Saturday, April 22, 2017

The White/WHITE Trash Summit




I was mildly chided today of the FBook by some for referring to ElDouche's guests Shown above) at that "pop culture" day at the WHITE House yestiddy as "white trash."
It was, it was said, a slur on poor, whites.
I demurred.
Turd Nugget, Caribou Barbie and that daintily mustachioed twatwaffle, "Kid Krock," are pretty much the epitome of the term "trash," regardless of pigmentation:" (though none of them is poor) tasteless, gauche, vicious, thoughtless, self-absorbed, small-minded, petty and vain.
And all are unself-consciously WHITE! They are regarded--even hailed--by their admirers as paragons of "whiteness."
"Trash" is what "trash" does.
If the foo shits! It fits the people who it describes, here, to a tee.
What ELSE would you call their widely-publicized, semiotically "fraught' mugging under the former First Lady's portrait?
They were mooning her, though (thankfully) without baring their ugly asses. The gilded filigree, notwithstanding, ElDouche's cut from the same trashy cloth
Remember El Chimperor Boosh carelessly tossing his used chewing gum into a Renaissance vase when he visited the Hermitage, in St. Petersburg. I suppose I could refer to 'em a parvenus and philistines, but neither they not their trashy admirers would understand.
Cash can't buy "class," can't hide "trash."

Friday, April 14, 2017

Digging the Dirt in Chimayo

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On what is called "Good Friday" (an idea fraught with irony, given the context), there occurs hereabouts an annual event of considerable, sociological and anthropological interest: The pilgrimage to Chimayo.
The faithful believe that miracles occur at a little church, located in an isolated, back-country, rural village in the mountains north of Santa Fe. The Santuario de Chimayo is reputed to be a 'holy' place of miraculous, healing powers, though I have never heard of any godly or saintly apparitions.
It has become a "Good Friday" tradition in northern New Mexico for the plebe to reassert their faith with an Easter-week pilgrimage to the site. Upwards of 20,000 pilgrims per year trek the roads to Chimayo, many walking a score of miles or more, sometimes bare-foot, some carrying crosses, 
to expiate their own sins and those of loved ones who might still be trying to placate "God" for a place in "Heaven." (I personally have no desire to "see" Heaven. It'd be redundant, since I got to spend four years in Santa Barbara.) After a rash of violent attacks and a murder, about 15 years ago, the State Police and sheriffs from two counties now patrol the route.

People have been making pilgrimages there, a la Lourdes, etc, for a couple of centuries, to receive a dram or two of the earth from the floor of the chapel. I believe the pilgrims ingest the soil (a form of spiritual pica?); I don't know.
The numbers of pilgrims to the site has been large enough that, left alone, the faithful would long since have excavated a substantial pit in the floor of the capilla. So regularly, the keepers of the Sanctuary retreat to a "secret spot" some ways away from the site, and return with fresh dirt for the pilgrims.

My family walked it one year from our place in Nambe. I was NOT 'transported."
I think the arch-diocese of Santa Fe oversees it all...but I'm not sure about that.