Part three of a series.

In the days following the murders at Columbine High School I visited the school and the grounds of Clement Park. Those walks produced this piece, which was originally published ten years ago today.

We have learned a great deal about the  events that took place at Columbine since  this essay was written (for instance, we now know that the  “Cassie Said Yes” story never actually happened,  and we also know that the whole “Trenchcoat Mafia”  thing was also a media-propagated fiction). But it seemed to me that going back  and revising to account for new information would damage the  fabric of what I wrote in late April and early May of 1999.  I have therefore elected to leave the factual inaccuracies  in place. I do, however, note the spots containing errors with an asterisk (*).

Salon.com and Westword.com provide as thorough and accurate  a picture as we are ever likely to have of the shootings and  the aftermath, and I recommend them highly.

_________________

Sunday, May 2, 1999

It won’t stop raining, and nobody seems to care. Full Story »

Got a hot atrocity? Bring it on and I’ll try to wrap my mind around it. For example, I read four books on the Rwanda massacres starting with We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families. Philip Gourevitch’s book may have been single-handedly responsible for positioning the tragedy front and center before American intelligentsia. Full Story »

“War means fightin’, and fightin’ means killin’,” Confederate cavalry commander Nathan Bedford Forrest once said.

While that might seem like a statement of the obvious in the context of the American Civil War, the topic of death and the war has largely gone unexplored. This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War by Drew Gilpin Faust is the first in-depth examination of the nation’s most intimate experience with death.

And although the subject is grim, the book is fascinating—not only for what it tells us about mid-nineteenth century America but also because of the light it sheds on us today.

Full Story »

Mountaintop removal coal mining at Kayford Mountain, Boone County,
W. Va. Photo: Vivian Stockman, courtesy of SouthWings Air

Part II: Almost Heaven Level: The Mechanics of Moving Mountains

In the heart of Appalachia, knobs, gaps and hollers define the undulating green landscape. Life is old, travel is slow, and it’s a daunting job to get a bus full of journalists up the steep, rutted dirt road through Cabin Creek Hollow to Larry Gibson’s cabin on Kayford Mountain. But no photos or descriptions of the devastation we are about to witness can do justice to a close-up look at a mountaintop removal mining operation. That is why we are here. That is what Larry wants to provide for reporters on this Society of Environmental Journalists field trip to the coalfields of southern West Virginia in October 2008, in hopes that we will be a conduit for the story he spends his life telling. Full Story »

Part two in a series.

There’s a rising tide on the rivers of blood
But if the answer isn’t violence, neither is your silence

- Pop Will Eat Itself, “Ich Bin Ein Auslander”

When all is said and done, nothing communicates the racism and knee-buckling stupidity of all-too-wide swaths of our nation quite like video. So if you don’t trust me to tell the truth about these folks, maybe you’ll trust their own words.

Full Story »

Part one in a series.

Listen to the victim, abused by the system
The basis is racist, you know that we must face this

In 1991 Pop Will Eat Itself produced one of the most damning comments on racism in society in the history of popular music. “Ich Bin Ein Auslander” was specifically aimed at anti-immigrant racism in Europe, but over the past 17 years it’s been impossible for me to hear the song without mapping its penetrating, undeniable truth onto our American context. Our black auslanders aren’t recent arrivals (although many of our brown ones are), but they nonetheless remain social, political, economic and cultural outsiders, and whatever progress they may have made in the several hundred years since they first arrived in shackles, only a fool can believe that the basis is no longer racist.

I said some time back, as the presidential election lurched into overdrive, that the heavy racist stuff was coming. Full Story »

On his outstanding Prodigal Son CD, North Carolina folk and blugrass legend Mike Cross presents us with a high-stepping little ditty called “Bill is in His Grave.” Bill, it turns out, was a scoundrel of the first order, and he’d been recently deceased.

The narrator is asked to say a few words at the funeral, a task that proves daunting for a man who’d rather not speak ill of the dead.

He finally manages this: Full Story »

Perhaps I’m jaded. Maybe I’ve read “A Rose for Emily” once too often, researched a tad too much about dismemberments in Memphis, taught one class too many on “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” and indulged myself too uncritically in the fictive Carolina childhood of T.R. Pearson.

Maybe there’s something deep and dark and twisted in me. I don’t know. But I do know that Truman Capote’s landmark In Cold Blood, as magnificent as the tale ultimately is, leaves my dank country soul wanting, well, more.

The Clutters were fine, upstanding folks, and Dick and Perry were warped sociopaths who received better than they dished out and far better than they deserved. And these sociopaths set out to make easy money and wound up killing four innocent and good people in the process. Then they got caught and hung. Fin. Full Story »

Let’s say this guy was running for president on a third-party ticket:

• proven track record for getting country out of wars
• strong foreign policy diplomat who forged stronger relationships with powerful developing (and enemy) nations
• implemented the first significant federal affirmative action program
• dramatically increased spending on federal employee salaries
• organized a daily press event and daily message for the media
• oversaw first large-scale integration of public schools in the South
• advocated comprehensive national health insurance for all Americans Full Story »

The Bloody Shirt
by Stephen Budiansky

Most Americans don’t realize that a large portion of our country was, once upon a time, overrun by barbarians.

That age of barbarians isn’t covered in most history texts, and when it is, it’s usually called the Era of Reconstruction. And as many Southerners resisted reconstruction, they resorted to acts of barbarism to impose their terrible will over the rule of law.

Stephen Budiansky’s new book, The Bloody Shirt: Terror After Appomattox, explores this age of barbarism—for age of barbarism it was. No other word can suffice to explain the acts of terror and violence committed by large numbers of Southern whites in the decades immediately following the Civil War. Full Story »

I was born and raised in the South, a region that’s often misunderstood and mischaracterized by those who’ve never been there. When I moved to the Midwest for grad school I encountered people whose knowledge of the South was pretty much confined to The Andy Griffith Show, The Dukes of Hazzard and Hee-Haw. And they called us stupid.

I’ve tried to live my life in a way that dispelled bad stereotypes about my home. Sadly, not everyone below the Mason-Dixon Line got the memo. Take this guy, the Pride of Kentucky, for instance.

Full Story »

It’s around 9 a.m. May 1, 1994. My stepmother, Kathie, has spent the night at Forsyth Memorial Hospital with my father, Larry, who will die late this afternoon. Their next-door neighbor, Wayne, is driving her home so she can shower and maybe get an hour or two of sleep. She hasn’t slept much in the six weeks since Daddy was admitted to the hospital with massive liver failure. Wayne has been a constant and salving presence during his friend’s illness.

Ten miles, maybe, down Silas Creek Parkway, through the south side of Winston-Salem, then on out Highway 109’s low, pine-strewn roll of hills to where Gumtree Road cuts across, demarcating the northern boundary of Wallburg, NC. This is where Daddy and Kathie live, and it’s where I grew up. These are the cultural outlands of the sprawling new metropolitan South. Our neighborhood straddles the Davidson and Forsyth County lines, and stands too far out into the country to be properly called suburban. But it’s also way too close to Winston to be considered rural. In some senses it’s a border town, possessing neither the urban sophistication of the city nor the kind of “agrarian virtue” my college Politics professor liked to attribute to country living. Antebellum mystique is dead elsewhere, and it never happened here. Full Story »

When I first heard, I was jubilant.  For a 10-year-old white kid living in a South we all thought was under siege, hearing that Martin Luther King was dead was like hearing that Satan had converted and joined the Southern Methodist Church.  The ogre was dead.

We were safe.

Very quickly, we learned that we needed to fear again.  My county was about 50% black, and seemingly all of them were set to converge on the courthouse square of my little town.  They were then set to march down the main street and US highway that ran right past my house.

My father was away from the area, working, so my mother told me to get all the guns in the house, load them, and be prepared to protect her and my sister if they stormed the house.  I sat by the front door when they marched by.  I sat there, trembling, surrounded by my single-shot .22 rifle with the sawed-off stock to fit my skinny shoulder, the lever-action .30-.30 carbine, and the .38 police special revolver.  The safeties were off.  I didn’t know how quickly I might have to fire.  I didn’t think I could stop them, but I could take a few with me.

All they did was sing and walk.

Idiots.

Jonathan Walton puts it this way:

I confess that I find this somewhat tragic, as I too have Southern pride. Full Story »

Yesterday, I wrote about a Florida columnist who’s so poorly educated and ill-read that she could neither construct a cogent argument nor recognize a ridiculous misstatement about Newton’s second law of thermodynamics that would be obvious to my middle-schooler.   Today, I find this report from Reuters that completely misses the story, and for the same reason:  a fundamental misunderstanding of science and the most basic scientific terminology.

The real story here is that those in favor of teaching evolution won an even bigger victory than they could have hoped for, and they won it because their opponents also don’t understand scientific basics. Full Story »

There was an interesting meeting last week in Chattanooga, Tennessee – a meeting of groups hoping to secede from the United States.

Ah, you think. Secessionists. Chattanooga. Must be crazy Confederate apologists looking to re-fight the Civil War (or, if you prefer, the War Between the States, or if that still doesn’t satisfy you, the War of Northern Aggression) or, worse yet, undo any good it might have done to bring the American South into a modern United States – one with silly ideas like racial harmony and equal justice under law.

Well, you’d be half right. Full Story »

John Edwards kicked off Poverty Tour 2007 today.

His opponents and a lot of media people who’d know better if they’d studied a little harder in school will be countering with the even higher profile Idiots and Liars Tour, so brace yourself for all kinds of stupid. You’re going to keep hearing about $400 haircuts. You’re going to hear about new mansions. You’ll hear about “lavish spending.” You’re going to hear lots of talk where the words “slick” and “lawyer” are used in close proximity.

Pay attention: every time you do, somebody is lying to you. Full Story »

Today is the 46th anniversary of the publication of Harper Lee’s iconic novel about Southern race relations, To Kill a Mockingbird.

This particular anniversary seems a bittersweet one, since the Jena 6 case suggests the central issue that Lee’s novel explores – the inability of Southern whites to see blacks as fellow Americans with equal rights – hasn’t changed:

Why reasonable people go stark raving mad when anything involving a Negro comes up, is something I don’t pretend to understand. – Atticus Finch, To Kill a Mockingbird Full Story »