I BELIEVE SUE SNELL

Robert Penn Warren’s All The Kings Men is the latest vehicle for me to have the experience of “wow, why didn’t anyone tell that this widely beloved classic fucking rules?”

“I’m not sure if I can win this, but it’s the right thing to lose.” - former Detroit School Board President Abraham Zwerdling on the fight to integrate Detroit Public Schools, which he did lose. (From Michelle Adams, The Containment: Detroit, The Supreme Court and the Battle for Racial Justice in the North)

This is, of course, separate from all the serious concerns about public history but just, specifically, for me, my personal connection to the issue is that I fucking love a woke museum and I especially love when an older institutional museum goes super woke. How the Philadelphia Museum of Art displays 17th century silver now fucking rules. It rules! And it’s a smaller museum but considering how woke it is with the budget and material it’s working with, the Virginia Museum of History and Culture punches way above its weight. Making museums less woke harms me in particular by taking away my fun.

All winter long, I carefully lurch down the icy sidewalks into town and sit in a mostly empty restaurant sipping my chamoy margarita and tipping 75% of the bill like a girl who is Jack Torrance. And as my reward, come July, I have the small beach town’s Mexican restaurant version of a lighting lane pass that zips me ahead of lines of sunburned children.

His argument is solid and interesting but I think it’s very funny that DuBois diagnoses that the failures of Charles Sumner et. al., were that they didn’t understand the ways that economics underlies politics because they hadn’t read the third volume Capital, but, in their defense, it hadn’t yet been published.

I’m thinking today of my commune-mate, a tiny, lovely gymnastic coach who wore her hair in two sailor moon style buns, who would periodically ask if anyone wanted to join her to go break bottles by the railroad tracks because she was real mad about stuff. And she was so right. It really helped.