Sophianotloren

Football plays in the background loud and raucous as a rodeo, the ball flying and falling into bodies, bodies falling into bodies, a hundred thousand beer-drunk bodies screaming at twenty-two adrenaline-drunk bodies behind me as I watch my grandfather’s limp-dicked body slowly destroy itself in a La-Z-Boy. Throat cancer. From too much, for too long, of everything.

“Get that fucker,” someone yells in the other room, watching the same game we are watching—Alabama against, who? Arkansas? Tennessee? Someone, in any case, I am told we hate. I have learned that we hate everyone. And then from the kitchen there is a shushing noise and everyone quiets down because there is a dying man amongst us. Though no one ever thinks to turn down the television. Or, for that matter, to stop using the word “hate.”

“The thing is,” one announcer says to the other, “this game is all about scoring points. You’ve really got to get points on the board.” And the other replies, “That’s right, Verne. Like they say: the best defense is a good offense,” though it’s not “they” but he who’s saying it this time. And we all nod in agreement—I almost said “agrievement”—even the soon-to-be-dead man. Though we could not know then, or now, or ever, what it was we wanted to defend against.

*

There is a one-lane wooden bridge you have to cross to get here, my grandfather’s triple-wide trailer on who-knows-how-many acres of forest on top of a mountain in Alabama where the trees grow up like children and die like them, too. It is rickety, of course, the bridge. Its thick slats lie further apart than perhaps you’d hope and just wide enough, my cousin would say, to squeeze your fat ass through. And then his wife would hit him on the shoulder for having said “ass” or maybe “fat” or maybe just anything, for having said anything. Everything here in the foothills of Appalachia holds the potential to be frowned upon.

And then there are the mountains of Alabama climbing up around me, blurred but somehow still sharp—looming, silhouetted and shining like impressionist paintings of, well, mountains. What is it about these mountains that arrests me? Surely not their size. I know bigger things exist. And it can’t, either, be their shape because I know the way the earth can launch itself up toward the sky like a football waiting to be caught. It must be then this sense I have of ownership. These mountains are mine, they are my mountains, they are the mountains of me. I’ve lived for so long so close to them that I couldn’t, like my own nose, begin to see them until I was almost gone. But, God, do I miss them now, my mountains, my mountains, this nose of me that is the earth, these rocky worlds through which I breathe. The mountains of Alabama are small mountains—foothills, really—but they are mine like a sports team is mine—like a football game (which I have for so long been near but have not really, really seen) is mine—as in the phrase “We scored! We scored!” How fine and good it is to have a thing before we die.

*

A few weeks before he died, my grandfather was alive. He was frail and fading but he could move and speak and we took pictures—all of us, the whole family—at the botanical gardens. He was in a wheelchair because he was weak. He hated the wheelchair. Let me get up, he’d say, and we’d say, see that big flower over there? You can get up when we make it there. But we never let him up. In the pictures he is sitting on a stone step that has been carved between two sets of bushes. Who can ever know what type of bushes bushes are? The wheelchair sits just out of frame, waiting like a coffin.

After the pictures we went back to his house, the lot of us, and made ham sandwiches and coleslaw, potato salad and deviled eggs. We ate off of paper plates against the protestations of my new grandmother, the woman my grandfather married just a few years ago after two decades of a solitude spent drinking heavily and smoking even more. These are the things that would kill him, of course, biologically. But it was the years of silence, I think, that really did him in. The years of watching war documentaries in a drunken haze and not having to close the door to piss and calling his sons at two a.m. to say, “Fuck you where are you why did you abandon me.” Though of course it was the other way around. He had two dogs but one of them drank antifreeze, keeled over like a log. Maybe that had something to do with it.

With our paper plates we gather in as few rooms as can hold us, about twenty-two or so people, mostly fat and lumpen, proletariat but maybe climbing out of it. In each room a television plays a football game, though who can know which team’s which and how many points are on the board and, anyway, who the hell do we even root for? We all know why we took the pictures, why the wheelchair’s there, why we’re there. We do not know why football is the thing we have chosen to watch, except that it is there in the air like pollen in an Alabama spring, dusting everything, even—especially—our aching American lungs.

The Alabama quarterback, AJ McCarron, is hurt that day. They put it a lower-string player whom they’re grooming to take over. He is a young African-American man, like so many of them are young African-American men. It is a gruesome scene—an older white man, Nick Saban, in a suit, clapping and yelling at young, lean black men to work harder, to sweat more. The older men in the room—all of them, all of them white—seem to think nothing of it. The new quarterback takes the field and my cousin says, “You know, I hate it when they put in those ni—” and I punch him across the jaw, dislodging blood from his mouth into his coleslaw.

Or, no. The better version of me does this. The worse version of me, the me-I-am, says nothing. The me-I-am sits silently on the couch, lets him finish the word, looks away, ashamed because he failed—because I failed—as I always, always do. The peaks of Alabama’s mountains are evergreen and verdant but underneath, the coal—my broken family, me—is ugly as the mud.

*

Years before he died, my grandfather was dying. I took a trip with him to a big cabin in the Smokey Mountains of Tennessee. You can rent cabins up there that hang out over the mountains like diving boards and look down onto Gatlinburg, a tourist trap full of knife shops and fudge shops and candy shops and kitsch. They’re big affairs, these cabins—sometimes eight- or nine-bedrooms-big and full of pool tables and dishwashers and everything is fake of course but, all in all, it’s a cheap vacation if several families pitch in and share the space.

I sat swaying with him in rocking chairs on the deck that wrapped around the place. Around us up that high there were no birds that I remember. But the thing about memory is it’s almost all a fiction. Maybe, after all, the birds were there. I cannot if I try begin to see them hovering near the burnished wood, its faux-age rubbed into it with skill and muscle and more than a little spit. But this is proof of nothing. Even now I can just barely see my grandfather’s body, its many cased-in bags, lumped in the chair, rocking pensively, looking out over the mountains below us, their titular smoke coagulating and clotting as if the earth needed to heal its broken body.

He asked me then, as he would never ask again, an earnest, quiet question. “Do you meditate?” he said, his eyes out away from me, toward where the sun would be later, as it fell slowly down to a sleep that my grandfather could not obtain, even then, without a CPAP machine to regulate his breathing. “I meditate a lot,” he said. And just to humor him I said, “Yeah, I do. I do. Sometimes.” But that was a lie. I never meditate. I can’t stand to be in myself enough to try. But he seemed satisfied by the answer, lifted himself, patted me on the shoulder, said “Good,” and nothing else. Went back inside an old, old man.

*

There wasn’t exactly a funeral because there was no body to entomb. We gathered instead around his ashes one last time, the dozens and dozens of us, too many of us for me to even know. My grandmother had laid out onto tables the objects of his life—report cards saved, miraculously, from the fourth and fifth grades; pictures of his mother and his farmer-father; his Green Beret beret; the photos we had taken in the garden just weeks before he passed; a letter of thanks from Richard Nixon—who knows, now, for what?

A man I did not know explained that as a child they called him, with a smile, “the Goot,” a word for “penis” they’d, as far as I can tell, invented. He was prodigious I suppose. The man began to cry and my uncle began to cry and softly all of us, all God-knows-how-many of us in a circle around these report cards and pictures, letters and forgotten pins, began to softly cry though really, why? Why are we always marking death with our bodies? Why does it fall out of us—the quick, the quick—like a sickness to be shed?

And in the other room my grandmother sat in the chair in which he spent so many of his days, a smoke-infused red leather contraption that barely held him until sickness took him. And then it swallowed him whole. On the television, football played—the end of the season, one of the last games of the year—though now we’d had the good sense, at least, to mute it. We walked back through the woods, a few of us, took a box in which his ashes lay, spread them out among the leaves and clay under an overhang, the beginnings of a mountain, at the last line of the land he owned. In football there is a certain pass thrown only at the ends of the rope, thrown only in the hopes of one last sporting redemption, called a “Hail Mary.” This is because, though an action—a jerk back of the hand and a launching, an utter launching, like a missile, across the field—this pass is really, in the end, like all the things we ever do at the ends of our possible being, just a prayer. Not the sound of passes but the sound of passing filled that trailer like a choir.

*

There is no time in sport for tears. In football there are men, real mean—whatever that means—and they can’t cry unless maybe they’re the coach, in which case, okay, we’ll accept it as a possibility—after winning a big game, perhaps. Or the same thing, only losing. But not the players. The players, there are twenty-two of them on the field and they wear pads, I think, and I’m pretty sure, some helmets. It is maybe against the rules if you don’t have a helmet. Like riding a bike, only different. Sometimes they say “hike” and sometimes they say “hut” and sometimes they say “Blue! 42! Blue! 42!” though that may be a myth and anyways I’m pretty sure they all mean the same thing, or close to it, like love and cherish and miss. But there is—I’m quite sure of this—a ball involved. It is brown and swollen with stitches like the busted lips of a child, which, all in all, I imagine was the intended effect. Like life, there are rules about what you can and cannot do with the ball, what you can and cannot do with your body—though, unlike life, the penalties seem to be not so severe. It should be clear by now I know nothing about football. In this way it is very much like everything else—like croquet, say, or dying.

What I do know: in football when a player is injured the stands go quiet until he rises again and everyone claps for him—partly because they are glad he is all right, partly because it is something like a brave thing to take bodily injury on behalf of those of us who can’t, and partly because they are excited that the game, now, will continue. Partly because he wasn’t all right, partly because dying isn’t brave—partly because the game was just over, over—at my grandfather’s funeral not a single person clapped.

*

In the house before he died the hospice nurse would ask us to help her move him from his deathchair to his deathbed—a cot they’d brought in from the hospital, electric and adjustable, fancy, large, one we’d disassemble and reassemble every time we’d move it from one room to another, trying to answer “Is this a better room in which to die? Is this?”—which would, the cot, be after all, she’d say, more amenable to washing him—a sudden, sudden necessity for a dying body, a diapered body that, though cathetered, had soiled itself because there are in a body too many entrances for deadly air, too many exits for the soul. She would position under him a sheet (any sheet, for this, would do, miraculously, though just a minute before it had been, what? an unthought-of piece of warmth? a balm?) and we would gather around him in his chair, the six of us—me, the nurse, my father, and my three uncles—and we would lift him up like one might, in a game, a small child, only heavier (how often in the course of everything have we noted, humanity, the likenesses of the small ones and the dying?), and his diaper would fall away from him and down below me would be my grandfather, my dying grandfather’s wet, stinking lump of a body, and his pubic hair would rise up, crinkled but still, against all odds, attached—his pubic hair would rise up like mountains, of course like mountains, and my uncle (who is not my uncle but my uncle only through a complicated series of marriages—so why, after all, would we let him carry—sheeting, the nurse would call it sheeting—my father’s father’s flaccid penis, the Goot—attached of course, of course, to his body—the now-tiny dickhead, as he would say, out of which he shot my father who, I presume, also shot me out like a completed pass, the first down of birth!), my uncle would drop his fucking e-cigarette between my grandfather and the sheet, straight down into the last pile of shit he’d ever emit, my grandfather, the shit the very reason we would be sheeting him over to this bed in which he would end and my-uncle-who-is-not-my-uncle would apologize, would grab it back, but my grandfather would somehow still be so heavy and we would falter but we would snatch him back again from falling, falling—and it would be over and I would leave for Tuscaloosa and I would never see him again, my grandfather, and how could that sonofabitch, my uncle-who-is-not, ever think an apology’d be enough? How could anything, anything, especially a sentence, ever be enough?

*

For four years I lived less than a mile away from Bryant-Denny Stadium, which is currently the fifth-largest stadium in the United States and the eighth-largest “non-racing” stadium in the world by seating, according to the Internet. Another way to put this is “too fucking big.” Bryant-Denny is the stadium of the University of Alabama, an SEC powerhouse, a force of football with an academic institution attached. On game days in Tuscaloosa I could hear the roar of a score, the sunken silence of a fumbled ball, an incomplete pass. The sound of the game gets into you there, into your body like a tick or a tapeworm, burrows down in your belly and starts eating from the same pile of sustenance you do. In the South you can hear people say, “We don’t play football. We live it.” Or, well, no. You don’t hear people say that. But you see it: on t-shirts, on billboards, on television. You don’t hear it out of a mouth so much as you hear it out of every possible mouth—it’s an overtone the country has, like a tuning-fork-the-earth-is.

After four years in Tuscaloosa, I am moving now to Ann Arbor. I am leaving the South and its vicissitudes for the cold winters of the Midwest and the long winds of the Great Lakes. I will live this time even closer to the city’s heart, less than half a mile away from “The Big House,” the stadium of the University of Michigan—the biggest stadium in the country and the third-largest stadium in the world. I do not play football, nor do I, outside of family functions, regularly watch it. But I imagine I will never escape it.

And I think now, perhaps, I do not even want to. I want now to embrace it like the end of a romantic comedy when the girl sees her best friend has been, all along, the one she should end up with. And I imagine someone watching saying: yes, yes, embrace it. This is your one and only chance at love. I will hop from one college town to the next, facing up against anyone and everyone, against everything they bring to bear—listening to the calls of first-downs and field goals, shaking a roar up from my feet through my chest to my open mouth, hoping to—my God, I don’t even know anymore—distract the other team? Cheer us on to victory? Wake suddenly, with force, the dead I’ve left behind beneath mountains I may never see again, sleeping, vibrating to the pitch of the earth?

***

Rumpus original art by Erech Overaker.

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Screenshot of “Madden NFL 15,” showing Colin Kaepernick’s tattoos (courtesy EA Sports)

In the new Madden NFL 15 video game released last week, the increasingly realistic visuals of the football series take a new step, for the first time showing some tattooed skin. But the inked biceps of San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick aren’t just a digital detail, they hint a growing issue of artistic copyright in tattoos, sports, and games.

As NPR’s All Things Considered pointed out, tattoo artists who work with athletes are devoting increased attention to their rights, as are the players in licensing their image. Intellectual property attorney Tim Bradley explained to NPR that “copyright law is actually very friendly to the artist, and that protections kick in once you’ve shown a ‘modicum of creativity’ in your design and you’ve put it on a ‘tangible medium’,” but “while you might own the copyright to your design, the recipient still owns their body.”

Colin Kaepernick on the field (photograph by Mike Morbeck, via Flickr)

In gaming, developers are generating their own copy of that work, which is where things get litigious. The very first released screenshot of Madden NFL 15 triumphantly showed Kaepernick front and center, his tattoos as recognizable as in life. However, his are the only tattoos in the game, as he’s the only player who sought out the release from his tattoo artists, something players are being increasingly encouraged to do. Back in 2013, tattoo artist Stephen Allen sued running back Ricky Williams and Electronic Arts for replicating tattoos in the NFL Street video game. The year before that, tattoo artist Chris Escobedo sued video game developer THQ Inc. over replicating — without permission — one of his tattoos on Ultimate Fighting Championship star Carlos Condit, and it was settled for an undisclosed sum. Then the year before that, in a suit that’s being used as a major impetus for protection on both sides, Warner Brothers was sued for replicating Mike Tyson’s face tattoo on Ed Helms in The Hangover Part 2 Hollywood film.

For players like Kaepernick, his tattoos are part of his branded image (just look at his shirtless GQ cover). As Seann Graddy, a producer for Madden NFL, told Polygon, Kaepernick “takes his tattoos as a personal self-expression that he wants represented in any product or marketing thing that he’s a part of.” While we might feel like we own our skin and everything on it, tattoos are more like a roaming gallery for the artist, and as the intense branding of sports stars continues to develop into digital replicas, there will have to be a good regulation of copyright to stop a potential escalation of lawsuits.

Daniel Berset, “Broken Chair” (photo by MHM-com/Wikimedia)

“Sculpture is something you bump into when you back up to look at a painting,” someone famously quipped once — maybe Ad Reinhardt or Barnett Newman.

In my defense, they were mesmerizing paintings! Or mesmerizing drawings, rather. In order to get a fuller view, I backed towards one of the benches the gallery had kindly provided for contemplation. I sat down.

“That’s not a bench!” my husband hissed.

Everything I knew about material reality suddenly changed. Jumping up, I heard a sound like a graham cracker snapping. A chip of material — plaster, cement, foam? — crumbled off the corner of the sculpture onto the floor. It was one of two pale, rectangular sculptures in the gallery. They were only suggestive of museum benches.

My husband was aghast. I was aghast. I was not supposed to be one of those people who stumbles into Picasso’s “The Actor” or stows their children in a Judd “Untitled.” Not because I count myself among the culturati, but because I’m cautious. I’m satisfied to get a little less pleasure out of life, so long as I never get into trouble, have to make amends, or feel guilty. Gaucherie and accidental vandalism are for other, more reckless people.

Years ago, when a friend and I were looking at a glass work by Dale Chihuly, she leaned against the vitrine. The carbuncle inside started rocking violently back and forth — skree, skree … skree, skreeee.  Neither of us breathed until, gleaming, it creaked to a silent, unscathed rest. We snuck out of the gallery.  Flexing my schadenfreude, I said, “I’m glad I didn’t do that.” It never occurred to me that I might, someday.

Back at the gallery, I squeezed my eyes shut and opened them again. The detritus remained on the floor, like a tiny earthwork installation. I tiptoed away, trying to look innocent. I was sweating. The blood rushed to my brain as I plotted our escape. Although the judgment of the New York intelligentsia was weighing upon me, Karl and I were alone in the room, and nobody else had seen me do it. We could stroll casually out the door, then break into a run! They’d never find us among the crowds on the High Line!

Unfortunately, my conscience chose that moment to speak up. Conscience said that no great exertion of virtue was required, but I had to be accountable for my actions. To behave like an adult. If I didn’t, there would be consequences: The artist might lose a sale. The gallery staff might get blamed for the damage and even, I thought, fired. People’s livelihoods were at stake.

I stumbled toward the reception desk and told an employee that I was sorry, but I had accidentally broken one of the sculptures in the next room. Her eyebrows rose; I described the damage. She said, “Thank you for telling me.” I repeated, “I’m very, very sorry.”

The employee let me depart the gallery on my own recognizance. She was so nice! And so was I! I had done the right thing and gotten my reward. “I’m so glad I confessed!” I cried when we got outside. This was my kind of ethics.

Karl wiped his forehead. “It turned out okay in the end.”

“Did you want me not to tell?”

“Of course I didn’t want you to tell!  But … I wasn’t going to interfere with the dictates of your conscience.”

We continued on to another gallery exhibiting massive iron sculptures encrusted with oil and filth. I had never smelled such magnificent filth before. I loved art!

But the employee from the last gallery had been searching the streets for me. She opened the door, zeroed in on me, and dropped her manhunt face for a Good Cop smile. Except that Good Cop had already let me go, which meant this one could only be … “Would you mind coming back?” she asked.  Her tone suggested that if I came of my own free will, she wouldn’t have to use force. “My boss wants to speak to you.”

I followed her herky-jerkily, half my body restraining the other half from running away. Karl lagged behind, as though reluctant to witness the spectacle of my humiliation. My warden told me to wait at reception until her boss got off the phone, to interrogate me about the liability.

I grew up in a household where you didn’t allow people on your lawn, never mind inside, for fear that they’d lose a limb and sue you for everything you have. “Liability!” is what my mother threatened me with when I was a teenager, to scare me away from sex, drugs, and booze. “Liability!” she moaned, when I suggested a home wedding.

“What does that mean, exactly?” I quavered, hoping that the gallery had an insurance policy that would cheerfully and comprehensively cover everything.

“Well, you did just damage an $8,000 work of art,” said the warden.

I thought: at least it wasn’t an $80,000 work of art, or $800,000.

I thought: my income last year was $26, which I won from a foreign transaction fee class-action suit. It had been an iffy year for my writing. Karl, who works as an assistant professor, is the sole breadwinner in our household, and we could not afford an $8,000 (plus taxes) work of art.

I thought: maybe I shouldn’t have tried to save the employees’ jobs.

I, The Clown Who Broke the Sculpture with Her Ass, waited. Chidden like a dog that isn’t housebroken, except if I had peed on the floor, instead of breaking the sculpture, that would have been semi-transgressive. Why hadn’t I run away? Why had I confessed? Why hadn’t the gallery taped off the floor around the sculpture, posted a placard, hired a guard, done anything so that people seeing the thing wouldn’t be reminded so forcibly of, say, benches?

Kilmainham Gaol prison (photo by CaptainHaddock/Wikimedia)

The warden returned: the Grand Inquisitor was still on the phone. “You can leave your name, address, phone number, and email, so he can contact you later.” She pushed a pad and pen across the desk, showing me the instruments of my torture.

One isn’t supposed to feel martyred just for behaving like a responsible adult, but this was my Gethsemane It’s hard enough to behave decently once, without having to keep proving it. I’d already imagined the dozen ways that doing so would screw us over; it would be even dumber than sitting on the sculpture in the first place! We couldn’t afford $8,000 worth of virtue. When had I ever been so high-minded before?

I picked up the pen. I knew what to do. I would become a different person: Cecilia Hsiao, which sounds far more plausibly Asian than the Anglo-Irish name my parents gave their adopted Korean baby.  Cecilia Hsiao, who breaks art, lives in Park Slope (not my neighborhood), and has a 718 number (not my area code). Cecilia Hsiao could afford to save us, and she really wanted to own a cement sculpture-bench.

I imagined telling the warden, “It’s pronounced ‘She-ow.’”

There’s no reason to self-incriminate after you’ve plotted your escape.

But. Eventually the gallery would realize that Cecilia Hsiao wasn’t real. They would release the story — maybe even security camera footage — to the press. Somebody would recognize my ugly hat and turn me in. They would expose me not just as a dipstick, but also as a liar, fraud, and coward who’d scapegoated her imaginary Chinese friend. My Chinese-American friends would beat me up. Strangers would mock me on Twitter. They might even put my picture on Gawker, and then I’d be finished in this town. The Gawker comments section was my panopticon.

Sniffling, I printed my real contact info. Karl sighed.

Afterwards, in the street, I shivered and wept. “I’m so stupid! I shouldn’t have sat on it! I shouldn’t have told them I did it! I shouldn’t have given my real name!”

Karl made a strangled sound. “The stupid thing to do … was also the right thing to do.”

“I KIND OF NEED YOU TO BE SUPPORTIVE RIGHT NOW!” I screamed.

He screamed back: “I’M GLAD YOU HAVE SUCH A FINE MORAL COMPASS!” I sobbed harder.  “NO, REALLY! I’M PROUD OF YOU! I’M JUST A LITTLE STRESSED OUT!”

We did not go to a restaurant for our post-gallery-hopping dinner; we could no longer afford dinner.  Karl pulled himself together to console me. “At least they can’t take away my job. They can’t take our home. Don’t worry. We’ll just withdraw all our retirement money and never be able to retire.”

Maybe the gallery would give me a job, like washing dishes when you can’t pay your restaurant bill. They already knew I was honest — that might make up for my lack of an arts background. I’d like to work in a gallery! We visit 30–40 a month, along with major museum shows, many more minor ones, a number of festivals and open studio days. We love the sheer bounty of art in our city.

Then I realized that in all this, I hadn’t given a single thought to the sculpture as a sculpture. I was a philistine. I had broken the pact that art-lovers make with artists, to see art as art. Not to walk past it, or be one of those people who gaze at it and see only a void, garbage, scams, hipsterism, things that their kids or cats or the past 50 years of praxis have done better. People who are so busy trying to see through art that they don’t see it at all, much less with curiosity, openness, or understanding.

I often don’t understand art, but I love walking into a space where somebody has made something, changed something, mediated the ordinary world by saying I was here and I did this — I did it for you, so that you would feel the world was more exciting and wonderful. I love the elements of surprise and transformation, of being transformed myself.

But now that I had gone and been a philistine, I owed an even bigger debt: I owed the artist an apology. Not just for breaking his sculpture, but for not having seen it. I wish my post-damage scrutiny — the hardest I’d ever looked at an artwork — had been in the service of his aesthetic mission, rather than of saving my hide. But I can truly say I will never think harder about a work’s quiddity, the space it occupies in a room and in time, the fragility of it, the thought and labor the artist put into it. I will never forget it.

It’s been five months, and the gallery has not called, written, or summonsed me. Maybe they have a slow lawyer. Maybe their insurer is giving them hell. Maybe they called in a conservator who spackled the corner back on. Maybe the artist said, “The work’s meaning is in the accumulation of interactions and reactions, so everything’s all right.” Three friends have suggested to me, “Maybe it was a performance piece tracking everybody who sat on it and their responses?” Another said, “Maybe they’re afraid you’ll sue them! That bench could have hurt you!”

Or maybe they lost my contact info and are desperate to find me. In that case, I ought to phone them. Karl says, “Why don’t you just go commit seppuku on their doorstep?”

I remind him that he’s the one who taught me about Derrida and infinite responsibility:

The surplus of responsibility of which I was just speaking will never authorize any silence. I repeat: responsibility is excessive or it is not a responsibility. A limited, measured, calculable, rationally distributed responsibility is already the becoming-right of morality; it is at times also, in the best hypothesis, the dream of every good conscience, in the worst hypothesis, of the small or grand inquisitors.

Responsibility — it goes on and on, and on and on …

I haven’t yet made that phone call, or my apology. Let this cup pass from me! So, gallery folks and artist: this is my real name, and I’m (kind of) letting you know it a second time, and I am really, really sorry.  You can look me up. I’d rather you didn’t. But if you must, please hire me. I promise never to go near the art.

Paul Moran began collecting John Updike’s trash in 2006, three years before the writer’s death. He found discarded photos, story drafts, and honorary degrees. The acquisition of curbside trash seems perfectly legal in Massachusetts, even if Updike and his wife took measures to dissuade Moran’s efforts. Nevertheless, the discarded material represents a legacy Updike either thought unimportant or wished to discard. The Atlantic explores Moran’s collection including a call to jury duty and residuals checks from The Simpsons, and what it means for writers to craft their posthumous legacy.

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Not sure if this ever raised money for charity.

“This is Chet from Visa. Your bill is two months overdue.”

“Yeah, I know. I just don’t have any money right now.”

“Well, can you tell me what happened? You’d been current on your account up until now–”

“I lost my job and have been been doing odd jobs, freelance work. The money’s just not been coming in.”

“Oh. Well, I understand, and I’m sorry to hear that. I’d like to work with you if I can to see what we can do to remedy this.”

“I don’t have anything right now. Everything I have needs to go to rent. But I will do what I can to pay when I have the money. I’m currently on county assistance–I can provide that if you want, if you need proof for your supervisor.”

“Well, I’m glad you’re able to get those resources. That’s great. But what can we do to just make a tiny payment on what you owe–”

“Ah, well, there is that…I don’t know, though.”

“What is it, ma’am?”

“It’s not a lot, but I do have a personal brand.”

“Oh? Well, can you tell me more about that?”

“I write about consent a lot and I’ve done a couple talks and have like 500 twitter followers.”

“That’s a start, but are you making any money from it?”

“It’s how I’m paying rent.”

“Sounds good enough to me! I’ll put you on the line with someone who can work something out with you.”

If you’ve found yourself having this conversation, then get that two-step authentication for your site because I’m coming to your alternate dimension and you don’t want the place I take to be yours. I’m swayed not by culture shock. Cyborg ocelots and mustard on toast or whatever it is your universe does, I can say–sight unseen– it’s easier to handle than having a faceless stranger interrogate your self-worth over a late payment paramount to what your roommates thrown down at “Sushi Thursday”.

Meanwhile, back at this fucking place:  those of us driven out the village for our activism are in turn taken to task for even the hint of any derived benefit from our work. And how I’ve hissed and hunkered at that word. Activism. In a culture where your erasure is deemed the societal default, simply leaving the house every day and being seen by people is activism.

But some of you are leaving your house to go to jobs. Some of you even have jobs at the very institutions that actively contribute to our marginalization. Which is fine. Capitalism is a drag and all, but you and your family still have to eat and wadded up mission statements have almost no protein in them.

There’s a lot of work to do. You’re doing what you can: we’re filling in the gaps. We’re blogging and speaking at your university and passing out pamphlets that point to local resources for those who don’t know where to turn. Some of us do this all day.  That killer blog post that is the “THIS! SO THIS” of your heart’s desire took–to contrast the few minutes you spent to read and retweet it–hours or even days for the person to write. Not counting: hours spent fielding negative comments and the occasional internet lawsuit.

Hashtags are the bearded Spock of an organic collective process. It takes experience and engineering. It all takes engineering.

Blame it on the media.  We’ve had a particular cultural portrait cultivated for us: the (usually white) free spirit with lots of free time who benignly irritates those around her with her (admittedly righteous) politics but doesn’t possess the resources or support to facilitate any genuine upset. Daria, Lisa Simpson, Hermione Granger, the girlfriend from Orange County–young (white) women without visibility who are summarily ignored by everyone, left as the lone voice of reason for us, the viewer. We feel a catharsis of empathy for the character and are (perhaps unconsciously) educated by the reactions of the other characters on how we and the rest of society should/will treat “activists”.

If you’d never written a blog post on rape culture, designed a protest flyer or spent the better part of an afternoon lecturing your local feminist sex supply shop about better inclusivity in their advertisements, you wouldn’t know the intense, thankless work that goes into it.

Let’s rewind.

Intense, thankless work that is necessary for your survival whether or not you possess the requisite spoons.

Last week, I spent I guess we’ll call it a “working lunch” at the local McDonald’s listening to a man tell everyone and their chicken nuggets that he would kill me. To keep AIDS out of our community. His presentation lasted the length of my meal and went uninterrupted. No one–not the private security guard, not the dyke couple holding hands and sharing a milkshake, not the family whose daughter was terrified to tears by the man’s shouting–said anything.

We–as in, those who do not direct the narrative–have had to reconcile this cultural blueprint for societal morals with the reality that this shit is bananas, bath and beyond. People of color are murdered by police in plain sight. Women face incarceration for miscarriages. We have to make cocktail straws and nail polish that reacts to date rape drugs because it’s too much effort to teach men not to rape and even if I ruin my manicure to catch a rapist CNN will still shed a tear over his lost lacrosse prospects if I press charges. We find ourselves a captive audience, stunned into silence.

That man followed me out of the McDonald’s. Not a single french fry was dropped in concern for my safety. Or his. He who thinks he can cast a circle of protection around his neighborhood with my blood to keep the AIDS away is just as sucker-punched as you, me or anyone else. What put the knife in his hand? Cultural mis-education about AIDS. A lack of adequate long-term care for those with mental illness. An inflammatory socio-political worldview that enables people to depict LGBT people as predators, as deceitful. Any other day, me and this man would be on the same side of the issue. But in that moment we were cast opposite, foils, albeit fleeting. And those who direct the narrative–the men who disrupt discussions of rape culture, politicians who view mental illness as a moral affliction–they don’t care, and that man didn’t care, if I was involved or not. Not being signed into the server wouldn’t spare me from permadeath.

And you expect us to make signs and design flyers and march against this shit out of the kindness of our hearts but I’m not sure I have one anymore.

I get it: the most prolific activists are always those who don’t need the money or visibility their activism affords them. Macklemore and Andrea James and Barney Frank make a fine, unthreatening addition to your Gl..b…..(t) luncheon, but they don’t know left from right about violence against trans women of color, transmisogyny in queer women’s spaces or really anything any of us want to have an actual conversation about. For all intents and purposes, they are uninvolved. This conforms to our bedtime stories of the bleeding heart who no one takes seriously.

See also: the Pride Whopper.

Not all activists are equal. Laverne Cox, CeCe McDonald, and Fallon Fox have so much more to know and say about being trans and/or queer in America and they have to fight so hard and endure so much hate–the quantity of which makes even spectators roll over in hopelessness–just to get a smidgeon of the visibility and presence of their white, heteronormative counterparts. And when we hold marginalized people to the same standards–the same, flawed standards based on a flawed understanding of how activism actually works–of their privileged peers, we are committing the very essence of complicity as violence.

If we can cast the responsibility of “saving the world” onto some yet-unsurfaced Pollyanna, clean of conscience and free of finanicial commitments, then nothing ever changes. There’s no quid for the quo. We remain rusted wheels. 

We want to believe. We want to think, to know, against all reason, against the ever-mounting evidence that life under capitalism just can’t work that way, that if we stopped accepting payment to write about pressing instances of social injustice, someone somewhere would take over Consent Culture. Someone somewhere would give that talk at Cornell. Someone somewhere will sit in on that community center discussion on trauma and sexuality. Anyone, anywhere. Out of their kindness of their hearts. 

To believe in activism without complications is to believe in an activist without complications. That is impossible. It goes against the very foundations of intersectional oppression. Everyone has bad thoughts. Everyone has prejudice. Everyone makes mistakes.

This perfect activist does not exist, and you cannot wish her into being by tearing down every other marginalized person who solicits donations on paypal for their twitter activism or gets rent money from Kickstarter/Patreon writing about what you write off as “no-brainer 101 politics”.

I wish Fallon Fox would make millions off her “personal brand”. I wish the “controversy” around her fights would build her a house and a boat and unlimited credit. But I know better. There’s no payout, no chest of treasures at the bottom of that deep, dark, well. Just more shitty Facebook petitions.

Still: we do the work. In hiding. Under aliases. Sometimes more than one.

We do what we must because we can.

We’re not always in this together, but we’re trying. Oppression is all around us. Within us. Forces go to work while we’re sleeping. We are surrounded and infiltrated and our spaceship doesn’t always know which way to go.

And maybe there’s no “right” direction for us to move toward. We need presence everywhere. We need people to get jobs. Grow vegetables. Share skills. Start blogs.

But there is a wrong direction–inward, at one another. When you accuse an activist of adopting social justice as their “personal brand”, by holding someone’s personal investment in fighting the oppression which actually seeks to hurt them, you are taking the side of the oppressor. You reward white men making a career out of telling other white men how not to be racist and sexist. You enable the forcing of trans women of color out of their homes so as not to interrupt Calpernia Adams’ coaching of cis male actors on how to be like trans women.

An activist is not a bad thing to be. It’s bad for your health–and sanity–but I defy you to make me feel guilty for taking a vested interest in toppling a system actively holding us down.

Activists deserve to be paid for their work. I’m not saying you have to pay for that work. We can discuss the boundaries of paying for anti-capitalism work in another post. But it’s valuable work, necessary work, work that allays the pressure and dread others feel at being trapped in a world they never made and being constrained by circumstances from participating to a degree that they like.

There is no perfect activism. There is no perfect activist.

When you go on social media to slap down an un/deremployed marginalized person for adopting a “personal brand”, ask yourself–

are you calling out or are you calling for blood?

One ensures sustainability and the other subsumes it.

That said: consent is not a zero-sum game. No line divides “good at consent” and “bad at consent”. Consistent with a consent culture is creating space where people can hold themselves accountable to educate themselves and others on the ways that un-negotiated power differentials in every day life have obscured our understanding of what that looks like and how that is best implemented.

I’m not an expert on consent. If anything, I strive to remain a perpetual pupil, as I think all activists strive to be.

Still: this is my job, and I don’t regret it. You shouldn’t regret your job either. Unless your job is the person who wants Kotaku to stop allowing people to fund game developers who rely on Patreon. In which case, you should regret your job and rethink your choices in life because you are trying to starve out social justice-minded media because you think it will make it better that some dude who writes for you did the thing with a girl who makes games. You and your mother should regret that.

But until the para-dimensional perforator punctures a whole in that parallel dimension where hospital billing departments take personal brand as payment, I’ll be here. We’ll be here.

Because it’s needed. Because we can. And because, for now, it ekes just enough to cover maybe half of rent pays.

The post Con$ent Is $exy: The Imagined Racket of Social Justice appeared first on Consent Culture.

...

So I returned to New York to find that The Young Lawyers had barely escaped cancellation in the purge that blissfully rid us of The Immortal, Barefoot in the Park, The Most Deadly Game, The Silent Force, The Young Rebels, Tom Jones and Matt Lincoln.

But the price of being kept on the air is a high one.  It is total Agnew-ization.

No scripts dealing with drugs.  No scripts dealing with "youth".  No socially conscious scripts.  Lee J. Cobb comes into prominence.  Zalman King fades back quite a lot and a pure WASP attorney will be introduced to ease the identity crisis of the scuttlefish  (Steve Kandel, one of the more lunatic scriveners in Clown Town, when assigned the chore of writing the script that introduces the new characters, despising the idea, named him Christian White.  It went through three drafts before anyone got hip to Steve's sword in the spleen.)

...

-- Harlan Ellison, approx. February 1970, reprinted in The Other Glass Teat *

...
[Kirk] Cameron said some of the claims that will be addressed in the film include: the notion that Christmas is really a church co-opting of winter solstice celebrations, that Jesus was not born on December 25, that Christmas trees are pagan and that consumerism is overshadowing the true reason for the season.

“It’s a scripted story about a guy named Christian White who represents the typical white Christian male and he’s got a bad case of religious bah humbugs,” Cameron said. “He is just deflating his wife’s entire Christmas party because he has come to believe that everything we’re doing at Christmas to celebrate is wrong.”

The movie includes reenactments of the original Christmas tree story, with portions and scripted scenes showing the nativity and the Council of Nicea, a pivotal event in the history of Christianity.

Cameron, who is also one of the film’s stars, told TheBlaze that he decided to make “Saving Christmas” to celebrate the spirit of the holiday season, while also pushing back against those who wish to “snuff out [the holiday's] holy root.”
...

Today in idiots:

Just when it seemed the right wing couldn’t get any more divorced from reality around here, a local conservative group has launched a protest against what it sees as a pernicious cultural touchstone.

Labor Day.

Yes, bittersweet old Labor Day — the first Monday in September, the holiday that’s been around for generations and is known to most non-ideologically blinkered Americans as an end-of-summer free day honoring all the hard work you put in the rest of the year.

But to the Freedom Foundation, a business-backed Olympia think tank, the day is evidence of the power of unions, which to them equals the decline of America. Rather than stoop to taking a union-backed day off, they plan to fight the power by … working all day Monday instead!

“I can’t think of a problem in society that can’t be traced in some way back to the abuses of organized labor, so it would be hypocritical of us to take a day off on its behalf,” said Freedom Foundation CEO Tom McCabe, in announcing the “work-in.”

That’ll show those unions who control everything around here. Let’s all go into the offices and the factories and work like dogs instead of barbecuing or watching parades! Who’s with me?

Of course, if McCabe followed this principle to its logical end, he’d have to work every Saturday, too. Year round.

If the Freedom Foundation is truly committed to this idea, might I recommend 19th century working conditions and wages as well?

Quite a while ago, the beautiful @rebelsnotes asked on Twitter if anyone sold a storage bag for doxy massagers. It seemed clear that nobody did. I piped up that I could make one for her if she would like. I have made quite a few storage bags for myself and for another friend.

While out shopping, I found a material that I hoped she would like and then got busy.

I find immense beauty and inner calm when I am making things, especially when they are for others. I normally channel this into baking, but I love craft projects and I got pure pleasure out of using my old, hand-cranked Singer machine to make this for Rebel.

The postie has delivered it to her and I got another rush of delight knowing that she likes it.

Who else is having a Sinful Sunday? Click and see.

zhinxy:

A grown man believes this. Really, truly believes this (and called me a creeper and bully for rting this). Just let that sink in. He really truly dwells in some movie-tinged dreamworld where packs of cruel women cackle that nerds are gross, that they should be hurt and shown their place. That all our feigned nerdery and sexism-talk is just a cover for this. 

Think of the world we live in - Where he isn’t the only one who thinks this, not by a long shot. A world where  SJWs are out to steal happiness from nerds. 

Sexism fucking makes this world BIZARRE. 

I see stuff like this about Escher Girls and Feminist Frequency and other things sometimes.  Insistence that what we say our reasons and criticisms are are all a lie, that really this is all about popular girls being mean to geeks, (or sometimes hatred and jealousy of artists/creators) but NOT AT ALL EVER WHAT WE SAY. e_e

And it’s easier this way.  It’s easier because it means they don’t have to pay attention to anything we say.  It’s easier because it means they don’t have to examine anything or wonder why real thinking human beings have issues with stuff they like, or wonder if they’re the ones being exlusionary or bullying.  Instead they just dismiss it all as just background noise to MEAN GIRL BULLYING.  Everything we say is just a distraction, the point is we’re just meany meanies and high school never ends.  It also means they can feel like brave rebels when they lash out at us, threaten us, dox us, etc, because they’re the brave underclass nerds (which girls can’t be because our lives are sunshine, gumdrops, non stop parties, and free meals) fighting against people who exist only to hurt them and have no legitimate concerns at all.

It’s kinda sad. :\

kaminas-spirit:

House dressed as a house painting a house on a house

Engraving of the capture of Washington, DC by the British during the War of 1812 (via Library of Congress)

The 200th anniversary of the burning of the White House passed without much hullabaloo last week, aside from the British Embassy in Washington, DC, having to apologize for their tweet that in questionable taste joked they’d only be lighting the President’s home with sparklers on a cake this time. The rather erroneously named War of 1812 (it stretched until 1815) is one of the lesser-known wars of the United States. Still, art looted away in the calamity of August 24, 1814, the day the British torched the White House and other buildings in Washington, DC, remains scattered along the war lines.

A story shared last week on the BBC’s Magazine Monitor details some of these artifacts, notably four paintings of King George III and his wife Queen Charlotte taken from the White House by the British. While First Lady Dolley Madison whisked away the Landsdowne portrait of George Washington from the threatening flames (with significant help from a slave named Paul Jennings), she likely didn’t have as much interest in the royalty. Along with the art, the soldiers took a grandfather clock and a receipt book used by James Madison, all of which ended up sailing to Bermuda with the British Navy. Now the paintings gaze with regal confidence from the walls of Bermuda’s parliament and house assembly.

The Bermuda House of Assembly, with the paintings of King George III & Queen Charlotte Sophia in the background (via bermuda-online.org)

The looting wasn’t, of course, one-sided, as the BBC points out, with the Americans still having many War of 1812 trophies in the US Naval Academy in Maryland, such as a gilded lion stolen away from York, now Toronto. Amends are slowly being made, even if they often take a light-hearted tone, such as in 2013 when the United States replaced books taken from Toronto’s library during the Battle of York. Inside the reconstructed White House burn marks remain, and you can find a bit of the charred timber now in the Smithsonian. It’s likely King George III won’t be returning to the White House anytime soon.

George Munger, “The President’s House” (1814-15), watercolor on paper, showing the burned-out White House (via the White House Historical Association)

IT'S COME TO THIS: Former Columbus, Ohio cop gets 30 months in prison for selling off the department's allotment of surplus military equipment.

Supposedly the officer sold the equipment as scrap metal, but it could easily have wound up in the hands of organized crime, or worse. Remind me again why it's so urgent that the police be armed up to military standards?

© 2007-2014 by the authors of Popehat. This feed is for personal, non-commercial use only. Using this feed on any other site is a copyright violation. No scraping.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

There are two kinds of parrots…

findanewequation:

So for the last four months or so, I have taken part in the body positivity movement on Instagram, including posting photos of myself in my bikini and underwear/bra. Keep in mind that none of my photos have ever been sexually explicit or suggestive and that I have always been fully covered. As far as nudity goes, I show no more skin than a thin woman in a bikini. Below is a photo I uploaded last night, with the caption “I love my belly. ♥”

At approximately 2:05 am, I received an email from Instagram stating that a photo had been removed from my account for “violating the community guidelines.” I went to my page to find the above photo missing from my account. Angry and determined to make a point, I went to the tags on Instagram to find photos of women dressed in as much clothes as I was. I found entire pages dedicated to sharing women in sexually explicit and suggestive poses in half the clothes I am wearing in the above photo. I also found men, completely naked with the photo cropped to just miss their dick being in the photo. I reported these photos for nearly half an hour.

At exactly 3:58 am, I was logged off of my Instagram account while using it and then told that my account had been disabled for violating the community guidelines. My entire account containing over 560 followers and over 500 personal photos and memories of my self love journey were removed without warning.

I went to sleep crying, disgusted and angry that Instagram would do this. When I woke up, I found that every pornographic image I had reported was not only still there, but so was the pages offering to send people nudes in direct messages. That is the moment that I became enraged and determined to fight this.

This is not the first time that Instagram has practiced size discrimination. Meghan Tonjes went through a very similar situation and her story went viral. I am asking you to make this go viral as well, because THIS is not okay. By removing my photos and the photos of women of size and not the others, Instagram is effectively telling women that our fat bodies are more offensive to the eyes of children and their viewers than thin women half naked and blatant pornography. They are silencing us and telling us that our bodies are to be censored while the rest of the world can practice “cocks in socks” and post Victoria’s Secret Models.

I will not be silenced. After years of struggling with my body through depression, anxiety and self harm, I WILL NOT let a website tell me that my body is censor worthy simply because it is a fat body with cellulite and rolls. END SIZE DISCRIMINATION ON INSTAGRAM.

This is really disgusting. >:\  WTF Instagram.

eschergirls:

Hi peoples :)

Just a short note to let people know that on Monday (today/tomorrow depending on where you live), I’m going to be doing an interview about Escher Girls with feminist/women’s radio program ”Yeah, What She Said” on 90.9FM in Calgary.  (I’m both super excited and super nervous >_>) 

http://cjsw.com/program/ywss

This is their website.  I believe you can listen live on there, as well as download previous episodes.

The show is at 8pm Mountain Time (10pm Eastern)

So… um… yeah.  Just in case people want to listen or something.

*runs off screaming in nervousness*

Yus.  I will be Radio Ami tomorrow/today. D:  SO NERVOUS.

I’m a sleep deprived grouch who is sick of bumper stickers telling me how to believe in God and kiss men’s asses for my daily bread, ok?  Inarticulate “So, why can’t I send them to their Gentle Jesus NOW?” rage is better put in pictures, don’t you think?

Their god must be a wussy, that’s what I think!

But hey, if that works for you –

I’ve always said, if I wake up any place full of Baptists, I’m leaving at once!

Me?  I thank the animals that died to feed me protein, and the plants that fed us both.

Yeah, you cherry-picking fucks!  Every time someone tells YOU the Old Testament forbids what YOU are doing, you say the New Testament supersedes the OT.  But every time you want to put some homosexual, some woman, some pagan in their hellbound place?  YOU quote the Old Testament.  So yeah…bite me.  I do bite back!

My grateful thanks to the web-hunting skills of Yellowdog Granny for all these nifty posters!

Click here to see the original. To see more questions like this one visit the FAQ on my tumblr.

Not anymore than everyone else should be regardless of their weight. Studies show that fatness carries a heightened risk of disease but that does not mean the body or weight itself causes disease. In fact, there are no studies that show fatness causes disease, rather, studies show that weight and disease are correlated with each other.

When we consider that and see how similar research on the health of fat people is to people living in poverty, women or People of Color we see that the relationship or heightened risk of disease has more to do with the environments we live in. Fat people are more likely to live in poverty. Fat people are also more likely to be People of Color. Sociological literature about health disparities show that racism and classism have a HUGE impact on the level of health people are able to access due to the social constraints created by both of those systemic / institutional oppressions.

So am I “afraid” of health problems later in life? No. Right now I’m afraid of the lack of access I have to quality medical care. I’m afraid of how the stigma I am forced to navigate through impacts my physical and mental wellbeing. I’m afraid of people putting more emphasis on individuals transcending the constraints placed on us instead of creating a world where everyone has access to safe communities, equitable wages, fresh foods and stigma free medical care.

That’s what I’m afraid of.

Originally posted 2014-08-31 15:58:27. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

tory lane brutal facefuck source: droolingfemme.

Some links for your reading pleasure…

• Turns out the German weren’t actually tracking Patton’s contributions on a white board.
• Jacobin’s history of pro-wrestling. 
• My argument with Loomis over Hamilton, Storified
• The US Navy’s indoor ocean.
• An appreciation of Phil Hartman.
• Putin and rationality.
• The depths of crazy in this story are, for all practical purposes, unfathomable.

Public Citizen is helping Cindy Fox sue Accessory Outlet for charging her $250 when she complained that an Iphone case hadn't shipped when promised; the company's rep told her that he'd fine her even more for emailing him to protest, adding an ominous "You are playing games with the wrong people and have made a very bad mistake." Read the rest

"Laughing at previous generations makes me feel bad," writes John Self, "but this *is* pretty funny."

A TC-377 in good nick may fetch $50 or so on eBay.

Frank Wu writes, "Brianna Wu is a game developer and a frequent writer about gender issues in tech. As such, she frequently receives harassing, unpleasant emails. She got pissed off and wrote an awesome response to one here."

I got a harassing email today, and decided to respond with this letter. (Thanks, Frank!)

Been a looong time since I had a proper space to make art. I’m still pressed for time, unbelievably pressed, but..

Did you miss my art? Well, I'm back in the saddle, folks. pic.twitter.com/ZKg11JaENE

— bspencer (@vacuumslayer) August 29, 2014

More substantive posts coming soon.

A minor detail in this article on the history of Tabasco sauce, but one that is telling about how, when we are talking about “innovators,” we forget who actually does the work:

Accounts differ as to when exactly McIlhenny acquired the seeds for those Capsicum frutescens peppers. But in the years after the war, he began using them to make pepper sauce, a popular Louisiana condiment. His method was a laborious one that involved crushing the peppers with a potato masher and mixing them with rock salt from the island’s own salt mines, then aging the mash twice, adding vinegar in between. After straining the resulting mixture through a series of sieves, he decanted it into castoff cologne bottles.

He began making the pepper sauce? He crushed the peppers? He decanted it into castoff cologne bottles?

Or was it African-Americans doing all of this, probably ex-slaves working for quite low wages and in poor working conditions? The article is titled “Who Made That Tabasco Sauce?” It was workers who made that sauce, even if it was McIlhenny who thought of it, if he even did that.

But when we are talking about the rich, they are deified and thus any mention, not to mention asking questions about, the labor used to make these products is irrelevant. All the credit goes to the supposed innovator.