The first cover of The Southerner magazine online, 1999: Spider Martin

The Big Picture – 
By Glynn Wilson – 

LOOKOUT MOUNTAIN, Ala. — Are you getting your affairs in order?

I know I am.

If this is not the end of the world as we know it, I don’t know what else that could go wrong to make it so.

Yellowstone could blow and we would not even feel it for more than a nano-second. Most of life in North America would be eviserated. It would be over.

The drought in the west is so bad there’s no way I would want to go back out there for the foreseeable future.

The locusts are swarming in Africa.

There is a plague upon the land, and it’s not caused by a god or a devil. This is Mother Nature’s revenge, baby, and it’s been coming for years.

The coronavirus is taking its toll on human life and destroying what’s left of the 20th century industrial economy.

The denial of reality in the White House is simply astounding. No science fiction writer could imagine it this bad.

Like Mark Twain said, “Truth is stranger than fiction…”

I’ve been writing about the destruction of science by this administration for three years now. Most people who were not paying attention are paying attention now, except for 43 percent of the country still standing strong for this deranged, narcissistic dictator king pharaoh parading around on TV and Twitter at the end of Pennsylvania Avenue as if this was still a freaking reality show, where the only thing that matters are the ratings.

The Republican governor of Florida opened the beaches back up this week, and the Republican governor of Alabama is planning to do the same on May 1.

At this point I am past caring if these stupid rednecks die. Maybe enough of them will die off to get Joe Biden elected president in November. That is if there is an election. Before this is all over, we will be burning their bodies and burying them in mass graves, and where is their Jesus to save them?

Are you up there man? If so, this would be a good time to show yourself.

The problem is they are putting everybody else at risk.

The Republicans are fighting an initiative to allow way more mail-in absentee ballots, knowing that higher voter turnout will spell their political demise.

The best thing Democrats can do right now is to stay safely at home and ride this out. Take all precautions, and maybe there will be enough of us left in November to finally get some better people in office to start addressing the real problems we face and start leading people into this new life we are going to have to get used to living.

Someone once said, get busy living, or get busy dying. Living is going to require changes.

Nostalgia

As I’ve been sitting here hiding out in the mountain woods for the past few weeks, I’ve been working on something I’ve needed to do for a long time.

One day while I was making phone rounds — I’ve been spending long hours on the phone the past few days — I talked to my good friend Ron Sitton in Arkansas. It just happened that he had some time on his hands that day too, so we got around to fixing the home page of The Southerner magazine at Southerner.Net.

As I was reading through some of that fine regional writing from the turn of the century, the early days of the internet, it hit me why keeping this archive up is important.

There are still people, especially in places like Alabama, where somehow writing on the web doesn’t count.

If it does not go through the bureaucracy of some mass circulation daily newspaper chain and end up in print to stack up and rot in some library, they still don’t respect it.

Of course I’m not talking about those who don’t read at all, those who get their news and entertainment from talk radio and cable TeeVee and their friends on Facebook. As far as I’m concerned, they don’t count. Most of them don’t show up to vote anyway.

While most of the content that fills daily newspapers is out of date garbage the day it comes out in print anyway, best suited for wrapping fish or lining a bird cage, there is all kinds of stuff being written online that would be better suited to a library archive space on a hard drive to be preserved forever than all those stacks of newspapers gathering dust mites.

They are printed on dead trees anyway. Millions of acres of forests have been felled to put them out so the owners could make millions pretending to promote democracy, when their real mission all along has been capitalism. Most of the money they put in their pocket, their profits made from the underpaid labor of thousands of reporters, writers, editors and photographers.

I hate to say it but I hope they lost it all in the most recent stock market crash, since they never did much for me.

I was riding in a car with a famous author from Alabama who worked for the New York Times back in 2003, heading from New Orleans to Plaquemine Louisiana to work on this story, which was mostly my work even though my name does not appear in a byline.

Somehow Roberto Clemente came up in the conversation, who once said: “Baseball has been very good to me.”

Well, I said, “Newspapers have not been very good to me,” and that’s OK by me. I own a web press and can say what I want.

On Sunday morning I was talking on Facebook messenger to an old friend who ended up spending 27 years at The Birmingham News, only to get the bum rush out of the building a few years back without so much as a by your leave when the Bush Great Recession nearly destroyed them.

“The thing about the big layoff of 2012 was the length they went to to destroy the newsroom culture,” he said. “They kicked us to the curb without so much as a thank you. Just toss your badge on the pile on the way out. They had a crew dismantling our desks as soon as somebody got up to leave that Friday.”

This paper of course was and still is owned by the Newhouse family in New York, although one of the two main brothers died in recent years. They own the papers in Mobile, Birmingham and Huntsville, as well as the Times-Picayune in New Orleans and the Cleveland Plain Dealer in Ohio, but now fly under the banner of a web blog at blog.al.com.

My friend, who shall remain nameless to protect the innocent, said due to the coronavirus and economic crash, they are laying off reporters again.

While this is a sad day for journalists, as I have been saying for years we don’t have to wait around for print publishers or go away. We just have to figure out how to get paid enough to live so we can keep doing this BETTER than any newspaper.

We have the power. We have the freedom. We just need to find the money, someone who values the role of the press in a democracy enough to help us save it.

Lowell Barron

Now I will end with a bit of Alabama political history that most people around here know nothing about.

As George Santayana once said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

The problem is there is much history published out there on the web that you will not find in a newspaper or on TV. It is even hard to find in the polluted search engines these days, where the popularity algorithm invented by Facebook and adopted by Google makes it hard to find what you are looking for.

One of the people I talked to on the phone this week was Lowell Barron, the long-time Democrat who represented the people in North Alabama in the Legislature for many years.

After I reminded him about it, he is 78-years-old now, he remembered this, because he is one of the ones who asked me to investigate this story. If you don’t know the story of how Artur Davis insisted on running for governor in 2008 and how that paved the way for the Republicans to take over all three branches of government and take over with a Super Majority in the Legislature, check this out.

Fighting the Final Battles of the Civil War

“He screwed everything up,” Baron said of Davis.

When he asked me which side I’m on, as in Republican or Democrat, I said neither.

“I’m just looking for good guys and bad guys,” I said. “If I can find a good guy or gal willing to serve, I try to help them. If I find a bad guy, I take him out.”

You see I have been playing this game long enough to know how to do it.

Jim Folsom Jr. was planning to run for governor in 2010, and he could have beaten Bentley, but he couldn’t face down Davis and figure how to run a campaign against a black man. Folsom had great respect in the African American community. Davis blew it all up for his own ego’s sake, and ruined his own political career in the process.

I don’t care what color you are. Your character does matter.

I covered it.

Where was the Birmingham News? Kissing up to Robert Bentley, who they later made a fortune off of making fun of him as the “Luv Gov,” and Mike Hubbard, who was convicted of all kinds of crimes, but has yet to serve a day in prison.

Contrast that with former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman, who spent seven years in prison — simply for being a Democrat.

By the way, I also talked to Don Siegelman this week. Among other things, I wanted to remind him about this story, with Spider Martin photos.

The New South Rises, Again: Alabama Gets Its First ‘New South’ Governor

How can you learn from history if nobody even bothers to tell people the story?