Category Archives: Southern Discomfort

That trooper was hardly alone

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Don’t think there was anything particularly rare about the language that trooper used in the notorious video.

Warren Bolton says he’s gotten "some pretty interesting feedback on my trooper column" in today’s paper. He shared this "gem" with me a little while ago:

Sent: Friday, March 14, 2008 2:47 PM
To: Bolton, Warren
Subject: Re: Trooper’s actions

Bolton;
The only thing that trooper did wrong was in not shooting the bastard down. At least that would have put one less nigger crimmal [sic] out of business.
Val Green

Warren gets this sort of thing all too often. So perhaps you can see why he worries that, as he said in his column today, "we’re not there yet" in the year 2008.

Bud testifies about the constitutional amendment

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Just so you know Bud Ferillo thinks about more than spending Belinda Gergel’s money, here’s his testimony to the Senate subcommittee considering whether to amend the S.C. constitution to read that the state "will provide a high quality education, allowing each student to reach his highest potential."

Bud, as you may or may not know, is the guy who made the film, "Corridor of Shame:"

Presentation of Bud Ferillo
Senate Subcommittee
On S.1136
March 13, 2008
9:00 AM
          It is a privilege for me to address the subcommittee this morning, something I have never done before.
          While I served this state, in the 1970’s and 80’s as Chief of staff to House Speakers Rex Carter and Ramon Schwartz and as Deputy Lieutenant Governor under Lt. Gov. Mike Daniel, I come today as a private citizen still in awe of these halls and full of respect for those of you in both parties who serve our state today.
          The Constitution of the State of South Carolina which the legislation before you would amend was adopted in one of the most difficult periods of our state’s history by some of our most unenlightened elected officials. It was the era of Jim Crow and the long shadow of slavery has given way to legalized racial segregation, a cruel, one sided system of rights and privileges for the few over the many. It was not until 1911 that South Carolina attained a majority white population and so the constitution adopted in 1895 was not a declaration of human rights. In fact, it sought to enshrine the benefits of government only to those with political and economic power.
          Our racially segregated public schools remained separate and unequal for another two generations because that was state policy. Even with the Brown decision in 1954, rising from the school desegregation case of Briggs vs. Elliott in Clarendon County, it was not until Governor Hollings declared in 1963 as he left office that “South Carolina had run out of courts” and the state negotiated the admission of Harvey Garnett into Clemson University, followed a year later by the integration of USC and our public school system.
          This difficult history is painful to recall and painful to hear but it explains why we have attained no little progress in securing quality public education for all the children of the state. To be honest, we have not been about the business of providing quarterly education to all the children of South Carolina for very long.
          Even today, sadly, the legal position of our state in the Abbeville vs. State of South Carolina school funding case, still places South Carolina on the wrong side of history. This state continues to claim it has no obligation to provide even a “minimally adequate” education for our children.
          I have come to you today as a witness to the failure of our state to achieve either minimally adequate education or the opportunity for our children to achieve an excellent education which would equip them to contend in a world changing before their eyes at warp speed.
          My plea today is a simple one: I urge the General Assembly to put the issue of high quality public education to the people of this state to decide.
          Our sister states of Virginia and Florida have shown the way by amending their constitutions to require their states to provide high quality education to their children.
          A state’s constitution is its highest standard of governance; it is the document that enshrines our noblest aspirations; it is the final repository of who we are and what we care about as a people. While we were born into an unjust society in South Carolina; we do not have to grow old in it.
          I respectfully urge this subcommittee to favorably report S.1136 so that it might begin its rigorous journey through the legislative process and be given to the people of this state to determine in the general election of 2010. The amendment will serve a useful purpose in setting the highest standards of educational attainment against which future legislative actions and funding can be judged.
          My friend and ally John Rainey, who will address you shortly, and others across this state in a coalition too broad and lengthy to name will soon launch a petition campaign that will allow South Carolinians to participate directly in the legislative process.
          We will soon unveil the web site www.goodbyeminimallyadequate.com where South Carolinians may sign a petition in support of this constitutional amendment. It is our ambitious but accepted challenge to present the signatures of 1,000,000 South Carolinians in support of S.1136 to the General Assembly during the opening day of the 2009 General Assembly.
          We cannot miss this opportunity to involve the people of our state in this process which will, to a large extent tell, us everything about what kind of state we have and what kind of future we will pass on to those who follow.

I’m not entirely sure what practical effect Bud and other advocates believe this wording change will have. I mean, even based on the "minimally adequate" interpretation, all that a court case that started in about 10,000 B.C. has accomplished was a ruling saying South Carolina should do better at early-childhood education, to which the Legislature responded by nodding vigorously, expanding a pilot program, then forgetting about it.

Such a wording change might make a lot of folks feel better, but the fact is that if South Carolina wants to pull up its rural areas to the educational level of the suburbs — which it must do if we’re ever to begin to catch up to the rest of the country — it will do so, whether the constitution mentions education at all or not.

Hold your breath

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Selcmap

You probably already saw the news story on the subject of this release from the Southern Environmental Law Center that came in Wednesday, but I thought you might be interested in the graphic above, so I pass it on now.

The SELC’s point is that the EPA’s new standard isn’t stringent enough. That seems like a bit like arguing about the number of angels dancing on the head of a pin from a Columbia standpoint, though: We can’t even meet the lower standard. The release:

South Carolina Upstate and Midlands still plagued by
unhealthy air, according to EPA
EPA’s
new standard fails to adequately protect public health, say environmentalists
and public health professionals

Chapel Hill, NC – New standards released today by the Environmental Protection Agency show most of the South Carolina Upstate and Midlands have unhealthy levels of ozone, including the Florence region, home to a new power plant proposal that will increase the region’s ozone levels. The new standards go further to protect the public’s health from ozone pollution, but fall short of the recommendations of public health professionals and EPA’s own scientists which recommended stronger protections.

“Unfortunately EPA has chosen to bow to political interests over the public’s health by releasing a ozone standard that falls short of the recommendations of  doctors and other public health professionals.  The fact that more cities than ever are being tagged as having unhealthy air should serve as a wake up call to all South Carolinians that this is a widespread and protracted problem,”  said David Farren, senior attorney with the non profit Southern Environmental Law Center.

Under the new standard, Columbia, and Greenville are expected to remain in violation of the federal standard, otherwise known as being in “nonattainment,” while smaller cities such as Chester, Lancaster, Newberry and Seneca will likely be added to the list. These areas will face deadlines to reach the new standard or risk federal sanctions including tighter smokestacks controls and the possible loss of federal highway money. 

“What we’re seeing is that unhealthy air is not just an urban problem,” said Farren. “Even small and mid-sized cities are going to have to tackle their air problems in order to protect the health of their citizens.”

Under the Clean Air Act, the EPA must set air quality standards at levels that protect public health, including sensitive populations, with an adequate margin of safety. In 1997, EPA set the national air quality standard for ozone at 0.08 parts per million (ppm) averaged over an eight hour period. The standard announced today is a slightly more stringent 0.075 ppm. However, in 2006, an EPA panel of scientists and public health experts unanimously recommended strengthening the ozone standard even lower, to within the range of 0.060 to 0.070 ppm, to adequately protect public health.

Power plants are a leading contributor to ozone pollution. In fact, the proposed Pee Dee plant will emit 3500 tons of ozone-forming nitrogen oxides each year under the existing draft air permit.

In addition to coal fired power plants, cars and trucks are among the biggest sources of ozone pollution in the South. To improve air quality, South Carolina must focus on strategies to reduce how much and how far its citizens drive such as investing in transportation alternatives and coordinating transportation and land use planning to reduce sprawl. Recently enacted reform of the state’s transportation department, if faithfully carried out, should aid in this work.

Lobbyists representing the oil, coal, electric power and manufacturing industries lobbied heavily against improved air pollution standards in the weeks leading up to the decision. However, EPA and OMB studies repeatedly show heath care costs and lost productivity far outweigh costs of clean up.

Ozone pollution, also known as smog, is known to trigger asthma attacks, reduce lung capacity, and has even been linked to heart disease and premature death. At its worst on hot, dry weather, ozone pollution causes officials to warn children and the elderly to stay indoors on many summer days. Children, whose respiratory systems are still developing, risk permanent loss of lung capacity through prolonged exposure to polluted air. For senior citizens, the natural decline in lung function that occurs with age is worsened by air pollution.

What does THIS have to do with ‘Christian Exodus’?

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Constantly bemused as I am by the odd coalitions that form the "left" and "right" in this country — coagulations of folks whose goals seem widely disparate to me — I am even more confused by the alliances one finds on the fringes of those wings.

So it is that, when I receive an e-mail containing an essay headlined "The NAACP is the Klan with a tan," I find myself wondering, Why is this being offered as though it somehow falls within the realm of ChristianExodus.org? Mind you, I could not find the article starting at the Web site itself, but the HTML message I received presented it within that context.

What’s that all about? Is it that both arise from separatist impulses, or what?

New ‘Take Down The Flag’ blog

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Michael Rodgers, a regular correspondent here and probably my most ardent regular blog ally on the cause of getting the Confederate flag off the State House lawn, has started a new blog dedicated to the cause, as he informed me over the weekend:

Dear Brad,
    Hi, how are you?
    What’s new on the Confederate flag?  It’s still flying from the Statehouse grounds. I’ve started protesting at the Statehouse when I can, and I now have a blog about the issue (Would you please add me to your blogroll?):

Take Down The Flag

    My state Representative Bill Cotty said that we have a "leadership in the House and Senate that will prevent the issue from seeing the light of day before we adjourn in June." My state Senator Joel Lourie agreed with your sense from the business community that they have no "appetite" for doing anything on this issue. I find that strange since Jim Micali of Michelin is the Chairman of the SC Chamber of Commerce. Surely he would want something done, but he’s retiring soon, so who knows?
    Take care and keep in touch.  Thank you.

                        Regards,

                        Michael Rodgers

Nothing new, I had to tell him. As y’all may have noticed, I’ve been working pretty much around the clock on presidential politics, and am just about to start paying attention again to S.C. issues (I had other folks doing that up to now), now that we’ve chased all those candidates out of the state.

Now I’m having to meet with all those folks I’ve been putting off for the past couple of months, on a wide variety of issues. The meeting with Vincent Sheheen was one of those long-delayed ones. I also have outstanding meeting requests from local hospitals, the state Department of Juvenile Justice, and … well, all sorts of issues.

The flag will certainly return in this space. Until it does, thank you, Michael, for keeping the conversation going.

P.S. Just now, going through e-mail from a different account (my published one), I see this form e-mail that Michael sent out to all potentially interested parties. As further elaboration on what he’s trying to do, I include the text of that as well:

Dear Brad Warthen,
    Hello, how are you?  I’m writing to you because I see that you’ve posted on your blog in support of taking down the flag.  I’ve written emails to people who are interested in joining your South Carolina Association for the Advancement of All People, or whatever it ends up being called.
    I’ve started a blog to encourage action to take down the flag.  I hope that we can get a group to organize and take action.  I’m inviting you to participate.  Please, let’s work together to take down the flag. http://takedowntheflag.wordpress.com/
    I’m also writing to remind you of the bill (H-3588) to take down the flag.  The bill is sponsored by Representatives Alexander, Hart, Rutherford, and Sellers, and it is currently stuck in the Judiciary Committee of the House. 
    Please write your State Representative and State Senator to ask them to get the bill to the floors and on to Governor Sanford for his signature.  You can read the bill and find out who your legislators are here (choose “quick search” for bill 3588 and choose “find your legislator”): http://www.scstatehouse.net/
    Please spread the word about H-3588.  I look forward to hearing from you and working with you.  We have a lot of work ahead of us, but we are right and we will prevail.
    Thank you.

With Kindest Regards,

Michael Rodgers

Living down our history

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By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
MY GRANDMOTHER used to tell a story about when she was a very little girl living in the Washington area.
    Her family was from South Carolina. Her father was an attorney working for the federal government. One of their neighbors was a U.S. senator from South Carolina. When her parents learned that she had visited the senator in his garden, sitting on his lap and begging for a peek under his eye patch, they were shocked and appalled.
    The senator was “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman, the state’s former governor, and a vehement advocate of lynching who had participated in the murders of black South Carolinians as a “Red Shirt” vigilante.
    Grandma’s people were of a very different political persuasion, as were of the founders of this newspaper, which was established for the express purpose of fighting the Tillman machine. That’s a second personal connection for me, and one of which I’m proud: We still fight the things that race-baiter stood for.
    Ben Tillman launched his rise to power with a fiery speech in Bennettsville, the town where I was born. But we’ve come a long way since then. Two very different politicians have spoken in Bennettsville in recent days.
    In November, Sen. Hillary Clinton spoke there, outlining her plan “to cut the dropout rate among minority students in half and help a new generation of Americans pursue their dreams.”
    John Edwards was there Wednesday. Tillman was a populist; John Edwards is a populist. But there the resemblance ends. Former Sen. Edwards’ advocacy for the poor helped endear him to black voters in South Carolina in 2004, propelling him to victory in that year’s primary here. His appearance in B’ville was in connection with his attempt to repeat that achievement.
    So my hometown and my home state have come a long way in the past century or so, at least with regard to the intersection of race and politics.
    Not far enough, of course. I don’t just say that because a statue honoring Tillman still stands on the State House grounds, a few yards from where the Confederate flag still flies.
    On the day that this newspaper endorsed Barack Obama, our publisher’s assistant passed on a phone message from a reader who was livid because we are “supporting a black man for president of the United States.” He continued: “I am ashamed that we’ve got a newspaper in Columbia, South Carolina, one of the best cities in America, and yet we’ve got a black operation supporting black candidates…. I am disappointed and upset that we’ve got a black newspaper right here in the city of Columbia.”
    How many white South Carolinians still think that way? Too many, if there’s only one of them. But such people stand out and are worth mentioning because we have come so far, and increasingly, people who think the way that caller does are the exception, not the rule.
    And truth be told, South Carolina is not the only part of these United States where you can still find folks whose minds are all twisted up over race.
    As I noted, Mr. Edwards did very well among black voters in 2004, but not this time. Several months ago, Sen. Clinton seemed to be the heir to that support. The wife of the “first black president” had lined up a lot of African-American community leaders, which was a big part of why she commanded an overwhelming lead in S.C. polls.
    But in the last few weeks, something happened. Sen. Obama won in Iowa, an overwhelmingly white state, and black South Carolinians began to believe he had a chance, and that a vote for Obama would not be “wasted.” This week, according to pollster John Zogby, he’s had the backing of between 56 and 65 percent of black voters, while Sen. Clinton can only claim at most 18 percent of that demographic.
    And as the days wear down to what is an almost-certain Obama victory in South Carolina, Sen. Clinton has gone on to spend most of her time campaigning elsewhere, leaving her husband behind to bloody Obama as much as he can.
    So it is that I would expect the Clinton campaign to say, after Saturday, that she didn’t really try to win here. But there’s another narrative that could emerge: Sure, he won South Carolina, but so did Jesse Jackson — just because of the huge black vote there. To win in November, Democrats need a candidate with wider appeal, right?
    Maybe that won’t happen. It would be outrageous if it did. But those with an outrageous way of looking at politics see it as a possibility. Dick Morris — the former Clinton ally (but now a relentless critic), the master of triangulation — wrote in The New York Post this week: “Obama’s South Carolina victory will be hailed as proof that he won the African-American vote. Such block voting will trigger the white backlash Sen. Clinton needs to win.”
    As a South Carolinian who’s proud of how far my state has come, I want to say right now, well ahead of time: As Joe Biden got himself in trouble for saying, and as Iowa voters confirmed, Barack Obama is no Jesse Jackson. Nor is he Bill Clinton, or John Edwards, or anybody else. He’s just Barack Obama, and Barack Obama is the best-qualified Democrat seeking the presidency of the United States.
    And no one should dismiss South Carolinians for being wise enough to see that.

The Convenient Nativist

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Odd, isn’t it, that this anti-immigrant bit of propaganda — which purports to be about Sen. Lindsey Graham — should emerge at this particular moment:

This offensive nativist screed makes no policy proposal. The thrust here is about people speaking Spanish — as opposed to fine, decent folks with "South Carolina values." Appalling.

And as we all know, there’s a lot more at stake with an emotional play like this than a quixotic slap at a secure incumbent senator.

Huckabee on the Confederate flag

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No time to get into this right now — I’m way behind on my Sunday column — but just to let you know, Mike Huckabee is now apparently bringing up the Confederate flag at campaign events, and here’s what he’s saying:

MYRTLE BEACH, South Carolina (CNN) – Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee told South Carolina voters Thursday that the government had no business making decisions over the Confederate flag.
    "You don’t like people from outside the state coming in and telling you what to do with your flag," Huckabee said at a Myrtle Beach campaign event. "In fact, if somebody came to Arkansas and told us what to do with our flag, we’d tell them what to do with the pole, that’s what we’d do."
    Later, in Florence, he repeated the remarks. "I know what would happen if somebody comes to my state in Arkansas and tells us what to do, it doesn’t matter what it is, tell us how to run our schools, tell us how to raise our kids, tell us what to do with our flag — you want to come tell us what to do with the flag, we’d tell them what to do with the pole."

The Eclectic Sandlapping Palmetto Tree

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The NYT today has a story keyed to the 20th anniversary of Bonfire of the Vanities, from the perspective of “how has New York changed since then?”

Thinking back on the way he wrote about the Big Apple, it occurs to me that if Wolfe would really like to write about bizarre, rococo foibles in a sociopolitical context, he should come to South Carolina. He’s done New York; he’s done Atlanta; now he’s doing Miami. All have been done to death. He should come to the home of neo-Confederates, Green Diamond, Bob Jones University, Jake (it’s pronounced “Jakie,” Mr. Wolfe) Knotts, an antebellum form of government, the nation’s most libertarian governor, Andre Bauer, Thomas Ravenel, John Land, Glenn McConnell (arguably the most powerful man in the state, Mr. Wolfe — pictured at right) and the Hunley — and, just a bit into our recent past, Lee Atwater, Strom Thurmond, Fritz Hollings, Jack Lindsay, Ron Cobb, Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker… by comparison, even Rudy Giuliani seems boring.

It would be like Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test without the acid (who would need it?). Actually, come to think of that, I’d much rather see him write about us in his nonfiction mode — partly because the reality here is weirder than any fiction, and partly because I just prefer his nonfiction works, particularly Acid Test and The Right Stuff.

You know why Wolfe disappoints me as a fiction writer? He has no love for any of his characters. Think about it — is there a sympathetic character anywhere in Bonfire or the Atlanta book? It’s a very depressing view of humanity. By contrast, his detached-but-intimate style of journalism makes real people come into view in a way that is far more engaging.

The NAACP’s selective boycott

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A reader sends this question today via e-mail:

My wife and I spent some time last week in Montgomery, Al, where our newly married son and wife reside.  We toured downtown Montgomery (in the throes of being "reinvigorated") and the State Capitol.  I was interested to see  confederate flags prominently displayed on the grounds of the Capitol.  Not just one flag, but the four major flags of the confederacy, includignthe battle flag.  This was not some subtle showing of the flags as they were all on tall flagpoles being very prominently displayed.  I became curious as to the NAACP stance to this but my research fails to find any reaction.  I wonder why SC is being boycotted but not Alabama?  Any ideas?

This is the way I understand it: The South Carolina element within the NAACP has a lot of pull with the national organization. A key link is the Rev. Nelson B. Rivers III. Basically, S.C. is targeted because that’s the way the South Carolina NAACP leadership wants it. It has nothing to do with S.C. being worse, or special, in any objective sense.

Consider:

If I were the NAACP, and I were inclined to boycott, I’d be boycotting Mississippi. But that’s just me.

And that’s a GOOD thing?

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The rituals of parties continue to befuddle me. The things they value defy understanding. I just got this not from the Romney campaign:

Good afternoon everyone,

 Dr. Bob Jones III of the eponymous university has
endorsed Governor Romney’s candidacy for President. 

Greenville News has the story at this
link:

http://www.greenvilleonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071016/NEWS01/71016060

Key quote:

“‘This is all about
beating Hillary,’ Jones said. ‘And I just believe that this man has the
credentials both personally and ideologically in terms of his view about what
American government should be to best represent the rank and file of
conservative Americans.’”

Y’all remind me when I finally get around to running on the UnParty ticket that I don’t want any such eponymous goings-on in my campaign. Unless it’s from Mr. HDTV Jones, and he’s giving out free samples. I might go for that.

In any case, watch for releases from other candidates on this same subject.

The cognitive divide between black and white

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By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
THE TIME of the week has arrived at which I look at some problem or other and confidently pronounce, as though I knew, just what we should do about it. But I have no solutions today.
    Today, I’m just sad, and solutions seem scarce. Part of it is personal. I just returned a few days ago from Pennsylvania, where my youngest daughter’s closest friend had died after a traffic accident. But there are other causes.
    As I write, my wife is on her way back from Memphis, where she had been, tending to family business, when the awful news came about David. She had to fly back there after the funeral to get her car, and drive it home.
    A few minutes ago, I checked on her by cell phone. I told her I was groping about for a column idea, and she said I should write about how lucky we were to be living in South Carolina rather than Memphis. She cited what she described as the painfully divisive victory speech Mayor Willie Herenton had delivered after his re-election a few days ago.
    I just saw the video, and she’s right. Lord knows we have our own demons here in the state that was first to secede, and would do it again if some had their way. But there is a rawness to racial tension in Memphis that is hard to describe if you haven’t been there.
    There was a time — 16 years ago, when he became the first black mayor of that city — when Willie Herenton was a sign of hope: a black man elected with both black and white support.
    It was the sort of thing we had wanted and expected to see for a long time. Back in 1974, when we were students at Memphis State, Harold Ford — senior, not the one who ran for the U.S. Senate last year — ran for Congress against incumbent Republican Dan Kuykendall. My wife and I were totally for Ford, even though Rep. Kuykendall was her Dad’s friend and business partner. He had been all very well and good for the folks his age, but our generation was going to change things. And that race thing? Our kids would only know about that from history books.
    So it was sad, here in the next century, to hear Mayor Herenton tell his supporters in his hour of victory that “I now know who is for me, and I also know who is against me,” and the overwhelmingly black crowd applauds, because they know just what he means.
    For a man just re-elected to an unprecedented fifth term, Mr. Herenton had a huge chip on his shoulder. “There are some mean, mean-spirited people in Memphis,” he said to much cheering. “There are some haters…. I know about haters, and I know about shaking ’em off.”
    He went on to tell about “two sad occasions” from the campaign. “I’m gonna let you know about the sickness in Memphis.”
    He spoke of a basketball game at which he had presented the key to the city during halftime, and “the fans showed so much disdain and hatred… and that place was full, 90 percent white.”
    Another time, while appearing live from Memphis on “Good Morning America” along with Justin Timberlake, “I get up on the stage, and it was 95 percent young white kids, they booed me on national television.”
    “But what they want to say is, can Willie Herenton bring us together? I didn’t separate us.”
    “Memphis got a lot of healing to do. But see, I don’t have that problem. They’ve got a problem.”
    We’ve all got a problem, and not just in Memphis. What is Memphis but a great, big Jena, Lousiana? Another town where there are no heroes, just a place full of people, black and white, all messed up over race.
    Mayor Herenton isn’t just some isolated megalomaniac. Judging by the reaction, every person in that room saw what he saw, just the way he saw it. And whites, watching on TV, saw a guy who was calling them racists.
    The Commercial Appeal, the newspaper the mayor dismisses as the voice of the white establishment, harrumphed that “contrary to the innuendoes he made during his speech, the 58 percent of voting population who opposed him can’t all simply be dismissed as racists.” No, they can’t, especially since one of the two candidates who split the anti-Herenton vote was also black. But Herenton supporters can stew over the fact that in the whitest precincts, his support was in single digits.
    It’s this cognitive divide between what white folks and black folks perceive, when both are looking at the very same thing, that keeps us from putting this mess behind us. And I didn’t just arrive at this conclusion.
    Somewhere — maybe in a box in my attic — is a manila folder containing a printout of a column I wrote in 1995, but never ran in the paper. I wrote it in a state of bewilderment on the day O.J. Simpson was acquitted. I hadn’t followed the trial and didn’t care much about it one way or the other, but I had found myself in a room with a television when the verdict came in, and a crowd had gathered to hear it. You know what happened next: The black folks watching cheered; the whites stared in silence. To me, another rich guy’s lawyers had gotten him off; big deal. But that wasn’t the way my black friends in the room saw it at all, and I was shocked at the contrast. But because I had no solution to offer, because the column just chronicled my shock, I didn’t deem it worthy of publication. I’d hold it until I could come up with an answer.
    I’m still holding it. And now, here we are. What’s my point? I don’t have one. I just think it’s sad. Don’t you?

The Little Rock Nine, 50 years on

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Last week, I happened to mention what happened in Little Rock 50 years ago in the course of asking the successor of Orval Faubus about his thoughts on race relations today, in Arkansas and the nation.

Mike Huckabee noted that today — Sept. 25 — would be the 50th anniversary of the day that the 101st Airborne Division escorted nine black kids to class at Central High School, to get them past the mob of white racists outside.

To mark that day, I edited a short video clip of the former governor talking about the meaning of those events. He mentions two items of note: First, that his daughter Sarah — seated behind him in the photo below — was attending Central High at the time when the 40th anniversary was marked (which raises yet another point of contrast with a certain other governor); and second, that he takes great pride as a Republican in having won 48 percent of the black vote in one of his elections.

Huckabeesarah

Long Tall Fred swaggers to the rescue, but of what?

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By BRAD WARTHEN
Editorial Page Editor
FOR MONTHS NOW, “conservative” Republicans have waited for their hounddog-faced Godot, Fred Thompson, to bring something to the presidential contest that was missing.
    So it was that quite a few of us left our cool offices and moseyed down to Doc’s Barbecue Monday with a mind to learning what that something was.
    The star of screen, lobby and courtroom swaggered onto the riser in the parking lot and launched into a hickory-smoked litany of what he had been talking about since his previous foray into electoral politics back in the ’90s. His delivery had a poetic — or perhaps “lyrical,” in a country-song-lyrics sense — quality:

… talkin’ about the val-yuh (that’s “value” to you pantywaist Easterners) of being pro-life;
talkin’ about the value of standing strong for the second amendment;
talkin’ about the rule of law;
talkin’ about the value and the rightness of lower taxes;
talkin’ about a market economy; talking about the ingenuity and the inventiveness of the American people and the value of competitiveness and how we would fare well in the international marketplace. We do more things better than anybody in the world, and it works for us….

    OK, so maybe it got a trifle less lyrical there for a moment, but he got his rhythm back right quick:

We’re talking about first principles, things this country was founded upon,
the idea that there’s some things in this changing world that don’t change.
Certain things,
certain things such as human nature,
and the wisdom of the Ages that led us to the Declaration of Independence
and led us to the Constitution of the United States,
and they are not outmoded documents to be cast aside….

    OK, Fred, all that’s great, but who said they were — documents to be cast aside, I mean? Who’s the bad guy here? Certainly not the men who’ve been running their fannies off seeking the GOP nomination while you were playing Hamlet all these months.
    Sure, Rudy Giuliani might have a bit of trouble on the abortion thing, and so might Mitt Romney — depending which Mitt Romney you chose to believe from the assortment available on “YouTube.”
    But that other stuff? Come, on, this is boilerplate, par for the course, warming-up exercises, the kind of stuff Republican babies cut their teeth on.
    So what sets you apart, aside from the fact that you are obviously way-up-yonder tall? (I would have said “Rocky-Top tall,” but Fred and I are both Memphis State grads — from back when they called it Memphis State — so I can’t hang a U.T. image on him).
    One thing, as far as I can see — and it goes back to the predicate in the first sentence of my third paragraph: swaggered.
    That ol’ boy’s got more swagger on him than John Wayne in a roomful of Maureen O’Haras. It’s in his voice, and in everything he chooses of his own by-God free will to say with it. It’s in his accent; it’s in those jowls sliding off his face like McMansions on a muddy California hillside.Fred_thompson3
    I’d say it was literally in his walk, if I could ever see how he walks, but he always has a crowd around
him, with his craggy head poking up above it.
    Those crowds respond to him: The ladies like a man who sounds like he durn-well knows what he’s talking ’bout and don’t mind saying so, and the men can tell right off that he’s one-a them — or what they like to think of themselves as, from the swagger itself right down to that hot-dang wife a-his that smiles so purty when he brags about sirin’ them babies on her.
    All of this can disguise the fact that this is a very smart man of rather broad-ranging sophistication (I mentioned he went to Memphis State, right?), but nobody holds that against him.
    And so it was that he came a-ridin’ into town on that bus a-his with Johnny Cash boomin’ out of it, ridin’ to the rescue of… of what?
    Once again, what was lacking? Who had to be saved from what?
    Last month, ol’ Fred told David Broder that he only considered getting into the race because his friend John McCain had stumbled along the way. Before that, “I expected to support John, just as I did in 2000,” he said.
    I remember him supporting McCain back then, because he came to see me at the time, and said we were wrong to have endorsed George W. Bush in the S.C. primary. And he was right.
    So I found myself puzzled last week, a week in which the biggest political news was the resurgence of John McCain. A few days after a well-reviewed debate performance in New Hampshire, the Arizonan was back in Washington to hear Gen. David Petraeus — who might as well have had a “McCain in ’08” button wedged among those rows of ribbons on his chest — tell the world that the strategy Sen. McCain had advocated for the last four years had succeeded. Suddenly the guy who was supposed to have fallen on his sword over Iraq looked “prescient and courageous on the campaign’s most vital issue,” according to The Associated Press.
    Sure, there are those Republicans who are still hot because Sen. McCain isn’t mean enough to Mexicans, whereas ol’ Fred leaves little doubt that he’d kick their Rio-moistened behinds clear back to Juarez.
    But while I grant you the man sure can swagger, I still find myself wondering: Why’s he swaggering into town now?

For video and more, go to http://blogs.thestate.com/bradwarthensblog/.

The SAT ‘typo’

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Does it ever occur to you, as it does to me each year, that our state average SAT score looks like a typo?

I mean, it only has three digits. So right away, you think this is the score on one part of the test or the other, verbal or math.

But that can’t be right, either, because it’s higher than 800. And it can’t be a matter of a digit left off, because it can’t be, say 1,985. That’s also impossible.

Then you realize the truth of what it represents — a whole lot of kids taking a college-bound test who are not ready to go to any kind of college — and the sadness descends once again.

The national average of 1,017 is pretty pitiful — and not much higher — but at least it doesn’t look like a typo.

Scooped by the newsroom

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Yesterday, Zeke Stokes sent me the above video, with the following terse comment:

Just when you think we’re making progress.

Once again, this was Zeke Stokes, not some guy who gets his jollies making fun of the S.C. public education system.

I looked at it and thought, "the poor kid," yet resolved to put it up on the blog as inherently interesting — but only after I put up several other things that had more substance. I didn’t get around to posting those things yesterday, and since Jon Ozmint is coming in in a few minutes to talk about all this, and we still have pages to produce, I’m probably not going to get to those things today, either.

Meanwhile, the blasted newsroom scooped me on this. They even blogged about it. Ah, well.

What it WAS, was a warning…

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Survival would be impossible in this doggy-dog world without friends to give us a heads-up when danger approaches. Here’s one I got today:

I have eight tickets for
this Saturday’s football game –  and we are making them available for members
of Senior Staff to purchase if any of you are interested.
 
First come, first served. 
Email me back.  The tickets are $35 each. 
 
Thanks.
 
Kathy

Of course, as a veteran of 20 years of this craziness, I knew just what to do. I immediately scribbled,

(note to self: Don’t try to come in to work this
Saturday)

Without such an early-warning system, things could get ugly…

Our Valerie gets Thomas Ravenel onto the front of the Wall Street Journal

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Here’s a link to the front page story in the Wall Street Journal today about Thomas Ravenel and his troubles, written by our own Valerie Bauerlein, late of The State.

I’m proud for Valerie whenever she gets a front-page byline at the WSJ, and I’m almost as proud for Thomas for being honored with one of those patented line drawings of his very own mug. Here’s hoping you can actually link to it. (Unless you’re a subscriber, you probably can’t, but don’t whine to me; I don’t run the WSJ.)

Anyway, as a recounting of the Ravenel saga to folks elsewhere who don’t know about it, the story’s fine. Trouble is, the WSJ is big-time, and editors there don’t put you on the front page if all you’ve got is an interesting story about what’s going on back in South Carolina. No, you’ve got to stick in some stuff about Vitter, and Gov. Perdue, make it look like a regional story, which makes it almost as important as something going on in New York. And then it has to have a nut graf. All God’s stories got to have a nut graf, or else they’re never, ever going onto the front page of a self-respecting newspaper like the WSJ.

And that’s where I have to quibble. Trouble is, the Ravenel tale doesn’t have a nut graf, in WSJ terms. So when you force one onto it, it sounds kind of funky. Here’s the one on Valerie’s story:

    The indictment is just one of the political headaches across the South that are making Republicans look more vulnerable than they have in years to losing ground in the region’s legislatures and statehouses. Though there isn’t any sign of them losing their dominance in the region, the once-formidable "Solid South" coalitions they forged in the 1980s and 1990s to end a century of Democratic dominion have given way to messy schisms and infighting. Today, they look a lot like the bitterly divided Democrats of three decades ago.

Well, OK, yeah — in the sense that it’s pretty much the same people, or their kids, or the people they would have been today (however you want to look at it). In the South, the GOP is the White Man’s Party. Everybody knows that. And white guys used to run the Democratic Party, because it was the only party around, and white guys ran everything there was.

Add to that the fact that historically, there hasn’t been much of a gender gap in the South Carolina electorate (compared to nationally), and you get a situation in which most voters (since more than two-thirds of the voters are white) identify themselves as Republican — that is, among voters who identify themselves with a party.

Majority parties (and by the way, Republicans are not an actual majority of the electorate, but just a plurality, but that tends to work much the same) tend not to be monolithic. The Democratic Party wasn’t, and isn’t. Nor is the GOP, now that’s it’s no longer a bunch of ideologues satisfied to be in the minority, so long as they’re "right" as they define "right." (You know, like the Libertarian Party today.) So you get "messy schisms and infighting," but that’s not newsworthy. That’s life. Actually, it’s probably more likely to be par for the course in a party that party as white as the GOP.

After 53 years of life, I’ve learned that white guys tend to have one thing in common: They don’t see themselves as having anything in common. They don’t see being white guys as a cause per se. They certainly don’t feel any particular loyalty to other white guys because they are white guys; nor do they feel any particular reason to agree with other white guys because they are white guys. In fact, one reason they probably aren’t Democrats is because they’re put off by Identity Politics; it’s not their thing. They don’t get it. This is one of the things that makes some Republicans sound so racist or sexist. (You know how they’re always griping about black people talking about race, or women talking about gender. Feminists say they "just don’t get it," and that’s true, because women know from white guys. Of course, some of them ARE racist and sexist, but a lot of it is just being cursed with a White Guy cognitive style.)

So basically, if you’re a white guy in the White Man’s Party and your name is, say Thomas Ravenel (or Mark Sanford or Lindsey Graham or any other name you care to pick out of the air), you’re kidding yourself if you think the other white guys in the party are going to agree with you or stick up for you just because you’re one of them. Once enough of these chaps get together to form a majority, look for lots of messy schisms. And infighting.

So it’s not news. And it certainly doesn’t mean the GOP in S.C. is going the way of the Democratic Party of 30 years ago — that is to say, out of power. No party is going the way of the Democratic Party of 30 (or perhaps we should say 40, or 50, years ago, to take us to the days when a South Carolinian was about as likely to be a Republican as he was a Buddhist) years ago, because that only happens if there is only one party.

Of course, come to think of it, the White Guys in the Republican Party mostly think that theirs IS the only party, in that they’d rather open a main vein than be a Democrat, but we’re quibbling here with our own quibbling…

Anyway, Valerie knows what she’s about, so she sets things right by the end of the story. Mind you, the nut graf didn’t say the GOP was actually in trouble in the South (as much as I may wish it, and all other parties, were about to be Gone With The Wind). But if not to suggest that, why have a nut graf? Cause all God’s stories got to have a nut graf, fool, which takes us back to where we were, which was where?

Oh, yeah. Valerie makes it all right in the end, correcting any misconceptions you may have inadvertently formed as a result of reading the nut graf. And for those of you who think party means anything, she introduced a delicious irony by having Don Fowler debunk your worries about the GOP:

    The Republican turmoil has raised some Democratic
hopes that parts of the South may no longer be as lockstep in support
of the Republican Party. But Donald L. Fowler, a former chairman of the
Democratic National Committee and the husband of Carol Khare Fowler,
South Carolina’s Democratic Party chairwoman, cautions that Republican
fatigue doesn’t yet necessarily portend broad Democratic comebacks,
particularly in South Carolina.

    He says it would require a major demographic shift,
such as an influx of people from other parts of the country, and a
major economic change, such as a depression, to change the landscape.

    "At least where we are now, Democrats don’t have the
wherewithal to take advantage of the split in the Republican Party,"
Mr. Fowler said.

I like the standard Mr. Fowler set, because it was hyperbolic while being no exaggeration — saying that it would take a change such as, say "a depression" for Dems to be able to take decisive advantage of this "schism." That’s cool because that sums up Southern politics so beautifully: hyperbolic, without being an exaggeration.

Making friends, of a sort

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I received this missive today, and while it’s hardly a welcome development to have someone turn his back on you, he did it in a civil way:

Mr. Warthen,
       This will be my last note to your newspaper. We’re not getting anywhere so I will bow out.
       I do thank you for communicating . . . . That is more than some newspaper folk do and even if we disagree, that’s our right, OK?

Thanks,
Irvin Shuler

I was just about to write back and say, sure, that’s cool; different strokes and all that … when I decided, just on a whim, to see what this correspondent had most recently had to say to me. I found that among my yet-unread e-mail was one he sent yesterday:

Why would "you" not want to talk about those n_____s brought across the
Atlantic by the damn yankee, money gruggers?    Were they "your" ancestors
and just how much did YOUR family make off of us?????? AGAIN ?????
Please,
Mr. Warthen……just get the hell out of our state….yes, b___h, leave this
state and YOUR
State Paper should be forgotten.
Remember……there was a "State Paper"
editor once that pushed a little too far and
got…..well….just what he
deserved.     He spoke against Southern Folk and got just what he
deserved.    He was killed………thank goodness !!!!

Irvin
Shuler……………..NEVER ANOTHER APPOMATTOX   !!!!!

You will now, no doubt, remember this gentleman from previous correspondence.

At least, as we parted, he was in a better mood. That’s something.

Do they really think that’s a good point?

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As I’ve noted before, many of the flag defenders think they are terribly insightful students of history, and that the rest of us are just showing our ignorance in saying that flying it on our State House grounds is stupid and wrong.

Welcome to the Bizarro World.

Anyway, there’s this one guy who keeps writing to me, and making the terribly profound — to him — point that there were American flags flying over some of the slave ships. To him, and the thousands of others who say this with a big, triumphant air — this is a major GOTCHA! Apparently, it’s supposed to cancel out the fact that South Carolina and the other Confederate states seceded in order to preserve slavery.

Seriously. That’s what these people seem to think. Human rationalization is a wonderful thing, is it not?

Anyway, he writes and says,

Warthen,
       Would you please write a column and explain that NO slave was brought to
America under our Confederate Flags but every one, every-one was brought over
under the glorious stars-and-stripes of that time……the stars-and stripes of that
time was and is still my enemy, the union flag….. The flag of that time…………
1860-1865 and on through what you yankees call reconstruction, which was one
hell-of-a-mess for the good folks of the South.

Irvin Shuler                     NEVER ANOTHER APPOMATTOX !!!

So I make the mistake of engaging with him to ask, what on Earth is new about the fact that the slave trade was banned well before 1860? He writes back,

WARTHEN,
There is nothing new in that but please let all "your" reades know they,
those captured overseas and brought here to be sold as slaves, were
brought here on ships flying the damn "stars and stripes" of the glorious
union (of-that-time) and none, not even one, was brought to this country
under the Flag(s) of the Confederacy.      Why can’t you print this ????
Are you scared to print the truth…..afraid of Hillary or that damn Osama
Obama, whatever he is ?
Afraid you’ll have to back it up and can’t ……..I understand…….you’ve
been lying to your readers all along.      
Thank goodness for those like "Pitchfork Ben Tillman" and Me.

Irvin Shuler

Then, I write back,

Why do you think it’s important that the slave trade preceded secession? Of course, it would have to. There would have been no slaves to fight over, otherwise.

The cessation of the slave trade was part of the long, slow movement toward getting rid of slavery. A generation after it ended, abolitionists had set their sights on the next target — the freedom of those who were already here. After Lincoln, who was their candidate (despite his attempts to reassure Southern voters), won the election, South Carolina — which since the battles over the Constitution in the 1780s had been one of the two most vehement defenders of the institution in the Congress — seceded rather than lose those slaves. Other states followed.

This is simple, basic history that everyone knows. Tell you what — I’ll put this on my blog and we’ll see if there was anyone out there who didn’t know it, or who thinks it means what you seem to think it does.

You know what else? Those ships all had sails! So let’s blame the wind for slavery! Only the advent of steamships led to their freedom. That makes about as much sense as what you’re saying about flags.

Halfway through, I chide myself for having wasted so much time, and reflect that it won’t be so bad if I post it on my blog. Which is why I told him I would.