Sanity

Alabama, you've got the weight on your shoulders that's breaking your back,

Your Cadillac, has got a wheel in the ditch, and a wheel on the track.

-Neil Young, Alabama

I've heard Mr. Young sing about her,

I've heard old Neil put her down.

But I hope Neil Young will remember,

A southern man don't need him around anyhow.

-Lynyrd Skynyrd, Sweet Home Alabama

Yesterday, the people of Alabama had a choice.  Were they going to be the people that Neil Young criticized, or were they going to be the people that Lynyrd Skynyrd defended.  Honestly I'll take Neil Young over Skynyrd just about any day, but this morning I'm feeling pretty glad that Skynyrd's Sweet Home Alabama showed up at the polls yesterday.  I understand that this does not mean that Alabama is suddenly going to go blue.  Doug Jones is the only Democrat to win in Alabama in decades, and he may be the only one to win for decades to come.  The election that just ended was more about people saying no to Roy Moore than it was about them saying yes to Jones.  In that way it is sort of similar to the way that last year's race was about people saying no to Hillary Clinton and all that she represents than it was about people really being in love with Trump.

That is where we are at this moment though, we are shaping up into a nation of what one of my Western PA friends called "Aginners," people who were "agin this, and agin that." "Agin," in Appalachia speak means against.  Neil Young's critique of Alabama and the South in general was based on his observation of deep seeded racism and white resentment (because apparently those things didn't appear last year).  While Neil was not unsympathetic: 

Oh, oh Alabama, can I see you and shake your hand?

Make friends down in Alabama,

I'm from a new land, I come to you and,

See all this ruin, what are you doing?

He was decidedly negative in tone. Skynyrd, by comparison, was perhaps naively sentimental about their Sweet Home, they knew something about the character of their homeland that Neil never would.  What they knew was that the idea of Alabama was sacred to people who live there.  While the rest of the country uses Alabama as a punchline to their jokes about rednecks and backwardness, Alabama holds on to its skies so blue and its government true.

I'm hoping that some day soon we will all be able to start being proud of our Sweet Home instead of just constantly having to cry out like banjos playing through the broken glass windows.  I think where we are as a nation is that we do have a wheel in the ditch and a wheel on the track.  Stopping Roy Moore, who was such a conglomeration of negative stereotypes about the south that he would have been unbelievable as a fictional character in novel, was crucial to keeping a wheel on the track, especially for Republicans.

Losing one seat now, is nothing compared to the carnage that would have happened in all those northern rust belt states that brought us President Trump, if Democrats could have put clips of him waving his little pocket pistol and talking about antebellum slavery as the good old days.  Whether or not the GOP takes this defeat as the actual gift that it is and tries to end their nosedive into absurdity remains to be seen, but the common sense and decorum of the Alabamian people has given them a few more months to give it a shot.

Democrats on the other hand, shouldn't get too swell headed about all of this.  Doug Jones is not exactly a paradigm they should follow, but he does demonstrate some necessary truths about politics in the age of social media.  First of all, don't try to be a strict party platform candidate.  Jones toed the party line on civil rights and reproductive choice, but he is also a gun owner and a rule of law former prosecutor.  If the Dems want to compete in red states they're going to need to get a little more Sweet Home Alabama and a lot less New York City elite.  And second of all, the thing Doug Jones did better than a lot of Democrats (especially Hillary Clinton) is avoid self inflicted wounds.  He observed that Roy Moore was growing increasingly unpopular for just being Roy Moore, and he stood back and let it happen.  He didn't so much attack as he simply stood up and said we can do better than that, he didn't dwell on the negative problems of his state, he sung about skies so blue, which honestly is what everyone wants to hear about their sweet homes.

It's easy to get sucked into the swamp of negativity that dominates in politics, because that swamp is about real stuff, important issues, critical policies.  As much as pundits want to shovel the blame for that negativity at the door of Donald Trump, honestly, he didn't make it up.  He makes plenty of of stuff up, but the way that he seized upon the zeitgeist of middle America and the deep south should not be written off as fiction. People are tired of "Aginners," and my hope is that we are beginning to see through the facades of both left and right.  Alabama doesn't have a great reputation for leading in a positive direction, but they may be the first state to give us, as a country, the sanity that we so desperately need.  You might even see this moment as turning of the tide of tribal politics (I think you know where I'm going with this, Lord help me).  If Roy Moore was that stinking, rotting bottom detritus that we had to see at the low ebb, so be it.  Let's hope the tide keeps rolling in.  Roll Tide (I'm very sorry for that, I just couldn't resist).