The Bitch Is Back

UPDATE ~ UPDATE ~ UPDATE

Over at Crossroads, Simpson writes:

NOTE: Connie Chastain clearly never actually understood the lyrics of the song she cited in attacking me … such as … “… ’cause I’m better than you It’s the way that I move, the things that I do …” As I’m the “I” in question, perhaps she’s right. After all, she’s never wrong. Just ask her. 

Oh, I know you're a lot better at the things you do. Lying, for example You're better at it because you do it a lot, and I don't do it at all. You're better at denigrating people's intelligence if you disagree with them, which I rarely ever do. (I'm much, much better at denigrating people's questionable integrity.) You're better at censoring people and sending their comments to oblivion. (The only person whose comments I block is Rob "Tu Quoque" Bakur.)  (Oh, and see? He DOES understand the use of ellipses! That means he deliberately left them out of my Emmett Till quote to deceive his readers into thinking he'd posted the whole thing.)
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I don't know where he went for several days. I just know that for some reason, my comments at the bitch's blog were being allowed through. Then, this happened.

I posted an excerpt from one of Douglas Harper's excellent essays, which included this:

 The four-year history of the CSA is not necessarily the place to seek an example of the values Southerners sought to uphold. Any nation fighting for survival from the cradle, invaded and blockaded all its life, doesn’t get a chance to express the finer points of democracy and civil culture. If all we knew of Americans was how they actually behaved from 1776 to 1783, we wouldn’t think much of our sense of “democracy” or commitment to “personal freedom.”

Simpson replied: “The four-year history of the CSA is not necessarily the place to seek an example of the values Southerners sought to uphold.” Black southerners would agree with this assertion. But Ms. Chastain has a blind spot when it comes to this issue. When she says “southerners,” she means white southerners.

My response: Well, Mr. Harper, a Pennsylvanian, wrote that. However, traditionally, the term “Southerner” has always applied to whites. Black Southerners don’t usually call themselves that but prefer “blacks” or “African American” without reference to region. I haven’t often heard blacks refer to themselves as yankees, or northerners or mid-westerners, etc., either.

Simpson:         I’m sure you converse with a lot of black people, Connie. Sweet Southern Boys is a fantasy: the murder of Emmett Till was the reality.

Notice how he brings up my novel, Sweet Southern Boys, out of the blue?  It has nothing to do with the conversation, it has not been mentioned but he brings it up. One reason is because he's obsessed with it. He's done that before, and I blogged about it here: The Desire to Denigrate. The other reason is to tar the novel (and me) with a fraudulent connection to the Emmett Till case.
 

Me:  Mr. Simpson, yes, as a matter of fact I have conversed with a lot of black people all my life, particularly as an adult — at school, at work, at church, etc. Sweet Southern Boys is fiction, not fantasy, inspired by an actual event. I’m not sure what the murder of Emmett Till has to do with it. Are you implying that fiction should be banned because of reprehensible acts that occur in reality? If not, what is your point in trying to connect the two? There is no connection, you know, except, perhaps, in your imagination.

Simpson: It is a truly vivid imagination that conjures up the connections you attempt to make.

Me: You’re the one who put them together in the same sentence, not I. Perhaps if you told us your reason for doing that, conjuring wouldn’t be necessary.

Simpson I linked them together for reasons that to explain would be to belabor the obvious and imply a disrespect for your level of knowledge and intelligence. But some times I guess giving someone the benefit of the doubt doesn’t pay off. Perhaps you don’t know what happened to Emmett Till or why it offers an instructive comparison to your fictional tale. At least your sweet southern boys weren’t murdered. Now hurry off to a search engine and return with something that you’ve snipped to suggest otherwise. As for your “conjuring,” I’d say it is illustrative of how your mind works. Thanks for providing it.

Me: I understand perfectly why you attempted to link my novel and the Till case. You pulled up a deplorable but completely irrelevant event from the past and implied a connection where none exists in a vain effort to shame me and disparage my novel. Yes, I know what happened to Emmett Till, and I know it offers no instructive comparison to my novel — in fact, no comparison whatsoever. No, my sweet Southern boys weren’t murdered. Do you think they should have been? Do you think all fictional Southern white boys should be murdered in the novels they’re featured in? …that they should not be portrayed admirably … or that they should not be portrayed as suffering injustice? My conjuring was not the result of vivid imagination but of deliberate facetiousness. It makes as much sense for me to suggest you’re implying that fiction should be banned because of reprehensible acts that occur in reality as it does for you to imply a connection between my novel and the Till case.

Simpson Wrong again, Connie. I’m not disparaging your novel. That’s merely a virtual artifact. For a woman who studies false accusations of sexual behavior, the fact that you can’t see how that links to the Till case suggests that history is indeed a foreign land to you. The difference, of course, is that Till was black, not white … and his case is history, not fantasy fiction. That you think I want fictional characters murdered suggests just how bizarre your mind is. Who cares about the contents of a book no one reads and which you have to give away for free? No one cares about your characters. I just wanted to see where your twisted line of “reasoning” would lead, and you fell into that trap so easily. Thank you. At least you admit that you also write fiction when you write about me and what you think I’m thinking … which is, after all, really about what goes on in the deep, dark, and dim corners of your mind. Thus endeth the lesson for today. Have a nice weekend. After all, you have yet to come up with a single positive feature of the Confederacy, and it’s time to shut you down so that you can concentrate on that. I wouldn’t want to distract you.

Me: It's par for the sleazy course with you, to lie about me and then block my responses. For someone who is so convinced of his own superiority, you sure are scared of letting me speak. I've described your absurd behavior. That is not fiction. Emmett Till was not falsely accused. He came on to a white woman in pre-civil rights Mississippi, and the was brutally murdered for it. The murder was an atrocity, but it has absolutely no connection whatever to the story in my novel. Just out of curiosity, did you agree with those folks who said the Duke Lacrosse defendants deserved their persecution (and worse), even if innocent, because they were "privileged" white boys? Sorry, no, your denials don't get it. You've shown way too much interest in my novels in the past to pretend you have no interest in them now. Your interest is well documented in a number of comments you've made on this very blog -- some of them out of the blue, in threads I didn't post in, about subjects that are totally irrelevant to them. You've "reviewed" them without having read them and you've made false judgments about me based on your fraudulent reviews. Certainly you care about my characters, because it sticks in your craw that white Southerners are portrayed positively, even in fiction, even by little ol' moi. Your comments in this thread are just more of the same -- the latest chapter in your well-established desire to denigrate.

Notice, too, how he fraudulently labels the the Till case as an example of  "false accusation.," for the purpose of claiming that my novel and a brutal murder are somehow related, or at least similar.  And remember that this man holds a highly responsible position at a major state university.

Just to clarify, I don't blog about Simpson and his attacks on me and my novels just to be whining, or as a bid for sympathy. People who know me, or even those who have simply read my blogs and Facebook posts, know I'm no simpering whiner. My purpose is not to say, "Poor widdle me," but, "Can you believe what a jerk this guy is?" My aim is to display his obsession with unethically throwing the "racist" tar bucket at Southern heritage folks -- and to show the mentality, the verbal methods, and the demonstrations of, um, ethics by a major critic of Southern heritage blogging in the disguise of a historian...