Lunatics of Georgia, Unite!

I love being from Georgia. This is because Georgia lawmakers are a never-ending and rich source of amusement, living as they do in an alternate reality of their own devising. Where else, I ask, would you have discovered a serious legislative consideration of something called the Traveling Electric Chair? And yet this was a serious proposal at back when I was a reporter at the Atlanta Journal Constitution; the idea was to put the state's execution apparatus into a van and hold executions around the state at the site of the crime. I mean, why not? They make extension cords, don't they? (To be fair, this wasn't a new idea, just an old idea resurrected; states in the South used to do something like this all the time.) It was while this proposal was being debated that the AJC ran two of my favorite newspaper headlines of all time: "Traveling Electric Chair Clears House" was one, followed the next day by "Traveling Electric Chair Passes Senate Panel." No, I am not making this up. No, there is no record of how fast the traveling electric chair was going at the time.

Oh, but that was decades ago, you protest; things have gotten better. No, they have not! Georgia legislators, in their finite wisdom, are now considering a law that would allow people who are mentally ill to carry firearms. In light of massacres at Newton and Virginia Tech, both perpetrated by people whose mental states should have prevented them from getting anywhere near a gun and yet who found it appalling easy to do so, Georgia legislators decide that the answer is: loosen the few pathetic restrictions on gun ownership that we have now! More Marshal Dillon wannabes packing heat! As Mao Tse-tung might have said if he'd been a member of the NRA, Let a thousand bullets zoom! 

This is of course lunacy--yet as a potential beneficiary of this law (I am a certifiably crazy person who has been hospitalized for a mental illness, and I often visit the relatives in Georgia), there is a part of me that says, Right on! For one thing, crime statistics show that mentally ill people are far more likely to be victims of crime than perpetrators of it. And in Georgia, they clearly have reason to fear not just the criminals who routinely prey on them, but also the inmates who are running the asylum they call the Georgia General Assembly. It's an arms race, people! Allons, enfants de la patrie! --target practice starts at eight.

D'Oh!

!I am slow on the uptake sometimes, so my first reaction to the uproar over remarks by Emory University President James Wagner was to roll my eyes. Wagner had written an essay about the virtues of political compromise that mentioned the (in)famous 3/5ths compromise during the writing of the Constitution, in which  North and South agreed that slaves in the South would be counted as three-fifths of a person for purposes of taxation and representation in Congress. I thought the critics were agog that Wagner had mentioned something that had involved slavery, and was thus giving some kind of "those were the good ol' days" imprimateur to the South's Peculiar Institution.

If only that had been true. Then I could have had fun at 21st century liberals getting their panties in a wad by judging 18th century history in the light of 21st century morals. But actually what Wagner did was to pick the worst--The. Very.Worst.--example for the point he was trying to make, which is that political compromise is the 10W-40 that makes democracy work. Why?

1. It's actually a counter-argument, a plausible example of why principle might at times trump all other considerations. Even in the 18th century there were people who ardently, passionately opposed slavery, the slave trade and agricultural economies which depended on slave labor. Theirs is a rare example of a principle which still looks pretty good 200-plus years later. If you want to advocate for compromise, don't hand the Tea Partiers a way to compare themselves with people who were morally ahead of their time.

2. It was a compromise based on an intellectually dishonest argument. How can slaves be three-fifths of a person on some occasions, like when you are counting population for Congressional representation, and a piece of livestock at others, like when you sell a mother's son for profit? When it comes to slavery, the South was always trying to have it both ways. "States' rights" was a cherished principle--until it came to the question of whether Massachusetts, say, could exercise its sovereign state power to refuse to send a fugitive slave back down South. Then, suddenly, it was all about property rights."Slaves cannot be allowed to fight for the Confederacy," said the leaders of the Confederacy at the beginning of the war; they were afraid of what those those loving, well-cared-for slaves might do once they got hold of some guns. By the end of the war, Confederate leaders had done a 180 on that question--with the exception of Alexander Stephens, who protested, "If slaves can fight, our whole theory of slavery is wrong." Bingo!

President Wagner is an engineer, not a historian, so maybe we can excuse him for not having a better grasp of history. But hey, I was an Emory English major, which most definitely does not qualify me to run a university, and even I would know better than to pull something like this. To quote Homer Simpson: D'oh!

Southern = White? Since When?

Michael Lind, of the New America Foundation, has a piece out in which he describes the current  political culture in the South as a "fading demographic's last hope to maintain political control"--the fading demographic in question being white Southerners. The Old South, he writes, is doomed to political irrelevancy in the same way that old-stock Yankees in the Northeast and Midwest have seen their hegemony fade, thanks to successive waves of immigration in the 20th century.

The argument that increasingly ethnic diversity in the South should mean the death of all things Southern still strikes me as a little weird, mainly because it's based on the assumption that "Southern" equals "white." While it's true that some people in the South still feel that way--and, for that matter, some people in the South still talk about secession--I always find it odd when educated observers of the South fall into this mistake. Did anybody notice Beyonce at the Super Bowl saying, "Thanks, y'all"? Anybody here heard of the Great Re-Migration, or the fact that the Atlanta area has surpassed Chicago as the largest majority-black urban area in the country? Can't black people--and, for that matter, Hispanic people and Asian people--be Southerners, too? Lind seems dubious.

If Southern culture had a tradition of assimilating immigrants, then cultural “Southernness” could be detached from any particular ethnicity or race. One could be an assimilated Chinese-American good old boy or a Mexican-American redneck.  To some degree, that is happening. And Southern whites and Southern blacks have always shared many elements of a common regional culture.

It remains to be seen how much Hispanic culture can be assimilated into Southern culture, and vice versa, but early evidence indicates to me that the answer will be "a great deal." I also think it's fair to say blacks and whites in the South do more than "share many elements of a common regional culture." I'm with Wilbur Cash on this one; he believed that the influence of white and black Southerners on each other was subtle, profound and pervasive--a list to which I would add the term "miraculous." It may be that in 25 years, "Southern" will be as automatically associated with dark skin as some people now associate it with white. If that happens, it won't mean the Death of the South (which, by the way, people have been predicting for about 200 years now). It will just mean that the South has done what it does best: morphed into something else, while maintaining its regional distinctiveness.

No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

I have this elderly friend--I'll call her Gladys--who is 90. Back when she was a spry 78, she worked for us for a time as a baby nurse right after our youngest was born, and I will love her forever if for no other reason than the memory of the love she lavished on my little girl. Gladys was with us until it was painfully apparent that she could not meet the needs of a growing toddler, and we have stayed in touch ever since. She lives alone, on Social Security, with her cat, who I will call Big Bastard.

The Lord broke the mold when he made Big Bastard. His feet are the size of our beagle's paws, he could make three of any ordinary house cat, and when he settles down on the braided rug in Glady's living room, he looks like a lion, surveying his kingdom on the veldt. He is a Maine Coon, and like most Maine Coons he is a long-hair, which would make him hard to groom even if he were a small kitty, which he is not. Consequently, Big Bastard needs to go to a groomer's---and this is where this ordeal begins.

Before Christmas, I called the local Petsmart and said I had this monster cat who needed to come in. Somebody who didn't know what they were talking about told me it could be handled on a walk-in basis. So one morning I load up the cat carrier, drive to Glady's house, install her in the front seat and BB in the back seat, and off we go to Petsmart--only to be told that we'd have to come back because the cat groomer wasn't in until 3 p.m. Ooookay. So last week, we made Try #2. This time I made an appointment, and showed up at Gladys's house with the cat carrier and, on my way in with this large item, I managed to break a glass pane in the bottom part of her metal exterior door. "I'll fix it later," I tell Gladys, and we spend the next 15 minutes cornering Big Bastard, who by now has figured out what this is all about, and cramming His Nibs into the carrier. Grooming accomplished--you could have knitted three afghans with what they shaved off that cat--I dropped off Gladys and BB and headed to Home Depot. Did they sell replacement panels for metal exterior doors? No, they did not. I could, however, buy a whole new door, for a mere $100.

Not doing that. So I do some online searching, which doesn't turn up what I want, and a couple of days later, I head out to a local salvage place, thinking I will get this little chore done lickety split, and one of Bowie's Finest gives me a friendly wave on my way. How nice of that sweet police officer! I think, just before it dawns on me that he has a speed camera and he is not waving to be friendly. I get a warning for doing 45 in a 30 mph zone--the guy he'd pulled over just before me, he said, was going 90--and I am informed that I can a) pay the fine and get one point on my license or b) go down to the county courthouse and tell the judge in person how really, really sorry I am, and I will get no points and probably a $6 fine or something. Wonderful. So I continue on my way to the salvage place and find a replacement door for $25, just as I knew I would, and get all ready to pay for it and take it home....when I see a sign saying, "Customers load their own merchandise." Well, I can't pick up this door; it's heavy, and I've got back and neck problems already. So I put a hold on it and come home, only to find the phone is ringing and Gladys is on the other end saying she just talked to a guy at Home Depot and he swore to her that he can put glass in that thing for $50 and would I please just go over there and get it taken care of. (She is being antsy and a little anxious, as 90-year-old ladies who live alone tend to be.)

Okay. So the next day, which would be Saturday, I get in the car AGAIN with this blasted metal frame with the jagged glass stuck in it and go to Home Depot, and just as I suspected, the people in the door department give me this fish-eyed look that says, "Whaaaat?" when I explain my mission. Nope, they do not do glass replacement. Nope, they never talked to any old lady. What I should do, they say, it take this thing down to a place about five miles down the road, because they will have what I want. I start to ask why they didn't tell me this the FIRST time I was there, but whatever. Back to the car. Head up the road to look for this place, and wander around for 15 minutes because it's in a strip mall that is hardly visible from the main road--but at last, at LAST I find it. I pull in, go to the back and get my metal frame with the jagged glass still in it, march up to the door of this place and---it's closed. On a SATURDAY, which is the day you might expect a lot of people to be running errands of this nature. It closed at noon, approximately 30 minutes before I got there. At this point, I get back in the car, roll up the windows, and scream.

So let us review: two trips to Petsmart, two trips to Home Depot, one hour of Internet sleuthing, five or six phone calls, one speeding ticket, one trip to a salvage store, one prospective trip to see the folks at the county courthouse and one expedition to a glass replacement store that for some mysterious reason is not open on Saturday afternoons. And I still have this godddamn metal frame with the jagged glass in the back of my car. And the phone is ringing. I'm pretty sure it's Gladys.

The New Old Civil War

Andrew O'Hehir over at Salon thinks that the South has risen again, like a zombie from the grave: 

"Even though it’s a truism of American public discourse that the Civil War never ended, it’s also literally true. We’re still reaping the whirlwind from that long-ago conflict, and now we face a new Civil War, one focused on divisive political issues of the 21st century – most notably the rights and liberties of women and LGBT people – but rooted in toxic rhetoric and ideas inherited from the 19th century....Our new Civil War is infused with the undead spirit of the old one and waged by a rebellious neo-Confederacy rooted in the states of the Old South, but its influence can be felt, as with the pro-slavery forces of the 1860s, in every part of the country."

Well, yeah. And it's also true that the forces of the 21st century culture wars shape up along lines that bear more than a vague similarity to the Rebel-Yankee lines of 150 years ago, and that some of the issues--states' rights, generalized resistance to Washington, claims of a special relationship with the Almighty--are the same. 

So far, so good. But where Mr. O'Hehir loses me is when he lets fly the standard accusation that liberals of my ilk always dredge up: that what conservatives are all about is finding a convenient rationale for bigotry. Bigotry, like poverty, will always be with us--but just as racism was never the sum total of all things Southern, even in the 19th century, bigotry is not the sum total of all things Southern/conservative today. 

What I see going on is a war between two ways of thinking about society. One is communitarian. Its highest values are economic justice and a particular type of personal autonomy: not freedom from them gol-durned bureaucrats in Washington, but freedom from sanctimonious judgments from the neighbors. The other is an authoritarian, deeply religious and class-based, and its highest values are social order and freedom from government restrictions. I grew up in a Southern culture steeped in the latter tradition, and instinctively migrated to the former once I was old enough to draw my own conclusions about things. 

But here's a funny thing: the culture I knew growing up was deeply communitarian in a lot of ways--far more neighborly and friendly than life in these so-called enclaves of liberal tolerance I live in today--and the liberal tradition I count myself a member of today is every bit as bigoted about conservatives in general, and Southerners in particular, as any Klansman of old. The comments to O'Hehir's piece start out this way: "The South is so screwed in the head...." and end with this: "There is something wrong down here." No, I'd say there's something wrong all over.