The Southerner Journal

It’s the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth and the 75th anniversary of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park

Connecting the Dots
by Glynn Wilson

I can’t wait for 2009.

When the ball drops and the calendar changes at one minute after midnight this Wednesday evening, Thursday morning, I’ve got a feeling the world is going to take a dramatic turn in a better direction. I could be wrong, but I say change is good.

If what I’m thinking turns out to come true, 2009 may be the year the human species turns it all around and starts living up to a smarter, more positive destiny. Maybe we can begin to escape the yoke of ignorance and religious dogma once and for all.

For starters, there will be a massive celebration among intellectuals on January 20, the day when George W. Bush boards that presidential helicopter with his dog Barney and leaves the White House lawn forever to head back to that fake ranch in Crawford, Texas.

On the same day, of course, Barack Obama will be sworn in as the 44th president of the United States. He will arrive in Washington, D.C., on a train, after riding a two-year campaign of “hope.” We will be drinking more than one toast to his victory on this New Year’s Eve, full of hope that he will be able to fulfill his promises.

The mainstream, corporate news media will treat every proposal he offers with a fake skepticism, questioning whether he can really make a difference. But here in Webland, we are going to reserve judgment and keep hope alive.

In addition to coverage of the new world under Obama, we will be spending a good bit of time and space in 2009 celebrating a couple of noteworthy anniversaries.

You will not be able to escape coverage of these events, so you may as well learn about them here first, since few American news organizations have turned the page to these issues, yet.

For the next year, it will be hard to turn on the TV and not see something about the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin. The year 2009 also marks the 150th anniversary of the publication of his myth-shattering book, On the Origin of the Species.

A column in the British newspaper The Guardian has the first story we’ve seen on this yet, and even acknowledges a fact you won’t see reported by any American news organization, since the religious backlash to Darwin is still powerful after 150 years.

According to the British author, it is reported that Darwin “is one of the three great intellectuals of the 19th century who shaped modernity, along with Marx and Freud.”

That would be Karl Marx, the social theorist who is attacked by the ignorant on a daily basis in the U.S. because of his association with Socialism, and Sigmund Freud, who pioneered explorations of the mind known as psychoanalysis.

All three of these men had a profound impact on the 20th century, as much for their influence on other thinkers as for the ideas they published themselves. That’s what the uneducated masses and the anti-intellectual news media don’t get.

Glynn Wilson

I captured the legendary blue mist of the Smoky Mountains on film one day in 2000. This is not just fog. It emanates from the pine trees there and is the reason the Cherokee people called it “the land of the blue mist.” European settlers came up with the translation “the Smoky Mountains.”

I spent a good deal of time in Tennessee in the late 1990s studying Darwin myself in a science communications doctoral program, so you can bet we will be following these stories all year with a great deal of relish.

And speaking of Tennessee, the year 2009 will also mark the 75th anniversary of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, which means, of course, that several camping trips will be in order this year to one of my favorite places on Earth.

According to one of the first stories out on this subject in the Scripps newspaper in Knoxville, the mountains have been home for my ancestors the Cherokee for centuries, and for researchers, “the park is an 810-square-mile laboratory containing more life forms than any other comparable location on Earth.”

Of course there is still a serious question as to whether my home state of Alabama is quite ready to join the rest of the country in this new world, since there are some who are still trying to fight the final battles of the Civil War here.

Even my old friend and the best columnist still working for an Alabama newspaper, Tommy Stevenson, just had to fall for it the other day by putting up a blog post suggesting that the Ten Commandments Judge, Roy Moore, may run for governor in 2010.

OK, we know a majority of the population of Alabama might very well vote for this religious zealot and authoritarian personality, long before they would vote for the black guy, Artur Davis. So if Alabama wants to continue being the laughing stock of the nation, go ahead people. Vote for the dumbass.

If you want to live in the past, keep reading those print editions of newspapers where they still think Karl Rove is a genius and former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman was guilty.

Meanwhile, we’ll be spending more time this year in another Southern state, Tennessee, camping out in the Great Smoky Mountains and thinking about the accomplishments of Darwin and his predecessors in science. Come along for the ride if you’re interested. There will be amazing photography to go along with the stories, budget willing.

Here’s to hoping you have a happy New Year in 2009.

Under the Microscope
by Glynn Wilson

In a world of hurt and bad news as the global economy implodes, there is some good news to report this Sunday morning as the late October air finally begins to cool off the brick walls of The Bunker.

The best news is that the presidential election of 2008 is almost over. One more week of negative TV ads and lying robo-calls and then we can all breathe a sigh of relief and get on with trying to turn this country in a better direction after eight years of black Bush anti-rule.

That is if the Democrats win and we don’t have to spend another four years fighting the idiotic conservative policies of the angry John McCain and his right-wing nut running mate Sarah Palin.

The other good news is that with one week and two days to go, the aggregated polling at Pollster.com shows the Democratic Party ticket winning in a landslide on Nov. 4. Let’s just hope the lead holds up for a few more days so that Karl Rove’s hackers cannot steal another election.

While the not-so-liberal New York Times issued it’s reasoned endorsement of the ticket of Barack Obama for president this week, our wildly conservative Republican hometown newspaper just had to extend its losing streak with this hilariously misleading endorsement of McCain.

We are still waiting on the apology from that editorial staff for their two-time endorsement of the dufus president-prince George W. Bush. It’s a wonder the racist “pro-life” newspaper sells any papers at all in a city full of liberals and African-American voters. I guess it’s safe to say they sell more newspapers in the white-flight suburbs than the city itself. The financial calculation had to be that an endorsement of Obama would have finished off the paper that has lost a significant portion of its staff of late to early retirement packages.

If only they knew how to produce a Website readers could use, they might have a chance of surviving in this new online world. There are a number of us out here who will never forgive them for their role in killing the one Scripps paper in Alabama, The Birmingham Post-Herald, which might have been able to provide the kind of Web journalism this state needs. Other Scripps papers around the country are doing some amazing work, including the Rocky Mountain News in Colorado and the Knoxville News-Sentinel in east Tennessee.

But that’s OK, because we have a long-term plan to continue providing a viable alternative to the people of this state who want a FREE free online news source without all the bureaucratic baggage of a conservative chain newspaper where corporate profits rule the editorial roost.

Since we already endorsed the Democratic Party’s pick in this race, there’s no reason to re-endorse the Obama-Biden ticket. Our recommendation is for voters to check the Big D and vote a straight Democratic Party ticket on the Nov. 4 ballot, not so much as an endorsement of “the man,” but to throw the Republican bums out who have screwed up just about everything they can in this country for the past eight years.

It is really hard to understand how anyone can vote for another Republican with the economy in the worst shape since the Great Depression, along with the debacle of the Iraq war, the failures associated with Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, and the complete loss of trust of the United States by people the world over.

We are concerned with some of Barack Obama’s suggested moderate policies, such as his hedge to the private sector on national health insurance. And we were not happy with his vote this summer for Bush’s spying bill that gutted the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution.

But we believe he is an educated man with an even-keel personality who can negotiate our way back into the hearts and minds of people around the world. And that should be our number one priority right now. We are going to need the good will of the world to right the wrongs and reverse the bad policies of the Bush-Cheney years.

Our first priority has to be an energy plan that begins to reduce our dependence on oil from the Middle East, a policy that also begins to address the top problem facing the world right now: climate change due to global warming. Even the Bush CIA and Senator John McCain realize that’s the world’s top problem, although that news gets buried in an election year when, in American elections, no one wants to be labeled a “liberal environmentalist.”

Once this election is over next Tuesday, that will be our focus. We will be working to influence the new administration in dealing with our energy and environmental problems, as well as figuring out how to provide health care to every American citizen. While the conservatives will continue to scream about “big government,” it’s going to take a pretty big government in the U.S. to tackle these problems.

And the fact is, it’s going to take a pretty big government, as well, to provide the leadership and incentive structure to fix the shattered economy. Our vision is that the only real future we have is a green future. We can grow our way out of this mess with green technology. That is our only real hope.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity.
- Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities, about the era of the French Revolution

Under the Microscope
by Glynn Wilson

It was the worst of times, the best of times, but now it’s over. Thank dog for the passing of August, 2007 - the hottest month on record in much of the United States and Alabamaland.

The dead leaves from the drought-ravaged trees in the area are already falling and the fall bird migration has officially begun.

But while August was a rough month to take in many ways, let’s not forget some of the best political news of the past seven years. President Bush’s amoral political aide Karl Rove and his incompetent but loyal Attorney General Alberto Gonzales have left the building – the White House that is – and slunk back to Texas in disgrace.

Senator Larry “I am not gay” Craig announced his resignation yesterday, helping to bring the Log Cabin Republican story out of the closet before the masses and the mass media.

Not since Monica Lewinsky’s stained blue dress have so many media organizations struggled with where to draw the line in talking about sex and politics in the same breathless sentence.

It just makes my heart sing when truth and justice are actually in evidence in the good old US of A.

But there’s more work to do to right the ship of state that has been careening toward the abyss of history since the Bush gang decided to invade Iraq in the wake of 9/11.

If things go as planned, North Alabama lawyer Jill Simpson of Siegelman affidavit fame will be heading up to Washington in mid-September to brief the House Judiciary Committee staff on what she still sees as an injustice directed from the White House in that political prosecution.

While the Alabama Democratic Party and even Siegelman’s own lawyers still don’t seem to get this story, it is one of the most important narratives going in the drive to set the ship of America back on an upright course.

There are no guarantees yet that the Democrats in Washington will be able to grasp this information and seize the day to turn this ship around. But at least it’s worth a try.

On September 15, we are told, there will be a large mass anti-war march in Washington on the same day Bush’s general in Iraq is supposed to report back on the progress of the troop surge. We will be there to cover it.

According to several early stories about that report leaked to national newspapers, the news will not all be good. But since those stories have been out there, the report seems to be changing, at the direction - surprise, surprise - of the Bush White House.

According to all the TV punditry on the Sunday morning talk shows today, Army Gen. David H. Petraeus may now have more so-called “good news” to report, although it will still set off a contentious debate in Washington over what to do about the debacle over there.

Reports Add Fuel to Iraq Debate

If the talking heads are to be believed on “Meet the Press” and the newer Chris Matthews show on NBC, Bush is so politically savvy that he will turn the political debate over the war around and the Republicans will stand by their man and not help the Democrats do anything to de-fund the war or force the beginning of troop withdrawals from Iraq.

I think they are totally wrong from a political point of view and certainly in terms of what is right for the country. Apparently, however, establishment Democrats are still such a part of the Washington taint that they do not have the guts to take the fight to Bush all the way to ending the war and impeaching Bush.

Sources tell us that the Republicans have the dirt on every Democrat in Washington, including Rep. John Conyers of Detroit, Michigan, who was seen in Africa with Rep. William Jefferson of Louisiana - the guy who got caught with a bunch of tainted cash in his refrigerator.

Before the 2006 mid-term election, Conyers was holding hearings in the Capitol basement and pounding the minority gavel saying if the Democrats regained control of Congress, he would move to impeach Bush, one of the worst presidents in American history and whose administration has been riddled with one scandal after another from Katrina to torture to spying on Americans.

Since the Democrats took back Congress, however, there has been very little talk of that, except from Rep. Dennis Kucinich, who is running for president but does not have an angel’s chance in hell.

A few weeks ago, there was a lot of talk about impeaching Gonzales. But he did the Washington two-step and got out of town while Congress was on vacation in August, right after Rove announced his resignation and just before Larry Craig announced his. The result? A buried story.

And now it’s football season, so the masses are paying even less attention, especially in Alabamaland.

Nick Saban seems to be on the right track with the Alabama Crimson Tide’s 52-6 season opening victory over Western Carolina, but let’s face facts. The Hoover High School football team could have beaten Western Carolina. It was no true test.

Let’s just hope the worst of times are over and that the best of times are still ahead. I don’t have much faith. But you’ve got to hold out some hope in life.

At least we’re all not dead yet. And as I often like to say, “you can’t win if you don’t play.”

So let’s take the fight to them! What do you say?

Not Black and White

Under the Microscope
by Glynn Wilson

BIRMINGHAM, Ala., June 10 - There is a famous story about editors at the New York Times I learned while working with the elite of the elite a few years back.

Reporters who make the big leagues of American journalism hear this story and learn to deal with it in their own way.

As the story goes, when an editor calls a reporter in the field in a place like Birmingham, Alabama, and asks: “Is the community torn asunder down there?” The reporter, if he wants to keep his job, is supposed to not only answer, “yes.” You are supposed to provide direct quotations from people in the community who will corroborate the premise of the story, to back up the lede, so to speak.

There have been many situations when my own instincts and the facts on the ground did not support the premise, and in fact, the opposite, counterintuitive truth is often the case.

And since I am in the business of calling it like I see it and telling it like it is, I often reported the truth on the ground and to hell with what a bunch of editors in New York think.

But today, in the story I am about to report, I think it is safe to say that this community is torn asunder. It’s just that in this case, the editors in New York could care less. Why? Because the story does not involve Paris Hilton or the Red State-Blue State, Conservative-Liberal, Democrat-Republican divide.

The story involves a little old man named Clay Blake, 78, who lives right down the street from here.

This past Tuesday afternoon around 1 p.m., in what we like to call “broad daylight,” Mr. Blake was unloading some groceries from his pickup truck. And up walked a mixed up young man - who should never have been in the possession of a hand gun – and held up Mr. Blake. He forced this little old man who never hurt anyone in his life into the house he has lived in for the past 40 years.

Once inside, this young man, of the African-American persuasion, tied little old Mr. Blake up with the power cord from a vacuum cleaner. He then kicked Mr. Blake in the face, rendering him unconscious.

When Mr. Blake came to, he discovered his wallet and a couple of pistols missing, and then made a phone call and had himself checked into the hospital at Medical Center East.

The neighborhood was all abuzz about this dastardly dead after the crime brief hit the Birmingham News on Saturday.

What this mixed up young man who committed this crime does not understand is that his already sad and pathetic life is about to take a drastic turn for the worse. Maybe the money he stole went to purchase some food and bought him another day of life on this planet. Or maybe it just went for some crack cocaine to make him fell better about himself for a few measly minutes.

Either way, this young man is about to be found out and turned in to authorities in ways he will never comprehend. And he will either end up in prison or dead.

Maybe he would be better off dead. Or maybe he should never have been born in the first place, if his mixed up single mama had been told by someone cool that there is a such thing as a condom - and that there is no shame in using one.

Now here is where the politics and sociology of the situation get interesting beyond the basic facts about the crime. If only she had been told that this is a black and tan world, not a black and white world, maybe none of this would ever have happened.

What do I mean by that?

It’s like this. There are some racist, conservative members of this community who would like to hang this little shit up by his toes and torture him to death for his crime. But these are the same Republican voters who oppose birth control - and taxes for prisons. It is just bad public policy to think you can have it both ways.

When the church and the state both advocate unworkable policies and try to tell teenagers to “abstain” from sex, and deny them a real education about sex and intelligent alternatives to unwanted pregnancies and the spiraling down nature of poverty, what kinds of bad decisions can we expect in our communities?

And this is particularly acute in a town like Birmingham, where both races still suffer from the sting and distrust of segregation.

At least in a place like New Orleans, the races lived in relative proximity of one another and in relative harmony for 300 hundred years. It is different in Birmingham, where the clash of the races in the newer, sprawling suburbs comes into specific relief every time an incident like this one is reported.

The African-American community in and around Birmingham will never trust white people, and the whites will keep trying to escape these kinds of crimes by moving further and further out into the country toward Blount and St. Clair Counties.

Meanwhile, nothing is done to try and bring people together and get them to understand the larger facts on the ground. And this serves only the politicians on the right and the left who get themselves elected by using the great divide to scare people and keep them down.

If only people could understand that there is no such thing as a simple, black and white world. There are an abundance of shades of gray out there.

What we need is a government that tackles practical solutions to real problems. One real problem that is leading to the current crime wave is the growing divide between the rich and the poor, fed by a mostly Republican effort to keep wages down so large corporations can make more and higher profits for mostly white stockholders.

This is an unsustainable world where all the problems in society are going to get worse, not better. And for every conservative who listens to talk radio and Fox News who likes to say, “that’s the American way,” here’s a fact for you.

The founding fathers of this democratic republic had in mind an egalitarian society with a large middle class with equal opportunities for all. They DID NOT envision a so-called “Christian” nation modeled after the Monarchies of Europe.

You can say it all day long every day. But that does not make it true.

And what is so Christian anyway about a society that discriminates on the basis of race and class? Nothing.

So show me a Democrat or a Republican politician who understands these things, and he or she will get my vote, black or white.

Now call me a liberal and dismiss what I have to say - you idiot so-called conservative lurkers.

We say there is a two-word phrase for anyone who plays that game. In the perfect, fictional world of Locustforkland, where the river runs cold and true, the great blue herons dance like Elvis and the people like to shoot the breeze (and they are usually right), we like to call you “Alabama dumbasses.”

And of course we are right.

Connecting the Dots
by Glynn Wilson

As I woke up and smelled the coffee this morning and consulted the wires, the polls and Krystal Ball, it became obvious already what’s going to happen in the Presidential election of 2008.

So you may as well go ahead and place your bets now at PaddyPower.Com, or take us up on the Yuengling odds.

Krystall Ball has been a tad fuzzy on ‘08 so far, since it’s WAY to early to be talking about a presidential election that is more than a year and a half in the future.

But now, with Tennessee actor Fred Thompson’s announcement that he is “testing the waters” and will jump into the race by July 4, it is fairly obvious how this whole thing is going to play out.

Thompson Moves To White House Run

It’s Sen. Fred Thompson vs. Oscar winner Al Gore in ‘08.

What’s Krystall Ball’s reasoning?

Up to now, the Christian Right really hasn’t had anyone in the race to vote for.

Rudy Giuliani of New York, with his pro-abortion and gay rights record, would never have cut it in the conservative Republican primary.

And Sen. John McCain’s numbers have been way down in part due to his push for more troops in Iraq and in spite of his foray to the Falwell mountaintop.

Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney could never carry the day, because the polls show the Christian Right will never vote for a Mormon. Sad but true. That’s the problem with this religious voting issue in the U.S.

Watch for the Karl Rove political machine, with the Bushes out of the way, to start painting Thompson as the next Ronald Reagan. He is a well-known Southerner from his days of playing the president in movies and a lawyer on TV and he has amassed a solidly conservative voting record in the U.S. Senate.

Hillary might have been able to beat Giuliani or even John McCain. But she hasn’t a prayer against Thompson. Sorry Bill.

As for why Al Gore will run, Krystal Ball says she doesn’t believe Gore when he says he is not running. He may not be in the race yet.

But when it becomes obvious from the polls that Hillary or Obama or even Edwards won’t be able to out-celebrity Thompson, the liberal bloggers will draft Gore and the Democratic Party hierarchy will have to go along or face losing in ‘08 - which could bring back talk of the party’s demise at the hands of Karl Rove.

Another interesting question is: Who will get the nod for Veep on the Democratic side?

Krystal Ball says it will most likely be Barack Obama, the popular black senator for Illinois, since chances are, Hillary would not be interested in being the first woman vice president without having Bill living in the White House as first hubby. Obama is young enough and new enough in American politics to take the Veep slot to position himself to run for president in the future.

But don’t place your Yuengling bet or Irish political bet on this one just yet. Krystall Ball needs to wait and see how everyone reacts to Thompson’s announcement around Independence Day.

The one other calculation is: Who will win in ‘08? Krystall Ball says the Democrats will still pull it out in a squeaker. It won’t come down to hanging chads in Florida this time or a few thousand stolen votes in Ohio. It will all come down to Louisiana, which will go Democrat no matter what due to the Bush administration’s handling of Katrina.

Bet against us if you dare. But the Thompson v. Gore match-up is a one Yuengling bet right now. It should be up to a six pack by the Fourth of July, when Thompson formally makes his announcement.

And that’s the word from Locust Forkland, where the river runs cold and true, the great blue herons dance like Elvis and the people like to shoot the breeze (and they are usually right).