No bad news today, but the links below are good for several long coffee breaks over the coming weekend. Enjoy!
Part the First: Political Hope in a Time of Despair. Independent media of all types have become essential to understanding our world. There is nothing new about that to this community. Salvation South is always interesting. The founder, Chuck Reece, was present at the creation of The Bitter Southerner, which was the source of our discussion of the lunchroom ladies last February. This week Salvation South takes up Southern Politics in an article by Doug Cumming, who is a retired journalist and journalism professor, in his No Choice in God’s Country.
And “No Choice” it has been for a long time in different parts of Georgia. Most of Rural North Georgia has been deep red for some time. The same is true in South Georgia, except for several very rural counties of the Black Belt. Larger urban areas, including the cities of Atlanta, Macon, Augusta, Athens, and Savannah tend to elect Democrats, but they are surrounded by a deep shade of gerrymander red. More widely in the South:
In Rockbridge County, Virginia, (one of the most beautiful parts of the United States) with its little university town of Lexington, there were always two political parties and competing candidates for the General Assembly in Richmond. But in parts of the Deep South today, counties are so “red” or “blue” that many local candidates for state legislatures face no opposition on Election Day. Uncontested state legislative races are increasingly the norm across the South. A Salvation South analysis of data from Ballotpedia found this: seven states, from South Carolina straight across to Louisiana and Arkansas (also Kentucky, but not Tennessee or Florida), had only one major party on more than half of the ballots for state legislatures in the latest state legislative elections. And those candidates were mostly Republican.
The most extreme examples in 2023 were Louisiana (where 82.6 percent of the seats were uncontested, and 69 percent of those were Republican) and Mississippi (where 86 percent were uncontested, and 67 percent were Republican).
To me, that seems not only undemocratic. It seems immoral.
I have spent much of the past year in rural North Georgia, a break from my retirement in comfortably liberal Decatur. On some Sundays, I sought the William Jamesian “varieties of religious experience” worshipping at different midsized churches. I wasn’t looking for the beating heart of Christian Nationalism or the theology of MAGA. Still, it surprised me that I saw no signs of politics at all.
These were living churches where the Democratic Party had died, and with it, some of the power of the vote. I saw no bumper stickers for candidates in the parking lots. The churches were full, and the gospel was preached. But folks at the coffee hours were too “Christian” to bring up such an uncomfortable subject as politics. They just smiled at the end of that ten-foot pole.
Immoral? When I first voted in Georgia in the mid-term election of 1974, things were the other way around. But like Mr. Cumming, I did feel a sense of participation then, and now. The article never really addresses the nature of our current Uniparty, but that is a national thing. Local and state politics are different and are likely to be the harbinger of change. But I do not think Mr. Cumming should have been surprised that politics did not issue forth from the pulpit or the pews in the churches he visited. For the most part, that is a line that is not crossed, except in mega-churches of uncertain theological provenance.
The Trump signs are scarcer than before. Will dissatisfaction with the Current Administration bring about change? I still pay attention as best I can in a state without even the ghost of the newspaper that used to be delivered daily to each of Georgia’s 159 counties, this is a difficult question. But those candidates who are trying are the proverbial breath of fresh air. Such as Mishael White:
And then there is Mishael White, a Black driver of eighteen-wheelers for Domino’s Pizza who is running for the second time for a state House seat in Henry County, a gateway between Atlanta and middle Georgia. White was encouraged by the Fighting Fifty to run in 2024, when he lost by 14 percentage points to Noelle Kahaian, a Bible-college graduate and paralegal. Kahaian had beat another conservative incumbent in the 2024 Republican primary after crusading against “Critical Race Theory” in the public schools. In the state legislature., she co-sponsored a stalled bill to reduce the authority of the Department of Health and local health boards to require vaccines for infectious diseases.
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Having moved his family to Georgia from New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Mishael White is campaigning on his ideas to help trade schools (after high school, he got trained in welding at the Avondale Shipyard in New Orleans), to reduce the state’s high maternal mortality rate, and to support small businesses (he owns part of a Stockbridge restaurant, Sheauxtime Kitchen & Lounge).
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He draws on his experience driving a truck rated for 80,000 pounds gross weight. Driving a big rig, he says, you have to get along and trust fellow drivers, especially when team driving. The predominantly white, MAGA culture becomes irrelevant on the road. And when Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp brags about funding to expand Interstate highways, White says the expansion makes traffic worse. White says the number of big trucks, not the quantity of lanes, is the problem. His solution: more parking areas for trucks so that drivers can choose to drive when fewer cars are out, which truckers would prefer.
In 2024, White lost to Kahaian by 14 percentage points—a 4,717-vote difference. Kamala Harris got 43.3 percent in the district, close to the same as White.
This year, he is running with more wind at his back, and more voters moving into Henry County. The population grew by about 4,400 in 2024, a rate of 1.7 percent a year, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. He doesn’t bring up politics on Sunday mornings at Victory Tabernacle Church International, where he and his family worship. Instead, he is doing interviews and town-hall meetings that end up online. He and his family are knocking on thousands of doors and working the crowds on Saturdays, one of his three days off, in McDonough’s popular Main Street Market.
Less than two weeks to go. We shall see. But a true son of the working class in the Georgia House of Representatives would be a sight to behold! Or as my grandmother, who was a poll worker in the 1930s in Telfair County when dead white people voted in alphabetical order for Governor Gene Talmadge (of Telfair County) in that equally inverted political universe, might have said, “Imagine that!”
Part the Second: Mickey Mantle and Don Larsen in a World Series for the Ages. I am not in general an envious person, but this story elicits some of that feeling in this Little Leaguer who came along about ten years after this adventure. Mickey Mantle was still there, and later I wore #7 on my high school baseball uniform, but it was not the same. The summary of A Picture Perfect World Series, seventy years ago when Don Larsen pitched a perfect game at the end of the season when Mickey Mantle won the Triple Crown (highest batting average, most home runs, and runs batted in):
Seventy years ago this month, a feisty, middle-aged aunt drove two Little Leaguers from Greenville, North Carolina, to New York City for the first time. They left with a photo of Mickey Mantle and memories worthy of a baseball history book.
Enjoy, the shortest read of this Coffee Break!
Part the Third: The Return of Thomas Frank. I have read every book written by Thomas Frank, going back to One Market Under God. Frank was virtually cancelled by the mainstream media for being intelligent. I have ordered his new book, The Creativity Con: How Innovation Became America’s Biggest Racket. The current issue of Jacobin has an excerpt entitled The Creativity Con Ate the Middle Class. Well, something sure did, and I have no doubt Thomas Frank has something worthwhile to say:
The faiths and hopes of the postwar middle-class society have mostly evaporated today. Our parents’ beliefs in consensus and the goodness of American civilization have joined mainline Protestantism and the benevolent corporation on some nostalgia channel of discarded ideas. One signature ideal of that era has survived, however. Indeed, it thrives; it glows with an incandescence that time cannot dim. I am referring to our ongoing fascination with creativity, the human power that our affluent-society ancestors liked to believe made life worth living and that was, at the same time, responsible for the forward motion of civilization itself.
Every year brings a bumper crop of sunny new literature on this tired old subject. Self-help books tell us how to sharpen our skills and be more creative; Substack writers explore the fascinating details of mental performance; South by Southwest (SXSW) and its many imitators bring together practitioners of this colorful art; governments zone urban areas for innovative pursuits; foundations issue sumptuous prizes to the exceptionally creative; executives from industries like advertising and defense assure us of their dedication to the human imagination; and Silicon Valley sells artificial intelligence as a creativity force multiplier — or, rather, it did before we started to fear AI as a creativity poison that would blunt our mental skills if not obsolete them altogether.
The long-running appeal of creativity to middle-class Americans is easy to understand: it is an explanation for progress that seems to put them in history’s starring role. The reason our country is so successful, it assures us, is the day-to-day innovativeness of millions of ordinary but ingenious people. But the actual, real-world effects of creativity have been anything but healthy for the middle-class society. At every step in the long march to our current state of crushing plutocratic inequality, creativity’s holy name was invoked. The big tax cuts of the 1970s and ’80s were done in order to reinvigorate our creativity. Our leaders deregulated banks, did endless favors for tech and pharma, allowed deindustrialization to rust out the heartland, and ushered us generally into a “postindustrial” era in which working people lost their claim on middle-class prosperity — all in order to augment our powers of creativity and innovation.
Yes. A comparison of The Creative Con with We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite, by Musa al-Gharbi, should be worth further discussion one of these days.
Part the Fourth: David W. Orr Is an Island of Sanity in an Insane World. I have read at least six of David W. Orr’s books nine books, and he once even replied to an email from me way back in the day. His students at Oberlin and Arizona State have been a fortunate few, but he has always shared his wisdom with the rest of us. For this part, we return to Front Porch Republic, in a long conversation between Professor Orr and Teddy Macker: The Great Work: An Interview with David W. Orr (NB: ~9,800 words and more than worth the time). A sampling:
With a son-of-a-preacher eloquence; an omnivorous learning; an intelligence alive to connections; a rascally sense of humor; and undeniable soul force, few others have warned us about our nation’s challenges so compellingly as David W. Orr.
We are not living by the terms set by reality for a healthy, lasting tenure on Earth, Orr tells us. We are out of alignment—perilously so—with Creation. We need to immediately “reimagine and remake the human presence on earth in ways that work over the long haul.” To truly heal we need to “stretch our hearts to reach out to other species and future generations.”
Despite the relentlessly unflinching gaze in his many sobering books about the challenges we face (he does not, as he puts it, “understate the problem in order to appear credible”), Orr makes one stouter of heart. Orr does not cynically relish his grim assessments of the global ecological disruption; our ailing democracy; and our “technological somnambulism.” At a time when our country appears to be “haunted by ill angels only” (to borrow from Edgar Allan Poe), Orr calls us to be people of care, compassion, and wisdom; people of thrift, neighborliness, and bravery. We must learn a “patriotism that shifts loyalties from ‘I,’ ‘me,’ and ‘mine’ to ‘we,’ ‘ours,’ and ‘us.’” Instead of being mere voyeurs, scrolling on our phones, we must enter into the breach. “Optimism and pessimism, I think, ought to be put aside,” Orr tells us. “Let’s just buckle down, do what we can, with what’s before us. Everybody has something to offer in this process.”
And Orr encourages us to graduate from what might be called “whole-blindness.” We must become “systems citizens” with a “more capacious view of our obligatedness. “You can’t pull a thread,” Orr says, “without troubling the stars.” Orr’s nine books—which I urge readers to find and read—invite us to reacquaint ourselves with our own agency, nobility, and awareness of “the connections that bind us to each other, to all life, and to all life to come.”
Other writers mentioned include Garrett Hardin, Thomas Berry, Bill McKibben, Wendell Berry, Robert Louis Stevenson, Aldo Leopold, Georgescu-Roegen, Herman Daly, Kate Raworth, Wes Jackson, Jane Austen, Ian McGilchrist, Mary Shelley, Pope Leo XIV, Joseph Wizenbaum, George Orwell…and in the middle:
Even though much of the science is beyond our comprehension, our hope unfortunately still is in better gadgets, not better systems design or improvement of our behavior and the “still unlovely human mind.” And despite the Titanic, Fukushima, and the next “normal accident” waiting in the wings, the hope conceals an even darker reality. Skeptics of technological fundamentalism are today’s heretics, no longer burned at the stake but merely ignored as hopelessly out of touch. We can do better.
As a start, we need shared understandings about our prosthetic devices and the systems in which they are embedded. Here is a very unoriginal list of considerations, adapted from Mary Shelley, Herman Melville, Lewis Mumford, David Ehrenfeld, Neil Postman, David Noble, David Schwartz, Kirkpatrick Sale, among others:
- Using tools, such as hoes, hatchets, shovels, hammers to solve problems, is not a solely human behavior. Some animals do as well. Consider for example how ingeniously birds build their nests with beaks and claws with no opposable thumb and, as far as we know, no engineering degrees. (Or, relatedly, ponder the fact that mere bumblebees have the capacity for inferential reasoning.)
- Every human tool and technological device is embedded in a system of political economy, ecology, culture, and morality.
- Benefits of technology come first, costs later, a pattern elsewhere known as addiction. We can do better.
- The effects of any device, anticipated or not, ripple throughout the larger system with unpredictable consequences.
- Sometimes these effects are counter-intuitive, opposite to what we might logically expect, which is to say they “bite back.”
- Technology amplifies the irony and paradoxes that haunt the human condition. Who coulda known!
- The invention of the process of invention in the nineteenth century made technological innovation a positive feedback system and the rate of change is accelerating.
- Technology-driven improvements often run counter to smarter systems designs that are generally cheaper, faster, and less destructive.
- Technological development without prior and careful public assessment is anti-democratic.
- Finally, is technology a blessing or a curse? In 1972 when asked what he thought of the French Revolution of the 1790s, Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai replied, “It’s too early to say.” So it is with all of our devices and the systems in which they are created and deployed.
Learnedness in every good way whether one agrees or not, unusual for our times. And perhaps not long for our times. But unless we unlearn certain truths our time is coming to an end.
Part the Fifth: The Peace of Wild Things
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s life might be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
Waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
– Wendell Berry, 1934-2026
Thank you for reading. See you next week. Stay safe out there!
