Gun shop advertisement affixed to front page of Charleston, South Carolina Post and Courier the day after a racially-motivated massacre in which nine people were shot dead at a church in the city. The flyer stuck to The Post and Courier offered a $30 (£19) deal for Thursday, which is “ladies’ night”, just miles away from the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church. For that price ATP Gun Shop gives women a pistol or revolver, 50 rounds of ammunition, eye and ear protection, access to a shooting range, an instructor and a souvenir T-shirt.: photo via The Independent, 19 June 2015
Sail Away
In America you'll get food to eat
Won't have to run through the jungle
And scuff up your feet
You'll just sing about Jesus and drink wine all day
It's great to be an American
Ain't no lions or tigers
Ain't no mamba snake
Just the sweet watermelon and the buckwheat cake
Ev'rybody is as happy as a man can be
Climb aboard, little wog
Sail away with me
Sail away
Sail away
We will cross the mighty ocean into Charleston Bay
Sail away
Sail away
We will cross the mighty ocean into Charleston Bay
In America every man is free
To take care of his home and his family
You'll be as happy as a monkey in a monkey tree
You're all gonna be an American
Sail away
Sail away
We will cross the mighty ocean into Charleston Bay
Sail away
Sail away
We will cross the mighty ocean into Charleston Bay
Sail Away: Randy Newman, 1972
JMW Turner, Slave Ship, detail of ship. Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1850): Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On), 1840, oil on canvas, 90.8 x 122.6 cm (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston): image by Steven Zucker, 11 March 2012
Bristol slave ship. The cargo was packed in tight, empty space cost money: image by Paul Townsend, 31 October 2010
Slave Ship Poster -- detail 1: image by Believe Creative, 7 April 2008
Dr. Martin Luther King at #EmanuelAME, Charleston, South Carolina, 1962. #HistoricBlackChurch #CivilRIghtsMovement #CharlestonShooting: image via The King Center @TheKingCenter, 17 June 2015
Members
of Emanuel AME Church announce that services and Sunday school will go
ahead as scheduled Sunday, four days after the pastor and eight other
people were shot to death: photo by Chip Somodevilla via Los Angeles Times, 20 June 2015
A photo from the white supremacist website The Last Rhodesian
showing Dylann Roof, the suspect in the Charleston, South Carolina,
church shooting: photo via New York Times, 21 June 2015
A photo from the white supremacist website The Last Rhodesian showing Dylann Roof, the suspect in the Charleston, South Carolina, church shooting: photo via New York Times, 21 June 2015
A photo from the white supremacist website The Last Rhodesian showing Dylann Roof, the suspect in the Charleston, South Carolina, church shooting: photo via New York Times, 21 June 2015
According to a lot of silly #RWNJs I run into on Twitter, those guys are liberals. #CharlestonShooting #Confederacy: image via J-S Poupart @jspoupart, 20 June 2015
The confederate flag still flies in South Carolina. #TakeDownTheFlag: image via deray mcckesson @deray, 20 June 2015
The confederate flag is tightly protected, chain is only at the top, hard to get to to take down. Columbia.: image via deray mcckesson @deray, 20 June 2015
It's time for the Magnolia State to get a new flag. Any reference to the Confederacy is unacceptable. #Mississippi: image via Jon Shonebarger @JonShonebarger, 20 June 2015
ANYone believes #DylannStormRoof is mentally ill...IS mentally ill. He IS a racist who planned a racist mass murder: image via AnonNOTORIOUS @MrMilitantNegro, 20 June 2015
People march in protest to the Confederate Museum in Charleston, South Carolina on Saturday: photo by Brendan Smialowski / AFP via Los Angeles Times, 20 June 2015
People march in protest to the Confederate Museum in Charleston, South Carolina on Saturday: photo by Brendan Smialowski / AFP via Los Angeles Times, 20 June 2015
Charleston shooting suspect Dylann Roof is escorted from the Shelby, North Carolina Police Department: photo by Tod Sumlin / Charlotte Observer. 18 June 2015
A
man kneels across the street from where police gather outside the
Emanuel AME Church following a shooting Wednesday, June 17, 2015, in
Charleston, South Carolina: photo by Wade Spees / The Post And Courier via AP, 18 June 2015
The
desk of South Carolina Senator Clementa Pinckney is draped in black cloth with a
single rose and vase in an empty chamber prior to a Senate session,
Thursday, June 18, 2015, at the Statehouse in Columbia, South Carolina. Pinckney
was killed, Wednesday, June 17, 2015, in a shooting at an historic black
church in Charleston, South Carolina: photo by Rainier Ehrhardt / AP, 18 June 2015
Family
members of the nine victims of the Emanuel AME Church shooting gather
for a prayer vigil at the College of Charleston TD Arena: photo by Chip Somodevilla via Los Angeles Times, 20 June 2015
Marie Goff wipes away tears during a prayer vigil at Morris Brown AME Church in Charleston, S.C., on Thursday for the victims of the previous day's shooting at the city's Emanuel AME Church: photo by Grace Beahm / AP via Los Angeles Times, 20 June 2015
Thousands of people gather for a city-sponsored prayer vigil for the nine victims of the Emanuel AME Church shooting at the College of Charleston TD Arena: photo by Chip Somodevilla via Los Angeles Times, 20 June 2015
College of Charleston TD Arena. Victims of the Charleston, South Carolina church shooting from top row left: Rev. Clementa Pinckney, Cynthia Hurd, Rev. DePayne Middleton-Doctor, Rev. Sharonda Singleton, bottom row left, Tywanza Sanders, Susie Jackson and Ethel Lee Lance (no photo of Rev. Daniel Simmons Sr. and Myra Thompson available): photo by Associated Press /MCT via Los Angeles Times, 20 June 2015
Dylann Roof appears via video before a judge in Charleston, South Carolina on Friday: photo by AP via Los Angeles Times, 20 June 2015
ANYone believes #DylannStormRoof is mentally ill...IS mentally ill. He IS a racist who planned a racist mass murder: image via AnonNOTORIOUS @MrMilitantNegro, 20 June 2015
Dylann Storm Roof, seen in a photograph posted on his website The Last Rhodesian: image via New York Daily News, 20 June 2015
A man wears a T-shirt representing the Confederate flag during a protest in Columbia, South Carolina, on Saturday: photo by Mladen Antonov via Los Angeles Times, 20 June 2015
Shooting
Suspect Dylann Storm Roof is in custody at the Charleston County
Sheriff's Office. Roof waived extradition in North Carolina, where he was
captured, and was sent back to South Carolina. He also waived his right
to counsel, reports the Associated Press: photo by Charleston County Sheriff's Office via Huffington Post, 18 June 2015
An undated handout photo provided by the Berkeley County South Carolina Government shows 21 year-old Dylann Roof of Columbia, South Carolina. Dylann Roof has been identified as the suspect in a shooting at an African American church in Charleston, South Carolina: photo by EPA via Los Angeles Times, 20 June 2015
JMW Turner, Slave Ship, detail with leg. Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1850): Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On), 1840, oil on canvas, 90.8 x 122.6 cm (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston): image by Steven Zucker, 11 March 2012
JMW Turner, Slave Ship, detail with shark. Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1850): Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On), 1840, oil on canvas, 90.8 x 122.6 cm (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston): image by Steven Zucker, 11 March 2012
JMW Turner, Slave Ship, detail with chains. Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1850): Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On), 1840, oil on canvas, 90.8 x 122.6 cm (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston): image by Steven Zucker, 11 March 2012
Sail Away: Randy Newman live with Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra, 1979
ReplyDeleteI could NEVER imagine that Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1850) could have done such a thing!
ReplyDeleteSlave Ship, detail with leg... This is terrifying!!
I am astonished at the depth of what you have disclosed in this remarkable post. Context... frightening.
ReplyDeleteYou have shown this reader the road to here. Shaking my head. So much to contemplate.
How to do the next right thing....
About Turner's painting, it should be understood that the work is the artist's expression, in the language of colours and forms, of his revulsion against the slave trade. Slavery had been banned in the British Empire since 1833 but still went on all round the world and it was felt by anti-abolitionists in Britain that work remained to be done to address the outrage. For his part Turner executed this painting and exhibited it to coincide with a meeting of the Anti-Slavery Society, in hopes that Prince Albert, who was to speak at the event, would see it. The painting was displayed alongside a placard showing a passage from an untitled poem Turner had written twenty-eight years before:
ReplyDelete"Aloft all hands, strike the top-masts and belay;
Yon angry setting sun and fierce-edged clouds
Declare the Typhon's coming.
Before it sweeps your decks, throw overboard
The dead and dying – ne'er heed their chains
Hope, Hope, fallacious Hope!
Where is thy market now?"
("Typhon" was the accepted spelling of "Typhoon" at the time, and Turner spelt it that way in titling his painting -- I've changed it to the contemporary spelling, here.)
Direct inspiration for the painting came from a work published in 1840 by Thomas Clarkson, The History and Abolition of the Slave Trade. In 1781 Clarkson, as captain of the slave ship Zong, had ordered 133 slaves to be thrown overboard so that insurance payments could be collected.
After exhibiting it, Turner consigned the painting to his dealer, Thomas Griffith, for sale. In December 1843 it was purchased by John James Ruskin for his son John, a devoted young admirer of Turner. In 1872, Ruskin sold it through a dealer to a New York collector; it would change hands in America again before being purchased in 1899 for $65,000 by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the present owner.
The extremely interesting Mike Leigh film Mr. Turner, which came out last year, throws some light on the sources and circumstances of the production of this painting, and of Turner's work as a whole.
One another point, as to the complicated metonymic iconography by which this baby-faced racist murderer declares his presence on Earth, I've neglected to indicate that the photo of him glowering out at us from an appropriately primeval cypress bog (I was reminded of Pogo contemplating the swamptrash muck on Earth Day, 1971 -- it seems so long ago now -- "We have met the enemy, and he is us"), comes from, naturally, his Facebook page. His black jacket sports two flag-badges attached above the right breast. The one on top is a South African flag from the Apartheid Epoch (speaking of primeval) -- the flag went out of use when apartheid was ended in1994; since then, however, the flag has had an extended "second life", as an identifying emblem of white supremacist movements round the world.
The badge below it displays the flag of the unrecognized white-minority state of Rhodesia, a decade-long (1968-1979) product of the fracturing of the former British colony. After a bloody civil war, a peace agreement and a new constitution guaranteeing minority rights resulted in the creation of the present state of Zimbabwe.
The wannabe Cecil Rhodes get-up in the back-yard selfies pretty much speaks for itself.
That the Confederacy, slavery, apartheid and "secession" should be popular "causes" in the American swamp-muck facebook-bogey backwaters may strike some as curious, but the sad truth is, it ain't even a little bit funny.
Oh, and by the way, about the lovely "Ladies Night" gun-shop advert stuck to the front page of the local Charleston paper on the morning after the carnage, the promotion seems to have lasted only the one day -- next day, no sticker.
ReplyDeleteBut what about NEXT Thursday, Ladies Night all over again... maybe this time upping the promised consumerist booty from 50 to 75 free rounds of ammo for the little ladies, in consideration of the current perceived emergency -- you know, all those elderly black folks still praying and singing in those damn uppity churches of theirs?
("We're all out of pith helmets this week girls, there's been a run on those, but to keep you happy we've got a live giraffe down here now, ready and willing to take a few slugs for y'all -- and the cause!")
So... where, you might be forgiven for wondering, did this not very big kid with this very big gun get his totally off-the-hook... what would you call them? Ideas? Theories? Opinions?
ReplyDeleteThe Last Rhodesian Barbeque
Speaking the unspeakable. Seeing the unseeable,
ReplyDelete