Teardrop

Teardrop on the Fire

A number of people have written to me to ask me how I'm doing, what I'm doing, and why I'm so silent. I'm writing. I'm publishing a small piece of what I'm working on. Just to let you all know that I haven't crawled into a cave and died. Life is good. Honest. And while there is a whole clusterfuck of mess out there, right now, I'm still in my solipsistic universe. It's where I need to be for a while.

Teardrop on the Fire. The night before I met Yves, we talked on the phone. He told me that he was listening to a lot of 80's musicâ€”that that was his mood. He would tell me later that he had been so nervous about meeting me that he had just wanted to get lost in old, familiar music. I remember that in the background, I could hear something playing, but I don't remember what it was. I just remember hearing the underlying excitement in his voice. That excitement has always manifested itself for me as anxietyâ€”near panicâ€”and there have been times that being so energized about meeting someone has sent me into a panic attack. So I understood his mood. I wasn't put off by it, or scared. I just knew that he and I shared one more thing.

Later, after the events had transpired, I would find the playlist of what he had listened to that night. He was the Web master for the housing cooperative he was a part of, and he maintained a site that contained news about the co-op, and playlists of music that the group's members could stream. Those playlists would remain on the page until he posted whatever new songs had appealed to him. He always entitled his playlists "Playing while we hack." If you happened to check the page while he wasn't there, you'd find the old list, but where a new list should be, it would simply say, "Nothingâ€¦ Our desktop's speakers are silent." Since the day of November 11, 2006, those words have become permanent on the site. They feel etched onto the monitor of my computer. The list of songs he was listening to the night before he met me are thereâ€”they are a permament record of that night, but I cannot seem to glean much of any meaning from that list.

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Words to live by

But, when it came down to, this case was made into a racial issue, which it shouldn't have been. It should have been an issue about a woman who was raped by three men. Case closed.

The fact that she was black and they were white only plays into the fetishization of Black women and white men that has developed through years of inequal treatment. This also biased many people because it made this case into a national spectacle. It split people along racial lines instead of factual lines and investigating the story that the woman told instead of going on a witch hunt.

Additionally, this case was turned into an issue of class as well. The Black, poor woman was raped by the rich white kids. Many wanted to see these men be charged because they felt it would put them in their rightful place, strip them of the privilege that they had been so accustomed to all of their lives.

All of the things that this case stood for are all of the things that were wrong with the media's coverage of the case, the national obsession with the case, and the prosecution of the case. It became an issue of stripping privilege and proving that white people were not superior instead of ensuring that this woman was actually treated properly and had her CORRECT assailants brought to justice, not for political reasons but for criminal reasons.

— From Ace Solylent's comment over at The Smoking Gun publishes Duke Lacrosse accuser's photograph