What explains it? What explains the darkness, the stark hatred inside people like Charles Worley, the so-called pastor of Providence Road Baptist Church in the town of Newton, North Carolina? Worley says his adherents “should build a great big large fence 50 or 100 miles long. Put all the lesbians in there. Fly over and drop some food. Do the same thing with the queers and the homosexuals. Have that fence electrified so they can’t get out. You know what, in a few years, they’ll die out. You know why? They can’t reproduce.”
The problem with people like Charles Worley is that they know their choirs, how to draw them in and how to preach to them. Such choirs come from the uneducated, the fearful, the bitter, the prejudicial, the resentful. Should we hold Charles Worley to account, or should we instead indict his more numerous, complicit lay supporters?
As Barack Obama said, infamously, in Pennsylvania, in 2008:
You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. They fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.
Well, that’s one explanation. But I think it goes deeper. People the world over do the same thing every day. Blame the immigrant. Blame the government. Blame the newcomer, the different one, the one who doesn’t believe what I believe. Blame him. Not me. Hate him. Not me.
Call me naive, but I think that public school education is the key. I had no idea, when I moved to North Carolina, that educated people could be viewed with such suspicion, and that education itself could be held in such low regard. Frankly, it is depressing to see what amounts to willful ignorance among a significant part of the populace here. It is not just some knee-jerk right-wing resistance to teachers’ unions. It is against teaching, period. Parents want to preserve their right to teach their children to hate the people they hate.
I don’t think I will live long enough to see this change. If it does, and I do, please come visit me in the rest home, give my shoulders a shake to wake me up, and shout to me, love won.
Richard Dawson, the long-time host of the TV game show “Family Feud”, died Saturday. He was 79. My wife will tell you (as I am about to) that my guilty secret, my brainless pleasure, is watching the bonus round on “Family Feud” and guessing the top answers.
“Family Feud” sits on the opposite side of the game-show spectrum from “Jeopardy”. “Jeopardy” is work. Watching “Jeopardy” is like playing chess while listening to NPR while doing a crossword puzzle. But playing along with the contestants on “Family Feud” is like being at a summer picnic, with beer and pretzels. And you had the questionably-sober Richard Dawson, keeping things lively without ever taking the game seriously.
Much was made of Dawson’s habit of kissing all the female contestants (upwards of 20,000 of them). Yes, he was a throwback, as were Johnny Carson, Dean Martin, Foster Brooks, Hugh Hefner and Jackie Gleason. You knew they were from another era and were never going to embrace this one, but you tolerated them nonetheless. Sort of like your parents.
Personally, I enjoyed Richard Karn as host of “Family Feud” more than I did Dawson or subsequent hosts. Karn followed Dawson’s tradition of tongue-in-cheek respect for the proceedings but, unlike Dawson, kept his tongue in his cheeks when greeting contestants.
Dawson died of esophageal cancer, as did writer Christopher Hitchens at 62 and Governor Ann Richards at 73. All were reputed or admitted heavy drinkers at one time. Alcohol reduces the tone of one’s lower esophageal sphincter, allowing the acidic contents of the stomach to flow backwards and damage the lining of the esophagus.
I take Prilosec but I also take note.