Check out my reading of Frank Rich’s latest accusation of treason against the president. Salon is running it. I’ll be contributing a weekly piece of left/liberal/whatever stupidity or malevolence to that online magazine. Good for them for having a diversity of views out there.
DECTER ON GSWB’S: A reader points to this July 1998 Commentary essay by Midge Decter on the Guilty White Southern Boy Syndrome. It’s about her experience as a young writer at Willie Morris’s Harpers. You can buy the full version here. She makes, as usual, some interesting points:
Willie’s Harper’s, “hot” though it may have been, was, for reasons of his own, brought to an end by its owner in the early 70’s. Little by little, the old office gang was broken up. By today, of course, decades later, all those up-and-coming Southern Boys I used to have beer with have long since settled into whatever they were going to be. I have not seen them in years. But one thing about them on which I would be willing to bet something of large value is that all of them have remained men of the Left. They have been locked into that posture most of all by the imposition on them of a new kind of entanglement with America’s blacks.
All their lives, to be sure, the Boys had been deeply bound up in the fortunes of black people. But the same civil-rights revolution that liberated Southern blacks from the oppressive thrall of Southern white men seems in some sense to have had the opposite effect on a decisive group of their former tormentors. To put it simply, the battle for civil rights that took place in the South was a dangerous struggle for the right and the good in which a group of Southern blacks acted with genuine heroism and, with only a couple of highly notable exceptions, the Southern Boys did not. Could educated, intelligent young Southerners at the time actually not have known where their duty lay? Of course they knew, but the combination of guilt and contempt they must all their lives have felt toward blacks no doubt made it impossible for them to participate outright in the action.
How they did ultimately respond to the death of Jim Crow was given expression in two separate ways, and unfortunately both turned out to be deeply influential. First, they staked their personal claim to decency by reminding us how much worse they could have been expected to be. Take the case of Tom Wicker, the former New York Times columnist and Southern liberal par excellence. In A Time To Die (1975), a memoir of his experience as a journalist during the famous riot at Attica prison in upstate New York in 1971, Wicker mused: “In 1946 [I] had made the great discovery that blacks were as human and individual as anyone. It was not much to learn, yet it was more than some people learn in a lifetime.”
What Wicker was really saying here was that, given where and how he grew up, to have discovered that Negroes were human made him a better man than those who had never doubted the proposition in the first place. Whether or not, in the dark night of his own soul, Wicker really got away with this piece of moral grandstanding, his notion of a special virtue attaching to the Southern liberal was accepted with enthusiasm, and taken up in a variety of ways, by a whole host of his fellow Southerners.
The second response of the Southern Boys to the disruption of their old social habits was contained in a formulation that, despite being quite untrue, again turned out to be not only psychically soothing to them but fateful for everyone else. What they commenced to declare in the mid-1960’s was that the experience of black people in the North was, in its own way, far worse than the experience of black people in the South. This claim, ridden for all it was worth, helped to create a whole new agenda for Northern civil-rights activists who had long been fighting the good fight in the courts – something it was, after all, possible to do in the bad old North – but had missed out on the defining experience of heroism that had been vouchsafed their Southern counterparts.
The Dish 