Dad's Moving

For the second time in nearly five years, my dad has moved to be closer to us.  I am grateful for my father's many gifts.   The most notable (and I am sorry to report that I do not have this talent) was his ability to see something and then recreate it without any plans.  His mechanical and design skills kept us in houses and cars without a lot of "expert" labor.  In this irony we call life, my dad's eyesight failed him six years ago last month.  He had lost vision in his left eye at age twelve, and though he lacked self-confidence, his accomplishments were impressive (he designed and built a house for my mother).  Almost to the day one year before my mother's death, my father woke up one morning to great pain in his right eye and little vision.  Numerous surgeries later, the sight in his right eye had failed.  The same virus that causes shingles attacked his optic nerve and then the retina.  This afternoon, as we settled him into his new quarters, my dad knelt on the floor and reconstructed his kitchen table with the "sight" of his hands.  I know that he stuggles to understand why he lost his sight, and I join him in that struggle when I think about what more my children could have learned from him.  But he is closer once again, and the children are older, so maybe this time we'll all learn to cope with dad's loss of sight, and learn from the many gifts he still has to teach us.

Adoption

Today we became five and moved forward on a journey my parents started almost forty-five years ago.  We adopted a young girl who has lived with us for almost two years.  We did not take her in thinking about adoption, but we willingly moved in that direction when it was apparent that the house she was removed from would never get better.  We had two children already and really believed that we were a temporary solution until the birth mother got on her feet again.  The boys embraced our decision and then struggled with what it meant to "share" us.  The younger son had the hardest time, but he is slowly taking on the big brother role and adapting well.

One would think we spent long hours talking about what needed to be done and how to do it, but honesty the conversation lasted for less than two minutes, and Kerri had to be reminded to let me know that we would picking her that first evening.  I knew from a young age that I wanted to adopt a child since my parents had opened their home to me, but also figured out pretty early that not all people feel the same way.  During our first extended conversation, Kerri and I discussed adoption and she shared that she had had a similar desire.  As I noted to a group at our church, the discussion the night before the young girl entered our home and our lives was simply turning the page on a discussion we began almost twenty years earlier.

I am not a proponent of the pay it forward idea since every day is filled with grace that we rarely notice so special events should not necessarily cause people to do good works.  Today is remarkable because of its ordinariness.  We woke up this morning to start the day because the dogs woke up at 6:30.  We got ready for work and other activities, and until 3:00 p.m. this afternoon, our lives looked like every other day since her arrival.  I am happy to say that we celebrated with a dinner and cupcakes, but then went back to the routine of our lives.  Some part of our family is made up of DNA and some part of our family is sealed by law, but all of our family are wrapped in love binds us beyond DNA and the law.  That might be the greatest gift my parents gave to me, and hopefully, we have passed on to the boys: the ordinariness of bringing someone into our home and our family.

Southerners All

In her post at the Washington Post yesterday, Kathleen Parker noted that southerners deserve better than what they get.  She was, however, more specific than that: poor white southerners deserve better.  The gist of her complaint was that the Republican hopefuls (mostly Mitt Romney) needed to stop playing to stereotypes about poor whites in the American South (cheesy grits anyone?).  Since it is one of many posts Parker has made in recent months for Romney to act more like himself, we can probably chalk up her effort to a familiar trope: I live in the South and I'm not like that stereotype.  Funny how one uses a rhetorical move to deflect a different rhetorical move.  Yes, media types play to common denominators, but that is nothing new.  Educated southerners, both black and white, have for the better part of the past two centuries tried to suggest that the South was somehow different from the backwoods-types.  But sad to say, sometimes we need those stereotypes.

H.L. Mencken

For historical context, no media type before or after H.L. Mencken has done more to dirty the water with regard to southern stereotypes of poor whites.  In his letters to family and folks at the Baltimore Sun during the infamous Scopes trial, Mencken noted how erudite his doctor host was.  He commented on how well read the leaders of the town of Cleveland, Tennessee, were.  His daily columns to the Sun, however, told a different, more devastating, story.  The power of evolutionary science and rational thought could not overcome the chasm caused by a religious simpleness.  Mencken knew the difference between fundamentalists (although that term would not be fully defined for another two decades) and "holy rollers," but that did not make a good story so he conflated the characters to highlight the backwardness of poor religious folk.  Except, like media today, Mencken is not solely responsible for the image.  Since the leaders in Cleveland, Tennessee, wanted to create a buzz about their little town and the economic opportunities of tourism, the trial could boost publicity.  Boosterism has often made strange bedfellows with all kinds of suitors.  In Scopes's case, it was strange indeed.  William Jennings Bryan looked feeble and Clarence Darrow buried him long before his actual death shortly after the trial.  Though Scopes was found in violation of the Tennessee law, Tennessee, and by extension the rest of the South, lost the public relation war over backwardness.  We have often invited the  stereotype.  "Holy rollers" make everybody nervous except other pentecostal types, which is why if a hand starts waving in a good white Baptist, Methodist, or Presbyterian church in the South everybody gets uneasy.  Mencken knew the power of the image.

Returning to Parker for a moment, it appears she needs Romney to win to validate her common-sense, transplanted southern conservatism.  Both Gingrich and Santorum have taken the deep South states from Mitt.  If he gets the nomination, Romney has to explain to these same people who rejected him the first time to vote for him.  The problem is that the Republican base in the South looks a lot more like the image Parker finds so objectionable.  Is it all of us?  Not a chance, but that does not matter because the image projected is the one the Republican base holds on to.  In a remarkably odd moment in southern history, these folks would willingly vote for a wealthy Catholic than mark a ballot for a wealthy Mormon.  In a region where both groups have been hated, Santorum's rhetoric looks more familiar, probably because it is as cafeteria catholic as these people are cafeteria protestants.  If Santorum adhered to the social justice (including labor and capital punishment) end of the Conference of Bishops teachings, these folks would have been caught in a pickle as my grandmother use to say.  And that is the rub for me.  Parker, and the Republican presidential candidates, are not looking out for poor whites.  If they were, they would know that grits are a product of the hard-scrabbled life of farm folk who grow what the earth will give them (funny how no one mentions "greens").  In this way, poor southerners, black and white, have far more in common with each other than with any of the candidates.

Yes, Ms. Parker, southerners, regardless of skin tone, do deserve better.  But the big shame in the past week is not that Romney said cheesy grits or hi y'all, it is that white middle-class southerners, transplant or otherwise, think they understand poor whites and can speak for them, co-opting their images in the process.  Wonder how many poor whites made it to any candidate's rally?  My guess is the answer is zero given that gas costs almost $4.00/gallon in these parts; unless we are counting Mr. Foxworthy and then he was one of many wealthy white men and women making money off of image of poor whites.

Automobile culture

GA 17 south of Thomson

I have spent the better part of six years thinking through a scholarly project about automobiles.  An historian by training, I have been interested in the way car culture shapes the larger culture.  As an historian of the American South, I have begun to think about the ways the automobile alter the southern landscape in ways that even southerners did not notice.  It is, however, only in the past year that I have begun to frame the work beyond my original thoughts.

 As a fan of NASCAR and a scholar of religion, I tried to find ways to think about how the sport uses religion (it is the only national televised sporting event that carries an invocation and the National Anthem live before each of its national series telecasts).  Part of the problem in the preceding six years is that I kept finding the traps in this kind of project.  I tend to find sports as religion arguments strained at best.  Anyone who wants to think of NASCAR as a religion can live in the infield at Talladega during a race weekend and notice that folks enjoy themselves without much in the way of ritual self-reflection. Last year, however, I was given advice to think more broadly about the automobile in culture.  With some administrative duties disappearing at the end of June, I have started thinking and researching more concretely about the subject.

GA 57 south of Gordon

Here is the working premise: if southerners emphasize "place," as John Shelton Reed has noted, then what happens when they adopt a technology designed to overcome place.  Mobility, as the car culture historians call it, means that we are no longer bound to our location.  Since few if any historians have looked at the way the automobile altered the South except in the way that Pete Daniel focuses on racing, I am looking at how the car became so vital for southerners.