What Texas and South Carolina Should Teach Us
My father liked Country Western music. Not the sleek and glamorous Nashville
product, but the old fashioned hard-core stuff: fiddling, picking and twanging.
Now, to understand how incongruous that was, you would have
to know the man. It’s not as if he had
deep Southern roots. And, he was the
kind of guy who would sing opera in the shower (not so well) and later grill
you on what aria he had just sung, including the act and scene. So, how does a child of Ellis Island immigrants
come to like what was sometimes called in those days “hillbilly music”? Basic training in WWII, where college-bound boys
from New York and Boston were thrown together with sometimes-illiterate men from the Ozarks. My father liked Jazz, he like Boogie Woogie,
he liked Swing. He liked Beethoven and Puccini.
And he liked music that used a jug for the bass line.
Dad was an old fashioned New Deal Democrat. His guys were FDR, Truman and Kennedy (Clinton amused and exasperated him.) He
thought like a New Deal Democrat, in fairly binary terms. I have a vivid memory of him asking, during
the debate over NAFTA, why it was a good idea.
True, Clinton supported it, but if all those Republicans liked it, something
had to be wrong. If he had lived to see
the 2012 election he would have looked at the tax-cutting rich businessman and
his eagerly hard-right theocratic younger sidekick, shook his head and said
“what do you expect”?
It is fascinating to see just how much, and how little, has
changed during the period that spanned
Dad’s adult life. The world he
returned to after his discharge in 1946 seems almost quaint. The population of the United States was less
than half what it is today, we still had only 48 states, and there were still large
swaths of land that were basically open range, open prairie. Just as importantly, news was local, written
in local newspapers, heard over local radio stations. In 1948 there about 100,000 TV sets in the
entire United States, and about 2/3 of those were in the New York area. In the early fifties, if you traveled more
than 75 miles from a large urban center like New York, Los Angeles, Chicago,
Boston or St. Louis, it was pointless to own a TV, because there was no
signal. Culture was local as well. You came back to the old neighborhood, you
worked locally, you found a job or opened a business, started a family, and put
down roots not all that dissimilar to the ones your parents laid down.
But the post-war era brought huge changes. Culturally, the growth of television tied
people together; they watched many of the same shows and the same news
programs. The development of the national highway system fostered a car culture
that put people on the road and helped fuel the explosive growth of the suburbs.
Air-conditioning opened up the South and Southwest to more than purely rural
living. In the 60 years from the 1950 census to the 2010 census, of the states
presently with populations of over 5,000,000, California’s population is up
over 3 ½ times, Texas has more than
trebled, Colorado quadrupled, Florida’s has grown by a factor of seven, Arizona
by eight. Just three states, dead-red
Texas, blue California, and swing-state Florida, have accounted for nearly 40%
of the total national population growth.
The media explosion has had several effects. On the one hand, it has helped to create a
common language defined by popular programs. But on the other, by (often superficially)
touching on a range of social behaviors including sex and violence, or even positive
portrayals of things like single parenting or gay relationships, it has
reaffirmed to Conservatives, particularly in the South, that Hollywood (and
liberals) are corrupted by sin. Sin is
at the gates of their communities, luring their children with the pleasures of
permissiveness. They feel a cultural
assault on their virtue, just as they feel one at their borders, with hordes of
Mexicans poised to change the very nature of the society they feel comfortable
with. Their fears are amplified by a conservative
media who tells them every day that they are the victims of a secular humanist
attack on the things they hold most essential to their way of life.
It’s easy for us who are more center and center left to
scratch our heads at this, but we would be better off if we acknowledged it and
learned to give it a wide berth. Let’s
not be so arrogant as to try to save people from what we think is their
foolishness. It is obviously not foolish to them.
Two recent events demonstrated this quite acutely. In South Carolina, disgraced former Governor
Mark Sanford (who, 2009, left the state without his IPhone to commune with
nature and his mistress) has just been elected to Congress, convincingly
winning over Democrat Elizabeth Colbert Busch.
In Texas, just a few days after the horrific explosion at a
fertilizer plant leveled much of a town and killed more than a dozen
people, Gov. Rick Perry pitched
relocation to Illinois business officials by talking not just low taxes but
limited regulations. In Texas, they know
how to do business, and in Perry’s opinion, more government intervention and
increased spending on safety inspections would not have prevented what has
become one of the most destructive industrial accidents in recent times. Move
to Texas, he said. No new
regulations.
What about the old regulations? The better question is “what old
regulations?” Texas has no state fire
code, and in fact prohibits smaller counties from enacting their own. Businesses don’t have to contribute to
workman’s compensation pools and workplace safety rules are basically
nonexistent. Is that prudent? Not really.
According a story in the New York Times this last week, Texas has the
highest number of industrial fatalities, and (since property is more important
than people, apparently) “(f)ires
and explosions at Texas’ more than 1,300 chemical and industrial plants have
cost as much in property damage as those in all the other states combined for
the five years ending in May 2012.” But
profits are really good, and you get to keep all of them, so businesses shop
for Ten Gallon hats.
Does
all this loss of life and property lead the people of Texas to demand more
restrictions? No more than the people of
South Carolina’s First Congressional District demanded a Congressman who isn’t
a cad.
So,
are Texans daredevil idiots and South Carolina’s Republicans just
hypocrites? And, why should this matter
to me in my Blue New York redoubt?
They
aren’t, and it shouldn’t. This is what
Democracy (with a big “D”) is all about.
People should vote for the people they want to represent them, and the
policies they support. I may not agree
with their choices, but I don’t have to live in Texas or South Carolina.
But,
is it possible to go back to a live and let live ethos? I have doubts, because
what we have going on right now is akin to a domestic cultural war.
Part
of the problem is that media creates the mechanism for instant nationalization
of any issue. There is an insatiable desire for news of any type; everyone
needs content. And even the smallest
events become big. A child is suspended for bringing a toy gun to school, and
the entire blogosphere is lit up for a week.
An obscure candidate utters a few yah-yah lines to like-minded
constituents and now it’s viral.
Secondly,
elected officials now see their roles very differently. It’s no longer “respect the institution and take
care of your constituents.” Instead, they
all want to go to Washington to shake it up and tear it down, then to “share”
the blessings of their local customs and mores with the rest of the nation. The “Gentleman from Texas” is no longer one
of one hundred gray-haired guys who sit on a few powerful committees and bring
home the bacon. Now he’s a Ted Cruz, a
neutron bomb with a Messianic desire to purge ideas he finds impure and bring
the entire country to heel.
And,
that’s a huge difference. What we should
be saying is, “Hey, I won’t tell you who to vote for and you won’t lecture me
on my supposed lack of moral virtue.”
But what everyone is saying is “just wait until we are in charge…”
I don’t
think my Dad would have liked that. When
he came back from the Philippines, he had a scraggly beard, an abiding dislike
for troop ships (and sea-sickness) and some new and strange tastes in music. That was about as “South” as he was going to
get, but that was enough. Respect other
people, take what you like from them, but otherwise don’t bother them and they
won’t bother you.
He might have been on to something. I was poking around on Youtube and found Red
Murrell and His Ozark Playboys 1947 recording of “Get That Chip Off Your
Shoulder.” Give it a try.
MM
