ACL 2025 ~ Top Ten Drone

When Movies Were a Night Out

Imperial Valley ~ American Memory

In this country, we don't talk about slavery. We don't talk about lynching. Worse, we've created the counternarrative that says we have nothing about which we should be ashamed. Our past is romantic and glorious. ... I think we have to increase our shame — and I don't think shame is a bad thing. I worked with people in jails and prisons, and most parole boards will make my clients say, “I am sorry,” before they can get parole. It's a requirement in many states that you have to show remorse, even if you have a perfect prison record, before they will let you out. We require that because our sense of comfort, our sense of safety, is compromised if we don't think you appreciate the wrongfulness of your criminal act. In faith perspectives, to get to salvation — at least in the Christian tradition — you have to repent. There is no redemption without acknowledgement of sin. It’s not bad to repent. It's cleansing. It's necessary. It's ultimately liberating to acknowledge where we were and where we want to go. We haven't done that collectively.

What we do in the memorial spaces says a lot about who we are. The American South is littered with the iconography of the Confederacy. We are celebrating the architects and defenders of slavery. I don't think we understand what that means for our commitment to equality and fairness and justice.

It gave Americans an exhilarating feeling of freedom, a sense they were exempt from the crushing weight of history under which places like the Balkans seemed buried. Yet ultimately this feeling was and is illusory. It is not, in fact, possible to step outside of time. A culture that generates such fantasies might fairly be called ‘historicidal,’ not for murdering some objective body of history, but for promoting an ahistorical temper, for obscuring the ways the past continues to shape the present, and for leaving us marooned in the now, adrift on the temporal surface of things.