Let's Break Free

Editor’s Note: Lynne McFarland is my neighbor. We met many years ago when she bought a book at one of our yard sales, and then we we met again more recently at a police station when we both showed up to support Justin Jones, who’d been wrongly accused and wrongly charged with a crime. I have come to think of her as a kind of mentor. I am amazed by her wit, her passion, her prophetic candor, and her writing. I eagerly await her public posts on Facebook and I reprint this rumination (and the images she included) with her permission. Read and be amazed.

Craig Breedlove was an auto racer who set land speed records back in the day, driving what was actually just a jet engine on wheels across the salt flats out in Utah. In 1964, he strapped himself in and broke a record going faster than 500 mph when his parachute brake deployed incorrectly and sent him careening into some poles, then crashing into a lake where he and his vehicle promptly sank. Craig got out of his safety straps, escaped through the roof of his vehicle, swam to shore, and to his frantic team members, who had arrived lakeside, he said, “For my next act I will set myself on fire.”

When I was in college, Craig Breedlove was sort of a hero of mine for his charming, cocky confidence, and the way he laughed off that brush with death. Clearly there was some psychological glitch of my own that led me to this position, but during those college years, after any event in which I displayed a self-propelled loss of good sense and failed judgment, I often quoted Craig, “For my next act I will set myself on fire.” I don’t think I am alone in the relish of my own foolishness. A Southern saying, “I’m feeling six feet wide and bulletproof” describes actual pride in taking The Gift of Life lightly. Behind that wall, of course, is the unacknowledged truth of possible failure, the fact that self-destruction was avoided largely only by good luck or grace.

I don’t know if that was actually Craig’s MO. He was probably more like the NASA astronauts of the 1960’s, guys with degrees in physics who had The Right Stuff, and a good sense of humor. I channeled his witty saying without either a physics degree or The Right Stuff, but with a love of the South that has endured everything. Right now I am reading a fantastic book by a Southern guy named H. D. Kirkpatrick, entitled Marse, in which he performs a psychological autopsy on the elite, white slave master of the antebellum South. (He calls him "Marse.") It makes my blood freeze and my skin crawl it is so true. If only it were really an autopsy, but unfortunately, The Creature Still Lives. Kirkpatrick acknowledges that as well, that the characteristics of the old Marse persist in the present day and are behind systems such as mass incarceration, police brutality against people of color, voter suppression, immigration, educational and housing discrimination, and the like. It’s a thick book, the author is a deep scholar of the literature on the South, you gotta read it, but here’s a quick look:

The Southerner, whose blood boiled in the face of tyranny, by becoming an enslaver, became a tyrant. This fact is extremely important psychologically, for Marse had to internalize a tyrant—a racist authoritarian-- as part of his being, and at the same time build an impregnable “wall” –perhaps composed largely of vanity and honor—if you will around this feature of his psyche. (Marse, 10)

Kirkpatrick calls this “lethal.”

Here in Tennessee, we love that combo of cheek and swagger in the face of self-destructive exploits: we see it now as we watch the TN Legislature crash, sink, and threaten to burn our shared values down in land-speed record time. There is some statewide psychological glitch in play to take the gifts of life so lightly. I’ve been there so I can speak from experience: self-deception.

Reverend James Lawson told Governor Bill Lee that he had “a hole down the middle of his soul,” his memorable phrase for the ability of a human to split the whole of his humanity in two. Rev. Lawson got that line from the movie Tombstone, in which Doc Holliday, played brilliantly by Val Kilmer, says that about a gang of murderous cowboys. Lawson loved that movie and said the cowboys “refused the gift of life.”

photo of Rev. Lawson and Justin by John Partipilo

So here we are in Tennessee. Getting ready to set ourselves on fire, denying our wholeness, in the process of self-destruction, and hollering “yee-haw” as we go down. It is so fortunate that we have just seen Vanderbilt University dedicate the James Lawson Institute for the Research and Study of Nonviolent Movements here in Nashville. It is so fortunate that Justin Jones, a young generation nonviolent activist, is running for a seat in the TN House of Representatives. God help him. Before we set ourselves on fire, let’s tear down that wall of self-deception, let’s break free, rise to the surface, and swim to shore.