THE FIRST SELFIE? – In 20th century journalism classes we were taught never to take pictures of ourselves for the newspaper. It was considered arrogant and unethical. Of course Facebook ruined that forever. But that never stopped my old friend Spider Martin, who found ways to include himself in the picture, usually hidden. In his defense, he never studied journalism in college. He studied art. So he would setup the camera on a tripod and set a timer to snap the shot. On March 25, 1965, he went all the way and put himself in the picture in front of the crowd gathering on the Alabama Capitol steps in Montgomery, where Martin Luther King led thousands of nonviolent demonstrators after a 5-day, 54-mile march from Selma, where the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) had been campaigning for voting rights: Glynn Wilson for NAJ/APR – original photo by Spider Martin

Tales From the MoJo Road –
By Glynn Wilson –

SELMA, Ala. – As fate would have it, no real plan of my own, I’m encamped in an undisclosed location somewhere off the Selma to Montgomery National Historic Trail. On Sunday, the reenactment of that historic march will kick off once again, as it does every year.

Sometimes it gets big, when big things are going on, like 2020 when the right to vote became get out the vote, for obvious reasons at the time.

This week, we heard a whisper of a hint, maybe a rumor and a wish that might be too much for the local organizers to pull off without national help. That is, why not march to Montgomery next week and keep on going, turning north toward Birmingham and march all the way to Washington, D.C. – picking up millions of marchers along the way. Non-violence, of course, John Lewis style. Nothing like Jan. 6, 2021 at the Capitol from the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys.

That might shake up things in the nation’s capital region, maybe change the subject away from Elon Musk’s hacker team dismantling the federal government at least. It might even slow their work down and make Trump rethink hiring a private billionaire with no government experience or position to dismantle the United States government.

Of course it might also attract the president to call out the National Guard to stop it, like George Wallace tried to do with his jack-booted State Troopers and Dallas County thugs in 1965, and really change the subject. I suspect much of the mainstream media would follow, if not the far right networks and platforms.

With all of the attacks on long-standing American institutions, including as of Wednesday the VA and hundreds of federal buildings housing civil rights museums and offices, including the Freedom Rides Museum in the old bus station in Montgomery, you would think people would be ready to march. It’s a state museum housed in a leased federal building by the federal courthouse, now closed temporary as a major redesign and upgrade are in the works.

Alabama Public Radio carried part of the story Wednesday morning. I was assigned to try to get reaction from some of those impacted by the decision.

Montgomery bus station among hundreds of federal buildings targeted for potential sale.

By the end of the day, however, after the GSA list had gone dark and taken down, the new list came up with less than 400 buildings.

Montgomery Freedom Riders Museum not really for sale—for now.

As for the thinking about the march itself, it was said, why wait around and watch in shock and horror for this administration to rob us all of our Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, National Parks and hand the country basically over to Putin?

If it’s going to be a war anyway, with half the country bowing down to the fascist dictator king and the other half in full resistance mode, why not bring the hammer down now, the hammer of mass non-violence, and see if Canada and Europe might come to the defense of democracy? Unless, that is, you liberals and progressives and Democrats are ready to simply capitulate and bow down to the king, simply sharing memes on Facebook like that’s really going to do any good except keep your adrenaline going and the dopamine coming, making you THINK you are doing something.

I know James Carville has a book out about winning is the only thing, or some such thing, a political rip off of Bear Bryant if there ever was one. And he’s the one this time who wrote in The New York Times and said it on MSNBC – “she’s got this” – about Kamala Harris, not Hillary Clinton.

Not at all sure about his crystal ball. I see clearly now from here.

And now his advice is to sit back and watch to see what the Republicans do and do nothing? Like he actually believes these fascists who have taken over the country will ever acknowledge failure and stop taking over the country and going after the world, even if they do crash the economy and kill a bunch of old, sick, poor people, including the ones who voted for them?

I’m not sure even anyone at The New York Times has really noticed this yet – maybe it’s my Political Science background from the Cold War – but has the international power balance just shifted literally overnight from our friends and allies for democracy to Russia, China, North Korea and even Iran? It’s not just that Trump likes other dictators. He is aligning with them against the rest of the world like this was some rogue, tin-pot, third world dictatorship. We now are supposed to stand against the entire world of democracies, including Canada, Mexico, much of Central and South America and all of Europe? Not to mention Australia and New Zealand?

If I were a radical activist like the old Earth First gang, I would be out there shutting down the power on all the A.I. outfits, especially the one in Memphis Elon Musk has running on diesel generator trucks. TVA doesn’t generate enough power to grant him a permit. They were planning on shutting down at least three coal fired power plants. That would have been a good thing for the country and the world and all our long-term futures, right?

Now they can’t? Because of the guy who claimed he was going to save the world with electric cars? No. I hear they are about to dump a bunch of Teslas into Boston Harbor. Maybe the march should come from there south to D.C. too. Hey California? You ready for a 3,000 mile walk? The Native Americans did it. Remember the Long Walk? They do in Greenbelt National Park, where I spent the better part of the past decade.

Greenbelt Park just north of the nation’s capital was the scene of a historic gathering of Native Americans, Japanese Buddhist monks and Americans interested in bringing about an era of spiritual peace 47 years ago in the summer of 1978. As it happens, I wrote the definitive story about that, with all the pictures I could find.

Native American Longest Walk History Remembered in Washington and Greenbelt National Park

Did y’all watch as Trump browbeat Zelensky in the Oval Office and then pulled all U.S. aid to Ukraine? Europe stepped in to take up the slack. Maybe they might turn their eyes our way too. I think they already are.

The reason I ended up here was mere circumstance, a quirk of place and timing. I had stepped away from covering daily news and politics, and was content to immerse myself in rock and roll history and ignore the noise on cable out of Washington. Then I heard from a news director in Tuscaloosa with Alabama Public Radio, who found me on Facebook and the web and thought I might be able to help his award winning team in the new Digital Media Center in Bryant-Denny Stadium. He said we might be able to get some stories on NPR as well. Why not?

He and the management there indicated they would like to have some help in Montgomery. This is not something I was immediately interested in jumping into, not at this juncture after spending the better part of the past 10 years covering national politics in D.C. But wait. The first story was an exhibit of Spider Martin photographs in the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, some of the best images of Bloody Sunday in 1965 and the successful march to Montgomery. And it is, after all, the 60th anniversary.

Spider Martin was one of my closest friends from 1986 to 2003, when about as broke as I am now, he shot himself in the heart with an old flare gun rigged up to shoot 16-guage shotgun shells. It was in that old Antebellum house on “the mountain” in Blount County, near Bangor Cave, the Top Hat BBQ, and the Locust Fork River – a fork of the Black Warrior.

The last paying work he got, thanks to me, was to shoot photos for a double byline story I did with Rick Bragg on the front page of the Sunday New York Times, above the fold. It was about an incinerator designed to destroy all the mustard gas and nerve gas from World Wars I and II stored in concrete bunkers at the Army base in Anniston.

They ran a large black and white picture from Spider on the jump. I had to deal with the copy desk before press time at midnight to assure them the photo was not posed. That was considered unethical by the National Desk. It was not. Spider waited on us to finish interviewing them inside, just over the hill and down wind from the proposed incinerator, and snapped the shot when they reached for each other and held hands.

You can still find it in the archives online, if you are a paying customer. Or here, I’ll show it to you.

So, sure, I can do a story about that, I said. It ran on the web and the radio and UA says they plan to pay for the story. It will take 10-14 days.

If so, it will help make up for the loss of my Social Security in February and March, since Elon Musk’s team of hackers invaded the Treasury Department, illegally accessing all our Social Security private information, and started building the algorithm to target critics of Trump, otherwise known as Trump’s “enemies list.” That is the real assignment at work here.

I guess I had the only story in the country about it, because it hit me on day one. In another time, that would mean I broke the damn story. Now people on social media just can’t believe it, because it didn’t happen to them – yet. What a new, mad, crazy world.

What have I been doing more than anything else over the past 10 years? Trying to warn people about Trump. Search the 1080 stories, all there in our archives for anyone to see with no paywall, no popup ads. Even the A.I. bots stole it to train themselves on how to write. It’s just most of the voices they copy are mainstream, boring stuff – or crazy, radical fake news. You think the hackers and bots couldn’t find it, in a nano second? The Watchdog Press image, all over the web? Wake up people.

I commissioned this art before the 2016 election. The artist wanted to use Hillary Clinton for the politician being chased by the watchdog press. I insisted it had to be Trump, figuring he would win: Evan Riddle

As for my stories, let’s try to be nice and say none of them were flattering. Where I come from, that’s what a real journalist is supposed to do. That’s what they sort of taught about how American journalism is supposed to work at the University of Alabama when I was a junior and senior in Paul “Bear” Bryant’s final two years as the head football coach. I was in on writing his obituary for The Crimson White. I asked some tough questions that day too.

Of course that was the textbook myth. Things work differently in the real world, as I describe in depth in my memoir, Jump On The Bus, which is due for a Third Edition soon.

I did not go to all those years of toil and trouble just to report what Trump said on Twitter or TV today. At least reporting on what he did is somebodies job, but not mine, from here, thank God.

So here I sit through a major thunderstorm, with underground power lines and wireless internet, wondering if “the people” might get the gumption to turn off the celebrity talking heads on cable TV for a month (although of course they can watch them on their phones along the way), and stop sharing memes on Facebook (although they can of course do that on their phones along the way) and pack a bag and come to Selma on Sunday, or at least Montgomery next weekend.

I suspect they won’t do it. It’s all just big talk, like a lot of the so-called resistance these days. We will see. Memes are not going to cut it. The battle of the memes? Give me a break.

But hey. If they want to do it, I will camp along the way and cover it. I know every campground between here and Washington and have stayed in most of them over the past 10 years.

I keep reminding people on social media about The Art of War by Sun Tzu. Steve Bannon knows the story.

“All warfare is based on deception. Hence, when able to attack … seem unable; when using (your) forces … seem inactive; when near, make the enemy believe you are far away; when far away, make them believe you are near.”

That’s too long for a Facebook meme. So most people miss it in the feed and move on to Netflix, I guess.

Buyer’s remorse? How? When the channels his people watch are not telling the real stories?

I did, and still do. As long as I’m able and not locked up or dead.

George Wallace never scared me. Neither does Donald Trump. No, I will never get a seat on Air Force One, or an office in the White House. So what? I’ve been there, done that, seen it from the inside twice. It ain’t all that great. Much smaller than it looks on TV.

Father’s Day from the White House

I can see clearly what’s going on, and write about it from here. Wake up people.

Related: Spider Martin Photography Exhibit Opens on the 60th Anniversary of the Voting Rights Act of 1965

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