Guns, Immigration, Health Care and the Trump Base Dying of Whiteness

       In a TED Talk on NPR April 2, Howard Stevenson tells a story about a presentation at a Southern Baptist Seminary on lynching. In one photo he points out two children in a picture witnessing a lynching. One of the white ministers in training breaks down uncontrollably, sobbing and confesses as a child he witnessed a lynching.
    The Black presenter Stevenson stops the class  while the seminarian regains his composure, confessing that he is now a pastor in a transitional neighborhood and has people of color in his congregation and hasn't been able to reconcile this memory with the ministerial task now facing him.
     Stevenson asks what about engaging the conversation about healing your own soul while doing justice work for people of color.
     Such sentiment is at the guts of Vanderbilt professon Jonathan Metzl and his book Dying of Whiteness that appeared on bookshelves March 5. In Tennessee, Missouri and Kansas Metzl looks at the Trump Base and the peculiar reality of white working class males voting against the best interests of themselves and their children with an ideology saturated with race and minority resentment. His charts and data make a compelling case white males in Trumps MAGA are shortening their own quality of life and life expectancy in the areas of guns, health reform and funding of schools.

    Though he never utters the word Baptist in his book, Dying of Whiteness meshes well with the Baptist story of the last 40 years. Metzl explores the legacy of Kris Kobach in his chapters on Kansas, and suggests he is former Governor Sam Brownback on steroids.
     In her grand history of America published in the fall of 2018, Jill Lepore spotlights in the chapter Battle Lines the legacy of EAgle Forum's Phyliss Schlafly. Lepore says it was the network of Schlafly including her ties to the fundamentalist takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention that had its roots in the John Birch Society and White Citizens Council Backlash conservatism emerging out of the McCarthy era and resistance to Brown v Board and the integration of public education that laid the groundwork for Donald's Trump's America. In fact one her last big moments was in 2016 when Trump saluted Schlafly in person in St. Louis.
     As an aside on Lepore, your know you are reading new territory when in secular history of America, in the chapter on the Scopes Trial and Fundamentalism you have this quote by J Frank Norris himself: "I was born on the dark moon night, in the dog fennel season, when a black cat jumped on a black coffin".
    It was the head of the Alabama Eagle Forum, Eunie Smith, who introduced Kris Kobach to Scott Beason of FBC Gardendale Alabama and the concoction of the draconian Alabama immigration Bill that brought a second chapter of Civil Rights and Justice Shame to Alabama in 2009--google Willimon repents, ethicsdaily.
    Metzl paints that same picture in Kansas with the Koch Brothers heavy funding of the politics  of Brownback and anti immigration lawyer Kobach.
     Metzl repeatedly comes back to his themes of austerity  and backlash politics that result in "upstream wealth and downstream despair".

     His concluding thoughts are worthy of quoting in full: 

      In our Midwest  there were certain tensions about fitting in--as Jews we were in many ways, white outsiders. But our family also thrived in Missouri and Kansas because of strong regional traditions of neighborliness, kindness and goodwill. These are the traditions that seem ever more in peril in this Trump moment of divisiveness. A moment when one side of a debate amasses arms, guts social programs that benefit the least among us and falls into a narrative in which the viability of certain groups exists only in relation to the despair of others.....[It was not always this way] and to be great we  again we must not fall prey to prefabricated and manipulated polarizations. Let us hope for all our sakes and for the future of our nation, that the white America of which I am a part can find a politics worthy of living for, rather than one whose enormity is marked by increasingly autoimmune forms of conflict, disempowerment and despair.

    More of how all this intersects the fundamentalism of the SBC can be found at Fox Blog, foxofbama.blogspot.com

     

   
     Robert Wuthnow has noted the strategies of Lee Atwater to find new avenues to bait white working class males--the underlying thesis of Metzl--with the politics of abortion and guns. In fact former Governor of Georgia, Roy Barnes said a few years ago on Georgia public radio it was Lee Atwater's dream to have every  white voter in the south go in a voting booth with a choice between a Black Democrat and a White Republican.
     Whatever the nuance of Kevin Kruse about millennial Southern Baptists, the current leadership of the Southern Baptist convention has some integrity issues if they can't engage the conversation about the key leadership of the takeover, Pressler, Patterson, Jesse Helms, Albert Lee Smith and Ed McAteer.
    In 1993 Yale Professor Harold Bloom nailed it for me: "The tragedy of  the Southern Baptist Convention is the result of a cultural and political conspiracy that continues to masquerade as a religious movement."
   Reading Metzl informed by Lepore and Wuthnow and the SBC role in how we got to this disaster of the Trump era, should be the subject of earnest conversation when the SBC meets in Birmingham, Alabama this summer.

    https://heterodoxacademy.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/43_Kevin_Kruse_On_Fault_Lines.pdf

      

Bird Thompson Remembers Gaffney's Finest eateries in the Halcyon Days of the 60s and 70s

     Bird Dean Thompson was older brother of my classmate. Lucille. He was a lineman for Wayne Whiteside right in the Middle of one chapter of Gaffney's gridiron Glory Days. I remember in Ms Sutton's sixth grade class in fall of  64 Lucille gave us a straight from the Huddle report on Gaffney's chances one afternoon for our prospects that evening.

     Bird worked for the fire department with Chief Petty in the 70s and one of my fondest and most colorful conversations privy too Bird witnessed the summer we exitted Gaffney in 78. My family had already gone to Knoxville and I stuck around a couple weeks.

    Petty was a deacon at Bethany Church. I stopped in the Fire Hall late one afternoon and now that the dust was settling a little Chief Petty was unhindered in his perspective. He was laying it down. Bird was up squatted on a Bunk Bed and he kept chimin in: "Charles is Right; Charles is Right."

       Bird recently graced the letters column of the Cherokee Chronicle whose editor is the Gaffney Great Raconteur Tommy Martin.

    Here is Bird in his own words and his finest with fond memories

          REMEMBER THESE?
“Good day Mr. Martin, speaking of your article Thursday on ‘Delicious
Memories,’ I know someone will remember these places, but here goes.
“On Monday nights after a home football game on Friday, the booster
club would feed the Gaffney team at Mabry’s downtown, There was the
Little MOO up by the swimming pool, Jack Millwood, his wife and Eddie
ran the place, the hamburger meat was always white never could figure
that out,
“Willard’s down on Pecan Street was all ways a treat for hash, Paul
Turner and his wife and Pat and Linda open the Pizza Inn over by the
Overhead bridge.
“Other places were treats also: Roses Dime Store had lunch counter
where you could get drinks, ice cream and sandwiches, the round seats
would go round and round, that was a cheap ride.
“You could go downtown on Saturday and get a haircut and then go
to Browns Market and look in the window and see all those fried chickens
going around and around. They would use a large fork and pick up the
chicken and drop it in a bucket of BBQ sauce and then put it in a lined bag.
It stayed hot enough to get home.
“When you went to a drug store you could get a ham, egg salad on
toast. You could always go and have the other Chicken (who ran the
BlueBird) grind you some ice and open a Pepsi. Nowhere on this earth
could you find something so good.
“Once a year we got to go to Kelly’s across the river. Its still the best.
You could all ways Get to Jennings Trading Post and get a footlong hotdog
all the way.
“Thanks for the good work, As JM Smith would say, “Gaffney is the
finest place on Gods green earth, (was and is)” – Dean “Bird” Thompson,
Spartanburg, and proud Gaffney native
THE TV

Southern Baptists obscure tawdry history in Birmingham

    Southern Baptists held their national convocation in Birmingham this week and acted like the takeover that began in 1979 had nothing to do with the John Birch Society and the Eagle Forum and leftovers from the White Citizens Council had nothing to do to put in place these vanilla coated 'reformers" posing as repentants on a sex scandal was the point.

    The main point is the fundamentalist takeover of the SBC was crafted by the network of Jesse Helms, Ed McAteer and Paul Pressler and their friends in the Council for National Policy and all the obfuscation in the world can't negate this purgatory they are in now.

  JD Grear is to be congratulated for a decent admission of this current crisis on a hot issue, as a former "reformer" the pastor Bryant Wright of Johnson Ferry in Cobb County Georgia who witnesses during Atlanta Braves  commercials is to be congratulated for resisting Donald Trump with a segment on CBS Sixty Minutes for taking in Ten Syrian Refugee Families.

    But the SBC CEO is now Ronnie Floyd a man from Northwest Arksansas marinated in the right wing politics of the 79 fundamentalist leadership. The current leadership is complicitous in the mess. They haven't done their homework of careful reads of Wuthnow's Rough Country, Jill Lepore Chapter Battle Lines in her magisterial history of 2018 These Truths, nor read the Apostles of Reason by Molly Worthen, nor responded to Jane Mayer's On the Media of NPR revelations about how the Baptist pulpits, the takeover got us to this Trump Moment of Franklin Graham and Jerry Falwell Jr.

     There are reports on this round of the SBC at Baptist Global News; there is Jonathan Merritt's overview at the Atlantic that misses the point of the references in the preceeding paragraph of this blog and there is a discussion at SBC Trends of the forums of Baptistlife.com if you want to take a peak at how the homeboys are analyzing this latest round.

    This 1a NPR hour chat on Tuesday may be the best of the week. It featured SBC's resident "intellectual" Al Mohler, the Calvinist inerrantist Tom Ascol, and a Duke Div proff raised Baptist now preaching with the Methodists. Ascol pretty much got his hiney kicked on the nature of Scripture.

      https://the1a.org/shows/2019-06-12/future-southern-baptist

     Rick Lance the CEO of Bama Baptists like SAra Huckabee Sanders homer Ronnie Floyd of Arkansas will never admit that this latest round of abortion politics in Georgia and Alabama is an outgrowth of the race baiting politics of Wallace of the 60s and Atwater in the 80s and 90s. Atwater admits as much But Trumps base in Ga and Alabama are still trying to put lipstick on the Pig and the pimping is about to play out.

Abe Lincoln's TOP Ten at City Stages

  Friends I hope to do this one justice as it was oozing to get written about a week ago but may not be as sterling as the muses were talking then; or something like that.

   City Stages had a good run in Birmingham Alabama in the Nineties through midway of the first decade of the 21st Century. And they those days were gone forever.

    For a bout fifteen dollars every third week in June for three days you could see music acts you never thought you would see say growing up in Gaffney South Carolina.

    So for fun in Abe Lincoln had been a contemporary here is what Ive concluded.
 
   Eight: Randy Newman singing Rednecks about Lester Maddox and friends. I was there, heard every word
   Number Seven

      Iris Dement cause he woulda loved that Authentic Arkansas Twang and earthiness

    Six The Gospel choirs on Sunday at the Methodist Church downtown cause he would see the Joy of Birmingham emancipation 140 years into Emancipation.

    Five The Temptations

    Four Gillian Welch. Authentic Bluegrass woulda connected with his Kentucky genetics

    Three Bob Dylan, the Balladier who sang on my 50th Birthday May 18, 1953

   Two, Sacred Harp singers of Alabama and friends. They sing same as he heard in the 1850s as Cold Mtn the Movie Proved.

    And One Southern Culture on the Skids. I have to believe Abe woulda had a refined sense of humor by now and there aint no more Refined than the SCOTS