'My' Side, 'Your' Side

In this week's Camino a Ítaca I look back at a surreal experience in deepest Arkansas and how some feel the past so strongly that they actually feel a living part of it. Click over to the original in Spanish or read the English version below. (PDF en castellano abajo)

The poor woman had obviously had way too much to drink, and judging how the regulars at the bar judiciously avoided her, it probably wasn’t the first time she found herself face down in an ashtray. We took the locals cue and continued to ignore her when she suddenly lurched over the bar, knocking some of the other clients bottles over in the process, and repeated what she had been slurring for the past half an hour, “You goddam Yankees stole my niggers! You bastards took away my slaves!”

I have to admit that I was a little confused. At first, I didn’t have a clue what she was raving on about, seeing as I am Canadian and all. But there we were, taking a break between sets at a gig in a bar in the southern state of Arkansas when I realized that the woman had obviously overheard my bandmate’s accent. An accent that distinctly marked him, to anyone who had seen any of the Hollywood gangster movies, as someone who had grown up in one of the boroughs of New York City. Hearing it, she had decided to direct her drunken rage at us.

One mystery solved, but I was still confused.  

What had this woman been drinking that would lead her to believe that something that had happened more than a century ago was somehow a personal affront to her? What kind of selfish narcissism allowed her to believe that a historical event that happened so long ago was the main cause of her problems? What kind of substances had she ingested that would lead her to think that she was an actual combatant in a long dead war? Worse yet, what kind of person would want to identify with something as abhorrent and horrendous as slavery? Yet there she was, floundering like a fish in the growing pool of spilt beer on top of the bar. Something had drastically failed along her path.

She’s not alone in her lostness. Just a few months ago we saw enraged masses waving Nazi flags assaulting the US capitol building. A flag that symbolizes an ideology that half a million of their forefathers died fighting against. A flag that represents the nightmarish horrors of places like Auschwitz and Dachau. A flag they now called their own. Turn on the TV and you’ll see LGTBQ protestors proudly wearing Che Guevarra t-shirts, identifying themselves with a regime that would have had them sent to labour camps, and perhaps even executed for their orientation. We see nostalgic neocommunists tweet on their iPhones about the need to do away with private property before settling down to watch Netflix in a second flat that their parents’ bought. Closer to home here in Spain, politicians and their acolytes talk of winners and losers of a war that was fought generations ago. A civil war in which there were only losers among the masses. Yet, there is still talk of ‘your’ side and ‘mine’, as if their coiffed hair had suffered the lice of the trenches. As if I'm somehow a member of a side simply because I don't agree with you?

Ideals from the past can obviously be supported, just as they can be rejected. But to claim ownership of these, to somehow assert ones membership as part of something long past seems as delusional as that poor woman wriggling in that pool of cigarette butts and stale beer on that bar in lost Arkansas.