Revenge Tour Chat

 I biked around Germany in summer 2025 to avenge my 2024 summer lost to cancer treatment. I had given up Facebook, so I made a WhatsApp chat to chronicle my travels. It was not easy to preserve the chat in its original format, so I laboriously edited what I was able to download, inserting photos in, hopefully, the relevant place in the comment thread. Then I discovered that I could not upload the edited chat with photos here, so here is a link to the Google doc. Hope it works.

 

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ePsO0VGu4UlgV1rGogjb1vno_lCC_5Ib2GR9_0kMijs/edit?usp=sharing

The Blue and the Grey

When I grew up, we used to sing "Two Brothers" ("One Wore Blue and One Wore Grey") in the living room on music nights. It was actually discussed that if we wanted to have a kepi in the costume box, it could be blue, but grey was right out. We had this graphically excellent beach towel with a Union Jack (yes, I know, 6 counties, Bengal Famine, Mau-Mau suppression), but the towel from the same company with the equally impressive Stars and Bars was not something we ever would own. 

 

I had ancestors on both sides of the American Civil War: a maternal great-great-grandfather in the New Jersey infantry, probably drafted right off the boat from Hamburg, and someone or other a unit from Mississippi. We still remember which ancestor called which other ancestor a "danged ol' Reb" on the school yard. 

 

At any rate, blue was OK, grey was not.

 

Thing is, whenever I hear the name of a state in the Midwest-- Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois, Ohio, Indiana-- I think of the blunt chauvinism with which men from these states prosecuted the War Between the States. I think of Sherman’s March to the Sea. Whatever you call the Civil War, whatever you think its cause (freedom for the slaves or Federal supremacy?) or its effect (national unity, or the obliteration of a heritage somehow thought to be deserving of existence?) was, it’s pretty difficult to find the happy in the whole affair.

 

Now, when I hear those same states named, I remember my feelings about the civil war. The news I hear is about their role as the places left out of the flowering of civil liberties led by the urban elites of the coastal Northeast and the West Coast in the decades following McCarthyism. I hear about how desperate, ignorant people with far too many weapons for even their own good fear a USA increasingly friendly to people of various skintones, various identities, various languages, various spiritual outlooks, various genders and various preferences of what to do with their minds and their bodies.

 

I don’t know who will achieve their goal-- those who seek freedom of existence, or those who wish to return to social oppression. As we move along, though, I keep remembering the link between the states of the Union Army and their sad, perverted descendants. 

 

Note: I wrote this in October 2020.