ON THE AVENUES: When love and hate collide – or, my father and the governor.

"A man will talk about how he'd like to escape from living folks. But it's the dead folks that do him the damage. It's the dead ones that lay quiet in one place and don’t try to hold him, that he can’t escape from."
-- William Faulkner, from Light in August

1.

This is a story about dead folks, or more accurately a dead era, although it might be said that anything this dead has no damn business being so very much alive, right now, in the year 2020. The retelling itself has proven difficult, and a definitive rendering eludes me.

I’ve read all about humankind’s past pandemics and those famous plagues of old, and assumed these lessons were clear to me, but the part they don’t teach you is the way seismic public health crises peel back the layers of your soul – or, in my case, what passes for one. Atheist with souls? Nah, surely not.

To begin this beguine, let’s go back to the beginning.

2.

These many years later, the way I remember it is that much of my father’s self-worth revolved around good, old-fashioned hard work.

In another place at another time, he might have been an enthusiastic Stakhanovite, a term originating in the Soviet Union to describe “workers who modeled themselves after (epic farm-near-me/">mining hero) Alexey Stakhanov. These workers took pride in their ability to produce more than was required, by working harder and more efficiently, thus strengthening the Communist state.”

We’re Americans, of course, or so we are told by the looters, and it’s all bound up into a different set of precepts. Unraveling these many motivations decades after the fact wouldn’t be easy in the best of times – and as you may have noticed, these aren’t.

It remains that my father was ideally suited to socialism. He just never realized it. A military veteran, working man, salt of the earth, the common folk, Joe Six Pack; my father was eternally suspicious of concentrated wealth and hoity-toity, over-educated elites.

By his own admission drawn to the underdog, he did not cheer for the New York Yankees or US Steel. My father died in 2001, and yet I can imagine him turning the air blue upon learning that Greg Fischer proposed to award Amazon half the city of Louisville (and a state park to boot) in order to lure the company’s headquarters to Louisville.

Conversely, and the hard part for me to accept, is that my father quite likely would have been enamored of Donald Trump’s bait ‘n’ switch brand of cynical populism. That’s because he always was drawn to charlatans, like a moth to the light fixture.

Ross Perot was great, at least until he proved to be an utter flake. Ronald Reagan? A godlike figure, except when those two presidential terms concluded, my father was disillusioned when he realized the rich had gotten far richer; trickle down, but treasure up.

Before them, there was another recipient of my father’s political affections, a passionate straight talker who spoke to the people, not the snobs, and understood what needed to be done to make the nation great again.

He was George Corley Wallace (1919-1998), seeker of the presidency from 1964 through 1976, although most convincingly in 1968 and 1972.

3.

My unanticipated journey through childhood days began innocently enough with a book, the title of which aptly conveys the essence of its content: Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future (James Shapiro; 2020).

The second prompting came during a chat with a friend, who mentioned a 1968 television appearance by Wallace, soon to become a presidential candidate as an independent: "Firing Line with William F. Buckley Jr.: The Wallace Crusade" (1968).

I watched the episode, and was strangely disquieted. Something began to stir. Concurrently, I started reading another book called Backlash: What Happens When We Talk Honestly about Racism in America (George Yancy; 2018).

At this point, little things began nagging at me. Something was troubling, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. Perhaps it was the culmination of six months spent largely at home, contemplating humanity, pandemics, racism and presidential politics – numerous strange disturbances coming together at the crossroads amid tumultuous news cycles.

Soon it became clear that the specific flash point came with the introduction of Wallace into the narrative; moreover, it flared after watching the Alabamian in peak crusading form on "Firing Line." Watching it made me physically uncomfortable, something uncharacteristic for a history buff with a customarily strong stomach.

It became apparent that I needed a more comprehensive refresher course on Wallace and his epoch, which came courtesy of a PBS "American Experience" documentary film titled "George Wallace: Settin' the Woods on Fire" (2000).

It took far longer to absorb than the three-hour running time because at the start, I couldn’t endure more than five minutes at a sitting. I studied the bathroom mirror. Could someone please explain why I was having such a visceral reaction to this?

4.

George C. Wallace was a four-time Alabama governor whose failed presidential candidacies in 1968 and 1972 functioned as grandiose overtures to the ensuing civil rights flip-flop of America’s two main political parties.

Wallace, who began as a New Deal “liberal” in relative terms, became etched in the minds of Americans as a racist bogeyman; his presidential platforms were swallowed whole by Richard Nixon and co-opted into the emerging “Southern strategy.” Black America subsequently deserted the erstwhile Party of Lincoln for the Democrats, now the presumed defenders of social justice, while Republicans scooped up the South’s (shall we say “reactionary”) electoral votes.

The ambitious Wallace’s political career was like an obsessive-compulsive personality disorder. He told his children only two things mattered in life, money and power – and he didn’t care about money; friends remarked that Wallace’s muse was the thrill of the campaign chase, and he became bored quickly when relegated to the day-to-day grind of governance.

And yet in 1958, when Wallace mounted his first Alabama gubernatorial campaign, he did so as a populist champion of all poor and working class residents, black or white, only to be badly beaten in the Democratic primary (the race that mattered; at the time, a Republican was lucky to get 35% of the vote in the fall).

A humiliated Wallace had an epiphany in 1958, and it brings us full circle, back to the opening exchange from the "Firing Line" of 1968.

Buckley … highlighted Wallace’s 1958 gubernatorial campaign against John Patterson, a race which Wallace lost and which led the young politician to claim that he would never again be outmaneuvered on the issue of segregation. Moderator C. Dickerson Williams had his hands full as Wallace attacked numerous peripheral details of Buckley’s comments, such as whether he really uttered terms like “out-segged” or whether he picked his teeth with a dirty toothpick, as the New York Times supposedly claimed.

“Out-segged.”

Hearing these words on a 52-year-old broadcast that I’m sure I didn’t watch as an 8-year old nonetheless struck me like a baseball bat to the cranium. On the face of it, they’re perfectly accurate words in the context of the discussion, but upon hearing them, I immediately guessed that something important was missing.

Wallace denied Buckley's attribution, openly sneering: “There’s no such expression as ‘segged’ in the vocabulary of southerners. I have never heard of the word ‘seg’ or ‘segged.’”

Duh. Of course he hadn’t.

Wallace was telling the whole truth; as you may already have guessed, and as the documentary film corrects the normally accurate Buckley, what the failed candidate actually said was this: “I was out-niggered, and I will never be out-niggered again.”

This may seem like a minor point given the slur. However, Wallace had already mastered the sort of coded language and dog whistles that have remained a valued component of the right wing’s wink-wink, nudge-nudge vocabulary to the present day. Buckley afforded Wallace a euphemism, but should he have done so?

Consequently, this had the effect of reminding me that the “N” word was explicitly forbidden in our household during the days of my habitation there.

As an ex-Marine, my father was a walking encyclopedia of creative profanity, but he doubled as family censor. THIS obscenity was okay to use in front of your mother, sparingly, but never THAT one. And the “N” word? Not at all; never. Soap, meet mouth.

Have I mentioned that my father was a strident, outspoken, sign-planting supporter of George C. Wallace in 1968 and 1972?

Ding, ding … ding.

Clearly this accounts for the dissonance in my Swiss cheese of a soul. Now, what’s to be done with it?

5.

I was born in a New Albany, Indiana hospital and spent the first 25 years of my life in or near the presumably anodyne settlement of Georgetown, less than ten miles away from the city, situated a few hundred feet above the Ohio River flood plain.

My guess is townies at the time would have denied Georgetown was a “sundown town,” just a law-abiding Mayberry clone utterly devoid of diversity even before white flight suddenly animated dozens of new subdivisions to sprout like noxious weeds, filling the former pastures of farms, all of it exploding into existence in the wake of Louisville’s 1975 desegregation order.

By then Wallace was in a wheelchair, crippled by the assassination attempt, with his national political career over and my father decamped to adoration of Reagan. After all, the GOP had cribbed all the disabled southern governor’s notes.

But this isn’t to say that my father was racist in any overt sense. He preached equality in matters like sports, although conveniently overlooking the realities of life off the basketball court or baseball diamond.

Dig deeper, and naturally it gets more complicated. My father was, in fact, an ordinary white guy in America. He was a muddled mixture of the admirable and indefensible, usually meaning well, sometimes revealing more than he’d intended, as when he would deny opposing biracial marriage – but shouldn’t they be thinking about the indignities those poor children will have to endure?

These indignities arose from my father’s and his coterie’s misplaced insistence that a biracial child was any of their business in the first place, all of which is to say that yes, my father was racist; he had to be a racist because I am, too, and this, to me, is an inescapable fact, part and parcel of hegemonic structural racism in America, hence the necessity of reading Yancy’s book.

"Racism, in short, is a way of being — exhibited by all white people, progressive and otherwise — that grants more freedom and benefits to whites at the expense of blacks and other people of color."

Am I deferring my own responsibility to listen and learn by somehow blaming my father for my upbringing? I don’t think so. I’m just trying to come to grips with it. Racism is society-wide. It’s endemic, shared and historical. On the surface, my father was better than some, and not as good as others. There’s not a lot to SEE here, such is the annoying and regrettable commonness of the topic.

To reiterate, my father doubtless would have explained his attraction to a populist demagogue like Wallace in non-racial language; obviously, they’re dog whistles precisely because they’re suggestive and implied, not overt.

He’d have said Wallace was a truth-teller who’d make American great again (half-century symmetry, anyone?) and would fight for the underdog. But my father and his buddies, well, they weren’t really underdogs, were they?

How could they be, given the eternal certainty, and those coded-language promises, that Blacks always would remain conveniently beneath them? To be blunt, that white Americans would always have a cushion between themselves and rock bottom: Black America, kept right where it belonged.

I’m angry with my father now, all these years later, not because he was a racist; as I’ve noted, it seems entirely reasonable to me that all whites are racist. Rather, it’s the one point of his that I always previously admired, and find now to be lamentably misplaced, this being his perception of the supposed underdog’s struggle.

Wallace wasn’t an underdog. He wasn’t really shielding the common white folks from mistreatment at the claws of evil central government, or the coming decades-long cancerous neoliberal pillage. Rather, Wallace was reassuring them they’d always stay a step ahead of Blacks, and so what if most of society’s wealth still somehow found its way straight to the 1%?

Maybe the poor would hit the lottery, and move up to the shining city on a hill where the accumulators of capital reside. But they wouldn’t move down THERE, below the (wink wink) invisible and therefore fully visible color line.

If the true underdogs are society’s most vulnerable, did the likes of Wallace really care for them at all? And while my father may have cared, he still supported Wallace and accepted the latter’s shell game. How do we explain this contradiction?

Later, when we both were older, I’d suggest to my father that he should take a closer look at the failure of exploitative robber baron capitalism as the root cause of certain of these maladies. Occasionally, it seemed that I was making headway against those headwinds, although in the end, he may have decided it was easier to humor me by listening, then enlisting with the next populist to appear.

6.

I can’t entirely account for the rise of this crushing angst, and it might well be the case that there’s nothing noteworthy about any of it, at least in the sense of these attitudes being common to a generation now passed.

And yet, as I’ve noted, a quick scroll of your social media feed will reveal the passing of the generational cohort, but not the diseased attitudes. They're very much still with us.

In 2016, dozens of commentators mentioned George Wallace’s racist and white nationalist legacies in the context of Donald Trump’s narcissistic theatrics, and as a well-read and informed individual, I shrugged and looked away. Of course, I recall thinking, but doesn’t everyone know it, and aren’t we past THAT?

Actually, no. Approaching the conclusion of Season Four of Aryan Nation: Trump Remixes the Racist Classics, we remain mired in it.

7.

My father's been dead for a while now. Our relationship was extremely complicated. We were very different people in many ways, and all too much alike in others. Most of the time it's nothing to dwell on, and I think we parted in 2001 with considerable mutual respect. We both gave ground. We both came around.

I'd use the word "love" if I could, but it isn't something he'd have said, so the notion seems superfluous. We were far tighter at the end than the beginning, and for this much I'm genuinely grateful.

Perhaps what I have learned the past few days while struggling to finish this demented jigsaw puzzle, all the while wearing a self-imposed blindfold, is that evidently I tried to bury quite a lot about those Wallace years as they pertained to my father – and to me. I buried it as deep as I could for as long as the memories would stay put, safely subterranean.

Maybe my boxing up of these memories and feelings, to be hidden in a dusty corner of the noggin, was a form of self-protection, with George Wallace merely a peripheral indicator. That’s because at the tender age of eight, I was an eager co-conspirator of my father's Wallace fetish, if for no other reason than the hope, so often forlorn, of this enthusiasm somehow making him happy.

My father was capable of a strange, unpredictable bad temper. He kept it inside the house, to our trepidation, and his contemporaries probably wouldn’t have known. When I was a kid, I'd try to figure out what was eating him, and couldn’t, so it became my habit to conclude that it was directed at me. My father erupted, then just as quickly erased the memory of his distemper.

It would seem that I didn’t.

Once enrolled in university, and intent on becoming the sort of intellectual calculated to irritate my father, it finally occurred to me that his anger likely stemmed from undiagnosed PTSD, a by-product of World War II; seeing as three years during your late teens on a leaky boat lobbing shells at people you couldn't see, until they came your way in kamikaze planes, is the sort of trauma calculated to stay with you.

Then, deciding the war was to blame, it compelled me to try to protect my father from his ghosts. It seemed terrible to me that one would go to war at 17, and be afflicted by the experience for decades afterward. Maybe he’d been shaped by these factors to be receptive to Wallace and his ilk.

52 years later, with the idiocy of racism and white privilege flaring all around us amid a deadly pandemic, tanking economy and global climate crisis, there remains sufficient depth of feeling – some level of feeling – about my father that out of nowhere exposed previously suppressed anger about the bill of goods my father peddled with regard to Wallace, as opposed to what Wallace really was about, and whatever part of all this involved me – or didn’t.

What’s the answer? I don’t know.

8.

It is well documented that during Wallace’s twilight years, in a dogged pursuit as vigorous as any of his campaigns for public office, he made an apparently sincere effort to atone for his mistakes. If his purported religious awakening was genuine, then the word “sins” might be more fitting.

According to Wallace’s friends, he finally understood that what he had done in order to possess political power caused great suffering to others, with his own accumulating illnesses and pain abetting this revelation. Wallace asked for forgiveness, and remarkably, Alabama’s Black voters supported his final runs for the governor’s office in the early 1980s.

A Black attorney who had figured in Wallace’s early period as judge during the 1950s responded to these entreaties by saying yes, he could forgive Wallace, but no, he could not FORGET what he'd done.

In another striking convergence, the late John Lewis – beaten by Wallace’s state troopers on Bloody Sunday in Selma at the Edmund Pettus Bridge, named for a 19th-century Confederate general, politician and Klansman – also forgave the governor.

Forgiveness from Wallace’s victims in the play’s final act alone attests to the seemingly distant role of William Shakespeare in all this, although I think the Bard of Avon is twice applicable.

I’m not the first to see familiarly dramatic Shakespearean aspects of tragedy as pertaining to Wallace’s story: a lust for power, deals with the devil, the ironic cruelty of an assassination attempt leaving him crippled and in agony (but not killing him), and of course these later efforts to achieve forgiveness and redemption as intended to snatch his tattered soul back from Satan.

Also, like Oedipus in ancient Greece, Wallace’s ambition and arrogance carried both the seeds of success, and his own destruction.

My personal nod to Shakespeare comes with an early 1970s recollection that somehow has stayed fresh in my memory, perhaps as the perfect summary of how tense the relationship with my father was at the time.

I’d taken to checking out LPs of Shakespearean plays from the library, and trying to follow along, reading them while listening. My father came into my room one day, projected his finest facially contorted dismay, and ordered me to get ready for baseball practice by turning off “that shit.”

It’s very strange what you remember, and what you don’t.

At times, it can be downright debilitating.

The ghosts wobble, but they don’t fall down.

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Recent columns:

August 13: ON THE AVENUES: In My Merry Oldsmobile.

August 6: ON THE AVENUES: Surrender.

July 30: ON THE AVENUES: Guys.

July 23: ON THE AVENUES: These overdue mask mandates should help us separate the bad actors from the good.

Losing basketball games to dogs, or why "This Is Going to Get Worse."

Burmila's thoughts are angry, gloomy, dark and largely accurate -- and the melancholy isn't confined to Trumpism.

This is Going to Get Worse, by Ed Burmila (The Baffler)

“Send her back” is what Trumpism has been all along

WATCHING A VIRTUALLY ALL-WHITE CROWD of viciously angry, red-faced people chanting “Send her back!” at the mention of Representative Ilhan Omar during the President’s latest herrenvolk rally was horrifying. But the real horror is that this, sixteen months out from the election, is just the tip of an iceberg. This is bad and it will get worse. Much worse.

The Democratic Party has little to offer in terms of solace, merely a promise to fail in the same way as before.

It will get worse because the Democratic Party still believes that the mushy center is the place to campaign against Trump, that white votes are the only votes worth winning, that people of color or young people will never vote so why bother giving them a reason to, and that, in the brilliant words of Chuck Schumer, “for every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia.”

The following passage cuts closest to the bone. I may have arrived at the tail end of the Boomers, but in the final analysis, their narcissism wins out.

It will get worse because an entire generation of people under forty has already been written off to a life of lowered expectations and debt peonage—a generation that might get more riled up by the politics of Social Security and Medicare had they not already resigned themselves to the reality that neither will exist when, if, they reach old age. None of the relevant social, political, or economic institutions are undergoing an intergenerational transition of power; instead, Boomers have decided simply to stay at the helm until death comes, and since nobody except them has ever mattered it’s no big deal if everything burns down on their way out.

Deaf Gahan assures the community there is no swastika sticker problem, then putters off to attend another ribbon-cutting. In the wake of Gahan's usual hypocrisy, let's take a closer look.

Yesterday was the day after.

HRC says: See a swastika sticker? Don't destroy the evidence -- call the police.

An NA Confidential reader commented.

I hope this is just a step one and not all that they plan on doing.

It's helpful to recall that American Vanguard white supremacist recruitment posters were appearing in New Albany all the way back in February of 2017.

In a disgusting sign of the times, white supremacists have landed in New Albany.

There is no known record of Jeff Gahan commenting publicly about this. Then, as the Courier-Journal notes ...

In August 2018, authorities reported multiple cases of swastika-related vandalism on a New Albany-Floyd County school bus and in front of the Azalea Hills retirement community. Police did not investigate the incidents as a hate crime.

More recently the social media discussion of swastika stickers dates to around late October of 2018.

In a late phone call, Mayor Gahan addresses our swastika sticker problem.

Gahan remained silent throughout. Now it's different, and suddenly Our Shining Eminence needs to be seen as a leader.

That's because it's an election year: "Mayor urges Indiana hate-crimes bill after swastikas, stickers appear." Seems that Gahan has spent the past 24 months building up a full head of steam to boldly and heroically ... contradict the testimony of citizens attending the Human Rights Commission meeting two nights ago?

The New Albany Human Rights Commission addressed the issue Tuesday evening after reportedly "hundreds" of hate speech stickers were seen throughout the city over the last couple of months.

Mayor Jeff Gahan said police have seen much fewer than "hundreds."

"To date, two incidences have been reported to police dealing with approximately 8 stickers and those matters were investigated immediately," Gahan said.

Of course, there's the recent non-history of the Human Rights Commission itself. Gahan beams with a play-actor's pride at his creation, leaving out the important part where he kneecapped it into oblivion several years back rather than allow the first sign of autonomy to challenge the tumescence of his own widening personality cult.

In January of 2017, we reported this: "CM Phipps, we're mystified as to why the New Albany Human Rights Commission is moribund."

During the appointments phase of this evening's city council meeting, President Pat McLaughlin (4th District) asked Greg Phipps (3rd District) about the council appointments status of the Human Rights Commission.

According to the ordinance, council and mayor each appoint members to the HRC, and then the four pick the fifth.

Phipps waved him off, briefly indicating that the HRC seems dead, with no meetings for the past 18 months and no apparent interest. McLaughlin was more than happy to move to the next commission, and that's all we know. It isn't much.

In 2018, with the municipal election season looming and Republicans taking the initiative on the HRC's re-enablement, it was time to start pretending again.

In the final analysis, the overarching point has nothing to do with any of the HRC appointees, save for (Warren) Nash's inexcusable presence, because Gahan's and (Adam) Dickey's objectives with their mismanagement of the HRC has not been to represent the community’s diversity.

It has been to assure their continued control of a “human rights” product in pre-packaged, controllable form.

Welcome to Jeff and Adam's Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test -- hypocrisy-flavored, please.

Progressives, pay heed. The HRC's comeback needn't have occurred, because it shouldn't have neglected, and once it became necessary, your own party's leadership has politicized it again; if Dickey and Gahan don't get what they want from the HRC, they'll smother it a second time.

What you permit, you promote. What you allow, you encourage. What you condone, you own.

Don't let Dickey and Gahan speak for you. They may be "Democratic" in the sense of a two-party duopoly, but they're by no means "democratic" in any meaningful way.

In closing, this observation from a Facebook friend.

NAPD (Chief Bailey) is full of it, because many concerned people in New Albany tried reporting these stickers every time, and they told us to stop calling them! They weren't concerned about it until it made them look bad for not having already acted once the story was finally picked up by the local mainstream media.

Alt media has been talking about this issue for 6+ months. No one cared! The human rights commission didn't even get involved until late 2018, when the stickering had been near-CONSTANT for months at that point. At least they finally did something, but they also got a nice pat on the back for solving BUPKIS.

This isn't over. This hasn't changed. Why did that feel like the last we hear of it? This city's officials can do better. The local media can do better.

The people of this town deserve better than this.

Is this enough for you? I mean... honestly.

Is it?

Let's be realistic. Gahan, Dickey, Bailey, Nash -- they're not going to stop pretending. They're incapable of viewing this issue apart from their own "big fish, little pond" political considerations, and we need to stop pretending they'll even try.

It's top-down control for them -- always has been and will continue to be -- and grassroots activists opposed to these tangible manifestations of white supremacy have little choice; they must push back simultaneously against the swastika bearers and the public officials who seek primarily to neutralize testimony differing with their Disney-fried civic facades.

Tell us YOUR experiences. This space always is available to those wishing to speak about whatever our pillars are reluctant to hear.

HRC says: See a swastika sticker? Don't destroy the evidence -- call the police.

Nürnberg, 1945.

The New Albany Human Rights Commission's Jennifer Ortiz shared the following at her Facebook page following the HRC meeting earlier this evening.

New Albany Residents:

Today, the Human Rights Commission held a public forum to discuss the recent string of Nazi Stickers in our town. Based on discussions at this meeting, the Chief of Police and the HRC ask that anyone who sees Nazi stickers around town please take the following steps:

1. Do not remove the stickers as the Chief stated we need to preserve evidence. These stickers are considered vandalism.

2. Contact NAPD at 812-944-6411 (not 911) and report the incident and location to law enforcement. The police will document the incident and remove the stickers.

3. If you are unable or unwilling to contact police, please take photos and email them to the New Albany Human Rights Commission at humanrights@cityofnewalbany.com. Please note the date of the incident and the location.

4. You may also email Chief Bailey directly at cbailey@napdin.net

Feel free to share this post widely.

I didn't attend and cannot elaborate, but this seems sensible.

New Albany's HRC and the Southern Poverty Law Center on countering the Alt-Right, extremism and white supremacy.

New Albany's HRC and the Southern Poverty Law Center on countering the Alt-Right, extremism and white supremacy.

It's a "movement" of sorts -- each
morning after breakfast.

It's good to see a Human Rights Commission in New Albany being pro-active about anything; the first iteration of the revised HRC a few years back was gracelessly knee-capped by Jeff Gahan and Shane Gibson, and the suppression was abetted by Greg Phipps for reasons as yet unknown.

Public forum to address recent swastika stickers in New Albany, by Brooke McAfee (Where Tom May Keeps Roaming and Roaming)

NEW ALBANY — On multiple occasions in past months, residents noticed the appearance of swastika stickers in downtown New Albany and other areas of the city. Although she didn't see the stickers herself, resident Jennifer Ortiz said she stopped running with headphones because she no longer felt safe as a person of color.

"I don't know who this person is. I don't know if they actually believe those ideologies, whether they are trying to scare us or whether they're just trying to make a scene," she said. "I don't know what their intent is. I know I've changed my behavior. I can assume that various people from various groups might have changed their behavior, and they might not feel comfortable in this town anymore."

The New Albany Human Rights Commission is presenting a special forum at 5:30 p.m. Tuesday in the third floor conference room of the City-County Building to allow residents to voice their concerns regarding the pro-Nazi stickers, which were first noticed in downtown New Albany in September.

Very soon Ortiz likely will learn the follicle-deep "depth" of Gahan's and Gibson's commitment to human rights. They'll tolerate the HRC's advocacy during an election year in order to demonstrate to self-styled "progressives" that something's being done, when we all know nothing will come of it, because the mayor himself cannot acknowledge swastikas, drug addiction or homeless people without contradicting the laughable aura of infallibility he's cloaked himself in (see "New Clothes, Emperor's for more information).

Meanwhile the experienced and sensible Southern Poverty Law Center has a pamphlet expressly designed for the college and university experience, but it's not difficult to see how the advice applies to everyday life in the city.

Substitute "citizen" for "student", "City Hall" for "college leadership", and so on. I don't know the exact answer when it comes to dealing with white supremacists, but there are numerous starting points therein (following is a condensed version).

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The Alt-Right and Extremism on Campus

An old and familiar poison is being spread on college campuses these days: the idea that America should be a country for white people.

Under the banner of the Alternative Right – or “alt-right” – extremist speakers are touring colleges and universities across the country to recruit students to their brand of bigotry, often igniting protests and making national headlines. Their appearances have inspired a fierce debate over free speech and the direction of the country.

Behind the provocative, youthful and sometimes entertaining facade of the alt-right is a scrum of white nationalists and white supremacists – mostly young men – who hate diversity and scorn democratic ideals.

They claim that “white identity” is under attack by multicultural forces using “political correctness” and “social justice” to undermine white people and “their” civilization. Characterized by heavy use of social media and memes, they eschew establishment conservatism and promote the goal of a white ethnostate, or homeland.

As student activists, you can counter this movement.

In this brochure, the Southern Poverty Law Center examines the alt-right, profiles its key figures and exposes its underlying ideologies. We also recommend ways to deconstruct and counter its propaganda, mount peaceful protests, and create alternative events and forums when alt-right speakers are invited or come to your campus.

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WHAT TO SAY, WHAT TO DO

When an alt-right personality is scheduled to speak on campus, the most effective course of action is to deprive the speaker of the thing he or she wants most – a spectacle. Alt-right personalities know their cause is helped by news footage of large jeering crowds, heated confrontations and outright violence at their events. It allows them to play the victim and gives them a larger platform for their racist message.

Denying an alt-right speaker of such a spectacle is the worst insult they can endure.

While there’s nothing wrong with peaceful student protests against a hateful ideology, it’s best to draw attention to hope instead. Hold an alternative event – away from the alt-right event – to highlight your campus’ commitment to inclusion and our nation’s democratic values.

What’s more, take action to inoculate the campus against such extremism before these speakers appear on campus. The following steps can help prevent your college or university from being exploited by the alt-right.

THE TIME TO DEAL WITH THE ALT-RIGHT IS BEFORE IT ARRIVES ON CAMPUS.

RESEARCH THE ALT-RIGHT’S HISTORY AND VIEWS.

MEET WITH CAMPUS GROUPS TARGETED BY THE ALT-RIGHT. ENLIST THEIR SUPPORT.

APPROACH THE HOST GROUP INVITING AN ALT-RIGHT SPEAKER TO CAMPUS.

CULTIVATE A COMMUNITY OPPOSED TO BIGOTRY.

ASK THAT THE COLLEGE LEADERSHIP DENOUNCE THE APPEARANCE.

MAKE A YOUTUBE VIDEO – OR TWO – ABOUT THE ALT-RIGHT.

IF THE ALT-RIGHT APPEARS ON CAMPUS, ORGANIZE A JOYFUL PROTEST AWAY FROM ITS EVENT.

ABOVE ALL, AVOID CONFRONTATION WITH THE ALT-RIGHT SPEAKER AND SUPPORTERS. The alt-right thrives on hostility, and hate feeds on crowds. Video footage of an altercation will only provide cover for the speaker, who can claim to be a victim. As hard as it may be to resist yelling at alt-right speakers, do not confront them. Do not debate them. Do not resort to violence, in speech or deed. As this publication makes clear, there are many other ways to challenge the beliefs of this movement.

In a late phone call, Mayor Gahan addresses our swastika sticker problem.

Maybe Joe Donnelly is available for a consultation.

Nick Vaughn forms exploratory committee, then joins anti-KKK protesters in Madison.

Nick Vaughn was on hand yesterday to join protesters at the Ku Klux Kooks gathering in Madison, Indiana.

What?

You say it's "kookout, not "kooks"?

Okay; whatever.

I think "kooks out" works better, but sadly, spelling deficiencies aren't confined to white supremacists. Vaughn had this to say about it at his Facebook campaign page.

Was proud and honored to speak against the hateful KKK today in Madison, IN. They have no place in Madison, New Albany, or anywhere else in this world.

Any other local Republicans care to weigh in?

Meanwhile, since Friday it has been made safe to refer overtly to Vaughn's prospective campaign, because this was the day he formed a formal "exploratory" committee.

Nick Vaughn to File Exploratory Committee

At approximately 11:30 AM, Nick Vaughn filed an Exploratory Committee for an unannounced office named "Nick Vaughn for New Albany." In the coming weeks and months, Nick Vaughn for New Albany will begin to meet with community leaders and concerned citizens about the issues facing New Albany. Additionally, Nick Vaughn for New Albany will begin to develop solutions to problems such as out-of-control spending, public housing, and ending the status quo in City Hall.

Finally, we are able to announce a few members of Nick Vaughn for New Albany:

Chief Advisor, Michael Grim
Treasurer, David Vaughn III
Youth Outreach Coordinator, Sam Stricker

The requisite Indiana form asks the filer to explain why he or or she is forming the committee, and Vaughn answered with "feasibility of a citywide campaign." The Green Mouse is hazarding a guess that it's not a campaign for city clerk, but beyond this, we know little.

GREEN MOUSE SAYS: What does it mean, this social media surge by Nick Vaughn?

Vaughn also has established a PayPal site for donations.

Now, for the local chain newspaper's coverage of the Kooks Up in Madison.

KKK event draws hundreds of protesters to Southern Indiana, by Erin Walden (A Cornucopia of Tom May Content)

Third "Ku Klux Kookout" held in Jaycee Park

MADISON — Hundreds of protesters descended upon Jaycee Park on Saturday afternoon, drawn together by their common objection to one thing: a cookout put together by the Ku Klux Klan.

This is the third year there’s been a “Ku Klux Kookout” in the small tourist city of Madison, nestled along the Ohio River in Southern Indiana, and the third time it’s drawn protests.

The Klansmen, some of whom had their faces covered with bandanas and handkerchiefs, gathered in a shelter house atop a small hill in the park. The group was comprised of fewer than 20 people, mainly men, who waved the American, Confederate and Nazi flags.

A chain link fence and police from three agencies — Indiana State Police, Jefferson County Sheriff's Department and Madison Police Department — along with barricades separated the Klansmen from hundreds of protesters.

“We are not a hate group,” Derek Eaglin, the leader of the KKK group, told the crowd. “We are not anti-black, we are pro-white.”

Their rhetoric seemed to contradict that sentiment. The group often shouted slurs at the protesters and argued that “diversity” and “minorities” are the cause for drugs in their community ...

 ... Another half of the protesters took a different approach. The Southern Indiana Fairness Alliance, Jefferson County United and Kaleidoscope, Hanover College’s diversity club, came together to organize counter measures against the “kookout,” according to Evan Stoner, a Jeffersonville native. The three groups lined up public speakers to send a different message to the KKK ...

The Bughouse: "Coming to terms with Ezra Pound’s politics."

Every now and then, Ezra Pound (1885-1972) bobs to the blog's surface, as in these three posts from 2016 and 2017.

"Ezra Pound: The Solitary Volcano," a biography by John Tytell.

Shane's Excellent New Words: Autodidacticism ... and a biography of the poet Ezra Pound.

SHANE'S EXCELLENT NEW WORDS: Effluvium or effluent? Ezra's tree needs to know.

In one of them I wrote: "It is fascinating to contemplate a time when an artist could proclaim that poetry would change the world, and be taken seriously."

According to Evan Kindley at The Nation, such a time hasn't yet passed, and Pound continues to have an influence on the nation's discourse, although this fact owes to Pound's fascist politics more than his poetry -- and at any rate, these factors were intertwined from the very start.

The Insanity Defense

Coming to terms with Ezra Pound’s politics.

In December 1945, Ezra Pound was committed to St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, DC. He was then 60 years old, internationally famous, and under indictment for treason against the United States. In an infamous series of broadcasts made on Italian radio between 1941 and 1943, Pound had declared his support for Mussolini’s regime and his contempt for the Allied forces. He parroted fascist talking points but also added a layer of byzantine anti-Semitic conspiracy theory all his own. “You let in the Jew and the Jew rotted your empire, and you yourselves out-Jewed the Jew,” he admonished the British on March 15, 1942. In other broadcasts, Pound spoke of “Jew slime,” warned of the white race “going toward total extinction,” suggested hanging President Roosevelt (“if you can do it by due legal process”), praised Hitler’s Mein Kampf, and urged his listeners to familiarize themselves with The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Pound had arrived at this vicious ideological position gradually. His early work, while always concerned with the relations between art and society, had rarely been political per se. Over the years, though, his long poem The Cantos, started in 1915, had drifted from a preoccupation with mythological subjects to an investigation of economics and governance, influenced by heterodox economists like C.H. Douglas and Silvio Gesell. By the time the Second World War began, Pound had come to blame the practice of usury, propagated by a secret network of nefarious Jewish bankers, for all the evils afflicting the world ...

"Ladies and gentlemen, YOUR vanguard of the white race."

In happier times: Heimbach and a wife.

As Hee Haw's Grandpa Jones used to say, truth is stranger than fact -- but this one is so bizarre that the Southern Poverty Law Center probably thinks it's on Candid Camera.

TWP chief Matthew Heimbach arrested for battery after affair with top spokesman's wife, by Brett Barrouquere and Rachel Janik (Southern Poverty Law Center)

Matthew Heimbach, the leader of the Traditionalist Worker Party, is free on bond after being charged with battery in southern Indiana after a bizarre sequence of events involving Heimbach having an affair with his chief spokesman’s wife.

Police in Paoli, Indiana, said Heimbach attacked his wife and TWP spokesman Matt Parrott early Tuesday morning after the two confronted him about the affair with Parrott’s wife.

After the arrest, Parrott announced he was walking away from the group.

“I’m done. I’m out,” Parrott told The Southern Poverty Law Center on Tuesday. “SPLC has won. Matt Parrott is out of the game. Y’all have a nice life.”

Parrott declined to comment further on Heimbach’s arrest or his resignation. His resignation came hours after the arrest and just days after he learned of the affair between Heimbach and his wife ...

Antifa and capitalism: "Hate is not an isolated occurrence, detached from the rest of society, but very much a symptom of a system built on exploitation."

This one's going to go down nicely at the Friday night fish fry.

The Anti-Capitalist Politics of Antifa, by Stephanie Basile (CounterPunch)

As antifa has burst into the mainstream in recent weeks, suddenly the efficacy of confronting Nazis in the streets is being debated on the national stage. Antifa is not one particular group, but a term used to describe anti-fascists committed to stamping out fascism before it can rise to power. The debate around antifa tends to stay narrowly focused on the use of physical self-defense in public spaces. What’s received less attention is the anti-capitalist politics of antifa, and how some anti-fascists and are putting these politics into practice through workplace organizing.

Two workplace examples are given.

Phoenix, Tiffany, and Kenny all identify as anti-capitalists and anti-fascists. They see combating fascism, racism, sexism, and capitalism as inextricably linked. “They’re inseparable, they are the pillars of white supremacy,” says Phoenix. “They can’t exist without each other.” Tiffany frames the connection between capitalism and other forms of oppression as being rooted in our material reality. “When I think about the connections between capital and white supremacy, I think- who owns what, and how did they come to own it? Slaves were working the land, producing cotton, or tobacco, or sugar. Where did that money go, and what does that mean?” For Tiffany, using concrete material conditions of workers’ lives as a starting point is the easiest way of making connections between systems of capitalism and white supremacy.

In his new book Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook, Mark Bray places current antifa struggles within a larger political ideology that is explicitly anti-capitalist. He notes that antifa has historically brought together broad segments of the left, including anarchists, communists, and socialists. “Many anti-fascists will argue that you can’t really be an anti-fascist without being an anti-capitalist, because they argue that capitalism breeds the conditions for fascism,” says Bray.

While anti-fascists have differing opinions about how fascism takes roots and grows, “what they agree on is that you can’t take fascism as a blemish on capitalist society, but instead as a key part of it.”

The compelling argument builds from these, which are excerpts only, so go and read the damn article -- and enjoy your "osters."

Required reading for local Democrats: "How (Not) to Challenge Racist Violence."

"If we truly want to challenge racism, oppression, and inequality, we should turn our attention away from the few hundred marchers in Charlottesville and towards the real sources and enforcers of our unjust global order. They are not hard to find."
-- from Common Dreams

Aviva Chomsky's essay (below) in the aftermath of Charlottesville sudenly becomes even more relevant in terms of escalated American military action in Afghanistan.

First, a local perspective.

DUNCAN: Hatred speaks loudest when we are silent, by Susan Duncan (That Hanson Show)

 ... But what cannot be seen is the hatred that dwells within. Racism has festered like an open sore, infection spreading like bacteria in the blood stream of America.

We have allowed that to happen by our denial, by our lack of attention, by our silence.

There were signs. Looks … words … deeds that proclaimed quietly, “I’m better than you.”

---

There isn’t enough sand along the Ohio River in which for us to bury our heads.

We cannot sit in the comfort of our living rooms and extol the shame of it all. Let loose the ties that bind you from action.

Hate is learned. Teach love.

I'm reprinting Chomsky's piece in full: "Her most recent book is Undocumented: How Immigration Became Illegal (Beacon Press, 2014). She is professor of history and coordinator of Latin American studies at Salem State University in Massachusetts."

The source: "Common Dreams has been providing breaking news & views for the progressive community since 1997. We are independent, non-profit, advertising-free and 100% reader supported."

---

How (Not) to Challenge Racist Violence, by Aviva Chomsky (Common Dreams)

"Protesters are eager to expend extraordinary energy denouncing small-scale racist actors. But what about the large-scale racist actors?"

As white nationalism and the so-called “alt-Right” have gained prominence in the Trump era, a bipartisan reaction has coalesced to challenge these ideologies. But much of this bipartisan coalition focuses on individual, extreme, and hate-filled mobilizations and rhetoric, rather than the deeper, politer, and apparently more politically acceptable violence that imbues United States foreign and domestic policy in the 21st century.

Everyone from mainstream Republicans to a spectrum of Democrats to corporate executives to “antifa” leftists seems eager and proud to loudly denounce or even physically confront neo-Nazis and white nationalists. But the extremists on the streets of Charlottesville, or making Nazi salutes at the Reichstag, are engaging in only symbolic and individual politics.

Even the murder of a counter-protester was an individual act—one of over 40 murders a day in the United States, the great majority by firearms. (Double that number are killed every day by automobiles in what we call “accidents”—but which obviously have a cause also.) Protesters are eager to expend extraordinary energy denouncing these small-scale racist actors, or celebrating vigilante-style responses. But what about the large-scale racist actors? There has been no comparable mobilization, in fact little mobilization at all, against what Martin Luther King called “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today”—the United States government, which dropped 72 bombs per day in 2016, primarily in Iraq and Syria, but also in Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan, making every single day 9/11 in those countries.

Historically, people and organizations struggling to change U.S. society and policy have used direct action, boycotts, and street protests as strategies to pressure powerholders to change their laws, institutions, policies, or actions. The United Farm Workers called on consumers to boycott grapes in order to pressure specific growers to negotiate with their union. Antiwar protesters marched on Washington or targeted their Congressional representatives. They also took direct action: registering voters, pouring blood on draft records or nuclear weapons, sitting in front of trains carrying weapons to Central America.

All of these kinds of tactics remain valid options today. But there has been a puzzling shift away from actual goals and towards using these tactics merely to express one’s moral righteousness or “allyship.” I remember my first “take back the night” march in Berkeley, in the 1970s. As men and women marched through the campus holding candles, I wondered whether they thought that would-be rapists would undergo a change of heart when they saw that large sectors of the public disapproved of rape?

Over the years I have come to see more and more of what Adolph Reed calls “posing as politics.” Rather than organizing for change, individuals seek to enact a statement about their own righteousness. They may boycott certain products, refuse to eat certain foods, or they may show up to marches or rallies whose only purpose is to demonstrate the moral superiority of the participants. White people may loudly claim that they recognize their privilege or declare themselves allies of people of color or other marginalized groups. People may declare their communities “no place for hate.” Or they may show up at counter-marches to “stand up” to white nationalists or neo-Nazis. All of these types of “activism” emphasize self-improvement or self-expression rather than seeking concrete change in society or policy. They are deeply, and deliberately, apolitical in the sense that they do not seek to address issues of power, resources, decisionmaking, or how to bring about change.

Oddly, these activists who have claimed the mantle of racial justice seem committed to an individualized, apolitical view of race. The diversity industry has become big business, sought out by universities and companies seeking the cachet of inclusivity. Campus diversity offices channel student protest into alliance with the administration and encourage students to think small. While adept in the terminology of power, diversity, inclusion, marginalization, injustice, and equity, they studiously avoid topics like colonialism, capitalism, exploitation, liberation, revolution, invasion, or other actual analyses of domestic or global affairs. Lumping race together in an ever-growing list of marginalized identities allows the history and realities of race to be absorbed into a billiard ball theory of diversity, in which different dehistoricized identities roll around a flat surface, occasionally colliding.

Let us be very clear. The white nationalists who marched in Charlottesville, hate-filled and repugnant as their goals may be, are not the ones responsible for the U.S. wars on Iraq, Syria, and Yemen. They are not responsible for turning our public school system over to private corporations. They are not responsible for our separate and unequal health care system that consigns people of color to ill health and early death. They are not the ones foreclosing and evicting people of color from their homes. They are not the authors of neoliberal capitalism with its devastating effects on the poor around the planet. They are not the ones militarizing the borders to enforce global apartheid. They are not behind the extraction and burning of fossil fuels that is destroying the planet, with the poor and people of color the first to lose their homes and livelihoods. If we truly want to challenge racism, oppression, and inequality, we should turn our attention away from the few hundred marchers in Charlottesville and towards the real sources and enforcers of our unjust global order. They are not hard to find.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License

New Albany city council, this Thursday: "Resolution Expressing Solidarity with the People of Charlottesville, Virginia, and a Public Condemnation of Racism, White Supremacy, and Neo-Nazi Ideology in Our Community, the Nation and the World."

Thursday evening, 7:00 p.m., 3rd floor meeting room. Let's see a big turnout for this.

Dolt supremacy: Remembering Bill O'Reilly's role in the assassination of Dr. George Tiller.

The White Supremacy of Anti-Abortion Extremism

Occasionally when provoked, this 2010 column comes to my mind.

ON THE AVENUES: Abortion? Wichita, or maybe Targu Mures.

It's just a bonus to be able to tie, Bill O'Reilly, Mike Pence, Nicolae Ceausescu and anti-abortion terrorists together in one big ball of "go away -- preferably to another planet."

Bill O'Reilly's Dangerous War Against Dr. Tiller, by David S. Cohen (Rolling Stone)

O'Reilly waged an unflagging harassment campaign against the abortion provider before Tiller was murdered in 2009

On May 31st, 2009, Scott Roeder assassinated Dr. George Tiller. Roeder had been waiting patiently that morning in the pews of Tiller's church. Right after Tiller finished his job as an usher, Roeder walked into the church foyer, pressed a gun against Tiller's forehead and shot him. He died from the single gunshot wound.

Roeder killed the doctor for one reason, and one reason only: Tiller was a prominent abortion provider – maybe even the most prominent in the country at the time – and Roeder wanted to stop abortion. No one questions that Roeder's radical anti-abortion views were responsible for Tiller's death.

But this, the day Bill O'Reilly was ousted from Fox News, is a good time to remember O'Reilly's role in the Tiller tragedy – especially in the context of newly released statistics showing that harassment of abortion providers in various forms is on the increase.

O'Reilly had waged an unflagging war against Tiller that did just about everything short of urging his followers to murder him.

In a disgusting sign of the times, white supremacists have landed in New Albany.

No, it isn't the American Vanguard Corporation.

Rather, it's a group briefly referenced in this Southern Poverty Law Center post. Our friend Brandon Smith saw the sheet today on Spring between 3rd and 4th and photographed it. The image appears here with his permission.

On Saturday morning, I saw one of these sheets stuck to David Thrasher's alley art between Spring and Market. Briefly contemplating my traditional free speecherism, I removed it and deposited in the nearest dumpster. Even if racists and white supremacists weren't repulsive, it remains that illegal signs are tantamount to garbage, so by definition, these sheets are garbage.

American Vanguard has a website, but I won't link to it here.

The GOP and its actual record: "For the entire history of modern conservatism, its ideals have been wedded to and marred by white supremacism."

Typically, whenever I remind contemporary gated-community Christians about the legacy of the Crusades and the Inquisition, the hushing is audible -- and a bit angry.

I'm told not to distort history, and that while this may have been true at one time, much has changed.

Many of these same advocates of Republican White Jesus now inform me that the period of my life span, which after all I've observed with my own two eyes, didn't actually happen at all. They remind me that the GOP directly reflects the ideals of its founding prior to the American Civil War, and furthermore, insist that Democrats remain as firmly unreconstructed as those representing the Deep South in the 1920s.

As the guy denouncing the two-party system, and now has little use for either "side," allow me to remind you this argument is a farrago of bullshit, perpetuated by folks who might read books other than the Bible every now and then. Most man-on-the-street Republican voters wouldn't buy it, because they know full well why the GOP appeals to them.

The subterfuge isn't necessary. My sense is that it's an ideological security blanket constructed by suburban white conservatives to keep their cognitive dissonance manageable.

But you needn't trust me.

Rather, take it from a Republican.

A Republican intellectual explains why the Republican Party is going to die, by Zack Beauchamp (Vox)

 ... “Conservative intellectuals, and conservative politicians, have been in kind of a bubble,” Roy says. “We’ve had this view that the voters were with us on conservatism — philosophical, economic conservatism. In reality, the gravitational center of the Republican Party is white nationalism.”

Conservative intellectuals, for the most part, are horrified by racism. When they talk about believing in individual rights and equality, they really mean it. Because the Republican Party is the vehicle through which their ideas can be implemented, they need to believe that the party isn’t racist.

So they deny the party’s racist history, that its post-1964 success was a direct result of attracting whites disillusioned by the Democrats’ embrace of civil rights. And they deny that to this day, Republican voters are driven more by white resentment than by a principled commitment to the free market and individual liberty.

“It’s the power of wishful thinking. None of us want to accept that opposition to civil rights is the legacy that we’ve inherited,” Roy says.

And ...

This soul-searching led Roy to an uncomfortable conclusion: The Republican Party, and the conservative movement that propped it up, is doomed.

Both are too wedded to the politics of white nationalism to change how they act, but that just isn’t a winning formula in a nation that’s increasingly black and brown. Either the Republican Party will eat itself or a new party will rise and overtake its voting share ...

 ... For the entire history of modern conservatism, its ideals have been wedded to and marred by white supremacism. That’s Roy’s own diagnosis, and I think it’s correct. As a result, we have literally no experience in America of a politically viable conservative movement unmoored from white supremacy.

"Liberal Racism: 25 Things I Learned After I Wrote About ISIS and White Racism."

Yesterday, "What ISIS really wants."

Today ...

Liberal Racism: 25 Things I Learned After I Wrote About ISIS and White Racism at the Daily Kos, by chaunceydevega (Daily Kos)

Racism is not an opinion. It is a fact.

White supremacy is one of the most powerful social forces and ideologies in the United States (and the West). As such, it is reflected in our political discourse, and both intentionally (through active racism) and unintentionally (implicit bias) reproduced by individuals.

Online spaces are a great lens into white supremacy because they are a type of public arena where individuals can drop the mask of social conformity and desirability, revealing their private thoughts and true selves.

Thus, comment sections are transformed into a space where “backstage racism” can be transformed into direct and public acts.