History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.

–  Karl Marx

My parents are on their annual cruise, this time the Mediterranean. They disembark from Nice France, making their way to Naples Italy, then Greece. “They’ll probably have you visit Pompeii,” I said to my mom. “What’s that?” she said, stuffing $40 dollars worth of fruit into a juicer. “Where an entire city got buried in ash, thanks,” I said with a new smoothie in hand. In about two weeks, when they come back, my mom will call me on the phone (while I’m at work) with an exhausting account — she’s been known to take notes — of all of my dad’s cultural, personal, and moral transgressions. “Sure,” I’ll say, in response to accompanying her — who vowed, again, never to step on a ship with my dad, ever again — next year to the cruise. I’ll internally dread going, as I dread most things on the horizon, where I imagine burning bodies and a cable bill. This is my life.

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As our eyes get sucked into the flat vortex of Olympia’s pale skin (Olympia. Manet, 1863), we miss the black cat, visually camouflaged in the same manner as the black maid. The cat holds the threatened pose of an arched back, perhaps terrified at the prospect of being immortalized in this human game of representation. In a now timeless interview at a New York Times TimesTalks event, Paula Deen — in that weird Southern defensive and ultimately counteractive way — feels compelled to express solidarity with black folk by casually calling up a black employee, one Hollis Johnson, whose skin she warned was “as black as this board,” referring to the backdrop behind her. “We can’t see you standing in front of that dark board!” she says, which made me, of all people, behind my laptop, feel humiliated. My sensibilities (privileged, protected) were simply shocked. The audience awkwardly laughs, knowing in their bones that just ain’t right, but this was before her public lynching (irony lives on). I’ve never liked Paula Deen; the affected Southern drawl, entitled casualness with everything around her, and earplugs politics all make for a kind of confederate hubris at war with liberal America, which is exactly the demographic (out-of-touch obese Republicans) Food Network was aiming at; and while it remains so predictable, and hypocritical, that they quickly snip her corrupted legacy from their corporate brand, it was invariably the only thing they could do. Instead of using this sad time to talk about racism (if it is even that, or merely glib provincialism), the academics and media have safely mollified discourse by shutting it down, branding her a “racist,” a conversation ending zinger whose ring feels attuned to McCarthy’s “communist,” Bush’s “terrorist,” and the Neo-Conservative “socialist,” words so bloated with ideological complexity they are rendered cacophonous.

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