Memories of Charlottesville,
Palmer Foley
In 2016,
things fell apart. The center lost its hold, and the worst of the far Right,
full of passionate intensity, seemed poised to loose their blood-dimmed tide
upon the world. With cracks suddenly appearing in the
free-markets-and-phony-multiculturalism orthodoxy, Luxemburg’s old question was
suddenly, shockingly, back on the table: socialism or barbarism? And it
appeared barbarism had a considerable head start.
Four years
ago, I was a groom’s maid in my dear friends’ wedding in a little chapel in
Charlottesville. I’d spent many happy, moon-shining nights talking and walking
the streets of the college town, 45 minutes from my home in Richmond, VA. When
I learned armed fascists, confederates, white nationalists, and sundry other
scum, emboldened by the pandering faux-Bonapartist businessman in the White
House, were descending en masse on
the community, I was no longer thinking about long-game Left strategy. I only
knew we all had a duty.
The morning
of Saturday, August 12th was drizzling and miserable when our crew
from the Richmond DSA chapter set out. By the time we met up with other DSA
chapters in Charlottesville, the storm clouds had cleared. After precautions,
plans, and red armbands were shared, we set out for Emancipation Park. A
comrade handed me a button that read, “No Race But Human.”
Emancipation
Park – teargas? Cops or Nazis? Hard to tell.
Unlawful assembly declared –
Better move to McGuffey Park.
Pass the
darkened windows of twee little shops, their handpainted sandwichboard signs
folded up like sleeping birds.
Anti-capitalista! Anti-fascista!
Regroup.
Everyone’s offering water bottles,
but everyone has to pee.
Several people lie on stretchers in medic
tents.
Now
down the block, at the corner of Market Street –
They
pass by:
Doughy boys in white polos with
floppy Nazi haircuts sweated to foreheads
Colonel
Sanders klansmen in bulletproof vests
White
knight LARPers with Celtic cross shields
Olde
Europa-fetishists shouting slurs at immigrants
(I wonder
how many of their ancestors were spat at, dragging through Ellis Island, not
yet considered white.)
There
are some grizzled old bigots, but mostly, they’re startlingly young,
the glaring
sun revealing on their faces the sallow stamp of 4chan and closed circuits of
hate.
August Bebel
once called the proto-fascist anti-Semitism of his day “the socialism of
fools,” and rarely have I seen such fools as on that street.
They
looked like little puffed-up cowards – fractured consciousnesses adrift in this
viciously competitive, alienating, spiritually barren capitalist society that
gambled away our future on speculative markets, leaving us stuck with a present
in foreclosure.
