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Dear automated data tracking software,

According to this pie chart, roughly 30 percent of all Letters to the Reader are crude tributes to bodily functions, while 40 percent make poorly masked references to alcoholism and other vices. It says here that 5 percent of LTRs display a penchant for celebrating anti-social and neurotic behavior in the workplace; 10 percent are half bright socio-political rants; with the remaining 10 percent dedicated to “pompous, self-masturbatory stream of consciousness inanities.” …That’s what it actually says on the chart. Who designed this software? We know numbers don’t lie but somehow I just don’t buy this data.

Columbia City Paper

Dear hot Publix cashier,

OK, I’ll level with you. I don’t really need all this stuff. In truth, most of it is just a smokescreen to hide my primary purchase: this roll of Angel Soft double ply. But, it would be weird if I just came in and bought that, like maybe I was having a major intestinal emergency and raced down here in desperation. Huh? Oh no, I can hold it. If it were a real emergency, I’d just grab some used fast food napkins out of the trash at home.

So, now that we’ve cleared that up, what are you doing for dinner?

Columbia City Paper

Dear self help book,

I recognize that you have a basic need to disseminate helpful information and I own my responsibility to that. However, after using the Self Checklist on page 42, I don’t believe it will puncture our Friend Bubble if I use you to prop up this wobbly computer table so I don’t spill my Scotch while I watch Russian porn online and quietly weep.

Columbia City Paper

Dear new office guard dog,

Since we moved the City Paper offices from our humble Five Points roots to a more swanky locale downtown, you and the high-powered alarm system are our only line of defense against crackheads looking to score a Mac or scorned nut jobs seeking to burn us at the stake. But, that still doesn’t give you license to run amok when we’re not in the office, boy. While odd smells and the occasional errant turd could easily be attributed to the news staff in the old office, all fingers point to you in this new space. Also there will be no audible lapping out of the toilet during sales meetings. Otherwise, help yourself to all the treats we can spare and feel free to ogle the neighbor’s hot female Collie. (And, hey, whatever happens between you and the publisher’s neck pillow is your business).

Columbia City Paper

Dear South Carolina legislators,

As the newspaper of record for the more degenerate and vice-oriented of your constituency, City Paper would like to congratulate you on your recent spate of fair and balanced lawmaking, both on state and municipal levels. Sure, folks can no longer smoke in public, but we can now buy beer on Sundays. We can’t play video poker but at least you kept the hallowed institution of the lap dance intact. Taking advantage of this give-and-take atmosphere while we can, we’d like to propose another trade off. Let’s see… we’ll give you a motorcycle helmet law, more stringent penalties for public drunkenness and you can have common law marriage back, all for marijuana decriminalization. We’re just throwing it out there.

Columbia City Paper

Dear deep thought in the checkout line at Bi-Lo,

You know, maybe the Weekly World News is onto something. Maybe the human brain is the true organism. The rest of the body was grown in its service, to do it’s bidding. It is not an organ in service of the body; the body was grown as a shell to encase it. To see for it and to feed it and to protect it from predators. After all, how can a mere organ be aware of itself? The brain knows what it looks like. With a mirror, anesthesia, and proper training, a brain could actually perform surgery on itself. Sadly, the brains developed an understanding of death millions of years ago and they have dragged that knowledge, as if shackled to a heavy stone, across the plains of time since the predawn of history. They envy other creatures for their seeming ignorance of that ultimate truth. The brain has enlightened itself but, in doing so, has also damned itself.

Eventually the brain grew tired of bumbling around in its never-ending search for sustenance and copulation, so it invented farming and prostitution. It could then spend more time inventing gods and watching sports and starting wars. Later it invented the car and this supermarket and plastic so it could acquire food by expending even less energy. All along the way, it developed art and theater and music and literature. It invented fart jokes and comic books and medicines and hair care products. Later still, it invented reality television. …Huh, oh sorry. Yeah, I have my bonus card.

Columbia City Paper

Steve Benjamin’s “One Columbia” campaign is a synthesis of the slogan-centric and logo-philiac Obama presidential campaign (with none of the heart) and all the sanctimony of classic Southern Municipal Politics (with none of the brow-mopping handkerchiefs). To me, it is a grand achievement in the arena of Sounds and Furies Signifying Nothing. But on the other hand, Mayor Steve royally kicked my ass at the polls in April.

One point is indisputable: the campaign deserves a gigantic E for Effort. And as I set myself down with Droid in hand, one of the architects of said Effort is about to reap the benefits of over a year of faithful service to the Benjamin Campaign.

He is getting a job as a temp with the City of Columbia.

The man to which I am referring was the entity on the other end of Benjamin’s frantic Blackberry Messenger conversations throughout the forums and debates of the Mayoral campaign. He was the hot shot wunderkind who brought modern, streamlined, national-level concepts of branding and electioneering to our humble civic campaign. And I have a sneaking suspicion that he came up with the wonderfully tacky “Benjamins for Benjamin” fundraising campaign.

If you’ve never heard of Michael Wukela, that’s because he’s a behind-the-scenes kind of guy — a classic Evil Vasir in the tradition of Jafar and Rosco P. Coltraine. He is the Grima Wormtongue to Benjamin’s Theomir, King of Rohan, a specimen of that queer breed of backroom buccaneers who relish in pulling the puppet strings of greater men.

I recall a breezy evening in early spring, deep into the race for mayor, when I was summoned to one of Mikey’s cigarette breaks and invited to kiss the ring of the burgeoning power broker. He had a cool, easy manner and a brash sense of detachment. When he greeted me it was like having Luke Perry slam his arm out into a locker, blocking my path and commanding my attention.

He glibly informed me that I had no chance in the election, but that I might be able to have a real effect on the campaign by endorsing his candidate. When I told him I had intended to see my run through to the end he took a long drag from his Parliament Lite and gave me an appraising glance. He
nodded his head. “I could run you,” he said. His voice was warm honey. “You might have a chance.”

My heart fluttered. He was tempting me, I found. Extending forth a golden apple, but my dizzying climb to political power would come with certain stipulations.

It would be expensive.  I would have to shave off my facial hair. I would have to tell people what they wanted to hear.

He sensed my hesitation. He threw down the butt of his cigarette and caught me in a reptile gaze that latched on to the herbivorial half of my omnivorous psyche. Now he aimed to appeal to my youthful, rebellious nature.

“Look, man,” he continued, with animal intensity. “You think I don’t get it? I’m a hard core socialist. I have tattoos all over my body. But if you really want to change the system you gotta play by the rules. If you do everything I say and we get some party support, I could get you on a school board, maybe even make you a state senator.”

It was a miscalculation. For all the counterculture affectations of my campaign and for all my boyish looks, I am not a socialist. I’m more of a libertarian-lite with a weakness for effective human service and civic programs like public transportation and investment in the arts infrastructure. And I don’t really like tattoos.  My conscience came flooding back to me and I saw Baba Yaga for the dark conjurer she really was. Mikey had no magic. His cold stare did not
see through to higher planes; it was merely the reptile gaze of a mid-grade sociopath who had latched on to the broad silk panels of Benjamin’s coat tails. The moment was past and we walked away from one another with an enhanced understanding of the game we were playing with one another.

When I next saw Mikey, at the Homelessness Summit, he was sporting a baby beard of his own. So much for shaving. He was colder, now. He knew he had no power over me, and, more importantly, he did not see me as a threat nor an opportunity. And so he had disengaged.

I lost the game with Mike Wukela on April 6, 2010. And today he takes another stride forward toward his lofty and mysterious ambitions. Anyone who has ever worked, as I have, for Kelly Services and Manpower for a couple of years knows that destiny is a fluid thing in the fast and loose world of Temping. And a career opportunist with an unquenchable thirst for power like Michael Wukela will no doubt leverage his presently notional role in our civic hierarchy into something of far greater substance in the months and years to come. Move by move, through patience and analysis, you can bet he has the End Game in mind, like a Chess Grand Master.

And I must be content to watch and marvel, as I would observe a Tiger in the Jungle or a Shark in the Sea.

Well played, Mikey. Well played.

talkback@columbiacitypaper.com

A morning in the mall walking underground

Cafeterias have long been pre-dawn gathering spots for the elderly, a quiet refuge where folks gather to chat about yard work or term life insurance over breakfasts of grapefruit and Metamucil. But, on the second Thursday of every month, when the mall walkers make the scene, the normal chatter is replaced by an excited energy that permeates the air like Vick’s VapoRub. Decked out in the latest high-end orthopedic footwear, some stake a claim to the middle dining room of the S&S Cafeteria in the Midtown at Forest Acres Mall to discuss health and fitness while others, out near the malls information desk, get loosened up to hit the tiles before the main building opens for business at 10.

Mall walkers are a different breed than the run-of-the-mill neighborhood power walker. Both share a flare for exaggerated upper body motion and, yes, there are the tracksuits. But power walkers prefer to be out in the elements dodging traffic, angry dogs and sneering motorists. By contrast, mall walkers avoid the scenic route and all its pitfalls. And though they enjoy crisp air conditioning and soothing Musak, mall walking comes with its own set of risks in the form of potentially slippery floors and gangs of scary looking teenagers, just to name a couple.

The youngest of this group, Eileen Sullivan, has been mall walking for over ten years. She says she prefers mall walking to outdoor power walking because she can work up more speed indoors. “I also have a lot of allergies,” she says, “so walking outside is not usually an option for me.”

On this bright Thursday morning the walkers orbit the lower floor of the Midtown mall at varying speeds, the sun filtering in through the plate glass ceiling above, a pan flute version of “Dust in the Wind” playing lightly on the audio system. The rocking tunes cause some to push their walkers along at a peppy, false teeth rattling pace while others seem to zone out and lumber slowly along in their street clothes.

Mac Carroll, 72, and his wife, Sara, look young enough to have kids in college and easily lap walkers half their age. Carroll attributes his youthful appearance to “good genes and a good woman.” And Jack Daniels whiskey, he adds, jokingly.

At times the Carrolls have to slow their pace so that we hung over City Paper staffers can keep up. Sara concedes that mall walkers keep earlier hours than most, but she says she prefers to walk in the morning before the stores open so they don’t disturb shoppers.

As we walk, a security guard shifts weight from one foot to the other near the escalator and surveys her charge like a chain gang boss. But, the mall sanctions walkers on these mornings, so for now, at least, a shaky truce seems to be holding. The guard begins to exhibit a growing interest in the reporters in her midst, though, so we pick up the pace and try to blend in.

On one lap, we pass a mall walker slumped on a bench near the Belk and I posit to the Carrolls that other mall walkers in the area might charge that walkers have it easier in Forest Acres, that Midtown walkers couldn’t hack it over at Dutch Square, a longer mall with more inclines.

Mac bristles at the thought. “Well, I’d say they’re full of—”

Sara quickly pops his arm, smiles apologetically and asks that we “don’t print that.”

“Hey,” Mac says, slapping my shoulder, “you’ve got to tell it like it is.”

And with that the Carrolls say their polite goodbyes, ratchet up their speed and leave the rest of us the dust. Bring it on, Dutch Square.

-Todd Morehead

Written by Corey Hutchins

Originally published in 2006

Jimmy’s Stats

Age: Late 50s

Name: Jimmy

Where Loitering: Maxcy Gregg Park

Time & Date: 9:45 p.m. – July 31, 2006

Quote: “Nobody fucks with me.”

Drug of Choice: Booze

“I need some goddamn pussy over here!”

That’s what the old white guy with the dirty-gray Santa-Clause-looking beard and mesh trucker’s cap pulled low over his face said after City Paper woke him up from a sacked-out slumber on a swinging park bench in Maxcy Gregg Park the night of July 31.

As thunderclouds rolled overhead and heat lighting lit up his weathered face, the man calling himself “Jimmy” sat upright and opened his bleary blue eyes wide.

“I’m drunk, OK,” he said, picking up a battered blue and white backpack and rummaging around through it. “Booze,” he said.

Jimmy said he did not smoke crack or do any other drugs.

“I just do booze,” he said, his speech slurred and sometimes incomprehensible as he pawed through his bag. “I’m trying to find some right now.”

Unfortunately for Jimmy, City Paper caught him on a Sunday and could not help him out.

Nor could he be entertained with the other request he shouted out repeatedly throughout the interview.

“Need some pussy over here!” he yelled toward Blossom Street as cars passed, his head rolling back against the back support of the bench. “Goddamn it! Need some pussy right over hee-yuh!”

A man on another bench nearby warned him about screaming such things, saying the previous night Jimmy had been yelling that same refrain throughout the Five Points area while people were still out walking around.

“Shit, y’all should have seen him yesterday… he wouldn’t shut the fuck up,” he said. “You better shut that shit or you gonna get everybody locked up.”

Portions of Harden Street, Devine Street and Santee Street were hopeless for the homeless that evening.

So were the darkened areas between the Shell station and Food Lion.

When asked if Jimmy was drunk, his friend said, “you could call it that,” before shaking his head and walking away.

“Hey Jimmy,” he said over his shoulder before departing. “Come on before it start to fuckin’ goddamn rain like a bitch out here.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. Park was also vacant of vagrants, as was the Five Points area. In the alleyway between Wachovia and the Salty Nut Cafe, there were also no hobos to be found.

A Columbia Police Dept. patrol car positioned on Lauren Street created slim pickings for any train track transients near Durkins and Mr. Friendly’s.

As the thunder grew louder, and others around him got up to find shelter, Jimmy stayed put. “I don’t think it’s gonna rain. I’m [going to] stay right here,” he said. “Goddamn, shit. Goddamn it, yeah. Fuck the goddamn rain.”

And then:

“I need some pussy over here right now!”

When asked where he was going to get it, and what was going to do with it if he did, he replied, “We can go down to Five Points right now and get it, OK. …Need some pussy over here!”

Jimmy said he was from Columbia and had been through a lot throughout the years. He said he had seen quite a bit of the “good” and the “bad” since he’s been on the streets.

“I’ve been through a lot of things,” he said.

“I’ve seen [people] killing other [people]. Right over here,” he said, pointing to the woods beyond the park, though he didn’t seem too worried about it.

“Nobody fucks with me,” he said.

Aries

An imminent philosopher once said, “pleasure is fleeting, herpes is forever.” Sadly, you’ll have a lifetime to brood over that phrase after your upcoming trip to Myrtle Beach.

Taurus

If the shoe fits wear it. If it stinks, spray it with Lysol.

Gemini

In 2052, greedy technocrats will require that all humans wishing to participate in the global super economy must be implanted with debit ID chips. You will balk at this, vow to grow your own food and become self-sustaining. But on a blustery August day, ozone layer long gong, you will curse yourself as you scratch at your wilted crops and admit: “Dang… I wish I’d have gotten that chip.”

Cancer

Get Darla to babysit! You done been so good to Ricky that he sold his snake tank to get y’all tickets to Kenny Chesney.

Leo

Your _______ (adjective) _________ (noun) will clear up after you ______ (adverb) _______ (verb) your _______ (noun). However, your proctologist will _______ (verb) when he sees the ________ (adjective), ______ (adjective) _______ (noun) that is oozing on your ______ (noun).

Virgo

Run away from your problems and don’t look back. Or just walk backwards quickly.

Libra

In a moment of weakness you will shack up with a mousy schoolteacher who possesses the kind of maniacal laugh that’s usually followed by an ax. She would hate to do hurtful, painful things to her pooki-wookie little maaaaaannn… SO SHUT UP AND HANG THOSE GODDAMNED CURTAINS!!!

Scorpio

It will suddenly dawn on you why every indie band gazes pensively off to the left in their promo photos: a very, very sad-looking squeaky toy.

Sagittarius

Tell women that you work at a bank. It’s a better pick-up line than “I park cars at Wachovia in Five Points after nine.”

Capricorn

Don’t let hay fever ruin your upcoming job interview. Human Resources departments are known for their compassion and will understand when you show up in goggles and a surgical mask.

Aquarius

Your class load is especially rough due to all the tests coming up. At least you got that important one completed last week. For your sake –and half of the Tri-Delt sorority—I hope the results come back negative.

Pisces

You have a primer-colored customized compact car that sounds like a weed eater. This weekend you will rev your engine at the corner of Greene and Harden as a courtship display to females and to ward off other competing bulls. But, the message you are really sending: “I have a small pee pee.”

Originally Published in 2007

To say I anticipated buxom waitresses on my first visit to Hooters would be an understatement. As far as I’m concerned, the first three letters of the alphabet have no place on any cup there. I envisioned bazookas barely contained by cotton and clasp, maybe an errant chest to accidentally spill my drink. I expected a sound like gallon jugs sloshing when she giggled and bounced over to the table with my hot wings, as every shirt seam fought to hold, headlights the size of tea saucers showing through in silent defiance. No server should have to put the ink pen behind her ear at Hooters, is all I’m saying.

A local female bookstore owner believes the restaurant chain unintentionally misleads the public with false promises.

“Hardly any of the waitresses have hooters!” she exclaimed.

The chain acknowledges that many consider “Hooters” a slang term for a portion of the female anatomy. According to the chain, “Hooters does have an owl inside its logo and uses an owl theme sufficiently to allow debate to occur over the meaning’s intent. The chain enjoys and benefits from this debate. In the end, we hope Hooters means a great place to eat.”

Right. A source close to the Harbison Dr. Hooters detailed the many deceptions waitresses will perpetrate on male customers.

“Many waitresses will pretend they have boyfriends or are engaged in order to deceive male customers so that they won’t bother them outside of providing a great meal,” the source revealed.

Others accuse the waitresses of taking measures as extreme as wearing fake engagement rings—called “Man Be Gone Rings” in the industry—to intentionally deceive undesirable males. As a reporter with uncompromising standards and ethics, it was important that I witness some on these allegations first hand.

When I arrived at Hooters, several beautiful young Hooters Girls greeted me.  Many may not live up to the name but it turned out that our waitress Hanna indeed puts the “H” in Hooters.

I ordered the quesadilla and was tempted by the famous wings, but was hesitant to make a mess of myself in front of the blond haired, blued eyed beauty. Hanna was sweet and intelligent and sat down with us to tell stories about growing up riding horses. She said some other stuff too, but I wasn’t really paying attention after the image of her in slo-mo on a wild stallion in her orange Hooters shorts floated softly through my head. I stared off into the distance and chewed absently as she talked, strings of cheese probably hanging from my mouth.

God, she was incredible. I had to know more about her.

Hanna then proceeded to tell me that she was engaged to be married. But the way she had asked for my drink order… there was definite chemistry. I thought I might still have a chance. She told us that her fiancé had proposed to her on the beach and I noticed a dinky ring on her finger. She deserves so much better and I imagined the rock I would have picked out for her.

We talked and laughed every time she refilled my drink or brought me more napkins. It was odd she didn’t have any of the wedding details finalized and it gave me further hope that maybe it wouldn’t work out with her fiancé. After she cleared my quesadilla basket, I excused myself to the men’s room to drop a quick deuce and work out my strategy before she took our desert order.

While I was in the bathroom, my dining companion played the classic restaurant gag and told our waitress that it was my 16th birthday. I guess maybe he also told them I had a degenerative disease to explain away the 14-year age discrepancy. All the waitresses came over to the table and forced me to a lone chair in the center of the room.  Not knowing what to do I first sat down expecting a dance of some kind, but little did I know I was to be the performer.  One waitress loudly demanded that I get up on the chair, dance and air-spell “Susan” with my gyrating behind.

I was mortified that my Hanna saw me in such a situation and could tell that she was laughing in order to help me feel better. We had a connection like that. When Hanna came back to the table with our check, she offered me a “Heart for a Dollar” with the proceeds going to the Ronald McDonald charity.  She also personally invited me to a Super Bowl party at Hooters that would feature a raffle for a big screen T.V.

She wasn’t sure if she would be on staff that night or not.

And then she did something truly special; she offered her favorite pen for me to sign my check. It was shiny, pink and covered with black spots.  On top bounced a perky ladybug nestled in a pink feather bed.  This pen, I felt, was the essence of Hanna and our brief time together.  It was more incredible than any other pen in its class.  It wrote beautifully, and the ladybug danced while the feathers tickled my wrist.

I brought the top up to my nose, and it smelled of my dear Hanna, a mix of perfume and potato skins.  Oh, what a glorious fragrance while those feathers caressed my face.  She didn’t say it, but I knew she wanted me to have this.  I slipped the pen into my pocket when her back was turned, knowing that neither of us would speak of it again.  That was the way my Hanna would want it.

It was then I realized that Hanna and the Hooters Girls give so much and ask for so little besides a 15 percent gratuity on tables of six or more.  So what if they lie to a few guys? They make them feel better while making the world a better place.

Though I guarded my pen like a wolverine around the City Paper office, I secretly debated if I should keep it. Maybe the pen was a test for me and Hanna. Perhaps she will forget that bum fiancé if I show my willingness to give back to the community like she does.

On August 28, ignorance looked pretty blissful

By Will Moredock

“War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.” – George Orwell

I have lived long enough to have witnessed some important changes in American culture, in the way Americans think, behave and speak.

When I was growing up in South Carolina a half-century ago, every white person I knew was a segregationist and a racist to a greater or lesser degree. Or if there were any white people who did not share those views, they were smart enough to keep it to themselves.

It is a tribute to the humanity of the civil rights movement and to the basic decency of the American people that so much has changed – even in the South. One of those changes has been in the way Americans use the language. The “n-word,” as it has come to be known, is now verboten. Its use can cost a person his social standing or her job, as it did with a right wing radio personality recently. Ironically, the word has standing today only among certain elements of the black community.

Likewise, the word “racist” itself has been transformed. Fifty years ago racist speech and behavior were perfectly respectable, even de rigueur. Whites not demonstrating sufficient hostility to blacks and suspicion of the civil rights movement might be ostracized – or worse.

Today “racist” is one of the strongest pejoratives in the language. No one – not even a racist – can allow the word to be hung on him. It is almost comic to watch conservative politicians backtrack and stumble over themselves (as several South Carolina pols have done in the last couple of years), trying to explain that their racist remarks were misunderstood, were taken out of context, were meant  in jest, etc.

I realized the language had undergone a strange mutation a couple of years ago when I observed that my critics had begun calling me a racist in their responses to my columns and blogs. Presumably, they were angry at my criticism of white people for their historic bigotry, for their subsequent distortion of history, for their glorification of violence and folly. And presumably, they took my motivation for writing such things to be racism against white people, ignoring the fact that I am white, that my family is white, that the majority of my friends associates are white.

So what does “racism” mean in the 21^st century? Is it just the pejorative of last resort for those of limited vocabulary? Did the civil rights movement so effectively stigmatize the behavior that even racists find the tag a handy cudgel against their adversaries?

And what does “honor” mean today? What does it mean in the mouth of a man like Glenn Beck?

I’ve wondered about the man’s state of mind in the past as I watched the tears stream down his face on his Fox News show. (He reminds me of Tammy Faye Bakker, who used open the faucets and streak her mascara while fleecing the lambs with her husband Jim at her side on their PTL Network.)

A few months ago, when Beck announced that he would hold a rally at the Lincoln Memorial, on the 47^th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech, there was appropriate outrage and consternation. The reaction was because Beck had so clearly taken that great moment in American history and turned it on its head.

“We were the people that did it in the first place,” Beck announced last spring on Fox News.

Did what in the first place? Stood up to ignorance, bigotry and violence? No, Beck and his Fox News colleagues have never done that. They have fanned ignorance, bigotry and violence with their Islamophobia and homophobia. And one knows instinctively that if Beck and Fox had been around in 1963, they would have been railing against Martin Luther King and everything he stood for.

“This is a moment, quite honestly, that I think we reclaim the civil rights movement,” Beck proclaimed with no sense of irony. “It has been so distorted and so turned upside down because we must repair honor and integrity first…We will take that movement because we were the people that did it in the first place.”

And so a hundred thousand white people gathered at the Lincoln Memorial on August 28 for Beck’s “Restoring Honor” rally, another linguistic contortion that failed to address whose honor was being restored and how it was lost.

“Political language,” George Orwell wrote,  “is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

There was much wind and lying at the Lincoln Memorial on August 28 and it all sounded very respectable. Such is the power of language when people no longer care or remember what words mean.

talkback@columbiacitypaper.com

By Will Moredock

“Who’s that?”

“I dunno. Must be a king.”

“Why?”                                                                                          “He hasn’t got shit all over him.”

— from “Monty Python and the Holy Grail”

Ah, feudalism. Those were the days. Life was so much simpler then. For one thing, everyone knew his place and stayed in it. And it was so easy to tell kings from everyone else in those old feudal times. The king – and a few of his friends and family – didn’t have shit all over them. And everyone else did. That’s all you had to know.

Leave it to the South Carolina Republican Party to bring back those good old days. They have been working at it for years by giving us one of the most regressive tax codes in the nation.

They scored a huge breakthrough when they herded the General Assembly into doing away with  taxes on most residential properties in 2007. The legislature eliminated the school operations portion of the property tax and capped reassessment at 15 percent for residential properties that had not changed hands. The lost revenue would be offset by a small increase in the sales tax. And to those who cried that the sales tax is regressive and falls disproportionately on the poor and middle class, the tax reformers threw us a bone, eliminating the tax on most groceries. The average household saved about $218  a year on that little benevolence. Wealthy property owners saved thousands on the property tax overhaul.

From the beginning, critics screamed that it wouldn’t work. The marginal sales tax increase could never replace lost property tax.

Today, those Cassandras have been proven right. S.C.’s schools are in desperate straights as teachers are laid off and furloughed, as class sizes swell, as extracurricular programs are cut.

Today the state Tax Realignment Commission is studying ways to increase revenue without inconveniencing the wealthy. One option they are studying would raise the sales tax on groceries back to their pre-2007 levels or higher. Other options on the table include taxing prescriptions drugs, water  and electric power — three things that have never been taxed in this state before. Yes, in a state where hundreds of our poorest residents have sought relief in paying their power bills during this scorching season, there are powerful individuals in Columbia who want to raise their power bills with a new tax.

GOP gubernatorial candidate Nikki Haley has demonstrated that she is on board with the TRC’s feed-the-rich agenda. She wants to raise sales tax on groceries and eliminate the corporate income tax.

More taxes on the working class and the middle class. This is the price we may soon pay to protect the feudal prerogatives of this state’s ruling class. Think I exaggerate?

The man who lead the statewide campaign to abolish property tax in 2007 is a local millionaire named Emerson Read, Sr. Though he did not completely succeed in his goal, his friends thought he had come close enough to merit special recognition. In October of that year, the French Society of Charleston met at the Carolina Yacht Club for their 191st anniversary dinner. There men in white ties and tails and women in  evening gowns applauded enthusiastically as Emerson Read received  the Society’s Humanitati Award, in recognition of his efforts  to “improve the human condition either in his community or the world at large.”

“Like a savior, he was there when we needed him,” French Society member Jack Simmons told the overdressed and overfed yacht club crowd. “And by ‘we’ I mean every single South Carolinian and potentially every United States citizen.”

That’s right! The ruling class of South Carolina considers that cutting their property taxes was nothing less than a great humanitarian triumph. Furthermore, they think they speak for “every single South Carolinian and … every United States citizen.”

Cloaked in such self-delusion, the plutocrats of this state make no apology for ruling over us with something like divine right. After all, they have been doing it for more than 300 years. Their attitude actually dates back to the age of divine right. And if Jack Simmons speaks for his class, those  wealthy bastards think we should be grateful for their wisdom and benefactions.

I have written here before that the people who run this state consider it their job to serve wealth and power. It is a medieval concept that came here on the first ships and we have never gotten over it.

It’s downright feudal in its implications for working class and middle class people. And it means we’re about to get covered with shit again. And again. And again.

talkback@columbiacitypaper.com