Ave Chingada

“El sueño de la Malinche” by Antonio Ruíz, oil on canvas, 1939

 

“Oh when I was a curly headed baby
My daddy sat me down upon his knee
Said son you go to school and learn your letters
Don’t be no dusty miner like me.”

— Jean Ritchie, from “The L&N Don’t Stop Here Anymore.”

“abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz.
Make of it what you will.”

— Mary Oliver, from “The Poet is Told to Fill up More Pages.”

I.

A is for Ave, sung in homage.

Originating in ancient Rome, the word was scripted for captives of war who were sentenced to die during reenactments of epic battles. It was spoken at the opening of each elaborate military play. Every prisoner was ordered to begin his final act in life by proclaiming total submission to imperial authority. 

Ave Imperator, Morituri te salutamus. Hail Emperor, we who are about to die salute you.

The first record of this salute comes from a spectacle staged by Caesar Augustus in 2 BC, part of the consecration of a temple built for Mars, god of war.

Months after that bloody drama, another conception of deity began to gestate. Soon Mary would give birth to Jesus, surrounded by anonymous livestock. Her pregnancy and labor would be praised for centuries to come, by peasants and aristocrats and all manner of beings. Believers would pray her name in affluent cathedrals and rustic grottos throughout the world.

Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.

From the Latin verb avere — expressing hail or farewell — ave opens or closes encounters with important people. That includes you now, wondering reader.

Ave literati. Welcome to my watchful abode of letters and soul. Here ideation flickers inside adobe made with mud and straw and dung from those aforementioned animal attendants (who, according to fable, mastered the art of alleluia on that miraculous evening, maybe in Aramaic).

Thank you for listening to phonemes with me, here in this little abecedarian shrine. May our minds eye some alchemy in the middle of nowhere. When appropriate, may angelic alarms echo between our ears.

Words can amplify awareness. Amen? They can awaken our appreciation, help us acknowledge grave mistakes, allay anger, even allow us to accept advice from allies we’ve mistaken for adversaries.

With that aim I measure out prudence and whimsy, stir sounds around, balance images that arise in texts and conversation. I mix trivia and myth, tincture lyrics into colors that often fade into plain-jane ambience, then suddenly she smiles and I cry, enrapt in brazen revelation.

That’s how things happen in this amnion-like sanctum, with inscriptions arranged according to acuity and hunch, assembled and dismantled and re-nested so the muse can articulate her stuff and us brood on it.

It, yes. Things. I know I should avoid calling this stuff “afflatus,” yet I’m amused by inspiration’s synonym. When I apply such words my Appalachian kin might accuse me of long-windedness, puttin’ on airs. But I don’t mean to seem pointy-headed or abrasive.

Humbly I ask you to tarry just a moment, even if you’ve decided I ain’t level or assimilated. Please allow me to i.d. an old quandary that pains my being and impairs man’s ability to care.


This shrine changes shape on occasion. It feels more like a chapel when I meditate on that opening section during nine months of editing, stuck close to home. I am the anchorite, goo goo ga joob. As such I’m struck by Mars and Mary, seated in close proximity, down near the front in those lettered pews.

Mars. Mary. Amazes me how different spells are cast by nearly the same row of characters. The personas known by these names seem poles apart:  that all-star avatar of violent red glare; the demure maiden-mamma of pure contemplation.

Mary has my adoration, without arm-twisting. She’s mostly revered by the masses for her reproductive acumen, truly a crude reduction of motherhood. I also honor her care for Jesus as an infant and toddler, her partnership with Joseph to raise God’s lad into manhood. What’s not to love?

Mars is different. Depending on the situation, he comes across as either a righteous avenger or arrogant asshole. Dude pumps me up to root for the home gladiators, drives chariots through stadiums, sends bombs bursting over hoo-rahs in his martial fields. He fills me with adrenaline to fight for a cause, primes me with action movies. Yet when Mars possesses the beserkers, spirit moves me to get in his way.

So, Mars and Mary, sitting in the chapel. Like ammo at a shotgun wedding, these names arrest my assumptions and affections. Do the agencies they identify share some root affinity? If we shed the packaging, does some hidden connection become clear?


Greco-Roman gods and Judeo-Christian angels play analogous roles on the religious stage. Both approximate an old archetype man has long revered, like a patriarch with ties to families in adjoining hollers. Other than the different combination of letters, what manifestation of power distinguishes Michael the archangel, ace of Jehovah’s armies, from Jupiter’s acclaimed commando of Rome’s legions?

I suggest the veil of separation between these supernatural war-jocks is sufficiently thin and membranous to signify with a hyphen. Based on what is written about them (in other words, what rulers commissioned nerds to scribble down) I believe it is reasonable to posit that Michael-Mars had an avuncular association with Mary. As such he probably knew about her pregnancy very soon after the Annunciation. Word gets around, presumably with archangels and gods even more swiftly than it does with rulers and scribes and other mortals.

Yet there’s another possibility. By Jove, could our archetypal warrior be the child’s father?

By extension, this question concerns the nature of divinity. Judging from the persona of Jesus, it’s clear to me that Michael-Mars is not the father. Jesus was and is the Prince of Peace. Yet we animals of faith often seem to value military prowess above all other qualities of manhood. Many equate armed force with absolute authority over society’s fate. Martial primacy is attested by man’s social rituals, civic ceremonies, public budgets, and arsenals at every level of government. In other words, we behave as if the god of war were actually God.

Who’s our Daddy? Time we think and pray on this matter, fellow children, for the days of appraisal are at hand.

So, ave brethren. Ave. Our first word in this alphabetical essay is aloha’s churchly cousin, accoutered not with fragrant leis, but rosaries of hard beads or knots that convey a tactile sense of devotion and in some quarters tactical transaction.


“Bird” is the word’s meaning when we flit from English to Spanish. On that branch ave derives from avis, another bit of Latin candy that fizzed and popped in the mouths of legions who toted standards west, from Rome to Iberia and the golden suds beyond.

Avis and avēre. Two signs become ave, one little quill that points to winged beings and reverence.

Too abstract, arcane, absurd? No need to linger if these words aggravate. Please accept this feather as a token of respect and maybe a totem for future contemplation. Carry it in peace as you wonder elsewhere, thinking about who or what you worship.

I am grateful for any readers who remain. This anchorhold becomes more like a portal as we explore the crux of a self-inflicted tragedy. Language strives to rise and converge with healing. Meaning expands, higher up and further in.

Now, and not just the hour of our death, Lord lift our understanding.



II.

B looks like the profile of a Belly and Breast. It’s not, of course. It’s just a letter. As such it serves at the beckon call of psyche — mankind’s buddy who tends bar down at the Brand-n-Belief. Behold now behemoth, brainy brawn behind the badges, ever so basic to buyer behavior and the body politic.



Being mimetic critters, humans can be herded using simple signs as ligaments to lock us into central liege. A bundle of rods or sticks, called a fascis, serves as an excellent illustration of this uniform bondage. Rome bathed the egos of citizens in a sticky proud brew that was carried in this symbol. Back then they called the brew “imperium.” Today we might call it patriotism or nationalism. They infused it with fat bubble narratives and nicene pomp surrounding a grand central figure, all to boost esprit de corps and bolster faith in Roman power.  Toward that end, many religious symbols came in handy.

Before a pivotal battle, for example, Emperor Constantine ordered his troops to emblazon their shields with a mark he said betokened a new patron deity. For the first time the Emperor brandished a cruciform symbol that was purported to signify Christ. He did so in pursuit of a specific end result. It is written that Christ Himself appeared to Constantine in a dream, saying that if he (Constantine) decorated his soldiers with this new sign, They (Christ, Constantine, the soldiers) would win Their battles.

So scribbled a prominent clergyman who became the Emperor’s right-hand publicist. And the dream paid off. Might makes right, as they say (meaning it often pays for scribes and publicists and their sponsors).

Thus it came to pass in the annals of man that martial force was marketed under the name of Christ Jesus Son of Mary and God, he who previously inspired people to die rather than follow Mars to war.

Did Christ also befriend the dreams of God’s children who followed him, on nights before they were executed for rejecting the religious orders of Rome? According to official scripts, child sacrifice could be either an abomination or a covenantal proof of absolute faith. Apparently the difference depends on which name was on the receiving end of the slaughter. Did Jesus explain to soon-to-be-martyred Christians that his beef with the empire wasn’t about behavior so much as branding?

Fellow seekers can ponder such questions with help from theologians of diverse views. What we know is that Constantine extended his winnings by presiding over a new communion between church and empire. While simultaneously remaining faithful to his Roman pantheon, the emperor also convened an assembly of clergy to authorize scripts for a new cruciform religion that advanced his underlying goals.

In so doing he mixed imperium with wine made from fruit crushed by Rome’s overseers in Jerusalem, centuries before.
 

B is for Blood, the bible of branding agents to baptize empire’s banners and emblems. There is power, ominous working power in the ritual killings of men. Blood can intoxicate warriors and captivate civilians. It can initiate booty hunters and privateers. Blood binds together brethren in uniform, helps broker agreements for arms dealers and mercenaries and militarized police. It lubricates the chain of command, redeems group debts, and seals colossal deals. So it seems.

But. Shed blood can also bestir shared grief and compassion, bridging hearts in mutuality with victims.


Because. Something deeper than death circulates through Creation. A seismic force shakes every soul when our Creator exposes man’s sacrificial script. Sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble with remorse at man’s lust for power and our fraternal order of violence.

III.

C soars with Condors, the largest flying birds that nest on land in the Americas. These creatures can glide 50 miles per hour and travel about 160 kilometers every day. Monogamous for life (which can exceed 70 years) the parental duties of condors are shared between sexes. Their digestive tracts contain potent bacteria that enable them to digest carcasses of dead animals without getting sick. They are superbly hygienic and wash themselves for hours after meals.



The word “condor” comes to us from Spanish-speakers who adopted it from the Quechua word kunter, meaning bird. Taxonomists dub these avian icons “New World Vultures,” a variety pack of species that includes California Condors, Andean Condors, King Vultures, Greater Yellow-Headed Vultures, Lesser Yellow-Headed Vultures, Turkey Vultures, and Black Vultures. Genetically they are distinct from “Old World Vultures,” having evolved in separate hemispheres to fill the same ecological niche.



At the time of this writing credentialed primates are split over which biological order is the right taxonomic home for New World Vultures. North American ornithologists assert these species should be placed in the same order as Eagles and Old World Vultures. South American experts say these winged ones should have their own distinct order.

All birders concur that Condors are members of the family Cathartidae, derived from the Greek katharos, associated with cleansing, purging, and purification. The same lingual egg hatched into “catharsis,” which denotes emotional and spiritual release. This echoes the high science of Indigenous folks who believe Condors help communicate with the spirit world and transport souls beyond death.


Attention to ecology fledges wisdom. Back east descendants of Wise Men still place cadavers on structures that allow nature to have her way. Rather than bury or burn dead humans, traditional Zoroastrians expose their bodies to the elements. Integral to this process is the White-rumped Vulture, Gyps Bengalensis, which helps remove fleshy mess so that clean bones can be stored elsewhere. Due to rapid unplanned urbanization this species has suffered the fastest collapse of any avian population in recorded history. Yet they’re inching back from extinction, thanks to nature’s God and sapient folks who care.

California Condors have experienced a similar decline. Some years ago an American conservationist proposed that citizens be allowed to volunteer our postmortem bulk to help sustain these magnificent feathered creatures. Presumably this could be done after organs are donated to people in need.

C is for Corpse, from the Latin corpus and the Proto-Indo-European kwrep, signifying “body, form, appearance.” The word may have arisen from a root verb meaning “to appear.” Until the early 18th century “corpse” could refer to a body that was either living or dead, and it could also denote a group of people. The “p” was dropped for a while, then picked up again. Somewhere along the way the word may have hung out with the Old High German href, meaning “womb, belly, abdomen.” On occasion the “s” was not pronounced. At some point people added that fancy “e,” wherein it could be used to denote a military unit “expressly organized and having a head.” The word’s root form feeds terms like corpulent, corporeal, corpuscle, and corporation (abbreviated as “corp”).

Whew. Literate primates have been a bit shaky about the corpus of letters and meanings surrounding this word. Men can be touchy about our bodies and the topic of mortality in general.

That last derivative of the word has long spooked me, frankly. A shiver ran down my spine the first time I discovered, in an old dictionary, the word “corporation” defined as “an artificial human being.” My brain flashed on Frankenstein’s resurrected assembly of cadaverous parts, how the consequences of man’s corporate actions are personified in that learned beast of literature. Letters can animate a body’s nervous system.

So can liturgical rituals. Arguably the most remarkable reconstitution of a body occurs when religious professionals officiate the conversion of processed grain and fruit into the flesh and blood of Jesus. Many believers feast on that sacramental corpse as an intimate way of showing shared alliance with deity. For some it embodies the idea that the killing of Jesus produced a corporate shield to protect people from liability for sins.

In my youth I accepted Jesus as the Word of God incarnated in Homo sapiens. He will always be mankind’s model citizen and formative life coach for me. Our relationship was first nurtured at home through the oral tradition, then reinforced by teachers at church. I was four years old when I returned from a Episcopal nursery school and my mom asked me what I had learned. We were Presbyterians, and she wanted to know if I had picked up anything unusual during chapel. She’s told me many times that in response I put my arm in the air, like I was draping it around the neck of another child, and said “meet my friend, the Holy Ghost.”

I also developed a rapport with letters at that time, in picture books like Go Dog Go. The images were my first focus, then the text became more and more important. Something inside me still stirs when I look at the illustrations next to the text in The Boxcar Children.

In fourth grade I went crazy on books, thanks to the Chronicles of Narnia (I checked out old hardcover editions from our church library). There were passages that I wrestled with, as happens with most writing, especially my own. But I devoured those classics of Christian lit, learning over time to appreciate the good parts without confusing God with the Emperor-beyond-the-Sea and his old power-mad executioner.

Similarly I’ve wrestled with inklings about our Creator scripted in the Old and New Testaments, noting that in the entire book Jesus is reported to have written only one word on the ground (which is not revealed). Christ’s teachings were delivered through deeds and parables, miracles and speech. His companions and first followers spread messages with messianic tongues of flame. After his death people wrote about him, and Christendom assembled the letters under the authority of Constantine.

There’s a lot in those writings that my Christian teachers didn’t understand, even those who had Bibles with well-worn pages. I suspect the Emperor and his clergy didn’t fathom those passages either, judging from history. Yet they loaded them into the official canon, giving future readers a shot at interpretation.


Asked for a predictor of the approaching spiritual age, Jesus is quoted as saying that it “would not come by signs to be observed,” but that “the kingdom of God is in the midst of you” (Luke 17:20).

I think that means the next big wave of revelation won’t be advertised like a billboard for a new real estate development. It will manifest in renewed human relationships with God’s Creation, as shaped by Christ’s calling to care for the least among us. That much seems clear.

Other passages are strange. According to gospel writers, Jesus shared a poetic clue about the second coming. “Wherever the body is, there the αετοι will be gathered together” (Mathew 24:28 and Luke 17: 37). The Greek word αετοι usually translates as “eagles.” This may be a reference to empire. Eagles were a core symbol of Rome, their likeness displayed on military standards. Yet other Bible translators render αετοι in this passage as “vultures.”

Was the Son of God and Mary saying that ritual consumption of his reconstituted corpse would become a core sacrament in the empire’s new religion? Was he pointing to how that ministerial meal would influence man’s spiritual nourishment? For some believers, that flesh and blood feeds a feeling of gratified immunity to wrongdoing. For others, the story of how mankind killed our beloved teacher provides a sober reminder.

My heart breaks open when I reflect on that murder alongside all the lives we have sacrificed. The gravity of man’s selfish predations knocks me to the ground. His death replaces my impulse to scapegoat with forgiveness of others, just as Jesus forgave the ones who killed him.

Chew carefully, fellow primates. One way numbs us to remorse, intoxicates us with the martyr’s ichor. The other anchors repentance and refills our souls with caring fellowship.


Condors and Eagles figure into another prophecy passed down by God’s children who were sacrificed for empire. Known for their ability to fly at great heights, these creatures serve as spiritual intercessors for Indigenous people, like high priests without salaries.

Native people of the Americas have long shared a prophecy concerning the Condor and Eagle, which spoke of a rift between North and South. This schism was marked by the brutal conquest of this hemisphere in concert with the enslavement of people based on skin color. Colonization and racism. Together these grand sins created a system of institutional oppression in which people of the North preyed upon people of the South. This was done on behalf of royal sovereigns who ruled Chistendom.

The prophecy also foretold of a spiritual awakening that would mend this rift, round about now. The Condor and Eagle will fly together in the sky, just as humans reaffirm our oneness of Creator and Creation.

Some commentators add symbolism to this mending:  Condor = emotional, intuitive, feminine, mother; Eagle = mental, scientific, masculine, father. I understand the impulse to think this way —  to assign seats for all beings in man’s integrated classroom of signification. Yet for me this prophecy goes deeper. A reunion of hearts and minds involves a shift in how we configure human identity. It transforms the way we relate to God’s Creation as a whole.

Condors and Eagles aren’t just signs or symbols, after all. They are, like us, living entities. They and we mean more than scribes imagine.

Man must learn how to repair the broken relationship between ideas and living context. Maybe, if we lift our eyes, Cathartidae will explain this matter better than any Episcopal or Presbyterian or other religious species of Hominidae.
  



Thus we come to the close of a complicated C section, wherein cranial joints have been contorted, perhaps beyond their capacity to consider sensible contents. And all the while one cogitates on these connections between condors and clergy and corpses, man’s abstracted signs and symbols of value circumnavigate the globe.

After distributing the sacrificial meal, money-changers pass collection plates throughout the capitals of commerce, exchanging capital for lives, as has been done for millennia.

Capital. This last Cadillac C-word is rooted in the Latin “caput,” meaning “head,” a unit used to count cattle, sheep, goats, etc. In the old world, livestock were the primary means of corralling moolah and social status. The structure of that economy has long stood in need of a new foundation, one built with an older and way cooler cornerstone that was rejected by man’s empires.



IV.

CH is the phonetic CHop that Spanish-speakers chose as the 4th letter of their noble alphabet. There it rarely if ever channels the chichi sound of “sh,” as often occurs in English (Charmin) and almost always in French (Charbonneau). No, the 4th letter es muy macho. Pick up a Spanish dictionary and CH-words are listed after the C-words, in their own separate chow line.
This confused me at first, but felt normal after a little practice.

CH is for CHattel, another word for portable wealth herded on four hooves and two feet. Slavery and war are equal partners in business of empire. Now outlawed in all countries recognized by the United Nations, the freedom to buy and sell human beings like cattle was once trumpeted by prominent citizens of faith, including patriotic Christian slave-owners who killed people to stop them from freeing their human property.



Americans generally skim over that chapter of our recent past. Some revise both history and faith in hopes of washing away the stain from a bloody cause they conflate with self governance and regional pride. Others apparently think man’s herd habits have advanced so far there’s no need for more detailed study or soul-searching.

Yet slavery’s legacy hasn’t just lingered in these somewhat united States of America. The practice flourishes, worldwide. Numbers show there are three times more people enslaved today than were captured and sold between the 15th and 19th centuries. Nearly three quarters are women and girls. This does not include laborers who are captive to a slavish existence, including the essential yet seemingly disposable workers who harvest, produce, package, and serve our meals.

Mankind’s first written record of slavery as an institution comes from the Code of Hammarabi, sixth emperor of Babylon circa 1754 BC. Apparently that code emerged from the social structures of earlier city-states. Most residents were considered servants of their respective temple gods, ranging in rank from peons up to high priests. When these city-states decided to seize control of surrounding areas, I suppose some of the conquered neighbors became servants of servants, captive laborers to elevate the temples of their captors into impressive towers. Clerical scribes became the handlers of mighty warlords, casting them as god’s martial headmen. And some, I assume, were good people.

This is all speculation. I have no degree that certifies me to chew the moo over slavery’s genesis. As a commoner of letters I welcome feedback from pedigreed scholars. Two charges infuse the marrow of my thesis.



1.  Mankind’s use of forced labor took a pivotal evil turn during the 15th and 16th centuries, when crown merchants conjured up a viral idea during their hauls around the Atlantic. Northern empires capitalized on a commercial innovation that lined regal pockets for generations to come. They launched a new brand of slave, packaged with the Spanish n-word for “black,” in tandem with colonization of the western hemisphere. Thus human beings were made into a hot market commodity by drawing a line of color on our skin and minds. That beastly mark still shackles and crucifies us.
   


2. Man wrestled with evil long before that, even before we built cities or alphabets. In truth our wrestling career began back in a mythic genesis, when man’s alpha sire first blamed our primal mother-of-color for screwing up their gig in Eden.

CH is for CHingada and CHingón, words I first met in a book-length essay by the poet Octavio Paz. Seventy years after publication, I began reading his “Labyrinth of Solitude” during a month-long trip from my home in Oregon to visit friends and kin in Mexico and Appalachia.



“Labyrinth” is an exploration of Mexican identity, yet it hollers inside my sense of selfhood. Paz wrote it in Spanish, as a well-travelled man of letters who was conversant in the cultural flow between North and South. I read it in English, for the most part my only language besides Appalachian.

Familiar words can explode with import when looked at through the lens of translation. So it happened that my head opened wide in 2020, soaring back home to Oregon, days before the airline industry was swatted by a coronavirus. The floor fell out from under my manly ideations as I flew through the section of Paz’s essay titled “The Sons of La Malinche.”

Like many Anglo-Americans I already knew the cuss word we commonly equate with chingar (the verb from which chingada and chingón are derived). But Paz doesn’t mention that English word, and so I simply followed him further into context.

The poet routes chingar to an Aztec expression for residue, like the dregs in the bottom of a potent alcoholic drink. Split-streams of meaning spill from that cocktail. Chingada implies passivity and failure, something used with force and then tossed aside. Chingón links with macho. It brims with aggression and violent conquest. What today we call “toxic masculinity” Paz suggested grows out of resentment, revenge, and a perversely cruel kind of humor.

“But whatever may be the origin of these attitudes,” Paz wrote, “the fact is that the essential attribute of the macho – power – almost always reveals itself as a capacity for wounding, humiliating, annihilating. Nothing is more natural, therefore, than his indifference toward the offspring he engenders. He is not the founder of a people; he is not a patriarch who exercises patria potestas; he is not a king or a judge or the chieftain of a clan. He is power isolated in its own potency, without relationship or compromise with the outside world.”

Such power runs as rampant in Appalachia and Oregon as it does anywhere. Gazing back over the rift between the Condor and Eagle, it’s also clear that Spanish conquistadores cannot lay claim to more rape and pillage than English colonizers. And I suspect there was plenty of machismo present in ranks of the Aztec Empire. El Gran Chingón has strut his stuff in every corner of the world. Part of his shtick involves boasting about his exploits while wagging the finger at other offenders.

Did some edenic age of balance precede El Gran Chingón’s dominion among us?
Could we send him to his swanky chambers to reflect on his behavior, come out only if he’s had a change of heart? Or are people so mesmerized by his power that we accommodate his druthers while covering over the consequences?

These questions have arisen while spending more time in my own room, thanks to COVID, reading and writing and trying to understand how we got here. Part of this effort involves reflection on how word-meaning shifts (or doesn’t) over time.

In 1950, Octavio Paz wrote of chingada and chingón as if they were filthy words, spoken privately among amigos but sometimes shouted from rooftops on drunken holidays. Yet even in the 50s, to be called a Gran Chingón was a badge of pride. A Mexican brother recently informed me that “chingón” is now an everyday slang term for “awesome” or “cool.”

 

By contrast, the word “chingada” has remained chained to the weak and discarded end of the social lexicon. In Mexico it is linked with a female slave named Malinchi who lived in the early 1500s. Indigenous men gave Malinchi to Hernán Cortez and his warriors, along with other women to service them. If someone had asked Malinchi “quien es tu papi?” in the same way this question was framed by English prostitutes in the 1600s, she would have pointed to Cortez.

Yet in addition to providing the soldiers with sex, Malinchi was very good at  the translation of languages. She helped the famed conquistador forge alliances with other Indigenous groups, and is credited with playing a lead role in his military triumph against the Aztecs. She also bore Cortez a son, and is mythologized as the mother of Mexico’s abundant mestizo population.

Malinchi survived by navigating a war between two empires. She helped steer the course of history in spite of her enslavement. One might think that feat would afford some measure of regard for her strength and womanhood. Yet today “chingada” still connotes loser status and blame. Man venerates raw power and denigrates whoever that power deflowers.

Trained up in the Bible Belt, I’ve heard many righteous hellfire sermons rebuking the Whore of Babylon. I don’t recall much mention of the Pimp.

Westerners cut our teeth on stories about empire builders who subjugate in the name of God. Imagine what that process felt like to Indigenous people in Africa and the Americas, when armed men anointed with the blood of Christ moved in to install their law and order. What were the conquered left with on that day of surrender? What final acts of submission might avert the destruction of everything dear?

CH CH CH CHildren — chuckled at and chastened by old chaps who’s predecessors fattened on young meat. Many champions of convention chafe at the legacy of loss that reaches us through trails of tears. Most have no clue about the details. For some, ignorance coincides with blissful privilege.

Poets like Paz remind us of how ancestral grief is tangled up in the choke-holds of empire. Coming to terms with that ancient pain is tricky business for men whose peers have been coached over generations to identify with conquerors. We’re conditioned to laud toughness and lambast sensitivity, find social footing by sacrificing others for personal gain. This predatory habit energizes our founding myths and bends the arc of human history.

Yet epic cruelty is built on small breaks in empathy. It proceeds by way of little mean routines and everyday acts of unkindness.

A tiny Appalachian parable bears witness to this conditioning. Back in the 80s my friend Sharon X — then an aspiring seminary student — asked our Presbyterian amigo Robert X to participate in a weekend youth conference at a Christian college near our hometown. Sharon reckoned Robert would be the ideal role-model to assist her and her superiors with the assembly. He was top of his class, a tall church-league athlete, president of Key Club, and fairly cleanish cut on most days.

As part of his duties Robert was asked to room with an awkwardly sensitive young Gen-X male who was marginalized by his peers. Unfortunately, early in the weekend, the kid lost his parent’s keys. This spiraled into a conspicuous panic that became part of the conference drama for all attendees. People find clever ways to mess with misfits. And on the last day, when the flock gathered together for a last meal, the head cleric stood up and announced that indeed a set of keys had been found.


“Oh, oh, that’s them!” shouted the youth, eager to restore his sense of equilibrium. 

“Well now,” chided the authority, dangling the lost item in front of the congregation. “Before anyone can rightfully claim these keys, of course we’ll need to conduct a thorough investigation. We must be absolutely sure these are in fact that person’s property.”

Which prompted precisely the anxiety-ridden response from the youth that was expected, conspicuously displayed for everyone’s mealtime entertainment. What was not anticipated were the words Brother Robert was moved to utter, just audible enough for everyone in the room to hear.



“Give‘m his keys, motherfucker.”

Thus time-out was called on business as usual. The keys were returned to their rightful owner, unlocking a wee lesson in primate behavior. And Sharon’s aspiring seminarian heart beat faster with the certainty that her chosen professional career had just ended.

Later, when Robert’s mom found out about the incident, she patted him on his head for doing like she’d taught. Tell the truth and shame the devil. And she also admonished him not to use ugly words in public, at least not in front of a conspicuous gathering of Presbyterians. Robert shared this story with me on the day his mom died, a beautiful soul. Sharon reminded him of it when she helped plan the funeral, as an ordained minister.

I keep thinking about that youth conference, how the underlying dynamic plays out wherever two or three or thousands come together in the name of anything. People are susceptible to cruel treatment of the vulnerable among us, a habit magnified by gender and racial hierarchies. If Sharon and Robert and I had grown up in a different era, there would be no chance of her ordination into an all-male clergy. Also, we would have been indoctrinated into a faith that conspicuously embraced white supremacy. Both positions have been vigorously advanced and defended with scripture.


This happened in Gran Chingón style back in 1861, when religious leaders from my birth-region met to form the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the Confederate States of America. They adopted words penned by The Reverend James Henley Thornwell, an esteemed educator at Columbia Theological Seminary who delivered the inaugural sermon. Reverend Thornwell’s text should be read as a religious document by every American, not just believers who praise the Lord while continuing to fly the battle flag of the Confederacy.

Thornwell argued that since the scribes of our Old and New Testaments did not explicitly forbid the ownership of slaves, it would run counter to the Bible to consider slavery a sin. Thornwell extends that line of thought to his assessment of civil rights in general. “As long as that race, in its comparative degradation, coexists, side by side with the white, bondage is its normal condition.”

Today that mindset galls the vast majority citizens. Yet it was a welcome scholarly perspective for many highly literate officials of Thornwell’s time, and had been so for centuries. Ranking men of Christian letters were adept at sculpting worldviews that seem diametrically opposed to the recorded oral teachings of Jesus, not to mention the Holy Spirit. Professionals have cast such theological spells, with peer-backed confidence, ever since authorities scripted the crucifixion.

Polite society has tried to soften this influence by tinkering with images and text. We lighten Jesus’ skin and straighten his hair, say he died for our sins rather than face the reality that we lynched him because of them.

In a similar way we draw nicer lines in the melanin, change “colored people” to “people of color,” replace “negro” with “n-word” in everyday speech. These gestures are not without social merit, especially for privileged speakers like me. Yet folks on the receiving end of epithets sometimes employ a different strategy, exposing and reclaiming the offensive diction.

Here’s a related example. Many years ago a brother-of-color wished Jennifer and me Happy Mother’s Day. “Seeing as how ya’ll are a couple of muthas,” he said.

I instantly understood his compliment, and we all flashed knowing grins.
The word used by our friend engendered camaraderie in that context. Rules of African-American slang say spelling helps to convey a distinction. I’m told “muthafucka” can mean cool, whereas “motherfucker” was first used as an insult in tandem with horrific crimes.

During our cursory study of chattel slavery in public school, most of us did not learn that the transatlantic trade in human flesh was outlawed before the institution of slavery itself was abolished. During that time period a few enterprising traders tried to make up for losses in their overseas supply chain by boosting domestic production. Male slaves designated for breeding purposes were ordered to inseminate kin in exchange for group survival. Apparently some victims recycled the title that was thrust upon them, transforming it to reaffirm their individual agency in the aftermath of extreme trauma and shaming.

Personally, I reserve the word for those who perpetrate this kind of economic predation. It is an accurate description of someone who harms people in fulfillment of their will to power, one who grabs the fat and glories in absolute authority over others. On a grand spiritual scale I think Christians make perfectly good use of English diction by equating the title of Antichrist with Motherfucker.

Of note:  there is no expression for “fucked mother” in my native tongue, no equivalent that I know of for “chingada.” She’s there, of course, because you can’t have one without the other. Her corpse is laid bare to poke and prod in the lyrics of Appalachia’s femicidal balads. I held a knife against her breast. I picked a stick up off the ground. Tonight I’ll put her on a train. Go down go down you Knoxville girl. I’ve killed Pretty Polly.

Did men who got the short end of the fasci pass along some social resentment by way of such songs? For whatever reason, I shared that energy in my Gen-X teens, backing up a bro on my banjo as we belted out “Banks of the Ohio.” We often included that tune in our sets while picking and grinning, flexing our chingón.

In high school young bucks and I engaged in a related fraternal ritual when we cracked quips about classmates of color. The n-word (we did not say “the n-word”) occasionally made the rounds in our colorless huddles. Indeed, the first time I ever heard complaints about “political correctness” was when we were admonished not to use that word outright or tell racist jokes. We refused to understand why people couldn’t just lighten up, laugh it off, not be so dark and moody about such stuff.


Once I made strategic use of the n-word to join the ranks of a social club that held sway in my alma mater. Key Club and Interact were rival junior offshoots of adult men’s groups that were popular in the town where I was born. Applicants for the former had to try out by singing a solo about why we sought admission to the fold. If a boy was accepted, his name was announced over the school loudspeakers, along with the names of other new members. To be left off that list, after trying out, was a blow to the ego. Those boys who were picked were then proudly hazed and initiated, which could include carrying lunch trays, eating raw liver and ex-lax, or having all manner of gunk poured over one’s head and clothes. Some of the lucky chosen got to wrestle in mud which was rumored to be mixed with the piss of our elders.

Having auditioned twice, without success, I made sure of my chances on the third try. I brought my banjo and sang altered lyrics I wrote to the tune of “Dooley,” a bluegrass anthem performed on the Andy Griffith Show. In one of my tweaked verses I pledged fealty to the fraternal order while contrasting my opposition to its rival. In advance I handed the lyrics to the club’s faculty sponsor and president (this was before Robert took the helm), making sure I went through the proper channels before belting out the critical lines.

“My feelings toward Key Club
will never ever sway.
My feelings toward Interact
are like a n–ger’s to the KKK!”

And a wave of haws swept through the room, one of the most glorious audience approvals I’ve ever received. Finally, I was accepted.

There are plenty of troubling lyrics about how boys learn to be chingónes. Like the one where my kind didn’t listen, just kept talking and laughing over those peons who we deemed unworthy of respect, ripe for ridicule. Or when we videotaped ourselves groping girls in school hallways. Or that time we instructed female classmates to text us with naked photos, threatening to spread defamatory rumors about them if they said no. Or when we went ahead and spread those rumors anyway, just for kicks, hiding behind the anonymity of social media. Or the one about how we formed a not-so-secret “Kool Kids Klub,” in lockstep with the KKK’s recruitment of young adults. Or that time we lured a dark-skinned classmate out into the woods and subjected him to a mock lynching.

These aren’t tunes I made up. Some have entered my consciousness within recent months. At first I did not believe they could be sung under the watchful gaze of authorities, just down the road. Then I listened deeper, and knew I could connect the notes with music from my youth, and also operas of adult bands of brothers and their commanding officers who boast about assaulting women, who hide behind anonymous camo while abducting and beating unarmed protesters, who inject dissidents with Pentathol and throw them out of airplanes, who hang radicals from cross-beams and leave them to suffer slow deaths, who kneel on the necks of peasants until they stop breathing, who burn heretics at the stake or feed them to hungry lions, who separate children from their parents and detain them indefinitely.

I am part of a longstanding culture led by esteemed beasts of prey, some who call ourselves Christian patriots, some who go home after a day at the chamber, ignoring health protocols and flouting empathic behavior, keeping the gas running for god and fatherland. Such is the kingdom of motherfuckers. Selah.


V.

D, Domino, Dominion. To call someone “Dictator” was not the least bit insulting when the title was first developed by the Roman Senate. This designation of total authority was created to install one man at the wheel of state, ostensibly for a limited duration, to navigate rough times. Human dickery intervened. One man’s martial emergency is another man’s opportunity to seize and keep power. And so the title of Dictator became menacing, similar to Strongman.

Nevertheless, the drive to dub one primate as the sole ruler over life on earth has been around for a very long while. Deemed the divine right of kings, this doctrine demands fealty to an individual said to derive executive sovereignty from God. Do those steps to domination begin in a conquered past we’d rather ignore?

Something stirred in me while watching the movie Braveheart for the first time during the late ‘90s. I was bewildered by scenes in which nobles imposed prima nocta on commoners. Also known as droit du seigneur, or “lord’s right,” this semi-historical entitlement was said to grant feudal lords the privilege of having sex with any subordinate woman, especially on her wedding night.

Of course I quickly identified with William Wallace, played by Mel Gibson, the blue-eyed hero in the movie. Yet buried inside my socialization was the truth that I could have just as easily soldiered for some power-ravenous lord. Cruelty hides in a lineage of denial. We mimic and laud monsters who exert authority over us, particularly when their rule crowns our membership in some exclusive club. In this way men seek to salvage personal power.

It doesn’t take much savvy to track that habit into my Confederate past, just as no fancy calculus informed President Andrew Johnson’s opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1866. Head-nods from his peers probably did the trick, confident signals from homeys like me who were right pleased to see one of Appalachia’s rising sons in that newly vacated White House.

So it was that Lincoln’s successor executed his veto authority, in keeping with his overall efforts to undo the progress that many had fought and died for during the Civil War. Johnson claimed the push for civil rights was flawed because “the distinction of race and color is by the bill made to operate in favor of the colored against the white race.” By the god of nods Johnson would not allow lawmakers to unlock the “Black Codes” that secured his version of law and order.

History records how reformers in Congress followed their consciences rather than bow down to Johnson’s noddy authority. They overrode his veto, thus handing advocates for social justice a victory.



VI.

D is for Deliverance, not just by way of dueling politicos but through cross-cultural duets and the creative use of words.

That same year, back in ‘66, American women conducted their own rendition of a national congress. They aimed to lift inalienable rights even higher than hoped for by many abolitionists. Participants at the event listened to an inspiring speech by poet Francis Ellen Watkins Harper, one of the first African-American women to be published in this hemisphere. Ms. Harper reminded her audience that breaking the chains placed on underprivileged people would benefit everyone, even descendants of misguided souls who viewed her body as marketable flesh.

“We are all bound up together in one great bundle of humanity,” said Harper, “and society cannot trample on the weakest and feeblest of its members without receiving the curse in its own soul. You tried that in the case of the Negro. You pressed him down for two centuries; and in doing so you crippled the moral strength and paralyzed the spiritual energies of the white men of the country.”

In her speech Harper spoke in solidarity with working families who had not profited from the color line stamped on minds by rich slavers. She called out Andrew Johnson who by his opposition to civil rights betrayed everyone. She said her quarrel with Johnson was not his race or class, but that “he keeps ‘poor whits’ all the way through.”

Poetry to power. Harper admonished the noddy Johnson for trying to preserve a perverse order wherein lords erect monuments to their wealth  on the backs of subjects forced to divvy up whits (scraps, crumbs).

Literacy was among the treasures locked up in those erections to hubris. The keys to letters were guarded by bosses sworn to keep them hidden, especially from women of color. Harper explains why in a stanza from poem “Learning to Read.”

“Our masters always tried to hide
  Book learning from our eyes;
Knowledge didn’t agree with slavery —
  ‘Twould make us all too wise…”

The word “all” is as essential here as it is in our country’s civic pledge and founding paperwork. All human beings are created equal, with liberty and justice for all. Looking back over the historic context of these truths shows how meaning gestates along with our learning. People who used that word to start the American Revolution barely scratched the surface of its significance. Harper’s poem “The Burdens of All,” shared here in full, connects humanity with spiritual growth that is nurtured by neighboring.

The Burdens of All 

“We may sigh o’er the heaven burdens
  Of the black, the brown and white
But if we all clasped hands together
  The burdens would be more light
How to solve life’s saddest problems,
  Its weariness, want and woe,
Was Answered by One who suffered
  In Palestine long ago

He gave from his heart this precept,
  To ease the burdens of men,
“As ye would that others do to you
  Do even so to them.”
Life’s heavy, wearisome burdens
  Will change to a gracious trust
When men shall learn in the light of God
  To be merciful and just.”

Where war has sharpened his weapons,
  And slavery masterful had,
Let white and black and brown unite
  To build the kingdom of God.
And never attempt in madness
  To build a kingdom or state,
Through greed of gold or lust for power,
  Or the crumbling stones of hate

The burdens will always he heavy,
  The sunshine fade into night,
Till mercy and justice shall cement
  The black, the brown and the white.
And earth shall answer with gladness,
  The herald angel’s refrain,
When “Peace on earth, good will to men”
  Was the burden of their strain.

The poet’s dream of shared burden did not arrive in her lifetime. Those who suffered most under white male supremacist rule were not granted suffrage until thirty four years after Harper’s speech, when Andrew Johnson’s home state of Tennessee cast the final decisive vote to amend the U.S. Constitution and uphold every woman’s right to vote. Go Vols. Then came voter suppression and Jim Crow, more pushback from the Antichrist. Yet liberation kept knocking, dilating hearts and minds, even as predators worked to keep the doors closed.



VII.

Prophets wrote the end times would come like a woman in labor. In the past I imagined those far-seeing experts on childbirth looked like me. When the apocalypse came I figured I’d be raptured up into heaven with them. There the chosen would be insured in our communion. Blood shed by way of man’s tortured killing of Jesus would protect us from God’s judgement of other sinners.

Many people who believe that way were raised to think of Christ and his apostles as light-skinned men. If more people viewed Jesus as a person of color, would we see his death for what it was — a lynching sanctioned by the state, clergy, and mob? If he had been a she, would her murder have been recorded? Would it inspire us to overcome our appetite for sacrificial lambs? Would we become less prone to scapegoat others and spend more time working on our own behavior?

Images and rituals steel men’s brains, armorize our identity. Yet God gave us the capacity to change minds, re-direct our thinking.

That old coot Chronos leads followers on a one-way chronology of faith — from Abraham’s knife to judges and kings and the canonized prophets and apostles, on to the priests and conquerers and celebrity executives who wield power from religious strongholds of prosperity.

Yet as I study and learn the letters scribbled by my kind, I try to consider them in light of the primal Word that was written on hearts long before Chronos handed out calendars. I reflect on human existence, personal and collective, through the lens of my friend the Holy Ghost and the moral lessons of a child who was sacrificed to man’s lust for power. And in the name of Jesus Christ, Son of Mary and God, I cast out that murderer from the beginning.

Él Gran Chingón no tiene nada bueno que ofrecer a la humanidad. Nada.

Mankind strains under our binge on blood, mimicking empire’s pimp and war-lord. Jesus showed us how to lift this burden. Repent and care for others.

Love strikes everyday to reveal life free of Babylon’s desolation. No violent towers block perception in these flashes. No high-rise temple of death mars our horizon. Spells break, prayers surge, and a mother lode of wisdom ululates in release.

Humanity, reborn, reaches round to embrace the child — holiness embodied, one and all. Spirit soars through the alphabet of Creation. Here come peaceable letters. Unlock the gates of kindness. Open them whole.

Ave Belly Corpus, Chingada Domina.

Envoy Flashover. Griot Humdinger. Invoke Jubilee.

Kyrie Logos, LLamada Mirror Numen.

Ñaque Oomph, Primo Quirky Rabbi. Sapient Troth.

Ushpizin. Versicle Watershed, Xylem Yoni.

Zoomazoomazoomazoom.