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Pulitzer Prize-winning author, biologist and naturalist Edward O. Wilson, a native of Alabama, appeared on Book TV's "In Depth" August 5. If you missed it, you can see it on the late night and weekend replays, or on C-SPAN's Website.
Mr. Wilson, who has taught at Harvard University since the mid-1950s was named one of America’s 25 most influential people by Time magazine in 1996. His books include: “Sociobiology: The New Synthesis” (1975) “On Human Nature” (1978, awarded Pulitzer Prize), “The Ants” (1990, awarded Pulitzer Prize), “The Diversity of Life” (1992), “Consilience:The Unity of Knowledge” (1998), “The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth” (2006) and “Nature Revealed: Selected Writings 1949-2006” (2006) as well as "Sociobiology: The New Synthesis" (1975); "On Human Nature" (1978); "Genes, Mind, and Culture" with Charles J. Lumsden (1981); "Biophilia" (1984); "Naturalist" (1994); "In Search of Nature" (1996); "The Future of Life" (2002); "From So Simple a Beginning: Darwin’s Four Great Books" (2005); "The Creation: An Appeal to save Life on Earth" (2006); "Nature Revealed: Selected Writings, 1949-2006" (2006).
And so too is America...
Under the Microscope
by Glynn Wilson
The era of the writer and the written word is over. Deader than dead.
And of course the American Century is long over, along with the ideal of what America could be, which is about as dead as Rome on the verge of its burning.
I am just now coming to the full realization of these facts, having finished reading New York Days by Willie Morris.
That is not to say that newspapers, magazines and books won't be published a few years longer, or that U.S. politicians won't get on the stump and try to convince us that "a new day is dawning in this city on a hill" or some such blather.
Publishing on ink and paper will go on awhile longer, maybe another 13 years or so. And with all the writing schools out there making money teaching writing, thousands of people will still try to learn how to write - for the dwindling audience that still gives a damn.
Oh, we will still get a Harry Potter series now and then, which the money people love, because it is a totally created world based on the idea that magic is real. There is no such thing as magic, people, or ghosts or vampires or zombies. But that won't keep the movies and TV shows about them from being churned out and the little people following with their dollar bills, like a frontier mom to a snake oil salesman.
In reading Morris's final memoir, I am struck most of all by how similar the world he describes is to the one today, with only one notable exception. Then, that is the 1960s, people were out in the streets protesting the Vietnam War and the slide of America into two classes of people, the rich and the poor, and for Civil Rights.
Now no one protests much. We just take it lying down.
I had never heard of Steve Erickson until reading New York Days, but when I read what he wrote about the American psyche circa 1970, I was left almost dumbfounded. I had to stop and read it again, for it is right out of conversations I've had in recent days with a few fellow travelers who also lament the "end times" we live in for intellectual thought, good writing and progressive politics.
"The American psyche of 1970 seemed split between those who hated and loved America simply - those who questioned everything about it, even what was good and reasonable; and those who served its authority and rules so blindly that not only their imaginations but their common sense became paralyzed."
It is possible that America was as divided then as it was in the 2004 election cycle? Is our TV media culture so bereft of any knowledge of history that the red state-blue state divide is not such a new and saucy story after all?
Is it possible that even then, when the number of media outlets made it possible for a shared experience on the part of most Americans - who read a handful of magazines and watched the same TV shows - the divide was already there?
David Halberstam, a regular contributor to the Willie Morris Harper's, wrote then: "We spoke in the same language, but we understood nothing that the other (side) said."
That is clearly true today, and must be more so, for the further we are removed from the historical lexicon of the written word, the further apart our experiences grow.
I have a stupid girl e-mailing me anonymously these days under the name GOPGIRL@blahblah.com.
She doesn't realize that she is stupid and uneducated and has no sense of history, and somehow for her, and thousands like her, the only written word they see are published on partisan blogs and sent around via e-mail. And since her tiny little peer group of people somewhere in the boonies of Alabama still stand by there man Lil Bush, even in the face of overwhelming evidence that his is the worse presidency in the history of the Republic by far, only goes to show just how far we are removed from anything resembling truth.
There is no truth to be found in America today; no justice either. We would all be better off just to throw ourselves on the mercy of the King Bush appointed courts, I guess, and hope they don't indict us and shackle us all like they did Don Siegelman and Richard Scrushy.
Or, saying fuck that, if we cannot raise enough of a fight in the Washington Democrats or the protest movement, we may as well all pack up and move to snowy Canada or sunny New Zealand and let China go ahead and bomb this place into annihilation once and for all.
They control all our borrowed money now anyway, and they could pull the plug at any moment.
This will not convince GOPGirl or any of her ilk. It will take more collapsed bridges like the one in Minneapolis, perhaps with her trapped under it, for the realization to set in that America is dead. Caput. No longer viable.
I wish I could say it were not true and that there was still some hope. But at this moment I don't see any.
 | | Photo by Glynn Wilson | | You can sit and smoke with a stoned William Faulkner in front of the Oxford, Mississippi, City Hall. I wonder what he would think about the death of writing and America? Would he still deny the doom of man? |
In his day, William Faulkner said, upon his acceptance of the Nobel prize for literature and in the days when all-out nuclear war seemed a real threat, "I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure; he will prevail."
But that was in the days when a writer had to tell the money people what they wanted to hear since no one likes or funds a pessimist.
For the American left, which has failed again, 2007 is much like 1967.
As Hunter S. Thompson, writing from Haite-Ashbury, said then: "The thrust is no longer for 'change' or 'progress' or 'revolution,' but merely to escape, to live on the far perimeter of a world that might have been - perhaps should have been - and strike a bargain for survival on purely personal terms."
Since this story has already been written, what's the point of writing it again? And since some of my writer friends even say these blog columns are too long, what's the point of going on and on?
If you can still read, and really like doing it, get thee to a library - before they burn all the books and turn it into a cyber café complete with a Starbucks coffee stand.
Pretty soon, the Bush royal family will abolish government altogether and privatize everything. And when they do, there will be no place for democracy or the written word - with the possible exception of the press release. What would Karl Rove and Bill Canary and the federal courts and the chain newspapers do without the press release?
I wonder how the Chinese feel about the press release? How do you write a press release in morphemes?
 | | Photo by Glynn Wilson | | The room of a real writer in the heyday of writing, William Faulkner's office at Rowan Oak in Oxford, Mississippi, when the writing instrument of choice was the manual typewriter. I still have one, for when the power grid goes down and the Internet stops flickering and cell phone towers stand mute in the pastures. Maybe I'll start an old fashioned journal and print it on a manual press and pass it around by hand. |
Former CIA Director George Tenet has made the rounds of the talk shows flacking his semi-tell-all book and insisting that he really did believe Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. However, as former CIA analyst Ray McGovern writes, the evidence actually shows that Tenet and his superiors in the Bush administration knew better.
For the full story of how George Tenet lied, go to the independent ConsortiumNews.Com.
George Tenet's memoir sheds new light on the Bush administration's failure to act aggressively on alarming intelligence in summer 2001 about an impending al-Qaeda attack.
Not only did the CIA demand an extraordinary meeting with national security adviser Condoleezza Rice in July and send a blunt briefing paper to George W. Bush in August, but Tenet followed up with a personal visit to Bush's Texas ranch.
However, that meeting slid into small talk about the ranch's "flora and fauna."
For the full story of how presidential incompetence helped set the stage for 9/11, go to the independent ConsortiumNews.Com.
Hands down, no one did more to inspire, entertain, refresh, and invigorate eco-activists and environmental defenders in the latter half of the twentieth century than Edward Abbey, according to the editors of Orion magazine.
The earnest, witty, cantankerous scribe captured the imaginations of many lovers of things wild and free, his words entering our hearts like a scramble through a wild place when the trappings of society have become too overbearing, like that first swig of beer after a long hard day at work.
As a tribute to the man and his influence, Orion magazine has unearthed and run some unpublished letters from Abbey's collected correspondence. They supply a unique window into the inner thoughts of a legend - a man who gave many of us something to latch onto, a vision to believe in, and countless quotes to be scribbled in journals, tacked to bulletin boards, and lodged in our musings and advocacy writings to this day.
The Unpublished Letters of Edward Abbey
Birding Babylon: A Soldier’s Journal from Iraq (Sierra Club Books), is the tale of a Connecticut Army National Guardman's obsession with nature, even in the grim face of a desert ravaged by war and death.
The book is a product of Sergeant First Class Jonathan Trouern-Trend’s war-time blog, Birdng Babylon, a look beyond the barbed wire in search of the life that was all around him during his yearlong tour of duty in Iraq.
“In Iraq there are ten thousand ways to see the world,” he writes. “I consider myself lucky to have seen it through the eyes of a naturalist.” By trading in violence and chaos for natural beauty, Trouern-Trend focuses on what he describes as the “resiliency of life…in the face of crisis.”
Though his tour of duty ended in February 2005, Trouern-Trend still blogs intermittently at Birding Babylon.
by Glynn Wilson
If readers are a writer's true companions, as Edward Abbey said of Henry David Thoreau, then perhaps I owe you, dear reader, another bit of writing today.
The explicit fact of the matter is, I don't owe you a damn thing. But I'm going to do it anyway. Because I can.
This thing called a blog started out as a form of online diary. I have a different view of how to use this new technology, although it is hard to escape the temptation to go personal at times, if not postal. People seem to like reading people's diaries. Maybe it is the hope that one might learn a secret.
Here's a secret. I hate to lecture, which is one of the reasons I do not teach anymore, almost as much as I hate being lectured to, especially via e-mail.
But sometimes there is no other way to get a point across in this traumatized world where the name of the game is explicitness. Irony doesn't work anymore, or at least it doesn't seem to.
Be comforted that at least for now, it is still possible in this world to pick up a book and go read it by a river.
I almost made it to the river today, but visited friends instead. One of them loaned me a book. Not a new book, but one I should have read before. Today is as good a time as any, and may be just the right time.
In Down The River, a series of essays by Abbey, a Western author, environmental journalist and self-described "agrarian anarchist," the ghost and writings of Thoreau are taken along on a trip down the Green River in Utah.
It seems like a trip well worth taking. I wish I were there now.
When I read a good book, it is hard to do it without a pencil in hand to mark the quotable parts. Otherwise, how would you go back and find them again when you write the review?
Here's a jewel from the preliminary notes.
"None of the essays in this book requires elucidation," Abbey says. It is a lie, but let him continue . . . "other than to say, as in everything I write, they are meant to serve as antidotes to despair. Despair leads to boredom, electronic games, computer hacking, poetry, and other bad habits."
I don't know if he stole that line or not, but it is one of those lines just about any writer would wish he or she had written.
Poetry indeed.
I will one day get around to writing more about the river, the Locust Fork that is, the river that will haunt me for the rest of my days like the Mississippi haunted Twain.
That is hard to explain in a sound byte. But for those of you who are new here, perhaps you have heard of a sprightly fellow from these parts by the name of Spider Martin? His photographs of the civil rights days are a testament to another time. I won't write his obituary here today.
But a few summers back, he and I spent a number of days running just about every run you can make on the Locust Fork in a 17-foot Kevlar canoe. We did it with two coolers in the boat, one full of food, the other full of beer.
If you ever got to know anything about him, you would have known that Spider didn't do anything the easy way.
So imagine being in the front of a canoe approaching white water and the river runs naturally to the left, but the guy steering the boat in the back takes you to the right. Looming ahead of you are several large, slippery rocks, and there appears to be only a sliver of an opening for a boat in the foaming water ahead, growing louder with every approaching foot.
It is one of those fear-gripped moments in nature when you suspect the earth is about to teach you a lesson in humility. I used to spend more time searching out these phenomena in nature than I do lately, although I need to get out there and do it more.
Have you ever experienced anything like this? Have you ever gone body surfing in the Gulf of Mexico and ridden a wave all the way into shore and been slammed like a little piece of flotsam on the beach? It is humbling. To do it right, you have to make sure the wave catches you exactly in your center of gravity at the waist. BLAM!
Or, have you ever gone water skiing and been ripped away from the rope and your skis by a wave, turned a flip in the air and landed on your face in the lake? Now that is humbling. It hurts good.
 | | Photo by Kenny Walters | | LocustFork.Net Editor and publisher Glynn Wilson atop Ruffner Mountain overlooking Birmingham, Ala. |
Some of the original new journalists used to like to humble themselves on peyote. I've tried that too, and it works for a week or two. Then that old human ego just comes right back and makes you think the world is your oyster. It is not, but you can think that all you want to until you truly fuck up and cripple yourself for life.
The last time I ran the Locust Fork with Spider Martin and shared a salmon steak and a 12-pack with him on the mountain in Blount County, he chastised me to write a story about the river.
"You could write one hell of a story just about today," he said.
Of course he was right, but it wasn't what I was assigned to do, for a paycheck, at that time. I was doing research for a story about the nerve gas incinerator in Anniston, and as every journalist knows, it is hard to write a story for nothing when you spend your days writing stories for money.
Abbey is the master at the kind of story a writer might write for free in a diary. Only he managed to get paid for it. If he were alive today, he might be publising a blog. And chances are, his blog would have bashed Bush on a regular basis for his administration's routine rape of the environment.
What do I mean by the statement that Abbey is a master at telling that kind of a story?
Well, it's like this. While you are reading Down The River, Abbey makes it seem as if he were writing the story at the same time he is floating down the river. Even though you know he must have taken some notes on the trip and written the story up later on a typewriter, the story has a first person, present tense feel to it. He brings you along for the ride, so to speak.
I've written a few stories like that myself - when the editors have paid for them. But they've never given me the freedom to write something like this. Maybe there is a good reason for it besides the profit. But for the life of me, I can't figure out what that good reason could be.
The blogs are proving that people like to read stories like this. It's just that the corporate publishers have not yet figured out how to make enough money from them in a way that protects them from criticism, political retribution and libel suits.
They will. Give them time. They will steal the idea one day soon and ruin the entire enterprise, like we suspect the oil companies will do to "alternative energy" sources.
One more reason to like Abbey. He didn't like the energy companies either, and he didn't like being lectured to. He had this to say about science, which just about sums up my own views of the social sciences.
"The face of science as currently construed is a face that only a mathematician could love. The root meaning of 'science' is 'knowledge;' to see and to see truly, a qualitative, not merely a quantitative, understanding. . . . That which today calls itself science gives us more and more information, an indigestible glut of information, and less and less understanding."
Thoreau was aware of this tendency even in his time. It is an epidemic today, an epidemic that can only be cured by finding a writer whose talents include the ability to synthesize information and put it into a readable fashion. Sometimes we call that connecting the dots . . .
by Glynn Wilson
It's blackberry winter in Alabama with cloudy skies and cool temperatures and there's not much light for shooting bird pictures. Plus, the spring migration is about over anyway.
So it's a good time to read and/or catch up on weekend programming on C-SPAN, where you can learn allot about what's going on in the world beyond the suburbs.
It's always funny and somewhat instructive to watch the annual White House correspondents dinner at the National Press Club building in Washington, D.C., especially for a credentialed Congressional reporter who has attended events there myself.
Last year on a trip there I met a lot of interesting people, including some of Hunter S. Thompson's editors and friends - and the famous White House shill reporter and gay male prostitute, Jeff Gannon.
It was interesting to watch President George W. Bush and First Lady Laura flee the building as soon as the dinner program ended after the spoof conservative comedian Stephen Colbert reamed the president while pretending to support him as his hero. It was also seriously funny to watch Bush lookalike comedian Steve Bridges do Bush better than Bush.
Bush Faces Press With Comedian Lookalike
Earlier in the evening, however, there was an interesting program on C-SPAN's Book TV, which featured MediaChannel's Rory O'Connor interviewing Danny Schechter, who calls himself the "news dissector."
Schechter's new book When News Lies: Media Complicity and The Iraq War is billed as "an up to date indictment of the role media played in promoting and misreporting the war on Iraq."
According to the MediaChannel.Org Web site, "It is an analysis of how and why the media got it wrong that pinpoints the failures of journalism and the collusion of media companies with the Bush Administration."
"Most of the anti-war movement focused on the crimes of the Bush Administration ignoring the mainstream media, its far more effective accomplice," says Schechter, a former network producer with ABC and CNN. "The government orchestrated the war while the media marketed it. You couldn't have one without the other."
With the book you also get a feature-length DVD of the prize-winning film WMD (Weapons of Mass Deception), which chronicles the media war fought alongside the military campaign and the struggle to stand up for truth and a foreword by acclaimed media writer and Vanity Fair columnist Michael Wolff, along with prefaces by independent Iraq reporter Dahr Jamail and information warfare specialist Colonel (Ret) Sam Gardiner, a war analyst for the PBS News Hour with Jim Lehrer.
The film WMD, distributed on DVD by Cinema Libre Distribution, won top documentary prizes at film festivals in Austin Texas, Denver Colorado and Durban, South Africa.
For more information and to see the trailer narrated by Academy Award winner Tim Robbins, visit wmdthefilm.com.
Or check out Schechter's media watchdog site, MediaChannel.Org.
It has long been my position that the media and the press need critics from the left as well as the right. As an investigative reporter who got into the news business at a time when then-President Ronald Reagan had the press on the ropes and the Moral Majority had the media on the march to the right, I have watched with great angst as this trend has continued under the fear-mongering Bush administration.
It is unclear whether the media and the press in this country will take up the call and respond to this criticism, or whether all the new alternative media sources will supplant them. But it is clear that large numbers of people are disgruntled with the mainstream media and turning to alternative sources for news online.
According to a survey by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, the World Wide Web continues to grow as a source of news for Americans. One-in-four, 24 percent, list the Web as a main source of news. Roughly the same number, 23 percent, say they go online for news every day, up from 15 percent in 2000; the percentage checking the Web for news at least once a week has grown from 33 percent to 44 percent over the same time period.
We say long live the press, the Internet, the First Amendment and the United States of America. But the media critics are right. The corporate media is complicit in this war and the damage this administration has done. The public should hold them accountable and raise hell about it.
An Epiphany: When you are a journalist with nine years of academic research experience in communications and you spend hours surfing the Internet, libraries and news on TV for the truth - from an undeground bunker no less - occasionally there is a huge pay off in the discovery of good research and real knowledge.
Listening to Mark Crispin Miller on C-SPAN'S Book TV Sunday night, it was mostly the usual boring, whiney affair from another New York journalist, professor and author who was bashing Bush - and Kerry by the way. But it was enough to bring me out of a late night Stratolouger semi-stuper when he said this, something you may not understand if you've never gone for a graduate degree in journalism and communications.
He refused to take sides in the debate between American quantitative researchers and the more European "critical theory" school of thought. Why?
"Because that debate is as obsolete and irrelevant as talking about the Cold War."
Exactly, which is what I tried to argue six years ago - before Bush stole the election of 2000 - but was shot down by a committee of quantitative American researchers at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, in the Ph.D. program.
I'll have more to say about this once I get my hands on the book on Monday. For now, the full title of the book is Fooled Again: How the Right Stole the 2004 Election and Why They'll Steal the Next One Too (Unless We Stop Them).
Here's an excerpt from the C-SPAN blurb.
Mark Crispin Miller argues that the outcome of the 2004 election, in many states including Ohio, was manipulated to favor George Bush and the Republican party. He discusses the evidence he has for this charge and talks about the reaction that Sen. John Kerry had when presented with the evidence.
Professor Miller also argues that the Republican party has been taken over by religious fundamentalists who see their opponents as evil and whose ultimate goal is to bring about Armageddon.
Mark Crispin Miller is a professor in the Culture and Communications department at New York University. He is the author of several books, including The Bush Dyslexicon: Observations on a National Disorder and Cruel and Unusual: Bush/Cheney's New World Order.
For more on Professor Miller and his work, visit his blog, News From Underground.
Watch the show if you get a chance. And/or back order the book from Powell's Books.
 | | E.O. Wilson |
The natural world is dissolving around us.
Ecologically, environmentally, biologically, things are looking grim.
It is reassuring, then, to know that Dr. Edward O. Wilson, a native of Alabama and widely heralded as one of the greatest scientific minds of the 20th century, is optimistic.
That's according to an article in the The Idaho Mountain Express.
The Future of Life, Explained
Wilson's latest book, The Future of Life, combines arguments from biology, economics, ethical philosophy and spirituality to address today's most pressing environmental issues.
The book opens with a letter to Henry David Thoreau, a man he sees as a forerunner in the conservation spirit. Informing Thoreau of the great changes that have taken place in the natural world since his death, Wilson writes:
"Half of the great tropical forests have been cleared. The last frontiers of the world are effectively gone. Species of plants and animals are disappearing a hundred or more times faster than before the coming of humanity, and as many as half may be gone by the end of this century. An Armageddon is approaching at the beginning of the third millennium. But it is not the cosmic war and fiery collapse of mankind foretold in sacred scripture. It is the wreckage of the planet by an exuberantly plentiful and ingenious humanity."
Hugo Black of Alabama: How His Roots and Early Career Shaped the Great Champion of the Constitution
By Steve Suitts, New South Books, 556 pages, $37.50
"You that would judge me do not judge alone," the Irish poet Yeats wrote. "And say my glory was I had such friends."
Review by Glynn Wilson
We should all be so fortunate to know a friend like Hugo Black.
One of the prime directives of American journalism is to expose myths and destroy false prophets. But every once in awhile, part of the mission is also to elevate heroes to the pedestal of human aspirations.
 | | Hugo L. Black |
As any Yungian psychologist knows, it is hard for the human animal to live a righteous and just life without archetypes.
Even with his inevitable flaws and warts, any child of Alabama or America for that matter would do well to study the life and work of Hugo Black. This is an especially fine time to reflect on Black, living as we are in an era when his main works are undergoing an all out assault by the political right.
What is it about Alabama that stirs up in its citizens such revolutions and counter revolutions in America politics and law? Perhaps it is something about the difficult struggle to survive in a land of monumental contradictions that drives men like Hugo Black and now Judge Roy Moore to try creating a better reality as they see it based on their studies and experiences.
If the author of the latest biography of Hugo Black has accomplished his assessment correctly, friendships defined the man. Friendships were responsible for his rise from a farmer's son in rural Clay County to the Birmingham bar, then to the U.S. Senate and ultimately the Supreme Court, where his lasting legacy to his country involved elevating the Constitution - especially the First Amendment - into the consciousness of every American citizen.
"Throughout his life, Hugo Black prized friendship as far more than a set of personal, pleasing relationships," Suitts writes. "Friendship defined much of his own identity."
Maybe, but in this limited but valuable contribution to the literature on Black, which effectively ends with his election to the Senate in 1926 and does not deal with his time in Washington, another theme is pushed aside. It was not just friendships that defined Black. It was a powerful sense of courage in the fight for justice under the law and his desire to help create a progressive country out of one of the most regressive periods in its history.
"Wealth and power tempted people to corrupt democracy, citizenship and friendship," Black believed. And so that is what he fought against all his life.
One of the great senators and Supreme Court justices in U.S. history, Black was buried in a plane pine casket, according to another Black biographer, Roger Newman, whose telling is a bit more artful and certainly a more complete portrait.
While there are some flairs of fine writing in Suitt's book, mainly the preamble, the chapter on Black's election to the Senate and the benediction, some of it is hard to wade through. The most glaring flaws in Suitts' book are some unnecessary tangents that could have been edited down and the over reliance on trial transcripts for dialogue. The detailed discussions of the convict-lease system were interesting for a son of Birmingham, Alabama, but perhaps not so crucial for anyone else in the country and not so critical for defining Hugo Black the man.
Clearly one of the most influential institutions that shaped Hugo Black was his life-long membership in the Baptist church, founded in America in 1639 by Englishman Roger Williams. This will come as the biggest surprise to readers today, including newspaper editors from Birmingham to New York.
It was the Baptist principles of religious freedom and the separation of church and state that led Black to write some of his most important decisions on the Supreme Court, decisions that still incite hatred of Black by today's Southern Baptists, who have clearly forgotten their roots and are totally ensconced in the fight to tear down the wall between church and state.
It is too bad this theme was not explored more for what it could do to inform the modern debate. It was Black who in 1962 wrote the language in Engel v. Vitale that is a large part of the law of our land today on the issue of school prayer.
"The First Amendment has erected a wall between church and state," Black wrote. "That wall must be kept high and impregnable. We could not approve the slightest breach."
Clearly, that wall today is not only breached, it is on the verge of being over topped like the levees in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. One can only hope the flood of religious violence in America and the world will not swamp our entire country like the flood waters of Lake Pontchartrain swamped the lower Ninth Ward.
Black is also largely responsible for many of the decisions we are fortunate to live under today on the issues of freedom of speech and of the press, and civil rights. It was the 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which found seperate black and white schools inherently and illegally unequal, that estranged Black from his native state for the next 16 years. He only returned for a surprise reunion in 1970, the year before his death.
"I had some fine friends . . . who remained my friends throughout their lives," Black said to a mostly admiring audience at the Parliament House on Birmingham's 20th Street.
But of course it was friendship, in part, that led Black to defend his friend and fellow member of the Ku Klux Klan, Chum Smelley, in his final case as a defense attorney in Alabama in 1927. Smelley, who had helped drive Black around the state in his run for the Senate in 1926, gunned down a black handyman outside the Talladega courthouse after the man was found not guilty of killing Smelley's father in a drunken mystery trip a couple of years earlier.
Black used friendship as his excuse in what Suitts says was the one thing that "burdened Black's conscience for the reminder (sic) of his years."
"It was inexcusable," Black reportedly admitted to his son Hugo Jr. years later. "But Chum was my friend . . . I had to help him."
If I were tasked with writing Black's story, I would not be as kind on the issue of prohibition, which also defined Black's early years and came out of his religious faith. Chalk it up to an alcoholic father, but Black's fervent drive to ban the consumption of alcohol was a flaw - in my eyes anyway. Luckily, Franklin Roosevelt, the president who valued Black's effectiveness in the Senate enough to appoint him to the Supreme Court, led the fight to repeal prohibition in 1933.
By then Black had far bigger battles to fight for the working people of America against corrupt corporations. The conservatives of today hate him for this too, but Black's authorship of the Fair Labor Standards Act and the first minimum wage law in the U.S. did much to lift the poor people of the South out of abject poverty during the Great Depression.
Now if only we could find similar champions of the poor in Congress and on the Supreme Court today. That has little chance of happening in these times, unless the public can be educated about the contradictions between their own plight and their voting patterns.
At the very least, college professors and school teachers in Alabama would do well to erect some kind of memorial to Hugo Black beyond the federal courthouse, a memorial that would educate the students of Alabama about the pillars of his legacy - before the reactionary, conservative forces destroy it forever.
It will take someone with Black's courage to stand up to these new forces. It would not be a bad thing to aspire to for any son of the South to live by these parting words.
"What more can be asked than for a man to have courage, express his views, and be ready to announce them without fear whichever side they happen to fall down on."
Where is that kind of courage to be found today?
The New York Times used to live by a similar slogan: "Without fear or favor." The Times never really understood Black - even though he helped save that great newspaper on several occassions.
As sad as it sounds, for that kind of courage today you have to turn NOT to America's politicians, judges or newspapers. Maybe the blogs and bloggers can fill some of the void.
Hugo Black.Com
 | | Photo by Glynn Wilson | | Deposed HealthSouth founder Richard Scrushy contemplates answers to reporter's questions... |
It's hard to blame a man who comes from nothing and makes something of himself for turning to God when all the world turns against him.
For all of the flaws of George W. Bush, this is the factor that sustains him with his supporters through the thick fog of war.
Perhaps a brave but wrong man of the South who is not afraid to pray in public can be forgiven.
But a snake oil salesman like Richard Scrushy? I guess he constitutes a different case entirely.
In the old South, a duke of a man like George W. would be pitied, not made king. In the New South, he is allowed to lead the nation into war because there is no one else around with the blood lineage to rise to the throne.
In the old South, a man pretending to be king like Richard Scrushy would have been tarred and feathered and run out of town on a long, pine rail. In the New South, in an odd twist of modern politics, he is tried over and over again in federal court.
Not having been around Birmingham much during Mr. Scrushy's rise and fall, I was willing to give the man the benefit of the doubt and let a jury decide his fate. All of the allegations about manipulating the jury pool by donating money to black churches was still not laid out convincingly enough to lead me to join the mob at his lynching.
Then I watched with a slack jaw the other day as Mr. Scrushy and his Christian bride spent an hour on WOTM making the case for creationism against evolution - on television.
At one point he even said, I kid you not, "there is more proof" for the biblical myth of creationism "than evolution."
Let's review: Burying Intelligent Design: It's Intelligent Evolution People.
I have been reminded of Mark Twain since first encountering the Scrushy story, covering his trial for the New York Times. There was something about him that reminded me of the "rightful King of France" in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Remember the disappeared Dauphin, "Looy the Seventeen, son of Looy the Sixteen and Marry Antonette?"
I can't get the picture out of my head of a raft on the Mississippi River and the tall talk of a salesman through and through, a Shakespearean actor indeed, on the run from Southerners who got conned.
"Out with you, Jim, and set her loose!," Huck shouted when he and his runaway slave friend thought they had shaken the king and the duke and tried to high-tail it down the river on the raft. "Glory be to goodness, we're shut of them!"
My relatives from St. Clair County would have said, "we're shit of them," but no matter.
Get thee to a nunnery, indeed - or face the rap music in a federal prison.
As for king George, would someone please donate some money to this Web site so we can buy a few more 19-inch TVs to blow out every time he makes a speech or holds a news conference?
If I had a bucket of tar, some feathers and a long, pine rail, I would make another trip to Washington and visit the White House myself.
Where, oh where, has the riotous indignation gone in Alabama against the federal government? Have we finally forgotten the War Between the States?
Perhaps a certain commentator was right in the last election cycle. The pious South has finally won the Civil War.
Watch for the return of the convict-lease system in the next election cycle.
Or maybe with enough of a majority, the Neo-Monarchy Party, otherwise known as the Republican Party, might just feel confident enough to bring back the debate over slavery.
Hey, they had slaves in the old testament, didn't they? If it says it's OK in the "good book," it must be alright with the Allmighty, eh?
This is, afterall, a "different" Republican Party - not exactly the party of Lincoln.
Hey Judge Roy Moore, what do you say? Are you fer it or agin it?
 | | Photo by Glynn Wilson | | Deposed HealthSouth founder Richard Scrushy takes questions from the media in Montgomery... |
Burying Intelligent Design: It's Intelligent Evolution People
 by Glynn Wilson
Editor and Publisher
"Great scientific discoveries are like sunrises. They illuminate first the steeples of the unknown, then its dark hollows."
Can you guess who wrote these words, and when?
I suspect not, especially if you depend on local newspapers, television news and conservative talk radio for your world view - along with the Bible and your local church.
(Of course the regular readers of The Locust Fork are much brighter than that, and if you are reading this online, do us a favor and print it out and hand it to 10 people who don't read online. In the interest of illuminating some dark hollows, this is for our new readers in Alabama and especially the local press, which needs a bit of dressing down from time to time - in the interest of trying to make them work harder to fulfil their Constitutional role under the First Amendment).
The joke around the bright end of cyberspace is that making fun of news outlets that rely on cliches such as shooting fish in a barrel to describe their feeble attempts to make us laugh and "call politicians on the carpet" is about as useful as using the print edition of the New Orleans Times-Picayune to soak up the flood from Hurricane Katrina.
In other words, it's just not going to be enough to get the job done. But we have to start somewhere, so what about here?
An interesting fellow by the name of Edward O. Wilson, a native of Alabama who just happens to be a great scholar at Harvard, wrote that opening line for a new book out on Charles Darwin. (Wait, don't click away yet. There's more).
Wilson's book should be the final say in the so-called culture war between those who want "intelligent design" taught in America's public schools alongside evolution.
But of course it won't be the last word, in part because even most of the news reporters in the country are not schooled enough to pass on this bit of scientific law to the lay public in a way that would put the debate to rest once and for all.
And let's face it, there are few people in the U.S. news business with the courage to pound this argument home in the face of public opinion polls showing that 60 percent of American citizens are so ignorant they believe in the prophecies of the Revelation and half do not believe in evolution at all.
News Flash: The constant debate about "objectivity" in the news business has nothing to do with truth. It has to do with maintaining a 20 percent return on investment for stockholders from the print edition by staying on the good side of the same ignorant souls politicians turn to for their government largess.
Just take a look at the Alabama Legislature where, in the first weeks of the 2006 session, more tax money was spent to debate Bible classes, carving "God Bless America" on state license plates and another attempt to display a new idol to the Ten Commandments in the state Capitol. This would be funny if it were not so pathetic.
Yet the press runs these press releases without the accompanying analysis pointing out to the "folks back home" why this might be a problem.
Church and Statehouse
At least Lt. Gov. Lucy Baxley had a passing reference to "telling the truth" and addressing "real problems" in her speech launching her candidacy for governor. But even she is using the issue of "faith" to try making the "leap" into the governor's mansion.
For the educators in this state and the entire nation, let's just say what we have here is a failure to communicate.
For in the community of scientists, who rarely come out of the research closet long enough to tell us their views, the expansive influence of the writings of Charles Darwin for the past 150 years "have spread light on the living world and the human condition," Wilson writes.
In his new book, From So Simple a Beginning: The Four Great Books of Charles Darwin, Wilson makes the case for evolution as a "deceptively simple idea."
But he, like Darwin, acknowledges that the human species, with all its noble qualities, still bears "the indelible stamp of his lowly origin."
If you don't believe that, take a look around the legislative halls of America today. Former Gov. Fob James' made a lot of hay a few year's back with a routine imitating a monkey. But does anyone really doubt that he evolved from one? And what about our dicktater-in-chief in Washington? Anyone doubt he descended from apes?
"Evolution by natural selection means, finally, that the essential qualities of the human mind also evolved autonomously," Wilson writes. "Humanity was thus born of Earth. However elevated in power over the rest of life, however exalted in self-image, we were descended from animals by the same blind force that created those animals, and we remain a member species of this planet’s biosphere."
Let there be no more doubt about it.
"The revolution in astronomy begun by Nicolaus Copernicus in 1543 proved that Earth is not the center of the universe, nor even the center of the solar system. The revolution begun by Darwin was even more humbling: it showed that humanity is not the center of creation, and not its purpose either."
Darwin and evolution are so central to understanding modern biology, and the other sciences, that the debate can be summarily dismissed with the famous remark of evolutionary geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky in 1973: “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.”
"Evolution by natural selection is perhaps the only one true law unique to biological systems...and in recent decades it has taken on the solidity of a mathematical theorem," Wilson writes. "In fact, nothing in science as a whole has been more firmly established by interwoven factual documentation, or more illuminating, than the universal occurrence of biological evolution. Further, few natural processes have been more convincingly explained than evolution by the theory of natural selection."
Wilson calls American public opinion on this issue "surpassingly strange," although he says, "Americans are certainly capable of belief, and with rocklike conviction if it originates in religious dogma."
Most of the religious Right opposes the teaching of evolution in public schools, he says, either by an outright ban on the subject or, at the least, by insisting that it be treated as “only a theory” rather than a “fact."
"Yet biologists," he says, "are unanimous in concluding that evolution is a fact."
The problem for the religious community is that they can never accept the idea of "blind chance" so necessary to understanding how species evolve. Nor can they accept "the absence of divine purpose." The problem with "intelligent design," however, is that the reasoning behind it "is not based on evidence but on the lack of it."
Critics of evolution sometimes try to make the case that scientists resist the "supernatural theory" because it is "counter to their own personal secular beliefs." What they don't understand, Wilson argues, is how the reward system in science works.
"Any researcher who can prove the existence of intelligent design within the accepted framework of science will make history and achieve eternal fame," Wilson writes. "He will prove at last that science and religious dogma are compatible!"
No one has come close, he says, "because unfortunately there is no evidence, no theory and no criteria for proof that even marginally might pass for science."
According to Wilson, "the only worldview compatible with science’s growing knowledge of the real world and the laws of nature" is "scientific humanism," which "considers humanity to be a biological species that evolved over millions of years in a biological world, acquiring unprecedented intelligence yet still guided by complex inherited emotions and biased channels of learning."
In other words, "Human nature exists, and it was self-assembled."
So can we please stop the Jihad and get on with living and evolving?
For more insight into where we are, check out these gems you won't find out about in the local press.
Apocalyptic Vision From Jerusalem to the White House
Chomsky Says There Is No 'War On Terror'
Glynn Wilson is a veteran reporter, free-lance writer and Net publisher who writes at least one column a week under the titles Under the Microscope or Connecting the Dots. His articles have been published in the New York Times, Christian Science Monitor, Dallas Morning News and many other newspapers and magazines, and his articles, columns and photos are available for syndication.
How His Roots and Early Career Shaped the Great Champion of the Constitution
I am deep into this new biography of Hugo Black by Steve Suitts this weekend and will have a full book review up soon. There is a lot of new information in this book that goes beyond the biography written a few years ago by my good friend Roger Newman, although a lot of it is too local for national interest.
A couple of the things that fascinate me about this book are the revelations about the role of Alabama's Baptists in electing Black to the U.S. Senate in 1926 and their involvement in the fight over separation of church and state. While the Baptists were a minority denomination in the early 20th century, Suitts' research shows that they claimed a special role in promoting the separation of church and state and helping to establish the public school system - without the predominance of religion in classrooms. What a difference a couple of generations make. Have the Baptists forgotten this important part of their own history?
Maybe Judge Roy Moore should add this book to his bibliography on religion and government. Right after Roy's rock was ordered removed from the state Supreme Court building in Montgomery, I asked him how two Christian lawyers and Sunday school teachers from Alabama, himself and Hugo Black, could come to such different conclusions about the Constitution. I never got an answer to that question, because his PR person had me kicked out of the press conference. Before this campaign for governor is over, I will get an answer.
There's a new book out on Hugo Black, perhaps the "most remarkable Supreme Court justice of the 20th century" and America's most controversial, according to author Steve Suitts, who appeared on "For the Record" on Alabama Public Television recently.
In Birmingham in the 1920s, it is well known that Black became a member of the Ku Klux Klan. Decades later, as a son of the South, he was one of America's staunchest judicial champions of free speech, civil liberties, and civil rights, according to the book's Web site.
Suitts has written the latest book showing how Black's Alabama origins and early influences shaped the great champion of the Constitution.
Over 25 years in the making, the book offers fresh, dramatic insights into Justice Black's consistent character, philosophy, and ethics. It chronicles his struggles with family tragedies, profound racism, bi-racial poverty, and Alabama-style conflicts over American ideals of justice.
This site offers book passages, extensive photo albums, audio clips, original documents, and much more on the life and times of Hugo Black of Alabama.
HugoBlack.Com
I have often said to my devout Christian friends that they should not just read the King James version of the Bible, but explore other books about the Bible from scholars. As we approach the Christmas season, perhaps this book would make a great Christmas gift for Christians.
As I was listening to National Public Radio on this rainy Wednesday afternoon, Fresh Air's Terry Gross conducts a compelling interview with scholar Bart Ehrman, who has a new book out exploring how scribes - through both omission and intention - changed the Bible that is read today.
Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why is the result of years of reading the texts in their original languages.
Ehrman says the modern Bible was shaped by mistakes and intentional alterations that were made by early scribes who copied the texts. In the introduction to Misquoting Jesus, Ehrman writes that when he came to understand this process 30 years ago, it shifted his way of thinking about the Bible. He had been raised as an Evangelical Christian.
Ehrman is also the author of Lost Christianities: The Battle for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew, which chronicles the period before Christianity as we know it, when conflicting ideas about the religion were fighting for prominence in the second and third centuries.
The chairman of the religious studies department at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, Ehrman also edited a collection of the early non-canonical texts from the first centuries after Christ, called Lost Scriptures: Books that Did Not Make It into the New Testament.
Bart Ehrman's 'Misquoting Jesus' on NPR's Fresh Air
Read it and weep. This book proves that the Bible is not the divine word of God, but the work of men promoting the new religion of Christianity. So much for Judge Roy Moore's interpretation, eh?
The Life and Times of the Bad Boy of Baltimore
by Marian Elizabeth Rodgers
Reviewed by Glynn Wilson
Editor and Publisher
LocustFork.Net
Courage.
That was the one virtue H.L. Mencken admired most in humans, especially newspaper and magazine reporters and editors.
His long-time publisher, Alfred Knopf, said as much in a radio interview not long before the so-called "Sage of Baltimore" died on January 29, 1956, less than a year before I was born.
Courage is a virtue that is lacking more than ever in the country Mencken fought to rescue from prejudice, propaganda, censorship and demagoguery for the first half of the 20th century in the heyday of newspapers, magazines and American democracy.
Newspapers and democracy are once again at their deathbed, although Mencken predicted their demise in the 1930s, which just goes to show you that newspaper reporters tend to be less than prescient in their prophesies.
While even an affable skeptic like Mencken would admit that the world needs heroes, he was called an iconoclast. It was a title he embraced.
An iconoclast is someone who attacks and seeks to overthrow traditional or popular ideas or institutions, according to one dictionary, although I take it to mean someone who spends more time breaking down false myths than building them up.
He scorned "the mob" and "the believer" and coined the term "boobosie" to describe them. He saw it as his mission as a journalist to "attack error wherever he saw it and to proclaim truth whenever he found it."
Mencken was a throwback in may ways. With my own similarity in outlook, I have been called a "throwback" myself. Perhaps there is some truth in it. Somewhere in my DNA there is a bit of H.L. Mencken.
While he said some things in his life that led some to believe he was a racist and even anti-Semitic - well before the days of political correctness - Mencken is one of the heroes of American journalism and literature. No doubt about it.
He rescued American journalism from the Victorian Puritanism of the late 19th century.
This biography by Ms. Rodgers, in the works since she first stumbled onto a box of Mencken letters in 1981 at Goucher College, attests to the fact that Mencken was not at heart anti-black or anti-Jew any more than he was against the rights of women or anti-freedom of religion. He was a critic through and through and not afraid to say and publish what he thought. Bloggers could take a lesson from that.
It is true he didn't much like the British. This account would have been stronger if it included more on Mencken's views about Monarchy.
Then of Arabs, Mencken once said, after a trip to the Middle East, they were "the dirtiest, orneriest and most shiftless people who regularly make the first pages of the world's press."
He was pro-freedom to the core. Pro Bill of Rights. Freedom of speech and of the press above all. And that included the freedom to express an individual opinion - no matter how wrong or disgraceful to polite society. That is what the world lacks now - except in certain comic personalities seen on HBO.
What makes Mencken a worthy hero for today's journalists – whether they publish the results of their work on a printing press, on the radio, TV or even on a blog on the Web – was his courage and belief in the search for scientific truth. He was a Huxley agnostic to the end. (That would be Darwin's "Bulldog" Thomas Huxley, who coined the term).
But no biography of a human being would be complete without revealing some warts and disappointments. What disappoints about this particular hero is that his German ancestry colored his objectivity on the Nazi threat to the world and Jews, a story he completely missed. He was also a major critic of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, which caused me to seriously question whether I wanted to consider this writer a hero or not.
In the final analysis, however, what he did not like most about Roosevelt was primarily his manipulation and censorship of the press.
As a true libertarian Democrat of his time, Mencken also railed against Roosevelt's social-democrat policies such as Social Security. But that could be expected from someone who lived his entire safe economic life in Baltimore, a product of the upper middle class of the Northeast who never felt the pangs of hunger during the Great Depression. His own combined journalism and literary careers protected him from poverty.
At least he was equally critical of big business, which he once said, "is almost wholly devoid of anything even poetically describable as public spirit."
He also hated the South. And rightly so, for it was and is a region of rubes and morons even now. His views on the South were largely drawn from experience covering the Scopes Monkey Trial in Dayton, Tennessee, in 1925.
Ms. Rodgers' account only gives passing credit to Roosevelt for ending Prohibition, and only mentions Hugo Black once in the context of getting the job over a candidate Mencken supported publicly. Mencken should have recognized both Roosevelt and Black's contributions to the individual liberties he crusaded for all his life.
Then again, the only woman he ever married was Montgomery, Alabama, debutante and writer Sara Haardt, so you have to give him credit for that.
And the fact is, he helped many Jews and African-Americans personally and fought for anti-lynching laws harder than anyone alive at the time, including anyone at the much vaunted New York Times.
Ms. Rodgers' biography is exhaustively researched and well written. The only recognizable flaws are perhaps too much attention on Mencken's love affairs, which the man himself did his best to conceal from historians, and only scant mention of Mencken's views on Charles Darwin and evolution. You would think a man who attained so much fame from covering the "trial of the century" would have had more to say about evolution.
Mencken's views on science are made clear on every other front, especially the health sciences. But the reader is left wondering where Mencken would come down today on the debate over the separation of church and state in the struggle over "intelligent design" versus evolution in American public school classrooms. It is easy to imagine Mencken railing against the "morons, hypocrites and homo boobiens," especially the gay, pedophile priests of the Catholic church and especially members of the Kansas City School Board.
Alas, his views on these subjects are not fleshed out in enough detail for a modern reporter to hang his fedora on.
Perhaps it was a weakness of Mencken's that he spent more time contemplating the works of Nietzche, a mere philosopher. For his views on objectivity based on science are clear enough.
Ms. Rodgers reports that "science gave him the basis for objectivity."
"I believe fully only in what may be demonstrated scientifically," Mencken wrote on the subject. He said more than once that he was concerned only with "the world as it is, and not with the world as it might or should be."
He was against jingoistic nationalism, which would no doubt put him at odds with the Republican Party of today, even in the wake of 9/11.
Mencken was probably the first major critic of American journalism itself. He published numerous articles on the subject in his American Mercury magazine. This biography makes several mentions of Mencken's negative views on the drive toward professionalism. More of an explanation of that would also have been interesting.
Finally, Mencken wrote more column inches against prohibition than any other writer of his time, helping to stop the madness that was the 18th Amendment, which kept beer, wine and liquor illegal and underground for more than a decade, from 1919 to 1933.
Perhaps if he were alive and writing today he would spend as much time railing against marijuana laws, which do more to corrupt the U.S. legal system than anything with the possible exception of the hyper-graduation rates of American law schools.
His views on beer are clear enough. He was for it.
Hear! Hear! And Cheers!
Then there is one other point of view I share whole heartedly with Mencken. He absolutely hated Christmas time . . . Bah, Humbug!
Author John Updike said on Book TV In Depth on C-SPAN that he plays golf twice a week and he's in his 70s. I knew that. He wrote Golf Dreams.
If I live as long, I hope to be hitting the links too...at least once a week. I wrote in book in New Orleans called Duffers Golf Rules. At one time it was available for sale online. Perhaps it is time to bring it back.
Description of Updike by C-SPAN: Author, novelist and literary critic John Updike will be a guest for In Depth on December 4th. Mr. Updike's books, nearly 60 in total, have earned him numerous awards, including the National Book Award, the American Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He received the Pulitzer Prize for his novels "Rabbit is Rich" (1981) and "Rabbit at Rest" (1990). Mr. Updike's latest book is "Still Looking: Essays on American Art."
Author Bio: For more on John Updike and his work, visit userpages.prexar.com/joyerkes.
C-SPAN Link
The Life and Times of the Bad Boy of Baltimore
I just picked up the latest biography of H.L. Mencken by Marion Elizebeth Rodgers.
I will be reading it over the weekend and will review it here perhaps by Sunday.
Watch for the segment on C-SPAN about it.
Perhaps he was no racist or anti-Semite after all.
In fact, perhaps we have him to thank for ending prohibition (hence the photo on the book jacket cover).
He certainly stood up for liberty and the separation of church and state.
Perhaps he is best remembered today for his acerbic coverage of the Scopes Monkey Trial in Dayton, Tennessee, in 1925.
I think I am part bear. All I want to do this time of year is sleep.
With any luck I will wake up at some point in the not too distant future and get around to reviewing this book myself.
But for the benefit of our readers, here's the review from Chuck Gregory in January Magazine.
Mike Palecek has written before about small-town Iowa, about the people of America, about truth, corruption and lies. He has written about brave individuals who are driven to make a difference. He has created characters who work within a system they hate, who later step outside that system and find doors everywhere are slammed in their faces.
Full story
In his book War Made Easy, Norman Solomon demolishes the myth of an independent American press zealously guarding sacred values of free expression.
"Although strictly focusing on the shameless history of media cheerleading for the principal post-World War II American wars, invasions and interventions, he calls into question by implication the idea of the press as some kind of institutional counterforce to government and corporate power," writes reviewer Jules Siegel of CafeCancun.Com.
***
War Made Easy is a definitive historical text that belongs in every serious library as an indispensable record of the real relationships among government authorities and media outlets. The book should be required reading for journalists and journalism students. It will dispel many illusions about the true reach of freedom of the press and replace them with a much more appropriate and healthier professional cynicism."
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