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Posts Tagged ‘alabama’

The Shelby County Case

Posted in The South of the Mind, tagged , , , , on March 9, 2013| 1 Comment »

Y’all need to quit picking on Shelby County.

It’ll be hard, I know. Any part of the South that challenges any part of the Voting Rights Act would seem to be asking for it.

That’s just it, though: it’s low-hanging fruit. It’s a comedy goldmine. It’s too easy, since it fits so neatly into so many preconceptions. The jokes practically write themselves:

Weekend Update’s “Really?” on the Voting Rights Act

The Daily Show’s “Ballots of the Southern Wild”

I’m not saying the South’s not the “Michael Jordan of racism,” and I’m the last person who’d say we should look away, Dixieland, from what white Southerners did not all that long ago.

If we’re going to talk about – or even just joke about – the Shelby County case, though, can we acknowledge that they’re not challenging the Voting Rights Act, but only Sections 4(b) and 5, which require all or parts of 16 states to get federal permission to make any changes to how they conduct their elections? Can we give more than passing mention to the fact that New York, California, and New Hampshire are bound by the same Section 5 provisions as Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana? Can we admit, after the voter suppression efforts in those Dixie-fried backwaters Ohio, Wisconsin, and Michigan, that maybe Shelby County’s case shouldn’t be that they don’t need those Voting Rights Act safeguards anymore, but that the rest of the nation does, too?

(While we’re at it, could someone at NPR learn the correct way to pronounce Calera?)

Could Jon Stewart and Seth Myers look a few dozen blocks uptown, to the Manhattan deli where Forest freakin’ Whitaker was stopped and frisked and suspected of shoplifting, and then do more than shrug it off with the suggestion – if not the assertion – that while, sure, our part of the country has its racism, the South’s racism used to be a whole lot worse, and that make ours’ OK?  Can we recognize that the South has always been shot through with dissenters, or even that nowadays many in the South are only recently Southern, and are that only in terms of geography?

Or are we going to keep on making lazy assumptions about an entire group of people, counting on the unreflective acceptance of condescending stereotypes, many of which were derived from the effects of disparity in economics and opportunity, and doing so in large part because the handy demonization of the ‘other’ helps distract from inequalities and injustices within the larger cultural group?

‘Cause, you know, if there’s anything the South has proved it can do, it’s that.

Whatever the outcome of the Shelby County case, whatever the legalities affirmed or denied by the decision, it brings up a question of conscience and myth, the question this blog, in one way or another, is always asking: What claims does the past have on the present?

Almost all of legal segregation’s last defenders are dead and buried, but their children and heirs – literal and metaphorical – are still very much among us. Is it fair, then, to worry that the Shelby County challenge is Jim Crow’s first step out of the grave? Would we find it as worrisome (or as funny) if the challenge came from somewhere other than the heart of the Heart of Dixie, the suburbs of what once was “Bombingham”?  (Someplace like, say, Charlotte, the New South’s gleaming “Banktown” and host to the party of Barack Obama – even though it, too, did not make it through the Civil Rights Era unbombed?)

If you’re going to lay claim to any pride in the place you’re from, or in the happenstance of being from that place, you have to accept some shame for its faults and crimes, as well.

I feel shame for the South’s racial past, but not guilt. What practical obligations do I then have? What should I do, other than know the history, face the history, and tell the history, square and true, and do whatever little bit I can to keep the worst of it from happening again?

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Don’t Try to Raise a Liberal in the South

Posted in The South of the Mind, tagged , , , , , , , on February 2, 2013| 3 Comments »

If, on these virtual pages, I judge my native land, and call on my kind and kin to recognize and repent of our past and present sins, in too harsh a way, a great part of why I do so is to head off, to cut off, to knee-cap the smug and lazy assumptions of visitors such as Nona Willis Aronowitz:

“So how do you raise a progressive child in a sea of red? It depends on which city you live in, but it usually takes a good amount of effort—and resources.”

How do you raise a progressive kid in Alabama?  I don’t know; ask my in-laws, or the parents of my wife’s many lifelong friends who would call themselves “progressive,” almost all of whom graduated from Alabama public schools.

How do you raise a progressive kid in the South?  Ask my parents; shoot, ask me, since my son just cast his first vote ever last fall, and cast it for Barack Obama.

dreamland

By the way, The Nation: This is not just “A Tuscaloosa BBQ Joint”; this is the original by-God Dreamland. Do a minute of research.

Asking how to raise a “progressive” child in the South just points out how specious and superficial such words are.  To much of my family across the South, I am the personification of a bleeding-heart liberal – I think gay couples should be able to marry, and gun owners should have to get licensed, and government should provide a strong social safety net.  To many of my friends in the Northeast, I’m a DINO (Democrat in Name Only) who’s been a gun owner since I was a child, who’s a big fan of capitalism and free-market enterprise, who has mixed feelings about organized labor, who worships at a Baptist church.

Neither my wife’s parents, nor my parents, nor my children’s parents set out to raise a “progressive” child.  All of us tried hard to raise thinking children.  To some, “thinking” and “progressive” may mean the same thing, but those are the same people to whom “South” and “reactionary” are synonyms, so what do they know?

Aronowitz admits that there are “blue dots” in the South, but those dots aren’t just in college towns or metropolitan hubs, and if you take the time and effort to look closely, they aren’t dots, and they aren’t just one of two primary colors.  Alabama may be “statistically . . . the most conservative state in the nation,” but I was in Alabama after the April 27 tornadoes ripped across the state, and I saw the long lines of Alabamians (and others from across the South) waiting for their chance to give of their means, their time, and their labor to help their neighbors.

The South is changing, quickly and dramatically.  In the Milken Institute’s most recent rankings of the fastest-growing metro areas (for job, wage, and GDP), six of the top 10, and 23 of the top 50, were in states of the old Confederacy.  Please do not presume to know what this growth will mean for the South, politically or socially, since you cannot assume that newcomers and transplants will be any less “conservative” than native Southerners.  (More to the point, please acknowledge that the South hardly has a monopoly on conservatives, reactionaries, or plain ol’ dumbasses.)

As I put it in an earlier post, not all of us who holler, hate.  The trick – no, the task – for us Southerners who both love and lament so much about the South, who would hate to leave this land no matter how much it breaks our hearts, who think purple whether we vote blue or red, is to figure out what is most worth holding on to, and how to hold on without being held down.

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Gulf Coast 8, Rest of U.S. 0

Posted in Deacon Blue, tagged , , , , , , , on January 8, 2013| Leave a Comment »

Well, that was anticlimactic.

Deprived of an exciting game to discuss last night, ESPN’s Brent Burgundy Musburger filled a few minutes (and blew up Twitter) by . . . um, lavishing praise on the girlfriend of Alabama QB A.J. McCarron (she’s also Miss Alabama, because of course she is).  Just before his drool ajsgirlfriendshorted out the mike, he urged “youngsters in Alabama” to go throw a football around the backyard with their dads, apparently so that each and every one of them could someday have a good-looking girlfriend like A.J.’s.

Nevermind (for now) the antediluvian sexual politics at play in that statement – does Brent really think there are any Alabama “youngsters,” at all inclined and capable, who aren’t already tossing a football every chance they get?

Much has been and will be made about the various ridiculous streaks that the Tide continued last night.  The University of Alabama has now won two straight national titles, and three out of the last four; the state of Alabama, however, has won all four in a row, since the Tide’s streak was interrupted only by their rivals at Auburn.  An SEC team has won the last seven BCS championships in a row, but that’s misleading: no one’s seen Kentucky, Vandy, and Arkansas contending for the big prize.

Only four SEC teams, each from a Gulf Coast state, have won those seven straight titles: Florida, Louisiana State, Auburn, and Alabama.  If you throw in Texas from the Big 12, then schools from Gulf Coast states have won the last eight straight national championships.  Throw in Miami and Florida State, and the Gulf Coast has won 11 of the 15 BCS Championship games played since 1998.  Remember that Tennessee won the very first BCS title, after the ’98 season, and you realize that the South has NOT sent forth the best college football team in the country only three times since Bill Clinton was president.

This isn’t extraordinary; this is cotton-pickin’ ridiculous.  This threatens to make college football a regional niche sport, if it keeps up.

alabama-routs-notre-dame-wins-2nd-straight-bcs-titleNor is this a case of big programs importing the best talent from all over the country.  This is, with one major exception, a homegrown phenomenon.  My quick, unscientific survey (i.e., finding the rosters online and counting) finds that of the 116 players on the Crimson Tide’s official roster, 48 are from the state of Alabama, and a whopping 104 are from the South (including Florida and Texas, but not Maryland).

Heck, Notre Dame’s roster includes 29 players from the South (most of them from Texas, Florida, and North Carolina), compared to 34 from the Fighting Irish’s traditional recruiting grounds in the Greater Rust Belt: Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan.

Much has been and will be made about how and why football is such a big deal down here, how and why we apparently do “do football better down South”; there’s a lot of words about pride and fear, and a lot of metaphors involving forges and furnaces.  All that is true and has its place – that place usually being the bright and hopeful start of the season – but in the cold light of another SEC championship, the more prosaic answers look more right.

This ‘Outside the Lines’ article, from nearly a year ago, sums up most of the reasons why the South keeps playing such fine football, but only touches briefly on two of the most important:

One, it’s warmer here.  Perhaps you’ve noticed.  Spring starts earlier; fall lasts longer.  As fun as it is to play tackle football in the snow, better weather makes for more practice.  Maybe global warming will level the playing field by melting the snow off of it.

Two, the Rust Belt is, you know, rusting.  The population is shifting South, and has been for a long while now.  Houston is the fourth-largest city in the nation, and is gaining on Chicago.  The kids who grew up playing football in the shadows of steel mills and auto plants have moved to Florida and Texas and the Carolinas, and their kids are growing up playing football in the shadow of the SEC’s dominance.

Charlotte, for instance, with no real native football tradition to speak of, suddenly has become a hotbed of high school football and college recruiting, with players from the Charlotte metro seeing significant playing time for both the Tide and the Irish.  Much of this is just a question ofboystacklefootball numbers: the population of the Charlotte area grew by 64.6% from 2000 to 2010, and more people means a better chance of more and better players.  Some of this, though, is the unintended consequences of the football culture.  The Carolina Panthers joined the NFL in 1995; since then, it seems like every time I listen to Charlotte sports talk radio, I hear about another retired Panther who’s stayed in Charlotte and volunteers to help coach a youth or high school team.  Nine-year-olds in Charlotte are getting coaching tips from former pros.  Repeat that pattern all over the region, and imagine the head start these Sun Belt kids have.  Imagine all the Alabamians not yet born, who will learn the game from coaches who are learning the game from Nick Saban.

Today – probably right at this moment – footballs are filling a thousand pockets of the Southern air, tossed and caught by kids who love the game for the game itself, with or without a shot at Miss Alabama.

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Tidal

Posted in Deacon Blue, tagged , , , , , , , , on January 7, 2013| 2 Comments »

Once I was soldiering through a rough summer, jonesing for college football more than usual, and since I’d already read all the preview magazines, and since there are as yet no biographies of Wake Forest football coaches, I bought a copy of The Last Coach, Allen Barra’s acclaimed biography of Bear Bryant.  From this book I felt I learned a great deal not just about Bryant and Alabama football, but about the South, and America in the middle of the American century.  Hell, a couple of times I even felt like Bryant was giving me a pep talk from beyond the grave, asking me what I was made of, challenging me not to quit.

And now I might as well tell you the rest of this story, which I promise you is true: About a month after I finished the book, I met a beautiful woman at a book convention in Atlanta.  When I learned that she was from Birmingham, and a rabid Alabama fan, I thanked Jesus and my reading muse for this little bit of lucky timing.

I said, Why, I just read a biography of Bear Bryant, a fantastic book called The Last Coach.  Do you, by any chance, know this book?

She did, indeed, she said.  Turned out, she knew it better than all but a few.  Turned out that the author was – is – her uncle.

Three years and two weeks later, she became my wife, which is how I came to find myself in Tuscaloosa on a September Saturday (roughly 5 years to the day after we met, by the way), walking down the Strip, drinking beer at The Houndstooth, continuing past the stadium and into the Denny Chimesboundaried swarm of the campus proper.  We ate barbecue and chicken wings.  She toured me around the Quad, from Denny Chimes to the Gorgas Library, wanting me to take in the full array of Tide Nation.

She said that tailgating on the Quad was once like a land rush, a frantic race to stake your claim days before the game.  Now, it seems, the Quad is chalked and platted into lots bought and paid for, most of them by banks and law firms and white-collar businesses.  Other businesses cater to the tailgaters, either literally by delivering food in a golf cart and drinks chilled in locked coolers, or figuratively by erecting a tent and hooking up a satellite TV (to watch other, lesser college football teams).  The effect is less Wild West and more well-ordered, prosperous subdivision; I would like to be here in the early, early morning, when the tents go up.

After a couple of hours we walked back to the stadium to see the team come off their buses, to watch, from the back rows of the deep and plaintive crowd, the tops of massive heads take the Walk of Champions, past the bronze pagan statues of the five coaches – including the one at the head of this walk – who brought the nation’s championship back to Tuscaloosa.

We returned to the Quad in time to see the “Million Dollar Band” line up on the library steps and play “Yea, Alabama” in the fading light.  “Yea, Alabama” may be the fightingest fight song in America.  The words to most fight songs are just rosy platitudes about the virtues of the home team and school, and generic urgings to play hard and win through.  “Yea, Alabama” commands its team to “teach the Bulldogs to behave” and “send the Yellow Jackets to a watery grave.”

I have found that there are two versions of the next verse.  My wife always thought it ran, “If a man starts to weaken, that’s a shame.”  Others say that the original lyrics are, “If a man starts to weaken, that’s HIS shame.”  My wife decided she likes this second version better.  I have been warned.  The band left the quad and marched into the stadium, and we joined the thousands following in their wake.

I am not an Alabama fan; I am a fan of the Alabama football team, and there is a difference.  Mainly I am a big fan of my wife and her family; I love them all fiercely, and, also, I am not dumb.  My own allegiance presents no conflict, and won’t without a miraculous rise or a stunning fall by one team or the other.  For this game I insisted on wearing a shirt in my team’s colors, but with an Alabama ball cap.  I wore that cap honestly, as family and not as a craven frontrunner climbing on the bandwagon, even if I’m not an Alabama fan.

Lord, though, it is seductive: all this history, this hegemony; to be invited into this community, sealed and marked with its own language that’s both private and famous; to be invited into all this confidence, all the downright certitude.  This is the tribal pride, the yawping barbaric gallantry, the “proto-Dorian bond” of the South, rendered joyful and (mostly) harmless and transracial and (so, so often) triumphant.  All that winning.  All that glorious past.  Never mind the sound of it – the very notion of 100,000 people yelling “Roll Tide, Roll” in unison, without mechanical prompt or reminder, astounds.

rolltideLet me be the 5,000th writer to point out that Alabama football gave this state, and all the South, something to be proud of when it had so much else to be very ashamed of, and that’s why they take their football so seriously here, and let me also throw out there that maybe they take their football so seriously here because they keep winning so doggone many football games.  (I will note and admit that most of the Alabama fans I’ve come to know, male and female, know the game well.)

The University of Alabama football team has stood as a symbol of so many things at so many times, and so often at the same time, that if they didn’t keep winning we might lose sight of the ball: They were the standard-bearers for downtrodden Dixie; they were the champions of segregation and white oppression.  To other, older parts of the South, they were a collection of country boys with names like Lee Roy, to be mocked and/or envied; within the state, they play for the school for the moneyed elites.  To the sports media, they are a juggernaut of excellence, the New York Yankees of college football, joyless in their grim perfection and lofty expectations; to their fans, they are the focal point around which the seasons turn.

In our seats high above the north end zone, my wife got teary-eyed watching the pre-game history lessons on the video boards.  First, the survey course, on Alabama football through the ages, from when the game crossed the Black Warrior River onto campus in 1892 through all 14 of their national championships, including – especially – the one won last year.  Then, soon after, the seminar, on the man who coached the Tide to six of those titles, the man remembered everywhere here by name and by fabric pattern.  You could call it a Bear-haunted landscape, except that his presence is too blatant to be a haunting.  The video board shows a clip from one of his locker room speeches, and 50 years on, he’s still the most charismatic man in the state.

Nick Saban is compelling in his relentlessness; he tricks you into thinking that you, too, could enjoy his level of success, his excellence, if you could just focus as narrowly, work as hard, be as single-minded as he is.  Saban benefits from having the job three decades after Bryant died, and he has won enough that his relentlessness has become a kind of charisma.  But the first time I came to Birmingham to meet my future wife’s family, I came for a wedding in which she was maid-of-honor, and the groom’s cake was topped with an edible and frosted houndstooth hat.

The groom, by the way, would have been in diapers when Bear Bryant died.

Tonight Ole Miss becomes the first team all season to hold a lead on Alabama.  They hold that lead for all of 15 seconds.  Alabama wins over the course of the night, and I mean that exactly.  This year’s team, perhaps more than any other ever, really does resemble a Crimson Tide: Alabama’s third-stringers could start for all but a few Division I teams, and for all Saban’s brilliance, he does seem simply to throw wave after wave of superior talent at the opponent.

These players and their head coach, though, never talk about talent.  They talk about “the process,” and how they stay focused on “the process,” and how, as long as they focus on “the process,” then winning will follow.  It’s the message that almost every great college coach, in one form or another, has preached: to Dean Smith, it was “the system”; John Wooden codified it as his “Pyramid of Success.”  The idea is that you worry about performing each function of the game to the best of your ability, each time you practice or perform.  (I assume it’s only a matter of time before someone opens a bar in Tuscaloosa called “The Process.”)

Saban’s other mantra is “Do your job,” the idea being that if each player does his job, and focuses laser-like on his small role within the grand mechanics of the game, then “the process” will proceed without hitch or hindrance, and victory will roll in as surely as the . . . well, you know.

Because Nick Saban and his staff and their players are so good at what they do, “the process” proceeds as envisioned far more often than not, and that much winning can’t help but be fun.  What it may lack in lyricism, it makes up for in effective competence, and effective competence is an undervalued virtue these days.

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