I love your work, and I enjoyed reading about Ruination Day for the second year in a row as a subscriber of this newsletter. I want to lift this passage at the end of your piece:
"Abraham Lincoln wasn’t a perfect President, but that doesn’t make him the same as Donald Trump. Some of my political enemies are actual Nazis, and it’s OK to denounce them as such. All I’m suggesting is that there has to be something more to this life than simply identifying the good guys and bad guys in our midst with a greater degree of moral accuracy."
I think here would have been an appropriate place to acknowledge that Lincoln happily led the execution of 38 Dakota people in 1862 during the ongoing campaign of genocide against Native Americans. I believe that understanding each of these historical actors' (Wilkes Booth AND Lincoln's) commitments to the twin projects of white supremacy and settler colonialism is crucial in understanding how we ended up here.
Your newsletter has taught me so much about how whiteness is constantly attempting to find foils within our own white communities in order to grace or exempt ourselves. It is with the knowledge that white people who are uplifted as arbiters of justice (such as, but certainly not uniquely, Lincoln) were also involved in settler colonial and white supremacist projects, that we as white folks can move forward with understanding ourselves and our histories.
Also, one of the surprises I've discovered in working on my book is how much Lincoln looms over it-- first as a figure of admiration, then as a figure of rejection (for the reasons you lay out so well) and then eventually a figure I'd have to metabolize as I made sense of my own complicity in *all this*. Another ghost who haunts me, as it turns out!
I just happened to do a deep dive into the lyrics of those two gems last night, on Ruination Eve (and into the wee hours of the holiday itself) and had my soul rended again, twenty-odd years later. I was transported back by the folk songs and African-American traditionals she references, but this adds layers I would never have considered without knowing the details of the Booth story. I’d so love to hear a conversation between you Gillian Welch about these tracks!
Thank you. And yeah, it's a dream of mine to one day get to tell Gillian Welch directly how powerful her historical excavation/imagining has been for me. The image she paints in that Longread article of how the realization about April 14th came to her just haunts me: "It wasn’t until 1998 or 1999, when I was living in a little shack of a house in Nashville. It was like an old slave quarters, and I was always sick when I lived there. So I was sick, and I had a ten-inch black and white TV, and I had it up next to the bed and I was lying in bed watching a PBS documentary on Lincoln. It got to the part where he was shot and they said “on April the 14th…” and I freaked out. I really thought it was very sinister; I think it’s how some people feel when they see a ghost."
Addressing the ruins around us: Spent the week on Spring Break with two great friends while we discussed--and made concrete plans for--how to put our money where our mouths are in ways that help those we care about (eg., youth of color), projects that give us joy (eg., investigative reporting), and the natural world (eg., oceans and redwoods).
I love your work, and I enjoyed reading about Ruination Day for the second year in a row as a subscriber of this newsletter. I want to lift this passage at the end of your piece:
"Abraham Lincoln wasn’t a perfect President, but that doesn’t make him the same as Donald Trump. Some of my political enemies are actual Nazis, and it’s OK to denounce them as such. All I’m suggesting is that there has to be something more to this life than simply identifying the good guys and bad guys in our midst with a greater degree of moral accuracy."
I think here would have been an appropriate place to acknowledge that Lincoln happily led the execution of 38 Dakota people in 1862 during the ongoing campaign of genocide against Native Americans. I believe that understanding each of these historical actors' (Wilkes Booth AND Lincoln's) commitments to the twin projects of white supremacy and settler colonialism is crucial in understanding how we ended up here.
Your newsletter has taught me so much about how whiteness is constantly attempting to find foils within our own white communities in order to grace or exempt ourselves. It is with the knowledge that white people who are uplifted as arbiters of justice (such as, but certainly not uniquely, Lincoln) were also involved in settler colonial and white supremacist projects, that we as white folks can move forward with understanding ourselves and our histories.
Extremely well put and 100% spot on!
Also, one of the surprises I've discovered in working on my book is how much Lincoln looms over it-- first as a figure of admiration, then as a figure of rejection (for the reasons you lay out so well) and then eventually a figure I'd have to metabolize as I made sense of my own complicity in *all this*. Another ghost who haunts me, as it turns out!
Goddamn. That was a beauty, thank you.
I just happened to do a deep dive into the lyrics of those two gems last night, on Ruination Eve (and into the wee hours of the holiday itself) and had my soul rended again, twenty-odd years later. I was transported back by the folk songs and African-American traditionals she references, but this adds layers I would never have considered without knowing the details of the Booth story. I’d so love to hear a conversation between you Gillian Welch about these tracks!
Thank you. And yeah, it's a dream of mine to one day get to tell Gillian Welch directly how powerful her historical excavation/imagining has been for me. The image she paints in that Longread article of how the realization about April 14th came to her just haunts me: "It wasn’t until 1998 or 1999, when I was living in a little shack of a house in Nashville. It was like an old slave quarters, and I was always sick when I lived there. So I was sick, and I had a ten-inch black and white TV, and I had it up next to the bed and I was lying in bed watching a PBS documentary on Lincoln. It got to the part where he was shot and they said “on April the 14th…” and I freaked out. I really thought it was very sinister; I think it’s how some people feel when they see a ghost."
Addressing the ruins around us: Spent the week on Spring Break with two great friends while we discussed--and made concrete plans for--how to put our money where our mouths are in ways that help those we care about (eg., youth of color), projects that give us joy (eg., investigative reporting), and the natural world (eg., oceans and redwoods).
Yes!!!!!
Beautifully crafted! Thank you for a delightful, thought provoking, informative piece.
Thank you!