Under the Microscope
by Glynn Wilson

CRESTWOOD TAVERN — Someone asked me last night after about the third Southern Pecan Brown Ale if I had made any New Year’s resolutions for 2010, and if so, did I plan to write about them? Since I hadn’t given it even a whiff of a thought, I said no, “but maybe I’ll get around to it.”

I don’t get paid $1.2 million a year to write two newspaper columns a week like Maureen Dowd, so there’s nothing in my contract that forces me to write such a column promising New Year’s resolutions but instead reporting on hanging out with and defending the woman in charge of Homeland Security.

But when I woke up this morning and saw the thermometer stuck on 20 degrees, I cranked up the new Mr. Coffee and started surfing the Web to see if there were any good columns in news Webland reporting good ideas for the new year and the new decade. Somehow it came as no shock to find that the best ideas came not from a highly-paid career newspaper columnist, but from a rock star: Bono: Ten Ideas for the Next Ten Years.

Here’s the thing. I’ve been trying to tell people for the past 10 years that the era of the mass circulation daily newspaper is over. But you would be surprised at the places you can still go and get an argument about such things.

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Under the Microscope
by Glynn Wilson

Historically, Christmas is one of my least-favorite holidays. This year, however, I am trying to gin up some hope with a little Christmas cheer.

Why? Because I think we need the break, for one thing. There are a lot of poor people suffering immeasurably this year due to the Bush recession. Anything that would give them a break and a boost would be a good thing.

Then, if the so-called “Christmas spirit” could do anything to end the partisan hostilities left over from the trauma of the Bush years, I wish everybody a very merry Christmas indeed.

Lest this curmudgeonly, Scrooge-like attitude about Christmas come as a shock to the hordes of new readers here, let me do a little word riff to explain.

Let me just say that if I was like Elvis, that is to say richer and more popular than god, I would blast the TV set every time I hear some talking head go on and on about “the true meaning of Christmas,” or go after ratings by trying to start up another fight over the “attack on Christmas” by “liberals.”

I quit even checking in on Bill O’Reilly’s show on Fox News a long time ago, in part because of his fake, cynical strategy of attracting conservative viewers by blatantly distorting the Supreme Court’s rulings upholding the separation of church and state about nativity scenes on public property.

One of my favorite film depictions of this divide in America comes in Charlie Wilson’s War. Remember when Tom Hanks suggests to his constituent from Texas that moving the nativity scene from the firehouse to the church down the street would be the best solution where everybody wins?

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Tom Campbell

Saban flashes a knowing smile and wink after Ingram won the Heisman Saturday night…

Under the Microscope
by Glynn Wilson

Somewhere in the great divide between religion and science there exists the uniquely American game called football — and the practice of voodoo.

Nick Saban knows a thing or two about football, and if there’s any truth to certain urban legends spreading around the “Internets,” he may have learned a thing or two about voodoo during his five-year stint coaching LSU down on the bayou.

You can’t live in that damn swamp without finding out a little about Hoodoo, gris, gris and the rest, as I learned in my four years of living in New Orleans, as did my good friend Rick Bragg, who was there at the same time.

They say college football is a religion in the Deep South, especially in places like Louisiana and Alabama, but according to Bragg, “it’s not. Only religion is religion.”

“Anyone who has seen an old man rise from his baptism, his soul all on fire, knows as much, though it is easy to see how people might get confused,” Bragg wrote in Sports Illustrated when Nick Saban announced he would take the head coaching job at Alabama — after telling the people of Louisiana and Florida he never would.

“If football were a faith anywhere, it would be here on the Black Warrior River in Tuscaloosa, Ala.,” Bragg wrote. “And now has come a great revival.”

When the announcement went out Saturday night that running back Mark Ingram had won the University of Alabama’s first Heisman Trophy, the news traveled over the Internets faster than the old church bells could ring across the Old South.

The Alabama faithful sent e-mail messages and text messages to their groups of friends. Bloggers posted news links, photos and comments. And the social Networking sites of Facebook and Twitter lit up like Christmas tree lights with tweets supporting Ingram with the now infamous acronym RTR, short for Roll Tide Roll!

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Let Tebow Cry…

Glynn Wilson

Paul “Bear” Bryant’s image casts a shadow over Tuscaloosa and all of Alabama. One spot stands open on the walk of fame, for the next coach to win a national championship. Will it be Saban? This year?

Under the Microscope
by Glynn Wilson

Class. It’s been awhile since we’ve heard that term used in the way Florida quarterback Tim Tebow did, through his tears Saturday night after losing the Southeastern Conference championship game, to describe the University of Alabama and its football team.

He was not using the term as a noun to talk about a group of students or an economic or social class of people. He was using it as an adjective to describe a world-class program characterized not only by its drive for “success” through “excellence,” but also by the way Alabama got the job done this year, with determination, practice and perseverance yes, but also with style, integrity, dignity and yes character, humility and grace.

That is a lesson we all should learn, if possible. It’s not easy. But life never is, is it?

While sports and American culture have both been diminished by “trash talk” over the past couple of decades, and our politics has been diminished by partisan rancor, the Georgia Dome Saturday night was the site of a remarkable departure from that nastiness. Tebow deserves credit for that, although some Alabama fans have not shown the same class toward him, which just goes to show you that class does not always trickle down to the masses.

Due to the way the Alabama defense shut down Tebow, and due to Mark Ingram’s dominance on the field, he will now most likely win the coveted Heisman Trophy for NCAA player of the year. He fully deserves it not only because of how many yards he gained or the number of touchdowns he ran. He deserves it because of his personal character and class in the way he handled it.

He never once said on camera he deserved the award. The same was true for Nick Saban, until that brief TV interview Saturday night, when he once again downplayed it by placing an emphasis on “the team.”

In case this is a burning question on the minds of people all the over the country and the world today, as I suspect it is judging by the remarks on my Facebook home page, here’s an essay on class I’ve been thinking about writing for some time. This is not just about football or sports in general. It is about life, which includes journalism and politics.

It is a story of why Nick Saban is the quintessential college football coach and was never suited to the pros. The short answer? Saban is at heart a teacher. By the time the players get to the pros, they can’t be taught anymore. By then, they either have it or they don’t.

It is a story also of why the United States became the greatest country the world has ever known, and the story of why the New York Times became the greatest newspaper ever published.

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Glynn Wilson

A scene from the Wind Creek State Park campground on Lake Martin…

Under the Microscope
by Glynn Wilson

WIND CREEK, Ala. — In the early morning hours before even the ducks awake, while the noisy campers are still asleep in their gas guzzling RVs and the lake is so calm it looks like a blue-green sheet of glass, that is the best time to contemplate the past, the present and the future. There is nothing like a hiatus into nature to put the mind on the right track.

It’s just too bad that our ancestors who fought with each other not far from here on the Horseshoe Bend of the Tallapoosa River in the early nineteenth century didn’t have the communications skills to negotiate a better future for themselves and this place.

Although I suspect it would not have mattered to General Andrew Jackson what anybody said. He was a hard-headed son-of-a-bitch who was determined to defeat the Creek Nation, represented by 1,000 Red Stick braves, and to run the Native American population out of the American South. It’s just too bad about 600 Cherokee didn’t know better than to fight on his side.

In case you’ve forgotten your state history, Alabama became a state in 1819, carved out of 23 million acres ceded to the United States government in the Treaty of Fort Jackson in August, 1814 after the Battle of Horseshoe Bend. The land was initially ceded to the Cherokee Nation as an ally of the U.S., but after Jackson became president in 1829, he pushed through Congress and signed the so-called Removal Bill, sending all the Native Americans he could round up on the “Trail of Tears” to live on reservations in the Oklahoma territory.

Chief Junaluska, the Cherokee Chief who led 500 braves in support of Jackson and who saved the general’s life in the battle, would say later, “If I had known that Jackson would drive us from our homes, I would have let him die at Horseshoe.”

If only…

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One Step Forward, Two Steps Back

Under the Microscope
by Glynn Wilson

Here’s a story about a psychological theory perhaps only a political animal like Karl Rove could love. I’m sure he’s familiar with the story of the invisible pink unicorn.

In Tuesday’s New York Times, there is a perfectly fine social science story interpreting a perfectly fine little academic study advancing our knowledge of learning by one baby step.

How Nonsense Sharpens the Intellect

But the overall effect is the equivalent of the story of the frog in the well, or what Lenin called, one step forward two steps back.

Yes, as the article reiterates, “researchers have long known that people cling to their personal biases more tightly when feeling threatened.” Think of Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine.

Furthermore, “After thinking about their own inevitable death, they become more patriotic, more religious and less tolerant of outsiders.”

And yes, when insulted, people profess more loyalty to friends. When told they’ve done poorly on a trivia test, people even identify more strongly with their school’s winning teams.

That should come as no shock to anyone observing the behavior of people in places such as Alabamaland, where a winning football team is sometimes about the only thing that keeps a people going.

The newspaper article summarizes a series of new social science papers in the journal Psychological Science by Travis Proulx, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Steven J. Heine, a professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia.

The authors argue that their findings are variations on a familiar theme: How humans attempt to maintain meaning or coherence in their lives in spite of the appearance of disorienting chaos. The brain evolved to predict, in other words, and it does so by identifying patterns. Check.

The studies are part of a long line of research that shows how people in the grip of the uncanny, as Freud called it, tend to see patterns even sometimes where none exist. They are more prone to conspiracy theories, in other words, since the drive to find order satisfies itself — regardless of the quality of the evidence.

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Malcolm Gladwell and the limits of New York liberalism

In “To Kill a Mockingbird,” Finch (played by Gregory Peck in the 1962 film version) sought to expose Jim Crow to the world, not change it overnight.

by Glynn Wilson

Just when I thought the South and race had been reduced to comedy and thus removed from literary thought out of New York for the final time, one of my favorite science writers recently decided to step out of his expertise in sociology to take a stab at history. The result, as usual, reveals more about the opinions of New Yorkers about the South than it does about the problem of race relations and what to do about it.

Regular readers will remember that I have praised Malcolm Gladwell before, most recently for his book Outliers: The Story of Success. But his most recent piece in The New Yorker on Big Jim Folsom and Atticus Finch and the limits of Southern liberalism cries out for criticism.

A number of my Facebook “friends” have shared this story around, so I know many people have read it. If you have not already, I recommend it. Hit the link and read it. Then come back and see why I think it has shortcomings.

At first scan, the story makes sense. The point being that when Big Jim Folsom was trying to influence the hearts and minds of the people of Alabama in the 1950s, he did so by example, knowing it would take a lifetime. He did not advocate immediate change through protests and law. If he had, he would never have been elected in the first place, and so he would never have been able to bring about any change at all.

Anybody who knows anything about politics knows you can’t do anything unless you get elected.

It is not clear whether Gladwell is even aware of it, although it’s hard to imagine he’s not. But when he uses George Orwell’s criticism of Charles Dickens to take on Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, he becomes Orwell in his own story.

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This Time With The Web Press

Under the Microscope
by Glynn Wilson

The crickets fill the night air outside with their incessant mating tune, playing their bent legs like tiny violins. Otherwise the suburbs appear to be locked down and fast asleep, as the Homeland Security Department and the Birmingham Police like it. The headlines are up on the news page, and the Facebook comments are slowing down.

It is time to shut down two of three computers, all connected to the Internets, time to crack open the third Yuengling Black and Tan, and head over to the Strat-o-Lounger to catch up on some TeeVee.

Surfing first the news channels, mostly MSNBC but checking in on CNN and Fox. Then the free movie channels. Then the premium pay jobs, often peddling the same old fare.

But there on the Turner Classic Movie channel, running without commercials, was that old 1939 American classic: Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.

The other choices being not so great, I figured what the hell, it’s been awhile, and you know, the political situation being what it has been for the past eight and a half years and all, with some obvious recent improvements, it might be worth another viewing.

As I type this, the following day, the talking heads are discussing a so-called “teachable moment” out of the Cambridge PD. I don’t know about wasting precious news and political time talking about the arrest of a Harvard professor, who just happens to be black. Hey, leave it to me and I say screw the cop. Fire the bastard. But Obama has to make nice, and we understand why. They will make nice at the White House, and then onto New York for the book and movie deal.

Who cares.

Here’s a teachable idea. For all of us worried about the major problems with American capitalism and democracy and the law and the press, minorities or not, re-watch this movie any way you can get your hands on it. Think of it as a sort of booster shot. A dose of courage that can only come from film.

It you are one of us who still believe in the possibility of a free and peaceful world, somehow, who cling to the one small hope that we still have a chance, a little more time, to solve the problems that may lead to our extinction as humans, not just conquer the fear of being shot walking down the street as individuals, watch it.

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Under the Microscope
by Glynn Wilson

We haven’t celebrated Father’s Day around here in a very long time. Why?

When my father died on that March day in 1973, my world changed in ways good and bad, in ways I will never fully grasp.

As for his world and this country, things were so different then that it is almost impossible to explain to a young person just how far things have come.

In many ways, however, the 20th century world of my father has not changed that much in my native Alabama. The more things change, the more they stay the same, they say…

Eschol Wilson, Fort Sam, Texas, 1944-46

My dad was a man of science who got out of rural St. Clair County and migrated to work in downtown Birmingham in the 1940s and ’50s, after a stint in the Army in Texas. He was keenly interested in machines, tiny machines, mainly clocks and watches. The Bunker space which now houses my online newsroom was his clock making and watch repair shop. But it was mostly a hobby, since he made his living working first for Western Electric and then as a supervisor for the old Southern Bell telephone company. He designed and built analogue telephone substations, including the ones in Pinson, Center Point and Roebuck.

You can still drive down that rural road in Shoal Creek Valley where he was raised and find a few people farming the old fashioned way, and you can run into them at farmer’s markets around here on almost a daily basis. According to a recent survey, research shows a majority of Alabama residents are still not connected to the Internet, at home or work. In other words, it is still possible to live in the past here in a way that is unfathomable in a place like New York.

Birmingham is a much different place today. In those days truckers called it “The Smoky City,” the Pittsburg of the South, where the haze from the steel mills hung so thick on some days you could barely see the skyscrapers.

Some of the attitudes of that era still survive, though, along the country roads and in the city. Racism, religious dogma and anti-intellectualism will still effect the outcome of the Alabama governors race in 2010, whether certain people want to believe it or admit it or not.

This would be hard to grasp for a New York born writer and director such as James Toback, whose discussions with author Norman Mailer I caught on cable recently contained a keen insight I would point out to writing students today — if I still had a desire to teach at the university level.

Since the world and the Web are still a long way from perfect, I can’t seem to find a single YouTube video clip to show you, unfortunately. But the upshot is this. In my father’s time and the era of Norman Mailer, the mass circulation daily newspaper was the primary medium of communications for news, and the hottest literary art form was the novel.

Today, most people get their news from television, although the Web is on the rise, and as Mailer said, the film is the art form where most creative types turn with stories to tell. I mean, with access to the Web through the Net, who takes the time to reads books anymore? And now TV news is even threatened, as least the nightly broadcast news.

On The Daily Show with John Stewart recently, Katie Couric said the average age of a CBS Evening News viewer is 62. Do the math. As you can see, there is not much of a growth future in that, just as newspapers will never be a growth stock ever again.

Mailer said he loved being a movie director, because it appealed to the Army general in his ego. Novel writing is a solitary practice between the writer and the page. Making a movie involves ordering a lot of other people around, he said, with a big laugh. Plus, the potential is there to reach a massive audience, much larger than any novel ever published.

When Toback interviewed Mailer for V Life, Variety‘s consumer magazine, in 2004, the author lamented the state of communications.

“There is too much communication now. Mediocrity has prevailed,” he said. “And all these new forms of communication often depress me rather than excite me.”

I guess he was talking about e-mail passed over the Internet and Web pages and text messaging by cell phone, because the world is changing so fast that Facebook and Twitter had not even been invented a mere two years ago when Mailer died in November, 2007.

Toback, who is one of the most insightful alternative filmmakers on the scene, began a friendship with Mailer in 1967, based on an essay he published in COMMENTARY magazine.

I only met Mailer that once on the subway ride from Manhattan to Brooklyn, but I tend to agree with him and would like to have the chance to make movies myself. I doubt if there is a best selling novel in the future, although a writer these days can build an audience on the Web.

So what are today’s aspiring writers to do? Education is key, of course, although even universities are becoming antiquated places, where some scholars now say there is “a huge clash between the model of learning offered by big universities and the natural way that young people learn who have grown up digital.”

According to a recent piece reprinted by Alternet:

The old-style lecture, with the professor standing at the podium in front of a large group of students, is still a fixture of university life on many campuses. It’s a model that is teacher-focused, one-way, one-size-fits-all and the student is isolated in the learning process. Yet the students, who have grown up in an interactive digital world, learn differently. Schooled on Google and Wikipedia, they want to inquire, not rely on the professor for a detailed roadmap. They want an animated conversation, not a lecture.

What do I say?

I think you can keep up with what’s going on and learn and create by turning to a variety of news and literary sources, catching snippets from the Web, cable TV and from some reading. After you have lived long enough and experienced enough, the Web may be all you need.

I suspect my dad would have loved the Internet. He would have been 83 now if he had lived. I still have a set of Science Encyclopedias he collected from the 1950s. They are so obsolete now it would be a waste of time to read or cite them. Yet I can’t bring myself to throw them away.

In think my dad would have been proud of the person I’ve become and what I’ve been able to accomplish already in my life, even though there is no doubt my path would have been different if he had lived.

I say long live the Web Press, where among other things, I can document one small memory of him on this day.

Edith Love-Wilson

Eschol Wilson on his horse Old Jim on the farm in St. Clair County, Alabama, 1942