The Freaks in Our History

In Kansas’ state capitol, in the beautiful city of Topeka (known for both Brown v. Board and the Westburo Baptist Church), there’s a mural on the second floor.

The mural is titled Tragic Prelude, depicting John Brown and Bleeding Kansas, the violent pre-Civil War struggle over whether Kansas would enter the Union as a free or slave state. Painted by John Steuart Curry, it stretches across the circular rotunda, distorting the proportions of Brown’s face and body.

Brown stands in the center, arms outstretched, holding a Bible in one hand and a rifle in the other. Behind him, Union and Confederate soldiers stare each other down. A tornado and a prairie fire loom in the distance. The whole thing looks like the moment before an explosion.

When it was painted, Kansas politicians hated it. Even the legislators who commissioned it hated it, calling it a picture of “the freaks in our history.”

In this moment, to say we are in a tragic prelude feels too obvious, too on-the-nose.

Can we admit that the prelude is already over?

That we’re in the middle of the freaking explosion?

Nationally, Trump and Musk keep on choosing shock and awe as they dismantle the social safety net, proliferate attacks on trans people, DEI, and undocumented people, and give Tulsi Gabbard and every other weirdo the keys to national institutions already set up to surveil and create chaos and fear. Almost every hand-wringing call to “organize” or to engage with this with urgency seems too little, too late, by design.

It’s worth mentioning that almost every Kansas lawmaker in 1914 hated that John Brown mural.

But it’s still there.