I’ve been thinking with increasing irritation about that perennial conundrum-within-an-enigma-which-actually-isn’t-that-difficult-at-all: the separation of church and state, this time in the context of gay marriage. The issue becomes more annoying the more headspace I give it, and it’s not the prejudice or the public protests or the proclamations of any group on either side. The question that makes my brain twitch is this: why is this even an issue?

I firmly believe that the followers of any given religion have the perfect right to include, exclude and/or vilify anyone they choose. I further believe that their right to express their group disapproval stops absolutely short of causing their chosen bugaboo any actual harm… as in, breaking the laws enacted by the larger secular state in order to protect all its citizens.  Those laws, we hope, evolve in specificity and efficacy as our understanding of what constitutes demonstrable societal or individual harm evolves as well. The American legal system has always possessed the power to control, modify or ban religious practices on these grounds: for example, in direct contradiction of Biblical precedent and many current religious beliefs, women are no longer owned by their husbands, twelve-year-old girls are off limits and public stoning for adultery has been replaced by Facebook flaming.

Another example: the general population, excluding certain Louisiana JOP’s, has eventually come to understand that a union between two people of differing overall skin pigmentation does not lead to apocalyptic plagues or children with multiple heads (also, that allowing humans to own other humans is a damaging economic construct, not to mention leading to some rather hard feelings in general). Had the original Southern Baptist Conference (and by “original,” I mean the SBC from 1845 until 1995) been able to retain a state-sanctioned grasp on the laws of the Southern states, slavery would still be legal, “miscegenation” would still be a crime and hundreds of thousands of lawn jockeys would still be on proud display across the land of Dixie. The Southern Baptist Conference was created to support these ideas: in defiance of the views of other Baptist congregations, but with the full support of Messieurs Leviticus and Nehemiah, to name only two. The Old Testament is all for concubines, slaves and massacres, but not intermarriage among tribes. Is this our best authority on human relations?

And what about the endless variations on marriage sanctioned by religions just as legitimate as Decent Christians Everywhere Inc? Why aren’t we respecting their traditions? Why are we letting widows remarry, those whores (Hinduism)? Why aren’t we letting Islamic American men who can afford it collect the four wives to whom they’re entitled? Who’s in charge here? The Founding Fathers, those whacked-out Deists, should have left us some instructions about which religion is right so we would know whose tenets to make law… oh. Wait. They did mention it. NONE OF THEM.

In a democratically-based society, the general idea is that we don’t let small groups dictate to everyone, in the belief that time, evolving understanding and the collective better judgment of a larger group of citizens usually works out better for everyone.  When small groups, or large groups, or individual states or Bible-beating rednecks do attempt to tar and feather someone, we can take their asses to courts which represent successively larger segments of the population and hope that somewhere along the line, better judgment and better education will prevail.

I don’t give a damn what happens in anyone’s church if the law isn’t being broken, if children aren’t being abused, if the Kool-Aid is untainted. And if a particular religious sect decided that I was by nature a lesser human being, I think I’d leave. Wait, make that I know I’d leave – that’s essentially why I don’t consider organized religion a tool that’s safe for most people to play with.  Any system of thought which approves and allows the dehumanization of certain other humans is risky stuff.

No religion owns marriage: the concept, the reality or the word itself. Religions have their own variations on the theme and every right to them. Marry (or don’t) anyone that you like (or hate (or sadly but firmly condemn)). Your religious definition, Ms. Christian or Mr. Sikh (and you do NOT want to go to the dictionary on this), is yours to live by. But please try to understand: pair-bonding predates religion; stable, wealth-creating, ably-parenting households are the true and demonstrable societal benefit of such bonds; and there’s not one iota of real evidence that a pair of the same gender doesn’t work just as well… and your talking shrubbery or flaming cow, while inspirational and possibly entirely real, is no excuse for ignoring science, history and simple justice.

“Sure, I’ll put The Finger on it,” I said.

“Enough with the stupid finger,” she replied. “I don’t want you to put your finger on anything, I want you to look at the car.”

“All right,” I answered. “But I can look at the car from here. It looks fine. Are you sure you don’t want me to go out there and put The Finger on it?”

She mumbled something and wandered away. I looked at the car. It needed a wash.

I guess I can’t blame my wife for ignoring the miraculous powers of The Finger. She was never a football fan, and even if she was, when The Finger made its foray into the miraculous, she was only eight years old and 358 miles away. Maybe I should start from the beginning.

When I was a junior in high school back in the autumn of 1971, I was part of something great. My high school football team started the season with four wins and all four were shutouts. We still hadn’t been scored on when we traveled east to take on the perennial powerhouse Maryville Rebels, and on the ride back home we had a fifth shutout to contemplate. They’d beaten us 14-0. But the next week, we shut out another opponent, then another. We were 6-1, with five shutouts, and the whole state was paying attention. Then we took a ride north to play a high school in Nashville that no longer exists. We weren’t afraid, since we’d beaten that same team, a senior laden squad, the year before by 30 points.

Now, I have to be careful about this, because that school that no longer exists produced a lot of competitors who might be up for parole soon. I’m not going to come right out and say their roster were stacked with ringers, but the players who showed up at game time weren’t the same guys we saw on the game films. These guys were old, with wedding bands, beards and tattoos. It wasn’t a football game so much as a mugging, and the referees were in on it, since they rightfully feared for their cars in the parking lot. At the end of the first half, the score was tied 0-0.

Our coach gave a rousing and memorable halftime speech that started with a prayer for our safe deliverance from the stadium and ended with a plea for few turnovers. When we went out for the second half, I saw the other team smoking and drinking in the concession stand. It was kind of spooky, but we had another 30 minutes of football to survive. And though I didn’t know it then, I was blessed with The Finger.

We kicked off to start the second half. The ball fell into the hands of a guy who was, I’m not sure, but I think about 9 feet tall. He began a speedy lope down the left sidelines, made a cut here, got a block there, and he was gone. Surely, I thought, our safety would stop him. We always had one guy who didn’t charge down the field, but stayed back as a last line of defense to prevent a kick returner from doing what this leggy freak of nature was doing. Where was our safety? Oh, yeah. I was the safety. So I took off after him. He had speed, but I had a great line of pursuit. He was at the 40, but I was closing. At the 50, I was almost to him. At our 40, he was getting away. I only had one chance. When I knew I couldn’t possibly get any closer to him, I dove in the direction of his canoe-sized feet. I caught the back of his left shoe with the last digit of my index finger, and he stumbled and tumbled, and finally fell. I had prevented a touchdown, and kept out shutout record alive for one more week. Our coach was so overjoyed at the play that he completely forgot how I’d blown my safety assignment in the first place. They fumbled on the very next play. We marched 73 yards for the first of two second half touchdowns.

My tackle not only brought down their freakishly tall returner, but also all the other old guys on his team. After that kickoff, they weren’t the same. I like to think that in the great plan of reality, I did them a favor. I know people who spend their entire lives reliving the same play or the same game or the same season, as if their lives hit the highest point of glory when they were 17. I feel sorry for people like that.

Or maybe it was the beer and cigarettes they enjoyed at halftime, because once we were ahead, they became uncomfortably friendly, wanting phone numbers and other personal information. The final score was 16-0, and despite the promises I’d made to a couple of their defensive backs, I never went back to that part of Nashville.

It was quite a year. By the end of the season, we’d won 9 games and shut out our opponents 8 times. We had not one, but two running backs who rushed for over a thousand yards. I caught a pass and made several tackles. Ironically, the two games we lost were also shutouts, and those two teams, Milan and Maryville, played each other for the state championship. I neither know nor care who won that game, and if the universe cared then somebody from one of those teams would be writing this to gloat about it. But I do know that that year was a close as I would ever come to being a part of something that was truly great, and if we couldn’t taste the greatness of our season, then we could certainly smell it and hear it. It smelled like cut grass and autumn, like dew and Atomic Balm, and the sound of that season was as crisp as the snare drums in the band, and as loud the roar of the home crowd.

Sadly, The Finger hasn’t done much of anything since then, but I still think it has a few more miracles in it. Every November, I think back to those warm Friday nights, and the teammates I had, and the blocks and tackles and endless runs we made.

Last night, my son Joey came downstairs with a bad scratch on his knee. Between his sobs, he gave a rambling narrative about how he was surfing on the bed, but wiped out and landed on one of the few toys he still owns that hasn’t been recalled by the manufacturer. Now his knee had a scrape and it hurt him mightily.

“Do you want me to put The Finger on it?” I asked.

I did, and he stopped crying and fell asleep on my lap. Maybe my touchdown- saving dive wasn’t The Finger’s greatest moment after all.

But it was an amazing tackle. You should have seen it.

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.

I went to Columbine twice this week. On Wednesday I was simply overwhelmed – I have never seen anything like the rambling memorial site that has spread across the grounds of the high school and the adjacent Clement Park, never imagined anything like it. There was no sense of scale, of proportion – there exists no frame of reference with which to make sense of this deluge of grief. But I feel compelled to try describing what I saw, the pain, the small expressions of faith for the future, this physical manifestation of a community’s psychic anguish. So I returned yesterday, Saturday, hoping vainly for perspective where none appears possible.

As you turn east off Wadsworth and drive down Bowles the park and school grounds lie to your right. The park features picnic space and fields for football, lacrosse, soccer, and softball. Fields for small children to run and play in. Fields to watch the sun set behind the Front Range of the Rockies just a few unobstructed miles to the west. Whatever permanent monument they eventually erect here will never reflect how thoroughly and ironically public Clement Park has become. We sometimes lament how our nation has lost all sense of itself as a community, has forgotten what it is to have a town square, a shared space that symbolizes the communal spirit.

Well, here it is.

At the west end of the park, beside an athletic field, there’s a small latticework shrine featuring a lacrosse helmet and two crossed sticks mounted over a bucket of flowers. On one side there’s a small laminated sign with a prayer that reads, in part, “Dear God, we have been abused and it has wounded our souls. Our memories and thoughts, Dear Lord, are full of horror and we are powerless to heal them.” The other sign reads, “When God would educate a mans (sic) and compels him to learn better lessons he sends him to school to the necessities rather than the graces that by knowing all suffering he may know also the eternal consolation.”

Just west of the site where Vice President Gore laid a bouquet last Sunday is a tent dominated by a tribute to Cassie Bernall, the young woman whom the gunman asked,”Do you believe in God?” with information about how to contribute to the Cassie Bernall Fund rest on a table.* Notes, posters, and banners offer condolences and solidarity from Uniontown, Pennsylvania, Marin County, California, and an elementary school in Wallace, North Carolina.

A major memorial has grown up around the flowers Gore placed, and a tent has been erected to protect the site from the elements. Inside lies a carpet of flowers – bouquets, formal arrangements, loose cuts, potted; a profusion of handmade cards, posters, placards, most handwritten and decorated, but few displaying anything like professional art or design skills and none that I saw were store-bought; a large poster from the people of Southern Oregon, who last year at Thurston High School came to know firsthand the pain we in Colorado are now grappling with; in front of this stands a silver and blue football goalpost – the crossbar is hung with a mobile featuring strings of paper angels; several stuffed animals, mostly teddy bears; balloons – some with sympathy messages, others in bouquets of blue and white; candles – some plain and some bearing Christian imagery; a blue baseball cap with a red and white cross; crosses, and more crosses. These artifacts – flowers, cards, posters, crosses, and hundreds, if not thousands, of stuffed animals, mostly teddy bears – make up the bulk of what people have brought and left at Columbine.

As you walk the hundred yards or so to the central memorial area the trees by the sidewalk are wrapped with blue and silver ribbons and some are draped with paper prayer chains. These were put here by a school district somewhere in the Midwest, and each link was made by a different student. Originally at least one chain hung from each tree, but to preserve them against the weather most have now been moved inside a tent down the street. Most of the trees in the park are wrapped with blue ribbons at the least; many have flowers laid beneath them and other remembrances hung from their branches. On one hangs a blue rabbit’s foot.

Just before you reach the main memorial area there’s a light blue wooden A-frame shrine about four feet tall and six feet wide dedicated to Cassie Bernall. It bears pictures of her and handwritten messages, as well as balloons and flowers. On the ground at one end is a one foot by one foot black board lettered in gold calligraphy: “I promise that from this day forth I will do everything in my power to insure that such a thing as this will never happen again. I will change my lifestyle and be more vocal and assertive in my beliefs.”

Some shrines are dedicated to all the dead, and others to individuals, these probably placed by the victim’s friends. As you turn into the central memorial area the first thing you come to is an elaborate tribute to Dave Sanders, the lone faculty member killed and a man who died trying to save student lives. This display features pictures of Sanders coaching, with his family, his players and students; two Columbine softball jerseys and a trophy; a pair of running shoes hangs from a tree; a soccer ball and a basketball lie loose among the flowers. The pile of flowers and stuffed animals threatens to swallow the whole display.

Some local residents went to Clement Park even as the tragedy was still unfolding and erected a series of lattices where people could place flowers. This spot has become the centerpiece of the memorial site, and eleven days later these lattices have been overtaken and literally buried beneath the artifacts of grief. I’m hard put to describe it, really. The central area around the lattices is probably thirty yards by fifteen, roughly oval. It’s bordered by row after row of displays, and if you didn’t know what you were looking at you might think yourself at some sort of carnival. Park officials have covered the ground here and in other heavy traffic areas with straw, adding to midway effect. More flowers, more teddy bears, more posters than you can possibly count, and more unconventional tributes stand in defiance of whatever hate drove Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold to want to destroy an entire school and all those in it. A volleyball lies before a sign placed by Columbine alumni. Nearby a baseball rests amid the flowers. There are also American flags, although fewer than you might expect.

Seemingly every school in the Denver Metro area has placed a memorial of some sort – whether a simple posterboard project from a kindergarten class or something more elaborate from a neighboring/rival high school, it’s clear that this attack is being taken very personally by students no matter where they are.

There are condolences from beyond the metro area, too. In addition to the tributes from Oregon, North Carolina, Marin County, and Pennsylvania, people in many other places have sent their thoughts and prayers: besides condolences from cities across Colorado, there are tributes from Maui; Cheyenne, Wyoming; Lynchburg, Virginia; Allan, Texas; Gage, Oklahoma; Pace, Florida, and Palm Springs, California. A blue banner hangs between two trees: “Our thoughts and prayers are with you, from the city of Fort Wayne, Indiana.” A poster and letter have been sent from Belvidere High School in Illinois, where on April 21, 1967, a tornado struck the school, claiming the lives of 17 students. On the news yesterday morning they interviewed a woman who had flown here as an emissary from her church in Franklin, Tennessee. There are probably commemorations from other communities, as well – it’s easy to miss things here. I think my fellow Coloradans wouldn’t mind me speaking for them in saying thank you to the citizens of these communities.

Southeast of this area several sets of wind chimes hang from a tree, ringing in the rain and the light wind. The chimes are in the shapes of butterflies, doves, and a couple of birdhouses. A young man who looks to be in his late teens is wandering around handing out free flowers – I get a bouquet with carnations and columbines.

A sign that especially caught my attention was originally nestled in one corner, and it has now been moved under a tent near the street. On a white sheet folded in half, written in black magic marker, is a crudely drawn message that may be among the most important for a community trying to heal. In big letters: “Ours pains and sorrows for the victims of CHS.” In smaller letters across the bottom: “Not everyone who wears trench coats are killers.” Hanging just to the top and right of this sign is a print of Warner Sallman’s famous portrait of Jesus, beatifically looking toward Heaven.

You may have read in the papers or heard reporters on CNN talk about Rachel Scott’s car. But even knowing it was there, it still took me a few second to realize what I was seeing. When it became apparent that Scott might be a victim, her friends found her car in the parking lot and began placing flowers on it. Since then the red Acura has been buried beneath flowers, cards, teddy bears…. I only know it’s an Acura from news reports – you can’t really tell by looking at it. The driver’s side especially is almost completely covered by plastic. The passenger side isn’t quite so concealed, though, and I’m startled by the things we sometimes notice in times of overwhelming sorrow. Rachel needed new tires. The right front is almost bald. Another thing – lying on the bed of flowers by the driver’s-side door between three teddy bears is a loose dollar bill.

A few feet away John Tomlin’s truck, a brown-gold Chevy beater, has also become an altar. John liked to off-road in the truck – a popular diversion here in the high country – but now it’s hard to imagine it ever moving again. Vehicles are about as secular as objects get in our culture, but in the wake of this tragedy these two have been invested with a profound aura of consecration. Relocating them will seem like graverobbing.

Adjacent to this lot is the portable satellite dish farm where all the news outlets have their trucks and trailers and uplinks. The memorial area is braced on one end (the end nearest the school) by a few media tents, and one crew was preparing to tape as we walked past on Wednesday. A reporter for the Today Show was recording a segment a few feet away. Despite the presence of the implements of media, the area remains quite hushed. When people talk, they tend to whisper. They don’t look each other in the eye as they pass so much – if they’re like me, they don’t want to see their own numbness reflected back at them.

Still more remembrances have been placed closer to the school itself. The fences of the tennis complex, two sets of three or four adjacent courts each, have become walls of posters and banners. This is where the members of the San Jose Sharks, in town for their playoff series with the Avalanche, placed their banner on Friday – it’s about fifty feet long and is signed by literally thousands of fans: “To the community of Littleton, Colorado – Our hearts and our prayers are with you.” The Sharks are wearing CHS emblems on their helmets for this series.

Other signs are placed by individuals, by towns and schools, by a sorority from the University of Colorado. And here, a new symbol – there are hundreds of angels and thousands of bears, but hanging on the fence are two bears with angel wings. Another sign notes the connection between Columbine, Oklahoma City, Pearl, Paducah, Jonesboro and Springfield: “As the world watched our lives were forever changed.” On Saturday the baseball team from nearby Arvada West High School is out in full uniform touring the grounds.

Two Hills

If you watched the memorial service on CNN last Sunday you saw the hill in the distance where students were gathering. It’s actually two hills, and as you walk across the field toward them you pass several other shrines – one, at the corner of a recreation football/lacrosse field, is fairly large, maybe ten feet by fifteen, a growing mound of flowers and posters and bears. By Saturday it had been covered by a tent. Cards and tributes hang from trees. There’s a four-field softball complex between the main memorial area and the hills, and on the outside of one of the center field fences another teddy bear sits with two or three cards. A smaller bear, wearing a sweater, hangs on the fence, and there’s a piece of paper tucked under the sweater. I pull it out and unfold it. In blue and pink marker it simply says, “We care.” If you walk around a bit you find these small, private remembrances all over the place – here a loose bouquet of flowers lying in the grass with no explanation at all, there a card or a balloon or a bear, maybe indicating a mourner whose grief found no solace in the company of others.

As I approached the hills on Wednesday it was growing dark and beginning to rain. The skies have been heavy here almost continually since the shootings, but as oppressive as the weather has been there is a sense of rightness about it. On Saturday it rained all day, with temperatures in the 40s. There is only one safe path up the hill now, as the weather and the foot traffic have rendered most of the area treacherous with mud. The grounds crew has paved the main route up the lower hill with straw, and hundreds of people wait in line to view the hilltop memorial. Some make their way up by other paths, slipping and sliding, but enduring nonetheless. Some people take shelter beneath colorful umbrellas. Others, like me, expose themselves to the skies. I can’t speak for anybody else, but there is nothing here I want to shield myself from.

Several days ago fifteen crosses were erected along the ridge of the lower hill by a craftsman from Chicago. Each cross bore the name and picture of one of the dead – thirteen for the victims, and one for each of the killers. People wrote messages on each of the crosses, and many stress love and forgiveness. The message at the top of Klebold’s cross said, “God loved you.”

As you can imagine, the crosses dedicated to Harris and Klebold stood amid some controversy. The cover of Thursday’s Denver Rocky Mountain News featured a photo of two students tearfully facing off with a woman writing “a derogatory message on Dylan Klebold’s cross.” Whatever the woman wrote was conspicuously marked out, as well as whatever was written at the top of Eric Harris’ cross.

I walked from cross to cross, reading what I could in the fading light. As I paused before the monument to Isaiah Shoels, I thought about the irony of a kid who had fought to overcome so much adversity. He worked to overcome a heart condition and his small size (he was just 4′11″) because he wanted to play football, and his family reportedly transferred into the Columbine district because it represented a better and perhaps safer school environment. There he died because he was black and an athlete.* When I returned yesterday, I took a marker with me so I could write Martin Luther King, Jr.’s words on Isaiah’s cross: “I have a dream….” But the wood was so wet that the marker wouldn’t write on it. A man behind me, without even asking what I wanted to write, handed me his marker, which he said was waterproof and should work. But the soaked wood resisted this, too. I told myself I’d come back when the weather broke and try again.

I won’t get the chance. On Friday the father of Daniel Rohrbough and some relatives went to the hill and took down the crosses dedicated to Klebold and Harris. Mr. Rohrbough told reporters that it was a simple matter of right and wrong, that people coming to the hill wouldn’t realize they were honoring killers. “I don’t think any thinking person in this country is going to disagree with me,” he said.

Two small makeshift crosses were quickly erected in the place of the ones the Rohrbough family removed, and at the top of each was written “Start to forgive.”

Then, early this morning, the Chicago man who built and placed the 15 crosses originally came and took them all down. CNN captured them being loaded in the back of a pickup truck and driven away, with all the remembrances that had been hung on them still dangling from the crosspieces. He did not speak to reporters, and no reasons were given.

Thirteen seedlings have appeared on the far hill – the taller of the two – since Wednesday. A marker near the pinnacle reads: “These 13 burr oak trees have been planted on this hill as a memorial, one for each special person who had their life taken. I will pray for each family every day. – Scott.”

At the crest is yet another memorial site. At one end a variety of Christian ornamentation hangs from a crude wooden cross. I’m struck, as I have been for days, by how powerful a moment this tragedy has been for Christianity. A bit of context – I grew up Southern Baptist but left the church in my early 20s. I never rejected the lessons I learned growing up, but the institution of the church seemed to have nothing to do with morality or spirituality any more. Now I consider myself a neo-pagan, although that term is fairly broad as I use it, and a friend once listened to me for a few minutes and concluded that I was a “Jungian” pagan. I’m fortunate to have Christian friends and family who see through the trappings and accept the person underneath.

I offer this information only to explain why I feel somewhat left out by the healing process. The moral authority here has been usurped by Christianity – at the local level the churches have been the center of most gatherings, and nationally our Vice President shared the stage with the Rev. Franklin Graham, son of the famous Southern Baptist evangelist Billy Graham. In the entirety of the memorial sprawl, which contains hundreds of thousands of individual expressions of mourning, I found precisely one overtly non-Christian religious symbol – a small Star of David on a sign placed by the Montessori School. There is another spot where I encounter sun and moon symbols often employed by neo-pagans. The largest sun ornament is attended by what I believe are Norse runes, but the symbols hang from a cross.

The Grief of Other Tribes

I don’t make these observations to diminish people’s faith – on the contrary, while I’m not a Christian, I have taken comfort in the fact that the community has a belief system which can be called on in a time of crisis to lend support and provide meaning.

But non-Christians are in pain, too, and as I faced the wooden cross on that hill Wednesday I wanted to offer some gesture in my own spiritual language, my own symbology. I was wearing my pentagram, a symbol which for pagans symbolizes the sanctity of the natural world and the human spirit (and which is all-too-often mis-associated with Satanism), and wanted more than anything to hang a symbol of my spirituality alongside those of the Christians in my community as a statement of unity.

But I feared the gesture would be misconstrued by many, if not most, visitors to the hill, and in such a time of pain I couldn’t imagine doing anything that would intrude upon the grieving of others. What if somebody mistakenly took it to be a Satanic cult mocking their sorrow? So I was forced to a compromise. I was also wearing a Celtic cross, an ancient pagan symbol often taken by Christians as reflecting their faith (since it’s a cross, after all), and I placed that on the wooden crosspiece amidst rosary beads, angels, and more crosses. The crosspiece itself is plastered with a bumpersticker reading “No Jesus No Peace, Know Jesus Know Peace.”

But a bridge has to be built between the normal and the marginalized. Christianity is our dominant religion, but there must be a space for those who find spiritual truth in other places, just as our schools must make room for kids who dress differently and don’t fit into the accepted idea of what normal is. On Saturday I decided to take a chance, and I hope my gesture can be accepted in the spirit it was intended. A small white board sits on the ground beside the “trench coat” sign I described earlier. I brought a marker with me, and I knelt in the mud and wrote this: “My tribe grieves with our Christian brothers and sisters. We may walk different paths, but we are all children of the divine. We love you.” I signed it with my online handle/craft name, Road Angel, and drew a small pentagram.

I can manage my own spirituality well enough, but can’t help noticing that even in the wake of a crime which resulted in at least small part from the failure of conventional society to respect those who are different, my own mode of expression was limited and prescribed by the dominant belief system. I thought back to whoever placed the sign saying that all people who wear trench coats aren’t killers – we praise individualism and tell our kids to be themselves, not to bow to peer pressure, to express their uniqueness, etc. But identity is negotiated, and self-image often fights a losing battle with the perceptions of the larger community. And now these children, these outcasts, must prepare to face people who are pledging to “be more vocal and assertive” about their beliefs.

I said earlier that there were shrines to individual victims, and the clear heroine of the tragedy, if number of tributes is a fair indicator, was Cassie Bernall. When the gunman asked, “Do you believe in God,” her affirmative reply was her death sentence, but it was also her entree into immortality in the Christian community. She died in what most Christians would see as the most noble way possible, as a martyr affirming God, and the Rev. Graham assured us Sunday that she was ushered directly into the presence of the Lord for her faith.

Cassie Bernall was indeed a heroine, even for those of us who don’t count ourselves as Christian, because these days we so rarely find somebody whose courage is genuine enough that they will die for their convictions. If I were faced with such a moment, I hope I’d have her bravery, but we never really know until the barrel rests against our heads, do we?

Again, however, there’s an element to the story that disturbs me. A major news outlet reported that for a time Cassie was involved with witchcraft and paganism (although what this means precisely is unclear). She was apparently locked in her room for a few days and was then sent by her parents to a Christian “boot-camp” where she rediscovered Jesus.

If this is an accurate accounting, then we have another dire example of the rage to conformity plaguing our culture. No matter how productive we might see the result as being, no matter how happy and loving Cassie Bernall turned out, the essential dynamic remains. The message is clear: we’ll do whatever we have to do to make sure our kids don’t become like those trenchcoat/goth/Satanic/loser/geek/punk outcasts. Different. Bad. We need to understand that the pressure that brought Cassie back to Christianity is the same pressure that drives other youths to less noble ends.

Are Our Arms Really Open?

When I started writing this I don’t think I had a point, but maybe I have come to one through remembering what I saw. If I have, this is it: in this time of pain and grieving, we have to insure that it never happens again, but perhaps our best-intentioned efforts are doomed to failure.

The community has been hit harder by these events than anything I have ever seen with my own eyes before, although tragedies of equal or greater magnitude happen somewhere in the world on a frighteningly routine basis. Before last Tuesday I was, like so many other residents of the Denver Metro area, somebody who lived here, but who wasn’t from here. I’m a North Carolinian by birth and have always considered myself a Southerner. But as I grappled to understand why this tragedy hurt me so deeply and so personally, I finally came to understand that somewhere along the way this has become home. I wasn’t an outsider looking in anymore – Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold have torn my community.

So when I look at the imperative above – make sure it never happens again – I can’t help worrying that my community is missing something important. If the culture’s failure to accept differences in others contributed to this deathlust, as the killers said it did in their diaries, then how can we help being concerned when our community is uniting around messages and images of conformity instead of diversity? Somebody in a trench coat reached out with that sign – “Not everyone who wears trench coats are killers” – but I haven’t seen the community of normalcy reaching back. The media coverage and the church services (some of which were televised here) have celebrated the All-American and the Christian, and in doing so they provide a powerful balm to people in need. But the others – the outcasts, the trenchcoats, the goths, the geeks – all those who fail to fit the conventional ideal, they were ignored, or worse, scapegoated, and so an open wound in our culture continues to seep.

These kids probably don’t really want to join the church youth group. But how much good it might do if they knew that the church youth group wanted them, wanted them as they are, and was willing to love and accept the person beneath the black clothing, the person hiding behind the pale makeup, the person who isn’t very good at sports, the person who finds solace in dark and tortured music, the person whose most rewarding moments of personal acceptance come in the imaginary triumphs of his or her role-playing game characters. How much good it would do for them to know that they don’t have to buy several hundred dollars worth of Nike and Gap clothing to be validated as human beings.

And if you believe that church youth groups aren’t like that, I should explain that a large part of why I walked away from the Christian church was that all the youth groups I was associated with during the first twenty years of my life were even more cliquish and less tolerant of those who were different, new, or simply uncool than my high school was.

Time will tell. But in this issue we may have an answer to the question on everybody’s lips, a question you see repeated over and over in the cards and posters littering Clement Park: “Why?”

If Cassie Bernall becomes an icon whose memory stands for inclusion, we will have made her death and those of her classmates meaningful beyond measure, and we will at least know that their tragic passing was not in vain.

But if, in the aftermath of Columbine, we fail to understand and bridge the gulf between “normal” and “outcast” then we will be doomed to continue asking why as hate and rage and loathing lay their claim on other schools in other communities around our nation.

B&W photography by Heather Butler.

Previously

• The enduring lessons of Columbine
• Was Columbine the rule or the exception?
  

I admit, however, that I almost met my match in Shake Hands with the Devil, one of the most heartbreaking books you’ll ever read. Now a Canadian senator, its author, General Romeo Dallaire, you may recall, served as head of the UN peacekeeping force in Rwanda, where his hands were tied by the severe limitations imposed by the UN on both the force’s numbers and its mandate.

I’ve also read more than my share of books on the Holocaust. Among my favorites: Robert Jay Lifton’s cheery tome, Nazi Doctors.

More recently, I’ve been studying the extremes to which the allies took bombing in World War II: Think Dresden, Hamburg, and Tokyo. Two outstanding recent books on the subject are Among the Dead Cities by A.C. Grayling and Human Smoke by Nicholson Baker. Then, of course, there’s Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which leads us to nuclear weapons.

Actually, it’s not nuclear weapons that I like to contemplate but the nature of the people who ponder — and promulgate, as well as propagate — nuclear weapons. For example, Mr. Megadeath himself, the late Herman Kahn. He was foremost among the men who, writes Louis Menand in a 2005 New Yorker review of two books on Kahn, “made it their business to think about the unthinkable, and to design the game plan for nuclear war.”

Menand cites the opening chapter of Kahn’s book On Thermonuclear War, which contains a “table titled ‘Tragic but Distinguishable Postwar States.’ It has two columns: one showing the number of dead, from two million up to a hundred and sixty million,” which is one category of the postwar states. Meanwhile, the other column shows the other category: “the time required for economic recuperation, from one year up to a hundred years.”

Yes, the strata of data are “tragic but [never fear] distinguishable.” But there is such a thing as putting too fine a point on it. Would that the degree to which that kind of theorizing numbs the soul led instead to a new Nuclear Freeze.

Recently, however, my son’s middle-school class has been learning about slavery, a subject which I somehow missed, either because my academic background is limited or, as you’ll see, because of unconscious avoidance. My reaction to the introduction of slavery into my consciousness (thanks to the need to quiz my son for his test) is two-fold –- flip sides of the same sentiment, actually –- feeling bad for my son, as well as myself, because we have to deal with this sorrowful subject.

Why is studying slavery more dispiriting to me than exploring an atrocity? Perhaps because it’s not an eruption of violence, a historical spasm, an aberration, like Nazi Germany and Rwanda. Instead, for hundreds of years slavery was a way of life fundamental to national economies. Many in Nazi Germany may have been in the grips of mass hysteria. But acquiescing to slavery required cultures to exist in a trance state for hundreds of years.

In the United States, certain plantation owners spurned physical punishment and no doubt formed a self-image of themselves as benevolent for providing care for “savages” who they considered childlike. As well, some believed they offered heathens a chance for salvation by introducing them to Christianity.

Making an individual your beneficiary is one thing; owning him or her another. Nor does any justification whatsoever exist for uprooting humans from their homelands and packing them like, yes, sardines on slave ships (see accompanying images).

Today, however, the tables have turned. While slavery, though still extant, has become abhorrent to us, most of us turn a blind eye to massacres, which, for a while, were a way of life in Iraq.

“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.

Cultures have intricate and quite specific customs and attitudes about death. “Men and women approach death in ways shaped by history, by culture, by conditions that vary over time and across space,” Faust explains. “[E]ven though we all die, we do so differently from generation to generation and from place to place.”

The American Civil War claimed the lives of approximately 620,000 through combat and disease. Faust offers plenty of context for those statistics: The estimated number of soldiers that died exceeds the combined death tolls of the Revolution, War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Spanish-American War, Word War I, World War II, and the Korean War; Confederate men died at a rate three times that of their Northern counterparts; one in five southern men of military age did not survive the war.

“But these military statistics tell only part of the story,” Faust writes.

Behind the numbers lay religious, moral, logistical, medical, political—indeed, cultural—implications that have echoed across the century and a half since.

“The Civil War matters to us today because it ended slavery and helped to define the meanings of freedom, citizenship, and equality,” Faust writes. “It established a newly centralized nation-state and launched it on a trajectory of economic expansion and world influence.”

But the war also had a profound affect on America because the loss of human life that took place between 1861 and 1865 shaped and unified America in a way no other experience could. “In face of the profound upheaval and chaos that civil war brought to their society and to their own individual lives, Americans North and South held tenaciously to deeply rooted beliefs that would enable them to make sense out of a slaughter that was almost unbearable,” Faust says.

That wholesale slaughter forced soldiers to question “both the humanity of those slaughtered like animals and the humanity of those who had wreaked such devastation.”

But death was not just a military matter. Faust points out that civilians were caught in the crossfire of battle and sometimes targeted by guerillas. Draft riots ripped through cities. Food shortages in the South led to starvation. Epidemics swept through army camps and towns, ravaging men from rural backgrounds who’d never before been exposed to common childhood diseases.

Her book delves deeply into the sociological and psychological impacts of death and dying, but also killing, identifying and burying the dead, and mourning.

It’s no wonder Faust’s book was a finalist for this year’s National Book Award in nonfiction. Faust’s scholarship is excellent—a reader would expect no less from the woman who serves as the president of Harvard University—and the story she tells is both profound and sublime.

Nathan Bedford Forrest made it all sound so simple; This Republic of Suffering proves otherwise, and our national identity is better illuminated because of it.

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.

Larry’s cabin on Kayford Mountain

Larry Gibson: standing against Big Coal

Larry has been facing down the coal industry for more than three decades, fighting for the survival of this mountain that has been his family’s home for 230 years. Much of the original homestead was seized by devious land companies in the early 20th century, but 50 acres remain. Back in 1993 a spokesman for the Sago Mine told Larry the property was worth $1million an acre to the coal industry, but he was offered $140,000 for all of it. He chose to put it in a land trust instead, and keep it as a base from which to fight against the destruction that now surrounds him and threatens many similar locations in the region.

“My mother gave me birth,” he said, “but these mountains give me life…There should be something in your life that money can’t buy. To me, it was my heritage, my culture, my way of life, of the Appalachian people.”

Larry Gibson

Larry is a lone hold-out on this mountain, which was once home to 60 families before the industry bought them out. He tells visitors, “I don’t need your help getting off this mountain; I need your help staying on it.”

He used to stand on this land and look up at green summits rising more than 3000 feet, surrounding the collection of cabins in the woods. Now, this lone forested flank at 2400 feet is the highest point around. The mountains encircling it have been blown up with millions of tons of dynamite in order to remove the shallow coal seams that lie buried within the layers of rock.

If I hadn’t heard the sounds of heavy equipment in the distance – the grinding engines of earthmovers and massive dump trucks beeping in reverse – I might never have realized what lay just a few hundred yards up a wooded rise from Larry’s cabin. We would discover it, he said, by walking through “Hell’s Gate,” the barrier marking the property line between his family’s land and the Samples Mine, where a subsidiary of Massey Coal has blown away 900 feet and 7500 acres of Kayford Mountain over the last four years. Another 6000 acres on adjacent Coal River Mountain are slated for the same fate. The first blast there went off the week before our arrival, Larry said, even though the permits are not yet final.

Central Appalachian Range in its natural state

Ancient landscapes, lost forever

To understand the atrocity of mountaintop removal mining, you must first have a sense of what is being eradicated. In central Appalachia, lush hardwood forests cover the slopes in a mélange of green, beech, buckeye and maple, ash, shagbark, hickory and oak, tulip tree and flowering dogwood. Beneath their leafy canopy lies an understory of shrubs like mountain laurel and rhododendron, and hundreds of flowers and herbs, including medicinal plants such as ginseng and goldenseal. Moss and fungi thrive where water is plentiful, as do an amazing assortment of freshwater fish, salamanders and frogs. Deer and black bear drink from the clear streams that fill the narrow valleys, forming the headwaters for the rivers of the Eastern seaboard.

Fall foliage near Larry’s cabin

One of the most biodiverse places on the planet, this region and its ecosystems have been a long time in creation. Some of earth’s most ancient mountains comprise this range, birthed 300 million years ago when North America and Africa were still connected: the Appalachians were formed as part of the same mountain chain as the Anti-Atlas in Morocco.

Deep within their folded slopes lie some of the world’s richest carbon deposits, the product of millennia of compression, the anthracite and bituminous coalfields that hold much of the U.S.’s most plentiful fossil fuel stores.

Intensive efforts to retrieve that coal have been a defining part of the natural and cultural landscape in Appalachia since the Civil War. Where Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia & West Virginia share borders, beauty and pain have resided side by side for 150 years. Coal barons of the 1920s sought to smash miners’ unions in a push to increase production and profits from underground mines, but today’s captains of industry have managed to find a way around the cost and conflicts associated with labor while taking coal out of the earth via a faster mode. In so doing, they are undoing the earth’s geology and devastating whole ecosystems. They call it mountaintop mining. Opponents call it mountaintop removal.

We walk through a golden tracery of lacy maples and red sumac to Hell’s Gate, a low black bar, and approach the rim of a vast pit. As bleak and gray as the clouds overhead, it stretches 270 degrees around us to the horizon. It is as if we have come to an overlook of the surface of the moon. Few people are present except us. Most of the work is being done not by miners, Larry tells us, but by heavy-equipment operators.

But a fraction of the minescape panorama SEJ tour members
viewed at Kayford Mountain

How to move a mountain

Destroying mountains to extract coal requires surprisingly little manpower. Just 19 men do what it used to take 650 to do in an underground mine, Larry says. “It is the most barbaric form of mining I’ve ever witnessed in my life.”

First, the trees are clear-cut and removed. The trees on Kayford Mountain were burned, Larry said, though occasionally they are sold for timber in some operations. Explosives are then buried in the ground and detonated. The mountaintop shudders and shakes apart into rubble. Ten to 12 blasts a day split the air at the Samples Mine, just a portion of the 3 million pounds of dynamite exploded every day in Appalachia, Larry said. He added that a single blast in 1999 costing $1 million was the largest non-nuclear blast to be detonated since World War II. Only on Sundays is the mine quiet, when Larry can hear the birds. There used to be 147 species native to Kayford Mountain, but just 39 remain, he said, according to a group of birders who monitor their numbers.

The blasting is hard on other animals, too, Larry says. He tells us that 14 bears were killed on the side of his land, tracked in to the mine zone via radio collars, but never out again.

Huge dump trucks haul away the rock, topsoil and waste that become
valley fill. I am standing next to the front tire.

After the blasting is finished the loose debris – or ‘overburden’ – is placed into enormous dump trucks that hold 240 tons and placed into adjacent valleys as “fill.” Once enough rock is removed to get at the coal seam, it is ripped out by gigantic drag lines and scooped into buckets big enough to hold 24 small cars. Then the process begins again. Each successive blasting round creates a deeper incursion into the mountain until ultimately it resembles a ravaged crater like the Samples Mine.

At the Four Mile Mountain Mine, our second stop, we learned that 25-30 feet of rock are blasted away to reach coal seams that are typically 10-18 inches deep and about 400 feet long. It seems like a lot of effort for a relatively little amount of coal versus rock. That tells you something about how lucrative coal is, and how cheaply it can be mined using these low-labor methods.

Andrew Jordon, CEO, Pritchard Mining

Andrew Jordon, CEO of Pritchard Mining and immediate past chair of the West Virginia Coal Association, told reporters at the site that much of the coal removed in mountaintop mining could not be accessed via traditional underground mining methods, and that which could would require a much greater expense and threat to human safety if surface mining methods were avoided.

Once the coal is removed, it is washed and loaded into trucks and eventually onto trains for transport across the country. Left behind are millions, even billions, of gallons of sludge. Black, stagnant and laden with toxic metals, the waste liquid is injected into old underground mines or impounded behind huge earthen dams that comprise “valley fills.” Hundreds of feet high, these piles of rock and dirt are often dumped into seasonal streambeds, wiping out the flow of water and affecting adjacent stream quality for more than 100 miles downstream.

Bill Raney, president of the WVCA, takes issue with this notion of “dumping.” “A valley fill is one of the most sophisticated structures in earthmoving engineering,” he said. And as for streams obliterated when such fills are placed in hollows?

Brushy Fork impoundment on the the west side of Coal River Mountain,
WV; built to hold 8 billion tons of coal sludge. Photo: Vivan Stockman,
courtesy of SouthWings Air

“Those aren’t streams,” said Rocky Hackforth, Pritchard’s vice president of operations and general manager at Four Mile. Because they only run when it rains, for instance, they are “ephemeral streams,” a term Raney offered, and thus do not meet the definition of a “navigable” waterway off limits to dumping under the Clean Water Act. Currently, law exists to prohibit mining activity within 100 feet of a stream. But the law is blatantly flouted on a regular basis by mountaintop removal operations that skirt the Act through claims that such ephemeral run-offs are exempt from the legal provision.

“Reclaimed” Kayford Mountain MTR site

The semantics of reclamation

Reclamation standards require that mining companies restore the land to a close approximation of its “original contours,” including reinstating streams, but in most cases what results is merely a layer of grass seed tossed over the topsoil-barren moonscape. And even industry leaders admit that attempts to recreate vital streams that offer a natural habitat for fish and other aquatic life have been less than successful.

Jordon’s operation has received recognition for industry best practices in reclamation, however, and a survey of the no-longer-active sections of the Four Mile Mountain mine show 10- to15-foot tall native trees that appear to be coming back nicely. “Our success rate with reforestation has been very, very good,” Jordon said.

Of 6000 acres under lease to Pritchard, 2200 have been mined and reclaimed so far. “We’re here to recover the resources that we’ve been blessed with in West Virginia and then to put it back,” Jordon said.

But to suggest that such replanting will do anything more than provide a veneer of green for decades to come defies reason. It has taken a thousand years to generate the layer of topsoil on the Appalachians, and thousands more to evolve the multitude of species of flora and fauna that reside in the undisturbed forest. Just because wild turkeys and deer “immediately” return to the reclaimed site, according to Hackworth, it’s hard to imagine convincing anyone that the scale and scope of damage inflicted has been mitigated.

Twisted Gun golf course, Mingo County, W. Va. Recreation in one of the
poorest counties in one of the poorest states in the nation.
Photo: Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition

In other cases, there is no mandate to restore the land to any semblance of its original character under the Interior Department’s 1977 Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act if a “higher and better use” can be demonstrated. This includes economic uses of flat property deemed to benefit the public with the construction of airstrips, schools, prisons, shopping centers and golf courses. The previous, largely vertical landscape was only useful for hunting or timber, while flattened mountaintops expand the range of uses and thus the value of the land, say proponents.

Larry Gibson, and many residents of coal country whose mountain roots and cultural heritage go back centuries, disagree.

At any rate, less than 5 percent of mountaintop removal sites have undergone any sort of economic development, despite the former coal mines being touted by industry and government as ‘gold mines’ for commercial growth.

The National Mining Association now estimates that 14 to 15 percent of the nation’s coal production comes from mountaintop removal mining.  In Appalachia, the number of surface mines now exceeds underground operations. The effects of such extreme methods on the face of the land in Appalachia are profound.   But the effects on Appalachia’s people are also deeply disturbing, as Part III of this series will examine.

Coming up:

Part III: The poor are always downstream
Part IV: The tenacity of hope

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.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Here, for your copying-and-pasting convenience, is a transcription of some of what you just heard:

“I’m afraid if he wins, the blacks will take over. He’s not a Christian! This is a Christian nation! What is our country gonna end up like?”

“When you got a Nigger running for president, you need a first stringer. He’s definitely a second stringer.”

“He seems like a sheep – or a wolf in sheep’s clothing to be honest with you. And I believe Palin – she’s filled with the Holy Spirit, and I believe she’s gonna bring honesty and integrity to the White House.”

“He’s related to a known terrorist, for one.”

“He is friends with a terrorist of this country!”

“He must support terrorists! You know, uh, if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it must be a duck. And that to me is Obama.”

“Just the whole, Muslim thing, and everything, and everybody’s still kinda – a lot of people have forgotten about 9/11, but… I dunno, it’s just kinda… a little unnerving.”

“Obama and his wife, I’m concerned that they could be anti-white. That he might hide that.”

“I don’t like the fact that he thinks us white people are trash… because we’re not!”

As I always told my writing students: show, don’t tell.

Clearing a Low Bar

Welcome to a state where the politics of hate
Shout loud in the crowd “Watch
them beat us all down.”

At this point, I’m trying to imagine what I can add that isn’t superfluous. That racism still exists, in tragic amounts, isn’t a revelation to anyone with more than six or seven functioning brain cells, although being confronted anew with this kind of evidence is still jarring.

What’s different, though, is what I said back in June.

Make no mistake, in the coming months you’re going to see the ugliest artillery that our nation’s drooling, inbred hatemongers have at their disposal. The looming prospect of a nigra in the White House is going to bring the vermin out of the woodwork, out from under their rocks and out into the light. It’s going to incite the well-heeled country club elite to crank up the meme machine with every sort of subtle, codemongering dogwhistle it can manufacture. The truly ignorant and hateful are going to be liquored up on rhetorical bile of the lowest sort and those who live further up the social ladder are going to be provided with a variety of messages that let them vote white without having to admit to themselves that they’re fundamentally just like the snuff-suckers in the trailer park across the tracks.

This is a good thing. Let me say that again: this is a good thing.

It’s a good thing because we’ll never defeat an enemy that can safely hide from scrutiny. This is a disease that’s only going to be cured with copious amounts of very bright light.

We will not fear your mask. Because what we believe in doesn’t need to hide.

In this election campaign, let’s invite the Klan and its fellow hate groups out into the light. Let’s get their hoods off of them. Let’s show all their videos. Let’s make sure that everybody gets to read their brochures and visit their Web sites. Let’s hand the microphone to their most eloquent speakers and stand aside. Let’s get them front and center and make sure America sees, in all its slack-jawed, toothless glory, precisely what racism looks like.
…
And above all, when we hear racist code masquerading as legitimate, issues-based messaging, let’s not be afraid to say “excuse me, but will you take off your hood?”

It’s decision time, and I’m ready for a referendum on hate. How about you?

Regardless of what happens on Election Day, we won’t have triumphed finally and completely over ignorance. Our culture is, at its very core, anti-intellectual and frighteningly tolerant of the willfully stupid. We fetishize shallowness and vote on whether or not we’d like to have a beer with the candidate. We mock “elites,” sort of. We’re too thick to recognize real elitism when we see it, but we can be relentless in our abuse of those born to meager means who, through little but their own intelligence and hard work, rise up to make something of themselves. Our ability for self-deception is unmatched in the entire civilized world.

But an Obama victory (which looks more likely by the day) would nonetheless mark a milestone: we would have arrived at a point where a man of non-white (or half non-white, as the case may be) heritage can be elected to our highest office. As my colleague Whythawk has observed, that actually says something pretty good about America, given how few of our fellow industrialized nations can say the same.

“We suck less,” though, isn’t the sort of shining-city-on-the-hill standard America has traditionally prided itself on setting (even if only rhetorically), and while being the first to clear a very low bar is something to note, it’s not something to get too puffed up over. This is especially true when we have millions of citizens howling for the corpse of Barack Obama. It’s especially true when our media institutions ignore the filthiness happening right before their eyes. It’s especially true when these disgusting public spectacles are funded by a hyper-rich power elite that’s willing to spend whatever it takes to keep us ignorant and at each other’s throats.

As for the premise that McCain is no racist, well … racist is as racist does, don’t you think? He got his back up at the suggestion that he was somehow like George Wallace, but in what conceivable way is that charge less fair and valid than the slanders his campaign has slung in Obama’s direction?

And why should we taken seriously McCain’s late-to-the-dance attempts to rein in the hate that’s been committed in his name? His actions in recent years have made clear that he’s willing to do whatever it takes to win the White House, Bob Dolizing himself to a degree that Dole himself could hardly have imagined. Tack this way on the advice of advisers, pander to the Right to shore up the base, let Karl Rove bully you out of your VP preference, let slip the dogs of Race War… Why would I or you or any other thinking American regard this as anything besides a tactical maneuver driven by research showing that undecided voters are turned off by it?

None of Us Are Free

In “None of Us Are Free” (written by Barry Mann, Brenda Russell and Cynthia Weil), Solomon Burke sings

None of us are free.
None of us are free.
None of us are free, one of us is chained.
None of us are free.

Clearly, large portions of America remain chained. Our Cracker Problem persists, and what ought to be most disconcerting is that it not only exists in the heart of Georgia, in Outback Ohio, in pro-America Virginia or in a Republican Women’s club in California. It not only thrives in the minds of elderly whites who preferred Jim Crow to Martin Luther King. It’s not only alive and well in organizations like Stormfront and the League of the South.

No, the problem is that racism, racemongering and race-baiting are alive and well at the very highest, most public levels of our democracy: our presidential election process. And it was put there, on full display, and sanctioned by one of the only two parties that ever really stands a chance in any national election.

On November 4th, let’s hope for an epic thrashing of those who seek to profit by trading in hate and ignorance. Let’s further hope that those who can’t and won’t evolve get the message loud and clear: crawl back underneath your rocks and remain quiet until it’s finally your time to die.

But whatever we do, let’s not confuse winning a battle with winning the war. Our Cracker Problem will be with us for awhile longer, and November 5th will be the beginning, not the end.

And when they come to ethnically cleanse me
Will you speak out? Will you defend me?
Or laugh through a glass
eye as they rape our lives
Trampled underfoot by the Right on the rise…

Click here to view the embedded video.

Previously: Ich Bin Ein Auslander

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. Not that it necessarily took Nostradamus to predict that, of course – as staggering prognostications go this one ranked right up there with “the sun will rise in the East.” Still, the predictability and magnitude of racism in America, the absolute certainty of it, matters.

Welcome to a state where the politics of hate Shout loud in the crowd
“Watch them beat us all down.”
There’s a rising tide on the rivers of blood
But if the answer isn’t violence, neither is your silence

So I collected the bits and pieces of evidence as they began flying across the transom. As Obama’s lead solidified. As McCain became more desperate. As the ignorant and hateful on the Right were whipped into a lynch-ready lather by Rush, Hannity, O’Reilly, by the Coulters and Savages and their legions of local market disciples. As they were egged on by the silence of a gutless old man who’d sold what little soul he had to start with; and by the photogenic perkiness of the former beauty queen he chose as his running mate: finally realized, Dan Quayle and Marilyn all rolled into one, witch doctor-approved, and so far to the right politically and theologically that even Pat Robertson has to be thinking “that bitch is crazy.” And of course, by their cynical proxies, who have read enough history to know a thing or two about the value of a good “other” when the scapegoating hour arrives.

Slowly, but all too surely, Cracker America began to realize that its most horrific of spectres is taking corporeal form: the White House is about to become the Black House. One of the greatest truisms of human nature is this: crisis reveals character. Or, in this case, lack of character. If you want to know what people are all about, at their core, back them into a corner. The truth will soon reveal itself, for good or ill.

The Code of Real America

“Take a look around at the cities and the towns.”
See them hunting, creeping, sneaking
Breeding fear and loathing with the lies they’re speaking

I said I had been collecting evidence. Let’s have a look, shall we?

• A Virginia county GOP chair wasn’t content to play the race card – he played the whole race deck:
  

  You need to read this column to believe it. In “humor” he accuses Obama of wanting to paint the White House black, supporting reparations, changing the national anthem to the “black national anthem”, teaching “black liberation theology in all churches”, and replacing the flag with a “star and crescent logo”.

  That he resigned is good, but it hardly excuses anything.

• While we’re talking about Virginia, what do you think Virgil Goode means by “politically correct loans”? Hmmm. Far be it from me to accuse someone of Mr. Goode’s stature of employing code, but as someone on one of my political lists points out, it’s worth noting that if you Google the term, the top result is … illuminating.
• When it comes to deciding whether a particular person is a racist, it’s hard (despite Mr. Bush’s claims of omniscience regarding Harriet Miers) to know his or her heart. Still, we might infer something useful from looking at the company the person in question keeps. With this in mind, Sarah Palin’s political associations should certainly raise a couple questions, don’t you think?
• In our current climate – which I guess we’ll call semi-actualized – it’s no longer acceptable or prudent for a candidate to stand up and shout something as inflammatory as “lynch the nigger!” So when you want people who are open to that message to hear it without you actually saying it, some sleight of tongue is required. At the moment, when we hear the word “terrorist” we tend to think of people who are … how to put this? … not white. We don’t think of Timothy McVeigh or Eric Rudolph, for some odd reason, nor do we think of the Irish Republican Army or the fine folks who advocate bombing Planned Parenthood clinics and murdering doctors who perform abortions (although we do get exercised about Bill Ayers, a man nobody cared about until he became a vague acquaintance of Obama’s; dare I suggest that he wasn’t a real terrorist until he was found in the company of negroes?) So when we hear Palin linking “Obama” and “terrorist” the way she’s fond of doing, we shouldn’t be surprised to hear people in the crowd stepping up for their portion of the call-and-response with “terrorist!” and “kill him!” You may argue that there’s nothing racist about this at all, and if it existed in a vacuum, if it were isolated from any larger context, I might have to cede the point that this was simply about a general ignorance of the facts. But there’s a lot of if in that equation, and those showing up to see Palin certainly seem capable of connecting the dots.
  

  At a McCain rally on Monday, television stations caught audio of a crowd member calling Obama a “terrorist,” while Dana Milbank reported that “[o]ne Palin supporter shouted a racial epithet at an African American sound man for a network and told him, ‘Sit down, boy.’” Also on Monday, at a Palin rally, one member of the audience yelled, “Kill him!”

  So I don’t see any of us benefiting from playing stupid.

  

• But, you say, it’s not the fault of McCain and Palin that there are a few yahoos in the crowd. True. I’m not responsible for your stupidity. However, I am responsible for my reactions to that stupidity. If you yell “nigger” in a crowded Republican rally and I, the candidate, say nothing, how can I be seen as doing anything but endorsing it? As Solomon Burke sings in “None of Us Are Free,” “if you don’t say it’s wrong, then that says it’s right.”
• By the way, I’m having a hard time understanding why the Secret Service isn’t hauling people out of these rallies and charging them with whatever the charge is when you incite/advocate murdering a Senator. Just saying….
• The above assumes, for the sake of argument, that the campaign’s racist tone and tactics aren’t by design. As last week’s Frank Rich column illustrates, though, we can’t possibly assume anything of the sort.
  

  From the start, there have always been two separate but equal questions about race in this election. Is there still enough racism in America to prevent a black man from being elected president no matter what? And, will Republicans play the race card? The jury is out on the first question until Nov. 4. But we now have the unambiguous answer to the second: Yes.

  McCain, who is no racist, turned to this desperate strategy only as Obama started to pull ahead. The tone was set at the Republican convention, with Rudy Giuliani’s mocking dismissal of Obama as an “only in America” affirmative-action baby. We also learned then that the McCain campaign had recruited as a Palin handler none other than Tucker Eskew, the South Carolina consultant who had worked for George W. Bush in the notorious 2000 G.O.P. primary battle where the McCains and their adopted Bangladeshi daughter were slimed by vicious racist rumors.

  No less disconcerting was a still-unexplained passage of Palin’s convention speech: Her use of an unattributed quote praising small-town America (as opposed to, say, Chicago and its community organizers) from Westbrook Pegler, the mid-century Hearst columnist famous for his anti-Semitism, racism and violent rhetorical excess. After an assassin tried to kill F.D.R. at a Florida rally and murdered Chicago’s mayor instead in 1933, Pegler wrote that it was “regrettable that Giuseppe Zangara shot the wrong man.” In the ’60s, Pegler had a wish for Bobby Kennedy: “Some white patriot of the Southern tier will spatter his spoonful of brains in public premises before the snow falls.”

  This is the writer who found his way into a speech by a potential vice president at a national political convention. It’s astonishing there’s been no demand for a public accounting from the McCain campaign. Imagine if Obama had quoted a Black Panther or Louis Farrakhan — or William Ayers — in Denver.

• McCain’s campaign co-chair employed a pretty nifty code-swarm when he worked “guy of the street,” “cocaine” and “Jeremiah Wright” into a conversation with Dennis Miller. “Guy of the street.” Hmmm. Granted, this steps away from all that “elitist” bullshit, which is nice. But if you’re black, your choices are now “uppity” or “street thug”? Lordy, how far our darkies have come from the days of “field negro” vs. “house negro”…
• We haven’t talked about Virginia in a few bullet points, so how about this: Obama = Osama. And again, let’s remember – we’re all smart enough to see the big picture and understand the larger context, especially in light of the fact that we now know this wasn’t a one-off – it’s part of the sewage that campaign workers are being trained to spew.
• By Virginia, of course, we’re referring to real Virginia. You know, Macaca Virginia, which we assume to be part of pro-America America. Just to make sure we’re all on the same page.
• There’s not only a “real Virginia,” there’s a real America. This FiveThirtyEight analysis takes a good, hard look at Palin’s ideal America (based on her rhetoric and the places she’s chosen to appear lately) and guess what? Real America is significantly whiter than … unreal? … America.
• In Fairfield, Ohio, Halloween is evidently being celebrated by hanging Obama in effigy. If you’re a little confused by the Star of David on his head, join the club. I imagine black and Jew are all pretty much the same thing in some people’s minds.
• By the way, you know that whole “Obama is a Muslim” thing? Read up on the piece of work who fabricated it here. Turns out he don’t like them dirty Jews, neither. And that’s not the half of it.
• You may be thinking – how have I gotten this far without once mentioning FOX “News”? I think this item will reward your patience. Up until now Colin Powell’s negrocity has been tolerated, but yesterday he forgot his place and endorsed Obama. Which means he’s fair game for stuff like this: “Colin Powell has his dancing shoes on, fueling speculation that he’s gearing up to do the Obama Two-Step.” I guess we should be grateful that they stopped at “two-step” (I was expecting “shuffle”) and that they didn’t deliver the story in blackface.
• Lest you think that racism is confined to the South and Midwest, this entry hails from the Great State of California. Where, apparently, them jigaboos loves them some fried chicken and watermelon. Of course, the perpetrator apologized because, you know, she didn’t mean to offend nobody.
• Want more? We got more. Check out the gallery of stupid over at Pam’s House Blend, where you’ll find:
  * More fun in post-racial America
  * John McCain forced to denounce racist, homophobic member of Virginia leadership team
  * Kentucky, I know you can do better than this
  * FL: middle school teacher uses ‘nigger’ to describe Barack Obama
  * Palin praised racist writer who called for RFK’s assassination
  * Values at the Values Voter Summit – Obama as a Muslim Aunt Jemima
  * Westmoreland stands by ‘uppity’ remark about Obama
  * White supremacists: Obama’s boosting our movement
  * John McLaughlin: Obama fits the ‘Oreo’ stereotype
  * Georgia: publication features Obama in crosshairs on cover for article on white supremacist threat
  * Bigot eruption: GOP House member refers to Obama as ‘boy’
  * South Carolina: black reporter attacked by white family (on camera!)

As the song says:

Freedom of expression doesn’t make it alright
Trampled underfoot by the rise of the right.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Next: None of Us Are Free

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:

If Heaven is pleased when sinners cease to sin
If the Devil is pleased when another soul comes in
If the Earth is glad to be rid of a knave
Then everybody’s happy ’cause Bill is in his grave.

This chorus sprang immediately to mind when I heard this past Friday that another scoundrel, former Senator Jesse Helms – a Tar Heel like both Mike Cross and myself – had departed the world that he worked so hard to corrupt. I hope Cross, who’s truly one of America’s epic musical treasures, won’t mind my invocation of his song on this occasion.

Like his narrator, I was raised to either speak well of people or say nothing at all, and that edict goes double when the subject is freshly dead. On the other hand, I was also taught to live my life in accordance with particular moral principles and to honor the truth above all other things. Perhaps you have, by now, sensed a certain tension in my writing – this is why.

So let me speak plainly and be judged by the fairness of my eulogy, such as it is. I will not gravedance, but I will note that in recent days a lot of raging morons have had all kinds of praise for the late Sen. Helms, that bastion of conservative principles, that stalwart defender of tradition, that foundational champion of the Republican ascendancy, and so on. Hell no, I’m not linking to any of it – if you have a taste for horseshit go get your own shovel.

There are some facts about the Senator’s life and career, though, and we should not allow the protocols of death or the shameless pandering of Helms’ equally corrupt fellow travelers distract us from them. Take this bit, for instance:

As an aide to the 1950 Senate campaign of North Carolina Republican candidate Willis Smith, Helms reportedly helped create attack ads against Smith’s opponent, including one which read: “White people, wake up before it is too late. Do you want Negroes working beside you, your wife and your daughters, in your mills and factories? Frank Graham favors mingling of the races.” Another ad featured photographs Helms himself had doctored to illustrate the allegation that Graham’s wife had danced with a black man. (The News and Observer, 8/26/01; The New Republic, 6/19/95; The Observer, 5/5/96; Hard Right: The Rise of Jesse Helms, by Ernest B. Furgurson, Norton, 1986)

How about this one:

“The Negro cannot count forever on the kind of restraint that’s thus far left him free to clog the streets, disrupt traffic, and interfere with other men’s rights.” (WRAL-TV commentary, 1963) He also wrote, “Crime rates and irresponsibility among Negroes are a fact of life which must be faced.” (New York Times, 2/8/81)

Rick Perlstein has more, and so does Pam Spaulding. Jesse never repented, by the way.

One of his most famous moments, of course, occurred during his re-election campaign against one such uppity Negro, Harvey Gantt. Much has been made of George Bush the Elder’s infamous Willie Horton/revolving prison door ad in the 1988 campaign, but it paled in comparison to Jesse’s “hands” spot.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Jesse Helms was an ignorant, bile-spewing hatemonger who left a greasy film on everything he touched. Yes Virginia, there are evil people in the world. There are those who make society a worse place simply by living in it, and when they manage to acquire power they can inflict damage on a scale so great that it may take generations to clean up.

As wonderful as it is that Jesse Helms will no longer be wreaking havoc on our culture, the sad fact is that there’s little time or cause to celebrate because his legacy lives on. He taught others that prejudice and hate are acceptable motivations for governance and his anti-intellectual progeny are ever manufacturing new and more appalling tools for the oppression of the innocent.

Fine – let’s all take a moment to toast the death of an evil human being – truly the world is a better place without Jesse Helms. But make it quick because we have to get back to work. Jesse’s mess isn’t going to clean itself up.

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.

But … from a writer as Southern as Capote, am I unjustified in expecting a few Gothic twists? Am I wrong to expect a tale that contorts and shapeshifts as unabashedly as the closing scene of Murder By Death (which features, by the way, none other than Capote hisownself)? We get no illicit prison rape scenes (although Capote flogs the masculine ideal card like it’s the last cashmere sweater in the closet). No dismemberments. No farm girls with artificial appendages. Nobody sleeping with relatives (nobody sleeping with anybody, for that matter). Dick doesn’t rape Nancy after she’s dead. No shenanigans involving exotic pets (like monkeys or meercats). Perry doesn’t perform unnatural experiments on the squirrel he lures into his cell. The lawmen appear to be honest. No lynch mobs gather outside the jailhouse. And the town’s few bona fide characters (like the postmistress, for example) are played remarkably straight.

What the hell?

Put simply, In Cold Blood isn’t really a very Southern story at all. Capote meticulously avoids the slightest suggestion of Gothic even when the potential hangs palpably in the stale afternoon air, as if a mile downwind of a skunk that’s been baking on the county road for a couple of days. For example, what about the killer who kept digging up his victim and moving him to different graves? Here Capote faces a classic opportunity to indulge a bit of the Faulkner or Welty that all of us Southerners allegedly have locked up inside somewhere. But he ducks.

It’s hard to account for Truman’s curiously restrained behavior. Perhaps he’s just trying to be true to the journalistic muse, or maybe he in all good conscience did not want to artificially impose upon the Clutter chronicle any more excess neo-antebellum baggage than necessary.

Whatever. I guess the point I’m driving at is this: while In Cold Blood is the work of a Southern author, its place in the canon is … unsettled. When we use that word – Southern – we invoke centuries worth of ambivalence and self-loathing, and a Southern author’s audience has as much right to expect humidity-warped outlandishness as the opening night crowd at a 007 movie has to anticipate half-naked women and chase scenes.

There’s no law saying that all writers have to pander to their respective regional stereotypes. But if you’re Southern and you make a habit of restraint and sophistication you risk confusing your audience. And nothing good can come of that.

• 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
• imposed wage and price controls in times of crisis
• indexed Social Security for inflation and created Supplemental Security Income
• created the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the Office of Minority Business Enterprise
• promoted the Legacy of Parks program
• appointed four Supreme Court Justices, three of which voted with the majority in Roe v. Wade

Have you figured out where this is going yet?

No, I’m not here to tell you that what American needs is Richard Nixon. I’m sure as hell not here to laud the man, who was – as Hunter Thompson so eloquently put it – so crooked he had to screw his pants on in the morning. I’m not here to argue that his policies were always noble or implemented with unrelenting elegance. Yes, he got us out of Vietnam, but not before considerable mucking around in the region. Yes, his record on race was … mixed. And so on.

The point I’m making isn’t about Nixon at all. Instead, it’s about our major political parties and the people who occupy them today. It’s about how far to the right even the left has slid in the last 35 years.

Let’s advance a posit, shall we?

If he were a candidate in the 2008 presidential election, Richard M. Nixon would be more progressive than either the Republican or Democratic nominees.

Discuss.

Thanks to Wikipedia for pulling a lot of stuff together in one handy-dandy place. I don’t usually cite them, but for things like this they’re a good jumping-off point.

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.

Budiansky’s book pulls no punches, and as a result it conjures palpable feelings of raw anger, frustration, and indignation. Southerners perpetrated injustice after injustice to keep blacks from exercising their rights as citizens as human beings. Northern whites who migrated south to help with Reconstruction efforts were also belittled and harassed.

“From 1867 to 1876, more than three thousand free African Americans and their white allies were killed in cold blood by terrorist organizations in the South,” the book says.

Budiansky’s loose narrative follows several individuals through the era, using them as archetypes for others who had similar experiences. None of them have happy stories, from Prince Rivers, an escaped slave who rose to prominence as magistrate in a black settlement only to be driven out of office after a massacre of his fellow townspeople; Lewis Merrill, a former officer with the 7th Cavalry who tried to stop the rising tide of the Klan in South Carolina; Adelbert Ames, a native Mainer who would become U.S. Senator and later Governor of Mississippi until whites suppressed the black voters who elected him to office; and entrepreneur Albert Morgan, who arrived in Mississippi and was welcomed by Southern society only to later be fleeced of everything he had when it became apparent he was not going to adhere to the racial status quo.

Former Confederate Lieutenant General James Longstreet, who tried to become a reformer after the war, suffers an especially pitiful and embarrassing fate.

Bad guys run amok. They burn and pillage. They literally get away with murder. They give each other a wink-wink, nudge-nudge and laugh it off as corpses dangle from trees and bodies bleed out in ditches. Terrorist organizations, made up of the so-called finest, most upright citizens, ruled through fear.

As a book, The Bloody Shirt is bit disorganized. Each chapter jumps in time and geography across the South, and although the chapters are kept in chronological order, the links between them are frequently weak.

Budiansky’s strengths lay in other areas. He is unflinching, for instance, in his ability to look at ugly situations. He puts institutionalized injustice on display and forces readers to ask uncomfortable questions. He is unapologetic that his characters do not have happy endings.

In fact, exposing that tragedy is part of the book’s purpose. In today’s world, where America fights the War of Terror, Americans forget we once had plenty of terrorism right here. Fanatics, committed to an outdated mode of life, refusing to respect the peace, willing to perpetrate horrific acts of violence, made life miserable for everyone else. (Which century is that, anyway?)

America still wrestles with the ramifications of that age of barbarism. Wounds haven’t fully healed—a process made harder by the glossing over of an entire generation’s behavior by selective cultural memory shaped, in large part, by the romanticized Lost Cause mindset.

The Bloody Shirt is not an easy read. Budiansky writes smoothly and compellingly, but his subject matter is distressing and depressing. No wonder history tends to gloss it over. But, as Budiansky suggests, until we face the ugliness and injustice, they will never go away. Budiansky never preaches about it. He just makes readers a little sick to their stomach about it instead.

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.

Click here to view the embedded video.

While we’re on the subject of varmints, they’re apparently shooting the sequel to Snakes on a Plane in a Wal*Mart parking lot in Louisiana.

Click here to view the embedded video.

If the Turtleman can afford the gas for a drive down to Savannah, his soulmate is waiting for him. (Alternate caption: Midnight in the Garden of Dat Bitch is Crazy.)

Click here to view the embedded video.

I’m not 100% sure what this is all about, to be honest.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Finally, meet the Southside Virginia Welcome Wagon. Just for texture, please keep in mind that two of S&R’s own have ties to this neighborhood: JS O’Brien grew up there and Jim Booth lives there now. Maybe they can shed a little light….

Click here to view the embedded video.

That’s it for this week, and here’s wishing everybody a beautiful, sunshiny weekend. And remember, when vacationing in the South, if you can hear banjo music you’re not running fast enough.

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.

Daddy’s place is one of the neighborhood’s older houses, built up in the late 1950s just as the baby boom was starting to lose its steam. But since they converted the carport into a den, added a new covered garage on the side, and painted everything a nice shade of sunshiny yellow, it’s one of the nicer places on the street, offering a welcome visual alternative to the predominant red-brick rancherscape. This is especially true since some of the more recent additions to the neighborhood have involved “prefabricated homes” and double-wides. Longstanding “real house”-owners like my father stand in their gravel driveways and talk about these things amongst themselves sometimes, arms crossed, eyes squinting as the sun slips behind the pines.

Wayne and Kathie turn into the driveway. The house key is hidden inside Daddy’s big smoker grill around back. Kathie cuts through the carport and turns the corner in time to look up and see Randy Wilson, my best buddy from childhood, crawling out through her bedroom window. The Wilsons live down the street a couple of houses, and our families have been friends for over 30 years. Daddy and Greer, Randy’s father, are men whose children grew up together, played baseball together. Although they aren’t intimate friends, exactly, they are men with much in common, men who relate to one another easily. Neighbors. Men who are comfortable trading tales over the occasional beer.

Kathie screams. Randy topples to the ground, more or less head first, rolls and comes up hauling ass for the woods. He’s busted, but due to the stress of the moment he hasn’t quite figured it out yet.

By now Kathie has made it back out front, hysterical, so Wayne retrieves the key. They go in the house and once he gets Kathie calm enough to explain what happened, they call the Sheriff’s department. Or rather, they’re trying to call the Sheriff’s department, but are distracted by Randy, who has evidently come to understand the nature of the pickle vat in which he now finds himself soaking. He slinks out of the woods like a cur dog, circles through the scrubby side yard between Daddy and Kathie’s house and the Weaver’s trailer, eases around the corner, and, as nonchalantly as possible, wanders in the front door. At some point during the past couple of minutes, Wayne has made his way into the bedroom and retrieved one of Daddy’s pistols, which somehow Randy missed during the burglary.

Randy begs them not to call the law. He’s currently out of prison on parole and out of jail on bail. It’s unclear what he was in prison for, but three weeks ago he got a call from his little sister, Tammy, who was stranded up in Winston-Salem somewhere and needed a ride home. Randy doesn’t have a car, so he walked up to the Baptista’s house – they live directly across the street from Daddy and Kathie – and appropriated theirs.

Apparently car thieving doesn’t constitute a parole violation in Davidson County. Then again, even a bad-ass television DA might have trouble convincing a jury that boosting the Baptista’s car, a rusting monument to the genius of coathangers, baling twine, and duct tape, merits a grand theft charge. Regardless, Randy somehow made bail, and this is how, three weeks later, he found himself rummaging through the drawers in my father’s bedroom.

For her part, Kathie has experienced nothing in her life which prepares her for this moment. She calls Randy names he’s never heard before, which is something of an accomplishment given that, in his pre-incarceration days, Randy was a Marine. Wayne tells Randy to leave while he still can and Kathie goes back to calling the law. Randy walks out the door. A moment later he’s back, doing his best to look penitent.

“Please don’t call the law Kathie, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he pleads. The dialing continues. He walks out the door, pauses on the cement porch, then comes back in again. Evidently trying to lighten the mood with small talk, he asks, “So, has Larry died yet?”

Wayne, in the passion of the moment forgetting that he’s outsized by a couple of inches and at least 40 pounds of hard, prison-yard muscle, whips around, grabs Randy by the front of his shirt, and pounds him hard up against the wall by the front door. For the first time he brings the pistol, a nondescript .45 automatic, to bear, laying it against Randy’s jaw.

“Motherfucker, you’re closer to being dead than Larry is. If you don’t get the hell out of here I’m going to blow your goddamned head off.”

Wayne lets go of Randy’s shirt, cautiously, allowing him to edge toward the door. Randy shrugs and smiles kind of vacantly at Wayne, who’s all of a sudden very aware of the odd weight of the gun in his hand. He’s never pointed a gun at anybody before, but he figures Randy probably has.

Randy holds his hands up in front of him and backs into the doorway, where he stops and bows his head for a second. “All right, all right.” He turns, walks out the door, through the front yard, and heads off down the street.

* * * * *

Larry “Chugger” Mulraney led what might charitably be called an imperfect life. He liked Cadillacs and diamond rings and junkets to Vegas. He liked women way too much to suit my mother and my first stepmother, who it turns out was originally one of the women Daddy liked too much to suit my mother. And the wheel goes around. Kathie, the third and final significant woman in his life, was the only one he didn’t run around on. That we know of.

Larry was not enlightened on questions of racial and gender equality. He wasn’t in favor of equal rights for gays and lesbians. And he absolutely, positively, had no time whatsoever for anybody who believed that smoking ought to be restricted in public places due to the hazards of second-hand smoke. Your lungs and my lungs were beside the point. Empirical research showing nicotine in the blood of fetuses whose mothers were non-smokers was beside the point. At stake was a more fundamental consideration: his Constitutional right to smoke wherever and whenever he pleased. When I once suggested that the Constitution didn’t explicitly articulate such a provision, it merely reinforced his long-held opinions regarding the relative merits of book learnin’.

Chugger was a shrewd trader of horses and cars and motorcycles and anything else you could turn a quick buck on. So shrewd, in fact, that his own family was reluctant to do business with him. I have no idea just how much I got took for in the two or three deals we transacted, and frankly I don’t want to know.

But even as he picked people clean to the bone, he did so according to an inflexible, if not necessarily noble, code of honor. My youngest sister, Carla, and her husband Bo are still scratching their heads over a deal they struck with Daddy a few months before he died. They were having financial problems (new babies can be expensive, they were learning) and were looking to unload their pickup. Daddy was quick to pay them the first amount they mentioned, even though it eventually proved to be significantly less than they could have gotten elsewhere. “I gave ‘em what they asked for it, didn’t I?”

Daddy just had a gift for dealing with the dumb and trusting. He’d always give people precisely what they thought they wanted. If they were witless enough to ask a fraction of what he knew the merchandise would fetch, well, that was hardly his fault, was it? That’s why I don’t want to know how badly I got skinned when we traded my Dodge Omni for his 1976 Caddy Sedan de Ville back in 1987.

I remember one Saturday morning back in the late ’70s he paid a guy up in Winston $100 for a piece-of-trash old Dodge truck that was missing fourth gear. By sundown he sold it to some enterprising halfwit for $1,100 cash without so much as taking it to the car wash. It’s a shame that Daddy went to work for Piedmont Airlines when he graduated from high school. Had he gone into the car business I’d have had a rich father. Mind you, my sisters and I wouldn’t have been rich, just him.

Larry Mulraney wasn’t always the most indulgent of neighbors, either, and as fate would have it, the two craziest families in Davidson County live next to him. Next door you have the Weavers. If you’ve heard comedian Jeff Foxworthy’s “you might be a redneck if….” routine, you have an introductory idea of what they were like. One of my favorites lines is, “you might be a redneck if you have a house that’s mobile and three cars that aren’t.” And there’s another one which goes, “you might be a redneck if your wife leaves the Marlboro in her mouth while telling the State Trooper to kiss her ass.”
The Weavers could have posed for the poster. Their tin-sided mobile home looked to be on the verge of collapse 35 years ago, but somehow or another it’s still standing. The three junkers clogging the driveway have been there since the Eisenhower administration. This next one I made up: you might be a redneck if people who keep livestock indoors complain that you’re dragging down their property values.

Directly across the street from Daddy’s place you had the Baptistas, who were a whole ‘nother case. Whereas the Weavers were your garden-variety, inbred, white trash kind of crazy, the Baptistas had this exotic, dark-eyed, inbred, Eastern European gypsy mojo working, and folks in the neighborhood were pretty much unanimous that they were loopy even by Jehovah’s Witness standards. Daddy would sit in his living room trying to watch the evening news, but he’d wind up transfixed as the various Baptista daughters took turns pushing their 300-pound mother up and down the street in her wheelchair. The sheer visual unattractiveness of the spectacle he could have endured – he’d grown up in Forsyth County, and as such, he’d seen his share of ugly. No, the part that vexed him to oratory was the fact that Mrs. Baptista didn’t need a wheelchair.

I always thought she was actually handicapped, but I was over at Daddy’s one day when the Baptista girls were pushing the “vegetable cart” around, as Daddy put it, when he told me how he found out she could walk.

“Remember the other week when that storm blew up all of a sudden? Well, they were out rolling her up and down the street like they always do when I’m trying to watch the news. They were up in front of Fuzzy’s place when a big old lightning bolt hit somewhere close by. Thunder damn near rattled the windows out of the house. And you shoulda seen her. Came up out of that wheelchair like she had a rocket up her ass, and she didn’t walk down the street, she ran. Full-tilt boogie. You wouldn’t think something that big could move that fast, but I couldn’t have caught her on my motorcycle. Ran her fat ass all the way down the street and nearly ripped the front door out of the frame trying to claw her way into the house. Crazy goddamned bitch – I swear, sometimes I almost feel sorry for her husband.” Daddy leaned back in the recliner and drew a long gulp off his Schlitz. “Course, he’s damned near as crazy as she is.”

For awhile there was talk that Puddin’, the Weaver boy, was sneaking around with Magdalena, the eldest Baptista daughter, who was probably ten years his senior. The very thought of a Weaver-Baptista spawn running wild in the neighborhood probably kept Daddy awake at night, although he wasn’t a man to show outward signs of fear. “Let me tell you something, boy. Inbreeding is nature’s way of containing defective genes. Over there,” he waved his Schlitz at the Baptista house, “and over there,” indicating the Weaver place, “are two sets of genes that you don’t want to see getting loose. Especially with each other.”

I never thought to ask where he learned so much about genetics, but underneath all the ignorance and seething ill will was a good point. Puddin’ and Magdalena copulating was a sure-fire recipe for an ubercarny, and in this case, a policy of genetic confinement seemed reasonable.

All this talk of Puddin’ bonking a Baptista was peripheral, though. Daddy’s primary beef with the Weavers had to do with the dog they kept chained up in back. And had always kept chained up in back. It’s probably not the same dog they had in 1960, but you can’t really tell for all the weeds and trash in the yard. It’s not like you ever actually see the dog. They never walk it or play with it or let it run around. They just kind of have it. But the dog had this bad habit of barking in the middle of the night when Daddy was trying to sleep.

Every so often Daddy would get fed up with the barking. The situation would unfold something like this. Daddy’s been drinking and shooting pool at Shade’s, a cinder-block watering hole about three miles up the road toward Winston. He and Kathie get home around 2:00 a.m., get in bed around 2:30, and at 3:00 Bosco hears a squirrel snoring and commences to yapping, waking up every dog within a mile radius in the process. At 3:05 Daddy’s had all he can stand. He gets up, grabs his shotgun, walks out into the yard wearing nothing but his boxers. He aims the gun straight up in the air and cuts loose.

“I was shooting ducks,” he once explained. “There was a whole flock of ‘em up there.” This sort of thing happened often enough that the details run together, but one time the Baptistas called the Sheriff. Daddy answered the door in his underwear and told the deputy he had no idea what those crazy bastards across the street were talking about. He hadn’t heard a damned thing. Didn’t mention anything about the ducks. The deputies just nodded, thanked him, and left.

A couple of years before Daddy died I was at a gun show down in Randolph County (not too far from the home of the King, Richard Petty) and found some 12-gauge shells that fired flares instead of shot. It seemed like just the sort of thing Daddy might like for his nocturnal duck hunts. I figured if he could illuminate his targets a bit it might improve his chances of actually bagging one, so I bought him a box – three white ones and three green ones. He never got around to using them.

Larry just loved beer. Loved it to death, you might say. I never checked but I assume that, commencing in mid-March of 1994 when he first went into the hospital, Schlitz sales dropped precipitously. I had pondered for years what might happen in the first meeting of Coors executives after my father’s death. Some VP of Sales and Distribution in Golden, Colorado, would note an inexplicable plummet in sales of their Schlitz brand 16 oz. tallboys. He’d see his entire career flash before his eyes, and would frantically dispatch some hapless toady to find out why in the hell the public had suddenly lost its thirst for the beer that made Milwaukee famous. Then, several years later, the grizzled modern-day Parsifal would arrive one rainy winter evening at the marble grail marking Daddy’s final repose, and there he’d kneel, praying and weeping that he never knew the man. He’d return to report his story to the corporate directors, and they would erect a monument to Larry “Chugger” Mulraney, understanding at last that it was he who had made Milwaukee famous.

My best guess goes like this. Daddy probably downed eight to 10 beers, on average, every day for 37 years or so. More on days when he was off work, but this is a good working estimate. That comes to roughly 135,050 beers. Which is 2,160,800 fluid ounces. And this was just his everyday beer routine. We’re not even talking wine with dinner and the several varieties of hard liquor associated with special occasions. Which means that, while my father only went around once in his 56 years, he sure as hell grabbed all the gusto he could lay his hands on.

The doctors didn’t waste a lot of Latin on Daddy’s case. His liver just quit. I’m not sure how much gusto the average human kidney can take, but I’m guessing that the red line on the gauge falls somewhere to the left of two million ounces.

“What people don’t understand is that he didn’t really drink that much beer,” Kathie explained. “They’d always see him with a beer in his hand, but a beer would last him an hour or so. He just liked the taste of beer.”

I remember one time on vacation he found this shop that made fake newspapers, inserting your name into one of their prefabricated headlines. He came back with one reading, in 72-point bold type: Larry Mulraney Quits Drinking; Schlitz Goes Out of Business.

* * * * *

All this isn’t to say that Daddy was a bad man. On the contrary. He was one of the most loved and respected people who ever drew breath. He wasn’t formally educated beyond high school, but there was no mistaking his innate intelligence. His sense of humor ran to the earthy, but laughter followed him everywhere he went socially, and nobody he knew ever threw a party without inviting him. And in spite of all his faults, he was in many ways one of the most honest men I ever knew (car dealing notwithstanding). His marriage to my Mom was short and ugly, lasting only long enough to produce my sister, Jeri, and me. A marriage made in hell, it was, but he was always straight with me about his failings as a husband and a father. Mom wasn’t blameless, I knew, but he never demeaned her in front of me. He actually defended her several times during periods when I was hacking through some emotional trauma and blaming her.

“Nina did the best she could, Junior,” he said. “I was out running around and she was stuck at home with two kids. You ought not blame her. She did what she thought was best for you.” He wasn’t exactly good at these sorts of talks, but he did have the guts to own up to his drinking, his infidelity, and his immaturity. Not that there would have been much point in denying it – there were simply too many witnesses. A lesser man might have been overcome by the fear of how he might look in the eyes of his only son. The only concern Daddy had, though, was that his boy knew his father would shoot straight with him.

Co-workers, friends, trading partners – pretty much everybody except the Baptistas and the Weavers – agreed that Larry was one hell of a guy. And I think even the Baptistas and Weavers had a soft spot for him somewhere. Probably. Deep down. Maybe.

Given Daddy’s immense popularity, when we had his surprise retirement party you could hardly get in the place. The house was full. The carport was full. The yard was full. Daddy had worked for Piedmont Airlines, then the Great Satan, USAir, for 33 years. When USAir bought out Piedmont it was, to Daddy’s way of thinking, the moral equivalent of having your mother raped by Yankees. But that’s another story. Everybody who ever worked with him, for him, or near him was at the party. For a while I wondered if everybody who had ever flown on Piedmont Airlines was going to show up. The party was a huge success, to say the very least.

And many of the faces from the party came around again during his six weeks in intensive care first at Forsyth Memorial, then at the UNC Medical Center down in Chapel Hill, then at Forsyth again when the doctors finally threw in the towel and sent him back to his hometown to die.

* * * * *

After the cops are called and Randy leaves, Kathie does a quick inventory and realizes that some of their stuff is AWOL. The most prominent piece of missing property is Daddy’s prized nickel-plated .38. We’re the sort of family for whom firearms often have sentimental value.

Randy has ambled on down the street to his house, presumably to wait for the deputies. Kathie storms out the front door and heads down to the Wilsons’ to personally expedite the recovery of her stolen property. Kathie is a slight woman, and she has endured a long history of poor health. Some of us have wondered among ourselves whether Daddy’s illness might not kill her before it does him. As such, she does not cut a terribly imposing figure, in spite of the fact that she possesses one of these faces in which every nuance of her emotional state is clearly readable. At this moment, she is very obviously on the edge.

Kathie bangs on the Wilsons’ storm door and demands, in no uncertain terms, that her property be returned to her right now. Randy plays dumb, tells her she’s crazy. He doesn’t know what she’s talking about. Then Randy’s mother, Carol, pokes her head out and says that Randy saw some people going in to Larry’ house and he went in to chase them away. “He was trying to help you, Kathie. Randy was trying to help.”

Carol’s slant on the events of the past half-hour might be forgiven, I suppose. Life has not blessed her with model children, and it’s no wonder she wants to put the best face on a rapidly deteriorating situation. In fact, many of us who grew up with Joanie and Randy and Tammy Wilson would argue that Randy isn’t even the black sheep in the family. That distinction goes to Tammy, who displayed abnormal hellcat potential even as a preschooler. And this was in a neighborhood overrun with all manner of aspiring delinquents. I don’t know how many of my childhood friends finally wound up in jail, but off the top of my head I can think of seven or eight the gendarmes would do well to keep an eye on.

In shock and disbelief, Kathie retreats to her house to wait for the authorities. They finally arrive around 10:00, arrest Randy, haul him up to Kathie’s to be identified, and then cart him off to the county jail in Lexington.

By sundown he’s made bail and is back at home, and Wayne wonders out loud why, exactly, the Davidson County Sheriff even needs a jail. “The cop shows on TV always make out like breaking parole is a big deal.” Of course, as I pointed out later, law enforcement in Davidson County bears a lot closer resemblance to The Dukes of Hazzard than it does NYPD Blue, so you have to lower your expectations a bit when you dial 911.

Later that night one of Randy’s acquaintances, a man the Sheriff’s deputies say is a known drug dealer, calls Kathie and offers to sell Daddy’s .38 back to her for $500. All this information – locations, descriptions, serial numbers – is handed over to the deputies.

“We’re on our way over there to bust him right now,” they say, as they hustle out the door. It’s the last she hears from them for five months.

Five months – that would make it early October of an election year, and the Sheriff’s bid for another term was on tenuous footing. The last thing Davidson County’s highest-ranking peace officer wants to see at this point is the meticulously detailed letter which arrives from Kathie via registered mail, a correspondence which is conspicuously cc’ed to all five daily newspapers serving Davidson County. Her late husband’s property had never been recovered. She had not been kept apprized of the disposition of the investigation or Randy’s trial. Her calls had not been returned. Etc.

This is the only victory Kathie wins during the whole debacle. Less than 24 hours after the letter was mailed, her doorstep was littered with public servants. That night the cherished .38 was recovered.

Six weeks later the Sheriff was looking for work.

* * * * *

Not with a bang, but a whimper. Such was Daddy’s death. The whole thing just stank of injustice. Not that he didn’t bring it all on himself – he did. Larry Mulraney abused his body mightily for nearly four decades, and several months earlier the doctors had given him a rather unambiguous ultimatum: stop drinking completely or die. And since they had just drained a gallon of fluid out of his gut, there was ample reason to expect they might be taken at their word.

And he did stop for a while. But the weekend before his liver finally checked out for good, according to Kathie, he had killed a gallon bottle of vodka. The vodka didn’t go down without a fight, and a couple nights later he was, for all intents and purposes, history.

“It was the liquor that killed him,” Kathie says. “He knew he couldn’t go back to drinking beer because he liked it too much, and there towards the end he was trying to drink liquor like he did beer.”

It doesn’t quite set that a man whose life presented him with so many chances to die dramatically should, in the end, waste into silence on the wrong end of a respirator. When he totaled his car so spectacularly back in his teens, it didn’t kill him. In 1965 he lost control of a motorcycle at 90 m.p.h. up on the expressway and slid, rolled, flipped, tumbled, and generally Evel Knieveled several hundred feet on the concrete, and somehow that didn’t kill him, either. I was four, I guess, and saw him the next morning. There was no two-by-two inch patch of skin on his body that wasn’t lacerated, abrased, bruised, or scarred, but he hated hospitals, so he had a buddy sneak him out.

And that pack of liquored-up South Davidson County dropouts didn’t kill him that night a few years back on Highway 109, just north of Denton, when they tried to run him and Kathie off the road as they were driving home from dinner at this barbecue place Daddy really liked down there. Of course, his survival that time probably had a lot to do with the other driver’s reaction when, looking over, he realized that Daddy was no longer paying the least bit of attention to his steering wheel. Instead, he was leaning out the window with the aforementioned revolver leveled at the driver’s earhole. The road simply wasn’t big enough for the both of ‘em, the little thug must have figured, so he opted for a quick and cinematic detour through the cornfield paralleling the highway.

None of the bulls Daddy rode on his way to winning the very first Love Valley Rodeo Bullriding Championship killed him, either. I was maybe eight or nine the first time my grandparents told me that Daddy used to ride bulls. Grandmother backhanded me for being impudent when I laughed in her face, but I couldn’t help it. I genuinely thought they were pulling my leg. My daddy was the consummate pretty boy – 6′4″, with thin, high cheekbones tracing back several generations to a full Indian grandmother, never a strand of that immaculate jet-black hair out of place, never a bead of sweat, never even the suggestion of exertion. The very thought of my father on anything as rough and dirty and smelly as a Brahma bull – I couldn’t help but laugh. I’d never seen him brave so much as a riding lawn mower.

But once they showed me photos I had to believe them, so I asked him about it one day. Some of his stories about being chased around the ring and over the fence by a rampaging ton of torqued-off ribeye, well, to this day I prefer my rodeos with three clowns, a high fence, and eight or nine rows packed with spectator between me and the mayhem erupting out of chute five.

All of this excitement was such a far cry from the bland desperation of the Intensive Care Unit at Forsyth Memorial. That day in mid-March when they first called me they said he probably wouldn’t last the night. I’d heard that crap before – that’s what they said when Grandmother first went into the hospital five years earlier, and she lasted another year or two before officially clocking out. So I wasn’t too surprised when a few days passed and he was still hanging on. I was in Boulder, in my first year of grad school at CU, and the family told me to just sit tight until they knew more. A month later they called and said it looked grave, and that I should come home right away.

In spite of all I knew about the situation, there was a big part of me that still revered the myth of Daddy’s immortality. I knew the odds – my friend Alex is an internal medicine specialist at Presbyterian Hospital in Atlanta, and he had pretty much acquainted me with the realities of the situation, given the facts as he understood them. But the head and the heart were not quite reconciled. And when I walked back into the ICU the first time, I wished on the spot that he’d died that first night, like the doctors promised, as quickly and painlessly as possible. I wished he had died in that car wreck, or on the expressway, or on the rodeo floor. Anywhere, anyway except this. It was exactly like when I flew home from Iowa in 1989 to see my grandmother. That husk, that improbable assemblage of flesh and fluid lying inert and incognizant on coarse, institutional sheets in a dank, gray institutional room. I’ve never quite known what it was, but it wasn’t Grandmother.

Likewise, there was precious little left of my father. I had been there three days before I had any notion that he had recognized me. He was drugged pretty heavily, thankfully, and I suspect that when he was conscious he played possum on us. Ignored us. Kind of like when you’ve kenneled the family cat for your vacation and you come home and the damned thing won’t acknowledge you for a week because it’s mad that you put it in that place. Daddy would rather have been dead at home than alive in the best hospital in the world.

The hospital had him hooked up to a stunning array of life-enhancing technology. You could have taken a picture of Daddy and all these machines and used it in a medical technology brochure. Hire an artist to doctor the photo a bit, maybe make the patient look a bit more lifelike, insert little numbers on each gizmo with lines leading off into the margins, where you’d have the make and model and a brief description. Add an 800 number and a price list and you’d have yourself a damned fine sales tool.

One of the things my thoughtful side wanted to ask him then, but couldn’t, was whether he had reconsidered his decision regarding Grandmother and the feeding tube. He couldn’t bring himself to have it removed. He couldn’t “play God.”

“I can’t make that decision. Can you?” he’d yelled. Well, yeah, actually I can, I said. I wanted to ask him if he’d changed his mind in light of what was happening to him now, but I couldn’t, because even when he finally woke up he couldn’t talk. The respirator makes that pretty much impossible.

There was one moment on the last night I was there. He had attained consciousness and seemed alert for the first time since I had arrived three or four days earlier. Several of us were back in his little room in ICU – Kathie and Wayne, as well as Chester and Donna, a couple of Daddy and Kathie’s closest friends. Daddy and Donna had some sort of private running joke going which I never got fully explained to me, but which everybody insisted was really a hoot. Her part in the joke involved asking Daddy if he wanted her to fetch him a Pepsi. We were all trying to be up for him the way people are when they’re around somebody who’s going to die. We smiled a lot, joked, told him how good he looked. Or rather the others did. I’ve never had much of a bedside manner.

Donna looked down at Daddy and recited her end in the long-running joke – “Chugger, you want me to get you a Pepsi?” And she laughed, I suppose the way she always did at this point in the gag.

Daddy, of course, couldn’t speak his line. But I was watching his eyes. YES! God yes, please bring me a Pepsi, the thought as clear as any words he ever spoke. He even strained upward like he wanted to climb out of the bed. He was on the respirator, though, and couldn’t have anything to drink – hadn’t had moisture in his mouth in a month – I know Donna didn’t mean to torment him, and I don’t even know if anybody besides me noticed.

I flew back to Colorado the next day, slightly encouraged by the fact that he had shown some improvement during my visit. If we could just get him stabilized. If the doctors could keep him alive and functioning and if Kathie could keep him on the wagon for six months, then maybe UNC would consider him for a liver transplant. Maybe. Maybe.
Two weeks later the phone rang.

* * * * *

It’s May 1, 1994, around 5 p.m. Larry Mulraney has just been pronounced dead. At roughly the same time, down the street at the Wilson house, Randy is back home after making bail. Tammy comes in. She’s heard what happened this morning. Whatever faults she might have, Tammy Wilson does understand something of the respect one accords to people who have been friends and neighbors for three decades. Especially when one of those people lies upon his deathbed.

An argument erupts between the two of them, and like most of the arguments I remember them having as children, this one rapidly escalates into a full-tilt flamethrower. Tammy simply cannot believe her brother could have done what he allegedly did. Not wanting things to deteriorate further, Greer attempts to intervene and halt the argument between his kids, which is kind of like a housecat trying to pull two pit bulls apart.

At about 5:15 p.m., a few scant minutes after Daddy died, Greer Wilson’s heart goes the way of Daddy’s liver – it just quits – and he drops at his children’s feet and dies.

* * * * *

I imagine Greer and Daddy boarding the train together. Hopefully there’s a lounge car, and maybe a pool table, so they can shoot a few games, enjoy a beer or two, and shoot the bull as the celestial engine chugs their souls off into eternity. Greer has a High Life and Daddy’s got a Schlitz, and since I’m not there to jinx him, Daddy’s probably whipping all comers in eight-ball. “Goddamn kids,” Greer says, hands on his hips. “I swear, Chugger, I don’t know what the hell I did wrong.” Daddy grunts, sizing up his next shot.

He runs the eight ball down the rail to win another one. Good karma early in the next life. It’s a positive sign for a man who was raised with Jesus, strayed as a young man, then, according to Kathie, came home to the Lord in the final weeks of his life.

Still, Larry Mulraney never was much for harp music. I can’t help hoping that Daddy and Greer are sitting in the lounge car of the Big Black Train, talking, drinking, comparing notes on the day’s events, and laughing their asses off.

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.

Jonathan Walton puts it this way:

I confess that I find this somewhat tragic, as I too have Southern pride. Aside from the velleity that describes the religion of the Lost Cause and the white supremacy that defines Confederate paraphernalia, there is such a rich history and heritage for Southerners to celebrate. It was Southern soil that gave birth to the original American musical art forms by way of the Negro Spirituals, blues and jazz. Then there’s the great literary tradition that includes Mark Twain, William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor and Tennessee Williams. The South provided the modern civil rights movement that moved this nation closer to its ideals of freedom, justice and democracy for all. And we should never overlook Southern sartorial splendor in the form of summer seersucker, and culinary combinations like chicken and waffles or fish and grits!

What he said. I have plenty of Southern pride, and my heritage does not depend on symbols that hurt other people.

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.

The great State of Florida has finally decided to revise language in its biology classrooms that banned the word “evolution” in favor of a mealy-mouthed “changes over time.”  After all, it is the 19th 20th 21st century, right?  Biblical creationists and their crypto-brethren adherents to intelligent design, sensing that the dreaded “e” word was about to snake its way into the sacred textbooks, clamored to soften the blow, insisting that said word be introduced as “the scientific theory of evolution.”  Florida’s State Board of Education voted 4-3 to accept the phrase, seemingly handing a victory to the religionists.

But not so fast.  The religionists think they won because they don’t understand the word “theory.”  They think (as I was taught in elementary school) that “theory” means “guess.”  And that is what it means in sloppy, common use.  Its precise, scientific meaning, however, is quite the opposite.  In science, a theory is a grand thing that explains a number of phenomena within a comprehensive framework.  For instance, the Theory of Gravity explains part of all of the motion of bodies in orbit, acceleration of bodies in relative motion to each other, how stars create fusion energy, and why bodies are torn apart in proximity to black holes.  Moreover, theories, because they predict so many things, undergo the most rigorous experimental testing imaginable.  A single conflicting datum, unexplained, can utterly destroy a theory.  Theories that have withstood the test of time, then, are virtually bulletproof.  They have often been expanded or given a more limited scope, in the way the Theory of Relativity limited Newton’s laws of motion to slow speeds, but they are rarely, and maybe never, completely overturned.

The new wording makes it extremely likely that Florida biology classrooms will spend a great deal of time exploring the word “theory” and what it really means.  That is not good news for the creationists.  The number of data now supporting the Theory of Evolution is staggering.  Any multi-day exploration of the evidence is likely to make at least some of their children rethink the literal interpretation of the biblical creation story.

Now, to the Reuters coverage.

The Reuters headline writer says “Florida will teach evolution, but only as a theory” (emphasis mine).  Clearly, the headline writer also has no idea what a theory is.  Michael Peltier, the writer, has this to say:

The panel includes the word “evolution” in state science standards for the first time, but it is relegated to a place among a host of ideas, including Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity. By contrast Isaac Newton’s law of gravity is taught as undisputed fact.

“Relegated” to a place including the Theory of Relativity???!!! That’s like a musician’s being relegated to Carnegie Hall, or an actor’s relegation to the Royal Shakespeare Company! I can only hope I’m so relegated one day.  As for “Newton’s law of gravity” being taught as “undisputed fact,” I would say that is true only in bad classrooms. Science has no undisputed facts. There are simply things that are so probable that they are treated as facts, and if they are undisputed at this time, then it is because no one has produced credible evidence to reduce their probabilities.

When are publishers and/or editors going to insist that their writers have at least rudimentary knowledge of science?  Math?  Anything at all?

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.

A major player in the Chattanooga meeting was The League of the South, an organization that at best can be described as – retrograde. Note these two points, the first from the “cultural independence” section, the second from the “social independence” section:

The South still reveres the tenets of our historic Christian faith and acknowledges its supremacy over man-made laws and opinions; that our Christian faith provides the surest means of securing the welfare of all mankind; and that our primary allegiance is to the Lord Jesus Christ and His Holy Church. (Italics mine)

Upholds the ontological or spiritual equality of all men before God and the bar of justice, while recognizing and rejoicing in the fact that it has neither been the will of God Almighty nor within the power of human legislation to make any two men mechanically equal. (Italics mine)

What The League of the South hopes for, then, with “Southern Independence” is a theocratic republic where Plessy v. Ferguson is the “right and proper” way for the races to live together under law.

That’s the half you got right.

But that meeting of secessionists in Chattanooga wasn’t only attended by Southerners of the same backward nature as those in the famous Harvard Yard joke:

Q: How many Southerners does it take to change a light bulb? A: Four – one to change the bulb, three to talk about how great the old bulb was….

The Middlebury Institute also sent delegates. Here are the “minimal rights and freedoms of individuals in a sovereign state” as articulated by Middlebury Institute:

MINIMAL RIGHTS AND FREEDOMS OF INDIVIDUALS IN A SOVEREIGN STATE

Rights to
Life, liberty, security
Equality before the law
Trial before competent tribunal, due process, counsel, appeal
Possess property and not be arbitrarily deprived thereof
Periodic elections with universal adult suffrage
Secession by any coherent unit

Freedoms of
Speech, opinion, expression in any media
Peaceable assembly, association
Belief, thought, religion, worship
Movement within any state, and to leave and return

Freedoms from
Slavery or servitude
Discrimination on the basis of race, color, sex, religion,
political belief, nationality, property, or birth
Torture or degrading treatment
Arbitrary arrest or detention
Invasion of privacy
Arbitrary deprivation of citizenship
Any action by the state to destroy or deny any of these rights and freedoms (Italics mine)

Clearly, the aims and goals of the Middlebury Institute are light years from those of the League of the South. So why are they meeting together? Is secession that strong and attractive an idea – one that reasonable people actually believe feasible? Interestingly, the Supreme Court may never have ruled definitively on the issue. Perhaps that is an impetus to the behavior of these groups.

For those on the far left like The Middlebury Institute and the Second Vermont Republic that oppose the Iraq War, support civil unions, and seek to free themselves from what they term “federal imperialism,” secession is a way to escape what they perceive as growing “corporatocracy” and pursue more humanistic, peaceful political and social paths. For those on the far right like The League of the South and Christian Exodus, secession would allow them to establish separate political and social states based on their views on race, religion, or both. And so they meet together to strategize and try to increase their support bases because while their particular reasons for secession may be widely different, their ends are the same – independence from what they believe is an increasingly intrusive and meddlesome federal government – a government more inclined to act for the political or economic gain of the governors than in response to the needs and wishes of the governed.

What’s perhaps most chillingly sad about this is that, no matter which side of the political spectrum one leans toward from that amorphous point we call “the center,” one can feel at least a twinge, an inkling of agreement with (or at least interest in) their reasons for seeking to leave the American union. Since we know that often what the fringe begins ends up in some form becoming the middle, that suggests problematic clouds on the horizon for what for now we know as these United States….

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.

In case you missed it, Democratic Presidential hopeful Edwards, a North Carolinian who’s behind Obama and Clinton in both the polls and fund-raising, is building his campaign around the theme of ending poverty (or at least putting a dent in it), a theme that seems to piss off just about everybody except the extremely impoverished. All’s fair in love and war and politics, of course, and we can expect Hillary (whose campaign has reportedly been testing the “$400 haircut” message with potential voters) and even Obama to take the cheap shot if they feel they need to, and if Sunshine Johnny somehow wins the nomination the gods only know what his GOP opponents will manufacture. Whatever it takes to win.

But in the interest of making sure that we understand what’s really going on, I want to make a few points.

First, about those haircuts. Presidential candidates can’t just waltz into Fantastic Sam’s like the rest of us (well, the rest of you – I don’t have any hair left to cut). They walk around with sizeable staffs and significant Secret Service contingents, which means that they either have to bring a barber in or shut down the shop for a couple hours. You can’t do either for $20. If you knew the truth about haute political coiffeur, you’d discover that John’s haircut probably cost no more than any other candidate’s.

Also, what precisely is wrong with a rich guy paying large for a service? The person cutting the hair is probably not rich, so that $400 is likely going to somebody who needs it more than John does. This is a good thing. From where I stand, it would be a tremendous thing if all rich people started getting more expensive haircuts. Going into restaurants and overtipping. Buying the most expensive bicycle in the shop when they they really only need one of the cheap ones. Hiring employees and paying them twice their market value.

No, you’re a bad person when you have all the money in the world and cheap those around you to death. So when people start laying that haircut shizzle on you, look hard at what they stand to gain from the lie.

Second, let’s look at the “slick lawyer” lie. I hate litigious ambulance chasers as bad as the next guy, but who exactly stands to profit by a smackdown on lawyers like John Boy? Well, he made a lot of money suing corporations. And while nobody talks about it, every goddamned one of those corps was represented by an army of slick lawyers of their own. Those slick lawyers acted in service to who? Ah – the have-mores. The corporate elites. Edwards and lawyers like him represent people who often (not always, to be sure, but often) have legitimate grievances against large corporate interests who have done them serious harm.

Put it this way – would you really want to face a world where there weren’t guys like John Edwards but there were companies like Halliburton, Enron, Adelphia, Qwest, WorldCom and Tyco being run by robbers and pillagers like Dick Cheney, Joe Nacchio, the Rigas crime family, Bernie Ebbers, Ken Lay, Jeff Skilling, Dennis Koslowski and Andrew Fastow?

When you hear one of Edwards’ detractors framing him as a slick lawyer, stop and ask yourself the real question – what does this person stand to gain by disempowering non-corporate litigators while doing nothing about the corporate side?

Third, about that “lavish” lifestyle. So Hillary and Barack and Rudy and Mitt and Lobbyin’ Fred live like sharecroppers? Are you stupid?

Oh, wait – it’s not that he’s rich, it’s that he’s a hypocrite. Because he’s rich but he wants to run on helping the poor. I get it. So let’s be clear about some basic realities here.

• Class disparity is an inherent function of human civilization. You have a nation, you’re going to have powerful and powerless, rich and poor, haves and have-nots, upperclass and underclass, etc.
• In America, only the rich get to run for President. Well, only the rich get anywhere near the point where they have a chance – put it that way. There are probably no more than five or six people who have a legit shot at the White House right now, and all of them are doing okay for themselves.
• Short of a shooting revolution, the poor are not going to overcome their poverty without the help of folks up the economic food chain. And frankly, they can’t even afford the hardware to win the shooting war, either.
• All this adds up to a basic fact: this election will be contested by rich people who care about poverty and rich people who don’t. Which is worse – using your resources and influence to work for the poor or living well and telling the poor to fuck themselves?

But wait – do we really believe that Edwards cares about the poor? That’s a better question, but again, let’s consider some facts.

Edwards wasn’t born with cash – “his father was a mill worker and he was the first child in his family to go to college.” I was raised by a mechanic and was the first person in my family to get a college degree, too, so I have a little insight into what this might mean. Having parents who worked in a mill in NC (and I’ll gladly defer to my S&R colleague Jim Booth, who was a mill worker’s son in NC, for a more informed perspective on this issue) meant not only that you didn’t have a lot of money, it meant that you didn’t have connections. You weren’t part of the old boy network and you were on the outside of the “good old American know-who” dynamic that determines who gets a shot and who doesn’t, especially in the South. I know this world, I know the invisible class barriers that working class whites face in North Carolina because I grew up working class there, too.

Edwards is that most cherished of American mythological creatures, the self-made man. He actually did work his way up from modest means. Rags-to-riches. American Dream. All those things we say make us great.

But when push comes to shove, those with power, money and influence tend to keep it close – they do not generally benefit from sharing with the previously unempowered. A significant number of our fellow citizens with money made it the old-fashioned way – they inherited it. And while creating opportunity for all makes for great campaign rhetoric, it’s not the sort of thing you see the hereditary have-mores throwing themselves into with a lot of verve.

Edwards is an outsider, and there’s not much the establishment likes less than uppity lower-class trash trying to shoehorn their way into the country club. Why? Well, you can trust people like you. If another guy grew up a fortunate son just like you did you have things in common. You share cultural experiences. He’s one of you. But if he’s one of them, you have to deal with something you don’t understand and can’t count on. Hell, what if the crazy bastard wants to, you know, start helping the poor? How is that good for you, exactly?

Am I being inflammatory? Maybe. Am I painting with an awfully broad brush? No doubt – you can’t talk about class factors house to house. But tell you what – prove me wrong. And you won’t do that by providing me with a couple nice exceptions, because for every Horatio Alger story you show me I’m going to respond with a few million hard examples of folks who didn’t manage to overcome their modest means. Life is a 100-yard dash and your chances of crossing the finish line first are greatly enhanced if you begin the race with a 90-yard head start. You may like the rhetorical flourish of the stirring example, but I’m a lot more persuaded by the 99.9% rule than I am the .1% exception.

I take a lot of this cynical rhetoric about Edwards for what it is, and yeah, I take it personally. Unless you were born rich, powerful and amoral you might ought to think about what this means for you, too.

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

The novel is something of a roman a clef, with fans, critics, and scholars having pored over Harper Lee’s life to look for the real life counterparts to the novel’s characters. Everyone knows that Scout Finch is based upon Harper Lee herself, that Dill is based upon Lee’s cousin, writer Truman Capote, and that Atticus Finch, Scout’s father and the “hero” of the book, is based on Lee’s father Amasa, an Alabama attorney.

The novel is in two large sections – the first part deals with Scout’s begging to attend school and attendant problems she experiences as a bright, precocious kid who tries to socialize herself into the public educational system. During summer vacation she and her brother Jem, with their summer friend Dill, establish a kind of friendship with a mentally disturbed neighbor, Boo Radley, who will eventually prove to be the children’s savior.

The second part of the novel explores a rape trial of the worst kind for the Deep South of the 1930’s – a poor, ignorant white woman, Mayella Ewell, accuses a kindhearted black man, Tom Robinson, of sexually assaulting her. As a favor to the judge presiding over the case, Atticus Finch agrees to serve as Robinson’s defense attorney. Finch proves conclusively that Robinson is innocent of the crime (humiliating both Mayella and her trashy, arrogant father, Robert E. Lee “Bob” Ewell, in the process), but the all white, all male jury convicts him anyway. Eventually Robinson, awaiting appeal of his case, panics, runs from his guards, and is shot dead. In the novel’s shocking coda, Bob Ewell attempts murder on the Finch children, badly injuring Jem before being killed by Boo Radley.

The novel’s scenes of contrasting cultures – the threatening white lynch mob defused by Scout’s chat with the father of a school mate among the lynchers, the warm visit by the Finch children at their black maid Calpurnia’s church – paint a picture of two separate realities overlapping lovingly at some moments, colliding viciously at other moments. Lee’s details evoke a South – with its mannerliness, its bigotry, its affectation of honor and its indifference to the suffering of part of its citizens – that everyone from Wilbur J. Cash to Bill Clinton has tried to suggest will disappear/is disappearing/has disappeared. To Kill a Mockingbird may be Harper Lee’s only novel, but it is a masterwork….

But then we have Jena, Louisiana.

As New Orleans attorney and law professor Bill Quigley reports, while the South Lee depicts in her classic novel may be only history in Richmond, Charlotte, and Atlanta, perhaps even in Montgomery, Jackson, and Baton Rouge (?!), the sophistication of Cash’s “Mind of the South” seems not to have reached the small town South despite its having had more than 70 years to get there….

Quigley’s Truthout report offers these facts about the case of the kids charged in the Jena case:

# The trouble started under “the white tree” in front of Jena High School. The “white tree” is where the white students, 80 percent of the student body, would always sit during school breaks. In September 2006, a black student at Jena high school asked permission from school administrators to sit under the “white tree.” School officials advised them to sit wherever they wanted. They did. The next day, three nooses, in the school colors, were hanging from the “white tree.”

# The Jena high school principal found that three white students were responsible and recommended expulsion. The white superintendent of schools over-ruled the principal and gave the students a three-day suspension saying the nooses were just a youthful stunt. “Adolescents play pranks,” the superintendent told the Chicago Tribune, “I don’t think it was a threat against anybody.”

# Black students decided to resist and organized a sit-in under the “white tree” at the school to protest the light suspensions given to the noose-hanging white students. The white district attorney then came to Jena High with law-enforcement officers to address a school assembly. According to testimony in a later motion in court, the DA reportedly threatened the black protesting students saying that if they didn’t stop making a fuss about this “innocent prank”, “I can be your best friend or your worst enemy. I can take away your lives with a stroke of my pen.” The school was put on lockdown for the rest of the week.

# On Friday night, December 1, a black student who showed up at a white party was beaten by whites. On Saturday, December 2, a young white man pulled out a shotgun in a confrontation with young black men at the Gotta Go convenience store outside Jena before the men wrestled it away from him. The black men who took the shotgun away were later arrested; no charges were filed against the white man.

# On Monday, December 4, at Jena High, a white student – who allegedly had been making racial taunts, including calling African-American students “niggers” while supporting the students who hung the nooses and who beat up the black student at the off-campus party – was knocked down, punched and kicked by black students. The white victim was taken to the hospital treated and released. He attended a social function that evening.

# Six black Jena students were arrested and charged with second-degree attempted murder. All six were expelled from school.

# The Jena Six and their families were put under substantial pressure to plead guilty.

# The prosecutor was allowed to argue to the jury that the tennis shoes worn by one black student charged could be considered a dangerous weapon used by “the gang of black boys” who beat the white victim.

# …when the pool of potential jurors was summoned, fifty people appeared – every single one white.

# The all-white jury which was finally chosen included two people friendly with the district attorney, a relative of one of the witnesses and several others who were friends of prosecution witnesses.

# The black student who was first tried, Mychal Bell’s parents, Melissa Bell and Marcus Jones, were not even allowed to attend the trial despite their objections, because they were listed as potential witnesses. The white victim, though a witness, was allowed to stay in the courtroom. The parents, who had been widely quoted in the media as critics of the process, were also told they could no longer speak to the media as long as the trial was in session.

# Other supporters who planned a demonstration in support of Bell were ordered by the court not to do go near the courthouse or anywhere the judge would see them.

# The prosecutor called 17 witnesses – 11 white students, three white teachers and two white nurses. Some said they saw Bell kick the victim, others said they did not see him do anything. The white victim testified that he did not know if Bell hit him or not.

# The Chicago Tribune reported the public defender did not challenge the all-white jury pool, put on no evidence and called no witnesses. The public defender told the Alexandria Town Talk, after resting his case without calling any witnesses, he knew he would be second-guessed by many, but was confident that the jury would return a verdict of not guilty. “I don’t believe race is an issue in this trial. I think I have a fair and impartial jury”

# The jury deliberated for less than three hours and found Mychal Bell guilty on the maximum possible charges of second-degree aggravated battery and conspiracy. He faces up to a maximum of 22 years in prison.

# The public defender told the press afterwards, “I feel I put on the best defense that I could.” Responding to criticism of not putting on any witnesses, the attorney said, “Why open the door for further accusations?”

Harper Lee’s Atticus Finch explains justice – and racism – this way to his son Jem:

The one place where a man ought to get a square deal is in a courtroom, be he any color of the rainbow, but people have a way of carrying their resentments right into a jury box. As you grow older, you’ll see white men cheat black men every day of your life, but let me tell you something and don’t you forget it—whenever a white man does that to a black man, no matter who he is, how rich he is, or how fine a family he comes from, that white man is trash.

Maybe it would be a good idea for Jena, LA, to have a town read-in and discussion of To Kill a Mockingbird. But given that they’ve had 46 years to address these same issues as they’re presented in Lee’s classic novel, perhaps it’s too soon for such an enlightened suggestion….