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.

NORTH LITTLE ROCK, Ark. — I found it funny (and not in a ha-ha way) that someone actually had to ponder whether to tell me Merry Christmas or Happy Holidays. I think the second title might give the holidaze too much credit.

How happy can one feel to wait in line for a checker when over a quarter of the lines aren’t manned? How happy can one feel to see people trampled, in some cases killed, so that someone can get the big deal on the flatscreen television? How happy can one feel to know that even with cheaper gas (for now at least) it’s going to be tough for people to have Christmas? Better yet, how can the vast majority of people consider it a holiday when their credit bill escalates while we bail out Citi and friends? Maybe Citi got a holiday; we didn’t.

Happy holidays? Bah! Humbug!

Perhaps now’s the time to re-read Dicken’s tale of appreciation and remember what Christmas means. It’s easy to get caught up in the gloom and doom of current times and forget things looked a whole lot worse for those living in a soot-drenched London (at least no one promised “clean” coal back then). If Scrooge could learn, so can we all.

More than presents, meaning comes from reflecting on the blessings of family and friends. Meaning comes from appreciating the opportunity to fail and try again. Whether Christian-in-deed or Christian-in-name, meaning comes by remembering the savior’s birth.

Yep, I said it. Christmas is about Christ.

Lord I know that will offend some, and it should considering Christ represents the most radical cat in history. Known to hang out with “undesirables,” Jesus never made the authorities happy. But he looked out for the unfortunate and reminded us that while no normal human can live up to the Ten Commandments, we can all love God above all and love our neighbors as ourselves. Imagine if all of the world’s laws could be boiled down to TWO. Radical, man.

Even more radical? Christ willingly died for others to live. Wow. Regardless of how you feel about the fanatics past and present, you must respect that. If that doesn’t qualify for hero status, I don’t know what would.

True, December 25th once served as a pagan holiday. Some call the Christmas celebration an abomination for religious reasons. Christmas framed by media represents consumerism at its worst, just as Christians framed by the Crusades represent religion at its worst. But you’ve got to remember it’s the practitioners not the practice that make such things “bad.” Were I to judge all Muslims by the idiots bombing people, I’d be as stupid as people judging all gun owners by those who go on a rampage: life’s not so black and white.

It’d be politically correct to say we should recognize everybody’s right to celebrate the holiday as they wish without any religious trappings … and I believe Christ would agree, especially since nobody knows the exact date of his birth.

So why should I insist Christmas is about Christ?

On one hand, Christianity represents the dominant religion in the United States. Were it not so, I might celebrate kwanzaa or hannukah just as if the South had won, I might salute a rebel flag … but it is what it is. Yeah, it may not be the actual date of Christ’s birth, but it’s not the first time government changed an actual celebration date.

On the other hand, Christ embodies the best parts of Christmas, i.e. love, loyalty, forgiveness, generosity, compassion. I find that radically heroic. A proper celebration of such qualities demands much more than some wimpy “happy holidays.” So while this year’s coal may be worth more than the presents, I wish a hearty Merry Christmas to you and yours!

NORTH LITTLE ROCK, Ark. - I just finished grading finals.

I got up at 4:30 a.m. to drive 100 miles to Monticello to make sure those grades were submitted by the 10 a.m. deadline. You may wonder why I’d leave so early. It turns out my office computer caught a malware virus last week that kept me from entering grades online as it had to be completely rebuilt. Joy. I digress.

So I arrived at 6:45 a.m. without coffee or breakfast (my stomach’s acting up) to finish adding things up and checking everything twice, which allowed me to submit them by hand just before 10 a.m.

Once that was done, I had to direct maintenance workers to help move my three-room lab into one small room. I thought it might work, maybe, not likely, but I’d gone so far as to diagram the room to indicate table placement: four 8-foot tables, two 5-foot tables and a 4-foot desk. Notice, I’ve given lengths. Unfortunately, the 8-foot tables were so wide, only three would fit.

Considering I wanted to return to North Little Rock to spend some time with my best friend (who just got back from Iraq), I became somewhat flustered, but the cold and blustery day made my face red anyway. (True, but silly; I couldn’t help it.) I invited the dean to take a look. He did and even found some thinner 4-foot tables that we might be able to line the walls with. God bless Dean Spencer.

So I’m thinking my day’s getting better. I grab glass from some folks (as I’m known to occasionally do since we recycle in NLR) and head 100 miles north. It’s cold, dreary, rainy … and I’m happy to be heading back, listening to Widespread Panic, watching for the troopers and the cars sliding off the road, waiting in a traffic jam crossing the river bridge and another on the Levy overpass.

Upon arriving home, I receive a phone call from the mother of one of my students. What?! (you incredulously ask) Her MOM? Seriously. At college? Actually a university. Granted, it’s not the first time I’ve had a parent inappropriately contact me. One man came to the door of my class while I taught to find out if his daughter was making it to class. He wanted her to graduate and was tired of paying for it.

But I can say this is a first. Never before has a parent called me, especially to bitch at me. (That’s why I don’t teach high school.) But here I am, phone stuck to my ear, explaining that I cannot talk to her about her daughter’s grades as it violates federal law (FERPA), explaining I’m taking her call purely as a courtesy, and if the student wants to talk, I needed to speak with her.

“I don’t wanna talk to him!” I hear her screaming in the background, just before the phone clicked. Damn, she even hung up on me.

At first, I got a little peeved. But then I realize this happened two days after I met the mother of a former student, who nearly had tears in her eyes thanking me for helping her son become independent enough to strike out on his own. Maybe it’s karma?

Whatever. After that, I found it easy to get online and read the other complaints about grades. I can cut-and-paste the course requirements right into the e-mails, so it’s easy to explain why things didn’t turn out as planned … without seeing anyone face-to-face or listening to an early 20-something’s mother as she bitches at me over the cellphone. (sigh)

America Just Elected Its First Black President

Are the people of Alabama ready for an African-American governor?

by Glynn Wilson

ATLANTA, Ga. — Some historians say the final battle of the Civil War was fought at Sayler’s Creek, southwest of Petersburg, Virginia, on April 6, 1865. Try bringing that up in a political bar like Manuel’s Tavern in downtown Atlanta, however, and see how fast you can start an argument.

While everyone knows that Robert E. Lee surrendered his Army of Northern Virginia on April 9, 1865, at the Appomattox Court House, effectively ending the war, many an expert would argue that the old, lingering causes of the war survived in people’s attitudes long after the fighting on the bloody battle fields came to a gentlemanly end.

Ask the leaders of the Civil Rights movement, those who had to fight those battles all over again in the 1950s and ’60s.

Then there are thinkers and writers who will tell you, if you give them half a chance over a few shots of whiskey or a few pints of dark beer, that the election of George W. Bush in 2000 effectively erased the Union’s victory in the war and was finally, at long last, a victory for the old Confederacy. Putting aside the issue of election theft and the Supreme Court, ponder the idea that Bush came into office in large measure by the hands of mostly white voters from the old Confederate states of the Deep South, with some help from middle America and parts of the West.

Since Obama’s election even the TV pundits will tell you the only base left for the national Republican Party lies in the old states of the Confederacy, thanks in part to the scorched earth strategies of Dick Cheney and Karl Rove, whose marches to Washington and Baghdad with Bush scarred the national character almost as much as General William Tecumseh Sherman’s fiery “March to the Sea.”

Then consider that while Bush’s campaign coffers may not have been filled by the profits from cotton, hand-picked on plantations worked by slaves, the mega corporations that mostly supported his candidacy were interested in keeping wages low and gutting the rights of juries in courtrooms to punish corporate crimes against working people, humanity and the earth. Bush got most of his money to run in 2000 from oil and other energy companies, including Exxon Mobile and Southern Company, as well as insurance companies and the pharmaceutical giants. He came into office — in the world prior to 9/11 — with the prime objective to pass national “tort reform,” the watchword for stopping juries from rendering multi-million dollar judgments against multi-national corporations.

Rove had already accomplished that feat in Alabama — once known as the top state in the country for large jury awards against corporate malfeasance — by helping the Republican Party orchestrate a political takeover of the state Supreme Court.

If you ask just about any academic expert who studies the demographic numbers from public opinion polls and election results, you could say Americans finally fought the final battle of the Civil War on Tuesday, Nov. 4, 2008. Symbolically, it took another Abraham Lincoln, Barack Obama, to put together enough of a national coalition to defeat Confederate attitudes once and for all.

Glynn Wilson

Rep. Artur Davis in Birmingham recently…

Jim Gundlach, a retired Auburn Sociology professor, harbors a special fascination for the “age” variable in public opinion research, mainly for the story it tells on an issue like public attitudes on race and the chances of electing African-American candidates to national and statewide office.

He ran the model on Obama’s candidacy before the election and predicted that the best he could possibly do in a national race was to win by about 7 percent, if he ran a flawless campaign and the other side stumbled (can you say Sarah Palin?). And Obama hit the number almost right on the dot, winning by about 7 percent nationally in the popular vote.

If you run the same model in a state like Alabama, where Birmingham Congressman Artur Davis is making noises about running for governor, what you find is that the state is at least a decade away from fighting the final battle of the Civil War. It will take that long, according to the numbers, for the younger and more progressive population to overtake the older diehards on the race issue, who will finally die off in substantial enough numbers for a black man to have a chance of moving into the governor’s mansion in Montgomery, in the city where the Confederacy was launched in 1861.

“People do not change their minds on core issues in their lifetimes,” Gundlach says. “That’s a fact.”

To read the full investigative news feature, go to our sister blog, The Locust Fork News-Journal

NORTH LITTLE ROCK, Ark. — We wish the best to you and yours during the upcoming holiday season. While celebrating the return of many, please remember those lost in our overseas conflicts.