The Big Picture
by Glynn Wilson

When I first opened my eyes and looked at the LaCross clock and temperature gauge Tuesday morning, it was 24-degrees outside in the Pinson Valley campsite. The local weather guys and gals on TeeVee say it was the coldest night of the winter so far.

Outside, the water in the bird bath is frozen, but the cardinals, finches and chickadees keep warm by flying back and forth between limbs in the dogwood tree, taking turns at the feeder.

The cold doesn’t bother me so much anymore, as long as there is a warm sleeping bag by a heater or a fire. The heat of summer is more annoying these days, perhaps because I have spent most of my life in the Sun Belt.

What annoys me more than heat or cold is ignorance.

I spent much of the holidaze of 2011 in a warm, comfortable recliner watching movies on television. The big party of 2012 will come later for me.

When I watch movies, however, it is not just for entertainment purposes or simply to coax my mind off to sleep at night. Sure, it does both of those things. But like great poetry or literature, films often have a point.

I know I’m not the only person on the planet who gets the point. In fact, if you are reading this at all, you probably get it too.

But I think there are a lot of people who just coast through life thinking these stories we are exposed to in the mass media are nothing more than infotainment to get us through the day. True, in the U.S. it is most often about the money. But do you ever stop and take the time to think about the stories abstractly, to ponder how you might improve your own plight in life by listening to the stories and learning the lessons well?

Do you ever wonder about this? Do ever wonder what John meant when he wrote in Revelation, “For those who have an ear let them hear?”

Big Fish

One of the movies I finally had the chance to catch over the holidays was a film called Big Fish based on the book by Daniel Wallace, another writer from Alabama and native of Birmingham.

While it is a well-told story and is certainly entertaining, a discerning viewer might come away with more than a smile and a laugh. Many a southern author has told fantastic tales to try educating an audience. Think of Flannery O’Connor or even Winston Groom.

At a glance, it is obvious the author was toying with a theme students the world over have had to deal with in their own lives: Whether to strive to become a big fish in a small pond, or take a chance at becoming a success in the larger world?

The cliche certainly came up early in my life about the time I decided to leave my home town to attend the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. For Willie Morris of Yazoo, Mississippi, it was off to Oxford, England. For Daniel Wallace, it was off to Chapel Hill, North Carolina to teach English and write stories.

For the main character in Big Fish, he became a big fish by telling tall tales about his life and travels. But what his son the journalist-narrator found out in the end was that there was a nugget of truth to the stories. His father might not have really been a fish, but he was a big deal who was loved by a lot of people. That in itself is a life worth living, for sure. But for many, it is not enough.

I remember when I was an undergraduate student in the first couple of years of college when I could not wait to have an English professor explain to the class what the poem or the short story meant. As a society, we have official interpreters of stories, from preachers to teachers to journalists. Some people even rely on politicians, although I would not recommend that. Mostly they use stories to fool people into voting for them, not to improve people’s lives.

Unfortunately, rare is the journalist these days who would ask the right question to help people understand.

If I were in Iowa today, for example, the question I would ask Mitt Romney and the other Republicans would be: “Why is it that you want to be president, really?”

In other words, tell us a real, honest story from the heart about why you want to be president.

Is it because you have dreamed your whole life about being president of the United States? Is it because you think you are the most qualified person in the country to solve our very real problems? Or is it because you crave the attention? The money? Or the power?

This is not a crazy question, people. It is the root question that should be at the heart of every campaign. Even political marketers know you have to establish a narrative of your life to sell yourself to voters. That’s how political campaigns work.

When I asked Artur Davis why he wanted to be governor of Alabama in 2008, he refused to answer it. He dismissed it as a crazy question from a blogger, not an honest question from a real journalist. He didn’t have the character to know the difference.

What he didn’t seem to grasp was that if he could not answer such a simple question with a convincing narrative, he had no chance of being the first African-American governor of Alabama. I was just giving him a chance to think about that question and to tell me the story, so I could quote him in a news story.

It is pretty obvious now that Mr. Davis did not get the point of all those stories he read in college, all those movies he watched over the years. He just thought you could wear a suit and show up in public and pretend to care and you could get elected and gain a lot of power and money by fooling people.

George W. Bush may have been elected governor of Texas and president twice, but what did he actually accomplish? Is getting elected to public office in and of itself an indication of success in life? Perhaps by some measures. But let me humbly suggest that there is more to it than that.

There is an AP story on the wires today indicating that Bush’s name is rarely being mentioned in the Republican campaigns for president in Iowa. There is no need here to re-list all of Bush’s failures. They are well known and documented elsewhere.

The lesson is that to be a success in life, you have to be able to communicate effectively to make a difference. But more than that, you have to care enough about people for them to care about you. You have to at least want to make a difference in this crazy world and go down trying, even if you fail from time to time. That, in my view, is what life is all about.

Like Humphrey Bogart said as Rick in Casablanca, “I’m no good at being noble, but it doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.”

What ended up mattering to Rick was the fight for freedom against the Nazis. In the end he risked his life, his fortune and gave up love to help save the world from Fascism.

What if enough of us understood that — and had the same courage to act on our convictions?

by Glynn Wilson

Former Alabama Congressman Artur Davis is a sore loser with questionable judgment, according to former state Supreme Court Justice Mark Kennedy, now head of the Alabama Democratic Party.

Davis, who held the congressional seat covering much of Birmingham, Tuscaloosa and the Black Belt as a Democrat for eight years before jumping into a losing run for governor, is now making the rounds of conservative blogs bashing the Democratic Party and making all kinds of wild accusations. Apparently this is an attempt to make himself famous and switch to the Republican Party to run for office again, perhaps the U.S. Senate seat held by Richard Shelby of Tuscaloosa.

“It calls into question his judgment,” Kennedy said in an exclusive interview. “Only after being soundly defeated and repudiated by his constituent base does he now come out and continuously attack the system that he was actively a participant in.”

Kennedy said he wishes Artur would have been as proactive in advocating for working families and the poor while he was in Congress “as he is now being proactive in attempting to grab headlines.”

“I don’t understand what his deal is,” Kennedy said. “He’s now going to be remembered, by many of us, as a man who has repudiated his party. He continues to make these allegations but refuses to provide proof, I guess all because he’s a sore loser.”

For a man who desired to be the first African-American governor of Alabama, which would have been a historic event, to make a campaign contribution to the Republican nominee for governor in Mississippi who was running against a qualified African-American Democrat, he said, “Just crosses the line with me.”

“It calls into question everything that I thought Artur Davis stood for, ” Kennedy said. “I wish him well and I hope he’s successful in his law practice representing corporations and big business. But it seems to me that he’s forgotten his roots and he’s certainly forsaken all of us here in Alabama.”

The Big Picture
by Glynn Wilson

Where to start?

When you are in the superhero save the world journalism business, sometimes it is hard to know which crisis to chase, which people to save.

Did you ever wonder how Superman did it? I mean, how did he choose which disaster to prevent? Which people to save?

Other than his city of Metropolis, I mean, and his girlfriend, Lois Lane.

Of course he was just a comic book superhero, who made it into the movies. So the writers had a lot of creative license.

Surely when he was flying at the speed of a bullet to prevent a dam or a building from collapsing, some people surely died, right? Even a superhero with x-ray vision and the strength to land a crashing jet plane on a baseball field has to miss some victims, right?

Clark Kent was a bumbling reporter, and truth be told, so am I. Yes, I am a bit cooler than he was, yet not nearly as strong as his caped alter ego.

So there is only so much I can do. Only so many stories I can report to try to save people from disaster.

In this business, as in the Christian religion, we can only help people who help themselves.

I am reminded of this today because of a story making the rounds on a certain e-mail list. I haven’t seen it hit Facebook yet, but give it time.

Glynn Wilson

Artur Davis sucking on a cocktail in Homewood

You may recall a politician from Alabama named Artur Davis, a conservative black guy with Harvard credentials who had a lot of potential, but blew it when he decided to run for governor of Alabama in 2010 — in spite of a lot advice from fellow Democrats who urged him to wait.

He didn’t listen to them, or to me, so the prediction came true. Davis’s candidacy helped the Republicans take over both houses of the Alabama legislature, and now this state is the subject of international scorn for the draconian immigration bill they passed, which is killing business recruitment and doing nothing to provide jobs here.

Don’t believe me. Just read the conservative bloggers at al.com and listen to Alabama’s own Wall Street whiz kid David Bronner.

Now, Davis is apparently working as a lawyer for some lobbying outfit in the Washington, D.C. area, and giving some thought to switching to the Republican Party. Maybe he is thinking he could become the next Clarence Thomas.

In recent months, Davis has been quoted saying all kinds of crazy things in the D.C. news Website Politico, so I gave the editors there a piece of my mind about it, and apparently that outlet has dried up for Davis.

So this week, in order to feed his ego and pretend he is still somebody in American politics, Davis roped in a Scottish reporter writing for a Website called The Daily Caller and got this story published, with an incredibly incriminating video that proves Davis has gone bat shit crazy. I mean it. I really think the guy needs professional help.

Artur Davis says Democratic Party bosses use voter fraud

I had an interesting e-mail exchange with the author of the story, and sent a copy to U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance in Birmingham, because if any of what Davis says is true, the one thing it proves is that he is guilty of voter fraud and failed to report it.

He accuses “Democratic Party bosses” and landfill owners of stuffing ballot boxes, including absentee ballots, to the tune of 50 percent of the votes cast in a voting district.

Now if Mr. Davis was so concerned about poor people being screwed by landfill owners, why did he not lift a little finger to help the people of Perry County — in his congressional district — when TVA decided to bring all that coal ash down and bury it in the landfill there?

The one public statement he made on the subject, in the Birmingham News, of course, indicated the county commissioners wanted the revenue from the tipping fees. Were they bought off and guilty of voter fraud? Was Davis?

If so, Davis should be investigated for voter fraud himself, or at least for failing to report it if he had knowledge of a crime. He is a lawyer, after all, and failure to report it would be a criminal offense in and of itself.

After getting to know him a little during the 2010 campaign, and watching his candidacy for governor melt down, I suspect Davis is totally full of shit. But let’s say for the sake of argument that he knows something about how voter fraud works in Alabama.

The question people should ask themselves is: Was he the beneficiary of it? And if so, why is he not under investigation like all the legislators who were accused of taking bribes to vote for gambling legislation? And what about former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman and HealthSouth founder Richard Scrushy? What about former Birmingham Mayor Larry Langford?

Maybe Davis is the one who should be investigated, along with his new Republican banking buddies.

Stay tuned. I turned it over to the U.S. Attorneys office in Birmingham. Does the Obama Justice Department and the FBI here still have the stomach for investigating more public officials in these parts?

If so, Artur Davis should be the prime suspect.

As far as I’m concerned, it would be far better to totally get rid of him from Alabama politics now than to have to deal with his crazy comments in the future. You know how Republicans love crazy comments from their candidates.

Hey, after the fiasco that is this Bentley administration, Davis might be able to get elected somewhere as a Republican.

Many years ago I did the only story in this state about how Guy Hunt should have been indicted for using his federal office for political gain in violation of the law. Nobody paid any attention to me, so we had to come back after his second election and investigate him for benefiting personally from inaugural money. As you may recall, he was removed from office in disgrace.

But there was no such thing as a Web Press then. No Internet. No social networking software.

If we are going to save the world, we have to use these tools effectively. Let’s start by shutting guys like Artur Davis up for good. He lost. Nobody cares. He should go camping at Buck’s Pocket, move to Virginia, and maybe learn to practice law for a living, and stay out of the press. That’s what he was trained to do at Harvard, the beneficiary of a lot of hard work and protest by other African-Americans who paved the way for guys like him to get elected to Congress.

Obviously he didn’t appreciate that, and does not give one good goddamn about what happens to this state. For some people who have no business in public life, it is obvious they are only out for themselves. The best thing Artur Davis could do for Alabama right now is to disappear and keep his mouth shut.

The last thing we need is another embarrassing politician on the scene. Dog knows we have seen enough of those in our lifetimes. This is not the time for another one making the rounds of national blogs.

We have some real problems to solve here. We need real leadership from honorable people who can actually help the cause, not make it worse by spouting nonsense.

Referencing a story in this weekend’s Mobile Press-Register in a press release, the Sparks campaign said Davis refused to state a position on several gaming issues, including casino gaming, sports betting, card games, slot machines, roulette and other games.

Sparks favors them all, and has said so from the beginning of his campaign for governor of Alabama.

“Why is Artur Davis afraid to take a stand on gaming issues, one of the most important issues facing this state?” Agricultural Commissioner Ron Sparks said. “He is hiding, cowering in the corner, while I have been perfectly clear in my support on each and every gaming issue. If the people of Alabama want it, they should be allowed to vote on it. I am leading on this issue, not running from it like Artur Davis.

“Alabama needs a governor who takes a stand and who commits the full force of his office to get this done for the people of Alabama. Sitting on a fence or hiding your views from voters like Artur isn’t leadership; it’s political cowardice. If you want gaming in Alabama, there is only one candidate committed to doing it, and that’s me,” Sparks said in the statement.

The Press-Register asked all gubernatorial candidates to answer eight positions on various forms of gaming. Artur only gave positions on three of them, answering “not sure” five times.

“That’s a worse percentage than his Congressional voting record this year,” Sparks said.

“He is refusing to say because his opposition to these forms of gaming stand in direct opposition to the views of a majority of Alabamians. He answered ‘not sure’ because he is OPPOSED and afraid to say it,” said Taylor Bright, Sparks’ communications director.

“It is clear where Sparks stands. He supports gaming if it is taxed at a rate of more than 25 percent and stringently regulated. He supports an education lottery. He supports traditional slot machines. If they are taxed and regulated. He supports Las Vegas-style games. If they are taxed and regulated. He supports card games. If they are taxed and regulated,” Bright said.

“That’s the difference between Artur Davis and me,” Sparks said. “You know where I stand on the issues. Artur runs and hides. That may work in Washington, but it doesn’t work in Alabama. The people of Alabama will always know where I stand on the issues.”

In the Mobile paper, Davis is quoted as saying: “If you think Alabama’s economic future is casinos, go to Mississippi and look at the casinos and the poverty joined at the hip.”

“That doesn’t sound like someone who wants gaming in Alabama,” Bright said. “Does it?

Davis also told the AP: “I will not make the mistake of making a lottery the cure-all for our fiscal needs.”

“It doesn’t sound like Davis is committed to increasing revenue, giving Alabama’s children college scholarships, and giving people back their jobs, does it?,” Bright said. “We wonder why Davis is waffling on this. He was emphatic when he voted to give Big Oil a $25 billion tax break, when he voted to strip consumer protections, when he voted to leave 66,000 people uninsured in his own district.
What’s the difference? He took money from all of those special interests and did their bidding.”

Glynn Wilson

Rep. Artur Davis

Davis, now running for governor, has returned to the campaign trail, said Addie Whisenant, a spokeswoman in his congressional office. She referred other questions to campaign spokesman Alex Goepfert, who said that the congressman has been clear for some time “that he would be spending more days in Alabama as the campaign progressed.” Davis plans to watch the speech at home in Birmingham, Goepfert said.

Davis’ campaign web site shows that he was in Shelby County for a candidate forum this morning, but does not list any other events today.

Davis is running against state Agriculture Commissioner Ron Sparks in June’s Democratic primary. Late this afternoon, Sparks issued a statement saying that “apparently, Artur Davis forgets he was hired to do a job in Washington, not in Alabama.”

“The people of his district, and the people of Alabama, expect those they hire to show up to work, vote and represent their interests,” Sparks said. “He should either show up for work or quit. Instead, his constituents are being cheated by the self-interest of Artur. When I’m Governor, I will work day and night creating jobs for working families and always put their interests ahead of my own.”

In related news, former political reporter Taylor Bright is joining Sparks’ Campaign for Governor as communications director, according to the press release.

Bright is a veteran reporter. He worked for the Birmingham Post-Herald, The Huntsville Times, and The Charlotte (N.C.) Observer. While he was at the Post-Herald, he wrote one of the best stories on the deep involvement of former Bush aide Karl Rove in turning Alabama’s judiciary Republican.

“I am excited to be working for the Ron Sparks Campaign for Governor of Alabama,” Bright said. “Sparks is a dedicated public official, and he is an outstanding candidate for Governor. In my previous jobs as a reporter, I worked firsthand with Commissioner Sparks when I covered state government, and I know that he will bring the hard work and proven record he achieved at the Alabama Department of Agriculture and Industries to the Governor’s office.”

“Taylor is a tremendous addition to my team,” Sparks said. “He has great contacts with the Alabama media, and he has the talent and experience to carry my message of job creation to every part of Alabama.”