Tennessee WordSmith: A Liberal Dose, October 10, 2024 "The Stormy Seas Have Followed Us"

A Liberal Dose

October 10, 2024

Troy D. Smith

“The Stormy Seas Have Followed Us Inland”

Who’d have ever expected that so much destruction and death (230 people and counting as I write this on Sunday) would visit the Smoky Mountains and surrounding areas from a hurricane hitting the coast of Florida hundreds of miles away. It is the worst flooding the region has seen in over a century. Over the last decade or so, as dramatic weather events have slowly begun to convince some die-hard climate change deniers that things really are getting bad at an accelerated pace, the percentage of Americans who recognize that coastal areas are endangered due to rising sea levels and intensified storms related to warmer air currents, and that forested mountains around the country are endangered by wildfires due to the heat and drier climate, has grown (hopefully it is not too little, too late). But no one expected this… from a hurricane at sea.

Two years ago, I was part of a team that embarked on an oral history of extreme weather in the Upper Cumberland, which also involved gathering data from government sources, especially NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration). We actually were able to fill in a lot of gaps in that NOAA data for our local region. But we had to warn our student workers, when interviewing locals, to be sure to say “weather” instead of “climate”, because as soon as that latter word is introduced some people shut down because they view the discussion as politicized. “Climate” should not be a political word… but it has become one, because so many conservative politicians have made it one in recent decades. When I was a kid in the 70s, conservative and liberal politicians alike used the word climate freely, without political association, and were equally concerned about protecting it. That ship sailed some time ago, primarily due to business interests’ desire to avoid environmental regulations that would affect their profits. Those corporations, and the politicians in their pockets, have used propaganda and misdirection, and outright lies, to convince many voters that any effort to protect our earth and keep it habitable is a liberal scam worthy of contempt, to the extent a lot of people go around deliberately polluting the atmosphere around them just to show how much they enjoy “liberal tears.”

This particular climate disaster has dovetailed with another conservative tactic of the past decade: spreading the most outrageous, ridiculous conspiracy theories -without the slightest mooring to fact -as irrefutable truths, to stir up their ever-more-easily-impassioned base and distract them from the real issues. Eight years ago, according to them, Hillary Clinton (and, somehow, Tom Hanks) were running a child sex ring out of the basement of a pizza parlor (which had no basement). Four years ago, Donald Trump was going to magically reverse the results of a national election and execute liberals in the town square. Today, relief and rescue efforts have been seriously hampered by an unbelievable string of conspiracy theories (propounded by actual conservative politicians) claiming Biden and Harris were stealing disaster relief money and giving it to “illegal immigrants”, or even that liberals had somehow generated this hurricane and intentionally turned it loose onto red states in order to win the election. You really can’t summon up anything too ridiculous, fantastic, and over-the-top that millions of MAGA faithful won’t believe every word of it if only their burnt-orange demigod and his acolytes say it to them. Much as with the mythical dog-eating Haitians of Springfield, local and state Republican officials have practically begged Trump and his devotees to cut it out because they are causing chaos in their communities -and, in this case, in relief efforts.

So many of the people who spread these falsehoods do not take the time and mental energy to see the real conspiracy. The Republican Party has been commandeered by people who want to dismantle the workings of the federal government, and any confidence the public has in it, in order to make it easier for oligarchs to get their tax cuts and deregulation, to the ultimate detriment of their own willing supporters, as outlined in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 -which these same supporters insist Trump has nothing to do with, just because he says so (despite all evidence to the contrary). It truly has reached the level of a cult -and one which endangers not just democracy but the future of the very ground we stand on.

--Troy D. Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at Tennessee Tech and serves on the executive committee of the Tennessee Democratic Party. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.

Buy the book A Liberal Dose: Communiques from the Holler by Troy D. Smith HERE