Foster Dickson's Blog, page 78

Three Deep Southern documentaries

I discovered back in 2009 and 2010, during my “Patchwork” project, how the national media is only really interested in telling stories of the Deep South when they regard college football, political chicanery, and weirdo-freaks. (To test this hypothesis, I recently started getting a daily Google Alerts again, with the keyword Alabama, and that trend still holds true.) However, there are so many stories from the region that are worth telling, that are worth hearing, and that lend themselves to a more accurate picture of how we struggle with poverty, its root causes, and its attendant social ills. Three recent documentaries tell some of those stories.

“Wilhemina’s War” (2016) was featured in PBS’s Independent Lens film series. It screened last February. The documentary deals with the HIV/AIDS crisis in rural South Carolina.

You can watch the complete film on the Independent Lens website for until July 28, 2016.

Likewise, “deepsouth” (2014) deals with the the same subject matter: HIV/AIDS. This 72-minute documentary won numerous awards.

In searching for information about this film or where you can to watch it, the website reminds us:

*Please note the correct spelling of the title: deepsouth – one word, no capitalization (even at the beginning of a sentence)

Finally, “Trapped” (2016) is a movie that I noticed when Mother Jones magazine covered its release: “This is what it’s like to be an abortion provider in the Bible Belt.”

While this subject gets a lot of play in the news – pro-life versus pro-choice – “Trapped” provides a more in-depth look than two dogmatic opponents duking it out in ten-second sound blurbs.

(Also, if you’re interested in films, South Arts’ Southern Circuit Tour of Filmmakers just announced its line-up of films for the 2016–2017 season.)

Filed under: Film/Movies, Social Justice, South Carolina, The Deep South

Passive Activist #9

We Americans are living with an unprecedented absence of leadership. In the Deep South, we have lived with this void for most of our history, so we’re a little more used to it than the rest of the nation— but that doesn’t make it OK. In the face of Congressional deadlock, soaring national debt, secular/religious strife, rogue policy actions by state legislatures, mistrust of the police, declines in public education funding, exorbitant college costs, internet predators and trolls, crumbling labor unions, global warming, and some psycho who machine-guns a hundred people in a gay nightclub,  the Passive Activist series offers ideas for how ordinary people can create and implement positive change in our own lives. Movements are made up of people.

9. Attend a regular City Council meeting.

You don’t have to get up and speak, just go. Too many people only go to City Council meetings when they have an issue on the agenda, to argue a point, or to resolve to a personal issue. But it’s good for any citizen to head down to City Hall and see what’s going on, too. Someone may raise an issue that you agree should be taken seriously, and if local news reporters don’t cover it, you may never even know that it came up.

Another good reason to go to City Council meetings is to find out what your councilperson is voting for or against, and what resolutions he or she is sponsoring. If you go to a couple of meetings, you may find that your representative doesn’t represent you at all. That would be handy to know in the voting booth the next time those names appear on the ballot.

Third, a substantial audience in those meetings keeps the council members honest. We all watch our mouths and check ourselves when people are watching, and politicians are no different. Leaders having to work out in the open, facing the people they represent is good for democracy— it’s better for democracy than all the flag-waving and party-bashing that TV news pundits or policy wonks could ever do.

Many people regard “politics” as only referring to the Presidency and Congress. A few more understand it also to mean their state legislature or assembly. But the real nitty-gritty of daily life where you live— that stuff gets hashed out at City Council and County Commission meetings. Local ordinances and budgets are of no concern to Barack Obama or Paul Ryan, but their outcomes mean a great deal to the people who have to live with them.

Local councils and assemblies have to make their meeting times and agendas public. Go see what’s going down in your neck of the woods.

Filed under: Education, Local Issues, Social Justice

A writer-editor-teacher’s quote of the week #123

This is not to say that American poetry began in 1900, which is the opinion of those who worship at the altar of modernism, an arrogantly exclusive movement whose idea of making everything new has done so much damage to our national culture. Modernist architects let the beautiful Victorian and Italianate buildings fall into decay in Oakland, where I live, because they saw themselves as the new and rejected the past. It took the postmodernists to restore the buildings, by mixing the old with the new.

— from Ishmael Reed’s “Introduction” to From Totems to Hip-Hop: A Multicultural Anthology of Poetry Across the Americas, 1900 – 2002

Filed under: Literature, Multiculturalism, Poetry, Social Justice, Teaching, Writing and Editing

Apoplectic, or I am more than a number.

In my classes, I’ve sometimes called a student’s grade “that stupid number.” This periodic outburst has been borne out of frustration that some students obviously cared more about the numerical grade than about learning. When I would hand back papers, essays, stories, or poems that I had read multiple times, marked thoroughly and diligently, and scored as conscientiously as I could, I would see some of them look only at the final score and try to hand it back to me; others, usually fewer, would do what I hope they will all do: genuinely read my comments, and even ask for clarification on them. Incensed that my efforts at teaching could mean so little, so much less than the number that I am required to dole out, I sometimes have a minor conniption and call grades what they are: a stupid number.

But I can’t blame the students. They live in a world where numbers matter far too much. The advertised paths to success in life are achieved through numbers: GPAs and test scores lead to scholarship dollars to ranked universities and then to earning potential. All numbers. And social success is now measured by numbers of “friends” or “followers,” or by how many “hits” we can accrue on what we post. (As evidence of this, I get periodic requests on Facebook to “like” things that I’ve never even heard of.) This absurd desire to quantify success has led many people, of all ages, to believe – to genuinely believe – that these numbers matter . . . more than anything else.

In a collective fury not to be left out of the numerical craziness, too many adults buy right in, showing children how to live the data-driven life. Some diligently follow the latest polls and voting results, while they neglect to think critically about what the campaigning candidates are actually saying, claiming through some false wisdom that they only want to support candidates that can win. Closer to home, too many of us care so little for our own privacy that we allow corporations to keep and sell their own tallies of everything we do or see online. A few even buy gadgets and apps to monitor their physical activity and improve their health. Some people even choose spouses or life partners (or lovers on-the-side) based on a website’s algorithms and multiple choice questions! I’m afraid that, one day, people will be having their video-game high scores chiseled into their tombstones, rather than Bible verses or kind sayings.

About this trend, I am apoplectic.

The word apoplectic sounds like either a disease or a really complicated type of poem. Its root noun, apoplexy, really is a medical term: “unconsciousness or incapacity resulting from a cerebral hemorrhage or stroke.” Basically, if you have apoplexy then you blew a gasket in your skull, literally. However, the adjective form of the word, apoplectic, means that you are “overcome with anger; extremely indignant.” So, if you are apoplectic, then you blew a gasket figuratively.

Well, I am apoplectic about the new, digital-era/Information-Age fascination with numbers and data. I am angrily exhausted with the numbers being an end in themselves. I am dead tired of numbers being regarded as qualitative, rather than simply quantitative. That err in judgment is a problem.

Take politics, for example. Last November, The New Yorker ran “Politics and the New Machine,” which focused on the history of polling and the flaws in relying on it. Providing examples of the problems with polling over a century of American politics, the writer, Jill Lepore, explains:

Election pollsters sample only a minuscule portion of the electorate, not uncommonly something on the order of a couple of thousand people out of the more than two hundred million Americans who are eligible to vote. [ . . . ] A typical response rate is now in the single digits.

If this is to be believed, then saying that a candidate is “ahead in the polls” means almost nothing in the grand scheme of national politics. Furthermore, in an Internet Age when fewer people have land-line telephones and when it is illegal to do robocalls to cell phones, pollsters still need to sample both the left-leaning tech-savvy people and the right-leaning land-line types. They are trying “to figure out just the right mix. So far, it isn’t working,” writes Lepore. Yet, we keep paying attention to these numbers . . . when what we should be doing is listening to and thinking about what the candidates say and do— then voting for who we believe in.

In education, the inherent problem with the numbers is equally apparent. While the socially important numbers are a means to an end – a high ACT score or GPA can open doors that might be otherwise closed – they are not a measure of the quality of the person thus described. A person with an ACT score higher than mine is not consequently a better person than I am, nor should it even be assumed that he is better educated. I’ve spent more than a decade around students who have high ACT scores and who have taken and passed AP exams, and I’ve been baffled at how many couldn’t answer basic questions about Western culture and current events— because they focused on “achievement,” not learning. The modern AP craze is not based on learning, but on numbers: a passing score yields college credit hours, which saves the family money. When a number is a façade, not an indicator, the assumptions about that number’s validity become false.

These ideas of mine, about how life ought to be lived, are also the root of my apoplectic attitude about the current trend of having students to do “service hours.” Through the process of quantifying something as wonderful as service to others, we have taught younger generations this: if you are physically present for a certain amount of time while something meaningful is being done, then your obligation to society has been met. And that’s just not so. I don’t care if a person performs a required task for a hundred-thousand-million hours, if the spirit of serving others isn’t in his heart, then all he is doing is going through the motions, which is as empty as simply closing his eyes during a prayer. I get why some schools require “service hours” – because many students won’t do anything that isn’t required – but trying to teach the merits of service in that way only makes service into another burdensome assignment with a quantifiable end-result. “I got my hours,” says the student, to himself and to his parents.

In early March, The New York Times featured a CEO named Joshua Reeves in their Corner Office interview, and I particularly liked his answer to the question, “How do you hire?” He said this:

In school, it’s very clear what success looks like. There’s a framework called grades, and that measures success. In life, there is no rubric or metric. A lot of individuals wrestle with that transition. If people don’t spend the time to be introspective and figure out what they actually care about, then society will give you the only remaining rubric, which is how much money you have. And that does not equal happiness, as people can attest to time and time again.

Shortly thereafter, in answering about his advice to new college graduates, Reeves said:

One of my most straightforward ones is that everyone’s always thinking about what job is best. They want the answer. I try in many ways to just communicate that there is no framework anymore, and it’s about actually trying things, discovering.

 And, my good friends, “trying things” and “discovering” can’t be quantified.

The idea of a leading a good life is qualitative, not quantitative. Nowhere in the Holy Bible, nor anywhere in Church doctrine or catechesis, does it tell me how many times exactly I have to pray or to confess or to attend Mass. There is no cut-off score for getting into Heaven. And my wife, who loves me, has never put a numerical qualifier on her satisfaction with our marriage: no salary dollar-amount, no number of times that I wash the dishes. And I can say with great certainty that my faith and my marriage are two of the best things in my life.

Goodness isn’t measurable— but it is recognizable. You won’t find goodness counting your footsteps or your calories. You can take pride in your GPA, but that abbreviation doesn’t stand Goodness Point Average. And, to be frank, there is no goodness in taking pride in counting your money; we call that greed. Count anything you want, live by the numbers, but you won’t find the answer you’re looking for.  (The novelist Douglas Adams even made the penultimate literary joke by having the answer at the end of his Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy to be “42,” leaving the baffled travelers to wander away, even more confused.)

If you ask me, a good life resides in unquantifiable things: faith, love, kindness, charity, hope, service, learning, wisdom. Each day, when I go to meet my classes, my goal is leave those young people better off than I found them, more knowledgeable, hopefully a little wiser. For me, teaching is about service to others and hope for the future. No matter how many people see me as a mere number-giver, and no matter how apoplectic I ever get about those people, they can never take away from me what I know to be true: education is about the improvement of the individual, which should then contribute to the improvement of society. True education has not been, nor will it ever be, about those stupid numbers.

Filed under: Education, Random, Teaching, Voting

The inaugural Southern Song of the Month

For the inaugural Southern Song of the Month, where better to start than in Mississippi, with “Rocket 88” by Jackie Brenston and His Delta Cats (aka Ike Turner’s band, The Kings of Rhythm.) The song is regarded by many critics and pop music history types as the first rock n’ roll song ever, but you know, there’s always disagreements and arguments about that stuff. Sam Phillips recorded this song in Memphis, and it was put out by Chess Records. “Rocket 88” hit number one in the summer of 1951.

Filed under: Music, Tennessee, The South

A writer-editor-teacher’s quote of the week #122

As I see it, the great virtue of fiction is that it allows a reader to live as many lives in as many settings as there are good stories.

– from “Preface: Is the South Still Southern?” by editor Shannon Ravenel, in New Stories from the South: The Year’s Best, 1993

Filed under: Teaching, The South, Writing and Editing

June’s Southern Movie of the Month

The bleak but endearing 1979 film “Norma Rae” tells the story of a 31-year-old woman in a small town who sacrifices nearly everything to unionize the textile mill where generations of them have worked. Though the story is based on real events in Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina, “Norma Rae” was filmed in the Auburn-Opelika area of eastern Alabama. Watching this film makes us understand the catch-22 circumstances of life in a Southern mill town, where working-class poverty, with all of its attendant ills, is one of the only constants.

“Norma Rae” opens with a very 1970s-singer-songwriter introduction during the credits, then the first thing we hear is the roar of the machinery. After the sentimental acoustic music of the first few moments, the shift is jarring. We first see Norma Rae among a cast of mill workers, both white and black, both male and female, both young and old. They are working, very hard, among this severe noise. After we get this imagistic overview of these characters’ life, we are led to a small room where a few of the workers are on their lunch breaks. Norma Rae is eating a sandwich and talking to her friend, a slim, pretty blonde named Bonnie Mae, when she segues the conversation to her aging mother, who is standing on her other side. But the old woman doesn’t answer— the machinery has given her temporary deafness, again. Norma Rae takes her to the mill’s doctor, who nonchalantly and callously offers a note to take off work, but Norma Rae objects: that will only help until it happens next time!

The film then shifts to Norma Rae’s home life. She lives with her parents, and her two small children. As her mother re-pots plants in the side yard, Norma Rae talks with her father, Vernon (Pat Hingle), a bulky man who wears overalls through the whole movie. During these scenes, both in the mill and after they get home, Norma Rae shows herself to be a feisty firebrand, who speaks her mind and who stands up for what is right. And that will come in handy: while the father and daughter talk, a man comes to the door, looking for a motel room to rent. Their lives are about to change.

The man, Reuben (Ron Leibman), is a union organizer for the Textile Workers Union of America, a New York Jew who has comes to the small Southern town, and who has already been warned by local law enforcement not to stick around. Though he is treated with equal degrees of unkindness by Vernon, Reuben makes it clear that he isn’t going anywhere.

Reuben and Norma Rae meet again in a local motel lobby, where Norma Rae has come to meet an older, married man who is using her for sex. After their interlude, as Norma Rae is getting dressed, she tells her lover that this will be the last time they will. The angry man hits Norma Rae during a barrage of insults, and as she is leaving their room with a bloody nose, Reuben comes to her rescue. His motel door at the Golden Cherry stays open all the time.

As Reuben begins to do his union-organizer thing, standing outside the mill and handing out pamphlets, Norma Rae is among the only ones to speak to him, though the two begin their relationship with a friendly antagonism. Each appears to pity the other, viewing the hopelessness of their respective situations with both humor and resolution. As the organizer’s message collides with the obvious iniquities in the mill, Norma Rae is soon on Reuben’s side . . . which puts her at odds with most of the town.

Through sadly sympathetic scenes, like the one in the motel with her married lover, we surmise that Norma Rae is “easy,” and that character trait has gotten her into an unenviable situation. At a softball game, she runs into her younger child’s father, a man who had sex with her in the back of his car and never did support their subsequent offspring. (Norma was married to the older child’s father, but he has died.) Then comes Sonny (Beau Bridges), another ne’er-do-well, though this one will be one of Norma Rae’s two solaces.

Sonny may be a classic fuck-up whose freak-out at the mill gets him fired, but he is also a good guy. Sonny is all smiles and, after a recent divorce, has a daughter of his own to raise. Within a short span of time, he marries Norma Rae and reluctantly accepts her unionizing ways! Despite his discomfort with having black men in his home – this is the late 1970s in North Carolina, after all – Sonny relents to Norma Rae’s efforts, and even attends the biracial union meeting held in his living room, where a few of the characters confess to the hardships.

Once the players in this drama are all in place, the tension swirls around a classically Southern scenario that mixes the communist suspicions of a fearful working-class, the tenuous leadership of a woman in a Southern small town, the cruelty of the working conditions, and the sexual tension between a Southern woman and Jewish union organizer. The film portrays the way that mill owners could promote troublesome employees to supervisory positions, in order to turn their co-workers against them, and the way that bulletin boards were the communication method of choice (in the pre-Internet days).

In perhaps the most famous scene in the movie, Norma Rae gets fired from her job. She has been asked by management to stop copying down a memo on the bulletin board, which she plans to give to Reuben so he can file a lawsuit. After being escorted around the mill by a throng of men in short-sleeve shirts and ties, Norma Rae tried to go back to work but is disallowed. In response, the tiny woman stands on a table and holds up a quickly made sign, marker on cardboard, that reads simply: Union! One by one, the workers cut off their machines, until the room goes silent – that roar of machinery eerily gone – and Norma Rae is escorted out . . . to a waiting police car.

As Reuben’s and Norma Rae’s efforts move toward a culminating vote in the mill, they are confronted by mill owners and their supervisor-thugs, by union officials who have gotten wind of Norma Rae’s reputation, and by workers who are skeptical about what a union might mean for them. (In a particularly cruel twist, Norma Rae’s skeptical father Vernon has a heart attack on the job, and dies.) Yet, when the crowd is amassed on the factory floor, all sweat and nerves, with Reuben and the now-fired Norma Rae standing outside, the final tally is made: 427 for and 373 against! Cheers erupt, Union! Union! Union!

After the vote, Reuben says a few sheepish goodbyes to Norma Rae and gets into his loaded-down baby-blue Pinto to leave. What will become of Norma Rae and Sonny and the newly unionized mill . . . we don’t know. The credits roll, and that’s all we get.

“Norma Rae” is based on a true story of a woman named Crystal Lee Jordan, who worked in the mid-1970s to the unionize those North Carolina workers. According to an article from the Institute for Southern Studies, the real story goes something like this:

Sutton was only 17 when she began working at the J.P. Stevens plant in northeastern North Carolina, where conditions were poor and the pay was low. A Massachusetts-based company that for many years was listed on the Fortune 500, J.P. Stevens is now part of the WestPoint Home conglomerate.

In 1973, Sutton, by then a mother of three, was earning only $2.65 an hour. That same year, Eli Zivkovich, a former coal miner from West Virginia, came to Roanoke Rapids to organize the plant and began working with Sutton, who was fired after she copied a flyer posted by management warning that blacks would run the union. It was that incident which led Sutton to stand up with her “UNION” sign.

About her unionization efforts, The University of North Carolina’s “Publishing the Long Civil Rights Movement” article on Sutton explains:

Sutton’s activism took many forms and connected struggles for unionization with the women’s movement. In 1974, she appeared in the pilot episode of PBS’ Woman Alive!, featuring Gloria Steinem and Lily Tomlin, and articulated the need for union representation to protect working women and promote gender equity. In 1980, the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union of America (ACTWU) sent her on a speaking tour to promote the union’s boycott of J.P. Stevens’ products. As the “real Norma Rae,” Sutton travelled across the country and even to Canada and the Soviet Union in support of workers’ rights to organize for better wages, fair treatment, and safe working conditions.

A 1975 book, Crystal Lee: A Woman of Inheritance, spawned the film incarnation, which then won a slew of awards, including Oscar nominations for Best Picture and Best Screenplay and a win for Sally Field n the Best Actress Category.

As a work that containing representations of Southern culture, “Norma Rae” does well. Sentimentalism is replaced by stark realism, characters are flawed and honest, and the provincialism of generational poverty is accurate. There are many people proclaiming a simple, dark truth: I don’t like it, but that’s the way it is. Sadly, that’s too common to Southern culture, where exploitation is rampant and where racial fears hamper the efforts of the working class to get together and improve conditions. A pre-Smokey and the Bandit Sally Field does an excellent job of getting these difficult facts over to a larger audience.

Filed under: Alabama, Film/Movies, North Carolina, Social Justice, The South

A Must-Read

If you live in Alabama and haven’t read Vanzetta Macpherson’s May 26 op-ed in the Montgomery Advertiser, titled “Rock-a-bye Alabama,” you need to. I won’t suggest it, then spoil it. Just read it.

This is where we are, folks. I wrote about it last September in a post called “The great many Deep Souths” and remarked on my conclusions, which are very similar to Macpherson’s. Sadly, nothing has changed since last September, except a few more people are fed up. This is where we are . . .

Filed under: Alabama, The Deep South

A writer-editor-teacher’s quote of the week #121

All right. If you’re not here, speak up.

— spoken by teacher Alex Jurel (Nick Nolte) in the 1984 film Teachers, as he is trying to take roll.

Filed under: Film/Movies, Teaching, Writing and Editing

The Sock Capital of the World!

If you missed this story on NBC Nightly News on Tuesday, you ought to give it a look. It’s a brief look at how one sock mill in Fort Payne, Alabama revamped itself to keep up with modern times.

http://www.nbcnews.com/widget/video-embed/692139587732

And if you’re so inclined, here’s the New York Times story about the same mill, from late March 2016: “The Sock Queen of Alabama”.

Filed under: Alabama, Arts, Generation X, Local Issues