Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 210

How Republican missteps turned Alabama blue

Doug Jones defeated his republican challenger Roy Moore to claim Alabama's U.S. Senate seat that was vacated by attorney general Jeff Sessions (Credit: Getty/Justin Sullivan)

If there was one Republican in Alabama the Democrat Doug Jones could beat, Roy Moore was that Republican.

And in a Tuesday night nail-biter, Jones did just that, edging Moore by a mere 1.5 percentage points in a state that hasn’t elected a Democrat to the U.S. Senate since 1992.

So while the Democrats are celebrating a victory in the special election, perhaps it makes sense to ask: How did Republicans manage to lose this seat?

How we got here

Let’s take a moment simply to marvel at the bizarre and cumulatively improbable series of events that ever led us to a “Senator Jones.”

You could say it began in 2014. That’s when Dianne Bentley, wife of 50 years to Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley, a 71-year-old Baptist deacon, began to suspect her husband was having an affair with a member of his staff decades his junior. Dianne planted a recording device in the governor’s office and captured some intimate phone dialogue. The governor attempted to use state resources to cover up his affair. Dianne leaked her tape to the press and the controversy exploded.

Meanwhile, another scandal was brewing. Alabama Chief Justice and conservative firebrand, Roy Moore, was suspended from active service as a result of an ethics investigation stemming from orders he gave to the state’s 67 probate judges to disregard the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision legalizing same-sex marriage. This was, incredibly, the second time in his career that he had been removed from the bench for defying a federal court order.

Back in gubernatorial purgatory, pressure had mounted upon Alabama Attorney General Luther Strange to investigate Bentley. Strange, though, was in no hurry to do this. You see, while the Bentley scandal was unfolding, Donald Trump was elected president of the United States. Trump selected Alabama’s junior U.S. senator, Jeff Sessions, to become his attorney general, thereby creating a vacancy in the Senate.

In this vacancy, Gov. Bentley reportedly saw an opportunity to avoid prosecution. He could appoint Strange to Sessions’ vacated seat, then appoint a new – presumably more sympathetic – state attorney general to replace Strange, and avoid prosecution. Allegedly to facilitate this scheme, Strange sent a letter to the Alabama House of Representatives urging them to slow down on articles of impeachment. In February 2017, Bentley appointed Strange to Sessions’ vacant seat. The public screamed foul at the apparent corrupt bargain.

After nearly a year of ceaseless controversy, Bentley entered into a deal to plead guilty to two misdemeanors, resign the governorship and avoid a more aggressive prosecution. Alabama Lt. Gov. Kay Ivey assumed the office of governor and swiftly moved up the date of Strange’s election by more than a year. Seizing upon this opportunity, the suspended Roy Moore resigned the chief justiceship and announced his opposition to Strange. The race pitted President Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on the side of Strange with Trump’s former campaign director Steve Bannon supporting Moore. Roy Moore trounced Strange by nearly 10 percentage points on his way to the general election.

But at least one more shoe needed to drop. Approximately one month before the election, the Washington Post published bombshell accusations that Moore had serially preyed upon teenagers as young as 14 when he was in his 30s. A flurry of accusations followed, with a total of nine women accusing Moore of some sort kind of sexual misconduct. Before they knew it, Republicans found themselves in a neck-and-neck race with Jones, a former federal district attorney most famous for successfully prosecuting a Klansman who bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church.

A steep hill for any Democrat

Previously, I have argued that in a statewide race, “perceivably any Republican is preferable to perceivably any Democrat.” In an ordinary race, Jones would have been a severe underdog. His base, African-American voters, the young, urban, and the well-educated constitute only about 35 percent of the state’s electorate. Nevertheless, this was not an ordinary race.

Alabama’s Republican Party is predominantly composed of upper-middle class individuals and white evangelicals. Generally, they vote as an homogeneous group. But Roy Moore, like George Wallace before him, has been a perennially divisive figure. He vocally supports an agenda of Christian supremacy such as bringing back state-led school prayers, outlawing homosexuality and barring Muslims from serving in Congress.

Moore’s extremism makes wealthier and better-educated Republicans in Alabama’s cities and suburbs uneasy, but he remains the darling of the hinterland. Rural voters have largely disbelieved Moore’s accusers. They characterize these accusations as contrived attacks upon a man they deeply affiliate with, ginned up by enemies who care more about tipping the outcome of an election than in reporting matters of fact.

Moore’s unique unpopularity meant that, even before the scandal, Jones had a fighting chance. In Moore’s last election in 2012, he only narrowly beat Democrat Bob Vance for the chief justiceship — earning 52 percent of the vote compared to the 61 percent Mitt Romney earned the same day. Moore performed similarly yesterday compared to 2012 — even improving his performance in rural, overwhelmingly white counties. But his losses in more populous areas ultimately outweighed his strongholds.

Jones, like most Democrats, ran up the score in the cities and in the Black Belt — a swath of southern counties where a majority of voters are African-American. Moore did his best in the Wiregrass — counties near the Florida border — and in rural north Alabama. But when you compare Moore’s share of the vote with Donald Trump’s from last November, Moore’s numbers are worse in every single county.

Moore especially underperformed around the suburbs. In Shelby and Tuscaloosa Counties, located south and west of Birmingham, Moore’s share of the vote was about 16 percentage points below what Trump earned last year. In more highly educated counties, such as Madison – home to a NASA research center — Moore also performed poorly compared to Trump.

Future of Alabama and Republican politics

Both the Alabama and national Republican Parties have some soul-searching to do. Roy Moore’s failed Senate bid demonstrates fundamental weaknesses for a political party with a narrow, and narrowing, base of power.

Right about now, Republicans are nervously eyeing their suburban base of support. In the 1970s and ‘80s, the Republican Party carved out one of the most durable coalitions in American political history using suburban voters as a springboard to public office. Last year’s presidential election and this year’s special elections demonstrate that Republicans are healthy in the hinterland, but Democrats are making important headway into the suburbs. As the Republican Party becomes the Party of Trump and Moore, the party that looks the other way on alleged sexual assault and pedophilia, a study from the Pew Research Center shows young, educated and wealthy voters leaving the party in droves.

The Alabama Republican Party has less to fear than their national counterpart, but if candidates like Moore continue to win Republican primaries, that may change. Trump won Alabama by nearly 30 percentage points, and Roy Moore is a unique candidate. But even in highly conservative Alabama, Republicans have a demographic problem on their hands.

Young Republicans, in particular, are not aligned with many Republican values — especially not Moore’s. Presently, there is an effort to remove the Alabama Young Republicans from the state Republican Steering Committee for rescinding their endorsement of Moore. This generational rift will only worsen if the divide between the grassroots and the mainstream wings of the party cannot be mended.

Democrats may use this opportunity to begin digging themselves out from rubble that is their state party. They should begin with disaffected, young, better-educated and suburban voters.

David Hughes, Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, Auburn University at Montgomery

Make Jerry proud: Learn to play guitar the smart way

Jerry Garcia (Credit: AP)

Technology helps us out with pretty much everything these days — whether it’s jogging our memory with calendar reminders for social engagements, giving us turn-by-turn directions when we need it or even helping us turn our lights on and off. It only makes sense that now that’s extending to the hobbies we pick up: including playing the guitar. With this FRETX Smart Guitar Learning Device, you’ll learn to play guitar in a smarter (and less expensive) way than time-consuming and pricey lessons.

This clever device fits any guitar you’ve got lying around — acoustic or electric — and shows you with lights where to put your fingers when playing chords, so you don’t need to know how to read music before you can start strumming. Controlled by mobile app, the FRETX makes it easy to save on lessons while nailing down the basics, giving you immediate feedback on how you’re playing (just like a regular music teacher).

You’ll learn all the basic chords in less than an hour, plus FRETX allows teachers and students alike to share exercises through the app, helping improve your skills. It even connects with 3rd-party apps and is open-source for further developments — so the sky’s the limit for your learning.

Stop playing air guitar, and start planning shows for your own real-life audience: usually, the FRETX Smart Guitar Learning Device is $110, but you can get it now for $69.99.

Pay what you want for a comprehensive coding education

These days, it’s not enough for programmers to be proficient in just one programming language — employers value coders who know a multitude of languages that they can employ to solve problems and develop applications. With this Pay What You Want: Learn to Code 2018 Bundle, you can sift through the best languages to learn — and become a hot employment commodity while you’re at it.

This massive bundle includes ten different courses covering everything from Python to iOS 11, and JavaScript to C#. You’ll learn how to build using the world’s most popular and in-demand programming languages by tackling hands-on projects that give you real-life practice coding.

Whether you’re learning to build high-end, scalable Java applications, using Angular to make your code more efficient, or using PHP MySQL for CMS-based employee management, this course includes something of value for everyone — whether you’re a veteran developer or just getting started.

Here’s how the bundle works: name any price you want, and you’ll unlock the last course, an introduction to R programming. R is invaluable if you’re looking to get into the lucrative world of statistical and data analysis. If you beat the average price, you’ll unlock the entire bundle.

Learn one (or many) new skills today! You can save up to 99% when you name your price on the Pay What You Want: Learn to Code 2018 Bundle.

Alex Jones: Democrats stole the Alabama election with dead people and buses

Alex Jones (Credit: YouTube)

Froth-spewing Infowars host Alex Jones believes the Democratic Party “stole” the Alabama special election in which Doug Jones defeated his disgraced Republican opponent, Roy Moore, through a nefarious, illegal conspiracy. Of course he does.

Jones claimed that the Democrats “had the dead people vote and had the folks bused in in those Democrat areas, and they stole the election.” Jones also claimed that “my research shows Roy Moore probably would have won by six, seven points.”

 

It’s not exactly clear what exclusive research Jones obtained or how it proved Moore would have won the election at this time. No poll had Moore ahead by 10 to 15 points. This one was always going to be closer than that.

“The election was clearly stolen,” Jones added. “The swamp has struck back big time in Alabama. Massive evidence of election fraud.”

Now, it wouldn’t be a true Infowars edition of the blame game if Jones didn’t somehow bring up the Clinton family, so naturally, Jones did. “So it really is biblical what we’re witnessing and the dirty tricks of the Clintons and the dirty tricks of their systems in this country reaching down through into daily life,” he said. “They come after you when you fight. They run intelligence operations. They destroy families. They pay people off.”

To be fair, Jones seemed to put the blame on all political factions in Washington (aka the “swamp”). “They buried Roy Moore under record amounts of vicious campaign ads, total demonization, false reports. The entire swamp, Republican and Democratic parties, ganged up on Moore. That was the program,” Jones said. “That was the operation. And so they’re heralding this as a great sign that they’re going to retake things in 2018.”

Earlier in his rant, Jones had claimed that “the Democrat judge said, ‘Oh, we’re going to erase all the computer files after tonight, on Wednesday morning. So there’s going to be no recount. Ha, ha, ha. Try that, Moore.” It appears he was referring to the staying of a court order that would have forced the state of Alabama to preserve the images of all recorded ballots. In truth it was Republican Alabama Secretary of State John Merrill, a Moore supporter, and Democratic election official Ed Packard who asked for the stay and the GOP-dominated Alabama Supreme Court that granted it. Regardless, the paper versions of all ballots are preserved by the state for 22 months under law.

The unhinged rant follows a hotly contested Senate race, the result of which has Jones taking the seat formerly occupied by Attorney General Jeff Sessions. President Donald Trump took a major gable and threw his weight behind the disgraced Moore, who is accused of sexually preying on teenage girls while he was in his 30s.

The baseless claims of election fraud echo President Donald Trump’s debunked claim that millions of people illegally voted against him in the 2016 election.

[H/T: Media Matters]

The Fempire strikes back

Ann Jones (Credit: Irene Young)

First, for the record, let me tell you my story about another of those perversely creepy Hollywood predators, a sort of cut-rate Harvey Weinstein: the screenwriter and film director James Toback. As I read now of women he preyed upon year after year, I feel the rage that’s bubbled in the back of my brain for decades reaching the boiling point. I should be elated that Toback has been exposed again as the loathsome predator he’s been for half a century. But I’m stuck on the fact of elapsed time, all these decades that male predators roamed at large, efficiently sidelining and silencing women.

Toback could have been picked up by New York’s Finest when he hit on me in or around 1972.  But I didn’t call the cops, knowing it would come to nothing.  Nor did I tell our mutual employer, the City College of the City University of New York. I had no doubt about which one of us our male bosses would believe. I had already been labeled an agitator for campaigning to add a program in women’s studies to the curriculum. Besides, to any normal person, the story of what happened would sound too inconsequential to seem anything but ridiculous: not a crime but a farce.

I didn’t know Toback. I must have seen him at infrequent faculty meetings, but we taught in different writing programs. There was no reason for our paths to cross. Ever. So I have no memory of him until the day I flung open the door of my Chinatown loft in response to a knock, expecting to greet my downstairs neighbor, and in walked Toback. My antennae went up.  How had he managed to get past the locked street door? I remember talking fast, trying to get him out of my place without provoking a confrontation. He agreed to leave with me — to go out for tea or lunch or some little excursion I proposed — but first he insisted on using my bathroom, from which he soon emerged naked. I remember the way he listed the many things he had in mind for me to do for him. Among them, one demand persists in memory, perhaps because it was at once so specific and so bizarre: that I suck and pinch his nipples.

I beat him to the door, furious at being driven from my own loft. I think I threatened to come back with the cops. Something scared him anyway.  From a shop on the street, I watched as he left my building on the run, waddling away at top speed.

Reader, if you think that nothing really happened, then you are mistaken. This incident took place almost 50 years ago and though I hadn’t thought of it in ages — not until his name popped up in the media — the memory remains remarkably raw. I still want to see him marched naked through the streets of Manhattan and Los Angeles to the jeers and uproarious laughter of women.

At the time, Toback was no more than 25 years old, while I was nearly 10 years older, a thoroughgoing feminist, and luckily faster on my feet than him. But recent reports say that, in the 1980s and later, Toback routinely focused his attacks on very young women, some of them teenagers, using promises of film stardom (sound familiar?) to lure them into encounters that left them sodden with shame. He is now in his seventies and, although women have reported his predation several times in major magazines, he was still on the prowl last month and had never before been called to account for his actions.

What could be more despicable than this: that for more than four decades, while he and his kind were allowed to practice undeterred, he only got better at his game of assaulting women.

A Catalogue of Violations

Not long after my run-in with Toback, a university professor from whom I was taking a writing course came calling to discuss my “extraordinary work” and emerged from that same Chinatown bathroom in a similar state of nakedness. (Do they follow some instruction manual I’ve never seen?) By then I was writing and photographing as a freelancer for the travel section of the New York Times, an unpaid task that entitled me to receive midnight phone calls from the drunken travel editor detailing the things I might do for him to insure a “real job” with the Times.  That’s when I became a freelancer elsewhere, always ready to cut and run. I’ve been a loner ever since.

I could tell you stories of other professors, editors, journalists, and TV hosts. But they would be much the same as those we read almost every day now as women go public with their own stories of sexual harassment and worse at the hands of powerful men in the film industry, major media outlets, Silicon Valley, and Congress, among other places. In response, almost every day come new denials, excuses, or half-baked apologies.

Some commentators are now reconsidering Bill Clinton’s record in the sharper light of the present moment.  Others ask if the current “witch hunt” for sexual predators has gone too far.  Expecting inevitable backlash, some recommend that women exercise restraint — as all of us have been taught to do for so many eons — lest some unsubstantiated accusation discredit the stories of thousands of women reporting #MeToo.  I don’t share such tender concern for the reputations of men, especially not that of the president, the self-congratulatory pussy-grabber-in-chief whose followers seem to mistake his behavior for the norm, if not an aspirational ideal.

Discussion of these matters quickly becomes political, eliciting erratic, gender-bending partisan judgments.  Some prominent Republican men called for former judge Roy Moore of Alabama, accused of harassing and assaulting teenaged girls when he was a 30-something assistant district attorney, to endhis campaign for the Senate, while many Republican women in that state, including many who are presumably the mothers of daughters, continue to stand behind him.

At the same time, Democrats parse which of Bill Clinton’s accusers to believe and which not. And who hasn’t thought again about Clarence Thomas?  He was elevated to the Supreme Court by an all-white male Congressional committee despite the thoroughly credible testimony of harassed law professor Anita Hill and the accounts of many other women, similarly violated and ready to testify against Thomas, but never called. Given his long misogynistic history on the court, isn’t it time to look at his testimony again? Did he commit perjury to gain his seat? And if so, what’s to be done about his consistent judicial record inimical to the common interests of women?

It’s Not Just Sex

Little or none of male harassment and predation is truly about sex, except insofar as men weaponize their sad libidos to pin women to the floor. Monstrous men commit what’s called sexual harassment and sexual assault not because women are irresistible but because they can’t resist the rush of power that rises from using, dominating, degrading, humiliating, shaming, and in some cases even murdering another (lesser) human being. (Sexist, not sexual, may be a more accurate adjective.)

Often — especially when the woman is better looking and more talented or qualified than her assailant — he gets an additional powerful kick from having “taught the bitch a lesson.”  A smug sense of power (“When you’re a star… you can do anything”) colors the phony apologies of accused predators. (“It was never my intention to leave the impression I was making an inappropriate advance on anyone.”)  Though a man may be truly sorry to be found out, it’s next to impossible for him, after that blast of solid-gold supremacy, to pretend to even a particle of remorse.

The times call for accusations to be scrupulously accurate. Yet it’s misleading to think of sexual harassment and sexual assault as separate and isolated indignities when in real life one so often segues into the other. Such terms arose in the course of intensive work by feminists of the so-called second wave, which is to say feminists like me who began work in the 1960s and 1970s.  One of our tasks was to expose and document the extent of violence against women in the United States. At that time, misogyny emanated from the pores of patriarchal men, poisoning the very air we breathed. We found overwhelming the violence such men committed against women and girls of all colors who did not conform to their notions of decorative and deferential “femininity.”

The fact that male violence methodically constricts female lives is so appalling that most women simply couldn’t acknowledge it. Psychiatrist Judith Lewis Herman, in her landmark study Trauma and Recovery (1992), described things as they were at the time: “Most women do not… recognize the degree of male hostility toward them, preferring to view the relations of the sexes as more benign than they are in fact. Similarly, women like to believe that they have greater freedom and higher status than they do in reality.”  Beneath the revelations of sexual harassment and assault today lie the same hard-rock foundations of male hostility that Herman described a quarter century ago.

To document male violence and depict how it works in daily life, second-wave feminists tried to break it down into its component parts: discrimination and domination — psychological, sexual, and physical — in the home, the schools, the workplace, the church, the courts, the prisons, and public life. We wrote the history of male violence against women, while exploring its effects at that time and its future prospects.  Our generation produced groundbreaking books on patriarchy (Kate Millet, Sexual Politics, 1970), rape (Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will, 1975), sexual harassment (Catherine McKinnon, Sexual Harassment of Working Women, 1979), pornography (Andrea Dworkin, Pornography: Men Possessing Women, 1981), the battered women’s movement (Susan Schechter, Women and Male Violence, 1982), men murdering women (Diana Russell, Femicide, 1992), and feminist consciousness (Gloria Steinem, Revolution from Within, 1993).  I wrote a history of American women who did not conform: Women Who Kill (1980). For countless women of my generation, this documentation and the movement for change became our life’s work.

The next generation of women thought differently. Many younger women, even some who call themselves feminists today, were persuaded by the hostile counterattack against the women’s movement (meticulously deconstructed by Susan Faludi in Backlash, 1991) that we uptight “man-haters” had wildly exaggerated the violence women face.  They, on the other hand, proudly proclaimed their youth, intelligence, ambition, and control of their own lives. They would not be victims or feminists either. We knew how they felt, for we had felt that way, too, when we were young. Then they went out to work and met the monsters.

To understand what actually happens to women, you only have to listen to or read any of the accounts pouring forth right now to denounce “sexual harassment.”  The stories are laced with fear about immediate physical threats and, more pointedly, with anger and despair about the potential demolition of their jobs, future careers, and life as they had envisioned it for themselves.

From the stories of individual women, it’s clear that predators violate the neat categories of feminist scholarship, shifting seamlessly from harassment to coercion to physical assault, rape, and worse. The “sexual” strategies exposed by these repetitive accounts are similar to those described in police reports on battered women, seasoned prostitutes, and women subjected to incest, trafficking, rape, and femicide. These are stories of the lives and deaths of millions of women and girls in America.

Behind all of them is the deafening sound of a silence that has persisted throughout my long life. But these past weeks have been startlingly different. By now, we — both women and men — should have heard enough to never again ask: “Why didn’t she come forward?” Let this be our own “open secret.” We all know now that a man who assaults a woman does so because he can, while a woman who comes forward, even with our support, is likely to be violated and shamed again — as were the women who came forward to accuse presidential candidate Donald J. Trump.

Now What?

None of this is new, though we tend to act as if it were.  Just last week, for instance, I heard three young women radio reporters explain that women back in the 1970s or 1980s accepted “unwanted male attention” in the office and in life “because that’s just the way things were.” (Harvey Weinstein offered the same excuse: “All the rules about workplaces and behavior were different. That was the culture then.”)

Please, can we get this straight?  Back in those ancient times — the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s — we did not accept violence against women in the workplace or any place else.  It’s true we hesitated to report it to employers or the police, because when we did, we had to watch them laugh it off or send us packing. But we did call it out. We named it. We described it. We wrote books about all forms of violence against women — all those “man-hating” books that these days, if anyone cares to look, may not seem quite so obsolete.

We worked for change. And now only 40 or so years later, here it seems to be. Los Angeles Times reporter Glenn Whipp broke the story of James Toback’s predation based on the complaints of 38 women. Within days that number had grown to 200. By the time I emailed him my story, the number reporting Toback assaults had hit 310.  In a follow-up article, Whipp mentioned that the Manhattan District Attorney’s Sex Crimes Unit wanted to hear from women Toback had attacked in their jurisdiction. I called and left a message, making good my threat to bring in the law after only about 45 years.

For the first time, someone other than my best friends might listen. Somebody might even call me back. But today, as I write, New York Timesreporters Megan Twohey, Jodi Kantor, Susan Dominus and their colleagues describe in hair-raising detail “Harvey Weinstein’s Complicity Machine,” a catalogue of “enablers, silencers, and spies, warning others who discovered [Weinstein’s] secret to say nothing.”  With their collaboration, Weinstein, like Toback, has preyed upon women since the 1970s.

The Times reports that among Weinstein’s closest media pals is David J. Pecker, the chief executive of American Media Inc., which owns The National Enquirer, a gossip rag whose reporters Weinstein could use to dig up dirt on his accusers. Reportedly, Weinstein was “known in the tabloid industry as an untouchable ‘F.O.P.,’ or ‘friend of Pecker.’”  It’s no surprise to learn that another predator who shares that untouchable F.O.P. status in the tabloids is Donald “grab ‘em by the pussy” Trump.

The question is unavoidable: If serial sexual predation disqualifies a man from being a film producer, screen writer, movie star, network newsman, talk show host, journalist, venture capitalist, comedian, actor, network news director, magazine editor, publisher, photographer, CEO, congressman, or senator, why shouldn’t it disqualify a man from being president of the United States? Shouldn’t sexist serial sexual assault constitute an impeachable high crime or misdemeanor?

We may find out. Time magazine passed over the president as its “person of the year” to name instead the “” — the brave, outspoken women who inspired the #MeToo campaign. Pictured on the cover along with actress Ashley Judd and pop star Taylor Swift is a Mexican strawberry picker, using a pseudonym for her safety. Her presence and the arm of an unidentified hospital worker seated just out of the frame signal that we might yet learn how this cultural awakening is playing out in ordinary America for women working in the far less glamorous worlds of fast-food chains, nursing homes, hospitals, factories, restaurants, bars, hotels, truck stops, and yes, strawberry fields.

So where do we go from here?  This train has left the station and rolls on. In some photos of those smart young relentless women journalists at the Times, I’ve noticed that their footwear tends not to stilettos, but to boots, which as every woman knows, are good for marching and for kicking ass. That’s promising.

But since I’ve traveled this route before, you’ll have to excuse me for thinking that when this big train passes, it could leave behind a system — predators, enablers, silencers, spies, and thoroughly entrenched sex discrimination — not so very different from that of the 1970s. And if that happens, no doubt those lying dead on the tracks will prove, upon official examination, to be female.

A leader as malignant as Trump stays in power with help

Donald Trump; Stephen Bannon (Credit: AP/Matt Rourke/Reuters/Carlo Allegri)

Anyone who spends a lot of time studying the mind, behavior, emotions and communications of human beings could have told you Donald Trump was disturbed and unfit to hold the office of president, or any significant public service office, well before he decided to make a run for it. When he did make that fateful decision, there were plenty of warnings from experienced politicians, leaders, journalists, and ordinary citizens alike that this was not a good idea.

It did not take long for experienced mental health experts to speak out, abandoning the equivalent of professional gag orders for the sake of what many considered to be of higher importance and graver concern. They believe Trump is not only “not a good idea,” but a danger to America, to the world and to the existence of American democracy (see The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump). It seems the country has found validity for its own fears and reactions in the analyses of these experts about how truly dangerous he is.

But Trump does not exist in a vacuum. He is not an island. If we keep hysterically reacting to every off-the-wall and totally dangerous tweet until our nervous systems ebb just enough to allow for the new normal, he will continue to terrorize us and eventually obliterate those facets of America even the least patriotic among us hold dear. Trump is the epicenter of a system that, even if frightened by him, or privately confused by his behavior, is nonetheless working very hard to maintain him in power. He is being explained, supported and justified by enablers, and many of them.

When he blows through norms of presidential conduct, they stretch the norms to make room for him, as if we had all agreed presidential norms were far too restrictive and needed loosening. When he lies, they lie right along with him as if there really were such things as “alternative facts.” When he says something openly hateful, it is denied that it was hateful, as if we all don’t share a common language and cultural understanding. When he threatens and humiliates his own staff we are told he is being “reined in,” as if the American public should find comfort in the idea that the president needs to be reined in. And when he turns around and does it again at the remotest sign of competition, we are asked to accept that no one can control him and that controlling him is not in anyone’s job description.

Let’s give some of these dangerous enablers a little benefit of the doubt. It is safe to assume some of them are simply afraid of him. He is a bully and has been his whole life. One can only imagine how he has alternately charmed and seduced thousands of people simply to turn on them or communicate that he would if they ever stepped out of line. I certainly can feel empathy for that. After all, he is very powerful. And a powerful and disturbed man is a dangerous thing.

Let’s assume others are still under the sway of his charm or his big, simple, “let’s get things done” personality, even if reality shows that not much is getting done. They, like any hubristic teenager, can still convince themselves that they are the exception. They may be very motivated to please him and believe that if he is displeased with others it is their own fault. They are under the illusion that he would not turn on them either because 1) they are better; or 2) they know how to manage him. This is a hazardous bet to be sure, but understandably human.

Then there are the deniers. Perhaps they do not feel very secure and so their best survival instinct is to deny what is right before their eyes. Perhaps they keep telling themselves that he will eventually settle down and become a regular president. They may engage in “if only” thinking, as in, “If only the press would just let this whole Russia thing go, he could stop being so afraid and would settle into the job,” or, “If only we could get that tax bill passed, he would relax.” To take in that something is deeply wrong is simply too much for us human beings sometimes, and so the explanation is always that it’s “out there” instead of staring us in the face.

Still others are motivated to further their own agendas. Perhaps they see the ineptitude, impulsivity, delusion, mendacity and how all that in one package is not a great gift. But it is the deal they made. Maybe they even betrayed their own consciences to support him, and now owning that is too hard politically and even too hard psychologically. They have been waiting years to push through a political agenda and conservative judges. The tunnel vision on those issues, as well as the fate of their own political careers, allows them to continue to justify keeping up appearances and keeping him in power, despite the queasiness some may feel.

And finally, there are those who are motivated either by pure greed or lust for power, or both. The desecration of whole swaths of different people (most recently Native Americans, Puerto Ricans and Muslims) and the degradation of a system of checks and balances does not give them the willies, because they hope to capitalize on it. The corporate donors who hope to get rich off the tax scheme, the directors of various departments enriching themselves and holding positions of power they never would have held because are not qualified for them, the racists whose long-disguised hatred is joyfully rekindled every time Trump tweets, all relish the brutish tactics of Trump because none of them truly believes in equality. They wear their lapel American flags while they fail to be moved by the idea of America itself.

Whether we can empathize or not, all of these enablers are endangering us. This president and this administration are so much more dominated by vice than by the slightest desire to be virtuous. Fear, pride, weakness, foolishness, selfishness, and greed are all human experiences and something we are all vulnerable to at some point or another. But when they are chronic and when that chronicity has deleterious effects on others, they need to be challenged. We do not elect people to be run by their vices. Nor do we elect them to ignore the debilitating vices of others also in power. We elect them to be guided by their better selves, to embody and make decisions on behalf of all of us based on courage of conviction, concern for fellow human beings (even above themselves at times), intelligence and good discernment, and some connection to a communal striving toward a better life for all. And the beauty of our democracy is that we can stop electing them and we can make their work very unpleasant if they do not measure up to those high expectations.

So what are we doing about the dangerousness of our president and his many enablers? Could we be enabling them in some way? Do we wallow in our helplessness because we are not near the center of power, nursing our anxiety and letting ourselves off the hook? Are we crippled by our fear? Are we engaging in our own self-soothing denial? Do we pass the buck onto the next person, just cross our fingers, or perhaps sanctify Robert Mueller as our next savior? Are we blinded by our own hopes for a financial reward for suffering this presidency? Do we secretly nurture fears and hatred of other people enough to hope for that wall, ignoring all the signs that Trump has never been who he said he could be?

Trump is not the only dangerous one. Anyone who excuses him and does not hold him to account for his behavior in a serious way every time is enabling, and therefore dangerous. If we are not finding ways to participate in our democracy both to resist the destructive things he is doing and to build enough momentum to get him out of office, we are dangerous as well.

In some collective way, whether we voted for Trump or not, we are responsible for the calamity of this presidency. This is because the epicenter cannot hold if the system changes. And the system cannot change until we hold ourselves and all the enablers responsible. We are all potentially dangerous. But we are also all potentially corrective.

 

Eileen M. Russell is a clinical psychologist in private practice in New York and New Jersey. She is senior faculty at the AEDP Institute, adjunct faculty at NYU/ Bellevue Hospital and faculty at the Trauma Treatment Program at the National Institute for the Psychotherapies in NYC. She is the author of Restoring Resilience: Discovering Your Clients’ Capacity for Healing.

Tax bill’s attack on higher education undermines America’s economic vitality

Howard University in Washington, D.C. (Credit: Library of Congress/Carol M. Highsmith)

With the Senate’s passage of the “Tax Cuts and Jobs Act,” President Donald Trump seems close to notching his first legislative victory — a huge tax cut for the 1 percent. All that remains is the need to reconcile the Senate bill with the version passed earlier by the House of Representatives.

The bill is a travesty. Never have so many been forced to give up so much to benefit so few. The president’s claims to the contrary notwithstanding, this is no wonderful Christmas present for the American people. It’s more like a grimy lump of coal — many lumps, in fact.

In a pair of bills that each runs to more than 400 pages, it is not hard to find objectionable provisions. As a long-time academic, I am particularly appalled by the treatment of America’s colleges and universities, the widespread network of institutions charged with training America’s talent pool of the future.

The Republican plan undermines what its backers claim is their goal: boosting America’s economic vitality. Here’s why.

Targeting higher ed

For instance, as part of its effort to pay for the generous tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy, Republicans aim to impose a 1.4 percent tax on investment income at private schools with endowments worth at least US$250,000 per full-time student. This would affect as many as 70 schools and cost them an estimated $2.5 billion over a decade.

Not only will that shrink the resources available to support research, much of which helps to fuel the nation’s economic growth. It will also make it more difficult to hold down rising tuition expenses, thus closing off educational opportunities for many students from lower- and middle-income families.

Public universities in states like New York and California can also expect to be hard hit by the bill’s elimination of the federal deduction for state and local taxes. Since this change will actually add to residents’ overall tax bills, state governments are bound to come under voter pressure to offset them with tax cuts closer to home, which in turn will require corresponding expenditure reductions. Public universities, by definition, tend to be highly dependent on the public purse for their revenues. That makes them particularly vulnerable targets when budgets are slashed at the state level.

Those of us who teach in the University of California system, for instance, still remember the pay cuts we all had to endure when Sacramento’s budget was hit by the Great Recession of 2008-2009. Funding for the system as a whole was cut by 40 percent, leading to an exodus of faculty, tight limits on new hires and severe limits on financial aid for students. It took years for support of instruction and research to return to pre-crisis levels.

And even more egregious are some “reforms” in the House version that might yet make it into law depending on how negotiations with the Senate turn out. The House bill is far stingier than the Senate’s when it comes to higher education. For example, House Republicans propose eliminating a benefit that lets some taxpayers deduct student loan interest. That too will close off opportunities for many poorer students.

The House bill also takes aim at a break that presently makes graduate school more affordable by allowing students to work as research or teaching assistants for tuition waivers that don’t count as taxable income. Counting these waivers as income would make graduate school unaffordable for tens of thousands of current and would-be students.

All in all, the House bill alone would reduce tax incentives for higher education by an estimated $64 billion over 10 years.

Higher ed’s economic impact

Whatever the final shape of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, the provisions targeting higher education will have adverse economic effects that will be both substantial and long-lasting.

Numerous studies have shown that a college education adds substantially to an individual’s lifetime earning potential. Research by the College Board, a nonprofit that helps students prepare for college, shows that the median income of bachelor’s degree recipients with no advanced degree and working full time in 2011 was $56,500, some $21,100 more than median earnings of high school graduates. Put another way, the benefits of a four-year college degree are equivalent to an investment that returns 15.2 percent per year — over a lifetime. And the earnings premium grows even wider for additional years of study.

Furthermore, over time individual earnings tend to rise more rapidly for those with higher levels of education, and unemployment levels are significantly lower. The evidence is strong that these benefits bolster the overall economy as well.

Zvi Griliches, a Harvard economist who died in 1999 and was a specialist on the topic, found that the historical growth of years devoted to higher education and other advanced training accounted for about a third of productivity growth in the U.S. economy over the 50-year period he examined.

These productivity gains, in turn, translated into higher output and incomes for the economy as a whole, adding substantially to America’s wealth.

Evidence also suggests that regions with a higher proportion of college graduates tend to have lower crime rates, higher levels of civic participation and improved performance across a number of other socioeconomic measures.

Shattered dreams, stunted economy

In its essence, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act embodies a contemptuous disregard for intellectualism and expertise that over time can only erode the quality of the U.S. work force.

Many schools will see their budgets cut; faced with higher fees and tuition, many students will be forced to drop out — their dreams shattered, their earning potential stunted, their contribution to the American economy significantly curtailed.

America will not be made great again by attacking its system of higher education in such a mindless manner.

Benjamin J. Cohen, Professor of International Political Economy, University of California, Santa Barbara

Add extra ports to your MacBook Pro with this USB hub

The one complaint you might have about your glorious MacBook Pro? The major lack of ports. For those times you want to multitask while still maintaining your new tech’s sleek exterior, there’s the HomeSpot USB-C Hub for MacBook Pro.

This utilitarian, streamlined hub adds two USB-C, three USB-A 3.0, an SD and a microSD port to your MacBook Pro — that means you can charge your devices and send out a 4K video at the same time. That’s right, you don’t have to choose between doing different tasks. You can do it all at once.

This handy hub is compatible with 2016 and 2017 MacBook Pro 13″ and 15″ models and gives you significantly more flexibility while you work.

It’s the perfect stocking stuffer for the productivity-driven person — usually, this HomeSpot USB-C Hubs for MacBook Pro is $159.99, but you can get it now for $54.99, or 65% off the usual price.

American Taliban

(Credit: Getty Images)

I had a nightmare some years ago. I had moved from Los Angeles to a southern state that had gone from marginally purple to bright red in the last election. The Republicans held the governorship and both houses of the legislature for the first time in generations, and every day you could pick up the paper and watch them go to work. They didn’t have a state income tax, and most of the state revenue was raised by sales taxes, and a weak economy had caused those to come up short recently, so what did they do? They raised the state sales tax on groceries. That’s right, they raised taxes on food. While they were at it, they raised taxes on drugs. So poor and middle class people in the state would pay more taxes to feed their children and to keep them healthy. But they weren’t finished. They cut funding for education, they cut funding for infrastructure repair, they cut funding for health care, and when Obamacare passed, they refused the funding it offered that would have increased enrollment in the state Medicaid program, causing funding to be cut to hospitals all over the state, and at least seven rural hospitals to close.

There came a night when I woke up sweating from a nightmare. It came to me in a dream that there was a plan behind all of this, an overall design to actually harm the lives of a certain number of citizens in the state. In my nightmare, there was a room where a bunch of men sat around and talked about this stuff. They knew what they were doing. They knew what the results would be. They planned out the bills and the votes, and they passed the laws, and then they carried them out.

Somehow I managed to get myself back to sleep, but when I woke up, I remembered the nightmare vividly. I had a friend who lived in a state in the Midwest who had been involved in politics his entire adult life. I decided I would call him and tell him my nightmare and ask if any of it could be true. Could one political party actually have a plan to harm the citizens ? Was I going crazy?

I asked him, could my nightmare be true? Absolutely, he said. He began describing the county where he lived. He had been on the school board for many years, one of three Democrats on board controlled by a Republican majority. This was a wealthy suburban county with a healthy tax base and a school budget that was in excellent shape every year. What could be wrong with that? Well, the county had enough money that they could fund a study of the problems their schools faced and come up with a program to fix stuff like graduation rates and reading and math scores. Their data in past studies was good enough that had tried funding some solutions, and they worked. If they spent this much, they could increase graduation rates by ten points. If they spent that much, they could increase reading scores at fourth and eighth grade levels.

Then the Republicans reached their limit. They knew that spending another few hundred per student per year would yield specific improvements in graduation rates, the numbers of students who would qualify for college, and so forth. But businesses needed a certain number of high school drop-outs to fill minimum wage jobs. They needed a population with a certain percentage that hadn’t gone to a four year college and would take low-wage jobs. They needed, in short, an underclass, and spending more on education wouldn’t yield one that was large enough. So there they stood with identifiable and achievable goals in front of them.

My friend told me that privately Republicans would admit what they were doing. But they never talked about it publicly. They didn’t for office stating their goals. They came up with other stuff to motivate their voters, “values” issues, “education” issues like school choice and charter schools and vouchers, attacks on the teachers’ union. Behind the scenes, however, they were voting to keep a certain number of their fellow citizens undereducated. They were using their votes to maintain a class of people whose labor would help to make the people who they served rich. It wasn’t cynical. It was purposeful.

Republicans aren’t a political party anymore. They’re the American Taliban. They’ve set out to lay waste to America as we’ve known it, and it’s gotten a lot harder to keep up with them, hasn’t it? The evil buggers have been nibbling away at us like ducks for so long there is hardly any flesh left on our bones. The latest scam they came up with was as predictable as it was venal. The “deficit hawks” in the Republican party who wouldn’t pass a single bill during the eight years Obama was in the White House unless it was “paid for” are in a so-called conference committee splitting hairs over how many trillions they’re going to add to the national debt.

Meanwhile, their gimlet-eyed death ferret speaker of the house just announced plans last week to lay waste to “entitlements.” You remember “entitlements,” don’t you? Those are the programs you actually pay for with your payroll taxes, Social Security and Medicare, which aren’t entitlements at all, but rather the federally established insurance policies that protect the elderly against poverty and disease.

“We’re going to have to get back next year at entitlement reform, which is how you tackle the debt and the deficit,” the Death Ferret said while being interviewed on a radio talk show. Medicare and Medicaid “are the big drivers of the debt” Speaker Paul Ryan explained. “That’s where the problem lies, fiscally speaking.”

Do you see the genius at work here? I mean, just look at them! First they pass a so-called “tax cut” that actually raises taxes on tens of millions of lower and middle class Americans while cutting taxes on millionaires and billionaires and adding trillions to the deficit. Then they use the increase in the deficit to justify cutting the two federal programs that actually work to aid the people whose taxes they just raised.

They do have a plan. We’ve spent the last 10 months watching them carry it out. Part of the plan is to overturn every single thing Democrats did under Obama. They wanted to repeal the Affordable Care Act completely. When squabbling amongst themselves put that out of reach, they started nibbling at it. The tax bill includes a provision they’re currently arguing over that would do away with the insurance mandate that would could potentially end coverage of pre-existing conditions.

They’re not stopping there.They aren’t even pretending anymore. They’re running on this stuff. Suppress the votes of fellow citizens who are black, latino, and poor? Check. Keep them in poverty by refusing to raise the $7.25 minimum wage? Check. Allow owners of restaurants to collect tips and dole them out any goddamn way they want? Check. Take away the ability of teachers to deduct money they spend out of their own pocket to help educate their students? Check. Tax contract workers’ income at regular rates while taxing owners’ pass-through income at lower rates? Check. Lower corporate tax rates while raising workers’ taxes? Check. Repeal the Johnson Amendment so billionaires could make tax-deductible “donations” to churches which could turn around and spend the same money on political campaigns? Check. Make it harder for workers to file discrimination suits? Check. Make it easier for polluters to foul the air and water? Check. Appoint a Secretary of Education who wants to privatize public education? Check. Allow billionaires to deduct certain expenses for their Gulfstreams? Check. Leave in place laws that allow offshore trusts and other tax avoidance schemes used by millionaires and billionaires? Check. Prepare the upcoming 2020 Census so it will provide a population count ripe for corrupt gerrymandering? Check. Pass an insane law that will enable lunatics to carry concealed guns across state lines into places where concealed-carry is illegal? Check.

It’s not a nightmare, it’s a goddamned political program, and they don’t need Donald Trump to carry it out. Everything we’ve seen over the last month proves that every Republican currently breathing oxygen stands foursquare behind this stuff. If they were willing to support Roy Moore’s failed campaign for United States Senate, they’ll do anything. They’re in it for the long haul and they won’t stop. They’ll nibble at our democracy until it’s a skeleton lying in a globally-warmed desert somewhere in a formally blue state where it used to rain.

30 things we love about Alabama

Doug Jones and his wife Louise (Credit: AP/John Bazemore)

Democrat Doug Jones was victorious in Tuesday’s senate election against alleged statutory rapist and Boss Hogg cosplayer Roy Moore, a man, who aside from the sexual-misconduct accusations, is on record saying racist, homophobic and sexist remarks. Even still, the election was painfully close, with white voters (men and women, people with college degrees and not) turning out for Moore.

Given the high-stakes election — which, with Jones’ victory reduces the Republican majority down to just one seat and gives the Democrats an early win ahead of many of the significant elections next year — Alabama has been in the national spotlight all season. Alas, this meant hearing scores sweeping stereotypes and caricatures about the state and its constituents from both the right and left.

More so perhaps than anything else, this campaign and the way it ended should serve to remind people that Alabama is much more than what Roy Moore and costal critics make it out to be. After all, it’s the state where a committed black electorate saw through the politics the GOP candidate represented and answered him with an organized, nearly universal response that swung the final outcome. As writer and teacher Clint Smith aptly tweeted Tuesday night: “don’t erase the lives & experiences of black, brown, & LGBTQ folks in Alabama who don’t subscribe to the same politics as those who are voting for Moore.”

Beyond the battle between Moore and Jones, and even politics more generally, Alabama has produced important civil rights figures, legendary athletes and performers, and is home to various museums, organizations and centers that work tirelessly to make the state and country at large a more equitable, cultured, worthy place.

Alabama, like every state in the U.S. is complicated in both its history and current politics — but it’s important to not negate the people and institutions in Alabama who’ve worked for decades to change its narrative.

This is all to say that there’s a lot of things to love about the red-leaning state once you set aside your preconceptions. Here’s just a few.

Birmingham Civil Rights Institute

This museum and research center tells the story of Birmingham’s role in the fight for civil rights, both as an epicenter in the movement in the 1950s and ’60s and also as an ongoing capital for black people and black freedoms.

Shepherded into being by the city’s first black mayor, it officially opened to the public in 1992, recently celebrating its 25th anniversary. Significantly, it stands across the street from the 16th Street Baptist Church where four young black girls lost their lives after white supremacists detonated a bomb in 1963. While there are several prominent civil-rights centers in the south, Birmingham’s remains one of the largest and oldest.

While tributes to the grace of various civil-rights leaders are many here, this is not a place that hides the ugliness of segregation and racism. Exhibits such as the “Confrontation Gallery” show the daunting white robes and hoods members of Ku Klux Klan wore as they terrorized black communities. It’s not just a catalog of who fought for equality, but a sharp exploration of why they were fighting.

Angela Davis

Political activist Angela Davis was born and raised in Birmingham, and her commitment to social justice has not wavered in over five decades of  work. Davis is most known for her iconic afro, membership in the Communist Party, affiliation with the Black Panther Party and for becoming a political prisoner after being charged with conspiracy, something she was eventually acquitted of after thousands organized for her release.

But Davis has continued to be a fierce advocate for many of important causes nationally and abroad, forwardeding an internationalist and intersectional approach to social justice. Her work includes authoring books connecting the struggles between Ferguson and Palestine, pointed examinations of the prison-industrial complex and meditations on women, race and class.

Davis has spoken out against the death penalty, transgender discrimination and misogyny within civil rights movements and organizations. Simply, she is a tireless champion for the values she learned in Alabama.

Rosa Parks Library and Museum

The Rosa Parks Library and Museum, located on the grounds of Troy University in Montgomery, preserves the legacy of the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the individuals who made such a profound and powerful protest victorious. The museum also highlights the many contributions of the woman who became known as the “mother of the civil rights movement.”

There are several components to the museum, but most notably is an exhibit that functions as a reenactment of the day in 1955 when Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery City Bus to a white man, a moment that many see as the spark that lit the civil-rights movement. No impromptu, unplanned moment of resistance, the move was strategic for Parks and the organizers she worked with. More crucially, the museum shows how it was one part of a larger career of activism and advocacy on behalf of black people and women.

Southern Poverty Law Center

Founded in 1971 by Morris Dees and Joseph Levin Jr., the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has fought and continues to fight against hate and bigotry and defend marginalized people through litigation, education and advocacy in a way that few organizations ever has.

As its website explains: “Our lawsuits have toppled institutional racism and stamped out remnants of Jim Crow segregation; destroyed some of the nation’s most violent white supremacist groups; and protected the civil rights of children, women, the disabled, immigrants and migrant workers, the LGBT community, prisoners, and many others who faced discrimination, abuse or exploitation.”

SPLC is also known for documenting and exposing hate groups, as well as taking on criminal justice reform. The Center has its own magazine called “Intelligence Report” and founded the Civil Rights Memorial located across the street from its center. Both institutions in Montgomery were built around the corner from the church where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. presided as pastor during the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

Evander Holyfield

Heavyweight and cruiserweight champion, Evander Holyfield was already one of boxing’s revered White Hats before the bout in June 1997 when, in a clinch in the third round, Iron Mike Tyson bit off a chunk of his right ear and spit it onto the mat in center ring. Who needs that? Certainly not Evander Holyfield, an Olympic gold medalist who had won and lost and then successfully defended his heavyweight title three times before retiring in 1992, and then abandoned retirement in order to fight Tyson.

What few people recall about the Tyson fight, originally billed as “The Sound And The Fury,” is that when it resumed immediately following his disfigurement, Tyson almost succeeded in biting off Holyfield’s left ear. “The Bite Fight” as it has been remembered was stopped before the start of the fifth round. Whatever he was doing, and whoever was biting him, Holyfield’s always paired determination with true class — a true credit to his state.

Joe Louis

Much like his fellow Alabaman pugilist, Holyfield, the “Brown Bomber” combined technique and raw power to become a champion in the ring. Unlike Holyfield, however, Louis was also a profoundly consequential figure in black history, one whose value is often overlooked by white society.

One of the most famous men of his age and perhaps the first black international hero (most of America saw Jack Johnson as a villain), he inspired crowds of African-Americans to take to the streets, cheering his name during a time when they didn’t have much to cheer about. Long after his career was done, President Ronald Reagan said of the man, “Joe Louis was more than a sports legend — his career was an indictment of racial bigotry and a source of pride and inspiration to millions of white and black people around the world.”

Corretta Scott King

Born in Heiberger, Corretta Scott King was much more than just the wife of Dr. King. She was an author, activist, singer and civil rights leader in her own right. Her advocacy work only increased after King’s assassination as she assumed roles in the women’s movement, founded the King Center and was instrumental in the recognition of Martin Luther King Jr. Day as a national holiday.

 

Jesse Owens & Carl Lewis

Owens is one of the greatest track-and-field athletes of all time. Fellow Alabaman Lewis kept his athletic legacy alive in the latter part of the 20th century. Owens won four gold medals during Adolf Hitler’s 1936 Berlin Olympics, undercutting the Nazi myth of the “master race”. Lewis, for his part, won nine gold Olympic medals and has been called “Olympian of the Century” by Sports Illustrated. Two fast men, one home state.

Doug Jones

Now, what’s good about Doug Jones isn’t just limited to his win over Moore. Nor is it circumscribed by the graceful, simple way he went about campaigning or actually listened to black voters while doing so. As a lawyer, he’s also brought to justice abortion-clinic bombers, prosecuted some of the KKK members who torched Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church in 1963 killing four young girls, held Monsanto to task and more.

 

Muscle Shoals Sound Studio

If you’ve ever had a soul, rock R&B or pop song from the ‘60s or ‘70s by Percy Sledge, Wilson Pickett, Aretha Franklin, Etta James, the Rolling Stones, Bob Seger or many others stuck in your head, there’s a decent chance it came out of this out-of-the-way studio with instrumentals from the legendary Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section. While off the beaten path, it’s ground zero for much of the music that provides the soundtrack for America.

 

Frank Lloyd Wright’s Rosenbaum House

While nowhere near as famous or spectacular as the architect’s “Falling Water” house, this ranch-style, single-family home in Florence may be just as influential and is certainly more livable. Warm, yet angular, welcoming, yet bold, it offers not just a model for the ideal modern home, but a blueprint for living happily with arresting architecture, not just cooped up in it.

 

The U.S. Space and Rocket Center

Located in Huntsville, it’s not just one of the largest museums dedicated to space exploration, it’s one of the most open and welcoming. From the titanic rockets that boosted the early days of the American space program outside, to the simulators and exhibits inside, it makes exploration technology something as approachable, touchable and inspiring as it should be.

U.S. Veterans Memorial Museum

Similarly, this other Huntsville institution, “where every day is Veterans Day,” doesn’t keep history under wraps. Unlike the marble monuments to our service members all over our country, this museum takes visitors up close to the arms they carried, the items they used and, in its outside portion, the vehicles they rode in.

 

Alabama Football

Simply put, Alabama owns college football. The Alabama Crimson Tide and the Auburn Tigers have set the standard with 21 National Championships between them. The names on the field are legendary — Bear Bryant, Joe Namath, Bo Jackson, Cam Newton — and the annual Iron Bowl between the state rivals is a classic.

SAW’s Soul Kitchen and BBQ

No one does soul food and BBQ quite like the south and SAW’s is a staple in Alabama. The pork and greens is a patron favorite, but the menu of these sister restaurants offers many, many more mouth-watering options. Don’t leave the state without a visit.

 

Hangout Music Fest

Once a year, people travel from all over the South to let loose at this three-day music festival on the beaches of Gulf Shores. At what some may consider to be the Coachella of Alabama, musical artists such as The Black Keys, The Killers, the late Tom Petty and Stevie Wonder have all graced the stage in the last few years.

 

Alabama Wildlife Rehabilitation Center

Located in Oak Mountain State Park, it’s the oldest wildlife rehabilitation center in Alabama and cares for almost 2,000 bird patients every year. What started as a volunteer-based organization in 1977 has now grown into one of the largest, and most vibrant, wildlife rehabilitation centers in the country.

 

Highlands Bar & Grill

This French restaurant features a menu that changes daily, making it a place both tourists and residents can return to since its foundation in 1982. But the experience at Highlands Bar & Grill goes beyond just the cuisine. Fine dining Alabama-style, it’s a cultural institution.

 

Dexter Parsonage Museum

Another iconic landmark for the civil rights movement, the Dexter Parsonage Museum is famous for being the home where Dr. King and his family lived during some of his most productive, consequential years. A center point for the Montgomery Bus Boycott, it’s a tangible artifact from those days you can walk into.

 

Ave Maria Grotto

A synthesis of religious kitsch, folk-art splendor and Christian reverence, Ave Maria Grotto presents itself as a series of miniature landmarks, from Jerusalem to the Vatican, painstakingly crafted by a monk, Brother Joseph Zoettl. Despite being off the beaten path, Ave Maria Grotto has taken its place in the canon of American folk-art monuments, likely because it’s so quintessentially American.

Fort Gaines

The site is famous for its role in the Battle of Mobile Bay during the Civil War and remains home to many of its relics including original cannons, the massive brick fortifications and the anchor from Admiral David Farragut’s flagship, USS Hartford. More than just an attraction for history buffs, though, Fort Gaines sits right at the lip of the Gulf on Dauphin Island, a beautiful location in and of itself.

Hank Aaron & Willie Mays

Alabama is home to two of the greatest, and most idiosyncratic, baseball legends. Aaron went straight from playing in an Alabama city league to the national level where he eventually broke Babe Ruth’s homerun record with a certain quiet grace and dignity. Mays, the “Say Hey Kid,” was far more flash and dash, but no less talented. Famously, he’s been in the starting lineup for more MLB All-Star Games than any other player in history.

 

Mia Hamm & Bo Jackson

And that’s not the end to Alabama’s athletic legacy. Not only is Hamm a two-time FIFA Women’s World Cup winner, she’s also a two-time gold medalist. Bo Jackson, an Auburn alum, is the famously multi-faceted athlete who played both baseball and football, becoming a massively popular all-star in both sports on the professional level.

 

USS Alabama Battleship Memorial Park

This relic South Dakota-class battleship is the sixth to be named after the State of Alabama. Commissioned in 1942 and a veteran of both theaters of World War II with nine battle stars, she’s a must-see sight for history fans passing through Mobile. She sits moored next to other attractions such as an aviation museum, an outdoors arms gallery and the submarine USS Drum, a World War II survivor herself.

 

W.C. Handy & Hank Williams

And, yes, many famous musicians have called Alabama home, including W.C. Handy. Born in Florence, Alabama, in 1873, the African-American composer was so influential he’s become known as the “Father of Blues.” Hank Williams, too, helped lay the brickwork for an entire genre. The Mount Olive native is perhaps the quintessential country star and, overall, one of the most influential singers of the 20th century.

 

Helen Keller

Born in Tuscumbia just 19 months before she lost her sight and hearing, Keller’s writing and, at times, speech transformed the way the world views disability. Through the help of Anne Sullivan and others, Keller overcame what many at the time viewed as the permanent isolation of deafness, dumbness and blindness to become perhaps the best advocate for the disabled this nation has ever had and a co-founder of the ACLU. It is through her example that many began to view physical limitations as obstacles to be overcome, not permanent boundaries.

 

Acre Restaurant

Located on one full acre of land in Auburn’s historic downtown, the aptly named Acre is a farm-to-table operation owned by Alabama-born and San Antonio-raised Executive Chef David Bancroft. Opened in a stone house in 2013, the kitchen garden grows everything from Arbequina olives to collard greens and lemongrass. What Bancroft doesn’t grow himself he gets from nearby ranchers, fishermen and foragers. Try the roasted gulf snapper served with creamed popped corn and collards.

 

Richard Shelby

There’s a lot of things you can hold against the senior U.S. senator from Alabama, but you can’t call him a coward. He’s blood-red on almost every issue you can name from abortion and gun control, to health care and the environment. But when it came between choosing his party’s agenda by voting for Roy Moore and doing the right and moral thing, he chose the high ground. “I think the Republican Party can do better” than Moore, he told CNN. “The state of Alabama deserves better.” He cast his vote for a write-in conservative candidate and left the election with his dignity intact, which is a lot more than many in the GOP can say.

Charles Barkley

Barkley grew up 10 minutes outside of Birmingham, in Leeds, and all through his storied career in the NBA played the heel to faces like Magic Johnson and Isiah Thomas and, especially, Michael Jordan. Barkley left the league for the chattering classes court side in 2000 and has been a reliable, enjoyable provocateur ever since. A life-long Republican, Barkley flirted momentarily with statewide office in 2008 but recanted that promise to run for governor when the opportunity arose two years later. This year, he tore a path through the state campaigning against Roy Moore and for Doug Jones.

 

“To Kill A Mockingbird”

Published in 1961 and based on events in and around Monroeville where author Harper Lee grew up, the lessons of “To Kill A Mockingbird” about the death of innocence in a radicalized America may be the one universally accepted text that children are encouraged to read in order to begin an explanation of the color line in this country. In an odd way, it might the state’s greatest tangible gift to America’s children