Specters of Laramie in Tucson, Arizona

I had been back on the UW campus for less than twenty minutes when I found out about the Tucson shooting last week.  I was checking the news in the Union building when the alert popped up on my laptop screen.  The next morning, my brother Coyote and I spent most of the morning before I headed to campus and he headed to work watching the press conference.  I only hope that the Tucson community can continue to stand together and support each other as they bury their dead, and that they remain unified in the face of the media speculations about 'toxic rhetoric' and political cheap shots aimed at the other side.

During that same time, I spent a lot of time on the microfilm scanners in Coe Library reading civic commentaries of a different sort, and I started to see discursive echoes of the current Tucson troubles in the Boomerang  and Branding Iron archives.  As journalists and ordinary citizens grappled with the trauma of Matt's beating, I saw them asking similar questions about politics and rhetoric in 1998: to what extent is the national discourse to blame?  How much is the local community to blame?  To what extent should politics and this tragedy coincide in national discussion?  Should political parties be held accountable for their words and policies that might encourage such behavior?   Is the community to blame for the actions of the perpetrator(s), and how should we remember the victim(s)? 

And, now I see that the people of Tucson, Arizona are grappling with similar questions about their identity as a community in the old West.  CNN recently posted an article titled "Tucson Battles Wild West Image After Shooting," looking at everything from the desert landscape and tourist kitsch to the political climate in this Arizona town.  The tone of the article sounds extremely familiar to me:

 ...Tucson sees itself as an oasis of progressivism and diversity in a state that's gotten a national reputation for bigotry and anti-immigrant hate speech. It's the kind of place that hosts mariachi festivals, celebrates Cesar Chavez and asks cars to pull into parking spaces backward, for the safety of bicyclists.  

But after the Democratic congresswoman was shot and six were killed Saturday during a political meet and greet at a supermarket on the northwest side of town, this place of golf courses, taquerias and cactuses started to look at itself anew -- examining not only the causes of the shooting but the borders residents put between each other.  (par. 5-6, emphasis mine)

This same formulation shows up everywhere in the 1998 archives.  This same article on Tuscon even shows the town struggling to understand the shooter's place in their community as well, in almost the same words as Laramie once struggled to place McKinney and Henderson:

[Others] see the accused shooter, Jared Loughner, as mentally unstable. The event, they say, was an aberration -- not a reflection on this unique town, where the hot, dry air attracts arthritis patients seeking relief.

"It's the nicest place on Earth, as far as I'm concerned," said Mark Gardner, a New Yorker who spends the winter in Tucson because of the warm weather. 

Gardner is like many who end up in this city of retirees, immigrants and transplants -- where chain stores are dressed up like pueblos and corduroy-textured cactuses line the roads, their stumpy hands outstretched like hitchhikers. He came to Tucson with romantic visions of the American Southwest.

What he found wasn't far off.  (par. 11-14, emphasis mine). 

There is also speculation about whether or not the society at large should bear some of the guilt for the Tucson rampage, a question which was asked, often unfairly, of Laramie as well.  At the same time, the question itself is legitimate: is there such a thing as social or societal guilt for a member who acts alone?  From a religious perspective, that question has an interesting answer, and one that Stephen Prothero explores in regard to the Tucson killer this week on CNN's Belief blog.  He confesses, "I can't help thinking we have at least a spattering of blood on our hands."  Despite the controversial nature of that comment, I find part of myself wanting to agree with him. Not just about Matt, but about Arizona, too.  Maybe we're all somehow a little more fallen because of what happened, less innocent.  Maybe our social connection to the killer and victims made us all somehow present in Tucson, just as I was once in Laramie, and perhaps that comes with some kind of social or metaphysical guilt attached.  I don't really know. 

So, once again the national discourse is repeating itself, but it has settled upon a new political lightning rod from all the dry, electric static surrounding the nation's new hot-button topic: immigration.  Could the Tucson shooting find itself becoming the next symbol of social turmoil in the national discourse?

I don't really know how to answer that yet, as this story is still just forming, but these events certainly show the same potential for that to happen.  In Laramie, that discourse created an extremely ambivalent response as some people cringed back from the old West motif and claims of intolerance while others took it to heart, indicting the culture.  Some then used that self-scrutiny to make Laramie, and the nation, a better place, and others rejected the notion altogether.

Maybe we know better now how to take these questions, these stories, and use them to create unity and social growth.  Or, maybe nothing's changed.  I don't really know how to make anything positive out of this observation, other than to note how social discourse and national memory seems to be following the same pattern.  What will be the outcome for national discourse, and what will happen to the Tucson community? 

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PHOTO CREDIT: Images of the spontaneous memorial at Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords' office and at Oracle Road, Tucson, Arizona. Taken by Search Net Media, available via Flickr.

Jackrabbit's conference paper on TLP, sort of

A few days ago I posted my initial reaction to presenting something vaguely academic at a scholarly conference; I figured that it was a lot easier to actually post the damn thing to let you see for yourself what I did than to try to reinvent the wheel-- especially when inventing the wheel the first time seems to have consumed a good portion of my sanity.

I have to give this with a caveat or two: first of all, this is not the final draft I presented.  I had to make a lot of handwritten changes to this before presenting, and now I can't find the stupid thing to type them in.  So this is simply a draft-in-progress; as such, it doesn't have any of my citations in it, either.  Besides, that will keep lazy undergrads from plagiarizing this for a research paper.  (For those who were considering it: shame on you, lazy undergrads.  Go to the bibliography page for sources and write your own.)  

So, please treat this for what it is: more of a sketch of my research than anything actually presentable or scholarly in of itself.  You can also view my Powerpoint presentation (oh joy.) to fill in the quotations, evidence and critical background, if you're that masochistic, here.  (hint: right-click the file on that page and click "save," otherwise your browser will try to open a Powerpoint file, with hilarious results...)

So, without further ado, here's a look at Jackrabbit's mediocre first attempt to act like a grown-up and treat The Laramie Project like a scholar after the jump!

Jackrabbit Goes to the Academy: and I survived!

This past weekend was the bi-annual NEXUS interdisciplinary conference at the University of Tennessee, focusing on the theme of "Trauma and Testimony." Yours truly presented a paper on The Laramie Project dealing with testimony and community identity, which went... interestingly.  I wasn't entirely sure I was going to be able to pull the damn thing off, but after a lot of hair-pulling I managed to get a paper written, and the presentation went off with just a few minor lumps, bumps and bruises.

Actually, I discovered that getting this paper together challenged a lot of my previous ideas about why I resent The Laramie Project so much, and that was a good thing.  Essentially, I didn't like what the play was doing to my ability to define my own existence, but I also realized that it's that destabilizing of Laramie's idea of community that allows the LGBT community to speak.  Secondly, I never liked having to allow certain people (who I will not name because of their litigious personalities) to speak for me.  That's the same argument that a lot of TLP haters use about letting gays and lesbians speak out against them, and I have to wonder...  I think that Tectonic did a great thing by allowing my gay friends and neighbors the agency to speak of their life in Laramie, and in doing so they challenge the way that the "majority" have defined the community, and they feel the same press of being "defined" by a society external to their own.  Is that why I'm so ambivalent for this play-- because now I have a vague idea of what it feels like to be a voiceless member of the GLBT community, defined by the center and unable to speak back?

Anyhow, getting to that realization took a bit of personal wrestling.  Due to exams and other concerns, I couldn't actually write the presentation until the week of the conference.  Even though I had loads of time to do it, I kept staring at a blank screen, tapping my fingers, reading friends' blog posts, doing some creative writing.  Finally, the night before I had to give the paper, I stared at my terrifying, blank computer screen and typed out a single phrase:

a strained and sometimes fractious relationship

 I stared at that phrase for about two solid minutes, and once I had the source of my writer's block on the page, the paper I had been writing in my head for the last month and a half sprouted out from under my fingers.  I stayed up all night writing the stupid thing.  

 The other three papers in my panel were freaking awesome, and there's one in particular I might write about, if "Annie" will let me, that is.  She wrote about her family's personal experience with a personal trauma and the weird position families get into, rhetorically speaking, as they try to urge the press to act as an outlet for their personal testimony. Since she's interested in the ability of victims to speak, as am I, it seems like a good fit...

And, Laramie made its presence known in an odd and interesting way once more to me at the conference.  The website for the conference is illustrated with images of trauma and violence of the sort that the presenters research, and this picture was one which one of the organizers (whom I don't even know) had found on Flickr:

Never forget that Laramie, Wyoming is a town scarred by more than just the Matt Shepard incident; every town's psyche shows the scars of a parade of grief.  The roadside memorial which stands at Tie Siding, Wyoming was erected after eight members of the UW cross country team were killed by a drunk driver just a week after the terrorist attack on Sept. 11.  They were traveling to a meet at the time, and the man who killed them was another UW student.  At the time, I had been attending school at my new college in the Deep South for a little over three weeks. 

When I saw this photo on the website, it stopped me in my tracks.  I mean, I was at a conference to talk about how Laramie has tried to speak through a moment of tragedy, and here I was being confronted by one that I haven't even thought about for years.  What makes one tragedy seem so indelibly burned into our collective consciousnesses and others, like this one, must remain silent except for eight pairs of shoes and a peeling marker at a deserted crossroads?  It sometimes seems so unfair, but that's just the strange way that collective memory works.  Somethings remain, others don't, and all will eventually be forgotten.  Perhaps it was good for me to step back a little from the Shepard tragedy and put it in this larger context-- in comparison to those Laramie tragedies whose presence scars just as deeply but whose stories don't get told: James Merritt, Kristen Lamb, Cindy Dixon, the Tie Siding accident, the 2006 double murder-suicide...

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PHOTO CREDIT:

1) The 2010 Nexus logo, used with permission.  You can view the full conference description here.

2)  The roadside memorial at Tie Siding, Wyoming, taken from gregor_y's Flickr photostream:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/gregor_y/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

Fear, Loathing, and "The Laramie Project": Hindsight

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He who learns must suffer

And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget

Falls drop by drop upon the heart,

And in our own despite, against our will,

Comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.

--Aeschylus, Agamemnon; tr. Edith Hamilton

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Okay, so all bets are off: this is memory stuff no longer any fun.  It seriously sucks.  

Just like I did with my first posts on my personal memory, I wanted to look back through my memories of 2000 to 2009 and see if I could find any similar lapses in memory like I saw in my first stories.   This little exercise, however, has led to some seriously personal introspection that I didn't want to have to do.  If you therefore don't want to read any extremely personal and depressing revelations about the Jackrabbit, then by all means read no further in this post.  Consider yourself duly warned.  

 Anyhow, I figured that, since these memories were more recent, I wouldn't have quite the same problems of recollection I had earlier.  I discovered that this wasn't necessarily the case; the more recent memories have just as many vagaries, and regarding one very important omission, there's more.  Here are some things I discovered that I fudged, left out or misrepresented in my previous recollection:

Fear, Loathing, and "The Laramie Project": Narratives

After the 2006 production of TLP at my college campus, I continued to teach the play; but, but following that traumatic evening, my pedagogy changed.  For one, I adopted instead a much more autobiographical focus in my classroom.  Our department allows us to pick themes for our 101 and 102 English classes, so I picked autobiographical memory for mine.  Actually, "Memory and Atrocity" might have been a better name for my class; in addition to TLP we generally read Maus and study the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa (a "semester of depression," one student quipped).  I've taught Jane Taylor's Ubu and the Truth Commission alongside TLP before, which had unpredictable but interesting results.  (Comparing TLP with autobiographical theater in South Africa is a rich, rich field of study I'm trying to research-- but more of that later.)

In my course, we read TLP as a reservoir of a crafted, collected (as opposed to collective) memory of Matt's murder, and we talk about the strengths, pitfalls, and limitations of memory to capture a specific moment in time.  We read TLP to look at the collective understanding of Matt's murder, the whys and hows of how people remember, and why personal memory is such a powerful tool for social change.  This would ultimately be good training for me, psychologically speaking, because I would have to face this play one more time:  the October reading of The Laramie Project: 10 Years Later.

The 2006 Production of "The Laramie Project" in Appalachia

Laramie Project 33, originally uploaded by rogerchoover.

If you'd like to see some stills of the well-acted undergraduate performance of TLP back in 2006 that sent me into a minor panic attack, Rocher Choover here at my college has put up a good series of stills from the performance. You can click on the picture above to follow it to his Flickr Photostream and the set for The Laramie Project.  (He also has sets for their other major performances, including Tommy, Flyin' West, Copenhagen and A Christmas Carol). 

This picture is from early on in the play, and (I think) depicts the Tectonic Theater crew discussing their upcoming project. The tall kid with the black hair with his hand on the chair is the actor who played Jed Schultz in the performance, and he interpreted his part close to the real Jed that it was really kind of scary. If memory serves, he was barely a sophomore when he did this performance. 

Looking through these pictures again actually made me feel a little queasy and jittery. But for you, I think they would be a helpful guide for picturing the nature of this second performance. Enjoy!

Fear, Loathing and "The Laramie Project": Haunted

I left Laramie in 2001 for the other side of the country.  I was recently married and my husband had a promising job lined up, so I was destined to finish my English degree at a small college in the deep South that smelled like mildew and looked like the set from a Civil War romance.  Once I left Laramie, however, I started to get an idea of what the rest of the country knew about Laramie and how the media, and how The Laramie Project as well, had colored their impression of us.  For the next eight years, it felt like every other new relationship I started also had to start with a defense of my home state.  I feel like ever since I left the Rockies I've been haunted-- haunted largely by this play.  Much of my own struggle to contend with the issues surrounding Matt's murder really come down to how I contend and find peace with The Laramie Project, but as you'll see from my story, that attempt to find peace is still very much a work in progress...

Fear, Loathing and "The Laramie Project": the 2000 Production

Now that I have explained my relationship to the Matt Shepard tragedy and the two trials, I need to explain the next phase.  My story doesn't really end with the conviction of Matt's killers; it continues through my experience with The Laramie Project to the reading of Ten Years Later.  A lot of my fear and loathing really comes out in relation to the play than anything else-- so I suppose that is what I'll have to explain next: my first experience riding out the shock waves of that earthquake of a play produced by Tectonic Theater.   

Before the 2000 Tectonic performance in Laramie, I never really considered myself "traumatized" by what had happened after Matt's murder. It was merely a headache, one among many. After all, I never knew Matt; In comparison to other people like "Sascha," who was his friend and was still hurting two years later, what right did I have to bear those kinds of psychological wounds?

Besides, I had bigger problems: screwing up the relationship I was in; trying to deal with seeing what was left of a suicide jumper from the top of my dorm; worrying about my brother dropping out of college and getting into trouble and my sister still trying to deal with the wreckage of a messy divorce; the death of a favorite high school teacher in a car wreck; running into spiritual questions I couldn't answer. The Shepard incident and the media problems seemed to be just one minor problem of a whole host of other issues that hit much closer to home and consumed much more of my attention.

Fences, cont.: Memory, Tragedy and Entropy

The fence is gone.  

I can't really explain my feelings when I found out.  I saw in a photo essay shortly before watching Ten Years Later that the buck fence where Matt Shepard was beaten had been torn down, and I gasped.  From the picture I saw, it looks like it had been replaced with a single-rail,  low, log zipper fence just to mark the boundary, something I hadn't actually seen much out west.   It was a weird sensation; I had never specifically been out to the fence (I didn't want to be one of the gawkers) so I had no personal frame of reference.  And yet, taking it down felt like an affront, or admitting defeat, or something-- I don't know what.  All I know is that I didn't like it. 

My husband and I had a long conversation about the fence that evening when we were getting ready for bed.  When I told him about it, I was a little offended; it seemed like a deliberate attempt to efface Matt's memory from that area.  My husband, however, disagreed.  "Well, why shouldn't the landowner take down the fence?"  He asked me.  "It's his property." 

"Well, because he's just trying to forget what happened there,"  I grumbled.  "That's not right.  There are too many people trying to just forget it." 
"But when does the landowner get to move on?"  He insisted.  "He didn't have anything to do with this.  When can he stop having people show up unannounced on his property, respectfully or otherwise?  Does he ever get to stop having that crime brought to mind when he's on that property?  Does  that spot ever get to be something besides a memorial?"  I gave him a glare.   "Moving on doesn't necessarily mean forgetting," he insisted. 

I still don't know for sure what I think, but my husband has a point.   Just because the fence is gone doesn't mean that Matt's memory is lessened, and it might have honestly been necessary.  Let me see if I can explain to you why...

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.

Down the Rabbit-Hole: Jackrabbit's Story, Part 2

One of the interesting things I've started to notice about trauma is the need to talk-- to talk to anybody, it seems. The few short days between Matt's assault and the night when he died were almost consumed with people talking-- about the beating, about sexual orientation and violence. That was the week I think I heard the word "hate crime" for the first time, and probably "homophobia," too. There was a sudden need to try and talk through the trauma, I guess in hopes of making it fit into how we saw the world.  But that's the problem with trauma-- it doesn't fit into how we see the world at all.  We can't just fudge it around until it squeezes into our sense of right and wrong.  For most of us, however, talking ended up being impossible anyhow because of the descent of the national media, and whatever dialogue that was happening after the beating promptly vanished.