I met Dick and Jane Elliott. We went to eat
with art professors from Cindy’s department.
She taught art at the university in Ellensburg.
It might have been the chairman and his wife.
Dick and Jane ran a janitorial business. Both of them
were painters. Somebody asked me about Haitians
and I sounded like Peter Boyle in Joe, making racist comments.
I sounded like a redneck. A bigot. A hatemonger. What did I have
against those poor, innocent people, victims of Papa Doc Duvalier
and his tonton macoutes. Ignorance and superstition. Belief in
animism. I was a reactionary. I was against Margaret Mead-Ruth Benedict
cultural relativism. I thought it was misguided. Bad science. I thought it was
liberal do-goodism. Rah, rah, rah, Ethical Culture. I was not against
the Haitians so much as I was against the professoriate.
I felt like they were two-faced, and couldn’t see that
the way they treated graduate students was unconscionable.
Well, I had a self-defeating way of showing it. I stabbed myself
in the head like a scorpion and injected a head full of poison in my own head.