In Soviet Russia, Comrade Lenin loots you!

It’s a giant mask of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, cast in pure copper.  It’s about 30″ tall, and weighs about 45 lbs.  It came from a major government building in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, probably an important one considering the size,  and would have been on prominent display, but unfortunately, I don’t know which one.  I hope to someday find a picture of it somewhere.

Vladimir Iliyich Lenin cast in copper

In 1991, as the USSR was disintegrating before our eyes, the people inside found themselves suddenly less enamored of their formerly mandatory heros/leaders/overlords, like Stalin, and Lenin.  That goes double for the people who were never Russian to begin with, like Lithuanians.  You apply decades of brutal oppression to tenderize, then stuff your populace to the gills with propaganda about your awesome hero/leader/tyrant like a goose on a pate farm.  Marinate in resentment, then toss ‘em in a power vacuum as the despotic government collapses, bring to a gentle boil, and BAM!  Some crazy shit happens.

One of the first things people do is start tearing down monuments to the motherfuckers who oppressed them.  Not just because “Hey, fuck those guys”, but also because  they’re not getting paid anymore, and scrap metal is worth pretty decent money, His Copperness is no exception.  Most of the things this size would have been more likely to have been scrapped.  Fortunately, this little baby made its way into my hands instead.  It cost me almost $500, but I think it was worth it, as a semi-unique, certainly unusual piece of history.  It’s a symbol of the The Evil Empire’s defeat.  It’s half history, half war trophy.  Communism went broke, Capitalism swept in, bought the joint for pennies on the dollar, kept what they wanted, and sold the shit that goes bang to third world countries who spent the next 20 years killing each other with it.  It’s a good thing I don’t have room in my garage for a fighter jet.  Don’t think I haven’t had my eye on that 1/4 scale remote control B-25 Bomber that’s been on Craigslist for 6 months though.

I was in my last year of high school when the USSR collapsed.  I followed the news closely, but I didn’t really have the same appreciation for what was really going on as I do now.  I grew up in the Reagan Years, the Evil Empire, Star Wars, “Whatevah!  I’ll kill us all!  I’ll do what I want!” days.  It wasn’t quite Cuban Missile Crisis kinda paranoia, but they were definitely The Bad Guys.  So, when shit started going down, my feelings were basically “America, Fuck Yeah!  We win!  Suck it, Kruschev!  Ok, you get Democracy now, yay!  Good for you guys, lets be friends!  We can rebuild you,  make you stronger, better, faster!  Umm, what’s gonna happen with all your nukes now?  Ohh……….this is more complicated than I thought.”

The guy I got it from got it shipped to him years and years ago from Lithuania, and then for some bizarre reason, never opened it.  It was still packaged exactly like it was shipped, return address in Vilnius, and everything.   He insisted that we open it up right there, because he’d never actually seen it, and wanted a picture of it.  He said he had been saving it for some kind of special occasion.  I have no idea what sort of special occasion would warrant keeping a giant copper Lenin head under wraps for a decade, but I guess some people are weird like that.  I actually kept the packaging because it had the shipping info from its place of origin, but it was mistaken for trash, and thrown away.

This is totally unrelated, but the guy who sold me this is a professional writer/photographer, who’s specialty is WWII German and Soviet war photography.  I naturally find this fascinating, so he proceeds to whip out the ol’ photo albums, only these ones don’t suck at all.  They’re 100% filled with original WWII photographs, mostly by soldiers, both in and out of battle.  There were photos of Nikita Kruschev as a pall bearer(in the front, left side).  There was a photo of 6 makeshift graves, with stick-crosses on top, British army helmets resting on the crosses.  Written on the back of the photograph, in German, it said “The first 6 Tommies to die.”  Fuuuuuuuck.  It had been taken in Dunkirk, presumably shortly after the allied armies fled across the Channel.

There was a picture of a German, pointing a rifle, bayonet attached, at a Soviet soldier, who was lying in a ditch, holding one arm up in complete surrender, as if to block the bayonet.  He was quite obviously fucking terrified.  The weird thing is that there was someone standing behind all this like “OOOH, duuuude.  Go over there and make like you’re gonna stab that commie in the face.  I’m gonna take a picture, and send it home to my wife!”  There’s a fair chance that immediately after the picture was taken, they stabbed the guy in the face.  If the situation had been reversed, it probably would have gone pretty much the same way.

There were photographs of captured french army soldiers from Algeria, you know, black ones.  He went on to tell me that Germans often didn’t take the black french soldiers prisoner.  They were kind of afraid of them, because culturally they’d been fed scary stories about savage africans.   Germany was never a major colonial power, so they didn’t have much direct prior experience with black people, unlike damned near everyone else in Europe, who all had colonies in Africa.  So, they made them do “funny” stereotypical things, like pose with a knife between their teeth, crouching as if to attack from out of the bushes, or some other stereotypically “savage” pose.  They’d have their buddy take pictures.  Why, yes, it does sound familiar, doesn’t it?  Sometimes they’d pose in the picture with them.  Then they’d shoot them.

There was this one hilarious series of photographs from the USSR.  The first one was Stalin, with 4 people in a room, standing behind a conference table.  Then one of them fell out of favor, so they erased him from the photographs.  Then another, so they erased him too.  Eventually, all of them were erased, the picture was just Stalin, by himself, in a completely different place.  Awesome.

Anyway, The reason he needed to sell His Copperness is so he could afford to buy more WWII photographs.   If any of those pictures sounded fascinating, then apply the picture:word formula, and imagine thousands of them.  He’s got a book and everything.  The cover alone sells the book.

I’m gonna need to get me some of those for the collection, I’m sure I can make room for a “babies in nazi hats” section.

Mother’s Little Helper

There was a time when Opium wasn’t illegal.  It wasn’t even shunned.  In fact, it was a goddamned cureall.  It was so widely accepted that it was often administered to children, even infants.  Baby’s a little fussy?  Give her a nip of Mother’s Little Helper, and she’ll nod right off!  The dosage instructions say 2 drops for under three months, 4 drops for one year olds, 6 drops for a four year old, 14 for a ten year old, 25 for a twenty year old, and 30 drops for an adult.

Laudanum bottle from the late 1800s/early 1900s.

At the time, it was kind of unseemly for women to be drunk in public, boozin’ it up was a man’s prerogative.  Women just couldn’t be all dainty while guzzling beer and whiskey, but it was perfectly acceptable for a woman to have a nip off the ol’ laudanum bottle.  When addiction set in, things could get pretty ugly.  Overdoses were common.

The bottles say “poison” on them, and in the pharmacies where they sold this stuff, they’d have warnings, and scary displays like the Apothecary Doll, kinda like the doll below, except this one isn’t old, I got it from the awesomely bizarre people at Madame Talbot, who have great stuff, but a torturously disorganized website.   Anyway, I believe this bottle is from somewhere between 1900-1910, near the end of when this kinda stuff was legal.  I’m deeply amused by the total incongruity of the other things they sell, which can basically be summed up as “spices and shit”.  Hey, kids!  Which of these things is not like the other: cinnamon, vanilla, peppermint, or opium?

The most incredible thing, and this isn’t even a particularly good example, but there are dosage instructions for infants on the bottle.  Yes.  It was tooooootally cool to give opium to infants.  It wasn’t just cool, it was 4 out of 5 doctors agree kinda cool.   It’s so far removed from what would be considered acceptable today that I just can’t wrap my wits around it.  They felt that opium dens were bad, but not opium for infants?  I think the reason is probably that they just didn’t have a problem with opium, in fact,  they quite liked it.  They had a problem with “chinamen” running opium dens.  As dens of iniquity go, opium dens weren’t much worse than bars.  Both were associated with the other typical vices, prostitution and gambling.

40 years earlier, the British were *huge* fans of opium in China, you know, while they were running the drug trade.  They stopped being fans when China told them to GTFO, thus kicking off the Opium Wars, over what the British Empire felt was her undeniable right, a monopoly in the trade in opium, especially the right to sell it back to the Chinese.  They helped themselves to Hong Kong in the process, you kinda need a port to ship your opium from, right?

LOL Racists.

How could I not buy this?  26 bucks on Ebay! I love things that are representative of something sick and wrong.  The present really ain’t so bad, when you find things like this to remind you how truly shitty things could be back in the olden days.

The sign basically says “The door is that way”, except that’s not what it says at all.  What it means to say is, “Your door is over there, filthy nigger.”  Or, alternatively, “Nonono!  Thar be black people there!”  It’s not the words that are significant, it’s the meaning.  There are a lot of deeply rooted, nasty things conveyed by this sign that have nothing to do with the words written on it.  There’s nothing shameful about a sign that says “You must be this tall to ride…”  There is no sinister subtext that suggests dwarves, or children are lesser people.

Racist entry sign from Atlanta, Georgia, dated 1933.

It completely blows me away that just a few years before I was born, it was perfectly acceptable to think of black people as subhuman.  I don’t think of my parents as racist people, I don’t think I ever heard them make a comment to me as a child that I would consider racist, or in any way betrayed racist tendencies.  I know my grandparents have though.  I don’t really understand how they could grow up in an environment where this kind of thing was the norm, and not feel like something was terribly wrong.  I don’t understand how they could have accepted this.  I would like to think that had I been in such a position, I’d be horrified at the thought of black people being forced to the back of the bus, or being sequestered in a different portion of the restaurant.  I don’t understand how America(Fuck Yeah!) of all places, not only allowed this to happen, but actively encouraged it, and aggressively resisted the notion of equality for everyone(and often still does.)  We like to think of ourselves as champions for freedom and justice throughout the world.  It’s easy to rail against injustice when it’s somewhere else.  It’s very easy to point fingers at someone else doing wrong.  It’s much harder to point the finger at yourself.  Black units fought in WWII, it’s just that they were black units, and were generally treated poorly in comparison to their not black counterparts.  Liberate Europe, but heavens no, not the negros!  The parallels between the civil rights struggles of the past, and those of the present are obvious.  Replace “gay marriage” with “interracial marriage” and the argument in opposition is essentially identical, and equally ridiculous.

All this segregation stuff happened before I was born, so I don’t really feel like I share any responsibility for it.  I don’t feel like a racist, but if I’m being honest with myself, I have to acknowledge that I still think of black people differently on some level.  It’s not that I think less of them, it’s that I fear that they think less of me.  I am all too aware that I represent the category of people who systematically abused their category of people, and sometimes still does.  Cops don’t beat white people like they beat Rodney King.  In Los Angeles, they beat people like that all the time, but not white people.   Driving While Black is not an imaginary phenomenon.   I’m all too aware of the unconscionable injustice of it all.

When I encounter a new black person, which happens quite often(EEK!  They’re everywhere!), a part of me is subconsciously afraid that they will be suspicious of my motives.  I’m slightly more self conscious.  I feel as if I might be inspected with a suspicious eye for indicators of racist beliefs.   I feel a little bit uncomfortable if I even acknowledge someone’s “blackness” in a conversation.  It’s as if I’m alluding to something that shouldn’t matter, but we both know sometimes does.  I feel a teeny twinge of discomfort when I say it.  I want it to be as meaningless as mentioning someone’s hair color, while tacitly acknowledging the hidden undercurrent that unfortunately exists, doing it in a manner that conveys my contempt for said undercurrents, proceeding to feeling ridiculous for even giving a shit about it at all.  There’s that little hitch in there where it all happens.  It’s over in a flash, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t there.  It’s not that we really think of ourselves as fundamentally different, we’re just in different, yet completely arbitrary categories, separated by a whole lot of bad history that neither one of us really wants to talk about.  I sort of feel between between two generations.  It’s far enough away that I don’t at all feel responsible for it, but close enough that I still feel a little creeped out by the fact that people really still believe that shit, and worry that I could accidentally be mistaken for one of them.

What kind of guilt do my parents/grandparents feel?  How could they sit near(or not so near) a black person, and not feel shame for all the occasions where they silently, but knowingly participated in a travesty of justice.  While you sit in the front of the bus, how do you not feel shame while you bear silent witness to the people being shuttled into the back, where the white folks won’t have to be reminded of their presence.  That’s the answer though.  You put them behind you, and you keep staring forward.  If you don’t see them, you don’t have to confront the fact that you’re a part of it too.   I really do wonder how people in my parent’s/grandparents generation feel about this, but it’s just not something you talk about openly, or honestly.  It’s one of those things you talk around.  It’s always discussed obliquely, as if it were a piece of history, a part of someone else’s life, not your own, carefully scrubbed of any first-person references.

I kind of understand where it comes from, in a general sense.  People classify themselves and others.  Evolutionarily, our ability to categorize the world around us is an advantage.  We seek out things in our environment that are somehow different, or stand out, and we point them out to call attention to them.  It doesn’t stop at objects though, it gets applied to people too.  Similar people are Us.  Different people are Them.  Neighbors, and nations both clash over property lines, religions, resources, or any other reason they can think of.  Neighbors can hate, or fear each other for their superficial differences, just like nations.  People inherently compete against other people.  We constantly frame things in Us vs. Them contexts on all levels.  We *search* for ways to define people as same, or different, Us, or Them.  When I’m white, and you’re black, it’s automatic to begin thinking of us as different.  It’s not better, or worse, it’s just Not Same.  It’s a completely arbitrary, and utterly meaningless distinction. We default to noticing the differences that are obvious, not the differences that are meaningful.  Tens of thousands of years ago, the differences that were obvious were also the differences that were meaningful.  Now we’re like, civilized and shit.  The differences that are meaningful aren’t so obvious, but the old tendencies still exist, sometimes to our detriment.

I feel like I have to acknowledge that being black makes someone’s experience in the world different, because it *is* different and there’s no reason it should be.  In acknowledging it, I secretly fear being associated with it.   By not acknowledging it, I’d  feel like I’m hiding from it, refusing to confront the ugly truth.  I don’t know how to resolve that conflict other than by laughing at the ridiculousness of the ugly truth.