Irregular Times Diaries: Unfit Discussion
In a time of the spring, old paths are obscured and new growth begins.
Irregular Times Diaries: Unfit DiscussionIn a time of the spring, old paths are obscured and new growth begins.
This morning, as I was sending off the latest set of anti-Bush buttons in the mail to people who had ordered them, I lingered for a moment over the address of one recipient: Mankato, Minnesota. The name “Mankato” brought me right back to Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie books, which I read over and over as a kid, and the Little House TV series, complete with Melissa Gilbert flying down a hill with her little arms stuck out wide at the end of each show.
Another town I think of is Skokie, Illinois. When I hear “Skokie,” I think of Nazis, and so for me the name Skokie is associated with white racism. That’s unfair, because Skokie is a fairly liberal-friendly place, picked on by Nazis outsiders back in the 1970s because it has a lot of Jewish people living there.
What place names can’t you hear without some association, fair or unfair, to the past?
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November 1st, 2006 at 2:34 pm
Sleepy Hollow, New York - real site of the fictional Washington Irving story, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. It’s not really sleepy anymore. It’s a jam-packed Hudson River valley town that runs smack up against other developed Hudson River Valley towns, and nothing at all remotely remote or spooky left in it.
November 1st, 2006 at 3:10 pm
Waco, TX: Striking not only because of the events in 1993 at the Branch Dividian compound, but because of the apparent lack of such stories today. Did all (American-grown) apocalyptic hell break loose and peak in the mid 90’s as a reaction to Clinton? Is the relative calm in survivalist-land due to a lack of new gun-restriction legislation?
Howard Beach, NY: The sting has worn off for me after years of my sister’s family’s residence there, but I’m sure it still connotes for everyone else the unspoken racial simmering in NYC. Mere blocks away is the neighborhood of Broad Channel, a few of whose paleolithic citizens staged a recreation of James Byrd’s fatal truck dragging during a parade. You could add Crown Heights to this list as well for the same reason as Howard Beach.
November 3rd, 2006 at 3:42 pm
Ohio, for the Kent state killings; through the Neil Young song “4 dead in Ohio”
July 22nd, 2007 at 11:36 am
Woodstock, even though the famed rock event was in White Lake, miles away.
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