July 15, 2020 Jim Bates: my only, lonely, defender in the midst of a defamation campaign led by local political zealots

GREENFIELD DISTORTER

July 15, 2020

About a month ago there was an online petition “to remove the artwork of a local business owner John Sendelbach.” 

The Recorder with all its exuberance, ran a front page article about the petition. Three days later the petition was taken down. The morning of the article, I wrote the following and sent it to the editor of the Recorder. My letter never made it to print. I am trying again, to offer my support to Mr. Sendelbach and voice my opinion the matter. 

June 12 I wrote: This newspaper is perpetuating division and exclusion. A petitioner states, “I want my community to be represented in a positive and loving way.” Hypocrisy! Am I wrong? How is calling out a person based on their skin color and gender, Mr. Sendelbach is a caucasian male, to publicly shame, ridicule and chastise him, threatening his business and livelihood, acting in “a positive and loving way”? I think it is the exact opposite. The petition group is using fascist techniques to silence and ostracize a person into submission. Read between the lines how subtle they are to highlight a person’s skin color and gender. Plain and simple a mob mentality: Encircle an individual, then shout them down, because they disagree with you. If this type of mob think continues, where will it lead to? Who is next? 

Jim Bates, Gill, MA

here are the creeps who did all this to me:

The Art Garden’s Hoop-Skirt Hypocrisy: “It’s Art and Community” — Except When It Was Me

I welded exactly one piece for the Art Garden. A female figural base — steel, antebellum big-hoop-skirt silhouette. Built at my own studio, for free. Jane Wegscheider praised it to my face. That praise felt like acceptance into the community of makers they claimed to champion.

For years I was one of the community-oriented art providers in Shelburne Falls. My sculptures still stand around town — Bridge of Flowers installations that draw visitors every season, Brookie the Trout swimming in RiverWorks Park, the Sturgeon on the Hudson. I showed up at Tish Murphy’s memorial (another Art Garden member who took her own life) when the community needed presence, not performance. I believed in the values they advertised: radical acceptance, non-judgmental space, real community.

That single hoop skirt became the perfect, bitter symbol for what the institution ultimately did with that community.

It's Not Your Time: A musician's case against PorchFest

It's Not Your Time

A musician's case against PorchFest — and against spending a village's scarcest days on other people's stage time

Missing the Big Indian?

On Cheap Morality and the People Who Practice It

UPDATED: "Eyeroll" Rhonda, The Big Indian, Hail to the Sunrise, and the Standard That Moves in One Direction

Condescension face: Rhonda Anderson,
Western Massachusetts Commissioner on Indian Affairs,
mention her name, and the eyes roll....because Rhonda knows best! 

I. The Letter That Started It

Drummers "boys" attempt to "Save Democracy" ROFL

What the Phrase Looks Like From the Inside of a Six-Year Case

Documented Record of Selective Coverage by the Greenfield Recorder & Daily Hampshire Gazette

Poor Joan! Had years to correct the record, finally her son had to do it in court testimony

I am not antisemitic. I am anti-semantic.

I oppose the way the accusation of "antisemitism" is deployed as a semantic weapon — a preemptive label that substitutes for evidence, shuts down examination, and protects specific individuals from accountability. Once the word is spoken, the actual record often becomes irrelevant. The label does the work. The inquiry stops.

NIGGERLIPS: What They Called Me First

Before anyone called me a Grand Wizard, they called me: NIGGERLIPS

An Open Letter to Rev. Kate Stevens, the Leadership of Trinity Church, and the Institutional Leaders Who Have Said Nothing

To Rev. Kate Stevens:

You wrote in the Greenfield Recorder on June 20, 2020: "We need to listen; we need to learn the real United States history and hear all the stories that have not been told."

Richard Wright's Black Boy: Symbolic Conversion and the Automatic Category

Symbolic Conversion and the Automatic Category: A Theoretical Integration

Relational Aggression, Symbolic Conversion, and Institutional Adoption: A Six-Year Case Study of Reputational Stigmatization in a Small Community

The Gnome and the Stones: Burning Man, Thirty Feet of Kitsch, and What Local Media Still Refuses to See

GNOME AND THE STONES

Black Lives Matter?

On Demographic Reality, Organizational Accountability, and the Suppression of Inconvenient Evidence