Truth Tellin on Obama and RFK from Anniston Star
Remarkable oped yesterday from Brandt Ayers in the Anniston Star on the similarities and distinctions between Obama and Bobby Kennedy.
Ayes, a Baptist dissent was in the funeral procession for Bobby Kennedy in 68. I am hoping Ayers will help bring Caroline Kennedy and Kathleen Townsend to the University of Alabama this fall to speak of Carl Elliot, Profiles in Courage, the implication for SEC Football and this remarkable political moment.
Some conversations have already started.
But here is the heart of Ayers in this column. Pockets of Alabama are thinking and have been all the time.
Will Ayers come to Collinsville, Alabama about a 45 minute drive and talk about this with Randy Owen, Red Etheredge and Lowell Barron.
Time will tell.
Maybe, now that I think about it, bring Mike Letcher, as he did the last documentary on Collinsville--we never had that hoped for town hall meeting--and also did the documentary on Carl Elliot, a remarkable piece indeed.
Brandt Ayers as published June 15:
Josephine was in the aisle when Ethel came through our car and sat in the nearest available seat, next to Dr. King's widow, Coretta Scott King. The two women noted Mrs. Kennedy's bearing in the face of tragedy, a poignant moment for two recent widows.
Somber crowds gathered at every stop, Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts in full uniforms. One image is locked in my mind. From a distance, I saw a man walking quickly up a hill toward the moving train. He crested the hill as we came alongside. He was a workingman, blue work shirt rolled up over muscular forearms. In his big fist was a bright yellow bouquet of late jonquils with which he saluted the train.
That New Jersey man looked no different than the men pasting George Wallace stickers on bumpers in Anniston two years before. Were they alike in some strange way — an answer to the mystery posed by Bobby Kennedy and Wallace carrying some of the same Indiana counties?
The author of a six-volume series of books on the states, Neal Pierce, and I talked about Wallace's appeal beyond racism, an attraction that many working-class people outside the South felt for him and for his polar opposite, Bobby Kennedy — a connection of comfort and familiarity that Obama is yet to make.
I put it to Neal this way. It's the problem of the 65 percent majority. In Anniston, as in any other city, you have the Chamber of Commerce crowd that represents 1 percent of the population, but about 80 percent of the wealth. They are organized, articulate, well funded, a group with a strong sense of mission and an ability to draw public attention to their agenda.
Then you have the black community, which in the 1960s developed means of drawing attention to their agenda and who represented 34 percent of Anniston's population at the time. That leaves the other 65 percent, who are most resistant to social change.
Some are racists. But cumulatively a host of other problems outweighs racism. The highway department removes a traffic light from a blue-collar community, and there's a series of serious accidents, but it seems impossible to get the bureaucracy to restore the light.
Despite the sanitary hazard of an overflowing drainage ditch in a working-class neighborhood, nobody at city hall seems to listen or do anything about it. The 65 percent begin to feel: "Nobody understands the conditions of my life. Hell, I know I'm the majority in this country. I built it with my own hands. The only person who understands me is George Wallace, who knows what I mean when I say I'm so p----d at those bureaucrats, suits, sneering journalists and blacks I see on TV, I'd like to punch one of 'em in the nose!"
Still, it was hard at the time to think of George Wallace and Bobby Kennedy paired in any way, just as it stretches credulity now to imagine Obama's appeal to the sons and grandsons of the men pasting those Wallace stickers.
When we returned home then, we found that through time and distance, we had changed, and the South was changing. In less than two years, waves of progressive governors were elected everywhere in the South — except Alabama.
Two generations have been born and matured since then. Race means little to this generation. Yet, there's still the problem of the 65 percent; can they look at Obama and see a man who understands their life and dreams?
From
http://www.annistonstar.com/opinion/2008/as-columns-0615-bayerscol-8f13t3539.htm
Ayes, a Baptist dissent was in the funeral procession for Bobby Kennedy in 68. I am hoping Ayers will help bring Caroline Kennedy and Kathleen Townsend to the University of Alabama this fall to speak of Carl Elliot, Profiles in Courage, the implication for SEC Football and this remarkable political moment.
Some conversations have already started.
But here is the heart of Ayers in this column. Pockets of Alabama are thinking and have been all the time.
Will Ayers come to Collinsville, Alabama about a 45 minute drive and talk about this with Randy Owen, Red Etheredge and Lowell Barron.
Time will tell.
Maybe, now that I think about it, bring Mike Letcher, as he did the last documentary on Collinsville--we never had that hoped for town hall meeting--and also did the documentary on Carl Elliot, a remarkable piece indeed.
Brandt Ayers as published June 15:
Josephine was in the aisle when Ethel came through our car and sat in the nearest available seat, next to Dr. King's widow, Coretta Scott King. The two women noted Mrs. Kennedy's bearing in the face of tragedy, a poignant moment for two recent widows.
Somber crowds gathered at every stop, Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts in full uniforms. One image is locked in my mind. From a distance, I saw a man walking quickly up a hill toward the moving train. He crested the hill as we came alongside. He was a workingman, blue work shirt rolled up over muscular forearms. In his big fist was a bright yellow bouquet of late jonquils with which he saluted the train.
That New Jersey man looked no different than the men pasting George Wallace stickers on bumpers in Anniston two years before. Were they alike in some strange way — an answer to the mystery posed by Bobby Kennedy and Wallace carrying some of the same Indiana counties?
The author of a six-volume series of books on the states, Neal Pierce, and I talked about Wallace's appeal beyond racism, an attraction that many working-class people outside the South felt for him and for his polar opposite, Bobby Kennedy — a connection of comfort and familiarity that Obama is yet to make.
I put it to Neal this way. It's the problem of the 65 percent majority. In Anniston, as in any other city, you have the Chamber of Commerce crowd that represents 1 percent of the population, but about 80 percent of the wealth. They are organized, articulate, well funded, a group with a strong sense of mission and an ability to draw public attention to their agenda.
Then you have the black community, which in the 1960s developed means of drawing attention to their agenda and who represented 34 percent of Anniston's population at the time. That leaves the other 65 percent, who are most resistant to social change.
Some are racists. But cumulatively a host of other problems outweighs racism. The highway department removes a traffic light from a blue-collar community, and there's a series of serious accidents, but it seems impossible to get the bureaucracy to restore the light.
Despite the sanitary hazard of an overflowing drainage ditch in a working-class neighborhood, nobody at city hall seems to listen or do anything about it. The 65 percent begin to feel: "Nobody understands the conditions of my life. Hell, I know I'm the majority in this country. I built it with my own hands. The only person who understands me is George Wallace, who knows what I mean when I say I'm so p----d at those bureaucrats, suits, sneering journalists and blacks I see on TV, I'd like to punch one of 'em in the nose!"
Still, it was hard at the time to think of George Wallace and Bobby Kennedy paired in any way, just as it stretches credulity now to imagine Obama's appeal to the sons and grandsons of the men pasting those Wallace stickers.
When we returned home then, we found that through time and distance, we had changed, and the South was changing. In less than two years, waves of progressive governors were elected everywhere in the South — except Alabama.
Two generations have been born and matured since then. Race means little to this generation. Yet, there's still the problem of the 65 percent; can they look at Obama and see a man who understands their life and dreams?
From
http://www.annistonstar.com/opinion/2008/as-columns-0615-bayerscol-8f13t3539.htm
posted by foxofbama | 1:44 PM
2 Comments:
I think you had better read that article again because I don't think it matches your title.
"...and I talked about Wallace's appeal beyond racism, an attraction that many working-class people outside the South felt for him and for his polar opposite, Bobby Kennedy — a connection of comfort and familiarity that Obama is yet to make." According to this statement, Obama HAS YET to make the connection that both Wallace and Kennedy made. No similarity there.
"...Race means little to this generation. Yet, there's still the problem of the 65 percent; can they look at Obama and see a man who understands their life and dreams?" According to this statement there is still a QUESTION as to whether or not the65% see Obama as understanding them at all! No similarity there.
As I see it, there is no similarity anywhere between Wallace/Kennedy and Obama. Both of the former understood the American people, their dreams, their trials, the everyday drugery of trying to make a living and stay afloat. Obama does not.
Learning has begun for Obama.
Alabama may be lost cause, but in North Carolina and like places, it may be different.
Even in Alabama will test the character of Matthew Morgan and his parents and brothers to see if they will engage this moment or sit it out.
Likewise are for Russ Beene.
If the pressure cooker top doesn't explode the pressure cooker, or some such metaphor; then as Maya Angelou says, We shall see what the end will be.
Post a Comment
<< Home