The Coosa River at the end of Shoal Creek Valley Road in St. Clair County, Alabama: Glynn Wilson

The Big Picture –
By Glynn Wilson –

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. – When the present goes wrong, hope for the future – or retreat into the past.

Mark Twain didn’t say that. I just did. More on that in a minute.

But on October 2, 1876, a speech of Twain’s was covered by The New York Times before Adoph Ochs bought it in 1896 and invented “objective journalism.”

“Some one asked me the other day, why it was that nearly all the people who write books and magazines had lately come to the front and proclaimed their political preference, since such a thing had probably never occurred before in America,” Twain said, and then went on to comment on a “strange, new band of volunteers” who “marched under the banner of Hayes and Wheeler.”

“I think these people have come to the front mainly because they think they see at last a chance to make this government a good government; because they think they see a chance to institute an honest and sensible system of civil service which shall so amply prove its worth and worthiness that no succeeding President can ever venture to put his foot upon it,” Twain said.

Clearly that is not why anyone voted for Donald Trump. They seem to want the United States government to be mostly abolished, as Trump has promised to dismantle the civil service and institute a spoils system made up of unqualified loyalists with the mission to break the government, ensuring that nothing works ever again.

“Our present civil System,” Twain said in his day, was “born of General Jackson and the Democratic party,” and it “is so idiotic, so contemptible, so grotesque, that it would make the very savages of Dahomey jeer and the very gods of solemnity laugh.”

Of course that was a different Democratic Party than today’s, more like the Republican Party of today.

This is where Trump will take the government, and soon this is what we will be saying about it, after Trump is done.

“We will not hire a blacksmith who never lifted a sledge,” Twain said. “We will not hire a school teacher who does not know the alphabet. We will not have a man about us in our business life – in any walk of life, low or high – unless he has served an apprenticeship and can prove that he is capable of doing the work he offers to do. We even require a plumber to know something [laughter, and a pause by the speaker] about his business, [renewed laughter] so that he shall at least know which side of a pipe is the inside. [Roars of laughter.] But when you come to our civil service, we serenely fill great numbers of our minor public offices with ignoramuses…”

MARK TWAIN IN POLITICS

So on Saturday, totally disappointed with the people of my country for how the majority voted on Nov. 5 and reluctantly back in my native state of Alabama, I had the occasion to meet up with a new found cousin and travel to the banks of the Coosa River in St. Clair County, where my father’s family was from near the southwestern edge of the old Cherokee Nation.

If you travel from Birmingham to the town of Ashville and take state Highway 231 south, then turn east on Shoal Creek Valley Road and south on Macedonia Road, you will see an old grave yard called the Mt. Zion Cemetery. That is where my grandfather and grandmother are buried, along with other relatives going back at least to the 1800s.

The Wilson family plot in the Mt. Zion Cemetery in St. Clair County, Alabama: Glynn Wilson

The Wilson family plot in the Mt. Zion Cemetery in St. Clair County, Alabama: Glynn Wilson

Inevitably, this sort of pilgrimage becomes a reluctant nostalgia trip. The old, wooden country store is no longer there on the corner where we used to have to wipe the dust off the Grapico bottles before drinking this favorite Buffalo Rock soft drink or “pop.”

I had a vague recollection of an old swimming hole just past the cemetery on the right, fed by Shoal Creek and the Coosa River, before Alabama Power built the dam and created Greensport Lake. I remember when some people would bring their Ivy soap on Saturday’s to take their weekly bath. It is still there, only now it is a cow pond.

When we rode to the end of the road where it dead ends into the lake, and turned right, the old public boat launch is still there where my dad used to park his Chevy pickup truck and put his aluminum bass boat into the water for fishing trips. We used to go for large mouth bass, bream and crappie.

We rode over the little mountain to Ragland for lunch, but the only restaurant in town was closed for cleaning. So on the way back, I stopped for ice cream in Ashville, then took the old route off Interstate 59 through the little town of Springville, and wound my way back down Old Springville Road.

Turning at the traffic light on Old Palmerdale Road, I wound up in Pinson. From there I took Highway 79 to the back road leading to Jefferson State Community College and stopped for a bathroom break by the tennis courts, where I spent many hours in my youth. The place is in total disrepair now, under the management of the city of Birmingham, which took over some of the area before Center Point finally incorporated.

The old house was occupied and looked fairly well kept.

The cheapest gas I could find was the Bama station on Center Point Road, $2.65 a gallon. I don’t know but it might still be owned by Joey Moore.

On Sunday, some of us will visit Birmingham Museum of Art’s Steiner Auditorium for a documentary film premier of “Nobody Really Knows Me: A Rock and Roll Journey,” about rock legend Wayne Perkins.

When I found out this was in the works, I wrote this story, which will be the new lead chapter in the Third Edition of my memoir, Jump on the Bus.

It’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll But I Like It

I’m working on a new chapter updating our journey from the election of Trump in 2016 and the election of Doug Jones to the U.S. Senate in 2017 through the Covid pandemic, the 2020 election and Jan. 6, 2021. There will be another chapter culminating in the outcome of the 2024 election, when democracy died.

I’m going to have to rework some of the thematic overlay in the book since it is all about how the press can help make democracy work, my life’s experience. That era is over. It does not work anymore, and social media is simply no substitute. But that’s where we are.

See you down the road.

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