Wright Thompson Quotes

That's the work of adulthood. Sorting out the good and bad within.

Our fathers are often mysteries to us and therefore we are often mysteries to ourselves.

Families stay together because of active decisions, because of patters that turn into tribunals, and they are torn apart most often not by anger or feuds but by careless inertia.0

Being Southern means carrying a responsibility to shake off the comforting blanket of myth and see ourselves clearly. I was bringing a child into this world, and into our long history of trying to do the right think while benefiting mightily from the wrong thing, and I wanted her to see it clearly without the nostalgia that so often softens my anger and desire to tear it down and build a new world in its place.

So this is what it means,” she said and I understood. We build a life to share, to pass on, so that some idea of us can live in our children and grandchildren, so that we might live forever and they might never be alone.

You drink expensive bourbon and then you piss it out. No getting around that.

This guy is handier than a pocket in a shirt.

everyone was drinking like they needed to forget some horrible thing they'd done

our long history of trying to do the right thing while benefitting mightily from the wrong thing

You're deep in the nostalgia now,' I told him. 'You get older, you got nothing left,' he said.

That's writing, he said. Be simple, blunt, and profound.

Longing for a vanished agrarian past (that probably never existed) dominates much of the American story.

When tomorrow comes this day will be gone forever, leaving something it its place I have traded for it.

It is not what we do, but also what we do not do, for which we are accountable.’ 

When I tell my daughter, Wallace the story of the place she's from--when I play Muddy Waters or Son House or Skip James--I want her to see the complete picture. I want her to hear that music and know that people like us--planters and landowners, which we are--often caused the pain these musicians turned into beauty,

never feel jealous of other people’s success, and to try to see the best in people and to have empathy for whatever might be causing or fueling their worst behaviors.

Being Southern means carrying a responsibility to shake off the comforting blanket of myth and see ourselves clearly.

Buried violence is just a perennial bulb that is fertilized by fear and watered by insecurity.

man often spends his entire adult life trying to be exactly like his father or nothing like him.

He doesn’t inspire selfies as much as handshakes.

The story sums him up best to me. He thought of the grand gesture and then did it.

This all makes me think a lot about what it means to be from the Mississippi Delta; to be from the South, For me and other White people of a certain social class, it means that I carry a legacy of a roguish and faded gentility, a love for whiskey, and fast cars on riding road,s and a knowledge of roadside blues clubs that offered guitars and tall boys of beer.

Here's the story they don't want to tell: eight companies make 95 percent of the whiskey in America...And all those different brand names are just that. Brands. Perhaps no word sums up the death of truth in America better than the word brand.

There’s the story of the Kentucky Derby party when a group of famous people, including baseball star Cal Ripken, had cornered Julian to talk whiskey and Wayne Gretzky kept coming up and interrupting, until Julian finally wheeled around and said, “Why don’t you shut the fuck up, Wayne?

I wanted her to have my dad's sense of wonder and fairness. He always celebrated other people's success and believed that greatness wasn't a zero-sum game. You were only ever competing against yourself and your own limitations. Someone else's joy was never your sadness, he always taught us.

Aging means losing things, and not just eyesight and flexibility. It means watching the accomplishments of your youth be diminished, maybe in your own eyes through perspective, maybe in the eyes of others through cultural amnesia. Most people live anonymous lives, and when they grow old and die, any record of their existence is blown away.

The covering up of Till’s murder was not something that was perpetrated by a few bad apples. It couldn’t have been. The erasure was a collective effort, one that continues to this day. This isn’t comfortable history to face. The more I looked at the story of the barn and came to understand the forces that moved everyone involved into the Mississippi Delta in 1955, the more I understood that the tragedy of humankind isn’t that sometimes a few depraved individuals do what the rest of us could never do. It’s that the rest of us hide those hateful things from view, never learning the lesson that hate grows stronger and more resistant when it’s pushed underground. There lies the true horror of Emmett Till’s murder and the undeserved gift of his martyrdom. Empathy only lives at the intersection of facts and imagination, and once you know his story, you can’t unknow it. Once you connect all the dots, there’s almost nowhere they don’t lead. Which is why so many have fought literally and figuratively for so long to keep the reality from view.

Despite its reputation for individualism and unbridled capitalism, the United States has a history rich in cooperation and communalism. From the colonial era to the present—and among the indigenous population for millennia—local communities have engaged in self-help, democracy, and cooperation. Indeed, the “individualistic” tradition might more accurately be called the “self-help” tradition, where “self” is defined not only in terms of the individual but in terms of the community (be it family, township, religious community, etc.). Americans are traditionally hostile to overarching authorities separate from the community with which they identify, a hostility expressed in the age-old resentment towards both government and big business. The stereotype, based on fact, is that Americans would rather solve problems on their own than rely on political and economic power-structures to do so. The following brief survey of the history substantiates this claim. While my focus is on worker cooperatives, I will not ignore the many and varied experiments in other forms of cooperation and communalism. Certain themes and lessons can be gleaned from the history. The most obvious is that a profound tension has existed, constantly erupting into conflict, between the democratic, anti-authoritarian impulses of ordinary Americans and the tendency of economic and political power-structures to grow extensively and intensively, to concentrate themselves in ever-larger and more centralized units that reach as far down into society as possible. Power inherently tries to control as much as it can: it has an intrinsic tendency toward totalitarianism, ideally letting nothing, even the most trivial social interactions, escape its oversight. Bentham’s Panopticon is the perfect emblem of the logic of power. Other social forces, notably people’s strivings for freedom and democracy, typically keep this totalitarian tendency in check. In fact, the history of cooperation and communalism is a case-study in the profound truth that people are instinctively averse to the modes of cutthroat competition, crass greed, authoritarianism, hierarchy, and dehumanization that characterize modern capitalism. Far from capitalism’s being a straightforward expression of human nature, as apologists proclaim, it is more like the very antithesis of human nature, which is evidently drawn to such things as free self-expression, spontaneous “play,”131 cooperation and friendly competition, compassion, love. The work of Marxist historians like E. P. Thompson shows how people have had to be disciplined, their desires repressed, in order for the capitalist system to seem even remotely natural: centuries of indoctrination, state violence, incarceration of “undesirables,” the bureaucratization of everyday life, have been necessary to partially accustom people to the mechanical rhythms of industrial capitalism and the commodification of the human personality.132 And of course resistance continues constantly, from the early nineteenth century to the present day. “Wage-slavery,” as workers in the nineteenth century called it, is a monstrous assault on human dignity, which is why even today, after so much indoctrination, people still hate being subordinated to a “boss” and rebel against it whenever they can.

Bourbon became popular again, and then it became expensive and rare, which made it more popular and yet so hard to get that its original purpose as a way to facilitate and lubricate fellowship was being replaced by the hunting for and finding of it.

What became clear in Michigan was that Julian and Sissy have become the fully realized version of themselves through success. That's actually rare. I profile famous and successful athletes for a living and almost no one understands that success is merely a currency to spend on one big purchase. Do you use it to try to get more success? To maintain the attention and bright lights? Or do you buy a life with it? The kind of life most people really want. I wanted what they have, wanted to organize the next act of my life, the one that moved finally past my youthful dreams and the rage and ambition that come shaped and fueled by my most broken and insecure self.

The attitudes and intentions are why we should bring it up, to interrogate the present to see what of the past remains. Because our present day potential for violence is alive and undiminished.

More and more today, we don’t want to do the work or take the chances required for greatness, and we try to fix all those shortcuts on the back end with marketing and branding—modern, fancy words that mean lie.

The accusation, as it often is in Mississippi, was the confession.

up, to interrogate the present to see what of the past remains. Because our present day potential for violence is alive and undiminished.

One famous (and perhaps apocryphal) story tells of how he, while testifying in court, was asked by an official to identify himself. Wright responded by declaring that he was the greatest architect in the world. His response, when asked how he could make such a statement, was that he had no choice – he was under oath.

I ordered us another, and we sat there, me and my father’s older brother and best friend, and we sipped this beautiful, rare, expensive whiskey and we didn’t need to say a thing.

That’s what Patterson Hood called the “Duality of the Southern Thing.

Close is always the only possible outcome when someone tries to make the present match up with his memory of the past. Home always seems warmer and safer than it really was. That’s where the pain comes from. We long for a fantasy that won’t ever come true and feel surprise at our inability to create it from force of will.

What’s in a Vanhattan?” I asked as he started to mix. “It’s half rye, half bourbon,” he said. When he said rye, he meant the Van Winkle rye. And when he said bourbon, he meant Pappy. The bar was on the wall near the grill. He poured from feel; he didn’t need jiggers. “Carpano Antica vermouth,” he said.

I know that success means reaching your goals and enjoying them and that one without the other is empty and meaningless.

Sometimes I worry we've already made our decisions and have no hope of undoing them.

What is the cost? I won't ever look at the Rebel flag the same again. Although I like "Dixie", especially when it is played slow, if it were never played again, I would be OK with that.

What I am doing today becomes important because I am exchanging a day of my life for it.

The citizens in New Orleans, generation after generation, have chosen joy in the face of disaster and oppression. Everything unique about the city is a reflection of that.

The most powerful four-letter word is home.

All sons, whether they love or hate their fathers, or some combination of both, want to cleanse themselves of inherited weakness, shaking free from the past.

But, today, he listens to just a few songs on repeat, by singer-songwriter Jason Isbell, "Something More Than Free", and "Traveling Alone." They're about loneliness and labor and the emptiness of being made to travel on a road not of your choosing.

I've learned in the past three years that I did many things solely to tell Daddy about them later.

None of this happens without Mama & Daddy. They raised me with curiosity, confidence, and empathy, the three most important traits in my line of work.

What is the cost of knowing our past? And what is the cost of not?

wasn’t there for the best bourbon-fetish bar moment. Once, in New York, Preston leaned against a bar and ordered a Van Winkle how he drinks it, as Julian drinks it, as Julian Jr. and Pappy drank it: on the rocks with a twist. The bartender snootily told him he didn’t feel right serving such fine bourbon like that. Preston grinned. He paused, for dramatic effect, and then delivered the kill shot: Well, sir, that sure is disappointing, given that’s how my grandfather and father taught me to drink it, and my family made the stuff after all. Hi, I’m Preston Van Winkle. . .

The monuments we erect--shouting into the wind that we were once alive and had hopes and dreams--often end up becoming a shrine to the fallacy and futility of that desire itself.

The hidden history of Kentucky is everywhere, relics of the booms and busts of people who tried to grab a piece of that permanence only to have it slip through their fingers. Most of these farms are owned by someone who made a breathtaking amount of money doing something else. In the rush of their pruchase, most never stopped ot think that they were probably buying from someone who'd lost a similarly breathtaking fortune. Nearly every horse farm comes with the silent warning of the construction magnate who took on one project too many, the coal baron who couldn't survive his industry's decline, the industrialist family that burned through its inheritance.

Violence and discord over Hamilton versus Jefferson remain the greatest threats to the health of our experiment in democracy.

I brought along a bottle of 1978 Old Fitzgerald and we drank it the whole way down. That's how we acknowledged the ghosts who'd be at the game with us. That's how we toasted them while we flew.

Both loved me unconditionally and showed that love every day, as well as an unshakable belief in me and my dreams, no matter how unlikely they seemed. That's what I wanted to provide, more than anything else: a safe harbor of encouragement.

Julian and his dad were men of different times. That's how it is with fathers and sons. The act of panning a generational divide is the single most important thing either person will do in their lifetime; the relationship depends on making that leap successfully.

Most every man competes with his father and imitates his father, lives in fear of disappointing, and craves approval, and on the extreme ends of this potentially fraught relationship, a man often spends his entire adult life trying to be exactly like his father or nothing like him.

I've written about my father a lot, too, and while I am not ashamed of his flaws, I did think it was my right to focus on the parts that rang most true to me. It was my job as a firstborn son to protect him in death as I had been unable to do in life.

Meeting Julian and making him talk about his family made me ask myself the same question I'd been asking him: What did I owe my late father? What did I owe a grandfather I never met? What is demanded of a son or daughter? What was demanded of me?

Perhaps it is almost justice, dad, that we should have to go through war every so often to pay for the peace years.

I profile famous and successful athletes for a living and almost no one understands that success is merely a currency to spend on one big purchase.

...left to write Darkness and stew. To me it's a record about trying to protect a dream while confronted with a growing wall of reality that says the dream is dead--and worse: useless, pathetic, impossible.

He has said his foal with his own family was to avoid the pain inflicted on him by his father, to be, as he put it, an ancestor in their lives and not a ghost. He wanted to walk by their side and guide and protect, not grasp their ankles and pull them back down.

Music is often the kingdom the dead inhabits in our soul.

My time with them made me examine my own life and think about my family's past and about what I want to bury and what I want to live on in my daughter. We must be intentional with our myths and stories, and we must live the lives we want our children to live.

the game always the same no matter how much the men who love it change, a simplicity that waits day after day, beautiful and addictive.

reclaim

Look at this place,” he says. “This big hotel, this town. It’s dust, all dust. Don’t none of it mean nothin’. It’s all only dust.

people in urban America aren’t Shakespearean characters with free will but actors in a Greek tragedy,

I find the brainstorm meeting absurd. Everybody is looking for ideas all the time, like breathing, or they are not doing it at all. If you have to come in at a set time to come up with ideas, I don’t want to be anywhere near you. I want to be around people who are curious citizens of the world who want to know everything about everything.

I understood in that moment why a memorial for Emmett Till in the Delta wasn't just about justice or truth. Memorials in my homeland had always been about forgetting. Nathan Bedford Forrest in Memphis, the Confederate dead on countless Mississippi courthouse lawns. But this memorial would be about remembering.

A cult is built on believing the absurd if the absurd justifies the cult.

Less than a decade had passed since the murder, but a world had died. All that violence to protect a way of life, and in the end, it just crumbled to dust.

There's a map on the Internet of the city's worst flood before Katrina, in 1849, when a levee ruptured on a sugarcane plantation west of town. Water rushed in, and if you look at the map of that flood and a map of the areas flooded by Katrina, they are almost the same. The United States invested millions of dollars, following plans drawn by the best scientific minds of the day, the construction coming at a great cost, both financial and human, and in the end, it didn't matter. Katrina flooded the same areas, almost down to the block. The high ground along the banks of the river, raised by a thousand years of floodwaters depositing silt, stayed dry in 1849. The land farther back, what is now Lakeview, New Orleans East, Chalmette, and the Lower 9th Ward- all that was then empty marshland. That's how it would have stayed, except that in the 1890's humans created the ability to drain swamps so that more people could build homes and lives. By 1915, the first phase of the draining project was complete, and new neighborhoods grew unchecked until Katrina turned them back into brackish swamps, But the drainage had an unintended side effect. As the pipes and pumps drained the water table, the land compacted, and the city began to sink. Today, almost everyone knows that New Orleans resides below sea level, but very few know that it didn't start that way. The city and its people, trying to survive and expand, literally sank themselves.

Then she pointed across the rolling hill to the most famous grave in the [All Saints] cemetery, which is where she was headed next, to pay respects to Harry Caray before going to watch the game. His stone has green apples on top, an inside joke referencing a quote about the Cubs one day making it to a World Series just as surely as God made green apples

The newspaper reporter summed up the rhetoric “on segregation all candidates agree, they support it….all five candidates tried to prove they were more racist than their opponents, a sprint to the bottom. All promising to take any measure to stop the most dangerous and immediate threat to the Mississippi way of life-which apparently was a black child who wanted to learn math. All of Hannibal’s elephants and Genghis Khan’s hordes lacked the world-destroying power of a bunch of first graders learning the alphabet and how to stay in line during the walk from recess to lunch”.

I knelt down. The dirt felt cool as it ran through my fingers. Nothing hits the nose quite like freshly tilled topsoil, carrying the scent of life and death. The ground around here smells rotten after a rain, gray buckshot petrichor, grabbing tires and axles and feet. I’ve lost shoes in this mud. Delta folks call it gumbo and it feels hungry, aggressive even, as if it actively wants to pull more living things down into its stinking maw.