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Born May 18, 1953; got saved at Truett Memorial BC in Hayesville, NC 1959. On rigged ballot which I did not rig got Most Intellectual class of 71, Gaffney High School. Furman Grad, Sociology major but it was little tougher than Auburn football players had Had three dates with beautiful women the summer of 1978. Did not marry any of em. Never married anybody cause what was available was undesirable and what was desirable was unaffordable. Unlucky in love as they say and even still it is sometimes heartbreaking. Had a Pakistani Jr. Davis Cupper on the Ropes the summer of 84, City Courts, Rome Georgia I've a baby sitter, watched peoples homes while they were away on Vacation. Freelance writer, local consultant, screenwriter, and the best damn substitute teacher of Floyd County Georgia in mid 80's according to an anonymous kid passed me on main street a few years later when I went back to get a sandwich at Schroeders. Had some good moments in Collinsville as well. Ask Casey Mattox at www.clsnet.org if he will be honest about it. I try my best to make it to Bridges BBQ in Shelby NC at least four times a year.

Monday, June 17, 2019

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

      

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