Not Cool

Explaining the meaning of the slogan, Raimondo said "young people ought to think about coming to Rhode Island, visiting Rhode Island, starting a business in Rhode Island because we're cool and we're hip. We're entrepreneurial, and it's warm."

 Cooler and warmer. That's our new state logo. Designed to bring the tourists flocking to our tiny little state and pump their much needed greenbacks into our struggling economy. It's hip and it's mod, it's what all the kids will be saying soon. Yeah. Wow. It's the bomb diggity, or some such shit.

Frankly, if it had been up for public vote, I would have gone with The Home Of Mobsters & Lobsters. Or, if we're going for bald faced truth, how about: "Where the Streets Have No Name." Or "New York's Ashtray?" 

All smartassedness aside, I love Rhode Island. I have to - I live here. But recent attempts to drive tourism haven't exactly been a rousing success. One recent article, which ticked off the weirdest attractions of all 50 states, offered Mercy Brown's headstone as Little Rhody's draw. The grave of a teenage girl who died of tuberculosis. Wow, yippee. Clearly, whoever wrote that probing piece of fluff has never heard of Nibbles Woodaway, the Big Blue Bug of Providence. Or fucking Ghost Hunters. Or, hey, how about H.P. Lovecraft? You know, that guy who was born here and died here and is buried in Swan Point Cemetery? Wrote all those short stories that got turned into huge sci-fi horror flicks? Oh wait, that's right - he was a racist. Imagine that, a white guy who was born 126 years ago being racist. Everybody, Ssh! We can't possibly drive tourism by drawing the nation's attention to a racist guy who's been dead for 70+ years. What would the neighbors think?

Yep, think it's time to drag out that article I wrote about Lovecraft when his likeness was stripped from the World Fantasy Awards...

Eccentric. Xenophobic. Anglophilic. Racist. Introverted. Every devoted fan of Howard Phillips Lovecraft has heard these terms applied to the acknowledged father of cosmic horror at one time or another. No one denies that these rumors are most likely true. Quite frankly, I'd be shocked to learn that Lovecraft - a white male born in 1890 to a staunch, upper crust New England family - was anything other than a racist. He spent his childhood in seclusion, subjected to his deranged mother's Munchausen Syndrome By Proxy abuse and, as a result, ended up a reclusive adult with no self esteem who wouldn't venture outside of his own house until after dark. I'm pretty sure that Lovecraft hated and feared everyone - white and black, Jewish and Christian, male and female, etc. He hated himself.

But to say that we can no longer have an award named after him because he was a racist? Because, by comparison, hypocrisy is so much more acceptable? Come on people - this is just getting fucking ridiculous.

Yes, Lovecraft was a racist. But what white man wasn't a racist back in the late 1800s/early 1900s? Was it right? Hell no! But it was a different time and, as such, an entirely different world. Things have changed. Lovecraft himself changed as he got older and made more friends and - gasp! - fell in love with and married a Jewish woman! Had he lived long enough to see the stock market crash of 1939 and the second world war, perhaps his ingrained beliefs might have changed and softened. We'll never know. But that isn't the point, anyway.

If you're going to strip an award of its name because you disagree with the author's admittedly antiquated beliefs, then you'd better take a good, hard look at all of the other awards and their namesakes.

The Hugo Award - named for Hugo Gernsback, described by writer and editor Barry N. Malzberg thusly:

"Gernsback's venality and corruption, his sleaziness and his utter disregard for the financial rights of authors, have been so well documented and discussed in critical and fan literature. That the founder of genre science fiction who gave his name to the field's most prestigious award and who was the Guest of Honor at the 1952 Worldcon was pretty much a crook (and a contemptuous crook who stiffed his writers but paid himself $100K a year as President of Gernsback Publications) has been clearly established."

The Michael Jackson Video Vanguard Award - Do I really need to go into graphic detail about the generally accepted belief that MJ was a pedophiliac freak?

Edgar Allan Poe (The Edgar Award) - The undisputed master of horror. He was also a drunk, a drug addict and married his thirteen year old cousin when he was 26.

The William Faulkner Award - Amazing writer. Drunken sot. Notorious philanderer.

The O. Henry Award - named for William Sydney Porter, a man who lost his job as a banker after being indicted for embezzlement. He fled to South America but was later arrested, tried and convicted for his crime and sentenced to five years in prison.

The Nobel Prize - named for Alfred Nobel, who invented dynamite and whose family made a fortune from the manufacture and distribution of armaments.

And why stop there?
If we're calling out all of the racism, sexism and anti-Semitism in the entertainment community, let's also make the following Verboten.

Disneyland - nope, you can't go there anymore. Not unless you want to be seen as a sexist, racist, Jew-hating bastard. Walt Disney was a founding member of the anti-communist group Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals. In 1947, during the Second Red Scare, Disney testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), where he branded Herbert Sorrell, David Hilberman and William Pomerance, former animators andlabor union organizers as Communist agitators. He was a woman-hating bigot whose own grandniece confirms rumors of his prickishness.

Bugs Bunny - no more Saturday morning cartoons for you. Bugs Bunny made fun of Native Americans, Asians and African Americans, depicting them all as ignorant savages who were easily outwitted. He also insulted drag queens and insinuated that extraterrestrials in general and Martians in particular, were idiots in comparison with the Almighty Inhabitants of Patriotic Planet Earth. No more Loony Toons for anybody, ever again.

Aunt Jemima Pancake Syrup - have fun eating your dry, naked pancakes from now on, you wanna be Grand Dragon of the KKK.

And don't even think about watching Gone With The Wind anymore. How dare you view a movie which depicts all black people as happy darkies singin' in the cotton fields all dee livelong day? Let's track down and burn every copy of the movie in existence, because it is offensive. Now. In the day and age where we live. Because Heaven Forbid we should see what ideas and behaviors were once considered perfectly acceptable and have now been discarded as we supposedly grow and change as a society and learn to embrace our backgrounds and cultures.

Look, I'm not saying that racism is ever okay. It's not. Not in this day and age. But what's done is done, and trying to cover up history is every bit as harmful as letting it continue unchanged.

So Lovecraft was a racist, So the fuck what? Why must I be forbidden to enjoy an artists creations simply because their personal beliefs are considered reprehensible by the greater percentage of society? Did you know that mystery author Anne Perry is a convicted murderess? Are you going to stop reading her books now? Varg Vikernes is the biggest fucking scumbag in the world (in my humble opinion) but I still like the song Dunkelheit and I make no apologies for that.

Lovecraft was a human being - flawed and molded by his time, his surroundings and his circumstances.

Lovecraft's writing could be clunky, clumsy and offensive. Even in the 1920s, his writing was archaic and not to everyone's taste.

But he created a sub genre, like it or not. He was the first writer to blend science fiction and horror successfully. He launched the Cosmic Horror movement.

If we have to cease appreciation for every single person who has ever had an idea, a thought or an expression that someone somewhere in the world found offensive, we would never read another book, look at another painting, see another film or award another prize to anyone. Where do we draw the line? When do we finally admit that no one is perfect - never has been and never will be - and try to overlook their flaws in favor of their strengths? I said overlook, not ignore. Acknowledge that he was a damaged person with prejudiced ideas - ideas that were the norm at the time in which he lived. Add a new award named after Octavia Butler, by all means. In addition to Lovecraft's award. Don't try to erase his failures as a person from the annals of history: stand his likeness right next to Octavia Butler's and acknowledge that this never could have been possible if we had not evolved as people and grown more accepting of one another. In uniting them, we acknowledge the past and progress into the future.

But by banishing Lovecraft and his works, by burying the things we are ashamed of, we admit we have not grown or accepted any responsibility at all, but simply wish to pretend it never happened. And that is childish, pointless and utterly fruitless.

PS - our new state logo really sucks. Just saying.