Well I come from down around Tennessee
But the people in California
Are nice to me, America
It don't matter where I may roam
Tell you people that it's home sweet home
America, America
And my brothers are all black and white, yellow too
And the red man is right, to expect a little from you
Promise and then follow through, America
-Waylon Jennings, America
(lyrics by Sammy Johns)
Woke up still a little out of sorts, after making a stupid decision to eat a bowl of Chile Colorado for supper when I already had the worst heartburn I've suffered in weeks. I spent most of the night in-and-out of sleep, feeling like I'd consumed the contents of a car battery. Still tasting chile with my coffee this morning.
Dean seems pretty out of it as well.
This morning my thoughts turn again to Florida, a possible bellwether of where we are heading as a country. In a state mired in poverty, massive inequities in opportunity and education, and growing environmental peril due to global warming, our legislature and governor have focused on what's really important: creating a thought police for our K-12 system and universities.
Does no one study history anymore? The ideological vetting of our faculty smacks of life behind the Iron Curtain four decades ago, or worse. "Fill out this questionnaire so we know where you lean. Trust us. There'll be no consequences. Just trying to keep the discussion balanced."
And what are we balancing here, with this insistence on what the right ironically calls "diverse" viewpoints? Well, one regular focus is their disdain for the 1619 Project, which actually did a pretty amazing job of re-framing our national narrative as largely resting on the original sin of race-based slavery. I read some of their stuff, and found it heavily data-driven and refreshingly lacking in sound bite thinking. The essays were long, dense, and thought-provoking.
The counter on the other side is that we should focus on the unique achievement of our Founding Fathers in creating the greatest country on earth, and on the principles articulated in the Declaration of Independence. In short, we should indoctrinate the little nippers in the dogma of American Exceptionalism.
Well, about that. For the time, the creators of the constitutional framework of this country did an extraordinary job, borrowing and distilling the very best of eighteenth century political thought into an experiment in self-governance that has survived quite a while. The universalist language of the Declaration, as well as the Constitution itself, was belied however by the reality of their moment. Only white men could vote. Women were only marginally more "citizens" than the slaves that comprised something like a third of the population of the South. And we rigged our representative democracy to give those slaves' owners a wildly disproportionate voting power, as a sop to convince them to support ratification. The consequence of that last defect is that in 2021 the population of Los Angeles County exceeds that of six combined states in the northern Great Plains and Rocky Mountain West, but LA shares two senators with the other 25 million residents of the Golden State, while those mostly empty prairies and mountain ranges have a dozen.
And let's face it, this country wasn't made great by its founders--they created a reasonably strong foundation, to be sure, but it took the efforts of troublemakers like Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King to help us move us toward our better self as a nation, not to mention a war that cost over 600,000 American lives because we couldn't peacefully address the malignancy of slavery baked into our system.
So that's what they mean by "diversity"--selling a panglossian fantasy of American exceptionalism rather than treating our government and society as a vast work in progress--progress that only comes through synthesis, and constantly identifying where we're not living up to our own principles and finding ways to do better. It's the difference between the wonderful, thoughtful AP history classes I took in high school with R. Herold, my favorite teacher and a good friend to this day, and the civics classes in which my football coaches taught the children's story of a Norman Rockwell America that never really existed.
It's just been that kind of year down in Florida. Earlier in the session, they passed a law that could land you in jail for fifteen years for participating in whatever law enforcement considers a "riot", and gives immunity to Real Americans who run over protestors blocking a roadway.
And our sheriff in Bay County--a very, very long way from Mexico, based on my foggy knowledge of geography--has vowed this week to answer the governor's call to head down to help Texas law enforcement protect our borders against Those People, who are mostly trying to escape the unfolding political disaster we have helped initiate and keep in motion in Central America for over a century.
I always liked Tommy, and have known his wife for years, but this is just the worst sort of grandstanding. I didn't see in the article anywhere that the feds asked for this assistance. Maybe it was the neo-Confederate governor of Texas. Or just our governor engaging in political theater in his ramp up to 2024.
It all makes me sad, this en masse turning away from our founding principles, mostly by white Southerners but aided and abetted by plenty of reactionaries elsewhere in the country, including right here. I'm guessing those Mennonites down the hill working on a home renovation project this morning, distinctive in their straw hats, suspenders, and matching blue trousers and work shirts, each sporting an Edwin Stanton beard,
[and . . . no photo of Big Ed, because this program has suddenly lost the ability to upload photos. Earlier this morning the audio driver failed. And our spiffy espresso machine sprayed about half of my second cup of coffee sideways across the counter like a prostate patient taking a whiz. It's going to be one of those days]
would probably feel the same as my neighbors having breakfast down at Granny Cantrell's in Panama City as I write this. We're heading in the wrong direction, they'd say. Time to peel away decades of social change, and go back, back, to the future!
But we can't. We can't disenfranchise what will soon be a majority of Americans. We can't scream "socialism" every time someone tries to do something about the yawning inequality that is turning us into two Americas. We can't impose the folkways and mores of the gun-toting American West on a densely packed population. We can't keep telling ourselves there's nothing we can or should do about an accumulating to-do list of domestic threats and challenges, as our country falls farther and farther behind the rest of the developed world in the quality of life of its residents.
That's not to say I have much patience for the extremists on the other side, either. Loving people who are different doesn't require an indoctrination program into lifestyles that seem repellant to many thoughtful folks, as if there's a clear right-and-wrong and the dissenters are somehow on the wrong side of it. We're told tolerance is never enough.
I don't much appreciate being told, as my own church did while I was in training to be a priest, that I as a white male was the only person capable of being a "racist" because my demographic is the oppressor, and everyone else is a "victim". I talked back rather passionately at that piece of the reeducation program, which probably didn't help my relationship with the bishop who thought this exercise was worthwhile. And like a lot of other people my age, I roll my eyes at the free pass so many on the left give to the objectively horrible communist regimes that now mostly reside in history's dustbin.
In sum, I'd probably be just as uncomfortable reading the local politics page of the San Francisco Chronicle as with my daily dose of Gary Fineout's Florida Political Playbook (a great daily read, BTW, if you haven't already found it).
But I'm umbilically tied to one and not the other, with my professional life anchored in the Florida panhandle, so the affront to my senses on any given day is more likely to come from Gaetz and Dunn than Pelosi and AOC.
I guess I'm my own sort of reactionary, when you come right down to it. I may be fogging the lens of history this morning with my stinky morning coffee breath, but I wish we could go back to a kinder time, a time when we at least could talk to each other, a time when we could agree on the broad outlines of an objective reality. I wish we could go back to the America Waylon sings about.
Just listen. Wouldn't you want to live in that America?
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