Mississippi Memories

In Gulfport, Mississippi, 1998, you could depend on the gracious hospitality from whites and blacks alike, a haircut for just $3 -- and perodic proof of an uncanny racism.

It's hard to relate how bigotry on the Mississippi Gulf Coast was any different from racial indifference you might experience in say, Philadelphia or New York City.

But during my two and half years living on the coast, covering a burgeoning casino industry for the local daily newspaper, driving a cab and fronting the Rockin' Daddy Blues Band, I experienced that unmistakable undercurrent of engrained bigotry.

Listening to the supremisct rhetoric from Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-Mississippi) who rallied in Biloxi/Gulfport Monday for today's Mississippi Senate runoff with Democratic challenger Mike Espy, reminded me of such things.

As an east coast white, yankee boy
lover and player of the blues, I was pretty much naive about the south's present day racial tensions. Hadn't the Civil Rights Act of 1964 gone a long way towards repairing the divide? 

My first night at the newspaper in Biloxi, making calls to find a place to stay, my future landlady asked me over the phone, point blank: "You're not black are you?"

I remember being taken aback. Up north they wouldn't put it so bluntly, and yet so smoothly.

For some folks, definitely a minority, it's like distrust, maybe hate, for the African American race is encoded into their DNA.

On the psuedo-melting pot of the Mississippi Gulf Coast, these bigotries didn't seem as manifest as in the heart of the "deep south," but at times they felt as present as any southern charm.

Cold indifference could seep to the surface of conversations and flow from the mouths of the bigoted as if they were casually asking you to pass the butter at dinner.

I was the only white boy in the blues band. 

On my band's first road trip gig north up Highway 49 to a backwoods joint just off the highway, in between Gulfport and Jackson, the scars of Mississippi's oppressive past and lingering present were evident on Guitar Bo's face.

Guitar Bo, a black man and Mississippi native in his early 60's, was an exceptionally versatile guitar player and genuine good soul. And he was intimately acquainted with the Magnolia state's hateful prejudices.

Bo, surveying the woods-enclosed shack of a bar as we arrived, stopped me outside the bar entrance.

"Now Kevin, you best make sure it's okay for all of us to order drinks from the bar," said Bo.

"What do you mean?" I asked baffled.

"Well, you don't know how some folks still think about black folks in parts of Mississippi," said Bo, his normally light-hearted demeanor, gravely serious.

I told him not to worry and after I ordered a pitcher of beer at the bar, awkwardly ensured there wouldn't be a problem with black band members ordering from the bar.

There were no issues. The owners were gracious. But the visceral concern that Guitar Bo had about open racism, and this, just prior to the turn of the new century, has stayed with me.

I couldn't fathom an east coast establishment on the cusp of the millennium, outright refusing to serve a person due to his or her skin color.

Another time, on a crowded night outside Grand Casino in Biloxi, three older white men agreed to share the cab I was driving with a younger black man.

On the way to the next casino, we all talked, mostly about sports. They were smiling and laughing.

But, after I dropped the black man off first, one of the white guys said concerned: "That boy wouldn't have been speaking so freely 10 years ago, I'll tell you that." 

Huh?

The guy was miffed just by the fact that the black man felt comfortable in my cab speaking freely in the company of white folks?

And I'll never forget how casually the older white-haired, balding barber dropped the n-word as he snipped away at my hair; it just oozed out the way you'd say: "It's a lovely day." 

The barber was ranckled over how somebody on the beach, probaly a kid, threw a seashell at a seagull and killed it. Referring to a story in the newspaper, he made it sound like a mob of blacks ganged up on the poor bird.

I thought of the irony and said little.

It wasn't until later, I realized Mississippi was 130 years behind most states in ratifying the 13th Amendment, and the Emancipation Proclamation Act, outlawing slavery.

Mississippi ratified the amendment in 1995, just a year prior to my arrival on the Coast. But even then, due to some unexplained oversight, the state never officially notified the U.S. Archivist.

It wasn't until Feb. 7, 2013, that Mississippi officially ratified the 13th Amendment, according published reports.

In retrospect, through my brief and amittedly mild encounters with racism in Mississippi, it's easy to imagine the machinations behind such delays.

With Mississippi finally officially on the books supporting the 13th Amendment, what better time for the state with the largest population of blacks than any in the country, to finally get a true representative?

If I could, I'd be voting today for Democratic challenger Espy for the Mississippi Senate.

With a demagogue President, inciting and dividing daily, this Mississippi senate race holds implications not just for the state, but for our nation.

The Pigs

As appears in Counter Punch
https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/11/23/trump-and-his-loyalists-are-animal-farms-pigs

NOVEMBER 23, 2018

Trump and His Loyalists are “Animal Farm’s” Pigs

by KEVIN MCKINNEY

They are the Pigs in Animal Farm, preaching righteousness, peddling preposterousness and hoarding all the “milk and apples” for themselves.

If the demogagic President Donald Trump and his greedy loyalist Republican abettors had their way, the American citizenry would be consigned to a life of Farm-like drudgery.

“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others” becomes the leader pigs’ contorted “Commandment” to the rest of the farm animals by the end of Animal Farm.

As Trump, in a grand Christmas tree ceremony outside the White House yesterday, bestowed more reverence to a harvested tree than he has recently to our fallen war heroes, American lives lost in California’s wildfires or our democratic rule of law, it’s more evident than ever that Trump and his loyalist enablers consider themselves “more equal” than the rest of us.

No brazen lie is too ludicrous. No insensitive criticism is too ugly. No bigoted, alarmist incite is too inflammatory. No obstructive meddling with our justice system is out of bounds.

In the face of Trump’s grotesque persistent disregard for truth, justice and human decency, Republican head hogs led by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and outgoing House Speaker Paul Ryan offer nary a snort nor a squeal of objection.

But, our Conservative leaders’ hero masks are slipping – and their snouts are starting to show.

George Orwell’s 1945 Animal Farm primarily was a dystopian fable on early 20th Century Soviet Communism’s bloody ruthlessness, but Orwell himself, indicated that his simplistic foreboding fairtale held “a wider application” about “power-hungry people.”

“I meant the moral to be that revolutions only effect a radical improvement when the masses are alert..” Orwell writes Politics magazine founder Dwight Macdonald in a 1946 letter.

“What I was trying to say was,” Orwell continues, “‘You can’t have a revolution unless you make it for yourself; there is no such thing as a benevolent dictatorship.’”

Disillusioned Americans, who weren’t so much “alert” as they were desperate, clearly were swindled by Trump’s disingenous populous revolution of sorts.

Now, in the flotsam wake of the midterm election’s Democratic blue wave — demonstrating a new found citizen alertness that will flood the House in January — the mistake of ever allowing a Trump Presidency, is coming into sharp, unsettling focus.

Oppression is oppression. Greed and abuse of power produce essentially the same result whatever the misanthropic ideology – Communism or Fascism or some other hybrid demagogic “ism” to which Trump and his loyalists aspire.

If Washington D.C’s plutocratic pigs had their druthers, Americans would be so dumbed down by the con-in-chief’s exhaustive lies and grating vitriol, endorsed by congressional majority party Republicans, that we would have about as much say in our Republic’s affairs as Animal Farm‘s befuddled barnyard animals had on the farm under the pigs.

“Napoleon is Always Right"

Trump is akin to Farm’s ruthless ruling pig, Napoleon, a Berkshire boar who, Orwell writes, has a knack for “getting his own way.”

Napoleon counted on his propagandist pig, Squealer, who “could turn black into white” to brainwash the farm animals with lies about their tyrannical leader’s supposed benevolence.

Even Clover the mare, who notices the changes the pigs sneakily make to Animalism’s Commandments, eventually is lulled into a sense of complacency, convincing herself that she must have “remembered it wrong.”

As the Farm animals work harder for less, the beloved, but dim-witted carthorse Boxer declares, “I will work harder” and routinely motivates himself by extolling the pigs’ most controlling lie of all: “Napoleon is always right.”

To advance his doubtless premeditated assault on truth and civility from the start of 2017, President Trump has employed his own tag team versions of Squealer – in imaginative mouthpieces Kellyanne Conway and Sarah Huckabee Sanders.

Sanders, White House press secretary, seems eternally lost in an alternate reality where if President Trump “says it, it must be true” – just as Farm’s animals were programmed to parrot of Napoleon, no matter how absurd the lie.

According to Sanders: Mueller’s Trump-Russia probe is a “hoax,” the President wants to protect pre-existing conditions afterall and, despite her boss’ constant maligning of the media as the “enemy of the people,” Trump actually favors a free press.

And we Americans, like Farm‘s flock of mindless sheep taught by Squealer to obediently bleat “Four legs good, two legs better,” are supposed to believe it all.

In the disturbing aftermath of pipe bombs mailed to Trump’s outspoken opponents and horrific hate-fueled mass shootings last month, we were expected to accept that Trump’s relentless fear-mongering of “the other” has had no destructive effect on the American psyche.

Republicans feign ignorance when it comes to explaining the disturbing spike in United States’ hate crimes that coincides with Trump’s exhaustive, malice-spewing 2016 presidential campaign.

The President’s most loyal sycophants – Senator McConnell, Vice President Mike Pence, Senator Lyndsey Graham and House leader Kevin McCarthy and their like – even stumble out of their way to defend Trump’s unrepentant childish outbursts and destructive autocratic impulses.

In the meantime, Trump bungles, connives and insults his way across the American landscape, leaving a destructive path of Reality TV rubble for us to clean up.

He tries to bury a probe into his criminal malfeasance by inserting an unqualified apologist as U.S. Attorney General, snubs our WWI fallen, strong arms The Press and increasingly blathers banalities.

Obstruction — A Majority Party Privilege?

With the looming threat of special counsel Robert Mueller’s “Trump-Russia” investigation wrapping and a blue wave crashing, President Trump, more and more over the past six weeks, has been lashing out like a cornered wild animal.

In the month leading up to the Nov. 6, 2018 midterms, Toronto Star Reporter Daniel Dale reports, Trump made as many “false claims” — 815 of them in 30 days — as he did in his first 286 days as President.

The day after Americans, in effect, voted (in the midterms) to preserve our democratic freedoms, Trump took the gloves off; he went rogue at a White House press conference, revoked CNN reporter Jim Acosta’s press pass (reinstated by a federal judge Friday) and savaged the U.S. Justice department.

Any last vestiges of his mask, or by way of their largely complicit silence, Republican leaders’ disguises, fell away that day.

As if obstructing justice were just another majority party privilege, Senate leader McConnell refuses to allow a vote on a bi-partisan bill that would protect the integrity of special counsel Mueller’s investigation.

McConnell baselessly insists there’s no need for alarm over Trump’s firing of Attorney General Jeff Sessions to replace him with his controversial inside man Matthew Whitaker, a vocal critic of Mueller.

Of course, Trump’s klutzy move to preserve his own hide by snubbing Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who has overseen the Mueller probe from the start, smacks of the authoritarianism abuses Orwell called out incessantly in his lifetime and creatively alerts us to with Animal Farm and his later novel, 1984.

Meanwhile, in America, despite the abject swirl of controversy befitting a crime boss encompassing Trump, the autocratic programming advocated daily by Trump apologist “news” outlets like Fox, even at this late date has so many citizens convinced that if Trump “said it, it must be true.”

As the pigs did in Animal Farmand Vladimir Putin does in Russia, Republicans, led by an authoritarian President, are advocating censorship, increased wealth to the powerful and suppression of the people’s democratic rights.

Pigs Hoarded Milk and Apples; Repubs, Tax Cuts For Rich

Just as Farm‘s pigs reason early on that they need all of the farm’s “milk and apples” to lead the rest of the animals, Trump and his complicit Republican chums insisted at the outset that billionaires’ tax breaks are the key to economic revival for all.

Never mind that Reaganomics trickled down – and out, decades ago. Never mind that corporate profits are soaring, while workers’ wages have stagnated.

And that now, in order to pay for corporate big wigs’ tax cuts, Republicans contrive to carve up the people’s Medicare and Medicaid, while sinisterly eyeing social security benefits.

Who is the real “enemy of the people”?

“The turning-point of the story was supposed to be when the pigs kept the milk and apples for themselves,” Orwell writes in the 1946 letter to Macdonald, published in  George Orwell: A Life In Letters, 2013.

“If the other animals had had the sense to put their foot down then,” Orwell continues, “it would have been all right.”

At the first sign of feebleness, Boxer, the farm’s hardest worker — instrumental in the farm’s success from which the pigs alone capitalized — is hauled off to the slaughterhouse.

Despite the animals’ increasingly desperate circumstances on the farm, Squealer’s barrage of untruths ultimately convince the lowly, overworked animals that “things were getting better.”

Think of Trump’s grandiose claims of new plant openings and soaring jobs numbers. When Fox News’ asked him this past weekend how he would grade his job as President so far, Trump offered, “A plus.”

And look no further than Trump’s scripted, dictator-esque, brainwashing rallies, where gullible Reality TV “fans” pathetically worship a snake oil salesman, cheering on command and smiling idiotic smiles.

Which is Which?

In Farm’s last pages, the pigs have rewritten Animalism’s “Seven Commandments” to suit them, embracing the ways of the animals’ sworn enemy humans.

“Comrade Napoleon” and his fellow privileged porkers have moved into overthrown (Manor Farm) owner Mr. Jones’ farm house, are dressed in his clothes and are walking upright on their two hind legs.

By then, the incoherent sheep under the absolute sway of Napoleon’s propagandist pig Squealer, no longer are sounding off on command: “Four legs good, two legs bad,” but rather, “Four legs good, two legs better.”

Animal Farm leaves us with the animals peering through the farm house dining room window as the pigs inside schmooze and toast mugs of beer with neighboring farmer, Mr. Pilkington and his associates.

The pigs and humans end up squabbling over a card game in which Napoleon and Mr. Pilkington each play an ace of spades.

Who is cheating?

In the novella’s last line, the baffled animals at the window look from face to face, from the humans to the pigs, but: “It was impossible to say which was which.”

Anymore, whether it’s in the company of dictators Trump keeps or among the multi-millionaires and billionaires that our purported Capitol Hill representatives mingle with at home and abroad, it’s becoming increasingly harder to tell “which is which.”

To what degree, weeks from now, the new Democratic House majority protects the Mueller investigation’s imminent findings and gets actionable results, may just hinge on the vigilance of the same Americans who made the midterm blue wave a reality.

There’s no time for typical post-election complacency. The real battle to reclaim our Republic from a manifestly unstable President and his gluttonous cohorts clinging to power, begins now.

And victory is likely to depend not only on our federal courts and newly elected legislators, but on “we the people” sticking to the fight — demanding loud and clear, our fair share of the milk and apples.

Thankful This Thanksgiving

I'm thankful this Thanksgiving. 

I'm thankful to be alive, for this imperfect life that ultimately through its trials and tribulations brings me closer to the knowledge of a creator, The Creator.

I'm thankful for family and friends, for the love for and of my fellow man. (And I think of the souls lost in recent tragedies and pray for their families.)

I'm thankful that Democrats won the House, to give us Americans a shot at reeling in destructive recklessness.

I'm thankful for the work for my hands -- for being able to work along side the Creator's wonderous works -- the ocean, in a seaside village of a town, breathing the seasalt air and listening to the waves crash on the sandy shore.

I'm thankful that God sticks around even when we snub him. He never leaves us, never forsakes us.

Even the darkest days hold a silver lining particularly as we "Trust in him with (our) whole heart." Psalm 3:5

I'm thankful that I know which side I'm on. And I'll always try to stand up for justice as Jesus Christ instructed.

And if I screw up, I'm thankful that His "mercies are new each morning." Psalm 103

And I'm thankful for the hope in knowing that ultimately God is a God of love and justice. And that justice indeed will prevail when it's all said and done.

A thankful heart truly does go a long way. Peace. Happy Thanksgiving.

I See a Storm .. and Blue Waves Crashing

Just so happens that from my work vantage point on the beach this landmark midterm election day, I see, appropriately enough, a storm coming.. and blue waves crashing on shore.
 #BlueWave https://t.co/jAlztjW0Im

A Vote For Republicans is A Vote For Trump

A vote for Republicans translates as a vote for Donald Trump. And we already know how that turned out.

Trump admits he's not on the ballot, but he's sort of running. He's sort of right. 

Reminds what I wrote two years ago and why it's so important to vote Democrat:

https://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/presidential-campaign/304042-the-danger-in-voting-for-trump

Vote With Conscience

(As appeared in the Cape May County Herald, Wednesday, October 31, 2018)

All this talk about "tribalism" tearing Americans apart, and how we need to "come together" as a nation only oversimplifies and masks the truth about our nation's present-day unrest.

It should be no surprise that such simplistically packaged sound bites, along with a barrage of hypocritical policy decisions that are severely destabilizing our democratic ideals, are coming largely from the right.

These guys are good.

Here's a political party, one of the most demonstrably morally bankrupt in the United States' 242-year history, which has given their unprecedentedly disingenuous, divisive, demagogue president a blank check to wreak havoc on the Republic, and they self-righteously suggest that it's just politics.

This growing popular sentiment that each side must have equally worthy stances or agendas is garbage. It seems to me, we Americans don't need so much of a coming together as a waking up.

Republicans and Democrats aren't suddenly coming together for warm group hugs, not without first identifying and admitting to the entrenched root of our animus.

Such feigned affection would merely be mimicking and perpetuating the exhaustive insincerity that has plagued our country in an unprecedentedly visceral way for the past three years.

Often when trying to warn about the divisive, destructive demagoguery of President Donald J. Trump, I've been dismissed as "being political."

As a Christian, certainly now more than ever, I don't consider speaking out against the blatantly un-Christ like behavior of Trump, a not so cleverly concealed wolf in sheep's clothing, as "political."

I consider it being spiritual. And, those who won't listen to legitimate concerns about a reckless, lying president, are in fact the ones "being political."

As I've been saying for some time, we need honesty. We need to break out of the bubble, find our better selves and embrace the truth.

Christians have been owned by the Republican Party for so long that their unquestioning allegiance to the party of conservatives has become an idol.

And it's time to wake up.

The former "moral majority" party has hoodwinked Christians for decades primarily on the singular issue of abortion to otherwise exploit all other "life" issues of the struggling masses.

If my fellow Christians truly want to win souls for Jesus Christ in these dark times, we're going to have to distinguish ourselves from the deceptions of President Trump.

Scripture warns us of false prophets, wolves in sheep's clothing and deceivers of all manner.

Ephesians 5:6 forebodes: "Let no man deceive you with vain words: for because of these things cometh the wrath of God upon the children of disobedience."

It's gotten so bad that the Republican base, including many Christians, ignores and even embraces the policies that hinder the poor, the sick and the elderly, the same folks Jesus taught us to care for.

So much is on the line, such as our environment.

The mid-terms next week are a chance to reel all that in. Vote with conscience.

The future of our Republic depends on it.