Under the Microscope
by Glynn Wilson

I don’t remember the exact moment when I first realized how important the press is in making democracy work. The simple fact is, the realization did not happen in one moment of epiphany. It took years of working at it and reading about it and thinking about it, even dreaming about it in the middle of the night.

As winter sets in early here in middle Alabamaland, however, that is increasingly the dominant subject occupying my thoughts: How to make democracy work.

Perhaps because I know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that making democracy work is critical to what kind of a future I will have for the second half of my life. And it is critical to the future of so many other lives here and around the country. And there can be no doubt that the shape of our new media will have a lot to do with creating that future, for good or ill.

There is no doubt that the American democracy has been broken for the past eight years both by an unbridled greedy hunger and a thirst for power by a group of people who don’t care about the rest of us. They have exploited a disconnect between real information and misleading political propaganda to dominate this country and the world for their own political and economic ends.

But their time is at an end. It is time for a new beginning.

In an effort to continue trying to inform a certain audience on what shape this new direction should take, I will continue to tell the stories that have informed my own experience in making democracy work. I have seen it work. I have helped make it work.

I know it can work, but not without the Web Press. The era of the mass circulation daily newspaper is about over.

Inevitably, there are those who will fight the onset of this future in the name of “conservatism.” Newspaper managers are even now trying to figure out how to cling to their hold on the past.

They will fight for the status quo like the plantation owners who did everything in their power to prevent the death of slavery as an institution in the late 1800s, like the merchants of downtown Birmingham in the late 1950s and ’60s who did everything in their power to keep people of color from eating in the same restaurants, drinking from the same water fountains, attending the same schools — and obtaining the simple American right to vote.

My own life and history is indelibly tied to this past. No matter how hard I have tried to run from it and escape it and wish it away, it hangs there like an albatross around my neck. But I know when I write about myself, the story is not just about me. It is about so many others from here who have been infected and held down by the same past.

From my experiences in moving beyond this past, there are lessons for others in how to go about changing. That is my simple quest.

Some people take it wrong. Nothing I can do about that. Some people will never learn. Some people have to learn things the hard way for themselves as I have.

If you are still reading at this point, I can only assume you are interested enough in this story to find out what my experiences have been and how I interpret those experiences to inform the future. I can’t force-feed people who don’t want to learn, which is one of the reasons I no longer teach. I may one day teach again, but not now.

In my decade of university teaching experience, I found the best students to be those who had been around for awhile, those who had lived some life before they came back to college with a real thirst for knowledge. That is my own story. Most of the young people who were forced by their parents to attend college thought they already knew it all and were not interested in what some old guy had to say.

I suspect they either went on to learn things the hard way, or failed. That is life. Some get it. Some don’t. It’s not magic. There are no shortcuts, no quick fixes, no get-rich schemes.

As Malcolm Gladwell documents in his book Outliers: The Story of Success, people need a helping hand to succeed. Yes, intelligence and luck are a big part of it. But it also takes hard work, many years of hard work. According to his analysis, it takes 10,000 hours or 10 years of hard work.

Some people may get lucky early in life. For others it may take even longer.

One of the down sides of the Web Press is that an author has to communicate in short segments. Most people are not going to read a book length manuscript in one sitting on a Website.

So I am planning a series of stories to run over the next month or so to explain more about what I mean. The news is going to slow down over the holidays from Thanksgiving through Christmas and New Years anyway. It always does.

So this will give me something to write about and you something to read, if you are interested.

I am planning to tell some stories from my past, stories that may one day be reprinted in book form. I will talk about how I first got interested in writing and journalism, how I got a college education and then found myself in the newspaper business. I will tell some stories about things that happened in those years, including what I learned covering the final term in office of George Wallace.

I will talk about what I learned as a free-lance journalist while owning my own business, a bookstore with a coffee bar on the Southside of Birmingham. I will talk about my return to the news business on the beach in Gulf Shores. I will tell the story of how that era of my life came to an end and how I ended up going to grad school at the University of Alabama, then how I taught in Georgia and ended up in a Ph.D. program in Knoxville, Tennessee.

I will tell the story of how I came to start THE first magazine online there, The Southerner, and then how I ended up in New Orleans and everything that happened there, including how my life was changed like a lot of people’s lives on September 11, 2001.

There is more, but for now it is time to cook Sunday breakfast. I hope you will stick around and continue on this journey with me. I promise you will not be disappointed in the end, because along the way, I am going to connect the dots and talk about how Alabama has a chance to play another critical role in the history of American politics and government.

We have it in our power to bring about change, if only we will heed the lessons and work hard to bring it about.

And Happy Thanksgiving, by the way. I am most thankful that George W. Bush will be headed back to Crawford, Texas, very soon, so I don’t have to write about him anymore. I am thankful that Sarah Palin will not be the vice president we have to make fun of for the next four or eight years. Whether you are a Republican or a Democrat or an independent, believe me when I say we are all better off. See you next week.

Under the Microscope
by Glynn Wilson

I’ve got an idea for a new song for the Dixie Chicks. Maybe they could sweep up the redneck capital of Nashville with it.

After sleeping late this Thursday morning, and after I got the coffee going and the laptop setup to blog, there was the mug of George W. Bush, our lame-duck president, making another one of those misleading morning speeches that define his failed eight years in office.

Then the next face to hit the screen was Sarah Palin, the diva of the so-called “New GOP,” the nitwit governor of Alaska who helped John McCain lose his bid for president, thank Dog.

I’m torn between two competing emotions.

On one hand, I want Bush and Palin off my TV.

Bush needs to go back to Crawford, Texas, and cut himself up into little pieces with his brush-cutting chain saw.

And Sarah Palin just needs to take her new wardrobe and go back to hunting wolves from helicopters in Alaska.

On the other hand, maybe it would be best to just keep these two anti-intellectual losers on the tube every day as a reminder to the independents in this country of how sad and pathetic the Republican Party is now.

If that is going to be the strategy for ratings, however, I’m just going to turn off the TV. I don’t want to see their faces any more or hear their idiocy.

A very smart man has now won the presidency. And he’s assembling a team of smart people to fix our national problems, at least the ones the federal government is best situated to deal with.

Like a majority of Americans, I have confidence that the Obama administration will be able to straighten out our economic issues, which will involve getting the U.S. military out of Iraq. And yes, it will involve helping U.S. automakers to survive.

As Bill Clinton’s former labor secretary Robert Reich has been saying in TV interviews, the federal government is the lender and spender of “last resort.”

And Obama is going to need Detroit to re-tool the American auto industry in the coming Green Revolution. Alabama could have been part of that, but they blew it. McCain won Alabama and managed a higher percentage of the white vote than any other state except maybe Oklahoma.

But now is the time to take the politics out of policy in this country. We’ve had enough after eight years of Karl Rove making all the decisions about what the Bush administration would do in order to try and create a Republican majority for the next generation. He failed in that. And he failed the country.

We now know that Bush was not “the decider” after all. Every decision Bush made was guided by the perceived effect on politics. But that is no way to run the government of the most powerful country in the world, not if your goal is long-term success.

So maybe it’s time for the Dixie Chicks to get in the studio and break out a new record, perhaps with the title song: Get Bush and Palin Off My TV!

The song that is ringing in my head for no apparent reason is Money For Nothing by Dire Straits, maybe because of the line in the song, “I want my MTV.”

[Video link]

I remember distinctly when that song came out and hit number one on the charts in 1985. I recall hearing it up loud in Johnny Wyker’s family hardware store in downtown Decatur, Alabama. I was a political reporter for The Decatur Daily at that time.

Wyker was a member of the one-hit wonder rock group Sailcat, which scored with the song “Motorcycle Mama” in 1972.

Another tragic story of an Alabama native who almost made the big time but blew it. Wyker got too drunk and stoned before a showcase performance in front of a major record label and vomited on stage. So much for Sailcat.

Karl Rove Halloween mask

The Dixie Chicks almost disappeared into obscurity when they became mired in political controversy after comments made by Natalie Maines about the 2003 invasion of Iraq and Bush. Maines told a sold-out crowd in London, England, “We don’t want this war, this violence; and, we’re ashamed the President of the United States is from Texas.”

But they made a major comeback in 2007 and won the coveted Grammy Award for Album of the Year for Taking The Long Way.

I have made a point of playing the first and third songs on the record at least once a week on the drums for the past two years, as a way of bashing out my anger on what Bush has done to this country. I have a mask of Karl Rove hanging on the wall of The Bunker right behind the drum set.

But now that Obama has won, I think it is time to retire the practice, burn the mask and bury the hatchet. Now if only Bush and Palin would get off my TV!

Under the Microscope
by Glynn Wilson

The dogwoods in Alabama are beginning to turn red, but the color of the nation on the electoral college map is trending mostly blue, blue, blue.

If the numbers hold up for another two days, Barack Obama will become the first half-black American elected president in history, only 146 years since the Emancipation Proclamation and 44 years since passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Judging by some of my hate e-mail of late, there are some right-wing militia nuts who can’t handle this possibility. They are threatening a counter-revolution if Obama wins.

Glynn Wilson

The dogwoods turn red…

It makes one wonder where in the fuck they have been for the past eight years as President George W. Bush just about destroyed this nation’s freedoms in the name of Christianity and “conservatism.”

It is almost impossible to know what they even think they mean when they call Bush a conservative and me a liberal these days, since Bush presided over record federal borrowing and spending and created the biggest federal government in our history, and since I have been almost the lone voice in the South trying to save our Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable searches and seizures in the face of the FISA vote for Bush’s massive spying bill.

The only thing I can figure is that these people are either morons, or what they stand for is not the United States of America but the Confederate States of America.

Someone, and I can’t remember who now, wrote during the 2004 election cycle that what Bush basically represents in the White House is a back-door win for the American South in the Civil War. Perhaps that’s it.

I have puzzled over the question before as to why the radical right here still seems to support Bush in the polls, when just about every other demographic group in the country has finally realized what a lousy president the frat boy, royal family prince from Texas turned out to be.

His administration has been riddled with one disaster after another, from the overreaction to the attacks on New York and Washington on 9/11 that led to the disastrous war in Iraq, to the failure to rescue New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, to the financial meltdown in the waning days of Bush’s failed presidency.

The Washington Post is warning on Sunday that there are going to be some terribly disappointed people come Tuesday.

If they are actually as fired up for action as their warnings, there may be more bullets flying at perceived liberals in the very near future like the nuts who killed the head of the Democratic Party in Arkansas and the Unitarians in Knoxville.

What will the Bush Justice Department do about it? Will the administration just let them slide like they did the meth heads who were released without prosecution in the most recently disclosed plot to assassinate Obama?

We will see. I will be voting for Obama on Tuesday anyway, no matter what the risk.

Reluctantly, I will be voting in a church, which is not exactly where we should be voting in this democratic republic that is supposed to have an “impregnable” wall separating church and state, according to the former U.S. Senator and Supreme Court Justice from Alabama, Hugo Black.

That is one of the ways the South finally won the War Between the States by getting Bush in the White House in 2000. The movement of federal tax money to faith-based programs, and the Bush Federal Election Commission’s total capitulation to allowing voting in churches, was symbolic of the problems to come.

Even now, as Bush is about to finally reach lame-duck status for real, the corporate bureaucrats who took over the federal government under Bush are pulling their final Confederate coup. They are trying to gut every environmental regulation left protecting American consumers against corporate pollution, when we should have spent the past eight years beginning the fight for alternative energy and against the coming scourge of climate change due to global warming.

I don’t know for sure if an Obama administration can begin to fix our economy, our politics or our environment. But I can either go with the campaign of “hope” or give up and die. I choose to try.

One thing I know for sure. Senator John McCain, who knows nothing of economics or even how to use a computer, is not prepared to take on the great challenges we face. And neither is his right-wing nut running mate, Sarah Palin.

A vote for McCain-Palin is a vote for the Confederacy. A vote for Obama is a vote for the new Lincoln.

I like what Princeton University professor Cornell West said on the Bill Maher show Friday night.

“It’s the last gasp of the conservative era, where the economics of greed, the culture of indifference, and the politics of fear have been brought together in such a way that it hides and conceals the plight of the poor and working people,” he said. I hope he is right.

“We’re in a transitional moment,” he said. “The real question is, can we generate a commitment to fairness and justice in the face of greed, can we generate compassion in the face of indifference, and can we generate hope in the face of fear?”

He also said, and I agree, “We don’t need another Clinton. We need a Lincoln. We need a statesman.”

Hear! Hear! We recommend a vote for the Democrat, Barack Obama, on Tuesday.

As for local races in Alabama, the best thing you could do to turn back the clock on George Bush and his political guru Karl Rove would be to vote for Deborah Bell Paseur for the Alabama Supreme Court. If you know anyone who has tried and failed to collect money from an insurance company in the past few years, the Republican Supreme Court is to blame. A vote for the Big D, a straight vote for Democrats, is the way to go.

You can either vote to be a part of history on Tuesday, or you can waste your vote in the effort to stop American progress. It’s your choice.

Under the Microscope
by Glynn Wilson

In a world of hurt and bad news as the global economy implodes, there is some good news to report this Sunday morning as the late October air finally begins to cool off the brick walls of The Bunker.

The best news is that the presidential election of 2008 is almost over. One more week of negative TV ads and lying robo-calls and then we can all breathe a sigh of relief and get on with trying to turn this country in a better direction after eight years of black Bush anti-rule.

That is if the Democrats win and we don’t have to spend another four years fighting the idiotic conservative policies of the angry John McCain and his right-wing nut running mate Sarah Palin.

The other good news is that with one week and two days to go, the aggregated polling at Pollster.com shows the Democratic Party ticket winning in a landslide on Nov. 4. Let’s just hope the lead holds up for a few more days so that Karl Rove’s hackers cannot steal another election.

While the not-so-liberal New York Times issued it’s reasoned endorsement of the ticket of Barack Obama for president this week, our wildly conservative Republican hometown newspaper just had to extend its losing streak with this hilariously misleading endorsement of McCain.

We are still waiting on the apology from that editorial staff for their two-time endorsement of the dufus president-prince George W. Bush. It’s a wonder the racist “pro-life” newspaper sells any papers at all in a city full of liberals and African-American voters. I guess it’s safe to say they sell more newspapers in the white-flight suburbs than the city itself. The financial calculation had to be that an endorsement of Obama would have finished off the paper that has lost a significant portion of its staff of late to early retirement packages.

If only they knew how to produce a Website readers could use, they might have a chance of surviving in this new online world. There are a number of us out here who will never forgive them for their role in killing the one Scripps paper in Alabama, The Birmingham Post-Herald, which might have been able to provide the kind of Web journalism this state needs. Other Scripps papers around the country are doing some amazing work, including the Rocky Mountain News in Colorado and the Knoxville News-Sentinel in east Tennessee.

But that’s OK, because we have a long-term plan to continue providing a viable alternative to the people of this state who want a FREE free online news source without all the bureaucratic baggage of a conservative chain newspaper where corporate profits rule the editorial roost.

Since we already endorsed the Democratic Party’s pick in this race, there’s no reason to re-endorse the Obama-Biden ticket. Our recommendation is for voters to check the Big D and vote a straight Democratic Party ticket on the Nov. 4 ballot, not so much as an endorsement of “the man,” but to throw the Republican bums out who have screwed up just about everything they can in this country for the past eight years.

It is really hard to understand how anyone can vote for another Republican with the economy in the worst shape since the Great Depression, along with the debacle of the Iraq war, the failures associated with Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, and the complete loss of trust of the United States by people the world over.

We are concerned with some of Barack Obama’s suggested moderate policies, such as his hedge to the private sector on national health insurance. And we were not happy with his vote this summer for Bush’s spying bill that gutted the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution.

But we believe he is an educated man with an even-keel personality who can negotiate our way back into the hearts and minds of people around the world. And that should be our number one priority right now. We are going to need the good will of the world to right the wrongs and reverse the bad policies of the Bush-Cheney years.

Our first priority has to be an energy plan that begins to reduce our dependence on oil from the Middle East, a policy that also begins to address the top problem facing the world right now: climate change due to global warming. Even the Bush CIA and Senator John McCain realize that’s the world’s top problem, although that news gets buried in an election year when, in American elections, no one wants to be labeled a “liberal environmentalist.”

Once this election is over next Tuesday, that will be our focus. We will be working to influence the new administration in dealing with our energy and environmental problems, as well as figuring out how to provide health care to every American citizen. While the conservatives will continue to scream about “big government,” it’s going to take a pretty big government in the U.S. to tackle these problems.

And the fact is, it’s going to take a pretty big government, as well, to provide the leadership and incentive structure to fix the shattered economy. Our vision is that the only real future we have is a green future. We can grow our way out of this mess with green technology. That is our only real hope.