Walter Rhett, Writer

The 2 interviews below feature Walter Rhett, the founder, publisher, editor, and writer of Southern Perlo, the South’s most successful review of shovel ready ideas.

with Walter Rhett, Writer

In the recent Shorty Awards, called Twitter’s Oscars, Rhett was the first place Shorty Award leader in Southern History and Blog. Below is his Shorty Award interview.

 What are six things you could never do without? Sweet Potatoes, baked

and hot; good thoughts, improved by memory; hope, love, mercy, and faith, given by eternity.

How do you use Twitter in your professional life? Manage and accelerate stories, ideas, and views.

What’s your favorite Twitter app? Kanaso, allows unlimited characters, great wingbats, modified RTs. Versatile! Paper li – twitter news web dailies. Great sources!

Twitter or Facebook? Tweets, all the way, baby!!!

What was the funniest trend you’ve seen? Whatever it was, a new, more outrageous trend will come tomorrow!

What feature should Twitter add? The ability to op out of sites they recommend! The ability to link multiple accounts.

Who do you wish had a Twitter feed but doesn’t? Many of my good friends!

Is there someone you want to follow you who doesn’t already? If so, who? One never wishes and dreams and tells to titillate! NYB!

Have you ever unfollowed someone? Who and why? Yes! For being press releases w/o new content or views.

Why should we vote for you? I engage; I offer cutting edge content in southern history; I support my followers & others, I look at issues deeply & globaly, I write well.

Terms you wish would start trending on Twitter right now? #peace. #faith. #mercy. The gifts that belong to us all that we can share.

What’s the most interesting connection you’ve made through Twitter?To leading news reporters. (I prefer not to mention names.)

Hashtag you created that you wish everyone used? #perlo for the American subsistance found in every life and story.

How do you make your tweets unique? Fresh insights, good stories, hot tips, personal support, caring tone, honest questions.

What inspires you to tweet? Living; the lives of others. The global human spirit. Every tweet tells of a heart, in joy or distress.

Ever get called out for tweeting too much? In the beginning!

140 characters of advice for a new user? Be silent. Listen to what others have to say. Find your community. Change and grow.

How long can you go without a tweet? Weeks, if I’m deep into a project. But I feel guilty.

How do you imagine Twitter changing? Great platform and search options.

Who do you admire most for his or her use of Twitter? Soledad O’Brien, her amazing humanness; Cory Booker, an inspirational mayor who combines new and old.

What is one of the biggest misconceptions of Twitter?It only duplicates FB. Shorter version. That it has no features.

Why should people follow you? They find their own reasons; it’s presumptive of me to suggest.

Can you name some one-of-a-kind Twitter accounts that you follow?NepalTV, who will often provide ground level commentary upon reply.

How do you decide what to tweet?  Posts that travel the world, touch its people, that find and share its stories, old and new, preserve its love, and recall its fear, greenly and cheaply.

Why’d you start tweeting? The posts reflect interests, are easy to share and offer a means of personal support and contact.

Has Twitter changed your life? If yes, how? Yes. Greater confidence, greater satisfaction, new friends, renewed faith in spirit and social action.

What do you wish people would do more of on Twitter? I write history because its truth and honesty gives my writing intimacy and authority. I wish people shared more local history.

How will the world change in the next year? I don’t have a crystal ball. I hope for improved water and health among the world’s poor.

What are some big Twitter faux pas?  Sales pitches; too many lists and bests; bad research; inaccurate facts; pushing ideologies, name calling, cursing.

What will the world be like 10 years from now? I love living in the moment.

Walter Rhett has been writing since the fourth grade and has a variety of awards and achievements under his belt: He first published poetry in Essence and a Paris journal, Presence Africane.

Then he switched to nonfiction, winning a scholarship to Johns Hopkins University’s summer writers’ workshop in 1986. He can be contacted at southernperlo@yahoo.com for information regarding readings and signings. He also does tours.

Rhett

Q: What’s your identity as a writer? Where do you find inspiration?

A: I react strongly to stories. I write about epic memories. I’m a Perlo writer — perlo is a Charleston rice dish made with local bounty. Perlo’s spice is history. I write history because the debate is settled and the facts are not disputed — unless you are talking about the Civil War. I write nonfiction because its truth and honesty give my writing voice intimacy and authority.

Q: Who are your major influences?

A: Frank Yerby, a wildly popular Georgia novelist from the mid-20th century who lived in Spain and sold 30 million books. Florida’s Zora Neale Hurston — she had absolutely the best ear among Southern writers. Poet Gwendolyn Brooks for her elegance. Local jazz writer Jack McCray for his swing. New York Times columnist Gail Collins — I actually scream and cheer at her lines.

Q: What advice would you give to local writers?

A: Practice craft. Find your voice and gain a sense of discovery and authority.

Q: When and how often do you write?

A: I write daily, usually posting in the top 100 online markets. Using standard metrics, my weekly audience averages 100,000 readers. New York Times Nobel and Pulitzer winning columnists frequently single out my work. Times columns feature and promote comment essays. The writers and editors highlight the exceptional essays and rank readers’ recommendations. I’m usually there.

I post my Southern Perlo blog (www.southernperlo.wordpress.com) weekly in 35 mid- and major U.S. newspaper markets: Savannah; Montgomery, Ala.; Des Moines, Iowa; and San Francisco, where the online editor invited me to post on their political page. I publish Southern Perlo on its own site with beautiful graphics and photos. I also publish three online news dailies and update a news stream and a unique Lowcountry history stream on twitter (www.twitter.com/walterrhett). I love photographs; Perlo and my twitter streams feature many of them.

Q: What’s in store for the future?I just finished my new paperback, “Butter My Biscuit,” a collection focused on Southern wit and storytelling. It’s available for the holidays.

To stir the pot, here’s a brief passage:
“But my mind always goes back to Ms. Lucy’s lunch. There are days when the single thought of a bite of her breads is enough to sustain me through the crush of a world that has left me starved for so much.”

Great Saves! In Congress, Everybody is Saving Everything

This is the year of the save! In Congress, the rancor is well intentioned; everybody is saving something. The last civil meeting of an American legislature was in Richmond during the birth of the Confederacy (“we are passing through one of the greatest revolutions in the annals of the world”) and its decorum lasted all of a week. South Carolina actually refused to elect its number one fire eater, the father of Secession, Robert Barnwell Rhett, because the people felt he would be too boisterious and extreme. 

Earlier in the US House in 1856, having took umbarge about remarks regarding his cousin in the Senate (suggesting slavery was his “harlot”), a SC House member walked to the Senate chamber carrying a metal tipped cane used to discipline dogs and viciously caned a MA member, salvagely striking his head, nearlly killing him, leaving blood on the Senate floor. But his life was saved. It took the gentleman a year to recover from his injuries. The SC House member avoided censure and won re-election.

The US Congress’ own exaggeration doing the healthcare repeal was more poisonous than a blow fish and just as colorful with its calls to save the republic from saving children, the unemployed, the uninsured, the adult unemployed uninsured children, and the elderly. The vote ended up saving them from a panel that, in the name of costs and crushing jobs, wanted to vote away a better option for saving lives and securing wellness. Funny how those national panels are only concerned with costs and crushing jobs rather than saving lives; sounds like somewhere we have visited before. It is silently obscene that my state ranks 47th in life expectancy and its representatives of a particular ilk (ain’t calling no names!) voted revocation after transparently debating for two days and offering no substitutes to assure those who wanted and voted for better. Instead, we came to the brink of getting worse.

What Congress lacked the web more than made up for. To paraphrase early Bogart (1949, “Knock On Any Door”), go to any social media site. What doesn’t make you blush will bring tears to your eyes.

A Playhouse for Our Worse Instincts

Civil War Causalities at Fredericksburg, VA, 1864

In a striking underground example, the 60s popularized non-medicinal pot leading to an agricultural economy in Humboldt County, CA in which normal, happy school children worked after school with manicure scissors to trim the buds, adding value above a thousand dollars an ounce for brands in high demand whose aggregate worth is well over a $1 billion annually. So is the country undergoing an equally dramatic, seismic reorganization in its values. It changes our national identity and policies; it reconstructs our moral ground and redefines how we act and respond to issues on America’s every corner.

(1) In economic policy, the ideology that now guides politicians and policy makers fails its own means test. Besides not hitting its numbers and ignoring better percentage plays, it fails to note that the economic arm of American exceptionalism is philosophically rooted and connected historically to an astonishing and exceptional social action: it originally held that individuals or groups who achieved great economic success would would give more and do more, to benefit all.

This idea born in American democracy was a remarkable, radical break with previous global and historical actions. Wealth would no longer be hoarded as a prize of absolute power, maintained by brute strength and a blind eye to the plight of those with lesser means. Instead, American exceptionalism meant wealth would contribute to the success of the whole. It would dampen destructive conflicts and renew progress. Less Hobbes, (although Hobbes sought protections for labor as a worker’s property); more enlightened Rosseau. Its highest result: the Marshall Plan after World War II. Rosie’s muscle stood for our collective might.

Today’s ideology stands the old, founding principle on its head. Exceptionalism has come to be the wolf pack of lone wolves, bound together by obscene obsessions with their power and privilege and wealth. The result: 7 and 8 figure bonuses for executives which 70% of Americans favor banning. Twenty percent of the population controls 85% of the wealth, leaving only 15% of the nation’s wealth for the remaining 80 percent. The top one percent controls more than 40 % of the country’s financial wealth, as charted by NYU’s Edward Wolff. The result: where we once led the world in progressive policies and organized capitalism for its greatest benefits, we are now stand against the global trend.

(2) Morally, many want to be like the men and women enjoying the spoils, tone deaf to suffering. Who cares how much Bill Gates give away today? What the NBA is to inner city neighborhoods, corporate America is to a large segment of America: a dream that cannot be fulfilled but is rooted on for its place at the top. The fallacy is obvious: the dream depends on fewer and fewer people winning. The biggest lottery prize has the most losers.

But a large part of the country overlooks this contradiction. Despite the cognitive dissonance of knowing we can’t win and will be ultimate losers, a segment of America thinks ignoring the inconsistency and tension makes us stronger. The result: transplant patients who die because they can’t afford life saving operations while the state funds the study of algae as a fuel. The result: South Carolina’s new Governor Nikki Haley increasing a staffer’s salary (he worked on her campaign!) by $27,000 before he performed a day’s work or demonstrated any competence in public service. This from an official in her first week in office who promised to be fiscally responsible and cut the public budget to reduce the state’s debt. The result, rooted in Emile Durkheim, is a weaker society ripe with alienation: conspiracy constructs, secret cabals, guided by those estranged; harsh words, wary mistrust; a tyranny conceived to be real and posited by remote control.

(3) Socially, the exhilaration of reveling in the playhouse of our worst instincts, shrinking our sphere of concern, and linking effete, self-indulging hands empowers much of our public participation. Like those naively walking the Knife’s Edge arȇte on Maine’s Mt. Katahdin, (a trail a mile long, a mile high and often only six feet wide), many of us seek only the thrills and are blind to the dangers, and blame others when we fall. The result: we never improve our climbing technique but only demand a safety rope (read: bail-outs, gifts of tax cuts, debt for our causes, security for our purposes).

Political activists and pundits of all stripes should be required to perform a day of public service a month: real contact helping, listening, and serving real people. Let Newt tutor in Kenyan colonialism; Boehner in restaurant management. Hands on means fewer will be found with hands out, and maybe those whose hands have been raking it in will understand the value and mutual benefit of joining hands and truly giving back.

HaleyB Rolling Back the Good Times

 
Mississippi’s Governor Haley Barbour isn’t guilty of racism. But he is guilty of one of my favorite southern sins – revisionism. Believe me, I know the differences in racism and revisionism.

As an African-American from the deep south who blogs in Mississippi on the state’s leading newspaper website, the Jackson Clarion-Ledger, I am keenly attuned to the governor’s positions. I like his state. I’m friends with members of its legislature on my blog site. I featured in Southern Perlo a collection of stunning Mississippi portraits by Dorothea Lange. Lange was America’s top photographer during the Great Depression, and she captured Mississippi life during a 1937 swing through the state. I can tell you Haley Barbour’s verbal snapshot of 1960s Mississippi has simply brought to the front a conversation that I have heard shared in the South for many years. At conferences and lunch tables, after church and at receptions, I have heard it expressed as a view of the period and events that dismantled segregation.

Sadly, to my ear and experience, Gov. Barbour’s quotes are verbatim repetitions of talking points that inform discussions by many old native southerners. Often heard comments also include: “We got along very well; everybody knew everybody; we attended each other’s funerals.” These comments are really not very different than the paternalism expressed in the traditional northern liberal remark, “some of my best friends are African-Americans,” or the remark I once heard in corporate America: “we have no problem in hiring, but many of our clients are opposed/uncomfortable/old fashioned.”

The point of all these remarks, north and south, old and new, in the broad net of American conversation about race is to create a “kinder, gentler” portrait of race relations, one without sting or special privilege or penalty for those whose skin made them oppressed. But the most important part of the civil rights movement was not just to integrate the old South’s schools and lunch counters; it was to end the status of African-Americans as economic chattel. In the governor’s time, thousands worked in a system that combined segregation and share cropping. Most who experienced it remember it as only a nudge beyond slavery, and in some ways, even more restrictive socially and economically.

William Cash, also a native southerner, writing in his brilliant  1941 work, The Mind of the South, pointed out one of the overlooked and misunderstood ironies of slavery; that it was a period of close contact and open relationships. Lives were touched from cradle to grave by contact across the races daily and in the most intimate ways: nursing children, cooking, caring for the sick, celebrating milestones—even as slavery’s dark side, its control of every aspect of human life and its brutal cruelty, was hidden away from this genteel view.

What Haley Barbour omits is even a mention of the dark side of race in Mississippi during his youth. This omission is more telling than what he actually says. He has firsthand knowledge that doesn’t fit the status quo.Yazoo City (like Manning, SC in my home state) was a center of the cotton economy that was still paying adult workers (and children as young as ten who cut school) to hand pick cotton fields in sweltering heat under blazing sun in dusty air that left the taste of grit on your teeth not for a minimum hourly wage but for a piece rate, calculated by the pound: two cents. Two cents a pound; a grand bonus of fifty cents for those who picked a hundred pounds in a single day. There were no worker or health protections or required breaks or heat monitoring or water stations or restrictions on child labor. There was no overtime, however long the day. Martin Luther King, Jr. reported meeting southern pickers in the 1960s who had never seen a dollar bill. I know personally families who worked the fields for shares or piece rates, who worked with stiff, bent fingers stooped over rows of cotton, whose day started well before dawn to get a small edge on the raising heat.

Against this backdrop, Gov. Haley claims, things (race relations) in Yazoo City “weren’t so bad.” His memories certainly differ from those who worked in Mississippi fields that provided Yazoo City with its wealth and commerce. The labor of these field hands enabled his and other families to achieve prosperity during an era when the workers were exploited, discriminated against in education and hiring, restricted in opportunities, and denied the right to vote.

Civil rights was not so much about social protest as it was about economic progress. The video clips and histories and memories of those from “off,” overlook a fact Haley Barbour knows well. Social change was simply the necessary pre-condition for economic change. Schools wouldn’t improve, hiring practices wouldn’t change, streets wouldn’t get paved, officials couldn’t run for office, football players couldn’t take the field until the old system of social segregation was broken apart. Whether it fell easy or hard is not the measure of a community, town, or state’s character. A place’s character is not in marking its process of change, but it celebrating its progress. Mississippi’s greatest legacy is how it won the battle with itself and offered equal opportunity to all, a mission still bearing fruit. As we say in my part of the south, pondering how much damage the rock did is less important than fixing the broken wheel.
Like many Southerners, the governor surely must have respected the character of the people who endured such conditions for so little benefit or hope. He certainly recognized their faces and can greet them by name on the streets of the small southern town that was his home. But the governor’s remarks plainly revise the truth. That despite hard work and personal effort, African-American farm workers in Yazoo City doing his youth were consigned to a life of poverty and to a citizenship that was egregiously and envisceratingly second class.

These citizens who were denied American freedoms petitioned by song and foot, rallying in churches and marching non-violently. They participated in the peaceful exercise of rights considered “inalienable,” clinging to the country, state, and city they loved, despite how they had been wronged. I am glad Yazoo City met them, as the governor notes, with a like spirit. They, not the members of the citizen councils, are the real heroes of southern change and the drivers of its new economic progress, and the governor should have given them credit and said as much.

Thanks for reading! /wr. Stir the Perlo, add a comment. Image: Mississippi: The Fourth of July, 1937, by Dorothea Lange, Library of Congress Archives. Use without restrictions.

No Blood, Just Charts!

Factories and Houses, 1942.

  Nobel laureate Paul Krugman says in his New York Times column today that the pending political crisis could deepen if the government makes the wrong policy decisions. He forecasts castrophic damage to families and workers and believes the appropriate analogy is the “blood bath” mentioned by Deficit Comission co-chair, Alan Simpson, former Republican senator from Wyoming. Stunning prediction for a man who reads charts to describes trends. My spin:

No blood, only charts! The decisions of politicians about the economy reflect cultural assumptions. Ironically the crisis for which you are the harbinger and predictor has historic antecedents. Not in the economies of Japan, Germany, or Ireland—or more appropriately, Iceland—but more recently in the cultural politics of Chicago.
 

Wrapping Chewing Gum @1910

Remember when Harold Washington was elected Mayor of Chicago? The city shut down. An intransigent block stymied the city council and refused to govern. The Chicago council refused to approve appointments. This parallels the Senate holding up Obama’s appointments to the federal departments, commissions, and the courts, which recently prompted a group of Republican judges to write a letter to Senate Republicans to ask that Barack’s judicial appointments go forward.

Chicago’s economy tanked. An able man was brought to his knees. Notice the parallels?

There’s an old southern joke that describes a southern gentleman meeting Booker T. Washington while traveling, and proclaiming Mr. Washington to be “the greatest living American.” Washington thanked the gentleman, but deferred the honor to President Roosevelt. The gentleman said he also once shared the same sentiment—until the President invited Mr. Washington to the White House for dinner. (Many on first reading may miss the implication and tragic humor here.)

Olympia Cotton Mill, Columbia, SC, 1909

Outside of the Chicago analogy—more apt for the federal impasse than Newt’s Kenyan anti-colonialism—are other unnoticed parallels. These are tied to the actions and influence of huge financial interests.

These interests always align and embed themselves in the system to create sleights of mind. The suffering of slavery was not revealed in economic charts. Rice, its profits, its rapidly increased production, its century-long sustained growth, its multiplier on global output from Sweden to Turkey, is replaced in the popular mind with cotton, but rice created the American dream, advanced trade missions to Europe, prompted Southern support for the revolution, and even fueled Rhode Island’s rum industry, all while hiding its human costs. And why did Southern workers die defending the state’s rights of the wealthy?

Stove factory in Michigan, @1900

As with rice, even today those with money and power benefit from our suffering. How else can South Carolina rank 46th in income with unemployment above 12% elect Jim DeMint while producing convertible BMW’s for the world and soon, Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner. The state also manufactures paper, Honda ATV’s and cement. Yet 20% of its families have been below the poverty line for 30 years! The new governor wants to tax groceries (they bring no jobs she says). Featured on the cover of Time, she refuses to address and has no plan for the lack of demand. She ignores Rep. Clyburn’s wisdom—how do you give a tax cut to businesses for which there is no demand or to a man without a job?

While an imperfect comparison, the trade-off of $700 billion in tax cuts for the nation’s top one percent while refusing $14 billion in economic relief for the nation’s unemployed is a reworking of the old plantation and feudal systems. The rich and powerful are again gaining wealth from the toil of those who by their status are ignored or labeled as morally flawed — thereby deserving the sufferings and pain of their economic disadvantage. Yet there is evidence of a class revolt. (45 millionaires and Warren Buffet have encouraged the Congress to come together to raise their taxes.)

The effort to de-legitimize the Obama Presidency has created a “truth” based on keeping up the fight against the President. For these folk, the goal and results justify the dirty process. Use everything from Marxism to birth certificates. In this brave new world, the system manufactures lies. The more radical and distorted the account, the more believeable is its hypervigilance. Witness the $200 million a day travel per diem—only a billion a week—repeated into the camera without shame or blame by one congresswoman, while another is tried on ethics. It’s okay to lie and take money. Just don’t ask directly. You can be influenced, just don’t use your influence. And Republicans are influenced: why else would they pull the country into the breach and stand firmly against abandoning a policy that failed? Why are they willing to increase a deficit they claim to abhor? Why do they attack a cherished principle of American exceptionalism, paying taxes proportional to your means?

As long as the silent agenda to remove Obama rests on its denial, the distortions will continue. The only sure thing in the crystal ball is that the rich will benefit and the country will lose, and we will have economic charts to calculate its costs.

Mississippi cotton field workers, 1937.

San Francisco 1939.

Bokors, Spells, and Buzz Words

 

 

skullboysketchZombie

 

Living Bad Dreams

 

Gail Collins in her Saturday column cited an unusual phantasmagoria–a zombie jamboree as an extended conceit for American politics. Here’s my spin: Gail, change your brand of popcorn! I much prefer the image and ideals of the Red Queen. Why she never munched a kidney, but loved her tea. And she embraced the impossible things. Practiced them and proudly acquired the knack. (I refer to Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass–And What Alice Found There.) She of course, is the model for Michele Bachmann, who looks straight into the lens and sees and tells the impossible things. $200 Million a day travel caravans, a billion for a five day work week! Too bad about Christine O’Donnell. I was counting on her to be the understudy.Actually, Haiti’s concept and descriptions of the “bokor” is a wee bit more apt. These are priests and priestesses with special spellings and an insatisible appetite for chaos, destruction, and inflicting pain as a means of enhancing their power. Their fury and willingness to overlook or withhold truth leave effigies of the common good in the marketplace and fuels their mimicry. The whole while, they remain fully alive, but in a detached, dream state.

Thursday’s charge led by Eric Cantor against NPR, in which a legal albeit controversial (to some laudable) action led to a frontal attack on the free press and free speech, is the kind of rites that bokors perform. In Haiti, they are legend. They lead their followers in lock step to complete support their actions. Their band rushes and attacks the weak.

A Bokor’s offering guidance rests on denials; they claim their dark magic is genuinely benevolent. Kind of like having a tax cut reduce the deficit. But the civility of the Red Queen, her earnestness, still has great appeal. She is beseeched by dilemmas. Can you hang someone if there is nothing there? Is hers the impending model of our national policy? On energy, education, nuclear arms, job growth, QE, health care?

Oh dear. More tea.

The Clouds Above the Dawn’s Early Light

 

American denial expands as its power shrinks. The economic deflation which many are wary of has already hit the spirit. Its worse than Jimmy Carter’s malaise. It’s more self destructive.We have lost sight of our own interests. Abandoned our inner compass that always pulled us up short before things spiraled out of control. We have become witnesses to our own implosion. Detached, we seem to derive a strange dignity from our self-inflicted sacrifice. We offer our hearts far too willingly to the wrong priests.

The New York Times op-ed pages have parallels today, so the pull of the force is strong. A colleague writes of zombies, but the bokors are the ones who raise up the zombies; nothing happens on its own. There is money and power behind our malaise. How else can South Carolina rank 46th in income with unemployment over 12%, while producing the convertible BMW’s for the world and soon, Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner. The state also manufactures paper, Honda ATVs, and cement. Yet 20% of its families have been below the poverty line for 30 years!

 

 

A Mandala of the I Ching

I am reminded of what a Professor told me long ago. That throughout history, most of the world, its leading states and empires so celebrated, has been in a state of decline. Egypt, Rome, China, Spain, Mali, the Cheek, the planters of the south, all have passed as time faded their powers.

Yet I recall from the I Ching that such a fade is not inevitable. If we are careful and bold like the fox, to use our eyes to see the steps along the path while using our ears to detect the dangers ahead that are beyond our sight, they we can successful achieve our mission without blame, finding the proper place for things. Will our results be good fortune or nothing that will further? Stumbling block or steeping stone, it all depends on how we use

A Mississippi Saturday Night, 1937.

our feet and hearts and minds. Stay resolute and steadfast. Success will overcome our misgivings.

 

Racial Crosstalk

Race involves crosstalk. Flying recriminations of race reflect the times. Laughably, even before Booker T. Washington,  conversations and buzz words about race are buried in history.

A personal favorite of mine is “drapetomania.” It referes to a colonial era disease that supposedly infected slaves and caused them runaway! More recently, “white power,” a not-to-original copy of “black power,” has been used to rally those who oppose those who crafted the original slogan!

Tracing discussions of race through history shows several paradigm shifts. The early discussions during slavery were often dominated by biology and biological terms. Blacks were described as genetically and mental inferiority by biology; biological descriptions abounded of low foreheads, thick brows, bungling muscles, et.al.; hence, Africans were hopelessly child-like and simple–or brutes and savages.

Then, in the 1800s, political terms and values were introduced to the discussion by abolitionists and by slavery’s defenders. The rhetoric of race entered a golden age. It took on the form of high art on both sides.

Charleston-born, Philadelphia President of the Underground Railroad Robert Purvis, (his mother Jewish and Morrocan, once slave; his father wealthy English; he, born 1810) offers an eloquent plea: “We love our native country, much as it has wronged us; and in the peaceable exercise of our inalienable rights, we will cling to it . . . Will you starve our patriotism?”

But a Purvis contemporary; Beaufort, SC politican and slavery supporter John William Grayson spins his “support” for those “starved” quite differently than Purvis. “Slavery is the negro system of labour. He is lazy and improvident. Slavery is that system of labour which exchanges subsistence for work. Slavery makes all work, and it ensures homes, food and clothing for all. It permits no idleness, and it provides for sickness, infancy and old age.”

Fast forward pass “Jim Crow” to the civil rights movement. During the civil rights movement, The word “agitator” expressed scorn on both whites and blacks who worked to break segregation. The extreme epithet of the era was “communist,” often applied to Dr. King.

Anti-Civil Rights Demonstrators Use Racial Epithets on Their Placards. Image for the Library of Congress.

Today the American debate on race has a moral/behaviorial/political context. It is summed up by a term appropiated by both sides. Racist!

Both sides concede the basic right of equal opportunity and freedom for all. So the key to the present debate is to recognize that “racism or racist” as an allegation or as tar and feathering, has an embedded code. For both sides, it has a hidden flash point designed to rally supporters of different views.

In today’s contrived gibberish, Black “racists” fully intent to take rights away from white people (Beck hears the Nikes coming). For those folk, as blacks gain, whites lose.

For the other side, white “racists” are psychologically impaired. They unable to accept the new status quo. They are trapped in the pain of losing something they deeply cherished and thought unassailable: their legacy and birthright to reign.

Anybody who talks about race, is pulled toward to align with one view or the other. The NAACP video clip of Shirley Sherrod showed this when a number of commentators insisted the long standing cultural practice of nods and words encouraging and supporting the speaker to bring forth the story (not to agree with its actions, but to support its telling and confession) was a sanction of “racism.”

Race will still be around and new buzz words will shape the discussion. It’s a fact of the American legacy. On that score, there’s not much we can do.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Utter Blame

President Barack Obama in the White House Green Room, October 2010

Push and pull once made for good politics and lively campaigns. And achievement used to count. Take Strom Thurmond; despite his horrific rhetoric on civil rights, his defense of segregation, (full disclosure: I’m African-American), I voted for him. When I was unemployed but actively seeking work, a phone call to his office and a 70 minute walk (saving bus fare), and I was a GS-10 in less than 72 hours. And after he invoked cloture on Jesse Helms’ filibuster of the King Holiday Bill, and delivered sewer, paved and lighted streets, and safety grants to SC’s small predominantly black towns, I voted by the deed rather than the word.

Now, the first African-American President and his party face the opposite problem. They have been matchless in acting for progress, but can’t get the message out. They have delivered, but have weak defenses and little attack. Quick: what is Chris Coon’s position on social security?

Democrats can’t actually find anyone to blame because they are too busy being blamed. “Job killing” is a mantra stickier and more frustrating than crazy glue. Yet, Politifact says that Pelosi’s statement is true that there were more private-sector jobs created in the first eight months of 2010 than in the entire eight years of the Bush administration which showed a net loss after two terms. Want smaller government? Federal & state government jobs increased by 1.7 million in 8 years under Bush, but have fallen by 357 thousand since President Obama took office. The Democrats increased private sector jobs and shrunk the government’s playroll.

Extracting a point of fallen and bruised truth, shredded by spin: austerity doesn’t bring prosperity; tax cuts will not stimulate demand or create jobs. Despite this obvious truth, a South Carolina commenter replied to me last week in a local paper that “the rich will buy a lot more groceries with a tax cut.”

Question: Fed Ex announced 45,000 temporary openings for the holidays, corporations are sitting on close to $2 trillion in cash, and Bank of America earned $2.78 billion in profit in the July quarter. Has outsourcing, cash hoarding, and profit expansion inhibited and blocked job growth? Especially since, Republican job one is to defeat the President?

The President Addressing the Joint Session of Congress, 2010

Could it be that the new source of wealth and prosperity is sourced in the permanent lose of jobs (Republicans want to dismantle the safety net, shifting even more wealth to corporations)? Might this new truth be hidden by the political spin of its own complaint?

That complaint, that Democrats have overspent, stimulated fear, and not messaged well, has partial truth. But it does not equal the massive truth of the Republican lies and distortions and wackiness. DeMint, Boehner, McConnell, Cantor and the others are no Strom Thurmond. Thurmond didn’t neglect the message to his base or service to his constituents, and did both aggressively, delivering the goods by word and deed, even when they were at odds and while getting his fair share, never uttered blame.

Mississippi sharecropping family, 1937. Dorothea Lange Photograph.

Nothing Finer, Carolina!

South Carolina! Nothing could be finer than the politics of the first state to secede from the Union even before Lincoln formally took office. SC provided the nation with two of its first four chief executives, Presidents of the Continental Congress Henry Middleton and Henry Laurens. Laurens was one of America’s richest men and largest brokers of enslaved Africans; he was exchanged for British General Charles Cornwallis at the end of the American Revolution; was one of four peace commissioners of the Revolution, with Ben Franklin, John Jay, and John Adams negotiated in Paris with England and France; established Thanksgiving as a national holiday; and received a diplomatic letter from Angola offering to jointly enslave the British!

South Carolina produced the nation’s first diplomatic corp, sending native sons to courts in St. Petersburg (Russia), St. James (England). Paris (France), and Barcelona (Spain), and later, Mexico. They achieved the Pinckney treaty, securing American shipping rights for the port of New Orleans, and the Gadsden Purchase, recognized by the namesakes Gadsden, Arizona and Alabama.

South Carolina was the first place a woman (the later New Yorker Harriet Tubman) commanded regular US Army troops (June 2, 1863) leading three gun ships and freeing more than 900 enslaved, more than any other action during the war. (The state has a bridge named for her.) The state also sent James Fremont to California via the Army. But that was then.

Now, the GOP’s candidate for SC governor, Nikki Haley, the first woman with a heritage from India to secure a major party nomination, has this week been challenged by leaders in her own party in a press conference held in Columbia, the state’s capitol city. “Nikki wants votes. We want answers,” said Cyndi Mosteller, a former first vice chairwoman of the state GOP. Haley has twice been accused by Republican operatives from her own party of having sexual affairs. She admits being late consistently on taxes. She wants to tax groceries, burdening the poor in a state that ranks 46th in income. A state legislator once stripped of her committee assignments for pushing for transparency she refuses to release her own emails. Haley wants “true conservatism” in a state with Republican governors for the last 20 years – a state where government is the number one employer!

But in the only state to send a write-in candidate to national office (Strom Thurmond, as a Democrat!), that values its independence (the Confederate flag flies on the capitol’s grounds), its nattering nabobs (Jim DeMint, et. al), its romantic holidays and get aways (Haley’s mentor, Mark Sanford, whose policies she claims she’ll continue), its rudeness (Joe Wilson), and its broken schools (highlighted by the “Corridor of Shame” documentary and a letter from a middle schooler read by the President during the State of the Union), we give the nation a fusion candidate, Morgan Bruce Reeves, nominated for governor by both SC’s Green and Citizens United parties.

Dr. Reeves’ doctoral degree is from a CA diploma mill run by an Indian immigrant. (This is simply rich irony!) Reeves master’s degree is from a seminary run by a convicted pedaphile that only operates off campus, gives life credit, and offers 11 types of doctoral degrees at the flat rate of $2,000 each, or a combination bachelor/master’s/doctorate for $3,250, with interest free payments and discounts. Reeves life experience includes having tried out for NFL teams.

His political website for the governor’s race under business includes several close ups of unmanned earth moving equipment parked on undeveloped property, a contact number for Dr. Reeves site preparation company, a promise that “no job is too big or too small.” That’s his program for economic development in a state that ranks 3rd in unemployment and 46th in income. He claims he faces racism in the race and wants to remove Thurmond’s name from public buildings. He supports solar powered, elevated commuter rail.

I’m breaking with House Whip Jim Clyburn. I’m voting for Alvin Greene, pending the outcome of his court case.

Lindsay Graham

• As a SC voter, I support people who vote for progress, who understand the inner workings of legislation, who don’t sell out to special interests, and who work for the national, state, community interests, independent of party or ideology. I’m African-American, but I voted often for Strom Thurmond because he measured up to the standards I set and merited my vote. I also remember when Everett Dirksen and Nelson Rockefeller. I support and vote for Lindsay Graham because of his strong positions on the military, his keen interest in the judiciary, and his fair representation of South Carolinians of all backgrounds and beliefs.

  Narrowed-minded politicans who put their greed, avarice, or ideology first will never fix the crushing poverty in 10 percent of SC counties for over 30 years. Narrowed-minded politicans will not improve the state of SC health, where we are among the leaders of deaths by diabetes, high blood pressure, strokes, smoking, and yes, HIV/AIDS.

  Despite pretending we believe in less government, government is SC’s number one employer, close to 18 percent of the workforce recieves a government check. Those that have strongly partisan beliefs often hold these beliefs without any basis in facts. If you want to be listened to, cite sound reasons, examples, and statistics for your positions. Facts count more than fanasty. Sen. Graham is an advocate for SC, and a man who advances SC by doing his homework and carefully considering what best for the state and nation.

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