and articulate and judicious as Virgil Tibbs.
There were no adult Virgil Tibbs in my life. Perhaps he was reminiscent of Perry Mason for me yet all the while oozing sexual and intellectual charisma. Vagal tone.
There were Great country dumb men in my life, sure, but no man like Tibbs. My grandfather Ted and my father Bill oozed sexual charisma. It wasn’t just a black thing, no. They just didn’t have the critical disinterested intellect of Virgil or Perry.
What is significant about Tibbs is his silhouette. He is defined and mired by his environs. He is made present and distinct by this miasmic swamp of whiteness.
Counter to Tibb’s quest for real truth and real justice, that is ultimately frustrated by the rude obliterating reality of power is the Sophist. The Trumpist.
“They can because they think they can.” said Virgil. (of the Aeneid)
Just as Arrio Hoffman said at Brigham Young, the Sophist feels that opinion is just as valid as truth.
If someone can be persuaded of something, it's true. And that is the definition of a demagogue: a populist like Huey P. Long or Donald Trump or Mussolini.
These shit-kickers said that Absolute Power was good for the people and the people believed them. My own father said of the shit-hole that is Detroit. “What we need is a good dictator” (An oxymoron that). But it is exactly what happened to the city when it was taken under management through its bankruptcy.
I said to my hick dad… the hayseed, “Dad, the first thing a dictator is going to do is take away your porno.”
As a shot across the bows, a warning to be sure, with Mussolini in mind, Barthes has insisted that the people, the audience to professional wrestling, and the reality show, and that mob seek always justice. They will see the heel come down. Mussolini hanged, his bimbo Claretta hung next to him, his genitals torn off his body with the mob’s bare hands, apocryphally its said.
Mussolini :
“Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.”
“Democracy is beautiful in theory; in practice it is a fallacy. You in America will see that some day.”
Goodness.. that, an eye-popping couple of quotes to be sure. And yet, I still somehow am wistful. I wish our own Führer knew such big words.
Speaking of which, I feel in my heart a fabrication of my own personality. A sense that I am in constant affected. I am affected as a sophisticate and a pretender. Certainly in the presence of some such shrill intellectual Jewess so much so that I am deeply affected by her, and finding myself thinking like her, and seeking her favor by riffing on the same notions of what is thought, and being, and what are words really.
I have this feeling in me that my Southernness is real, though of course it is a gross affectation. But the cadences and slurs and malapropisms of grammar are authentic. And more so around blacks than anyone else and always in speaking extemporaneously before larger crowds. Like Amy Adams in Sharp Objects I am more Southern the angrier I am. And given a moment, given pause and a safe space… this little typewriter say... I have space to elucidate notions as a highbrow phrenic aspirant might.
Who am I?
What is the self but a construct of the environs we feel safe in?
Who are we but a Confucian negative space. 孔子
A silhouette?
Kara Walker You Do 1993-94 and a Victorian Silhouette
We and I are patterns of thought, memories that are chosen for their coincidental comparison to a self we like, that we have a preference for. This is a Japan that does not exist, but is the one we prefer. Quoth Edward Said.
We are Hicks.
As a judicial aside, here, I believe is an interesting note on Kara Walker and her inspiration Adrian Piper "who played with her identity as a light-skinned black woman to flush racism out of hiding.”
Well, thank goodness racism is out of hiding now.
So to speak on cultural normalization a quote from the African American artist Betye Saar who thinks Kara's work is "revolting and negative and a form of betrayal to the slaves... [and] basically for the amusement and investment of the ‘White art’ establishment… pandering, a minstrel performance dishing out unmediated stereotypes to whites.”
(She said, and I paraphrase, our text of thought should be mediated before presented to the overculture.)
Betye Saar The Liberation of Aunt Jemima 1972
Again, there is the Sincere notion here that the artist is a kind of God above morality and an authentic movement towards standards. Whatever motivations Walker has to destroy racism Ms. Saar sees her as an authentic Judas, and denies the moral equivalency of the Sincere. Where in a sincere effort to define truth you might find yourself shooting heroin in Morocco.
Ms. Saar, the authentic, clearly is insulted by Kara’s point of view and message (however intriguing and uncomfortable that might be to her white market and critical audience who very dearly wish to be her ally) and then criticizes her for her betrayal to the Black Folk, to the Matriarchy. I wonder if Ms. Saar in her boudoir mutters murmuring passages like ‘She black?”
Jesus, can’t she just be and say whatever the fuck she wants to the market who wants it?
Ain’t that Uhmerica? Ain’t that Sincere, tho?
Classy
Hick rests not on innocence but self-intentioned aspiration… a desire to be “classy.”
The rhinestone cowboy is classy. Classy a naive sort of camp, an unintentional camp, but an intentional act of rising above one’s station in a way the paintings of the great Dutch painter Bruegel are never Hick — they are simple country folk.
The Hick move is the pretension to engage with material that is far over one’s head. In 1995 I attended a lecture at SAIC where the poet Ed Hirsch reprised his interview with Susan Sontag. I remember nodding and smiling uncomfortably as others laughed at in jokes and then I fell asleep through the entirety of her reading of her own book.
That’s Hick.
As a northerner or as transplanted Canadian now firmly back on home soil (the Hick Clan married into the Slaights and settled Niagara and then Saskatchewan, as you may remember, after being kicked out of the colonies for supporting the British).
Though, having grown up in the South I feel I can hear the nuances of speech as I had and must fit in that environment. Which is to say that when I hear black folk in the North I hear the South.
“Passing like a Lord in that fine big shiny car!!” This is cool, this pimp reference from the impregnated slutty future welfare queen, Dolores to Sheriff Gillespie.
I wish, sincerely, that the girl from the Heat of the Night was actually named Doris and we could talk about Leroy Brown and Jim Croce and affected hipster Hick some more. Jim Croce is amazing at the Hick move. Incredible. If you can hear Jim Croce speaking at a college show you can hear him code switching.
He is natural in the collegiate environment witty and self-deprecating. His folksy county dumb street language is affected perhaps or he really is just a hyper-educated South Philly Italian Jew Hick who studied psychology and German studies at Villanova.
(Jesus, what a fucking hick, Helen Reddy was, right? It’s like Hick is the Australian national ethos).
In Part VI we will discuss code switching in more depth before getting into the Clintons finally.
You cannot talk about Hick and not talk about Bill.