Every now and them something happens that exposes cultural fractures we don’t even suspect exist.
In 1989, Marc Lépine opened fire on female engineering students at the École Polytechnique in Montréal. This was the first of the mass student shootings, years before Columbine and Virginia Tech. His suicide letter claimed his life had been ruined by feminists.
Men were able to distance themselves from his actions by suggesting Lépine, in fact, was not a typical man. Instead, psychologists reassured them Lépine was a disturbed Catholic, or the son of a foreigner who had left him to be raised by his mother, or an abused a child who had failed at previous attempts to learn engineering.
Women could not ignore the 28 dead or injured young women. No matter how rational the psychologists’ explanations, they were frightened for themselves and their daughters.
When couples, even those married for decades, responded differently they couldn’t ignore the fundamental differences that existed between themselves and in society. The shock of the assault could not be excised.
The recent travails of South Carolina’s Republican governor, Mark Sanford, threatened to develop into a similar rift. When he first appeared before the press to confess he had actually fallen in love with another woman, a number of male reporters, including Salon’s Gary Kamiya, were sympathetic. Women, like the Times’ Gail Collins and Maureen Dowd, were more cynical, but noted it was a nice change that he didn’t humiliate his wife by forcing her to be present and didn’t treat the other woman as an object.
We’ve all suffered enough watching the forbearance of Silda Spitzer and Hilary Clinton. We’re tired of Elizabeth Edward’s passive aggression, and may have been just a bit suspicious of Jenny Sanford’s bitter comments during the time her husband was incommunicado.
Then, Sanford spoke to the press again.
Women’s views didn’t change much, but men, especially conservatives, found the personal nature of his comments disturbing. The Republican party has become a pragmatic coalition of religious conservatives and men bent on holding wealth or power who tacitly agreed neither would reveal their abiding interests.
Mark Sanford seemed their perfect spokesman, an educated Episcopalian married to woman who left Lazard Frères for her husband and four sons. But then his refusal to accept stimulus money, invoking South Carolina’s nullification crises, led some to think his lust for power was blinding him to the necessary political compromises. Now his refusal to follow the accepted method for dealing with moral transgression suggested someone who failed to understand his world.
His fellow Republicans in South Carolina, who are primarily concerned with their own reelections and pursuing their agendas in the legislature, began suggesting he was temporarily insane. Larry Grooms said "he is coming unhinged." Larry Martin. believed he’d heard "the ramblings of a troubled man" and "that man needs help."
The deeper problem is a cultural expectation that one not become too serious about anything, that passion is the mark of the unstable. If genuine excitement should arise, it should be channeled into following a sports team. When that wasn’t sufficient in the past century, it could lead to anonymous mob violence. In this century, we’re supposed to have progressed beyond that. Respectable southerners especially do not want to be reminded that cultural outlets may fail.
Many Canadians marriages are not the same after Marc Lépine, and neither will Sanford’s political life. Genuine shocks always do isolate people, no matter how unruffled the surface remains, and only a few outsiders are willing to learn from them. Resorting to using psychologists as gatekeepers of the damned only limits the utility of our tools for coping with crisis.
Notes:
Wikipedia article on the École Polytechnique Massacre provides a good summary.
Barr, Andy and Jonathan Martin. "South Carolina GOP: Mark Sanford Must Go," Politico 1 July 2009, interviews Grooms and Martin.
Collins, Gail. "An Affair to Remember," The New York Times, 1 July 2009.
Dowd, Maureen. "Rules of the Wronged," The New York Times, 30 June 2009.
Kamiya, Gary. "The Strange Nakedness of Mark Sanford," Salon, 25 June 2009.
Showing posts with label South Carolina. Show all posts
Showing posts with label South Carolina. Show all posts
Sunday, March 14, 2010
Sunday, August 23, 2009
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.
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.
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
South Carolina
South Carolina has always been one of those states that appears in lists, but doesn’t really exist in my mind. I memorized it in high school as one of the thirteen signers of the Declaration of Independence, but it was only Massachusetts and Virginia that were described in the textbooks.
The thing that’s remarkable is how often the same strain of intransigence appears when people from the state do become famous: John Calhoun provided the theory for states rights, Ben Tillman led efforts to negate reconstruction with segregation, Strom Thurmond lead the Dixicrats out of the Democratic party convention in 1948.
Race has been another recurring feature, but it has mutated with conditions: for Calhoun it was the right to own slaves, for Tillman the right to control freedmen. Recently, Mark Sanford used the refusal to provide federal benefits to the poor, implicitly Blacks, as a way to bring attention to his political aspirations.
The two ideas are tightly interwoven, but they are separate, if for no other reason than intransigence existed before abolitionists and persists after civil rights. That is also the idea that’s more dangerous to the well-being of our constitutional democracy. We’ve survived, for better or worse, depending on our skin color, the vicissitudes of racism, but we’ve already had thousands die to establish the priority of federal law over local, and still see people willing to impose their dissident views with guns.
So far, my attempts to understand South Carolina are superficial, the conclusions of anyone just starting to read about something. At best, all I have are a few facts and a number of suppositions, that need a great deal more research to become history. But, as the King of Hearts told Alice, you must begin at the beginning, and so begins a series of musings on that state’s past.
The thing that’s remarkable is how often the same strain of intransigence appears when people from the state do become famous: John Calhoun provided the theory for states rights, Ben Tillman led efforts to negate reconstruction with segregation, Strom Thurmond lead the Dixicrats out of the Democratic party convention in 1948.
Race has been another recurring feature, but it has mutated with conditions: for Calhoun it was the right to own slaves, for Tillman the right to control freedmen. Recently, Mark Sanford used the refusal to provide federal benefits to the poor, implicitly Blacks, as a way to bring attention to his political aspirations.
The two ideas are tightly interwoven, but they are separate, if for no other reason than intransigence existed before abolitionists and persists after civil rights. That is also the idea that’s more dangerous to the well-being of our constitutional democracy. We’ve survived, for better or worse, depending on our skin color, the vicissitudes of racism, but we’ve already had thousands die to establish the priority of federal law over local, and still see people willing to impose their dissident views with guns.
So far, my attempts to understand South Carolina are superficial, the conclusions of anyone just starting to read about something. At best, all I have are a few facts and a number of suppositions, that need a great deal more research to become history. But, as the King of Hearts told Alice, you must begin at the beginning, and so begins a series of musings on that state’s past.
Sunday, July 26, 2009
Lindsey Graham
Lindsey Graham, the Republican senator from South Carolina, made one true statement when he questioned Sonia Sotomayor in July. He admitted he wouldn’t have had the courage to oppose segregation.
What an extraordinary thing to be thinking then, to be ruminating on the possibility that one is weaker than Frank Johnson, an Alabama judge who ruled in favor of Rosa Parks in 1955 when Graham was an infant. Later, local congressmen prevented the Nixon administration from nominating Johnson to the Supreme Court, but Jimmie Carter placed him on the Court of Appeals that served both Georgia and Alabama.
Graham didn’t have the advantage of Carter, whose mother, Lillian, knew the ways of the deep south well enough to blunt the effects of segregation in Plains, Georgia, without actually precipitating incidents that would endanger her family or the people she befriended.
Unlike Carter, whose father was a successful businessman who used his profits to buy land and whose mother was a nurse who joined the Peace Corps, Graham’s parents ran a bar and grill in Central, South Carolina, that catered to men getting off work at the local textile mill before OSHA and the EPA existed to protect workers from injury and air pollution.
His mother died of Hodgkin’s disease, a form of cancer that can be cured if treated early. His father died when he was 21, leaving him with bills to settle and a 13-year-old sister to support. While Carter had the connections necessary to be appointed to Annapolis, Graham financed his education by joining ROTC.
As a boy working in the bar and later the adjacent pool hall, he no doubt learned early that ugliness existed, and would be immediately redirected towards anyone who didn’t conform. I rather suspect he faced his share of hazing by both the mill kids and the scions of the local Baptist and Methodist middle class who looked down on tradesmen, especially those who trafficked in sin.
The sad thing is that Graham’s life’s experiences have reinforced the values of a closed, rigidly stratified society. If he had drawn different lessons from his own life, he might have seen Sonia Sotomayor as a kindred spirit: a single person committed to the law who managed to earn a law degree from a prestigious school despite losing a father.
Instead, Melissa Harris-Lacewell suggested, he joined the crowd that harassed her evoking images of the adults screaming at Elizabeth Eckford in Little Rock in 1957 when Graham was two. He remains the nice boy who was isolated in that mill town and is still trying to prove he’s one of the gang.
Note:
Harris-Lacewell, Melissa. "Sotomayor and the Politics of Public Humiliation," The Nation website, 17 July 2009.
What an extraordinary thing to be thinking then, to be ruminating on the possibility that one is weaker than Frank Johnson, an Alabama judge who ruled in favor of Rosa Parks in 1955 when Graham was an infant. Later, local congressmen prevented the Nixon administration from nominating Johnson to the Supreme Court, but Jimmie Carter placed him on the Court of Appeals that served both Georgia and Alabama.
Graham didn’t have the advantage of Carter, whose mother, Lillian, knew the ways of the deep south well enough to blunt the effects of segregation in Plains, Georgia, without actually precipitating incidents that would endanger her family or the people she befriended.
Unlike Carter, whose father was a successful businessman who used his profits to buy land and whose mother was a nurse who joined the Peace Corps, Graham’s parents ran a bar and grill in Central, South Carolina, that catered to men getting off work at the local textile mill before OSHA and the EPA existed to protect workers from injury and air pollution.
His mother died of Hodgkin’s disease, a form of cancer that can be cured if treated early. His father died when he was 21, leaving him with bills to settle and a 13-year-old sister to support. While Carter had the connections necessary to be appointed to Annapolis, Graham financed his education by joining ROTC.
As a boy working in the bar and later the adjacent pool hall, he no doubt learned early that ugliness existed, and would be immediately redirected towards anyone who didn’t conform. I rather suspect he faced his share of hazing by both the mill kids and the scions of the local Baptist and Methodist middle class who looked down on tradesmen, especially those who trafficked in sin.
The sad thing is that Graham’s life’s experiences have reinforced the values of a closed, rigidly stratified society. If he had drawn different lessons from his own life, he might have seen Sonia Sotomayor as a kindred spirit: a single person committed to the law who managed to earn a law degree from a prestigious school despite losing a father.
Instead, Melissa Harris-Lacewell suggested, he joined the crowd that harassed her evoking images of the adults screaming at Elizabeth Eckford in Little Rock in 1957 when Graham was two. He remains the nice boy who was isolated in that mill town and is still trying to prove he’s one of the gang.
Note:
Harris-Lacewell, Melissa. "Sotomayor and the Politics of Public Humiliation," The Nation website, 17 July 2009.
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