Trailer Witch

And then there was morning, and then there was evening

2009-01-24T20:40:00.000-08:00

I am tentatively... thrilled. More to come, as soon as Stewart, Colbert and I figure out what the hell to do now.

For the moment, I'll raise my tallboy to exeuctive orders.

Bristol Palin Is Pregnant - Right Now? Stair-Step Children Do Happen

2008-09-01T17:38:00.001-07:00

Sarah Palin announced this morning that her 17-year-old daughter, Bristol is currently pregnant - which, at first glance, does seem to contradict my last post.

There has been much discussion today of Bristol's pregnancy and the Daily Kos' August 30 claim that Bristol Palin, not Sarah Palin, is the mother of five-month-old Trig Palin. Steve Clemons of the blog Washington Note featured the above photo in his post "Looks Like Sarah Palin Due Some Apologies," a photo provided by Andrew Sullivan of The New Republic. This photo was taken five days before Trig Palin was born.

Like many of those who left comments on the Washington Note, I'm unconvinced that this single photo provides conclusive evidence that Sarah Palin gave birth to Trig Palin. As Hollywood and pregnant-nun Haloween costumes alike have proven, pregnancy can be faked, pretty easily.

The suspicious circumstances surrounding Trig's birth presented in the Daily Kos post - Bristol's months-long absence from school during the time Trig would have been gestated, Sarah Palin's long flight from Texas rural Alaska after her water had supposedly broken, Alaska Airlines representative Caroline Boren's assertion that during her flight back to Alaska Sarah Palin's "state of pregnancy was not apparent by observation as she did not show any signs of distress," Bristol's appearance of pregnancy in the photo in my last post (taken when Sarah was supposedly seven months pregnant) and Sarah's lack thereof, the fact that April photos of Sarah Palin disappeared from the State of Alaska's website on August 29 - all of these factors still make me suspicious.

I am, however, less convinced than I was yesterday. That said, because of the strong opinions expressed in my last post, I feel compelled to weigh in on the topic once more. Given the relative unimportance of this issue, on the grander scale of world events, I feel petty discussing this at such length. Then again, if Sarah Palin and the Republican Party are covering up a scandal, they are likely relying on bloggers like me to drop the issue - for fear of perceived pettiness.

Thus, I am offering up a (frightfully simple) theory of how Bristol Palin may currently be in her second trimester, and have given birth to Trig Palin in April. I do not necessarily subscribe to this theory. I don't know who the mother of Trig Palin is and am convinced that, short of a DNA test, we will never know. I merely offer the idea up because it of its simplicity, and because no one has yet discussed it.

Sarah Palin's is a conservative Christian who believes in abstinence-only education. If her daughter did become pregnant with Trig Palin and gave birth to him in April, it is unlikely that Sarah Palin, a politician widely praised for her idealism and steadfast beliefs, would have agreed to put her sexually active daughter on birth control.

As the oldest of five children, whose mother was one of four, whose grandmother was one of 13, I wholeheartedly subscribe to the old wives' wisdom that fertility runs in families. Sarah Palin had (four to) five children. It's not inconceivable that her daughter might also be fertile.

It is also unlikely that, if Trig is Bristol's son, Bristol would be breastfeeding him - which, according to Breastfeeding Magazine - offers almost 100% protection against pregnancy. Many children of the Boomer generation can attest to the fact that the 1950's aversion to breastfeeding resulted in more than a few families with stair-step children.

Bristol Palin could have given Birth to Trig in April, gotten pregnant in May, and be, as the Palin camp states with perhaps telling ambiguity "about five months along."

America, did Britney Spears teach us nothing? [insert snarky grin] Young girls faced with conflicting urges and conflicting values can make some shockingly irresponsible mistakes. Of course, Bristol is no Britney, not by a country mile. But, like Britney, Bristol was reared in a conservative Christian household. And like all young American women, Bristol grew up in a culture in which sexual power and sexual proclivity have been prized as they have been at no other time in history.

Maybe Bristol made a mistake - twice. If so - if Bristol did give birth to Trig, and became pregnant again shortly theareafter, then this young girl is a sobering example of the failure of the abstinence-only sex education her mother champions.

Bristol Palin

2008-08-31T11:33:00.000-07:00

I know I'm a mean, petty person to gloat over the misfortunes of others. That said, it's certainly not the suffering 16-year-old Bristol Palin, daughter of Republican VP Candidate Sarah Palin, may have faced over the past year that has inspired such twisted glee in this (admittedly malicious) progressive. I can only imagine how painful might have been to be an unwed, pregnant teenager in a Christian fundamentalist household - a household with a staunchly anti-abortion governor with national political ambitions at its helm.

If the solid evidence presented in the Daily Kos' August 30 post "Sarah Palin Is Not the Mother" points to the truth, and Trig Palin is VP Candidate Sarah Palin's grandson, not her son, then my heart goes out to Bristol Palin. I believe that any woman, no matter her age, should have the right to choose her own fate and the fate of her unborn child, especially if that child is suffering from Downs Syndrome.

Make no mistake, I do not imply that Bristol Palin would have, or should have, chosen to terminate her pregnancy. I merely claim that she deserved the right to choose her child's fate, both before and after its birth, as does every woman. I am by no means privy to the details of the Palin family dynamics, but I suspect Bristol exercised as little agency in her pregnancy as she will have in the life of Trig Palin.

That said, if the story is true, the hypocrisy of Sarah Palin's poorly orchestrated cover-up of her daughter's pregnancy - and the possible implications on the November elections - calls for full, throaty, chest-shaking, side-splitting belly laughs among progressive Americans.

The heart of the anti-abortion claim is that a pregnant woman should take responsibility for the life growing inside her, and should respect that life by bringing it safely into the world. This argument isn't much different from my own pro-choice beliefs. I believe that a woman should be able to take full responsibility for the life growing inside her; she should able to choose not to bring that child into an over-populated world, where adoption-eligible children are plentiful, if she does not feel adequately prepared to care for her child. Like anti-abortion advocates, I do believe that the unborn are children. But I believe that the world has too many poorly cared-for children to bring more neglected life into it.

What does this pregnancy cover-up really say about Sarah Palin's belief that a woman should take responsibility for her actions? If the Kos' story is true, Palin did not let her daughter take responsibility for her pregnancy or for her child.

No, it's not Bristol and the Palin family's ordeal that is so amusing, it's the hypocrisy of Sarah Palin....

...and the fact that, one night, 11 months ago, the fate of the free world may have rested in the loins of two horny teenagers.

Now, that is irony.

Taxing the Poor

2008-08-13T17:46:00.001-07:00

In case you missed it, here's a link to video of the April PBS NOW program on Alabama's regressive tax structure:

PBS NOW "Taxing the Poor"

During his tenure as governor, my "political crush" Don Siegelman exacerbated the problem of the state's tax structure, which places undue hardship on the poor. Although the car manufacturing plants he brought to Alabama undoubtedly created much-needed jobs, Honda and Mercedes benefited from enormous tax breaks when they came to the state. Those taxes have to be paid by someone.

I Wish I'd Been Wrong

2008-08-11T14:52:00.000-07:00

Back in January, I wrote a post entitled "A New Deal With the Blue-Eyed Devil" - in which I explained why I was beginning to mistrust John Edwards. I was tentatively supporting Edwards' presidential bid at that time.

Edwards' ties to Fortress Investments made me doubt the veracity of his stated commitment to serving America's underclass. As I examined Edwards' employment by and investment in a company with ties to offshore tax havens for the wealthy and subprime mortgage loans for the poor, I came to the conclusion that poverty was more a platform than a purpose for this personal injury lawyer.

Back in January, I deemed Edwards an opportunist. But I maintained then, as I do now, that opportunism isn't necessarily a bad thing. Moderated opportunism, like Obama's reversal of opinion on offshore drilling, may not be pretty - but it is smart politics. Politics is a dirty game - a game that often requires the betrayal of short-term goals in order to achieve a greater end. The ability to seize upon an opportunity that will end in that greater good, even at the expense of one's values, is the mark of a great politician. It takes remarkable moral intelligence to accurately weigh ends and means - to understand which justifies the other and make sacrifices accordingly.

And so, it's not the opportunism displayed by John Edwards in making his wife's illness a focus of his presidential campaign that angers me. Neither is it the hypocrisy of this focus in light of Edwards' extramarital affair with Rielle Hunter. No, it is his blatant disregard for the people whom Edwards' was claiming to serve - the underclass - that makes my blood boil.

By signing up for a foolhardy presidential bid knowing that this affair might surface, John Edwards placed those Americans whom he claimed to serve in peril. What if Edwards had won the nomination? Where would the Democratic Party be now, in light of this affair? Or, more importantly, where would those Americans whom Edwards claimed to serve be?

I think there is little doubt that, if Edwards had won the nomination, this affair could have ruined his chances of winning the general election. By embarking on a presidential bid with an extramarital affair lingering in his recent past, John Edwards failed the American underclass.

Any of the other Democratic candidates, if elected, would have served our nation's poor far better than John McCain would. If Edwards truly cared about "forgotten Americans" as much as he claimed to, he would have conceded the nomination to one of the other Democratic candidates - to a candidate who did not have the time bomb of a nasty affair ticking away in his front pocket.

Edwards' use of $114,000 in campaign funds to pay to his mistress, a novice-at-best filmmaker, for a few months of documentary work adds insult to injury. A millionaire many times over, John Edwards did not "keep" his mistress using his own funds. He used money supporters donated in good faith, instead.

It is clear Edwards' regard for himself, for his own desires and his own ambitions, outweighed his regard for those whom he served.

The American underclass, and those who truly wish to serve it, dodged a bullet with John Edwards. And we have the blogosphere, the Huffington Post in particular, to thank for it. I think the mainstream media would have uncovered the Edwards scandal, eventually. But John Edwards could have secured the VP nomination by then. In our 24-hour news nation, much is often made of little. Considering the near-nuclear fallout of the Rev. Wright scandal, it's not inconceivable to think that a vice presidential scandal on the level of the Edwards/Hunter affair, if timed correctly, could have tipped the scales in favor of McCain.

I wish I had been wrong about John Edwards. Although I never was so naive as to believe that his commitment to helping "forgotten Americans" was entirely selfless, I had hoped that his poverty platform wasn't as self-serving as Edwards is proving it to be.

I Think I Have a Political Crush on Don Siegelman

2008-07-21T12:45:00.000-07:00

Sure, the word "crush" is jejune. And putting "political" and "crush" side-by-side seems a bit flippant, too postmodern to be taken seriously.

But apparently I'm not the first person in the blogosphere to describe pinning one's hopes on a promising politician as a "political crush." And I think, silly though it may sound, the term might just be appropriate.

Any of you out there who have ever been a 12-year-old girl know just what a let-down being a 12-year-old girl is. With the onset of puberty, you see your brash childhood confidence eroded. Once so assured of your talents, your abilities, your bright future - you find yourself hemmed in by insecurity and self-doubt.

Our nation is a 12-year-old girl.

Stay with me...

We were a prosperous nation, brash, confident, assured of our economic and political stature, of a bright future for ourselves and future generations.

Now, in the face of national economic downturn, growing influence of Asian superpowers, and increasing international unpopularity, we're feeling insecure. Our nation has begun to doubt itself and its future. We feel about as deflated as a 12-year-old girl.

And that's why we've begun to get crushes on promising politicians.

A young girl hopes to build a relationship with the object of her crush, to find comfort with him or her. She hopes her crush will help her feel secure about herself and her future once more.

We're looking for a politician who will do just that. We're looking for a leader on whom we can pin our hopes. We're searching for someone who will make us feel secure about our nation and its future.

And Don Siegelman is my new political crush.

As long as I'm making far-fetched comparisons, I'll share my dirty little secret. I'm holding out hope that Don Siegelman may be the South's answer to Nelson Mandela. Sure, it's a hyperbolic and grandiose idea. Don Siegelman's nine months in a U.S. federal prison don't begin to compare to Mandela's 27 years of hard labor in a South African quarry. And the economic stratification of the South, of the nation as a whole, certainly isn't as pervasive or overt as Apartheid.

But, if Carl Rove is made to testify before congress, if Rove and the Bush administration are finally called to account for the politically motivated prosecutions that occured on Attorney General Gonzales' watch, well, I'm about as giddy as a 12-year-old girl when I think of what the future could hold for Don Siegelman.

Siegelman has weathered his prosecution and imprisonment with such remarkable grace, consistently reminding interviewers that his personal struggle is not important. Siegelman repeatedly insists that the implications of his prosecution on American democracy as a whole is the real issue. Hearing him speak, it's easy to see why Rove feared him enough to prosecute him.

See below for Siegelman's interview with Air America's Sam Seder at the 2008 NetRoots Nation Conference.

"Traces of the Trade" - Is It Possible for the Descendents of America's Most Prolific Slave Traders to Ethically Make a Film on Their Family History?

2008-07-08T09:44:00.001-07:00

Filmmaker Katrina Browne's documentary "Traces of the Trade" explores how her Rhode Island ancestors, the DeWolfs, brought over 10,000 West Africans to the United States and Cuba as slaves. I learned about Ms. Browne's film from her interview on the Leonard Lopate Show.*

In her interview with Lopate Ms. Browne states that the DeWolf family "... has the unfortunate status of being the family most invested in the slave trade by virtue of having been involved for over three generations."

Unfortunately, nothing seems unfortunate about the economic situation of a woman who, along with a group of her relatives, can choose to spend numerous months traveling the globe and creating a documentary - a documentary that, despite its important message, seems both self-aggrandizing and hypocritical - if not in its execution, then certainly in its promotion.

It's not that I don't appreciate the topics that Ms. Browne is bringing to the table. I do, very much. The under-explored role of the North in slavery, white America's lack of understanding of white privilege, the importance of establishing a national truth and reconciliation process - these topics have long been absent from our national discourse. I thank Ms. Browne for calling attention to them.

In her interview with Lopate, Ms. Browne readily admits that she was bequeathed immense social and economic privileges by descending from a wealthy and powerful slave trading family. And she calls attention to the social and economic disadvantages that have befallen the descendants of the slaves her family traded. I appreciate Ms. Browne's forthright address of these facts.

I was right there with Ms. Browne through the first part of the interview. "Yes," I thought, "it's about time white people started discussing these issues. It's time we started looking at the culpability of the whole nation, not just the South, in the slave trade and finally addressed slavery's lingering effects."

However, it was Ms. Browne's claim that visiting a dungeon in a slave fort in Ghana made her experience "full empathy" for slaves and their descendants, that got me to thinking...

What in this privileged, white, Ivy League-educated filmmaker's life experience could ever give her the capacity for that kind of empathy?

You got any ideas?

Me neither.

In his book, "Clinical Empathy," D.M. Berger defines empathy as "The capacity to know emotionally what another is experiencing from within the frame of reference of that other person, the capacity to sample the feelings of another or to put oneself in another’s shoes."

According to Berger, to experience empathy for another person, one must understand that person's frame of reference.

So I have a suggestion for filmmaker Katrina Browne. Ms. Browne, if you really do want to experience full empathy, if you want to erase, once-and-for-all the effects your family's slave trade, here's what you can do:

Quit your publicity tour. Hang up the laurels of "bravery" and "courage" the national media, not to mention black America itself, has showered upon you for making this film.

Liquidate everything you own, and divide your assets among the first 1,000 descendants of the 10,000 people your family enslaved that you can find. Burn your Princeton degree; cut off contact with all of your relatives and friends.

And move to Wilcox County, Alabama - one of the poorest places in America, where 72% of the population is black.

Once you get to Wilcox County, take whatever job you can get - without your Ivy League degree or your influential contact list. It will be menial. It will be repetitive. It will be far less satisfying, less creative, less fulfilling than filmmaking. It won't give you the fame that "Traces of the Trade" did. No one will be "applauding your courage" for getting up and going to work the same soul-crushing job every day.

Slip off your Cole's, and walk a mile in the shoes of the descendants of the people your family enslaved.

If Ms. Browne had made this film, and then disappeared into obscurity, entrusting the film's publicity into hands other than her family's, I would respect her. The topics she is addressing are important, and she addresses them intelligently.

But going on a media tour and profiting from her family's slave trading history is not much different than profiting off of the backs of slaves themselves. Even she is not profiting in dollars (which she may very well be, I don't know), she is profiting in fame. And today, that is more valuable than gold (or at least more valuable than the greenback). Fame is influence; it gives the power to pursue one's interests, to explore a million creative avenues, as financial backing is always available for the famous.

But perhaps I am being too hard on Ms. Browne. Her intentions seem noble, and her work with AmeriCorps, detailed in her bio on the film's website, is impressive. Perhaps she is making the best use of the accident of her birth - using the influence she has inherited to serve others. That is much more than I can say for most people born into Ms. Browne's position.

But if I am being harsh, I am the only person that is. I have yet to read an article on "Traces of the Trade" or listen to an interview with Ms. Browne that does anything besides laud her film and her work. If I am being harsh, then I argue that harshness is called for, as no one has yet looked critically at "Traces of the Trade," or the people who have made the film.

Seeing as how I'm a white cracker woman from the South, it's ironic that mine is the only the dissenting voice.

*Note: I was not able to view the PBS broadcast of "Traces of the Trade," as I heard Lopate's interview online, after the broadcast. I look forward to viewing the film when it is released on DVD and will post another bulliten if I find anything in the film that contradicts what I have learned by viewing the trailer and listening to multiple interviews with Ms. Browne.

Are Republicans More Vulnerable Than We Think?

2008-07-06T15:24:00.000-07:00

Are they more vulnerable than they think?

At this relatively early stage of game, pundits have been relying on figures from the 2004 general election to predict 2008 voting trends in the South, segmenting the region into ever-smaller blocks (black male college-graduate Democrats, white female blue-collar Independents, Latino Log Cabin Republicans) and conjecturing as to how much each block will participate and how, based on previous patterns, they will vote.

You can't really blame them, I guess. How many pundits are from the South, especially the rural South? How well could they be expected to understand us? How accurately could they be expected to predict our behavior? Trends really are all they have to go on.

But I argue that these trends do not hold as much sway as we've been led to believe.

My 76-year-old grandmother is registered as an Independent, but she has always voted Republican. She's voted this way because of the sense of security, of stasis, that the party gave her. I think this is the reason many Southerners have so long supported the Republican Party, because it has made them feel safe - safe from tumult, safe from change. Southerners are frightened of change and, perhaps, with good reason. Change has never gone smoothly here.

But in 2008, Republicans no longer make Southerners feel safe.

The Iraq War took a disproportionate toll on the South, on its young men and women and their families.

Hurricane Katrina hit right on our doorstep, affecting many of us directly and devastatingly. And all Southerners, regardless of whether they lived in Katrina's path, maintain deep emotional, if not familial, ties to the storied city of New Orleans - a Dionysian playground for which we hold fond memories.

Then there's the ecomomy, the last remaining textile jobs finally moving south, the gas prices rural Southerners feel so disproportionately, the rising cost of food. We don't trust our dollars to spread as far tomorrow as they did today. Neither do we trust our earnings to rise. We little trust that we will keep those earnings at all.

We no longer feel safe in Republican hands.

My grandmother is voting for Obama this year. I doubt she's the only Southern granny out there who's switching her loyalty. Hey, who's monitoring the disillusioned Independent granny vote these days, anyway?

Reinstate Hank Williams to the Grand Ole Opry

2008-07-06T12:17:00.000-07:00

So it seems that Hank Williams got kicked out of the Grand Ole' Opry for being a bit too rambuxious [read: drunk]. Anyway, the Opry intended to reinstate him, but Hank passed away before they got the chance.

Although the Opry sales scads of Hank memorabilia, they have yet to reinstate him.

If you support Hank Williams' posthumous return to the Grand Ole' Opry, sign this petition.

Also, look for Hank Williams III's album "Damn Right and Rebel Proud," to be released on October 21. If you're expecting the expected, you probably won't dig it too much. This boy ain't nothin' nice.

Could Meth Users Be Spreading Staph Infections?

2008-07-06T11:18:00.000-07:00

A study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) indicates that nearly 19,000 people died in the U.S. in 2005 after being infected with an antibiotic-resistant staph infection, formally known as Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA). As noted in an AP story the New York Times ran in October of 2007, this would mean that, each year, more Americans die of staph infections than of HIV-AIDS, Parkinsons, emphysema or homicide.

Rural communities, particularly communities in the rural South, are thought to be the hardest hit by these staph outbreaks - although infections have gone largely unreported.

The CDC and the Georgia Department of Public Health studied three rural Georgia emergency rooms and three urgent care facilities over two months in 2005. Of the 119 patients who visited these facilities to seek treatment for a skin infection, a full 68% had an MRSA infection. Ten percent of those patients infected with an MRSA admitted to using methamphetamine.

This study suggests that rural Georgia has among the highest rates of MRSA infection in the nation. It also shows that crystal meth-users are five times more likely to develop an MRSA than the general population, a figure that has been confirmed by other studies.

Drug users are not the only people at risk. Anyone who comes in physical contact with an MRSA-infected person can contract the disease, and those living in households with an MRSA-infected person are particularly vulnerable. Unlike other infections related to drug use, meth-users who have MRSA do not spread the disease via injections. Rather, it is contracted via contact with MRSA-infected skin. Meth-users suffer from a feeling of "crawling skin," and are thus prone to excessive scratching. Once an MRSA sore is opened via scratching, the disease is spread through physical contact.

Therefore, the children of crystal meth-users, a vulnerable population with limited access to health care, are at particular risk for contracting the disease. Once MRSA is contracted, they can spread it to other children via physical contact at school. This may, in part, explain the introduction of MRSA into Georgia schools. Despite extensive research, I could not find a health organization, nor a news organization, that has yet investigated this possibility.

With Atlanta serving at the U.S. distribution base for an influx of Mexican methamphetamine, Georgia maintains a high rate of crystal meth use. The deaths of two children due to MRSA recently garnered a front page spot on the Atlanta Journal Constitution. I am surprised that, given the 2005 CDC study, the AJC didn't explore the possible link between methamphetamine users and these children's MRSA exposure.

I am by no means suggesting that the grieving parents of the children that died due to MRSA infections are meth-users. But perhaps it would be useful, in finding the source of these infections, to investigate whether the children could have come in contact with a meth-user or the child of a meth-user. If we can isolate and treat the person introducing the disease into the population, perhaps we can stop its spread.

Of course, these children could have easily come in contact with someone who was infected with MRSA during a hospital stay, as hospital infections account for approximately 85% of MRSA deaths. Contact with a meth user is certainly not the necessary cause.

It is largely my personal experience with MRSA that leads me to believe that the link between meth use and staph infection in the general population warrants further investigation. During the methamphetamine epidemic in my hometown of Elba, Alabama (pop. 4,000), staph infections became rampant. It began with the meth-users. In fact, we locals came to see a staph sore as the surest tell-tale sign that someone was using. However, infections also began to crop up in non-users as well, and in children - although at a lower rate than they did in meth-users. Thankfully, none of these infections was serious, and thus did not warrant reporting to health agencies.

But when I began to see news reports of staph infections here in Atlanta, I wondered why no one was talking about what everyone back in Elba had known: meth use brings with it staph infection, and staph infection can be spread to anyone, whether they use the drug or not. Perhaps I am making more of this connection than there is, based on my own anecdotal evidence. Still, with the number of serious MRSA infections rising steadily, particularly in places like the rural South, it would be reassuring to hear some discussion on the topic.

As Gas Prices Swell, So Could Welfare Rolls

2008-07-05T10:19:00.000-07:00

Clifford Krauss' June 9 New York Times article "Rural U.S. Takes Worst Hit as Gas Prices Top $4 Average" named two Southern counties where gas prices are eating up the greatest percentage of family income - Holmes County, Mississippi and Wilcox County, Alabama.

These heightened fuel costs, combined with a lack of public assistance for childcare, could lead to a dramatic swell in welfare rolls.

Take Wilcox County, for instance, where people are spending a greater percentage of their incomes on gas than they do anywhere else in the United States. The median annual family income in Wilcox County is $22,200. According to a 2006 survey performed by the U.S. Census Bureau, the median cost of full-time daycare for an infant in Alabama ia $5,356 per year. Thus, if a family in Wilcox County is paying the median Alabama cost for day care for an infant child, they would be spending 24% of their income for day care. Tack on another 16% of income for fuel prices, as noted in Krauss' article, and the family has only $13,320 per year to spend on food, housing, clothing and other expenses. This figure is for families with only one infant child.

The outlook is even more bleak for single-family households. According to census data, 27% of Wilcox County families are headed by a female with no husband present. The median income for a single mother in Alabama is $17,311. After child care and gas expenses are paid, a single mother in Wilcox County with one infant child would have only $9,186 per year to cover the cost of food, housing, clothing and all other expenses.

Wilcox County residents find little help in covering childcare costs. In Alabama, he maximum income a single mother with one child can earn and still receive Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) daycare subsidies is $2,280 annually. The Family Guidance Center of Alabama, a non-profit organization that helps provide childcare to low-income families that do not qualify for TANF, currently has a two-year waiting list in most counties, as does Head Start. And that list is getting longer every day.

With the combined costs of fuel and child care, work simply isn't paying for many people in these rural areas.

The most reasonable option for some families in rural areas, particularly those headed by single mothers, may be to forgo the cost of childcare and fuel by leaving the workforce and relying solely on public assistance for food (food stamps), housing (public housing) and other expenses (TANF). By leaving the workforce, these families will distance themselves even further from the mainstream and further dimming their hopes of rising out of poverty.

The New Service Class - Give Me Your Stories

2008-06-23T13:44:00.000-07:00

I belong to a class of poor people who know what "sous-vide" means, would never eat dessert with salt on the table, who laugh when they see "Kobe" beef on American menus, who can tell you all about the '04 James Beard scandal and would never call sparkling wine "Champagne."

I grew up serving in upscale restaurants because that was the only line of work that allowed me to live comfortably while attending college. As an upscale server, I never had to take out student loans to cover my living expenses. And, unlike any bartender, I got off work early enough to make an 8 a.m. class and keep my 3.8 GPA.

I'm not alone.

I belong to a group of young people with limited means and good tastes. We are the 21st-century answer to the European tradition of a professional service class. We're the broke-but-strappy "boomlets," kids whose college careers bore no resemblance to our classmates'. Our boomer parents didn't have the means to pay for our tuition, our books, our apartments, our sorority or fraternity memberships. While our classmates were drinking at a Friday night kegger, we were recommending bottles of wine to their parents, were explaining to them what a mirepoix was. Then, after-hours, we were getting schnokered with the chefs on the restaurant's liquor - exchanging gossip and innuendo in that blunt, cunning, fowl-mouthed manner only upscale restaurant industry folks have.

Now in our twenties, we attend the weddings of our college friends who came from wealthier backgrounds than we did. We snicker when we see them serve wine in the wrong glass, roll our eyes at misspelled words on the menus. The experience is supremely satisfying.

We worked ourselves to death through college, nearly drank ourselves to death during after-hours, but came away with far more discerning tastes than children of the monied class will ever ever have.

And we came away with stories.

Lots of stories...

And so, fellow members (current and former) of the professional service industry, I want to hear your stories. Give me your "sex-in-the-walk-in-cooler" story. (I know you have one.) Tell me about the night you did blow in the bathroom with your Beard-Award-winning executive chef. (Not my story, and I've been sworn to secrecy on it.) Tell me about that time you drank a bottle of Stag's Leap in the middle of Lake Michigan while skinny dipping with your manager, two other waiters, and your Beard-nominated executive chef. (Ok, that one is mine.)

I want to hear them.

And you want to tell them... (I know you do.)

[Insert Cheshire grin here.]

Awesome/Impossible Idea #3784

2008-06-22T09:58:00.000-07:00

Hey, 'yall. Back in the Land of Cotton and back from hiatus. Been wrapped up with the cross-country move (New Hampshire to Atlanta), looking for a full-time writing gig, visiting the 4,000 family members I didn't see during my five-year-stint on the other side of the Mason-Dixon. You know how it is.

Anyway, I'm baaaaack.

Did anybody else hear the This American Life story on Jerry Springer?

Here's my pipe dream for the day: a kind of CurrentTV for the rural working class - a video and graphics-heavy website that focuses on how world events shape the lives of "everyday Americans." Segments would begin by engaging the audience with a question that has direct impact on their lives: "Why am I paying $4 a gallon for gas?" Then, in simple terms and using heavy graphics, it would tease out the answer to that question and provide possible solutions. The videos would also include questions and commentary from "everyday Americans" who bear resemblance to the target audience to keep the audience actively engaged.

And it would be hosted by Jerry Springer.

Seriously, how awesome would that be?

With the exception of Fox News, the media has never tried to reach and inform a rural, working-class audience on their own terms. We saw how well it worked for Fox News. How come Left-leaning media doesn't want to get in on the action?

Plastic Beads

2008-03-24T19:51:00.000-07:00

What do Spring Break, Mardi Gras, St. Patrick's Day, and presidential campaign rallies all have in common?

You probably guessed it from the title - or from this lascivious, if gorgeously rendered, photo.

When our nation falls, our relics will not be Corinthian columns or merchant ships, the Colosseum or Buckingham Palace - they will be plastic beads.

Plastic beads are, in a way, a democratizing force. For all people under 30, regardless of education, intelligence or socioeconomic class, enjoyment of any kind - from a ride down the strip at Panama City, Florida to an Obama rally in Illinois, includes the throwing and wearing of plastic beads.

But as much as I love anything democratizing and am an avid champion of the lowbrow, photos like the one above, taken from what appears to be a personal website, make me ill-at-ease with this social phenomenon - or at least with its origins.

Formerly relegated to Mardi Gras celebrations in New Orleans and Mobile, plastic beads began to infect the zeitgeist when I was 15, the year MTV began filming its Spring Break special in Panama City, Florida. I went to Panama City that year and stood on the balcony of the $30-a-night Panama Inn with my best friend, Bri, smoking pot and watching people ride down the crowded strip of highway that ran along the beachfront.

Thug rap pulsed from expensive extended cab pick-up trucks. Thong-clad girls, some as young as me, stood in the truck beds, flashing their breasts, asses, genitalia - gyrating flaps of flesh in time with beats that spilled from tricked-out sound systems. Onlookers hollered and goaded, throwing handfuls of beads. During Spring Break, the number of beads a girl possessed was a testament to her sexual attractiveness, and to how far she was willing to go to display it. Girls wore the beads proudly, like beauty pageant trophies.

My adolescent ideas about womanhood were largely post-feminist, although I didn't know enough about feminism to classify them as such. I didn't want to feel ashamed of these girls. Their bodies were theirs - young, pretty and, above all, powerful. They had a right to do as they pleased with them. Yet I still felt disgusted with those girls for reasons I couldn't explain at the time. And I was too busy smoking pot and looking for acid to really bother trying.

But looking back, 10 years later, I think that what angered and sickened me then, in my state of total teenage rebellion, was the fact that these young girls weren't so much doing what they wanted to with their bodies than they were behaving as they'd been told to behave.

I was born just a few months after MTV was launched and over the course of my lifetime watched the Great Marketing Machine, facilitated by MTV, capitalize on girls' ambivalence, nervousness and confusion about their sexuality.

MTV offered advertisers an unprecedented opportunity to reach adolescents and young adults via a medium they trusted - a medium that delivered the ultimate in "cool," new music. As anyone with experience or education in marketing knows, the "youth market" is advertisers' golden calf. These are people in the process of making brand decisions that they will carry with them for a lifetime. A highly-suggestible demographic, teens and young adults have not yet chosen Secret over Degree, Lays over Pringles, Honda over Toyota.

They may be sure which brand they like, but these young people are certain to like one thing: one another, up close, preferably involving friction.

[They like sex.]

So the good folks in marketing created advertisements, aired on MTV, that related sex to cell phones, sex to cars, sex to soft drinks, shoelaces and rubber bands. It wasn't long before MTV's programming began to reflect its advertising content. By 1998, the station had all-but-abandoned its music video format for a host of sex-, booze-, and drama-fueled reality TV shows.

I know what you're thinking: Sex sells. Wow. Shockingly insightful, Constance.

Granted. But here's my point: by consistently using sex as a selling tool, MTV and its advertisers are teaching young people that sex is a commodity. They are sending a message that sex, and one's own sexuality, are only valuable if they can produce a reaction in another person (such as purchasing a product or tuning in for a TV show).

"Girls Gone Wild" was not created in a vacuum.

The most often-used, and (likely) most potent, sexual symbol employed in selling products has been the young female body. With consistent cultural reinforcement, young girls have begun to believe that they are valuable to the world only insofar as other people see them as sexually attractive. Of course, throughout history sexual attractiveness has brought young women power. That's nothing new.

But never in history has a culture so consistently reinforced the connection between young female sexuality and power, and never has young female sexuality been linked to power so exclusively. Teenage girls' cultural value has always been partially determined by their attractiveness. But, through the course of history, many other attributes have been deemed important - chastity, charm, domestic prowess, social elegance, cunning, intelligence. Until now, no culture has emphasized female sexual attractiveness at the exclusion of other qualities.

Here's a secret, from a former teenage girl: Young girls are enormously uncomfortable with the importance placed on their sexuality. It seems that overnight girls' bodies go from being comfortable and familiar, something used to climb trees, something they never really think about - to something strange, expanding, leaking, rounding, something that keeps them from swimming or running without embarrassment, something that everyone around them is suddenly very, very concerned with.

The mantle of virginity is a heavy thing to carry around. Thus, the new directive from MTV pop culture comes as a relief for many girls. "Go ahead, get rid of that annoying virginity. Chastity is old-fashioned. Flaunt your sexuality. You are a modern woman. You know what you want. You know want we want. You have the power. Use it."

And that's exactly why plastic beads at Spring Break - and the girls who would put on such a show to get them - insulted by 15-year-old rebel sensibilities. A culture can order girls to be chaste until marriage, as it has done throughout most of recorded history. Or it can tell girls to shrug off the mantle of virginity, be promiscuous and flaunt their sexuality, as it has during the MTV era. But the college "girl gone wild" who flashes her tits is no less doing as she's been told than the Christian girl who flaunts her "purity ring." They're both following orders.

Ba, Ba, Black Sheep, Have You Any Balls?

2008-02-28T06:26:00.000-08:00

No sir. No sir. None at all.

Last night I was bartending, at Strange Brew Tavern in Manchester, NH, where I work two nights a week. Moby, one of our regulars, came in. (His real name isn't Moby, of course, but he's pale, thirty-ish, and shaven-headed. "Moby" is the only name I know him by.) He's in grad school, and the inevitable arc of our conversation, like all conversations with grad students, led to his loans.

I can feel a physiological change I have a rant coming on - feel that change before my brain realizes I'm about to go off. My muscles tighten; my cheeks and forearms begin to tingle. My fingers clench into something halfway between a claw and a fist. Before I know it, my hands are up beside my head; my index finger is pointed, and I'm talking - loud - punctuating the air with my tiny, chipped-nailed hands. I'm talking... way too fast, but clear, words flying through the air like shatter glass in a car accident. I'm into my second sentence before I realize what I'm saying - or that the whole bar is now listening. I smile.

This is why I love bartending.

The following is a more developed, less interruped, and more lucid version of what was said at the bar last night. A rant, with a little esprit de l'escalier thrown in. All characters are real; nicknames are not changed to protect the innocent:

"What if I told you that there's a way to make your student loans go away - or if not go away entirely, then at least be reduced to fair, manageable payments? What if I tould you that with one simple step, taken by a large number of graduates, we could force the entire American educational system to be scrutinized, to be overhauled, to become more fair? We could ensure that the best and the brightest would begin to get the education they deserve - if not for free, then for an equitable price. Instead of top tier education going to the wealthiest and most well-connected, people like our intellectually-challenged president, it would go to the people who would be most able and willing to utilize their education for the good of not just themselves, but our country as a whole. If I told you that, and that all you have to do is one very tiny, totally moral, completely easy, and, for the most part, enjoyable action, would you do it?"

"Of course."

"No you wouldn't."

"Well, what is it?"

"Stop paying your student loans."

He laughed.

"I'm serious. If we all - or just most of us - Hell, 40% might even work - if we stopped paying our loans, it would undermine the entire credit system. And credit, the finance industry, is the United States' single biggest economic base right now. Industry, agriculture - all that has been outsourced. Our economy is literally running on credit - and consciously so. Instead of pushing plows, we push decemils, zeroes, move numbers around. This abstraction, money, and not even real money - backed by precious metals, but the idea of money - backed only by confidence, has literally become our bread and butter. So what happens if a large number of college graduates refuse to pay their loans, if we throw a wrench into the credit system - a wrench far larger and wider-reaching than the current mortgage crisis?"

"Panic, probably," Moby answered.

"But that's just not a good idea," said another regular, a coiffed and strong-jawed thirty-something we bartenders know only as "Psycho Guy" - from observing his relationship with his equally vaipid and unfaithful girlfriend "Psycho Girl." "We'd all ruin our credit."

"How predicitbly stupid, sweetheart," I snapped, angry that this guy had just confirmed my fears about how my idea would be interpreted. "The credit companies can't very well ruin the purchasing power of an entire generation of upwardly mobile individuals. They can't prevent a large number of college graduates from being able to obtain a mortgage. If they did, the entire mortgage industry would collapse. The same goes for a car loan - or anything else we protect our precious credit scores for. They want to give you credit. That's how our economy works. It's the crutch on which Wall Street stands. They can't render large numbers of people ineligible to obtain credit without collapsing our whole economic system... But it won't work."

"Why?" asked Moby.

"Because retards like him," I gestured to Psyco Guy, knowing I was crossing the line between brassy bartender and bitch, risking my job, "have been conditioned to think that their credit score determines their self-worth. And he doesn't have a mind to change. Neither do most people who've attended the finishing schools we call 'universites.' And everyone else - those 'enlightened' students," I kept raising my hands into obnoxious air quotes, "who protested the Iraq war and canvassed for the Obama - all those pampered kids who don't have to work 40 hours a week while taking a full course load and thus have the time to be commited to social change - those people are far too mealy-mouthed and scared of failure to ever put their financial butts on the line."

Moby smiled.

"We're pretty close to the same age, " I said to Mogy. "And I was born in '82, the same year Reagan went into office. What our generation is getting is, frankly, the crap end of Reaganomics. And until we, collectively, realize what's happening to us and find the courage to start taking some real personal risk - that's not going to change."

I refilled Moby's beer and went back to washing dishes.

Bishop Perry Tillis

2008-02-08T10:49:00.000-08:00

Well, I'll be! You spend 18 years in a town with fewer than 5,000 people. You spend your whole childhood in a remote corner of Alabama where your family has lived for more generations than you can count - where your ancestors were the first European settlers (cracker farmers mostly, but still the first cracker farmers). You just assume you know everyone. Then, lo and behold, one day and you discover - via Google of all things - this fascinating bluesman, born in your hometown in 1919, a man who played with all the greats, before they were ever great. After playing the Chicago blues circut for almost 30 years, Bishop Perry Tillis escaped, "dreamy-eyed women and hard liquor" (his own words) and returned to Elba, Alabama to preach the Gospel and continued preaching until his death in 2004.

Check out Rhapsody to listen to Bishop Perry Tillis' music online. Or you can purchase his CD at emusic.com, from which this blurb was taken:

Too Close

Release Date: 25/09/2006

...Studying a map during that first trip [to the United States], [Swedish music historian] Bengt Olsson chose Coffee County at the base of Alabama “because it was the remotest place I could find.” “We got to Elba, Alabama, and asked around about possible local musicians,” Olsson relates. “People immediately mentioned a man named ‘Blind Perry’ and when we found the place we hardly knew we’d found it. The driveway was covered in weeds, the house itself looked abandoned. Dogs were running around. It was not a romantic kind of thing, it was real sad. There he was living all by himself, blind since not too many years back, pieces missing in the wooden floor. He was living in a condition of total despair. Then when he played, the music was so intense, so beautiful! It was like hearing Charley Patton for the first time; it shook me in the same way, musically and emotionally. It was all I could do not to cry.”

Too Close is superlative, one of those releases that not only redresses historical wrongs, but one that you find yourself listening to on repeat without even realizing it. The recordings on Too Close were made by Olsson in ’69 and ’71 and later by a close friend of Olsson’s in ’72, after Terry had gotten an electric guitar. It’s astonishing stuff. The music consists solely of Tillis’ voice and guitar, with occasional percussion caused by his feet stomping the loose floorboards in his house. From the first song, his take on “God Don’t Like It,” a song that advises against the drinking of moonshine, to “Kennedy Moan,” a stirring political number, it is all stirring stuff. Asked about this music’s rarity, Olsson says “I think sanctified blues as a tradition lived on as long as [‘regular’] blues,” but surmises that maybe “sanctified people didn’t buy the records as much, plus you didn’t have sanctified records on jukeboxes except for maybe Sister Rosetta Tharpe.”

Olsson notes that Perry Tillis was a professional musician who traveled extensively back in the ‘40s. “He went everywhere. He literally traveled from Florida to California.” Along the way Tillis met and played with Muddy Waters, with Pops Staples when he still was in Mississippi, and with John Lee Hooker before he went up north. Like a great many blues musicians of the day, from Charley Patton and Bukka White to the Reverend Gary Davis and Fred McDowell, he played blues with both sacred and profane content. Some of the biggest and best early blues singers sang only spiritual-type tunes, so-called guitar evangelists like Ed Clayborn and the great Blind Willie Johnson (who allegedly sought out Tillis in the ’40s to play with him). In the ‘60s, Tillis was converted and devoted himself to his music and his ministry via the Church of God in Christ. He became an itinerant preacher, eventually starting his own church and calling himself a reverend; years later, he made himself a bishop.

On Grove Street - Why the Pollsters and the Pundits Got It Wrong in New Hampshire

2008-01-10T15:40:00.000-08:00

On January 8, election results began pouring in as Erin, my tattooed, pierced, and gruffly sweet bartender, poured my friends and me a pitcher of PBR at O.K. Parker's.

In a weird circularity that illustrated just how media-saturated Manchester, New Hampshire had become - Parker's, a dive bar with a great juke box $6 pitchers, was just across the street from the Palace Theater, where "Dan Rather Reports on Politics" was being filmed in front of a live audience. Digital recording cameras converted Dan and his audience to ones and zeros, which were fed into the broadcast truck parked in front of the Palace, bounced to a stratospheric satellite, back to earth, to a local broadcasting station, and, finally, to O.K. Parkers, where we watched Dan Rather on the bar's TV.

I asked Erin, a Manchester townie, if she'd voted. "I didn't really have time," she replied, "but if I had, it would've been for Hillary." Erin, a bartender and part-time diner waitress is - not surprisingly - white. Most of the people I've met in my eight-month stint living in Manchester, a largely blue-collar former mill town, have been just that, white. But there have been a few, very notable exceptions - the African refugees.

If the pundits had, perhaps, taken a short detour off the well-worn track of the political horse race, and taken a little time to get to know the sometimes-gruff New Hampshire communities half so well as the coached and coiffed candidates, their predictions may have been a little more accurate. So, my reader, since the swarms of press that overtook this Southern transplant's adopted home, the largest city in New Hampshire, didn't find it necessary to stray far from the candidates' beaten path, we'll take a little trip ourselves - down to Grove Street.

When I first came to Manchester, following my boyfriend, I moved into his college apartment - on the top floor of a huge, creaking, clapboard building - hastily erected in the 1820's to house mill workers during Manchester's industrial boom. In 1846 Manchester, New Hampshire, a city named and modeled after history's first industrial city - Manchester, England - was home to the largest textile mill in the world. However, by 1938, competition from Southern textile mills, conveniently located amid the nation's cotton crops and possessing a cheap work force, had caused Manchester's once-great Amoskeag Mill Company to declare bankruptcy. A city still teeming with the descendants of the Irish and French-Canadian immigrants who had flocked to Manchester to work in the mills was now stripped of its most important revenue source. Manchester quickly slid into an economic slump from which it only began to recover in the mid-1980's.

Many of Manchester's residents left the city during the Great Depression, which Manchester felt acutely due to the mill closings, in search of greater prosperity elsewhere. But some, entrenched in their debts and their communities, or both, were either unable or unwilling to leave. These people, of largely Irish and French-Canadian decent, remain the economic and cultural backbone of Manchester to this day, as well as the city's largest population base.

The depopulation of Manchester between the late 1930's and early 1980's left not only the mills empty, but also a number of hastily-erected tenements built to house the immigrant textile workers. Because of the dearth of population and wealth of available housing, leasing apartments in these sprawling clapboard buildings became less and less profitable for landlords. Subsequently, building owners invested little in their properties, and they quickly fell into disrepair.

In 1982, to help bolster the flagging economy and to find tenants for its numerous, poorly-maintained multi-family housing units, the City of Manchester chose to become a federally-designated refugee resettlement area. This strategy, combined with New Hampshire's 1990's technology boom, an influx of Massachusetts residents into income and sales tax-free Manchester, and the expansion of the Manchester-Boston regional airport led to a dramatic economic turnaround for Manchester. So dramatic, that in 1998 Money Magazine named Manchester the "Number One Small City in the East." By the turn of the 21st century, Manchester had become the fastest-growing metropolitan area in New England.

By 2006 a full 10% of Manchester's population was foreign-born, many of them having come to Manchester through the refugee resettlement program. And although many of these refugees are Bosnian, a greater number have come from Africa. Which takes us back to Grove Street...

Our building on Grove Street, like many others on our block, was owned by well-known local slum lord Ted Lynard, who owned most of the buildings on our block. Located on the top floor of a building nearly two centuries old, our "penthouse suite" was big on charm - and not much else. Mushrooms sprouted between the cracks in our bathroom tiles. Three roof leaks went unrepaired, despite repeated requests, for two years. In the winter, wind whipped through the Merrimack Valley and through the quarter-inch cracks in windows that had been warped out of their frames by 200 years of gravity. The only heating source in the sprawling, four-bedroom apartment was a stove with a manufacturer's date of 1953 - four years older than my mother.

But our apartment, so far as I could tell, really was a penthouse compared to our neighbors in the next building over, a building also owned by Ted. They were a seemingly innumerable Somali family - or group of families, I was never sure, that occupied the first and second stories of the house next door.

In the summer, the women of the Somali family - or families - pulled mattresses into their dirt yard around 6:00 a.m., and there, with their children, they spent the whole day. When the men came home from work they joined them there, staying outdoors until at least 10:00 p.m. It sounded charming when my boyfriend told me about it - before I moved into his apartment. I imagined this National Geographic tribalism in the middle of New England and couldn't wait to meet my future neighbors. Their stories, if they'd share them with me, would be so interesting. Before even arriving in Manchester, I had pitched a couple local papers on a human-interest piece on how these families were adapting to New England and how they were enriching Manchester's culture.

It all seemed so fascinating, so charming - until the first morning I woke up in my boyfriend's apartment. We'd been up late night the night before - my boyfriend, Jim Beam and I - celebrating my arrival. It was just after sunrise, and a baby's scream, like a red-hot pincer, tore through my hungover unconsciousness. I was no longer charmed.

There were at least eight children under five living in the house. And one of them was always crying. I came to realize over the months I lived beside them that the volume at which my neighbors spoke, never, ever below a shout, was just the nature of their language - and did not indicate hostility toward one another or a desire to annoy me. But realizing that never did make it less irritating. From sunrise until late in the night, the noise was endless. Babies crying, people yelling - and, in what seemed a particularly insulting gesture, every phone conversation the family had was on speakerphone, outside, with the volume turned up to the max.

And, God help me for saying this, but the famlies seemed to forever be multiplying. And it made me angry. The women's pregnant bellies, wrapped tight under brightly-colored fabric, meant just one thing to me - more noise. I found myself - me, an intensely anti-racist Southern expatriate who spent her college years as a breakdancer in Chicago - I found myself thinking thoughts I'd be embarrassed and ashamed to repeat here or anywhere else.

But the West Africans and my boyfriend's college clan weren't the only people on Grove Street, besides the Mexican family that lived two doors down, the rest of the neighborhood's residents were white and poor - decedents of out-of-work textile laborers, families who had braved Manchester's 70-odd years of economic slump because they were too broke or too bound to their community to go anywhere else.

And just as racism grew up in the disenfranchised post-industrial cities of Britain - such as that city upon which our New Hampshire city was modeled and after which it was named - so was racism fed and fostered in Manchester, New Hampshire. In early 1970's Britain, a lack of economic opportunity in the lower-class communities of former textile towns provided fertile feeding ground for a once-positive, racially-unified movement centered around working class pride - the early skinhead movement - to be infected with a message of racial hatred. Today, the racist skinhead movement maintains a strong foothold in Manchester, New Hampshire, as do other racist groups, such as North East White Pride, headquartered in New Hampshire.

In my childhood in Alabama, I had never met a racist skinhead - nor had I encountered the kind of blatant, ignorant, ingrained racism that I did when I moved to New Hampshire. No matter how abusive and tumultuous the history of race relations in the South may be, in Alabama, we do have just that - a history of race relations. Three hundred years is a long time to learn how to live together.

I certainly do not downplay the horrors of slavery, the hard and violent fight for equal legal rights in the 1960's, the decades of social and economic inequity, or the fact that those inequities blatantly exist today. All I can say is that in the South, in my generation at least, I have begun to see racial cooperation that goes far beyond petty "tolerance." Race relations in today's South is far too multi-faceted a topic to explore in this blog. But, to paint it in the broadest and perhaps most controversial of strokes, I liken blacks and whites in the 21st century South to members of the same dysfunctional family, a family in which an abuser and abused are at last making peace and learning to love, appreciate, and understand those to whom they are intricately tied.

New Hampshire has no such history. Few minorities, and especially few African Americans, ever lived in Manchester until the Refugee Resettlement Program began bringing West African refugees in 1982. The white, low-income, long-term residents of blue-collar Manchester are thus experiencing an acute case of xenophobia. They are living in places like Grove Street among neighbors whose lives and customs they little understand.

I firmly, and, again, controversially, believe that we all nurture a dirty little inner racist inside of us - an evolutionary remnant of tribalism - of the belief that other tribes will steal our tribe's resources and thus we must fear them and protect ourselves against them. In combating racism, I believe it is our first duty to recognize that impulse and guard against it. My encounter with my Somali neighbors ignited my "inner racist" and led to thoughts I am loath to admit. I can only imagine what thoughts and beliefs our Somali neighbors inspired among the white residents of Grove Street, those without the education or experience to be psychologically equipped to deal with people unlike themselves.

As Andrew Kohut, president of the Pew Research Center, laid out in his Op-E d piece for today's New York Times, lower-income, less-educated whites frequently refuse to participate in surveys, thus skewing poll results. This fact, compounded with a growing racism among working-class Manchuians, led to polls that, now famously, inaccurately favored Obama. Additionally, both Obama's father and his last name hail from the same part of the world - the same part of Africa even - as refugees in Manchester's Resettlement Program. This certainly did not bode well for a New Hampshire victory for Obama - or for the pollsters.

But the pollsters and the candidates weren't the only resource the media had in reporting on New Hampshire. New Hampshire does have something besides pollsters, campaign workers, candidates and cameras - it also has residents.

And if the media had focused less on the political horse race and instead taken time to get to know New Hampshire's residents - not just those politically-active enough to show up for debates and rallies, but the run-of-the mill, under-informed residents that comprise the core of New Hampshire's voting base, maybe then they wouldn't have trusted polls that insisted Obama would score a double-digit victory.

They could have started at the airport. My boyfriend, Ashley, is starving artist with a day job as rental counter agent at the Manchester-Boston Regional Airport. A fellow news junkie, he usually stays better-informed than I do, although he mistrusts the political process and is not one to attend rallies. The Obama, Clinton and Edwards campaigns all rented cars exclusively from Ashley's company. At least three reporters from every major news organization rented a car from him at some point during the primary season. Ashley was the first "local" that no fewer than 500 campaign workers and members of the press encountered once they landed in Manchester.

And how many were curious as to whom Ashley was voting for? How many of them asked a single question about his political leanings? Two. They were from the Obama campaign.

We voted for Obama.

The Feudal States of America

2008-01-06T11:18:00.000-08:00

Nearly 1/5 of all the poplulation of my home state of Alabama lives at or below the poverty line. They all shop at Wal Mart. That's just one reason this pisses me off.

NPR Interview "David Cay Johnston on How the Rich Get Richer

Is it just me, or does this smack of feudalism to anyone else? Doesn't it seem that we're all a bit like serfs - paying tribute to the superrich and super-influential?

A "New Deal" with the Blue-Eyed Devil? Examining John Edwards' Ties to Fortress Investments

2008-01-05T09:51:00.000-08:00

Those caramel Carolina vowels, those clear blue eyes - creased with concern and blinking often - that sincere cleft in his country-boy chin... oh Johnny it was love at first sight. You said all the right things "universal health care," "equitable tax laws," "higher education for all," "campaign finance reform," "building the middle class." Johnny, you had me at "war on poverty." I want to believe.

Okay, all snarkiness aside, I do, rather desperately, want to believe in John Edwards. His talking points line up so excellently with what I think are the most important issues facing our country - or at least the socioeconomic sect from which I hail. But alas, it doesn't seem that my favorite candidate has been "putting his money where his mouth is," as it were. Edwards' investment in, campaign contributions from, employment by Fortress Investments - a firm with ties to subprime mortgage lenders and offshore tax havens for the wealthy - has me wondering if I'm falling for a smooth-talking lawyer for whom ending poverty is more of a platform than a purpose - or if John Edwards is just another wealthy, busy, over-invested, and under-informed politician who made a (perhaps forgivable) oversight - or if it really matters at all either way.

Edwards' ties to Fortress Investments were originally reported last spring. For those of you who missed the story, The Washington Post featured excellent reporting on the scandal.

To learn more about Fortress Investments and the subprime lending crisis, click this link:
The Washington Post "Edwards Says He Didn't Know About Subprime Push

And to learn more about Fortress Investments and offshore tax havens, read this article:
The Washington Post "Hedge Fund Ties Help Edwards"

A temporary resident of the state of New Hampshire, I've become an acrobat in this primary circus largely against my own will. Knowing enough about our electoral process to mistrust it entirely, I had decided to abstain from voting in the primaries - changing my mind only one week before the election.

It was the intense press coverage of the 2008 New Hampshire primary that at last convinced me to cast my ballot on January 8. Although my vote may technically be rendered inconsequential by the Democratic National Committee's nominating system, as a New Hampshire resident during the most scrutinized Presidential primary in history, my vote will inevitably count – in some sense. By voting, by showing my support of a candidate in this over-saturated primary-on-steroids, I can do at least a small part to help build the necessary media momentum to propel my chosen candidate to the nomination.

And besides, the postmodernity of a vote counting more within a media realm than it does in an electoral one is just too ironically humorous an opportunity to pass up. So, one week before the election, I was in an unenviable position for a chronically disillusioned twenty-something. I had to stop criticizing the process and the people and learn to, in some sense, trust both. I had to trust in the process at least enough to participate in it and trust a candidate enough to put my vote and my voice behind him or her.

And it was just that - trust - that got me into this pickle. Do I trust John Edwards? I don't know.

Edwards has long criticized our increasingly polarized economy, characterized by the "two Americas - one rich, one poor" he so often cites in stump speeches. But his employment by, investment in, and campaign contributions from an organization that creates tax shelters for the wealthy while profiting from predatory lending practices for the poor, well, that's a pretty big pill to swallow.

However, all of the major Democratic candidates have at least some ties to hedge funds. Although Hillary and Bill Clinton have recently divested their hedge fund portfolios, Hillary still receives campaign contributions from hedge fund companies and is also being assisted in her fundraising by Lisa Perry, whose husband, Richard, is the manager of a $12 billion hedge fund. Meanwhile, although he and his wife have never invested in hedge funds, one of Barack Obama's most important presidential fundraisers, Orin Kramer, is a partner in hedge fund management company Boston Provident Partners LP of New York.

The truth is, the interests of the “common man” can never and will never be truly reflected by the wealthy. I was born a bail bondsman’s daughter, and John Edwards was born a mill worker’s son. But changes in financial situation and social station, do, inevitably, change a person’s sympathies. Although social perceptions of me have changed now that I've made a foray into the professional world, I remain in roughly the same lower-middle-class income bracket to which I was born. And thus I remain emapthetic to poor and working-class plights. I cannot say where my sympathies would lie if I had a net worth between $12.8 and $60 million (Edwards’ Senate financial disclosure documents do not give an exact figure).

If I achieved that measure of wealth, would I see helping those people whom I grew up beside, being a champion of the struggling, would I see it as a purpose – or would I see it as a pitch? Would my humble beginnings be a true motivation, or just something else to sell? Without being in that position, without being John Edwards, I can’t say for certain. But I can certaintly conjecture...

Although my income (starting salaries in public relations are notoriously low), and thus my sympathies, have changed little over these past 2.5 years - working in PR has nonetheless drastically changed my way of defining myself and the world around me. I have begun to interpret all things - the people I meet, my accomplishments, my personal history, the histories of others - less for what they are in and of themeselves and more for the narrative they provide and how that narrative helps accomplish an objective.

This way of seeing the world is an essential skill for anyone working in PR. However, it has been particularly vital for me to master it, promoting, as I did, luxury items among people whose background and financial status bore absolutely no resemblence to my own. I had to vigilently hide the fact that I was living paycheck-to-paycheck, the fact that my family had a Hydra of unfortunate and unsavory problems I was constantly trying to fix, the fact that I'd been places and seen things that would make most of the people I encountered in my professional life wet their pants.

But, at the same time, I had to use my long vowels and "quaint" country upbringing, twisting and molding stories I could rarely tell the full truth about, to market myself as "interesting" and "unique" to those whom I was trying to charm. I don't think it is possible for once-low-income person, especially an attorney, to achieve the measure of wealth that John Edwards has achieved without deeply understanding and internalizing this skill.

Growing up in the rural South, working class at best, as John Edwards did - as I did, has few advantages. But one advantage is the fact that almost no one you'll meet in the great wide world of influence will have the first clue about who you are and where you come from. Thus you are free to write and re-write your own history as need arrises, to fashion yourself as a dirt roads noble savage - abitious country kid, pulled up by his bootstraps and on a mission to pull up the rest of low-income with him. It doesn't matter if the story is really, entirely, 100% true, or if the mission is really, entriely, 100% selfless, only that the story and the mission are effective.

Public relations has taught me this: every narrative can be a product, and every product must have a narrative.

John Edwards needed a platform for the national stage, one that fit with voters’ concerns, the narrative of his childhood poverty gave him that platform. Conversely, the cause of poverty needed a candidate with a narrative for the national stage, and John Edwards had one, ready for the selling. The product is poverty. The narrative is John Edwards’ childhood. And the relationship is reciprocal.

So, do I trust John Edwards as "genuine?" Well, I trust him about as much as I do any other candidate - or any other wealthy person playing chess with the lives of others on a media-mad national stage. I don't trust John Edwards' motives any more than I trust the motives of the Waltons, or the Gates, or the Clintons for that matter. And I don't know that it matters if John Edwards genuinely believes in his platform, or if he only believes in its ability to get him elected, so long as that platform is carried out once he is in office.

But will it be? Do I trust John Edwards to still be committed to bringing social, economic, and educational equitability to this country once the subprime mortgage crisis has cycled out of the headlines and once Hurricane Katrina finally fades from our national consciousness? Not really.

When poverty is no longer splashy, when the plight of the working class is no longer media-viable, will John Edwards care if my hometown in Alabama finds jobs to replace those that fled south with NAFTA? When the White House is dark and he lays his head on his pillow, will the methamphetamine addictions that took over after those jobs left weigh on John Edwards' mind? Once the floodlights are off and the cameras stops rolling, will the three-year waiting list for my best friend to get her son into Head Start wake him at 3:00 a.m.? Or will the fact that my autistic cousin, whose mother died in the methamphetamine epidemic and is forced to rely largely on public aid, will the fact that my cousin can't get Medicad to cover the prescriptions he needs to manage his autism, will that be at the top of John Edwards' agenda when he steps into the Oval Office the next morning?

I don't know. But I kinda doubt it.