The bench: Matthew Shepard's memorial and its landscape

In The Laramie Project: 10 Years Later,  we learned about the Shepard memorial bench on the University of Wyoming campus, which is parked at the front of the Arts and Sciences building.  (That's A&S there at the right.)  In addition to holding the university's main concert hall venue, A&S is also home to the Political Science department (Matt's university home) and a lot of administration.
A&S holds a privileged location on campus, too: of all the enormous buildings which ring Prexy's Pasture, the functional center of the university, A&S occupies the entire western end, and the pasture in front of it sometimes feels like a grassy mall leading up to its front steps.  (The bench is basically right behind that maroon van.) 

So, without any further ado, here's the bench, with a closeup of the plaque:

It really is a sweet gesture, I think. It gives Matt an important place on campus to permanently commemorate his life, and it's both right in front of the A&S college and in a high traffic area when the A&S auditorium is being used.  I especially like the positive message of the plaque.  It commemorates Matt, not as a victim, but one who made a positive impact.  After so much bad press after his murder, I think reminding the campus that Matt was a person, and one who has made a positive difference on everyone there is important.  And, doing it on a piece of furniture means that people will actually interact with the memorial is a great way to set the right tone. This isn't a cumbersome monolith that forces an ambivalent memory upon a campus still covering its scars. Rather, it invites remembrance to those who stop to enjoy its presence.

So, yes, I rather like the placement and wording of the Shepard memorial, but if someone took a brisk walk around camps and even around town, she would realize that Shepard's commemoration is hardly unique.  For instance:

 Here we have an identical bench dedicated to former UW president Phil Dubois and donated by the Trustees. It's located a little farther up Prexy's pasture, on the side nearest to A&S.   

This one is dedicated to former president Dubois' mother (complete with crow droppings from the flock of crows roosting on A&S):

This one was paid for by the Dubois family, as she passed away in 1999.  The former Mrs. Dubois has her bench only about seventy-five feet from the plaza in front of A&S, sort of between A&S and Merica Hall just to the south.

There are lots of these benches around campus, and I'm willing to bet at least a dozen of them have memorial plaques, to everyone from beloved former professors to admins.  (I think one I saw was for a donor, but I have no idea, really.)  So, at this point I bet you're thinking, "Wow, the Shepard memorial bench isn't unique at all!"  I'm afraid so-- in fact, these benches are not just a campus phenomenon.  Here's one dedicated to Cal Rerucha, the former DA who prosecuted both McKinney and Henderson in 1999-2000:

You can tell from the picture that these are not the same kind of benches; I think they're part of a city rather than a university project.  These benches, which sit on the north (Ivinson Avenue) side of the county courthouse, are not really reserved as memorial markers, judging by the presence of a bench with a plaque for Wal-Mart stores (I think it's the one just past the upper left-hand corner of this photo.  Rather, they're more like tiny billboards.  I think that's the point of the Reruchas' plaque on this one: it simply names himself and his wife as "attorneys at law."  What better place for a lawyer to hang out his shingle than in front of the courthouse, eh? 

So, I guess there are two different ways to look at Matt's bench in the context of the surrounding environment.  The negative one might complain that Matt's memorial isn't really all that special, and the only way they managed to get on campus was to sneak it in under a campus beautification project.  It's almost like saying, "Okay, we'll actually let you mark the campus with his memory, but his memorial can't draw attention to itself..." Honestly, I suppose that's how I felt about it when I first wandered about the campus that afternoon, but I think that there's a second, positive way to think about the bench. 

What helped me change my mind?  On the way back to my car one afternoon, I was walking back towards Prexy's in the direction of my car when I saw this fellow chatting on the phone:

Seeing this student casually tracing his hands down the bench as he talked on his phone made me stop to think: what are the chances that this kid will look down and see the plaque? Maybe he will, but he might not, either.  Even though this student's act of remembrance isn't what most people think when they try to picture commemoration, this interaction with Shepard's memory on his own terms shows how the bench incorporates Matthew's memory into the very fabric of UW's landscape.   This is unlike a normal memorial marker, like the one for the Challenger explosion on the west side of campus.  When I lived on campus, the Challenger astronauts' stone and bronze marker only really got any attention when someone used it as a hole for Frisbee golf.  Then some of us felt a little queasy about the idea of slapping the Challenger astronauts in the face with a golf disc, and eventually we moved the hole.  After that, none of us really even noticed it anymore. 

 In contrast to the Challenger memorial, Matt's bench gets a lot of daily interaction because it's designed for interactive experience.  As students look for a quiet spot to read and bask in the sun, they seek it out.  And, since it's part of a larger network of memorial benches to other beloved people, the bench presents who he really was to the campus:  someone who was a part of the UW community and whose life has indelibly left its mark on us all.

One evening after photographing Old Main, I stopped to have a seat on the memorial bench myself.  As I sat in the lengthening shadows of A&S, I could gaze upward to its highest floors dressed in sandstone, or the huge, stately pines which dominate the green spaces on the north side.  To my left was Prexy's Pasture, with its diamond pattern of walkways leading to the family/unity statue in the center, and the flagpoles for the university, state, and nation beyond.  It's a good place to sit and ponder, I decided, and as students do that, they meet with a little piece of Shepard's life.  And every time we do, we remember a little piece of Matt.

Class lines on the front lines, part 3: Why facts can't kill prejudice

[A note from Jackrabbit:  after spending the morning counting <span> tags and <div> separators, I finally managed to find the problem which made half my post disappear.  You can now read the whole thing!]

In my last post, we looked at how a couple of really outraged west Laramie residents schooled the AP reporters who portrayed the community as a poverty-class wasteland of despair.  Both wrote letters to the editor of the Boomerang to counteract both the poverty narrative of West Laramie and the notion that Matt's murderers were typical of the people who lived there.  

While I had that little thrill from seeing ordinary Laramie citizens taking on "the man," so to speak, something didn't seem right-- and the more I thought about the AP article and the local response it just didn't feel right.  But after these letters rattled about in my head for a couple months, I finally realized what was bugging me: what's the point of attacking the reporters anyhow?  They aren't the ones who made this story up. 

 In the month following Shepard's death, locals and former residents attacked that article as everything from "a putdown" to "asinine." My personal favorite was the person who told them to "lose the finger paints."  But none of that changes the fact that the form of that story wasn't an AP construction.  It's ours.  Sure, those AP hacks should be held accountable for their lazy reporting and filling in details which weren't true, but the narrative driving that portrayal is a local product.  It's like slapping that little kid who points out that the emperor isn't wearing any clothes so you can keep pretending that there's no parade going on. 

In short, all these reporters did was to link two firebomb narratives already present in Laramie-- the Shepard beating and the West Laramie class divide-- and do a really lousy job of it.  So when the outrage started, sure, it gave people an opportunity to stick up for the home crowd, but it goes no farther.  They can't exorcise this story from Laramie because it would also mean confronting it head-on.

I guess what I'm saying is that you can never really succeed in attacking a false narrative about power-- whether it's between classes, between races, or genders-- by proving it's not true; you can only attack a powerful narrative by exposing why it exists, what fears it elicits, and who needs that story to be true.  I'd like to spend a little bit of time thinking about that disconnect in the West Laramie story, and why it's still floating around.  But that also means I'm going to go all Marxist/Lacanian analytical on you and pull out some Slavoj Žižek.  You've been duly warned!

Laramie in Pictures: Lincoln Highway

To be honest, I don't really know why somebody felt like naming the highway running from Evanston to Cheyenne after Abraham Lincoln, but the state of Wyoming has always had some sort of Lincoln fetish; we were almost named "Lincoln" instead of Wyoming, there's a Lincoln county.  As far as I've figured out, it's had that name at least since 1913, and that original road became the route for Interstate 80 some decades later.

At the highest point of the pass and just off of Happy Jack Road is an enormous, random monument for Lincoln, standing next to the Interstate named after him.
It's one of the more eerie feelings as you're driving along on I-80.  You're surrounded by tractor-trailers going twenty miles under the speed limit as they limp their way up the deadly incline, there's nothing but high pink granite walls on both sides, and then, startled, you jerk your head up and say, 

"Oh look, there's an enormous disembodied head of Abraham Lincoln."  

Once you see that behemoth for yourself and the way he hunches over to observe the traffic, usually the second thought in your head (and everyone else's) is this:

"What a minute... um, Mister Lincoln looks like he's standing at a urinal..."

You can see it, can't you?   I guess that the designers of the statue never really considered that most adults have exactly the same imagination as a twelve year-old boy.  

All immature giggling aside, this really is an impressive piece of statuary.  The monument's placement makes it absolutely dominate the landscape, but the natural rock of the pedestal asserts that it is nevertheless a part of the land he gazes upon.  For many this monument is a symbol of Laramie's values.   Some even appeal to the monument to appeal to The Equality State's values of freedom and tolerance.

To be honest, until recently, all I could ever see when I looked at this statue was a giant herma, and that always made me break out into infantile giggles.  (I blame Dr. H., my Laramie Classics professor.  Man, I love that guy.)

I finally had an experience on the Fourth of July this year that forced me to look at the monument in a new light.  I had brought some cool new toys with me to Laramie, a tripod and a remote shutter release, and I wanted to try taking some long exposures of the stars.  I headed up to Happy Jack to my favorite stargazing place only to find that the entire canyon was locked up in heavy, super-low clouds almost brushing the ground.  Rats.

So, I grumbled and stomped my way back to the car, and when I turned around I saw President Lincoln bathed in an eerie orange glow from the sodium lights, with rays of light shooting out of his head.  So, without further ado, here's a view of the Lincoln Monument like you may never see again:

This is hands-down my favorite picture I've ever taken.  I just love the rays of sodium light shooting out of his head, like Moses, which light up the world.
 
Next is a picture of the otherworldly Lincoln from the front:

You don't normally think of sky shadows at night. Here's a clearer picture of old Abe's shadow carving shadows on the surface of the fog.  In person it looked more like a deeply layered, three dimensional hole in the sky.

After about an hour, the clouds cleared and I finally had a chance to try some night sky shooting.  I'm standing about a mile away from the monument when I took this, which is creating the orange glow at left:

I hope you enjoy them!

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PHOTO CREDIT:

the first picture taken of Lincoln during the daytime comes from Steve-stevens' Flickr photostream, and is available under a Creative Commons 2.0 license.

Class Lines on the Front Lines, part 2: The Citizens Strike Back!

A couple of weeks ago, I looked at an AP article about the class divide in Laramie, WY from the time of Shepard's murder and how it overplayed a narrative of class antagonism to the point of absolute absurdity.  In their attempt to capture the "feeling" of the social divide in Laramie, the reporters resorted to using tropes that distorted West Laramie's character and had no basis in reality.  The reaction to that AP article, mostly from West Laramie residents, is really quite interesting.  On the one hand, they (rightly) try to attack the article as inaccurate, using their own personal experience as Laramie residents to shore up their claims.  On the other hand, after observing both hate protests and their counter-protesters for the last year or so, I have to ask: how effective is this approach for neutralizing prejudice?  I'll save that for a later post, but let's look at a couple of Laramie responses after the jump! 

That's one step for justice, one giant leap for Republicans!

CNN is reporting that US federal district judge Virginia Phillips ruled this afternoon to issue a worldwide ban on the enforcement of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" in the US military, which is a major victory for LGBT groups.  The catch is that the military has 60 days to assess the ruling and decide whether or not they would like the Department of Justice to appeal.  You can see the entire injunction as a PDF here. CNN is also reporting that the ruling will probably be appealed in the next day or to because normal policy is to appeal all decisions which take down a Congressional decision. 

In any case, we have a couple of months to see if it's going to fall now or not, but DADT is very, very close to ending.  But do you know who's been driving this lawsuit for several years?  Log Cabin Republicans.   People within the same party which promoted anti-gay policies for years essentially crippled this massive piece of injustice.   

See, world?  Not all Republicans-- or conservatives-- suck.  No political party can "own" justice because justice is universal.

And appropriately enough, it was announced on October 12.  Maybe there's hope for my old political home after all.

Twelve years later: tu benedictus in die natalis sis, Matt...

Another October the 12th is passing, which means one more year to look back on Matt's lamentable death, one more year to get all moody and self-referential, and yet another opportunity to lapse into a misanthropic grouch-fest and hate the whole world because it's such a downer.  I seriously need a more positive way to remember this person whom I had never personally met but who has changed the course of my life in ways I didn't expect.  I need to find a way to commemorate this day in a way that does justice to him and celebrates him in a positive light, not simply as a victim. 

So, where can I go for a different perspective?  Since I'm a medievalist, I guess that my natural impulse is to look backwards to the past for insight, and so pondering my problem eventually brought me to thinking about medieval memorial practices.  In medieval Christian society, for instance, monasteries often kept a calender or roll of their brothers and associates (called a liber vitae or "book of Life") in order to remember their passing.

Although a name in a Liber vitae was an act of commemoration in of itself, sometimes calendars of names organized by death date were used so the community could read their names aloud during the prime hour service as they performed the "work of God" in the cloister.  In those lists, the death date of a person is recorded as their dies natalis-- that is, their "birthday."  It makes a lot of sense from a medieval perspective, as Christianity often talks of that as the day that we are finally and truly freed from the bondage of sin and attain our real home with God when the soul is "born" in heaven.  It's the date of our heavenly birthday. 

This kind of commemoration was important in the monastic setting because it reinforced the sense that their brotherhood was an eternal bond, and that those who passed should continue to be recognized as a part of their community.  It reinforced that death really cannot sever their social, religious and personal ties, and that the departed who served the community in life are still a benefit to their abbey.   

And so, in my struggle to find an appropriate way to remember this day,  I think I'll do it with a celebration of Matt's continued presence and life within my community.  From here on out, this will no longer be for me a time when I'm forced to revisit a horrible, brutal crime that has scarred so many and ended a human life; instead, I'm going to mark this day as Matt's dies natalis, to recognize the part he still plays in my communities: in Laramie, in the states, and in the lives of those who loved him.  Is this the sensible approach that everyone will accept?  Probably not; all I know is that it helps make all of this make sense to me. 

Happy 12th birthday, Matthew Shepard.  You are still very much a part of us all.     

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PHOTO CREDIT:

Okay, so I couldn't find a picture of a liber vitae under a CC license, so the above picture is a leaf from Yale University, Beinecke Library MS 923, an unusual travel foldaway calendar and prayer book, which is available for CC use via the library's Flickr photostream. This text lists the feast days and/or dies natalis of popular saints (marked with giant, stretched out N's) in October.   The pic of Matthew's memorial is mine and very much free for use.

If you'd like to see what a liber vitae looks like, you can follow this link to one of the more famous manuscripts from the time period I work with.  On this single page of the Durham liber vitae, there's literally dozens of names written in hands at least three centuries apart, and it's remarkable.  

On a side note, October 12 marks the dies natalis for two of the more famous Anglo-Saxon saints:  Wilfrid, who tended to stir the muck, and Edwin, who was the first Anglian king to take up Christianity.  One of the most famous passages of Anglo-Saxon prose comes from his conversion, as recounted by Bede in his Ecclesiastical History 2.13.

Christians?! Speaking out against homophobic bullying??? AWESOME!

I don't know about you, but the recent rash of suicides of gay students in response to bullying really bothers me.  Sure, part of it is just the injustice of it, but after having dealt with the suicide of a gay friend under different circumstance, this is something I tend to take very, very seriously.  After what had happened to Tyler Clementi at Rutgers,  I was really quite encouraged to see how the students of Rutgers had come together to remember him and speak out against his treatment by his roommate. 

One of CNN's religion bloggers, Warren Throckmorton, has thrown down a sort of evangelical gauntlet in front of other Christians on the issue of anti-gay bullying, insisting that Christians need to apply the "Golden Rule" of Jesus to victims of anti-gay violence:  "Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets"  (Matt. 7:12).  (Personally, I'd point to the Great Commandment, which insists that we love our neighbor, just like we love ourselves. And upon that, and a love for God, hangs all the law, and all the prophets.) 

Obviously, with my own personal sentiments, this is an argument I find extremely timely for my faith community.  What I find particularly interesting is that Throckmorton holds traditional conservative views on homosexuality-- and yet he's still issuing this appeal:

"As a traditional evangelical, I may have some differences of opinion with my gay friends. However, such ideological differences don’t matter to a middle school child who is afraid to go to school."  

 That's a great place to start from, and it's a lot farther down the road to acceptance than a lot of my fellow evangelical Christians ever get.  I don't know how far we can actually get Christians down that road to acceptance-- but if we can accomplish just this one thing and realize we're not following Jesus' own commandments about loving one's neighbor like we love ourselves, and we can encourage evangelicals to speak out against anti-gay violence and bullying, we could make a huge impact on the injustices inflicted on the LGBT community, and that's nothing to scoff at.  I therefore salute you, Warren Throckmorton, as one Christian to another...