Columbia's only locally owned alt weekly

In The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion wrote that when her husband died, she would not throw away his shoes, because he might need them when he comes back. This is the magical thinking in the book’s title. Whenever we talk about the economy “coming back,” we are engaged in exactly the same kind of magical thinking.

That is the problem with both parties. They have been telling us for a generation that we can have something for nothing.  And we have believed them. We believe it is our most fundamental right and would trade the Constitution for this magical power in a heartbeat. When we talk about “our way of life,” that’s what we mean: something for nothing. Magic is our way of life.  We can give you a war, not ask you to serve, and not ask you to pay for it. Really?

It is impossible to have a consumer-based economy. It is so obviously unsustainable. We’ve seen that. But no one in either party will admit it. Instead, we talk about when the economy “comes back.” It shows how infantile we have become in our isolation from reality.  We are like Didion after she lost her husband, or like children when their grandmother has died, wondering when “she’ll come back.” And yet, we have done nothing to bring the economy back. We still don’t make anything.  Sure, it would be great if Marvel Comics and Netflix were enough to maintain control of the world, but they just aren’t.

During the second half of the 20^th Century, freedom was defined as the ability to buy whatever you want. I remember when I was a child during the Cold War and I asked my parents why the Russians weren’t free, I was told that they couldn’t even buy blue jeans.

The Baby Boomers, especially, have been the grand recipients of this idea—it was built around them. A consumer economy seemed possible only because their generation was so large. Now that the consequences of this false idea have come home, the Baby Boomers are angry. They can no longer buy whatever they want. Therefore they are no longer free. This is where all of that tea party anger comes from.

People are pissed that they can’t really have something for nothing and so they will vote one more time for whomever tells them that they can.  But, neither party will be able to deliver. If DeMint really let government fail and told all the tea-partiers on Medicare and Social Security that they could not get their benefits so the U.S. could cut back on its deficit, he would lose to Alvin Greene, guaranteed.

We need to reinvent ourselves. Instead, the supposed champions of the Constitution, religion, and private property have spent the summer arguing that a religious group should not be free to build a mosque on private property, and no one will even acknowledge the deadly irony.

If we don’t grow up, perhaps the government should withdraw from the economy entirely so that we actually taste the fruits of our own failure.

There is a remarkable group of writers, including Suzanne Hudson, Joe Formichella, and Everette Capps, at a place called the Waterhole Branch out in Alabama. Every year, the Waterhole Branch group has a shoe burning. They build a big bonfire and throw out all the bad juju of the previous year by burning their old shoes in the fire.

We need a national shoe burning night in order to get over the magical thinking that Didion described. Sure, we might have hangovers the next morning (just ask the Waterhole Branch crowd about that), and we shall certainly have lost our innocence. But that is what we need as a country. It is time to face reality.

talkback@columbiacitypaper.com

Opinion by Baynard Woods

In the 1990s I lived in Albuquerque and there was a great “pirate radio” station—Rebel Radio 90.9. The FCC busted the station—which didn’t interfere with any other frequency and could only broadcast as far as someone could climb in a tree; it didn’t extend beyond the student ghetto—and yet the FCC threatened to fine everyone involved ten thousand bucks. Eventually they relented, but the station died after the third bust. I agree with the radical country singer Steve Earle when he sings, “Fuck the FCC.”

I was surprised to see that Senator DeMint might agree with him too. At least it seemed that way when he introduced a bill that would limit the authority of the FCC, stressing the need “to protect consumers.”

The FCC entirely limited my freedom as a consumer, deciding what I could hear and not hear for most of my life. What if I wasn’t happy and wanted to start up my own station? Rebel Radio tried to do it legit—it cost over a hundred grand to even apply for a license to run a station.  But I wanted there to be small stations. The FCC clearly harmed the consumer for the sake of the corporations who owned the bog stations.

When I first heard about DeMint’s bill, I thought he might want to protect anarchists and gutter punks and hippies broadcasting drunken rants from clandestine locations.  Or even, since we are really talking about the internet now, maybe DeMint wants to protect the average porn-viewer, pot-seed from Amsterdam purchaser, and paranoid conspiracy theorist browsing the web at three in the morning.

In reality, DeMint is trying to protect Comcast, Verizon and a few other companies. He is against Net Neutrality, a regulation which would prevent giant internet service providers from providing preferred or delayed service to different sites. Without net neutrality, Comcast, who now owns NBC, could block consumer access to sites like ABC or CBS.

It’s bad for the American consumer, but worse for the American citizen. If Verizon decided to support Senator DeMint, and you got your internet through their FiOS or phone lines, they could prevent you from accessing this article altogether. They could make it so slow that it wouldn’t exist for you.

Because DeMint has brilliantly redefined his terms, he is able to make the unemployed guy in Iowa think the senator is protecting his freedom. But, DeMint doesn’t mean this guy is free any more than Jefferson was talking about slaves when he said all men were created equal. DeMint hopes to help create the new, truly feudal state.

The idea of a new feudalism has been around at least since NAFTA, but it explains a great deal about the character and politics of DeMint.

In DeMint’s radical world-view, multinationals are the knights and the lords who battle it out on the (to us meaningless and abstract) field of battle—the stock market.  Instead of investing in our own communities, we bet on the jousting matches of the new super-human royalty. This is what passes for an economy.

We have been free to give money to whatever company we wanted to for the last half century. When that freedom is limited by its own failure, the Tea Baggers pop out screaming, without even noticing that the old sense of freedom is long gone. In the new feudalism, the individual is a serf who should be highly regulated. The state should imprison as many people as possible (tough on crime), closely monitor the free citizens to make sure they don’t need to be renditioned, interrogated, or incarcerated (Patriot Act), and interfere in people’s sex lives and base hiring of state employees upon the sexual acts they do or do not perform (DeMint’s claim that gay people should not be allowed to teach in public schools).

If DeMint were truly against government intervention, he would immediately introduce bills to legalize drugs, prostitution, and gambling. He would enact prison reform. He would declare smoking bans unconstitutional. He would do everything possible to protect the voice of the individual.

The voice of the lonely and uncertain individual may be warbled and imperfect. It may crack and falter. It is frail by nature, articulating words in a world of sound and fury. The entire universe seeks to drown this voice. It is vulnerable always precisely in its use, in its raising. It is endangered and needs the protection of the first amendment.

The internet is still a place where that individual voice can be heard. Rather than freeing it from government control, DeMint hopes to make the internet like television and radio were for most of his life—well-mannered behemoths, not the ragged collection of ill-mannered, idiosyncratic and individual voices that makes the internet free.

talkback@columbiacitypaper.com

By Baynard Woods

Lindsey Graham has collapsed. This week, the senator proved that his actions over the last few months constitute a capitulation to the outrageous elements of his own party. It seems that in the epic battle between our two senators Jim DeMint has won. DeMint has not vanquished Graham the man, but Graham the idea—for the man has bowed to the DeMintean principle, and kissed the ring of the king of the New Right.

When Graham backed out of the very pro-business rather right-wing cap and trade bill over immigration, it seemed that he did not want his friend Senator McCain to have to face the issue in the Arizona Republican primary. Now that the Tea Party has embraced immigration as a major issue and admittedly Neo-Nazi groups are patrolling the border, Graham embraces their principle in the most anti-conservative way possible: a Constitutional Amendment.

A reader of this column may be surprised to find that—at least half of the time— I consider myself a conservative, in the sense that Edmund Burke, Peter Vierek, and even Andrew Sullivan are conservatives. I’ve studied enough history to know that all human endeavor is fraught with unforeseen consequences and so I am generally skeptical of revolution. I believe conservatism and conservationism are the same thing. DeMint—and now Graham—claim to be conservatives, but are in fact radicals who want to undo the last century and a half of American tradition.

Right wing radicals consistently claim that they want to preserve and protect the Constitution. When is the last time that someone on the Left has attempted to amend the Constitution? What about the Right? Recall the Protection of Marriage Amendment –or whatever that attempt to radically expand the reach of the federal government into the realm of religion and sex and the family was called. They wanted to tell Americans what the family must be and criminalize anyone who pursued happiness in any way that made them slightly uncomfortable. It is not, as in classical political philosophy, that your freedom ends where my nose begins. Rather, for the Right, you’re freedom ends where their imagination begins. (There are those on the left who embrace this same maxim. I pray that Al Gore divorced that hideous monster he was married to because he could not stand her puritanical attempts at censorship and thought control—I predict she’ll become a right-winger before the end of the year.)

Graham demonstrated his fealty to the radical Right on FOX News Wednesday night in an interview with Greta Van Sustern. Graham said that he’s “got to”  “change our Constitution and say if you come here illegally and you have a child, that child’s automatically not a citizen.”

Of course, the Right is probably comfortable changing this part of the Constitution because it is the 14th Amendment that gives citizenship to anyone born in the United States. It was the amendment that made the former slaves citizens. It is also the amendment that prohibits members of congress from an insurrection against the government. (By the way, all you Confederacy lovers, it was treason. You can’t fly both the Confederate flag and the United States flag in South Carolina. The U.S. National Guard ought to come and physically take the Confederate flag down, like they would for any other rebel group trying to occupy American soil.)

Graham went on the say: “I’m a practical guy, but when you go forward, I don’t want 20 million more 20 years from now.” Twenty million more what? Brown people?

The day before Graham announced that he just “got to” change the Constitution to keep brown people out, BusinessWeek.com released a survey that ranked South Carolina as the eighth laziest state. The citizens of South Carolina were reported to sleep nearly nine hours a night and to work fewer than three and a half hours a day. Sandlappers watched more television than the citizens of any other state. In fact, at three hours and seven minutes, the average South Carolinian works only 19 minutes more than he watches television on a given day. It is no surprise that seven of the top ten lazy states are Confederate “Right to Work” states—the others are West Virginia, Kentucky, and tax-free Delaware. Maybe since these are also some of the least educated states, we simply misunderstood our economics lesson. It’s laissez-faire, not a lazy chair, economics.

Imagine where South Carolina would be without immigrants. I was just talking with a small business owner who told me that illegals are the only people who want to dig the ditches he needs dug. When a white guy comes in looking for a job and the boss tells him that he can start right now if he wants to shovel, the white guy inevitably tells him he’d rather stay on unemployment.

The country is facing countless crises, Senator. Instead of fearing the Constitution and the citizens it protects, you ought to welcome any help you can get. Stop worrying about brown people and start worrying about your own brown nose, Senator Graham.

talkback@columbiacitypaper.com

By Baynard Woods

If Jim DeMint truly stands by the principles he espouses, he may one day take a bold stand against South Carolina’s shrimpers and could even try to ban college football on Saturdays.

I spent a day calling DeMint’s offices to see when and if he would put those plans into effect. The young summer interns who answered the phone were quite confident when I asked them if the Senator believed that the Bible was true. They were less certain when I asked about specific abominations. DeMint still will not return my calls, but I think it is safe to say that the Senator does not like abominations. The book of Leviticus says that for a man to lie with another man is an abomination. DeMint is pretty serious about hating gay sex. While running for the Senate in 2004, he talked with Tim Russert about how “as a father” he hated gay sex; he said openly that gay people should not be allowed to teach in public schools.

But notice the wording (in the King James translation): “Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination.” It does not apply to lesbians, and so the lesbian bondage clubs are cool and not abominatory at all. Besides, there was something the Old Testament God hated even more than gay men: shell fish.

These shall ye eat of all that are in the waters: whatsoever hath fins and scales in the waters, in the seas, and in the rivers, them shall ye eat.

And all that have not fins and scales in the seas, and in the rivers, of all that move in the waters, and of any living thing which is in the waters, they shall be an abomination unto you:

They shall be even an abomination unto you; ye shall not eat of their flesh, but ye shall have their carcasses in abomination.

Whatsoever hath no fins nor scales in the waters, that shall be an abomination unto you.

How can you miss it? God himself states three times that shrimp, oysters, crabs and scallops are abominations. The rant against shellfish is three times as long as the passage about homosexuality. If abominations are marked with an X, gay sex is X-rated. But shrimp is XXX. Those clams you’re eating better be bearded, lady, or God might strike you down!

And yet I’ve never heard DeMint mention the issue at all. The guy must despise shrimpers—because they’re really like gay prostitutes when you think about it in Biblical terms, trolling around, selling their abominations to others. To children even! He must be really rejoicing about the BP oil spill, because it killed this pernicious industry in more than one state. He could only pray for such a miracle in South Carolina.

David Bahati, a member of the Ugandan Parliament and DeMint’s C Street Family, introduced a bill that would make homosexual activity a capital crime. I’m looking for DeMint to offer a similar bill about shrimping.

Abomination-eating masses, we’ve got to be ready.

And, to the S.C. man who keeps getting caught having sex with a horse: Exodus says bestiality should be punished by death—the horse too. Sanford, bad news, buddy: Death.  Well, as long as she wasn’t “another man’s wife” you might be saved, since your wife was little more than property and wasn’t guaranteed any protection from your fornicating. But that’s kind of like asking what the meaning of is is, ain’t it? Oh, and no more college football. See, when Numbers says you die for breaking the Sabbath, it means Saturday.

DeMint claims that his ethics and his politics are religiously motivated. And yet he disobeys God every single day in an act of open defiance. Leviticus commands Jim not to cut his hair on the side or shave his face. DeMint says you cannot have two masters; in the battle for DeMint’s soul, Gillette beats Jehovah every day.

If DeMint and his tea partiers shave and cut their hair and eat shellfish and break the Sabbath, why don’t they just get it over with and start teabagging each other?

Or they could just stop selectively using the Bible to justify their positions.

talkback@columbiacitypaper.com

By Baynard Woods

Alvin Greene answered his home phone when I called and we casually set up a time to meet. A few days later, the 32-year-old candidate regarded me from a puffy chair in the corner of his father’s home, which served as headquarters for his Zen-like campaign for the U.S. Senate. On the table by the chair sat toenail clippers, a disposable razor and a Sonic fast food bag.

“Lately it’s been very busy,” Greene said of his life as he took a bite from his sandwich. “I didn’t expect so much so soon.”

Greene is unemployed. He said that before the election he spent much of his time watching television. The news was on the whole time we talked.

Greene managed to pay the $10,000 filing fee to the State Democratic party, but no one noticed him until he inexplicably beat his opponent, Vic Rawl, by a large margin in the Democratic primary. Now, everybody wants to figure out what happened and who the heck Alvin Greene actually is. As was widely reported, Rawl challenged the results, claiming that the voting machines were faulty. South Carolina bought them used from Louisiana when that state outlawed them. Rawl collected anecdotal evidence but eventually acknowledged there was no good way to prove the errors he claimed had skewed the results.

Jim Clyburn, the majority Whip and Greene’s own representative, called Greene a “plant.” Lindsey Graham echoed Clyburn’s calls for an FBI investigation.

But, on the day before my visit, the state party had decided not to overturn the results of the election, making Greene, Sen. Jim DeMint’s official opponent this fall. The state party still hopes Greene will step down. When asked if Greene had a chance against DeMint, Kiana Page, the party spokesperson said, “This race proves that anything can happen in politics. Especially in South Carolina.”

Greene knows that as well as anyone and has a simple answer to the question of who he is. “I’m the best candidate in the United States Senate race in South Carolina,” he says.

I asked him if his non-campaign campaign was an intentional strategy to attack the anti-government senator. He just smiled and took a bite of his sandwich and looked at the TV. I asked what he was going to say to DeMint.

“Well, I’m planning for a September debate. One hour long on a major television channel.”

“If he refuses to debate, what would that say about him?” I asked.

“It says that he doesn’t care about the people of South Carolina or their concerns,” Greene answered. “He and other representatives are responsible and accountable for the dire situations we face here in South Carolina and across the country.”

Greene grew up in Manning and served in the air force and the army. He claims that he was involuntarily, but honorably, discharged from the military and refuses to say more about the issue. He earned a Political Science degree from USC. I was asking him about classes he remembered when a knock sounded at the door.

Greene laid down his Sonic wrapper and got up. “Here’s the umm,” he fumbled a moment and nodded toward the door. “…Manning Times Reporter. Here’s someone from the Manning Times.”

“So you were just telling me about your own education and about studying political science when he knocked on the door,” I said.

As if on cue, there was another knock. “Who is it?” Greene hollered.

“It’s WIS.”

“I told them not to come,” he said, as if to himself. “OK! All right. Just open the door.”

The Manning Times reporter got up to open the door.

“Seems like your life’s gone crazy,” I said to Greene.

“It has.”

It was clear at that moment that Greene had absolutely no control over what was happening to him. It was almost like a sci-fi movie where an ordinary guy was sucked through the screen into the hyper-reality of the televised universe. He seemed to be struggling to find his bearings.

The TV man did not introduce himself and spoke in a gruff tone.

“I was just wondering you know –I see you’re eating lunch,” he said. “I know you said that you didn’t really want to do TV interviews, but, uh, I was just down here trying to get a feel of who you were. And so many people have a preconceived notion of who you are just because of the charges and everything.”

The charges are, of course, the felony charges pending against Greene for allegedly showing pornography to a college freshman and asking her if she wanted to go back to her room. It is something else Greene refuses to talk about. But it is clearly one of the main reasons why no prominent Democrats have reached out to help him.

“I’m really not interested in that now,” Greene said to the TV man. “Maybe in a week or two you can check back.”

The phone rang.

“Well you know it’s just kind of hard for me to get to Manning from Columbia every day,” the TV man said, obviously annoyed.

Greene ignored him and picked up the phone. “Hello? …OK.” He hung up.

“So I was just hoping we could go ahead and knock it out today if that’s possible,” the TV man said, seemingly oblivious to we print reporters who were in the middle of an interview. “You just step right outside. It’ll be real quick.”

“OK. Let me finish these and then I’ll think about it,” he said.

“All right. I’ll just be right outside in the Channel Ten Jeep.”

The TV man walked out, shaking his head. WIS subsequently wrote on their website on June 19 that Greene had agreed to do an interview and backed out, even though, at least to me, it seemed like he had repeatedly told the reporter he did not want to talk.

Greene said it was like this every day now. He did not have a computer, a cell phone or even Caller ID. He answered every call blindly. He said that he was in the process of organizing a campaign and building a website, but at the moment, he needed a press secretary more than anything else.

“So you were talking about your political science classes,” I continued. “Way back then were you thinking of running?”

“Yes. I took a course in black politics. And the professor was Kenneth Whitby,” he said. “But I’ve followed politics since I was a child, so I always knew that running for office was always in the back of my mind.”

He took the last bite of lunch, crumbled the wrapper and put it in the bag.

“As a soldier serving in Korea two years ago I knew that this country was declining and I knew if I got a chance I would make things better,” he said. “That’s my campaign: Bringing America Back.”

The phone rang again.

“Hello? ….Who’s calling?” He listened for a little while. “OK. Can you get back with me in a week or two? I’m busy.”

He hung up and turned back to me.

“What is your campaign strategy other than the debate?” I asked.

“The issues, my message. Jobs. See I have a plan for jobs. Even picking back up with the Department of Transportation projects put on hold after 9/11. Such as Interstate 74 from Michigan to Myrtle Beach. Widening of other major highways across the state, especially the evacuation routes from the coast. And those will create jobs in the short term and the long term.”

The phone rang.

“Hello? …Where you at? …Hello?” He hung up. “Yes. And better PTAs, better facilities for better education. Fixing dilapidated schools and building new ones.”

“Your opponent, I guess, would ask where that money is going to come from?”

“Well, we spend two times more of our taxpayer dollars on inmates than on students,” he said. “Non-violent offenders should be offered pretrial intervention. Justice in the justice system is important. It takes so much money a day to keep someone incarcerated. Fairness saves money. It’s another example of how our incumbent Republican— ”

The phone rang.

“Hello?” I could tell from Greene’s side of the conversation that it was a Sunday talk show wanting him to go on. To the person on the other end of the line, he said, “That’s church time mainly right there in the middle of the day.” Then he hung up.

He turned back to me.

“When I say my opponent is reversing forward progress, I’m not being sarcastic. It’s green jobs and it’s better for the economy and the environment. That’s advancing society that I’m for and our two current United States senators are against that. They’re trying to repeal Health Care.”

As the Manning reporter got up to leave, the WIS crew burst in without knocking.

“All right,” the TV man said, “you want to do it inside or outside? We have a light on the camera if you want to do it inside. Like I said, it will just take two quick minutes.”

“What are you going to ask again?”

“Now that all of the late night comedians have made their jokes and protests have been done, how do you plan to get your campaign rolling?” the TV man asked. “A lot of people there still don’t seem to be taking you seriously. How do you plan to get people to take you seriously?”

“I told you over the phone that I wasn’t doing this,” Greene said.

“Two questions, that’s it.”

“No.”

“Ok. So why not?”

“I just… I just don’t like the questions and I don’t like— ”

The phone rang. Greene answered it. WIS kept talking.

“You’re going to have to get used to it,” the TV man said. “I mean I’ve been covering politics for years.”

“Yes,” Greene said into the receiver. “All right I’m busy now. I have folks over here. All right.” He hung up.

“So you don’t want to do the interview?” the TV man asked.

“No.”

The TV man seemed angry. His voice got louder and he said Greene would look bad. “That’s not a threat,” he said. “It’s just the way it is.”

Finally, they left. Greene had just fought another battle in the attempt to maintain control of his life and be a candidate. He insisted that he campaigned in the primary—he just didn’t use the media to do it. He’s trying to maintain that unlikely model.

As a result, everyone wonders if Alvin Greene is crazy. Perhaps, the only really crazy thing about him is that he believed an ordinary citizen with no organization could run for Senate and win without getting sucked into the media machine. He seems to believe he can control what he wants to talk about and leave major questions unanswered. He is living in another century.

But, so far, Alvin Greene’s crazy idea has not been so crazy.  At least he won in the primary. “I wasn’t that surprised,” he said. “I expected to win. I worked hard. It wasn’t a big deal.”

But now it is a big deal and the media are trying to suck Greene into their orbit. In the television world, he seems like a lost alien, inhabiting a universe whose laws he doesn’t comprehend. Maybe he could start to get a handle on it, if only he could get someone to answer the phone.

“Hello,” he said as I said goodbye.

By Baynard Woods
Rand Paul, son of Texas Representative Ron Paul, won the Kentucky primary last week and then immediately found himself in trouble when he claimed that he was opposed to the Civil Rights Act. That is, his libertarianism extended so far that he did not believe that the Federal Government had the right to prohibit businesses from discriminating on the basis of race. He did stress that he was not racist and that he hoped the market would punish such businesses.
Jim DeMint endorsed Rand Paul before the election. Both men have claimed the Kentucky primary as a “tea party” victory. Since Paul’s views on Civil Rights have become clear, DeMint has been asked if he agreed with Paul.
He said that he did not agree with Paul and that he supported the Civil Rights Act. Which means that Jim DeMint supports the Federal Government’s intervention in the affairs of private businesses. Which means, that for all his claims to purity -he is the only Senator to get a 100 percent ranking on his own “Senate Conservatives” website—he is not consistent or pure.
I believe that DeMint probably does agree with Paul—but as an ad man is too savvy to say so. Ever since Truman first introduced Civil Rights in the Forties, the rhetoric that opposed it has always been based around an intrusive Federal Government.
When the Committee for Civil Rights report came out, in 1948, Strom Thurmond became a leading segregationist. Jack Bass and Marjorie Thompson’s book “Strom” details his arguments. Strom said: “Don’t forget that the so-called Civil Rights program would bring about the end of segregation in the South, forcing mixing of the races in our hotels, in our restaurants, in our schools, in our swimming pools and in our public places. This change in our customs is not desired by either the white or colored race.”
No modern politician will talk in those terms. But Thurmond went on in a vein that could easily be found on FOX News tonight:  “To bring this about, the federal government would set up a super police force with power to rove throughout the states and keep our people in constant fear of being sent to a federal jail unless we accept the decrees turned out by a bunch of anti-southern bureaucrats in Washington.”
This could be DeMint. The Senator is in a tough position. He doesn’t yet know how the Tea Party is responding to Rand Paul’s remarks. The movement’s most ardent supporters are used to accepting ridiculous nonsense from people named Rand. If DeMint comes out in support of Civil Rights—he might be seen as a Big Government man. If he comes out against it—he’ll come across as a radical racist. He’s up for reelection this year and he can’t afford to alienate either racists or antiracists.
True conservatives need to support the Federal Government as the greatest guarantee of individual liberty against the tyranny of the majority and get off of this idea that everything would be fine if there were no government.
It is so weird. The whole thing goes back to Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. To vastly oversimplify things, Rousseau believed that human beings were “naturally” good, or Noble Savages, and that civilization and government corrupted us. Hobbes believed that without society human life was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” (No, that is not a description of Joe Wilson—he’s rich). Only government could save us. Rousseau has been traditionally aligned with liberals and hippies and the like and Hobbes with conservatives and law-and-order types. Now, these new Randy Libertarians are embracing Rousseau and moving from Libertarianism to anarchism. The far left and the far right, together again. They come together in the dream that we can live free from constraint. Of course, this is one of the most appealing ideas in history… until somebody else harms you. In the current right wing rhetoric, only the government, terrorists and city slickers hurt you. This latter locution is useful because “urban” acts as code for ‘black’ and ‘elite’ at once.
In reality, the Massey coal mine and BP oil slick make it clear that the Federal Government ought to be a Hobbesian overawing power when it comes to behemoth corporate interests. To keep a business from discriminating against individuals does not take freedom from the individual—it places the citizen before to the merchant, the individual above the business.

talkback@columbiacitypaper.com

By Baynard Woods

I was in the seventh grade. I was staying home with strep throat. I was rewinding the Skate Visions video on the VCR. The Challenger exploded.
Bad analogies are dangerous—not as dangerous as space shuttles and underwater oil wells, maybe, but close.  Here I am writing my second column as the oil continues to flow from BP’s drilling disaster in the gulf.  And yet Lindsey Graham told the Greenville News last week that “backing away from offshore drilling because of the spill would be like halting space exploration because of the Challenger accident.”
The Challenger was certainly a disaster. The entire crew died. But it is absurd to compare it to this disaster. There was little damage beyond the loss of the crew and the shuttle itself. In the case of the BP oil spill, the entire ecology of the gulf is being destroyed. Unless by “The Gulf” we simply mean the location—not the contents, the being of that location—then BP is destroying the gulf itself.
So in order for the analogy to hold up, the Challenger would’ve destroyed space itself—or a very significant portion of it.
For the record, Sanford is an opponent of offshore drilling. DeMint probably likes it precisely for its destructive value. I can imagine him sitting at home at night getting romantic to pictures of oil stained birds. But who knows, maybe he’s not as weird as he looks. But Graham, what is he up to?
John Kerry and Joe Lieberman finally introduced the Climate Bill that Graham had once helped them craft. Graham drafted the language regarding offshore drilling, which has been amended since the gulf disaster. The president has vowed to end the “cozy” relationship between regulators and oil companies. Forecasts now imagine the disaster to be ten times worse than originally thought.
But Lindsey told the Times, “The problems created by the historic oil spill in the gulf, along with the uncertainty of immigration politics, have made it extremely difficult for transformational legislation in the area of energy and climate to garner bipartisan support at this time.”
God forbid we do anything extremely difficult—or even to try it. I mean, we’re only the United States of America, after all. No need for the Senate to try to do anything difficult. To paraphrase Lindsey, “The obvious urgency of this issue and a completely unrelated thing make it impossible to act on the urgent issue.” You are facing the issue of a lifetime, Senator Graham, and you are acting like a goddamned baby about it. Man up and do the right thing and try to enact transformative legislation. It will not be enough—but it will be a start.
It is almost as if Graham is simply admitting that he and his colleagues are too petty to do anything significant. He wants to be able to push his drill-bit after the disaster, so he is going to sit on his hands.
He and his party argued that the world would end if health care was passed. They continue to argue that government action is the devil. And yet, for many fishermen, the world is ending not because of what the government did, but because of what it didn’t do.
This is another bit of the bitter fruit that the seeds of deregulation have sown. Economic meltdown, environmental catastrophe. And now, they want to blame Obama for not acting quicker. Damn right, everybody should be doing more. But the people who say that the government shouldn’t do anything don’t get to make that call. Sorry guys, you can’t have it both ways.  According to you, BP and Halliburton should be one hundred percent responsible for this clean up. Big government has no role.
Lindsey, Jim, Joe and the rest of you idiots that make our state look bad: please just resign. Or, since you’ve done such a good job clogging up our government with your bullshit, maybe you can volunteer it to BP and they can use it to clog up the leak.  It might be the first useful action any of you have ever taken.

talkback@columbiacitypaper.com

By Baynard Woods

I’ve been sick with some kind of bacterial poisoning, probably from some oysters I ate at a stand up bar in Baltimore on the middle of a warm day. I’ve lain in feverswoon watching the oilslick approach the Louisiana Coast and it has somehow been the only state of mind from which I can imagine watching this tragedy unfold.
It is impossible not to be outraged at the simple fact of the destruction and the contamination itself.

Five thousand barrels a day into the Gulf is nearly unthinkable. President Obama has placed the blame squarely only the shoulders of BP. Halliburton is also heavily involved in the running of the rig and the ruining of the Gulf. We can be outraged at them and at all of the assholes who’ve been chanting “drill baby drill.” And this includes Lindsay Graham, from whom I wish to strip any compliment I’ve ever paid. I still believe he got the administration to back him on offshore drilling for Cap and Trade and this week decided to back out of Cap and Trade to keep JohnMcCain from having to take a stand on immigration.

The outrage spreads like the oil itself until we notice that we are all sticky. We are all Halliburton. The devastation in the Gulf is not only the fault of Palin and Graham and the rest of the “drill baby drillers.” It is my fault and yours.

It is not just our cars—but the entire modern world that is built on petroleum. We are all addicts. Our food is grown and shipped with petroleum products; our water heated; our TVs, computers, and cell-phones. We put petroleum on our lips when they’re chapped and many a young man has lost his virginity to a petroleum jelly.

Of course, there are degrees of accountability.  They’ve been hugely profiting off of this oil and others have profited politically by promoting it. Now they’re talking about building big covers to put over the leak and we may scream at the TV “Make them? Why the hell weren’t they already made and ready?”

The slow initial response, the slow onset of horror is reminiscent of the response to Katrina. The silence of the “off-shore right” are all infuriating. But we cannot allow this to become another small battle in our small-thinking culture wars.

This is a generation defined by missed opportunity. On 9/11, President Bush had the chance to rethink American power and American citizenship. People wanted to act. He told them to keep shopping. Then, eight years later, Obama inherited an economic crisis based on the very same logic of Bush’s solution: the economy is a lie whose effectiveness if precipitated upon our belief. Obama missed a chance as great as Bush’s. He could have faced the fundamental contradiction of our economy: what is good for the economy is bad for the consumer and especially the citizen. In a consumer based economy, debt, over spending and profligacy is public virtue because otherwise the economy doesn’t work. But, we’ve now learned, it doesn’t work even if we spend more than we have. It will ultimately collapse. We cannot live in a derivative economy that produces nothing more substantial than super hero movies.

We have been pusillanimous in our response to these problems. We have refused to look at them. If we all face up to the fact that the crude in the Gulf is on our hands—only then might we have the chance to rebuild our economy on an actual foundation. The attempt to create a world and an economy that is not based on fossil fuels can rebuild our economy. Economy and ecology share the same root: home.

These two problems have not only infected our home. We have dwelled in them for so long that they are our only home and our only hope is to recognize it.
The people of Louisiana can clearly see what is still just another TV segment to the rest of us. If we do not take the intellectual effort to ask what this means, we’ll get more and more lessons until oil clogs Beaufort’s marshes.

The country reinvented itself after Pearl Harbor. It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to see this dual economic and ecological crisis as a similarly great threat to our home.  We could accept this as another example of the “Age of American Decline.” Or instead of waiting for the next lesson, we could try to make sure Louisiana is the last catastrophe of this kind and rebuild our economy in the process. If we accept responsibility, we can begin to take action.

talkback@columbiacitypaper.com

By Baynard Woods

As Republicans attempt to figure out the future of their party, they ought to look closely at South Carolina’s senators.

DeMint and Graham are a perfect study in the stark contrast between a politician and a legislator.

In the epic battle for the soul of conservatism, it long looked like Graham would face defeat at the hands of the meaner DeMint. But as surely as the giant mounds of snow here in Washington have morphed into the blobs of pasty tourist flesh, DeMint’s stranglehold on his party seems to be loosening.
Everybody knows he said that healthcare would be Obama’s “Waterloo.” When Scott Brown won, DeMint took credit for the victory, reprising his Waterloo remarks like a one-hit wonder at the county fair.
He grew bolder with every minute he was on cable news. He fell in love with the way the make-up made his face look. He loved his own voice. He loved his power.
Now, it is fading.
First, healthcare passed. DeMint was left looking like the boy who talks a lot of smack but ends up getting his ass kicked. But that was ok. It only proved his point about the evils of socialism. Reload and repeal.
But then, two things happened. People started liking healthcare. And, as more right wing radicals threatened and cursed Democratic lawmakers, the Hutaree Christian Militia got busted planning to shoot a cop and then attack the funeral with improvised explosive devices and missiles.
Bad press for the Right Wing Revolution.  It is a lot harder to preach “revolution” when nuts like Hutaree are actually trying to make it happen.
DeMint dared go on “Face the Nation” last week—but we have heard less from him since the passage of healthcare than we have at any time since the last election. That’s because his strategy is bankrupt and he has come home from the fight with nothing but his teabag in his hand. He got stomped.
Not so, Graham. Graham’s willingness to work with John Kerry on “cap and trade” climate legislation may be singly responsible for Obama’s otherwise inexplicable announcement that he would now allow offshore drilling and exploration of the East Coast. Lindsey was quietly working the whole time Jim was promoting the DeMint “brand” on Twitter. DeMint’s “repeal the bill” is already passé; Graham brought to fruition the Republican dream of “drill baby drill.”

I think that Graham and Obama are dead wrong on this. We’ve got to take dramatic and long-reaching action and a bit of off-shore drilling is not going to cut it. This is a chance for the country to revitalize our economy and our leadership status in the world. And we are drilling for more oil?
Graham himself complained that the president didn’t go far enough, but so far, Graham has gotten something for nothing. Nothing has happened yet with “cap and trade” and it is an entirely business-based policy that would put a “cap” on the amount of carbon a business is allowed emit, while allowing low-emitters to sell their credits to other companies that pollute more.
That is his concession: he’s for businesses trading carbon emissions. I don’t understand what other Republicans don’t like about this. It is the most Republican response to climate change: profit.
Graham should be able to take some credit for this. But he does not taut himself as the leader of a movement. He does not liken himself to the “Founding Fathers.” He’s not seduced by the revolutionary chic and radical posturing that are so popular. But he gets things done. He does not need to represent a national movement in order to represent his state.
Remember when the Republicans compared Obama with Paris Hilton? Now, it seems, Republican Senators and staffers are starting to say the same thing about DeMint. He is on the news a lot for being on the news a lot. He makes a lot of noise—but he doesn’t do anything. Sadly, his stand will get votes. But it will ultimately accomplish nothing—because he doesn’t really want revolution anymore than Grad school Marxists do.
Graham has helped secure a legislative victory for his side, but if he were up for reelection this year, he would be challenged in the primary by a tea party candidate.
If I knew nothing about history, I might be tempted to think people would be acting more rationally by 2014.

talkback@columbiacitypaper.com

By Baynard Woods

After my trip to CPAC, I decided to descend further into the belly of the beast. Which meant, for me, going home to Greenville. It is the home of Jim DeMint and Bob Jones University. I had always hated Greenville.

When we moved to Greenville from Columbia, in the mid-eighties, I was a skate-punk. We used to go to Bob Jones when we got bored. We’d skate around until their golf-cart driving security guards chased us. Then we’d ollie down some steps and flip them the bird and waltz off campus as they gawked at us.

We couldn’t go anywhere in that town without them evangelizing us. They’d froth at the mouth and scream about hell-fire. That was our way of fighting back… and it was all kind of fun.

A little later, I grew my hair out and drove a bug and looked like a hippy. I got kicked out of schools—DeMint’s alma mater in fact, named after a confederate general. I got pulled over at least once a week and called a fag and searched. It wasn’t fun at all.

And yet, this is the part that the Tea-Partiers are down with. Why weren’t they with Obama when he denounced the police-abuses against Henry Louis Gates? That’s what I don’t understand or trust about the “Oath Keepers,” the group who urge sheriffs, fire departments and other local authorities to resist the Federal government. I haven’t been personally assaulted, offended, pushed, cursed, or abused by the Federal Government, but all of those things have happened at the hands of local officials. How often have you been bullied by a local cop? And a federal agent?

The last time there was such a big State’s Rights outcry, it was against Civil Rights. The logic is the same now. Southern states argued that the Federal Government was imposing its will on them—when the Feds were keeping them from violently imposing their will on African Americans. The purpose of the Federal Government is to protect us against local abuses. When people rail against “activist judges” or require referenda to give people basic rights, they misunderstand the Constitution entirely. We have a Constitution not to protect the majority and make sure it can decide who should be excluded, but to make sure that the majority can’t do that. The purpose of the Judicial Branch is to stand up for the minority of one, the weirdo, the freak, the loner, and the loser.

Even if it is Bob Jones. I walked around the campus of the uber-conservative fundamentalist college on a recent spring day when the dogwoods were blooming (remember, Jesus was killed when the Federal Roman judge let the locals decide). The women’s skirts now hung only to their knees, instead of their ankles. It didn’t quite look like the campus of USC or Clemson, but it didn’t look like one of the Taliban schools either. As I strolled, I wasn’t and I didn’t flip any birds.

Bob Jones has cleaned up its image. But they’ve taken their fight from the streets into the political arena. And if I still lived in Greenville, I’d be damn glad that a Federal government existed to keep the Jonesers from imposing their will on me.

While, I was in town, I went to Jim DeMint’s office.  Danielle Gibbs, his Regional Director spent about fifteen minutes with me (without knowing I was a reporter). I wanted to ask about a crazy contradiction in the Senator’s thinking. At CPAC, he declared that we should get rid of the Federal Income Tax. And yet he thinks we should not only maintain but increase our military presence in the world. “Because we need to be near trouble spots,” Gibbs explained to me.

I took the libertarian point of view. “But Representative Paul would say they’re trouble spots because we are closer to them,” I replied.  There was no answer.

Here’s a news flash. The Military is part of the Federal Government. Sorry, but it is. You can’t have it both ways. You can’t talk about how bad the Federal government is and how great the military is.

The Federal government abused the Constitution plenty. Warrentless wiretapping by the NSA, the suspension of Habeas Corpus, illegal rendition, etc. But the Tea-Party has been silent on these issues because they aren’t really interested in limiting Federal power but in reviving all the old things that States Rights used to stand for.

So, to all the Tea-Party people who claim to worship the Constitution. Please, read Article 6 and save us all some time. It says that Federal Law supercedes State Law. End of discussion. You may want to go back and reargue the issues surrounding the Federalist Papers—which is fine, but it is not Conservative, it is radical and revolutionary and would require a new Constitution.