FOLIO
DUUUU-VALLLL!
From #ILoveJax to #MyOneThing, city leaders and stakeholders, and those who want to be counted among such august personages, have attempted to brand Jacksonville as a happening place — a bivouac of wonderment, an oasis of transcendence.
Money has gone into the branding. Studies have gone into the branding. So much branding has gone, and come, and gone again.
And yet, the answer for our perpetual civic identity crisis was here all along, as one of our citizens got global exposure for her unique use of a Better Jacksonville Plan facility for which we bonded out only a half-billion dollars or so.
Consider the headline from the London Daily Mail.
“Woman, 26, posts video on Twitter of herself performing oral sex on a man INSIDE a Florida courthouse.”
Whoot, there it is — to quote Duval’s own 95 South! Well, was. She pulled it off Twitter, but it’s been memorialized on other websites.
There was apparently an element of quid pro quo to the quid pro blo. When Brittney Jones posted the video, she captioned it, “Had so much fun at court today. Found a way to get my charges dropped. … Ssssssh don’t tell.”
Jones had been popped for a drug paraphernalia charge, but was granted leniency. Her charges were dropped. Jones has a history of exhibitionist social media posts, but this is more. This is art on a grand scale – arguably the most significant bit of local political protest theater in the Trump era.
Protest theater. Let me stress the phrase.
Though there were protesters outside the courthouse that very same week, echoing national themes in opposition to Trump and his Muslim ban, Jones’ act of transgression in the Hall of Justice was a protest all its own.
It pointed out all kinds of intersectional conflicts. A justice system that preys on those with institutionalized disadvantages that were borne of decades of benign neglect, preceded by centuries of oppression and exploitation.
She exploited the paradigm. She got over. She knew she was getting over, exposing the hypocrisy in a racially biased system that is predicated on taking the poor, the uneducated, the marginalized, and rendering them subjects of “two minute hate” style moments.
And, predictably, the corporate media decided to shame her.
And, remarkably and admirably, she shoved it back in their faces, with the kind of singular élan only seen in those who know they have nothing to lose, and no matter what censure they face, keep going.
This quote was money: “To all the news channels following me on Facebook. I know for a fact your reading this, so I will let all of your know; I will only do a interview with the highest bidder. Shoot me a price,” she wrote on Thursday.
And that is how it is done.
Brittney Jones doesn’t need Action News Jax. Or News4Jax. Or First Coast News.
I say this as someone who has given more thought than most on the outside of television news to their revenue models, their narrative presentation, and their seeming belief that, at least on most stories, the target demographics have a limited attention span unless something is as lurid as possible.
Fellatio on a courthouse bench qualifies.
They drug out Jones’ dad, who did the mea culpa act about what a bad dad he was, rendering him a figure of pathos.
Brittney Jones knew better. She’s seen the news before and she’s seen the world.
And, as someone who labors in the field of erotic performance art, Jones likely is monetizing this notoriety already.
Even though she faces charges for a lascivious and unnatural act, chances are good that the payoff exceeds the risk hazarded for her.
In terms of commentary on the local judicial system, Jones’ act of subversion reminds me in an odd way of the “painting” George Zimmerman did of Angela Corey a few years back.
One of his “paintings” (appropriations of copyrighted photographs) sold, somehow, for $100,000 – a measure of the convergence of that odd celebrity status/hero worship from certain quarters, which Zimmerman got for walking after killing Trayvon Martin.
Maybe he was famous. Maybe it was money laundering. But here’s the thing – the painting, unbelievably, said something in spite of the repellent nature of the artist. As I wrote in 2014:
“The primitivist rendering of the subject, the eyes frozen without soul, the Katherine Harris bangs, the gaudy necklace like a Kool Moe Dee gold chain; this painting lays it all bare like a chicken plucked and slaughtered … Forget who painted it. If it were Basquiat, you’d feel differently …
Bold strokes used in bold ways to make bold statements.”
Zimmerman, of course, couldn’t figure out how to market his hustle beyond the occasional headline for road rage incidents. But that’s a story for another column.
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