Beginning to Deconstruct Cincy
I am beginnig to post fragments and beginnings of writings I've been doing over the past few weeks. They are raw, but they are products...
The Queen City stands on the banks of the Ohio with a chip on it s shoulder. In many ways, it so resembles the black men it spawns; longing to be normal, learning normal from a TV screen or Hollywood images, and filled with intense self doubt, if not full fledged self hatred. This is a city that averts its eyes from a direct gaze and chooses back-door deals and outright violence, a passive-aggressive response to confrontation and communication. Perhaps this city does not even remember how to communicate without the polite veneer of surface liberalism. Instead it looks out onto the Midwestern landscape with unmitigated envy in its eyes, wishing it could have the cache of other cities, but unwilling to change any of its ways to make that a possibility. Cincinnati clings to its hardworking Midwestern WASP ethos while refusing to make room for the poor, immigrants or homosexuals; but secretly it longs for the cultural and economic stability of cities where accommodating differences has paid off. In the meantime, it engages in dangerous self-speak that denigrates and derides itself, content to complain about the status quo and exist in a cloud of fear rather than engage, relate and participate in the solving of the problems we face.
This is a city of angry, bitter people, where the media is the chief cheerleader for white flight and pictures are painted at 9, 12, 6, 5:30, 6, and 11 of scary black men and dark, drugged out streets armed with guns, where no self respecting white man would let their daughters roam at night.
And the county and the city war with one another and fight over crusts of bread. The schools sag under the weight of ill-prepared teachers, hopeless students and disinterested parents. People turn out to vote so that the elected officials can be hanged on the gallows when the problems don’t disappear; hands-off is a well known policy in the city of seven hills, East-side, West-side relationships are considered interracial, and the region drives into the downtown city, never gazing at the river, to earn a buck and then return to their safe and pale suburbs, where everyone’s the same and undesirables are hard pressed to get to, because public transportation does to make that outreach outsides commuting times.
Cincinnati’s a class-ed classist city that likes to eat but not dine- that doesn’t mind thugs, as long as they are athletic and successful on the court or in the boardroom; that loves the arts but still finds them somewhat of a guilty pleasure; and that, like my dress sense, cannot see the layers in the solutions to its societal problems. It prefers a one sweater, one pair of slacks approach that ignores any intersectionality whatsoever.
Cincinnati has many of the ingredients for success, but no recipe and no master baker. It confronts the world with its chin thrust forward defiantly against any guidance, while begging for any outside with a million dollar contract to consult it to its own freedom. And now, with perennial armpit Northern Kentucky developing faster than e. coli outbreaks in spinach, it no longer has it’s favorite backwoods whipping boy to kick around.
It is now time for this city to look itself squarely in their eye and claim an identity, or sink forever into obscurity; it is time for the peons to create the lords, and the lords to create the rulers.