What is America, and what is an American? If anything binds us together across space and time, it is our ideals and the stories we tell about our pursuit of them. From the beginning, we set ourselves against Europe’s hierarchies. We exalted democratic government, equality of opportunity and individual freedom. We conceived of our experiment as “the last best hope of earth,” in Lincoln’s words.
But ideals don’t live in a vacuum; they take root in the soil of institutions. Beginning with our first experiments in self-government, the dissonance between our ideals and our institutional practices–especially the tolerance and extension of slavery–created tensions that finally tore us apart.
The South’s alternative vision of the good society was defeated in the Civil War, and our 20th-century history can be told as a narrative of halting progress toward greater tolerance and equality. The major plot points include regulations on corporations in the early 1900s; women’s suffrage in 1920; a social safety net in the New Deal; the Supreme Court’s rejection of Jim Crow laws in 1954; the civil rights and feminist movements of the 1960s; the gay rights victories since the 1970s.
This narrative suggests that our democratic experiment is working, albeit slowly. If we have never been entirely unified in our ideals, the Civil War at least re-unified our institutions. A century and a half later, we rally around the same flag. Or so we think.
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.
In his documentary film Martial Law, Alex Jones interviews John Buchanan, who was instrumental in uncovering the documents tying Prescott Bush to the financing of the Third Reich. The subject is also covered in Alex’s upcoming film, End Game, which includes rare video of Smedley Butler’s testimony.
A BBC investigation sheds light on clique of powerbrokers, including Prescott Bush, who sought to overthrow U.S. government and implement Nazi-style policies. The BBC Radio 4 investigation sheds new light on a major subject that has received little historical attention, the conspiracy on behalf of a group of influential powerbrokers, led by Prescott Bush, the grandfather of George W. Bush, to overthrow president Franklin Roosevelt in 1934 and implement a fascist dictatorship in the U.S. based around the ideology of Mussolini and Hitler.
In 1933, Marine Corps Maj.-Gen. Smedley Butler was approached by a wealthy and secretive group of industrialists and bankers, including Prescott Bush the father of George Herbert Walker Bush, who asked him to command a 500,000 strong rogue army of veterans that would help stage a coup to topple then President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
According to the BBC, the plotters intended to impose a fascist takeover and “Adopt the policies of Hitler and Mussolini to beat the great depression.”
The conspirators were operating under the umbrella of a front group called the American Liberty League, which included many families that are still household names today, including Heinz, Colgate, Birds Eye and General Motors.
Butler played along with the clique to determine who was involved but later blew the whistle and identified the ringleaders in testimony given to the House Committee on un-American Activities. The committee, however, refused to even question any of the individuals named by Butler and his testimony was omitted from the record, leading to charges that they were involved in covering the matter up, and the majority of the media ignored, killed or blackballed the story.
The inmates took over the political asylum on Tuesday as a flood of bitter tea spilled all over the American landscape like a bloodbath, leaving the poor and the foundering middle class even more at the mercy of the rich and powerful, including corporations that now dominate life in the United States in a way no one has seen since the Robber Barons at the height of the Industrial Revolution in the nineteenth century.
Incomplete returns showed the Republican Party picking up at least 60 House seats, far more then they needed to take over a majority in Congress where they are now in a position to control the national political calendar, the Congressional agenda and all the committees where government policy is largely set in the U.S.
“A Republican takeover of the House ushers in a new era of divided government after two years in which Obama and fellow Democrats pushed through an economic stimulus bill, a landmark health care measure and legislation to rein in Wall Street after the near collapse of the economy in 2008,” according to the staunchly mainstream Associated Press.
Yet not all the tea party insurgents won, according to the AP and other news outlets.
There is no question that the current crop of crazies contending for office, masquerading as Republicans, are dangerous, stupid and evil.
Sharron Angle, Christine O’Donnell, Carl Palladino, Rich Lott and Rand Paul to sport a mere hand full. Angle believes the government should force a child to bring a baby to term despite that baby being the result of incest and rape. But she opposes government control of just about anything else.
O’Donnell is woefully unqualified as well as a chronic liar who believes among other things that people shouldn’t masturbate because it’s the same as adultery.
Angle and Paul are closely associated with a group of jerk off physicians (AAPS) that posit abortion causes breast cancer, that it’s evil and immoral for doctors to participate in Medicaid or Medicare, that tobacco taxes harm public health, that electronic medical records would be a form of “data control” similar to efforts of East German secret police.
Palladino is a raging homophobe bigot and Lott gets his jollies prancing around in an SS/Nazi uniform.
This is not your father’s Republican party. These people are outta their goddamn minds. Crazy as shit house rats and as festooned with the gore of hypocrisy as any human walking erect. They pine and wail about the Constitution while they seek to impugn and mitigate it over crap notions like “anchor babies.”
Senate Contender Joe Miller Refuses to Answer Questions
Are Republicans really conservatives who believe in freedom, including freedom of speech and the press, or do they stand for social control, using private thugs to harass any journalist who tried to ask a real question? Does this remind anyone of the Gulf Coast, BP and their private thugs?
The tea party needs to answer this question: Are you really for freedom, or fascist-style control?
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.
