The cool October air has driven me inside. It’s that time of year again, when the rotation of the earth leads to shorter days and cooler nights.
God has nothing to do with it. That’s just how our planet works.
Meanwhile on the outside, people all over the planet are finally getting off their couches and protesting the abysmal economic situation brought on by the greed and corruption of the American moneyed class.
In New York, where the protests began, the Occupy Wall Street movement celebrated when the decision was made to keep Zuccotti Park open instead of forcing the protesters out while a company cleaned the park. They feared, probably correclty, that once the crowd was dispersed, the protest would effectively end.
A Lesson in New Web Journalism and Political Activism
Editor’s Note: In December, 2002, I was on the payroll of The New York Times National Desk operating from my duplex on Plum Street, two blocks from the Carrollton Avenue street car line in New Orleans, Uptown, when the Trent Lott story broke, bringing to an end to the rise in national politics of one of the South’s most prominent, conservative Republican Senators. Much has been made of this case study in the power of the new Web Press to influence both the traditional, national news media — and the direction of politics itself. This is my original contribution to this important story in the history of Web publishing, as well as the academic field of media influence on politics and public opinion. I publish it today because it is time.
“I want to say this about my state. When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We’re proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years either.”
— Mississippi Senator Trent Lott, Dec. 5, 2002
“On December 20, 2002, after significant controversy following comments regarding Strom Thurmond’s presidential candidacy, Lott resigned as Senate Minority Leader. In December 2007, he resigned from the Senate and became a Washington-based lobbyist.”
– Wikipedia
by Glynn Wilson
On December 5, 2002, about the time Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott was making the remarks that would bring him down at Strom Thurmond’s 100th birthday party in Washington, D.C., I was in New Orleans sending an e-mail message to the brand new New York Times correspondent in Atlanta, David Halbfinger, pitching a story on the Alabama Ride to Freedom bus tour planned for January, according to my old Outlook Express e-mail archive. It goes back all the way to the 1990s, and is still on occasion a useful and reliable research tool.
Halbfinger and I never got to do that bus ride story together. But for the next few months, we would work on a number of stories. I also worked with the other more experienced Times correspondent in the South at the time, Jeffrey Gettleman, as well as Rick Bragg and a number of others. If either one of those guys had known what I knew about the history of Civil Rights struggles in the South, perhaps we could have done that bus ride story justice, especially since I was working a lot with photographer Spider Martin at the time. He was sitting on one of the most important collections of photographs from that era at his place atop the mountain in Blount County, Alabama, where I often stayed while working on stories in my home state for the Times and the Christian Science Monitor.
When the Lott story broke, it may not have caused a firestorm of publicity right away. But within only 15 days, Lott was gone and his rising political ambitions went stone cold dead.
Because of my academic research experience as well as the fact that I was one of the reporters who worked the story for the Times — in fact doing critical investigative work that was as important as anything done by the bloggers or television news in the battle — I have my own unique perspective on what went down and what it all means. But in part because I was a free-lance reporter for the Times and was never properly credited for my work on that story, along with many others, the academics in New York who used this story to make a name for themselves ignored my attempts to comment and provide some perspective for their research.
To me, it is an important lesson for bloggers trying to influence the mass media and public affairs — and for activists who are trying to change the country and the state for the better.
The very fate of our human species, yes, and your state too — as well as this country and the earth — may well depend on a compromise between science and religion.
Yes, you read that correctly. Not that I ever wanted to admit it before.
This will be a precarious journey with no guarantee of success like the fate of all life itself, from the beginning into the infinite future.
A top American scientist from Alabama writes that religion and science “are the two most powerful forces in the world today, including especially the United States.” That is from Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson’s book The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth, which he wrote to Southern Baptist preachers who hold sway over millions of votes that could have a positive, or negative, impact on all kinds of government policies.
Poor But Proud: Twenty Years Later
Auburn History Professor Wayne Flynt Answers the Central Political Question of Our Time
by Glynn Wilson
AUBURN, Ala. — In a state where intellectuals are generally scorned as “elitists” — or as former governor and presidential candidate George Wallace liked to call them for his own opportunistic political reasons, “pointy-headed liberals” — retired Auburn History professor Wayne Flynt is one expert who is widely known around Alabama. He is someone who people seem to listen to, at least those who pay attention.
Since moving back to my home state and city a few years ago after many years of chasing a journalism career and then an academic career elsewhere, and struggling to figure out what’s wrong with this place, a key question comes up over and over again in conversation. No one seem to have a simple, satisfying answer.
Why do working class people in the South so frequently vote against their own economic self-interest?
As a historian and author, Dr. Flynt tackled this question in great detail a little more than 20 years ago in a book called Poor But Proud: Alabama’s Poor Whites.
I know. It’s such a burden to be such a Socialist-Nazi, a horrible journalist and a major danger to society. On top of that, I’m a lousy lay.
If you believe the right-wing attack machine wingnuts on talk radio and their three fans, or the lefty bloggers and their eight anonymous commenters, that’s what I am.
Never mind that there is no such thing as a Socialist-Nazi. Don’t take my word for it. Take a minute to click on this link to see a graph of the political spectrum. There are tens of thousands of academics who have pondered this question over the centuries, my friends, probably all the way back to the days of Aristotle in Ancient Greece. According to them, Socialism is on the extreme left side of the spectrum. Fascism is on the far right. Never the twain shall meet. Or so they say.
But then, Glenn Beck never studied Political Science at the university level, so how could he possibly know that?
Whether the news media covers them or we talk about them or not.
A Facebook friend shared this video with me this morning, and it reminded me of Spider Martin’s last words. To read the true story of Civil Rights Photographer Spider Martin’s death, and for a literary explanation of what this Website is all about, in case you missed it here’s the story:
The coffee tastes more than a little bitter this morning. It is no sweet tea to see your worst political predictions come true.
I have been railing for the past five and a half years about the need for a coalition to come together to fight the complete corporate takeover of the American political system. Many people got off the couch and fought for the election of Barack Obama in 2008. It was a great victory and there is no doubt he is a better president than George W. Bush and certainly better than anything we could have hoped for from John McCain or Sarah Palin.
But thanks in part to the tea party morons, that election looks like one step forward, two steps back. Give me the Coffee Party any day.
In order to appease the incoming Republican majority in the U.S. House of Representatives, and to show he can broker a bi-partisan deal after all, Obama caved to the GOP without a fight and backed a bill to extend the Bush tax cuts for the richest Americans for two more years, breaking yet another campaign promise to make his deal with the red state devils.
“When you’re finished changing, you’re finished.”
- Benjamin Franklin
“What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate.”
- Paul Newman as Luke, in Cool Hand Luke
“Keep close to Nature’s heart … and break clear away, once in awhile, and climb a mountain or spend a week in the woods. Wash your spirit clean.”
- John Muir
The Big Picture
by Glynn Wilson
LITTLE RIVER CANYON – Sitting as quietly and patently as could be expected on such a quick, short trip to the mountain waterfalls around Mentone, Alabama over the weekend, I gazed until I knew the sun would soon disappear from view behind the treetops at one of the Littler River Falls overlooks.
In this preserved idyllic setting, I thought about my Cherokee ancestors who lived here for hundreds of years before the United States of America was a gleam in Ben Franklin’s eye. I thought of the men who killed the Cherokee too, and connected the dots in my mind to understand the modern descendants of those killers.
Is it possible that a grudge could linger from a human gene, and not just pass down from one generation to another through the culture?
I thought about the social and political problems in the world today, chiefly focusing on this country — and my native state.
There in that muted fall beauty, as muddled as the world has become today, my thoughts also turned to the Scotsman John Muir, an early American botanist, one of the first American naturalists and nature writers to roam from the hills of Scotland to New England, through Appalachia to the Gulf of Mexico and ultimately California by way of South America.
You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink.
- English proverb
A person who won’t read has no advantage over one who can’t read.
- Mark Twain
The Big Picture
by Glynn Wilson
For the record, I’ve never owned a horse.
I’ve ridden a few, but I still don’t know for sure if this proverb is true.
Although I suspect when John Heywood used the phrase in 1546 he was talking more about people than horses.
You think?
As for Mark Twain’s quote, I agree 100 percent.
My humble sympathies go out to the citizens of the world, the country and the Gulf Coast today, however. I’ve lived on the coast of Alabama and loved it, and in New Orleans, and I feel you. I do.
But I know how hard it is sometimes to actually spend time reading up on a subject before bloviating about it.
During the Bush years, we specialized in covering the politicization of the U.S. justice system as much as any news organization. Our archives are about the most comprehensive for anyone researching the prosecution of former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman, and the original case against Richard Scrushy, which Glynn Wilson covered for The New York Times.
