Notes from the road
America observed at 70mph
Last month I drove to Kansas City to read for the I-70 Review release party. Since it’s “only” 500 miles from Chicago to Kansas City and a car rental plus gasoline was going to be cheaper than airplane tickets, I decided to drive there and back.
While the interstate system doesn’t really give the most accurate view of America, it at least gives a view.
Almost all of the stretch between Chicago and Kansas City is what would easily be called red-state territory. Even Kansas City, somewhat surprisingly for an urban area, is majority-Republican. At one point, I passed a store advertising a “no sales tax” sale on guns and ammunition to celebrate the second amendment.1
One of the first things I noticed in the course of my drive was a preponderance of anti-abortion billboards along I-55. On my return via the same route, I noticed that the same stretch of road had only one billboard. My best guess would be that this is at least in part a consequence of the fact that I-55 is the main driving route between Chicago, Illinois’2 biggest city and Springfield, its capital and these billboards are geared towards legislators coming to Springfield from upstate.
I say “would be” thought because these were not the only billboards of this sort that I saw. They also appeared on I-72 and US 36 as I headed West. On the return trip, my phone instructed me to take I-70 to US 54 which put me off the main thoroughfare for quite a while and on that stretch, I only saw a single sign about abortion.
So I began to consider other possibilities of the meanings of these signs, along with the handful of homemade pro-Trump signs, various large declarations of Christian identity and patriotism.
It seems to me that these sorts of tribal affiliation displays (in which I would also, from the left side of the political spectrum include things like Black Lives Matter bumper stickers, Ukrainian flag emoji and Hate Has No Home Here lawn signs) fulfill a number of different roles.3 Some exist as a means of signaling group membership to those around them. In most cases, this might be to make it clear that you’re part of the tribe around you. Belonging is, after all, a primal human need. Declaring one’s love for God, or justice, or country, or political party, or guns in a public way can be a way to declare to others, “I’m one of you.”
On the flip side, it can also be a way of declaring, “I’m not one of you and I don’t want to be.” Again, thinking about my liberal suburb, there is one house I’ve passed by where the owner makes a point of lining his sidewalks with American flags for any vaguely nationalistic holiday and had a number of yard signs advocating against the adoption of a progressive income tax when it was on the ballot a few years ago.
The most dramatic form of this came when I was driving out of Kansas City on I-70.
(the picture above comes from this article)
The Three Percenters4 are a far-right group anti-government group which advocates gun ownership and resistance to the U.S. Federal Government. I somehow doubt that they have a strong presence in Kansas City where this sign appears, and certainly not in the predominantly Black section of Kansas City that’s closest to the sign. I think that this, like the KKK highway adoption that took place in 1999 in St Louis is meant more as a provocation than anything else. The KKK was kicked out of the program in 2001 for failing to keep their section of the highway clean and looking at the grass in the lower right corner of the picture above, I suspect that the three percenters are following in their footsteps.
This is not a case of declaring one’s group allegiance or virtue signaling. Like the hooded Klansmen who never cleaned their stretch of highway, the Three Percenters are not doing this to show off their civic concern, but rather to do this as a middle finger raised to the residents of the east side of Kansas City. Looking at demographic maps of Kansas City, the Three Percenters, with ties to white supremacist movements, have chosen to sponsor a stretch of I-70 which runs through a predominantly Black section of the city.
On my return trip, my phone decided to take me off the interstate for an extended stretch of the drive, passing through cities which are too small to host a stoplight, let alone a school and the difference in tribal signaling was pronounced. There were frequent proclamations of faith and patriotism in the form of American flags and large crosses, but in that whole stretch of road, there was a single anti-abortion sign and the message felt less confrontational than what I saw on the interstate.
Recommendation
For some reason, I only got around to watching the Spike Lee film, Chi-Raq, in the last week, even though my friend Plu Harmon appears in the background of the church scene (he’s the drummer in the band) and I knew he was in it. It has pretty much the social commentary that you’d expect with John Cusack doing a fictionalized version of Saint Sabina’s Father Michael Pfleger (and while he tried, he didn’t come close to matching the fire of the real thing). But perhaps just as importantly, the movie is funny. The jokes range from the crude to the recondite and Samuel Jackson playing the role of the Greek chorus as absolute perfection. It’s available for streaming on Amazon Prime video.
Recent publications
It’s been a while since I’ve sent out one of these and since the last mailing, I’ve published a story and two poems:
My poem “Place de Stalingrad” was published this past Spring by Ligeia.
My senryū5, “宝石の十字架” was published last month by Invisible City. Don’t worry, only the title is in Japanese.
My poem, “A Song of Isaac” was published last month by I-70 Review. This is only available in print, although I did tweet a photo of it recently.
Just the existence of stores selling guns and ammunition always feels weird to me—I live in a city where in the 2016 election, there was an advisory referendum about whether the second amendment should be repealed which won handily.
One of my English professors in college told me flatly that my writing Barthes’ as a possessive for Barthes (with a silent “s”) was incorrect. Now, I finally did some digging on this and found that style guides are evenly split on whether the possessive for a word ending with a silent s should be ’ or ’s so I was perfectly within my rights to write Barthes’ instead of Barthes’s. That professor is dead now, so I have to settle for writing Illinois’ in this email.
Sociologists and political scientists would be well-advised to consider this as a potential area for research. The best I could find in my cursory research was an article which begins with, “Despite the ubiquity of yard signs, little is known about how and why individuals display them.”
Although I haven’t seen anywhere online make this connection, I do wonder about the fact that I’ve seen campaign signs for Republican politicians in Wisconsin and Missouri which featured a motif of three stars in a line. Might this be a way of trying to convey in a clandestine manner some allegiance to Three Percenter ideology?
A senryū is similar in form to a Haiku, but rather than being about the beauty of nature, it’s about the messiness of humanity.