Virginia Is a Quiet Menace

You’ve probably seen Virginia in the news a lot lately, much more than the usual amount of Virginia news that you get in your daily news intake, which would be zero. Governor Ralph Northam—a limp Democrat who only won his post because he was facing off against even limper GOP candidate Ed Gillispie—is currently under pressure to resign after his medical school yearbook included photos of two men, himself likely one of them, dressed in racist outfits. His potential replacement, Lt. Governor Justin Fairfax, is also currently under serious accusations of sexual assault. Not content to be left out of the scandal party, state Attorney General Mark Herring confessed today that he ALSO once dressed up in blackface, because, uh, who amongst us? Oh, and the sergeant assigned to monitor protests of Northam now stands accused of having formal ties to White Nationalism. I’ll let this heartbreaking photo taken of State Senator Louise Lucas accurately summarize the entire Virginia situation in tidy fashion:

Full disclosure: I am not from Virginia. But I've lived in the state NEXT to Virginia since 2004, and I commuted every day to the state for five years as part of a day job I had in Falls Church. Does that qualify me to take cheap potshots and Maryland-splain an entire neighboring state from afar? Reader, it very much does. Because while I may not be FROM Virginia, I know enough about Virginia to tell you that it’s been a quiet menace for many, many years.

The Virginia you readers know is probably restricted to Northern Virginia, a swath of land that serves as a hub for government subcontracting and residential housing for DC commuters. It’s also home to one of America’s worst airports (Dulles) and one of its most overcrowded malls (Tyson’s Corner). Truly, NoVa is best embodied in the drippy personality of Northam, whose racist escapades in medical school (why do those schools have yearbooks?!) don’t take away in the least from his thoroughly underwhelming presence as head of government. Northern Virginia is anodyne, overbuilt, horribly congested, populated with aggro ‘Skins fans and drivers even worse than me, and all of it will only get worse once Amazon moves in and strip-mines a whole new metro area.

And this is the GOOD part of Virginny I’m talking about here: the part of the state that has outstanding food (the Vietnamese food in Falls Church is some of the best in the nation), pleasant weather, the enchanting scenery of Old Town Alexandria, and enough liberal voters to keep the state in play when an election year rolls around. This, somehow, is arguably VA at its best, even though NoVa has all the ambience of a Buffalo Wild Wings and every street is named after General Lee.

Sit in traffic for 9 hours in order to stray a few miles outside of this area and you find yourself in VUHJINNYUH. You are in the deepest South, with Fuck You pickup trucks and men who sound like Foghorn Leghorn if he owned a plantation and was drunk on Beast Light all day long. You are in REAL Virginia, I do declare. Like the rest of the Deep South, rural Virginia is gorgeous but also rife with the kind of toxic redneckism that’s given the region its deservedly tarnished historic reputation. The gross thing about Northam’s escapade isn’t that he had the temerity to dress up in racist garb, admit it, then un-admit it, but that plenty of Virginians will give him a pass for what he did. That’s why he’s foolishly trying to stay in office. He’s seen other politicians—Republicans, mostly—get away with open displays of bigotry and stick around. And I bet he figures he can do likewise. Despite the uproar now, he may be guessing right on that.

Northam’s past display of casual, festive racism is the kind of shit that deserves to be called out. It’s also the kind of shit that will draw complaints about “the PC police” from right wing outlets who still want to live in a white America where their kind can be free to be absolute dicks. That’s the kind of dickishness that President Trump embodies on a daily basis, and it’s often celebrated in places like Virginia that tend to overly bask in the glories of past injustices. Northam belongs to an upper class there that has been forged—as it has in so many other states, Northern ones included—by traditionally segregated elite institutions. That class can pretend it has shed all its ingrained hatred of the past, but we already know that’s a big lie.

But wait! I’m not here just to complain about racism in Virginia—there’s a lot of other shit that’s annoying about it! I know I complained about traffic in the D.C. suburbs, but actually traffic EVERYWHERE in the state is pure misery. Drive through Hampton Roads and you’ll crawl at 20 mph through an area of nearly two million people without seeing anything or anyone interesting. Visit Colonial Williamsburg and you'll realize you’ve made an egregious error. Want to see how people in the 1700s made candles while your children whine at ever-higher pitches about wanting to leave? You do not. Enjoy walking underground until you die of a panic attack fueled by a fear of being buried alive? Go to Luray Caverns!

There’s less! Charlottesville isn't a charming college town that periodically hosts Nazi rallies—it's more of a strip mall that periodically hosts Nazi rallies. No wonder they were able to find stores that sold lawn torches and khakis so easily. Busch Gardens? It kicks rounds of ass EXCEPT for the fact that you have to visit six different kiosks that feature reservoir-still lines just to get INSIDE the park. Enjoy beaches? Then you'd best drive through Virginia to get to the coastline states with beaches you’ll actually like. Dreaming of a jaunt to Richmond? Dream bigger. I’ve been. It’s optional.

Virginia is the tenth state in the history of our nation. It was home to the first colony of permanent English settlers on this continent, and it’s as rich in beauty and history as the states that joined the USA before it. Of course, that past has a serious criminal element to it. And if the past couple years have proven anything, it’s that so many dark stains in the fabric of American history still exist, only covered in new and cheap coatings of dye. The work to wash out so much of the inherent toxicity in our institutions has only just begun. Trump seems eager to preserve a good amount of the dirt.

But the saga of Ralph Northam makes it clear that the difference between the new toxicity and the old toxicity isn’t as wide of a gulf as he might pretend to be, particularly in an open wound of a state like Virginia. He needs to resign, and Virginia needs to get on with the overdue work of becoming a state that the rest of us can be proud of.