Battle Not With Monsters

Friedrich Nietzsche is a complicated character to study. He’s often blamed for Hitler, and Hitler is blamed for fascism. I don’t think it’s that simple. Hitler read “Also sprach Zarathustra: Ein Buch für Alle und Keinen” (Thus Spoke Zarathustra), including during his time in prison, but it did not create him. I don’t think you can blame Nietzsche for Hitler, and I don’t think you can blame Hitler for fascism.

Hitler rode a wave that was spreading around the world by the end of the twenties. Had it not erupted in Germany, it would have erupted in Russia. Had it not erupted in Russia, it would have erupted here. I don’t think people realize how close we came to having just that happen. “Battle not with monsters, lest you become one.” Nietzsche wasn’t trying to create fascism—he was trying to save us from it.

I used to share lunch with a woman who spent her afternoons scouring the Eudora Welty Library for books by Nietzsche and poems by Emily Dickinson and Sylvia Plath. At night, she used body spray with glitter and danced naked for businessmen and losers who considered themselves gangsters. It used to make me laugh to introduce this six-foot-tall naked woman as “one of my best friends” to men wearing power ties.

I asked her once if it was ironic that she made so much money working at a titty bar when hers were almost absent. She told me that her job wasn’t about getting naked. Her job was to make lonely people feel attractive and significant, and that extended to both the customers and the other dancers. She eventually moved from dancing to management. As a titty bar manager, she realized that while that industry wasn’t destroying her, it was destroying everybody else around it. She took a course in medical coding, got married, and had kids.

I’m sure she still gets naked sometimes, but she doesn’t get paid for it. We’re still friends. She says she’s a “survivor” of the adult entertainment business. “if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.”

Whatever Nietzsche saw in the abyss, and whatever it saw in him, he spent the last two decades of his life in a slow descent into madness. For the last eleven years, he was almost entirely delusional and non-communicative, except with his sister, who sold his books to pay the bills. Knowing the truth can destroy you.

I was born sandwiched between the assassination of Medgar Evers and the attempted assassination of Ed King. It all took less than a week. At the end of it, Eudora Welty published "Where is that Voice Coming From" in The New Yorker magazine to try and make sense of it all. When asked if she was afraid that the men who killed Evers might come for her after reading her story, Welty said, “Men like that don’t read the New Yorker.” That seems to have been true.

I was fairly young when I learned the truth of the world at my birth. My father always bore the weight of Mississippi like Atlas on his shoulders. I don’t write about that often because it sounds like I’m exaggerating, but it’s true. For a while, he thought he could change the world he left for me, but he didn’t.

Charles Evers, Medgar’s brother, was on the radio, and he became politically active. I can’t remember a time when Ed King was much further than an arm’s length away from me. While we generally agreed on things, the weight of what he was terrified me. We only once took opposite sides of an issue. Even with the support of George Harmon and Stuart Good, I felt like I barely survived the encounter.

I never expressed to either of these men what I always knew and what I always thought about. They were physical proof of how hate could manifest in the world, and I was desperate to understand that. In the attempt to kill him, Ed King was left with a noticeable scar because doctors wouldn’t treat him. Ed King wore the hate of other men on his face. It hurt me to see it. He wore it with some pride.

I was never able to express what I was thinking and what I was feeling to either King or Charles Evers.

Byron De La Beckwith was twice acquitted for the murder of Medgar Evers. He spent almost thirty years bragging about that. A young lawyer named Bobby Delaughter decided to take another run at it. Just before his third trial for murder, De La Beckwith granted an interview with Jerry Mitchell. He threatened Mitchell with God’s punishment if he wrote bad things about a White Christian, and there were men who would enact his vengeance if God chose not to.

During his trial, a television reporter asked De La Beckwith if he killed Medgar Evers. “I did not kill that nigra! Are you a Jew?” was De La Beckwith’s answer.

Hate isn’t some alien force that only some people feel. We all feel it. There are deep evolutionary and genetic reasons why we all respond to anyone who is different (especially when we’re driving, and they cut us off.) There are tremendous evolutionary and genetic pressures on us to conform. Standing out makes us vulnerable, and other people who stand out make us vulnerable just by being near them.

One thing you’ll notice about hated classes of people is that they almost never pose any actual threat. Jews were no threat to Germany. Blacks were no threat to Mississippi. Transgender people were no threat to Donald Trump. They seemed like a threat because they were different. That’s how monsters are born.

I was obsessed with “Famous Monsters of Filmland” magazine as a child. As a man, I came to know some of the people who made the magazine. One thing I understood, even as a small child, was that the monsters weren’t Frankenstein, The Wolfman, or King Kong. The monsters were the villagers who hated them for being different. I don’t think I knew I was processing the Mississippi I was born into through the paintings of Basil Gogos and the movies of James Whale, but I was. Battling what they thought were the monsters, the otherwise innocent villagers became the monsters.

Jerry Mitchell and Bobby DeLaughter prevailed. Byron De La Beckwith was convicted of murdering Medgar Evers. Hollywood came to Mississippi and made a movie about it. After being expelled from the Mississippi Methodist Conference, Ed King became recognized as one of its heroes. I went into the twenty-first century thinking that maybe the world had actually changed. If the world was different, maybe I could rest, and so I did. I hid myself from the world I thought was better without me for almost fifteen years.

Barack Obama ran for president of the United States with posters with just one word on them: “Hope.” If a half-black, moderate Democrat from Chicago (via Hawaii) could become president, then maybe things here would change. I had hope, mountains of hope, but I was also waiting for the other shoe to drop.

By the end of the nineteenth century, America had survived the sins of slavery and Native American replacement. Still, it suffered under the weight of men called “Robber Barrons,” who concentrated almost ninety percent of the country’s wealth into far less than one percent of the people.

A brash young Republican named Teddy Roosevelt thought he could use the party of Lincoln to break the grip these men had on America. Those in power laughed at him, but he was more powerful than anyone had imagined. Teddy Roosevelt changed America and ushered in a new generation of progress and happiness, even in desperately poor Mississippi.

Ten years into the twentieth century, women cut their hair and their hemlines. They even began smoking in public. Africans found centers of wealth in New York and Chicago; even in backward Mississippi, there was a center of black commerce on Farrish Street. African rhythms were broadcast through America through the miracle of radio. In Los Angeles and Berlin, gentlemen who preferred the company of other gentlemen could live openly as they were. Women could go to doctors for abortions, not midwives and witches.

By the end of the twenties, all of this would change. Poor economic choices led to painful economic times. All of these massive social changes of the teens and twenties were blamed for the financial pain of the thirties. Men who pointed the finger of blame at the weakest rose to power. The world was introduced to fascism. Battle not with monsters, lest you become one.

Everyone I knew made fun of Donald Trump. They made fun of him regularly on Saturday Night Live. He occasionally joined the cast to try and make it seem like they were laughing with him, not at him, but these were New Yorkers; they were still laughing at him. Receiving no respect in New York, Trump began investing in Florida.

A wrestling promoter and a beauty pageant operator, Trump was considered one of the worst business people in America. NBC, who made fun of him on SNL, offered him his own reality television show where they would pair him with other trainwrecks like Gary Busey as “Celebrity Apprentices.” Trump, again, was the butt of the joke in New York.

Something about the success and popularity of Barack Obama did something to Trump. He began to see it as his mission to take the president down. Since Obama didn’t have an anglicized name (or anglicized skin), Trump tried to claim Obama was born in Africa. He had several press conferences to make his point.

I always felt like Obama was toying with Trump. He obviously had the proof of his birth all along, but he withheld it as long as he could because it held Trump up for ridicule. At the Washington Press Roast, Obama openly made fun of Trump after showing proof of his American birth. Within weeks, Trump began trying to insinuate that Obama’s wife, Michelle, was really a transgender man, and their daughters were secretly adopted. Again, the world laughed at Trump. Only Joan Rivers picked up on the Michelle Obama is Transgender story, and she was in the last stages of fatal dementia.

Something about his failure to take down Obama made Trump become fixated on the presidency; now, people all over the world are saying America is becoming a fascist country. Whatever we escaped in the thirties returned with a vengeance.

I don’t think anyone can escape feelings of alienation from people who don’t look like them. It’s this natural urge that leads us to hate. We have lots of natural fears. We’re naturally afraid of the dark and naturally afraid of heights, but we learn to overcome them. Feelings of alienation lead to what we call “hate.” Some say it’s a sign of evil at work in the world. I believe it’s a sign of weakness in humans.

I’m not sure that evil exists. Eve was blamed for introducing evil into the world when she ate from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Granted, she was disobedient, but wouldn’t you have made the same choice? I don’t believe a God who could create us would make “knowing” something “evil.” Maybe evil is something invented not by God but by us.

I was born into a world of monsters. I’m pretty sure I’ll die in a world of monsters. I’ll do battle. I’m made for it, but I’m very careful about who I call a monster.