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Under the Microscope
by Glynn Wilson
A virus is growing like a pestilence.
There's only one way to kill it.
Information is power.
Here goes.
In 1876, Mark Twain wrote a short story he called A Literary Nightmare about a virus-like jingle that occupied his mind for several days until he managed to "infect" another person and remove it from his mind.
The funny story was also published under the title Punch, Brothers, Punch.
The story is significant to note today because it is a fairly accurate description of what has become known as a communications meme, which I will define here as a bad piece of information that is repeated over and over again, replicating itself and causing all kinds of problems, like a mutated gene that leads to a biological virus, which results in sickness and ultimately death.
In 1976, biologist and evolutionary theorist Richard Dawkins cited Twain's story when he coined the term meme in his book The Selfish Gene.
He used a number of examples to illustrate his point, including tunes and catch-phrases.
The term was picked up by string theorists and others in science. But it was also picked up by communications scholars in the early days of studying how people use the Internet and the World Wide Web.
Some college professors used it in the early days to infect students with a sense that passing around information on the unedited Web could lead to bad information that could mislead the public. But what they did not realize, at least the one's I met, was this. Just as a virus contains its own antidote, think flu shots, the Web can also be used to get good information out and thus "kill" the insidious virus.
The point I'm going to make is that enough bad information can lead to the death of democracy. It's already out there and spreading. And like a plague, it may or may not be too late.
There are many examples of memes we could talk about. But for starters, let's take the term "jackpot justice."
I'm not sure who first coined the term, but I know it was used by Karl Rove in his first forays into Alabama politics in the 1990s to take over the Alabama Supreme Court.
And instead of being passed around over the Internet, that term is still being used by reporters working for Alabama newspapers as if they coined it themselves. I guess they find it funny to write, or maybe they know the Republican bosses like it.
That virus led to an Alabama Supreme Court ruling a couple of weeks ago that resulted in all but destroying the jury system that is set out in the U.S. Constitution, when a judge elected with Rove's help using the meme overrode the jury's verdict against the oil giant ExxonMobile.
The term was used to make the false claim that "run away jury verdicts" are bad for business and hold the state back in recruiting industries to the state, thus costing the people jobs.
But any serious analysis of the business climate in Alabama will show that businesses do not stay away from Alabama or anywhere else because of large jury verdicts. In fact, the reason industries locate here or anywhere is because of their global search for cheap, non-union labor (also true of Mexico and China, other third world countries).
Alabama has that in spades thanks to a compliant, under educated population that has been successfully conned into believing that unions are more corrupt than management of multi-national corporations. It's a meme, I tell you. A virus.
The people have also been told over and over again that "big government" is bad, bad, bad. As if big corporations are not worse, worse, worse. You can look at the cost of private contractors in Iraq and see that they do a worse job than the U.S. military and cost the taxpayers 10 times more.
Privatization is a growing trend for everything from prisons to hospitals, but the evidence, and movies such as Michael Moore's SICKO, show us that government health care systems are far more efficient and provide better health care for citizens than for-profit hospitals, insurance companies and drug companies.
Corporations are also interested in locating in places where there are no enforceable environmental regulations. Since Fob James first set up the Alabama Department of Environmental Management in the early 1980s as a "one stop (pollution) permitting agency" like the Waffle House, that's what you have in Alabama.
Industries also like places where the press can be counted on to promote them without any so-called "liberal" skepticism. I know this from experience of working on the Gulf Coast back in the day when environmental reporting was new. I no doubt cost the state some business in those days by fighting developments. But I also saved the state business by helping to protect state waters and beaches from pollution.
In fact, I am a firm believer in the fact that democracy does not work without watchdog journalism, where the press plays the role of looking over the government's shoulder and holding public officials accountable.
CNN and other news organizations now use various slogans to claim they are doing this.
"Holding them accountable for you" and such are simply other examples of memes.
The fact is they rarely if ever actually do anything more than quote two under-informed sources on two sides of an issue.
Now let's take another meme from Alabama, this repeated by someone who should know better on a large e-mail list just this morning.
"Alabama is a Republican, red state."
It's a meme. It's not true.
The latest poll from the Alabama Education Association's Survey Research Center shows that 34 percent of likely Alabama voters identified themselves as Democrats, compared to 33 percent who said they were Republicans. The other 31 percent said they were independents, but even this number is misleading.
As we have already reported, the poll also shows that only 12 percent of the people in this state have confidence in the abilities of George W. Bush. Where's the reporting that reflects this?
You can read about it in the Tuscaloosa News, in a column called Alabama Voters More Undecided Than Ever.
What that poll alone and that story will not tell you is why people identify themselves as independents.
According to an interview I conducted with former Alabama Secretary of State Nancy Worley in Birmingham last week, many people in Alabama are afraid to say they are Democrats and would not register as a Democrat because they are afraid their preachers or co-workers might find out. Better to say you are a Republican or an independent, since all the peer pressure for the past couple of decades has been toward "conservatism," a trait that the Republican Party is supposed to own - sort of like the American flag and the ability to pray.
It's mere poppycock. A meme. But it has been spread like a lethal virus and mucks up our political system like mucous from the flu clogs up your lungs.
Where is the outrage from Democrats? You can find it in e-mail if you are on the right list, but that's about the only place (other than here).
The New York Times has another example worth pointing out in the Sunday paper. Mark Halperin says Richard Ben Cramer’s What It Takes about the 1988 battle for the White House influenced the way he covers political campaigns.
"If past is prologue," he writes, describing the meme, "the winners of the major-party nominations will be those who demonstrate they have what it takes to win."
And he suggests an antidote.
"But in the short time remaining voters and journalists alike should be focused on a deeper question: Do the candidates have what it takes to fill the most difficult job in the world?"
Book Inspires Bad Political Journalism
Alabama voters and others around the country will go to the polls on Feb. 5, a little more than three months from now, and vote for president on "Super Duper Tuesday."
So who will you vote for? The person the pundits say is most likely to win? Or the person YOU THINK based on critical thinking might be best able to govern?
Nobody said saving democracy was going to be easy. But at least think about it. It's part of the antidote. Seeing the medicine on the shelf is not enough. You have to buy it and swallow it - and go back to work.
Under the Microscope
by Glynn Wilson
Political prognostication is a little like handicapping sports.
The difference is that politics and government matter.
Whether or not your favorite football team wins or loses is rarely a life or death issue.
Of course it is more popular and publicly acceptable in traditional medialand to talk about sports, to be provocative and even to use political analogies in sports commentary.
Political reporting is criticized for focusing on the so-called "horse race." The idea is that the U.S. news media seems to focus more on who is up and who is down than on the important issues facing the world, the country and people in their daily lives.
But when political candidates on the right and left are largely in agreement with each other on most of the issues, what is a political columnist to do?
When I was able to predict the Kerry-Edwards ticket after the very first debate in the 2004 race, some people who lost that Turbo Dog bet thought I was the modern equivalent of Nostradamus.
But the fact is, that prediction was about as lucky as calling an interception while watching an Alabama football game on TV.
I used to do this all the time back in the day when I cared as much about football as I now care about politics.
Watching a game on TV in a crowd of friends, I would often say something like: "What Alabama needs now is an interception."
As the ball was snapped, I would say, "Here it comes. INTERCEPTION!"
And every once in a while, in part thanks to the recruitment of great defensive backs by the UA coaching staff, I would be right - and come off looking like Nostradamus.
But this time around, all the surfing around the Web for good polling research and informed commentary leaves me at a loss to be able to predict who the next president will be. It is still not even clear who the major party nominees will be.
I suppose I could go ahead and say who I would like the nominees to be, but the fact is, while there are fine, qualified candidates running, none of them blows me away.
It is encouraging that most of the Democrats are against the Iraq war and for health coverage for all Americans, but I am not convinced that come November 2008, any of these candidates will blow away the Republican competition.
The Republicans are all running to the right of Bush the Hun, so you would think the American public would be turned off to all of them considering the progressive responses of the electorate on the issues.
But deep down in my gut, I worry that what the public ultimately wants is a strong quarterback. And I worry that the corrupt Republican machinery set up by Karl Rove over the past seven years will be able to steal any close election. Which means the Democrats need a candidate who can win hands down.
And none of the candidates on the stage now inspire overwhelming confidence.
While I would be more than willing to vote for a woman or a black candidate for president myself, I just don't think a majority of American voters will actually pull the Hillary or Obama lever come next November.
And the prospects of a Giuliani presidency leaves me cold and desperate for an alternative. Plus, Giuliani is only down on Hillary three points in a head-to-head matchup, a number that is within the dangerous margin of error. Not good.
A lot of independents, libertarians and progressives are pulling for Ron Paul as an alternative, but considering his radical libertarian views on the Federal Reserve and the IRS and other things, I doubt he has a real chance to win the Republican nomination.
Feds Raid Ron Paul Coin Company
So what is a liberaltarian to do?
I just don't understand how anyone can think that Hillary Clinton is the most electable Democrat, but that seems to be the current sentiment. Maybe the American people are so mad at the Republicans that they would be willing to elect the first woman president in our history. It could happen, but I have my doubts.
I have no information about how John Edwards and Barack Obama get along, but I think together, they might make a winnable ticket. Obama is young and as vice president for four or eight years, he might be able to make history and become the first African-American president in our history. I just have my doubts that he could carry the country next November from the top of the ticket.
For some of the best commentary on the candidates, turn to a special series of columns by The Nation magazine: Time to Choose.
In the magazine's online poll, Dennis Kucinich is winning with 34 percent of the vote. There's no doubt he is the bravest candidate on the stage who has moved articles of impeachment against Cheney in the House. He is educated and smart and has a handle on the issues, but he is such a leftist that it is hard to imagine the American masses handing him the keys to the White House.
I wish I could say it could be so of Joe Q. Public, but the U.S. education system lags too far behind the rest of the world to even dream of a radical, liberal president.
So we will continue watching the game and see who emerges as the voting starts in a couple of months in Iowa and New Hampshire and elsewhere.
The one prediction we can make with some certainty concerns John Edwards. It is likely he will post strong showings in some of the caucuses and primaries, so the Democratic Party presidential contest is likely to be a three-way race by February.
When that happens, the media coverage of this race will take on a different cast. And depending on fund raising and performance, Edwards could emerge from the pack and win by a nose. We will see…
Under the Microscope
by Glynn Wilson
The air has cooled off in Alabamaland and it appears the 2007 global warming heat wave has finally waned. And according to the birding experts, migrants are on the move South. So I may have to get back on the chase after breakfast.
Even The Bunker is finally cooling off enough to break out one of my half-Cherokee grandmother's quilts for the big brass bed. She has been in her grave now for 30 years, but her fine quilts are still an inspiration to me, along with the copies of Mark Twain's books she gave me from her library in St. Clair County before her passing.
You may recall that I recently quoted from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court.
Today I want to talk a little bit about another author, a famous columnist named Walter Lippmann, especially to debunk a label that has been pinned on me of late by a local used car salesman. As you will see from this essay, I am no "elitist."
I hope the bad students down at the Big Mule Press are listening, but I do not have much hope since they are passing off another piece of manufactured GOP propaganda as news even today, with no documentary evidence and a key source who, of course, could not be reached for comment. You know who I am talking about. I refuse to link to their bullshit.
But to prove that I am a truly independent scholar ruled by no political party or ideology, I am also going to publicly quibble with a couple of liberal writers who I otherwise respect. That is still allowed under the First Amendment, I presume.
Scott Horton at Harpers.org has written a blurb about the re-release of Lippmann's book Liberty and the News and linked to a column by Sidney Blumenthal about it. Both of these men are incredibly educated and brilliant, and Lippmann's book is worth reading to be sure.
The problem is, the book was written in 1920 and Lippmann changed his mind about some things about the public by 1925 that guided him through the next half a century as one of the most widely circulated columnists in American newspaper history. I know this because I spent a considerable amount of time reading up on this debate in the 1990s as a graduate student at the University of Alabama and Tennessee.
One of my professors at Alabama had been trying for years to finish and publish a book about some of this. I'm not sure if he ever did, but I still have the early manuscript and do recall having a problem even with his analysis.
This part is true, although it would be difficult to find anyone who would admit it.
"Everywhere today, men are conscious that somehow they must deal with questions more intricate than any that church or school had prepared them to understand," Lippmann wrote. "Increasingly they know that they cannot understand them if the facts are not quickly and steadily available. Increasingly they are baffled because the facts are not available; and they are wondering whether government by consent can survive in a time when the manufacture of consent is an unregulated private enterprise."
Does this not remind you of the ongoing debate about the Alabama monopoly press coverage of the case of Don Siegelman?
"Lippmann had witnessed firsthand how the 'manufacture of consent' had deranged democracy," Blumenthal writes. "But he did not hold those in government solely responsible. He also described how the press corps was carried away on the wave of patriotism and became self-censors, enforcers, and sheer propagandists. Their careerism, cynicism, and error made them destroyers of 'liberty of opinion' and agents of intolerance, who subverted the American constitutional system of self-government."
Even the great newspaper owners, Lippman wrote, "believe that edification is more important than veracity. They believe it profoundly, violently, relentlessly. They preen themselves upon it. To patriotism, as they define it from day to day, all other considerations must yield."
That seems to be as true today as it was in 1920, to be sure, and it is certainly the primariy reason for the ratings success of Fox News. It was Lippmann who first identified the tendency of journalists to generalize about other people based on fixed ideas, what he called "stereotypes," coining the phrase often used today. Lippmann argued that people - including journalists - are more apt to believe "the pictures in their heads" than come to judgment by critical thinking.
Humans condense ideas in to symbols, he wrote, and journalism, a force quickly becoming the "mass media" in his day, could be an effective method of educating the public if they took their charge seriously, Lippmann argued in another book, his 1922 classic Public Opinion.
In that work, a more definitive book than Liberty and the News, Lippman argued that twentieth century advances in the technology of "the manufacture of consent" amounts to "a revolution" in "the practice of democracy" because this allows the control over public opinion about the world and about the public's interests in that world. Control of public opinion, he said, was a means of controlling public behavior.
All of this came out of the early days of mass propaganda, when many scholars in America worried about the manipulation of the public already going on from Germany during the first World War.
Lippmann was optimistic about American democracy and the Jeffersonian ideal early on, along with the role of the press in educating the public to be informed citizens.
But later on he gave up on the press and the public, writing in his 1925 book The Phantom Public that a governing class of elites "must rise to face the new challenges." He came to see the public as Plato did, a great beast or a bewildered herd – floundering in the "chaos of local opinions."
Leftist scholar Noam Chomsky in his day came to be seen as Lippmann's intellectual antithesis after he co-wrote a book about the media called Manufacturing Consent, borrowing Lippmann's term, in 1979. But Lippman actually had a critic in his own time, the philosopher John Dewey, who may have agreed with Lippmann's assertions that the modern world was becoming too complex for every citizen to grasp all its aspects, but Dewey believed that the mass public could form a "Great Community" that could become educated about issues, come to judgments and arrive at solutions to societal problems, especially with the help of an "objective" press.
But much of that debate has been lost today, in part because Dewey was a lousy writer whose work is so dense that it is nearly impossible to read today. Lippmann's caving in on that issue, I believe to further his own publishing career with the new class of media moguls, contributed to a new, non-scientific, capitalist definition of objectivity that came to dominate our stereotypical thinking about the press.
Who can deny that Rush Limbaugh's bashing of "the liberal press" came to dominate our discussions? It permeates the debate on cable television news today, and it is a perfect example of what Lippmann was worried about in his early years. Most of the uneducated masses in this country hold a picture in their heads of a "liberal press," and the word liberal has been demonized to be seen as something just as bad as Communism or Socialism - or eating spinach.
Popeye tried to make eating spinach a good thing, but somehow it didn't work.
But Limbaugh's bashing of the "liberal media" did work. It was taken up by conservative commentators everywhere, and so the publishers of newspapers used it as an excuse to march steadily rightward, starting in earnest in the 1980s just as I was embarking on a career with aspirations of becoming an "investigative reporter."
Even in those days, the glow of the Washington Post's grand achievement in Watergate had faded, and in the American South, the only investigative reporting allowed was the kind that served corporate, Republican interests.
Who can forget how the Birmingham News sent a photographer (who I have known all my life) to hide in the bushes in 1986 and spy on Bill Baxley? The news trumped up a scandal against George Wallace's heir apparent Democrat and reported that Baxley was using a state car to run for governor against Charlie "fry 'em 'till their eyes pop out" Graddick, a Republican from Mobile masquerading as a Democrat so he could get elected. It turned out not to be a state car after all, but the damage had been done.
In walks old chicken farmer, Amway salesman and Primitive Baptist preacher Guy Hunt, who should have been indicted instead of elected for using a federal office to run for governor. Of course, he was never investigated by the U.S. Attorney in Montgomery at that time, a Reagan appointee. Sound familiar? And he was never investigated by the Birmingham Ruse.
You can read all about it in David Burnham's book, in which I am quoted, on the Justice Department, comparing the Hunt case to the investigation of former Birmingham Mayor Richard Arrington.
There is another newspaper publisher who should be mentioned here, even though I've not had the time or resources to fully investigate it.
Adolph Ochs, the former publisher of a paper in Chattanooga, Tennessee who went on to buy out and transform the New York Times into a great objective newspaper starting in 1898, had some ideas about objectivity in his day that transcended merely making a lot of money by printing both sides of stories. I am not aware of any scholar who has fully investigated this, but one day I would like to get into his papers, and the papers of other publishers of the time when Charles Darwin was still alive, and see just what they were thinking about using the press as a vehicle for educating the public, especially as it concerned science.
That is the strain of intellectual thought that most interests me, and I think it has been lost. As a result, the very idea of Democracy is in grave peril.
And I don't give a hoot what New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd says about how Democracy and the Republic and the New York Times will always be around. I'm sure it honestly looks that way if you are living on the Upper West Side of Manhattan making $1.2 million a year to write two measly newspaper columns a week.
Come on down to Alabama, Ms. Dowd, and I will show you a totalitarian system right here in the good old US of A. I can introduce you to poor people living in the woods who would just like something to eat, a warm (or cool) place to sleep and maybe some health care for their children. Try telling them Democracy is alive and working in Bush's America.
Now to wrap up this tale with a local example of why I think people basically get it without too much help from elites. They do need real political leadership, but it doesn't take much to convince them - if the press would just try.
After the hearing on selective prosecutions by the House Judiciary Committee the other day, a friend of mine (and a member of the focus group for this independant news site) took a trip to Tennessee. While there, she ended up in a little country store and overheard a conversation by a group of old men. They had only read the AP that day on the hearing and the controversy over Don Siegelman, but they understood it without a lot of editorial analysis.
She overheard them talking about all the good things Siegelman had done for the poor people of Alabama, locating auto plants out in the country with all those good paying jobs. And, they had no doubt the prosecution of Siegelman was done for political reasons by the Bush Justice Department. They got it.
It's the management of papers like the Birmingham Snooze that don't get it. Do you think that may be why they are losing readers and subscrbers? They like to blame bloggers.
But just maybe it's that we are more willing to tell the truth and write wide open, interesting stuff, stories worth reading.
Under the Microscope
by Glynn Wilson
Rain is falling in the hood, which is a good thing considering the heat wave and drought we're in. But since it is keeping me from something I want to do this morning, I am going to unload one hell of a rant instead.
Let me apologize in advance if this sounds bitter and let me assure you it is not bitterness or even simple anger. To fully understand it, this should be read aloud in the thundering voice of an uncompromising statesman. If I could find such a person alive in American politics I would go to work for them and write their speeches.
As I read the headlines this morning on the best damn (yes) liberal online newspaper in America, I just want to grab some Dumbocrats by the nape of the neck and shake some sense into them.
President George W. Bush is without a doubt the dumbest and worst president at least in our lifetime, probably in American history, and his approval ratings now hover around 24 percent, according to the most recent poll on the subject.
Yet the Democrats in Congress continue to cave in to the Bush administration on one issue after another, which is why their approval ratings are right down there with Bush, the traditional, corporate news media and used car salesmen.
This morning I read that the Senate Democrats plan to cave in to Bush on the bill authorizing unlimited spying on American citizens by the telephone companies, and they are about to approve a measure that would give the phone giants immunity from lawsuits for using their networks to engage in spying on every kind of American, not just those suspected of being engaged in talking to terrorists overseas.
(The Dumbocrats are also not standing up against a plan by the F.C.C. to ease restrictions on media ownership).
By all means we need to spy on anyone who would help radical extremists kill our citizens, but that is not what is happening. The Bush administration is using the phone companies to spy on the enemies of the Republican Party, including peace groups and environmental groups and little old ladies who like Hillary Clinton but hate Bush.
And what does Hillary Clinton do about it? She compromises, trying to appear reasonable.
Well if that's how she plans on running her presidential campaign, she will not get my vote and she will not be the next president. I will bet an entire case of Yuengling Black and Tan on that.
I got a phone call last night from a prominent Alabama Democrat who is a regular reader of this site who is now working for Hillary. And I've got one simple message for her and her campaign. If she wants to be the next president, she needs to go into the practice booth and work on a new, thundering voice that shows she has the courage to stand up to the corrupt fake-Christian Republicans.
Since the Dumbocrats took control of Congress in 2006, they have compromised on one issue after another, including continuing to fund the war in Iraq, which is the main reason enough swing voters swung their way to hand them that election. Now they are pissed off and may swing back in 2008.
The facts about the phone companies
My father worked his ass off for the old Southern Bell telephone company. In the end, it killed him at the age of 47.
I was not in favor of the federal breakup of the old AT&T empire in the early 1980s, since it is obvious there are certain utility industries that would simply work better for people with quasi-government monopolies.
The corrupt Southern Company has that now, including its subsidiary Alabama Power Company, and you don't ever hear one squeak about that from Republicans, libertarians or consumers.
But once the federal courts did break up the phone companies, under the auspices of an unfair trade monopoly, what happened to phone service and phone rates? Sure, other companies entered the market and new phone products were developed. But at what price?
Is phone service any better? Is it cheaper for consumers? Is the customer service better or worse?
If you are old enough to remember Southern Bell, you remember making a phone call for a dime, the ability to get change from a quarter in a pay phone and friendly southern ladies working as operators.
Have you tried calling the phone companies lately? Not many people use pay phones anymore due to the proliferation of cell phones, but have you tried to use a pay phone lately? Why do they even keep making the phones with the change slot? It doesn't work.
A note about lawyers
I tried to get a prominent (formerly) liberal law firm in Birmingham to sue BellSouth two years ago when the spying story first broke. This is a law firm that I used to sue a corrupt newspaper many years ago.
In those days, it was a kick ass labor law firm and truly part of the "liberal" Democratic Party establishment in the days when George Wallace was still alive, if not well.
Now, the same firm represents HealthSouth clients in Mountain Brook who lost some of their wealth when Richard Scrushy cashed in his stock options. And I've learning recently that they are working for the administration of Republican Governor Bob Riley.
The Dumbocrats in Washington are compromising with Bush on the issue because the new AT&T and the others are saying it will cost them millions in jury awards in civil suits. But they are making billions, and billions, and billions of dollars for charging way too much for phone service and Internet access. What's a few million for engaging in illegal spying on innocent American citizens?
And let's not forget. Anyone who sued the phone companies would have to prove they were being spied on and not engaged in terrorist activity.
The lawyers I talked to would not sue the phone companies, for reasons only they know, even though I can prove the spying in my case. It would be an interesting case, and just maybe we could use it to clarify some things that the American people should understand:
Criticizing the president is not terrorism.
Advocating peace in the Middle East is not terrorism.
Favoring a clean environment is not terrorism.
Now, if Hillary Clinton wants my vote or this independent media company's endorsement, let's see her make a speech saying that. In a thundering voice.
Under the Microscope
by Glynn Wilson
Where are the super heroes worthy of legend in our world today?
Greece and Rome had Hercules.
America had Superman. Lest we forget, he was by day the mild-mannered reporter for The Daily Planet Clark Kent.
Hercules is the Roman name for the mythical Greek hero Heracles, son of Zeus and the mortal Alcmena. He was made to perform 1200 great tasks to cleanse himself - after he went temporarily insane and killed his wife and kids, along with his entire village, an oft forgotten part of his heroic tale.
 | | Photo by Glynn Wilson | | Hercules at The Met |
While he was a champion and a great warrior, Hercules was not above cheating and using any unfair trick to his advantage, historians say. Later, Hercules went mad with rage and slaughtered cows.
So much for the foibles of heroes.
In Roman works of art and in Renaissance and post-Renaissance art that adapts Roman iconography, Hercules can be identified as an example of action and masculinity. He embodies great strength, courage - and great appetites, including erotic adventures with both women and boys.
So much for the foibles of heroes.
Hercules was renowned for making "the world safe for mankind" since he supposedly destroyed many terrible beasts, including the snake-headed Medusa. His "self-sacrifice" obtained his welcome from the gods, as the half-son of Zeus, into Olympia, the Greek version of heaven.
Wiki Hercules
Superman, on the other hand, was born on another planet but became the savior of Metropolis and was known to stand for quaint things such as, "Truth, Justice and the American way." Of course he would tell Louis Lane this right before taking her out for a late night flight around the city, and then back to her place for some super sex.
So much for the foibles of heroes.
Wiki Superman
I've never been one to put that much stock in heroes anyway, myself, as more than fantasy.
Even the biggest Superhero of them all for Christians, Jesus, who would save them all for their sins and assure them a nice seat on the grass in heaven, always struck me as lacking in ultimate authenticity.
Maybe it's just that I've never met a real hero in person.
 | | Photo by Glynn Wilson | | Jesus on the cross depicted in centuries-old art at The Met |
Oh, I've interviewed a few who drew the title, for saving kids from burning buildings, being wounded for their country in a war. But even most wars seem of questionable validity when you look closely at their political genesis.
In today's pop culture, we often refer to rock stars as our heroes, along with football players, race car drivers and movie actors. But some of us seem to bitch like hell when an actor comments on the state of the world or politics.
I mean, look at the Dixie Chicks? Natalie Main is my hero, for saying what she did and taking the heat and coming back to win the big Grammy.
What about politicians? Do you know of a politician you would call a hero? I don't, and I've been covering politics for almost 30 years.
John McCain was a bona fide war hero, serving years in a North Vietnamese prison camp. Until recently, when he decided to run for president, he was seen as a maverick, tell it like it is statesman. But no more.
John Kerry is a larger than life kind of character, all rich and smart from Massachusetts, with that big face and his own Vietnam bona fides. But nobody in the American South saw him that way in the 2004 race, because the old Wallace anti-Ivy League Yankee liberal label still works for the likes of Karl Rove, George Bush and the GOP.
Maybe he should have shot his duck hunting companion back during that campaign. It would have made him seem more manly, like Dick Cheney.
I certainly don't know of any heroes alive from my home state of Alabama, with the possible exception of E.O. Wilson, and he lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts now too.
Where are the media heroes?
Now that's where the story gets interesting.
Scott Horton is the last of the crusading New York lawyers with an interest in justice and the South, specifically Alabama and the case of railroaded former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman.
The folks over at The Nation Institute seem genuinely interested in what's going on down here, and have a long-term project going on all about "purple America," where the liberals and conservatives are mixed in all over the place, even here in Alabamaland.
It's sort of nice to be back in the bunker with my computer wall working, although I would trade it all in, in a New York heartbeat, for a loft in the West Village or SoHo. That is if I didn't have familial responsibilities here - and if someone would pay me enough to live and work there.
I suspect I could write and drink with the best of them. I did it in New Orleans, and never had to publish one correction in four years.
You see, I'm sort of like Superboy. I take this American journalism shit seriously, maybe too seriously at times. I've been called a "true believer" right up there with Jill Simpson.
Maybe if we had a few more true believers - who were willing to do what it takes to be a superhero - we could straiten this old world out.
Hey, it's not like I'm countin' on it. Yet I have no choice but to fight. It's in my genes.
If I have to do that living on the road cowboying out of a van, so much the better. It's a great way to actually see the country.
Most people in New York, Washington and LA only see it from the air, which means they don't see it at all.
The good news is they need someone down here on the ground to tell them what is up in the South. As it turns out, that's my specialty.
So, for now I can definitely report that global warming is real and happening now in the American South.
See that red sun in the photo below? It was as hot as it looked coming down out of the Appalachians and into the foothills around Ft. Payne, Alabama, just northeast of Rainsville.
It was a nice two week break up the East Coast. Maybe fall will hit here soon and we can spot some migrating birds.
 | | Photo by Glynn Wilson | | The final sunset on our Washington, New York trip, looking out over Ft. Payne, Alabama, in the foothills of the Applachian Mountains. |
It's time for a fall trip. Let's go...
"I needed something to pare the fat off my soul, to scare the shit out of me, to make me grateful, again, for being alive."
- Colin Fletcher, River, R.I.P.
Under the Microscope
by Glynn Wilson
Major trip preparations can take your mind off other things. Like the news that it's been six years since 9/11.
Catching up on cable on my last night in Alabamaland for awhile, I did take a moment to remember.
I looked up the column I wrote that week as a faculty member for The Moroon college newspaper at Loyola University New Orleans. I don't think I've read it since it appeared on Friday, Sept. 14, 2001.
The column documented some indelible images from that day and assessed the media coverage - history on the run.
"How will the media handle this day? How will we handle this horrific tragedy?," I wrote. "Remember. The answers will define us for the rest of our lives."
Media Coverage Brings Stories, Images to Country
Then I think about what's happened since. How President Bush and co. blew away the good will of not only the American people, but people around the world with the ill-conceived and disastrous invasion of Iraq.
And now if Bush and Cheney and Gen. David H. Petraeus have their way, tens of thousands of U.S. troops will be in Iraq for years to come. In case you haven't caught on to this yet, we've been saying for two and a half years there was never any plan to get out. This was to be a long-range staging area for world and oil domination - and the political card to turn the U.S. over to the GOP for a generation.
Well, it didn't work out with roses, so Bush and co. have to continue to pretend that the surge is working to try and withdraw, somehow, "with honor." It's hard to see anything honorable coming out of this, except perhaps for a Texas jail cell for someone higher up in the political food chain than former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman.
I guess if you are the most clueless leader of the free world in history, however, there's no choice but to pretend everything's OK and just go on playing Howdy Doody on TV. Continue the ratings failed puppet show until the contract runs out - or until someone fires you, which would mean impeachment. And for some reason, we can't even consider that, according to the pundits and the Democrats in Congress.
Can America stand another 16 months of this? How many scandals does it take?
Oh well, back to the trip. I'll be looking in the front windows of the White House in a couple of days from Lafayette Park at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. It won't be the first time.
In 2004 and 2005 I used to ride my Cannondale mountain bike from Alexandria, Virginia, through the Carlisle Group compound, down the Potomac River and by National Airport (I never liked it when they renamed it for Reagan). It's a 14 mile ride that eventually takes you across the river at the Jefferson Memorial, and onto to the National Mall - framed by the monuments of Lincoln and Washington and the Capitol itself. The White House is just off The Mall by a park known for its protests dating back to the Vietnam War. Ride around the White House and there's that statue of Andrew Jackson on his goddamned horse. There are many benches there where you should be able to sit and think, although the cell phones and the omnipresent Secret Service agents and park police make real contemplation difficult.
It is one of the busiest and most intense places in the world not only because of the number of people who cram into the area around Washington, D.C. It is the sheer power and security of the place that keeps your attention focused in a level of awareness that is impossible to escape.
Even back across the river in Virginia in a park, reading a good Civil War book, you can never really escape the intense feeling of where you are and what you are close to.
Every time the presidential helicopter flies overhead, or its decoy, you are constantly aware that for the slightest of reasons, some cop there could think you are a criminal or a terrorist - and whisk you away to Guantanamo (or simply the D.C. jail).
But if you have a van with a canoe on top, a digital recorder and camera, and a Capitol press credential, you might have a chance - if you don't put a PRESS sign on the outside of your vehicle.
Woops! Someone warned me I should get that LocustFork.Net sign off my back window. After the Jill Simpson story broke with the stuff about the fire and her car being run off the road, one friend even said, the one who loaned me the River book, "Knock out that damn back window and get rid of it."
But no, I like promoting my domain name on the back window of the Chevy van. I often get waves and honks from others on the road with blue dot bumper stickers on their cars. In Alabama, women drive up beside me and hold up their blue dots to show me through the window. They are too afraid to stick them on their cars in the land of Karl Rove's Supreme Court and Bob Riley's cowboy boots.
So once again I will be cowboying in the van across the American South to D.C. and beyond. This time the plan involves van camping in three state parks in three states, Virginia, Maryland - and Pennsylvania, on the way back from New York.
There will be a little old hearing at the Rayburn House Office building on Friday, and Saturday, a bit of war protesting on The Mall - great photo and blog material, if we don't get arrested.
Cross your fingers, say your prayers or whatever, then check us out again in a day or two. We should have some fun to report.
Last fall I spent 12 days van camping and chasing bird pictures and free high speed wireless Internet connections all down the Gulf Coast, and four days in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina.
Friends in high places tell me this is the best time of year for a trip up the East Coast. It's a fall trip. Let's go…
Postscript: Just as we finished editing this column, the editor of The Progressive Populist newspaper near Austin, Texas, notified me the Justice Off the Tracks in Alabama story has been published online. It will appear in the newspaper out Sept. 12, two days before Ms. Simpson's appearance before the House Judiciary Committee in Washington.
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity.
- Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities, about the era of the French Revolution
Under the Microscope
by Glynn Wilson
It was the worst of times, the best of times, but now it's over. Thank dog for the passing of August, 2007 - the hottest month on record in much of the United States and Alabamaland.
The dead leaves from the drought-ravaged trees in the area are already falling and the fall bird migration has officially begun.
But while August was a rough month to take in many ways, let's not forget some of the best political news of the past seven years. President Bush's amoral political aide Karl Rove and his incompetent but loyal Attorney General Alberto Gonzales have left the building – the White House that is – and slunk back to Texas in disgrace.
Senator Larry "I am not gay" Craig announced his resignation yesterday, helping to bring the Log Cabin Republican story out of the closet before the masses and the mass media.
Not since Monica Lewinsky's stained blue dress have so many media organizations struggled with where to draw the line in talking about sex and politics in the same breathless sentence.
It just makes my heart sing when truth and justice are actually in evidence in the good old US of A.
But there's more work to do to right the ship of state that has been careening toward the abyss of history since the Bush gang decided to invade Iraq in the wake of 9/11.
If things go as planned, North Alabama lawyer Jill Simpson of Siegelman affidavit fame will be heading up to Washington in mid-September to brief the House Judiciary Committee staff on what she still sees as an injustice directed from the White House in that political prosecution.
While the Alabama Democratic Party and even Siegelman's own lawyers still don't seem to get this story, it is one of the most important narratives going in the drive to set the ship of America back on an upright course.
There are no guarantees yet that the Democrats in Washington will be able to grasp this information and seize the day to turn this ship around. But at least it's worth a try.
On September 15, we are told, there will be a large mass anti-war march in Washington on the same day Bush's general in Iraq is supposed to report back on the progress of the troop surge. We will be there to cover it.
According to several early stories about that report leaked to national newspapers, the news will not all be good. But since those stories have been out there, the report seems to be changing, at the direction - surprise, surprise - of the Bush White House.
According to all the TV punditry on the Sunday morning talk shows today, Army Gen. David H. Petraeus may now have more so-called "good news" to report, although it will still set off a contentious debate in Washington over what to do about the debacle over there.
Reports Add Fuel to Iraq Debate
If the talking heads are to be believed on "Meet the Press" and the newer Chris Matthews show on NBC, Bush is so politically savvy that he will turn the political debate over the war around and the Republicans will stand by their man and not help the Democrats do anything to de-fund the war or force the beginning of troop withdrawals from Iraq.
I think they are totally wrong from a political point of view and certainly in terms of what is right for the country. Apparently, however, establishment Democrats are still such a part of the Washington taint that they do not have the guts to take the fight to Bush all the way to ending the war and impeaching Bush.
Sources tell us that the Republicans have the dirt on every Democrat in Washington, including Rep. John Conyers of Detroit, Michigan, who was seen in Africa with Rep. William Jefferson of Louisiana - the guy who got caught with a bunch of tainted cash in his refrigerator.
Before the 2006 mid-term election, Conyers was holding hearings in the Capitol basement and pounding the minority gavel saying if the Democrats regained control of Congress, he would move to impeach Bush, one of the worst presidents in American history and whose administration has been riddled with one scandal after another from Katrina to torture to spying on Americans.
Since the Democrats took back Congress, however, there has been very little talk of that, except from Rep. Dennis Kucinich, who is running for president but does not have an angel's chance in hell.
A few weeks ago, there was a lot of talk about impeaching Gonzales. But he did the Washington two-step and got out of town while Congress was on vacation in August, right after Rove announced his resignation and just before Larry Craig announced his. The result? A buried story.
And now it's football season, so the masses are paying even less attention, especially in Alabamaland.
Nick Saban seems to be on the right track with the Alabama Crimson Tide's 52-6 season opening victory over Western Carolina, but let's face facts. The Hoover High School football team could have beaten Western Carolina. It was no true test.
Let's just hope the worst of times are over and that the best of times are still ahead. I don't have much faith. But you've got to hold out some hope in life.
At least we're all not dead yet. And as I often like to say, "you can't win if you don't play."
So let's take the fight to them! What do you say?
 | | Photo by Glynn Wilson | | David Rae Morris in front of the Southside Gallery in Oxford, Mississippi and the image of his father, the writer Willie Morris. |
The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means, and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again... Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal… This is the artist's way of scribbling "Kilroy was here" on the wall of the final and irrevocable oblivion through which he must someday pass.
- William Faulkner, from Lion in the Garden, 1968.
Under the Microscope
by Glynn Wilson
OXFORD, Miss., July 28 – Like overcoming our fears in life, escaping shadows is something we all must face - or die trying.
Driving across the landscape of northwest Alabama out of the shadow of Birmingham's dark past and into the light of a place in Mississippi known for its literary giants, who cast shadows of their own for others to escape, it is the shadow of the South itself I long to escape. It may sound funny, but the only way I know how to do that these days is to drive a Chevy van with a canoe on top from one part of the South to another in search of stories and pictures.
 | | Photo by Dave Stueber | | Writer Glynn Wilson at the grave of William Faulkner in St. Peter's Cemetary in Oxford, Mississippi. |
It is hard to get away when some fortune teller long ago said, and she turned out to be right so far: "You will always be tied to this region, in spite of all your efforts to escape."
Elvis Presley escaped by picking up a guitar and singing his way into history, although like a lot of us, he never really left.
The writer Willie Morris escaped by going off to school in Oxford, England and by going to New York, as all great American writers have done in the past. Morris regretted never having met Elvis, even though they were about the same age and both from Mississippi.
For David Rae Morris, an artist and photographer with indelible ties to this place even though you get the feeling he would like to escape it, his ultimate search for escape has been in some ways like the journey of the children of Elvis Presley, the attempted escape from a famous personage, his father.
Although in David Rae's case, the shadow of Willie Morris the writer and teacher is not so towering as the shadow of the King of Rock 'n' Roll, who is known by so many people across the globe that the shotgun house of his birth in nearby Tupelo, Mississippi, along with the museum and chapel built there, stays busy year around.
So David Rae's journey seems to have been as technically if not emotionally as easy as a lazy float down the Mississippi River into New Orleans. At least that's where he found a city to call home that almost compared to the one he was born in, London, and the one he was raised in and would always judge other cities by, New York.
But it may very well be that the town where he is most accepted and welcome is Oxford, Mississippi, also known as the "Little Easy," where the descendants of the people who knew William Faulkner knew Willie Morris better than anywhere else, including those in his home town of Yazoo, Mississippi.
Many of the photographs on display at the Southside Gallery on Oxford's town circle, also known by locals as the "center of the universe," show Willie Morris here, in black and white. Walking with his dog Pete, pointing a drunken finger at his son holding the camera, posing by Faulkner's grave or gazing into the Southern horizon, the images show an extraordinary and contradictory man mostly past his prime.
Yet he seems content in his Southerness, more at home at the University of Mississippi teaching writing than he claims to have been in New York in the 1960s as the youngest editor in the history of Harper's magazine in its heyday.
Continue reading "Escaping Shadows: The South as a Backdrop for Art" »
"These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph."
- Thomas Paine, 1776
Under the Microscope
by Glynn Wilson
I'm wondering if Thomas Paine ever took a break from the Revolution to enjoy nature, maybe go fishing.
To tell you the truth, I would rather be sitting by a river or a creek watching the birds and maybe snapping some pictures than having to re-fight the American Revolution.
So yesterday, when the e-mail messages slowed down and the phone stopped ringing, that's what I did.
I picked up a friend and photographer and we rode over to Turkey Creek, the only habitat in the world for the vermilion darter.
 | | Photo by Glynn Wilson | | A yellow-crowned night heron fishing |
One good thing about Turkey Creek is that it is only a few miles from where I live. Another is that it is not visited by that many people, so it is easy to find a rock along the creek to sit on and rest your feet in the cool water and not have to listen to other people talk. And, you don't have to hike for miles in the summer heat and humidity into the outback to find that spot and contemplate your historical connection to this land that goes back much further than the Europeans who invaded this place 400 years or so ago.
But alas, here I sit back in front of this bank of computer monitors reading the good and bad journalism from the American press online.
And I'm wondering a couple of things. Maybe you have been asking yourself questions about this too.
Why is it that a New York attorney who spent summers in Alabama as a kid visiting his grandparents shows more knowledge, wisdom and understanding of this place than all of the newspaper reporters combined who have lived and worked here for many years, some of them all their lives?
Scott Horton, who writes a blog column on the Harper's magazine Website, has done his best to come to the rescue of oppressed people in this dog forsaken state.
But the daily newspaper and wire service reporters and editorial writers here, with a few notable exceptions, continue to crank out the most asinine blathering bullshit ever seen in American journalism.
This seems to confound the editors at national news organizations such as the New York Times. Although if they had studied their press history, they would realize that Alabama newspapers have long been the bastion of corrupt, corporate obfuscation. Remember, "Big" Jim Folsom called the Birmingham News the paper of the "big mules," or the industrial interests.
You would think that after all this time, things would change even in hidebound Alabama, a place Neil Young described as well as any American artist ever has in a song published in 1972 – the same year George Bush Jr. came to Montgomery to party his way into Republican Party politics.
I have written many times in this space that there are many mysteries in life, and maybe the dog shit that passes for journalism around here is one of those mysteries. Or maybe not.
I know the reporters on the ground think they are working hard and trying to get at the facts. They would never admit to being manipulated by their corporate, Republican bosses. But when your main interest in life is keeping a job writing for a newspaper and hoping to make it to retirement before the entire print journalism industry collapses, what is a local newspaper reporter to do?
Loyal Bush Republicans control the machinery of this state like no other, and don't give me any lip about all the Democrats in the Alabama Legislature. They are Republocrats at best. And they may be part of the reason the press in Alabama hates Democrats and clings to Republican Governor Bob Riley – who does not bait the races, make fun of Charles Darwin or get drunk and screw around on his wife, at least not in public.
But you would think that with all their liberal education and their love of America, the First Amendment and the concept of freedom, at some point they would find a way to stand up for truth and justice - at least a little bit.
Maybe in their heart of hearts, somehow they really think the Republican Party, George Bush and Bob Riley stand for freedom – or maybe they just think the Republicans are more macho than the Democrats when it comes to standing up to terrorists who would threaten our security. Maybe when they sit down to dinner with their families in their little pink houses they would rather be safe than free.
Hey, I can understand that. Something inside of me would like to find a safe little job and a safe place to live too. One side of me says "let the politicians run the world; I would rather be photographing the birds."
But there is another side of me that chomps at the bit when I see anybody, Democrat or Republican, handcuffed and shackled and hauled off to jail - after a trial that on the face of it was manipulated from Washington and conducted unfairly by local prosecutors and a judge who seem to have no regard for any Constitutional oath or sense of right and wrong.
Maybe some of those reporters hated Richard Scrushy so bad that it does not matter to them if he got a fair trial or not. As long as he is in jail, they must say to their friends away from the newspaper, all is right with the world.
Maybe the reporters in this state believed all the rumors about Don Siegelman, even though none of them have been able to substantiate any of them, and so they have no place in their hearts to mourn the complete lack of justice in this case. Or maybe they are all a bunch of Republican religious nuts who believe justice is divine.
Of all the people I have had dealings with in my native state - since moving back here a few years ago after years of being away – Jill Simpson seems to be the only person here who actually believes in justice. She is a religious Republican too, but she will not stand by and allow justice to be subverted for political purposes. She has suffered numerous slanders in the local press since she decided to try and shine the spotlight of justice on the corrupt prosecution of Siegelman and Scrushy perpetrated in Montgomery.
While I would rather be off communing with the birds and listening to the sound of water over rocks from the depths of time, I know an injustice when I see one. And if fighting against injustice is not the job of a journalist, what is?
No true journalist can sit idly by and watch his state and country sullied beyond recognition by the likes of the corrupt forces who now run this state and country.
Will those safe little jobs be worth it when the world comes crashing to an end because some terrorist gets his hand on a nuclear bomb, or global warming is allowed to continue unabated and the seas begin to rise?
When the shit goes down, I will still be over here on the Web Press fighting for truth, justice and freedom. Will you?
***
Meanwhile, Jill Simpson issued a press release today. The full text is reprinted below:
Continue reading "Communing With the Birds or Re-Fighting The Revolution?" »
 | | Photo by Glynn Wilson | | The people of Alabama were once a rebellious lot. Now they seem to be mostly sheep ready for the slaughter. |
Under the Microscope
by Glynn Wilson
Some writers like gloriously describing places they have been, like Willie Morris in New York Days or Hemingway in For Whom The Bell Tolls from Spain.
Mostly, I tend to be a critic, unless I am cowboying around in a van with a canoe on top exploring and successfully finding secret vistas in nature.
Many writers like glamorizing where they are from, and this is as true of New York writers as it is of those of us from the American South.
You cannot watch late night cable TV without running across legendary fables about New York, many of them adapted from books and with "Hell's Kitchen" in the title.
Mostly what you see about the South is either over dramatized for a gullible Southern audience, or overblown in their criticisms. I could cite numerous examples, but that would just be dropping names.
For any struggling writer, finding the right tone to reach the right audience is sometimes daunting, especially now with the Web Press taking up so much of peoples' time and attention - and other forms of publishing waning in importance.
That is not to say that some readers don't still like their newspapers, their magazines, their books.
With a newspaper, you can reach out to all kinds of tiny little constituencies and put together a fairly large audience, but you sacrifice any chance of total satisfaction for any audience.
Magazines can specialize and find those nitch audiences certain advertisers love. With books, well, you can publish it for a small audience or reach out to a large constituency.
After experimenting with online publishing for the past 11 years, it has become apparent that you can appeal to a diverse audience like a newspaper and specialized audiences like a magazine. You may never satisfy those who insist on sticking with the book, either those who buy and collect books or rely on a library.
If you are creative and continue to learn and push the envelope, you can have some success in gaining an audience and making some money using blogging software to publish on the Web.
But even there, or here I should say, you may run into interesting challenges. The biggest challenge we face, I think, is in trying to report and write for highly educated people in New York and even the West Coast, all while trying to keep things on a level for the good people of places like Arkansas and Alabama, where dog knows they could use some help to understand the world.
In one day this week, for example, I talked about stories I had written to a New York attorney who writes for one of the most legendary magazines in the history of publishing, and to someone I have known since before I was old enough to go to any school who has never left the neighborhood where he grew up for much more than a trip to the beach at Gulf Shores or to New Orleans for the Sugar Bowl.
How in the hell is a writer supposed to figure out how to communicate with them both in the same space?
Sometimes it ain't easy, but it seems to be working, judging by our traffic numbers (providing we can keep the damn computer server running. Obviously not many Republicans who remain loyal to President George W. Bush like us very much, and they are willing to spend their time trying to spam us out of business and discredit us in blog comments).
But there is an interesting lesson in all of this. If a writer is dedicated to shining the spotlight on a subject, perhaps an injustice, say, or a recurring issue in politics or science, like the line in the movie and the old saying goes, "build it and they will come."
Maybe it is like a vessel that is sometimes overflowing, and the best thing to do is to back off and dole it out in drips and drabs.
I tend to like my wine glasses filled to the top, however, so I'm sure some people get drunk before they can drink it all down. If you can't handle your liquor, I guess, maybe its best to sip, not guzzle.
So I apologize at this point to my readers who like the small drinks - the short stuff. I'm not in the mood tonight to give it to you fast and hard.
What I have on my mind is a theory I ran across in my last college days, a theory that came out of Nazi Germany and made its way into American political science and communications research.
Trust me, it has everything to do with the South, the case of Alabama's Don Siegelman and the future of democracy in the United States of America.
Continue reading "The Spiral of Silence Redux" »
Under the Microscope
by Glynn Wilson
Bring on the strait-jacket, please.
It is kind of hard to keep up with all the news when your Web server is being pummeled by casino spammers from George W. Bush's home state of Texas. But I did manage to catch a good bit of the president-king's press conference yesterday, enough to see our commander in poop go unhinged one more time.
The Associated Press moved a story saying Bush dismissed the CIA leak story as "old news."
"It's been a tough issue for a lot of people in the White House," Bush dissembled.
Really? How tough? It has been a tough issue for the country and the Constitution as well, not to mention all of Valerie Wilson's contacts around the world.
Do we have to keep reminding the president and the country that Bush said he would get rid of anyone involved in the leak way back when?
But ole Karl Rove is still there in the White House, advising the president, no doubt telling him to keep saying it was al-Qaida in Iraq that was responsible for the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001.
Oh, but wait. There was no al-Qaida in Iraq in September 2001. Saddam Hussein pretty much had that situation under control – until the U.S. invaded, creating the vacuum and civil war there today.
But we can't begin to pull the troops out either, commander "Mission Accomplished" says - because we might be admitting a mistake. And when you are a king, there are no such things as mistakes - only divine coincidences that historians will just have to sort out later.
Meanwhile, at least one prominent Democrat in the U.S. Senate, albeit one from San Francisco, now says Impeachment should be "on the table".
But why wait for a long, drawn out impeachment process that might further damage the reputation of America and its government?
Isn't there some provision in the Constitution for removing a mentally unstable commander in chief?
Come on Nancy. Come on Harry. Call Walter Reed. Get a team of psychiatrists over to the West Wing right away. Tell them to bring an ambulance - and a strait-jacket.
It makes one think of a Tennessee Williams play set in New Orleans, when in the end, Blanche DuBois says, as she is taken away to the insane asylum, "I have always depended on the kindness of strangers."
Bush's "compassionate conservatism" has just about killed kindness in America, what with former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman being shuffled off to jails in Texas, Louisiana and Oklahoma and all.
Hey, there's an idea. Any votes for a 12 by 12 cell for Bush?
Or, since these Republicans seem to like monarchy and capital punishment so much, maybe we should just bring back the Guillotine?
Or better still.
Since this frat boy president is having such a "hard" time of it up there in Washington, why doesn't he just resign and take Cheney, Gonzales, Karl Rove and Jeff Gannon with him back to the ranch and be done with this disastrous affair now?
He's already fucked in history.
So here's the deal.
If he resigns now, we won't bring back the Guillotine.
Under the Microscope
by Glynn Wilson
The sun is not shining bright on liberty and justice on this Fourth of July in Alabama - or America.
In fact, as the summer clouds and ozone haze in Birmingham obscure the sun, a moral cloud hangs over our entire national purpose as set forth in the Declaration of Independence 231 years ago.
Liberty and justice may be working for the rich and powerful. But there is no more trickle down to the poor and the dwindling middle class.
"The system" is certainly working for the Federalist Society Fascists who now control the White House and the courts in this state and around the country. It is working OK for the members of the ruling elite in New York, Washington and Montgomery, even some liberal Democrats. It is working for newspaper publishers even with shrinking circulation who still make a 20 percent return on their obsolete investment, mainly because they no longer invest in the kind of journalism America needs at this critical time in our history.
But the rest of us just cling to a thin thread of freedom like the last remaining piece of cloth from the final vestiges of a burned American flag.
I will not be celebrating freedom and independence today, because I don't believe freedom and independence still exist. We may still be free of the British monarchy, but the American monarchy that has arisen in its place is just as rank.
I will head down to the Southside of Birmingham to watch others celebrate, just to see how jubilant or muted their protests turn out to be. I may burn a flag in silent protest at some point while sipping a Yuengling and eating barbecued ribs. But I will not be smiling and laughing much as I watch the fireworks burst over Vulcan's head.
It is a sad day in America, not a happy day. I just keep wondering when enough of the oppressed people in this country will stand up and say they've had "ENOUGH!"
I know for a fact "the people" can still make a difference in this damaged democracy. Aided by an aggressive, watchdog press, we could still make a difference and change things. But not if the vast majority of "the people" are so oblivious to the truth that they sit on their cheap couches drinking watered down beer and wait for a savior from the heavens to rescue us all.
Even the "good book" says: "God helps those who help themselves."
King George III is long dead, but we have another King George II in power now. And it is obvious he thinks he can get away with anything, including commuting Scooter Libby's sentence and having the officers in his court throw Democratic governors in jail - all because the people WILL NOT RISE UP!
Now, it may be worth re-reading the Preamble to the Declaration of Independence before or after you eat your barbecue today. Think about how you might re-write it for today's world. Is it time to write a new Declaration of Independence?
When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands, which have connected them with another, and to assume, among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed, by their Creator, with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.
That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
United States Declaration of Independence
Not Black and White
Under the Microscope
by Glynn Wilson
There is a famous story about editors at the New York Times I learned while working with the elite of the elite a few years back.
Reporters who make the big leagues of American journalism hear this story and learn to deal with it in their own way.
As the story goes, when an editor calls a reporter in the field in a place like Birmingham, Alabama, and asks: "Is the community torn asunder down there?" The reporter, if he wants to keep his job, is supposed to not only answer, "yes." You are supposed to provide direct quotations from people in the community who will corroborate the premise of the story, to back up the lede, so to speak.
There have been many situations when my own instincts and the facts on the ground did not support the premise, and in fact, the opposite, counterintuitive truth is often the case.
And since I am in the business of calling it like I see it and telling it like it is, I often reported the truth on the ground and to hell with what a bunch of editors in New York think.
But today, in the story I am about to report, I think it is safe to say that this community is torn asunder. It's just that in this case, the editors in New York could care less. Why? Because the story does not involve Paris Hilton or the Red State-Blue State, Conservative-Liberal, Democrat-Republican divide.
The story involves a little old man named Clay Blake, 78, who lives right down the street from here.
This past Tuesday afternoon around 1 p.m., in what we like to call "broad daylight," Mr. Blake unloaded some groceries from his pickup truck and went into the house he has lived in for the past 40 years. Right behind him in walked a mixed up young man - who should never have been in the possession of a hand gun – and held up Mr. Blake, who never hurt anyone in his life, in his home.
Once inside, this young man, of the African-American persuasion, tied little old Mr. Blake up with the power cord from a vacuum cleaner. He then kicked Mr. Blake in the face, rendering him unconscious.
When Mr. Blake came to, he discovered his wallet and a couple of pistols missing, and then made a phone call and had himself checked into the hospital at Medical Center East.
According to Mr. Blake's son, the intruder wore a black and white ski mask and gloves, but sounded for sure like a black man. So much for black on black crime in the inner city.
The neighborhood was all abuzz about this dastardly dead after the crime brief hit the Birmingham News on Saturday.
What this mixed up young man who committed this crime does not understand is that his already sad and pathetic life is about to take a drastic turn for the worse. Maybe the money he stole went to purchase some food and bought him another day of life on this planet. Or maybe it just went for some crack cocaine to make him feel better about himself for a few measly minutes.
Either way, this young man is about to be found out and turned in to authorities in ways he will never comprehend. And he will either end up in prison or dead.
Maybe he would be better off dead. Or maybe he should never have been born in the first place, if his mixed up single mama had been told by someone cool that there is a such thing as a condom - and that there is no shame in using one.
Now here is where the politics and sociology of the situation get interesting beyond the basic facts about the crime. If only she had been told that this is a black and tan world, not a black and white world, maybe none of this would ever have happened.
What do I mean by that?
It's like this. There are some racist, conservative members of this community who would like to hang this little shit up by his toes and torture him to death for his crime. But these are the same Republican voters who oppose birth control - and taxes for prisons. It is just bad public policy to think you can have it both ways.
When the church and the state both advocate unworkable policies and try to tell teenagers to "abstain" from sex, and deny them a real education about sex and intelligent alternatives to unwanted pregnancies and the spiraling down nature of poverty, what kinds of bad decisions can we expect in our communities?
And this is particularly acute in a town like Birmingham, where both races still suffer from the sting and distrust of segregation.
At least in a place like New Orleans, the races lived in relative proximity of one another and in relative harmony for 300 hundred years. It is different in Birmingham, where the clash of the races in the newer, sprawling suburbs comes into specific relief every time an incident like this one is reported.
The African-American community in and around Birmingham will never trust white people, and the whites will keep trying to escape these kinds of crimes by moving further and further out into the country toward Blount and St. Clair Counties.
Meanwhile, nothing is done to try and bring people together and get them to understand the larger facts on the ground. And this serves only the politicians on the right and the left who get themselves elected by using the great divide to scare people and keep them down.
If only people could understand that there is no such thing as a simple, black and white world. There are an abundance of shades of gray out there.
What we need is a government that tackles practical solutions to real problems. One real problem that is leading to the current crime wave is the growing divide between the rich and the poor, fed by a mostly Republican effort to keep wages down so large corporations can make more and higher profits for mostly white stockholders.
This is an unsustainable world where all the problems in society are going to get worse, not better. And for every conservative who listens to talk radio and Fox News who likes to say, "that's the American way," here's a fact for you.
The founding fathers of this democratic republic had in mind an egalitarian society with a large middle class with equal opportunities for all. They DID NOT envision a so-called "Christian" nation modeled after the Monarchies of Europe.
You can say it all day long every day. But that does not make it true.
And what is so Christian anyway about a society that discriminates on the basis of race and class? Nothing.
So show me a Democrat or a Republican politician who understands these things, and he or she will get my vote, black or white.
Now call me a liberal and dismiss what I have to say - you idiot so-called conservative lurkers.
We say there is a two-word phrase for anyone who plays that game. In the perfect, fictional world of Locustforkland, where the river runs cold and true, the great blue herons dance like Elvis and the people like to shoot the breeze (and they are usually right), we like to call you "Alabama dumbasses."
And of course we are right.
Under the Microscope
by Glynn Wilson
The spring bird migration seems to be over now, the grosbeaks have moved on north and the mosquitoes have finally arrived, along with the dreaded need for air conditioning - a great invention that allows us in the South to live in these climes year around but fuck up the planet at the same time.
The news is not so interesting these days, although the scandals still pile up in Washington. It's not a bad time to reflect on another Monarchical time - thanks to Showtime.
If you have not been watching the new series on the young Henry VIII, you may want to catch up with the action as young Henry is about to figure out a way to marry the vivacious Anne Boleyn and split from the Catholic Church to form the Church of England, an event that led to the beginning of a great flight of Europeans to what became the United States of America.
The Tudors Official Website
The series shows just how corrupt and sick ruling elites can be in a Monarchy. It's something Americans should beware of considering our current political predicaments. If the Bush's had their way, we would be headed - or beheaded - in that general direction politically.
One point you should understand right away. The cardinal is the king's pimp.
That is more or less an accurate depiction of what the mix of religion and state can produce when the leader of a people is said to get his power from a divine source. They called it the "divine right of kings."
We did away with that shit in the American and French revolutions, and it would be a shame to see something similar return to public favor on Earth.
One of the more important and interesting characters being depicted is Sir Thomas More (1478-1535), also known as Saint Thomas More, an English lawyer, author, and statesman. During his lifetime he earned a reputation as a leading humanist scholar. He was a man of great honesty and character, apparently, which makes him rare in this tale.
More coined the word "utopia," a name he gave to an ideal, imaginary island nation whose political system he described in an influential book called Utopia published in 1516.
I red this book a long time ago, but lost my Book Club hard bound copy along with all my Aristotle, Plato and Socrates on my move from Gulf Shores back to the Southside of Birmingham in 1992.
Utopianism or "no place" refers to an imaginary island depicted by Sir Thomas More as a perfect social, legal, and political system. Various social and political movements, and a significant body of religious and secular literature, are based upon the idea of a Utopia on earth.
Utopia is largely based on Plato's Republic. It is a perfect version of Republic where equalism (egalitarianism) and pacifism flourish throughout human society and where poverty and misery are eliminated. It is a place where private property does not exist and religious toleration is practiced. It has few laws, no lawyers and rarely sends its citizens to war.
Utopia is often seen as the forerunner of the Utopian genre of literature, in which different ideas of the "ideal society" or perfect cities are described in varying amounts of detail. It is a typical Renaissance movement, based on the rebirth of classical concepts of perfect societies as set out by Plato and Aristotle, combined with the Roman rhetorical finesse of Cicero. Utopianism continued well into the Enlightenment Age.
Many commentators have pointed out that Karl Marx's later vision of the ideal communist state strongly resembles More's Utopia, especially on the issue of individual property, although Utopia is without Marx's atheism.
Apparently Henry VIII employed More's exceptional intelligence and grasp of the law and religion to write several treatises in defense of the Catholic faith against European reformers, notably Martin Luther.
But after young King Henry split from the Catholic Church, which would not grant him a divorce, and after he formed the Church of England, More came to believe that the rise of Protestantism represented a grave threat to social and political order in Christian Europe. As with many of Henry's enemies, he was charged with high treason for denying the validity of the Act of Succession and sentenced to be hanged, drawn, and quartered - the usual punishment for traitors. But the king commuted his sentence to execution by beheading.
We suspect if Bush had his way, he would be allowed to do that to his enemies. Instead, these fuckers just set out to ruin people who criticize them via rumor, innuendo and secret dossiers passed around over the "Internets." Sometimes the bastards employ a car crash that looks like an accident. Yes, we could cite specific examples and document them.
But it's late. And afterall, how many scandals does it freaking take to get rid of these corrupt swine?
I'm far more interested in getting past these royal assholes and getting onto more productive pursuits, such as later versions and theories of Utopia. Maybe a scientific approach, something like the one founded by the Global scenario group, an international group of scientists led by Paul Raskin, which uses scenario analysis and backcasting to map out a path to an environmentally sustainable and socially equitable future. Its findings suggest that a global citizens movement is necessary to steer political, economic and corporate entities toward this new sustainability paradigm.
But apparently we're going to have to re-fight the American and French Revolutions, at least in the political realm, before we can get on with that paradigm shift. We always seem to repeat the mistakes of the past, perhaps because people don't remember the past in an educated way.
Did you hear the socialists are rioting as the Conservative Sarkozy won the French presidency?
Bummer man...
Get on top of things people. Don't just watch The Tudors.
Learn more about it.
And let's stop it from happening all over again...
A Meet Up With Bill Clinton
Under the Microscope
by Glynn Wilson
It should be no secret that I would rather be photographing birds from a canoe than covering politics.
Unfortunately, the state of American politics and the press is in such bad shape that I feel I have no choice. It's that important.
While there are about a zillion places on the planet I would rather be than Highway 280 south of Birmingham, I headed over to the Cahaba Convention Center Friday night to meet former president Bill Clinton.
Now here is where Web coverage gets a little different than the mainstream press. The idea here on a blog journal is to create a more conversational style for readers who are tired of the formalism of balanced journalism.
 | | Photo by Glynn Wilson | | Former President Bill Clinton shakes hands with Alabama Democrats Friday night. That's party chair Joe Turnham on stage in the background. |
If I had been covering the event for a newspaper such as the New York Times or the Christian Science Monitor, I would have remained at arms length from the politician and written a more formal news feature on the event, complete with background information and political analysis all wrapped up in the pretty language of a literary feature.
Instead, I concentrated mainly on getting some serviceable photographs in the bad light of the big HealthSouth hall, then passing on the key points of what Clinton said.
As it turned out, I was right down front at the end of Clinton's address. He walked right toward me to shake some hands. What was I to do?
Perhaps I should have asked a tough question in that rare moment in today's over-handled PR world when you get to meet an American president up close and personal. But quite frankly, I wasn't in the mood to be a tough reporter in that moment. I'm sure meeting George W. Bush would be different.
So instead, I scanned my brain quickly for something to say during that brief handshake. Here's what I came up with, which I think he will remember.
As I grasped that infamous hand and looked Bill Clinton in the eyes, I said, simply: "You were the best president ever - no matter what they say about you."
He smiled that humble smile of his and said thank you, then turned to state Sen. Roger Bedford, D- Russellville, to shake his hand and continue working the room.
I also had a word with former Lt. Gov. Lucy Baxley at the event. She suffered a stroke not long after losing the race for governor last year, but she didn't want to miss the annual Jefferson-Jackson dinner, which drew about 1800 people this year and raised about $350,000 for Alabama Democrats.
I also got a hug from my old source and friend Nancy Worley, our former secretary of state who is being legally harassed by certain Republican forces in this oh so conservative state.
When I told some of my Democrat friends in Birmingham about the Clinton meeting, they were very interested, since they consider Clinton not only to be the best president ever.
"He is the only president we've ever had," said one Democrat from Clay, Alabama.
I'm sure all those Republican birders out there would scoff at that statement. But that is what the world looks like from over here whether they like it or not.
Their man Bush has been the worst president in American history bar none. I would bet the whole Yuengling 12-pack that historians will come to that conclusion when all is said and done.
Except for being defeated by the big, corporate insurance companies on creating a national health care system, cowtowing too much to corporate America by supporting the NAFTA free trade agreement, and that little matter of oral sex with a flirtatious intern, it was great to be alive and covering science with Bill Clinton in the White House.
The federal government actually worked for the first time in my lifetime, and the economy was on such a roll I spent most of the 1990s in grad school studying science and communications.
Unfortunately it all unraveled when the U.S. Supreme Court handed Bush the election of 2000. After the attacks of 9/11, I knew I wanted back in the news business covering politics.
I never imagined I would meet Bill Clinton on Highway 280 in Birmingham, since that's rock solid Republican territory. I think Republicans must like suburban sprawl and driving gas guzzling SUVs in rush hour traffic.
Me? After a fine Sunday breakfast on a beautiful spring day, I'll be putting the canoe in the water this afternoon, searching for some birds to shoot – with a camera of course.
And unlike all of the Republicans and most of the Democrats on the TV talk shows today talking about the shootings in Virginia, I've been in favor of stronger gun control laws for a long time. Give me a camera over a gun any day…
Postscript Note: Notice our lead story on the Locust Fork News page today. The New York Times didn't have it. The Washington Post didn't either, and neither did the Birmingham News.
Al Gore Presid |
