♫ oooh, they love it when you lost boy now the low life at the top floor everybody hating ever since you got more they praying for the death of a rockstar ♫
The kids on TikTok think that just because he was a classic country singer, Johnny Cash was conservative??? My babies he covered a Nine Inch Nails song in his seventies.
Classic country singers (the majority of which came from poor roots) were always talking about how much The Man sucked because they were taking money from poor rural folk. You’re gonna tell me that’s conservative?? Get outta here.
And somehow on the opposite side of the scale with the same exact opinion the conservative kids say “I like the old country music, because there’s no politics to it” Woodie Guthrie’s got a “this machine kills fascists” sticker on his guitar? You think there’s no politics in 9 to 5 or Folsom Prison Blues?!
For anyone confused there was a sudden and dramatic shift in the country music genre. It used to be a genre fixated on the experiences of people. Lived or common experiences that resonated with the common people. It was music that you listened to and it thrummed in tune to your soul because you had lived it yourself. And a lot of that was about ordinary people getting ground up in the gears of society.
The hyper patriotism, beer, and trucks chimera we have now didn’t show up until after 9/11 and the world is lesser for it
Allow me to post the entire lyrics to the Johnny Cash song “Man in Black”, released in nineteen goddamn seventy-one and written about why he always wore black onstage:
Well, you wonder why I always dress in black
Why you never see bright colors on my back
And why does my appearance seem to have a somber tone
Well, there’s a reason for the things that I have on
I wear the black for the poor and the beaten down
Livin’ in the hopeless, hungry side of town
I wear it for the prisoner who has long paid for his crime
But is there because he’s a victim of the times
I wear the black for those who’ve never read
Or listened to the words that Jesus said
About the road to happiness through love and charity
Why, you’d think He’s talking straight to you and me
Well, we’re doin’ mighty fine, I do suppose
In our streak of lightnin’ cars and fancy clothes
But just so we’re reminded of the ones who are held back
Up front there ought to be a man in black
I wear it for the sick and lonely old
For the reckless ones whose bad trip left them cold
I wear the black in mournin’ for the lives that could have been
Each week we lose a hundred fine young men
And I wear it for the thousands who have died
Believin’ that the Lord was on their side
I wear it for another hundred-thousand who have died
Believin’ that we all were on their side
Well, there’s things that never will be right, I know
And things need changin’ everywhere you go
But ‘til we start to make a move to make a few things right
You’ll never see me wear a suit of white
Ah, I’d love to wear a rainbow every day
And tell the world that everything’s okay
But I’ll try to carry off a little darkness on my back
'Til things are brighter, I’m the man in black
That right there is an anti-war, anti-bigot, anti-mass-incarceration, anti-war-on-drugs (Cash was an addict in various stages of recovery who was pissed as hell about how this country treats people with substance issues), eat-the-rich protest song. And it was arguably his signature song, his personal manifesto. Notice that even the Jesus reference, which today would be a signal that the song is about to drop some racist dogwhistles, segues immediately into a line about “the road to happiness through love and charity”. As in “Motherfucker, our shared god said love thy neighbor and care for the poor and the outsider, and we both know he didn’t fucking stutter.” He’s throwing shade at self-described Christians who use his religion as a cudgel to beat people with.
Johnny Cash wasn’t a conservative. I’m pretty sure if he were alive and in reasonably good health today, he’d knock Jason Aldean’s teeth out (or, failing that, write a song so devastatingly memetic about how much Aldean sucks that Aldean would never work in music again).
Johnny Cash was punk rock. He just happened to be punk rock in the body of a country singer.
I’ve never watched Scott Pilgrim but I’m reading about this animated Netflix series and apparently one of the reasons they were able to get the whole cast of the 2010 movie to reprise their roles is bc Michael Cera fucking responded to a 9 year old cast email thread out of nowhere as if no time had passed and got the cast all chatting with each other again
So Arizona launched an “education hotline” that allows “concerned parents” to report “””critical race theory””” and other things like ~gender identity~ being taught in the classroom
It would be a shame if the number and email were spread to bad actors looking to prank call the AZ Department of Education
and for the love of god, don’t just spam it with memes or le funny shrek jokes or whatever, they’ll just hang up
make plausible-sounding reports for things that don’t actually exist, so that they actually have to waste time/resources investigating false leads - the goal is to waste time they would otherwise be using to do their jobs, not to get tumblr clout for being an epic troll
So apparently the internet article said the superintendent wouldn’t be deterred by the prank calls because they would ‘taper off eventually’. It’d be a real shame if this post stayed in circulation via queues so they get a consistent list of prank calls to filter through. 😇
You apply for 20 jobs on Indeed. The silence is deafening.
You apply for 20 jobs on Indeed. Half of them require you to create an account on the company website. You leave a trail of ghost accounts that will be used once and never again. You never receive a response.
You apply for 20 jobs on Indeed. One employer offers an interview, but it’s so rare for you to receive any response that you forget to check the website and you miss the time.
You apply for 20 jobs on Indeed. One employer offers an interview, but you don’t know the magic words that signal to the esoteric mind of an interviewer that you’re fit for the job.
You apply for 20 jobs on Indeed. One employer e-mails you saying that ‘unfortunately, you do not have the qualifications we are looking for’. You check the job again and see you applied to be a menial labourer.
You apply for 20 jobs on Indeed. Half of them require a car. No one stops to ask how you’re supposed to afford one with no job.
You apply for 20 jobs on Indeed. One employer offers a job. The commute makes you want to die in your sleep.
You call the HR manager for the workplace in hopes of arranging an interview more directly. They don’t even have an answering machine.
Employers complain that no one wants to work anymore.
when it takes you a while to process what someone is saying and you realize they asked you a question
I cannot fucking believe I am drunk, past midnight, and tumblr is throwing fucking saturated fatty-acids at me
Listen here friendo I didn’t sit through a year of organic chemistry for you to come into my house and call a carboxylic acid a saturated fatty acid you respect that hexadecanoic acid
And I didnt get a degree in biochemistry to hear you say that carboxylic acids with aliphatic chains arent fatty acids. That hexadecanoic acid IS a saturated fatty acid!
“In 1984, when Ruth Coker Burks was 25 and a young mother living in Arkansas, she would often visit a hospital to care for a friend with cancer.
During one visit, Ruth noticed the nurses would draw straws, afraid to go into one room, its door sealed by a big red bag. She asked why and the nurses told her the patient had AIDS.
On a repeat visit, and seeing the big red bag on the door, Ruth decided to disregard the warnings and sneaked into the room.
In the bed was a skeletal young man, who told Ruth he wanted to see his mother before he died. She left the room and told the nurses, who said, “Honey, his mother’s not coming. He’s been here six weeks. Nobody’s coming!”
Ruth called his mother anyway, who refused to come visit her son, who she described as a “sinner” and already dead to her, and that she wouldn’t even claim his body when he died.
“I went back in his room and when I walked in, he said, “Oh, momma. I knew you’d come”, and then he lifted his hand. And what was I going to do? So I took his hand. I said, “I’m here, honey. I’m here”, Ruth later recounted.
Ruth pulled a chair to his bedside, talked to him
and held his hand until he died 13 hours later.
After finally finding a funeral home that would his body, and paying for the cremation out of her own savings, Ruth buried his ashes on her family’s large plot.
After this first encounter, Ruth cared for other patients. She would take them to appointments, obtain medications, apply for assistance, and even kept supplies of AIDS medications on hand, as some pharmacies would not carry them.
Ruth’s work soon became well known in the city and she received financial assistance from gay bars, “They would twirl up a drag show on Saturday night and here’d come the money. That’s how we’d buy medicine, that’s how we’d pay rent. If it hadn’t been for the drag queens, I don’t know what we would have done”, Ruth said.
Over the next 30 years, Ruth cared for over 1,000 people and buried more than 40 on her family’s plot most of whom were gay men whose families would not claim their ashes.
For this, Ruth has been nicknamed the ‘Cemetery Angel’.”— by Ra-Ey Saley
She’s 60 now, she’s still doing activist and advocacy work, and working on a memoir.
my favorite thing about this story is that ruth had inherited a large family graveyard and never really knew wtf she was going to do w dozens and dozens of empty grave plots but then the AIDS crisis happened and she realized what she could do with it
When Burks was a girl, she said, her mother got in a final, epic row with Burks’ uncle. To make sure he and his branch of the family tree would never lie in the same dirt as the rest of them, Burks said, her mother quietly bought every available grave space in the cemetery: 262 plots. They visited the cemetery most Sundays after church when she was young, Burks said, and her mother would often sarcastically remark on her holdings, looking out over the cemetery and telling her daughter: “Someday, all of this is going to be yours.”
“I always wondered what I was going to do with a cemetery,” she said. “Who knew there’d come a time when people didn’t want to bury their children?”
She hasn’t been back to Files Cemetery since her stroke. While she made sure it was kept up back when she lived in Hot Springs, it appeared to have been let go a bit when the reporter visited in late December, some of the tombstones pushed over and broken, the snag of a dead oak left to rot among the graves. Even without knowing the story of the place, it might have been downright spooky if not for the constant stream of traffic cruising by at 10 miles an hour over the speed limit.
Before she’s gone, she said, she’d like to see a memorial erected in the cemetery. Something to tell people the story. A plaque. A stone. A listing of the names of the unremembered dead that lie there.
“Someday,” she said, “I’d love to get a monument that says: This is what happened. In 1984, it started. They just kept coming and coming. And they knew they would be remembered, loved and taken care of, and that someone would say a kind word over them when they died.”
See the chap with glasses and an incredible moustache in the bottom right? that’s Magnus Hirschfeld, the gay Jewish doctor who ran the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for Sexual Research) in Berlin. It was largely his books, his research that the Nazis burned.
Everyone else in this photo is a trans person that Dr Hirschfeld worked with. This photo was taken at their christmas party.
It is important to note that this action was not an “oh, Nazis ALSO targetted other prople”. They directly linked Hirschfeld’s institute and research to claims of a Jewish plot to destroy German society.
If that sounds familiar, it’s because it is the EXACT same rhetoric being rolled out by prominent TERFs for the last few years including, yes, The Wizard Lady.
Antisemitism, racism, and transphobia/homophobia are ALWAYS linked together.
if parks and rec was still being made they’d do a bit where ron swanson has to wear a pronouns name tag and it’d just be “???/???” And it’d cut to a talking head of him going
“I’ve been a fool all this time. It’s bad enough the government knows my name, but now they want to know my gender? So I’m not letting them know my preferred pronouns. As far as I’m concerned, no one in this building should refer to me at all.”
Ayo, trans people who are worried about passing, i see you and i, to a pretty decent degree, understand you. I have but one set of encouraging words for you on this day: take solace in the fact that your transitioning will never be as shitty as this guy’s
