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

 

 

 

 

Falling Down: What a 30-year-old Movie Tells Us About Today

A Liberal Dose

April 6, 2023

Troy D. Smith

“Falling Down: What a 30-Year-Old Movie Tells Us About Today”

Recently, I used that famous blue/white dress photo to demonstrate how hard it is to really see something from someone else’s perspective. It’s not impossible, however, as our own catalogue of experiences and knowledge grows over time. I absolutely saw that photo as white in 2015 -to my surprise, it now appears blue to me. The facts have not changed, but I have.

I used the whole thing as a tool to explain why some white conservatives are unable to see the racism that other people do. My friend John Gottlied pointed out to me that my approach had been one-sided -and I agreed. I actually had given a lot of thought to how it works in the other direction, but being limited to 650 words sometimes prevents nuance or detail. So now I am going to use a tool of my own trade -the study of popular culture -to try to get at the other side. One of the best ways to understand people of a certain era is to look at what entertained them, because it shows how they felt.

In 1993, there was a movie called Falling Down. I think that very few people who saw it at the time recognized just how deeply it was exposing the psyche of middle America, or how prescient (or perhaps prophetic) it was. If you’re getting old like me, you may remember the film, though few people under forty have heard of it.

It stars Michael Douglas as a defense engineer in Los Angeles. When we meet him, he is stuck in traffic on a sweltering day, getting nowhere when he clearly has somewhere to be. He kind of snaps (quietly at first), and abandons his car and takes off through L.A. on foot. We later learn he was fired from his job a month earlier because, with the Cold War ended, his job was obsolete. He is also recently divorced and his wife has a restraining order on him (fearing his anger), but he is determined to take his young daughter a birthday gift. On his odyssey across the city, he descends deeper and deeper into frustration and eventually rage at the way that city -and the country -is changing, in his opinion for the worse. He ends up in a violent confrontation with a Korean store-owner, whose accent he can’t understand and whom he believes is overcharging for everything. He gets accosted by two Latino muggers, whom he fights off. They come back with reinforcements and try to kill him, but he is unscathed and winds up with their gym bag full of weapons. He shoots up a fast-food restaurant that won’t serve him breakfast because he was three minutes past the cutoff; encounters panhandlers, a sleazy Nazi who claims to identify with his angers, and has confrontations with wealthy people whose greed offends him.

He is presented in a sympathetic light. Disturbed as you may be by his actions, it is impossible not to feel for Douglas. He feels like the American Dream has been stripped away from him. “I’m the bad guy?” he says at the end. “How did that happen? I did everything they told me to.” And that’s just it. He is a leftover from a time that is passing. He feels abandoned, mistreated, isolated, irrelevant, lied to (which he says often), and hopeless. The detective trying to catch him, played by Robert Duvall, understands -because he feels the same way. And so did a lot of people in the audience. This movie could be called an expression of “white rage,” but it is also middle-class rage, directed at both upper and lower classes. Douglas gains a momentary feeling of power by lashing out against the system and burning it down. His actions are wrong, but they come from a place of pain and do not make him intrinsically evil.

Next time: Breaking Bad.

 

--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

 

"Needed: Your Memories About Weather in the Upper Cumberland"

 

A Liberal Dose: March 30, 2023

Troy D. Smith

“Needed: Your Memories about Weather in the Upper Cumberland”

The primary purpose of this column has always been to present thoughts from the left side of the political spectrum, in large part to counterbalance the perspectives of several columnists from the right who were regular contributors to this paper when I started. However, there has usually been a secondary, sometimes almost as prominent, purpose: to look at things from a historical perspective, especially things that relate to our town or our region. I’ve written about labor history in Sparta, about the black Union soldiers who had largely been forgotten by history, about Native Americans of the Upper Cumberland, and many more.

This week I am completely focused on history, with no political flavoring.

One year ago this month, with the untimely demise of my dear friend and mentor Michael “Birdie” Birdwell (beloved by many of you), I inherited directorship of the Upper Cumberland Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences. My long-term goal was to build on the work the Institute did in the 1980s when they conducted oral history interviews of all the living ex-coal miners from the 1930s they could find. I wanted to do something similar with people who worked in shirt factories and tobacco agriculture -two things that used to be at the heart of our local culture until about the 1990s, but have since moved on from our area. I want to get a record of what life was like for those Upper Cumberland folks who worked in those industries before, like the coal miners, they have all left us. Along the way, at the suggestion of my good friend Nick Blaylock, we added to the mix interviews with military veterans. Between us, Nick and I have conducted several interviews. Mostly, though, the last year has consisted of clearing a path for the Institute to do this work. Very soon, we will learn whether our efforts have resulted in gaining physical work space at the university and additional funding, as well as the development of a website connected to the TTU archives (coming soon) at which anyone can listen to or read the interviews we have conducted.

This spring, I have also been part of a team of TTU faculty who received a “Rural Reimagined” grant to build an archive of Upper Cumberland weather history. The team, led by geology professor Lauren Michel, also includes TTU archivist Megan Atkinson and geography professor Evan Hart. The grant has enabled us to hire seven Tech students part-time to do research. In addition to combing through government records and old newspaper articles, they will be interviewing local folks who have been in the area a long time about their weather-related memories. Do you remember blizzards, tornadoes, floods, droughts, storms, and so forth that have occurred in the Upper Cumberland in your lifetime? What was it like? Just like the interview for the Institute, these will be stored at the TTU archives and accessible to historians, climate experts, and the general public to listen to and learn from.

Students will be conducting interviews with willing volunteers at the White County Public Library several afternoons per week, starting next week. This project will continue through the end of June. The Institute and the archives will have an additional two student workers continuing through August; the student working directly for the Institute will also, at that time, be conducting interviews about shirt factories and tobacco farming. All told, these projects are going to be extremely valuable for local history, and even for local government and businesses as we produce data that can be used to not only interpret the past but understand the present and work toward the future. We can’t do it, though, without your help.

If you are willing to be interviewed, please contact me at tdsmith@tntech.edu (the best way to reach me) or leave a message on my office phone at 931-372-6297 and we’ll make an appointment.

--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, March 23, 2023 "Perceptions of Reality Are Defined by Your Perspective- So Widen It"

 

A Liberal Dose

March 23, 2023

Troy D. Smith

“Perceptions of Reality are Defined by Your Perspective -So Widen It”

 

Today (Sunday, March 19), I heard yet another interview with science journalist David McRaney, whose book How Minds Change has been in the news a lot the last couple of years. His book, and his interviews about it, start with the 2015 social media meme called “The Dress.” You probably remember it. It was a photo of a dress… roughly half the people who saw it beheld a white dress with gold trim, while the other half saw a blue dress with black trim. It was not one of those things where if you tilt the picture (or your head) you can see two different things; no, you could only see ONE thing. Different people just saw it differently.

Turns out the photo, taken with a cheap camera, was overexposed- and when that happens, your mind automatically fills in the blanks with what it thinks OUGHT to be there, based on your experiences, and it does so without you even realizing it. People who spend a lot of time in artificial light, or outdoors at night, see the dress as blue; people who spend a lot of time in natural sunlight see it as white.

This is because color itself isn’t “real,” it is an illusion our mind creates. Wavelengths of electromagnetic energy emanating from a heat source (like the sun) hit an object, then bounce off. Depending on the surface texture of that object, it will absorb PART of that wave and bounce back the rest- which enters our pupil, and thence our brain, which translates it into color… what color depends on which parts of the wave get bounced off. BUT, when there is ambiguity or uncertainty, such as in that overexposed photo, your brain constructs a color scheme that is entirely dependent on your own experiences and perception. If you see blue, no amount of arguing from someone else is going to convince you it is white… because that is not what you are experiencing.

That same principle applies to how we see life: we fill in the blanks, our mind automatically interprets things, according to our own experiences and perspective. Someone else could be experiencing the exact same thing, but experience it (and interpret and understand it) completely differently than you do, because their experience (and therefore their worldview) is different. This is why some conservative, middle-class white folks can watch an event and not see the same things as some members of minority groups do. If you have never directly experienced true prejudice, oppression, and injustice -you may not recognize it in the same way as someone who has. They may be telling you it is racism, but you honestly just don’t see it that way. The two of you may argue back and forth, neither giving in, because one of you sees a white dress and one of you sees a blue one.

This ties into concepts called privilege and implicit bias, which the Tennessee state legislature have ruled too dangerous to utter in front of children (or maybe even college students). In effect, they have passed laws saying you HAVE to agree -or at least pretend to agree -that dress is blue, no matter what you see. That, of course, is not a solution.

What is the solution? Well, in the case of the actual photo, if everyone understands HOW the difference occurs, they can understand that their view is not the only completely true one, and try to see from the other person’s point of view. Same with colorblindness- when my wife tells me my brown shirt is red, I realize my own limitations and have to agree that she, and most other people, are not seeing it the way I do.

In other words… communicate. Honestly, sincerely listen to one another. Don’t tell someone their lived experience is inaccurate because it doesn’t match yours, or what you think theirs should be.

--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