Even 4chan Can't Stand the WBC...

Wanna see something just hilarious?  Click on the image below to read the whole thing. 

The image screen capture is courtesy of the blogger Joe My God.   I've decided to put our differences aside for one day and give him a high-five for snagging this.   Thanks, Joe!

Apparently, Cindy Phelps Roper got just a little mouthy about the purported Internet attack on Westboro Baptist Church and Anonymous has finally had enough.  Shortly after proclaiming on a live, on-air radio program that God made the Internet just so WBC could spread their rant to the whole world and (more or less) invoked the protection of God over their servers, a spokesperson from Anonymous (on the same radio program)  took their website down in about 45 seconds with a "swift and emotionless b%&#%slap" courtesy of 4chan.

As of 3:00 EST today, I tried to get on the WBC servers, and all their sites are STILL down.  Yowza.  If you like brimstone served with a side of poetic justice, you can see most of the radio interview on YouTube courtesy of the David Packman Show.  If you want to skip Cindy Phelps-Roper grinning like a zombie and being her generally unlovable self, however, the money shot starts somewhere around the 8:00 mark. 

I know I shouldn't take joy in the suffering of our enemies.  But I did a little dance for joy when I saw this nonetheless.  Oh well. 

Fred Phelps: civil rights activist?! CNN Reports...

Well, well-- if wonders never cease.  It seems that Fred "I'll protest anything" Phelps has a stranger history than even fiction could produce.  According to CNN, the head of the Phelps family was once a full-time civil rights attorney-- although his commitment to African-American equality is still very much in doubt, as conflicting reports are coming from the Phelps children.

The CNN article, linked above, does clear up one question I've never found an answer for-- how the Phelps clan can afford to gallivant over the nation doing protests.  CNN reports that 11 of 13 of the Phelps kids are attorneys, which might be the answer to how they collectively have the cash to pull off so many publicity stunts all over the country.  Not that Phelps is still a practicing attorney himself, however; Phelps was disbarred in 1979 by the Kansas supreme court on account of witness badgering, CNN's John Blake claims.  Phelps' daughter, however, claims that the disbarment was on account of animus against her father for his activism for blacks. 

The article is an interesting read, for lots of reasons-- quotes from Phelps-Roper on her father and from a son who's left the church, as well as anecdotes from people who knew Phelps before he started carrying placards at Shepard's funeral.  You have to read it to believe...

Make your Own WBC Protest Sign... um, really?

Obviously, I've been thinking about protests lately, first from the side of the spectator, and now from the side of the protester.  As I was cruising about on Flickr, I ran into this beauty.

If you're wanting to push the boundaries of taste, a few extremely imaginative counter-protesters have created a website where you can create your own WBC counter-protest.

It works a lot like the lol-style caption sites-- just type in a phrase and create your own protest sign in a variety of Phelps-approved color schemes.

As I look at this, I am both appalled and yet somehow thrilled.  The Flickr photostream for the image above has other pictures of this same fellow protesting the WBC with some rather funny signs. My favorite?  His friend is holding a sign that says "Mikey hates everything."  Enjoy (if you can!)

---

PHOTO CREDIT:

Picture by Sir EDW, available through Creative Commons License: http://www.flickr.com/photos/sir_edw/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

The Second Casualty is the Truth: Some Thoughts on the Murder Narrative

[Our Spanish door poses a very good question: what is truth, exactly?]
[You may decide for yourself, but the door requests that you check John 18.]

Like I've said before, I did not want to hear from Henderson and McKinney when I watched The Laramie Project: 10 Years Later.   There were a lot of reasons for that which left me conflicted after the performance.  But one upside to hearing them speak, I figured, was that perhaps we'd finally hear the truth come out.  At first, when I started to think over McKinney's revelations in the play, for a moment of two I thought that we had finally heard the truth.  But the more I reflected back on the different versions I've heard and read, I realized that I don't think that was the case.  I started to see more and more holes in the new stories until I couldn't trust their version of events.  And the more I thought about it, I didn't trust what they told us in the 20/20 interview-- and they told us then that they weren't telling the truth when they talked to the cops the first time, either.  The more I mentally sorted through all this narrative debris, I started to wonder: have they ever told the truth?  And if they did, how on earth would we ever know? 

There is an old saying that in war, the first casualty is the truth.  With the two plays of The Laramie Project, we can see a similar principle at work:  Matt Shepard was the first casualty of McKinney and Henderson's rage.  The truth behind his murder, it seems, was the second.  It may be time to finally realize that of the three people who know the truth of that night, one is dead, and the other two, after so many years of rehashing this story for different purposes, have apparently lost the ability to tell us.

At this point, I feel like I can no longer treat McKinney and Henderson as capable of telling me anything about what happened on that night.  If there was ever any truth there, it's lost.  All that leaves me with is to see their stories as just that--  narratives they tell us.  Each narrative is an attempt at a relationship between them and their audience, told for a specific purpose.  Certainly, each narrative contains elements of the truth, but we have so few tools to help us discern what the truth is that the forensic truth of what happened that night might just be gone forever.  All we can do is look at these different narrative strains and evaluate them for their purpose and effectiveness.  What are the advantages to telling each story, and how were these narratives applied?  What were the perpetrators responding to when they told each story? 

The Best of Counter-Protesting on Flickr

Okay, so this is going to be my last post on Phelps counter-protesters, I swear. But if you found any of the social protests things I have mentioned over the last few days fun or interesting, I'd recommend this Flickr Gallery of images I put together which contains my favorite responses to the WBC in one spot. There's a little bit of everything rolled together in the gallery-- a lot of love, a little hate, reason and religion-- and what has to be the most adorable social protesters I have ever encountered. 

Peace, love and finger paint, y'all. It's a beautiful thing.

---

PHOTO CREDIT:
Richmond Protester against WBC, fundraising for "Pennies for Peace."  From theloushe's Flickr photostream: 

http://www.flickr.com/photos/theloushe/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Laughing at the Devil

SURGEON GENERAL'S WARNING 
FOR THE EASILY DISGUSTED:

I am personally offended by my own post.  So proceed at your own risk.  :-)

So, in my last written post I shared with you a rather hilarious trend in Fred Phelps counter-protesting: silliness.  Irresponsibly, horrendously fun silliness.   From what I can tell, many protesters have realized that 1) Fred Phelps makes no sense, and 2) they like to protest because they just want the attention, so the counter-protests are making fun of these same two traits.  But if we compare these kinds of civil protest to operation "Angel Action,"  many of the counter-protests don't seem to have coherent message anymore. Others take the opportunity to undercut the power behind the one-two punch of hate that Fred Phelps dishes out by distorting his message, satirizing it to the point of absurdity.  You know, like these fellas.  (No points for originality there, fellas, but you get a B+ for style and an  A+ for chutzpah.) 

Part of me, I have to admit, absolutely loves this trend because it's so subversive.  Part of the power of hate is the ability to control somebody else's emotions or actions by making them feel small, or even worse, making them hate back.  That's the wonderful thing about satire: it breaks the blade of hate and sharpens the handle instead.  If nobody takes Fred Phelps seriously, if he has no emotional impact, then he doesn't have any power to hurt people anymore.  He just becomes the desperate, masturbatory attention slut he really has been the whole time. (Sorry for the language.  Just sayin'.)

On the other hand, I look at these protesters' refusal to take Phelps seriously, and I think that they don't understand how dangerous of a game they're playing.   Just pretending that a rattlesnake doesn't have fangs isn't going to keep people from getting bit.  The problem with Fred Phelps' rhetoric is that it leads to things with very real consequences: gay-targeted violence, intolerance, racism.  You can't make those real-world problems of evil go away by holding up a "FRED PHELPS IS GAY" placard in a protest.  To borrow a cliche from The Usual Suspects, the biggest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing people he didn't exist-- and convincing people that he's merely a buffoon isn't too far off.  Likewise, the worst thing that could possibly happen to social justice in this country is to convince the world that rhetoric like Phelps's doesn't matter.  It'd be too easy to ignore him, let this hate fester, and then when it breaks forth in a real way, wonder where it had come from.

For a different example: are you offended by "Emo Hitler?" Good-- he offends me, too.  That's why I put him in this post.  In some ways, pulling out Hitler as an exemplar in any debate feels like "jumping the shark," but that picture crystallizes so many of the ethical dilemmas of satirizing Phelps: how is the picture at left any different than what those two guys are doing to Phelps above, I have to wonder?  In a weird way, I kind of think they are equally dangerous-- and the humor in the satire undercuts the seriousness of the threat they pose. 

There's no good way to talk about the following subject without offending at least somebody, so I'll just let "Emo Hitler" and his Flock of Seagulls haircut ask the question for me: when is it okay to laugh at the devil? Or, do we have a moral imperative not to laugh, but to combat evil seriously, and head-on? That's what I'd like to explore today. 

New Horizons in Intolerance Management

[Seeing as it's April Fool's Day, this seemed as appropriate place as any to run this post.  Enjoy the zaniness!]

So, way back when I first starting blogging (well, back in November anyway) I wanted to put some fancy bling and gadgets on my website to make it more exciting.  One of the things I added was this sweet little gadget you can see off to the right which displays photos from Flickr based on certain search terms.  (You can probably see it ticking away right now, just below and to the right of the top of the screen.)  Whatever robot it uses to crawl the pictures tends to find one particular photostream or group of recently uploaded pictures, so the photos run in common batches, switching out to something new every couple of weeks or so.  

I put in just the search term "Laramie" and let it run, and it started just the way I wanted-- with shots of sunsets, prairie, the college, homecoming parades, sports, family pictures and kids on bikes-- even these cool stereoscopic "crosseye" pictures one Laramie community member makes and posts online.  I've found that little gadget to be an interesting little waste of my time.

But something has changed in the last few weeks-- my picture gadget has gone rogue and started posting strange pictures-- of protests.  Actually, for a little while they have been almost exclusively pictures of different protests, sometimes of things that have nothing to do with Laramie or The Laramie Project whatsoever.  A lot of people (on Flickr, at least) seem to have associated Fred Phelps with Laramie itself, which I obviously have a problem with.  No doubt his nasty Matthew Shepard signs have something to do with that. But what these counter-protesters are doing, and why people are protesting Phelps, are absolutely strange! 

Most of these pictures I'm going to show you today come from Tabiii's Flickr Photostream, which were of a counter-protest in Dutchtown, LA against the Westboro Baptist Church.  They were protesting (you guessed it) a high school production of The Laramie Project.  She was a really good sport to let me use these pictures, and I appreciate it!

If you'd like to see all of Tabiii's photos from the Dutchtown protest, you can view them as a full slide show at this link.

Another great set is antelucandaisy's set for the same protest, which you can view as a full slide show here.

So, let me show you one little sample of some of these wild, zany crazy "Laramie" tagged protests, and an interesting new trend in counter-protesting, after the jump! 

Incredible panorama shot of a WBC protest/counter-protest

Westboro Baptist Church Counter Protest Clowns pt.1, originally uploaded by jesse.feinman.

I had used some pictures from a 2009 Albany high school performance of The Laramie Project in a previous post.  Apparently, Westboro Baptist Church had shown up to protest the performance, and a Flickr community member, Jesse Feinman, has posted an absolutely amazing panorama shot of the protest.  (That's him at left counter-protesting, which I absolutely love.)  If you want to see what love overwhelming hate looks like, then I'd recommend it.   The counter protest on the other side of the street in the full panorama shot is simply amazing.

Since Flickr has a size limit posted on pictures, the link below goes to a different web address where you can view the whole thing.  

My favorite signs:  "Jesus Forgives" (on left)   and "You eat your kids" (!) on the right.  Guess which one is which:  http://pic90.picturetrail.com/VOL2209/11470066/20327503/357238914.jpg

The picture link above is watermarked (I did that intentionally), but go to his Flickr photostream (linked above) for contact information and link if you'd like a clean copy.  He says he's happy to answer requests.  

So please if you like, take a look, wash your hands, and then hug somebody who needs it.

UW's resource page for the Matt Shepard attack

In my quest to find as many resources as possible on the Shepard killing and The Laramie Project I have discovered that the University of Wyoming never cleans out their press releases.  This means that they're turning into a great online source to get the university's response to the Shepard killing. 

For instance, during the media blitz they put together a news page with all the university's official releases on it to streamline media access.   Here is the link to that page for some great primary source information about the university's response to Shepard's beating and murder.  It includes addresses at both the candlelight vigil and the memorial held the next day and some press releases regarding the protests.

The permanent link is as follows:  http://www.uwyo.edu/News/shepard/

Down the Rabbit-Hole: Jackrabbit's Story, Part 4

You know, up until three years ago, I was extremely resistant to admit that the Shepard murder had any profound or lasting impact on my life. I'm not entirely sure even now why that was the case; I think maybe it was because how much the whole experience left me jaded and worn out. It probably also had to do with denial; it didn't hit home until I saw a TLP performance just how psychologically battered the whole mess had left me, and the less I thought about everything, the better.

But Matt's death, and the trials, did leave a lasting impact on me. Like it or not, the worldview I had inherited from my conservative parents and my farm-born grandparents was undergoing a sea change. In a lot of ways, I still consider myself more of a conservative on some things, but I was rapidly turning into a rabid egalitarian when it came to issues of human rights and tolerance. When I later became a believing, evangelical Christian, I took those lessons with me into my faith; I moved progressively away from the staunch, legalistic individualism of my Western American upbringing (and the Baptist Faith and Message) to something much more closely akin to Desmond Tutu's ubuntu theology.  I can't deny that these years following Matt's death have been a major influence for all of that.

Down the Rabbit-Hole: Jackrabbit's Story, Part 3

You know, I'm not really sure where the next place I should go with this should be. There was a pretty long hiatus between the insanity of the first weeks, the arraignment of Henderson and McKinney, and then the news reports, but that doesn't mean that time was calm. Someone in our program died in a wreck in Telephone Canyon, which was extremely tough for some of the upper classmen. I went home for Thanksgiving for the first time since I had started college and all hell broke loose. It seems like everyone except me and my parents were drinking like fish, and we all spent most of our time yelling at each other.   I retreated into my books instead, reading Wise Blood and The Violent Bear it Away, and I marveled at how O'Connor's spiritually distorted, disjointed world looked a lot like the one I was living in.  Over winter break I tore into more Nabokov and tried my hand at some Faulkner.  Quentin Compson hit just a little too close to home, so I put The Sound and the Fury away for a little longer, until I took modern literature with Dr. Loffreda. 

That spring hit us with a dizzying salvo of personal tragedies. Russell Henderson's trial and plea bargain had to compete with a suicide jumper from the 12th floor of White Hall and one of the more ridiculous bomb threats ever concocted. The Columbine shooting was that spring as well, and some of my fellow band students from the Littleton area were devastated. I have a vague memory of Henderson's sentencing sometime around the suicide and just before the Columbine shooting, but it's not very clear to me at all.

A Sense of Place: a note

So a few days ago I posted some thoughts about Laramie as a landscape and how Amy Tigner's sense of Laramie as a pastoral landscape might help explain how audiences may interact with Laramie as a space.  To recap, my main concern was that people from urban landscapes and are more used to seeing rural America as an "elsewhere" might have a harder time using the play for self-reflection.  

There might actually be some truth to that.  For instance, I was reading an article on a high school production of TLP in California back in 2003.  In an interview following the murder of a transgendered teen in his community, the director of the production, Dennis Kohles, made an interesting comment: 

No one was more shocked by the angry faxes [from Fred Phelps] and Eddie Gwen Araujo’s slaying than the play’s director.

“I guess I’ve lived in the East Bay too long,” said Kohles, a lifetime Oakland resident and O‘Dowd alumnus. “Our kids are very open and mature, more like college students. Some of them have gay relatives. And our religion classes here teach the kids to learn how to do a good discernment of tolerance and how people differ,” said Kohles, who remembers himself at their age as “naive.” (Abercrombie). 

I can't help but feel that he's contrasting his cast of mature young adults at his high school in Oakland to what he sees of Laramie in TLP. And, if that's the case, then he isn't seeing Laramie as a reflection of his own community; he sees Laramie as elsewhere.  That comment is particularly interesting when you know he's reacting to the murder of a transgendered teen from his own community.  If the East Bay community is full of "very open and mature" kids, then what about the four young men who brutally murdered Gwen Araujo in 2003?  It could be that's exactly what he's trying to figure out.  If that's the case, then he gets what this play is about.  Or, maybe he doesn't see the disjunction at all; it's hard to tell from the article the exact context of his comment.  If that's the case, then Laramie is still an 'elsewhere' that doesn't register as a 'here'; they don't grow children like that here.  He's lived in the East Bay too long.

But that's the awful, awful blessing of Laramie: we know.  That place is our place.  It's his place, too.  I would love to talk to this man now, six years after this high school production, that teen's murder and Phelp's picketing, and see how he reflects back on this time.  I wonder because the difficulties he's reflecting on are exactly my own.  

---

My secret hope was that they were from somewhere else, that then  of course you can create that distance: We don't grow children like that here.  Well, it's pretty clear that we do grow children like that here...

-- Jeffrey Lockwood, in The Laramie Project (2001):46

---

Source: 
Abercrombie, Sharon.  "'Defeating Hate' with a Play About a Killing: Local Murder Brings Matthew Shepard Story Home for Students."  National Catholic Reporter 21 Mar. 2003: 3.