Herman in the Lion's Den

Herman Cain, we hardly got to emotionally ravage ye.

The Tea Party darling, the Right’s Obama, Cain was, only a few weeks ago, the leading contender for the center spotlight in next November’s presidential election. But in a decision that should have surprised no one, Herman Cain suspended his presidential campaign last week after his meteoric rise did what meteorites do: burned up on entering the atmosphere of modern media attention.

A successful businessman and small-government advocate, Cain burst onto the scene with presidential charisma. He had the smile, the connections, the voice, the ideas for change. Experience? None, but that appealed to his everyman persona. Intelligence? More common than academic, but everyone agrees we need a good dose of that in Washington. Viability? A black man with Southern roots and national contacts who advocated for all the right issues. He was the poster boy for the GOP’s diversity and had the “it” factor. He even looked presidential.

But just as quickly as Cain became the favorite, the tide turned. Rumors of inappropriate touching and sexual harassment, lawsuits and a longtime affair with a Georgia woman surfaced. Cain returned to Atlanta, his campaign all but concluded, and took his ideas with him.

Cain’s demise is all too common in modern American politics. In an era of round-the-clock news, amateur-turned-professional bloggers, and investigative journalism, a presidential race (or really any political election above the local level) has become more a gantlet of unevenly judged morality than an ideological contest. It is a crucible of ironic proportions: we save the trash – the missteps, political and societal  – and throw out the purified metal, the true value of a candidate.

To be clear, this is our fault, mine and yours. We watch Fox, CNN, MSNBC, and all of their splinter channels. We follow pundits from day to day as they try to find filler for three hours of talk time. We believe their reports and their commentary, trusting them to do the thinking for us. We choose sides (and networks) and only listen to our perspective spun twenty different ways.

We are the lions who crave the flesh of our candidates, who devour the fatty morsels of their personal lives and leave the marrow-filled bones of their ideas behind. The twenty-four hour media is only the zookeeper, cutting apart the public servant and tossing out what they know we will consume.

And by cannibalizing our candidates we limit our political choices. Consider Winston Churchill, perhaps the most beloved British pol of the twentieth century. Would he have a chance at election in modern America as a hard drinker with a face only a bulldog’s mother could love? His caustic wit was so biting it would today be media gold, his quips so politically incorrect they would derail even the most promising of campaigns.

Or Thomas Jefferson, described by some as the smartest man who ever held the office president. Would he survive an MSNBC investigative report into his illicit relationship with slave Sally Hemmings, especially if he were discovered to have fathered children with her out of wedlock? Would we elect John F. Kennedy with Fox News digging into his love life? What about Abraham Lincoln after a CNN report on his repeated failures as a businessman?

In actuality, today these men likely would be smart enough to stay far away from political arena, lest their lives be dissected and the darkest corners of their histories probed.

And there is the real trouble. Imagine all of the would-be leaders who have shuttered their political ambitions in lieu of the scrutiny they would face. Think of nameless, faceless men and women with brilliant ideas for our country’s direction who will not or cannot allow their pasts to be two-week’s fodder for the news networks.

Where are the modern Washingtons and Jeffersons, Lincolns and Roosevelts? Where are our statesmen? They are heading up think tanks in D.C. and serving as political science professors in the Ivy League, unwilling to represent and serve the masses if the masses demand destroyed privacy in return.

Please understand, news organizations play a vital role in creating an informed electorate. We need to vet candidates for their emotional, intellectual, and moral aptitude. We need to know candidates’ positions versus their voting records, their altruistic promises versus their scandals. We need journalists who will fight and dig and publish with impunity. The free press is the cornerstone of a functioning republic. The world is a better place because of Woodward and Bernstein’s investigation into the Watergate break-in.

However, sometimes we need to protect our candidates from the media. In a perfect world, we would look to news outlets and see unbiased anchors, not a troop of analysts who tell us what to think. We would listen to balanced reports, not politically slanted talk radio. And our news consumption would look proportionately much like this paper, heavy on reporting, light on editorials. 

In that world, Herman Cain still may not have been the right choice for Republicans (I was not a fan) but he would have been defeated on the basis of his ideas, not his private life. Unfortunately, we don’t live in that world.

Someone get the next slab of meat ready. The lions are hungry.

A Matter of Culture - A Letter Published in The Moultrie Observer

NOTE: This letter appeared in The Moultrie Observer on Saturday, December 3, two days after I submitted it and a day following the Packers season-ending loss to the Grayson High Rams. The day it was written, GPB announced it would not air the Colquitt-Grayson game on its flagship station as expected, scheduling it for a smaller network, GPB Knowledge, a channel we don't get in our hometown. Offended, I wrote the following piece. I was surprised at how many people missed the sarcasm and took it at face value. Check out the comments on The Moultrie Observer page. Definitely worth the click. For the record, I love football, probably too much.

MOULTRIE — Dear editor,

I am writing with regards to Georgia Public Broadcast’s (GPB) Friday night television schedule and its decision to air Rick Steves’ European Insights instead of the Grayson-Colquitt semifinal GHSA football game.

Georgians (and Southerners in general) are characterized nationally as backwards and out of touch with progressive culture. We are mocked for our low test scores and high poverty, our accents and our dress. We are called uncultured, illiterate, and, perhaps most commonly, redneck. "Welcome to the South," they joke. "Set your watch back 50 years."
 
So when I saw GPB removed the GHSA football semifinals from its lineup, I was pleased. Georgians need more exposure to the greater world and Rick Steves is just the man for the job.

Rick Steves, looking more
awesome than I expected

This Friday’s episode, for instance, touts Rick’s "travels through Europe [and includes] stops in Pisa, the Mauthausen Concentration Camp, Hitler's Eagle's Nest in Berchtesgaden and the Danish Nazi Resistance Museum in Copenhagen. Also: Europe's ethnic diversity and infrastructure investments are explored."

Fantastic stuff, really, and so much more exciting than a football game between two of the state’s best squads. Rick Steves will provide information so pertinent to daily life, yet  strangely inexplicable to most Southerners. I can't even estimate how often I have attempted to talk to my coworkers about the intricacies of Serbian race relations or the Grecian debt crisis, only to have them look at me as I look at the "art" of Marcel Duchamp (you get the reference, I’m sure).

Simply put, Georgians need more exposure to European culture; GPB on Friday night would be an excellent place to start.

Marcel Duchamp's most
famous "work." For real.

As well, it is past time someone took a stand against King Football in this state. Our obsession with this "game" is astounding and, quite frankly, unhealthy. Consider the scene at Mack Tharpe Stadium here in Moultrie on a football Friday night in the fall. Thousands from Colquitt County, people from all walks of life – blue collar and white collar; white, black, and Hispanic; Republican and Democrat; rich and poor; old and young; entire families – waste nearly three hours of their lives sitting side by side together, watching a high school football game when they could be home reading the latest issue of The Economist or learning about The Netherland's dike systems with Rick Steves.

They scream and chant and sing and laugh and boo, sometimes all in the space of just 10 minutes. They blow obnoxious vuvuzelas, shake cans full of pennies, and contribute to the national obesity rate by snacking on high-fat, low-nutrient foods. They are deliriously elated by a win and ridiculously disappointed with a loss, all over watching high school boys run around with a piece of leather. I bet not a single one of them was that excited after reading Brian Schmidt’s Nobel Prize winning research on universe expansion and supernovae development.
 

A troglodyte

To cap it off, for the next week, that GAME is all these slack-jawed troglodytes want to talk about! Not a single time this fall was I solicited for my opinion on wealth inequality in modern America. Yet, I was asked seven times this past week if I would have made the same decision as Coach Propst to go for two at the end of the Camden game. How sad to take such pride in 48 minutes on a game clock! How hopelessly backwards.

Yes, GPB made the right decision by removing the playoff game from Georgia's televisions. I only hope Moultrians will take this opportunity – this freedom from football's demagoguery – to better themselves this Friday night. I for one anticipate long conversations on Monday about Italian efforts to stabilize the Leaning Tower of Pisa in lieu of the typical Packer-driven water cooler fare, because I know that, even with the game not on, the majority of our town will still tune in to GPB for the fine cultural programming it offers us every Friday night.

Reflections on Fishing

In memory of my grandfather, J.C. Benton, who died seven years ago today. I wrote this for a creative writing class in grad school while my grandfather was sick but didn't finish it in time to read it to him before he died. That night, I finished it and read it as his funeral.

I knew when he swapped hats my grandfather was ready to fish. He'd slip off his cap worn high on his forehead, advertising some long extinct outboard motor company or emblazoned with the Colquitt County Packer emblem, and replace it with his wide-brimmed straw fishing hat. Yes, it was only a hat, but it was tradition, symbolic of countless hours spent honing a craft that he only perfected. Others in our family are adroit fishermen, but my grandfather was the master craftsman, expert with a rod and reel or a cane pole, equipped with the nimble moves of a NASCAR driver on the trolling motor.

My grandfather's skills were God-given, but he'd spent a lifetime on the river. He fished the waters of the St. Johns as a boy, first brought to the river by his father, my Great-granddaddy Benton. They fished out of Palatka, 45 miles north of where my grandfather would eventually bring me, for mullet and bream. Those early fishing trips taught him the love of the open water while giving him the innate ability to fish the tightest overhangs. Without those early trips, my grandfather might never have discovered the river. Without the river, two generations of my family would have lived lives of lesser fulfillment.

He wore the cap on the truck ride down to the river, high, barely covering the wavy mop of white hair that served as his crown. Packing, unpacking, and packing again, the cap was a fixture. He worked the boat wearing the cap, storing bait and ice chests, passing out life vests. He and his cap would settle into the captains chair and, with a backwards glance and a smile, he'd gracefully maneuver the boat from its slip, tongue pushed to the side of his mouth, an unconscious reaction to everyday concentration.

Even on the ride out, his cap remained with the least bit of effort. I, on the other hand, lost two hats on that river, ripped from atop my head by the combined forces of a speeding boat and the open-water breeze, reducing me to ride with one hand high, holding my hat in place like some Spaghetti-Western damsel-in-distress, bonnet bobbing in a runaway carriage scene. Even in the stiffest winds, my grandfathers cap never moved, anchored as steadily and stubbornly as my grandfather himself, the hat a natural extension of the man.

Cutting the engine, the boat would sputter to a stop. Here, my grandfather's moves were deliberate and ritualistic, passing out poles and splitting bait, holding a bare modicum of balance against the rocking of the boat. Equally deliberate, my grandfather would change hats, moving from world to world, work cap to fishing hat, trading in every day life for the river. I searched for symbolism in the act, some sort of metaphor about casting off daily life for the peace my grandfather found in fishing. The real answer, I found, was less poetical.

"When the water is shallow, you can see fish in the shadows that you cant see with a cap on," he muttered matter-of-factly, a tone denoting his grandson should already know the answer to such simple questions. "Sometimes, you can't see for the light."

We'd float for hours on the river, shifting directions intermittently to the tune of his trolling motor, telling stories and jokes, laughing. I learned life's lessons from my grandfather, his blue eyes blazing from under the brim of his hat. He'd tell me about his parents and grandparents, about basketball trips and childhood pranks, even family secrets my parents had so carefully misplaced. We discussed the damage alcohol had inflicted on our family, the topic punctuated with stories of family members offered to the belly-god of malted barley. We talked of his own conversion and redemption, a peaceful realization with repercussions stretching into the next life. We discussed theology and politics, the latter of which focused more on common ground than differences. Through it all, my grandfather was truthful beneath his old hat. Good, bad, and sometimes terrible, he never hid facts from me, laying it all out without mincing words or prettying-up the unpretty. He opened my eyes on those trips.

Our days fishing gave me an understanding of how short life is, just how tentative our grasp is on this world, so little keeping us from slipping into the next. You could tell he didn't feel anywhere near the number of years he had lived, some 70-plus years removed from his birth, a half a century of life lived after Bigmama's house and the beginning of his marriage.

His stories allowed my mind to wander through my own plans for the future, pondering how quickly our own designs change because of the experiences life has in store for us. Would I end up back in my hometown with a nice little house, grandkids, and a modest retirement? Or was something else planned for me, some great unknown, a hand-written destiny that would someday guide me away from all this?

As if reading my mind, my grandfather said, "You know, my dad used to bring me out here to fish, and I brought my children and my grandchildren. One day, you'll bring your children, and maybe one day you'll bring your own grandson for fishing trips out here on the river."

I smiled, first to myself, then at him, knowing he was right, his intense blue eyes driving the simple statement home. One day my life will float along the same currents and around the same bends as my grandfather's. One day I will be the old man in the hat, leading my progeny to the fishing holes of my youth. One day will find me in the twilight of my own life, my own fishing trip almost over. Like my grandfather when that day comes I hope I am an "imitation" of the man, to quote the Dan Fogelberg song, a living legacy to a life well-lived.

As the sun set behind Shell Point, my grandfather would begin to wind up his line, casting the last drowned worm into the water, allowing it its place in the cycle worm to fish, fish to man, man to worm. I wasn't ready yet, not knowing if this would be my last time on the river with my grandfather, and I awkwardly swung my line out among the river grass, hoping for one last fish in the basket, a last moment on the river with the master. My grandfather smiled, perhaps remembering his grandsons pleadings as a child, "Come on, Granddaddy, just one more cast."

The fishing done, his grandson satiated, my grandfather changed hats again, replacing the wide-brimmed straw hat with his cap, ready to again face reality. He packed the poles away with equal ritual, and I followed suit, knowing that there is only one way one should pack away the boat: my grandfathers way, lest you are scolded and shown the correct way...again.

He returned to his captain's chair with a look back at me. We smile, and he asks me if I want to drive us back in, knowing I always do. We swap seats, my grandfather seated behind me, hand on my shoulder, finger directing me around crab traps and pointing to landmarks he'd shown me since my youth. The boat bounced over the breakers, across the leftover wake of a larger bass boat, headed for home carrying two fishermen, a boy and his grandfather, both at different points in their own fishing trips, but both fishers of the same river.

Wave on Wave

The battle of wave on sand is quite possibly the earliest sound uttered from this creaking old planet millions of years before human ears ever caught onto the song. Imagine that first moment, that first second, when prehistoric man discovered the rhythmic beating of water on land, first felt the salt air in his face, tasted a warm coastal day in his mouth. Imagine the moment - one unspoiled by thousands of dried-marrow, emotionally-flaccid essays on the subject - when man first felt attachment to the sea, first heard the drone of the ocean calling him to stay.

I have a friend, an anthropologist, who says that many early civilizations were afraid of the sea. Though several found bounty in its waters and learned to survive in the environment we now call prime resort location, others feared the ocean, feared the wide, endless horizon. These people moved inland, preferring the fresh water rivers for sustenance, secure in its set boundaries and permanent flow.

Still, there were those who braved the waves and the flash thunderstorms that afternoons bring to the beachfront, warm rains that seem to cool off the red-hot July days only to bring the humidity to intolerable levels later in the evening, creating an aura in which one needs gills to breathe. As Jimmy Buffett said, "Salty air ain't thin / It can stick right to your skin / And make you feel fine."

I would do just about anything to wheel my truck around that last curve and see the salty inland bay of Destin, FL through my windshield, to roll down my window and revel in the sudden thrust of salt air and fish, inhale deeply, and know I'm right where I need to be.

I want to be there.

I want to go back down and lie beside the sea there.

With a tin cup for chalice,

Fill it up with good red wine,

And I'll be chewing on a honeysuckle vine.

Leaving

The sound of a tattered canvas duffle bag hitting the rust-covered truck bed echoed far past the backyard planted pines and into the fields surrounding the neighborhood lake - a pond, really, dug from the exhausted soil of a former cotton field turned suburban neighborhood - and returned, diminished now but still familiar. It was a sound he'd heard many times before. He'd thrown his bag into the back of truck a couple of times a day for several years. Still, the finality of the moment, realizing that this would be the last time he stood in this spot of the driveway - his spot - hit him.

This was it. He was leaving. No more mornings smelling the blooming purple and pearl azaleas and dogwoods of a south Georgia spring, flowers that symbolized all he would miss of his home.

He was leaving his family. His dad, strong and vulnerable all in one moment, had asked him again the night before not to go, not to abandon all that hed known. His mother, a stalwart of emotional security, hadn't cried, but had looked at him with such helplessness that he knew her heart was breaking. She would survive. She'd always survived before, through her sons tumultuous teenage years when he'd been more instrument of torture than loving progeny, through the death of her father, the family patriarch, from an illness that drained not only his own life away but stole life force from an entire family leaving the a hollow shell of extended familiar ties in its wake. His sister, petite and as emotionally vulnerable, had cried on his shoulder before sliding down the hallway wall to her bedroom for the sleep that takes all problems.

Of course, he'd miss them terribly.

But he'd decided - no, committed - to leave, and he wasn't turning back now. He took a moment to look around one last time, to gather together the courage it would take to walk out of one life and into a new one, an unknown one, before flopping down into the driver's seat.

The engine hesitated before roaring to life, and he backed the heavy frame of the truck down the winding driveway to the only road he'd ever lived on. He breathed heavily and wiped a tear from his cheek before adjusting the rearview mirror to garner one last glance at his home. He jammed the stick shift down into second and faced the open road, somehow new to him even after all of these years, and turned the steering wheel south, guiding the truck to new destinations, new adventures, and the life he dreamed he would one day come to see.

Decoration day

Based on the Drive-by Truckers song "Decoration Day"

It's usually the insignificant moments which send me whirling back, lightheaded, giving birth to the fear and anger that most marked my adolescence. It's the smell of honey suckle on the summer breeze, or a glimpse of my father's cold blue eyes and hawk-like nose in my morning mirror.

Those moments take my breath, steal it from me, and leave me momentarily shocked and disoriented until I realize it's over, all the fighting. It's over, removed from the now-quiet existence I lead by three decades of life in this small south Georgia town.

Sometimes, I awake from sleep staring dead in the face of the broken, crying teenage boy we left in the woods that June night, the sound of my brother's voice exhorting me to run faster reverberating around the three bedroom ranch house of my new life. Those moments leave me searching for security, forcing me to touch my wife for some shred of reality, her mere presence pulling me back from the netherworlds of my dream-like state.

It's the quiet nights on the porch where he haunts me, that boy, and my father's voice, too, winging out of the planted pines, carried on the wind, reminding me of my name, my life, and the heritage of pain of he left me.

At one time I took pride in the heritage. We were soldiers, warriors in the grand family tradition. We were Lawsons, true to the name and to the family. We were defenders of the land, keepers of the fight, perpetuating three generations of familial hate with the Hills.

I saved the newspaper accounts of the events, each tucked quietly away inside my mom's Bible, placed high on the shelf in spare bedroom where no one is likely to find them. Each clipping, now somewhat yellowed with age, recounts the struggle of two families locked in a generational grudge match, a battle to regain lost prides by the genocide of the opposing family.

Each article somehow works in "feud," though the word doesn't quite capture the struggle. It was more than a feud. For us it was a war more real than any battle fought in Vietnam or some armpit Central American country. This was our war, our fight, and it was in our backyard. It was the classic struggle against the "principalities of this present darkness," as my father so often called it. To my father it was a spiritual battle, though it was wrestled day to day by men of flesh and blood in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains.

I don't remember the beginning of the violence any more than I remember the first days of my own life. It was always there, a permanent fixture of my childhood home. My mom said my first word was "fight," my second "Hill." I somehow doubt that, though it wouldn't surprise me.

As a child, I didn't really care why we fought or hated, just as long as we did. It was nice to have something to hate, something to serve as the antithesis of our good and perfect family. The hate was comfortable, a way of life.

I remember my father telling jokes about the Hills, mocking their rusted-out car, mouth replicating the exaggerated engine noise and grinding gears as he rocked back and forth on the porch. The boys would laugh and egg him on, my father always obliging with more vigorous rocking and an even louder grinding of the gears, often accompanied with his mangled mimicry of the Hill's speech pattern.

Mama would smile and tell him to behave himself before returning to the inside of the house. Dad would continue, quieter this time. Even Daddy didn't want to aggravate Mama.

Truth be told, their car was no less rusty or noisy than ours, and their speech patterns certainly weren't much different, each retaining the somewhat cumbersome dialect of the foothills, not quite mountainous but not quite flatlanders either.

Now it's Decoration Day, and as my pastor speaks from the pulpit of honoring the fallen veterans of the community, I wonder how to honor my father. The pastor urges us to take a flag to mark the graves of soldiers in the church's graveyard. My son moves beside me, eager to sprint down the aisle to grab a flag.

My father was a soldier.

In my father's case, a flag seems inappropriate, a touch too patriotic and respectable for the old man. Truth be told, I've a mind to roll a stone on his grave, I chuckle dryly to myself. Perhaps that would keep the old man in his resting place and remove him from the guilt I carry, the blood on my hands only I can see.

I laugh aloud to myself, wondering what he would say if he knew my thoughts. "Son, keeping me down won't keep you away."

I suck in air too quickly, cough, and shiver, suddenly cold from memory of my father's voice. I know I'll never escape it.

Comfort in the Senses

The human mind is a wondrous creation if for no other reason than the curveball of reminiscence it throws at us on occasion. You can be walking down a hallway, smell the subtle saltiness of Play-Doh being rolled out by eager young hands, and feel the shift of remembrance in your stomach, suddenly rushed to your pre-school classroom and a moment of smushing different-colored dough together just to see what happens. Or catch a whiff of feet and sweat and you might be back in your high school locker room, reliving past glories and failures, celebrating the friendships and waxing nostalgic (bitterly, sometimes) over what might have been.

This happened to me twice this past week. Monday, I had the opportunity to go fishing with my grandfather, father, and uncle. As we walked along the banks of the river, I noticed the air was scented with an amalgamation of smells: honeysuckle, wet grass, and fish. Though understated, they brought with them the comfort of a hundred hours walking the banks of rivers and the rabbit trails of local woods. It doesn't matter what's been happening in my life, the stress melts away on warm spring days that smell like fish.

The second instance happened just today. I walked in after a long day of work, tired, ready for my summer break, and was suddenly surprised by the smell of peaches. Instantly, my mind wafted back to my childhood days filled with peach cobbler cooking in the oven, peeling peaches on my grandparent's front porch in Coolidge, and the day I found out what happens to your nose if you smell a peach to closely and rub the fuzz into your cheek. The smells rejuvenated me and I walked into the kitchen to find Jessica cutting fresh peaches at our table.

It was picturesque - perfect, this moment - and I know the image of my beautiful wife smiling, slicing peaches in the hot afternoon air will be with me until the day I die, tucked back in some shadowy recess of my mind, ready to spring forward and surprise me with yet another charming memory, more proof I've lived a pretty dang nice life.

There's a certain perfection that permeates those odd, aromatic moments.