Thoughts On Home and Healing

Around the time I was 18 or so, I checked out a book from the old Pine Street library in Spartanburg called Leaving Alaska by Grant Sims. Sims wrote the book as a sort of memoir of his time living in Alaska, and the tone was bittersweet. He was critical of the state in many ways, but even his criticisms landed in my young mind with a heavy dose of reverence for a state that still exists in many people's minds as an untamed and wild place.

I was a confused and angry as a teen, and all I ever thought about was going someplace—anyplace—else, and I picked up Leaving Alaska because I wanted to read about a place I could escape to, even if only within the confines of my own mind. What I didn't expect from the book, was that it would ultimately leave me feeling more connected to my home than I'd ever been before I'd read it. One line in particular stuck with me. As I remember it, the line was repeated several times throughout the book.

“Place makes people; in the end place makes everything.”

It's such a simple sentiment when you look at it, and for some people it's undoubtedly not even true. Some people, from the moment they're born, are never tied to a place. They move and shift like Saharan sand, only staying in one place until the ever present wind pushes them on. I wonder, if place makes people the way Grant Sims insists that it does, what makes someone who never had a sense of place? Is it the journey then?

Whether or not Sims' sentiment applies as universally as he'd like to think it does, it certainly applied to me when I first read it. I was born of the piedmont countryside as surely as kudzu is born of the red clay. I've ran from that attachment, denied it, scorned it, made peace with it, and embraced it, sometimes doing some mixture of all of those things at the same time. If you ask me, a heritage isn't worth a damn unless you've taken the time to question it and fight against it a little.

Now as I sit here staring at this screen, I'm fighting against it again, though in a different way this time. I have to go back home.

Not that it should be of as much consequence as I'm making it out to be. As it is, I only live about 15 minutes or so from my childhood home, not exactly a cross-country trek. Still, psychologically this move might as well be 100,000 miles. My girlfriend and I will be living in the home I grew up in, next door to what was once my grandmother's home, on a plot of land once farmed by my great-grandfather. It's been in the family for nearly a century now.

The land itself shaped me in ways that I didn't understand until not that long ago. I spent many of my childhood days walking the woods, hearing stories from Papa about how they'd lived during the depression. Those stories, often about people long dead but still undeniably entwined with the land, created a sort of personal mythology. It was the sort of thing that gets into the bones, becoming a part of you whether you asked it to or not.

Now I'm going back to this place that nurtured me, the place that made me, and I'm going to ask it to nurture me again, to make me something else. I'm going to ask this not because I want to, but because when options are gone, home is there.

I need the land to sculpt me anew, to heal me in the broken places. I hope that I don't ask too much. I hope that the land is as forgiving as I need it to be. I hope that now, as a man, I can find the peace that proved so elusive as a boy. I hope that the lessons the land had to teach me then can still be learned now. I hope.

Tough Love for South Carolina

Oh South Carolina. You are my home, my heritage, my marrow, and very often my muse. You’ve given me so much over the years, and done so much to shape my character that no matter what I do or where I go from here, your deep and abiding lessons will always be with me, shaping most every thought and action.

Though ours has never been an ideal relationship, I still have never abandoned you in my heart. While it may be true that you’re a lot like an embarrassing alcoholic uncle, always turning up to say the most inappropriate things at the most inopportune times, I’ve stuck by you, because that’s what family does.

Recently though, you’ve started to alarm me a bit. Your formerly harmless eccentricities have started to look a lot more like paranoid schizophrenia. Because I love you and because I want you to become the state I’d always hoped you could be, I think it’s time that you and I had ourselves a little intervention.

Before you start thinking it though, I’m not doing this just because you embarrass me at times; I’m doing it because your behavior is hurting those of us who love you most.

As I alluded earlier, you’ve never exactly been the country’s most ideal citizen. Whether it was flying the Confederate battle flag over the State House dome for almost four decades after not-so-subtly raising it during the middle of the civil rights movement, or electing a former segregationist “Dixiecrat” Presidential candidate to eight consecutive terms as a U.S. Senator, you’ve never been the type to play nice with those other, more genteel states.

Your track record speaks for itself. You’re consistently ranked near the bottom in good things like K-12 education performance, college graduation rates, and per capita income, and you rank near the top in all the bad things like HIV/AIDS infection rates, domestic violence rates, violent crime rates, and premature birth rates. These things have been common knowledge for a long time, but because of your devil-may-care attitude and your unwillingness to deal with real-world problems, you’ve largely ignored them.

All those things I mentioned are bad, but over the years I’ve learned to let most of them go, to chalk them up to the historical quirkiness befitting the first state ever to secede from the United States. Besides, those things aren’t really the sorts of things people talk about. Even those notoriously rude Northeastern states know it’s not polite to make fun of your neighbor’s deficiencies.

What’s been happening lately though, is a different sort of thing altogether. The crazy that you used to keep mercifully hidden, the sort of stuff I always knew was there but had thought was comfortably buried underneath several layers of appropriate decorum, has recently been let loose. And as your crazy stampedes across the land like some sort of mad elephant, I’m left to wonder what we’re supposed to do with you, South Carolina.

I guess what I’m trying to say is, lately you’ve been giving me too much to handle all at once.

First, you gave me an ineffective, extremist governor who, it turns out, spent many of his days galavanting across the world on the state’s dime to have an affair with his Argentinian “soul-mate” and then compared himself to the biblical King David when trying to explain why he doesn’t have the decency to resign.

As if that weren’t enough, you turn right around and give me a senator intent on painting himself as the Duke of Wellington out to give President Obama his “Waterloo” by killing health care reform, the same man who once declared his support for banning openly gay teachers from teaching in public schools. South Carolina, your junior U.S. Senator is such a reactionary demagogue that he makes your senior senator—a pretty conservative guy by national standards—look like a red-flag-waving communist by comparison.

The straw that broke the camel’s back for me though happened this past week, and predictably it involved one of your elected representatives.

This past Wednesday, during a televised speech to a joint session of Congress on health care reform, President Obama was openly and loudly heckled by someone in the audience. After saying that the proposed health care bill would not cover undocumented immigrants, someone shouted “you lie” at the President. Leaving aside the fact that President Obama was, in fact, correct in saying the bill will not cover undocumented immigrants, the real problem was actually shouting “you lie” at a sitting president during a speech to a joint session of Congress. For my part, I was sitting on my couch watching the speech, pleading with Providence to please let the person responsible for this incredibly disrespectful outburst be from somewhere, anywhere else besides here.

As you already know, South Carolina, the heckler was the Congressman from your 2nd District, Rep. Joe Wilson.

I wouldn’t mind the national embarrassment if it weren’t for the fact that when you do things like this you hurt what others are trying to do in their own individual communities within your borders. My hometown of Spartanburg is going to great lengths to modernize itself and attract new “creative class” residents who are fast becoming the cornerstone of economic progress in the new century. When I read things like your governor comparing himself to an Old Testament king, I start worrying what those “creative class” people think of us.

They don’t move to places they perceive as culturally backwards. If our state’s elected officials sound like reincarnations of John C. Calhoun then it’s pretty difficult to make an argument to those “creative class” workers that we’re a forward-thinking bunch. So those of us in places like Spartanburg who would love nothing better than to see our cities thrive are left fighting against a perception—perhaps unfair—that we’re all just as crazy as your elected officials are, South Carolina.

I’m not a hard guy to please. I know you’re never going to go completely clean and give up the crazy sauce, but I’m having this heart to heart with you hoping that maybe you’ll see that what you’re doing ultimately hurts you and those who care about you.

You’re better than the way you’ve been acting lately, and I’d like to see you pull yourself together a little bit. I need you to be more than the sum of your history for once. I need you to be my friend and partner for a change, instead of being the guy I’m always apologizing for. If you won’t do it for me, maybe you should think about doing it for yourself and your future. Pretty soon, there won’t be much room in America for your kind of regression anymore.

This post first appeared on the Spartanburg Spark.

The Property Tax Scam

When I make my decision on what to write about for my Spartanburg Spark column every week, an important topic will often get passed over because some more pressing or timely issue inserts itself into the local conversation. Sometimes, if the issue that got passed over was important enough, it won’t go away. It sits there in the back of my mind, pestering me to write about it until finally, I give in and put fingers to keyboard. Such is now the case with Bob Dalton’s now nearly month-old piece in the Spartanburg Herald-Journal about the effect of 2006’s so-called property tax cut bill, Act 388.

In the piece, Dalton points out that far from being a tax break for most Spartanburg homeowners, Act 388 has actually increased taxes on most homes in the county. A homeowner with a home valued at $100,000—roughly the median home value in Spartanburg County—paid $889 in property taxes in 2006. That same homeowner paid $921 in 2008. Meanwhile a home valued at $1 million would’ve seen a tax cut of about $6,199 in that same time period. That means that the tax cut given to Spartanburg’s 35 homeowners with homes valued at $1 million or better is more than the total property tax bill of 235 median Spartanburg homeowners.

Act 388 has been an absolute disaster for South Carolina’s schools because the centerpiece of the bill was the much-touted tax swap that eliminated the portion of homeowner property tax associated with school funding, replacing it with a one percent sales tax increase. The idea was to shift as much of the tax burden as possible away from wealthy property owners towards middle and lower income residents.

The effort was led mostly by wealthy coastal-dwelling homeowners who were unhappy that—horror of horrors—their property taxes had been going up because of their homes’ rapidly appreciating value. One of the biggest backers of Act 388, Charleston resident Emerson Read, was given state’s highest civilian honor, the Order of the Palmetto by Governor Mark Sanford. Apparently Governor Sanford was quite impressed with Read’s tireless work fighting against the evils of property taxes on coastal McMansions and antebellum estates.

When pushing for the law, the supporters of property tax reform assured us that school funding would not suffer. They assured us that the school money lost from the property tax cut would be more than made up for by the one percent sales tax increase. Though some at the time did point out that cutting property taxes on the wealthiest South Carolinians only to shift the tax burden to middle and lower income earners was unfair, many of them were ultimately placated by an agreement to eliminate the sales tax on groceries. In the end, the bill passed overwhelmingly in both chambers of the South Carolina General Assembly and was signed into law by Governor Sanford on June 10th of 2006.

Since then, basically everything that Act 388’s supporters have said wouldn’t happen has happened. They said that the bill provided broad-based property tax relief for all South Carolina homeowners, but as Dalton’s article points out, that clearly has not been the case. They claimed that school funding would not suffer under the bill because of the new sales tax, but school districts in South Carolina lost 1,900 employees last year. That number could soon grow higher as further cuts of four to five percent are expected according to State Superintendent of Education Jim Rex. Most of those cuts are directly related to the sharp decline in sales tax revenue that’s been experienced since the economic downturn.

What the passage of Act 388 really was about was power and influence. Those South Carolina residents with the most power and influence wanted their property taxes cut. They didn’t care that the shortfall would hurt public schools because the people living in million-dollar homes don’t send their kids to public schools. In fact, many of them are honest enough to admit that they’d rather not have to pay for public schools at all. These people don’t care that their property tax relief has caused such massive budget shortfalls or that now the burden of funding our already-anemic state government falls with a thud into the laps of an already overextended middle and working class.

Really, why would we expect them to care?

Granted, It’s disturbing that a bill so blatantly biased in favor of our most state’s well-off citizens and against everyone else could’ve passed so easily. Now as we reap what we as a state have sown in the form of a state budget crisis and rising property taxes for middle class homeowners, we have a teachable moment.

The repeal of Act 388 anytime soon is extremely unlikely, but what we can do is learn from what happened. When concerns were brought up that property tax reform was skewed towards the wealthy, the bill’s supporters countered that though while the biggest cuts would come for most expensive properties, everyone would ultimately benefit from property tax reform. That was a lie, and an intentional one at that. Those lawmakers pushing so-called reform knew very well the shape of what they were carving, but they lulled people into supporting the bill by promising them money that was never going to come.

What the reformers managed to prove was that if you promise one voter a $10 tax cut, that voter won’t likely care that you promised a neighbor down the street a $10,000 tax cut. Keep the focus on the words “tax” and “cut” and you’re golden. It’s a scam, but it’s one that South Carolinians can’t seem to stop falling for. We’d buy the Brooklyn Bridge if we were told we’d get a tax cut in the process. Act 388 is just the latest in a long line of examples of exactly that kind of thinking, and I, for one, am pretty sure it won’t be the last.

This post first appeared on the Spartanburg Spark.

Annexing Spartanburg's Free-Riders

I’ve long thought that maybe the most interesting—and most American—paradox in the political world is how we expect top-notch services at all levels of government, but we are almost always opposed to funding those top-notch services. We expect the mail to be delivered on time, but we howl when there’s an increase on the price of a stamp. We demand that our schools educate and prepare our children for the economic realities of the 21st century, but we insist that they do that job with 20th century funding. We really like the idea of public parks, but we’d rather see that sort of thing happen without it costing us anything.

And if we’re lucky enough to live in the urbanized area of a city without living inside that city’s borders, we’ll take it as our God-given, unalienable right to partake of that city’s services without paying for them. That’s the mentality city leaders in Spartanburg are having to deal with as they prepare to move forward with plans to annex about 880 properties on the west side, and another 103 on the east side.

South Carolina has arguably the most restrictive annexation laws in the country. 75% of the property owners representing at least 75% of the assessed value of an area must have agreements with a municipality in order for that municipality to annex the properties in that area. By contrast, our neighbor North Carolina’s annexation laws are based on population density and land usage so that when an area becomes sufficiently urbanized it is either annexed into an adjacent municipality or it must incorporate as a municipality itself. The result is that while South Carolina cities struggle with providing services for an urbanized area often far larger that the actual city boundary, North Carolina cities have fewer problems as their borders are far more representative of the actual size of the city.

According to the 2000 census, the city of Spartanburg had a population of 39,673. According to that same census though, the urbanized area of the city was closer to 150,000. That means that Spartanburg has many of the costs associated with a city more than triple it’s size without the tax base to pay for those services.

The planned annexation of the properties on the east and west sides is a small but necessary step if Spartanburg is to be able properly fund city projects and services. According to an article in the Spartanburg Herald-Journal, the tax increase for a family with a home valued at $150,000 and two cars valued at $10,000 each would be $340. Though that tax increase amounts to less than $1 per day and though the newly annexed properties would receive city trash and recycling pickup as well as city police and fire department protection, the residents of those areas have been vocal in their hostility towards being annexed.

I have a short piece of advice to those residents concerned about paying for their new status as city residents: get over it!

By every reasonable measurement, the people living in those areas are already de facto city residents. They live a in an obviously urbanized area adjacent to the city. They enjoy easy access to the urban core that they’re adjacent to using city streets and traffic signals with city police patrolling those streets. They live a short distance from city parks, and green spaces without paying anything for their upkeep. They live minutes away from city-sponsored festivals and events like Spring Fling, Music on Main, Creative Tastes, Red, White, and Boom, and others without paying a dime in city property taxes to make those festivals and events happen.

Presumably one of the reasons they chose to live in these areas was because of the convenience of living next to the city. Living in an urban area with lots of amenities is very convenient, but one trade-off of that convenience is paying municipal taxes to fund the infrastructure that allows an urban area to function. It’s as simple as that.

What the residents on the east and west side are truly angry about is that their free ride is over. Up until now, they’ve enjoyed city living at county tax rates and now that that’s about to change they’re crying foul. Perhaps no one’s bothered telling them this so far, but the fact is it’s unreasonable to expect to be able to live ten minutes from downtown but somehow believe you should have the same tax rate as someone living in Enoree. It’s unfair to expect the 39,000 people living in the city to pay for infrastructure used by 150,000, and bringing these new properties into the city’s tax base is a small but much needed step in the right direction.

Eventually, the state will have to address our wildly out of date annexation laws. As municipalities struggle to widen their borders while simultaneously watching their urban areas expand, city services will suffer to keep up. It’s simply impossible to do proper urban planning without being able to reasonably establish the size of the urban area and tax it to fund that planning.

No one enjoys paying municipal taxes, but they are absolutely necessary if we expect to have a city worth living in, working in, or spending our leisure time in. It’s not unreasonable to expect that people would pay for those things, and if they don’t want to pay for them that’s fine; there is no shortage of rural and semi-rural areas in Spartanburg where they will never have to worry about being bothered by those ugly old municipal taxes. No one though, should be able to have it both ways. Spartanburg needs to annex its free-riders, and welcome them to the city that the rest of us have been paying for already.

This post first appeared on the Spartanburg Spark

Hopes for Spartanburg's Next Mayor

City politics was never exactly my field of expertise. In fact, it’s only in the last couple of years that I cared to pay attention to city government at all. I grew up out in the county, and while politics has been a passion of mine since my teen years, the ins and outs of city government seemed pretty unimportant to a kid whose main goal in life was to get as far away from Spartanburg as possible, as soon as possible.

In the last couple of years though, that’s all changed for me. Since moving into the city and noticing some of the positive things happening around town, I’ve started to pay attention to our city’s government. One of the first things I noticed once I started paying attention was that no conversation about the new “up and coming” Spartanburg was ever complete until someone heaped a big helping of praise on Mayor Bill Barnett.

Mayor Barnett’s non-campaigning, write-in campaign had become the stuff of legend—or at least as much a legend as something that happened less than a decade ago can become. His leadership was credited for practically everything positive that had happened in Spartanburg since his election. Admittedly, I didn’t really see what all the fuss was about at first. Because of the way Spartanburg’s city government is structured, the mayor doesn’t really have very much power. He or she gets a vote on city council, but no veto power. The mayor also presides over city council meetings, but that position doesn’t come with any special privileges either. Practically speaking, the Mayor of Spartanburg is pretty much a city council member elected by the city at-large.

As far as I could tell, the area where Mayor Barnett stood out, the reason why all of the city’s movers and shakers seemed to like him so much, was that Mayor Barnett was the best PR guy the city ever had. He seemingly never missed an opportunity to promote the city in one way or another. His ties to the business community helped tremendously with the downtown revitalization effort.

More than that though, people just plain seemed to like the guy. He was able to bridge divides between various factions in the city with an uncanny sort of ease. The city’s well-off white business class supported Barnett because he was one of them, and its downtown-boosting new urbanites respected him because he supported their interests. Even the city’s black population seemed to come to respect Barnett even though he’d won his first term by defeating Spartanburg’s first black mayor James Talley

Now, after two terms in office, Mayor Barnett has decided not to run for another term. In a little better than two months, city residents will have to pick a new mayor to be the ambassador and spokesperson for Spartanburg.

Since Mayor Barnett’s announcement, I’ve been asking myself a question that just a few years ago I would’ve never bothered with: What do I want to see from the next mayor of Spartanburg?

To be honest, I wasn’t exactly sure at first. As I wrote before, the mayoral position is as much symbolic as anything else. Everyone I talked to on the topic seemed mostly concerned about downtown and continuing the positive momentum in making the area a destination for people to live, work, and hang out. That’s a very important goal for a lot of reasons, but Spartanburg is more than the few square blocks that make up the city center, and the problems facing the city won’t be fixed by bringing in another corporate office or a major retailer on Morgan Square.

Statistically, Spartanburg is a majority-black city with a poverty rate more than double the national average. Driving through the tree-lined streets of Converse Heights or walking the sidewalks of downtown may make it look otherwise, but take a drive through Park Hills or down Howard Street sometime. Though we don’t hear about it a lot, that is what the majority of Spartanburg looks like, and as a city-wide elected official, the mayor of Spartanburg must represent the interests of the people living on Howard Street just as much as those living on Dupre Drive.

What’s more important to me than anything else is that our next mayor be an advocate for the concerns of those who, in my estimation, have been ignored. As important as it is to make downtown a thriving cultural hub for city and county residents, it’s even more important to make sure that the children living in the city’s poor areas can walk their own streets. As impressive as it is that some of our city’s schools are ranked so highly, that fact should always come with the realization that other schools in our city are horrendous and are failing in every measurable way.

While it will obviously be necessary for our next mayor to be able to bridge the gap between the different factions in Spartanburg, it’s even more important for that mayor to recognize that those gaps don’t come from nowhere. In many ways Spartanburg is more like two cities than one, and too many influential people seem perfectly content to talk about one city while completely ignoring the other.

I’d like to see our next mayor address the issue of neighborhood gentrification that’s sure to become more prevalent as our city tries to attract more creative-class new urbanites to live and work in and around our downtown area. I’d like to hear our next mayor say, in no uncertain terms, that open bigotry and homophobia have no place in our city. I’d like to see a mayor who at least had the courage to mention a living wage campaign in Spartanburg.

There are so many progressive issues that could be raised by our next mayor, I could write an entire column where I do nothing but start sentences with the phrase, “the next mayor should”. I’m not stupid though. I know it’s highly doubtful that I’ll get any of those things out of a mayoral candidate, and if I did it’d probably be a sure-fire sign that that candidate was destined to lose. Still, it’s important that these issues are brought up, even if only by a lowly blogger.

Right now it’s way too early now to know anything about what’s going to happen in November. So far, there’s only one announced candidate for mayor, and I’m sure that in the next few weeks we’ll have a couple more throw their hats into the ring. I hope I’m just being overly pessimistic, but I’m already going over in my head what compromises I’m going to have to make with whomever it is I end up supporting. Still, I’m holding out hope that I’ll be able to hold my head high when I pull the curtain behind me this year.

Otto Von Bismark once famously said that “politics is the art of the possible”. Decades later, economist John Kenneth Galbraith responded to Bismark’s quote saying, “Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.” Deep down, I think Galbraith was right, but just this once I’d like to side with Bismark.

This post first appeared on the Spartanburg Spark.

Health Care and Democracy

I haven't written about national politics in a while. It's not that I haven't had much to say on the topic, but rather I'm not quite sure what to say right now. The topic of the moment is health care, and I'm more passionate about that subject than a great many things I've already written about, but watching the vitriol, the misinformation, the misdirection, the obfuscation, and the out and out fiction being perpetrated in order to defeat not a policy, but a president, has beaten me back a bit. I'm not proud of that.

Say what you will about the Republicans, but they sure know how to play defense. It's true that the methods they choose are despicable. It's true that they prefer to fearmonger rather than actually make arguments based on merit. It's true that they betray their own cynicism about the wisdom of the American people by making the vilest of accusations and counting on a docile and uninformed population to parrot those baseless claims. Even though all those things are true, it doesn't change the fact that they're winning this fight.

Perhaps the biggest difference between the progressive and the conservative, is that one believes there should be rules to the game, and the other does not.

I can't imagine respected progressive leaders saying that a conservative president wanted to institute “death panels”, though I don't have to imagine that sort of thing coming from a conservative leader; I can just watch the YouTube clip. I can't imagine that progressives would bring loaded guns to protests against the sitting president, though I don't have to imagine that sort of thing coming from conservatives, because it's already happened. I can't imagine progressives making an argument that we should have McCarthy-style witch-hunts for un-American Republicans in Congress, but I don't have to imagine that coming from conservatives because Michelle Bachman already did it.

More disturbing that all that though, if any of those things did come from some lone progressive somewhere, that person would be ostracized and removed from mainstream political circles immediately. On the right though, the people who spout this unbelievable nonsense aren't ostracized, they're celebrated.

The moral of the story: If you find yourself sans idea in a battle of ideas, find something else to talk about.

Preferably, it should be something that plays on people's natural fears and anxieties. Make your opponents answer questions that have no real business even being asked. Make outrageous, easily-debunked claims with a straight face counting on the fact that most people are too stupid to bother debunking anything. Call an issue something it's obviously not. The only people who have rules in this thing are the losers. Intellectual honesty plus $3.25 will get you a latte at Starbucks.

This debate is important, or rather it was. There isn't a debate anymore. It's been hijacked by people who want to talk about government killing Grandma and refusing little Billy's heart transplant. Rather than ask for details on the plan so they can make an informed choice, they choose to talk about the new “Nazi regime”. Intentionally misinformed pawns run to town hall meetings intent on fighting battles that only exist in their sad, deformed little minds.

There's a method to this madness, and it's been written about before to be sure. As a rule, I despise Niccolò Machiavelli. His political masterpiece The Prince is a literal textbook on manipulation of the public by its leaders. I've always prided myself on the belief that people—when given a good education and accurate information—are generally reasonable and should be trusted to make wise decisions concerning their own government, and that Machiavellian manipulation is the ultimate form of cynicism. That kind of thinking is ultimately corrosive to the democratic body, and should never be celebrated. Even in the worst of times, I still believe this.


Still, I read a wonderful piece by Micheal Lind in Salon yesterday, and I haven't been able to shake the quote he used from The Prince or its stunning aptness in getting to the heart of what's going on right in front of our eyes.

It must be considered that there is nothing more difficult to carry out, nor more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to handle, than to initiate a new order of things. For the reformer has enemies in all those who profit by the old order, and only lukewarm defenders in all those who would profit by the new order, this lukewarmness arising partly from fear of their adversaries, who have the laws in their favor; and partly from the incredulity of mankind, who do not truly believe in anything new until they have had actual experience of it. Thus it arises that on every opportunity for attacking the reformer, his opponents do so with the zeal of partisans, the others only defend him half-heartedly, so that between them he runs great danger.

I won't touch on that quote here, except to say that if you just read it, you should read it again. After that, you should read it again. Sit with it a while. It's been haunting me since I read it, so I thought I'd share that anti-joy with others.

In response to these rabid dogs of unreason, our side has offered to give up the “public option” portion of President Obama's health care reform. It was a foolish move that only emboldened those dogs—who now smell blood in the air. They don't want the public option gone. This isn't about that. It's about crippling a presidency, and I can't believe there aren't people in the West Wing smart enough to know that.

In all likelihood now, we will lose this thing. I'm not giving up on it by any means, and Democrats obviously have the ability to drag the conservatives kicking and screaming along by voting along party lines, but I'm beginning to think they don't have the stomach for it. Nor do they seem to have the stomach to whip the Blue Dogs into line. I find myself wondering how many of those Blue Dogs got progressive money, time, and sweat to get themselves elected, only so that those same progressives can watch while the candidate they supported turns a blind eye to them and their issues now.

This fight is about people, mostly it's about poor and working class people. That's one reason it's such a hard fight. Most people aren't poor or working class, they're middle class people with health insurance from their employer that—while it may be too expensive—isn't breaking the bank, until they get sick of course. Most of these people aren't bad people. They're just afraid of change. They're frightened by change because we've taught them to be frightened by change. We've spent a generation telling them that government can't do anything. There's no reason we should be surprised when they don't think it can do this now.

So what about that belief of mine that a well-informed, educated public can and should be trusted to make intelligent decisions?

That works fine if the public is indeed well-informed and educated. The American people are neither well-informed nor educated. Hell, they can't even answer basic questions about the world around them. If you want to know what I'll be mourning if we loose this health care battle, that's what it will be. I will be mourning the realization that the ideas and ideals of democracy can't be fulfilled without those well-informed, educated citizens. I will be mourning the fact that we allowed the worst of our nature to overcome the best of it. I will be mourning the fact that “We the People” would rather be ignorant and proud than reasonable and wise.

Rep. Bob Inglis Meets The Mob

I’ve never been a fan of Bob Inglis. In one the first blog posts I ever wrote— back in 2003 when Inglis was gearing up for his run at a second stint as our U.S. Representative—I wrote about his hypocrisy in running for the old Congressional seat he’d vacated back in ‘98 because of a term limit pledge that he later apparently came to regret. In the post, I mocked him for losing in his bid to unseat Democratic Senator Fritz Hollings that same year, and then having to wander in the wilderness for six years while his former aide Jim DeMint was using the same Congressional seat that Inglis once held as a springboard to the same U.S. Senate seat that Inglis once sought.

In that post I called Inglis a “corporate lawyer turned Congressman turned corporate lawyer” who was looking to regain his old seat as some sort of consolation prize for losing the Senate bid. After the election in ‘04 when DeMint won that Senate seat—albeit after Hollings retired—I mocked Inglis by writing how the “student had overtaken the master”, and I imagined how Bob Inglis would wile away the hours in his “small potatoes” Congressional seat wondering what might have been if it weren’t for that enterprising former aide of his.

Well today, I’m writing about Bob Inglis again. The difference this time, is that today I almost feel like praising the guy.
Last Thursday, Rep. Inglis held a town hall meeting in Boiling Springs to explain his position on President Obama’s health care reform bill. There was a packed house at the Upstate Family Resource Center, and glancing around at the crowd revealed a group that looked middle class, mostly over 40, and almost exclusively white. While waiting for the town hall meeting to begin, I started to wonder how things were going to shake out.

I’d noticed a few people when I first walked in with “Taxed Enough Already -TEA” signs, and I knew that Inglis hadn’t always been the most popular guy with the extremists on the right fringe of the GOP, but this meeting was about the President’s health care proposal, and Inglis had just released a list of 16 reasons he was opposed to the healthcare reform bill. Surely that would tamp down some of the ire from the hard right, wouldn’t it?

Well in a word, no.

The meeting started at 7 o’clock and right away the hostility of the crowd was evident. In the first part of the meeting, members of the crowd were allowed a chance to speak and raise issues, and right away it was apparent that this Inglis was going to be attacked from the right all night long. All the extreme right’s talking points were well represented. There was the guy who only wanted to talk about getting the “illegals” out of the country, and the woman who referenced a story from a well-worn conservative gossip site. There were people who warned about Obama’s supposedly-planned “Death Panel” and shouts about “euthanasia.” 16 minutes into the meeting, someone referenced Ron Paul and drew a standing ovation. Another woman brought up some conspiracy theory about forcing all Americans to receive an untested H1N1 vaccine and rather than laughing her out of the room, the crowd applauded.

There was even one woman who took it upon herself to call out Inglis for his support of a bill requiring all Federal buildings to replace their incandescent light bulbs as they burn out, with compact fluorescents—which she called “curly Q’s”. When Inglis asked the crowd why we shouldn’t replace the old bulbs in federal buildings with the more efficient CFL’s as they wear out, someone shouted “because they’re dangerous”. Nobody ever said exactly why the compact florescent light bulb is dangerous, but my guess is that those evil Obama-bulbs turn you gay with their unchristian, energy-efficient, florescent light.

When it came time for Inglis to speak, he had to spend most of his time pointing out that, like most of the people in the crowd, he doesn’t actually support the President’s healthcare proposal. He voiced his opposition to the proposed “public option” in the health care bill because, he claimed, the Government system would be able to undercut private insurance companies who wouldn’t be able to compete with the Government’s ability to negotiate lower prices for health care services.

I laughed to myself when I considered that someone from a party that trades on the idea that government is so inept that it can’t hit the ground with its hat in three tries, was now arguing that we can’t have a Government option because it would be too efficient. How a supposed free-marketeer can make the argument that competition is bad with a straight face is beyond me.

Still, even though I vehemently disagreed with Rep. Inglis’ arguments against President Obama’s health care plan, he wasn’t using scare tactics or being disingenuous in his arguments. He had an honest disagreement with the plan based on his own convictions. While I may not agree with his convictions, I spent the better part of the evening after that lamenting the fact that I would only be able to devote a few lines of my upcoming column to what should be the real centerpiece. A reasoned, sensible debate on health care might not have been nearly as heated or as interesting, but it would’ve been meaningful and substantive, two things that seem to be in short supply in modern politics.

Instead, Inglis spent the rest of his time doing things like assuring people that there was no secret plan to give them untested vaccinations against their will, and explaining why the energy savings from compact florescent bulbs mean that government buildings will spend less of their energy bill on lighting. Viewed in one way, it’s very entertaining to watch a mainstream conservative squirm in front of the extremists he depends on to ensure his reelection every two years. Viewed in another way though, it’s extremely disheartening to know that these people’s irrational ideas and conspiratorial mindset can send what should be a levelheaded and much-needed debate down into a rabbit hole of nonsense.

To put it another way, it’s an interesting commentary on American society that so many of us are so privileged and well-fed that our main political concerns could be so abstract and detached from our everyday lives.

After Inglis’ remarks, there was a short time left for questions from the crowd, but the crowd wasn’t really interested in asking questions so much as making statements. They dressed him down for every issue where, in their estimation, he wasn’t sufficiently conservative. Toward the end, a woman shouted that she was afraid of Obama. When Inglis asked why, the crowd erupted into shouts. Through the noise Inglis heard someone suggest that he should watch Glenn Beck—a conservative television personality who recently made headlines after making a joke about poisoning House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. In response to the suggestion, Inglis countered that people should “turn that television off when he comes on.” That comment brought down the loudest boos of the night, and after the noise had subsided a bit Inglis explained his suggestion saying of Beck, “he’s trading on fear.”

For me, that exchange with Inglis and the crowd encapsulated what the entire night had really been about.

When you boil it down to its essence, what happened last Thursday night was that Inglis found himself a mainstream conservative in a room full of people who hate mainstream conservatives almost as much as they hate liberals. The crowd he faced at the meeting was the best example I’ve seen so far of the rift that’s been consuming the GOP both nationally and locally since President Obama’s election. These people are angry, and any GOP leaders who don’t seem to be able to match their level of vitriol soon find themselves targets of the same conspiratorial rage that dogs President Obama and the Democrats. What the extreme right is engaged in is a good old-fashioned ideological purge, and before it’s all said and done, plenty of mainstream conservative and moderate Republicans are going to find themselves politicians without a party.

To his credit, Rep. Inglis seems to have no interest in playing their game. He could easily give these people exactly what they want. When they ask why he opposes the President’s health care bill, rather than give a nuanced, reasoned answer, he could simply call it a “socialistic attempt to undermine the American, free-market way of life” or some other jingoistic bit of reactionary garbage. He could pander to the lowest common denominator at every possible opportunity. He could take a page out of his old friend Senator Jim DeMint’s book and shift so far to the right that there’s no room left for anyone to out-crazy him. No Republican from South Carolina is going to challenge one of their own from the left, and even the moderates who don’t like the more extreme conservatives in the GOP still fall in line come Election Day rather than vote for a Democrat.

Because of his refusal to toe the ultraconservative line, Inglis is facing challengers in the GOP primary in 2010, and his reelection is anything but certain. Rather than move to the right to cut off his opponents line of attack, Inglis is standing by his mainstream conservative stance on most issues. While I disagree with nearly every issue position Inglis has ever taken, he has managed to win my respect for standing up to the extremists in his own party even though it could cost him his office in the process. That takes character, and there are plenty of politicians in similar circumstances who’ve read the GOP tea leaves and moved themselves further right to the suit the reactionaries.

After everything was over and the crowd had started to clear out, I walked outside and found Rep. Inglis listening to someone who seemed all worked up over something I couldn’t quite make out. Inglis seemed to be listening pretty intently to what the man had to say, and he didn’t seem to notice the woman shouting at him from the parking lot. “God bless Glenn Beck” the woman brayed, “and God bless Sean Hannity”. It was a fitting coda to the spectacle I’d just witnessed. I laughed a little bit, shook my head, and walked towards the car.

This post originally appeared on the Spartanburg Spark.