The other day my spouse and I were driving home from visiting friends on the South Side. Spouse wanted to see my mom’s old house. Mom hadn’t been living there for a few years; she’s got dementia, and can’t be left alone.
Last I saw it, maybe a year and half ago, the house was run down, and had become overgrown with shrubs and weeds, and the two-car garage had all but collapsed.
It’s a place I’d never wanted to set foot in again, anyway, for reasons. So seeing that it had been fully rehabbed – new garage and all – and seeing the interior pics on Zillow, and learning that it had been scooped from a tax sale and flipped, felt like a successful exorcism.
Sam
Sam is a spouse and a parent, and makes a living driving fire engines. He was originally educated by the Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Chicago Public Schools, and decided much later in life to get a bachelors in social sciences from DePaul University. In his spare time he reads voraciously, mostly left wing political analysis or sci-fi & fantasy written by women. If you’re really lucky (or unlucky, depending on taste), you can catch him sharing a stage with his fellow singing students, trying his best and hamming it up at musical theater.
Recent writings:
The Apocalypse Trajectory
By Sam Holloway
“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
—Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
As I ease along toward my mid-fifties, having borne witness to a great many atrocities committed in my name, and as I currently witness a transition from the blundering, brutal fascism of President Trump to the smugly violent neoliberalism and imperialism of President Biden, I am tempted to dismiss King’s statement as hopelessly naïve. Not only is that quote a curt paraphrase of a more nuanced idea, it has likely also been used for cynical or misguided rhetorical purposes more times than I am willing to count. Even liberal commentator Chris Hayes has his doubts:
[Read more…]Mark of the Healer
By Sam Holloway
An interview with the creator of Netflix’s surprise hit
Unless you were a fan of the United Kingdom’s Department for Transport public safety and personnel training videos, until recently you were probably not familiar with the work of C. C. Cheltenham. By now you may be familiar, however, with the controversy and buzz surrounding their new Netflix movie Mark of the Healer. The movie, which debuted on the subscription streaming service January 19, quickly became the subject of wildly varying reviews; a rapidly growing global cult following; and even a series of protest campaigns in the U.S., Canada, and the UK.
[Author’s note: the following will be heavily laden with spoilers!]
[Read more…]Thrice removed
By Sam Holloway
One
When the medical personnel in the ICU pulled the plug on my father, it was anticlimactic for me. I can’t speak for my two sisters who were there, nor for my brother who was (as I recall) not there but was somewhere near the hospital in Kalamazoo, or perhaps somewhere back in Dowagiac. To be candid, I don’t reliably remember which of my siblings were there.
What I clearly recall is that when the time came, we all seemed to adopt a similar poise and decorum. We each took a turn to sit by his side and briefly say something in his ear, not knowing whether any of his mind was left for him to hear and understand it, but before and after that each of us stood outside the room and yielded the space around our father to his third wife, to her son who he’d come to regard as his own, and to the many adopted grandchildren and great-grandchildren who had been born and were being raised with him as their beloved patriarch.
I felt no envy or resentment toward my father or my step-brother. I felt a sympathetic sadness for my step-brother, who I shall call ‘Mike,’ and for his children as they all crowded around my father’s dying body and wept and wailed and begged him not to go. I understood, perhaps instinctively in that moment, and certainly consciously in retrospect, that Mike and his children and grandchildren were in the process of being torn away from a love and a paternal presence that I had already lost before I was old enough to comprehend.
The Spider’s Gambit
By Sam Holloway
On January 29, 2019, African-American actor and singer Jussie Smollett called Chicago Police to report that he had been assaulted and subjected to racist and homophobic abuse by two masked men. According to Smollett, the two assailants put a rope around his neck, doused him with a chemical substance, and told him that Chicago, including the wealthy Streeterville neighborhood where the alleged attack occurred, was “MAGA country.”
While subsequent developments of the case might tempt us to dismiss it as an overheated farce, the responses to those developments have much to tell us about our competing national mythologies. For the sake of this analysis, we can divide those mythologies into two categories: the dominant, foundational mythology of the normatively patriarchal, white supremacist nation-state; and the numerous mythological traditions of the oppressed and marginalized, of which we shall examine one: the West African trickster, Anansi.
[Read more…]Programming
By Sam Holloway
Several months ago, I wrote about how U.S.A.’s civic culture – for all its aspirations to social and intellectual progress – has not been able to escape our distant civilized ancestors’ predisposition to engaging in human sacrifice. There is another dynamic at work, though, one that manifests itself with both liberals and conservatives in this country and thus demands closer inspection. In fact, it is an issue with any body politic in any country at any time. For an illustration of this dynamic, consider this passage:
[Read more…]The Waning Age of the Altar
By Sam Holloway
“Your own history tells you. Your people are intelligent, and that’s good…But you’re also hierarchical…You’re bright enough to learn to live in your new world, but you’re so hierarchical you’ll destroy yourselves trying to dominate it and each other.”
Octavia Butler, Adulthood Rites, pp. 264-265
In its June 27, 1948 issue, The New Yorker Magazine included what was arguably one of its most controversial short stories to date and since. Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” generated an avalanche of immediate feedback for the magazine, most of it negative (1). Hundreds of readers were horrified and confused enough to cancel their subscriptions. Jackson began receiving a steady stream of hate mail, and even her parents openly expressed dismay at the story.
“The Lottery,” for the uninitiated, depicts a small, contemporary New England village as it conducts its annual lottery to determine which villager will be stoned to death. While much has likely been written about Jackson’s possible motivations for writing the story, this analysis will be informed more by the reactions. Most 1948 readers of The New Yorker had to have been aware, as doubtless was Jackson, of the horrors of the Nazi-led Final Solution in Europe just a few years before, and of the mass slaughter of Allied carpet-bombings on German and Japanese cities that had culminated in the deployment of an unprecedented and potentially apocalyptic weapon of war. Why, then, did the situation of ritual human sacrifice in a mundane, modern, and culturally familiar setting discomfit so many presumably sophisticated readers? It is beneath that jarring cognitive dissonance that we must look, if only to find whether ritual human sacrifice is either as obsolete or as incongruous to our modern, liberal societies as we might wish to believe.
[Read more…]