Secrets in the East

I’ve been delaying working on this for a few days.  Sometimes, what I have to say makes me uncomfortable.

My father had eight children. Four were human: my two brothers, my sister, and me; four were not human: Missco, Mllsaps, Trustmark, and St Dominic’s. He tried his best to balance his time between us, but sometimes, living things are difficult to balance.  In the five or six years before his death, I would regularly meet my father and his office for a drink after work. He alone understood how dangerously unhappy I was and blindly helped me search for the solution neither of us could see.  On those nights alone with my father in his office, he told me many things as he reflected back on my own history and the history of my city.   

One day, not long before he died, he told me that he had searched as far into the west as he could see to remove anything that might be a danger to his children in the future, but he failed to look very far into the east. Anyone who grew up in a prosperous and successful and growing Jackson and then expected that to continue in their lives probably understands what he meant. Nobody expected the city to die. We were doing great, but we didn’t look into the east.

I always knew that my dad kept secrets.  I also knew that he kept these secrets because if he didn't, somebody would get hurt, and that made me sad for him.  What happened to Jackson, why it grew so rapidly, then broke and started to shrink, is a story he was deeply involved in.  Some of it he told me, and some of it he kept secret. 

To understand what happened to Jackson, you have to understand what happened in 1969 and 1970 when nearly half the white students abandoned the Jackson Public Schools and started something else.  I wanted to resolve, in my own mind, what his role was in all this.  He told me a few things through the years, but I wanted to validate what he told me through other sources.  I wanted to see his role in what happened to Jackson the way other people saw it.

My dad was in the school business.  Even if he weren’t in the school business, he would have been right in the middle of all this because that’s how he lived, trying to build his community.  He told me many things, but there were many more I had to find out on my own.  

I had dinner with my sister this weekend.  There are things in my universe where she really is the only person alive who can understand what I’m saying.  After everyone else had left, she waited with me for my Uber to arrive.  I talked to her about how I’ve spent over twenty-five years digging deeply and researching what happened to Jackson, our home.  I always felt like, because of who our family was and because of who I was, I might be in a fairly unique position to understand what went on here, why, and what the results were.

There’s been so much written about what happened in Jackson and in Mississippi during the “civil rights era.”  It’s become this really complex mosaic of different points of view and different perspectives, and I’ve tried to consume it all, to try and understand what happened in a way that satisfied my own mind.  Doing this for so long, I’ve cultivated a pretty substantial body of knowledge.

I told my sister I didn’t really know what I wanted to do with all this history I’d accumulated.  I could write a scathing tell-all that exposes all the secrets of Jackson’s society and its racist underbelly, but the story was so much more complicated than that, but even if it weren’t more complicated than that, even if it were just the story of a bunch of unreconstructed racists screwing things up, nearly all those guys are dead, and the ones who aren’t dead are in a memory care facility now.  There’s nothing I could write that could bring anybody justice, and there’s nothing I could write that would change the past or change the future.  Most of these guys are dead, but their children aren’t; their grandchildren and, in some cases, their great-grandchildren are still very much with us, still very much a part of Jackson.  Did I want to be the guy who put down in a book that somebody’s beloved Pop-pop did something horrible long before they were born?  

I still want to tell this story, but I have to be careful and be gentle with the memories people have of the people who lived here.  I have to try not to be a hypocrite here because I have already said some pretty rough things about Ross Barnett and Alan C Thompson, and I very much know their families and descendants, but I’m trying to make allowances for people whose histories are already part of public discourse, and people (like Barnett and Thompson) who made a particular effort to make things difficult.

That being said, in my studies, I’ve found that some of the people everyone assumes were the villains might not be.  My entire life, I’ve heard people from every angle blame what happened in Jackson on Billy Simmons and the Citizen’s Council.  I can’t posit that Billy was anything like a good guy.  He said, wrote, and broadcast some of the most vile racist stuff that I’ve ever been exposed to.  He was pretty bad, but If you look at the number of kids who ended up enrolled at the three Jackson Citizen’s Council Schools and the fact that they were out of business by 1981, you can’t really say they caused the problem.  There just weren’t enough kids in those schools to account for the nearly 50% drop in white student participation in Jackson Public Schools, and even if they were, they were out of business before the first class of kids who had never been in public schools graduated.

In 1981, former Nixon Aide and lifelong republican operative Lee Atwater was recorded as saying: 

“You start out in 1954 by saying, “N____r, n____r, n____r.” By 1968 you can’t say “n____r”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “N____r, n____r.”

Here, he lays out the infamous “Southern Strategy” pretty plainly.  It was never more relevant than in 1969 and 1970 in Jackson, Mississippi.  There were guys who believed everything Billy Simmons believed but didn’t like the way he said it.  In their minds, as long as you didn’t say “N____r, n____r, n____r” then you were in the clear, even if that’s what you were thinking.  These guys wanted schools that ticked all the boxes that the Citizen’s Council schools ticked but without being affiliated with the Citizen’s Council.  They managed to introduce class into this gumbo of race, class, and gender.  They considered themselves in one class and Billy Simmons and all his Citizens Council pals in another.  I have a problem with that.  Billy Simmons had the courage to tell us what he was.  These guys who were the same thing but tried to tell us they were something different were less of a man than Billy, in my opinion.  I can’t say that any of the things he believed were right or decent, but he had enough respect for other people that he would at least be honest and upfront about it and not hide it behind dog-whistle words like what Atwater was talking about.  

One of my fraternity brothers, a man by the name of Dick Wilson, tried to tell me not to judge Simmons too quickly.  “He’s a lot smarter than people realize,” Dick told me.  It took me a while to understand what Dick was saying, but he was right, Billy Simmons was kind of a genius.  You can look at his library now at the Fairview and see evidence of this.  What might tempt a guy with such a vast intellect down such dark avenues is something I don’t understand, but I’d really like to.  I’m fascinated by his story.

The influence of Kappa Alpha Order is waning in the world, and I think that’s probably for the best.  In 1969, it was at its peak.   When I look at the names of the men who organized and funded these non-citizens-council segregation academies in Jackson, a good two-thirds of them were KAs, mostly from Ole Miss.  We’ll be judged for that, and I think that’s fair.  These guys were community and business leaders; they could have said, “Let’s take all this money and effort and dump it into the public schools, and the Justice Department be damned!” but they didn’t. 

In 1969, most of these guys considered themselves at war, not with black Mississippians, but with the federal government.  Kirby Walker, superintendent of Jackson Public Schools, had a plan to gradually integrate our schools.  In interview after interview, he was proud of the fact that he had introduced black students into every school without incident.  I honestly think Mayor Thompson wanted a big, violent confrontation like what happened in Oxford.  He kept buying equipment and building up his forces to be ready for it, but it never happened.  

In the Alexander v Holmes County decision, the court decided that “justice delayed, is justice denied” and ordered the Mississippi schools to be racially balanced immediately. And in some cases, like Jackson Public Schools, they put the Justice Department in charge of it.  Kirby Walker spent ten years out of a thirty-year career trying to desegregate Jackson Public Schools.  He believed he had done a good job, only to have it torn from him and given to Washington Bureocrats.  In 1969, he retired rather than serve under the federal Department of Health Education and Welfare.  Upon retiring, he told my grandfather to say to my father, “Tell Jim to get those boys into private schools.  I just don’t know what’s going to happen with Jackson Public Schools.”  

That caused a bit of panic in my family.  Both my mother and father were products of the Jackson Public Schools.  They were our best and most profitable customer, and even with Dr. Walker retiring, my dad had many friends who still worked at Jackson Public Schools.  At the same time, nearly everyone he knew from Ole Miss was sending their children to either JA or Prep, and his fraternity brothers served on every board.  There was a time when four members of the Jackson Prep board of trustees had consecutively been the president of the Ole Miss Chapter of Kappa Alpha after my father.  For good or for evil, in the second half of the twentieth century, we got mixed up in everything that happened in Mississippi.

Announcing that the Justice Department was taking over our schools caused a full-on panic.  In it, with pressure from his own father and his father’s friends, I think my dad also panicked.  In his mind, sending us to St. Andrews quieted the voices, yelling that he had to do something while not giving in to the pressure to join a “segregation academy.”  Without a doubt, there were parents who were sending their kids to St. Andrews because it was almost entirely white, but there were also parents who sent their kids to St. Andrews precisely because it wasn’t entirely white.

There were heroes in those days, although we don’t talk about it very much.  Andy Mullins couldn’t have been much older than twenty-five or twenty-six when he fought off efforts from without and from within to force St. Andrews to join the Mississippi Private School Association, so boys at St. Andrews wouldn’t have to worry about playing football against any black boys.  Andy went on to fight a number of important battles, but that one must have been pretty tough, considering how young he was and how uncertain the times were.  As I understand it, St. Andrews still plays in the league he got us into.

I’ve made no secret about how much I fought David Hicks when I was at St. Andrews, but there’s something important I need to say about him.  David pretty quickly assessed the situation in Jackson and what was going on with the other schools almost as soon as he got here.  He very firmly drew a line in the sand and said, “This is what they’re about, and this is what we’re about.  Don’t ever get it confused.”  The school still operates under that principle today.  

In 1950, Jackson had one of the most successful and friendliest public schools in America (so long as you were white.)  By 1970, nearly half the white students in Jackson Public Schools abandoned it rather than stay and be a part of the Justice Department's efforts to balance the school’s population racially.  They left, and they never went back.  People who couldn’t afford to keep sending their kids to private schools left the city.

I often think about what would have happened if the scores of families who left Jackson Public School had banded together and decided they were going to make the best of whatever the Justice Department had in mind.  I think, within just a few years, they would have realized that they could handle this, and with a strong public school that everybody supported, there never would have been the massive white flight that decimated Jackson.  There were efforts from several prominent private school educators in the 80s and 90s who returned to the public schools and tried to undo the harm they had done.

Jesus talks to us about shifting sands.  There’s even a pretty great song about it.  Mississippi twice built its house on shifting sands.  Once, when we started importing people from another part of the world to serve as slaves here, and then again, when we decided that we had to keep these former slaves under our thumb and forever separate from us socially and politically after slavery ended.  What Jesus said about building a house on the shifting sands was true; our foundations came tumbling down.

None of the people in this story meant to choose the wrong thing.  That choice was made decades before they were born.  The people in this story were trying to navigate the world as it was left to them.  Their biggest sin was not questioning the assumptions they were working under.

In the story of what happened in Jackson, there were bad actors, that’s for sure.  Because I’ve been doggedly pursuing this story for thirty years, I’ve uncovered a lot of them, even the ones my father tried to keep hidden from me.    Most people weren’t bad actors, though.  Most were regular people trying to do the best they could for their families during a time when nothing made much sense, not the world they knew before and not the world laid out before them.  Faced with a very uncertain future, a lot of them just panicked.  Moving their kids out of the public schools into a private school seemed like the safe thing to do, and when your children are involved, nearly everyone wants the safe thing to do.

So, here we are.  Fifty years later, and I’m keeping the same secrets my father kept.  Maybe that’s my legacy.  Maybe that’s what he was trying to keep me away from.  What I know is this:  there were bad men.  There were many painful and ignorant and short-sighted things–but most people were good.  They may have been short-sighted or misguided by our tangled and snarled culture, but they all wanted something better for their children, even if what they were afraid of wasn’t even real.  

Jackson survived.  It just moved to Madison, Brandon, Pearl, and Clinton.  The city itself sits like a scar on the landscape.  A reminder of the good we failed to do.  I wanted to know what happened to my city.  I wanted to know if my father or I were culpable for what happened.  I think he was, and I am, but so is everyone else.  People use the word “simple” to describe Mississippi.  “We’re simple.”  “We have simple minds.”  “We have simple lives.”  None of that is true.  There’s nothing simple about living here or about being born here.  Our history is a mass of rose thorns, kudzu, shards of broken stained glass from churches where no one meets anymore, cornbread, and piercing sunlight.  It’s really hard to make any sense of it unless you were brought up in it.  Look as far as you can to the West, but look to the East too, when you can, and sometimes decide to keep secrets.

The Van Cliburn Concert

 In 1978 I was fifteen years old.  It was the first year I ever fully experienced the darkness inside me.  My family fought through an extraordinarily difficult 1977 and survived.  Things were looking up, but my outlook on life lost any hint of sunshine for the first time.

My father was the chairman of the Mississippi Arts Festival, an event designed to raise money and awareness of the proposed art center attached to what was then called the City Auditorium.  My father’s favorite appreciation of art was listening to Hee Haw on channel 12.  He was a big promoter of the idea of bringing arts and culture to Jackson, but he wasn’t the type to spend much time at the opera.

The featured performer for the 1978 Mississippi Arts Festival was Van Cliburn, the celebrated pianist from Shreveport, Louisiana.  He was to give a performance at the City Auditorium and attend a gala reception afterward at the Governor’s Mansion.  My mother wanted very much to attend.  Although he helped arrange the event, my father would have never survived a two-hour classical piano concert awake, and he didn’t much care for that governor, and that governor didn’t much care for him.

My oldest brother had just returned home and was under both legal and medical advice not to go out at night.  My middle brother saw nothing remotely cool in a concert by a guy who looked like Jerry Lee Lewis in a tuxedo.  Having deeply loved the previous Beverly Sills concert, I was anxious for my mother to ask me.  She decided I was old enough, not only for the concert but for the reception afterward.

We had dress circle tickets purchased in the name of The Office Supply Company.  I didn’t have a tuxedo, but I did have a navy blue suit and a red tie.  The concert was fascinating.  Van Cliburn moves like he was animated by Walt Disney.  I was attentive and wrapped in attention the entire concert.

After the concert, Mother asked if I thought we could park behind the Office Supply Company and walk to the Governor’s Mansion.  Since she was the one with the impractical shoes and the one driving, so I figured it was best just to do whatever she suggested.

Inside the Governor’s Mansion, I recognized many faces from church and our neighborhood.  Dick Wilson and Lester Senter stood next to Dick’s father, Baxter.  Bill Goodman had a drink and asked my mother, “Where’s Jim?” with a smirk.  My father’s actual location at home watching television wasn’t a mystery to anyone.  I’m sure there were lots of husbands who wished they’d made the same deal.  

Sunday night in April, the Governor’s mansion was prolific with flowers.  The Governor and his wife stood to the right of Van Cliburn, shaking the hands of those willing to wait in line.  Cliff Finch had hair not unlike Donald Trump.  Both an unnatural color and an unnatural shape.  Deeply tanned, he convinced Mississippi farmers and workers that he was one of them by carrying a lunch box.  He was not.  His wife looked like she’d taken enough pills that we could have performed minor surgery on her without complaint.  We later learned that was most likely the case.  At fifteen, I was already pretty well-versed in the ritual of shaking hands.  This wasn’t my first governor.  

My mother began to work the room.  These were her people, and there was an open bar.  “I want to look at the paintings,” I said as a way of announcing that I was going off on my own.  More than anything, I just wasn’t in the mood for a grown-up party or any kind of party, even though I really loved the concert.  

I found my way into a room to the side of where they had the staging area set up for the party.  It seemed to be used for storage.  In a couple of years, Elise Winter completely remodeled and restored the Governor’s Mansion.  Rumors and tales of the damage they found left by the Finch administration passed around Jackson for years.

I recognized a girl standing by a window as the governor’s daughter.  She was something like two years older than me and held a glass of chilled white wine.  “Do you want one?” she asked.  I was pretty sure she wasn’t supposed to have one, and I was absolutely sure I wasn’t supposed to.  I’d snuck alcohol from parties before, but considering the guest list at this one, I was under some pressure to be good.  She sounded like this was maybe her third glass that night.

“What’s your name?” She asked.  Her hair was unnaturally blonde and sculpted with aquanet and a blow dryer.  Her voice had a cadence that told me we weren’t from the same tribe.

“Alexander,”  I said.  I did that sometimes when I didn’t want to have to explain that my name was Boyd with a “D” and not just “Boy.”  I still do it sometimes.

“Did you go to that thing?” She asked, gesturing toward the Auditorium.  

“Yeah, my dad was a sponsor,”  I said.

“That’s not my kind of music.”  She said and gripped the back of my arm.  “You’re so big.”  She said.  I’d heard that before.  “I can get you a glass of wine or a beer if you want it.”  She said, demonstrating her power and connections.

“Can’t, I’m in training,”  I said.  It was mostly a lie, but if she hadn’t figured out I was just fifteen, I didn’t want to be the one to spoil her delusion.  

Glancing left and right, she moved her hand around to the front of my arm and squeezed my bicep.  Then she leaned in and kissed me.  I could feel her tongue brush against the tip of the cupid’s bow on my top lip.  This, too, felt like a show of power and connections.

I pulled back.  “I’ve got to go check on my ride,”  I said.  Saying that my ride was my mother wasn’t cool, so I left that part out.  After I found my mother, I never saw the governor’s daughter the rest of the night and never spoke to her again the rest of my life.

There were stories about her career at Ole Miss, but I’m sure she was a pretty nice girl.   A few glasses of wine and a really boring party can lead a girl to silly mistakes.  

I didn’t feel like I’d been kissed by a pretty girl at all.  I felt really dark and misunderstood.  I felt like if she had any idea who I was or what I was like, she never would have kissed me.  Sometimes, it’s a lot easier to kiss a stranger.  I experienced that a few times.  It’d be another year before I felt like I had a handle on this being around girls thing.  So much had to happen before that.  Some of it was really dark and painful.  I wasn’t really ready for what life would become.  I’d had a taste of it.  Some of my friends had lost a parent, and I was just beginning to realize that I’d lost my brother, or at least lost the person he was before he got sick.  

Van Cliburn’s career would continue to rise, but I would always associate it with something entirely different.  His was the music that played when I went through one of life’s more difficult doors.  Hiding a pretty girl in one of the rooms didn’t make things much better.

The Citizens Council and the Republican Party

 The genius of the Citizens Council, the thing that made them both the most effective and the most evil, was that they equated segregation with good citizenship.  It was in their name.  Fighting to keep our schools segregate equated to patriotism and cultural loyalty.  If you read their literature, that was clearly the message.

The Citizens Council started in the Delta, in areas where the black population outnumbered the white population, areas where the idea of “separate but equal” was as problematic as the idea of integration.  They didn’t see these descendants of slaves as peers or equals or fully citizens and saw the interference from the federal government, both through the Brown Decision and the Civil Rights Act, as an impingement on their sovereignty.  For them, this was the heart of “states’ rights.”  

In Jackson, the Citizens Council was, at first, fully accepted in business and social circles.  Doctors, Lawyers, and Bankers all became members, along with tradesmen of every sort.  The Citizens Council was a great equalizer with regard to the issue of class but the most significant divider with regard to the issue of race.  

By the mid 70’s, the social and economic tides turned against the Citizen’s Council.  The rest of the world began equating the Citizen’s Council with the Klan.  Jackson's business, legal and religious leaders began seeing it the same way.  There were men in Jackson who remained loyal to the Citizens Council, including some prominent physicians, but by 1975 they saw their professional progress hampered by their membership in the CC.  Offers for board memberships and professional advancement started slowing and stopping.  Thompson, who had been Mayor of Jackson, was in the Citizens Council; he was replaced by Davis and then Danks, who were not.  The tide was changing.  

The idea that the federal intervention in our culture, our education, our economics, and our society didn’t go away though, but it did change names.  Mississippi had been a yellow-dog Democratic state ever since the civil war, but by the mid-seventies, a growing number of Mississippians saw the Democratic party as against us, an interference in how we lived.  

When you look at early adapters of the Republican Party in Mississippi, I can just about promise you they never sat down and discussed the “Southern Strategy” as such.  They didn’t have to.  Saying you wanted to get the federal government out of your business, even if your business is oil, banking, insurance, or the like,  Nobody ever had to say, “Boy, we sure would have been better off if they left our damn schools alone.”  Nobody ever had to say it because the great majority of Mississippians believed in their hearts and still do.  

There were guys out there who believed in an evolved Democratic party and believed it was good for Mississippi.  Guys like Charlie Deaton and Bob Fortenberry built their careers trying to apply these new, expansive ideas of the Democratic Party to the boots-on-the-ground situation in Mississippi.  They had some success, but the most successful was William Winter.  Winter and his Boys of Spring were the last great stand for the new Democratic Party in Mississippi.  

Likened to Camelot, both the play and the Kennedy administration, Winter’s tenure as Governor of Mississippi was, and is, seen as a golden age of progressive politics and moves to equalize, at least educationally, the experience of white and black Mississippians.

Ray Maybus rose out of Winter’s team and became governor at a time when a lot of Mississippians thought we were turning over a new page and Mississippi was changing.  It was not.  Toward the end of his term, preparing for his next move, Maybus ran full force into the rising Republican Revolution in Mississippi.  The Young Republicans were becoming more popular than over-starched Oxford shirts at Ole Miss, and at an SEC game in Jackson, Mabus was booed when the announcer asked the crowd to greet him before the game started.   

In my mind, that moment when a bunch of guys my age began to boo a sitting governor at an Ole Miss game loudly was a sea change in Mississippi culture.  I’d seen them cheer Ross Barnett, both before and after his tenure as governor.  I’d seen them cheer Cliff Finch, even knowing that all the stories about Finch were true, but they were booing Ray Mabus–Herman Hine’s son-in-law, a champion of education and public benefit in Mississippi, a genuinely nice guy with a career drive like nothing I’d ever seen before somehow equated to a bad thing among my peers.  To them, being in favor of Mabus and his pro-education platform was unpatriotic.  I still don’t get it.  Not even a little.  In my heart, I will always pin some of that moment on feelings about the Democratic Party forcefully integrating Mississippi.  

Even today, there are people in Mississippi who straight-up blame the Democratic Party for changing the Mississippi State flag, even though every single person involved in pushing that move through our legislature was Republican, and it was signed by a Republican governor.  People don’t want the truth.  They want somebody to blame.  

I was five years old when the Jackson Citizens Council started sending out fliers saying they would accept students into their five different schools.  Council Schools were priced considerably lower than Prep, JA, St. Richards, or St. Andrews.  They were actually priced too low to pay their bills using tuition money.  The Citizens Council promised fund-raising efforts to make up the difference, and for a while, they did, but they couldn’t sustain it.  The business community distanced itself from the Council, limiting its ability to raise money.  Pretty soon, the council schools began closing.  

What happened next is a matter for the history books.  Much of Jackson’s white population did what they must to pay and send their children to Prep, JA, St Andrews, and St. Richards.  That made Jackson Public Schools the majority black.  Dr. Walker, the superintendent, retired almost as soon as integration began.  He was replaced by a series of men who didn’t stay until Bob Fortenberry came back to Mississippi to take the job.  Bob fought for Jackson and for JPS, and he did a great job, but he was ambitious and wouldn’t stay forever.  

By the 90s, with Dr. Fortenberry retired, people who couldn’t afford private school began leaving Jackson for cities in Rankin and Madison counties that still had a majority white population.  This created an avalanche of white flight out of Jackson that we’re still dealing with.  Jackson is still losing population, even though we were at an all-time high in the 80s.  

Life is like a series of domino pieces standing on end.  When you knock one over, it knocks the one next to it over, and that knocks over the one next to it, and so on, and so on, until you get to a space quite a distance away from where you first tipped over a domino, but the causation remains the same.  

A lot of people want to say that what happened in the sixties and seventies has nothing to do with what’s happening now.  That’s just not true.  What’s happening now is a direct result of what happened in the sixties and seventies, even though we had to go through many steps to get here from there.

Where Do The Children Play?

Our mom's generation tells us about how they would put on starched cotton dresses with half a dozen petticoats and white kidd gloves and go shopping downtown with their friends.  Everything they could ever dream of was in three or four stores, and their entire school, which was the entire town, would have hamburgers and milkshakes and cokes at the Woolco lunch counter, and she'd talk about how great it was, and it was great.

My generation tells their children about how they put on the coolest stone-washed denim mini dress, half a bottle of aqua net, and twist beads and went with their friends to the mall.  Their entire school was there, and the kids from all the other schools and we'd meet in the foodcourt and have those corndogs they make in front of you and Orange Julius, and then maybe go play a video game, and we'd talk about how great it was, and it was great.

Our kids talk about how they'd call each other on Skype but not turn the camera on because their hair looked like shit, and they were wearing the same hoodie they wore the night before, and they'd log into Amazon and see what the prime deals were.  When we asked why they never go out, they said the mall is gross, and it's not safe downtown, and they'd talk about how shit it is, and it is shit.

We could have made a world for them where the malls were cooler than ever and shopping downtown was beautiful and safe for everybody.  We could have done it, but we didn't.  We tried to make a world like that, but your mom had that operation, and maybe I had a couple of affairs, and it's not our fault anyway; it's the woke liberals and the conservative fascists.  You don't know how hard it was to raise yu kids, and I fucking hate my job, but I did it for you! It's George Soros and Bill Clinton and Donald Trump--they did this; I was just trying to live my life, man; nobody told me it was gonna be like this.  Nobody told me it was up to me!

When you get my age, you start looking around, and that guy in Washington was in your pledge class.  That guy in the governor's mansion was on your brother's baseball team.  That chairman of the bank used to try and call your sister, and you took his ex-girlfriend to the prom.  We made this world.  It wasn't somebody else.  It was us.

Every day, I talk to guys who want to blame somebody else, some other party, some other culture, or some other part of the country.  It's a lot easier to sleep at night when you think it was somebody else who did this.  It's a lie, though; we did this.  

Our kids are graduating high school, graduating college, and some are hitting that thirty-year goalline.  Pretty soon, we'll be handing the ball off to them.  They won't know we're handing the ball off to them because you never realize you were carrying the goddamn ball until you're sixty and look back on what happened in your life.  This is the world we made.  This is the world they'll make.  Maybe they'll do it better.  

Oh, I know we've come a long way
             We're changing day to day
                         But tell me, where do the children play?

Sunday Sermon July 30 2023

 The governor came to church today.  It’s good for the church when he comes, and it’s good for him when he comes, and I don’t mean politically (although that might have been a consideration.)  I can’t promise there weren’t twenty people around him praying that Jesus would remove the scales from his eyes, but I’m pretty sure he knew that was part of the job when he took it.  

There’s a lot going on in his life, including a second run for governor of Mississippi.  A little bird told me he wasn’t entirely satisfied with his reception at the Neshoba County Fair, so that might have something to do with him being butt in the pew this morning.  To my way of thinking, a candidate who is a little dissatisfied with the job he’s doing is a lot more beneficial than the guy who thinks he can do no wrong.

I like Tate.  We have a lot in common.  When he was a student, I used to talk to Matt Henry about him when they were both KAs at Millsaps.  Matt liked him too.  I wish I could talk to Matt about anything again.  A lot has changed for Tate since he left Millsaps.  A lot of his views have gone from fairly moderate to, I don’t know what to call them now.  I honestly don’t believe in my heart that Tate honestly believes in a lot of the things he’s been pushing for lately, but I think the men pulling his strings and making promises about his future career that they’ll never keep are leading him astray of his own judgment.  

I’m not the guy who’s gonna say Mississippi needs a Democratic government because, quite frankly, considering the state of the Mississippi Democratic Party right now, other than about four people, I wouldn’t trust them to organize a fish fry.  A lot of people think Presley can turn it around, but that’s an awful lot to put on one guy.  We’ve had strong Democratic governors before, but they served when there was a strong Democratic Party backing them up.  People call William Winter Mississippi’s greatest governor, and maybe he was, but he had a team of some of the sharpest guys I ever met behind him, both on his staff and in the legislature.  

With a word, Tate could do more good than I could with a year's effort.  Good for Mississippi and its people.  With just a few words, he could make huge strides in healing the schism in the United Methodist Church in Mississippi and solving the hospital crisis in Mississippi.  I don’t think that word is coming.  I think there are men with a very impractical vision of Mississippi holding carrots in front of Tate’s nose and dangling swords over his head.  Those words aren’t coming.  

Not long ago, a senior member of Tate’s party told me he thought “market forces” would solve the problem of Mississippi hospitals.  It was a moment that took my breath away a little.  I didn’t say anything, but what I wanted to say was, “Dick Wilson came to me thirty-five years ago and said you wanted to run for office, and you were a solid conservative, and I should give you a listen–which I did.  Somewhere along the way, you and some other guys changed the definition of what a conservative means, and now you’re as useless as tits on a bull when it comes to solving Mississippi’s problems.”  I didn’t say that, not because I’m a gentleman, but because I don’t think he’d listen to me, and I didn’t want to get in a fight in front of people.

After Sunday School, I thought, maybe some of us who Tate either knows or knows of should go see him with hats in hand and talk to him about what Jesus wants for Mississippi, and I don’t mean what Jesus wants for the unborn babies of Mississippi, because right now being a born baby in Mississippi can be a pretty sketchy proposition with way too high of a chance for a horrible ending, and he’s much more able to solve this than me or any of my friends.  I’m not good at begging, but I’d beg for the people of Mississippi.  I’d beg Tate Reeves to remember what he was taught at Millsaps and make choices based on what the people who are trying to live here need, not based on what some conservative talk show host says is important.  You going on Fox News isn’t going to save one malnourished baby or one heart attack victim living in an area without a hospital.  

Going to church should mean more than just going to church.  Cary was sick today, so Susannah delivered the sermon.  Her sermon was about presenting a welcoming face to the world and the good it can do.  In it, she discussed her time ministering to Aids victims at a time when most people weren’t very educated about how Aids spread, and there were few effective treatments for it.  She made the point of how powerful a simple human embrace could be for someone whose own family is afraid to hold them for fear of the disease.  She didn’t know the governor would be in the pews before her this morning.  She didn’t even know she would be preaching.  I know he heard what she was saying.  Whether it reached into his heart is between him and Jesus.

If I could talk to Tate today, I’d tell him that his heart is a lot more likely to tell him the truth than whoever is whispering they’ll send him to Washington in his ears.  Hopefully, he realizes he’s not the first guy they did this to.  Tate’s smart enough to pass comprehensive exams at Millsaps.  He’s smart enough to figure this out.  He just needs to listen to a higher power.

Gun Statistics - Real Life

 Here on the front end of sixty, here is the tally on my experience with guns:

A few dead deer.  Several dead ducks and doves.  A few dead squirrels, which I feel bad about because we didn't eat them; we just killed them.  

Three near-fatal accidents.  Three accidents where only property was damaged.  Six suicides and two suicide attempts.  Two murders.  Three armed robberies and two assaults with a deadly weapon.  

What I have yet to experience is anybody using a firearm to protect life, liberty, or property, including the police.  I've heard of it happening, but I have yet to witness it or have it happen close to me.  

If you look at the FBI statistics for Mississippi, my experience is pretty normal.  Despite what the NRA says, you're statistically more likely to accidentally shoot yourself or someone else than you are to use a gun to defend yourself.  You're also more likely to use a gun to kill yourself.  Whatever effect the 2nd amendment hoped to produce, this is what it did produce.

The other argument in favor of the NRA's interpretation of the 2nd amendment is that it gives us what we need to defend ourselves from a tyrannical government.  Well, we tried that too.  The result was Jackson burned to the ground, and Vicksburg was under siege for so long people were eating rats and mules to survive.  Our economy was destroyed, our railroads unusable, and more than six thousand Mississippians were dead.  People like to say we killed more Yankees than they killed of us, but that's not true.  Mississippi was a turkey shoot.  We've received accolades for fighting as hard as we did, but we were brutalized, and the right to bear arms didn't help us.

Reasonable gun laws start with looking at things how they really are, not how we'd like for them to be.  I don't know why we're not using guns more to protect life and liberty, but at the moment, you're a lot more likely to take these things with a gun than to protect them.

Whatever the intention of the 2nd amendment was, whatever the potential the 2nd amendment has, the result we're getting now is the exact opposite. Clearly, we're not interpreting this correctly, and since one organization is almost entirely responsible for how we interpret the 2nd amendment, the fault pretty clearly lies with them.

Women Who Don't Celebrate Holidays

 Wayne LaPierre and the NRA are big fans of the idea that a "good guy with a gun" is all you need to solve the problem of "bad guys with guns."  They believe in it so much that they plaster it all over their social media every time it works.  

That's the problem; every time it works is between one and two percent of all the gun violence in the nation.  One or two percent make their evidence in this argument almost anecdotal.  While it does work at some level, their strategy simply isn't solving the problem.

Usually, their social media post will go like this: Larry Smith takes out Rico Warez with the AK47 he kept in the back of his truck in case he wanted to go deer hunting.  Their posts are filled to the brim with racial dog whistles. Then 500 middle-aged men will comment how great it is to be an American and FU Brandon!  

Problems like gun violence amplify problems with economic disparity.  The darker and the poorer you are, the more likely you are to be the victim of gun violence.

Going to the grocery today, I was struck by what a terrible job we do of governing the people who live here.  Morgan Place is so filled with potholes you can't navigate it with a normal vehicle.  Inside the grocery, the women at the deli counter were talking.  I suppose the topic before I walked up was why they're working today (July 4).  One of them said she didn't mind working on the fourth because that's when her cousin got shot, and her family doesn't celebrate it, and the other woman said she felt the same about Christmas because that's when her daddy got shot.  

Two women, Americans both Mississippians and Jacksonians, laid out a testimony before me of what a horrible job we've done of governing the world they live in.  By "we," I mean me too!  There certainly have been thousands of times when I could have done more, said more, and tried more to make things better but didn't.  

Our city has an administration that was elected on the premise that they could and would do something about economic disparity, but they've done such a shit job at maintaining the basic functions of a city that they've actually made the effects of economic disparity much worse.  Our state has a decidedly conservative legislature and administration, by word, absolutely devoted to providing security to its citizens but failing utterly for these two women.  Both ends of the political spectrum made promises to help these women, and both failed.  Their lives are bad and getting worse.  

I think we have to admit that conservative gun policies are a failure.  I think we also have to admit that liberal policing policies are also a failure.  I think we have to go back to the drawing board and re-evaluate everything we're doing and look for solutions to the problem rather than ways to protect our empire of ideas.  

It's not fair that these women have to work on July fourth while I get to fuck around and do what I want.  It's also not fair that in one of the world's most advanced countries, we can't keep that woman's father safe on Christmas Eve or the other woman's cousin safe on the Fourth of July.

Lee and Agamemnon

 In Lee: The Last Years, Flood quotes one of the "KA Five" as saying of Lee that "We likened him unto Agamemnon."  I always found that strange because things didn't end well for Agamemnon.

For a white Southerner, college-educated in the nineteenth century, it's not at all surprising that they read and studied the Illiad.  Agamemnon, drawing the Greeks together for this great cultural and political, and military adventure, probably did remind him of his service under Lee, both as a soldier and as a student.  

Apparently, whoever taught Greek literature, at Washington College, after the war, didn't include the Orestian Trilogy in their lessons.  Agamemnon's life may have been the origin of the Greek State, but his death was the origin of Greek justice.  Their professor only told them half the story.

Unlike Robert E Lee, who I'm absolutely certain was real, I'm not at all convinced that Agamemnon was ever a real person.  If he was, I can't imagine his real story matching up to the myth at all.  That's not what myths are for.  

Myths create stories that explain societies.  Sometimes they build up over many years, and disparate stories are combined and remade to fit the narrative the culture builds.

Every culture needs two creation stories.  The first is a metaphysical story.  The earth was a woman, and the sky was her husband.  The gods came as horses rising from the foam of the sea.  The Greek stories of metaphysical creation are fascinating and beautiful.  

They also need a myth about their political creation.  In Judaic culture, that's Joseph and Abraham, and Moses.  These are stories about what sets our people apart from other people.  They are vital in creating a cultural identity.  For the Greeks, the Illiad serves this purpose.  The Greek culture created itself with a story about defeating Troy, fighting over their ideas about the honor of a woman.

There are other very important myths, though.  Myths about where our cultural values come from.  In the bible, you have stories about Cain and Abel sewing the seeds of ideas about justice.  That's what the death of Agamemnon and his son's quest for redemption does for the Greeks.  It creates and describes in them the idea of Justice and just redemption.

It's entirely possible that the myth about Agamamemnon's life and Agamemnon's death was originally two entirely different people that were merged together into one story.  I think that happened a lot.  

Lee's political campaign might have created the political culture of the South, even though he lost the war, but there's been a much longer struggle for justice to come out of the Civil War, one that we're still fighting today.  I can't really say that Lee was part of that battle.  His purpose after the war was to get these boys, who had been his soldiers, prepared to be productive citizens again.  The question of Justice in the South would not be answered in their generation.  I'm very much starting to doubt that it will be answered in mine.

Education is a funny thing.  You can't ever really fit a complete understanding of any subject into any one lifetime, even if what you're trying to understand happened thousands of years ago.  Whoever taught the KA five about the Illiad didn't mention what happened to Agamemnon when he got home.  That was a pretty serious omission. 

 

Available at Amazon

The Fight over a Mississippi Textbook

Civil Rights, Culture Wars: The Fight over a Mississippi Textbook by Charles W. Eagles

I've just been made aware of this book, but I'm moving it up on my reading list because it's pretty important to me.  The history of the struggle for civil rights is, in many ways, my own history.  Born in 1963 in Jackson, Mississippi, to a very political family, this is the world I entered into just as the fight was getting more heated.  

For the past several months, I've been doing a really deep dive into the integration of Galloway United Methodist Church, and my plan is to do Millsaps next.  This book is about incidents that happened later on, more into the early and mid-seventies.

Mississippi Conflict and Change was a textbook about Mississippi history written by James W. Loewen, who taught at Tougaloo, and Charles Sallis, who taught at Millsaps.  It was the first Mississippi History textbook to include anything about the civil rights movement.  There's where the conflict and change about the book itself came in.

Mississippi has a free textbook law.  That means students of the public schools (and some parochial schools) are provided free textbooks paid for by the State of Mississippi.  In order to qualify for these funds, the books have to go through an approval and adoption process as set out in the law.  This is true for all the states that have a free textbook law, which I believe is all the states now.  

Approving textbooks can be very political.  With so many concerns about Critical Race Theory and anything about people with different sexualities, approving textbooks has become much more political than has been in many years.  In the seventies, there was considerable pressure to keep the civil rights movement out of any Mississippi History textbook.  Authors Lowen and Sallis, having struggled to get the book published in the first place, were determined to have it adopted by the state Textbook board, so they filed suit, accusing the board of rejecting their book illegally.

Eagle's Book "Civil Rights, Culture Wars: The Fight over a Mississippi Textbook," tells the story of the fight over getting "Conflict and Change" published.   

At St. Andrews, I was taught Mississippi History using Conflict and Change.  A very young priest named Jerry McBride taught it.  I didn't know it at the time, but St. Andrews was the only school in the nation that had ordered the book for classroom use.  I knew this because my father and grandfather ran the Mississippi State Textbook Depository.

My dad was asked to give a deposition in the case.  Considering the very political nature of his business, both at Missco and Trustmark and St Dominics, he really didn't want to get mixed up in this, but he also was pretty determined to get the book adopted.  Dr. Sallis was an important member of the Millsaps History Department.  Bill Goodman represented the State of Mississippi in this and many other matters.  He was also a life trustee of Millsaps College.  Mr. Goodman's advice was that the state not fight this, that fighting it would make us look pretty bad.  

At the time, there were political figures in Mississippi who had much to gain for taking a stance against a civil rights textbook.  Sadly, those days may have returned.  There was considerable political wrangling over this.  I don't know how much is in Eagle's book, but it involved a lot of icons of my youth.

Ultimately, cooler heads were able to prevail, and the book was adopted after considerable political and legal pressure.  I'm very interested to see how much of this lines up with my own memory of that period.  I was thirteen and fourteen.  Interestingly, the only reviewer of the book on Amazon is Bob King, former Dean at Millsaps College.

They have Mississippi Conflict and Change listed as almost $1,500 on Amazon.  I think I have two copies.  

Civil Rights, Culture Wars: The Fight over a Mississippi Textbook is available in hardcover, softcover, and kindle formats on Amazon.com I'll write a review once I've finished it.  

What's In The Box?

A lot of people find things they don't understand are intimidating.  It's a natural reaction.  If you don't know what's in a box labeled "X," it could be anything.  It could be a puppy, it could be a chocolate cake, but it could also be a tiger or a diamond-back rattlesnake.  Until you open the box, you don't know.   Some people find the chance that it might be a rattlesnake much more important than the chance that it might be a chocolate cake, so they presume this box labeled "X" is a threat and act like it.

I think that may be part of what's happening with some of the hate we're seeing lately with transgenderism.  For most of us, me included, the experience of transgenderism is utterly alien and quite far from our daily experience.  We make our physical gender part of our identity, and even people who understand that identity is a construct find it very difficult to see beyond it.   

Over the last fifteen years, a lot of LGBTQ people and their allies have been operating under the presumption that if they raise the awareness of gay and trans people, it will make the larger public more accepting of them.  The idea being that if we open the box and show the contents, people will see it's not a threat.  In many cases, that's worked.  It worked on me.

Some people are so concerned about the possible threat in the box that they don't want to look, even if it's open.  Efforts to raise the awareness of LGBTQ people and normalize their presence make some people feel threatened, like this thing they're afraid of is growing and being "forced down their throat," which is exactly the opposite of the original intent to show that LGBTQ people aren't anything to be afraid of or concerned about.

It's really hard to cross the lines of culture, sexuality, and identity.  These ideas become the core of how people define themselves, and far too many people don't feel confident enough of their own place in society to be accepting of people who are different.  Anytime you see somebody with a chip on their shoulder, jealously guarding their spot in the world, it's a pretty good bet they're going to have trouble with bigotry.  

It's particularly painful to see people who themselves were once marginalized because of their culture or race, or religion participate in the hate and rejection of LGBTQ people.  You'd think they would be the first to recognize this syndrome in other people, and most are, but some become even more reactionary, almost as if their seat at the table will be taken away if they allow someone different to sit next to them.   

This is one of those situations where I don't really know the solution.  I think there's some merit to staying the course and continuing to raise the profile of differently-sexualized people and continue to try and educate people that they are not a threat in any way.  There's going to be pushback.  The slate at the last session of the Mississippi Legislature is a pretty good example of push-back.  Recent political pressure to shut down the LGBTQ clinic at the University of Mississippi Medical Center is another example.  

All I can suggest is, don't respond to hate with hate.  Be firm but understanding.  Fear of the unknown is legitimate; continuing to try and make known the unknown is still the best course.  Maybe cut back on some of these basic cable shows exploiting the lives of teenage transgender people and focus more on the experience of adults.  A lot of people are responding with near violence to the idea of trans people participating in sexed sports.  It's actually a pretty rare event, but concern over it has exploded.  Maybe there's some merit to trying to understand and cooperate with these fears, even though it's really very rare.

Reaching out to people who don't fit the larger cultural patterns isn't a hill most people want to fight on.  It makes people wonder why you can't just go along to get along.  This is something Jesus specifically shows us to do, though.  There's a reason why he made a tax collector his disciple.  There's a reason why he told the parable of the Samaritan.  It's incredibly liberating for your own mind to take these lessons to heart and make them part of your life.  Living without fear of other people is one of the greatest gifts you can I've yourself.  

Shrimp and Grits

 1985.  Ruben Anderson is appointed to the Mississippi State Supreme Court.  My dad decided to have a dinner party in his honor.  My dad was making a point.  He probably thought his points were subtle, but they never were.  There were men in Mississippi who might make a face at having a black man on the State Supreme court, and my dad wanted them to know his opinion of their opinion.  

Besides Judge Anderson and his remarkable wife, the guest list was the regular suspects, Brum Day, Rowan Taylor, Charlie Deaton, and added in George Hughes, Bill Goodman, and of course, everyone's respective spouses or public girlfriends.  A lot of times, I was more pleased to see the spouses and girlfriends than the men themselves.

Daddy was making a point.  His side of the Capitol Street Gang approved of Judge Anderson, and he didn't care who had other opinions.  Not just approval of Judge Anderson, although he's a genuinely remarkable man, but approval of having black men in positions of power in Jackson, Mississippi.

The guts and the details of the dinner party fell to my mom.  She was a self-taught cook and a great one.  Her regular co-conspirators were Mrs. Kroeze, Mrs. Lewis, Mrs. Flood, Mrs. Bass, and my Aunt Linda.   Jane Lewis was the best baker I've ever met.  They told me it was a rare disease that took her from us, but several other dear Mississippians died of the same condition, so maybe it wasn't all that rare after all.  That disease stole vital human beings from me.  That makes it my enemy.

Mother was a very experimental cook, which I appreciated, but my siblings often had another opinion.  Sometimes her menus were unconventional.  Gazpacho, different forms of liver and oysters, and calf's tongue were served at family dinners but not well received.

"What are you serving?"  I asked as she was cutting onions.

"Shrimp and Grits," she said.  I could see the shrimp in the sink where she de-veined them.  She bought them from a man coming up from Biloxi every week and parked his truck with ice chests full of fresh seafood at Deville Plaza.  Every woman in town made occasional trips to meet him and cut a deal. 

"Mother, this man is a judge; you cannot serve grits for supper."  I was adamant.

She ignored my opinion, as she often would.  In this instance, she was correct.  This was a few years before Bill Neal made shrimp and grits famous and Southern Cooking respectable.  If you've never heard of Bill Neal, I'll include a link to a video about him.  He's a remarkable man and responsible for many of the recipes you eat.

Years later, I asked her how she knew ten years before anyone else that Shrimp and Grits were a thing.  She said she got the recipe out of Southern Living, but I've looked, and there weren't any Shrimp and Grits recipes in Southern Living that year.  Further research told me that Galatoire's in New Orleans had occasionally been serving Shrimp and Grits since the seventies.  Her recipe was similar to that.  Either she had it there, or one of her co-conspirators had it there.

The best Shrimp and Grits I've ever had was at City Grocery in Oxford.  Their recipe was similar to Bill Neal's but had a little extra push to it.  By now, if you're from here, you've had the dish somewhere unless you were kosher or suffered a shellfish allergy.  

For me, Shrimp and Grits mean a time when my mother was right, and I was wrong.  They represent a day when my Daddy wanted to make a blunt point, and my mom made it graceful.  Food isn't just food.  It's art, and it's culture, and sometimes it's memory.

A video about Bill Neal

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TeteYtkVB6Y

A Solution to the Gun Violence Epidemic

Ok, here's another tough one.  Before you get mad, hear me out.  These are just my observations and ideas.  Maybe they have merit, perhaps they don't, but I feel like we should discuss this.

Today, the leading cause of death for men under the age of twenty-one is gun violence.  It's been gun violence before, but only during times of war.  Only recently did gun violence surpass automobile accidents as a cause of death in peacetime.

Let's define gun violence as any time the projectile from any gun enters human flesh, causing injury or death.  In ascending order, the types of gun violence are accident, suicide, murder, and assault.  Let's focus on the last two as they cause the most problems.  I do believe my proposal would decrease all four, though.

Our constitution provides us with the right to keep and bear arms.  I believe in this.  I take advantage of it personally as a gun owner.  However, the constitution does not address the issue of how we make people responsible gun owners.  There is no policy or law designed to make novice gun users into responsible gun users.  I believe this is why we have the problem with guns now.  People who posess guns, but don't have the necessary skills to use them properly are incredibly dangerous and a threat to the safety of all. 

Let me present this: when was the last time you heard of a person who committed assault or murder with a gun who was a regular hunter?  It almost never happens.  Hunters know guns are only tools.  Powerful tools that demand respect or disaster results.  You sometimes hear of hunters having gun accidents, but it's pretty rare, and I've never heard of a case where the hunter didn't know exactly what he did wrong and regretted it and knew or learned how to prevent it the next time.

Automobiles are tools too.  To make it safe for young people to use automobiles, we make them take tests and get licenses, and where possible, we have them take driving education classes.  We're tested on automobive laws and safe operation before we're liscensed to operate them.  That model works pretty well with automobiles. What if we tried it with guns?

Every state and municipality in this country has gun problems, and every state and city in this country has an education system.  Maybe we can use the schools to improve or resolve the situation of gun violence.  We make kids learn algebra in school, why not gun safety?  

I propose we include gun education as part of our national educational objectives, just like math or language.  We could do this at three levels, elementary, middle, and high school.  Curricula objectives would be gun safety, gun function, gun storage, gun maintenance, and finally (for the older kids) gun use.

We'd have to find funding for it but let the schools manage the program.  As the second amendment is the law of the land, I feel like we have the political will to seek and find funding for a gun education program.  

Keep the NRA out of it, though.  When Oliver North, who used to work for the NRA, says it's corrupt, there's a problem.  It's Oliver North, for god's sake.   We can do this without the NRA trying to take the reins.  (Which they would,)

Think of gun teachers like you would driving teachers.  Their purposes are the same.  Automobiles are dangerous machines if misused, and so are guns.  We should address gun use the same way we do automobile use.

Young car owners must procure a learner's permit and a license to operate an automobile.  Through this, the state helps decrease injury and death by automobiles.  It would do the same for guns.  We also rely heavily on automobile insurance to help us cope with whatever injuries the misuse of cars may cause. Gun-owners insurance to help cover the cost of accidental discharges and lapses in judgment.

We have to do something.  Getting tough and building more prisons won't solve the issue.  Our society cannot function with so many in prison.  I believe gun education is a better solution than gun control.  We don't have a lot of luck with prohibiting things.  I see no reason to believe gun prohibition would work any better than marijuana or alcohol prohibition did.

A responsible, educated gun owner, no matter what type of gun they have, is far less likely to commit gun violence. In a nation where everyone has the constitutionally granted right to a gun, it's our responsibility to make sure they know how to use them safely.  I believe gun education would decrease people using the threat of a gun to commit robbery too.

Let's at least try this before we start talking about outlawing guns.  Those of you who profess the "good guy with a gun" philosophy, imagine how much stronger your argument would be if all these good guys were equipped with the best available gun education.

 

Karl Marx Was An Asshole

Recently I wrote about how conservatives in these troubled times are returning to their roots and re-reading Ayn Rand. In the interest of fairness, I'd like to also point out that liberals are showing a renewed interest in Karl Marx.

If you don't know, Marx was the evil genius behind communism and he was a real asshole. Despite his reputation as a humanitarian, the people who actually tried communism would tell you there wasn't much improvement between having the state own everything and the old system where the king owned everything.

Like Rand, Marx had no practical experience in any of the subjects he wrote about. He idolized Darwin but decided to forgo Darwin's extensive fieldwork and based his economic and political theories entirely on stuff he read in books.

It's not like people never gave Marxism a chance. Russia and China both tried Marxism, but the only way they could keep order was by killing tens of millions of people. Even hippies were barely able to eek out a medieval subsistence using Marxism, only made bearable by copious amounts of cannabis and lots of sex with hairy women. Marx called religion "the opiate of the people", never realizing how much actual narcotics his own system required.

Professional English asshole, Christopher Hitchens recently waxed nostalgic about Marx in his Atlantic Monthly article: The Revenge of Karl Marx. I could write a whole article on how Hitchens is an arrogant ass and pretty much wrong about everything.

To bring things full circle, I hear a lot of buzz among the republican zombies about how President Obama is trashing the constitution and ushering in an era of communism in America.

First off, Obama isn't trashing the constitution any more than any of his twenty predecessors. Compared to George W Bush, he's John Adams himself. The office of the president is far more powerful than the founding fathers ever intended, but that started some time before Lincoln and growing ever since.

Secondly, Obama isn't introducing communism. Communists take over successful, going companies to expand their power and install their social plans. Obama is taking over decidedly unsuccessful companies in what one could best describe as something of a super-power bankruptcy action for companies "too big to fail".

These companies could easily avoid any government aggression by simply getting their act together and not taking any government bailout money. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that Obama's actions with these companies is an effort to calm people's concerns about the bailout process. People want to know this money is well spent so the government is getting involved to make sure these companies do fairly logical things like reducing salaries, which, by some twisted logic, they weren't doing on their own.

Most of these companies probably won't exist in ten years, no matter what the government does. The Obama administration is trying to engineer some sort of soft landing for the rest of the economy as these really big companies implode. Obama may be liberal, but he's no communist.

To be quite honest, incendiary political speech like this really chaps my ass. I realize it's people's preferred way to play the game these days, both on the left and the right, but it's simply not helpful in any way. You have to accurately describe what's going on before you can understand it and deal with it. Otherwise, you might as well just say George Bush is Godzilla and Obama is Gamera and cheer them on from the rubble like a Japanese school kid.

Penn And I Want To Legalize Drugs

Although we disagree on religion, I usually find myself agreeing with Penn Jillette most of the time.

Penn says he never tried drugs. Considering the wide range of things he freely admits to, I see no reason he would lie about that. Despite never using drugs, he supports the legalization of all drugs, not just marijuana and I agree with him.

Unlike Penn, I did try several different recreational drugs. I never found them very recreational though so most of my experiments were very short lived. I stuck with alcohol for a while because it was such a part of my culture, but by the time I was thirty it was pretty much out of my repertoire. Tobacco I still stick with because it's the mildest of all stimulants except chocolate.

Penn's main reason for ending the prohibition on drugs is an issue of freedom. While I agree with him there, my main reason for wanting to end drug prohibition is that it's so grossly ineffective and is the main motivation for organized crime, not only in this country, but worldwide. If we ended the war on drugs, organized crime would all but dissapear in one generation or less.

Penn Says on YouTube


Link: You Tube

I'm as Mad as Hell and I'm Not Going To Take This Anymore!

This is one of my favorite performances in the history of cinema. If you've never seen Network, I encourage you to see it as soon as you can. I'm not kidding. Many people consider it the greatest film of that decade, better than the Godfather films.

Peter Finch won an oscar for this performance, probably for this very scene, and he deserved it.

Howard Beale: I don't have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It's a depression. Everybody's out of work or scared of losing their job.

The dollar buys a nickel's work, banks are going bust, shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter. Punks are running wild in the street and there's nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there's no end to it.

We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat, and we sit watching our TV's while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that's the way it's supposed to be.

We know things are bad - worse than bad. They're crazy. It's like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don't go out anymore. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we are living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, 'Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials and I won't say anything. Just leave us alone.

Well, I'm not gonna leave you alone. I want you to get mad!

I don't want you to protest. I don't want you to riot - I don't want you to write to your congressman because I wouldn't know what to tell you to write. I don't know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street. All I know is that first you've got to get mad.

You've got to say, 'I'm a HUMAN BEING, Goddamnit! My life has VALUE!

So I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window. Open it, and stick your head out, and yell: I'M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!

I want you to get up right now, sit up, go to your windows, open them and stick your head out and yell - 'I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore!'

Things have got to change. But first, you've gotta get mad!

You've got to say, 'I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!
Then we'll figure out what to do about the depression and the inflation and the oil crisis. But first get up out of your chairs, open the window, stick your head out, and yell, and say it:

I'M AS MAD AS HELL AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!

Putting off Melton's Re-Trial

It's probably not possible, but part of me would like federal authorities to put off Frank Melton's retrial until after we elect a new mayor.

The city's been through so much the past few years, it might help if we put off the turmoil of a new trial until a time when Melton's no longer mayor. Of course, that assumes he won't win re-election, and with a field of as many as fifteen candidates anything is possible.

A lot of people were upset when Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon to spare the country the damage of a presidential trial and conviction, but I've always thought his decision was wise. As much as I despise the crap Melton pulled while in office, a re-trial, conviction, and the turmoil of pulling him out of office leaving us with a gap of six months or more with no mayor or an acting mayor might be worse.

If possible, it might be better to see him somehow constrained from further illegal acts, but still in office until the natural end of his term, and once he's no longer mayor, I don't much care what happens to him.

The Next Mayor
So far I don't see a really outstanding choice among the contenders for Melton's seat. There's still time before the election for one of these guys to really distinguish himself though, so I'm holding out hope.

Whoever becomes our next mayor faces all the same challenges in place when Melton was elected, plus having to deal with the gang-like management structure Melton put in power. It's going to take some time and a lot of effort for the new mayor to clean that particular mess up and get some of these jokers out of power in the city's systems.

Jackson's next mayor will probably be black, but it could be a different experience than before. Electing a third black mayor is a very different from the first or second. For one thing, his race isn't nearly as big a deal as it once was and there won't be as many people who cast their vote or lend their support based just on the candidates race. There should be a feeling among the voters that getting the job done is now more important than race.

I'm holding out hope that the Obama presidency can provide a model to cities like Jackson of what a black-lead administration can be like. At the very least, a successful black president should give any newly-elected black mayor confidence none of his predecessors had.

There will still be conflicts over whether to spend money on the white side of town or the black side of town, but those definitions are changing to be more about class and income than race, and, although that's still not an ideal situation, it is improvement.

The nation is changing and Jackson is changing. I, for one, am hopeful, but we still have to shed ourselves of some of the mistakes of the past, and that's going to be difficult.

Evolution and the Obama Chimp

Even though they've issued an apology, people are still simmering over the New York Post's Obama-Chimp cartoon.

It's offensive, we're told, because there's a history of people comparing Africans to apes and monkeys. What people may not realize is that it wasn't just random rednecks making this comparison, but legitimate anthropologists as well.

It started with Darwin's theory of evolution. People theorized that African apes evolved into African humans, who evolved into European humans, making African people more closely related to apes than Europeans.

There's two problems with that theory, both arising from a basic misunderstanding of how evolution works. First, evolution never operated with the development of European humans as an ultimate goal, that's just our own vanity pushing its way into the theory.

Secondly, evolution isn't linear. It starts from a pretty identifiable point, but then grows from that point into an ever expanding sphere of chain-reaction consequence. African apes are further into the sphere than humans, but African and European humans are more-or-less on the same level emanating from that point.

In other words, we're equally related to apes. You could say they are our grandparents, but African and European humans are cousins. Examining the three at a genetic level yields basically the same conclusion.

Stephen Jay Gould's most significant scientific work was probably his theory of punctuated equilibrium, but many will remember him most for his later work deconstructing the history of using race in evolutionary studies.

Most people don't spend much time considering the nuances of the evolutionary model and most white people spend very little time considering the influence of race and racism on it and the consequences.

I suspect this is how Sean Delonas came to draw the Obama-chimp cartoon in the first place. He might have had "comparing black people to monkeys is bad" stored somewhere in his brain, but he didn't consider the thought often enough for it to surface when he drew the cartoon, so he stepped in it big time.

There are going to be lots of land mines like this for people criticizing Obama over the next few years, because the experience of racism is so different for white people than it is for black people. I think we're just going to have to get used to it though, because it's unreasonable to expect people to lay off criticizing the current president, just because he's black. If it's any consolation to black people, it'll take an awful lot of racist comments to balance out the fact that the president himself is black, at the end of the day, he's still president.

What the hell is a "progressive"?

What the hell is a "progressive"?

As best I can tell, it's some sort of modern liberal, only they don't use that word lest anyone confuse them with the kind of liberals Regan made Persona non grata in the 80's, back in the days when opponents of abortion tried to scoop the opposition by labeling themselves "pro-life", only to have the proponents of abortion come back with "pro-choice". Have you ever met anybody who was willing to say they were either "anti-choice" or "anti-life"?

I really hate when people try to jockey for position by labeling and re-labeling themselves and the competition, trying to gain some slight advantage by whatever adjective they currently use as a noun. Sometimes I wish we'd just assign people to either the red team or the blue team with no other euphemisms or labels allowed.

If you're liberal, say you're liberal. To hell with what Reagan thought about liberals. He was wrong about a lot of stuff anyway. Don't try to co-opt a new word just because you want a change of style. Besides the Uni-Bomber, who the hell isn't for progress anyway?

"What's in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet."
Romeo and Juliet (II, ii, 1-2)

A Lack of Faith

I'm beginning to worry that we're losing faith in everything, especially ourselves. From politics to the economy to culture and religion, nobody seems willing to trust anyone anymore.

The flagging economy and the falling stock market has a basis in tangible matters, but most of it is just a massive lack of faith in the system and its ability to correct itself. Recently on another blog, people were discussing a possible local criminal case and someone commented "forget about it: it's Mississippi", as if it were a forgone conclusion that justice can't be done here.

They say it started with the Kennedy assignation, then the Johnson era credibility gap and finally Watergate just blew everything out of the water. Whatever "innocent" trust we ever had in ourselves is just gone now. I think this might fuel a lot of the anger and inflexibility between the parties. Nobody is willing to trust the "other guys" to be anything but corrupt.

If I could do one thing for this country, it would be to get people to believe in each other again. "The other guy" acts an awful lot like you would in the same situation, and that's really all you need to know to understand him. Yes, there are people who abuse the system, but most of them get caught and the system always works to correct itself. Eventually, the system flushed out even "untouchables" like Scruggs and Abramoff and corrected itself.

Life's never been simple or easy, but even though the system breaks down from time to time, it always pulls itself back together because it's our nature to make things work and do the right thing. Things have been tough for a while now and they're liable to be tough for a while longer, but we will right ourselves again and we will do it because, in the end, we can trust each other: we have to.

You don't have to believe in God to understand what Jesus meant when he said "consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin...yet even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these..."

Things will fall into their right place because they are meant to; that's how the system works. Certainly we have to be vigilant and mindful of what we are doing, but we can do that, we do it every day.

Have faith in God, but have faith in each other too because we are all just lilies of the field.

Hung Jury For Melton?

It's looking more and more like Frank Melton's second trial may end in a hung jury.

I really thought both juries would find his actions more disturbing than they did. His defense seems to be that it was OK to tear down the house because it was a public nuisance. I guess if that's all there is to it, heck, tear them all down. Forget about due process, just let the mayor decide what should be done.

The thing people don't understand is that sometimes there's nothing more dangerous than a person trying to do the right thing. That's why our constitution was written to try and protect us from our own government.

I understand Melton's desire to tear down all the crack houses in Jackson, but I don't trust anyone with the power to actually go out and do it based just on their own judgment. Vigilantes are dangerous because it's difficult enough to ensure justice with our full court system, there's no way we can trust any single man to dispense justice on his own.

Certainly I don't want a mayor who's soft on crime, but jeeze louise fellas, can't we get somebody in there who has the same respect for the law he wants the criminals to have?