But just maybe it could get more people to swallow the medicine –

The Big Picture – 
By Glynn Wilson – 

ALABAMA – What do you get when you crush sugar cane and boil the juice?

Molasses, of course. The thick, brown syrup still used in the American South for baking pies, cookies and other sumptuous dishes. Mix in brown sugar, sorghum syrup and the heat of a fire and you can grill a pig to perfection. With a syrupy side of baked beans.

What do you get when you mix molasses, brown sugar and sorghum syrup into words on a page?

Rick Bragg, of course. The Alabama author and former New York Times feature writer and Pulitzer Prize winner — maybe the last of the Southern writers — who once thought his writing career in the newspaper business was over when he was fired from the Birmingham News. That was about the same time I sued and beat The Decatur Daily in federal court for blatant violations of the Fair Labor Standards Act. Bragg went onto the St. Pete Times in Florida, where he figured out how to pour on the Southern flavor by writing about a chicken that refused to die when its head got chopped off.

What if Bragg had remained in Birmingham and written editorial columns expressing his opinions instead of feature stories about other people?

That’s what happened to John Archibald, the popular columnist with the Birmingham News. He tries to pour it on thick like Bragg.

I’ve never been one to pepper my writing with so much sugar and spice. Not that I don’t know how to cook that way. It’s just not been my recipe. I’ve long been the coarse salt and vinegar in your barbecue.

When Rick and I were hanging out together in New Orleans back when — yes we both made it out of Alabama to the big sin city, although not quite on a raft down the Mississippi River like Huck Finn — Bragg once told me that I write news stories with “an authoritative voice.”

That was right after he read the UPI story I wrote on the proposed nerve gas incinerator at the Anniston Army Depot in his home town, when we were working together on a piece for the New York Times about it.

Burning of Chemical Arms Puts Fear in Wind

Another time, maybe that day we tried to play golf in the rain at the old Audubon Park golf course before they prettied it up and made an executive course out of it, with 12 par threes where you had to put on a real golf shirt and golf shoes with spikes, he told me I “write with barbs.”

I guess he’s right about that. He’s a pretty smart guy, maybe a genius. He’s managed to write many an effective news feature over the years and quite a few good books without being loathed and hated by what he calls “my people.” The poor, working class Scots-Irish people of Alabama.

In fact they seem to love him, even while the rest of the press in America is being called “the enemy of the people” on a daily basis by the president, and the mail pipe bombers and synagogue shooters are back threatening anyone who might challenge or criticize their patriotic nationalist champion and blonde king.

Bragg always told me he reads the kind of news stories I write. Not because they are pretty. But because they inform. One day in years past he saw something I wrote, and said, “Keep sticking it to ’em, buddy.”

Of course I did.

As I passed through Birmingham recently on my way back from Washington, D.C. to spend at least part of another winter in Mobile on the Gulf Coast, I clicked on the Newhouse news site Al dot com, a smart, short domain name for the web but a dumb name for a news organization. I wanted to see what was being reported locally about the constitutional amendments that will appear on the ballot Nov. 6 to gather information for a story of my own.

Vote ‘No’ to Adding Even More Stupid Amendments to Alabama’s Outdated Constitution

What I saw on that front page was this column from Archibald, an abridged version of a speech he made down at Auburn University on “Journalism Day.”

When things seem bleak, trust these people

Now I guess I should have sent John a nice note thanking him for telling it like it is about our craft or profession, depending on your point of view. But it struck me as wrong for some reason. I guess I’m just a bitter-sweet kind of guy.

I couldn’t figure out how to sign in to make a comment on the little new iPhone SE I was using at the time, so I just clicked on his email address. I was not in a very good mood when I did it. What I said was this: “You are so full of shit it is unbelievable. Be brave? Nobody at Newhouse (the owner of Alabama’s big city newspapers) has a clue what that means. I am the bravest MoFo from Birmingham to ever practice journalism from this state and around this country and y’all either totally ignore me or steal from me. Get real.”

Archibald just won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary for writing about Roy Moore, including one story I broke about Moore being “banned” from the Gadsden Mall. The New Yorker magazine, also owned by Newhouse, credited me by name and linked to my story. It made the Late Show with Stephen Colbert on CBS.

The Birmingham News and Al dot com never acknowledged my role in that and acted like it was their idea, after admitting in a Reckon video that they had never heard about the sexual misconduct allegations against Moore and got beat on the story by the #MeToo team at the Washington Post.

What I said to Archibald was mean, I know. He responded to the email, to my surprise. He was not mean about it, to his credit.

When I mentioned the conversation to my artist friend Steve Lowery in Birmingham, a big fan of Archibald’s and mine, he admonished me to “have lunch” with the guy. So I did. We met at Carlile’s Barbecue on Sixth Avenue South, and had a working man’s lunch with other cap wearing working men and women of Birmingham. Over barbecue pork, we had an honest chat about the state of American journalism and politics in these parts.

I was about ready to sign a truce or a peace treaty with the mainstream media.

That is until a deputy editor at the Washington Post “talent network” for free-lancers decided you can’t report facts and publish opinions too, even though their expert reporter on the Middle East, Jamal Khashoggi — recently killed on the orders of the crown prince of Saudi Arabia with a wink and nod from Trump — did both. Archibald does both and it doesn’t seem to bother Newhouse. Ted Bryant covered politics in Alabama for The Birmingham Post-Herald for 40 years and wrote a weekly opinion column about politics. Nobody ever blinked at that.

I covered politics for a chain of papers on the Gulf Coast for four years in the late 1980s and the early 1990s and wrote a column called The Beach Beat. I know what I’m talking about. I’ve been covering the news and writing a column since the late 1990s when I published one of the first magazines online, The Southerner. I did it for The Locust Fork News-Journal and for the past five years the New American Journal.

As long as the New York Times and the Washington Post are going to keep living in the 20th century and pretending that their reporters don’t read the editorials and know what the advertisers are selling, we are not going to get anywhere against the Steve Bannon’s and Donald Trump’s of the world. The news deserts, as the Columbia Journalism Review is calling the places without daily news sources now, will continue to grow. The masses will be left with the growing conservative news outlets like Sinclair Broadcasting, who are not in the business so much for the money as they are to promote the religion of conservatism.

I’ve got news for the elites in New York and Washington who thought Hillary Clinton was a lock in the presidential election of 2016. The Washington Post came up with a great slogan a couple of years ago right after Trump got elected. They say right there on their front page: “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” But the skies are already dark in America and democracy is almost dead.

Brain Drain

Back during the special election last year between Roy Moore and Doug Jones, I got an anonymous email from someone in New York or Washington urging me to work with other newspaper reporters in Alabama for the good of the state and the country. That’s not been my style either. I don’t much like working in a pack or a gaggle, although in years past, I’ve been more than willing to work as part of a team and share bylines.

As Archibald and I were talking, I remembered another column he once wrote about the brain drain from Alabama, so I later went back and looked it up. The headline?

Alabama exiles its prophets and exalts its fools

The basis of the story was a quote provided by Auburn historian Wayne Flynt, who told Archibald about Harry Golden, a newspaper publisher and activist during the Civil Rights era. Golden once wrote:

“No state will long progress which exiles its prophets and exalts its fools.”

Golden reported facts, published opinions and was an activist for civil rights. Nobody ever told him he couldn’t do all three. In fact, he was later considered a hero for doing just that.

I told Archibald a few stories he didn’t know about, including the one about Gould Beech, the editor of the Southern Farmer in the 1940s who hooked up with the Populist Big Jim Folsom and helped him get elected governor.

I wrote a note on Facebook about this last year. I’m working on a book chapter about it.

But the lesson seems to be lost on people here, especially the Democrats running for office. When most or all of the Democrats lose in their election bids coming up Nov. 6, remember this. I’ve tried, and tried, to help people in this state. Not too many seem to appreciate it much, although I do have a loyal following on the New American Journal and on Facebook and people send me money to help pay the expenses for the real work I do.

Another idiom comes to mind. One step forward, two steps back.

Alabama stepped out of the darkness and into the light last year for one brief moment and barely rejected ole Judge Roy Moore’s bid to take a seat in the United States Senate. Birmingham Democrat Doug Jones somehow opened up a wormhole in the fabric of the universe and rode it through to victory. I like to think I helped in that endeavor. Not because Jones was running as a Democrat. But because I knew him well enough to know he would actually show up and at least try to do the job.

Moore would have just used the position as a platform to promote his radical religious views, which have no place in our federal, state or local government. He has every right under the First Amendment to hold his religious views. He can hold all the tent revivals he wants and fool people into sending him money on GoFundMe. But he had already been kicked off the state Supreme Court, twice, for proving he was incapable of following the law.

While the #MeToo reporting team at the Washington Post gets credit for breaking the sex scandal story about Moore with a month to go in that election, I think Jones had the race won before that story broke. There were plenty of other reasons for mainstream Alabamians not to vote for Moore.

All that was needed was a voter turnout of about 30 percent. Moore won the primary with a turnout of only 18 percent. After the story exploded nationally, the turnout ended up being 40 percent. But many of those voters were Republicans who responded in the final week to Trump’s endorsement of Moore in Pensacola, the TV ad paid for by the Republican National Committee and Alabama Secretary of State John H. Merrill’s admonishment to Republicans that they didn’t have to put a check mark by Moore’s name on the ballot. All they had to do was show up and vote “R” for Republican.

Jones only won in the end by 1.63 percent, by 21,924 votes, 49.97 percent to 48.34 percent.

Unless I’m very surprised, the state will take two steps back on Tuesday and reelect Kay Ivey as Governor over Tuscaloosa Mayor Walt Maddox. They may very well elect Roy Moore clone Tom Parker over Bob Vance as Chief Justice of the state Supreme Court.

If you vote for Tom Parker, Alabama, the joke’s on you

Without a winning candidate for governor’s coattails, it will be hard for any other Democrats to win. The Baptists and Alabama and Auburn fans will flock to the polls in droves next Tuesday to support the wishes of President Donald J. Trump to elect lots of other conservative Christian Republicans, none of whom will ever lift a finger to make the government work better here, unless I am sadly mistaken. They will get elected and reelected by stubbornly refusing to push this state forward past the spoils system set up by George Wallace here more than 50 years ago.

Some writer somewhere will quote Neil Young singing “Alabama: You got the weight on your shoulders, That’s breaking your back. Your Cadillac, Has got a wheel in the ditch, And a wheel on the track.”

My own journey is not unlike Jesus himself, who they so love around here.

Or at least they say they do. They don’t much act like it. But they swear and bless their sweet food in his name.

If there is any truth to this story, Jesus was forced to leave his hometown of Nazareth to setup a ministry in Capernaum, a town in Galilee. After he became famous elsewhere, he returned home to preach. The first thing he said to his people went something like this: “Truly I tell you, no prophet is accepted in his hometown.”

The Rejection at Nazareth

In other stories from his so-called disciples, this story is reported in different ways.

Matthew 13:57 – “And they took offense at Him. But Jesus said to them, ‘Only in his hometown and in his own household is a prophet without honor’.”

Mark 6:4 – “Then Jesus told them, ‘A prophet is without honor only in his hometown, among his relatives, and in his own household’.”

John 4:44 – “Now He Himself had testified that a prophet has no honor in his own country.”

In my experience there appears to be some truth to this parable.

I’m certainly no preacher or prophet, although by keeping up with the polls, the news and just knowing what people are like, I’ve been able to predict the outcome of elections.

I was the only journalist and public opinion expert I know to predict that Donald Trump would win the presidential election in 2016. Michael Moore doesn’t count. He’s a film maker, not a journalist or a public opinion expert. But he saw something similar to what I saw in people and how they react to key words and phrases sensationalized in the news.

I was also the only journalist anywhere to predict that Doug Jones would win that election in 2017. The New York Times, the Washington Post and the Birmingham News didn’t give him a chance in hell. Look what happened.

I’ve known musicians and artists, creative types of all kinds — even from places like New Orleans — who’ve had to move away from home to find fame and fortune. They usually end up in New York or LA.

Jon Batiste may have remained a local club musician in New Orleans had he not gotten out and played with Stevie Wonder, Prince, Willie Nelson and others. He’s now bandleader on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” on CBS in New York.

I left my home town when I was fairly young to go to college in Tuscaloosa and wound up at the beach in Gulf Shores covering politics and the environment. Thanks to more education I eventually found my way out of my native state into Georgia to teach, then to Tennessee, Louisiana and Virginia across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C. In recent years I’ve spent much of my time in Maryland about 13 miles from the White House.

I’ve come back home from time to time, but always with some trepidation and dread. A fortune teller on Birmingham’s Southside once looked me in the eye and told me I would try and try to leave this region. But she said I would never make it out. Maybe she was right.

But if enough people don’t show up and vote on Tuesday to force a change in this place at the ballot box, I will try again. I will take my brain and go somewhere else.

I’m sick and tired of religious ignorance and racist bigotry. I just can’t handle the lying politicians anymore who prey on poor people’s fears. If I had the budget I would get in their faces with a video camera and put them to shame, like I did to state Senator Trip Pittman during the Medicaid crisis a few years ago.

I used to cover both sides of the story and quote Republicans and Democrats alike. I never set out to become a partisan commentator. The problem is the Republicans moved way too far to the right. They win elections by simply lying to people’s faces and crassly using social wedge issues like race, religion, sexual orientation and access to guns to keep people stirred up into an irrational lather.

Unfortunately, the Democrats in Alabama seem unwilling or unable to take good advice and relearn how to win elections. I can’t handle that either. The state party in Montgomery desperately needs change. But the leaders simply won’t step aside for the good of the country, the state and the party.

It’s not all the poor people’s fault.

The capitalist, corporate press and media here just seem to pander to the lowest common denominator in the interest of keeping what little profits that are left in the print and broadcast news business. How is a poor person to know the truth if no one goes to the trouble to tell them an alternative to the same old story?

Jesus is also reported to have said, for those who have an ear, let them hear.

If all they hear is Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity on Fox News, this place is as doomed as the prophets predicted. Listen to what I’m saying and we might be able to change all of that. We can create an alternative to Breitbart News and promote the hell out of it with social media.

The one possible option available to people now is Facebook. I’ve got my problems with the platform, but that is about the only way to reach people these days. There’s also Twitter, but the masses are not on it yet. If the social media tools were used properly, by the right people — learning the lessons of the bad people who abused it in 2016 — we could make a major difference in 2020 and 2022. But you can’t do it without the real news to share. These memes everyone is sharing don’t work. They don’t reframe the story or change the narrative people live by.

The demographics of the country and the state should be shifting away from racism and turning things in a more diverse and progressive direction.

Unfortunately, Trump’s false rhetoric about immigrants and the caravan in Mexico is fueling a rise in the public perception that racist language is legitimate free speech. The Boy Scouts of America are becoming the Nazi youth of the future who will carry this racism into the next generation.

Fake news travels further and faster than real news every time.

You can quote me on that. Trump knows this.

Fake news is nothing new. It’s just been exaggerated in the era of social media and Trump. The New York Times was talking about “fake news” and “freak news” in 1896.

Even this quote attributed to Mark Twain is not accurate. The quotation is often attributed to Twain from 1919, while he died in 1910. Although it sounds good and rings true, so it makes a good ending to a syrupy tale.

“A lie can travel around the world and back again while the truth is lacing up its boots.”

Sorry, but I can’t help myself. I’m not interested in playing that game. I live by a constitutional oath to tell the truth and nothing but the truth. For that I may be shunned, or at least not rewarded with fame and fortune. But I’m going to keep on doing what I’m doing, reporting and saying what I think to be true and trying to help people understand the alternative story line.

Let’s be real. Bravery and courage are not rewarded in mainstream American journalism, in spite of what Archibald told those students at Auburn. Playing it safe and being careful to tell both sides is what gets you promoted in the mainstream news business. Having an opinion and posting it on social media guarantees you won’t get work in the old interfaces left over from the 20th century. If he was being honest, he would have told the students that.

If any of the students at Auburn or Alabama or anywhere else are interested in publishing on a platform where bravery and courage matter, check out the New American Journal. We will publish it. We can’t pay a lot for it yet. But give it time.

Maybe after the 2020 and 2022 elections we will evolve beyond our primitive minds and begin to truly realize the democratizing influence of the internet and web publishing.

I hate to close with a couple of cliches. But what the heck? Everybody else does it.

Where there’s a will there’s a way. One can only hope.

Roll Tide Roll

FuckTrump.Press

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