Flying Oskar

Moving On!

2010-08-30T23:24:00.000-04:00

This blog is no longer in use. If you want to follow my writings, check out my new site: FlyingOskar.com

What Comes After The Spartanburg Spark?

2010-07-22T02:16:00.006-04:00

The Spartanburg Spark has been one of the most amazing things that I’ve ever been a part of. In the year and a half I’ve been actively involved with the project, I’ve seen the number of unique monthly visitors to the site more than double, and the page views skyrocket to over five times the level they were when I first started. I’ve had the privilege of being along for the ride as this simple blog has changed the tone in Spartanburg in some small, but important, ways. Even if it closed its digital doors tomorrow, I think it would be hard to call the Spartanburg Spark anything but amazingly successful. That point is driven home even further by the fact that the project never had any money to speak of. The whole thing has been a giant learning experience for me personally, and I’m going to miss shooting emails over to Steve to ask about this or that Spark-related thing.

When I first learned a while back that Steve was going to be moving back to Asheville, and that the Spark would either have to be handed off to someone else or killed off altogether, I didn’t have any idea what that meant for Spartanburg’s burgeoning progressive movement or for me personally. Defying all common sense, Steve offered the site to me first—and keeps offering it to me every time we speak—and while I’ve definitely entertained the idea of running the site, I’m not sure that doing that would be the best thing for me personally or for the Spark.

It’s not false modesty that makes me think that I shouldn’t run the Spark. I could run the site just fine. In fact, I’ve done exactly that for a couple of months at a time. The truth is, I don’t think Steve Shanafelt realizes that the Spartanburg Spark can’t survive without his voice. I’m not trying to kiss the boss's ass here. That’s just calling things as I see them.

Steve is persistently positive on many, many fronts when it comes to Spartanburg. Not to be insulting, but the word “Pollyanna” has been thrown around a lot, though always in a good way. That sort of enthusiasm isn’t something I’ve always shared, but it has been part of the Spark’s character. If I’m being honest, I have to admit that it’s a part of that character that I can’t reliably recreate. I told Steve, in explaining why I wouldn’t take over the Spark, that the only thing I’m truly confident in is my own voice. My voice has been a part of the Spark, but it’s only a part. I wouldn’t dream of making it the whole.

There are practical, personal concerns as well. I am currently still unemployed, which obviously means that I have the time to run the Spark, at least for now. Eventually though, I’ll find a job. It’s hard enough as it is to look for work without worrying about some site that thousands of people depend on. What happens once I find work? If I took on the Spark, I’d naturally want to find work that allowed me to devote the necessary time to running the site. I don’t know if anyone’s noticed or not, but now isn’t exactly the time for those of us looking for jobs to be selective. I won’t allow the future of the Spark to hinge on my employment situation.

So, now we’re at the part where we talk about other options for the Spark.

Steve has been having conversations with different groups about how the site could continue, and I won’t go into any detail about those conversations except to say that in my opinion, many of the people who’ve expressed interest don’t exactly “get” the Spark’s mission. They’re coming from the best of places I’m sure, but to me, a lot of what’s been mentioned so far hasn’t been anything I’ve been thrilled with. Ultimately, what happens there is Steve’s decision, and I’ll support whatever he decides, but I should explain what I mean by not “getting” the site’s mission.

Some of the people who’ve been reaching out so far believe that every aspect of the future Spark should be relentlessly positive in it’s coverage of Spartanburg. I’m sure it will come as a surprise to absolutely nobody reading this that I think that’s a terrible idea.

I know, I know. I just wrote a few paragraphs ago about Steve’s “persistently positive” take on many things in our community, so how can I be bashing that sort of positivity now?

For starters, Steve is positive on certain things, but he’s just as quick to turn a critical eye at some things as I am. Some of the people who who’ve expressed interest in taking over the site don’t share that eye. The public persona of those people is relentlessly positive at all times. That sort of thinking will kill the Spark. The choice isn’t between negative and positive. In fact, I reject that dichotomy out of hand. There are issues where it’s important to speak out with a loud, forceful voice. That’s not negative, that’s realistically confronting injustice. There are other times when boosting something positive in the community is what needs to happen. The Spark has always been about balancing those things, cheering when appropriate, challenging and questioning when not. To lose that balance is to lose the essence of what the Spark is.

The other part of that for me is personal. I don’t think it’s going to happen, but if the Spark is ultimately taken over by people who have the intention of neutering the site and turning it into some bland, mindless, cheerleading blog, not only will I not have any part of it, but I’ll actively work against it. The last thing we need in Spartanburg is another goddamn cheerleading organization. We need an honest, balanced, forcefully progressive alt-media site, and if there’s no way for that to continue on the Spark once Steve leaves then the site should be killed off.

The truth is I don’t know exactly what’s going to happen with the Spark, but I can make a few promises about what’s going to happen with my part of it.

First, “Flying Oskar” isn’t going anywhere. If the Spark is ultimately shut down I will create a site for it, and for some other projects I’ve had on the back burner. It will not be a replacement for the Spark by any means, but it will be a place where progressivism in Spartanburg is proclaimed loudly and proudly. I also intend to continue filming Spartanburg City Council meetings as long as it doesn’t conflict with whatever job I end up with. My hope is that I’ll be able to deliver some sort of original content at least three times a week, and I think that’s possible even if I do land a job that puts more constraints on my time than I’d like. I’m willing to gamble on that because it would be my site, so if it fails it’s won't be as though people depend on it the same way they’ve come to depend on the Spark.

Whatever happens to the Spark, I can promise you that I’ll still be out there doing many of the same things I’m doing now. The Spark may have been my most successful foray into the world of blogging, but it was by no means my first, and it certainly won’t be my last. I started “Flying Oskar” with no expectations beyond the catharsis that comes for me with writing. As far as I can tell, I need that catharsis now probably more than I did when I started, so no matter what, I’m pretty sure you’ll all still have Christopher George to kick around for quite a while to come.

Thoughts on Movements and Consensus

2010-05-29T19:24:00.002-04:00

I had an interesting conversation over lunch this week that left me in a decidedly philosophical mood. The conversation was about whether it’s more productive to work to build a consensus among the powerful and influential members of a community or whether mass, populist movements of ordinary people are more effective. During the conversation I admitted that it’s a smoother ride from idea to implementation for those who work the elites for their pet causes, though the idea seemed fundamentally elitist and undemocratic to me. Still, say whatever you want about democratic principles, when the elites want something done, especially in Spartanburg, it gets done.

There’s a famous Fredrick Douglass quote that says, ““Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.” Less often quoted though, is the context of that particular quote.

If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.

Try as I might want to for the sake of my friends who seem to—on occasion at least—marvel at the efficiency of oligarchy, I can find no reason to disagree with Fredrick Douglass. The truly powerful people in a community (or a society) will never agree en masse to a move that threatens their own position. It’s not an evil on their part, at least not a conscience one; it’s simply the nature of power. No thinking person who sits as lord and master of the manor is going to argue that we should burn the manor down. The servants, however, may have a different opinion.

Movements are messy. Movements are invariably imperfect. Movements are sometimes destructive. But movements are the only tools for meaningful social change that have ever worked.

Without a labor movement, there would be no minimum wage, no eight-hour day, no child-labor laws, no social security, and no right to organize. Without the Civil Rights movement, there would be no Brown Vs. Board, no Voting Rights Act, and no Civil Rights Act. These were things that the powerful did not want. They were things that the powerful actively fought against, and were it not for the thousands who lost their lives fighting in those causes, these are things that never would have happened. Societies move forward because those without a seat at the table demand a chair.

It’s no different at the community level. Rent control in New York happened because tenants during the Great Depression demanded it. Berkley, California’s “People’s Park” didn’t exist until a group of people who wanted a place where free speech would be respected without condition seized it from the university, instigating a bloody standoff with then-Governor Ronald Reagan. City ordinances all over the country covering everything from public green space protection to affordable housing, and from benefits for same-sex partners of city employees, to the preservation of culturally significant historic landmarks all have their origins with community movements.

If a community’s progress is left exclusively in the hands of a community’s powerful members then we should never be surprised if that progress only seems to benefit those already affluent members, aside from the paternalistic sense of noblesse oblige driving the best-intentioned among those elites of course. Well intentioned though they may be, theirs is a paternalism that thinks of the underclass as a problem to be solved, not as a people who should be empowered. Those benevolent members of the beau monde never seem to come up with the right answers for how best to lift up the underclass because they spend all their time asking the wrong questions.

Like most other ideas I have, there’s a quote out there that sums this one up far better than I ever could. This one’s from Paulo Freire: “True generosity consists precisely in fighting to destroy the causes which nourish false charity. False charity constrains the fearful and subdued, the ‘rejects of life’ to extend their trembling hands. True generosity lies in striving so that these hands — whether of individuals or entire peoples — need be extended less and less in supplication, so that more and more they become human hands which work and, working, transform the world.”

If it seems like I’m throwing the idea of influencing the aristocracy as a means to bring change under a bus it’s because I am, but that’s not to say that I don’t think that sort of thing has it’s place. In areas less about the powerful versus the powerless, it can work effectively and quickly. That’s nothing to shake a stick at, but the issues where that sort of thing is possible are almost always benign matters that may have a perceived benefit to all of a community’s citizens, but never seem to address the disparities between those citizens.

I guess when you get right down to it; this whole thing is a lot simpler for me than it is for a lot of other people. Many people go through their lives never wanting to rock the boat, and I understand that. I’ve just always been the sort of person who doesn’t just want to rock the boat; I want to capsize the motherfucker, and drown the people who’ve been steering it. That’s one area of my radicalism I’ve never been able to completely abandon, and really, I hope I never do.

At the end of the day, it comes down to one point that I think is absolutely inescapable. Elites are fine with progress, so long as that progress doesn’t threaten their status. To me, any progress that doesn’t threaten the status of a community’s elites isn’t progress at all, at least not the sort of progress that truly matters. So when it comes to deciding how people seeking real change go about achieving it, I think the roadmap is already pretty clear.

Bloggers Versus "Real" Writers

2010-02-25T18:08:00.003-05:00

Through the technological marvel of Netflix-streaming through my Playstation 3, I started watching Californication today. It's a Showtime series starring David Duchovny as a down-on-his-luck writer who, for a variety of reason, can't seem to get his shit together. It's pretty interesting so far, in that way that shows with semi-nihilistic, self-destructive characters are usually interesting. One episode in particular though, grabbed me in a slightly different way.

In the episode, Duchovny's character is being interviewed for a local public radio show—Henry Rollins plays the radio show host. In the interview, Duchovny's character goes on this rant against Internet acronyms like “LOL” and “LMAO,” saying that they represent the destruction of the English language. The radio show host points out that Duchovny is part of the same problem because he's blogging for a local website. Duchovny agrees, and makes a joke about self-loathing.

The exchange reminded me of an old argument I've had with myself many times over the difference between being a blogger and a writer.

To a certain extent, there is no difference at all. Bloggers write just the same as other writers. From one point of view, the only difference is in the method of delivery. “Real” writers write for reputable publications like the New Yorker or the L.A. Times. Bloggers either self-publish on their own websites (like this one) or they blog for other websites. The line between writers and bloggers is pretty blurry at times though. Almost every “real” writer these days has a blog, and though many of them complain about the informal, conversational nature of the format, they still aren't stupid enough to allow a new medium to completely pass them by.

For what it's worth, I've always called myself a writer, not a blogger. Maybe it's just that I buy into the snarky stereotyping coming from the “real” writers out there, but I've always felt like calling myself a blogger would somehow belittle what I write. Since I started writing for the Spark, I've become more open to the label, but mostly it's because that's how the world sees what I do, so I can either get with the program and call myself a blogger, or I can insist on calling myself something that the rest of the world will likely never call me.

My name is Christopher George, and I'm a blogger. That wasn't so hard I guess.

Does that put me in the same class as some of the bloggers out there, the ones with prose as clumsy and awkward as a fat kid trying to play shortstop? Maybe.

It's not as though I don't at least somewhat buy some of the criticism being thrown out there by the “real” writers of the world. Lately, I've been doing the Spark's weekly local blog roundup, and just based on that I can tell you that a huge majority of what's out there is terrible, the sort of stuff so awful that when you read it you feel embarrassed for the person who wrote it even if they don't. Still, a fair amount of what's out there is pretty good, especially among the bloggers who take it seriously, so when I read something from some professionally trained journalist going on and on about how awful the blogosphere's content is, I take it with a grain of salt.

Those people are staring down a technological shift that they're not prepared for. It's going to change their entire world in ways nobody can predict, and a lot of times, they're lashing out because they're afraid. A lot of times though, they're also lashing out because of a certain contempt.

It's easy to understand from a certain point of view, a professional, educated point of view.

I don't mean that the point of view itself is educated, just that the people who ascribe to it usually are. These are people who've often spent the better part of a decade learning how to write, paying good money for the privilege. They look at bloggers the same way that a composer who graduated from Juilliard might look at Dee Dee Ramone. It's snobbishness par excellence.

As far as I know, I've never had any of that snobbishness directed at me personally, but I have been in situations where I felt dramatically out of place because I was surrounded by writers far better educated than I am, and far more accomplished to boot. It was intimidating to say the least, but more because I noticed the difference, not because anybody thought any less of me as I writer, at least not openly anyway.

Leaving aside those personal experiences though, I think bloggers don't get nearly the respect they deserve, especially the best of them.

I've read commentaries from blogs that were every bit as nuanced and thought-provoking as the best op-ed's in the New York Times. Conversely, I've read pieces by “real” writers that I could've outdone in high school. As often as not, a person's educational background and his or her professional status have absolutely nothing to do with the quality of the writing that person is capable of producing. Does that mean that it might be better to save the money you intend to spend on that graduate degree in journalism from Columbia and just start a blog, getting by on whatever talent you may have? Well, if you can stand the scorn from others who carry around their possibly meaningless piece of paper as though it's an affirmation from the almighty that they are indeed masters of the English language, the answer is...maybe.

There's still a lot to be learned from that formal training, besides being allowed to call yourself a “real” writer. I don't think I'd be $100,000 better, but I bet I'd be a better writer if I had that graduate degree from Columbia. At the very least, I'd get to shed that blogger label.

Thoughts On Home and Healing

2009-12-04T01:54:00.001-05:00

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

2009-10-01T22:15:00.001-04:00

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

2009-09-08T15:11:00.004-04:00

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

2009-08-31T11:57:00.002-04:00

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

2009-08-24T09:40:00.002-04:00

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

2009-08-19T17:27:00.006-04:00

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

2009-08-17T13:41:00.002-04:00

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.

Deconstructing the Redneck Games

2009-08-10T10:08:00.002-04:00

Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary defines the word redneck as “a white member of the Southern rural laboring class.” While it may be technically correct, that’s a pretty dry definition if you ask me. The word redneck conjures a certain image in many people’s minds that’s a little more specific than the dictionary definition describes, and if you want a more clear picture of what a redneck actually looks like in the American lexicon, modern pop culture has more than a few examples to give you some ideas.

Comedian Jeff Foxworthy, who has made millions telling jokes starting with the phrase “You might be a redneck if…”, describes a redneck as someone with “a glorious lack of sophistication.” Larry The Cable Guy — a Nebraskan whose real name is Daniel Lawrence Whitney — has managed to turn his stereotypically redneck character into an entire franchise selling his catchphrase “Git-R-Done” emblazoned on everything from wallets to women’s thong underwear. Whitney’s character typically speaks with a dimwitted-sounding Southern drawl and wears a camouflage cap and flannel shirt with the sleeves cut off.

This past Saturday though, the popular redneck mold was proudly on display much closer to home at the Redneck Games at the Mid-City Shrine Club in Wellford.

The Redneck Games — held annually for the last four years — opened with the ceremonial lighting of a toilet bowl. The event featured a mud pit and an array of games like bobbing for pig’s feet, and redneck horseshoes where participants played with toilet seats instead of horseshoes. Also at the event, was the Little Miss Mud Pit and Little Mr. Mud Pit contest for five to ten-year-olds where kids were asked “What is a redneck?” The winning response on the girls side came from a five-year-old who answered “Watchin’ Nascar, drinkin’ beer”. Another event had contestants using their hands and armpits to see who could do the best “armpit serenade.” Many people were laughing on Saturday I’m sure, but whenever I read about this sort of thing, all I can ever do is shake my head in disgust.

I know that in the general scheme of things, something like the Redneck Games shouldn’t matter, but for me they do. I grew up in a trailer, and my family was pretty much the standard rural Southern family. And speaking from that point of view, I just don’t see what’s so damn funny about the Redneck Games.

When I was a child, I spent a lot of my time playing in the woods below my house, the woods that had grown up from the fields my great-grandfather once turned with nothing but a mule, a plow, and his own sweat, the same land where we raised chickens and hogs in my youth, the land I still think of as home. Being so close to my ancestral roots, and being surrounded by older family members throughout my childhood lent nearly everything around me an added significance.
Behind every tree was a story, and evening walks down to the creek became history lessons filled with tales of hardship, toil, music, mischief, love, and loss. Those stories — literally dozens, if not hundreds, of them — have stuck with me for my entire life. It was a wonderful way to grow up, knowing the land as this place which had shaped everyone I knew. It gave me a feeling of incredible connectedness, and left me with the firm belief that place makes a person more so than almost anything else in that person’s life.

One of the greatest things about being a child is the fact that children don’t label their experiences, they just experience them. When I was young, I never knew that there were people who made fun of rural Southerners. Honestly, I didn’t spend that much time wondering how other people lived at all. Children tend to accept reality as it’s presented to them in an unquestioning sort of way. It wasn’t until later — much later in fact — that I even heard the word redneck.

That’s not to say that once I did hear the term that I didn’t recognize a certain grain of truth in the stereotype, but the derogatory portrayal of the rural Southerner as some sort of backward-thinking idiot who deserved to be ridiculed made me feel embarrassed by my own background. During my teenage years, I mocked the “rednecks” relentlessly along with my friends. I distanced myself from most things Southern, because I’d bought in to someone else’s ideas about what “those people” were like, never mind that the “those people” in this case included me and everyone I’d ever really cared about.
It wasn’t until I was in my 20’s that I finally let go of that caricature and started to see rural Southern culture on my own terms. That’s when I started to notice the way the standard boilerplate redneck image was used to mock and belittle a group of people whose only sin as far as I could tell was being poverty-stricken and uneducated. Ever since I came to that realization, the only thing I’ve found funny about the popular redneck image is the irony of people like Foxworthy and Whitney making millions by poking fun at the poor.

Saturday’s Redneck Games were a part of that same mockery, and while I know most people think it’s not something to take to seriously, I think it is serious. For most people it won’t make much of a difference either way, but somewhere out there, there’s a little boy who’s about to learn to be ashamed of his own background. A little girl who had no inkling that she was any different from anybody else is going to be mocked because she lives in a trailer, and it’s going to change her whole world. The Redneck games play a part in that whether we want to admit it or not, and while most people laugh it all off, it’s going to hit others a little closer to where they live. To me, there’s nothing funny about that.

This post originally appeared on the Spartanburg Spark.

The News Channel 7 Challenge

2009-08-03T13:57:00.002-04:00

Last Monday, I began my week with a mission. As much time as has been spent on the Spark criticizing local media coverage, our local television news on WSPA News Channel 7 has gotten precious little attention. At first it seemed odd to me that that would be the case, and I spent a good deal of time thinking about it. What I came up with in the end was that we here at the Spark deal in a world of words.

Those words may now more often than not be digital representations on an illuminated screen rather than ink on wood pulp but either way, they’re still words. So even though on the surface ignoring the local television news coverage may seem like some sort of glaring omission in the Spark’s coverage, from a certain point of view it makes sense that the local television news coverage would’ve largely flown under our radar up to now.

So it was with all those things in mind that I decided to watch a week of News Channel 7’s local news coverage.

I should say at the outset that I’m probably the last person who should have ever volunteered to watch a whole week of local news. I’m the sort of guy who’d much rather bury himself in a 5000 word article in the New Yorker than watch 30 minutes of local coverage on car crashes, shootings, stabbings, and sensationalized criminal trials. A lot of people know the old rule of thumb about television news: “If it bleeds, it leads”. Less popular though, is the other half of that rule: “If it thinks, it stinks”. That’s always been my problem with local news. Generally, it plays to our most voyeuristic and base instincts. Local television news often serves little purpose other than to provide us all a chance to gawk at the misfortune of others, and any useful information gleamed from watching is entirely incidental.

Needless to say, I wasn’t looking forward to the week ahead and not being content with suffering alone, on Monday I posted a challenge over on the forum to attempt to get some of the Spark’s readers to take the local news challenge with me. My results were decidedly underwhelming, and the few responses I got were from people opting out, or starting and failing. The local news challenge was such a dismal failure in fact, that if in the future anyone ever has the audacity to accuse me of being an influential member of the community here in Spartanburg, I’ll promptly point to the local news challenge thread in the Spark’s forum as evidence that I can’t even motivate people to sit down in front of their televisions for 30 minutes. I’m so stung by the experience, it surprises me when my dog still comes when I call him.

Even though the forum local news challenge was a failure, I still had a week’s worth of local news to watch. So with my netbook on my lap for taking notes, I turned on the TV Monday at 5 PM for my first installment of WSPA’s local news coverage.

For my first evening of local news, I decided to watch the entire hour and half of coverage from 5 to 6:30 PM. That plan was good; unfortunately I only managed to make it to about 5:40 or so before I fell asleep on the couch from a combination of boredom and the lack of my afternoon cup of coffee. Before I dozed off though I caught what at first seemed like an interesting lead story at 5:30 about North Carolina parolees committing crimes in South Carolina. The story only referenced two parolees, both of whom committed crimes in Cherokee County, one of whom was the now infamous Gaffney serial killer Patrick Burris, and that’s when it hit me that this supposed story was really just an excuse to bring up the serial killer story again.

The two men referenced in the story had no connection to each other, and the fact that they both were on parole in North Carolina when they happened to commit crimes in an area of South Carolina less than 30 minutes from the North Carolina state line is an obvious coincidence. This story didn’t expose some gaping hole in the North Carolina judicial system. It simply used an incidental connection to get more mileage out of the already throughly covered serial killer story.

The other thing I noticed about the 5 and 5:30 editions of the local evening news is that in addition to telling the news not quite good enough for the 6 o’clock block, they also serve as teasers for what’s coming up at 6. In fact, a disturbing amount of air time during the first hour of evening coverage is devoted to promoting the news at 6; which in turn uses a significant portion of its time to promote the news at 11. It’s almost like watching an infomercial with commercial breaks.

I’d like to be able to say that things got better as the week progressed, but they didn’t. I tried watching at 6 and at noon, but no matter what time you tune in, it’s pretty much the same thing: something sexy or bloody in the lead, a pseudo-deep investigative report about something relating to sex, children, or violent crime in the middle, and then weather and sports. Finally, we go out with some puff piece pulled down from the national network about a dog that saved a guy’s life by dialing 911 when the house was on fire or something equally heartwarming and meaningless. I didn’t need a week to figure this stuff out. I could’ve wrapped it up in an afternoon.

When it was all over, I finished out my week with pretty much the same ideas about local television news coverage that I started the week with—albeit articulated a little better. That isn’t to say that I didn’t learn a few things or develop new ideas. For example, I’m now thoroughly convinced that weather and sports are scheduled towards the end of each 30 minute block because if they were scheduled in the beginning of the block half the audience would change the channel before the half-hour was over. I’d never really bothered to give it that much thought before last week. That’s something I suppose.

The problem with our local television newscast is that it simply doesn’t report much actual news. News is something that affects people’s everyday lives. Accidents out on the interstate are tragic, but they’re not news. Criminal child neglect trials are heartbreaking, but they’re not news. A stabbing in a convenience store is frightening, but it’s not news. If you disagree with that, you should ask yourself how any of those stories will affect you, me, or society in any way. These are personal tragedies and to the people directly involved, they are very important. To the rest of us though, these so-called news stories won’t make any impact on our lives one way or the other.

I know that may come across as a little cynical. Before you dismiss me as cold and unfeeling though you should ask yourself what’s more cynical, the guy who says that these stories of personal tragedy aren’t news, or the news agency that—under the guise of being informative—exploits people’s voyeuristic impulses for its own private gain?

The biggest problem with our local television news is that there’s actually plenty of news out there, but most of it would require lifting the audience up and educating them to the things that really do matter in their lives instead of talking down to them as though they’re caged animals only interested in sex or gore. The real stories out there aren’t likely to make for the best visuals, but they would provide the public with information they really need to better their own communities, and while that’s not exactly sexy or glamorous, it is what journalism is supposed to be about.

This post originally appeared on the Spartanburg Spark.

Birthers, Conspiracies, and Democracy

2009-07-30T16:52:00.001-04:00

Birthers. I've purposefully avoided writing about them for as long as I possibly could. Not, as some would suspect, for political reasons. It's true that generally I'm a supporter of President Barack Obama. In fact, I'm often less critical of him than I should be from an ideological point of view. Call it what you will, but after spending my entire adult life under either a do-nothing moderate Democrat or an inarticulate perpetual frat-boy who allowed the crypto-fascists around him to take over the country, I'm willing to cut the new guy more slack than he probably deserves. We'll call it an extended honeymoon for lack of a better term.

No, the reason I've avoided writing about the birthers up until now is because I just plain can't stand conspiracy theories.

That goes for conspiracy theories from all political corners. As far as I'm concerned, conspiracy theories always bear the mark of lazy thinking and poor reasoning skills, and those two things may just be my biggest pet peeves in the entire world. All a conspiracy theory needs in order to have a reasonable number of ardent followers is to be plausible, not provable or even likely, just plausible. Conspiracy theories never have to stand up to the same scrutiny as their targets; the burden of proof is never placed at their feet. They make extraordinary claims and rather than prove those claims, they ask any challengers to disprove them. It's Russell's Teapot gone mad!

The birthers are classic conspiracy theorists and to be frank, they're not that interesting to write about. Like all conspiracy theories, they start from a certain point of view—in this case a strong dislike for and distrust of President Obama. Next, they use this distrust and dislike to formulate an irrational—but plausible on the surface at least—theory about the President. The new theory becomes solidified gospel within the confines of the group because of the irrational fear, distrust, and hatred they all share with one another.

No amount of evidence contradicting the theory will ever be good enough for the dedicated conspiracy theorist because there's always a backup answer. You've got the birth certificate? That doesn't matter, because it's not the “real” birth certificate. You've got birth announcements in the paper? That's meaningless because those were obviously planted to make it “appear” that President Obama was born in Hawaii. Hawaii's Republican Governor and the Department of Records say the birth certificate's legit? That doesn't matter; they're part of the conspiracy too.

The reason I write all this is to illustrate the fact that rational arguments have no place in a discussion with conspiracy theorists. They've abandoned reason completely, because it doesn't line up with the version of reality that they've already accepted as undeniably true. Hence the reason every single one of these conspiracy-devastating facts fails to make a dent in the worldview of the conspiracy's true believers. The conspiracy theorists always portray themselves as people just “looking for answers”, but it's just a cover. They've already got all the answers they need thank you very much.

Do you find yourself sympathetic to the birther movement? Do you think I'm just some lefty-socialist type trying to defend my fearless leader at all costs? Try this little exercise. Take everything that I wrote about the birthers above and apply it to some other conspiracy theory. Pick whichever one you like.

It works for pretty much every conspiracy theory out there: 9/11 truthers, moon-landing deniers, the HIV virus being created intentionally by man, water fluoridation, aliens at Roswell, and many, many more. They all bear the same marks, irrational people making incredible claims while placing the burden of proof on everyone except themselves. There are people from all corners of the political spectrum involved in these wacky claims, and one on the left that's been gaining a lot of credence lately is the idea that vaccinations—specifically the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine—cause autism.

This idea has a lot of traction on the affluent white yuppie left largely because of how seamlessly it meshes with the “all natural” movement (a subject for another blog post). Despite all the scientific research to the contrary—not to mention the numerous statements released by the CDC refuting the claim—some people continue to believe that the MMR vaccine will give their kids autism. Why would they believe this? Well, because those nasty old live-saving vaccines have lots of chemicals in them, and that just can't be good. Every Doctor worth the paper his medical degree is printed on says the vaccines are absolutely not to blame for autism, but that doesn't matter because the people who believe the vaccine conspiracy nonsense suffer from all the same symptoms as the birthers. They don't like and don't trust the medical profession with its “harmful” chemicals, and that distrust, fear, and dislike lead them to gravitate toward an idea with no basis in factual research, but one that meshes well with their “all natural is best” worldview.

So what's the moral of this meandering story? It's pretty simple really. If someone makes a claim that doesn't hold up to the most basic logical scrutiny, and then sticks with that claim even after it's been refuted, that person is not to be believed. Above all I'd advise everyone to THINK. Wacky conspiracy theories don't grow well in soil that hasn't been fertilized by ignorance and preconceived biases. It's fine to disagree with President Obama. It's fine to protest and work actively against his agenda if that's what you choose to do. In fact, both of those things are healthy for democracy.

Conspiracy theories though, are not the same as legitimate protest and debate. Conspiracy theories are cancers that grow on the democratic body. They foster irrational distrust in our leadership and our institutions, and if we could allow ourselves to see past our own political and personal biases we'd see that at their core, conspiracy theories are corrosive to the very framework of our nation. They aren't just an attack on their particular targets, they're an attack on our entire country, and that's something that none of us should be in the business of supporting.

Dollar General and the Politics of Land Use

2009-07-26T00:16:00.003-04:00

A spectre is haunting Spartanburg—the spectre of land use regulation. All the powers of old Spartanburg have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Business leaders and politicians, Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives.

I’d like to thank Karl Marx for giving me the words—with some minor adjustments—to convey the massive importance of an issue that’s literally been left at the doorstep of our affluent friends just outside the city. I’m writing of course about the proposed Dollar General store over on the corner of Country Club Road and Andrews Road.

Who knew that all it would take to get the “free marketeers” over on County Council to get religion on land use was the horror of low income shoppers, tacky commercial development, and the fear of declining property values in…wait for it…a mostly affluent, white area. If I’d have known that all it would take to start a conversation on county land use was the threat of some discount shopping center being built near an area where the county’s well-heeled residents hang their hats I’d have convinced my mother years ago to sell her house and land over near Carolina Country Club to Wal-Mart so they could build another Supercenter. If only I’d acted sooner we’d have had county-wide zoning by now.

I was brought up with the old yarn about not looking a gift horse in the mouth, and I know that any opportunity to bring the land use debate to the front burner is a good thing. Still, motivations matter whether we want to admit it or not, and it obviously speaks volumes about the way things work in Spartanburg County when the only way to get an issue heard is if the right sort of people bring that issue to the table.

We’ll get back to that part later though.

For those of you who don’t know, Dollar General is a discount retailer that specializes in selling things that most people who make better than a working class income would never buy. The stores themselves are filled with an mishmash of cheap household essentials and tchotchke crap that no one really needs and in Spartanburg County, it seems like you can’t throw a rock without hitting one. If that sounds like an exaggeration try this as little experiment. Go to Google Maps, type in your address and get directions to “Dollar General”. Unless you live in one of the remote parts of the county, I’ll guarantee there are at least two of them within five miles of your home.

In case you’re wondering, there are nine Dollar General stores withing five miles of my address. That’s right, nine.

Needless to say, the greater Spartanburg community isn’t exactly underserved in the discount retail department. In fact, it was that realization that made me start wondering about other local Dollar General stores. Were any of them set in residential areas?

I didn’t have to look far for an answer. The closest Dollar General to my home—a scant mile and a half away on South Church Street Extension—backs up against the neighborhood on South Avenue. As it happens, this Dollar General is also one of the area’s newest, built less than a year ago if memory serves. Where were the shouts of outrage when that Dollar General was built I wondered.

That Dollar General clearly sits in a residential area. There are no boundaries between the store and the homes along South Avenue. In fact, one of the homes sits directly adjacent to the store’s parking lot. The people along South Avenue are presumably subjected to the same things as the people over on Country Club Road would be: higher traffic on neighborhood roads, property devaluation, and the other associated annoyances of having a commercial development right next to a neighborhood.

So what are the differences between the people living on South Avenue and the people living on and around Country Club Road? Well, there are two as far as I can tell. First, the people living along South Avenue have bank accounts with far fewer digits in the available balance line than their counterparts living a couple of miles to the east. Second, most of the people living on and around South Avenue are black.

Things like that aren’t supposed to make a difference I know. I’ve heard all the rhetoric about our supposedly class-free community that’s moved past its old racism, but when the building of a discount retail store in an affluent, white area gets the attention of county council so much that they enact temporary rules just to put a stop to its development and the controversy generates so much ink in the local media that it becomes the talk of the whole town, you have to wonder why. And you especially have to wonder why when that same discount retailer built a store right beside a poor, largely minority neighborhood less than a year ago and no one on county council or the in local media made so much as a sound about it.

I sincerely hope this fiasco over on Country Club Road gets County Council on the right track concerning land use if for no other reason than its a fight that most of the country had settled long before I was ever born. It’s tiring reading about disputes over something as elementary as design standards and zoning, and frankly it doesn’t bode well for an area trying to bill itself as a modern 21st century community to have so much opposition to the idea. This debate needs to happen though, and no matter how it all got started, it’s important that the good guys win this one. The way our county will look in the next 20 years may well depend on what happens in these next few months. It’s important not to lose sight of that.

Still, if we have to wait until some white guy with deep pockets gets upset about something in order to get anything accomplished in Spartanburg, progress will be slow indeed. I didn’t need the first nine Dollar General stores within five miles of my house, and I don’t need a tenth one either.

Our county leaders have been asleep at the wheel a long time on the land use issue, and the people along South Avenue deserved their attention and protection just as much as the people over around Country Club Road and to me, the fact that they didn’t get it speaks pretty loudly about whose concerns really matter in Spartanburg County. County Council’s actions in the face of this controversy have inadvertently provided us with a teachable moment. It’s best we don’t forget the lesson.

This post originally appeared on the Spartanburg Spark.

A Hitch in the Herald-Journal's Stroll

2009-07-18T13:05:00.002-04:00

Ever since I was old enough to read, I’ve read the Spartanburg Herald-Journal. When I was a kid, I spent a lot of time two houses over from my house at my great uncle’s place. For whatever reason, I took up with him and his wife at a very young age so much so that I came to call him “Papa” and her “Grandma”. Papa and Grandma subscribed to the Herald-Journal and in addition to my Dr. Seuss books, my earliest reading material was the paper’s comic page. Even though I didn’t always understand the jokes, I couldn’t wait to check up everyday on the latest exploits of Garfield or read the melancholic musings of Charlie Brown in Peanuts. The times I spent going through the paper with Papa everyday are some of my oldest and most cherished childhood memories.

Papa’s favorite part of the Herald-Journal back in those days was a column that even then was already a Spartanburg institution: “The Stroller“.

Every day without fail, Papa read “The Stroller” before he bothered reading anything else in the paper. He laughed at the invariably corny jokes and either nodded in agreement with or grunted his disapproval at the political musings of whichever armchair politico was lucky enough to have his or her comments published that day. At that time, I wasn’t nearly old enough to understand the writing in “The Stroller”—let alone have an opinion on any of it—but I think the fact that the two things I remember most about the Herald-Journal from my formative years are the comics and The Stroller speaks volumes about the influence the column has had on Spartanburg over the years.

After having said that though, there’s still one completely undeniable fact about “The Stroller”: It’s absolutely terrible in practically every way possible.

I know that in some corners attacking “The Stroller” is tantamount to saying the food at The Beacon isn’t all that good anymore (it isn’t) or that Daniel Morgan was a drunk with a strong penchant for gambling (he was). Some truths are tough to swallow, and while nobody would argue that The Beacon should close its doors because the chili-cheese isn’t as good as it used to be or that Daniel Morgan’s statue should be taken down because he liked his whiskey, every time I read The Stroller I’m forced to ask the question: Why does this column still exist?

In preparation for writing this piece, I committed myself to reading a week’s worth of Lou Parris’s contribution to Spartanburg’s cultural lexicon. For six days—”The Stroller” doesn’t run on Monday—I subjected myself to “quips” that stretch the definition of that word as though it were in a taffy puller, and political “opinions” so poorly thought out they make Sarah Palin’s bumblings look like the writings of George Bernard Shaw. If I thought that “The Stroller” was an accurate representation of what passed for community discourse in Spartanburg, I’d pack up my things right now and move somewhere far, far away.

Don’t take my word for it though, check out this little gem from George Burnett in last Friday’s column: “It is said elections have consequences. That fact becomes clearer day by day. Franken and Pelosi and Reid and Schumer and Obama … how many liberal-socialist pallbearers does it take to bury a republic?”. Or how about this one published on Sunday from Byron Inman about the poor state of Highway 29 going east out of Spartanburg “I pay a lot of taxes on my vehicles, money that is supposed to be used for road improvements, but if this is the kind of work we get, we’re in trouble…It’s just one patch after another from Hillcrest all the way to the Cherokee County line. It’s pitiful.” I can only imagine how soul-crushingly awful Lou Parris’ job must be if all he does is spend his days sorting through pearls like these.

Almost every comment in “The Stroller” not dedicated to thanking some good Samaritan, complaining about some sports team, or talking up some local eatery is dedicated mostly to either complaining about taxes or talking about how awful the socialist, baby-killing, prayer-hating, homo-loving Democrats are. Why any of these things deserve mention in Spartanburg’s largest print publication is beyond me. What civic purpose could the poorly-conceived, mean-spirited rantings of a few of Spartanburg’s senior discount set possibly have?

Democrats and taxes aren’t the only things Stroller contributers complain about though. Easily my favorite segment from last week was Wednesday’s cautionary tale about unethical dealings in the mattress industry. After becoming unsatisfied with his recently purchased mattress, John Kirkland of Moore tried to return it. Apparently though, some sneaky sales person tricked poor Mr. Kirkland into signing a paper declaring his mattress soiled and thus voiding his warranty. Those dastardly mattress people slipped one by him, and now Mr. Kirkland warns us all “don’t sign anything”; sage advice indeed.

Leaving all the complaints about content aside though, what bothers me most about “The Stroller” is how terribly dated the whole thing feels.

The back and forth on political topics reads very much like some sort of archaic forum where the people posting take days to reply to each other. In fact if it weren’t for the bit of editing that Parris does for every segment, the people commenting would sound an awful lot like the people posting on the Herald-Journal’s own forum. That sort of thing probably looked like a pretty interesting way to foster some sort of political debate in the past, but in the digital age it just reads like disjointed nonsense coming from a group of people too technologically inept to know how to start a blog.

In fact, everything “The Stroller” does is done better in the online world. Many of the little updates or “quips” read an awful lot like tweets on Twitter or status updates on Facebook. Take this little ditty from Robin Wright published on Tuesday; “I believe President Barack Obama is going to accomplish one thing. At the rate he’s spending money, he is going to make George Bush look very good”. If you knock off a couple of unnecessary words, that would fit nicely under Twitter’s 140 character limit. And if Robin Wright’s words had appeared on Twitter instead of in the Herald-Journal, I’d at least have had the option of not seeing them right there on the front page of the “Upstate” section.

It’s easy enough to see why” The Stroller” still exists. The Herald-Journal—much like most of the daily newspapers in the country—has a relatively old readership. The people who read “The Stroller” regularly probably don’t have a clue about blogging, Twitter, or Facebook. They’re among the last of a dying breed who don’t realize that the rest of the world is passing them by. When “The Stroller” started back in 1957, it was probably the cutting edge in community journalism. A lot has changed since 1957 though. It’s hard to see any logical reason to keep “The Stroller” going to be honest, and I suspect that if it weren’t for fear of a huge backlash from their most prominent readers, the Herald-Journal would’ve done away with the column years ago.

“The Stroller” will eventually be removed, but I’d be willing to bet that the Herald-Journal won’t take it out until they’re forced to by the natural progression of technology. To put it gently, “The Stroller’s” readers have to…ahem…move on before the column will ever be taken out. Until then, there’s not much use expecting that column space over on the left hand side of B1 to open up to anything actually useful or relevant.

This post originally appeared on the Spartanburg Spark.

The End of the Mark Sanford Era

2009-07-12T17:31:00.003-04:00

Oh what a difference a few months can make. Back in March, I wrote a piece for the Spartanburg Spark called “Introducing Presidential Candidate Mark Sanford”. Back then, if I’d been asked to choose one Republican leader who was best tapping into the anger of the conservative base I wouldn’t have hesitated to name our own esteemed Governor. Sanford’s seemingly principled stand in taking on President Obama on the stimulus plan was scoring him major points among the hard right nationally as well as in South Carolina. National media coverage abounded. Mark Sanford was a rising star in the GOP, and was positioning himself well to become a front runner for the 2012 Republican Presidential primary.

All that changed on June 24th.

After a little less than a week of playing “Where’s Waldo” with the people of South Carolina, Mark Sanford admitted that he’d been in Argentina visiting his mistress of more than a year María Belén Chapur. I’ll spare all the sordid details since they’ve been reported ad infinitum in practically every media outlet in America both large and small because for me, there’s really only one question that’s been burning in my mind lately. What does Sanford’s fall from conservative grace mean for the political landscape in South Carolina, and more specifically what does it mean for the Spartanburg legislative delegation which has several of Sanford’s allies on it.

Sanford championed a part of the SCGOP that likes to call itself the “reform” movement. As far as I can tell, what they mean by reform is extreme economic libertarianism, but I’ll yield that one point and use their terminology just for the sake of labeling. The “reform” politicians like to talk about doing away with the South Carolina “good old boy” system and replacing it with some sort of Howard Rich funded, anti-government capitalist utopia. To help place them on the ideological map, follow this little example on public education funding. Person “A” believes we should devote more funding to public education, and person “B” believes we should reduce funding or keep it at the same level. Person “C” disagrees with both “A” and “B” and believes we should privatize the public education system and let the poor eat cake. Up until last month Mark Sanford was the public face for person “C’s” views.

The affair and Sanford’s refusal so far to resign has thrown gas on a fire that’s been burning between the “reformers” and the more moderate members of the Republican Party. Calls for his resignation have come mostly from political opponents with few of the Governor’s allies coming out of the woodwork to say much of anything. Most people have speculated that Sanford’s refusal to resign and save his “reform ”faction the embarrassment of seeing his face in the paper every day next to some tawdry story about sexual infidelity stems from the fact that his replacement would be fellow Republican Lt. Governor Andre Bauer. Bauer, who more often than not has been a political opponent of Governor Sanford, is widely expected to run for Governor in 2010, and many speculate that the last thing Mark Sanford would want to do is give Bauer a leg up in the race by allowing him to become Governor once he resigns.

And so, the fire burns on.

In all likelihood, Sanford will be forced to resign based simply on the forces of political gravity. Over half his party’s elected leaders disliked him to begin with, and have no interest defending him now. Meanwhile, many of his allies are trying to duck for cover till the storm goes away, which of course can only happen if Governor Sanford steps down. Sanford for his part seems to be trying his best to ignore the denouncements of his enemies as well as the poll numbers that say 69% of South Carolinians believe he should resign. He seems convinced that if he just lays low for a little while, it’ll all blow over and he can go back to being the most ineffective state governor in the United States. To that I say: Good luck sir.

Once Sanford is out—whether it be from resigning or not—there’s still the question of his ideological followers. What happens to them and more importantly, their movement?

There’s no shortage of people looking to take up Sanford’s libertarian banner in the SC GOP but from the looks of things, none of them have a high-enough profile to legitimately lead the movement, and that makes the “reformers” a kind of rudderless ship. It’s pretty hard not to see the “reformers” of the South Carolina Republican landscape becoming more and more marginalized as the less reactionary elements of their party seize power. Before the scandal broke, it was possible that Sanford allies like Rep. Nikki Haley or Sen. Larry Grooms would’ve been able to make serious runs at the Governor’s seat in 2010 with Sanford’s endorsement and the backing of his political network. That scenario now seems much less likely.

For Spartanburg, it means our legislative delegation will likely be on the outside looking in. It’s hard to imagine the conservative extremists in our delegation like Rep. Joey Millwood, Sen. Shane Martin, and Sen. Lee Bright doing anything much in the future except opposing the more moderate elements of their own party. A freshman group that has already distinguished itself by its stunning ineffectiveness and inability to produce anything worthwhile for its constituents will only founder in obscurity once its ideological face is out of office and replaced by a more moderate Republican or—horror of horrors—maybe even a Democrat.

That’s the silver lining in all this from my point of view. Sanford’s inability to live up to those conservative “family values” principals has opened a huge door for the South Carolina Democratic Party. The state is in economic and fiscal turmoil right now and if they’re smart, the state and local Democratic Party will go out of its way to make itself the party of pragmatic solutions. They should emphasize that the GOP, under Governor Sanford, has been more interested in ideological grandstanding than in job creation and economic recovery. They should point out that while Governor Sanford and his allies in the General Assembly fought a dogmatic war over federal stimulus funds, South Carolina’s unemployment rate skyrocketed. Sanford’s followers are vulnerable, and there’s no reason our local Democratic Party couldn’t use this tactic on right-wing extremists like Rep. Millwood in 2010.

Governor Sanford’s indiscretion will invariably lead to a serious change in the political landscape here in South Carolina, but nobody can say for certain what kind of change we’ll have. Will the “reformers” be able to survive once their biggest champion is gone? Will the Democratic Party be able to use Sanford’s failures as an opportunity to win voters over in the name of practicality? 2010 was supposed to be the year when the “reformers” had their Armageddon with the mainstream conservatives for the soul of the South Carolina GOP. Now though, it looks like that script may have to be rewritten. Sanford has stirred the muddy water of the state’s political scene, and there’s no telling what it’ll all look like once that water settles again.

This post first appeared on the Spartanburg Spark.

Opinion Writing and Groupthink

2009-07-08T16:41:00.004-04:00

Opinion writing is one of the most rewarding and simultaneously difficult things I've ever chosen to do. It's also one of the things I've been most successful at, which probably says more about me than I'd care to admit. The rewarding part is having people tell you, either in person or through e-mail and comments, that they enjoy or agree with what you wrote. As a guy who's been convinced most of my adult life that I've had something valuable to say, I can say it feels pretty good to have other people think I have something valuable to say too. I haven't gotten tired of that rewarding feeling of vindication yet, and I hope I never do.

There's another truth I've found through opinion writing though, and while in some ways that truth is something I'd expected, in other ways I've been blindsided by it. People are more predictable than you think.

A lot of this has to do with “groupthink” mentality that permeates practically every aspect of our lives. We cleave to people we share some sort of ideological or social kinship with. It's a normal human response I'm sure. The idea of group reinforcement is surely written somewhere in our DNA, but it's also fundamentally destructive to the individual's critical thinking skills.

It's not as though I just fell off the turnip truck though. I've known about groupthink for a long time. In fact, I've pointed it out many many times when I've noticed it in political opponents. Teeming masses all foaming at the mouth about abortion or gay rights because their ideological leaders have moved the group in that direction have always been quick to draw my ire. Either through my own naivete, or because of my insistence on looking at things through my own dogmatic prism I've really failed to see it on the other side of the political divide.

Maybe it's because I never really interacted with many people who were part of what I'd call a clique or scene before, but as incredibly dumb as it sounds to me now, I never really thought of progressive people as groupthinkers. I did notice, while living in California, that come election time most people voted for the candidate with a “D” beside his or her name more out of habit than out of any real clearly articulated reason. At the time though, I attributed it to a larger cultural influence that manifested itself at the ballot box, much the same way I rationalized the reason so many South Carolinians walk seemingly in ideological sync with each other.

I guess what I'm getting at, is that I knew about and understood the concept of groupthink, but I always thought of it as something that the majority of any particular culture engaged in. I'd always assumed that the minority opinions of a place—whether those minority opinions were liberal or conservative—were held exclusively by people not subject to groupthink. In other words, if you're liberal in Spartanburg or conservative in the San Francisco Bay Area, you're probably a rational, freethinker whose ideas come from your own critical examination of facts. At least, that's what I thought at the time.

It turns out, people who hold opinions in the minority are every bit as subject to groupthink as those in the majority. How that fact ever escaped me before, I'll never know.

As anyone who's bothered to read my writing can tell you, I'm a pretty progressive guy. I like to pride myself on the idea that I came to my opinions from my own careful reading of a particular issue, and for the most part I think I have. As I wrote earlier, I've never been a part of any clique or group of like-minded people who would've reinforced my thinking and perhaps influenced me to move in one direction or another; no churches, no civic groups, no political organizations or parties, not even an ideologically driven group of fiends, nothing. I'm just not what you'd call a “joiner”.

Far from seeking out the comfort of dovetailing opinions, in the past I've actually sought out dissenting ideas. It pains me to admit this, but once upon a time I used to listen to Rush Limbaugh on a fairly regular basis. It made sense to know the arguments of one's enemies, I reasoned. Later, I stopped because if you listen to Rush—or any other talk radio blowhard for that matter—for too long he starts repeating himself. After a while, you can read a news story and predict not just what his opinion on it will be, but the exact way he'll tailor his argument for or against it. If you've got a couple of months to kill, it's not a bad rhetorical exercise actually.

I've discovered though, that most people don't go to nearly this length to examine their own ideas. Most people, rather than think, choose to adhere to the opinions of their particular peer group. It's much easier to recite someone else's reasons for believing something than to come up with your own, and having a gaggle of people behind you echoing your same sentiments is very reassuring. Agreement is easy. Dissent—especially when you're alone—is much more difficult.

Groups all have their leaders of course, and those group opinions all originate somewhere. The thing I've noticed though—and what may be the most disturbing aspect of all this—is that the opinions reverberate around the group till everyone believes almost the exact same things. Rather than form individual opinions, the group members assimilate each other's opinions to the point where no one can even seem to remember where the original ideas even came from.

Any opinion writer whose words are worth the disk space they're saved on, can never be afraid of slaughtering sacred cows. That's what I've learned in all this. The job of an opinion writer—or any writer for that matter—is to say what must be said, and to hell with the consequences. The only loyalty a good writer should have is to the truth.

I don't think it's really possible to be immune to the allure of groupthink. Even I've caught myself talking about issues that, while I may not have disagreed with them, may have been issues that I honestly didn't care that much about. More than once I've defended a group of people who I thought deserved defending even though I didn't care much for the issue being defended. That was a rookie mistake, and I don't intend to make it again

What I do intend to do from here on out is the same thing I set out to do in the beginning and not be distracted by the game that inevitably ensues when a group decides to call you friend or foe. Just because they've decided to line up with you on this issue or the last ten issues or the last hundred issues, doesn't mean you should be any more loyal to them than you were before. Loyalty is for dogs and people incapable of reasoning for themselves.

I enjoy writing my columns and blogs more than anything else I do most of the time, and these last six months have been eye-opening and exhilarating. Still, I don't ever want to lose sight of the anger than led me here in the first place. There's never been a person who started opinion writing who didn't have a chip on his or her shoulder. It's the nature of the beast. My goal when I started was the same as it is now, to be—in the words of Phillip Seymour Hoffman's portrayal of Lester Bangs in the movie Almost Famous—“honest and unmerciful”. If I continue to do that, then I've done my job as I see it.

Pride in Spartanburg

2009-06-25T15:46:00.002-04:00

Writing my column for the Spark every week is not a happy endeavor. More often than not, I’m complaining about something in Spartanburg’s political scene, and while there’s certainly no shortage of things to complain about, it can get a bit tiring at times. Don’t misuderstand; I think the complaining is very important. In order for change to happen, someone has to stand up and point a finger at the things that need changing. When leaders work against the needs of their constituents, they must be held accountable for it. When hypocrisy rears its ugly head in the political realm—which it always does—someone must be there to call things as they are. In a small way, that’s what I generally try to do on the Spark, and I’m glad I get to do it.

This week was different though. This week, I got to write about a victory for a change.

On Saturday, I had the honor of attending Spartanburg’s first GLBTIQ Pride march and I have to say, it couldn’t have gone better. Around 500 marchers gathered at the Unitarian-Universalist church off of Henry Street for one purpose, to show their support for equality. 500 people marched in the scorching June sun for an idea, a principal that all of us are worthy of respect and acceptance regardless of our differences. 500 people marched to show the bigots and homophobes in Spartanburg that change is going to come whether they want it or not. Hatred and intolerance in Spartanburg took quite a blow on Saturday, and those who would seek to ostracize others for their differences may soon find their prejudices as antiquated as those of the segregationists that came before them.

Looking through the crowd Saturday during the march, it was hard to spot a face that wasn’t smiling. As we marched, the gravity and importance of what was happening seemed to make its way through the crowd. That there could be so many of us, was something that most people had never honestly considered, and judging by the looks of some of the anti-gay protesters, they’d never considered it either. Many of them looked more than a little taken aback by just how outnumbered they were.

Numbering no more than a hundred, the protesters stood, holding their signs with slogans like “No Special Rights for Sodomites” and “Homosexuals cannot reproduce so they must recruit”. For the most part, they were pretty subdued holding their signs silently as we marched past. Every so often though, there’d be some guy—always a guy—holding a bible and shouting warnings about our impending damnation. Several of them appeared to be pastors, and pretty much true to the stereotype they marched up and down their church’s section of sidewalk, charismatically condemning the evils of the “homosexual lifestyle”, shepherds showing off for their flocks.

After the march was over, a festival was held on the grounds of the Unitarian-Universalist Church where the march had started and ended. There were several musical acts and speakers at the festival, but the one that stuck out most in my mind was Elke Kennedy who’s son Sean Kennedy was killed in a hate crime in Greenville. On May 16th 2007, outside a bar, Stephen Andrew Moller walked up to Sean, called him a faggot, and punched him hard enough to break bones in his face. Sean’s head hit the pavement hard enough to cause his brain to separate from his brain stem, leading to his death. Kennedy’s tragic story stands as a monument to the horrors that many in the homosexual community have had to endure for no other reason than their sexuality. Sean Kennedy, and others who have suffered like him, are the reason Spartanburg’s march was so important.

Ultimately for me, what the Pride march showed was that Spartanburg is ready to move forward. Old prejudices must be put away. The GLBTIQ community is an integral part of Spartanburg’s cultural landscape and they deserve nothing less than complete equality with heterosexuals. 500 people marched on Saturday for basic human decency. 500 people showed up to give us hope that our city will be a place where all people are welcome, and that the voices of intolerance will fade into history.

This post originally appeared on the Spartanburg Spark.

Across The Great (Tuition) Divide

2009-06-22T20:22:00.001-04:00

What is a college education worth? According to the United States Department of Labor, in the first quarter of 2009 workers over 25 with a high school diploma had median earnings of $620 dollars per week. Workers with at least a bachelor’s degree earned nearly double that amount at $1,138 per week (click here for PDF). Statistically, a person’s odds of economic security increase dramatically if that person graduates college. Economists have been insisting for years that the keystone for success in our new creative class driven, post-industrial society is education, particularly college education.

There’s another way of measuring what a college education is worth though, and that’s by measuring the dent college tuition puts in the student’s or the student’s family’s bank account. On Friday, the Spartanburg Herald-Journal ran a story about a 3.6% tuition Increase at the University of South Carolina Upstate here in Spartanburg. The cost of a college education at Spartanburg’s only public four-year university is about to go from $4,031 to $4,176 per semester for full-time students.

On the face of it, a 3.6% increase doesn’t seem like a lot. In fact, USC officials quoted in the article are quick point out that the increase at the Columbia campus is the smallest in eight years and that the increases correspond with increases in operating costs as measured by the Higher Education Price Index. Sounds perfectly reasonable, right?

Well, yes and no.

Public universities typically charge much lower per semester rates for in-state residents than they do for students who come from out of state, and USC Upstate is no exception. For non-South Carolinians, the university charges a much higher $8,502 per semester. Public universities do this because they receive state funding to offset some of the costs for in-state students. The governing idea behind this, is that subsidizing part of the tuition at a public university will allow more people to go to college than would’ve otherwise been the case, and that those people, now better educated, will contribute more to the economy and to the state as a result.

So where’s the problem? Students who are residents of South Carolina already pay less than half of the amount charged to non-residents, and the $4,176 per semester charged to USC Upstate students is certainly less than the minimum $16,660 full-time Wofford students can expect to pay this fall. So on the one hand, the officials with USC are exactly right, a $145 tuition increase per semester isn’t really a big deal. On the other hand though, the $4,176 tuition for a semester at USC Upstate is much higher than the tuition at other comparable public universities in other states, and that’s where the problem is.

About 70 miles or so up Interstate 26, North Carolina residents can attend the University of North Carolina Asheville for $2,102 per semester, about half the in-state cost of USC Upstate. Take a drive down Interstate 85 to Atlanta, and Georgia residents can attend either Georgia State University or the Georgia Institute of Technology this fall for $3,035 per semester. Go the other direction on 85 and tuition at the University of North Carolina Charlotte is $2,140 for residents. Whichever direction you go, It seems our neighbors may have a little better handle on the importance of keeping college affordable for their citizens.

As wide as the tuition gap is between South Carolina and it’s neighbors at public four-year universities though, the situation at the public community colleges is even worse.

At Spartanburg Community College, a South Carolina resident can expect to pay $1,697 per semester in tuition. Less than an hour away in Spindale, North Carolina residents can attend Isothermal Community College full-time for $672 per semester. That tuition is the same in Asheville at Asheville-Buncombe Technical Community College. Back in Atlanta, Georgia residents pay $622 per semester to attend Atlanta Technical College.

So, what does all this mean for the individual students? Obviously it doesn’t look good on paper that students attending USC Upstate are paying almost twice what their counterparts are paying just a stone’s throw away in North Carolina. Obviously it means something that it costs more than $1000 more per semester for a South Carolinian to attend SCC than it does for a Georgian to attend the same type of school in Atlanta. Obviously it matters, but how?

Well for starters, it means that students graduating from public institutions of higher learning here in South Carolina have to come up with more money than students in neighboring states and normally, that means more student loans. In fact using the current tuition numbers, an in-state graduate of USC Upstate will have paid over $16,500 more than an in-state UNC Asheville graduate for the same education over four years. That’s $16,500 plus interest in student loan repayment that the UNC Asheville graduate won’t have to worry about. That’s $16,500 that will hang around the neck of the USC Upstate graduate, slowing the graduate’s march towards economic stability. The overall effect is that the UNC Asheville graduate starts out in economically better shape than the USC Upstate graduate, and that’s a serious advantage.

Things are much the same for our community college graduate. While the North Carolina and Georgia residents each paid under $700 a semester—making debt-free graduation a real possibility—our Spartanburg Community College graduate most likely will have at least some student loan debt, making it more difficult to climb the economic ladder.

The real problem in all this is our approach to higher education here in South Carolina. Every dollar that the state refuses to put towards college education is a dollar that some public college student is going to be expected to come up with. If we intend for our communities to thrive in the new post-industrial economy we need college graduates, lots of them. It won’t help matters much though, if those college graduates have much larger debts than their counterparts in other states. The money invested by our neighbors’ state governments in their public higher education systems is an investment in their future. We’d do well to follow their example.

This post originally appeared on the Spartanburg Spark.

Right-Wing Hate and the Murder of Dr. George Tiller

2009-06-16T03:08:00.003-04:00

“Dissent is the highest form of patriotism.”—Howard Zinn

This is one of my all-time favorite quotes by my all-time favorite historian. For a while back during the Bush years it was appearing all over the place. It was on bumper stickers, t-shirts, and other assorted political paraphernalia. At a time when senior Bush officials like Ari Fleischer were saying that people should “watch what they say”, the quote seemed an appropriate response to the attacks from the right on progressives who voiced disagreement with the neoconservative agenda that so dominated the Presidency of George W. Bush.

Lately though, I’ve been thinking about a different sort of dissent.

These days, political dissent has a different face. In what has to be one of the most interesting political reversals in my lifetime, the same people who called anyone who didn’t support Bush’s agenda unpatriotic, un-American, or worse now find themselves on the outside looking in. The people who used to mock the sign-carrying protestors who marched against the Iraq War now find themselves carrying signs and protesting everything the new uppity-negro President does. Hypocrisy thy name is “tea party”.

As unintentionally hilarious as I find the new Republican dissent machine overall, there is a darker underbelly to their particular brand of opposition though that I have to confess, scares me a little bit. Nothing recently has typified this dark side of conservative dissent better than the reaction on the right to the murder of Dr. George Tiller.

I’m not equating the people who disagree politically with the policies of President Obama’s administration with the vile murderer who killed Dr. Tiller—though there were plenty of conservatives back during the Bush years who made the same equivocation—but the reaction by many of those on the right illustrates pretty well the blurring of the line between the legitimate dissenters and the violent fringe.

All over the conservative landscape, condemnations of Tiller’s murder have been followed with some form of the qualifier like “but you know, Tiller was a murderer”. Listening to conservative commentators trying to find some nuanced position to keep them from unequivocally condemning a cold-blooded murder leaves me with a hypothetical question. What if some left-winger had murdered George W. Bush using the logic that because he started the Iraq War, he was responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians and therefore deserved to die?

Imagine after our hypothetical assassination that liberal pundits argued that while the murder was horrible, Bush was in fact, a mass murderer, and that his murder would result in thousands of innocent Iraqi lives being saved. Does that sound far-fetched? Here’s a quote from a local GOP activist here in Spartanburg: “I am happy to report that on May 31, 2009 60,000 babies may have been given another chance at life. I am also sad to report that more than 60,000 babies have already been killed by one man. Although the murders he committed were legal, that in no way makes them justified. I am sorry that it took the illegal actions of one man to save so many lives.”

Using the hypothetical situation from before, replace the word “babies” with the phrase “Iraqi civilians” and the “one man” in the second sentence with the name “Bush”. Now imagine the right-wing shrieks of outrage that would come from such a statement. Later in the post, the author makes it clear that he condemns the murder of Dr. Tiller, but not before making his qualifying statement in the beginning.

My point in illustrating this hypothetical situation is to show that if the political roles were flipped, anyone who tried to rationalize a murder would be justifiably ran out of polite society. That person would become a pariah, persona non gratta in mainstream politics. Curiously though, that’s doesn’t seem to be the case in the conservative world.

Some conservatives went even further cutting out the equivocations altogether and openly celebrating Dr. Tiller’s murder. Operation Rescue founder Randall Terry said of Tiller’s murder: “George Tiller was a mass-murderer. We grieve for him that he did not have time to properly prepare his soul to face God. Unless some miracle happened, he left this life with his hands drenched with the innocent blood of tens of thousands of babies that he murdered.”

As crazy as Randall Terry may seem, his views aren’t nearly as far-removed from the conservative mainstream as most of us would hope.

Prior to Dr. Tiller’s murder, conservative stalwart Bill O’Reilly did a total of 29 segments on the doctor saying of Dr. Tiller’s abortion practice, "This is the kind of stuff happened in Mao's China, Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Soviet Union". O’Reilly also accused Dr. Tiller of having “blood on his hands” and that he wouldn’t want to be Dr. Tiller on “Judgment Day”. Reading O’Reilly’s words about Dr. Tiller I’m left wondering if he still believes all that inflammatory stuff now that Dr. Tiller is dead, because if he does still believe it then how is he any different from Randall Terry?

Randall Terry may not represent the mainstream of the conservative movement in America, but in the end the only difference between Terry’s comments and Bill O’Reilly’s comments is timing.

What I’m left wondering after all this is; where is the line between the rational mainstream conservative dissenters and the crazy fringe elements? For the life of me, I can’t seem to find it anymore. Obviously, the political opinion-makers on the right have the right to say whatever they want, and I would be the first to defend that right no matter how contemptible I find their particular brand of venom to be. I’d be lying though if I didn’t say that it worries me that the rhetoric of the conservative infotainment machine may be fueling the violence of the right-wing fringe. I hope my worries are unfounded. I hope that the man who killed Dr. Tiller was a random kook, and that Dr. Tiller’s murder proves to be an isolated incident. My feeling though, is that we’ve only just started down what will be a long road of right-wing violence in the coming years, and that scares the hell out of me.

The Boiling Springs Sprawl Machine

2009-06-15T14:32:00.002-04:00

A couple of weeks ago, I read an article in the Herald-Journal about the impending plan to widen Highway 9 in Boiling Springs from Rainbow Lake Road to Fagans Creek Drive just south of Lake Bowen. The widening of Highway 9 has been talked about for several years now, and anyone who’s driven up through Boiling Springs recently can certainly tell you why. In the last decade or so, Boiling Springs has experienced enormous growth. Widening the highway, we’re told, would ease traffic congestion from existing growth while simultaneously encouraging new growth. It’s a cycle that’s become all too familiar here in the Upstate

I have to confess, I avoid driving through Boiling Springs like the plague whenever possible. After reading the article though, I decided to suck it up and take a little drive up Highway 9 just to get the lay of the land and see for myself the area where the road will be widened.

As it’s not exactly a town but more an area, knowing exactly where Boiling Springs begins is kind of tricky, but somewhere past the northern city limits of Spartanburg and past Business 85 you’ll find yourself, kind of suddenly, right in the thick of it. It was a Sunday afternoon when I took my drive, and even though traffic was nothing like it can be on a weekday afternoon, the roads were still pretty busy. After I crossed the intersection of Highway 9 and Rainbow Lake Road, Highway 9 began to narrow down to two lanes right in front of a giant Wal-Mart Supercenter.

From there, development began to taper off a bit. There was still the hodgepodge of new housing subdivisions, land for sale, and signs promising the next great shopping center but for now at least, this was the edge of Boiling Springs’ sprawl. On my particular Sunday, the traffic on my drive north from Rainbow Lake Road towards Lake Bowen wasn’t all that bad, and after the intersection with Highway 292, it was downright peaceful. I crossed over Lake Bowen, turned around in the parking lot of Lake Bowen Fish Camp, and headed back home.

On the drive home, I started to wonder how much of the Highway 9 widening project had to do with alleviating a traffic bottleneck, and how much of that was just a pretense to extend the wild-west style development of Boiling Springs all the way to Lake Bowen. I couldn’t help remembering all those signs I’d seen between the narrowing at Rainbow Lake Road and the lake with land for sale, or promising some future commercial development. The more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that the widening of Highway 9 is really mostly about spreading the unplanned exurban nightmare that is Boiling Springs as far north as possible.

After my drive I decided that I needed to get an aerial perspective on things, and not having access to a helicopter, I decided to take a little look at the area using Google Earth. What I saw wasn’t pretty.

Zooming in on Highway 9 starting around the intersection with Business 85 and scrolling northward I saw of a plethora of exurban neighborhoods looking like contorted fingers or the veins of some enormous animal, and on those fingers were equally-spaced houses on tranquilly named streets like Thornbird Circle and Sandpiper Drive. The way they seemed to spread so naturally from the main artery of Highway 9 made me think of the way kudzu spreads from its main vine. Staring at those recently created subdivisions made me think of the old Malvina Reynolds song “Little Boxes”.

As I continued to scroll up the highway, I eventually came to the intersection of Rainbow Lake Road, which was absolutely dominated on the overhead view by the giant Wal-Mart Supercenter. From there—just as when I’d driven the route—things seemed to thin out a little. The subdivisions were still there of course, but they were more spread out.. Apart from some large patches of telltale reddish-brown dirt—probably already developed by now—there didn’t seem to be very much commercial development going on either.

So what did I make of all this?

Well for starters, I went into this convinced that the widening of Highway 9 was a necessary, if unfortunate, consequence of the sprawl we’ve already allowed to happen through our lack of proper countywide land-use planning. Now though, I’m of the opinion that widening Highway 9 is just an excuse to sprawl further.

There’s no reason to believe that widening the highway without countywide zoning to prevent further unregulated sprawl would do anything other than make the situation worse. Instead of horrible traffic on a two-lane road, we’ll have horrible traffic on a four-lane road. We’ll have more supermarkets, more big-box retailers, more chain restaurants, and more everything else. In the process, all we will have done is make it possible for land speculators and developers to make huge profits selling and developing property along the new taxpayer-funded four-lane Highway 9.

Unchecked new development is similar to a brush fire. It burns brightly in new areas with plenty of fuel, but after it’s exhausted its fuel source all it leaves behind are charred remains. Developers and big-box retailers are always looking for the next shiny new store, one that’s better and inevitably bigger than the last one. As soon an opportunity to build the next big thing presents itself, they jump at it, leaving behind their old storefront to smaller-drawing retailers until eventually, it sits completely vacant.

The residential areas end up pretty much the same way. A family moves into an exurban subdivision for lots of reasons, but one of the biggest reasons is because they don’t want to live in a city. At the same time though, they don’t want to live too far away from where their jobs are. The answer is seemingly right there in the exurbs. The only problem is, a lot of other people have exactly the same idea.

So in the end, the family’s dream of having it all by living out in the country while living close enough to the city to commute to work is shattered by all these other people who move to live in the same area, ruining the pseudo-country feel that was half the reason for moving there. Then before you know it, those cool big-box stores that used to be only a stones throw away from the family’s formerly sweet subdivision are moving on down the line to their sparkly new locations. The family’s exurban dream is beginning to sour.

Undaunted though, our intrepid exurbanite family moves further away in a mad dash to find that ever-elusive balance between urban convenience and rural serenity. Then, predictably, the whole cycle starts over again and before you know it, you’ve got a vibrant ring of thriving humanity with an abandoned desolate urban center. The whole process is the best example of individualist thinking run amok that I can come up with.

Without some countywide plan to control growth and channel it in some sort of logical and sustainable way, Spartanburg County will be doomed to this sort of fate. Widening Highway 9 will only result in Boiling Springs’ brushfire spreading further north. The “devil take the hindmost” approach to county land-use got us in this situation. Proactive countywide zoning is the only thing that can get us out.

This post originally appeared on the Spartanburg Spark.

Showing Up and Standing Up For Spartanburg

2009-06-07T14:05:00.002-04:00

When I arrived at Morgan Square last Wednesday it was about 10 minutes after 5 PM and what would soon become a pretty heavy rain was just beginning with a few ominous drops. A small stage had been set up under a tent in front of the statue of Daniel Morgan, and a diverse crowd of about 60 people was starting to crowd around the stage for a rally of sorts.

It wasn’t a rally for a particular cause, or a grandstanding session from some local leader. The people in attendance represented neighborhoods and organizations from all over the city, and their only motivation was to “Show Up For Spartanburg”; a pick-me-up for a city, and a people, who certainly could use one at times.

After a bongo performance by students from Whitlock Junior High School kicked things off, a parade of speakers went up, one by one, to the stage to talk about their own unique love and appreciation for practically everything Spartanburg and rally the rain-soaked crowd. The speakers themselves were as diverse as the crowd. People from neighborhoods like Converse Heights cheered for speakers from neighborhoods like South Converse, and ordinary citizens’ speeches were just as enthusiastically received as the Mayor’s.

That sense of democracy permeating the event impressed me even more that the enthusiasm of the crowd. Overall, it was a fairly stirring example of civic pride, and it also went a long way in showing what a diverse, committed group of people dedicated to making Spartanburg a progressive forward-thinking city can do when properly motivated.

Underneath that though, I felt like there was an important truth sitting among us like the proverbial elephant in the room or in this case, on the square.

The elephant lurking among everyone in attendance was best personified—to me anyway—by Shawntae Moore from Piedmont Care, an HIV/AIDS educational and advocacy organization. In Moore’s speech, she touted Piedmont Care’s “biggest basket of condoms in Spartanburg County” and led the crowd in a safe sex chant. I was enthralled. In the realm of local things to celebrate, having a center dedicated to HIV/AIDS prevention and education here in Spartanburg is a pretty damn fine thing to be proud of from my point of view.

So, where does the elephant come in?

Well, when you get right down to it, Shawntae Moore’s speech advocating safe sex was decidedly political, and in a way it highlighted what, for me, was the only flaw of the entire event. While many people at the event were perfectly fine with Moore’s speech, I got the feeling that others in the crowd might have thought that it violated the non-partisan nature of the event.

The organizers went out of their way to make the event as nonpartisan and inclusive as possible, but in the end Shawntae Moore showed why that sort of denial of the political is impossible. The problem with holding a non-political civic pride rally is that civic pride itself is invariably political.

It’s impossible to hide that fact, and far from running away from it, we should be rushing to embrace it. Issues that for some people may be non-political may be very political and controversial to others. More than that though, there are indisputable facts about building our progressive city and sweeping those facts under the rug in the name of being inclusive is dishonest.

I’m going to make what I consider an uncontroversial statement, but one that I’m willing to bet almost no one will be willing to agree with me on: Conservatives do not care about making Spartanburg a thriving, progressive city.

First of all, I should explain what I mean by “conservative”. I’m not talking about the old-money Converse Heights dwelling mainstream conservatives that have traditionally been fixtures in the Spartanburg political scene. The conservatives I’m referring to would be called extremists in most other parts of the country. The conservatives I’m referring to would, if they were able, strangle all the funds from community arts projects like Hub-Bub because of their fundamentalist belief that government should stay out of the arts.

The conservatives I’m referring to aren’t likely to be city residents at all because to them, incorporated towns and cities are needless bureaucratic constructs that only provide another layer of evil government to hate. These conservatives look to the unbridled, unregulated sprawl of places in the county like Boiling Springs as the ideal model for local growth.

These conservatives are extremists—no doubt about that—but before you dismiss them consider how powerful they’ve shown themselves to be here in Spartanburg. Locally, they’ve given us leaders like Rep. Joey Millwood and Sen. Lee Bright, both of whom were bought and paid for by anti-government, libertarian extremist Howard Rich. Twice now they’ve helped elect Governor Mark Sanford; a man who has made it his personal—and somewhat ironic—mission as Governor to destroy as much of South Carolina’s government as possible.

The reason I bring this up is to say that anyone who thinks that speaking the language of inclusion and doing our best to be non-confrontational is going to curry favor among the extremist conservative set is operating under a serious delusion. You cannot talk about sustainable growth with people who don’t believe in zoning laws. You can’t talk about increased funding for the arts with people who don’t believe in any funding for the arts. These people are the enemies of progress in Spartanburg, and we’d all do well to recognize that.

I understand that “Show Up For Spartanburg” wasn’t an overtly political rally, and I know that it was neither the time nor place to bring up overtly divisive concerns, but standing up for Spartanburg, means being political whether we want to admit it or not. It’s not important to draw battle lines at every possible turn, but still the people dedicated to Spartanburg’s progress should know that battle lines often have a way of drawing themselves.

It’s wonderful to hold events to accentuate the positive here in Spartanburg. In fact, I’d like to see more of that around town. Nothing, to my mind though, is gained by hiding behind a cloak of non-partisanship. If our city is to become what we’ve envisioned, we’re going to have to stand up as what we are, progressives.

Actively discouraging progressive political speech has the effect of making all civic-minded advocacy vague and non-specific, which is the exact opposite of the clear forward-thinking vision we need right now. Whether we want to admit it or not, standing up for Spartanburg is political, and in a very real sense it’s also partisan, and we should never be ashamed of that.

This post originally appeared on the Spartanburg Spark.

Seasteading: The Wave of The Future

2009-06-02T18:30:00.002-04:00

Are you tired of putting in all that time at the office just to watch your hard-earned dollars siphoned off by Barack Obama’s socialist American tax system? Are you tired of driving your kids to your town’s most exclusive private academy only to get stuck behind some yellow bus full of the offspring of society’s undesirables on their way to those evil government indoctrination buildings called public schools? Does the defeat of Ron Paul, and the general failure of libertarianism as a movement in every nation in the world get you down?

Well worry no more, friend. We here at the Seasteading Institute are working to make your utopia a reality.

The concept is simple. As the last rational people on Planet Earth, we libertarians have a moral obligation to demonstrate that our political and economic system is superior to the capitalist/social democracy hybrid that dominates the world today. The only rational way to accomplish this task is pool our resources—in a totally non-socialist way—and build floating cities moored out in international waters.

The father of our great movement is Patri Friedman. Patri is the grandson of Milton Friedman, perhaps the greatest mind in the history of laissez faire capitalism. Milton Friedman may be best known for his work with economic freedom fighter Augusto Pinochet in Chile in his efforts to gently remove the non-producers and immoral socialists like the “democratically elected” Salvador Allende from positions of influence.

Taking his cues from his grandfather, Patri has illustrated in no uncertain terms the fallacy of modern democracy as a means of achieving libertarian goals saying that, “Democracy is the current industry standard political system, but unfortunately it is ill-suited for a libertarian state”, and that “Democracy is rigged against libertarians.” Lucky for those of us who believe in our unrestricted right to acquire as much wealth as possible without having to be bothered with the concerns of “democracy”, Patri’s Seasteading plan will lead us into the next epoch of political evolution.

Despite sounding like the plot to a bad sci-fi movie, building these seasteads is actually our last best hope for putting our libertarian principals into practice. Our floating utopia will become a beacon of economic freedom to members of the producing class who’ve grown tired of being tied down by small persons and their irrational sense of entitlement. On our seastead, equality is measured in the only way that matters, dollars and cents.

Economic progress will be swift. All sorts of people will be interested in the benefits of floating libertarian utopias. Imagine the economic benefits of locating your business to a place with none of those restrictive laws put in place by the unethical nanny-state governments of the world’s democracies. In our book detailing the future of our libertarian utopia we discuss several economic possibilities like “offshore manufacturing” citing examples like “the oil companies have not been able to break ground on a new refinery in the US in decades. They might like to have a refinery that floats. That way they can refine the crude closer to the source and just ship the finished product around. We suspect that Union Carbide feels similarly about manufacturing pesticides.”

Helping corporations get around pointless environmental restrictions is the libertarian way. Of course there are other benefits as well. Those justifiably profit-minded corporations would also be able to circumvent worker safety and child labor laws as well, making production even cheaper and more efficient.

Of course there are more possibilities than just dull manufacturing. Our seasteads could also turn a profit by becoming havens for “so-called sin industries like drugs, prostitution, and gambling. Drugs are low-capital and high-profit, but also carry a great political risks. Still, European countries are relatively tolerant, and as long as drugs are only used locally, the idea may fly. Prostitution, as long as it does not involve children, is widely accepted. It is at least claimed that some tourism to Thailand and Costa Rica is motivated by cheap prostitutes.”

This is a no-brainer. There’s plenty of money to be made in the narcotic and prostitution industries, especially if there aren’t any bothersome regulations protecting from STD’s or providing addiction treatment. And hey, we’re libertarians, so if a few underclass children from the third world get sold into prostitution what business of that is ours?

There are certain to be bumps along the way, and kinks we haven’t worked out yet, but we believe that seasteading is the wave of the future, and other libertarians are just as enthusiastic as we are. That’s why contributions are so important in these beginning stages of the seasteading project. To date, we’ve received $512,889 in donations from forward-thinking libertarians around the world, including $500,000 from Paypal founder Peter Thiel.

Thiel knows better than most that the time to break away from “the unthinking demos that guides so-called ‘social democracy’” is now. The nations of the world are too far-gone to be rescued. They must be abandoned because “since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women—two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians—have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.” Truer words may have never been written. The problem with democracy is that it’s become to damned democratic.

As any of us could have predicted, the issue with modern democratic nations has been their corruption by insidious collectivist impulses. Giving all of societies non-achievers equal say in the democratic process disrupted the natural order whereby political influence was only possible after certain economic conditions had been met. Defying the spirit of our harmonious gilded-age prosperity, socialist-minded demagogues seized power by appealing to the ignorant masses and their passion for “equality”. Once the die had been cast, demands were made on the basis of “fairness” that we, the architects of civilization, should give up some of our just privileges so that those who had not earned their place could have their so-called “rights”. Thus began the slip towards Gomorrah.

Our attempts to remedy the situation have, at all instances, proven unsuccessful. The minds of the mass of people in our modern democracies are too clouded by ideas of “the greater good” to be reached by the perfect ideas of laissez faire. Too many have become accustomed to receiving more than someone with their station in life—as dictated by the all-knowing market—deserves. In their ignorance, they fail to see the benefit of allowing not just economic power—which thankfully we still have—but political power as well to concentrate in the hands of those who know best how to wield it.

So now, devoted libertarians, it’s time to turn away from those who cannot see the error of their ways. In true Randian fashion, we must abandon the vile “social democracies” to their fate. Our days of being burdened with the concerns of others can be at an end if we so desire. Since we cannot remove the parasite of socialist government from our people, we must remove our people from the domain of the parasite. Libertarians everywhere, our Garden of Eden awaits on the high seas.

Who Are You Calling Liberal?

2009-05-28T10:07:00.002-04:00

In my short time as the Spartanburg Spark's local political columnist, I’ve been called a lot of names. It goes with the territory really, and it’s not something that I really spend that much time worrying about. The truth is, if you don’t have the stomach to see your ideas criticized in ways that are sometimes honest, but often unreasonable and mean-spirited, you don’t have what it takes to write substantive opinion-based material. The two most important requirements for this position are a commitment to your ideas and a thick skin because dealing with the crazies is a big part of the game.

The name-calling though, has to be my absolute favorite thing about the crazies. The best ones are always the funny ones, and the funniest are the ones hurled clumsily by people using English words in wholly inappropriate ways like an inept carpenter who uses his shoe to hammer a nail because he can’t figure out what that blasted hammer in his tool belt is for. So when I’ve been called things like reactionary, anti-Semite, chauvinist, and bigot I’ve tended to laugh a little and shrug it off as the ramblings of people who can’t articulate their anger in any other way. Again, it’s part of the game.

Most of my detractors though, get right to the point with the political insults. They call me a liberal.

The term liberal is not one that I shy away from. I am, in fact, a proud liberal of the social democratic variety. Of course they mean the word “liberal” as the Rush Limbaugh-inspired caricature that exists only in the minds of those on the extreme right, and when they use the term, It’s meant to conjure visions of anti-family, immoral, America-hating, socialists who want to make everyone in the country wards of the state. I have to admit, I like caricatures. Even more than that, I like what the liberal caricature says about the people who believe it as gospel truth.

I had that particular caricature in my mind around lunchtime last Wednesday when I went to the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) protest outside the McDonald’s over on John B. White Sr. Blvd.

According to PETA’s press release, they were outside the McDonald’s protesting “the abuse that chickens suffer in slaughterhouses that supply the fast-food chain”. The protest featured two PETA members “crammed together in a tank of "bloody" water with the message ‘McDonald's Scalds Chicks to Death’”. Several others were walking around holding signs that said, McCruelty: I’m hatin’ it. One protester held a sign with a picture of a dead chicken that had apparently been scalded to death, a tactic that reminded me instantly of the anti-abortion protesters who walk around with pictures of aborted fetuses attached to their signs.

As an event, the protest was decidedly underwhelming. It really amounted to nothing more than about a half-dozen people standing on a sidewalk being roundly ignored by both passing cars and McDonald’s patrons. If there was any effect on McDonald’s lunchtime business, I didn’t see it. Other than to satisfy some sense of moral outrage felt by the protesters, I don’t see exactly what was accomplished by the local PETA members on Wednesday.

Watching the protest was sort of surreal for me. On the one hand, there’s a valid point to be made about factory farming practices here in the United States. Factory farms and slaughterhouses are quite often needlessly cruel to the animals that eventually make their way to our dinner plates, and stricter rules are certainly needed to reign in such abuses. On the other hand though, When I see a spectacle like the one put on by PETA last Wednesday, I can’t help but feel that for them, the cause they claim to be supporting is secondary to the feeling of moral superiority they get from showing all those evil McDonald’s patrons how cruel and awful they are.

And that’s how we get back to that caricature I had floating around in my head earlier.

The fact that I think PETA is group of self-serving moralizers, who have more in common with fundamentalist religious fanatics than they’d ever care to admit, separates me from many people on the left. People who’d normally be shaking their heads in agreement with me if the topic were preemptive war might find themselves angrily disagreeing with me when the topic turns to PETA. Conversely, my more conservative readers might find themselves in the awkward position of agreeing with a self-avowed liberal. That is of course, if they can bother to look past the label.

The trouble with the liberal caricature is that it leaves no room for nuance. The tagging of someone with a label becomes an act that stifles debate. It’s dismissive, and it gives the labeler the freedom to ignore any legitimate concerns raised by the labeled. It allows the labeler to wrap themselves in a warm blanket of like-minded discourse, never being challenged, and certainly never having to defend a position from one of those awful “liberals”. It sheds a whole new light on why fans of Rush Limbaugh call themselves “dittoheads”.

In the end, I still wear the liberal badge proudly. I wouldn’t let the animal-rights fundamentalists at PETA take the label from me any more than I’d let the right-wingers use it to dismiss me. I am a liberal. Just don’t be surprised if I’m not ready to do that liberal song-and-dance every time it’s expected of me. Sometimes, I just don’t feel like dancing.

This post originally appeared on the Spartanburg Spark.

Rep. Mitchell Rolls Over

2009-05-22T19:30:00.002-04:00

Principled stands are commonplace in the South Carolina politics. There’s never been a shortage of local and state leaders willing to martyr themselves in the name of some cause in order to score a few brownie points with this group or that. Every good politician knows that at certain times, it’s more politically beneficial to be on the losing side of an issue—provided you lose loudly enough—than it is to be on the winning side. When a position is unpopular though, principal is more often than not quickly shown the door so that it may be replaced by its evil twin, quiet capitulation. Real leadership requires courage and sometimes, a bold and unpopular stand is the only difference between being a true statesman and just another politician.

It’s with that in mind that I’d like to present my capitulator of the week, Spartanburg’s own Rep. Harold Mitchell.

Rep. Mitchell’s latest failure in leadership came last week in an amendment to a house bill that he co-sponsored, H. 3543. The bill is a measure aimed at helping prevent dating violence between teenaged couples, which is certainly an admirable goal, and the bill in its original language was a much-needed directive to school districts to educate their students about the realities of dating violence. Last Thursday though, the legislature decided that one group doesn’t need to be educated about or protected from dating violence. That group is homosexuals.

The amendment, proposed by Rep. Greg Delleney (R-Chester), changed the language of the bill so that the phrase “dating partner” could only mean “a person involved in a heterosexual dating relationship with another”. In other words, if you’re a gay teenager in South Carolina, there’s no such thing as dating violence for you. Explaining the amendment Rep. Delleney said, “I do not want the Department of Education or school districts teaching our children in grades six through 12 about same-sex relationships”. Apparently, Rep. Delleney would rather we not acknowledge that teenaged gay couples exist. It’s the legislative equivalent to sticking your fingers in your ears and shouting “blah, blah, blah” every time someone utters the word “homosexual”.

That reactionaries like Rep. Delleney would propose excluding homosexual relationships from any sort of protection or recognition is not surprising. It’s also not surprising that the amendment passed in our conservative legislature overwhelmingly 87 to 13. It may not even be surprising that Rep. Mitchell didn’t see fit to stand up to the homophobes in the state House of Representatives, but while it may not be surprising, it is disappointing.

Compromise is invariably an important part of the legislative process and had he wanted to, Rep. Mitchell could have even opposed the amendment while still supporting the overall bill. The argument could’ve been made that the bill was still worthwhile even after the discriminatory language was inserted. It might not smack as such a betrayal of the Spartanburg GLBT community if some attempt to stand up against the homophobes had been made. It’s not as though this was a zero-sum game. There was room for nuance and middle ground could have been found had Rep Mitchell been seeking it.

On the other hand, had Mitchell been willing to show the courage of a true leader, he could have asked that his name be removed from the list of sponsors of the bill in solidarity with those being removed for the bill’s language. He could have stood up to speak against the amendment when it was presented for debate, pointed out that same-sex couples have statistically similar rates of abuse as straight couples. He could have told the legislature that an amendment that does nothing except specifically remove one group of citizens from being mentioned dehumanizes their concerns. He could have said that to ignore the rights of some is to endanger the rights of all.

He could have said a lot of things, but instead he sat on his hands when the issue was put up for debate, and when the time came for a vote on the amendment Rep. Mitchell cast his lot with the reactionaries and voted in favor of the amendment.

Perhaps such things are to be expected. Speaking out on behalf of homosexual teenagers isn’t likely to win you any political clout here in South Carolina. In fact, if your interest is your own political career, speaking for those taboo relationships is probably politically damaging, especially if you have designs on a higher office than the one you currently hold. Still, there were 13 representatives who voted against the amendment. Those 13 were apparently not intimidated by the bigots in the chamber. Those 13 decided to stand for what was right. Rep. Mitchell though, couldn’t be bothered to stand with them.

This post originally appeared on the Spartanburg Spark. Click here to view the original.

The Better Angels of Notre Dame

2009-05-19T16:56:00.003-04:00

In the world of politics, inflexible positions are commonplace. Rhetorically, a simplistic argument of “we’re right and they’re wrong” is much easier to make. Generally a politician finds much more success in appealing to people’s moral outrage—or at least their claimed moral outrage—than in appealing to the people’s intellect.

Nuanced arguments are difficult to make in our soundbite driven world, so most politicians simply don’t bother. That’s the path of least resistance, but it has the unintended effect, through the drawing hard lines between what’s supposedly right and what’s supposedly wrong, of coarsening the political debate. In the battle for the hearts and minds of Americans, the latter is normally thrown under a bus in favor of the former.

So it was with much interest that I watched the speech that President Obama gave at Notre Dame’s commencement last weekend.

First though, I should rewind a little bit. I have to say that early on in his presidential campaign, I wasn’t at all convinced that Barack Obama had the slightest chance of becoming the next President of The United States. Even after he’d won the Caucus in Iowa, I thought that the obstacles of race and background were too great to be overcome.

Politically, though he was more moderate than I am personally, he was more progressive than any of the other mainstream Democratic candidates, and while this certainly appealed to me personally, I was worried that he might be too much for many other people in the country. Despite these concerns, I openly supported Barack Obama during the South Carolina Primary largely because I would’ve rather lost with him as the nominee than won with Hilary Clinton as the nominee. The Clinton’s, and the rest of their moderate “New Democrat” group, were persona non grata as far as I was concerned.

Later that year in March came the dreadful thing that I’d feared the most. The media—Fox News in particular—had dug up sermons in which the former pastor of Barack Obama’s church had said controversial things about America’s role in world affairs and its treatment of minorities. At the time, I figured this would be the death of Barack Obama’s Presidential campaign.

His now legendary response to the controversy became a defining moment for who he was not just as a candidate, but also as a person. In my mind, and the minds of many others, Barack Obama showed himself, through his response, to be a different sort of political animal than the one’s we’d grown accustomed to.

Rather than attempt to shed himself of the controversy by denouncing Reverend Wright and distancing himself from any racial discussion, Obama did what few would’ve predicted any sensible Presidential Candidate would do. He gave an impassioned, thought-provoking, and honest speech on the nature of race relations in America. In the speech, he disagreed with Wright’s comments, but argued that in order to understand them we must understand the cultural context from which those ideas emerge, saying in the speech that, “[The African American community’s] anger is real; it is powerful; and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races.”

Obama went on to say, that the real flaw in Reverent Wright’s anger was that it assumed that America was static, that progress had not been made, and that progress would not continue. He also refused to condemn Reverend Wright as a person adding that,

“I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother— a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe. These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love.”

It was a stirring speech for its honesty, and the direct way that it tackled race relations. It was a speech designed to appeal to the empathy, fairness, and intellect of the American people. It dealt with the topic in a way more common to the university classroom than the political stump, and I, for one, was dumbfounded by it.

In his speech on race, Obama had also done something that’s now become a hallmark of his style in framing an issue. He explained both sides of the issue in non-confrontational terms to everyone listening, robbing the demagogues their chance to frame the debate on their own terms. So far, it’s proven to be his greatest strength as a leader.

At Notre Dame on Sunday, President Obama disarmed the demagogues yet again.

The lead up to the commencement was full of controversy. Notre Dame is a Catholic university, and many conservative Catholics were outraged that President Obama—who is pro-choice—was invited to give the commencement address. Angry letters were written, threats of withholding money by donors were made, and anti-abortion activists seized the opportunity to paint President Obama as a pro-abortion extremist who threatens to destroy our very society with his irreverent stance against a so-called “culture of life”. The self-serving moralistic rhetoric of the anti-choice extremists had become positively nauseating.

As he had done before with the Reverend Wright incident, President Obama did not hide from the controversy, he met his critics head on.

He argued, as before, that political differences are real—even irreconcilable—but that shouldn’t mean there isn’t room for agreement. He called for understanding among different sides of issues by highlighting that both to their ideas based on deeply held convictions, and that those convictions should be respected.

“The soldier and the lawyer may both love this country with equal passion, and yet reach very different conclusions on the specific steps needed to protect us from harm. The gay activist and the evangelical pastor may both deplore the ravages of HIV/AIDS, but find themselves unable to bridge the cultural divide that might unite their efforts. Those who speak out against stem cell research may be rooted in admirable conviction about the sacredness of life, but so are the parents of a child with juvenile diabetes who are convinced that their son's or daughter's hardships can be relieved.”

The call was to recognize our ideological opponents as human and good, and not to demonize those who come to the table of ideas with fair-minded ideas and honest concerns. Disagreements are fine, and in fact they are the life-blood of democracy, but when the people behind those disagreements resort to dehumanizing the other side, the disconnect that allows the creation of “us versus them” occurs. What we need, as the President put it are, “Open hearts. Open minds. Fair-minded words.”

It’s the sort of high-minded ideal that politicians rarely speak to. Appealing to the “better angels of our nature” is something that went out of fashion sometime after the Great Emancipator coined the phrase, and our political appeals are now most often aimed at our fears and prejudices. President Obama’s elevated sense of political discourse is the sort of thing that I wouldn’t have believed possible in our modern society.

For all his lofty ideals about political discussion here in America though, I’m under no impression that the demagogues, who’ve made their living by dividing not just ideas, but people, will simply go away. Even in the midst of his speech, President Obama was interrupted by a man who starting shouting at him and had to be escorted out. We, as a people, obviously have a long way to go before we can see each other as one American family whose members can disagree, but never forgetting our bonds of kinship.

For the first time in my life though, I believe it is possible to achieve this goal. The demagogues will always be with us I suspect, but I’m no longer convinced that they will control the debate. President Obama, through his consistent appeals to our more reasonable sensibilities, actually has me believing the long-awaited American age of reason may be possible. That, in and of itself, is a miraculous change already.

Casual (Legal) Encounters

2009-05-18T00:24:00.002-04:00

A line in the sand has been drawn. In a world reeling from the stench of moral compromise, one courageous man has taken a stand for common decency. Standing against a technological demon threatening to shred the moral fiber of our very society, this hero stands tall, fires a warning shot over the demon’s head, and delivers an ultimatum; “I’m gonna give ya’ till 5 p.m. Eastern on May 15th to get out of my state, demon. After that, I’m a-gonna bring the righteous hammer of justice down upon your head.”
The hero, undaunted by the size of the beast, knows that he — and he alone — can end this immoral reign of terror. Only the chosen one, our guardian of probity, can protect us from the malevolent demon known as craigslist.

The hero in this particular story is South Carolina Attorney General Henry McMaster, and the aforementioned ultimatum was delivered in a letter to craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster last week. In the letter, McMaster threatens legal action against craigslist if it does not remove the ads on its South Carolina sites related to “the solicitation of prostitution and the dissemination and posting of graphic pornographic material” by this Friday at 5p.m. McMaster further accuses craigslist of having “knowingly allowed the site to be used for illegal and unlawful activity.”

Now I don’t want to be the one to throw water on a good old-fashioned moral crusade, but McMaster’s outrage seems a tad convenient to me.

First, there’s the timing. McMaster has all but said he’s running for governor in 2010, and it just so happens that craigslist is the media talk de jour these days thanks to Phillip Markoff, the so-called “craigslist killer,” who assaulted and robbed three women he met through erotic ads on the site, killing one of the women. The formula couldn’t be more perfect: a media feeding-frenzy over a murderer with a penchant for meeting prostitutes through craigslist ads, and the position as Attorney General to get in on that sweet media action by writing a grandstanding letter to that company’s CEO. It’s manna from political heaven.

Then of course, there’s the fact that almost all lawsuits involving internet sites over the conduct of their users have ended in favor of the sites. Surely someone with the legal acumen Attorney General McMaster knows that the odds of being able to shut down craigslist’s “erotic services” section with a lawsuit are pretty slim.

If he were truly concerned with doing something about prostitution on craigslist, he may have taken the more low-key approach of the Attorney Generals of Connecticut, Missouri and Illinois, who had a private meeting with Craigslist to discuss the company’s stance regarding its “erotic services” section. It might not have scored McMaster as many column inches and soundbites as he’d wanted, but it almost certainly would’ve been more productive.

And then there’s that other telling bit of information in McMaster’s letter. The Attorney General isn’t just outraged over the erotic services offered in the ads; he’s upset about the porn too. Apparently some of the prostitutes selling their wares on craigslist are letting the potential guests check out the goods before they pony up the dough. It’s not just the prostitutes though. It’s also the people over in the “casual encounters” section of craigslist. These supposedly morally repulsive degenerates post all sorts of shamefully graphic pictures of breasts, backsides, genitalia and sex acts right there on the site.

Imagine that: Porn on the Internet!

Of course in order to go into those sections, you have to go through a warning and disclaimer informing the user that the section is only for those 18 and over and that the section may include “adult content.” Craigslist also states that it has implemented a content labeling system compatible with many commercially available and open-source internet filtering software. In fact, I was able to block myself from seeing the “adult” sections by simply altering the parental controls on my computer. The only way I’m going to see erotic images on craigslist, is if I want to, and if I want to block my child from seeing those images, it’s not very hard to do.

It all makes McMaster’s argument about the “unrestricted manner in which graphic pornographic pictures are posted and displayed by users on the craigslist site and their accessibility to minors” seem pretty disingenuous.

What’s really going on here is some time-tested pandering to the social conservative electorate that dominates the SCGOP. McMaster will have a tough primary fight next year, and any feathers he can put in his social conservative cap will help him stay in the good graces of the state Republican Party’s Christian conservative base. For all those reasons, I’m pretty sure that a couple of things are going to happen on Friday. Craigslist will still have an “erotic services” section on their local South Carolina sites, and Henry McMaster will make good on his threat.

I have little doubt that McMaster will do everything in his power to stick up for the good upstanding citizens of South Carolina with the fervor that only a demagogue can muster. I won’t be at all surprised to read in the coming weeks that McMaster decided that the only way to defend the righteousness of the people in South Carolina is the file suit against the purveyors of this indecency. He won’t hesitate to spend state money on his fruitless crusade, and he’ll never miss a chance to tell the people about how what he’s doing is right. Then when the case is struck down — which is sure to happen — McMaster won’t miss a beat.

He’ll be right there to tell us all that he fought the good fight. He’ll assure us that he’s a good man just fighting against the coarsening of society. McMaster will use the case and its defeat as a battering ram against a supposedly decaying society that has lost its moral sense of purpose. This sense of purpose, he will assure us, is one that we can regain, and all we’d have to do of course, is vote for him. Henry McMaster’s going to try to sell us an old wine, but craigslist has given him a brand new shiny bottle to put it in.

This post originally appeared on the Spartanburg Spark. Click here to view the original

Star Trek Lamentations

2009-05-12T01:42:00.003-04:00

I don’t write movie reviews. It’s nothing personal, and I’m a huge fan of cinema. It’s just that, writing the standard movie review isn’t the sort of writing that ever really appealed to me. Conversely though, I love to read movie reviews, especially bad ones. I guess it’s because I’m a big fan of satire and wit, but to me some of the most enjoyable reading out there comes from watching a seasoned movie critic use the keyboard as a weapon to totally disembowel some cinematic disaster they’ve been forced by their job to endure. It’s a form of literary revenge exacted on the purveyors of the populist pap that more often than not dominates the mainstream movie business and insults the intelligence of those who expect more than catch phrases, ham-fisted plots, and CGI explosions as far as the eye can see. Hell hath no fury like a movie critic scorned.

If I got to write reviews for bad movies all day though, I think I’d love the job. Imagine sitting down at the computer with the full intention shredding some piece of rubbish created by someone like Roland Emmerich, a man smart enough to know what the cinematic abortions he creates really are, but greedy enough to not care. Emmerich and his ilk are the sort completely content to make their money by giving the great-unwashed horde exactly what it wants, big dumb movies. There’s no thought required, no attempt to raise anyone’s sensibilities, just nice visual stimulation, the same sort of stimulation that entertains an infant staring up at a mobile from the crib.

I usually avoid such movies, so the opportunity for near-slanderous disparagement of the modern mainstream movie is something that I usually don’t get a chance to do. This past weekend though, I saw something that moved me to cinematic rage. I saw Star Trek and while a proper review just isn’t my style, I can’t let this one slide by without comment.

I should say up front that I’m a Star Trek fan from way back. I started out watching reruns of the original series and the first seasons of Next Generation when I was a kid. I’ve seen all of the movies, and the only series I didn’t actively follow was Enterprise. I appreciated the optimistic future Gene Roddenberry had imagined for humanity, and while certain concepts—especially from the original series—seem quaint, I’ve always felt that the Star Trek universe always strived to show humanity in the best possible light whether we deserved it or not. That, to me, made Star Trek unique, and made its stories engaging.

That’s not to say that the various Star Trek series weren’t without their flaws. I can’t even watch the first season of TNG anymore without wincing a little bit at how clumsy everything was from the laughable plotlines, to the stiff and clumsy portrayals given by the series actors. The only solace really is that the show got much better later on.

Then of course, there was Enterprise. This was the show that should’ve mercifully ended the wringing of a once original idea of every dollar it could possibly make. In a word, it was terrible, and it quickly became the first Trek series that I didn’t follow. For me, it felt like everything that could be said in the Trek universe had been said, and there was no point running the concept into the ground anymore.

Fast forward to 2009. My own disconnection from the goings on in the Star Trek franchise world meant that I didn’t know very much at all about the new movie. I knew that J. J. Abrams had directed it, but I don’t care for his other work like Lost or Alias so I didn’t have any feelings about his involvement either way. I’d heard about the core Trek fanbase being upset about the movie, and knew that it had something to do with the lack of continuity with the original series, but I had no idea of the specifics.

Leading into opening weekend I started reading reviews for the movie on Rotten Tomatoes. By Friday, the movie had a pretty remarkable 95% fresh rating, and the consensus was a ringing endorsement that read, “Star Trek reignites a classic franchise with action, humor, a strong story, and brilliant visuals, and will please traditional Trekkies and new fans alike.” Reading all that positive press had me pretty excited to see the movie.

Little did I realize, I was in for one of the biggest disappointments I’ve ever experienced in a theater before.

The movie was terrible. The acting was uninspiring at best. The plot was poorly developed. The characters were one-dimensional cliché’s, and ever scene in the movie was just another excuse to have an explosion or CGI riddled fight scene.

When I write that the movie was bad, I mean that it was really bad. In the conscience effort to attract a new generation to the franchise, they literally threw out almost everything that made the franchise endearing. There was very little dialog, and what dialog was there was just to serve as a bridge between explosions. The new Star Trek movie literally turns the franchise into a standard action flick, albeit in space. The main characters' lives were in danger throughout the entire movie.

No time for character development, we’ve got 17 year old boys to impress.

They got around that big geeky Star Trek canon, by actually writing the movie in an alternate universe set in motion by the movie’s main villain, in what surely has to win the award for “cheapest plot devise” of 2009. The writers of the new Trek basically gave themselves the freedom to write whatever they want, and to hell with all those old trekkies bitching about “continuity”. We can’t be worried about that; there’s money to be made.

What Abrams and company did was no different from what’s been done in the “comic book hero” movie genre for years now. Step one: Start with a well-known character and storyline and a nice built-in fanbase. Step two: Make your own “reimagined” version of the character in order to bring in the younger generation. Step three: Collect a nice fat check, and repeat steps one and two every 20 years or so in order to repeat step three.

What the new Star Trek is, is exactly what the old Star Trek never was, a big dumb movie. It did well with critics because they love J. J. Abrams and Lost so for a while anyway, everything he does will be wonderful in their eyes. It did well at the box office because it’s a big dumb movie, and we love big dumb movies. Now they’ll make big dumb sequels until those don’t rake in the dough anymore, and another 20 years or so from now it’ll be time for another “reboot”. By then, I expect that the next "reimagining" will be little more than a series of CGI explosions in space followed by the credits. Hopefully by then, I’ll have managed to forget this travesty masquerading around as a triumph. Somehow though, I doubt it.

The Rising Tide of Non-Theism

2009-05-09T11:12:00.002-04:00

Last week, I read an intriguing article in The New York Times titled “More Atheists Shout It From the Rooftops.” The article was about a Charleston group called Secular Humanists of the Lowcountry, and how the group’s growing membership is proof that even in uber-religious South Carolina, non-believers of all stripes are coming out of the woodwork in record numbers to organize, trade stories and make themselves known as a group within their community.

The article went on to quote members of another South Carolina group at USC in Columbia, the Pastafarians. Pastafarians take their name from the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, a hilarious parody religion invented by Bobby Henderson in a letter to the Kansas School Board opposing the teaching of Intelligent Design in schools. In the Pastafarian meeting at USC, the group had members come up to tell their “coming out” stories. When I read this, I was immediately taken with the concept and at the same time, a little disturbed by the idea that any group could be so ostracized by their religious beliefs that a “coming out” story would even be necessary.

As a way of “outing” myself, I suppose I should say that I’ve been in that nonreligious category for my entire adult life, and while I don’t have any particular animosity towards religion, it has made for some uncomfortable conversations over the years. Truthfully, religion just isn’t something that enters into my mind very often one way or the other. It’s an absolute nonfactor in my day-to-day life. Since reading the Times article though, I’ve been wondering if that’s something I’ve purposefully but unconsciously kept in the background in my life to avoid confrontation.

Eventually I started to wonder, if Charleston and Columbia have enough people to support these groups of nonbelievers, what’s the underground freethinking scene in Spartanburg like? According to the article, the number of people who listed their religion as “none” in the American Religious Identification Survey nationally went form 8% in 1990 to 15% in 2008. South Carolina’s number during that same time more than tripled, going from 3% to 10%. Assuming that Spartanburg’s average was somewhere close to the state average, that would mean there are around 28,000 people in the “none” category in the county.

Obviously not all of the people calling themselves “not religious” are atheists, agnostics, secular humanists, or other genuine nonbelievers. Many are likely just believers without a particular tie to one faith or another, but even assuming that only half of the 28,000 “nones” are nonreligious that’s still a significant number.

I’m betting that many of those people, like me, have had their fair share of the old “What church do you attend?” question. I, myself, have tried not to lie when asked the question, but I have been hesitant in the past to say exactly what I’ve wanted to say when I’m asked the question, especially if the person asking is in some position of authority over me. I’ve always felt cowardly after the fact, but I always reasoned that a little cowardice was the price I had to pay in order to not start something with the wrong person. After considering it lately, however, I’ve decided that maybe that cowardice did more harm than good.

My real opinion is that there’s an assumption in that “church” question that smacks of the kind of arrogance that permeates most religious discussion between believers and nonbelievers. That nonbelievers, as a group, are generally distrusted by the religious is impossible to dispute. A 2006 University of Minnesota study found that, “…Americans rate atheists below Muslims, recent immigrants, gays and lesbians and other minority groups in ’sharing their vision of American society.’ Atheists are also the minority group most Americans are least willing to allow their children to marry.” In a 2007 Gallup poll, 53% of respondents said they wouldn’t vote for an atheist candidate for president even if that candidate was “generally well-qualified.” That number was far higher than for any other group, including homosexuals.

Christian dominance of the political structure here in South Carolina can’t be denied. South Carolina is a place where our elected officials invoke God for every argument under the political sun and compete with each other over who’s more publicly devout, apparently ignoring what Jesus had to say in Matthew about public versus private piety. In a place where the leaders never forget to praise Jesus when they cut taxes, and where people in most counties can’t walk into a store on Sunday and buy a beer out of deferment to some religious belief that drinking is wrong, it’s tough for a nonbeliever to not feel like a bit of an outsider.

As I wrote earlier though, I have no particular animosity towards religion. I know religious people who are open-minded, progressive, and passionate in their beliefs, and often they draw inspiration from those beliefs to fight for progressive causes because they believe the work they are doing serves a higher purpose. No one should ever argue that religion hasn’t proven itself to be a powerful force for social change in America. I respect and even admire that commitment to social justice as a higher calling even if I don’t share the same religious feelings.

I have no doubt that there are others out there in Spartanburg who feel just as isolated as I do at times. Maybe the time is right for those people to come together to share their experiences and reinforce one another as secularists in a deeply religious land. Atheists, agnostics, humanists and other nontheists are just as much a part of the citizenry as anyone else here in Spartanburg. Perhaps it’s time for them to assert that fact as a group.

This post originally appeared on the Spartanburg Spark. Click here to view the original.

Eating Their Own

2009-05-02T00:43:00.001-04:00

How much sway do the “tea party” Republicans hold within the GOP? That’s the huge political question being tossed around a lot lately, nationally as well as locally, and in a non-election year it’s a pretty tough question to answer.

Nationally, the Republican Party is in absolute disarray. The party has formed the sort of circular firing squad reminiscent of the Democratic Party in the ’80s. The competing factions of moderates and moderate-leaning conservatives on one side and angry “tea party” conservatives and libertarian-leaning types on the other has set up an epic battle for no less than the soul of the Republican Party.

The moderates argue that because of unfavorable demographics, the GOP must expand its base by moderating its stance on social issues like gay marriage, abortion and immigration. To not do these things, the moderates say, would doom the party to regional minority status as their older white evangelical base becomes smaller and smaller over time. On the other hand, social conservatives and many Republican strategists argue that moderating on social issues would loose the party its largest voting base, Christian conservatives.

It’s an absolutely fascinating conflict nationally, but the question most on my mind lately is: What does it mean here?

South Carolina in general, and the Upstate in particular, are strongholds of conservatism. There are few states in the country that can boast the sort of one-party rule South Carolina has had for the last decade. In most parts of the Upstate, the Republican Primary determines who will hold office and the General Election is just a formality against a weak Democratic candidate or often no Democratic candidate at all. In Spartanburg, the Democratic Party is badly underfunded and disorganized, and certainly not presently up to the task of taking on the dominant GOP machine.

In South Carolina, the internal struggle for control of the GOP is, in reality, a struggle for control of the state itself. The twist on things here, though, is that rather than the moderate wing and the right wing, the struggle is between the right wing and the extreme-right wing, with the Ron Paul-libertarian activists thrown in somewhere as well.

Earlier this month, we had a changing of the guard in the local GOP leadership. In the race for Spartanburg Republican Party chair, Rick Beltram was defeated soundly by LaDonna Ryggs with 291 votes to Beltram’s 87.

Normally, I don’t read very much into changes in county leadership. The politics involved in such races are often based on personal preferences and leadership style, and I’m sure that there was plenty of that going around in the GOP county convention. Beltram had made himself a lot of enemies among local Republicans, and it’s possible that he’d have been on his way out without all the other turmoil within the party, but the absolute thumping he received tells me that something deeper was at work.

The “tea party” base of the local GOP is angry, and that anger thus far has been pretty indiscriminant. For all his missteps, Beltram’s biggest one may have been underestimating that anger. In Spartanburg, as well as the rest of the Upstate, an ideological purge is underway within the Republican Party, and the “tea party” types that routinely label mainstream conservatives like Sen. Lindsey Graham “liberal” are intent on shifting the party hard right.

The “tea party” set is furious, but from my point of view, they don’t seem to quite know what it is they’re furious about. Who can blame them really? We live in a state that’s been cut to the bone fiscally by its Republican ruling class, and yet somehow the conservative-envisioned gilded-age has yet to materialize. There’s not one single state or local problem that can legitimately be laid at the feet of the marginalized minority Democratic Party, as the Republicans have been at the wheel while the bus has been driven off a cliff. The only ideologically acceptable answer for the extremists is that those Republicans they elected weren’t Republican enough. So now, the revolution has no choice but to eat its own.

How many people will be taken by the angry mob? Which elected officials will be deemed ideologically impure? How influential are the “tea party” conservatives going to be in the 2010 elections? These are all questions that no one has answers to right now, but these questions will ultimately determine what our local representation will look like in the future. When it comes to Spartanburg politics, I’m never overly optimistic about the future, but the “tea party” conservatives have me a little unnerved. Mobs are, by their very nature, unreasonable. Ideologically driven mobs who feel they’ve been wronged in some fundamental way, are dangerous.

Still, a part of me thinks this is all just saber rattling by a bunch of reactionaries upset at what they perceive as their own fading influence. When push comes to shove, they’ll vote for the guy with an “R” by his name in the general election no matter who that guy is and even though the actual candidate may change, the politics won’t.

It’s all become formulaic at this point. Republican candidate “a” gets elected. Candidate “a” becomes incumbent “a” with a track record not quite up to conservative extremist snuff. Republican candidate “b” comes along, and while ideologically nearly identical to incumbent “a”, “b” still gets to claim the coveted “outsider” status. Republican candidate “b” wins in Primary and goes on to face tissue-paper Democrat or non-existent Democrat in November. Republican Candidate “b” becomes incumbent “b”. Meet the new boss. Doesn’t he look familiar?

This post originally appeared on the Spartanburg Spark. Click here to view the original.

Commenting on Commenting

2009-04-28T02:50:00.001-04:00

I read a piece on The New York Times site recently called “Comment Is King”. The piece, by Virginia Heffernan, is basically about how crass, inarticulate, and simplistic the comment sections are for most pieces, particularly political opinion pieces, published online. In her piece, Heffernan focuses on one writer in particular to make her point, Anne Applebaum. Anne Applebaum is a Pulitzer Prize winning author, and political columnist for The Washington Post and Slate. Her views generally fall somewhere in the neo-conservative realm, but in last year’s election she broke ranks with the Republican Party and supported Barack Obama’s Presidential bid. Her views though, aren’t really all that important to the piece. The point that Heffernan seems intent on driving home, is that the Internet is full of mouth-breathing morons, and the way an educated sophisticate like Applebaum is treated by the digital vox populi is simply shameful.

I don’t want to sound too dismissive of Heffernan’s concerns, but what exactly does she expect from the comment section of an online article?

Anyone who’s ever spent more than 15 minutes in their lives listening to ordinary people discussing complex political issues in the real world can tell you that well-reasoned, rational opinion is not exactly commonplace out here among the proles. On any particular morning, an observer hanging around the small family owned breakfast joints here in red state America is likely to hear all sorts of conspiratorial nonsense, none of it very reasonable or convincing. I doubt very seriously that the scenario is very different in any other working-class area of the country. People who spend most of their time worrying about rebuilding transmissions, wiring circuit breakers, or laying brick don’t typically have the time or the inclination to form nuanced political opinions. How is that some sort of revelation?

What Heffernan doesn’t seem to realize is that while the Internet is quite democratic, democracy doesn’t require intelligence as a prerequisite. The people reading online are the same as the people who used to read in print. The main difference is that now when someone has some half-baked argument against what an author has written, now that person can post that argument for all to see, instantaneously. The difference between Heffernan and Applebaum’s world before the digital age and their world after is simply proximity.

It should come as no surprise to anyone that educated intellectual types like to hang out with other educated intellectual types. Prior to their entry into the online world, the elites of global opinion mainly had to contend with the objections, questions, and praise of other’s in the commissar class. Those filthy, uneducated, teeming masses might have been the ones paying the salaries for the titans of commentary with their subscription fees, but not having a means to communicate their inarticulate frustrations, outside of the occasional letter to the editor published at the editor’s discretion, meant that most often a columnist had to contend only with the duly appointed representatives of the other side of polite opinion.

In our new information era however, online comment sections have allowed those who previously had no voice to shout incoherently from the virtual rooftops. The opinion world as it is now, is egalitarian. Whether that’s a good thing or not is difficult to say, but bemoaning the ignorance of the masses as though it were somehow shocking comes across as either disingenuous or horribly out of touch.

I am certainly no stranger to the “Internet comment section” world. Writing my weekly column over at the Spartanburg Spark has put me on the receiving end of the same types of barrages that other columnists like Applebaum have experienced, on a much smaller scale of course. My negative comments on the Spark have ranged anywhere from cheap one-liners, to name-calling, to straw man arguments, to regurgitated second-hand polemics against a topic that I didn’t even write about. It can be a bit unnerving at times, and I’ve sworn off the comment sections of my pieces more than once only to find myself later going back on my word, a narcissist to the last.

Even this blog has had its share of naysayers having at me for all sorts of reasons, and they’ve ran the spectrum from fairly reasoned to bat-shit crazy. It’s all part of the game at this point. The other day I had a negative comment that measured a staggering 5,516 words long on an original post that measured a comparably miniscule 1,140 words. I’d like to think that someone who spent that much time writing a comment would’ve absolutely obliterated my original thesis but the truth is, I don’t know because I didn’t read it. I tried, but after about the third rambling paragraph, I just gave up. You can read it if you want though; it’s on here somewhere.

The real problem I have with Heffernan’s view is that it smacks of a certain elitism that I don’t think helps move the conversation. The world is full of people who don’t fully grasp the intricacies of global, national, or even local politics, but that’s not going to stop them from having an opinion about it. Obviously, that’s a not logical position, but I think if the cultural elites of the country would step out of their insulating bubbles and take a walk down here to the land of open contradictions, they might understand the phenomenon a little better.

Rather than dismiss the crass and common commenters, the political opinion elites should take a more hands on approach to the problem. If the people don’t understand, explain. If they still don’t understand after that, explain some more. Above all, it’s important to understand that just because people don’t understand a topic with the clarity that comes with years of study doesn’t mean they’re not entitled to tell an author that he or she is completely full of shit. Who knows, maybe they’re right.

The Layoff

2009-04-23T23:09:00.002-04:00

I’d heard stories about layoffs before, stories about people being led into a room with no warning one Friday and being told that their services would no longer be required. I’d heard stories about somber-faced human resources managers delivering the sort of news that every person dreads with efficiency and calculated compassion, with lots of platitudes about markets and empty gratitude for years of faithful service. I’d heard about how the choreographed efficiency of the whole thing tended to give it an air of surreal detachment, almost like what had happened hadn’t exactly happened to you.

I’d heard all those stories. Prior to last Thursday morning though, I’d never actually felt what it was like to lose my job that way.

Up until Thursday, I was an employee of Trelleborg working at their Coated Systems plant off of Highway 29 in the area of Spartanburg County just past the westside Target. I ran a machine that spread liquefied rubber over a textile carcass to make blankets for use in printing presses. It wasn’t the sort of job that anyone tells their first grade teacher they want to do when they grow up, but it paid pretty well, and enabled me to do my part towards providing my family with a decent existence. For that alone I was grateful to have the work, and while I’m not to the point where I’m fearful for the future of the people who’ve depended on me, uncertainty over it all is my constant companion these days.

The week started with very little indication of what was coming. There had been a few ominous rumors about layoffs, and everyone knew that business had been slow, but rumors are tricky things in a manufacturing plant. When people work 12 hours on the night shift, there are bound to be things that get made up and passed around out of nothing but boredom. Ideas get bandied about, and one person’s idle speculation gets turned into ironclad truth by the person who hears it.

Before long, every idea from complete plant closure to temporary selective layoffs had someone advancing it. I decided to take a wait-and-see approach to things. Deep down I knew that whatever was being planned wasn’t going to be known by any of us until the exact moment they wanted us to know.

Wednesday evening at 7 o’clock, those of us just showing up for our last night shift of the week got word that there was going to be a mandatory plant-wide meeting at seven the next morning. Everybody was buzzing about it, but nobody had the slightest idea what exactly this plant-wide meeting was about; just more speculation, nervous jokes, and hope. The night went by like any other, and as 7 a.m. was approaching, a palpable anxiety set in.

Around ten minutes till, everyone started filing into the “employee training room.” The room itself has about 40 chairs or so, which eventually left a little better than half the people in attendance standing. In the front of the room is a table with a laptop computer connected to a projector. Our human resources director was standing in front of the laptop getting everything set up. While we were waiting for everyone from the day shift to get there, people started cracking small jokes just to break the tension, but glancing around at the faces in the room, I didn’t see anyone smiling. The gravity of the situation was starting to set in.

After everyone arrived, the director of Trelleborg’s North American operations walked in the door. He walked up to the table in the front of the room, picked up a piece of paper, and began to read. I don’t remember exactly what was said, but I do remember it was a lot of corporate jargon about “market conditions” and “difficult economic times” eventually punctuated with the only useful fact in his reading of this meandering corporate memo: A significant number of us were going to lose our jobs that day.

I found myself wondering in the middle of all this exactly how hard these economic times had been on this guy. It’s tough being lectured about “markets” by a guy who will climb in his bed that night still employed, and not just employed, but also making far more than anyone else in the room.

Still, his wasn’t an enviable task, and he obviously wasn’t enjoying it. He barely looked up from his prepared remarks and even after he was finished reading, he kept his head down trying not to make eye contact with anyone. I can’t be sure, but I read his guilt as sincere. He looked as though he believed this thing had an inertia that he couldn’t stop, as though it were a storm blowing through, and he was just trying to hold on. Maybe he was right to feel that way. The decision was almost certainly made back at Trelleborg’s corporate headquarters in Sweden, but how much input he had in that decision only he could say. Whether or not he was just Pontius Pilate washing his hands, I’m honestly not quite sure.

Once he was done telling us the broad overview, he turned things over to the human resources manager to handle the particulars. She picked up a list and started to go though departments, letting those who weren’t going to be affected by the layoffs leave. When she’d whittled down the crowd a bit, she got to the departments that were going to be affected. Then she picked up another list and started reading names. After she’d read the names, she told those people to leave. They still had their jobs. The rest of us, we’re told, were going to be placed on permanent layoff. The air seems to have gotten sucked out of the room. About 40 people lost their jobs that day.

While the HR manager passed out information about the particulars of our firings, I took a look around at the faces in the room. Some of these people had been working for the company longer than I’ve been alive. The looks on their faces told me that they literally didn’t know anything else, and as bad as it all was for me, I couldn’t imagine what it must’ve been like for them. What does it feel like to lose the only job you’ve ever had in your adult life? There aren’t any statistics for that.

After all the pertinent information had been explained, the HR manager thanked us all for our years of service. It was an empty gesture, the kind of thank you you’d get from someone running a drive-thru window when you pick up your cheeseburger, and I winced a little when she said it. Finally, we were told that our department supervisors would need to escort us to our lockers so we could turn in all our tools, and then escort us out of the building. It was the ultimate humiliation; we freshly fired employees, were being treated like thieves.

I almost balked at the suggestion, but decided that making a scene probably wouldn’t help me or anybody else in that situation so I just sucked it up, and made my way to my locker with my supervisor. I unlocked my locker, and left the door open so that someone could come along later to get my tools. Once everyone had gotten what needed to be taken home and left what didn’t, we walked towards the parking lot for the last time.

I told my supervisor on the way out how humiliating it was to have to be escorted out of the plant like some potential criminal. He agreed with me of course, but what was he supposed to do? He was caught up in this just like anyone else, just another cog in this horrible corporate machine. When we got to the door I turned towards him, shook his hand, and made my way towards the car.

This post originally appeared on the Spartanburg Spark. Click here to view the original.

The No-Brainer of Gay Marriage

2009-04-21T02:20:00.003-04:00

I believe that gay marriage is the next frontier in civil rights here in the United States, and the people opposed to it are bigots. I’m not accustomed to being so blunt about a political topic, and most of the time in political discourse it’s easy to see that even if you don’t agree with the other person on an issue, that person is not coming at that issue from a fundamentally wrong place. On most issues, different people may have different ideas, but for the most part, their motivations are pure. Gay marriage is fundamentally different and here’s why: Gay marriage opponents’ only motivation is to see one particular segment of society relegated to second-class status.

The recent news about Iowa’s Supreme Court and Vermont’s Legislature legalizing homosexual marriage and New York Governor David Patterson’s recent push to make his state next have come as a major blows to the bigoted side of this debate, and the validity of their arguments slips more and more all the time. Earlier this month the National Organization for Marriage ran a despicable ad, which portrayed homosexual marriage as a gathering storm threatening the very fabric of our country. The ad was mocked unmercifully with tons of people lampooning it on YouTube, and one hilarious parody on the Colbert Report last Thursday night. The position of the bigots is becoming untenable and just like the segregationists before them; they’re on the wrong side of history

Believe it or not though, I don’t like seeing the worst in my fellow citizens. That’s one reason that up until now, I’ve been somewhat hesitant to write about this issue. Another reason for my reluctance is that the arguments for gay marriage are so strong, and the arguments against it so weak, that there was hardly any challenge in writing it. There aren’t any complex arguments to be made, no gray areas to be painstakingly navigated.

This issue is simple. There are two people. They have decided to make a (hopefully) life-long commitment to each other. Society has long recognized that the sociological, psychological, and economic benefits of these commitments make them worthy of official recognition. The problem is that only one type of couple, heterosexual, is officially recognized in this way, and a large number of the population is not heterosexual. The benefits of a long-term committed relationship though, are pretty much the same for both heterosexual and homosexual couples. The solution to this inequality in official recognition, and all the benefits that official recognition brings, is obvious. The homosexual couples should be granted equal legal standing with the heterosexual couples. That’s so simple, right?

Well apparently not, and there’s the rub. The opposition claims that allowing homosexuals to get married somehow undermines the sanctity of that institution. Nobody as of yet, has managed to explain to me exactly how a homosexual couple getting married undermines a heterosexual couples rights, other than citing some religious mumbo-jumbo and a few archaic Bible verses to try to argue that God is against homosexual equality. The arrogance of this argument never ceases to amaze me.

These people, who claim to have a direct pipeline to the will of the almighty, wish to impose that particular view on the rest of the population. See it doesn’t work that way on the other side of this issue. There are no gay rights groups trying to take away the rights of conservative Christians unless you count trying to stop them from using their fundamentalist views to exclude people from their basic rights. I, personally, do not. No harm is done to Evangelical Christianity by allowing homosexuals to get married. They are entitled to their beliefs, but those beliefs about God and his wants are far from universally held. This is not, nor has it ever been, a Christian nation, and fundamentalist Christian values are not the only values in our society. Fundamentalist values aren’t even the only values in Christianity.

No one’s religious freedom is hurt when our secular society decides to correct a historic wrong. Religious freedom is guaranteed in our First Amendment, and there’s no stopping Evangelical Christians from believing whatever they want to believe about homosexuals, nor should there be. Many already believe all sorts of things that others would find offensive. Many believe that Atheists, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Sikhs, Jews, and anyone else who doesn’t believe in their specific religious claims are going to Hell. No one has made any fuss about this, and unless such claims were used to attempt to discriminate against these groups within society at-large, no one would. The Evangelical community is free to believe whatever they want about homosexuals, and that’s as it should be.

The nation though, cannot be tied by the narrow religious beliefs of a particular group, and on a personal level I’d like it very much if more people in the Evangelical community came to understand that there are all sorts of people in the country with all sorts of backgrounds, beliefs, and lifestyles, and that far from being a weakness, it’s one of our greatest strengths. It’s never a good idea for one group to believe they have a monopoly on what it means to be American. There is no “real” America or “fake” America. The homosexual couple is no less valid in our country than the heterosexual one and if you ask me, the real threat to our country is exclusion, whatever form that may take.

Our nation is a wonderful nation because it has proven time and again that humanity always progresses. Humanity is essentially good, and though our irrational fears may blind us temporarily with bigotry, eventually the inescapable truth that bigotry was hiding, will find the light of day. As Dr. King once put it, “Let us realize the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice”. Iowa, Vermont, and others are showing us, whether we want to see it or not, which way the arc bends now.

The Wal-Mart Shell Game

2009-04-16T22:29:00.001-04:00

Spartanburg’s economic picture is pretty bleak. The county’s unemployment rate stands at 11.5% and climbing. In all, 16,169 people are out of work in the county, and many of those that are still employed are clinging to those jobs and keeping their fingers crossed that they’re not the next to be put on the chopping block. In this environment, any positive economic news should be welcomed with open arms. So, why does the opening of the new Wal-Mart returns center in Spartanburg leave a bad taste in my mouth?

Exel Logistics is the third-party supply chain management company running the Wal-Mart returns center in a building leased from Johnson Development Associates on N. Blackstock Road slated to open it’s doors tomorrow. The company announced in February that it would be closing its plant in Macon, GA, and moving those operations here, giving the ax to about 400 workers in the Macon plant. Shortly after that, around 3,000 people filled out applications for the new positions at a two-day job-fair at the Tyger River Campus of Spartanburg Community College. The plant will eventually employ an estimated 550 people when it’s fully operational in September.

All that looks like the makings of a good economic story. It’s got local job creation and new business investment and on the surface at least it’s just a feel-good story about a ray of economic sunshine to help get us through the unending bad economic news. On a closer examination though, it’s pretty easy to see that Wal-Mart got a sweetheart of a deal from Spartanburg County Council with just the bare minimum of a commitment to the area.

The deal, which sailed through its first council reading last month, was cut in the form of a fee-in-lieu-of tax, or FILOT, agreement which will allow the returns center to save $44,000 on its county tax bill in the first year alone. Also in the deal was a special-source revenue credit to Wal-Mart for $100,000 a year for the first two years. The deal is contingent upon a $13.5 million investment in the county within the next five years.

The jobs being created to supposedly merit this sweetheart deal pay between $10 and $11 an hour.

For their part, County Council couldn’t help but pat themselves on the back for bringing these fine jobs to our humble upstate county. Councilman David Britt said of the deal, “Right now, every job we can bring into Spartanburg County is an opportunity.” Really? I wonder if Britt would like to try to see exactly how far one of those $10 per hour “opportunities” would go towards paying the bills. I seriously doubt that any of those 3,000 people who lined up to apply for those jobs were under any delusions about the great “opportunity” being presented to them. They waited in line for just the chance of barely adequate earnings out of necessity, not opportunity.

The real rub in all this though, is that in a time when local governments are hurting from lack of funds, Spartanburg County Council intends to pass a corporate welfare giveaway to the largest retailer in the world in exchange for 550 $10 per hour jobs in a leased building with no commitment necessary beyond five years. It’s an opportunity all right: An opportunity for Wal-Mart, Exel and Johnson Development.

Why were wage guarantees not part of this deal? When Spartanburg City Council passed an agreement last month for RJ Rockers to locate their new brewery downtown, a large portion of the tax benefit was contingent on them creating jobs that averaged $28,000 a year, just under $13.50 an hour. If a small local company like RJ Rockers can afford to pay this in order to get a tax deal, surely the world’s largest retailer can afford as much or more. Beyond fattening George Dean Johnson’s already swollen pocket with rent payments, I fail to see that much local benefit in giving away tax breaks to a company like Wal-Mart, which is notorious for cutting labor costs by any means necessary.

No one can deny that in order to attract business, incentives must be used. The competition between local areas over proposed new development is fierce, and businesses are always looking to play one area against another to get a better deal. Our elected officials are there in part to bring in those businesses, but favoring business wants at the expense of the people’s best interest is not part of the deal. Those incentives should be used for businesses that bring good jobs and an honest long-term commitment to the area. In the case of the Wal-Mart return center, I’m not seeing too much of either.

This post first appeared on the Spartanburg Spark. Click here to view the original.

The Neo-Hooverite Revolution Starts Here

2009-04-09T08:22:00.002-04:00

It's been a scant three weeks since the last time I wrote about Governor Mark Sanford and his neo-Hooverite view on spending South Carolina’s stimulus dollars. At the time, I figured I’d said all there was to say on the matter. But far from going away, the debate featuring Mark Sanford on one side and most of Planet Earth on the other has only intensified in the intervening weeks. So as much as I’d like to ignore these recent rounds of punch and counterpunch, I’d be remiss in my duty as as the Spark's political columnist if I didn’t revisit the issue that has been dominating every political conversation in the state.

At stake in the Governor’s political game is the $700 million in stimulus dollars designated for South Carolina for use in education and public safety spending. Only the Governor can request the money, and until Friday Sanford had been saying that he would not request the money at all unless the state legislature agreed use an equal amount from general funds to pay down the state’s debt. On Friday, Sanford bought himself more time to posture in the national spotlight by agreeing to request the money, but still insisting that in order to use it, the legislature must meet his demands about how to spend it.

The idea of using stimulus money to pay state debt, whether directly or indirectly, has been roundly criticized from all corners including State Education Superintendent Jim Rex who said that without the stimulus money South Carolina School Districts will have to cut 5,200 jobs with 2,700 of those being teaching positions. The state has already slashed $387 million in education spending since last July, and ranks 38th in the nation in per pupil expenditures according to the Children’s Defense Fund. (click here for the PDF of the report.)

The legislature has been equally cold toward Sanford’s idea. State Senate Finance Committee Chairman Hugh Leatherman (R-Florence) said Sanford’s refusal of funds would “create absolute chaos in governmental agencies that perform core missions for the people, and will hurt tens of thousands of South Carolina families at a time when uncertainty and fear over the economy already pervade almost every household.” Leatherman has said that without the stimulus money, he would have to write a budget that cuts public school spending by $161.6 million, college spending by $44.2 million and law enforcement and public safety agency budgets by $39.4 million.

The Governor though, is not entirely without allies in his war against all things spending related. Three members of Spartanburg County’s legislative delegation were part of an event at Morgan Square a couple of weeks ago showing their support of Sanford’s position by literally rolling up their sleeves to fight against the stimulus spending.

Sen. Shane Martin, Sen. Lee Bright, and Rep. Joey Millwood were all present, and well equipped for battle with inapt analogies, non sequiturs, and generally flawed ideological arguments against any attempts at fiscal hole filing. Sen. Shane Martin compared funding education and public safety shortfalls with stimulus money to planning for April’s expenses with December’s Christmas bonus. Martin’s analogy is pretty clever, but it’s also obviously flawed.

Our current state financial situation is actually more like a guy, we’ll call him Bob, who originally has a job that pays just enough to pay his mortgage and other expenses. Then inexplicably one day, Bob decides to quit his job and take a job at Wal-Mart instead. Another person, we’ll call her Jill, takes pity on Bob despite his poor judgment in quitting a job that paid his obligations, and offers to make up the difference. Bob though, perhaps suffering from some sort of mental disorder, tells Jill to keep her dirty socialist money, because he doesn’t want it. That probably wouldn’t work as well as a political sound bite as what Martin Said, but it at least has the advantage of being a suitable analogy.

While Martin may have been clever, his colleague Sen. Lee Bright sounded a slightly different note at the event saying, “The folks that were wanting the stimulus package were talking about how this was going to affect individuals and people and how we were fighting for ideals, and the governor was fighting for ideals, and ideals didn’t feed people. And our argument then, and it will be for the next coming weeks, is that freedom is an ideal. Our way of life that we have now is because of ideals. And we’re going to stand firm.”

Could someone please tell me what the hell Lee Bright is talking about? I would love to write some sort of cutesy sarcastic response to this, but he’s really disarmed me here. I’m genuinely at a loss for words, which in my line of work is no small feat. After reading this quote over and over, all I’m left with is the feeling that he got that last name of his from the “World’s Most Ironic Last Name” store.

Sanford has been pretty busy arguing his position as well, using a lot of folksy language in his criticism of the proposed stimulus spending, and saying that South Carolina is “in a hole” and that our “first order of business is to stop digging.” I’ve got to hand it to the Governor on that one. That sounds really nice to say. It makes everything seem so simple, so black and white. It’s the sort of thing that looks really nice on a bumper sticker.

Of course the truth is that for the last six-plus years we’ve had a Governor who has pushed a reckless fiscal policy composed of tax cuts designed to reduce funding to the state government inevitably followed by posturing speeches about making “tough choices” when it comes to funding things like public education. Sanford has spent his years as Governor playing his own version of “starve the beast.” It’s one of the oldest conservative tricks in the book.

It works like this. First you cut taxes; this will bring about a budget deficit. Then you use the budget deficit as an excuse to cut funding to “evil” government programs like education that happen to be too popular to cut without a good excuse. Later, after the programs you cut funding for begin failing from lack of money, you can push to cut those programs altogether by claiming they aren’t serving their intended function. This is of course true, but only because you cut their funding to such an extent that they couldn’t function as intended. In the end, you get exactly what you wanted in the first place, the end of those evil, socialist, big-government programs.

So when you get right down to it, Governor Sanford is technically correct. We are in a hole, but he’s standing in it with the shovel. Meanwhile, there’s a giant pile of dirt being offered to fill in the hole, and all Sanford can be bothered to do is look up from the bottom of that hole and say “Get the hell out of here with that dirt, you’re interfering with what I’m trying to accomplish here.” For Sanford’s fiscal plans to work, he needs this hole. Where else do you expect him to put our state’s public education system and social safety net after he’s finished killing them?

This post first appeared on the Spartanburg Spark. Click here to view the original.

Unemployment Daze

2009-04-02T13:59:00.002-04:00

It’s about 10AM last Tuesday, sunny and warm outside. I walk out my front door, making sure to lock the door behind me, walk up the sidewalk to the corner, and take a right. Just around another corner and up ahead is my destination and as I turn off the sidewalk, I notice the parking lot is completely full. I tell myself there’s no point turning back now, and walk down a small hill and up to the front door, and with a little sigh, I open the door and get in line at the South Carolina Employment Security Commission Unemployment Office on S. Church Street.

The line stretches all along the wall, wrapping around the perimeter of entire building, eventually making a horseshoe and winding back to the front door where I’m standing. I have no idea how long the wait may be, but from the looks of the people standing just a few yards in front of me, it’s going to be a while. I’m not technically unemployed, but recent serious order slowdowns at the local manufacturing plant where I work have forced temporary weekly layoffs, and those layoffs are the reason for my being here at the unemployment office. Without these unemployment benefits, I don’t make the rent, so line or not, I’m here to stay.

As I’m standing in line, I start to take notice of the people around me. There’s a guy about five feet in front of me with a relatively nice looking suit, and I can’t help but wonder why he’d wear that here. I mean he’s obviously not working, and even if he is he’s not working today. It’s mid-morning on a Tuesday. Maybe he’s just so used to wearing it, that he doesn’t know what else to wear. Maybe he wears it because he thinks it’ll set him apart from everyone else here, make him seem like he wants work more than the rest of us. Maybe though, he wears it just so he can feel a little bit better about getting up in the morning.

The line moves at a laboriously slow pace, and the office is terribly understaffed. I find myself marveling at the irony of an understaffed unemployment office at what must surely be a booming time for them. Logically a person would think that when unemployment is high, the unemployment office would be hiring more help to process all the new claims they’d be getting. It’s not as though the individual workers in the office are slow. They’re actually working pretty efficiently from what I can tell; it’s just that there aren’t enough of them.

In the line, people talk about most anything to pass the time, and predictably the most common topic is the reason we’re all here, jobs or more properly, the lack of jobs. I hear one man telling another that this is the first time he’s filed an unemployment claim in his 25 years of working. One woman turns to tell another woman behind her that she’d applied for a job at the new Wal-Mart returns center set to open next month. She was one of the 3,000 or so that showed up to the job fair last month to apply for the 550 jobs available when the center is up to full capacity in September. The jobs pay $10 to $11 an hour, not exactly big money by anyone’s standards, but that certainly doesn’t seem to stop the woman from hoping that she lands one of those jobs.

The feeling of mass depression in the air is palpable. These people feel defeated, and almost without exception they’re confused and afraid. They’re not sure how this all happened. They’re not looking for a handout; they want work, but work is not there to be found. I can’t help but feel a little guilty for even being here. After all, I still have a job. It may not be steady right now and I try not to think too much about what may happen if things stay this slow at my plant but for the time being, I’m the lucky one in this room. These people would love to have my job, steady or not.

Finally I get to the front of the line, and the lady behind the desk looks over my claim, and directs me to the computer room where I can file for benefits. Once inside, I’m given the sort of basic computer instruction clearly designed for people unfamiliar with a mouse and keyboard. The instructing woman is curt but thorough, guiding the room through a series of questions designed to establish our eligibility and the amount of our weekly benefit check. Once we’re done she runs through the particulars of the benefit system, lets us know what’s expected of us as the gainfully unemployed, or in my case gainfully underemployed, and wishes everyone good luck in the job search. Luck, I say to myself, is not going to help the people in this room.

At just a little past 12:30PM, I finally walk out the unemployment office. As I’m walking out the door, I notice that the line is pretty much exactly the same length as it was when I’d walked in two and a half hours ago and as I walk outside, I can see that the parking lot is every bit as full. I make my way to the sidewalk, and head back home.

Later in the week, I read that the latest unemployment numbers were released. South Carolina went from 10.3% in January to 11% in February with Spartanburg County jumping from 10.7% to 11.5%. As I read the numbers, I thought about the people I was standing in line with earlier in the week, and about how there’s another group of people standing in line there right now looking almost exactly the same. I do my best to try to picture it, and even though I know the faces would be different, I’m pretty sure that the expressions on those faces would be the same.

This post first appeared on the Spartanburg Spark click here to view the original.

Go Galt...Please!

2009-03-31T02:44:00.004-04:00

“The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.”—John Kenneth Galbraith

There’s a whisper of upheaval in the air, mingled with a faint odor of money, emanating from a monochromatic mob issuing a threat. They tell us that if we don’t stop this crazy euro-socialism, and give them their country back, they’ll show us all. They’ll go Galt. No more Mr. and Mrs. (mostly Mr.) nice guy. They’re serious, and we’d better listen because they’ve got a blueprint for how best to punish us if we don’t, and that blueprint’s name is Atlas Shrugged.

There’s been something of a movement brewing among conservative ideologues in the last few months. The idea is, that these horrible tax increases soon to be unleashed by the dreaded Obama administration will be just absolutely unbearable, and in order to combat these evil socialistic schemes, they have to slow America’s economic engine. In short, libertarian leaning conservatives have decided that they must combat the Obama administration’s economic policies by…organizing.

Anyone reading this blog who doesn’t get the irony of that last sentence should stop reading now. The rest of this post probably won’t be very entertaining for you.

The idea, such as it is, comes from Ayn Rand’s dubiously titled propagandistic novel Atlas Shrugged. The novel exists basically as an argument for Rand’s particular brand of libertarianism, which she called objectivism. The main character in the novel is a man named John Galt. I’ll spare the boring details, but Galt gets about a 50 page monologue where he espouses the virtues of selfishness, condemns the nonproductive “moochers” in society and generally, argues that a certain “class”, in this case the productive, creative, and inventive capitalist class, is superior to everyone else. In the story, Galt leads the “productive” members of society to separate from society, and form their own utopia free from the evils of government “looters” and unproductive “moochers”. This guy has been inspiring CEO’s ever since Rand’s clumsy prose brought him into being.

Fast forward to now. Galt is enjoying a sort of renaissance as a symbol for the libertarian right. He’s a rallying point for all that they see as wrong with Obama’s America. So now the idea is that all these individualistic libertarians have to band together (there’s that irony again) and reduce their economic production so as to then reduce the amount they contribute to the evil Obama government.

I should mention that the outrageous tax increase that has these would-be-Galt’s so upset is only on those making more than $250,000, and the increase would only raise those taxes back to Clinton-era levels, but details like that only distract from the heroic narrative of these noble capitalists fighting against the corrupt socialist regime, so disregard this sentence.

As you might imagine, I have a few problems with this whole “going Galt” movement, and the first one is that the underlying philosophy is a load of bunk. I know there are a lot of free-market worshiping libertarians out there who think Ayn Rand was some sort of prophet but seriously, do you really think that individual humans exist in some sort of isolated vacuum where society means nothing? Show me one, just one, uber-rich capitalist who truly gained all that wealth alone.

Everyone builds on the creations of others and traditionally government has been the biggest creator of all. Bill Gates is the wealthiest man in the world. He achieved that wealth by (sort of) creating a computer operating system that has become the de facto worldwide standard for personal computing. So far so good, right? It does beg the question though, where did computers come from?

Well ENIAC was the world’s first general-purpose electronic computer, built between 1943 and 1946 and costing around $500,000. It is the direct ancestor of today’s modern PC, and was developed by the United States Army. Mr. Gates also owes his fortune to the development of the Internet, which made personal computing popular and led to his operating system finding its way into hundreds of millions of homes worldwide. The Internet as we know it today, got it’s start as ARPANET back in the late 60’s. It was funded by the United States Department of Defense.

When these technologies were first invented, they were decades away from being profitable in any way. No company in its right mind would’ve ever sunk the R&D funds into a product that wouldn’t pay off for 30 to 50 years. It just wouldn’t have make good business sense. So in a very real way, Bill Gates owes his fortune to the research that our parents and grandparents paid for. So much for that rugged individualism I guess.

That’s just one example, but I could literally come up with hundreds more. The point of it all is that this romanticized idea of some genius toiling away at a desk only to have the fruit of years of labor plucked away by an evil government on behalf of undeserving freeloaders may make a nice plot for a novel, but it just doesn’t jibe that well with reality. We’ve been socializing the risks associated with capitalism for a long time. Only the profits have remained private.

Frankly, I’m a little tired of hearing the bellyaching of those who have been the biggest beneficiaries of the advantages of our collective America. If they really wanted to go, I’d say let them.

Of course, they don’t want to go. They just want to keep their share of the profits up, and make sure we keep those evil mooching do-nothings off their money pile. They don’t advocate true withdrawal from our political and economic system because deep down, they know exactly which side their bread is buttered on. They understand the inescapable truth that labor creates all wealth, and all the Cato Institutes in the world can’t change that fact. I for one though, would like to issue a challenge to these pseudo-Galts.

If you believe that our society is what you claim it is, then drop out of it. Find yourselves a nice island for sale, and move there. Let’s see those libertarian principals put into practice. I want to see CEO’s plowing fields. I want to see marketing consultants putting in night shifts down at the power plant. I want to see banking executives become plumbers, hedge fund managers become garbage collectors, and conservative media pundits become electricians.

There should be none of this lukewarm “pulling back” from economic production. If you’re going to “go Galt” then at least live up to the namesake. Show us all who's boss. Your utopia is there if you want it bad enough. Come on guys, have a side of courage to go with that big empty plate of convictions.

SCGOP Candidates Are a Comedy Gold Mine

2009-03-26T10:54:00.002-04:00

Generally speaking, I try to avoid squabbles happening within the local Republican Party. I almost never have a side to take, and most of the time it’s not worth it to me to waste my energy following the back-and-forth internal action of a group that I have very little use for. Every so often though, the drama of it all will get the better of me and I’ll be hooked and reeled in by the invariably bizarre soap opera that is the Spartanburg GOP.

I have to admit though, I have a bit of a fetish for all that is GOP and crazy, and right now it’s prime time for loony Republican nonsense. Two of the all-time most entertaining Spartanburg Republican heavyweights, Rick Beltram and Karen Floyd, are running for South Carolina Republican Party Chairman seat. There was a debate last Monday here in Spartanburg between the chairman candidates, Beltram, Floyd, and Columbia-based attorney Kevin Hall. The event was hosted by the Spartanburg County and the Palmetto House Republican Women and moderated by talk radio personality Bob McLain and Spartanburg Herald-Journal reporter Jason Spencer, and it proved to be a great source for popcorn-munching moments for Spartanburg politicos of all stripes.

Our first entertainer/chair candidate is Spartanburg businesswoman and wholly owned subsidiary of Howard Rich, Karen Floyd. Floyd is a former one-term Spartanburg County Council chairwoman who later went on to run for State Superintendent of Education in 2006, narrowly losing to Democrat Jim Rex. She is perhaps best remembered for the $52,500 she received from arch-libertarian anti-public school activist Howard Rich and his associates. Floyd was by far the largest recipient of Rich’s money in 2006, but even with that boost many voters were apparently turned off by the idea of voting for someone running for State Superintendent of Education who’s only real idea was destroying state public education, go figure.

On Monday, Floyd defended her former bankroller’s freedom to spend as much as he damn well pleases buying legislative seats in a state that he doesn’t live in. In response to a question from Jason Spencer about Rich, Floyd Said; “Howie Rich is a philanthropist out of New York City that has an absolute belief in school choice. He found the state of South Carolina a place to infuse his capital, a place to put his money where he thought was important. And again, I honor that.” Oh I see he’s a philanthropist. He’s not some millionaire with a grudge against public schools who sees an opportunity to turn a small conservative-leaning state into his own personal laboratory for school privatization experiments, he’s just a great guy looking to help people out. That money isn’t meant to peddle undue influence. It’s charity; kind of like Oxfam, except not for poor people.

As nutty as Karen Floyd is though, she can’t hope to hold a candle to the undisputed king of Spartanburg political lunacy, Rick Beltram.

Beltram, chairman of the Spartanburg County Republican Party, has had so many scandals in the last couple of years it’s a wonder he’s still around. Whether it’s calling former Presidential Candidate Fred Thompson’s wife a “trophy wife”, or allegedly harassing African American voters in last years election, Beltram’s been a constant source of sometimes humorous, sometimes serious derision. His brand of buffoonish corruption comes across as mix of Richard Nixon and Mayor Adam West from Family Guy.

It was classic Beltram on display Monday. Beltram’s latest scandal was caused by a posting on The Conservatist of an audio recording where Beltram says he won’t do anything to support Jim DeMint’s reelection campaign in 2010 because of DeMint’s endorsement of Kevin Hall for state Republican chair. When asked about the controversy Beltram said; "This is a 15 minute clip that somebody took, apparently on an iPhone, sitting in my office in a confidential meeting. If you listen to it carefully, it was clearly doctored and moved around and so forth.”

There’s a conspiracy afoot. Someone wants to deprive the people of South Carolina the privilege of having Rick Beltram for their state chair, and they’ll stoop to any level to do it. Remember, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not after you. Beltram’s always accusing someone of trying to bring him down; Ron Paul supporters, bloggers, journalists, elderly black ladies, his enemies are always looking for a new angle on him apparently.

Of course, Beltram is as pure as the driven snow in this race right? Well, almost. Last month he was apparently forwarding an e-mail around to some South Carolina bloggers called “Eight Reasons Kevin Hall Should Not Be State GOP Chairman”. At least one source has said that it was Beltram himself who wrote the e-mail calling it “vintage Beltram…right down to its bad grammar”. Beltram has denied writing the e-mail, but not forwarding it. For South Carolina political bloggers, Rick Beltram is like a slot machine that pays out every single time you put a quarter in. He’s a priceless resource, and I will truly be sad when he finally packs it in one day.

Are these candidates the best the SCGOP can do? I don’t know much about Kevin Hall, but if he can’t beat these two clowns he doesn’t deserve to be chairman of a dog kennel. Still though, I’d really like to see one of Spartanburg’s finest sitting in the Republican Party’s big chair down in Columbia. I’m hopping crazy is the new black in the SCGOP, and keeping my fingers crossed for our hometown candidates. In the absence of that though, I’ve got a proposal for the Republican Party here in SC.

As a committed progressive Democratic-leaning voter and blogger, I’d like to make a formal request that the SCGOP amend its rules to allow two statewide party chairs. Having amended their rules I ask the party faithful to please choose both Karen Floyd and Rick Beltram for the positions. You see, I write a political opinion column every week on the Spartanburg Spark, and I could really use the material. I mean seriously, all press is good press right? From my point of view this is a win for both sides, you get to double up on the party message, and I’ll provide you with all the free press you can stand. What do you say?

This post first appeared on the Spartanburg Spark click here to view the original.

"Maggie's Farm" Musings

2009-03-24T01:12:00.002-04:00

“Well I try my very best
To be just like I am
But everybody wants you
To be just like them.”
Bob Dylan - "Maggie’s Farm"

"Maggie’s Farm" may be my favorite Bob Dylan song of all time. That’s difficult to say definitively but still, it may be true. The song tells the story of a mistreated farm worker determined quit, but somehow to me he always sounds like he’s not sure that he can. He says in one line “I got a head full of ideas that are drivin’ me insane”. He has ambition, but he’s not exactly sure what to do with it. I suppose I like the song so much because in a certain way, I empathize with the character.

Circumstances carve deep chasms that must be crossed in order to fulfill personal ambitions and for the life of me, and I’ve never quite figured out how to cross them. Jobs are taken because they pay the bills, compromises are made for the sake of comfort, and before long who you are can seem lost in the shuffle somewhere. Dreams are sacrificed or deferred; it’s really just the way of things.

Balance, Balance, Balance, that’s the key to everything. At least I hope that’s the key to everything, otherwise I’ll have to resign myself to the idea that there is no key. The outlet is just an outlet, and the only thing that keeps you going with it sometimes is the word “maybe”.

In a certain way, it’s a serious privilege to worry about your place in the big everything. Philosophical concerns are a luxury that a lot of people around the world aren’t able to worry about. In Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, self-actualization is at the very top of the pyramid. Concerns like creativity and meaning are things that are considered only after a person is sure that food will be provided tonight. Some would say we’re spoiled for spending so much time on such a seemingly superficial thing as “meaning”.

That doesn’t really change anything for me though. I certainly am privileged, and from the point of view of a great many of the world’s 7 billion people or so, I may even be spoiled. I shouldn’t cry about not realizing my aspirations, I should be thankful that death squads don’t come knocking on my door at night to take me away. It’s a fair point I suppose.

Still though, the thought of not breaking out of this blue-collar hell I’ve created for myself terrifies me. I have absolutely no idea how I’m supposed to do that, and I guess that makes me just like Bob Dylan’s character in “Maggie’s Farm”. I do have a head full of ideas that have driven me insane for as long as I can remember, but I don’t have the slightest idea what to do about it. Still, that doesn’t mean I’m won’t get there.

Billionaire Blues

2009-03-16T02:06:00.001-04:00

Unemployment rates are up. People are losing their homes. Dateline NBC recently did a piece showing families being evicted. The economic situation is as bleak as it’s been in at least a generation. Millions of people are hanging on by a thread, hoping that the economic guillotine doesn’t fall on them next. The question on my mind recently though is; how’s Bill Gates doing?

According to Forbes, it’s been quite a tough year for billionaires. A year ago, there were 1,125 billionaires in the world; today that number is down to 793, and that’s not the worst of it. The total net worth of all those billionaires is down to a paltry $2.4 trillion, which is $2 trillion less than it was last year but wait, there’s still more. Their average net worth is now down to just $3 billion, that’s a 23% decline from last year. If losses like this continue…well I don’t know what will happen, but I bet a lot of rich people are going to be pissed off about it.

Among the biggest losers was former AIG head Maurice “Hank” Greenberg, who saw his fortune shrink from $1.9 billion to less than $100 million today. The humiliation of going from obscenely wealthy to just plain wealthy must be a terrible burden for Mr. Greenberg and while I’m sure he holds his head high, the private moments surely get to him from time to time.

It’s not all bad news though; Bill Gates managed to regain his position as richest person in the world thanks to Warren Buffett’s $25 billion loss for the year. Gates lost $18 billion to bring is fortune down to a more manageable $40 billion. I myself, cant help but wonder what exactly does it mean from a practical standpoint for a person’s fortune to go from $58 billion to $40 billion? No more gold-plated…everything? It doesn’t matter either way though. Just because we’re from different worlds doesn’t mean we’re not suffering equally.

Sure dwelling on the losses of billionaires might seem a bit crass when so many people are scrambling just to get by, but it’s all relative really. Have you ever had to deal with the costs associated with keeping a private jet ready to go 24 hours a day? Have you ever considered how much a person with four or five homes might be paying in upkeep and taxes on that many properties? Think outside the box a little bit. Imagine the frustration of having to give up your personal chef. Sympathize with those who’ve had to downsize their fleets of automobiles, and now are forced to make due with only one luxury car for every day of the week.

If you can’t do that, then maybe you should learn to. After all, these people may never drive past your neighborhoods, but that doesn’t mean they don’t understand loss. Sure they sit in the corporate boardrooms where the decision on whether or not to ax your job is bandied about in the same cold fashion as the latest reports on water usage in the men’s rooms of the corporate headquarters, but you should know they’re suffering too. They’re wondering if they’ll ever get to actually buy that house in Fiji that they’d promised their wives. They’re concerned because now they may not be able to afford to hire Lady GaGa for their daughter’s sweet 16 party. These are trying times for everyone.

It’s so important that we remember that we’re all in this together. Don’t let any of that divisive “class warfare” stuff make it’s way into you head. These people are no different than you; they put their pants on one leg at a time. The differences between your lives are trivial. You vacation down at the shore and so do they, in France. You’ve worked hard to put a roof over your family’s head, and they’ve worked hard for the roofs over their family’s head. You’ve watched the price of healthcare skyrocket, and they’ve watched the price of imported Italian leather skyrocket thanks to the devaluation of the Dollar next to the Euro. It’s a cold, cold world for all concerned.

Remember to support your local billionaire. He (and it almost certainly is a he) is going through some tough times right now, and he needs your understanding. Don’t let petty details like class get in the way of your natural human emotions. The rich are people too. They’re just like you, except for that little part about controlling the world. Come on people; have a heart.

Monsters of Satire

2009-03-10T02:58:00.002-04:00

Satire, n. the use of irony, sarcasm, ridicule, or the like, in exposing, denouncing, or deriding vice, folly, etc.

I’ve had lots of heroes in my life. I think a person needs heroes, as many as possible really. The more a person has, the less that person can be convinced of some unjustifiable originality. There’s a humbling aspect to hero worship, and sometimes it’s a much-needed check on the ego. For example, I’ve tried my hand at satirical essay writing before with mixed results and thanks to Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal, I know what a truly great satirical essay looks like, and can say with better certainty after having read that masterpiece that my attempts have paled in comparison.

Come to think of it, a lot of my heroes have been satirists, and I’d like to think what I’ve taken from them is the importance of honesty. It may sound cynical to some, but the satirists pull back the curtain to reveal an important truth, that all life is a sort of game, and the winners are usually the ones who understand the rules to the game best. How else would they be able to break them so efficiently?

When it comes to satire though, I like mine doled out in small doses. There are some wonderful satirical books out there but for my money, nothing has that transcendent ability to cut right to the core of a subject quite like a good quote. The ability to distill a something down to a bite sized piece is something our culture has become quite good at. Politicians talk in sound bites, and 24 hour news networks have talking heads shouting prearranged talking points back and forth at each other, but that’s not what I’m talking about. A good quote isn’t the same as a sound bite. The best ones have a kind of timelessness to them that most things in our disposable media-hype-driven society lack.

There used to be a great tradition of satirical quotes here in America. Wonderful tidbits of irony, derision, and intelligent mockery used to add a certain savor to our cultural conversation. Some of them have become part of the American lexicon, and are often used by people either unwilling or unable to place them in their proper context. When a writer or commentator uses them in a meaningful and thoughtful way though, their original bite comes through even decades or centuries after they were originally written. Moments like that are some of the biggest reasons I read at all.

For me, there are two titans of satire in American history, Mark Twain and Ambrose Bierce. Mark Twain, along with writing one of the greatest novels in the history of literature, is synonymous with American satire. He has to be one of the most quoted Americans who ever lived, and his gift for biting satirical prose was legendary.

Twain has a ton of well-known quotes like; “It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.” Nice, but he has better like; “Man is the only Patriot. He sets himself apart in his own country, under his own flag, and sneers at the other nations, and keeps multitudinous uniformed assassins on hand at heavy expense to grab slices of other people's countries, and keep them from grabbing slices of his. And in the intervals between campaigns he washes the blood off his hands and works for ‘the universal brotherhood of man’- with his mouth.” Now that’s a quote with some meat on it.

My personal favorite master of satire though has to be Ambrose Bierce. “Bitter Bierce” as he was nicknamed wrote what I consider the greatest piece of satirical literature ever, The Devil’s Dictionary. First published in 1911, it’s a book filled with alternate definitions of words with the intention of lampooning practically everything in American society. A few of my favorites include; “Corporation, n. An ingenious device for securing individual profit without individual responsibility.” and “Pray, v. To ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy.”

What I especially like about Bierce is that he had no qualms about ridiculing himself in the same manner. In The Devil’s Dictionary, he defined an “egoist” as, “A person of low taste, more interested in himself than in me.” A good satirist should never let what is probably an already too healthy self-esteem get in the way of the ultimate literary goal of satire, truth. Bierce taught me that.

I don’t want to leave anybody with the impression that all the great satire of the world is a thing of the past. In fact, I think we may be experiencing something of a satire renaissance even in the midst of the dumbing down of America. People like Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert give me hope that while the rest of the world may be circling the drain, at least there are a couple of people who see it and have enough courage to give it too us straight and even make us laugh about it, if only to keep from crying.

Stewart and Colbert may not have the rhetorical flourishes of a Twain or a Bierce and I wonder if anything they’ve done will stand the test of time the same way as the great satirists before them. They do have what matters though, a nice firm bead on where the truth is and how absurd some of the lies are. I’ve heard criticisms from some that Steward and Colbert encourage apathy in our political processes, but I can’t say that I buy it. Poking fun at the world with no real moral point to make would be breeding apathy. Stewart and Colbert have an obvious moral center that forms the core of what they do each night on their respective shows. Behind each joke, there is a point to be made, and having something important to say is the whole meaning of satire.

I figured I’d wrap all this up with a little video of our modern Twain doing what he does best, taking someone who deserves it out to the woodshed.

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

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10 Reasons Progressives Should Love Rush Limbaugh

2009-03-02T03:38:00.002-05:00

Rush Limbaugh is the leader of the Republican Party. That feels good to me. In fact, that feels very good to me. The GOP, drifting aimlessly since November, has gotten its grove back by embracing the concept of “no”. Basically it goes like this, whatever President Obama is for, they’re against, and not just against, they’re so against it that they can’t even stand to be in the same room as it. They’re against the evil Obama agenda infinity plus a billion. If you thought the Republican Party was conservative under George W. Bush, just wait till you see the new and improved Limbaugh GOP. It just so happens though, that I’ve got a list of reasons why that’s cause for celebration among us progressives, and I certainly don’t mind sharing.

1. Rush Limbaugh is an absolute wack-job.

This seems like such a no-brainer, but I suppose I’ll explain for those of you who aren’t really on the up and up on the right’s favorite mouthpiece. The list of things Limbaugh has said over the years proving himself to be unhinged is too long for this humble blog post, but on the short list would be; accusing Michael J. Fox of exaggerating the effects of his Parkinson’s disease for political ads supporting stem-cell research, he called soldiers opposed to the war in Iraq “phony soldiers”, and he compared the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison to a Skull and Bones initiation. I could go on with examples like this, but surely you get the point.

2. Rush Limbaugh is a hypocrite.

On his syndicated radio show, Limbaugh has said that drug users should be behind bars. However, when the story broke about his own drug addiction in 2003, Limbaugh fought tooth and nail to prevent himself from being sent away for doctor shopping. Seems like he should have donned the orange jumpsuit and taken that one just for the sake of consistency.

3. Rush Limbaugh is a racist.

His show was the first to play the song “Barack the Magic Negro”, he once told a black caller to “Take that bone out of your nose and call me back.”, and he also once said; “The NAACP should have riot rehearsal. They should get a liquor store and practice robberies.” Really, I’ve got a million of these too, and this is too easy. You got the point right?

4. Rush Limbaugh is unpopular.

I know I know, Rush has 14 million listeners a week right? The thing is though, the country has 300 million people in it, and most of them don’t care much for Rush Limbaugh. In a Rasmussen poll from 2007, Limbaugh had an unfavorable rating of 62% and a favorable rating of only 33%, by far the worst rating of any media figure included in the poll. In case you were wondering, President Obama currently has a 71% approval rating.

5. Rush Limbaugh is too stupid/proud to admit fault.

In his recent CPAC speech, Limbaugh repeated his line about hoping President Obama fails. Apparently, the tongue-lashing he got from members of his own party after the last time he said that didn’t get through all those layers of self-love that Rush wraps himself in. Either that, or he just didn’t care what they had to say. Whichever reason it was, it’s another reason for progressives everywhere to love him.

6. Rush Limbaugh is an embarrassment to mainstream Republicans

Every time he opens his mouth and says something outrageous, Republican lawmakers, who actually have to worry about pesky things like elections run for cover. During the 2008 presidential campaign, John McCain found himself in the difficult position of having to condemn Limbaugh over the “phony soldiers” comment. I’m sure it was quite the conundrum for Senator McCain, condemn Rush and lose the kook base of the party or stand by him and lose the other 70% of the country. It was a no-win situation for McCain, and it’s a no-win situation for any Republican lawmaker unfortunate enough to find themselves answering questions about whatever crazy thing Rush spouted off with that day.

7. Rush Limbaugh is very influential in conservative circles.

On the surface, this may not seem like a reason to celebrate, but when you think about how nuts Limbaugh truly is, it becomes more clear. When someone in the GOP steps out of line, and by stepping out of line I mean disagreeing with Limbaugh, he will call them out for it. He invariably goes after moderates, and as a conservative opinion maker, Limbaugh shrinks the ideological tent under which the Republican Party sits. Rush doesn’t grow the party, he shrinks it.

8. Rush Limbaugh is at his looniest when a Democrat is in the White House.

For a while there, Rush seemed to have lost his mojo. I mean sure he’d say something completely asinine, and get himself mentioned in the mainstream news every once and a while, but nothing can compare to the Clinton years when Limbaugh was everywhere. Hate is Limbaugh’s game, and hating is much easier to pull off when the person or thing you hate has power over you. You get to be the patriot fighting the good fight against the evil big government machine. Back when Bush was in office, he was stuck making nuanced arguments to disgruntled right-wing radicals about why Bush was still worth supporting. President Obama’s election has unleashed the crazy, and now we get to watch the fun.

9. Rush Limbaugh is an entertainer who fancies himself an intellectual leader.

The reason Limbaugh says half the ridiculous things he says is because it gets a better response from his listeners than saying the same thing in a less inflammatory way. Politicians are constantly wary of controversy, but Limbaugh actively courts it. This would be fine except that Limbaugh imagines himself as some sort of conservative leader so while controversy pays the bills, Limbaugh’s ego demands respect as well. So he goes to CPAC, doubles down on the Obama hatred, and watches while the Republican Party squirms and his core audience of self-proclaimed “dittoheads” cheers.

10. Rush Limbaugh is the conscience of the Republican Party.

All those other reasons lead up to this one perfect fact. Rush Limbaugh is completely unambiguous in what he believes, he articulates it quite clearly for anyone willing to listen, and right now he is the ideological fuel for the GOP engine. This is excellent news.

To most Americans, Rush Limbaugh is an extremist. His views are not the views of the overwhelming majority of the population here in the United States, and the fact that his radical brand of coservatisism is becoming synonymous with mainstream Republicanism spells doom for the party at the national level. Sure they’ll still hold seats in conservative strongholds, but if he Republican Party wants to find its way toward regional/opposition party obscurity, Rush Limbaugh is holding the road map for them, and apparently they’re following his directions.

Fair and Balanced

2009-02-23T02:02:00.003-05:00

A license permits broadcasting, but the licensee has no constitutional right to be the one who holds the license or to monopolize a...frequency to the exclusion of his fellow citizens. There is nothing in the First Amendment which prevents the Government from requiring a licensee to share his frequency with others.... It is the right of the viewers and listeners, not the right of the broadcasters, which is paramount.

— U.S. Supreme Court, upholding the constitutionality of the Fairness Doctrine in Red Lion Broadcasting Co. v. FCC, 1969.

The Fairness Doctrine; no phrase in the English language strikes more fear into the hearts of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Michael Savage, Mike Gallagher, and the rest of the right-wing talk radio world than that phrase. Ever since the election of President Obama, the right-wing blogosphere and conservative talk radio have been all up in arms about the possibility that the new Democratic administration might try to balance the deafening screech of extremist right wing propaganda coming from pretty much every talk station on the AM dial with (gasp) views from the other side of the political spectrum.

Chances are, this is just the latest stunt to get their “dittohead” listeners all riled up over the chance that their precious fiefdom might be under attack by the evil liberals looking to silence the real American patriots like Rush. President Obama himself has said he has no interest in reinstating the Fairness Doctrine, but that doesn’t really matter to the demagogues on right-wing radio. Since when has someone like Rush Limbaugh let a little thing like facts get in the way of a good outrage?

Limbaugh himself wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal on Friday calling on President Obama to reject “Government-imposed censorship disguised as ‘fairness’ and ‘balance’”. It’s a nice thought, except that we’re not talking about censorship, we’re talking about what’s the proper use of the public airwaves.

The Fairness Doctrine was first adopted by the FCC as a rule in 1949, and rather than limit free speech as Mr. Limbaugh states, it actually facilitated a larger free exchange of ideas. It was used by groups of all political stripes to present their side of a political argument. If there was a ballot measure, both sides were given equal time to argue their side of the issue at hand. If a group wants to argue an issue on radio or broadcast television today, they’d better make sure they can buy the time first. This causes many instances where the side with the most money is able to completely drown out the opposing view by the sheer power of the dollar.

Contrary to what Mr. Limbaugh and his cohorts would have us believe, the rule never applied to individual shows, and no one would or could force a show, even one as vile as Rush’s, to offer equal time to an opponent. What the Fairness Doctrine would do is force the station carrying Rush to balance his conservatism with an opposing view, and while this at first may seem like unwarranted government meddling, it helps to remember the special role that broadcast radio and television have in our society.

From the beginning of radio, it was an obvious technological fact that there were a limited number of frequencies available in the broadcast spectrum. We couldn’t have allowed just anyone with a radio transmitter to broadcast on whatever frequency they chose. The results would’ve been chaotic, with stations attempting to monopolize frequencies, and all sorts of other nonsense. The scarcity of the available frequencies led to the creation of a licensing system whereby the licensee would agree to certain terms as a condition of being issued a license to broadcast on a particular frequency. Since there’s a scarcity of available frequencies, and those frequencies technically belonged to the public, it was also decided that one of the conditions for broadcasting was that the broadcaster had to provide for the public good in a number of different ways. One of those ways was to ensure that equal time was presented to opposing views in politically controversial issues.

Broadcasting isn’t like print or the Internet. To put out one’s views in print is a relatively easy task, and in fact before the age of radio, the number of political newspapers and magazines was staggering. Periodicals advocating everything from communism to Nazi-style fascism had wide readerships, and in general, there was an opposing view readily available for practically anything a person chose to read. The invention of radio, and later television, made all other forms of presenting a message seem quaint by comparison, and the Fairness Doctrine was put in place to make sure that no single interest was able to monopolize this powerful and scarce new medium. When questions about the Fairness Doctrine were posed, Supreme Court Justice Byron White wrote: “There is no sanctuary in the First Amendment for unlimited private censorship operating in a medium not open to all.”

In truth, the Internet may well be on its way to making questions about the Fairness Doctrine irrelevant. As it stands, more and more people, particularly younger people, are getting their news and information from the web, and unlike radio or broadcast television, anyone willing to put up a blog or issues-oriented website can have a voice with the potential to reach millions. In another decade or two, radio and television may well have gone the way of the dinosaur when it comes to how people relate to their information.

For the time being though, talk radio has millions of listeners getting all right-wing all the time, and no group should monopolize the flow of ideas on the public airwaves. The return of the Fairness Doctrine would ensure that those who would still choose the old broadcast medium for their information would have a chance to hear all sides of the story. Unlike the Internet, where information flows more freely from individual to individual, radio and television deliver their information from the top down, and if all you’ve got is one point of view on an issue coming over your airwaves, you’ll never even have the chance to hear the other side, even if one day you decided you wanted to. That may be the America that Rush Limbaugh wants, but it’s not the one we should have.

The Nero Award for Decisive Inaction

2009-02-16T02:24:00.002-05:00

In the year 64 CE, there was a great fire in the city of Rome. Rumor has it that Nero, Rome’s Emperor at the time, played the fiddle while the city burned to the ground. The story is almost certainly false, a rumor spread by Nero’s enemies and in any event, it wouldn’t have been a fiddle anyway. The fiddle hadn’t been invented yet.

The story though, works well as a metaphor for doing something irrelevant when a crisis erupts, and of being so detached from the reality of a situation that it defies reason. It’s in that spirit that I’d like to officially create an award here at Flying Oskar, the Nero Award. From time to time, I’ll select a leader whose inaction in the face of catastrophe, and whose stalwart refusal to see circumstances for what they actually are, demand special commendation.

With that being said, it is my honor to present the first ever Nero Award for Decisive Inaction to South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford.

Governor Sanford is no stranger to inaction. He regularly voices his disbelief in government’s ability to do practically anything at all, which may strike some as an odd position for a person who’s made a career in government, but Governor Sanford feels it’s his sacred duty to protect the office of Governor from being tainted by the evils of governing. Consequently, he spends his days in government not doing much except complaining when other people attempt to govern.

As much as Governor Sanford is opposed to doing anything in good times, he’s even more opposed to doing something in bad times. In fact, during bad times Governor Sanford believes that we should do less. What’s the solution to our current economic woes? Tax cuts with a side of more tax cuts. How can we create more jobs? Tax cuts, and if that doesn’t work we’ll try more tax cuts. It’s as if Sanford is a giant See N’ Say, and every time you point the arrow towards economics and pull the handle you hear a recorded voice saying “The governor says, ‘tax cuts’”.

In recent weeks, Sanford has been making headlines outside the state for his opposition to President Obama’s economic stimulus bill. Governor Sanford is absolutely outraged that anyone outside of the business world would have the audacity to try to do anything about a problem created by the business world. The idea of government actually doing something active is just repugnant to Sanford. All that pesky stuff about New Deal spending being responsible for cutting jobless rates and lifting us out of the Great Depression is just a load of socialist propaganda. The real solution is simple; tax cuts. Weren’t you paying attention earlier?

Never mind that most economists believe that a large economic stimulus will actually help pull us out of this free market mess. They’re all wrong. Sure the Republican Party has had nearly a decade to implement their economic policies with disastrous results, but that’s because they weren’t pure enough. Their economic theories were too nuanced. What they needed was simple; tax cuts. I know they passed some, but it wasn’t enough. If only those tax cuts had been deeper we’d have never gotten into this mess. The hands-off approach to economic governance that preceded this crisis simply wasn’t hands-off enough.

The stimulus bill is an affront to all that Governor Sanford holds dear. It has an extension of unemployment benefits and an increase of $25 for each unemployment check mailed out. It has expansions of the Earned Income Tax Credit and Child Tax Credit along with a new refundable tax credit for lower income workers designed to keep an additional 2 million people from falling into poverty. It includes increases in the Pell Grant for low-income students. $39 billion of the $54 billion going to states must be used for K-12 education expenses to help prevent an estimated 600,000 teachers from losing their jobs. $90 billion is to be spent on infrastructure, and another $42 billion on energy related investments. It’s an ugly big government spending spree, and what’s worse is that it’s going to the wrong sorts of people. As Governor Sanford will tell you, tax cuts are the answer, and spending money on the poor who don’t even pay taxes is just insane.

Governor Sanford also knows that the government can’t create jobs (except for maybe his), and that only business can do that. Besides even if it did create the number of jobs that President Obama claimed, we’d be spending $223,000 per job created according to our governing sage. That’s as good an example of wasteful government spending as you’re going to get right? It doesn’t matter that this number has been widely demonstrated to be false, and that the actual number is somewhere around $60,000 per job. Everybody knows those numbers were cooked up by free-market-hating-pinko-big-government-loving-liberals. Governor Sanford is wise enough to know that you just can’t trust those people.

Governor Sanford is a fine conservative example to us all. It’s a dog-eat-dog world out there. You’ve got to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps, and stop looking for that government handout. If you lose your job and don’t have the proper savings to make it through till you can find another one, that’s not the government’s business. In fact, absolutely nothing in your economic life should involve the government. If hard times mean living out on the street for a while, well let that be a lesson to you to not let it happen again.

Until the economy comes back, we’re just going to have to suffer together. Some of us will lose our summer home at the beach while others will fall completely off the economic ladder, but it’s all relative right? Governor Sanford didn’t start this fire, and he’ll be damned if he’s going to let some big-government liberal tell him to put it out. The fiddle is on his shoulder, the bow is out, and Governor Sanford is playing his favorite song. The rest of us are left just hoping someone else will put out this fire.

Michael Phelps vs. Sheriff Leon Lott

2009-02-09T02:40:00.002-05:00

So, have you heard any interesting stories about Olympic Gold Medal winning, record-breaking swimmers lately? Normally I try to stay away from celebrity gossip, and when I first heard that Michael Phelps had his picture taken while he was smoking weed from a bong at some college party in Columbia by some nefarious opportunist that later sold the picture to a British tabloid, I rolled my eyes a little and went about my business. It’s just weed. Why would anyone under the age of 50 in 2009 really have a problem with anyone smoking weed? So I have to be honest and say that I was a little surprised to find that it became such a big media story. I mean seriously think about it, do you really believe that the fact that Michael Phelps smoked marijuana is a big deal?

My interest in the Phelps thing didn’t get piqued until Tuesday, when it was reported that Richland County Sheriff Leon Lott said that he intended to investigate the incident to see what charges could be filed against Phelps. Now, I’m pretty sure that Buford Pusser has been dead for about 35 years or so but for whatever reason, every time some famous person jaywalks down here there will inevitably be some county sheriff complete with Southern drawl, mirrored sunglasses, and tough-on-crime clichés talking to the media about pressing charges and their own firm conviction that “no one is above the law”. Sheriff Lott is just the latest in a long line of “no exceptions” tough guy sheriffs to come along, and his threats to charge Michael Phelps are as empty as his head.

For starters, every legal expert questioned about the possibility of charging Phelps has accused Sheriff Lott of grandstanding or worse, including one particularly biting opinion from the head of the Richland County Public Defender’s office Doug Strickland who said that in his 21 years as a public defender, he couldn’t remember a single case where someone was charged with drug possession based on photographic evidence and a non-specific admission of wrongdoing. In fact, after searching the Internet for hours (more or less), I was only able to find one douche-bag willing to agree with Sheriff Lott that Michael Phelps should be charged. That’s got to put a bit of a damper on things right?

Well yes and no. You see, I’m of the opinion that Sheriff Lott’s real motivation here was to get his name in the papers and keep those good old Richland County voters reminded that he won’t tolerate crime in his county, especially that evil drug crime. The man has made his career by being tough on drugs apparently, and last year he even got his department a tank (seriously) to prove it. So, by God, if the only way to keep law and order in Richland County is to bring Michael Phelps in, charge him with misdemeanor possession of marijuana, and have him pay a $500 dollar fine, then that’s what the good sheriff will do. Even if the best legal minds in South Carolina say he can’t.

Still though, I find myself wondering what the justification for charging Michael Phelps could possibly be. I’d just love to hear the inner monologue of someone who actually supports Sheriff Lott’s idea of charging Phelps. My bet is it would go something like this:

We simply can’t allow this role model’s behavior to go unpunished. I mean what if the children saw that Michael Phelps smoked marijuana and got away with it. They’ll end up smoking marijuana themselves, and never amount to anything. Imagine if our children grow up to think they could occasionally smoking marijuana and still be 14 time gold medalists with multiple world records. Everyone knows that’s preposterous, and no one who ever smokes weed amounts to anything, even though 42.4% of Americans admit to having smoked marijuana. The demon weed wreaks havoc on our communities, destroys homes, and ruins lives. The thought that some smug Olympic swimmer could come down here, flaunt his devil-may-care attitude on something as serious as marijuana, and get away with it just burns me up, and Sheriff Lott is just the man to take him down a peg and set things right again.

Okay, I might have taken a little creative license with that one, but honestly I’ve heard some of these arguments from people before, and I’m always left with the feeling that they’re the same sort of people who made the movie Reefer Madness. If I’m wrong about this, and there is some logical argument for prosecuting Michael Phelps for marijuana possession, please feel free to comment and tell me what it is, because I’m completely clueless.

Eventually, this whole circus will die down. Michael Phelps will get off completely free from the wrath of Sheriff Lott whether the sheriff or the voters in Richland County like it or not, and life will go on. People love celebrity gossip, politicians love to grandstand, and the media loves to sell ads, everyone wins. This sort of story always grabs the headlines and captivates the people, for a while anyway. I’m not so sure that it’s a good thing that it does, but I’m completely certain that it always will.

The Big Rock Show

2009-02-02T03:40:00.002-05:00

This blog was supposed to be different. I was supposed to be writing about healthcare this week. In fact, last week I committed myself to writing a series of four blogs about issues that I’d like to see tackled during the four years of President Obama’s term. Well, I should’ve learned my lesson about trying to commit to a series of blogs the last time I tried it back with my “Modern South” series. It’s not really interesting for me to write something in a blog unless I can put it in some kind of current context, and while last weeks blog about the economic crisis was certainly topical, writing about other issues before the battle over those issues has begun seems a little like putting the cart before the horse. It’s a lesson I’m going to try to take to heart by saying “no more blog series”.

That’s not to say that I won’t write a blog on healthcare at some point in the future or even to say that I won’t write another “Modern South” blog, but I can promise that when I do write one of those blogs, it will be because they are current and relevant to something going on in the world, and not just the self-important ramblings of some guy who doesn’t have enough real insight into those topics to just spout off about them without some context. So the spirit of change, and in honor of my new topical commitment, I want to make this blog about the most important thing I can possibly think of; the Drive-By Truckers show I saw at the Orange Peel in Asheville on Friday.

It’s not so much the band, but it’s more the concert experience that I want to write about. I’ve been to lots of shows over the years, and they’re all different in one way or another, but the truly special bands out there always have that thing, that indescribable “it” quality that sets them apart from other acts out there. It’s really difficult to explain, and it’s not just limited to bands that I’m a fan of. I recognize it in bands that I don’t care for as well. There are certain bands that are able to inspire such loyalty in their fans, that it borders on a kind of religious devotion. Drive-By Truckers is that kind of band. They’re the sort of band where you go to the show, and if you brave the front of the stage where the “hardcore” all congregate, you’ll find a group of strangers standing body to body singing lyrics so loudly that the band is sometimes drowned out.

There is a palpable and genuine camaraderie among the hardcore at a Truckers show, and strangers who’ve never met before find themselves with their arms around each other lost in the revelry of shared experience. A sort of temporary community develops around the show itself, and every sort of character can be found. There are the dancers, who are moved quite literally by the music, and are generally given a wide enough berth to do whatever it is that the spirit is telling them to do. There’s the touchy feely drunk guy, a rather happy character who every so often will grab someone near him and say something like; “man this shit is great”. There’s the larger than life fan. This person has usually done something so hardcore that the rest of the group is left to stand in awe of the person’s commitment to the band. Also on occasion, there’s the guy who’s dead set on ruining it for everyone by refusing to play nice with the rest of the group. This guy is usually quite drunk, and is either belligerent in wanting to get in front of you even though this is clearly impossible, or is so out of it that he starts running into and/or spilling beer on everyone near him. Normally, the group will respond by punishing this person in the oldest possible way, shunning and banishment. Pretty much everyone else, fits somewhere between these archetypes.

The show on Friday was one for the ages. The Truckers were on and absolutely everyone in the Orange Peel knew it. For it’s part, the Orange Peel is an awesome venue. It was chosen as one of the top 5 rock clubs in the country by Rolling Stone last year. National acts go out of their way to play there, and the Orange Peel’s crowds are legendary for their appreciation of great music. When you have a venue like that coupled with a band with a loyal following like Drive-By Truckers, you have a recipe for a truly momentous show.

From the moment the band walked out on stage, you could feel an impending eruption of pent up energy, and when Patterson Hood dedicated the first song to recently deceased Lynyrd Skynyrd pianist Billy Powell and launched into the opening chords of “Life in the Factory”, the crowd erupted in a fit of euphoric release. The song choice was especially significant because it was about Lynyrd Skynyrd’s early beginnings as a garage band in Jacksonville, Florida. From there, the band launched into a set of 23 songs that left everyone in the Orange Peel in awe of what they were all collectively a part of.

For my part, I was there with my girlfriend and brother-in-law, and we were about 10 feet from the front of the stage and slightly to the right, but for the duration of the show, we were part of something that felt much larger. There was the girl behind us, a friendly thin-framed woman about 30 or so from Anderson who was there with her brother and his wife. She struck up a conversation with us immediately, and at one point during the show said we should all hang out sometime because she was in Spartanburg quite a bit, and needed some cool people there to hang out with. There were the two girls beside us, one a full-figured blond and the other a soccer-mom looking brunette, who said they used to live in Athens, and insisted that to really see a Truckers show, you had to see them at the 40 Watt. The blond claimed that she used to cut Patterson Hood’s hair. She was hardcore. There was the guy behind us, a large guy who always seemed to have two beers in his hands and at one point, rolled up his sleeve to show us a Drive-By-Truckers tattoo on his forearm. He was hardcore too. I thought about trying to impress them by telling them we had seen the last show they’d done with former guitarist Jason Isbell at the Music Farm in Charleston, but I didn’t exactly want to get into a pissing contest with people who were obviously more committed than me.

The show was an exercise in humanity. For a fleetingly short time, people were genuinely good to each other. When someone wanted to take a picture, people would move out of the way. When someone accidentally bumped into or spilled beer on someone, the slight was almost instantly forgotten. We even protected each other. There was a guy standing near us wearing a cool looking hat that looked like the one Paul “Bear” Bryant used to wear except that it wasn’t red checkered, he was pretty drunk and getting a little too handsy with our friend the girl from Anderson, so I told her to get in front of us so that we could act as a barrier between her and the groper. It was a shining example of people helping people, if only in miniature. For a short time, we had built a self-contained, self-regulating, harmonious commune based on our mutual love for Drive-By-Truckers. In a certain way, we’d made a micro-utopia.

Once it was all over, the house lights went up, and we all began to slowly drift our separate ways. Whatever brand of magic it was that had held us together had dissipated, and now the real world was making itself known again. As we began to feel our throats become sore from the yelling and singing, and the jubilation we’d all felt slowly gave way to exhaustion, we began the slow march back to the car. We passed the girl from Anderson when we walked outside. She said hey and smiled, but it was the awkward sort of acknowledgement that could only come from a person who’d shared an experience with someone so different from everyday life, that it couldn’t be immediately related in the real world. It was clear now, that the Truckers had brought us together in the same way that a charismatic preacher brings together his flock, and now that our preachers were gone we were all strangers again. Still though, we had all shared an honest moment with each other, and though we may not have known what to do with that moment here, out in the world, the moment happened anyway, and while the beauty we’d shared might have been gone, still it couldn’t be dismissed.

Hopes for a New Day: Part I

2009-01-26T04:20:00.002-05:00

January 20, 2009, unless you’re an unreconstructed racist, you’d have to admit the significance of that date. Barack Obama being elected the first African American President of the United States represents a milestone that I personally thought wouldn’t be broken at least until I was an old man, and maybe not even then. Regardless of whether you agree with his politics or not, the meaning of this moment in history can’t be denied. When you consider that since Reconstruction, there have only been three African American state governors, and four African American U.S. Senators (counting Barack Obama’s recently appointed successor Roland Burris), it was apparent that it was exceedingly difficult for an African American to win a statewide race let alone a national one.

I remember the first time I’d ever heard of Barack Obama. I was watching the 2004 Democratic National Convention, and he was the keynote speaker. I was taken aback by his oratorical skills, and was impressed with his personal story and his message. I remember telling one of my friends after watching his speech, that I may have just seen the first black president, “Just give the country about 16 years or so to warm up to the idea”, I said. Clearly I was selling the man, and the country, short.

Now that the Inauguration is over and the business of governing has begun, there comes the question of what should the new president do. I didn’t write about or criticize Obama before he took office, because I didn’t believe there was very much you could concretely pin down one way or another about a man who hadn’t even taken the oath of office yet. I purposefully avoided talking about any of his cabinet choices, though a couple like Timothy Geithner as Treasury Secretary and Lawrence Summers as directory of the White House National Economic Council seriously bothered me, because I wasn’t sure how much you could truly divine from cabinet selections.

It really depends on the President himself. If he’s a man with his own ideas simply seeking differing opinions to keep him on his toes while he makes the decisions, that’s one thing, but if he’s like our beloved outgoing President, who was incapable of making any decisions on his own and allowed Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rove, and the rest to run the country in his stead (very Reaganesque of him), we might be in trouble. I’m of the opinion that President Obama is more of the first type, and that has allowed me to be somewhat more at ease with his cabinet choices.

Happily, Obama’s first week on the job has given me more confidence in him than some of his cabinet choices. It was quite a week for the newly inaugurated President as he banned all Executive Branch personnel from accepting money or gifts from lobbyists or holding jobs as lobbyists for two years prior to or following their service, signed an Executive Order closing the prison at Guantanamo Bay within one year, banned torture and ordered all interrogations to follow the Army Field Manual, and he rescinded the so-called “Mexico City Policy” which prevented any non-governmental organization receiving federal funding from performing or promoting abortion services in other countries. Not a bad week for a new guy on the job

So now that it’s time to look forward to the coming term, I’ve decided to write a series of blogs devoted to the top four things that I’d like to see in the next four years of the President Obama administration. I want to devote an entire blog to each one of them, because in our concise, black and white, sound bite obsessed world, too often complex issues are broken down into talking points, and any real discussion or debate gets thrown out the window in favor of opposing teams throwing truths, half-truths, and outright lies at each other in the hopes of winning some fictitious “battle of ideas”. It’s with this in mind, that I want to devote my first blog to a subject that has its battle lines already firmly drawn; the economy

I’m not going to pretend that I know as much about the complex workings of the largest economy in the history of the world as the experts who’ve devoted their entire professional lives to the study of it, but I’m not sure that anyone can truly say what would be the best course of action to get us out of this particular mess. Suggestions come from all quarters, with conservatives arguing that government just needs to get out of the way and let the markets correct themselves, and liberals (myself among them) arguing that allowing the financial giants to operate as free and unfettered as a bull in a china shop created the problem in the first place. It’s a classic argument whose time may have come and gone, because the free market has shown us once again why it can’t be left unregulated. Comparisons to the Great Depression can hardly be totally relevant as economic realities today are far different from the 1930’s, but lack of any controls on the excesses of capitalism brought us that particular national crisis, and that same lack of controls, albeit in a slightly different form, brought us this one.

Truthfully, I’m as uncertain what the absolute best course of action is right now as anyone else is. For his part, President Obama’s stimulus plan consists of about 60% in direct spending and 40% in targeted tax cuts and credits. The plan itself has been criticized on all sides, most notably by Nobel Laureate economist Paul Krugman, who says that the plan falls well short of what’s actually needed to get the economy moving again. Krugman argues that direct fiscal stimulus in the form of infrastructure investment will create a “multiplier effect” and stimulate consumer spending by providing workers with better and steadier wages. In effect Professor Krugman is arguing for a massive public works program similar to the old WPA during FDR’s administration. Krugman further argues that tax cuts, especially those targeted at businesses, will have little stimulating effect as most business aren’t going to hire more people during an economic downturn just to get a relatively small tax credit. In economic crises, businesses hunker down even more than workers and consumers do.

If Krugman is right, Obama’s stimulus plan is doomed to failure. It will do some things, but will not be enough to truly move the economy forward. The plan itself is a little bit of everything tax cuts for middle class families and below, tax credits for businesses to create jobs, and a litany of direct infrastructure investments from greening federal buildings to building bridges, and I suspect that there’s a certain idea behind that approach. As I said before, no one really knows what’s going to work and what isn’t. We’re in totally new territory here, and whoever turns out to be right will look like a genius, but that person will more than likely be just lucky. I tend to lean more in the direction of Paul Krugman not just because I believe that providing work for American workers should be a priority in any economic stimulus, but because I believe that any economic relief that comes should focus more on the people in danger of losing their livelihood than on those whose only danger is losing the summer home or the private jet.

There are some who say the real root of our economic woes is the fact that we have become the world’s financier, and we don’t really make things anymore. Trade policy is inexorably tied to the economy, and decades of so-called “free trade” have literally decimated our manufacturing sector. As a person employed in the remnants of that once proud sector of our economy, I’m particularly dismayed by this. The manufacturing sector was the source of the post war middle class boom, and it’s unraveling may have made its effect known in our current economic crisis. As Harley Shaiken, a labor economist at UC Berkeley put it; “The most important model to roll off the Detroit assembly lines in the 20th century was the middle class for blue-collar workers”.

The world has certainly changed since then and those jobs will never come back but politicians, including Obama, can talk until they’re blue in the face about educating people for the new jobs in our changing economy, but behind that promise lies a dark secret. There aren’t enough of those jobs to cover the huge numbers displaced by the loss of manufacturing, and the people who don’t get those jobs will face a service economy paying wages up to two-thirds less than their old jobs paid them. Not everyone can work in IT, and President Obama is certainly smart enough to know that. Those people deserve good paying jobs that feed their families and keep their dreams of middle class stability alive. President Obama advocates raising the minimum wage to $9.50 by 2011 and that’s a good first step, but it’ll take more than a minimum wage increase and a green jobs initiative to bring us a new era of prosperity like that of our parents and grandparents.

In the end, the problems with the economy are certain to linger for the majority of Obama’s first term and even after that, there are still significant long-term systemic problems with the underpinnings of our economy. My hope is that when President Obama considers an economic policy, his first concern is for how it affects the lives of the factory workers, store clerks, short-order cooks, fork lift drivers, and all the other workers here in America who live their lives on the edge, and are always the first to fall off when the ground starts shaking. I voted for Barack Obama largely in the hope that he would reverse the course our country had chosen almost 30 years ago. Our economic policies have remained largely unchanged since Reagan’s “voodoo economics” first took hold back in the 80’s. There have been booms since then, but they failed to spread to the workers the way the last four presidents had said they would, and now that it’s all gone bust it’s those workers who are most at risk. My hope now is that President Obama will forgo the advise of the Larry Summers of the world, take a walk around an abandoned factory or two, get his bearings, and get to work.

Pop Music Matters?

2009-01-19T03:42:00.004-05:00

I have never been cool. Looking back, I’m pretty sure that’s a safe statement. I remember being in high-school and listening to asinine people drone on and on about how high-school was supposed to be the best years of your life, and looking at them as though they had to be from another planet; some bizarro-world where high-school was the land of milk and honey. These were the salad days I was lead to believe, though my actual high-school experience was quite different. I was a loner with few friends, and few interests outside of music. I hated most of the crap the kids at my school listened too. The cool kids weren’t really that into music from what I could tell and when they were, it was crap that I didn’t listen to like TLC or Boyz II Men. I remember going to school the day after Kurt Cobain died and being absolutely devastated about it, but most of the people there didn’t seem to care much one way or the other. I remember one guy in particular saying “oh yeah, he was that Nirvana guy right”, and then kind of shrugging his shoulders a little bit like it was no big deal. Needless to say, I didn’t exactly mesh with the overall theme of my high school. So I guess I’m no stranger to being uncool.

Lately though, I feel as though I may have crossed some heretofore unknown threshold of uncoolness. I’m starting to believe I may actually be the antithesis of cool. Earlier this week, I became acutely aware of the extent of my lack of cool when I, on a whim, checked the Billboard “Hot 100” singles chart and realized that I haven’t heard a single one of the top 50 songs on the chart. I’ve heard bits and pieces of some of them, but I haven’t listened to a single one of them start to finish. That’s not the worst of it though. I haven’t even heard of quite a few of the artists. For example, who the hell is Lady GaGa? How the hell did she get a number one song without me ever having heard of her? What has happened to my musical acuity? I mean the “Hot 100” chart is usually dominated by pop anyway, and when I was in high-school it would’ve been populated by the dreadful pop that was around back in the mid 90’s, but I’m pretty sure I would’ve known all the artists and would’ve heard most of the songs too. What am I supposed to make of all this?

I’m not saying that my teenage musical tastes were above reproach. I liked some stuff then that I now realize wasn’t nearly as good as I thought it was at the time. Nirvana, Soundgarden, Mudhoney, Smashing Pumpkins, Jane’s Addiction, Porno for Pyros, and Helmet were excellent bands that I liked then that still hold up to the scrutiny of my older and wiser ear, but I also listened to Stone Temple Pilots, Candlebox, Filter, and even Silverchair, and all of them, to one extent or another, suck to me now. My musical sins might not be as bad as some people’s, but I’m not without my own skeletons.

I also don’t want to sound like the old guy talking about how much better things were back in his day or anything, but I wish someone would point out the Soundgarden of today. To my ears, “modern rock” is an absolute joke. Most everything played on “modern rock” radio stations like 93.3 here in the upstate is like some sort of anemic parody of the early-mid nineties alternative sound. It’s as though someone scrapped off all the raw emotion from Kurt Cobain’s stuff, but kept the “soft verse-loud chorus” dynamic that he borrowed from The Pixies and popularized. Every time Nickleback plays a song, Kurt Cobain spins in his grave like a top. If anyone ever wonders—as I do—about why Chris Cornell doesn’t get back to rocking like he did with Soundgarden on Badmoterfinger, it’s probably because the current crop of “modern rock” bands is so putrid that he can’t bring himself to be played on the same radio stations.

It’s been this bad for a while really. Around 1998 or so, I started making a conscious decision to separate myself from mainstream music altogether. Bands like Creed were slowly driving me insane, and while there were a few interesting bands to come out on the metal front like System of a Down, Fear Factory, and Slipknot, most mainstream rock music was absolute garbage. So with the help of my new friend the internet, I went underground. I discovered genres that I’d never heard of before, as well great bands from genres that’d I’d never really paid all that much attention to. Those were my salad days, my days of discovery. I listened to Son Volt while the rest of the world discovered the joys of Linkin Park.

Still though, I can’t shake the feeling that not knowing who the most popular musicians in the country are puts me a bit outside of the loop. I tried to rationalize my ignorance away by saying that the Billboard charts aren’t a good indicator of “what’s really going on” out there. We live in a brave new world now, and most cool people get their music from download services like iTunes, so a quick check of the most popular downloads would vindicate me right? Well, not exactly. Actually, Lady GaGa is number one over on iTunes too. But wait a second, the cool people don’t actually pay for their music nowadays. They download torrent files of the albums and get it for free. Quickly to GPirate I go to find pardon for my sin of ignorance, but this part is a little tricky. GPirate doesn’t’ exactly keep record of their most downloaded torrents so I have to play it by ear a little bit. So I search for Lady GaGa to see how many people are seeding the torrent, and it’s about 4000 people just for the top four files on the list. For those of you who don’t know anything about torrent files or seeding just take my word for it; 4000 is a lot of seeders. Lady GaGa is very popular.

I couldn’t take it anymore. Even though I knew I’d hate it, I had to listen to Lady GaGa’s big hit song that I’d never heard before. So I head over to her MySpace to listen, and it’s every bit as terrible as I thought it would be. It’s total Pro tools enhanced crap, but her profile has been viewed over 9 million times and her big hit "Just Dance", has been listened to a stunning 178 million times. Where the hell have I been? I mean her music is absolutely terrible, and you’d have to pay me to listen to it again, but if this song had been this popular back when I was in high school I’d have at least known about it, and probably hated it at a far more visceral level than I do now. Am I just old, or is it purposeful mainstream musical isolation that keeps me from knowing about Lady GaGa’s ascension to the top of the pop music pantheon? I can’t really say, and I’m not sure quite how to feel about it.

On the one hand, it doesn’t really matter very much to me if I don’t know who’s getting the most airplay on “Top 40” radio these days, but on the other I pride myself on having a fairly well-rounded knowledge of the musical world out there and it’s pretty clear to me now that I have a fairly sizable gap that maybe I ought to fill. Maybe I should start watching American Idol. That might help school me on the ins and outs of this post-millennial pop music world that I’ve purposefully shielded myself from. Learning to gauge Paula, Randy and Simon’s reactions to what’s good and bad about a particular singer may serve as my Rosetta Stone to learning this strange and new language. I could start watching some MTV, assuming that there are actually times when they play still videos. I could subscribe to Entertainment Weekly, Vibe, Blender, and start watching as much of the E! Network as possible. I could do all that, but I won’t. Maybe I’m old or maybe I’m sheltered, but peaking my head up out of my hole to take a look around at the larger pop world has only shown me that it’s the same stupid shit as before, I just don’t know the names anymore and actually, that’s fine by me.

"I Believe" in Politics

2009-01-12T04:11:00.002-05:00

I didn’t want to write this blog; really I didn’t. Despite appearances, I’m not the sort of guy who gets a charge out of controversy or negativity. Most of the time, I’d rather not have to make the arguments that I find myself making, especially when it comes to local issues. I don’t have to do it really. I could make this blog about my love of craft beer, or maybe I could continue my “Modern South” blog series. After the fiasco over in Greenville last Tuesday night though, I knew that not writing something about the “I Believe” license plate would be copping out on an issue that I do actually care about, and I just couldn’t let that happen.

For those who don’t know, last May our State House and Senate unanimously passed a bill allowing for the creation of a special license plate with the words “I Believe” and a picture of a cross over a stained glass window. Governor Mark Sanford allowed the bill to become law without his signature. A lawsuit was filed shortly after that by Americans United for Separation of Church and State on behalf of two Christian pastors, a Humanist-Unitarian pastor, a Rabbi, the Hindu American Foundation, and the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee and on December 11th, a U.S. District Court Judge issued a temporary injunction banning the plates until the issue is resolved in court.

Political symbolism is a powerful motivator. Convincing Christians that the enemies of their faith are at the gates through demagoguery is a time-tested method of garnering support. The “I Believe” tag is the just the latest political football to get tossed around. So when gubernatorial hopefuls Andre Bauer and Henry McMaster appeared at a rally in the electorally-crucial Greenville County last Tuesday, you can bet they were there to show the proper amount of outrage and piety for that essential Christian voting bloc. Bauer, the current Lt. Governor, got right into the spirit of things saying; “There is freedom of speech for every group in this state besides Christians”. McMaster, currently the state’s Attorney General, was equally on cue; “We have to stand tall. We have to preserve. The people will prevail.”

Both of these men know better. Bauer isn’t stupid enough to believe that a state issued religious tag is an issue of free speech. If that were the case then the state refusing to issue me an “I hate South Carolina politics” tag would be infringing on my free speech right to express my hatred for South Carolina politics. Bauer’s argument conveniently leaves out the fact that you could paint “I Believe” in two-foot letters down the side of your car with a giant cross on the hood if you wanted to, and no one would be able to stop you, nor should they be able to. Freedom of speech has nothing to do with a state issued license plate. McMaster too, as Attorney General, certainly knows where the chips are going to fall in this case, but it sure does make good copy for the papers when you position yourself on the proper side of a controversy you helped create in the first place.

I’m no Constitutional scholar but to my eyes, this case has “slam-dunk” written all over it. The cost to produce each tag is covered by the individual requesting the tag, but a State issued tag is a State issued tag no matter who foots the bill for it. The 1st Amendment’s clauses dealing with religion read; “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…” These are known as the “Establishment Clause” and the “Free Exercise Clause” respectfully. The one pertaining to the “I Believe” license plate case is the “Establishment Clause”. There are a wealth of Constitutional legal opinions and rulings regarding all aspects of the “Establishment Clause” dating all the way from Thomas Jefferson’s Letter to the Danbury Baptists, which was the first time the term “wall of separation” was used, to the landmark Everson v. Board of Education case which established that the “Equal Protection Clause” of the 14th Amendment guaranteed that the “Establishment Clause” of the 1st Amendment applied to state governments as well as the Federal Government.

The real landmark case for most modern “Establishment Clause” cases though is Lemon v. Kurtzman which established the three pronged “Lemon Test”. The “Lemon Test” is three-part requirement for legislation regarding religion that establishes:
1. The Government’s action must have a secular legislative purpose.
2. The Government’s action must not have the primary effect of either advancing or inhibiting religion.
3. The Government’s action must not result in an excessive government entanglement with religion.
Using the “Lemon Test”, it becomes pretty obvious that the “I Believe” plates are unconstitutional. They don’t serve a secular legislative purpose, their primary effect is to advance religion; specifically Christianity, and the tags are an excessive government entanglement with religion. Assuming that the court doesn’t want to overturn 150 years of legal precedent over a license plate case, this case is dead in the water.

So if a factory worker living in Spartanburg, South Carolina with no legal training can figure out that the law creating these plates is unconstitutional, why couldn’t the legislature, with its healthy contingent of lawyers, figure it out before the bill was ever passed? The short answer is, politics. South Carolina’s largest and most powerful voting bloc is Evangelical Christians, and pandering to them by creating an issue out of thin air might help more than a few careers along. Conservative Christians are strung along by issues like this all the time. Invented outrages like the “War on Christmas”, the “Secularization of Society”, and the “Banning of Intelligent Design” are all designed to keep Christians fired up so they remember to go to the polls in on Election Day, and remember to vote for the guy with the “R” beside his name who was good enough to inform them about this “important issue”. The idea of a “war” on Christianity by “secularists” in a country where Christians outnumber the non-religious 76.5% to 14.1% is so absurd that in order to believe it you’d have to be stunningly ignorant of the laws, customs, and demographics of the United States. This is the most religious nation in the Western World, and the two religious clauses in the 1st Amendment have specifically preserved that tradition.

The rally itself is a testament to what the “I Believe” plates are really about. It was held in People’s Baptist Church, and led by Rev. Arnold Hiette. According to the Spartanburg Herald-Journal, the rally was structured like a church service, and during his speech Rev. Hiette said that the complainents, along with the judge and the ACLU, were all going to “burn in Hell”. If you’re a lawmaker or official trying to make the argument that the license plates meet the secular criteria of the “Lemon Test”, you might want to distance yourself from rallies held at churches, and the inflammatory language of people like Rev. Hiette. If however, your interest isn’t with the success of the case but how much political mileage you can get out of it, you’d want to appear at as many of these rallies as possible.

As for our local media, they’re predictably lap-doggish in their uncritical coverage of the rally. Both WSPA and the Herald-Journal ran stories completely uncritical of the rally or the license plates themselves. Neither bothered to track down a quote from anyone with Americans United for Separation of Church and State, the ACLU, or anyone opposed to the “I Believe” plates; not even a quote from a local Unitarian even though Rev. Hiette was especially strong in singling out the Unitarian in the case for damnation to hell. The local media has been unsurprisingly one-sided in their coverage, and unquestioning of the motivation of Bauer and McMaster.

I suspect that in the coming weeks, Bauer and McMaster will milk the manufactured controversy for all its worth until eventually the inevitable happens and the license plates are ruled unconstitutional. They’ll score their brownie points for fighting the “good fight” against the enemy of secularism and solidify as much of that Christian base as they can, but when the dust clears South Carolina will still have all the real problems it had before the legislature decided to invent our latest one, and my worry is that nobody will be interested in holding rallies to address those problems.

Israel and The Gaza Situation

2009-01-05T02:56:00.003-05:00

The Gaza Strip is an area of land about 25 miles long and at its widest point, measures about 7.5 miles across. The Strip is home to about 1.4 million Palestinians who happen to be unfortunate enough to have a government that those living outside Gaza have deemed unacceptable. In January of 2006, in free and fair elections, they voted for Hamas. In the election, Hamas won 76 of the 132 seats in the Palestinian legislative chamber. They unseated the ruling Fatah party, which was widely seen in the Palestinian territories as corrupt and ineffective. Following a few twists and turns, Fatah ended up governing in the West Bank, and Hamas ended up Governing in the Gaza Strip. As I write this, Gaza is burning.

On December 27th, Israel launched an air strike that killed at least 225 people in response to Hamas rocket fire. It was the single bloodiest day in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. On January 3rd Israeli ground troops began moving into Gaza and as I write this, the Palestinian death toll has climbed to over 500 with at least 75 of these being children. The Israeli death toll from Hamas rocket fire is 3 civilians and one solder. The fighting has led to a humanitarian crisis, as the Israeli government has refused to allow aid workers and journalists into the area. All indications are that Israel’s real objective here is to deal a crippling blow to Hamas.

Hamas is not innocent by any means. The organization has a long history of indiscriminate violence against Israeli citizens, and usually cares very little about whether they kill innocents or not. The U.S., the E.U., Japan, and a whole slew of other countries rightly list them as a terrorist organization. Their charter calls for the destruction of Israel and the establishment of a Palestinian state consisting of all Israeli land, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip. They aren’t exactly peaceful, but they are popular among many Palestinians.

Their popularity comes from good old-fashioned community development. Hamas builds hospitals and schools. They feed poor Palestinians, building a strong base in the process. They took a hard-line stance against an Israeli occupation seen as brutal by most Palestinians, and when Israel responds to one of their suicide bombings or rocket attacks by destroying a village, Hamas shows up to rebuild the village. Hamas’s greatest recruiters are Israeli warplanes.

Israel is attempting to deal a deathblow to Hamas and if they succeed, they will almost certainly create Hamas’s successor. Violent suppression doesn’t work against an enemy that enjoys popular support. Hamas as an organization may cease to exist, but the things that Hamas stands for will certainly continue to flourish and find a new form. Hamas’s methods are despicable, but its grievances against Israel are not without merit.

To be fair, it must be said that Israel is running a sort of apartheid in the Palestinian territories. The Palestinians are walled-in in both the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, with no freedom of movement by land, sea, or air. A complex pass system with Israeli checkpoints inhibits Palestinian movements even within their only territory. For 39 years, the Israelis moved Palestinian families out of choice areas in the West Bank in order to move new Israeli immigrants in. The U.N. reported that the recent economic blockade by the U.S. and Israel of the Gaza Strip led to a food shortage comparable to the poorest parts of sub-Saharan Africa. Hamas is not punished by these actions, but the Palestinians as a people are. Most Palestinians are not radicals, but a reasonable person can be made radical if mistreated often enough.

Israel must realize that violence in response to violence is not an acceptable means to peace. If peace is to be achieved, someone has to stop fighting and start talking. Those talks will have to mean something to both sides. Israel can’t expect to pick which Palestinian leaders they want to deal with. That decision should ultimately lie with the Palestinian people. For their part, the Palestinians must renounce the violence as well. They must also recognize Israel’s right to exist within its 1967 borders. Both sides have to realize that the other isn’t going to simply go away. This problem doesn’t have a military solution.

Ultimately, I believe Israel may be successful in ousting Hamas from their leadership position in Gaza, but the price they will pay will not be worth it. Every father that loses a child becomes a potential radical. Every Palestinian boy who sees his neighborhood destroyed by an Israeli air strike grows into a man full of hatred for Israel. The destruction of Hamas can only widen the gulf. No good can come of this. The winners are the people on both sides that want to destroy each other. The losers are everyone else.

The Modern South, Volume III: Pop Culture

2008-12-29T04:35:00.002-05:00

Southerners are a hypersensitive bunch generally. When it comes to our culture, we are prone to massaging the truth, self-aggrandizement, and a blinding pride that can sometimes obscure the truth. The Southern mythology is told and retold until sometimes; we end up perpetuating our own stereotypes. Our pop culture plays an incredibly complex role in this dance of Southern fact and Southern fable, and pinning down where the truth is doesn’t often seem to be a priority for anyone involved in the dance. I’m not sure where that truth is myself, or even if there is some truth to be had, but certain things feel real to me, certain things feel contrived, and certain things feel downright offensive.

It’s not really very hard to find offensive Southern stereotypes in pop culture; all you have to do is pay a little attention. Watch a little TV with a critical eye and some things just leap right out at you. For instance, almost every time a character is portrayed as dumb, ignorant, poor, or lazy there’s a fair shot that character will speak with a Southern accent. This is especially true on animated shows. Have you ever noticed that the character Cletus on The Simpsons, and Kenny’s parents on South Park all speak with Southern accents? These characters are often portrayed as poverty stricken drunken degenerates with no social graces, a comical ignorance, and very few (if any) redeeming qualities. It’s worth noting that the choice in accent is almost certainly done to enhance the “redneck” label of these characters since neither South Park nor The Simpsons is set in the south.

It’s not just animated television characters though; Larry the Cable Guy (whose real name is Daniel Lawrence Whitney) is basically a walking personification of a common “white trash” myth. Whitney, who is actually from Nebraska and attended the affluent King’s Academy, a Christian school in West Palm Beach Florida, credits his roommates at Baptist University of America with frosting the “dialect cake” for him, meaning of course that his redneck shtick is just that, and that of course he has little to no first-hand knowledge of the culture he so proudly ridicules. Whitney’s Blue Collar cohort Jeff Foxworthy has been at the mocking game for a long time now. According to Billboard, his 1994 comedy album You Might Be a Redneck If… has sold over 4 million copies and is the best selling comedy album of all time. Of course to Foxworthy, it’s all just good fun. He describes the term “redneck” as simply a “glorious absence of sophistication”, conveniently ignoring the fact that most often his examples of so-called “rednecks” conjure common stereotypical images of backward trailer-dwelling idiots too slow to even realize their own ignorance.

Then of course you have music. The most blatantly offensive song in recent years has to be Gretchen Wilson’s "Redneck Woman". This song is the anthem of “white-trash” stereotypes. From standing barefoot in the front yard with a baby on the hip, to leaving Christmas lights up all year, to buying everything at Wal-Mart, this song has it all. It wears it proudly too except that, Wilson’s not Southern either she’s from Illinois. Wilson can sing songs about the glories of shopping in Wal-Mart, but she never has to do it, and she doesn’t have to consider the consequences of promoting a business whose practices help ensure that the poor she apparently admires so much stay that way. She never seems to consider that so many people in rural America shop there not because they want to, but because Wal-Mart itself has driven many of their traditional hometown stores out of business. In essence, she advocates the destruction of the lifestyle she claims to honor. It’s a sickening irony that Wilson has made millions of dollars by celebrating white poverty.

There are many more examples of this same sort of sort of thing from both outside and within the South and listing them would take forever, but just listing these hurtful stereotypes leaves out one crucial factor; the biggest supporters of the “redneck” typecast seem to be Southerners. Going back a long time, people in the South have readily embraced characters and images that mocked them. Shows like Hee-Haw and The Beverly Hillbillies ran for years and were most popular in the South.

I grew up watching Hee-Haw with my great-uncle and great-aunt (who I called Grandma and Papa), and I remember the show for it’s corny (literally) jokes and mostly harmless portrayal of poor rural Southerners. The show was hosted by Buck Owens and Roy Clark. I love Buck Owens, and his "Streets of Bakersfield" is one of my all-time favorite country songs. I also remember being fascinated by Roy Clark’s guitar playing, even though now I’d probably agree with what Papa said when he told me that Roy Clark was good, but he was “too technical” and he sounded “more like a guitar-playing machine than a guitar player”. I loved the show when I was a kid but truthfully, it wasn’t casting us Southerners in a very positive light for the rest of the country.

The old shows weren’t all bad though. I can’t find too much fault with the classic Andy Griffith Show. It’s portrayal was pretty even-handed, and the jokes never felt like the were mocking the characters. There were some simpletons, but they were balanced by Andy and some of the more intelligent characters. Even Barney wasn’t stupid, just high-strung. All of them were Southern, and the show had a good balance while still keeping it funny. In fact, Andy Griffith made his whole career out of that sort of thing. His old comedy albums always got laughs, but he didn’t belittle Southerners to get them.

There are positive Southern images out there They’re just harder to find and a lot of times, they’re less popular. As I wrote in a previous blog, the movie Junebug is the most realistic portrayal of a modern Southern family I’ve ever seen. The parents in the movie are a lot like my parents, and I can certainly find quite a few ways to sympathize with the main character myself. Picking through the movie, I can find so many things common in the South, but not common anywhere else, that are presented in an honest and unfiltered way. Of course the shame is, for every Southerner who has seen Junebug, there’s probably about 1,000 who regularly use the phrase “git-r-done”.

Sometimes an honest and good portrayal can come from a source completely outside the South. For me, the greatest Southern song ever is "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" by The Band. Written by Canadian Robbie Robertson and sung by Arkansas-born Levon Helm, the song tells the story of a Civil War veteran named Virgil Kane who served on the Danville supply train and later at the defense of Richmond. Virgil’s story is one of a poor farmer who lost his brother in the war and returns to the same poor farm he left, defeated but not broken. Robertson’s lyrics capture better than almost anyone could the duality of the Civil War for Southerners. Of course the war was fought for political reasons but like most wars, it was fought by men who didn’t have much of a stake in the politics either way. The poor Southerner fought because he had been told to, and because there were Yankee armies marching through his homeland. For the common man, it was as simple as that. Robertson captured that story better than anyone. Again though, I’m sure you’ll find "Redneck Woman" on more iPods down here than "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down".

I don’t know exactly why the negative Southern images are more popular than the honest ones among Southerners. I think it has something to do with how easy it is to turn a simplistic stereotype into a brand. Stereotypes are usually pretty one-dimensional. They can be converted into crude anthems, bumper stickers, slogans, and t-shirts. In short, they’re profitable. The truth is always complex with shades of gray and subtleties that aren’t meant for mass consumption. Simplicity is easy to market.

Pop culture is a bit of a double-edged sword down here I suppose, and it’s one that we cut ourselves with as often as someone else cuts us. Deciding what is and isn’t authentic Southern culture is a sticky process in and of itself. My opinions on the subject are certain to be far different from some other people’s take on it and in the end, in could be that no one is right. My railing against what I call the “marketed South” may be just as subjective as preferring the color blue to the color red. It could simply be a matter of taste. Gretchen Wilson could be the scion of a Southern cultural renaissance where the “rednecks” assert their ownership over all things Southern, and make people like me with our “elitist” tastes persona non grata. They could usher in a golden age of idiocy where the sophisticates have been shown the door and paper-thin git-r-doneisms are the order of the day. I could be the one celebrating a “false” Southern culture. I could be wrong about all of it. Somehow though, I doubt it.

The Modern South, Volume II: My Story

2008-12-22T04:48:00.003-05:00

For a person to speak on issues of Southern culture, it helps if that person can show some Southern credentials so that the old boogeyman of “yankee meddling” can be properly laid to rest. So I figured the best way to approach the next chapter of this blog series would be to lay myself out there so that there can be no doubt that while my take on the South may not be as uncritical as some of my fellow Southerners, I am every bit as much of this region as they are. The idea that the South has or should have one unchallenged sympathetic narrative is as bankrupt as that romanticized narrative itself.

I was born at Spartanburg General Hospital (now Spartanburg Regional Medical Center) in June of 1978. My parents were also both born in Spartanburg, as were their parents. I don’t know the particulars on my father’s family history, but my mother’s family was one of the first to settle in the old Spartan District back in the 1750’s. My grandfather on my father’s side was an only child who inherited a sizable portion of land out in Glenn Springs. His father was a planter. Planters were notably different from farmers in that planters didn’t plant much of anything. Planters were large landowners who before the Civil War, had slaves work the land for them, and after they had sharecroppers working it for them in exchange for a place to live and in good seasons, a cut of the profits from the harvest; similar system, different name. In contrast, my mother’s parents grew up on small farms in Moore and Roebuck where the size and quality of the year’s cotton harvest went a long way towards deciding how much food would be on the table. I am, in one way or another, two generations removed from the farm. None of that matters one bit of course but as I said before, establishing ones bona fides is a time-honored Southern tradition and if it helps, I’m happy to oblige.

I grew up in a trailer on my maternal grandmother’s land. It was the same land that she and her siblings had worked alongside their parents before and during the Great Depression, but now it was grown up and wooded. My parents divorced when I was five, and my mother got remarried to a man that became my father in every way that mattered. They had two girls, my sisters. We never had a lot of money, but we were decidedly better off than some of kids I went to school with from the nearby trailer parks. I never really gave much thought to being Southern when I was a kid. Self-examination is a skill unachievable for children, and maybe thankfully so. Asking me about being Southern at that age would have been something like asking a fish how the water was. It was all just reality for me.

I didn’t form any opinions on the South or Southern Culture, until I reached my teen years. I remember when I was 14 or so, Spike Lee’s movie biopic Malcolm X came out, and a lot of black people were wearing hats and t-shirts with a bold “X” on them in reference to the movie and the man. I also remember seeing t-shirts some white people were buying at the flea market with a Confederate Flag on them with “You have your ‘X’, and I have mine” written across the front. Tensions from this racial tit-for-tat caused some local schools, including mine, to ban both images as disruptive and presto there it was, controversy Southern-style. My parents fell pretty firmly into the camp that thought the Confederate Flag was a symbol of Southern heritage plain and simple, and that the shirts were an acceptable extension of that sentiment. Anyone who found offense in it was seeing it in a way other than the way it was intended.

I’d never given much thought to the Confederate Flag before that, and at that age my parents’ ideas seemed reasonable to me in my limited experience, so while I may have had some tinge of doubt I wasn’t sure enough of myself to really have an opinion of my own. Gradually though, I was starting to move towards my own way of thinking.

Controversy over the Confederate Flag is an old staple down here, and in 1996 South Carolina Governor David Beasley stoked those old fires in a speech in which he called for the removal of the Confederate Flag from the statehouse dome. I was 18 then, and I remember feeling differently than before. I had gone through my on politicization by then, and the old "heritage not hate" crowd wasn't able to sway me anymore. My position became especially clear when I found out that the flag was originally placed over the statehouse dome in 1961 to commemorate the centennial of the Civil War, and was supposedly never intended to be permanently installed. The flag flying over the statehouse was never even an official flag of the Confederacy; it was an unofficial battle flag. The fact that the flag was placed over the dome in 1961 at the height of the Civil Rights movement and the white Southern backlash against it wasn’t lost on me either.

Beasley stepped in a hornet’s nest with the flag issue. Almost immediately, bumper stickers began to show up saying “Dump Beasley, Keep the Flag”. The backlash against Beasley was so strong; it was a major factor in his losing his reelection bid to Jim Hodges in 1998. Hodges became the first challenger in over a century to defeat a sitting governor in South Carolina. The flag as a symbol was powerful. When the topic came up at home, my parents and I disagreed pretty heatedly on the Flag issue. I remember it as the first time I’d ever expressed a political opinion so opposed to my family’s opinion. It was also the first time I’d ever felt confident in my argument, and been brave enough to stand on my own.

Also around that time, I was also going through something of a Southern identity crisis. When I was 16, I started playing in my first band. Grunge was the order of the day, and we all longed to be from Seattle. Our music was from someplace else. Our parents listened to Lynyrd Skynyrd, so we made fun of it. We made fun of the older guys with their mullets and tight (nut-hugger) jeans. Country sucked. Classic rock sucked. The South sucked. We were surrounded by rednecks, and they were ours for the mocking. It was pretty narrow-minded, but teenagers usually aren’t the most accepting people around, and we were no exceptions.

For a while, I was living with a sort of Southern shame. All the popular images of Southerners were stereotypical portrayals of rednecks. It was all a bunch of NASCAR shit from my point of view. I didn’t realize that underneath all the media portrayals, there was a truth that was valuable. I’d skimmed the surface, and decided that the surface was all there was.

When I got to my 20’s, I started getting a little more of the message behind the message. I started branching out with my musical tastes. I discovered the Blues, and later Classic Country. I started listening to old bands from my parents’ generation, and developed a special affinity for The Allman Brothers Band. I even found a new appreciation for Lynyrd Skynyrd that had been lost since my early teens. It turns out, they resisted the redneck imagery back in their day too. Skynyrd originally never wanted the Confederate Flag as a stage backdrop, their record label MCA, insisted on it. Their song Sweet Home Alabama was a response to Neil Young painting the whole South with the same racist brush in his songs Alabama and Southern Man. Skynyrd’s singer Ronnie Van Zant though, was a big Neil Young fan and even wore a Neil Young t-shirt on the cover of their last album Street Survivors. I also discovered alt/country and found people fusing my old punk/alternative influences with country to make styles that weren’t new to the world, but were new to my ears. I started reading books on Southern history and revisiting stories from my own past that now had a meaning I had missed before. It was all so much more complex than I’d ever imagined.

I eventually came to my own personal understanding of the South and my place in it. I’ve kept my progressive politics, and I don’t give an inch to our leaders both historic and modern, who have made their careers on divisiveness and exclusion. I love the South, but I am not a Southern apologist. If someone is pushing a negative Southern stereotype, I’ll confront that, but I have no intention of pretending that some criticism isn’t justified, and sometimes there should be a lot more that just some criticism. There are too many of us Southerners that are quick to defend the indefensible, because we’ve been unfairly picked on at times.

I suppose I’ve made my peace with the South. Our cultural contributions to the American lexicon are unparalleled, and the country is a richer for having us. On my good days, I’m able to take a great deal of comfort in that. Other times, there’ll be some sort of tidbit on the news, some new terrible modern country song, or some racist I meet that’ll get me down, but all I have to do is remember that nobody has a monopoly on what being Southern is. A few months ago, a lady I work with was talking about a recent trip she’d taken to Asheville. I told her how much I loved Asheville, and how often my girlfriend and I go there. She replied “Yeah you look like you’d love Asheville”, and then went on to say, “You know, it’s nice but it doesn’t even feel like the South to me”. I walked away from that conversation upset and asking myself what made her think she had the right to decide what was and wasn’t Southern. I perked up a little and smiled to myself once I realized that the answer was nothing, nothing at all.

The Modern South, Volume I: Does the South Exist?

2008-12-15T04:57:00.003-05:00

What is the South? Is it a simple geographic term designating the former Confederacy? Is it a series of slogans and symbols invented, printed on bumper stickers, and sold to Southerners as badges of their own identity? Is it a deep and abiding cultural connection between members of a shared heritage? Does the South exist? If so, then in what ways is it different from the popular image of the South?

I’m not asking these questions as a way of setting up this first in a series of essays, I’m asking them because I don’t know. The South as I understand it, is physically a geographic region for which the barriers are not readily agreed upon. Some claim the 11 states of the original Confederate States of America. Some say the influence is larger, and extends to states and cities that had lots of Southern migrants move to them in the 20th century for work. Meanwhile, South Florida has more migrants from Northern States and Cuban immigrants than it has Southerners, and in many ways is a world apart from the panhandle and upper portions of the state. East Texas has a distinctly Southern feel to it, while West Texas is decidedly Southwestern. Kentucky and West Virginia’s Appalachian parts are culturally similar to western Virginia and Tennessee, but the other portions of those states have a different feel. Missouri in Mark Twain’s day was decidedly Southern, but is now Midwestern. So the physical boundaries of the modern South are a bit harder to put a finger on than the traditional 11 secessionist states.

Frankly, I’m not all that convinced there’s a large cultural cohesion either. Historically, the people living in the mountains of Western North Carolina had very little in common with the genteel planter societies in Southern cities like Charleston. The South has been mythologized to death, and often a shared cultural heritage has been presented where there is very little evidence that one ever naturally existed. The images were and are often cultivated by the only people with something to gain by rallying disparate people together under the banner of an invented common identity; politicians. If there is such a thing as “the South”, it’s safe to say that most of us would never be able to come to an agreement on the specifics of its existence.

There’s an old Buddhist teaching about nothingness and interconnection where the teacher will instruct a student to deconstruct an object with the student’s mind. The Teacher may for example tell the student to find the part of a car that makes the car a car. The student will mentally separate the car into its component parts; engine, transmission, seats, body panels, etc, and then find that the car is not to be found. Moreover the parts that make up the car can be separated into their own still smaller components, and these can be separated to their raw materials. Down and down it goes until the mystified student is left with the conclusion that the car doesn’t exist at all; at least not in the way it existed before. The South is a lot like that except that there isn’t even a general agreement on what the parts are.

The Southern archetype is difficult to pin down, and generalizations are treacherous ground to walk on, but the South does appear to have at least a few, and maybe a lot more than a few, idiosyncrasies emanating from the region. Whether a bona fide culture can be found in the fragments may be another matter altogether though.

Southern music is so pervasive in its influence on the rest of the country and the rest of the world that to even use the term “Southern music” seems somehow small and wrong. I read once that using the term “Southern-Rock” to describe a genre is a little like saying “rock-rock” because there isn’t a single form of popular music that isn’t Southern in origin. I don’t know if I’d take it quite that far, but it’s probably a safe bet that if you take any popular musician, old or new, you can almost certainly trace that person or group’s influences back through that interconnected and tangled musical web to someone from below the Mason-Dixon line. From The Carter Family, to Lead Belly, to Bessie Smith, to Jimmie Rodgers, and from New Orleans, Memphis, Nashville, and Appalachia, the music of the South is the foundation for all popular music that followed. The influence of region, in both positive and negative ways, was instrumental in the creation of our American soundtrack.

Our writers too, have been some of the most influential in the American lexicon. Writers like Mark Twain, William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, Tennessee Williams, and Harper Lee wrote some of the greatest works of fiction ever produced. Their works, often steeped in Southern imagery, are responsible for some of the most enduring images of the American Southern legacy.

Those things have been the Southern contribution to world culture, but is the essence of the South to be found in the pages of The Sound and the Fury, or in the sound of Maybelle Carter’s guitar in Wildwood Flower? The connection between these artists and their region is undeniable, but how does that speak for the region? Also, all of that’s in the past. Where is the modern South? What are its cultural touchstones? I’m not sure they’re so easy to find.

The unique cultural products of the old South were a result of geographic isolation, poverty, and a legacy distinctly different from the rest of the country. The modern South doesn’t have many of those things. The United States is a distinctly more culturally homogenous place than it once was. A Journey that used to take weeks or months, now takes only hours. We have become a mobile, shifting society where many people don’t have a cultural tie to any particular place. Many of us are as influenced by the pop-culture piped directly into our living rooms, as we are our own families and traditions. The South as it was, is ebbing away.

Even our accent, the most instantly noticeable identifier of a Southerner, is fading. My Grandparents used all of the old pronunciations and odd words of poor Southern farmers in their everyday speech, and their accents were thick and pronounced. My parents have less pronounced accents, and I have even less than they do. I wonder sometimes what my grandchildren may sound like. Granted, most of those words and pronunciations were used out of ignorance of proper English, and the vocabulary of the poor farmers in those days was severely limited, but looking at it that way misses the larger cultural point. The poor people in my grandparents’ generation were forced by their limited vocabulary to find complex metaphorical ways to express themselves. Story’s were used as morality tales; jokes could make highbrow points without using highbrow words. In order to get across complex points, poor Southerners had to be creative. The language itself became a sort of folk art. I believe this is the root of the traditional Southern style of music and writing. Sometimes knowing the exact word to properly express an idea can make prose dry and uninteresting. When you have to take the long road around, sometimes you spot a flower or two.

I believe the South is an area whose cultural influence is in decline. Too many consider themselves Southern in the same way that they consider themselves Mac or PC people. The modern South is a brand. G.R.I.T.S paraphernalia, Confederate flag bumper stickers, Larry the Cable Guy, Gretchen Wilson’s Redneck Woman, and buying absolutely everything at Wal-Mart; those appear to be the new identifiers of the South. Real culture though, can’t be bought, stuck on a car, or worn on a t-shirt.

Even so, there is still some intangible essence left there. Every so often the real South will peer up through the muck just to let us know it’s still there. The first time I heard Kings of Leon, I didn’t have to ask if they were Southern, I just knew it. The move Junebug, was the most quintessential, least contrived, and most unselfconsciously Southern movie I’ve seen made in my lifetime. There is something out there, difficult to grasp, that is identifiably of us. The South may be dying back a bit, but the roots are still alive and they occasionally send up new shoots just to prove it. The South exists, just maybe not in the way a lot of us think it does.

Spartanburg and The Big Sort

2008-12-08T04:12:00.003-05:00

The country is polarized. Liberal places are becoming more liberal, and conservative places are becoming more conservative. People are sorting themselves into like-minded communities to get farther away from “the wrong sort of people”. That’s the basic thesis of The Big Sort by Bill Bishop. The idea is that unlike previous generations that were equally mobile, people now move for personal reasons rather than economic reasons. In the past, Southerners moved from the jobless hills in Appalachia to booming industrial towns in the Midwest like Cincinnati, Cleveland, Chicago, and Detroit. People used to move for the most basic of reasons, work. Now though, people move increasingly for personal reasons.

A certain type moves because they want to live in a city, a bustling culture-rich metropolis with art museums, a vibrant music scene, bike lanes, independent bookstores, ethnic diversity, and coffeehouses. They’re generally not very religious and if they are, it’s a safe bet that they’re not Evangelical Christians. These people want to live in high population density areas, in homes that are closer together and smaller than average. And though they usually don’t intentionally look for it, they’re also moving to places that are full of liberal people much like themselves.

Another type moves out of the city because they want a piece of the country; a place where they can have a large yard, raise a larger than average family, go shopping at malls and big box stores, and get away from the decadent city. They’re generally religious Evangelicals with a strong sense of morality. These people want to live in low population density areas, in homes that are farther apart and larger than average. And though they usually don’t intentionally look for it, they’re also moving to places that are full of conservative people much like themselves.

Bishop’s basic idea is that this sorting of like-minded people is making us less like one country and more like two, and those two countries understand each other less and less all the time. This process, dubbed by Bishop as The Big Sort, makes us naturally distrustful of those from the other side because we don’t live in the same towns anymore, and it strains our bonds of national unity, or so the line goes. When I was reading the book, I couldn’t help but wonder what all this meant to Spartanburg. Where do we fit in the Big Sort?

I was pretty sure I already knew the answer. Spartanburg is a reliably Republican county, and a cursory look around reveals a place that looks like it’s sorting more red all the time. I started looking at some numbers to either dispel or confirm my concerns. According to U.S. Census estimates, Spartanburg County has grown about 6.8% from 2000 to 2006. That’s a sizeable amount of growth, but it’s where those people are going that tells the tale of the Big Sort. The city of Spartanburg in the same time span has lost 3.3% of its population. There is a population boom in Spartanburg, but its out in the county in places like Boiling Springs where the boom is happening. The city is shrinking.

If the local political situation is an accurate indicator, I’m in bigger trouble than I thought. The local Republican Party ran roughshod over the county in 2008, and the local Democratic Party was so anemic and ineffective, they couldn’t even be bothered to put up candidates for a lot of local races. It was no secret that most races were settled not by the General Election in November, but by the Republican Primary several months earlier. It’s not entirely the Democrats fault though. The demographic changes of the Big Sort have simply sorted the local Democratic Party right into irrelevance, and if the trend continues it’ll only get worse.

According to Bishop’s research, people who move to places out away from the urban center are more likely to be conservative. So it would stand to reason that the boom in the county, coupled with the loss in the city mean that Spartanburg as a whole, is moving farther to the right. Sure enough, looking at Presidential election returns for every election since ’92 in Spartanburg County shows that in each election, the margin of victory for the Republican candidate has gone up, until in 2004 George W. Bush beat John Kerry by a whopping 29.3% margin in an election where the national popular vote margin was a much smaller 2.4%. 2008 seemed to buck the trend somewhat with John McCain beating Barack Obama by 21.3%, but I believe most of that can be attributed to the much higher than normal African-American turnout. So what does this all mean? What do the political leanings of an area tell us about the area as a whole?

Well for one, this trend is bad for the city of Spartanburg. Using Bishop’s standard, the people who move here have little-to-no interest in a vibrant downtown area. Anyone who’s compared the number of cars in the parking lot at the Dorman center to the number of people walking around downtown on any particular day could tell you that much. They don’t like cities. Most of them moved here specifically to get away from cities. They also aren’t big patrons of the arts. Bad news for Hub-Bub, Chapman Cultural Center, and the art galleries that recently opened downtown. They don’t care much for greenspaces and parks, so conservation isn’t a top priority either. Basically everything that I care about in Spartanburg is threatened by the influx of what I suppose I should call, the wrong sort of people.

For the sake of comparison, I looked at a few numbers from a place that I once tried unsuccessfully to sort myself into, Santa Cruz, CA. Santa Cruz is a city of about 55,000 along the coast about 70 miles south of San Francisco. Its population numbers tell you that it’s slightly larger than Spartanburg, but those numbers are deceptive because of South Carolina’s lax annexation laws. To me, it felt slightly smaller. Santa Cruz is about as different from Spartanburg as a town can get. There are bus stops nearly every block, and the busses run about every 20 minutes. Bike lanes line nearly every street. It has a vibrant downtown area that puts every similar-sized city I’ve ever been to, to shame. It had a great local club scene with some great bands. I remember being hesitant to cross a street downtown because I was so used to watching for rouge cars back home. It wasn’t until everyone behind me blew past like I was standing still that I realized how pedestrian-friendly the city was.

There were several independent organic grocery stores, a farmers market that met twice a week, at least 3 independent bookstores, and a slew of local coffee shops. There was also a Boarders that seemed eerily quiet compared to the large crowd always present at the local favorite Bookshop Santa Cruz, and a Starbucks that seemed to have the smallest crowd of any Starbucks I’d ever seen. There were exactly two big-box stores in the city limits of Santa Cruz, a PetSmart and a Costco. There were two independent theaters, one where my girlfriend and I saw Shortbus with a Q&A afterward with one of the actors (a Santa Cruz local). Santa Cruz is also different from Spartanburg in another crucial way. Barack Obama carried Santa Cruz County by an unbelievable margin of 57.9%. In Santa Cruz, local elections often have the Republican candidate (if there is one) coming in third behind both the Democrat and the Green Party candidate.

I only mention my old stomping ground to illustrate the difference between red and blue America. The things that I loved about Santa Cruz were very much linked to the liberal politics of the area, and while I didn’t realize it at the time, the people who kept the town vibrant had sorted themselves there much the same as I had. The unconscious collective decision to move to a place for “people like us” had made the place more accommodating for us.

No doubt there are people moving to the city of Spartanburg with the intention of making some of what I saw in Santa Cruz happen here. I’m sure a lot of people would love to see an independent bookstore, an independent theater, more bike lanes, and a little more character for our city. When I first moved back to Spartanburg, I was very excited to see the changes taking place and hopeful for the future of my hometown. I still am.

Increasingly though, it looks as though we’re outnumbered. If Bishop’s research is right, we don’t have much hope beyond building a small alternative to the dominant red-state culture. The idea of a true transformation may be a silly fantasy. It’s sort of a catch-22 really. How do we attract more people who care about a thriving downtown without a thriving downtown? How do we make downtown thrive when we’re surrounded by people who couldn’t care less about it? It becomes especially hard when you realize that there are more of them arriving in our county everyday.

There are days when I feel like Spartanburg is worth the fight. I was born here, and everyone I love is here. I don’t want to leave, but sometimes it seems as though that’s the only alternative if I want to have the sort of community I can be proud to live in. Actually, this is exactly what Bill Bishop was writing about. Leaving is exactly what the Big Sort theory says I will do. I don’t want that theory to be right but as I see it, we in Spartanburg have a choice, either we can reverse the sorting trend that’s going on right now, or we can keep going down the same path till we’re left with nothing much but strip-malls and churches. Here’s hoping for a reversal.

Long Line Musings

2008-12-01T03:24:00.003-05:00

Standing in line is always two things for me, incredibly boring and perversely entertaining. Rarely though, it can also be enlightening. Standing in line to vote is often all three of those things, and this past November 4th was no exception. Waiting in line to vote is a sacred cultural experience that too many of us overlook. It’s an opportunity to look around at those who live near us, but may or may not be truly like us.

First, I have a minor confession. I didn’t change my address in time to vote in my correct precinct. I know that’s a terrible sin that sits somewhere between impure thoughts and patricide, but it couldn’t be helped. Okay, that’s not exactly true either. I’m just a lazy guy who couldn’t find the time in the year-plus that I’ve been at my current address to go to the DMV to change my address on my driver’s license or my voter registration. So because of my laziness, I voted in my old precinct.

My old precinct votes at my old middle school. I hated school, and every single time I’ve set foot in my old middle school to vote I’ve had this rush of terrible old memories. The only thing I hated more than middle school was high school, but I don’t have to worry about that one anymore since they tore it down and built a Wal-Mart. Now if they’d just tear down the middle school and build a Target I’d be completely free, and the sense of symmetry would be nice too.

So anyway, I get to the “technically not my” polling place at about 7:20 AM or so just after I finish working my normal 12 hour night shift at a local manufacturing plant. Of course, I’m a little tired, the line is out the door, and I’m wearing the work cloths that I’ve been wearing for a little better than 13 hours or so. I’ve been anticipating this all night, so it’s not like I’m horribly upset or anything. It was more like a feeling of resignation, a feeling not unlike that of a condemned man moving slowly and inexorably towards the gallows. Inevitably, the mind begins to wander.

I start out by people watching, and of course judging each and every one of them. It starts out innocently enough with me trying to figure out one by one whether a person is going to vote for McCain or Obama. The precinct is solidly Republican and I know this, but still I hold out hope for a few. There’s an indie-looking girl with red-highlighted hair that my girlfriend would be totally jealous of. She might be an Obama supporter. Then again she could just be a Republican with cool fashion sense. The guy right in front of me is big, seriously big. I mean I’m a pretty big guy myself, but this guy’s got me by about 100 pounds. He’s sporting a Clemson hat, but otherwise looks like he just came out of the woods from a deer hunt, McCain voter all the way. This sort of stuff is tricky, and subject to all sorts of variables that can throw a person off. For example, if anyone happened to be looking at me and wondering, I’m not sure they could’ve gotten it right.

As I said before, I was wearing my work cloths, which are normally just old cloths that I don’t mind getting dirty. I’m also wearing an old dirty cubs hat and my steel-toed boots. The steel toes and dirty cloths would signal blue-collar, and coupled with me being a white Southern male and all, might lead a person to think McCain. I do have a full beard, designer glasses, and longish hair though, so that might have thrown it the other way for someone. I’m not sure, and people are usually terrible at guessing what others think of them but suffice to say, I was probably a walking example of why it’s a bad idea to try to peg a person’s political persuasion by that person’s looks, but it’s not like that was going to stop me.

After a while I started to take note of the conversations of those around me. Most of it was mundane stuff like what to eat for dinner or some other such thing. I was struck by how everyone was intentionally avoiding talking about the reason we were all there. No one wanted to talk politics at all, even though it was almost certain that many of them were going to vote the same way. It was charmingly polite. There was this one woman about five people back from me though. She was loud and very social in that way that only certain Southern women can be.

She was standing about two people in front of a man that surely everyone within a quarter-mile radius would have heard was her boss. She was mostly talking with him and everyone near her about the same small nonsense as everyone else, and her loud piercing voice was making it increasingly hard for me to pass my silent judgments on my fellow voters in peace. Eventually, I just gave up and allowed myself to be sucked in by her twangy knife-like siren song.

It turns out; her boss is a well-known businessman in the Spartanburg community. For the sake of anonymity, I’ll call him Mr. Byrd. I’ve met Mr. Byrd personally on several occasions. Well, maybe not met exactly, but I did used to work at the country club that he and his family were members of back when I was in college, and on several occasions during my summer running the pool-side grill, I took his order for a beer or his wife’s order for some chicken fingers for the kids or something. Ours was a complicated relationship to say the least.

So, I’m listening to the Carolina banshee behind me shriek poetic about her kids, her husband, and pretty much anything else she can get out between breaths, when finally there comes a joyous word. The line is dividing in two and those of us with last names starting with the letters A-L get to separate and form our own line. This wonderful news allowed me to put some distance between myself and what had become the most annoying sound I’d ever heard. Apparently, she wasn’t one of us privileged A-Lers, and had to join the M-Z crowd in the other line. So I’m standing in my new line, getting ready to resume my judgments when Mr. Byrd steps in line behind me.

Mr. Byrd is one of the heirs to a large regional business that owns about 50 gas station/convenience stores, a luxury resort down on the coast, another luxury oceanfront hotel, two mountain retreat hotels, and 18 fast food locations in North and South Carolina. Needless to say, Mr. Byrd is well heeled. I do my best to go back to my earlier preoccupations, but the conversations have already started. You see, in addition to being a local business scion, Mr. Byrd is apparently a gregarious people person, and he just can’t help but strike up conversations with those nearest to him. Luckily for me, he’s taken up by a woman in line behind him whom we soon learn is a teacher in this very middle school we’re all standing in. She looks to be just a little older than me, so thankfully she wasn’t teaching when I was there.

So while Mr. Byrd is chatting it up with the teacher, I get back to my judgments. There’s a lady a few spots ahead of me with the button-up proper look of a church deacon’s wife. She’s about 65 years old or so, and I decide that if she were to vote for Obama, I’d eat the dirty Cubs hat right off my head. Behind me, Mr. Byrd is telling the teacher about how he had to drive up from his vacation home on Hilton Head this past weekend to make sure he was here to vote. The trials and tribulations of voting are cumbersome I suppose. Just after this, he sees the guy just in front of me and as luck would have it, he knows the guy.

I should back up a little and tell you that the guy standing in front of me now is not the mountain of a man that was standing in front of me earlier. Apparently, that guy was banished to the land of M-Z. The man in front of me now is a classy looking older guy wearing an expensive looking suit and sporting the sort of smart gray hair almost always reserved for businessmen or politicians. He was standing quietly with an equally classy looking woman I assumed to be his wife when Mr. Byrd noticed the gentleman and called out to him.

They did their little small-talk greeting, asked about each other’s families and began to chat. Not too long into it Mr. Byrd told his friend that he was planning a trip to South Dakota for the weekend. “Quail hunting?” he asked Mr. Byrd. “Yes we just decided it this past weekend” he replied. So for a while it goes on like that. They talk about their shared love of taking long trips to shoot birds, and I’m left standing there unable to make my rulings on the political leanings of those near me.

Eventually, Mr. Byrd gets an e-mail on his Blackberry and stops talking to his friend long enough to read and answer it, but now we’re only about ten minutes away from actually voting and getting out of this dreadful line. I try to occupy myself for the remainder of my time there, but I can’t stop thinking about Mr. Byrd. It’s not his political leanings I’m thinking about. He’s well known to be involved with the local Republican Party, so I don’t have to guess which way the wind blows on that one. It’s something else entirely

I can’t stop thinking about the differences in our lives. His day-to-day reality is about as far away from mine as anyone’s possibly could be. While I’m standing here half-asleep with my feet killing me from standing in this line after 12 hours of work, he’s chatting about vacation homes and cross-country hunting trips. I ask myself if he’s able to have such a life of leisure, why doesn’t he pay the employees of his convenience stores more? Why are there signs on the ones in bad neighborhoods promising sign-on bonuses for those brave enough to make it three months? I start to wonder if he makes sure all the employees are aware of the dangers of chronic exposure to gasoline additives like MTBE. He seems like a nice enough guy, but I can’t help but feel that he lives the good life while his underpaid employees make wages that couldn’t possibly support a household, and many of them live with the day to day fear that they might be robbed or possibly killed working in one of his stores.

I’m not a class warrior in the strictest sense of the word. It’s not as though I go around keying Mercedes and throwing Molotov cocktails through mansions, but when something is shown so clearly as this, I can’t help but think about it. As I said before Mr. Byrd is a business heir. His father did all the footwork to build the fiefdom currently controlled by Mr. Byrd and his siblings. He’s a member of the lucky sperm club. The only thing that separates him from the people his company employs is his fortunate parentage.

We’re taught in America that we all have equal opportunity, but that’s not true and it never has been. If this were a race, some of us would start 50 yards ahead, and some of us would have to run it on one leg. Mr. Byrd’s children go to Spartanburg Day School. They’re certain to go to a great college, and even if they don’t take up the family business, the connections made by the previous two generations and the fortune of a good name will assure them of a soft landing. That’s America for some of us.

Others will walk a razor’s edge. If they’re smart then the sky’s the limit for them, as long as they don’t do anything to screw it up. That’s the real difference between Mr. Byrd’s children and his employee’s children. If one of his employee’s children wants to make it out of the doldrums of the working poor, that child will have to do everything perfect. There are no second chances, there aren’t any connections to fall back on, and there isn’t anyone to pick you up if you fall back down. It’s perfection or nothing.

Just as I’ve run all this through my head, it’s my turn to step up, present my credentials, and go wait to be told what machine to vote on. My head is foggy, and I’m ready for bed. A nice lady tells me to go to the next open machine. I look at the screen, and try to think about how my choices (all of our choices really) will affect Mr. Byrd’s employees and their children. I make my choices, push the appropriate buttons, step out, and walk back towards my car. It’s all over till next time, and I couldn’t be happier about it.