The Anti-Pilgrim

Reflections of history while writing my novel, American Hero.

Maypole Envy

For want of a nail . . . the kingdom was lost. For want of an O’Doul’s non-alcoholic beverage, America lost a non-stop, multi-cultural, party-all-the-time party and got the Puritan Work Ethic, instead.

Let’s back up. Way up.

Back to the Roaring 20s—the 1620s. The Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock and started an intolerant, close-minded, xenophobic, racist, and repressed worker’s paradise. But a little side note has been written out of the history books.

Let’s dash across the pond to the Mermaid Tavern. (Shakespeareans know what I’m talking about). At a table in the back, through the haze of lavender and dill flavored tobacco smoke (What?), behind a small army of beer tankards you will see Thomas Morton, a Falstaffian libertine with poetry in his heart and beer on his breath. He just closes his copy of Francis Bacon’s utopian screed, Bensalem, that argues against the shame/guilt/blame sandwich that forms the staple of contemporary diets. Bensalem suggests, and Morton nods eagerly, that maybe God doesn’t want us to suffer. Maybe God didn’t necessarily create a zero sum world of pre-Darwinian Darwinism, winner takes all, to the victor go the spoils. Maybe God created the world’s biggest playground—the world—and said, okay, kids, go play, Daddy’s gonna take a nap.

Maybe life is about the pursuit of happiness (that’s right, young Tom Jefferson, pay attention). Maybe life is about exploration. Maybe science is not about defining the world, but fooling around with it. Maybe art is about the possible. Maybe people aren’t to be feared because they’re different. Maybe it’s more fun that way, more colors in the Crayola box.

So Morton gets funding from the Merchant Adventurers, the same cabal of business interests that funded the Mayflower and Jamestown—it’s called hedging your bets—and came to the New World, settling across the street from Plymouth in a plot of land Morton actually paid the Algonquin tribe for (unlike the Pilgrims who just bloody well took it), and, in honor of his Celtic ancestors—who were pretty much identical to the native population in America, especially with their fondness for feathers and naked dancing in the moonlight—he created Merrymount.

The difference between Morton’s Merrymount and Plymouth/Jamestown was that Morton had no interest in recreating the dysfunctional Church and State bananafish of the old world. He wanted to reinvigorate the ecumenical encomiendas of Bartolomé de Las Casas in Venezuela from the 1540s. He encouraged indentured servants to rebel against their masters. They did. He wanted the Indians to live with their English cousins. They did. Morton invited everybody to the party: Africans (including Muslims), Catholics, even Jews. There was complete equality between women and men. He established a representational democracy based on the Iroquois system. Everybody had a voice.

Mostly, the voices were singing. Morton felt the best use of time and resources would involve a lot of dancing and drinking beer.

 When they actually built a Maypole, a symbol of European paganism, and danced around it with ribbons and flowers in their hair, it became too much for the Puritans, who had already looked upon their neighbors as an incurable tumor.

They sent the stout Miles Standish, or as Morton called him, Captain Shrimp, to perform the operation. Two-dozen armed Pilgrims marched down the road to Merrymount singing “Onward Christian Soldiers.”

Standish’s bloodlust was frustrated because he arrived the morning of May 2^nd, the night after the Maypole revelry, which left the entire population merrily unconscious or with start-the-revolution-without-me hangovers. The Pilgrims bum-rushed the Catholics and Jews, re-indentured the white men, shipped off the Africans to the slave markets of Barbados, chased the Indians back into the forest, and married off (enslaved) the women. As for Morton, who as leader of the Merrymounters set the bar high for drunken revelry, he finally woke up chained in the hold of a ship plowing back to Merry Old England.

Thus ended a noble experiment in personal inspiration and social acceptance. The Merrymounters may have been having too good of a time, but eventually, people either moderate or pixilate. The Merrymounters never got that chance. I like to keep Thomas Morton’s fever dream alive every time I raise a pint, or some less fattening equivalent, but I don’t think of what might have been. I think of what can be.

Interviews: Jett Lagged

Interviews: Jett Lagged

Joan Jett

Before I reformed my wicked ways, I plied the dark alleys of the fourth estate. Touring through my back pages, I intend to report here on some of those bits and pieces.

I got into bed with Joan Jett and thought, not for the first time, that truly, I have the best job in the world. She was very Joan Jett, too. Rail thin, her crow black hair styled in a cross between a mullet and Jane Fonda’s from Klute, a stripe of black kohl across her eyes, red bandana tied around one wrist, black leather studs on the other. I wasn’t sure if she wasn’t going to kiss me or beat me up—and, either way, I’d be okay with it.

She brooded and she burned in that big bed in that small Manhattan hotel room, guitars and hair blowers on the floor, pizza boxes and beer cans on the table. She was sort of like an amped up version of the way Kristen Stewart played her in The Runaways years later, except this Joan Jett, the real Joan Jett, the one who the night before in a packed club belted out her hits such as “I Love Rock ‘N’ Roll,” “Crimson and Clover,” “I Hate Myself For Loving You,” and “Bad Reputation” was garrulous, talking non-stop, jet-lag anxious, caffeinated jittery. “I can’t get used to getting off the road,” she said, sitting up, crossed legged, flexing her hands like a boxer before getting gloved. “I never unpack. I can’t. I’ve got to run, even when I’m in bed. It’s fun, this life, working hard, getting blisters on your fingers from playing guitar all night, getting cramps from dancing around the stage, getting so tired sometimes because it’s like an hour and a half non-stop moving around horizontally with no time to breathe, like sex. 

She bursts out a guffaw and her head collapses onto the pillow, getting back into her groove, “And all the smoke and the lights—it’s like over a hundred degrees on stage—and if you stop for water everybody screams, ‘Hurry up, you—’ well, ‘hurry up’—and you think you’re just going to collapse any minute, just fall down in exhaustion and die, but you don’t, and that makes it all even better. God, I love it. Rock ‘n’ roll is better than sex.”

         During all of this, and though we’re both lying down in the bed, she never stops moving, twitching, arms flailing, miming a Pete Townsend guitar swipe or a series of Iggy Pop contortions, sitting up, flopping down. Being in bed with her is exhausting.

         Maybe she’s high, or maybe I’m low. She gets on about record companies and her original band The Runaways, and the enthusiasm turns sour. “We were slammed from here to eternity,” she says about the band, “because we were teenage girls playing sweaty rock ‘n’ roll, and then,” her eyes torch up, “they tag us with this sexual image.” She looks away, half disgusted, half embarrassed, “From there on then it was jailbait.”

         “I was always thought it was about the anger,” I offer.

        “Anger?” she says, angrily. “I’m not angry. I’m aggressive. There’s a difference. Men get to be aggressive because people will cut you down just because you’re rowdy and loud and wanna have a good time because otherwise what else is there, and that’s aggressive living, and that’s okay for a man. But for a woman, she’s angry like it’s this bad thing. You know what? I am angry. I’m angry at people who think I’m angry.”

        She rolls on her side facing me, head in hand, “Doesn’t it boggle your mind the way people twist? The same people who said to me two years ago, ‘Please, get lost,’ now say, ‘I always knew you were great.’ I’ve seen it repeatedly and it’s disgusting. But you don’t have to be in a rock ‘n’ roll band to get that. You see it in entertainment, you damn well see it in politics. I bet you see it in every hut and street corner in the world. That’s the human condition, isn’t it? And if that doesn’t—you know—the lies, the bullshit, the double-dealing, the raw manipulation, if that doesn’t make you angry, then you’re just not paying attention. That’s why the only truth there is, the only thing real, sometimes, I feel, is that time on stage, that time when the lights are hot, the music is loud, you’re soaked in sweat, your hands are numb, you’re playing out of a near death experience, and everyone in that room is with you, for that song, maybe a note, you got them, they got you. Yeah, I live for that. I got the best fucking job in the world.”

I lay down corrected.

Land of the Free, Home of the Slave

Reflections of history while writing my novel, American Hero.

                 Islamophobia led to Slavery                       

As many things do, this story begins with a storm at sea. A Dutch ship carrying 20 African slaves to Brazil is blown off course and slams into the outer banks of Virginia within rowing distance of the English settlement in Jamestown. The Dutch make a deal: fix our ship and we’ll give you 20 barrels of sugar. But the laborer-deficient Jimmies say, how about those men over there? Welcome to the future United States, Africans, and centuries of slavery and oppression. But wait. Not yet.

So these 20 Africans are unchained and escorted off the slave ship. The Jimmies don’t take out the whip. Instead, they hand them shovels. They give the Africans the same deal they got: seven years of backbreaking labor for The Man (the Merchant Adventurers, underwriters of the settlement) and then . . . freedom. Meaning, a lifetime of backbreaking labor for yourself. They were Indentured Servants. After their term, just like the Euro-Jimmies, the Afro-Jimmies got a few acres and a pat on the back.

Wait? Where’s the Massa and the bullwhip? Not yet.

Meet Antonio Negron, aka, Anthony Johnson. At the end of his indenture, he got some land, grew tobacco and indigo, took on his own indentured servants, got more land, more servants. He became one of the biggest planters in Virginia, with over 200 workers, mostly European.

To recap: One of the richest men in America in 1640 was a black man and he had over a hundred white men working his fields—and that was considered normal. At the end of their Hard Seven, all of them, whether they came from Gloucester or Gambia, were given the same deal; land and a handshake.

What happened?

In the classical and medieval world, there is tribalism based on religion or geography. But all that ugly racism (leading us to Nazis, Bull Connor, and the Birthers) doesn’t appear until the late 17^th century and then used to justify slavery, ipso facto.

It doesn’t start with color of skin.

It starts, as many things do, with the Puritans.

The problem with Anthony Johnson and the other Africans mixing it up in the jambalaya of humanity making it rich in the New World was not skin color, but religion.

The vast majority of Africans in America were Muslims.

The problem with Anthony Johnson was his God.

Puritans hated Islam more than Catholicism, almost as much as they hated the Jews.

So, as the Massachusetts Colony became more successful and had more clout they made laws to prohibit Muslims, Catholics, and Jews from owning land.

Eventually, Catholics got Maryland and Jews settled in Rhode Island. They had powerful connections in European politics. Muslims did not.

What did Anthony do? By this time he was a devout worshipper of the only religion that really counted in America. Keep your muezzin, show me the money. He converted to Christianity.

In compliance with the worship of money, however, businessmen gradually changed the laws to confiscate African-owned land. From there, it’s an easy step to take suddenly indigent blacks and make them work—for free and, unlike traditional slavery, for life and, here’s the real innovation, create generational slavery so children are automatically born bonded.

Like Jews in Germany, Africans in America did not at first realize the momentum of these new laws.

Once it became obvious that things were changing, Anthony bought and freed as many “slaves” as he could—in vain. Slave trading proved profitable. The game was up.

Anthony died sometime before the slave laws really kicked in. (Georgia waited until the 1750s to make slavery a legal distinction, only a generation before the Revolution for Freedom and Equality—oh wait, not for you, sorry).

How did the black people react to this unfortunate series of events? How would you? Stunned at first, disbelieving (again the parallel to the Jews in Germany), then outrage. Stories of slave revolts don’t often make it into the history books because it’s embarrassing at Back to School Night, but we’ll get to that later.