A Liberal Dose, May 25, 2023 "Tear Down the Walls of Division"

 

A Liberal Dose

May 25, 2023

Troy D. Smith

“Tear down the walls of division”

 

My 9^th grade civics teacher (also 11^th grade history teacher), Burl Johnson, was also a county commissioner and deeply patriotic. This was in the ‘80s, when -as had been true for well over a century -White County was overwhelmingly Democratic. Mr. Johnson said on several occasions that “the Republicans stand for the rich man, and the Democrats stand for the working man.” We’ll skip over the fact he shouldn’t have been making political preference statements in the classroom. My dad used to say the same thing, as did a lot of people around the country. This was especially true during the Depression when FDR was president, pushing through all those social safety net laws, which is probably why, in 2016, people in their 90s (who remembered FDR) were more likely to support Bernie Sanders than Clinton or Trump.

Now, I’ve known (and still know) a lot of wealthy people who were incredibly kind, empathetic, and giving people. Heck, FDR and JFK came from very wealthy backgrounds. Conversely, there are very rich Democrats who give a lot of money to politicians. So you can’t paint people with broad strokes. But, by and large, I agree with the past words of Burl Johnson and my dad: the Republican Party tends to benefit the wealthiest one percent way more than the middle or working class. The kind of wealthy people my grandma referred to as “the big shots.”

This hearkens back to my very first entry in this column two years ago, about Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676 Virginia. The poor white folks, free black folks, and runaway slaves all came together to rebel against the colonial elites and it was barely suppressed. Southern colonies then began to pass laws meant to divide white workers from black ones, and pit them against each other. The implicit promise the elites gave to poor whites was “stick on our side, you’re one of us, we’re better than THEM.” The Populist movement of the 1890s made some temporary cracks in that dividing wall, as did FDR’s New Deal.

More bricks were put in the wall, though, first by Nixon and then by Reagan (look up “the Southern Strategy”, or Reagan’s speeches about “young bucks” and “welfare queens”). Republicans inundated the white middle-and-working class with “others” to be scared of, and have only ramped it up in recent years. As LBJ said, this was a tactic to distract them so they didn’t notice their pocket was being picked. Remember all that stuff I wrote about the white middle class feeling abandoned and betrayed beginning in the 90s? That was because of Republican economic policies -but there were GOP politicians and pundits constantly giving them other people to blame. People who were different. “Black people want to live off your tax money!” “Immigrants want to take your jobs!” “LGBTQ people are… are wearing dresses!”

Many liberals have done themselves no favors by appearing to drip with contempt at the “backwardness” of the working class. They, too, have added some bricks to that wall. Not NEARLY as many as Republicans, true, but bricks nonetheless… reinforcing the idea that liberals think the white working class is stupid and evil, which only pushes them farther into the camp of those who are using them.

Drag queens, immigrants, and minorities are neither hurting you nor holding you down. Billionaires whose only concern is making more money (and keeping it all)… that’s who is behind your economic woes. Your other woes are only imagined -exaggerated fears planted in your mind to keep you voting against your own real interests.

Farmers, factory workers, immigrants, minorities… and yes, LGBTQ people (drag queens included), and wealthy people with a social conscience like the Roosevelts and Kennedys …no matter their color or race… should all be on the same side. Against the big shots, the real elites, trying to keep everyone else down so they can make one more buck. THEY are the “dividers.”

 

--Troy D. Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at Tennessee Tech. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.

You can find all previous entries in this weekly column HERE

A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE

Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com

The author's historical lectures on youtube can be found HERE

A Liberal Dose, May 18, 2023 "The Difference Between a Column and a Classroom"

 

A Liberal Dose

May 18, 2023

Troy D. Smith

“The difference between a column and a classroom”

 

A couple of months ago, an old classmate of mine made a comment on the online version of my column at Spartalive that I wanted to talk about this week. Here’s what they had to say:

“Every week you sit down to brow beat the right. It doesn’t matter what is happening in this country, you find a way to blame the right, the right leaning left, anyone that doesn’t absolutely believe the exact same way you do. You say you’re a historian. You’re a professor at Tech. Why not just teach down the center and stop telling the young adults your opinions about how the right screwed this country up. As long as some are determined to keep the hate going, there will never be any peace.”

There are several points there that I feel it is important for me to address. First, I was asked to write this column as a way to provide a counter-balance to the conservative columnists who were contributing to the paper at that time. The whole point, as evidenced by the subtitle “A Liberal Dose”, is to give a perspective from the left. Therefore, it should not come as a surprise, or be viewed as a negative, when that is what I do.

Second, while I often have strong opinions, I think it is unfair to characterize my column as a constant, vicious attack on the right. I have often endeavored to be even-handed, to try to understand the other side’s feelings, and to present verifiable facts rather than a torrent of emotional bromides. Far from trying to “keep the hate going,” I’d say the most common theme I’ve written about the past two years has been to call for an end to hate and violence and to communicate with one another.

Third, and most important, I am disturbed by these remarks: “You say you’re a historian. You’re a professor at Tech. Why not just teach down the center and stop telling the young adults your opinions about how the right screwed this country up.” Never having been in my classes, how do you have any idea how I teach them?

This column is me stating my opinions as a private citizen, exercising my freedom of speech. I do so with a historical slant, offering context, but it is not the same thing as teaching a class, nor would I use the same techniques to do so. In these columns I have 650 words -in my classes I have an hour, for forty-five total hours in a semester. That gives me plenty of time to present all sides, which I do. In twelve years of receiving student evaluations at the end of every course, there have only been one or two students -out of probably a couple of thousand in that time -who’ve said they thought I was biased. I’d estimate at least a hundred have said the opposite. Just this week I received this anonymous evaluation from a student: “He teaches this class in a way his students can grasp the content of the class but develop their own opinions.”

Here’s why that distinction is so important to me. There are legislators in this state, and other red states, who are passing laws about how history teachers can teach -when they have not been in their classrooms and have no idea what happens there, or how. I have been telling legislators for years that they need to get out of teachers’ way and let them do their jobs, and inviting them to come to my classroom to see for themselves how I do mine. No one has taken me up on it.

It reminds me of a phenomenon I mentioned last week. My conservative friends often get mad, not at what I say, but at what they have prejudged I was going to say or what it was going to mean.

--Troy D. Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at Tennessee Tech. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.

You can find all previous entries in this weekly column HERE

A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE

Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com

The author's historical lectures on youtube can be found HERE

 

A Liberal Dose, May 11, 2023 "A Final Word (For Now) on Perception"

 

A Liberal Dose

May 11, 2023

Troy D. Smith

“A Final Word (For Now) on Perception”

 

About twenty years ago, I wrote a novel about our local Confederate guerrilla Champ Ferguson. Champ was a divisive character in both history and historical memory (how groups remember something). At his graveside here in White County there is a historical marker describing him as a martyr and a hero; at his birthplace in Clinton County, Kentucky, there is a marker describing him as a terrorist. White County was mostly Confederate, Clinton County was mostly Union- and that still affects people’s perceptions. I tried to be fair, and present Champ as a flawed human being with some good and a lot of bad. I was apprehensive about how readers would react- I thought everybody would be mad at me on both sides. But I was surprised. What happened was that people who already revered Champ told me how much they liked the fact I showed he wasn’t as bad as people say; people predisposed against Champ told me how much they liked that I showed how bad he really was.

Perception.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the blue dress/white dress thing, using it a means to demonstrate people’s difficulty seeing things from the other side’s perspective, and I mentioned racism as an example. My friend John -rightly -pointed out that I was being selective in my own points. Therefore, I spent several weeks looking to various movies and TV shows from recent decades to explore -and try to understand -the pent-up anger in many white, middle class, MAGA, Trump supporters, which led to a violent attempt to overthrow the government by a few individuals… and a disturbing amount of support for those rioters from many on the right. My conclusion was that, although I vehemently oppose their actions and many of the ideas behind them, in order to understand them I have to have empathy for the frustrations and emotions that led them to that point. We have to recognize those things in each other if we are going to find peaceful resolutions, we can’t just all hate each other and call each other evil. We have to see each other’s humanity, and that works both ways.

I feel like John may have missed my point. In his response last week, John seemed critical of my effort to look for shades of gray rather than black or white. He pointed out that all the characters in my examples broke the law and did evil, and that fact was what ultimately mattered. This took me somewhat aback, as my whole point was trying to understand the anger on the right by looking more deeply than the actions of January 6. I believe those people broke the law and performed evil deeds, as did the various criminals in my examples… but I was proposing we look at WHY, so as to prevent it in the future. And I did so because I felt remiss in doing so in earlier discussions.

Too often, on social media and in real life, I hear people on my side of the political fence othering conservatives or rural America (or the South) in general, by tossing around hateful stereotypes and painting them as evil and/or stupid. Of course, there is plenty of that from the other side… I’m tempted to say there’s more, but it’s hard to tell. It’s like we all hate each other without thinking- and definitely without showing empathy or trying to see the other side. I see something similar with a lot of my conservative friends when they react -not to what I said -but to what they had presupposed I was GOING to say, to the extent they start responding before they’ve even listened.

That said, though, I stand beside those individuals and groups who feel like the other side is out to strip away their rights or even their existence. I draw the line at empathy for Nazis and Klansmen.

--Troy D. Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at Tennessee Tech. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.

 

You can find all previous entries in this weekly column HERE

A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE

Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com

The author's historical lectures on youtube can be found HERE

A Liberal Dose, May 4, 2023 "Frustration, Rage, and Searching for the American Dream"

 

A Liberal Dose

May 4, 2023

Troy D. Smith

“Frustration, Rage, and the American Dream”

 

In recent weeks I’ve talked about Falling Down, Breaking Bad, and the American Dream. I’ve done this in context of getting a finger on the pulse of middle-class America the last couple of decades, and to have some empathy for such folks which might lead to at least a little understanding of what has been going on. It is easy to look at the violence, the rage, the frustration, the sense of betrayal displayed by people across the political aisle and simply write it off as them being foolish, thuggish, backward, or evil. Make no mistake, some of them are evil, to some extent- I’m looking at you, Gus Fring and the neo-Nazis in Breaking Bad. I suppose it depends on the extent to which they go, and their willingness to harm others or deprive them of their rights. We know that Michael Douglas’s character in Falling Down was not as evil as other characters believed him to be -at the end, he was armed only with his child’s water gun -and, if you watched Breaking Bad, you know that Walter White was capable of great evil. But the point of my examining these programs is to see what set them down that road of rage.

And the opposite is true.

I’ve always said that Breaking Bad has the exact same plot as The Godfather -but in reverse. What they have in common is a relatable protagonist who turns -gradually -to crime and violence, justifying it as the only way to protect their family. Michael Corleone and Walter White each viewed themselves as moral men, but each of them discovered they were very, very good at being bad -and relished it. In both cases, they lost everything they were trying to protect.

But their family trajectories were different. Michael Corleone’s dad, Don Vito “The Godfather” Corleone, had come to America from Sicily with nothing. He was a member of a despised immigrant group. He turned to crime and violence to carve a place for his family, and his greatest dream was to, one day, build his family up to “respectability.”

A very similar situation is described in the fourth season of Fargo, which is actually set in Kansas City. The opening montage of the first episode shows how, in the 1920s, the Jewish gangs were wiped out by the Irish gangs, who were then wiped out by the Italian gangs in the 1930s, who were then challenged in the 1940s by an African American gang led by that season’s star, Chris Rock. Each immigrant group tried to claw their way up to the top, and to respectability- except the black gang, who realized (in Rock’s words) that they would always be on the bottom, and all the other groups were trying to prove they were better and be accepted into society. Yet Rock and his gang kept trying to succeed and be accepted.

They were all trying to gain admittance into the American Dream. And, to varying degrees, some of them did.

But the protagonists of Falling Down and Breaking Bad weren’t trying to ACHIEVE the American Dream; they had been brought up believing it was theirs for the taking, but due to changing circumstances in the country, were starting to feel it slipping away from them. It was their promised birthright. If you work hard, and play by the rules, you will be more successful than your parents -that was how America works. They had been cheated. And they weren’t going to sit still for it. They were going to take action.

There was a feeling in the air in 2016. There was a lot of anger and frustration with the status quo. I think Bernie Sanders would’ve done much better against Donald Trump than Hillary Clinton did -because people at both ends of the spectrum were disgusted by the establishment and were ready to tear things down.

--Troy D. Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at Tennessee Tech. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.

You can find all previous entries in this weekly column HERE

A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE

Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com

The author's historical lectures on youtube can be found HERE

 

A Liberal Dose

April 27, 2023

Troy D. Smith

“Shot for getting the wrong address- what is happening?”

 

In about one week’s time, there have been FOUR national news stories about people making simple mistakes and being shot by paranoid people with guns. In Kansas City, a black teenager with a sterling reputation is sent to pick his little brothers up from a sleepover. He gets the address confused and rings the wrong person’s doorbell. The door is answered by an 85-year-old white man with a gun, who shoots the boy in the head then, as he is lying on the porch, opens the door and shoots him again. The boy manages to run away and goes to multiple neighbors seeking help, none of whom will open their door, until someone finally calls 911. He is alive now, but missing brain tissue.

In Texas, a group of teenaged girls returning from cheerleading practice stopped at a convenience store… one of them accidentally got in the wrong car. She immediately got out and got into the car with her friends… but the driver of the car she’d accidentally gotten into, a 25-year-old Latino man, fired into the car as it left, shooting the girl in the back and leg.

In Upstate New York, a group of young people looking for a friend’s house got lost and pulled into the wrong driveway. As they were backing out, the 65-year-old homeowner came onto the porch and started shooting at the car, killing a 20-year-old young woman (everyone in this story, so far as I know, was white).

In Florida, two African Americans making a grocery delivery for Instacart accidentally pulled into the driveway next door. The homeowner sent his 12-year-old out to tell them to get off his property. They started pulling out when the homeowner, hearing his son yelling, ran out with a gun and got close enough that the scared Instacart driver ran over his foot. The 45-year-old homeowner then fired three shots at the car. In this case, fortunately, the man’s foot was the only injury.

What the heck is going on in this country?

That is a valid question and one that needs addressing.

Some of these incidents may have had a racial component. In fact, Kansas City police have stated that to be the case. Maybe we should talk about the elements of our country’s history that make some white people feel inordinately threatened by the presence of a black person. But wait, I forgot, we’re in a red state and that is practically illegal. Our General Assembly is much more concerned with banning books, defunding libraries, and dictating how (or whether) teachers can talk about race.

Some of these cases have no racial component.  Some would say it calls for more gun control -but, in these cases, I don’t think that’s the issue. Three of the four cases involved homeowners with handguns to protect those homes, which I am foursquare in favor of, and not weapons of mass killing being deployed against the public. My conservative friends say it is not a gun issue, it is a people issue -and, in these cases, at least, I agree with them. But where does the sudden spike in paranoia come from? The Kansas City man’s own family says he has been increasingly radicalized by conservative media- and I’ve seen it happen to my own loved ones. People who never even owned guns in the prime of their life now, in their old age, afraid to go to the supermarket without three or four guns on them… because they are being lied to, over and over, about alleged “carnage in the streets”. Case in point: recent news that our own local representative’s campaign is telling people the peaceful -ANTI-GUN -protesters in Nashville were arrested for having pipe bombs, a flat out lie. Lies like that are intended to stir up the base… but it is stirring them up in the wrong way, and the carnage talk becomes self-fulfilling.

--Troy D. Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at Tennessee Tech. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.

 

You can find all previous entries in this weekly column HERE

A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE

Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com

The author's historical lectures on youtube can be found HERE

 

A Liberal Dose

April 20, 2023

Troy D. Smith

“Breaking Bad and the Receding American Dream”

 

Recently, I wrote about Michael Douglas’s character in Falling Down, William Foster. Foster was a middle-class engineer who had followed all the rules throughout his life, but just as he was on the verge of middle age the world changes (the end of the Cold War) and his job becomes obsolete. His wife has left him, he is unemployed, and everything he worked for has slipped through his fingers. The American Dream that he had felt was promised to him did not materialize, and he felt cheated and cast aside. One hot day, he snaps and goes on a rampage.

I noted that the film, released thirty years ago, said a lot more than people realized at the time about the emotional state of the American middle class. The film came out, by the way, right at the same time as the Los Angeles riots which divided, not only the city, but the country. There was a lot of anger under the surface -middle class and poor, black and white alike were frustrated by the dissolution of the American Dream, perhaps made even worse by the fact the “bad guys” (Soviets) had fallen and everyone was supposed to live happily ever after.

1993 was the year of the Waco standoff, which a lot of middle-and-working-class white folks, then and now, pointed to as proof you can’t trust the government. Perhaps people were starting to conclude you can’t even trust your vision of America.

Fifteen years later, we were introduced to a 21^st century version of William Foster. On Breaking Bad, we met Walter White (Brian Cranston.) On the day after his 50^th birthday, White learns he has terminal cancer. He is a high-school chemistry teacher whose insurance won’t pay his medical bills. In fact, he is already having to demean himself by have a part-time job washing cars, where the younger managers treat him like dirt. But it didn’t have to be that way -in his youth, he’d been a brilliant chemist whose research helped establish a company that White and his best friend ran. White’s girlfriend left him for the best friend, and in his depression Walter had sold out his share for a mere $5,000. Now the company was worth many millions -and he was washing cars and dealing with arrogant students.

His American Dream had become a nightmare.

We know what happened. He partnered with an ex-student who was now a meth dealer, and started using his superior skills to create high-quality meth… to pay his medical bills and make sure he had something to leave his family.

Once he made that decision, we all knew he was doomed- but we could understand his feelings. Like the guy in Falling Down, we sympathized with him (at least at first). In one of the most memorable images in the series, Walter is standing in the desert in his underwear pointing a gun at the rival meth dealers who attack him and his partner Jesse. He is screaming in desperation. The underwear highlights how vulnerable and exposed Walter feels.

Interestingly, both Walter White and William Foster have an encounter with an annoying fly. The fly is a symbol, too -of how each man yearns desperately to gain control over the mundane irritations of his life, irritations that take away his peace.

The American Dream, when deferred, sometimes explodes -so said Langston Hughes. He was talking about Black America, and the fact that all the promises made to them never materialized. White and Foster represent a middle-class America of recent decades who had no reason to ever DOUBT their dreams would come true- but they didn’t. This, too, can lead to a slow-burning fuse of rage.

I think we have seen that rage these last few years. Taking the time to look from a different perspective can at least give us a handle on where that rage comes from, even if we oppose it... and even if we recognize that, in the end -unlike William Foster -Walter White really was evil.

--Troy D. Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at Tennessee Tech. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.

 You can find all previous entries in this weekly column HERE

A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE

Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com

The author's historical lectures on youtube can be found HERE

 

A Liberal Dose, April 13, 2023 "The Tennessee Legislature Has Shot Itself in the Foot"

A Liberal Dose

April 13, 2023

Troy D. Smith

“The Tennessee Legislature Has Shot Itself in the Foot”

 

My apologies for anyone who was looking forward to my promised exploration of the themes of the TV show Breaking Bad this week. I have to postpone that until next time so I can address what happened in the Tennessee legislature last week. You probably know what I’m talking about, as it was all over the world news.

To summarize. Over a thousand people joined in a peaceful protest at the state capitol on March 30, calling on the legislature to pass gun control laws in the wake of the tragic school shooting in Nashville. Three Democratic legislators joined in the protest, on the legislature floor, interrupting proceedings. The three included two black men -Justin Jones of Nashville and Justin Pearson of Memphis -and one white woman, Gloria Johnson of Knoxville. For the violation of decorum, the Republican supermajority drew up charges to eject the three from the legislature.

Let’s pause right there. Since the Civil War, only two people have been ejected from the Tennessee state legislature -one for accepting a bribe and one for sexual harassment. Multiple legislators (all in the majority party) have escaped expulsion in recent years despite extremely racist or sexually inappropriate comments and activities, in one case admitting to child sexual abuse, and in another of urinating on the chair of a fellow legislator who had said mean things about them on social media. So the idea this was meant to protect “decorum” is a stretch.

No. This vote was meant to put the “Tennessee Three” -and future legislators who might be vocal in their disagreement with the majority -in their place. Even if you do agree that their behavior violated floor rules and should therefore be addressed, the immediate and extreme act of expulsion is clearly over the top and disproportionate to the actions they took. All those incidents I mentioned above? In those cases, Republicans in the legislature argued that expelling those members would strip representation away from the voters who had sent them there, and that such an action should only be taken in the most egregious cases out of respect for those voters. So what does this action say about the respect the legislature has for voters in urban areas, who tend to support Democrats? It says volumes. It says those voters do not matter as much -and they, too, need to know their place.

Then we have the results of the vote. The two black men were, in fact, expelled -while the white woman fell one vote short (and several votes shy of her black colleagues) of the same fate. They kicked out the two “uppity” young black men, but kept the middle-aged white woman. This, within a month or so of trying to rename the street from honoring Civil Rights legend John Lewis to honoring Donald Trump (just a couple of years or so after Lewis died and it was named for him), and of making comments pining for the days people could be lynched in Tennessee (both of those courtesy of our very own representative, Paul Sherrell). They are no longer even trying to hide how they really feel about people like Jones and Pearson, and the people who would vote for them.

It was an incredibly bone-headed move. As I write this on Easter Sunday, it is expected that on Monday Jones will be appointed by the Nashville City Council to be his own temporary replacement until a special election can be held, and Pearson will probably do the same. By the time this column comes out they will probably both be back in their jobs.

But they have been given a worldwide spotlight. They have become martyrs and heroes to millions. Young people in Tennessee are starting to organize like never before, and thousands of new Democrats have been created. The legislature has shot itself in the foot on a colossal scale.

--Troy D. Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at Tennessee Tech. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.

 

You can find all previous entries in this weekly column HERE

A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE

Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com

The author's historical lectures on youtube can be found HERE