South Carolina - Lindsey Graham

My boss has no sympathy for people in Detroit who’ve lost their jobs. He lumps them with the sharecroppers on the Mississippi flood plain who return after a disaster. Since they don’t recognize the impossibility of their situation, they deserve no sympathy, and certainly none of his tax dollars.

We live in times when many find themselves in the position of those farmers who no longer can survive where they are, but recognize their lives would not improve if they left everything behind and started over. Not all are people ground down by poverty or illiteracy. It’s become the fate of many of our best people born in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Lindsey Graham always interested me, perhaps because when he was first elected to the House in 1992, he inferred a change from the racial hypocrisy of Strom Thurmond. The life-long bachelor disabused us of that hope when he eagerly volunteered to join the group delivering the articles of impeachment to the adulterous Bill Clinton in 1999.

Perhaps it’s impossible for a decent man to survive South Carolina politics in these times when the ancien regime has been so reduced in size and diversity. In that world, one has to choose between becoming a tool of the desperate or moving away.

Perhaps that’s why he was so strong a supporter of John McCain in 2008: he could both atone for the way his party smeared McCain’s adopted daughter with rumors of miscegenation in 2004 and join his cabinet if he won. Graham probably did not comprehend that the way McCain groveled to those who had humiliated him revealed a streak of rudderless ambition that destroyed his image as a man of principle outside the state.

Now that McCain has lost, Graham has to repair his relationships with the king makers of South Carolina, the ones who applauded the governor, Mark Sanford, when he was refused federal funds that would help laid-off textile workers and poor Blacks in his part of the state. Now Graham has been pressured to renounce his friend for openly discussing his adulterous relationship with María Belén Chapur.

There’s no longer some thin line to walk between integrity and pragmatism in South Carolina, like there was in past generations when Strom Thurmond could get away with supporting his daughter with a Black servant by promoting segregation. The forces of the status quo in his state have become so angry over past betrayals that they’ll attack anyone who even suggests such an accommodation. Sooner or later, Graham will be forced to betray the person or value he cherishes most, and it won’t matter if he yields or leaves. Either way, he will be left a broken man, and the cultural system will persist.

It isn’t just the Elvis Presleys and Michael Jacksons we place in situations where they can no longer function as healthy human beings. We have many decent people who are finding themselves in positions where they must survive by betraying what they believe or lose their livelihoods, and either way are diminished in their own eyes. A world of walking wounded is a world of Gracelands and Neverlands, and one that cannot respond to crises in reality when they arise.